REMARKS TO THE NATIONAL STRATEGY SEMINAR THE NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP70-00058R000200020018-8
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 15
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 6, 2000
• Sequence Number: 18
• Publication Date: July 24, 1959
• Content Type: REPORT

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REMARKS TO THE NATIONAL STRATEGY SE IINAR
THE NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE
By ALLEN W. DULLFS
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
July 24, 1959 (8:00 p.m., EDST)
I appreciate the opportunity to make the concluding remarks.
to the National Strategy Seminar for Reserve Officers. From the
reports I have had of your meetings, and my intelligence on this ij
good, I realize that you have broadly covered the various elements
of Soviet strategy and tactics, the nature of the Communist threat
the relative military strength of East and West, and the face of w$.r
in the nuclear age.
In dealing with analyses of the Soviet threat I find that there
is often a tendency to go to extremes. There are experts in this
field who tend to magnify all aspects of Soviet power and become
prophets of gloom. Others tend to discount Soviet accomplishments
and unduly magnify their internal difficulties. This could add up
to an unhealthy complacency.
The first class of experts is the larger, though recently ~e
have seen the other extreme in some magazine articles which have
attempted to discredit, on what appears to me to be the flimsiest
evidence, recognized Soviet accomplishments, particularly in the
field of outer space.
Certainly it is more dangerous to underrate than to overrate,
though the latter can well be expensive in terms of our budget.
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In these estimates of where we stand in relation to the Soviet,
one of the crucial areas where some tend to underrate the Soviets is
in the assessments of the relative economic output of the two great
power blocs.
True, the gross national product of the United States alon
over twice that of the USSR. If we add to U.S. production that of
other countries of the Free World, while adding to Soviet producton
that of Communist China and the Soviet Satellites, the ratio is s ill
But as against this we must recognize that the rate of growth
of the Communist Bloc is substantially greater than that of the F'ee
World, and will probably remain so for some time.
Even more important is the extent to which Soviet present Pro-
duction and investment are keyed directly and indirectly to their,
military power. In fact, Soviet military outlays are now about equal
to ours in terms of what they would cost us. Similarly, their an ual
investment in industry - vital to military power as well as econo
growth - is now equal to that of the U.S. To achieve all this from
their lower economic base, they have to devote about twice the propor-
tion of their gross national product to military purposes as we! do.
Of course, to achieve such goals within their much smalle
economy, they are forced to curtail consumers, goods. But by
emphasizing guns instead of butter, they have greatly reduced the lI
significance in the terms of the power struggle of the still gre.t
,gap between their over-all economic strength and ours.
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Naturally, Khrushchev would like to have his people believe
that the USSR has already achieved a state of military parity, if
not superiority. While it is not the role of intelligence to attempt
detailed net estimates of our relative military position vis-a-vis
the Bloc, we have good evidence on which to reject any such conclusion.
Furthermore, the theory that either of the great nuclear
powers could destroy the other, without the attacker himself being
devastated, is not, I believe, subscribed to on either side of the.
Iron Curtain. The threat of mutual nuclear destruction is a night-
mare that cannot be dismissed, but even though International Communism
expects to gain the world, it does not wish to acquire a world in
From Soviet statements as well as from other evidence ava
able to us, it seems clear that the USSR is placing more and more,
reliance on the development of ballistic missiles as its chief
instrument of strategic nuclear attack. But the Soviets are not
immune to the many difficulties inherent in developing new and untried
hardware into reliable weapons systems.
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Meanwhile Khrushchev and his military aides have done their
best to deprecate the manned bomber, both to their own people and.
abroad. In fact he has called them "museum pieces." This may bef
in part, to quiet the fears of their people and to bolster their
assertions of superiority in one key military field.
Last May, Khrushchev told a delegation of West German Soci'4l
Democratic editors that, though the NATO countries really possess d
a large air force, it was, he said, technically outdated and it
could be shot down by ordinary anti-aircraft artillery, and even by
ordinary fighters.
"Why then," said Khrushchev, "do the Western
military leaders base themselves on bomber aviation
and talk a lot about it? Because their rocket tech-
nology is still weak" . . . "Therefore it appears
that talk about a large number of bombers is being
indulged in for purposes of deceit."
From Khrushchev's viewpoint this is undoubtedly good
propaganda if he can make it stick, since the USSR today is in al
position of inferiority vis-a-vis the U.S. with regard to manned
bombers. The tremendous effort which we see the Soviets putting
into advanced radar, ground-to-air missiles, and other defenses
against aircraft would seem to belie the deprecatory statements Of
Khrushchev about them.
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Obviously both our military defenses and our ability to
retaliate by missile and aircraft should together be kept adequate
to meet the threat. Here is where the superior industrial capacity
of the Free World and of the U.S. in particular can and must playi
its role.
In the past when a technical, scientific, or industrial
problem, such as that we face today in the missile field, has bee#
put up to the ingenuity of our scientists and production experts,
we have not long remained in second place. It is certainly incum ent
upon us to see to it that we do not fail in this instance.
If we do keep up our military defenses, the most immediate
threat to us for the years immediately ahead is not likely to be
physical destruction by all-out nuclear war. The danger is rather
the slow attrition of the power position of the Free World by a
combination of political warfare, and economic penetration and sub-
version.
version.
Despite occasional missile rattling, as at the time of Suez.,
during the Middle Eastern crisis last year, and more recently in
talks with Mr. Harriman and others, we do not estimate that it is
the Kremlin's present intention to advance Communism by deliberately
provoking war.
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We cannot entirely discount the risk, however, that the
Soviets might miscalculate Western strength or the firmness of our
intentions, and adopt positions from which it would be hard for them to
find an acceptable line of retreat. The Soviets have miscalculated
before, as in the 1948 Berlin blockade and in Korea. We can hope
that Khrushchev, after having castigated Stalin for adventurism
in the famous speech of February 1956 will not fall prey to the.
same temptation at Berlin or elsewhere. Aggression by proxy
against the newly emerging and less developed countries may be
a tempting but it obviously is a dangerous course.
The basic strategy of International Communism, with its
primary emphasis on measures short of war, has remained remarkably
unchanged over the years. So too have its objectives.
These were never more bluntly stated than in Khrushchev'
ebullient speeches in Poland these last days.
Obviously referring to the phrase attributed to him, "We'
will bury you," he explained that when he said that Communism would
be the graveyard of Capitalism, he did not mean that Communists
would take shovels and start digging; "History," he said, "would
take care of capitalists." They too, he suggested, would become
museum pieces, and added that "If there were a God and he could,
act, he would take a good broom and sweep you out."
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Certainly Khrushchev pictures himself as devoted to the
task of helping in this burying and sweeping.
The "we will bury you" theme has been the fanatical tenet
and credo of communism, sophisticatedly preached by Lenin, brazeril.y
carried out by Stalin, and more subtly practiced by Khrushchev.
If Soviet policy were restricted to building a better Rus is
for the Russians, we could not object. To the Kremlin leaders,
however, the USSR is merely the base from which Communism is to tie
expanded to cover the world.
As we are entering a period of greatly increased personal;
intercourse between the two power blocs, with exhibitions, touri m,
cultural exchanges, and the like, it is important not to lose si ht
i
of the fundamental nature of this conflict.
This is too often overlooked by the casual visitor to the
Soviet Union. To a considerable degree the Kremlin's international
objectives are not well understood or necessarily shared even by
the Soviet people themselves with whom our tourists and exchange.
missions come in contact, and with whom as individuals the Ameridan
people have so much in common.
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We should remember that the Soviet Union is a dictatorship,
run by the high command of the Communist Party, that the Party
itself numbers only about eight million -- about five percent of
the adult population of the Soviet Union and only about 13 percent
of the number of actual voters in our own last Presidential election.
Furthermore, these eight million party members have no re
freedom even in choosing their local party leaders much less the
leaders in the Presidium. It is these latter who determine the
policies on which the fate of the Soviet people depend, including
the policy of the secretly subsidized export of Communism on a wo ld-
wide basis.
This policy is an insidious interference in the internal
affairs of free countries. If the Communist program were advancei
in the international field by open and peaceful means as a form o
competition between two great conflicting views of how society an
the lives of people should be organized, we could well accept this
challenge. Let us compete, let the peoples c11-Yx-e and decide which
system is the better. Khrushchev claims he is inviting us to such
a competition.
But this is a mirage.
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Where behind the Iron Curtain have the peoples themselves
had a free opportunity to choose? Certainly not in Czechoslovakia,
in 1948, or in Hungary in 1956, or in East Germany today. And
where in the Free World would Khrushchev give this choice, if our
liberties had once been taken away. And if Khrushchev wants an
open competition why does he shield the Soviet people from a full
exchange of ideas, of information, and of persons? Why the almost
pathological concern to hide things from us and from his own peopl;
The answer is that Communism, despite its brazen ideological
pronouncements, cannot tolerate free competition. Nowhere has a
y
nation fallen under Communist domination and then been allowed to
test its choice by resort to free elections.
Instead, peoples are faced. with the fait accompli of being
taken over before they realize what has happened. In Hungary this
was helped on in the immediate postwar days by what I understand
has been vividly described to you as the Bakosi "salami" techniqu
-- biting off, bit by bit, elements of freedom until the whole
structure was eroded.
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In Czechoslovakia the nopular front technique succeeded
in putting a minority party into power. This illustrates the
grave danger of a situation in any state where the Communist
party and its allies succeed in gaining even a substantial min-
ority position. Once in power, the voting ends and popular say
has no peaceful way of recovering control. In the case of
Czechoslovakia the danger point was reached when the Communists
gained less than 40 percent of the electorate, with the non-
Communist parties, as is so often the case, hopelessly divided.
Today the Communists, with their progress blocked in
Western Europe and to a great extent in the Far East, are concenj-
i
trating a major effort in the newly emergent states of Asia and
of Africa. Here they exploit political weaknesses as well as
dynamic nationalism and the surge of rising expectations which
are not easy to satisfy.
Their weapons include economic penetration, the develop-
ment of hard-core Communist parties -- underground or above-
ground -- propaganda both open and black, and in the areas around
I
the periphery of the Communist bloc itself, they maintain the
overhanging threat of their military power.
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Yet there is no reason to adopt an attitude of pessimism as
we face this particular challenge of International Communism.
We are far better prepared than is generally believed, to
deal with the Communist political and subversive threat.
In the last ten years, after going through far too long a
period of naive complacency, this country has been awakened to the,
danger. We have also learned to understand Communist operating
techniques. We know about the orders given in Moscow to leaders of
other communist parties. This is not too difficult. The securityk
of these parties as they operate in the Free World varies from
medium to poor. We have ways of covering their activities and we
get the basic information we need to gauge their strength and
tactics. Like too many of the rest of us, they talk too freely fOr
i
their own good.
Furthermore, the efficiency of the Communist organization in
the less developed areas of the world is itself not well developed.
In the post-war days they had in many Furopean countries, as in
France and Italy, for example, sophisticated old-line Communists pif
the Thorez-Togliatti school. Through death and old age this type;
of leadership is wearing out in Europe, and it will be a long while,
if ever, before such leadership could be developed for Asia, Africa,
or Latin America.
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In area after area Moscow and Peiping, and their covert
spokesmen in their far-flung apparatus, have overreached themselves.,
Their true hand has been shown in Hungary, Tibet, Egypt, and in many
other countries that could be mentioned. It may be that in their
over-eagerness to promote a Communist-dominated Iraq, the Communist$
have overplayed their hand with the new Iraqi leaders and damaged
their position in the Arab world.
Here is an interesting sidelight on Tibet. The agreement of!
May 23, 1951, between the Peiping government and the local government
of Tibet provided that the Chinese Communist army units entering
Tibet should not "arbitrarily take a single needle or thread from
the people." Eight years later they took the lives of many Tibetano,
the liberty of all.
The Communists are fond of saying that the forces of history
are on their side. One of the great forces at work today is that or
nationalism, particularly in the newly emerging countries of the
world. However, not the Communists, with their goal of domination,,
but the West, with its ingrained respect for self-determination, is
coming more and more to be recognized as the ally of the new Afro-
Asian nationalism. As anti-colonial feeling subsides in the new
states, it is being replaced by growing realization that Sino-Sovi t
expansionism is a far greater threat to their cherished independen e.
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Soviet economic aid is beginning to run into the same type of
problems we face in our own aid programs, including too many Soviert
experts and technicians and here and there shoddy goods. Also the;
political petticoats of the programs have shown up badly in sever4
instances, notably in Yugoslavia where aid was promptly terminated
and half-built projects left to the weather, when Yugoslav policy no
longer pleased the Soviet.
Here as in certain other instances the so-called "aid without
strings" has been shown up as "strings without aid."
It is significant that little or no publicity is allowed to
reach the Russian people themselves about the Kremlin's
loans and
aid to foreign countries. This leads one to believe that this us
I
of their assets would not go down well with people who are themselves
denied so many of the good things of life.
When things don't go as the Soviets want, they tend to los
their temper in public, as most recently in the cancellation of
Khrushchev's Scandinavian trip and in the Chinese Communists' retrt
to India over Tibet.
Many of the states in Europe, Asia, Africa, and even in p is
of this Hemisphere, which have tended towards neutralism, have
markedly changed in their attitude about communism over the last ew
years. Their former complacent approach to the danger is being r placed
by a far greater degree of sophistication. Here some of the initial
appeal of communism is wearing off. The uninitiated are becoming
initiated.
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Finally, there are signs of change within the Soviet UnioI
itself which over the years might bring about some relaxation of the
aggressive expansionist policy of the International Communist
movement.
The rigid police state of the days of Stalin has been rel
Education is being pressed and while special emphasis is being p
on education in scientific, technical, and engineering fields, w
would add to their industrial and military strength, there is
nevertheless, a general broadening of the educational base in th
Soviet Union.
While the Soviet government is still a closely regulated
xed.
aced
ich
autocracy, it is not today quite as free as under Stalin to disr~gard
i
wholly the desires of the people among which the yearning for puce
is foremost. As long as the Soviet people are only permitted to
hear, to read and to learn what the Soviet government dictates,
progress will be slow. But as long as there is some progress there
is hope of gradual evolution. Increasing contact between the
American and Russian peoples should contribute to this end.
I would not leave the impression, in concluding, that this
listing of favorable trends should in any sense cause us to relax
our sense of urgency in taking measures to counter Soviet political,
economic and subversive penetration in the Free World.
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Quite the contrary, the moment a tide shows signs of
slacking, then is the opportunity to drop holding operations and
press the advantage. Since I appreciate there are many "Doubting
Thomas"' on this score, I can assure you that we are better prep ed
and better coordinated to deal with this challenge, and are dealing
with it more effectively, than many of you realize.
But too much talking about plans and practices would only
alert the challenger to our counter measures. Hence silence in fzce
of criticism is better than any bragging about past accomplishment,
or programs for the future.
One of the key purposes of this reserve officer seminar ha
been to alert a highly selected group to the nature and implications
of the challenge which we face from International Communism. I would
like to give my fullest endorsement both to the objective of the
seminar and to the manner in which it has been carried out. But he
job does not end here tonight. Each of you in turn can help to g ve
the thinking citizens of your communities the benefit of your own
impressions. In a free society like ours an informed public opin on
is indispensable to give the backing to those men and to those
measures that are needed to meet Khrushchev's challenge to us.
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