LETTER TO ROBERT GATES FROM BILL GERTZ

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90G01353R001900060002-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 10
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 28, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: June 2, 1988
• Content Type: LETTER

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ACTION
INFO
DATE
INITIAL
1
DCI
2
DDCI
3
EXDIR
4
D/ICS
5
DDI
6
DDA
7
DDO
8
DDS&T
9
Chm/NIC
10
GC
11
IG
12
Compt
13
D/OCA
14
D/PAO
x
15
D/PERS
16
D/Ex Staff
17
18
19
20
21
22
Remarks
To #14: Please see DDCI's note on the attached
letter.
STAT
8 Jun '88
Date
3637 (10.81)
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Ae )Na!*ngtan Vme0
3600 NEW YORK AVENUE NORTHEAST
WASHINGTON, D.C. 20002 / 202-636-3000
June 2, 1988
Mr. Robert Gates
Deputy Director of Central:., Intelligence
CIA
Washington, DC 20505
Enclosed please find a copy of an article I wrote about the
KGB under.Soviet reforms. I thought you might be interested in it,
so I sent it along.
I'm also in the process of writing a book about the KGB and
I would like to meet with you sometime to discuss the subject.
Please let me know if this would be possible.
Sincerely,
Bill Gertz
National Security Affairs Reporter
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LJ UUII ItN I IJ5Utb
THE KGB AND SOVIET REFORM
by William Gertz
T he Soviet Union's State
Committee for Security, the
notorious KGB intelligence
and internal-security service, re-
mains the self-described "sword
and shield" of the Soviet Commu-
nist Party. It is playing a ma-
jor role in controlling the cur-
rent thaw in rigid totalitarian
control over Soviet society that
has emerged as part of the
economic and social-reform pro-
grams launched in 1985 by Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Under Gorbachev, internal
controls over selected elements
of society, such as the state-
controlled press and the intelli-
gentsia, have been loosened. A
number of imprisoned ideological
opponents, many of whom were
well known outside the Soviet
Union, have been released from
prison camps or internal exile.
And emigration levels, strictly
controlled by the government,
have risen modestly in an appar-
ent effort to appease critics of
Moscow's human rights policies.
Yet no systemic changes in the
ruling bureaucracy, either in the
Communist Party or the Soviet
government, appear to have been
made. The KGB, in particular,
has remained one of the few in-
stitutions that has not become an
announced target of reform.
A lack of evidence supporting
the existence of any positive or
fundamental changes in the So-
viet system under Gorbachev has
led critics of the Soviet Union to
view the current period as a tem-
porary sidetrack from the path
to the Soviets' proclaimed revo-
lutionary ideal of establishing a
world socialist order.
Despite President Reagan's re-
cently stated opinion that Gorba-
chev is a less messianic commu-
nist than his predecessors, the
Soviet leadership remains un-
KGB agents break for a cigarette at the 1986 Iceland summit. Intelligence
experts report that the KGB is currently responsible for domestic political
control and foreign intelligence operations.
MAY 1988 115
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daunted in its quest for global
revolution. In fact, Moscow's ru-
lers seek a more efficient, attrac-
tive, and thus more exportable
brand of Soviet-style socialism
than the one they've been ped-
dling for the past 70 years.
For many Western analysts,
the KGB is regarded as a bastion
of opposition to Gorbachev's re-
form programs, known as peres-
troika (economic restructuring)
and glasnost, a corollary pro-
gram involving a new level of
openness. Yet, it is still not clear
whether the KGB and its leaders
are anti-glasnost. In the past, ef-
forts to portray this powerful
and highly influential component
of the party-state apparatus as
"conservative" have been used as
a propaganda ploy to depict the
Soviet leadership as a small
group, divided along Western po-
litical lines. In fact, it is more
unified.
Playing the lead
The closed nature of Soviet so-
ciety and the secrecy integral to
the KGB make it difficult to say
with certainty or precision what
role the internal security ser-
vices are playing as part of
perestroika and glasnost. State-
ments by current Soviet leaders,
published accounts in the West-
ern and Soviet press, and an ex-
amination of similar, short-lived
periods in Soviet history when
relaxations of communist dic-
tatorship occurred, reveal the
KGB's role as the stage manager
-within the Leninist tradition of
ideological flexibility, of reform
programs designed to strengthen
and perpetuate Soviet power and
prestige.
At the top of the KGB is Chair-
man Victor Chebrikov. He is a
member of the ruling Politburo,
the entity that sits at the apex of
the Communist Party hierarchy
and thus controls the entire gov-
ernment apparatus. Chebrikov's
public statements have shown
him to be wary of internal re-
forms. Like Gorbachev, Chebri-
kov is a protege of Yuri Andro-
pov, who ran the KGB from 1967
until he became the Soviet leader
in 1982. It was then that Chebri-
kov assumed KGB control.
Chebrikov's public attitude to-
ward glasnost appeared in a
KGB statement issued in Jan-
uary 1987 that many analysts
have viewed as a key indicator of
the security organ's participation
in perestroika and glasnost. A
front-page article in Pravda re-
vealed that a KGB operative had
been fired for illegally arresting
a Soviet "investigative reporter"
in the Ukraine. Two KGB colo-
nels who had searched the re-
porter's residence were also chas-
tised and, days after the inci-
dent, the Politburo-run Central
Committee, which rules over the
KGB, ordered the institution to
improve its political police work
"in conditions of the spread of
democracy and openness, relying
on the trust and support of the
people."
Analysts viewed the notice and
the entire incident as a ploy
meant as a signal from the lead-
ership to the Soviet population
that officially sanctioned mem-
bers of the media who express
their views freely under glasnost
would be protected from official
reprisals. Intelligence experts
have pointed out that the an-
nouncement of the KGB agent's
arrest was not unprecedented,
since similar tactics have been
used in the past.
The relaxation of restrictions
appear to be part of what has
been called "feel-good" measures
designed to increase popular en-
thusiasm for the economic re-
forms. What Soviet leaders have
come to realize is that the KGB
has been more repressive than it
needs to be to maintain party
and state control.
Since Gorbachev launched his
reforms, several new laws and
regulations have been imposed or
are under consideration. Other
laws have been modified or re-
pealed, which appeared liberal on
the surface but would have given
the KGB, over time, even more
draconian control than it now
exercises. Some laws forbidding
free expression were repealed,
but the catchall statutes used to
imprison dissidents remain on
the books.
Valentin Falin, chairman of the
Novosti Press Agency and a
hard-line propagandist, recently
backed a new Soviet press law.
He boasted the law would tighten
restrictions and "close the gaps"
in current legislation that have
permitted the existence of nonof-
ficial publications, the lifeblood of
the small but influential political,
religious, and ethnic opposition in
the Soviet Union.
Sergei Grigoryants, a leading
Moscow dissident author, has said
that new regulations designed to
shift government control over the
psychiatric hospital system from
the Interior to the Health minis-
try are not likely to end KGB
abuse of psychiatry to curb po-
litical dissent. Grigoryants, who
spent eight years in a labor camp
116 THE WORLD & I
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I
as a political prisoner, said the
KGB uses unlawful incarceration
of dissidents in psycho-prison as a
way to circumvent the legal sys-
tem. He advocates the removal of
psychiatrists and KGB doctors re-
sponsible for psychiatric abuse.
Grigoryants, released from
prison early in 1987, sees the new
press law as a communist method
of ending the underground free
press. He edits and publishes an
unofficial journal called Glasnost
that until late 1987 was tolerated
by Soviet authorities. The KGB
seized copies of the journal and
harassed its contributors. The se-
curity organ also pressed the lit-
erary magazine Novy Mir into
severing its contract with Grigor-
yants, thus leaving him vulner-
able to arrest. "In our country,
being unemployed is grounds for
arrest," he said. Grigoryants and
several other dissidents were vi-
ciously attacked and beaten by
the KGB in an apparent renewal
of violence by the state security
organs against dissenters.
Demonstrators who gathered
outside the KGB's Moscow head-
quarters on December 20, 1987,
during a protest to mark the 70th
anniversary of the founding of
the state security police, were ar-
rested, and some were severely
beaten.
A senior U.S. intelligence of-
ficial who specializes in Soviet af-
fairs believes the KGB has been
directed by the Soviet leadership
to manage glasnost in ways that
permit the authority of the Com-
munist Party dictatorship to re-
main unchallenged. The KGB, ac-
cording to the official, has been
tasked to set wider parameters
for permissible activities than in
previous times, but also to avoid
taking harsh and highly inflam-
A KGB agent peers from his car. The estimated tally of full- and part-time
KGB agents is 490,000.
matory repressive actions against
dissenters to avoid arousing
Western indignation. In the past
several years, dissidents and oth-
er Soviet citizens have taken ad-
vantage of the new period of re-
laxed restrictions to take to the
streets in demonstrations, or to
launch unofficial publications.
The KGB has also been forced by
circumstances to contend with a
large number of unofficial groups,
whose very existence, formed
around such topics as music,
sports, and literature, is a protest
against the communist monopoly
on power.
While much of perestroika and
glasnost has been heralded by the
Soviets as a "broadening of de-
mocracy," the phrase should not
be confused with Western democ-
racy. In The Cheka, a study of
Lenin's political police, British in-
telligence specialist George Leg-
gett wrote: "Democracy, freedom,
and justice were relative terms to
Lenin, to be interpreted according
T he KGB, in
particular, has
remained one of the few
institutions that have
not become an
announced target of
reform.
to their application in the class
struggle: Constitutional democra-
cy was a capitalist trap, freedom
was solely for the proletariat, jus-
tice valid only when it was revolu-
tionary." It is in this context that
current Soviet internal changes
should be viewed.
Chebrikov echoed this theme
during a September 1987 speech
in Moscow when he attacked
Western security services for al-
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^ CURRENT ISSUES
ANALYSIS
legedly instigating public pro-
tests. This is a classic example of
how the Soviets have used the
charge of foreign meddling in
their domestic affairs, a favorite
tactic since 1917, to justify politi-
cal coercion in the furtherance
of protecting a government that
lacks legitimacy. Commenting on
this alleged meddling, Chebrikov
condemned Western security ser-
vices for spreading the "virus of
nationalism" during the Decem-
ber 1986 riots in Soviet Central
Asia, protests by Crimean Tatars
in Moscow in the summer of 1987,
and nationalist manifestations in
the Baltic republics of Latvia,
Lithuania, and Estonia in August
1987. He charged that "extre-
mists" linked to the West had
infiltrated unofficial groups be-
hind the demonstrations. "One
gets the impression," Chebrikov
stated, "that these people have
understood the process of the
broadening of democracy as a
possibility to do anything that
comes into their heads without
punishment and act against the
interests of Soviet society." Refer-
ring to the use of the secu-
rity organs during Joseph Stalin's
reign of terror, Chebrikov went
on to state that the late 1930s
were a "departure" from Lenin-
ism, and that political and legal
guarantees had been created in
support of Gorbachev's reforms.
The KGB's tactics during glas-
nost were evinced in the handling
of the Tatar protests. Instead of
carrying out mass arrests during
the Red Square demonstrations
held by hundreds of Tatars, who
were deported from their home-
land by Stalin, KGB security
agents singled out demonstration
leaders and forced them to leave
Moscow immediately by train. To
win public support for squelch-
ing the demonstration, the KGB
falsely accused a U.S. diplomat of
The Moscow headquarters of the
KGB sits at the apex of the Soviets'
totalitarian state.
starting the protests, a charge
U.S. officials denied. "It appears
they've been told to handle public
demonstrations with kid gloves,"
the intelligence official said of the
handling of the Tatar protests.
Relaxed restrictions on emigra-
tion also have been used by the
Soviets in an attempt to limit
Western criticism of the denial of
free emigration. Gorbachev de-
fended the practice of denying
exit visas to Jews as the Soviet
response to what he termed a
Western-inspired "brain drain."
Although Jewish, Armenian, and
German emigration rose modestly
in 1987, Soviet authorities also
imposed a harsh new law on Jews
that limits applicants for emigra-
tion to those with close relatives
abroad. The law has had the ef-
fect of curbing emigration re-
quests from those who see no
hope for gaining permission to
leave.
A global setup?
Gorbachev, as the architect of
perestroika and glasnost, is clear-
ly the prime mover in Soviet re-
form, and knowledge of his views
is important for understanding
the rationale behind the policies
of the current crop of Soviet lead-
ers who set the KGB's policies
and direct its activities. He was
described recently by a Soviet
emigre who knew him in law
school as a zealous Stalinist who
expressed an abnormal vener-
ation of Vladimir Lenin. The
emigre, Fredrikh Nezansky, iden-
tified Gorbachev as a devotee of
Lenin's doctrine of revolutionary
flexibility: the doctrine of one
step forward, two steps back-or
the ability to achieve objectives
through tactical maneuverability.
In his new book, Perestroika, Gor-
bachev writes, "In politics and
ideology, we are seeking to revive
the spirit of Leninism."
For the most part, Gorbachev's
implementation of recent internal
changes in the Soviet Union has
occurred within the framework of
his national program of economic
revival. Most observers agree this
strategy is designed to prevent
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the Soviet Union from losing its
status as a world power in the
face of a burgeoning worldwide
technological revolution.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Soviet
affairs specialist at the Center
for Strategic and International
Studies and former Carter admin-
istration national security advis-
er, describes the Soviet Union as
a "corrupt, stagnant, and brutal
system" that through perestroika
is seeking to recover its standing
in the world. Once regarded by
many developing nations as a
model for progress, the Soviet
Union today stands discredited
because of its inability to compete
economically with the West, Brze-
zinski says. Behind the recent
Washington summit, according to
Bzrezinski, is a Soviet drive for
"breathing space" that will allow
them to catch up. "The Soviets
realize they are losing the histori-
cal competition with the United
States.... They know they are
hopelessly behind, not just in such
areas as computer technology and
industrial robotics, but in provid-
ing the basic amenities of life."
Externally, the KGB has
shown no signs of curbing its $4
billion annual program of large-
scale "active measures"-covert
and overt propaganda and intel-
ligence operations-to influence
foreign governments and publics
into viewing the Soviet Union
more positively and as less of a
threat.
Under Gorbachev, the Soviet
Communist Party has revitalized
its Information Department and
strengthened its international ap-
paratus of front groups that seek
to advance Soviet policies. The
KGB has been very active in
these groups, especially the So-
viet Peace Committee. The com-
mittee's new director is Genrikh
Borovik, identified as a former
KGB operative who maintains
close ties to the KGB through his
brother-in-law Vladimir Kryuch-
kov, the head of all KGB overseas
operations.
The KGB also plays a part in
the active diplomatic efforts that
have been a part of Gorbachev's
reforms. At the recent U.S.-
Soviet summit, for example, KGB
foreign-operations chief Kryuch-
kov was part of the Soviet delega-
tion in Washington.
Other enhanced Soviet dip-
lomatic efforts have been directed
toward the Middle East and long-
time rival China, where improved
relations have emerged. Ties with
West Germany and Great Britain
also have been augmented within
Gorbachev's stated objective of
improving the possibilities for
greater economic exchange. At a
dinner with British Prime Minis-
ter Margaret Thatcher last year,
Gorbachev called for fewer re-
strictions on Soviet access to
Western technology as a precon-
dition for better relations.
Many of the recent U.S. espio-
nage cases involving federal ar-
rests and investigations of Soviet
spies involved attempts to steal or
acquire through agents classified
high-technology data useful for
Soviet military purposes. High-
tech spying is one indication of
the important role the KGB plays
in supporting economic reform.
Also, KGB penetrations of the
U.S. embassy in Moscow, includ-
ing the implantation of sophisti-
cated listening devices in the new
Moscow chancery and the seduc-
tion and attempted recruitment
of a Marine security guard, have
shown that the KGB has not
slackened in its espionage efforts,
despite a warming of U.S.-Soviet
relations.
Under the direction of Soviet
Foreign Minister Eduard She-
vardnadze, the KGB's role in su-
pervising the ideological dimen-
sion of foreign policy will remain
strong. Soviet diplomacy and in-
telligence operations abroad are
seen by many experts as a con-
venient method of reducing exter-
nal pressures, a justification for
high military expenditures that
could allow valuable resources to
be diverted to revamping much of
the outdated 1930s-era industrial
infrastructure. Shevardnadze, for
his part, has been viewed by
Western analysts as a possible
T he KGB stands at
the core of the
world's largest
totalitarian police state.
replacement for Chebrikov, a
move that would allow Anatoli
Dobrynin, head of the Informa-
tion Department, to take over the
foreign ministry.
Any understanding of the
KGB's role must be viewed within
the context of its position and
mission within the Soviet party-
state bureaucracy.
Soviet security history
The KGB security apparatus is
unique in the annals of modern
history. It stands at the core of
the world's largest totalitarian
police state and is the action arm
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CURRENT ISSUES
quired by the New Economic Poli-
cy-and that calls for more revo-
lutionary legality," Lenin told the
tenth party congress.
Leggett also noted that the
NEP had two contrasting conse-
quences that are equally applica-
ble to today's perestroika:
Vitaly Yurchenko (center) "redefects" to Moscow. Recently, the KGB has
been tasked with softening its actions against dissenters.
of a political party that for 70
years has sought to exercise total
control over virtually all aspects
of human endeavor in the name of
Marxist-Leninist ideology.
The KGB today is charged with
the dual responsibilities of exer-
cising internal political control
over Soviet society and conduct-
ing foreign intelligence collection
and operations abroad. Although
estimates of KGB personnel are
all but impossible to verify, au-
thor John Barron, a specialist on
the KGB, put the number of pro-
fessional KGB officers at about
90,000. The network of Soviets
who serve as internal security op-
eratives and informants has
been estimated at an additional
400,000.
The KGB is a direct descendant
of the Cheka, the name given
to Lenin's ad hoc political police
bureau, which sprang up only
weeks after the first communist
regime was established in 1917.
Answerable only to the bolshevik
Council of People's Commissars,
the Cheka under Lenin and his
deputy Felix Dzerzhinsky quickly
assumed powers of arrest, trial,
imprisonment, and execution, and
launched a reign of terror that
claimed the lives of hundreds of
thousands of innocent victims.
The pattern followed by Soviet
leaders seeking perestroika and
glasnost is very similar to Lenin's
first tactical retreat from com-
munism. The program was
launched in 1921 under what was
called the New Economic Policy
(NEP), a term repeated by Gorba-
chev as he pushed his reforms.
The NEP permitted private trad-
ing, allowed the establishment of
foreign investment, and abolished
a system of food requisitioning.
With the civil war essentially
over in 1921, Lenin found the So-
viet state beset by internal strife
and serious economic shortcom-
ings. Under the new program, Le-
nin overhauled the security police
and limited its role. "We are now
faced with the task of developing
private exchange-that is re-
Economic liberalization on the
one hand, but political tighten-
ing of the screws on the other.
. . . The implementation of
NEP and the relaxation of re-
lations with other countries
called for a new, liberalized
image of the Soviet state.
...Lenin's New Economic Pol-
icy required economic regener-
ation at home and political
conciliation abroad; a pre-
condition of both was the dim-
inution of terror, and its corol-
lary the strengthening of the
rule of law.
The roots of the current reform
period can be traced to the poli-
cies of Andropov. Gorbachev, at
one time a minor party function-
ary in outlying Stavropol Prov-
ince involved with Soviet agricul-
tural policies, rose to power in
1978 with the support of Andro-
pov and Mikhail Suslov, the late
party hard-liner and standard-
bearer for communist ideolo-
gy. Once in power, Andropov
launched a series of programs de-
signed to end the corruption that
had flourished within the Soviet
system under Brezhnev, and Gor-
bachev served as a key enforcer
of the Andropov program. Andro-
pov also initiated an antialcohol-
ism campaign that has been con-
tinued under Gorbachev. Soviet
officials, questioned about the mo-
tive behind glasnost, frequently
mention the corruption under
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Brezhnev as a primary rationale
for glasnost and perestroika.
The KGB also played an impor-
tant role in Gorbachev's bid to
s
th
l
d
ft
be
t
t
op par
er a
er
come
e
y
ea
the death of Brezhnev aide Kon-
stantin Chernenko, one year after
he succeeded Andropov in 1984.
Gorbachev became Soviet leader
after KGB chief Chebrikov, in line
with the Andropov-Gorbachev an-
ticorruption drive, helped elimi-
nate Gorbachev's chief rival by
claiming to have incriminating
evidence of corruption by Vic-
tor Grishin, chief of the power-
ful Moscow party. Thus, Gorba-
chev assumed power, and within
his first two years as general sec-
retary replaced 44 percent of the
top leadership, including another
leading contender, Grigori Roma-
nov, believed to be Grishin's pa-
tron.
While changes in the Soy '.et
Union under Gorbachev have
been political in nature, the KGB
intelligence service is one of the
few institutions that has not been
overhauled and is not likely to
be weakened. From the Western
vantage point, perestroika ap-
pears more the product of an
imaginative, younger generation
of hard-line communist leaders,
who see the KGB as an instru-
ment to be used in building a
more efficient socialist system,
than of a desire for a more benign
and less-threatening state, which
some observers have hoped for.
Seen from this perspective, the
KGB will continue in its role as
the modern-day Cheka and will no
doubt be more vigilant in main-
taining control over, and if neces-
sary neutralizing, whatever op-
Former KGB chief YuriAndropov (center) sits with former Foreign Minister
Andrei Gromyko (left). According to the author, the KGB was a major force
in Gorbachev's rise to power.
position develops in the form of
political, religious, and ethnic
groups that seek more freedoms
and reforms than permitted un-
der glasnost.
As Defense Intelligence Agency
analyst John J. Dziak stated in
his book Chekisty: A History of the
KGB, the current glasnost initia-
tives have not altered the essen-
tial reality of the Soviet system,
in terms of its operational mode.
"The State is still above society
and the party-state security pha-
lanx sits at the apex of state
elites. . . . The KGB of the
Andropov-Gorbachev period has
long been rehabilitated and once
more is the cutting edge of the
party, a circumstance pointedly
repeated by the party and KGB
alike."
Dziak notes that the 24 KGB
delegates who attended the im-
portant 1986 Communist Party
Congress, where perestroika was
outlined in great detail, represent
a higher degree of party and state
T he KGB will no
doubt be more
vigilant in maintaining
control over whatever
opposition develops.
security interpenetration than at
any time in the post-Stalin era.
"The KGB, as did the Cheka, con-
siders itself the sword and most
trusted servant of the party.
Those duties entail striking ene-
mies and preserving the system
in its core essentials. Both Chek-
ists and party apparatchiks his-
torically have demonstrated that
in the face of the most dangerous
challenges they can energize the
counterintelligence state into con-
fronting the threat frontally ...
or through stratagem."^
William Gertz is a national security af-
fairs reporter for the Washington Times.
MAY 1988 121
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1 ^ UUIlIltIV I IJJUtb
Commentary
NATIONAL SECURITY
AND FISCAL REALITY:
AN IMPENDING COLLISION
by Harlan K. Ullman
T o use a maritime metaphor,
the ship of state is on a
collision course with fiscal
reality. The first Reaganaut since
former Budget Director David
Stockman to sound the alarm
publicly was ex-Secretary of the
Navy James Webb. His sudden
resignation in February will be
remembered largely as the result
of a policy rift with Secretary of
Defense Frank C. Carlucci over
defense priorities and naval
spending cuts. That controversy,
however, reflected only sighting
the tip of this looming fiscal ice-
berg. To the next administration
will fall the responsibility of cop-
ing with the consequences of colli-
sion.
For national security, the im-
mediate impact of hitting this fis-
cal iceberg will be a significant
and swift reduction in overall
U.S. military strength and num-
bers, perhaps by as much as a
third, and beginning before this
decade's end.' The most newswor-
thy questions, as is the case with
many dramatic events, will focus
on why and how this reduction
occurred. The more relevant ques-
tions, however, rest in identify-
ing and understanding the conse-
quences for national security, if
1. See the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, U.S. Conventional Force Structure at The
Crossroads (Washington, D.C.: November 1985) for the
analysis leading to this conclusion.
any, of this impending diminution
of military capability, and deter-
mining the likely implications for
the broader geostrategic context
of U.S. and allied security as well
as what damage control measures
the new administration and next
Congress must consider, given
this erosion in military power.
For better or worse, the time
remaining in office for the cur-
rent administration and Congress
is far too short for any course
corrections even to be considered.
Adjustments in commitments and
threat assessments are not going
to happen.2 And, despite the at-
tractive solution of deriving
greater value from the dollars
spent on defense to arrest the
impending decline in military
power, the most sweeping and re-
cent attempts at serious reform
of the defense process, including
the Goldwater-Nichols Defense
Reorganization Law of 1986 and
the President's Blue Ribbon Com-
mission on Improving Defense
Management (the Packard Com-
mission), have simply not yet
moved the rudder enough to de-
flect a future collision.
In all likelihood, the next ad-
2. Debate will, of course, focus on U.S. commitments
and threat assessment. Given a tendency for adminis-
trations to move to the center, generally this has
meant no major adjustments occurring for either com-
mitment or threat. This paper assumes this condition
will continue. Hence, the resource expenditure process
emerges as the issue on which political action could
have positive effect.
ministration will enter office
largely unaware of or prepared
for this condition. Since it takes
time for an administration to fill
senior positions and have them
approved, and time beyond that
to settle into office, the chances
are good that the administra-
tion will fall behind in address-
ing these issues. That reality will
only serve to complicate our fu-
ture choices.
Why the decline?
Projecting the overall decline
in U.S. military strength
precipitated by constrained
defense spending is a relatively
straightforward exercise. Esti-
mating the political conse-
quences of that decline is in a
different universe of predictabili-
ty. This is because it will be dif-
ficult to predict how the public
will react to the fact that after a
50 percent real (after inflation)
increase in annual defense spend-
ing during the Reagan years, we
could be left with what may come
to be called the incredibly shrink-
ing defense establishment. And it
is inherently difficult to deter-
mine precisely how much mili-
tary power is objectively needed
to ensure our security. The struc-
tural reasons that will cause the
decline, however, are much eas-
ier to identify.
199 THE WC1RI f1 R I
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