DRAFT DDCI TESTIMONY FOR HASC

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90T00435R000100070031-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 6, 2013
• Sequence Number: 31
• Publication Date: July 5, 1988
• Content Type: MEMO

Declassified in Part- Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/09/06: CIA-RDP90T00435R000100070031-1
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MEMO FOR: B. Blackwell, L. Gershwin, L. Budge
FROM: C/NIC
SUBJECT: Draft DDCI Testimony for;HASC.
On the whole Ben's draft is excellent: Expert, thorough, balanced, and
nuanced. It still awaits allealthy sprinkling of community views, which is
the NIOs' responsibility. Please provide this.
There is, nevertheless, a largely implicit tendentiousness'in'the draft
which I strongly suspect Gates will'spot-and object to. It needs to be made
explicit and then countered with the contrary possibility.
The implicit tendency is that, while little has changed concretely as
yet, the potential for "radical change" in the "nature of the military
threat" is there, and that, if Gorbachev gets his way, the change will be
iformly benign. To wit:
5 July 1988
Less emphasis on military as opposed to other (political, economic,
cultural) means of international power projection.
Reduced military spending because of arms control and economic
constraints; resource shifts at the margin from military to civilian
purposes.
More receptivity to stabilizing and verifiable arms control agreements.
Reduced force structure.
Reduced emphasis on destabilizing pursuit of warfighting/warwinning
nuclear advantages.
Adoption of less offensive, more defensive military postures in the
general purpose forces.
Adoption of "functional" definitions of military sufficiency which serve
as self-denying prescriptions not to indulge in arms racing.
If all this were to come to pass, the US-Soviet strategic competition would
be radically muted, and perhaps even disappear. The Cold War might be over.
?
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/09/06 : CIA-RDP90T00435R00610on7nm1_1
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/09/06: CIA-RDP90T00435R000100070031-1
As the draft notes, much is what Is e 14' 1r
being used, if not designed, to promote these very be .
West...along with important internal political goals. But we hive?tolis
what kind of Soviet superpower Gorbachev really has in his minals,eye and
whether it is as benignly demilitarized as the tendency of some of these
doctrinal themes and ideas implies to us.
If you take together the themes of strategy and doctrine, economic and
technological modernization, arms control, and political effects on the
West, it is quite possible, in about a decade's time, to come up with a
different but more formidable Soviet threat than the one familiar to us. To
Spurred by arms control politics and agreements, NATO defense efforts
fall as sharply as they have in such periods in the past.
Aided by arms control politics and agreements, the Soviets manage a
major reduction of the standing military forces of NATO and the Pact,
while retaining and modernizing their advantage in mobilized forces.
Aided by arms control politics and agreements, the Soviets achieve
reduction in the size of battlefield, theater, and strategic nuclear
arsenals and the likelihood that they would be used in a European war.
Reductions of strategic arsenals by 50% and more leaves open the
possibility that modernized remaining Soviet nuclear forces could
achieve significant military advantages and that the USSR could survive
a nuclear war.
A START/ABM Treaty regime could leave the Soviets free to pursue their
kind of strategic defense (C3, forces, mobilization base) while
precluding the area defenses that, in the long run, are the only kind
with a political constituency in the US.
Detente gives the USSR the breathing space to modernize its industrial
base for more effective technological competition, and "new thinking"
makes it a more effective diplomatic competitor.
The Soviets end up with a more usable conventional advantage in Europe,
a still powerful nuclear capability to inhibit nuclear escalation, and a
combination of nuclear offensive and strategic defensive capabilities
that allows plausibly for survival of a central nuclear war.
This scenario has a lot of "ifs" in it as,well, most importantly the
depressing effect of detente on Western military spending and vigilance.
But it is as plausibly a conception of Gorbachev's vision of the future as
the benign one suggested by much of the new rhetoric. It fits with the
Gorbachev that I have seen across the table and with the institutions he is
trying to win over. It fits with a USSR which, to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn,
Is trying to be both a great power and a great country.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/09/06: CIA-RDP90T00435R000100070031-1
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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/09/06: CIA-RDP90T00435R000100070031-1
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I think we needge 1. tiitnuo;:,
ttle. ?
panoply of new thinge: debate)iitght'cOn
new:. kind and intensityb.fystrategic.challenge, rather- than a' .diniing
the challenge. On the basis of past conversations, I think the106
want to do this.
ritz W. Ermarth
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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2013/09/06: CIA-RDP90T00435R000100070031-1