PAPER ON SOVIET STRATEGIC THOUGHT FOR THE PRESIDENT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP89T01156R000100100019-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 6, 2011
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: October 18, 1985
• Content Type: MEMO

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The irector o en ra Intel ence
R'ashington, D.C. 5
NIC #05197-85
er 1985
'Ina
MEMORANDUM FOR: Director of Central Intelligence
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
VIA: Chairman, National Intelligence Councils
Vice Chairman, National Intelligence Council
FROM: Fritz W. Ermarth
National Intelligence Officer for USSR
SUBJECT: Paper on Soviet Strategic Thought for the President
1. Several days ago I gave Jack Matlock the attached draft paper which
he requested from me as part of his continuing series of informal
backgrounders for the President. Like earlier submissions from SOVA and
others, he planned to edit and abridge as necessary for the President's
reading. Yesterday one of Jack's assistants told me that the paper looked
OK and probably would go forward largely unchanged.
2. The paper is a variation on a lengthier and more analytic piece I
did for Kissinger in support of his PFIAB charge to examine what we had
learned about Soviet military doctrine and how that might help our arms and
arms control planning. Kissinger, as you know, is scheduled to talk with
the President soon about this, perhaps to give him a letter on the subject
(a PFIAB staff draft of which you have seen), and to recommend that the
President receive a seminar-style briefing from some or all of the figures
who briefed Kissinger at the onset of his inquiry (Ermarth, Odom, Gershwin,
Negus, and Marshall). Expecting that the President might be interested in
this, Kissinger wanted you to discuss orchestrating the desired
presentations with Secretary Weinberger, and may have mentioned this when
you saw him a week ago.
3. This may be overkill on an important, but not all-important
subject. It would be helpful, however, for the President to appreciate --
as a bottom line -- that determined pursuit of our military programs, from
conventional technology to SDI, has a chance of knocking the props out from
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NIC #05197-85
SUBJECT: Paper on Soviet Strategic Thought for the President
under the way the Soviets think about and configure their offensive power.
The very prospect of this happening may help persuade them to modify their
military ambitions and perhaps other aspects of their behavior we find
threatening. Of course, there is a big difference between hypothesizing
about such things and actually doing them.
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NIC #05197-85
SUBJECT: Paper on Soviet Strategic Thought for the President
Distribution:
Orig - Addressee
1 - DDCI
1 - ExecReg
1 - DCI/SA
1 - ExDir
1 - C/NIC
1 - VC/NIC
1 - NI0/EUR
1 - NI0/GPF
1 - NIO/SP
1 - NIC Reg.
1 - NI0/USSR (Chron)
1 - NI0/USSR (Subj)
NIO/USSR:FWErmarth:l I/180ct85
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SOVIET STRATEGY AND STRATEGIC THINKING
Underlying all the destructive weapons and forces are ideas about strategy.
From the mid-1960s well into the 1970s, many influential Americans believed --
despite persuasive evidence to the contrary from Soviet military writings and
to be very much like our own. In our familiar American tendency to attribute
our own views and values to other peoples and their leaders, we tended to
believe that, because we and the Soviets both faced the awesome problem of
nuclear weapons, and we were both basically sensible people, we had to think
about the management of this problem in roughly the same way. Maybe the
Soviets weren't quite as sophisticated as we with all our think tanks and
academic journals, but they would more or less follow our lead in strategic
thinking.
Today, while this mistaken "mirror imaging" of our views on the Soviets
persists in some circles, we know a lot better. The manner and size of the
Soviet strategic and other force buildups of the last twenty years showed that
the Soviets thought differently than we about strategy and military, including
nuclear, power. Study of the Soviet buildup, of Soviet military exercises and
command structures, of their military writings
has taught us a great deal about Soviet
-- that Soviet strategic thinking had
strategy and military thinking. It underscores some important differences
from our own.
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JGVRGII I
This shouldn't have been surprising to us. After all the Soviets are coming
from a different place in geography, in history, and in political culture.
Although now a global military superpower, at least in nuclear terms, Soviet
Russia remains a continental superpower and, like Tsarist Russia, places a
high store on dominating its continental periphery. The influence of history
and political culture is often misunderstood as follows: Having been
frequently invaded by Europeans and Asiatics over the centuries, Russians are
seen as pathologically insecure; hence the they feel the need for massive
military power. There is some truth in this, but the essence is different.
First of all, growing from a small principality in Muscovy, Russia has spent
much more time invading and conquering than being invaded and conquered. The
Russian state was built by the autocratic princes of Moscow, not by the
merchants of the more westward-looking cities, such as Novgorod. For this
reason, Kremlin rulers have from Medieval times to the present seen their
security, indeed the legitimacy of their rule, to rest upon as much control
over people, their own and those around them, as they could get. These
attitudes toward political power have also shaped Russian and Soviet thinking
about strategy and military power.
Americans tend to think of military power as an unpleasant but necessary means
of preserving live-and-let-live conditions in a sometimes dangerous world.
The Soviets think of military power as a means of preserving and expanding
their authority. This makes their strategy both very defensive and very
offensive at the same time.
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The structure, or architecture, of their strategy and their overall military
forces displays this quality. The basic aims of Soviet military power in war,
and also in peace, are to assure the survival of the political system at home
and to enhance the projection of its power in the surrounding world. Hence
the Soviets have been engaged in strategic defense, air, civil, and ABM
defense, from the beginning of the nuclear era. We had strategic defenses in
the 1950s, but gave them up in the 1960s, in favor of the deterrent "balance
of terror" concept based on nuclear offensive forces. The second basic
mission of Soviet military strength is to project power into the surrounding
regions of Eurasia, especially Europe, but also in East Asia and southward
toward the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Hence the enormous land combat
forces, with their accompanying air and nuclear power, far more than they
would need to retain control of East Europe or to deter attacks. By contrast,
the US and NATO have seen our general purpose forces as a heavy trip wire to
release the nuclear deterrent or as means of dealing with very limited
contingencies outside of Europe.
The Soviets see their long-range nuclear offensive forces as a deterrent, as
we have. But to a much greater extent, they have also regarded these forces
as long-range artillery support for backing up the other two primary missions
of their forces: strategic defense of the homeland, through counterforce
attacks on US nuclear forces and their command and control; and dominance of
the Eurasian periphery, through attacks on nearby enemy forces and their
bases.
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In their thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war, the Soviets have
never made the distinction between deterrence and warfighting capabilities
that h been characteristic of US thinking. Nor have they discarded the
notion of victory in nuclear war despite the assertion of Soviet leaders that
nuclear war should not p occur (which they believe) and cannot be'won (which
A
they do not believe).
Even when, in the 1950s and early 1960s, they had too little nuclear force to
implement their view, the Soviets developed and held to the notion that real
deterrent power had to be real warfighting power as well. This is because
they believed that they had not only to deter attacks on them, but as far as
they could to encourage acceptance of their aims around the world short of a
major war. This required nuclear warfighting strength. Moreover, they
believed that nuclear war could actually occur, and, if it did, it would have
to be fought for rational political and military aims, despite the awesome
destructiveness of nuclear weapons. This is why they have developed a
comprehensive array of counterforce nuclear weapons, such as the SS-18 against
our silos and SS-20s against Eurasian military targets, and homeland defenses,
including civil defense.
Soviet political and military leaders appreciate full well that any large
nuclear war would be horribly destructive for their country and potentially
lethal for their system. This has not, however, nullified their belief in the
possibility of victory in nuclear war. For one thing, the ideology on which
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their system rests prevents that belief from being discarded. For them to
really believe that the handiwork of humans, such as nuclear weapons, could
write the end to Soviet and even human history would mean that Marx and Lenin
were wrong in a fundamental respect. More important, however, the Soviets
have never believed that nuclear war, even a very large scale war, was likely
to take the form of a mindless exchange of massive attacks on cities. Rather
they have tended to believe that a major nuclear war would involve attacks of
varying intensity and timing on a wide range of military targets, after which
one side or the other would quit or collapse, but societies as such could
survive, especially if they provided for active and civil defense.
Over the years they have built up offensive and defensive capabilities for
this kind of nuclear war. Moreover, as their capabilities have grown, their
concept of a major war between the superpowers has evolved as has their
concept of victory. This evolution continues, and we are trying to track it
in their military exercises and literature. What appears to be happening is a
growing Soviet belief that their powerful nuclear forces along with their
general purpose forces can enforce a different kind of victory, by deterring
US use of nuclear weapons at least on a large scale, while general purpose
forces, supported if necessary by the required nuclear strikes, can conquer
Europe and perhaps other regions nearby. The US would have to accept the
result rather than be destroyed in a massive exchange. But the US would be
reduced to a secondary power, while the USSR would emerge preeminent.
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The key to this kind of thinking lies in the combination of all Soviet forces
strategic nuclear, general purpose, and homeland defense. The Soviets do not
separate them into distinct categories quite the way we do. In combination,
they could allow victory in a large scale, general, but still not absolutely
allout nuclear conflict. The Soviets do not see this outcome as certain, by
any means; but it is a possibility that the design of their forces and
strategies can make more probable if it ever comes to a war.
In the meantime, the Soviets believe that this overall force combination,
along with increasing ability to project power at a distance, e.g., into the
Third World, enhances the image of the USSR as a superpower and enhances their
"persuasiveness" (i.e., ability to intimidate) vis-a-vis neighboring
countries. Power projection into the Third World, which includes military
deliveries, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations, as well as military
bases and forces,has become a fourth pillar of the Soviet strategic
architecture, along with strategic defense, Eurasian dominance, and long-range
nuclear strike.
From another perspective one can say that Soviet strategy has been designed
over the past forty years to defeat American strategy in war and also in
peacetime power politics. Historically, the US has relied on long-range
nuclear sanctions plus relatively weaker forward forces to protect its exposed
allies near the USSR. The USSR has built forces to dominate over the regions
where US allies are located while also negating the credibility of US
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long-range nuclear guarantees. Desiring to avoid any war or major test of
strength, the Soviets have hoped that this combination would gradually
demoralize the US and its allies in peacetime, leading to the erosion of our
security commitments, the collapse of our alliances and the replacement of the
US by the USSR as the predominant world power.
In the late 1970s, the Soviets developed a detectable confidence that trends
in the "correlation of forces", by which they mean political as well as
military forces, was moving in a direction favorable to this prognosis. In
the 1980s, however, the US and its allies have been more determined to resist
this trend, undermining Soviet confidence that this is the way things will
go. On the contrary, they now see factors that could -- not necessarily will
-- turn these trends around.
From a strictly military point of view, the most worrisome new factors, other
than the increase of US defense efforts and renewed commitment to global
security, lie in the combination of SDI and the new non-nuclear technologies
for conventional defense the US is pursuing. All sources of information
indictate how concerned the Soviets are about SDI. Interestingly, Soviet
marshals write even more eloquently about their concern over the new
conventional defense technologies. Together they challenge the primacy of the
twin darlings of Soviet military power: the long-range ballistic missile and
the tank. If the US and NATO actually develop and deploy such capabilities,
they will undermine the offensive pillars of the Soviet strategic
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architecture. The USSR may be no less secure in the strictly military sense,
as a result, but it will be less capable of casting an intimidating shadow
over its neighbors. This is why Soviet propaganda, diplomacy, and arms
control policy are trying to stop SDI and other US defense programs, and, more
generally, to encourage the US to return to the behavior and strategic
doctrines we exhibited in the 1970s, which the Soviets found quite
comfortable. Because Soviet superpower status rests so heavily on offensive
military power combinations, the loss of this edge, so the Kremlin fears, will
negate Soviet superpower status and ultimately undermine the legitimacy of
Kremlin rule itself.
In the end, the challenge of the USSR to Western security and values stems
more from the nature of its system than from the content of its strategies and
military thought. If the rulers of the Soviet Union could somehow be brought
to relent in their determination to control everybody they can reach, at home
and road' their marshals and generals -- who are intelligent and rational
men -- could readily come up with military strategies and force postures which
would allow the USSR to be a secure and constructive participant in the world
community. For that to happen, however, they have to be shown that the
strategies they have followed patiently for thirty years will not work.
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