Alex Kingsbury, in US News and World Report, has just published a piece on inner workings of the Soviet Bloc. He is, as far as I can see, right on target. Here are some quotes and comments.
“These military plans and after-action reports show how unrealistic the Soviets were in planning for conflicts that included nuclear launches.
Military planners assumed that cities like Munich, Vienna, and other major urban centers would be obliterated by nuclear weapons, yet within a matter of days they assumed that Warsaw Pact forces would be able to sweep through those areas with no ill effects. It's very clear that they completely glossed over the reality of what it would mean to be marching through a nuclear wasteland.”
“Penetration of the western military was unusually high, and they had a lot of very specific intelligence about NATO's thinking. That should have told them that NATO's planning was defensive, but their ideology predisposed them to assume that capitalist states were aggressive and that NATO was on the verge of a strike at any moment. Their ideology, in part, explains why they ignored the findings of their own intelligence establishment.”
Cold War era intelligence analysts noticed a disconnect between military doctrine and what their intelligence reports were showing. While this was puzzling, I gradually came to believe that it was the lack of a free press and outside academic experts that allowed the Soviet doctrinal mindset to go unchallenged. In the United States, intelligence agencies had to be concerned about not overstating the threat (called the 10 foot tall Russian soldier). DIA, in particular, came in for a lot of criticism for its Soviet Military Power documents stressing the size of military spending. It wasn’t just ideology that caused the Soviets to ignore the findings of their own intelligence establishment, it was the lack of a free press and independent universities.
In addition, the group of Army analysts that I worked with was very careful to use Soviet terms and viewpoint to describe Soviet actions. We prepared an entire series of Documents called the Soviet Battlefield Development Plan (SBDP) to accomplish this. Our Soviet analytical counterparts did not appear to exercise an equivalent care. We had been taught that “mirror imaging” – seeing our own face in the mirror – was a bad analysis.
“Over the years there was a tremendous amount of jockeying and maneuvering and outright dissension among virtually all the allied states, which wasn't as clear before. Some states were concerned about the financial burden; others were concerned about the Soviet strategy, which called for Eastern Europe to be the central battleground for a conflict. The prime directive was to defend the Soviet Union and not the Soviet bloc.”
Spies, including Polish Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski and KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky were essential in shaping US – and Britain’s understanding of Soviet actions and intentions. These two men, in particular, recognized that Soviet Doctrine was at variance with the findings of their own intelligence establishment.
Comments