The Third World War: August 1985

CHAPTER 27: Reflections on a War

Conflicts which the Soviet Union did not start, but which it studiously sought to sharpen and exploit, have yet to be resolved. Fighting still goes on. The pattern of the successor states into which the USSR seems now to be dividing has yet to be fully determined. There are differences between the countries which, under their former regime, were all members of the Warsaw Pact. There are also differences between each one of them and the member states of the Western Alliance, with which they have so lately been at war. To settle all these differences will take time and will be far from easy. Meanwhile, there is still warfare outside Europe. No doubt it will continue, in one way or another, for some time, with whatever resources (and much material has been left behind by the Russians) the belligerents can find.

The Third World War, however, can be fairly said to have ended with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in late August 1985 and the cessation of direct hostilities between the major powers. We have already taken a brief glance at how the world then looked, and in the concluding chapter we look a little into the future. Something more should now be said about what might have happened and did not, about certain contributory factors to the outcome and about some, at least, of the conclusions that can be drawn from these events.

What especially distinguishes the scene we now see about us — and this is something to which we shall only be able to grow accustomed with the passage of time — is the absence from it of the powerful, restless, baleful, expansive, intractably dogmatic imperialism of Soviet Russia.

The world has come out of another bad dream, just as it did out of the Nazi nightmare. This one lasted rather longer. The myth born in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 persisted, before it was dispersed, for nearly three-quarters of a century. It was the myth of the emergence of true democracy from a proletarian explosion, when what had really taken place was the murderous overthrow of a democratically elected government by a fanatical authoritarian minority.

It is argued by some that the basic contradictions of Marxism-Leninism would inevitably have caused, in time, the downfall of any state built on it. Whatever Karl Marx may have contributed to nineteenth-century thought his political philosophy is held by many today, a century later, to be unscientific, romantic and obsolete, no more useful as a guide to government in the twentieth century than the novels of Charles Dickens as a reflection of life today in England. Indeed, if the revolutionary genius of Lenin had not harnessed to the advancement of Marxism a huge and backward group of peoples accustomed to absolutism — most of them Asiatic and some still semi-savage — it might have been consigned to the dust heap of history long ago, and this particular nightmare might never have occurred at all. The nightmare is now over, and we shall never know if the USSR, given time, would have fallen apart by itself or not, without the war it brought about. There may be other nightmares still ahead.

It has been suggested with some plausibility that in addition to the conjunction of miscalculation and mischance which triggered off the explosion of August 1985 there had long been a growing awareness among the rulers of the USSR of increasing strains within the Warsaw Pact, and within the Soviet Union itself, which could hardly be contained without a signal military victory over the capitalist West. There had also been, among the top people in the regime, a very real fear of Germany. There had even been some fear of the capacity of the Federal Republic to lead the West (and above all the United States) into an aggressive war against the communist East. This was a fear which West German insistence on ‘forward defence’ (whatever that might mean — and it clearly meant different things to different people) did little to abate. It was for all that little but the product of the Soviet Union’s own propaganda.

The real causes of this war between the Eastern and the Western blocs will long be matter for debate. Whatever they were the fighting could not, it now seems, find its resolution (if it did not move into the strategic exchange of weapons of mass destruction, which would have emptied the concept of ‘resolution’ of all meaning) anywhere but in Europe. Its focal point could be nowhere but in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The critical point in the military action was therefore bound to be, at least as far as the battle on and over the land was concerned, in what was designated in NATO as the Central Region of Allied Command Europe.

What also seems beyond doubt is that the Soviet plan to penetrate the Northern Army Group, cross the Rhine in the Low Countries, and roll up AFCENT by an offensive thrust from north to south along the west bank of the Rhine, which would have taken CENTAG in the rear, came very close to success. It was well conceived and well prepared, with a not unreasonable assessment of the difficulties involved. This particular plan was an element in a general structure of contingency planning, any one part of which was valid in itself though none was likely to be implemented in isolation. It was the unexpectedly strong Western response to the Soviet intervention in Yugoslavia which pulled the chocks out, as it were, and set the plan for the invasion of the Central Region rolling down the slipway to the launch.

What might have happened in the long run if this plan had come off is quite incalculable. It can be said with complete confidence that in the shorter term it would have brought about the total destruction of the Federal Republic of Germany, and that the Atlantic Alliance would in consequence have lain in ruins. The possibility of a counter-offensive by the United States, in these circumstances, can hardly be conceived. The situation would have been beyond repair.

The bogey of an all-out attack on Allied Command Europe by forces of the Warsaw Pact, planned in total secrecy and carried out with complete surprise by forces already in place, with the aid of massive under-cover operations prepared with absolute security, was not the sort of thing to give sensible men sleepless nights in the years before the war — though it might not have been sensible wholly to disregard the possibility. Much more likely, Allied planners thought, was what actually happened: the implementation of well-prepared contingency plans, involving a high degree of preparation, as crises developing elsewhere showed signs of moving out of control.

Unlikely though it may have been, a surprise attack in the late seventies by in-place forces of the Warsaw Pact would have found Allied Command Europe so ill prepared that its early success could hardly have been in doubt, whether the French came in on the Allied side or not. The US Army in Europe had not yet fully recovered from the Vietnam experience. It was becoming accustomed to the absence of the draft but was already running into serious and unexpected difficulties over reserves as a result of ending it. Stocks which had been run down for the Israeli war were only slowly being replaced. The ‘Reforger’ system, by which formations would be flown in from the continental United States to marry up with equipment pre-stocked in the Federal Republic, though already showing great promise, had not yet been as fully developed as in the years to come.

The Bundeswehr was improving, but although its units were rated by the Russians as the best of the Allied bunch it was still only in moderate shape by the exacting standards of German professional soldiers, while the German Territorial Army was scarcely more than embryonic.

The British Army of the Rhine was again in the throes of reorganization, with the level of provision (and the state) of its equipment causing concern to its officers and with several battalions of its invaluable infantry still in Northern Ireland. The forces for defence in depth in NORTHAG, when the inevitable breakthrough occurred and there was no release of Allied nuclear weapons (which would almost certainly have been withheld), were wholly inadequate.

Belgian and Dutch forces were heavily — and dangerously — reliant on reservists with no more than short conscript training behind them, and were still reluctant (particularly in the case of the Dutch) to maintain any considerable strength in proximity to their forward battle stations in the Federal Republic. There was very little hope that in the event of a surprise attack Dutch forces of any real significance would have been able to reach their emergency positions before these were overrun.

The Allied air forces were still ahead of those of the Warsaw Pact in quality of equipment, though the gap was closing. They were also well ahead in the quality of their aircrew, but among the European Allies air forces had been ruinously run down. Air defence with surface weapons, even in Allied Command Europe, was nowhere strong. Some of the equipment was good. The British low-level Rapier, for instance, was outstanding. There were in 1977 only two Rapier regiments in BAOR, however, neither of which was armoured or even tactically mobile. The air defence of Great Britain, upon which so much would depend, was particularly weak. It was almost as rundown as the UK’s civil defences against air attack, whether by conventional weapons or nuclear.

Invasion from a standing start in the late seventies, if it had ever been tried, would almost certainly have brought the Russians to the Rhine in a very few days — unless NATO employed nuclear weapons. What would have happened then is anyone’s guess. A high probability would have been swift escalation into the strategic nuclear exchange which would very soon have rendered the land battle in Europe largely irrelevant.

Deliberate all-out attack with complete surprise from a standing start, it must be repeated, was always unlikely. The more probable way in which it was thought in the West that a war in Europe would be likely to break out was just the way it did. What happened to start it off in 1985 could have happened, in one way or another, much earlier.

If the crisis of 1985 had occurred in 1977, say, or even in 1978, it is, as we have seen, scarcely conceivable that the Soviet plan for an advance to the Rhine, the dismemberment of the Alliance and the total destruction of the Federal Republic of Germany could have failed given the state of preparedness of the Allies at that time.

What was done in the years between 1978 and 1984 was enough to prevent this. The tale of it has already been referred to in outline. It is told more fully, using Britain as a test case, in Appendices 1 and 3.

The advantages of the military structure formed to function in peacetime — a quite unique feature of the Atlantic Alliance — have become ever more abundantly clear. Without NATO as a framework the individual efforts of the Allies would have been of little account and much less effective in the aggregate. Within NATO the contributions of the Allies, though incompletely co-ordinated, added up to far more than the sum of the parts. In these years the United States came out of its post-Vietnam trance. Great Britain threw off some of the illusions which had flooded into the vacuum left by the disappearance of an empire. The Federal Republic ceased to be mesmerized by the success of its economic miracle and the allure of a welfare state. Even Belgium and Holland, though late and incompletely, began to show some awareness that the Soviet Union was already in a position to meet and master a real crisis and would welcome a showdown with the capitalist West, and sooner rather than later at that. Throughout NATO there was a growing tendency to face and accept defence responsibilities, nowhere more clearly shown than in a steady rise in readiness, an improvement in reinforcement capabilities and a striking advance in anti-tank and air defence.

The miscalculation over the possible participation of France was a major blunder on the Soviet Union’s part at the very outset. In the sphere of grand strategy the Soviet Union was soon to be in deeper water still. It was attempting to handle an almost worldwide problem of war command, with operations proceeding simultaneously from Bodo in Norway to Berbera in North-east Africa, from the Caribbean to the Caucasus. This was beyond the powers of the centralized system of control on which the regime depended. Only a degree of independence in command which was wholly foreign to it, and to which Soviet commanders themselves were completely unaccustomed, could have enabled peripheral commands to retain the initiative without which they were bound to fail.

At the tactical level, a very similar point applied. The Russians were attempting to apply a battle-fighting method which demanded a degree of independence in junior leaders which it had been a major interest of the Marxist-Leninist system to discourage.

The battle-fighting method itself was on the whole unremarkable. What was hailed in the West by some in the late seventies as a tactical revolution in the Red Army, the conversion from mass attack to manoeuvre, from the shock of frontal assault to the ‘deep thrust’ and the ‘daring raid’, was neither so novel nor so radical as was thought. What was being developed in Red Army tactical practice was the action of combined arms, co-ordinated and commanded at a lower level than was customary. This marked a shift of emphasis which showed up weaknesses none the less. The BMP, designed for the nuclear battlefield, was found not to be the best combat vehicle for the carriage of infantry supporting armour in a non-nuclear battle. It was in the process of being somewhat hesitantly replaced by a better vehicle, the MTLB, when war broke out. The problems of interrelating combat elements with different speeds and other characteristics remained unsolved.

So did the difficulties of combining many widely differing parts into a composite tactical whole in a fluid situation, where initiative, inventiveness and a bold independence of mind in junior leaders were what counted. The Red Army had made much over the years of the importance of free and lively debate among junior officers, particularly in journals available to the public and to foreigners — much more, in fact, than the armies of the West where such things were taken more for granted. In action on the battlefield, however, the young Red Army officer — who almost certainly expected nothing else — found himself as usual under the deadening hand of total conformity. It was this which made the command posts, control structures and communications systems of the Warsaw Pact such rewarding targets for attack.

It must here be strongly emphasized again, however — and it cannot be too often repeated — that the forces of the Western Allies were only in a position to survive the onslaught of the Warsaw Pact because, though heavily outnumbered from the outset, they were able to remain in being. Without the sort of improvements effected in the years between 1978 and 1984 this would have been impossible.

The war on land in Europe was a short one. Deprived of the swift victory that could have been so confidently predicted only a few years before, the Warsaw Pact, once checked, could not recover momentum in time to achieve and stabilize a decisive advantage before the arrival of the first of those Western reinforcements, with their great weight of weapons, which could soon be expected to flow so plentifully.

The fighting could hardly have gone on for very long in any case. Neither side could have sustained for more than a few weeks the expenditure of aircraft and of missile and other stocks — of fuel, for example, and of all manner of warlike stores and equipment — demanded in the modern battle. Even if the production of munitions of war in the home bases had been possible at the rate at which they were used up on the battlefield, it is doubtful whether, with hostile interference to the lines of communication, supply could ever have kept up with consumption.

The Soviet concept of the application of armed force for the purpose of securing a political advantage, in the state of the art in the last twenty years of the twentieth century and in the circumstances of the time, was thus wholly rational. It was facing an adversary relatively weak in the first instance but disposing of potentially overwhelming resources. Late twentieth-century war consumed material in such enormous quantities as to put very long drawn-out operations out of the question. It was imperative, therefore, to secure a position of great political advantage in a short, sharp, violent encounter, starting with the offensive initiative, exploiting as far as possible the advantages of surprise and of a somewhat longer period of preparation than the enemy’s, and reaching a chosen strategic objective before the enemy could bring his superior resources to bear and while stocks were still sufficient to sustain intensive action.

We have seen what happened. In the last few years before the outbreak of war the West began to wake up to the danger it faced, and in the time available did just enough in repair of its neglected defences to enable it, by a small margin, to survive. The Allies had better luck, perhaps, than they deserved. The Soviet Union was guilty of an important misjudgement in the matter of the American response to intervention in Yugoslavia, and of a critical blunder in their assumption that the French would not come in on the Allied side. A check to the forward impetus of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of the Federal Republic of Germany followed by a single, catastrophic, strategic nuclear exchange, triggered off the dissolution of the Pact and started the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself into its national components. The Marxist-Leninist empire, as hated and feared, perhaps, as any regime the world has seen, collapsed in total ruin, and the world is even now engaged, in many different ways, in picking up and sorting out the pieces.

The immediate tidying up which engaged the Allies, as soon as the USSR ceased to be able to prosecute the war and hostilities in Europe came to an end, contained operations that were already more or less familiar from experience of other wars but also one that was both highly important and quite new.

The presence of large numbers of nuclear warheads in Europe presented the Allies with a new and very difficult post-war problem. Many remained firmly in Allied hands, though a considerable number had been in Special Weapons Stores overrun in the offensive and could not now be accounted for. Very many more were dispersed and lost on the other side, amidst the confusion in which hostilities ended. Much of the deadly content of these weapons had disappeared and so far has not been traced. The United Nations Fissile Materials Recovery Organization (UNFISMATRECO) is seeking urgently to recover all it can. Some will almost certainly find its way into hands from which, in the interests of peace and security, it should at any cost be kept.

One last lesson is worth drawing from the war itself. Not inappropriately in an age of high technology, it lies in a technical area.

The period of full-scale hostilities between the forces of the Atlantic Alliance and the Warsaw Pact was short — no more, in fact, than a few weeks. It was still sufficient to show in quite astonishing fashion how far the electronic technology of the West had outstripped that of the Eastern bloc. The reason was very simple and beyond dispute. The advantage of the West lay in commercial competition. No state-controlled activity, no collective operation, in a field wide open to scientific inventiveness and industrial enterprise, could have produced developments as staggering as those in the electronics industries of the non-communist world. The reduction in size, weight, power consumption and cost of electronic components in a competitive market had been quite phenomenal. The evolution of micro-electronics and of micro-processing had been nothing less than a technological explosion.

Let a short example suffice. In the 1950s the transistor began to replace the vacuum tube. In the 1960s circuits often transistors were in use. Within ten years transistors numbering several hundreds could be mounted on one small chip of substrate two centimetres square. What was called medium-scale integration (MSI) was then possible. By 1977 large-scale integration (LSI) had come in, employing 1,000 or more transistors mounted in the same space. When war broke out very large-scale integration (VLSI) was already in use, with 10,000 transistors mounted on a chip still only the size of a postage stamp. The work of a computer whose equipment in the forties, using vacuum tubes, would have filled a barn could now be done by something the size of a wrist-watch.

The impact of this on the development of military hardware was incalculable. The equipment for communications, control, guidance, the detection and location of weapons and emitters, the means of jamming, interception, interpolation, diversion and a thousand and one other functions, was flowing in such profusion that there was much more, and in much greater variety, than could be used. The irony for the West, in the shortness of the war, welcome though it was, lay in the inability of military men to find the questions to which the electronics men already had the answers.

They were only beginning, when the fighting ended, to get the best out of the equipment and techniques already in service. They had not yet begun to explore, in a technology developing at an almost frightening rate, the applications of techniques already far advanced and being improved on daily.

The wars of the late nineteenth century — the American Civil War, for example, and the Franco-Prussian War — were wars of the railway, the telegraph, breech-loading small arms and tinned rations. The seas were dominated by the ironclad. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Russo-Japanese War showed to any who cared to learn the dominance on the battlefield of the spade, barbed wire and automatic weapons. The First World War rammed home the same lesson, in a war in which the internal combustion engine, artillery, the submarine, air power and armoured vehicles became the dominant features. The Second World War was one of worldwide mobility on land and sea and in the air, of total mobilization of population and industrial reserves, of seapower and of air forces. It ended in the shadow of the nuclear weapon. The Third World War was widely expected to be the first nuclear war — and perhaps the last. It turned out in the event to be essentially a war of electronics.

To end these reflections on the Third World War upon a technological note may appear odd. It is unlikely to seem so to some future reader. Wars commonly produce an acceleration of technical advance. This one did more: it took the lid off Pandora’s box. We are now moving forward into a world which will be more and more dominated by electronic technology. It is likely to prove a very different world from the one we knew, the one which came so near to destruction in the Third World War. That war was fought, it is true, under the shadow of the threat of nuclear devastation. On the basis of NATO’s rediscovered confidence and hastily repaired defences it was largely won by electronics. We cannot begin to guess how our lives, and even more our children’s lives, will be influenced by the possibilities which these swiftly developing techniques are now opening up. An unfamiliar, perhaps uncomfortable world awaits us, very strange and new. We can only be thankful to have survived, and wait and see.