The Third World War: August 1985

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.