The Third World War: August 1985

The voices raised for so long among the British left wing, and from their ill-assorted allies among the die-hard disengagers in the USA, urging a sharp reduction in military spending and the withdrawal of troops, had recently been listened to with growing scepticism. It was therefore possible, even in the months of false detente in the spring and early summer of 1985, to proceed, against this chorus, at least with those defence programmes whose suspension would increase domestic unemployment. Improvement in the air defences of the United Kingdom, for example, went on. It was even possible in the USA, though only by the narrowest of margins, to retain the Active Forces Draft.

There is no need to dwell here on the political and social stresses generated in the United States in the years 1979-81 over the reintroduction of the draft, nor to recapitulate the stormy history of the passage of the appropriate legislation. We are more concerned with its consequences, as seen in Allied Command Europe in 1985, and with the sobering reflection that without it no book like this, placing on record as it does the manner of the free West’s survival, could ever have been written.

It is just worth recalling, however, as a helpful reminder, that the US Army was in 1977 facing a critically dangerous position in the virtual disappearance of its reserves. When public disenchantment with the Vietnam War resulted in the end of the draft and the creation of an all-volunteer army, a sharp decline in paid-drill personnel (i.e. personnel actually carrying out reserve training) set in. By 1977 the Army’s National Guard and Reserve were 100,000 under peacetime strength. The Army’s Individual Ready Reserve — the pool of trained men to fill up units and replace combat losses — was dropping so fast that by 1982 it would at this rate have been 360,000 short of mobilization requirements. The back-up Selective Service System was in such ‘deep standby’ that training of drafted personnel could not start until four months after mobilization and no trained men to replace combat losses could be expected to reach Allied Command Europe until three months after that.

A scheme produced by the US Army to spend $750 million a year on a Reserve Component Readiness Improvement Package (RCRIP) was rejected. Schemes for a Reserve Component Draft, or for an Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) Draft, were found to be unworkable. The only real alternative was an Active Forces Draft, with exemption for Reserve Components and IRR volunteers. Without it, within a few years, the US Army would only have been able to go to war when the war was over.

American public opinion in 1977 would not have accepted reintroduction of the draft. A Gallup poll in that year showed that 45 per cent of all Americans were against it, with a count as high as 82 per cent of all males between eighteen and twenty-four years of age.

Gradually, however, as elsewhere in the Alliance, the realization began to spread that the Russians meant what they had so often said and knew exactly what they were doing. In spite of the most strenuous efforts of those who refused to recognize the threat, or argued that if there were one it did not matter, or even claimed that they welcomed the chance of living under a Marxist dictatorship (whether anyone believed them or not), the awareness grew in the United States that a time could come when truly vital decisions would have to be made, and that it would be very foolish for the nation to surrender in advance all power of choice.

Soviet international diplomacy, uncompromising and unconciliatory as ever, was not unhelpful to those in the West who sought to make the danger better known. The Active Forces Draft was introduced in 1982. By early 1985 the reserves, though with some way still to go, had passed above crisis level. The US Army in Europe was no longer in such a state that, in the event of a military showdown with the Warsaw Pact, it would face early and unavoidable disaster because of a lack of trained manpower.

The position of France, critical to the whole question of the survival of the Alliance, must now receive attention. In the long history of Soviet maladroitness and miscalculation since the Second World War nothing — not the free elections so rashly allowed in Austria in 1946, or the swift re-arming of West Germany by the USSR’s recent allies in response to Soviet threats, or yet the alienation of Marxists outside the Soviet Union or the antagonization of China or the ineffective meddling in the Middle East — nothing at all in an impressive record of political ineptitude proved to be a more spectacular and costly failure than the confident attempt by the Soviet Union to persuade France to renounce her obligations under the Atlantic Treaty.[6]

The earlier Brussels Treaty, to which France also still belonged, was even more categorical about affording military aid to a victim of attack.