The Reagan Administration and the Common Defense
Pfaltzgraff, Robert L. Jr.
Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, jr. THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION AND THE COMMON DEFENSE Moving toward assured survival. The election of 1980 represented a mandate for change both in domestic economic policy...
...In the final analysis, the defense programs of the Reagan administration will serve the needs of the United States and those other peoples whose destiny is intertwined with ours, only if they protect our interests in the dangerous world of the 1980s...
...In effect, this would concede naval supremacy in such seas to the Soviet Union, unless allies, such as Japan in the Western Pacific, develop far greater maritime forces...
...Moreover, it would raise the possibility that a Soviet barrage attack with nuclear weapons over the air space of the United States could destroy an airborne ICBM force...
...Of course, no technology would conclusively end the prospect of future conflict, since the quest for weapons of destruction will last as long as states retain deeply rooted antagonisms toward each other...
...Like its predecessor, the Reagan administration recognizes the need for a Rapid Deployment Force to defend vital interests under adverse circumstances...
...The decisions a government faces are usually more complex than the solutions espoused by candidates for office...
...Presumably, each side would calculate its , options and assess the resolve of the other...
...This is to suggest that defense programs, however dependent they may be upon a nation's overall economic strength, meet their test ultimately outside the ledgers of bookkeepers or the supply-demand curves of economists...
...Given these circumstances, can the American consensus for a stronger defense be sustained, particularly if the United States receives no support for its new commitments in the Persian Gulf-Indian Ocean, where the interests of Japan and Western Europe are at least as vital as those of the United States...
...strategic forces and, therefore, a potentially important instrument in crisis management...
...The implication of the Nixon statement is that, faced with the prospect of highly disadvantageous fatality exchange ratios, an American president could not credibly threaten to use nuclear weapons even in defense of interests deemed to be vital...
...If it proves impossible to deploy such systems, the effect will no doubt be detrimental to the Reagan administration's other efforts to maintain U.S...
...At the same time, the Soviet Union is committed in deed and word to defending the homeland...
...It would be an acceptable means for replacing aging systems only if the adversary were kind enough to reciprocate...
...When the United States eventually develops a new generation stealth aircraft, the B-l would replace the B-52 force, equipped with cruise missiles in a stand-off deployment mode...
...Because of the enormous sums of money consumed by defense, it is inevitable that, except under conditions of actual warfare, military spending will be subjected to close scrutiny by a public concerned about waste and inefficiency...
...Although the Reagan administration is opposed to reinstituting the draft, the fact remains that the All Volunteer Force has resulted in . significantly higher financial costs...
...mobilization base is worthy of criticism, for example, for the long lead times that affect weapons options that will be available-or in most cases unavailable-to the Reagan administration...
...It is unfortunate that the CBS television series, entitled "The Defense of the United States," presented in the spring of this year, among its numerous errors and distortions described the defense procurement process as dominated by the "Iron Triangle": defense officials in the Executive Branch, industrial contractors, and the United States Congress, all allegedly "obsessed with procurement- getting exactly the new hardware it wants and as much of it as it can...
...Of all the potentially available strategic systems, the B-l could be fully completed well within the second half of the present decade of strategic vulnerability...
...The coalition that elected President Reagan encompassed not only those who saw the need for substantial shift in economic policy with reduced governmental regulation, but also those who viewed the world of the 1980s as containing dangers making necessary a greater effort on behalf of the common defense...
...Potentially, then, they could transform the global balance of power...
...Thus, recent efforts (particularly by well-intentioned advocates of arms control) to prevent the militarization of space are likely to be confounded by states already regarding space as a strategic frontier...
...This deployment effort is continuing, with one new system added to the Soviet inventory approximately every five days...
...For all the attention on strategic force modernization, it is easily overlooked that about 90 percent of U.S...
...By that time, the image of some wholly new technology on the distant horizon might have again forestalled any decision...
...Also of crucial importance in the Reagan administration's naval program is the maintenance of a naval battle group in the Indian Ocean-Persian Gulf area...
...About 175 of these are targeted against Western Europe, with the remainder deployed against targets in East Asia, presumably China and Japan...
...Navy, building more adequate ground forces, and acquiring other power projection capabilities...
...It is feared that the United States would fight a war with nuclear weapons confined to Western Europe, since new generation theater nuclear systems have ranges sufficient to strike targets in the Soviet Union...
...Thus while the United States postpones its weapons choices, the Soviet Union deploys a series of imperfect systems-by our standards-and simultaneously makes costly investments in R&D for wholly new capabilities...
...defense capabilities...
...What is evident, however, is the integral relationship between concepts governing the RDF and other measures to strengthen U.S...
...With a lengthening lead time, as well as other delays plaguing the acquisition process, we are in danger of falling behind the Soviet Union simply as a result of our complex decision-making process...
...If crises have often served as surrogates for the actual conduct of warfare, the ability of one side to obtain accommodation or de-escalation from the other party is a function of the former's ability to dominate, or at least influence, the ladder of escalation, as the United States was able to do during the Cuban Missile Crisis thanks to its strategic-nuclear superiority and its decisive advantage in local conventional forces...
...The dilemma between the shorter and longer terms in defense procurement is also evident in" the options for enhancing MX survivability...
...The NATO strategy of flexible response has rested simultaneously upon low nuclear threshold and a high conventional threshold to reinforce deterrence...
...Eurogeans have been equally reluctant to contemplate the fighting of any future conventional war on their territory and to leave escalation to the nuclear level as their only option...
...The Reagan administration faces a dilemma between the need to strengthen capabilities within this decade and the need to develop weapons systems based on new generation technologies...
...It is doubtful whether the United States, no matter what the buildup undertaken by the Reagan administration, could ever develop forces for rapid deployment on a massive scale...
...and allied interests more apparent than in the Rapid Deployment Force...
...Because of such gaps in transatlantic perspectives, American policy toward NATO will be inadequate without an agreed concept for the deterrence of war in Europe...
...options in crisis management substantially modified the doctrine of mutual assured destruction...
...It is apparent that in recent years our strategies and capabilities have not matched the threat facing us...
...and the inevitable need to draw upon forces already deployed in, or committed to, NATO...
...In the case of strategic defense, the potential payoff from each of these systems-layered, LoAD, or space-based lasers-is indeed enormous...
...The impact upon these states was feared even by supporters of a strengthened U.S...
...As a candidate, Reagan supported the MX but opposed the Carter plan to deploy 200 launchers that would be shifted among 4600 shelters...
...Therefore, it clearly deserves high consideration by the Reagan administration in its effort to enhance the survivability of U.S...
...This reassessment of Soviet intentions was the basis for the growing influence of defense analysts critical of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction and apprehensive about Soviet strategic designs...
...By the late 1970s, discussion began to focus on technological options for ballistic missile defense...
...security commitments in Western Europe...
...The expectation that weapons decisions must be based on perfect knowledge about the future system's capabilities and the strategic environment within which it will operate is unrealistic...
...Whatever the effects of such.opposition upon the final decision, the principal question facing the administration was how to close the window of vulnerability in the shortest possible time, a concern shared by many respected outside analysts as well...
...In seeking to win support for the sale of AWACS, President Reagan has made an even more explicit commitment to the defense of Saudi Arabia, and by inference to other Persian Gulf states, than offered by the Carter Doctrine in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...Clearly, such breakthroughs in exotic space technology would leapfrog the current and emerging generation technologies in many aspects of warfare, from strategic nuclear forces to other systems designed to deter battlefield conflict...
...Critics were quick to suggest that the report failed to compare Soviet and American capabilities...
...Among other important defense issues is the modernization of the United States Navy and, in particular, the planned return to a 600-ship navy...
...All elements of the Soviet Armed Forces - the Strategic Rocket Forces, the Ground Forces of the Army, the Air Forces, the Navy and the Air Defense Forces-continue to modernize with an unending flow of new weapons systems, tanks, missiles, ships, artillery and aircraft...
...He expressed deep concern about the formidable personnel retention problems confronting the U.S...
...Although the urgency ot such problems has been recognized, the tendency has been to solve defense budgeting problems by deferring the steps necessary to increase sustainability...
...This entails the allocation of ample resources to air and civil defense and, it may be inferred, to strategic defense...
...capability to launch a series of limited nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union, and subsequently in the Countervailing Strategy unveiled by the Carter administration in July-August 1980...
...This is a latter-day version of the much maligned "Military-Industrial Complex" pejoratively used to describe the infrastructure vital to the development of an adequate defense capability-what on the eve of our entry into World War II was more accurately described as the "arsenal of democracy...
...In each of its strategic force modernization decisions, the administration has had to grapple with this problem: whether to acquire systems whose development is based on existing state-of-the-art technologies or to press Research and Development for new generation systems whose prospects are uncertain and would not in any case be ready within the decade...
...Nevertheless, the modernization of NATO theater nuclear forces, a program begun in the Carter administration, now meets with rising opposition, particularly in West Germany and the Netherlands, and increasingly in Britain...
...Even more important, we cannot know the precise security threats we will face at that time...
...forces...
...Inadequate levels of equipment maintenance are an increasing concern among analysts who have surveyed U.S...
...Together, these could destroy enough incoming Soviet warheads to assure the survival of an adequate number of U.S...
...As declining U.S...
...In fact, Secretary of Defense Weinberger's proposed deployment of ICBMs aboard aircraft represented one potential solution, although experts within the Air Force and outside were quick to point out that airborne deployment would cause other problems, such as diminished accuracy and the diversion of C-5 transport aircraft from their assigned missions...
...Candidate Reagan advocated the building of the B-l to replace part of the aging B-52 force, while Carter had announced his opposition even before he became president...
...The present decision to develop a cruise missile that could be launched from the torpedo tubes of attack submarines, to construct a system designed to strengthen communications with submerged ballistic missile submarines, and, in time, to produce a more accurate warhead for missiles deployed on such submarines leaves the administration the option of increased emphasis on sea-based deterrents...
...In the preface, Secretary of Defense Weinberger noted that In the past quarter century, we have witnessed the continuing growth of Soviet military power at a pace that shows no signs of slackening in the future...
...To be sure, the present state of the U.S...
...The lack of coincidence between the period of maximum vulnerability and deployment time confronts the administration in the B-l decision to a lesser extent, since the first of the aircraft, unless further delays are encountered, would be-available in late 1984, with full deployment of 100 aircraft possible before the mid-point of the next administration...
...Any failure to deploy such systems in Western Europe would symbolize a decoupling of European security from that of the United States...
...and relieving deficiencies in equipment maintenance...
...Otherwise, the United States would once again face the need, as in 1979-80, to withdraw naval units from its other fleets to maintain necessary strength in the Indian Ocean...
...The Reagan administration assumed office committed to the restoration of a "margin of safety" to U.S...
...If fixed land-based missiles are vulnerable to a counterforce attack as a result of the growing accuracy, number, and size of Soviet missiles, the administration's announced plan to deploy MX in super-hardened fixed silos would only postpone the vulnerability problem for a few years, the critics charge...
...By 1980 it was widely acknowledged that the Soviet Union had been engaged in a vast strategic-military buildup during the SALT decade...
...But the fact remains that in most indicators of military power the Soviet Union has either surpassed the United States, or threatens to do so...
...In such circumstances, however, a superpower with options not limited to the devastation of its adversary's cities would have an advantage in crisis bargaining even without the actual use of such weapons...
...interests will necessarily be based upon a highly mobile and agile force, with tactics of maneuver rather than mass...
...We might recall that among the reasons for the failure of the U.S...
...The value of this strategy, if applied to NATO-Europe, lies in the need to secure the North Atlantic against the Soviet naval threat to transatlantic shipping lanes, as well as the sea lfnes of communication between the North and South Atlantic Oceans...
...military capabilities, both at the strategic-nuclear level and in general purpose forces...
...It was unaffected in any readily discernible way by the efforts of the United States, under Democratic or Republican presidents, to devise an adequate framework for detente and for the limitation of strategic armaments, first in the SALT I Accords of the Nixon administration and subsequently in the Carter administration's emphasis both on the SALT II Treaty and arms control by example-the exercise of unilateral restraint by the cancellation of programs such as the B-1 and delays in the deployment of other new generation i weapons systems...
...The administration added substantial new funding to a defense budget that had been increased in the last year of President Carter's tenure in response to the deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relationship, particularly after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979- The incoming Reagan administration concluded properly that the United States faced a period of heightened vulnerability for which the appropriate remedy lay in simultaneous efforts in strategic force modernization, strengthening the U.S...
...Unfortunately, Soviet strategic planners have shown little regard for the strategic sensitivities of their adversaries, committed as the Soviet leadership is to a theory of deterrence based on the destruction of an enemy's ability to wage war...
...In contrast to expectations held in the 1960s when Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense, the Soviet Union never did embrace the American conception of mutual assured destruction...
...was technologically able to deploy such a system before the Soviet Union could do so...
...The question of defense burden-sharing is apparent not only in the United States-Japan security relationship, but also in the relations between the United States and its West European allies...
...This navy would not only defend sea lines of communication, but would also have the means to engage Soviet maritime forces before they reached the high seas...
...Among these are shortfalls in unit equipment, shortages of repair parts, inadequate maintenance, and lack of medical support required for sustainability...
...It is appropriate to finance national security without the deficit spending that contributed to the inflation which gripped the United States in the 1970s...
...The creation of a stronger American economy, based upon increased incentives to invest, work, save, and produce, can only have a positive effect on the ability of the United States to underwrite its national defense...
...strategic nuclear force...
...In the report of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on U.S...
...Therefore, the concept that best serves U.S...
...Nevertheless, the history of warfare consists of alternating periods in which the offense, and then the defense, was dominant...
...European reluctance to increase defense spending despite widely acknowledged growth in Soviet military strength can be rationalized by the formidable economic problems facing the Western European nations, especially Britain, but also the Federal Republic of Germany...
...Such a comparative analysis, of course, together with an assessment of respective strategies and foreign policy goals, is indispensable for informed decisions about future weapons programs...
...This is not the place to consider the philosophical basis, most starkly stated by libertarians, against national conscription, except to note that such perspectives, as well as the legacy of the Vietnam war, are likely to continue to diminish the prospects for the resumption of the draft in the Reagan administration, except, of course, in the event of a national emergency...
...strategic forces...
...strategic force levels in the years immediately ahead unless the lead time for weapons development and acquisition were to be drastically reduced...
...The question of more exotic systems has been the object of intense study in the United States for nearly a decade...
...strategic nuclear guarantee from Western Europe...
...As a strategic nuclear aircraft, the B-l is potentially the most flexible component of the TRIAD of U.S...
...As part of the TRIAD of U.S...
...Although the United States, in its Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), has always targeted Soviet military capabilities as well as urban-industrial centers, the assumption behind mutual assured destruction was deterrence based upon the ability of both sides to inflict unacceptable levels of damage upon each other's populations and industries...
...At the same time, such forces have contributed to a NATO force structure based upon flexible response below the nuclear threshold...
...These have been met by reducing force readiness and deferring modernization programs...
...A renewal of serious interest in strategic defense bespeaks an important shift in the American military affairs community...
...Such arguments against American weapons systems have been used in recent years with increasing frequency...
...Other options include the deployment of some form of ballistic missile defense.' In contrast to its predecessors since the ABM Treaty of 1972, the Reagan administration appears committed to ballistic missile defense to enhance ICBM survivability...
...The variant of the aircraft to be procured by the Reagan administration, it is hoped, will be versatile enough to perform a variety of missions, both nuclear and conventional, against targets on land and at sea, in support of both a strategic TRIAD and the conduct of conventional warfare...
...With great pressure from Western Europe, the United States is entering arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union on theater nuclear systems, even though under the best circumstances, deployment of the planned NATO systems will not begin before 1983...
...With few exceptions, this will not take place until at least the end of this decade...
...military establishment, although he seemed even less willing than his predecessor to contemplate some form of national service...
...Of course, we do not know what the precise state of Soviet air defenses will be by the late 1980s, just as there is no assurance that a future generation of wholly new aircraft will not confront a Soviet air defense system based on concepts not yet even on the drawing board...
...The causes for the rising tide of West European opposition are numerous and complex...
...Such a concept is fraught with complexity...
...This was the significance of President Nixon's question...
...The Reagan administration came to office determined to strengthen these forces...
...Reagan advocated a return to a navy of at least 600 ships, as well as other efforts to strengthen American defense forces...
...West European critics have alleged that the deployment of NATO theater nuclear systems symbolizes the de facto decoupling of the U.S...
...Although it is by no means self-evident that the United States should abrogate, or even amend, the ABM Treaty, the formal review at five-year intervals stipulated in the Treaty and scheduled for 1982 can be expected to be more than the pro forma exercise of 1977...
...Such systems would make existing strategic nuclear systems vulnerable to destruction...
...defense budget will be matched by NATO allies, or that many members of the Atlantic Alliance can even maintain the three percent growth in defense spending to which they committed themselves in 1978...
...These include: the great distance over which American or allied power must be projected, in contrast to the Soviet Union's relative proximity to the Middle East-Persian Gulf...
...In addition to lengthening lead times, these problems include inadequate stockpiles of raw materials, low incentives for investment in new technologies, insufficient machine-tool industrial capacity, lack of available subcontractors, burdensome requirements imposed by recent socioeconoraic policies and laws, and government procurement procedures that make difficult the development and long-term maintenance of an industrial capacity committed to defense...
...Such a layered defense could conceivably be deployed by the end of this decade...
...When considering options before making its decision, the administration was opposed by some of its closest political allies in Nevada and Utah, where the MX would have been based on federal lands...
...Even in the early seventies, however, there was concern that such a doctrine left unanswered the question posed by President Nixon in 1970: "Should a President, in the event of a nuclear attack, be left with a single option of ordering the mass destruction of enemy civilians, in the face of the certainty that it would be followed by the mass slaughter of Americans ?" An answer to that question was sought, first in the Schlesinger Doctrine of 1974 calling for a U.S...
...In any event, we will need several years of major defense effort to move beyond the vulnerabilities presently confronting us...
...hostage rescue operation in Iran in April 1980 was the malfunction of helicopters...
...This strategy would require the deployment of as many as three additional carrier task forces, and in the shorter run the reactivation of at least two Iowa class battleships equipped with cruise missiles...
...The challenge facing the administration is the designing of such force levels based upon sound strategic concepts and linked to the other tools of statecraft, including diplomacy, to help fashion a world in which our interests are preserved...
...In late September the Reagan administration, in an apparent effort to broaden public understanding in the United States and among its allies, published an assessment based in part on hitherto classified information about Soviet capabilities...
...This system would destroy missiles that had penetrated through the first line of strategic defense, a- high altitude system targeted against enemy missiles before they re-entered the earth's atmosphere...
...In its early months, the administration mounted a program to improve military readiness: rebuilding inadequate stocks of ammunition and spare parts...
...These included LoAD, a low altitude defense system which would fire ground based interceptors at missiles as they plunged toward their targets...
...Why, then, should the present offense-dominant strategic environment not be superseded by an age of defense dominance: the replacement of assured destruction by assured survival...
...defense capabilities...
...progams now contemplated or actually underway reach fruition...
...Though inferior in numbers, this force would be sufficient to deter Soviet intervention because any clash with Soviet forces would presumably run the risk of escalation to a level unacceptable to the Soviet Union...
...To enhance the survivability of strategic forces is the sine qua non of deterrence...
...Short of such quick fixes, new systems could not augment U.S...
...In light of the growth of Soviet-Warsaw Pact forces, the Reagan administration needs to reassess with its West European allies not only the assumptions which have guided NATO, but also the extent to which there remains in the 1980s a transatlantic consensus sufficient to sustain an adequate Alliance defense capability...
...If prospective technologies for defense of missile silos are eventually superseded by systems adequate to defend cities, it would revolutionize the conduct of warfare...
...The answers are no longer self-evident...
...Although such an assessment must necessarily be based upon the best intelligence reports available about Soviet programs in strategic defense, it is not self-evident that the United States, under present circumstances, could complete such a deployment before the Soviet Union...
...After the Carter administration's decision against the B-l, the issue-came to be not whether the United States should build a new generation bomber, but rather which one: the B-l, a stretched version of the FB-111, or a wholly advanced generation aircraft based on so-called stealth technologies that will not be available before the next decade...
...No discussion of the Reagan administration's defense policy would be complete without considering the adequacy of the defense mobilization base of the United States...
...Nevertheless, the Reagan campaign and its defense advisors reflected a broadly based sense of public concern about the adequacy of American defense, and, more important, developed an understanding of defense needs substantially different from the Carter administration's...
...ICBM launchers...
...In this case, the disparity between relative contributions to collective defense will widen in favor of the United States...
...Until the announcement on October 2 that the B-l would be built and the MX would be deployed in fixed silos, the administration's strategic modernization program had lagged behind domestic economic policy and, to a lesser extent, foreign policy...
...By choosing the B-l, as well as funding research for a successor aircraft, the administration has taken a prudent course of action...
...American forces stationed in Western Europe have served to assuage European fears that, in extremis, the United States would not feel sufficiently committed to invoke its ultimate strategic capability in defense of European interests...
...Such considerations must be placed in the context of doctrinal differences between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...Such a decision would have had to deal with the uncertainties inherent in R&D, including a lengthening lead time between the drawing board and the weapons inventory...
...It goes without saying that the greater the number of perceived options available to one protagonist over the other, the greater his capacity to influence to his advantage the outcome of a crisis, as the United States did at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis...
...Much will now be made by critics of what is said to be a contradiction between the administration's emphasis upon a "window of vulnerability"-the alleged capability of the Soviet Union to destroy all or most of the fixed land-based Minuteman force-and its decision not to deploy MX in a basing mode designed to enhance survivability by shuttling 200 missiles among 4600 shelters...
...Similarly, in the sea lanes adjacent to Japan, and more broadly in the Western Pacific, an immediate task would be the destruction of enemy naval units...
...At a time of increasingly complex weapons systems, the All Volunteer Force has problems attracting and retaining qualified personnel...
...the lack of secure military access ashore in the region...
...But it may be more plausibly argued that deterrence based upon escalation requires the availability of various weapons systems, some deployed on the territory of allies and others in the United States itself...
...forces...
...Since such knowledge must remain imperfect, the effect is to create doubts about a weapons system and diminish the prospects for its acquisition...
...These problems must be addressed if the United States is to have the means to build defense to adequate levels in this decade of danger...
...Furthermore, the B-l holds potential as a conventional power projection force, both as a component of a rapid deployment force, supplementing forward deployed naval air power, and for sea control missions designed (as envisaged in the Reagan administration's forward naval strategy) to destroy enemy surface fleets before they could threaten vital U.S...
...A decision not to deploy the B-l would have delayed acquisition of a successor to the aging B-52 until the 1990s...
...There is no easy way to resolve this dilemma, short of the deployment of needed present generation systems while pressing for technologies which could transform the strategic environment...
...Nowhere is the problem of power projection in defense of U.S...
...Numerous official and non-governmental studies have provided somber analyses of trends in Soviet military spending...
...In his Military Posture report for fiscal year 1982, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pointed to deficiencies that "combine to limit the readiness of U.S...
...Although the United States has tested a space shuttle eventually capable of constructing platforms in space, the Soviet Union has deployed the world's first anti-satellite system, which could be used to destroy the surveillance and communications satellites necessary to launch the U.S...
...Such an approach would confine armaments policy to an endless R&D phase without deployment...
...But to project the exact level of defense spending consistent with the achievement of a balanced budget by 1984 is not possible, for we do not know the full impact of present economic policies upon levels of growth and productivity, and hence tax revenues...
...military posture for fiscal year 1982, General David D. Jones listed the factors that, in his view, have transformed the international security environment: modernization of Soviet ground, sea, and air forces, sustained improvements in Soviet force projection capability, Soviet use of proxy forces to support revolutionary factions around the world, increased turbulence in areas of vital economic importance to the industrial democracies-these and other developments have transformed the character of the world and of our strategic requirements without a corresponding transformation in our strategy and the forces needed to carry it out...
...For example, a decision by the United States to press for changes permitting strategic defense of a substantial number of its land-based ICBMs would presumably be based upon conclusive evidence that the U.S...
...defense spending is allocated to general purpose forces...
...In the absence of a strategy that relates means to ends, military forces cannet-be-designed that hold the prospect for effective defense without excessive cost...
...By contrast, the Soviet Union has already deployed 250 SS-20s, a mobile system of counterforce accuracy, each with three warheads...
...A decade ago, the strategic doctrine of mutual assured destruction attracted widespread support among defense analysts...
...This state of affairs will remain unchanged unless U.S...
...increasing pay to help retain personnel...
...Such systems, consisting of a total of 572 Pershing II missiles and Ground Launched Cruise missiles, would be deployed, principally at American expense, at sites in Western Europe controlled by U.S...
...strategic nuclear forces, the B-l would replace the B-52 in penetration missions into the Soviet Union...
...Thus, what point is there in negotiating with the Soviet Union for limits on such systems that do little more than codify the present disparities favoring Moscow...
...If the potential is enormous, so are the risks if such programs are pursued at the expense of state-of-the-art weapons...
...The election of 1980 represented a mandate for change both in domestic economic policy and in foreign policy and defense...
...In fact, in the absence of an accelerated American R&D program-to which the Reagan administration thankfully is now committed-apprehension has grown that the Soviet Union may be preparing a "breakout" capability designed to exploit whatever technological advantage it believes it may now enjoy...
...interests...
...It is conceivable that manifestations of political will and of increased commitment to security will help in the meantime to substitute for needed capabilities, although such an approach to defense has inherent limits...
...In recent months, the planned increases in defense programs have confronted the budgetary constraints imposed upon public spending by the administration's economic policies...
...Instead, the thinking of the Soviet Union, both in its military literature-intended principally for military elites in the Soviet Union-and in the configuration of its strategic nuclear forces, proved substantially different...
...defense capability...
...By choosing to deploy MX in fixed silos, the administration has postponed until 1984 a decision about further measures necessary to reduce vulnerability...
...To be sure, certain immediate options were available -"quick fixes" as they have come to be called...
...This is not to suggest that the Soviet Union believes it can fight and win a nuclear war, though it may believe it eventually can...
...birth rates produce heightened competition with the civilian economy, the problem will only become more acute...
...At present, there is no prospect that the real increases in the U.S...
...Either the B-l or a stretched version FB-111 could be produced in comparable time, although the B-l is far superior in pay load, range, and mission versatility...
...The concern is that the Soviet Union, sooner or later, might register dramatic breakthroughs in space-based, high energy laser weapons...
...Its strategic force modernisation decisions, together with other measures adopted in recent months, represent a necessary first step toward providing an adequate common defense.rst step toward providing an adequate common defense...
...With the administration's decision both to procure 100 B-ls and to put large scale funding into the advanced generation stealth, the debate has shifted to Capitol Hill, where opponents of the B-l will argue that we cannot afford the former if we are to pursue the latter and, in any event, by the time it is produced, the B-l will allegedly face a far more lethal Soviet air defense system restricting its ability to fly over the Soviet Union...
...But even more formidable is the problem of personnel retention...
...At present rates of procurement, the MX would not begin to be deployed until the middle years of a second Reagan administration and would not reach full deployment until well after President Reagan's successor had taken office...
...In itself, the deployment of an anti-satellite system (like the Soviet development of the counter-force heavy missile, the SS-18) might be regarded by Americans as inherently destabilizing...
...Whatever the innermost views of the Soviet leaders, Soviet strategic doctrine and force planning have emphasized the development of counterforce capabilities designed primarily to destroy the military capabilities of an adversary rather than to hold his population hostage, which is the basis for deterrence under mutual assured destruction...
...These efforts to increase U.S...
Vol. 14 • December 1981 • No. 12
