The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine

...Since the non-Vietnam share of U.S...

...In his breezy treatment of the enormously complicated Quantity-Quality debate, Cockburn predictably accepts James Fallows's criticisms of advanced aircraft like the F-15 and F-16, but goes beyond Fallows by arguing that advanced systems are actually less capable than the ones they replace...

...Cockburn's failure to see a military rationale for these weapons is related to his basic ignorance about military operations, and the book is replete with simple factual errors...

...secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him...

...Take the example of air defense weapons...

...The actual relationship is quite likely to be the reverse: a future war will not be a girls' school outing, and the Russian soldier, whose daily privation merely reflects the lower standard of living of Soviet society as a whole, will be better suited to survive its rigors than an American serviceman who has opted for military service as an alternative to unemployment...

...But the opposite has also occurred: for several years in the mid-to-late sixties the CIA consistently underestimated the level of Soviet ICBM procurement...

...and that sonar and radar were not crucial in destroying German submarines in World War II...

...His defence was : 'First, I never borrowed the kettle from B. at all...

...There are many reasons for taking a balanced view of Moscow's capabilities...

...He presents considerable anecdotal evidence about racial tensions between Slavs and Central Asians in the Army, accidents and discipline problems in the Navy and soldiers who go blind drinking the hydraulic fluid out of their airplanes...

...The Threat obviously reflects considerable research into various aspects of the Soviet military...

...How then were those Israeli A-4s and F-4s shot down...

...Andrew Cockburn's book The Threat presents the case that Soviet military power has been vastly overrated by the West, and that American attempts to redress the balance are both wasteful and dangerous...

...Cockburn's self-assurance in passing judgment on highly technical questions and sneering at the viewpoints and motives of those who don't agree with him would be more becoming were he less manifestly unqualified to pose as an expert...

...he claims that the E-2C Hawkeye did not play a major role in Lebanon...

...For instance, he spends a good deal of time documenting the poor quality of life in the Soviet armed forces, citing low pay, bad food, inadequate health services, and high incidence of alcoholism as evidence that the Soviets will perform poorly on the battlefield...

...The pilots who fly these planes, for instance the Israelis operating over Baghdad and Lebanon, would gasp in disbelief...

...As for The Threat, it is best summarized by the Soviet pamphlet Whence the Threat to Peace?, quoted by Cockburn in a different-Context: "tenden-tiously selected and deliberately distorted information about the Armed Forces of the USSR...

...Unfortunately, this mass of information is subordinated to the sole purpose of denigrating every aspect of Soviet power-a purpose, \ suspect, the author had formulated long before he knew what a T-72 tank was...

...THE THREAT: INSIDE THE SOVIET MILITARY MACHINE Andrew Cockburn / Random House / $16.95 Francis Fukuyama All thoughtful analysts of the Soviet military are well aware that the Soviet threat is at times exaggerated for political purposes, and that complicated issues are treated simplistically...

...Cockburn, in his eagerness to deflate the Soviet threat, adduces a number of similar arguments...

...Freud, incidentally, comments that while this may not be a joke, it is a piece of sophistry...

...and thirdly, Igave him back the kettle undamaged...

...His unremitting single-minded-ness and pretzel-like twisting of arguments and facts are breathtaking and frequently laughable...

...Now, Cockburn's thesis that threat overestimation drives unnecessary U.S...

...In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud cites the following story: "A...

...Evidently they fell out of the sky of their own accord, victims no doubt of American gold-plating...

...This of course neglects the fact that modern Soviet air defenses are an integrated system of overlapping layers of fire,, in which high altitude missiles force aircraft to fly low into ground defenses-a mistake made in the book at several places...

...A book which treats Soviet weaknesses objectively and deals with qualitative issues remains to be written...

...Cockburn notes this fact, but typically uses it as a basis for attacking the CIA's competence...

...Cockburn then goes on to argue that the Soviet ZSU-23-4 antiaircraft gun (which in fact accounted for a large proportion of Israeli losses) is an oversophisti-cated piece of technology whose worthlessness has been demonstrated on the test range...

...For example, he suggests that armored personnel carriers would be better off without roofs...

...For one thing, an awareness of Soviet weaknesses and vulnerabilities allows us to plan policies which exploit them and yield the greatest return on a given political of military investment...

...Cockburn therefore devotes much space to an across-the-board criticism of American weapons systems", including areas like tactical airpower or anti-submarine warfare where everyone is agreed we have a substantial lead...

...Cockburn correctly notes that during the 1973 Yom Kippur War only one-third of the aircraft lost by Israel were downed by surface-to-air missiles, the rest falling victim to simple antiaircraft guns and other fighters...

...borrowed a copper kettle from B. and after he had returned it was sued by B. because the kettle now had a big hole in it which made it unusable...

...Fallows at least admitted from the outset that he was an amateur...

...Overemphasis on the threat can be counterproductive: the current administration's rhetoric about the Soviets has not stopped and may even have contributed in some measure to the unraveling of the national consensus for a stronger defense that existed when it came into office...

...Static "bean counts" of weapons inventories hide the complex realities of actual combat and fail to take into account the .all-important human element in war...

...defense spending shrunk steadily in real terms from 1964 until midway through the Carter Administration, Cockburn's point of view is difficult'to sustain...

...Indeed, the book's stated theme is that "there is very little military rationale to be found in any of the activities of the superpowers' armed forces...

...The author has, for example, interviewed recent Soviet e'migre's who have served in the Soviet military...

...The list could go on...

...military spending has some validity, particularly for the late fifties and early sixties when Khrushchev's valiant but ultimately vain efforts to cut back Soviet military spending generally went unrecognized in the West...

...Other examples of Cockburn's peculiar logic abound...

...Much of this is interesting and represents an inadequately pursued line of inquiry...

...Wockburn's efforts to run down the Soviet military would be simpler but for his countervailing desire to give the American military no credit for doing things well...

...There are endless stories from World War II of the unbelievable toughness of individual Soviet soldiers and the miserable quality of their service conditions as they fought their way-often completely drunk-to Berlin...