European Document/Secrets of the Warsaw Pact
McGurn, William
EUROPEAN DOCUMENT 41 _ a ,SECRETS OF THE WARSAW PACT Brussels A sked to locate the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, most people will point to this European...
...In other words, for all its awesome military might, the Warsaw Pact as distinct from the Kremlin command exists more or less only on paper...
...In military exercises, the Warsaw Pact pursues an offensive strategy, whose aim, according to Colonel Sloan, is "to destroy the enemy in his own territory, which is classic Soviet doctrine...
...The Warsaw Pact has none of these problems, and so it hums along toward its objectives—Soviet objectives—with a minimum of fuss...
...NATO allies are free and independent nations that occasionally have different ideas about what is in the interest of the alliance, as America has had impressed on it more than once...
...EUROPEAN DOCUMENT 41 _ a ,SECRETS OF THE WARSAW PACT Brussels A sked to locate the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, most people will point to this European capital...
...Add to all this a command structure virtually indistinguishable from that of the Soviet Union, and the Warsaw Pact's true nature takes shape...
...The problem with that model here is that one team always has the ball...
...But what the structure and operation of the so-called Warsaw Pact ultimately shows is that the Soviets are serious not about alliances but about war...
...Smack dab in the middle of this same entrance is a rusting hulk of a sculpture that identifies the compound once and for all, just in case you missed the sixteen flags flying nearby...
...On the political side, any NATO decision involves all sixteen members together, which is what makes them so difficult to arrive at...
...Having the HQ in Moscow, TASS as the information service, and a Soviet command structure for the military makes it all the more convenient...
...In what was perhaps an early architectural stab at detente, the buildings here all seem to have been patterned on workers housing in East Berlin...
...Ask these same folks to locate the headquarters of the Warsaw Pact, however, and the likely response will be a blank stare...
...But were they to go operational, they would immediately be under local Soviet commands...
...Harry Sloan...
...More important, NATO actually functions as an alliance, which usually means it functions poorly or not at all...
...In addition, they have introduced a web of entangling side alliances—through such associations as Comecon—to tie their Eastern allies to themselves...
...Not so NATO...
...Unfortunately, the tendency in the West is to report and talk about the Warsaw Pact vis-a-vis NATO and solely in terms of force comparisons, sizingup the respective advantages and handicaps of the two military blocs as if they were two opposing football teams...
...That most of us on the Western side of this East-West divide can't even say where our foe is based suggests the Cold Warriors among us have their work cut out for them...
...On the military side, this means that NATO has its own command structure in place in the event of a conflict...
...No wonder NATO is on the defensive...
...Warsaw" is a brave guess, but wrong...
...As Lord Carrington has informed those who keep trying to get him to meet his "opposite number" in the Warsaw Pact, the proper arena for such relations is in bilateral contacts between the interested nations...
...But America's undeniable dominance of NATO differs from the Soviet dominance of the Warsaw Pact not in degree but in kind...
...If the more or less institutionalized chaos at the main gate is any indication, moreover, the allies are already simulating battlefield conditions...
...The first clue lies in the original question: where is the Warsaw Pact...
...NATO strategy, by contrast, is purely defensive, which is why it does not even aim to match the Warsaw Pact by William McGurn bullet for bullet in the arms race...
...For every superficial similarity between NATO and the Warsaw Pact—the Warsaw Pact charter is almost a copy of the NATO document—there is a fundamental, real difference...
...Based here in Belgium's dour capital city, NATO's headquarters is a veritable city unto itself, including within its vast confines not only strategy rooms and so on but a local bank branch, a beauty salon, a travel agency, and a magazine shop...
...in 1984, for example, General Jaruzelski signed an agreement giving the USSR a stranglehold over the Polish economy every bit as important as the political concessions the general has made...
...Colonel Sloan might further have pointed out that the Warsaw Pact has no Colonel Sloans—a British military officer assigned to a purely NATO function, the public information office...
...In theory, they have a Warsaw Pact administrative headquarters in Moscow...
...Instead, the Warsaw Pact eliminates the tedious middlemen by handling such information through the official Soviet news agency, TASS...
...This is not one of those who's-buriedin-Grant's-tomb questions...
...But unlike its counterpart across the Elbe, NATO is out here for all to see, and, quite possibly, to attack...
...The pact is based in Moscow, and its name derives from the founding treaty signed William McGurn is deputy editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal and a former deputy managing editor of the Brussels-based Wall Street Journal/Europe...
...Nor is this the only difference...
...The sheer imbalance of numbers is matched by different military strategies...
...Although billed as an association of sovereign nations, the Warsaw Pact is an alliance honored more in the breach than on the battlefield...
...Moreover, an offensive strategy is easily adaptable, as the Soviets amply demonstrated to the Czechs in 1968, the Hungarians in 1956, and the Afghans in 1979...
...In certain European circles, it is common to think that Western Europe faces much the same domination from its partner across the Atlantic...
...European forces would not report to an American but a NATO structure...
...In tanks, aircraft, artillery, nuclear warheads, and almost any area you care to name, the Warsaw Pact enjoys clear numerical superiority, sometimes as much as two to one...
...First on this list must be the dominance of the Soviet Union, which keeps the Pact based in Moscow, the better to keep an eye on its "partners...
...But the same features that make NATO such an inviting and obvious target—politically as well as militarily—also distinguish it from its Soviet-backed counterpart, the...
...rr here's a tremendous amount of 1 double-hatting with the Soviets," explains a NATO spokesman, Col...
...Warsaw Pact...
...Even for those who pontificate daily about "East-West tensions" and suchlike, the Warsaw Pact remains largely an intellectual abstraction...
...On top of this, the teams aren't evenly matched: the Warsaw Pact nations together have a standing force of 6 million personnel against NATO's 4.5 million...
...Although the good colonel adds that an offensive strategy is not necessarily the same as an aggressive strategy, NATO officials from Lord Carrington on down have noted that the Warsaw Pact's buildup and military expenditures far exceed legitimate defense needs...
...The Soviets decide what they want and how they want to do it and then they inform their allies...
...The equivalent would be to have NATO communiques handled by the United States Information Agency...
...Indeed, the Soviets have built up a considerable tradition of invading their partners as opposed to defending them...
...in Poland's first city in 1955 by the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Albania (which left and formally denounced the Pact in 1968...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 35...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
