Developing the database proved to be a monumental undertaking. Oddly enough, obtaining data on the United States’ NATO allies was even more challenging than estimating the forces of the Warsaw Pact states. The US intelligence community was formally restricted from “spying” on US allies, and thus did not keep a detailed database on their military forces and programs. Then there was the dispute between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. Although both countries were NATO members, each viewed the other as an enemy and was reluctant to share information on its forces that might prove useful to the other. The result was that the Greeks and Turks classified their force data at levels that made gaining access difficult.
In the end Marshall’s ability to open doors in Europe to provide access for Karber’s team proved crucial. It turned out that NATO archives contained historical order-of-battle data that even the Pentagon did not have. As one of Karber’s analysts, Diego Ruiz-Palmer, recalled,
We had incredible access. We tapped in on virtually everything that the U.S. government had in terms of Soviet, Warsaw Pact, U.S., and NATO intelligence and information . . . We had wide access to general officers at the three- and four-star level. Andy [Marshall] was able to open lots of doors in many directions, and we got into the war plans of the U.S., we got into the general defense plans of NATO at all levels, from SACEUR [Supreme Allied Commander Europe] down, and into the special Soviet data. . . . [Polish] Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski . . . was very much a silent member of Project 186 because of the incredible intelligence that for eight years, from 1973 to 1981, he was able to communicate to the CIA, at great risk to himself.37 He gave the United States a panoramic view of the Warsaw Pact and, thanks to him, the pieces of that huge puzzle, came together, as if by magic.38
Marshall was interested in obtaining much more than intelligence on Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces and defense investments. US Cold War strategy focused not only on preserving vital national interests in the event of war, but also on deterring enemies from choosing the path of war in the first place. To defeat an enemy of the United States one had to understand the military balance from the US perspective. But to deter an enemy meant understanding how the enemy, in this case the Soviets, viewed the balance. Thus it was vital to know how Moscow calculated what it called the “correlation of forces,” since it was the Kremlin leadership that had to be deterred.
Doing so led Marshall to pursue what came to be known in ONA as the Soviet assessment. The core questions were: How did the Soviets assess the military competition with the West?* What planning assumptions, analytic methods, models, technical calculations, effectiveness metrics, norms, and dominant scenarios did they use to assess the correlation of forces in each of ONA’s main balance areas? Under what circumstances would their assessments lead them to undertake acts of aggression or coercion? If one purpose of undertaking net assessments was to identify opportunities that the United States might exploit to influence Soviet behavior, it was essential to understand what underlay Soviet calculations about the prospective costs and benefits of going to war, especially in Europe.
In looking for ways to address the problem, Marshall came upon John Battilega, who was employed at Science Applications International (SAI), a defense consulting firm then headquartered in La Jolla, California. Battilega had a strong background in quantitative analysis, having earned a doctorate in applied mathematics from Oregon State University. Following his service in the Army during the Vietnam War and a brief stint as an engineer for the Martin Marietta Corporation, a major US aerospace firm, Battilega joined SAI in 1969. There he was given oversight of the development of analytic methods and computer models to assess US and Soviet nuclear forces for Allan Rehm, the branch chief of the CIA’s Force Evaluation Analysis Team (FEAT), as part of an effort known as Project Eager.39
When funding from the CIA and other sponsors ended, Marshall continued to support Battilega’s work on Project Eager—an investment that would, over time, pay big dividends. Battilega’s team developed broad insights into how the Soviets did operations research, as well as other forms of analysis, modeling, and simulations bearing on the Soviet assessment of the military competition.40 As with Project 186 at BDM, Battilega’s organization would continue its work for nearly two decades, building up a storehouse of information about how the Soviet military approached and evaluated its competitive position with the West.
Battilega was working a different part of the puzzle from Karber, one that Marshall was attempting to solve, if incompletely and temporarily, given that the military competition was dynamic in character and thus constantly shifting and evolving. Battilega’s terms of reference called for him and his group to scour Soviet writings—particularly military writings—to get as good a sense as possible of how they viewed the rivalry in general and how they calculated their version of the military balance in particular. The insights gained over time from this line of research were important for two reasons: (1) They helped senior US policy makers better understand how to deter the Soviets from acts of coercion or overt aggression; and (2) they provided a sense of what and how US actions might shape Soviet behavior in ways favorable to the United States.
Over time Battilega and his team identified three major differences, or asymmetries, between the assessments of the Soviet military and those of their US rivals. The first involved basic aspects of military art. Perhaps not surprisingly, Soviet views on warfare were rooted in the logic of the Marxist dialectic. Battilega concluded that the Soviets truly believed warfare could be understood as a process governed by objective laws. If you could understand what these laws were and use them to plan military operations you would, by definition, be successful in war. Believing as they did, the Soviets were obsessed with identifying these laws, intensely studying historical battles and campaigns to isolate the factors that determined why the winning side had emerged victorious and the losing side had failed. Starting with the General Staff, the Soviets applied these factors through various models and simulations and attempted to come up with “scientific” formulas that would ensure success in combat.
This approach led the Soviets—and by extension, the Warsaw Pact—to take a top-down approach to warfare aimed at ensuring that the objective laws of war were applied correctly. Thus they valued centralized control of forces and frowned on individual initiative from the bottom up. The US military and its NATO allies, by contrast, took the opposite approach. They viewed war more as an art rather than as a science. Western military practitioners were acutely aware of the “fog” and “frictions” of war, which were rooted in human physical and cognitive limits, unavoidable informational uncertainties, and the inherent nonlinearity of combat interactions. Far from looking for specific formulas that would guarantee battlefield success, they believed that war’s fog and frictions worked to undermine their ability to conduct operations as they planned or intended. Rather than attempting to wring out the fog and friction of war, the US military accepted them as inevitable and attempted to limit their effects by training junior commanders and noncommissioned officers to exercise initiative and judgment as circumstances changed—a “bottom-up” approach. They drew inspiration from Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, who observed, “Everything in war is simple. But the simplest thing is difficult,” and from another Prussian, General Helmuth von Moltke, who famously declared, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
Battilega’s findings with respect to the differences between Western and Soviet assessments were not unique. Others in the US defense community were coming to similar conclusions. Few if any, however, dug as deeply into the Soviet military’s operations research literature and “correlation of forces” calculations as did Battilega’s group. Over time his researchers identified many of the norms, rules, and calculations that the Soviet military used in their planning and assessments, all which were in theory based on empirical data from conflicts such as the 1941–1945 Russo-German War and Arab-Israeli conflicts in the Middle East. When they found battles or
operations in which the side with the superior correlation of forces did not win, Battilega found that
[T]he Soviet conclusion from that was not that “Our theory is bad.” It’s that, “We don’t understand the dimensions of strength that actually led to success. Our indices were bad.” So, they repeatedly would do historical analysis to try and find the actual dimensions of strengths in the situation, and then, from that, draw conclusions about how to characterize that in terms of the correlations of forces. And this went on over and over again. There was a large military institute in Moscow that was focused on historical analysis. Their first objective of historical analysis was always, always to understand the objective laws of war that governed that particular conflict situation. And . . . then determine the dimensions of strengths that would translate that into prescriptive capabilities.41
The work of Battilega’s Foreign Systems Research Center (FSRC) at SAI helped Marshall’s staff identify and evaluate Soviet strengths and vulnerabilities as the Soviets saw them, not as United States and its NATO allies saw them. This was crucial to NATO’s strategy of deterrence, which ultimately rested not on how the alliance’s senior decision makers viewed the correlation of forces, but rather on how the Soviets interpreted it. From a US perspective, this kind of analysis could be very useful to a secretary of defense needing to make decisions about what kind of military capabilities to buy and in what combination. While senior American military leaders can provide the secretary with detailed information on why they believe a particular set of capabilities will enable the United States to achieve its security objectives at an acceptable level of risk, they cannot answer the question of intent: Will this set of capabilities deter the Soviets from taking the path to war in the first place? It was for help in answering this question that Marshall turned to Battilega.
Karber’s P-186 effort and Battilega’s FSRC program exemplified the sort of long-term research that Marshall’s office not only needed but was able to support over periods of many years. Both reflected the kind of analysis Schlesinger sought to help him with the strategic management of the Defense Department. They would not, however, begin to realize dividends until long after Schlesinger was gone.
On November 2, 1975, President Ford dismissed Schlesinger from his position as defense secretary. Apart from his differences with Kissinger, Schlesinger had been directly at odds with his president on several key issues.* The two clearly disagreed on defense funding, with Ford opposed to the higher levels of spending Schlesinger felt necessary. Ford understood the need to stroke the egos of key members of Congress; Schlesinger did not. Of Schlesinger it was said that “he did not suffer fools gladly—if at all,” and his straight-talking manner often alienated congressional leaders whose support Ford needed. There were other personality clashes. Ford was offended that Schlesinger “couldn’t remember to button his shirt collar and cinch up his tie when he came to see the President of the United States.”42 Not surprisingly, politics were also a factor. Ford was looking ahead to the 1976 presidential election and decided the time was ripe to make some cabinet changes.
Schlesinger was succeeded by Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, whose position at the White House was filled by Richard Cheney. George H. W. Bush was brought in to succeed William Colby at the CIA. Nor did Kissinger escape unscathed. While he retained his position at the State Department, Brent Scowcroft replaced him as Ford’s national security adviser.
Despite having served less than three years as defense secretary, Schlesinger could look back on several impressive accomplishments. He had navigated the dangerous weeks of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, when US forces were placed on high nuclear alert when the Soviets threatened direct intervention in the conflict. He oversaw the successful evacuation of US personnel from South Vietnam in the spring of 1975 as North Vietnamese forces unleashed a major offensive against South Vietnam and, in a lightning campaign, toppled its government and occupied the country.
It was in nuclear strategy, however, that Schlesinger had perhaps his greatest influence, as he moved the country toward a more flexible nuclear doctrine that took into account the shifting nuclear balance between the United States and Soviet Union. In so doing he rejected the single option of massive assured destruction, which in the event of any Soviet nuclear attack called for the president to respond with an all-out US nuclear counterstrike that would have included Soviet cities and industry along with Moscow’s nuclear forces. And, of course, Schlesinger established the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and recruited Andrew Marshall to direct it.
In retrospect, Schlesinger may have been the most able strategist ever to serve as defense secretary. But he was not one of the most politically astute occupants of the office, which requires constant attention to the never-ending machinations going on at the White House, among cabinet officials, in Congress, and by the media. Unwilling to temper what he believed to be the right course of action for the nation, he was loath to compromise his principles for the sake of political expediency. One can almost hear him echoing Marshall’s words: “We’re here to inform, not to please.” A man of strong, uncompromising views on national defense, Schlesinger’s path was often a lonely one.
Despite Schlesinger’s supposed poor relationship with Congress, upon his departure the Senate voted to commend him, appropriately emphasizing not only “his excellence in office,” but also “his intellectual honesty and personal integrity. . . . ”43 No doubt reflecting what he and Marshall had concluded regarding the true state of the geostrategic competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, upon his departure Schlesinger retained his optimism about his country’s prospects: “I feel like that intelligence officer who was at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and, looking around at the disaster, said, ‘We are going to win this war. But God bless my soul if I know how.’”44
With Schlesinger’s departure, Marshall assumed that he would soon be returning to California. Besides, he had originally promised Mary that the Pentagon job would only last a year or two. Marshall was surprised, then, when Rumsfeld told him that he wanted him to stay.
It soon became clear that Rumsfeld, at age forty-three the youngest defense secretary to date, was not only genuinely interested in assessing the main components of military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. But he was also willing to accept the agreements Marshall had reached with Schlesinger about ONA’s role and functioning.45 Marshall’s assessments would continue to be diagnostic rather than prescriptive. They would focus on the long-term US-Soviet competition rather than on current issues. They would go directly to Rumsfeld. They would not be staffed through the bureaucracy or negotiated with other parts of the Defense Department. For Marshall, what Rumsfeld agreed to would prove to be the first step in a long journey that would result in the institutionalization of the Office of Net Assessment and cement Marshall’s role as the Pentagon’s éminence grise, a behind-the-scenes adviser on strategic issues. Eventually the Russians themselves would recognize Marshall—the “Pentagon’s Gray Cardinal”—as one of the most influential thinkers in the US Defense Department.46
*NSDM 239 rescinded NSSM 186 and NSDM 224.
* Also known as the October War and the Ramadan War.
† The price spike was also due in large part to the peaking of US domestic oil production in 1970, leaving the country with no spare production capacity.
‡ In 1944 delegates from over forty nations, including the major Western allies, met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to establish a postwar economic order. In August 1971, when various factors led to the US dollar’s becoming overvalued, President Nixon suspended unilaterally the convertibility of the US dollar to gold at Bretton Wood’s set rate of $35 per ounce.
*The Department of the Navy includes the Marine Corps, whose equities were at stake in the assessment of ground forces.
*Founded in 1959 by Joseph V. Braddock, Bernard J. Dunn, and Dan McDonald. BDM is now part of the Northrop Grumman Corporation.
&
nbsp; *The other members of the Warsaw Pact were Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (“East Germany”), Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
† West Germany was formally known as the Federal Republic of Germany. Although France had dropped out of NATO’s unified military command structure in 1966, it remained within the alliance itself, and continued to station troops in West Germany.
* With the help of Nathan Leites, Marshall also undertook to learn how key US allies assessed the military competition. If the United States were to keep them as allies it was important to understand what aspects of the balance most concerned them, and what military capabilities particularly impressed them. Such information could influence what the United States emphasized in dealings with those allies.
The Last Warrior Page 17