The Last Warrior

by Andrew F. Krepinevich

  * There were rumors that Ford was angry with Schlesinger over his alleged failure to carry out additional retaliatory strikes the president had directed against Cambodia’s Communists after they attacked a US freighter, Mayaguez, in May 1975. Prior to Schlesinger’s ignoring the order by the commander in chief, American forces did bomb military and fuel installations in Cambodia and rescue the Mayaguez crew, at the cost of 41 US troops killed in action.

  6

  THE MATURATION OF NET ASSESSMENT 1976–1980

  What we are involved in is diagnosis, not therapy.

  ANDREW MARSHALL

  Schlesinger may have departed the Pentagon, but his two immediate successors, Donald Rumsfeld and Harold Brown, both quickly recognized the value of Marshall’s new form of analysis. As for Marshall himself, after several years of effort, he was now in a position to begin producing the longer, more complete net assessments he had envisioned. His primary task when he came to the Pentagon had been to establish a net assessment capability for Schlesinger. Initially there had been little need for the long, analytic military balance papers that Marshall’s office would begin writing under Rumsfeld. As Schlesinger later observed, Marshall was so bright and the breadth and depth of his knowledge so great that he could “see things without having the data.”1 He could (and did) walk into Schlesinger’s office and offer important insights about aspects of the US-Soviet competition without having to provide the detailed background and analysis that most others would have required.2 Of course, it helped immensely that Schlesinger was, next to Marshall himself, the person who best understood net assessment.

  One of the first things that Marshall realized when Rumsfeld came on board at the Pentagon was that ONA’s assessments would have to begin providing more of the analytic background and detail that Schlesinger had not required. Rumsfeld proved a good customer for Marshall’s products. He not only asked for assessments of what he considered the key balances, but also requested special analyses of the Middle East, US and Soviet mobilization capabilities, détente, and the future of the strategic nuclear competition.3

  In December 1975, barely a month into Rumsfeld’s tenure, Marshall began forwarding to him four- or five-page summaries of the strategic nuclear, naval, power projection, and NATO–Warsaw Pact balances. In the case of the strategic nuclear balance, for example, ONA’s basic assessment was that in the mid-1960s the United States had enjoyed a significant margin of superiority. But by the mid-1970s standard static measures of the balance showed that the Soviets had closed the gap. Nevertheless, Marshall judged that there was an adequate balance in the size and capabilities of the US and Soviet strategic forces. By this he meant that the United States’ strategic forces were sufficient to deter a Soviet nuclear attack on the US homeland. But he cautioned that this could change in the future because the Soviets had “the more vigorous development program” and appeared “to be strongly motivated to further improve their forces.”4 Looking ahead, Marshall suggested that these and other improvements might one day give the Soviets “a significant advantage in crises” and even “a superior warfighting capability.”5

  Marshall was less sanguine about the US-Soviet maritime balance, which seemed to be shifting in Moscow’s favor. “The simultaneous decline of our own naval force levels and the rising capability of the Soviet Navy, he wrote, “have clearly caused and are continuing to cause an adverse shift in the naval balance. However, as of today, the US Navy should be able to fulfill its assigned tasks in most areas of the world, although not without considerable losses in certain situations.”6 Eventually Marshall’s basic assessments of these and other key competitions with the USSR would be incorporated as a separate section in an unclassified version of the secretary of defense’s annual report to Congress.7

  Aside from Rumsfeld’s requests for these short memos, during his first few months in office he largely left ONA alone. This changed in the spring of 1976 when he tasked Marshall, along with PA&E, to help him in deciding what warships should be included in the Navy’s next five-year shipbuilding program.8 In all likelihood, Rumsfeld’s concern with this area was fueled in part by ONA’s assessment that the US-Soviet naval balance was shifting in the Kremlin’s favor. Of particular concern to Marshall was that the Soviet Navy appeared to be ahead of the United States in the development and fielding of ship-to-ship (or “antiship”) guided missiles.

  To gain a better understanding of the Navy’s shipbuilding program, Rumsfeld decided to convene a Saturday session at which ONA and PA&E were to give presentations. PA&E’s briefing lacked the kind of broad strategic perspective Rumsfeld sought, instead focusing on the cost effectiveness of alterative shipbuilding options. About halfway through PA&E’s presentation Rumsfeld brought the briefing to a halt, saying, “Why don’t we stop looking at our shoelaces and raise our sights and see where we are going?”9

  ONA’s presentation proved much more to Rumsfeld’s liking. Titled “Thinking about the Navy,” it placed the issue in its strategic context, and recommended that the United States openly declare its intention to maintain a “blue water” navy able to dominate the world’s oceans. Specifically ONA’s paper argued for moving the US-Soviet competition into areas where the United States had distinctive advantages. One such area was in the quieting of submarines. The ability of each superpower to identify and track the other’s submarines was highly dependent on acoustic detection. The quieter a submarine, the more difficult it would be to locate it and maintain a track. In line with this, Marshall noted that the US Navy had a clear lead over the Soviets in the ability to detect submarine noise, in part through its network of undersea sensors known as the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS). Concentrating on quieting and acoustic detection, Marshall suggested, could pay big dividends against the Soviet Navy, which placed far greater emphasis on its submarine fleet than did the US Navy. ONA also recommended giving priority to guidance technology, another area in which the United States enjoyed a lead that seemed likely to endure for some time to come. Although precision-guided warfare would not come into its own for another decade, Marshall had already identified its great potential. Underway replenishment—or the ability to resupply and rearm warships at sea without their returning to port—was yet another area ONA recommended be given emphasis. In Pentagon parlance, underway replenishment provided the Navy with a “force multiplier” in that the fleet would not have to waste time and energy returning to base to be resupplied but could remain constantly in action.10 Here again, the United States enjoyed a significant lead and Marshall urged the Rumsfeld to ensure that this lead was maintained. Marshall’s evaluation of the maritime competition was perhaps even more noteworthy than PA&E’s presentation for what it did not emphasize, namely the number and types of ships and aircraft that should comprise the fleet.

  Marshall’s coauthor on “Thinking about the Navy” was a young Navy commander, James Roche, who had joined Marshall’s staff in 1975. By 1976 Roche had already risen to assistant director of net assessment, owing to his intelligence, bureaucratic skills, and the remarkable similarity between his and Marshall’s views on competing with the Soviets. Roche combined a formidable intellect with a dominating, even aggressive personality that was in many ways the opposite of Marshall’s. Yet Roche’s educational background—which included the study of literature and philosophy, operations research, and business administration—was as eclectic as Marshall’s.

  In June 1973 Roche had been given command of the USS Buchanan (DDG-14), a guided missile destroyer. His tour as the Buchanan’s commander was so successful that in 1974 he was awarded the Arleigh Burke Fleet Trophy for the most improved naval combat unit in the Pacific. Then, in 1975, Roche was detailed to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations’ systems analysis staff in the Pentagon. There he was assigned to figure out, in the event of a European conflict, how to maximize the number of ship convoys that could successfully transit the Atlantic against a Soviet submarine force engaged in a commerce raiding campaign. Frustrated by this
mundane assignment Roche decided to look for a way to escape from the Navy staff.

  Roche heard about Marshall and learned that he was looking for talented officers to fill out his staff. He wrangled an interview. Marshall hired him on the spot. In time the two men became intellectual soul mates and close friends. Over a quarter of a century later, when Rumsfeld was beginning his second tour as secretary of defense in 2001, he asked Marshall to undertake a strategy review. The first person Marshall turned to for help was Jim Roche. When the strategy review started, Roche was the president of Northrop Grumman’s Electronic Sensors and Systems sector. By the time the review ended, Roche was secretary of the Air Force.

  Given Rumsfeld’s positive reaction to “Thinking About the Navy,” Marshall decided to draft a strategy paper that addressed in much broader terms the long-term competition with the USSR. Working with Roche, Marshall completed “Strategy for Competing with the Soviets in the Military Sector of the Continuing Political-Military Competition,” and sent it to Rumsfeld in July 1976. Rumsfeld found that Marshall had convincingly “demonstrated that the Soviet Union had been gaining ground relative to the United States” in overall military power, that the “trend lines were clearly adverse to America” and that these trends would persist unless US defense spending was increased significantly.11 Ironically, Pentagon pressure to increase defense spending had been one of the reasons President Ford had fired Schlesinger and replaced him with Rumsfeld.

  With the 1976 presidential campaign and general election on the horizon, Rumsfeld’s acceptance of Marshall’s assessments brought him into conflict with Kissinger, who did not want any public admission of these “unpleasant facts.”12 President Ford sided with Kissinger. He saw no politial advantage to be gained from telling a voting public hostile to defense in the wake of a failed war in Vietnam that the US-Soviet military balance was shifting in the latter’s favor.13 But while Ford was not anxious to discuss the erosion of the US position relative to the Soviets, the issue would not go away.

  In 1976 the state of the US-Soviet strategic nuclear balance was generating considerable debate. Conservative critics of the administration had openly accused the CIA’s estimates of Soviet strategic nuclear forces of understating the threat. For example, the key judgments in the Agency’s 1974 National Intelligence Estimate, NIE 11–3/8–74, stated that Soviet leaders were continuing to develop powerful strategic forces to deter nuclear war, project an image of national power, and support détente.14 There was no discussion in this or earlier NIEs of whether the Soviets might be building toward a capability to fight and win a nuclear war, as some of the CIA’s critics feared. At the urging of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), then CIA director George H. W. Bush initiated a Team B competitive analysis (Team A comprising Agency analysts) led by Harvard professor Richard Pipes.15 The effort began in May, with Team B’s members given access to classified intelligence on the Soviet Union’s nuclear forces and programs. Marshall was among the experts tapped to brief Team B.

  The Team B assessment found that, contrary to the more benign judgments of the NIE 11–3/8 series in the early 1970s, the USSR was striving “for effective strategic superiority in all the branches of the military, nuclear forces included [emphasis in the original].”16 This judgment directly challenged Kissinger’s views on the issue. At a Moscow press conference in 1974 the secretary of state had famously asked, “[W]hat in the name of God is strategic superiority? . . . What do you do with it?”17 In 1977 Pipes’s reply was that if the Soviets thought had they sufficient superiority, then they could fight and win a nuclear war.18

  Interviews with senior Soviet officials after the Cold War ended suggest that Team B exaggerated Moscow’s confidence in its nuclear capabilities.19 But in the mid-1970s the Team B report generated much controversy within the US national security community. Team B’s pessimistic conclusions resonated with Rumsfeld. He turned to Marshall and asked for his views on the likely state of the strategic nuclear competition over the next ten to fifteen years (that is, out to 1986–1991).

  Marshall’s August 26, 1976, response to Rumsfeld remains the closest he has ever come to writing an ONA military balance paper himself. Both then and later, ONA’s assessments were written by members of his staff. They, in turn, were given considerable latitude to assess their assigned balances as they saw fit, with Marshall providing only the broadest guidance as to what he wanted.

  In his cover memo to the twelve-page “The Future of the Strategic Balance” Marshall noted that neither the usual “static” nor force exchange (or “dynamic”) measures adequately captured the essence of the underlying issues.20 This meant that the inferences one could draw from such measures were of limited utility. Yet, while various static measures—typically side-by-side comparisons of the numbers of US and Soviet strategic warheads, intercontinental delivery vehicles, ICBM payload capacity or “throw-weight,” and the like—differed in their portrayals of potential risk, all of them suggested that the balance would grow less favorable to the United States in the immediate future. Similarly, the dynamic measures—the results of modeling all-out exchanges between the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals, which US analysts invariably presumed would begin with a Soviet first strike—indicated increased risk starting in 1976 and continuing well into the future.

  Beyond these observations on the limits of the metrics widely used to assess the nuclear balance, Marshall offered three other judgments:

  •The Soviets did “indeed seem embarked on a number of nuclear programs to erode our assured destruction capabilities”—the US capability to inflict catastrophic damage the USSR even after absorbing a Soviet first strike.21

  •The future of this competition would inevitably see both sides continuing to introduce new technologies—primarily greater missile accuracy and increased weapon yields—into their nuclear forces.22

  •The United States had “not [yet] felt or assessed the likely impact of Soviet nuclear parity on the overall U.S.-Soviet military balance.”23

  Marshall therefore concluded in his forwarding memo that the United States “needed to think through how we should respond to the military and political aspects of the trends in the strategic situation” and “develop a more effective strategy for competing with Soviet nuclear forces within the bounds of rough parity in the size of the US and Soviet strategic forces [emphasis in the original].”24

  These observations reflected Marshall’s judgment that the United States’ position in the nuclear competition with the USSR was eroding. First, even if static measures of the balance and force exchange calculations did not tell the whole story, one could not escape the fact that public perceptions of the balance often were based on them, and those perceptions mattered. Domestically, members of Congress knew that their constituents tended to form opinions based on simple static metrics, and were wary of being charged by their opponents as being weak on defense. Just as important, the United States’ ability to provide shelter under its “nuclear umbrella” to key allies who had foresworn nuclear weapons—such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea—was in no small measure based on their perceptions of the nuclear balance between the two superpowers, whether their perceptions were accurate or not.

  Because these static and dynamic measures suggested that strategic nuclear balance was shifting in the Soviet Union’s favor, this unpleasant reality needed to be taken into account. In the case of static metrics, the USSR was moving ahead of the United States in ballistic missile throw-weight, equivalent megatonnage (the weapon’s yield raised to the 2/3 power), and ICBM and submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) launchers. At the same time, Marshall worried, exchange calculations were likely to “reflect the increasing vulnerability of the [US] silo-based ICBMs.”25 Next, the increased vulnerability of US ICBMs to a Soviet ICBM attack, combined with Soviet efforts to promote the survival of the Soviet economy following a nuclear exchange, would over time cause some erosion in the US capability to maintain assured destruction.
26 If the Soviets could take out a large portion of the Americans’ ICBM force, the United States’ ability to retaliate to a Soviet first strike would decline over time, perhaps tempting the Soviets to risk such a strike. Third (and by far the most important, in Marshall’s judgment), because US leaders may not “clearly enough see the difference in Soviet objectives and their perspective on the military and political competition,” they risked ignoring the broader geopolitical leverage that might be derived from the USSR’s growing nuclear capabilities, and the longer-term dangers of the USSR’s achieving, if only in the its leaders’ eyes, sufficient superiority to risk a first strike.27

  How might the United States deal with these problems? Marshall offered a number of specific suggestions. But his main recommendation was the need for thoughtful strategy that would find ways to impose burdensome costs and difficult choices on the Soviets, including rendering some of their investments in strategic forces obsolescent. “As in a chess game,” Marshall wrote to Rumsfeld, “one has to think two and three moves ahead.”28 But he stopped short of telling Rumsfeld what sequence of moves to choose.

  FIGURE 6.1.Trends in the US-Soviet Strategic-Nuclear Balance 1966–1976.

  SOURCE: CIA, National Intelligence Estimate 11-3/8-76, “Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict Through the Mid-1980s,” December 1976, in Donald P. Steury, Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates on Soviet Strategic Forces, 1950–1983 (Washington, DC: Center for the Study of Intelligence, CIA, 1996), p. 357.

  Despite a late surge in the polls, President Ford lost his bid for election to former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election. Ford’s margin of defeat was so narrow—2 percentage points in the popular vote—that Rumsfeld later ruminated “that almost anything might have changed the outcome.”29 On Carter’s side, his simple campaign promise, “I’ll never lie to you,” appealed to a nation that had yet to recover from the traumatic experience of Watergate and Vietnam.30