The Last Warrior

by Andrew F. Krepinevich

  When Carter dispatched American military forces in an attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980, the operation turned into a fiasco. Eight helicopters were deployed to a desert staging area inside Iran, but only five arrived in operating condition. A decision was then made to abort the mission. But one of the departing helicopters crashed into a transport aircraft carrying fuel. In the resulting explosion and fire, eight servicemen were killed. In addition to the destroyed aircraft and helicopter, five other helicopters were abandoned. The operation seemed to confirm fears that the series of cuts in the Pentagon’s budget following the Vietnam War had left the United States with a “hollow” military: one that looked strong on paper but whose troops were ill-trained and poorly equipped. Following by less than four years the dramatic and successful rescue of Israeli hostages at Entebbe in Uganda, the aborted US hostage rescue mission appeared an even greater failure. A running joke at the time was that Carter should have outsourced the mission to the Israelis.

  In contrast to the pessimistic views of Kissinger regarding the US-Soviet nuclear competition, or the worrisome indicators that the US military was becoming a “hollow” force, Reagan came to the presidency with a more optimistic view of the United States’ position in the world. He saw the US-Soviet Cold War as a “struggle of ideas and economic systems.” Because the Soviet system was politically illegitimate and economically flawed, Reagan believed it could be challenged and ultimately defeated by an open, representative democracy with a free market economy.1 In some ways his views of the Soviet Union echoed George Kennan’s in that both believed the seeds of the USSR’s destruction were inherent in its system and well advanced.

  In fact—as Marshall had long known—unlike free market economies, Soviet central economic planning was highly inefficient in allocating resources. The totalitarian government of the USSR suppressed the kind of individual initiative so vital to the functioning of a dynamic economy stimulated by entrepreneurs who were willing to take risks to reap the rewards of success. Over time this produced economic stagnation. Soviet leaders were forced to make increasingly tough decisions regarding the apportionment of resources. Guns or butter? Armaments or consumer goods? They chose military production, thereby imposing increasing burdens on their people and the USSR’s economy.2

  Yet even within Reagan’s own administration, few were inclined to believe that the United States could win the Cold War. Marshall’s growing suspicions about the economic problems lurking beneath the surface of the Soviet behemoth were neither widely shared by the US intelligence community or the military. Senior military leaders in the Pentagon tended to presume that any resource constraints on Soviet military spending were minimal to nonexistent. In the end, however, Marshall’s long-term competition framework would lead the Defense Department to adopt what he called competitive strategies, which placed greater priority on imposing disproportionately large costs on the USSR’s military efforts. Coupled with the increases in defense spending under Reagan, the 1980s would find Soviet leaders confronting ever-greater challenges in their attempts to hold up their end of the competition with the United States.

  Reagan’s belief that history was on the side of the United States rather than the Soviet Union was formalized in US strategy early in his administration. National Security Decision Directive 32 (NSDD 32), which Reagan signed in May 1982, stated that US global goals would include containing and reversing “the expansion of Soviet control and military presence throughout the world,” increasing “the costs of Soviet support and use of proxy, terrorist, and subversive forces,” while seeking opportunities to foster restraint in Soviet military spending, discourage Soviet adventurism, and weaken Soviet alliances.3 NSDD 32 was followed in early 1983 by NSDD 75, “U.S. Relations with the USSR,” which went even further. Drafted by Richard Pipes, who was then serving on Reagan’s NSC staff,4 NSDD 75 established three objectives for dealing with the Soviet Union: (1) containing and over time reversing Soviet expansionism by competing more effectively; (2) promoting change in the USSR “toward a more pluralist political and economic system in which the power of the privileged elite is gradually reduced”; and (3) engaging the USSR in negotiations leading to agreements that “protect and enhance U.S. interests.”5

  To achieve these objectives, and to remedy the decline in US military readiness over the previous decade, Reagan felt he needed to build up US military strength. He tapped Caspar (“Cap”) Weinberger, a longtime political associate from his days as governor of California, to head the effort as his defense secretary. Weinberger’s background on defense matters was limited to his service as a junior officer in World War II on General Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence staff. He had, however, served in senior positions during the Nixon administration, first as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, then as director of the Office of Management and Budget, and finally as secretary of health, education and welfare. During his time at OMB Weinberger was given the nickname “Cap the Knife” for his aggressive cost-cutting. Yet as the man chosen by Reagan to lead his defense buildup, Weinberger would become a tireless advocate for increasing the military budget.

  Reagan was especially concerned with the strategic nuclear balance. With this in mind, in October 1981 he signed NSDD 12, reversing Carter’s cancellation of the B-1 bomber. NSDD 12 also endorsed moving ahead with the Advanced Technology Bomber (the B-2 “stealth” bomber), increasing the accuracy and payload of US submarine-launched ballistic missiles and deploying a newer, larger and more accurate land-based ICBM.6 These decisions were consistent with NSDD 75’s emphasis on sustaining steady, long-term growth in US defense spending and capabilities—both nuclear and conventional—as “the most important way of conveying to the Soviets American resolve and political staying-power.”7

  Yet despite these efforts by the new president to strengthen the United States’ military position, as late as March 1983—the same month as his “Star Wars” speech calling for the development of the capability to “intercept and destroy” Soviet ballistic missiles before they could reach American soil—Reagan privately believed that the United States remained “dangerously behind the Soviets” in military capability and was falling still further behind.8 Meanwhile, the Soviets continued their nuclear buildup. After prolonged debate within the US national security community, especially over basing schemes, the first of fifty Peacekeeper LGM-118A ICBMs were deployed in 1986. But the Peacekeeper deployment was modest and late compared to the USSR’s deployment of 308 R-36MUTTH (SS-18) ICBMs, each armed with ten independently targetable thermonuclear warheads.9 The last of the SS-18s became operational in 1983, three years before the first Peacekeeper’s were deployed.

  Marshall’s impression of Weinberger was that the new defense secretary had little interest in the sorts of net assessments his office had produced under Harold Brown. From Weinberger’s perspective, the president’s desire to catch up with the Soviets militarily did not require careful net assessments of where the United States stood militarily relative to the USSR. Weinberger seemed to view the country’s defenses as having been left in such a sorry state by the previous administration that everything—from military personnel compensation to research and development funding, from training and readiness to the purchase of new equipment—merited large funding increases. Unlike Schlesinger or Brown, Weinberger lacked a background in defense matters in general and in military strategy in particular. While Marshall could be a superb source of strategic insight for a defense secretary who knew how to exploit ONA’s potential, he was not adept at engaging those who did not, and consequently did little to promote ONA’s work to Weinberger.

  Armed with a political mandate following his election victory, Reagan was able to win Congress’s support for substantial increases in funding for defense. The growth in the defense budget was so great—around 50 percent from Fiscal Year (FY) 1980 to FY 1985—that Weinberger found himself with an embarrassment of riches. Weinberger’s problem was less one of apportioning scarce resources than figu
ring out how the Pentagon could absorb the flood of money heading its way. Thus for the new defense secretary, Marshall’s net assessments had little to offer.

  Observations from those who worked with Weinberger during his tenure as defense secretary from 1981 to 1987 indicate that he had very little appreciation of either net assessment or the limits on resources that inevitably constrain strategic choice. During those years Marshall only met with the defense secretary a handful of times.10 One of those meetings took place in the mid-1980s at Fred Iklé’s insistence. As the undersecretary for policy Iklé thought that Weinberger needed to hear some of the insights that had emerged from ONA’s work on the US-Soviet military investment balance. Marshall’s sense by this time was that the Soviet economy was headed for serious trouble and Iklé wanted the defense secretary to hear about its problems from ONA’s perspective. While Weinberger acknowledged the USSR’s economic difficulties, he believed that Moscow’s military programs did not consume a large percentage of Soviet GNP because the Soviets employed slave labor in their factories and their military conscripts were underpaid relative to American service members.11 Marshall’s conclusion from the meeting was that Weinberger had little understanding of economics.

  After his experience with the previous three defense secretaries Marshall found serving Weinberger both disappointing and frustrating. Years later, after Weinberger had stepped down from his post, per tradition a portrait of him was commissioned to hang alongside those of his predecessors. By coincidence, these portraits were displayed along the hallway outside Marshall’s office on the Pentagon’s A Ring. Each portrait’s unveiling was the subject of a formal ceremony, attended by the Pentagon’s senior civilian and military leaders, including Marshall. On the day of Weinberger’s ceremony, however, a member of the ONA staff noted the event was not on Marshall’s calendar. When asked why, Marshall responded, most uncharacteristically, “I might have gone if they were hanging Weinberger instead of his picture.”

  While ONA was suffering Weinberger’s disinterest, it was thrown a lifeline by Fred Iklé. Shortly after he arrived at his post in April 1981 Iklé was preparing the first Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) whose purpose was to provide policy guidance for the military services to follow in developing their annual budgets. When Iklé asked Marshall to take a look at the DPG his main observation was that draft said nothing about exploiting Soviet weaknesses. At Iklé’s suggestion Marshall then wrote some guidance to the effect that priority should be given to exploiting opportunities to impose disproportionate costs on the USSR over the long term, something he had originally articulated in a report he had written while at RAND (R-862-PR).12 Unfortunately the idea was largely negotiated away in later DPGs because the military services argued both that it was too difficult to do and, to the extent it could be done, they were already doing it.13

  Marshall believed otherwise. He felt the military services had powerful incentives to highlight Soviet strengths and downplay Soviet weaknesses in order argue for increased budgets to cope with Soviet threats. Strategies aimed at exploiting Soviet weaknesses therefore had little appeal to the military during the first Reagan administration. But Marshall was nothing if not patient and persistent in advocating what would emerge in the second Reagan administration as Weinberger’s “competitive strategies” initiative.

  In the meantime, Iklé filled the void created by Weinberger’s indifference to ONA’s potential value. He did so by directing Marshall to undertake a series of special projects rather than concentrating on the kinds of net assessments that ONA had produced under Brown.14 Iklé’s use of ONA primarily for special studies and projects led to a 1985 revision of the DoD directive spelling out the responsibilities of the director of net assessment. Among other things, the new directive put Marshall and his office under the direction, authority, and control of the undersecretary of defense for policy.15

  Moving ONA under the USD(P) was not the only change in how Marshall’s office functioned under the Reagan administration. During Harold Brown’s tenure as defense secretary the director of central intelligence, Stansfield Turner, had sought to get the CIA into the net assessment business. Brown had flatly rejected this initiative on the grounds that the intelligence community should concentrate on analyzing the adversary—the Soviets—and that getting the Agency involved the DoD’s posture and programs would only corrupt the analysis. This response from Brown created hard feelings between the Agency and the Defense Department. The new administration, however, decided to address the issue head on. Early in 1981 Turner’s successor, William Casey, and Weinberger decided to take steps to get the Defense Department and the Agency working more closely together.

  During World War II Casey had worked for William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, and throughout his subsequent career he sustained a deep interest in foreign affairs. After World War II Casey became a multimillionaire, first working as a corporate lawyer and later as a venture capitalist. During the Nixon administration, he also chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission (1971–1973) and served as an undersecretary of state (1973–1974). As his reward for having directed Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign Casey was appointed DCI.

  To get the Defense Department and the Agency on the same page, Weinberger and Casey decided that net assessments, “when undertaken, would be published under the joint auspices of the Secretary of Defense and [the] Director of Central Intelligence.”16 This decision was formalized in a June 1981 memorandum signed by Frank Carlucci, Weinberger’s deputy defense secretary. A former Foreign Service officer who had served as the US ambassador to Portugal, Carlucci had also worked as the CIA’s deputy director under Turner.

  Given Reagan’s concerns about the US-Soviet strategic nuclear balance, Carlucci’s directive designated it as the subject for the first secretary of defense/director of central intelligence (SecDef/DCI) net assessment. The directive gave Marshall primary responsibility within DoD for the assessment. As the lead staff element on the CIA’s side Carlucci designated the chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which produced National Intelligence Estimates. At that time Marshall’s former colleague Henry Rowen, who had left RAND after the furor over Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War, was the NIC’s chairman. In July, Marshall reached out to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Jones, for his thoughts on the joint assessment. Marshall also met with Rowen to develop a plan on how to proceed. By late August, Rowen and Marshall had agreed on an outline.

  The assessment, which was published in November 1983, took over two years to complete. Progress on it was complicated by the fact that the intelligence analysts who were working on the CIA’s part of the joint assessment were repeatedly pulled off to work on NIE 11-3/8, “Soviet Capabilities for Strategic Nuclear Conflict,” which was intended to both support and precede the net assessment. In addition, two of the key research issues Marshall had identified at the outset required more than technical descriptions and quantitative projections of Soviet nuclear forces out to the early 1990s. Marshall wanted the CIA to develop the closest approximation possible to the Soviet assessment of the strategic nuclear competition and articulate how their views of the correlation of forces differed from Western estimates.17 His rationale was that US strategists engaged in efforts to strengthen deterrence needed to understand how the Soviets calculated the costs, benefits, and risks associated with this competition. He also wanted the assessment to highlight any emerging problems in the competition that needed high-level attention.

  Marshall had long held the view that Soviet assessments were likely to be substantially different from those produced by the United States. As time went on and ONA’s research on these assessments matured, it became increasingly clear that he was right. The Soviets made different assumptions about objectives, emphasized different scenarios, used different measures of effectiveness, and highlighted different key variables than did t
heir US counterparts.18 These differences even extended to the physical effects of atmospheric nuclear detonations. Whereas US test data indicated that the peak blast overpressures on the ground from a nuclear detonation occurred at greater distances from ground zero as the burst height increased, Soviet test data evidently did not.19 This discrepancy may be one reason why the Soviets generally preferred ground bursts to air bursts in targeting their strategic nuclear forces. In addition, Soviet analysts and planners also assessed the seismic effects of ground bursts against ICBM silos to be greater than did US analysts. This could have a significant influence on Soviet calculations of the prospects of success in executing a disarming first-strike against the US land-based missile leg of the nuclear triad. Marshall’s insistence on developing a better understanding how the Soviets assessed this area of military competition was a key reason why it took two years to finish this assessment.

  The joint SecDef/DCI net assessment was a hefty two-volume document. Volume 1 provided a relatively short executive summary drafted primarily by US Navy captain Charles Pease in ONA and Lawrence Gershwin, the national intelligence officer for Soviet strategic forces. It contained the key judgments about the nuclear balance and had very limited distribution due to its high level of classification and sensitivity. Weinberger, who was not the reader Harold Brown had been, reviewed the first volume but probably did not spend much time on the second, which ran over 350 pages and contained detailed descriptions of both sides’ projected intercontinental nuclear forces and capabilities for nuclear war. But being less sensitive, the second volume received wider distribution than did the first.

  Overall Marshall judged the result to have been the “most satisfactory assessment” of this balance that ONA ever produced.20 ONA’s initial strategic nuclear net assessment in 1977 had flagged the need to better understand Soviet assessments but had not been able to provide much detail on how those differed from US assessments. By late 1983 much more was known about how the Soviets perceived and assessed the nuclear competition with the United States, marking a significant step forward in the maturation of net assessment. In fact, the focus of NIE 11-3/8-83 was the “USSR’s strategy, plans, operations, and capabilities for strategic conflict” as the intelligence community believed Soviet leaders perceived them.21 Although this version of NIE 11-3/8 was not published until March 1984, many of the insights into Soviet assessments it contained were available to those who worked on the joint SecDef/DCI net assessment.