Transforming the Mission: The Soviet Military’s Reorientation to a Defensive Posture in Europe

Chernyaev’s notes on Gorbachev’s briefing of the Politburo on the recent visit of Margaret Thatcher show how the Soviet leader’s effort to communicate the developments of glasnost and perestroika were met by the British prime minister. Thatcher, as usual, made a strong impression on Gorbachev, who he described as “prepared,” “clever” and “audacious.” While Gorbachev wanted to focus on the high-minded ideals of glasnost, Thatcher slammed the Soviet interventions in Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. “We do not believe you,” she told Gorbachev. “We are afraid of you.” Thatcher was “hardened, convinced, and cluttered with stereotypes,” according to Gorbachev, but the notes from his meeting indicated that he wanted the Politburo to understand that Europeans were genuinely fearful and deeply distrustful of the USSR.

Chernyaev’s notes on a Politburo discussion about the military role of the Warsaw Treaty Organization includes the voices of Gorbachev and top Politburo members. Gorbachev’s impressions from his April meeting with Thatcher are on clear display; he now understands how anti-Soviet much of Europe is and how the USSR is feared: “This perception is widespread among the public there. It persists in the minds of many people.”

The second half of the meeting focuses on what parity should mean in the current Soviet context of perestroika. Gorbachev argues for a lessening of reliance on the military-industrial complex, in line with his new pursuit of comprehensive reform: “They [the West] have 6 billion people working on armaments. So should we try to catch up the number?” The issue of stationing troops in Europe from the Soviet perspective and NATO’s position is also discussed.

This CIA report provides an unusually prescient and accurate view of the internal changes driving the mechanisms of the Soviet political-military structure, providing a window into U.S. perceptions of the strategic transformation of their principal Cold War adversary. The report insightfully identifies Gorbachev’s tightening of control over the military and its forced civilianization, and Gorbachev’s fears that “sagging economic growth” threatens the position of the Soviet Union on the world stage. After giving a summary of Soviet political-military relations, the report also correctly identifies the resistance from the Soviet military establishment to Gorbachev as he threatens their pre-eminent position. Most impressively, the report predicts exactly some of the radical measures that Gorbachev would undertake in the following years, including “Large multidivisional unilateral withdrawals of troops from Europe.” and that these would indeed result in a discrediting of his position and to extreme pressure from the Soviet defense establishment.

This Defense Research Comment is characteristic of the general U.S. view of Gorbachev’s military-political-economic restructuring efforts. The report identifies the significance of

Gorbachev’s policy changes along with his view, as a genuine communist, that this will strengthen the USSR’s power. However, the report minimizes any chances of a less powerful Soviet military, anticipating that Gorbachev “will take all necessary steps to assure the nation’s military capabilities” and that modernization will only improve the Soviet Union’s position, including militarily. The DIA report predicts business as usual, with any changes occurring under the expected aegis of “continued party supremacy over the military” and does not acknowledge

major stressors at play between the political and military sphere. These would only increase in the following year, when genuine, major unilateral troop withdrawals would objectively weaken the USSR’s military position–a sacrifice made in Gorbachev’s radical pursuit of increased economic output.

Gorbachev’s desire for reform was genuine, as was the Soviet military’s resistance to it, according to this U.S. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research report. The report

reveals the INR’s contemporaneous level of understanding about internal Soviet processes of reforms affecting military and social practices, especially the effect of glasnost on the military, which forced them to address long-standing cultural habits of extreme hazing and giving voice to long-suffering Afghan war veterans.

Of note is Gorbachev’s role in “cutting down on bureaucratic privileges” of the Soviet military. Stalin’s heroic reputation among the military is also a topic of note, with the military tending to still glorify Stalin as a wartime leader (despite his role in the persecution of the professional officer establishment) in sharp contrast with the “pacifist” and anti-militarist youth wave in Soviet society.

The Soviet military’s resistance to Gorbachev’s reforms is on full display in comments from Georgy Shakhnazarov, one of Gorbachev’s close political allies, about internal Warsaw Pact discussions of the reaction to the report of Marshal V. Kulikov, Commander in Chief of the Warsaw Pact’s armed forces. The Warsaw Pact’s armed forces, although not part of the SAF, are under the command of a Soviet officer, and in this sphere, Kulikov has continued the old policy of militarization at the expense of all other concerns, voicing the rote fear that “war danger in Europe will not decrease, but, in fact, will increase.”

Practically speaking, Gorbachev’s reforms, including the unilateral force reductions, aimed to draw down the militarization level of Eastern Europe. Kulikov’s report goes against this in a wide variety of practical ways– expanding the role of the chemical combat troops, expanding the role of the VDV (air assault forces), increasing stockpiles of fuel and ammunition, improving military airfields, etc. Kulikov is out of step, and is critiqued strongly: “What is more profitable for us: that they [Warsaw Pact states] continue their armament and march towards economic disaster or, on the contrary, that they save on military expenditures and improve their economic situation, reinforcing de facto the security of the commonwealth?”

Chernyaev’s notes from a Politburo discussion include a number of stark statements about the reality of the Soviet military posture in Europe compared to what the Soviets had typically presented to the West. The Soviets had always insisted that their defense spending was proportional to their needs and, in fact, far lower than that of the imperialist Western powers. Instead, Gorbachev admits that this was a farce, and that the USSR was top-heavy in armaments production: “if we let the scope of our expenses be known, all our new thinking and our new foreign policy will go to hell. Not one country in the world spends as much per capita on weapons as we do.”

The persistent Soviet claim of peaceful intentions was simply incongruous with its military forces, doctrine, and methods. As Gorbachev says, “In the GDR we have [stationed] a powerful group of armored forces, plus pontoon forces. When all this hangs over them, how can they believe that our doctrine is defensive?!” Gorbachev strongly argues that new, real changes are needed– the liquidation of short and medium range missiles, a withdrawal from Afghanistan, and real, systemic military reform– for anyone to believe that the USSR is serious at all about the advancement of the policy of peace.

Written just two and a half weeks before Gorbachev announced the massive unilateral force reductions, the selected key judgements from the November 1988 Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) on Soviet forces reveal the suspicion with which the intelligence community regarded Soviet political announcements on formative military change, glasnost, and perestroika which were regarded more as a diplomatic offensive than portending any serious change. Instead, the SNIE anticipates that the Pact will “pursue a strategy aimed at reducing the West's perception of the Soviet threat in the expectation that this course will make it difficult for NATO governments to maintain or increase defense spending”

The report acknowledges that major negotiations were underway and evaluated their likely

impact on different NATO member states, couched in terms of how resistant they would be to the Soviet “gambits.” The key judgments conclude that the changes are not genuine attempts to reduce their combat capability and instead are “intended primarily to make [Soviet] units more effective for prolonged conventional combat operations against NATO.” A few weeks after this report, Gorbachev would announce changes far more sweeping and foundational than anything expected by the writers of this report.

This memorandum of conversation between Russian Minister of Defense Dmitri Yazov, U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, and their respective delegations summarizes an unprecedented session in which the two sides “compare notes” on their respective state’s approaches to military strategy, budgeting, and their defense industries. Both sides explain, in a simple and direct format, their national defense strategies, military procurement and the arms industry interacts with their governments and militaries. Yazov equates the U.S.’s National Security Council with the USSR’s Defense Council. The issue of arms control as it pertains to short and medium range missiles is also discussed, and Cheney offers his defense of SDI, which the Soviets vehemently oppose: “We are pursuing SDI to switch from offense to defense.”

The meeting between the delegations is the first time most of these officers have met, yet they were well-aware of each other for most of their professional careers. Colin Powell, on “his first day of the job” as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointed out to General Achalov that they had been “neighbors some time ago” in Germany, with just 115km separating Powell’s V Corps from Achalov’s 8th Guards Army. Powell had a picture of Achalov on his wall, and Yazov had a picture of Powell, that “good-looking chap,” on his. The commanders at the table had made it their business to be personally informed about their opponents. Had war started, their armies would have been at each other’s throats, but instead they were able to meet at the negotiating table.

This is a transcript of Dmitri Yazov’s speech at NDU to an audience of U.S. military officers on the transition of Soviet military strategy. Just five or six years prior, a Soviet general giving a lecture in Washington on this subject would have been completely unthinkable. As Yazov states: “just an idea of my appearance here would have been seditious only a few years ago.” Yazov details the changes brought about by Gorbachev’s reforms, which transformed the entire Soviet military doctrine and strategic stance from one of attack to one of defense.

Yazov attempts to communicate that these changes were more than just surface-level– and that they were evidenced in the very structure of the newly reorganized SAF units. In doing so, Yazov cited a British phrase he had recently learned: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” He provides a detailed overview of the Soviets’ withdrawal of military forces from Eastern Europe and speaks on the practical changes in the Soviet military’s structure which, he says, is evidence that these changes are genuine.

In his words, the Soviets “completely removed the discrepancy between the political objective, which is to prevent war and provide reliable security and defense of the country, and the practical activities to reach this objective.” These efforts to convey genuineness to the audience may have been diluted somewhat by Yazov’s allegiance to the old Soviet line that the USSR never planned to start a war, and his failure to acknowledge the reality of Soviet military doctrine before Gorbachev’s radical changes.

In a joint news conference at the Pentagon, Dmitri Yazov and Dick Cheney detail Yazov’s recent visit to various U.S. military facilities and overall impressions from his trip. The Soviet Defense Minister got an unprecedented look at the inside of the U.S. defense establishment, enjoying Marine training in San Diego, F-16 maneuvers at Luke Air Force Base, and an exercise by the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg. Yazov was highly complementary of the professionalism on display, saying that the “tactics they employed and the power they showed struck us immensely.”

Yazov also answers questions on the impact of the B-2 bomber and SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) on Soviet military thinking. Yazov minimizes the importance of the B-2 bomber, saying that the Soviets “have the capability today to bring down any aircraft” and that regardless, the Soviets “do not consider it to be a challenge.” On SDI, Yazov repeats the common Soviet line that it is “an attempt to encourage another cycle of the arms race” and a destabilizing factor between the US and USSR. Yazov is also asked about and speaks on the impact of perestroika on the Soviet Armed Forces, which again he minimizes, stating that “the perestroika processes have already been practiced in the armed forces of the USSR.”

This is a report to the Committee on Armed Services of the House of Representatives by a delegation that visited Berlin, East Germany, and the USSR to evaluate progress in the USSR’s unilateral force reductions and in its restructuring of its forces. The report notes the practical extensive changes in the Soviet’s force structure brought about by Gorbachev’s reforms, acknowledging that “Gorbachev’s actions will reduce the offensive capability of Soviet forces in Eastern Europe by about 30 percent.”

However, the experts of the delegation also exhibit a high degree of suspicion about how much these reforms hamper the ability of Soviet forces to wage offensive war. This was in part due to the U.S. rating military power through wargaming and battle calculations, in which pieces of equipment would be plugged in and given an inherent “military value.” By such a method, a self-propelled artillery piece was worth nearly as much as a tank. In doing so, some US experts failed to recognize that the removal of tanks, air assault forces, and assault bridging elements of SAF units was of critical importance to the Soviets. In other words, the Soviets weighed such combat elements as much more important than the U.S. considered them to be.

The report also includes a descriptive chronology of the U.S. delegation’s trip in the USSR, describing a wide range of visited sites, including the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Slava guided missile cruiser in Sevastopol, and a chemical weapons demilitarization facility in Chepayevsk. The U.S. delegation was impressed by the Slava’s amenities including its onboard sauna. Diagrams showcasing the new Soviet military schema for large-scale defensive operations are also included, signaling a major departure from traditional Soviet doctrine.