First Published: Revolution, Vol. 2, No. 6, April 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. With the tremendous buildup of the Soviet Union’s military machine, this truth is beginning to turn the U.S. imperialists’ dreams into nightmares. The once overwhelming superiority of U.S. arms has eroded to the point where the New Czars have reached a rough parity with the U.S. and their momentum hasn’t yet begun to slow. The U.S. bourgeoisie is worried and the debates within its ranks over how to meet the military challenge of Soviet social-imperialism are spilling over acres of newsprint and hours of TV time.
Much of the gearing up for war takes place behind the smokescreen of detente. While the superpowers advertise all their arms limitation talks and cultural exchanges as moving towards peace and understanding, their very nature as imperialists is driving them towards war. There is a great deal of confusion within the working class and the U.S. revolutionary movement over what is really going on in military affairs and what the big hullabaloo is about. It is important that these questions be understood because an imperialist war between the superpowers, and all steps towards it and all preparations short of it, are a matter of life and death for the masses. Either these developments can be understood correctly and the proletariat can lead the masses in overthrowing these vicious oppressors, or these developments can be ignored, misunderstood or simply covered up, and doom the masses to further decades of misery under capitalism.
Eugene Rostow, a major figure in the LBJ administration, recently pointed out that the world “must be described today not as a ’postwar’ but as a ’prewar’ world ... ” Drew Middleton, New York Times military writer, wrote a book two years ago, receiving wide attention in the ruling circles, whose title asked the question, Can America Win the Next War? His columns in the Times have continually posed that question over the past few years, hitting on a real worry of the U.S. imperialists.
The situation today is a far cry from the period of the mid-’60s to early ’70s. Then, war between the two superpowers, we were told was “unthinkable,” a big change from the days of the cold war when war with the Russian Bear was always pictured as just around the corner. Now, the possibility is not only conceded as being very real but public attention is being focused around what to do about it – always, of course, under the cover that all war preparations are for defense and to prevent war.
From the end of World War 2 until the early ’60s the U.S. military machine was the strongest the world had ever seen: In 1962 the U.S. was able to humiliate the New Czars during the Cuban missile crisis simply by rattling its sabre. But this incident corresponded with the end of unchallenged U.S. hegemony.
The Soviet revisionists on coming to power faced the necessity of developing armed forces strong enough to do more than just defend Soviet territory. They needed the muscle for imperialist aggression as well. During the time the U.S. was bogged down in Vietnam spinning its wheels on the road to defeat, the USSR put arms production into high gear.
Measured in military terms there is an overall equality of power between the U.S. and USSR, but it is important to note that this armed might rests on somewhat different bases. The USSR has a weaker, less developed all-round economy than the U.S. with, on the other hand; more centralization and a stronger, centralized state apparatus. This both requires and allows them, in the short run, to concentrate a greater proportion of their production on armaments. Their position is not totally unlike that of the old Czars at the time of World War 1, except that now they are more economically developed relative to the other imperialists.
Also, Soviet military power still plays a much more central role in their imperialist adventures, even in gaining economic leverage and penetration in other countries (through arms sales, etc.) as well as in their over-all drive for domination and hegemony. The U.S., an older imperialist power, has the advantage of widespread developed’ contacts as well as a heftier economic clout to make use of and therefore can use more “peaceful” methods in expanding its tentacles of exploitation. The U.S. relies on military power more as a final resort, using it or threatening to use it, however, wherever necessary and without qualms.
For imperialist powers, a strong military capable of worldwide reach is an absolute necessity. Armies must be available to put down popular rebellions, navies must be dispatched to “show the flag” and “encourage” friendlier policies by weaker ruling classes, and taken together everything must be powerful enough to discourage rival imperialists from grabbing chunks of the empire and, at the bottom line, powerful enough to defeat any rival imperialist who cannot be “discouraged” short of war. In today’s world it is only the two superpowers who have such military capability, and this is why, in the final analysis, despite contradictions with the super- powers, other capitalist and imperialist countries fall into a bloc with one or the other of the superpowers, as the contention between them inevitably leads toward war.
“War,” as the bourgeois military expert von Clausewitz stated, “is the continuation of political relations, with the intervention of other means.” The current debate in the ruling circles over military affairs is a continuation of the debate on imperialist foreign policy. Understanding this current hullabaloo over B-1 bombers, cruise missiles, new tanks and new fighter planes cannot be totally separated from the heated discussions of detente that were a big factor in the 1976 presidential campaigns, especially of Ronald Reagan and Henry Jackson. Obviously, “getting tough with the Kremlin” requires more muscle than continuing contention within the framework of detente. (Though detente also requires the well-timed use of military force, like the Mayaguez incident or the 24-hour “red alert” of U.S. armed forces during the 1973 Mid-East war, to back up the fine-tuned diplomatic dealings of the imperialists.)
The article “Capitalists Change Guard at State Department” in the January 1977 issue of Revolution deals with the foreign policy debate and the main lines of U.S. foreign policy in much greater depth than will be attempted here, In short, however, the U.S. imperialists came out of the Vietnam War on the strategic defensive. The defeat in Vietnam coupled with rebelliousness in the army and the antiwar and anti-intervention sentiment of the American people was a powerful factor in forcing the U.S. bourgeoisie into a period of retrenchment and consolidation. Also, the other Western imperialists in the U.S.-led NATO bloc had taken advantage of the U.S. preoccupation with Vietnam to strike a more independent course for themselves, stepping up competition with the U.S. in the arenas of politics, trade and international finance.
At the same time, the social-imperialist actions of the Soviet Union were growing more and more bold. In 1968 the New Czars invaded Czechoslovakia, in 1971 they backed India in her dismemberment of Pakistan, and beginning in the late ’60s, their navies penetrated seas long considered the “private lakes” of the Western imperialists. Strategically, the Soviet Union is and has been on the rise and clutching for a bigger empire under the “socialist” signboards of the “international dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “international division of labor.”
The current debates within the U.S. ruling class revolve around what is the correct evaluation of military strengths of the two superpowers and in what direction is the equation changing; what is necessary to maintain “adequate” U.S. strength and exactly what is “adequate;” and what role do the two blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, play and what can be done to maximize NATO strengths and minimize the Warsaw Pact strengths? The two aspects of military force considered are strategic forces and conventional forces.
The main camp in the U.S. bourgeoisie is represented by President Carter and such lesser lights as the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other government figures and retired “heavies” like Henry Kissinger. The other camp, whose political representatives like Reagan and Jackson lost the immediate chance to grab the presidency, has its biggest mouthpiece in the Committee on the Present Danger, staffed with retired military men like ex-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and ex-Air Force intelligence chief Major General George Keegan, Jr.
The bourgeois press characterizes the lesser camp as the “hardliners:” whose line can be summed up as saying the Soviet Union is ahead of the U.S. so the U.S. needs lots more of everything. The main camp, headquartered in the Carter administration, are called the “moderates” because they say the U.S. and Soviets are roughly equal and the U.S. needs more guns but less than what the “hardliners” call for. This distinction is convenient for the bourgeoisie because the fundamental unity between the two camps is obscured, much the same as the unity between “hawks” and “doves” during the Vietnam War was concealed, Both the “moderate” and “hardliner” camps are 100% behind increased war preparations and they have iron tight unity on any number of specific projects designed to build up the imperialist military machine.
Like the detente debates, the issue is not whether or not to contend with the Soviets for world hegemony but rather how best to contend’ under present conditions and how to prepare for the future. Each side recognizes the absolute-necessity for military force. There are no Buddhas in these debates, only imperialists and their spokesmen. In fact, the presently smaller camp of “hardliners” actually eases the task the main line “moderates” face in winning the American people’s support for greater war preparations by spreading horror stories of Kremlin power.
Recently, the B-1 bomber and the cruise missile have received a lot of attention in the media. These are part of the strategic forces and whether or not these two systems go into mass production is presently the centerpiece of the debate over strategic forces.
The basic function of strategic forces is to destroy an opposing nation’s war-making potential, such as factories, communications and transportation networks, important military bases and people by the millions. Another crucial function is to destroy the opposition’s own strategic forces, before they have a chance to be used, if possible (the “first-strike capability”). Finally, they are supposed to destroy the opposing people’s will to resist, either by massive destruction or by the threat of massive destruction.
At this time, all strategic weapons are nuclear and delivered by either missile or bomber. On the NATO side virtually all strategic weapons are in U.S. hand’s, with small, semi-independent forces under the control of Britain and France (the “Eurostrategic forces”) and on the Warsaw Pact side they are all Soviet. U.S. forces have been developed under the Triad concept, a three-way combination of land-based ICBMs. (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, the Minuteman system), submarine-launched missiles (the Polaris system, eleven of which will be retired and replaced with the new Trident system), and long-range bombers (the aging B-52 fleet, which saw its numbers decreased with “disturbing” ease over Vietnamese skies during the war; this is the bomber system the B-1 is meant to replace). The Triad concept is supposed to be insurance against a Soviet sneak attack, so that if Russia can knock out the Minutemen before they leave the silos, the bombers and Polaris missiles can still knock out Russia, etc.
There are a number of areas that must be examined when looking at strategic forces: the destructiveness of nuclear weapons; theories on the use of nuclear weapons; the balance of forces, including where things are at now, the systems under development that have the potential to change the balance, the SALT talks and efforts to “regulate” the strategic arms race; and whether world war necessarily means nuclear war.
Since the first use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the imperialists have made every effort to exaggerate the power of nuclear weapons, with statements like atomic weapons have attained the power “to end civilization as we know it.” It cannot be denied that they are very destructive and can kill millions. But a cold examination of the facts shows that nuclear weapons are not the biblical Armageddon, that their use will not send mankind back to the stone age.
The use of the atomic bomb to attack two of Japan’s major cities at the end of World War 2 did indeed cause tremendous suffering to the Japanese people and is a towering crime of the U.S. imperialists – compounded by the fact that the Japanese could readily have been made to surrender without launching these nuclear attacks, whose main purpose was to head off Soviet military victories in the Far East and intimidate the people of the world. But, as destructive as the effects of the A-bombs were, the great terrible loss of life and the tremendous suffering of the citizens of Nagasaki and especially Hiroshima were compounded by a number of other factors besides the terror of the bomb itself.
The U.S. imperialists had a weapon of mass terror. Stand up to U.S. imperialism, they said, and face The Bomb. And with a virtual monopoly on atomic weapons the U.S. shamelessly pursued a policy of nuclear blackmail called “brinksmanship.” During the Korean War, large chunks of the U.S. rulers, represented by General MacArthur, argued strenuously for the use of the bomb on Korea and the People’s Republic of China. And later, when the then-socialist Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons to defend itself against the U.S. nuclear monopoly, the U.S. imperialists would say, if the American people don’t line up behind us against the Russians today, tomorrow the Kremlin will use The Bomb. Who doesn’t remember the Cuban missile crisis, the groceries stored in the basement and the fear that if President Kennedy didn’t have the people’s total backing the whole ball of wax might go up in flames?
During the early ’60s the balance of forces was called the “balance of terror” and nuclear war, while always a possibility, was increasingly considered the “unthinkable” because of the “catastrophic consequences“ of their use. This change from out front nuclear blackmail to test-ban treaties and the “unthinkability” of nuclear war was due to many factors (once again See Revolution, January, 1977), an important one being that the USSR, while already on the road to becoming an imperialist superpower, was not yet thoroughly and completely driven to challenge U.5. hegemony on a global basis. Collaboration, joint sabotage of the world revolutionary struggle, was the main feature of U.S.-USSR relationships while the growing contention remained secondary tor a time.
Today, when the imperialists are talking about “thinking the unthinkable,” it is even more important to break down the well-constructed myths surrounding nuclear weapons. They are big, bigger today than in 1945, they are destructive, and like all weapons of imperialist war, they are terrible. But they cannot end the world and they should not enable the imperialists to terrorize the masses.
While the capitalists have, in the past, preached to the masses that nuclear war would mean “the end of the world,” they never based their own calculations on this hogwash. They have set their bourgeois experts to work to try to figure out how quickly capitalist society – and their profits – could be restored to “normal.” According to one of the most “pessimistic” of these types of studies, the worst possible case of nuclear exchange – the unrestrained use of strategic, forces – would most likely have this effect: Some 30 to 50 million Americans would die. Most major industrial centers would be reduced to a nonfunctioning rubble and there would be a lingering danger of radiation. The population will have to be evacuated to the countryside, both to leave destroyed urban areas behind and because it will be necessary for agricultural production. Without the agricultural implement industry, petrochemical fertilizer complexes, etc., agriculture will have to become more labor intensive in order to feed everyone. After 20 years or so, the experts predict, society will stabilize at the level of development of around 1890. From there, because the accumulated knowledge of the twentieth century will be available, development will take off again. And what the bourgeois experts cannot take into account is the real possibility of working class revolution, which would liberate the productive forces and lead to a far faster recovery from a nuclear exchange.
For a long time the U.S. imperialists’ theory on nuclear weapons use was that of “massive retaliation,” that is, hold the Soviet Union hostage for any assault on U.S. imperialism and threaten to hit the Soviet Union with everything in the arsenal if anything gets out of hand. This line began to be questioned during the Korean War but it wasn’t until Vietnam that the line fell entirely into disuse. By this time the U.S. ruling class had a more sophisticated, and realistic, understanding of the world – everyone opposing the U.S. were not “Kremlin dupes.” Secondly, it was obvious that with the need for “limited war,” such as practiced in Vietnam, a strategic theory that diverged from all-out nuclear war was required. The theory U.S. imperialism came up with was “flexible response,” tailoring the weight of military force to suit the nature of the threat to their interests.
But since the early ’60s, the time of the so-called “missile gap,” when the U.S. imperialists used the fabrication that it was behind in strategic weapons to build them up further, the Soviets have closed the real gap that did exist between themselves and the U.S. The U.S. bourgeoisie, up to its armpits in Vietnam War expenditures, was unable to maintain the early U.S. lead and they gradually came up with a new theory to deal with the relative parity between U.S. and Soviet strategic forces. This new concept was called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). MAD simply meant that if one side launched a successful first strike, that is, scoring before the target country got its own strategic weapons off the ground, the target nation will still have enough nuclear weapons left to assure destruction of the first strike nation.
Supposedly, Mutual Assured Destruction carries some sort of guarantee against the use of nuclear weapons because neither side can gain a decisive advantage by launching a first strike. (This may be true, but it’s no guarantee against the use of nuclear weapons by either side – more about that later.) MAD is only operable as long as neither side gains a strategic superiority – either by sheer numbers or technological breakthrough – and the SALT discussions have been an attempt to compete in strategic weaponry within the framework of MAD.
But the very momentum of the Soviet buildup is causing a big alarm among some sections of the bourgeoisie who fear this momentum will carry the Soviets beyond parity to a position where the social-imperialists will hold a decisive edge, a first strike capability. In fact, Committee on the Present Danger personality General Keegan claims the Soviets have already established “a significant lead over the U.S. by every criterion used to measure strategic balance” {which. in point of fact, is a boatload of buffalo chips).
This group is pushing particularly for full-speed development of the B-1 bomber and cruise missile programs as necessary steps to at least maintain parity and possibly regain the lost glory of U.S. imperialist superiority, dropping this MAD business. The congressmen supporting this position have been in an uproar over Carter’s appointment of Paul Warnke to head up the U.S. delegation to SALT 2. Warnke, they claim, is “soft” on the Soviets and might “violate basic U.S. interests” in the name of arms control.
The Carter position begins with the assumption that parity and MAD are at this time the way to fly because the alternative offers only the chance of gaining an edge, thus the “hardliner” position is not worth dumping the detente framework for. Besides, the detente framework itself allows a wide latitude in pursuing development of new systems and even for grabbing a slight lead over the USSR.
The “moderate” camp disputes the wild claims of Soviet superiority by the Keegan types. The main line feels that at the present time gaining a decisive strategic edge over the Soviets is impossible and doesn’t want to give up the political benefits of maintaining the “momentum” of detente and its illusion of the two super-powers working out contradictions peacefully. Whatever improvements the imperialists may make in their strategic forces will be matched step-by-step by the social-imperialists. Such a strategic arms race for superiority would only be needlessly expensive – the money could be used on other arms programs – and would probably end up only with a rough parity all over again hundreds of missiles and billions of dollars later, they say.
At the present time, then, the U.S. and Soviets will continue to sit down at SALT 2 and negotiate some sort of limits to the strategic arms inventories and their further development. Any agreements are, of course, temporary and can be violated later if necessary. Neither superpower feels that SALT signs away their right to “go for broke” further down the road, if they think it is in their interests and has a good chance of success.
The political usefulness of the SALT negotiations is that they are billed and widely known as “disarmament talks.” They are nothing of the kind and have not led to a single weapons system getting dismantled. There have been certain agreements within the framework of parity but the overall effect has only been to keep the arms race going within supposedly “reasonable” limits.
The superpowers agreed to place a limit on 41 long-range missile firing submarines, a ceiling the U.S. had attained so it went ahead with plans to build the superior Trident system and retire some of the Polaris subs. The Soviets hadn’t reached 41 yet so they went right ahead with their construction program. The superpowers agreed not to install much in the way of ABMs (Anti-Ballistic Missile systems) but it was only because each side had summed up that ABMs weren’t very practical and the cost wasn’t worth it.
The superpowers agreed to certain ceilings on numbers of land-based ICBMs, ceilings neither side had reached, and put limitations on numbers of warheads each side could have and then proceeded to MIRV their missiles to meet these ceilings. MIRVing (Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles) upgrades each missile by adding on extra warheads with independent guidance systems. It enables each missile to carry warheads able to hit widely scattered targets: The Soviets are behind in MIRV technology-this was a SALT victory for the U.S.-and their stuff has mainly got the Multiple without the Independent, in other words, producing a shotgun-type affair dropping groups of warheads in one general area.
There are a number of weapons in the’ research and development phase or even ready to go into production and deployment that threaten to upset the superpower strategic parity. On the Soviet side these are the Backfire bomber and the SS-20 mobile missile (which presently is only intermediately ranged, that is, against Europe and China, but will probably soon have an inter-continental version). On the U.S. side there is the B-1 bomber, the cruise missile and the M·X mobile ICBM; a sort of a Minuteman missile, which could be moved about constantly, preventing the Soviets from plotting its position as a target.
The Backfire bomber is potentially very valuable for the New Czars. It will be the first credible Soviet long-range bomber threat in a long while and presently the U.S. has virtually no defense against bombers. The Soviets have been offering to drop Backfire if the U.S. will stop the cruise missile but Carter has torpedoed the trade. The cruise is worth a lot more than a bunch of Backfires, mainly because buying bomber defenses is cheaper and uses existing technology, whereas the cruise missile is a wild card-there is no known effective defense against it yet.
The cruise missile is a recent technological leap for the U.S. imperialists. It has a terrain guidance system which “reads” the ground it Is traveling over and “compares” it to a map programmed into its on board computer. It is so refined it can be counted on to strike within 30 meters of where it’s supposed to. Present U.S. missiles have a 100 to 200 meter Circular Error Probability (CEP) and the current Soviet hardware has a one to two kilometer CEP (which is why the USSR is forced to use bigger missiles to throw bigger warheads).
What the cruise missile threatens to do is to make present Soviet protection around their missile silos just about useless since the cruise missile can practically come in right through the front door and may not even need a nuclear warhead to do the job. Besides which, it is far smaller than most missiles and can be launched from just about anything, including a modified Dodge van. As a whole, the U.S. bourgeoisie finds the cruise missile quite attractive.
The B-1 bomber is another story. Some sections of the bourgeoisie question whether any kind of bomber is a viable weapon. The B-1, according to all indications, is a good long-range bomber, with the ability to fly at tree-top level, maintaining high speeds, getting in under the radar, and packing scads of new ECM (Electronic Counter Measures) to make Soviet electronic gear think the B-1 is a flock of geese. Its problem is that it will run about $70 billion and it is quite possible that the Soviets will come up with something that will reduce the B-1s advances to zip – like new “look down” radars on their fighter/interceptor jets or some fancy advance in electronic detection to separate the geese from the bombers – and for far less than 70 billion rubles.
At the present time, even without the cruise missile on the table, the superpowers will continue to dicker with each other at SALT 2. They feel that it looks good when they are talking and some sort of agreement on other areas can be worked out. Also, the present theory of Mutual Assured Destruction and the relative parity in strategic forces will remain in effect. Of course, each side will go on searching for the “wonder weapon,” a new advance in technology that could decisively tip the scales.
The other facet to the military preparedness debate is conventional forces. In the press this debate has been illustrated with wild claims such as the Soviet Union could overrun Europe in two or three days, or charts with quantities of particular weapons given and the Soviets coming out ahead in most, of photos of the sleek new Soviet Navy poking its nose into new seas.
The purpose of conventional forces is to annihilate the opposition’s conventional forces and seize territory. Conventional forces are the traditional armies, navies and air forces, fighting with jet planes, tanks and ships. Included as a part of conventional forces are tactical nuclear weapons because they are targeted against other conventional forces and their purpose is closer to a large artillery shell than anything else.
Measuring the conventional strengths of the imperialist superpowers is a complicated question and lends itself to simplistic, self-serving analysis, a game the superpowers play to the hilt. Conventional warfare is itself much more complex than the exchange of strategic forces. To put it in somewhat simplified terms, with bombers and missiles the buttons gets pushed, the missiles are launched, the planes take off and either they make it to the target or they don’t. Much more than strategic exchanges, conventional warfare involves the quantitative and qualitative aspects of weapons systems, the degree of training and motivation on the part of the soldiers who use them, the ability of the commanders to direct it all and the relative correctness of military line, the operational and tactical doctrines.
Right now, each superpower likes to rate its own overall strength in terms that make it out to be number two (though each will admit to “equality” or balance in some areas too obvious to ignore). Being number two, of course, means that the U.S., or the USSR, is more “defensive” and “peace-loving.” Any new arms production is strictly for defense, etc., etc. The U.S, readily points to the Soviets’ quantitative lead and the Soviets just as quickly turn right around and point to the U.S.’s technological edge.
An entire evaluation of the relative strengths of NATO and the Warsaw Pact is not within the scope of this article. However, an example of some of the fast and loose playing around with facts can be seen in looking at tanks as a weapons system. Since the beginning of World War 2, tank forces have been central to conventional ground forces because tanks combine a big offensive weapon with defensive armor and a cross-country mobility. U.S. spokesmen say the Soviet Union has a three to one advantage in tank strength along the central front (West Germany). True, but first of all, this conveniently’ “forgets” about the rest of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, which reduces things to a two to one advantage for the Soviets. Secondly, this leaves out the fact that NATO tanks are, superior to what the Russians have and even more superior to what the Soviets have stuck the Warsaw Pact countries with. Poland, East Germany and the rest are still using 1950s vintage T-54s and T-55s and even large numbers of World War 2 vintage T-34s. NATO tanks have better rangefinders (for a higher first shot first kill probability), carry more ammunition (able to stay in battle longer) and break down less often, among , other things. Thirdly, NATO is not counting on their tanks to knock out Soviet tanks.
With the rise of tanks as the backbone of ground forces, every munitions-making country, has attempted to develop cheap ways of knocking them out. Every country that can pay the price has anti-tank missiles of all varieties, including ones small enough to be carried around by foot soldiers, like the U.S. LAW and Dragon, and the Soviet RPG-7. NATO has a big technological advantage here. In vehicle-mounted anti-tank missiles, for instance, the Soviet Swatter system weighs in with a 33% kill probability compared to the U.S. TOW system’s 76%. Additionally, NATO has very capable tank-busting helicopters, one model of which averaged a 20 to 1 kill ratio over tanks in NATO maneuvers (each helicopter “knocked out“ an average of 20 tanks before getting “shot down”) – and this was one of the cruder models, at that.
Even for trying to evaluate the effectiveness of tanks from a purely military point of view there are many more variables that could be included, such as air superiority, the extent and mobility of artillery support and the degree of tactical flexibility in the use of air and artillery support. All this goes to show that counting tanks or even checking out how often they throw their treads is a spurious way of measuring strength.
Taken as a whole, all along the line – for ground, naval and air conventional forces – and with the situation of the U.S.-led NATO bloc on the strategic defensive and the Soviet-dominated Warsaw fact on the strategic offensive, neither side has a decisive advantage over the other. (One principle of military theory is that in combat there is an inherent advantage in holding the defensive position so that, all other things being generally equal, the attacker must be substantially stronger to gain the upper hand.)
At the present time, NATO is not strong enough militarily, to say nothing of having the necessary political unity, to invade the Warsaw Pact and the situation of conventional parity only holds in the case of a Soviet invasion of NATO, which regardless of “who started it” is the most likely scenario for military action in Europe. This does not mean, however, that even now the U.S. could not start a war by luring the Soviets onto the rocks of NATO’s defenses and from there launch a counter-invasion, after weakening the Warsaw Pact to the point where NATO had offensive superiority. The defensive in war can only be a temporary stage and victory can only come by going over to the offensive.
Conventional forces are extremely important because both superpowers would like to defeat each other without the use of strategic nuclear weapons. This would fulfill the “promise” of the MAD concept. While nuclear war would not end the-world’ it would be mutually destructive on both sides. It would be far better for the imperialists and social-imperialists if they could defeat the other side and redivide the world keeping the bulk of their own-and even the enemy’s productive forces intact. Acquiring a much larger empire will only be a partial victory if massive amounts of capital must first be channeled into rebuilding the home country – and those areas conquered – though even this can, in the short run, be turned into a profitable business for the victor as shown by the experience of the, U.S. after World War 2.
The present rough parity between the superpowers exposes what lies at the bottom of their empty words about expanding the military machine in the name of “defense”: both the U.S. and USSR are striving to achieve a decisive advantage in conventional forces, in order to gain the upper hand in imperialist contention. Short of war this means being able to impose small adjustments in spheres of influence by threat of force. In war itself, it means greater chances of victory, to gain the ability to dictate the wholesale redivision of the world to favor one gang of bandits over another.
Within the U.S. ruling class there is much less difference than there appears at first between “hardliners” and “moderates” over the need for military buildup. Difference exist, such as the debate between the nuclear-powered navy and the non-nuclear navy advocates, where the ramifications center around the question of fewer high-quality ships as opposed to many more lesser-quality ships. But everyone in this debate agrees the U.S. Navy needs to get much larger.
Recent programs the bourgeoisie has approved Include: the A-10 tank-busting tactical aircraft, the new XM-l main battle tank, an increase in the army from 13 to 16 combat divisions (in addition to the three Marine divisions}, the F-14, F-15 and F-16 new fighter aircraft, the Spruance class of destroyers, the SCS (Sea Control Ships) class of small aircraft carriers, etc., etc. There has been little disagreement over these programs because to oppose arms expansion in general would go against the basic necessity of imperialism.
Most of the conventional forces of NATO belong to other countries besides the U.S. Despite recent press reports about the possible unreliability of the Dutch Army, with its soldiers with hair to their navels, “armed hippies” who neither salute nor shine boots, and about the British Army, which had to take civilian ferry boats to recent NATO maneuvers in Norway, the NATO armies taken together are strong and getting stronger.
West Germany is now-the biggest financial contributor to NATO and is in the process of reorganizing their army. For the first time since the mid-’60s, Italy is going through a major modernization program and acquiring loads of new weapons. France, which technically does not participate in NATO military affairs (though it always kept two divisions stationed in West Germany), has stated that its first line of defense is not the Rhine River between West Germany and France, but rather the East/West German border, and they are doubling their mobile forces and redeploying the bulk of their naval units to the Mediterranean Sea specifically to deal with the Soviets. Even moribund Britain is reorganizing and reinforcing its Army of the Rhine (troops in Germany).
The main line of the U.S. ruling class was laid out in a major speech given by Henry Kissinger in London, June 25, 1976: “These strengths of ours demonstrate that our present security posture is adequate, and that it is well within our capacities to continue to balance the various elements of Soviet power. To maintain the necessary defense is a question of leadership more than of power. Our security responsibility is both manageable and unending. We must undertake significant additional efforts for the indefinite future. For as far ahead as we can see, we will live in a twilight area between tranquility and open confrontation.
“This is a task tor both sides of the Atlantic. Our defense efforts within the Alliance will be importantly affected by the degree to which the American people are convinced that our allies share similar perceptions of the military challenge and a comparable determination to meet it. The greatest threat to the Alliance would occur if, for whatever reason – through misreading the threat, or inattention to conventional forces, or reductions of the defense efforts of allies, or domestic developments within NATO members – U.S. public support for NATO were weakened. The challenge of building sufficient hardware is easier than those of geopolitical understanding, political coordination; and above all resolve. In the nuclear age, once a change in the geopolitical balance has become unambiguous, it is too late to do anything about it .... ”
Stripped of some of the elegant diplomatic double-talk Kissinger is defining the current situation and the main tasks of Western imperialism. He stresses that current NATO defense is adequate – and this summation was recently upheld by NATO Supreme Commander General Alexander Haig – but to maintain that defense in this “twilight area between tranquility and open confrontation” requires a number of steps.
Most important is Kissinger’s statement that the “geopolitical balance” must not “become unambiguous.“ Within the framework of detente this has meant contention along the lines of “what’s mine is mine,” while not yet playing the card “what’s yours is mine, too.” The U.S: imperialists and their bloc must prevent the social-imperialists from gaining a decisive advantage or it will be “too late to do anything about it.”
This is fundamentally opposed to the policy of appeasement practiced by Britain and France towards Germany before World War 2. Then the Allied imperialists hoped that unhinging the geopolitical balance would set the Nazis against the Soviet Union. While today attempting to set the Soviet Union against China is a part of U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. imperialists recognize that Europe is the grand prize the New Czars seek and nothing can substitute for NATO military might in preventing them from achieving their aim.
Kissinger makes NATO strength a question of leadership, “more than power.” This is the recognition that above all, the NATO bloc must tighten itself up and look to the U.S. for leadership. Although recent tendencies for the Western European bourgeoisies to go off on independent tangents has been curbed somewhat, the U.S. imperialists feel that even greater unity against the Soviet Union is vital and necessary. The importance of NATO to the overall security of Western imperialism was underscored by the diplomatic offensive of Kissinger’s “Year of Europe” (1973) and by Vice President Mondale’s junket there right on the heels of the inauguration.
Within tightening of the bloc a stepped-up military buildup must take place. Kissinger promises the allies that the U.S. will make “significant additional efforts.” This is being borne out in practice, and the West European bourgeoisies have responded by showing their “determination” to do the same.
As NATO attempts to tighten itself up, the U.S. is leading a diplomatic, political and economic offensive – of which the current human rights hoop-de-doo is part – to open up cracks in the Warsaw Pact. The masses of people in Eastern Europe deeply resent the heel of the New Czars and there has been a lot of struggle directed both at the Soviet Union as well as local ruling classes. While the Warsaw Pact has some built-in military advantages, common Soviet weaponry (a logistical advantage) and unitary command, even now the Soviets are not counting too highly on the Czech or Hungarian armies in any moves against NATO. They fear these armies will have their hands full at home if war breaks out.
Overall, then, the U.S. bourgeoisie, along with its allies, is stepping up war preparations to meet the Soviet challenge. Within this, debate will continue to rage over how to conduct foreign policy and how much military muscle is necessary to back it up. Even so, the bourgeoisie cannot simply “go for broke” around arms spending and they are forced to take into account just how much military the U.S. can afford, attended by arguments over what weapon gets a “bigger bang for the buck” and what are cost-effective ways of dealing death blows to the Soviet Union.
Contrary to a widely held belief, increased military spending is not automatically wonderful for the capitalist economy. Vietnam War spending had a powerful impact on the economy, stimulating some growth in the early stages but, more significantly, as the war dragged on and on towards final defeat it fueled the fires of inflation and helped to drag the country into recession. Of course, individual defense contractors are interested in little more than lining their own pockets so there will constantly be calls for more contracts costing more and more billions, accompanied by dire warnings that if super jet plane Z-4652 isn’t bought by the thousands the Russian Army will be in New Jersey tomorrow and other such claptrap.
The state, acting for the bourgeoisie as a whole, is aware that to finance war preparations will require more bond issues and other forms of deficit spending. Besides fueling inflation, government bond issues attract capital investment away from U.S. industry, which is crying for more capital to modernize the means of production. This is one reason Carter is going ahead with $2.7 billion in defense cuts in this year’s budget, even though he has pushed off into the hazy future his campaign promise of axing $5 to $7 billion from defense. What Carter is cutting is “fat” and not muscle. The generals hope that more and more fat will get trimmed, both to make U.S. armed forces leaner and meaner and to save billions of dollars for the new tanks and planes that must come off the assembly lines. And it is also an established practice for the Pentagon to request more billions than it expects to get, which allows the President and Congress to look good by making insubstantial budget cuts.
The U.S. imperialists, as well as their counterparts in the Soviet Union, are trying to come to grips with the changing world situation. In the U.S. two lines have evolved over how to take on the Soviets, one parading as “tough” and the other as “moderate and reasonable.” The difference between these two lines is only the difference between two alternative imperialist policies to defend imperialist interests and prepare for imperialist war to defend and extend empires that oppress and exploit for the benefit of a tiny handful. With so much at stake it’s not surprising that the debate gets rather heated and cries of “sellout” are sometimes heard.
The facts of the situation and the different lines of the debate are out there for all to see. Yet a number of “generals” in the U.S. “left” choose to ignore the facts, ignore the essence of the ruling class debate and instead turn reality upside down in order to root for their favorite superpower. (The working class is lucky these people do not have armies behind them.)
The working class and masses of people in the U.S. have a special responsibility to struggle against “our own” bourgeoisie’s drive to war. To do so effectively and to build the kind of movement that will enable the working class to make revolution requires a correct understanding of what is really going on behind the smokescreen of both superpowers. Unfortunately, the superpowers get an assist in their ball of confusion from certain phony “revolutionaries” and “communists” in the U.S.
The February 9 Guardian newspaper ran an article on the current military situation that outdoes Pravda in building up U.S. imperialism into the world’s number one strongman. They began all right by shooting down some of the myths of U.S. inferiority but, in their eagerness to cover over the Soviet Union’s tremendous military buildup, they begin cutting out of whole cloth a myth of U.S. superiority using the same sort of simplistic, self-serving analysis the bourgeoisie indulges in. By comparison, the Soviet buildup comes off exactly the way the New Czars portray it, purely “defensive.”
Soviet military journals have the guts to put it on the line, why not the Guardian? Admiral Gorshkov, architect of the new Soviet Navy, wrote a series of articles years ago on Soviet naval power. He proudly pointed out how the New Czars had dumped Stalin’s concept of the “Fortress Fleet,” whose only value was being able to defend the socialist motherland, and had built a navy capable of projecting Soviet power beyond the traditional areas of Russian interest, even in the time of the old Czars. Soviet power, in case the Guardian needs reminding, is social-imperialist power.
Without bothering to answer every point the Guardian made, right off the bat these “military experts” are wrong on at least one important front. The Guardian argues that the global reach of the U.S. imperialists is superior to that of the Soviets. True enough. But the pivot of the imperialist war will take place in a relatively small area of the globe, Europe. Comrade Generals, have you forgotten that there is the principle of concentration of force as well as dispersal of force? The Soviet Union’s concentration of power in a limited area, Europe, is an advantage over the U.S., not the other way around.
Not only on this particular point but in general the Guardian’s bourgeois expertise on military affairs is a lot less expert than the bourgeoisie’s, but no less bourgeois. Their logic propels them to the overall incorrect conclusion that U.S. imperialism is still number one. What good does ignoring the changes in the balance of forces do? Does the Guardian think that by rejecting “its own” ruling class, only to embrace another pack of hungry wolves, they are upholding Leninism?
The October League, in the February 21 issue of The Call, runs out an article that is the mirror image of the Guardian and just as ugly. Predictably, the OL is “freaked out” by the USSR’s big military buildup. They are even more horrified because “certain powerful forces in the [U.S.] ruling class are clearly trying to cover up this growth and appease Soviet social-imperialism.” Among those who are selling out the blood-thirsty interests of U.S. imperialism are the President of the United States, the Joint Chiefs of Staff – “it is the Pentagon itself which is doing much of the covering up for the Soviet Union” – and other lesser lights in the imperialist galaxy.
One example of appeasement given is that SALT negotiator Warnke will propose that the Soviets keep the Backfire bomber out of the talks. How totally one-sided! The U.S. is only making this “offer” because it wants to keep a much more superior weapon of its own off the table, the cruise missile. The Soviet Union has repeatedly offered to give up the Backfire if only the U.S. will drop the cruise missile.
This is the entire content of the OL piece, building up the might of the Soviet Union, ignoring the strength of “our own” imperialist ruling class and going off and indicting leading figures in the bourgeoisie for “appeasement.“ The article does everything but call for the U.S. rulers to “arm themselves or harm themselves.”
But, true to form, the OL inserts toward the end of their article a single sentence promising opposition to the “frantic arms buildup of both superpowers, not just the U.S.” With a magnificent sentence like this how could anyone dare to accuse them of calling on the U.S. bourgeoisie to step up war preparations? (Interestingly, this article appears in the same issue as the announcement of the start of a $500,000 fund drive. May we suggest asking the Committee on the Present Danger – 1028 Connecticut, N.W. Washington DC 20036)
The OL also ruthlessly points out the weaknesses of NATO, how the Western European bourgeoisies are playing patsie for the Soviets. The OL tells us that Norway only has a 400-man frontier patrol company deployed facing the Soviet border. All this really exposes is that even for armchair generals, the OL is half-witted, at best, A fast look at an atlas shows that this border is over 700 air miles and even more road miles from Norway’s major population center. Actually the OL should commend the Norwegian military command for not leaving large forces at the end of an extended supply line and choosing instead to defend in depth. The OL and the Guardian are exactly the same in some respects. They each use undiluted bourgeois analysis in the flimsiest of Marxist wrapping to choose which superpower to root for.
Further, these “Marxist-Leninists” base their entire case on weapons. They don’t even begin to take up the questions indicated by Lenin when he said that weapons are just the basis of tactics. Even more, they leave out any evaluation of what Mao Tsetung described as “man’s conscious dynamic role in war.”
Some of man’s role we have already mentioned. The use of military forces is governed by strategic, operational and tactical theories, the laws for directing war that are determined by time, place and condition. In World War 2, for instance, a big contributor to early German successes was that they had grasped the great changes the tank had brought to the battlefield, had summed them up in an operational concept, blitzkrieg, and had an organizational embodiment of these concepts, the panzer division. It remained for other countries to grasp these changes and adapt to them. Today, NATO and the Warsaw Pact are operating with different theories, and it remains to be seen which of them is more correct than the other.
Something more important, and ignored by the OL and Guardian, is the role of the masses. In the purely military sense (his truth is recognized by even the bourgeoisie, seen in the place infantry, the basic component of the masses in uniform, is given in the overall scheme of military theory. (Whatever else goes on in war, it is infantry and infantry only that can actually occupy ground. All other branches of arms merely supplement and aid the infantry in this task.) The role of the masses, in the political and military relations, must be the starting point of the working class’ stand towards war, and specifically, imperialist war.
The war plans of the superpowers are coldblooded calculations of geo-politics and murder on a mass scale. Their imperialist war aims have nothing in common with the interests of the masses of people. In his writings to strip war of its feudal misconceptions and place it on a bourgeois scientific basis Von Clausewitz pointed out that: “War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale ... an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” The will of the imperialists has nothing to do with “defending the people” or any other such nonsense they might cloak their war aims with, but rather with forcing the other superpower to concede a new division of the world, to give over parts of the empire to rival exploiters.
The superpowers’ preparations for war are likewise an attack on the masses. They both build up the military machines at the same time as they try to whip up public opinion and prepare the masses for a holy crusade against “communism” (social-imperialism), or from the other side, imperialism, labelled as such. Because of the terrible destructiveness of modern weapons, not limited to nuclear weapons only, the imperialists’ holy crusade is a march to slaughter.
While war between rival gangs of imperialists is inevitable and part of the imperialist system itself, by no means does this mean the masses can only kill or killed as the cannon fodder or nuclear targets of the tiny handful to whom human life is just a commodity. The masses in uniform have always exerted a powerful effect on the outcome of wars. World War 1 is a good example. It too was an imperialist war where the people had no interests in supporting either side or in defending their own rulers. In 1916 the French Army was crippled because hundreds of thousands of soldiers refused to go on the offensive. This mutiny nearly destroyed French capital’s dreams of eventual victory over the Kaiser. In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution, with the rebellious remnants of the Russian army playing a major role, pulled Russia out of the war. And lastly, in 1918, Imperial Germany collapsed, before the final defeat of her armies at the front, because the soldiers, sailors, workers and peasants rose up. There are modern parallels to this: the U.S. Army’s disintegration in Vietnam, despite all the most up-to-date weaponry, and the periodic mutinies aboard Soviet warships.
In the face of momentum toward WW3 the masses of people in the U.S., the Soviet Union and within the countries of the two blocs can and must fight against every move of the superpowers that lead towards war, every move on the part of the lesser imperialists to aid this drive. If war breaks out this struggle continues, even if under more difficult conditions. The infantry that carries guns against the “enemy” superpower can also turn those guns around against their real enemy, “their own” bourgeoisie.
The destructiveness of nuclear weapons will be a sword the bourgeoisie will hang over the people’s heads. “Follow us or else,” the line will go, as if total unity with the U.S. bourgeoisie will prevent the New Czars from using-their strategic forces. All moves towards the use of nuclear weapons must especially be opposed. In war, most likely the ruling classes will hold back their use, in hopes of winning without them. But if the war begins to go badly and they see no other chance for victory except through their use, they will not hesitate. The imperialists can cause great suffering but they cannot “end the world.” As the Chinese comrades, have profoundly pointed out: nuclear weapons will not destroy mankind, mankind will destroy nuclear weapons!
In the present world situation, the proletariat does not choose sides between superpowers. There is a third choice; revolution to overthrow these war-makers. Revolution is in the interests of the masses of people. The working class holds the tiny handful and their system alone responsible for imperialist war.
As long as imperialism exists there will be war. If the war looming on the horizon is not prevented, or if the war is not followed by proletarian revolution, there will be continuing contradictions among the imperialists, contradictions that will intensify and eventually lead to yet another world conflict. The working class has nothing to gain by “sitting this one out” through fear of nuclear weapons or siding with one gang of bandits or the other. By grasping the situation and exposing the imperialists for the grim reapers they are, the working class can lead the broad masses in struggle, against preparations for war, imperialist war, and imperialism itself, overthrow these mass executioners and advance through socialism to communism, where the arsenals of the world can be scrapped, except for a few pieces to place in the museums where they will be historical curiosities of an era when mankind hadn’t yet fully transcended barbarism.