TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040191/0401007.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 135 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 40

MILITARY STRATEGY

How Moscow and Beijing Lost the War


The allied victory is a sobering lesson for the world's two
largest armies. It may be a prohibitively costly one.

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing and
Bruce van Voorst/Washington


    The commanders of the world's two largest communist armies
have seen the future, and to their horror, it works. Generals
in Moscow and Beijing are organizing conferences and ordering
up studies, but their conclusions are already clear: neither
the Soviet nor the Chinese armed forces can match the
high-technology weapons and tactics the U.S. displayed in its
swift demolition of Iraq.

    It is not just that American M1A1 tanks made scrap metal out
of Soviet T-72s, which they did, or that Iraqi pilots of
top-of-the-line MiG-29s were unwilling even to engage U.S.
planes, which they were. Worse, from the Soviet and Chinese
points of view, is the fact that they have no counterparts to
the Western weapons that won the war in its first few days --
Stealth fighter-bombers, precision-guided munitions, electronic
warfare. Hardest of all for the Soviet Union and China to
accept is the near certainty that neither will be able to catch
up with the U.S. anytime soon.

    In the decades after their successful revolutions, both
communist giants built massive ground forces equipped with
heavy tanks and artillery. Since the 1970s, their military
leaders have also given lip service to the need for lighter,
faster forces and high-tech weapons. Partly out of bureaucratic
inertia and largely because their economies were not up to the
task, neither country actually moved into the modern military
age of microelectronics. "People talk as if the Soviets haven't
done their best, and have to do better," says Stephen Meyer,
a military expert at M.I.T. "The point is, their best wasn't
good enough."

    Some of the conservative officers in Moscow are trying to
pretend the Iraqi collapse never happened. Marshal Viktor
Kulikov told a Soviet news agency that Iraqi soldiers had
failed, not Soviet equipment. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, an
adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev, said any claim that the
gulf war proved the superiority of American arms was "sheer
propaganda."

    That kind of bluster is wearing off, and other generals are
drawing pointed lessons. Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov told the
Supreme Soviet in Moscow that Iraqi air defenses "failed in
most cases." Furthermore, "we have weak spots in the
antiaircraft system, and we need to examine them." The success
of the American F-117A Stealth fighter, of course, throws into
question the effectiveness of the whole $100 billion Soviet
radar- and missile-defense network.

    The Soviets must also be shaken by the overwhelming speed,
firepower and flexibility of the new American method of
warfare, the doctrine called AirLand Battle, which combines
air, ground and naval forces into one integrated onslaught.
"They can't help being as impressed by the U.S. performance as
they are depressed about what it means to their forces," says
Raymond Garthoff of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

    A few reformers in the Soviet officer corps admit as much
in public. Colonel Alexander Tsalko, former director of an air
force training center and now a member of the Soviet
parliament, says Iraq's defeat shows that Soviet military
doctrine and the structure of its forces are obsolete. "Some
military authorities in this country," he says, "still believe
that the outcome of a war is determined by the clash of huge
ground forces." That is "madness," he says, because the outcome
in the gulf was determined by air power; Iraqi troops had no
choice but to "keep their noses buried in the sand."

    Most of Moscow's brass, however, is not absorbing that
lesson and is simply demanding more money. That is in part a
knee-jerk reaction, conditioned by a series of shocks to the
military system, like the humiliation in Afghanistan, the
dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and two years of major cuts in
the defense budget.

    Because Gorbachev is relying heavily on the armed forces to
keep him in office and maintain order in the country, he may
ease off on future spending cuts -- scheduled to reduce the
defense budget 14.9% this year. But the Soviet economy is in
such dire straits that it cannot provide the enormous amounts
of money necessary to create the entire industries needed to
duplicate U.S. battlefield technologies. "To be able to do as
the allies did in the gulf," says Abraham Becker, director of
the RAND-UCLA Center for Soviet studies, the Soviets "would
have to revolutionize their economy." That is something
Gorbachev has so far been unable to manage.

    China is even further behind in the high-tech stakes. A
commentator in the military's Liberation Army Daily wrote of
the gulf conflict, "We are seeing the warfare of the 21st
century fought on the battlefield of today." The gulf battles
were the antithesis of Mao Zedong's theories, which insisted
that a "people's war" of massed armies would defeat any
aggressor. Beijing began thinking about modernization recently,
but with a defense budget of only $6.16 billion last year, it
is hard pressed to deliver much more than basic equipment to
its army of 3 million.

    Beijing is eager to buy new arms from the Soviet Union,
though it must be having some doubts about the quality of the
merchandise these days. China announced two weeks ago that it
would provide the U.S.S.R. with food, tea, cigarettes and other
consumer goods worth $730 million. In return it wants to buy
combat aircraft, missiles and tanks.

    If America's smart weapons make Soviet hardware look bad,
there is another lesson for Moscow and Beijing to learn -- one
far less pleasing to the West. Saddam Hussein's mobile missile
launchers proved very difficult to counter, and even his
primitive Scuds, though little more than terror weapons,
indicated the potential effectiveness of ballistic missiles.
As a result, the Soviets and Chinese are now likely to base
their defense even more heavily on missiles and nuclear
weapons.