"Weapons of Mass Destruction" — The Impact of the Offset

On the morning of May 9, 1984, the Soviet Union celebrated its thirty-ninth Victory Day. Wreaths went down at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Old men in chestfuls of medals walked stiffly along Tverskaya Street toward the Bolshoi Theatre. The newspapers, as they did every year, carried tributes to the generation that had broken the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad and Kursk. On page two of Krasnaya Zvezda, the Red Army’s daily, under the title “Defense of Socialism: Experience of History and Modernity,” the chief of the Soviet General Staff published an article that was not, on its face, a holiday piece.

Marshal Nikolai Vasilyevich Ogarkov was sixty-six years old. He was tall, severe, and unfashionably blunt for a Soviet officer of his rank. He had been chief of the General Staff since January 1977 and a Marshal of the Soviet Union since the same week. By rule and tradition, the Victory Day essay he had been asked to write was supposed to dwell on the Great Patriotic War and the moral debt the present owed the dead. Ogarkov did the moral debt in a few opening paragraphs and then turned to the present war, the one not yet fought, and to the weapons that would fight it.

What he wrote, if read attentively, was an admission. New developments in the West’s nonnuclear arsenal, Ogarkov told his readers, were “qualitatively new” and would “make it possible to sharply increase, by at least an order of magnitude, the destructive potential of conventional weapons, bringing them closer, so to speak, to weapons of mass destruction in terms of effectiveness.” Automated search-and-destroy complexes, long-range high-precision terminally guided systems, remotely piloted vehicles, qualitatively new electronic control systems, all of these would together alter the nature of operations. The next war in Europe, if it came, would not look like the last one. It would not even look like the one Soviet planners had been preparing for through the 1970s. It would be a war of sensors and silicon, decided in the rear before the first armored division crossed the Inner German Border.

The phrase that lingered, in Moscow and in Washington alike, was the analogy. Conventional weapons brought “closer to weapons of mass destruction.” A serving Marshal of the Soviet Union had told the readers of his army’s newspaper that the Americans had built, or were on the verge of building, something that did the work of a nuclear weapon without being one. Four months later he was relieved of his post.

Ogarkov was not the first Soviet officer to notice that the chip had begun to bend the curves of war. He was the first to put his career on the line over it.

He had risen, like much of his generation, through engineering. Born in 1917 in a Tver village, he had joined the Red Army in 1938 and graduated from the Kuibyshev Military Engineering Academy in 1941, just in time for the Wehrmacht. He spent the war building bridges and clearing minefields. After 1945 he stayed in uniform and rose through the engineering branches into the General Staff, where his technical literacy and bureaucratic stamina made him visible. Brezhnev named him chief of the General Staff in January 1977, and Marshal of the Soviet Union less than two weeks later. Western analysts, picking him out of the routine traffic of Soviet appointments, marked him as a man who actually understood what the engineers in his own ministry were trying to tell him.

What they were telling him, by the late 1970s, was that the Americans were building a different kind of war. Soviet planners had a name for it. They called it the “reconnaissance-strike complex,” razvedyvatelno-udarnyi kompleks in Russian: a sensor, a network, a shooter, and a control node, each useless without the others, each made possible by the integrated circuits the Soviet Union could not produce in quantity or quality. The American program that had crystallized the concept in Soviet eyes was Assault Breaker, run by DARPA through the second half of the 1970s and demonstrated at White Sands in December 1982 when a Pave Mover radar plane fed targeting data to a missile that dispensed submunitions onto a simulated armored column ninety miles away. The architecture had been theorized by Soviet General Staff writers since the early 1970s; what alarmed Ogarkov’s office was that the Americans were now building it.

What the General Staff had to confront was an arithmetic that did not work. A Soviet motor-rifle division of the 3rd Shock Army in East Germany was supposed to roll west under the umbrella of artillery and air defense, mass at the breakthrough sector, and crack NATO’s forward defenses by sheer concentration. Concentration was the whole idea. If the reconnaissance-strike complex worked as advertised, concentration was a target. The very second-echelon divisions that gave the Pact its quantitative edge would be detected on the Polish road network and destroyed before they ever closed with NATO formations. The Soviet plan to win in Europe relied on mass; the American plan to defeat the Soviet plan relied on the elimination of mass at standoff range. None of it required nuclear weapons. None of it would even cross the nuclear threshold. Yet the operational outcome, the destruction of an attacking front before it could attack, looked, from Moscow, indistinguishable from a tactical-nuclear stop.

Ogarkov was already saying so in his own publications. As early as 1978, in articles in Voennaya Mysl’, the General Staff’s classified journal Military Thought, he had argued that scientific-technical progress was accelerating the improvement of conventional arms and “sharply increasing” their combat capabilities. In a 1981 piece in Kommunist, the party theoretical journal, he had begun to lay out a doctrinal case for treating high-precision conventional weapons as a category of their own, no longer subordinate to nuclear forces in the General Staff’s thinking. He oversaw the editing of the Soviet Military Encyclopedia, whose volumes appeared through the late 1970s and early 1980s and rewrote, quietly, the entries on operational art to admit the possibility that strategic objectives could now be achieved without nuclear use. In a 1982 booklet, Always in Readiness to Defend the Fatherland, he stated openly that limiting a nuclear war was impossible, an argument whose obvious next step was the embrace of conventional precision as the only usable form of force. By the time he sat down to write the 1984 Victory Day piece, he had been laying intellectual track for six years.

He had also been losing the political argument that should have followed.

Soviet doctrine in the early 1980s sat uneasily on top of the Voennaya Mysl’ analysis. The Strategic Rocket Forces still claimed pride of place in the budget. The civilian leadership, first Brezhnev and then his short-lived successor Yuri Andropov, was wary of an open turn toward conventional precision because it implied two unattractive admissions: that the existing nuclear arsenal could not, in fact, do the political work it had been bought to do, and that the Soviet electronics industry was not equal to the task of building the reconnaissance-strike complex’s twin on the eastern side of the line. The first admission undercut the legitimacy of the missile bureaus. The second undercut the legitimacy of the Politburo’s stewardship of the economy. Neither admission was easy in a system whose elderly general secretaries had been built, careers and all, on top of those two pillars.

Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, the Politburo member responsible for the entire military-industrial complex, had spent forty years acquiring his weight in Soviet politics by championing missile production. By 1982, he was already ailing. Ogarkov was his subordinate and on most matters his protégé. On the central question of where the next ruble should go, they had begun to differ. Ustinov wanted more SS-20 mobile intermediate-range missiles deployed against Western Europe. Ogarkov wanted more chips. He wanted, in particular, a Soviet equivalent of Pave Mover, a Soviet equivalent of the Boeing E-3 AWACS already orbiting over Western Europe, and a Soviet equivalent of the precision submunitions DARPA was qualifying at White Sands. He understood, as Ustinov perhaps did not, that without those tools the SS-20 was useful only as a political signal, and that the political signal it had sent had backfired badly.

That was the painful part. The SS-20 deployments, beginning in 1976, had triggered NATO’s December 1979 dual-track decision to deploy Pershing II and Gryphon ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe by 1983. The Pershing II, with its terminal guidance system, was itself a precision conventional capability disguised as a nuclear delivery vehicle: it could put a warhead within thirty meters of a hardened target at a range of eighteen hundred kilometers. To Ogarkov, watching the deployments come on line in West Germany in late 1983, it was a textbook demonstration of the new arithmetic. A handful of American missiles, accurate to a few feet, were producing a strategic effect in Europe that the Strategic Rocket Forces had not produced for the Soviet Union with thousands of warheads. Precision was substituting for mass at the strategic level too.

Andropov, by then dying, called Ogarkov into the Defense Council more than once in late 1983 to argue about budget priorities. The conversations are not on the record, but the outcome was visible in the documents Ogarkov began to publish in the months that followed. Andropov was sympathetic in private to Ogarkov’s diagnosis and unwilling, in public, to confront the missile bureaus and the consumer-goods lobby simultaneously. Andropov died on February 9, 1984. Konstantin Chernenko, the seventy-two-year-old apparatchik who replaced him, lacked even Andropov’s appetite for argument. The Politburo, in early 1984, was a coalition that wanted to be left alone.

Ogarkov did not leave them alone. The May 9 Krasnaya Zvezda essay was the most public escalation, but it was not the only one. Earlier in 1984, in a long interview given to the same newspaper for its February 8 issue, he had advanced the argument that “a quantitative buildup in nuclear weapons no longer holds practical purpose,” a sentence that read in Moscow as a direct challenge to the Strategic Rocket Forces’ claim on the next five-year plan. The May essay then doubled down, telling Soviet officers that the new American conventional capabilities were closing on weapons-of-mass-destruction levels of effectiveness and that Soviet doctrine and force structure had to be reorganized around that fact. He gave interviews to Western journalists in which he repeated the same lines, in tones less coded than Soviet etiquette permitted. He asked, in essence, that the system spend more on the side of the budget that the Politburo least wanted to spend on, and pay for it by cutting the side the Politburo least wanted to cut.

By the summer of 1984, several constituencies wanted him gone. Ustinov resented the public sermons. Chernenko resented the implicit critique of his own caution. The Strategic Rocket Forces and their backers in the central party apparatus resented the suggestion that their cathedrals were empty. The decision was taken at a Politburo session in early September. On September 6, 1984, Krasnaya Zvezda announced that Ogarkov had been “transferred to other work.” His deputy, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, took the chief’s chair. The notice carried no farewell tribute, no thanks for forty-six years of service, no listing of the new post. By the standards of Soviet leave-takings, the silence was punitive.

The “other work,” it emerged later, was command of the newly reconstituted Western Theater of Military Operations, headquartered in Legnica in southwestern Poland. On paper it was an honorable command of the Pact’s most important front. In the politics of the Soviet General Staff, it was Siberia with better food. Ogarkov, at sixty-six, was put in charge of the formations he had spent the last decade trying to reform, and was given no platform from which to keep arguing about the reform. The Washington Post’s Dusko Doder, writing on September 7, called the announcement “abrupt,” and noted that no Soviet observer could remember a chief of staff being moved without ceremony in living memory. Western analysts compiled lists of possible reasons. The KAL 007 disaster of September 1, 1983, on which Ogarkov had been the awkward Soviet spokesman, was on most of the lists. So was the failure of the SS-20 deployment to split NATO. So was, on the longer lists, his repeated insistence that the Soviet Union needed an economic and technological transformation it was not prepared to undertake. By later analyses, including William Odom’s careful reconstruction in The Collapse of the Soviet Military, the simplest explanation was the most accurate. He had told the leadership things the leadership did not want to hear, and had told them publicly.

He kept telling them. In April 1985, six months after his removal, the Voyenizdat military publishing house released a small book under his name, History Teaches Vigilance. It was, on its surface, a generic warning against American imperialism and the Reagan administration’s defense buildup. Read carefully, it was something else. The book contained the most explicit description of the new conventional dimension in Soviet theater strategy that any Soviet officer had yet put under hard covers. Ogarkov was the second-highest-ranking Marshal in the country writing about a war the Politburo did not want fought, with weapons the Soviet defense industrial complex could not yet build, against an opponent whose technological lead his own publications conceded. The Central Intelligence Agency analysts who got their hands on the book inside a few weeks of publication wrote a National Foreign Assessment Center memorandum titled “Ogarkov’s New Book: A Call for Change in Soviet Doctrine?” The answer, the analysts concluded, was yes. The man had been demoted but not silenced.

By then the silence was unnecessary. The people who needed to hear the argument had heard it. Mary FitzGerald at RAND, Andrew Marshall at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, and a small circle of Sovietologists in Washington and London had been reading Voennaya Mysl’ for years; by 1986 they were writing analyses of Ogarkov’s framework that explicitly used his own term, voenno-tekhnicheskaya revolyutsiya, the military-technical revolution. The Americans renamed it the Revolution in Military Affairs and built careers on the proposition that Ogarkov had been right. The doctrinal case for what the United States was about to do, first to its own military and then to the Iraqi army in 1991, had been written most clearly by a Soviet Marshal who could not get his own Politburo to let him do it for the Soviet Union.

The reason was structural, and Ogarkov knew it. Behind every paragraph in his published work was a fact he could not say out loud in print. The Soviet electronics industry was at least two generations behind the American and the Japanese; the Central Intelligence Agency’s 1986 unclassified assessment would put the gap at two generations and roughly five years, and concluded that it was not closing. Ogarkov’s reconnaissance-strike complex required the digital signal processors, airborne radars, data-link computers, and terminal-guidance seekers that the Americans were producing on commercial Moore’s Law trajectories at Texas Instruments and Motorola, and that the Japanese were beginning to produce at Hitachi and NEC. The Soviet equivalents, fabricated at Mikron and Angstrem in Zelenograd, were copies of late-1970s American parts on yesterday’s process equipment, in volumes too small to drive learning curves and at qualities too low to support the system integration the new doctrine demanded. The chips for the Soviet AWACS analog, the A-50 radar plane that Beriev was trying to bring into service, were coming off Soviet lines at fractions of their American specifications. The chips for a Soviet Pave Mover did not exist at all.

To read Ogarkov in 1984 was to read a serving Marshal making the case that his own country needed to do something it could not, in fact, do. The reconnaissance-strike complex he described was real; the description was correct; the strategic implication was correct. But the precondition for building the Soviet version of it was a microelectronics industry that the Soviet Union had been trying and failing to assemble for two decades, and that no decree from the Politburo, however energetic, could conjure into existence on the time scale his analysis required. The argument he was losing in the Politburo over budgets was downstream of the argument the Soviet Union had already lost in its fabs.

The political consequence followed. To accept the Ogarkov diagnosis was to accept that the Soviet Union was, in the silent way these things happen, already losing a war it had not yet fought. The conventional balance in Europe, the foundation of Soviet leverage over its own Warsaw Pact and over Western European political opinion, was about to tilt against Moscow not because NATO had outbuilt the Pact in tanks, which it had not, but because NATO’s chips would, in a war, multiply the value of every NATO platform in ways that Soviet chips could not match. The threat that had organized the Soviet defense budget for thirty years, the threat of nuclear annihilation, was being rendered obsolete in slow motion by an industrial advance the Soviet Union could neither replicate nor block. None of this had happened on a battlefield yet. Ogarkov was reading the trajectory off blueprints and test reports and concluding, ahead of nearly everyone in Moscow, that the trajectory had only one terminus.

He was not heard, in part, because being heard would have required the system to act, and the system could not act.

In August 1991, the coup against Gorbachev failed in a few days, and the Soviet Union spent the rest of the year coming apart. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who had taken Ogarkov’s chair in 1984, hanged himself in his Kremlin office on August 24, 1991. Ogarkov outlived him by two years. Retired into the Group of Inspectors General, the dignified shelf where Soviet marshals were stored when they were neither needed nor disgraced, he watched from a Moscow apartment as a war he had spent a decade trying to prevent rolled toward Iraq instead and there, on television, demonstrated everything he had said. He died on January 23, 1994, and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery with full honors. The country he had served had ceased to exist twenty-five months earlier. The doctrine he had written had been claimed by the country that had defeated his.

Through the long quiet between 1985 and 1991, a small ritual began to occur in Western analytical offices. A Marshall protégé would translate a paragraph from a Soviet journal article on the military-technical revolution. A briefing slide would put Ogarkov’s diagnosis in a few bullet points. The most lucid available account of where American defense was headed had been written, in Russian, by a Marshal of the army the Pentagon was preparing to fight. The diagnosis traveled. The doctrine traveled with it. By the time the first Tomahawks crossed into Iraqi airspace in January 1991, the framework that would explain what they were doing was already, in a sense, on file in Moscow under a different cover.

What was not on file in Moscow was the industrial means to do anything about it. That asymmetry, between insight and capability, was what Ogarkov had been telling the Politburo for six years. The Politburo had not wanted to hear it. They had heard it anyway. He had been right.

By the autumn of 1984, before the desert in Iraq was even a planning assumption, the men who ran the General Staff understood, with a clarity their political masters refused, that the next war in Europe would be lost in the rear, by silicon they did not yet make. The marshal who had said so was rotated quietly to Legnica, and the chips on the other side of the line kept getting better.