Document created: 6 February 03
Air University Review, March-April 1977

Emerging Major Power Relationships

Implications for the American Military
 in the Late Twentieth Century

WE are at the threshold of an era in which power, military and economic, will be far more diffused than at any earlier time in the twentieth century. In addition to the superpowers and China, the international system of the last quarter of this century will contain a series of regional powers, as well as smaller actors, in possession of destructive capabilities of unprecedented lethality and accuracy, nuclear and non-nuclear. Patterns of interaction among actors, major and lesser powers, will be far more variegated and complex than at any earlier time in the twentieth century. Thus the world of the next generation, the focal point of this analysis of emerging major power relationships, is likely to hold for the United States and its allies even greater danger than the recent past.

As they have been in the past, relations among major powers will be the product of many factors--foreign policy objectives and capabilities, domestic stability or instability and political will, levels of economic and technological development, to mention but the most obvious. It is possible, of course, to postulate a variety of scenarios in the U.S. Soviet relationship, based on the Soviet Union in an "imperial phase" and the United States in decline, both in relative military power and in political will. The assumption of this analysis, however, is that the United States and the Soviet Union will remain in a condition of general parity in defense capabilities, although the Soviet leadership will continue to strive for overall military superiority and the United States, in the years just ahead, will face major decisions about both the adequacy of existing levels of defense and the allocation of resources between strategic and general purpose forces. Both superpowers, but especially the Soviet Union, will be engaged in large-scale research and development (R&D) efforts designed to achieve breakthroughs that might prove decisive in altering the existing strategic-military relationship. Among the likely emphases of Soviet R&D will be ballistic missile defense and antisubmarine warfare. The United States and the Soviet Union will remain adversaries, although their relationship will be punctuated by periods of detente, whether for tactical or other reasons.

The Soviet Union will be in an "imperial" phase with global interests and a propensity to seek to extract political advantage by virtue of the possession of vast military power. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union will probably face increasing problems internally as a result of the demands of intellectuals, nationalities, and other dissident groups, and externally in its relations with emergent regional actors and even smaller states whose interests diverge from those of Moscow. Formidable economic problems will continue to beset the Soviet Union as a result of the inefficiencies of Soviet economic planning, declining per capita productivity, persistent difficulties in agriculture, including climatic variations and changes, and the continued concentration of Soviet technology and other resources in the defense sector.

In the period ahead the United States, while endeavoring to reconstitute its domestic consensus on foreign policy in support of allies and interests abroad, will make an effort to redress the military imbalance that, in the mid-1970s, appeared to be emerging with the Soviet Union.¹ Nevertheless, the United States will have lost, perhaps irretrievably, many of the major qualitative advantages in strategic nuclear systems that it enjoyed until the present decade, even though U.S. forces, at levels below the strategic, will be based upon the substitution of quality for quantity, firepower for manpower. In comparison with the rest of the world, the United States and the Soviet Union will remain in defense technologies the most advanced of nations, although technologies now available only to the superpowers will be diffused to other states. The technological edge that will be possessed by the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, will result from their superior concentration of R&D, especially in defense, relative to other states.

Crucially important to the future of the Soviet-American relationship is, of course, the Sino-Soviet conflict. The deepening of tensions between Moscow and Peking in the late sixties, together with the interest of the United States in minimizing its potential for conflict with Peking with the reduction of U.S. interests in the Asian-Pacific region, provided the crucially important ingredients for the Sino-American rapprochement symbolized by President Nixon's visit to the People's Republic of China in February 1972. While several factors (including the Soviet need for large-scale imports of grain) accounted for the Soviet interest in the detente relation ship with the United States that emerged in 1972, the possibility of improved relations between Peking and Washington, possibly to the detriment of Soviet interests, contributed to Moscow's eagerness to sign agreements with the United States, including the SALT I. From the American perspective, the Sino-American relationship became central to U.S. diplomacy with the Soviet Union. The United States sought to evolve both with Peking and Moscow a better relationship than either could maintain with the either.

The essence of the triangular relationship and major power interaction within it was competition by each of the powers to preclude a major improvement in relations between the other two. From the U.S. perspective, if not necessarily from that of Moscow or Peking, a condition of neither friendship nor war was, and remains, vital to triangular diplomacy. A Sino-Soviet war, resulting in the destruction of a Communist power, would in all likelihood leave the Soviet Union in a pre-eminent position in Eurasia. Since the early 1970s, the United States has signaled to Moscow its interest in the preservation of China, whose physical integrity is indispensable to the major power balance.

The problem of assessing future relationships among the major powers--the United States, the Soviet Union, China--is complex and difficult. Widely differing domestic structures, potential changes of profound importance in the leadership of at least two of the major powers, and conflicting, and yet in some instances parallel, foreign policy goals complicate the search for clarity about the future. In this analysis, for example, we assume, as previously noted, a continuation of hostility between China and the Soviet Union. Historically, however, nations have undergone transformations in their relations with each other, even in short periods of time. The renversement-des-alliances was a feature of past, and recent, international systems.

For the Soviet Union, the stakes in a Sino-Soviet rapprochement would be enormous, as the Moscow leadership must have realized when it made renewed overtures to Peking just after the death of Chairman Mao. The substitution of collaboration for competition between the two leading Communist powers would impose perhaps insurmountable burdens on the United States. Even in a world of power diffusion, a decision by Moscow and Peking to act in concert to achieve their respective goals in regions of interest to the United States would have incalculable consequences for American foreign policy. Conceivably, the transformation of Sino-Soviet relations from essentially a zero-sum to a nonzero-sum game is an unlikely contingency. It deserves to be mentioned in an analysis of emerging major power relationships only because of the horrendous consequences it would have for the United States and its allies. They would be heightened if such a rapprochement came at a time of strategic-military imbalance starkly in favor of the Soviet Union. In fact, it may be hypothesized, the incentive for China to repair its rift with Moscow would be increased by a decline in the position of the United States relative to the Soviet Union--if the Chinese leadership concluded that it had more to gain, or less to lose, by an improvement in its relations with Moscow than by continued hostility. Among the assumptions, therefore, that inhere in an analysis of future major power relationships is the preservation of American power in all of its dimensions--military, economic, technological--at such a level as to constitute a form of parity with the Soviet Union, even though Soviet conceptions of nuclear strategy call for patently superior forces adequate not only to deter the United States but also to enable the Soviet Union to prevail in a nuclear exchange--with a fundamental commitment not to a strategy of mutual assured destruction but rather to assured survival. ²

In addition to competition for the development of strategic systems and general purpose forces, the continued superpower adversary relationship will manifest itself at several levels: efforts to increase polycentrism in alliance systems and, in the case of Soviet policy, to promote tendencies toward neutralism in the alliances of the United States; attempts to retard the emergence of new power centers or to gain influence in such states and regions; and a Soviet interest in exploiting the tensions and conflicts that will be endemic in the global system of the next quarter century, especially in the Third World.

In Western Europe and Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union, as in the recent past, will have largely divergent foreign policy goals. Soviet policy has been, and is likely to continue to be, oriented toward efforts to detach the United States from alliance partners and to achieve, especially in Western Europe, a form of neutralization or "finlandization." Political patterns in Western Europe are complex and shifting; there are, for example, contradictory tendencies within the European community and a movement to the left in some countries, especially Italy (and perhaps France) and, for the present at least, toward greater conservatism in other countries (the Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden). The accession to power of Communist parties in Italy and France would accord with the Soviet interest in neutralization and the weakening of West European links with the United States.³ The continued growth of Warsaw Pact capabilities will confront NATO with a variety of defense problems: threats to the stability of the military balance on the NATO Central Front; uncertainties about sea control, especially in the Mediterranean, where surface navies composed of large ships will become increasingly vulnerable to attack by precision-guided weapons launched from land, submarines, or aircraft; greater nuclear threats to Western Europe posed by new generation Soviet strategic forces such as the SS-X-20 and the Backfire bomber; and, in sum, a potential for a shift in the overall military balance in Europe toward the Soviet Union.⁴ In itself, this phenomenon might be sufficient to achieve a form of "finlandization"--if Europeans perceived increasingly a political shadow cast by the possession, not necessarily the actual use, by the Soviet Union of military power. In the absence of an alliance relationship that continued to commit American military power to NATO, Western Europe would be hostage to Soviet good will in such a changing military balance.

Likewise, Soviet policy in northeast Asia, and especially toward Japan, will diverge from that of the United States. Japan's high vulnerability to disruption in supply of vital raw materials, together with her heavy dependence on overseas markets, will provide the Soviet Union potential leverage against Japan and indeed against Western Europe and other countries and regions vitally dependent on trade. Major increases in Soviet naval deployments in the seas adjacent to Japan and in the Indian Ocean may pose a threat to Japanese commerce. This is not to suggest that the Soviet Union necessarily will take action to interdict Japanese shipping. However, the potential leverage available to the Soviet Union to do so (or to interrupt, or to threaten to interdict, vital shipping from the Persian Gulf to Western Europe) will pose difficult choices for U.S. allies in the event of protracted crises between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Conceivably, the Soviet Union will attempt, as it has in the past, to achieve a normalization of relations with Japan. The prospects for success will be severely limited so long as the Soviet Union refuses to return to Japan territory seized at the end of World War II. Soviet diplomacy, like that of Japan, moreover, will be conditioned by the quadripartite power balance that exists in northeast Asia. Japan will seek to utilize the Sino-Soviet conflict to minimize potential threats from either China or the Soviet Union. Conceivably, Japan will evolve a somewhat closer relationship with Peking than with Moscow. Japan may be drawn increasingly into trade technology transfer agreements with both China and the Soviet Union, although neither Moscow nor Peking will wish to have the other's industrial capabilities strengthened so long as they remain in confrontation. Thus, for example, the Chinese leadership apparently viewed with apprehension the possibility that Japan, together with the United States, might make substantial investments in the development of Siberian oil and natural gas.

The alliance issues confronting the United States in its relationships with the Soviet Union are, in some cases, the legacy of the past generation and, in others, new manifestations of a competitive relationship in which the stakes revolve around the world's greatest industrial-technological-economic power centers outside the United States and the Soviet Union. In this respect, if not in military power, Western Europe and Japan represent economic power centers in the emerging international system, although they are highly vulnerable, as we saw in the immediate aftermath of the October 1973 War, to international political and economic forces over which they have little or no control. But the world of the last quarter of this century is likely to contain other emerging power centers that, if not as vast economically as Japan and Western Europe, nevertheless will have impressive capabilities. Within the next generation a series of regional superpowers such as Brazil and Iran will probably have emerged. These regional superpowers will have attained their status in the international system by dint of economic growth based, in some instances, on resources and on major progress toward industrialization, with technology transfer and investment from the industrialized countries of the West and Japan. The problems of international security will have become far more difficult and complex as a result of the power diffusion within each of the world's regions, as well as the presence of numerous conflict-laden issues. The capacity of the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, to influence the behavior of regional superpowers will have diminished, even though major regional actors will remain dependent on the United States and the Soviet Union for certain of the most advanced military capabilities.

The rapid growth in the defense capabilities of major regional actors will provide potential threats to superpower interests, and even military forces (for example, naval forces deployed in oceans where regional powers maintain substantial naval power, especially "inshore navies" based on small ships equipped with precision-guided weapons and other advanced capabilities that can threaten superpower forces). There will be a growth in R&D capabilities and weapon production facilities in regional superpowers as technologies and skills are transferred from the most advanced countries.

The continuation, and in some cases the growth, of adversary relationships within regions will create new opportunities for intervention, directly or indirectly, by one or both superpowers. The continued propensity of the Soviet Union to exploit regional problems for unilateral advantage will provide a destabilizing element in some, and perhaps all, regions. The potential for conflict among regional powers and for superpower involvement in regional conflict will increase. Major regional powers will possess or be capable of acquiring nuclear capabilities for the deterrence of other powers within their respective regions. In some instances other regional powers (in addition to Britain and France) will have the capability to strike superpowers with nuclear weapons. On balance, the Soviet Union will be more vulnerable than the United States to nuclear attack by smaller nuclear powers, especially in the 1980s, although by the 1990s the United States, too, will have become more vulnerable than in any earlier period to attack by such powers. The relatively greater vulnerability of the Soviet Union to smaller nuclear forces will result both from the geographic proximity of the Soviet Union to other nuclear powers and from the conflict potential of issues dividing the Soviet Union and nations, or groups of nations, on the Eurasian land mass and rimlands. The possibility of the emergence of a series of such regional powers in possession of nuclear forces gives added incentive to the Soviet Union to seek both to neutralize and to achieve major influence in potential power centers. Thus the Soviet Union has sought not only to detach Western Europe and Japan from their respective alliance relationships with the United States but also to prevent the emergence of a unified, militarily strengthened Western Europe.

By the late 1980s such countries as Britain and France are likely to have built new generation strategic forces, based perhaps on technologies such as those embodied in the U.S. cruise missile program; however, the ability of other states to incorporate such advanced cruise missiles (nuclear and conventional, long range and short range) into their weapon inventories will depend in part on the acquisition of highly sophisticated guidance systems now available only to the United States.⁵ It is conceivable that Britain and France will have achieved substantial technological collaboration in the development and production of new generation nuclear weapons and, as part of a broader European Atlantic framework, in other types of weapons as well. The availability of relatively inexpensive delivery systems such as the cruise missile will increase the prospects for the emergence of a multinuclear world.

Within the next generation many other states will have acquired nuclear weapons. The list of potential nuclear powers in Europe and its periphery includes the Federal Republic of Germany, Spain, Italy, and Yugoslavia and, by the 1990s, Greece and Turkey.

Outside of Europe it is possible to envisage hostile pairs of countries, one or both of which will have acquired within the next generation an atomic weapons capability or will have augmented substantially existing nuclear forces: in the Middle East, Egypt Israel, Egypt-Libya, Iran-Saudi Arabia, Israel-Iraq, Algeria-Libya; in Asia, Taiwan-People's Republic of China, Philippines Indonesia, South Korea-North Korea, India-Pakistan; in Africa, Nigeria-South Africa, Zaire-South Africa; and in Latin America, Argentina-Brazil.

In Europe the propensity of states to acquire nuclear weapons will depend on several factors, including the perception of continued credibility of the U.S. nuclear guarantee embodied in the Atlantic Alliance. Outside NATO, the potential exists for the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Yugoslavia. Depending on the course of events in Yugoslavia after the demise of Tito, especially the outcome of whatever succession crisis ensues and the Soviet propensity for intervention, there will be incentive for the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Yugoslavia, although the Soviet Union could be expected to exert pressure to prevent the development of a nuclear force there. The possession of nuclear weapons by states outside Europe, particularly in North Africa and the Middle East, will lead existing European nuclear powers to retain such capabilities and provide a rationale for the development of a European nuclear force or for the acquisition of atomic capabilities by other European states, especially those on the northern littoral of the Mediterranean. Several Middle East states (for example, Egypt and Libya) will have the potential for developing or acquiring a nuclear capability, part of which could be targeted against Western Europe. Other states in the Middle East Persian Gulf area are likely to have an atomic force capable of reaching targets in the Soviet Union, notably Israel and Iran.

Whatever the outcome of racial conflicts erupting in South Africa, the region will probably maintain a technological infrastructure capable of developing and manufacturing nuclear weapons. If it survives the formidable challenges it faces, the present South African government will have great incentive to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, perhaps as part of its strategy to ensure survival. A successor black-dominated government, if it were to come to power after a protracted racial conflict, might have within its grasp the capacity for a nuclear force and thus the means to remain for some time to come the strongest military power in sub Saharan Africa, although economically Nigeria by the 1980s can be expected to register major gains. This latter assumption is dependent on Nigeria's ability to prevent internal fragmentation and to attract needed levels of overseas investment.

In South America, Brazil has embarked on programs to acquire technology for the development of a nuclear weapons capability. The achievement of nuclear status appears to accord with Brazil's aspirations to become the dominant power in Latin America and perhaps eventually assume a major role out side of Latin America. Depending on its success in resolving formidable domestic political and economic problems, Argentina would posses the technological infrastructure needed for atomic weapons development and production in the next generation.

In Asia, Japan may be deterred from the development of nuclear weapons by the continuation of Sino-Soviet rivalry and by security guarantees extended by the United States. In all likelihood, Japan will have increased, as a percentage of gross national product, its defense spending. Japan's defense interests will encompass the sea lanes through which Japanese commerce must pass as well as control of airspace over and near Japan. Japan will retain a technological infrastructure to permit a future Japanese government to take the decision to "go nuclear." Major changes in Sino-Soviet relations--either the defeat of China by the Soviet Union in a war or a rapprochement between Moscow and Peking-- would have unsettling effects on Japanese foreign policy, including the issue of nuclear weapons. Especially if it came at a time when U.S.-Japanese relations were strained, war or rapprochement between Moscow and Peking could produce either a marked growth of neutralism in Japan or impetus toward a major defense build-up. The former is more likely than the latter, if only because of the lead times that would be needed to produce a credible Japanese nuclear force.

Similarly, a sharp increase in the Japanese perception of isolation from the United States and of growing threats to economic well being could lead to rapid shifts in Japan's foreign policy. At the very least, Japan in the next generation can be expected to evince in its foreign policy a greater tendency toward independence from the United States.

Within the next decade, both South Korea and Taiwan will have a greater incentive to develop nuclear weapons and increasingly the necessary technological infrastructure to do so. Especially in South Korea, a nuclear capability, designed for deterrence against attack by North Korea, will become feasible. Whatever other incentives may exist for the acquisition of an atomic capability by Taiwan, they will include a desire to preserve independence at a time when the capacity or willingness of the United States to provide a defense guarantee for Taiwan will have diminished. The interest in Seoul in the acquisition of an atomic capability will stem, in all likelihood, from similar considerations, notably the withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from the Republic of Korea. Conceivably, a decision by South Korea to develop atomic weapons would give rise to an intensified debate within Japan on the nuclear issue.

The effects of the possession of nuclear capabilities on regional power balances and stability are difficult to predict. It is conceivable that hostile pairs of states both of which possess nuclear capabilities will be deterred from taking military action against each other. It is possible, as previously noted, that superpowers will face additional constraints in intervening directly in regional conflicts if their territory becomes vulnerable to nuclear attack from a regional atomic power. While regional possessors of nuclear weapons may find that the risks of nuclear devastation exceed the potential gains (in accordance with deterrence theory in bipolar nuclear relationships), the prospects for regional instability may be heightened by other factors, including power imbalances between possessors of nuclear weapons and states that have not acquired them.

In such a multinuclear world, the United States will confront many difficult security problems. The protection of assets of importance to the United States--the territory of allies, vital sea lanes (especially from the Persian Gulf to the North Atlantic and East Asia), and resources that are onshore and offshore--will become more difficult. The difficulty will result not only from the proliferation of nuclear weapons but also from the acquisition by regional superpowers of a broad range of military capabilities. For this reason, technology transfer and the acquisition of indigenous technological infrastructures, weapons development, and production facilities will be salient characteristics of the emerging international system.

The diffusion of military power characteristic of the global system of the last quarter of this century will have potentially important implications for the conduct of warfare. Here, it is possible to suggest, only in broad terms, some of the likely implications. New technologies will blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional conflict. As nonnuclear weapons become more lethal and accurate and nuclear weapons with extremely low yields, i.e., below 0.1 kiloton, become available, the threshold between the use of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons will be less distinctive. ⁶ Such weapons for use in each of the military environments-land, sea, and air-will be more readily available to a wide variety of actors-state and nonstate, larger and smaller. Many of the types of weapons that will be widely available will be easily operable by relatively unskilled persons. Conflict environments, in the air, on the battlefield, and on the oceans will be increasingly inhospitable to manned weapon systems, therefore placing a premium on the conduct of warfare by weapons directed at remote range.

The conflict environment of the future, it has been suggested, will contain a variety of new technologies and actors. In recent years there has been considerable discussion in the literature of international relations about the growing importance of nonstate actors, of which there are many types, from multinational enterprises spanning national economies to organizations employing terror and blackmail to achieve their objectives. The increase in world trade, the continued growth of the economies of many states (if not necessarily all) and the development of a more interdependent global economic system, together with the diffusion of power in a world fraught with conflict potential, provide the setting for a wide variety of nonstate actors. The extent to which such actors, especially those bent on the use of violence to effect revolutionary change, will use sophisticated weapons to achieve their goals cannot be determined with great accuracy. The emergence of such actors, with greater military capabilities, holds the potential for security problems for all states, but especially for highly industrialized societies. Traditional defense concepts may be largely inapplicable to the problems posed by such actors. They may seek redress for grievances against the Soviet Union or against the United States. The Soviet Union as well as the United States may be vulnerable to actors possessing such capabilities. Nonstate actors, not having fixed assets in the form of internationally recognized frontiers and territory, will be less affected by deterrence rationales than state actors have been. If targets of great value to nonstate actors cannot be identified and threatened with unacceptable levels of damage, traditional theories of deterrence cannot be applied. The potential exists, therefore, for conflict and for nuclear blackmail between nonstate actors and regional powers, between nonstate actors and superpowers.

Much has been written in recent years about the issues that supposedly will dominate the foreign policy agenda of the United States and other nations in the next quarter century. It has been suggested that North-South issues will hold greater importance than East-West relationships in the global context. Such argumentation is not new. It has formed a basis for criticism of alleged shortcomings of U.S. foreign policy for at least a generation. But it has become more salient in recent years as a result of a series of newer (and older) issue areas that include much of the so-called Third World--resources, population, food, trade and investment, and growing dissatisfaction among have-nots, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with the uneven distribution of wealth among nations.

Dangers in the global system of the next generation will result in large part from issues such as these. For example, there is great potential for conflict arising from demand for scarce resources. We have already witnessed clashes over fishing rights among NATO members and the difficulty of delineating zones for fishing even among members of the European community. It is not difficult to foresee the development of technologies that will make more profitable the extraction of a variety of resources in addition to oil from the seabed. Control of the seas will be of increasing importance to nations or other groups in search of new resources. At the same time, the exploitation of on-shore resources will provide new potential for conflict. Much of the mineral wealth of the world lies within the territory of the major powers. Much, but not all, of the competition for resources outside the major powers is likely to focus on the so-called Third World, although there is potential for conflict involving one or more major powers over North Sea-Barents Sea oil, over oil in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and over fisheries in several parts of the world, to mention only the most obvious. Because oil destined for Japan, Western Europe, and the United States must travel several thousand miles over oceans and through narrow chokepoints, the potential for a variety of forms of disruption is enormous, whether from the Soviet Union itself, from smaller surrogates with in-shore navies, or from other powers not aligned with the Soviet Union yet bent on disruptive action against either suppliers or consumers.

Furthermore, it may be hypothesized, the international system of the last quarter of this century will contain a large number of states faced with many varieties of revolutionary forces. In some instances they will be based on new, and old, ethnic-linguistic nationalisms seeking independence from, or control of, an existing state. They will include groups whose goal is the destruction of other groups within an existing state. The age of nationalism, far from having run its course, may yet produce new nationalisms that will pose threats to the viability and survival of many states. While the potential for such movements is greatest in the Third World, if only because of the larger number of states and greater endemic political instability, they exist even in certain of the oldest of nation states in the industrialized West.

Such actors will have available to them weapons of unprecedented destructive potential. One or more contending groups may possess nuclear weapons, either by virtue of control of the apparatus of state authority or by having captured nuclear stockpiles, or even by having had nuclear weapons made available by an outside power (not necessarily the United States or the Soviet Union). With the proliferation of nuclear weapons in a world of growing tendencies toward fragmentation within states, the potential for civil conflict between parties, at least one of which has nuclear weapons, will increase. In subnational wars of the future, decisive engagements are likely to be fought with weapons of unprecedented lethality. It will be less possible to confine civil conflict within state boundaries. The potential for spill-over into neighboring states, and to nonadjacent powers, may be enhanced by at least two factors: the extent to which outside powers, including superpowers, intervene, directly or indirectly; and the increased range and lethality of weapons available to protagonists in a civil conflict. Whether this factor will serve to deter or restrain would-be superpower intervention is uncertain. It may be hypothesized that the growth in superpower vulnerability to devastation, even on a limited scale, by nuclear or other forces controlled by smaller states, will introduce into superpower behavior greater restraint in support for one or another of the contending groups in an internal, or a regional, conflict. But it may also be hypothesized that the superpowers will be pressed toward indirect forms of intervention in support of one side or the other, or both, in the regional and subnational conflicts of the next generation. The Soviet support for Cuban forces in Angola and elsewhere in southern Africa may provide a harbinger of future Soviet utilization of strategies and tactics based on "proxies." In return for various forms of Soviet assistance and support, other states in addition to Castro's Cuba may seek to playa greater role in fomenting and exploiting the revolutionary forces in the world of the late twentieth century, and some at least may be available for Moscow's use by virtue of the existence of parallel interests or as a result of extensive superpower-client state leverage between the Soviet Union and smaller powers.

Even in the generation after World War II, it was not possible to view East-West issues in isolation from those associated with the Third World. Many of the confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union, or involving forces backed by one or the other superpower, related directly to the Third World: the Korean conflict, the Cuban missile crisis, the successive Middle East wars, the Vietnam war, and the Angolan civil war. The pattern of Soviet behavior has been consistent at least in one respect: the Soviet Union has shown great propensity to seek to exploit, to the disadvantage of the United States and the West, the conflicts that have been endemic to the Third World. This pattern is being repeated today in the Middle East and in southern Africa. We may infer, therefore, that the East-West issues of the future will be, in large part, North-South, or Third World, in nature.

The emergence of a series of new issues does not necessarily preclude the possibility that issues from an earlier period will remain with us. In fact, the dangers posed in the emerging global system for the United States in its relations with the Soviet Union result in large measure from the need to cope effectively with issues that are the legacy of the past, while responding to a series of new challenges. Because the interests of the Soviet Union continue to diverge from those of the United States on many of the problems of the past generation, it is likely that Soviet American relations on the old and the new issues of the last quarter of this century will be characterized more by competition and conflict than by detente and cooperation. In fact the potential for discord between the Soviet Union and the West may grow as a result of the increasing salience of the so-called global issues.

While Soviet-American collaboration on as many issues as possible represents a desirable objective, the pattern of past Soviet behavior does not furnish great latitude for optimism about the future. If the Soviet leadership has always been the "scavenger of revolution," why should it necessarily see its interests in the remaining years of this century as more in harmony than in conflict with those of the United States and our principal allies? It is far more likely that the Soviet Union, especially in a period when Soviet military power may be at its zenith or at least unprecedented in its relative position to the United States, will seek to benefit from the existence of issues offering potential for conflict at many levels--intranational and regional, between rich nations and poor states, producer and consumer states-with possible effects highly adverse to the economic prospects for the industrialized, non-Communist world. This has, in fact, been the pattern of Soviet behavior even when the Soviet Union was far less strong than it is in the 1970s.

Several important implications of major power relationships can be adduced from this analysis of the emerging international system of the last quarter of this century. At the abstract level of theory, the deterrence concepts that have been central to U.S. force planning at the strategic level, and applied within a bipolar Soviet-American strategic relationship, will be inadequate, or at least in need of re-examination in a multinuclear world. The diffusion of weapons to other power centers, together with the unprecedented lethality of such capabilities, will decrease the ability to deter conflict, while at the same time enhancing the need for deterrence in light of the calculus of risk versus gain. However, problems of ensuring the adequacy of forces against pre-emption, of determining suitable levels of forces, and even of identifying sources of an attack or targets of value will be rendered more difficult in a multinuclear world. Problems of threshold between conventional and nuclear conflict and between intervention by regional actors in regional conflicts and by superpowers in such conflicts will become more complex. In turn, problems of determining the adequacy of strategic forces against more than one, and possibly many, potential threats will increase for the United States but also for the Soviet Union. With the inaccessibility of nonstate nuclear actors as targets for the strategic forces of nuclear states, there will be greater need for technologies for defense against limited nuclear attack as well as the accidental launch of nuclear weapons, not only by the Soviet Union but also by smaller nuclear powers with less sophisticated command and control systems.

The problems of protecting allies of the United States will be heightened, as noted earlier, both by the diffusion of military power and by the emergence of the Soviet Union as a global military power. Both trends will diminish, but not necessarily eliminate, the efficacy of security guarantees provided by the United States in its alliance systems. The continued presence of U.S. forces stationed in vitally important regions and countries such as Western Europe and South Korea will help to retard the diffusion of military power, especially at the nuclear level, as well as the prospects for "finlandization," especially of Western Europe, by the Soviet Union.

The diffusion of military power, together with the increasing availability of highly accurate and lethal weapons, will have implications of potentially far-reaching magnitude for superpower-client state defense relationships and the protection of superpower interests in the various regions. The problems likely to confront superpowers in direct intervention in regional conflicts have been noted. They result from the greater indigenous capabilities of regional actors in the world of the future and from the possibility that regional powers may have the capacity to inflict destruction at unacceptable levels on the superpowers themselves. Therefore, a premium may be placed on the capacity of superpowers either to preposition military materiel on the territory of allies and clients or to resupply such states rapidly in a conflict environment characterized by the use of advanced weapons. Western Europe and the Middle East are illustrative of such conflict environments.

Elsewhere, especially in a large number of Third World environments, the problems facing superpowers, and especially the United States, in assisting allies and client states will be enormous indeed. In light of Vietnam, such problems need not be belabored here. To the extent that the United States will need a capability to assist allies in such contingencies, including indirect support for one side in a subnational conflict, a premium will be placed not only on a capacity for the rapid movement of large quantities of materiel but also on the availability of weapons of great accuracy that began to be deployed in the final stages of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

The implications of new generation weapon systems widely diffused as well as the emergence of new conflict issues are potentially enormous for the structuring and for the roles and missions of U.S. forces. Several examples are illustrative: the development by regional superpowers and by the global superpowers of naval forces equipped with highly accurate weapons, together with the availability of such weapons for launch against ships from land or air, will increase the vulnerability of large surface navies to attack and destruction. Also, the development of highly accurate antiship cruise missiles with an over-the-horizon attack capability will create problems for surface navies and for the protection of other maritime forces (for example, convoys) in wartime. Especially at chokepoints, navies and merchant vessels will become increasingly vulnerable to attack from land or air. In seas such as the Mediterranean, naval forces will face growing problems from highly accurate weapons launched either from submarines or from land or air.

The use of tactical air power will face increasing constraints in battlefield environments, especially in Western Europe and possibly the Middle East, as a result of the technologies inherent in electronic warfare. It will probably be both feasible and desirable to make more extensive use of remotely controlled capabilities and other highly accurate weapons such as cruise missiles, especially against fixed targets such as airfields, supply depots, and other military installations and against other targets such as tanks, at an early stage in a future conflict.

Because of the increasing importance of the oceans, both as a source of energy and vital raw materials, and for the transit of rising levels of trade in an interdependent world, the need for capabilities for sea control missions will increase. To these considerations must be added the rise of Soviet naval capabilities, which will enable the Soviet Union to pose a variety of threats to U.S. interests in the years ahead. The emerging technologies noted earlier will alter the roles performed traditionally by the services. For example, sea control and surveillance missions may be undertaken to a greater extent than ever before by long-range aircraft equipped with highly accurate air-to-surface weapons. Submarines or highly mobile, small surface craft may be able to pose major threats to land-based battlefield targets by virtue of highly accurate weapons with nuclear or conventional warheads with ranges of at least several hundreds of miles. Targets on the oceans may be struck most effectively, especially in narrow seas, by weapons deployed on land.

IN SUM, the United Stats faces, the emerging international system, a far more complex constellation of forces and actors than in any previous era. We can assume that new actors and older ones such as the Soviet Union will seek to maximize the potential inherent in new weapons technologies and conflict issues for political gain, even though a major goal of U.S. diplomacy has been to search for areas of parallel interest between the United States and the Soviet Union in order to minimize conflict and build a more stable and peaceful world.

The paradox of the emerging system is that the need for more effective structures and mechanisms to reduce the likelihood of conflict will be greater than in any previous era. But at the same time the potential for exploitation of a variety of conflicts for unilateral advantage will be greater than ever. The broad interest of the United States lies, of course, in helping to shape a global system in which the prospects for conflict will be diminished. For this purpose American military power will remain an indispensable ingredient. Whether the Soviet propensity to exploit regional and subnational conflict to achieve unilateral advantage, even under the best of circumstance, can be diminished is uncertain. Whatever the prospects for reducing such Soviet proclivities, they will be vitally dependent on the continued ability of the United States to maintain at least overall military parity with the Soviet Union together with the political will and the conceptual vision that will be needed to help mold regional power balances and protect vital American interests in a world of greater power diffusion, interdependence, uncertainty, and revolutionary change.

Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis

Notes

1. See, for example, John M. Collins and John Steven Chwat, The United States/Soviet Military Balance: A Frame of Reference for Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, for the Congressional Research, Library of Congress, January 1976); Paul H. Nitze, "Deterring Our Deterrent," Foreign Policy, Winter 1976-77.

2. See John Erickson, The Soviet Military, Soviet Policy, and Soviet Politics, USSI Report 73-3 (Washington, D.C.: United States Strategic Institute, 1973), p. 5.

3. See, for example, James E. Dougherty and Diane K. Pfaltzgraff, Euro-communism and the Atlantic Alliance, Special Report (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Institute for Foreign Policy analysis, January 1977.

4. See John Erickson, Soviet-Warsaw Pact Force Levels, USSI Report 76-2, (Washington, D.C.: United States Strategic Institute, 1976).

5. See Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr. and Jacquelyn K. Davis, The Cruise Missile: Bargaining Chip or Defense Bargain? Special Report (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, January 1977).

6. See, for example, Geoffrey Kemp, Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr. and Uri Ra'anan, editors, The Other Arms Race: New Technologies and Non-nuclear Conflict (Lexington, Massachusetts: D.C. Heath, 1975).

Editor's Note

An earlier version of this article was presented at the October 1976 meeting of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society, cosponsored by Air University and hosted by Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. This article will appear in a forthcoming book, The Changing American Military Profession, edited by Franklin D. Margiotta, Westview Press (Frederick Praeger, President), Boulder, Colorado.

Contributor

Dr. Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is Director, Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Associate Professor of International Politics, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He bas been Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; Visiting Lecturer, Foreign Service Institute, Department of State; George C. Marshall professor, College of Europe, Broges, Belgium; Editor, Orbis, and Director, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia. Dr. Pfaltzgraff writings have been widely published in books and professional journals, and he is a previous contributor to the Review.

Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor