Air University Review, July-August 1978

The Nunn-Bartlett Report

a realistic prescription for NATO?

On 24 January 1977, the Senate Armed Services Committee published a report by Senator Sam Nunn (D Georgia) and Senator Dewey Bartlett (R Oklahoma) entitled NATO and the New Soviet Threat. The senators apparently had substantial assistance in its preparation from Lieutenant General James F. Hollingsworth, U.S. Army (Retired). The report is based at least in part on a previous report prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee by General Hollingsworth prior to his retirement.¹

The trust of the report is that the Russian Bear, besides being nine feet tall and rising, can now get up to fun speed from a standing start with hardly a warning twitch. In fact, say the authors, "Soviet forces deployed in Eastern Europe now possess the ability to launch a potentially devastating conventional attack in Central Europe with little warning."²

In support of this assertion, the report points out tat the Soviets have expanded and modernized their ground forces and simultaneously transformed their frontal aviation from a defensive force into a potent offensive arm. The quantitative expansion of the Soviet forces has been accompanied by a sweeping modernization of those forces designed to increase "the capacity to wage successfully the kind of blitzkrieg called for in Soviet doctrine."³

The total effect of these Soviet expansion and modernization efforts has been to confront NATO forces in the Central Region with five Soviet armies that can move directly to the attack without reinforcement. These armies, it has been estimated, could sustain multiple axes of advance at rates of 20-40 kilometers a day.

To NATO this means trouble since, as the Nunn-Bartlett report points out, the Soviet posture changes are specifically designed to exploit the political and military weaknesses of NATO's current strategy of flexible response.⁴ This strategy calls for the development of sufficient capability at the strategic nuclear, theater nuclear, and conventional levels to deter and, if necessary, defeat Soviet aggression.

A basic underlying tenet of flexible response is the concept of forward defense--the notion that a conventional defense must be established as far forward as possible along the NATO-Pact border. Obviously, the need for a forward defense and the dependence of the defensive battle on overseas reinforcements are the areas of vulnerability threatened by the Soviets' newly developed capability to launch a major assault with little prior warning.

What should we do to counter the menace of the high-speed Russian Bear? The Nunn-Bartlett report proposes a series of steps to be taken. First, on the political side, the senators recommend that a conference of key NATO military and political leaders be convened to develop "ways to speed up the political decisions required to meet unexpected Warsaw Fact mobilization."⁵

On the military side, a list of eight essential tasks is presented. First, say the authors, "current U.S. force planning assumptions as to the prior warning time and likely duration of a future conflict in Europe must be revised."⁶

Second, "current postural deficiencies which threatened NATO's ability to conduct a successful forward defense should be corrected with the aim of permitting the alliance to wage the main defense battle close to the inter-German border."⁷ Specifically, the "covering" forces facing potential Pact invasion points "should be strengthened to the degree necessary to compel the Pact forces to deploy for major battle before they enter NATO territory."⁸ To accomplish this strengthening, NATO forces currently deployed in the Central Region must be shifted to the east and north, with some units currently deployed along or west of the Rhine being moved forward to assigned wartime positions.

Third, according to the report, NATO forces must be provided with more artillery, antitank, and air defense systems. Fourth, ammunition stocks must be increased, with priority on increasing artillery allocations from 55 up to 350 rounds per tube per day.⁹

In addition to these first four steps, the combat readiness of deployed forces must be improved. Air defense must also be improved by better integration of existing assets. The NATO command and control system must be upgraded, particularly by the addition of the Airborne Warning and Control System. The capability for rapid transfer of U.S. and British reinforcements to the Central Region must be enhanced, and finally, "interoperability of arms and equipment within the Alliance must be relentlessly pursued."¹⁰

The political and military measures proposed in the Nunn-Bartlett report, particularly the redeployment of forces to eastern and northern Germany, represent a continuing endorsement of the NATO forward defense concept. In fact, it can be argued that the prescribed measures represent proposals for a strategy for NATO similar to that proposed by General Hollingsworth for the defense of South Korea. Regarding Korea, General Hollingsworth insisted that the notion of trading space for time be discarded in favor of blunting a North Korean invasion with firepower and then carrying the battle into North Korean territory.

Can the same type of "positive thinking" applicable to the narrow confines of the Korean peninsula be transferred to Europe? Can a Soviet thrust be blunted at the border by strengthened NATO "covering" forces and then cut off by a drive eastward to the Elbe?

Maybe so! But there are some factors that perhaps should be considered before we start a redeployment of NATO forces to the eastern and northern regions of Germany. For example, even in the confines of Western Europe, the Soviets retain strategic flexibility that may make forward eastern-oriented deployments dangerous.

Suppose, for example, that the Soviets have their own editions of Liddell Hart and will forswear the "direct approach" to NATO's demise across the North German plain in the direction of Antwerp. Instead, that they opt for the "indirect approach" and search for the "joint" in NATO's defenses. Where might they find it? The answer may well vary with the circumstances of the time, but France might be a good place to look in view of her tentative relations with the alliance.

Consider the following scenario. The Soviets, intent on an attack on the alliance, provoke or stage an incident involving the French government. In a secret ultimatum, they demand passage for their forces across southern Germany and maintain that they seek only redress from the French. The NATO allies, seeing an obvious ploy, choose to resist. The Soviets on crossing the German border attempt a psychological dislocation of the alliance by playing on traditional Franco-German enmity and loudly propagandizing their basic friendly intent toward the Germans.

Such a maneuver may seem far-fetched, but so did the Berlin-Moscow Pact prior to World War II. It does have the distinct advantage, as did Sherman's drive to the sea, of continuously threatening multiple objectives. Will the Soviets turn north or continue west against the French border? Once inside France, will they drive toward Paris or press on, à la Guderian, to the sea and the Low Countries to sever NATO's sea lines of communication? Far-fetched? Perhaps, but it is 500 miles from Switzerland to the North Sea, and the Soviets do have a degree of flexibility that would place a premium on NATO's maintenance of centrally located, highly mobile strike forces.

Even if the "direct approach" across the north German plain is considered in-finitely more likely than the foregoing scenario, both the Nunn-Bartlett forward deployment prescription and the concept of forward defense require examination.

Consider the following factors.

·First, Soviet numerical superiority in the Central Region is universally granted.

·Second, these numerically superior forces have been specifically trained to pursue a blitzkrieg doctrine of the kind postulated in Fuller's Plan 1919 and later perfected by the German Wehrmacht. The emphasis is not on gaining or holding terrain, or even on the destruction of the enemy force. The objective is instead to strike deep into the enemy's rear to demoralize, dislocate, and hopefully defeat -him without even deploying for a major encounter.

·Third, if the Nunn-Bartlett thesis is correct, the Soviets will be able to come very close to complete strategic surprise, launching their assault with little warning. Certainly they will achieve a considerable degree of tactical surprise, massing overwhelming force at points of their choosing in order to force initial breakthroughs.

·Finally, keep in mind that the north German plain is no longer a vast agricultural openness. Urban areas such as Hamburg, Bremen, and Göttingen are constantly expanding. These cities will be the logical target of any Soviet breakthrough. Their occupation has political value, and it denies NATO the nuclear option. These cities, also, constitute gaps in the NATO defense. They are not considered acceptable battlegrounds by the alliance, and training for urban warfare is therefore minimal.¹¹

What does all this add up to? In sum it is an extremely high probability of a Soviet breakthrough along the inter-German border. The effect of deploying troops too far forward in the face of such a probability is simply to increase the size of the force encircled by the Soviet armored pincers. The Soviets are quite familiar with the phenomenon. The creation of great pockets on the Eastern Front gave them an object lesson in the error of deploying too far forward and then committing reserves in an attempt to hold as much territory as possible.¹²

The Nunn-Bartlett report would perhaps have done more service to the alliance if it had placed greater emphasis on the creation of a mobile defense in depth. At one point, the report says that "Corrective action in this regard should not be misinterpreted as a call for the creation of a Maginot Line along the inter-German border at the expense of powerful active forces withheld in the rear as a flexible reserve." But, the same paragraph continues "It is a call, however, for a shift in the weight of NATO's combat firepower deployed in the Central Region to the east and to the north."¹³

A shift in emphasis to the creation of a series of strong points supported by artillery and mechanized counterattack fortes might be more appropriate. The very existence of such strong points serves as a deterrent to execution of a classical blitzkrieg thrust. The enemy knows that he must reduce them or run the risk of counterthrusts that will cut his communications and isolate his armored spearhead. The alliance should prepare such strong points and ensure the effectiveness of their counterattack forces by replacing their "leg" infantry divisions with mechanized infantry as rapidly as possible. These forces should be provided with a mechanized combat infantry vehicle and supported by self-propelled artillery as well as armored launching vehicles for antitank missiles such as the tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided (TOW), two-stage missile.

On the strategic level, instead of endorsing the current NATO concept of forward defense and attempting to maintain a tactical nuclear option that probably does not exist anyway, Senators Nunn and Bartlett should have stressed the ugly but likely prospect of a Soviet breakthrough and penetration. The truth is that the Soviets have everything going for them in this regard. They have the numbers, the equipment, and the doctrine. What's more, they will almost certainly have the initiative. The allied game has to be one of holding the shoulders of the breakthrough and then isolating the Soviet spearheads with fast-moving, mechanized counter-attacks.

In short, the facts presented in the Nunn-Bartlett report should give rise to an examination of both the strategy and deployment of NATO forces. But these same facts also support alternatives other than those prescribed by the senators, and these, too, should be considered before a definitive course is selected for the NATO alliance.

Notes

1. Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Dewey F. Bartlett NATO and the New Soviet Threat (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977).

2. Ibid., p. 16.

3. Ibid., p. 4.

4. Ibid., p. 7.

5. Ibid., p.19.

6. Ibid., p.18.

7. Ibid., p.19.

8. Ibid., Emphasis added.

9. F. Clifton Berry, Jr., "NATO Readiness-Frank Talk at Last" Armed Forces Journal International, March 1977, p. 24.

10. Nunn and Bartlett, p.20.

11. Major A. B. Hemesley, "NATO Defensive Concepts," Armor, November-December 1976, p. 26.

12. Chance Messenger, The Blitzkrieg Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), p. 189.

13. Nunn and Bartlett, p. 19.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard J. Stachurski (B.A., Manhatten College; B.S., State University of New York) is a program element monitor at headquarters USAF. He has been a Minuteman launch control officer and also served as a Project Apollo flight controller assigned to NASA. He was a program manager at the Remotely Piloted Vehicle System Program Office, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio. Colonel Stachurski is a graduate of Squadron Officer School and the Defense Systems Management College.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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