Air University Review, September-October 1984

International Order and American Power

THERE is no debate about the general goals of U.S. foreign policy: we seek peace and security. If the United States does not have adequate security, it will not enjoy peace for very long--or at least it will not have peace on terms with which Americans would want to live.

The capabilities, declarations, and actions that collectively are termed defense policy should flow from the goals of foreign policy. Too much of the debate in this country about security matters is conducted out of political context. For example, one cannot make sense of the MX missile system unless one specifies the foreign policy burdens that argue for such a capability. In the words of former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger:

The authorization of the MX missile goes to the heart of the foreign policy objectives of the United States . . . It goes to the heart of arms control, it goes to the heart of our alliance relations.¹

Schlesinger was alluding to the long-standing fact that U.S. strategic nuclear forces are not designed solely to deter massive attack on the American homeland. They are also charged with providing a credible nuclear umbrella over distant allies in contexts where the forces deployed locally are known to be inadequate to withstand a Soviet assault. Strategic forces for extended deterrence must be capable of being employed flexibly against Soviet military targets.²

The same point can (and should) be applied more broadly. The quantity and quality of U.S. nuclear forces, as well as conventional and special forces, make sense only in terms of the security commitments with which U.S. foreign policy burdens U.S. defense policy. If one favors a great reduction in the scale of the U.S. defense effort, then one should favor a dramatic reduction also in the scale of U.S. overseas security commitments.

In principle, the United States does have a choice in foreign policy, therefore in the required character of its defense policy, and--by extrapolation--in the number and variety of weapons that it buys.³ At the present, the United States is the principal and essential organizer or guardian of Western security. That role emerged from the collapse of the European balance-of-power system in the first half of the twentieth century.

An important distinction that often is neglected is that between survival interests and vital interests.⁴ A survival interest is an interest that must be supported (fought for, if need be) if one's nation is to survive. A vital interest is an interest worth fighting for but not one that must be fought for to preserve the nation itself.

The United States has a survival interest in avoiding nuclear war. But many people fail to notice that the immediate danger of nuclear war lurks not in the defense strategy chosen, mix of weapon systems acquired, and quality of arms control policy but rather in our adherence to security commitments overseas that bring the United States directly into conflict with the Soviet Union and its clients. If avoidance of nuclear war is the overriding priority (which, of course, it is not), there is something to be said for the United States' removing itself from those security entanglements that could lead to nuclear confrontation. The United States cannot perform in what amounts to a global guardianship role on the cheap. Anyone who proposes drastic cuts in the defense effort without, simultaneously, proposing a drastic reduction in foreign policy commitments in Europe, the Middle East, the Gulf, and East Asia is encouraging the United States to accept greater risks than it does today.

Soviet Power

It is essential that the character of Soviet power be addressed very explicitly. Regardless of what one thinks U.S. defense policy should be, the following points about the Soviet Union need to be understood. First, the Soviet Union is an imperial power that feels threatened by everything, that it does not control. Soviet definition of its security needs is incompatible with the security of others.

Second, the Soviet reading of history, as well as Soviet state ideology, mandates relentless struggle against enemies within and without. The political legitimacy of the domestic authority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union rests substantially, though not exclusively, on its claim to be the interpreter of the correct theory of historical change.⁵ By Soviet definition, the Soviet Union cannot wage an unjust war, while its weapons--again by definition--are stabilizing instruments and forces for peace; U.S. weapons, on the other hand, are destabilizing (the latter is a political view, not a technical one). A general settlement of differences is not feasible with the Soviet state. The Soviet Union does not have finite security objectives that it can be allowed--after which it will settle back as a satisfied power.

Third, the basic fuel for Soviet antipathy toward the United States does not lie in objections to particular policies or weapons, although particular U.S. initiatives have triggered unusually forceful Soviet reactions. Rather, the Soviet quarrel with the United States is a quarrel with the existence of the United States as an independent security-organizing power in world politics.

Fourth, in worst imperial fashion, everything in Soviet security reasoning is connected to everything else. The Soviet Union is a multinational state in which the loyalty of a large fraction of non-Russian Soviet citizens to Moscow is questionable. The tranquillity of the Soviet territorial empire is threatened by movements for independence in the hegemonic empire in Eastern Europe.⁶ In their turn, the imperial "holdings" in Eastern Europe are imperiled by the social, economic, and political attractions of Western Europe; and the political independence of Western Europe is underwritten by the United States.

Fifth, Soviet leaders are careful opportunists, nor "gangsters in a hurry" like the leaders of Nazi Germany. In geopolitical terms, Soviet long-range goals may usefully be appreciated in terms of two phases: first, to expel U.S. influence and security organization from the Eurasian periphery (i.e., to deny access); second, having confined the United States very largely to the Western Hemisphere and thereby achieved a revolution in the global correlation of forces, to outcompete with an isolated United States in all the crucial categories of power.⁷

This argument may be presented in terms of realpolitik, ideology, or some judicious mix of the two. Similarly, one may cast the Soviet Union in offensive or defensive character--it really does not matter very much. The point is that the Soviet Union does not, and really cannot accept the idea that what it defines as nonprogressive elements in the world have legitimate interests. Thus, Soviet defense efforts must not be interpreted solely or even largely as responsive reactions to the U.S. (or any other) threat.

The name of the game in Eurasia is political intimidation in the shadow of military power. Of course, the Soviet Union does not want nuclear war; but one should recognize that the Soviet state has been at war with the Western democracies since 1917, in the sense of conducting what can be understood as a "war in peace."⁸ In Soviet eyes, as Lenin made abundantly clear, any tactical accommodation is acceptable, provided it serves longer-run Soviet interests.⁹ The arms control process between the superpowers is, on the Soviet side, one among many instruments of political struggle. Yet this circumstance does not mean that the United States cannot do business with the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders are realists and will endorse tactical agreements for pragmatic reasons of near-term advantage or risk management.

Principles for
U.S.-Soviet Relations

The United States plays the key role in organizing essential countervailing power to the Soviet Union. If the United States should cease to perform this role, no one else will (or can) substitute. There is no replacement candidate with sufficient power to perform the erstwhile U.S. global guardian mission. The Soviet Union would like nothing better than for the United States to withdraw its forces and its security commitments from around the littoral of Eurasia. In that happy event, in Soviet perspective, Soviet security relations with the states of peninsular Europe, the Middle East, the Gulf, and East Asia could be conducted on a one-to-one basis, where the disproportion in diplomatic weight would ensure very one-sided relationships indeed. The Soviet Union would like to see its relations with every country currently beyond the borders of its empire conducted after the model of its relationship with Finland. The Soviet Union, for certain, does not want to occupy Western Europe, but it does want the kind of respect that would allow it veto authority over the security policies of Western Europeans.

Several summary points are relevant here. First, one should recall the Golden Rule of History, that is, those with the weapons make the rules. Unlike Great Britain and the United States, Russia/the Soviet Union has not enjoyed a geographically based security that enabled it to neglect the Golden Rule. Furthermore, the Soviet Union is not interested in resting its security on goodwill. Soviet leaders require the respect and obedience that comes more reliably from fear. While it is true that nothing remains unchanged forever and that the Soviet Union of fifty or a hundred years from now may be considerably different from that of yesterday or today, one cannot foresee the future. U.S. policy must be designed to cope with the world as it is.

No one can guarantee that his preferred policies will ensure peace and security. But the history of statecraft in general and the record of American relations with the Soviet Union in particular suggest some thoughts that should help guide the design and execution of U.S. foreign policy.¹⁰

First, an authoritarian state that is seeking total security will not respond benignly to gestures of goodwill, measures of unilateral disarmament, or the dismantling of rival military alliances.

Second, American behavior today feeds expectations for tomorrow. The greatest barrier to miscalculations that could produce war is a steadiness in U.S. policy and responses. A democracy that does not resist encroachment on its interests on four or five occasions can mislead an authoritarian state easily into not expecting a military reaction on a fifth or sixth occasion. The unpredictable drawing of lines, as the British did over Poland's frontiers in 1939 and as the United States did over Korea in 1950, is the stuff of which war by miscalculation is made.

Third, Soviet and Soviet-allied power flows wherever it is not opposed. It is almost always difficult to rationalize resistance in any particular instance. In and of itself, in American terms, U.S. territory aside, probably no piece of real estate is worth the serious risk of nuclear war. But a United States committed to the global containment of Soviet power and influence has to regard each of its overseas interests not only in the light of their intrinsic value for U.S. security but also in the context of their symbolic value. The U.S. reputation as a reliable provider of security is the greater part of the U.S. interest in most of the individual cases where American clients might be threatened by the Soviet Union or its clients.

Fourth, if the United States were to choose to behave on the basis of an overriding (and, in many ways, sensible) fear of nuclear war, it could be intimidated out of fulfilling any overseas foreign-policy commitment by a Soviet Union that seems less intimidated by nuclear dangers.

Fifth, in a nuclear age, it is not controversial to say that the United States must have a nuclear strategy.¹¹ Nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented, and nuclear threats are very important as a backstop to U.S. diplomacy because of the geography of East-West conflict (the United States and its allies have major and apparently enduring deficiencies in nonnuclear forces in Europe). Anyone who would do away with nuclear threat and the nuclear arms competition has to explain how the political structure of competition that sustains the arms race is first to be transformed.

A 1982 bestseller by Jonathan Schell painted a truly gothic picture of the risks that are endemic in a security system that rests on reciprocated nuclear threats, but the author failed in that work to explain how the necessary political transformation in human security arrangements might be effected.¹² Despite this nontrivial weakness in his analysis, Schell at least recognized that there can be no comprehensive escape for the human race from nuclear danger unless the political millenium can be made to happen. Subsequently, however, in replying to his many critics, Schell has attempted to design a proposal for nuclear safety that would not require the prior pooling of national sovereignties in a single global authority.¹³ Schell now seeks to persuade his readers that deterrence, including nuclear deterrence, would continue to function in a world of nuclear-disarmed states (there would be a fear of rearmament). It would be a gross understatement to say that the plausibility and rigor of his more recent argument leaves a very great deal to be desired.

Much of the more orthodox arms control literature suggests that the road to safety lies through better management of the arms competition. There is no prospect that START agreements could effect sufficient reductions in superpower nuclear arsenals to preclude the possibility that a nuclear war would trigger a so-called nuclear winter. For radical measures of nuclear disarmament to be even remotely feasible politically and strategically, the superpowers would need to deploy competent ballistic missiles and air defenses to "police" their officially disarmed counterparts.¹⁴

Implications for U.S. Policy

Even if the United States were to change its foreign policy drastically away from global containment and intervention, security travail and danger for Americans would not vanish as a consequence. The Soviet client-state system in Eurasia would expand, and the geopolitical terms of the Soviet-American competition would be altered greatly to the disadvantage of the United States. Just as the Bolsheviks discovered early in 1918 vis-à-vis Imperial Germany, one cannot simply declare "no war, no peace," go home, and expect an adversary who has very strong incentives to continue the struggle to abide by one's unilateral preference for a quieter life.¹⁵ As noted earlier, truly irresponsible people would cut U.S. military forces but seek to leave U.S. foreign policy intact. In other words, there would be far fewer means to protect U.S. overseas interests. Already, military limitations are a severe problem. U.S. foreign security commitments have grown since the early 1950s, as the United States inherited security duties on behalf of former colonies and clients of the European powers. But while the U.S. foreign policy burden has increased, the Soviet Union has transformed the military balance since the 1950s, neutralizing previously clear U.S. military advantages, particularly in the realms of strategic nuclear and naval forces.

If the United States were to step back from what, pejoratively, is called its "global policeman" role, peace would not break out (either for the United States or for others). Instead, local powers would have to find substitute policies for their previous American security connection. In some cases, the result would be nuclear proliferation; in many others, a prudential drift toward acceptance of a more or less tacit Soviet hegemony (a client-state relationship). The United States would find itself more and more isolated in the world--moreover, it would be so in a world that still contained a Soviet empire both committed to the downfall of its only first-class adversary and encouraged to press its claims by the plain evidence of American retreat.

A good argument can be turned into a bad argument if it is translated without finesse or discrimination into policy recommendations. It is important that the United States be a steadfast friend and ally, but that steadfastness must be understood to be of a contingent character. The United States should not write blank security checks for anybody (regardless of their regional behavior or domestic practices). If local clients persist in pursuing their local interests in ways that have the effect of transforming them into net security liabilities to the United States, then they should be abandoned to find their own salvation.

It should be clearly understood that a security-client relationship with the United States does not come cost-free. Clients cannot enjoy the benefit of U.S. protection and at the same time be at liberty to pursue military adventures (among other sins) of which the United States disapproves very strongly. From time to time, quite properly, the United States may choose to confine its disapproval to private remonstrance only. Such will be the case in circumstances where a net assessment of the costs and benefits to U.S. security of continuing the formal security connection proves to be positive. Needless to say perhaps, abandonment and "support as usual" comprise only the poles on the range of policy possibilities. More often than not, the foreign policy choice is not one of either/or.

A good example of just how difficult the role of security provider can be is the case of U.S. relations with Greece and Turkey. In geostrategic terms, Greece is important to the United States, but Turkey is essential. The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 posed a most undesirable choice between allies for U.S. policymakers. Sometimes choice cannot be avoided (as between Britain and Argentina in 1982), but of ten, clear choice can be evaded (as between Greece and Turkey)--though at a price. The general consequence of the evasion of clear choice is that all local parties to the dispute come to view the United States as an insufficiently steadfast ally.

The United States must be willing to back its diplomacy with force where necessary. Certainly, it should be slow to anger and should remember that military power often is most effective when it is not expended in action.¹⁶ Nonetheless, a reputation for meaning what one says is essential. There are rare occasions when there is no substitute for military deterrence and, if need be, for the use of force (for example, in a British case, over the Falklands). Timely demonstration of a willingness to defend a vital interest can preclude very dangerous misperceptions.

Soviet and Cuban policies will, of course, seek to exploit whatever opportunities for mischief local conditions permit. It is important that international perceptions to the effect that there is a "tide of history" favoring Soviet-assisted elements be corrected and reversed, and those perceptions can be corrected and reversed only as a consequence of actions, not by words alone (which is why the Grenada operation in October 1983 was so significant). People who contemplate asking assistance of Cuba or the Soviet Union should understand that major risks for them will accompany such assistance.

I do not favor a trigger-happy United States, glorying in an international "bully" role and simplemindedly defining any and every local conflict in terms of the East-West competition. Just as nobody wants nuclear war, nobody desires indiscriminate military intervention overseas.

The contemporary architecture of American foreign policy is both necessary and honorable. It is necessary for the preservation of U.S. national security and for the maintenance of the global balance of power and such international order as we enjoy. It is honorable in that it is intended, insofar as real-world conditions permit, to sustain and encourage the values that are central to decent human existence.

FINALLY, it is necessary to address directly the question of risk to Americans implied thus far. There can be no ignoring the fact that the survival of the United States and its people is threatened most immediately by Soviet military power as a consequence of the security guarantees that the U.S. government has extended to countries around the periphery of Eurasia. The first-strike requirement with which U.S. long-range theater and strategic nuclear forces are burdened reflects not U.S. choice in nuclear strategy but, rather, the logical necessity of providing a deterrent continuum against the contingency of unfolding regional defeat on the ground.

It is likely that the United States could secure some considerable near-term relief from the danger of nuclear war if it were to decide to contract its defense perimeter back to the Western Hemisphere (and perhaps selectively even there) and to abandon, unambiguously, the grand strategy of global containment that it has pursued since the late 1940s. The occasions for superpower confrontation, so the argument proceeds, would have to shrink dramatically if the United States ceased to act as the supportive keystone in the arch of anti-Soviet alliances around littoral Eurasia.

However, apparently commonsense logic that holds that security guarantees are simply too dangerous to the guarantor in a nuclear-armed world neglects some inescapable facts of our age.¹⁷ First, the United States is not at liberty to decide to cultivate its garden inoffensively in North America--leaving the Old World to settle its security dilemmas as best it can. As I have argued earlier, Soviet-American competition is inescapable.

Second, the nuclear age is irreversible. The most crucial atomic secret was revealed in 1945 at Alamagordo, New Mexico: the atomic bomb worked. There are no alternatives to the nuclear age. Just as the United States cannot find security through choosing once again to retire from world politics, so it cannot remove definitively the nuclear threat to its existence by any measure of unilateral or even negotiated bilateral (or multilateral) nuclear disarmament. If nuclear disarmament should ever be feasible, so would nuclear rearmament if the political incentive were present.

Third, nuclear dangers may be alleviated to some modest degree by strengthening conventional deterrence, but both history and logic suggest that the United States cannot escape the worst of nuclear dangers by emphasizing nonnuclear defense preparation. Deterrence may be enhanced were Soviet military planners and political leaders to be decreasingly confident that they could achieve rapid success in a conventional blitzkrieg in Europe.¹⁸ However, it is prudent to reason that Soviet leaders could never be wholly confident that they could control the type of weaponry that would be employed in a massive attack against a heavily nuclear-armed NATO. Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that conservative Soviet leaders would attach more importance to the war/peace threshold than to the conventional (chemical?)/nuclear one. A Soviet Union sufficiently motivated politically to choose to invade NATO-Europe would be, one should presume, a Soviet Union sufficiently determined and prepared to employ whatever kind and quantity of weapons might be required for the securing of victory in the theater. It should be noted that NATO-European governments have been scarcely more enthusiastic about providing the means for the strengthening of conventional deterrence than they have been about designing a theater nuclear warfighting doctrine and posture for the restoration of deterrence.¹⁹

Given that the nuclear age cannot be rescinded and that fundamental Soviet enmity toward a United States that is beyond Soviet control is inescapable, it follows that the United States has no choice other than to seek to manage the threat posed by Soviet power to an international order that is compatible with the security of important American interests. No deus ex machina is going to rescue the United States from nuclear insecurity. However, nuclear-age dangers can be alleviated, though certainly not resolved, by steadiness in providing military deterrent muscle of all kinds and through energetic exploration of the technological possibilities for strategic defense of the United States and its allies. Active defenses against ballistic missiles, aircraft, and cruise missiles can do little to promote political peace, but they may be able to have a very marked, benign impact on the scale of danger to which the U.S. homeland is exposed as a result of the inalienable political struggle with the Soviet imperium.

Notes

1. Testimony in U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, President's Commission on Strategic Forces, Hearing, 98th Cong., 1st sess. (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 11 May 1983), p. 6.

2. The relationship between foreign policy commitments and nuclear strategy and forces is explored in Colin S. Gray and Keith B. Payne, "Nuclear Strategy: Is There a Future?" Washington Quarterly, Summer 1983, pp. 55-66; and Earl C. Ravenal, "Counterforce and Alliance: The Ultimate Connection," International Security, Spring 1982, pp. 26-43.

3. For a detailed examination of some alternative conceptions for U.S. national security policy, see Colin S. Gray, Basic U.S. Choices, 1982-2000 (Fairfax, Virginia: National Institute for Public Policy, March 1983), particularly chapters 10-12.

4. This distinction is made and applied rigorously in Donald E. Nuechterlein, "National Interests and National Strategy: The Need for Priority," in Terry L. Heyns, editor, Understanding U.S. Strategy: A Reader (Washington: National Defense University Press, 1983), pp. 35-63.

5. Other sources of legitimacy include the longevity of Soviet rule; the Party's role, real and fabricated, as organizer of victory in the Great Patriotic War; and the ability of the regime to satisfy the economic expectations, if not aspirations, of the Soviet peoples. A useful discussion of the issue of political legitimacy is Seweryn Bialer, Stalin's Successors,: Leadership, Stability, and Change in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), Chapter 9.

6. See Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union (London; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983); Helene C. d'Encausse, Decline of an Empire The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt (New York: Newsweek, 1979); and Gary L. Guertner, "Strategic Vulnerability of a Multinational State: Deterring the Soviet Union," Political Science Quarterly, Summer 1981, pp. 209-23.

7. On the geopolitics of Soviet-American competition, Colin S. Gray, The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands, and the Technological Revolution (New York: Crane, Russak, 1977).

8. Robert Bathurst, "Two Languages of War," in Derek Leebaert, editor, Soviet Military Thinking (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), Chapter 2.

9. Several examples in Soviet history illustrate short-tem accommodation to achieve long-term gains. In March 1918, the Soviet Republic accepted a humiliating peace treaty with Imperial Germany at Brest-Litovsk; while in August 1939, Stalin signed a nonaggression with Nazi Germny (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), which, de facto, bought time for the Soviet Union at the price of giving Hitler a free hand in the West. Lenin's rationale for accepting Brest-Litovsk may be found in V. I. Lenin, "Theses on the Question of the Immediate Conclusion of a Separate and Annexationist Peace," 20 January 1918, in Alvin Z. Rubinstein, editor, The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union, third edition (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 53-58. Both the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Molotov's official explanation of the rationale for the treaty can be found in the same work, pp. 136-44.

10. An excellent review of the history of Soviet-American negotiations is U.S. Congresss, House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Soviet Diplomacy and Negotiating Behavior: Emerging New Context for U.S. Diplomacy, Special Studies Series on Foreign Affairs Issues, Vol. 1 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979).

11. See Colin S. Gray, "Nuclear Strategy: A Regrettable Necessity," SAIS Review, Winter-Spring 1983, pp. 13-28.

12. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Knopf, 1982).

13. Jonathan Schell, The Abolition (New York: Knopf, 1984).

14. I have explored this question in some depth in Strategic Defense and National Security: The Policy Challenge, Information Series No. 159 (Fairfax, Virginia: National Institute for Public Policy, November 1983), and "In Defense of Disarmament," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 1984, pp. 46-47. For discussion of the issues of transition, see Keith B. Payne and Colin S. Gray, "Nuclear Policy and the Defense Transition," Foreign Affairs, Spring 1984, pp. 820-42.

15. See Adam Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy from 1917-1967 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968), p. 67. On 10 February 1918, Leon Trotsky "read to the dumb-founded enemy delegates a declaration that Russia was proclaiming the end of the war without signing a peace" (Emphasis in the original.)

16. A powerful exposition of this view is Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century, A.D. to the Third (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), particularly pp. 195-200.

17. The formal rationale for the development of France's force de frappe has always been that no country, no matter how honorable its intentions, can be trusted, or should be expected, to assume risks to its own survival on behalf of others. In recent years, some European commentators have expressed the fear that the U.S. nuclear guarantee may mean that Europeans security is hostage not so much to American firmness of will but rather to American steadiness and wisdom--both of which have been questioned severely. Henry Kissinger caused sizable tremors throughout NATO-Europe in 1979 when he said:". . . our European allies should not keep asking us to multiply strategic assurances that we cannot possibly mean or if we do mean, we should not want to execute because if we execute, we risk the destruction of civilization." See "The Future of NATO," in Kenneth A. Myers, editor, NATO: The Next Thirty Years (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1980), p. 8. This book comprised conference papers delivered in September 1979. European anxiety about the steadiness of U.S. policy isstrongly implied in Michael Howard, "Reassurance and Deterrence: Western Defense in the 1980s," Foreign Affairs, Winter 1982/83, pp. 309-24.

18. See European Security Study, Strengthening Conventional Deterrence in Europe: Proposals for the 1980s (New York: St. Martin's, 1983); Thomas A Callaghan, Jr., "Can Europe Be Defended?" Policy Review, Spring 1983, pp. 76-85; John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983); William W. Kaufmann, "Non-nuclear Deterrence," in John D. Steinbruner and Leon V. Sigal, editors, AIliance Security: NATO and the No-First-Use Question (Washington: Brookings, 1983), Chapter 4; Elmar Dinter and Paddy Griffith, Not over by Christmas: NATO's Central Front in World War III (Chichester, United Kingdom: Antony Bird, 1983); Richard K. Betts, "Conventional Strategy: New Critics, Old Choices," International Security, Spring 1983, pp. 140-62; and the subsequent "Correspondence" between Betts and Edward N. Luttwak in International Security, Fall 1983, pp. 176-82.

19. The long-term defense plan (LTDP) adopted by NATO in 1978 called for achievement of 3 percent per annum growth in real defense expenditures for a ten-year period in order to correct deficiencies across-the-board in conventional forces. As of 1984, the LTDP essentially is dead. For example, in November 1983, the British government announced that it would be unable to meet the requirements of the LTDP. While there are economic reasons for the unwillingness of most NATO-European countries to meet the LTDP goals, European distaste for a true conventional "warfighting" strategy goes far deeper than economic considerations alone. See Colin S. Gray, "NATO Defense and Arms-Reduction Proposals," Military Review, October 1983, pp. 62-68.

Colin S. Gray (Ph.D., Lincoln College, Oxford University) is president of the National Institute for Public Policy. He has been Director of National Security Policy Studies, Hudson Institute; Assistant Director, International Institute of Strategic Studies (London); and was a member of the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Dr. Gray's articles have appeared in numerous journals.

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.

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