A "One-Dimensional" World Power

By John Kohan

In a mobilized society, the military's influence is pervasive

Unlike Leonid Brezhnev, who loved to wear row upon row of medals, Yuri Andropov kept his army general's uniform in the closet. But if the late Soviet leader gave every appearance of being a civilian, his ties to the military Establishment came under increasing scrutiny during his brief tenure. Andropov, it was believed, owed a debt to the military because Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov had backed him in the race to succeed Brezhnev. In what many saw as a disquieting sign of the brass hats' growing power, it was the military's Chief of Staff, Nikolai Ogarkov, who stepped forward to explain the Soviet decision to shoot down Korean Air Line Flight 007 last September. Now, as the Soviets go through another transition, a critical question remains unanswered. Does the military play an increasingly influential role within the closed world of the Kremlin?

Beyond the medieval crenelated walls of the Moscow citadel, Soviet society certainly seems to the outsider to be in a permanent state of mobilization. In the streets of the Soviet capital, civilians stand patiently in long, dreary lines outside shops, as if wartime rationing were still in force, while above them huge 1930s-style posters show jut-jawed young men and women shouting slogans. Columns of army trucks filled with uniformed soldiers can sometimes be seen rumbling through city centers. There is even a military presence at soccer matches, when soldiers encircle the playing field to keep rowdy fans in order. Every town of any importance has a monument to the 20 million Soviets who died in World War II. Often the memorials are guarded by rosy-cheeked youths who carry automatic rifles (unloaded) and wear the red neckerchief of the Pioneers, the Soviet equivalent of scouts. On their wedding day, young brides and grooms go to war memorials to lay floral tributes to fallen soldiers. On park benches, old men playing chess wear rows of ribbons that attest to their military service.

The Reagan Administration has based its defense and arms-control policies on the premise that for the first time the Soviet Union has moved significantly ahead in most important measures of military power. The U.S.S.R. has outstripped the U.S. in weapons production over the past decade. According to a Pentagon report issued last year, the Soviets have built 2,000 ICBMs, compared with 350 for the U.S.; 6,000 new combat aircraft, vs. 3,000 for the U.S.; 85 new surface warships, compared with 72 for the U.S.; and 61 attack submarines, against 27 for the U.S. When it comes to tanks and armored vehicles, the U.S.S.R. has outproduced the U.S. by 54,000 to 11,000. According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser in the Carter Administration, Moscow's arms buildup at the expense of development in other areas has turned the Soviet Union into a "onedimensional" world power.

Despite the ominous portents, many experts dispute the notion that under Andropov the military significantly gained power as an institution. They hold that the armed services have been, and will continue to be, a faithful servant of the party. The Soviet Union, says University of Edinburgh Political Science Professor John Erickson, has "a neutralized military Establishment in a militarized state." A Soviet analyst explains the phenomenon differently: "What many Westerners do not understand is that in our system the military truly does take orders from the party. They are like a fire brigade. They are called out when there is a fire and then go back to the fire station. They know their place. Their role has always been a subordinate one."

When the Red Army was organized, party leaders were careful to assign political commissars to carry on propaganda work among the rank and file, a system that is still in effect today. The chain of command in the Soviet military ensures that the Communist Party is in charge. Explains Uri Ra'anan of the Fletcher School of Tufts University: "Soviet military doctrine is not made by military people. It is made by the Defense Council, which is overwhelmingly run by the party leadership."

The all pervasive role of the military in Soviet life ultimately has little to do with the ebb and flow of Kremlin politics and intraparty squabbling. Protecting the homeland has been an obsession of Russian leaders throughout the centuries, as they contended with Mongol hordes from the East and Teutonic knights from the West. That overriding concern will not change with a new man in power. Says a West European diplomat in Moscow: "If Ustinov says to the Politburo, 'Comrades, I cannot guarantee the security of the state unless the military gets X, Y, Z,' he gets X, Y, Z. Security takes precedence over everything."

The current preoccupation with national survival began with the Nazi surprise attack on June 22, 1941, a date that flickers like an eternal flame in the memory of all Soviets. At a time when faith in the official ideology is faltering, continuing calls from the Communist leadership to remember the suffering of the war years are aimed at forging a patriotic link with the nation. Ustinov used the theme to express Soviet concern with new threats to national survival in his Victory Day address last May: "The experience of World War II convincingly shows us that to prevent [war's] outbreak one has to have united, coordinated offensive action by all the peace-loving forces."

Soviet strategists talk of the need to avert nuclear war but they are still prepared to fight one, if necessary. Unlike the U.S., the Soviet Union has an extensive paramilitary civil defense system that employs 100,000 people. Many foreign analysts think such a program indicates Moscow believes it can survive a nuclear war. But Soviet citizens pessimistically refer to the organization by its acronym, GROB, which means coffin in Russian. No amount of security seems to affect the psychology of insecurity. After a local official in the republic of Georgia had a briefing for party activists to explain the Andropov attack on Reagan policies, he was approached by women on the verge of tears who wanted to know if there was going to be a war.

Whatever Washington may say about the Kremlin's growing military might, there is no sign that Soviet civilian leaders or the military establishment feel more secure today. Observed London's respected weekly, the Economist: "Their insecurity problem has become other people's security problem."

A major difficulty in sizing up the Soviet military machine is figuring out how much it costs. The Kremlin publishes a single figure for its defense budget each year ($22.8 billion in 1983), but Western intelligence experts believe the true amount is ten times as large. Still there is a wide margin for error. Though the CIA had reported that the Soviets were increasing military spending by 4% a year, agency analysts published a report last November stating that the rate of growth may have been only 2% in each of the past seven years.

The truth is that no one really knows how much the Soviets spend to maintain their status as a superpower. The Soviet civilian and military sectors are simply too intertwined to separate. The military today is the principal consumer of Soviet industrial output, with at least 135 major defense plants and 3,500 related factories across the country. Typically, the aviation plant that manufactures MiG-25 fighters also makes domestic products like washing machines. The logic is simple: a factory that produces tanks on one assembly line and tractors on another can easily expand military output in the event of war. Says Robert Pfaltzgraff, president of the Massachusetts-based Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis: "The Soviet Union is a military-industrial complex."

The civilian economy is the clear loser in this arrangement. To ensure that the military receives the very best, uniformed officers oversee production from the start of research and development until the finished product rolls off the assembly line. If they accept only one of 100 electrical switches, for example, the rest will find their way into the civilian economy. Says a Western businessman with long trading experience in the Soviet Union: "If a tank comes down the line and something is not right, they get the workers to do it over again. But civilian assembly lines are allowed to turn out junk."

The defense sector suffers few of the shortcomings of the civilian economy. One reason is that the military makes little pretense of being egalitarian. A 22-year-old graduate of a technical institute who lands a job in a military plant discovers immediately that he is working with superior equipment. Moreover, since defense industries are given priority in raw materials, the factory producing arms has a much better chance of meeting or exceeding production targets. For the worker this means consistently higher bonuses than his civilian counterparts are likely to receive, plus such valued perks as better housing. By contrast, civilian employees have few incentives to work harder.

Moreover, while competition is all but unknown in the civilian sector, more than one design bureau might be asked to develop the same weapon. After years of close cooperation with the military establishment, several "families" of weapons producers have evolved. The Sukhoi and Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureaus, for example, produce Sukhoi and MiG jet fighters. Missiles are the specialty of the Yangel, Chelomei and Nadiradze bureaus. Often, test models from rival firms will be put into production simultaneously. The result: in a country where the selection of shoes or overcoats is limited, there are six different types of interceptor jets.

The Soviets are convinced they have no choice but to operate their military sector with such rigor: they know they can force their citizens to wear ill-fitting shoes but they cannot afford to fall far behind the West's steady technological innovation. In some cases, designers have tried to keep up with Western models. The MiG-23, for example, has the "swing-wing" look of the U.S. F-111. The need to adapt foreign ideas and keep up technologically with foreign mili tary equipment has introduced a capitalist-like competitiveness to military production that is woefully lacking in the domestic economy, where shoddy goods do not face the test of the marketplace. As a leading Soviet economist, Academician Vadim Trapeznikov says, "One of the mainsprings of progress is the comparison of the quality of goods with that of the products of other domestic and foreign firms. This is particularly apparent in the defense industry, where there is a permanent and inevitable comparison with foreign technology."

If much of the Soviet Union's industrial output cannot compete on world markets, its weaponry certainly can. Moscow has a political interest in meddling in Third World conflicts, but economics as well as ideology has driven the Soviets to become major players in the booming weapons market; foreign sales keep Soviet production lines operating at a lower cost per item and bring in badly needed hard currency. Between 1971 and 1981, Soviet arms sales to the Third World earned an estimated $21 billion in hard currency. Says U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs Lawrence Eagleburger: "Arms have become a larger portion of exports from the U.S.S.R. than from any other country."

The Soviet Union's arms clients are useful in providing valuable information on the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet weapons. The reports are not always upbeat. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the Syrian army lost more than 390 tanks, including 34 of the modern T-72s. The Syrian performance in the air was no better. Flying U.S.-built F-15s and F-16s, Israeli pilots downed 96 Soviet-built jets; one-fifth were newer-model MiG-25s and MiG-23s. Israeli pilots also wiped out 23 batteries of Soviet-built surface-to-air missiles. The official Soviet press dismissed the reports as CIA disinformation, but the Kremlin took them seriously enough and quickly dispatched several high-level military delegations to survey the destruction.

U.S. military analysts warn that such performances should not lead the West to become too complacent. Many of the Soviet weapons sold abroad are stripped-down older models; often they are used by poorly trained troops. As an example of a first-rate Soviet product, American experts point to the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle. Simple, reliable and versatile, it is the favored weapon of guerrillas from Central America to Southeast Asia. The Soviet-built RPG-7 antitank rocket launcher is also easy to operate and has proved lethal in the fighting in Lebanon.

Still, even Soviet servicemen equipped with the best Soviet weaponry often fall short of the Pentagon's image of the Soviet military as a fighting force. On paper, for example, Soviet air-defense forces command a string of 7,000 radar installations and 2,300 interceptor jets. Yet the fact that two Korean civilian aircraft were able to stray into Soviet airspace without being rapidly intercepted suggests that the defense shield is sievelike in spots.

The formidable Soviet fleet also has flaws, despite its success at projecting Soviet power in ports of call from Cuba to Mauritius. Although larger than the U.S. Navy in numbers of warships, the Soviet surface fleet still lacks anything as sophisticated as a U.S. aircraft carrier. Soviet nuclear-powered submarines are thought to give off so much radiation that Soviet sailors morbidly joke that members of the northern fleet are easily identifiable be cause they glow in the dark. During the past eight months, one nuclear sub foundered in deep water off the Siberian pen insula of Kamchatka and a second was disabled off the U.S. East Coast when the craft's propeller became entangled in an undersea surveillance cable.

No matter how sweeping Admiral Sergei Gorshkov's vision of a navy that can "protect state interests on the seas and oceans," his fleet cannot transcend the limitations of geography . Reports that some 40 freighters and tankers were trapped in ice-clogged Arctic seas last fall underscore the restraints that the absence of warm-water ports has imposed on Russian dreams of being a maritime power. Two of the Soviet Union's four fleets can gam access to the sea only through strategic waterways that are not under Soviet control, the Baltic Sea and the Dardanelles.

Pentagon officials are particularly concerned about the quantitative lead the Sovi et Union holds in manpower with its 3.7 million men, in contrast to 2.1 million for the U.S. The Soviet conscription system is indeed impressive. On a single day every spring and autumn, about half a million 18-year-old males cram into flag-bedecked train stations across the Soviet Union as they set off to begin mandatory military service. Except for those who have been selected for three-year stints in the navy and border guard, the new draftees will begin two years of rigorous training, living in spartan barracks and eating such fare as greasy soup, cabbage, potatoes and salted fish. In the event of war, the military can draft 5 million more men from active reserve and an additional 40 million who are obliged to answer the call until age 50.

But the Soviet fighting machine may not be as awesome as the one that NATO strategists sometimes conjure up. When the situation in Poland deteriorated in December 1980 and Soviet divisions were put in a heightened state of readiness, the Carpathian, Baltic and Byelorussian military districts called up reservists. According to unconfirmed reports, the exercise was a shambles. Many failed to show up, and some who responded to the call-up deserted rather than spend cold nights in tents. By the end of January 1981, five of the ten top posts in commands bordering on Poland had changed hands, a signal that all was not well on the western front.

After four years in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union's "limited contingent" of 105,000 men still seems far from winning a decisive victory over anti-Communist rebels. Moscow's forces had not previously engaged in combat outside the Soviet bloc since 1945, and from the start they appeared to be unprepared for the mujahedin's hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. In recent months, Soviet military journals have devoted considerable space to the problems of mountain combat, pointing out that Soviet soldiers have not been adequately trained to cope with communication and equipment breakdowns in rugged terrain with fluctuating temperatures.

Military officials have found it difficult to meld a national, Russian-speaking army from the more than 100 ethnic groups in the Soviet population. Whatever suspicions the leadership might have had about the political reliability of non-Slavic minorities were reinforced when Central Asian reservists assigned to Afghanistan began buying Korans and passing ammunition and guns to Muslim rebels. Not surprisingly, the majority of conscripts who are assigned to noncombat battalions are believed to come from non-Slavic minorities.

Such examples of cracks in the formidable Soviet military facade suggest that some Pentagon analysts have become mesmerized by the sheer size of the Soviet colossus. Indeed, a number of skeptics within the Western military Establishment have long believed that NATO and U.S. assessments of the Soviet machine represent "threat inflation," the deliberate overstatement of Soviet might in order to win larger budgets for weapons programs. Says Andrew Cockburn, author of The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine: "It may be that the military on either side is engaged not so much in an arms race as in simply doing what it wants for its own institutional reasons. The other side is relevant only in that it serves as a convenient excuse for these unilateral activities."

Even if that is so, a Soviet army vastly inferior in weaponry to today's ground forces defended Stalingrad against the Nazis in an epic, five-month struggle that was a turning point in World War II. The Soviets astonished the world again in October 1957 when they launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, despite a technological gap with the West far greater than the present one. And whatever account one believes of the Korean Air Lines calamity, the fact remains that a Soviet pilot did fire on the intruding jumbo jet. Given the growing size and complexity of both superpower arsenals, there is every reason to be concerned about the risk of future accidents and conflicts.

Confronted with the Reagan Administration's commitment to an improvement in U.S. defense, the new Kremlin leadership will face tough choices as it decides how to allocate resources in its new Five-Year Plan, due to begin in 1986. There are already signs that the Soviet military-industrial complex may be feeling the squeeze. Among the 25 principal classes of armament, production has declined in 13 between 1977 and 1981. That drop may indicate that the Kremlin has built its arsenal up to strength. But it could also reflect the stagnation in the civilian economy, as producers fail to supply quality steel and as bottlenecks in rail transport hold up vital raw materials needed by defense contracts.

If the military is impatient about the inefficiency and corruption that have settled into the Soviet civilian economy, that concern has not resulted in changes that will challenge the status quo. Explains a Soviet analyst: "Whatever its deficiencies, central planning served us well when we had to mobilize the energies of the population in World War II. Is this really the time to start trying experiments when the nation is again in peril? This is what the military will be asking."

For the foreseeable future, the long-suffering Soviet consumer will have to continue paying for the inherent contradiction of Soviet society: the desire to be a military superpower while having the economy of a semiadvanced nation. Says Economist Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center: "The Soviets have the slimmest waistlines in the world. They can always tighten their belts another notch."

But the new man in the Kremlin will have to face a fundamental if revolutionary fact: the Soviet Union will be able truly to change only when it is ruled by people who realize that there are measures of international prestige other than numbers of missiles, tanks and men. --ByJohn Kohan. Reported by Erik Amtitheatrof/Moscow and Bruce van Voorst/Washington

With reporting by Erik Amfitheatrof, BRUCE VAN VOORST