Friendly Rivals by Thies Wallace J.;

Author:Thies, Wallace J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The outcomes cited thus far are of more than merely academic interest. Taken together, their effect during the Cold War was to enfeeble the alliance militarily and psychologically. The reluctance of the members to take the lead in building up their forces, the frequent resort to tactics for avoiding responsibility, the endless requirements for consultation, and the energy invested in arguments over cost shares computed to four decimal places all served to retard progress toward larger and better armed forces. By the same token, the proliferation of burden-sharing formulas, the members’ preoccupation with issues of marginal financial significance, and the intensity with which they argued that they were too poor to afford even slight increases in their military budgets all contributed to a psychological climate that encouraged the members to believe themselves weaker than they really were. “The states to whom was allotted the task of raising the forces proposed for the Central Front have included some of the most notable and successful military powers in modern history—the U.S.A., Britain, France and later Germany, with assistance from Canada, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Denmark,” yet they “never succeeded in reaching actual force figures commensurate with even their minimal strategic objectives.”35

Considering that during the Cold War the NATO countries were superior to the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies in population, wealth, and number of men under arms,36 it is surprising that the burden-shifting strategies employed by NATO members did not take the form of disparaging the Soviet threat. In effect, Americans and Europeans alike were constrained by their desire to shift burdens to each other to magnify rather than downplay threats from the east. American officials feared that the Europeans would seize on any apparent reduction in the Soviet threat as an excuse to do less; the Europeans worried that any diminution in the Soviet threat would unleash irresistible pressures in the United States for the withdrawal of American forces stationed in Europe.

Political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic thus had powerful incentives to accept without challenge the threat estimates provided by their intelligence agencies, which were often inflated by sloppy procedures and/or the parochial concerns of the military. “[O]f the 175 divisions the Soviets supposedly had under arms, we now know that many were paper units consisting only of a skeleton headquarters staff.” Even so, “American military intelligence in the late 1940s made no attempt to distinguish those units capable of fighting from those which existed in name only.”37 In June 1973 the NATO intelligence chief, Admiral Günter Poser, told the Defense Planning Committee that Warsaw Pact troops in the Central Region outnumbered NATO troops in the same region 700,000 to 350,000. Military analysts Richard Lawrence and Jeffrey Record note that the NATO figure is “quite mystifying” since at the time U.S. and West German ground forces alone numbered more than 450,000.38

In retrospect, a strong case can be made that inflated estimates of the Soviet threat had the effect of undercutting rather than supporting efforts by NATO members to shift burdens to their partners.

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