Global Communications and Political Power by Donald Wilhelm

Author:Donald Wilhelm [Wilhelm, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, Political Parties, Language Arts & Disciplines, Communication Studies, Globalization
ISBN: 9781412824644
Google: FhGIOiM1DaoC
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 1990-01-01T04:37:11+00:00

The place of power in the modern world is very well exemplified by the role of the Soviet armed forces. In Brian Moynahan’s carefully-researched book The Claws of the Bear: A History of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1917 to the Present, he characterises the Red Army (his shorthand for the Soviet armed forces) as “the world’s most powerful institution.”29 With more than five million men in its ranks (not to mention more than eleven million reservists), it is, for example, well over double the size of the U.S. armed forces. With its enormous submarine fleet (including the world’s largest individual subs), it has some of its submarines permanently on station just off the U.S. East coast, from which a single missile could vaporise Washington, D.C. within five minutes of the order to fire having been given. The Soviet armed forces have vast resources, and in important categories vast superiority over NATO, in the contemporary paraphernalia of war. The Soviet military’s all-pervasive satellite fleets girdle the earth.

Officially the Soviet armed forces are under the firm control of the Party, and Gorbachev seems determined to maintain the Party’s ascendency. The Red Army represents an enormous and prestigious establishment ensconced in the middle of a backward civilian economy, which Gorbachev is bending all efforts to improve. “Until it happens,” Moynahan suggests, “and it will be immensely difficult, Gorbachev remains in hock to senior officers.” In important respects, as we have noted, Gorbachev’s efforts parallel the earlier ones of Krushchev; and Moynahan reminds us that the October 1964 coup against Khrushchev was supported by the military.30

In the Soviet Union, according to Moynahan,

the military are the only consumers who are taken seriously. The defence ministry has its own huge complex of ‘closed’ factories which work only to its orders. Where it shares a plant with a civilian production line, the products are made to a different standard and under rigorous quality control. Military quality is better than export quality. The domestic consumer gets the…junk.

The Soviet military economy, he adds, is the one sector of the overall economy “that has performed brilliantly.”31 In his view, “The Red Army, not the Party, is the superpower.”32

That superpower, whether defined as the army or the country, has a global reach and a global outlook. Moreover, in the modern era, as Gregory C. Radabaugh of the U.S. Air Force has noted, “the Soviet Union has stated that victory in any terrestrial conflict cannot be achieved without control of space….”33 It must be remembered, adds John L. Piotrowski as Commander in Chief, North American Aerospace Command and United States Space Command, “that Soviet space war-fighting doctrine is an integral component of overall military doctrine. Soviet doctrine does not view space as a separate theater of miltary operations but as an extension of the terrestrial environment….”34

That same Soviet doctrine can well be applied to military and nonmilitary matters alike. An obvious linkage exists between what we can call the three Ps: Power, Persuasion and Peace. In the 1990s and beyond, it

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