Comment on the 1964 Warsaw Pact War Plan
by
Gen. William E. Odom*
“The Plan of
Actions of the Czechoslovak People’s Army for War Period“, dated 1964, is of
special interest to me. During 1955-58, I served as company grade officer in a
mechanized infantry battalion in the 6th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Germany,
and also in the tank battalion of the 11th Airborne Division. The armored
cavalry screened the Czech border from Hof in the north to Passau in the South.
The 11th Airborne Division operated behind the reconnaissance screen of the
armored cavalry and planned to fight delaying actions, slowing down and
frustrating advancing Warsaw Pact forces. Having spent months on the border,
seeking any sign of an impending invasion by Soviet and Czech forces, and
having practiced delaying operations beginning on a line slightly northeast of
Amberg-Regensburg-Landshut-Deggendorf, falling back over days and weeks to successive
north-south lines of Augsburg-Weissenburg, Ulm-Crailsheim, Heilbronn-Stuttgart,
and finally to the Rhine River, this recently published Czech war plan has a
very personal impact.
I and my
fellow officers naturally wondered if we had a serious chance to achieve our
mission in the late 1950s. Judgments were mixed. Most of us realized that we
needed many more armored units to deal with the swift offensive the Warsaw Pact
forces were obviously preparing. Instead of tanks, we received a reorganization
and tactical nuclear weapons. The 11th Airborne was converted to a “pentatomic”
division with a flatter command structure and five “battle groups” instead of
three regiments with three battalions each. It was to canalize enemy attacking
columns and strike them with low-yield nuclear weapons, such as the “Honest
John” (a short range rocket system) could deliver.
Whether
these tactical nuclear weapons would have been effective is debatable, but had
the 11th Airborne Division been a tank division, the odds would have been
greatly improved. Back at the Armored School in 1959-60, I learned that a great
deal of a nuclear weapon’s effects, such as blast, heat, and radiation, could
be mitigated by armor-protected vehicles–considerably more than the popular
image at the time and especially today would have it. Not only could armored
forces greatly reduce potential casualties from tactical nuclear strikes; they
could also move through contaminated areas rather safely, keeping their troops
from suffering radiation exposure at dangerous levels. While these realities
made use of tactical nuclear weapons far more conceivable, even advantageous,
other realities, such as tree blow-down, residual radiation, fires, and other
collateral damage, promised that they would complicate military operations for
the side that used them. In other words, they were a mixed blessing, but even
the undesirable effects – creation of unintended obstructions – might
contribute to slowing a Soviet-Warsaw Pact offensive.
In the late
1950s, we supposed that Warsaw Pact forces did not have tactical nuclear
weapons. That began to change in the 1960s. In 1963, while I was a student at
the US Army Russian Institute in Germany, I recall the excitement caused by the
publication of Voennaya strategiya [Military Strategy] under the editorship of
Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky. Upon reading it, I realized for the first time the
essence of Soviet military thinking about nuclear weapons use. Western
“deterrence theory” was very new, and it was not taught at army schools. Thus I
had no preconceptions other than US Army tactical nuclear doctrine when I
confronted the Sokolovsky volume, a compendium of chapters summing up a decade
of internal study of nuclear weapons by the Soviet military.
From the
moment I read this book, I recognized what must have been the breathtaking
scope and speed of Soviet war plans for invading Western Europe. The authors
were quite clear on how the speed of warfare could be increased by nuclear
weapons use, how concentration of nuclear fires could achieve objectives
swiftly that required weeks and months during World War II. Big gaps could be
created in minutes in NATO defense lines, and large armored formations could
rush through, moving to great depths before halting to consolidate their positions.
These Soviet concepts pressed the limits of the conceivable, but I could not
dismiss them. In fact, my experience in Germany made them seem quite sensible,
even if and breathtakingly daring.
In 1964-66,
I served with the US Military Liaison Mission to the Group of Soviet Forces in
Germany. This allowed me to travel weekly throughout most of East Germany,
periodically observing Soviet forces in field exercises, albeit uninvited.
Their patterns of operations were highly consistent with the concepts found in
the Sokolovsky volume. Moreover, during this period, virtually all Soviet
divisions were re-equipped as either “tank” or “motor rifle.” The new T-62 tank
with a 125mm main gun was appearing in large numbers to replace the older
T-54/55 with a 100mm gun, and armored fighting vehicles for infantry – BTR 40s
and BTR 60s – were also coming into more units, providing armor protection and
motor transport for infantry units. Self-propelled artillery pieces with armor
protection were not as numerous, but they were appearing. These things, as well
as many others, reflected the requirements elaborated in general terms in the
Sokolovsky book. I realized that I was witnessing a huge modernization process,
one designed to exploit battlefield use of nuclear weapons.
Reading the
Czechoslovak war plan, I am not the least bit surprised at its bold outlines,
certainly not its heavy dependence on nuclear weapons. And whether or not it
could have succeeded, I am fairly confident that the Soviet forces involved
would have acted according to it. By the mid-1960s Soviet units in Germany had
the new armor and motorized capabilities essential for such operations. The
East German forces were not as modern but probably able to keep up with Soviet
forces if they were winning. Whether the Czech forces could have played their
part according to the plan is far more questionable in my view.
A decade
later I would learn that the Soviet forces probably did not have adequate motor
transport – i.e., trucks – to supply the scale of deep operations envisioned in
this Czech war plan. By the late 1970s, however, that assessment was revised to
suggest that they had acquired enough trucks to give such war plans a serious
chance of success.
For anyone
who really wants a sense of what the US military was facing in Central Europe,
this Czechoslovak plan is important. Corroborating documents exist in the East
Germany military’s files that were taken over by West German officials upon
reunification in October 1990. Thus the plan cannot be dismissed as an exception
or an aberration. It may have been a fantasy, far beyond what the Czechoslovak
military could execute, but it certainly strikes me as valid evidence of how
Warsaw Pact planners viewed their missions and what Soviet military theorists
thought was possible with nuclear weapons.
This kind of
evidence, of course, does not confirm the widely held view in Western circles
that the Warsaw Pact and its Soviet leadership understood or adhered to Western
“deterrence theory” as constructed for the use of nuclear weapons. On the
contrary, it shows how wildly misplaced such assumptions about Soviet thinking
on nuclear weapons really was. This is not to argue that Soviet leaders took a
reckless view of their use. On the contrary, abundant evidence exists showing how
awed they were by nuclear weapons. But they had to decide what they would do
with such weapons if war actually broke out. And this Czech war plan shows that
they decided to use them like big artillery, to support and speed up a
traditional ground invasion of NATO territory. They did not cultivate
self-vulnerability, as the United States and NATO did after the 1950s, assuming
that battlefield use was irrational and therefore would not occur. Too many
students of military affairs have forgotten that the US military initially took
a similar view of nuclear weapons as useful battlefield artillery well into the
1960s.
By that
time, the US Army was so deeply engaged in Vietnam that it lost interest in
tactical nuclear weapons. And Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara introduced
his “assured destruction” concept that left no place for tactical nuclear use.
Meanwhile, the ideas of “deterrence theory” were capturing the university and
think tank worlds in the United States, creating a blind spot for what the Soviet
military was thinking and doing.
Only after
the end of the Vietnam War did the US Army turn full attention once again to
NATO and the Central Front. It was astounded at the size and speed of Soviet
operational concepts and forces, now modernized within the context of the
thinking in the Sokolovsky volume. Air-Land Battle was the US Army’s response
to Soviet war plans which were more breathtaking than the 1964 Czech plan.
Air-Land Battle, however, was not based on tactical nuclear weapons but rather
the so-called “emerging technologies” and “smart weapons” made possible by
microcircuitry technology and lasers. They permitted the production of highly
accurate, longer range, artillery and rocketry for NATO’s FOFA, i.e.,
“follow-on forces attacks”. They also made possible the huge increase in
tactical speed and agility provided by M-1 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles,
and a number of other new systems allowing fairly deep ground counterattacks
and spoiling attacks. Thus the Soviet general staff faced the prospect of a
series of NATO deep attacks that might unhinge Soviet offensive operations.
This
qualitative military competition between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was too
little understood during the 1970s and 80s. It was beginning to make tactical
nuclear weapons appear much less attractive to Soviet planners, but as Marshal
N. V. Ogarkov and others acknowledged in early 1980s, Soviet industry could not
provide this new generation of higher technology weaponry being fielded by
NATO. Actually, Soviet planners believed they were woefully short of tactical
nuclear weapons until the late 1970s and early 1980s when artillery-delivered
nuclear weapons and nuclear warheads for improved tactical ballistic missiles
began to arrive in the Soviet forces in East Germany. East German war plans
recovered by West German authorities dictated surprisingly large numbers of
nuclear weapons for use in the first few days of a war, e.g., as many as 40
warheads to be dropped in the Hamburg vicinity.
This longer
term perspective, viewing force developments over three decades, raises
interesting questions about the 1964 Czech war plan. The Soviet military simply
did not have an adequate menu and inventory of small-yield nuclear weapons in
the early 1960s. How, then, was the 1964 war plan to be implemented? Presumably
with very large yield weapons – 20 kilotons and larger, not 10 kilotons and
smaller, down to less than one kiloton yields, the range for US tactical
nuclear weapons in the late 1950s.
An equally
important question is whether non-Soviet Warsaw Pact forces, such as those in
Czechoslovakia, had adequate armored and motorized forces at the time to
execute the massive and rapid ground offensive envisioned by the 1964 war plan.
Both of
these questions – about tactical nuclear weapons and about ground forces – need
to be answered if we are make clear sense of the 1964 Czech war plan. Was it
practical for Warsaw Pact forces to implement at the time? Or did it express an
aspiration considerably beyond both Soviet and Czechoslovak military capabilities
at the time?
With the
demise of Ronald Reagan the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR
briefly flashed across the public consciousness. This article a fragment of a
much larger review of a Czech Warsaw Pact Operational Concept Plan for war with
NATO illuminates just how dangerous the Cold War was. Liberals and assorted leftist
are still busy pushing the line that it was our 'inordinate' fear of communism
that created the antagonism between the USA and the USSR and that the Soviets
were defensively oriented and only responding to US-NATO provocations in
keeping a large and heavily equipped military force positioned in East Germany.
Gen Odom's remarks highlight what anyone with any sense knew, the Soviets were
planning for war fighting not counter deterrence and they were planning to
utilize lots and lots of nukes from the start of operations. We were incredibly
lucky to come through the Cold War to victory over the Soviets without very
large numbers of Americans being killed.
________________________________________________________________________
*
William Eldridge Odom (June 23, 1932 – May 30, 2008) was a
retired U.S. Army 3-star general, and former
Director of the NSA under President Ronald
Reagan, which culminated a 31-year career in military
intelligence, mainly specializing in matters relating to the Soviet Union.
After his retirement from the military, he became a think tank policy expert and a university professor and became known
for his outspoken criticism of the Iraq
War and warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. He died of an apparent heart attack
at his vacation home in Lincoln,
Vermont.
Early in his military career, he observed Soviet military activities
while serving as a military
liaison in Potsdam, Germany. Later, he taught
courses in Russian history at West Point, New York, and while serving at the
United States embassy in Moscow in the early 1970s, he visited all of the
republics of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics. Although constantly trailed by KGB, he nonetheless managed to smuggle
out a large portion of Alexander
Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and Second World War military
citations; Solzhenitsyn subsequently paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir
"Invisible Allies" (1995).
Upon returning to the United States, he resumed his career at West Point
where he taught courses in Soviet politics. Odom regularly stressed the
importance of education for military officers.
In 1977, he was appointed as the military assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish
assistant for national security affairs to President Jimmy Carter. Among the primary issues
he focused on were American-Soviet relations, including the SALT nuclear
weapons talks, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran hostage crisis, presidential
directives on the situation in the Persian
Gulf, terrorism and hijackings,
and the executive order on telecommunications policy.
From 2 November 1981 to 12 May 1985, Odom served as the Army's Assistant
Chief of Staff for Intelligence. From 1985 to 1988, he served as the director
of the National Security Agency,
the United States' largest intelligence agency, under president Ronald Reagan.
Odom was a Senior Fellow at the Hudson
Institute, where he specialized in military issues, intelligence, and
international relations. He was also an adjunct professor at Yale University and Georgetown
University, where he taught seminar courses in U.S. National Security Policy
and Russian Politics. He earned a national reputation as an expert on the
Soviet military.
Since 2005, he had argued that U.S. interests would be best served by an
immediate withdrawal from Iraq, having called the 2003 invasion the worst
strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy. He had also been
critical of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of international calls, having
said "it wouldn't have happened on my watch". Odom was
also openly critical of the Neocon influence in the decision to go to
war: "It's pretty hard to imagine us going into Iraq without the strong
lobbying efforts from AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and the
neocons, who think they know what's good for Israel more than Israel
knows."
General Odom is a member of the Military
Intelligence Hall of Fame. He is also a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial
Foundation.
2 comments:
Very good
Quite interesting my friend !!!
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