World Naval Developments

Misreading the Soviets and Somalis

Two recent developments have created doubt concerning the adequacy of U.S. intelligence for a post-Cold War world. The first is the announcement, by Viktor N. Mikhailov, head of the Ministry of Atomic Energy, that at its peak the Soviet nuclear arsenal contained 45,000 warheads. The usual conservative Western figure was 33,000, and many suspected that the true figure was considerably lower. The United States is trying to buy up most of the Russian enriched uranium, material some of which may otherwise eventually turn up in the hands of Third-World bomb makers. Original estimates in­dicated that buying 500 tons would suffice (the estimated Russian stock­pile was 800 tons). Now the esti­mated stockpile has risen to 1,200 tons.

During the Reagan administra­tion, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinburger claimed that the Sovi­ets had 46,000 warheads, but that figure was apparently considered excessive even within the intelli­gence establishment. In recent months it has become clear that our knowledge of the Soviets was de­fective in many ways, although spe­cial effort was always devoted to the Soviet nuclear arsenal. If we could not understand the most important military program in the one country we studied intensively for nearly half a century, how well can we detect nuclear proliferation in Third World countries, of which our knowledge is surely far less per­fect? Our recent experience in Iraq becomes even less comforting in this light.

The second point unfortunately reinforces the first: failure in So­malia. More than a year after going to Somalia to end a famine, we find ourselves fighting what appears to be a guerrilla war against a very ill-defined enemy. We act as though the oppo­sition is concentrated in one man, Mohammed Aidid, but that is by no means clear. Indeed, a reading of Somali history suggests that the populace generally resents foreigners, and that it can be quite warlike. Whether we like it or not, our pres­ence—and that of the United Nations—is an attempt to impose order, a euphemism for an attempt to impose a government. It seems most unlikely that calling a meeting of prominent war­lords will have that result. Each warlord is probably balanc­ing the advantages to be gained by seeming to accede to over­whelming foreign power (and thus gaining the assistance of that power against the other warlords) against those of resist­ing the hated foreigner. If the foreigners seem to be on the

point of leaving, the latter course becomes more attractive.

Our reactions in Somalia betray an ignorance of local con­ditions akin to our ignorance of the Soviet nuclear program. Our men have been tortured and killed, their bodies dishonored; the administration’s reaction is that we will retaliate and rein­force our position. The trouble with retaliation is that in a guer­rilla war it is often either pointless—because there is no appropriate target, the victims generally turn out to be innocent, and the perpetrators are unscathed—or so draconian as to disgust the world and to inspire further resistance (recall cases of German anti-guerrilla warfare during World War II).

We have been trying to capture Mohammed Aidid for about six months; he knows just how inef­fective we are likely to be. More hardware is unlikely to make much of a difference. As for reinforce­ments, there is every possibility that they will supply Aidid and his rivals with more hostages and with more victims. At the very least, they will reinforce the sense, al­ready apparently strong in Soma­lia, that the hated foreigners are bearing down, and that they should be ejected posthaste.

Our motives are good; we merely want to end starvation and establish the sort of peaceful envi­ronment in which the Somalis can flourish. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world peace and pros­perity are poor rivals to national pride. Our ideas of what is good for Somalia may not appeal so much to the locals, and, after all, it is their country. In particular, once starva­tion has been brought under con­trol, the need for further foreign armed presence may seem less and less obvious to most Somalis. Our argument that starvation will soon return once we have left may not be particularly understandable in Mogadishu.

Moreover, to a considerable extent starvation was a conse­quence of the power struggles of the warlords, who intercepted food shipments and controlled distribution. It is ludicrous to call on them now for help, and expect them to relinquish their most important weapons—the power to enforce starvation—for what we see as patriotic reasons.

For about a decade, the former Ethiopian government, occupying territory bordering Somalia, used famine in just this way to punish its internal enemies. The United Nations care­fully avoided any reference to the essentially political charac­ter of the Ethiopian famine, and now we are acting as though warlords and famine have only an incidental relationship with each other in Somalia.

Somalia is not a military problem at all; it is a police prob­lem, not too different from that which confronts American urban police forces in very violent neighborhoods. I am unaware of any American city whose mayor has called upon major crimi­nals to join together to foster peace. Nor do I know of any city in which the mayor imagines that a temporary build-up of po­lice will somehow solve the crime or gang problem. Police forces are always needed, and everyone accepts that. Not everyone accepts that U.S. or U.N. troops should police So­malia forever, or even for a decade or two.

The parallel to Vietnam is clear and ironic. Many of those who opposed the Vietnam War imagined that it was a colonial adventure by a corrupt U.S. Government. In fact the war was fought for the best of motives; we wanted to protect a free peo­ple from the encroachment of communism. Many of those free people had already voted with their feet when they fled what became North Vietnam in 1954 (many voted again after 1975, taking their chances in extremely dangerous small boats).

Our motives collided with local nationalism and with an inept South Vietnamese government, quite possibly made worse by our own intervention in overthowing Diem in 1963. Probably the most devastating error in our involvement in Vietnam was the U.S. Government’s idea that a short-term military operation could solve a long-term problem. The North Vietnamese soon realized that United States could not remain engaged indefi­nitely and South Vietnam was lost as soon as the North Viet­namese learned that the U.S. Government could not contem­plate the only short-term permanent solution—to reunify Vietnam on our terms.

Without the will to do that (for fear of escalation into a land war with China), the United States had to accept either an open-ended commitment to defending South Vietnam, which was, after all, a peripheral area for us—or defeat.

Now we are once again engaged on a wholly altruistic mis­sion in the Third World. The United States clearly has no na­tional interest whatever in Somalia; it is of no strategic signif­icance to the United States. It is merely a miserable place whose people deserve better.

We have the military force to make it better and our obvi­ous altruism made the Somali operation extremely popular ini­tially; many imagined that it was a new and benign way to use U.S. power. But people care about more than their material wel­fare. Nationalism is a real force, and one the U.S. Government often neglects in its calculations.

What has all this to do with the Soviets and their bombs? The error in Somalia, and almost certainly also in Vietnam, was an inability to comprehend local conditions, particularly local political culture. Too often the U.S. Government seems to be­have as though everyone in the world thinks as we do, albeit speaking some foreign language. That just is not so. The dif­ference applies not only to local culture, but often also to the very structure of a foreign country.

Consider the Soviets. We almost certainly estimated the num­ber of their warheads by counting up the means of delivery. We imagined that they had reached the same conclusions as we had: that there was little point in buying extra bombs or missile war­heads, since virtually no system would get a chance to fire more than once. We assumed that, like us, the Soviets would seek efficiency in weapons procurement.

What we never thought through was just why such efficiency was attractive. We had to justify each new expensive item. Even in the heyday of the Reagan buildup, the bulk of the federal budget went to non-military items, and the country would only tolerate so large a budget. Considerable control had to be exerted. Much effort therefore went into estimating just how many of each weapon the country needed. It may be argued that the calculations were wrong or that too much was bought, but examination of the record will show that the effort was made, and made seriously.

Now consider the Soviet system. The vast mass of the So­viet population did not figure in Soviet political calculations. The politically relevant class included the factory managers. They received incentives based on their execution of the economic plans. None of the managers wanted to go out of busi­ness; all of them were happiest when production requirements were steady from year to year (since they knew how to produce what they were already making). From at least the late 1930s on, the economy had been tilted heavily in favor of military production.

There was, literally, no incentive to change or to limit pro­duction, and every incentive to keep the machine ticking over. Producing guns brought the managers their butter, and the managers and their equivalents were the base of the Soviet po­litical system. The production incentives had little or nothing to do with enmity toward the United States, although the prod­ucts of the machine provided the Soviet rulers with the sort of military power they craved, which helped them in their own contest with us. The nature of the command economy was such that the Soviets themselves did not know and now cannot esti­mate the price they paid for their military power; price did not count in their calculations.

We even had some historical evidence of the character of the Soviet system. When Nikita Khrushchev took power in 1955, he decided that existing types of weapons were becoming ob­solete. To gain the resources needed to develop nuclear-armed long-range missiles, Khrushchev cancelled numerous programs and forcibly retired thousands of officers and hundreds of thousands of enlisted men. (He described the changes as disar­mament, but in fact it was reorientation.) Khrushchev’s crash programs (he actually cancelled a Five Year Plan in 1958) upset the class of factory managers, led by the Communist Party’s military industrialist, Leonid Brezhnev. Less than a decade after Khrushchev rose, Brezhnev deposed him in a coup. Brezhnev’s partners were Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who regarded Khrushchev’s new nuclear-based strategy of minimum deter­rence as insane, but was probably also incensed by the rundown of conventional forces; and by Mikhail Suslov, the Party ide­ologist infuriated by Khrushchev’s dangerous denunciation of Stalin in 1956.

Khrushchev had made all sorts of waves, and he met real re­sistance. His predecessor, Stalin, had encountered no such resistance, because he preempted it by executing or jailing any­one he imagined might even think of disobeying (and many mil­lions of others). In effect, Khrushchev and his contemporaries decided soon after Stalin’s death that they would avoid any re­vival of terror. The Soviet economy was no longer a simple machine responding to the demands of the ruler of the Soviet Union. As Khrushchev learned, the ruler also had to keep in mind the needs of those who ran the parts of the machine.

Brezhnev kept the industrial machine happy by maintaining all production lines—including those for warheads. It seems unlikely that the West, or at least the United States, learned any­thing like the same lesson. In particular, it is unlikely that we followed the actual production of warheads by the Soviet nu­clear industry, which might have alerted us to the discrepancy between numbers of weapons and delivery capability.

Now it seems that, for all the immense resources we devoted to studying the Soviet Union and its military, the greatest threat we have ever faced, we never really understood it. The sin of naivete afflicted us in the case of the Soviets, and is likely to prove our undoing in Somalia where, as ever, the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions.

Lockheed delivered the 16th electronic warfare/reconnaissance aircraft on 30 September. VQ-5 and -6 operate ES-3As.

The Balkans Again

Early in October Andreas Papandreou was re-elected Prime Minister of Greece. Until his defeat four years ago, Mr. Pa­pandreou was a major voice on the Greek left, a champion of Greek nationalism and, therefore, rather anti-American and anti-NATO. Now his election may have an extremely sinister implication.

In what is left of Yugoslavia, Greek nationalism has focused on the status of Macedonia, a former southern Yugoslav state which declared its independence. Greeks have argued that Tito named it Macedonia merely to assert claims on Macedonia in northern Greece, and the Greek government has tried to force the republic to change its name. For example, it appears that a Greek signature of the Maastricht Treaty (to increase the level of unification within the European Community) was conditional on non-recognition of Macedonia by the other members of the Community. Thus far, with Serbia occupied in Bosnia to the north, Macedonia has preserved a nervous independence. For its part, Greece has flirted with a pro-Serbian orien­tation, partly in hopes of suppressing the Macedon­ian republic.

It seems very likely that Serbia will turn south to attack Kosovo (and probably Macedonia, too) once Bosnia has been dealt with. The United Nations has shown little appetite for controlling Serbian forces, and Kosovo is a very emotive issue for Serbian nationalists. Geography has precluded serious foreign intervention in Bosnia. Kosovo is a very different proposition. For example, it is easy to imagine Turk­ish troops entering through Albania. Greece, too, might easily become engaged, partly because of its ancient antagonism toward Turkey. Should Greece and Turkey fight, the war might well be quite intense. It is not difficult to imagine Bulgaria intervening, and possi­bly Russia (or Russian volunteers) as well, in the event that Bulgarian forces are roughly handled.

Missiles at Moscow

At the second Moscow Air Show, in September, the Chelomey (Mashinostroeniya) design bureau, which developed the big Russian antiship missiles, showed two new ones: the Yakhont and the Alpha.

Contrary to expectations, it did not show the anti­ship missile, probably the SS-N-22, carried by Sovre- fnennyy-class destroyers. This weapon appeared in a poster at the 1992 show and also in a poster displayed at the 1993 Paris Air Show, in June. Chelomey hopes to sell the weapon to one or more Western navies (see last month’s column) and is now reluctant to publicize it, for fear of ruin­ing the deals.

The Alpha appears to be a ramjet version of SS-N-22 using a belly intake; the Paris poster touted it as the missile for the turn of the century and beyond. A poster at Moscow showed it fired from aircraft as well as from patrol boats, submarines, and ground launchers. No figures were given, but projected maxi­mum speed is Mach 4.5. Projected range is probably about 300 kilometers (164 nautical miles). No photographs of the Alpha Were displayed, but a brochure showed it folded up within a long, slender capsule. This is probably the capsule reportedly developed for a folding-fin version—the P-100 sketches in the Alpha brochure showed missiles in a Western-style vertical launcher, with individual launch cells (unlike the revolver-style launchers used with SA-N-6 and -9), and in a quadruple launcher abaft the sail of what appeared to be a Kilo-class submarine.

The missile attack boats in the Alpha and Yakhont brochures each had three weapons to a side (like Nanuchkas) but were not any recognizable design. Unlike the Yakhont, the Alpha is ad­vertised for both ground-attack (against, e.g., a radar) and an­tiship attack. This missile is different from the confusingly named Alpha coast-defense weapon offered by the rival Nova- tor design bureau.

The Yakhont, another ramjet (with a nose intake like those on older U.S. Talos missiles), seems to be nearer reality. A cap­sule (but no missile) was displayed, and the impression given was that the shipboard version is already in series production. A photograph in the brochure seemed to show a firing from a Neustrashimyy-class frigate. The frigate lacks missile tubes, but it does have torpedo catapults aft, capable of firing anything up to a 65-centimeter weapon, and the catapults may sometimes be used to fire encapsulated SS-N-22s. Photographs show what appears to be the blast of firing, which might involve a missile igniting after a cold launch out of a catapult. No dimensions were given in the brochure; claimed performance was a speed

Navy Gets Final ES-3A

of Mach 2.0-2.5 (which would match that of the rocket-pow­ered P-80), with a range of 300 kilometers (185 nautical miles) compared to 130 kilometers (80 nautical miles) for the P-80, as described in the 1992 Moscow poster).

Chelomey announced a coast-defense version of the Yakhont—Bastion—which is definitely not yet in service. Three missiles are carried in a truck; a single command post can control up to 24 missiles. Chelomey was seeking foreign fund­ing for development.

These supersonic missiles presumably make replacement of existing point-defense weapons more urgent. Russian defense marketing success was symbolized at the show by a MiG-29 in Malaysian markings. The momentum of the old system was symbolized by a new rocket-ramjet air-to-air missile, a version of the R-77 “AMRAAM-ski” shown last year. Its manufacturer, Zvezda, stated that although the Russian Air Force had been unable to afford it, the weapon had been placed in limited production in hopes of a foreign sale.