WHAT THE RUSSIAN GENERALS THINK: Reds See Victory

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WHAT THE RUSSIAN GENERALS THINK

THE West's military leaders have long understood that their Soviet counterparts were thinking along lines quite different from postwar Western military thought. This difference was condescendingly put down to a time lag on the part of the Russians; they were believed frozen in the experience of World War II, unable to face the implications of the new nuclear weapons. This week, in a coldly penetrating study* of modern Soviet military doctrine, Russian-speaking Raymond L. Garthoff, 29, Defense Department analyst and specialist on Soviet military writings, enters a strong dissent. Since the death of Stalin in 1953, says he, Soviet military doctrine "has made a quantum jump from the bayonet age to the thermonuclear age."

This jump has not brought the U.S.S.R.'s generals closer to current U.S. military doctrine. It has in fact taken them in an independent direction. Garthoff, whose book is authoritatively studded with hundreds of references to Soviet military periodicals, backed up by personal conversations with Soviet officers, sums up the "Soviet image of future war" thus:

"The initial strategic strikes by modern jet bombers, intercontinental and intermediate range rockets and missiles, and submarine-launched missiles, will wreak devastation upon both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and upon their chief allies. But does mutual devastation spell mutual defeat? The Soviets answer: no. The priority strikes will destroy the enemy's strategic air and missile bases insofar as these are known. Major cities and industrial centers, on a lower level of priority, will also suffer heavily. Radiological and bacteriological weapons may be used. But this enormous mutual destruction will probably consume the major portion of the respective long-range air and missile forces. Thus the efforts of these forces would in a sense cancel each other out.

"This is a crucial phase of the war, one which a weak or ill-prepared power could lose. But it is not the decisive stage of a war between well-prepared major powers; it does not determine the final outcome of the war between them.

" 'Tactical' air power and rockets, those forces designated to attack the enemy's military forces up to roughly a 1,000-mile range from the starting borders, would similarly engage in mutual nuclear strikes. But here the Soviets do not see a mutual stalemate. The heart of such a capability is the ground forces—trained for nuclear war, armed with nuclear weapons—and here the war would begin with a serious imbalance: a preponderance of Soviet forces.

"Moreover, in the Soviet view, their mobilization and dispatch of ground forces would be much less critically disrupted than would ours by the nuclear exchange, due to their larger force-in-being and to its deployment. The surviving Soviet land armies are thus expected to be capable of defeating the proportionately weakened enemy forces on the ground.

"Thus the Soviets would strive to achieve at least a favorable 'draw' by occupying the Eurasian continent, and exploiting such resources as might still be available to restore some of the Soviet Union's losses. The shrunken and devastated Free World would be entirely relegated to the Western Hemisphere."