Soviet Nuclear Doctrine - Team B
Team B was an experiment in competetive threat assessments approved by the director of the CIA at that time, George Bush. Teams of experts were to make independent assessments of highly classified data used by the intelligence community to assess Soviet strategic forces in the yearly National Intelligence Estimates. The 1976 "Team-B" experiment in comparative assessments of Soviet strategic strength was initiated by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). PFIAB commissioned three ad hoc outside groups (composing the "B Team") to examine the data available to the U.S. intelligence community's analysts (the "A Team"), to determine whether such data would support conclusions on Soviet strategic capabilities and objectives different from those presented in the community's NIEs. Responding to the PFIAB initiatives, the new DCI, George Bush, consented to the experiment, and by June 1976, the PFIAB and the DCI had worked out ground rules for a competitive assessment experiment.
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict is one of the most important intelligence documents produced each year. The mandate of Team “B” was to take an independent look at the data that went into the preparation of NIE 11-3/8 "Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict", and on that basis determine whether a good case could be made that Soviet strategic objectives were, in fact, more ambitious and therefore implicitly more threatening to US security than they appear to the authors of the NIEs. If the answer to this question was positive, they were further to indicate what accounted for the NIEs unsatisfactory assessments.
Team B was led by Professor Richard Pipes, and consisted of Professor William Van Cleave, Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, USA, (Ret), Dr. Thomas Wolfe, RAND Corporation, General John Vogt, USAF, (Ret), with an advisory panel of Ambassador Foy Kohler, The Honorable Paul Nitze, Ambassador Seymour Weiss, Maj. General Jasper Welch, USAF, Dr. Paul Wolfowitz, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
The composition of the B Team dealing with Soviet objectives was so structured that the outcome of the exercise was predetermined. Members of Team “B” were deliberately selected from among experienced political and military analysts of Soviet affairs known to take a more "somber" [aka hawkish] view of the Soviet strategic threat than that accepted as the intelligence community's consensus. The intelligence agencies were cast inaccurately in the role of "doves," when they in fact represented a broad spectrum of views. They needlessly allowed analytic mismatches, by sending relatively junior specialists into the debating arena against prestigious and articulate B Team authorities.
No attempt was made in this Report to arrive at anything like a net assessment: US capabilities were not touched upon except to give perspective to certain Soviet programs. The Report concentrated on what it was that the Soviets were striving for, without trying to assess their chances of success. Nor did Team“B” seek to produce a full-fledged counterpart to NIE 11-3/8, covering the same range of topics: its contents are selective, as befits the experimental nature of the Team's assignment.
A certain amount of attention was given to the track record of the NIEs in dealing with Soviet strategic objectives, in some cases going back to the early 1960s. The purpose of these historical analyses was not recrimination, which, given the Team's advantage of hindsight, would be pointless as well as unfair; rather, Team "B" found certain persistent flaws in the NIEs that did not disappear with the change of the teams responsible for drafting them. It concluded, therefore, that only by tracking over a period of time NIE assessments on any given subject was it possible fully and convincingly to determine what methodological misconceptions caused their most serious errors of judgment.
"Team “B” found that the NIE 11-3/8 series through 1975 has substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat. This misperception has been due in considerable measure to concentration on the so-called hard data, that is data collected by technical means, and the resultant tendency to interpret these data in a manner reflecting basic U.S. concepts while slighting or misinterpreting the large body of “soft” data concerning Soviet strategic concepts. The failure to take into account or accurately to assess such soft data sources has resulted in the NIEs not addressing themselves systematically to the broader political purposes which underlie and explain Soviet strategic objectives.
"Since, however, the political context cannot be altogether avoided, the drafters of the NIEs have fallen into the habit of injecting into key judgments of the executive summaries impressionistic assessments based on "mirror-imaging," i.e., the attribution to Soviet decision-makers of such forms of behavior as might be expected from their U.S. counterparts under analogous circumstances. This conceptual flaw is perhaps the single gravest cause of the misunderstanding of Soviet strategic objectives found in past and current NIEs. A fundamental methodological flaw is the imposition on Soviet strategic thinking of a framework of conflicting dichotomies which may make sense in the U.S. context but does not correspond to either Russian doctrine or Russian practice: for example, war vs. peace, confrontations vs. detente, offense vs. defense, strategic vs. peripheral, nuclear vs. conventional, arms limitations vs. arms buildup, and so on.
"In Soviet thinking, these are complementary or mutually supporting concepts, and they by no means exclude one another. One effect of “mirror-imaging is that the NIEs have ignored the fact that Soviet thinking is Clausewitzian in character, that is, that it conceives in terms of “grand strategy” for which military weapons, strategic ones included, represent only one element in a varied arsenal of means of persuasion and coercion, many of them non-military in nature. Another effect of "mirror-imaging" has been the tendency to misconstrue the manner in which Soviet leaders perceive the utility of those strategic weapons (i.e., strategic nuclear forces) to which the NIES do specifically address themselves.
"The drafters of NIE 11-3/8 seem to believe that the Soviet leaders view strategic nuclear weapons much as do their U.S. analogues. Since in the United States nuclear war is generally regarded as an act of mutual suicide that can be rational only as a deterrent threat, it is assumed that the USSR looks at the matter in the same way. The primary concern of Soviet leaders is seen to be the securing of an effective deterrent to protect the Soviet Union from U.S. attack and in accord with the Western concept of deterrence. The NIEs focus on the threat of massive nuclear war with the attendant destruction and ignore the political utility of nuclear forces in assuring compliance with Soviet will; they ignore the fact that by eliminating the political credibility of the U.S. strategic deterrent, the Soviets seek to create an environment in which other instruments of their grands trategy, including overwhelming regional dominance in conventional arms, can better be brought to bear; they fail to acknowledge that the Soviets believe that the best way to paralyze U.S. strategic capabilities is by assuring that the outcome of any nuclear exchange will be as favorable to the Soviet Union as possible; and, finally they ignore the possibility that the Russians seriously believe that if, for whatever reason, deterrence were to fail, they could resort to the use of nuclear weapons to fight and win a war.
"The NIE's tendency to view deterrence as an alternative to a war-fighting capability rather than as complementary to it, is in the opinion of Team “B”, a grave and dangerous flaw in their evaluations of Soviet strategic objectives. Other manifestations of “mirror-imaging" are the belief that the Russians are anxious to shift the competition with the United States to other than military arenas so as to be able to transfer more resources to the civilian sector; that they entertain only defensive not offensiveplans; that their prudence and concern over U.S. reactions are overriding; that their military programs are essentially a reaction to U.S. programs and not self-generated.
" The NIEs concede that strategic superiority is something the Soviet Union would not spurn if it were attainable; but they also feel (without providing evidence for thiscritical conclusion) that Russia's leaders regard such superiority as an unrealistic goal and do not actively pursue it. Analysis of Soviet past and present behavior, combined with what is known of Soviet political and military doctrines, indicates that these judgments are seriously flawed. "The evidence suggests that the Soviet leaders are first and foremost offensively rather than defensively minded. They think not in terms of nuclear stability, mutual assured destruction, or strategic sufficiency, but of an effective nuclear war-fighting capability. They believe that the probability of a general nuclear war can be reduced by building up one's own strategic forces, but that it cannot be altogether eliminated, and that therefore one has to be prepared for such a war as if it were unavoidable and be ready to strike first if it appears imminent. "There is no evidence that the Soviet leadership is ready, let alone eager, to reduce the military budget in order to raise the country's standard of living. Soviet Russia's habitual caution and sensitivity to U.S. reactions are due less to an inherent prudence than to a realistic assessment of the existing global “correlation of forces;" should this correlation (or the Soviet leaders' perception of it) change in their favor, they could be expected to act with greater confidence and less concern for U.S. sensitivities. In fact, there are disturbing signs that the latter development is already taking place......
"Team “B” agreed that all the evidence points to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what is euphemistically called “the worldwide triumph of socialism” but in fact connotes global Soviet hegemony. Soviet actions give no grounds on which to dismiss this objective as rhetorical exhortation, devoid of operative meaning. .....
"For historic reasons, as well as for reasons inherent in the Soviet system, the Soviet leadership places unusual reliance on coercion as a regular instrument of policy at home as well as abroad. It likes to have a great deal of coercive capability at its disposal at all times, and it likes for it to comein a rich mix so that it can be optimally structured for any contingency that may arise. After some apparent division of opinion intermittently in the 1960's, the Soviet leadership seems to have concluded that nuclear war could be fought and won. The scope and vigor of Soviet strategic programs leave little reasonable doubt that Soviet leaders are indeed determined to achieve the maximum possible measure of strategic superiority over the U.S. Their military doctrine is measured not in Western terms of assured destruction but in those of a war-fighting and war-winning capability; it also posits a clear and substantial Soviet predominance following a general nuclear conflict.
"Russia is a continental power not an insular one, and it happens to have the longest external frontier of any country in the world. In contrast to the United States, it has never enjoyed the luxury of isolation, having always been engaged in conflict along its frontier, sometimes suffering devastating invasions, sometimes being the aggressor who absorbed entire countries political, intellectual, and business communities as lying along its borders. For a country with this kind of historic background it would make little sense to separate any category of military weapons, no matter how destructive, from the rest of the arsenal of them.
" ... the Russians construe their own security in the sense that it can be assured only at the expense of their neighbors. This leads to an essentially aggressive rather than defensive approach to security. And in fact, Russian, and especially Soviet political and military theories are distinctly offensive in character: their ideal is the “science of conquest" (naukapobezhdat) formulated by the 18th Century Russian commander, Field Marshall A. V. Suvorov in a treatise of the same name, which has been a standard text of Imperial as well as Soviet military science. There are valid reasons why Soviet political and military thinking should be offensive.
As a matter of the historical record, it is untrue that Russia has suffered an exceptional numberof invasions and interventions: it has probably done more invading itself. The expansion of Russia as a continental empire is without parallel in world history: no country has grown so fast and none has held on so tenaciously to its conquests. It is no accident that Russia alone of all the belligerents hasemerged from World War II larger than it had entered it......
"There are also internal reasons which push the Soviet leadership toward an offensive stance: The great importance which Soviet political theory attaches to the sense of forward movement: the lack of any kind of genuine legitimacy on the part of the Soviet government compels it to create its own pseudo-legitimacy which rests on an alleged "mandate of history" and is said to manifest itself in a relentless spread of the “socialist" cause around the globe.....
" .... it is unwarranted to assume a priori that the Soviet leadership is eager significantly to raise its population's living standards. The ability to mobilize the population not only physically but also spiritually is regarded by the Soviet leadership as essential to any successful war effort. Having had ample opportunity to observe post-1945 developments in the West, the Soviet leaders seem to have concluded that a population addicted to the pursuit of consumer goods rapidly loses its sense of patriotism, sinking into amood of self-indulgence that makes it extremely poor material for national mobilization. There is every reason to believe - on the basis of both the historic record and the very logic of the Soviet system - that the Soviet regime is essentially uninterested in a significant rise of its population's living standards, at any rate in the foresceable future. Certainly, the prospect of acquiring additional resources for thecivilian sector is for it no inducement for a reductionof the arms buildup.
"It is certainly true that the Russians have been prudent and generally cautious, and that they have avoided rash military adventures of the kind that had characterized nationalist-revolutionary ("fascist") regimes of the 1930's. As the record indicates, when everthey have been confronted with situations that threatened to lead to U.S.-USSR military confrontations, they preferred to withdraw, even at the price ofsome humiliation. The reason for this cautious behavior, however, lies not in an innate conservatism,but rather in military inferiority, for which reason one cannot count on it recurring ....."
This was the first of the three Team B reports. The other two—“Soviet ICBM Accuracy: An Alternative View” and “Soviet Low Altitude Air Defense: An Alternative View”. The "competitive analysis" and use of selected outside experts was little more than thin camouflage for a political effort to force the National Intelligence Estimate to take a more bleak view of the Soviet strategic threat. The Team B press leaks and public attack on the conclusions of the NIE represented but one element in a series of leaks and other statements which were aimed at fostering a "worst case" view for the public of the Soviet threat. In turn, this view of the Soviet threat was used to justify new weapons systems.
Team B's notion, that the Soviets intended to surpass the United States in strategic arms and are in the process of doing so, went from heresy to respectability, if not orthodoxy. In his annual report, Defense Secretary Brown referred to "a substantial and continuing Soviet [strategic] effort, [which] is highly, dynamic." Although puzzled as to "why the Soviets are pushing so hard to improve their strategic nuclear capabilities," Brown noted that "we cannot ignore their efforts or assume that they are mo- tivated by considerations either of altruism or of pure deterrence." Representative Les Aspin, in a paper the State Department promptly endorsed, warned that if the Senate did not ratify a proposed SALT agreement, the US would be "entering a race in which we are already behind." Even after spending $20 billion on strategic arms, in his judgment, we would still be comparatively worse off.
Senator Daniel P. Moynihan later observed "Knowledge is power; and the ability to define what others will take to be knowledge is the greatest power. It is not to be wondered then, that the National Intelligence Estimates - the sources of "official truth" - escape irrelevance only at the price of controversy. Any attempt to improve the estimates will be denounced as an attempt to manipulate them by those who disagree with the new directions they take. The objective standard will be to look at how well one institutional arrangement, or one line of argument, has predicted and explained recent events."
The 2003 Iraq prewar intelligence failure was not simply a case of the U.S. intelligence community providing flawed data to policy-makers. It also involved subversion of the competitive intelligence analysis process, where unofficial intelligence boutiques "stovepiped" misleading intelligence assessments directly to policy-makers and undercut intelligence community input that ran counter to the White House's preconceived preventive war of choice against Iraq. Historical precursors were the original 1976 Team B exercise and the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission report on ballistic missile threats.
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