‘A (more) defensive strategy’: The reconceptualisation of Soviet conventional strategy in the 1980s

Abstract

THE CHANGES IN SOVIET FOREIGN, SECURITY AND DEFENCE POLICY in the second part of the 1980s, momentous as they were, challenged the common wisdom of Sovietology, international relations research, and political science. These changes were a matter of intense dispute among Western political observers and academic analysts, and they still are, even when the Soviet Union is no longer on our maps. The widely divergent conclusions of these analysts reflect their different approaches, assumptions and methods in treating international relations and foreign policy. This article sets out to reassess these explanations by focusing on the internal Soviet policy processes that led to some crucial decisions in the area of Soviet military strategy. It tries to answer the question of what caused the sea change in Soviet policy from planning a totally offensive strategy to designing a much more defensive one. The focus will be on the Soviet conventional strategy for the European battlefield, as this was the area in which the greatest changes occurred. A methodology will be developed and applied that allows us to assess the relative contributions of both foreign and domestic factors in Soviet military-strategic change. The focus of the study will be on a concept that played an important role in this process: 'a (more) defensive strategy'. The analysis of the concept's life-cycle-encompassing generation, development, realisation and decline-sheds light on the deeper causes of the defensive change in Soviet military strategy. The main conclusion is that this change was only in small part caused by Western military-technological challenges, and in much greater part by changes in policy beliefs of Soviet decision makers and in civil-military relations, in combination with the activity of transnational groups of experts. These factors figure in the explanations offered by Western analysts. Sceptical analysts emphasise the role of the international context. They believe that the Gorbachev leadership reacted to the Western military-technological challenges without changing the traditional goals of Soviet security policy. It still tried to weaken NATO by eroding its flexible response strategy and thinning out its conventional forces, to ensure a Warsaw Treaty capability to win a conventional war, and thus to enhance the Soviet political leverage over West European states. Unlike its predecessors, however, the Gorbachev leadership was flexible, taking unilateral and asymmetrical measures that both made the opulent Soviet forces leaner but meaner and