Military Strategy: How Moscow and Beijing Lost the War

By Bruce W. Nelan

The commanders of the world's two largest communist armies have seen the future, and to their horror, it works. Generals in Moscow and Beijing are organizing conferences and ordering up studies, but their conclusions are already clear: neither the Soviet nor the Chinese armed forces can match the high-technology weapons and tactics the U.S. displayed in its swift demolition of Iraq.

It is not just that American M1A1 tanks made scrap metal out of Soviet T- 72s, which they did, or that Iraqi pilots of top-of-the-line MiG-29s were unwilling even to engage U.S. planes, which they were. Worse, from the Soviet and Chinese points of view, is the fact that they have no counterparts to the Western weapons that won the war in its first few days -- Stealth fighter- bombers, precision-guided munitions, electronic warfare. Hardest of all for the Soviet Union and China to accept is the near certainty that neither will be able to catch up with the U.S. anytime soon.

In the decades after their successful revolutions, both communist giants built massive ground forces equipped with heavy tanks and artillery. Since the 1970s, their military leaders have also given lip service to the need for lighter, faster forces and high-tech weapons. Partly out of bureaucratic inertia and largely because their economies were not up to the task, neither country actually moved into the modern military age of microelectronics. "People talk as if the Soviets haven't done their best, and have to do better," says Stephen Meyer, a military expert at M.I.T. "The point is, their best wasn't good enough."

Some of the conservative officers in Moscow are trying to pretend the Iraqi collapse never happened. Marshal Viktor Kulikov told a Soviet news agency that Iraqi soldiers had failed, not Soviet equipment. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, an adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev, said any claim that the gulf war proved the superiority of American arms was "sheer propaganda."

That kind of bluster is wearing off, and other generals are drawing pointed lessons. Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov told the Supreme Soviet in Moscow that Iraqi air defenses "failed in most cases." Furthermore, "we have weak spots in the antiaircraft system, and we need to examine them." The success of the American F-117A Stealth fighter, of course, throws into question the effectiveness of the whole $100 billion Soviet radar- and missile-defense network.

The Soviets must also be shaken by the overwhelming speed, firepower and flexibility of the new American method of warfare, the doctrine called AirLand Battle, which combines air, ground and naval forces into one integrated onslaught. "They can't help being as impressed by the U.S. performance as they are depressed about what it means to their forces," says Raymond Garthoff of the Brookings Institution in Washington.

A few reformers in the Soviet officer corps admit as much in public. Colonel Alexander Tsalko, former director of an air force training center and now a member of the Soviet parliament, says Iraq's defeat shows that Soviet military doctrine and the structure of its forces are obsolete. "Some military authorities in this country," he says, "still believe that the outcome of a war is determined by the clash of huge ground forces." That is "madness," he says, because the outcome in the gulf was determined by air power; Iraqi troops had no choice but to "keep their noses buried in the sand."

Most of Moscow's brass, however, is not absorbing that lesson and is simply demanding more money. That is in part a knee-jerk reaction, conditioned by a series of shocks to the military system, like the humiliation in Afghanistan, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and two years of major cuts in the defense budget.

Because Gorbachev is relying heavily on the armed forces to keep him in office and maintain order in the country, he may ease off on future spending cuts -- scheduled to reduce the defense budget 14.9% this year. But the Soviet economy is in such dire straits that it cannot provide the enormous amounts of money necessary to create the entire industries needed to duplicate U.S. battlefield technologies. "To be able to do as the allies did in the gulf," says Abraham Becker, director of the RAND-UCLA Center for Soviet studies, the Soviets "would have to revolutionize their economy." That is something Gorbachev has so far been unable to manage.

China is even further behind in the high-tech stakes. A commentator in the . military's Liberation Army Daily wrote of the gulf conflict, "We are seeing the warfare of the 21st century fought on the battlefield of today." The gulf battles were the antithesis of Mao Zedong's theories, which insisted that a "people's war" of massed armies would defeat any aggressor. Beijing began thinking about modernization recently, but with a defense budget of only $6.16 billion last year, it is hard pressed to deliver much more than basic equipment to its army of 3 million.

Beijing is eager to buy new arms from the Soviet Union, though it must be having some doubts about the quality of the merchandise these days. China announced two weeks ago that it would provide the U.S.S.R. with food, tea, cigarettes and other consumer goods worth $730 million. In return it wants to buy combat aircraft, missiles and tanks.

If America's smart weapons make Soviet hardware look bad, there is another lesson for Moscow and Beijing to learn -- one far less pleasing to the West. Saddam Hussein's mobile missile launchers proved very difficult to counter, and even his primitive Scuds, though little more than terror weapons, indicated the potential effectiveness of ballistic missiles. As a result, the Soviets and Chinese are now likely to base their defense even more heavily on missiles and nuclear weapons.

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing and Bruce van Voorst/Washington