It must here be strongly emphasized again, however — and it cannot be too often repeated — that the forces of the Western Allies were only in a position to survive the onslaught of the Warsaw Pact because, though heavily outnumbered from the outset, they were able to remain in being. Without the sort of improvements effected in the years between 1978 and 1984 this would have been impossible.
The war on land in Europe was a short one. Deprived of the swift victory that could have been so confidently predicted only a few years before, the Warsaw Pact, once checked, could not recover momentum in time to achieve and stabilize a decisive advantage before the arrival of the first of those Western reinforcements, with their great weight of weapons, which could soon be expected to flow so plentifully.
The fighting could hardly have gone on for very long in any case. Neither side could have sustained for more than a few weeks the expenditure of aircraft and of missile and other stocks — of fuel, for example, and of all manner of warlike stores and equipment — demanded in the modern battle. Even if the production of munitions of war in the home bases had been possible at the rate at which they were used up on the battlefield, it is doubtful whether, with hostile interference to the lines of communication, supply could ever have kept up with consumption.
The Soviet concept of the application of armed force for the purpose of securing a political advantage, in the state of the art in the last twenty years of the twentieth century and in the circumstances of the time, was thus wholly rational. It was facing an adversary relatively weak in the first instance but disposing of potentially overwhelming resources. Late twentieth-century war consumed material in such enormous quantities as to put very long drawn-out operations out of the question. It was imperative, therefore, to secure a position of great political advantage in a short, sharp, violent encounter, starting with the offensive initiative, exploiting as far as possible the advantages of surprise and of a somewhat longer period of preparation than the enemy’s, and reaching a chosen strategic objective before the enemy could bring his superior resources to bear and while stocks were still sufficient to sustain intensive action.
We have seen what happened. In the last few years before the outbreak of war the West began to wake up to the danger it faced, and in the time available did just enough in repair of its neglected defences to enable it, by a small margin, to survive. The Allies had better luck, perhaps, than they deserved. The Soviet Union was guilty of an important misjudgement in the matter of the American response to intervention in Yugoslavia, and of a critical blunder in their assumption that the French would not come in on the Allied side. A check to the forward impetus of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of the Federal Republic of Germany followed by a single, catastrophic, strategic nuclear exchange, triggered off the dissolution of the Pact and started the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself into its national components. The Marxist-Leninist empire, as hated and feared, perhaps, as any regime the world has seen, collapsed in total ruin, and the world is even now engaged, in many different ways, in picking up and sorting out the pieces.
The immediate tidying up which engaged the Allies, as soon as the USSR ceased to be able to prosecute the war and hostilities in Europe came to an end, contained operations that were already more or less familiar from experience of other wars but also one that was both highly important and quite new.
The presence of large numbers of nuclear warheads in Europe presented the Allies with a new and very difficult post-war problem. Many remained firmly in Allied hands, though a considerable number had been in Special Weapons Stores overrun in the offensive and could not now be accounted for. Very many more were dispersed and lost on the other side, amidst the confusion in which hostilities ended. Much of the deadly content of these weapons had disappeared and so far has not been traced. The United Nations Fissile Materials Recovery Organization (UNFISMATRECO) is seeking urgently to recover all it can. Some will almost certainly find its way into hands from which, in the interests of peace and security, it should at any cost be kept.
One last lesson is worth drawing from the war itself. Not inappropriately in an age of high technology, it lies in a technical area.
The period of full-scale hostilities between the forces of the Atlantic Alliance and the Warsaw Pact was short — no more, in fact, than a few weeks. It was still sufficient to show in quite astonishing fashion how far the electronic technology of the West had outstripped that of the Eastern bloc. The reason was very simple and beyond dispute. The advantage of the West lay in commercial competition. No state-controlled activity, no collective operation, in a field wide open to scientific inventiveness and industrial enterprise, could have produced developments as staggering as those in the electronics industries of the non-communist world. The reduction in size, weight, power consumption and cost of electronic components in a competitive market had been quite phenomenal. The evolution of micro-electronics and of micro-processing had been nothing less than a technological explosion.
Let a short example suffice. In the 1950s the transistor began to replace the vacuum tube. In the 1960s circuits often transistors were in use. Within ten years transistors numbering several hundreds could be mounted on one small chip of substrate two centimetres square. What was called medium-scale integration (MSI) was then possible. By 1977 large-scale integration (LSI) had come in, employing 1,000 or more transistors mounted in the same space. When war broke out very large-scale integration (VLSI) was already in use, with 10,000 transistors mounted on a chip still only the size of a postage stamp. The work of a computer whose equipment in the forties, using vacuum tubes, would have filled a barn could now be done by something the size of a wrist-watch.
The impact of this on the development of military hardware was incalculable. The equipment for communications, control, guidance, the detection and location of weapons and emitters, the means of jamming, interception, interpolation, diversion and a thousand and one other functions, was flowing in such profusion that there was much more, and in much greater variety, than could be used. The irony for the West, in the shortness of the war, welcome though it was, lay in the inability of military men to find the questions to which the electronics men already had the answers.
They were only beginning, when the fighting ended, to get the best out of the equipment and techniques already in service. They had not yet begun to explore, in a technology developing at an almost frightening rate, the applications of techniques already far advanced and being improved on daily.
The wars of the late nineteenth century — the American Civil War, for example, and the Franco-Prussian War — were wars of the railway, the telegraph, breech-loading small arms and tinned rations. The seas were dominated by the ironclad. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Russo-Japanese War showed to any who cared to learn the dominance on the battlefield of the spade, barbed wire and automatic weapons. The First World War rammed home the same lesson, in a war in which the internal combustion engine, artillery, the submarine, air power and armoured vehicles became the dominant features. The Second World War was one of worldwide mobility on land and sea and in the air, of total mobilization of population and industrial reserves, of seapower and of air forces. It ended in the shadow of the nuclear weapon. The Third World War was widely expected to be the first nuclear war — and perhaps the last. It turned out in the event to be essentially a war of electronics.