Strategic Forces, General Purpose Forces, and Crisis Management

The 1980s could prove to be an unusually dangerous decade because of the simultaneous maturing of Soviet multilevel military superiority and of very severe Soviet domestic problems. It is not clear that the Western "window of military vulnerability" will be defined by the Soviets as a "window of opportunity," but the West has been very imprudent in permitting such a question ever to have potential policy salience. Unlike the situation in the 1960s and 1970s, fairly plausible scenarios for war between the United States and Soviet Union can be drafted for the 1980s. Western understanding of how acute crises should be managed almost certainly is outdated as a consequence, in good part, of the cumulatively dramatic change in the East-West military balance. U.S. defense planning should recognize the essential unity of military and crisis bargaining problems and appreciate that one cannot prudently choose to emphasize, for example, the modernization of the general purpose forces at the expense of the "less usable" strategic forces. Indeed, if anything, the United States can least afford relative weakness at the higher potential end of the escalation spectrum.