Ian Mather, Observer 19th Feb. 1984
Recent Nato study concludes that USSR’s spending on arms in past 7 years has been increasing at less than half the rate previously thought.
Notice that the headline is completely misleading: the report actually describes a change in NATO estimates of Soviet military spending. What they are actually doing is anybody’s guess.
This study, taken with an earlier version by the CIA which came to similar conclusions, marks the end of a period in which inflated estimates of Soviet military spending have been accepted (at least in public) by NATO members’ governments for their political utility in justifying increases in their own military spending.
The basis for all this was the now notorious ‘Team B’ exercise in 1976 when Bush, then DCIA, invited a group of ‘hawks’ to rework the CIA’s estimates of Soviet military spending. Given the right-wing orientation of that group, no one was surprised when they concluded that the CIA’s figures were too low. The ‘Team B’ estimate (little more than a crude fraud) then became ‘fact’ and the ‘dollar gap’ was born.
The major mystery of this episode is not that the right-wing should attempt such a fraud, but that the liberal wing of the American ruling elites, especially the New York end of it, should allow them to do so with so little protest. Almost the only voice raised against the ‘Team B’ fraud was ex CIA Arthur Cox, who exploded the ‘Team B’ exercise in the New York Review of Books, 6th November 1980.
The bureaucratic struggle within the US government over the estimates of Soviet military capability tends to get overlooked in favour of the more exciting aspects of US foreign policy and the work of US intelligence agencies. This is a pity, because those estimates form the basis for the official US government definition of ‘reality’. A low estimate of Soviet spending/capabilities makes it difficult to persuade Congress to fund the military’s programs.
There is a very interesting and much neglected study of this process by Lawrence Freedman (now Professor Freedman), US Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat (Macmillan 1977). Freedman, in this minutely detailed account of the post-war estimates ‘game’, attempts to steer a course between, on the one hand, the way intelligence estimates are simply doctored to extort money out of Congress, and, on the other, are the consequences of genuine uncertainty and disinterested academic study.
Freedman’s relatively sanguine (1976) view of this balance can hardly have survived the gross fraud perpetrated by ‘Team B’ and the subsequent open manipulation of the estimates for political ends.
This NATO study looks like a fairly tricky piece of work. It seems to want to justify the scare-mongering of the past 8 years by claiming that the ‘Team B’ estimates were correct at the time, while simultaneously claiming that Soviet military spending has slowed since then. This will justify reductions in future NATO increases in military spending. (Without reading the actual report it is impossible to know how its authors manage to convince us – or themselves – that the USSR’s military spending should be slowing down during a period of rapid NATO increases.)
I would guess that this study signifies a somewhat belated recognition of the damage the current enormous US military expenditure is doing to the world economy via the Federal deficit and the resulting high US interest rates. In one sense, the US deficit just is that military spending; and in the end US capitalism is first and foremost interested in its own health, regardless of the niceties of ideology. Somewhere inside the Reagan administration the US business world has been ringing alarm bells about US military spending, just as it did in the late 1960s over expenditure on the Vietnam War.
This time round, it remains to be seen if the Pentagon can, in fact, be reined in.
RR