The Evening Star (June 1, 1946)
Eliot: Soviet military power
By George Fielding Eliot
There is a tendency in this country to overestimate the present military resources of the Soviet Union. This tendency is helpful to the Russians as they sit with the western powers around the council table. Consequently, they do all they can to encourage it. They talk of their great strength, they repeatedly state that they are not going to be intimidated, they hint at dire things which may occur if they do not get their way. But their actual military situation does not justify overconfidence.
Partly, of course, this is due to self-delusion. The Russian political leaders get their military advice from the chiefs of the Red Army, quite naturally. And the chiefs of the Red Army, still a little flushed with victory and justly proud of their accomplishments, may be expected to have a very natural bias in favor of the methods by which that victory was attained. They may be expected to think in terms of great masses of men, of guns and of tanks, supported by a numerous tactical aviation. Well aware of the defects of the Russian transportation system, they may likewise be expected to think in terms of buffer states and “friendly” neighbors, which means in Soviet parlance, controlled neighbors, in order to gain more time for an inevitably slow mobilization.
But it is likely that this obsolescent military philosophy is being called into question even now by forward-looking Russians and will be increasingly questioned in future. It might be interesting to imagine that the little handful of men in the Kremlin who really control Russia’s destinies have called in a non-Russian expert, perhaps one of the captive German generals, and asked him for a cold-blooded appraisal of Russia’s present military position.
I think he would say something like this:
“Gentlemen, your military position at the moment is not encouraging. You have lost many millions of the flower of your young men. You have younger replacements, but they are not yet trained, many of them have not yet reached military age. Your manpower position will improve; in five years it will be much better; in 15 years it will be infinitely better. But now it is bad. Your industrial situation is likewise suffering severely from the shocks and dislocations of war. You are still able to turn out great numbers of tanks and guns, but you are not prepared to turn out long-distance aviation, nor do you have a flourishing electronics industry.
“In fact, this is your basic defect almost everywhere, lack of air power and of sea power, and consequently lack of strategic mobility. The one answer which your land power can make to air power or sea power is to overrun the bases of these types of power, which both require support from the land. But you must be able to do this quickly enough to avoid irreparable injury to your own vital centers. In these days of atomic warfare, you cannot hope to do that.
“Your situation will improve with time. You will acquire the new weapons for yourselves. You will be able to train the army of technicians you will need. You can build warships and long-range planes, you can acquire rockets and guided missiles. You can conquer the secrets of the release of atomic energy. But when you have done all this, you must still remember that for all the foreseeable future, there is no military security save in a swift and overwhelming offensive. As long as the principal powers of the west, and notably the United States and Great Britain, retain a well-armed and well-dispersed position of offensive readiness, you will do well never to think of carrying matters to the state of armed conflict with them.
“You should, therefore, if you desire military superiority for your future purposes, seek to divide these two powers one from the other, and to weaken them in every way. Criticize their armaments programs as being threats to peace. Cry out in indignation if one of them seeks an air base anywhere outside its own frontiers. And chiefly, hope with all your hearts that presently they will relax, will go back to their comfortable dreams as they have so often done in the past, and neglect their armaments. Then, if you are of a mind for war, your opportunity may come. But for that you must wait. You are in no state for war at present, gentlemen, believe me.”
That is about what an important military expert would tell the men of the Kremlin – if they were to ask.