Soviet Union The Big Shake-Up

By John Greenwald

When Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci tours defense installations in the Soviet Union this week -- the most senior American official granted that privilege since World War II -- he will find the military in the midst of one of those profound shake-ups that have plagued the Red Army since Leon Trotsky helped build it in 1918. Under Mikhail Gorbachev's program of perestroika, the world's largest military machine faces unprecedented political pressure to slim down, open up and rethink its basic strategy. At the same time, the armed forces are plunging into the electronic age in a frantic drive to narrow the West's lead in high-tech weaponry. Taken together, the changes could revolutionize every aspect of Moscow's military philosophy, from the deployment of troops in Eastern Europe to its attitude toward nuclear war.

Gorbachev has little choice but to strive to bring the military under tighter control. While the armed forces have long occupied a privileged position in Soviet life, military spending has become a major impediment to Gorbachev's drive to revitalize the economy. Many Western experts estimate that the armed forces consume as much as 17% of the Soviet gross national product (vs. 6% for the U.S.). That comes to roughly $300 billion and places a heavy burden on the country. Observers agree that Gorbachev's restructuring of the civilian economy will not be possible without parallel changes in the military. Inevitably, as U.S. Naval Analyst Norman Polmar points out, "Gorbachev's reforms will directly confront major military interests."

The Soviet arsenal has traditionally been characterized by serviceable but relatively primitive weapons, known more for brute strength than sophistication. That is true as well of the military's tough but poorly trained personnel, who, because of ethnic diversity, often do not speak the same language; up to one-quarter of all Soviet draftees must be taught Russian before they can understand their commanders.

The U.S.S.R. has a standing armed force of 5.2 million (vs. 2.1 million for the U.S.), but Moscow's reliance on universal conscription of 18-year-olds means that morale and motivation are lower than in countries with all- volunteer forces, like the U.S. and Britain. In conventional units, the Kremlin has traditionally opted for quantity over quality, relying on large numbers of troops and weapons and de-emphasizing battlefield initiative and high technology.

Though the war in Afghanistan gave Soviet troops valuable combat experience, it exposed an array of equipment deficiencies. Machine-gun fire and U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles brought down heavily armored helicopter gunships. In a move reminiscent of the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam, Moscow called a halt to the fighting after nine years of frustration and began withdrawing its troops in May. Says David Isby, a U.S. military expert and author of Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army: "The vaunted Soviet military was basically fought to a standstill."

Gorbachev took a step toward streamlining the military last December, when he and President Reagan agreed to scrap all medium- and shorter-range nuclear missiles. The Soviet leader makes no secret of his hopes that continuing strategic arms talks and conventional-weapo ns negotiations will reduce the defense burden. To decrease East-West tensions further, Moscow and Washington have embarked on a series of unprecedented exchanges between their military leaders. Last month Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the Soviet Chief of Staff, peered into the cockpit of a B-1B bomber and visited the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt during a six-day American tour. Carlucci on his four-day trip planned to board a missile ship in the Black Sea and inspect the new Blackjack bomber.

Gorbachev has begun to challenge the very pillars on which Soviet defense policy rests. Though he made no mention of the military in his speech to the party plenum last week, Gorbachev has made it clear that he wants the military to shift from an offensive to a defensive posture through such possible moves as withdrawing from forward positions in Eastern Europe. In place of its quest for superiority over the West in numbers of weapons and troops, Gorbachev is demanding that the armed forces make do with a "reasonable sufficiency." To assure success, Gorbachev has reshuffled the military high command and silenced opponents of reform. Last week Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, a key Gorbachev ally, called for the Supreme Soviet to supervise "all departments occupied with the military and military-industrial activity." Such control is now believed to rest with the Defense Council.

While moves to upgrade the military have been under way for a decade, Moscow has grown more desperate in recent years. "The acceleration of high technology in weapons threatens the whole Soviet concept of war with obsolescence," says Christopher Donnelly, director of Soviet studies at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Every Soviet service has turned to technology in a faltering attempt to keep up. Though not always state of the art by Western standards, lasers, computers and satellite technology have been brought into the arsenal and forced officers and troops to deal with complex new weapons.

The results so far have been mixed. The Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies hold a 2-to-1 advantage over the U.S. and NATO in numbers of tanks, for example. Yet Moscow's armored force includes large numbers of the undersized and underpowered T-55 and T-62 models. The new T-80 travels at a sluggish 40 m.p.h., but is equipped with a lethal 125-mm cannon and laser-guided fire control. One big advance is shields of "reactive" armor that explode on contact to deflect projectiles fired by all but the newest NATO tanks.

The Soviet surface navy, by contrast, continues to lag far behind Western fleets. High operating costs and wear and tear have forced Soviet ships to spend 85% of their time in port, compared with 66% for U.S. vessels. Moscow has severely curtailed Pacific-fleet activity since 1984. "There's no doubt that the Soviet navy is deploying markedly less," says Harlan Ullman, an expert on Moscow's fleet at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Signs support the thesis that they are changing their strategy."

Frustrated in its effort to challenge the U.S. on the surface, Moscow has built the world's largest, and in some ways most advanced, fleet of nuclear- powered submarines. While the undertaking produced such vessels as the titanium-hulled Alfa-class boats, so expensive that only six were built, it also produced newer Soviet sub classes that go faster, travel deeper and carry more weapons than their American rivals. Moscow's Oscar-class attack submarines are the most heavily armed on the seas.

The air force remains the most backward Soviet service. When a Soviet defector flew a MiG-25 fighter to Japan in 1976, Western experts judged the craft to be little more than a crude weapons platform -- underpowered, poorly built and laced with dangerously primitive electrical wiring. Soviet jet engines still burn out early and guzzle more fuel than comparable U.S. power plants. The Soviets continue to fly 1950s-era propeller-driven Bear-H reconnaissance bombers on patrols off Alaska and the U.S.'s Eastern Seaboard. New jet fighters like the MiG-29, a downsized version of the 14-year-old U.S. F-15, leave skeptics unimpressed. After inspecting a MiG-29 in the Soviet Union, a delegation of U.S. experts found the plane's electronics and fabrication to be second-rate. In London, a British defense official dismissed the even newer MiG-31 as "simply a pregnant MiG-25."

By contrast, the Soviets have made great strides in the accuracy and mobility of their ballistic missiles. U.S. experts concede that Moscow has taken the lead in mobile systems. At sea, Soviet subs bristle with nuclear- tipped missiles with ranges of 4,000 miles and more.

The Soviets have had their share of blunders to rival the U.S.'s DIVAD, an antiaircraft weapon that was scrapped in 1985 after a $1.8 billion development outlay. Moscow pushed ahead with its ZSU-30-2, a DIVAD counterpart, but despite a decade of improvements, the weapon's radar guidance system still does not operate properly. Many experts even sneer at the Blackjack bomber, which suffered flight problems and engine setbacks that kept it in development for more than a decade.

Yet Carlucci may feel a twinge of envy on his travels in the Soviet Union. While the Pentagon is awash in public procurement scandals, the Soviet armed forces operate behind a veil of secrecy that even insiders cannot always penetrate. Marshal Akhromeyev stunned his hosts during his recent U.S. tour by conceding that military leaders do not know precisely how much the Kremlin spends annually to develop weapons. Procurement as well as research and development is funded by the central government, he said, and the costs do not show up in the military budget. Those two items alone represent close to half of overall U.S. defense spending. "The bottom line is that the Soviets don't really have a handle on the burden of defense spending," says F. Stephen Larrabee, vice president of the Institute for East-West Security Studies in New York City. "Some internal studies may well have shocked Gorbachev on just how high it is."

The switch to high-tech weapons will send Soviet military costs soaring. The T-80 tank costs nine times as much to produce as the older T-64 and is more expensive to maintain. Qualified personnel will be needed to operate the new equipment -- at higher training costs. Soviet procurement practices, moreover, are skewed toward the purchase of proven products rather than sophisticated new equipment. "They have no problem churning out tanks," says Jonathan Eyal, a research fellow at Britain's Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies. "But they do have a problem keeping pace with technological advancement."

For that reason, many experts conclude that the Soviet military, as currently organized, will never catch up with Western armed forces in advanced equipment. "What's going on in the Soviet military is an index of their desperation," says Lieut. General William Odom, who retires this week as director of the U.S. National Security Agency. "The Soviets have become aware that they can't afford to compete with the U.S. in quality weaponry."

That realization -- plus the Soviet military's drive to modernize and Gorbachev's insistence on controlling defense spending -- means that Carlucci is arriving in Moscow at what could prove a critical moment in Soviet military history. Since taking over as Defense Secretary late last year, Carlucci has struggled to control costs and rationalize U.S. procurement policies. He may find, in that sense at least, that he has a lot in common with his Soviet hosts.

With reporting by Ken Olsen/Moscow and Bruce van Voorst/Washington