Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.comment From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Farewell to junked Date: Tue, 27 Oct 92 13:27:07 EST Message-ID: \SE F;COMMENTARY \HD Farewell to junked arms? \BY Philip Gold Five years from now (10 at the outside), a dozen or so of the world's nastier nations will find themselves, by conventional military standards, disarmed. They may also be a lot more dangerous - a peril neither the candidates nor most of the punditry have so far deigned to address. The problem, much simplified, is this. Though the military-industrial complexes of NATO and the former Warsaw Pact are trending down, the planet remains awash in weaponry. Some of it's getting chopped up, blown up, or otherwise deep-sixed. But the rest, especially the former East Bloc's inventory (minus Germany), is up for sale. And that's the key word: sale. Gone are the days when relatively small nations (Syria, for example) could maintain massive forces, courtesy of Soviet largess. The Russians, not to mention the Chinese, North Koreans, and sundry other suppliers, want cash. It may be a buyer's market nowadays, but cash is something many of the more avid purchasers lack. And, ironically, the more dependent their forces are (or become) on bargain-basement commie and ex-commie stuff, the worse off they'll be down the road. It used to be a standing NATO joke, and source of nervous reassurance, that, on any given day, half the tanks and vehicles in the Warsaw Pact were down at the motor pool, broke. Ditto most of the airplanes in the hangars. Whatever this may have said about Soviet maintenance procedures, it certainly reflected their design philosophy. The Soviets, and their imitators, assumed, correctly, that the life of a vehicle or aircraft in high-intensity combat was very, very short. They never designed their weapons for longevity, or even for easy, reliable maintenance. They wanted quantity. All that mattered was that, when the Big Day came, everything would be up and ready for a brief, one-way trip. This means that nations with large inventories of Soviet and similar weapons have forces almost impossible to maintain, especially as spare parts and technical assistance dry up, as systems get cannibalized, and as Third World operating and maintenance procedures take their toll. Munitions have a limited shelf life. And training uses things up, wears them out, and busts them all to pieces. This inevitable disarmament-by-breakdown-and-consumption leads to one hope, and to a trinity of dangers. The hope is that the nations possessed of such forces (Syria, again for example) may finally decide to give peace a chance. The dangers may turn out to be more real. First, in the short term, some nasties may succumb to a use-it-before-you-lose-it mentality, i.e., fight while operational confidence is still possible. Or they may decide to de-emphasize increasingly expensive and deteriorated conventional forces and concentrate on the two ends of the spectrum of conflict. This gives rise to the second danger - that nations formerly fielding large forces may shift to seemingly primitive but eminently usable low-intensity forces, especially in regional, ethnic, and religious conflicts. It will look like disarmament; in reality, it will be war by less sophisticated, though still terrible, means. The third danger is that disarmament-by-deterioration may beget serious interest in weapons of mass destruction, either for use in local conflicts or as a means of deterring outside intervention. These weapons need not be elegant; nor need they be purchased outright as complete systems. All that will matter is that they can be assembled and delivered or placed somewhere. This may already have happened. A few months ago, for example, reports circulated that the Kazakhs had sold a couple nukes (at below-dealer's-invoice) to their Iranian brethren. Unfortunately, America was preoccupied with what Miss Hillary really meant, when she made that crack about staying home and baking cookies. Since then, Miss Hillary's cookie recipe has been found acceptably yummy. But the United States, and the world, still lack a recipe for dealing with the new mix of threats. Take the following ingredients: (1) Recognition that, now more than ever, the United States needs first-rate intelligence collection and analysis, and sturdy co-operation with other nations'intelligence services. (2) Recognition that U.S. conventional forces must be structured to deal with both use-it-before-you-lose-it aggressions and with more primitive threats. This means forces configured for strategic and tactical mobility, rapid response, and ample firepower. (3) A multinational approach to ballistic and cruise missile defense. (4) And finally, recognition that international law must evolve to address the problem. A "right of humanitarian intervention" is aborning. It might come to include a "right of humanitarian pre-emption" - strikes against nasties that are acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Notions of inviolable national sovereignty have no more place here than they do in addressing any other problem which threatens the globe. Philip Gold is a fellow of the Discovery Institute and teaches at Georgetown University. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM