[p2p-research] Candid Interviews with Former Soviet Officials Reveal U.S. Strategic Intelligence Failure Over Decades

[Kevin Carson]

On 10/28/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> Just to show when the "professionals" with billion dollar budgets go wrong:
>  ""Previously Classified Interviews with Former Soviet Officials Reveal U.S.
> Strategic Intelligence Failure Over Decade: 1995 Contractor Study Finds that
> U.S. Analysts Exaggerated Soviet Aggressiveness and Understated Moscow's
> Fears of a U.S. First Strike"
>   http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb285/index.htm
>  """
>  While the BDM analysts found that some interpretations of Soviet policy
> were consistent with the interview evidence (e.g., the Soviet interest in
> avoiding nuclear war and Moscow's quest for superiority), they identified
> what they believed to be important failures of analysis, including:
>     * "[Erring] on the side of overestimating Soviet aggressiveness" and
> underestimated "the extent to which the Soviet leadership was deterred from
> using nuclear weapons." [I: iv, 35]. Recent evidence from oral history
> sources supports this finding.  The Soviet leadership of the 1960s and 19702
> suffered from a strategic inferiority complex that supports its drive for
> parity with (or even superiority over) the United States. All of the
> strategic models developed by Soviet military experts had a defensive
> character and assumed a first strike by NATO (See Document 3 at pages 26-27,
> Oral History Roundtable, Stockholm, p. 61)

Part of the problem was that Western decision-makers were trapped in
their own paradigm:  namely the "Chamberlain at Munich" paradigm,
where every foreign adversary plays the Hitler ca. 1938 role, and the
only American choices are "deterrence" vs. "appeasement."

The problem is, the Soviets had their own paradigm (Hitler 1941) that
governed their view of American intentions.

Far from  having the motivations of Hitler in the 1930s, I think the
Soviets can better be compared to Germany before WWI:  a second-rate
would-be superpower, with a sense of inferiority toward the first-rank
superpower and a desire for "a place in the sun."  Everything in
Soviet culture, the desire to build the biggest and best of
everything, even Khrushchev's "we will bury you" speech, reflected the
perceived lack of parity and the desire to prove the country wasn't
backward or weak.


-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
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