The Cold War as Military History

Summary of Olof Santesson's article in RSAWSPJ no 3 2001.

Norman Friedman has, in his book The Fifty-Year War (Chatham Publishing, London 2000), written a comprehensive study of the Cold War. The author, a US military scholar, does not belong to the revisionists who contend that the West did not take into account legitimate Soviet security demands. His perspective is truly American. But he criticizes his own country as being incapable of realizing who it was dealing with.

It was, according to the author, wrong to believe that the Soviet Union could be tamed and gradually transformed into a conventional state. The Cold War could not end as long as the Soviet state existed. More than forty years long, the era was not an uncertain peace. It was the Third World War, let alone in a slower tempo than its two predecessors. If the West did not understand Soviet goals and motives, how shall it then understand more alien challengers such as Muslim fundamentalists? asks Friedman.

The author is an historian by profession. What he in fact has written is the Cold War as military history. The reader is invited to follow the changing role of both nuclear forces and the conventional armed forces during the conflict. President Dwight D Eisenhower is given credit for cutting down on the army on the premise that war had become impossible in the nuclear era. The next president, John F Kennedy, adhered to the idea of flexible response and increased the army in the belief that conflict between the superpowers would take place in the third world countries.

What followed after the Vietnam War is by the author seen as the nadir of the West. After efforts of Khrushchev to limit the Red army Brezhnev gave every military branch what they wanted. The Soviet nuclear arsenal grew quicker than the Americans had counted on. But the Soviet twilight had in fact started with, among other problems, a demographical demise. Michail Gorbachev could not control the forces he let loose when he belatedly tried to modernize Russia. The Soviet Union was doomed.

Nevertheless, the outcome was not at all clear when Ronald Reagan some years earlier had entered the global picture. As US president, however, he was able to harness the emerging computer technology to his forceful policies at exactly the moment where it gave advantages far greater than was needed in the form of expensive investment.

A few years earlier the same American efforts would not have been enough to meet the Soviet threat. Ten years later, the Soviets could have bought new tech-nology from a rather demoralized Western Europe and thus avoided the need of reform to meet the challenge from the West.

Thus Norman Friedman describes the end of the Cold War: The computer wrecked the Soviet Union.