WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25, 1987.

NATO DEFENSE

WITNESSES

HON. DAVID ABSHIRE, FORMER UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR TO NATO DENNIS KLOSKE, SPECIAL ADVISOR TO THE DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ON NATO ARMAMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Mr. CHAPPELL. The Committee will please come to order.

Today we have the former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Hon. David Abshire, and Mr. Dennis Kloske, Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense on NATO Armaments.

Mr. Abshire and Mr. Kloske, we would like to explore with you today the capability of the NATO nations to defend Europe against a Warsaw Pack attack and the commitment of all the NATO nations to share in this defense burden.

Mr. Abshire and Mr. Kloske, if you want to make brief statements at this point, you may begin and then we will proceed with questions.

What we are attempting to do this year is get a better understanding of the NATO alliance, what the U.S. responsibility ought to be and what progress we are making in the various arenas that fall within the jurisdiction of this committee.

Mr. Abshire, you may proceed.

SUMMARY STATEMENT OF MR. ABSHIRE

Mr. ABSHIRE. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure to be here.

As I mentioned to you in Brussels, I applaud what your Committee is trying to do to place these issues in a larger framework and I would like to make a general presentation with regard to the development of the strategy at NATO for better use of resources and I think this will fit very nicely as a forerunner of Dennis Kloske's comments in the armament cooperation field.

NATO STRATEGY

Mr. Chairman, I feel that at NATO and in our military institutions, enormous attention has been given to forces in being, how those forces might be used in combat.

I think in a sense a little attention has been given to what I call a strategy for forces in the making.

Now, I find in my studies and when I leave government on April 6, having completed my 90-day commitment to the White House and go back to the Center for Strategic International Studies, one of the projects I will become involved in is following up on some of

these things we will be talking about and would be happy to share my findings with this Committee as I go along over the next year and a half.

Mr. CHAPPELL. We would appreciate that very, very much.

Mr. ABSHIRE. As I look at the classical strategic principles that deal with forces in being, I am struck by the similarity of such principles as forces in the making.

RESOURCES STRATEGY

I have devised what I call a resources strategy, and this has become accepted at NATO, out of taking those principles such as economy of force, economy of effort, objective means and so forth, and applying them to the field of forces in the making.

I call this a strategic approach to our resource utilization.

The reason that I think this strategic approach is so important is that I believe it enables us to correct specific vulnerabilities and develop force multipliers.

But if I could take a historic example, the Maginot Line in the thirties, the construction of the Maginot Line was not a bad decision. It was a good decision.

If the Maginot Line had been combined with a completion of that line along the Belgium frontier to include the 11⁄2 mile area where the breakthrough occurred and had there been a mobile reserve, there would have been no breakthrough.

Suppose in the late thirties the French Defense Minister had become very concerned and felt that French defense was inadequate.

To throw more money at the problem would not have been the answer because that additional investment of money would have probably gone into reinforcing even more the Maginot Line and the key areas of vulnerability would have remained.

So our concern is how to deal with specific vulnerabilities, how to get an investment strategy to eliminate those. The problem with NATO today, Mr. Chairman, is not that it is universally weak and it is not universally strong. The problem is that it is uneven and you have got vested interests and institutional trends, for example, that would continue to reinforce strength and overlook vulnerabilities.

For example, the tendency is to build more platforms. Those have their constituencies and yet low stocks of ammunition and spare parts can invalidate that very investment in platforms.

We, Mr. Chairman, in the West, have 21⁄2 times the GNP and 11⁄2 times the population of the Warsaw Pact.

We both, if you take the Warsaw Pact investment, and if you take the West investment, are about at the same level.

They have an enormous comparative advantage because of the cost of their manpower, and yet we are being outproduced in most areas by the Warsaw Pact.

Despite the fact that they in certain areas have a technological lag, despite the fact that they lack the creativity that we have.

So this is the reason that I say that the prime concern of NATO should be the development of an effective strategy for the super use of our resources.

So when I speak of a resources strategy, I talk about a strategy different from the military strategy once you are committed to combat, but it is a strategy of preparation, a strategy of development to marshal and harmonize the super resources of the alli

ance.

And this is to produce, first, a better return on expenditures of over $340 billion.

DEFENSE INVESTMENT OF ALLIES

When I was at NATO, I asked my military staff to figure up the portion of defense investment of the allied nations that go into NATO, and they came up with that figure of $340 billion.

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Tom Callahan, whom many of you know coined that word structural disarmament where we are in a process of spending more and more on fewer and fewer weapons with those weapons becoming more expensive and, therefore, we are pricing ourselves out of the defense market.

So in that $340 billion investment, if we can begin to reverse structural disarmament and this spiral that I have talked about, not just in the United States, but in NATO together, we have accomplished something.

We have begun to get better return on our overall investment and part of the thesis that I am going to give you is that through a coalition strategy of investment as compared to simply a national strategy of investment, we have got a better chance of developing those kinds of investments, investment advantages, if we have this discipline of a resources strategy.

But the purpose of this is not simply to have better return on investment, which I think is badly needed because the defense consensus is in decline.

The purpose of this is for something more yet, and that is to improve NATO's conventional defense and to enhance deterrence of war or coercion.

Mr. CHAPPELL. On the $340 billion, what does that include? Is that actual investment in the European area, NATO, or does that take into account the various budgets of the nations?

Mr. ABSHIRE. That takes in account the various budgets of the nations that would be related to NATO.

Mr. CHAPPELL. TO NATO?

Mr. ABSHIRE. TO NATO.

Mr. CHAPPELL. It doesn't mean that you take the Belgian and the German budgets for defense, but identify within those budgets what is actually being done in the NATO alliance?

Mr. ABSHIRE. It goes beyond the corporate investment such as our infrastructure fund, which is put in a common pool, but it would relate, say, to the budget of the Federal Republic of Germany, practically all of it would be NATO, whereas ours we would deal with something over half.

So it is that total portion of the budget that is going into NATO defense and procurement related to NATO.

So, Mr. Chairman, if we were to accomplish simply better return on investment, and that would help us improve the defense consensus, but if that were not so disciplined in terms of battlefield payoff

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and in terms of deterrence and defense, then we have accomplished something of economic value, but not something truly of defense value.

So in my resources strategy, we have got two objectives, better use of investment and improvement of NATO's conventional defense.

COMMITMENT TO EUROPE

I would like to say that when we start to speak about strategy and resources, it is very important to speak of commitments, and I would like to take a minute on this subject because a Professor of Economics at New York University has written a rather dramatic book which proclaims that NATO weakens the West and if we could take $140 billion to $170 billion, that is about the size of our trade deficit, and we could simply eliminate that, of course, this would mean taking those troops back from Europe and taking them out in their end use and there are enormous costs with that-but the thesis of his book is not only is this a misinvestment, but it is actually weakening the defense of the West.

Now, I will talk more about the specifics of that in a minute, but I want to say something about the reason of the basic commitment to Europe. And I have said this to my NATO colleagues on my farewell talk there.

I love those cultural ties, the heritage that has come down through Judeo-Christian Greek-Roman renaissance, but that is not the reason for the commitment to Europe.

I am concerned about trade and investment with Europe, but that is not the reason for the commitment to Europe. The commitment to Europe is that we have had two world wars at a cost of 65 million lives and that if we have a third world war, it is going to be related to that strategic area like the first and the second world war related.

Now I have a particular philosophy from my reading of history, and I can send you a much longer piece on this

Mr. CHAPPELL. I wish you would do that.

[CLERK'S NOTE.-The article "War by Miscalculation" referred to by Mr. Abshire is printed at the end of this hearing. See page 1194.]

Mr. ABSHIRE. World War I and World War II came from misconception. I don't mean there weren't bad guys; there were, but in World War I in the fatal months of June and July, there was not a principal contender that thought a world war would be set off, it would be a Serbian or Eastern war, commitments were unclear and secret and ambiguous, unlike Article V of the NATO Treaty, which is a very clear commitment.

So it was out of those miscalculations and miscommitments that created the miscalculation and misperception resulting in a world war that nobody planned and I have read the revisions of historians like Fisher of Hamburg, but my statement still stands.

As we go into the period of World War II, allies backed down time and again, but when Hitler made the commitment on Poland, he thought it would be the Polish war, that if British came in that British would back out; it was blackmail and coercive strategy.