Europe

Joint US-Soviet Seminar on Conventional Arms Reductions in Europe

➪ full-text PDF

by Carl Conetta, Conference Report, in Defense and Disarmament Alternatives, the newsletter of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS), January 1989.

Jonathan Dean in MoscowReport on the September 1988 conference, co-hosted by the Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) and Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS), of  Soviet and US arms control and military policy specialists. The report summarizes the exchange regarding problems and prospects for conventional force reductions in Europe.

These meetings happened a little less than two months before President Gorbachev’s historic announcement at the UN in December of 1988 of substantial unilateral reductions and defensive restructuring of Soviet troops in eastern Europe – one of the most significant policy shifts in the process of ending the European Cold War. This international conference likely had more import than most.

The Sometimes You Win and Sometimes You Lose Hypothesis: Some Comments on the Use of Models in Force Comparisons

by Charles Knight, 18 March 1988. PDF

In this previously unpublished paper from 1988, the author reviews various models for simulating war along the Central Front in Germany and their relevance for finding a stable conventional force balance in Europe (and elsewhere.)  Force structures that tend to produce stable outcomes in battlefield simulations are likely to have more deterrent value in the real world.

battle simulation

 

“[C]omplex models [can] be very useful in distinguishing the conditions (i.e. force structures, tactics, and armaments) that produce chaotic, oscillating, or unstable outcomes from those that produce stable outcomes.
“The outcome of a conflict between balanced forces as currently structured is unknowable and unpredictable. This would seem to support the position that no stable conventional deterrent to war can be built, short of overwhelming superiority.  If that was as far as our analysis went, we [might] end up giving support to flexible response doctrine with its fundamentally unstable nuclear deterrent component. Of course, the favored option is to model restructured conventional forces that can take us out of the chaotic conventional battlefield and give us stable outcomes.”