The Other Cold War Goes On

BY: Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post, August 13, 1991

The Cold War is not over, a Soviet intellectual told me morosely during the recent U.S.-Soviet
summit. It continues inside the Soviet Union.

An entrenched Soviet defense establishment fights as fiercely as ever to hold on to the resources
and perks it commanded for a global confrontation with the United States, despite the outbreak of
peace.

The internal conflict pits Soviet civilian experts and politicians who recognize their country is
going broke at a dizzying pace against generals and party bosses who have made their careers in
the giant Soviet military-industrial complex. The struggle now is over money, not territory.

The stakes for the West in how this battle comes out are enormous. Restructuring of the Soviet
Union’s military and its defense industries holds the key to long-term global stability.
Unfortunately, the generals and factory bosses have held their own in the initial skirmishing.

Western hopes that Soviet defense spending would enter a steep, continuing decline, and that
Soviet tank factories would efficiently and happily turn to producing washing machines or
tractors, now look illusory. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s plans for “defense conversion,”
which he asked the London Group of Seven summit to support, are more sizzle than steak.

Defense conversion was supposed to strip down Soviet military potential while building up
consumer-goods production. It was to be a twofer. Thus far it is doing neither.

In the half-dozen instances of conversion the Soviet military has undertaken, the factories
continue to produce excellent tanks or warplanes while making a few mediocre tractors or
washing machines.

Leaders in the military-industrial complex have persuaded Gorbachev that they head the only
cost-efficient part of Soviet industry and should therefore take the lead in consumer-goods
manufacturing. Western officials voice support for this wrongheaded and dangerous notion.

The Soviet military-industrial complex builds rockets and tanks that work because its factories
are able to disregard cost as a factor. Unlike their civilian counterparts, military factory managers
keep rejecting shoddy material until they get what they need. But their refrigerators or baby
buggies will be astronomically expensive and probably not much good, says Andrei Kortunov.

“The whole concept of a tank engine is that it will work for a couple of days at full speed.
Tractors need engines that last a long time. And I doubt that an SS-20 rocket scientist will be
much good at designing simple washing machines. It is a mismatch to expect this industry to solve
that problem.”

Kortunov is the sharpest analyst of Soviet defense and foreign policy I know. From his perch as
head of the foreign policy department at the USA and Canada Institute in Moscow, he carefully
observes the political-military affairs of both superpowers.

Defense conversion grew out of “Gorbachev’s desire to show the people a peace dividend out of
the withdrawals from Eastern Europe,” Kortunov told me. “But letting individual plants produce
consumer items changes nothing if the military simply adds a production line for civilian goods.
The end result is that the military gets more resources than it had before and no structural change
is made. Until the structural change is made and these enterprises are removed from the military
command system, conversion won’t really help.”

Moreover, Soviet military spending will rise from a projected 77 billion to 100 billion rubles in
this fiscal year’s public budget. Military demands forced Gorbachev to prepare a supplemental
budget in July despite his government’s promises to stop printing rubles to meet unexpected
needs, Kortunov reports.

The pattern of how the Soviet military is spending these rubles is revealing as well. It is the
reverse of the United States, where Defense Secretary Richard Cheney is cutting short-term
procurement sharply to put more money into research and development of the next generation of
American weapons.

Here procurement of weapons from existing production lines continues to take priority, to the
detriment of research. Plant managers have as much say about the quantity of weapons produced
for the armed forces as does the Ministry of Defense.

The Soviet military-industrial complex resists the radical structural changes that the end of open
superpower hostility should bring. Until there is a break with the old system, the West should look
warily on proposals for financial support of Gorbachev’s conversion plans. Such support could
retard the radical restructuring of the Soviet defense industry that is needed to end the last battle
of the Cold War.