What if there were still a Soviet Union assessing its strategic position in the world by the well-known “correlation of forces.” If the United States asked itself how it stood within that Soviet perspective, there is at least one dimension in which we might experience anxiety.
Consider: under the initial formulation of the theory, the Soviets calculated that they required always being able to bring overwhelming massed military might to a potential point of attack in order to prevail in war. They had in mind, of course, war in Western Europe and against the western powers in general. The correlation of forces, therefore, applied foremost to the European theater. Indeed, the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated that the approach could not apply beyond Europe, since it became patent that they could under no circumstances succeed in forward basing forces sufficient to overwhelm the United States in its homeland.
The United States, by contrast, recognized that it could not match Soviet massed military might in Europe through its own forces. Therefore the U. S. adopted the concept of “force multipliers” to fend off the Soviet threat. That meant, in Europe, counting on forward-based U. S. forces acting in concert with sufficient allied forces to withstand a Soviet assault eventually to be repulsed with reinforcement from the U. S. As the decades passed, however, it became clear that the combination of ambitious Soviet aims and hesitating allied preparedness created an increasing threat to the U. S. Accordingly, in the 1980s President Reagan altered the strategy by imposing forward based tactical nuclear weapons to nullify the weight of Soviet land forces. Indeed, the principal symbol of the fall of the Soviets is far less the Berlin Wall than the “pink tankstupy” in Prague, for it was the nullification of the threat of massive tank forces that trumped the Soviet correlation of forces.
Today, the idea of “force multipliers” seems increasingly tenuous, at the precise time when any realistic threat of tactical nuclear deployment has dramatically receded. This plays out in the regional theaters in which the U. S. seeks the support of allied forces to sustain extended campaigns but does so with decreasing effectiveness. Coupled with growing reluctance to deploy massive forces of its own for any but nominal periods of time, these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq increasingly begin to resemble a return to the “correlation of forces” model relied on by the Soviets, tilting dangerously toward U. S. adversaries and nowhere more dramatically than in a potential Iranian foe. Without a credible nuclear threat, the U. S. is running out of “force multipliers.”
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