SADARM to the Rescue

By John Skow

THE THIRD WORLD WAR: THE UNTOLD STORY by General Sir John Hackett; Macmillan; 372 pages; $15.75

Jimmy Carter's second term disappears without a trace, and the Shah of Iran is no longer mentioned as a steadfast ally of the U.S. Egypt has a sharply different role: now it is assumed not to be a reliable Soviet client state but, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, a force that extinguishes Libyan extremism, helps to impose moderation on the Israelis and thus stabilizes the Middle East. Otherwise, our next spasm of global bloodshed remains much as imagined four years ago in The Third World War: August 1985 by retired British General Sir John Hackett, 71, and his military associates. So does the authors' message: civilian blathering about disarmament is infantile, and the West's only hope is to trust its stalwart military men and give them whatever costly whizbangs they ask for.

In his sequel volume, the former deputy chief of the British general staff describes in finer detail the events that follow the fatal decision of the Soviet Union, powerful militarily but shaky in its economy and unsure of Poland and its own Asian provinces, that the moment has come to attack what it assumes to be a soft and irresolute NATO alliance. When their mighty armored thrusts into West Germany fail--just barely--to overwhelm NATO, the Soviets gamble that a nuclear attack will throw the West into panic, and they vaporize Birmingham, England. Twenty-five minutes later the Allies detonate four ICBMS over Minsk. The ghastly three-week war is ended, and the dammed-up anger of its own abused citizens sweeps the Soviet government and the Communist Party into history's celebrated dustbin.

So the story goes. A civilian reader in the West is not much comforted by the precarious victory, nor is he meant to be. In part, the world owes its bloody deliverance to simple luck. (Certainly one ironic bit of luck, although it came too late for inclusion in this book, would be that the Falkland Islands war gave he British an opportunity to sort out their modern weapons and bucked up their national courage.) Had the Soviets delayed their attack for a year or two, as KGB intelligence reports recommended, the activities of European disarmers, and the foreign policy blunders of the "abrasive" Republican Administration in the U.S., might have wrecked the unity of NATO. Had the last-toss nuclear gamble of the Politburo struck at New York and London instead of a single English manufacturing city, worldwide incineration could hardly have been avoided. Had several nations of the Western alliance not reversed their pinchpenny defense policies and bought desperately needed new weapons systems in the early 1980s, the brutal tank and air attacks of the Soviets could not possibly have been stalled. Had the Poles not sabotaged their own military transport...

Much is made, in an ideological and not very convincing way, of supposed rigidities in Soviet military practice. Their pilots and naval captains are taught to fight strictly by the book and risk being shot by security police if they deviate into independent maneuvers. Half-trained Asian infantrymen, most of whom cannot understand their Russian-speaking officers, march stolidly forward, knowing that if they falter they will be machine-gunned by the KGB. So blindly is the stricture against retreat enforced that even a temporary strategic withdrawal is forbidden, and the Soviet officer who recommends it is dragged out and shot.

A civilian reader simply does not know whether to believe this legend making, retailed by the author in a tone of righteous contempt. Resentment underlies many of the arguments advanced here, and not all of it is directed against the Soviets. The author frets that "the resolve and the military capability of the West had since 1918 been sapped by an uncritical hankering for peace." Among the hankerers, they comment snidely, were what Lenin called "useful fools," and these fainthearts were quick to join "socalled 'peace movements,' unobtrusively orchestrated and largely paid for by the U.S.S.R."

Such Blimpish prejudice is galling, especially to those who, regarding themselves as tough-minded and not fainthearted, will see these books as further evidence that war is too devilishly attractive to be left to the generals. Hackett's lip-smacking language ("seek and destroy armor, shortened into the not infelicitous little acronym SADARM") can make the military mind seem demented. But civilian harrumphing is no more useful than the military kind, and reading Hackett's prickly books goads the reader to ask: How can the human race evolve beyond the savagery of tribalistic nationalism? --By John Skow

Excerpt

There was no question where the focal point of any conflict between the armies of the two great power blocs would lie. It would be in the Federal Republic of Germany, where the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, largely stationed in what was known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), faced the considerably weaker NATO forces ... It was in the GDR that the Warsaw Pact was even now staging maneuvers of impressive size, so large as to arouse at first strong suspicion in the West, and then to confirm, that this was really mobilization .. . The maneuvers had been notified to other powers ... Some smaller though still considerable maneuvers of the Southern Group of Soviet Forces in Hungary had not. It was from these that one airborne and two motor rifle divisions had moved into Yugoslavia.

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