While discussing the legendary guns of the Special Forces from 1972 through 1992, a former Special Forces weapons man describes the times:
This era began with withdrawal from Vietnam triggering a period of slow motion and even retrenchment in the Army in general and SF in particular. Headcount was cut back and units vanished as the Army transitioned from a rather clumsily implemented draft levée en masse to an all-volunteer force, something only one major power had attempted before (indeed, it was largely the British success of a volunteer military that encouraged us to end the draft that had run continuously since 1940). Draftees had never been the core of Special Forces (although during Vietnam, draftees had volunteered their way in) but the Regular Army was not going to let end-strength cuts spare SF. In fact, Big Green wasted no time flushing everything that reminded it of Vietnam, including Special Forces. The Chief of Staff was an officer known to despise SF, and he raised a generation of SF-loathing Mini-Me’s. (Pleas click “more” to continue).
The 1st, 3rd, 6th and 8th Special Forces Groups were disbanded, and their experienced NCOs scattered: to drill sergeant duty, to ROTC assignment purgatory, to babysitting fractious troops in conventional units. A few cadred a new idea, two Airborne Ranger battalions, units that the Chief hoped would replace SF’s raid and reconnaissance capability without becoming so culturally distinct from Big Green. SF combat officers bore a disproportionate share of officer Reductions In Force (RIFs). The teams of the surviving groups (5th, 7th, and 10th) inherited responsibility for the areas once covered by the disbanded units, but had to do it at about two-thirds strength. Even the Reserve and Guard groups (11th, 12th, 19th and 20th) lost numbers because some members had joined with a view to avoiding Vietnam without looking yellow. These crypto-yellows were soon gone, and, ironically, were often replaced by Vietnam veterans who, having finished their military service and started new jobs and families, missed something about it.
Money for training dried up. Ammunition was cut, to the point where even an SF unit had to fight to get its men 40 rounds a year to fire the qualification table and another 10 or so to zero. The conventional Army didn’t even try, conducting rifle qualification with the “M1 Pencil.” Forget about blanks for force-on-force training: they were doled out like rubies, and many exercises ended like childhood games, with both sides standing on the objective after shouting “bang, bang!” during the TOT, arguing about who killed whom. It was not only deleterious to readiness, it was unseemly.
The other SF specialties suffered similarly. Funds for continuing education of medics evaporated, too; commo gear repairs didn’t happen, and even crypto pads became scarce, with clueless commanders suggesting saving and reusing old ones (a very bad idea); ultimately they made a set of reusable pads for training, and resigned themselves to Ivan reading our every message on exercises. While all this logistical strangulation was going on, commanders lied on their unit readiness reports. (A truth-teller committed career suicide, in a sea of flunkies admiring the Emperor’s New Clothes). In the Pentagon, all looked rosy; a command culture of unwillingness to listen to negative reports produced, mirabile dictu, an Army that never transmitted a negative report.
This was corrosive to troops’ respect for their superiors, but superiors who could produce the illusion of respect with a command seemed satisfied with it.
Meanwhile, society at large turned on the military in the aftermath of Vietnam, particularly elite, educated society. Soldiers were losers, morons, cretins who could get no better work, or perhaps were attracted to the military by character deficiencies: lust for power, inability to adapt to civilian life, or outright criminality. Celebrity psychologists published research-lite opinion papers on “the military mind.” (In a word: dim). A series of news reports on “tripwire vets” blamed crime on Vietnam veterans. Their examples were often rampant wannabees but Boomer reporters like CBS’s Dan Rather were so disconnected from the military — Rather had flunked out of Marine boot camp, but calls himself a former Marine, a foundational lie in a career packed with them — that they couldn’t tell. (Hot tip: a guy with a below average IQ and personal hygiene, telling tales about cutting babies’ throats, probably wasn’t really a SEAL).
But as we’ve seen, the trend collision of an under-resourced military and leaders’ zero-defects mentality produced a military culture that demanded and tolerated systematic dishonesty whilst paying cynical lip-service to integrity. The psychologists were right about the military being messed up; they were wrong about how.
I’ve read several places, and generally agree with, the idea that the only window of opportunity the USSR had to grab Western Europe was this period immediately after Vietnam. They had just completed a massive (economy-wrecking) arms buildup, both conventional and nuclear, while we had let ourselves go to seed in both departments; not to mention general social disorder, economic difficulties, and low morale in our armed forces. Additionally, several of the governments of our stalwart NATO allies were starting to tack towards a more Soviet-friendly stance.
I think it would have been hard to sell that policy internally, though. From everything I’ve heard the Soviets didn’t have — and very few organizations seem to have — a separate layer of cold-eyed rationalist top decision-makers and top staff who don’t need to pay attention to the propaganda claims and rationalizations that the organization presents to the larger world. The top layer may include many individuals and cliques who are less devoted to official truth than to cynically manipulating the organization for their own gain. But that cynicism and specialist skill set and informal or semiformal backscratching organization isn’t what anyone sensible would choose as a good foundation for assessing outside reality. (Admittedly it might be less bad at assessing reality than various other organizational forms that have existed in history, but it’s nothing you’d choose to rely on if you had the power to set up something good.)
Even more objective knowledgeable specialists in the West had trouble predicting how much the West might continue to mess itself up, psychohistory being difficult and all, and the USSR was not well supplied with objective knowledgeable specialists, so few would both (1) perceive that it was a window of opportunity instead of the dawn of a new age of ever-improving opportunity that the historical inevitability of communism would suggest and (2) feel a rational incentive to try to explain this to the rest of the organization.
I agree completely with you, William Newman. There was no way the people on top of Soviet society’s hierarchy were going to risk everything on a gamble like that. Typical human organizational behavior seems to hold that its better to ride ever-diminishing returns into the ground than to risk all.
I think this is one of the reasons why everyone is surprised by individuals who do choose to roll the dice; Caeser, Hitler, etc. come immediately to mind, but I think you could find plenty of examples in spheres of experience other than conquest.