3.1 THE COLD WAR PLANNING SCENARIO
By the time these developments were in place, the Allied nations were well into a major confrontation with the Soviet Union, a confrontation that eventually came to be known as the Cold War. Started because we came to believe that containing the spread of communism was a better choice than directly confronting its major proponent, this war was intended to isolate the Soviet Union both economically as well as politically until the internal faults upon which its system was constructed would lead to its natural demise. During this Cold War, whether correctly or not, we came to believe that the Soviet Union possessed a military capability similar to ours in kind but significantly inferior to ours in strength. This belief reflected our view that the Soviets thought about war in essentially the same way as we did; we both seemed to be agreed that war in the second half of the 20th century would unfold in essentially the same way that the world wars of the first half did.
This peer-competitor view of war that we shared with the Soviet Union extended to the nuclear dimension as well. After the relatively short period of time during which our allies and we had a distinct nuclear advantage over our opponents, both sides developed sufficient nuclear capabilities to render any numerical differences between them irrelevant. It did not really matter that one had perhaps a few more assets than the other, for both could destroy each other, and the entire world with it, many times over. This somber recognition had quickly persuaded both sides to abstain from using such weapons, so that the only remaining concern was ensuring that either side would not be able to preemptively use its weapons against the other. Under this nuclear umbrella, stabilized in place by the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, we were all proceeding on the premise that a war, if it ever actually occurred, would unfold much like World War II did.
According to this mutually agreed model of war, both sides expected to meet on the fields of central Europe in a classic battle of infantry, tanks, and aircraft in which the Soviets were seeking to wrest control of Western Europe from the Allies and in which the Allies were trying to defend themselves against the Soviet attack. Naval battles conducted on the flanks were envisioned as a powerful means of influencing the outcome of the battle on the Central Front. Aircraft carriers would aid the air campaign there, and, according to a later strategy, antisubmarine warfare forces would confront the Soviet submarine force at the source. In addition to giving us control over the naval sea lines of communication in the Atlantic and the Pacific, these naval battles would place our forces in position to threaten the Soviet strategic reserve of nuclear ballistic missile submarines and provide the Allied high command with the option of demanding unconditional surrender on the Central Front.
Whether the Soviets ever really intended to conquer Western Europe or not, the most amazing thing about this bizarre period in world history is that both us and them were utterly agreed as to the general nature and specific details of the next war between our respective blocks. The issue, therefore, ceased to be one of strategic designs intended to surprise and out-maneuver the enemy and became one of comparative weapons inventories and strengths. This unique feature of the planning scenario encouraged the military establishments to focus their attention upon the question of technology to the exclusion of scenario alternatives. The underlying scenario was to remain unchanged, and the interesting alternatives were instead to explore the universe of military technology for comparative advantage.
This Cold War planning scenario, by definition predictive of the way the next war would proceed, remained the fundamental context for American planning for fifty years, and to a great extent, it still dominates the thinking of many in the military community today. Under the beneficent rule of this stable scenario, command technology entered a period of rapid and spectacular growth producing in quick succession a formidable array of new and ever-more exotic weapons. By challenging the Soviet military-industrial complex to keep pace with Allied advances, this development brought enormous pressure upon their economy. Eventually, the Soviet economy, and with it the entire political structure of the foremost communist state, collapsed.
Until that day was to come, however, the institution of systems analysis used the context provided by this Cold War planning scenario to illuminate technology acquisition. To that end, it developed a systematic, open, and quantitative method of deliberation that helped decision makers better understand which alternative technology they ought to choose from amongst the many technologies made possible by command technology, and why they should do so.