By Rebecca Grant When the Soviets achieved nuclear parity, the US regained its military advantage—through technology. USAF photo by TSgt. Fernando Serna Fernando TSgt. by photo USAF columns of Soviet tanks, troops, jets, and ships SSgt. Marc Konynkik (l) and SSgt. Jacques Smith unload a guidance nose cone for a bomb before loading the assembled haunted American defense leaders in the 1970s and weapon on an F-111 (background) during Operation Desert Storm. 1980s. They couldn’t hope to match Russia’s growing Cold War numerical advantages, so they had to find option. The conventional mismatch again raised the specter another way to deter the Soviet Union. that the West wouldn’t be able to hold Soviet conventional In the 1950s, the US had resorted to a lopsidedly large forces at bay in Europe or elsewhere. nuclear force to offset the USSR’s overwhelming conventional Thus arose what became known as the “Second Offset.” capability. As the Soviets achieved rough nuclear parity in Though the US couldn’t afford to match the Soviets tank for the early 1970s, however, it stunted the utility of the nuclear tank, it could field smaller numbers of extremely capable, 32 AIR FORCE Magazine / July 2016 high-quality equipment, leap-ahead technologies, and associ- Bernard A. Schriever, as the genesis of precision strike. One ated operational concepts. It was quality vs. quantity. of Schriever’s top recommendations was to concentrate on This approach didn’t headline speeches. Epic debates on zero circular error probable, or CEP. US and Soviet nuclear strategy usually overshadowed it, and Early ICBMs like Minuteman I had a CEP of 1.3 to 1.7 harvesting the gains of the Second Offset took the better part miles, as cited by Donald A. MacKenzie in his book Inventing of 20 years. Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Yet this quiet approach was a tour de force that bridged ICBMs could therefore strike enemy cities under a strategy of across the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan presidencies and mutually assured destruction, but a valid counterforce strategy ultimately fueled the precision targeting revolution in the depended on accuracies good enough to hit Soviet military 1990s. According to Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Defense, targets directly. Harold Brown, some of the Second Offset’s deepest roots “From that idea flowed generations of increasingly accurate lay with the Air Force. weapons called precision guided munitions,” Brown wrote in The need for the Second Offset began to sharpen with his 2012 memoir. Russia’s deployment of the fearsome new Soviet SS-19 It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. Research had to switch nuclear missile, carrying multiple, independently targetable from improving floating gyros and other elements of inertial re-entry vehicles, or MIRVs. American leaders realized Soviet navigation to harnessing the power of electro-optics, lasers, strategic nuclear parity or even potential superiority might and ultimately, global positioning. create a window of vulnerability, giving Moscow free rein By the early 1970s, the airmen’s quest for precision had put in international politics at US expense. in place a strong basis for building up precision attack. One The top spokesmen for this theory were Eugene V. Rostow milestone was the 1972 destruction of the Thanh Hoa Bridge and Paul H. Nitze. They formed the Committee on the Present in North Vietnam, using laser guided bombs. The success of Danger in 1976. “If we continue to drift, we shall become that strike—following 871 unsuccessful attacks—proved the second best to the Soviet Union in overall military strength,” value of laser targeting. they warned. “Then we could find ourselves isolated in a hostile world, facing the unremitting pressures of Soviet SEEKING THE HOLY GRAIL policy backed by an overwhelming preponderance of power.” In those early days of aided precision, F-4 Phantoms In 1976 the Soviets deployed their first mobile theater used electro-optical guided bombs, with TV cameras on nuclear missile, the SS-20. 1978 was the tipping point, as the the bomb transmitting a picture to the weapon systems USSR’s inventory of 25,393 warheads for the first time topped officer in the aircraft. The WSO adjusted contrast to pick the US’s inventory of 24,243. The Russians had added over out the target, then transmitted the selection to the bomb, 8,000 warheads since 1974. The fear was that if the Soviets which flew itself to impact. Laser guided bombs went one had nuclear supremacy, they might just be willing to risk a better: The bomb could follow the low-power laser beam conventional push into NATO. illuminating the target from a pod carried under a fighter “Soviet military leaders in their doctrinal writings expressed and operated by the fighter crew. Both systems worked the belief that they could win a blitzkrieg victory in Europe,” well—if visibility was good. recalled Brown in his book Star Spangled Security. Brown Offsetting the Soviet conventional advantage would require served as Secretary of the Air Force from 1965 to 1969 and much more, though. The “Holy Grail” was a way to hit Soviet Secretary of Defense from 1977 to 1981. tanks on the move, especially in rear echelon areas. Ideally, Improving NATO’s conventional forces with superior it all had to be done at night and in bad weather, too. firepower to disrupt a ground attack became a top priority. In 1973, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, Specifically, that meant developing forces able to find, fix, and launched the Long-Range Research and Development Planning destroy the forward line of Soviet troops while striking follow- Program “to provide the President and the joint force with on echelons as they attempted a thrust into West Germany. better tools to respond to a Warsaw Pact attack,” recounted The offset strategy sought advanced technologies for Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work in a January precision attack in order for NATO to whittle down superior 2015 speech. numbers of Soviet tanks and other conventional forces to The offset coalesced around an operational concept. battle-manageable levels. Step One was accurately tracking moving tanks and other “We do not plan our theater nuclear forces to defeat, by mechanized vehicles. themselves, a determined Soviet attack in Europe, and we Step Two was developing munitions to hit the small targets rely mainly on conventional forces to deter conventional precisely. attack,” Brown told Congress in 1980. “As one example, we Step Three concentrated on ways to deliver munitions: cannot permit a situation in which the SS-20 and Backfire either via ground launch or from aircraft. Accordingly, those [bomber] have the ability to disrupt and destroy the formation aircraft needed standoff missiles or a way to penetrate close and movement of our operational reserves, while we cannot to the target—especially important against moving armor. threaten comparable Soviet forces.” “The objective of our precision guided weapon systems To threaten those Soviet forces, the US needed rapid pre- is to give us the following capabilities: to be able to see all cision attack of Soviet counter air and ground force targets. high value targets on the battlefield at any time; to be able Airmen had been on this quest for over a decade. Brown to make a direct hit on any target we can see, and to be able credited USAF’s 1963 Project Forecast, directed by Gen. to destroy any target we can hit,” testified William J. Perry, AIR FORCE Magazine / July 2016 33 DOD photo by Ken Hackman via National Archives National via Hackman Ken photo by DOD undersecretary of defense for research and engineering (also An 82nd Airborne Division soldier gives a commence-firing called DDR&E), in 1978. order during a NATO-sponsored exercise in Europe in 1982. By this time, the US knew it needed a new way to offset huge This would emerge only after careful work on a fusion of Soviet conventional force advantages. systems—a core attribute of the offset. The Pave Tack pod, for example—built by Ford Aerospace—illustrated the maturation of precision. Pave Tack fused several technologies: forward- The most lasting cohesion came from focusing on the looking infrared, a laser rangefinder and a laser designator. battlefield. The centerpiece of the offset was not any one How would the Pentagon focus its research efforts? Perry’s technology in particular. It was an operational concept for role as DDR&E was crucial. The offset emerged at a time when precision: how to see and target Soviet ground forces and direction, management, and funding were highly concentrated debilitate them quickly enough to prevent them from over- in that post, created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In running Europe. That operational imperative for precision his memoir Waging Peace, Eisenhower said legislation passed drove forward through the ups and downs of research and in 1958 set up the job for a “nationally recognized leader in development. Programs might start with one intent, then science and technology” who would advise the Secretary of go on to deliver real capability in another, next generation Defense and “supervise all research and engineering activities application. in the department.” A case in point was Assault Breaker. This concept posited standoff weapons attacking moving, rear echelon armor FOCUS ON THE BATTLEFIELD massed deep behind enemy lines. According to a 1981 Gov- DDR&E was at its peak power by the early 1970s. For ernment Accountability Office report, components included: example, ARPA reported directly to DDR&E. Brown, John airborne ground moving target indicator radar; missiles with S. Foster Jr., Malcolm R. Currie, and Perry held the post from submunitions for airborne or surface launch; and anti-armor 1965 to 1981.