ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies in militarily meaningful terms, the conventional defense purposes to which North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) should be aspiring in the Central Region. The Warsaw Pact's forces are sufficiently large, equipped, and oriented to fight a conventional campaign against NATO. The reasons underlying NATO's need to bolster its conventional defenses thus derive as much from strategy considerations as from a purely technical appraisal of the military balance. A robust posture thus would not provide NATO complete confidence in its defenses or remove entirely its reliance on nuclear weapons. A robust defense is nonetheless an achievable goal, but only if NATO focuses specifically on denying the Soviets the kind of war they intend to fight in central Europe. The major strides NATO has taken since 1967 are often overlooked in overly negative appraisals of the NATO-Warsaw Pact balance, appraisals that seem fixated on Soviet gains.
