That's what happens when you have an interest in military affairs and you are in university in the early 1980s.
In 1985, yours truly finished an honours essay written for an undergraduate degree. The paper dealt with Soviet military doctrine as it existed in the early 1980s. The main idea: Soviet military doctrine focused on the importance of pre-emption as a means of ensuring victory in any major war against capitalism. Essentially, the Soviet military was aimed at winning a major war and would look to strike an overwhelming blow early in the conflict, including launching a pre-emptive attack.
The Soviet concept originated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet military had evolved a concept based on conventional military forces that was designed to win quickly and to forestall any use of nuclear weapons by NATO forces. All very trendy at the time as that stuff might have been, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s made the whole idea a matter of mouldering history.
Some stuff continued to be relevant. Like the concept of the operational manoeuvre group. Odd as it might seem, Memorial's Queen Elizabeth II Library subscribed to an obscure set of foreign documents translated by the US government.
Lo, in the pile of microfiche - yes, microfiche - were all the papers on OMGs originally published in Polish and in which a bunch of scholars in the United Kingdom had discovered a modern discussion of OMGs. Don't bother trying to figure out what an OMG is; let's just say it was important and there weren't too many people in Canada reading that stuff outside of National Defence. In fact, except for a couple of colleagues here in Newfoundland (since gone to greater things) there wasn't a soul here even aware they existed.
Or the reconnaissance-strike complex, which was adapted in a highly simplified and tactical form by one of the British divisions in the 1991 Gulf War.
Or the concept of the Revolution in Military Affairs. That one came back with force in the 1990s as western armies began to think about things their Soviet counterparts were discussing in the 1970s and early 1980s.
All this is in aid of a link to the latest release of documents by the Central Intelligence Agency. The collection comprises what were once highly classified assessments on a variety of political and military topics involving the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.
Flipping through some of the documents is interesting in light of the public discussions some 20 years after they were originally circulated at Langley and in DC. The ideas contained in some of them formed the roots of concepts your scribe was dealing with.
Those documents also had a particular context that makes them valuable for understanding what was going on at the time they were published. Take for example, Soviet thought on future war, originally published in April 1962 and its companion, Soviet strategic doctrine for the start of war that was circulated in July of that year.
Those documents would have been fresh in the mind of a great many people at the uppermost levels of the American administration facing missiles in Cuba in October 1962.
While the "family jewels" series will likely garner the most attention from news media, the rest of the documents released today contain far more useful information.
Like those microfiche years ago, they just need someone to read them to find the real jewels hidden therein.
-srbp-