Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (58 page)

The port was open by then and the crew filing in. He was last. "Close it fast," he told the trader. "I had to—"

"I saw you," grunted blackbeard. "A semaphore message?" He was working as he spoke, and the metal port closed.

"Astrogator and engineer, take over," he told them.

"All hands to their bunks," ordered Astrogator Hufner. "Blast-off immediate."

Alen took to his cubicle and strapped himself in. Blast-off deafened him, rattled his bones, and made him thoroughly sick as usual. After what seemed like several wretched hours, they were definitely space-borne under smooth acceleration, and his nausea subsided.

Blackbeard knocked, came in, and unbuckled him.

"Ready to audit the books of the voyage?" asked the trader.

"No," said Alen feebly.

"It can wait," said the trader. "The books are the least important part, anyway. We have headed off a frightful war."

"War? We have?"

"War between Eyolf's Realm and Vega. It is the common gossip of chancellories and trade missions that both governments have cast longing eyes on Lyra, that they have plans to penetrate its economy by supplying metals to the planet without metals—by force, if need be. Alen, we have removed the pretext by which Eyolf's Realm and Vega would have attempted to snap up Lyra and inevitably have come into conflict. Lyra is getting its metal now, and without imperialist entanglements."

"I saw none," the Herald said blankly.

"You wondered why I was in such haste to get off Lyra, and why I wouldn't leave Elwon here. It is because our Vegan gems were most unusual gems. I am not a technical man, but I understand they are actual gems which were treated to produce a certain effect at just about this time."

Blackbeard glanced at his wrist chronometer and said dreamily: "Lyra is getting metal. Wherever there is one of our gems, pottery is decomposing into its constituent aluminum, silicon, and oxygen. Fluxes and glazes are decomposing into calcium, zinc, barium, potassium, chromium,
and iron.
Buildings are crumbling, pants are dropping as ceramic beltbuckles disintegrate—"

"It means chaos!" protested Aten.

"It means civilization and peace. An ugly clash was in the making." Blackbeard paused and added deliberately: "Where neither their property nor their honor is touched, most men live content."

"
The Prince
, Chapter 19. You are—"

"There was another important purpose to the voyage," said the trader, grinning. "You will be interested in this." He handed Alen a document which, unfolded, had the seal of the College and Order at its head.

Alen read in a daze: "Examiner 19 to the Rector— final clearance of Novice—"

He lingered pridefully over the paragraph that described how he had "with coolness and great resource" foxed the battle cruiser of the Realm, "adapting himself readily in a delicate situation requiring not only physical courage but swift recall, evaluation, and application of a minor planetary culture."

Not so pridefully he read: "—inclined toward pomposity of manner somewhat ludicrous in one of his years, though not unsuccessful in dominating the crew by his bearing—"

And: "—highly profitable disposal of our gems; a feat of no mean importance since the College and Order must, after all, maintain itself."

And: "—cleared the final and crucial hurdle with some mental turmoil if I am any judge, but did clear it. After some twenty years of indoctrination in unrealistic nonviolence, the youth was confronted with a situation where nothing but violence would serve, correctly evaluated this, and applied violence in the form of a truncheon to the head of a Lyran signal officer, thereby demonstrating an ability to learn and common sense as precious as it is rare."

And, finally, simply: "Recommended for training."

"Training?" gasped Alen. "You mean there's more?"

"Not for most, boy. Not for most. The bulk of us are what we seem to be: oily, gun-shy, indispensable adjuncts to trade who feather our nest with percentages. We need those percentages and we need gun-shy Heralds."

Alen recited slowly: "Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised."

"Chapter 14," said blackbeard mechanically. "We leave such clues lying by their bedsides for twenty years, and they never notice them. For the few of us who do—more training."

"Will I learn to throw a knife like you?" asked Alen, repelled and fascinated at once by the idea.

"On your own time, if you wish. Mostly it's ethics and morals so you'll be able to weigh the values of such things as knife-throwing."

"Ethics! Morals!"

"We started as missionaries, you know."

"Everybody knows that. But the Great Utilitarian Reform—"

"Some of us," said blackbeard dryly, "think it was neither great, nor utilitarian, nor a reform."

It was a staggering idea. "But we're spreading utilitarian civilization!" protested Alen. "Or if we're not, what's the sense of it all?"

Blackbeard told him: "We have our different motives. One is a sincere utilitarian; another is a gambler—happy when he's in danger and his pulses are pounding. Another is proud and likes to trick people. More than a few conceive themselves as servants of mankind. I'll let you rest for a bit now." He rose.

"But you?" asked Alen hesitantly.

"Me? You will find me in Chapter Twenty-Six," grinned blackbeard. "And perhaps you'll find someone else." He closed the door behind him.

Alen ran through the chapter in his mind, puzzled, until—that was it.

It had a strange and inevitable familiarity to it as if he had always known that he would be saying it aloud, welcomingly, in this cramped cubicle aboard a battered starship:

"God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us."

The Soviet Army has no recruiting posters. It doesn't need them. Not only are there no volunteers in the ranks of the Soviet Army, there can't be. There's no provision for volunteering for the ranks.

There's no need for volunteers, because every male Soviet citizen is conscripted at age 18. Every six months, approximately one million young men enter the system. They stay in for two years of training, after which they remain in the reserve registers until they reach the age of 50. They can be called up at any time.

There are always nearly two million men in the Land Forces alone; within ten days, these could be expanded to some 21 million. The Land Forces contain 123 divisions and 47 independent regiments of motor-rifle divisions. Each division has 23 tank companies and 67 artillery batteries.

There are also 47 Tank divisions, plus independent regiments and battalions. All in all, the Tank Army forces have some 54,000 tanks.

The Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces muster some 325,000 troops. There are at least 1,400 land-based ICBM rockets. Five hundred intermediate range missiles (IRBM) are deployed in the Western USSR; this includes 315 mobile SS-20's. The SS-20 can be reloaded, and many of the launchers already have at least one nuclear-tipped reload weapon.

In 1944, General Patton raced across France with his 3rd Army. The 16 divisions of First and Third Armies were supported by 5,600 trucks of the Red Ball Express. In 1975, the North Vietnamese Army moved south against Saigon. Its 20 divisions were supported by over 10,000 trucks and vehicles, nearly all of them sent into North Viet Nam from the Soviet Union. Those were the transport vehicles the Soviets could spare from their military establishment. The Red Army today has access to nearly half a million supply vehicles.

Germany entered World War II with 57 submarines. Britain had 58, Japan 56, and the United States 99. In 1941, the Soviet Union had 212 submarines in commission. They have about 275 submarines now,
in addition to
83 Strategic Nuclear Forces nuclear subs. Of their 275 "regular navy" subs, at least 100 are nuclear powered.

We could continue, but surely the point is clear? The Soviet Union has built an enormous military machine, the largest peacetime military establishment in the history of mankind, and continues to maintain it. The expenses are great, but the Kremlin's control over the Soviet Empire is strong; apparently, the expense does not greatly concern the Politburo and its secret inner circle, the Defense Council.

We don't have to look into Soviet motives to conclude that the United States must respond to this enormous military buildup. The official policy of the Soviet Union is "world liberation." One may argue that they don't really mean it, and that their revolutionary ardor long ago expired, but world revolution remains their official aim. If it is immoral to tempt a poor man by making theft easy, it seems no less so to tempt the Soviets by making conquest cheap and bloodless.

In fact, it is pointless to debate the issue. No responsible President or Congress can or will advocate leaving the United States helpless in the face of the growing Soviet strategic threat. Unilateral disarmament may be a subject for debate within the population, but it has been overwhelmingly and repeatedly rejected by the American people, and our political leaders know this.

Granted that we must respond to the Soviet military threat, though there remains the problem of what the response should be. It is no good responding ineffectively.

We could, if we chose, attempt to match the Soviets in men, machines, and weapons. Their military machine costs much less than ours, of course. As an example, they pay their soldiers no more than $25 U.S. a month. Even so, the United States is far wealthier than the Soviet Union, and there is no question of our ability to
afford
a military establishment equal to or greater than theirs.

The costs would be high. Taxes would rise, and there would be real cuts in our standard of living; but we could do it. We could match the Soviets gun for gun, tank for tank, plane for plane, ship for ship.

We aren't likely to do that. Indeed, the events of the past two years demonstrate that the Congress isn't likely to do half that. Current administration efforts to bring the defense budget up to the proportions it held under John F. Kennedy have not been successful. Moreover, although the courts have held universal conscription to be constitutional, it certainly wouldn't be popular; and without universal conscription, we could never match the Soviets. We aren't
that
rich

This, too, is a pointless debate; in the absence of some clear and unambiguous provocation, such as a massive invasion of Western Europe, or direct attack on Israel, the American people are not prepared to make the necessary sacrifices. We won't give up consumer goods, cosmetics, and the myriad luxuries we enjoy, nor will we opt for universal conscription. There is just no way that we'll respond to the Soviets by building a peacetime military establishment similar to theirs.

Unfortunately, although we have rejected matching the Soviet military establishment, we have not seized upon any viable alternative. Instead, we putter about, building some of this and some of that, hoping that our technological superiority will somehow do the trick even though we have no clear cut strategy of technology.

This has not always brought about good results. As Congressman Newt Gingrich, among others, has repeatedly pointed out, simply throwing money at the Pentagon is wasteful. Given money but no marching orders, the Pentagon almost always buys more M-1 tanks for the Army, more carriers for the Navy, wings of F-16's for the Air Force. They buy "things people can ride on," as one analyst recently put it.

Left to its own direction, the military is very conservative. Military establishments tend to keep the old, while flirting with the new and glamorous; to buy one or two armored cars, but keep horses for the cavalry. To put catapults and seaplanes on battleships, but reject aircraft carriers as not needed.

The result is a lack of direction. As the
Wall Street Journal
put it in November 1982, "The Pentagon is an enormously inefficient nationalized industry. Its decisions are less the implementation of a coherent strategy than a matter of three services dividing a patronage pie. The most predictable result has been to deaden innovation."

The bold new systems are shunted aside; or, if the Pentagon is forced to deal with them, they are studied, tested, restudied, and retested. Then, suddenly, often as much a result of the geographical location of the factory that makes them as of strategic necessity, some of the most glamorous systems are procured.

We end up with weapons that no one is trained to use, aircraft with no spare parts and few trained pilots, communications systems that don't quite work, ships without trained sailors to man them, and missiles that work splendidly in test situations, but have profound problems on the battlefield.

I do not mean here to argue against high-technology weapons systems. One of the clearest lessons of the Viet Nam War was that high technology pays off. From "Blackbird" gunships to smart bombs and automatic mortars, high-technology weapons proved to have high effectiveness, and to be relatively cheap compared to the results they achieved.

The Falklands battles demonstrated the same point. High-technology weapons are essential for modern warfare. Moreover, the weapons must be in the hands of trained, able, and dedicated troops. It is not enough that we design and develop high technology weapons systems. We must build them, deploy them, bring them to operational effectiveness, and maintain them. Anything short of that invites disaster.

However, it is not enough merely to recognize that high technology is vital to our future. There must also be a strategic focus. As Stefan Possony and I have argued elsewhere, we must have strategic direction to our military research and development. We must have a strategy of technology.

That won't be developed overnight. Most analysts believe it will require a grueling and painful reorganization of the entire defense establishment. That will generate great opposition. There are too many vested interests for things to be otherwise.