Chapter 2 -- Initial Preparations

The American CFE Treaty Inspection Teams

A Treaty-specified limit of nine inspectors per team drove the design of all inspection teams. The U.S. teams consisted of inspectors who were professional military officers and noncommissioned officers; other U.S. augmentee inspectors were civilian specialists. The team chiefs would be, in Colonel Kelley's terms, "independent patrol leaders."⁴² Based on OSIA's experience with the INF Treaty inspections, General Lajoie and Colonel Kelley decided that the team chiefs would be experienced field grade officers. During an inspection, these officers and their teams would be traveling under escort to remote places in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and at times they would have to lead inspections in extremely severe weather conditions on the Eurasian continent. As Kelley saw it, the team leaders were officers "with whom you would have precious little contact once they deployed, and on whom you had to rely implicitly."⁴³ From the beginning, he wanted a specific type of officer: a U.S. Army or Marine Russian foreign area officer (FAO) or Air Force officers with similar skills, although the Air Force did not have a comparable program. FAOs were career military officers who had served in one of the combat branches and then had specialized in Russian language and Soviet military force structure. Highly trained and educated, Russian FAOs were in demand as attach‚s, arms control specialists, and plans/analysis staff officers. In fact, the demand for them was so great that they were not available for assignment to fill all the CFE team chief positions.

The team leaders were officers "with whom you would have precious little contact...on whom you had to rely implicitly."

--Col. Lawrence G. Kelley, USMC
Chief of Operations, OSIA European Operations Command

U.S. inspectors were professionals in their fields.

Consequently, Headquarters OSIA and its European Operations Command accepted a different composition of team chiefs: some Russian FAOs, some West European FAOs, and some line officers--artillery officers, aircraft commanders, or armor officers. The U.S. Army's European FAOs had similar education, training, and experiences to the Russian FAOs, except that they had spent much of their career working with NATO armies, air forces, and staffs. The line officers had served nearly all of their Army or Air Force careers working with combat units in armor, infantry, artillery, or tactical aircraft. They knew U.S. military force structure, weapons, units, and personnel, specifically how the soldiers, marines, and airmen combined to make an operational unit. Equally important, they were experienced in serving in and evaluating operational military units. So it was from these three groups that the CFE team chiefs came. As for the deputies, Colonel Kelley and Colonel Grosick decided that the second officers would be field grade officers, ideally at the rank of major. Their backgrounds would complement those of the team chiefs, so that if one officer could not speak Russian, the other would.

How did these plans work out? Six of the eight team chiefs were lieutenant colonels. The eight deputy team chiefs, except for one captain and one warrant officer, were majors or major selectees. Noncommissioned officers filled the two team positions for treaty linguists. Trained as Russian linguists, these NCOs had served in the U.S. military with its high standards for noncommissioned officer leadership and training. They were professional soldiers. Two other inspection team members were also NCOs; they were weapons specialists who had direct experience with conventional armed forces in the European theater. Rounding out the nine-person inspection team were three specialists who were knowledgeable in Soviet and Central European military forces.⁴⁴

This purposeful mix of military skills and experiences among team members gave Colonel Kelley flexibility in assigning inspection teams to missions. Any American team could inspect either a Polish armor regiment or a Soviet tactical air unit because someone on the team had firsthand experience with armor and someone else had worked on or flown aircraft. The CFE Treaty's Protocol on Inspections allowed each inspection team to break into three subteams, and it was American policy to routinely use three subteams. The protocol, however, required each subteam to possess linguistic capability in the inspected country's language. Since every U.S. team had two linguists, either the team chief or deputy had to speak Russian to allow the team to break down into three subteams for greater operational coverage at an inspection site.

At treaty signature in November 1990, the best estimate for entry into force was April 1, 1991. To be ready to inspect and escort on that date, OSIA's European Operations had to have the team chiefs, deputies, linguists, and weapons specialists in place in Europe by January 1, 1991. This did not happen. Because of the Gulf War, the limited availability of FAOs, and the drawdown of American forces, the U.S. military personnel system could not provide qualified officers and NCOs rapidly for reassignment to Europe. Frustrated because the unit had to be ready regardless of the U.S. military's systemic problems, Colonel Kelley recalled that they "were totally unable to acquire personnel until, at the earliest, January 31, 1991," and even then the fill was only partial. This delay was serious: individual treaty training would be postponed, team training could not begin, and mock inspections evaluating the readiness of U.S. CFE sites in Western Europe could not be undertaken. Nominations came late, arrivals still later. Not until the summer of 1991 did six of the eight team chiefs arrive at Rhein-Main. Two of the deputy team leaders did not reach Germany until December 1991, 12 months behind initial expectations.⁴⁵

An Unforeseen Delay

There was an unforeseen development. No nation had ratified the CFE Treaty in time for the projected April 1991 entry into force date. In fact, the national ratification process was not completed at all in 1991; it was not until July 1992 that the treaty entered into force provisionally. This delay allowed time for five parallel developments.

U.S. inspectors received experience during training in Czechoslovakia.

First, it allowed time for the national ratification processes to conclude in 1991-92 in the congresses, parliaments, and governments of all the CFE Treaty signatory states. Next, it allowed time for intense diplomatic negotiations by the CFE Treaty states with the Soviet Union over two significant issues: the relocation and transfer of its TLE beyond the Ural Mountains, and the redesignation of forces as naval infantry. Because of those diplomatic discussions, the NATO nations delayed treaty ratification until the summer and fall of 1991. Third, it gave the Western and Eastern European national verification agencies, many of which were newly established, time to develop leadership cadres, inspection teams, escort teams, communications systems and procedures, and operational plans for conducting on-site inspections and escorts. Fourth, there was time for the new verification agencies to conduct extensive practice, or mock, inspections with their own national military forces, with the military forces in their respective alliances, and in a few instances, with the military forces of nations in the opposing alliance. Finally, it allowed time for the consequences of the Soviet Union's demise to unfold. That epochal development resulted in the establishment of 15 successor nations and set in motion a series of political, military, diplomatic, and economic developments. Six months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the successor states agreed in May 1992 at Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to partition the former USSR's military forces and accept all of its CFE Treaty obligations.

These five developments profoundly influenced the CFE Treaty. Discussed in the next chapter, they demonstrated how the changing international order profoundly altered the mission of implementing a signed arms control treaty. The CFE Treaty was essentially a European arms reduction and conflict prevention treaty. When Europe changed profoundly in 1991-92, so too did the context for planning the treaty's implementation. There is a simple historical truth, known to every experienced verification agency director: "Every treaty has its own particular history." This was never more apparent than in 1991-92 with the ratification process and operational preparations for the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty.