The End and the Beginning
From Offensive to Defensive
Q: When was the Ops Plan reworked from the scratch, as a whole?
General Zachariáš: When at the Ops Staff, I did not hold positions involved in putting together the Ops Plan, but I believe that the Ops Plan was reworked from the scratch at about the time I was participating in developing on of its parts, i.e. in the 1980s, at the latest, because the emphasis then was on what I had always been saying – to start preparations for a defensive operation in the first place and then, if it has been successful, to exploit it by launching an offensive. But this requires a complete set of documentation, basically for two operations, first a defensive one, then an offensive one. [Zachariáš, 5]
General Slimák: I do not know until when the [1964] War Plan had been valid, but when I worked at the Western Military District, I know that work on a new Ops Plan started sometimes in the autumn of 1985. In connection with the declaration of a new military doctrine. Perhaps it was declared in 1987 or so, but defensive issues had been worked on much earlier. We started working on it – before us, it had been the General Staff – in 1985 and the planning took until about May 1986. The Ops Plan was prepared by the Front Command. And there were two plans, one for an offensive operation, the other for a defensive one. And these were executed in four copies, one for ShOVS (Shtab obshchikh vooruzhonnykh sil - Staff of Unified Armed Forces), one for the Czechoslovak General Staff, one for the Soviet General Staff and the last one for the Front Command. And – it was a specialty then – the plans were also prepared by subordinate levels, i.e. also at the army level. [Slimák, 6]
Doctrine Without an Enemy
Q: Regarding the end of your career, when you were in the Unified Command, what was the atmosphere there at the time of those political changes in Central and Eastern European countries?
General Zachariáš: The atmosphere was – how to say it? [ . . . ] - funeral. The first to go were Germans. All national representatives had offices on the same corridor. And I had very good relations with the German and Polish representatives. Both spoke very good Russian, we used to go to lunch together, we were in touch. When Germany was reunified, the atmosphere was indeed sad and glum. I know we first said goodbye to the German, then the rest said goodbye to me, and it was clear that the days of the Warsaw Pact were over.
They were even interested in what we were doing, because we had already started working on our doctrine at that time, and by 1990 we already had some ideas. So they wanted me to tell them something about it. I had to get some supporting information in Prague and I delivered a presentation on how our doctrine would look like to all of them. I didn’t say much, but the twenty minutes about our doctrine was my last presentation there. Once in a month, there was a meeting where each national representative delivered a presentation. My last presentation’s title was “The Probable Future Doctrine of Czechoslovakia”.
Q: At that time, no one probably knew what …
General Zachariáš: Everything was somewhat fuzzy – what can you say about it? Actually, there is not much new you can come up with. The army does not change … the enemy has changed. And the worst thing – can you formulate a doctrine if you don’t have any enemy? [ . . . ]
However, even the rudimentary doctrine mentioned what is a very topical issue today – terrorism. The doctrine mentioned even then that there might be fanatics, zealots, terrorist attacks, they were the enemy. But, on the other hand, what can a regular army do about them. ...
Q: We were playing …. It is likely, if not certain, that the Warsaw Pact would have disintegrated anyway, if not because of our initiatives, then by a force of circumstances, because of Poland, Germany, it would have disintegrated anyway. However, at the time of its disintegration, we played a prominent role in the pressure aimed at its dissolution.
General Zachariáš: We had been regarded the strongest link of all. And, all of the sudden, the strongest link broke. Try to pull a chain, if its strongest link is broken. [Zachariáš, 13]
The Old Track
General Slimák: Some time at the beginning of 1990, he [the last Chief of Staff of the Unified Armed Forces] [1] paid me a visit and got briefed on the changes going on here. In the end of the meeting, he said we “posed a serious threat to readiness”, “exposed the left flank of the Warsaw Pact”. I tried to explain what it was about, he did not understand. The representative of the [Warsaw Pact] Staff at the Ministry of National Defense was also present, and he had to guide the Chief of Staff so that he understood what I was saying. It was in the spring of 1990, they did not understand the situation and were simply putting the blame for everything on us.
[ . . . ]
Iazov [2] accused me, he was indignant at me, which also showed during the 1990 Warsaw Pact meeting, on the occasion of its 35th anniversary. There was a conference in Moscow, which was a part of the meeting. As we were announcing there that we’re expecting some changes, and the like, in everything, Lushev [3] asked me whether we had considered it, those circumstances... The part attended by experts dealt with a plan for the next five years. Our position was that we could not guarantee it and that we proposed, as the first year of the plan was 1991, a postponement. And the Germans were in a similar situation, I recall the meeting was attended by the German Chief of Staff, there was to be the “Shield” exercise in the German territory in 1992, and he said he could not guarantee it, because of the developments ... They were on the old track. I think they entirely failed to understand what the changes were about. [Slimák, 13 – 14]
The Last Operational Plan
Q: General Vacek writes in his memoirs [4] that he submitted the Ops Plan to Havel [5] in 1990, and the latter initialed it. You have already mentioned that. So, basically, Havel initialed the plan containing both the defensive and the offensive options, didn’t he?
General Slimák: Yes. The comprehensive name was “The Plan of Use of the Army”, but the operations were dealt with separately, there was separate planning for the offensive operation and for the defensive operation. The first to be prepared was the defensive operation, because it was deemed crucial at that time, while the offensive operation was regarded as something forced by the situation. [ . . . ]
Q: You then became the Chief of the General Staff – can you tell us when this Ops Plan ceased to be valid and what was it replaced by?
General Slimák: In 1990, there was nothing being done about operational planning [ . . . ] because of the situation developing ... in the political sphere, I am referring to prospects of the Warsaw Pact.
When all those negotiations began, I have one recollection dating back to the turn of 1991 – it was in autumn, under Dobrovský[6] – we informed [Chief of the Soviet General Staff and First Deputy Minister of Defense] Moiseev that the Ops Plan had lost its relevance; because of this, the Czechoslovak Army was preparing its own Operational Plan, and we were done [with the Warsaw Pact]. The answer was that they, that is the General Staff, did not have any objections, but that they regarded our action premature. This is how it ended, without any pressure, any resistance. You will ask why we informed Moiseev. I believe that when I was sending it to Moiseev, who was the Chief of the Soviet General Staff .. because ShOVS (Shtab obshchikh vooruzhonnykh sil - Staff of Unified Armed Forces) … the situation was not very clear there. [...]
So, when it became clear that the Warsaw Pact is just a question of time, when the negotiations started, we viewed the plan as useless. It was necessary to re-orient it.
Q: And it was then based on ...?
General Slimák: Well, this is what I said in the beginning. We withdrew from the plan, and now the question was what to do. It was obvious that the Ops Plan was not what mattered most. What mattered most was a vision, a future look. Not just with respect to the Ops Plan, but also as regards a sort of a clear concept. [...]
Q: So, the idea of territorial defense was revived?
General Slimák: I have not finished yet – we staged a test command post/staff exercise, me and the Ops Directorate Chief at the General Staff, and then with the Military District Command in Tábor. We tried to sort things out, looked for solutions. There were some conclusions: there is no threat from any direction, the army must be versatile, the existing stationing remains valid, there can be any organizational structure – division- or brigade-based, it doesn’t matter. This was actually one of the points criticized by the National Defense Council, that we were not adopting the brigade-based system quickly enough. This must be seen in a certain setup of circumstances; we lacked a forward-looking vision of the army’s role. The conclusions were roughly as follows: mobility, maneuverability, capabilities. Because there were two threats: a dangerous situation in the east – and there was also the Western Group in Germany. Consequently, the gist of the Ops Plan was being able to deploy a task force capable of fulfilling a mission arising from a potential scenario. It was not something set in stone, not something like “this is the way to do it and that’s it”. It was an elaboration of specific scenarios of the use of the army, naturally with general capabilities. We had to respond to a political order, because the year was 1992, after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. [Slimák, 9 – 10]
On the Way To NATO
Q: What do you believe to be the crucial moments in the transformation of the Czechoslovak Army in the early 1990s? [ . . . ]
General Pezl: [ . . . ] Well, what I consider most important ... there were actually several phases. The first one was to clean the army, to remove that ... rotten core. Those were problems related to the liquidation of political ….. reduction of weight – it was not a full-fledged liquidation, but that is not possible in a revolution like ours – of political and cadre apparatchiks, military counterintelligence, breaking up of principal, mutually intertwined commanders’ corps, a purge of many people, removal of the top personnel who had had direct relations to the political apparatus. However, all this was done with a view to retaining a certain level of combat readiness of the army, because at that time we had an almost 100,000 strong army, there was the Warsaw Pact, 22 Soviet divisions up in the north, so there had to be some efforts aimed at maintaining a certain level of self-defense. At the same time, we had to deal with Slovakia, it was “stripped” of assets, there was nothing in Slovakia. So, this was the first reorganization, which moved some of the forces to Slovakia, to even the balance a bit. It was good to have at least something in Slovakia at the time of the events in Moscow.
So much for the first phase. The second phase consisted in looking for a new place of Czechoslovakia and its armed forces in Europe, opening up to the North Atlantic Alliance, to make ourselves more transparent and palatable for them so that they could get to know us better. A very important phase was the splitting of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic, also a very interesting operation, which proved that what had been done in and with the army until then was good and prevented a Balkan-like situation in our country. All this had to be accomplished in the context of the Vienna Protocol on the reduction of conventional armed forces in Europe, i.e. in the context of a permanent reorganization. Basically, the army has been fluid since the early 1990s until now, no department has undergone such changes having such a shaking impact on personnel, human resources, structures, everything.
Well, and then came the phase of approaching NATO, peaking in the accession. It was a period of a sort of internal transformation and looking for avenues of approach. The latter were represented, from the very beginning, our participation in the Gulf War, peace-keeping missions in the Balkans and so on – simply efforts to show the army in a bit different light. Based on the activities listed above and relations to the NATO Command in Europe, I believe the army made a significant political contribution resulting in our accession, albeit with a narrow margin. It didn’t have much other support. [Pezl, 10 – 11]
[Translated by Jiří Mareš, Prague]
Notes:
[1] At that time, the Chief of Staff of the Unified Armed Forces was General of the Army Vladimir Lobov.
[2] Marshal Dmitrii Timofeevich Iazov, Soviet Minister of National Defense from 1987 to 1991.
[3] General of the Army Petr Georgievich Lushev was the last Supreme Commander of the Unified Armed Forces of the Warsaw Pact.
[4] Miroslav Vacek, Proč bych měl mlčet [Why Should I Keep Silent] (Prague: Nadas, 1991), pp. 49 – 50.
[5] Václav Havel, one of prominent Czechoslovak dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s, Czechoslovak President from 1990 to 1993, Czech President from 1993 to 2003.
[6] Lubomír Dobrovský, Czechoslovak Minister of Defense between 1990 and 1992.