201 
determine, until the appearance of the Gorshkov series there was 
apparently no such thing as a readiness of the armed forces for na- 
tional oborona. Readiness always implied “‘combat readiness,” readi- 
ness to “‘repel’”’ the aggressor’s attack and ‘‘defeat’’ him, ‘‘readiness 
for zashchita of the motherland.” *4 
In emphasizing ‘“‘military-political tasks’? and “‘political goals’ to 
the exclusion of military-strategic tasks and goals, Gorshkov may have 
been suggesting the same thing as when he employed state oborona 
rather than state zashchita terminology, that is, that the navy’s main 
Orientation is now within the military-political system of national 
oborona and not within the combat system of the motherland’s armed 
zashchitniki, where military strategy prevails. In peacetime, of course, 
military policy determines military strategy through the mediation of 
military doctrine. However, when it comes to war, doctrine tends 
to retire and make way for a relatively autonomous military art; “‘not 
doctrine but strategy leads the war and the armed struggle.” ® This 
does not mean the political struggle is in abeyance in war. The Rus- 
sians, as students of Clausewitz, have always regarded war as a con- 
tinuation of politics by violent means, but they insist on the integrity 
of the system channelizing this violence; once the armed struggle 
has begun—and the armed struggle is the “specific sign’ of war—it 
is subject to its own “‘laws” and not those of the diplomatic struggle. 
Soviet military writings are studded with references to “decisively 
defeating” the enemy and “achieving victory,” which signifies that 
in war the political struggle shifts from nonmilitary to military forms, 
and that war has its own logic, tasks and goals—‘“‘strategic tasks” 
and “strategic goals’—which only in the “last analysis” lead to the 
attainment of political objectives.’ As one set of authors put it, 
In past wars the main military-strategic goals of the warring 
sides consisted of defeating or weakening the opponent’s armed 
forces and, as a result of this, the seizure and retention of vitally 
important regions or administrative-political centers. The achieve- 
ment of such goals usually insured the attainment also of the 
political goals set for the war.°®” 
The situation may be somewhat different today, but not in the sense 
we have been discussing. Today, it is said, 
(Continued) 
USSR. However, for juxtapositions of national oborona and national zashchita in the same passage, 
which serve to point up the distinction between them, if not always the grounds of the distinction, see 
Col. Yu. Korablev, “V. I. Lenin on Ways of Strengthening Soviet State Defense,’ VIZ, No. 4 1970, 
p. 18; F. Petrov, “The CPSU—Organizer of the Defense of the Socialist Fatherland,’ VIZ, No. 2, 
1975, p. 100; Zubarev in Zubarev and Sidorov, op. cit., 145; Babakov in KVS, No. 19, 1968, p. 64 
and No. 11, 1969, p. 26; Grechko speech, XXIV s‘‘ezd Komm. Partii Sov. Soyuza, I, 348; Grechko, 
Vooruzhennye Sily Sovetskogo gosudarstva, 94; Grechko (ed.), Istoriya vtoroy mirovoy voyny, 11, 
171, Azovtsev, V. I. Lenin i Sovetskaya voennaya nauka, 93; Lipitskiy, Voennaya deyatel’ nost’ TsK 
RKP (b) 1917-1920, 121; Bondarenko in KVS, No. 18, 1974, p. 25; Col. S. Lukonin and Lt.-Col. N. 
Tarasenko, “‘V. I. Lenin on the Defense Function of the Socialist State,’ KVS, No. 10, 1969, pp. 22, 
24; E. Tyazhel’nikov, ‘“‘The Leninist Komsomol and the Armed Forces of the USSR,” KVS, No. 4, 
1973, p. 14; S. Levitin in S. Levitin (compiler), Partiya v bor’be za uprochenie i razvitie sotsi- 
alisticheskogo obshchestva: usilenie oborony strany, 1937 god—iyun’ 1941 goda (Moscow, 1962), 
69. 
®4 Kozlov, Smirnov et al., O Sovetskoy voennoy nauke, 387, 388. 
85 Sokolovskiy (ed.), Voennaya strategiya (3rd ed.), pp. 30, 31. 
*6 Ibid., 243-244, also 151, 210-211. 
87 Col. M. Ivashchenko and Lt.-Col. E. Lemeshko, “‘F. Engels on the Dialectics of Development of 
the Methods of the Armed Struggle,’ KVS, No. 14, 1970, p. 13. 
