He looked around the small room with its walnut paneling and the massive
teakwood conference table that dominated everything. The expressions his top
advisors wore told him the news wasn’t good.
With a sigh he settled into the leather chair at the head of the table.
An Air Force officer carrying an innocuous-looking briefcase took up a
position nearby.
Connally hated that briefcase and everything it stood for. It was the
“football,” holding the codes that would grant Presidential authorization for
a nuclear weapons release. The football had been much on his mind these last
few days.
“All right, gentlemen, let’s hear it.” The message requesting his
presence in the Situation Room had been brief and vague. His Chief of Staff,
Gordon West, had framed it carefully to avoid giving away details to any of
the senators attending the morning conference in the Cabinet Room. His eyes
met West’s for a moment, but the former governor of Minnesota looked away.
It was Admiral Brandon Scott who spoke. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
had a reputation for bluntness and was an outspoken critic of the new
Administration’s defense policies, but Connally also knew that the man
understood his business.
“The Soviets have advanced their front to link up with the amphibious and
desant forces around Trondheim,” Scott said. He touched a button on the table
in front of him and the curtains blocking off the rear-projection screen at
the end of the room opposite the door rolled back. A map of Norway appeared,
showing Soviet positions astride the center of the country in red. A second
blob of red marked their bastion around Oslo, so far supplied and reinforced
entirely by air.
“How the hell did they move so far, so fast?” Connally asked. “I thought
the plans for the defense of Norway were solid. Haven’t they been working on
them for the past fifty years, for Crissakes?”
“Not quite, Mr. President,” Secretary of Defense George Vane responded.
“The planning that was put in motion fifty years ago was based on having a
strong NATO alliance. Most of them became obsolete the day the Berlin Wall
went down and everybody started scrambling to make friends with the Russians.”
“I’ve had about all the anti-Communist bullshit I need for today from the
Senate delegation that was just upstairs, George,” Connally snapped. “I don’t
need rhetoric. I need results!”
“It isn’t just rhetoric, Mr. President,” Vane said quietly. “The simple
fact is that the end of the Cold War era left us behind. It’s a classic case
of being ready to fight the last war when the next one rolls around.”
“Just what’s that supposed to mean?” the President asked him coldly.
“It means that we didn’t evolve new strategies fast enough to keep pace
with the new political realities,” Scott amplified. “For better than forty
years we were all geared for one thing–the big conventional war in Europe,
with Russian tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap and the NATO allies rallying
to hold them off. The situation changed, but we didn’t change with it.”
“We counted on a couple of divisions attacking the Norwegian frontier,”
Vane added. “So far we’ve identified six divisions on land and the equivalent
of another one operating by sea, plus a pair of divisions providing desant
troops for paradrops and airmobile attacks. There are at least twice as many
tactical air units available in Scandinavia as we ever projected. Without the
need to support operations in Germany or elsewhere the Soviets can overwhelm
Norway without even trying very hard.”
The National Security Advisor, Herbert T. Waring, spoke for the first
time. “There’s also the matter of our preparedness. If this had been
happening in the seventies or the eighties we would’ve been on full alert the
first day of the crisis, back when it was still just a lot of saber-rattling.
We would have been shuttling Marines over there as fast as we could round up
the flights to carry them, and the prepositioned supplies we had around
Trondheim would’ve been worth something. Norway could’ve gone just like the
buildup in Saudi before Desert Storm … but we let it slip by until it was
too late to act.”