Team B

Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States.

President Gerald Ford began the Team B project in May 1976, inviting a group of outside experts to evaluate classified intelligence on the Soviet Union.

Its findings were leaked to the press shortly after Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential election win in an attempt to appeal to staunch anticommunists in both parties and also not to appear partisan.

[4][5] The Team B reports became the intellectual foundation for the idea of "the window of vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Ronald Reagan.

[6] Some scholars and policy-makers, including Anne Hessing Cahn of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, later criticized the Team B project's findings.

In response, Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, accused the CIA of systematically underestimating Soviet missile deployment in his 1974 Foreign Policy article, "Is There a Strategic Arms Race?"

Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz wanted to create a much less charitable picture of the Soviet Union, its intentions, and its views about fighting and winning a nuclear war.

Colby refused, stating it was hard "to envisage how an ad hoc independent group of analysts could prepare a more thorough, comprehensive assessment of Soviet strategic capabilities than could the intelligence community.

The report cited these specific areas to reinforce its assessment: Team B concluded that the Soviet Union did not adhere to the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, but rather believed it could win a nuclear war outright.

Pipes—in his Commentary article—argued that CIA suffered from "mirror-imaging" (i.e., from assuming that the other side had to—and did—think and evaluate exactly the same way); Pipes further wrote that Team B showed Soviet thinking to be based on winning a nuclear war (i.e., not avoiding such war due to MAD, because, he wrote, the Soviets were building MIRV'd nuclear missiles of high yield and high accuracy—appropriate for attacking hardened missile silos, but not needed for such large and vulnerable 'hostage' sites as cities).

"[9] The CIA director at the time, George H. W. Bush, concluded that the Team B approach set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy.

Naval War College, argues that the Team B exercise made sense in theory because scrutiny from outside of the intelligence bureaucracy can pressure analysts to be forthright regarding their assumptions and methodology.

"The administration did not try to determine the membership of Team B nor the process of the exercise, but it gave de facto control over these pivotal issues to a group of outspoken critics of détente who argued publicly that the United States was seriously underestimating the Soviet threat.

"[33] Richard K. Betts, the Arnold Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University argues that the underlying problem was confusion about what level of analysis was at issue—an implicit blurring together of Soviet political objectives and military strategy.

Team B and Harvard University's Richard Pipes focused on this but did not distinguish the military strategic orientation clearly from political intent (objectives to be achieved), on which there were many more indications of Soviet commitment to avoiding nuclear war at nearly all costs.

[37] Derek Leebaert, professor of government at Georgetown University, supported Team B in his 2002 book The Fifty Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Shapes Our World.