Ogarkov was a strong advocate of reconstructing the huge, unwieldy Soviet military machine into a smaller, more compact strike force based around advanced technology. In a candid exchange with an American journalist in 1982, he had admitted that "Soviet technology is a generation or two behind America. In your country, even small children play with computers. We do not even have them in every office of the Defense Ministry. And for reasons you well know, we cannot easily make computers available in our society. Economic reforms are sorely needed, but they will most likely also entail political reforms." This openness was in sharp contrast with the anti-American rhetoric he displayed during the aftermath of the KAL-007 shootdown. Aside from Ogarkov's belief that fundamental changes needed to be made to the Soviet socioeconomic status quo, he also ran afoul of army officers who believed in a more traditional World War II style of warfare. In a 1984 article in the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, Ogarkov outlined his vision for modernizing the Soviet military.
Ogarkov's ousting
Ogarkov was fired by the Politburo on 6 September 1984 in both his capacity of Chief of the General Staff and First Deputy Minister of Defense, and was replaced by Sergey Akhromeyev. The political analyst Ilya Zemtsov has argued that Ogarkov's removal was the result of Grigory Romanov's failed ambitions to succeed Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary. According to Zemtsov, Romanov had been trying to force a crisis of succession where his control of the armed forces, via his good relations to Ogarkov, would have tipped a split within the Politburo to his favor. Furthermore, the Politburo was worried about Ogarkov's rapid ascension: Ogarkov had already weakened the power of the Main Political Administration, the organisation tasked with keeping the military under party control, and he had gained access to the Defense Council, though not as a voting member. Romanov, who was preparing for a diplomatic mission, could not protect Ogarkov from being dismissed from his positions for "unpartylike tendencies". Raymond L. Garthoff has written that although "the reasons for Ogarkov's abrupt removal are not known, there is little question that they concerned matters of defense allocation". Contrary to Zemtsov, Garthoff argued that "There is no indication that Ogarkov was involved in factional political infighting". Ogarkov was soon after made commander of a newly created Western theater of war command.
In establishing one of the animating ideas for his novel, Breakpoint, Richard Clarke includes a discussion of technological advantage in revolution in military affairs using the precedent of the end of the Cold War. He characterizes Ogarkov as the first Soviet military leader who "realized that the gap had gotten so wide that they could not catch up. So they gave up...".
