46 James S. Corum and Wray R. Johnson, Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Terrorists and Insurgents (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 430–431, 433.
47 Derek Read, ‘Airpower in COIN: Can Airpower Make a Significant Contribution to Counter-Insurgency?’, Defence Studies 10:1–2 (March–June 2010), 147.
48 Sarah Kreps and Micah Zenko, ‘The Next Drone Wars’, Foreign Affairs 93:2 (March/April 2014), 68.
49 Ibid., 71–72.
50 Michael Mayer, ‘The New Killer Drones: Understanding the Strategic Implications of Next-Generation Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles’, International Affairs 91:4 (2015), 774.
51 Elinor Sloan, ‘Robotics at War’, Survival 57:5 (October/November 2015), 112.
Further reading
Corum, James S. and Wray R. Johnson. Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Terrorists and Insurgents (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003).
Douhet, Giulio. The Command of the Air, trans. by Dino Ferrari, ed. by Joseph Patrick Harahan and Richard H. Kohn (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1942).
Lambeth, Benjamin S. The Transformation of American Air Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Lambeth, Benjamin S. Air Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2005).
Mayer, Michael. ‘The New Killer Drones: Understanding the Strategic Implications of Next-Generation Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles’, International Affairs 91:4 (2015).
Mitchell, William. Winged Defense (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1925).
Pape, Robert A. Bombing to Win: Airpower and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
Read, Derek. ‘Airpower in COIN: Can Airpower Make a Significant Contribution to Counter-Insurgency?’, Defence Studies 10:1–2 (March–June 2010).
Warden, John. The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1989).
4 Nuclear power and deterrence
When we arrive at nuclear power, we contemplate a qualitatively different dimension of warfare. Unlike seapower, landpower, airpower and even cyberwar (see Chapter 8), where we can speak of the actual conduct of war, in the realm of nuclear power we are operating entirely in the abstract, theoretical sphere. As Lawrence Freedman so aptly put it in his 1986 assessment of Cold War nuclear strategists, the study of nuclear power and strategy is the study of the ‘non-use’ of these weapons.1
Despite the fact that nuclear weapons were never used in the first four and a half decades after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War period was replete with policy and academic discussions of nuclear strategy – of whether and how to use nuclear means to achieve military and political ends. This well-known history begins with early post-war views that nuclear weapons were simply a more powerful tool of airpower; to a subsequent argument that such weapons could best be used to avoid wars; to the Eisenhower administration’s mid-1950s statement that it was prepared to massively retaliate with nuclear weapons against aggression anywhere; to a brief flirtation in the late 1950s with ideas about conducting limited nuclear war. It continued on with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations mixing of conventional, tactical nuclear and strategic nuclear threats into an escalating framework of Flexible Response; to the Carter administration’s countervailing strategy of meeting any Soviet escalation with an effective US response; and finally to the Reagan administration’s emphasis on marrying offensive strategies with ballistic missile defences (BMDs). In the course of all this strategizing a whole new language emerged, including terms like ‘first-strike’, ‘second-strike’, ‘counterforce’, ‘countervalue’, ‘deterrence by punishment’, ‘deterrence by denial’ and ‘mutual assured destruction’.
This chapter examines strategic thought on nuclear power and deterrence. It briefly discusses the Cold War period before turning to the post-Cold War and post-9/11 eras. Notable strategists of the Cold War were Bernard Brodie and Thomas Schelling while those of the contemporary period include, among others, American scholar Keith Payne and British scholars Colin Gray and Freedman. Significant contemporary strategic thought is also reflected in some key Pentagon documents, particularly the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the 2006 Deterrence Operations Joint Operating Concept (JOC) and, to a lesser extent, the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The organizing principle is the evolution of thinking about how to apply the deterrence concept as established during the Cold War to contemporary threats. Nuclear weapons figure prominently, of course, but perhaps the defining aspect of deterrence today, as compared to that of the Cold War period, is the degree to which non-nuclear capabilities and non-military elements now complete the deterrence menu.
The Cold War era
Because nuclear power is best put to the ends of averting war, it is often discussed in the context of deterrence. Deterrence can be defined as the threat of force designed to convince an adversary, via a cost–benefit analysis on the part of the adversary, not to take an action of some kind. The idea of threatening force to prevent conflict is as old as war itself. In historical accounts it can be traced back millennia and figured, for example, in Thucydides’ analysis of the Peloponnesian War. But it was in the nuclear era that the concept of deterrence first came to be examined with rigour. From the late 1950s onward US scholars spoke about ‘deterrence by punishment’, under which an adversary is convinced not to take an action because the costs will be unacceptable, and ‘deterrence by denial’, wherein the enemy is persuaded not to take an action because he cannot achieve his operational objectives. Although there were variations and nuances, during the Cold War deterrence by punishment and nuclear weapons dominated the analysis. The superpowers were deterred from military action by the threat the adversary’s nuclear-armed international ballistic missiles posed to one’s own population centres, otherwise referred to as ‘countervalue’ targets. The strategic picture was stabilized by the fact that, after the Soviet Union achieved rough parity with the United States in nuclear capability in the mid-1960s, each side could absorb a ‘first strike’ – a nuclear attack by the other side – and still have enough missiles and warheads survive the barrage to launch a devastating ‘second strike’ or counterattack. To the extent that deterrence by denial played a role, it was when strategies moved toward nuclear warfighting roles against military and leadership targets, also referred to as ‘counterforce’. All this led to a highly mathematical and capability-oriented means of achieving deterrence.
The Cold War literature is vast on this topic and will not be discussed in detail here. But two strategists stand out as key thinkers of the era on deterrence, and their ideas laid the foundation for future strategic thought in this area. An American scholar, the political scientist Bernard Brodie, was the first to examine the implications of the nuclear age for military strategy. In The Absolute Weapon, an edited volume published in 1946, Brodie made the much-quoted observation that: ‘Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them.’2 In doing so, he set the intellectual parameters of how to view the role of nuclear weapons. In a subsequent book, Strategy in the Missile Age (1959), Brodie notes that deterrence has always been an instrument of national strategy or diplomacy, but with the advent of the nuclear era it had acquired many distinctive elements. Whereas previously deterrence was dynamic, presenting both failures and successes, in the nuclear era it was absolute, allowing for no breakdowns whatsoever. ‘Deterrence now means something as a strategic policy only when we are fairly confident that the retaliatory instrument upon which it relies will not be called upon to function at all.’ Brodie identified a core requirement of effective deterrence, credibility; explained the folly of declaring what later came to be called a ‘no first use’ (NFU) policy (‘it would be tactically and factually wrong to assure the enemy in advance that we would in no case move against him until we had already felt some bombs on our cities’); p
ointed out that in the nuclear era the potential deterrent value of an inferior force is sharply greater than in a world of only conventional weapons (a contemporary example would be North Korea’s handful of nuclear weapons); and raised the perils of trying to find a minimum deterrence, since a deterrent force must always be conceived as credible, and a retaliatory force must be capable of striking first and overwhelming the enemy’s retaliatory force.3
Another American scholar, the economist Thomas Schelling, examined the requirements and mechanisms of stability between the two Cold War superpowers. His ideas on bargaining, negotiation and game theory, developed in detail in his seminal book The Strategy of Conflict (1960),4 will have renewed relevance should relations among today’s great powers deteriorate further than they already have. In a later work, Arms and Influence (1968), Schelling made a critical distinction between deterrence and ‘compellence’, a concept that subsequently entered the strategic studies literature. Simply stated, deterrence refers to actions designed to incite the opponent not to do something, whereas the goal of compellence is to get the opponent to do something. ‘Deterrence involves setting the stage … and waiting. The overt act is up to the opponent … Compellence, in contrast, usually involves initiating an action … that can cease, or become harmless, only if the opponent responds. To deter, one digs in … and waits. To compel, one gets up enough momentum … to make the other to act to avoid collision … It is easier to deter than to compel’ (emphases in original).5 In the contemporary period compellence will play a role, particularly as the United States increasingly faces the prospect of peer and near-peer competitors. But the concept of deterrence will have wider applicability because of the nature of the range of likely opponents, including not just peer competitors but rogue state and non-state actors.
From the West’s perspective, during the Cold War there was one major adversary, the Soviet Union, which while seen as threatening and expansionist was also thought to be a rational actor, and a conservative one at that. Strategically, deterrence was achieved by maintaining a certain size of US nuclear arsenal that would guarantee a second strike against the Soviet Union. Requirements were debated almost exclusively in technical terms, i.e. the number and types of nuclear weapons necessary to maintain deterrence. Tactically, on the battlefields of Europe, deterrence was achieved by maintaining escalation dominance from conventional, to tactical nuclear, to strategic nuclear forces.
Deterrence is a unique concept in that, because it is judged by what does not happen, one can never be completely certain if it ‘worked’. Nonetheless, because there was no military exchange between the superpowers during the Cold War it was deemed a success. As a result, the initial post-Cold War inclination was to simply apply the basic tenets of Cold War deterrence to post-Cold War circumstances, notably by continuing to focus on numbers of warheads and missiles held by the United States and Russia. Since these arsenals still exist the exercise has value, and the most recent strategic arms reduction treaty between the two countries entered into force in 2011. But much of the Cold War practice and perspective on nuclear policy and deterrence has been rendered obsolete by the new threats and circumstances of the post-Cold War and contemporary period.
Deterrence now
‘We need a new model of deterrence theory, and we need it now’, admonished the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, in 2008, ‘Terrorists are trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction. Some [rogue] states … are trying to build and/or improve their own nuclear weapons. The specter of state-on-state conflict, though diminished, has not disappeared’ (emphasis in original).6 In his view, not enough had been done to advance the Cold War theory of deterrence. ‘What is necessary’, argued one US analyst, ‘is a reexamination of the underlying theory [of deterrence] and a determination of how to apply it to modern cases of concern, without the irrelevant attributes of Cold War deterrence’.7
Despite these statements, the first two post-Cold War decades actually saw a fair bit of strategic thinking on nuclear power and deterrence, initially at the think tank and scholarly level and later within official policy documents. Keith Payne’s 1996 volume Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age was one of the first significant studies to address the nature of the post-Cold War deterrence environment. Perhaps the most visible change was that the United States and its allies no longer had the luxury of being able to focus on just one large threat; rather, there would be several, smaller regional challengers like North Korea and, at that time, Iraq. Less visible were changes in how deterrence strategies would have to be carried out. In the post-Cold War era, the character of the US military threat, so central to how the deterrence concept was applied to the Soviet Union, was far less important than specific intelligence about the challenger and the particular context. ‘The initial step in identifying how we might be able to increase the reliability of deterrence policy is to harken back to Sun Tzu’s fundamental admonition to “know your enemy”’, Payne emphasized, including ‘the challenger’s character, motivation, determination and political context … the answers to these questions cannot be generalized’.8
The idea of moving beyond the generalized assumptions of the Cold War to a practice of ‘tailoring’ deterrence policies to a given opponent was one that emerged at this time. With the focus still on state actors Payne argued the imperative of determining such basic things as: whether it is possible to actually communicate with the adversary in question, as there would be no ‘hotline’ in place; what the enemy values most, i.e. his centre of gravity; if the decision makers being targeted are actually in control of policy decisions; what sort of threats the enemy would deem as credible; and whether there are cultural or idiosyncratic factors that have to be taken into account. In later work, Payne presents a deterrence framework designed to tailor deterrence policies to specific antagonists and contexts. Things like leadership characteristics, cost and risk tolerance, and beliefs about the credibility of US threats figure prominently and are followed by detailed US deterrence policy options. The idea, Payne notes, is to first ‘get inside’ the decision-making process of the challenger to identify the particular factors that may be critical to the functioning of deterrence in a specific case, and then to determine the most appropriate approach. ‘There is no adequate alternative to the hard task of attempting to ascertain the particular opponent’s modes of thought and core beliefs, assessing how they are likely to assess its behavior, and formulating U.S. deterrence policy in light of those findings.’9
Not until the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review did the term ‘tailored deterrence’ appear in an official US policy document. The emphasis, however, was on capability approaches rather than on the background homework required in order to ‘know your enemy’. ‘The Department is continuing its shift from a “one size fits all” notion of deterrence toward more tailorable approaches’, the report states. ‘The future force will provide a fully balanced, tailored capability to deter both state and non-state threats.’10 The Pentagon’s JOC released later that year, by contrast, is far more attuned to the subtleties of contemporary deterrence. It notes that US deterrence efforts must be tailored in character because the perceptions and resulting decision calculus of specific adversaries in specific circumstances are fundamentally different. It goes still further to make a distinction between the direct means of deterrence – the tailored capabilities – and the enablers that necessarily come first. A central enabler, indeed ‘the foundation of deterrence’, is global situational awareness, a somewhat nebulous term that becomes more concrete when one looks at its components. These are two: the first, familiar from Payne’s assessment, is to develop an underlying knowledge about adversary decision-makers’ values, culture, perceptions of benefits and costs, and risk propensity to the maximum extent possible; the second is to gain operational intelligence information about adversary assets, capabilities and vulnerabilities.11 In later work, Payne takes this theme still further, noting the requirement for ‘tailored intell
igence’ to understand the enemy as fully as possible. ‘Deterrence now’, he states, ‘is first and foremost a matter of intelligence’.12
The 2006 JOC, which in the ten years after its publication had not been superseded by any subsequent document, makes an important contribution to strategic thought on deterrence. It goes beyond more narrowly conceived military capabilities to include broader, non-military elements that play in deterrence. Indeed, the US military has expanded the concept of strategic deterrence to include not only nuclear and conventional forces, as first spelled out in the New Triad (see below), but also diplomatic, economic and informational tools. Thus the JOC mentions strategic communication, or ‘efforts to understand and engage key audiences in order to create, strengthen or preserve conditions favorable for the advancement of [US] interests’ as a direct means of influencing the deterrence effort.13 The effect is to take the idea of a tailored approach to a new level. Notes Payne, ‘in some cases, non-military approaches to deterrence may work best, in others, conventional force options may be adequate and advantageous, in still other cases, nuclear threat options may be necessary to deter’ (emphasis in original).14
Tailoring capabilities
This brief discussion of the evolution of strategic thinking on nuclear policy and deterrence reveals that the idea of tailored deterrence as it has emerged over the past two decades comprises two important facets: tailoring to specific actors and situations, and tailoring capabilities – the direct means versus enabler distinction made in the JOC. While Payne’s strategic thought on deterrence in the first post-Cold War decade did much to address the former aspect, the earliest comprehensive attempt to address the changed capability requirements for deterrence dates to the Bush administration’s 2001 NPR. Released in December that year, but begun long before the 9/11 attacks, the NPR introduced a New Triad as the basis for America’s nuclear posture. In place of the ‘old triad’ of bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that formed the basis of strategic deterrence during the Cold War, the first leg of the New Triad includes all the offensive strike systems that were in the old triad (i.e. nuclear capabilities) and improved long-range conventional strike capabilities. In this way ‘strategic deterrence’, previously a concept involving only intercontinental nuclear weapons, expanded to incorporate conventional forces. The other two legs of the New Triad are active and passive defences, most notably missile defences; and a ‘responsive infrastructure’, meaning a research, development and industrial infrastructure that is robust enough to maintain offensive and defensive forces.
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