Modern Military Strategy

by Elinor C Sloan

  US allies, too, have discussed the deterrent value of low-yield, accurate nuclear weapons. In 2001, France took issue with the Bush administration’s view, later expressed in the 2002 National Security Strategy, that rogue leaders could not be deterred. ‘The Americans judge that deterrence does not work with “rogue states” that are considered irrational’, former French President Jacques Chirac stated upon releasing France’s new nuclear deterrence strategy. ‘However, the leaders of these states are sensitive to threats exerted against their centre of power.’ To this end, France would be acquiring ‘more accurate, less powerful, longer-range [nuclear] weapons’ to reach ‘above all the political, economic, and military power centers of a possible aggressor’.33 The French goal was to acquire precise, discriminate nuclear strike options that could destroy bunkers without destroying cities, thereby increasing the credibility of French threats and strengthening deterrence.

  Consistent with the American approach, France maintains a distinction between deterrence credibility and the willingness to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. Even as it pursued an option that lay between ‘the total annihilation of a country and doing nothing’,34 France stressed its overall nuclear doctrine is one of ‘non-use’. Notes one scholar, ‘[t]he French have repeatedly affirmed since the mid-1980s that they do not regard nuclear arms as “tactical” for battle but as political and strategic instruments’.35 Far from promoting warfighting, French officials emphasize, more operationally useful and discriminate nuclear weapons would enhance deterrence credibility, thereby bolstering the ‘non-use’ principle.36 Box 4.2 highlights one perspective on contemporary nuclear force requirements for deterrence.

  Box 4.2 ‘The nukes we need’

  • Contemporary scholars argue the only way for the United States to determine the nuclear arsenal it needs for deterrence in the twenty-first century is to work through the ‘grim logic of deterrence’: what actions need to be deterred, what threats need to be issued and what capabilities are needed to make the threats credible.

  • Actions may include the introduction of nuclear weapons by countries like North Korea, Iran or China during a conventional war with the United States as a means of compelling a ceasefire or denying the US access to allied military bases. Nuclear escalation would be rational from the adversary perspective because of his conventional inferiority compared to the United States, just as NATO strategy rested on nuclear escalation throughout the Cold War because of its conventional inferiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.

  • The least bad threat that could be issued to deter escalation is to be able to launch a counterforce attack that destroys an enemy’s nuclear forces, while the worst and least credible approach would be to threaten to destroy enemy cities. The latter would be a vastly disproportionate response to, say, a nuclear strike against a US carrier.

  • Capabilities for a disarming counterforce strike include a mix of conventional and nuclear weapons, specifically low-yield precision nuclear weapons and conventional counterforce weapons such as those the United States is pursuing with its prompt global strike capability.

  • In addition, a limited number of traditional high-yield nuclear weapons must be retained in the event of circumstances ‘so dire that collateral damage was not a major concern’.

  See: Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, ‘The Nukes We Need: Preserving the American Deterrent’, Foreign Affairs 88:6 (November/December 2009).

  Questions of nuclear pre-emption

  A related concern within this overall debate is that the pursuit of more accurate, low-yield nuclear weapons could be part of an overall shift in nuclear doctrine toward pre-emptive nuclear strikes. Early supporters of the 2001 NPR interpreted the US approach in the following way: ‘Recent trends present a challenge. On the one hand, there is a strategic capability optimized for a danger that no longer exists … On the other, failures in non-proliferation confront planners with relatively small-scale threats that could become serious problems with little warning … America accepts that it cannot prevent proliferation. Instead, it is preparing to target [NBC] arsenals with conventional and, if necessary, nuclear forces.’37 Although it is difficult to justify the use of nuclear weapons to prevent enemy use of nuclear weapons, for some this is a necessary card to hold in order to maintain escalation dominance. A high-level report prepared by retired NATO generals in 2008 argued the Alliance must be able to resort to pre-emptive nuclear attack to halt the ‘imminent’ spread of nuclear weapons, and that the ‘first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of [WMDs]’.38 Nor was this approach confined to NATO: in a 2008 speech the chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces stated Russia was prepared to use pre-emptive nuclear strikes to uphold its interests in a variety of situations.

  Throughout atomic history the United States and its allies have maintained the option for the first use of nuclear weapons, refusing to adopt an NFU doctrine. Meanwhile, the Cold War declaratory policy of the Soviet Union was NFU, but post-Cold War Russia reversed this, including in its military doctrine the option of nuclear first use. China is also thought to be abandoning its Cold War NFU policy in favour of the first use option. NFU opponents argue the potential, however remote, for a scenario to arise in which the only option is to use nuclear weapons first to forestall enemy use necessitates reserving the first use option. But some scholars have made the case that retaining the first use option in the contemporary period undermines crisis stability because the fear of a disarming first strike on the part of the United States increases the possibility of rogue state escalation. Others note that an acknowledgement of the peril created by the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a rogue state can reasonably lead to the requirement for a pre-emptive strike, but it does not necessarily lead to a nuclear pre-emptive strike. In 2003 the commander of Strategic Command (STRATCOM) stated precision-guided conventional munitions could do just as good a job as any nuclear penetrator in sealing off underground facilities. Still others have pointed out earth-penetrating nuclear weapons may be useful for destroying moderately deep and precisely located nuclear bunkers, but this value would disappear as soon as an adversary responded by digging deeper or adopting a strategy of dispersion or mobility.

  For proponents of the 2001 NPR, of course, all this points to the value of including long-range precision conventional weapons in the first leg of the New Triad. The Obama administration’s 2010 NPR does not use the term ‘New Triad’, reverting instead to the old terminology of a ‘nuclear triad’ comprised of ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers. But while the New Triad terminology is gone, its content remains largely intact. In line with the US objective of reducing the role of nuclear weapons in deterrence, there is no mention in the 2010 NPR of new low-yield weapons. The document does, however, place significant emphasis on the value and role of conventional precision force, missile defences and a robust infrastructure in America’s strategic force posture.

  Pre-emption and biological and chemical weapons

  Questions have also been raised about what role strategic weapons, whether conventional or nuclear, may have in deterring adversary use of chemical and biological weapons. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) – which divides the world into nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states – the United States has extended a long-standing (since 1978) ‘negative security guarantee’ stating that it would not target, with nuclear weapons, non-nuclear weapons states that are in compliance with its NPT obligations. But this negative security assurance did not extend to states brandishing chemical and biological weapons. Up until recently, the US had always maintained a ‘calculated ambiguity’ doctrine of refusing to say whether or not it would respond to chemical or biological threats with nuclear weapons, given that it has no chemical or biological weapons of its own. In the past Britain and France have also left open the option of threatening nuclear retaliation against adversaries employing chemical and biological weapons, even if th
e adversary had no nuclear weapons and was not allied with a nuclear weapons state.

  The Obama administration’s 2010 NPR was the first to explicitly rule out the use of nuclear weapons in response to chemical and biological weapons threats. Advances in US conventional military capabilities, it argued, as well as continued improvements in missile defences, were enabling the US to continue to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterrence – a trend that had begun with the 2001 NPR. The United States reiterated its negative security assurance, noted above, but went further to state it ‘affirms that any state eligible for the assurance that uses chemical or biological weapons against the United States or its allies and partners would face the prospect of a devastating conventional response’ (emphasis added). The threat of a nuclear response is eliminated. That said, the administration does leave open the right to make a future ‘adjustment’ in its stance, i.e. to return to America’s previous policy of strategic ambiguity, if warranted by developments in proliferation and US capacities to counter the threat.

  The Obama administration’s less than firm position on whether conventional or nuclear forces should be used to deter chemical and biological weapons threats reflects the mixed views that exist within strategic thought on this issue. In a 2000 article scholar Scott Sagan argued America’s calculated ambiguity policy placed the United States in a ‘commitment trap’.39 The reputation costs of not following through on threats increased the probability, in the event of deterrence failure, that US leaders would respond with nuclear weapons where it might otherwise have retaliated with conventional weapons only. Sagan and other scholars recommended an unambiguous commitment to retaliate with a devastating conventional response to the use of unconventional weapons. In fact, soon after the 1991 Gulf War Perry had raised the idea that conventional precision force could ‘serve as a credible deterrent to a regional power’s use of chemical weapons’.40 But others dispute the deterrent value of conventional responses to WMD threats. For Payne, indicating what is militarily necessary to target biological or chemical weapons sites misses the fundamental point that deterrence involves exploiting an opponent’s fears and sensitivities – and these may have little or no connection to America’s conventional combat capabilities.

  BMD

  The second leg of the Bush administration’s New Triad for deterrence, the integration of passive and active defences, marked a substantial development in the evolution of strategic thought on deterrence. Cold War deterrence relied almost exclusively on the threat of punishment in kind. This was partly because conservative, status quo superpowers were particularly amenable to the logic of deterrence, but also because – notwithstanding the vision of US President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative – it was not possible to defend against the ballistic missile threat, which numbered in the thousands. In the contemporary period, both elements have changed and this is reflected in the strategic thought of several scholars. Colin Gray, for example, argued early on for defensive counterforce capabilities (noted above) as part of an overall ‘national military strategy that looks with favor upon denial options’.41 In his view, defence against some forms of WMD delivery has become both necessary and feasible: necessary because deterrence against rogue states is far more difficult and likely to fail; feasible because the challenge is to be able to defeat missile threats much more modest in scale and sophistication than was the case during the Cold War. ‘With the arguable exception of the … Russian nuclear arsenal’, he argued, ‘there are no missile-armed groups in the world today [1999] … whose WMD capabilities should prove beyond defeat by U.S. offensive and (especially) defensive counterforce means’ (emphasis in original).42

  Other scholars and strategic thinkers have similarly focused on the current necessity of incorporating defence into strategic thought on deterrence and nuclear policy. ‘Defense, not deterrence’, argues Sagan, will ‘be necessary when confronting irrational enemies who either welcome a nuclear apocalypse or are, for whatever reason, oblivious to any level of threatened destruction’.43 Meanwhile, Payne predicted soon after the end of the Cold War that in the second nuclear age missile defence would be viewed more sympathetically, even as essential, as a ‘safety’ net against deterrence failure when a challenger is armed with a relatively small arsenal of missiles. BMD could provide protection for US urban areas while its sister, theatre missile defence, could protect deployed troops, thereby increasing the credibility of conventional deterrence using force projection capabilities. On the home front BMD ‘should now be seen … as wise insurance against the near-certainty that at some future point deterrence will unexpectedly fail’44; abroad, without defensive capabilities ‘the risk of significant American and allied casualties resulting from projecting force abroad could be too great for any President to accept’.45 Payne neatly summarized at the end of the 2000s that in the contemporary environment ‘we must seek not only to deter, we also must prepare to defend our society, our expeditionary forces, and our allies in the event deterrence fails’.46

  Critics contend that incorporating defensive measures into the US strategic posture is inherently destabilizing. During the Cold War the logic behind having no missile defences was twofold: first, establishing defences would spark an arms race as one side sought to overcome the other side’s defences with more offensive power; second, missile defences could make nuclear weapons more usable in the eyes of a country that was, by virtue of having defences, no longer vulnerable to nuclear retaliation. Similarly, in the contemporary period it has been argued BMD could motivate an arms build-up by new and old nuclear powers to offset the defence, and that ‘[t]he deployment of effective missile defenses … returns us to a condition in which victory is thought to be possible’.47 But for Payne and others these arguments have the effect of applying Cold War logic to twenty-first-century circumstances. New actors are not invariably deterrable; contemporary deterrence is more fallible. Today ‘[d]eterrence may fail, and US damage-limiting capabilities may be the only means for mitigating the catastrophic consequences of nuclear or other WMD attack’ (emphasis in original).48

  Conceptually, then, active defences are included as part the US strategic posture for two related yet discrete reasons: first, to enhance defence for the sake of defence, i.e. to minimize potential US and allied losses; second, to strengthen deterrence by denial by convincing an adversary that an attack against US territory could not succeed, and that the US would have the will to deploy (conventional) power protection forces. In this way, missile defences are expected both to offer a hedge against deterrence failure, and to contribute to the functioning of deterrence itself. Meanwhile, passive defences, such as improved homeland security measures, operate in the same fashion – strengthening deterrence and minimizing losses. For the latter, passive defences like efficient consequent management capabilities reduce the effectiveness of attacks that active defences fail to defeat. As for strengthening deterrence, if the police, customs, immigration and other government services are better able to deal with the consequences of an attack, this might send the message that the homeland is a ‘hard target’.

  Deterrence and terrorism

  A final area of strategic thought on nuclear power and deterrence that has emerged in the contemporary period (particularly, of course, since 9/11) is its relevance to terrorism. The primary issue here is the applicability of the concept of deterrence writ large with respect to terrorism, with the unspoken assumption that we are talking about conventional deterrence. Few would entertain nuclear strikes against terrorist sites, but this does not mean that the relevance of nuclear deterrence in the face of these attacks has not been discussed in the literature. Soon after 9/11, France responded to the seeming irrelevance of nuclear deterrence to contemporary threats with the point that ‘these attacks have in no way … affected the credibility of nuclear deterrence. It was never designed to work against individuals or terrorist groups. It is aimed at states.’49

  Whether we are talking about nuclear or conventio
nal deterrence, the original post-9/11 thinking was that non-state actors could not be deterred. This was certainly the perspective of the Bush administration, as expressed in its 2002 National Security Strategy (noted above). America’s National Research Council pointed out at the time that there are problems in using traditional threats of punishment against terrorists because they do not control particular territories; they may not believe direct threats against them can be readily carried out in the short run; their leadership is elusive; it is hard to identify targets; in any case, it can be difficult to know what terrorists ‘value’ and therefore what should be targeted; there are often no established channels of communication with such a diffuse adversary; clearly communicating credible warnings and threats is thus of limited utility if not entirely impossible; and some terrorists may actually wish for an overwhelming response against them because this will radicalize potential supporters.50

  ‘Does that mean [deterrence] can be written off as a strategy of historical interest but no contemporary application?’ Freedman asked in the early post-9/11 period.51 For some this was initially thought to be true, but sober second thought indicates otherwise. Freedman challenges the argument that deterrence does not work with terrorism, and his writings in this regard, as well as those of others, comprise an evolution in strategic thought surrounding the concept. The core of this thought is that while it may be true that terrorists cannot be deterred in an immediate sense, is also the case that even suicide terrorists want to die to accomplish something. Therefore, focusing on deterrence by denial – denying terrorists the accomplishment of the ‘benefits’ of their actions – may be an avenue for applying the deterrence concept to non-state actors. In later work, Payne explicitly examined the utility of denial measures against non-state actors (see Box 4.3).