THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Many persons in the West believe that war occurs only because of miscalculation; sometimes this opinion is combined with the view that only aggressors make war. Persons holding these two views would have a hard time justifying the wisdom of Alliance resistance to Communism the last fifty years because it was usually the U.S. and her allies and not the Soviets who resolutely and studiedly escalated matters to crises threatening war. Besides the obvious cases involving Berlin in 1952, or Cuba in 1962, we might add the decisions to make the move to war in South Korea and in South Viet Nam, the nature and motivations of which decisions are underscored by the persistent refusals of the Americans and their allies to bomb China or invade North Viet Nam. That is, in both cases the allied forces fought to stop aggression by going to war and declined to employ decisive counteraggression.

  Those persons who concede these facts and conclude that these deci-sions were wrong, and yet who applaud the victory of the democracies in the Cold War, are perhaps obliged to reconsider their views. For it was this peculiar combination of a willingness to make the move to war coupled with a benign nonaggression, even protectiveness, toward the other great powers that ultimately gave the Alliance victory. Sometimes this matter is confused in the debate over precisely how this victory was achieved. Was the Cold War won because U.S.-led forces militarily denied Communist forces those strategic successes that would have sustained a world revolu-tion? Or was it won because northern-tier markets were able to build an international capitalist system that vastly outperformed the socialist sys-ttem (and an international communications network that informed the world of this achievement) ? Such a debate misses the point, perhaps because it is suffused with the assumptions about war and miscalculation to which I have referred. Neither military nor economic success alone could have ended the Cold War, because neither alone could deliver legitimacy to the winning state, or deny it to the loser. Moreover, neither military nor economic success was possible without the other: can one imagine a European Union having developed without Germany, or with a Germany strategically detached from the West? Even the ill-fated American mission in Viet Nam contributed to the ultimate Alliance victory: a collapse of military resistance in Indochina in 1964 would have had political effects on the very states of the region whose economies have since become so dynamic (analogous to those effects that would have been felt in Japan following a collapse of resistance in Korea in 1950). The political and economic, far from being decisive causal factors on their own, are really two faces of the same phenomenon. Only the coherent union of a constitutional order and a strategic vision could achieve the kind of results that ended, rather than merely interrupted, such an epochal war. We shall have to bear this in mind with regard to maintaining either success, political or economic, in the future.

  Contemporary imagination, however, like so many aspects of contemporary life, is suffused with presentism. This is often commented on by those who lament the current lack of interest in the past, but it is equally manifest, ironically, in our projections about the future. This leads us to the third preconception that must be dismissed: namely, that future states of affairs must be evaluated in comparison with the present, rather than with the unknowable future. One encounters this often in daily life, in the adolescent's decision to quit school so “I can make more money” (because going to school pays less than working in a fast-food shop) or the columnist's claim that “if we balanced the budget, interest rates would drop and growth would increase” (because the government would not be adding to the demand for borrowed money). In those cases the speaker is making the mistake of comparing a future state of affairs with the present, and omitting to imagine what an alternative future state of affairs might be like (if he stayed in school and qualified for a better job; if the government steeply increased taxes in order to balance the budget), which would provide the proper comparison. If this seems altogether too obvious, let me give one famous example of this preconception.*

  Many commentators believe that the turning point in the 1980 U.S. presidential elections came in the first debate between the candidates when Governor Reagan asked the American people to consider the question “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Indeed, this riposte was so successful that it was used in the 1984 debate by Reagan's opponent, Walter Mondale; and used again by George Bush against Michael Dukakis; and then used by Governor Clinton against President Bush.

  Such a question, however, can scarcely be the measure of a presidential administration because the one thing we know is that things will never stay the same for the length of a presidential term, regardless of who is in power. Governor Reagan ought to have asked the public in 1980, “Are we better off now than we would have been if President Ford had held office these last four years?” This is the measure of the choice to be made, which might be phrased: “Will we be better off in four years, not ‘than we are now' but ‘because of the choice we are asked to make now‘?”

  The calculus employed by a state in order to determine when it is appropriate to make the move to war is, similarly, future-oriented. It asks: will the state be better or worse off, in the future, if in the present the state resorts to force to get its way? For half a millennium, the State has been an attractive institution for making political decisions precisely because it is potentially imperishable. The State, being highly future-oriented, can channel resources into the future and harness present energy for deferred gains. But this quality of futurism is also its vulnerability: the State is a clumsy instrument for persuading people to make sacrifices when objectives are in doubt, or to parry subtle long-term threats, because the interests of the people can easily be severed from those of the State when long-term objectives and goals are at issue. In the long term, as Keynes remarked, we are all dead. In periods in which the objectives to be pursued by the State are unclear, its very habits of orientation toward the future do not help to marshal the popular will, and thus the State is apt to be disabled from carrying out commitments that may be necessary for its ultimate security and the welfare of future generations to which it is, faute de mieux, committed. Threats such as the destruction of the ecology, the erosion of the capital base, potential threats to its critical infrastructure, and especially demographic developments all play on this vulnerability, for each such threat can call on a vocal domestic constituency that, out of reasonable motives but a present-minded orientation, can paralyze rational action. And, it should be noted, military power can quickly erode if a state does not accurately conceptualize the threats it actually faces, and thus neglects to adopt a strategy that meets those threats.

  It is interesting to ask just what the United States, for example, at the end of the twentieth century took to be the objectives of its strategic calculus. According to a Pentagon White Paper at the time, there were three such objectives: deterrence, compellance, and reassurance.10 It can be easily shown, however, that these three objectives were hangovers from the era just past, indeed that they were borrowed from theories about the objectives of nuclear strategy. What is less obvious is that, at the end of the war the Alliance had just won, objectives such as these were worse than useless because they tended to obscure the tasks that the United States had to undertake in order to redefine the goals of its national security policy. Let us look at each of the three purported objectives.

  Deterrence is an extraordinarily limited theory that relies on a reasonable but extraordinarily broad assumption. That assumption is that the State will make decisions as a result of balancing the benefits to be achieved by a course of action against the costs incurred in pursuing those benefits by the particular means proposed. This assumption, in turn, depends on the commonsense observation that human beings can imagine pain greater than that they now endure, that they can imagine happiness greater than that in which they now delight, and that they will evaluate possible futures in terms of their mixtures of these two imaginary states. For instance, deterrence is a common means in criminal law, in the classroom, even in the
family. “Don't even think of parking here” reads a familiar sign that reflects this approach.

  As a strategy, deterrence makes most sense in the extreme case of nuclear deterrence, where the interest of the state in simple survival intersects the clarity of the danger of annihilation. Deterrence is more problematic, however, when the calculations on which it relies become more complex, or when these calculations are clouded by cultural differences and varying attitudes toward risk, or when the facts on which such calculations depend are uncertain or colored by wishful thinking. In other words, the idea of deterrence is itself so much a part of human nature that it can be applied only as it is affected by the various fallacies and shortcomings to which human nature is prey. Moreover, the strategic theory of deterrence is of a very limited application. It is scarcely deterrence, much less nuclear deterrence, that prevents the United States from invading Canada (or the other way around). Our political relations with Canada—an amalgam of our mutual history (including past wars against each other), our shared institutions, our intertwined economies, our alliances—are what render the idea of an attack by one on the other absurd enough to have been the basis for a popular satiric comedy. Rather, military deterrence is a concept that is useful within war or the approach to war, once political relations have become so strained that hostilities only await opportunity. It is only because we have lived for so long at war that we are inclined to miss this point, and that we have come to think of deterrence as a prominent feature of the international relations of a peacetime regime.

  Drawing on work by the economist Jacob Viner, Bernard Brodie introduced into American strategic thinking the remarkable idea of nuclear deterrence. To see how revolutionary an innovation this was, we need only recall Brodie's famous conclusion. He wrote, “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. It can have almost no other useful purpose.”11 This makes a great deal of sense when dealing with nuclear weapons. The destructiveness of such weapons and their possession by our adversaries required a revolution in thinking about the purposes of our military forces. The military managers and politicians of the 1950s who were inclined to treat nuclear weapons as though they were simply bigger bombs had to learn a new, eerie form of strategic calculation. Deterrence, as a general matter, however, is a poor mission statement for a state's armed forces. No state, even one as wealthy as the United States, can afford to maintain the forces that would successfully deter all other states acting independently or in combination. One can see from the Pentagon White Paper that this idea of Brodie's in the nuclear context—the use of armed forces to avert war—has now infiltrated the conventional, that is, the non-nuclear mission statement. Not only is it unrealistic to assert that the United States must maintain forces so vast as to be a matter of general, conventional deterrence. It also begs the one important question at the end of the Cold War: whom are we supposed to deter? Only when this question is answered can we so configure our forces as to realize such a policy. Deterrence does not come with its own specifications. If it takes two to war, then the idea of deterring wars without a specified adversary or threat is nonsense. The simple intuitive appeal of being so strong militarily that no one dares threaten you is an absurd idea for a state. Indeed, such an idea, however appealing, can actually weaken the state because the diversion of its resources into an undirected defense establishment undermines the economic and political strength the state will require should it find itself in a dangerous confrontation.

  Advances in weapons technology make it possible for the leading states of the developed world to produce weapons of mass destruction that are so deadly relative to their size and cost that they can bypass even the most sophisticated attempts at defense by attrition. A corollary to this fact is that these weapons can be deployed clandestinely, so that the possibility of retaliation can be defied, and thus the strategy of deterrence rendered inoperable.

  Compellance, too, is an idea that originated in the strategy of nuclear weapons and has been imported by the White Paper into the world of conventional forces. There is some considerable irony in this. Thomas Schelling introduced the neologism “compellance” as a complement to “deterrence” because this ancient concept of the use of force had become lost in the bizarre new world of nuclear strategy.12 Schelling used “compellance” to describe the coercive use of nuclear weapons. This occurs when the threat of the use of such weapons seeks to compel an adversary state to actually do something it would otherwise not do, rather than merely refrain from doing something it would like to do (which is the purpose of deterrence). Compellance has been a purpose for armed force or, indeed, violence generally throughout the life of mankind. Yet it too is inappropriate as a mission statement for American forces. Only if we have a clear political objective can we determine what form of compellance is appropriate strategically. To say the mission of our forces is “compellance” is very like saying the mission of our minds is “thought.” It is both a true and an empty sentence.

  Compellance has had a good run lately. It was compellance that forced Saddam Hussein to evacuate Kuwait, once he had occupied and annexed it. It was compellance that forced Slobodan Milosevic to abandon Kosovo, a province he hitherto controlled utterly. These were worthy objectives, even if our execution of our war plans was not faultless. It would be good to have had a Bush Doctrine or a Clinton Doctrine, spelling out precisely for what reason and in what contexts the United States will compel other states by force, not only because the public in a democracy has a right to such an articulation of purpose, but also because without such limiting guidelines, compellance has a way of bringing forth countervailing force. When he was asked what the lesson of the Gulf War was, the Indian chief of staff is reported to have said, “Never fight the United States without nuclear weapons.”

  Interestingly, the third idea said to make up the mission of U.S. forces today is an idea also drawn from nuclear strategy. Sir Michael Howard is the father of the notion of “reassurance” in nuclear strategy.13 In a series of essays and lectures he stressed reassurance as the key element in American nuclear strategy—an element not directed at our adversaries, but toward our allies. Much stronger forces are required, he concluded, to reassure a nervous ally who is dependent on U.S. nuclear protection than are actually required to deter a targeted enemy from attack. Like the contributions of Brodie and Schelling, this insight has been of crucial importance in the development and understanding of nuclear strategy. I doubt, however, that it can be of much use in the absence of a threat to the Atlantic Alliance, or to any of the states who have relied upon the American nuclear umbrella. Of what exactly are we to reassure our allies?

  Reassurance as an idea in nuclear strategy depends on the crucial distinction between extended and central deterrence. The former term applies to the extension of American nuclear protection to Europe and Japan; the latter term refers to the threat of nuclear retaliation to deter attack on the American homeland. I have argued elsewhere that extended deterrence has driven U.S. nuclear strategy, not central deterrence. Reflecting on the evolution of nuclear strategy in Democracy and Deterrence, I concluded in 1983 that:

  The fate of the world does not hang on whether the U.S. or the USSR reduce their weapons or on whether they freeze their technologies. Indeed it should be easy to see that were either goal pursued too single-mindedly, there would result a much more dangerous world as other powers entered the nuclear field, approaching parity with the superpowers. Rather, our situation will be determined by whether Euro-Japanese security is enhanced, from their perspective, by our strategies, military and diplomatic; whether the public can be made to understand and support such steps as do enhance the extended environment when it has been told more or less constantly that it is the number of weapons and the advance of technology that causes (or cures) the problem….14

  I still endorse this view, but such reassurance is now far less easy to achieve because it has largely ceased
to be defined. Reassurance played a crucial role during the final phase of the Long War, from 1949 to 1990, because it prevented multipolarity—the proliferation of nuclear weapons to states such as Germany and Japan and thereby made possible the quite stable deterrence relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Reassurance, I will argue, has an equally vital role to play in the twenty-first century as our strategies move toward a greater emphasis on defense and deception. This will not be possible, however, if we continue to think and plan as though the stable relations that attended the possessors of weapons of mass destruction in the Cold War are somehow intrinsic to such weapons. Indeed, in my view the use of nuclear weapons is likelier in the first fifty years of the twenty-first century than at any time in the last fifty years of the twentieth century, but we are lulled into complacency about this because of the nuclear stability we experienced in that period. As one commentator has put it,

  our current strategic thought tends to project this peculiar experience into the future. It assumes that the use of mass destruction weapons will either be deterred or be confined to localized disasters caused by strategically incompetent terrorists. Competent adversaries, this thinking implicitly assumes, will have to emulate the “revolutionary” military technology that we now possess, but at the same time adhere to our old, counterrevolutionary strategy, as worked out in our superpower rivalry with the former Soviet Union. But, unfortunately, our old strategy is not an immutable law of nature. A highly competent enemy might well emerge who will seek to destroy the United States by using mass destruction weapons in a truly revolutionary kind of warfare.15