Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  Rooting Out Risk

  The Wohlstetter School’s preoccupation with risk management derives in part from the conviction that passivity in the face of a building and evolving threat almost inevitably increases vulnerability, whereas well-conceived action can reduce it. “The problem of deterring a major power,” wrote Albert Wohlstetter in 1961, “requires a continuing effort because the requirements for deterrence will change with the counter-measures taken by the major power.” The imperative is to keep one step ahead in order to avoid falling a potentially fatal half-step behind. Staying ahead necessarily entails intensive, ongoing exertions, anticipating the adversary’s next moves, and devising methods and capabilities from which to formulate a countermeasure.

  Action undertaken to reduce risk necessarily entails a further element of risk, which is difficult to forecast (and easy to exaggerate). Yet members of the Wohlstetter School do not shrink from action, convinced that the risk of inaction could well be greater still. Persuading a skeptical public and skittish politicians to buy into this proposition can pose challenges. Writing in Life magazine in 1960, Albert Wohlstetter saw “no reason to believe that Americans would not make a greater effort for the major purposes which they share, if they understood that the risks of not making such an effort were large and the rewards for effort great.” Americans seemed to think that by trying to stay that step ahead, they could forfeit all the benefits accruing from the country’s advantageous postwar position. “I think this is wrong,” Wohlstetter wrote. “They are threatened by the risks involved in failing to make an effort.” Viewed from this perspective, the strategist’s task is twofold: creating policy options to facilitate action, while nurturing a political environment conducive to the actual exercise of choice. Analysis was “about the invention of new solutions,” wrote one admirer, describing Wohlstetter’s modus operandi: “out of analysis emerged new choices.”10 Yet just as the absence of options could inhibit activism, so too could public unwillingness to defer to those at the center of power. Avoiding strategic paralysis required not only a rich menu of policy choices but also public willingness to let decision-makers choose.

  With these twin tasks in mind, members of the Wohlstetter School have long specialized in concocting scenarios purporting to expose existing US defenses as grotesquely inadequate—according to Nitze, for example, the Gaither Committee “calculated that 90 per cent of our bomber force could be knocked out on the ground by a surprise Soviet bomber attack”—and then proposing ways to fix whatever problem they had conjured up.11 Almost invariably, making things right imposes considerable demands on the US Treasury. But as Wohlstetter put it, “the initiation fee is merely a down payment on the expense of membership in the nuclear club.” So during the Cold War, adopting Wohlstetter School recommendations on whether to disperse US bomber forces, harden missile launch sites, improve air defenses, or field new weapons—the list goes on—provided a continuing rationale for high levels of military spending, with implications not lost on the officer corps, members of Congress, corporate chieftains, or union bosses. Simply put, ideas generated by the Wohlstetter School produced lubricants that kept the wheels of the national security state turning, while also helping to fuel the military-industrial complex.

  When it came to spotting (or inventing) flaws in US defenses, Albert Wohlstetter himself possessed a rare talent. His approach to framing and addressing problems was empirical, comprehensive, and uncompromising. Never content with generalities, Wohlstetter insisted that “actual details—missile accuracies, reliabilities and payloads, bomb yields, bomber ranges,” and the like mattered, indeed, were of central importance. Sloppy or lazy thinking—for example, expectations that the horrors implicit in thermonuclear war might suffice to preclude its occurrence—drew his particular ire. “Relentless questioning of everything and everyone” was Richard Perle’s description. Wohlstetter demanded rigor and precision. He tested assumptions. He challenged conventional wisdom wherever he found it. “All this is familiar,” he would say, when preparing to demolish the latest bit of comforting nonsense to which Washington had succumbed, “but is it true?”12 In the eyes of his admirers, Wohlstetter was above all a disinterested seeker of truth.

  In reality, Wohlstetter’s reputed penchant for relentless probing extended only so far. For starters, he left untouched key assumptions undergirding Wohlstetter-preferred Soviet strategies. To him, the Soviet Union was a black box. While categorizing the Soviet regime as totalitarian, he never bothered to evaluate the validity of that label or to question whether any such abbreviated characterization could provide an adequate basis for gauging state behavior. Furthermore, neither he nor any other member of the Wohlstetter School ever paused to wonder what it was that made the United States itself tick. The “relentless questioning” so evident when probing contradictions in the US nuclear posture has never extended to US policy more broadly. Accepting at face value the prevailing American self-image of a nation whose purposes are benign and intentions peaceful, the Wohlstetter School does not trouble itself over how the United States got enmeshed in whatever predicament it happens to be facing.

  Thus, while promoting stratagems to navigate through the perils of the moment, members of the Wohlstetter School remain oblivious to the role that ill-conceived US policies may have played in creating those dangers. As a consequence, an approach to strategy purporting to expand choice actually serves to circumscribe it, reducing strategy itself to a stylized process that Wohlstetter termed “opposed-systems analysis.” Attributing supreme importance to matters such as “payloads, bomb yields and bomber ranges” obviates the need to examine the near-term benefits and long-term consequences of, say, plotting to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Iran, obstructing the non-violent unification of a divided Vietnam, or refusing to allow Cubans to determine their own destiny. Actually existing strategy—power expended in accordance with a discernible pattern—disappears behind a cloud of obfuscation.

  Discriminate Deterrence?

  The search for a Holy Grail derives its allure not simply from the value of the object sought, but from the challenges inherent in the quest. For the Wohlstetter School, the Holy Grail of radical risk reduction in lieu of mere risk management has proven elusive, with the pursuit itself not without disappointment. Early efforts to implement this fourth precept of the Wohlstetter School foundered in Indochina. There, variants of “opposed-systems analysis” found expression in US attempts to coerce the North Vietnamese into accepting the permanent division of their country. Active US participation in the Vietnam War, beginning in the 1950s and ending in the 1970s, spanned five presidential administrations. None of the five attempted to win the war outright. Rather, the United States relied on indirect means or calibrated violence, expecting Hanoi, either worn down or brought to its senses, eventually to concede the point. At issue was more than simply the fate of South Vietnam. Success in Vietnam would demonstrate that the United States possessed the ability to nip problems in the bud without exorbitant expenditures and without breaching the nuclear threshold. Such an outcome would notably enhance American power. To put it mildly, however, success was not forthcoming. For a time, Vietnam seemed, in the words of one keen observer, to be “the Waterloo for the entire enterprise of strategic analysis.”13

  Albert Wohlstetter, for one, refused to accept this verdict. “Of all the disasters of Vietnam,” he warned in 1968, “the worst may be the lessons that we’ll draw from it.” In his estimation, the worst lesson of all would be one persuading Americans that “we are better off reducing the choices available to us” rather than devising new ways “to use our power discriminately and for worthy ends.” The reference to the discriminate use of power should be noted. So too should the reference to worthy ends. Among the various signatures of the Vietnam War—free-fire zones, napalm, Agent Orange, and carpet bombing by B-52 Stratofortresses—none were suggestive of power used discriminately or, indeed, worthily. Yet in that war Wohlstetter glimpsed the inkling of a
vision for investing force with unprecedented efficacy, thereby reducing both moral and political inhibitions to its use.

  The first generation of what we today call precision-guided munitions made their appearance on the battlefield during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. For the American military, the implications of this advance in weaponry were tactical—making possible, for example, the assured destruction of one North Vietnamese bridge by a single aircraft employing a single bomb, rather than numerous aircraft unleashing a hail of bombs with uncertain result. In Wohlstetter’s eyes, the potential implications of precision weapons appeared much larger. In his view, advanced technology could expand the utility of force across a range of contingencies, even while reducing both risks and moral hazards. If Hiroshima had transformed the sword of military might into a sledgehammer possessing limited utility, Wohlstetter now saw the possibility of converting the sledgehammer into a scalpel with multiple applications. Here lay the possibility of escaping from the frustrations and uncertainties of deterrent strategies relying on nuclear weapons. To put it another way, it was an opportunity to impart to anticipatory self-defense an offensive orientation. During the 1970s and 1980s, Wohlstetter and like-minded figures such as Defense Department officials Andrew Marshall and Fred Iklé, along with Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, closed in on their Holy Grail, now described as “discriminate deterrence.” The central idea was this: by enabling the United States to make highly effective attacks with low collateral damage, the advent of near-zero-miss non-nuclear weapons promised to provide policymakers with a variety of strategic-response options as alternatives to massive nuclear destruction. By eliminating the unintended killing of noncombatants and the excessive physical destruction that made nuclear weapons essentially unusable, improvements in accuracy promised to make possible “the strategic use of non-nuclear weapons.”14

  As members of the Wohlstetter School explored the prospects of “discriminate deterrence” to check a Soviet Union that they described as on the march, the actually existing Soviet Union was entering its death spiral. Even before revolutionary technologies could supersede nuclear weapons, revolutionary change in the realm of politics brought the Cold War to an abrupt end, rendering “discriminate deterrence” obsolete even before it reached maturity. Yet in this moment of sudden technological and political change, the shackles hitherto limiting American freedom of action fell away. No sooner had discriminate deterrence become passé than discriminate attack began to emerge as an idea whose time had come. Back in 1958, Albert Wohlstetter had speculated about a situation in which “the risks of not striking might at some juncture appear very great to the Soviets,” creating circumstances in which “striking first, by surprise, would be the sensible choice for them, and from their point of view the smaller risk.” With the end of the Cold War and the advent of precision weapons, this might describe the situation facing the United States. For members of the Wohlstetter School, the appeal of striking first—fixing problems, rather than merely coping with them—glittered.

  Targeting the Balkans

  George W. Bush would refer, in his second inaugural address, to the interval between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War on Terror as “years of repose, years of sabbatical.” Some repose, some sabbatical. The 1990s opened with war in the Persian Gulf, which, despite the putative success of Operation Desert Storm, dragged on for years. A policy of coercive containment directed against the Saddam Hussein regime found expression in a never-ending sequence of feints, demonstrations, and punitive air strikes, reinforcements for draconian economic sanctions. The decade also included a host of lesser interventions, beginning in 1992 with Somalia and culminating in 1999 with Kosovo, all euphemistically referred to as “military operations other than war.”

  Meanwhile, Big Thinkers vied with one another to divine the implications of the Cold War’s passing. They announced the end of history, proclaimed the arrival of a unipolar moment, worried about the coming anarchy, warned of a clash of civilizations, and found hope in the prospect of globalization creating a fast, flat, wide-open, and wealth-generating world. In Washington, consensus reigned on one point only: having gained unprecedented and unquestioned military supremacy, the United States needed to preserve it. How best to maximize the benefits of US military preeminence became a point of considerable disagreement. One view, found in a 1992 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, advocated unambiguous and unapologetic US global dominion. A second view, styled as assertive multilateralism or humanitarian interventionism, sought to put American military might to work on behalf of others. The Wohlstetter School fashioned a third position bridging the differences between the two: activism on behalf of others to legitimate and sustain US global hegemony.

  The long Balkan crisis, unfolding in fits and starts throughout the 1990s, provided the occasion for members of the Wohlstetter School to refine this third view. Here, it seemed, was a made-to-order chance to employ American power discriminately and for worthy ends. No one made the case for doing so with greater conviction and passion than Albert Wohlstetter himself. In the final years of his life, he published a string of scathing opinion pieces denouncing the West’s fumbling reaction to horrific ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Europeans against Europeans in the former Yugoslavia. For decades, Wohlstetter had mocked anyone not sharing his view that nuclear deterrence was a complicated and problematic business. Now he mocked anyone who worried that using high-tech weapons might prove complicated and problematic.

  The stakes, Wohlstetter insisted, could hardly be higher. The collapse of Communism had not eased the threats facing the United States; it had heightened them. To find reassurance in the fact that the “canonical attack”—a Warsaw Pact assault on NATO, escalating into all-out nuclear warfare—was not going to happen reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Cold War had been about in the first place. That “apocalyptic danger—if it ever existed—had dwindled to a negligible likelihood more than three decades ago,” Wohlstetter now announced. At the very moment when his “Delicate Balance” was winning acclaim as the latest in cutting-edge thinking, “threatening an unrestrained nuclear war against populations” had already become “plainly a loony alternative.” The real concern even in the 1960s, it now turned out, had never been a nuclear holocaust; it was the prospect of disorder “in places like the flanks of Europe, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, the trans-Caucasus, and Central and Northern Asia.” With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, disorder was now in full flood, signifying in Wohlstetter’s estimation “the total collapse of US policy in the critical Gulf region.”

  The US and European response to the Balkan crisis—which Wohlstetter described as “craven,” “shameless,” “a bloody farce,” “a grim farce,” “a grim charade,” “gyrating indecisions,” and “political apologetics for doing nothing”—had the effect of “spreading pan-nationalism and genocide,” thereby allowing “brutal dictatorships [to] hide plans and programs for mass terror against countries near and far.” Overall, Wohlstetter fulminated, it amounted to “the worst performance of the democracies since World War II,” even “exceed-[ing] the nightmares of Vietnam.” Furthermore, Washington’s hand-wringing and hesitation were completely unnecessary since the United States had readily at hand the means required to settle the Balkan crisis forthwith—and, by extension, to dispatch any other ne’er-do-wells. Throughout history, war had been costly, hard, and fraught with uncertainty. No more. At the end of a career spent poking holes in erstwhile simple solutions, Albert Wohlstetter had latched onto his own simple solution: war remade—indeed perfected—by advanced information technology.

  Legacies

  By the time of Albert Wohlstetter’s death in 1997, precepts he had promoted for decades permeated the ranks of the American national security establishment. Above all, his enthusiasm for precise, discriminate force as the basis of a new American way of war, imparting an expanded offensive potential to US defense policy, had come to enjoy wide circulation. Yet
opening the ranks of the Wohlstetter School to include the riff-raff—the functionaries, elected and unelected, military and civilian, who translate theory into practice—came at a cost. Wohlstetter’s ideas enjoyed wide dissemination but in a corrupt or vulgar form. The term that popularizers coined to describe this new way of war, touted as a sure-fire recipe for security, was Revolution in Military Affairs. During its brief heyday, the RMA gave birth to various offspring, almost all of them illegitimate. Two of these deserve attention here, since they played a significant role in creating the immediate climate from which the Bush Doctrine emerged. Both were products of the Clinton era. The first was “full-spectrum dominance,” a concept unveiled in Joint Vision 2010, a Pentagon document drafted in the mid-1990s. Joint Vision 2010 stands in relation to the RMA as Tom Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree stands in relation to globalization: it is an infomercial—marketing disguised as elucidation. To read JV 2010 is to learn how “dominant battlespace awareness” will enable US commanders to “sense dangers sooner” and “make better decisions more rapidly,” while employing weapons possessing “an order of magnitude improvement in lethality,” all of this making US forces “persuasive in peace, decisive in war, preeminent in any form of conflict.”

  Full-spectrum dominance was not some wild notion concocted by a technology-besotted general staff. It bore the imprimatur of official policy and won the full approval of senior civilian leaders. “The information revolution,” a confident Secretary of Defense William Cohen declared in 1997, “is creating a revolution in military affairs that will fundamentally change the way US forces fight. We must exploit these and other technologies to dominate in battle. Our template for seizing on these technologies and ensuring military dominance is Joint Vision 2010.” The RMA, wrote Secretary Cohen, was providing US forces with “superior battlespace awareness, permitting them to dramatically reduce the fog of war.” Or as the 1999 edition of the Clinton administration’s national security strategy put it, “Exploiting the revolution in military affairs is fundamental if US forces are to retain their dominance in an uncertain world.” Leveraging the RMA’s “technological, doctrinal, operational and organizational innovations” promised to “give US forces greater capabilities and flexibility.” Implicit in all of these references to dominance was an assumption about risk, that perennial bugaboo of the Wohlstetter School: the application of information technology to war was drastically curtailing it. As technology produced clarity, barriers to action were falling away; available options were increasing.