Air University Review, May-June 1983
Dr. Stephen J. Cimbala
For most of the nuclear age, deterrence and war fighting have been treated as separate issues by soldiers and scholars. Recent changes in declaratory and employment policies have brought strategic nuclear deterence and war fighting closer together. It is an uneasy coexistence, however, involving some mismatched expectations and strategic and political anomalies.
This article explores the requirements of credible war-fighting deterrence and compares those requirements with the actual development of American declaratory and employment policies in the 1970s. What came to be called the "countervailing strategy" by the end of the Carter administration allowed gaps between declaratory and employment policies that continued to plague the Reagan administration. Not only inconsistencies but omissions in policy also created a shortfall between war-fighting deterrence requirements and capabilities.
A later article will develop the implications of war-fighting deterrence for alliance cohesion in NATO. It will suggest that the more successfully American leaders fulfill the requirements of credible war-fighting deterrence, the more jeopardized will be our leadership within the alliance on important military and political issues. War-fighting deterrence to the Europeans implies regionalized nuclear war, decoupling of the American nuclear umbrella from the Central Front, and political recklessness in Washington. The politics of war-fighting deterrence could work to the advantage of the Soviet Union if it makes NATO consensus more difficult to obtain and prevents us from exploiting political disunity within the Eastern European satellites.
The inevitability of war-fighting deterrence became apparent to American decision-makers as the Soviets approached strategic parity with the United States and as their refusal to acknowledge American deterrence concepts became clear to even the most determined advocates of détente. The Soviets will not initiate a nuclear exchange over a trivial issue, but they do recognize that crises can get out of hand. The possibility of strategic preemption is not foreclosed. Thus, their leaders and principal military theorists have maintained consistently that the Soviet Union should be prepared to fight and survive any war, including a nuclear exchange. War survival is an important element in Soviet nuclear strategy, as Leon Gouré and others have pointed out for many years.1
The Soviets draw little distinction between deterrence and war fighting as applied to nuclear strategy. They do not minimize the cost of a nuclear exchange, but they have refused to take the absolutist position against damage limitation that became official American policy from the McNamara assured destruction pronouncements until the limited nuclear option (LNO) amendments of James R. Schlesinger.2 The Schlesinger LNO amendments recognized the convergence of deterrence and war fighting in the abstract, due to the emerging technologies of the 1970s and 1980s and the implications of U.S.-Soviet strategic parity. But U.S. force postures did not provide the weaponry or the strategic command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) necessary to implement the Schlesinger Doctrine.3 We acknowledged that the virginity of mutual assured destruction (MAD) had been violated by the technologies of war fighting and tried to reassure the Europeans that a decoupling of the strategic and theater nuclear deterrents would not occur as a result of parity. These technologies of war fighting included the MIRVing (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle) and potential MaRVing (maneuverable reentry vehicle) of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and the dramatic improvements in inertial and stellar guidance made possible by research and development breakthroughs that are already apparent or imminent.
The Carter administration amended the Schlesinger amendments by adding "countervailing strategy" to the lexicon of politico-strategic doctrine—a restatement of the Schlesinger principle in another guise. It suffered the same credibility gap. The forces did not exist (and would not exist given the Carter changes in the proposed Nixon-Ford strategic programs) to implement countervailing strategy. The countervailing doctrine implied a capability for selective, calibrated strategic nuclear warfare under conditions of extremely survivable retaliatory forces, protracted conflict, and intrawar deterrence.4 A truly credible war-fighting strategy would require all of the following components: highly survivable C3I, which will not be available until the latter 1980s, against the Soviet threat of even the later 1970s; a notion of targeting priorities that corresponds to some coherent hierarchy of political objectives; some capacity to defend the American population from the effects of nuclear war, including ballistic missile defense and civil defense; and some scheme for war termination under the assumption that a doctrine for limited strategic warfare envisions a conflict that stops short of uninhibited counter-city destruction.
In fact, the Carter administration provided for few of these essential components of any credible war-fighting deterrent. Declaratory policy and forces remained disjointed. By 1980 this was most apparent in the area of C3I, the "brain" of the strategic retaliatory forces.5 Recognizing this, the Reagan administration has attempted to upgrade strategic C3I capabilities and provide more secure command and control for post-attack reconnaissance and targeting. Improved C3I capabilities will be available in the latter 1980s.
The case for survivable C3I against the bolt-out-of-the-blue attack or its preempting cousin--a Soviet attack motivated by fear that we are about to launch one—is not disputed. But the development of improved space-based C3I, allowing postattack reconnaissance and retargeting, is both stabilizing and destabilizing in its implications for deterrence. Such is the potential, for example, of the Navstar global positioning system (GPS) combined with the integrated operational nuclear detection system (IONDS) scheduled for deployment in the late 1980s. IONDS technology will make possible the precise determination of the location of nuclear explosions anywhere on earth, a vital component of successful war fighting.6 The Navstar system will most certainly provoke a Soviet effort to develop a comparable capability and work toward countermeasures such as antisatellite (ASAT). Thus, a "C3I race" is quite conceivable in which the ASAT capability (and space-based counter-ASAT defenses) are deployed to provide or preclude destruction by real-time postattack retargeting. The technologies of the 1980s make possible the declaratory policies of 1974-80.
The second necessary component of a war-fighting strategy is a coherent targeting philosophy. Are the targeting priorities to be countersocietal, counterpolitical, or countercombatant once war begins? Countersocietal targeting emphasizes retaliatory damage to the opponent’s economy, population, and homeland. Counterpolitical targeting emphasizes the effort to destroy the opponent’s state; in the case of the Soviet Union, this implies the leadership of the party, military and political leaders other than party officials, the KGB, and the C3I of the Soviet system.7 Countercombatant targeting placed priorities on elimination of the opponent’s strategic retaliatory forces, enforcing a kind of nuclear disarmament prefatory to political coercion. Attacks on C3I have both countercombatant and counterpolitical facets.
Advocated of mutual assured destruction have espoused countersocietal targeting in principle a1though not always or exclusively in practice. It promises the most vengeful societal retaliation as punishment for having initiated the conflict. Critics of MAD regard the punishment as militarily irrelevant and morally dubious. In a situation of strategic parity, a second countersocietal strike would invite brutal retaliation against the American homeland in a Soviet third strike. Invulnerable Soviet submarines not used in their first strike would be available for the third strike.
Counterpolitical targeting threatens the values presumed most important to the Soviet leadership: its own preservation, the survival of the Communist system of rule, and the integrity of the Soviet Empire. Again there are problems of implementation. The destruction of the Soviet state will involve collateral damage to millions of Soviet citizens. Moreover, if the political and military leadership is unable to continue to rule, who will negotiate the terms of war termination (the fourth missing ingredient of credible war-fighting scenarios)? The counterpolitical targeting emphasis may be injurious to our political priorities if they include ending the war on some terms acceptable to our own leaders.
The countercombatant targeting emphasis is most consistent with the purist model of controlled strategic war fighting.8 The ideal of protracted, limited strategic warfare is compromised in practice by several factors: the absence of survivable U.S. C3I providing real-time retargeting; the destruction of at least one "hemisphere" of the Soviet "brain" due to the contiguity of military leadership and military command centers; and the interactive effects of crippled Soviet C3I and pre-IONDS American C3I which would be an impediment to war termination. All this pertains to countercombatant targeting, which is assumed to follow the initiation of war by the opponent, with the implication that the opponent is predisposed to begin such a conflict with the intention of limiting it in specific and clearly communicated ways. If the hypothetical "opponent" is the Soviet Union, this flies in the face of their doctrine.9 If the countercombatant targeting is supposed to occur while applying the flexible response doctrine to NATO Europe, it should not be proclaimed too loudly to the Europeans. To them it sounds suspiciously like nuclear decoupling. (More will be said about the implications of war-fighting deterrence for European politics in a forthcoming article.)
The third component of a truly credible war-fighting strategy involves a capacity for damage limitation through active and passive defenses. Strategic defense includes air defense of the traditional sort: interceptors, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and ballistic missile defense (BMD). Civil defense for populations can be accomplished by crisis relocation of urban populations to safer "host" areas, provided sufficient warning is available and the conflict is less than total.10 Civil defense also emphasizes preparedness for postattack societal and economic recovery. During the l970s, as a result of SALT and the arms control philosophies on which SALT was predicated, the United States disregarded strategic defense and civil defense as components of deterrence. No example of the erroneously perceived dichotomy between deterrence and war fighting is more illustrative than this failure to seek any significant damage limitation against the effects of nuclear war should deterrence fail.
The neglect of damage limitation was only partially induced by SALT. MIRV was counted on by policymakers to compensate for the absence of a damage limitation capability. A more terrible retaliatory threat would obviate the need for any damage limitation (other than that accomplished by strategic offensive forces, it was assumed).11 Improved accuracy, married to multiple warheads, was the "assured destruction" that guaranteed against failures of deterrence.
But the guarantee soon proved dubious for several reasons.
• First, the Soviets began to deploy their "fourth generation" ICBMs and threaten the United States Minuteman force with a possible successful Soviet first strike (by calculations of American pessimists).
• Second, the MIRV accuracy combination provided little in the way of extended deterrence against higher probability but lower cost threats, such as those against Western Europe.
The extended deterrence umbrella was a leaky sieve, and the Europeans knew it; as Robert Art has pointed out, it was they rather than we who demanded steps toward long-range theater nuclear force (LRTNF) modernization in the latter l970s.12 Thus, NATO took the "572" decision to modernize its intermediate nuclear forces (INFs) in December 1979 by eventual deployment of 108 Pershing IIs and 464 ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) in Western Europe. This step was qualified by an insistence that on a separate and bilateral track, the Americans and the Soviets pursue INF reductions. This has led to reciprocal volleys of arms control proposals, each providing a disclaimer of the other side’s good faith. The INF proposals seemed unavoidable in a military sense, since the Soviet deployments of the multiple-warheaded and mobile SS-20 exceeded 330 by February 1983.
But extended deterrence remains inadequate without any capacity to defend the American homeland. We have little room for escalation in crises that expand from local situations to broader conflicts. The reasons for this loss of "escalation dominance" are strategic parity and asymmetry in theater systems, nuclear and conventional, favoring the Warsaw Pact. In such military circumstances, asking the American population to assume the roles of hostages for European societies, when American society has no credible nuclear civil protection, is asking a great deal.
Some deterrence theorists have artificially separated deterrence from war fighting, with especially unfortunate implications for civil defense. Civil defense has been paired with first-strike intentions or inadvertent signaling of such intentions, despite every indication that the Soviets do not share these views of civil defense.13 Nor do they share the assumption made by some theorists that strategic defense is provocative and therefore threatening to arms control or crisis stability.
The fourth component of a credible war-fighting posture is a plan for war termination. That such a plan is implied by any strategy which aims at some concept of "victory" (or the avoidance of some state defined as defeat) is part of what makes war-fighting deterrence objectionable to mutual vulnerability theorists.14 They prefer to avoid the issue of war termination, assuming either that it will be a planetary holocaust as a result of the futility of damage limitation, or that communications between adversaries in a U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict will be disrupted, thus preventing meaningful agreements in war termination. The Soviets speak of victory in war, including nuclear war, as a necessary goal of a Marxist state; the empirical conditions for postnuclear victory are variously defined.15
The lack of experience with nuclear war is the biggest obstacle to defining the essence of victory, but that lack of experience should prompt the most thorough initiatives to do so. We have already witnessed two nuclear detonations in anger in this century that might have been prevented had the United States and its World War II Allies had a clear concept of victory other than "unconditional surrender." Peace overtures to the Japanese which might have brought about surrender on terms not requiring the devastation of Hiroshima or Nagasaki were misunderstood by the Japanese because the terms were wrongly assumed to imply the removal of the emperor as the symbolic head of state and society. The Allies were never able to communicate effectively the difference between military surrender and political humiliation before the decision to drop the atomic bomb faced President Harry S. Truman. (There were other reasons for dropping the bomb, of course.)
It is ironic that the persons most likely to object to war termination studies as a component of war-fighting deterrent strategies will be persons favoring arms control and disarmament. Their absolutist perspective on the effects of nuclear war, once deterrence fails, allows little room for gradations between acknowledgment of military defeat and societal obliteration.
Yet this is precisely the most important line that we can draw in prewar planning, and it is for reasons both military and moral, the latter being the more important. To have a war termination strategy is to consider self-consciously the matter of political values. To define the conditions of American victory (or surrender, for that matter, an exercise as necessary for planning purposes as it sounds unpatriotic to Congress) is to spell out as unambiguously as possible what we are willing to fight for and at what cost. If we cannot or are unwilling to do this, we have no strategy. Certainly there is room for disagreement among proposals for definitions of victory and defeat in nuclear war, and undoubtedly any planning calls for anticipation of the need for improvisation during war itself.
The certainty of diverse proposals and political disagreements is a sign of a healthy democratic society; unwillingness to face the issue is an indicator of immaturity in thinking about war and peace issues. In the final analysis, attaining consensus on war termination may be more elusive than reaching agreement on targeting priorities, adequate C3I, and an active or passive societal defense. All of these matters defy easy resolution. Even if these imposing technical problems are resolved, the political problems will remain.
The political problems will force our decision-makers to choose more explicitly. Piecemeal approaches to strategic questions are more typical of our policy process. Declaratory policy, employment policy, and weapons development proceed on different agendas, a luxury in an era of war-fighting deterrence.
Pennsylvania State University,
Delaware County Campus
Notes
1. Leon Gouré, War Survival in Soviet Strategy: USSR Civil Defense (Miami, Florida: University of Miami, Center for Advanced International Studies, 1976), pp. 5-8.
2. "Flexible Strategic Options and Deterrence," excerpts from the Press Conference of U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, 10 January 1974, Survival, March/April 1974, pp. 86-90. Colin Gray notes that the Nixon and Carter deviations from essentially apocalyptic and technological views of deterrence are "trivial ‘: see Colin S. Gray, "Arms Control in Soviet Policy," Air Force, March 1980, p. 68.
3. Desmond J. Ball, Can Nuclear War Be Controlled? Adelphi Paper No. 169 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981), cites the Command Data Buffer System FOC 1977 as an example of a significant improvement in C3I affecting our retargeting capability for Minuteman III, according to Secretary Schlesinger. This was, as Ball indicates, an upgrading of an idea first proposed in the l960s in a different context, p. 8.
4. Address by Harold Brown, U.S. Secretary of Defense, 10 August 1980 in Survival, November/December 1980, pp. 167-270. See also Louis René Beres, "Tilting toward Thanatos: America’s 'Countervailing’ Nuclear Strategy," World Politics, October 1981, pp. 25-46; Leon Gouré, "The U.S. ‘Countervailing Strategy’ in Soviet Perception," Strategic Review, Fall 1981, pp. 51-64.
5. John Steinbruner, "Nuclear Decapitation," Foreign Policy, Winter 1981-82, pp. 16-28.
6. Desmond J. Bath in Can Nuclear War Be Controlled? refers to better stellar navigation for SLBM targeting. See also his "The Coutiterforce Potential of American SLBM Systems," Journal of Peace Research, no. 1, vol. XIV, 1977, pp. 23-40. Ball suggests that United States efforts to equip the Poseidon system with a hard target counterforce capability can be dated back as far as 1964 and that Secretary Schlesinger attempted to incorporate the fleet ballistic missile system into his "limited nuclear options" targeting doctrine, p. 26. See also Joel S. Wit, "American SLBM: Counter-force Options and Strategic Implications," Survival, July/August 1982, pp. 163-74.
7. Colin S. Gray and Keith Payne, "Victory Is Possible," Foreign Policy, Summer 1980, pp. 14-27, discuss some of the implications of what is called counterpolitical targeting. Selective targeting of the Soviet great Russian population and related fears of losing party control are discussed by Gary L. Guertner, "Strategic Vulnerability of a Multinational State: Defeating the Soviet Union," Political Science Quarterly, Summer 1981, pp. 209-23, and John M. Weinstein, "Soviet Civil Defense and the U.S. Deterrent," Parameters, March 1982, p. 79.
8. Bruce M. Russett, "A Countercombatant Deterrent? Feasibility, Morality, and Arms Control," in Sam C. Sarkesian, editor, The Military-Industrial Complex: A Reassessment (Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1972), pp. 201-42. Russett suggests that Soviet reciprocity for such a strategy would not be necessary for deterrence but essential for restraints during war itself, p. 223. This has sobering implications for intrawar deterrence, given Soviet doctrine. See L. S. Semeyko, "New Forms, but The Same Content," Selected Soviet Military Writings, 1970-75 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 56-59. Russett’s countercombatant strategy also targets internal security forces, military bases, and troop transport facilities, p. 218.
9. See Vasiliy I. Zemskov, "Characteristic Features of Modern War and Possible Methods of Conducting Them," in Harriet Fast Scott and William Scott, The Soviet Art of War (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1982), pp. 211-15.
10. Carsten M. Haaland and Conrad V. Chester, "Will Technology Make Shelters Obsolete?" Orbis, Fall 1981, pp. 771-94. See also Federal Emergency Management Agency, Civil Defense Program Overview, FY 1983-89, 12 March 1982. Improvements in the survivability of C31 as related to the Reagan administration’s civil defense program are discussed by Edgar E. Ulsamer, "Civil Defense in a Nuclear War," Air Force, June 1982, p. 73.
11. The influence of this logic on SALT negotiators is made clear by Strobe Talbott, Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980). See also Ted Greenwood, Making the MIR V: A Study of Defense Decision Making (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger, 1975), p. 101.
12. Robert J. Art, "The United States and NATO: Managing the Unsolvable," in The 1980s: Decade of Confrontation? Proceedings, Eighth National Security Affairs Conference, 1981, p. 166.
13. See Gouré, War Survival in Soviet Strategy, p. 8; Civil Defense: A Soviet View (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States Air Force, 1970).
14. Keith Payne, Nuclear Deterrence in the U.S.-Soviet Relations (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1982), suggests the term mutual vulnerability to apply to mutual assured destruction theorists who amend their views to accommodate "flexible targeting" options such as LNO and countervailing strategy.
15. Richard B. Foster and Francis P. Hoeber attempt to specify the Soviet strategy for "recuperation, reconstitution, and recovery"; see Foster and Hoeber "Ideology and Economic Analysis: The Case of Soviet Civil Defense," Comparative Strategy, vol. 1, no. 4, 1977, pp. 405-24. Hoeber notes elsewhere that the calculation of outcomes, expressed as a comparison of reserve forces after the correlation of forces has been altered by initial Soviet moves, is important for some Soviet military writers.
Contributor
Stephen J. Cimbala
(BA., Pennsylvania State University: MA., Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is Associate Professor of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, Delaware County Campus, Media, Pennsylvania, and a Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, and other political and social science journals.Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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