War, conflict and Security.

A strategist should think in terms of paralyzing, not of killing.

—Basil Liddell Hart

Sir Basil Liddell Hart was also shaped in his thinking by his expe-riences in the Great War (he had been gassed and wounded at the Somme 1 ) and his determination that future wars should avoid the sort of mindless slaughter he had witnessed. Fuller was the more original and powerful thinker, but not always the most accessible. His friend Liddell Hart had a crisper style, and despite some poor calls in the run-up to the Second World War, his reputation grew after that war. This was partly because he gave unstinting support to a new generation of civilian strate- gists and military historians, who were able to develop their craft in the comparative security of the universities rather than through continual free- lancing like Liddell Hart. In addition, Liddell Hart’s ideas about limited war gained traction as thermonuclear weapons gave new meaning to the idea of total war. He was also a relentless propagandizer on his own behalf, to the point of suggesting that the tragedy of the Second World War was that British generals neglected his ideas on armored warfare, while German generals turned them into the blitzkrieg. After his death in 1970, his his- tory was challenged and his self-promotion rebuked, 2 but the central idea of the “indirect approach” continued to gain adherents in business as well as military circles.

The Indirect Approach chapter 11

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Initially Liddell Hart’s work was wholly derivative. Before he sought to claim a remarkable parallel development between Fuller’s ideas and his own, he had pronounced The Reformation of War to be “the book of the century.” He had read T. E. Lawrence’s early presentation of his ideas in The Army Quarterly in 1920 and appears, although this is less easy to document, to have drawn on the work of Julian Corbett as well. Liddell Hart was never challenged by those from whom he had borrowed so liberally. Lawrence kept no records and so was only impressed later by the similarity between his views and those of his good friend, Liddell Hart. 3 In 1922 Corbett died. Fuller did not care about the plagiarism, although his wife did. Following Fuller, Liddell Hart adopted the analogy of the brain controlling the body to call for attacks on the enemy’s communications and command centers. His appeal for an “indi- rect approach” as the “most hopeful and economic form of strategy” struck a chord with those who believed that cleverness was preferable to brute force. Moreover, unlike Fuller, he asserted his own originality by comparing the indirect approach to the more direct, which he claimed to be Clausewitz’s terrible legacy.

Liddell Hart blamed Clausewitz, or at least his followers, for their con- viction that everything must be geared to decisive battles with the sole aim of destroying the enemy army through frontal assaults. Everything he hated about the futile mass offensives and horrifi c bloodshed of the Western Front in the First World War he seemed to blame on Clausewitz, the “evil genius of military thought.” His presentation tended to caricature, as if Clausewitz was gripped by some sort of bloodlust, unable to view war except in absolutist terms, anxious for battle at the fi rst opportunity, and seeking to win through overwhelming numbers rather than proper strategy. He wrote furiously in one of his earliest books about “the Ghost of Napoleon.” 4 The approach he deplored was mechanical and a-strategic. Clausewitz’s “gospel deprived strat- egy of its laurels.”

Eventually Liddell Hart acknowledged that the differences between Clausewitz’s view of war and his own were not large—they both understood that it was an extension of politics and infl uenced by psychology as much as brute force. 5 He could point to the density and philosophical complex- ity of On War. This made it more likely that Clausewitz would be read as an incitement to early battle at the fi rst opportunity rather than at a more advantageous moment. The view that Clausewitz’s disciples extracted sim- plistic slogans and applied them crudely was clearly expressed late in his career when Liddell Hart wrote the introduction to Samuel Griffi th’s popular translation of The Art of War . Sun Tzu’s “realism and moderation,” he wrote, formed a contrast to “Clausewitz’s tendency to emphasize the logical  ideal

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and ‘absolute’ ” that had led these disciples to develop “the theory and prac- tice of total war beyond all bounds of sense.” Interestingly, Liddell Hart recorded that he was fi rst made aware of Sun Tzu by a contact in China in 1927. “On reading the book I  found many other points that coincided with my own lines of thought, especially his constant emphasis on doing the unexpected and pursuing the indirect approach. It helped me to realize the agelessness of the more fundamental military ideas, even of a tactical nature.” 6 According to one biographer, there was no direct infl uence of Sun Tzu when Liddell Hart was developing his approach in the 1920s because he did not actually read the book until the early 1940s. 7 This makes his specifi c mention of 1927 curious, especially since he started to develop his “indirect approach”—so close to Sun Tzu in many clear elements—over the next two years. There was certainly no mention of Sun Tzu in the fi rst version of his constantly refi ned presentation of his core ideas, The Decisive Wars of History , but the last version, Strategy: The Indirect Approach , included extensive quotes at the front of the book. The Giles translation of Sun Tzu, the one most in use at the time, includes the line: “In all fi ghting the direct methods may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.” Later translations from the Chinese, however, contrasted the straightforward with the crafty, the normal with the extraordinary, or the orthodox with the unorthodox.

Liddell Hart followed Sun Tzu by prescribing an ideal form of strategy as it should be rather than how it often turned out in practice. Liddell Hart judged Clausewitz’s defi nition too narrow, too battle-focused, as if this was the only means to the strategic end. Instead, he defi ned strategy as “the art of distributing and employing military means to fulfi ll the ends of policy.” The ends of policy were not a military responsibility. They were handed down from the level of grand strategy, where all instruments of policy were weighed, one against each other, and where it was necessary to look beyond the war to the subsequent peace. At the other end of the spectrum, tactics came into play when “the application of the military instrument merges into actual fi ghting, the dispositions for and control of such direct action.”

In an age of total war, Liddell Hart was seeking limitation, a search that became even more urgent after the invention of nuclear weapons. He was an advocate of limited aims as a means of ensuring limited means, although this urge to proportionality between the two contained an important fal- lacy: that military means could be geared to the political stakes rather than the strength of the opposition. Large wars could start for small stakes. To this Liddell Hart would reply that if prospective costs were wholly disproportion- ate to likely gains, the value of the whole enterprise should be questioned.

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The art of strategy required not only fi nding means to achieve a fi xed end but also identifying realistic and desirable ends. His method was to defi ne the ideal against which actual performance would be judged. Thus the aim of war was “to subdue the enemy’s will to resist, with the least possible human and economic loss to itself.” Avoiding loss meant avoiding large battles, though the basic principles would apply even if battle had to be joined. The link with Sun Tzu was clear: “The perfection of strategy would be, therefore, to produce a decision without any serious fi ghting.”

Instead of the direct approach, taking the obvious route into a confron- tation with a prepared enemy, the indirect approach would “diminish the possibility of resistance.” The vital impact would be in the psychologi- cal rather than the physical sphere. This required calculating the factors affecting the will of the opponent. So while movement might be the key to catching the enemy out physically, surprise was the key to infl uenc- ing the enemy’s psychology. “Dislocation is the aim of strategy; its sequel may either be the enemy’s dissolution or his easier disruption in battle. Dissolution may involve some partial measure of fi ghting, but this has not the character of a battle.” It is important to note that although Fuller and Liddell Hart are often seen as intellectual twins, on this they disagreed. Fuller certainly sought the psychological dislocation of the enemy, but he saw no problem in taking the direct route if that would have the desired effect. An indirect approach was “usually a necessary evil,” and “weapon power” would determine which to choose. Where Liddell Hart was dog- matic, Fuller was pragmatic. Liddell Hart wanted to avoid battle; for Fuller, it was the likely source of victory. 8

In the physical sphere, avoiding battle required upsetting the enemy’s dispositions by means of a sudden “change of front.” This could be achieved by separating enemy forces, endangering supplies, menacing routes of retreat, or combining several of these moves. In the psychological sphere, dislocation required that these physical effects be impressed on the commander’s mind, creating a “sense of being trapped.” Moving directly against an opponent would not throw him off balance. At most it would impose a strain, but even if successful, the enemy would retreat to his “reserves, supplies, and reinforcements.” The aim was therefore to fi nd “the line of least resistance,” which translated in the psychological sphere into “the line of least expecta- tion.” It was also important to maintain a number of options. Having alter- natives kept the enemy guessing, putting him on the “horns of a dilemma,” and allowed for fl exibility should the enemy guard against your chosen route. “A plan, like a tree, must have branches—if it is to bear fruit. A plan with a single aim is apt to prove a barren pole.” 9

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Liddell Hart claimed that his theory developed through a careful exami- nation of the whole of military history. Unfortunately, his approach to his- tory was intuitive and eclectic rather than, as he liked to believe, “scientifi c.” There were always elements of subtlety, surprise, or innovation in military victories, and indirectness could be “strategic, tactical, psychological and sometimes even ‘unconscious.’ ” As Bond noted, Liddell Hart came extremely close to a circular argument: by his defi nition, a “decisive victory” was an event which is secured by an “indirect approach.” 10 As with Sun Tzu, Liddell Hart’s attraction was that he celebrated the subtle intelligence over brute force. But also like Sun Tzu’s, it raised the questions of how matters would be resolved if both sides were following an indirect approach, the practical problems of coordination, and the impact of chance and friction. Although Liddell Hart later became celebrated as an apostle of maneuver, the cam- paigns he admired were often attritional, in that they required wearing down the opponent.

The ideal indirect strategy created conditions in which the enemy was forced to conclude that defeat had become inevitable before battle was joined. This strategy relied upon the intelligent maneuver of forces to create a rela- tionship that, once apparent, encouraged the adversary to become more con- ciliatory. The logic pointed to deterrence. If the likely outcome of battle was known, the best advice would be to avoid the original provocation or—at the other extreme—go for complete, preemptive surprise. Liddell Hart was addressing situations which lacked this clarity and were harder to predict or control, by indirect or direct means. If battle was to be avoided, the role of land war must be limited and sea and air power relied on instead. Blockade from the sea or bombardment from the air might undermine enemy power by damaging the morale and logistical system of the armed forces and per- haps the underlying economic and social structure which sustained the state. Not surprisingly, therefore, Liddell Hart advocated both types of warfare during his career, although his enthusiasm for both naval blockades and air raids waxed and waned. The diffi culty was that unless territory was taken the enemy could continue to resist.

Liddell Hart’s advocacy of strategic air power was quite short-lived, although it included a fl irtation with crowd psychology when he warned how ordinary people subjected to attack from the air could be “maddened into the impulse to maraud.” 11 When it came to following the indirect approach on land, his analysis—following Fuller—focused on the impact of mechanization. Here too he concluded (on the eve of the Second World War) that the potential of a well-organized defense was probably more potent than that of a maneuvering offensive. He hoped that this would reduce

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the likely aggressor’s readiness and ability to disrupt the status quo. Thus, despite his enthusiasm for the indirect approach, Liddell Hart came up con- stantly against the very real constraints on its implementation, especially when confronting an opponent of equivalent—let alone greater—raw power and tactical intelligence. An indirect approach represented a strategic ideal but one only likely to be realized in very special circumstances. Societies and their armies could prove to be extremely resilient. Getting in a position to mount sustained pressure in a resolute manner requires effective military dominance—whether at sea, in the air, or on land. This in turn was likely to require very direct and decisive contact with enemy forces. This led Liddell Hart to eventually conclude that very little useful purpose could be served by war.

Churchill’s Strategy

The maneuver which brings an ally into the fi eld is as serviceable as that which

wins a great battle. The maneuver which gains an important strategic point may

be less valuable than that which placates or overawes a dangerous neutral.

—Winston Churchill, The World Crisis

We shall discuss later the reality behind the blitzkrieg story. There is no doubt that the Wehrmacht’s mastery of armored warfare gained Germany some great victories in the early stages of the Second World War that led to virtual domination of Europe. But the domination was never complete and in the end Germany lost. It was settled by the logic of alliance as much as mili- tary prowess. Germany was consistently superior in the fi eld but in the end could not cope with the combined weight of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire. That this would be the eventual outcome was hardly apparent in the spring of 1940, when only one of the “big three” was actually at war, and its situation appeared to be parlous. On May 10, 1940, the German army began an offensive that in ten days saw it move through Belgium and Holland to the French coast. Soon France fell and Britain was alone. Yet Britain continued to fi ght when its position appeared hopeless and eschewed the possibility of a deal with Hitler that might have left it a diminished but still independent power.

Richard Betts has used this example to query the role of strategy. The British government’s decision to continue to fi ght was one of the most “epochal” decisions of the last century, yet at the time it made little strategic

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sense. 12 For it to make sense, Betts argued, Churchill would have had to know in advance and with confi dence that the Germans would be unable to cross the English Channel, lose the Battle of Britain, and eventually lose the Battle of the Atlantic. Most importantly, Churchill would have had to assume that by the end of 1941 Britain would be fi ghting alongside the Soviet Union and the United States.

This is, however, the wrong way to look at the decision in terms of strat- egy. A better approach was that adopted by Ian Kershaw in his analysis of the decision-making among the great powers during the Second World War. He did not pose the question of strategy in terms of how to best meet ultimate objectives but how the available options come to be defi ned and what consid- erations infl uenced the choices. His starting point was where political leaders found themselves rather than where they wished to be. 13

As Germany advanced toward France, and Britain’s close ally teetered, Winston Churchill became prime minister. His fi rst days in offi ce were taken up with whether France could stay in the war and what might be done if she could not. His own reputation as a war leader had yet to be made: he was still viewed with suspicion for a career marred by regular lapses of judgment. Now he had to address the arguments of his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, that there was no point in accepting unnecessary suffering if a compromise deal with Hitler could be found that would preserve Britain’s independence and integrity. There appeared to be an option using Italy, who had yet to join the war, as a mediator. Churchill convinced his colleagues that this was not worth pursuing.

The choice they faced was not about alternative means of winning but about how best to avoid defeat and humiliating terms. It was not about refusing to negotiate under any circumstances but whether there was any- thing to be gained by trying to negotiate when circumstances were so dire. The option of a negotiated outcome was not rejected because of Churchill’s pugnacity but because the arguments in favor of it were unpersuasive. It depended on Benito Mussolini, who was becoming an increasingly unlikely mediator because of his pro-German stance and lack of infl uence over Hitler. On examination, possible peace terms appeared to be unacceptable. In an effort to appear reasonable during taxing cabinet discussions, Churchill professed himself willing to consider concessions in areas of British infl u- ence or the transfer of a few spare colonies to “get out of the mess,” but demands which went to the heart of the country’s constitutional indepen- dence, involving a different sort of government and enforced disarmament, would be intolerable. 14 Available terms might be better than those follow- ing military defeat, but this was not self-evidently the case. It was possible

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that matters would get even worse and Britain would be subjugated. But it was also possible that this would not happen. Any deal would be better for Britain if the Germans assumed they were dealing with an opponent that had some fi ght left. In addition, the very act of exploring a settlement would be viewed abroad as weakness and cause demoralization at home. For the moment, the country was not beaten and the armed forces felt that they could organize strong resistance to a German invasion. These discussions took place before the “miracle” of Dunkirk. The initial expectation had been that, at best, tens of thousands would escape to Britain from defeated France. When a third of a million troops were rescued from the beaches where they were suffering relentless air attacks, this provided an early vindication of the decision to fi ght on.

Churchill could have no idea at the time about the likely course of the war. According to Eliot Cohen, Churchill did not think of strategy as a blue- print for victory. He knew that the course of a war could not be predicted and that steps to victory might not be discerned until they were about to be taken. He distrusted “cut and dried calculations” on how wars would be won. For him, strategy was very much an art and not a science—indeed so art-like as to be close to painting. “There must be that all-embracing view which presents the beginning and the end, the whole and each part, as one instantaneous impression retentively and untiringly held in the mind.” With a few key themes always at the fore and a grasp of context, there was a framework for taking in new developments exploiting new opportunities. This was not, as Cohen notes, a machine built “to narrow tolerances and an exact design,” nor was it “a chaotic welter of unconnected and opportunistic decisions.” 15

While Churchill’s approach to purely military affairs could be impetuous, he had a natural grasp of coalition warfare. Coalitions were always going to be central to British strategy. The empire contributed signifi cantly to the war effort in terms of men and materiel, and its special needs had to be accommo- dated. The United States had the unequivocal potential to tip the scales when a European confrontation reached a delicate stage. Almost immediately after taking offi ce, Churchill saw that the only way to a satisfactory conclusion of the war was “to drag the United States in,” and this was thereafter at the cen- ter of his strategy. His predecessor Neville Chamberlain had not attempted to develop any rapport with President Franklin Roosevelt. Churchill began at once what turned into a regular and intense correspondence with Roosevelt, although so long as Britain’s position looked so parlous and American opin- ion remained so anti-war, little could be expected from Washington. His fi rst letter was if anything desperate, warning of the consequences for American

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security of a British defeat. If Britain could hang on, something might turn American opinion. Churchill was even prepared to believe that this might happen if the country was invaded. 16

At the time, Hitler’s choices appeared more palatable and easier. German victories had confi rmed his reputation as a military genius with unques- tioned authority. Yet he recognized the diffi culty of following the defeat of France with an invasion of Britain. A cross-channel invasion would be com- plicated and risky. There were also other options for getting Britain out of the war. The fi rst was to push it out of the Mediterranean, further affecting its prestige and infl uence and interfering with its source of oil. Whether or not this would have had the desired effects, Hitler was wary of his regional partners—Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, and Vichy France. They all dis- agreed with each other, and none could be considered reliable. Mussolini, for example, used German victories to move a reluctant country into war. He then demonstrated his independence from Hitler by launching a foolhardy invasion of Greece. This left him weakened and Hitler furious. Germany had to rescue the Italian position in Greece and then North Africa, leading to a major diversion of attention and resources from Hitler’s main project, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

He considered a war with the Soviet Union to be not only inevitable but also the culmination of his ambitions, allowing him to establish German dominion over continental Europe and deal once and for all with the twin— and, in his eyes, closely related—threats of the Jews and Communism. If he was going to go to war with Russia anyway, it was best to do so while the country was still weak following Josef Stalin’s mass purges of the army and communist party in the 1930s. 17 A  quick defeat of Russia would achieve Hitler’s essential objective and leave Britain truly isolated. But Hitler also had a view about how the war was likely to develop. Britain, he assumed, only resisted out of a hope that the Russians would join the war. Of course, without a quick win, Hitler faced the dreaded prospect of a war on two fronts—some- thing good strategists were supposed to avoid—as well as increasing strain on national resources. He needed to conquer the Soviet Union to sustain the war and to gain access to food supplies and oil. With the Soviet Union defeated, he reasoned, Britain would realize that the game was up and seek terms. If Hitler had accepted that the Soviet Union could not be defeated, his only course would have been to seek a limited peace with Britain that would have matched neither the scale of his prior military achievements nor his pending political ambition.

Another reason for acting quickly was that the Americans were likely to come into the war eventually, but not—he assumed—until 1942 at the

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earliest. Getting Russia out of the way quickly would limit the possibility of a grand coalition building up against him. In this Stalin helped. The Soviet leader refused to listen to all those who tried to warn him about Hitler’s plans. He assumed that the German leader would stick to the script that Stalin had worked out for him, providing clues of the imminence of attack. Churchill’s warnings were dismissed as self-serving propaganda, intended to provoke war between the two European giants to help relieve the pressure on Britain. Unlike Tsar Alexander in 1812, Stalin compounded the problem by having his armies deployed on the border, making it easier for the German army to plot a course that would cut them off before they could properly engage. The result was a military disaster from which the Soviet Union barely escaped. Yet a combination of the famous and fi erce Russian winter and some critical German misjudgments about when and where to advance let Stalin recover from the early blow. Once defeat was avoided, industrial strength slowly but surely revived and the vast size of the Russian territory was too much for the invaders. The virtuoso performances of German commanders could put off defeat, but they could not overcome the formidable limits imposed by a fl awed grand strategy.

Germany’s fi rst blow against the Soviet Union depended on surprise (as did Japan’s against the United States), but it was not a knockout. The initial advantage did not guarantee a long-term victory. The stunning German vic- tories of the spring 1940 and the bombing of British cities that began in the autumn approximated the possibilities imagined by Fuller, Liddell Hart, and the airpower theorists, but they were not decisive. They moved the war from one stage to another, and the next stage was more vicious and protracted. The tank battles became large scale and attritional, culminating in the 1943 Battle of Kursk. Populations did not crumble under air attacks but endured terrifi c devastation, culminating in the two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the war’s shocking fi nale. Our discussion of American military thought in the 1970s and 1980s will dem- onstrate the United States’ high regard for the German operational art and recall that this was not good enough to win the war.

When it came to victory, what mattered most was how coalitions were formed, came together, and were disrupted. This gave meaning to battles. The Axis was weak because Italy’s military performance was lackluster, Spain stayed neutral, and Japan fought its own war and tried to avoid con- fl ict with the Soviet Union. Britain’s moment of greatest peril came when France was lost as an ally, but started to be eased when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Churchill’s hopes rested on the United States, sympa- thetic to the British cause but not in a belligerent mood. It was eighteen

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months before America was in the war. As soon as America entered the fray, Churchill rejoiced. “So we had won after all! . . . How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care . . . We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end.” 18

We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the

other, but only at the risk of his own life.

—J. Robert Oppenheimer

Wars normally conclude with calls for a new era of peace and jus-tice, and the Second World War was no exception. Unfortunately, the developing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and their ideologically opposed blocs provided few grounds for optimism. The possibility of a third world war became apparent almost immediately as the underlying antagonism between Britain and the United States on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other surfaced over the fate of the territo- ries liberated from German occupation. Soon there was talk of a “cold war,” a term popularized in 1947 by Walter Lippmann in a book with that title. 1 Lippmann recalled the term from the late 1930s when “la guerre froide” had been used to characterize Hitler’s war of nerves against the French. 2 A cold war was therefore one in which two states weighed each other up, viewing each other warily like two boxers circling each other in the ring before the proper fi ght began. It was not used with any optimism, as if anticipating decades of antagonism that would never quite tip over into a hot war. 3

The British essayist George Orwell actually used the term before Lippmann, in October 1945, as he tried to assess the impact of atom

Nuclear Games chapter 12

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bombs on international affairs. He described the prospect “of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them.” He saw, however, that while such a war was possible, this might be avoided as a result of “a tacit agreement never to use the bomb against one another.” Use would only be threatened against those unable to retali- ate. So this new form of supreme power might not only lead to an uneasy standoff between states but also to even more effective ways of keeping the exploited classes down. An end to large-scale wars perhaps, but instead “a peace that is no peace” between “horribly stable . . . slave empires.” 4 The idea that atom bombs would rob the exploited “of all power to revolt” may not have appeared so far-fetched at the time, given recent evidence of the readiness of regimes to use instruments of mass slaughter against subject peoples.

The question of what strategic purposes these new weapons could serve was fi rst addressed seriously by historian Bernard Brodie, who had previously specialized in maritime strategy. On hearing of the atom bomb, Brodie told his wife, “Everything that I have written is now obsolete.” 5 Established forms of strategic theory were inadequate. “Everything about the atomic bomb,” he observed, “is overshadowed by the twin facts that it exists and its destruc- tive power is fantastically great. 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.” 6 From the start, therefore, Brodie recognized the dissuasive character of the “absolute weapon.” Political communities would be wary about using a weapon against others that could also wipe them out if used against them.

The New Strategists

By his own career, Brodie defi ned the possibility of a fi eld of strategy in which civilians took the lead. He already had a low opinion of the quality of mili- tary thinking—and made little effort to hide this—and regretted the extent to which the study of war had lagged behind other fi elds of human activity. “The purpose of soldiers is obviously not to produce books,” he remarked in a 1949 article, “but one must assume that any real ferment of thought could not have so completely avoided breaking into print.” Military training, he suggested, discouraged contemplation, was anti-intellectual, and focused excessively on practical matters and command issues. To the extent strategy was discussed it was with reference to the supposedly unchanging principles

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of war, along the lines fi rst set down by Jomini. These were at best “a pointed injunction to use common sense.”

With military problems growing not only in complexity but also in the potential for utter disaster, Brodie insisted that strategy needed to be taken altogether more seriously. As an example of how this might be done, he pointed to economics. Just as the economist sought to utilize the total resources of the nation to maximize its wealth, the strategist sought to use the same resources to maximize the total effectiveness of the nation in war. As all military problems were about economy of means, a “substantial part of classical economic theory is directly applicable to problems of military strat- egy.” In particular “a science like economics” could show the way to a “genu- ine analytical method.” 7 The idea that the resolution of strategic problems depended on intellect and analysis rather than character and intuition fi t in with the trend to subject all human decisions to the dictates of rationality and the application of science. It was given more urgency by the potentially catastrophic consequences of misjudgment in the nuclear age.

The scientifi c method as a means of interpreting large amounts of dispa- rate data had proved itself in Britain in the Second World War. It fi rst made a mark when used to determine the best way to employ radar in air defense. As one of the key fi gures in the British program noted, the methodology used was closer to classical economics than physics, although economists were not directly engaged. 8 During the course of the war, operations research—as the new fi eld came to be known—made major strides in support of actual opera- tions, including working out the safest arrangement for convoys in the face of submarine attack or choosing targets for air raids. 9 Mathematicians and physicists made more of an impact in the United States, notably those who became involved in the Manhattan Project, the organization which had led to the production of the fi rst atomic bomb.

The center for the postwar application of such methods to practical, and particularly military, problems was the RAND Corporation, which became the prototypical “think tank.” The organization was set up under an air force grant to develop operational research. It soon became an independent nonprofi t corporation addressing defense issues and other aspects of pub- lic policy using advanced analytical techniques. RAND began by recruit- ing natural scientists and engineers who expected to deal with hardware. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi describes RAND as fashioning itself as a cold war avant-garde, self-consciously exploratory and experimental, with an “insou- ciant disregard” for traditional forms of military experience. 10 Soon it was hiring economists and other social scientists. The steady improvements in computational power made mathematical approaches to complex problems

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more practical. Even economics up to this point had been more literate than numerate. Now quantitative analyses grew in strength and credibility. It is hard to overstate the importance of RAND, especially during its early years, in transforming established patterns of thought not only in the military sphere but throughout the social sciences. The resources and tools it had available, including the most advanced computers of the day, provided it with a capacity to innovate, which it did with a remarkable sense of mission and confi dence.

The new universe that was explored at RAND was simulated as much as observed. Philip Mirowski describes what he calls the “Cyborg sciences.” These refl ected the new interactions between men and machines. They broke down the distinctions between nature and society, as models of one began to resemble the other, and between “reality” and simulacra. The Monte Carlo simulations adopted for dealing with uncertainty in data during the Manhattan Project, for example, opened up a range of possible experiments to explore the logic of complex systems, discerning ways through uncertainty and forms of order in chaos. 11 RAND analysts saw these new methods as sup- planting rather than supplementing traditional patterns of thought. Simple forms of cause and effect could be left behind as it became possible to explore the character of dynamic systems, with the constantly changing interaction between component parts. The models of systems, more or less orderly and stable, that had started to become fashionable before the war could take on new meanings. And even in areas where intense computation was not required, there was a growing comfort in scientifi c circles—both natural and social—with models that were formal and abstract, not just based on direct observations of a narrow segment of accessible reality but on explorations of something that approximated to a much larger and otherwise inaccessible reality. Types of systems and relationships could be analyzed in ways that the human mind, left on its own, could not begin to manage.

As one of the fi rst textbooks on operations research noted, work of this sort required an “impersonal curiosity concerning new subjects,” rejection of “unsupported statements,” and a desire to rest “decisions on some quantita- tive basis, even if the basis is only a rough estimate.” Although this approach started with a focus on problems of national defense, its most far-reaching impact was elsewhere. Because in the military, particularly the nuclear sphere, there were practical and consequential decisions to be taken, the research and analysis had to remain grounded in evidence even when it was conceptually innovative.

When faced with the possibility of nuclear war, an event for which there could be neither precedent nor experiment and which in its enormity

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challenged imagination, only simulation was possible. In areas which seemed to be wholly unique (“How many nuclear wars have you fought, general?”), experience counted for less than a sharp and disciplined intellect. When in 1961, Hedley Bull, a young Australian with a skeptical but discerning eye, considered the state of strategic thought, he observed how much of it assumed the “rational action” of a kind of “strategic man.” This man, Bull observed, “on further acquaintance reveals himself as a university professor of unusual intellectual subtlety.” 12 The reason for the ascent of strategic man, he sug- gested, was nuclear weapons. Strategy could no longer be solely concerned with how to fi ght war as an instrument of policy but also had to understand how to threaten war. Studies of actual violence had to be supplemented by discussions of deterrence and the manipulation of risk. It was because of this that strategic thinking was no longer a military preserve. Civilian experts, Bull noted, overwhelmed the military with their publications and were the obvious people to consult on questions of deterrence and arms control. Now that John F. Kennedy had become president, civilian strategists had “entered the citadels of power and have prevailed over military advisers in major issues of policy.” Neither the military nor the civilians had any experience of the conduct of a nuclear war, so inevitably much strategic thinking was of an “abstract and speculative character,” which suited the civilians. They demon- strated “sophistication and high technical quality” in their work. 13

The key people in this new approach had largely come from RAND. They were led at the Pentagon by a secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, who had pioneered the use of quantitative analysis while at the Ford Motor Company. He challenged the armed services to justify their budgets and pro- grams in the face of intensive questioning. His agents in this were young analysts gathered in the Offi ce of Systems Analysis. They were smart, brash, confi dent, and dismissive of the faltering attempts of military offi cers to block their ascent. McNamara’s right-hand man in the Pentagon, Charles Hitch, who was recruited from RAND, had observed with a colleague in 1960:  “Essentially we regard all military problems as, in one of their aspects, economic problems in the effi cient allocation and use of resources.” 14 McNamara demanded data and insisted on quantitative analysis as the best way to assess the costs and benefi ts of alternative programs. Disregarding the preferences of the armed services, McNamara canceled favored programs and challenged cherished beliefs.

It became a truism that McNamara’s methods were inappropriate for fi ghting a war, especially one as politically complex as Vietnam, and failure here sullied his reputation forever. Yet for the fi rst part of his tenure in the Pentagon, McNamara was considered to be the most gifted and effective

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member of the cabinets of Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson. The mili- tary fl oundered in his presence, looking amateurish even when discussing operational issues. McNamara was described as an “IBM on legs.” Decisive and articulate, he was the epitome of the rational strategic man in his mas- tery of the evidence and analytical techniques. 15 The mythology surround- ing McNamara, and the opposition he faced, exaggerated the difference his methods had made. The military had not dominated Eisenhower’s bud- getary process, nor had the civilians controlled Kennedy’s as much as was claimed. Nonetheless, senior offi cers viewed with alarm the civilians who lacked combat experience yet pontifi cated on military tasks. The arrogance that the civilians had nurtured at RAND, never doubting their intellectual superiority over their military paymasters, had left resentments that were now aggravated as programs and budgets were put at risk. One tirade, from a former chief of the air staff, was joyously quoted in a book by two members of McNamara’s staff against whom it was directed. General White complained about the “pipe-smoking, tree-full-of-owls” types, doubting that “these over- confi dent, sometimes arrogant young professors, mathematicians and other theorists have suffi cient wordliness or motivation to stand up to the sort of enemy we face.” 16

While Bull defended the new strategists against various charges of being uncritical, amoral, or pseudoscientifi c, he noted a conceit. Many were of the view that previously “military affairs escaped scientifi c study and received only the haphazard attention of second-rate minds.” He also noted an aspiration among the civilians to turn strategy into a science by “elimi- nating antiquated methods and replacing them with up-to-date ones.” If only, as some hoped, these new methods could get closer to economics they could help “rationalize our choices and increase our control over our envi- ronment.” Brodie also doubted the exaggerated ambition. Though White’s comments confi rmed the stereotype of a narrow-minded and prejudiced military, Brodie also found the new analysts and their methods a mixed blessing. They improved decision-making in the Pentagon on such mat- ters as the procurement of new weapons, but there remained limits to what could be achieved by applying economics to strategy. Economists tended to be insensitive to and intolerant of political considerations that got in the way of their theories. More worrying than their weakness in diplomatic or military history, and in contemporary politics, was their lack of awareness of “how important a defi ciency this is for strategic insight.” The quality of the theoretical structures adopted by economists led to a disdain for other social sciences as “primitive in their techniques and intellectually unworthy.” 17

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Game Theory

The presumed signature methodology of the new strategy was game theory. As Chapter 13 demonstrates, the actual infl uence on nuclear strategy was slight. Nonetheless, game theory represented a way of thinking about strategic issues that was abstract and formal. Its infl uence on the social sciences eventually became signifi cant. It emerged as the result of collaboration between two European émigrés working at Princeton during the war. From Hungary came John von Neumann. As a child he could astound with feats of memory and computation, and he was soon recognized as one of the mathematical geniuses of his age. He had developed the basic principle of game theory in the 1920s by contemplating poker. When Oskar Morgenstern, an economist from Vienna, got to know von Neumann at Princeton he saw the broader signifi cance of his ideas and helped give them structure. Their formidable joint work, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior , was published in 1944.

Why poker and not chess, which had always been seen as the strategist’s game? The scientist Jacob Bronowski records von Neumann’s reply:

“No, no,” he said. “Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defi ned form of computation. You may not be able to work out all the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games,” he said, “are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffi ng, of little tactics of deception, of ask- ing yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.” 18

In chess both sides are working with exactly the same, perfect information, besides what is going on in the head of the opponent. Chance is a factor in poker, but the game is not pure chance. It is possible to apply probabilities to assess the likely hands of other players. As there will always be a degree of uncertainty, the same hand can be played in different ways according to judg- ments about whether other players are bidding out of strength or weakness. It is possible to outthink the competition. Game theory was therefore about intelligent strategies in inherently uncertain situations.

Von Neumann watched how in poker all the players encouraged uncer- tainty about the quality of their cards. Bluff was essential and unpredictabil- ity in their play helpful. He identifi ed the optimum outcome for one rational poker player playing against another as the “minimax” solution, the best of the worst outcomes. His 1928 proof of this solution gave game theory its mathematical credibility, moving it away from a representation of how a game might be played to a suggestion of how it should be played. By showing how

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to proceed rationally in an irrational situation, game theory demonstrated why it might be logical to bluff for both offensive and defensive purposes, and how the occasional random move could make it diffi cult for an opponent to discern a pattern of play, thereby adding to his uncertainty. 19

The book von Neumann co-authored with Morgenstern was described as “one of the most infl uential and least-read books of the twentieth century.” At 641 pages of dense mathematics, it barely sold four thousand copies in its fi rst fi ve years in print. 20 After extensive but mixed reviews, and though some enthusiasts began to spread the word, the economics profession gave every impression of being underwhelmed. Where it initially took root was in the operations research community, to the point that it was described in an early postwar survey as a branch of mathematics special to this fi eld. Here von Neumann appears to have been particularly infl uential. As one of the govern- ment’s top scientifi c advisers until his premature death from cancer in 1959, he encouraged all means, including linear programming and the increased use of computers, of raising the quality of the scientifi c input. He saw RAND as an institution that could showcase the new techniques. 21

Von Neumann and Morgenstern also found their popularizer. John McDonald’s Strategy in Poker, Business and War is curiously neglected in the histories of game theory. In 1949, McDonald came across von Neumann and Morgenstern when researching an article on poker for Fortune Magazine . Then McDonald wrote another article on game theory for the same magazine, before turning both arti- cles into a book. The reason for the neglect of McDonald’s book may be that it did not take the theory forward and was geared to a popular exposition. But the author had extensive conversations with the academics and provided a clear state- ment of what they thought they might achieve. McDonald acknowledged that the mathematical proofs would challenge any lay reader, but he promised that the underlying concepts could be readily grasped. Game theory offered insights not just into military strategy but strategy in general. It was relevant whenever relationships involved confl ict, imperfect information, and incentives to deceive. Because the theory was “formal and neutral, non-ideological,” it was “as good for one man as for another.” It would not help with assessing values and ethics, but “it may be able to tell what one can get and how one can get it.”

In terms of the shift in strategic thinking prompted by game theory, the critical insight was that acting strategically depended on expectations about the likely actions of others over whom one has no control. The players in a game of strategy do not cooperate, yet their actions are interdependent. In such restrained circumstances the rational strategy was not to attempt to maximize gain but instead to accept an optimal outcome. Minimax, McDonald observed, was “one of the most talked about novelties in learned

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circles today.” When he moved on to consider its applications, paying par- ticular attention to the importance of coalitions, he saw a number of pos- sibilities. “War is chance,” he concluded, “and minimax must be its modern philosophy.” Yet he also described this as a theory with “imagination but no magic.” It involved “an act of logic with an unusual twist, which can be fol- lowed to the borderline of mathematical computation.” 22

The presumption behind the pioneering work on game theory, enthu- siastically encouraged at RAND, was the conviction that there could be a scientifi c basis for strategy. Past endeavors to put these matters on a prop- erly scientifi c basis had supposedly faltered because the analytical tools were not available. Specialists in military strategy lacked the mathematics, and the mathematics lacked the concepts and computational capacity. Now that these were available true breakthroughs could be made. Game theory was exciting because it directly addressed the problems posed by the fact that there was more than one decision-maker and then offered mathematical solu- tions. It was soon generating its own literature and conferences.

In 1954, the sociologist Jessie Bernard made an early attempt to consider the broader relevance of game theory for the softer social sciences. She also worried about an inherent amorality, “a modernized, streamlined, mathematical version of Machiavellianism.” It implied a “low concept of human nature,” expecting “nothing generous, nothing noble, nothing idealistic. It expects people to bluff, to deceive, to feint, to withhold information, to play their advantages to the utmost, to make the most of their opponent’s weaknesses.” Although Bernard acknowledged the focus on rational decision, she misunderstood the theory, pre- senting it as a mathematical means of testing rather than of generating strat- egies. The misunderstanding was perhaps not unreasonable for she assumed that different qualities were required to come up with strategies: “Imagination, insight, intuition, ability to put one’s self in another person’s position, under- standing of the wellsprings of human motivation—good as well as evil—these are required for the thinking up of policies or strategies.” 23 For this reason, the “hardest work, so far as the social scientist is concerned, is probably already com- pleted by the time the theory of games takes over.” In her grasp of the theory’s claim, she missed the point, though in her appreciation of the theory’s limits she was ahead of her time. The theory assumed rationality, but on the basis of prefer- ences and values that the players brought with them to the game.

Prisoners’ Dilemma

The values attached to alternative outcomes of games were payoffs . The aim was to maximize them. Players were aware that in this respect they all had the

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same aim. In card games they accepted that their choices would be determined by the established rules of the game. As the application was extended, the choices could be shaped not only by mutually agreed upon and accepted rules but by the situation in which they found themselves. The theory progressed by identifying situations resembling real life that created challenging choices for the players. For the theory to move on, it was necessary to get beyond the limits of the von Neumann and Morgenstern analysis involving two play- ers and “zero-sum payoffs,” which meant that what one won the other must lose. The normal approach for a mathematician having solved a comparatively simple problem was to move on to a more complex case, such as coalition for- mation. But this process turned out to be diffi cult in the case of game theory, especially if mathematical proofs were going to be required at each new stage.

The key breakthrough came in the exploration of non-zero-sum games, in which the players could all gain or all lose, depending on how the game was played. The actual invention of the game of prisoners’ dilemma should be attributed to two RAND analysts, Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. The most famous formulation, however, was provided in 1950 by Albert Tucker when lec- turing to psychologists at Stanford University. Prisoners’ dilemma involved two prisoners—unable to communicate with each other—whose fate depended on whether or not they confessed during interrogation and whether their answers coincided. If both remained silent, they were prosecuted on a minor charge and received light sentences (one year). If both confessed, they were prosecuted but with a recommendation for a sentence below the maximum (fi ve years). If one confessed and the other did not, then the confessor got a lenient sentence (three months) while the other was prosecuted for the maximum sentence (ten years). The two players were left alone in separate cells to think things over.

It should be noted that the matrix itself was a revolutionary way of pre- senting strategic outcomes and remained thereafter a fi xture of formal

B

A

1 Silence 2 Confess

1 Silence -1

a1b1

-1

-0.25

a1b2

-10

2 Confess -10

a2b1

-0.25

-5

a2b2

-5

Figure 12.1 The fi gures in the corners refer to expectation of sentence.

n u c l e a r g a m e s 155

analysis. This matrix demonstrated the prediction for prisoners’ dilemma (see fi g. 12.1). They both confessed. A was unable to conspire with B and knew that if he remained silent he risked ten years’ imprisonment; if he confessed, he risked only fi ve years. Furthermore, if B decided on the solution that would be of the greatest mutual benefi t and so remained silent, A could improve his own position by confessing, in a sense double-crossing B . Game theory pre- dicted that B would follow the same reasoning. This was the minimax strat- egy guaranteeing the best of the worst possible outcomes. A key feature of this game was that the two players were forced into confl ict. They suffered a worse result than if they could communicate and coordinate their answers and then trust each other to keep to the agreed strategy. Prisoners’ dilemma came to be a powerful tool for examining situations where players might either work with or against each other (normally put as “cooperate” or “defect”).

Game theory gained a boost during the early 1960s because it was pre- sumed to have shaped nuclear strategy, although its actual infl uence was fl eeting. It seemed to be of value because the core confl ict could fi t into a matrix as it was bipolar and between two alliances of roughly equivalent power. The confl ict was clearly non-zero sum in that in any nuclear war both sides were likely to lose catastrophically. Thus they had a shared interest in peace, even while pursuing their distinct interests. There was no obvious way that the confl ict would end, as the two alliances refl ected opposing world views. There was a degree of stability in the relationship in terms of both the underlying antagonism and a fear of pushing matters to a decisive confrontation.

The theory helped clarify the predicament facing governments. The chal- lenge was to use it to generate strategies for dealing with the policy dilem- mas it created. Formal methodologies were favored by some analysts as a means of engaging in systematic thought in the face of the otherwise paralyz- ing contingency of nuclear war. It was easier to cope with the awful impli- cations of any move if the discussion was kept abstract and impersonal. Yet when contributing to policy, analysts had to move beyond the theory. It soon reached its limits when it came to addressing such questions as to how vital interests could be defended without disaster when war was so dangerous, or whether it was possible to fi ght wars limited to conventional capabilities without escalation.

This is a moral tract on mass murder: How to plan it, how to commit it,

how to get away with it, how to justify it.

—James Newman, review of Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War

Despite Brodie’s nomenclature, the fi rst atomic weapons were not “absolute.” They were in the range of other munitions (the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was equivalent to the load of some two hundred B-29 bombers). Also, at least initially, the weapons were scarce. The key develop- ment introduced by atomic bombs was less in the scale of their destructive power than in their effi ciency. By the start of the 1950s, this situation had been transformed by two related developments. The fi rst was the breaking of the U.S. monopoly by the Soviet Union, which conducted its fi rst atomic test in August 1949. Once two could play the nuclear game, the rules had to be changed. Thought of initiating nuclear war would henceforth be qualifi ed by the possibility of retaliation.

The second development followed from the fi rst. In an effort to extend its effective nuclear superiority, the United States developed thermonuclear bombs, based on the principles of nuclear fusion rather than fi ssion. This made possible weapons with no obvious limits to their destructive potential. In 1950 the American government assumed that the introduction of thermo- nuclear weapons would allow the United States and its allies time to build up conventional forces to match those of the Soviet Union and its satellites.

The Rationality of Irrationality chapter 13

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When Dwight D.  Eisenhower became president in January 1953, he saw things differently. He wanted to take advantage of American nuclear superi- ority while it lasted, and also reduce the burden of spending on conventional rearmament. By this time, the nuclear arsenal was becoming more plenti- ful and more powerful. The strategy that emerged from these considerations became known as “massive retaliation,” following a speech made by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in January 1954, when he declared that in the future a U.S. response to aggression would be “at places and with means of our own choosing.” 1

This doctrine was interpreted as threatening nuclear attack against tar- gets in the Soviet Union and China in response to conventional aggression anywhere in the world. Massive retaliation was widely criticized for plac- ing excessive reliance on nuclear threats, which would become less credible as Soviet nuclear strength grew. If a limited challenge developed and the United States had neglected its own conventional forces, then the choice would be between “suicide or surrender.” Dependence upon nuclear threats in the face of an opponent able to make threats of its own sparked a surge of intellectual creativity—later described as a “golden age” of strategic studies. 2 At its core was the key concept deterrence, to be explored with a range of new methodologies designed to cope with the special demands of the nuclear age.

Deterrence

The idea that palpable strength might cause an opponent to stay his hand was hardly new. The word deterrence is based on the Latin deterre —to frighten from or away. In its contemporary use it came to refl ect an instrumental sense of seeking to induce caution by threats of pain. It was possible to be deterred without being threatened, for example, one might be cautious in anticipation of how another might respond to a provocative act. As a strategy, however, deterrence involved deliberate, purposive threats. This concept developed prior to the Second World War in contemplation of strategic air raids. The presumption of civilian panic that had animated the fi rst airpower theorists retained a powerful hold on offi cial imaginations. The fear of the crowd led to musings on the likely anarchy that would follow sustained attacks. Although the British lacked capabilities for mass long-range attacks prior to the war, they doubted the possibility of defense and believed that only the threat of punitive attacks could hold Germany back. Ultimately, Britain had to rely on defense, which it did with unexpected success thanks to radar. The raids against Britain, and those mounted in return against Germany

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with even greater ferocity, resulted in terrible civilian pain but had limited political effects. Their main effect was on the ability to prosecute the war by disrupting production and fuel supplies. The surveys undertaken after the war demonstrated the modest impact of strategic bombing compared with the pre-war claims. But this did not really matter because the atom bomb pushed the dread to a new level. As Richard Overy put it, with air power the “theory had run ahead of the technology. After 1945 the two reached a fresh alignment.” 3

Deterrence answered the stark exam question posed by the arrival of nuclear weapons: What role can there be for a capability that has no tactical role in stopping armies or navies but can destroy whole cities? Answers in terms of war-fi ghting, though explored by the Eisenhower administration, appeared distasteful; answers in terms of deterrence promised the preven- tion of future war. It sounded robust without being reckless. It anticipated aggression and guarded against surprise but could still be presented as essen- tially reactive. The diffi culty was whether deterrence could be expected to hold if it was self-evidently based on a bluff. Credibility appeared to depend on a readiness to convey recklessness, illustrated by another of John Foster Dulles’s comments about the need to be ready “to go to the brink” during a crisis. Thus the residual possibility of use left a formidable imprint, precisely because it would be so catastrophic.

This reinforced the view that the main benefi t of force lay in what was held in reserve. The military capacity of the West must never be used to its full extent, though for the sake of deterrence the possibility must exist. As decades passed, and the Cold War still did not turn hot, deterrence appeared to be working. At times of crisis there was a welcome caution and prudence all around. War was avoided because politicians were all too aware of the consequences of failure and the dangers of preparing to crush enemies with overwhelming force. The dread of total war infl uenced all considerations of the use of force, and not just those directly involving nuclear weapons. It was never possible to be sure where the fi rst military step, however tentative, might lead.

The impossibility of a fi ght to the fi nish affected all relations between the American and Soviet blocs. There developed “a predominance of the latent over the manifest, of the oblique over the direct, of the limited over the gen- eral.” 4 If, as it seemed, there was no way of getting out of the nuclear age, then deterrence made the best of a bad job. While it was often diffi cult to explain exactly how deterrence had worked its magic—and historians can point to some terrifying moments when catastrophe was round the corner— yet a third world war did not happen. The fact that the superpowers were

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alarmed by the prospect of such a war surely had something to do with its failure to materialize.

The importance of deterrence meant that considerable efforts were devoted to exploring the concept and examining its policy implications. Deterrence succeeded if nothing happened, which led to a problem when working out cause and effect. Inaction might refl ect a lack of intention or an intention once present that had lapsed. Deterrence of an intended action could be due to a range of factors, including some unrelated to the deterrer’s threats and some related in ways the deterrer did not nececessarily intend. According to the most straightforward defi nition, that deterrence depended on convincing the target that prospective costs would outweigh prospective gains, it could be achieved by limiting gains as much as imposing costs. Preventing gain by means of a credible ability to stop aggression in its tracks became known as deterrence by denial, 5 while imposing costs became deterrence by punishment. Denial was essentially another word for an effec- tive defense, which if recognized in advance would provide a convincing argument against aggression. Thus the main conceptual challenges con- cerned punishment, especially the most brutal punishment of all: nuclear retaliation.

As deterrence became wedded to a foreign policy of containment, inter- preted as preventing any Soviet advances, both major war and minor provo- cations had to be deterred, not just those directed against the United States but also those directed against allies, and even the enemy’s enemies. Herman Kahn, an early popularizer of some of the more abstruse theories of deterrence, distinguished three types:  Type I  involved superpower nuclear exchanges; Type II limited conventional or tactical nuclear attacks involving allies; and Type III addressed most other types of challenges. 6 At each stage, the require- ments in terms of political will became more demanding, especially once both sides had acquired nuclear arsenals. It was one thing to threaten nuclear retaliation to deter nuclear attack, quite another to threaten nuclear use to deter a non-nuclear event. Because it was always unlikely that the United States would be directly attacked by a major power with anything other than nuclear weapons, the most likely non-nuclear event to be deterred would be an attack on an ally. This requirement came to be known as “extended deter- rence.” Because of the development of Soviet capabilities, U.S. methods of deterrence became less confi dent, moving from disproportionate to propor- tionate retaliation, from setting defi nite obstacles to aggression to warnings that should aggression occur the consequences could be beyond calculation, from assured and unconstrained threats of overwhelming force to a shared risk of mutual destruction.

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Schelling

The theorist who did more than any other to explore the conundrums of deterrence and nuclear strategy was Thomas Schelling. He was one of a num- ber of fi gures in and around RAND during the 1950s—including Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Herman Kahn—who despite their dif- ferences contributed to a developing framework for thinking about these weapons that acknowledged their horrifi c novelty yet tried to describe their strategic possibilities. At the time, Kahn—ebullient and provocative, and one possible model for Stanley Kubrik’s Dr. Strangelove —was the best known. His book On Thermonuclear War forged a link with Clausewitz, at least in its title, although his biographer doubted whether he had ever even done more than skimmed Clausewitz: “He never showed a smidgen of interest in any strategic theorist.” 7 Wohlstetter described his prose as “dictated through a public address system.” 8

He was nuclear strategy’s “fi rst celebrity,” with his “physical mass and somewhat geeky cast” confi rming myths that the ultimate war would be the product of the imaginings of “mad geniuses.” A  mass of statistics on the likely character of nuclear war would be qualifi ed by breezy and hardly comforting statements, such as “barring bad luck and bad management,” and led to policy options that were evaluated in terms of possible losses of units of humanity measured in the millions. 9 Kahn’s fellow nuclear strategists objected as much to his showmanship and the bad name he gave their new profession as to his claims about emerging victorious from the apocalypse. An enthusiastic advocate of civil defense, Kahn was convinced that control was possible in all types of confl ict, even nuclear war.

Schelling was a more substantial theorist, developing ways of think- ing about confl ict that illuminated nuclear issues while remaining relevant to broader strategic questions. After the mid-1960s, when he felt he had said much of what he wanted to say about nuclear matters, he turned his attention to other issues, ranging from crime to cigarette smoking, but still applied the same essential approach. His achievement was underlined by the award of a Nobel Prize in economics in 2005 for “having enhanced our understanding of confl ict and cooperation through game-theory analy- sis.” 10 Yet Schelling’s relationship to game theory was equivocal. He did not describe himself as a game theorist but rather a social scientist who used game theory on occasion. He hit upon his big idea before he came across game theory as a means through which it could be expressed. He preferred to reason through analogy in ways that purists found maddening. Schelling’s reputation depended on his gifts as a brilliant expositor who

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wrote with elegance and lucidity, traits for which this particular fi eld of endeavor were not well known. 11

Schelling did not claim to have achieved the “science” that had long been sought in strategy or that formal logic could in principle lead to a mathemat- ical solution. He shared the view, growing among the operational research community, that advanced mathematics and abstract models were making their work less accessible to potential users, 12 and he always opposed the suggestion that strategy was or should be “a branch of mathematics.” 13 He confessed to having learned more “from reading ancient Greek history and by looking at salesmanship than studying game theory.” The greatest achieve- ment of game theory, as far as he was concerned, was the payoff matrix. It was extraordinarily useful to be able to put together in a matrix a “simple situation involving as few as two people and two choices.” 14

His equivocation on game theory was not unique. Other nuclear strate- gists who worked at RAND during the 1950s tended to talk of following the “spirit” of game theory rather than its rules. In a 1949 article, Brodie referred to game theory in a footnote as a source of “mathematical systemati- zation,” adding that “for various reasons” he did not share the authors’ “con- viction that their theory could be directly and profi tably applied to problems of military strategy.” 15 Later, while fi nding its “refi nements” of little use, he acknowledged the value of the “constant reminder that in war we shall be dealing with an opponent who will react to our moves and to whom we must react.” 16 Few of the books on nuclear strategy made much, if any, mention of game theory. This absence was notable in a book by one of the founders of game theory, Oskar Morgenstern. 17 Bruce-Briggs suggests that the close association between nuclear strategy and game theory was a consequence of the reception of Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War . Although Kahn had used nei- ther game theory nor mathematics, he was accused of being the most extreme example of a game-theory-wielding militarist, a moniker implying great technical capacity but no moral sensibility. Schelling was also included in this category. 18 Schelling observed at the time, “I don’t see that game theory is any more involved than Latin grammar or geophysics; but its quaint name makes mysterious and patronizing references to it an effective ploy.” 19

Schelling had little background in military issues. Trained as an economist, he worked on the implementation of the postwar Marshall Plan for economic reconstruction in Europe. This led to his general interest in negotiations of all types, particularly the process of fi nding points that could support an agreed solution, possibly through tacit as much as explicit bargaining. After publishing an article demonstrating the possibility of arriving at common solutions without direct communication, 20 he read Luce and Raiffa’s Games

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and Decisions and saw the potential of game theory. 21 His interest in how “nations, people, or organizations go about committing themselves to threats and promises in bargaining positions” led him into contact with RAND in 1956 and he spent a productive year there from 1958 to 1959. 22 Schelling was able to test his developing theories in the company of other key think- ers from a variety of disciplines, all trying to make sense of the nuclear age. Although he was offered jobs in the Kennedy administration, he preferred to keep his independence. He did work as a consultant, however.

Many of the ideas and concepts Schelling developed along with his col- leagues at RAND became familiar and entered the strategic vernacular, but it is important to note just how novel and radical they were. Critics com- plained, with some justice, that the methodology allowed talk about dread- ful possibilities in dispassionate terms and contemplated moves that should never be countenanced by a civilized people. Their models did not offer a way of transcending the Cold War confl ict and failed to accommodate the ideo- logical and geopolitical issues. These were important limitations, but they should not hide the achievement of developing a way to think about confl ict that could also accommodate cooperation.

Schelling started with the special features of a game of strategy, compared with those of chance or skill: “Each player’s best choice depends on the action he expects the other to take, which he knows depends, in turn, on the other’s expectation of his own.” Strategy was all about interdependence, “the condi- tioning of one’s own behavior on the behavior of others.” This could cover any social relationships in which there was a mixture of confl ict and cooperation. All partnerships were to some degree precarious, just as all antagonisms were to some degree incomplete. The combination of confl ict and cooperation was at the heart of the theory. It became irrelevant when there was an absence of either. Schelling noted that the theory “degenerates at one extreme if there is not scope for mutual accommodation, no common interest at all even in avoiding mutual disaster; it degenerates at the other extreme if there is no confl ict at all and no problem in identifying and reaching common goals.” 23

On this basis the role of force could be rethought. Traditionally it had been used by countries to take and hold what they wanted: “Forcibly a coun- try can repel and expel, penetrate and occupy, seize, exterminate, disarm and disable, confi ne, deny access, and directly frustrate intrusion or attack. It can, that is, if it has enough strength. ‘Enough’ depends on how much an oppo- nent has.” 24 In setting up an alternative to brute force, Schelling made one of his most startling assertions: “In addition to weakening an enemy militarily it can cause an enemy plain suffering.” Contrary to prevailing views—and established international law, for that matter—that stressed the importance

t h e r a t i o n a l i t y o f i r r a t i o n a l i t y 163

of avoiding unnecessary suffering, Schelling claimed that the ability to hurt was “among the most impressive attributes of military force.” Its value lay not in actually doing so, which would constitute a gross failure of strategy, but in what opponents might do to avoid it. So long as the violence could both be anticipated and avoided by accommodation, it had coercive value. “The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” Under this proposition, strategy moved from considerations of conquest and resistance to deterrence, intimidation, black- mail, and threats.

Coercion was therefore at the heart of the theory. The hurt did not have to be nuclear. The same framework could work with less punitive forms, for example, economic sanctions. It could also take in the traditional distinction between offense and defense, although not in the sense of being able to be certain of either conquering territory or stopping any invasion at the borders. The point about coercion was that it involved infl uencing through threats rather than controlling the opponent’s behavior. The defensive equivalent was deterrence, persuading an enemy not to attack; the offensive equiva- lent was “compellence,” inducing withdrawal or acquiescence. Deterrence demanded an opponent’s inaction; compellence demanded action or ceas- ing adverse actions. Deterrence was about the status quo and had no obvi- ous time limits; compellence projected forward to a new place and could be urgent. Deterrence was easier because all that was required was that an action be withheld. The target could deny that one was ever contemplated. Compliance was more conspicuous with compellence, more evidently “sub- mission under duress,” less “capable of being rationalized as something that one was going to do anyhow.” The two could merge. Once an initial deterrent threat had failed and an opponent was acting in a hostile way, the next threat must be compellent. In a confl ict in which both sides could hurt each other but neither could forcibly accomplish its purpose, and in which the balance of advantage kept changing hands, the requirement to deter and to compel could shift, depending on who was on top at any time. 25

Nuclear threats had a special character. Executing them would be an unusually horrible thing to do, but a state with a nuclear monopoly might feel that it was not too diffi cult to gain strategic advantage by threatening others. What made the difference was that something equally horrible might come back in return. How could one benefi t from threats that lacked cred- ibility because of the risk of retaliation and could thus be exposed as bluff at the fi rst challenge? Again, Schelling addressed this conundrum by turning traditional concepts upside down. The aim of strategy, it had been supposed, was to exert the maximum control over the course of an unfolding confl ict.

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Schelling asked a different question: could there be strategic advantages in accepting a loss of control? Coercive threats worked by infl uencing an oppo- nent’s choices. Perhaps their choice could be made more diffi cult by limiting one’s own. To inject credibility into an apparently irrational stance, why not work to create an essentially irrational situation?

The idea was to shift the onus of decision onto the other side, so that it was the opponent who was obliged to choose between continued combat and backing down. Only “the enemy’s withdrawal can tranquilize the situa- tion; otherwise it may turn out to be a contest of nerves.” 26 There were prec- edents: the Greeks burning their bridges to show they would stand and fi ght against the Persians; the Spanish conqueror Cortez conspicuously burning his ships in front of the Aztecs. By removing retreat as an option, your men had no choice but to fi ght, while the enemy would be discouraged by an apparent display of confi dence.

In the nuclear sphere, at one extreme, choice could be wholly conceded to the opponent by making the threatened action automatic, beyond recall unless stopped by an act of compliance. That was the notion of the “dooms- day machine”: pass a line and nothing could be done to stop the detonation and the shared calamity. Removing all choice was unacceptable, so Schelling posed the problem in terms of progressive risk. The opponent would know that even if the threatener had second thoughts, the threat might still be implemented. This set up the possibility of a “competition in risk-taking” which could turn war into a contest of “endurance, nerve, obstinacy and pain.” This would be not quite a doomsday machine, but the threatened would know that the threat could not be wholly bluff because the threatener was not completely in control. Schelling called this “The Threat That Leaves Something to Chance.” The feature of such threats was that “though one may or may not carry them out, the fi nal decision is not altogether under the threatener’s control .” 27 In his version of Clausewitz’s friction, Schelling emphasized the ubiquity of uncertainty that gave this type of threat credibility:

Violence, especially in war, is a confused and uncertain activity, highly unpredictable depending on decisions made by fallible human beings organized into imperfect governments depending on fallible com- munications and warning systems and on the untested performance of people and equipment. It is furthermore a hotheaded activity, in which commitments and reputations can develop a momentum of their own. 28

Whereas Clausewitz saw friction as undermining all but the most dogged of strategies, Schelling saw how these uncertainties might be used creatively, if

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recklessly. The uncertainty would grow as a crisis turned into a limited con- fl ict and then moved toward general war, getting out of hand “by degrees.” 29 Skillful tactics would exploit this fact, not shrink from it. The assumption was that it was worth letting a “situation get somewhat out of hand” because the opponent would fi nd such circumstances intolerable. Deterrence was pos- sible because of a situation in which terrible things might happen (which was credible because of human irrationality) rather than a specifi c threat to do those things (which was incredible because of human rationality).

The potential rationality of irrationality was illustrated using the game of “chicken.” Two cars were driven toward each other by delinquent teenagers, Bill and Ben, anxious to prove their toughness. The fi rst to swerve lost. If both swerved, nothing was gained; if neither swerved, everything was lost. If Bill swerved and Ben did not, then Bill suffered humiliation and Ben gained prestige. The matrix appeared as shown below.

The minimax strategy dictated that they both swerved as the best of the worst outcomes. This represented the natural caution displayed by both sides during the Cold War. Timing, however, made a difference. Bill was prepared to swerve, but Ben swerved fi rst. Bill won because he delayed his commit- ment. He kept his nerve longer. Perhaps he was confi dent that Ben would swerve because he knew him to be weak-willed. Suppose that Ben was aware of this impression and sought to correct it. He wanted Bill to think him reck- less or even a bit crazy. A number of ruses might reinforce such an impres- sion:  swaggering, boasting, or feigning drunkenness. Irrationality became rational. If Ben could persuade Bill that he had taken leave of his senses, Ben might just prevail.

This illuminates the basic problem with this line of argument. Even if one was apparently committed to a patently irrational course to impress the

table 13. 1

Bill

Ben

1 Swerve 2 Don’t Swerve

1 Swerve 0

a1b1

0

+20

a1b2

-20

2 Don’t Swerve -20

a2b1

+20

-100

a2b2

-100

The fi gures in the corners refer to values attached to alternative outcomes.

166 s t r a t e g i e s o f f o r c e

opponent, a foot would still hover close to the brake pedal and hands would stay fi rmly on the steering wheel. What might work for two individuals was less likely to work for governments who needed to convince their own people that they knew what they were doing. Even if the internal audience was tolerant of ruses designed to suggest a loss of control, such stunts could not be a regular feature of crisis management. Whether the game involved individuals or states, it was diffi cult to pretend irrationality consistently, in one game after another. Like deceptive strategies, pretended irrationality would be diffi cult to repeat as it would affect perceptions of behavior next time round. Indeed it could be counterproductive if the other side overcom- pensated. The more often the game was played, the more dangerous it could become. The full importance of any strategic encounter lay not only in the implications for the matter at hand but also in the long-term impact on the relationship between the two adversaries. The results of strategies adopted in a particular game would affect their potential success if used in subsequent games. Game theory presented simultaneous decisions by players. Schelling understood that the moves often took place sequentially, so that the structure of the game changed each time. 30

The mutual learning process was important to Schelling’s schema. It was almost a mission to reorient game theory to take account of the fact that “people can often concert their intentions or expectations with others if each knows that the other is trying to do the same.” Unlike theorists who argued that equilibrium points could be found using mathematics, Schelling insisted that points would suggest themselves as being obvious or natural. This required “some common language that permits them to hold discourse.” Communication of this sort between adversaries would not allow for great subtlety or sophistication, especially if the language did not emerge through formal negotiations or declarations. It could be tacit as much as explicit, dependent on prominent symbols and values in a shared culture, guided by tradition and precedence, with mutual understandings created and reinforced through deeds as much as words. It would draw “on imagination more than on logic; it could depend on analogy, precedent, accidental arrangement, sym- metry, aesthetic or geometric confi guration, casuistic reasoning, and who the parties are and what they know about each other.” 31 Certain focal points would become salient. They would need to be simple, recognizable, and conspicuous. In Arms and Infl uence , Schelling gave examples of features that might suggest themselves to opposing forces who could not communicate directly:

National boundaries and rivers, shorelines, the battle line itself, even parallels of latitude, the distinction between air and ground, the

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distinction between nuclear fi ssion and chemical combustion, the distinction between combat support and economic support, the dis- tinction between combatants and non-combatants, the distinctions among nationalities. 32

Once proper communication was possible, and the players could use direct speech and overt bargaining, the “pure-coordination game,” Schelling sug- gests, “not only ceases to be interesting but virtually ceases to be a ‘game.’ ” 33

Yet for all the possibilities of indirect communication, the infl uence of norms and conventions of behavior, or the focal points thrown up by nature, it was hard to see how they could be more reliable than direct communica- tions. In circumstances where the opportunities for direct communication were sparse, as was the case between the two ideological blocs for much of the Cold War, Schelling’s insight about the possibility of still fi nding shared focal points by indirect means was valuable. But it could not be taken too far. It did not necessarily mean that these points would be found when they were really needed. Moreover, when two sides were working with such different sets of values and beliefs, what was salient for one might not be so salient for the other. Without direct communication to verify that an agreed point had been found, it was possible to miscalulate by assuming that the other side attached the same salience to the same point or by assuming that agreement on such matters was impossible. It could seem, as Hedley Bull observed in a review of Arms and Infl uence , that the superpowers would be “sending and receiving messages and ironing out understandings” with “scarcely as much as a nod or a wink.” 34

First and Second Strikes

Schelling argued that not only was it possible to think of nuclear strategy in terms of bargaining and coercion but it was unwise to think of it in any other way. This challenged the idea of a decisive victory directly by claiming that at least in the nuclear area it made no sense. That did not mean that there was no concept of what a decisive nuclear victory would look like. To ensure success it would have to take the form of a knockout blow that left the oppo- nent no chance to retaliate. This was not a possibility that either side in the Cold War ever felt able to dismiss entirely. It provided part of the dynamic of the arms race between the two sides and governed calculations of risk. A “fi rst-strike capability” came to refer to the potential ability to disarm the enemy in a surprise attack. No military operation ever conceived could be as fateful. It would be the fi rst and only time it would be attempted and would

168 s t r a t e g i e s o f f o r c e

be launched in secret, using untried weapons against a range of disparate targets in a wholly unique scenario, using equally untried defenses to catch any retaliatory weapons. Whether such a capability was in reach depended on evaluations of the developing capabilities of offensive and defensive weapons.

In a celebrated RAND study of the mid-1950s, a team led by Albert Wohlstetter demonstrated that the air bases of the U.S. Strategic Air Command could be vulnerable to a surprise attack. Retaliation from such an attack would be impossible, thereby exposing the United States and its allies to Soviet black- mail. 35 This challenged the prevailing view that nuclear weapons could be used solely in “counter-value” strikes against easily targeted political and economic centers. A “counter-force” strike against military targets would potentially be strategically decisive because it would leave the opponent without any way of retaliating. If, however, the attacked nation was able to absorb an attempted fi rst strike and retain suffi cient forces to hit back then it would have a “second- strike capability.” Wohlstetter believed that this study, drawing on “the tra- dition of operations research and empirical systems analysis,” far more than Schelling’s musings, discovered the “vulnerabilities of strategic forces.” 36

Suppose both sides had a fi rst-strike capability. Brodie set out the alterna- tive possibilities in a 1954 article in which he observed that in a world in which “either side can make a surprise attack on the other” it would make sense to be “trigger-happy.” As with the “American gunfi ghter duel, frontier style,” the “one who leads on the draw and the aim achieves a good clean win.” If neither side had the capability, however, trigger-happiness would be sui- cidal, and restraint only prudent. 37 Depending on how the technology devel- oped, there would either be powerful pressures to preempt at times of high political tension, which could lead to a dangerous dynamic, or there would be considerable stability, as no premium would be attached to unleashing nuclear hostilities. Thus, confi dence in stability depended on expectations with regard to the opponent’s attitude and behavior. In a compelling example of his mode of analysis, Schelling described a “reciprocal fear of surprise attack” to show how an apparently stable system of deterrence could suddenly be destabilized even when there was no “fundamental” basis for either side to strike fi rst: “A modest temptation on each side to sneak in a fi rst blow—a temptation too small by itself to motivate an attack—might become compounded through a process of interacting expectations, with additional motive for attack being produced by successive cycles of ‘He thinks we think he thinks we think . . . he thinks we think he’ll attack; so he thinks we shall; so he will; so we must.’ ”

To reduce any chance of such thoughts, nuclear systems should be unequiv- ocally geared to a second strike: relatively invulnerable and relatively inac- curate. In practice this meant that cities would be threatened, not weapons.

t h e r a t i o n a l i t y o f i r r a t i o n a l i t y 169

The logic became even more uncomfortable and paradoxical. Nothing should be done to diminish the murderous consequences of a nuclear war because nothing should be done to encourage any thought that it was worth starting. “A weapon that can hurt only people, and cannot possibly damage the other side’s striking force,” Schelling explained, “is profoundly defensive; it pro- vides its possessor no incentive to strike fi rst.” The danger lay with weapons intended to “seek out the enemy’s missiles and bombers—that can exploit the advantage of striking fi rst and consequently provide a temptation to do so.” 38 The aim was to stabilize the U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship. On this basis, Schelling noted, missile-carrying submarines were admirable for sec- ond-strike purposes. They were extremely hard to fi nd and destroy at sea, but it was also hard (at the time he was writing) to use them for accurate strikes against the enemy forces. For this reason, Schelling argued that Americans should not want a monopoly on these submarines, for if they “have either no intention or no political capacity for a fi rst strike it would usually be helpful if the enemy were confi dently assured of this.”

If such reasoning led to conclusions that seemed quite bizarre to the mili- tary mind, the same was true for those on the other side of the argument, campaigning for radical measures of disarmament. The more weapons one had, the more diffi cult it was for the adversary to wipe them out in a surprise attack. An agreement designed to stabilize the nuclear relationship would be easier to maintain at higher rather than lower levels, for it would be much more diffi cult to prepare to cheat by hiding extra missiles if the starting numbers were high. 39 Neither the military nor the disarmers were at all sure that their activities should be mutually reinforcing. The term “arms con- trol” was in fact coined in the 1950s precisely to identify forms of mutual understanding that were compatible with the new imperatives of military strategy. 40 It meant that the military had to get used to the idea that while opposing the enemy’s force they must

also collaborate, implicitly if not explicitly, in avoiding the kinds of crises in which withdrawal is intolerable for both sides, in avoiding false alarms and mistaken intentions, and in providing—along with its deterrent threat of resistance or retaliation in the event of unaccept- able challenges—reassurance that restraint on the part of potential enemies will be matched by restraint of our own. 41

In line with Schelling’s general interest in how productive agreements could be reached without direct communication, arms control could involve “induced or reciprocated ‘self-control,’ whether the inducements include negotiated treaties or just informal understandings and reciprocated restraints.” 42

170 s t r a t e g i e s o f f o r c e

In any event, technological developments supported the second strike. Attempts to develop effective defenses against nuclear attack proved futile. By the mid-1960s, fears eased of a technological arms race that might encourage either side to unleash a surprise attack. For the foreseeable future, each side could eliminate the other as a modern industrial state. Robert McNamara, as secretary of defense, argued that so long as the two superpowers had confi - dence in their capacity for mutual assured destruction—an ability to impose “unacceptable damage” defi ned as 25 percent of population and 50 percent of industry—the relationship between the two would be stable. These levels, it should be noted, refl ected less a judgment about the tolerances of modern societies and more the point at which extra explosions would result in dimin- ishing marginal returns measured by new damage and casualties, the point at which—to use Winston Churchill’s vivid phrase—“all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”

If serious fi ghting did begin, the incentives would shift. Assuming no rush into nuclear exchanges, it would still be possible to shape the develop- ment of the confl ict by drawing on the potential of what could happen. So long as cities were spared there was some hope of establishing a new bargain, even in the midst of war. But once cities were destroyed there was noth- ing else to lose. Attacks on cities would be “a massive and modern version of an ancient institution: the exchange of hostages.” Keeping something of value vulnerable was a way of enforcing good behavior. 43 Like Clausewitz, Schelling saw how raw and angry passions could also undermine restraint.

The process by which a confl ict intensifi ed and became more danger- ous came to be described as “escalation.” This word (not one that Schelling favored) came into vogue to describe a tragic process as a limited war became total. It was based on the metaphor of the moving staircase that once started could not be stopped, however much the original decision might be regret- ted. The term—initially interchangeable with words like explosion , eruption , and trigger —was fi rst used to challenge the idea of a limited nuclear war. Henry Kissinger, for example, defi ned escalation in 1960 as “the addition of increments of power until limited war insensibly merges into all-out war.” 44 Schelling was aware of opportunities to use the process for bargaining pur- poses as well as how these would become fewer as control over events was progressively lost. To get the aggressor to stop and preferably go back to the starting point, relinquishing captured territory, the threat would have to be credible and serious, yet the circumstances would be those in which a previous deterrent threat had not been taken suffi ciently seriously. The func- tion of limited war therefore had to be understood less in terms of ensuring that war stayed limited and more in terms of posing “the deliberate risk of

t h e r a t i o n a l i t y o f i r r a t i o n a l i t y 171

all-out war” and keeping the risk of escalation “within moderate limits above zero.” 45 The role of the fi rst nuclear exchanges would not be “solely or mainly to redress a balance on the battlefi eld” but primarily “to make the war too painful or too dangerous to continue.” 46

Schelling developed his ideas before it became apparent that the super- power confrontation would become dominated by thoughts of mutual destruction. The possibilities that Schelling explored did not materialize because the consequences of any nuclear use would be so horrendous that they did not lend themselves to subtle and clever maneuvers. Crisis behavior became careful, cautious, and circumspect. So much of Schelling’s frame- work can be considered in retrospect as a mind-clearing exercise, explor- ing a range of possibilities that never moved beyond speculative hypotheses but at least demonstrated the inadequacy of conventional strategic thought. During the 1950s, with memories of past lurches to war still strong, few were confi dent that a third world war could be indefi nitely postponed. The exploration of the logic of deterrence, and why it made sense to accept this logic rather than attempt to circumvent it, was important enough to justify the effort.

Existential Deterrence

It might have even been possible to imagine a major war between the two superpowers in which nuclear weapons were not used, although few would have been prepared to rely on continuing restraint. The core problem which niggled away at America’s strategists was that of extended deterrence, the commitment to bring nuclear means to the aid of non-nuclear allies. Once a stalemate was reached, it seemed reckless to consider nuclear war on behalf of allies. But the Europeans were assumed to have insuffi cient conventional strength to hold back a determined assault by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. If Europe was not to be overrun, there at least had to be a possibility that the United States would initiate nuclear war. Were it not for this basic political commitment, refl ecting a vital interest, there would have been no need to worry about Schelling’s “threats that left something to chance.” This idea was best captured by so-called tactical nuclear weapons whose military value could never be properly explained but conveyed the risk that once entangled in a land war in Europe, they could trigger nuclear war in a way that was beyond rational consideration.

By the start of the 1960s, there was a developing view in the United States that the best way to ease this problem was to reduce dependence upon

172 s t r a t e g i e s o f f o r c e

nuclear threats by increasing conventional forces—to create deterrence by denial. The diffi culty was that a conventional build-up would be expensive and such obvious efforts to reduce their nuclear liabilities would suggest to European minds that the Americans might consider European security a less than vital interest. Behind this there was a disjunction between the formal strategic analysis emerging from the American think tanks and the politics of Europe, divided between two hostile ideological blocs, yet enjoying some stability. The Europeans did not view the continent as being on the edge of war. They understood that nuclear threats might not be credible, but deter- rence could still work because of the residual possibility that in the irratio- nal, intense circumstances of another European war, nuclear weapons might be used. The possibility did not have to be very large for political leaders to decide to stick with a manageable status quo. On this basis, the key to deterrence was alliance, the close link between American power—including its nuclear arsenal—and European security. The threat to deterrence was any- thing which undermined that link.

Here was a clash of strategic frameworks. One was top down, the classi- cal, grand strategic perspective which focused on the formidable reasons not to risk war when it was possible to imagine catastrophe for all involved. The other was bottom up, an operational analysis which considered where the advantage might lie in a confl ict, should the politicians decide the stakes were worth the fi ght. This pointed to an inability to match Soviet conven- tional strength. Only increasingly incredible nuclear threats were available should Moscow take advantage of this vulnerability, raising the possibility that it just might.

This issue came to a head in 1961 when newly elected President Kennedy was faced with a major challenge over the status of Berlin. The old German capital was fi rmly in communist East Germany, yet as part of the postwar settlement it had been divided into two. West Berlin, connected uneasily to West Germany, offered an easy route out for East Germans seeking to escape communism. This was a major irritant to Moscow. There were threats that summer of a Soviet move to cut off West Berlin and bring it into communist control. As the city was indefensible by conventional means, any effort to prevent this carried a risk of nuclear war. Ultimately this risk was suffi cient for the communists to limit the provocation, and they built a wall which divided Berlin and so kept their people hemmed in.

During that summer’s crisis, a paper by Schelling setting out his ideas on limited nuclear confl ict was passed to Kennedy. The paper stressed the importance of heightening the risk to the enemy rather than making a futile bid to win a decisive victory. “We should plan for a war of nerve, of

t h e r a t i o n a l i t y o f i r r a t i o n a l i t y 173

demonstration and of bargaining, not of tactical target destruction.” This paper apparently made a “deep impression” on Kennedy. Schelling had been talking with McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s national security advisor. They shared a concern that the military seemed unable to think through the “hid- eous jump between conventional warfare and a single massive all-out blast.” 47 His main contribution to policy at this time, however, was to help set up a “crisis game” that sought to simulate, as closely as possible, the confused and stressful conditions decision-makers might face and the questions to be addressed should tensions over Berlin escalate. Schelling’s game explored how the Berlin crisis might unfold. This had the advantage of being a contained scenario, in which the dimensions and core views of the protagonists were known. In September 1961, a number of rounds of this game took place in Washington designed to impress on the participants the “bargaining aspect of a military crisis.” The games forced senior policymakers—military and civilian—to work out responses to various contingencies. The conclusions, which had an effect on both offi cial thought and Schelling’s future theoriz- ing, emphasized the pressure of events. It was far harder to communicate effi ciently than was often assumed, as the enemy saw only the actions and not the intent behind them, and there would be far less time for diplomacy to operate than had been hoped.

Yet it also became extraordinarily diffi cult in the games to trigger a large-scale conventional war, much less a nuclear confl ict. According to Alan Ferguson, Schelling’s collaborator, “our inability to get a fi ght started” was the “single most striking result.” 48 The games also highlighted a problem with Berlin: “Whoever it is who has to initiate the action that neither side wants is the side that is deterred. In a fragile situation, good strategy involves leaving the overt act up to the other side.” 49 The game therefore gave little support to the idea that any nuclear use, even for signaling purposes, pro- vided realistic options for NATO in the event that the Berlin crisis worsened but it did reinforce the size of the gap between conventional and nuclear war. Reporting back to Kennedy, an aide highlighted the diffi culty of using “military power fl exibly and effectively for tactical purposes in the conduct of the day to day political struggle with the Soviet Union.” 50

The next year Kennedy faced an even greater crisis prompted by the dis- covery that the Soviet Union was building missile sites in Cuba. Many of the conversations of leading players on the American side were recorded as they debated potential moves and counter-moves. The president spent much of the crisis trying to determine the effect of a particular course of action on Moscow, and to do this he tried to put himself in Nikita Khrushchev’s shoes. In doing so, Kennedy supposed that the Soviet leader was cast in the same

174 s t r a t e g i e s o f f o r c e

mould, responding to the same stimuli and facing the same sort of pressures from his own hard-liners, fi nding it as hard as Kennedy would to back down from public commitments. He was fearful that a missile strike against Cuba would lead to a Soviet attack against Turkey, where American missiles of equivalent range and targeting were based; a blockade of Cuba would revive the issue of a blockade of West Berlin.

Kennedy formed an in-group of key offi cials—known as ExComm— to debate the alternatives. One option was to launch air strikes against the offending bases in Cuba to take them out before they became operational. This option had to take into account whether it might be possible to get away with a small “surgical” strike or whether the risk could only be removed by continual and heavy strikes, possibly followed by an invasion. Another option involved a more gradualist approach, demonstrating resolve through a block- ade to prevent military equipment getting to Cuba. ExComm’s decisions in part depended on the practicalities: the air force’s confi dence in their ability to fi nd and destroy the bases, the quality of the air defenses they would face, and the risk that some of the weapons were already operational. When confronting the possibility of air strikes, especially without warning, a number of mem- bers of ExComm felt uneasy. The United States had, after all, been the victim of a surprise air strike on December 7, 1941. The president’s speechwriter, Ted Sorenson, noted that he had no trouble writing the speech announcing the blockade but great diffi culty writing one to report an air strike. The other advantage of the blockade was it did not preclude tougher action if it failed to produce immediate results. It kept options open and the opponent guessing.

There was still anxiety over whether the blockade could be enforced. Robert Kennedy wrote of his brother as he waited to see how Soviet ships would respond.

I think these few minutes were the time of greatest concern for the President. Was the world on the brink of a holocaust? Was it our error? A mistake? Was there something further that should have been done? Or not done? His hand went up to his face and covered his mouth. He opened and closed his fi st. His face seemed drawn, his eyes pained, almost gray.

From the other side, consider a long, impassioned private letter to Kennedy that arrived two days later from the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev:

If people do not show wisdom, then in the fi nal analysis they will come to a clash, like blind moles, and then reciprocal extermination will begin. . . . we and you ought not to pull on the ends of the rope

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in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut it, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose. 51

On Saturday, October 27, 1962, tensions were at their height after mixed messages from Moscow—one conciliatory, the other tough—and the added tension of an American spy plane getting shot down over Cuba. The pre- sumed response was to retaliate against Soviet surface-to-air missile sites in Cuba. While this might be held back, at some point surveillance would need to start again, putting U.S. aircraft at risk and making a response unavoid- able. Robert McNamara set out a possible script. If surveillance aircraft were fi red upon, the United States would have to respond. There would be losses of aircraft, and “we’ll be shooting up Cuba quite a bit.” This was not a posi- tion that could be sustained for very long. “So we must be prepared to attack Cuba—quickly.” This was going to require an “all-out attack” involving air strikes, with “sorties every day thereafter, and I personally believe that this is almost certain to lead to an invasion, I won’t say certain to, but almost certain to lead to an invasion.”

The next stage assumed a tit-for-tat reprisal from Khrushchev: “If we do this, and leave those missiles in Turkey the Soviet Union may , and I think probably will, attack the Turkish missiles.” This led inexorably on to the proposition that “ if the Soviet Union attacks the Turkish missiles, we must respond. We cannot allow a Soviet attack on the—on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey without a military response by NATO.” He continued

Now the minimum military response by NATO to a Soviet attack on the Turkish Jupiter missiles would be a response with conven- tional weapons by NATO forces in Turkey, that is to say Turkish and U.S. aircraft, against Soviet warships and/or naval bases in the Black Sea area. Now that to me is the absolute minimum, and I would say that it is damned dangerous to—to have had a Soviet attack on Turkey and a NATO response on the Soviet Union. 52

McNamara took this suffi ciently seriously, even though he was assuming in this script that his own government would take choices that he clearly thought unwise, to suspect that a nuclear war would be set in motion the next day. In reality, neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev were prepared to

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contemplate such a calamity and they found a way to draw back from the brink: withdrawal of Soviet missiles in return for an American promise not to invade Cuba. During the crisis there were many examples of how poorly the two sides understood each other, yet on the most fundamental issue they had a shared view. They were determined to avoid a nuclear tragedy.

Although the outcome of the missile crisis was shaped by a shared fear of nuclear war, one conclusion drawn was that with a clear head and a strong will, such crises were possible to manage. In particular, the successful out- come was used to challenge the notion of escalation. This had been not so much a strategy as something to be avoided. After the crisis, the metaphor was challenged for failing to recognize the potential for graduated moves, especially during the early stages of a confl ict before serious battle had been joined. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter observed that “there are down- escalators as well as up-escalators, and there are landings between escalators where one can decide to get off or get on, to go up or down, or to stay there; or to take the stairs. Just where automaticity or irreversibility takes over is an uncertain but vital matter, and that is one of the reasons a decision maker may want to take a breath at a landing to consider next steps.” 53

Herman Kahn sought to show that even once nuclear exchanges had begun there were ways of conducting operations that might keep the pres- sure on the other side while avoiding Armageddon. He saw escalation as a dragon to be slain:  not so much a phenomenon operating independent of human action but a possible product of inadequate intellectual and physical preparation. He introduced the idea that escalation might be a deliberate act. The noun acquired a verb when he referred to “people who wish to escalate a little themselves, but somehow feel that the other side would not be will- ing to go one step further.” 54 Escalation was transformed from a hopelessly unruly process to one that might be tamed and possibly manipulated. In his 1965 book On Escalation , he introduced the “escalation ladder” with sixteen thresholds and forty-four steps. For most, the striking feature of the book was the possibility of anyone coming up with almost thirty distinct ways of using nuclear weapons following their fi rst use at rung fi fteen. 55 The escala- tion up the ladder concluded, when all semblance of control had been lost, with a “wargasm.” Kahn declared himself innocent of the Freudian connota- tions. Luigi Nono, the radical Italian composer, used Kahn’s ladder as the theme for a musical composition dedicated to the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, which moved from (1) “crisi manifesta” to (44) “spasmo o guerra insensata.” 56

McGeorge Bundy, former national security advisor to both Kennedy and Johnson, also reacted strongly to analyses such as these. He concluded that

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the arms race had become largely irrelevant in terms of actual international political behavior. Once both sides acquired thermonuclear weapons, there was a stalemate. The “certain prospect of retaliation” meant that there had been “literally no prospect at all that any sane political authority, in either the United States or the Soviet Union, would consciously choose to start a nuclear war.” He wrote of the “enormous gulf between what political leaders really think about nuclear weapons and what is assumed in complex calcu- lations of relative ‘advantage’ in simulated strategic warfare.” In the think tanks, levels of “acceptable” damage could involve the loss of tens of millions of lives, so that the “loss of dozens of great cities is somehow a real choice for sane men.” For Bundy, in “the real world of real political leaders” a “decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one’s own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.” 57

Bundy’s belief that the more esoteric strategic debates had lost touch with reality led in 1983 to the argument that because both sides would be able to retaliate with thermonuclear weapons even after the “strongest possible pre- emptive attack,” there was in place a form of deterrence which he described as “existential,” resting on “uncertainty about what could happen.” 58 This removed the strategic effect from particular weapons programs, preparations for employment, or doctrinal pronouncements. So long as any superpower war carried a high risk of utter calamity, it was best not to take risks. This notion proved to be extremely seductive not only because of its intuitive plausibil- ity but because it solved all those perplexing problems of nuclear policy by rendering them virtually irrelevant, so long as they did not stray too far into the realms of recklessness and foolishness. Although in policymaking circles it was still extremely diffi cult to think of ways to assess the size and com- position of nuclear arsenals except by reference to the assumed requirements of actual exchanges, as evidenced in numerous debates in Washington over new weapons systems, these debates eventually acquired a routine quality. The scenarios became drained of credibility. Nuclear deterrence worked for the United States because it warned of the severe dangers of disrupting the status quo. The sense of danger depended not on the rationality of a nuclear response but on the residual doubt that once the passions of war had been unleashed no reliance could be placed on the irrationality of nuclear response.

The power of Armies is a visible thing,

Formal and circumscribed in time and space;

But who the limits of that power shall trace

Which a brave People into light can bring

Or hide, at will,—for freedom combating

By just revenge infl amed? No foot may chase,

No eye can follow, to a fatal place

That power, that spirit, whether on the wing

Like the strong wind, or sleeping like the wind

Within its awful caves

—William Wordsworth, 1811

If nuclear weapons pulled military strategy away from conventional warfare in one direction, guerrilla warfare moved it in another. With nuclear weapons the issue was about threatening society with extreme force. Guerrilla warfare was about the response of an enraged society to illegitimate military force. Although it later acquired an association with radical political movements, its basic attraction was as a method that could help weaker sides survive. Although as a form of warfare it was not at all new, and had recently been adopted in the American War of Independence, guerrilla warfare gained

Guerrilla Warfare chapter 14

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its name from the tactics of ambush and harassment used during the “little war” fought by Spaniards against French occupation forces at the start of the nineteenth century. Wordsworth’s poem refers to this campaign.

Guerrilla warfare was therefore defensive, fought on home territory with the advantages of popular support and local knowledge. It was geared to a strategy of exhaustion, gaining time in the hope that the enemy would tire or that something else would turn up. Such warfare was unlikely to be suc- cessful on its own. Irregular forces worked most effectively when providing a distraction to an enemy also facing regular forces in a more conventional campaign. Napoleon suffered in Spain because he also faced the British army. Similarly, Russian peasants made life additionally miserable for French forces in 1812. Clausewitz, who experienced the French occupation of Prussia and was in a position to observe the Spanish insurrection and the French debacle in Russia, made guerrilla warfare the subject of his early lectures and writing. In On War , it was considered a form of defense. By the 1820s, when Clausewitz wrote most of On War , it had become an uncommon strategy. Popular energies appeared to have been played out and conservative states were in command.

Guerrilla warfare could cause an occupying force trouble, but it was the “last and desperate resort” of an otherwise defeated people. A general upris- ing against an occupier would need to be “nebulous and elusive,” because as soon as it became concrete it could be crushed. Though a strategically defen- sive concept, the tactics of guerrilla warfare had to be offensive, aiming to catch the enemy unawares. Guerrilla warfare would most likely be effective when conducted from rough and inaccessible terrain in a country’s interior. Clausewitz did not see irregular militias as being of much value in the absence of regular forces. 1 Jomini had a similar response. He understood the challenges militias could pose for occupying forces, and how diffi cult they might make wars of expansion if popular opinion could readily be excited, but he recoiled from the prospect. Wars in which entire peoples had become animated by reli- gious, national, or ideological differences he considered deplorable, “organized assassination,” arousing “violent passions that make them spiteful, cruel, and terrible.” He acknowledged that his “prejudices were with the good old times when the French and English guards courteously invited each other to fi re fi rst” rather than the “frightful epoch when priests, women, and children throughout Spain plotted the murder of isolated soldiers.” 2

During the 1830s, the possibility that guerrilla warfare might serve an insurrection was raised by Mazzini’s failed Young Italy campaign, with the red-shirted Giuseppe Garibaldi emerging as a gifted guerrilla commander. Despite this example, the main models for revolutionary violence remained a sudden uprising of the masses that would catch authorities by surprise. The

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idea that they might be worn down gradually in a prolonged campaign did not catch on. Frederick Engels, in an article drafted for Karl Marx, saw the emergence of the guerrillas in Spain as a refl ection of the failure of the Spanish army. Engels presented them as more of a mob than an army, moti- vated by “hatred, revenge, and love of plunder.” 3 He tended to think in terms of conventional military formations, even when contemplating revolution, and assumed that after a revolution a socialist republic would need a proper army for its defense. The presumption that a revolution would need a dis- ciplined fi ghting force of class-conscious proletarians continued to infl uence socialist thinking, so that guerrilla warfare was seen as the domain of anar- chists and criminals, of drunken riffraff indulging their violent tendencies. Though somewhat sympathetic to this view in Russia, Lenin refused to dis- miss guerrilla warfare entirely. But he believed it could only be a subordinate form of struggle, not the main method, and would benefi t from proper party discipline to keep it under control. Once the mass movement had reached a certain stage of development, guerrilla warfare was not out of the question during the “fairly large intervals” that would occur between the “big engage- ments” in the revolutionary civil war. 4

When, after the 1917 uprising, the Bolsheviks found themselves caught up in a civil war, military commissar Leon Trotsky also saw guerrilla warfare as a useful but subordinate form of fi ghting. It was demanding, so it required proper organization and direction and must be free from amateurish and adventurist infl uences. It could not “overthrow” an enemy but could cause diffi culties. Whereas the stronger force would seek annihilation of the enemy using large-scale, centrally directed mass armies, the weaker force—Trotsky argued—might seek to disorganize the stronger using light, mobile units operating independently of one another. This followed Delbrück’s distinction between annihilation and exhaustion. Trotsky was clearly in favor of annihila- tion. “The Soviet power has been all the time, and is still, the stronger side.” Its task was to crush the enemy “so as to free its hands for socialist construction.” It was the enemy, therefore, that was attempting guerrilla warfare. This refl ected the shift, for the proletariat was now the ruling class and the tsarists were the rebels. Trotsky denied that his strategy was too ponderous and positional, and lacked mobility. 5 The Red Army had begun with “volunteers, rebels, primi- tive, inexperienced guerrillas” and turned them into “proper, trained, disci- plined regiments and divisions.” Nonetheless, as the civil war became more challenging, Trotsky sought to form mobile guerrilla detachments, supple- ments to “the weighty masses of the Red Army,” that would cause problems for the enemy on its rear. 6 Guerrilla warfare was therefore viewed, even by radicals, as a lesser strategy, a defensive expedient but not a source of victory.

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Lawrence of Arabia

The expansion of the European empires during the nineteenth century prompted regular uprisings and rebellions, which put their own demands on regular forces. The British army put these tasks under the heading of impe- rial policing. The classic discussion was C. E. Calwell’s Small Wars , published in 1896, which observed that as a general rule, “the quelling of the rebellion in distant colonies means protracted, thankless, invertebrate war.” 7 It was Thomas Edward Lawrence, an archaeologist who made his name during the Great War seeking to foment an Arab rebellion against Ottoman rule, who did the most to develop principles about how guerrilla warfare should be fought rather than how it could be contained. Lawrence had not only a star- tling story to tell but also impressive literary gifts. His vivid metaphors and aphorisms help explain his infl uence. His memoir of the campaign, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom , remains a classic. His basic philosophy of guerrilla warfare, with a brief history of the revolt, was fi rst published in October 1920. 8 After the war, he struggled with the myth he had helped to create about himself, as well as with the failure of the Allied government to honor the promises of independence Lawrence had made to the Arabs.

The campaign against the Turks had begun in 1916 with operations against the long railroad between Medina and Damascus, a key supply line. The regular loss of trains frustrated the Turks, for whom fully protecting the railroad appeared impossible against the Arab enemy, Eventually, this turned into a full-scale Arab revolt—a major distraction for the Turks. Lawrence described a moment early in 1917. He had been wrestling with the limita- tions of irregular forces. They could not do what armed forces were supposed to do:  “seek for the enemy’s army, his centre of power, and destroy it in battle.” Moreover, they would not effectively attack a position nor could they defend one, as he had recently discovered. He concluded that their advantage lay in “depth, not in face” and that the threat of attack could be used to get the Turks stuck in defensive positions.

Lawrence then became ill and contemplated the future of his campaign while he recovered. He was “tolerably read” in military theory and impressed by Clausewitz. Yet he was repelled by the idea of an “absolute war” that was concerned solely with the destruction of enemy forces in “the one process battle.” It felt like buying victory in blood and he did not think the Arabs would want to do that. They were fi ghting for their freedom (“a pleasure only to be tasted by a man alive”). While armies were like plants, “immo- bile as a whole, fi rm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head,” the Arab irregulars were more “a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front

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or back, drifting about like gas.” The Turks would lack enough men to cope with the “ill will of the Arab people,” especially as they were likely to treat the rebellion in absolute terms. They would not realize “to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” Attacking the Turks’ supply lines would keep them short of materiel. Instead of a war of contact there was the possibility here of a war of detachment. This would involve becoming known to the enemy only when there was an opportu- nity to attack and avoiding being put on the defensive by “perfect” intel- ligence. There was a psychological aspect to this. Lawrence spoke, in the commonplace of the time, of the “crowd” and the need to adjust the “spirit to the point where it becomes fi t to exploit in action, the prearrangement of a changing opinion to a certain end.” The Arabs not only had to order their own men’s minds but also those of the enemy (“as far as we could reach them”) and of supporting and hostile nations, as well as the “neutrals looking on.”

To this end Lawrence developed a small, highly mobile, and well- equipped force, which could take advantage of the Turks having distrib- uted their forces thinly. The Arabs had nothing to defend and excellent knowledge of the desert. Tactics were “tip and run, not pushes, but strokes.” Having made their point in one place, they would not hold it but would instead move on to strike again elsewhere. Victory depended on the use of “speed, concealment, accuracy of fi re.” “Irregular war,” Lawrence observed, “is more intellectual than a bayonet charge.” These tactics reduced the Turks to “helplessness.” Yet he conceded that this irregular war was not the main event in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, which came as a result of a much more conventional push by British forces under General Allenby. In this respect, Lawrence’s campaign was a “side show upon a side show,” though signifi cant in a supporting role. In his acknowledgment of Allenby’s role there was a tinge of regret that this deprived him of an opportunity to see whether war could be won without battles. It had been a “thrilling experi- ment” to “prove irregular war or rebellion to be an exact science.” He noted the advantages: an unassailable base (in his case the Red Sea ports protected by the Royal Navy), an alien enemy unable to manage the space it was occupying, and a friendly population (“Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passive sympathetically.”). Lawrence offered the following synopsis:

In fi fty words:  granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the

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algebraic factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfection of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.

It is not surprising to fi nd that Liddell Hart was enamored of Lawrence, for he was the epitome of the indirect approach in action. The two men had brief correspondence after the war, and Liddell Hart borrowed Lawrence’s insights. They later became friends when Liddell Hart summarized the main themes of Lawrence’s thought for an article in the 1929 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , for which he was military editor. Lawrence’s exploits served a didactic purpose in illustrating the indirect approach, and Liddell Hart was impressed by this man who was both a thinker and doer and had found him- self with such an infl uential command without have passed through the mili- tary system. Thereafter, Liddell Hart wrote an admiring biography in which he put Lawrence on a plinth. 9 He was intrigued with Lawrence’s observation that the Arabs hankered after bloodless victories. Otherwise he had little interest in irregular warfare for radical purposes. If anything, Liddell Hart disapproved of it because it normally led to brutality and terrorism. What enthused him was the possibility that regular warfare could develop along the lines Lawrence had shown to be possible with irregular warfare. 10

Mao and Giap

This same resistance to the idea that guerrilla warfare could be a separate route to victory was evident in the strategy of Mao Zedong, who led the Chinese communists to victory over their nationalist opponents in 1949. Mao saw guerrilla warfare as an acceptable strategy when on the defensive but not as an independent route to victory. He relied on it whenever his immedi- ate need was simply to survive. As this was often the case, his writings on guerrilla tactics have a certain authority, but his preferred form of warfare involved mobile, regular forces. Reliance on guerrilla warfare was dictated not only by the fact that for some twenty years Mao’s forces were facing stronger armies in the former of the nationalist Kuomintang and Japanese occupation forces (from 1937–1945) but also because he made his base in rural areas and came to see the peasants rather than the urban proletariat as the source of revolution.

Although Mao came from a rural family, his initial work as a Communist Party activist in the 1920s focused on labor struggles. This was required by the Party’s urban leadership, but Mao could not see how the working classes in such a vast, populous, and agrarian country as China could act as agents of

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change. After witnessing peasant uprisings in Hunan, he observed in 1927 that the peasants, properly mobilized, could be “like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back,” sweeping away “all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt offi cials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.” That year a fragile united front between the nationalists and the communists collapsed. In the ensuing con- frontation, Mao’s army was defeated and he was forced to fl ee. He concluded quickly that it was only by means of guerrilla warfare in the expanses of rural China that survival was possible. 11 The next stage in his thinking, following the party leadership’s disastrous forays against nationalist cities in 1930, was to conceive of the countryside not so much as a base from which to attack cities but as the place where the revolution could be made. He built up a new power base—the Kiangsi Soviet—but another failed conventional offensive against nationalist strongholds in 1934 led to a counterattack which put this base under pressure. He escaped by a mass evacuation, known as the Long March, which succeeded to the extent that he evaded capture—at an extremely high cost. The communists marched some six thousand miles for a year, until a new safe haven was found in Shensi province in October 1935. By then, Mao’s force had been much reduced, to barely ten thousand men. According to Chang and Halliday, the nationalists actually allowed the communist army to escape—as Stalin was holding the son of nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek hostage— and then Mao took an unnecessarily long route to avoid joining a rival’s larger force. 12 With the old leadership discredited and a reputation, whether or not deserved, as a military commander and expert on rural China, Mao became Communist Party leader.

In July 1937, Japan invaded China. Mao had already proposed a united front against the Japanese. Though agreed upon the previous December, it was always tenuous in practice, not least because it suited Mao more than the nationalists as he was able to gain time. The nationalists were on the defensive, their leaders and offi cials pushed out of signifi cant parts of the country. Meanwhile the Japanese were unable to establish effective authority, so the communists were given an opportunity to fi ll the polit- ical vacuum. They were accepted as the representatives of the anti-Japa- nese united front and given a hearing for the economic and social reforms they sought. The peasantry were given a chance to transform local power structures. At the same time Mao was extremely cautious when it came to taking on the Japanese. He concentrated on survival, especially once the United States entered the war in December 1941. Even after the war, when the civil war resumed in China, Mao remained cautious, expecting at best a negotiated peace with the Kuomintang. 13 By 1947, he had begun to

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appreciate that although the nationalists notionally occupied large parts of the country, their roots were not deep and were at last vulnerable to a com- munist offensive. He seized power in 1949.

Mao’s ideas had taken shape a decade earlier. In their early formulations they diverged from received wisdom. As he was not then the Party leader, these ideas were formulated in more pragmatic and conditional terms than their more dogmatic later expressions suggested. The most authoritative pre- sentation of the theory of people’s war was a series of lectures in 1937, in the aftermath of the Long March and the Japanese invasion. These formed the basis of Mao’s treatise on guerrilla warfare. 14 They refl ected his conviction that the peasantry could be an agent of revolutionary change. Because he was not working with the urban proletariat, who were supposed to acquire politi- cal consciousness as a matter of course, he put political education and mobili- zation at the heart of people’s war. This required the masses to understand the politics of the struggle, the objectives for which it was being fought, and the program which would be implemented when it was won. The time gained by guerrilla tactics, therefore, had to be used productively “to conduct pro- paganda among the masses” to help them gain revolutionary power. Politics, therefore, always had to be in command.

Mao played down material factors, such as economic and military power, in which he was evidently defi cient, in favor of human power and morale: “It is people, not things that are decisive.” 15 Given the armed struggle in which he had been engaged for over a decade, it was not surprising that he insisted in another famous aphorism that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” refl ecting the twists and turns of the armed struggle that had shaped his life. Mao had read Clausewitz and Lawrence. 16 John Shy judged him to be in some respects closer to Jomini, with “similar maxims, repetitions, and exhorta- tions,” and the same “compounding of analysis and prescription” and “didac- tic drive.” 17 The infl uence of Sun Tzu was clear in his observations on how to wear down a superior enemy while avoiding battle (“The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass. The enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats; we pursue”) and the importance of intelligence and a better grasp of the situation (“Know the enemy and know yourself and you can fi ght a hundred battles without disaster”). 18

While guerrilla warfare had by necessity loomed large in his scheme, Mao was well aware of its limits. He described the basic principle of war as to “pre- serve oneself and to annihilate the enemy.” Guerrilla warfare was only relevant to the fi rst of these tasks, although this happened to be the one which preoc- cupied him for all but the last few years of his military struggles. He relied on its defensive properties—popular support and local knowledge—against

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an occupying force. In a well-known metaphor, he described how the people mobilized would be “a vast sea in which the enemy will be swallowed up” but in which their army would thrive like fi sh. 19 The importance of keep- ing unity between the guerrilla army and the local people was stressed in his three rules (“All actions are subject to command; Do not steal from the people; Be neither selfi sh nor unjust”) and eight remarks (“Replace the door when you leave the house; Roll up the bedding on which you have slept; Be courteous; Be honest in your transactions; Return what you borrow; Replace what you break; Do not bathe in the presence of women; Do not without authority search the pocketbooks of those you arrest”). 20

Unlike Lawrence, whose fi ghters could go out and attack the enemy at vulnerable points, Mao was wary of venturing too far from his base. His strategy was to lure the enemy into his areas of strength. Here he could go on the tactical offensive, but there were limits to the possibilities of a strategic offensive. His expectation of the war with Japan was that it was likely to be protracted. As he contemplated its likely course he identifi ed an optimum strategy in terms of three stages. The fi rst stage was defensive. Eventually a stalemate would be reached (second stage), and then the communists would have the confi dence and capabilities to move on to the offensive (third stage). Although at the time the Chinese were on their own, Mao was aware that at some point external factors that would undermine Japanese superiority might come into play. He saw a role for both guerrilla and positional (defense or attack of defi ned points) warfare, but the best results would require mobile warfare. Only that could lead to annihilation of the enemy defi ned in terms of loss of resistance rather than complete physical destruction. Mao was fi ghting an enemy with whom there might be a stalemate, but never a compromise. So the third stage demanded regular forces. Until these could be developed, guerrilla units would be crucial. In the third stage they would play no more than a supporting role.

The most assiduous follower of Mao after his revolution was General Vo Nguyen Giap, a schoolteacher from Vietnam who fought against colonial France and then the U.S.-supported anti-communist government in the south. He immersed himself in Maoist theory and practice in China in 1940 and then returned to Vietnam to lead the fi ght against the Japanese and later the French. He is also reported to have described Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom as his “fi ghting gospel” that he was “never without.” Giap took Mao’s three stages seriously, but his major innovation was his readiness to move between the different stages according to circumstances, whereas Mao had seen these as sequential steps. Vietnam was a relatively small country compared to China and so required greater fl exibility. In particular, Giap

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was prepared to use regular forces before the third stage, to hold space, for example.

His description of guerrilla warfare captured the best practice of the Asian communist struggle of the mid-twentieth century. Guerrilla war served the broad masses of an economically backward country standing up to a “well- trained army of aggression.” Against the enemy’s strength was poised a “boundless heroism.” The front was not fi xed but was “wherever the enemy is found” and suffi ciently exposed to be vulnerable to a local concentration of forces, employing “initiative, fl exibility, rapidity, surprise, suddenness in attack and retreat.” The enemy would be exhausted “little by little by small victories.” Losses were to be avoided “even at the cost of losing ground.” 21

In the communist mainstream, from Engels to Giap, guerrilla warfare was therefore never seen as suffi cient in itself. It was a way of holding out until it was possible to develop a true military capacity. At any time it might be all that could be done to stay in the game. But if the aim was to seize power, the regular forces of the state would have to be defeated.

Counterinsurgency

Two books published in the 1950s sought to capture the American struggle to come to terms with communist insurgencies. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American , based on the author’s experiences in Vietnam in the early 1950s, focused on the earnest but naïve American, Alden Pyle, who had a theoretical concept of what Vietnam needed but no true understanding. He was “sincere in his way,” but as “incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others.” Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, a professor and military offi cer, respectively, intended to write a nonfi ction book about the mistakes being made by the Americans in confronting communism in southeast Asia. But they decided, correctly, that they could make their point more effectively through fi ction. In The Ugly American , there was more of an American hero. Colonel Edwin Hillendale helped run successful campaigns in South Vietnam and the Philippines. The message of this book was that Americans seeking to infl uence events in these societies should live among the people and get to know their language and cultures. “Every person and every nation has a key which will open their hearts,” observes Hillendale. “If you use the right key, you can maneuver any person or any nation any way you want.” 22

The main characters in both books were often assumed to have been inspired by General Edward Lansdale. Greene always denied this was the case

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for his book, but Hillendale evidently was modeled on Lansdale. In 1961, Lansdale became an adviser to President Kennedy after being introduced to him as one of the few Americans who really understood the demands of coun- terinsurgency. Lansdale understood that without popular support there was “no political base for supporting the fi ght.” People had to be convinced that their lives could be improved through social action and political reform, as well as by the physical protection that came with sensitive military opera- tions. This required a responsive, non-corrupt government; well-behaved armed forces; and a cause in which they could believe.

John Kennedy endorsed The Ugly American as a senator, attracted by its central message that people in desperate situations could be as inspired by the ideals of American liberalism as those of Soviet communism. One of Kennedy’s fi rst acts as president was to demand that the American military take counterinsurgency far more seriously. 23 Kennedy encouraged all those around him to read Mao and Che Guevara, the theorist of the Cuban revolu- tion, and took a personal interest in special forces and their training manuals and equipment. Groups were established to coordinate what was described as “subterranean war,” with South Vietnam soon the main area of concern. The challenge was seen to be less with the diagnosis—drawing attention to the problems with development, weak governmental institutions, and militaries that were more instruments of repression than sources of security for ordinary people—than in working out what to do about it. There was considerable study of Maoist doctrine, which meant that American policy became reactive in the sense of trying to determine whether the North Vietnamese commu- nists were moving from the second to the third stage, or focusing on counter- ing communist propaganda and tactics.

The Americans were infl uenced by the successful British experience in Malaya as described by Robert Thompson. 24 Under the leadership of Sir Gerald Templer, a communist insurgency had been contained. “The shooting side of the business is only 25 percent of the trouble,” observed Templer, “and the other 75 percent lies in getting the people of this country behind us.” The answer was not “pouring more troops into the jungle.” It was instead, in a phrase Templer made famous, “in the hearts and minds of the people.” He understood the importance of civic action but also the need to show a determination to win. This required a readiness to be ruthless. 25 Templer was successful, but he enjoyed favorable conditions. In Malaya, the communists were largely associated with the minority Chinese population, their resupply routes were poor, and economic conditions were reasonable.

The unsuccessful French experiences in Vietnam and Algeria were refl ected in the writings of David Galula who provided one of the more lucid

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texts on how to counter communist tactics, and who popularized the concept of “insurgency.” He also stressed the importance of the loyalty of the popula- tion. A successful counterinsurgency must ensure the people felt protected so they could cooperate without fear of retribution. Victory would require paci- fying one area after another, each serving as a secure base from which to move to the next. 26 Galula’s actual experience in Algeria was mixed. His efforts to treat local people positively were not matched by many of his fellow offi cers. When it came to propaganda, he judged the French “defi nitely and infi nitely more stupid than our opponents.” Like other counterinsurgent specialists, Galula found that his theory fi tted neither the local political structures nor army culture. 27 The main effect of the attempt by the French offi cer class to develop a counterinsurgency doctrine that matched the communists in its political intensity and ruthlessness was that they began to turn their ire on Paris for not supporting their efforts with suffi cient vigor—even attempting a coup. 28

An awareness of the need to give the anti-communist South Vietnamese government more legitimacy and turn its forces into agents of democracy and development refl ected a theoretical objective that was far removed from the realities on the ground. It was understood that any fi ghting should be done by indigenous forces, but that left open the question of what should be done when these forces could no longer cope. It was one thing if the insurgency was a response to local conditions cloaked in the rhetoric of inter- national communism; if it truly was being pushed from outside by commu- nists, that was another. The U.S. military was doubtful that this was really a new type of insurgency and preferred to treat it as old-fashioned aggression. Counterinsurgency theory suggested that the role of military action was to create suffi cient security to introduce programs to improve the social con- ditions of the people, thereby winning over their “hearts and minds” and denying the insurgents bases, recruits, and support. Against this the military argued that wars were won by eliminating enemy armed forces and frustrat- ing their operations. This supported a policy of “search and destroy” through shelling and bombing areas where the enemy was believed to be hiding, though the enemy had often moved on and the attacks led to civilian deaths and popular resentment.

One of those involved in the internal discussions later commented rue- fully on the “somewhat simplistic” assumptions about a monolithic form of threat, following the script of a “war of national liberation.” Under this mindset, sight of the “domestic origins and root causes of internal turmoil” was lost, which meant that the insurgency was treated as if it was “a clearly articulated military force instead of the apex of a pyramid deeply embedded

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in society.” 29 Another offi cial questioned the very description of opponents as “insurgents” instead of revolutionaries or rebels because this denied the pos- sibility that they might be champions of a popular movement. It was hard to accept that the opponents were often local and popular and that their victims were associated with repression. 30 The basic problem was that ameliorating the “worst causes of discontent” and redressing “the most fl agrant inequities” would require positive action—and in some cases, radical reform—by the local government, yet the measures being proposed threatened to undermine the government’s position because they would involve altering the country’s social structure and domestic economy. 31 It is also important to note that the original formulations of counterinsurgency doctrine assumed that the main work would be undertaken by local forces, assisted by American resources and advisors. The use of American forces on a large scale was to be avoided. 32 There were many examples of this during the 1960s. In this respect, South Vietnam was the exception, but it was an exception that clouded all later thoughts on counterinsurgency theory and practice.

By the start of 1965, it was apparent that it was going to be very diffi cult to deal with the domestic sources of insurgency. Instead, American atten- tion switched to dealing with the supply lines coming from the north. The confl ict was fi rmly framed in terms of a fi ght with the communist leadership in North Vietnam and beyond rather than as a power struggle within South Vietnam. At this time, Tom Schelling’s concepts of bargaining and coercive diplomacy were particularly infl uential. This can be seen even in discussions of Vietnam, a situation far removed from the one to which Schelling had most applied himself—a superpower confrontation over a prized piece of real estate in the center of Europe and directly linked to a possible nuclear war. 33 The fi gure in the U.S. Government most infl uenced by Schelling during the 1960s was John McNaughton, an academic lawyer from Harvard who died in an air crash in July 1967. He had worked with Schelling on the Marshall Plan in the late 1940s, and the two remained good friends. When McNaughton spoke of arms control, for example, he showed interest in the notion of the “reciprocal fear of surprise attack” and “non-zero-sum games.” 34 He is said to have remarked that the Cuban missile crisis demonstrated the realism of Schelling’s games. 35 McNaughton was a key fi gure in the development of the U.S. policy on Vietnam, working closely with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. One of his memos was famously described by a colleague as the reductio ad absur- dum of the planner’s art, combining realpolitik with the hyper-rationalist belief in control of the most refi ned American think tank. 36 In a report of a working group McNaughton chaired in February 1964, 37 one suggestion was

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pure Schelling: it would be possible to infl uence Hanoi’s decisions by action designed “to hurt but not to destroy.” 38 Also drawn from Schelling was the proposition that “a decision to use force if necessary, backed by resolute and extensive deployment, and conveyed by every possible means to our adversar- ies, gives the best present chance of avoiding the actual use of such force.” The basic principle was that “a pound of threat is worth an ounce of action— as long as we are not bluffi ng.” 39

The main threat his group had in mind was the use of American air power. At the time, the government was still trying to avoid using ground forces. But that could not achieve much of direct military value, as the supply lines were hard to disrupt and mass air attacks on civilian populations were considered unacceptable. McNaughton came up with the idea of coercive air strikes with a political purpose, which he described as “progressive squeeze- and-talk,” orchestrating diplomatic communications with graduated mili- tary pressure. Even if the United States eventually gave up, it was important to show that it had been “willing to keep promises, be tough, take risks, get bloodied, and hurt the enemy badly.” 40 McNaughton was thus trying to fi nd ways of giving the impression of commitment without being truly resolute, of following one course while not closing off others.

At the start of 1965, McNaughton consulted Schelling on exactly how the North could be coerced in these unpromising circumstances. According to one account, the two men wrestled unsatisfactorily with the question of “what could the United States ask the North to stop doing that they would obey, that we would soon know they obeyed, and that they could not simply resume doing after the bombing had ceased.” Kaplan comments, with some satisfaction: “So assured, at times glibly so, when writing about sending sig- nals with force, infl icting pain to make an opponent behave and weaving patterns of communication through tactics of coercive warfare in theory, Tom Schelling, when faced with a real-life ‘limited war,’ was stumped, had no idea where to begin.” 41 In fact, Schelling was highly skeptical about the likely value of a bombing campaign against the North. He noted the weak diplo- macy accompanying the bombing and hoped that there had been private communications to Hanoi of a less ambiguous nature. 42 Schelling’s reason- ing, while suggestive and provocative, could not by itself generate strategies because that required the introduction of levels of complexity that his theo- retical structure could not handle.

The new civilian strategists had some infl uence on the early stages of the U.S. policy regarding Vietnam, but the overriding infl uence was American military preferences. In some respects, the two came from the same start- ing point: a focus on techniques and tactics separate from political context.

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Counterinsurgency theory, like nuclear strategy, developed as a special body of expertise geared to discussing special sorts of military relationships as if they were special types of war. As discussed, Mao and Giap never saw guer- rilla tactics as more than expedients for when they were weak. They did not think they could win a “guerrilla war”—success at this level would allow them to move on to the next stage defi ned by the familiar clash of regular armies. What they thought was truly distinctive to their type of warfare was the attention paid to political education and propaganda.

Vietnam, a war for which the civilian strategists had not prepared and on which they had relatively little of value to say, marked the end of the “golden age” of strategic studies. Just as the arrival of mutual assured destruction and a period of relative calm took the urgency out of the Cold War, Vietnam “poisoned the academic well.” 43 Colin Gray charged the civilian “men of ideas” with being overconfi dent about the ease with which theory might be transferred to the “world of action.” The prophets had become courtiers, living off their intellectual capital. Their “dual-loyalty” to the needs of prob- lem-oriented offi cials on the one hand and the disinterested “policy-neutral” standards of scholarship on the other “had tended to produce both irrelevant policy advice and poor scholarship.” 44 In response to this criticism, Brodie praised policy engagement and defended the small group of civilian strate- gists who had accepted the burden of making sense of the new nuclear world, because the military were incapable of doing so. Yet having left RAND in 1966 bemoaning the “astonishing lack of political sense” and ignorance of diplomatic and military history among the engineers and economists, he readily accepted Vietnam as a consequence of these tendencies. 45