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1
Challenges for International
Secu rity E n the ~ 990s
R. James Woolsey
When Dr. Press called me a while
back to make these remarks tonight, and I was deeply honored to be
invited, he was gentle in his polite way, but his underlying message was,
"Keep it general, Woolsey, and do not try to lecture all these distinguished
scientists, the way you are wont to from time to time, on Me virtues of
small mobile ICBMs and 30 PSI hard mobile launchers and the like."
This subtle admonition not to lecture, lawyer-like, recalled an expen-
ence I had when I was a lieutenant in the Anny, working in the Office of
the Secretary of Defense for Alain Enthoven, in Systems Analysis, back at
the end of the 1960s. My boss was an Air Force colonel, a very able man
with a great deal of technical training and scientific background. We were
working on intelligence issues, working with another staff, part of the
intelligence community, that was supposed to produce an interagency
paper for us to review and take to a meeting on Monday.
Late Friday afternoon he said, "Jim, do you want to come in and help
me work on this tomorrow, because we have to get this paper ready?" I
said, "Arch" Systems Analysis was an informal place and lieutenants
called colonels by their first name "I am glad to come work all weekend,
no problem, but the other staff is going to put the paper together. We are
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CHAllENGES FOR THE 1990s
just supposed to read it and go to the meeting on Monday. Why are we
writing our own?"
He said, "Well, you know it is not going to be any good. We really
have to do the work for everybody." ~ said, "Well, I am glad to do it, but
why do you think it is not going to be any good?" He said, "You know
that staff out there; it is a bunch of lawyers."
I pulled a slightly long face, having just been nodded that week that ~
had actually passed the bar and being moderately proud of that modest
achievement. He realized that he had said something—he was a kind
man, too, just like Frank Press. And so he said, "Oh, km, I'm sorry. I
don't mean like you. ~ mean real lawyers."
This morning's newspaper was remarkable. Your colBeague of tomor-
row, Roald SagUeev, as wed as a fascinating economist, Mr. Smiliov, and,
of course, most remarkably, Sakharov himself, have been elected to the
Congress of People's Deputies Sakharov after demonstrations in the
streets in Moscow in his support.
One hundred fifty thousand students massed in Beijing in Tiananmen
Square, chanting for democracy and liberty with signs in English and
Chinese, singing the Internationale, "Anse ye prisoners of starvation,
arise ye wretched of the earth." Portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and
Stalin have long been down on Tiananmen Square—only Mao is left at
one end and on the other end of the Square, overlooking this scene, is
another portrait: Colonel Sanders. The largest Kentucky fried chicken
restaurant in the world is now on Tiananmen Square. So as the leadership
of communist China walks out of the funeral which they are attending
there~he memorial service past tens of thousands of students chanting
slogans that would have been familiar to Thomas Jefferson, they are
overseen by the founder of their regime and by the Kentucky colonel. The
times are quite remarkable.
It seems to me that the overall issue we have to assess in this circum-
stance—particularly given your program for tomorrow and me title of
your organization, the Committee on International Security and Arms
Control is really what the relationship is in this time and in these
circumstances between intemational security and anns control.
There is an old parlor game in which one is given the answer and is
supposed to invent He question. For example, "9W." What is the
question to which that might be the answer? "Do you spell it win a V,
Mr. Wagner?" If the answer is anus control, what is the question?
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ClIAI1ENGES FOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
It seems to me that one problem we have had over the course of the last
20 years or so of negotiating with the Soviets on, first, strategic, and, if
you count MBFR and I suppose you should—conventional arms con-
trol, is the assumption on, more or less, the left-hand side of the political
spectrum, that arms control is The Answer (capital T. capital A) and, on
the right-hand side of the political spectrum, that it is The Problem
(capital T. capital P).
In fact, in these days and times I really do not think it is either one, at
least not with capital letters. I think the loins Chiefs' formulation some
years ago about SALT II, "modest but useful," is about right and that we
are moving into a period in which we could with a lithe bit of luck and
some sensible planning on our own part and the continuation of Mr.
Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union—produce some reasonably
modest, useful arms control agreements, both on strategic and on conven-
tional forces.
But I would view them more as a lubricant for the evolution of stable
and sensible national security policies on our part, and in the East as well,
rather than as some overriding or overweening objective—not an Answer
(capital A).
I am speaking of an evolution in a general direction toward strategic
and conventional force stability, and when one talks that way—often with
our Soviet friends~ne gets the answer, "But what is your objective?
What is your end point? How do you know what you are trying to do
unless you know exactly where it is you are trying to go? Do you not
believe that a nonnuclear world is what we should be trying for? What
steps are you taking in order to get there?"
In talking with them I am often reminded of a wonderful exchange in
the Holmes-Lasky letters between justice Oliver Wendeld Holmes, Ir.,
and the British socialist, Harold Lasky. Lasky, in his continental style and
as part of his continental tradition—reaching, really, back to Plato, and in
its notion of a general, overald approach toward philosophical problems
back through Hegel, Kant, Marx, Descartes~eveloped a very elaborate
argument from first principles of something that he wanted to convince
Holmes of.
Hobrnes wrote back a one-sentence letter: "My dear Lasky, man was
born to formulate general propositions, and none of them was ever worm
a damn. Yours, Holmes."
You could not have a clearer confrontation between the tradition of
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CIlAllENGES FOR TlIE l990s
reaching, really, back to Aristotle—pragmatism and the empiricism of
Mills, Locke, Hume, Will James, ant! Holmes and the tradition of seeking
~ · · · · -
re~uge In an overnc lng pnnclp .e.
And that, in part, is what is going on when we and our friends—
sometimes our allies! friends such as the French, but certainly in our
discussions with the Soviets—end up haggling with one another about
whether or not you can make progress without a single overriding objec-
tive. Those of us in He pragmatic tradition tent! to think it is Al right if
you can get the herd roughly heacled west and see if you cannot make
some progress (sort of like the Lewis and Clark expedition); whereas the
Soviet perspective is often far more one of trying to formulate a general,
overreaching concept, all-embracing and not just the Soviets but in
many ways the continental Europeans as weld. It is an attitude about
progress that works in a very different way, very much the way Holmes
and Lasky clashed. Isaiah Berlin calls it the difference between "hedge-
hogs" (who "know one big thing") and "foxes" (who "know many things"~.
Now I consider myself very much in the Holmes, the fox, tradition on
this dispute. I have very rarely—and this will not surprise you for a
lawyer—met a general proposition of which I was not at least partially
skeptical. I have a feeling that the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square
and the demonstrations on behalf of Sakharov in the streets of Moscow a
short time back which had something to do, I believe, with his election
yesterday~nay indicate some development along these more pragmatic
lines of thinking in the East as well as in the West. We do not know where
all of this is going on their side. It may be quite hopeful, but it may not
work out.
After all, if one wants to look for historical comparisons—for Russia,
let us say there was another nation, at one time a very powerful rlation,
that stood on the frontiers of Europe, and had an extremely autocratic state
and church culture, the church as part of the state. It saw itself as the
bulwark against Islam and protector of Europe and came into the mid-
twentieth century after a period as a monarchy and as a totalitarian power,
albeit a small one. I am speaking of Spain.
It is less than a long generation from totalitarianism to autocracy to
democracy in Spain. If we want to look for a positive historical model,
Spain might be it. And in spite of its very different historical experience,
there are some interesting parallels between Russia and Spain, drawn very
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ClIALLENGES FOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
wed, ~ would say, by km Billington in his wonderful work, The Icon and
the Axe.
If we want to be optimistic about where the Russian empire might go,
we might think of Spain. If we want to be pessimistic, we will look back
on the four or five or six attempts at reform in the Russian empire before
the coming of the communist revolution, and the couple or so afterward,
and remember that the reforms of Peter the Great and Alexander II and, In
the early twentieth century, the reforms by Stolypin under Nicholas II, the
reforms at the end of Lenin's life, the New Economic Policy (NEP), the
political reforms under Khrushchev have Al in one way been followed
by sometimes accompanied by a period of repression and retrogres-
sion.
In my pessimistic moments I think of Gorbachev as a modem-day
Alexander II. The optimistic young czar who came to power in 1855 in
the aftermath of the Crimean War, who freed the serfs, who held forth to
the world and to Russia as a whole a great dream of liberalization, whose
refonns began to slow over the years as the aristocracy, the army, the
church, and the structural powers in Russia thwarted his effor~until he
was finally assassinated.
Are we looking toward a Spain or toward a rerun of Alexander II? I do
not know. What I do believe is that for a substantial period of time some
of the old verities of maintaining deterrence~eterrence with a nuclear
component to it and collective security with allies such as NATO and
Japan are going to have to be a centerpiece of our policy in dealing with
the Soviet Union.
Nuclear weapons cannot be "disinvented" anyway. One may, in Sam
Nunn's phrase, be able to evolve toward a "less nuclear world." I think
that is plausible with survivable nuclear forces, forces that are well con-
troBed (by command and communications), safe and secure against ter-
ror~sm and accidents. I do not believe that reducing numbers is the main
thing, although it may be, in some circumstances, moderately useful. But
I think our long-run objective ought, ready, to be boredom with nuclear
weapons—not abolition, not a crusade.
Arms control, I think, has a role in that evolution. First of all, it has to
follow the Hippocratic oath, pr~mum non nocere; first of an, do no hand.
Proposals such as those that were instituted at the end of 1985 and are still
formally He position of the U.S. Government, such as a ban on mobile
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CHAI1ENGES FOR THE 1990s
ICBMs, to me, violate this arms control Hippocratic oath, since I think
mobiles are the best way not the only way, but the best way to achieve
survivable land-based forces for the long run.
It seems to me that what arms control may help accomplish is a shift
toward more survivable and safer systems. There is room for disagree-
ment about how to do this. I tend to focus on offensive forces and think
about things like mobility. Others concentrate more on SDI. But if one
stays within the framework of the START agreement as it is perhaps
ee-quarters to seven-eighths negotiated I believe that an agreement
with the Soviet Union within the next year or two is a reasonable prospect.
It is something that can set a framework for us to continue to maintain a
survivable and, hopefully, more boring nuclear deterrent as the years roll
on and we see what develops in this relationship with the East, whether
they take the path of modern Spain or of Russia under Alexander II.
Conventional forces of some strength and numbers I believe we are
going to need for a substantial number of years—partly for reasons
unrelated to the Soviet Union, having to do with renegade states such as
Libya and the rest. I think that our conventional deterrent in Europe and
the structure of NATO is, if we are lucky, going to last many more years
and will, in part, depend in some degree on reliance on a nuclear deterrent,
including some types of nuclear weapons maintained in Europe.
One may be able to decrease their numbers and radically reduce the
numbers of nuclear artillery shells, for example, but ~ believe some type
of nuclear capability is the glue that holds the alliance together. The com-
mitment of the American nuclear shield is going to be essential.
~ was at a conference a few years ago in which the evolution away from
nuclear and toward conventional deterrence was the main theme. A
French participant more.or less stopped the show by standing up and
saying, "I have heard at this conference much talk of conventional deter-
rence. I have only one thing to say. The history of the nation-state in
Europe for the last millennium teaches one and only one lesson with
absolute clarity: Conventional deterrence does not work."
It is a reasonable thought and no one had a very good answer, in spite
of a great deal of arm waving about replacing nuclear with conventional
deterrence that had taken place up until that time.
Equal numbers of conventional forces on each side are no guarantee of
stability, however. Our current proposals to the Soviets, ones which they
have come very close to matching on tanks and armored troop carriers and
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CHALLENGES FOR INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
ardUery, would suggest an evolution toward equal numbers at a level
slightly (S to 15 percent) below the current NATO levels. That is cer-
tainly better than what we have now, but it is no guarantee—as my French
friend would suggests any long-term stability.
The Germans, after all, attacked and won, outnumbered significantly in
both men and in armor, both against France and against Russia in 1940
and 1941. Within a two-hour drive of where we are now, i;here are no
fewer than eight battlefields on which Stonewall Jackson won, outnum-
bered two to one. Indeed, Stonewall Jackson never even considered it
interesting until he was outnumbered two to one.
Throughout military history it has been possible and plausible for able
commanders to concentrate their forces, break through, destroy the win of
their opponents, and succeed, even when outnumbered. So, equal num-
bers across the front in Europe, negotiated as part of an arms control
agreement or otherwise, are not going to do the job without something
else.
What is going to be necessary is reducing the ability for a blitzkrieg to
be conducted effectively. The cuts that Gorbachev announced in Decem-
ber, if they are taken in moment and effective and forward-deployed
forces as we can all hope and, I think, should expect they win be wild
certainly be a help to this end. But a good deal more is going to need to be
done in order to introduce some degree of stability into the conventional
balance. I think, for many, many years, stability is going to require some
degree of nuclear deterrence in order to ensure that the peace is kept
regardless of the degree of reform in the Soviet Union.
With the right type of changes on the Soviet side and on our side,
however, I think we can expect some substantial changes in the structure
of those forces deployed in Europe perhaps a rather greater reliance on
reserves both in Europe for the Europeans and in the United States for
ourselves. That, in my mind, is the best way to trot to save money in the
defense budget, not to try to destroy the modernization of our forces and
not to drag down the readiness across the board, as was done in the 1970s
in the aftermath of Vietnam.
It wild require, both for our allies and ourselves, some rather major
restructuring of the way our reserves work. But to me that is far and away
the most reasonable approach—far more so than most of the altema-
tives and it win take time. Almost any effort to try to save substantial
amounts of money out of the defense budget within the next year or two as
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CHALLENGES FOR THE 1990s
a result of arms control agreements or restructuring in response to Gor-
bachev or anything else are going to end up severely undercutting our
military position, ~ believe. But in time ~ think substantial amounts can be
saved if a major shift from active to reserve forces is handled in the proper
way.
~ want to finish up by saying something about what ~ think is going to
be, in many ways, the major challenge for international security for all of
us, if we are able to see a continued positive evolution in the Soviet
Union, maintain our own defenses prudently as ~ have suggested and
have, perhaps, some framework-seuing arms control agreements of the
sort that we are pointing toward in START and in the CFE (Conventional
Forces in Europe) talks, as both sides have made their proposals in
Vienna.
The area ~ want to mention briefly is environment and energy use,
because it affects our international security directly. Dependence for us
and even more for our European allies and the Japanese—on oil, particu-
larly from the Midge East, continues to be destabilizing. The Middle
East is unstable enough as a world hot spot for religious and nationalistic
rivalries without adding to it the West's dependence upon it for energy.
It is and I think it remains the most troubling part of the world from the
point of view of its importance, its instability, and the possibility of bow
the United States and the Soviet Union feeling they have vital interests
there and getting involved in some sort of hostilities in support of their
friends and allies.
I do not have to tell this audience that, of course, hydrocarbon burning
is a major part of the global warming problem as web. We are losing In
deforestation—which is also a major contributor roughly an area the
size of Austria in forests a year.
If present emission trends continue for hydrocarbons, according to
some recent work by Jessica Tuchman Matthews, with no offsetting
cooling mechanism such as increased clouds and the like you can take
your pick, but current models put Me temperature increase by the early
2030s (which is in the lifetime of today's college students) as an increase
of between 3 and ~ degrees Fahrenheit. The earth has not been that hot for
2 minion years, since before the beginning of homo sapiens.
Then let me share with you some recent energy statistics from the
Rocky Mountain Institute.
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CHAllE;NGES FOR INTERNATION~ S=UR~
In energy use we have gone~urselves, as a nation—from being
grotesque gluttons to merely being fulsome gourmands. From 1977 to
1985 we made some progress. We had about a 5 percent annual improve-
ment in our productivity in oil product use, mainly from a five-mile-per-
gaBon improvement in automobile efficiency.
We saved oil then about 80 percent faster than we needed to in order to
compensate both for our economic growth and for declining domestic
production, and we cut our imports in half. That has turned around in the
last few years. The amount of crude oil that we wasted in 1986 alone by
rolling back the automobile efficiency standards equaled the entire U.S.
previous year's imports from the Persian Gulf. It also equals, just about,
our annual expected output from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
should we tap it.
Our imports would plummet if we had only Japanese and European
mileage standards for our automobiles. If you move from oil to energy as
a whole, in the last decade, again, we have gone from being complete
gluttons merely to being bad gourmands. We have increased our avail-
able energy by seven times as much using conservation, seven times as
much as we have from all net energy increases, and due to the improve-
ments we have brought about since the first oil shock in 1973, our annual
energy bill in this country is roughly $430 billion instead of $580 billion,
saving $150 billion a year. As Everett Dirksen used to say, "$150 billion
here, $150 billion there, before you know it, it adds up to real money."
But, again, if we just had European and Japanese energy efficiency
today, we would be saving approximately another $200 billion on our
energy bill.
Can we make these types of changes, the types of investments neces-
sary to do something about our energy gluttony and the negative contribu-
tions we are making to the world's environmental crises? Or are we
stopped by massive defense spending, by our"imperial overreach"?
In my judgment, applying that concept to the United States is among
the weakest of arguments affecting public policy that has been put for-
ward in the public arena from a respected academic within the last several
years. The U.S. defense budget today is about half the GNP share that it
was during the Kennedy Administration—about 5 percent rather than 10
percent of the gross national product (GNP).
We spend on health care about double what we spend on defense, and
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CHAIlE7IGES FOR TlIE 1990s
about half of health care is hospitals. So the defense budget is roughly
equivalent to what we spend on hospitals in the United States today.
Those, on the average, are operating at 60 percent of capacity.
Have we otherwise collapsed in our ability to make these changes,
these investments, that are needed because of some sham decline in our
GNP since the late 1940s and early 1950s by some inability to produce
industrial goods compared with the rest of the world?
Such allegations are, in my judgment, simply wrong. Charles Wolff of
Rand has pointed out that the United States' share of world GNP has been
a couple of percentage points—give or take a percent~nder 25 percent
(nearly a quarter of the worId's GNP) at the turn of the century, in the late
1930s, in the 1960s, and today, and it is projected to be that around the end
of the century.
When it was not just under a quarter of the world's GNP was in the late
1940s. But in me late 1940s we had just won World War II. Our allies—
the Soviet Union, China, and England were devastated from the victory.
Our enemies were devastated from our military actions. As Shakespeare
said, in Julius Caesar, "We bestrode the world like a colossus." We had
nearly half the worId's GNP.
Any assumption that the United States was destined, for any period of
time, to dominate the worId's economy, with our tiny share of the worId's
population, to the tune of nearly half of the world's GNP, and that any
decline from those days of the late 1940s is evidence of some type of
decline in our civilization, I would submit, is simply ndiculous.
Tuming to some figures from Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard, the
United States' share of world industrial output was 32 percent in 1938.
Has it declined? Yes, by ~ percent. It is 31 percent today. Our share of
the world output of high technology over He last 15 years, since the early
1970s, has vacillated between 24 and 25 percent.
Yes, we have lost in some key areas, in electronics, particularly In
teIms of manufacturing capability, partially because some of our friends
in Asia have reamed manufacturing and quality control techniques that
were invented here and that we forgot. But in terms of some overall share,
decline of our influence in the world compared win any other part of the
twentieth century, except the days immediately following World War II,
is very hard to find.
The real problem, according to a superb article by Francis Bator in the
most recent Foreign Affairs quarterly, is that we are eating our seed corn.
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We invested, as a nation, between ~ and 10 percent of our GNP in the
1950s, in the 1960s, and in the 1970s. In the 1980s, in the last eight years,
it has dropped to 2 percent. We are investing approximately one-quarter
of what we did in the three previous decades. Personal consumption has
skyrocketed. In personal consumption—I am not Eking about govern-
ment spending this richest nation on earth consumes a staggering two-
thirds of its GNP.
There is nothing inherently wrong, Bator points out, with borrowing or
with deficits if you are wisely investing what you are borrowing. Senator
Pat Moynihan put it, as I think is often the case, exactly right. What has
happened in the last decade is that we have borrowed a trildion (now it is a
trillion-and-a-half) dollars from Japan and had a party. U.S. personal
consumption is so high that minor shifts in it dwarf everything else.
Let us undertake a hypothetical thought experiment: Could we do
something for the poor in the United States by making substantial cuts in
defense? Absolutely. Again, using Bator's figures, if you hold defense to
the share of GNP that is its 30-year low, 4.8 percent, we would cut
defense by $39 billion this year. Transfer that to the poor, which is about
13 percent of the country, and you could increase an average poor fam-
ily's consumption by over 50 percent, from a little over $S,000 a year to
$12,5(30. Not a bad move, you say.
On the other hand, that kind of cut in defense might to put it mildly-
create some problems for national security. Are there other possibilities?
Altematively, you might try brown bagging once a week or so. Let me
explain what I mean. According to Bator's figures, a reduction in con-
sumption from today's level for an average family of between three and
four Americans of about $500 per year is a reduction from $44,600
(which is what we, the nonpoor, consume on the average per family
today), down to $44,100. By the early 1990s, say 1993, this would do the
following: It would make it possible to increase the consumption of all
the poor in the United States by over 50 percent (the figure I gave earlier);
it would keep the defense budget stable, in real terms, thereby holding on
to what we may need for international security; and we would have
enough left over to quadruple our national investment rate from 2 up to ~
percent or so, the way we talked about a minute ago. This could be done
with these several years of foregone increases in consumption and an
actual decrease in consumption down to a consumption level that is $500
per family below today. This is roughly $10 a week for a nonpoor family
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CHAllENGES FOR THE 1990s
below today's consumption level, which could be saved by brown bag-
ging it roughly once or twice a week, or maybe foregoing a movie plus
popcorn small popcorn at today's movie popcorn pnces.
Even small changes in our consumption are changes in such a huge
base that many, many things—energy savings and others become pos-
sible, if we wild but make them.
Are there continuing intemational security problems? Yes. Can we
deal with them with a stable, even declining, defense budget if we manage
that transition? WeD, ~ Link so, but it is going to take care and gradualism
and planning and sensible reductions and changes in our own policy.
Alms control can help in this. But if you really want to do something
about the over problems that are looming—environmental damage, en-
ergy, and the rest there are a variety of solutions, but probably the
simplest and the best for us as a nation is simply to determine that we are
going to consume slightly less than we do now.
It can be said, as Bator suggests, that the American people will not put
up with that; that we cannot confront them with the need to pay slightly
higher gasoline taxes or any other steps that would be required in order to
reallocate resources away from consumption and toward investment for
these over needs.
If we do not urge it, what we resemble is a physician who sees an
important patient win a serious degenerative disease and decides that he
has to choose between letting the disease run its course and major surgery,
even Cough a modest diet would solve the problem. And if you ask
him ask us "Why don't you recommend a modest diet?" He answer is,
'whose people do not like to diet. They will never do it."
Representative terms from entire chapter:
international security
