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APPENDIX B
Contemporary Strategic Deterrence and Precision-Guided
Munitions
Paul H. Nitze and J.H. McCall, Johns
Hopkins University
Two major developments in the post-Cold War era profoundly alter
the objectives and potential effectiveness of contemporary U.S.
deterrence efforts. The first is the obvious change in the
international political and security environment and with it change
in the goals of deterrence. With the dissolution of the Soviet
Union, the direct threat of nuclear attack upon the United States
has subsided. U.S. policy makers and strategic planners no longer
face a specific nuclear threat, or even a general threat of war
from one adversary. Instead, they find themselves confronted with
an extremely complex international situation without clear
adversaries, where regional aggression not necessarily directed
against the United States or its interests has proven more likely
than it has been at any time since before World War II. It is also
an environment in which it is more important than ever that the
United States attempt to define its national interests, its foreign
policy goals, and its security strategy.
The second development is the evolution of the potential tools
of deterrence. In the past decade, culminating with the Persian
Gulf War and the deployment of stealth weapons, families of
precision-guided munitions (PGMs), and the means to deliver them,
have matured to a level of capability, sophistication, and
reliability that permits us to use them in more than limited
operational roles. The United States now possesses conventional
weapons that can shoulder strategic missions—that is, missions
engaging targets at the heart of the military, economic, and
political power of an adversary—once thought the preserve of
nuclear weapons. Because of the changes in our goals and in our
weapons, it is appropriate that the United States recast its
approach to strategic deterrence to meet new challenges and to take
advantage of new capabilities.
WHAT IS DETERRENCE? WHY AND HOW?
To understand our options and possible new approaches to
strategic deterrence, we should start by defining what we mean by
the term. Although it may sound trite to remind ourselves, it is
helpful to restate again that, in its simplest form, to deter means
to inhibit or prevent someone from doing something. The definition
implies specificity: We should know whom we are deterring from
doing what, to whom, and when. From these considerations arises the
notion of a broader process or act—deterrence—which we
propose to translate into policy, whereby a specific government or
state seeks to deter another from pursuing a specific policy goal.
More commonly, we think of
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strategic deterrence as our will and ability to wield military
power to prevent or inhibit the use of force by another state in a
manner of which we disapprove.
Successful deterrence lies with careful and precise application
of such a policy. In practice, deterrence is an element of a
specific security strategy, and such strategy does not evolve in
isolation. There is a logic, or a series of steps based on a broad
policy objective, that we follow to arrive at a strategy. To reason
out and implement deterrence in foreign policy, we identify whom we
want to deter from doing something, how we want to deter them,
under what circumstances, and by what means we plan to deter them.
Thereafter we must decide how we obtain those means. More simply,
we have to know which states we want to deter from doing
what—and we have to decide what we need to do so and how to
get it.
To deter specific cases of aggression, the best deterrent is
possession of superior military fighting capabilities coupled with
well-thought-through "use" and "declaratory" doctrines. However, it
is also essential, although often overlooked, that the target
government and leadership we wish to deter respond to the logic of
deterrence—that they recognize, understand, and react to our
efforts to inhibit their actions as we would have them do. Such
behavior requires a similar logical thought process to our own, an
assumption not always justified.
Much of the Cold War discussion about deterrence has muddled our
understanding of the concept. We should guard against a general
notion of deterrence as an end in itself rather than as a tool, a
means to an end. Many writers, and even policy makers, attempted to
treat deterrence as an abstract. In the Cold War years, these
efforts aimed at creating a general theory and policy of
deterrence, with an associated clutch of models one might apply to
help understand and address unfolding challenges to the United
States. The unique security challenges to the United States during
the Cold War helped engender this search for a general theory. It
was a bipolar world, and to deter war meant inhibiting the Soviet
Union from using force to further its foreign policy goals.
Furthermore, since we could assume that any use of force between
the superpowers would lead to escalation into eventual nuclear war,
debate centered on coupling nuclear and conventional arms
deterrence as the key to prevent general war. Ultimately, these
Cold War efforts toward "general" deterrence against all types of
aggression failed, although the idea has resurfaced more
recently.
COLD WAR DETERRENCE AND THE LIMITS OF
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
During the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy and security strategy
flowed from the threat of the Soviet Union and the ultimate threat
of nuclear war. We designed and implemented a national security
strategy centered on containing further Soviet expansion and
deterring Soviet use of force toward achieving their foreign policy
ends. Although we sought to reduce the risk of nuclear war,
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we were prepared to use nuclear weapons as part of that
containment. We built a huge and diverse nuclear arsenal to that
purpose.
The primary mission of U.S. strategic nuclear weapons reflected
this principal focus of deterrence. U.S. strategy called for
deploying a large number of nuclear weapons targeted against Soviet
nuclear weapons and other military targets. With the existing
technology, the best weapon against a nuclear weapon was another
nuclear weapon and to ensure a reliable and credible nuclear
deterrent the United States fielded parallel land-, sea-, and
air-based nuclear forces all with varying types of weapons both
strategic and tactical.
With the enormous destructive capability of nuclear weapons,
many theorists and policy makers tended to treat them as the
catch-all deterrent against any and all aggression. This was
certainly the case in the early nuclear era, when contemporary
attitudes allowed some to see atomic bombs as simply another
weapon. However, in practice we rapidly learned that nuclear
weapons can provide no such absolute security. Because we were
unwilling to unleash nuclear weapons in small conflicts, they added
little to our practical ability to deter petty aggressors. We also
discovered that the "finesse" of nuclear security depended in part
upon our ability to control those small conflicts, preventing
regional disturbances from escalating into nuclear confrontations
between their sponsors. In response, the United States attempted to
construct another layer of deterrence based on conventional
capabilities designed not only to deter or deal with Soviet
incursions but those of its surrogates. The ensuing bipolar
stability, based upon mutual deterrence and the effort to impose
political and military limits on small conflicts, lasted throughout
the remainder of the Cold War.
The lessons of the limited military utility of nuclear weapons
in the Cold War era should be frankly acknowledged. We will never
be certain what has deterred the use of nuclear weapons since 1945.
It is possible, even probable, that the strategic nuclear arsenals
in their morbid way did stay the use of these weapons, i.e., that
mutually assured destruction helped prevent the use of nuclear
weapons against other nuclear powers. At the same time, using
nuclear weapons was never entirely ruled out, and much of the
debate of nuclear strategy during the Cold War reflected this
reality. In some circles there was discussion, and even advocacy,
of the American use of nuclear weapons in Korea and elsewhere.
Furthermore, revelations of Warsaw Pact plans regarding the first
hours of any invasion of Western Europe are said to have included
the use of tactical nuclear weapons against conventional troops and
civilian targets. Surely these are not indicative of a complete
aversion to employing nuclear weapons in combat, in a limited
nuclear exchange. Military planners believed that escalation might
be controlled and that limited use of nuclear weapons was possible
and might stay limited.
What inhibited the American use of nuclear weapons was clearly
our sensitivity to the moral and political implications of the
weapons and their destructiveness. Use of nuclear weapons in a
regional crisis was never really an option for the United
States-despite talk of it. Some troublesome governments have known
this and exploited it as a weakness in U.S. military posture.
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Although the McNamara-era decision to move away from a nuclear
trip wire toward flexible response led to a more credible U.S.
military presence and deterrence against a Soviet threat, it did
not necessarily improve our strategic deterrent options elsewhere
against rogue states. We were left with a massive investment in a
nuclear arsenal of limited use except in possibly deterring a
nuclear attack by the Soviet Union directly against the United
States. It was a one-use strategic deterrent.
POST-COLD WAR STRATEGIC DETERRENCE AND
THE PERSIAN GULF WAR
After the Cold War, an undeclared "general" approach to
deterrence returned to American security policy in a new guise.
During the Bush administration years, conventional wisdom held that
aggression previously subsumed or neutralized in superpower rivalry
might now be addressed by the combination of a functioning U.N.
Security Council able to act upon, and a United States determined
to combat, aggression. In this new era, an emerging U.S.-Soviet
cooperation would reduce or remove superpower-sponsored aggression.
Furthermore, removing the fear of escalation between the
superpowers might allow the United States to act more freely in
response to aggression when it did occur, and even help deter some
international conflicts. In a sense, the United States was in a
position to enforce a peace where and when it chose.
The Gulf War was the first test of an emerging "general"
deterrence and revealed some weaknesses in it—although
probably because of shortsightedness on the part of Saddam Hussein.
Some of the initial inability to deter Iraq's invasion of Kuwait
may well have been ill-communicated policy—that is, the vocal,
or declared, determination that the United States would not
tolerate aggression in the region. However, even after the United
States made clear that it would not let Iraq's action stand, Saddam
Hussein did not back down, despite the growing, though never
complete, certainty that the United States fully intended to carry
through with restoring Kuwaiti independence. It appears that Iraq
discounted the resolve and credibility of the United States to
follow through on its threat to act or its ability to use its
military capabilities. It may also be true that Saddam Hussein was
unresponsive to the "logic" of deterrence, in which case he was
''undeterrable." In any case, the existence of strategic nuclear
missiles, as part of the looming, if dimly understood, American
deterrence, appeared once again to have had limited value in
deterring conventional aggression either in the invasion itself or
the subsequent conduct of operations during the war.
Although the U.S. nuclear arsenal did not inhibit Saddam Hussein
from invading and annexing Kuwait, some observers hoped that
massive allied superiority in all strategic weapons, particularly
nuclear ones, would deter Iraqi Scud attacks on Israel or their use
of chemical weapons generally. The prevailing fear of the time was
that, if attacked, Israel might enter the conflict
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and in doing so, break up the new and delicate association of
Arab powers arrayed with Western powers against a fellow Arab
state. Such a disruption would have handicapped coalition efforts
to stop Iraq, let alone restore Kuwaiti independence. To preserve
an element of deterrence against these possibilities, the Bush
administration carefully neither ruled in nor ruled out the use of
nuclear weapons in the war, particularly in response to Iraqi
threats of chemical warfare. At the same time, it was clear,
although unspoken, that the administration would probably not
equate conventionally armed Scud missile attacks with nuclear
weapons.
Despite the array of weaponry, and the calculated uncertainty
over coalition willingness to use nuclear weapons, an undeterred
Iraq did launch Scuds against Israel. It seems that, in choosing to
attack, it made little difference to Saddam Hussein whether the
coalition could strike Iraq with nuclear strategic weapons or
conventional weapons. In Saddam's mind apparently, the chance of
embroiling Israel in the war was worth these risks, or perhaps he
did not care. American use of nuclear weapons was politically
improbable, and Iraq could expect the United States to deploy
strategic conventional weapons in a range of missions in any case.
In short, Saddam Hussein perceived no added risk for Iraq in
attacking Israel and launched what missiles he could.
As it turned out, Iraq's offensive strategic weapons proved of
little value. The Scud strikes against Israel did not provoke an
Israeli military response and served no purpose, although the
Israelis were sorely tested and were restrained only with the
greatest effort on the part of the Bush administration. The
coalition war effort went on unimpaired, settling into a one-sided
exchange of strategic conventional strikes in which Iraq
experienced the full destructive effects of smart conventional
strategic weapons hitting targets at will throughout the depth of
the country, followed by a ground war to physically remove Iraqi
forces from Kuwait. The question remains, however: If Saddam
Hussein had had nuclear weapons, would his influence on allied
political and military decisions have been greater and more
troubling, complicating the prosecution of the war? Would Iraqi
nuclear weapons have deterred the coalition in some way?
There was no useful role for Iraqi nuclear weapons in the Gulf
War. In practical military terms, it would not have been possible
for Saddam Hussein to diminish significantly the overwhelming
military superiority of the forces arrayed against him. Even had he
developed nuclear weapons in time for use in the war, the
international military might arrayed against Saddam Hussein was
overpowering. It is true that a nuclear weapon in Saddam Hussein's
hands might well have led to unfortunate consequences. Nuclear
weapons used in desperation, or from wild plans of revenge against
Israel, could have resulted in great human tragedy. Furthermore,
had Saddam struck with a nuclear weapon, Israel undoubtedly would
have struck back in kind, leading to untold casualties and
suffering. However, the political costs were high. For Saddam to
have used such a nuclear capability as he might have developed
would merely have
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isolated him and reinforced the determination of the coalition
powers to eliminate him.
Despite the political costs, and limited military utility of an
Iraqi nuclear weapon, it is not clear whether Saddam Hussein would
have used nuclear weapons had he possessed them. However, it is
also unclear whether the coalition's, or Israel's, nuclear threat
could ever have been counted upon to deter him from using them.
After all, Saddam Hussein chose to start a nuclear weapons program
in the very face of the overwhelming nuclear power of the states
arrayed against him, including the Israelis he sought to provoke.
There was no apparent logical reason for Iraq to build a nuclear
weapon outside of this very threat of irresponsible behavior: the
looming threat of a wildcard regional nuclear power. Saddam
Hussein's decision to embark on a nuclear weapons program itself
demonstrates that there was little or no nuclear deterrent at play
in Iraq's evaluation of the strategic situation in the Gulf.
Although the United States proved unable to deter the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait, the Gulf War did offer an opportunity to
reinforce the future credibility of our resolve to act by making an
example of Iraq's invasion for future wouldbe aggressors. The Bush
administration carefully followed the U.N. path, seeking peaceful
resolution of aggression before resorting to force. At the same
time, it equally carefully orchestrated and led a multinational
response to Iraq, culminating in a U.N.-sanctioned use of force to
eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. In this way, the Bush
administration laid the foundations for what might be a model for
the response to future aggression—determined and decisive
American-led multinational efforts in the United Nations and on the
ground.
The Persian Gulf War also opened a further opportunity to
restore credibility to U.S. deterrence efforts in the form of the
PGMs it used against Iraq. The war confirmed that smart
conventional strategic weapons had a practical combat mission.
Against Iraq, these weapons rapidly countered and rendered
essentially useless Iraq's offensive weapons and military
forces—even if such offensive weapons were confined to Scud
missiles with relatively limited warheads posing little threat to
allied forces in the Gulf region. In the Gulf War, the United
States demonstrated that it had both the resolve and the reach to
strike devastating blows against the economic, military, and
political power bases of an adversary without resorting to the use
of nuclear weapons.
CURRENT CHALLENGES
As the Persian Gulf War demonstrated, in the current context of
international relations, one without an overarching threat such as
the Soviet Union and general nuclear war, the problem of deterrence
is more complex than in the Cold War and its solutions must be more
flexible. We must now seek to deter aggression from a variety of
other states on a number of levels, while the rules of power and
deterrence have altered along with the resources behind them. The
already questionable ability of large powerful states to control
the
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actions of smaller ones has disappeared altogether. We are,
therefore, less able to predict, prevent, or control the occurrence
of security problems, let alone to stop them from spilling over
into larger conflicts.
The spread of technology exacerbates the complexity of the
diverse sources of new security problems. Not only is nuclear
proliferation a headache, but a host of lethal and efficient
nonnuclear technologies makes deterrence of specific threats ever
more difficult to implement. Aside from missile technology, or
chemical and biological weapons, detection technologies such as
sophisticated radar defenses, advances in information nets, and the
like make even smaller states more powerful and quicker than in the
past. We can no longer construct a security strategy and policy
around the belief that sheer numbers and firepower will deter
aggression generally; we must create better, more specific, focused
policies and strategies with better technology for the job if we
hope to inhibit the aggression of rogue states.
Post-Cold War deterrence will require creating forces that can
offer a credible deterrent on these new terms. Developing true
strategic conventional weapons offers us the core of a flexible,
credible strategic capability that no aggressor should discount in
a wide range of circumstances. These weapons allow us to use them
when the use of a nuclear weapon of any sort would be politically
or militarily impractical. However, no mixture of forces will
prevent any and all aggression or offer the preparedness we would
wish. As the very occurrence of the Gulf War itself reminds us, no
strategic weapon, or array of forces, can forestall the ambitions
of a tyrant. New strategies and well-balanced nonstrategic
conventional forces should permit the United States the ability to
prevent escalation—to limit the spread of conflict—and
allow us the power to redress aggression as it unfolds.
However, we must still balance the popular perception of these
weapons. To much of the world viewing the Gulf War on television,
PGMs appeared a miracle weapon, a new panacea for all sorts of
conflicts which could do the job with little loss of military
personnel and limited civilian losses. This perception caught the
imagination of a people with the reasonable desire to limit human
suffering and loss of life under any circumstances. Unfortunately,
this is an unreasonable perception, especially at the current stage
of strategic conventional weapons development. Smart weapons can do
much to limit loss of life, but they cannot take on all missions,
and they cannot address all emerging challenges.
We should also take special care to underscore that we should
not view possession of precision-guided munitions as an alternative
to our possession of nuclear weapons; we should have both. The
United States should continue to maintain a secure and widely
dispersed array of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems until
we are assured that the nuclear weapons of others constitute no
threat to the overwhelming strategic nuclear superiority of U.S.
forces. However, even though it may be necessary for us to maintain
an overwhelming nuclear strategic capability, it is unwise and
unnecessary for us actually to use that capability, even in
retaliation. The improvements in PGMs
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offer us the option to respond to nuclear attack with nonnuclear
weapons. If we can rely on a proven capability to disarm a nuclear
aggressor with conventional strategic weapons, we should not merely
retaliate, as eye for eye, or out of anger; we should act with
wisdom and a sense of the great responsibility that comes with
great power.
In the future, both strategic nuclear weapons and strategic
conventional weapons can offer us a tailored deterrence mission.
Strategic nuclear weapons may now fulfill a broader, or
nonspecific, deterrence mission, poised not against another state
but against the threat of nuclear attack upon the United States and
its allies by a major nuclear power. Strategic conventional
weapons, in the form of a variety of precision-guided munitions and
the ships or planes equipped to deliver those munitions, may help
create a more specific deterrence against particular emerging
threats, once those threats are identified and a strategy to combat
them is crafted. In a real sense, the end of the Cold War and the
maturing of better conventional weapons have returned deterrence
from the further reaches of abstract theory to the fold of
practical policy. They encourage us to plan and declare more
focused, practical, and credible deterrence policies and provide us
the means with which to back them up.
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, as the lessons of the
successes, failures, and potential of conventional, strategic,
high-precision strategic, smart weapons are digested by all
nations, one message should come home most emphatically: the United
States, when provoked, can and will use strategic conventional
weapons against whatever targets it considers appropriate. A
general understanding of this one lesson, at home and abroad, may
offer us the first credible and therefore useful strategic
deterrent we have seen since the early days of the nuclear era. At
the same time, the United States should not squander its
credibility by allowing challenges to go unmet and forfeit
international leadership in moments of crisis. Unless and until the
United States is willing to closely examine its new national
interests as well as publicize them, and to take the foreign policy
and security measures required to meet those interests, no amount
of weapons, no matter how sophisticated, will succeed in deterring
aggression.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
conventional weapons
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