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OCR for page 485
The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, Institute of
Medicine. ~ 1986 by the National Academy of Sciences.
National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
Managerial Demands of
Modern Weapons Systems
JOHN D. STEINBRUNER, PH.D.
The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
Other papers presented in this volume discussed the psychology of
individual decision makers. As a complement to this analysis, I would
like to examine the context in which decision makers must operate. I will
focus on the burdens that modern military forces impose upon decision
makers and on some of the very predictable difficulties that individual
decision makers are likely to have in dealing with them, particularly
decision makers in the American political system.
Not the least of these burdens is the uniqueness of the current situation.
Contemporary military forces have a combination of properties that make
them much more difficult to manage under crisis circumstances than were
their historical counterparts: the extreme destructiveness of individual
weapons, the rapid timing of the delivery vehicles, the technical com-
plexity of weapons that imposes very intricate operational requirements
on the forces that manage and operate them, and the worldwide scale of
deployment.
It is not frequently realized that the full maturation of the military
situation has taken considerable time, and it probably has only been in
the last decade that both sides have really had fully integrated and de-
veloped forces. This means that any experience before this time can be
drawn upon for evidence only by using very uncertain extrapolations.
Fortunately, the world has survived this condition for at least a decade,
and that fact has to do with the success of modern management techniques
for military forces in peacetime. Advanced communications and automated
information processing have made safe and coherent management of these
485
OCR for page 486
486
IMAGES AND RISKS OF NUCLEAR WAR
arsenals feasible under normal circumstances, but by extrapolation it can
be ascertained that in all probability this coherent management could not
be sustained under the conditions of a nuclear war. Though individual
weapons probably could survive a dedicated attack in fairly substantial
numbers, the military organizations necessary for strategic management
could not. If explicitly directed to that purpose, for example, only a small
fraction of the current U.S. or Soviet nuclear arsenals would be required
to incapacitate the opponent's command system. That fraction, depending
on which estimates are used, varies from 1 to 5 percent of the current
nuclear arms inventories, and 1 percent is likely enough. Managerial
coherence is at once the most critical and the most vulnerable aspect of
contemporary military forces.
Under peacetime circumstances the dominant objective of the mana-
gerial system is that of preventing any unauthorized use of even an in-
dividual nuclear weapon. This objective has been labeled by outside observers
as that of negative control, although that is not the standard usage within
the military. Elaborate, and so far very successful, procedures have been
worked out within all military systems to guarantee that negative control
can be exercised under all situations that are normally encountered, and
again, for more than 20 years the world has successfully survived under
these arrangements.
If negative control procedures were to be preserved unaltered under
advanced crisis circumstances, however, they would expose military or-
ganizations to decisive defeat by means of destroying their central com-
mand authorities. This has been recognized, and for this reason all military
forces have established a competing managerial objective of positive con-
trol. The essence of positive control is to ensure that authorization to
conduct military missions can be provided and that authoritative orders
will be carried out. Strategic forces exercise continuously to be sure that
they can do just that.
One of the principal effects of crisis is that it would force the military
organizations to go through changes of state that in effect would adjust
the balance between managerial directives of negative and positive control.
To some degree these state changes are explicitly thought out and orga-
nized in advance by formalized alert procedures, but they cannot be com-
pletely determined or centrally controlled in their entirety. Operational
procedures are too complex, too widely dispersed, and too responsive to
the immediate circumstances of individual weapons commanders for cen-
tralized direction to be feasible. To a significant extent the changes in
state in a military organization under crisis are necessarily spontaneous,
and their full effects cannot be known in advance by anyone, however
wise he might be.
OCR for page 487
MANAGERIAL DEMANDS OF MODERN WEAPONS SYSTEMS
487
As has become familiar in the long discussion of deterrence, the gov-
erning policies of the two major military establishments, those of the
United States and the USSR, are disciplined by the conditions of strategic
parity. The prevailing balance of military power confers no decisive global
advantage on either the United States or the Soviet Union, and there is
no serious prospect for changing that fact in the foreseeable future, how-
ever strong political aspirations to do so might be. It is a fact that neither
side can wish away by political rhetoric. Whatever that rhetoric might be,
both superpowers are compelled to act in a crisis to try to avoid global
war, and both thoroughly understand that.
At the same time, both superpowers are compelled to acknowledge that
a threat to the managerial coherence of their forces gives powerful incen-
tive to initiate war if they judge that the threat can no longer be avoided.
There is an inherent tension between this imperative to avoid war on the
one hand and that of controlling the circumstances of initiation if war
cannot be avoided on the other. There is good reason to believe that this
tension would increase dramatically at the point of crisis and would subject
both opposing establishments to severely conflicting internal impulses.
That fact makes the prevailing circumstances of deterrence prone to sudden
catastrophic failure at the point of serious crisis, a point that could not
be known about in advance and that would only be experienced as it
happened.
The circumstances of the global balance do not apply to all local con-
ditions. Each side enjoys a substantial advantage of conventional military
power in certain areas of the world, and that fact does have strong effects
on a crisis that is focused on one of those areas. In general, undisputed
military dominance of one side makes a localized crisis less dangerous
and its management easier, simply because its outcome is determined by
those initial local conditions. At some of the more likely sources of crisis,
however, most notably in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, the
local balance of military capability is or could readily become inherently
ambiguous. When that occurs, the outcome turns upon details of circum-
stances that the leaders must try to control.
Given these situations, under a severe crisis or under one that is oc-
curring with an ambiguous local balance, the managerial capacities of
decision makers, no matter how stable psychologically or skilled politically
they may be, are likely to be overwhelmed. There are several basic reasons
for this fact.
First, in a serious crisis under current world conditions, the spontaneous
interactions of conventional nuclear forces could not be predicted or con-
trolled in all their important details. They are far too extensive and too
elaborate for anyone to completely determine.
OCR for page 488
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IMAGES AND RISKS OF NUCLEAR WAR
Second, the rapid timing of these operations would make the discovery
and timely correction of the inevitable errors of managerial judgment
extremely difficult. It would be very difficult to keep up with the pace of
events that would be triggered. The extensive flows of information created
by technical sensors directly observing the opponent's military operations
would produce interacting perceptions by both military establishments that
would tend to dominate the normal channels of diplomacy used to try to
produce a constructive resolution.
Finally, the background tension between the objectives that I discussed
above would inevitably produce major differences in judgment between
the civilian and political leadership on both sides, making it very difficult
for completely consistent lines of action to be established.
Problems of this sort have been experienced during the only two crises
involving nuclear weapons in the post-World War II period: in Cuba in
1962 and in the Middle East in 1973. It should be noted that neither crisis
is directly relevant to the current situation. The Cuban crisis occurred
before both sides had fully developed their managerial establishments.
The Middle East was a one-sided crisis as far as nuclear weapons are
concerned. Nonetheless, there were some significant failures of managerial
direction under those circumstances, although the crises obviously were
successfully resolved.
In Cuba, despite extraordinary and largely effective measures under-
taken to coordinate the American government, some significant features
of American actions escaped central control, most of which are well
known. There was an unauthorized incursion into Soviet air space by a
reconnaissance plane a strategic aircraft. It was officially described as
an accident and clearly was not intended directly, certainly not by the top
managers.
Very extensive antisubmarine warfare operations were conducted by
the United States, implicitly under U.S. Navy rules of engagement but
without the advance knowledge of the executive committee that was at-
tempting to manage the crisis. It is not known explicitly what the executive
committee would have done had they thought about it in advance, but it
certainly was inconsistent with the tight control that they exercised in other
aspects of the crisis.
The tactical air operations in the southern part of the United States
anticipated the crisis and extensively developed their capability of dealing
with it well in advance of the leaders in Washington. Because the American
press was able to discover this preparedness, it is very likely that the
Soviets were able to as well. These are inevitable features of a crisis, and
they would be far worse under current circumstances.
OCR for page 489
MANAGERIAL DEMANDS OF MODERN WEAPONS SYSTEMS
489
In the Middle East in 1973, an alert was ordered for the sole purpose
of sending a diplomatic signal, a signal that was intended to be secret.
The persons ordering the alert thought that they could keep it from being
public, which reveals just how little they knew about what they were
ordering. There is no way that U.S. forces can be put on alert without it
being made public.
None of these episodes had any major negative consequences on the
outcome of these crises; indeed, in context they may well have helped
their resolution. However, that may be, in part, a product of fortuitous
circumstances, and there is no guarantee that fortune will always be so
kind. These were not centrally directed or managed actions.
The American political system is particularly susceptible to these kinds
of problems. The domains of civilian and military authority are separated
fairly sharply, making it difficult for anyone to mesh diplomacy and
military operations. The United States has problems with that in peacetime.
These problems would intensify in a crisis situation.
Neither civilian nor military leaders are normally granted long tenure
in office in the U.S. system, making it virtually impossible for anyone to
develop all the types of expertise that the circumstances of crisis would,
in fact, demand. The open and adversarial political process of the United
States protects against wide deviations from common judgment that make
it very difficult to identify and correct mistakes emerging from a consensus
of opinion. In order to operate at all in the American system, there is
dependence on consensus of opinion; otherwise, no coherence is produced.
In general, then, the pressures that would be created by an intense crisis
with military forces at their current state of development appear to be so
formidable that prudent security should focus on their prevention rather
than any expectation of safe management. That does not mean we should
not try to manage crises safely and think about that, but we shouldn't
count on it.
Unfortunately, that principle is not widely acknowledged in U.S. foreign
policy at the moment. Indeed, the emphasis it appears to deserve would
require very substantial change in prevailing assumptions about how for-
eign policy is conducted.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
middle east
