A History of Strategy (15 page)

By the time it was made, the credibility of this threat was already in some doubt. In September 1949 the Soviet Union had detonated its first bomb. By the early fifties its arsenal, though still smaller than that of the US, was growing. Given that the US was the first to develop operational H bombs, possessed far more delivery vehicles, and had deployed those delivery vehicles across a worldwide chain of bases it could probably have “won” a nuclear exchange. Still this did not address the question as to what would happen if, in the face of an all-out American offensive, a few Soviet bombs somehow survived in their hideouts and, loaded aboard equally few bombers, found their way to North American targets such as New York and Washington D.C. Then as now, the Dr. Strangeloves of this world tried to exorcise the “bugaboo of radiation” and reassure the public that recovery from a nuclear war was possible. Then as now, the question proved unanswerable.

In the late fifties the situation changed again. Soviet nuclear power was growing, and so were the range and effectiveness of its delivery vehicles in the form of the first Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM). The debate surrounding the concept of Massive Retaliation was replaced, or supplemented, by the question as to how the US itself could be protected against nuclear attack; leading to the emergence of city-busting and counter force, first strike and second strike. A broad consensus was formed that, precisely since cities could not be protected against a nuclear offensive, it was vital to have forces in place which could survive such an attack and still retaliate with sufficient force to wipe the other side off the map. The outcome was the famous Triad, a vast array of airborne, seaborne, and land-based nuclear strike forces linked together by an electronic command system and supposedly capable of “riding out” anything that the Soviet Union could throw at them. Perhaps because the 1962 Missile Crisis had given people a fright, over time the Triad’s role in fighting a war tended to be de-emphasized and its deterrent function was given greater prominence. Projected onto the other side, which in spite of its occasional protests to the contrary was supposed to share the same objective, this doctrine became known as Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD.

A point to be made about these and other Western theories of nuclear power and its use in war is that, contrary to the vast majority of their predecessors, they were produced neither by serving commanders nor by retired ones. To be sure, it was the generals who were left in charge of the armed forces themselves; building them, organizing them, and training them for action. From time to time one uniformed figure or another would also put his voice into the debate by penning an article or, less often, a book. Still it was not they but civilian analysts—working either in the universities or, increasingly, so-called think-tanks especially created for the purpose—who produced the most important “strategic” volumes of the Cold War era, such as Albert Wohlstetter’s
Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases
(1954), William Kaufman’s
Military Policy and National Security
(1956), Henry Kissinger’s
Nuclear Weapons and
Foreign Policy
(1957), Robert Osgood’s
Limited War
, Herman Kahn’s
On Thermonuclear War
(1960), and, above all, Thomas Schelling’s
Arms and Influence
(1966). Though ostensibly dealing with “strategy,” all these works were concerned at least as much with deterring war as with devising better ways to fight it. As the title suggests, the last-named in particular all but renounced the use of armed force as suicidal. Instead it explained how a state might avail itself of nuclear arsenal to exercise diplomatic pressure on its opponent while itself resisting similar pressure. It was as if war itself had been cut down to size. To misuse a phrase coined by an earlier head of state, in the face of weapons literally capable of destroying the earth it had become too dangerous to leave to the generals.

From time to time, the question whether the balance of terror might not be upset, and a capability for at least limited war-fighting restored, by devising some kind of defensive umbrella was raised. As early as October 1945 a Canadian general went on record as saying that the means for countering the atomic bomb were “clearly in sight”—a premature statement, no doubt, but one which has since then been repeated countless times. In the late fifties communities and people were encouraged to provide themselves with anti-nuclear shelters and advertisements for such shelters, looking just like the typical American living room magically transported underground, were circulated. The late sixties brought ABM, or Anti-Ballistic Missiles. The idea was to “hit a bullet with a bullet,” as the phrase went, and intercept the incoming Soviet missiles while still
en route
. The advent of MIRV, on which more below, terminated those hopes. In 1972 it led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty which obliged both sides agreed not to deploy Anti-Ballistic Missiles; however, in 1983, President Reagan’s so-called Star Wars initiative once again aimed at rendering ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete.”

Reagan’s Star War Initiative was followed by the Strategic Defense Initiative. So far it has resulted in a small number of launchers stationed in Alaska. Since testing under operational conditions is all but impossible, just how well it will work under a serious attack nobody knows. Each time tens of billions of dollars were sunk into the effort. Each time, it turned out that anything even resembling “reliable” protection was out of reach. Not, perhaps, because it could not be done from a technical point of view. But because, set in the context of nuclear weapons which are quite capable of annihilating entire societies in a second, “protection” and “reliable” constituted an oxymoron.

Running in parallel with the attempts to design a defense was the progressive introduction of smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons. Capable of being carried by a variety of delivery vehicles—from fighter bombers down to atomic bazookas—they raised the question whether they might not be used against at least some targets without running the risk of blowing up the world. Whether, in other words, nuclear warfare once it had broken out could not be contained within a single theater. Towards the late sixties the same question was raised with even greater urgency by the near-simultaneous appearance of two new technologies, MIRV (Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles) and cruise missiles. Besides putting an end to any hope that incoming missiles might be intercepted—given that each missile was now made to carry as many as ten warheads—both MIRV and cruise missiles were capable of delivering those warheads with unprecedented accuracy, “straight through Mr. Brezhnev’s window.” Both therefore gave rise to hopes, if that is the word, that a nuclear war might be fought without necessarily leading to escalation. On paper at any rate, the outcome was a shift away from deterrence towards possible use of nuclear weapons in war. From the early seventies to the mid-eighties there was much talk of “flexible response,” “selected options,” “escalation dominance,” “decapitation,” and even something known as “nuclear shots across the bow.”

From at least the time of Korea on, the rationale behind the various American attempts to find ways for using nuclear weapons in war was the considerable gap in conventional forces believed to exist between the US and the USSR. From at least the publication of V. D. Sokolovsky’s
Soviet Military Strategy
(1961) on, the standard Soviet response was that the Americans were deluding themselves. Any war between the Superpowers would be full scale from the beginning; it would involve the use of all available nuclear weapons not only at the front but, as Soviet doctrine dictated and Soviet organization implied, in depth as well. Whether, had war broken out, the Soviet threat to escalate would have proved more credible than the American attempt to make first use of nuclear weapons possible by limiting its scope is questionable; but it certainly served the objective—if that, in fact, was its objective—to deter war. One way or another, and in spite of countless crises, forty years of Cold War during which both Superpowers behaved like scorpions in a bottle did not end in a nuclear exchange; by some interpretations, such an exchange had never even been close. However often it was announced that new and much more accurate weapons had brought about the death of MAD, in practice it proved remarkably hard to escape. As Bernard Brodie, in
The Absolute
Weapon
, had written as far back as 1946:

Thus far the chief purpose of a military establishment has been to win wars. From now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have no other useful purpose.

As additional countries joined the nuclear club—by 2010 there were at least nine, plus any number which were capable of building the bomb had they felt the need to do so—the logic of deterrence began to work for them too. Contrary to the fears expressed by many Western strategists, this turned out to be true regardless of whether they were democratic Americans and West Europeans, or Communist Chinese, or Indians claiming to have inherited Mahatma Gandhi’s doctrine of
ahisma
(non-violence), or Pakistanis seeking an “Islamic Bomb,” or Jews allegedly possessed by a Holocaust Complex, or paranoid North Koreans. Regardless also whether the nuclear arsenals in question were small or large, primitive or sophisticated, balanced by those of the enemy or not. For a country to wage large scale war against a nuclear enemy without the aid of nuclear weapons was madness. To do so with nuclear weapons, greater madness still.

From the late sixties on, any country in possession of the industrial and technological resources necessary for waging large scale conventional war was also able to build nuclear weapons. Hence, and not surprisingly, there was a growing tendency for such war to be fought solely by, or against, third and fourth rate countries—the most recent cases in point being, as of the time of this writing, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Libya.

This is not to say that nuclear weapons were capable of deterring
all
sorts of war. Far from it. In particular, the post-1945 have witnessed a great many wars which were not fought by states against each other but inside them, at the hand of non-state actors variously known as militias, guerrillas, and terrorists. Waged not by regular forces invading across some border but at extremely close quarters by people who could barely be distinguished from the surrounding civilian populations, these wars were impervious to nuclear threats. Moreover, as experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan again, was to show, they could be waged even in the teeth of the most powerful conventional forces in history. Considering that entire continents, and hundreds of millions if not billions of people, came to live under different political regimes as a direct result of such wars, there could be no doubt about their effectiveness; no wonder that they multiplied promiscuously.

Terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and insurgency are nothing new. Throughout history, people too weak to meet their opponents in open battle have resorted to attacking them by stealth, sometimes winning the struggle but more often losing it as ruthless countermeasures, including turning entire districts into deserts, were taken. Nevertheless the first attempts to formulate a guerrilla
theory
had to wait until the second half of the eighteenth century. And even then the term referred not to people’s war as we understand it but to what was also known as
Kleinkrieg
or
petite guerre
; meaning the operations of small groups of troops who engaged on the sidelines, so to speak, and were beneath the notice of that novel, mysterious, and August doctrine, strategy.

A coherent theory of guerrilla warfare was, perhaps, put together for the first time by Lawrence of Arabia in
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
. A typical eccentric—when used to describe the products of Britain’s Public School system, the two terms are not as contradictory as one might think at first glance—before 1914 he had studied archaeology at Oxford. During the War he found himself working for British Intelligence in Cairo and it was in this capacity that he was first sent to what is today Saudi Arabia in order to foment a revolt against Ottoman rule. In his book he sought to recapitulate his experiences as one of the leaders of that revolt in 1916–1918. However, whether his contribution to it was really as great as he and his adoring followers tried to claim is a matter of some doubt.

To Lawrence, then, the guerrillas ought to operate “like a cloud of gas.” Most of the time they should be inactive and invisible. They should hide in places too remote and inaccessible to be reached by their larger and more cumbersome opponents and rely on dispersion and mobility to escape such punitive expeditions as might be sent against them. Such expeditions, however, might also provide opportunities for action, given that regular forces would inevitably rely on lines of communication which could be subjected to attack. In general, guerrillas ought to avoid head on clashes with the enemy’s main body. Instead they were to operate against his flanks, his foraging parties, the garrisons which he put into isolated places and the like; all the while relying on speed and surprise to concentrate their own troops, do their worst, and disappear again before reinforcements could be brought up and retaliatory action taken. Logistically speaking they were to be sustained partly from the countryside and partly by taking arms and equipment away from the enemy, thus making it unnecessary to have permanent, and vulnerable, bases. So far, the theory; however, it should by no means be overlooked that, throughout the revolt, Lawrence and Sharif Hussein received both money and weapons from his British Military Headquarters, Egypt.

As will be evident from the above account, Lawrence was concerned above all with the tactical and operational—assuming the latter term is applicable at all—aspects of guerrilla warfare. In this respect, subsequent authors have added little to his work; after all, there are only so many ways of saying that “when the enemy advances, we retreat.” What the other important writer on guerrilla warfare, Mao Tse Tung, added was, first, an analysis of the relationship between the guerrillas and the people at large and, second, his famous “three stage” theory of the way in which the campaign ought to proceed. Dependent as the guerrillas were on the people for shelter and supply, the indispensable condition for obtaining success consisted of gaining the support of that people. Various methods could be used: including propaganda, deliberately provoking the enemy into reprisals, or by main force (“power grows from the barrel of a gun”). If the third method was used, good care should be taken not to allow the guerrillas to become simply a group of marauders. The essential point to grasp—and it is here that Mao made his greatest contribution of all—was that the struggle is primarily
political
in nature.