THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (58 page)

(3)

Sustained precision bombing
: In Operation Linebacker, conducted in Southeast Asia in 1972, some nine thousand laser-guided bombs were fruitlessly dropped near Hanoi and Haiphong over eleven days—roughly the same number as were dropped with far greater effect during the entire Gulf War. So-called surgical strikes are among the most desired, and most elusive, options in the military handbook. Three difficulties have thwarted their promise of low-risk, low-collateral damage and high destruction: (1) air crews are inevitably put at risk because precision bombing requires low-release altitudes, and the very technology that enables target acquisition and homing for the bombardier is also used by antiaircraft missiles with integral radar systems; enhancing bombing accuracy also usually
means employing air crews more intensively—the “smartest” of smart weapons was, after all, the kamikaze; (2) precision-bombing campaigns require enormous quantities of real-time intelligence to locate targets and track them; this intelligence relies both on satellite tracking, which is only now becoming achievable, and on highly efficient collection methods; (3) such bombing campaigns require patience—which the publics of market-states, fed as they are by hyperbolic media and sensitized to the suffering of civilians who are harmed by the bombing, will seldom tolerate—and modest goals. Contradicting the promises of early strategic bombing theorists, like Douhet and Billy Mitchell, it is extremely difficult for strategic bombing alone to effect a constitutional change in a hostile regime.

All of these perceived shortcomings were in the minds of U.S. planners when they considered the problem of attempting to lift the Serbian siege of Sarajevo. Despite intense pressure from the public and Congress, senior military officials refused to carry out bombing raids against the Serbs in Bosnia on grounds that strikingly reflect the interplay between market-state constraints and nation-state military mentalities. These officials forcefully rejected any area-bombing campaign on the grounds that too many civilians would be killed, reports of which would horrify the American public, and they rejected precision bombing on the ground that the public would not tolerate a long-drawn-out campaign. Given the rugged terrain in Bosnia and the fact that Serbian mortars and even howitzers could be quickly moved and easily camouflaged, any air operation short of a long campaign or area carpet bombing would be ineffective. In any case, it was reasoned, air strikes alone could not resolve the political conflict in Bosnia, or even safeguard civilians from the campaign of massacres, rapes, and deportations. Indeed, any bombing by the United States risked retaliation by the Serbs, who might take hostages from locally deployed U.N. forces, which, if withdrawn, would only lead to a demand for American ground troops, something else the public would not support.
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In the end, it was the insistence by military and diplomatic officials in many countries that bombing could not be decisive that was itself decisive. Military moves that could win the war and force the Serbs to surrender their goals required tactics that the public would reject; anything else was futile and risky. In these two demands—the insistence by the public on quickly terminated action, and by security personnel on achieving total objectives—we see the intersection between market-state and nation-state, between, that is, the new role of media-driven public sensitivities and the military demand for definitive state action.

In the event, an extremely modest bombing campaign conducted over a series of days without any obvious stopping point in fact lifted the
siege of Sarajevo—the longest siege of the century, longer than Verdun or Stalingrad. As the memoirs of the American negotiator Richard Holbrooke wholly demonstrate, it was in fact this open-ended bombing campaign— over the strenuous objections of the British and French—that brought the siege to an end and, with the Croatian ground campaign, brought the Serbs to the negotiating table.
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By contrast the NATO campaign against Serbia to force acceptance of an international protectorate for Kosovo relied on aerial bombing from the outset.
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During the course of the campaign, nearly 40,000 sorties were flown with virtually no losses.
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When Slobodan Milosevic acceded to alliance demands, delivered by Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin and Finnish president and E.U. special representative Martti Ahtisaari on June 3, not a single NATO ground troop had entered Serbia.
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How was this possible and what lessons are there for the future use of this arm for the market-state? Each of the three vulnerabilities of precision-guided attacks that had been used to forestall NATO action in Bosnia had been blunted. First, stealth aircraft—aircraft whose radar profiles are so attenuated as to render them invisible to radar-guided attack—had taken out anti-aircraft missile sites that would otherwise have posed lethal risks to American pilots. Second, new technology had allowed for more accurate target acquisition, and the targets themselves were not confined to tactical strikes against Serb forces but included strategic strikes against Belgrade and the Serbian infrastructure. Third, NATO's political objectives were sufficiently modest and did not require a change of regime in Belgrade.

More important for our study, each of these three potential shortenings of precision-guided attack is likely to be even further ameliorated. In the past, precision-guided munitions depended upon some sort of homing technology—relying on either guidance from a command operator, or using emissions from the munition itself, or homing in on energy bounced off the target by an external transmitter or energy emitted by the target. Currently, however, the United States has the capability to use radar onboard the munition to generate midcourse corrections for an inertial guidance system or to fly to a precise set of coordinates using a guidance system updated by a Global Positioning Satellite system. Naval vessels lying offshore or aircraft distant from the target can launch these pilotless munitions with an accuracy that even the kamikaze would be hard-pressed to match. This, plus the introduction of Stealth technology, can greatly lower the risk to pilots and the likelihood of collateral damage to civilians.

Just as significantly, however, the United States set modest, achievable goals in the Yugoslav campaigns. NATO was willing to settle for something far less than victory; this did not prevent “ethnic cleansing,” but it did enforce an end to the Serbian armed presence in the provinces where Serbs had conducted their ethnic campaigns.

(4)

The term
information warfare
usually
*
refers to the capacity both to penetrate and degrade an adversary's electronic communications and to protect one's own communications from interference. Such warfare played an important role in the Gulf War and doubtless will play an even larger role in future conflicts as electronic monitoring and control becomes more extensive, and the links to commanders more numerous.

This use of information technologies is potentially a highly valuable strategic option for the market-state. More important, however, the United States can also use information as a diplomatic and strategic commodity with which to create incentives and deterrents affecting the political behavior of other states. Of course it has long been true that the United States has shared information with allies—using satellites to aid Britain in the Falklands War, or forwarding decrypts to Stalin that revealed the impending Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union—but this was undertaken as an adjunct to military activities and not something that was pursued as a strategic alternative in itself. Now, however, dramatic developments in information technologies—the increased capabilities of intelligence gathering combined with the enormous synthesizing powers of computers—have made possible for the first time a truly global system of near-real-time monitoring.
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It is already the case that weather satellites, medium-resolution imaging systems, worldwide air traffic control networks, television links, and the like are being used by civilian corporations, while the U.S. military can rely on extensive photo reconnaissance abilities, infrared missile launch detectors, radar satellites, unmanned aerial sensors, remotely planted acoustic devices, and various military guidance tools. The United States could undertake to expand this technology in order to achieve a complete system of satellite sensors that would provide real-time monitoring on many wavelengths.
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The architecture for such a space-based information system is new, but the necessary communications technology is already emerging from the private sector. The entire system, however, depends upon affordable space lift, and this is something the U.S. government must undertake.

Such a system would provide the United States with the ability to detect, identify, track, and engage far more targets with a higher degree of lethality and precision, over a global area, than ever before. Knowing which subset of targets to strike serves as an enormous force multiplier, greatly reducing the number of weapons and strikes necessary to prevail over an enemy force.
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In addition, there are real benefits to the market-state to be
found in information sharing (and withholding) beyond what can be achieved by weapons strikes.

At Sandia National Laboratories, an experiment has been undertaken in which a cooperative monitoring center acted as a confidence-building measure in much the same way that negotiated troop positioning, missile constraints, and transparency were used during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Mutual monitoring between two hostile states can reduce the chances of war by preventing successful pre-emption. Setting up such a center is an example of producing the collective goods that can maintain U.S. leadership. Indeed, as we shall see, the concept of collective goods is especially crucial to the market-state because the functions of that state do not replicate but supplement the market, which is astringently economical with public goods.

At present, the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) network established by the United States is used by any country with the capability to access it. Foreign nations have previously utilized the GPS system to direct missile attacks against U.S. interests; indeed, GPS-guided weaponry could be used to destroy U.S. satellites in orbit.
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Access to a truly global monitoring system, however, could be limited by the United States and bartered to licensee states either for fees or for political cooperation. In addition to its crucial contribution to warfare, such a system would be integral to weather control, asteroid defense, solar flare warnings, commodity planning, environmental monitoring, and the sustainable exploitation of natural resources, all
collective goods
for the society of states.

(5)

By providing licensed states with the protection of a
missile defense
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system, the United States could provide an effective and trustworthy strategic umbrella analogous to that it provided during the Cold War through extended nuclear deterrence. Moreover, without such defensive systems the vulnerability of U.S. forces to missile attack abroad will be an increasing deterrent to U.S. force projections in aid of allies or for humanitarian missions. Thus what positive effect still remains as a result of U.S. extended deterrence could be sharply eroded in the absence of a credible U.S. ballistic missile defense.

“Central deterrence” is a function of the threat to target a national homeland in order to protect the homeland of the threatening, deterring party.
*
For example, the U.S. central deterrent consisted of the threat to attack the Soviet homeland in order to protect the American homeland from attack. The term denotes a relationship between vital objectives whose very centrality to the State gives them the highest value to the deterrer
and thus assures both the willingness to run the highest risks of retaliation or pre-emption and the will to inflict a level of harm commensurate with the necessity to protect “central” objectives. “Extended deterrence,” by contrast, projects nuclear deterrence beyond the absolutely central, into other geographical, nonhomeland theatres or for other, nonvital interests. Extended deterrence was the objective of the policy according to which the United States promised to retaliate with nuclear weapons if the states of Western Europe or Japan were attacked. Sometimes this threat of retaliation is called the nuclear “umbrella.” Extended deterrence is the single most effective instrument the United States has to prevent major-state proliferation because it permits these states to develop their economies without diverting vast resources to the nuclear arms competition, and yet remain relatively safe from nuclear attack.

It would be a grave mistake to assume that the threat of missile attack has receded worldwide as a result of the end of the Cold War. In the Gulf War, Iraq launched almost ninety missiles against targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia; 25 percent of all U.S. combat fatalities from that war were the result of a single Scud missile strike. Moreover, missile technology is quickly spreading to many states. North Korea, China, and other states have played major roles in this export trade. When North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and the North African countries ultimately possess the 1,300-kilometer-range No-Dong I missile, or something like it, the capitals of Japan, France, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Italy will all be within range of potentially hostile states.
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Since the end of the Cold War, the American program for ballistic missile defense (BMD) has been redirected away from the effort to achieve a comprehensive shield against a massive Soviet attack and toward theatre nuclear defense systems. The Clinton administration endorsed a program that included an upgrade to the Patriot systems used in the Gulf War; a Theater High Altitude Area Defense system that would supplement short-range point-defense systems like Patriot; and a sea-based system using the AEGIS ships.
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The enthusiasm with which these systems have been pursued, however, has been diminished by the intellectual residue of the Cold War: during the Soviet-American confrontation, many persons felt that BMD was essentially destabilizing to the deterrence relationship because it promised—a promise it could not possibly fulfill—to prevent the USSR from being able to destroy the United States in a retaliatory strike, thus potentially tempting both sides into pre-emptive moves.

It would reflect a considerable misunderstanding if these opinions, whatever their merits in context of the Long War, were to prevent the most rapid feasible deployment of BMD by the United States today. This deployment would enable the United States to protect many countries—perhaps for a fee—including states that would be hard-pressed to deploy
their own defensive systems and that therefore might otherwise be tempted to develop other, far cheaper, deterrent systems of mass destruction. Moreover, the deployment of a theater BMD system would cast doubt upon potentially preclusive moves by other states to prevent the United States from projecting power abroad through conventional forces. For example, the six-month buildup of coalition forces in the Saudi desert would have been far too risky for a market-state like the United States if Iraq had possessed adequate offensive missiles. Even for a nation-state acting to protect its survival, such a threat to an expeditionary force can be preclusive: with respect to the Normandy invasion, General Eisenhower wrote that “if the German had succeeded in perfecting and using [the V-1 and V-2 missiles] six months earlier than he did our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible.”
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A theatre BMD might be able to rehabilitate future regional military operations similar to the coalition offensive in the Gulf War despite hostile missile proliferation that it is evident is very difficult for market-states to prevent. As an aside, I should add that it is not necessarily a decisive argument against BMD to say that it would be ineffectual against nuclear threats delivered by other means—the so-called suitcase bomb, for example. These devices are extremely difficult to manufacture and, more important, are as much a threat as an asset to an authoritarian state because, unlike missile systems, they do not require elaborate control procedures and technologies and are thus potential tools for insurrection.