June 2015 Affirming Extended Deterrence Dr. Robert L. Butterworth President, Aries Analytics, Inc. Sixty-­‐nine years ago, Bernard Brodie published his famous precept about the consequences of the atomic bomb: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.”1 Brodie was well ahead of his time (until the 1960s the US had the weapons to “win” a war with the USSR, although it would have been costly). But the problem he posed went far beyond the purposes of a military establishment and it continually challenges our statecraft. To solve it with general principles would require having the Erised mirror of Harry Potter, which reflected not a viewer’s image but rather his heart’s desire. Harry saw his parents; his friend Ron saw himself winning a sports event. A nuclear force planner would see a general principle, a guide to policy and force planning, a formula to tell enemies and allies (and ourselves) about the military contingencies that might arise if events unfolded along certain lines. But we don’t have one. Core Deficiency What we do have is a vocabulary deficiency. Brodie’s “avert war” was soon replaced by “deterrence,” which seems to identify one path to averting war if only that path could be found. In the 1950s the US sought to ensure deterrence through a policy of “massive retaliation” and a defense program heavily emphasizing nuclear weapons, pre-­‐delegation of authority to use those weapons, preparations to ensure they could be used preemptively, distribution of intermediate range missiles under NATO allies’ control with warhead to be armed by the US, and strategic operations planned to destroy as much of the Soviet state as possible. • In the 1960s the US sought deterrence through a policy of flexible response and a defense program heavily emphasizing conventional forces; centralization of the authority to use nuclear weapons in the National Command Authority; endless “imagineering” about how nuclear war might be limited; and strategic operations planned to assure the destruction of an “optimal mix” of targets that would destroy military and governmental facilities while still killing an estimated 90 million or so of the Soviet population, which were reported as “bonus kills.” The next decade saw deterrence pursued though policies and programs to fight long nuclear wars. After that came policies to use nuclear weapons selectively, to •
•
attack or spare civil or strategic command and control facilities, to free ethnic communities through pattern attacks along their borders, and to demonstrate capability or determination. In sum, deterrence sounds simple: get somebody who wants to hurt you not to do so. But how to get there is far from obvious. Is an enemy, for example, more likely to be deterred if: • We threaten to retaliate massively or to do so proportionately? • We have lots of options for reprisals or not very many? • Our forces are ready to go at any minute or if they require some time to be generated? • Our forces are targeted to destroy opposing forces or to inflict other punishment? • Our nuclear weapons are distributed in the hands of our operating forces or if they are kept under central control? • Authority to use nuclear weapons is pre-­‐delegated to operational forces or if it is kept restricted to the National Command Authority? The answer to each, of course, could well be either “yes” or “no, depending entirely on the circumstances at hand and how they came to pass. Deterrence, in short, is a vacuous concept, devoid in itself of meaningful guidance for policy and force planning. As others have noted, deterrence is not the answer—it is the problem.2 The Pentagon’s Deterrence Operations Joint Operating Concept makes that quite clear: to deter an enemy, it says in many words, make sure that he thinks he will lose more than he gains by doing what you told him not to do.3 Here’s another such insight: “buy low and sell high.” Consequences And yet we can’t stop talking about deterrence in generalities. One consequence has been policy oxymorons: the MAD oxymoron (protecting people makes us less secure); the sponge oxymoron (we need to modernize the ICBMs to make sure the enemy will strike our homeland with several hundred megatons); the retaliatory counterforce oxymoron (we need lots of highly accurate SLBMs to destroy the enemy ICBMs that would presumably have been launched earlier to attack our ICBMs); and so on. As the verbal junction of contradicting concepts, policy oxymorons flourish where strategic analysis is lacking. The oxymorons then call attention to a second consequence: the fading importance of strategic analysis and military perspectives in shaping policy about nuclear weapons. To be meaningful, that is, to be implemented operationally, deterrence requires an intentioned opponent (preferably one who delights in savage acts of depravity). Lacking such a focus, deterrence policy diffuses into vague generalizations about imagined contingencies. Putin may yet step up and save our bacon. But for the past couple of decades national leaders have taken pains to obscure the empirical referents for American The Marshall Institute — Science for Better Public Policy 1601 North Kent Street, Suite 802 • Arlington, VA 22209 Phone (571) 970-­‐3180 • Email: [email protected] • Website: www.marshall.org 2
deterrence. In the post-­‐Cold War enthusiasm of the early 1990s, Secretary of Defense Perry replaced “mutual assured destruction” with “mutual assured safety”4; General Horner, Commander of US Space Command, then newly in charge of the ICBM force, declared that “the nuclear weapon is obsolete;”5 Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that “our intention is to have a military that doesn’t need to use [nuclear, biological, and chemical] weapons;”6 and Deputy Secretary Deutch told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that there was at that time no threat to US vital interests that could not be met with conventional weapons.7 Subsequent administrations played the same music. President George W. Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review in 2001 discarded earlier threat-­‐based force planning in favor of “capabilities-­‐
based” planning, and specifically noted that “the US will no longer plan, size, or sustain its forces as though Russia presented merely a smaller version of the threat posed by the former Soviet Union.”8 President Obama’s review ranked worries about nuclear proliferation and terrorism ahead of nuclear deterrence and stability. For quite some time, the controlling voices in national nuclear policy more and more have been those concerned primarily with making it ever increasingly difficult actually to use the weapons. Advocacy for force development and modernization has been reduced to bureaucratic horse-­‐trading over budget shares, legislative logrolling to help state budgets, and to fast quips about replying to a limited attack with total destruction. The rationale for modernizing the Triad, for example, is that (a) we’ve always had it, and (b) it’s wearing out. The ED Consequence As policy generalizations about deterrence come to appear less immediately derived from strategic and military assessments, they can exacerbate friction with our allies and national security partners. In what has become increasingly a pristine example of ignotum per ignotius, the United States has long talked of extending deterrence like an umbrella to protect friendly sovereign states. But who is to be deterred by what threats from doing what things under what circumstances? By itself, the US will fill in those blanks in response to an evolving challenge. But we nearly always work with our allies, and they have an irritating habit of seeing things from their own points of view, evaluating US proposals in terms of their own interests, and interpreting alliance agreements in terms that make sense to them. •
•
•
Years ago, for example, it was hard for the European members of NATO to endorse wholeheartedly US war plans that deferred using nuclear weapons until NATO’s conventional forces were nearly defeated, after which the US would fight a limited nuclear war on their territories. They also were not wholeheartedly sure that the US would consult fully and in time before using nuclear weapons, “time and circumstances permitting.” Some of the allies would be willing to consult under the same terms if they had their own nuclear weapons, but every US administration after Eisenhower insisted that the US, UK, and (reluctantly) France would be NATO’ s only nuclear powers. And for all the allies, nuclear powers or not, it was hard to understand US The Marshall Institute — Science for Better Public Policy 1601 North Kent Street, Suite 802 • Arlington, VA 22209 Phone (571) 970-­‐3180 • Email: [email protected] • Website: www.marshall.org 3
protestations of shared, indivisible national security when it was threatening to withdraw its forces if Germany did not provide it with increased offsets to help with the US balance of payments. The heart of the problems in NATO, of course, was lack of technology: a button that would allow each member to launch NATO’s nuclear forces when it felt necessary, and that would also be a safety catch to stop anyone else from doing so. We never did create that button. Instead, with the Kennedy Administration, we shifted our emphasis to conventional forces, and the allies eventually followed suit, although they never did as much as we wanted. Keeping American forces and some nuclear weapons in Europe was part of that realignment. The US may have to reverse that pattern in the Pacific theater. Today our allies in South Korea and Japan still welcome the continued presence of American forces (though they might be moved to different locations in the future). Both countries participate in ongoing discussions about regional security (although the bilateral talks with the US are much more substantive than the trilaterals), and each has supported US efforts to advance security in the region more broadly, most formally with the Philippines, but also with Vietnam and, in different degrees, with Indonesia and Malaysia. One hopes these activities can help build a foundation for measures to help resist any attempt to re-­‐draw international boundaries by unilateral force. For nuclear relations, however, the forecast is not so favorable. Chinese and even, to some extent, North Korean nuclear forces create the same “magic button” problem that troubled NATO, aggravated by the disparity between the US policy pronouncements and military practices. The tension is most evident in South Korea, where some complain that the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpeong Island represent failures of US deterrence. As this region becomes more dangerous, with North Korea’s missile launches and its nuclear program, the South Korean forces have been seeking greater autonomy in planning and operations. Some in the US worry that they are doing so to be able trigger a war against the North regardless of any US hesitation. Seoul’s quest for a longer-­‐range ballistic missile might speak to that point. And some want to go much further. Nuclear weapons can be seen as providing an essential degree of independent security for countries lacking the resources to confront militarily powerful adversaries, and recent years have seen calls by some in both South Korea and Japan for the development of independent nuclear forces. The circumstances here are different from those in Europe fifty years ago, when the bumper-­‐sticker challenge was whether the US would sacrifice New York for Paris. Today the challenge is whether the US would ever use nuclear weapons in any event short of its own survival, and we now have about a half-­‐century of policies, programs, practices, and opinions of national leaders that suggest the answer is No. When US officials talk about ”deterrence” extended to allies and partners, they are often referring to conventional forces. When they talk about transparency and confidence-­‐building measures, they are often talking about non-­‐proliferation. When they talk about strategic stability, what they are talking about is anybody’s guess. The Marshall Institute — Science for Better Public Policy 1601 North Kent Street, Suite 802 • Arlington, VA 22209 Phone (571) 970-­‐3180 • Email: [email protected] • Website: www.marshall.org 4
Recommendations We can do better. To start, let’s stop talking in generalities about “deterrence,” a term that today adds nothing but static to discussions of national security. Then let’s recognize that in practice the deterrence requires extended deterrence, and extending deterrence requires statecraft well beyond agreements about military cooperation. In its highest form, extended deterrence would reflect the presence of a deep community of shared interests so entangling the parties as to make them effectively partners in a common homeland. "The difference between the national homeland and everything 'abroad' is the difference between threats that are inherently credible, even if unspoken, and threats that have to be made credible.”9 To encourage that community to grow, let’s talk about conventional force issues in terms of defense, not “deterrence by denial,” and talk in detail about forces, deployments, operations, logistics, training, and what happens next, and what we want the region to look like in ten years. Let’s make sure to include cooperation in space, for communications and maritime domain surveillance at least, and to lay the groundwork for joint command and control. Cyber operations must also be included, but organizational arrangements should remain malleable or even provisional until the role of cyber in the joint fight is better understood. And let’s talk more about what we are likely to see and might want to do regarding nuclear weapons in the “extended” environments, particularly about forward deployment of US forces that could deliver our only surviving nuclear capability that is not governed by an agreement with Russia—the B-­‐61, deliverable by F-­‐15s and nuclear-­‐
capable successor aircraft that would be visible when based in the region. The time may come when we might even want to forward deploy some of the bombs as well. Dr. Robert L. Butterworth is the President of Aries Analytics, Inc., and was formerly a member of the board of directors of the George C. Marshall Institute and Chief of Strategic Planning, Policy, and Doctrine at Air Force Space Command. This Policy Outlook is based on remarks made by Dr. Butterworth to the Strategic Deterrence Coalition Symposium, Warrensberg, MO, on May 5, 2015. 1
Bernard Brodie, "War in the Atomic Age," in Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), p. 76. 2
For example: Michael MccGwire, “Deterrence: The Problem-­‐Not the Solution,” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-­‐) 62:1 (Winter, 1985-­‐
1986), pp. 55-­‐70. 3 “Deterrence operations convince adversaries not to take actions that threaten US vital interests by means of decisive influence over their decision-­‐making. Decisive influence is achieved by credibly threatening to deny benefits and/or impose costs, while encouraging restraint by convincing the actor that restraint will result in an acceptable outcome.” Department of Defense, Deterrence Operations Joint Operating Concept 5
The Marshall Institute — Science for Better Public Policy 1601 North Kent Street, Suite 802 • Arlington, VA 22209 Phone (571) 970-­‐3180 • Email: [email protected] • Website: www.marshall.org (Version 2.0, December 2006), p. 3, accessed at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/concepts/joint_concepts/joc_deterrence.pdf 4
“The new posture which we are seeking . . . is no longer based on mutual assured destruction, no longer based on MAD. We have coined a new term for our new posture which we call mutual assured safety, or MAS.” Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, in Defense Department News Release, “Press Conference with Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, et al.,” 22 September 1994, pp. 2-­‐3; accessed at http://oldsite.nautilus.org/archives/nukestrat/USA/Npr/dodpc092294.pdf 5
http://www.apnewsarchive.com/1994/Top-­‐General-­‐Eliminate-­‐All-­‐Nuclear-­‐
Weapons/id-­‐aa473a3dd966463ccfacb7021e3c9d6a 6
Art Pine, “US Developing Arms, Battle Plans to Avert Nuclear, Gas Attacks,” Los Angeles Times 9 May 1994; accessed at http://articles.latimes.com/1994-­‐05-­‐09/news/mn-­‐
55652_1_u-­‐s-­‐nuclear-­‐weapons See also Michael R. Boldrick, “The Nuclear Posture Review: Liabilities and Risks,” Parameters 25:4 (Winter 1995-­‐96), pp. 80-­‐89, in which I first encountered the quotations from Perry, Horner, and Carter cited above. 7
John W. Deutch testimony to House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 103rd Cong., 2d Sess., 5 October 1994, response to Chairman Hamilton, just following opening statement; accessed at http://archive.org/stream/usnuclearpolicyh00unit/usnuclearpolicyh00unit_djvu.txt 8
Department of Defense, “Nuclear Posture Review Report,” 9m January 2002, p. 2; accessed at http://www.defense.gov/news/Jan2002/d20020109npr.pdf 9
Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence p. 36. The Marshall Institute — Science for Better Public Policy 1601 North Kent Street, Suite 802 • Arlington, VA 22209 Phone (571) 970-­‐3180 • Email: [email protected] • Website: www.marshall.org 6