Isegoria

Every analyst in Washington is writing about the coming air campaign against Iran, Vox Day says, but none of them are writing about Beijing using this distraction to take Taiwan without a shot fired:

Iran launched roughly 550 ballistic missiles and over 1,000 drones during the Twelve-Day War. The official “90% interception rate” is a masterwork of selective statistics: it describes the success rate of attempted intercepts. Al Jazeera’s analysis found that of 574 missiles, only 257 were engaged at all. The remaining 317 were never intercepted. Of the 257 attempts, 201 succeeded, 20 partially, 36 failed.

The damage to Israel, the extent of which is still under military censorship, included a direct hit on the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv that rendered Netanyahu’s office unusable for four months, confirmed satellite imagery of structural damage at Tel Nof Airbase, devastation of the Beersheba cyberwarfare base, $150-200 million in damage to the Haifa oil refinery, and at least five military facilities directly struck according to the Telegraph. Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker reported that “many strikes went unreported” and that “we were also deterred.” So much for the clean victory.

But the damage to Israel is secondary. The primary problem is the damage to the interceptor stockpile. The United States expended approximately 150 THAAD missiles in twelve days—roughly 25% of total production since 2010. Eighty-odd SM-3s were consumed. Israel was running low on Arrow interceptors by war’s end. FY26 authorized procurement of 37 new THAAD rounds. Twelve days of defending against 500 missiles consumed years of production and a quarter of the cumulative stockpile.

Iran began the war with 2,500-3,000 missiles. They fired 550. This means Iran retained 1,950 to 2,450 missiles post-war. They’ve had eight months to build and otherwise acquire more missiles, disperse them, and harden their launch sites. The interceptor math does not work for a second round. This is not analysis. It is arithmetic. And the more significant danger is if either the Chinese or the Russians have helped them reduce their margin of error from 1 kilometer to 500 meters or less.

Just this week, something happened that the press mentioned in passing and clearly failed to understand the implications. The PLA and MizarVision published high-resolution satellite imagery pinpointing American military assets across the Middle East. Eighteen F-35s and six EA-18G Growlers at Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan. Patriot positions at Al Udeid. THAAD deployments in Jordan. The PLA produced a video titled “Siege of Iran” showing eight US bases under continuous satellite surveillance, with real-time maritime tracking of carrier groups via Yaogan satellites.

This was not an intelligence leak. It was a gift to Tehran, delivered publicly, with the PLA’s name on it.

The significance is not the obvious warning, but what it enables. Iran has completed its transition from GPS to BeiDou-3 for missile guidance, which means it is now encrypted, jam-resistant, and isn’t subject to American denial-of-service attacks. During the June war, GPS jamming was one of the most effective defensive measures against Iranian missiles using satellite terminal guidance. That vulnerability has been eliminated. Combined with Chinese satellite targeting data showing the exact coordinates of every defensive position, fuel depot, and aircraft shelter in the theater, Iran can shift from the saturation tactics of June to more accurate time-sensitive strikes against specific targets.

Former CENTCOM commander Votel dismissed the Chinese and Russian naval presence in the Strait of Hormuz as “an easy way to show support” that “doesn’t fundamentally change anything.” This is the kind of assessment that sounds reasonable if you think military support means destroyers, and sounds idiotic if you understand that ISR is the decisive enabler of modern precision warfare and that China is providing exactly that. The next Iranian missile will originate from Iranian soil. Its targeting data will have traversed Chinese satellites. No Chinese ship needs to fire a single missile for this to fundamentally change the equation.

The American analytical establishment is organized by regional command. CENTCOM watches the Middle East. EUCOM watches Europe. INDOPACOM watches the Pacific. Nobody’s job is to watch all three simultaneously, which is why nobody in Washington can see the obvious.

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The fishing militia exercises are relevant here, but not as the invasion rehearsal the military analysts believe them to be, but as economic coercion capability demonstration. Between 1,400 and 2,000 PRC fishing boats mobilized in blockade-like formations in December and January. Taiwan’s Coast Guard expanded its “suspicious vessel” list from 300 to 1,900 in response. This doesn’t signal D-Day. It signals the ability to strangle the island economically at will, and therefore the cost of resistance to any incoming government considering whether to cooperate with Beijing or not.

The path forward isn’t complicated. The KMT wins municipal elections. The DPP is discredited. A political crisis—manufactured or organic—produces a change of government. The new government invites dialogue, accepts a framework for integration, and stands the military down. What, precisely, is the US going to invade to prevent? It cannot defend a government that does not wish to be defended. It cannot maintain an alliance with a country whose leadership has chosen the other side.

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Xi doesn’t need intelligence briefings about the Taiwanese business elite. He’s known them for thirty years. He knows who’s leveraged, who owes him favors, who’s sympathetic to unification, and who can lean on others. A political transition doesn’t require tanks. It requires the right phone calls to the right people at the right moment, and Xi has spent his entire career assembling the right numbers.

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I believe Xi intends unification to be his crowning legacy, and peaceful reunification would mark the superior achievement, not just in strategic and economic senses, but in the Chinese civilizational context. Military conquest would prove the PLA is strong. Peaceful reunification would prove that Chinese civilization’s gravitational pull is irresistible, that the Western model of strategic competition was defeated by patience and political art, and that the last holdout returned to the fold voluntarily. It would vindicate not just the CCP but the entire Sunzian tradition against the Clausewitzian one.

The most spectacular event of the past half century, Thomas Schelling explains in Arms and Influence, is one that did not occur:

We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.

What a stunning achievement—or, if not achievement, what stunning good fortune. In 1960 the British novelist C. P. Snow said on the front page of the New York Times that unless the nuclear powers drastically reduced their nuclear armaments, thermonuclear warfare within the decade was a “mathematical certainty.” Nobody appeared to think Snow’s statement extravagant.

We now have that mathematical certainty compounded more than four times, and no nuclear war. Can we make it through another half dozen decades?

[…]

These weapons are unique, and a large part of their uniqueness derives from their being perceived as unique. We call most of the others “conventional,” and that word has two distinct senses. One is “ordinary, familiar, traditional,” a word that can be applied to food, clothing, or housing. The more interesting sense of “conventional” is something that arises as if by compact, by agreement, by convention. It is simply an established convention that nuclear weapons are different.

True, their fantastic scale of destruction dwarfs the conventional weapons. But as early as the end of the Eisenhower administration, nuclear weapons could be made smaller in explosive yield than the largest conventional explosives. There were military planners to whom “little” nuclear weapons appeared untainted by the taboo that they thought ought properly to attach only to weapons of a size associated with Hiroshima or Bikini. But by then nuclear weapons had become a breed apart; size was no excuse from the curse.

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Was Ike really ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy—or Taiwan itself? It turned out he didn’t have to. The conspicuous shipment of nuclear artillery to Taiwan was surely intended as a threat. Bluffing would have been risky from Dulles’ point of view; leaving nuclear weapons unused while the Chinese conquered Taiwan would have engraved the taboo in granite. At the same time, Quemoy may have appeared to Dulles as a superb opportunity to dispel the taboo. Using short-range nuclear weapons in a purely defensive mode, solely against offensive troops, especially at sea or on beachheads devoid of civilians, might have been something that Eisenhower would have been willing to authorize and that European allies would have approved, and nuclear weapons might have proved that they could be used “just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” The Chinese did not offer the opportunity.

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Hardly anybody born after World War II remembers the name of Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson. But most who have studied any American history know the name of John Foster Dulles.

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The anti-nuclear movement in the Kennedy administration was led from the Pentagon, and in 1962 McNamara began his campaign—his and President Kennedy’s—to reduce reliance on nuclear defense in Europe by building expensive conventional forces in NATO. During the next couple of years McNamara became associated with the idea that nuclear weapons were not “useable” at all in the sense that Eisenhower and Dulles had intended. Undoubtedly the traumatic October of 1962—the “Cuban Missile Crisis”—contributed to some of Kennedy’s key advisers’ and Kennedy’s own revulsion against nuclear weapons.

The contrast between the Eisenhower and the Kennedy-Johnson attitudes toward nuclear weapons is beautifully summarized in a statement of Johnson’s in September 1964. “Make no mistake. There is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon. For 19 peril-filled years no nation has loosed the atom against another. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order.”

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It is worth a pause here to consider just what might be the literal meaning of “no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon.” Specifically, why couldn’t a nuclear bomb no larger than the largest blockbuster of World War II be considered conventional, or a nuclear depth charge of modest explosive power for use against submarines far at sea, or nuclear land mines to halt advancing tanks or to cause landslides in mountain passes? What could be so awful about using three “small” atomic bombs to save the besieged French at Dien Bien Phu (in Indochina, 1953), as was discussed at the time? What could be so wrong about using nuclear coastal artillery against a communist Chinese invasion flotilla in the Gulf of Taiwan?

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(The analogy to “one little drink” for a recovering alcoholic was sometimes heard.) But both lines of argument arrived at the same conclusion: nuclear weapons, once introduced into combat, could not, or probably would not, be contained, confined, limited.

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The case of the “neutron bomb” is illustrative. This is a bomb, or potential bomb, that, because it is very small and because of the materials of which it is constructed, emits “prompt neutrons” that can be lethal at a distance at which blast and thermal radiation are comparatively moderate. As advertised, it kills people without great damage to structures. The issue of producing and deploying this kind of weapon arose during the Carter administration, evoking an anti-nuclear reaction that caused it to be left on the drawing board. But the same bomb—at least, the same idea—had been the subject of even more intense debate fifteen years earlier, and it was there that the argument was honed, ready to be used again in the 1970s. The argument was simple, and it was surely valid, whether or not it deserved to be decisive. The argument stated that it was important not to blur the distinction—the firebreak, as it was called—between nuclear and conventional weapons; and either because of its low yield or because of its “benign” kind of lethality it was feared, and it was argued, that there would be a strong temptation to use this weapon where nuclears were otherwise not allowed, and that the use of this weapon would erode the threshold, blur the firebreak, pave the way by incremental steps for nuclear escalation.

The argument is not altogether different from that against so-called peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs). The decisive argument against PNEs was that they would accustom the world to nuclear explosions, undermining the belief that nuclear explosions were inherently evil and reducing the inhibitions on nuclear weapons. The prospect of blasting new riverbeds in northern Russia, a bypass canal for the waters of the Nile, or harbors in developing countries generated concern about “legitimizing” nuclear explosions.

A revealing demonstration of this antipathy came with American arms controllers’ and energy-policy analysts’ universal rejection of the prospect of an ecologically clean source of electrical energy, proposed in the 1970s, that would have detonated tiny thermonuclear bombs in underground caverns to generate steam. I have seen this idea unanimously dismissed without argument, as if the objections were too obvious to require articulation. As far as I could tell, the objection was always that even “good” thermonuclear explosions were bad and should be kept that way. (I can imagine President Eisenhower: “In any energy crisis where these things can be used on strictly civilian sites for strictly civilian purposes I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a barrel of oil or anything else.” And Dulles: “Somehow or other we must manage to remove the taboo from the use of these clean thermonuclear energy sources.”)

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There is typically the notion that to provide equipment is much less participatory than to provide military manpower; we arm the Israelis and provide ammunition even in wartime, but so much as a company of American infantry would be perceived as a greater act of participation in the war than $ 5 billion worth of fuel, ammunition, and spare parts.

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Arms control is so often identified with limitations on the possession or deployment of weapons that it is often overlooked that this reciprocated investment in non-nuclear capability was a remarkable instance of unacknowledged but reciprocated arms control. It is not only potential restraint in the use of nuclear weapons; it is investment in a configuration of weapons to make nations capable of non-nuclear combat.

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With the possible exception of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, this buildup of conventional weapons in Europe was the most important East–West arms understanding until the demise of the Soviet Union. It was genuine arms control, even if inexplicit, even if denied—as real as if the two sides had signed a treaty obliging them, in the interest of fending off nuclear war, to put large amounts of treasure and manpower into conventional forces. The investment in restraints on the use of nuclear weapons was real as well as symbolic.

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Iraq was known to possess, and to have been willing to use, “unconventional” weapons—chemicals. Had chemical weapons been used with devastating effect on U.S. forces, the issue of appropriate response would have posed the nuclear question. I am confident that had the President, in that circumstance, deemed it essential to escalate from conventional weapons, battlefield nuclear weapons would have been the military choice. Nuclear weapons are what the Army, Navy, and Air Force are trained and equipped to use; their effects in different kinds of weather and terrain are well understood. The military profession traditionally despises poison. There would have been strong temptation to respond with the kind of unconventional weapon we know best how to use.

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There is much discussion these days of whether or not “deterrence” has had its day and no longer has much of a role in America’s security. There is no Soviet Union to deter; the Russians are more worried about Chechnya than about the United States; the Chinese seem no more interested in military risks over Taiwan than Khrushchev really was over Berlin; and terrorists cannot be deterred anyway—we don’t know what they value that we might threaten, or who or where it is.

I expect that we may come to a new respect for deterrence. If Iran should, despite every diplomatic effort or economic pressure to prevent it, acquire a few nuclear weapons, we may discover again what it is like to be the deterred one, not the one doing the deterring. (I consider us—NATO at the time—as having been deterred from intervening in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.) I also consider it crucial that Iran’s leaders, civilian and military, learn to think, if they have not already learned to think, in terms of deterrence.

What else can Iran accomplish, except possibly the destruction of its own system, with a few nuclear warheads? Nuclear weapons should be too precious to give away or to sell, too precious to waste killing people when they could, held in reserve, make the United States, or Russia, or any other nation, hesitant to consider military action.

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They will conclude—I hope they will conclude—over weeks of arguing, that the most effective use of the bomb, from a terrorist perspective, will be for influence. Possessing a workable nuclear weapon, if they can demonstrate possession—and I expect they will be able to do so without actually detonating it—will give them something of the status of a nation. Threatening to use it against military targets, and keeping it intact if the threat is successful, may appeal to them more than expending it in a purely destructive act. Even terrorists may consider destroying large numbers of people as less satisfying than keeping a major nation at bay.

Thomas Schelling explains the dialogue of competitive armament in Arms and Influence:

Nuclear age communications were dramatized by the Soviet-American hot line, a leased transatlantic cable with teletype machinery at both ends. Some people hailed it as a notable innovation; others were simply astonished that, in an age when one can directly dial his mother 3,000 miles away to wish her happy birthday, facilities did not already exist for a more urgent conversation. The hot line is a reminder that even in the era of Telstar and radio-dispatched taxis, facilities for quick communication between heads of government may not exist unless somebody has thought to provide them.

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In fact, the germ of the hot-line idea has to be sought still further back. Neither Gromyko nor Herter, nor any modern writer on arms control, has expressed the problem more lucidly than Xenophon did in the fourth century before Christ. Mutual suspicion arose between the Greek army departing Persia and the Persian army that escorted them. The Greek leader called for an interview with the Persian, to try “to put a stop to these suspicions before they ended in open hostility.” When they met, he said,

I observe that you are watching our moves as though we were enemies, and we, noticing this, are watching yours, too. On looking into things, I am unable to find evidence that you are trying to do us any harm, and I am perfectly sure that, as far as we are concerned, we do not even contemplate such a thing; and so I decided to discuss matters with you, to see if we could put an end to this mutual mistrust. I know, too, of cases that have occurred in the past when people sometimes as the result of slanderous information and sometimes merely on the strength of suspicion, have become frightened of each other and then, in their anxiety to strike first before anything is done to them have done irreparable harm to those who neither intended nor even wanted to do them any harm at all. I have come then in the conviction that misunderstandings of this sort can best be ended by personal contact, and I want to make it clear to you that you have no reason to distrust us.

The upshot of this incident is chastening. The “personal contact” so established was used by the Persians to slay the entire leadership of the Greek host; and while we owe to their treachery one of the most rewarding books on strategy in print, we can lament that they did not get arms control off to a more creditable start. The mistake was apparently in thinking that the only way to take the danger out of distrust is to replace it with trust.

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Upon reflection almost anyone will agree that the communication that takes place between enemies is the most urgent and that what is “unnatural” in the modern era is the notion that in case of war there could be nothing legitimate for enemies to talk about.

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This was no novelty; Julius Caesar in Gaul, or Xenophon in Persia, understood the crucial importance of communication with the enemy and inflicted the severest penalties on subordinates who did not respect the personal safety of enemy ambassadors.

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The Soviets may not have realized when they lofted their first Sputnik into orbit that they were doing for American strategic forces what the Korean invasion had done earlier to Western military programs. They might have guessed it; and even if they did not, in retrospect they must be aware that their early achievements in rocketry were a powerful stimulus to American strategic weapon development. The American bomber buildup in the 1950s was a reflection of the expected Soviet bomber forces and air defenses; the “missile gap” of the late 1950s spurred not only research and development in the United States but also weapon procurement. Whether the Soviets got a net gain from making the West believe in the missile gap in the late 1950s may be questionable, but it is beyond question that American bomber and missile forces were enhanced in qualitative performance, and some of them in quantity, by American beliefs.

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The Korean War, in retrospect, can hardly have served the Soviet interest; it did more than anything else to get the United States engaged in the arms race and to get NATO taken seriously. The Soviets may have been under strong temptation to get short-run prestige gains out of their initial space successes; perhaps they lamented the necessity to appeal to a public audience in a fashion that was bound to stimulate the United States. Whatever political gains they got out of the short-lived missile gap which they either created or acquiesced in, it not only stimulated Western strategic programs but possibly gave rise to a reaction that causes the Soviets to be viewed more skeptically at the present time than their accomplishments may actually warrant.

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Samuel P. Huntington examined a number of qualitative and quantitative arms races during the century since about 1840, and he does find instances in which one power eventually gave up challenging the supremacy of another. “Thus, a twenty-five year sporadic naval race between France and England ended in the middle 1860s when France gave up any serious effort to challenge the 3: 2 ratio which England had demonstrated the will and the capacity to maintain.” He points out, though, that “in nine out of ten races the slogan of the challenging state is either ‘parity’ or ‘superiority,’ only in rare cases does the challenger aim for less than this, for unless equality or superiority is achieved, the arms race is hardly likely to be worthwhile.”

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In America we have been suffering from proliferation in recent years—of cigarette brands, not nuclear weapons—and smokers eager to try new brands are usually anxious to discriminate between mentholated and ordinary. As far as I know, there has been no collusion between cigarette manufacturers and their millions of customers on a signal, and there may not have been even among the manufacturers, yet there has arisen a fairly reliable color signal: mentholated cigarettes are to be in green or blue-green packages. I think by now the Soviet leaders have discerned that statements datelined Geneva are mentholated.

Disarmament advocates may not like the idea that any understandings with the Soviet Union on force levels are reached through the process of military planning and a half-conscious, inarticulate dialogue with the enemy, unenforceable when reached, subject to inspection only by unilateral intelligence procedures, and reflecting each side’s notion of adequate superiority or tolerable inferiority. Opponents of disarmament may not like the idea that the executive branch or the Defense Department, even inadvertently, may accommodate its goals to Soviet behavior or try to discern and manipulate enemy intentions. But the process is too important to be ignored and too natural to be surprising. Nor is it a new idea.

In 1912 Churchill was chagrined at the naval procurement plans of the Kaiser’s government, which was about to purchase a quarter again as many dreadnoughts as Churchill had expected them to. He wondered whether the Germans appreciated that the result of their naval expansion would be a corresponding British expansion, with more money spent, tensions aggravated, and no net gain to either from the competition. The Cabinet sent the Secretary of State for War to Berlin to communicate that if the Germans would hold to their original plan, the British would hold to theirs; otherwise Great Britain would match the Germans two-for-one in additional ships. Churchill thought that if the Germans really did not want war they would be amenable to the suggestion, and that nothing could be lost by trying.

Nothing was lost by trying. In his memoirs, Churchill displays no regrets at having had the idea and having made the attempt. He had not had a “disarmament agreement” in mind; he simply hoped to deter an expensive acceleration of the arms race by communicating what the British reaction would be. He did it with his eyes open and with neither humility nor arrogance.

Essentially, this process of discouraging the Soviets in the arms race is no different from trying to persuade them that they are getting nowhere by pushing us around in Berlin. In Berlin, as in Cuba, we have tried to teach them a lesson about what might have been called “peaceful coexistence,” if the term had not already been discredited by Soviet use.

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The principle of “containment” ought to be applicable to Soviet military preparation. However constrained they are by an ideology that makes it difficult for them to acknowledge that they are bested or contained, they must have some capacity for acceptance of the facts of life. Perhaps the American response can be made to appear to be a fact of life.

This is a kind of “arms control” objective. But it differs from the usual formulation of arms control in several respects. First, it does not begin with the premise that arms agreements with potential enemies are intrinsically obliged to acknowledge some kind of parity. (But since there are many different ways of measuring military potency, it might be possible to permit an inferior power to claim—possibly even to believe in—parity according to certain measures.) Second, it explicitly rests on the notion that arms bargaining involves threats as well as offers.

It may be impolite in disarmament negotiations explicitly to threaten an aggravated arms race as the cost of disagreement. But, of course, the inducement to agree to any reciprocated modification of armaments must be some implicit threat of the consequences of failure to agree. The first step toward inducing a potential enemy to moderate his arms buildup is to persuade him that he has more to lose than to gain by failing to take our reaction into account. (It could even be wise deliberately to plan and to communicate a somewhat excessive military buildup ratio relative to the Soviet force in order to enhance their inducements to moderate their own program. This sort of thing is not unknown in tariff bargaining.)

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A good many military facilities and assets are not competitive: facilities to minimize false alarm, facilities to prevent accidental and unauthorized acts that might lead to war, and many other improvements in reliability that would help to maintain control in peacetime or even in war.

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A missile-hardening race is not the same as a missile-numbers race. Getting across to the Soviet Union the kind of reaction they can expect from us, therefore, involves more than a quantitative plan; it involves getting across a notion of the kinds of weapon programs that appear less provocative and those that would appear more so. The Cuban affair is a reminder that there can be a difference.

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For the strategically inferior power there is a dilemma to be taken quite seriously: to maximize deterrence by seeming incapable of anything but massive retaliation, or to hedge against the possibility of war by taking restraints and limitations seriously.

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You get somebody’s attention much more effectively by listening to him than by talking at him. You may make him much more self-conscious in what he communicates if you show that you are listening carefully and taking it seriously.

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There was every sign that it was being carefully read within the government and by scholars, military commentators, journalists, and even students. No wonder the Soviet authors in their second edition reacted to some of the Western commentary, “corrected” some of the “misconceptions” of their overseas readers, and quietly corrected some of their own text. There are indications that some of the more extreme doctrinal assertions have been softened, as though in fear the West might take them too seriously!

This strange, momentous dialogue may illustrate two principles for the kind of noncommittal bargaining we are forever engaged in with the potential enemy. First, don’t speak directly at him, but speak seriously to some serious audience and let him overhear. Second, to get his ear, listen.