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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.”

[…]

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?

[…]

(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.”)

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.”

[…]

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.

[…]

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.)

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

Thomas Schelling explains the dynamics of mutual alarm in Arms and Influence:

With every new book on the First World War it is becoming more widely appreciated how the beginning of that war was affected by the technology, the military organization, and the geography of Continental Europe in 1914. Railroads and army reserves were the two great pieces of machinery that meshed to make a ponderous mechanism of mobilization that, once set in motion, was hard to stop. Worse: it was dangerous to stop. The steps by which a country got ready for war were the same as the steps by which it would launch war, and that is the way they looked to an enemy.

[…]

Railroads made it possible to transport men, food, horses, ammunition, fodder, bandages, maps, telephones, and everything that makes up a fighting army to the border in a few days, there to launch an attack or to meet one, depending on whether or not the enemy got to the border first.

[…]

This miracle of mobilization reflected an obsession with the need for haste—to have an army at the frontier as quickly as possible, to exploit the enemy’s unreadiness if the enemy’s mobilization was slower and to minimize the enemy’s advantages if he got mobilized on the frontier first. The extraordinary complexity of mobilization was matched by a corresponding simplicity: once started, it was not to be stopped. Like rush-hour at Grand Central, it would be fouled up enormously by any suspension or slowdown.

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As a precaution against German attack, full mobilization might have been prudent. But full mobilization would threaten Germany and might provoke German mobilization in return. Partial mobilization against Austria would not threaten Germany; but it would expose Russia to German attack because the partial mobilization could not be converted to full mobilization.

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How different it would have been if the major countries had been islands, as Britain was. If a hundred miles of rough water had separated every country from its most worrisome enemy the technology of World War I would have given the advantage to the country invaded, not to the invader. To catch the enemy’s troop ships on the high seas after adequate warning of the enemy’s embarkation, and to fight on the beaches against amphibious attack, with good internal communications and supplies against an enemy dependent on calm seas for getting his supplies ashore—especially for a country that preferred to arm itself defensively, with railroad guns and shore batteries, and submarines to catch the enemy troopships—would have given so great an advantage to the defender that even an aggressor would have had to develop the diplomatic art of goading his opponent into enough fury to launch the war himself.

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The worst military confrontation is one in which each side thinks it can win if it gets the jump on the other and will lose if it is slow.

[…]

If the weapons can act instantaneously by the flip of a switch, a “go” signal, and can arrive virtually without warning to do decisive damage, the outcome of the crisis depends simply on who first finds the suspense unbearable. If the leaders on either side think the leaders on the other are about to find it unbearable, their motive to throw the switch is intensified.

[…]

But there are two ways to confront the enemy with retaliatory forces that cannot be destroyed in a surprise attack. One is to prevent surprise; the other is to prevent their destruction even in the event of surprise.

Radar, satellite-borne sensory devices to detect missile launchings, and alarm systems that signal when a country has been struck by nuclear weapons, could give us the minutes we might need to launch most of our missiles and planes before they were destroyed on the ground. If the enemy knows that we can react in a few minutes and that we will have the few minutes we need, he may be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But hardened underground missile sites, mobile missiles, submarine-based missiles, continually air-borne bombs and missiles, hidden missiles and aircraft, or even weapons in orbit do not so much depend on warning; they are designed to survive an attack, not to anticipate it by launching themselves at the enemy in the few minutes after warning—perhaps ambiguous warning—is received. In terms of ability to retaliate, warning time and survivability are to some extent substitutes but they also compete with each other. Money spent dispersing and hardening missile sites or developing and building mobile systems could have been spent on better warning, and vice versa.

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The system that can react within fifteen minutes may be a potent deterrent, but it poses an awful choice whenever we think we have warning but are not quite sure. We can exploit our speed of response and risk having started war by false alarm, or we can wait, avoiding an awful war by mistake but risking a dead retaliatory system if the alarm was real (and possibly reducing our deterrence in a crisis if the enemy knows we are inclined to give little credence to the warning system and wait until his bombs have landed).

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We get double security out of the system that can survive without warning: the enemy knowledge that we can wait in the face of ambiguous evidence, that we can take a few minutes to check on the origin of accidents or mischief, that we are not dependent on instant reaction to a fallible warning system, may permit the enemy, too, to wait a few minutes in the face of an accident and permit them in a crisis to attribute less nervous behavior to us and to be less jumpy themselves.

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But there is a conflict, and a serious one, between the urge to have fewer weapons in the interest of fewer accidents and the need—still thinking about “accidental war”—to have forces secure enough and so adequate in number that they need not react with haste for fear of not being able to react at all, secure enough and so adequate in number that, when excited by alarm, we can be conservative and doubt the enemy’s intent to attack, and that the enemy has confidence in our ability to be calm, helping him keep calm himself. A retaliatory system that is inadequate or insecure not only makes the possessor jumpy but is grounds for the enemy’s being jumpy too.

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“Vulnerability” is the problem that was dramatized by Sputnik in 1957 and by Soviet announcements then that they had successfully tested an ICBM. Nobody doubted that the aircraft of the Strategic Air Command, if launched against Soviet Russia, could do enormous damage to that country, unquestionably enough to punish any aggression they had in mind and enough to deter that aggression if they had to look forward to such punishment. But if the Soviets were about to achieve a capability to destroy without warning the massive American bomber force while the aircraft were vulnerably concentrated on a small number of airfields, the deterrent threat to retaliate with a destroyed bomber force might be ineffectual. The preoccupation with vulnerability that began in 1957 or so was not with the vulnerability of women and children and their means of livelihood to sudden Soviet attack on American population centers. It was the vulnerability of the strategic bomber force.

This concern with vulnerability led to the improved alert status of bombers so that radar warning of ballistic missiles would permit the bombers to save themselves by taking off. And it led to the abandonment of “soft,” large, liquid-fueled missiles like the Atlas, and the urgent substitution of Minuteman and Polaris missiles which, in dispersed and hardened silos or in hidden submarines, could effectively threaten retaliation. An Atlas missile could retaliate as effectively as several Minutemen, if alive, but could not so persuasively threaten to stay alive under attack. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s the chief criterion for selecting strategic weapon systems was invulnerability to attack, and properly so. Vulnerable strategic weapons not only invite attack but in a crisis could coerce the American government into attacking when it might prefer to wait.

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If a city has a limited number of bullet-proof vests it should probably give them to the police, letting the people draw their security from a police force that cannot be readily destroyed.

[…]

If one airplane can destroy 45 on an airfield, catching the other side’s airplanes on the ground can be decisively important while having more airplanes than the other side is only a modest advantage. If superiority attaches to the side that starts the war, a parade-ground inventory of force—a comparison of numbers on both sides—is of only modest value in determining the outcome. Furthermore, and this is the point to stress, the likelihood of war is determined by how great a reward attaches to jumping the gun, how strong the incentive to hedge against war itself by starting it, how great the penalty on giving peace the benefit of the doubt in a crisis.

The dimension of “strength” is an important one, but so is the dimension of “stability”—the assurance against being caught by surprise, the safety in waiting, the absence of a premium on jumping the gun.

[…]

A vivid example of this dynamic problem is bomber aircraft. In case of warning they can leave the ground. If they leave the ground they should initially proceed as though to target; in case it is war, they should not be wasting time and fuel by loitering to find out what happens next. As they proceed to target, they can be either recalled or confirmed on their mission. (The actual procedure may be that they return to base unless confirmed on their mission, by “positive control” command procedures.) If recalled, however, they return to the relative vulnerability of their bases. They need fuel, their crews are tired, they may need maintenance work, and they are comparatively unsynchronized. They are, in sum, more vulnerable, and less ready for attack, than before they took off.

[…]

Like the railroad mobilization of World War I, the bomber arrangements may enjoy simplicity and efficiency by ignoring the possibility that they may have to loiter or return to base. Like the railroad mobilization of World War I, the procedures may coerce decisions unless the procedures are compromised to facilitate orderly return to base.

[…]

If both sides are so organized, or even one side, the danger that war in fact will result from some kind of false alarm is enhanced.

[…]

The fueling of missiles could have created a similar problem if solid-fueled missiles had not so quickly replaced the originally projected missiles utilizing refrigerated fuels. If it takes time to fuel a missile, fifteen minutes or an hour, and if a fueled missile cannot be held indefinitely in readiness, a problem very much like the bomber problem can arise. To fuel a missile is not a simple act of prudence, achieving enhanced readiness at the cost of some fuel that may be wasted and some potential maintenance work on the missiles themselves after the crisis is over. If the fuel begins to dissipate, or the fueled missile becomes susceptible to mechanical fatigue or breakdown, getting a missile ready requires a risky decision. The risk is that the missile will be less ready, after a brief period, than if it had never been made ready in the first place. It, too, like the aircraft burning fuel in the air, can coerce a decision; it can coerce a decision in favor of war once it is fueled and ready and threatens to become unready shortly. It can coerce a decision to remain unready by making it dangerous to put the missile into its mobilization process.

[…]

Some observers thought this was a disadvantage, because the enemy could not be so readily coerced by American demonstrations, by getting ourselves in a position of temporarily increased readiness, by taking steps that showed our willingness to risk war and that actually increased the risk of war. There were some who thought that bombers were more usable in a crisis than instantly ready missiles, because they could dramatically take off, or disperse themselves to civilian bases, giving an appearance of readiness for war.

They could be right. What needs to be recognized is that the flexing of muscles is probably unimpressive unless it is costly or risky. If aircraft can take off in a crisis with great noise and show of activity, but at no genuine risk to themselves and at modest cost in fuel and personnel fatigue, it may demonstrate little. The impressive demonstrations are probably the dangerous ones. We cannot have it both ways.

[…]

Civil defenses are often called “passive defenses,” while anti-missile missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, and interceptor aircraft are called “active defenses.” In an important sense, though, giving the words their ordinary meanings, it is the civil defenses that are probably the most active and the “active defenses” that would be the most passive. If we should install antimissile missiles around our population centers they would probably be quick-reacting missiles themselves, in a state of fairly continuous readiness, involving no dramatic readiness procedures and not being utilized unless threatening objects appeared overhead. One can imagine other kinds of defenses against ballistic missiles that did involve readiness procedures, that required decisions to mobilize in advance; perhaps short-lived orbiting systems that had to be launched in an emergency in anticipation of attack would have this character. But the systems currently under discussion or development appear to be relatively “passive.” They would sit still in constant readiness and fire only in response to the local appearance of hostile objects overhead.

The civil defenses would be a dramatic contrast. Shelters work best if people are in them. The best time to get people in the shelters is before the war starts. To wait until the enemy has launched his ballistic missiles (if one expects some of them to be aimed at cities) would be to leave the population dependent on quick-sheltering procedures that had never been tested under realistic conditions. Even if the enemy were expected not initially to bring any of our cities under attack, fallout from target areas could arrive in periods ranging from, say, a fraction of an hour up to several hours, and in the panic and confusion of warfare a few hours might not be enough. Furthermore, the most orderly way to get people into shelters, with families assembled, gas and electricity shut off, supplies replenished and fire hazards reduced, the aged and the sick not left behind, and panic minimized, would be by sheltering before the war started.

And that means sheltering before war is a certainty. There is a dilemma right here. If sheltering will be taken as a signal that one expects war and intends to start it, sheltering gives notice to the other side. Surprise would depend on not sheltering. A nation’s leaders must decide whether the advantage of surprise against the enemy is worth the cost of surprising their own population unprepared. This would be a hard choice.

[…]

One type of defense against thermal radiation from nuclear weapons—and it is semantically unclear whether this is a passive defense or an active one—is smoke or fog injected into the atmosphere. A thick layer of smoke can make a difference, especially if anti-missile defenses could oblige the enemy to detonate his weapons at a distance. But a smoke layer could not be produced instantaneously after enemy weapons came in sight; it would work best if the smudge-pots were put into operation before the war started. This means that it is most effective if subject to “mobilization,” with the attendant danger that it signals something to the other side.

People in shelters cannot stay forever. The usual calculations of how long people should be able to stay in shelters—what the supply of rations should be, for example—relate to how long it might take radioactivity to decay, and cleanup procedures to dispose of fallout, so that the outside environment would be safe. But if we must envisage sheltering as a mobilization step, as something that occurs before war is a certainty, then the endurance of people in shelters is pertinent to the crisis itself. They may well have been in their shelters for two or three weeks without any war having started; and, like aircraft in the air, they coerce the nation’s leaders into decisions that reflect the inability of the country to sustain its readiness indefinitely. Of all the reasons for having people able to stay in shelters for an extended period, one of the most important would be to avoid any need to have a war quickly because the people couldn’t stand the suspense or the privation any longer.

De-sheltering would be a significant activity. It would be a dramatic signal either that a nation’s readiness was exhausted or that the crisis was becoming less dangerous.

[…]

In fact, simply to avoid panic it could be essential to get the population busily at work on civil defense in a crisis, whether filling cans with water, shoveling dirt against fire hazard, educating themselves by television, or evacuating particular areas before panic set in.

[…]

They are not part of our military organization and our weaponry, so we typically ignore them in discussions of our military posture. But there they are, and they could make the brink of war as busy and complicated and frantic as the mobilizations of 1914. We can hope they would not make it as irreversible.

The special danger is that the way these processes work will not be understood before they are put to test in a real emergency. The dynamics of readiness—of alert and mobilization both military and civilian—involve decisions at the highest level of government, a level so high as to be out of the hands of experts. “The bland ignorance among national leaders,” writes Michael Howard in describing the mobilization of 1914, “of the simple mechanics of the system on which they relied for the preservation of national security would astonish us rather more if so many horrifying parallels did not come to light whenever British politicians give their views about defense policy today.”

[…]

In managing nations on the brink of war, every decision-maker would be inexperienced. That cannot be helped. Thinking about it in advance can and should make an enormous difference; but it did not in 1914.

[…]

If all nations were self-sufficient islands with the pre-nuclear military technology of World War II, mutual deterrence could be quite stable; even a nation that had determined on war would not care to initiate it. With thermonuclear technology the danger of preemptive instability becomes a grave one; weapons themselves may be vulnerable to sudden long-distance attack unless they are deliberately designed and expensively designed to present less of a surprise-attack target. This in turn can imply a choice between weapons comparatively good for launching sudden attack and weapons comparatively good for surviving sudden attack and striking back. The Polaris submarine, for example, is comparatively good at surviving attack and striking second; the Polaris missile itself may be good for starting a war, but not compared with its ability for surviving attack. It is an expensive weapon compared with other missiles, and the expense goes into making it less vulnerable to attack, not into making it a better weapon for launching sudden attack.

[…]

If both sides have weapons that need not go first to avoid their own destruction, so that neither side can gain great advantage in jumping the gun and each is aware that the other cannot, it will be a good deal harder to get a war started. Both sides can afford the rule: When in doubt, wait.

[…]

The problem does not arise only at the level of thermonuclear warfare. The Israeli army consists largely of a mobilizable reserve. The reserve is so large that, once it is mobilized, the country cannot sustain readiness indefinitely; most of the able-bodied labor force becomes mobilized. The frontier is close, the ground is hard, and the weather is clear most of the year; speed and surprise can make the difference between an enemy’s finding a small Israeli army or a large one to oppose him if he attacked. Preparations for attack would confront Israel with a choice of mobilizing or not and, once mobilized, with a choice of striking before enemy forces were assembled or waiting and negotiating, to see if the mobilization on both sides could be reversed and the temptation to strike quickly dampened.

[…]

During the Cuban missile crisis the Soviet Union apparently abstained from any drastic alert and mobilization procedures, possibly as a deliberate policy to avoid aggravating the crisis. The establishment of a “hot line” between Washington and Moscow was at least a ceremony that acknowledged the problem and expressed an intent to take it seriously.

[…]

Ballistic missile defenses, if installed on a large scale by the United States or the Soviet Union, might preserve or destroy stability according to whether they increased or decreased the advantage to either side of striking first; that, in turn, would depend on how much better they worked against an enemy missile force that had already been disrupted by a surprise attack. It would also depend on whether ballistic missile defenses worked best in protecting missile forces from being destroyed or best in protecting cities against retaliation. And it would depend on whether ballistic missile defenses induced such a change in the character of missiles themselves, or such a shift to other types of offensive weapons—larger missiles, low flying aircraft, weapons in orbit—as to aggravate the urgency of quick action in a crisis and the temptation to strike first.

[…]

In fact a case can be made that some instability can induce prudence in military affairs. If there were no danger of crises getting out of hand, or of small wars blowing up into large ones, the inhibition on small wars and other disruptive events might be less. The fear of “accidental war”—of an unpremeditated war, one that arises out of aggravated misunderstandings, false alarms, menacing alert postures, and a recognized urgency of striking quickly in the event of war—may tend to police the world against overt disturbances and adventures. A canoe can be safer than a rowboat if it induces more caution in the passengers, particularly if they are otherwise inclined to squabble and fight among themselves.

[…]

If war breaks out a nation can rearm, unless its capacity to rearm is destroyed at the outset and kept destroyed by enemy military action. By the standards of 1944, the United States was fairly near to total disarmament when World War II broke out. Virtually all munitions later expended by the United States forces were nonexistent in September 1939. “Disarmament” did not preclude U.S. participation; it merely slowed it down.

[…]

Since weapons themselves are the most urgent targets in war, to eliminate a weapon eliminates a target and changes the requirements for attack.

[…]

In the event that neither side had nuclear weapons, asymmetrical lead times in nuclear rearmament could be decisive. Whether it took days or months, the side that believed it could be first to acquire a few dozen megatons through a crash program of rearmament would expect to dominate its opponent.

[…]

It might not be essential to possess nuclear weapons in order to destroy nuclear facilities. High explosives, commandos, or saboteurs could be effective. “Strategic warfare” might reach a purity not known in this century: like the king in chess, nuclear facilities would be the overriding objective. Their protection would have absolute claim on defense. In such a war the object would be to preserve one’s mobilization base and to destroy the enemy’s. To win a war would not require overcoming the enemy’s defenses—just winning the rearmament race.

[…]

Some kind of international authority is generally proposed as part of an agreement on total disarmament. If militarily superior to any combination of national forces, an international force implies (or is) some form of world government. To call such an arrangement “disarmament” is about as oblique as to call the Constitution of the United States “a Treaty for Uniform Currency and Interstate Commerce.” The authors of the Federalist Papers were under no illusion as to the far-reaching character of the institution they were discussing, and we should not be either.

[…]

The operations of the Force raise a number of questions. Should it try to contain aggression locally, or to invade the aggressor countries (or all parties to the conflict) and to disable them militarily? Should it use long-range strategic weapons to disable the country militarily? Should it rely on the threat of massive punitive retaliation? Should it use the threat or, if necessary, the practice of limited nuclear reprisal as a coercive technique? In the case of rearmament, the choices would include invasion or threats of invasion, strategic warfare, reprisal or the threat of reprisal; “containment” could not forestall rearmament unless the country were vulnerable to blockade.

[…]

Keeping large forces stationed permanently along the Iron Curtain is a possibility but not one that brings with it all the psychological benefits hoped for from disarmament.

[…]

Nevertheless, if the Force is conceived of as superseding Soviet and American reliance on their own nuclear capabilities, it needs to have some plausible capability to meet large-scale aggression; if it hasn’t, the major powers may still be deterred, but it is not the Force that deters them.

A capability for massive or measured nuclear punishment is probably the easiest attribute with which to equip the Force. But it is not evident that the Force could solve the problems of “credibility” or of collective decision any better than can the United States alone or NATO collectively at the present time.

[…]

The knottiest strategic problem for an International Force would be to halt the unilateral rearmament of a major country. The credibility of its threat to employ nuclear weapons whenever some country renounces the agreement and begins to rearm itself would seem to be very low indeed.

[…]

This is, of course, aside from the even more severe problems of political control of the “executive branch” and “military establishment” of the world governing body. If we hope to turn all our international disputes over to a formal procedure of adjudication and to rely on an international military bureaucracy to enforce decisions, we are simply longing for government without politics. We are hoping for the luxury, which most of us enjoy municipally, of turning over our dirtiest jobs—especially those that require strong nerves—to some specialized employees. That works fairly well for burglary, but not so well for school integration, general strikes, or Algerian independence. We may achieve it if we create a sufficiently potent and despotic ruling force; but then some of us would have to turn around and start plotting civil war, and the Force’s strategic problems would be only beginning.

Before Trump’s operation against Nicolás Maduro, Matthew Yglesias had been considering how the invasion of Iraq worked out better than the invasion of Afghanistan:

That’s a bit of a vexing conclusion, because the war in Afghanistan was much better justified. The September 11 terrorist attacks really happened, the Taliban had long been sheltering Al Qaeda, and the United States invaded with broad global support and legitimacy provided by the United Nations. There’s no such thing as a perfect war but, as far as these things go, this one was well-grounded conceptually. It just ended up failing in a pretty profound way, despite a solid casus belli and a perfectly reasonable war aim of “set up a government that is better than the Taliban.”

The point of this, pre-emptively, was going to be to say that just because the burgeoning war with Venezuela was insane and unprovoked didn’t mean it would necessarily be catastrophic.

Trump seems to have been thinking along the same lines because, rather than coming up with any kind of plausible-sounding pretext or legitimate war aims, he appears to have focused on shrinking the mission down so as to maximize the odds of success. Rather than actually changing the regime in Caracas, he decapitated it. He now seems to be simply trying to stabilize the situation under the leadership of a successor group of autocrats who’ll just agree to be more pliable to his demands, which center around seizing a slice of Venezuela’s natural resource wealth.

This is very much not what the Bush administration did in Iraq.

Notably, though, it is something that many of the Bush administration’s left-wing critics said he was doing in Iraq. The war was often portrayed by its opponents as a kind of cynical smash and grab for oil. Trump, meanwhile, has spent years being vocally critical of “neocons,” which led some lefties to see him as a kindred spirit.

But Trump himself has always been clear that he thinks we should have taken Iraq’s oil. In other words, his complaint with Bush is precisely that he thinks the war should have been a cynical smash and grab for oil. And you can see this same line of thinking in other contexts, too. An administration led by a John Bolton or Paul Wolfowitz type would have been very aggressive against Venezuela, but would complement that by being very supportive of Ukraine. The actual Trump policy is to continually back away from supporting Ukraine, but to follow up the Venezuela putsch with new threats to seize Greenland.

Trump is a guy who largely agrees with leftist critiques of the mythos of American power as a force for good in the world and sees military power primarily as a means to imperial extraction. But he thinks that’s good!

Thomas Schelling explains the diplomacy of ultimate survival in Arms and Influence:

As a doctrine, “massive retaliation” (or rather, the threat of it) was in decline almost from its enunciation in 1954. But until 1962 its final dethronement had yet to be attempted. All-out, indiscriminate, “society-destroying” war was still ultimate monarch, even though its prerogative to intervene in small or smallish-to-medium conflicts had been progressively curtailed.

[…]

But in his speech at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in June 1962—a speech reportedly similar to an earlier address in the NATO Council—Secretary McNamara proposed that even in “general war” at the highest level, in a showdown war between the great powers, destruction should not be unconfined. Deterrence should continue, discrimination should be attempted, and “options” should be kept open for terminating the war by something other than sheer exhaustion. “Principal military objectives . . . should be the destruction of the enemy’s military forces, not of his civilian population . . . giving the possible opponent the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities.”

The ideas that Secretary McNamara expressed in June 1962 have been nicknamed the “counterforce strategy.” They have occasionally been called, as well, the “no-cities strategy.”

[…]

Cities were not merely targets to be destroyed as quickly as possible to weaken the enemy’s war effort, to cause anguish to surviving enemy leaders, or to satisfy a desire for vengeance after all efforts at deterrence had failed. Instead, live cities were to be appreciated as assets, as hostages, as a means of influence over the enemy himself. If enemy cities could be destroyed twelve or forty-eight hours later and if their instant destruction would not make a decisive difference to the enemy’s momentary capabilities, destroying all of them at once would abandon the principal threat by which the enemy might be brought to terms.

[…]

Secretary McNamara incurred resistance on just about all sides. The peace movements accused him of trying to make war acceptable; military extremists accused him of weakening deterrence by making war look soft to the Soviets; the French accused him of finding a doctrine designed for its incompatibility with their own “independent strategic force”; some “realists” considered it impractical; and some analysts argued that the doctrine made sense only to a superior power, yet relied on reciprocity by an inferior power for which it was illogical.

[…]

The idea was not wholly unanticipated in public discussion of strategy; but suggestions by analysts and commentators about limiting even a general war had never reached critical mass. Secretary McNamara’s “new strategy” was one of those rare occurrences, an actual policy innovation or doctrinal change unheralded by widespread public debate. Still, it was not altogether new, having been cogently advanced some 2,400 years earlier by King Archidamus of Sparta, a man, according to Thucydides, with a reputation for both intelligence and moderation.

“And perhaps,” he said,

when they see that our actual strength is keeping pace with the language that we use, they will be more inclined to give way, since their land will still be untouched and, in making up their minds, they will be thinking of advantages which they still possess and which have not yet been destroyed. For you must think of their land as though it was a hostage in your possession, and all the more valuable the better it is looked after. You should spare it up to the last possible moment, and avoid driving them to a state of desperation in which you will find them much harder to deal with.

[…]

The reason for going after the enemy’s military forces is to destroy them before they can destroy our own cities (or our own military forces). The reason for not destroying the cities is to keep them at our mercy. The two notions are not so complementary that one implies the other: they are separate notions to be judged on their separate merits.

[…]

The city-hostage strategy would work best if the enemy had a good idea of what was happening and what was not happening, maintained control over his own forces, could perceive the pattern in our action and its implications for his behavior, and even were in direct communication with us sooner or later. The counterforce campaign would be noisy, likely to disrupt the enemy command structure, and somewhat ambiguous in its target selection as far as the enemy could see. It might also impose haste on the enemy, particularly if he had a diminishing capability to threaten our own cities and were desperate to use it before it was taken away from him.

[…]

Discussions of “counterforce warfare” often imply that the war involves two stages. In the first, both sides abstain from an orgy of destruction and concentrate on disarming each other, the advantage going to the side that has the bigger or better arsenal, the better target location and reconnaissance, the advantage of speed and readiness, and the better luck. At some point this campaign is over, for one side or both; a country runs out of weapons or runs out of military targets against which its weapons are any good, or reaches the point where it costs so many weapons to destroy enemy weapons that the exchange is unpromising.

[…]

This threatened city war is usually implied to be an all-or-none affair, like full-speed collision on the highway, and the driver who has his whole family in the car is expected to yield to the driver who has only part of his family in the car.

[…]

Two adversaries face each other in the knowledge that war is on, each capable of large-scale damage, probably unprecedented damage, possibly damage beyond the ability of either to survive with any political continuity. If each retains more than enough to destroy the other, the counterforce exchange was merely a preliminary, a massive military exercise creating great noise and confusion (and undoubtedly great civilian damage too), but constituting an overture to the serious war that is about to begin.

[…]

We know little about this kind of violence on a grand scale. On a small scale it occurs between the Greeks and the Turks on Cyprus and it occurred between the settlers and the Indians in the Far West. It occurs in gang warfare, sometimes in racial violence and civil wars. Terror is an outstanding mode of conflict in localized primitive wars; and unilateral violence has been used to subdue satellite countries, occupied countries, or dissident groups inside a dictatorship. But bilateral violence, as a mode of warfare between two major countries, especially nuclear-armed countries, is beyond any experience from which we can draw easy lessons.

There are two respects in which a war of pure violence would differ from the violence in Algeria or Cyprus. One is that insurgency warfare typically involves two actively opposed sides—the authorities and the insurgents—and a third group, a large population subject to coercion and cajolery. Vietnam in the early 1960s was less like a war between two avowed opponents than like gang warfare with two competing gangs selling “protection” to the population.

There is a second difference. It involves the technology of violence. Most of the violence we are familiar with, whether insurgency in backward areas or the blockade and strategic bombing of World Wars I and II, were tests of endurance over time in the face of violence inflicted over time. There was a limit on how rapidly the violence could be exercised. The dispenser of violence did not have a reservoir of pain and damage that he could unload as he chose, but had some maximum rate of delivery; and the question was who could stand it longest, or who could display that he would ultimately win the contest and so persuade his enemy to yield. Nuclear violence would be more in the nature of a once-for-all capability, to be delivered fast or slowly at the discretion of the contestants. Competitive starvation works slowly; and blockade works through slow strangulation. Nuclear violence would involve deliberate withholding and apportionment over time; each would have a stockpile subject to rapid delivery, the total delivery of which would simply use up the reserve (or the useful targets).

[…]

If I waylay your children after school, and you kidnap mine, and each of us intends to use his hostages to guarantee the safety of his own children and possibly to settle some other disputes as well, there is no straightforward analysis that tells us what form the bargaining takes, what children in our respective possessions get hurt, who expects the other to yield or who expects the other to expect oneself to yield—and how it all comes out.

[…]

This is a strange and repellent war to contemplate. The alternative once-for-all massive retaliation in which the enemy society is wiped out as nearly as possible in a single salvo is less “unthinkable” because it does not demand any thinking.

[…]

And it may seem less cruel because it does not have a cruel purpose—it is merely purposeless—compared with deliberate, measured violence that carries the threat of more. It does not require calculating how to be frightful, how to terrorize an adversary, how to behave in a fearsome way and how to persuade somebody that we are more callous or less civilized than he and can stand the violence and degradation longer than he can.

[…]

In earlier times, one could plan the opening moves of war in detail and hope to improvise plans for its closure; for thermonuclear war, any preparations for closure would have to be made before the war starts.

Even the enemy’s unconditional surrender might be unavailable unless one had given thought in advance to how to accept and to police surrender. And a militarily defeated enemy, desperate to surrender, might be unable to communicate its offer, to prove itself serious, to accept conditions and to prove compliance on the urgent time schedule of supersonic warfare unless it had given thought before the war started to how it might end.

[…]

With today’s weapons it is hard to see that there could be an issue about which both sides would genuinely prefer to fight a major war rather than to accommodate. But it is not so hard to imagine a war that results from a crisis’ getting out of hand.

[…]

Bombers vividly illustrate the dynamic character of war—the difficulty of finding resting places or stopping points, the impossibility of freezing everything. Bombers cannot just “stop.” They have to move to stay aloft; to move they have to burn fuel, and while they are moving crews become fatigued, enemy defenses may locate and identify them, and coordination of the bombers with each other will deteriorate. If the planes return to base they have to recycle, with refueling and other delays if the truce was a false one and the war is still on. Finally, at base they may be vulnerable. The aircraft would have been launched quickly for their own safety, and once in the air were immune to missile attack; when they return to base they may be newly vulnerable—if the bases still exist. If they have to seek alternative bases their performance would be further degraded, and so would the threat they pose to the enemy in bringing about, or keeping, a precarious armistice.

[…]

There are some good reasons for supposing that, if the war could be stopped, it might be a simple cease-fire that would do it. Considering the difficulty of communication and the urgency of reaching a truce, simple arrangements would have the strongest appeal and might be the only ones that could be negotiated on the demanding time schedule of a war in progress. And a crude cease-fire might be the only stoppage that could be arrived at by tacit negotiation, by the mere extension of a pause.

[…]

(The side first motivated to announce its terms could be either the stronger or the weaker, the one most hurt or the one least hurt, the one with the most yet to lose or the one with the least yet to lose, the one that started the war or the one that did not—and it might not be clear who started it, who had been hurt worse, or who eventually had the most yet to lose.)

[…]

If among the terms of the understanding were that one side should disarm itself, partially or completely, of its remaining strategic weapons, ways would have to be found to make it feasible and susceptible of inspection. If it had to be done in a hurry, as it might have to be, enemy aircraft could be required to land at specified airfields, even missiles could be fired at a point where their impact could be monitored (preferably with their warheads disarmed or removed), and submarines might surface to be escorted or disabled. Certainly of all the ways to dispose of remaining enemy weapons, self-inflicted destruction is one of the best; and techniques to monitor it, facilitate it, or even to participate in it with demolition charges would be better than continuing the war and firing away scarce weapons at a range of several thousand miles.

“Uncontested reconnaissance” would be an important part of the process. Submitting to surveillance, restricted or unrestricted, might be an absolute condition of any armistice. In the terminal stage of the war, it is not just “armed reconnaissance” that could be useful but “unarmed reconnaissance,” uncontested reconnaissance by aircraft or other vehicles admitted by sufferance.

[…]

If one side is submitting to a very asymmetrical disarmament arrangement, it may have to prove how strong it is for bargaining purposes and then prove how weak it is in meeting the disarmament demands of its opponent. For purposes of bluff it would be valuable to have an opponent think one had hidden weapons in reserve; for abiding by a truce arrangement it may be frustrating and dangerous to be unable to deny convincingly the possession of weapons that one actually does not have.

A critical choice in the process of bringing a war to a successful close—or to the least disastrous close—is whether to destroy or to preserve the opposing government and its principal channels of command and communication. If we manage to destroy the opposing government’s control over its own armed forces, we may reduce their military effectiveness. At the same time, if we destroy the enemy government’s authority over its armed forces, we may preclude anyone’s ability to stop the war, to surrender, to negotiate an armistice, or to dismantle the enemy’s weapons. This is a genuine dilemma: without technical knowledge of the enemy’s command and control system, the enemy’s war plan and target doctrine, the vulnerabilities of enemy communications and the procedures for implementing military action, we cannot reach a conclusion here. All we can do is to recognize that there is no obvious answer. Victorious governments have usually wanted to deal with an authority on the other side that could negotiate, enter into commitments, control and withdraw its own forces, guarantee the immunity of ambassadors or surveillance teams, give authoritative accounts of the forces remaining, collaborate in any authentication procedures required to verify the facts, and institute some kind of order in its own country. There is strong historical basis for presuming that we should badly want to be sure that an organized enemy government existed that had the power to demand its armed forces cease, withdraw, submit, mark time, or perform services for us. This has to be weighed against the advantage of disorganizing the initial enemy attacks by destroying the enemy command structure.

[…]

If we were certain that he would fire all of his weapons as quickly as he could, and fire them to maximize civilian damage on our side, the argument for going after his weapons quickly and unstintingly would be conclusive. If alternatively we were certain that he preferred to pause and negotiate, but nevertheless would fire his weapons rather than see them destroyed on the ground, our all-out attack on them would simply pull the trigger; the argument against it would then be conclusive.

[…]

To think of war as a bargaining process is uncongenial to some of us. Bargaining with violence smacks of extortion, vicious politics, callous diplomacy, and everything indecent, illegal, or uncivilized. It is bad enough to kill and to maim, but to do it for gain and not for some transcendent purpose seems even worse. Bargaining also smacks of appeasement, of politics and diplomacy, of accommodation or collaboration with the enemy, of selling out and compromising, of everything weak and irresolute. But to fight a purely destructive war is neither clean nor heroic; it is just purposeless. No one who hates war can eliminate its ugliness by shutting his eyes to the need for responsible direction; coercion is the business of war. And someone who hates mixing politics with war usually wants to glorify an action by ignoring or disguising its purpose. Both points of view deserve sympathy, and in some wars they could be indulged; neither should determine the conduct of a thermonuclear war.

What is the bargaining about? First there is bargaining about the conduct of the war itself. In more narrowly limited wars—the Korean War, or the war in Vietnam, or a hypothetical war confined to Europe or the Middle East—the bargaining about the way the war is to be fought is conspicuous and continual: what weapons are used, what nationalities are involved, what targets are sanctuaries and what are legitimate, what forms participation can take without being counted as “combat,” what codes of reprisal or hot pursuit and what treatment of prisoners are to be recognized. The same should be true in the largest war: the treatment of population centers, the deliberate creation or avoidance of fallout, the inclusion or exclusion of particular countries as combatants and targets, the destruction or preservation of each other’s government or command centers, demonstrations of strength and resolve, and the treatment of the communications facilities on which explicit bargaining depends, should be within the cognizance of those who command the operations. Part of this bargaining might be explicit, in verbal messages and replies; much of it would be tacit, in the patterns of behavior and reactions to enemy behavior. The tacit bargaining would involve targets conspicuously hit and conspicuously avoided, the character and timing of specific reprisals, demonstrations of strength and resolve and of the accuracy of target intelligence, and anything else that conveys intent to the enemy or structures his expectations about the kind of war it is going to be.

Second, there would be bargaining about the cease-fire, truce, armistice, surrender, disarmament, or whatever it is that brings the war to a close—about the way to halt the war and the military requirements for stopping it. The terms could involve weapons—their number, readiness, location, preservation, or destruction—and the disposition of weapons and actions beyond recall or out of control or unaccounted for, or whose status was in dispute between the two sides. It would involve surveillance and inspection, either to monitor compliance with the armistice or just to establish the facts, to demonstrate strength or weakness, to assign fault or innocence in case of untoward events, and to keep track of third parties’ military forces. It could involve understandings about the reassembling or reconstituting of military forces, refueling, readying of missiles on launching pads, repair and maintenance, and all the other steps that would prepare a country either to meet a renewed attack or to launch one. It could involve argument or bargaining about the degree of destruction to people and property on both sides, the equity or justice of what had been done and the need to inflict punishment or to exact submissiveness. It could involve the dismantling or preservation of warning systems, military communications, or air defenses. And it very likely would involve the status of sheltered or unsheltered population in view of their significance as “hostages” against resumption of warfare.

A third subject of bargaining could be the regime within the enemy country itself. At a minimum there might have to be a decision about whom to recognize as authority in the enemy country or with whom one would willingly deal. There might be a choice between negotiating with military or civilian authorities; and if the war is as disruptive as can easily be imagined, there may be a problem of “succession” to resolve. There could even be competing regimes in the enemy country—alternative commanders to recognize as the inheritors of control, or alternative political leaders whose acquisition of control depended on whether they could monopolize communications or get themselves recognized as authoritative negotiators. To some extent, either side can determine the regime on the other side by the process of recognition and negotiation itself. This would especially be the case in the decision to negotiate about allied countries—China, or France and Germany—or alternatively to refuse to deal with the primary enemy about allied and satellite affairs and to insist upon dealing separately with the governments of those countries.

A fourth subject for bargaining would be the disposition of any theater in which local or regional war was taking place. This could involve the evacuation or occupation of territory, local surrender of forces, coordinated withdrawals, treatment of the population, use of troops to police the areas, prisoner exchanges, return or transfer of authority to local governments, inspection and surveillance, introduction of occupation authorities, or anything else pertinent to the local termination of warfare.

[…]

Fifth would be the longer term disarmament and inspection arrangements.

[…]

For that reason the armistice might, as in the days of Julius Caesar, involve the surrender of hostages as a pledge for future compliance.

[…]

A sixth subject for negotiation might be the political status of various countries or territories—dissolution of alliances or blocs, dismemberment of countries, and all the other things that wars are usually “about,” possibly including economic arrangements and particularly reparations and prohibitions.

[…]

We are dealing with a process that is inherently frantic, noisy, and disruptive, in an environment of acute uncertainty, conducted by human beings who have never experienced such a crisis before and on an extraordinarily demanding time schedule. We have to suppose that the negotiation would be truncated, incomplete, improvised, and disorderly, with threats, offers, and demands issued disjointedly and inconsistently, subject to misunderstanding about facts as well as intent, and with uncertainty about who has the authority to negotiate and to command.

[…]

In ordinary peacetime the Soviet leaders have tended to disdain the idea of restraint in warfare. Why not? It permits them to ridicule American strategy, to pose the deterrent threat of massive retaliation, and still perhaps to change their minds if they ever have to take war seriously. On the brink of war they would. It may be just before the outbreak that an intense dialogue would occur, shaping expectations about bringing the war to a close, avoiding a contest in city destruction, and keeping communications open.

Thomas Schelling explains the idiom of military action in Arms and Influence:

Contrast “un­conditional surrender” with “un­conditional ex­termination.”

[…]

Italy and Japan, even Germany, could still exact a price in pain and treasure and in postwar stability, and they knew it; they could not win, once the tide had gone against them, but they could make our victory hurt us more or cost us more. The war was costly to both sides, and jointly we could stop it if terms could be negotiated.

[…]

The United States wanted a Japanese government that could order soldiers in the Pacific islands to surrender and not to hold out indefinitely either in continuation of a lost war or as local bandits. The United States wanted the opportunity to impose a stable regime in Japan itself and to conduct a military occupation consistent with its political objectives and democratic principles. The United States wanted a surrender that acknowledged the decisive role of the United States with minimum credit to the Soviet Union and minimum Soviet rights of occupation; that required an early surrender, and one negotiated mainly with the United States. The United States wanted to demobilize a large military establishment and to enjoy the relief that goes with the end of a war; holding an invasion army in readiness for ultimate collapse, while a slow atomic bombing campaign reduced Japan to rubble, was expensive and undesirable.

[…]

The Japanese government, in other words, still had important powers that it could withhold or yield—the capacity to cooperate or not—and therefore had important bargaining assets. The fact that it had infinitely more to lose than did the United States, in case no agreement was reached, should not obscure the fact that the United States could get little consolation out of its ultimate ability to destroy tens of millions of people. In terms of what the United States was bargaining for, the trading position of the Japanese government was not to be despised.

[…]

As American troops approached victory on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1847, General Winfield Scott was “persuaded to hold his position and not attempt to force an entry into the City.” In his eagerness to secure the fruits of victory, he and his State Department colleague “were easily convinced that a forward movement of the army might cause a general dispersal of officials from the capital, leaving no one with whom to negotiate.”

[…]

The Germans were exhausted, and the French too, when the Franco-Prussian War was brought to a close in 1871. The Germans possessed all that they wanted of French territory and the French had little hope of expelling them; but without complete victory (and often with it) it takes two to stop a war. The French could still exact a price from the Germans, and the Germans from the French. They had a common interest in closing the books on war, cutting their losses or cashing in their gains and putting a stop to the violence. The French wanted the Germans out, and the Germans needed security to evacuate. Both sides had an interest in keeping communications open, respecting emissaries and ambassadors and listening to the other side, and working out reliable arrangements for closing out the war.

Not all of the restraint in these wars was confined to the terminal negotiations. White flags and emissaries have usually been respected, and open cities, ambulances and hospitals, the wounded, the prisoners, and the dead. In battle itself, soldiers have shown a natural willingness to permit, even to encourage, enemy units to come out with their hands up, saving violence on both sides. The character of this restraint, its reciprocal or conditional nature, is even displayed in those instances where it is absent; where no quarter was given, it was usually where none was expected. Even the idea of reprisal involves potential restraint—ruptured restraint to be sure, with damages exacted for some violation or excess—but the essence of reprisal is an action that had been withheld, and could continue to be withheld if the other had not violated the bargain.

[…]

Contrast the Korean War. It was fought with restraint, conscious restraint, and the restraint was on both sides. On the American side the most striking restraints were in territory and weapons. The United States did not bomb across the Yalu (or anywhere else in China) and did not use nuclear weapons. The enemy did not attack American ships at sea (except by shore batteries), bases in Japan, or bomb anything in South Korea, especially the vital area of Pusan.

[…]

The Korean War is our one modern instance of a sizable, overt limited war conducted by well-organized armies representing both sides in the East–West conflict. To call it “restrained” is, of course, to take a very broad view; the density of fire and of manpower was comparable with the campaigns of both world wars. Both sides slugged it out with unrepressed fury: the troops fought for their lives; there was as little etiquette on the battlefield as in any theater of the Second World War; the stakes were high; and there was a strong sense of “showdown.” Restraint took the form of specific limitations on the fighting; within those limits, the war was “all out.”

[…]

Nuclear weapons were known to exist on both sides, East and West, and whatever the estimates about their size and number they scared people; the Soviet Union held in reserve a tidal wave of military manpower and was not believed so vulnerable to attack, even atomic attack, as to be wholly intimidated from launching war in Europe. The consequence was a war in which the fury of battle was exceeded only by the preoccupation with violence held in reserve.

[…]

Nuclear weapons were not used in the Korean War. Gas was not used in the Second World War. Any “understanding” about gas was voluntary and reciprocal—enforceable only by threat of reciprocal use. (That the Geneva Protocol of 1925 outlawed chemical agents in war and was signed by all the European participants in World War II does not itself explain the non-use of gas; it only provided an agreement that both sides could keep if they chose to, under pain of reciprocity.)

[…]

“Some gas” raises complicated questions of how much, where, under what circumstances; “no gas” is simple and unambiguous. Gas only on military personnel; gas used only by defending forces; gas only when carried by projectile; no gas without warning—a variety of limits is conceivable. Some might have made sense, and many might have been more impartial to the outcome of the war. But there is a simplicity to “no gas” that makes it almost uniquely a focus for agreement when each side can only conjecture at what alternative rules the other side would propose and when failure at coordination on the first try may spoil the chances for acquiescence in any limits at all.

“No nuclears” is simple and unambiguous. “Some nuclears” would be more complicated. Ten nuclears? Why not eleven or twenty or a hundred? Nuclears only on troops in the field? How close to a village can a nuclear be dropped? Nuclears only when the situation is desperate? How desperate is that? Nuclears only on enemy airfields? Why not bridges, too, once the ice is broken? Nuclears only on the Yalu bridge? But once nuclears are available “in principle” for a unique and significant target, won’t it be easier to go on and find a second target, and a third, each almost as compelling as the one that preceded it?

There is a simplicity, a kind of virginity, about all-or-none distinctions that differences of degree do not have.

[…]

National boundaries are unique entities. So are rivers. A national boundary marked by a river, as the boundary between Manchuria and North Korea was marked by the Yalu River, is doubly distinctive.

[…]

They are merely lines on a map, but they are on everybody’s map and, if an arbitrary line is needed, lines of latitude are available.

[…]

And what is so different about nuclear weapons? Is it the size of the explosion? Would everyone expect either side to observe a weight limitation on bombs containing TNT, drawing the line at one ton, or ten tons, or (if there were planes to carry them) fifty tons? And why is a kiloton nuclear bomb so different from an equivalent weight of high explosives dropped in a single attack?

It is. Everybody knows the difference.

[…]

Apparently any kind of restrained conflict needs a distinctive restraint that can be recognized by both sides, conspicuous stopping places, conventions and precedents to indicate what is within bounds and what is out of bounds, ways of distinguishing new initiatives from just more of the same activity.

[…]

And in limited warfare, two things are being bargained over, the outcome of the war, and the mode of conducting the war itself. Just as business firms may “negotiate” an understanding that they will compete by advertising but not by price cuts, and rival candidates may agree implicitly to attack each other’s policies but not their private lives; as street gangs may “agree” to fight with fists and stones but not knives or guns and not to call in outside help; military commanders may agree to accept prisoners of war, and nations may agree to accept limitations on the forces they will commit or the targets they will destroy.

Just as a strike or a price war or a racketeer’s stink bomb in a restaurant is part of the bargaining and not a separate activity conducted for its own sake, a way of making threats and exerting pressure, so was the war in Korea a “negotiation” over the political status of that country.

[…]

Much of this bargaining is tacit. Communication is by deed rather than by word, and the understandings are not enforceable except by some threat of reciprocity, retaliation, or the breakdown of all restraint. Because the bargaining tends to be tacit, there is little room for fine print. With ample time and legal resources a line across Korea could be negotiated almost anywhere, in any shape, related or unrelated to the terrain or to the political division of the country or to any conspicuous landmarks. But if the bargaining is largely tacit and there cannot be a long succession of explicit proposals and counterproposals, each side must display its “proposal” in the pattern of its action rather than in detailed verbal statements. The proposals have to be simple; they must form a recognizable pattern; they must rely on conspicuous landmarks; and they must take advantage of whatever distinctions are known to appeal to both sides.

[…]

A number of countries, including Germany and Britain, had formally subscribed to the code of behavior worked out by the International Committee of the Red Cross; it specified a number of things about treatment of prisoners, how to declare an open city, or how to mark the roof of a hospital. The details of this code had been worked out in advance, with some participation by the countries that ultimately adopted the code. And to a remarkable extent the code was adhered to by countries fighting against each other—remarkable considering that a bitter war was being fought, the conduct of the war was in the hands of “war criminals” in some countries, and the conduct of the war included civilian reprisals and other violent contradictions to the concept of a clean war. If one asks why the Geneva conventions were adhered to, to the extent they were, it is hardly an adequate answer that governments felt morally obliged and politically constrained to be on their good behavior. Moral obligation was notably absent among many participants in the Second World War; and being charged with violation of an “agreement” on the Geneva accords would have been a comparatively minor public relations problem for most of the countries concerned. Evidently there was self-interest in moderating some dimensions of the war, and compliance with the Geneva agreements has to be considered voluntary. It was voluntary and conditional; for the most part countries must have followed the Geneva accords to the extent they did in the interest of reciprocity.

[…]

The United States had no legal obligation to anybody, not having subscribed to that convention. But evidently if the United States wanted to reach an “understanding” with its enemies, at a moment when diplomatic niceties could not be tolerated, the choice was to accept arbitrarily the convention that was available or do without.

[…]

One difficulty with overt negotiations is that there are too many possibilities to consider, too many places to compromise, too many interests to reconcile, too many ways that the exact choice of language can discriminate between the parties involved, too much freedom of choice. In marriage and real estate it helps to have a “standard-form contract,” because it restricts each side’s flexibility in negotiation.

[…]

While the attack was under way, President Johnson announced on television that the North Vietnamese attack had occurred and had to be met with positive reply. “That reply is being given as I speak to you tonight.” He said, “Our response for the present will be limited and fitting,” adding that, “we seek no wider war” and that he had instructed the Secretary of State to make that position totally clear to friends “and to adversaries.”

With only one dissent, the eleven Republican and twenty-two Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees were satisfied that the President’s decision was “soundly conceived and skillfully executed” and that, in the circumstances, the United States “could not have done less and should not have done more.” Republicans and Democrats, military and civilians, even some Europeans, with unusual consensus felt the action was neatly tailored in scope and in character—everybody, that is, with the possible exception of the North Vietnamese and the Communist Chinese. Even they may have thought so. As a matter of fact, theirs was the most important judgment. They were the critics who mattered most. The next step was up to them. America’s reputation around the world, both for civilized restraint and for resolve and initiative, was at stake; nevertheless, the most important audience, the one for whose benefit the action was so appropriately designed, was the enemy.

[…]

And, like any bargaining process, a restrained war involves some degree of collaboration between adversaries.

No one understands this better than the military themselves, who in many wars have had a high regard for the treatment of prisoners. Aside from decency, there is a good reason for keeping prisoners alive; they can be traded in return for the enemy’s captives, or their health and comfort can be made conditional on the enemy’s treatment of his own prisoners. Collecting the dead is an even more dramatic instance of the non-conflicting interest in war, of a recognized common interest among enemies that goes back in history at least to the siege of Troy.

[…]

When a dog on a farm kills a chicken, I understand that the dead chicken is tied around the dog’s neck. If the only purpose for punishing a dog’s misdemeanor were to make him suffer discomfort, one could tie a dead chicken around his neck for soiling the rug, or spank him in the living room every time he killed a chicken. But it communicates more to the dog, and possibly appeals to the owner’s sense of justice, to make the punishment fit the crime, not only in scope and intensity but in symbols and association.

[…]

If the Russians restrict the travel of our diplomats or exclude a cultural visit, our first thought is to tighten restrictions or cancel a visit in return, not to retaliate in fisheries or commerce. There is an idiom in this interaction, a tendency to keep things in the same currency, to respond in the same language, to make the punishment fit the character of the crime, to impose a coherent pattern on relations.

[…]

When Khrushchev in 1960 complained about U-2 flights, he hinted that Soviet rockets might fire at the bases from which U-2 aircraft were launched in the neighboring countries, Pakistan and Norway. Was this because the U-2 aircraft were a threat to him and he would eliminate it by hitting the bases from which they were flying? Probably not.

[…]

There can be times when a country wants to shake off the rules, to deny any assurance that its behavior is predictable, to shock the adversary, to catch an adversary off balance, to display unreliability and to dare the opponent to respond in kind, to express hostility and to rupture the sense of diplomatic contact, or even just to have an excuse for embarking on a quite unrelated venture as though it were a rational response to some previous event. This is still diplomacy: there are times to be rude, to break the rules, to do the unexpected, to shock, to dazzle, or to catch off guard, to display offense, whether in business diplomacy, military diplomacy, or other kinds of diplomacy. And there are times when, though in principle one would like to conform to tradition and to avoid the unexpected, the tradition is too restrictive in the choices it offers, and one has to abandon etiquette and tradition, to risk a misunderstanding, and to insist on new rules for the game or even a free-for-all. Even then, the rules and traditions are not irrelevant: breaking the rules is more dramatic, and communicates more about one’s intent, precisely because it can be seen as a refusal to abide by rules.

[…]

If one side in a crisis or military engagement steps up the conflict, abandoning some restraint or crossing some threshold, we can distinguish two very different determinants of the other’s response. One is the change in the tactical situation—the pressure to avert defeat or to recapture advantage by enlarging its own participation. The other is the incentive to make an overt response, to meet the challenge, to effect a reprisal, to “punish” the other side for its breach of the rules or to “warn” against doing it again, even to force the initiator to back down and observe the old rule, ceasing what he started or withdrawing what he introduced. The Chinese entrance into the Korean War appears mainly motivated by the first determinant, the tactical need to keep the American military from conquering all of Korea. There was no obvious “incident” to which they were reacting, no sudden change in American military conduct that released them from some “obligation” to stay out. In contrast was the American response in the Tonkin Gulf, based not on military requirements but on a diplomatic judgment of what the situation called for. Similarly, when Syrian artillery, which had often harassed Israeli military outposts and received ground fire in return, fired on civilians in late 1964 the Israeli response was to break the ground-fire tradition and use airpower to silence the batteries. I am told that an important consideration in this decision was that a serious departure from routine by the Syrians deserved a retaliatory break in the Israeli tradition—with the attendant risk of enlarging the war.

[…]

A more important limitation that acquired status with time was the non-use of nuclear weapons in Korea. In retrospect this was one of major influence: it set a precedent that is fundamental to the inhibition on nuclear weapons today and to the controversies about whether and when nuclear weapons ought to be introduced. Had they been used as a matter of course in Korea—and they might or might not have been decisive, according to how they were used and how the Chinese reacted—there might have been a much greater expectation of nuclear weapons in subsequent engagements, less of a cumulative tradition that nuclear weapons were weapons of last resort.

As a matter of fact, if the United States government had desired to be free to use nuclear weapons whenever it might be expedient—in the straits of Formosa or in Vietnam, in the Middle East or in the Berlin corridor—there would have been a strong case for deliberately using them in Korea even without a military necessity. Their use in Korea could have retarded or eliminated any sensation that nuclear weapons were a different class of weapons; it could have established a precedent that they are to be freely used like any other weapon, would have reduced their revolutionary surprise and shock in subsequent engagements and would have raised the general expectation that, where nuclear weapons would be useful, they would be used. The Korean War itself was decisive in the precedent it set, in its confirmation that the decision to use nuclear weapons was, in a real sense and not just nominally, a matter for presidential decision, and in making nuclear weapons the hallmark of restraint in warfare. In 1964 President Johnson said, “For nineteen peril-filled years no nation has loosed the atom against another. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order.” 16 The nineteen years are themselves part of the reason why.

[…]

Beliefs matter. Beliefs may not correspond to statements; official Soviet declarations that no nuclear war could be limited do not mean that Soviet leaders believe it—or, if they do, that they would not change their minds quickly if a few nuclear weapons went off. President Eisenhower used to say that nuclear weapons ought to be used like artillery, on the basis of efficiency, but that does not begin to imply that he really felt that way; his willingness to negotiate the suspension of nuclear tests is evidence that he was affected by the psychological and symbolic status of nuclear weapons. Even those who believe that the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons is sentimental folly and political nuisance, and that there is no rational basis for distinguishing explosions according to their internal chemistry, will nevertheless catch their breath when the first one goes off in anger, in a way that cannot be explained merely by the size of the explosion.

But beliefs do matter. If everybody believes, and expects everybody else to believe, that things get more dangerous when the first nuclear weapon goes off, whatever his belief is based on he is going to be reluctant to authorize nuclear weapons, will expect the other side to be reluctant, and in the event nuclear weapons are used will be expectant about rapid escalation in a way that could make escalation more likely. Virtually all of these thresholds are fundamentally matters of beliefs and expectations.

Another “ultimate threshold” that has appealed to some is the direct confrontation of Soviet and American troops in battle. There have been some who felt that a war could be restrained as long as the two major powers were not directly engaged in organized military combat, but that if infantrymen in Soviet and American uniforms, organized in regular units and behaving in accordance with authority, started shooting at each other, that would be “general war” between the United States and the Soviet Union, and it could stop only with the exhaustion or collapse of one side or both in a major war. It is hard to see how even a strong belief in it could have made this true; but it is an interesting bit of testimony to the symbolic character of these thresholds and restraints, and seems not only to make war an extraordinarily “diplomatic” phenomenon but would make the biggest war in the history of mankind a phenomenon of antique diplomacy reminiscent of the dueling etiquette of some centuries ago.

An important “ultimate threshold” that undoubtedly commands more assent is the national boundaries of the United States and the Soviet Union. If “limited war” has meant anything in recent years, it has usually meant a war in which the homelands of the two major adversaries were inviolate.

[…]

Visible intent would be important. Suppose Soviet troops spilled into Iran during an uprising in that country, and Turkish or American forces became involved. Soviet aircraft could operate from bases north of the Caucasus, and a possible response would be an attack on those bases by American bombers or possibly missiles. To do more than symbolic damage the missiles would have to contain nuclear warheads; these could be small, detonated at altitudes high enough to avoid fall-out, confined to airfields away from population centers, and might easily make clear to the Soviet government that this was an action limited to the Transcaucasus as an extension of the local theater.

There is no doubt that this would be a risky action. It might or might not be militarily effective; and it might or might not open up some “matching” use of Soviet air strikes, perhaps also with nuclear weapons confined to military targets, possibly including American ships in the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean, possibly including Turkish air bases.

[…]

Secretary McNamara’s policy of 1962 goes even further in suggesting that a major campaign against homelands might still consciously avoid cities. This was a proposal that homelands in the awful emergency of major war not be considered “all-or-none” entities. Even a major attack on military installations need not, according to McNamara’s declaration, have to be considered the final, ultimate, step in warfare, bursting the floodgates to an indiscriminate contest in pure destruction. He was talking about a much larger and more violent “limited war” than had theretofore received official discussion, but the principle was the same. What he challenged was the notion that restraint could pertain only to small wars, with a gap or discontinuous jump to the largest of all possible wars, one fought without restraint. His proposal was that restraint could make sense in any war, of any size, and that the traditional distinction between small restrained wars and massive orgies of pure violence, with nothing between, was not logically necessary—was in fact false and dangerous.

[…]

Evidently the tempo of nuclear war is what makes people think it hopeless, or unpromising, to keep any relations with the enemy once the first city goes. If cities could be destroyed indefinitely, but at a rate not exceeding one per week or one per day, or even one per hour, nobody could responsibly ignore the possibility that the war might be stopped before both sides ran out of ammunition or cities. An enemy might surrender or come to terms; some truce might be arranged; the original issues that provoked the war might still receive some attention. National leaders could not neglect the fact that millions of people were still alive who would either remain alive or be destroyed according to how negotiations and warfare were conducted. No national leader would think of resigning his job and just turning the dial to “automatic,” letting the war run its course, as long as he had a country and a population to which he could feel responsible. And nobody would suppose that the enemy’s behavior had been ineluctably fixed in perpetuity by a decision to “go automatic.”

[…]

But the Vietnamese war brought in a new element, new to the United States, if not to Algeria, Palestine, and other arenas outside the East-West competition. This was the direct exercise of the power to hurt, applied as coercive pressure, intended to create for the enemy the prospect of cumulative losses that were more than the local war was worth, more unattractive than concession, compromise, or limited capitulation.

This is yet a third species of limited warfare, and its implications are comparatively unexplored in the strategic literature.

[…]

There are two special cases that fall somewhere on the borderline between qualitative limitations on combat, and the quantitative application of coercive violence. One is reprisal, the other is illustrated by “hot pursuit.”

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Coercion depends more on the threat of what is yet to come than on damage already done. The pace of diplomacy, not the pace of battle, would govern the action; and while diplomacy may not require that it go slowly, it does require that an impressive unspent capacity for damage be kept in reserve. Unless the object is to shock the enemy into sudden submission, the military action must communicate a continued threat. Furthermore, in a “com-pellent” campaign it may take time for the adversary to comply; decisions depend on political and bureaucratic readjustments; and it may especially take time to arrange a mode of compliance that does not appear too submissive; so diplomacy may dictate a measured pace.

[…]

In military engagements the advantages of surprise, concentration, and timely commitment of reserves usually make it inefficient, perhaps disastrous, to withhold resources too long and to let them dribble slowly into battle. But a campaign of civil damage is often comparatively uncontested, able to be delayed or spread over time with no particular loss in efficiency. Unless there are defenses to be overwhelmed or enemy reinforcements to be preempted, haste may be of no value.

[…]

Most of us, in discussing limited war during the past ten years, have had in mind a war in which both sides were somewhat deterred during war itself by unused force and violence on the other side. That is, we were not thinking about wars that were limited because one side was just not interested enough, or one side was so small that an all-out war looked small, or even because one side was restrained or both were by humanitarian considerations. We have mainly been talking about wars that involve some continued mutual deterrence, some implicit or explicit understanding about the non-commitment of additional force or non-enlargement to other territories or targets.

[…]

This [bombing North Vietnam as “compellence”] was a new departure undertaken in rather specialized circumstances. First, the bombing itself was unilateral; the North Vietnamese were militarily unable to do anything like responding in kind. How such a war might go if both sides were capable of conducting similar and simultaneous campaigns against each other received no answer. Second, the Vietcong had already been using terroristic techniques of intimidation, against civilians as well as against enemy military personnel, and the war had never been confined to straightforward engagement. Third, nuclear weapons were not used; the weapons most peculiarly suited to civil destruction and the ones whose reciprocated use could accelerate most rapidly and get out of hand were not involved.

In fact, there was no hint that nuclear weapons were being considered in this role. But of course they would have to be considered if the adversary were China rather than North Vietnam, and undoubtedly would be considered, both for their greater effectiveness against a larger adversary and because it would become a much more serious war.

[…]

Roughly speaking we have one limited war of the battlefield (Korea), we have several contests in risk-taking (Berlin, Cuba), and we have one example of coercive violence, North Vietnam.

[…]

I see no reason to suppose that a war in Europe, if it should break out, would be a battlefield test of strength the way Korea was rather than a competition in risk taking, as Cuba was, or a coercive campaign, as North Vietnam has been.

[…]

The suggestion has occasionally been made that if the Chinese or North Koreans again attack South Korea, if the Soviet Union attacks Western Europe or Iran, if the Chinese attack India, it may not be necessary to oppose them with force. A little violence may do the trick. Knock out a city, tell them to quit; knock out another if they don’t, and keep it up until they do. The earliest proposal I know of, and a provocative one, was by Leo Szilard, who delighted in putting his ideas in shockingly pure form. As early as 1955 he proposed that if the Soviets invaded a country that we were committed to protect, we should destroy a Soviet city of appropriate size. In fact he even suggested that we publish a “price list” indicating to the Soviets what it would cost them, in population destroyed, to attack any country on the list. On whether the Soviets might be motivated to destroy a city of ours in return, Szilard allowed that they probably would be; that was part of the price. They would get little consolation from it, he argued, and our willingness to lose a city in return would be testimony of our resolve. A cold-blooded willingness to punish the enemy for his transgressions, even if it hurt us as much as them, he considered an impressive display.

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But if we can talk about wars in which tens of millions could be killed thoughtlessly, we ought to be able to talk about wars in which hundreds of thousands might be killed thoughtfully. A war of limited civilian reprisal can hardly be called “unrealistic”; there is no convincing historical evidence that any particular kind of nuclear warfare is realistic. What often passes for realism is conversational familiarity.

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The idea, though, that war can take the form of measured punitive forays into the enemy’s homeland, aimed at civil damage, fright, and confusion rather than tactical military objectives, is not new; it may be the oldest form of warfare. It was standard practice in Caesar’s time; to subdue the Menapii, a troublesome tribe in the far north of Gaul, he sent three columns into their territory, “burning farms and villages, and taking a large number of cattle and prisoners. By this means the Menapii were compelled to send envoys to sue for peace.”

Nor were punitive reprisals confined to relations between a colonial power and its subjects; Oman describes this form of warfare between the Byzantines and the Saracens in the ninth century. When the Saracen invaded,

much could also be done by delivering a vigorous raid into his country and wasting Cilicia and northern Syria the moment his armies were reported to have passed north into Cappadocia. This destructive practice was very frequently adopted, and the sight of two armies each ravaging the other’s territory without attempting to defend its own was only too familiar to the inhabitants of the borderlands of Christendom and Islam.

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The pain and damage could also be aimed at intimidating populations, affecting governments only indirectly. Populations may be frightened into bringing pressure on their governments to yield or desist; they may be disorganized in a way that hampers their government; they may be led to bypass, or to revolt against, their own government to make accommodation with the attacker. Even a few nuclear detonations on a country, unless all news and communication are cut off, would likely dominate civilian life and cause evacuation, absence from work and school, overloading of the telephone system, panic purchasing, and various forms of disorder. (If all communications are cut to prevent the news from reaching people and outside radio transmissions jammed for the same purpose, the people may be even more scared.)

Terrorism usually appears to be aimed mainly at intimidating populations and perhaps separating them from their governments.

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Limited nuclear exchanges may suddenly look realistic to a decision-maker who is confronted with two familiar and “realistic” alternatives—massive obliterative war and large-scale local defeat.

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If tactically one side were doing well it might bend over backward to keep the war tactically pure and limited, picking targets that minimized nonmilitary damage. But if the other side were doing badly it would certainly recognize that, in the guise of tactical warfare, it could do an enormous amount of punitive damage.

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Graduated reprisal into the Soviet homeland (or into the West) might take the form of picking nominal targets that were “tactical” or “strategic” in a strictly military sense. But the motivation might become more and more that of subjecting the other side to unbearable punitive pressures, to demonstrate how frightening the war could become, and to intimidate with the threat of further expansion.

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For years most strategic analysts have thought of Communist China itself either as a minor theater in a major war or as an indirect adversary. Hardly anyone seems to have thought about what kind of war it would be or ought to be if the United States became directly engaged with China.

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To attack China was merely to give the Russians first strike in a general war. And in that war there was a main adversary, Russia, and all the United States had to do was to obliterate enough of China to destroy the regime, or to satisfy a revenge motive, or to use up whatever weapons it had that could not reach Russia.

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The attempt should be to minimize casualties, not to maximize them; there would be no reason to kill Chinese, and there is no historical reason to suppose that the Chinese people, by the hundreds of millions, are any worse threat than any other people except for the regime that heads them in disciplined opposition to us.

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If we did have a war with China, it could be either of two kinds. It could be an effort to destroy the present regime by destroying or disrupting the physical and social basis of its authority and control, with a simultaneous effort to minimize population damage. Or it could be an effort to coerce the regime to come to terms, to pull its troops out of India, to withdraw from Formosa, to disarm itself, or something of the sort. In either case, it is virtually certain that we would not and should not rely on our strategic missiles against China.

We should not because that is probably the most expensive way to destroy the targets that would need to be destroyed and the way least consistent with the constraints we should observe, to wit, minimizing gratuitous population damage, minimizing the Soviet obligation to intervene, and minimizing postwar revulsion against the way we had fought the war.

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Furthermore, coercive warfare against Communist China, intended not to destroy the regime but to make the regime behave, would probably be aimed at Chinese military potency and objects of high value to the regime. The two least appropriate, or least effectual, weapons might be the two that people seem readiest to contemplate: conventional explosives and megaton warheads.

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What the United States was doing in North Vietnam in 1965 against a third-rate adversary, with conventional explosives carried by airplanes that were not designed for the purpose, it would probably attempt to do in China with low-yield nuclear weapons in airplanes that have not yet been designed for it.

We should probably want to destroy the Communist Chinese force with weapons that would cause no casualties beyond a half mile or so from the airfields; we should want to destroy industrial facilities that had a low population or labor-force density. We should want to destroy transport and communication facilities, military depots and training facilities, and troops themselves. We might not afford to do it with conventional weapons (unless newly effective conventional weapons were designed for it) and could not afford to cover such a target system with precious strategic missiles.

We need to recognize that China, as a “strategic” adversary, could not be taken care of by “strategic-war” planning that was developed during two decades of preoccupation with the Soviet Union. China is a different strategic problem altogether.

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The need to distinguish a campaign intended to eliminate the regime from one intended only to coerce the regime into good behavior could become supremely important when the Chinese possess a nuclear retaliatory capability (against the United States or against any other population center that they might choose). Making clear to them that, however bad the war already was for them, it could become much, much worse, might be the most effective way to keep that capacity for nuclear mischief disarmed. At the same time, the most potent coercion might be a target strategy that threatened the regime—eventually, gradually, or uncertainly, not suddenly and decisively—and such a strategy would require discriminating what it is that the regime most treasures and where it is most vulnerable.

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Forcible resistance to them outside their borders can never cost the Chinese more than the resources they knowingly put at risk, the troops and supplies they send abroad; but the bombing of North Vietnam is a mode of warfare that the record now shows to be a real possibility, one that the United States has not only thought of but engaged in. It is a mode of warfare that, at least with air supremacy and the absence of modern anti-aircraft weapons, can be conducted deliberately over a protracted period.

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All of this does not mean expecting a war with China, any more than preoccupation with deterrent forces has meant settling for a war with the Soviet Union. It means making sure that if the point should be reached where a war with China were contemplated or forced on us, we would not fight a preposterously wrong kind of war for lack of having thought in advance about it or for lack of having equipped ourselves for a major adversary that differs drastically from the adversary that motivated our strategic weapons design for two decades.

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A major attack on India could make all of this suddenly relevant, just as the Vietnamese war suddenly made relevant a concept of warfare that did not conform to the model of “limited war” that we inherited in Korea.