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Abraham Kaplan wasn’t addressing national security, but what he wrote in 1964 is broadly applicable and still fresh today:

I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.

Transposed to adulthood, that principle might go some distance toward explaining certain mysteries in the story reported by John Markoff, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker in Tuesday’s New York Times, titled, “In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent.”

The story describes a recent exercise involving “top Pentagon leaders” that simulated their response to “a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks” — with “dispiriting” results:

The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability. No one could pinpoint the country from which the attack came, so there was no effective way to deter further damage by threatening retaliation. What’s more, the military commanders noted that they even lacked the legal authority to respond — especially because it was never clear if the attack was an act of vandalism, an attempt at commercial theft or a state-sponsored effort to cripple the United States, perhaps as a prelude to a conventional war.

Thus, we are told, the pursuit of cyber-deterrence has yet to bear fruit.

But Why Deterrence?

A number of points are left unexplained, but let’s consider just two. First, are intrusions into computer systems really capable of shutting down a wide variety of critical physical systems? And second, if this is so, why is a deterrence strategy the preferred response?

If hackers could bring the nation to its knees at any time, one wonders why it hasn’t happened. It’s not as if America wants for unscrupulous, highly motivated, and fairly computer-savvy enemies. We shouldn’t dismiss the idea, since there has long been concern about the potential vulnerabilities of SCADA systems, although this seems more like an “insider” than a “hacker” problem. Regardless, let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is a serious ongoing problem.

So why would the threat of retaliation be the preferred form of protection for the national infrastructure? Even if an attack on the electrical grid could be attributed with high confidence — and the chances of that sound pretty dim — what if the the hacker turned out to be a terrorist, a criminal for hire, or perhaps an amateur bent on mischief on a grand scale? Do we respond by turning out the lights in the perpetrator’s country of residence? I’m guessing not, especially if it’s Canada — or America, for that matter.

But even more basically, if you were a government official, and your best experts told you that a serious national vulnerability existed, wouldn’t your first thought be, “How do we fix that?” If a serious threat exists to computerized control systems linked to critical infrastructure, then some equally serious effort ought to go into securing them, even if that means isolating them from the Internet, just to be safe. Even if that means seeking a new grant of regulatory power. This is a national security matter, right?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not averse to the idea of deterrence! But hammers are for driving nails, and this problem looks like a bunch of bolts, nuts, and washers.

For further reading: why the “cyber threat” mostly involves espionage — and poisoning relations between major powers.

Comment [14]

The recent essay on declaratory policy by ACW’s own Jeff Lewis is one of those rare writings that brings the reader to think about a well-trodden subject anew. Jeff is onto something when he says that the representatives of a nuclear weapons state — America, China, or any other — shouldn’t even try to answer what-if questions meant to exhume sinister contradictions in their declaratory policy. That’s so whether the policy is no-first-use, “sole purpose,” or some other formula that sends the same basic message with the necessary clarity.

As Jeff says, we really ought to get this one right. U.S. declaratory policy was crafted with the Soviet Union in mind. Although change is 20 years overdue, it still could not come at a much better time than in the months before the May 2010 NPT Review Conference. I’ve already raised this point in two columns for the Bulletin, first in October 2009, and again last week, but let’s have one more stab at it.

Declaratory Policy and Nonproliferation

Perhaps the most important reason to change U.S. declaratory policy has little to do with deterrence requirements. When it comes to nuclear deterrence, our cup runneth over. But when it comes to nonproliferation, we’re experiencing some challenges.

The stated role of nuclear weapons illuminates the role of nonproliferation. If the U.S. nuclear arsenal is meant to coerce future opponents, then nonproliferation becomes an adjunct to global American power, which is already considerable. If, on the other hand, nuclear weapons play a strictly defensive role for the United States and its allies, then nonproliferation can be a matter of broadly common interest.

Come this May at the RevCon, when Washington puts forward its proposals to strengthen the NPT, both Washington and Tehran will be courting the votes of some of the same countries. These include states that are neither enemies nor fully-fledged allies of the United States, and perhaps hold some reservations about the idea of a unipolar world. In this situation, the Nuclear Posture Review can deal cards into the hand of the U.S. delegation, or take them away.

So let’s recognize declaratory policy for what it is, first and foremost: an instrument of diplomacy. And let’s also recognize that “deter enemies” and “assure allies” is not the whole of diplomatic endeavor. The United States aspires to lead the international community, which is not the same thing as leading NATO. The RevCon will put that aspiration to the test.

Comment [1]

It can be surprising just how strongly people tend to feel about nuclear weapons declaratory policy.

The entire idea of declaratory policy, after all, comes down to words. It controls no instruments, makes no irrevocable commitments, and lacks the binding force of law. It amounts to an overt exercise in what the psychologists call impression management. As someone once told Janne Nolan, the standing promise of the United States not to use nuclear weapons under certain circumstances – the so-called Negative Security Assurances, or NSA – boils down to “just a policy.”

(As words go, too, the NSA’s are rather vague.)

Still and all, the strength of the feelings surrounding declaratory policy comes through loud and clear in an exchange of views in the current issue of Survival on whether to adopt a nuclear no-first-use pledge, or NFU, a long-standing proposal recently mooted again by Scott Sagan. For some, NFU would be too weak and therefore meaningless. For others, it would be too strong, tying the hands of the United States when it absolutely, positively has to nuke somebody.

The truth almost certainly lies in between. Michael Gerson – that’s Michael “I’m Not the Speechwriter Guy” Gerson – nailed it when he described the power of NFU as stemming from “audience costs.” This idea, sometimes also described in terms of costly signaling, means that a leader or a state can try to commit itself to a course of action by threatening itself with humiliation if it does not follow through. This is essentially the same reasoning involved in taking a public oath. You can break an oath, but really don’t want to, other things being equal. For this reason, the leader of an NFU state would be reluctant to threaten first nuclear use in a crisis.

My latest column in the Bulletin takes a somewhat different tack. While I’m in favor of NFU, I don’t think it should be pigeonholed as “declaratory policy.” It should be treated as policy policy, laid down in an Executive Order. (Yeah, right there in the Federal Register.) As Commander-in-Chief, of course, the President can override his own standing orders in a pinch, but in the meantime, they should form the basis of guidance for planners.

Why is this distinction important? For one thing, declarations enjoy greater credibility when something more than reputation stands behind them. And President Obama has promised – rather publicly, although no proper oath was sworn – to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy.”

This is a good idea because, as I’ve sought to explain in the column, the present role of nuclear weapons is rather broad and nebulous. And it’s just that much harder to persuade countries outside of the U.S. alliance system that nonproliferation is in their interest, too, if it enforces an oligopoly on weapons intended in part for what Thomas Schelling called “compellence” and Alexander George called “coercive diplomacy.” Call it nuclear blackmail, if you like.

Clausewitz on the Bomb

At some point, too, we really ought to decide for ourselves what our nuclear weapons are for. Perspectives vary, so much so that the Perry-Schlesinger Strategic Posture Commission, for example, didn’t make a clear statement about it.*

The nature of nuclear weapons has tended to override attempts to harness them to sensible policy objectives. Policy, as Carl von Clausewitz put it,

converts the overwhelmingly destructive element of war into a mere instrument. It changes the terrible battle-sword that a man needs both hands and his entire strength to wield, and with which he strikes home once and no more, into a light, handy rapier—sometimes just a foil for the exchange of thrusts, feints and parries.

Despite efforts to craft limited nuclear options, there are in the final analysis no thermonuclear rapiers or atomic foils. It’s “terrible battle-sword” all the way. As a consequence, nuclear policy debates have always seemed especially susceptible to arguments that spring less from Clausewitzian strategic calculations than from hawkish or dovish sentiments, pure and simple. In settings like Perry-Schlesinger, the sentiments more or less cancel each other out, leaving matters not very far from where they started. (See the chapter on declaratory policy.)

So, with the Soviet Union almost two decades in the grave, we’re still poised to conduct an annihilating strike on Russia in response to the Red Army’s thrust through the Fulda Gap. And we explain this posture to the world in terms of North Korea’s or Syria’s chemical weapons program. This just makes no sense at all. It’s a function of inertia. Up to now, no President has been ready for the massive exertions required to force change, but the pressing need to overhaul the nonproliferation regime could finally produce that impetus.

* There is no clear joint statement, to be exact. The Chairman's Preface is another matter.

Comment [7]

In meetings over the past few weeks, I have heard repeated references to the wonderful 1983 essay Deterrence and Reassurance by the late Michael Howard.

Point of fact — Sir Michael Howard is not dead. But with the way in which conference goers continuously distort his seminal article, published as both an Adelphi Paper and an article in Foreign Affairs, it sure feels like he ought to be rolling in his grave.

(This reminds me of the grim joke during the carnage in Bosnia: “None of this would have happened if Warren Christopher were still alive.” The humor, of course, being that the septuagenarian Christopher was the sitting Secretary of State. But I digress.)

Several speakers have cited Howard to make the point that assuring our allies may be more difficult than deterring our adversaries. One speaker went so far as to style the proposition that reassurance will be more difficult than deterrence as Howard’s Dictum. Howard’s Dictum is then invoked to suggest that the United States may need to retain certain capabilities that do not contribute meaningfully to deterrence (cough, TLAM-N, cough) because they do contribute to assurance of certain allies like Japan.

This proposition may be true — though I very much doubt it — but true or not the proposition that assurance requires the United States to deploy capabilities in excess of those for deterrence is opposite of what Howard argued in 1983. Howard did argue that reassurance was more difficult, but the relationship he described was rather different.

Many capabilities such as the Pershing II that Washington judged necessary to deterrence, Howard argued, were in fact deeply unsettling to our European allies. In his Adelphi paper, Howard warned of “a serious disjunction between deterrence and reassurance.”

The object of deterrence is to persuade an adversary that the costs to him of seeking a military solution to his political problems will far outweigh the benefits. The object of reassurance is to persuade one’s own people, and those of one’s allies, that the benefits of military action, or preparation for it, will outweigh the costs.

[snip]

It is also apparent, at least in Europe, that reassurance cannot be re-established by any improvement in the mechanism of deterrence, certainly not of nuclear deterrence. Perhaps the people of Western Europe ought to feel safer when the installation of Pershing II and cruise missiles has made clear our capacity to counter an SS-20 first strike, but I doubt whether they really will. Perhaps we should all feel safer if the United States did develop the capacity to carry on, and ‘prevail’ in, a prolonged nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union but in fact public opinion in Europe is terrified by the prospect – and so is much of it in the United States. In the calculus of nuclear deterrence both developments may appear appropriate, even essential, but such a calculus does not translate easily into the language of political reassurance and certainly not in a Europe where any nuclear exchange, on however limited a scale, spells almost inconceivable disaster. Limited nuclear options do not look very attractive if we are likely to be one of them ourselves.

It is, as the late Samuel Huntington admits even in dissent “original in thought, elegant in phrasing, and penetrating in analysis.” I would simply say it is a beautifully written article.

Although the situation in Europe in the early 1980s provides, however, only a few vague clues about what to do in our current predicament, there are some parallels. These are parallels are not found in the military balance of respective armories, but rather the distorting effects that arise when democratic allies abdicate responsibility for their own defense:

How has such a widespread and grotesque misunderstanding come about? Obviously there is a whole complex of reasons, in which simple cultural friction plays its part. But it is at least in part the outcome of the process I have described, by which the defence of Europe has become perceived not as the responsibility of the Europeans themselves but increasingly in terms of a system of ‘extended nuclear deterrence’ manipulated from the United States in accordance with strategic concepts with which few Europeans are familiar.

At some level, this diagnosis may be actually quite similar to the problems that bedevil the Washington-Tokyo alliance, although the manifestations appear very different.

Howard’s proposal to reassuring Europe in the 1980s may, in very general terms, offer some clues about reassuring allies in Europe and Asia today. At base, Howard’s proposals about less about building military capabilities than establishing a Transatlantic consensus:

How are we to deal with this problem? How are deterrence and reassurance to be once more reconciled? This is the task that will confront statesmen and strategists for the rest of this century.

[snip]

Our first task must therefore be to get Soviet power and intentions into perspective. The exaggerated melodrama implied in the term
‘The Soviet Threat’ seems and has always seemed to me unnecessary and counterproductive.

[snip]

One does not have to attribute to the Soviet Union either predatory intentions or ambitions for global conquest to persuade all but a stubborn minority that the states of Western Europe have a problem of military security that must be solved if normal intercourse with the Soviet Union is to be sustained on a basis of equality.

[snip]

The second task therefore is to show that Europe can be defended, and that the costs of doing so would not outweigh the benefits.

[snip]

So where does this leave us? First, the requirement for effective deterrence remains, if only because the Soviet Union cannot be expected to observe a higher standard of conduct towards weaker neighbours than other states, whatever their political complexion, have shown in the past. Second, deterrence can no longer depend on the threat of a nuclear war, the costs of which would be grotesquely out of proportion to any conceivable benefits to be derived from engaging in it. Third, proposals to make nuclear war ‘fightable’, let alone ‘winnable’ by attempting to limit its targets and control its course, however much sense this may make in the military grammar of deterrence, are not persuasive in the political language of reassurance. And finally the problem cannot be solved by any massive transferral of resources to conventional capabilities. The immediate social costs of doing so, whether one likes it or not, are unacceptably high.

This is a rather elegant expression of the same point I made more clumsily in my remarks to the Carnegie Endowment last week regarding both NATO and Japan.

The obvious analogue to Howard’s analysis in, say, the case of Japan would not be keeping TLAM-N any more than Howard thought we could assuage European concerns by adjusting the Pershing II deployment. Rather, we need a sustained US diplomatic effort to put the threat from North Korea (and to much lesser extent, China) in perspective and to make clear the possibilities of defending Japan, primarily with conventional weapons.

Comment [11]

Herman Kahn has a favored place in my shoe box collection because he followed his logic train to territory where other deterrence strategists feared to tread. Kahn was plus-sized (above), utterly confident, and easily caricatured. A sense of the man’s mind can be found in the preface of one of his important books, On Escalation, Metaphors and Scenarios (1965), which was written, he writes, to “create propaedeutic and heuristic methodologies and frameworks.” For the sake of our youth, I sincerely hope that the word propaedeutic is never used during a national spelling bee. Readers of lesser intelligence are instructed that this word “pertains to introductory instruction, although there is no suggestion of the elementary.”

In schooling us in the intricacies and logic of nuclear war fighting, Kahn identified eight factors that governed the degree of escalation one might expect in a crisis or war:

1) Apparent closeness to all-out war
2) Likelihood of eruption
3) Provocation
4) Precedents broken
5) Committal (resolve and/or recklessness) demonstrated
6) Damage done or being done
7) Effort (scale, scope, or intensity of violence)
8) Threat intended or perceived

Go ahead and mock the man, but try your hand at compiling a better list.

Kahn argued that there were “two traditional American biases: an unwillingness to initiate the use of moderate levels of force for limited objectives, and a too-great willingness, once committed, to use extravagant and uncontrolled force.” Neither trait, he warned, would serve the United States well in the serious business of dealing with Cold War dangers. Where Kahn lost most of his audience was in the particulars, to which his agile mind was his particularly drawn. Kahn’s escalation ladder – “a generalized (or abstract) scenario” – included no less than forty-four rungs.

The Cold War literature on escalation, as exemplified by Herman Kahn, was deeply flawed. It rested heavily on rational choice, which might well be in short supply if the nuclear threshold were crossed. This literature, as well as U.S. plans for the employment of nuclear weapons, also presumed that Soviet nuclear war fighters would respect rungs on Kahn’s escalation ladder. This key assumption, as we learned after the Cold War ended, was badly mistaken.

Comment [21]

Students of nuclear deterrence could learn something from the financial crisis. (So I’ve argued before.) One reason to think so appears in a review of Justin Fox’s new book, The Myth of the Rational Market.

In Paul Krugman’s telling, Fox describes how the efficient markets hypothesis, which is the basis of modern financial risk assessment, depends on a glaring fallacy: the assumption that others consistently decide and act in their own optimal self-interest, or close enough that it doesn’t matter.

This journey to disaster began with a beautiful idea…

[Harry] Markowitz’s model told investors what they should do, rather than predicting what they actually do. But by the mid-1960s other theorists had taken the next step, analyzing financial markets on the assumption that investors actually behaved the way Markowitz’s model said they should….

But if the markets are already getting it right, who needs finance professors?

What the idea of efficient markets has to do with the non-use of nuclear weapons is actually pretty straightforward, since deterrence is traditionally modeled on bargaining and risk-taking. And indeed, back in 1974, Alexander George and Richard Smoke detected a similar problem in deterrence theory. The theory, they warned, was primarily “abstract-deductive” in origin, based upon ideas about what states ought to do rather than evidence about what states actually have done. This was a problem if anyone was supposed to rely on it:

The character of the theory is fundamentally normative-prescriptive, not historical-explanatory. …[T]he large deterrence literature has grown up with almost no systematic attention to historical cases of deterrence, to the explanation thereof, or to inductive theory-building therefrom. These time-consuming activities have been sidestepped, for reason of theorists’ understandable sense of urgency during the Cold War era…

To put it another way: if everyone is already acting in their own best interests, who needs strategists?

The common root of these problems is the assumption that optimization of subjective expected utility (SEU) self-evidently forecasts actual behavior. As Herbert Simon put it, with dry understatement,

The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful. Moreover, it allows us to predict (correctly or not) human behavior without stirring out of our armchairs to observe what such behavior is like.

Or as Larry Summers once put it, according to Krugman, “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.”

Comment [10]