Quote of the week:
“Deterrence now means something as a strategic policy only when we are fairly confident that the retaliatory instrument upon which it relies will not be called upon to function at all… In short, we expect the system to be always ready to spring while going permanently unused. Surely there is something almost unreal about all this.” — Bernard Brodie
Long-time readers of these posts know that I’m a big fan of Bernard Brodie. Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton University Press, 1959) captures his gifts of analysis and writing style, as well as his conceits. Brodie had little regard for popular enthusiasms. The quote he selected by Clausewitz opposite his title page was: “[M]an, who in great things as well as in small usually acts more on prevailing ideas and emotions than according to strictly logical conclusions, is hardly conscious of his confusion, one-sidedness, and inconsistency.” Nor did Brodie hold in high regard many of the heavy hitters who wrote about the Bomb. He presented an interesting mix — a man sure of himself, while acknowledging dilemmas more than most of his fellow strategists.
Here are some excerpts from his chapter on “The Anatomy of Deterrence:”
“The one great area of our public affairs in which romanticism survives is that of national defense policies… These attitudes and moods have, however, a common tendency to depart reality in favor of certain fantasies about ourselves and the world we live in. Romanticism exalts strong action over negotiation, boldness over caution, and feeling over reflection. It exalts dedication to a cause, with minimum consideration for the utility of the cause. It also prompts us to imagine ourselves more courageous, alert, and idealistic than sober appraisals of our behavior would confirm.”
“[P]reventive war, preemptive attack and massive retaliation reflect an idea congenial to modern military thinking, that of seizing the initiative and carrying the fight to the enemy. These approaches also reflect an abiding faith in the ritual of liquidation — the idea that some convulsive and fearfully costly act will justify itself through the elimination of the evil enemy and the need to live in the same world with him.”
“[T]otal nuclear war is to be avoided at almost any cost. This follows from the assumption that such a war, even if we were extraordinarily lucky, would be too big, too all-consuming to permit the survival even of those final values, like personal freedom, for which one could think of waging it. It need not be certain that it would turn out so badly; it is enough that there is a large chance that it would.”
“The philosophy of deterrence takes account above all of the enormous American cultural resistances to our hitting first in a period of threatened total war… In other words, our rejection of the idea of ‘preventive war’ has committed us completely and inevitably to the policy and strategy of deterrence.” Brodie doesn’t reflect on the possibility of preventive wars for less than total stakes — a notion that wasn’t entertained in the 1950s, but gained currency after the 9/11 attacks.
On matters of deterrence, Brodie had the capacity to entertain seemingly contradictory conclusions without informing his readers how the application of reason and logic could sort out these matters. Take for example:
“So long as there is a finite chance of war, we have to be interested in outcomes; and although all outcomes would be bad, some would be very much worse than others.”
“To be willing to accept enormous destruction only for the sake of inflicting greater destruction on the enemy (which may be all that some mean by ‘winning’) argues a kind of desperation at the moment of decision which rules out reason.”
How much assured retaliatory destruction is enough? Brodie, unlike Robert McNamara, didn’t say — only that “The overriding considerations should be that the nation is committed to a deterrence policy and that such commitment dictates primary concern with the survival of a retaliatory force of adequate size following enemy attack.”
But here’s the rub: Brodie acknowledges that “A force which fulfills that requirement is likely to be also a good first-strike force.” What, then, to do? Brodie was dismissive of calls for nuclear disarmament. Instead, he was drawn, like Thomas Schelling and others, to “The kind of measures… which could seriously reduce on all sides the dangers of surprise attack.”
In this regard, he warned that “Our overriding interest, for the enhancement of our deterrence posture, is of course in the security of our own retaliatory force. But this does not mean that we especially desire the other side’s retaliatory force to be insecure. If the opponent feels insecure, we suffer the hazard of his being trigger happy.”
Brodie’s brain was unable to sort out the dilemmas of deterrence and what to do if deterrence failed, as was periodically the case. Nobody’s brain was able to figure out the dilemmas of nuclear deterrence which led to the default position of having more killing capacity than reason and logic presumed necessary. And if “total” war was abhorrent, how could sharp reasoning and logical conclusions be applied to limited nuclear war? Here Brodie stumbled, as did his fellow brainiacs. But he captured these dilemmas far better than most, and is worthy of a first or second reading.