Edward N. Luttwak – Strategy – The Logic of War and Peace

Das Buch erklärt eigentlich alles. Die Unterstreichungen werden ihm nicht wirklich gerecht.

Meine Unterstreichungen:

To derive their benefit, we must never use the nuclear weapons acquired and maintained at great cost. To be ready to attack — in retaliation ç is evidence of peaceful intent, but to prepare antinuclear defenses is aggressive, or at least “provocative” — such are the conventional views on the subject.

Within the sphere of strategy, however, where human relations are conditioned by armed conflict actual or possible, another and quite different logic is at work and routinely violates ordinary linear logic by inducing the coming together and reversal of opposites. Therefore it tends to reward paradoxical conduct while defeating straightforwardly logical action, yielding results that are ironical or even lethally damaging.

Violating commonsense criteria of what is best and most efficient — as the shorter route is preferable to the longer, as daylight is preferable to the confusions of the night, as completed preparations are preferable to hurried improvisations — the bad option may deliberately be chosen in the hope that the unfolding action will be not be expected by the enemy, thus diminishing his ability to react. Surprise in war can now be recognized for what it is: not merely one advantage among many, such as material superiority or a better initial position, but rather the suspension, if only brief, if only partial, of the entire predicament of strategy.

With secrecy rarely absolute, the leakage of the truth can be countered only by deception, in the hope that the “signals” generated by all that is done to prepare for action will be submerged by the contrived”noise” of misleading, outdated, or just irrelevant information.

All that is done by way of paradoxical action as well as secrecy and deception must weaken the overall effort and perhaps greatly, but surprise yields its advantage whenever the enemy’s reaction is weakened to an even greater extent. At the limit, surprise could in theory best be achieved by acting in a manner so completely paradoxical as to be utterly self-defeating: if almost the entire force available is used to meslead, leaving only a faction of it for the real fight, the enemy should certainly be surprised, but the venture will most likely be easily defeated even by an enemy completely unprepared. Obviously the paradoxical path of “least expectation” must stop short of self-defeating extremes, but beyond that it is a matter of probabilistic calculations neither safe nor precise.

But a clever enemy will strive to compound inherent frictions, attacking supply lines if supplies are already short; communications, if they are already overburdened; command centers, if enemy officers are lacking in initiative; and so on. These are instances of the most ambitious kind of military operation: relational maneuver, the application of strength against specifically identified enemy weaknesses—a form of warfare, discussed later, which is itself highly vulnerable to friction.

The advantages of surprise that paradoxical schemes offer are thus offset not only by the lost combat potential deliberately sacrificed but also by added organizational risk. Yet straightforward military actions, entirely shaped by linear logic to make the fullest use of all available resources by the most direct methods, are not that common in the record of war, and still more rarely do they escape criticism in the aftermath. At least some paradoxical elements will be present in the preparation and conduct of most competent military actions.

The targets of military technology are much less cooperative. As soon as a significant innovation appears on the scene, efforts will be made to circumvent it – hence the virtue of suboptimal but more rapid solutions that give less warning of the intent and of suboptimal but more resilient solutions. This is why the scientist’s natural pursuit of elegant solutions and the engineer’s quest for optimality often fail in the paradoxical realm of strategy.

For commercial fleets that must survive in the peacetime setting of competitive freight markets, the unlimited pursuit of economies of scale is essential. But when we encounter a similar concentration of value in combat ships and auxiliaries several times larger than their predecessors of the Second World War, in major airbases and repair depots in places quite close to enemy territory, we can see that military logic has been displaced by economic priorities that are valid only in peacetime.

Ballistic missiles for example are dramatic weapons, but if they do not have nuclear warheads, they are simply expensive vehicles for modest quantities of ordinary high explosives, or unreliable chemicals, or even less reliable biological agents.It is therefore easy to overshoot the culminating point of effectiveness in developing countermeasures to nonnuclear ballistic missiles – in fact the best defense against an ineffectual threat is no defense at all, for drama does not count in war, only results.

Once this further self-protection was added, it turned out that an entire carrier group, with its several destroyers and one cruiser, its escort submarine and several supply ships, with almost ten thousand crew members in all, could provide onlv thirty-four aircraft for offensive action, along with a dozen guns of mid-ding caliber and sundry cruise missiles.

aircraft carriers defended all too well to be worth keeping.

If the forces cut off are quickly defeated, they may still have obtained an advantage for the defense. But if their resistance persists in prolonged, heroic endurance, attracting public notice, the locality that was perhaps once quite obscure or just another name on the map can be transformed into a weighty symbol, into which the reputation of military or political leaders may become inflexibly invested.

In strategy’s dynamic paradox, a defense as much as an offensive can be too successful. It can evolve into a wider failure, whether in defending outposts, in protecting fleets that technical advances are making insecure, or in preserving any other military instrument that emotions and institutional interests transform from servant to master.

To preserve their power and authority within their own societies, democratic leaders must obey the linear logic of consensual politics. That means, for example, that they cannot act paradoxically to surprise external enemies, because they must inform and prepare their public before acting. Nor can they deviate from the conventions of the time and place without a loss of authority. In any case, a conscious understanding of the phenomena of strategy is a great rarity among political leaders, whose talent is precisely to understand and guide public opinion, itself wedded to a commonsense logic that is very different from the paradoxical logic of strategy. They can still win wars of course, but only by mobilizing superior resources, being condemned to failure whenever they lack material superiority. There are exceptions however. Winston Churchill is the most notable modern example — a rather marginal politician in peacetime significantly enough, but a premier strategist in war-time — quite aside from his role as an inspiring leader. His specifically strategical talents, moreover, can be precisely documented.

And because German air defenses inflicted disastrous losses on aircraft attempting to bomb specific military and industrial targets in daylight, Bomber Command had to fly at night, when its aircraft could hit no target smaller than a fairly large city. Thus the paradoxical reward that the Germans obtained for the victory of their army, and the effectiveness of their fighters and antiaircraft artillery in daylight interception, was the beginning of the destruction of German cities.

With compulsory universal labor enforced in Britain since 1940, and with all nonessential trades and services eliminated or severely restricted, it was never imagined that until mid-1943 most German women were still at home, that there were more than a million domestic servants, and that such nonessential trades as bookbinding were still thriving. Having quite deliberately started the war, Hitler could not demand extreme sacrifices from the German people—and the state of the German war economy reflected that fundamental political reality. It was only from February 1943 that a full mobilization began, in the wake of the Stalingrad defeat with its catastrophic losses. Once German energies were more fully harnessed, the output of military equipment and supplies rose sharply and kept increasing, so that the rising tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany during 1944 coincided with a steady increase in the volume of war production.

Since 1945, wars among lesser powers have rarely been allowed to follow their natural course. Instead, they have typically been interrupted long before they could burn out the energies of war to establish the preconditions of peace.

it has also become routine to interrupt wars in more lasting fashion by imposing armistices. Again, unless directly followed by successful peace negotiations, armistices perpetuate the state of war indefinitely because they shield the weaker side from the consequences of refusing the concessions needed for peace.

At this writing, in addition to the United Nations a series of multilateral organizations make it their business to intervene in other peoples’ wars. Their common, inherent, characteristic is that they insert themselves in war situations while refusing to engage in combat. That greatly adds to the damage.

The phenomenon of “multinationally induced troop degradation” can rarely be documented as such, though its consequences have been abundantly visible in the litter of the dead, mutilated, raped, and tortured that attends UN interventions.

Because regular forms of warfare among well-organized belligerents in more developed areas offer few opportunities for NGOs, they naturally focus their efforts elsewhere, aiding war refugees in the poorest parts of the world, especially in Africa. There, the feeding, shelter, and health care offered, while perhaps abysmal by global standards, are sufficient to keep refugees in place perpetually. The consequences are entirely predictable. Among many lesser examples, the huge refugee camps established along the Congo-Zaire border with Rwanda in the wake of the 1994 genocide of Tutsis by the Hutu, which was followed by the Tutsi conquest of Rwanda, stand out as a particularly egregious case. NGOs that answered to no authority sustained a Hutu nation in exile that would otherwise have dispersed to find a myriad of private destinies in the vastness of Zaire. The presence of a million or so Hutus still under their genocidal leaders made the consolidation of Rwanda impossible. Armed Hutu activists, fed by NGOs along with everyone else, kept the other refugees under oppressive control, enlisting, training, and arming their young to raid across the Rwanda border to kill more Tutsis.

When especially threatened, moreover, as in Somalia through the 1990s but less visibly in other places too, NGOs purchase security from local war bands, often the very same bands that threaten them. No recondite strategic calculation is needed to uncover the result: unless the totality of their payments are insignificantly small— which was definitely not true of Somalia-NGOs themselves prolong the warfare whose consequences they seek to mitigate.

Almost all wars nowadays become endemic conflicts that never end, because the transformative effects of both decisive victories and exhaustion are blocked by outside interventions of one kind or another. Thus the evils of war persist, but without the compensation of eventually compelling peace.

They could only remain “great” [powers] if they were seen to be willing and able to use force even to protect interests far from vital, and indeed to acquire more “nonvital” interests, whether in the form of distant possessions or further additions to their spheres of influence. To lose a few hundred soldiers in some minor venture or even some thousands in a small war or expeditionary campaign were routine events for the Great Powers of history. It suffices to mention the abrupt American abandonment of Somalia after the loss of eighteen soldiers in October 1993 to expose the unreality of the Great Power concept in our own days.

If the significance of new family demography is accepted, it follows that none of the advanced low-birth-rate countries of the world can play the role of a classic Great Power anymore, not the United States or Russia, not Britain or France, least of all Germany or Japan. They may still possess the physical attributes of military strength, or the economic base to develop significant military strength, but their societies are so allergic to casualties that they are effectively “de-bellicized,” or nearly so.

Army leaders and, in the case of the United States, those of the marines as well cannot admit that their manpower-intensive forces have become largely unusable in combat, except in the exceedingly unlikely event of a defensive war.

A second limitation of remote bombardment, dramatically exposed by the Kosovo war, was that the absolute priority of avoiding any risk to NATO pilots made it impossible to protect the persecuted Albanians of Kosovo, on whose behalf the war was ostensibly being fought.

Among the many obstacles encountered was the deep mud — as if attack helicopters were not normally meant to be operated from unimproved terrain, the key advantage of helicopters in general, for which field-assembled pads are routinely provided. In reality much more than the placing of 24 expedient pads was involved, for the U.S. Army was determined to care for and protect the 24 Apaches and their crews more than adequately: 6,200 protective troops and command and service personnel with 26,000 tons of equipment were sent to Tirana in 550 flights by C-17 heavy transports, including a company of 14 MIAl battle tanks, 42 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, and 27 Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters for airmobile protective troops and for search and rescue. The expeditionary field headquarters of the force was itself large enough to require 20 mobile offices forty feet long, and 190 shipping containers with ammunition, replacement engines, and parts were sent-enough for a sustained campaign. To open the way for the Apaches by scattering bomblets against any hostiles in their flight paths, ATACMS tactical missiles were also provided. General Reimer’s retrospective comment was exemplary of postheroic priorities: “We probably went in a little too heavy… I don’t apologize for that … the people on the ground knew they were protected, and that gives them confidence” — the people in question being the Apache crews, rather than the Albanians then being terrorized with impunity.

none of the pilots in place were deemed qualified to fly with night-vision goggles. Training duly started, a little belatedly perhaps. On May 4, an Apache crashed, killing both crewmen. In addition, because of the absence of a ground force with its own organic intelligence capabili-ties, there was also the problem of finding targets without exposing the Apaches to greater danger by having them circle and look for them. […] These continued until the Kosovo war ended with not a single Apache combat mission flown: General Clark was never authorized to send them into action.

This too is a way for peace to evolve into war. Peacetime conditions can induce societal and cultural changes that diminish effective military capabilities even as peacetime prosperity increases the resources that may be spent on the armed forces: in 1999, as the Apache saga was unfolding in Albania, the U.S. Army was in the process of spending $1.9 billion on minor upgrades to its Apaches.

Repression, by contrast, is fragile. Being itself in the realm of strategy, all its components – propaganda, police control, internal political intelligence – are continuously eroded by the reactions they evoke, undoing themselves, and thus require constant injections of effort not to decline toward impotence. Propaganda undermines itself as yesterday’s boastful claims are denied by present realities; police control tends to become lax over time precisely because the regime seems secure, thus making it insecure; internal political intelligence functions until secrecy becomes integral to any opposition activity-undermining the value of informers.

[In re Stalin’s repression:] all those associated with the arrested were required to denounce them, including professional colleagues and coworkers, teachers, fellow students, parents, relatives, spouses, and their own children (young children who denounced their parents were elevated into highly publicized heroic models). The aim was not merely to terrorize society but to reduce it into an inchoate mass of noncommunicating individuals deprived of any bonds of solidarity (all clubs and voluntary associations had long since been out-lawed). Any personal opposition to the regime, any critical thought what-ever, became a personal secret that could not be shared with anyone else, for fear of betrayal and arrest.

For military bureaucracies, the maximum quality that can be achieved in a single weapon is usually sacrificed for the sake of quantity: to reduce the magnitude of the forces is to reduce the base of the military hierarchy. For scientists and engineers, numbers have no value at all in themselves: maximum quality is the only goal of their ambition, so that they are always seeking to develop the most complete, the most perfect, the most versatile weapons with the highest possible performance, no matter how much the cost.

Before and during the Second World War, the paths of technological ambition diverged and proliferated to yield many different innovations, some of immediate military value (radar, for example, and eventually the fission bomb) and others of negative military value at the time, most famously the German V-1 and V-2 rockets that consumed vast resources without serving any worthwhile purpose. Many other innovations, such as the V-3 ramjet gun and the 100-ton Maus supertank also absorbed scarce German resources without even reaching the production stage.

Between 1990 and 2000, the arrival of cheap, reliable, and powerful small computers caused much structural change in the world: many businesses were drastically reorganized and many school-children changed their habits of work and play. Those years, however, happened to coincide with the end of the Cold War and declining defense budgets, leaving military forces hardly changed at all. They did not adapt their structures and methods to exploit the many possible advantages of computer abundance; instead they merely added computers to their established organizational formats.

What overcomes instinct to make combat possible are the three great intangibles that all fighting armies strive to cultivate through parade-ground drills (to make obedience automatic); speeches, songs, and flags (to inspire pride); and punishments and rewards: individual morale, group discipline, and unit cohesion. Of these decisively important but unmeasurable attributes, small-unit cohesion is usually the most important, because the willingness of men to fight for one another survives the terrible impact of battle far better than any other source of morale.

The intellectuals who dominated the post-1918 French general staff, in fact, could prove mathematically the counterconcentration superiority of defense over offense, […] By this calculation, so long as German mothers did not breed more than three times as many sons, the French would be able to resist any offensive, unless first weakened by futile offensives of their own. Victory was therefore assured if a purely defensive theater strategy was rigidly followed.

The risks of relying on nuclear weapons became increasingly obvious as the Cold War continued, but for the Alliance the consequences of increasing nonnuclear strength could have been paradoxically negative. The refusal of the European allies of the United States to increase their nonnuclear forces was certainly motivated by opposition to greater military expenditures. But it could also have been justified by strategic reasoning. True, if the nonnuclear forces of the Alliance had been strong enough to defend the central front against a Soviet nonnuclear invasion, there would have been no need to employ battlefield nuclear weapons. In the event of war, therefore, the world would have been spared the ultimate danger of a step-by-step progression from battlefield to intercontinental nuclear war. But if nuclear use is absent in a war, nonnuclear combat must occur in a war still enormously damaging for the affected European populations, but not for either Russians or Americans. It seemed wise at the time to equalize the risk.

First, the paradoxical logic of warfare (he who defends all can defend nothing, or, victory can be excessive) inevitably clashes with the linear logic of politics, which calls for maximum protection or maximum conquest as the case might be. Almost all military men therefore consider almost all politicians too bold or too timid. Second, the military striving to obtain the best possible outcome – even if short of victory – can be at odds with the ever present political option of pursuing a negotiated outcome instead. It is only at the level of grand strategy that these collisions are unresolved one way or another.

Normally it is a preclusive defense that is desired, even if some shallow form of defense-in-depth is accepted in practice. As for its deeper versions, and certainly any sort of elastic defense, these are hardly ever deliberately planned; they are accepted only reluctantly, to avert imminent defeat. Actually there is a format even more desirable in theory than a preclusive defense: an active defense, whereby a theater is defended by launching an immediate counteroffensive, without any defensive fighting at all.

Further, it is organizationally easier to launch preplanned offensives than to cope defensively with a variety of surprise attacks. In all cases, however, if both the attacker and the defender choose the offensive, one or the other must have seriously misread the balance of power. One reason an active defense is a rarity at the strategic level is that it requires an offensive elan more likely to be encountered among aggressors than among victims. In fact no modern example in pure form can be cited except for Israel’s 1973 war, and the nearest case before that, the advance of the French and British armies into Belgium in immediate reaction to the German offensive of May 10, 1940, was not an encouraging precedent.

Only to the south was Muscovy exposed, as long as what is now Ukraine remained a no-man’s-land, part of the steppe corridor open to Turkic and Mongol invasions – and that danger was finally removed by Russian expansion and Ottoman decline during the time of Peter the Great.

As always, there is a paradox at work. If the enemy’s own air power and antiaircraft forces are formidable, then his troops and supplies in transit can be crowded in dense convoys in broad daylight, for then air interdiction is not likely to be attempted in any great depth by large numbers of attacking aircraft (partly because many fighters would be needed to escort the few armed for bombing and strafing). But if the enemy’s air defenses are weak, allowing a free hand for interdiction aircraft, then they are not likely to encounter dense military traffic they can profitably attack. For in that case the enemy would strive to move his troops and supplies at night, or in dispersed order, or both. Thus air power that is too strong undermines its own potential utility.

That for the British sea power I was an essential instrument, and sea power II the source of much wealth, is beyond question. But the real cause of Britain’s naval supremacy was the success of its foreign policy in preserving a balance of power in Europe. By intervening to oppose any one Great Power or coalition that seemed on the verge of dominating continental Europe, the British ensured continued strife. That forced the continental powers to keep large armies, which in turn prevented them from keeping large navies as well.

That British naval supremacy coexisted with the notoriously ungenerous funding of the Royal Navy reflected the logic of strategy. By contrast, it would have contradicted the paradoxical logic if Britain could have achieved supremacy just by adding more and more frigates to the Royal Navy. European adversaries left free to react by an exclusive British focus on naval strength would have built their own frigates, instead of being forced to devote their resources to their armies. Contemporaries who deplored the neglect of the Royal Navy, and admirals who bitterly complained that British gold was being given away to foreigners while their own ships were in need, had common sense on their side but not strategy.

Ironically, by the time Mahan published his book, the British government had abandoned its historic policy. Instead of arming Germany’s continental adversaries, especially the undersupplied Russians, to keep its power well entangled on land, substantial funds were finally granted to the Royal Navy to preserve sea power I in a direct shipbuilding competition with imperial Germany. Common sense and popular opinion were both satisfied. It was not as a guide to policy but rather as the propagandist of a policy already formed that Mahan was so greatly acclaimed in Britain: the National Defence Act, which mandated “parity” with the two strongest continental navies combined, was passed in 1889 –before Mahan’s first “influence” book was published.

That sequence ensured the defeat by attrition of the Luftwaffe’s 1940 bombing campaign against Britain. It could not break the will to fight of the British, as no bombing campaign would ever break the will of any other nation thereafter, while the Luftwaffe bomber force lacked the explosive and fire-raising payloads to destroy much British industrial capacity quickly, as no bombing campaign was ever to do thereafter against any other major industrial nation.

The long and bloody process of attrition by ground fighting and naval blockade that the bombers were supposed to circumvent was instead translated into the air war — in which the chances of survival of bomber crews were actually smaller than those of the infantry in the trench warfare of the First World War.

In the intimidating presence of Soviet occupation forces, between 1945 and 1948 the leaders of the majority political parties of Hungary, Romania, and finally Czechoslovakia were intimidated into forming coalitions with local communist parties. Police forces were invariably placed under the communist ministers in these broad coalitions. Soon, noncommunist government ministers, still in the majority but under personal duress, voted to outlaw the remaining political parties on the right outside the coalition, which were accused of “fascism.” Then a new coalition was formed, excluding the most conservative party, which was outlawed in turn or dissolved by its own leaders in fear for their lives. The process was repeated, narrowing the coalition slice by slice, until only the communists and their controlled subparties remained in office. By the end of 1948, the process was completed: the wall of nuclear dissuasion was intact, but Soviet power had tunneled underneath it, to assert full control over Eastern Europe with no overt use of force.

On the one hand, the destructive potential of large fusion bombs, with retaliation in kind duly included, exceed by far any culminating point of utility for the purposes of suasion. Indeed, the curve declined so steeply that less could be expected from those weapons than from the earlier fission bombs, which had only a fraction of their destructive energy.

With nuclear weapons present in the inventory of air wings and army corps, warships and submarines, a direct mechanism was in place to convert imminent nonnuclear defeat into nuclear combat, nullifying the victor’s achievement until then.

The Soviet Union never succeeded in excluding nuclear weapons from the balance of nonnuclear forces on land, in which its numerical advantages therefore remained without effect. The American policy of “massive retaliation” (1954-1961), which was meant to nullify the entire balance of nonnuclear strength by relying “primarily upon a great capacity to retaliate, instantly, by means and at places of our own choosing,” also failed. Massive retaliation would certainly have affirmed the strategic autonomy of nuclear weapons, had it been successful. But it will never be known if the Soviet leaders could have been dissuaded by nuclear threats alone, because the policy was declared but never implemented: the United States did not reduce its nonnuclear forces to the very low levels needed as regional trip wires for its “great capacity to retaliate.” instead, over the decades, through cycles of rearmament, war, disarmament, inflation, and more rearmament, the American nonnuclear military effort became the best evidence of the erosion of nuclear suasion.

It is always the same. The bombs land with awesome explosions, the earth trembles, the upcast of craters jets in the air, the troops are shocked by the blast waves, many bleed from noses or perforated ear drums, they are terrorized into apathy or outright panic. But unless the enemy is nearby and ready to advance immediately, the moment passes. The explosion cease, the ground stops heaving the troops calm down, and the number of dead and wounded is finally found to be very small, indeed so small that if a count is done the counters declare their astonishment — though what is more astonishing is that anyone should still be surprised by the amply proven fact that bombs rarely kill deployed troops.

For the rule-of-thumb estimate is that at least 25 percent casualties are required to incapacitate a tactically defensive unit in mediocre armies, and twice that is required in armies of good quality. In the battle of Stalingrad the best units on both sides continued to fight defensively even after losing 75 percent casualties. On the offense, even the finest troops will stop attacking in earnest if they suffer even as little as 5 percent casualties in a short span of time (hours rather than days).

The striving to avoid air losses altogether can all too easily overshoot the culminating point of utility. Virtual attrition-the diversion of resources from positive action to self-protection – can be more costly than actual attrition in lost offensive effectiveness. As noted earlier, in the Kosovo war, NATO strike aircraft were so well escorted and protected that their pilots flew more safely than the passengers of some Third World airlines, but the air campaign was weakened in proportion.

others desire only to keep what external power and influence they have, while focusing on domestic goals, including the increase of prosperity; some governments are active on the world scene primarily to claim economic aid in various forms and can measure their achievement with rare precision; others see a fullness of success if they are simply left alone; and still others seek external support precisely to be left alone by their enemies.

Much effort is wasted in defining “national interests,” as if they had an objective existence that could be identified and measured. It should be obvious that so-called national interests emerge in a political process that owes nothing to the logic of strategy. When contending parties in domestic politics seek approval for their own particular goals by presenting them as “national” interests, they must do so by commonsense arguments, in which good is good, bad is bad, and larger gains are better than smaller, with no paradoxes.

It x army divisions or y missiles are thought necessary for national security, it is now possible that twice as many will not be automatically accepted as even better. It may at least be suspected that additional divisions or missiles could evoke adversary reactions either competitive or, worse, preemptive. It is fittingly ironic that such enlightenment derives from the simplistic, in fact mechanistic, idea that “arms races” are self-propelled and closely interactive. The clash of political ambitions that is the true cause of competition in all categories of weapons, and in many other things as well, is thus ignored.

Thus post-1945 Franco-German diplomacy successfully propelled joint initiatives in many fields, setting in motion the unification of Western Europe. Starting soon after the war, many summit meetings, state visits with mass participation, youth exchanges, and more such all helped to dissipate an outdated hostility. But it was only the suppression of the old conflict by the new, much wider East-West conflict that ensured the success of Franco-German diplomacy and of all the gestures of goodwill. When exactly the same procedures were tried before the Second World War, with continuous formal diplomacy, summit meetings (notably at Munich), arms-control negotiations, and a great many gestures of goodwill, including friendly reunions of veterans of the trenches, the only effect of so much gazing at the tempting valley below was to weaken French defenses while Nazi Germany was rearming.

The process of negotiations in itself was often seen as having a useful calming effect. So it did, but that is only half the story. Because arms limitations as such do not restrain the competitive impulse but merely divert it, the consequences of agreed limits depend on the specific features of the weapons restrained and of the new weapons that are built with the resources thus released. While the former weapons are known, the latter are not. Therefore the pursuit of arms control is a gamble for each side, though it systematically favors the side best placed to innovate (that was generally the United States in the American-Soviet competition). s215

Dependent on satellite observation, radar tracking, and signals intelli-gence, verification is the sine qua non of arms control: what cannot be verified cannot be limited. Not all weapons are sufficiently visible to be detected and reliably counted, and not all forms of performance are sufficiently transparent to be assessed.

But there still remains the far larger part of the unknown, the intangibles of organization, operating skills, morale, cohesion, and leader. ship that count for so much more than the material factors. When it comes to tactics, operational methods, and theater strategies, other uncertainties intrude: are they only prescribed on paper or will they actually be executed And if executed, will they be done well? Again the answer depends on human intangibles that cannot be measured at all and that can be assessed only on the basis of prejudices that may be perfectly sound or totally wrong: until 1870 France, not Germany, was considered the warrior nation of Europe; until the establishment of the state of Israel, the Jews were widely viewed as incapable of combat.

Sweden, for example, although a a considerable military power by territorial standards, was apparently unable to dissuade violations of its territorial waters by Soviet submarines during the Cold War. Af least from the narrow viewport armed suasion, a demonstrative peace policy can be too successful.

But few countries are willing to display an easily provoked belliosity just to maximize their potential for armed suasion. Most are confronted by one of strategy’s typical dilemmas: to avoid the actual use of force and still protect their interests, they must maintain a reputation for violence if they are to persuade or dissuade by armed suasion — and that is not the kind of reputation that countries intent on avoiding war want to present. Domestic political imperatives and urges derived from unstrategical sentiments and self-images often undercut the potential for armed suasion, sometimes with costly results.

Ultimately, by the usual paradox, it is those considered most willing to use force that are least likely to have to use force. That was the secret of the great military empires of history, whose widespread intrusions on other nations could only have resulted in constant war on all fronts, were it not for the eagerness with which their desires were accommodated without war.

While the United States and the Soviet Union were dissuaded from direct warfare with each other throughout the Cold War because of the presence of nuclear weapons, their hostility found outlets in the wars fought by their allies, clients, and agents. The counterpart of the unprecedented peace of the Great Powers was therefore the prevalence and intensity of Small-Power wars, some 144 of them during the Cold War years 1948-1991.

Intimidation was mostly masked by pieties: subjected and obedient clients-rulers such as Herod were dubbed “friend of the Roman people,” and it was the Roman consul C. Flaminius who proclaimed the “freedom of all Greeks.” But intimidation could be brutally direct, as when the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes IV was curtly ordered out of Egypt and Judea in 168 B.C. by C. Laenas Popilius, who confronted him as he was advancing with his troops. Popilius had no troops with him, only the text of a senate resolution that offered a stark choice between immediate retreat and war with Rome. Antiochus asked for time to consider the matter, but Popilius traced a circle in the sand around his feet with a stick and demanded an immediate reply. The humiliation was intense and the loss huge, for Egypt’s great wealth was within his grasp, but Antiochus obeyed: the Romans had just defeated and ruined one Hellenistic king, Perseus of Macedon, and they might easily have chosen to destroy another. This episode, vividly described by Polybius (book 29), would fall within the current definition of “compellence.”

Hitler at the end declared that the destruction of the German nation was acceptable and even desirable, because the Germans had shown themselves to be racially degenerate by failing to win the war for him. Hitler could not have been deterred by punishment at that point, because he might actually have welcomed the nuclear destruction of Germany.

In the usual paradoxical way, therefore, if the strength of Alliance nonnuclear forces had been increased beyond the culminating point of a defense that could stop intrusions but not an all-out offensive, the result would have been to weaken dissuasion, by reducing the credibility of battlefield nuclear use. If the strength of the nonnuclear forces were then further increased to much higher levels, to make the use of battlefield nuclear weapons unnecessary, the result would not have been to avoid nuclear warfare but rather to ensure it in the event of war-because if the Soviet Union became desperate enough to attack, it would have had to attack with nuclear weapons. Of course the Soviet Union would lose any chance of a quick and clean nonnuclear victory, but that was only relevant if the Soviet Union attacked the Alliance by calculated choice rather than in desperation. It is possible, then, that the refusal of Alliance governments to keep larger nonnuclear forces throughout the Cold War era reflected an awareness, however unsystematic, of strategy’s paradoxical logic: once again, more can be less.

Were it not for the counterforce targeting requirements of each side, the intercontinental-range nuclear forces of the Soviet Union and the United States could not possibly have become as large as they became, with more than 20,000 warheads on both sides at the peak of the Cold War? If the nuclear weapons themselves had been removed from the target lists of each side, there would have been no worthwhile targets at all for most of the intercontinental nuclear weapons acquired by each side.

The easy, unilateral American solution to the arms race was to renounce the use of intercontinental nuclear weapons except to retaliate against a prior Soviet nuclear attack upon the United States by attacking (only) Soviet cities. With such a policy, the United States could have reduced the number of its intercontinental weapons quite drastically. Counting fifty city targets at most (enough to deter anyone), making a healthy allowance for weapons lost to a prior would-be disarming Soviet attack, and allowing for technical malfunctions, a maximum of, say, 500 nuclear warheads distributed for safety among bombers and missiles, both cruise and ballistic, both land-based and sea-based, would have sufficed. (Even as of this writing, with the Cold War only a memory, some 3,000 intercontinental nuclear weapons remain in the U.S. inventory.) Such an American policy of “no first use” would have undone decades of accumulation: out of more than 10,000 American intercontinental nuclear weapons deployed at the peak of the Cold War, all but 500 could have been dismantled. And there would have been no need to negotiate any agreement to obtain reciprocity, because most Soviet weapons would have been made unusable anyway since they would no longer have had any worthwhile targets.

Actually all those military struggles in the “vertical dimension that dominated the outcome of the fighting in North Africa were themselves dominated by Hitler’s utter tallure or statecrait in the horizontal dimension. Because his entire conduct united the strongest industrial powers of the world against Germany, Italy, and their distant Japanese ally, the defeat of Germany was virtually certain in spite of any number of battlefield victories. Having chosen the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union as his enemies, and Italy, Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, and Romania as his allies, Hitler had preordained his defeat. S.239f

Stalin, it appears, was convinced that the British would strive to persuade the more innocent Americans to secure an alliance with Nazi Germany before its defeat became complete, making German support against the Soviet Union useless. From Stalin’s point of view, it was simply illogical for the British and Americans to reach the forthcoming postwar confrontation without securing the valuable alliance they could so easily obtain. He himself had been preparing for the new postwar struggle since 1943, and had already overlooked Nazi crimes easily enough to make a profitable alliance with Germany in 1939. Stalin therefore assumed that the British and Americans would do what he would have done in their place, probably behind the fig leaf of a new German military government that would remove Hitler while continuing the war—but only against the Soviet Union. That is why news of the abortive military coup against Hitler of July 20, 1944, merely aroused Soviet suspicions, as did any British or American contacts with German officers (which did eventually take place during the last weeks of war, in conjunction with localized surrender negotiations.)

For example, at a time when Germany was producing, say, five hundred fighter aircraft and pilots per month while British and American fighter production destined for the European theater was three times larger, even the loss of three Allied fighters for every two German fighters shot down would eventually accumulate to yield victory. For the Allies, moreover, such attrition could be profitable any-where: there are no sideshows in attrition.

The Germans and Japanese were in a very different situation. Military victories, that is, successes in the vertical dimension, could help them to win the war only if those victories could reshape the horizontal dimension as well. The defeat of Allied forces in battle, as happened again and again during the early years of the war, was not enough. It did not diminish the central Allied advantage in the horizontal dimension: their superior ability to generate trained men and equipment for their fighting forces.

Vietnamese could not bomb or otherwise attack the United States — it was simply too far away for them. But their diplomacy and propaganda had unlimited strategic reach: they started off by damaging American relations with major allies in Europe, before reaching into the United States itself, with powerful consequences. Without ever defeating any large body of American troops in battle, without coming close to exhausting American material strength, the North Vietnamese won by successfully exploiting diplomacy and propaganda to fragment the American political consensus that sustained the war effort, first to induce the withdrawal of American forces, and then to bring about a drastic decline in the flow of equipment and supplies to South Vietnam. Military achievement was indispensable for the North Vietnamese, not to win battles that were bound to be inconclusive any-way, but simply to prolong the war, creating the conditions in which diplomacy and propaganda could be successful.

And there are cases of weapons successful at all military levels but counterproductive at the level of grand strategy because they fail in the horizontal dimension. German pre-1914 battleships were wonderfully advanced and did well in combat, but all they ever gained for Germany was Britain’s lethal hostility — once again a wholly predictable result.