The MADness of It All

This post covers ground that is already well-covered in “It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World“, “MAD, Again“, and ““MAD, Again”: A Footnote“. But those posts are now going on three years old and the issue at hand is too important to ignore.

Here is David Hambling, writing at Forbes (“The Hidden Nuclear Policy the Biden Administration Needs to Tackle“, January 26, 2021):

A U.S. Navy policy on ballistic missile submarines may threaten the stability of the strategic nuclear balance. This seems to be the result of the inertia of a strategy laid down in a different era, one which is becoming increasingly precarious as technology advances.

Previous administrations have failed to spell out the actual policy, preferring to keep it under wraps. Continuing this lack of clarity could prove catastrophic….

ASW is all about finding, tracking and destroying enemy submarines. Strategic ASW targets the submarines carrying nuclear missiles. During the Cold War, Strategic ASW was about tying up enemy forces [Soviet submarines armed with nuclear missiles, thus] affecting the war on the ground, but now the situation is quite different….

The rationale for putting missiles on submarines is to ensure second-strike capability. The argument is that while land and air-based weapons might be knocked out in a surprise attack, the underwater force would survive because submarines cannot be located. This makes submarine-based weapons a linchpin for the nuclear deterrent, the most secure leg of the U.S. nuclear triad as well as the Russian one.

Any threat to a nation’s ballistic missile submarines makes it vulnerable to a first strike, and, in a time of crisis, might prompt them to act first. Hence the question … is strategic ASW still official U.S. policy?

There is no official answer. The last National Security Strategy to be completely declassified was from the 1986 Reagan administration, which explicitly tasked the Navy with strategic ASW. The most recent National Security Strategy, from 2018, has only been released in summary form, and says nothing on the topic.

Actions speak louder than words though, and from the U.S. Navy’s actions, they are still very much in the business of pursuing Russian subs in the Arctic. For example, there are regular ‘ICEX’ exercises which include submarines test-firing torpedoes at targets under the ice….

In fact it is not even clear whether there has been any decision-making process, or whether strategic ASW has become the default policy….

This would make it one of those zombie policies that keeps going long after it ought to be dead and buried. And, while strategic ASW might have made strategic sense 30 years ago it, does not today. This is partly because technology is improving and submarine detection keeps getting better. Each new advance makes the ability to threaten ballistic missile submarines more serious….

[Some] analysts and academicians want to encourage the new administration to state clearly whether strategic ASW is still U.S. policy, and if so who is driving it. [The] aim, for starters, would be to ensure the policy is disowned, which could at least reduce the risk and open up the way for discussion.

And so, the non-problem of strategic ASW is to be solved by a non-solution: a treaty that would be hard to enforce.

Why is strategic ASW a non-problem? First, as Hambling suggests, it wasn’t a problem during the cold war, but not for the reason given by Hambling; namely,

Strategic ASW was about tying up enemy forces and affecting the war on the ground, but now the situation is quite different….

That’s tail-wagging-the-dog reasoning. Whatever strategic ASW was about during the Cold War — in the minds of American strategists — it could only have been about one thing in the minds of Soviet strategists: a threat to Soviet second-strike capability. The possibility that the U.S. would engage in strategic ASW was never an actual threat to Soviet second-strike capability because the precondition — a ground war in Europe being lost by the Allies — was never met.

Moreover, the U.S. rationale for strategic ASW during the Cold War was flawed, and the Soviets knew it. The rationale, as Hambling says, was to tie up Soviet forces defending Soviet submarines armed with nuclear missiles (the Soviet second-strike capability). But those defensive forces were in place long before strategic ASW became a U.S. policy. And those defensive forces wouldn’t have been used for any other purpose, so intent were Soviet strategists on protecting their second-strike capability.

Further, an actual effort to take out the Soviet second-strike capability during the Cold War would have met the same response as an actual effort to take out Russia’s second-strike capability now or in the future: an ultimatum followed, if necessary, by a warning shot across the bow. The ultimatum would be along these lines: Make a move toward our second-strike capability and we will take out one of your cities. And if the ultimatum were ignored, the city would be taken out. (Why, then, the need for defensive forces? Well, why do some men wear both belt and braces (suspenders, in American)? “Just in case”is the best answer to both questions.)

You can play what-ifs and if-this-then-thats all day long. But the bottom line will always be the same: Strategic ASW wouldn’t be conducted in the first place (and wouldn’t have been conducted during the Cold War) because no U.S. president would want to risk having a U.S. city taken out (or worse), nor would he want to risk being humiliated by having to back down in a game of nuclear “chicken”.

The Soviets understood all of that. The Russians (and Chinese) understand all of that. So any talk of strategic ASW is simply irrelevant. Just as irrelevant is the notion that U.S. Navy talk of strategic ASW is destabilizing. It’s not destabilizing because the Russians (and Chinese) know that it won’t happen.

But what could happen? The U.S. could sign on to — and honor — an agreement that limits the ability of the U.S. to detect enemy submarines, even as Russia (and China) — acting clandestinely in bad faith — would develop more sophisticated means of detecting U.S. submarines. Such capabilities, even if irrelevant to a nuclear showdown, would be invaluable in a war where U.S. interests are at stake (e.g., a contest for control of the South China Sea).

So, wittingly or not, Hambling and those U.S. analysts whom he represents are playing into the hands of our adversaries by advancing a “solution” to a non-problem. The “solution” — a hard-to-enforce agreement — would weaken the ability of U.S. forces to defend America and Americans’ overseas interests.

MAD and McNamara

With the ~~anti-Kavanaugh~~ anti-Constitution circus almost over (temporarily), it is time to revisit the weighty matter of defense strategy. In particular, there are some loose threads hanging from my earlier posts (here and here) about mutually assured destruction (MAD).

I have been using this definition of MAD:

[It] is a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender…. It is based on the theory of deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy’s use of those same weapons.

Implicit in that definition is the sensible view that mutually assured deterrence obtains even where there is a significant disparity in the strengths of opposing forces, as long as the weaker of the forces is strong enough to wreak vast devastation on an enemy. This view is consistent with the concept of overkill: a destructive nuclear capacity exceeding the amount needed to destroy an enemy.

At any rate, I recently discovered something about MAD that I should have learned long ago. The lesson came from Roger Barnett — a professional strategist and esteemed correspondent — who sent me a copy of a chapter that he contributed to American National Security Policy: Essays in Honor of William R. Van Cleave.

Armed with what Dr. Barnett says about MAD (in the course of a deservedly scathing critique of Robert S. McNamara), I went further into the Wikipedia article quoted above, and found this:

The doctrine [MAD] requires that neither side construct shelters on a massive scale. If one side constructed a similar system of shelters, it would violate the MAD doctrine and destabilize the situation, because it would not have to fear the consequences of a second strike. The same principle is invoked against missile defense.

In other words, there is a strict (and improbable) version of MAD that implies a fine balance of strategic-nuclear offenses and defenses. The purpose of this fine balance isn’t mutually assured deterrence; it is mutually assured destruction. Anything that changes the balance is thought to be dangerously destabilizing, thus inviting a preemptive strategic-nuclear attack by the party against which the fine balance has tipped.

This flies in the face of experience and logic. There was no such fine balance throughout the years of the Cold War. The U.S. and USSR had quantitatively and qualitatively different offensive and defensive strategic-nuclear forces. Despite that state of affairs, MAD (in my loose sense of the term) held together for decades. Nothing that the U.S. or USSR did during those decades upset the rough balance of forces. Not the construction of air-raid shelters. Not efforts to develop missile defenses, Not pronouncements about a U.S. strategy of attacking Soviet ballistic-missile submarines in their bastion. Not exercises aimed at demonstrating the ability to undertake such attacks. And so on, into the night.

None of the those things — predictably decried by hand-wringers (mainly appeasing leftists who begrudge defense spending) — was, and is, enough to upset the rough balance of forces that held, and holds, MAD in place. U.S. leaders, for example, could not know with enough certainty that an anti-missile defense system would thwart a retaliatory strike by the USSR, and thus enable the U.S. to launch an devastating first strike. (Nor have U.S. leaders ever been blood-thirsty enough to contemplate such a thing.) The same kinds of uncertainties (if not lack of blood-thirstiness) have held Soviet and Russian leaders in check.

As I say here (using Russia to stand for the USSR, as well):

The main lesson of the Cold War and its sequel in the US-Russia relationship is that MAD works among major powers.

MAD works mainly because of ASSF – assuredly survivable strategic forces, or enough of them to retaliate (perhaps more than once). It was and is impossible, even with first strikes against all three legs of Russia’s strategic-nuclear triad, to nullify Russia’s strategic retaliatory capability. The same goes for the U.S. triad and retaliatory capability.

These truths have been and are understood by U.S. and Russian leaders. Were they not understood, MAD might have failed at any of the several stress points that arose in the past 70 years.

Mr. McNamara nevertheless hewed to the strict version of MAD. Why, and to what end? I call upon Dr. Barnett for the why:

What underlay McNamara’s thinking about assured destruction was complex. It was a combination of a myopic trust in systems analysis and cost-effectiveness based on an overweening belief in the primacy of technology in the conduct of warfare; a deficiency of knowledge about, a thoroughgoing disinterest in, and a total want of respect for Soviet strategic thought; and, most importantly, an absence of faith and confidence in the rightness of America’s cause and the ability of U.S. leaders to make correct, humane, moral judgments. This combination set the United States on a course for humiliation and political failure in Vietnam, and imposed on the world a false and deeply immoral understanding of strategic interactions among states….

… Mr. McNamara rationalized [assured destruction] initially by arguing publicly that the Soviet Leaders‘ have decided they have lost the quantitative race, and they are not seeking to engage us in that contest…. There is no indication that the Soviets are seeking to develop a strategic nuclear force as large as ours.” Earlier, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. McNamara claimed that parity in strategic weapons had already been attained by the Soviet Union, even though the actual balance of strategic weapons disproportionately favored the United States…..

… Later, assured destruction was said to be the controlling factor to prevent a spiraling out-of-control action-reaction strategic arms race. There was no need to continue to add offensive weapons to the U.S. arsenal so long as an assured assured-destruction capability was maintained.

In spite of such blatant contradiction, McNamara’s henchmen went on to argue that imbalances in the size of strategic arsenals was “destabilizing.” If Country A had appreciably more strategic weapons than Country B, then deterrence was unstable. There would be a temptation on the part of the stronger to launch a disarming strike against the weaker, especially in time of crisis. Furthermore, so long as large differences in inventories of strategic weapons existed, arms control would be impossible; for the weaker side would have no incentive to agree not to build up to equal the stronger, and the latter would have no incentive to reduce its superiority through negotiations. This led to Mr. McNamara’s welcoming the Soviet buildup in strategic weapons: as a consequence the strategic balance would be stabilized, any temptation by the United States to strike first would be scotched, and the foundation for arms control would be put in place.

To what end? I return to Dr. Barnett:

[T]o McNamara, MAD was a horrific bluff — indeed the most terrifying bluff ever issued. Given much of what McNamara said, then and since, there was no intention to carry out the threat posed by assured destruction. It was merely a device to limit the size of the U.S. offensive nuclear arsenal, promote arms control, and prevent the dedicated pursuit of strategic defenses.

As a veteran of the Pentagon during the McNamara regime, I concur wholeheartedly in Dr. Barnett’s judgment:

McNamara’s great, inexcusable moral blunder was to abandon strategic defenses and to lay MAD [mutually assured destruction] as the cornerstone of strategic stability. The damage that wrongheaded course has already caused is immeasurable, and the potential for even greater harm to the United States is truly frightening. At the time McNamara, as Secretary of Defense!, turned away from the key concept of defending U.S. citizens, the entire prospect of space-basing of defenses, for example, had hardly been conceived. Perhaps MAD was necessary as a stop-gap, temporary solution in the absence of defenses. To argue that strategic defenses can never work, can always be overcome, will fuel arms races, and will run contrary to arms control is to be absolutely wrong, and immoral on all counts.

Amen.

Planning for the Last War

I am in the midst of an exchange with a former colleague. He is a retired political scientist who decades ago belonged to a small but hardy band analysts who questioned the conventional wisdom about Soviet naval strategy. It turns out that he and his comrades-in-arms were right, and the conventional wisdom was wrong. He worries, with good reason, that history might repeat itself, and is working on a paper to document the events of 40 years ago and the possibility that history is repeating itself.

I have no doubt that history is repeating itself. This is from a recent message from me to him:

It seems as if the Pentagon [of the 1970s] was planning to fight the last war (or two), just because that’s the way things are usually done. Fast forward to 2018: What war(s) is the Pentagon planning to fight now? I’m not au courant with the defense budget, but I believe that it’s considerably smaller (in constant dollars) than it was in the 1980s [after adjusting for the cost of America’s present wars]. Which means, rhetoric aside, that the Pentagon is actually planning to refight the wars of the past 28 years, with a side-helping of skirmishes of other kinds. In any event, it can’t be on the scale of the two-major/one-minor war strategy of the McNamara era, which (de facto) animated the Reagan buildup after the post-Vietnam let-down. The point of this ramble is to suggest that the U.S. is in a position (once again) to be “surprised” by the not-so-sudden emergence of an aggressive power or axis of them. You may not subscribe to this view, but if you do, some discussion of it in your paper would underline the essential point: The dire consequences of [the] persistent misreading of a potential enemy’s intentions and capabilities. It’s an old refrain, which begins (at least) with Pearl Harbor and extends through North Korea’s invasion of the South, the Tet Offensive (and some later reruns), 9/11, and the emergence of IS.

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