Air University Review, November-December 1984
Dr. Stephen J. Cimbala
ALTHOUGH strategic command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) procedures occur within a bureaucratic milieu and must be responsive to operational requirements, their essential nature is conceptual. Thus, in developing a model for the C3I process, one must first outline a model of the intellectual activities involved, not an operational or bureaucratic model. The five important intellectual functions included in the C3I process are: analysis, optimization, intelligence-gathering, feedback, and synthesis.
Analysis is the process of defining precisely what you want to know, who should know it, and when it should be known. It deals with the "output" side rather than the "input" aspects of a problem. Failure to define the what, who, and when can lead to irrelevant knowledge or can make relevant knowledge available to the wrong persons at the wrong times.
An illustration of the complexity of this task can be seen in the problem of attack warning and assessment. Presumably, satellites would provide a maximum of thirty minutes' warning to U.S. authorities in the case of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. But this initial warning would be too ambiguous to allow the National Command Authority (NCA)--the President, the Secretary of Defense, and their successors--to do more than put forces on alert and otherwise "batten down the hatches." U.S. ICBMs are constantly in a state of immediate readiness for retaliatory launch, and ballistic missile submarines are protected by the oceans from elimination in a surprise first strike. But bombers, air defense systems, and command centers are more vulnerable; they would be alerted.
Perhaps the President and other key political and military leaders would be dispersed from Washington. The selection of an appropriate response to initial satellite warning would await more precise attack characterization by terrestrial sources, since we do not intend to launch ICBMs "on warning." By the time this more detailed attack characterization became available, however, the President's options would be narrowed, and decision time would be shortened.
Decisions about whether to respond and how would be even more complicated if Soviet ICBM launches were preceded by submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) attacks against our C3I system itself, including the NCA. Even partial decapitation might compromise NCA capabilities to issue orders to the retaliatory forces. Additionally, the disruption of our C3I system due to the by-products of nuclear atmospheric or space explosions cannot be excluded. Thus to await more precise attack characterization is to risk a deterioration in our ability to respond at all, particularly in a controlled fashion. Yet to react too soon is to risk retaliating unnecessarily (if the initial warning is false) or inappropriately (if the character of the opponent's attack is misperceived).
Preprogrammed options in the single integrated operational plan (SIOP) for targeting U.S. strategic weapons do not resolve these dilemmas. It is true that SIOP options have been "fine tuned" as more warheads with improved accuracies have been deployed in American ICBM and SLBM forces. But the uncertainties in choosing partial or full retaliatory responses to imprecise attack characterizations are not due to insufficient numbers of options. More options provide a larger menu but not necessarily a better one, unless the additional options can be linked to survivable C3I, which includes improved attack characterization.
Failures in analyzing attack characterizations adequately are almost always misperceived as due to either insufficient information or analysts' intellectual inability to determine what they need to solve the problem. If organizations cannot define precisely their required outputs, they are doomed to failure. A possible example is provided by the gap between U.S. strategic declaratory policy and employment policy during several past administrations. If the policy guidance to war planners is inexpert or irrelevant to their tools, they will define their own operational objectives. While American declaratory policy statements have been full of aspirations for "victory denial" and "restoring peace on favorable terms," military planners have quite sensibly planned for destruction of the opponent's arsenal and other key targets as quickly as possible.
Optimization can be defined as the selection of the most desirable mix of inputs to obtain appropriately defined outputs. Much economic analysis involves the use of optimization models and techniques. Examples of optimization problems include: how many carriers should be forward deployed in the Mediterranean, Pacific, and Indian oceans, and on what schedule? What mix of heavy and lightweight infantry vehicles should be assigned to an Army mechanized division? What combination of reenlistment bonuses, "quality of life" inducements, and educational benefits is appropriate to fulfill Department of Defense manpower requirements?
In strategic C3I, an example of an important optimization problem is the ratio of ground-to-air or space-based communication links and warning sensors. The number of alternate command posts for NCA and force commanders is another. A third example would be the relative emphasis on fixed versus mobile terminals for processing communications from satellites to military commanders or from commanders to the retaliatory forces.
Perhaps the most difficult optimization problems are those in which the most important variables cannot be quantified easily, if at all. The nonquantifiability of important variables in an optimization problem may lead to the substitution of irrelevant measurements for relevant ones. We all remember the results of using "body count" statistics to estimate tactical successes or failures in Vietnam.
The Reagan administration's program for modernization of strategic C3I must resolve the question of relative investment in "survivable" versus "enduring" command and control. Some aspects of this trade-off are measurable, but others are strictly qualitative. Survivable C3I increases the probability of communicating launch orders to retaliatory forces even after they are attacked. Enduring C3I imposes requirements beyond this necessary minimum. Not only must command, control, and communications survive the first waves of enemy attacks, but they must persevere through the second or "transattack" phase of initial exchanges into a "postattack" phase. In the postattack period, reliable damage assessments must be provided to decision makers. Based on those postattack estimates, the NCA can, in theory, order further attacks on Soviet military targets that have the highest potential to inflict additional damage to U.S. forces and society. In practice, there is no guarantee that the Soviets will oblige us by withholding enough forces from their earlier attacks to provide inviting targets later.
The postattack assessments must be complemented by "real-time" targeting information from space-based sensors, such as the integrated operational nuclear detection system (IONDS) aboard U.S. satellites. Soviet pre-, trans-, and postattack attempts to cripple these sensors can be presumed. The satellites themselves are vulnerable targets compared to terrestrial strategic forces and command posts. Enduring postattack systems will be expensive. The need for them must be estimated, based on some assumptions about how long strategic nuclear forces could continue exchanges into the postattack period. These assumptions involve value and fact distinctions. How long we can continue to fight a nuclear war calls for both political and technical judgments. Is it worthwhile to invest in systems that can endure for a few additional hours at the expense of investments in other systems that are more survivable against the initial attack but not necessarily enduring?1
The danger in this optimization between survivable and enduring command and control is that the technical capability to increase endurance may lead to false confidence in our ability to fight a protracted nuclear war. Actually, more enduring systems may inhibit, rather than promote, controlled nuclear warfighting and war termination, raising expectations that fail to materialize. Thus, resolving the survivability-endurance dilemma to achieve optimization may be not merely a crucial task but a difficult one.
The kinds of intelligence needed to deter or to fight nuclear war are of two kinds: intelligence about the opponent's capabilities and intelligence about his intentions. Worst-case scenarios can lead us to self-delusion, particularly if we infer our enemy's intentions from his capabilities alone, and this, in turn, can weaken rather than strengthen our deterrence posture.
A case in point is the much-discussed problem of "ICBM vulnerability" of U.S. land-based missiles to a surgical Soviet first strike against those forces.2 In this scenario, Soviet attackers disarm the U.S. ICBM force while holding in reserve additional strategic forces for subsequent attacks against other American forces, C3I systems, or cities. Concern about this scenario has led several administrations to search for basing modes that will make American ICBMs invulnerable to such an attack.
Simultaneously, the focus of much of our intelligence collection on Soviet strategic forces has been on such characteristics as the numbers of warheads mounted on missiles, throw weights, accuracies, alert status, and reload capabilities. These emphases are not to be disparaged; they are things that our planners need to know. But there should be equal interest in the less measurable aspects of possible scenarios: the intentions of current Soviet leaders, Soviet military doctrine, and the Soviets' historical record in regard to risk-taking. Significant analysis of the vulnerability problem for U.S. ICBMs cannot be based on physical or technical evidence alone. Knowledge of Soviet actions and reactions in previous wars and contemporary crises, temperaments and motivations of Soviet leaders, and other intangibles are as important as are the "harder" kinds of knowledge. Indeed, they may even be more important. Even if the Soviets revealed a clear-cut capability to execute successfully a selective first strike against American ICBMS, that fact, by itself, would not guarantee that they would choose to launch such an attack.
While our technology-driven estimates of Soviet capabilities have improved in ways that can be measured, our estimates from human sources about Soviet intentions and psychology are still mostly guesswork. Unfortunately, if we guess incorrectly during a crisis, we could start a war that neither side intended to start. On the other hand, we could be the victim of surprise if our assumptions about their intentions are too optimistic. American intelligence experts have noted our overreliance on the collection of technical data and our underutilization of human sources. 3
One consequence of excessively technological estimates (in the case of ICBM vulnerability scenarios) has been the vain search for survivable basing modes for American ICBMs against improbable Soviet counterforce threats, given Soviet doctrine and historical crisis behavior. Soviet doctrine provides little reassurance that the Soviets would confine their attack to a limited nuclear strike against ICBMs alone if they were to attack U.S. strategic forces.4 Furthermore, as the Scowcroft Commission noted, the issue of ICBM survivability cannot be assessed properly without considering the survivability of other components of the strategic Triad.5 Certainly, the Soviets would have to take into account the necessity of attacking other American forces and C3I systems for an even partially successful attack, even if their criteria for a "credible first strike" differed from our own.6
Feedback refers to the process by which decision makers acquire information about the effects of their decisions. In strategic command and control, this feedback to NCA from force commanders may spell the difference between victory and defeat.
Feedback will be compromised if the NCA cannot be identified by force commanders or if communications in the transattack phase are disrupted. In these instances, force commanders on submarines and in aircraft will assume by default the responsibilities of political leaders. But this emergency improvision of command responsibility becomes irrelevant if the status of surviving forces cannot be ascertained.
C3I feedback can be disrupted in at least two ways. First, the C3I systems themselves can be interrupted or physically destroyed. Fixed ground command posts and communications links probably would be early casualties of the first nuclear strikes against the continental United States, and airborne emergency command posts could be disrupted.
Another type of disruption in American C3I could occur as a result of the death or incapacitation of NCA and force commanders. Both the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon and the Alternative NMCC are vulnerable to direct hits by Soviet weapons, which have already demonstrated the requisite accuracies for such hits.8 The President's National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) must be moved from Indiana to Washington or to some other location where the President can meet it under conditions of extreme duress. Even if the President survives the initial attack and gets airborne, he can remain in that status for only a limited period of time.9 All airborne command posts eventually would run out of flight time or favorable landing sites if a nuclear war continued beyond the first limited exchanges of strategic weapons.10
Nor are these the only problems related to feedback. The most important kind of feedback is information about Soviet capabilities and intentions to continue or terminate warfighting once a war has begun. How would our adversaries define "victory" or "defeat" under the extreme conditions of nuclear warfare? Could we communicate with them in ways that would be perceived as credible and authoritative? Soviet doctrine provides little reassurance that, once a nuclear war had begun, such feedback would be high among their priorities. Their doctrinal pronouncements have emphasized instead the improbability of ending the war on terms other than total defeat for their adversaries.11 Should such doctrine guide their transattack and postattack decisionmaking, war termination short of global catastrophe would be difficult.
Synthesis is the process of combining analysis, optimization, intelligence-gathering, and feedback into a coherent whole. C3I problems cannot be resolved individually in isolation from one another. Furthermore, if it is to be other than haphazard, synthesis must proceed from a systematic framework of assumptions about our and their capabilities and intentions before, during, and after the first exchange of strategic weapons. This conceptual framework must emphasize priorities among C3I requirements, based on policymakers' needs for attack assessment, retaliatory options, and capacity to control the war in the transattack and postattack phases.
Before the Reagan administration took office, our strategic priorities emphasized retaliation over war survival in nuclear conflict. Attempting to improve active and passive defenses against nuclear attack, with the attendant command and control requirements for those forces, was regarded by many experts as "destabilizing" for both the nuclear balance and crisis management. President Reagan's 23 March 1983 speech indicated a change in position on this matter, and subsequent studies have argued that missile defense systems are within the realm of possibility near the end of this century or the beginning of the next. Should these projected missile defense systems and other defensive measures prove feasible, changes in our C3I systems might be required to make these advances work to our political and military advantage.
The kinds of C3I systems that are best suited for damage limitations may not be appropriate if defense against ballistic missile attack is considered infeasible. Furthermore, presuming that civil defense is regarded as an adjunct to deterrence, credible protection for the American population begins with the ability to communicate with that population under wartime conditions. Thus, if part of the U.S. passive defense program includes improved civil defense, C3I planners must consider hardening communications systems beyond those intended for military and diplomatic uses.12 Present systems offer little capacity of the sort needed.
IN this rough outline of the important processes in strategic C3I, a number of unresolved dilemmas have been mentioned. To recognize the "probabilistic" and conceptual character of these problems is not to fault previous efforts to address them in other frames of reference. Improvements in C3I technology have been apparent since the 1950s.13 However, during the decades ahead, advances in understanding the unquantifiable issues associated with nuclear force systems will be equally important.
Several practical implications of the ideas presented here have immediate policy relevance. First, declaratory policies should provide consistent objectives to war planners. To the extent that they are designed simply for public relations rather than internal consumption by strategists and planners, they will be irrelevant, misleading, or predestined for failure. Second, approaches to strategic C3I should not be technically driven but only technologically sensitive. Third, the most important things we need to know include the intentions of probable opponents, which may require our paying more attention to "tradecraft" than to hardware.
Pennsylvania State University
Author's note:
I am grateful to Bruce Blair and John Hamre for reading an early version of this article, and to Barry Schneider for his encouragement to pursue this topic. Helpful suggestions by William Mattis are also acknowledged.
Notes
1. Congress of the United States, Congressional Budget Office, Strategic Command, Control and Communications: Alternative Approaches to Modernization (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1981). Some experts doubt whether U.S. strategic forces can be fully alerted safely. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 54-73.
2. For some calculations pertinent to this scenario, see Matthew Bunn and Kosta Tsipis, "The Uncertainties of a Preemptive Nuclear Attack," Scientific American, November 1983, pp. 38-47.
3. For a discussion of our overreliance on technical data in the context of a possible U.S.-Soviet strategic conflict, see Angelo Codevilla, "Wartime Collection Requirements," Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s: Clandestine Collection, edited by Roy Godson (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books/National Strategy Information Center, 1983), pp. 127-47. On the possibility of U.S. forces and C3 being subject to strategic surprise, see Zbigniew Brzezinski, "From Arms Control to Controlled Security," Wall Street Journal, 10 July 1984, and John Steinbruner, "Launch under Attack," Scientific American, January 1984, pp. 37-47.
4. For a more comprehensive view of Soviet doctrine for nuclear war, see Fritz W. Ermath, "Contrasts in American and Soviet Strategic Thought," in Soviet Military Thinking, edited by Derek Leebaert (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), pp. 50-69; Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., and Amoretta M. Hoeber, Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1979); and Benjamin S. Lambeth, "How to Think about Soviet Military Doctrine, in The Dfense Policies of Nations, edited by Douglas J. Murray and Paul R. Viotti (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 146-53.
5. President's Commission on Strategic Forces, Report, April 1983.
6. Lambeth (in "How to Think about Soviet Military Doctrine") expresses doubt that U.S. and Soviet concepts of a successful first strike are the same.
7. John Steinbruner, "Nuclear Decapitation," Foreign Policy, Winter 1981-82, pp. 16-28. As Colin S. Gray has noted, "a strategic doctrine that emphasizes endurance and real-time responsiveness to possibly novel strike demands is a doctrine that stresses prospective technical accomplishments precisely where it is least convincing--with regard to C3I." See Gray, Nuclear Strategy and Strategic Planning (Philadelphia: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1984), p. 26.
8. Desmond Ball, Can Nuclear War Be Controlled? Adelphi Papers, No. 169 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Autumn 1981), p. 14.
9. See the comments by Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft in Strategic Nuclear Policies, Weapons, and the C3 Connection (paper published by Electronic Systems Division/MITRE Corporation, National Security Issues Symposium, October 1981), pp. 93-95.
10. Ball, p. 17.
11. Marxism-Leninism and War and Army (A Soviet View), translated and published under the auspices of the United States Air Force (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), pp. 28-30. The Soviet authors suggest that the relationship between war and politics is not severed by nuclear war, but they do acknowledge that the "essence" of nuclear combat is somewhat different from other kinds of conflict.
12. For a discussion of the elements required for survival and reconstitution of the federal government, the government's role in societal recovery, and other postattack considerations, see William M. Brown, On the Postattack Viability of American Institutions (Santa Monica, California: Rand Corporation, 1970). For an assessment of the U.S. telecommunications structure and its implications for strategic C3I, see Lee M. Paschall, "C3I Damaged, Intercepted, or Blinked," in The U.S. Defense Mobilization Infrastructure: Problems and Priorities, edited by Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., and Uri Ra'anan (Medford, Massachusetts: Archon Books, 1983), pp. 204-15.
13. Ball, pp. 3-8. See also Thomas Powers, "Choosing a Strategy for World War III," Atlantic Monthly, November 1983, pp. 82-110.
Contributor
Stephen J. Cimbala (B.A., Pennsylvania State University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is Associate Professor of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University, Delaware County Campus, and a Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia. His articles have appeared in numerous political and social science journals, as well as in previous issues of the Review.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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