Air University Review, January-March 1987
The US strategic nuclear forces of the future will have to meet expected and unexpected challenges. Those that can be foreseen are sufficiently intimidating. These challenges fall into the categories of policy and technology demands on the performances of US forces. The connection between force and policy will be strained in future decades by the requirement to reconcile an exuberant technological environment with a discordant policy process. The planning process for US nuclear deterrence and warfighting may suffer from special debilities, given what is now foreseeable.
Three aspects of the technological environment bear examination. These are defensive technology, offensive force modernization, and new "smart" technologies.
Defensive Technology
President Ronald Reagan in a speech on 23 March 1983 called for a program in research and development toward possible deployment of nonnuclear missile defenses that would make strategic offensive ballistic missiles obsolete.1 His reasons for doing so were complex. The initiative had not come from the bureaucracy but from the President. As a result, the public relations offensive for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), as it came to be called, was poorly prepared.
Closely read, the President's speech does not mandate anything other than an exploratory program in research and development. This is quite realistic. The United States is not now in a position to choose among competing technologies for boost, postboost, midcourse, and terminal ballistic missile defense (BMD). Experts, including the authors of the Fletcher Commission Report and the Office of Technology Assessment's 1985 study on ballistic missile defense technologies, agree that imminent deployment would be premature and infeasible. Even Project High Frontier is now only one of a number of possible architectures under study for various phases of a missile defense system; earlier it had been the only candidate system.2
The news media and the academic community assumed the Reagan speech foreshadowed a departure from the preexisting bases of US strategic deterrence policy. This assumption was widespread despite repeated and frequent statements from the administration reaffirming those aspects of US nuclear strategy and policy that were built on earlier precedents.3 The Reagan SDI program was attacked by critics who assumed conclusions about questions of technology left unanswered by the program and then disputed the conclusions.
US Ambassador Paul H. Nitze, special adviser to the President and Secretary of State on arms control matters, explained the administration's short- and long-term SDI objectives. In a widely reported speech in Philadelphia that was subsequently published by the US State Department, Nitze outlined the administration's strategic concept of the future US Soviet relationships.4 These relations would evolve through near-term, transitional, and long-term phases. In the next decade, deterrence would continue to be based on the threat of nuclear retaliation. Reductions in US and Soviet strategic offensive weapons would be sought during this period. In the transition phase, we would begin to deploy defenses if they meet two stringent criteria: they must be survivable and cost-effective at the margin. The ultimate or long-term phase (following BMD deployments) would witness reductions in offensive nuclear weapons as close to zero as possible.5
Offensive Modernization
Hopeful optimism about the transitional and long-term phases for BMD development and deployment was constrained by the administration's recognition that its program for offensive force modernization was in suspended animation. The US Congress has put an effective "hold" on MX/Peacekeeper deployments unless and until it can be satisfied that the administration has found a survivable basing mode for the missile. Congress has imposed a ceiling on MX deployments well below the administration's objective of 100 silo-based missiles. The Reagan modernization program could be forced to settle for a token MX deployment, or none.
Were MX aborted or diluted, efforts to modernize the Triad of US strategic offensive forces (land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBMs], submarine- or sea-launched ballistic missiles [SLBMs], and bombers, with cruise missiles available for sea-based and airborne platforms) would be restricted to other near-term and long-run programs. The landbased leg of the Triad would be augmented by possible deployment in the 1990s of the small ICBM (Midgetman) in fixed or mobile basing, by interim deployment of the B-1B bomber and follow-on deployment of the advanced technology (stealth) bombers, and by deployment of additional Trident ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) and Trident II (D-5) missiles. Nuclear-armed cruise missiles would also be deployed on US surface ships, submarines, and aircraft; some of these would be "strategic" under previous arms control agreements between the superpowers.
Without MX, US ICBM modernization stands or falls on Midgetman. The General Accounting Office has expressed reservations about whether the Midgetman program can meet congressional specifications, such as weight restrictions to preserve mobility, and still fulfill policy requirements for deterrence.6 According to the recommendation of the President's Commission on Strategic Forces (Scowcroft Commission), Midgetman would be capable of attacking hard targets promptly with sufficient accuracy to ensure a high probability of destroying those targets.7 Combined with MX, Midgetman would improve survivability of the ICBM force while supplementing prompt hard target capabilities of MX and Minuteman. To fulfill these objectives, Midgetman must be survivable against Soviet barrage attacks that could be made against its deployment areas. The probable success of those barrages is directly related to total throw-weight. Thus, the US Soviet arms control process must result in significant reductions in USSR ICBM throw weight or payload before survivable scenarios for national Midgetman deployments can be guaranteed.8
It might be possible in theory for the United States to shift away from survivable Triad to a "dyad" of forces based at sea and aloft. This process would require reshuffling the deck of cards that now allocates one leg of US strategic retaliatory power for each of the armed services.9 Reallocation of service missions is politically difficult to accomplish. It may also not be strategically prudent. Advocates of a dyad assume that US fleet ballistic missile submarines and bombers with cruise missiles can fulfill both prompt and slow counterforce missions. Others argue that sonic missions now calling for prompt, hard target counterforce could be accomplished with slower counterforce weapons. For example, under some scenarios it might not make much difference whether the United States attacked Soviet strategic command bunkers promptly or later. Indeed, we might want to preserve some of the Soviet command structure through the earliest exchanges of weapons into the postattack phase in order to make possible war termination by other than exhaustion of arsenals.10
Were the United States blessed with a truly "general staff" engaged in the full-time business of strategy from the perspective of national interest, the decision about Triad versus dyad might be addressed by confronting the question of policy objectives for US forces. Such prioritizing is unlikely to result from the present structure, which permits coordination at the lowest common denominator through the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.11 (We return to this theme later.) Even our decentralized system of policymaking could frame more appropriate questions than those usually asked by advocates of diverse strategic postures in the various services and civilian branches of government. This verdict is not unduly harsh, although it is not pronounced with any smugness. The US policymaking system is designed for conflict resolution and for smoothing over sharp policy differences, and it focuses strategic choices on marginal adjustments in the status quo.
The paradigmatic product of this strategic policy process is the MX. Conceived in the early 1970s as a way to redress the US-Soviet imbalance in prompt, hard target capabilities, it is now becalmed in the waters of "analysis paralysis" over basing modes and arms control. The process of bringing MX from concept to fruition lasted so long that by the time of its deployment as scheduled by the Reagan administration (if then), it will seem almost anachronistic. And the Reagan administration, very much aware of the need for survivable, hard target counterforce, accepted the Scowcroft compromise of deploying MX in a presumably nonsurvivable basing mode.12 The Reagan Peacekeeper MX was decoupled from the objective of ICBM survivability solely through technical means such as mobility, hardening, and deception. ICBM survivability following Peacekeeper silo deployment now depends on the synergy among the two and one-half strategic forces of dubiously survivable ICBMs, ballistic missiles deployed on submarines, and bombers with their cruise missiles.13
"Smart" Technology
Some have suggested that the US political climate does not augur favorably for rational strategic choice. The technology environment within which future choices must be made is also becoming more complicated. Several aspects of this anticipated technology environment deserve further comment.
First, new technologies for endoatmospheric and exoatmospheric defense against ballistic missiles (and possibly cruise missiles) will complicate previously established baselines for deterrence stability. In the past, US and Soviet leaders could pay less attention to the problem of penetrativity against the active defenses of the opponent because those defenses could be assumed to be weak or nonexistent. They could assume that those retaliatory forces surviving a surprise attack would have reasonably high probabilities of penetrating to their assigned targets. This lopsided ratio of high expected penetrativity and uncertain survivabilities (for various forces at various stages of the US-Soviet arms race) led to diversified and, in the view of some critics, redundant strategic offensive deployments on both sides. Mutilayered active defenses will change this ratio of survivability to penetrativity. Even crude defenses will exact a higher "attack price" against offenses not designed to foil them compared to the situation before capable BMD existed for either side. Current Soviet deployments indicate the Soviet Union's serious interest in exploring BMD options against theater and strategic US/NATO offensive forces.14
Second, new offensive technologies will complicate attack and defense plans. Two of the most imminent "over-the-horizon" technologies are strategic nonnuclear weapons and new developments in computer technology. Strategic nonnuclear weapons might make possible attacks over intercontinental ranges, traversing those distances either rapidly or slowly. At various speeds, these weapons would use precision guided reentry vehicles (PGRVs) and possibly maneuvering reentry vehicles (MaRVs) to home in on targets within tens of feet, compared to the standard hundreds of feet now characteristic of the most accurate US and USSR ICBMs.15 Some of these weapons could also use spacebased navigational updates for even more precise target acquisition, in addition to their ability to compare prestored information with visual data collected during flight.16. Small yield nuclear weapons could also take advantage of this first generation "smart" technology in order to deliver more calibrated and selective attacks against the opponent’s military objectives while sparing damage to cities.17
Strategic nonnuclear weapons of the first generation may not stabilize at that plateau. A second generation of such weapons could evolve that are truly "brilliant" rather than smart. They would have adaptive optics and memory modifiers which allow problem-solving behavior that duplicates some highly complicated learning behaviors.18 Some of the research attendant to brilliant systems has already been done and needs only to be tested under conditions simulating realistic battlefield scenarios.19 (The most popular generic label for this activity has been "artificial intelligence." The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] has already begun to demonstrate some successes in developing prototypes for pilots’ associates, autonomous land vehicles, and other precursors of think-for-yourself adjuncts to the state of the art.)20
It has been said correctly that artificial intelligence and related technologies have been the victims of premature boomlets that proved counterproductive. Whatever the evaluations of the past, the direction of future trends cannot be doubted. Drone remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) have already found successful use by the Israelis and by other armies under operational wartime conditions. US space-based navigation, photoreconnaissance, and electronic listening satellites have already developed from crude and vulnerable platforms into sophisticated sensors with realtime information processing and transmitting capabilities.21
Some of the applications of these smart and brilliant weapons to the survivability and penetrativity of US strategic offensive forces can now be imagined, if not fully funded. The sea based strategic deterrent could be spread over a larger number of smaller and stealthier platforms, providing a more formidable challenge to Soviet preemptive neutralization of the US SSBN force. Those more numerous mini-SSBNs could also be provided with advanced postattack communication suites and cruise missiles for land attack, providing a more survivable and possibly enduring post attack sea-based deterrent under control of surviving national command authorities (NCA).
For mission effectiveness, land-based and sea-based forces as well as bombers will rely on the robustness of early warning and communications systems, including satellites, which must be survivable against enemy attacks. Otherwise they invite preemption. The United States, as previously noted, has conceded that this is the case with space-based BMD, but it also applies to those space-based assets that are required to support offensive force survivability and retaliation. Current generations of communications and warning infrastructure will not suffice for the future. Future US forces may face greater-than-expected Soviet preemptive attacks, while being required to survive and to penetrate Soviet defenses that are at least partially completed. Reliable warning and communications connectivity cannot be assumed unless it is planned for and improved on in conjunction with force improvements. The record of preceding administrations in this regard is, for the most part, regrettable. While the balance of US and Soviet forces appeared to provide for US force survivability even against "worst-case" attacks, the US strategic command, control, and communications (C3) system was vulnerable to less-omnivorous strikes that would have precluded all but ragged, and possibly ineffective, relaliation.22 It was this recognition of C3 vulnerabilities that led the Carter administration to reverse its field from calls for nuclear purgation at the beginning of 1977 to the advocacy of protracted nuclear warfighting capability in 1980.
Smart technology bedevils planners of future offensive, defensive, and C3 systems even if their tasks are isolated. In practice, we know they are not and cannot be. The United States quite properly goes about the business of offensive reentry vehicles (under the Advanced Strategic Missile Systems, or ASMS program), while the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) designs measures to defeat hypothetical, future Soviet offenses. The technologies of 2010 will be more stressing to US offenses and defenses if they are not correctly anticipated and if countermeasures are not designed. The example of satellite defense and attack illustrates the relationship. US planners should now be anticipating how Soviet planners might attack early warning, communications, or BMD satellites should they decide to do so. Possible methods include space mines, ground-based and space-based ASATs of the kind already tested and deployed, and various electronic countermeasures designed to blind or spoof satellite systems.23
It has been noted that smart technology will create dilemmas for planners of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Congressional and public interest was piqued by the possibility that a space-based "boost phase" missile defense system might intercept targets after a computer program automatically triggered the appropriate response. Such automaticity bothered those who wondered whether the President could remain "in the loop" to make the final decision about beginning strategic war. But we have lived with serious dilemmas with regard to strategic offensive forces (armed with nuclear warheads) for many years without comparable anxiety. Few have noted that current US deployments place high reliance on strategic warning of Soviet attack; a "launch-on-warning" or "launch-under-attack" response might be unavoidable or impossible given only tactical warning, due to the uncertain survivability of US ICBM forces.24 Another difficulty ascribed hypothetically for SDI has also applied to offensive forces for some time. SDI critics question whether computer programs of the appropriate length (perhaps some ten million lines of code) could be constructed. Yet the work of such programs depends less on their length than upon their complexity and fidelity under wartime conditions, which are difficult to simulate. Offensive C3 software and hardware suffers similar potential limitations. Computer-generated false alarms at North American Aerospace Defense Command in 1979 and 1980 triggered problematical, although not fatal, responses from the system for a short time. And the worldwide military command and control system (WWMCCS) connecting strategic command posts and primary or secondary force commanders has a troubled history of failure at the most inopportune moments.25
The not very hypothetical C3 problems attendant to offensive force survivability have also been acknowledged for current and near term US attack warning and assessment systems. These systems are few in number and can be easily destroyed, jammed, or otherwise prevented from performing their assigned missions to provide reliable and accurate information.26 Soviet attacks against 400 primary and secondary C3 targets during the 1980s could probably disrupt postattack NCA control over US retaliatory forces .27 Because of this possibility, submarine commanders have operated under the assumption that they may be required against their instincts to initiate retaliatory launches if postattack communications between SSBNs and the NCA are permanently disrupted.28 This situation has been wrongly described as attractive to naval commanders and planners.29 It has, on the contrary, come about because postattack communications with the most survivable strategic platforms, the ballistic missile submarines, are allegedly the most unreliable of the three legs of the Triad.30
The process of reducing assumptions about national commitments, threats, and capabilities into realistic options is called war planning. War plans need to do a number of things if they are to provide feasible options to policymakers. First, they must be based on the best professional military judgment about what is possible under given circumstances. Second, that judgment must be subject to review and modification by policymakers who know what political objectives they want to accomplish. Those objectives should not be stated in broad and comprehensive terms when they are ingredients in the military planning process. Instead, they should be specified to the extent possible. "Nation building" "winning hearts and minds" are illustrations of well-meaning phrases that defy definition in operational terms.
Third, as Harry Summers has so rightly pointed out, war plans must take into account the relationships among the American public, its government and constitution, and its armed forces.31 There are some things that the US armed forces cannot or should not be asked to do, either because those things are not part of our national psyche or because the US Congress could never be persuaded to concur. Thus one can ask, for example, whether under any circumstances the US Army can be charged with the conduct of major counterinsurgency wars in the third world given public abhorrence of the kinds of tactics necessary to defeat insurgents. This is not just another admonition about "no more Vietnams"; there are some scenarios being written for commitment of US forces to other non-European conflicts where it is doubtful the US public, media, or Congress would be supportive in the face of sustained heavy costs. The experience of American marines in Beirut, Lebanon, especially following the bombing of their barracks, is instructive.
The process of strategic nuclear war planning is an extremely complicated one. General policy guidance is supposedly provided by the National Security Council (NSC) in the form of national security decision memoranda, or National Security Decision Directives (NSDD) as they are now known. Under the Carter administration, the terminology changed to Presidential Directive (PD), the best known among students of nuclear strategy being PD-59, the Carter administration guidelines for strategic nuclear war planning. The Reagan equivalent is reportedly NSDD-13.32 The Secretary of Defense is then charged with preparing the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy (NUWEP)and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, through the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS), with development of the single integrated operational plan (SIOP).33
There are several questions that can be raised about this planning process. The first is the question of what we are planning for. What is to be accomplished by US strategic nuclear forces other than the obvious imperative that they are there to deter war in the first place? The second question is whether the planning process can provide the appropriate connection between means and ends, between policy objectives (however they are defined) and military operations. A third question is whether the American people understand the process and its results and, if they do, support them.
Deciding what to do with strategic nuclear forces if deterrence has failed is a major challenge in itself. Much effort has been expended over the years to refine operational plans. Reportedly, the war plans of the 1950s called for massive unleashing of the entire US arsenal against targets in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the People's Republic of China. The Kennedy administration began the process of attempting to build more numerous and more selective options into the SIOP, even while US declaratory policy, as presented to the public and the US Congress, remained "assured destruction"34 The American public and our European allies were given a misleading appreciation of the character of American war plans. The misperception was not the result of deceit but of a divergence between declaratory policy explained publicly and operational policy as it appeared in war plans.35 Because operational plans cannot be stated publicly in meaningful detail for obvious reasons, some discrepancy in nuance and interpretation is unavoidable. The discrepancies were more than a matter of emphasis during the McNamara years, however, because the secretary of defense used "assured destruction" as a metric to restrict the numbers of strategic launchers, especially ICBMs, for budgetary reasons.36
The problem of a credibility gap between war plans as publicly explained and war plans as actually developed has continued. Former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger attempted the quite sensible refinement of US targeting objectives in order to allow for limited nuclear options in the event that deterrence failed. Schlesinger did not assert that it would be easy to limit or to terminate strategic nuclear war. Nor did he argue that the USSR would necessarily cooperate if we attempted to do so. What he sought to do was to build on the work of his predecessors, who had recognized that multiple options were useful. However, Schlesinger was concerned that the more numerous options were all too large to be useful in responding to initiatives by adversaries that involved less than total war.37 When Schlesinger went public with his explanations for these changes in declaratory and (eventually) operational policy, a public furor resulted.
The Carter administration stepped into the hot water of justifying nuclear war plans as a result of a comprehensive review of US strategic targeting, which it undertook on assuming office.38 The results of this review were neither revolutionary nor unexpected; they continued the trends established under Schlesinger toward the incorporation of more, and more selective, options. When elements of these revised plans leaked, administration officials attempted to explain publicly the rationale for "countervailing strategy," as it came to be known.39 Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown soon repeated Schlesinger's unpleasant experience of attempting to explain how selective options reinforced deterrence without making nuclear war more likely. In a public forum this was extremely difficult to do, and Carter administration efforts to do it during the presidential campaign of l980 were thought by some critics to be self-serving.
The Reagan administration has continued the evolutionary trends that began with Schlesinger, although it has apparently endorsed the most contentious of the Carter PD-59 criteria for war planning: the possibility of a protracted nuclear war must be prepared for and fought if necessary.40 The Carter formulation of the concept of fighting protracted nuclear war proved as difficult to explain to the press, Congress, and the public as did the subsequent Reagan continuation of it. Apparently other administrations sought to develop additional options for extended warfighting which, if Soviet planners were aware of those capabilities, would be more deterring. This message, that the extended war plans were related to deterrence and not to any real interest in fighting nuclear wars, was lost in the translation.
If the contents of strategic nuclear war plans are problematical, the process by which they are developed is also subject to question. There is all the difference in the world between drawing up a list of targets and fighting a nuclear war. Destroying any number of things in the Soviet Union, whether those things are cities or silos, does not fulfill the requirements of any sensible policy. Policy must explain what we want to accomplish; that is, it must explain how the postattack world after we retaliate should be "better" than the post-attack world if we did not. Broadly speaking, there are three general sets of objectives for the postattack period (the period following the first relatively preplanned sets of exchanges). These are as follows: to disarm the opponent by destroying his forces and strategic command and control, to terminate the war at the lowest possible level of violence consistent with avoiding unacceptable losses for us, and to destroy the opponent’s war-supporting economy so that even if his armed forces and government want to continue the war they will be unable to do so.
Notice that there is no mention of the destruction of cities or people as such. It is not now the objective of US war plans, nor has it been since the early 1960s, to destroy cities. The residual capacity of US and Soviet arsenals creates the potential to do this, and it is that potential that can be threatened in order to bring any war to a conclusion. Once cities are destroyed, they are no longer of any value to the attacker. Thus, it is unfortunate that US policy has been described publicly as "assured destruction," implying to the reader that our operational objective was to kill large numbers of people. This misconception was also fostered by misguided efforts to quantify the numbers of persons who would be killed in US-Soviet nuclear wars, as if the estimates were precise and verifiable.41 Cities are of value as hostages; they can be destroyed if the adversary is threatening to disarm us and if no termination of the war can be negotiated.
Of the three objectives, the first, counterforce /countercommand attacks designed to disarm the opponent, are achievable under current conditions only by a US or USSR first strike, and perhaps not even then. Factors having to do with "friction" or the "fog of war" might make countersilo attacks that look good on paper self-defeating in actual combat.42 The "window of vulnerability" scenario for Soviet annihilation of the US Minuteman ICBM force following a surprise first strike was treated very gingerly and, in effect, repudiated by the Scowcroft Commission Report of April l983.43 It would make no sense for the USSR to attack the Minuteman force and then accept retaliation delivered from the surviving US forces without some antisubmarine warfare (ASW) breakthrough and improved active defenses for the Soviet command structure. Moreover, the expectation that counterforce/counter-command attacks could disarm the opponent early in war could produce "lose-it-or-use-it" temptations during crises. Bruce Blair has shown that US strategic command and control have been more vulnerable for several decades than the retaliatory forces themselves.44
Not only may we not be able to destroy the Soviet countercommand components, but it might not be advisable to succeed if we could. The Soviet control structure is not easily destroyed because it permeates the entire economy and society down to the "grass-roots" level.45 And if the United States successfully decapitates the top of the structure (party, military, and KGB leadership, for example), then no one would be able to turn off isolated fragments of the Soviet war machine. The postattack, disrupted Soviet C3 system might not be able to coordinate further strategic nuclear attacks against US forces or society, but elimination of that option does not exhaust Soviet potential for postattack destruction, including attacks against our allies with conventional forces. The most understudied problem of the US military establishment (in addition to war plans) is the role of US and NATO conventional forces in the aftermath of nuclear war; the USSR has paid careful attention to this issue, however pessimistic they and we must be about what can be accomplished.
The third set of postattack objectives involve destruction of the opponent's war-supporting economic and social infrastructure. This would obviously cost the lives of many innocent civilians, which is why the priority of counterforce targeting is often asserted. But it is a mistake to suppose that in any wars other than exemplary demonstration salvos that are not followed up, clear distinctions can be made between targeting the Soviet war economy and destroying the Soviet population. Nor does it help when policymakers tabulate levels of Soviet civilians killed as percentages required to fulfill deterrence requirements.46 Targeting the war economy of the opponent means destroying bridges, dams, power plants, manufacturing centers, transportation networks, and other societal assets that would include millions of "incidental" civilian deaths. Such lethal attacks against the economy and society might also trigger "nuclear winter," which several scientific studies postulate will result from atmospheric by-products of nuclear detonations above certain cumulative thresholds.47
Thus, the second set of objectives, war termination, is regarded by this writer as the one that is most consistent with US capabilities, traditions, and ethical commitments. However, the process of explaining to the Congress and the public how war plans provide for war termination is a challenging one. One wants, for example, to threaten the destruction of cities but not actually have to carry it out. In similar fashion, the Soviet government should have some realistic fear of loss of its coherence in prosecuting an extended war but not have the fear of imminent and total destruction.
The most difficult issue to be faced is how the subtlety of policy guidance can be mated, if at all, to the actual construction of nuclear options in the SIOP. Target planners will focus on the destruction of the maximum number of targets with the most efficiency, and options reflecting those priorities will loom large in the preplanned components of the SIOP. Yet, war aims might change during the process of war, especially if some alternatives for stopping the conflict appear in midstream. It may be difficult or impossible for the United States to do other than to execute a few large and preplanned nuclear sorties against the most obvious Soviet target base under realistic conditions of nuclear attack.
Whether this would allow for flexible intervention in the postattack environment by policymakers in order to bring about an end to the war on any terms is doubtful given current procedures and policies. If current and future plans cannot tell us how to end a strategic nuclear war, then it makes little or no sense to aspire to fight such a war over many weeks and months. As Christopher Branch has noted, the planning process has apparently neglected some of the important "nuts and bolts" prerequisite for fighting extended wars, including reconstitutable airfields, fuel supplies, and maintenance for strategic bombers.48
Should the SDI program lead to the deployment of strategic defenses for the United States and the Soviet Union, its implications for the selection among these three broad categories of postattack options will be enormous. There is not space here for a complete discussion of the possible implications of SDI, but a few observations relative to the discussion above are pertinent. First, SDI may make the pursuit of postattack war termination more realistic if it can contribute to preservation of the US command and control system against early decapitation. Soviet deployment of comparable defenses would not necessarily interfere with this objective; it appears that the USSR, which has deployed the only ballistic missile defense system now operative, has already placed a priority on protection Of its leadership and command and control.49
SDI could also improve protection for the US ICBM force, both for fixed silo and mobile-based ICBMs such as the proposed Midgetman small intercontinental ballistic missile (SICBM). This could create more reliable threats to destroy the Soviet prompt counterforce base and thus contribute to deterrence if the Scowcroft Commission's judgement that the Soviets value most their leadership and military forces is correct.50 However, SDI has a "dark side" if it presents Soviet planners with the problem of a credible US first-strike capability against their land-based strategic retaliatory forces, which carry approximately three-fourths of their warheads.
The Reagan administration has called for defenses that can protect US society against any attack and ultimately render offensive nuclear weapons obsolete.51 The near-term fallout from SDI is obviously not going to include such comprehensive accomplishments. Should SDI provide even credible defenses for retaliatory forces, it could help to stabilize deterrence by making first strikes less promising.52 However, we have already seen in the superpower arms race that one side's damage limitation is another side's first-strike potential. SDI deployments without bilateral arms control agreements could result in self-defeating arms race spirals. Future war plans for the postattack period will have to prioritize among counterforce/countercommand warfighting, war termination, and countersocietal attacks in a defense-pregnant environment, although how effective those defenses will be even a decade from now is unknown.
US planners will be racing themselves and the Soviets to "stay up to speed" in the 1990s and thereafter. US technology is competent and competitive, if not superior in most areas. Strategy making within a democracy is another matter. Whether the US policy process can guarantee strategically consistent decisions in the face of unprecedented challenges is unknown. Multiple options pulling in different directions, plus some good fortune, have gotten us through in the past. If the past is prologue, we will somehow manage the future however untidy our efforts prove to be.
Pennsylvania State University, Media
Notes
Stephen J. Cimbala (B.A., Pennsylvania State University; M.A. and PhD, University of Wisconsin) is associate professor of political science, Pennsylvania State University, Delaware County Campus, Media, Pennsylvania. Dr. Cimbala has been a research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, and Air University 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.