Published: 21 February 01
Air & Space Power Journal - Spring  2001

Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age by Paul Bracken. HarperCollins (http://www.harpercollins.com/ hc), 10 East 53d Street, New York, New York 10022, 1999, 186 pages, $25.00.

Paul Bracken, a professor of management and political science at Yale and author of The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (1983), has written a thought-provoking book for the policy community about how the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Asia may affect international relations. In the past, technology helped the West dominate Asia militarily; today, Asian countries are acquiring technologies that will help them challenge Western military dominance as an unbroken chain of countries between Israel and North Korea either possesses or is developing WMDs and ways to deliver them. Within Asia, such weapons allow Asian countries to attack each other’s homelands, something that has largely been beyond their means in the past. In addition, they are intensifying relations among countries that were loosely linked in the past, exemplified by China’s relations with Pakistan and Iran. Finally, these weapons allow Asian countries to attack the US homeland and its bases abroad.

Bracken’s contribution is to move beyond weapons and capabilities to assess consequences: how will WMD proliferation affect Asia, and how will it affect America? His answer is that the effects may be revolutionary. At its heart, this book is about the political effects of a revolution in military affairs (RMA). Unlike the application of information processing to warfare that is at the core of the RMA debate in the United States today, Bracken goes back to the RMA of nuclear weapons and brings it forward. Nuclear weapons (and other WMDs) were, and are, revolutionary because they can potentially devastate the infrastructure supporting military forces or the homeland of a country without first defeating the defending military forces. This characteristic of WMDs has ramifications beyond the obvious political ones of any capability to attack the US homeland. For example, the capability to target US bases means that the United States may be unable to act with as much of the logistical tail that has been critical to the American way of war. The residual logistical tail that remains will be more dispersed and so both less efficient and more problematic for host countries. Politically, the capability to confront the United States without confronting the US military on its favored terms may constitute a paradigm shift for US power and engagement in Asia because the United States may be more circumspect in its relations with Asian countries in the future.

Bracken’s argument seems most applicable to major-theater-war contingencies, like the canonical Persian Gulf and Korean Peninsula that might see engagement of US land forces, or to the unspoken contingency in the Taiwan Straits. However, Bracken does not address how the WMD revolution in Asia might interact with the information revolution in America. Attacking Global Positioning System, reconnaissance, and communications satellites individually by antisatellite weapons or en masse by means of a nuclear weapon exploded at high altitude could degrade US conventional capability without creating conditions in which the United States might retaliate with nuclear weapons. US reliance on information as a force multiplier might then turn into a force divisor.

The widespread availability of WMDs may make interactions among countries in East Asia, including the United States, more complex and paradoxical than Bracken seems to expect. First, many Asian countries have a strong, if unspoken, interest in the order provided by US power outside of their immediate regional quarrels. Even China, which may want to be a regional hegemon, probably does not want to bear the expenses inherent in providing order in faraway places or of suffering if the United States does not. Second, states may attempt to balance against other nuclear-armed states by allying themselves with a benignly hegemonic United States, so America may become more rather than less involved in the region. Both of these arguments warrant a continued, robust US presence in East Asia to maintain stability, although that presence may be increasingly exposed to complex war-initiation dynamics if the United States intervenes in support of an ally fighting a foe armed with WMDs. Finally, WMDs may be more likely to be used in intraregional conflicts, like a nuclear war in South Asia, in which the United States might not have much influence and in which US military forces might not have much of a role. The effects of such a war on US power are hard to forecast, although they might lead either to increased anarchy as the United States and other countries in the region pull apart from each other or to increased reliance on the United States as the best guarantor of security.

Fire in the East is an essay rather than a scholarly piece, and Bracken succeeds by asking an important question. Unfortunately, the examples he uses can frequently be interpreted to make an opposite point. Many leave out important elements, and far too many are not on firm historical ground. These missteps are unfortunate rather than fatal, although they do diminish the credibility of the argument.

Read Fire in the East for a thought-provoking big picture of consequences. Do not get bogged down in the examples and try to think about the implications for US power of a world with more Asian powers with WMDs and ways to deliver them, both within Asia and beyond.

Carmel Davis
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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.