Such a system would provide the United States with the ability to detect, identify, track, and engage far more targets with a higher degree of lethality and precision, over a global area, than ever before. Knowing which subset of targets to strike serves as an enormous force multiplier, greatly reducing the number of weapons and strikes necessary to prevail over an enemy force.66 In addition, there are real benefits to the market-state to be found in information sharing (and withholding) beyond what can be achieved by weapons strikes.
At Sandia National Laboratories, an experiment has been undertaken in which a cooperative monitoring center acted as a confidence-building measure in much the same way that negotiated troop positioning, missile constraints, and transparency were used during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Mutual monitoring between two hostile states can reduce the chances of war by preventing successful pre-emption. Setting up such a center is an example of producing the collective goods that can maintain U.S. leadership. Indeed, as we shall see, the concept of collective goods is especially crucial to the market-state because the functions of that state do not replicate but supplement the market, which is astringently economical with public goods.
At present, the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) network established by the United States is used by any country with the capability to access it. Foreign nations have previously utilized the GPS system to direct missile attacks against U.S. interests; indeed, GPS-guided weaponry could be used to destroy U.S. satellites in orbit.67 Access to a truly global monitoring system, however, could be limited by the United States and bartered to licensee states either for fees or for political cooperation. In addition to its crucial contribution to warfare, such a system would be integral to weather control, asteroid defense, solar flare warnings, commodity planning, environmental monitoring, and the sustainable exploitation of natural resources, all collective goods for the society of states.
(5)
By providing licensed states with the protection of a missile defense68 system, the United States could provide an effective and trustworthy strategic umbrella analogous to that it provided during the Cold War through extended nuclear deterrence. Moreover, without such defensive systems the vulnerability of U.S. forces to missile attack abroad will be an increasing deterrent to U.S. force projections in aid of allies or for humanitarian missions. Thus what positive effect still remains as a result of U.S. extended deterrence could be sharply eroded in the absence of a credible U.S. ballistic missile defense.
“Central deterrence” is a function of the threat to target a national homeland in order to protect the homeland of the threatening, deterring party.* For example, the U.S. central deterrent consisted of the threat to attack the Soviet homeland in order to protect the American homeland from attack. The term denotes a relationship between vital objectives whose very centrality to the State gives them the highest value to the deterrer and thus assures both the willingness to run the highest risks of retaliation or pre-emption and the will to inflict a level of harm commensurate with the necessity to protect “central” objectives. “Extended deterrence,” by contrast, projects nuclear deterrence beyond the absolutely central, into other geographical, nonhomeland theatres or for other, nonvital interests. Extended deterrence was the objective of the policy according to which the United States promised to retaliate with nuclear weapons if the states of Western Europe or Japan were attacked. Sometimes this threat of retaliation is called the nuclear “umbrella.” Extended deterrence is the single most effective instrument the United States has to prevent major-state proliferation because it permits these states to develop their economies without diverting vast resources to the nuclear arms competition, and yet remain relatively safe from nuclear attack.
It would be a grave mistake to assume that the threat of missile attack has receded worldwide as a result of the end of the Cold War. In the Gulf War, Iraq launched almost ninety missiles against targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia; 25 percent of all U.S. combat fatalities from that war were the result of a single Scud missile strike. Moreover, missile technology is quickly spreading to many states. North Korea, China, and other states have played major roles in this export trade. When North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and the North African countries ultimately possess the 1,300-kilometer-range No-Dong I missile, or something like it, the capitals of Japan, France, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Italy will all be within range of potentially hostile states.69
Since the end of the Cold War, the American program for ballistic missile defense (BMD) has been redirected away from the effort to achieve a comprehensive shield against a massive Soviet attack and toward theatre nuclear defense systems. The Clinton administration endorsed a program that included an upgrade to the Patriot systems used in the Gulf War; a Theater High Altitude Area Defense system that would supplement short-range point-defense systems like Patriot; and a sea-based system using the AEGIS ships.70 The enthusiasm with which these systems have been pursued, however, has been diminished by the intellectual residue of the Cold War: during the Soviet-American confrontation, many persons felt that BMD was essentially destabilizing to the deterrence relationship because it promised—a promise it could not possibly fulfill—to prevent the USSR from being able to destroy the United States in a retaliatory strike, thus potentially tempting both sides into pre-emptive moves.
It would reflect a considerable misunderstanding if these opinions, whatever their merits in context of the Long War, were to prevent the most rapid feasible deployment of BMD by the United States today. This deployment would enable the United States to protect many countries—perhaps for a fee—including states that would be hard-pressed to deploy their own defensive systems and that therefore might otherwise be tempted to develop other, far cheaper, deterrent systems of mass destruction. Moreover, the deployment of a theater BMD system would cast doubt upon potentially preclusive moves by other states to prevent the United States from projecting power abroad through conventional forces. For example, the six-month buildup of coalition forces in the Saudi desert would have been far too risky for a market-state like the United States if Iraq had possessed adequate offensive missiles. Even for a nation-state acting to protect its survival, such a threat to an expeditionary force can be preclusive: with respect to the Normandy invasion, General Eisenhower wrote that “if the German had succeeded in perfecting and using [the V-1 and V-2 missiles] six months earlier than he did our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible.”71 A theatre BMD might be able to rehabilitate future regional military operations similar to the coalition offensive in the Gulf War despite hostile missile proliferation that it is evident is very difficult for market-states to prevent. As an aside, I should add that it is not necessarily a decisive argument against BMD to say that it would be ineffectual against nuclear threats delivered by other means—the so-called suitcase bomb, for example. These devices are extremely difficult to manufacture and, more important, are as much a threat as an asset to an authoritarian state because, unlike missile systems, they do not require elaborate control procedures and technologies and are thus potential tools for insurrection.
(6)
As noted above, computer-assisted design and manufacturing, training simulators, and virtual-reality environments will doubtless shape the military planning process of the twenty-first century. Simulation might, however, play an even more ambitious role in the hands of a market-state arbiter, such as the United States, or an ad hoc group of such states. With global monitoring, it ought to be possible in principle to simulate battles and then assess costs and damages afterwards. No lives need be lost in such conflicts. The role of individual heroism, of unit esprit, and sheer good luck will be less perhaps in future wars where combat is mainly fought by machines against machines—or against defenseless persons once their machines fail. In a transparent environment without tactical surprise, it may well be possible to arbitrate disputes not so much on the basis of international law as on a simulated c
ompetition run by computers. Recalcitrant losers would face coercive measures as penalties. The American legal practice of plea bargaining is an analogous example of such simulation in a different context. Based on the likely assessment of what would happen if the defendant went to trial, the prosecution and the defense barter within a range of likely outcomes, each preferring to avoid the risks and costs of trial if possible.
(7)
Mercenary forces were once the dominant armed instrument of the State because they were an economical alternative to more expensive standing armies. In the future, the use of local proxy armies can offer a similar efficiency. Backed by the information and intelligence collection, the air power and the strategic direction of United States – led coalitions, such forces could provide the indispensable element of ground control without risking American lives to the same degree as U.S. ground forces. The risks attendant to the use of proxies—as Rome discovered—is that they are unreliable allies; the weapons and information they are provided must be carefully calibrated and the technological support given must be carefully weighed.
The present volume began with this question: why is it so difficult for contemporary leaders to determine when to use force in international affairs? Now, I believe, we are in a position to answer this question. If the American state—and many other states also—is in the midst of a transition from one form of constitutional order to another, then states are also in the midst of a change in their strategic relationships vis-à-vis one another that is related to this change in constitutional order. The difficulty lies in the fact that we have yet to appreciate the nature and implications of this transformation. We are quickly becoming a market-state. Yet we still cling to a strategic mentality that was formed within the constitutional order of the nation-state and its Long War for survival. It's not so much a matter of finding a new strategic paradigm as it is of acquiring the habits of thinking that are compatible with the character of the new constitutional order; then the paradigm will follow.
The United States's world role as protector of free states and our domestic constitutional institutions of liberty and equality are linked together by our history. Any set of rules that forbids the use of American force in virtually all the contexts in which the United States is likely to find itself moved by moral considerations in the current era will forfeit its claim on our moral sense. Then when those situations arise that do threaten our vital interests and call for a supreme national effort, we shall regret having ignored the cardinal historical lesson of American war making: that it is never done wholly on a moral or an expedient basis, but always and only when both are present. For two hundred years, U.S. foreign policy has been to offer assistance, where our assistance was sought and where it would be efficacious, to peoples who wanted free institutions and peaceful lives, and to oppose aggressors who threatened the constitutional way of life that is our greatest legacy to mankind. In service of the former objective we fought the warrior tribes of the Plains, the Mexican dictator Santa Anna, the German empire, the Spanish empire, and the Asian totalitarians Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, and sent forces to many places around the world where the collapse of the legal order brought great suffering. To defend our constitutional form of life, we fought both Britain and France in the nineteenth century, and defeated fascism and communism in the twentieth. We have seldom sought territorial cessions by conquest and have largely grown our continental state by the wishes of the pioneer inhabitants of the territories we protected or purchased. This history must be qualified by the wrongs we have committed, including those against Native Americans and the preservation of slavery and the slave trade for half a century after it had been outlawed in Europe. Yet it is our history that gives us a consistent sense of our achievements and of our wrongdoings.
It is important for the United States and its leaders to remember that Thucydides concluded that the “truest reason” for the Peloponnesian War was Sparta's fear of the growing strength of Athens. Not simply increasing American power, but persuading others of our modesty, our benign intent, our deference to the preferences of other societies will be an indispensable element in maintaining peace. American references to “the sole, remaining superpower” are scarcely helpful but the label “hyperpower” comes from abroad.
For history is not made within the State alone. Indeed I have argued that the State depends upon conflict with other states—the object of strategy— in order to establish itself as the legitimate guardian of a legal order. What of the society of states? How does its constitutional order come about, and what legitimates that order? This is the subject of Book II.
All wars are so many attempts to bring about new relations among the states and to form new bodies by the break-up of the old states to the point where they cannot again maintain themselves alongside each other and must therefore suffer revolutions until finally, partly through the best possible arrangement of the civic constitution internally, and partly through common agreement and legislation externally, there is created a state that, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.
—Kant, Idea for a Universal
History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Wars of the Market-State:
Conclusion to Book 1
THE LONG WAR was an epochal war. Such wars are distinguished from other types not simply by their duration—which often spans lengthy periods of armistice—but mainly by their constitutional significance. Indeed such wars keep going precisely because they concern the fundamental legitimacy of the State. When revisionist historians suggest that the World War II Allies could have ended that war earlier by modifying the surrender terms offered the Japanese so as to guarantee the constitutional position of the emperor, these historians are reflecting their tacit understanding of the war itself. They think it was like other wars, mainly about the accretion of power or wealth. When we see World War II as but a part of a much longer constitutional conflict, however, such observations appear to miss the point.
Let me reiterate that the reasons epochal wars are begun are no different from those of any wars: they arise from clashing claims to power, from competing ideologies and religions, insistent ambition, the gamble for greater wealth, sympathy for kinsmen or hostility to foreigners, and so on. The reason epochal wars achieve, in retrospect, an historic importance is because however they may arise, they challenge and ultimately change the basic structure of the State, which is, after all, a war-making institution.
In studying past wars that came to be recategorized as mere engagements in longer, epochal conflicts, one repeatedly finds that basic issues persisted and were not resolved by the peaces that followed the cessation of overt belligerency. Because the very nature of the State is at stake in epochal wars, the consequence of such wars is the transformation of the State itself to cope with the strategic innovations that determine the out-come of the conflict. Thus, the transformations of the State into the various constitutional archetypes described in Part II are each associated with epochal wars.
The metamorphosis of the realms of princes into Renaissance princely states coincided with the Wars of the Italian Peninsula, begun by the French invasion of Italy in 1494. The modern state originates in the transition from the rule of princes to that of princely states that began there.
Of these new princely states, Machiavelli argued that their security and liberty were the prince's first concern and that all else depended on this.1 The great princely states of Habsburg Spain, Valois France, and Tudor England were superseded by kingly states forged in the Thirty Years' War. On behalf of the kingly states, Bodin insisted that only a single sovereign embodying the ultimate authority of the State could prevent the religious rebellions that had repeatedly erupted during this epoch.2Territorial states in turn proved triumphant in the defeat of the greatest of the kingly states, in the wars of Louis XIV. Locke, whom we anachronistically associate with American democracy, in fact accepted a sovereign who
singularly made all the laws, so long as this reflected a covenant between the governed and the governing. These regimes were in turn superseded by the great state-nations, of which Hume3 is no less the prophet than Robespierre.* Burke famously said in 1774 that Parliament was not a congress of ambassadors from its various electoral constituencies, but “a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.”4 The Napoleonic Wars accompanied the introduction of this constitutional archetype into the history of Europe, and their settlement at the Congress of Vienna enshrined this order for four generations. By contrast, the nation-state is associated with the Long War, a struggle that was fought over the moral and political orientation of that constitutional form in the twentieth century. Wilson and Lenin, Hitler and Roosevelt5 all claimed that their systems would best benefit the material well-being of the people, a claim we have heard so much that it is hard for us to imagine a constitutional form that does not take its legitimacy on such a basis. Yet this was not always the case.
Legitimacy is what unites the problems of strategy and law at the heart of epochal war just as history supplies the answers to those problems. The axiom of legitimacy has changed as new constitutional archetypes have replaced their predecessors; it is invariably the consequence of epochal wars that new constitutional archetypes appear as the competing states involved in the conflict develop into more successful forms for managing the strategic innovations that win the war.
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Page 49
