Twilight of the American Century

by Andrew J Bacevich

  Minimizing the impact of surprise demands sustained and intensive attention to risk management: this is the Wohlstetter School’s third precept. Conjuring up vulnerabilities that adversaries might exploit, crediting them with the ability and intent to do so, and devising remedies to prevent or reduce any resulting damage, thereby maintaining the ability to strike back and also raising the risks that adversaries will incur if choosing to attack: this, for Wohlstetter’s followers, defines the very essence of risk management strategy. Effective risk management entails activism. To remain inert in the face of peril is to forfeit the initiative, thereby exacerbating the threat. To see some momentary advantage as a guarantee of safety, therefore, is to misapprehend the reality of strategic competition, which involves continuous interaction on ever-shifting terms.

  In other words, the first precept of looming peril necessitates an anticipatory approach to self-defense. Yet the second precept of surprise means that an anticipatory self-defense that is strictly defensive in its orientation can never be fully satisfactory. Miscalculate just once—fail to see what lurks around the corner or over the horizon—and catastrophic failure ensues. The fourth precept looks beyond mere risk management—the third precept—to radical risk reduction—the Holy Grail of the Wohlstetter School. It posits the existence of capabilities that will confer upon the United States the ability not only to dispose of the perils it faces, but also to create a better world for all. To achieve this sort of risk reduction requires an offensively oriented approach. Rather than simply parrying, the US should thrust.

  For a brief moment after 1945, some observers believed that the American nuclear monopoly had put the United States in a position to do just that. The founding members of the Wohlstetter School were among the first to recognize that this was a delusion and to see that far from enhancing US freedom of action, the advent of nuclear weapons created daunting complications and imposed constraints. Yet this insight, important in itself, did not dissuade them from seeking escape from those constraints. By the 1990s, leading Wohlstetterites believed they had discovered the means to do so.

  NSC-68 and After

  Just as McCarthyism predated Senator Joe McCarthy, so too ideas of the Wohlstetter School made their appearance even before Albert Wohlstetter signed on with RAND in 1951 to analyze nuclear strategy. Drafted early in 1950, National Security Council Report 68 remains a classic expression of the looming-threat precept. Emphasizing that the end of the nuclear monopoly had plunged the United States into deepest peril, with all of humanity now facing “the ever-present possibility of annihilation,” freedom itself “mortally challenged,” and the very survival “not only of this Republic but of civilization itself” hanging in the balance, NSC-68 may strike present-day readers as overwrought, if not altogether hysterical. With the Soviet Union having long since ceased to exist, the United States today finds itself more or less perpetually entangled in foreign wars, all the while professing a yearning for peace. Viewed from this perspective, NSC-68’s attempted contrast between the “fanatic faith” inspiring the Kremlin’s efforts to “impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world” and the “essential tolerance of our world outlook, our generous and constructive impulses, and the absence of covetousness in our international relations” might seem overdrawn.1 Yet Paul Nitze, director of State Department policy planning and NSC-68’s principal author—soon to emerge as a charter member of the Wohlstetter School—believed otherwise. By his own account, Nitze was simply looking facts in the face. A self-described hard-nosed pragmatist, he addressed questions of policy with “clear and rigorous logic, based upon a cold and unemotional assessment of the objective evidence.”2 If Nitze cried wolf, it was because a wolf (or perhaps a bear) was pawing at the door, even if others remained blind to the danger.

  With a little help from the Korean War, NSC-68 demonstrated that in Cold War Washington crying wolf worked: Nitze won approval for his recommendation of a large-scale build-up of American military power, conventional as well as nuclear. At regular intervals thereafter, groups—some quasi-official, others unofficial, many including Nitze himself as a prominent participant—sought to replicate this achievement. Every couple of decades, the Committee on the Present Danger appeared on the scene, version 1.0 sounding the alarm in 1950, with 2.0 following in 1976 and 3.0 in 2004. Otherwise, even as the names varied, the refrain remained constant. The Gaither Committee (1957), the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy (1969), “Team B” (1976), the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (1988), and the Rumsfeld Commission (1998) all subscribed to a common set of propositions: ignored or discounted by US intelligence agencies, the United States was falling behind; America’s enemies were gaining an edge; absent prompt action to close the resulting capabilities gap, catastrophe beckoned.

  An accommodating press routinely amplified the ominous warnings issued by the Wohlstetter School. When the classified findings of the Gaither Committee found their way into the hands of a Washington Post reporter, for example, the resulting story, appearing on December 20, 1958, carried the headline: “Secret Report Sees US in Great Peril.” Team B concluded its work as President Ford was preparing to leave office. In its January 10, 1977, issue, Newsweek’s coverage featured an essay called “The Russian Bear Redux?” The text of the article removed the question mark, describing the Team B report as “the most alarming forecast in years.” Similarly, on July 17, 1998, the Newark Star-Ledger summarized the findings of the Rumsfeld Commission: “Experts See Missiles’ Shadows Darkening Skies over US Cities.”

  The point here is not to contest the accuracy of these forecasts—although allegations of a “bomber gap” and later of a “missile gap” during the 1950s proved utterly fanciful—but to note their remarkable consistency. In this regard, the findings reported by Team B—convened by CIA director George H. W. Bush in response to charges by Wohlstetter (and others) that official estimates were understating the Soviet threat—are representative. As an exercise in intellectual inquiry, Team B’s investigation was the equivalent of asking a group of senior academics to evaluate the pros and cons of tenure: the outcome was foreordained. Consisting of hardliners vociferously opposed to Soviet-American détente (Nitze and Wohlstetter protégé Paul Wolfowitz among them), Team B reached precisely the conclusions it would be expected to reach: US intelligence agencies had “substantially misperceived the motives behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope and implicit threat.” With “all the evidence point[ing] to an undeviating Soviet commitment to what is euphemistically called the worldwide triumph of socialism but in fact connotes global Soviet hegemony,” the Kremlin had no interest in settling for strategic equivalence. It was engaged in a single-minded pursuit of strategic supremacy. “Soviet leaders are first and foremost offensively rather than defensively minded,” Team B reported. That statement applied in spades to Soviet thinking about nuclear weapons. The Soviets did not view nuclear conflict as tantamount to mutual suicide. Instead, they were expanding their arsenal in order to achieve a “war-fighting and war-winning capability.” For the United States, the outlook was grim indeed.3

  Wohlstetter himself drafted the most beguiling and comprehensive articulation of the looming-peril hypothesis. Written under federal contract for RAND in 1958 and subsequently appearing in revised form in Foreign Affairs, “The Delicate Balance of Terror” qualifies in the estimation of one admirer as “probably the single most important article in the history of American strategic thought.”4 In late 1957 the USSR had launched Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite. As Wohlstetter noted, the shock resulting from this demonstration of Soviet missile capabilities had “almost dissipated,” however. American concern, momentarily bordering on panic, had subsided, with the prevailing assumption that a general thermonuclear war was “extremely unlikely” restored. Wohlstetter set out to demolish that assumption, “dispelling the nearly universal optimism about the stability of det
errence.” The requirements for thwarting a Soviet nuclear attack, which in his view were stringent, made such optimism entirely unwarranted. To assume that the Kremlin leadership was “bumbling or, better, cooperative”—adhering to what he derisively referred to as “Western-preferred Soviet strategies”—was sheer folly. In fact, advances in Soviet strike capabilities had created prospects of “an essentially warningless attack” that the United States “may not have the power to deter.”5

  What followed was, in effect, a riff on Wohlstetter-preferred Soviet strategies. Elaborating on the difficulties of maintaining a viable second-strike capability, Wohlstetter found no reason to doubt that Soviet leaders possessed the cunning and ruthlessness to exploit those difficulties to their own advantage. The possibility of nuclear war causing considerable damage to the Soviet Union itself would not, in his view, dissuade the Kremlin from acting. After all, although World War II had killed more than 20 million Russians, the Soviet Union “had recovered extremely well.” Under “several quite plausible circumstances,” he surmised, “the Russians might be confident of being able to limit damage to considerably less than this number,” in which event, “striking first, by surprise, would be the sensible choice for them.” In short, to imagine that “a carefully planned surprise attack can be checkmated almost effortlessly,” with Americans thereby resuming “their deep pre-Sputnik sleep,” was a recipe for disaster. On the contrary, shoring up the US deterrent required urgent, ongoing, and intensive effort: ensuring the survivability of retaliatory forces, thickening air defenses, protecting civilians, improving conventional capabilities, and exploring innovative non-nuclear modes of warfare, hitherto “financed by pitifully small budgets.” Yet in outlining the minimum requirements for avoiding nuclear war in the 1960s—which he viewed as an iffy prospect at best—Wohlstetter was also describing “a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent danger.” Responding to Wohlstetter-preferred Soviet strategies would oblige Americans to make hard choices entailing sacrifice and uncertainty. It also implied being kept in the dark about matters said to determine their chances of survival, while placing their fate in the hands of those claiming mastery of such matters—people like Albert Wohlstetter.

  Anticipating Pearl Harbor

  A treatise written by Roberta Wohlstetter has long served as the Wohlstetter School’s urtext on the issue of surprise. Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, prepared under the auspices of RAND and published in 1962, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history, but this was history narrowly focused to serve—and privilege—a specific agenda. Pearl Harbor was written in order to answer the question “Why was the United States surprised on December 7, 1941?” In retrospect, indicators of an impending Japanese attack seemed blindingly obvious. How could Americans at all echelons of command—civilian and military alike, both in Washington and in Hawaii—have overlooked so many clues? Wohlstetter’s answer emphasized the difficulty of distinguishing between the clues that mattered and those that did not: “we failed to anticipate Pearl Harbor not for want of the relevant materials, but because of the plethora of irrelevant ones.”6 What Roberta Wohlstetter described as noise—false or misleading information—obscured the signals that foretold an attack.

  In “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” her husband had identified six hurdles that the United States needed to overcome in order to achieve the assured second-strike capability required for effective deterrence, so as to demonstrate the enormous challenges involved.7 In Pearl Harbor, Roberta Wohlstetter likewise identified six hurdles, factors increasing a nation’s susceptibility to surprise attack: false alarms; alertness dulled by continuous tension; enemy efforts to conceal their true intent; spoofs, that is, enemy-generated noise designed to mislead; changes in the character of relevant intelligence, caused, for example, by technological advances; and bureaucratic barriers obstructing the sharing of relevant information. Roberta Wohlstetter’s point reinforced her husband’s: avoiding surprise, like creating an effective deterrent, was a difficult proposition indeed. The one major practical lesson of her study was that “we cannot count on strategic warning.” In the two decades that had elapsed since Pearl Harbor, she concluded, “the balance of advantage” had clearly shifted “in favor of a surprise attacker. The benefits to be expected from achieving surprise have increased enormously and the penalties for losing the initiative in an all-out war have grown correspondingly.” As a consequence, the United States needed to acknowledge the likelihood of being surprised. “We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn to live with it.” Rather than expecting advance notice of an enemy attack, defenses “must be designed to function without it.”

  Events of 1962, the very year in which her book appeared, seemingly affirmed Roberta Wohlstetter’s analysis. Soviet efforts to position a nuclear-strike force in Cuba caught the Kennedy administration completely unawares. Writing in Foreign Affairs three years after the fact, she described it as a case of déjà vu. Once again, in October 1962 as in December 1941, there had been plenty of signals, but also an abundance of noise. Thanks to advances in aerial photography, notably from the U-2 spy plane, and the nuanced response of President Kennedy, the United States managed to recover from its initial surprise and avoid World War III. She found it “comforting to know that we do learn from one crisis to the next.” Muting that comfort was her conviction that “the future doubtless holds many more shocks and attempts at surprise,” with no reason to assume that next time the United States would be so lucky.8

  Strategy Precluded

  Wohlstetter’s analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis mirrors her analysis of the attack on Pearl Harbor in this additional respect: in both cases, she imputed strategic significance to actions that occur in the realm of tactics. Among adherents to the Wohlstetter School, this tendency is pervasive: a preoccupation with tactical matters—relabeled “strategic” to reflect the involvement of nuclear weapons or long-range delivery systems—supplants serious strategic analysis. So Wohlstetter begins her account of the Cuban Missile Crisis on August 31, 1962, when Senator Kenneth Keating of New York charged that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba, thereby posing a threat to the United States. (The Kennedy administration dismissed Keating’s charge.) She evinces no interest in events occurring prior to that date. In her account, therefore, CIA-engineered efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro, collapsing the year before at the Bay of Pigs, go unmentioned. So too does the Cuban Revolution, its origins, and its purposes.

  Implicitly, for Wohlstetter, the Cuban Missile Crisis came out of nowhere, making it unnecessary for her to ask if ill-advised US policies prior to 1962 might have laid the basis for the surprise that Castro and his allies in the Kremlin sprung in the autumn of that year. By extension, that same presumption foreclosed any need to consider whether Washington’s vulnerability to surprise might stem less from lapses in US intelligence than from misguided US behavior toward Cuba. In framing the problem as a failure to distinguish between signals and noise, Wohlstetter disregarded the possibility that the problem might be one that the United States had brought upon itself—decades of meddling and manipulation producing unhappy consequences to which policymakers remained willfully blind. In short, for her, strategy as such—how Washington had defined US interests in Cuba and the prerogatives it had claimed in pursuing those interests—evaded serious scrutiny.

  Much the same applies to her account of Pearl Harbor. Preoccupied with explaining the origins of the Japanese attack on December 7, Wohlstetter evinces no interest in assessing the origins of the Pacific War. She pays no attention whatsoever to developments prior to June 17, 1940, while focusing in detail only on events that occurred in November and December 1941. Again, strategy as such—how Washington defined its interests in the Asia-Pacific and the policies that put the United States on a collision course with Japan, beginning with the promulgation of the Open Door Notes in 1899–1900 and culminating in the summer of 1940 with the imposition of economic sanctions to punish Japan—simply does no
t qualify as relevant.9

  To characterize the Pearl Harbor attack as a strategic failure—whether of “warning” or “decision,” to cite the subtitle of Wohlstetter’s book—is to abuse and misconstrue the word “strategy.” Washington’s actual strategic failure, its inability to persuade Japan to accept America’s requirements for an Asian-Pacific order by means short of war, had become evident long before the first bombs fell on Oahu. When open hostilities finally erupted, the particulars of time and place may have come as a surprise; that the United States was already engaged in a winner-take-all contest with the Japanese did not. To impute strategic significance to the events of December 7, 1941, therefore, serves no purpose other than to insulate basic US policy from critical attention. This members of the Wohlstetter School consistently do—whether the issue at hand is the origins of the Pacific War, the Cold War, or the War on Terror, their fixation with the perils lying just ahead obviates any need to consider whether the United States itself may have had a hand in creating those dangers.