The Reagan Restoration

Reagan’s “first hundred days,” probably because they created the illusion of a relatively clean slate, have provided an irresistible occasion for advice-giving, particularly in foreign and military policy. Some advice has been intended as a calling card by eager careerists; some has been more remote, though not necessarily more detached and objective.

These remarks are decidedly not intended to obtain a job offer from the Reagan administration. For I argue for profound reductions of defense spending, which must be based on deep cuts in our force structures, both nuclear and conventional, and in turn on severe curtailments in our foreign commitments and worldwide deployments.

This must seem a peculiarly inhospitable season for suggesting deep cuts in our national security efforts. Even those who want to set limits ask only how steep an increase should be; they take for granted some share of the national product, some diversion from other purposes, public or private. Former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird wants a “buildup” rather than a “binge,” and he has been praised for his moderation. Laird is thinking of a mere 6 percent annual increase in defense spending authority after inflation. Others have been flaunting scarier figures: Senator John Tower, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wants 9 to 13 percent annual increases above inflation. Reagan advisor Fred Iklé envisions defense budgets, not so long from now, of a trillion dollars a year.

But the question is not “how much?” or even “how much is enough?” — the supposedly definitive query — but “enough for what?” and “how much can we stand?”

The Reagan administration’s defense program does not, of course, accomplish the moves that I favor. It does not cut defense spending. It does not reduce force structures, either strategic nuclear or general purpose. It does not limit commitments to armed intervention and let America’s alliance systems wither away. It does not attenuate the linkages that implicate us in regional conflict. It does not revise national strategies to minimize the chance of our own involvement in war, particularly the escalatory linkages that expose our homeland to nuclear attack. It does not revise those counterforce strategies which might precipitate nuclear war in crises, and which therefore destabilize our strategic nuclear balance with the Soviet Union.

On the contrary, the Reagan administration will further the drift to strategic counterforce by developing and deploying the MX missile, but without solving the notorious “basing mode” problem. (Something there is that doesn’t love a nuke; even the conservative Western governors don’t want one in their backyard.) Therefore, we’ll probably end up with the worst of all worlds; the MX missile with its outsized yield and super-accuracy and multiple MIRV-ing, but stuffed into fixed silos or planted in shelter fields that would be a “sponge” for Soviet missiles.

This administration will expand the Rapid Deployment Force. This is a tangible implementation of Jimmy Carter’s Doctrine, which originally inspired the waggish comment, “He speaks stickly but carries a big soft.” Now, apparently, we’ll carry the stick, too.

And eventually, despite his campaign protestations, Reagan will probably install some form of conscription, when the planners discover that you can’t “fund” an armed establishment of 2.1 million people with manpower of sufficient quality in the face of a declining population group and a competing private economy; so we’ll get the quasi-enslavement of a generation. We sometimes forget that the levée en masse is a liberal idea. Just recently we read Leslie Gelb, the Politico-Military Director in Carter’s State Department, coaching Reagan: “If I could choose one issue on which you could make your mark in history, and along the way send a signal of strength and determination abroad, nothing would be better than the draft.” (New York Times Magazine, January 18, 15

1981.) The Reagan administration has requested, in defense obligational authority for fiscal year 1982, $222 billion. That is even higher than Carter’s bogus legacy for the same fiscal year—a budget for a year his administration would not have to face. It is also 14.6 percent (above a hopefully stated inflation rate of 10.2 percent) more than what finally turned out to be the FY 1981 defense authorization of $178 billion. No doubt Reagan will have to come back to Congress for a hefty supplemental allowance for 1982, too. We can also make some projections for the years beyond (using a continuing rate of inflation of 10 percent and assuming 7 percent real annual increases): FY 1983, $264 billion; FY 1984, $309 billion; FY 1985, $361 billion; FY 1986, $423 billion.

Of the total of $222 billion for 1982, strategic nuclear forces will take “only” about $45 billion. General purpose forces will take about $177 billion, of which NATO will account for $109 billion, Asia $37 billion, and other parts of the world $31 billion.

The Soviet threat

It is “the Soviet threat” that both pushes and justifies almost every category of our defense effort, whether it is the central strategic balance, our major alliance systems, our military arrangements in regions such as the Middle East, or our global naval deployments. But the facts of the Soviet challenge are not as interesting or important as the logic. We must presume that our foreign and military policies are “rational,” even though policymakers might be misguided or ignorant. Therefore, we should be concerned with the connection that might run, from Soviet politics and Russian character and Marxist ideology, to pressures on our regional allies and strategic points, to imputed danger to our own territory, cities, people, property, economic health, and way of life. In other words, the payoff question is not “what?” but “so what?”

Some would say the very question shows hopeless naivete. But I believe the unexpressed premises are more important than the surface facts—even if we grant that they are the facts. In other words, you could conceivably believe the worst that the native American right wing, the emigrés, and the reactionary historians say about Soviet leadership—its motives, goals, dreams, even what it spends on arms—and still come out with a noninterventionist position. Ironically, the worse the threat, the smaller the proper response: If things are really as bad as the hawks represent, then we need to put some distance between ourselves and the next war.

How can I say this? Unlike most critics, I don’t try to nitpick the data customarily offered in official studies of the Soviet challenge. In particular, I have never been overly impressed by the “ruble war”—attempts by defense critics such as Congressman Les Aspin and former CIA analyst Arthur Macy Cox to impugn the CIA’s methodology for stating Soviet arms expenditures. The CIA prices Soviet spending as if the Russians had to procure their manpower, equipment, and technology at our prices. Of course, the Soviets hold down their actual manpower costs by con-scripting their population at the most abject rates of pay. But that doesn’t invalidate the pricing of the Russian army in U.S. terms. As in all costing, you have to consider what the exercise is for. In this case, in order to be efficiently compared and intelligibly evaluated, the resources devoted to defense by both sides must be expressed in some common denominator, and one that is relevant to us.

Other defense critics cite the “legitimate” motives the Soviets might have for their military moves: among other things, their fear of NATO’s impressive force buildup, Chinese pressure on their borders, and the new generation of American strategic weapons. Lately, the obvious excuses have been wearing thin, and doves have had to be more ingenious in imagining, or inventing, appropriate motives. That doesn’t mean these mitigating judgments make no sense—only that I wouldn’t want to found my case for disengagement and arms reductions on such benign diagnoses.

A better point of entry into the argument is not the facts, or even the motives, of Soviet arms acquisition and expansionist behavior, but the linkage our leaders forge between these disturbing acts and some “necessary” American military response. It is this linkage that needs to be cut. The United States has other options, in the form of hedging moves to blunt the effects of challenges, that are better than preparing for or precipitating war. In other words, it takes two to make a threat.

But in fact there is a lot to restrain the Russians even without the active opposition of the United States. First, the Russians can’t do whatever they want in the world, any more than we can. One obstacle is simply the existence of other countries and peoples. We needn’t dwell on this. To pacify Afghanistan, for example, the Soviet occupying forces must literally run over the freedom fighters and their sympathizers with tanks. There are a thousand times more Afghans than Soviet tanks.

Another factor undoubtedly restrains Soviet expansion. A would-be aggressor doesn’t invade a neighboring country, let alone attack its major adversary, simply because the odds are that it can win. There is such a thing as the calculus of costs and benefits. Our apprehensive defense analysts should think before they measure.

Some propositions about war and spending

Defense spending and war are related, but not in simple ways, and it is well not to confuse them. It is just not true that big defense budgets and “arms races” cause wars—the thesis of the doves. And certainly the opposite is not true, either: that you get “peace through strength”—the thesis of the hawks—though of course, at the limit, you must try to deter pure nasty aggression against your own country. There is no particular correlation, one way or the other, at least over the interesting range of the problem. Arms don’t cause war any more than they insure peace. They are something like the handguns in the propaganda of the National Rifle Association: Arms don’t kill people, aggressors do (though it is somewhat harder to do with bare hands).

Just as, four years ago, the incoming members of the Carter administration were labeled variously as “McGovernites” or “Trilateralists,” the early Reagan administration was billed as a battle between the Nixon-Ford retreads (or, I suppose, you’d have to call this bunch “re-runs”), who were cast as the moderates, and the authentic Kamikazes (the foreign policy fanatics, the suicidal hawks).

It hasn’t turned out that way. Even Georgi Arbatov, Brezhnev’s chief America expert, predicted that Reagan would move to the political center and that the Soviet Union could cut an arms control deal with him. The real point is that Reagan can hardly go far in any direction. You don’t have to be too sanguine about the Reagan advisors to reject the more fanciful or hysterical prognostications. What is missing from those criticisms is a theory of how foreign policy gets made. A proper theory tells us that the Reagan administration, no less than its predecessors, is caught between the upper and nether millstones: its foreign policy “objectives,” which are really not that different from Carter’s, and the “constraints,” which are also not that different, including the tax revolt, the abhorrence of inflation, and the resistance to the draft.

It might seem strained to invoke the lack of public support for an ambitious foreign policy. After all, this is the early eighties, not the late sixties. We’re supposed to have recovered from the Vietnam “trauma,” or “syndrome,” or whatever. In fact, so rare are overt demonstrations against the military that the odd confrontation, as when a thousand women marched on the Pentagon last November, is reported by the Washington Post in the Style section, not the news, and the headline reads “A ‘60s-Style Protest”—as if it were a fashion collection or a retrospective at the Modern Museum, not a serious political expression. No matter: The important constraints are implicit in the policy process, and as such they are still operative.

Avoiding war

A funny thing happened to our nuclear strategy on the way to the nineteen-eighties. Never a pure example of city-busting second-strike deterrence—the popular image of “MAD” or “Mutual Assured Destruction”—it took a more decisive turn with the Nixon-Kissinger State of the World messages of the early 1970s and the Schlesinger Doctrine of January 1974. These strategic statements recommended intermediate nuclear options between total abstinence and a spasm of retaliation. They implied the use of some fraction of our strategic nuclear force to attack a portion of the enemy’s target system consisting of military installations, logistical complexes, and—to put first things last—missile silos and command bunkers. They contemplated nuclear war-fighting and even war-winning, and they told us how to define “victory.”

PD-59, the famous leaked presidential directive of the Carter administration in July 1980, furthered the shift in our nuclear targeting. In a sense, it was not the last strategic act of the outgoing Carter administration, but the first of the incoming Reagan administration.

But this gravitation to counterforce is not so strange or arbitrary. It is virtually compelled by America’s present commitment to its alliance systems, especially NATO. We have always unabashedly depended on the threat of our first use of nuclear weapons, and our continuous escalation from battlefield nukes to the final use of our strategic intercontinental weapons. That is called “extended deterrence,” and in its practical consequences it differs sharply from the mere deterrence of direct nuclear attacks on our homeland. Extended deterrence is the omnipresent, though spectral, guest at the strategic banquet.

It isn’t unworthy for the Reagan administration to strive for the protection of allies—though it may become unwise. And it isn’t unintelligent to try to achieve this protection through extended nuclear deterrence—though this may turn out to be infeasible. It is the logical extension of these objectives that is troublesome.

The “logic” of extended deterrence and counterforce is full of ironies. The first is that many self-styled defense critics, including those of the liberal left, are as firm in supporting our defense of Western Europe as are the hawks (perhaps more, since many of the hawks are closet unilateralists who don’t give much for allies); yet these critics are also supporting—implicitly, or “objectively” as the Marxists are fond of saying—preemptive nuclear attack against the Soviet Union.

For protection of Western Europe requires reliable conventional defense or credible extended deterrence; indeed, as we shall see, it probably requires both. Extended deterrence in turn requires the virtually assured invulnerability of our own society to Soviet attack—not to be confused with the invulnerability of our nuclear weapons—since no one really believes we would risk tens of millions of American lives to spread our protective mantle over Western Europe and other parts of the world. We would have to provide that invulnerability through both our defensive and our offensive strategic systems.

But, first of all, the attempt to acquire such a defensive capability is very demanding. It would require a vast program of shelters and evacuation, as well as measures such as area anti-ballistic missiles or laser or particle beam weapons in space, air defense against Soviet bombers and cruise missiles, and anti-submarine warfare against Soviet missile submarines. And these measures wouldn’t even work; the extension of Soviet offense is always easier than the extension of our defense.

Societal invulnerability would also, rather understanably, require us to keep in reserve enough surviving nuclear weapons, enough sheer nuclear megatonnage and delivery vehicles, after any of the earlier stages of a protracted nuclear exchange, to threaten counter-city strikes to deter Soviet attacks on our own cities, so that the enemy would never think that he could threaten our cities and exact a political price, including our surrender.

But what is the purpose of the third requisite for extended deterrence specified by the nuclear hawks: the acquisition of counterforce—specifically “hard target kill capability” (the nuggety phrase that marks “where it’s at” in the current strategic debate)? This would enable us to execute a “damage limiting” strike against the Soviets’ time-urgent nuclear weapons—that is, primarily their missiles in silos.

theory is that we must be able to disarm our enemy, so he can’t hit our cities effectively, while reserving enough of our retaliatory forces so he wouldn’t want to hit our cities. The hawks declare, rather innocently, that we must have our own hard target kill capability in order to “neutralize” the Soviets’ hard target kill capability. But what does “neutralization” mean? Surely not simply matching our opponents symmetrically, because that would be even more meaningless than the “perceived essential equivalence” which counterforce domination is partially intended to supplant. Rather, it must be part of our intention to strike preemptively.

The “preemptive attack”

I’m aware that “preemptive attack” is one of the dirtiest words in the strategic lexicon. (And, mind you, I didn’t even say “preventive war,” which is even dirtier — at least preemptive attack is a contingent concept and would occur only in an already ripening confrontation with the Soviet Union.) The word is never-never used by euphemistic American war planners, except to describe the intent of the other side, something we uniquely have to defend against. But dirty or not, we had better examine the logic of preemptive attack. Because, in order to have a nuclear war, someone has to start it; and because the objective fear of our — or their — preemptive strike destabilizes the strategic nuclear balance in a crisis.

It is not well understood that counterforce and a first nuclear strike are mutually dependent. A first strike implies counterforce, since the only initial attack that “makes sense” is a damage-limiting strike against the enemy’s nuclear forces, not his cities, where the missiles would be largely wasted from a strategic standpoint. And counterforce implies first strike — a preemptive attack — because a second strike against the enemy’s missiles is useless to the extent that our missiles would hit empty holes, since we wouldn’t know which silos are still full.

Admittedly, if we concede some rather bizarre scenarios, and if we accept some rather delicately poised assumptions about the surviving numbers of our own missiles and the residual numbers of unfired Soviet missiles — then perhaps we would have to grant that the hawks were at least sincere, though not infallible, in their representation that second-strike counterforce was a sensible mission. (Indeed, that is the peculiar “attraction” of the MX missile — highly accurate, very potent, and multiply MIRVed — in its mobile or multiple basing mode.) But what these hypothetical scenarios really prove is that the mathematics created by new technology endows the initial offense with such impressive advantage that it makes little sense to build expensive counterforce into the force structure and not also adopt a preemptive strike doctrine.

And expensive it is. Hard target kill probability is by far the most demanding of the various missions that are pushing the expansion of our nuclear force to 15,000 or 20,000 “RVs” or reentry vehicles, up from the present total of about 7,000 (excluding the weapons carried by bombers, which the Secretary of Defense so inelegantly calls “the air-breathing leg of the strategic triad”).

Moreover, counterforce creates some nasty contradictions. Even the hawks claim that part of their intention in deploying counterforce weapons is to force our adversary to move to an invulnerable posture, through mobility or dispersion or putting his missiles to sea. That is called achieving “crisis stability.” But then we couldn’t even disarm him and enhance the societal invulnerability we sought in the first place — a necessary condition to insure the credibility and feasibility of our extended deterrence. Crisis stability would actually undermine our deterrence of conventional aggression. Since neither we nor our enemy would have sufficient incentive to escalate to nuclear war, they might seek the verdict of a conventional war, and we might have to accept the verdict of a conventional war!

It isn’t even clear, however, that we could proceed smoothly through counterforce to crisis stability. For even if eventually our hard target kill capability forced the Soviets to go mobile and reestablished crisis stability through the invulnerability of both sides’ nuclear forces, this would be only at the end of a long process that must pass through a phase of acute instability. The Russians, after all, might initially react by planning to launch on warning, or even preemptively.

But if all we want from counterforce is to reestablish crisis stability, which is a worthy objective in the design of our — and their — nuclear forces, then counterforce isn’t even necessary. There are other, better, ways to achieve crisis stability. For it takes only one of the nuclear antagonists to achieve weapons invulnerability for himself, and that is all you need for crisis stability. We can achieve this unilaterally, by cancelling our vulnerable land-based missiles (our Minuteman IIIs) and not replacing them with the mobile MX or anything else. We would move to a diad of strategic nuclear forces, consisting of nuclear submarines — not necessarily a new breed to put alongside the Trident force — and bombers armed with stand-off medium-range air-launched cruise missiles.

An alternative policy

What emerges from this analysis is that we can’t easily or cheaply or conveniently — if at all — provide the requisite conditions for extended deterrence. Of course, the argument proceeds, we could attempt to build a self-sufficient conventional defense that would not depend on escalation, particularly to strategic nuclear weapons. But that would defeat the very economies we hoped to obtain through linking local defense to general deterrence. And it would “decouple” us from Europe, anyway, because we could not credibly threaten escalation to nuclear war.

If this long train of reasoning is correct — if the game of extended deterrence is over and crisis stability alone can be pursued through unilateral and non-threatening and inexpensive moves—then the stage is set for a major alternative policy that has long been ignored: a policy of nonintervention, consisting of war-avoidance and self-reliance. These themes come together in the discussion of our defense of other regions of the world.

“Coupling” is the key to regional defense in a nuclear age. In the case of Europe, this piece of exotica signifies the linkage of our escalatory reponses, from conventional war in the theater, through tactical nuclear weapons, to our strategic nuclear arsenal. Obviously coupling creates stronger—though never perfect—deterrence. The question is whether this linkage is safe in an age of nuclear parity and nuclear plenty. If deterrence fails...then coupling entails the swift and virtually automatic progression to higher levels of violence and wider extensions of conflict. Thus our alliances become transmission belts for war rather than bulwarks against the spread of war.

I believe our circumstances indicate a strategy of compartmentalization of conflict rather than linkage. This means the delegation of defensive tasks to our allies. Most essentially, it also means our acceptance of the results, win or lose. Understandably, people on both sides of the Cold War have trouble appreciating, even imagining, the disintegration of those apparent fixtures, the Warsaw Pact and NATO. But now, with Poland, we can foresee the crumbling of the Eastern bloc. Why should we be so resistant to the notion of the eventual erosion of the Western alliance?

President Reagan inherited the Carter Doctrine, which threatens intervention in the Persian Gulf. Since the Doctrine was announced in January 1980, the United States has acquired a series of stepping stones in the western Indian Ocean. It has also put as many as sixty ships into that Ocean, including two carrier task forces—about a sixth of our Navy.

Reagan has also inherited the Rapid Deployment Force, the 100,000-plus group of Marines, Army, Air Force, and Navy units, mostly for missions in the Persian Gulf. But the salient feature of this force is its irrelevance in the emergencies we are most likely to encounter—such as the Iran-Iraq conflict, where we don’t even know whose side we are on, let alone what to do when we get there. It is the old question, straight out of the children’s poems of A. A. Milne (who seems to have had a profound understanding of diplomacy and bureaucracy): “Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there?” To which the flustered feline replies: “I frightened a little mouse under the chair.”

Paradigm and counter-paradigm

Rather predictably, the Reagan administration has embraced the same paradigm that has shaped the foreign and military policy of the United States since the inception of the Cold War. It has two components: deterrence and alliance. These have been mixed in various proportions over the past 35 years, and the varieties and oscillations have been more than trivial. But the underlying paradigm has scarcely been challenged during that time. Unless this paradigm is substantially altered, we will be condemned to periodic exercises of “brinkmanship,” credibility-enhancing regional confrontations, and limited wars—and the hovering threat of global nuclear destruction.

The essence of a counter-paradigm would be war-avoidance and self-reliance—in a word, nonintervention. Our security and welfare would depend on our simple abstention from regional quarrels and, in the strategic nuclear dimension, on what I would call “finite essential deterrence.” (FED — there’s a nice acronym for security bureaucrats to roll on their tongues, much nicer than MAD.)

These general formulations — war-avoidance and self-reliance—are not mere abstractions. They translate into a particular and tangible set of force structures and major weapons systems, to which in turn defense budgets can be assigned. We could defend our essential security and core values with a much smaller and tighter force structure than we now have. Such a force structure would provide the following general purpose forces: 8 land divisions (6 Army and 2 Marine), 19 tactical air wing equivalents (11 Air Force, 2 Marine which are equal to 4, and 4 Navy), with 6 carrier task forces. With the addition of a diad of strategic nuclear deterrent forces (submarines and stand-off bombers), it would require 1,250,000 men (Army 390,000, Air Force 360,000, Navy 370,000, Marine Corps 130,000). The total defense budget, at the end of a period of adjustment, would be about $100 billion a year, in FY 1982 dollars. In contrast, we have the Reagan administration’s request for FY 1982: 19 land divisions and 45 tactical air wing equivalents, with 13 carrier task forces; 2.1 million men; and $222 billion.

What emerges from this analysis is that — if we put our hearts and minds to it — we could save over half of the defense budget projected by Ronald Reagan. And at the end of a decade, we would be spending $256 billion in inflated dollars, while conservative (not wishful) projections of the Reagan administration’s program would yield a defense budget of over $1 trillion. If we dare to contemplate the cumulative cost of defense over a decade, it would be: our forces $2 trillion; Reagan’s, a cool $5 trillion.

Viewing the Reagan inauguration — the ceremonies, the festivities — you got the feeling of a kind of Restoration, after a period of usurpation. The trouble is that this administration thinks it has received a mandate to restore the prestige and power, as well as the style, of the 1950s — to “make America great again,” in the world as well as among ourselves.

But this invites a cruel dilemma, because no amount of wishing, orating, or posturing will summon the resources for this global task. This dilemma is nothing more or less than the classic situation of the mature empire: it must defend a vast security perimeter that is beset by multiple probes from without, while at home overblown governmental structures, on a rotting base of popular support, run out of fiscal tricks, and thus out of revenues to realize their foreign policy designs.

The beginning of wisdom is to be clear about one’s situation. If we are to accommodate ourselves to a world of diffuse challenges and indecipherable signals — most of them indistinguishable from noise — then we have to de-sensitize ourselves, to blunt our responses rather than sharpen our attitudes. We have to cultivate, at the official national level—though not necessarily at the private personal level—a studious neutrality, almost an indifference, in the literal sense, to opportunities of foreign intervention— even if that intervention promises to set things right.

In the continuing glow of the Reagan Restoration, that might seem strange, even forbidding, advice. But it is the basis for a constructive adjustment of America’s posture to a confused and antagonistic world. ☐

Earl C. Ravenal, a former official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, is now a professor of international relations at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. His most recent book is Never Again: Learning from America’s Foreign Policy Failures.