Hi FaultLine; Re Nuclear Missile Defense... The NYTimes' biased and sensationalistic (as usual) article misses the point. (What were these guys saying about the Afghanistan war 24 hours before Mazar-i-sharif fell?)
Re: "In the nearly 40-year fight over building weapons to shoot down incoming missiles, the proponents have generally fallen into two camps, the dreamers and the schemers." Okay, the guy admits that he's going to write a biased article right from the first paragraph. A better (nonjudgemental) way of putting this would be to say the proponents for nuclear missile defense have fallen into two camps, those interested in the potential applications of the technology in the long term, and those interested in what the technology can provide in the immediate future. Instead, he's classified everybody on one side of the debate as either "dreamers" or "schemers" rhyming as if he were Cassius Clay before a boxing match. Why do you read this paper?
Re: "That time around, the schemers had it right." Then why is he calling them schemers?
Re: "The impermeable superdome was a technological fantasy ..." So is 95% of my daily life, to someone from 20 years ago. Re: "... and one that could have bankrupted the national treasury." This is a rather empty accusation. When only what, 1% of the population is even capable of being trained to become "rocket scientists", how is it possible to bankrupt the nation? Obviously someone made some estimates and they took it from there.
Re: "Even if it had worked, it would have been dangerous, because it would have encouraged the illusion that we could win a nuclear war." If it "worked" then it wouldn't have been an "illusion" that we could "win a nuclear war".
Re: "The prospect of an American missile defense system did, however, help goad the Soviets into mutual cuts in our nuclear arsenals." If the American plan were militarily impossible, then how did it goad the Soviets into doing anything? Did we fool the Soviets into thinking that something impossible could be possible? Did the NYTimes have better understanding of nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union? And if this guy is such an expert, then why did he later write: "we amateurs" with respect to nuclear strategy? Oh, and if we got what we wanted out of it, why is the NYTimes complaining about it? If this is the kind of result that the "schemers" and "dreamers" get, shouldn't we be letting them run the show? Why use the pejorative "schemers"?
Re: "The concept at the heart of nuclear strategy is deterrence, which means that our ability to obliterate the enemy prevents him from doing something rash." Actually, MAD is the ability to obliterate the enemy's leadership even if he turns out to be able to obliterate our own leadership. They only generalized the concept of "leadership" to "nation" because nukes were very powerful but not terribly well directed. As it turns out, we were able to "assure destruction" of the Taliban leadership without having to resort to nukes. If they'd been able to "assure destruction" of the US's leadership, well, my guess is that the US wouldn't have bombed the bejesus out of them.
Re: "It is generally accepted that our nuclear strength deterred the Soviet Union from raining nuclear warheads on America. But preventing Armageddon was not the main purpose of our nuclear forces. The foremost purpose was to stop the Soviet Union from sending its superior non-nuclear armies into Western Europe. By deliberately leaving open the possibility that we would go nuclear if Soviet tanks crossed the Fulda Gap into West Germany, we deterred the Soviets from beginning a conventional war in Europe. Would we in fact have risked decimating the planet to save Europe? Maybe not, but the Soviets could never be sure." I don't think this is true. And certainly a major part of Reagan's military strategy was to improve the conventional war making capability of NATO in Europe.
Re: "The schemers in the current debate fear that any nation with a few nuclear weapons can do to us what we did to the Soviets — deter us from projecting our vastly superior conventional forces into the world." This is exactly correct, except for the use of the pejorative, "schemers".
Re: "This could mean Iraq or North Korea or Iran, ..." Probably correct, but that's because these nations are not already ballistic missile nuclear warhead equipped nations.
Re: "... but it most importantly means China." Not the case. China is easily technologically capable of building missiles that would get around the simple NMD systems the US is talking about right now. By the way, China doesn't have to threaten the US with nukes in order to get an "MAD" bye from us. All they have to do is be able to threaten our allies in the area, South Korea and Japan.
Re: "The real logic of missile defense, to these advocates, is not to defend but to protect our freedom to attack. ... ''The logic of missile defense is to make the stakes of power projection compatible with the risks of power projection,'' says Keith B. Payne, a deterrence theory expert and an ardent supporter of missile defense. Missile defense, in other words, is not about defense. It's about offense." This is true, but it's in the nature of military forces that attack and defense are united. And there's nothing wrong with being able to attack, if it's used rightfully. If he's been reading the papers recently he probably noticed that our military's ability to attack resulted in cheering crowds in Kabul, the capital city of the country we attacked.
Re: "There was a funny misfire of a debate about deterrence earlier this year. President Bush, arguing the need for missile defense, suggested that a rogue state might not be restrained by the fear of nuclear annihilation, the way the Soviet Union was. Critics pounced gleefully ..." This misses the point. The fact is that MAD is not (and was not) a 100% reliable solution to international relations. MAD is not an objective of military strategy, it's a trap that military strategies fall into. The ideal is to have the ability to kill the enemy without him having the ability to kill you. This is military strategy as executed beautifully in Afghanistan just now.
Re: "Unless we happened to have our tank divisions parked at the outskirts of their capital, prepared to move in. Under those circumstances, even a semi-rational megalomaniac like Saddam Hussein might just decide to launch whatever he had. Or, more to the point, we couldn't be quite sure he wouldn't. If Saddam had possessed a nuclear missile in 1991, could we have persuaded such a broad coalition to drive him from Kuwait?" If Iraq had had nuclear tipped missiles, they could have used them to threaten to nuke Israel. How would that have changed the Kuwait war? My guess is that the war would still have gone on, but we wouldn't have targetted places in Baghdad where Saddam and his relatives, were likely to be living. And our soldiers would have taken their nuclear war training considerably more seriously. But we still would have driven them from Kuwait. The threat of MAD is between the leadership of the countries, it is only to the citizens indirectly.
Re: "Or, if the Taliban had a single missile capable of pulverizing Washington, would we have been so quick to go into Afghanistan?" This is exactly correct. With Iraq, all we wanted to do was to get them out of Kuwait. MAD never had a big problem with fights on the periphery. We could, and did, fight the Communists in all kinds of brush wars, but we never militarily threatened the existence of their goverment (or leadership) at home. In other words, if the Taliban had had nuclear weapons the people of Afghanistan would still be under the thumb of the Taliban.
Re: "You won't hear President Bush saying so, but the scenario that preoccupies many of those in and around the Pentagon is this one: Taiwan decides to risk a climactic break with mainland China. The mainland responds with a military tantrum." This is pure, unadulterated fantasy BS. Re: "America would like to defend the island democracy against the Communist giant — but we are backed down by hints that Beijing cares enough about this issue to launch nuclear missiles." The fantasy continues: If it were possible to make the US back down by "hints", then why is it that the Russians weren't able to prevent us from giving weapons to the Afghans? All they would have had to do is "hint". Re "American voters may or may not support a conventional war for Taiwanese independence; they're much less likely to support one that risks the obliteration of our cities." True. Re: "Ah, but if we have an insurance policy, a battery of anti-missile weapons sufficient (in theory) to neutralize China's two dozen nuclear missiles, we would feel freer to go to war over Taiwan." This is wrong in a bunch of ways. First, he's giving a count for Chinese nuclear capability as it exists today. China only has about 20 Deng Feng 5 ICBMs at this time. But they're working on designs for 3 more missiles with the range to hit the US (some of which have already flown), and since it will undoubtedly take a decade to design and build an NMD capability it's also true that China will be able to hit us hard at that time. And besides, most of China's nuclear capability is short range (they already have 536 nuclear capable missiles in their arsenal), but long enough to threaten our ally Japan, and, of course, to threaten Taiwan itself. See: softwar.net In other words, he's confusing the current situation with the one that NMD is intended to deploy into. No, the US isn't planning to bomb Peking into submission. (And anyway, why would be bomb China? What have they done recently that's so horrible? Copy CDs? What amazes me is how well China puts up with our poking at her air defenses.)
Re: "Personally, if missile defense is about defense, I can imagine better ways to spend $100 billion. Defending our porous seaports against a nuclear device in a tugboat or shipping container seems like a more urgent investment." Tugboats misses the point about MAD. Shipping container bombs are about terrorism. The author is confusing tactics of terror with tactics of military force. Afghanistan is a great example of this. The US gave an ultimatum to Afghanistan to hand over their terrorists or face US military force. Similarly, Osama bin Laden threatened the US with "or else". The rest of the world was given a chance to line up on one side or the other. Line up with the US or face B-1 bombers. Line up with the Taliban or face "or else". It was obvious that B-1 bombers could put a hurt in your day, but the "or else" was a bit shakey. So the world lined up with the US. This is a perfect example of why overt military force is far more useful than threats of terrorism.
The problem with cruise missiles (and ICBMs) is that even if you know exactly when they're going to arrive you can't do much about it but dig deeper. With shipping containers, all you have to do is watch your ports more carefully. Sure it's possible that one could slip by, and hey, we already lost our virginity at the WTC. And in the final analysis, the destruction witnessed in NYC is nothing compared to what the US is capable of doing on a moment's notice anywhere. That "moment's notice" is important. The WTC attack was planned from years ago. The same would apply to a shipping crate bomb. What would the enemy do, put bombs in shipping containers months in advance of an expected show down? And then, if they the US did back down, would they not explode them? These terror weapons are only useful for ongoing wars, they are useless as a threat. They're like ICBMs that take 18 months to reach target, and in the human world of military force, that's too slow.
Re: "One is whether missile defense makes it likelier we will get into a war that is not essential to our national interests, or that we will move more easily from containing bad regimes to ousting them ..." This is an argument in favor of more situations like Iraq. It would have been far, far, far kinder of the US to have put Saddam out of power 10 years ago.
Re: "... and whether as part of such a conflict we may find ourselves playing nuclear chicken." Already playing that game. Iraq was well known to be trying to build a bomb. So was the Taliban, for that matter. And there's plenty of rumors of loose nukes floating around the post USSR world. But rumors are not credible as threats. If they were, we'd be paying extortion to every imaginative tin-pot dictator on the planet. Humans simply are not very afraid of "or else".
Re: "The other is whether missile defense might lead to a new arms-building competition." That's right! Arms become obsolete. If they didn't, bows and arrows would still be state of the art and the US would be at a significant disadvantage. Re: "If it is true that China cares enough about Taiwan to threaten nuclear war — that is, if China's ability to deter us with nuclear weapons really matters to Chinese leaders — then it stands to reason they will work hard to protect their deterrent." There are several things wrong about this. First, he's hanging a heck of a lot of argument on the concept of China's "ability to deter us". Why isn't he looking at it from the other way around? Shouldn't China be questioning whether we'd be willing to nuke them for invading Taiwan? And why is it that China would want to invade Taiwan, anyway? Taiwan doesn't (yet) want to become a part of China. Do they think that having another vicious civil war would be a good way to help their country grow? Do they think that threatening to nuke Taiwan would cause Taiwan to toe the line? If they do, they're probably in for a little surprise. Humans are notorious for refusing to knuckle under to improbable threats. What do they do if the US threatens to nuke China if they nuke Taiwan? As far as conventional threats to Taiwan, what are they going to do with an airforce that will be easily destroyed by Taiwan's F-16s? Will they go back to Mao's plan to have their army swim over on a calm day with self-inflated swim bladders? There's a reason that Hitler never managed to cross the English Channel (21 miles), and he had equal or better aircraft technology, do they think that crossing the straits of Taiwan (100 miles) is going to be easy for the Chinese? Re: "However they do that, by manufacturing more missiles or putting multiple warheads on each launcher or by a shift in strategy ..." China is already doing all this, why blame it on NMD? Re: "... a Chinese buildup may well influence the behavior of China's wary nuclear neighbor India. What India does in turn alarms its nuclear neighbor Pakistan. If you're following the news, you know that India and Pakistan are at this moment on the verge of war." China is already doing this, why blame it on NMD?
In other words, this is just another useless editorial from a guy who's squeamish about military force. These are exactly the guys you don't want making your military equipment decisions for you. His whole argument can be reduced to the concept that if the US doesn't develop new weapons the world would be a safer place. Perhaps an understanding of Richardson's "equations of war" will help:
prenhall.com
-- Carl |
