[Peace-discuss] The death of deterrence?

[Morton K. Brussel]

An article by Gabriel Kolko worth considering, even if one can be  
somewhat skeptical of its pronouncements. But I' fear that the Bush  
cabel won't, if what we read about their plans for Iran come true.  -- 
mkb

The death of deterrence
By Gabriel Kolko

The United States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years  
before other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the  
1990s, deterrence theory worked - nations knew that if they used the  
awesome bomb, they were likely to be devastated in the riposte.

Despite such examples of brinkmanship as the Cuban missile crisis and  
numerous threats of nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers,  
by and large the few nations that possessed the

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bomb concluded that nuclear war was not worth its horrendous
risks. Today, by contrast, weapons of mass destruction or precision  
and power are within the capacity of dozens of nations either to  
produce or purchase. With the multiplicity of weapons now available,  
deterrence theory is increasingly irrelevant, and the equations of  
military power that existed in the period after World War II no  
longer hold.

This process began in Korea after 1950, where the war ended in a  
standoff despite the nominal vast superiority of the United States'  
military power, and the Pentagon discovered that great space combined  
with guerrilla warfare was more than a match for it in Vietnam, where  
the US was defeated. Both wars caused the US military and  
establishment strategists to reflect on the limits of high-tech  
warfare, and for a time it seemed as if appropriate lessons would be  
learned and costly errors not repeated.

The conclusion drawn from these major wars should have been that  
there were decisive limits to US military and political power, and  
that the United States should drastically tailor its foreign policy  
and cease intervening anywhere it chose to. In short, it was  
necessary to accept the fact that it could not guide the world as it  
wished to. But such a conclusion, justified by experience, was far  
too radical for either of the United States' two main political  
parties to embrace fully, and military contractors never ceased  
promising the ultimate new weapon. America's leaders and military  
establishment in the wake of September 11, 2001, argued that  
technology would rescue the country from more political failures. But  
such illusions - fed by the technological fetishism that is the  
hallmark of their civilization - led to the Iraq debacle.

There has now been a qualitative leap in technology that makes all  
inherited conventional wisdom, and war as an instrument of political  
policy, utterly irrelevant, not just to the US but to any other  
nation that embarks upon it.

Technology is now moving much faster than the diplomatic and  
political resources or will to control its inevitable consequences -  
not to mention traditional strategic theories. Hezbollah has far  
better and more lethal rockets than it had a few years ago, and US  
experts believe that the Iranians compelled the group to keep in  
reserve the far more powerful and longer-range cruise missiles it  
already possesses. Iran itself possesses large quantities of these  
missiles, and US experts believe they may very well be capable of  
destroying aircraft-carrier battle groups. All attempts to devise  
defenses against these rockets, even the most primitive, have been  
expensive failures, and anti-missile technology everywhere has  
remained, after decades of effort and billions of dollars,  
unreliable. [1]

Even more ominous, the US Army has just released a report that light- 
water reactors - which 25 nations, from Armenia to Slovenia, already  
have and are covered by no existing arms-control treaties - can be  
used to obtain near-weapons-grade plutonium easily and cheaply. [2]  
Within a few years, many more countries than the present 10 or so -  
the army study thinks Saudi Arabia and even Egypt most likely - will  
have nuclear bombs and far more destructive and accurate rockets and  
missiles.

Weapons-poor fighters will have far more sophisticated guerrilla  
tactics as well as far more lethal equipment, which deprives the  
heavily equipped and armed nations of the advantages of their  
overwhelming firepower, as demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq. The  
battle between a few thousand Hezbollah fighters and a massive, ultra- 
modern Israeli army backed and financed by the US proves this. Among  
many things, the war in Lebanon is a window of the future. The  
outcome suggests that either the Israelis cease their policy of  
destruction and intimidation and accept the political prerequisites  
of peace with the Arab world, or they too will eventually be  
devastated by cheaper and more accurate missiles and nuclear weapons  
in the hands of at least two Arab nations and Iran.

What is now occurring in the Middle East reveals lessons just as  
relevant in the future to festering problems in East Asia, Latin  
America, Africa and elsewhere. Access to nuclear weapons, cheap  
missiles of greater portability and accuracy, and the inherent limits  
of all anti-missile systems will set the context for whatever crises  
arise in North Korea, Iran, Taiwan or Venezuela. Trends that increase  
the limits of technology in warfare are not only applicable to  
relations between nations but also to groups within them - ranging  
from small conspiratorial entities up the scale of size to large  
guerrilla movements. The events in the Middle East have proved that  
warfare has changed dramatically everywhere, and US hegemony can now  
be successfully challenged throughout the globe.

Iranian missile exercise
US power has been dependent to a large extent on the country's highly  
mobile navy. But ships are increasingly vulnerable to missiles, and  
while they are a long way from finished they are more and more  
circumscribed tactically and, ultimately, strategically. There is a  
greater balance-of-power militarily, the re-emergence of a kind of  
deterrence that means all future wars will be increasingly protracted  
and expensive - and very costly politically to politicians who  
blunder into wars with illusions they will be short and decisive.  
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his defense minister, Amir Peretz, are  
very likely to lose power in Israel, and destroying Lebanon will not  
save their political futures. This too is a message not likely to be  
lost on politicians.

To this extent, what is emerging is a new era of more equal rivals.  
Enforceable universal disarmament of every kind of weapon would be  
far preferable. But short of this currently unattainable goal, this  
emergence of a new equivalency is a vital factor leading less to  
peace in the real meaning of that term than perhaps to greater  
prudence. Such restraint could be an important factor leading to less  
war.

We live with 21st-century technology and also with primitive  
political attitudes, assorted nationalisms, and cults of heroism and  
irrationality existing across the political spectrum and the power  
spectrum. The world will destroy itself unless it realistically  
confronts the new technological equations. Israel now must accept  
this reality, and if it does not develop the political skills  
required to make serious compromises, this new equation warrants that  
it will be liquidated even as it rains destruction on its enemies.

This is the message of the conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank, and  
Lebanon - to use only the examples in today's papers. Walls are no  
longer protection for the Israelis - one shoots over them. Their much- 
vaunted Merkava tanks have proved highly vulnerable to new weapons  
that are becoming more and more common and are soon likely to be in  
Palestinian hands as well. At least 20 of the tanks were seriously  
damaged or destroyed in the recent conflict with Hezbollah.

Israeli missiles target Beirut
The US war in Iraq is a political disaster against the guerrillas - a  
half-trillion US dollars spent there and in Afghanistan have left the  
United States on the verge of defeat in both places. The "shock and  
awe" military strategy has utterly failed save to produce contracts  
for weapons makers - indeed, it has also contributed heavily to de  
facto US economic bankruptcy.

The administration of President George W Bush has deeply alienated  
more of America's nominal allies than has any US government in modern  
times. The Iraq war and subsequent conflict in Lebanon have left its  
Middle East policy in shambles and made Iranian strategic  
predominance even more likely, all of which was predicted before the  
Iraq invasion. Its coalitions, as Thomas Ricks shows in his wordy but  
utterly convincing and critical book Fiasco: The American Military  
Adventure in Iraq, are finished. Its sublime confidence in and  
reliance on the power of its awesome weaponry are a crucial cause of  
its failure, although we cannot minimize its peremptory hubris and  
nationalist myopia.

The United States, whose costliest political and military adventures  
since 1950 have ended in failure, now must face the fact that the  
technology for confronting its power is rapidly becoming widespread  
and cheap. It is within the reach of not merely states but of  
relatively small groups of people. Destructive power is now virtually  
"democratized".

If the challenges of producing a realistic concept of the world that  
confronts the mounting dangers and limits of military technology  
seriously are not resolved soon, recognizing that a decisive equality  
of military power is today in the process of being reimposed, there  
is nothing more than wars and mankind's eventual destruction to look  
forward to.

Notes
1. Mark Williams, "The Missiles of August: The Lebanon War and the  
Democratization of Missile Technology", Technology Review  
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology), August 16, 2006.

2. Henry Sokolski, ed, Taming the Next Set of Strategic Weapons  
Threats, US Army Strategic Studies Institute, June 2006, pp 33ff, 86.

Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. His latest  
book is The Age of War. He wrote this article for Japan Focus.

(Copyright 2004-2006 JapanFocus )