No More Learning

There is no guarantee, of course, that a slower war would not persist. The First World War could have stopped at any time after the Battle of the Marne. There was plenty of time to think about war aims, to consult the long-range national interest, to reflect on costs and casualties already incurred and the prospect of more to come, and to discuss terms of cessation with the enemy. The gruesome business continued as mechanically as if it had been in the hands of computers (or worse: computers might have been programmed to learn more quickly from experience). One may even suppose it would have been a blessing had all the pain and shock of the four years been compressed within four days. Still, it was terminated. And the victors had no stomach for doing then with bayonets what nuclear weapons could do to the German people today.
Thereisanotherdifference. Inthepastithasusuallybeenthe victors who could do what they pleased to the enemy. War has often been "total war" for the loser. With deadly monotony the Persians, Greeks, or Romans "put to death all men of military age, and sold the women and children into slavery," leaving the defeated territory nothing but its name until new settlers arrived sometime later. But the defeated could not do the same to their victors. The boys could be castrated and sold only after the war had been won, and only on the side that lost it. The power to hurt could be brought to bear only after military strength had achieved victory. The same sequence characterized the great wars of this century; for reasons oftechnology and geography, military force has usually had to penetrate, to exhaust, or to col- lapse opposing military force-to achieve military victory- before it could be brought to bear on the enemy nation itself. The Allies in World War I could not inflict coercive pain and suffering directly on the Germans in a decisive way until they
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could defeat the German army; and the Germans could not coerce the French people with bayonets unless they first beat the Allied troops that stood in their way. With two-dimensional warfare, there is a tendency for troops to confront each other, shielding their own lands while attempting to press into each other's. Small penetrations could not do major damage to the people; large penetrations were so destructive of military orga- nization that they usually ended the military phase of the war.
Nuclear weapons make it possible to do monstrous violence to the enemy without first achieving victory. With nuclear weapons and today's means of delivery, one expects to pen- etrate an enemy homeland without first collapsing his military force. What nuclear weapons have done, or appear to do, is to promote this kind of warfare to first place. Nuclear weapons threaten to make war less military, and are responsible for the loweredstatusof"militaryvictory"atthepresenttime. Victory is no longer a prerequisite for hurting the enemy. And it is no assurance against being terribly hurt. One need not wait until he has won the war before inflicting "unendurable" damages on his enemy. One need not wait until he has lost the war. There was a time when the assurance of victory-false or genuine assurance-could make national leaders not just willing but
sometimes enthusiastic about war. Not now.
Not only can nuclear weapons hurt the enemy before the war
has been won, and perhaps hurt decisively enough to make the military engagement academic, but it is widely assumed that in a major war that is all they can do. Major war is often discussed as though it would be only a contest in national destruction. If thisisindeedthecase-ifthedestructionofcitiesandtheirpop- ulations has become, with nuclear weapons, the primary object in an all-out war-the sequence of war has been reversed. Instead of destroying enemy forces as a prelude to imposing one's will on the enemy nation, one would have to destroy the nation as a means or a prelude to destroying the enemy forces. I f one cannot disable enemy forces without virtually destroying the country, the victor does not even have the option of sparing the conquered nation. He has already destroyed it. Even with
blockade and strategic bombing it could be supposed that a country would be defeated before it was destroyed, or would elect surrender before annihilation had gone far. In the Civil War it could be hoped that the South would become too weak to fight before it became too weak to survive. For "all-out" war, nuclear weapons threaten to reverse this sequence.
So nuclear weapons do make a difference, marking an epoch in warfare. The difference is not just in the amount of destruc- tion that can be accomplished but in the role of destruction and in the decision process. Nuclear weapons can change the speed of events, the control of events, the sequence of events, the relation ofvictor to vanquished, and the relation ofhomeland to fighting front. Deterrence rests today on the threat of pain and extinction, not just on the threat of military defeat. We may argue about the wisdom of announcing "unconditional sur- render" as an aim in the last major war, but seem to expect "unconditional destruction" as a matter of course in another one.
Something like the same destruction always could be done. With nuclear weapons there is an expectation that it would be done. It is not "overkill" that is new; the American army surely had enough 30 caliber bullets to kill everybody in the world in 1945, or if it did not it could have bought them without any strain. What is new is plain "kill"-the idea that major war might be just a contest in the killing of countries, or not even a contest butjust two parallel exercises in devastation.
That is the difference nuclear weapons make. At least they may make that difference. They also may not. If the weapons them- selvesarevulnerabletoattack,orthemachinesthatcarrythem,a successful surprise might eliminate the opponent's means of retribution. That an enormous explosion can be packaged in a single bomb does not by itself guarantee that the victor will receive deadly punishment. Two gunfighters facing each other in a Western town had an unquestioned capacity to kill one another; that did not guarantee that both would die in a gun- fight--only the slower of the two. Less deadly weapons, per- mitting an injured one to shoot back before he died, might have
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THE DIPLOMACY OF VIOLENCE 25 "The United States has come to the conclusion," said Secre-
tary MeNamara,
that to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives . . . should be the destruction of the enemy's military forces, not of his civilian population . . . giving the possible opponent the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities. 1I
This is a sensible way to think about war, if one has to think about it and of course one does. But whether the Secretary's "new strategy" was sensible or not, whether enemy populations should be held hostage or instantly destroyed, whether the primary targets should be military forces or just people and their source of livelihood, this is not "much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. " This is utterly different, and the difference deserves emphasis.
In World Wars I and II one went to work on enemy military forces, not his people, because until the enemy's military forces had been taken care of there was typically not anything decisive that one could do to the enemy nation itself. The Germans did not, in World War I, refrain from bayoneting French citizens by the millions in the hope that the Allies would abstain from shooting up the German population. They could not get at the French citizens until they had breached the Allied lines. Hitler tried to terrorize London and did not make it. The Allied air forces took the war straight to Hitler's territory, with at least some thought o f doing in Germany what Sherman recognized he was doing in Georgia; but with the bombing technology of World War II one could not afford to bypass the troops and go eX~lusively for enemy populations-not, anyway, in Germany. WIth nuclear weapons one has that alternative.
To concentrate on the enemy's military installations while deliberately holding in reserve a massive capacity for destroying
11. Commencement Address. University of Michigan, June 16,1962.
been more conducive to a restraining balance of terror, or of caution. The very efficiency of nuclear weapons could make them ideal for starting war, if they can suddenly eliminate the enemy's capability to shoot back.
And there is a contrary possibility: that nuclear weapons are not vulnerable to attack and prove not to be terribly effective against each other, posing no need to shoot them quickly for fear they will be destroyed before they are launched, and with no task available but the systematic destruction of the enemy country and no necessary reason to do it fast rather than slowly. Imagine that nuclear destruction had to go slowly-that the bombs could be dropped only one per day. The prospect would look very different, something like the most terroristic guerilla warfare on a massive scale. It happens that nuclear war does not have to go slowly; but it may also not have to go speedily. The mere existence of nuclear weapons does not itself determine that everything must go off in a blinding flash, any more than that it must go slowly. Nuclear weapons do not simplify things quite that much.
In recent years there has been a new emphasis on distinguish- ing what nuclear weapons make possible and what they make inevitable in case of war. The American government began in
1961 to emphasize that even a major nuclear war might not, and need not, be a simple contest in destructive fury. Secretary McNamara gave a controversial speech in June 1962 on the idea that "deterrence" might operate even in war itself, that belligerents might, out of self-interest, attempt to limit the war's destructiveness. Each might feel the sheer destruction of enemy people and cities would serve no decisive military purpose but that a continued threat to destroy them might serve a purpose. The continued threat would depend on their not being destroyed yet. Each might reciprocate the other's re-
straint, as in limited wars of lesser scope. Even the worst of enemies, in the interest of reciprocity, have often not mutilated prisoners of war; and citizens might deserve comparable treat- ment. The fury of nuclear attacks might fall mainly on each other's weapons and military forces.
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THED~LOMACYOF~OLENCE 27
his cities, for exterminating his people and eliminating his soci- ety, on condition that the enemy observe similar restraint with respect to one's own society, is not the "conventional ap- proach. "InWorldWarsIandIIthefirstorderofbusinesswasto destroy enemy armed forces because that was the only prom- ising way to make him surrender. To fight a purely military engagement "all-out" while holding in reserve a decisive ca- pacity for violence, on condition the enemy do likewise, is not the way military operations have traditionally been approached. Secretary McNamara was proposing a new approach to warfare in a new era, an era in which the power to hurt is more impres- sive than the power to oppose.
From Battlefield Warfare to the Diplomacy of Violence
Almost one hundred years before Secretary McNamara's speech, the Declaration of St. Petersburg (the first of the great modem conferences to cope with the evils of warfare) in 1868 asserted, "The only legitimate object which states should en- deavor to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces ofthe enemy. " And in a letter to the League of Nations in 1920, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote; "The Committee considers it very desirable that war should resume its former character, that is to say, that it should be a struggle between armies and not between popula- tions. The civilian population must, as far as possible, remain outside the struggle and its consequences. "12 His language is remarkably similar to Secretary McNamara's.
The International Committee was fated for disappointment, like everyone who labored in the late nineteenth century to devise rules that would make war more humane. When the Red Cross was founded in 1863, it was concerned about the disre- gard for noncombatants by those who made war; but in the Second World War noncombatants were deliberately chosen
12. InternationalCommitteeoftheRedCross,DraftRulesfortheLimitation ofthe
Dangers Incurred by the Civilian Population in Time of War (2d ed. Geneva, 1958), pp. 144,151.
as targets by both Axis and Allied forces, not decisively but nevertheless deliberately. The trend has been the reverse of what the International Committee hoped for.
In the present era noncombatants appear to be not only deliberate targets but primary targets, or at least were so taken for granted until about the time of Secretary McNamara's speech. In fact, noncombatants appeared to be primary targets at both ends of the scale of warfare; thermonuclear war threat- ened to be a contest in the destruction of cities and populations; and, at the other end of the scale, insurgency is almost entirely terroristic. We live in an era ofdirty war.
Why is this so? Is war properly a military affair among combatants, and is it a depravity peculiar to the twentieth century that we cannot keep it within decent bounds? Or is war inherently dirty, and was the Red Cross nostalgic for an artifi- cial civilization in which war had become encrusted with etiquette-a situation to be welcomed but not expected?
To answer this question it is useful to distinguish three stages in the involvement of noncombatants-of plain people and their possessions-in the fury of war. These stages are worth distinguishing; but their sequence is merely descriptive of Western Europe during the past three hundred years, not a historical generalization. The first stage is that in which the people may get hurt by inconsiderate combatants. This is the status that people had during the period of "civilized warfare" that the International Committee had in mind.
From about 1648 to the Napoleonic era, war in much of Wes- tern Europe was something superimposed on society. It was a contest engaged in by monarchies for stakes that were mea- sured in territories and, occasionally, money or dynastic claims. The troops were mostly mercenaries and the motivation for war was confined to the aristocratic elite. Monarchs fought for bits of territory, but the residents of disputed terrain were more concerned with protecting their crops and their daughters from marauding troops than with whom they owed allegiance to. They were, as Quincy Wright remarked in his classic Study of War, little concerned that the territory in which they lived had a
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new sovereign. 13 Furthermore, as far as the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria were concerned, the loyalty and enthusiasm of the Bohemian farmer were not decisive consid- erations. It is an exaggeration to refer to European war during this period as a sport of kings, but not a gross exaggeration. And the military logistics of those days confined military operations to a scale that did not require the enthusiasm of a multitude.
Hurting people was not a decisive instrument of warfare. Hurting people or destroying property only reduced the value of the things that were being fought over, to the disadvantage of both sides. Furthermore, the monarchs who conducted wars often did not want to discredit the social institutions they shared with their enemies. Bypassing an enemy monarch and taking the war straight to his people would have had revolutionary implications. Destroying the opposing monarchy was often not in the interest of either side; opposing sovereigns had much more in common with each other than with their own subjects, andtodiscredittheclaimsofamonarchymighthaveproduceda disastrous backlash. It is not surprising-or, if it is surprising, not altogether astonishing-that on the European continent in that particular era war was fairly well confined to military
activity.
One could still, in those days and in that part of the world, be
concerned for the rights of noncombatants and hope to devise rules that both sides in the war might observe. The rules might well be observed because both sides had something to gain from preserving social order and not destroying the enemy. Rules might be a nuisance, but if they restricted both sides the disadvantages might cancel out.
This was changed during the Napoleonic wars. InNapoleon's France, people cared about the outcome. The nation was mobi- lized. The war was a national effort, not just an activity of the elite. It was both political and military genius on the part of Napoleon and his ministers that an entire nation could be mobilized for war. Propaganda became a tool of warfare, and war became vulgarized.
13. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1942, p. 296.
Many writers deplored this popularization of war, this in- volvement of the democratic masses. In fact, the horrors we attribute to thermonuclear war were already foreseen by many commentators,somebeforetheFirstWorldWarandmoreafter it; but the new "weapon" to which these terrors were ascribed was people, millions of people, passionately engaged in na- tional wars, spending themselves in a quest for total victory and desperate to avoid total defeat. Today we are impressed that a small number of highly trained pilots can carry enough energy to blast and bum tens of millions of people and the buildings they live in; two or three generations ago there was concern that tens of millions of people using bayonets and barbed wire, machine guns and shrapnel, could create the same kind of
destruction and disorder.
That was the second stage in the relation of people to war, the
second in Europe since the middle of the seventeenth century. In the first stage people had been neutral but their welfare might be disregarded; in the second stage people were involved because it was their war. Some fought, some produced materi- als ofwar, some produced food, and some took care ofchildren; but they were all part of a war-making nation. When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, the Poles had reason to care about the outcome. When Churchill said the British would fight on the beaches, he spoke for the British and not for a mercenary army. The war was about something that mattered. If people would rather fight a dirty war than lose a clean one, the war will be between nations and not just between governments. If people have an influence on whether the war is continued or on the termsofatruce,makingthewarhurtpeopleservesapurpose. It is a dirty purpose, but war itself is often about something dirty. The Poles and the Norwegians, the Russians and the British, had reason to believe that if they lost the war the consequences would be dirty. This is so evident in modem civil wars-civil wars that involve popular feelings-that we expect them to be bloody and violent. To hope that they would be fought cleanly with no violence to people would be a little like hoping for a clean race riot.
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There is another way to put it that helps to bring out the sequence of events. If a modem war were a clean one, the violence would not be ruled out but merely saved for the postwar period. Once the army has been defeated in the clean war, the victorious enemy can be as brutally coercive as he wishes. A clean war would determine which side gets to use its power to hurt coercively after victory, and it is likely to be worth some violence to avoid being the loser.
"Surrender" is the process following military hostilities in which the power to hurt is brought to bear. I f surrender negotia- tions are successful and not followed by overt violence, it is because the capacity to inflict pain and damage was successfully used in the bargaining process. On the losing side, prospective pain and damage were averted by concessions; on the winning side, the capacity for inflicting further harm was traded for concessions. The same is true in a successful kidnapping. It only reminds us that the purpose ofpure pain and damage is extortion; it is latent violence that can be used to advantage. A well- behaved occupied country is not one in which violence plays no
part; it may be one in which latent violence is used so skillfully that it need not be spent in punishment.
This brings us to the third stage in the relation of civilian violence to warfare. If the pain and damage can be inflicted during war itself, they need not wait for the surrendernegotiation that succeeds a military decision. I f one can coerce people and their governments while war is going on, one does not need to wait until he has achieved victory or risk losing that coercive
power by spending it all in a losing war. General Sherman's march through Georgia might have made as much sense, possi- bly more, had the North been losing the war, just as the German buzz bombs and V-2 rockets can be thought of as coercive instruments to get the war stopped before suffering military defeat.
In the present era, since at least the major East-West powers are capable of massive civilian violence during war itself beyond anything available during the Second World War, the occasion for restraint does not await the achievement of military victory
or truce. The principal restraint during the Second World War was a temporal boundary, the date of surrender. In the present era we find the violence dramatically restrained during war itself. The Korean War was furiously "all-out" in the fighting, not only on the peninsular battlefield but in the resources used by both sides. It was "all-out," though, only within some dramatic restraints: no nuclear weapons, no Russians, no Chi- nese territory, no Japanese territory, no bombing of ships at sea or even airfields on the United Nations side of the line. It was a contest in military strength circumscribed by the threat of unprecedented civilian violence. Korea mayor may not be a good model for speculation on limited war in the age of nuclear violence, but it was dramatic evidence that the capacity for violence can be consciously restrained even under the provoca- tion of a war that measures its military dead in tens ofthousands and that fully preoccupies two of the largest countries in the world.
A consequence of this third stage is that "victory" inad- equately expresses what a nation wants from its military forces. Mostly it wants, in these times, the influence that resides in latentforce. Itwantsthebargainingpowerthatcomesfromits capacity to hurt, not just the direct consequence of successful military action. Even total victory over an enemy provides at best an opportunity for unopposed violence against the enemy population. How to use that opportunity in the national interest, or in some wider interest, can be just as important as the achievement of victory itself; but traditional military science does not tell us how to use that capacity for inflicting pain. And if a nation, victor or potential loser, is going to use its capacity for pure violence to influence the enemy, there may be no need to await the achievement oftotal victory.
Actually, this third stage can be analyzed into two quite different variants. In one, sheer pain and damage are primary instruments ofcoercive warfare and may actually be applied, to intimidate or to deter. In the other, pain and destruction in war are expected to serve little or no purpose but prior threats of sheer violence, even of automatic and uncontrolled violence, are
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coupled to military force. The difference is in the all-or-none character of deterrence and intimidation.
Two acute dilemmas arise. One is the choice of making prospective violence as frightening as possible or hedging with some capacity for reciprocated restraint. The other is the choice of making retalia- tion as automatic as possible or keeping deliberate control over the fateful decisions. The choices are determined partly by governments, partly by technology. Both variants are charac- terized by the coercive role of pain and destruction-ofthreat- ened (not inflicted) pain and destruction. But in one the threat
either succeeds or fails altogether, and any ensuing violence is gratuitous; in the other, progressive pain and damage may actually be used to threaten more. The present era, for countries possessing nuclear weapons, is a complex and uncertain blend ofthe two.
Coercive diplomacy, based on the power to hurt, was impor- tant even in those periods of history when military force was essentially the power to take and to hold, to fend off attack and to expel invaders, and to possess territory against opposition- that is, in the era in which military force tended to pit itself against opposing force. Even then, a critical question was how much cost and pain the other side would incur for the disputed territory. The judgment that the Mexicans would concede Texas, New Mexico, and California once Mexico City was a hostage in our hands was a diplomatic judgment, not a military
one. If one could not readily take the particular territory he wanted or hold it against attack, he could take something else and trade it. 14 Judging what the enemy leaders would trade-
14. Children, for example. The Athenian tyrant, Hippias, was besieged in the Acropolis by an army of Athenian exiles aided by Spartans; his position was strong and he had ample supplies of food and drink, and "but for an unexpected accident" says Herodotus, the besiegers would have persevered a while and then retired. But the children ofthe besieged were caught as they were being taken out of the country for their safety. 'This disaster upset all their plans; in order to recover the children, they were forced to accept . . . terms, and agreed to leave Attica within five days. " Herodotus, The Histories, p. 334. If children can be killed at long distance, by German buzz bombs or nuclear weapons,theydonotneedtobecaughtfirst. Andifbothcanhurteachother'schildren the bargaining is more complex.
be it a capital city or national survival-was a critical part of strategy even in the past. Now we are in an era in which the power to hurt-to inflict pain and shock and privation on a country itself, not just on its military forces-is commensurate with the power to take and to hold, perhaps more than commen- surate, perhaps decisive, and it is even more necessary to think ofwarfareasaprocessofviolentbargaining. Thisisnotthefirst era in which live captives have been worth more than dead enemies, and the power to hurt has been a bargaining advan- tage; but it is the first in American experience when that kind of power has been a dominant part of military relations.
The power to hurt is nothing new in warfare, but for the United States modem technology has drastically enhanced the strategic importance of pure, unconstructive, unacquisitive pain and damage, whether used against us or in our own defense. This in tum enhances the importance of war and threats of war as techniques of influence, not of destruction; of coercion and deterrence, not of conquest and defense; of bargaining and intimidation.
Quincy Wright, in his Study of War, devoted a few pages (319-20) to the "nuisance value" of war, using the analogy of a bank robber with a bomb in his hand that would destroy bank androbber. Nuisancevaluemadethethreatofwar,accordingto Wright, "an aid to the diplomacy of unscrupulous govern- ments," Now we need a stronger term, and more pages, to do the subject justice, and need to recognize that even scrupulous governments often have little else to rely on militarily. It is extraordinary how many treatises on war and strategy have declined to recognize that the power to hurt has been, through- out history, a fundamental character of military force and fundamental to the diplomacy based on it.
War no longer looks like just a contest of strength. War and the brink of war are more a contest of nerve and risk-taking, of pain and endurance. Small wars embody the threat of a larger war; they are not just military engagements but "crisis diplo- macy. " The threat of war has always been somewhere under- neath international diplomacy, but for Americans it is now
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THE ART OF COMMITMENT
much nearer the surface. Like the threat of a strike in industrial relations, the threat of divorce in a family dispute, or the threat of bolting the party at a political convention, the threat of violence continuously circumscribes international politics. Neither strength nor goodwill procures immunity.
Military strategy can no longer be thought of, as it could for some countries in some eras, as the science of military victory. It is now equally, ifnot more, the art ofcoercion, ofintimidation and deterrence. The instruments of war are more punitive than acquisitive. Military strategy, whether we like it or not, has become the diplomacy of violence.
No one seems to doubt that federal troops are available to de- fend California. I have, however, heard Frenchmen doubt whether American troops can be counted on to defend France, or American missiles to blast Russia in case France is attacked.
It hardly seems necessary to tell the Russians that we should fightthemiftheyattackus. Butwegotogreatlengthstotellthe Russians that they will have America to contend with if they or their satellites attack countries associated with us. Saying so, unfortunately, does not make it true; and if it is true, saying so does not always make it believed. We evidently do not want war and would only fight if we had to. The problem is to demon- strate that we would have to.
It is a tradition in military planning to attend to an enemy's capabilities, not his intentions. But deterrence is about inten- tions-not just estimating enemy intentions but influencing them. The hardest part is communicating our own intentions. War at best is ugly, costly, and dangerous, and at worst disas- trous. Nations have been known to bluff; they have also been known to make threats sincerely and change their minds when the chips were down. Many territories are just not worth a war, especially a war that can get out of hand. A persuasive threat of war may deter an aggressor; the problem is to make it persua- sive, to keep it from sounding like a bluff.
Military forces are commonly expected to defend their home- lands, even to die gloriously in a futile effort at defense.