After publication of the ORSA report, Senators Cooper, Symington and Hart asked more than a dozen scientists and strategists to comment on the document. Among them was Philip Morse, who had resigned from ORSA over the incident. Morse had been director of the U.S. Navy Operations Research Group in World War II. During the war, he and other similar OR groups took data from the weapons designers on a particular weapon’s effectiveness and then devised calculations predicting how it would perform in combat—essentially what Wohlstetter and others had done with the data on the SS-9, Minuteman and Safeguard. However, the World War II OR groups then assembled operational data on how the weapons really performed in combat. It turned out that the weapons designers had overestimated the effectiveness usually by about three times. Until the assumptions in the OR groups’ original calculations were adjusted to conform to reality rather than theory, Morse commented, “the predictions of our beautifully accurate analyses could be wrong by a factor of as much as ten.”
What worried him, and what seemed to him symptomatic in the ABM debate, was that “a new generation of officers and analysts has come on the scene, many of whom have never had the sobering experience of seeing their optimistic predictions disproved by deaths on the battlefield. They too often are willing to take the assumptions given them by designers and ‘intelligence’ as gospel truth, and to base their calculations on them without adding any correction factors for the ‘fog of war’… Strategy is still an art, not a science…. Anyone who tries to argue his case for the ABM on the grounds of the accuracy of his analyses is either scientifically naïve, or else he thinks it doesn’t matter, that the time will never come when hard reality will provide a check on his assumptions.”
With the ABM debate, this “new generation” of analysts went public and took over the field. The realm of nuclear strategy came disconnected not only from what Bernard Brodie would call “the political dimension” but also from the technical realities of the very weapons that circumscribed what strategy can do.
25
THE NEW GENERATION
AS THE NEW GENERATION occupied positions of power, the story of nuclear strategy came full circle and started all over again, as if the debates, the disillusionments and the discreditings of the early-to-mid 1960s had never occurred. Counterforce, no-cities, limited nuclear war, tit-for-tat, the coercive strategy again came to dominate the defense world. And the spirit guiding the resurrection breathed forth, once again, from the RAND Corporation.
It was the Air Force that spearheaded the revival. By the late 1960s, the upper echelon of the Air Staff had changed character dramatically. The acolytes of Curtis LeMay and Tommy Power were no longer in charge. A new generation had worked its way up the ranks, and its members had a different conception of warfare. They were more familiar with tactical bombing in Korea than with strategic bombing over Europe or Japan. Most of them had risen to power on Air Force planning staffs during the period when defense intellectuals first came into vogue; nearly all of them had read, and met, Wohlstetter, Kahn, Kaufmann, Brodie, Schelling and the rest of the RAND community; many were Air Staff colonels when Bill Kaufmann arranged his 1960 counterforce briefing with General Noel Parrish. The combination of this intellectual milieu and their general detachment from the SAC traditions led many of these new officers to move away from the all-out, max-effort, bomb-everything notions that had dominated Air Force thinking since the end of World War II and more toward thinking about how to use these weapons in a more traditionally military manner, how to fight with them, how to use them rationally.
A small nucleus of Air Staff officers who shared this line of thinking banded together on a project they called NU-OPTS, for Nuclear Options or Nuclear Operations. Its leaders were General Richard Ellis, director of plans, who had spent years in the Tactical Air Command, SAC’s rival within the Air Force, and who had worked on the first NATO war plan involving tactical nuclear weapons, all of which were to be fired against strictly military targets; General Russell Dougherty, assistant director of plans, who had done tactical bombing in the Korean War; General Leslie Bray of the war plans office, a former SAC officer who then served in the Pacific and became heavily influenced by the critiques of massive retaliation in the late 1950s; and the group’s intellectual master, General Richard Yudkin.
Yudkin was a most peculiar Air Force officer—short, rotund, Jewish, bookish, a bachelor with no hobbies or interests outside the Air Force, a man who had never been a pilot or a navigator, who had climbed to the rank of major general and director of Air Force policy on his brainpower. Even more than his colleagues, Yudkin had felt continually frustrated by the budget-cutting and anti-counterforce sentiments of Robert McNamara. He realized that if the Air Force was to move to the forefront again, some new concepts—justifying both a credible nuclear war-fighting capability and procurement of more Air Force weapons—would have to be formulated. In the past, Yudkin had frequently found inspiration in discussions with the strategists at RAND, and off to RAND he journeyed again, in search of new rationales.
When Yudkin called, he was taken to the director of RAND’s new strategic studies division, James R. Schlesinger. Schlesinger was practically the ideal type to help launch a revival of the RAND tradition. Everything about him spelled “defense intellectual”—the slightly jaded sensibility, the whiff of arrogance, the pipe-puffing affectation of cool insouciance. Like most of the leading lights, Schlesinger was an economist by training and so fell in comfortably with the culture of calculation and the rational-marketplace assumptions of nuclear war-fighting. He had come to RAND in 1961, naturally read all the classic RAND literature and quickly befriended Andy Marshall, who passed along to him the guiding principles of the old RAND Strategic Objectives Committee and the Kaufmann counterforce briefing.
By the mid-1960s, Schlesinger, like several others, had started to wonder about the feasibility of counterforce. Since the Soviets were building more missiles and hardening them in silos or putting them in Polaris-type submarines, a counterforce campaign might not be so effective. Moreover, it would require firing so many missiles that the Soviets might not be able to distinguish a “limited” counterforce strike from an all-out attack, and retaliate accordingly with a massive blow against American cities. Since avoiding urban damage was the whole point of the RAND strategy, counterforce could soon have counterproductive consequences. And yet the problem of “credible deterrence” remained. What was the nuclear strategy that would avoid both the implausibility of counterforce and the recklessness of minimum deterrence or massive retaliation? Schlesinger found his answer in the writings of RAND alumnus Tom Schelling—the option of “limited” or “graduated reprisals,” in Schelling’s words: small-scale nuclear strikes, shots across the bow, bargaining counters demonstrating American will and resolve, pricks of pain shooting a message to the Soviets that more pain will follow unless they desist from their aggression at once.
In December 1968, under Yudkin’s direction, Schlesinger wrote a RAND memorandum called Rationale for NU-OPTS, very briefly sketching the basic principles of the Schelling strategy. Schlesinger also told Yudkin that the strategy would make an ideal rationale for a new manned bomber. The Air Force had been destroying its own case by painting the bomber as little more than a manned missile; in so straightforward a comparison, the Minuteman ICBM was certainly more cost-effective than, say, the B-70. However, if one envisioned the Soviets grabbing northern Norway or some other region where the U.S. would find it difficult to meet the threat with conventional forces alone, the small-strike strategy would be an appropriate response, and the manned bomber—more precise and reliable than the missiles of the day—would be the ideal instrument.