Wohlstetter had doubts about how far one could go with a strictly mathematical exposition of game theory, but he was certainly taken with its fundamental guiding point: that in planning one’s own tactics and strategies, one had to take into account systematically the actions that an enemy might take if that enemy were a completely rational player.
Up to this point, most military applications of game theory had focused on tactics—the best way to plan a fighter-bomber duel, how to design bomber formations or execute antisubmarine-warfare campaigns. But Wohlstetter would carry it further. It was this insistence on figuring one’s own best moves in light of the enemy’s best moves that provoked Wohlstetter to look at a map and to conclude that the closer we are to them, the closer they are to us—the easier it is for us to hit them, the easier it is for them to hit us.
Finally, there was the influence of Wohlstetter’s wife, Roberta. Andrew Marshall, an analyst in the social science division who had a deep fascination with the techniques of intelligence, suggested to her that she look at Pearl Harbor from an intelligence perspective—to ask what was it about American intelligence in 1941 that prevented anyone from foreseeing the Japanese attack right up to the last moment.
Roberta Wohlstetter spent the next seven years on this project, finishing it in 1957 and publishing a declassified version in 1962. (The book would be called Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, and would win handsome praise and a number of historians’ awards.) Even in the early phases of the study, by 1951, she could see, in a very rough way, how the United States had missed out on adequate warning of the attack: it was not so much that the nation lacked intelligence as it was that the military was unable to separate the relevant information from many other messages that had no particular relevance.
And so, Albert Wohlstetter, in addition to detecting the fatal flaw in Ed Paxson’s bomber study and looking at a map with the principles of game theory in mind, was also getting from his wife a heavy dose of information on the issue of surprise attack, a feeling of how even a powerful nation might not see an attack coming. The Pearl Harbor fleet had been remarkably vulnerable. The Japanese had their eyes set on oil in the South Pacific. They had no desire to occupy Pearl Harbor, but saw the American presence there as an obstacle. They noticed the fleet’s vulnerability, and so disposed of it. Wohlstetter projected a similar situation to the mid-1950s, imagining the Russians as the Japanese and SAC’s overseas bases as Pearl Harbor. If a crisis seemed about to turn into war, or if the Russians, say, wanted to invade Western Europe, their chief worry would be SAC—which had, after all, been designed primarily to counter a Soviet attack against Europe. (At the time, almost nobody even pretended that the Soviets had much ability to attack the United States directly.) If the Soviets, under such circumstances, saw that SAC was vulnerable, they might feel tempted to knock it out so that the European grab could succeed more assuredly. The realization that SAC might be vulnerable to a direct Soviet attack put a whole new spin on the notion of deterrence.
For Wohlstetter, what began as a seemingly boring study, and then as the discovery of a fatal flaw in Ed Paxson’s earlier study on the ideal bomber, was unexpectedly turning into a critical analysis not just of overseas bases but of the foundations of SAC policy, of the resistance that the United States could muster in the face of a direct attack, of the nation’s ability to deter Communist aggression and nuclear war.
Wohlstetter, although he did not know this at the time, was not the first to point out the vulnerability of U.S. overseas bases. As early as February 1950, the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, the Pentagon think tank of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in its very first report that the overseas bases in England were vulnerable and that they might be “‘Pearl Harbored’ at the outset of future hostilities.” The Joint Intelligence Committee, responding to this report, affirmed that “Soviet forces are considered adequate to launch D-day attacks which, if consummated, would be in sufficient strength to cause serious damage to the bases under consideration” in the SAC program. In June 1950, SAC commander General Curtis LeMay told the Air War College: “We would be foolhardy to risk, on other than unavoidable emergency basis, the deployment to forward airdromes within range of enemy attack of the tremendous investment in national resources represented by even a few atomic bombs.”
Even at this early date, LeMay eventually wanted to have an intercontinental bomber force, one that would require no foreign bases at all. LeMay distrusted and disliked most foreigners. As far as he was concerned, the command of SAC and the delivery of nuclear bombs over Russia were the main ingredients of victory, and it was just too important for SAC to depend so critically on a bunch of foreigners.
Still, it was clear that through the 1950s, the technology for intercontinental bombers would remain rather primitive; overseas bases of one sort or another would still be needed. It was also clear that, even while paying lip service, few in military command took seriously the notion of base vulnerability. In devising war plans and assessing threats, most officers and analysts fell back on the traditions of OR-style analysis of World War II, in which the main goals were to penetrate enemy defenses and destroy enemy targets. In that tradition, the vulnerability of air bases was viewed as just another in a series of things that might go wrong, as perturbations that might require some minor adjustments in the analysis, but certainly nothing that should attract center-stage attention. Taking the offense and the initiative was all-important.
Wohlstetter saw vulnerability as the centerpiece of the strategic problem largely because he knew absolutely nothing about the traditions of strategic-bombing analysis and, therefore, was not blinded by their assumptions. Likewise, he had no preconception that cities were the logical targets of an A-bomb attack because, unlike Brodie and the others, he had done no serious thinking about the bomb during the late 1940s, the period of atomic scarcity. As a result, Wohlstetter came up with a set of conclusions that would revamp the way that “defense intellectuals” would view nuclear strategy for decades to come.
Before coming to RAND, Albert Wohlstetter had no experience and not much interest in military matters or strategic thought. For most of his life, he had been a rather otherworldly figure. He was born in 1912, in New York, to a family of well-to-do Viennese extraction. His father, a lawyer by profession, owned a phonograph company on the side and, through that enterprise, made many friends who performed at the Metropolitan Opera.
During World War I, the conversion from civilian goods to war production—and the consequent competition for labor and scarce materials from Du Pont and other large corporations—wiped out his father’s fledgling recording business, and he died shortly afterward, when Albert was just four. An older brother of Albert’s soon struck it rich in investment banking, however, and the family’s standard of living was back on the track—until the Depression, when it was reduced to straitened circumstances once more.
Amid this turmoil, Albert Wohlstetter turned inward, and discovered and immersed himself in the formal beauty of logic and mathematics. As a young teenager, he perused Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica. At the City College of New York he studied math and philosophy. After graduating, realizing there were few jobs to be found in the field he loved, he enrolled very briefly in Columbia Law School but, quickly bored, switched departments to study mathematical logic and the logic of science.