This was the world of Game Theory. And Schelling added a spin. Most analysts figured Game Theory as a “zero-sum game”: your loss is my victory; your negative “payoff” is my positive “payoff”; hence, the sum of the two payoffs is zero. Schelling thought that the more interesting and pertinent situations were “non-zero-sum games,” which involve a mixture of competition and tacit cooperation. In a traffic jam, you want to pass a car, but you don’t want to smash it; in limited war, you want to defeat the enemy’s will without compelling him to bring nuclear weapons into play.
Schelling appealed strongly to those who felt constrained by the doctrine of massive retaliation. His book reinforced the insouciance toward force that marked the insignia of the post-Eisenhower defense intellectual. But in the process Schelling tended to make limited war appear casual, too predictable, too manageable, as if national leaders really might control their moves and counter-moves in war as tightly and single-mindedly as the drivers of two cars trying to pass each other on a narrow bridge.
Far more than most of his RAND comrades, Schelling was also interested in nuclear arms control. Inspired by Albert Wohlstetter’s work on the vulnerability of SAC, Schelling figured that if a nuclear war ever did spark between the superpowers, it would be because of what he called “The Reciprocal Fear of Surprise Attack.” The Air Force had used Wohlstetter’s arguments to justify building more bombers and missiles; Schelling inferred from those same arguments that both sides should sign arms-control agreements restricting the deployment of weapons that were both vulnerable to attack and made opposing forces vulnerable to attack. “If the advantage of striking first can be eliminated or severely reduced, the incentive to strike at all will be reduced.” From this logic, Schelling concluded that weapons of great counterforce power upset the “stability” of the balance of terror and heighten the incentives for one side or the other to launch a preemptive first-strike.
Schelling’s concept of nuclear stability presented a serious dilemma. If both sides were essentially invulnerable to a lethal first-strike from each other, if counterforce was destabilizing and if massive retaliation meant mutual suicide, then how would the United States use the threat of nuclear attack to deter Soviet aggression in, say, Western Europe? Did a stable balance render nuclear weapons useless? Schelling felt that they would “still be capable of carrying out ‘retaliation’ in a punitive sense.” Massive retaliation lacked credibility as long as the Soviets could massively retaliate in turn. But “putting pressure on the Russians” through “limited or graduated reprisals,” inflicting “civilian pain and the threat of more”—sending signals, upping the ante in the bargaining round in a manner similar to Herman Kahn’s “tit-for-tat” Type III Deterrence strategy—would still deter limited Soviet aggression. While different from Kaufmann’s counterforce idea, Schelling’s strategic concept was still basically a “coercive strategy,” demonstrating resolve, appealing to the opponent’s rational calculations to back off before still more damage is done.
In his next book, Arms and Influence, published in 1966, Schelling went further. “The power to hurt,” he wrote, “can be counted among the most impressive attributes of military force…. To inflict suffering gains nothing and saves nothing directly; it can only make people behave to avoid it…. War is always a bargaining process…. It is in the wars that we have come to call ‘limited wars’ that the bargaining appears most vividly and is conducted most consciously.” One must use force in such a way as to exploit “the bargaining power that comes from [the] capacity to hurt,” to cause “sheer pain and damage,” because they are “the primary instruments of coercive warfare.”
When, in the early months of 1964, government officials laid plans to step up military action against North Vietnam, it was precisely this concept of coercive warfare that shaped the resulting strategy. This was the natural outcome not only of McNamara’s own proclivity toward controlling force rationally, but also of the coincidence that one of McNamara’s closest advisers on Vietnam strategy, one of the Pentagon’s brightest theorists and most skillful bureaucratic players, happened to be one of Tom Schelling’s most dedicated devotees, a Harvard Law School professor named John McNaughton.
Tom Schelling and John McNaughton had been friends from the late 1940s, when both were helping to administer the Marshall Plan in Paris. In the winter of 1960–1961, Paul Nitze, the new Kennedy Administration’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, offered Schelling a job as his arms-control deputy. Schelling demurred, but recommended McNaughton. McNaughton thanked Schelling for the good words but said he knew almost nothing about arms control. Schelling told him not to worry, that it was easy, that he would teach McNaughton everything he would need to know. Before long, McNamara and McNaughton were hitting it off splendidly. McNamara had a penchant for brilliant Harvard lawyers. By the end of his first year, McNaughton was McNamara’s general counsel and chief aide on arms control. It was mainly McNaughton who convinced the Pentagon of the merits of the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. When Paul Nitze was made Secretary of the Navy that same year, McNaughton succeeded him as Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Then came Vietnam. McNaughton drifted away from Schelling’s ideas on arms control and more toward his mentor’s theories of limited war.
On May 22, 1964, McGeorge Bundy sent a memo to Lyndon Johnson informing him of a “small, tightly knit group” that had met at Bundy’s request to prepare the plans Johnson had asked for to broaden the Vietnam War. “An integrated political-military plan for graduated action against North Vietnam is being prepared under John McNaughton at Defense,” Bundy reported. “The theory of this plan is that we should strike to hurt but not to destroy, and strike for the purpose of changing the North Vietnamese decision on intervention in the south. This is easier said than done,” Bundy acknowledged, “but McNamara has confidence that we have the military means as long as we have the political will.” Two days later, Bundy sent Johnson a memo recommending that the U.S. “use selected and carefully graduated military force against North Vietnam,” that troops be deployed “on a very large scale, from the beginning, so as to maximize their deterrent impact and their menace.” He noted, “A pound of threat is worth an ounce of action—as long as we are not bluffing,” and urged that the initial air strikes against the North should “be very carefully designed” to emphasize their “deterrent… impact, as far as possible.” The Harvard professor’s theory had been translated into official U.S. war strategy.
On September 3, McNaughton wrote a memo to McNamara, “Plan of Action for South Vietnam,” in which he stressed, “We should watch for… DRV [North Vietnamese] actions which would justify a limited retaliation or the commencement of a squeeze on North Vietnam…. The concept of the course of action… in essence is: by doing legitimate things to provoke a DRV response and to be in a good position to seize on that response, or upon an unprovoked DRV action, to commence a crescendo of GVN [South Vietnam]–U.S. military actions against the DRV.”
Early “actions of opportunity” had already occurred, on August 2 and 4, with allegations of a North Vietnamese gunboat attack on the U.S. destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The next came on November 1, three days before the 1964 Presidential election, when the Viet Cong launched a mortar attack on the U.S. air base at Bien Hoa, killing five Americans, wounding seventy-six, and severely damaging twenty-seven of the thirty B-57 bombers that were there as a signal to Hanoi that the U.S. could swiftly deliver a crushing air attack on the North.