THE LOST GENERATION OF WARFARE

The generational framework for modern warfare was first introduced by Lind (et. al.) in the seminal article in the Marine Corps Gazette: "The Changing Face of Warfare: Into the 4th Generation." It made the argument that warfare, since the foundation of the modern nation-state at the Treaties of Westphalia and until the recent present, could be divided into three successive generations of state vs. state warfare. These were:

• The 1st generation. Mobilization. Decisive battles. Linearity of approach to maximize firepower and control.
• The 2nd generation. Firepower. The defensive. Attrition. Rail logistics. Indirect fire. Industrial scale mobilization and command structures. Trench warfare.
• The 3rd generation. Maneuver. The offensive. Disorientation. Aircraft. Motorized transport. More fluid command structures. Blitzkrieg.

The Lost Generation

As per the framework, states that used the most recent form of warfare could reliably defeat those states that still clung to the previous generation. This continued to hold true until the final thrust at the end of WW2 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that nuclear warfare was the new salient generation. Lind and his cohorts ignore this generation of warfare, since with its advent the generational advancement of inter-state warfare breaks down. The technologies of this "lost" generation of warfare quickly progressed to MIRVed (multiple independent re-entry vehicles) ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) that could mobilize for global war in minutes, maneuver to enemy rear areas in fractions of an hour, and unleash firepower that could destroy the entire urban infrastructure of a state. At that point, the trends of interstate warfare reached their logical conclusion in their negation. The well founded fear of this form of warfare made hot war between the great powers unthinkable.

Comments

[gmoke]

If the fourth generation is technologically amplified small groups that can create the destructive force of armies then the nuclear weapon is the forerunner and epitome of the fourth generation. However, I have no particular experience or expertise in the theory of warfare just an interest in understanding war as part of my affection for survival.

[zenpundit]

Hi John,

"Lind and his cohorts ignore this generation of warfare, since with its advent the generational advancement of inter-state warfare breaks down"

I'm not certain of you would count van Creveld as a " cohort" of Lind's but the 4GW school does seem to have adopted major ideas from van Creveld, who it must be said, did consider the nuclear war issue quite carefully.

"The well founded fear of this form of warfare made hot war between the great powers unthinkable."

A more precise formulation would be that nuclear arms significantly changed the calculations of the great powers, who nevertheless did edge toward the brink over Korea, Berlin, Cuba and the Mideast. The Soviet warplanners on the Red Army General Staff never quite bought the " unthinkable" line - or were not permitted to do so, at least.

Proxy war though was incentivized because of the legalistic figleaf of plausible deniability.

[adam]

John,

I think I see what you're saying. As I recall in the 1950s (either 1954 or 1956?) and 60s the NATO war plan was "trip wire and massive retaliation". In other words the Russians come over the German border and we kill everyone, then they can kill whats left.

If I recall correctly flexible response wasn't Nato strategy until 1967.

I would suspect that Linds arguing that during those two decades the entire theory of war at that time should be ignored because it was, lets face it, suicidally nuts, particularly as the Russians then raced to develop as many or more nuclear weapons than the West had which made the entire thing pointless. As Zenpundit correctly notes proxy wars became the only feasible options as a real war would simply eliminate both sides in any recognisable form and turkeys do not vote for Christmas.

[PapaBear]

The purpose of war is to enable the leadership of a country to impose its will on an opponent, and/or prevent an opponent from imposing their will. The weakness of the "unlimited nuclear war" model revolves around the fact that the leadership of both sides risks not having much to rule afterwards.

One new method of taking over an opposing country and imposing your will, is to simply flood the country with immigrants. Demographics will eventually pass control to whoever controls the loyalty of the new immigrants.

Another new method is to simply buy off the elected leadership of democratic countries. Giving a bunch of officials and legislators some goodies is a lot cheaper than buying a bunch of F-16's

[dan tdaxp]

I suggest the discussion at ZenPundit.

Perhaps the best is Purpleslog's original comment

"State vs State Nuclear Warfare is clearly the pinnacle of 2GW - massed industrial resources to create and sustain the nuclear warfighting infrastructure. Nukes are the ultimate in attrition warfare. The ability to do mass damage in no uncertain terms by both sides (US and Soviets) brought mutual deterrence or MAD - Mutual Assured Destruction..."

http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2007/01/downgrading-unthinkable-to-thinkable.html#comments

[John Robb]

Actually, nuclear warfare is the ultimate in nearly all areas. There is a huge body of strategic thinking on the use of nuclear weapons that goes beyond attrition -- from decapitation strikes to limited nuclear war.

[djhabakkuk]

Much of that 'huge body of strategic theory' is junk. It was developed by civilian strategists who were uninterested either in serious study of the adversary, or of the technicalities of nuclear weapons. People like Albert and Robert Wohlstetter.

Limited nuclear war theorising presupposed all kinds of things -- neglecting the immense pressures towards escalation in nuclear conflict, and the impossibility of creating a command and control system which could be expected to be robust in the event of nuclear war.

Because of this latter problem, the actual American force posture was not devised so as to make it possible to ride out a nuclear attack and strike second, as the civilian strategists and the politicos thought. It was a posture of launch on warning. So too was the Soviet force posture, after the change of strategy which began in the mid-Sixties and developed through the first half of the Seventies.

A confrontation between two nuclear arsenals postured for launch on warning is inherently liable to generate a significant possibility of accidental nuclear war. This was true in the Cold War, and will be true in future nuclear confrontations.

In fact, it was the Soviets, not the Americans, who took seriously the idea that nuclear war was unthinkable. Until the Seventies, they thought that it was possible to achieve something which could be called victory in a nuclear war, and planned accordingly. This involved seeking to acquire nuclear superiority.

This is unsurprising, as they had a very strong General Staff tradition, rather than a discipline of 'security studies' dominated by academics from the axiomatic sciences. And whatever the problems of staff officers, they are not subject to the crippling lack of imagination liable to afflict mathematicians and economists when they attempt to deal with the mucky realities of war.

After the shift in the late Sixties and early Seventies, Soviet contingency planning for war was aimed at conducting warfare in such a way as to avoid the nuclear devastation of the Soviet Union. This involved a massive conventional buildup on the central front. Such a buildup was necesssary, 1. to disable NATO theatre capabilities by non-nuclear means, and 2. to eliminate the bridgeheads on which American potential power could be deployed in Eurasia. One reason for doing this was to knock away the first step on the escalatory ladder.

The other was that, while in an all-out nuclear war, the Soviet could expect to do lethal damage to the American military industrial potential, if attacks on the Soviet Union were to be avoided, they would have to leave that potential untouched. Accordingly, the problem of preventing the effective deployment of that potential in Eurasia reacquired the salience it had had at the outset of the Cold War.

It is misleading to see nuclear threats as the natural propensity of tyrannical regimes. They are a natural security strategy for democracies, which combine a deep conviction that they are fundamentally innocent (however they actually behave) with an equally deep reluctance on the part of their citizens to accept the sacrifices required to create an effective conventional force posture.

On all this, the work of a group of analysts who were at the Brookings Institution back in the Eighties is critical. On command and control, the former Minute launch control officer Bruce Blair is central. On Soviet strategy, Ambassador Raymond Garthoff and Michael MccGwire, formerly head of the Soviet naval section of British defence intelligence, are key figures.

These men were serious strategic analysts. The Wohlstetters and their heirs (Perle, Wolfowitz et al) were inept as strategic analysts, but were virtuosos at the manipulation of opinion. Unsurprisingly, they have won out in the PR wars. Equally unsurprisingly, they are leading the United States (and my own country, Britain) to disaster.

[zenpundit]

David's comment was very interesting and I agree with parts of it but others strike me as over the top.

For starters:

"In fact, it was the Soviets, not the Americans, who took seriously the idea that nuclear war was unthinkable. Until the Seventies, they thought that it was possible to achieve something which could be called victory in a nuclear war, and planned accordingly."

Well...this would be the majority of time that the USSR was a nuclear power. Hence, my earlier comment.

The change came after Brezhnev had cemented his dominance over the nomenklatura and began rewarding his original political " base", which was in Soviet military industry. At the same time, acheiving rough parity allowed Brezhnev to try to do detente deals with Nixon to get access to Western credit with which he planned to inject some life into the ailing economy.

There were also doctrinal changes in Soviet conventional forces - crushing the Prague Spring was an early example of "flexible response", Soviet style ( the ground commander there -Pavlovskii(?) in '68 was also part of the Afghanistan operation in '79)So I think the change in Soviet nuclear war planning reflected a larger systemic shift in the worldview of the Soviet leadership and the alignment of Brezhnev-Ustinov-Andropov-Gromyko within the politburo.

Another point I am skeptical of:

"Limited nuclear war theorising presupposed all kinds of things -- neglecting the immense pressures towards escalation in nuclear conflict, and the impossibility of creating a command and control system which could be expected to be robust in the event of nuclear war."

First, I would like to hear more from David as to why he believes RAND, Wohlstetter, Kahn (or whomever)can be categorized as "ignoring" such escalatory pressures in their theories.

The best test case of this argument would be the Cuban Missile Crisis, for which we have relatively strong documentary sources. Had JFK followed the preferred military advice of the decidedly non-civilian, non-defense intellectual, Joint Chiefs for a strike ( massive or "surgical" )on Cuba a nuclear war would have been a highly probable result.

Likewise, the "forward" strategy in Europe of the Soviets that David correctly described, if it had ever been tested, would have caused WWII unless the Red Army stumbled badly at the very inception.

"General Staff thinking" to " disable NATO by non-nuclear means" would have precipitated the very event a conventional attack sought to avoid.

[djhabakkuk]

Zenpundit

I may have been over the top. Let me try to clarify. I am sorry the comment is so long, but it is difficult to any kind of justice to a range of complex and interrelated issues briefly!

Incidentally, I think you are a reader of Colonel Lang’s blog. I have gone into some of these issues at some length in an exchange of comments with Babak Makkinejad on the War against the Boogey Men threat of 14th January.

On the Wohlstetters. The view of the nuclear balance as unstable, given seminal expression in Albert Wohlstetter’s 1958 ‘Delicate Balance of Terror’paper, available on the RAND site, essentially restates the view set out in the NSC 68 paper of April 1950. This reflected a radical and rapid change of mind on the part of Paul Nitze, who masterminded the document. In his initial response to the memorandum which Kennan produced in January 1950 on 'The International Control of Atomic Energy', Nitze wrote that Kennan's paper 'indicates that it is improbable that the U.S.S.R. would itself initiate the use of weapons of mass destruction.'

When NSC 68 was produced the following April, it took a very different view. As the 'existence and persistence of the idea of freedom is a permanent threat to the foundation of the slave society,' NSC 68 argued, 'it therefore regards as intolerable the long continued existence of freedom in the world.' And it went on to claim that there was 'no justification in Soviet theory or practice for predicting that, should the Kremlin become convinced that it could cause our downfall by one conclusive blow, it would not seek that solution.'

Why did this happen? A number of points. One is that Kennan’s view was not the product of a change of mind. In January 1947, according to David Mayers, he suggested that the Soviet leaders knew that using atomic weapons 'would defeat their aims and that no one wins in an atomic war.' The Soviet leaders were, he remarked, 'wiser than we are in that sense.' (See David Mayers, Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, p. 13.) In his summary of the January 1950 memorandum, Mayers describes Kennan as arguing as follows:

"In case of general war, Kennan feared that the American democracy, naturally viewing itself as the innocent victim of aggression and congentially committed to justifying its cause in the loftiest terms, would be more apt than the USSR to use the most destructive available weapons. In contrast, the Soviets self-consciously connected ulterior political goals (control of additional economic resources, acquisition of buffer territories and new subjects) to their wartime operations and there, were predisposed against the wholesale extermination of any opponent. Thus the nature of its aims – namely, the ultimately triumph of good over evil rather than the prosaic goal of changing the status quo – suggested to Kennan the most baleful conduct of future American wars."

I am not suggesting that one should assume that, because Kennan says something, it is right. But it is worth at least taking account of his views.

Note that NSC 68 sets out precisely the kind of ideological template which Kennan was afraid of – and which is central to the Bush Administration’s conduct of the ‘war on terror’. Both because of this, and also because of the importance in the tradition that runs through the Wohlstetters of the belief that the Soviets take a relatively sanguine view of nuclear war, it worth probing more closely into why Nitze did what he did. My own view, for what it is worth, is that behind the apocalyptic vision there is a sophisticated argument about military technicalities, which is commonly ignored.

According to NSC 68’s own figures, the American production of motor vehicles was more than ten times the Soviet. If this potential power can be turned into actual power, and deployed effectively in Eurasia, and in particular Europe, the Soviets lose. The problem for the United States is that, as a democracy, it has difficulty maintaining ground forces in peacetime, and a considerable length of time will be required for forces to be trained and for industry to put back onto a wartime footing. Accordingly, if they lack a nuclear arsenal, the only way in which the Soviets can hope to avoid defeat in the event of general war is to eliminate the bridgeheads on which American power can be deployed, which entails taking over Western Europe.

This basic strategy reality was spelled out by JCS planners when they attempted to anticipate how the Soviets might fight a war in May 1947. It was also spelt out in an article by Major General V Khlopov in the June 1950 issue of the confidential Soviet journal Military Thought, discussed by Raymond Garthoff in his 1958 study Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age. Accordingly, nothing follows from the very evidently offensive nature of the Soviet force posture in Central Europe demonstrates nothing about Soviet intentions. This is of limited relevance when one is discussing Western force requirements, in that it is commonly ill-advised to base these on estimates of the intentions of the adversary. It is however of crucial relevance in wider foreign policy planning, and in particular because different assumptions about Soviet intentions generate different assumptions about how the Soviets will perceive Western policy. It is also of crucial relevance to the question of the supposed stabilising effects of nuclear weapons. An all-out war against an adversary who can outproduce one in aircraft, tanks and trucks by a margin of ten to one, where one’s best option is stalemate, is not a very attractive prospect. The Japanese had tried it with disastrous results, evident to all, and in any case Marxist-Leninists had a word for this – ‘adventurism’. It is in fact for more likely that nuclear weapons destabilised the post-war superpower relationship rather than stabilising it.

Once nuclear, and even more thermonuclear, weapons enter the equation, then the possibility arises of the Soviets making the possibility of the Americans remobilising their power and deploying it in Eurasia moot at the beginning of a war by an all-out preemptive nuclear strike. Of course, the price they are likely to pay is an American nuclear strike. If, however, they are going to face this anyway, they may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. And if war is going to escalate to an all-out nuclear confrontation, then the least worst strategy for a Soviet General Staff officer was to pre-empt at the start of a conflict. In fact, Kennan’s argument that the Soviets will eschew first-use only makes sense if one sees it in the context of another of his arguments – that it was imperative for the United States to get away from reliance on first-use by means of a massive conventional buildup. In arguing for such a buildup, NSC 68 was not repudiating Kennan, but attempting to accommodate his concerns. But in the view of its authors, the buildup they recommended was inadequate to get away from threats of first-use; while in order to make it possible, they portrayed Soviet willingness to use nuclear weapons in apocalyptic terms which Kennan, and his fellow Soviet expert Charles Bohlen, thought had zero relationship to reality.

One consequence of this was that Kennan rewrote history, confusing what he had advocated at the time with what, in the light of hindsight, he wished he had advocated. The result has been comprehensively to muddy the waters of Cold War historiography.

Why did Kennan do this? Answer, he was shit scared. A great deal of Western ‘strategic studies’ develops as an attempt to produce a technical solution to the problem of crisis stability under conditions of extreme tension. A central model for the origin of war for Kennan came from events in Europe in the summer of 1914. In such models, what is stressed is the context in which a specific crisis – which may of itself be of limited importance – develops. The notion of technical solutions to crisis stability is naturally to be seen as the figment of academics out of touch with how the real world develops.

In fact, the major thread of thinking at RAND attempts to remodel the study of strategy as an axiomatic study on the model of large areas of the hard sciences and economics (as distinct from an historical science on the model of Clausewitz, for example). The minor thread, the ‘social science’ thread associated with Bernard Brodie and others, produces the pioneering academic work on Soviet military strategy of Raymond Garthoff. But this was never integrated into ‘deterrence theory’ (See Garthoff’s memoir, A Journey Through the Cold War). Logically, it should have been.

It was misleading of me, while not actually inaccurate, to suggest that up to the Seventies, the Soviets believed nuclear war could be won, for two reasons. One has first to distinguish the meaning of 'won' which Kennan was employing, which relates to the use of war for political ends, from its more limited meaning, as indicating that one can devise a strategy whose implementation avoids total disaster. And then one has to distinguish the question of whether the Soviets believe that nuclear war was winnable in the latter sense, from that of whether they believed they could themselves win it. The first operational Soviet nuclear weapons were delivered to forces in 1954 – so that at the time which NSC 68 called the ‘point of maximum danger’ it was the Soviets who were facing a classic ‘window of vulnerability’. The strategy of pre-emption is adopted in 1959. Moves away from it are partly to do with Khrushchev’s ouster. But also they are a response to Western ‘flexible response’. As soon as the Soviets saw some change of fighting a war in a way which would avoid the nuclear devastation of the Soviet Union, they looked for means of doing this. But for reasons I gave in my last post, the conventional strategy naturally reinstates the importance of the conventional blitzkrieg. It is wrong to say this would have caused a world war. It is the least worst strategy, in the event of world war.

Already before Gorbachev came to power, Soviet General Staff officers were having second thoughts. One of the leading figures behind Soviet nuclear strategy, General-Mayor Valentin Larionov, would also emerge as the principal military theorist behind the Gorbachev ‘new thinking’. This ‘new thinking’ was incomprehensible to many in the West, because the shift to the conventional strategy had been missed. With the aid of Richard Pipes, the heirs of NSC 68 defended existing orthodoxies about the Soviet of nuclear war, against the volume of evidence presented by Garthoff, on the basis of an analysis of Soviet writings, and Michael MccGwire, who complemented this with a vastly detailed analysis of Soviet arms procurement, deployment, and exercising patterns.

At the same time, Soviet military theorists, not existing in a theoretical dreamworld, were well aware of the chimerical goal of the idea of a technical solution to the problem of crisis stability under conditions of extreme tension.

In the 'Delicate Balance of Terror' paper, Wohlstetter laid out six ‘hurdles’ which had to be fulfilled in order to make possible a secure second strike capability. Among these was the ‘hurdle’ of making the decision to retaliate and communicating it.' According to the Wohlstetter's own logic, Soviet planners are waging everything on a kind of nuclear blitzkrieg, whose object will be to destroy every shred of an American ability to strike back. So, one might thought that a question could conceivably arise as to whether the goal of 'making the decision to retaliate and communicating it' was entirely unproblematic.

In 1974, the ‘great debate’ which followed James Schlesinger’s announcement of the new policy of limited nuclear options started some reflections in the mind of Minuteman launch control officer called Bruce Blair. He noted the supposedly new conception of ‘counterforce’ strikes, both in official statements and in academic writings, and it struck him as ‘completely of the wall’. For he almost never was required to do drills in which he fired off missiles after sustaining a full scale Soviet attack. Instead, he was ordered to practice drills in which no Soviet attack had yet occurred. It appeared that either the United States was launching first, pre-emptively, or on warning of an incoming attack. A fundamental reason behind this was that the SAC commanders did not share the assumption Wohlstetter had so cavalierly made – that it was possible to produce a command and control system robust under nuclear attack. Blair then went to graduate school, and became a central figure among that band of scholars who investigated seriously the practical commands of nuclear command and control. The product was a number of seminal works, including his 1993 The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War. His argument about the operational problems of ‘deterrence’ theory was confirmed in an interview by the former SAC Chief General Lee Butler. “Part of the insidiousness of the evolution of this system,’ Butler remarked, ‘is the unfortunate fact that, whatever might have been intended by the policymakers (who, incidentally, had very little insight into the mechanisms that underpinned the simple words that floated onto a blank page at the level of the White House), in reality, at the operational level, the requirements of deterrence proved impracticable…’ See http://www.cdi.org/blair/launch-on-warning.cfm