Experienced diplomats and military leaders are creatures of the dominant strategic rules of the nation-state, but are soon to be called upon to make decisions in a world—and before the publics—of market-states. The demands upon these decision makers by their publics, who are sensitive to the sufferings of others and to those of their own armed forces in a way that is quite distinct from earlier generations, are met with a mixture of cynical deflection or perplexed frustration. The professionals knew, for example, that it would have taken at least 100,000 troops to pacify Bosnia, and they knew the public would never stand for such a massive deployment, but they were under great pressure from that public, and from politicians responsive to that public, to do something that would stop the ethnic cleansing in that region. So decisions oscillated between the public declaration of “safe areas” and private decisions to abandon their safety, between—to take another example—the highly publicized hunt for a Somali warlord and the humiliating scampering off when this hunt ended with the deaths of seventeen American soldiers. Two scholars writing in International Security summed up the Clinton administration's performance at this time by saying this:
The accommodations that the Clinton administration strategy [of the first term] has made with the obstacles it has encountered have been incremental, rhetorical, disjointed, and incomplete. In theory, the incoherence of the current strategy could produce a series of new difficulties for the administration, and conceivably a disaster.51
And another writer asked, “What might explain this failure to define a grand strategy?… Is the failure due to Clinton, the person? Or to America, a society that is exceptional in its assets, aspirations and afflictions? Or to the post-bipolar setting?”52
This author concludes that it is all of the above; I think it is none. Rather, the Clinton administration, like its predecessor, was attempting to apply the policy tools of a mentality that was inappropriate to the context within which it had to operate. The Somalia misadventure provides a good example of this.
The Somalia intervention came to a sudden end after the bloody failure of a daring helicopter raid in true commando style—a normal occupational hazard of high-risk, high-payoff commando operations. But given the context at hand—a highly discretionary intervention in a country of the most marginal significance for American interests—any high-risk methods at all were completely inappropriate in principle.53
Many factors, including the immediacy and power of televised images, drastically lowered birth rates, the sense of heightened opportunities forgone by the wounded and killed, account for the public's increased sensitivity to humanitarian issues—including, of course, its sensitivity to casualties in the armed forces. But whatever its cause, the effect has been a drastic shift in the appropriateness of military means, accompanied, paradoxically, by increasing demands for its use as an instrument of humane intervention.
It is true that we can avoid flip-flops like the Somali embarrassment by setting criteria so confining that force is only used in situations that threaten our vital interests, have overwhelming public support, can be exited quickly, and so on, as former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger has proposed. But this is simply to apply the strategic mentality of the nation-state so thoroughly that problems with which it cannot deal are no longer to be treated as susceptible to the use of force at all. The Weinberger Doctrine is not so much a remedy as it is a symptom of the military's inability to deal with the shifted context.54 There are casualties, however, attendant to this approach, too, among them the defense budget (for why should the public pay for a force structure that is so unresponsive to the public's perceived needs?) and the moral leadership of the world community (for why should the world defer to the richest and most powerful state in history when that state demands to sit passively by and expects other states to run the risks and bear the costs of humanitarian intervention?).
There are other alternatives. In an essay in Foreign Affairs, Edward Luttwak argued that the concept of war that governed American action had much to learn from the cabinet warfare of the territorial state. Eighteenth century wars, Luttwak noted, were characterized by
[d]emonstrative maneuvers meant to induce enemy withdrawals without firing a shot [and were] readily called off if serious fighting ensued. Superior forces avoided battle if there was risk of heavy casualties even in victory…. [E]laborately prepared offensives had unambitious objectives, promising campaigns were interrupted by early retreats into winter quarters merely to avoid further losses, and offensive performance was routinely sacrificed to the overriding priority of avoiding casualties…55
Luttwak's essay is perhaps most helpful not as a recommendation that the strategic style of territorial states provides a model for use today, but rather as a reminder that that style was superseded when state-nations achieved ascendancy. Indeed Luttwak lamented that the current American military establishment is so thoroughly imbued with the nineteenth century Clausewitzian criticism of eighteenth century thought. It is the grip of such criticism—and its affirmative ideas about the overwhelming use of force, the necessity of great battles and decisive conflicts, etc.—that has made American power so helpless in the face of post – Long War crises both before and since the Gulf War.
Luttwak realizes that adapting to this new historical context will require not only a change in outlook as regards the means to be applied to military situations but also a greater modesty as to the objectives sought by these means. This insight is indispensable if we are not to dismiss some of the most useful of market-state military and nonmilitary strategic alternatives as merely ineffectual. By such alternatives, I have in mind economic sanctions, covert action, bribes and financial incentives, sustained campaigns of precision air strikes, novel military and political uses of intelligence products, information warfare, missile defense, simulation, the use of proxy forces, and the entire range of new technologies and tactics discussed earlier as the revolution in military affairs.
If economy in lives risked and efficiency in resources used to accomplish the goals of the public are the two guideposts of the market-state, then let us see how we might judge some of these seven programs.
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Economic sanctions include a wide range of economic and financial measures—asset freezes, trade embargoes, expropriations, the withholding of credit, boycotts, and the like—that have become more difficult to maintain as the market has become globalized. Economic sanctions were not unknown to the state-nation—Napoleon's “continental system” is one famous example—but the sharp distinction between the operations of the market and the operations of government often made such sanctions hard to enforce. It was not thought unseemly that throughout the Napoleonic Wars, British bankers continued to finance French enterprises. The nation-state has not been so detached: with the coming of total war there arose also an intensified economic warfare against the civilian society.
The collective organizations of the society of nation-states have had a mixed record with such sanctions, however. The League of Nations was first called upon to apply economic sanctions to Japan following her invasion of Manchuria and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League condemned Japan's actions as unlawful, but drew back from invoking economic sanctions for fear of provoking a Japanese attack on colonies in the Far East belonging to the League's European members. When Italy attacked Ethiopia, the League called for an embargo on arms, bans on loans and credits, the boycott of Italian imports, and an embargo on the export of key raw materials to Italy. All this failed to stop the Italian conquest, and when Ethiopia sued for peace, the sanctions were withdrawn. When Germany invaded Poland three years later, the Western powers simply declared war; the League's elaborate peacekeeping machinery, with its emphasis on economic sanctions, was completely bypassed.
Nor has the United Nations's record, until recently, been much better. As with the League, collective economic sanctions were given a key role in international peacekeeping, but because action by the Security Council requires a unanimous vote of the permanent members, such sanctions could never be invoked against a great power or against a protégé of such a power. Even when a great power allows the Council to condemn the actions of a friendly state, it usually vetoes economic sanctions, as the United States has done for Israel and the Soviet Union did for Iran. From 1945 to 1990, economic sanctions were invoked only once, against the white government of Rhodesia, which was in revolt against a permanent member of the Security Council, the United Kingdom.
The coming together of the great powers at the time of the Gulf War, however, allowed the U.N. to impose economic sanctions on Iraq. Oil exports have been barred, with limited exceptions to pay for Iraqi imports of food and medicines. Since 1990 these sanctions have been the principal means by which the coalition states that fought the Gulf War have controlled what would otherwise have been the rapid recovery of Iraq's military forces. It is estimated that during the first seven years following the Gulf War, sanctions have kept $110 billion out of the Iraqi treasury. Similarly, though less dramatically, the denial of Serbian imports and exports eroded the political base of the Serbian leader, Milosevic, and doubtless played an important role in his extradition to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.
As in other matters at the time, this represented an Americanization of the U.N., though one of uncertain duration. For the Americans have relied on the economic weapon to a greater degree than any other state: since World War II, we have invoked economic sanctions against China, Cuba, Viet Nam, Iran, the Soviet Union, Libya, India, Pakistan, and Poland, among others. Indeed there has hardly been a time in which the United States was not applying economic sanctions against at least one foreign state. Partly this is owed to the important economic position of the United States in the world, and our crucial assets, a vast and lucrative market coupled with a self-sufficient economy. States that are vulnerable to retorsion are seldom enthusiasts for sanctions. Partly also the use of this instrument is a function of the gradual emergence in the United States of a market-state, and that sort of state's emphasis on market tools and its aversion to risking lives.
Despite this reliance, however, there is a consensus that economic sanctions do not “work,” and they are seldom studied by military strategists. This conclusion is the result of a profound misunderstanding about the role of such sanctions. Economic sanctions are used precisely because they are unlikely to result in the kind of change of constitutional regime sought by nation-states in war. If such sanctions really could drive another state to total collapse, they would just as surely lead to armed conflict, and it is the avoidance of armed conflict that gave sanctions their unique role in the post–World War II environment. If the grain embargo imposed on the Soviet Union by the United States at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan really had starved Russia into famine, it would not have driven that country into political submission but rather into a war for food.56 Sanctions are useful when conventional war is against one's own interests and therefore the relative costs of going to war, which are usually very high, must be kept high. Sanctions so powerful that they gravely weaken the opposing state quickly—as a decisive battle or military campaign can—would just as greatly lower the relative costs of war. It may be that this is what happened to the Japanese as a result of the U.S. oil embargo in 1941; the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor moved from being a clever theoretical possibility to a daring course of action acceptable to Japanese political authorities when the relative costs of war plummeted owing to the threatened imposition of a stringent oil embargo.57
Sanctions work by raising the cost of pursuing a particular political path—for both parties. (Thus they are especially useful to a rich power, like the United States, who can afford to play for “table stakes.”) Sanctions can help to discredit a policy—again in both states, the applying and the applied-to—and are therefore most useful where there is an active opposition party in the state to which the sanctions are applied, and no powerful interest group that is forced to bear the cost in the applying state. Even against a dictatorial government, sanctions can have a useful effect because such regimes are no less rational for being authoritarian. The crucial points to bear in mind are that sanctions' true utility lies in the modesty of their impact, a useful thing for the market-state that tries to shun warfare where possible, and that only an internationally coordinated effort, as exemplified by the sanctions against Iraq and Serbia, can be effective in an era of globalized markets and transient capital.
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The utility of the strategic alternative of covert action is also not widely appreciated. Even sophisticated commentators persist in thinking that covert action involves any clandestine action by a state's secret services. In fact, “covert action” is a term of art in intelligence operations, referring to those operations by a state that are intended to influence the politics and policies of a target state without the hand of the acting state being disclosed. Thus covert action includes the training provided by the United States to the Philippine anti-insurgency forces, requested by the Aquino government but denied by both the United States and the Philippines at the time; and the provision of radio transmitters to the mujahedin attempting to destabilize the Iranian regime; and the cash contributions to the Christian Democratic Party in Italy after World War II, and the subsidies to Encounter magazine at the same time. Covert action must therefore be distinguished from intelligence collection, counterespionage, and intelligence analysis and forecasting.
Of late, covert action has been generally held in low esteem in the United States. Writing in Foreign Affairs, former American official Roger Hilsman concluded that “covert political action is not only something the United States can do without in the post–cold war world, it was something the United States could well have done without during the cold war as well.”58 Such an observation, whatever its historical merits, is a revealing example of how disputes and positions taken during the Cold War tend to hang over into the new market-state context. In this new context, however, covert action is a far more viable and potentially useful tool. The most discrediting example of covert action—the Iran-Contra fiasco—was a fumbling attempt to privatize covert action, an objective consistent with the methods of the emerging market-state. A brief study of that affair provides an excellent object lesson in the home truth that all government acts must be consistent, however, with the constitutional law of the State, regardless of its constitutional order.
In the aftermath of the 1976 revelations of the Church Committee, which had convened to investigate whether the CIA had been involved in the Watergate Affair, various statutory and regulatory rules were promulgated that sought to limit U.S. covert action. The Reagan administration came into office in 1981 believing that the Carter and Ford administrations had been far too restrictive of CIA operations, and it wished to use covert action programs in Central America to challenge the new Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. A skeptical Congress cut back financing for such operations, and in 1983 adopted a complete ban on CIA operations against the Nicaraguan government. Moreover, thoughout this period it had become increasingly difficult to plan and execute covert operations without their exposure to the press—sometimes, it was said, by members of the oversight committees in Congress that the post-Watergate statutes had put in place.
Thus in the early 1980s CIA operations in Central America were imperiled by a statutory cutoff in funding, and the Reagan Administration believed that it risked exposure of these operations and others by compliance with the statutory requirements to fully inform Congressional committees, some of whose members were hostile to the very idea of covert action. This picture was made more troubling by a rise in anti-American terrorism and the apparent inability of U.S. agents to penetrate and neutralize the groups responsible. Throughout 1984, the United States was the target of a wave of bombings, assassinations, hijackings, and kidnappings in Lebanon. The stateless chaos that reigned in that country provided the perfect milieu for such crimes because the traditional methods of counterterrorism depend upon careful and experienced police work backed by firm legal authority.
In this situation, the director of the CIA proposed the development of a quasi-private covert action agency. This scheme offered several important advantages to the administration: (1) using private persons as liaisons, the new agency could manage the Contra insurgency against the Sandinista government, providing the tactical and operational guidance that had been coming from CIA before its funding and participation were cut off by Congress; (2) it would avoid the unwelcome scrutiny of Congress because it would not be a government operation, dependent on government funding, and thus would not come within the provisions of various statutes that imposed congressional oversight; (3) a private agency could act more daringly, avoiding the legal prohibitions contained in prior Executive Orders (against assassination, for example) that it would have been embarrassing to repeal, and in defiance of international norms against violent reprisals; thus it was hoped the United States might recapture the initiative that seemed to have been surrendered to the terrorist groups; (4) because of the agency's dissociation with official government, it would provide the president with the option of “plausible denial” should the private agency's operations be exposed. Statutes adopted in the late 1970s had greatly increased the political costs of maintaining such presidential denials because these laws required that the chief executive actually sign a written verification of the necessity for each covert operation and report this “finding” to Congress; therefore there always hovered the possibility that such written authorization might be discovered by the press after an official denial had been made.
The plan of using a privately funded agency to provide, in the words of one of the conspirators, “a self-sustaining, stand-alone, off-the-shelf covert action capability” was a natural market response to the problem of overregulation. In many ways it resembles the legal schemes by which multinational corporations take their enterprises offshore to escape onerous regulations by the state in which their operations are resident. Major General Richard Secord, the chief operating officer of the new covert action entity, called it simply “the Enterprise,” a very apt term. Although the public's understanding of this agency appears to be that it was created to manage the American arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, and then expanded its portfolio by diverting black-market profits from those arms deals to the Contras, in fact the chronology is the other way around. The agency was set up to manage the Contra account that Congress had taken away from the CIA; as the agency grew, it took up other accounts, conducting covert operations in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. It was intended to be staffed and available for use for any covert operation that needed its special scope and freedom from legal restraints. Had “Enterprise” operations in Iran not been exposed by the Iranians themselves, its executives believed that it would have taken on further assignments, in Angola and elsewhere.
This agency ultimately collapsed because it was fundamentally incompatible with American constitutional law. The exposure of the “Enterprise,” in a different political climate, could well have led to the impeachment of the U.S. president. Unlike other states—unlike even other representative democracies—the United States does not permit the private funding of federal operations because this would evade the legitimating check of representative government. Only when the persons for whom the electorate has voted require the taxpayers to pay money for government acts is there a direct link between voting and government operations. Otherwise, the framers thought, and our constitutional structure and practice reflect, the link between citizen responsibility and governmental authorization is broken. It is a very pleasing thing to have others pay for the operations of the State, but even gifts to the U.S. government cannot be accepted without statutory authorization. To do otherwise allows the government to undertake functions for which it has no authorization from the people.
But if the Iran-Contra Affair was a textbook case of how not to conduct a covert action, there is nevertheless an important role for such activity in the arsenal of the market-state. Usually such operations amount to the financial and technical support of local elements in foreign countries with whom the United States is in some sympathy, or at least with whom we are willing to cooperate for a common goal. Rarely, arms may be provided. Paramilitary forces may be supported by the provision of intelligence, logistical support, or financing. It is doubtful the Russian defeat in Afghanistan would have occurred absent U.S. support for the mujahedin. The key elements are strict accountability of funding; careful professionalism and planning; and setting achievable goals. With the multiplication of entities operating in the international environment, and the increasing sensitivity of most governments to public opinion, the potential usefulness of covert action increases with the emergence of the market state, as do the costs of exposure.
The Iran-Contra Affair was the result of a government that in some respects anticipated the new market-state and was eager to use its tools, but was insufficiently attentive to the rules of the American constitution into which the norms of the new constitutional order must be translated. Far from discrediting covert action, the affair should enable us to use this instrument with more care in the future by emphasizing the crucial role of the legal setting of the market-state. A deregulated state does not mean an unregulated state; indeed, the legal rules that remain after deregulation have an importance that is, if anything, more salient than under the ends-justify-the-means ideology of the nation-state. The Russian state has been imperiled by its involvement in black-market activities, precisely because it has been unable to heed this rule. Whether the United States can marshal the imagination and daring to execute significant covert actions in the new politically fraught context of the market-state remains to be seen.
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Sustained precision bombing: In Operation Linebacker, conducted in Southeast Asia in 1972, some nine thousand laser-guided bombs were fruitlessly dropped near Hanoi and Haiphong over eleven days—roughly the same number as were dropped with far greater effect during the entire Gulf War. So-called surgical strikes are among the most desired, and most elusive, options in the military handbook. Three difficulties have thwarted their promise of low-risk, low-collateral damage and high destruction: (1) air crews are inevitably put at risk because precision bombing requires low-release altitudes, and the very technology that enables target acquisition and homing for the bombardier is also used by antiaircraft missiles with integral radar systems; enhancing bombing accuracy also usually means employing air crews more intensively—the “smartest” of smart weapons was, after all, the kamikaze; (2) precision-bombing campaigns require enormous quantities of real-time intelligence to locate targets and track them; this intelligence relies both on satellite tracking, which is only now becoming achievable, and on highly efficient collection methods; (3) such bombing campaigns require patience—which the publics of market-states, fed as they are by hyperbolic media and sensitized to the suffering of civilians who are harmed by the bombing, will seldom tolerate—and modest goals. Contradicting the promises of early strategic bombing theorists, like Douhet and Billy Mitchell, it is extremely difficult for strategic bombing alone to effect a constitutional change in a hostile regime.
All of these perceived shortcomings were in the minds of U.S. planners when they considered the problem of attempting to lift the Serbian siege of Sarajevo. Despite intense pressure from the public and Congress, senior military officials refused to carry out bombing raids against the Serbs in Bosnia on grounds that strikingly reflect the interplay between market-state constraints and nation-state military mentalities. These officials forcefully rejected any area-bombing campaign on the grounds that too many civilians would be killed, reports of which would horrify the American public, and they rejected precision bombing on the ground that the public would not tolerate a long-drawn-out campaign. Given the rugged terrain in Bosnia and the fact that Serbian mortars and even howitzers could be quickly moved and easily camouflaged, any air operation short of a long campaign or area carpet bombing would be ineffective. In any case, it was reasoned, air strikes alone could not resolve the political conflict in Bosnia, or even safeguard civilians from the campaign of massacres, rapes, and deportations. Indeed, any bombing by the United States risked retaliation by the Serbs, who might take hostages from locally deployed U.N. forces, which, if withdrawn, would only lead to a demand for American ground troops, something else the public would not support.59
In the end, it was the insistence by military and diplomatic officials in many countries that bombing could not be decisive that was itself decisive. Military moves that could win the war and force the Serbs to surrender their goals required tactics that the public would reject; anything else was futile and risky. In these two demands—the insistence by the public on quickly terminated action, and by security personnel on achieving total objectives—we see the intersection between market-state and nation-state, between, that is, the new role of media-driven public sensitivities and the military demand for definitive state action.
In the event, an extremely modest bombing campaign conducted over a series of days without any obvious stopping point in fact lifted the siege of Sarajevo—the longest siege of the century, longer than Verdun or Stalingrad. As the memoirs of the American negotiator Richard Holbrooke wholly demonstrate, it was in fact this open-ended bombing campaign— over the strenuous objections of the British and French—that brought the siege to an end and, with the Croatian ground campaign, brought the Serbs to the negotiating table.60
By contrast the NATO campaign against Serbia to force acceptance of an international protectorate for Kosovo relied on aerial bombing from the outset.61 During the course of the campaign, nearly 40,000 sorties were flown with virtually no losses.62 When Slobodan Milosevic acceded to alliance demands, delivered by Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin and Finnish president and E.U. special representative Martti Ahtisaari on June 3, not a single NATO ground troop had entered Serbia.63 How was this possible and what lessons are there for the future use of this arm for the market-state? Each of the three vulnerabilities of precision-guided attacks that had been used to forestall NATO action in Bosnia had been blunted. First, stealth aircraft—aircraft whose radar profiles are so attenuated as to render them invisible to radar-guided attack—had taken out anti-aircraft missile sites that would otherwise have posed lethal risks to American pilots. Second, new technology had allowed for more accurate target acquisition, and the targets themselves were not confined to tactical strikes against Serb forces but included strategic strikes against Belgrade and the Serbian infrastructure. Third, NATO's political objectives were sufficiently modest and did not require a change of regime in Belgrade.
More important for our study, each of these three potential shortenings of precision-guided attack is likely to be even further ameliorated. In the past, precision-guided munitions depended upon some sort of homing technology—relying on either guidance from a command operator, or using emissions from the munition itself, or homing in on energy bounced off the target by an external transmitter or energy emitted by the target. Currently, however, the United States has the capability to use radar onboard the munition to generate midcourse corrections for an inertial guidance system or to fly to a precise set of coordinates using a guidance system updated by a Global Positioning Satellite system. Naval vessels lying offshore or aircraft distant from the target can launch these pilotless munitions with an accuracy that even the kamikaze would be hard-pressed to match. This, plus the introduction of Stealth technology, can greatly lower the risk to pilots and the likelihood of collateral damage to civilians.
Just as significantly, however, the United States set modest, achievable goals in the Yugoslav campaigns. NATO was willing to settle for something far less than victory; this did not prevent “ethnic cleansing,” but it did enforce an end to the Serbian armed presence in the provinces where Serbs had conducted their ethnic campaigns.
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The term information warfare usually* refers to the capacity both to penetrate and degrade an adversary's electronic communications and to protect one's own communications from interference. Such warfare played an important role in the Gulf War and doubtless will play an even larger role in future conflicts as electronic monitoring and control becomes more extensive, and the links to commanders more numerous.
This use of information technologies is potentially a highly valuable strategic option for the market-state. More important, however, the United States can also use information as a diplomatic and strategic commodity with which to create incentives and deterrents affecting the political behavior of other states. Of course it has long been true that the United States has shared information with allies—using satellites to aid Britain in the Falklands War, or forwarding decrypts to Stalin that revealed the impending Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union—but this was undertaken as an adjunct to military activities and not something that was pursued as a strategic alternative in itself. Now, however, dramatic developments in information technologies—the increased capabilities of intelligence gathering combined with the enormous synthesizing powers of computers—have made possible for the first time a truly global system of near-real-time monitoring.64
It is already the case that weather satellites, medium-resolution imaging systems, worldwide air traffic control networks, television links, and the like are being used by civilian corporations, while the U.S. military can rely on extensive photo reconnaissance abilities, infrared missile launch detectors, radar satellites, unmanned aerial sensors, remotely planted acoustic devices, and various military guidance tools. The United States could undertake to expand this technology in order to achieve a complete system of satellite sensors that would provide real-time monitoring on many wavelengths.65 The architecture for such a space-based information system is new, but the necessary communications technology is already emerging from the private sector. The entire system, however, depends upon affordable space lift, and this is something the U.S. government must undertake.
Such a system would provide the United States with the ability to detect, identify, track, and engage far more targets with a higher degree of lethality and precision, over a global area, than ever before. Knowing which subset of targets to strike serves as an enormous force multiplier, greatly reducing the number of weapons and strikes necessary to prevail over an enemy force.66 In addition, there are real benefits to the market-state to be found in information sharing (and withholding) beyond what can be achieved by weapons strikes.
At Sandia National Laboratories, an experiment has been undertaken in which a cooperative monitoring center acted as a confidence-building measure in much the same way that negotiated troop positioning, missile constraints, and transparency were used during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Mutual monitoring between two hostile states can reduce the chances of war by preventing successful pre-emption. Setting up such a center is an example of producing the collective goods that can maintain U.S. leadership. Indeed, as we shall see, the concept of collective goods is especially crucial to the market-state because the functions of that state do not replicate but supplement the market, which is astringently economical with public goods.
At present, the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) network established by the United States is used by any country with the capability to access it. Foreign nations have previously utilized the GPS system to direct missile attacks against U.S. interests; indeed, GPS-guided weaponry could be used to destroy U.S. satellites in orbit.67 Access to a truly global monitoring system, however, could be limited by the United States and bartered to licensee states either for fees or for political cooperation. In addition to its crucial contribution to warfare, such a system would be integral to weather control, asteroid defense, solar flare warnings, commodity planning, environmental monitoring, and the sustainable exploitation of natural resources, all collective goods for the society of states.
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By providing licensed states with the protection of a missile defense68 system, the United States could provide an effective and trustworthy strategic umbrella analogous to that it provided during the Cold War through extended nuclear deterrence. Moreover, without such defensive systems the vulnerability of U.S. forces to missile attack abroad will be an increasing deterrent to U.S. force projections in aid of allies or for humanitarian missions. Thus what positive effect still remains as a result of U.S. extended deterrence could be sharply eroded in the absence of a credible U.S. ballistic missile defense.
“Central deterrence” is a function of the threat to target a national homeland in order to protect the homeland of the threatening, deterring party.* For example, the U.S. central deterrent consisted of the threat to attack the Soviet homeland in order to protect the American homeland from attack. The term denotes a relationship between vital objectives whose very centrality to the State gives them the highest value to the deterrer and thus assures both the willingness to run the highest risks of retaliation or pre-emption and the will to inflict a level of harm commensurate with the necessity to protect “central” objectives. “Extended deterrence,” by contrast, projects nuclear deterrence beyond the absolutely central, into other geographical, nonhomeland theatres or for other, nonvital interests. Extended deterrence was the objective of the policy according to which the United States promised to retaliate with nuclear weapons if the states of Western Europe or Japan were attacked. Sometimes this threat of retaliation is called the nuclear “umbrella.” Extended deterrence is the single most effective instrument the United States has to prevent major-state proliferation because it permits these states to develop their economies without diverting vast resources to the nuclear arms competition, and yet remain relatively safe from nuclear attack.
It would be a grave mistake to assume that the threat of missile attack has receded worldwide as a result of the end of the Cold War. In the Gulf War, Iraq launched almost ninety missiles against targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia; 25 percent of all U.S. combat fatalities from that war were the result of a single Scud missile strike. Moreover, missile technology is quickly spreading to many states. North Korea, China, and other states have played major roles in this export trade. When North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and the North African countries ultimately possess the 1,300-kilometer-range No-Dong I missile, or something like it, the capitals of Japan, France, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Italy will all be within range of potentially hostile states.69
Since the end of the Cold War, the American program for ballistic missile defense (BMD) has been redirected away from the effort to achieve a comprehensive shield against a massive Soviet attack and toward theatre nuclear defense systems. The Clinton administration endorsed a program that included an upgrade to the Patriot systems used in the Gulf War; a Theater High Altitude Area Defense system that would supplement short-range point-defense systems like Patriot; and a sea-based system using the AEGIS ships.70 The enthusiasm with which these systems have been pursued, however, has been diminished by the intellectual residue of the Cold War: during the Soviet-American confrontation, many persons felt that BMD was essentially destabilizing to the deterrence relationship because it promised—a promise it could not possibly fulfill—to prevent the USSR from being able to destroy the United States in a retaliatory strike, thus potentially tempting both sides into pre-emptive moves.
It would reflect a considerable misunderstanding if these opinions, whatever their merits in context of the Long War, were to prevent the most rapid feasible deployment of BMD by the United States today. This deployment would enable the United States to protect many countries—perhaps for a fee—including states that would be hard-pressed to deploy their own defensive systems and that therefore might otherwise be tempted to develop other, far cheaper, deterrent systems of mass destruction. Moreover, the deployment of a theater BMD system would cast doubt upon potentially preclusive moves by other states to prevent the United States from projecting power abroad through conventional forces. For example, the six-month buildup of coalition forces in the Saudi desert would have been far too risky for a market-state like the United States if Iraq had possessed adequate offensive missiles. Even for a nation-state acting to protect its survival, such a threat to an expeditionary force can be preclusive: with respect to the Normandy invasion, General Eisenhower wrote that “if the German had succeeded in perfecting and using [the V-1 and V-2 missiles] six months earlier than he did our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible.”71 A theatre BMD might be able to rehabilitate future regional military operations similar to the coalition offensive in the Gulf War despite hostile missile proliferation that it is evident is very difficult for market-states to prevent. As an aside, I should add that it is not necessarily a decisive argument against BMD to say that it would be ineffectual against nuclear threats delivered by other means—the so-called suitcase bomb, for example. These devices are extremely difficult to manufacture and, more important, are as much a threat as an asset to an authoritarian state because, unlike missile systems, they do not require elaborate control procedures and technologies and are thus potential tools for insurrection.
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As noted above, computer-assisted design and manufacturing, training simulators, and virtual-reality environments will doubtless shape the military planning process of the twenty-first century. Simulation might, however, play an even more ambitious role in the hands of a market-state arbiter, such as the United States, or an ad hoc group of such states. With global monitoring, it ought to be possible in principle to simulate battles and then assess costs and damages afterwards. No lives need be lost in such conflicts. The role of individual heroism, of unit esprit, and sheer good luck will be less perhaps in future wars where combat is mainly fought by machines against machines—or against defenseless persons once their machines fail. In a transparent environment without tactical surprise, it may well be possible to arbitrate disputes not so much on the basis of international law as on a simulated competition run by computers. Recalcitrant losers would face coercive measures as penalties. The American legal practice of plea bargaining is an analogous example of such simulation in a different context. Based on the likely assessment of what would happen if the defendant went to trial, the prosecution and the defense barter within a range of likely outcomes, each preferring to avoid the risks and costs of trial if possible.
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Mercenary forces were once the dominant armed instrument of the State because they were an economical alternative to more expensive standing armies. In the future, the use of local proxy armies can offer a similar efficiency. Backed by the information and intelligence collection, the air power and the strategic direction of United States – led coalitions, such forces could provide the indispensable element of ground control without risking American lives to the same degree as U.S. ground forces. The risks attendant to the use of proxies—as Rome discovered—is that they are unreliable allies; the weapons and information they are provided must be carefully calibrated and the technological support given must be carefully weighed.
The present volume began with this question: why is it so difficult for contemporary leaders to determine when to use force in international affairs? Now, I believe, we are in a position to answer this question. If the American state—and many other states also—is in the midst of a transition from one form of constitutional order to another, then states are also in the midst of a change in their strategic relationships vis-à-vis one another that is related to this change in constitutional order. The difficulty lies in the fact that we have yet to appreciate the nature and implications of this transformation. We are quickly becoming a market-state. Yet we still cling to a strategic mentality that was formed within the constitutional order of the nation-state and its Long War for survival. It's not so much a matter of finding a new strategic paradigm as it is of acquiring the habits of thinking that are compatible with the character of the new constitutional order; then the paradigm will follow.
The United States's world role as protector of free states and our domestic constitutional institutions of liberty and equality are linked together by our history. Any set of rules that forbids the use of American force in virtually all the contexts in which the United States is likely to find itself moved by moral considerations in the current era will forfeit its claim on our moral sense. Then when those situations arise that do threaten our vital interests and call for a supreme national effort, we shall regret having ignored the cardinal historical lesson of American war making: that it is never done wholly on a moral or an expedient basis, but always and only when both are present. For two hundred years, U.S. foreign policy has been to offer assistance, where our assistance was sought and where it would be efficacious, to peoples who wanted free institutions and peaceful lives, and to oppose aggressors who threatened the constitutional way of life that is our greatest legacy to mankind. In service of the former objective we fought the warrior tribes of the Plains, the Mexican dictator Santa Anna, the German empire, the Spanish empire, and the Asian totalitarians Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, and sent forces to many places around the world where the collapse of the legal order brought great suffering. To defend our constitutional form of life, we fought both Britain and France in the nineteenth century, and defeated fascism and communism in the twentieth. We have seldom sought territorial cessions by conquest and have largely grown our continental state by the wishes of the pioneer inhabitants of the territories we protected or purchased. This history must be qualified by the wrongs we have committed, including those against Native Americans and the preservation of slavery and the slave trade for half a century after it had been outlawed in Europe. Yet it is our history that gives us a consistent sense of our achievements and of our wrongdoings.
It is important for the United States and its leaders to remember that Thucydides concluded that the “truest reason” for the Peloponnesian War was Sparta's fear of the growing strength of Athens. Not simply increasing American power, but persuading others of our modesty, our benign intent, our deference to the preferences of other societies will be an indispensable element in maintaining peace. American references to “the sole, remaining superpower” are scarcely helpful but the label “hyperpower” comes from abroad.
For history is not made within the State alone. Indeed I have argued that the State depends upon conflict with other states—the object of strategy— in order to establish itself as the legitimate guardian of a legal order. What of the society of states? How does its constitutional order come about, and what legitimates that order? This is the subject of Book II.
All wars are so many attempts to bring about new relations among the states and to form new bodies by the break-up of the old states to the point where they cannot again maintain themselves alongside each other and must therefore suffer revolutions until finally, partly through the best possible arrangement of the civic constitution internally, and partly through common agreement and legislation externally, there is created a state that, like a civic commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically.
—Kant, Idea for a Universal
History with Cosmopolitan Intent (1784)