One factor complicating a nuclear terrorist attack is the need for the aggressor to maintain command and control over their weapon at all times. Letting a nuke out of sight of a terrorist leadership cell is the supreme act of faith in the attacking cell. The nuke can be turned against them in a leadership struggle; diverted for sale or used to extort vast amounts of money. Fanatics can seize them to use against another faction. Much terrorist violence in the world is faction-on-faction. They can even be intercepted and made to blow up in their own faces. Unless used immediately nukes must be secured in a heavily guarded, hard to conceal place. If used immediately they cannot be stockpiled into a decisive amount. Missile delivery systems were ideal solutions to all the problems of command and control problem. That is why North Korea and Iran sought a missile capability immediately. Anti missiles defenses were therefore an immense discouragement against nuclear terrorism in their own right.
The most likely reason for Russia’s objections to US missile defense is not that it degrades their vast and unstoppable arsenal, which remains effective in any case, but it reduces the effectiveness of sock puppet proxies who threaten the US. Russia is not about to threaten the US directly. But wouldn’t it be convenient if others would? And wouldn’t it be even more convenient if the US could not defend against them.
Iran
Terrorism’s Heart of Darkness
This post, entitled Assessing Counter-Terror Since 9/11 is worth reading. But one line jumped out at me.
Successful terror attacks require real skills at surveillance, security, and usually explosives manufacture. None of these skills are easy to acquire. Most successful attacks have involved someone with real training, usually acquired in Pakistan. By monitoring movements to and from Pakistan (and other areas that could be training centers) and extensive sharing between national intelligence agencies suspect activity can be identified and monitored.
(emphasis added) It is axiomatic that terrorism usually requires state sponsorship to be effective, and this post makes a strong case that this axiom has ongoing validity — and that the worst state sponsor is Pakistan. (This is consistent with other things I have read.) In fact, according to this post, it is so bad that you can monitor terrorists generally by monitoring who comes and goes from Pakistan. That, if true, is intolerable.
I had a good visit this weekend with our colleague Zenpundit. One of the things we talked about was the seeming lack of strategy underlying American policy. It has been spasmodic and reactive. We contrasted the current “three wars” — The Global War on Terror, the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, none of which have a goal or an articulated means to reach that goal (i.e. a strategy) which is worthy of the name.
Contrast this with two very successful strategies. In World War II our strategy was “Germany First”. Two words, and all else flowed from it. In the Cold War our strategy was “Containment” or “Containing Communism”. This over-arching aim held through thick and thin and we eventually succeeded in our aim of containment.
In the current conflict we seem to be floundering around. The goal in both Iraq and Afghanistan is to arrange things so we can leave. In other words, we are admitting that we should not have invaded either place and that we cannot accomplish much of anything of value by being there. We just don’t want to make things worse by the way we leave. This reminds me of the sort of prestige-based decision-making that kept us in Vietnam. The current vision of population-centric COIN appears to be way too expensive and time consuming to be worth doing on a big scale in Afghanistan. Gen. Krulak’s recent letter to George Will is one example of a proposed different course. As Afghanistan becomes “Obama’s War” I hope we will see some creative thinking.
In the meantime, I am thinking more and more that the focus should be on state sponsors of terrorism. The main sponsor of terrorism is Pakistan. Of course, there is no “Pakistan” but rather factions within Pakistan. Nonetheless, if we are going to focus our military and political energy anywhere, it should be on ending Pakistan as a source of terrorism.
I am not yet committed to the idea, but I suggest “Pakistan First” as our strategy. I do not mean conquer and occupy Pakistan. I mean compel the government there, but whatever combination of carrots and sticks, to stop supporting terrorism and to actively work to stop terrorism originating within its borders.
Accidental Wars
In this Reason Hit&Run post, the vile Patrick Buchanan takes a well deserved beating for his bizarre and ahistorical defense of Adolf Hitler in WWII. However, as loathsome, racist and stupid as he is, Buchanan is correct about one thing: Hitler did not intend to start a second world war that would drag in every industrialized country and leave 3/4 of the industrialized world in ruins.
Instead, Hitler planned on fighting a short, sharp war in Poland. Based on his experience at Munich, he expected that France and Britain would either merely raise a token protest or that they would would fight briefly, realize that they couldn’t recover Poland and then negotiate a peace. He never envisioned that he would fight a gotterdammerung war of global destruction.
Hitler miscalculated. In this he was far from alone. In the 20th Century every war that involved a liberal democracy resulted from the miscalculation of an autocratic leadership.
Breaking the Springs
In 1944, the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery was flying reconnaissance missions with the Free French forces. He was also working on what would be his last book: the philosophical musings of the fictional ruler of a fictional desert kingdom. St-Ex was killed in action before he got the chance to finalize the manuscript, but it was published as Citadelle in French and under the somewhat unfortunate name Wisdom of the Sands in English.
In one passage, the ruler muses that the criminal who has been sentenced to death may well contain an inward beauty of some form…but goes on to justify his execution:
For by his death I stiffen springs which must not be permitted to relax.
I thought about this passage when I heard about the decision of the Scottish authorities to release the Lockerbie bomber Al Megrahi, who has now received a hero’s welcome in his native Libya.
Deterrence
In October 2004, I visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. One of the exhibits there is a Minuteman III ballistic missile. It’s not a very impressive-looking object, and I hadn’t paid much attention to it on previous visits. But this time, I stopped in front of it for a while.
It was only about a month since the terrorist attack on a school in Russia, in which 186 children were murdered. And it struck me that had this missile ever flown, it would quite possibly have killed thousands of Russian children very much like those who were murdered by the terrorists.
I am not a pacifist or a nuclear disarmer, and I am not making a moral equivalence argument here; not in any way suggesting that American missileers are somehow similar to child-murdering terrorists. At the dawn of the age of strategic airpower, George Orwell summed up the situation: “If someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother.”
While the argument that the only defense against air attack was retaliation proved to be somewhat overstated during WWII, in which radar-directed fighters and AA guns did provide some meaningful defense against bombing, the argument was quite true throughout most of the Cold War era, given the existence of unstoppable ballistic missiles. I think that as a country we did the right thing in building and deploying Minuteman–and Atlas, and Polaris, and Trident, and the rest of them. But we must never forget that these things are the instruments of nightmares, and words like “deterrence” and “nuclear umbrella” and “massive retaliation” should never be allowed to hide the underlying realities.