Richard K. Betts

Columbia University

#### *THE FUTURE OF FORCE*

**The views expressed in this and other papers associated with the NIC
2020 project**

**are those of individual participants. They are posted for discussion
purposes**

**only and do not represent the views of the US Government.**

> October 27, 2003

Richard K. Betts

Columbia University

*THE FUTURE OF FORCE*

The following discussion touches on (1) probable occasions for the use
of military force up to 2020; (2) the role of international institutions
in affecting decisions to use force; (3) evolution of international
norms on employment of force, and the effects of norms; (4) effects of
technological change; (5) reactions of other countries to the use of
American power. The main arguments are that developments in the use of
force that can be reasonably estimated will not be major changes from
practices that have evolved in the past dozen years, but that
developments that could mark big shifts are entirely possible. Most of
the major changes of previous eras were low on the list of probabilities
\-- if on the list at all \-- before they occurred.

***When and Where Will the Use of Force Be Most Likely?***

***Predicting From and Away From Current Trajectories***

Probabilities that the U.S. will use force in significant ways in the
years up to 2020 depend on:

*Challenges and opportunities that will not be anticipated until shortly
before they erupt.* The most likely uses of force are those that we do
not now see as likely.

*Potential crises or opportunities that are currently recognized*. This
does not contradict the previous point. The United States uses force
quite often. Many occasions are surprises, others are ones that were
seen coming.

*Feedback from experience.* Successes at low cost will encourage more
frequent resort to force, failures or pyrrhic victories will discourage
it.

*Who is in power in Washington.* Parties, politics, and personalities
will determine which choices are made in all but the most compelling
situations (most compelling meaning when the United States is attacked
directly).

It is risky to predict the future on the basis of current trajectories
of events, because developments deflect or derail trajectories, and
unimportant countries become important without much warning. In none of
the past six decades would estimators have put high on their lists of
predictions the crises or wars that broke out. Who would have predicted
in 1943 that a decade later the United States would be ending a war
against its World War II ally China in an obscure country like Korea? or
in 1953 that the closest brush with nuclear war would come over a crisis
in Cuba? or in 1963, following the victory in the missile crisis, that
within a decade the United States would be pulling back from military
activism abroad? or in 1973 that in ten years American forces would be
fighting in Grenada and Beirut? or in 1983 that within a decade the
United States would have fought a major war against Iraq and would be in
combat in Somalia? or in 1993 that the next ten years would see three
American wars, and against countries like Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq
again?

Nevertheless, some occasions of conflict are anticipated. Estimates
should consider both what developments could plausibly flow from the
current trajectory of events (points that are noted in italics below),
and what changes in international or domestic conditions could make the
main strategic engagements of the United States completely novel.

*Limited humanitarian interventions in small countries that pose few
risks of long-term entanglement will be frequent, but more often
undertaken by European countries or United Nations-mandated coalitions
than by the United States.* The implicit division of labor by which
American forces do the heavy lifting of conventional war, and allies do
the dishes of peacekeeping, will not be established in principle, but
seems to have emerged in practice. In the context of the current
reluctant embroilment in nation-building in Iraq, nothing at present
appears to be working in the other direction. The United States may
participate in humanitarian interventions, but more probably as a junior
partner and with token contingents. If the recent crisis in Liberia
could not overcome the legacy of Somalia 1993 enough to energize prompt
and decisive intervention, few "normal" emergencies will.

Three conditions could make the United States a more enthusiastic
practitioner of humanitarian uses of force. One would be the imminent
prospect of another shameful large-scale *genocide* like Rwanda's in
1994. Burundi is a case in point, where preliminary warning of the
danger already exists.

Another condition would be the advent of stable inter-state peace
throughout the areas in which the United States has been strategically
engaged. This would leave the U.S. armed forces with no preferred
missions, and in danger of withering away if they lacked other
rationales for deployment. Previously disdained missions would then have
to be welcomed. Interstate peace impressive enough to have this effect
would require at least the elimination of the two principal remaining
rogue regimes and their replacement with compliant, friendly
governments, and resolution of the Taiwan problem; it would be most
likely with more thoroughgoing change such as integration of Russia in
the West (including membership in NATO) and democratization of China.

The third condition would be the coming to power of politically secure
liberal interventionists in the White House and Congress. This would
have most effect if the domestic change coincided with either of the
first two conditions.

*Unconventional counterterror operations will be frequent* \-- attempted
whenever possible \-- at least until Al Qaeda is neutralized. The only
conditions under which counterterrorism might recede to minor activity
would be retrenchment of U.S. presence abroad so dramatic that it turned
terrorists with global reach away from focusing on American interference
in their societies as a prime grievance. At the least that would mean
evacuation of the Middle East and the end of massive U.S. diplomatic,
military, and financial support to Israel.

*Conventional wars between states will be rare.* Interstate wars became
rare altogether after the middle of the 20^th^ century, and most civil
wars have been unconventional, guerrilla-style wars. Looking forward,
the disincentives to the United States to take on North Korea or Iran
militarily are substantial. Hardly any other major powers appear
inclined to engage each other, or to be challenged by weaker countries,
at the conventional level.

One big potential exception is the India-Pakistan conflict, where
miscalculation and unplanned escalation could overwhelm mutual nuclear
deterrence. Another case lower in probability but higher in consequence
for the United States would be a U.S.-PRC war over Taiwan.

*Use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is the biggest wild card*. The
first catastrophic incident (tens of thousands of fatalities) would
change trends in unpredictable ways. It could plausibly trigger either
panicked retreat from confrontation and a groundswell for disarmament,
on one hand, or indiscriminate preventive wars on the other. Use of
nuclear weapons is less likely than use of chemical weapons (CW) or
biological (BW), but is still not a negligible possibility. Inadvertent
escalation in South Asia, or reckless escalation by North Korea, offer
the main possibilities. By 2020 it will be three-quarters of a century
since nuclear weapons were first used in combat. It would be an unusual
achievement to find a major weapon still unused over such a span of
time.

Use of chemical weapons somewhere is most likely, because they are
comparatively easy to procure, but CW in most scenarios are not really
in the mass destruction category. CW are also least likely to cause
major changes in attitudes or policies because, having been used a
number of times in recent decades, they are not unprecedented and
therefore seem less shocking.

Use of BW should be the greatest concern, in theory, because they
combine the high killing power of nuclear weapons and the comparative
availability of CW. In practice, however, BW do not appear to have
captured the imaginations of rogue regimes, or to frighten American
leaders, to the extent that they should by virtue of their physical
killing capacity. No state has yet attempted to brandish BW for
deterrence or coercive leverage. For governments, nuclear weapons will
probably remain the most sought options for countering the American
threat; for non-state terrorist groups, CW and BW may be sought by
default, as the only obtainable WMD for coercing or punishing western
countries.

##### International Institutions as Influences on Force

In the first decade after the Cold War many expected international
institutions such as the United Nations to exert far greater control
over the authorization and employment of military force. This did appear
to happen in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. It also occurred especially in
peace operations, as many such interventions were mandated by the UN, or
at least by NATO, which although it is really an alliance, has come to
be seen by many as a collective security organ.

Such institutions play a role in blessing the use of force, and in
coordinating the use of national contingents for participation in
peacekeeping. They will be less significant for either inducing
countries to employ force on a significant scale, or preventing them
from doing so, when those countries' governments reach different
conclusions about the necessity of force. For inducing intervention, the
United Nations Security Council (UNSC) does not move faster than the
decisions of the member governments themselves. For preventing use of
force, it is hard to think of a case in which a major power refrained
from combat because it lacked permission from an international
institution. The recent American assault on Iraq despite the UNSC's
refusal to authorize it is the clearest example.

Do recent events herald a crisis for the UN, the danger as some see it
that the organization will become irrelevant in the years leading to
2020? No \-- or at least not any more than was true for most of the UN's
history, when the Cold War hobbled the Security Council. The recent
humbling of the Security Council and Secretary General by the unilateral
American decision to wage war against Iraq marks not a new departure but
a reversion to the pattern of superpower behavior in the first four
decades of the UN's existence. This is a surprise to observers who
mistook the 1990s pattern of superpower collaboration with the UN for a
new authority of the UN, and who assumed that the UN and NATO would take
over the regulation of security worldwide.

The notion that international law now requires UNSC authorization (or at
least the sanction of a major regional organization like NATO) for
waging war is an idea that grew in the past dozen years and achieved
currency as the governments of small countries, their lawyer
functionaries and diplomats, and international bureaucrats embraced it.
Until recently it was easy to confuse the cooperation of great powers
with procedures of international institutions on decisions about
intervention \-- which occurred because interests of the countries and
of the institutions coincided in most post-Cold War cases \-- with the
cession of sovereign prerogatives to make war. In the coming decades
cooperation of major powers with international institutions will
continue to *reflect* common interests, but will not override major
powers' own strategic decisions.

***International Norms Limiting Uses of Force***

Two distinct dimensions of the evolution of norms on permissible tactics
in the application of force do not necessarily coincide: content and
impact. The groups that control one may not control the other.

Prevalent norms will be shaped and usually observed by the large
majority of countries in the world that do not engage in great power
competition or major combat actions outside their own borders.
Disinclined and unable to play in the same strategic league as the
United States and a few other major powers, this majority exerts its
greatest influence by collaborating through international organizations
such as the United Nations or the new International Criminal Court to
promote rules with content designed to be universal, and thereby to bind
the great powers who do fight wars of consequence.

For norms that are consistently in everyone's interest, effect will
follow, but for ones that leave combatant states in occasionally
problematic positions, effects will be limited. The major powers will
not accept "universal" rules that contravene their strategic interests,
nor will smaller powers whose territorial or regime security is less
than that of the majority in the "international community." Or if the
rules are accepted in principle, their interpretation by State
Department or Foreign Ministry lawyers will ensure that violations are
never admitted.

In any event, the content of norms on use of force is unlikely to change
very much in two decades. The principal one aimed at constraining force
or assigning blame is the norm against aggression, which is quite old
and is now accepted in principle by all. It is no closer to being
defined in a way on which all agree, however, and has little effect on
behavior. There is no reason to expect that by 2020 there will be more
progress in establishing consensus on standards for charging aggression
than there has been in the last century.

Norms have already evolved fairly far toward constrained standards for
employment of weapons. Deliberate killing of civilians has been entirely
delegitimized, and expectations of strong efforts to prevent accidental
collateral damage have grown. (The most dramatic reflection of this
trend is the recent institutionalization of direct oversight by lawyers
in targeting processes for U.S. and NATO forces during and since the war
over Kosovo.) It is unlikely that even the pressure of events would
reverse the trend and promote formal recognition of more permissive
criteria for killing.

Nevertheless, a significant minority of countries still seek to develop
\-- or to keep \-- inventories of nuclear weapons, despite the fact that
such weapons' principal effects are against noncombatants. The
disjunction with norms against killing civilians is finessed by
rationales based on deterrence and the aim of preventing war, but
proliferation reflects the priority of security and strategy over rules
divorced from particular situations.

Whatever the content of evolving norms may be, however, their impact
will vary with the importance of the case. Practical pressures for
relaxing constraints could come from a change in the priority placed on
combat success. (This may already have happened in certain parts of the
American war against terrorists.) When the users of force believe
effective action to be required for their own genuinely vital interests,
rather than for humanitarian purposes (the vital interests of others),
and effectiveness is threatened by constraints in targeting, the users
will be more likely to risk violating demanding standards for restraint.
(We have probably already seen a more peermissive application of
targeting standards in U.S. bombing of Afghanistan in 2001 than in the
Kosovo War two years before.) In that event explicit acceptance of
civilian casualties \-- a revision of norms \-- will not be the
solution. Rather official rhetoric will more likely ignore the change in
practice, explain controversial results as accidents and proclaim
continued concern, or ignore the question altogether.

One development that could push norms even further toward restraining
combat tactics would be the advent of revolutionary capabilities in
non-lethal or "less-lethal" weapons. If novel instruments for subduing
targets without destroying them become capable of decisive results not
just in riot control but on the battlefield as well, many \-- especially
in the nations of the international community that do not engage much in
the use of force themselves \-- will push to establish the norm that
such weapons become the prime military instruments. (This tendency would
be greatest among countries whose conception of force focuses on
peacekeeping and policing rather than regular war.) Although there has
been significant progress in research and development of less-lethal
weapons, no such revolutionary change is yet on the horizon.

Norms against collateral damage may be honored by less use of imprecise
weaponry simply because technology and combat effectiveness mandate
greater reliance on precision strikes. It is always easy to honor
humanitarian norms when the requirements of combat effectiveness
coincide with them. This combination of purp0ose may be less available
for countries that lack the precision technology of the United States,
but few such countries have been engaged in conventional military
operations anyway, or seem likely to be major military actors (beyond
internal actions to pacify their own countries) in the next couple
decades. The exceptions would be "rogue" regimes defending themselves
against attack, and they are unlikely to worry about international
norms.

How clear will norms be? They will be most impressive if codified in
international agreements and addressed by international institutions,
such as the new International Criminal Court. Whether the United States
feels bound by such formal declarations will depend primarily on who is
in power in the United States, and what counterpressures there will be
against accepting the new norms as international law. In recent times
the great powers have more or less refused to be bound by restraints in
treaties favored by the majority of states when the new norms inhibit
desired military options \-- for example, the United States, China, and
Russia initially refused to adhere to the treaty banning land mines,
which most other countries who do not worry about performing a wide
range of conventional military missions themselves were happy to
embrace. When a U.S. administration lacks interest in preserving options
constrained by emerging rules, Washington may embrace them, as in the
Clinton administration's endorsement of the Comprehensive Test Ban. The
Senate's rejection of that treaty, however, leaves few if any examples
of American acceptance of new rules that preclude old established
military operations.

***Technological Change***

For the United States, new technologies will have tactical effects on
employment of force more than strategic ones. Capacity for real-time,
detailed visual tracking of human targets, for example, will make it
easier to mount discrete attacks by facilitating strikes at times and
places where large-scale collateral damage can be avoided. This may make
it easier at the margins of decision to use military instruments for
counterterror operations, but should not change more general decisions
about war or peace.

For American adversaries, however, the spread of old technologies (for
WMD) could have major strategic consequences. If adversaries manage to
acquire and deploy "finite" but secure nuclear deterrent forces, U.S.
freedom of action will be constrained. This is potentially dangerous not
only because Americans would prefer to have carte blanche, but because
acceptance of this constraint may be tentative, ambivalent, and an
occasion for miscalculation.

For forty years of Cold War Americans took for granted that we could not
liberate Russians or Eastern Europeans from their odious regimes. After
the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, Americans stopped being
accustomed to being deterred, and the dominance of deterrence as an
overarching rationale for American strategy disappeared. Recent shifts
in strategic doctrine toward reliance on ballistic missile defense and
on preventive war have reinforced the notion that the United States
should not be deterred from attacking other countries that deserve to be
defeated. The United States was not deterred from attacking Iraq by what
was thought at the time to be a potent Iraqi stock of biological weapons
capable of killing millions.

Apparently for psychological reasons more than simple estimates of
casualties that could result, the prospect of nuclear weapons in the
hands of rogue states is more daunting to U.S. leaders. Readjusting to
constraint from fear of even small nuclear retaliation could prove
awkward, but could easily happen in the near future. It has already
implicitly begun to happen in the Bush administration's latest moves to
mollify North Korea's concern with regime security. If a crisis occurs,
however, recent American rhetoric and actions suggest that rogue
regimes' finite nuclear deterrents might not be sufficient to deter U.S.
attack. Then the odds that such a regime could manage to deliver a
handful of nuclear weapons (perhaps in combination with BW) against U.S.
cities via clandestine means, or by airbreathing systems such as jumbo
jets from national airlines or cruise missiles from merchant ships,
would become crucial.

***How Will Other Countries React to the Use of U.S. Power?***

Responses will run the gamut, according to the degree that countries
beholding American power feel threatened by it. They will react by
cooperating , carping, cowering, collaborating, or countering.

*Cooperating.* Some allied governments like Blair's Britain, or those
who foresee diplomatic and economic benefits from bandwagoning (like
"the new Europe" or newly independent countries near Russia that want
American patronage) will line up and ask no questions.

*Carping*. Skeptical allies or other countries that oppose American uses
of force will probably react rhetorically more than actively,
criticizing from the sidelines, charging the United States with immoral,
illegal, arrogant, myopic, and counterproductive muscle-flexing. In
theory, we might expect that other countries will form counterbalancing
coalitions to check American power. For more than a dozen years,
however, the United States has been the sole superpower or hyper-power
and has exerted that power frequently (for example, fighting twice as
many wars in the short post-Cold War period,at a fraction of the cost in
blood and treasure, as during the four-decade Cold War) but has not yet
provoked real balancing action. Despite much finger-shaking, other major
powers have not done anything concrete to oppose U.S. initiatives. Even
the sort of "soft" balancing predicted by Robert Pape \-- foot dragging
and diplomatic obstructionism \-- has been notable by how little there
is of it so far.

*Cowering.* Realism about material self-interest should make helpless
adversaries lie low and avoid provocation, hoping to escape being
targeted. Three types of exceptions may react instead with reckless
confrontation.

One exception would be a religiously motivated regime that believes God
is on its side (for example, Iran at the height of its revolution two
decades ago, or Pakistan after a revolution or radical coup d'état a
decade from now), or that moral rather than material interests are the
measure of policy.

Another exception would be rogue regimes that see U.S. demands leaving
them no possibility of survival even if they make concessions \-- those
who believe they are in the position of Saddam Hussein in 2002. At
present it is hard to see which countries could be such low-hanging
fruit for the United States as Iraq was \-- countries with no allies or
options for either deterring or appeasing Washington.

The third exception is a fanatical secular regime like North Korea \--
although North Korea may be sui generis. Pyongyang's penchant for acting
like a state with delusions of equality has been fed by a unique record
of success in provocation from a position of weakness. (Consider that
remarkable record: in the 1960s, the Blue House raid, seizure of the
*Pueblo*, and shooting down of the EC-121; in the 1970s, murder of
American officers in the tree-cutting incident, assassination of
President Park's wife, and tunneling under the DMZ; in the 1980s,
bombing of the South Korean cabinet in Rangoon and of an airliner in
flight; in the 1990s, threats that imposition of economic sanctions
would trigger war; and over long spans of time, kidnappings and commando
infiltrations. *None* of these initiatives produced forcible U.S.
retaliation, and in 1994 resistance to being called to account for
violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty prompted American
accommodation.

*Collaborating.* Although counterbalancing against American primacy has
not happened yet, there is no reason that it cannot. One
counter-coalition that would be both plausible and potent would be an
anti-American alliance of Russia and China. Tensions between both
countries and Washington have fluctuated, and are low at the moment, but
U.S. policy on NATO expansion, the Balkans, moving bases into Central
Asia, and defense of Taiwan provide long-term sources of conflict with
both countries, and an incentive to them to subordinate their suspicions
of each other to cooperation against the common threat of American
pressure. Such an alliance becomes more likely if conflict over the
Taiwan issue grows at the same time as conflict between Russia and NATO
over such matters as the status of Russians in Estonia.

*Countering.* Fanatical or desperate adversaries will seek to counter
the United States by mobilizing diplomatic and political support for
opposition to American force, or by developing "asymmetric" means of
deterrence and retaliation. North Korea, for example, tends to act not
like a realistic weak state, but like a suicidal one ready to bring
others down with it. It or other rogue regimes may try confrontational
strategies, despite the gross imbalance of power. They will do this if
they see no alternative to guarantee survival. They may also do this for
the purpose of deterring the United States. The danger then is that
Washington will see not deterrence, but provocation, and the deterrent
strategy may provoke preventive war as an American response.

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