Revised Oct. 29, 1965

CUBA, VIETNAM AND CHINA:
CHANGING CONCEPTS OF WARFARE

T. C. Schelling

Ten years ago the literature was dominated by a two-fold
classification of warfare: "all out" and "limited." "All
out" meant just that, and little attention was given to
whether it meant an all-out effort to hurt the enemy, an
all-out effort to avoid damage to ourselves, or an all-out
commitment of resources to a final showdown.

The model for "limited war" was Korea. At least, that
is the model that not only dominated discussion but was
applied to Europe when limited war in that theatre was
discussed. The Korean War was furiously "all out" on the
battlefield but was fought within conspicuous boundaries
and constraints: it was limited in territory, nationality,
and weaponry, as well as in war objectives, in the taking
of prisoners and in the maintenance of diplomacy.

The Korean War was essentially a <u>battlefield</u> war.
There was little attempt to coerce either side by deliberate

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attacks on civilian value. The immediate objectives on both sides were to destroy enemy troops and bases, to interdict supplies, to avoid casualties and to occupy territory. Army fought against army in a classical way, while the threat of greater violence--against the homelands of China, Japan, Russia, America, and Europe--policed the limits and kept war objectives compatible with a local armistice.

War in Europe, if successfully limited, was also expected to be "all out" on the battlefield, subject to limitations on territory and weapons. It might be restricted to non-nuclear weapons; it might be restricted to particular uses of nuclear weapons; it might be restricted from the American or Soviet homeland; conceivably, interdiction would not extend to submarine warfare on the high seas. But within those limits the battle, once it went beyond experimental probings, was expected to use all the troops and all the ammunition available; and the tactical objective was expected to be destruction of enemy troops, supplies, and bases, the minimization of one's own military casualties, and the occupation of territory (either to keep after the war or to trade for other territory). It was to be a contest in strength, with the outcome determined by fire-power, mobility, tactical surprise, maintenance of

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supply, and the quality of soldiery and generalship. It was
essentially the Korean model, with limits and participation
adapted to the politics, geography and weaponry of NATO and
the Warsaw powers. If it remained limited, the war aims would
presumably be less than "unconditional surrender" of the enemy.

Since ten years ago the concept of "all out" or "general"
war has been modified, mainly to admit coercive tactics of city
sparing and war termination, i.e., to enlarge the concept of
"limited war" to include even strategic weaponry and all the
homelands. This is a sensible modification. Even if it proves
impracticable, our intellects should not be subjected to the same
constraints as our weapon systems; and we ought to recognize that
throughout history war has been a _coercive_ as well as a _forcible_
action, aimed at enemy _motives_ as well as at enemy _capabilities_.

Since ten years ago, "limited war" has also been modified
conceptually, mainly by extension to problems of insurgency and
revolt that were below our military threshold until we became
especially concerned about Vietnam and the Congo. The Suez War
left no conceptual legacy, mainly because it stopped before it
could develop a character of its own and partly because it fit
an old-fashioned pre-nuclear model.

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This paper is about some other kinds of limited war that we are already engaged in and may have to anticipate for the future.

## Wars of the Battlefield,

### Wars of Risk,

### and Wars of Pain and Damage

I want to distinguish three types of limited warfare that may be relevant to the nuclear era. I shall call them "wars of the battlefield," "wars of risk," and "wars of coercive pain and damage." The battlefield type is the Korean type, and the type that NATO has planned for. By a war of risk, I mean a war that is intended to intimidate the other side--either to deter action or to coerce positive action--by posing the threat of *unintended* enlargement or escalation. Below the threshold of war itself, this is the kind of thing that has occurred around the Berlin Autobahn for fifteen years; there might have been some of it at the time of the landing in Lebanon, but it came dramatically to the front in the Cuban crisis, where the president really posed the threat that diplomatic or military commitments might compound themselves in an unforeseeable way and lead to some large engagement that, had it been anticipated, neither side would have got into.

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The blockade had some of this character; an attack on missile
sites would have had more.

At the tactical level there is a neat and unmistakable
example of this type of engagement--"buzzing" an airplane. The
essence of buzzing is that a genuine risk of collision is created,
but a collision that _both_ participants would deplore. (And we do
not necessarily know which would deplore it more). The pilot of
the harrassing plane has got to make it plain that, though he
evidently deprecates collision and has failed in his mission if
he collides, he still may collide. If he cannot get into a situation
that he may not get out of, he cannot scare the other plane. He
has to pose the risk that, through mishandling his aircraft, bad
eyesight, or faulty projection of his opponents course, the planes
may collide though _he_ doesn't want them to. The collision, if it
occurs, is "all out"; what can be limited is the _risk_ of collision,
and that may be large enough to intimidate yet small enough to make
the expectable outcome one of no collision. It is a form of
road-hogging or tail-gating in which, if you clearly can avoid
collisión when you want to, you cannot scare the other man.

Some of this competition in risk taking has surely been present
in Vietnam, intended or not. My interpretation is that it was
intended. There was some element of it in the reprisal bombing in

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the Gulf of Tonkin in August, 1964; there must have been more of
it in the initiation of bombing over North Vietnam. So many people
have been afraid of escalation that it is hard to believe this
important characteristic of the campaign gets ignored in the
motivation and design of the campaign. Surely one of the purposes,
even if only instinctively, is to engage in something risky enough
to make the other fellow move over a little to avoid collision
(or to deter an action that he might have taken, that would be the
more risky in the newly created environment).

It must have worked. One cannot say that no risk was created,
and therefore this tactic was absent, because in the end the bombing
has proved ever so much safer than even the most optimistic could have
hoped for. That could equally well mean that the risk was sufficient,
was timely enough, and was communicated adequately to succeed. The
Communist Chinese, insisting they could not "sit idly by," have done
just that; and Russian involvement seems to be the minimum that one
might have anticipated. Some of this prudence must have been due
to the danger of colliding with the United States, a danger
"pre-emptively" created by American intrusion into North Vietnamese
air space and American air-to-ground fire in North Vietnam.

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This is the tactic, or even the broad strategy, to which
the name "brinkmanship" can genuinely be applied.* It is not new
in Vietnam; and since brinkmanship may involve no collision, it is
not confined to war itself but can occur in any crisis or even be
characteristic of a steady state.

What is new in Vietnam is _coercive_ warfare, war designed to
inflict plain loss of value on a misbehaving adversary and to
promise more unless he behaves. The bombing of North Vietnam is
not an all-out interdiction campaign, exclusively designed to cut
supplies to the Vietcong; had it been that, there would have been
little reason not to do the bombing on a larger scale at the outset.
The bombing was widely discussed, and sometimes explained by the
Administration, as a means of putting pressure on the government of
North Vietnam. (The occasional hints, and one actual instance, of
conditional cessation of the bombing testify to its "negotiatorious"
character.) When extension of the bombing to industrial
establishments had been discussed, it has not been in terms of
slowing down the war effort but rather of destroying things valued

*I have argued before that creation of risk may be among the strongest motives for using nuclear weapons and should be an important criterion for how to use them if they have to be used. But the principle is not peculiar to nuclear weapons, although they especially lend themselves to the creation and appreciation of genuine risk. See my "Nuclear Strategy in Europe," *World Politics*, 14 (1962), 421-32, reprinted in *Survival*, 4 (1962), 206-11.

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by the government of North Vietnam, of raising the cost of their
not coming to terms, of making the war more unattractive to them
(and possibly of making them apprehensive that if another war occurs
nearby in the future it, too, will be an expensive one). The bombing
of North Vietnam is, at least partly, an exercise of the power to
hurt.

This is one of the things that military force can do. It gets
strangely little attention in strategic literature, which tends to
concentrate on forcible defense and occupation, to which sheer pain
and damage are incidental--not unimportant, often more important
than the "military" objectives, nevertheless incidental rather than
central to the strategy. It is military engagement, not the "diplomacy
of violence," that has attracted the attention of Western strategists
during the past century or more. But in addition to opposing enemy
force, military force can be used directly to destroy value. The
results of the bombing in North Vietnam, I take it, were not to be
sought mainly in the physical reduction of material capable of reaching
the Vietcong, but rather in the North Vietnamese willingness to comply,
to accommodate, to withdraw or to negotiate (and possibly in setting
a pattern, and a warning, for the contingency of Chinese participation
or of some other Chinese adventure).*

*And the warning, though perhaps not so intended, may have been
picked up by others, possibly the Indonesians who may perceive a
precedent for a mode if warfare to which they could be vulnerable in
the event Malasia (or eventually, Australian New Guinea) proves
indefensible on the battlefield.

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The contrast with battlefield warfare is not only in the
motive but in the tempo. In the Korean War, and in the anticipated
NATO war, the limits (realized or anticipated) were qualitative,
discrete thresholds, limits in kind and not degree. Coercive warfare,
in contrast, can apparently be conducted by _degree_, in measured
doses, in a way that purely military engagements usually cannot be.
There is probably a tendency for battlefield warfare, once embarked
on, to be intensified up to the next natural limit, up to where a
new decision is required to change the quality of participation.
But when one side can _hurt_ the other off the battlefield, possibly
when both can hurt each other, the process can be more gradual, more
deliberate, less concentrated.

This is apparently due to two things. First, the pure hurting
does not accomplish anything forcibly but must work indirectly. It
depends more on the threat of what is yet to come than on damage
already done. The pace of diplomacy, not the pace of battle, governs
the action; and while diplomacy may not require that it go slowly,
it does require that an impressive unspent capacity for damage be
kept in reserve. Unless the object is to shock the enemy into sudden
submission, the military action must communicate a continued threat.

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Furthermore, it may take time for the adversary to comply, even time for him to arrange a mode of compliance that does not appear prohibitively submissive, and diplomacy may dictate a measured pace.*

Second, a campaign of civil damage, even when conducted by both sides against each other, will not necessarily be a contest in local strength in which it is important to strike before the other can strike, or to concentrate overwhelming force. In military

*Most of us, in discussing limited war during the past ten years, have had in mind a war in which both sides were somewhat deterred during war itself by unused force and violence on the other side. That is, we were not thinking about wars that were limited because one side was just not interested enough, or one side was so small that an all-out war looked small, or even because one side was restrained or both were by humanitarian considerations. We have mainly been talking about wars that involve some continued mutual deterrence, some implicit or explicit understanding about the non-commitment of additional force or non-enlargement to other territories or targets. It is presumably fear or prudence, in the face of some kind of reciprocity or escalation, that leads one to believe that we should not cross the Yalu, we should not bomb the Soviet homeland, the Chinese dare not attack Guam, the Russians would prefer not to introduce nuclear weapons in Europe, and all that. This mutual deterrence or reciprocity is important, so important as to deserve the emphasis it has got. But in coercive warfare there is this other important reason for not committing all of one's force, not destroying all the targets one might destroy, even if one faces no possibility of enemy escalation. It is simply that the object to make the enemy behave. To use the threat of further violence against somebody requires that you keep something in reserve--that the enemy still have something to lose. This is why coercive warfare, unless it gets altogether out of hand and becomes merely vengeful, is likely to look restrained. The object is to exact good behavior, or to oblige discontinuance of mischief, not to destroy the subject altogether. And this would be true even if the enemy posed no threat of reprisal or reciprocal damage and even if the punitive warfare were costless.

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engagements the advantages of surprise, concentration, and timely commitment of reserves usually make it inefficient, perhaps disasterous, to withhold resources too long and to let them dribble slowly in the battle. But a campaign of civil damage is often comparatively uncontested, able to be delayed or spread over time with no particular loss in efficiency. Unless there are defenses to be overwhelmed or enemy reinforcements to be pre-empted, haste may be of no great tactical value.

So there may be no great loss in military efficiency, and possibly a gain in diplomatic effectiveness, by limiting the degree of intensity of such a campaign, as has surely been done in Vietnam. And of course if both sides are able to conduct painful reprisals against each other there can be natural reluctance to maximize mutual damage. The pain and loss, if damage is reciprocated, are not recoverable.

## Reprisal: A Special Case

There is a special case that needs to be distinguished. That is "reprisal," which connotes a response, a reply, a retort or an answer in kind, and implies a reciprocal action, some punishment for

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a breach in the rules. The bombing of naval ports in the Gulf of Tonkin had this character; one unaccustomed act was responded to with another, the two linked in time with the intended relation of cause and effect, of crime and its punishment, of violation and retribution. Nominally at least, the reprisal is related to an isolated breach of conduct, not to the underlying continuing dispute. The motivation and intent can of course be more ambitious than that; the object can be to display determination or impetuosity, not just to dissuade repetition. (One might even hope for an excuse to conduct the reprisal, as a means of communicating a more pervasive threat.) Nevertheless, the reprisal tends to have a direct linkage with a recognizable act and an association in time with it that is intended to communicate that that particular act went beyond certain bounds and has provoked a response that also goes outside the routine bounds, and that the incident is capable of being closed.

Reprisals may of course spiral in a competition to have the last word; and an exchange of reprisals can become so prolonged as to become disconnected with the original incident and to take on the character of coercive warfare, even the character of a showdown. Even then there may be a tendency for reprisals to retain their linkage in time, each act being adjusted to the one that preceeded it.

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And this is different from the steady pressure of coercive warfare, aimed at settling the original dispute and not just at punishing some departure from the accepted method of conducting that dispute. Reprisals often have the function of policing qualitative limits against violation, not of widening the area of combat itself. This seems to have been the case along the Israeli border and in other areas where reprisal warfare is as common as the Korean War has been in American thinking.

## Coercive Warfare and "Compellence"

Among the reasons why coercive warfare has not figured much in our theoretical discussions or our military plans, one is that we have been mainly concerned with something called "deterrence," and deterrence is comparatively simple. By deterrence I mean, and I think officially we have always meant, inducing inaction through fear of the consequences. Partly our aim has indeed been deterrence; partly deterrence has been a euphemism for the broader concept of coercion, as "defense" has replaced words like "war" and "military" in our official terminology. It is a restrictive euphemism if it keeps us from recognizing that there is a real difference between deterrence and what I have had to call "compellence," that is, a real difference between inducing inaction and making somebody perform.

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Abstractly it might seem that action vs. inaction is merely
a two-fold choice; that it does not matter whether we call good
behavior "action" or "inaction," and that the logic of deterrence
ought to be the same as the logic of compellence. This is not so,
because the composition of the action, the timing of the action,
and the interpretation of the action are usually different according
to whether deterrence or compellence is involved.

In the first place, a threat that compels rather than deters
often requires that the punishment be administered _until_ the other
acts, rather than _if_ he acts. This is because often the only way
to become committed to a dangerous action is to initiate it; this
means in turn that the action initiated has to be tolerable to the
initiator, and tolerable over whatever time is required for the
pressure to work on the other side. For deterrence, the "trip wire"
can threaten to blow things up out of all proportion to what is
being protected because if the threat works the thing never goes
off. But to hold a large bomb and to threaten to throw it _unless_
somebody moves cannot work so well; the threat is not believable
until the bomb is thrown, and by then the damage is done.

Deterrence and compellence differ in a number of respects,
many of them corresponding to something like the difference between
statics and dynamics. Deterrence involves setting the stage--by

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announcement, by rigging the trip wire, by incurring the
obligation--and *waiting*. The overt act is then up to the opponent.
The stage setting can often be non-intrusive, non-hostile,
non-provocative. The act that is intrusive, hostile or provocative
is usually the one to be deterred; the deterrent threat only changes
the consequences if the act in question--the one to be deterred--is
then taken. Compellence, in contrast, typically involves initiating
an action (or an irrevocable commitment to action) that can cease
or become harmless only after the opponent responds. The overt act,
the first step, is up to the side that makes the compelling threat.
To deter, one digs in or lays a minefield, and waits in the interest
of inaction. To compel, one gets up enough momentum (figuratively,
but sometimes literally) to make the other act to avoid collision.

Deterrence tends to be indefinite in its timing. If you cross
the line we shoot. When? Whenever you cross--preferably never,
but the timing is up to you. If you cross it, *then* is when the
threat is fulfilled. But we can wait--preferably forever, that's
our purpose.

Compellence has to be definite: we move, and you must get
out of the way. By when? There has to be a deadline, otherwise
tomorrow never comes. If the compelling advance is like Zeno's
tortoise that takes infinitely long to reach the border by traversing,

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with infinite patience, the infinitely small remaining distances
that separate him from collision, it creates no inducement to
vacate the goal line. Compellence, to be effective, can't wait
forever. Still, it has to wait a little; collision can't be
instantaneous. The compelling threat has to be put in motion to
be credible, and then the victim must yield. Too little time, and
compliance becomes impossible; too much time, and compliance becomes
unnecessary. Thus compellence involves timing in a way that
deterrence typically does not.

In addition to the question of when, compellence usually
involves questions of where, what, and how much. "Do nothing" is
simple, "do something" ambiguous. "Stop" is simple; "go back"
leads to "how far?" "Leave me alone" is simple; "cooperate" is
inexact and open-ended. A deterrent position--a status-quo in
territory or in more figurative terms--can often be surveyed and
noted; a compelling advance has to be projected as to destination,
and the destination can be unclear in intent as well as in momentum
and braking power.

In the deterrent threat, the objective is often communicated
by the very preparations that make the threat credible; the "trip
wire" often demarcates the forbidden territory. There is usually
an inherent connection between what is threatened and what it is

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threatened about. Compellent threats, in contrast, tend to
communicate only the general direction of compliance, are less
likely to be self-limiting, less likely to communicate in the
very design of the threat just what, or how much, is demanded.
The garrison in West Berlin can hardly be misunderstood about
what it is committed to resist; if it ever intruded into East
Berlin, to induce Soviet or GDR forces to give way, there would
be no such obvious interpretation of where and how much to give
way unless the adventure could be invested with some unmistakable
goal or limitation--a possibility not easily realized.

Also, any coercive threat requires some corresponding
assurances. The object of a threat is to give somebody a choice.
To say, "One more step and I shoot," can be a deterrent threat only
if accompanied by the implicit assurance, "And if you stop I won't."
The corresponding assurances are usually clear in the static
status-quo-oriented deterrent threats; they are furthermore
confirmed and demonstrated over time; as long as he stays back
and we do not shoot we fulfill the assurances and confirm them.
The assurances that accompany a compelling action--move back a
mile and I will not shoot, and I will not then try for a second
mile--are harder to demonstrate in advance unless through a long
past record of abiding by ones own verbal assurances.

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There is a tendency, in making threats, to emphasize what we shall do if he misbehaves and not to emphasize what behavior will satisfy us. This is natural when deterrence is our business, because the prohibited misbehavior is often approximately defined in the threatened response; but when we must start something that has to be stopped, as in compelling actions, it is both harder and more important to know our aims and to communicate. Deterrence can often afford to concentrate on the initiating events--what happens next if he misbehaves. Compellence often involves an action that has to be brought to successful closure; the payoff comes at the end, as does the disaster of the project fails.

And if the opponent's compliance necessarily takes time--if it is sustained good behavior, cessation of an activity that he must not resume, evacuation of a place he must not re-enter, payment of tribute over an extended period, or some constructive activity that takes time to accomplish--the compelling threat may require some commitment, some pledge or guarantee, some hostage, or else must be susceptible of being itself readily resumed or repeated. Particularly in a crisis, a Cuban crisis or a Vietnamese crisis, there is strong incentive to get compliance quickly to limit the risk of damage; just finding conditions that can be met on the demanding time schedule of a dangerous crisis is not easy. The

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ultimate demands may have to be achieved indirectly, by taking
pledges or hostages that can then be used to coerce compliance
after the pressure has been relieved.

Notice that to deter <u>continuance</u> of something the opponent
is already doing has some of the character of a compelling threat.
This is especially so of the timing, of who has to take the initiative.
In the more static case we want him to go on not doing something;
in this more dynamic case we want him to change his behavior. The
"when" problem arises in compelling him to stop, although problems
of "how much" may not arise if it is some discrete and well defined
activity. "At all" may be the obvious answer. For U-2 flights that
may be sufficient; for subversive activity, "at all" may itself be
ambiguous because the activity is complex and hard to observe or
attribute.

There is another characteristic of compelling threats that
often distinguishes them from deterrent threats. It is that the
very act of compliance--of doing what is demanded--is more
conspicuously compliant, more recognizable as submission under
duress, than when an act is merely withheld in the face of a
deterrent threat. Compliance is likely to be less casual, less
capable of being rationalized as something that one was going to
do anyhow. The Chinese did not need to acknowledge that they
shied away from Quemoy or Formosa because of American threats,

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and the Russians need not agree that it was NATO that deterred them from conquering Western Europe, and no one can be sure. Indeed, if a deterrent threat is created before the proscribed act is even contemplated, there need never be an explicit decision not to transgress, just an absence of any temptation to do the thing prohibited. The Chinese still say they will take Quemoy in their own good time, and the Russians go on saying that their intentions against Western Europe were never aggressive.

The Russians cannot, though, claim that they were on the point of removing their missiles from Cuba anyway. If the Americans had evacuated Guantanamo when Castro turned off the water it would have been a conspicuous act of submission. The tendency for affirmative action to appear compliant is vividly illustrated by the widespread suspicion--one that could not be effectively dispelled--that the U.S. missiles removed from Turkey in the wake of the Cuban crisis were part of a bargain, tacit if not explicit. The mere act of bombing North Vietnam changed the status of any steps that the North Vietnamese might take to comply with American wishes. It can increase their desire, if the tactic is successful, to reduce support for the Vietcong; but it also increases the cost of doing so. Secretary Dulles used to say that while we had no vital interest in Quemoy we could not afford to evacuate under

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duress; intensified Chinese pressure always lead to intensified
determination to resist it.

There is an argument here for sometimes not being too explicit
or too open about precisely what is demanded. President Johnson was
criticised for not having made his objectives entirely clear when
the bombing was initiated. How could the North Vietnamese comply
if they did not know exactly what was wanted? Whatever the reason
for the administration's being somewhat inexplicit--whether it chose
to be inexplicit, did not know how to be explicit, or in fact was
explicit but only privately--an important possibility is that
vague demands, though harder to understand, are less embarrassing
to comply with. If the president has to be so explicit that any
journalist knows what is demanded, and if the demands are concrete
enough to make compliance recognizable when it occurs, any compliance
by the North Vietnamese regime would necessarily be fully public,
perhaps quite embarrassingly so. The action and the motive could
not be so readily disguised.

Another serious possibility is suggested by the North
Vietnamese case: the initiator of a compelling campaign may not
himself be altogether sure of what action he wants, or how the
result that he wants can be brought about. In the Cuban missile
case it was perfectly clear what the U. S. government wanted, clear

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that the Soviets had the ability to comply, fairly clear how
compliance might be monitored and verified though in the end
there might be some dispute about whether the Russians had left
behind some things they were supposed to remove. In the Vietnamese
case it is easy to suppose that the U.S. government did not know
in detail just how much control of influence the North Vietnamese
regime had over the Vietcong. We can even suppose that the North
Vietnamese regime itself is not altogether sure how much influence
it would have in commanding a withdrawal or in sabotaging a movement
that receives their moral and material support. The American
government may have been in the position of demanding results,
not specific actions, leaving it to the North Vietnamese through
overt acts or merely through reduced support and enthusiasm to
weaken the Vietcong or to let it lose strength. I do not know
enough to judge this Vietnamese instance, but it does point up
that compelling threats may have to be focused on results rather
than on contributory deeds, like the extortionist's demand. "Get
me money. I don't care how you get it, just get it." A difficulty
of course is that results are then a matter of interpretation in a
way that deeds often do not need to be. To judge how much support
the Vietcong is losing from North Vietnam is a little like judging
whether a recipient of foreign aid is making an adequate effort to

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expand exports or to control inflation; at best the outcome is
arguable, and often the evidence is delayed.

Even more than deterrence, compellence requires that we
recognize the difference between an individual and a government.
To coerce an individual it may be enough to persuade him to
change his mind; to coerce a government it may not be necessary,
but it also may not be sufficient, to cause individuals to
change their minds. What may be required is some change in
the complexion of the government itself, in the authority,
prestige, or bargaining power of particular individuals
or factions or parties, some shift in executive or legislative
leadership. The Japanese surrender of 1945 was marked as much
by changes in the structure of authority and influence within
the government as by changes in attitude on the part of
individuals. The victims of coercion, or the individuals
most sensitive to coercive threats, may not be directly in
authority; or they may be hopelessly committed to non-compliant
policies. They may have to bring bureaucratic skill or political
pressure to bear on individuals who do exercise authority,
or go through processes that shift authority or blame to others.

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In the extreme case governing authorities may be wholly un-
susceptible to coercion, may, as a party or as individuals,
have everything to lose and little to save by yielding to
coercive threats--and actual revolt may be essential to the
process of compliance, or sabotage or assasination. Hitler
was uncoercible; some of his generals were not, but they lacked
organization and skill and failed in their plot. For working
out the incentive structure of a threat, its communication
requirements and its mechanism, analogies with individuals
are helpful; but they are counterproductive if they make us
forget that a government does not reach a decision in the same
way as an individual. Collective decision depends on the internal
politics and bureaucracy of government, on the chain of
command and in lines of communication, on the structure of
parties and pressure groups as well as on individual
values and careers. This affects the speed of decision, too.

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I have dwelt on compellence for two reasons. First, that is the business we are now in. We are trying to make the North Vietnamese regime do something (even if only to stop something it is doing) and this is different from deterrence. "Compellence" helps to explain why our coercion takes the form of delivered damage, not just verbal threats and damage; we communicate the threat by progressive fulfillment, because the first step is up to us. It also helps to explain why this kind of campaign needs to be allocated over time and apportioned in its intensity, in a way that retaliatory deterrent threats often do not. And it explains why it is so important to know who is in charge on the other side, what he treasures, what he can do for us and how long it will take him, and why we have the dilemma of being clear so that he knows what we want or vague so that he does not seem too submissive when he complies. Compellence is new business for us, as is coercive warfare; it is no coincidence that these two departures from earlier concepts are linked together in place and time.

Deterrence will go on being our main business, compellence the exception; but for actual warfare the historical mixture may now be more nearly representative of what we have to expect. Roughly

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speaking we have one limited war of the battlefield (Korea), we
have several contests in risk-taking (Berlin, Cuba), and we have
one unmistakable example of coercive violence, North Vietnam.*

*I am distinguishing the coercive campaign against North Vietnam from the more straightforward military campaign against the Viet Cong. The latter campaign will prove to have been substantially "coercive" if in the end the Viet Cong yield because their losses are unendurable, to themselves or to their supporters; if in the end they yield or become manageable through sheer loss of numbers, or loss of leadership or supply, it is in my scheme a "battlefield" rather than a coercive mode of warfare that we wage against them. If one insists it is all the same war, it only means the two models can be mixed in the same war yet be distinguishable and worth distinguishing. South Vietnam has illustrated, as Algeria did dramatically, that one side may wage a coercive and terroristic war while the other tries to oppose it forcibly, not coercively. Algeria showed also that when battlefield warfare proves unavailing, and the terroristic adversary cannot be disarmed, confined, or repelled forcibly, the army that first tries forcible action may resort to terror itself. And Algeria showed that giving way to coercive terror may prove to be not only degrading but incompatible with the purpose it is intended to serve. North Vietnam suggests the important possibility that coercive warfare may be directed against things the adversary values *other* than his population; when one is trying to coerce governments, rather than populations themselves, the distinction between civilian, or non-military, targets and civilians themselves is a terribly important one.

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I think we'd be wise to recognize that North Vietnam may be as "typical" of limited war as Korea, and then turn around and look at other parts of the world in the light of this new emphasis. I see no reason to suppose that a war in Europe, if it should break out, will be a battlefield test of strength the way Korea was rather than a competition in risk taking, as Cuba was, or a coercive campaign, as North Vietnam is. In a way, because of the greater relevance of nuclear weapons, one might put greater emphasis on the brinkmanship and the coercive civil damage than on battlefield tactics, when thinking about Europe. But I have argued this before, and only wish to point out that the Vietnamese War provides real precedent for taking this seriously.* What I want to turn to is the question of China.

* See again my "Nuclear Strategy in Europe," also my chapter and others in Klaus Knorr and Thornton Read (editors), *Limited Strategic War*, New York, 1962.

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China as a "Strategic-Warfare" Adversary

For years most strategic analysts have thought of Communist China itself either as a minor theatre in a major war or as an indirect adversary. Hardly anyone seems to have thought about what kind of a war it would be or ought to be if the United States became directly engaged with China.

There is little or no visible evidence that in the design of strategic weaponry the possibility of war with China has been taken into account in a manner commensurate with the attention China is now given by the U. S. government. The great diplomatic event of the last half decade is that China is no longer, for purposes of strategic warfare, equivalent to Siberia or the Baltic coast. It is a separate country; and both the Chinese and the Russians have managed to establish that Russia is not absolutely obliged to defend China, or to retaliate on behalf of China, if China should get militarily engaged with the United States. For a long time the idea of a war with China seemed almost meaningless, for although everybody was permitted to express misgivings about the American commitments to France and Germany, nobody seemed to have misgivings about the Russian commitment to China. To

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attack China was merely to give the Russians first strike in a general war. And in that war there was a main adversary, Russia, and all the United States had to do was to obliterate enough of China to destroy the regime, or to satisfy a revenge motive, or to use up whatever weapons it had that could not reach Russia.

Now, however, the overriding consideration in case of engagement with China would be to avoid obliging the Soviet Union to intervene. And if it did not intervene, the ensuing war would have, and should have, almost no similarity to the kind of "general war" that is usually envisaged with respect to the Soviet Union.

The attempt should be to minimize casualties, not to maximize them; there would be no reason to kill Chinese, and there is no historical reason to suppose that the Chinese people, by the hundreds of millions, are any worse threat than any other people except for the regime that heads them in disciplined opposition to us. There may be some reason to threaten to destroy Soviet society in case of general war; I see no reason to threaten to destroy Chinese society in case of general war. There is even less reason actually to destroy Russian society in case of general war, and none at all for

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destroying Chinese. Somehow the notion got around that the Chinese would still outnumber us if we killed only half of them, and we should therefore try to kill more; this is a grotesque idea, and as far as I can tell the Chinese do not believe, any more than we should, that victory would go to the side that merely outnumbered the other at the end of a cataclysmic war.

If we did have a war with China, it could be either of two kinds. It could be an effort to destroy the present regime by destroying or disrupting the physical and social basis of its authority and control, with a simultaneous effort to minimize population damage. Or it could be an effort to coerce the regime to come to terms, to pull its troops out of India, to withdraw from Formosa, to disarm itself, or something of the sort. In either case, it is virtually certain that we would not and should not rely on our strategic missiles against China.

We should not because that is probably the most expensive way to destroy the targets that would need to be destroyed and the way least consistent with the constraints we should observe, to wit, minimizing gratuitous population damage, minimizing the Soviet obligation to intervene, and minimizing

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post-war revulsion against the way we had fought the war.
And we would not, because the need to keep our deterrent force
intact and ready, to keep the Russians at bay, would be greater
than it had ever been before. A war with China would be precisely
the time when the United States ought not and would not use
a substantial proportion of its strategic deterrent weapons
against a second-rate enemy; when Polaris and Minuteman weapons
would be valued far beyond their historical money cost.

Furthermore coercive warfare against Communist China,
intended not to destroy the regime but to make the regime
behave, would probably be aimed at Chinese military potency
and objects of high value to the regime. The two least
appropriate, or least effectual, weapons might be the two that
people seem readiest to contemplate: conventional explosives
and megaton warheads. It might indeed take nuclear weapons
to shock the Chinese into an appreciation that we were serious;
and it probably would take nuclear weapons, in the face of
whatever attrition rate the Chinese could force on us in a
protracted campaign, to give us any commanding ability to
inflict military or economic damage on them. What the United
States was doing in North Vietnam in 1965 against a third-rate
adversary, with conventional explosives carried by airplanes

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that were not designed for the purpose, it would probably
attempt to do in China with low-yield nuclear weapons in air-
planes that have not yet been designed for it.

We should probably want to destroy the Communist Chinese
air force with weapons that would cause no casualties beyond
a half mile or so from the airfields; we should want to destroy
industrial facilities that had a low population or labor-force
density. We should want to destroy transport and communication
facilities, military depots and training facilities, and troops
themselves. We might not afford to do it with conventional
weapons (unless newly effective conventional weapons were
designed for it) and could not afford to cover such a target
system with precious strategic missiles.

We need to recognize that China is a "strategic" adversary
that cannot be taken care of by "strategic-war" planning that
was developed during two decades of preoccupation with the
Soviet Union. China is a different strategic problem altogether.
New modes of coercive limited warfare would have to be developed
for coping with the problem. The entire tempo of war would
be wholly different from anything contemplated against the
Soviet Union; except for a small retaliatory force that the
Chinese might possess some time in the future, there would be

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few or no targets of such urgency as to make the initial moments,
even the initial days or weeks, as critical as they are
bound to be in planning for the contingency of Soviet-American
war. The idea of "limited strategic war" between the Soviet
Union and the West is often dismissed as plain impracticable,
and those who dismiss it may be right; between China and the
United States a war would have whatever tempo the United States
decided on, or a tempo determined by Chinese actions in some
local theater, not the hypersonic tempo of pre-emptive thermo-
nuclear exchanges.

The need to distinguish a campaign intended to eliminate
the regime from one intended only to coerce the regime into
good behavior could become supremely important when the Chinese
possess a nuclear retaliatory capability (against the United
States or against any other population center that they might
choose). Making clear to them that, however bad the war already
was for them, it could become much, much worse, might be the
most effective way to keep that capacity for nuclear mischief
disarmed. At the same time, the most potent coercion might
be a target strategy that threatened the regime--eventually,
gradually, or uncertainly, not suddenly and decisively--and
such a strategy would require discriminating what it is that

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the regime most treasures and where it is most vulnerable.

Whatever its effect on the North Vietnamese willingness to support the Viet Cong, and whatever the capacity of North Vietnam to control the Viet Cong in submission to the threat of continued bombing attacks, the bombing of North Vietnam must have had one implication for China that went far beyond the present war in Southeast Asia. Forcible resistance to them outside their borders can never cost the Chinese more than the resources they knowingly put at risk, the troops and supplies they send abroad; but the bombing of North Vietnam is a mode of warfare that the record now shows to be a real possibility, one that the United States has not only thought of but engaged in. It is a mode of warfare that, at least with air supremacy and the absence of modern anti-aircraft weapons, can be conducted deliberately over a protracted period. And it is a mode of warfare that, if quantitatively increased, could cause extensive physical damage inside the target country, denying any guarantee that the costs of aggression can be confined to the expeditionary force put at risk outside one's border.

Nuclear weapons (or other unconventional weapons) are hardly discussed in connection with the North Vietnamese bombing campaign, presumably because nuclear weapons are not essential

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to the campaign and because the issues in Southeast Asia are
not yet commensurate with the issues raised by nuclear weapons
themselves. For translating the North Vietnamese campaign to
China, though, nuclear weapons are sure to be considered, not
only because their greater efficiency may be more decisive
but because the issues involved, in a coercive attack on China
itself, would be correspondingly greater and more likely to
equal or to exceed in seriousness the rupturing of our
anti-nuclear traditions. Whether intended or not, the air
attack on North Vietnam must carry a warning message to China,
a message more credible than the massive threat of megatons
on Peking, more potent than the threat of logistical support
to the Indians or of Korea-type opposition elsewhere in Asia.

All of this does not mean expecting a war with China,
any more than preoccupation with deterrent forces has meant
settling for a war with the Soviet Union. It means making
sure that _if_ the point should be reached where a war with
China were contemplated or forced on us, we would not fight
a preposterously wrong kind or war for lack of having thought
in advance about it or for lack of having equipped ourselves
for a major adversary that differs drastically from the adversary
that motivated our strategic-weapons design for two decades.

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It also means thinking about the kind of threat that we
wish to pose to the Chinese. There may well be something in-
credible about a threat to drop megaton weapons on cities like
Peking, as well as the threat to engage them in a Korea-type
encounter. If they are to be threatened with anything other
than rebuff outside their borders, it must be a kind of war
that is not wholly incompatible with our principles, with the
need to keep the Soviet Union deterred, and with the forces
we have available. A major attack on India could make all of
this suddenly relevant, just as the Vietnamese War has suddenly
made relevant a concept of warfare that does not conform to
the model of "limited war" that we inherited from Korea.