# INTRODUCTION TO NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY

by Henry A. Kissinger

## I. The Nature of Modern Power

It has been a commonplace to say that we are living in an age of technological, strategic and political upheaval. In order to understand the nature of the changed relationship between power and policy, a few definitions are required:

1. **Offensive power** is the ability of a political unit to impose its will on another.

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2. **Defensive** power is the ability of a state to avoid coercion by another.

Defensive power may be further subdivided into purely defensive policy and precautionary policy. Power has a purely defensive use when a country waits for a threat to materialize before dealing with it. It is used in a precautionary manner when policy is directed toward preventing potential and not actual challenges. The policy of the United States before World War II was purely defensive. The tendency was to allow threats to become unambiguous and then to muster every effort to overcome them. The United States could afford such a course because our wide margin of survival guaranteed that no conceivable early reverse could menace the national interest.

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Britain's policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries illustrates the precautionary mode of action. Britain acted on the principle that Antwerp must not fall into the hands of a modern power. This was not because of any certainty that a major power would use Antwerp, with hostile intent. Rather, British policy was based on the proposition that by the time the opponents' intentions were clear, it was too late to affect them.

3. Deterrent power is the ability to prevent certain threats or actions from being carried out by posing an equivalent or greater threat.

There is no inevitable symmetry between offensive and defensive power. Some states have had little of the first but much of the second. Switzerland, for example, has managed to combined inaccessibility of terrain with the ability to mobilize a considerable proportion of its national resources. States in this position have been able to prevent other countries from imposing their will. On the other hand, they have not played a very active role in international affairs.

Power has no absolute measurement; it is always relative. In the seventeenth century, it would have been futile to try to compare the power

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of Japan and that of Great Britain, since they possessed no means of bringing their strength to bear on each other. This geographical separation of power remained a fact until the middle of the nineteenth century. And after that one small continent, Europe, was physically far superior to the rest and could dictate international affairs.

Power also depends on psychological as well as objective factors. Until it is actually used, it is what people think it is.

All these factors have been dramatically altered in the contemporary period.

Until the industrial revolution, total war in the modern sense of fully mobilizing all national resources was impossible. Subsistence economies simply could not spare the manpower or the resources for protracted large-scale operations. Armies were, therefore, largely composed of mercenaries, and they were small because the economy could not support a substantial standing force. A mercenary army did not possess the morale of modern citizen armies; the soldiers were not personally concerned with the fate of the country for which they fought. In the crudest sense, their ability to carry on their profession depended on their

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survival. Typical battles of the eighteenth century involved complicated maneuvers, which determined the relative position of the two sides. They caused relatively few casualties because both commanders were eager to conserve their resources and could not rely on the staying power of their troops. Citizen armies, on the other hand, which appeared during periods when political or religious passions ran high, could not conduct uninterrupted operations; in the absence of a surplus of manpower, they frequently had to disband during the harvest season.

Of course, wars fought by countries with subsistence economies did produce great suffering. The very narrow margin of survival ensured that any disturbance of the economic balance was likely to produce cataclysmic effects on society. As a result, until the industrial revolution, the collateral effects of war, the casualties caused by starvation or pestilence, were usually more severe than those of the battlefield.

The industrial revolution made possible the total mobilization of modern war. This trend was given impetus by the relatively small destructiveness of what is now called conventional technology. Until the middle of the

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Industrial plant. Thus Russia became a major power despite an almost complete lack of industry. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the limiting condition to the conduct of war was rarely the lack of equipment. Victory, almost invariably, was due to greater reserves of manpower or to a superior strategy, rarely to a superior industrial capacity.

In order to put a premium on industrial potential, weapons must be sufficiently complex to require a substantial production effort, but not so destructive as to drain the national substance before industrial mobilization can make itself felt. As a result, industrial potential proved strategically most significant when there existed a balance between the destructiveness of weapons and the complexity of the means of their delivery. Any substantial increase either in the power of weapons or in their number could then be translated into a strategic advantage. This situation led to the total mobilization of the two World Wars.

Modern technology has changed these conditions dramatically.

Modern weapons are enormously destructive; they are always in a high

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state of readiness. If the stockpiles of weapons available at the beginning of a war suffice to destroy the opponent's industrial potential, it is clear that industrial potential has lost a great deal of its significance and that the side whose forces-in-being are superior will gain a decisive advantage. Above all, the nature of strategy has changed fundamentally when the decision to go to war hazards the lives of tens of millions instead of thousands, when what is risked is no longer the loss of a province but the survival of society itself.

This situation reflects the basic paradox of contemporary technology. Power has never been greater; it has also never been less useful. In the past, the major problem for strategists was to assemble superior strength; in the contemporary period the problem more frequently is how to discipline the available power into some relationship to objectives likely to be in dispute. Yet, no matter what spectrum of power the major contenders may have at their disposal, the fear of escalation is inescapable. Though states have an unprecedented possibility to devastate their opponent, their

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threats to use this capability have only a limited credibility. This is
because the ability to destroy is not related to the ability to disarm--so
that using one's nuclear arsenal indiscriminately against a major opponent
only guarantees self-destruction.

This problem is made more acute because the primary purpose of
modern weapons is deterrence. But deterrence is as much a psychological
as a military problem. It depends on the aggressor's assessment of risks,
not the defender's. A threat meant as a bluff but taken seriously is more
useful for purposes of deterrence than a "genuine" threat interpreted as a
bluff.

Moreover, if deterrence is successful, aggression does not take
place. It is impossible, however, to demonstrate why something has not
occurred. It can never be proved, for example, whether peace has been
maintained because a country pursues an optimum strategy or a marginally effective
one. Finally, the more effective deterrence is, the more credible becomes
the argument that perhaps the enemy never intended to attack in the
first place. An effective deterrent strategy may thus have built-in

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pressures to strengthen the arguments of those who argue that a defense
effort is unnecessary.

Even when the necessity for a military policy is not challenged,
serious disputes are produced by the novelty of modern weapons. Never
before in history has so much depended on weapons so new, so untested, so
"abstract." Nuclear weapons have been used in wartime only against Japan,
which did not possess means of retaliation. No one knows how governments
or people will react to a nuclear explosion under conditions where both
sides possess vast arsenals.

Then, too, modern weapons systems are relatively untested. During
the debate over the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a great deal of attention was
focused on the adequacy of nuclear warheads. In fact, the other components
of modern weapons systems contain many more factors of uncertainty. The
estimated "hardness" of Minuteman silos depends entirely on theoretical
studies. Of the thousands of missiles in our arsenal, relatively few of each
category have been tested under operational conditions. There is little
experience with salvo firing. Air-defense systems are designed without any

definite knowledge of the nature of the offense. A high proportion of the
phenomena discovered in nuclear testing has been unexpected.

The novelty of modern weapons is compounded by the difficulty of
forming a plausible conception for their use. How does one threaten an enemy
with solid-fuel missiles? As these are always in an extreme state of readiness,
how does one demonstrate an increase in preparedness, which has historically
served as a warning? During the Cuban missile crisis of October, 1962,
dispersing SAC planes to civilian airports proved an effective warning. What
will be an equivalent move when strategic forces are composed entirely of
missiles?

## II. Definition of National Security Policy

National Security policy in the nuclear age thus goes far beyond
the traditional concept of assembling overwhelming power. It includes
political, psychological, economic and social factors. In its widest
sense it comprises every action by which a society seeks to assure its
survival or to realize its aspirations internationally. This definition
embraces all measures that have a bearing on the strength and vitality of

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society. A more significant definition of national security policy is the way in which the term is used within the United States Government: the policy area where power impinges on national objectives. In this sense, national security policy includes defense policy—the development of a country's military potential, but it also involves the attempt to influence the actions of other countries either by organizing them in efforts of collective defense or by creating an environment in which neutrality is possible. It involves a policy for dealing with what the West calls insurgency and the Communists define as wars of national liberation. National security policy embraces the efforts to discipline the arms race through formal or informal arrangements. Arms control and disarmament, in short, are not alternatives to national security policy but an integral part of it.

Finally, any consideration of national security policy must deal with the organizational machinery by which it is devised and implemented.

Therefore, this book is subdivided into the following sections:

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I. Strategic Doctrine and American Defense Policy

II. Alliances in the Nuclear Age

III. National Security Policy and Counterinsurgency Warfare

IV. The Control of Modern Weapons

V. National Security Policy and Governmental Organization

Each section of reading is preceded by a brief explanatory note by the author outlining the theoretical framework. Each of the selections has a brief note summarizing it and explaining its significance.

### III. Strategic Doctrine and American Defense Policy

Every advanced country has more technical choices than it can afford. Whether it selects missiles with large or small warheads, whether it emphasizes nuclear or conventional power, will depend more on its strategic doctrine than on the technology available to it. But strategic doctrine must not be thought of as something theoretical or dogmatic. Its role is to define the likely dangers and how to deal with them, to project feasible

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goals and how to attain them. It must furnish a mode of action for the circumstances it defines as "ordinary." Its adequacy will be tested according to whether these ordinary events do in fact occur and whether the forces developed in their anticipation are adequate to deal with the real challenges.

In the inter-war period, French strategic doctrine exalted the value of the defensive and built its plans around the Maginot Line. However, the likely German attempts to overthrow the Treaty of Versailles could be prevented only by French offensive action. By the time the Maginot Line might prove useful, in other words, the Versailles settlement would already have been overturned. Thus, French strategic doctrine contributed to the paralysis of French policy. When German armies re-occupied the Rhineland and attacked France's allies in Eastern Europe, French power remained passive and French diplomacy stood impotent. Even when the long-awaited attack in the West finally come, it turned the flank of the French fortifications.

A wrong strategic doctrine can lead to disaster. An excessively rigid strategic doctrine can absorb great energy in the attempt to reconcile what happens with what is expected. If it is too complicated, it can break

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down under the stress of decision-making. The Schlieffen Plan, Germany's military design for World War I, provided for every contingency except the psychological strain on the commander. It failed ~~largely~~ because the German leaders lost their nerve. In the face of Russian advances into Eastern Germany--foreseen by the Schlieffen Plan--they rushed reinforcements from the West weakening their offensive power at the crucial moment. It adds to the irony of the situation that these reinforcements were in transit when the decisive battles in both the East and the West were being fought.

But if there is no doctrine at all and a society operates pragmatically solving problems "on their merits" as the saying goes every event becomes a special case. More energy is spent deciding where one is than where one is going. Each event is compartmentalized and dealt with by experts in the special difficulties it involves without an adequate understanding of its relation to other occurrences.

Considerations as these are especially relevant to the strategic debate as it has developed in the United States since World War II. The United States emerged from the war in a position of unchallenged military

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superiority. The war seemed to have confirmed all traditional American
strategic axioms. The United States, despite its late mobilization, had
together with its allies crushed the aggressor. Victory had been achieved
by a massive outpouring of materiel. Strategic bombing, in which the
United States could engage without fear of retaliation, was seen by many as
a key to victory, and victory was conceived in terms of unconditional surrender.

Inevitably, this caused American strategic thought in the post-war
period to start as an adaptation of World War II maxims. Nuclear weapons
were incorporated into existing practices as a more efficient explosive.

In 1948, General Omar N. Bradley said:

> Plans for national security must consider the possibility that the United States will be subject to air and air-borne attack on the outset. The likelihood and the practicability of this kind of attack increases daily. We would [therefore] have to immediately secure bases from which an enemy might attack us by air. Next we will have to launch an immediate counterattack . . . predominantly through the air. . . . To make our counterblows we will need bases which we do not have now. The seizing and holding of [these] bases . . . will require Army combat elements. . . . Lastly comes the phase of total mobilization and maximum offensive efforts. In conjunction with the air and naval arms, the Army will engage in joint operations designed to carry the war to the enemy with ever increasingly intensity. The closer we get to the enemy, the more determined will be his resistance.

✓ U. S. House, Military Functions, National Military Establishment
Appropriation for 1949, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on
Appropriations, 80th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington: GPO, 1948), pp. 31-41.

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The theory of massive retaliation was far from new when Secretary Dulles proclaimed it.

During the 1950's it became evident that the growth of Soviet long-range nuclear power presented new problems. For the first time, an aggressor could mount a threat to the United States not only from outlying bases but from its homeland. The subtle studies of Albert Wohlstetter selection and use demonstrated that the strategic balance was "delicate" depending on such factors as the vulnerability of the bases of the retaliatory force, the relative state of active and passive defense and the ability to reach enemy targets.

Though the intention of these studies was to call attention to the vulnerability of U.S. strategic forces, they could also be used to emphasize that military victory remained a significant concept even in a general nuclear war. The American strategic doctrine of the Sixties was strongly influenced by these concepts. It has the following major components:

Albert Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 37, No. 2 (January, 1959), p. 211-234. See also p. 1960's below.

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1. **Flexible Response:** In the late 1950s the United States strategy emphasized a single all-out response. If general nuclear war proved inevitable, the goal was to be able to destroy the opposing society essentially in one blow.

This was replaced by the Kennedy Administration with an approach that offered more alternatives. An attempt was made to develop the maximum number of options even for the contingency of general nuclear war—a strategy summed up in the phrase "flexible response." This strategy was described by Secretary of Defense McNamara in 1962 as follows:

our forces can be used in several different ways. We may have to retaliatiate with a single massive attack. Or, we may be able to use our retaliatory forces to limit damage done to ourselves, and our allies, by knocking out the enemy's bases before he has had time to launch his second salvos. We may seek to terminate a war on favorable terms by using our forces as a bargaining weapon—by threatening further attack.³

The purpose of the flexible-response strategy was first enunciated

was victory in the traditional sense:

³ Robert S. McNamara, Address before the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation Dinner, Chicago, Illinois, February 17, 1962, Department of Defense, Office of Public Affairs, News Release, No. 239-62, (February 17, 1962), p. 9.

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President Kennedy described the French nuclear program as "inimical" to NATO. Secretary McNamara called European nuclear forces "dangerous," "expensive," "prone to obsolescence" and "lacking in credibility."

Under Secretary Ball has criticized these nuclear forces because "the road toward nuclear proliferation has no logical ending." In short, the

requirement of central control is interpreted by the Pentagon to mean the integration of strategic nuclear forces in a way that forecloses the technical possibility of independent use. If any of our allies are to have nuclear forces of their own and the clear United States preference is that they do not--these must be an adjunct to United States strategic forces and under what amounts in practice to American control.

3. **Tactical Nuclear Weapons:** United States strategic doctrine has shown considerable ambivalence about tactical nuclear weapons, which in the 1950's and 1960's were considered a key element of the military establishment.

✓ George Ball, "NATO and World Responsibility," The Atlantic Community Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 1964), 211.

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On the one hand, the number of tactical nuclear weapons has been considerably increased—according to official Pentagon estimates by some sixty per cent. in NATO alone. On the other hand, tactical nuclear weapons do not really fit the Administration's strategic concept.

Tactical nuclear weapons in the hands of front-line units are extremely difficult to subject to the central command and control envisaged by the new doctrine. If used for local defense, they would be likely to pass rapidly beyond the control of governments or high-level commanders. The Administration has repeatedly stressed the danger of such escalation.

As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Gilpatric put it, "I, for one, have never believed in a so-called limited nuclear war. I just don't know how you build a limit into it once you start using any kind of a nuclear bang." And in the spring of 1961, Secretary McNamara said that, in his concept, limited war in effect excluded the use of any nuclear weapons, "I think by 'limited' war we simply mean war that is carried on for the most part with

7 The New York Times, June 7, 1961.

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other way to cope with a particular situation."

This view, was

in a major statement reproduced in Part II of this book, stressed by Alain G. Enthoven a little later that year:

> we will have no sensible alternative to building up our conventional forces to the point at which they can safely resist all forms of non-nuclear aggression. Our forces will be adequate if we can never be forced because of weakness to be the first to have to resort to nuclear weapons.¹¹

The logical attractiveness of this theory obscured many difficulties. This was particularly true of Secretary McNamara's proposition at Ann Arbor in June 1962 that a general nuclear war could be conducted on the basis of purely military consideration—the so-called counterforce strategy. It soon became apparent that the reliability of a counterforce strategy was bound to decline as the retaliatory forces multiplied and became more dispersed.

10 U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on McNamara, Statement before the House Armed Services Committee. The Fiscal Year 1964-68, Defense Program, 1964 Defense Budget, January 30, 1963, p. 18.

11 Enthoven, Address to the Loyola University Forum for National Affairs, Los Angeles, February 10, 1963, *Attn: Survival* V. No. 3 (May/June 1963), p. 98. See below, pp. —

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As missile systems become more diversified and sophisticated, some will be hardened as underground installations; some will be mobile on land, others at sea. This will enormously complicate the problem of coordinating an attack.

Thus, even if the proportion of the Soviet retaliatory force for the next decade, the United States is able to destroy were to remain constant—an unwarrantedly optimistic assumption—the absolute number remaining is bound to increase. Whatever its technical feasibility, there are certain to be increasing political and psychological obstacles to a strategy that is based on fragmentary intelligence and that depends on large numbers of weapons for which there is no operational experience in wartime.

Moreover, the counterforce theory implied that because the United States was numerically superior and therefore in a position to spare Soviet cities, the Soviet Union would have an "incentive" to spare those of

the United States. Of course, Soviet military theorists have consistently denied the possibility of this kind of war. This would not be decisive were it not in accord with the realities of the strategic equation. For a war of attrition, even if it were technically feasible, cannot be in the interest of the weaker side. Against a numerically superior opponent, the sensible strategy would be to shock him into stopping his attack while some forces remain by attacking objectives of great value to him, such as cities.

This is why United States doctrine has grown more modest. Within two years of the enunciation of the counterforce theory, Secretary McNamara started to set much more limited aims for the strategy of "flexible response." "Fully hard ICBM sites can be destroyed but only at great

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cost in terms of the numbers of offensive weapons required to dig
them out," he said in 1964. → "Furthermore, in a second
strike situation we would be attacking, for the most part, empty sites
from which the missiles had already been fired. The value of trying
to provide a capability to destroy a very high proportion of Soviet
hard ICBM sites becomes even more questionable in view of the expected
increase in the Soviet missile launching submarine force."

The purpose was primarily to limit the damage to the United States
in follow-up attacks:

Thus, a "damage-limiting" strategy appears to be the
most practical and effective course for us to follow. . . .
While there are still some differences of judgment on
just how large such a force should be, there is general
agreement that it should be large enough to ensure the
destruction, singly or in combination of the Soviet
Union, Communist China, and the Communist satellites as
national societies, under the worst possible circumstances
of war outbreak that can reasonably be postulated, and, in
addition, to destroy their war-making capability so as to
limit, to the extent practicable, damage to this country and
to our allies.¹³

12 U.S. Senate, Armed Services Committee, Hearings, Military Procurement Authorization Fiscal Year 1964, 88th Congress, 1st sess., pp. 40-41.

13 U.S. House, Appropriations, Subcommittee, Hearings, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1965, 88th Cong., 2nd sess., Part 4, pp. 25-28.

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In his testimony before the Armed Services Committees in 1965, Secretary McNamara pointed out that under the then projected programs, fatalities in a general nuclear war would not be lower than 122 million--or more than half of the United States population. In close

conditions it is no longer meaningful to speak of nuclear war as involving the same principles as additional military operations. United States strategic doctrine has thus had to face the

fact that in the nuclear age, a general war fought by purely military criteria must have catastrophic consequences. Many of the traditional tenets of national security policy have been shaken by this realization. In particular, new problems have arisen for alliances.

Alliances in the Nuclear Age

In the past, alliances have been created for three basic reasons: (1) To provide an accretion of power. With conventional weapons, overwhelming power could generally be assembled only by way of coalition. The wider the alliance, the greater its power to resist aggression. (2) To leave no doubt about the alignment of forces. It has often been argued that, had Germany known at the beginning of both World Wars that the United States--or even England--would join the war,

aggression would have been averted. (3) To express as a formal
obligation what may otherwise be an inchoate interest in mutual
assistance.

To be sure, even before the advent of nuclear weapons, there
was some inconsistency among these requirements. The attempt to combine
the maximum number of states for joint action occasionally conflicted
with the desire to leave no doubt about the collective motivation.
The wider the system of collective security, the more various were the
motives animating it and the more difficult the task of obtaining common
action. The more embracing the alliance, the more intense and direct
had to be the threat that would produce a united response.

This traditional difficulty has been compounded in the nuclear
age. Nuclear war requires tight command and control of all weapons.
This is to some degree inconsistent with a coalition of sovereign
states. Moreover, the enormous risks of nuclear warfare affect the
credibility of traditional pledges of mutual assistance. Traditionally,
alliances have been operative because it was believed that the *immediate*
risk of conflict was less than the *ultimate* danger of facing a