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Strategy in the Missile Age (Rand Corporation Research Studies): Bernard Brodie

Review: The Book of Proverbs on "Nuclear Age Strategy"

I give this book five stars not because its arguments and conclusions are fully persuasive, or ever were, but because it so perfectly encapsulates the US strategic thinking that kept the Cold War going. . . and going. . . and going.

Brodie is widely considered one of a handful of strategic thinkers who shaped our Cold War policy, so his books are excellent ones to read. It would be a mistake to rebuke from hindsight his analysis of nuclear war, per se, since nothing in Cold War history really appears to have either proven or disproven his earnestly developed theories on nuclear war strategy. What is plain from hindsight though -- and thoroughly demonstrated by this book -- is that because of the constraints thought to be inherent in nuclear strategy, American security strategy as a whole was dedicated almost entirely to the objective of achieving a stasis between the nuclear-armed powers; a stasis that was, ultimately, intended to prevent a "total" war. Brodie develops the reasoning behind this approach cogently, and presents an elegant argument for stasis as the only rational strategic objective. The policies of deterrence, containment, mutual assured destruction, arms control, and detente all flowed naturally from this fundamental premise. Brodie's analysis cannot tell us how we ever got off this strategic top dead left, in the late 1980s, but his 1959 book sheds considerable light on what put us there in the first place.

I am fully persuaded Brodie did the best he could in the environment of the time. His only annoying tic is a certain supercilious tone common to academic commentators on what are traditionally military affairs. Watch for a couple of hilarious footnotes developing his 1950s-era psycho-theories on the "rages" infesting the breasts of certain military decisionmakers.

Review: Strategy for the Ultimate Weapons of the Cold War

This book is a marvelous anachronism! Written early in the age of intercontinental ballistic missiles by the country's foremost civilian expert on military strategy, it is an important document for anyone who wants to understand how strategy for nuclear war evolved. Brodie believed nuclear war was "unthinkable," and, by thinking about the unthinkable, he clearly hoped to provide an intellectual framework for avoiding a catastrophe.

Brodie was originally an academic specialist in military strategy (after leaving academe, he worked for the RAND Corporation), but he was not an elitist: Early in this fascinating book, which was written in 1959, at the dawn of the missile age, Brodie wrote: "Any real expansion of strategic thought to embrace the wholly new circumstances which nuclear weapons have produced will therefore have to be developed largely within the military guild itself." Indeed, Brodie looked to a military officer for basic strategic concepts. According to Brodie, Italian Brigadier General Giulio Douhet "possessed the largest and most original mind that this far addressed itself to the theory of air power." Brodie explained: "In its broad outline, Douhet's...basic argument twofold: first, the nature of air power requires that `command of the air' be won by aggressive bombing action rather than by aerial fighting, and second, an air force which achieves command thereby ensures victory all down the line." According to Brodie, "Douhet's constant refrain" that "he only way to destroy an enemy air force is to strike at its own bases, and the only force that can accomplish such destruction is a bomber force." In Brodie's view, Douhet was totally committed to the aerial offensive, and "Douhet's reasoning required him to place an enormous premium upon hitting first with all one's might." According to Brodie, "ir power had a mighty vindication in World War II," although, as Brodie observed, during World War II, "he battle of Britain resulted in an outright victory for the defense." According to Brodie, "strategic bombing brought the German war economy to the point of collapse," but that result came "too late to develop its full potential effects on the ground and naval campaigns." According to Brodie: "It was the collapse of transportation which caused the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, to state... `the German armies, completely bereft of ammunition and of motive power, would almost certainly have had to cease fighting by June or July'" of 1945. Nevertheless, Brodie wrote, the Allies' "bombing of [German] cities turned out to be a great waste of time...The bombing of German cities cost the Germans much in production and more in the diversion of military resources to defense; but we must nevertheless state that no critical shortages in war commodities of any kind are traceable to it." Brodie concluded that the effect of bombing German cities was "indecisive." He also asserted: "It is difficult to tell just what proportion of the bombs dropped on Germany in World War II was deliberately aimed at German morale, but it was unquestionably very large." According to Brodie: "The huge share of Allied bombs spent in attack on German morale failed to achieve any important end results" because "people accustomed to responding to authority - and all peoples are, in modestly varying degrees - will continue to respond even under very great physical stress." According to Brodie: "The strategic air offensive against Japan was remarkably different from that against Germany in character as well as result. It was much more concentrated in time, and had the benefit of the more advanced technology than available. Japan was more urbanized than Germany, its cities were more vulnerable to fire, and its active defenses at the time of the campaign were of a lower orders of effectiveness, being mostly confined to antiaircraft guns. Thus, more was accomplished with fewer bombs. Only 160,800 tons of bombs were dropped on the home islands of Japan, compared to 1,360,000 dropped within the borders of Germany." After providing historical background, Brodie proceeded to discuss nuclear war: "Under atomic weapons, even ignoring the effects of fallout, the proportion of persons exposed to risk in cities would be greater, the incidence of casualties and of lost homes would be multiplied, and the disorganizing effects upon the surrounding countrysides would be immeasurably more immediate and direct." In Brodie's view, with the advent of nuclear weapons the entire value of past military experience as a guide to the future was called into question. For instance, according to Brodie: "Since a large thermonuclear bomb exploded over a city would as a rule effectively eliminate all its industrial activities, there is hardly much point in asking which industries should be hit and in what order, or which particular facilities within any industry." According to Brodie: "Warning is the key to the entire defense problem." Brodie explained: "The old adage that every new offensive development inevitably provokes the development of a suitable defense is hard to justify historically, and it is certainly excessively optimistic for the nuclear era. One should hesitate especially to apply it to the ballistic missile." Over 40 years ago, Brodie presciently wrote: "A system with enough built-in sensitivity to react promptly to any real attack must be sensitive enough to respond also to false alarms or deliberate enemy `spoofing.'" According to Brodie: "The enormous destructiveness of each delivered nuclear weapon is what makes the ultimate prospects for the defense, especially for active defense, appear so hopeless. With multi-megaton weapons, one on target is already appalling - assuming the target to be a large city - and the prospect of twenty or thirty on similar targets is horrendous."

Written over 40 years ago, this study obviously is now dated, but it remains a cautionary tale. If the United States and the Soviet Union had gone to war in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis, according to Brodie's prediction of three years earlier, "the minimum of expected fatalities in an enemy strategic bombing attack probably has to be reckoned in tens of millions.

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