The Revenge of the Melians: Asymmetric Threats and the Next QDR

Abstract

Foreword This essay is a product of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) 2001 Working Group, a project of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. Sponsored by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the working group is an independent, honest-broker effort intended to build intellectual capital for the upcoming QDR. More specifically, it aims to frame issues, develop options, and provide insights for the Chairman, the services and the next administration in three areas: defense strategy, criteria for sizing conventional forces, and force structure for 2005-2010. One of the group's initial tasks was to assess the future security environment to the year 2025. This was pursued by surveying the available literature to identify areas of consensus and debate and by deepening knowledge of asymmetric threats to the United States both at home and abroad, given their potential appeal to likely adversaries in view of America's conventional military superiority. essay that follows grew out of that latter effort and reflects a growing consensus that the issues posed by asymmetric threats should occupy a more prominent place in defense strategy and force planning. This essay makes a unique contribution to the growing literature on asymmetric threats by providing a conceptual framework for thinking about such threats, offering an approach to determining which threats should receive the greatest attention from defense planners, and suggesting concrete steps that the Nation should take to address them. Michele A. Flournoy Project Director Introduction In 416 B.C., the Athenian-led Delian League, then the dominant naval power of the Hellenic World, was locked in a death struggle with its rival, Sparta, and its Peloponnesian allies. In the wake of the battle of Mantinea, and on the eve of the ill-fated naval expedition to Syracuse, the small island of Melos in the northern Cretan Sea had become an object of strategic concern to Athens which sought to force Melos to join the Delian League and pay tribute. Melians refused and claimed the moral right of a state to remain neutral. Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, answered the Athenians ; The strong do what they wish and the weak suffer what they must. (1) One may admire Melian principles and courage, if not strategic acumen. Their heroic stubbornness cost the Melians their existence. Athenians slaughtered all adult males and sold the women and children into slavery. Melian Dialogue by Thucydides, an account of the exchange recorded between the Athenian negotiators and the Melians, has been a locus classicus for the realistic study of international relations for millennia--especially the notorious Athenian refusal to be constrained by the unenforceable dicta of hypothetical international law. Weak states have long sought to counter the overwhelming political, economic, and military superiority that great powers can bring to bear. Melos, treading a familiar path, sought succor against one power through an alliance with another, Sparta, which failed. Absent a powerful ally, the most effective responses from weaker states have been those that sought to counter the hegemon's power indirectly through superior military organization, crafty diplomacy, wily espionage, or terror. Modern counterparts of the Melians can add weapons of mass destruction with a long reach to this traditional arsenal. Melians might have survived, had they been able to raise the cost to the Athenians of attacking their island. Weak nations today can do what Melos could not--inflict severe damage on attacking forces or a distant homeland. As weak nations, and even nonstate groups, contemplate intimidating or punishing a dominant power on a scale inconceivable 2,500 years ago, we might speak metaphorically of the revenge of the Melians and hear far-distant applause of those islanders. …