Thinking about a “Known Unkown”

Abstract

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, strategic considerations about the role and utility of weapons - save the issue of proliferation - have fallen off the political-military agenda. After four US-led wars over the past 19 years, numerous international peace operations or interventions, the terrible events of 9/11, three US quadrennial defense reviews and two US nuclear posture reviews, the state of affairs concerning weapons can be boiled down to two or perhaps three notable developments.The development is the transformation of the US strategic triad in 2002.1 The second is the US adoption of an explicit strategy of preemption, which carries ominous if not new implications for weapons employment, and follows Russia's formal adoption of a preemption strategy with its declaration of a policy of first use.2 Finally, there is the ongoing process of strategic force reductions, dominated by the highly formalized, Cold War-style arms control in the strategic arms reduction treaties (START I and II), and then through the highly informal (one page) strategic offensive reduction treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow treaty). The projected reduction of over 80 percent of US and Russian strategic arsenals from their Cold War peaks has been accompanied by the French and British following suit, relatively small Chinese increases, two new de facto weapon states - India and Pakistan, and the incipient capability of North Korea. Overall and in dramatic contrast to the theological fervour of the Cold War debates on deterrence and strategy, weapons reside in purgatory, and for all intents and purposes there exists no such thing as strategy. Nuclear weapons are at best a hedge against the uncertainty of the future.In direct contrast to the purgatory of strategic weapons or the strategic offence, strategic defence has come into its own over the past 19 years. Of course, while it is a technological product of earlier research and development efforts, this is not the strategic defence of the Cold War and Reagan's strategic defense initiative (SDI). Rather, ballistic missile defence as strategic defence reflects two considerations - the new strategic environment of ballistic missile and proliferation and the manner in which the debate regarding strategic defence unfolded following the announcement of the post- Cold War US missile defence program - protection against limited strikes - in 1991.3 The former places regional proliferators as a primary strategic threat to the US. The latter concerns the implications of a limited strategic missile defence, primarily designed against proliferators, on the strategic arsenals of the existing powers. These employ the old Cold War, largely negative, strategic arguments about defence, as most clearly evident in the last of four deployment criteria of the Clinton-era national missile defence program - namely, international stability.4Despite a largely sterile debate between the past and the present, little if any attention has been paid to a future that is neither the Cold War reborn nor the contemporary world of proliferators - one in which a great power rivalry of multiple centres of strategic power exists without the socioideological global character of the Cold War. It is also a future of strategic offence coexisting with strategic defence, although the capacity and sophistication of strategic defences will likely vary widely amongst the great powers. It is a world being created by current US actions sans formal deliberations about its strategic requirements and implications - a mentality of will figure it out when we get there. Of course, this is not the only possible future, and the literature abounds with alternatives. Regardless, this world is the most neglected and under-theorized, yet it is the most strategically significant in outline of all possible futures. …