Principles of Global Security

by Steinbruner, John D.

• ISBN13: 9780815780960
• ISBN10: 0815780966
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-04-01
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Summary

From the earliest human records, warfare has been both an organizing focus and a prime source of political motivation. Countless battles have been fought in the course of colonizing the planet, and the experience has created a legacy of military confrontation that many people consider immutable. Since preparations for war and the occasional conduct of it have been central preoccupations for virtually all the major states throughout time, it is widely assumed that the pattern is rooted in human nature and will endure indefinitely. But contemporary civilization is undergoing a monumental transformation affecting its most basic features. The combined effects of information technology, population dynamics, and the globalization of economic activity are altering some of the critical operating conditions of human societies and appear to be inducing a new pattern of interaction. Correspondingly, fundamental changes in the practice of war-or what is now more politely called international security-can be expected to follow. Principles of Global Security anticipates the major implications of this massive transformation for security policy. John D. Steinbruner, one of the nation's leading specialists on defense issues, identifies formative problems and organizing principles relating to the predictable issues of security. He examines in sequence how the configuration of nuclear and conventional forces might be affected, how the problems of communal violence and dangers of technical proliferation might be managed, and how security relationships among the major states might be altered. One of the fundamental implications of globalization in a post-cold war environment is a shift in security policy from deterrence to reassurance, from active confrontation to cooperative engagement. Without an opponent to justify preparation for large-scale traditional missions, nations must establish safer and less volatile patterns of deployment. Maintaining global security in the twenty-first century calls for a reconfiguration of basic relationships among historical opponents, as well as revisions in military practices. This visionary work will stimulate productive thinking among policymakers seeking to reshape the legacies of the cold war with a new conceptualization of international security.

Author Biography

John D. Steinbruner is professor of public policy and director of the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland and a nonresident senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution.

Table of Contents

Contending Presumptions	1	(22)
Managing Deterrent Operations	23	(62)
Assuring Conventional Missions	85	(48)
Containing Civil Violence	133	(42)
Preventing Mass Destruction	175	(19)
Transforming Security Relationships	194	(37)
Notes	231	(30)
Index	261

Excerpts

Contending Presumptions

In the fall of 1991, David Hamburg, then president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Sam Nunn, then a U.S. senator from Georgia, convened a series of meetings to discuss the future of international security. They were impressed, as everyone was, by the precipitous ending of the cold war-just then being confirmed by the imminent dissolution of the Soviet Union-but they were already concerned about the aftermath. They were particularly concerned that the diffusion of the accumulated weapons arsenals and of their embedded technologies might produce a dangerous pattern of conflict. They believed that the United States would have a strong interest in controlling the dangers of weapons proliferation and would have to bear primary responsibility for doing so. They wanted to consider the implications.

In one of the many meetings held, an argument was advanced that the specific problems of proliferation could not be isolated from the general conditions of international security and that fundamental revisions of established practice would have to be contemplated as a new era emerged. The reasoning was that the historical pattern of belligerent confrontation between the major states could not continue indefinitely, not only because the inexorable spread of advanced technology would increase the risk to civilian society but also because the globalization of economic activity was altering the nature of the security problem. Diffuse violence, it was suggested, posed a greater threat than traditional forms of mass aggression, driving even the most reluctant states into intricate collaboration for mutual protection. Classic notions of balancing power by means of active military deployments would have to be overlaid by more refined concepts of cooperation. Unavoidable disparities in raw military capacity would have to be constrained by explicit principles of equity, and those principles would have to be reinforced by agreed rules of procedure for force operations, rules that would be continuously practiced and actively monitored. The doctrine of deterrence-the major policy product of the cold war-would have to be subordinated to the countervailing idea of reassurance.

This argument envisaged a major shift in the organizing principles of international security. Under the established deterrent arrangement, security is based primarily on the active confrontation of military forces. If reassurance were to be established as the predominant principle, the active confrontation of deployed forces would be replaced by the continuous enforcement of collaborative rules designed to preclude military forces from being mobilized into an immediately threatening configuration. Deterrence as currently practiced involves the continuous presentation of an active threat. Reassurance would involve comprehensive restraint on such threats continuously documented in convincing detail. A shift in the degree of reliance on these basic principles would have to be undertaken, the argument maintained, not only to control proliferation but also to assure all other aspects of security under drastically altered circumstances.

In response to that argument, Senator Nunn, with a wry choice of phrasing, posed a skeptical question. "Well," he said, "you have human nature and all of history going against you there. What have you got going for you?"

The argument in question actually did not contradict all the results of history or every aspect of human nature. Strands of cooperation are deeply implanted in both, and indeed one could hardly have a major war without elaborate forms of cooperation within the military establishments of the opposing parties. Cooperation is arguably as integral to the human experience as battle. It is reasonable to consider how the balance of these different activities and the scope of their application might shift with changing circumstances. Nonetheless Senator Nunn's question undoubtedly reflected where the burden of proof did then and does continue to lie. Most of those engaged with the subject of international security, whether as direct participants or as attentive citizens, are acutely sensitive to the possibility of willful attack. A solid majority in most societies is convinced that active preparation of national military forces provides the only reliable means of protection. This attitude is formulated in the self-labeled realist school of thought, which holds that security necessarily depends on the organized power of the nation-state and that states by their very nature compete with one another in the development of power to the extent they are able. As a result, the staunch realists contend, any form of arranged security cooperation is less reliable than national military power. Those who hold that view concede that the passing of the cold war produced many important changes in circumstance, but they do not believe that those changes altered the fundamental character of nation-states or of the security problems they generate. As a practical matter, that is the prevailing presumption, and it is up to those who question it to make a convincing case.

On broad questions of this sort, assigning the burden of proof is nearly always decisive as far as prevailing opinion is concerned. Those who are made to carry it generally lose the argument. In this instance it clearly would be extremely difficult to overturn the entrenched presumptions of the realist school whose origins can be traced, if not literally to all of human history, then certainly to prominent features extending back as far as there is documented testimony. From the earliest records of human societies, warfare has been both an organizing focus and a prime source of political motivation. The binding power of common threat and the closely associated impulse to control territory have had much to do with the rise of states, the justification of their governments, the genesis of armies, the development of technology, the evolution of manufacturing capability, and formation of the human attitudes that have accompanied all of these. Countless battles have been fought in the course of colonizing the planet. Hundreds of millions of individual lives have been expended. The experience has created a legacy of military confrontation that many people consider immutable, as the senator's question implied. Since preparations for war and the occasional conduct of it have been central preoccupations for virtually all the major states throughout their existence, it is widely assumed that the pattern is rooted in human nature and that it will endure indefinitely.

But security practices clearly are not immutable in every important respect. And as consequential as prevailing opinion unquestionably is, it is not the only consideration of importance. Although the full implications are still obscure, it is increasingly apparent that contemporary societies are encountering a major deflection in the course of their development, as illustrated dramatically by the manner in which the cold war ended. That was largely a spontaneous event, surprising virtually everyone who experienced it, including the political leaders most intimately involved. No one seriously anticipated the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, or the dismemberment of the Soviet Union until just before those events occurred. In the aftermath there has been a natural inclination, particularly in the United States, to interpret this good fortune as an episode in the triumphant extension of market democracy, but it is prudent to question whether that will prove to be the full story. Since no one could anticipate either the timing or the scope of what happened, no one can claim to grasp all of the consequences either. The massive transformation that has engulfed the Soviet Union and its Central European allies suggests the workings of very large forces capable of doing far more than settling an ideological quarrel. If that can happen in one part of the world, it may be happening in all of it, and the process may be far from complete. The specific security implications presumably will not overturn all that history has done, but they might well prove to be far more extensive than currently imagined, especially by adherents of the realist perspective. Exploring that possibility is appropriate, even urgent, and it is the central purpose of this book.

Discontinuity

For those willing to undertake such an exploration, the hint of a general transformation in progress is a natural place to begin, and there are some strong clues about the underlying forces that might be driving such a process. It has something to do, one can surmise, with trends in the capacity for violence. In absolute terms the past century has been the most destructive in history, with more than 100 million people killed and a commensurate amount of physical damage done through various forms of warfare. But that record is eclipsed by the technical potential for destruction, which already has reached unprecedented magnitude and is on the verge of reaching unprecedented intrusiveness. As the principal activity of the cold war, military forces were developed to the point at which they could directly slaughter tens of millions of people within a few hours and so devastate the infrastructure of major societies that hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of other people would be at grave risk. Political attitudes have so accommodated that development that it is not now considered remarkable and, with the proclaimed passing of the cold war, not even especially relevant. The capacity for rapid destruction on that scale imposes relentless pressures on fallible human institutions, however, and simple common sense suggests that the cold war pattern of nuclear weapons deployments cannot be sustained in a safe manner indefinitely. Some major transformation in the handling of this capability can eventually be expected.

The potential for mass destruction is not the only source of unusual pressure, moreover. The capacity for precise attack at very long range is developing to the point that forms of coercion could be undertaken that have never been feasible before. In all of history up to this point, killing a king and sacking his headquarters first required defeating his protective armies. It will soon be feasible to accomplish this directly at any moment from any location. If that capability matures to its full potential and diffuses throughout the world, critical assets of all societies will be continuously exposed to dedicated attack from anonymous sources. Even the possibility of this threat means that advanced rules of restraint will have to be devised if normal daily life is to be protected.

But the enhanced capacity for violence is not the only and probably not even the primary agent of social transformation. It is based on a technical revolution with implications much broader than the conduct of warfare. It also is set in the context of what necessarily will be a unique moment in history-an unprecedented surge in the total human population. Whatever else might be happening, the combined effects of technology and population dynamics are altering some of the critical operating conditions of human societies, are creating unusual pressures within them, and appear to be inducing a new pattern of interaction among them. One of the many consequences of this situation is the emergence of fundamentally different security problems. Correspondingly fundamental changes in the practice of war, or what is now more politely called international security, can be expected to follow.

Technology

A sense of historical discontinuity produced by radical technical change was, of course, a prominent feature of the cold war itself. That sense emerged with the revelation in the final stages of World War II of what were then called atomic weapons, and it became a continuous theme in the extensive effort to comprehend their implications. The point was forcefully expressed in a memorandum written on September 11, 1945, by U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to President Harry S. Truman:

If the atomic bomb were merely another though more devastating military weapon to be assimilated into our pattern of international relations, it would be one thing. We could then follow the old custom of secrecy and nationalistic military superiority relying on international caution to prescribe the future use of the weapon as we did with gas. But I think the bomb instead constitutes merely a first step in a new control by man over the forces of nature too revolutionary and dangerous to fit into the old concepts. I think it really caps the climax of the race between man's growing technical power for destructiveness and his psychological power of self-control and group control-his moral power.

The same thought was summarized two decades later by Albert Einstein in one of his most widely noted remarks: "The unleashing of the power of the atom has changed everything but our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes."

The "everything" that Einstein had in mind concerned the energy densities that his conceptual advances had enabled. With mastery of the contributing technologies, it became possible over a two-decade period to increase the explosive yield of a given amount of weapons material by a factor of a million. With the mastery of ballistic missile technology, it became possible to deliver nuclear explosives over intercontinental ranges at speeds more than forty times greater than the aircraft of World War II were able to achieve and to do so with sufficient precision to bring the destructive effects to bear on intended targets with very high confidence. But contrary to Stimson's plea, those accomplishments were applied to standard missions of warfare and were assimilated to the traditional pattern of international relations. Two contending alliances arose, each imagining that the other might use the new technology to initiate a massive assault without notice. Each alliance spent large sums preparing to apply the new weapons to the massive ground assaults and strategic bombardments characteristic of World War II. The physical calculations that supported the technical achievements made it possible to measure the destructive implications of these more advanced forms of warfare with enough precision to provide an indisputable and riveting depiction of threat. The clarity and the magnitude of nuclear weapons effects crystallized a conception of international security based on a confrontational balance of opposing forces, and that conception became the organizing formulation of international security.

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Excerpted from Principles of Global Security by John D. Steinbruner Copyright © 2000 by Brookings Institution Press
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.