XXXI SURPRISE ATTACK: NATO's Richard K. Betts The Western alliance cannot afford a surprise attack. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) does not have a cushion of material superiority in standing forces that could counteract the effects of major Warsaw Pact success in the first week of battle; the West's material superiority in mobilization potential could only be relevant, if ever, in a prolonged conventional war, which is possible only if defeat is forestalled at the outset. Nor does NATO have great strategic depth which can compensate for initial enemy breakthroughs. The Wehrmacht had to march 600 miles to get to the gates of Moscow; the Soviet Army, which is much more mechanized than Hitler's was, needs to traverse only a third of that distance to get to the Rhine. Increased destructiveness of modern conventional weapons also means that the initial phases of war will be even more critical, and nuclear parity places a higher premium on successful conventional defense. The side that strikes first against an unready opponent will have a substantial edge. Most analyses of the surprise attack problem define it in terms of warning: how to improve intelligence collection and analysis to detect Warsaw Pact mobilization in its early phases. If history teaches anything, however, it is that warning in itself is often not sufficient to protect a victim from surprise. There are powerful psychological and political incentives for decision-makers to misinterpret warning or delay the necessary response.1 NATO's potential susceptibility to surprise is as much a political problem as an operational one. RECASTING THE ISSUE The NATO central front is not the most likely ignition point for conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The flanks, and especially the Near East, are less unlikely. But the central front is the worst case. It is the one that would most threaten American interests and the one that would most probably escalate to general war and the nuclear destruction of the United States. Because the dangers for both sides are tremendous, deterrence in Europe appears quite solid. For that very reason, however, if the Russians ever do decide to strike, Western leaders will find it very difficult to believe. The stronger deterrence Richard K. Betts is a Research Associate at the Brookings Institution, and author of Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises. He teaches defense policy at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities. From International Security, Vol. 5, Spring 1981, pp. 117-149. Betts, R. "Surprise Attack: NATO's Political Vulnerability." Copyright 1981 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Reproduced by permission for use in the courses of the National Defense University. 1 This article is drawn from a forthcoming book on the lessons of past surprise attacks for current defense planning. See also Richard K. Betts, "Surprise Despite Warning: Why Sudden Attacks Succeed," Political Science Quarterly 95, no. 4 (Winter 1980-81), and "Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures are Inevitable," World Politics 31, no. 1 (October 1978), pp. 63, 69–71, 80-81. seems, the more likely it is that an attacker will achieve surprise if deterrence fails. "What if deterrence fails?" Too much of Western defense analysis hinges on this deceptively simple question. It suggests that war comes in a quick shifting of gears from peacetime diplomacy to military operations. The failure of deterrence and the switch to defense, however, does not occur automatically at one point; it is a process extended in time. Military requirements for the first day of war depend on assumptions about what political decision-makers will do in the twilight period of weeks or days while deterrence is failing, when war appears possible but not yet inevitable. NATO's defense depends heavily on acquiring warning of Soviet attack, and using the warning to alert allied forces in Germany, transport additional divisions from the continental United States States (CONUS), and move troop units out of garrison and into defensive positions. But even if intelligence monitoring can ensure warning, it cannot ensure authorization to respond to it. Senators Sam Nunn and Dewey Bartlett have noted that the alliance's "entire structure rests upon the willingness of each member state to accept the judgment of NATO's international military commanders and staff, which may or may not be in accord with those of national intelligence services."2 The latter dimension of uncertainty receives scant attention in debates over NATO's military posture. Most attention is focused on the balance of forces between the West and the Warsaw Pact, and how to increase the quantity and quality of manpower and equipment facing the enemy; ensuring detection of enemy preparations; or the physical capacity to respond to warning with rapid reinforcement and redeployment. To this extent, worriers should be comforted by the plans in recent years to address the concerns in the Nunn-Battlett report. One example is a readiness task force designed, in former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown's words, "to increase the responsiveness of standing forces, selected reserve units and civil support in crisis. . . or during hostilities. It will focus on improving NATO's alert machinery, including early commitment to SACEUR of national forces." Other initiatives emanating from President Carter's early decisions and the NATO consultations of 1977 included stationing of several thousand additional U.S. troops in Germany, as well as plans to enhance reinforcement capabilities and prepositioned material, reserve mobilization, air defense, command, control, and communications, electronic warfare, procedures for headquarters transition from peace to war, and other readiness measures.* 3 Such "hard" improvements would boost deterrence by raising NATO's weight in the military balance, but even if fulfilled they do not address the "soft" problems of how Western leaders will react politically to warning intelligence. While such welcome measures marginally improve the military balance, they do not reduce the potential for surprise, and surprise is a greater danger than the Warsaw Pact advantages in the balance. First, the Soviets do have an advantage in the order of battle, but it is not so overwhelming that they could have high confidence of success in a short war of attrition against fully ready NATO forces. 2 U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, NATO and the New Soviet Threat: Report of Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Dewey F. Bartlett, 95th Cong., 1st sess., 1977, p. 10. * U.S., Congress, Senate, Committee on Armed Services, Hearing, NATO Posture and Initiatives, 95th Cong., 1st sess., 1977, pp. 6-7, 59, 61-62. 4 For NATO's inferiority to be debilitating enough to assure its quick defeat in conventional war, the Soviets would have to use optimistic assumptions about their own capabilities and pessimistic assumptions about NATO's. This is the reverse of the normal double standard applied by prudent military planners. On the sensitivity of assessments of the balance to optimistic and pessimistic assumptions see James Blaker and Andrew Hamilton, Assessing the NATO/Warsaw pact Military Balance (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Budget Office, December 1977), pp. 9-37, 49-50. To have reasonable confidence of victory, Soviet leaders considering an aggressive attack in Germany need surprise as a force multiplier either strategic surprise to catch NATO standing down, or doctrinal surprise to use novel schemes of maneuver or application of firepower to neutralize NATO defenses. If Soviet leaders were to strike for defensive reasons, on the other hand, they might not be deterred by uncertainties about the extent of their military advantage (in fact such uncertainties combined with beliefs that war was unavoidable would enhance incentives to strike first). But they would be likely to achieve surprise because the conditions prompting their anxieties would make Western leaders more inclined to find charitable interpretations for warnings of their military preparations. In either case, therefore, measures to reduce the probability of surprise, or to anticipate it and hedge against its impact on chances for successful NATO defense, would be more advantageous than incremental reductions in the imbalance of physical capabilities. The focus on intelligence detection and on the balance of forces, rather than one the process of reaction to warning and political transition to a decision to mobilize, misdirects some of the defense debate. Hawks expend most of their analytical and rhetorical capital on arguing for increases in the NATO bean count of men and materiel, making recommendations "related to force structure rather than strategy."5 Doves, on the other hand, take excessive comfort from the apparent implausibility of "standing start" unreinforced attack, and-like hawks-tend mistakenly to elide warning and response, thus assuming a false dichotomy: "If they [the Russians] wish to launch an attack, they have two choices. Either they gain surprise by striking with a relative handful of capable divisions, or they choose to strike with a powerful [mobilized and reinforced] force and lose the element of surprise." This comforting but simplistic formulation ignores the possibility of extremely dilatory political response to adequate monitoring of Warsaw Pact preparations, or "the catastrophic prospect of hostilities preceding even a NATO decision to mobilize"-a possibility that appears less unthinkable in the light of history and the probable context of a future Soviet decision to strike. Prelude to Surprise: How Could War Happen? To avert surprise, political leaders with the authority to unleash NATO forces must believe, in time of crisis, that the Russians really are contemplating an attack. If no explanation for such Soviet motives seems plausible to them, or if they see Red Army movements as precautionary and reactive rather than aggressive, they may not permit the full range of responses that would optimize Western readiness to meet the onslaught. Strategic planning that focuses on preventing the consequences of surprise, therefore, rather than just equilibrating the balance of forces, cannot afford to relegate the political scenario to a ceteris paribus clause. Soviet attack on the West is improbable because the risks would be astronomical. But this improbability is not comforting enough and fosters an illusion of permanence about post-1945 European stability. History shows that surprisers occasion * John C. F. Tillson, "The Forward Defense of Europe," ACIS Research Notes, No. 5 (Center for International and Strategic Affairs, University of California at Los Angeles, November 1979), p. 3. Les Aspin, "Surprise Attack on NATO-Refocusing the Debate," NATO Review 25, no. 4 (August 1977), pp. 10–11. 7 Senate Armed Services Committee, NATO and the New Soviet Threat, p. 10. ally have resorted to suicidal risks, because of miscalculation or misinformed desperation. The improbability of war varies directly with the probability of surprise. To reduce vulnerability to surprise, we need to look more closely at the grounds for confidence in peace. For war in Europe to emerge from local causes, a major shift in political conditions would have to occur. Such change is not unimaginable. The détente of the 1970s was virtually dead by the end of the decade. Similar developments great hopes for détente followed by severe tension-had occurred earlier in the Cold War. (At the end of 1956, less than two years before the second Berlin crisis, a NATO committee report "reflected the common view that, following the Kremlin's tactical shift of pressure to the political realm, the military threat to Europe has ceased to be the foremost problem. . . .")8 Resurrection of the West Berlin problem, despite the 1971 agreements, is not unthinkable. Stalin and Khrushchev put pressure on the city despite the four-power treaty establishing allied rights there. Fault-lines remain in political stability throughout Eastern Europe. If Hungary's 1956 experience did not stop Czech reformists in 1968, and the fate of the latter did not stop the Poles in 1980, there is scant reason to assume indefinite cohesion of the Soviet bloc. The danger in this context is the inverse of Leninist theories of inevitable East-West conflict: a "crisis of communism," inducing Moscow to lash out against the West to save its crumbling empire. However political conditions might deteriorate, the existence of nuclear weapons will continue to pose a profound constraint on resort to force. But this constraint will be no greater than at the height of the Cold War. The emergence of parity in the 1970s (or, in the consensus view of the U.S. defense community, Soviet superiority through most of the 1980s) may not kill the credibility of escalatory American nuclear threats. Such threats will certainly not be any more credible or efficacious than in earlier years. But even if the credibility of the Western commitment to attack the Soviet homeland with nuclear forces before accepting defeat in conventional or theater nuclear engagements in Germany is substantially diminished, the uncertainty should be enough to dissuade a Soviet attack for all but the most desperate reasons. Compound Crisis The most desperate reasons are the ones worth worrying about. Any single cause of crisis is likely to be handled successfully, with fulmination, posturing, and hand-wringing, but without resort to force. The risks of war will focus attention on how to apply brakes to escalation and find a diplomatic way out of a crisis. The greater danger is a situation of multiple unlikely crises which aggravate each other and overload the brake systems, where deterioration begins to appear out of control and the structure of deterrence seems to be collapsing. This would be a political version of the "Titanic Coincidence" described by Robert Machol: The ship had been constructed with a double-bottom hull having 16 separate water-tight compartments. Calculations had shown that many of these compartments, even any four on one side, could be ruptured without the ship sinking. Unfortunately, the iceberg cut a 300-foot gash on one side of the ship, flooding five adjacent compartments, and down she went. A number of subsidiary coincidences Robert E. Osgood, NATO: The Entangling Alliance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 4. contributed...: the captain was going far too fast...; the ship was not carrying enough lifeboats; the radio operator on another ship a short distance away was asleep; etc. Most accidents in well designed systems involve two or more events of low probability occurring in the worst possible combination. . . . When people make predictions about the successful operation of a system, and the system then fails dramatically and embarrassingly . . . the reason is usually that the predictor has not considered the combination of events which will cause the system to fail. Explicitly or implicitly, people multiply together probabilities of events of low probability and come out with impossibly small numbers when in fact the events are dependent. . . . A probability of 105 of a fatal aircraft accident may be entirely acceptable to a passenger contemplating the flight, but is surely unacceptable to the manager of a system that has 106 flights per year.9 The most potent combinations of revolutionary changes would involve political turmoil on both sides of the line of demarcation. Examples of low-probability events that could be handled in isolation or sequentially, but could yield the Titanic effect if occurring simultaneously, could be chosen from a shopping list such as the following: Anti-Soviet unrest within the Warsaw Pact (especially East Germany, and especially if coinciding with similar activities in other bloc countries). Dramatic growth in "revanchist" sentiments in West Germany, or pressures for political intervention on behalf of revisionist groups across the border. - Civil war or a slide toward anarchy in Yugoslavia, with one faction requesting Soviet military assistance and other seeking Western support. Similar developments in Iran or Turkey. - Reduction but not termination of American commitments and force levels in the Seventh Army (a born-again Mansfield Amendment) matched by significant increases in the Bundeswehr and rumors of a nascent West German nuclear weapons program. "Encirclement" of a right-wing government in Bonn by the leftist governments in France and Italy. Neutralization of Denmark and Holland. - Neutralization or "Yugoslavianization" of Rumania. - Accidental naval engagements between elements of U.S. and Soviet fleets. War in Korea. Sino-Soviet war. Sino-Soviet rapprochement. There is no record of experience by which to judge the stability of deterrence under conditions of metastatic chaos. In such a confused situation of mixed motives and perceptions, Soviet attack could be prompted by aggressive opportunism, defensive paranoia, or a mixture of both. Through the first two decades of the Cold War the starkest view of Soviet intentions prevalent among American strategists was the "plum theory": Western Europe was a ripe fruit which the acquisitive Russians would pluck if they believed they could get away with it. The disillusionment over Vietnam, coinciding with the bloom of détente, reduced the popularity of this view. The continuing Soviet military build-up and invasion of Afghanistan brought it back into prominence. As subsequent argument will elaborate, the assumption of such purely aggressive intent is dangerous-not because it is necessarily incorrect, but Robert E. Machol, “Principles of Operations Research: The Titanic Coincidence," Interfaces Vol. 5, no. 3 (May 1979), pp. 53–54. |