Nuclear weapons must, therefore, be avoided in limited war because they are “new and strange. They have about them all and more of the sinister psychological connotations of gas or dum-dum bullets…. They have tended to fall into that very arbitrary category of weapons that are regarded as uncivilized to use.” Finally, “because of their capacity for large-scale slaughter, they may be able to cause such sudden and startling reversals of military fortune as to increase the uncertainty and irrationality that are always so pervasive in conflict situations. If we employ them on the enemy, we invite retaliation, shock, horror, and a cycle of retaliation with an end that is most difficult to foresee.” The critical element of keeping limited wars limited—their predictability, controllability, rationality—becomes completely unhinged, and so therefore does the very purpose of waging limited wars.
For victory in the traditional sense cannot be a proper goal. “Limited war cannot be a means of bringing about a radical alteration in the distribution of power…. Nor can it be a method of obtaining overwhelmingly favorable resolutions of outstanding issues.” If those were the aims, then it would by definition no longer be a “limited war.” A more proper aim on the battlefield is sustained stalemate. Once “the lines of battle have been drawn,” from Kaufmann’s frame of mind, “the chances of an inconclusive result would seem very good indeed.” As long as “both sides will have ample reserves to pump into the conflict, playing for such a stalemate… would thus seem to be desirable.” The war would end in the same rational fashion by which it had begun and been waged: whenever the enemy—assuming it is he who pulls out—calculates “that the costs of fighting to him outweighed the costs to the United States, and consequently that the advantages of terminating the conflict were greater than the advantages of continuing it.”
It would be a completely different sort of war not only for the military to fight, but for the American people to support. “All the emotions traditionally associated with war must be inhibited,” Kaufmann realized. “We are flung into a straitjacket of rationality, which prevents us from lashing out at the enemy. We are asked to make sacrifices and then to cheer lustily for a tie in a game that we did not even ask to play.”
It was a conception very similar to John von Neumann’s Game Theory—the “calculating individual,” the elements of value, cost and risk, the premise of rationality, of violence on the battlefield elevated to a jousting tournament or a chess game.
Kaufmann had little knowledge or interest in Game Theory, but he did come out of an intellectual tradition whose principles and perspectives—while not at all mathematical—produced preferences and conclusions quite similar to those of von Neumann’s theory. First, from his training at Yale, Kaufmann was an internationalist and a Realist. He saw rivalry and conflict as unavoidable, usually predominant features of world politics. Second, mainly from his association with Bernard Brodie, he was a Clausewitzian in his outlook on the nature of war: wars were fought over political objectives, and the means of violence, the costs risked, must be commensurate with the political benefits to be potentially gained. In an age of nuclear weapons, wars could not be fought in their traditional manner without upsetting the chief Clausewitzian principle: there simply were no objectives commensurate with the horribly destructive magnitude of all-out nuclear war. Yet it was nevertheless a world of overwhelming tension and lurking Communist aggressiveness. Therefore, warfare had to be “returned to its traditional place as politics pursued by other means.” That meant, in the nuclear age, creating new rules for fighting wars.
On a more personal level, Kaufmann never really felt quite at home in the twentieth century. “We may not be able to create the refined distinctions that characterized the politics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when two powers could be friends on one side of a line while fighting bitterly on the other side,” Kaufmann wrote in one of his Princeton essays on limited war; “but we may at least be able to approach the relatively compartmentalized pattern of the nineteenth century, and that itself would be a significant gain.”
Shortly before Military Policy and National Security went to press, Kaufmann wrote Bernard Brodie that he was “rather unhappy with a number of the chapters—my own included.” He had, consequently, “been hoping to get sufficiently authoritative confirmation of my doubts to support the case for cancellation or postponement of publication.” He feared—unjustifiably, as it turned out—“the book will get a bad reception.”
Still, what Kaufmann had written was the product of extensive thinking and did constitute a coherent framework in which to view the problem of modern limited war. And it would serve as the foundation of his thinking on nuclear war when he turned his head in that direction over the next few years after returning to the RAND Corporation, where the art of imposing rationality on nuclear war was well under way.
13
COUNTERFORCE
IN FEBRUARY 1956, three months after reluctantly turning in his final manuscript to the Princeton University Press, William Kaufmann ditched academic life altogether and moved to Santa Monica and the RAND Corporation. The Yale refugees from the old Institute of International Studies, of which Kaufmann was a member, were not finding Princeton the compatible home they had optimistically anticipated. The new Center of International Studies, which they created there, never achieved the same coherence that had been so vital to their spirit, indeed existence, back in New Haven. Its members were now scattered across the Princeton campus in various departments, forced to do more teaching than researching, not allowed the sense of elite separateness that Charles Seymour had given them in his tenure as Yale president. So when Hans Speier, RAND’s social science chief, who had always been impressed with Kaufmann and who—unlike some at RAND—liked “The Requirements of Deterrence” very much, asked Kaufmann to take a permanent position at RAND, Kaufmann leaped at the chance.
Back in Santa Monica, one of the first activities in which Kaufmann became involved was one of the simulation games, or “diplomatic exercises,” that were the rave in the RAND social science division at the time. The game would set up a situation; players would divide up into “Red” and “Blue” teams; the managers of the game would provoke a conflict, and the players would act out their respective roles to see what happens. The mathematicians and economists at RAND thought this was foolishness, perhaps fun but not at all scientific. The leaders of the social science division, on the other hand, especially its director, Hans Speier, thought that the simulations run by the mathematicians, involving nuclear-exchange calculations with estimates of kill probability, weapons reliability and so forth, were devoid of history or politics, that they left no room for the exigencies of chance, the moves and countermoves and other real-life phenomena which they thought their own games represented. In the mid-to-late 1950s, the issue of political games and their relevance was one that symbolized and further sharpened the rift between the social science division and the rest of RAND.
The particular game in which Kaufmann participated in his very early days at RAND in 1956, a game managed by Speier and fellow RAND sociologist Herbert Goldhamer, concerned NATO military policy. Kaufmann was initially intrigued with the game because it started with a premise quite similar to his analysis in “The Requirements of Deterrence.” Speier and Goldhamer asked whether—now that the Soviets were building up their own nuclear arsenal—our NATO allies could really trust us to drop nuclear bombs on Russia in response to a Soviet ground invasion against Western Europe, knowing that the Soviets would almost certainly drop bombs on the United States in return. Although in “Requirements of Deterrence” Kaufmann had focused mainly on the defense of Asia, these were precisely the sorts of questions that had driven him to his advocacy of a massive conventional-force buildup.