“Goddammit, Loftus,” he screamed, “there’s only one way to attack the Russians, and that’s to hit them hard with everything we have and”—at this point, pounding his fist on top of the Bible—“knock their balls off!”
That’s all they were interested in, Loftus realized—knocking the Russians’ balls off. Meanwhile, Loftus was also finding himself pushed out of control at Target Programs. From the time he had first joined Air Intelligence, military officers were nominally in charge, but bright civilians were given the run of the lot. Around the same time that the targeteers began corrupting Loftus’ counterforce dreams, the heads of Air Intelligence started to think that it was time that the military officers start taking over. Most of these officers were captains and majors, bomber pilots, fly-boys, not keenly interested in intelligence and not very smart.
By April 1954, Loftus realized that the EWP was completely out of his hands, and everything else was slipping away too. In July, he quit.
Almost at once, he got a job offer from the RAND Corporation. Loftus had frequently sat in on Air Force briefings given by various RAND analysts and had come to know a few of them fairly well. Until the end of the year, Loftus hung around RAND’s Washington office, perusing internal reports and memoranda. Just before leaving for Santa Monica, he found out about Jim Digby’s counterforce study, and was delighted and surprised that someone else was taking an interest.
In Santa Monica, Loftus introduced himself to Digby right away. While he did not work directly on Digby’s project, he did put him in touch with people in Air Intelligence who could aid him in getting up-to-date intelligence on the location of Soviet military targets. Through this connection with Digby, he first met Andy Marshall. Marshall had worked on a study concerning early warning a few years earlier and, ever since, was utterly fascinated with the techniques of intelligence. It was only natural that Marshall and Loftus struck up a close friendship.
Digby’s ill-fated study notwithstanding, few RAND analysts in the mid-1950s thought about counterforce, and those who did considered it chimerical and impractical, believing it impossible to know where Soviet military targets were or how to hit them if their location were somehow discovered. One thing Marshall learned from Loftus was that this simply was not true. Loftus told him about the World War II photographs, the analysis that he and his associates in Targets had done, most of all about communications intelligence, COMINT, intercept technology that nobody else at RAND knew anything about. Marshall would occasionally tell a colleague or two that the United States did have the intelligence data to wage a counterforce campaign, but when asked for substantiation, he stayed mum.
In the summer of 1957, Marshall was tapped to go to Washington to work on the staff of the Gaither Committee. Marshall, a statistician by training, did quantitative operations-research analysis of problems fed to him by the committee’s steering panel. But he also kept informed on the general direction of the committee’s analysis and conclusions. He was extremely disappointed with what he saw. The committee was utterly unimaginative on the issue of what to do with nuclear weapons if the nation had to use them. It simply assumed, almost tacitly, in accordance with the conventional wisdom of the day, that they would be used to strike back at the cities of the Soviet Union. There was not even remotely any consideration of the idea of going after enemy military forces or of withholding a large segment of the arsenal, that he, Brodie, Digby, Loftus and Victor Hunt had discussed back at RAND. While many of the Gaither Committee’s members had been sharply critical of John Foster Dulles’ “massive retaliation” doctrine, and while the committee did recommend the expansion of conventional military forces, their collective view on the use of nuclear weapons was no less oriented to massive retaliation than the Secretary of State’s.
With RAND sociologist Herbert Goldhamer, Marshall’s mentor while a student at the University of Chicago, and with a little help from RAND’s chief Kremlinologist, Nathan Leites, Marshall spent the next four months working out a highly elaborate study systematically analyzing various possible strategies, in the face of various likely Soviet threats, that would prove the virtues of counterforce and, more important, discredit population-targeting as a reasonable strategy.
Published and stamped top secret on April 30, 1959, the study was called The Deterrence and Strategy of Total War, 1959–61: A Method of Analysis, and to Marshall’s colleagues, it could only be judged an ambitious, analytical tour de force. Its premises and conclusions, with slight variations, synthesized the two strands of strategic thinking then prevalent at RAND. It assumed that the Soviets launch a “surprise (‘sneak’) attack” against SAC targets with at least 200 ICBMs, a few hundred bombers, or both. In the end, it called for the protective measures to reduce SAC’s vulnerability, as prescribed in the Wohlstetter-Hoffman-Rowen studies; and it called for the counterforce and withholding targeting strategies thought up by Bernard Brodie, Victor Hunt and the old Strategic Objectives Committee.
To one trained in the RAND style of strategic analysis, the study was ingenious. The logic was presented in the form of Game Theory, with the possible strategies of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. laid out on giant matrixes. The preferable U.S. strategy was determined by calculating which moves and countermoves produced the highest value under a broad range of circumstances, depending on such variables as the proportion of SAC surviving a first-strike, the Soviet estimate of this proportion, Soviet choice of targets, U.S. choice of targets, Soviet estimate of U.S. choice, estimates of military or population damage done by each of these possible choices, the availability of warning of a Soviet attack, and the “utilities or values attached by the Soviet Union and the United States to various outcomes of the war anticipated on the basis of the initial moves of the war and their outcomes.”
Their conclusion after 195 pages was that the population-targeting strategy, which lay at the heart of the Gaither Report as well as of the Wohlstetter-Hoffman R-290 study, produced the worst value in most cases. The best values were produced by one of two alternative strategies, depending on the circumstances: either firing at military targets with very high yield weapons, exploding them near the ground, thus spreading radioactive fallout to nearby cities, destroying the Soviet military and killing some people as a “bonus”; or, if SAC had enough forces surviving a first-strike to do so, firing some weapons at military targets, but withholding a large reserve force, as well, aimed at Soviet cities and used as a bargaining lever to try to bring the war to a swift and successful conclusion. And to be able to pull off such a strategy, the U.S. should adopt many of the protective measures recommended by Wohlstetter and Hoffman in R-290: putting bombers and missiles in hardened shelters, dispersing them more widely, improving early-warning systems.
The study was laid out in systematic, logical order, and above all it was quantitative. Again and again, Marshall and Goldhamer warned that the numbers that they put in the matrix boxes were hypothetical, illustrative. They even conceded at one point, “Very likely a decision to initiate nuclear war cannot be made on the basis of strict calculation”—an observation quite contrary to the foundation of the entire study, which was that the “utility to the Soviet Union of starting a war” is “based on the utilities of the [Soviet] matrix, the probabilities of the different results of a Soviet first-strike, and the probabilities attached to the various U.S. countermoves,” in short “an average of the possible war outcomes weighted by their probabilities.” But such concessions could easily be glossed over. However arbitrary the numbers, they were numbers. Unlike the work of, say, Bernard Brodie or Victor Hunt, written in what Albert Wohlstetter scorned as “the essay tradition,” Marshall and Goldhamer were speaking the right language. Their study could be taken much more readily as serious analysis in the RAND universe.