21st Century Power: Strategic Superiority for the Modern Era

INTRODUCTION

The Second Nuclear Age

For most of the Cold War, American might—and American air power in particular—was exemplified by the Strategic Air Command, known throughout the world by its acronym SAC. As the guardian of two-thirds of the United States’ nuclear striking power, the silver bombers and missiles of SAC projected American power across the world and played a major role in keeping the Cold War against the Soviet Union cold. In its heyday from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, SAC was led by two very strong personalities: Gen. Curtis Emerson LeMay and Gen. Thomas Sarsfield Power of the U.S. Air Force. During the ’50s and ’60s both men were often seen on television and in news publications throughout the West. However, as the Cold War shifted in emphasis from nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) to the jungles of Vietnam, SAC and its leaders began to slowly fade from the public eye.

LeMay, a near-legendary combat leader in World War II and President John F. Kennedy’s Air Force chief of staff during the Cuban Missile Crisis, stuck in the public imagination. Power, however, who ended World War II as a mere brigadier general staff officer, was much easier to forget. Power largely disappeared from even the Air Force consciousness shortly after he retired in 1964. His fate presaged SAC’s own rapid decline after the Cold War. After the fall of the Soviet Union, SAC was quickly dissolved in 1992 by the Air Force and its assets merged into the new Air Combat Command. The popular consensus after the Cold War was that nuclear weapons may still be necessary, but were no longer important. Nuclear weapons were largely neglected by strategists except in terms of disarmament and nonproliferation. Along with the organization’s demise, the men steeped in the knowledge of nuclear weapons, like Power, were quietly ignored into obscurity. However, in the early years of the twenty-first century, nuclear weapons have refused to be ignored. Almost thirty years after the end of the Cold War, they threaten to re-emerge on the world stage in a large and potentially destructive way.

Of the many problems confronting defense strategists today, the Second Nuclear Age, the end of the Great Power monopoly over nuclear weapons, may be one of the most complex.¹ The First Nuclear Age, the Cold War, had two primary players: the United States and the Soviet Union. Each of the small nuclear arsenals of Great Britain, France, and China was essentially an adjunct to one of the superpowers in the solidly bipolar world of that age. During the half-century of the Cold War, the world lived a handful of minutes from the midnight of nuclear Armageddon. When it was over, mankind breathed a collective sigh of relief that the worst had not come to pass and the world was spared a devastating nuclear war.

But today’s nuclear environment, some argue, is even more challenging than the Cold War. The world is more dangerous than the Cold War because the stable bipolar world has yielded to a new multipolar world, especially among the recently proliferated new nuclear states. India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea have joined the Big Five in the nuclear club. Additionally, new entrants such as Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia may become nuclear at any moment. Instead of only one nuclear dyad in the Cold War (NATO versus the Warsaw Pact), there are now multiple conflict pairs from which a nuclear war may emerge: the United States versus Russia or China, Pakistan versus India, Iran versus Israel, North Korea versus anyone or everyone. Furthermore, the most mature nuclear countries, the ones strategists know the most about, are the least likely to engage in nuclear war. As political scientist Paul Bracken has written, Atomic weapons have returned for a second act and everyone seems to be inviting themselves to the party.²

The strategic maelstrom that is the Second Nuclear Age offers many reasons for strategists to lose sleep at night. Beyond the horrors of a global nuclear war, this new era adds other problems associated with regional nuclear war, as well as myriad lesser issues that nonetheless carry grave consequences for the fate of nations—and the least of these are a resurgent Russia armed with thousands of tactical nuclear weapons and a rapidly modernizing and confident People’s Republic of China competing with the United States for near-peer strategic capability. In the twenty-first century the United States must deal with far more than merely near-peer challenges. It must also combat crumbling nonproliferation plans to deter U.S. adversaries and allies alike from developing nuclear weapons. While doing so, the United States must decide on how best to modernize its strategic forces after decades of neglect, constantly keeping in mind the security dilemma—the propensity for other nations to react to an arms buildup with their own buildup, thus making everyone less safe. In 2009 the United States Air Force reactivated a four-star major command for nuclear operations, Air Force Global Strike Command. Acquisition questions involving hundreds of billions of dollars surround the United States Navy’s Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine replacement project, the Air Force B-21 Long Range Strike Bomber, as well as an almost top-down replacement and recapitalization of America’s nuclear warhead development capability. American political and military leaders will soon need to decide what nuclear systems the country should buy to confront the security challenges of the twenty-first century. Any solution may entail great risk and offer pitifully little reward.

Perhaps the most interesting problem of the Second Nuclear Age is the problem of limited nuclear wars. America’s monopoly over atomic weapons lasted only a few years, and the rapid development of hydrogen bombs by both the United States and the Soviet Union led many to believe that any use of nuclear weapons would inexorably escalate into a civilization-ending global thermonuclear conflict. Therefore, escalation control—ensuring any nuclear crisis would not escalate further to risk general nuclear war and would naturally tend to de-escalate over time—was deemed the paramount skill of Cold War deterrence strategy. Limited nuclear wars were briefly considered by intellectuals but quickly dismissed as impossible, or too dangerous to contemplate. Today, however, the situation is different.

Most players in the Second Nuclear Age won’t have the capacity to engage in a large global thermonuclear war. For all the ink spilled over sour or deteriorating relations among Russia, China, and the United States, no extant problems seem remotely serious enough to consider a nuclear exchange likely. Nuclear war between the Great Powers may no longer be conceivable—a happy but dangerous thought. However, today’s most volatile regional hot spots now overlap the borders of the lesser nuclear powers. Neither India nor Pakistan can fight a global thermonuclear war that can place mankind itself in peril, but it is entirely possible that they could engage in a regional war with the use of multiple nuclear weapons. North Korea and Iran pose similar issues of pairing nuclear weapons with a high probability of regional aggression and conflict.

The rise of unstable nuclear powers with serious regional animosities led Jeffrey Larsen and Kerry Kartchner in their book On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century—one of the few books to explore small powers in the Second Nuclear Age—to posit three assumptions about limited nuclear war. First, the strategic theories of limited nuclear war that were developed in the early phase of the Cold War are still relevant and must be revisited. Second, nuclear wars are both likely and they are likely to be limited rather than general, overturning the Cold War strategic consensus. Third, American strategists needed to again confront the problems of fighting, not just preventing, nuclear war.³ In this environment, Larsen and Kartchner and many of their fellow authors questioned the continuing validity of escalation control as the preeminent interest of deterrence studies, and offered that renewed study of escalation dominance—the ability to defeat aggression at all levels of violence, to include nuclear strategic superiority in order to eliminate any possible incentive for an adversary to escalate a situation—might prove to be valuable in the Second Nuclear Age.⁴

At the end of their edited study, these scholars were forced to conclude that US policy makers and combatant command commanders have really not thought through the implications [of the Second Nuclear Age]. As a result, the United States has neither the right weapons nor the right doctrine to wage such a conflict if one were thrust upon it. . . . War is inevitable. Limited nuclear war is possible. Yet neither the U.S. government, its military, nor its allies appear fully prepared to deal with this eventuality.⁵ What seems clear is that escalation control, the answer to the nuclear question as the Cold War matured, does not provide a sufficiently robust answer for the much more dangerous and difficult Second Nuclear Age. Perhaps looking to the early Cold War, before escalation control became accepted, can assist today’s Second Nuclear Age strategists.

To read what little to date has been written about him, Thomas Power seems like a poor candidate to be named a great military philosopher of the past. General Power was the third commander in chief of SAC, from 1957 to 1964, taking the reins from General LeMay when he left SAC to become vice chief of staff of the Air Force. Only LeMay exceeded Power’s length of tenure as SAC’s top general. However, Power has not been remembered well by standard histories.

Author Stephen Budianski’s take on Power is a common one. In his book on the development of U.S. air power, Budianski described Power as LeMay’s hand-picked successor as SAC commander despite being the only Second World War-generation Air Force general who had no education beyond the high-school level.⁶ Budianski’s chosen anecdote to describe Power’s character was a story about a 1960 briefing when a civilian RAND consultant briefed SAC commanders on a new concept that civilians had developed called nuclear counterforce. Counterforce’s key concept was restraint in nuclear warfare. When Power heard this, Budianski explained, the general’s reaction was clear: Why do we want to restrain ourselves? Power shouted. "Restraint. Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. Look, at the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win."⁷

Budianski used this event, recalled by a civilian consultant for Fred Kaplan’s book Wizards of Armageddon⁸—not exactly a SAC-friendly tome—as a typical example of what he considered the more than a little brash, I-don’t-give-a-damn anti-intellectualism in the attitude of SAC commanders regarding nuclear strategies developed by civilians, consultants often high on academic credentials but low on practical experience. Budianski also typified a standard reaction of post–Cold War historians when considering SAC by claiming that the organization’s mission was fantastic and hypothetical and a paradoxical blend of make-believe and dead earnest whose trigger, if ever actually pulled, would cause instant mutual suicide. Budianski even ridiculed the SAC Survival School that trained bomber crews to hide in caves and live off the land for weeks while awaiting rescue, in case they were forced to ditch after launching World War III.⁹

Budianski immediately discounted the fact that nuclear war in the Cold War was a military scenario, which had to be properly thought out by professional men in order to fulfill their professional responsibilities. To steal a phrase from Herman Kahn, nuclear war was unthinkable, so any operational planning to prepare for a nuclear war was wasted effort at best, or the sole purview of diseased minds at worst. Budianski defended this line of thought by telling of civilian consultants who were appalled by the military’s shallow thinking and casual assumptions about ‘winning’ a nuclear war.¹⁰

RAND civilian Bernard Brodie, Budianski argued, developed the appropriate approach to nuclear strategy. Brodie argued that winning a nuclear war was simply nonsense and proclaimed that the only real value of nuclear weapons was in the threat they posed, and this value would be completely lost once they were used and, hence, nuclear weapons required thinking about targeting strategy in a way entirely different from what generals were used to. Budianski concluded that many SAC commanders apparently could not grasp such subtlety as counterforce, signaling, and other civilian nuclear strategy innovations and many seemed to face down the paradox of getting ready for a war that could never be fought by deciding that it could, too, be fought.¹¹ In the end, Budianski claimed that it was the existence of thousands of undereducated aviation cadets—of which Power was the most successful—that caused the Air Force to become blinded to the wisdom of civilians and academics like Brodie.

This traditional narrative of SAC and SAC leadership, typified by Budianski, is flawed in many respects. Historians are particularly susceptible to the credentialist fallacy—automatically assigning intellectual correctness to the holder of the highest degree over any other metric. Mostly, however, Budianski simply assumed—like many of the Cold War civilian consultants—that nuclear war was to be avoided at all cost or was simply impossible to consider as an operational problem.

The reality of the Second Nuclear Age introduces serious doubts to this basic assumption. Nuclear war is now possible and, since it will probably be limited if it occurs, the comfortable Cold War assumption that thinking through how to operationally fight a nuclear war was unnecessary is no longer valid. Worse, as Larsen and Kartchner argued, this assumption has left today’s strategists intellectually disarmed and profoundly ignorant about how to confront today’s nuclear challenges. In their intellectual arrogance, Budianski’s vaunted civilian strategists have left America critically deficient in strategy, and therefore profoundly vulnerable. The fatal assumption in Cold War nuclear strategy no longer appears to be the military’s assumption that nuclear wars can be fought and won, but rather the consultant’s casual assumption that planning to fight and win a nuclear war is not worth pondering.

Strategic Air Command leaders pondered nuclear war. It was their job. While civilian consultants divined new strategies based on theoretical assumptions that obviated concerns of classical strategy and warfare, justified because the atomic bomb had changed all that, SAC aircrews knew how exposed bomber crews were to the elements after being shot down.¹² Airmen learned this after seeing friends perish in unforgiving climes after being brought down in World War II. Therefore, SAC leaders ensured their crews were as prepared as possible to survive if they were brought down, even if they were shot down during a nuclear war. Aircrews could not count on the assumption that the whole world would be dead immediately after the beginning of a nuclear World War III like the consultants did.

SAC combat crews—aircrew and missile crew—also knew that if nuclear war did break out, the only chance their families back home had to survive was if SAC destroyed the Soviet nuclear forces before they could be launched. SAC provided them with the tools and skills to accomplish this mission. Thus armed, SAC crewmen knew they were directly responsible for the safety of their loved ones, and so they all trained relentlessly at what skills their experience taught them held the highest probability of success in accomplishing their mission of keeping the United States safe. Any excessive conservatism by today’s standards that SAC may have exhibited, be it retaining the Survival School or contemplating nuclear warfighting, was not necessarily due to lack of imagination or education, but simple abundance of caution due to the remarkably high consequences of failure. If the civilian consultant made a mistake based on a flawed assumption it was arguably theoretical, and the most damaging direct consequence may be that his next book might be poorly reviewed or he might not be rehired to his academic post. If a SAC crewman made a similar mistake it was operational and practical, and the crewmen recognized the possibility that their fellow crewmen or worse, parents, wife, and children, might be killed. For SAC, nuclear war was not an intellectual parlor game—it was a deadly profession that required all of a man’s physical, moral, and intellectual courage.

Enter Thomas Power. While it is true that Power did not graduate college due to family responsibilities and not academic skill, he was a prolific writer and speaker on nuclear and strategic issues from the mid-1950s to his untimely death in 1970. Historians who have dismissed Power because he was an undereducated aviation cadet have overlooked his long list of articles and speeches, which he gave to diverse audiences. His volume of work also exposes the lazy assumption that Power was dimwitted and no match for his civilian opponents. Indeed, no one—in or out of uniform—has expressed the depth, rigor, and internal consistency of SAC’s thoughts on nuclear strategy as well as Power. While Power may not have held any advanced degrees, he was probably the most experienced officer ever in strategic air warfare (a concept that will be explored in Chapter One). It was General Power, not General LeMay, who led the most destructive strategic air attack in military history—the firebombing of Tokyo on 9 March 1945. It was Power, not LeMay, who developed and implemented SAC’s most innovative developments such as airborne alert and the incorporation of the intercontinental ballistic missile. It was Power, not LeMay, who developed the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the notorious SIOP, the unified plan for total nuclear war. It was also Power, not LeMay, who came closest to fighting SAC during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the only time SAC was ever elevated to DEFCON-2—one step away from nuclear war.

Thomas Power was SAC’s unacknowledged dean of strategic air (and later, aerospace) warfare. His work—much of it contained in this volume—provides an intellectual framework for considering nuclear warfighting strategy. This strategy was casually dismissed by civilian consultants during the Cold War and its existence broadly ignored by historians of the Cold War. Today, however, it is vitally necessary for modern strategists to become reacquainted with Power’s arcane knowledge because it provides a much-needed alternative perspective that may prove vital to confronting the problems of the Second Nuclear Age.

Before one can fully appreciate a strategist’s body of work, a reader would do well to understand something of the history of that strategist in order to provide necessary context. In this case, Thomas Power’s life and career made him uniquely suited to become one of the foremost American thinkers on strategic warfare.

Thomas Sarsfield Power was born to Irish immigrants Mary Rice and Thomas Stack Power on 18 June 1905 in the Bronx, New York City. Tommy was the youngest child of the family, and the only boy. The Powers lived a relatively comfortable middle-class lifestyle in Mamaroneck, New York, for many years. Young Tommy was a bright student who played varsity football and baseball, as well as editing the student newspaper, at the prestigious private Barnard School for Boys. However, before Tommy could graduate, his parents divorced and Thomas Sr. abandoned his family, forcing young Tommy to abandon plans for college in order to support his mother and two sisters. Tommy quickly got a job as a construction worker at Godwin Construction in New York. But Tommy’s new role as family bread-winner ended his dreams of becoming a full-time college student. Tommy missed college because he was forced into adult responsibility very early, not because he lacked aptitude.

Despite working full-time, Tommy consistently strove to increase his education. He enrolled in Cooper Union’s night school in 1925, but had to drop out after only two months. Trying to gain more education once again in 1926, he completed a special night course in civil engineering at the College of the City of New York. Tommy’s hard work at his job and his education paid off early. By 1926, he had become a construction superintendent for Godwin. By all indications, he was content with construction as his profession.

In 1927, Tommy’s life took a very important change of direction. At a