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EXCERPT: ALBERT WOHLSTETTER'S APPROACH TO THE ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF STRATEGIC POLICY

By Robert Zarate

Albert Wohlstetter first entered the world of strategy in 1951, when at the age of thirty he began working at the RAND Corporation, a defense-oriented research organization based in Santa Monica, California. So new and so singular a place was RAND that the U.S. press would have to coin new terms--neologisms like think factory and the more familiar think tank--just to describe more succinctly, if not accurately, what this organization was.

RAND--the name is a contraction of the phrase research and development--was very much a product of the political, economic, military, and technological "cold war" competition between the West and the Soviet Union that began as World War II was ending. Recognizing the crucial roles that science and technology had played in the Allied victory over the Axis, the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) in October 1945 formed Project RAND, the think tank's institutional predecessor, as an experimental organization to retain wartime scientific and technological expertise. Written at a time when the American military services were struggling to comprehend how the atomic bomb might affect the future character of war and peace, Project RAND's mandate was framed to encompass "study and research on the broad subject of intercontinental warfare, other than surface, with the objective of recommending to the Army Air Forces preferred techniques and instrumentalities for this purpose." This broad mandate enabled a well-funded, cutting-edge, and extremely flexible research agenda that helped to attract some of America's brightest minds in economics, physics, engineering, mathematics, and the social sciences. Although RAND would gain institutional independence from the USAAF's successor, the U.S. Air Force (USAF), after incorporating itself as a private not-for-profit entity in 1948, the USAF would remain RAND's main client for many years to come.

During the 1950s, Albert's research on America's nuclear forces would help to establish the RAND Corporation's reputation as the center of U.S. strategic thought. His own journey to RAND would be a circuitous one, however. Given his undergraduate and graduate education in mathematical logic, and his later work in manufacturing as well as prefabricated housing, it may seem perhaps incongruous--even surprising--that he would spend his remaining forty-six years immersed in questions of nuclear-age strategy and morality. Yet Wohlstetter would import lessons and insights from earlier disparate experiences into his defense-oriented research at RAND, and thereby shape his own unique approach to the analysis and design of strategic policy.

Road to RAND.

Born in New York City on December 19, 1913, Albert was the youngest of Philip and Nellie Friedman Wohlstetter's four children. Although Philip would die when Albert was four-years-old, a close-knit and cultured extended family--and the efforts of Albert's eldest brother, who forsook university studies to work full-time--would help widowed Nellie to care for her children.

Raised in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood, Wohlstetter attended DeWitt Clinton High School, where he showed an early and strong interest in mathematics, Latin, and modern dance. In 1930, as the Great Depression was descending upon America, 16-year-old Albert entered the City College of New York. As an undergraduate, he concentrated his studies on mathematical logic, and was particularly stimulated by the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), a philosopher of science whom he would describe in later years as "probably the greatest American philosopher" and "a major influence" on his own work in nuclear-age strategy. On the side, Albert would participate in campus activities like the college's R.O.T.C.

After graduating from City College, Wohlstetter earned a fellowship to Columbia Law School. There, he met a master's degree student in psychology (whom he would marry in 1939) named Roberta Mary Morgan, the daughter of Edmund Morris Morgan, Jr., a distinguished Harvard Law School professor who would later help to modernize the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Although Albert would leave law school after only a year, he would remain at Columbia to pursue a Ph.D., studying mathematical logic and the philosophy of science, and working with some of the era's great logicians, such as Columbia's Ernest Nagel and Harvard's Willard Van Orman Quine. While in graduate school, Wohlstetter would take on odd jobs to help support himself, and would even work for a time as art historian Meyer Shapiro's assistant.

After earning his M.A. in 1937, Albert received several fellowships to finish his doctorate--including one from the Social Science Research Council to introduce modern mathematical methods into economics, a prestigious fellowship that in turn enabled him to intern for a time at the National Bureau for Economic Research. However, when the United States entered World War II, he halted his studies to work initially for the War Production Board's planning committee as an economic consultant, and later for the Atlas Aircraft Products Company as a factory and quality control manager at a plant manufacturing power-generating equipment for Allied forces.

After the war, Wohlstetter declined to complete his doctorate and instead moved with his wife, Roberta, to southern California. Except for a year spent in Washington, D.C., where he served as the National Housing Administration's Director of Programs (his one and only official government position), Albert would spend the rest of the decade managing research and development at the General Panel Corporation of California. General Panel would attempt--but in the end fail--to help meet the postwar housing shortage by mass-producing the "Packaged House," a modular prefabricated housing system designed by émigré architects Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann.

In February 1951, as General Panel was folding, Albert was already contemplating a change in career, and even considering a return not only to more academically-oriented research, but also to the East Coast. However, Roberta--who had been working part-time in the RAND Corporation's social sciences division since late 1948 while at the same time raising her and Albert's daughter, Joan--was intent on remaining on the West Coast. Toward that end, she set up a meeting for Albert with Charles Hitch, the head of the think tank's economic division. A Missouri-born Rhodes Scholar, Hitch had served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II before coming to RAND. Upon meeting, the two immediately clicked, and Hitch hired Wohlstetter on at RAND as a part-time consultant.

Wohlstetter's Approach: Key Features.

During the 1950s, Albert would lead a series of highly classified studies at the RAND Corporation that revolutionized how the United States based and operated its strategic nuclear forces. These studies (which the next section of this essay examines in some detail) would also stand out as exemplary applications of his unique methodology, a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to the analysis and design of strategic policy. (Although Albert would write only a handful essays on methodology, his most accessible work on this subject is probably "Theory and Opposed-Systems Design" (1968), a version of which is included in this edited volume.)

First, Albert's approach sought to identify, frame, and answer questions directly relevant to the decisions facing government policymakers. Such decisions encompassed not only choices among "means to accomplish ends that stand a good chance of being opposed by other governments," but also choices among the ends themselves.

In Wohlstetter's view, the ends of government policy could run into opposition in a number of ways. Such opposition, of course, could take the form of a conflict of aims between or among several governments. "The ends of any government," he observed, "are multiple and only partially incompatible with those of other governments--even very hostile ones--and of course such conflicts may be resolved without fighting." However, he added: "A peaceful resolution may depend in part on the risks involved in combat."

Such opposition could also take the form of a partial conflict of aims within one government. He elaborated:

While we may talk about national purpose in the singular, the first thing to observe about our aims is that we have many of them. They are connected; some depend on others; many conflict. Obviously two aims may conflict when each represents the interests of a different group. But even ends which the nation as a whole can be said to share oppose other accepted national ends.

A government's ends cannot be accepted as the final deliverances of authority or intuition. They are subject to revision as the result of an analysis that frequently displays incompatibilities with other ends of that government, or that indicates means so costly that the game is not worth the candle.

Second, Wohlstetter's analytical approach used theoretical models, empirically-driven research, and interdisciplinary collaboration to wade through the complexity and uncertainty surrounding these problems of policy, and arrive systematically at some partial order among preferences and choices of means and ends.

Lessons from his pre-RAND experiences profoundly shaped this approach. On the one hand, Albert's education in mathematical logic and the philosophy of science had given him an appreciation of the uses--and the limits--of quantitative and qualitative theoretical models in capturing and explaining real-world interactions and phenomena. On the other hand, his professional experiences in wartime and peacetime manufacturing had taught him the importance of moving away from the abstract and grappling with the concrete. Indeed, he repeatedly stressed the critical importance in his analyses of "grubby, highly specific empirical work on technologies, operations, costs, and potential interactions among states, factors that are plainly relevant for decisions of the governments of these states--or for citizens evaluating these decisions." Drawing inspiration from the work of the philosopher of science Charles Sanders Peirce, Albert thus sought to use theoretical models and empirically-driven research in a heuristic manner: deductive theoretical models spurred further empirically-driven research, the findings of which helped inductively to refine and improve the deductive theoretical models, and so on, in a method of successive analytical approximation.

In addition, Wohlstetter's professional experiences impressed upon him the need to collaborate with and draw upon the insights and creativity of experts in other relevant fields. Indeed, he expressed pride in how his approach "required the cooperation of several disciplines and, in particular, a kind of close working together of natural science and social science disciplines which remains very unusual, if it exists at all, in universities."

Third, Albert's approach aimed not only to weigh and consider the received range of possible choices, but also to invent and design new alternatives. He explained:

A central part of the inquiry must look at the current and impending state of the art and at feasible and useful changes. In the past two decades in which such inquiries have grown up, nuclear, electronic, propulsion, and transport technology have changed massively. The problem is not just to predict such changes, however. Since this is a work of design, it must explore how--in the light of interdependencies with military, political, and economic events--the changes may usefully be bent.

Fourth, Wohlstetter stressed the importance of being explicit about the limits of one's analytical approach, including the uncertainties surrounding the study. Yet he also noted that certain kinds of uncertainty could be leveraged to make the inquiry, inferences, and conclusions of the analysis more robust and persuasive. He elaborated:

In comparing alternative systems with one programmed,one cannot eliminate uncertainty, but one can assume that they will be resolved favorably from the standpoint of a dubious programmed system. One cannot avoid theoretical simplification, but one can design a model to favor the programmed or other losing systems and to give them the benefit of the doubt. Then if the comparison shows that, even with all the favors bestowed by the model's assumption, the system programmed or otherwise likely to be chosen is vastly inferior to an alternative, this offers substantial ground for choice. Moreover, it should not be surprising that bureaucrats exhibit enough inertia to make such a fortiori analyses possible and very useful, as some opposed-systems analyses have been.

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To read more of Robert Zarate's introduction to Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (2009):

• Download free PDF version
• Order free softcover version
• Buy softcover from Amazon.com.

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EXCERPT: THE WOHLSTETTERS ON LIMITING AND MANAGING NEW RISKS.

By Robert Zarate

In the late 1980s, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dramatic Soviet decline was leading some to foresee a pacific post-Cold War world. However, Albert Wohlstetter, now a Medal of Freedom-winning strategist in his mid-70s, was already thinking about the next set of strategic challenges. "Does [the Cold War's potential end] mean there are no latent long term dangers demanding prudence?" he wrote in the conclusion of a June 1989 outline for his memoir. "[T]he political and economic futures of the heavily armed Communist states and of the increasingly lethally armed Third World countries are, to say the least, rather cloudy," he observed apprehensively, adding:

Even if, implausibly, the Second and Third Worlds change rapidly to the market economies of the First World, nice though this would be, we are likely to discover once again that, contrary to Cobden and the Manchester School, trade and investment--good things though they are--are not all that pacifying. Trading partners have found a good many reasons to go to war. We haven't seen the end of fanaticism, mortal national and racial rivalries, and expansionist ambitions. It is conceivable that all the variously sized lions and lambs will lie down together, that there will be the kind of moral revolution that many hoped for at the end of World War II when they thought it, in any case, the only alternative to nuclear destruction. But, as Jacob Viner [a University of Chicago economist] wrote at the time, "It is a long, long time between moral revolutions." We should not count on it.

Seventeen months before the U.S.S.R.'s December 1991 dissolution ended the Cold War, Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Iraqi military invaded Kuwait--producing a Persian Gulf conflict contingency that Wohlstetter and his colleagues had presciently warned of as early as 1980. In the early 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic's pan-Serbian ambitions ignited long-suppressed ethnic rivalries, and then genocide, in the Balkans. In the mid-1990s, deep racial rivalries would also lead to genocide in Rwanda. And in the late 1990s, after Osama bin Laden had issued a fatwa urging attacks on American citizens, his Al Qaeda organization carried out deadly bombings against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania--in retrospect, harbingers of the violent extremism and suicidal fanaticism that were yet to come.

Moreover, the United States would discover just how lethally armed the former Third World and the Communist holdouts were becoming. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, the American-led coalition uncovered a Ba'athist Iraqi nuclear program far closer to producing a nuclear weapon than either the Western intelligence services or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had ever anticipated. And at mid-decade, after North Korea had refused to grant the IAEA access to suspected nuclear weapons-relevant facilities, Washington began long negotiations with Pyongyang for an "Agreed Framework," a "grand bargain" that sought to prevent the North Koreans from acquiring fissile material for a nuclear explosive device.

Wohlstetter remained intellectually active during the post-Cold War period until his death in 1997. As a member of the Defense Policy Board, he supported U.S. efforts to liberate Kuwait from Ba'athist Iraq during the Gulf War. After the war, he lambasted Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton for what he saw as their failures to respond meaningfully to Ba'athist aggression against Iraqi Shi'a and Kurdish populations, as well as to Saddam's other violations of the United Nations Security Council resolutions that had established the stringent conditions for the Gulf War's cessation.

In the mid-1990s, Albert, now an octogenarian, focused much of his attention on the Balkans, publishing numerous op-eds (especially on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, edited by his long-time friend and colleague, Robert Bartley) and articles that sharply rebuked Western leaders for their indifference and indecisiveness towards Slobodan Milosevic's pan-Serbian expansionism, and agitated for greater Western involvement on behalf of Bosnian Muslims and other victims of Milosevic's aggression. Of note, he and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher co-authored "What the West Must Do in Bosnia," an open letter to President Clinton published in the Wall Street Journal in September 1993, and signed by more than 100 people from across the globe and the political spectrum--people like Morton Abramowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Osama El Baz, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Zuhair Humadi, Marshal Freeman Harris, Pierre Hassner, Zalmay Khalilzad, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, Teddy Kollek, Laith Kubba, Czeslaw Milosz, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle, Sir Karl Popper, Eugene Rostow, Henry Rowen, George Shultz, George Soros, Susan Sontag, Elie Wiesel, Leon Wieseltier, and Paul Wolfowitz. (The text of this letter is reprinted in this volume.)

And in response to what he considered to be the shortcomings of the Agreed Framework between the United States and North Korea, Wohlstetter called on Washington to admit that the global spread of nuclear fuel-making is significantly driving the problem of proliferation and to face "squarely the challenge of persuading our major allies, not to say our potential adversaries [such as Pyongyang], to abandon the sale or use of plutonium fuel" and other weapons-usable nuclear materials.

*****

Although Albert Wohlstetter died in Los Angeles on January 13, 1997, and Roberta, in New York City on January 6, 2007, their work in strategy remains all too relevant and timely. In the early years of the 21st century, the United States and its allies are now struggling with many of the problems of nuclear-age policy that the Wohlstetters themselves had anticipated and grappled with throughout their long careers in strategy--problems like the dangers posed by the spread of nuclear bombs, fuel-making technologies, and fissile materials to new states and non-state actors; the difficulties of enforcing ambiguously interpreted international law and nuclear nonproliferation rules; the uncertain economics surrounding energy security and alternatives for power production; and the proper role of deterrence and military force in an increasingly lethally-armed and disorderly world. Their writings on nuclear-age strategy and policy thus can help decision-makers and policy analysts (as well as those who aspire to these positions) to clarify their thinking on these most urgent matters.

When Albert spoke of his approach to the analysis and design of strategic policy, he often liked to describe it as "coming down at right angles to an orthodoxy." Indeed, Wohlstetter's approach did not fit well the conventional dichotomy of hawk and dove. He was a strategist who had originally established his reputation for his path-breaking work on nuclear deterrence, a traditionally hawkish concept; yet he had added to that reputation not only by supporting nuclear nonproliferation, an often dovish concern, but also by consistently urging the U.S. Government to block the spread of nuclear weapons, weapons-relevant nuclear technologies, and weapons-usable nuclear material to America's allies and adversaries alike. He was a strategist who, like the doves, was horrified by the brute destructiveness of nuclear weapons and nuclear war, yet hawkishly saw U.S. innovation in military technologies of precision, control, and information as a way of markedly limiting the potential of weapons for indiscriminate killing, thereby strengthening deterrence and making nuclear war less likely in the first place.

Indeed, when President Ronald Reagan awarded Medals of Freedom to the Wohlstetters in November 1985, he summarized their work in the following way:

Albert has always argued that in the nuclear age technological advances can, if properly understood and applied, make things better; but his point, and Roberta's, has been a deeper one than that. He has shown us that we have to create choices and, then, exercise them. The Wohlstetters have created choices for our society where others saw none. They've taught us that there is an escape from fatalism.

To these ends, this edited volume provides readers not only with the present essay on the Wohlstetters' key historical contributions, but also with many of Albert and Roberta's most enduring and relevant writings, some of which have never before been published. This volume's six chapters correlate directly with the six themes set forth in the present introductory essay--namely, (1) Analysis and Design of Strategic Policy, (2) Nuclear Deterrence, (3) Nuclear Proliferation, (4) Arms Race Myths vs. Strategic Competition's Reality, (5) Towards Discriminate Deterrence, and (6) Limiting and Managing New Risks. (However, the editors of this volume have remained mindful of James Digby and J. J. Martin's wise caveat that, given Albert and Roberta's "continuity of concepts across many diverse types of military problems," it therefore "may be inconsistent with the nature of [the Wohlstetters'] work to summarize their contributions in terms of discrete categories.") Moreover, each chapter begins with a short commentary by a former colleague or student of Albert and Roberta--Henry S. Rowen, Alain Enthoven, Henry Sokolski, Richard Perle, Stephen J. Lukasik, and Andrew W. Marshall, respectively--before offering the selected Wohlstetter writings themselves.

To conclude, at least two larger themes emerge from a close reading and careful appreciation of the Wohlstetters' work in strategy. First, as a palliative to the fatalism that sometimes besets the nuclear age and gives rise to the extreme responses of the Utopian or the Dystopian, we must learn to tolerate the fact of uncertainty. Indeed, in the conclusion to her magisterial 1962 study of one of America's worst military disasters, Roberta soberly observed, "If the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer for the future, it is this: We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn to live with it. No magic, in code or otherwise, will provide certainty. Our plans must work without it."

Second, as the United States struggles not only to limit and manage the nuclear risks and changing dangers it faces in this new century, but also to "slowly and piecemeal, build a more orderly and safer world," we should weigh and consider carefully Albert's sober words on the need for facing up to hard choices and sustaining intelligent effort as expressed in No Highway to High Purpose (1960):

The great issues of war and peace deserve to be treated candidly and objectively, without wishfulness or hysteria.... [They] are tall orders. They cannot be filled quickly, or finally, or by means of some semiautomatic gadget, or in one heroic burst of energy. Nor will the answer come to us in a dream.... Our problem is more like staying thin after thirty--and training for some long steep, rocky climbs. If, as we are told, America is no longer a youth, we may yet hope to exploit the advantages of maturity: strength, endurance, judgment, responsibility, freedom from the extremes of optimism and pessimism--and steadiness of purpose.

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To read more of Robert Zarate's introduction to Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (2009):

• Download free PDF version
• Order free softcover version
• Buy softcover from Amazon.com.

Robert Zarate and Henry Sokolski, eds, Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Strategic Studies Institute, 2009). | Book review in Foreign Affairs magazine.

ABOUT THE BOOK

(Jump down to the Table of Contents)

Pioneers of nuclear-age policy analysis, Albert Wohlstetter (1913-1997) and Roberta Wohlstetter (1912-2007) emerged as two of America's most controversial, innovative and consequential strategists. Through the clarity of their thinking, the rigor of their research, and the persistence of their personalities, they were able to shape the views and aid the decisions of Democratic and Republican policy makers both during and after the Cold War. Although the Wohlstetters' strategic concepts and analytical methods continue to be highly influential, no book has brought together their most important essays--until now.

Edited by Robert Zarate, former Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) research fellow (2006-2009), and NPEC executive director Henry Sokolski, Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (2009) demonstrates not only the historical importance, but also the continuing relevance of the Wohlstetters' work in national security strategy and nuclear policy. It is the first book to make widely available over twenty of Albert and Roberta's most influential published--and unpublished--writings on:

• methods of policy analysis and design;
• nuclear deterrence through survivable, controllable and therefore credible strategic forces;
• nuclear proliferation and the military potential of civil nuclear energy;
• spiraling arms-race myths versus the real, observable dynamics of strategic competition;
• the revolutionary potential of non-nuclear technologies of precision, control, and information; and
• the continuing need for prudence and pragmatism in the face of changing dangers.

Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter is a must-read and an indispensable resource for policy makers, military planners, and strategic analysts, as well as for students who aspire to these positions.

NUCLEAR HEURISTICS: TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface (2009) by Henry Sokolski

Acknowledgments (2009)

Introduction: Albert & Roberta Wohlstetter on Nuclear-Age Strategy (2009) by Robert Zarate

I. Analysis and Design of Strategic Policy

Commentary: How He Worked (2009) by Henry S. Rowen

Theory and Opposed-Systems Design (1968) by Albert Wohlstetter

II. Nuclear Deterrence

Commentary: On Nuclear Deterrence (2009) by Alain C. Enthoven

The Delicate Balance of Terror (1958) by Albert Wohlstetter

Excerpts on "Missile Gap" from General Comments on Senator Kennedy's National Security Speeches (1960) by Albert Wohlstetter

On the Genesis of Nuclear Strategy: Letter to Michael Howard (1968) by Albert Wohlstetter

III. Nuclear Proliferation

Commentary: Timely Warnings Still--The Wohlstetters and Nuclear Proliferation (2009) by Henry Sokolski

Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N + 1 Country (1961) by Albert Wohlstetter

Spreading the Bomb without Quite Breaking the Rules (1976) by Albert Wohlstetter

The Buddha Smiles: U.S. Peaceful Aid and the Indian Bomb (1978) by Roberta Wohlstetter

Signals, Noise and Article IV (1979) by Albert Wohlstetter, Gregory S. Jones and Roberta Wohlstetter

Nuclear Triggers and Safety Catches, the "FSU" and the "FSRs" (1992) by Albert Wohlstetter

IV. Arms Race Myths vs. Strategic Competition's Reality

Commentary: Arms Race Myths vs. Strategic Competition's Reality (2009) by Richard Perle

The Case for Strategic Force Defense (1969) by Albert Wohlstetter

Racing Forward? Or Ambling Back? (1976) by Albert Wohlstetter

On Arms Control: What We Should Look for in an Arms Agreement (1985) by Albert & Roberta Wohlstetter

Arms Control that Could Work (1985) by Albert Wohlstetter and Brian G. Chow

V. Towards Discriminate Deterrence

Commentary: Towards Discriminate Deterrence (2009) by Stephen J. Lukasik

Strength, Interest and New Technologies (1968) by Albert Wohlstetter

How Much is Enough? How Mad is MAD? (1974) by Albert Wohlstetter

Bishops, Statesmen, and Other Strategists on the Bombing of Innocents (1983) by Albert Wohlstetter

Connecting the Elements of the Strategy: Excerpt from Discriminate Deterrence (1988) by the Commission on Integrated Long Term Strategy

RPM, or Revolutions by the Minute (1992) by Albert Wohlstetter

VI. Limiting and Managing New Risks

Commentary: Strategy as a Profession in the Future Security Environment (2009) by Andrew W. Marshall

End of the Cold War? End of History and All War? Excerpt from an Outline for a Memoir (1989) by Albert Wohlstetter

The Fax Shall Make You Free (1990) by Albert Wohlstetter

The Bitter End: The Case for Re-Intervention in Iraq (1991) by Albert Wohlstetter and Fred S. Hoffman

What the West Must Do in Bosnia: An Open Letter to President Clinton (1993) by Albert Wohlstetter and Margaret Thatcher

Boris Yeltsin as Abraham Lincoln? (1995) by Albert Wohlstetter

About the Editors and Contributors

For updates, bookmark Albert Wohlstetter Dot Com.

• The Future of Containment, report of the Offense-Defense Working Group, submitted to the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October1988).

• Recommended Changes in U.S. Military Space Policies and Programs, report of the Working Group on Technology, submitted to the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1988).
• Technology for National Security, report of the Working Group on Technology, submitted to the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1988).

The Commission was chaired by Reagan's former Undersecretary of Defense Fred C. Iklé and strategist Albert Wohlstetter. Known also as the Iklé-Wohlstetter Commission, it included a number of military and foreign policy luminaries: Ambassador Anne Armstrong, Counselor to Nixon and Ford; Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser; Judge William P. Clark, Reagan's former national security adviser; W. Graham Claytor, Jr., Carter's deputy secretary of defense; Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster (ret.), former Commander-in-Chief of USEUCOM and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Forces; Adm. James L. Holloway, III (ret.), former Chief of Naval Operations; Dr. Samuel P. Huntington, prominent Harvard political scientist; Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon and Ford's Secretary of State; Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel-winning biologist; Gen. Bernard A. Schriever (ret.), U.S. Air Force proponent of ballistic missile and space programs; and Gen. John W. Vessey (ret.), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Commission completed its final report, Discriminate Deterrence, in January 1988.

The Future Security Environment Working Group (FSEWG) was one of several working groups that provided analyses to the Iklé-Wohlstetter Commission. Co-chaired by the Defense Department's Office of Net Assessment director Andrew W. Marshall and RAND Corporation economist Charles Wolf, Jr., the working group's members included: Eliot A. Cohen; David F. Epstein; Fritz Ermarth; Lawrence Gershwin; James McCrery; Jeffrey Milstein; James Roche; Thomas Rona; Stephen P. Rosen; Dennis Ross; Notra Trulock; Dov Zakheim; and rapporteur Barbara Bicksler.

Here's the full citation for the FSEWG's 184-page report:

The Future Security Environment, report of the Future Security Environment Working Group, submitted to the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1988).

A few of the photos were taken for a 1959 profile of the RAND Corporation in LIFE Magazine:

"Valuable Batch of Brains: An Odd Little Company Called RAND Plays a Role in U.S. Defense," LIFE, Vol. 46, No. 19 (May 11, 1959), pp. 101-107.

Albert Wohlstetter, "A Purpose Hammered Out of Reflection and Choice," Life, Vol. 48, No. 24 (June 20, 1960), pp. 115, 126-134.

Albert Wohlstetter, No Highway to High Purpose, P-2084-RC (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, June 1960.

Albert Wohlstetter and Henry S. Rowen, Objectives of the United States Military Posture, RM-2373 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, May 1, 1959).

James Johnson and Robert Zarate, "A Slow Pearl Harbor: Some Disasters are a Long Time in the Making," The Weekly Standard, Vol. 11, No. 14 (December 19, 2005).

SIXTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, Japan stunned our nation with a daring raid on Pearl Harbor, killing 2,400 Americans and crippling the Pacific fleet. That same day, Japan also attacked U.S. forces in Manila, Midway and Wake Islands, and Guam, as well as British forces throughout East Asia. American leaders had anticipated attacks on the latter targets, but not on Pearl Harbor.

In the years following, fierce debates raged--in congressional hearings and among historians--over how the United States could have been so completely surprised. But it was not until the publication of Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, historian Roberta Morgan Wohlstetter's 1962 Bancroft Prize-winning study, that the dimensions of this national tragedy came to be fully understood....

Read the whole thing.

PDF version of Robert Zarate's introductory essay to Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writing of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Strategic Studies Institute, 2009), edited by Robert Zarate and Henry Sokolski.

• Albert and Roberta's contributions to nuclear deterrence;
• The Wohlstetters on nuclear nonproliferation and civil nuclear energy's military potential;
• Albert and Roberta on arms race myths and strategic competition's reality; and
• Albert's contributions to discriminate deterrence.

• Download a free PDF version from the Strategic Studies Institute's website;
• Order a free second-printing of the book's softcover version from the Strategic Studies Institute's website (while supplies last); or
• Buy a softcover version of the book from Amazon.com.

On Sunday, March 15, at 6:00 AM (ET), and Monday, March 16, at 1:00 AM (ET), Book TV is scheduled to broadcast its recording of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter's Writings and the Future of U.S. National Strategy.

Featuring Andrew W. Marshall (director of Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment), Richard Perle (former Assistant Secretary of Defense), Henry Sokolski (NPEC Executive Director), and me, Robert Zarate (NPEC Researcher Fellow), this panel was hosted by the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) and Hudson Institute on February 23, 2009, to discuss the continuing relevance of the recently released book, Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (2009).

Book TV also posts its broadcasts online, so when this broadcast is available on the web, I'll be sure to post or link to it here.

Each weekend, C-SPAN2's Book TV features 48 hours of nonfiction books, beginning on Saturday at 8:00 AM ET, and ending on Monday at 8:00 AM ET.

In the meantime, Hudson Institute's raw video of the Wohlstetter book event is available here.

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EXCERPT: MOVING TOWARDS DISCRIMINATE DETERRENCE -- ALBERT WOHLSTETTER'S CONTRIBUTIONS

By Robert Zarate

In 1962, Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin first published (with research assistance from Donald Brennan) Strategy and Arms Control, a book that famously identified what they took to be the three core objectives of all arms control agreements: to reduce "[1] the likelihood of war, [2] its scope and violence if it occurs, and [3] the political and economic costs of being prepared for it." Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter saw themselves as sharing these very same goals, but they diverged from the conventional wisdom of most arms controllers in that they believed the United States (and the USSR) could often achieve these objectives more reliably and effectively by means of independent technological innovation.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Albert would work to demonstrate the stabilizing potential of technological innovation. In particular, he would join a small circle of analysts who identified for U.S. decision-makers new alternatives for responding to -- and thus for deterring -- a wide spectrum of possible enemy aggression without resorting to the sort of massive nuclear retaliation against cities and civilian populations prescribed by mutual assured destruction (MAD) and other doctrines of automatic and minimum deterrence. By promoting the development of technologies and systems that stressed precision, control, and information, Wohlstetter would help the United States to reject MAD-inspired threats against noncombatants -- and instead to field a new generation of more discriminate and less destructive non-nuclear capabilities that, in turn, would substantially reduce America's reliance on nuclear weapons.

Birth of MAD: A New Doctrine of Deterrence by Massive Retaliation.

The doctrine of mutual assured destruction first emerged in the late 1960s. Like earlier doctrines of automatic and minimum deterrence, MAD held that a government could deter stably and reliably a wide range of nuclear and non-nuclear aggression simply by threatening to escalate any conflict with massive retaliatory attacks targeting the aggressor's cities and populations. Because MAD required a government to field only a "minimum deterrent" -- that is, a second-strike capability consisting of technologically crude and indiscriminately destructive nuclear weapons aimed at civilians -- the doctrine counseled against technological innovation. The reason was that when two governments adopted "minimum deterrent" nuclear postures, MAD doctrine held that the necessary outcome will be a stable, mutual deterrence. Arms controllers -- especially arms race theorists who sought to limit qualitative technological improvements to America's strategic nuclear forces -- thus gravitated toward MAD.

In a curious twist, however, it was Donald Brennan, an arms controller at Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute, who first coined the phrase "mutual assured destruction" in the mid-to-late 1960s. Brennan meant MAD as a tongue-in-cheek way of mocking arms controllers who had advocated escalatory threats of massive nuclear retaliation as a means not only of deterring a wide range of nuclear and non-nuclear aggression, but also of achieving deep cuts in nuclear arms. Nonetheless, many such arms controllers ended up embracing the phrase.

MAD alludes to a concept that was birthed during Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's tenure. Upon arriving at the Pentagon, Secretary McNamara and his team of analysts -- a group which included Charles Hitch, William W. Kaufmann, Alain Enthoven and other alumni of the RAND Corporation -- set out to rein in what they saw as the budgetary excesses of the military services. To constrain military spending on nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, they had introduced by late 1963 the metric of assured destruction capability. (Although assured destruction capability is traditionally referred to by the acronym AD, this essay shall refer to it as ADCAP.) Enthoven, a protégé of Albert Wohlstetter who had served initially as McNamara's Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis, explained the concept behind ADCAP in a 1977 essay:

[T]he size and composition of our strategic retaliatory forces would be determined by the "assured destruction mission." Under this policy, we would buy amounts and kinds of forces sufficient to be sure, even under very pessimistic assumptions, that they could survive a deliberate Soviet attack [aimed directly against them] well enough to strike back and destroy 20 to 25 percent of their population.

The assured destruction test did not, of course, indicate how these forces would actually be used in a nuclear war. United States strategic offensive forces have been designed with the additional system characteristics -- accuracy, endurance, and good command and control -- needed to perform missions other than assured destruction, such as limited and controlled retaliation.

. . . our strength may be tested at many levels. We intend to have at all times the capacity to resist non-nuclear or limited attacks -- as a complement to our nuclear capacity, not as a substitute. We have rejected any all-or-nothing posture which would leave no choice but inglorious retreat or unlimited retaliation.

The U.S. has come to the conclusion that to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general nuclear war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives, in the event of a nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the Alliance, should be the destruction of military forces, not of his civilian population.

The Long Range Research and Development Planning Program.

In the early-to-mid 1970s, Wohlstetter participated in a highly classified DoD study that would help to clarify the potentially revolutionary implications that new technologies could have for war and peace in the nuclear age. This study would not only help the United States over time to reject doctrines of automatic and minimum deterrence and MAD-inspired threats of massive nuclear retaliation, but also lay the seeds for America's own "revolution in military affairs."

Initiated by Stephen J. Lukasik, director of the Pentagon's Advanced Research and Projects Agency (ARPA), and Fred Wikner, an informal representative of the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), this study was known as the Long Range Research and Development Planning Program or LRRDPP. Because Lukasik and Wikner had intended to keep the study initially low-key, they consciously chose a name for the study that would be clunky, and the acronym for which would not be easy to pronounce.

The LRRDPP sought to examine military applications for emerging technologies: for example, new methods of autonomous-terminal homing to deliver munitions more precisely, planned global positioning system satellites, and anticipated improvements in micro-computing and information-processing. The goal was to lay out how America's military services could leverage these technologies to provide U.S. decision-makers with new alternatives -- that is, choices that would not rely on indiscriminate massive nuclear retaliation -- for responding to limited-nuclear and less-than-nuclear aggression.

To work on the study, Lukasik and Wikner brought together technologically innovative industrial contractors with Albert Wohlstetter, Joseph Braddock, Don Hicks, Dom Paolucci, Jack Rosengren, and other analysts who had strong knowledge of the subject of nuclear-age strategy and intimate familiarity with the military services. Lukasik -- in the commentary that he contributes to Nuclear Heuristics (2009) -- summarizes how the LRRDPP worked and some of Wohlstetter's contributions:

The program was organized into three panels supported by four industrial contractors to contribute expertise and advanced concepts in ground, air, and naval warfare, conventional and nuclear munitions, reconnaissance, command and control, and system integration. Albert chaired the strategic alternatives panel, Don Hicks the advanced technology panel, and Jack Rosengren the munitions panel. Senior-level executives from OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the Services participated in panel sessions. The team members were selected for their in-depth knowledge as well as their skill in working as a multidisciplinary group, combining history, strategy, technology, military operations, and systems. In addition to Albert's broad skills, his ability to synthesize the essence of a problem and its solution and to communicate it to senior executives and political leaders was invaluable.

In addition, the LRRDPP's draft summary report of February 1975 would cite two additional crucial developments. The strategic nuclear forces of both the United States and the USSR had apparently acquired survivable, controllable, and therefore credible second-strike capability; and in part because of this, the Executive Branch had called for a reassessment of the World War II-era "strategic bombing" metrics that were still being used to measure the effectiveness of nuclear and conventional strategic attacks -- namely, "the number of targets destroyed" and "the percentage of the targets at risk that have been destroyed by the attack."

Citing the potential feasibility of "weapons with near zero miss distance," the LRRDPP strategists proposed what Wohlstetter had termed the dual-criterion (or, alternatively, the dual-criteria) to replace the persisting World War II-era targeting metrics. Under the dual-criterion, the U.S. military would aim: "(1) to achieve the desired damage expectancy on an intended target or target system with high confidence, while simultaneously (2) not damaging particular regions or population areas, again with high confidence." To meet the dual-criterion's much more stringent targeting requirements, the strategists identified promising weapon-system concepts which, by capitalizing on foreseeable improvements in the accuracy of warhead delivery and other technologies, could accomplish their missions using extremely low-yield nuclear and even non-nuclear explosives. Such weapon-system concepts included remotely-piloted vehicles, precision-delivered ballistic missiles, deep-earth penetrators, shallow-earth penetrators, and advanced precision-guided munitions.

Thus, a key insight from the LRRDPP's work was that improvements in a warhead's delivery accuracy could make greater reliance on non-nuclear explosives possible. For when it comes to increasing the probability of destroying a hardened point target (e.g., a missile silo), a ten-fold improvement in the accuracy of a warhead's delivery vehicle is roughly equivalent to a thousandfold increase in the warhead's indiscriminate explosive yield. This, in part, is why Wohlstetter himself saw revolutions in precision, control and information as potentially trumping the so-called nuclear revolution.

The LRRDPP strategists then used a number of possible conflict scenarios -- contingencies like less-than-nuclear Soviet aggression against non-NATO nations peripheral to the USSR, and Soviet attacks against individual NATO member states -- to think through the sort of strategic contexts and operations in which the United States might use these technologically-driven military capabilities to deter and, if necessary, halt such aggression. In particular, they identified two strategies for employing these capabilities:

• Coercive response. A "declaratory or implied policy which threatened attack against limited numbers of selected targets in the USSR," the objective of which "would be to help initiate negotiations or to support ongoing negotiations involved with halting the war"; and
• Stemming the aggression. A deterrent response policy which would use the military forces of "the threatened country, along with prompt assistance by U.S. forces, [for] actually halting the aggression."

Yet the LRRDPP strategists also saw the opportunities that military capabilities using non-nuclear technologies of discrimination, control, and information could afford by enabling America to rely substantially less on threats of massive nuclear retaliation, to respond decisively to provocations short of all-out nuclear war, and, by so doing, to deter such aggression all the more credibly.

Revolutions in Technologies of Precision, Control, and Information.

The LRRDPP study profoundly influenced Wohlstetter's thinking. Long opposed to automatic deterrence, minimum deterrence, and other doctrines of massive nuclear retaliation, he had sought as early as the late 1950s to identify for decision-makers new alternatives to meet limited-nuclear and less-than-nuclear forms of aggression. Indeed, in a conference speech titled Strength, Interest, and New Technologies delivered in September 1967 and sponsored by the Institute for Strategic Studies (now the International Institute for Strategic Studies), he had displayed remarkable prescience regarding the transformative potential of emerging technologies, suggesting that revolutions in precision, control, and information could very well trump the nuclear revolution and the fatalism that had flowed from it. America's technological means had not yet caught up with Wohlstetter's strategic ends, however. The Long Range Research and Development Planning Program would help to change that.

The education and expertise gained from Lukasik and Wikner's LRRDPP study would considerably inform Wohlstetter's own heated criticisms of MAD-inspired nuclear deterrence and targeting doctrines. The LRRDPP experience would also shape the later work of President Ronald Reagan's Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, a high-level panel that outgoing Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Fred C. Iklé and Wohlstetter chaired in the mid-to-late 1980s. (The other members of the Commission were Anne L. Armstrong, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William P. Clark, W. Graham Claytor, Jr., Andrew J. Goodpaster, James L. Holloway, III, Samuel P. Huntington, Henry A. Kissinger, Joshua Lederberg, Bernard A. Schriever, and John W. Vessey.) With its January 1988 final report, the Commission offered a new doctrine of discriminate deterrence to help meet the future security environment's changing dangers, with the aim of increasing American and allied ability "to bring force to bear effectively, with discrimination and in time, to thwart any of a wide range of plausible aggressions against their major common interest -- and in that way to deter such aggression."

In the decades following the LRRDPP, the United States developed and acquired, though in stops and starts, many of the technologically-driven military capabilities that the study's strategists had identified. In turn, these non-nuclear technologies of precision, control, and information -- the development of which many arms controllers had fiercely opposed in the 1970s and 1980s on the grounds that they would spark spiraling arms races -- would substantially reduce America's reliance on indiscriminately destructive nuclear weapons, and thereby help to make all-out nuclear war less likely.

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To read more of Robert Zarate's introduction to Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (2009):

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For those interested in more context . . .

The Multilateral Force was a proposed nuclear weapons-sharing arrangement in which not just the United States, but all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), would have jointly commanded and directly controlled naval vessels manned by multinational crews, and armed with U.S.-supplied nuclear-armed Polaris sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Research leads me to believe the MLF proposal was first conceived by Robert A. Bowie, director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff under President Dwight Eisenhower from 1953 to 1957, in a 1960 report known as the "Bowie Study":

The North Atlantic Nations: Tasks for the 1960s, a report to the Secretary of State, August 1, 1960, SECRET, declassified on January 9, 1986, DDRS No. CK3100227683.

In early 1961, both Bowie and Wohlstetter jointed the Committee on U.S. Political, Economic, and Military Policy in Europe, an advisory body chaired by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and charged by the Kennedy Administration to re-examine transatlantic relations between the United States and Western Europe. Wohlstetter -- who, as a consultant to the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, had emerged as one of America's most inventive and provocative thinkers of nuclear-age strategy -- served as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's informal representative to what came to be known as the "Acheson Committee."

During the Committee's deliberations, Bowie pushed hard the MLF proposal. Wohlstetter pushed back, but not just on the grounds that the MLF would make the spread of nuclear weapons more likely among allies, as well as potential adversaries. He also believed that the MLF would tend to weaken -- not strengthen -- the sinews of Alliance.

Wohlstetter countered that the MLF would make it difficult for the Allies to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the face of potentially severe yet deeply uncertain nuclear dangers, with indecisiveness or disagreement dissolving Western cohesion in times of crisis. The proposed MLF, he argued, would multiply and dangerously complicate the allied decision-making process. In the event of a nuclear attack against one or more NATO members, which governments would have the power to decide when to use the MLF's jointly-controlled nuclear weapons? Which governments, if any, would have the right to veto such use? Only the United States? Or, all participating NATO members? Or, just some? And what would the process for making decisions actually be? Simple majority? Consensus? The answers to these critical questions were far from clear.

Wohlstetter instead argued to the Acheson Committee that the United States should retain direct control of America's strategic nuclear forces (SNFs). That the final decision of whether or not to use SNFs in a crisis should belong to the U.S. President. And that the United States and its NATO allies should establish better non-nuclear, conventional military options to defend Western Europe, not just to deter more credibly less-than-nuclear aggression on the Continent, but also to assure America's closest partners and make less likely knee-jerk calls for recourse to nuclear weapons. The sort of arguments he privately made to the Acheson Committee found public expression in the following, difficult-to-find 1961 Foreign Affairs article that Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writing of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (2009) has made available again:

Albert Wohlstetter, "Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N+1 Country," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 39, No. 3 (April 1961), pp. 355-387.

The Acheson Committee's final report would not recommend Bowie's concept of a Multilateral Force:

A Review of North Atlantic Problems for the Future, the Committee on U.S. Political, Economic and Military Policy in Europe's Policy Guidance to the National Security Council, March 1961, SECRET, declassified on December 30, 1996, DNSA No. NH01131, esp. pp. 7-11.

Policy Directive Regarding NATO and the Atlantic Nations, National Security [Action] Memorandum No. 40, April 24, 1961, CONFIDENTIAL, declassified on May 4, 1977, DNSA No. BC02034.

Speaking of the NPT, I thought I'd end this post with "What's Next?" Tom Lehrer's satirical ode to the sort of proliferation that people worried might follow the October 1964 test detonation of a nuclear explosive device by the People's Repubic of China at Lop Nur:

In turn, China's detonation of a nuclear explosive device led the Johnson Administration to assemble an interagency Task Force on Nuclear Proliferation, chaired by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric. The Gilpatric Committee's final report -- which is available as item 64 here -- played an important role in convincing President Lyndon Johnson to suspend America's attempts to negotiate in the ENDC for a treaty on complete and total disarmament, and instead to focus exclusively on getting the ENDC to conclude a much more modest nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

The Wohlstetter book panel included Andrew Marshall (director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment), Richard Perle (AEI resident fellow and a former Assistant Secretary of Defense), and Nuclear Heuristics co-editors Henry Sokolski (NPEC executive director) and me.

On a personal note, it was a treat that day to see many colleagues and critics in the crowd, and make some new friends. It was an especial honor to have Albert and Roberta's daughter Joan, Nobel economics laureate Thomas Schelling, and several former Wohlstetter students in the audience.

For more, visit Hudson Institute's webpage for the event, where you can download the event's video (.mp4) or just its audio (.mp3).