So sit back and get a cuppa.
The writer, Jeffrey Lewis, should know better:
Jeffrey Lewis is a Research Fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy (CISSM). His research focuses on the space policy component of CISSM’s Advanced Methods of Cooperative Security Program, which is generously funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Dr. Lewis is also member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Dr. Lewis received his PhD in Policy Studies (International Security and Economic Policy) from the University of Maryland and his BA in Philosophy and Political Science from Augustana College in Rock Island, IL
Now, I don't have his academic background - I stopped with a MA in political science, economics and philosophy - but I spent a lot of time on Hermann Kahn and his works.
The above linked article includes this:
Most discussions about target sets leave the impression that the decision to use a nuclear weapon here or there is a deeply rational business, with great care taken not just in the selection of each target, but also to ensure each nuclear weapon is really necessary. After all, if we are going to put a nuclear weapon on a tank factory sitting next to a grade school, you'd think that someone made a careful, anguished decision about the lesser of two evils in a morally ambiguous world.
You might think that, but you'd be wrong.
First, the primary assumption is incorrect. Target sets have nothing to do with deciding to use a nuclear weapon: rather, a decision to use a nuclear weapon is first and fundamentally a political decision that has nothing to do with target sets. Target sets and SIOP are all about the military implementing a political decision, to use nuclear weapons at all. Target sets and SIOP can allow a politician making such a decision to achieve the goals of such a political decision with a minimum of force and destruction, if the decision is to, for instance, destroy part of the military infrastructure of an adversary.
Hence if the US were to "put" a nuclear weapon on a tank factory, that decision is not made after a careful, anguished decision of whether there is a school next door or not: that decision is made after a careful, anguished decision of the necessity for using nuclear weapons at all.
Hence Jeffrey Lewis is wrong: the decision to use nuclear weapons isn't fundamentally a rational decision: it's a political decision. Now the nitty-gritty of choosing target x under criteria y is one of deciding to, for instance, use a low-yield surface burst in order to destroy utterly a large tank-making complex, rather than using a medium-yield air burst that would do the same job but also destroy a significantly larger area. But the decision here is: eliminate target x under a set of operating criteria.
Not: hand-wringing "gotta get the tank factory, but oh, no, there's a school next door. What should we do????"
For example, of the 12,500 targets in the SIOP at that time, one of them was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons. It seems superfluous to say that this is crazy, but it is important to understand how the planning process could result in such a figure. At the level of a presidential directive, a document of a thousand words or so, you will have the reasonable-sounding requirement--if you're thinking about war-fighting at all--to, say, target the political and military leadership. That guidance goes to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which in a 15- or 20-page document called a NUWEP (for "nuclear weapons employment policy") adds some detail: for example, what sorts of leadership facilities should be targeted. The NUWEP then goes to the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which in hundreds of pages of a document called Annex C to the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan lists specific facilities to be struck and damage requirements to be met. Annex C then goes to STRATCOM, where the targetting staff figures out which weapons, and how many, to apply to each target to meet the required level of damage.
[snip]
When I mentioned Butler's 69 weapons to Dr. Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman missileer and acknowledged expert on the operational aspects of nuclear warfighting now at the Brookings Institution, he found in his notes a statement by a high official at SAC in the late 1980s that the highest kill probability for the United States' best weapon against deeply buried, sprawling, hardened command posts was less than 5% (how they calculate this is a whole other matter, but the short answer is, they guess). Blair got out a calculator, assumed a kill probability of 4% for one weapon, and started multiplying. To attain a 50% confidence in destroying the target required 17 weapons. When Blair got up to 69 weapons, the "kill probability" had reached 94%.
It's part of the calculus of deterrence. The Soviets were really hot on scientific planning of war-making capabilities, and using a complex system of correlation of forces to determine when their war-making capabilities were such that they could be guaranteed crushing success. It's important to understand that "guaranteed" thing: if the Soviets thought they could obtain success via the battlefield, that gave them a psychological edge in their confrontational politics.
And that's why so much of SIOP and various missile-defense systems and planning is strictly targeted at ensuring that the enemy can't do what they want to do: get inside of their loop and you've won the game. Not the wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am knock-down exchange of nukes, but rather of making sure the Soviets never thought they could obtain success via the battlefield. That way you don't have to fight, since the confrontational politics are never implemented.
But here is where I really got annoyed:
The real issue here is that organizations abstract reality to manage it. That abstraction, James Scott pointed out in his book, Seeing Like A State, can produce disasterous consequences such as Soviet collectivization and the Maoist Great Leap Forward.
But more fundamentally, organizations aren't those that abstract reality in order to manage it: people do this. It's how we all work. Reality, that amorphous cacaphony of perceptions and demands, is managed by each and every one of us when we interface with the world. If you can't abstract the real world, how are you supposed to understand it at all?
Abstract reality to manage it. The mere phrase sets me on edge, because it sounds like this is a bad thing: after all, he goes directly to comparing it with the Soviets and Maoists.
Most of us intuitively understand the inhumanity of bureaucracies - a perhaps necessary evil in the modern world. This understanding is why General Butler's narrative is so compelling -- a human being acheives a vantage point from which to survey the madness of an inhuman organization. It's Kafka and Joseph Heller in equal measures.
But it's not a madness of an inhuman organization.
Only an organization would target 69 nuclear weapons on a single facility (later revealed to be the Sofrino missile defense radar) outside of
And STRATCOM doesn't calculate other damages not "because fire damage is hard to calculate and, therefore, not real."
It doesn't because calculating fire damage is fundamentally unknowable, given the fact that it makes a huge difference if the attack is in summer in the middle of a drought or in the middle of winter in a blizzard with 3 meters of snow on the ground after two weeks of sub-zero weather. But that doesn't mean it's not real: it just means that you can't take those factors into account in planning for a strike that might happen at any given time of day.
Further, secondary blast effects are very much real, but not to the target in question: a hardened, deep bunkered target ignores surface fires. Only blast and radiation affect such a target.
Again, secondary effects are ignored because they don't change the cold, cold equations of ensuring that the target is destroyed. The link takes you to an analysis of how fire damage can be calculate, but he's begging the question here: the analysis is for a soft target, not a hard one.
Although the details are classified, the contact website makes clear that the ISPAN doesn't change how STRATCOM does business. ISPAN does not address the fundamental myopia of "kitchen sink" target sets, artificial damage expectencies and rigid delivery schedules that encourage the President to use nuclear weapons before an adversary has time to take protective measures.
That's one reason to be worried about efforts by the OVP to plan to strike
First: the SIOP offers the President a widely nuanced range in the practice of what Tom Lehrer so beautifully called "escalatio" in his song "Who's Next?" It's not a "kitchen sink" of target sets, but if the President decides in a conflict to destroy, for instance, the ability of an adversary to make rocket fuel, that opportunity needs to be available *now* and not after 6 weeks of planning.
Artificial damage expectancies? What SIOP and military planning does is plan on not having a theoretical, ideal performance of weapons and systems, but rather of accepting reality, that they won't always work. That's why you see two conventional bombs hit a target instead of one when the military really, really, really wants to have the target destroyed. The idea that it's not "real" if damage assessment doesn't take into account secondary effects is specious when the planning calls for ensuring a minimum of assured destruction: it's only real if you can be really, really sure that you can do what you claim.
Rigid delivery schedules? Humans are always in the loop: you can stop at any time. The military isn't full of yahoos who simply obey orders. This isn't the Franco-Prussian War or WW1, where the Kaiser was told he couldn't stop the war any more.
And for the very last: SIOP, if not constantly updated and rethought, does fail if it doesn't offer politicians a nuanced, controlled usage. But that's not got anything to do with alienating any President from deciding to use nuclear weapons.
Again: using nukes is first and most fundamentally a political decision. The use of military force is always an expression of political will. The President shouldn't be involved in the technical details of whether to use 45 or 12 weapons, but rather makes the decision to eliminate the enemy's war-making capabilities.
And if the SIOP fails to give him this option, then it's failed in its mission.
I've gone on here for longer than I planned to. I don't want to rag on the man, but this was sloppy and shallow.
And I'll reiterate: using nuclear weapons is a political decision. SIOP serves the President, not the other way around.
And it is one of the fundamentals of our age: if you don't want nuclear weapons to be used, then make sure that everyone involved understands what their use means. If North Korea threatens to use them, make sure that the North Korean leadership knows that one nuke from them means three hundred on them and the complete dismembering of the entire North Korean military apparatus in a hail of complete and utter devestation.
And this is the problem with countries like Iran developing nuclear weapons: that you introduce non-rationality into the nuclear calculus, that an obsession with the destruction of Israel means that deterrence will no longer work. That's when the world becomes very, very dangerous: if you have people who are deeply, completely convinced that Israel must be eliminated, that Israel and the US are indeed direct manifestations of Satan, and you allow them to obtain nukes, then it's gonna be hard to keep them deterred, since they prove day after day that they love death and its transformation to martyrdom more than the lives of their children.
