 I'm Rich Wagner. I have been helping Pony and CSIS conduct a series of seminars, workshops on the intersection between technology and strategy, the intersection between those two, as it relates to large scale strategic issues of which nuclear is one, of course. And this is, in some sense, a part of that series. Airland Battle is a story that I think has not been well documented, more important, I think, to what happened during the Cold War and to our understanding of extended deterrence in general than the extent to which it has or has not been treated in the histories might indicate. So I thought it would be useful before too much more memory of Airland Battle is lost for us old guys, yeah, for us to spend a little time on that subject. NATO, NATO experience of extended deterrence, as we call it today, is the only real experience of successful extended deterrence in the nuclear age that exists. And so we'd better learn as many lessons from it as we can because we're going to have to extend. We are extending deterrence, we're going to have to do it for a long time, and we need to learn those lessons. My colleague Jim Technalia and I both lived through the Airland Battle story, not either of us, I think, perhaps right at the center of it, but close enough to it to have seen different parts of it. I was at Livermore during the 70s helping design, leading some of the design programs and then went to the Pentagon in 81 and was there for the first six years of the Reagan administrations, when in some ways the Airland Battle strategy came to its fullest form and was fully implemented by NATO. And then during the rest of the 80s, after I left the Pentagon, I was still connected in three or four ways, one of which was being the American co-chair of what the day we would call a Track 2, German-American working group on European conflict and deterrence. So I was involved in this for probably 20 years. Jim, let me let you introduce yourself before we go any farther. Good morning, everybody. Make sure everybody's here. Okay. My name's Jim Technalia. Let me just give you a little bit of background. First of all, I'm an Army veteran during the 60s. I'll tell you I've been yet about one of my Army training days. I was in a quartering party and we were doing what we had to do to set up command headquarters. And the fellow says, at 010-100, there's going to be a nuclear simulation. And what they did was they did these, they were basically napalm things. And they simulated what they said was a Davy Crockett, which was 500 tons worth of. And let me just tell you that it scared the hell out of everybody. And it shut down all the operations that we were doing. You know, in my day, every platoon had a Davy Crockett. It was the shoulder-fired individual weapon. And we had munitions from what are called ADMs, hand-carried things, all the way up to Davy Crocketts to artillery, and everybody had a nuclear weapon. And you could just tell when you were on the ground here, that can't be the way we're going to wage war. There are going to be too many people killed. This thing can't possibly work this way. Well, I spent a year in Vietnam, separated from the military, worked for the Army laboratory system and then eventually in DARPA. And I had eight years in DARPA, which is now no longer allowed, but it used to happen in those days. And I had every technical position you could have in DARPA, ending up with, ending up being the acting director. In that job, I set up the stealth office, which was the key, one of the key elements which we'll talk about in Air Land Battle, the technology part of it. I also ran the JSTARS initiators, an important part of what turned out to be Air Land Battle. And we did a thing called Assault Breaker, which was a demonstration program of extended range precision guided munitions, which also became part of Air Land Battle. And so my history with Air Land Battle was that, first of all, came up with the thought that we need to really think about a different way to do this. And the second thing was I was involved with the technology associated with Air Land Battle. I finished my career in DITRA and as a member of the Sandia staff. And I'll draw some messages. This is a fact. The biggest, if you will, organization that was not in favor of Air Land Battle was Sandia. And the presentation committees always thought it was good sport to have me come up and talk about Air Land Battle and what the technology could do. And that gets Sandia to come up and tell everybody why that was such a bad idea. So I kind of know it from both sides, I've been in the DOE labs, been in DOD. And I think, as Rich does, I think it's a significant activity, a study in the merger, in the union, the logical union of policy, doctrine, operations, and technology. And when those three things, policy, operations, and technology get in resonance in amplification, some really interesting thing happened. And the purpose of my talk will be to try to give you a sense of what that resonance turned out to be in Air Land Battle, where some of the words came from and who some of the players were. That's an extended introduction, but it's nice to be here. So I'll speak with view graphs because I don't know the story as well as Jim does, and Jim's going to speak without view graphs because he's got it all down pat and can do that. So I'll advance the slide. So I just want to set the stage with three or four points about the way the world developed there before 1970, before some of you were born. Wars at NATO and Warsaw Pact were in place. Europe was partitioned. The Iron Curtain was, as Winston Churchill had said, descended over Europe, across the middle of Europe. As a relic from World War II, not a relic, a continuation in some sense of the end of World War II, there were massive Warsaw Pact armored forces on the inter-German border, and that was the threat. There was an immediate local threat. NATO had been established and was struggling with how to deal with that threat. In about 1958, I may be off for a couple of years. By a couple of years, NATO issued and adopted the Harmel Report, which said in a sense that the most important thing for the alliance is to continue the economic growth and the path to prosperity that the Marshall Plan had initiated in reconstituting Europe, and that in order to do that, the NATO nations would be handicapped if they had to spend as much money on conventional forces as that might be required to counter the Warsaw Pact conventional forces. So they said NATO ought to rely on nuclear weapons. Partly in response to that, the U.S. had continued its forward deployment of conventional forces in Europe and had deployed what we often call tactical nuclear weapons, battlefield nuclear weapons in Europe, and nuclear weapons had come to be thought of as, and this was often said in those words, the glue that holds NATO together. But in fact, there was a lot of controversy about nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are controversial, and that wasn't entirely an apt simile because in some ways, nuclear weapons were as much a source of contention as a source of confidence in NATO, and that's part of the story. So the situation in about 1970 was that West Germany, if it had not been the fulcrum of the early days, had become the fulcrum of the Cold War. They were the front line. You remember the Germany was divided into the Federal Republic of German and the German Democratic Republic east of the Iron Curtain. The Soviets had achieved parity or near parity, effective parity in intercontinental weapons and in homeland deterrence. That issue was in some sense off the table, although it continued as an important one for many decades. The Russians were obsessed with Germany, had been for centuries probably in various ways, but their memories of World War II were recent and intense. And the Soviets adopted a strategy of threats and enticements, especially with regard to Germany, whose objective and the objective of that strategy was to undermine the cohesion of NATO. If they could do that, they'd win without having to fight. The threats were the military threats and the enticements to oversimplify it a lot were that they had something the West Germans wanted, which was East Germany, their cousins in East Germany. It had been a German political objective for a long time to reunify Germany. That wasn't going to happen unless the Soviets allowed it. So the Germans were of two minds, stick with NATO in order to protect themselves from the Soviets or make some kind of an arrangement with the Soviets in order to effect the reunification of Germany. NATO's nuclear weapons strategy was very difficult, however. It entailed at the time, in about, let's say, 1970, the massive use of NATO nuclear weapons on resturment territory if deterrence failed in order to deal with the many, the dozens of armored divisions coming across the border, it would require massive battlefield use of nuclear weapons to stop them. Because that was sort of the only level at which nuclear weapons might be used, there was a big gap where we lacked escalation control between that and the strategic level, and that meant that there was problematic coupling to the strategic level, which was important also for deterrence. In order to function as an alliance of democracies, consultation on nuclear matters was one of the fundamental principles of NATO, and that meant consultation on deployments in peacetime, consultation on how you would act in a crisis, and consultation on how you might use nuclear weapons in wartime. That kind of consultation and the fact that it had to be somewhat deliberate, it couldn't be a pre-delegated, pre-arranged tripwire sort of thing, it required, so the thinking went at least a few days, to assess what the nature of the attack would be, whether the conventional forces could hold out, and for how long, and whether and how to use nuclear weapons, and the nuclear weapon posture did not allow that. Another thing that caused concern about nuclear weapons in NATO during those years was the terrorist threat to nuclear weapons based in NATO nations. Because the nuclear weapons had to be ready to be used quickly, they were based in the field, close to where they might have to be used, and thus, and because there were many places where they recited, the weapons were vulnerable to terrorist attack. Remember that in those days, we think of terrorism as a new thing, but in the 70s and 80s, there was a lot of terrorism going on in western Europe, especially West Germany. In 1982, I think it was, the U.S. Air Force Europe headquarters at Ramstein Air Base was almost destroyed by a car bomb. General Dozier was kidnapped by terrorists. My good friend, the head of the U.S. Army, Europe, Fritz Kroesen, was severely injured in a car bomb attack, directed directly at him. There was some evidence at the time that the same kinds of terrorist groups had designs on nuclear weapons, U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Europe to expose their vulnerability and inflame the concern about the nuclear weapons on the part of the public. A partial response that developed during the 1970s to that difficult situation was to propose, and then to some small extent to deploy, the enhanced radiation battlefield nuclear weapons, plus improved conventional armor, anti-armor. And I'll explain this energy between those two in the next slide. This was a controversial proposal. The West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was a social democrat, the two parties were the social democrats and the Christian democrats on the left and on the right respectively, much of the public concern about the nuclear weapon posture was centered in the social democrats of which Schmidt was one. But he, in a courageous move, and you'll see another courageous move in a minute, accepted the proposed deployment of ER weapons, which was then a year or two later canceled by Jimmy Carter, largely because of concern that, well, who knows. But as I remember it, that the ability to use nuclear weapons on a battlefield might make them more usable. But as we understood after the Cold War was over, the Soviets understood that even though we did not deploy many, that they were latent and could be perhaps deployed quickly, and so they played a role even beyond the size of the actual deployments. NATO adopted a posture of what was called flexible response, which was an ambiguity that was in part intended to keep the Soviets from understanding how we would actually fight if deterrence failed, but also partly to help NATO avoid having to endorse a particular approach which might be controversial. There were some initiated by Johnny Foster and Jack Howard and President Kennedy and others. In the late 60s and early 70s, there were some improvements in the security of forward-based nuclear weapons, which helped with the concern about their vulnerability to terrorist attacks. But as we'll see in a minute, didn't go far enough for a couple of reasons. I'll digress a little bit on enhanced radiation weapons. To the extent that they're remembered at all, people remember them as being weapons that would kill people and not destroy buildings. That was not the way they were conceived in our understanding of how they would play on the anti-armor battlefield. On the left is a diagram of radius of effects with conventional nuclear weapons and less capable non-nuclear anti-armor. If the lethal area against personnel and tanks is the red circle, then the standoff distance that conventional NATO anti-armor forces had to stay away is the large circle on the left. The capability of conventional NATO anti-armor in the late 60s was not great. So the shaded area was the area that could be neither handled by nuclear weapons or by conventional anti-armor. What longer-ranged conventional anti-armor capability and the reduced sure safe distance accomplished was to allow Warsaw Pact armored forces, so went the story, to be more effectively engaged with the use of many fewer nuclear weapons. In the left-hand side, one might have to cover the gray area with nuclear weapons. On the right-hand side, you wouldn't have to do that. And so the simulations that were carried out by the Army and Livermore and Sandia showed that perhaps one-tenth the number of nuclear weapons were going to be required to deal effectively, at least for a few days, with the Warsaw Pact armor. In response to that, in part, I'm simplifying this story. It's a complicated story, and I'm conceptualizing it to some extent to get the basics across, but recognize that it's undoubtedly more complicated than we can do justice to in a few slides in half an hour. In part, in response to that, the Soviets adopted a strategy of echelonment, and instead of having all their forces forward with a massive 100-mile-long attack on the west to move their forces back where they would be less vulnerable to a NATO-initiated attack, perhaps a preemptive attack, which was a concern on the Soviets' part. And also, they could see where the initial forward echelon might find a weakness and then throw all of the forces that were stationed further behind the border into that place. So that was called echelonment. And it, in fact, was a rather effective counter to NATO's obsession with dealing with this massive forward-based conventional force. Another part of this was the Soviet deployment of short-range tactical ballistic missiles, dozens of miles and hundreds of miles range, which together with their special forces posed a special threat to the NATO nuclear weapons that were in these storage sites. And that threat posed a political problem for NATO, that in order to keep the weapons in the storage sites from being destroyed by Spetsnaz or short-range tactical missiles in the first hours of the war, Spetsnaz is so, I've forgotten exactly what it stands for, it's Soviet special forces. The NATO would have to make a difficult decision to take those weapons out of their storage sites and disperse them in the countryside immediately. That was thought to be a difficult decision because it might be provocative. If the war hadn't gone nuclear by that time, it might indicate that NATO was intending to take it nuclear immediately. And that was thought not to be a prudent position. So those threats to the storage sites were an important part of undercutting NATO's reliance on nuclear weapons. The deployment of SS-20s, the longer-range weapons that could reach Western Europe from the Soviet Union, from deep in the Soviet Union, is a story that is part of this, but I'll mention a little bit more later. All of this was accompanied by a propaganda program in Western Europe to reinforce the natural public concerns about being defended by nuclear weapons and especially during the 70s against enhanced radiation weapons and perhaps via some cutouts, some Soviet support to these terrorist groups that were thought to pose a threat and perhaps did pose a threat to the storage sites. So that was the Soviet move. NATO's response, here we come to the air land battle, which was developed in the mid-70s to the mid-80s, implemented and developed in the 70s and implemented in the early and mid-80s. And it consisted mainly of follow-on forces attack, which consisted of two parts, to be able to see deep into the echelon, the deeper deployments, the echelon deployments of Warsaw Pact forces. And you did that not only did you see, but you understood on the basis, you understood what you saw. The objective, which was achieved, in fact, we think, in fact, it was achieved, was to discern the operational patterns of life so that we could see both during peacetime in Soviet or Warsaw Pact exercises, but also in war, how the Soviets were, in fact, moving those rear-based forces forward to exploit any early breakthroughs that they'd had, and then to be able to strike those forces before they could move forward or as they were moving forward, especially with precision conventional weapons, but also with reduced collateral damage, nuclear weapons. So reduced collateral damage has entered twice now, first in the enhanced radiation weapons in the anti-armor attack, and then here for striking against the Warsaw Pact forces moving forward in Eastern Europe. There was a political need to do that as well because now this war was going to be fought on Eastern European territory, on, in particular, East Germany, and it was unacceptable in Germany to think of threatening their cousins east of the border, so there were strict limits placed on the kind of collateral damage that nuclear weapons would be allowed to do in Eastern Europe. We began to deploy, or at least talk about deploying, defenses against tactical ballistic missiles. In the late 70s, I chaired a Defense Science Board task force that recommended and resulted in a patriot being given an anti-ballistic missile capability and the winning argument in the assessment in the Pentagon was that that was needed for this purpose, for this particular purpose, to allow the weapons to stay in garrison enough longer so that NATO could consult about the difficult decision of taking them out of garrison and moving them into the field where they'd be presumably more survivable. We also did a lot to improve nuclear rep, a lot more to improve nuclear weapon safety and security, to some extent with the help of President Reagan, who intervened on a couple of crucial occasions with his heads of state colleagues in Europe to convince them to spend the money. There was an interesting little twist on that and for some reason a number of NATO nations were unwilling to spend the money to harden the storage sites against terrorist attack and it occurred to Fred Selick, whom some of you know that it would be, he was an Air Force Colonel in OSD policy at the time, that it might be useful to take NATO defense ministers to a storage site. And there is for many people an aura about nuclear weapons that has an impact on how they think. So we took the NATO ministers to a storage site in I think Germany, maybe it was Holland, and they actually put their hands on NATO nuclear weapons and that solved the problem. They endorsed almost a day or two later spending the money to harden the storage sites. So little twist like that can make a difference too and that's another aspect of the political dimension of this problem. So here were the problems solved by the Irland battle. It thwarted the Warsaw Pact echelonment strategy. It considerably improved the politics of nuclear weapons in NATO, less perspective use of and damage from nuclear weapons, less used in West Germany, more time for consultation, improved escalation control because there were other options to better safety and security. And after the war was over, there were a lot of interviews with former Warsaw Pact military people at a dinner and bond between a few of us and a few of them. One of them said to me, you know, we saw that we were out of options. When you deployed Irland battle, we weren't, we didn't see a move that we could make next. That would work both the military problem and undermine your, the political support for your deterrent strategy as we had hoped to do. They felt they were out of options. The INF story is in some ways connected with this. It was going on at the same time. You could think of it as a part of echelonment and certainly an aspect of preventing a problem of coupling escalation to the strategic level because the SS20s could reach Western Europe from the sanctuary of the Soviet homeland, which posed an escalation problem for us. Helmut Schmidt, again, in a courageous and somewhat counter political decision on his part, invited the deployment of long range. It wasn't only he, but it was the NATO nations in general of longer range weapons systems in Germany and in NATO. Our version of the INF systems, the ground launch cruise missile perching to and improved long range air. And then to work the political concern, remember the nuclear freeze movement was going on at the time. We instituted this two track approach of continuing deployments plus negotiations and negotiations eventually led to the INF treaty. I want to spend a second on how Air Land Battle was developed because to some extent it was done behind the scenes until the ideas were ready and it took years for the ideas to mature and the technology base to be developed. Jim mentioned some of it, the stealth technology for penetrating air defenses and the surveillance technology from aircraft and other ways of looking deep into the Warsaw Pact territory. Joe Braddock and General Don Starrie connived, starting in about 1970 when Starrie was probably a Lieutenant Colonel to develop a cadre of co-conspirators who would develop a strategy for dealing with NATO's deterrence problem in an effective way. They enlisted people, they enlisted perhaps a dozen or 20 people. Braddock made a good bet on Don Starrie because Starrie went on to get four stars and run the Army's training and doctrine command at just the right time in the late 70s and early 80s so that the Army by that time with the ideas developed over 10 years by Braddock, Starrie, Fred Wigner, Don Cotter, Albert Wolstetter, others. Jim and me a little bit. Jim, I think more than I, although I did do some of the work at Livermore on how reduced collateral damage nuclear weapons would play in the scheme. Developed the ideas that I sketched out in the previous charts. DNA, the predecessor to DTRA, played an immensely important role. It was almost a covert role. In those days, DNA was led by a three star general or admiral and they rotated every two or three years. The technical director was a man named Pete Haas, a Swiss American, naturalized American citizen who was recruited by Braddock and Starrie to fund out of DNA funding, but not within DNA's charter. I mean, DNA wasn't chartered to solve the Cold War deterrence problem. DNA was chartered to do some more particular narrower things. But Pete Haas became part of this, of the Braddock, Starrie, Cabal and funded companies to develop the thinking about how this would all work, to do the systems analysis and military analysis studies. That was easier for DNA to do in those days because the relationships with DNA's contractors, SAIC, Braddock's company, Braddock, Dunn and McDonald, others was much more collegial. There was a group called SAGE, the advisory committee to the director of DNA, which consisted of the CEOs of DNA contractors. They would get together every few months and decide what DNA's program, I'm oversimplifying this some, decide what DNA's program to effect the air land battle and other important things. Advise the DNA director, here's how you should spend your money with us. And, you know, I mean, he wasn't a pushover, he brought some independent thinking to it, but it largely happened. So it was much more collegial and much more effective. I've mentioned Don Starrie's role in Treydock and being the commander of Treydock at just the right time. Jim, I hadn't remembered that Sandia opposed air land battle, but Sandia did do a lot of work on two kinds of technology. One, the technologies for improving the safety and security of the weapons forward deployed was pursued by over decades by a group of people at Sandia that knew not only the warhead technology, but everything about unauthorized launch, securing weapons from attack, ensuring that there weren't accidents. Sandia had spent, perhaps because these guys were so insistent, had spent a lot of discretionary money, which the labs have almost none of now, to go down the false leads until they found out where the fruitful paths were and until they developed all of the technologies that were needed to vastly improve the security of nuclear weapons forward-based in these vulnerable places. Much of the work on precision strike and surveillance technology with Jim's leadership in DARPA was done within DOD, but Sandia was also helping to build the technology base for doing that as well. So they played that role also. Most of the development of the warheads, the nuclear package for the reduced collateral damage weapons was done at Livermore, Lawrence Livermore, and well, and Sandia Livermore. And we also developed the warfare simulation codes in order to understand how collateral damage played on the combined arms battlefield that then became the Army's principal warfare simulation simulations and continued that way for at least 20 years. The crucial step was convincing the Supreme Allied Commanders in Europe that air land battle was the way to go. It was an uphill fight for a while, and without General Starrie at TRADOC, it would have probably failed. General Bernie Rogers was the Sankir in the early 80s, and Bernie, when I paid my courtesy call on Bernie Rogers when he first went to shape, he closed the door, turned around, pounded his fist on his desk, and said, no goddamn civilian weenie in OSD is gonna tell me how to use my nuclear weapons. And we got along famously after that, and of course we did tell him how to use his nuclear weapons, but he added a lot to the idea, and was the, really was the, was the, Bernie died a few years ago, I can tell that story now. He really was the, made the crucial decisions that allowed it to be implemented in the early 80s. There was another thing that went on after the Sankirs became convinced that really solidified air land battle, and our confidence in our ability to do it, and that was a series of exercises called shockwave, which were used in NATO war fighting exercises that were used in a clever way to elicit Warsaw Pact exercises in response that we could then validate our view of their operational patterns by watching. It was a very, very clever way of using exercises. So over the course of two or three cycles, we'd use, we'd structure the NATO exercises to explore this particular thing that we weren't quite sure we understood about how the Soviets would operate. And then they, nicely, would respond by doing an exercise of their own that would reveal a little more so that we could understand it better how they were operating. I hope we're doing that in other parts of the world today. So that's how our air land battle was developed. I'm not sure we could do it again today. There's not the discretionary money. There is not the relationship between analytic thinkers and the people who fund them. Today, I believe that would allow that to be done. But it was very effective. In the spirit of recapping this intersection between strategy and policy and technology and politics, here are just seven, eight things. This vastly improved surveillance that Jim had a lot to do with understanding their operational patterns, the precision deep strike weapons. You can read them all. I think I've mentioned them all. But those really did unlock the new strategy that won. It was curious to me at the time and has become more curious since then how that all worked politically. The political context was anti-nuclear sentiment and freeze movements. And there were many cycles of this strange phenomenon where these technical developments and new operational plans enabled by them would be discussed with politicians and the politicians, in particular, rest German parliamentarians, would discuss them with other opinion shapers in rest Germany and in NATO. And the ideas would be in a low-fidelity transmission discussed and exposed to public scrutiny. Publics would respond. They would go back up that chain and be reflected to some extent in a readjustment of the boundaries around which NATO's strategy would be politically acceptable to publics and then to some extent implemented. That was augmented by the high-level group and a group that I chaired, which was involved more with the details of the operations and in particular, the problem of taking weapons out of garrison and getting nuclear release early in the war. But it always seemed to me and still seems to me that the political utility of those developments was greater than what an analyst would say the actual military utility was. There's a PhD thesis in political science there somewhere for somebody that I think would be useful to understand because it really was a dynamic that was displayed over and over again and it was effective. I think maybe my, that's my last chart. I have a few charts later that speculate on how we might go, how we might take lessons from what I've just tried to describe and what Jim will describe and carry them into the future, but let me turn the floor over to you. Thank you, Rich. Interesting. We're gonna talk about a lot of common people. I can tell you that. First of all, as Rich mentioned, I have no view graphs and so I would prefer if I make some statements which you don't understand or question that you just interrupt me and we have a discussion. I broke my talk up into two pieces and the first piece deals with the subject of air land battle Europe up through the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, 91 through 91 and what Royal Air Land Battle had in that demise of the Soviet Union and I'm gonna talk about the history of that, the policy of that and then talk about how the technology contributed to that. So that's the first piece. Air land battle up through the end of the Soviet Union and then I have some observations that I'd like to give you about how in general, the themes that went along in air land battle applied to the situation that we have today and Rich will be nice to know, you'll be nice to know that I'm consistent with everything that Rich says. We approach it from a very different point of view because while I've been in the military, I'm basically a technologist. Let me start with the history. I go back to Dwight Eisenhower and it's one of these kind of idiosyncrasies of history. Back at the end of World War II in the late 40s, early 50s, Eisenhower was secure and he was asked the question as we ended World War II, what is it gonna take to defend Europe? And he laid out what he thought it would take to defend Europe. The number turned out to be something like 92 divisions it was gonna take to conventionally defend Europe and he sent his paper to his superiors. Well, one of the people who got his papers was Dwight Eisenhower, the president. And as sometimes happens in history, you end up writing letters to yourself about what should be done. I remember when I was in, there was a thing called the track and I ran the R&D operation of the track and I wrote a letter to the director that he didn't have his R&D program set up properly. The director of DTRA. The director of DTRA. And so when I became the director of DTRA that letter was prominently placed in the middle of my desk to make sure that I had to do something about it. And so these idiosyncrasies of writing letters to yourself happens. Unlike what happened in DTRA, Eisenhower didn't take his own advice. And the thing that he was concerned about was the economic development of the Western world after World War II. So he created the so-called tripwire strategy which was nominally 20 divisions backed up by a nuclear weapon for you and me. And so we had nuclear weapons at all echelons of the land force. The 20 divisions were to assure that the Soviets were serious about an attack but the defeat of that attack was going to be done by the nuclear weapons in a station in Europe. And that situation was stable probably up to the mid-60s. At which point there were a couple of developments that occurred. The first one was obviously that the Soviet Union began developing their own nuclear weapons. At the time that he created the tripwire strategy we had a pretty prominent lead in nuclear weapons. But there were two developments that happened in the 60s which questioned this mutual assured destruction activity in Europe. The first one is, some of you may remember the two heavy strategic thinkers in our world. Tom Shilling who, I guess he's still alive now, right? He's still teaching at the University of Maryland. He must be in his 90s now. I think something like that. Has a Nobel Prize in Game Theory related to economics. And he was a firm believer in the fact that nobody should ever try to win a nuclear war. That stability was the right thing. So he had problems with this idea that we were going to do something different in Europe. His protagonist at the time, passed away in the late 60s was a fellow by the name of Herman Kahn. And Herman Kahn had the view. By the way, if you remember the movie Doctor Strange Love, Doctor Strange Love was a composite of Henry Kissinger and Herman Kahn. What he actually said was Herman Kahn. And Herman Kahn had this view that you needed to be prepared to win at all levels of warfare. That stability, which was Shilling's word, was not enough to do the job. And he was particularly concerned about, and I think this is important in this context, about whether the United States actually could be credible in an extended deterrence environment. If the real outcome from the United States' point of view was it was gonna get into a nuclear war that it could have avoided if it didn't extend deterrence to the European continent. So Herman Kahn's view was extended deterrence doesn't work unless you can win. That's a little bit oversimplified, but that's where he was. So that was one vector. The United States was having trouble with this idea that it would guarantee a nuclear release in Europe. The other vector of difficulty came about from primarily the Germans. And I remember I had a mutual friend of a fellow who I'm sure some of you know, Manfred Werner. Manfred Werner at the time was in a thing called the Planning Staff, Planning Stab. That was the, I guess, the policy shop of the German M.O.D. And I was asked to give him a briefing on what we were working on that I'll outline for you in the near future on approaches to conventional defense in Europe, that's what we called it. And he listened to it, asked no technical questions at all. And by the time we were done, his response was completely different than what I had expected. And he said, you know, in the Alliance, the Alliance reserves for the individual nations the right to disallow the use of nuclear weapons on their terrain. And he said, the United States should not assume that we're going to allow for release of nuclear weapons on Germany. He said, we're used to the Huns invading us for centuries. We live through the Romans invading us back around the time of Christ. We're still here. And we're not sure we're prepared to turn Germany into a vast nuclear wasteland in the process of trying to defend it. So we need a new strategy. And the kind of thing that you're preparing for is the kind of thing that might be the approach to doing that. And so we support the kinds of things that you're talking about. So we had a good rapport with the German government and German planning staff. And that didn't always translate into NATO, but certainly the member states were really concerned about this all out nuclear war in the 60s in the 60s and 70s. So the combination of Hermann Kahn's policy issues. Hermann Kahn, by the way, was an advocate just to give you the way he thought of missile defense because he thought that causing the other side problems and trying to win was the real objective. And he was in favor of conventional defenses. He passed away in 69, so he didn't know any of the specific things we were talking about. But he was in favor of increasing conventional defense in Europe and extended deterrence. The situation was bad enough that Senator Sam Nunn wrote a monogram for the Senate, published in the Senate's written in the 70s, called Will the Alliance Survive? And it really questioned the ability of the alliance to pull together in a war in Europe to be able to beat the Soviet Union in an alliance fight. And that's where the situation stood. Probably in the mid-70s, as Rich mentioned, and I think this is something which really needs to be thought through, if you decide you're gonna make a fundamental change in policy, it's a decade's long proposition. It is not something that happens. It takes a long time to see the problem you're trying to solve. It takes a long time to develop the solutions, and it takes a long time for acceptance of those solutions within the alliance that you're dealing with. And I have some more things to say about that as we proceed through it. Well, we're now at late 1970s. A person who I've worked for over the years was the undersecretary for, I don't know what they called it then, for science, technology, and acquisition, Bill Perry. And Bill Perry was a big advocate of the work that Dittra was doing with regard to the alliance. And I'm gonna use his summary of the technology and give you a sense of how it operated. Perry boiled it all down to three very simple technological advances that were the root of Air Land Battle. And I'll try to give you the interlinking of those and how they actually determined Air Land Battle. He called it stealth precision and speed. Stealth precision and speed. Stealth and precision are kind of self-explanatory, although I'll go through it in more detail. Speed really had to do with being able to disrupt, be faster and be able to disrupt, get inside the jargon in the military, this is a dawn story, is to get inside the operational timelines of your enemy. And that's what speed really refers to. If you actually talk to Don about any of these things, he felt that the speed issue was the biggest issue of Air Land Battle because we were now no longer, the Soviets were no longer able to set the op tempo of the battle. And so if you took the three, stealth precision and speed, Starry's view with speed was the essential thing. Now let me spend a few minutes with each one of those topics. Stealth. Begin with some fundamentals. At the time in the 60s, the exercise of power, military power by the Soviet Union was really in their tank formations and in their land battle formations. So there was no question about the target. And as Rich mentioned, Shockwave and other kinds of things, their operational concepts were not a surprise to us. We watched them exercise fairly continually. I'll go back through that at the end of this. Shockwave told us a lot about what they did. And so the topic, the issue that you had to address with the Soviets was how do you handle their tank battles, their tank formations? That was very simple. Well, the Air Force was not a player. The Air Force's view was I'm gonna win the air battle and then I'll worry about the ground battle. Unfortunately, the ground battle was over before they could win the air battle. So when you looked at the timelines, that process meant that it was the Air Force taking care of the air and the Army taking care of the ground force. And at the time, there was also one other issue which was kind of wrote, I'll relay a story to you about this. The belief was that only a tank could kill another tank. There was just no way that other bombs dropped from airplanes couldn't hit them well enough. The infantry had some sapper charges and the like but they were too vulnerable. So the only thing that could kill a tank was another tank. I remember giving a talk, I mentioned Manfred Werner. I briefed the German military and I had two subjects that I was talking about. They were related and it was night anti-tank. And some of you may remember the tow missile sites and all these kinds of devices. So we gave him this speech and he didn't say a thing, he got done and he told his translator, tell him this. He says, first of all, no honorable gentleman fights at night and if you remember the armies, I mean at six o'clock you got into your mess dress, you went to the officers club and the war was over until six o'clock the next day. And I'm not joking. I mean, and that was the case in Vietnam. And they absolutely, the tankers, the tankers just refused to accept the fact that they might not be the primary force on the battlefield. And so they were convinced, the only way you could kill a tank was another tank. Well DARPA comes along with the army and shows two things. The first thing is not only can we kill a tank but we can kill them by the handfuls. And we can do that at hundreds of kilometers. That's where the term deep strike came from. That's where the term follow on forces came from. And a part of that activity was the fact that if you had a stealth airplane, remember the F-117 was one of the few airplanes. A-10 is another example. One of the few airplanes that didn't have an air to air mission. It was a ground attack aircraft. And the purpose of the F-117 was it could fly through the air defenses of the Soviet Union and attack ground targets deep into their air defense space. So the ability of precision guided munitions to hit tanks, the ability to bring the precision guided munitions to arm every individual with an anti-tank weapon and furthermore to attack them deep into their second echelon, was the terminology, as Rich mentioned to you, was the key to how you would neutralize the power of the Soviet tank armors. And so that's where Air Land Battle came from. This was the first time that the Air Force and the Army, Don was Starrie, was the Air Force rep, John Wickham was the chief of staff at that time, got together with Charlie Gabriel and they put together the doctrine of Air Land Battle in which the Air Force would immediately be in play to help the Army with the Land Battle and that it could do it deep into the enemy airspace. I'll come back to that subject. So words like follow on forces attack, Air Land Battle, deep attack, all those descriptors were based on this ability to attack the Soviet Union formations before they could be presented to this thin defense at the so-called FIBA. Don't even use the term anymore because it's no longer relevant. Forward line of troops at the FIBA, forward edge of the battle area, that they could be attacked before they could even get there. Now let me talk about, so that's where PGMs played, that's where stealth played. Now let me, let's talk a little bit about speed. At the time the Soviet Union felt that they could disguise their operations and they tried this so that this thin force couldn't be marshaled against their point of attack. And so they decided that what they would do was exercise deep and they thought they could even, in some cases, they believed they could attack certain geographic positions and do that underneath the nuclear umbrella, present the United States with a fate of complete, strike quickly, Spetsnaz was part of that, take over positions, and they could fight underneath the nuclear umbrella of the United States. And so this issue of operational timeline became very important because the speed at which, the speed at which a tank army moved was very important. If you allowed them to be able to take over their military objective before you could put your defenses together, you lose. What Starry understood was if I can, if I can know what their direction of attack is, and I did that through deep sensors, JSTARS was an example of that, and I knew the directions that they were going to attack. I could blunt their timelines before they could ever get to the target that they were after. That's what the story about inside operational timelines was associated with. So the sensor business was the fundamental behind how do I understand what the Soviet attack strategy is, how do I understand what their timelines are, and how do I blunt those timelines? That's what speed was all about. And as I mentioned to you, Don Starry believed that it was the speed issue, the ability to understand their operational objectives was the real thing of air-land battle. So let me, let me, let me now summarize with regard to this history, I'll leave it at this. Some of you may remember Marshall Gorkoff. He was, he at the time, this is now the 80s, was the Marshall in charge of the military part of the Warsaw Pact. He was not a politician, he was the, he was a German, a Russian general. He became the chaired chief of defense, the chief of staff of the Russian military and Soviet Union military. When Rich mentioned shockwave, the thing that we got, one of the things we got out of shockwave was we watched the Germans exercise against the concepts that I talked to you about. So they developed this thing called an RSG. The translation of it was Reconnaissance Strike Complex. And it was JSTARS and Stealth and Precision Guidance integrated into a system which they put together as an RSG. And we watched them and so they in effect did a Red Force which was us against their forces. And we knew or Gorkoff's conclusions to those exercises was they could not beat the RSGs. They could not win the timeline battle in the RSGs. And so by 1980s, we had done some negations of some of their strategies. We'd taken out their air defense systems. We now have an S-300, S-500 trying to respond to stealth. We took out all their air defense systems both inside Europe and inside former Soviet Union. We negated without having to go nuclear their tank armies, the seat of their power. And we could do that at long ranges and not all that risk to the number of people that we had. And our Gorkoff knew that. And that was one of the contributors to the fact that the former Soviet Union saw that it was going to have trouble being able to defeat the West. And so here's Eisenhower, minimal defense, maximum economic development, being able to show that technology when married with proper operational tactics, deep strike, phoba, could in fact defeat somebody who invested more money into basic military operations. Now, as a parting shot on the history, one of the things that I always get a big kick out of, I'm sure all of you remember Reagan's Star Wars speech. Some of us have a mutual friend by the name Vic Rees, who was on the president's advisory staff during that time and wrote some things. And if you read President Reagan's speech, some of the concepts that Rich and I talked about are in that speech. Now, you probably, when you listen to this, it's a little bit complicated as to how you actually use conventional forces, back them up with nuclear forces. So when you read the speech, some of the, you don't get a lot of detail in it. And everybody understood missile defense, so it became the Star Wars speech. But there were a lot of these things that were in his Star Wars speech. And so I would just suggest to you that one of the properties of a technology married with policy is it really does need high-level backing in order to be able to make it work all the way up to the president, certainly through, as Rich mentioned, the senior military people. And if you don't have that, technology becomes just another thing in your quiver. It doesn't have the power that it could have. So my summary with regard to the history, and I hope this was clear, my summary with regard to the history, is the marriage of a policy problem, a good strategy and technology, when they're put together in resonance, can create very synergistic and quote, unquote, revolutionary kinds of effects with regard to military operations. That's the theme that I would like to leave with you. I think I'll stop there with the history. And how would you like to proceed? We might even take a break, for sure. Yeah, sure. You know that? And some of the pony folks may not internalize this. You're used to thinking of an American military that is the unquestioned dominant military in the world. But don't think that way. In 1978, when I went to the war college, every single army officer, these are guys coming off battalion command, was convinced they would lose in Europe. I so seldom need this. Every single army officer was convinced that they would lose in Europe. We were madly trying to beef up conventional forces by inducing our allies to spend more money, a process that goes on to this day with roughly the same amount of success. But the point is, this is not just a story of an interesting thing. This is a story of a revolution that changed the military situation as seen by the guys who would have died from will lose to will win. And if you want to see some of the power of it, what is it that the Navy and the Air Force are calling this well-designed concept for operation? They're calling it Air Sea Battle. That is not a coincidence. The second thing that you ought to think about, because it's another thing that is a different world, you just notice you have really two wonderful presentations. And let me suggest some words you didn't hear. Joint staff, JCS. Because prior to Goldwater and Nichols, all of this was done at the service level. It was a big deal that the Air Force and the Army got together on this. And it depended on individuals. The Navy was busy off planning for an entirely different war I was helping. It would have been an interesting war. It had nothing to do with that war. And so you need to think, as you try and draw these lessons forward, first, that this really was a kind and we thought we would lose. I mean, nuclear weapons weren't there because we liked the idea of nuking. They were there because we thought that the Soviets would be at the damn channel in two weeks if we didn't use them. So I want you to have the sense of how important this idea was. And then also, as you try and map this forward, you do have to take account, Rich mentioned, one different aspect of the relationship between industry and government has changed. I would argue the amount of thinking industry does has changed pretty substantially. But also, the organizational structure of government is very different because of the Gold War and Nichols. Jim mentioned, let me tell you what I'd like to do for the next hour is devoted, we'll take a break in a minute, but devoted to thinking about what this might mean for the future. And I've got five slides, and as Jim often does, he will say better without slides than I say with the slides, but we're going to start with my slides. But I want to go back and say a word about Ronald Reagan. I came into the Pentagon as a nuclear weapon guy. And I thought there was a lot of that nuclear weapons were a crucially important thing, and they were. Ronald Reagan had a better understanding of how the anti-nuclear sentiments in America and Europe played in the politics of deterrence and assurance than anybody else because he didn't like nuclear weapons at all. I think there's a lesson there, too, for us nuclear guys. You've got to think about how you've got to honor the sentiments of people who don't like them. Let's take a five-minute break. That'll mean 10 minutes, but let's try for five minutes and then come back and see what this means for the future. Well, that part was easy. And so I will screw up my courage and walk you through five slides quickly. They deserve five hours, but I'll try to do it in a minute or slide to just stimulate some thinking on your part about what all this means for the future. So let me see if this thing still works. Well, some lessons. First point is obvious. A thing I learned late in life was that the real problem that NATO was facing was losing politically, even if we didn't lose a war, to in effect end up in a political situation as if we had lost a war, as if extended deterrence had failed, but it hadn't. And alliance cohesion is what it's really all about. Somebody said it better than I will say it, but that given a particular military posture, your adversary will take an on-side conservative position and your allies will take an on-side conservative position, which means that he will be deterred if he thinks you're only 10% as good as you appear to be, and your allies will not be assured unless they're convinced that you're 90% as good, or maybe 110% as good as you might be. I think it's really important to plan several moves ahead. I think that the story that Jim and I just told involved people anticipating about a move is going to have ahead, but I think the extended deterrence problems in the future, in particular, the one I want to focus on in a minute, China, is going to take longer, and there are going to be more moves and the moves are going to have more dimensions, and so we're going to have to think ahead rather than be responsive, in part because of some other side that I have, I don't think we're going to have either military dominance or economic dominance as we had during the Cold War. Forward deployments are really important. Couldn't have done without them. Burden sharing, which took a kind of a financial, I mean, it had to do with the allies paying their fair share of a financial burden, but the reason it was important for them to pay their fair share was political. That America would feel, that the American public would feel that they were in it too, and the allies then could count on us more if they felt that our public was supportive because they were paying their share. It's hard for an old nuclear weapon guy to say, minimizing the role of nuclear weapons as much as possible, but I think that's really important because, as Ronald Reagan understood. And a thing we didn't mention much, but was important is that the allies have to be involved in the details of the military planning. Now they tried to be more involved than we ever wanted them to be, or ever let them be, but that was in some ways the demonstration of cohesion, that we're all in it together, was their desire to, and our willingness to, let them see quite a ways into the planning, especially with regard to nuclear weapons. All right, now I've got four slides. The first two are on similarities between extended deterrence and the Cold War, and I am picking Asia. We may need to extend deterrence in some other places, and when I say Asia, I really have China in mind. So I think a political move counter move model is gonna be relevant. Strength of economies will make all the difference. That's what won the 20th century for the US, but we may not be able to rely on it in the 21st century. The higher the political and economic stakes, the higher the geopolitical stakes, the more relevant nuclear weapons are gonna be, and when they are relevant, the story that Jim and I have told will be the way by which their relevance will be expressed and translated politically, on the details of how the strategy, how the fighting strategy might be implemented. Next slide, extended deterrence insurance will revolve around internal politics. Publics will be ambivalent about being defended by nuclear weapons, which will be exploited by adversaries. Important to involve them in the details, and both forward deployment in peacetime, but also crisis and wartime moving forward will be very, very difficult. First it'll be too soon, and then it'll be too late. It will be perceived to be too soon, and then it will be too late. To me, a concern, I almost hesitate to say this because I don't think I want the idea to become part of the conversation, but to me the most important reason for keeping DCA in Europe is to maintain the principle that the United States can deploy nuclear weapons outside its own borders. We are the only country on the planet, as far as we know, that deploys nuclear weapons outside our own borders, and I think that is a very important principle to sustain. It's more important perhaps in Asia than at least in the near term it is in Europe, but the reason for sustaining it in Europe is so that we can sustain it as a principle. The next two slides are on differences, and it occurred to me last night that the most important difference, really, is that in 1980, we were only 35 years away from America having sacrificed half a million soldiers and one GDP's worth of national debt in World War II. And by 2020, we're gonna be 80 years away from that, and it will be ancient history, not part of people's personal experience. And that was really the commitment, the evidence that America was committed to Europe or committed to some other part of the world, is that we had spent half a million lives and one GDP, and it's gonna be a long time. I hope we don't have to give that evidence again before we have to deter again, but I think that will make all the difference in the world. There's been a lot of talk about the Syria thing about American credibility. A lot of it is because that time of American sacrifice is receding into the historical past. China's not the Soviet Union. Andy Marshall sponsored some work years ago, maybe still is, interviews with Chinese general, Mike Pillsbury wrote a book called Conversations with Chinese Generals, and one of them said, you guys had it easy, you Americans had it easy with the Soviets because they were trying to emulate you. We are not going to try to emulate you, so we'll be doing things in plain sight and you won't understand what they are. That worries me a lot. So China's not the Soviet Union, Japan is not the FRG for a lot of reasons that you could say. The Cold War was kind of a central thing. There may be other places as charged in the world as where we may want to deter in Asia. Pacific's wider than the Atlantic, literally and figuratively, you know what I mean. In some ways, the Cold War was driven by ideology. The ideology may not drive it as much in the future and therefore the stakes will seem or be lower and when the stakes are lower, nuclear weapons seem less relevant and I don't know exactly how to play that. I mean, there's a self-equilibrating thing going on there that we need to think through. We may not be economically dominant. An obvious difference between what Jim and I said in the future is maneuver warfare on land is not gonna be the military paradigm. Air-sea battle is, and you know, there isn't a long history of large scale. By large scale, I mean, you know, the Battle of Stalingrad. Large scale land battles. There is not that history of large scale air-sea battles unless you think of the Pacific, the World War II and the Pacific as being one of them and maybe that's not a bad analog but it's obviously not very close. Our partners in Asia won't be linked the way the NATO nations were linked because political cultures are much more heterogeneous in Asia. WMD terrorism was almost not, I mean, there was a concern about nuclear US nuclear weapons being stolen but I think it could play a bigger role in the future than it did during the Cold War. And many other things are more salient compared, you know, cyber warfare, cyber attacks can become weapons of mass destruction. Space warfare is crucial. So there are other large pieces of military consideration that are gonna be on the table in the future. So that's, I'm very conscious that this is a very sparse and inadequate list of ways in which we might think about the implications of what we said about the past for the future. But there it is. What do you all think? Jim, what do you think? I mean, what lesson should we take into the future? Well, I'll give you some ideas. The first thing is what's the same and the second thing is what's different. All right. And let me, let me spend five minutes or so so we have some time for discussion on what's the same and what are different. First of all, let me read two quotes to you. I have a friend by the name of Fred Wickner. Rich mentioned him and I spent some time with him and he's big in this kind of thing, but he gave me some interesting quotes. See if you can figure out who said this and when. Be careful above all things, not to let go of atomic weapons until you are sure and more than sure that other means of preserving the peace are in your hands. Conrad Abner. Winston Churchill said it. Winston Churchill said it in 1953, something like that. And it was quoted by Margaret Thatcher in her address to the Congress in 95, something like 85, excuse me. Another quotation, this is harder to guess, but I think it's also important. So let me not play the guessing game, but Paul Knitsa, 1995. It's important that we understand both the effectiveness and the limitations of strategic and conventional weapons. All right. And if any of you are reading Jim Acton's book from the Carnegie Foundation on Precision Global Strike, what is it, isn't that the name of the PGS? Yeah, good, see. Prompt Global Strike, excuse me, that's what I was looking for. Keep, keep. There he is over there, by the way. I mean, you can take whatever credit for it. I didn't see him. I want you, Jim. Good. Keep that thought in mind, because I think that book tried to get at those kinds of issues and it's an important thing. So what's the same? I don't see, and I don't know whether this is good or bad, I don't see as rich didn't see a replacement for flexible response and extended deterrence. I don't see an alternative strategy. And these two quotes point out the trades that one has to do to be able to preserve those two theory. So right now, the policy position seems to be the same that we had in the Cold War. I'm not sure I consider that to be a positive. And I do that because I think a comment that Linton made. Let me just point out a fact. Air Land Battle, FOFA, was not originated in the Department of Defense. It was originated by a bunch of different thinkers in the industrial base outside of the system and tried to convince people that they were right. The role that the government played, the role that the government played was twofold. The first thing is it made the investments in the technology, something that was very important. And the second thing was they experimented with it, a topic that we don't do enough of today. They experimented with it and determined that they could deploy it and that it would be, that it would be useful relative to their other concepts. So let's be clear that we probably have extended deterrence and flexible response only because there's no innovation going on outside of the system for all the reasons that were mentioned about what some new concepts would be. I'm critical a little bit of Prompt Global Strike for one kind of fundamental thing. Until some of the thoughts that were here, there's no policy wrapped around Prompt Global Strike. There's no operational concept wrapped around Prompt Global Strike. It is simply a technology demonstration program. And as I try to point out in the initial part of this discussion, if you just do technology divorced from operations and policy, you're not gonna have the resonance that you want. And I'm afraid of that for Prompt Global Strike. So we're still with the same policy. The second thing that's common is we still are relying on technology to be our discriminator in world affairs. In military world affairs. And I will just give you one comment on this very quickly. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this. Leon Panetta, when he addressed, he's Secretary of Defense, when he addressed the Defense Science Board, current policy, the United States will be the most technically dominant force in the world on the planet, he said. And he was asked, you don't mean technically, why don't you just take the word technical out of your discussion? You just want to be the most dominant military strategy. And he said, he's very clear, the word was there for a purpose. And that purpose was, if we took technology out, the military will come back with numbers. And you name numbers any way you care to, numbers, people, tank, ships, we can't afford it. And so if we are not the technically most dominant force, we're gonna be in a very difficult position. So we're still betting on technology. And I would make comment to you that if you look around at the globalization of the technology base and the STEM situation, maintaining technical dominance is going to be much harder in the early part of the 21st century than it was after World War II. And I mean, you can begin to see some leaks. I mean, space dominance no longer as guaranteed as it used to be. The whole cyber realm, one that I'm particularly concerned about and I'll talk a little bit more about this is the combating WMD business. I mean, how to make a third world power into a first world power, just give them a lot of WMD. And there are people who are trying to do that. All right, so those are the things that are the same. Dependence on technology, extended deterrence, and both of them have some problems with it. What's different? I start off with a point which Rich talked about and Linton talked about. I don't see that we believe, that the nation believes that it is into an existential fight today like it did during the end of the Cold War. And as Linton pointed out, it was existential from the PFC on the FIBA on the float in West Germany who thought he was cannon fodder all the way up to the president. Well, you don't hear that today. So you don't see the emphasis on the thought, on the investment for the military side of the equation because it's not existential. You don't see the investment that you're used to seeing in military affairs. Second point, we really don't know, it was very clear in Europe what the center of Soviet military strength was. All right? Not clear in today's environment. Not as clear in today's environment. And I think that's one of the reasons why we lack, we lack a clarity of the focus that we're on. I personally believe, I'll go off the record for a second, Air Sea Battle is not, and it actually preserves the status quo. And it is not clear to me that that's really the issue of central power for China. I am persuaded, and this is my last comment, since the central focus of military power is not known, it's hard to get to derive a strategy around it. I personally am convinced by Phil Carver's work in one regard, and that is the whole world is going to underground structures. And regardless of what you feel about his numbers of Chinese nuclear weapons and so on, you just cannot deny the importance of underground structures as a important investment of the Chinese, on the part of North Korea, Iran, and so on. We don't know how we're gonna deal with that. Right now, the only real option that you have, and I'm a big fan of silver bullets, but it's not too hard to run the calculation to show how deep you have to dig in order to be able to make sure you can't handle it with a conventional weapon, and you can't take them as idiots. So they know that you have a problem with the straightforward solution to underground targets. Now maybe cyber will give us an out, but we don't know how to deal with that problem, and it represents a huge investment on the part of the potential protagonists, and it is an investment like tank armies and like air defense. The other thing which scares me is, right now the agenda, my opinion, I read this with the Tree-Stell-Pescher's book, and I really believe it, the agenda today is being set by the third world. It is not being set by the first world powers. I mean, the simple example of that is, we can't do anything in the Security Council in the United Nations, the first world powers just neutralize ourselves, and when that kind of thing happened in history previously, it was a disaster. World War I is an example of that. Well, what do they do? We have no answer to combating WMD in the broad sense. The idea that we would have to send 100,000 troops into Syria to secure Syrian chemical weapons shows we don't have good ideas, all right? I don't think we really know what to do with the nuclear proliferation around the world. I don't think we really have examples about that, and if you're talking about the seat of military power, I mean, that's North Korea, it may not be only the seat of their military power, maybe the seat of their total power, all right? Iran seems to be following course. I don't know about you, but India and Pakistan scare the hell out of me, and so this issue of how do the difficulties in the third world blossom out through WMD into major issues of the first world without any control from the first world is a troublesome thing to me. So let me just summarize. What's the same? The same is, we still have the same doctrine. Don't know whether it's the right doctrine, don't see the innovation, but we still have the same doctrine. Number two, we still rely on technology. Gonna be harder, but we look to technology to provide us the edge because we don't wanna pay for the other alternatives. What's different, we're not in an existential battle. People are looking at it, they're not as committed as they ought to be, and there are some serious problems in target sets which are very different than what we faced in Europe. That we so far, and I gave you two examples, underground targets and combating WMD, I can give you four or five others without thinking too hard, that we really don't have solutions to and there's something that we're gonna have to focus on. And they're tough problems, at least I don't see the innovation that gets the solution to it. Bottom line, where's the innovation in military affairs? That's what we really need, enough. All right, enough from us, let's hear from you all for a while. James. James Axton from the Carnegie Endowment. Thank you for an absolutely fascinating pair of presentations and discussions, and thank you for the shout out as well. One of the criticisms of air sea battle today is that insufficient tension has been paid to escalation risks associated with air sea battle, the fact that the Chinese, if they felt their backs were up against the wall and they were in an existential fight, they were losing could result to the use of nuclear weapons. And I would assume that that has resonances to a potential Soviet response to air land battle. Given the air land battle essentially flipped the conventional balance in Europe, the Soviet reaction, which I assume would have been to use nuclear weapons earlier in the fight. I mean certainly, as soon as the Cold War ended, the Soviets dropped no first use and openly advertised nukes as a counterweight to conventional. And just thinking aloud here, the use of nuclear weapons by the Soviet side during air land battle, I assume would have had both very significant military implications. It's one thing fighting on a conventional battlefield, it's another thing fighting on a nuclear battlefield. And I assume it would have had very significant political implications. I mean, from a German perspective, whether it's Soviet radiation or American radiation that's on their soil probably doesn't make all that much difference. So my question is, how did you think about the escalatory, the potential escalatory consequences of winning the conventional war in Europe? How did you think about the military consequences? How did you think about the political consequences? And is there a way that that thinking can usefully be transformed into the contemporary air sea battle context? Well, Jim mentioned escalation control and Herman Kahn and it's a complicated subject, but I think we felt that at least for several rungs up the escalation ladder, I mean, that's a complicated idea, but it's still not a bad sort of metaphor. But for several rungs up the escalation ladder, we could win. And exactly, you know, further you go up, winning takes on a more and more catastrophic sense, but and that that would help address the problem of their use. And when you get to the very top, all bets are off. You know, I mean, it just becomes a stylized, hypothetical situation, but I think we generally felt we could win control escalation, not at the beginning, but at the end of the land battle, I think we felt that we could go several rungs up the ladder and pose the Soviets with the prospect of not winning. I still think that's not a bad metaphor for the future, but I'm very much with Jim that in your saying that we've got to come up with new thoughts. What I just said is sort of old thing. I'll stick with it until something better comes along, but I'm very conscious of the difficulties that it posed during the Cold War and the fact that it may pose a lot of difficulties in the future. Let me give you at least one perspective on the specific question you asked about escalation in Europe. Linton mentioned the fact that the force thought that it was gonna die in Europe. I think that that was true at a time, but it wasn't true universally. And that toward the end of the Cold War, they really thought that it was gonna be up to the Soviet Union to escalate, not up to the United States. Absolutely, I was 17 years old. Right, exactly right. Right, and so in my opinion, and let me be extreme, they were not war-fighting doctrine. They were defensive doctrine and deterrence doctrines that had flexible response associated with them to initiatives that the United States was not gonna take, that NATO was not gonna take, but that the Soviet Union was gonna take. And I think that the simple view of it was they had the ability to respond at any level to battle space and win at any level of the battle space, even to the point of using Pershing II, which in my mind was a very disruptive system to the Soviet Union, of escalation of nuclear weapons. So I don't know that I could give you a specific answer to it, except to say that the doctrine was we're gonna win at any level, we're gonna make sure the Soviets know we can win at any level, and so therefore they won't fight us. That was basically what I thought the doctrine was. And I really believe they believed that. I believe the US forces believed that, that the NATO forces believed that they were gonna be capable of doing that. And one thing I wanna be clear, based on a comment that Clark made, I'm not downplaying the importance of nuclear weapons in this overall flexible response process. It was part of the fabric. That's why I read the Churchill activity. You could get to the point where it would involve nuclear weapons, but they thought they could win at any level. One of the differences, I think, is that since the end of the Cold War, we have evolved a strategy of trying to prevail by disrupting command and control. You look at Gulf War I, the idea of disrupting the varied, the fiber optics, drive them into the band where we could find out what they were doing. And if you look at Air Sea Battle and its three tenants, it's the same thing. But I think that where I'm not sure the Cold War gives us a good metaphor or a good model is with the Chinese blurring of nuclear and conventional command and control, which some believe is deliberate. I don't know whether it is, but it doesn't sort of matter. You cannot attack conventional command and control, which is what Air Sea Battle does without attacking nuclear command and control. And I would argue that the decision to escalate to nuclear weapons is qualitatively different in the US China case than it was in the Soviet case. First of all, there aren't, in Chinese terms, there aren't escalatory steps. There's a nuclear or not that may change. A lot of people think it will change. I don't happen to, but that's not where we are now. So how would you apply or would you apply the lessons you've learned to that particular thing, which I thought was what James was getting at about the particular escalatory aspects of Air Sea Battle, which, at least in the public domain, don't appear to be gamed out in the same way you're talking about the political and operational and technological links that people like Trey Dock were doing. So talk a little bit about that for us. Well, let's see. First of all, I have a bias associated with this. Information dominance and command and control dominance, to me, was a key element of Air Land Battle. It was the only way that Starry could win the timeline argument in the operational timeline argument. So we got to information dominance. We'd been in that for 20 years, 30, 40 years. And I don't think that Starry felt that he was worried about the interleaving of nuclear command and control and conventional command and control. His definition of winning the battle and understand the operational timelines was what happened on the ground and whether he could, in fact, determine what the intention of the Soviet Union was on the ground. And so I personally don't believe, having talked to him a little bit about this, I personally don't believe that he thought that, how do I say this, that nuclear escalation tied with conventional escalation meant all that much because he would have the signals that he needed from the unfolding of the battle to be able to make the proper decisions. That's why I put so much emphasis on the sensor part of the activity and not necessarily on the CQ part of the activity. And so I personally don't think that the structure, I know we have a very particular structure of nuclear conventional command and control. I don't think that structure is as pivotal as being able to keep surveillance dominance, to keep information dominance, to really understand what's happening on the battlefield. My opinion. I think that it's not quite to your point. Let's see, the question of the information dimension of escalation or of warfighting is obviously the crucial one. And cyber warfare and space warfare are crucial in that regard. And it's a new thing. We had a talk here six months ago about cyber warfare and we had two people that are really experts. And one of the things I retained from what they said is, we experts don't understand what the strategy is. So I think it's a wild card. I think we're gonna have to come up, we're gonna have to understand, develop, invent and test and experiment a strategy for information use, for information in warfare that we don't have today in light of these two big gorillas in the room, cyber warfare and space warfare. Sarah. I have a question from someone watching online for Dr. Tagnalia. Recently, a former US artillery officer, David O. Smith, wrote an analysis in which he suggested that there was no workable doctrine behind US tactical nuclear weapon applications in the defense of NATO. And hence, emerging nations such as Pakistan will be well counseled to work out such doctrine. You suggested the opposite, that trade-off and DNA had exhaustively pondered the use of tactical nuclear weapons in a battlefield setting. Well, you might not be aware of Smith's article. How would you counsel nations that are or might choose to include tactical nuclear weapons in their arsenals with respect to developing doctrine and capabilities to underpin that doctrine? I'm not sure I quite understand the question. I wanna be clear about the fact that where we ended up was I think the idea of the Pakistanis ending up with tactical nuclear weapons and a no first use prohibition is one of the most dangerous things that exists on this planet. I think that the US had a doctrine that they exercised with regard to nuclear artillery. They knew what they were gonna do with nuclear artillery. They knew they didn't like it, but what is Oregon Trails? If you're familiar with the old Oregon Trails exercises, they went through what the operational doctrine was and how the United States was gonna fight on a nuclear battlefield. They had estimates of what the casualties were gonna do. They knew what each part of the nuclear thing was gonna play. And I can tell you that the outcome of Oregon Trails was it scared the hell out of the army. So I think if you make the distinction between what is the strategy, what are the doctrine and tactics, they knew what they were gonna do. But the question of whether it was a safe doctrine, whether it was a useful doctrine in Europe or whether it is a useful doctrine in South Asia, I don't think the army believed that that was the case and it scares me that the Pakistanis do because I think it could in fact end up with a war in South Asia. I hope that answers the question. If he has a follow up, I'd be happy to see if I'd deal with it. I comment on your point. Having sat in shape shock during Wintex's selection of the quote strategy, actually tactics, had more to do with trying to fashion an acceptable political use for the use of nuclear weapons. Reference from Joseph Schultz are looking for multiple occasions in the different sectors of MACE, such that there could be justified to the political authorities because you had to go up through that very complicated NATO alert structure to get it done. So they may have been doctrine played by the army and I'm sure it did scare the hell out of them, frankly, but it didn't play that way in the actual NATO Wintex exercises or for that matter, I would think in the able archer CPXs, which were NATO CPXs, as you know. I had a lot of dealings with Franz Joseph Schultz as well and he ran what, third core, the center core of Germany and I know he didn't really think that was a viable strategy. You may disagree with that, but I don't think he thought it was a viable strategy. Pardon? He played it. He played it because that was his job, but when he retired, he was one of the advocates for a new policy in Europe because of the fact that when he played it, he knew that the situation was not a stable, was not a useful activity. And the thing that was interesting about air land battle or FOFAR, whatever you want to call it, was the number of people who had positions in that battle process, in that training process, in that, that had the positions were the biggest advocates for a new strategy because they knew that there was a problem with the way that they were playing the rehearsals or the training exercises and the command post exercises in Europe. They knew it wasn't gonna work. So I don't know whether that answered your question. Any more comment because it was obviously. That issue of release of nuclear weapons and the fact that the NATO alliance was basically grounded in nuclear weapons was the basis for Sam Nunn's article about is the alliance in difficulty because it was based on some operating principles that people knew were not realistic. And that was what he was concerned about. You know, it seems to me that the way you have to develop strategy is by working on the problems you can work on rationally. And nuclear weapons at some level introduce an element of something else. And the art in making military strategy politically useful is to focus attention on the places where operational planning can be talked about in a rational way. And you simply deal with, I mean, I think Reagan kind of felt this way. You deal with the irrationality at the upper level. These are my words, not his. At the upper level of the escalation ladder by talking about something else. And frankly, I think that's a useful approach. I mean, that really is, now that I think about it, I think that's what we've been talking about is we're gonna talk about the things where we can talk about it analytically. And you can't really talk about the apocalypse analytically. So we just deflected the conversation. And I think that was a useful way to approach it. I have to tell you, maybe a story to end the meeting on. France Joseph Schultz, in World War II, he was a very junior officer. And he was in command of a unit that was part of Hitler's show of force in Munich. And they had this march that they were gonna show. Was it McMillan? Was the McMillan? The might of the German armor. And so they marched them past a reviewing stand. And what McMillan didn't know was it was a circular route. And what Schultz did was change the uniforms of his people and marched them around the thing continually. And so McMillan never really knew how many troops he was seeing or what was going on. And so it just gives you an impression of a lot of this is deterrence and what's in your head rather than what the actual facts on the ground are. I wanna say the last word. And that is experiment. We've spent the last 10 or maybe 20 years thinking about counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and so forth. And that's what our troops have experimented with. And they did a lot of wonderful experiment while fighting. And so I have some confidence that if we shift our thinking toward these kind of larger scale scenarios that we're talking about, that we'll be able to experiment again. To me, the most amazing example of experimentation was the US Navy during the 19, from 1925 through 1938. When with first people just thinking and then fleet exercises in the Pacific, we learned how to harmonize the technology of airplanes and the technology of aircraft carriers. And that was a difficult technical thing while thinking about how you would fight fleet engagements while thinking about how you would use fleet engagements to project power across 10,000 miles. And Andy Marshall sponsored a wonderful book on that history and that to me is almost the epitome that the Army was doing much similar things with regard to land warfare and armor, the use of armor. But I think we can do it again. And that's what we're gonna have to do. Last word. Thank you all. Thank you.