The Age of the Unthinkable (12 page)

In Jervis’s mind the heart of the security dilemma was that though all nations sought the common goal of security, they would
be unable to actually achieve it. “In domestic society,” Jervis wrote, “there are several ways to increase the security of
one’s person and property without endangering others. One can move to a safer neighborhood, put bars on the windows, avoid
dark streets and keep a distance from suspicious-looking characters. In international politics, however, one state’s gain
inadvertently threatens another.” This was a balanced formula for disaster, no small matter at the time Jervis was writing,
when a loose détente was all that kept the nuclear superpowers away from Armageddon.

But Jervis had an idea: what if you could find some way to increase your security without scaring another nation? The equivalent
of nation-sized bars on the windows? Then, he thought, it might be possible to skirt the paradox. One way to do this might
be through weapons or ways of fighting that were purely defensive. But what sorts of weapons are offensive and which are defensive?
Thus the machine-gun question.

In advance of World War I, the consensus of most military thinkers was that machine guns were the best offensive technology
ever invented. Ferdinand Foch, the general who was often named as the brightest mind in the French military (a compliment
of unclear import), laid out the argument in simple terms. “Any improvement in firearms is bound to strengthen the offensive,”
he wrote. In this view of the world, one bolstered by the performance of early Gatling guns in the one-sided African colonial
affairs and the Spanish-American War, more bullets per second had to be a boon for offensive forces. Thus Europe’s generals
opened their campaigns in the late summer of 1914 with the promise that the speed of machine-gun battles meant the Great War
would be a fast sprint, concluded by Christmas. It was only after four years of grinding trench combat — and the arrival of
a true offensive weapon in the form of massed motorized tank formations at Cambrai in 1917 — that the generals realized their
error: the machine gun was a defensive weapon.

In tracking the shift between offensive and defensive weapons through history, Jervis and other political scientists began
to notice a correlation. During times of “offensive dominance,” when technologies gave the edge to attacking forces, wars
were more frequent. At the tail end of the fifteenth century, for instance, when the use of artillery began to spread in Europe,
wars became much more common, undoing the period of relative peace that had started with the increased use of unbreakable
fortifications in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Then in the sixteenth century, fortress architects developed innovations
such as the
trace italienne,
a star-shaped defensive work that allowed gunners inside forts to lay down a murderous cross fire on approaching enemies.
This helped the defense take the upper hand again. Cities like Venice and Metz were nearly impregnable to artillery fire;
siege times lengthened from days to months or years. And, as the theory predicted, fewer wars were fought. At least until,
in the early eighteenth century, mobile artillery was perfected, equipped with longer barrels that could accelerate shells
to wall-busting velocities — advantage offense, and the start of a very violent several centuries in Europe. This back-and-forth
continued through both world wars (World War II opened with an offensive blitzkrieg that pitted panzer tanks against horse-mounted
Polish cavalry) and into the Cold War, a period in which nuclear weapons led to a stable dominance by defense. The cost of
offense in an atomic age — complete nuclear destruction — was so large as to preclude full-scale war. It was when the offense
had a better chance of winning (or when governments or rebels thought it did) that wars burst out. The measure Jervis and
other scholars eventually developed for offensive dominance was this: was it less costly to attack or to defend?

The combination of the Nintendo-style American victory in the Gulf War in 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union convinced
some military theorists that America’s military dominance was untouchable. In their eyes, the world was on the verge of a
“revolution in military affairs” not unlike the ones brought on by artillery or fortification. This revolution would be led
by information technology — an area in which the United States, with its ceaseless loop of IBM-to-Intel-to-Google innovation,
had an unassailable advantage. As one analyst observed in 1993 about the future of war, “While precise prediction is out of
the question, it appears certain that it will involve great increases in the ability of military organizations to detect,
identify, track and engage with a high degree of precision and lethality far more targets, over a far greater area, in a far
shorter period of time, than was possible in the Cold War era.” An age of push-button conflict suggested a near-permanent
shift in the offense-defense balance, to an era in which offense against the United States became impossible since the attacker
would immediately be hunted down and destroyed, most likely by some combination of satellites, unmanned spy planes, and high-speed
missiles.

And if we weren’t living in a revolutionary age, if we lived in a time when technology innovations, for instance, were confined
to just one side, to “the good guys,” this view might have been correct. Unfortunately, the idea of a point-and-shoot military
revolution was an illusion. The video-game wars in places like Kuwait or Kosovo, it turned out, had been only one sort of
combat that was possible. And neither conflict had presented a real threat to American security. Saddam Hussein’s toy armies,
for example, were based on an old model of fighting in which every nation tried to build a miniature version of the American
or Soviet military. The belief that such a force could stand the full weight of the U.S. military was absurd — and yielded
a predictable result. But it also set our enemies scrambling for new ways to fight. Enter the engineers behind that Chinese
HARM-fooling box, to say nothing of a whole band of terrorists, hackers, bioengineers, and nuclear experts. Indeed, the more
relevant mid-1990s battles came in 1993, which included both the bombing of the World Trade Center in March and the botched
“Black Hawk Down” American intervention in Somalia in October, both precursors to a decade of small, cheap, and deadly terrorist
attacks, on the one hand, and shocking, brutal collisions in places such as Rwanda, the Balkans, and, eventually, the streets
of Basra and Kabul, on the other. And for countries such as China or Russia, the two Gulf Wars offered priceless lessons about
how
not
to fight the United States, if it ever came to that.

Is it now more expensive to attack or to defend? The real math of our present moment yields the opposite answer from what
security optimists postulated in the 1990s: attacking is cheap, and, if Jervis is right, it suggests that we’ll see more violence
in the future rather than less. The 9/11 hijackers spent less than $1 million to attack the United States. The cost to try
to prevent a similar attack — in police, airport security, and other systems — runs to a million dollars
an hour
in the United States alone. Any thoughts that somehow a professional military would absorb hits for us, that there is an
easy division between military and civilian, are also being scrubbed away. The logic of Hizb’allah’s Sheik Nasrallah in relation
to Israel, that “in occupied Palestine there is no difference between a soldier and a civilian, for they are all invaders,
occupiers and usurpers of the land,” can be seen in attacks in places as different as Moscow, Bogotá, Bali, New York City,
and Madrid.

As in most every revolution, new technologies benefit revolutionaries the most. And the culture of revolutionaries, that psychology
of risk and curiosity and confidence admixed with joy, is custom-built to find ways to wedge into the places where big-ticket
power doesn’t reach. Today insurgents and terrorists possess underground logistics networks capable of securely spreading
money, matériel, and men around the world. Transnational drug smugglers cultivate, distribute, and invest the returns of a
multibillion-dollar business, for instance. And mixed with ideology, technology only speeds the spread of revolutionary ideas.
Since 9/11, Al Qaeda cells have been found in Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Tanzania,
Kenya, Yemen, Albania, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Jordan, Algeria, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and France. Robert
Pape, in his study of suicide bombing, notes that of all such bombings in history, 90 percent have occurred in the past decade.
It was a tactic, Martin Kramer writes in “The Moral Logic of Hizb’allah,” that “enjoyed such stunning success that leading
Shi’ite clerics were prepared to bend their interpretation of Islamic law to sanction it.” As Clausewitz wrote in
On War,
“Once barriers — which consist in a sense only in man’s ignorance of the possible — are torn down, they are not easily set
up again.”

So it turns out that the balance-of-violence equation that produced a relatively stable world in the Cold War by ensuring
that offense was suicidal was a passing phenomenon. It emerged from the usual tidal rocking of human history. The idea that
stability of security is normal — or even reliably obtainable with enough careful thought — is one of those legacy ideas that
are frankly lethal in the presence of the sandpile effect. Conflagrations around our planet, the nervous itchings of a rising
power like China or a reemerging one like Russia, aren’t exceptions to the rule of a globalizing international order. They
are not the last gasp of holdouts against American-style modernity. They are a natural expression of the shifting, shuffling
energy of global power, energy that will only become more pronounced as the effects of financial fear, demographics, and ideology
kick in. Keeping our soldiers at home no matter the circumstances, doing less in the world, minding our own business — none
of these will protect us any more than meter-thick fortress walls could protect against long-barreled siege artillery. We’re
entering a new and dangerous era. The offense-defense balance switch has flipped. We must squarely face the awful fact that
our security will become ever more perilous.

In a painfully frank analysis titled “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars,” written in 1975 as Vietnam wound down, the historian
Andrew Mack compiled a list of reasons to explain the inability of superpowers to win small wars. Mack identified the weak
joints that undid superpowers. They rarely had their complete survival on the line, unlike guerrillas, who had everything
to lose. They were victims of a timetable; guerrillas were committed to fighting protracted struggles, forever if necessary.
And the war-fighting hopes of big nations were almost always beset by contradictions, particularly an unworkable schism between
the pleasant tea-party (the bone china, not Boston, sort) morality of their home societies and the mercilessness demanded
in battlefield combat. Torture, indiscriminate killing of civilians, and other inevitable calamities of violence were tolerated
by those societies only when national survival was clearly at stake. In any less dire situation, they became politically and
ethically toxic. “For the insurgents,” Mack wrote, “the war is ‘total,’ while for the external power, it is necessarily ‘limited.’
” Mao Zedong, the father of modern guerrilla tactics and blessed (depending on how you looked at it) with an instinctive feel
for his opponents’ weaknesses, spotted another hitch. “Countries with legislative bodies,” Mao wrote, “cannot take a war of
attrition, either financially or, in the long run, psychologically.”

Unwinnable wars — and it is vitally important that we stare that 21–1 score in the face, acknowledging that there is no silver
bullet, no technological breakthrough, no robotic soldiers or DNA-altering high-tech gas that will fix this problem — now
rest at the center of our military future. And even small wars and conflicts can produce effects much larger than we might
initially suspect. If you look at American history, at, for instance, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil
War, the occupation of the Philippines, the world wars, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the interventions in Lebanon in 1983
and in Somalia in the early 1990s, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq — all of these conflicts shape-shifted in ways never anticipated
when they were begun. And in our more complex order now, it’s not only that such changes are inevitable, it’s that sometimes
they will produce new security challenges faster than the old ones are solved. Starting a war will very often simply create
new, harder to treat headaches. Our old way of war is increasingly useless. It is senseless to aspire to periods of “peace
on earth” during the lifetime of anyone reading this book unless we begin to change how, where, and why we do fight. Threats
to our physical security are complex, new, and growing. They demand nothing less than a complete reinvention of our ideas
of security. And that is where we will turn now.