Forward Defense

WRITING AT THE Christianity Today website, Mark Moyar of the Marine Corps University reviews Lyle J. Goldstein's Preventive Attack and Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Comparative Historical Analysis. He begins by citing from the latest iteration of the National Security Strategy of the United States (2006), and notes:

[O]ne of America's chief tasks is to "prevent our enemies from threatening us, our allies, and our friends with weapons of mass destruction." That document states further, "We do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur . When the consequences of an attack with WMD are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize." Thus, despite extensive criticism for going to war with Iraq based on what later proved to be flawed WMD intelligence, the Bush Administration has not backed down from its professed willingness to launch preventive wars against countries to forestall the use of weapons of mass destruction. Whether the United States should undertake military action to prevent Iran and North Korea from developing large WMD stockpiles is now among the most dire questions the nation faces.

In his review, Moyar stresses Goldstein's linkage between preemptive war and the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction. For instance, he states:

Goldstein concedes that nuclear weapons can promote international peace and stability, but he takes the position of a deterrence pessimist in arguing that they do so only under certain conditions. When rival powers have roughly similar nuclear capabilities, he observes, they are unlikely to contemplate war with each other, but a country's initial development of a small WMD arsenal will make countries with large WMD arsenals more likely to attack the country in order to nip WMD development in the bud. In other words, "radical WMD asymmetry"--as Goldstein terms it--encourages preventive war by the stronger power. In contradiction of Waltz and others, Goldstein posits that small WMD arsenals do not instill great fear in the minds of adversaries. Only after a lengthy period of expansion does a country's WMD arsenal promote international peace.

One could contest that position, since it seems that it is the relative position of the parties in any regional dispute that matters, and not the absolute size of their nuclear arsenals. Neither India nor Pakistan, for instance, has a particularly large nuclear arsenal--a couple of dozen warheads each, by most counts--and neither has much in the way of delivery systems, but because each stands in relative parity with the other, there is no doubt that nuclear weapons have served to increase regional stability in that particular case. On the other hand, the United States had a huge nuclear advantage over the USSR well into the 1970s-yet the U.S. was not inclined to attack the Soviet Union in order to preclude Soviet nuclear parity

However, while Goldstein stresses that radical asymmetries in nuclear weapons cause instability and therefore increase the risks of preemptive (if not preventive) war, the convergence of key military technologies and the changing nature of modern war is creating new radical asymmetries that increase the attractiveness (if not the necessity) of preemptive action in both conventional and low intensity warfare.

With regard to conventional war, defined here as combat between national armed forces employing large formations armed with tanks, artillery, aircraft and the whole panoply of modern combined arms combat, the key driver is the emergence of what the U.S. calls "network centric warfare," but whose intellectual underpinnings originated with Soviet military theoreticians. During the 1980s, the Soviet military developed the doctrinal concept of "Reconnaissance-Strike Complexes" that would constitute the next "Revolution in Military Affairs". The began work on this intellectual construct after the Israeli war in Lebanon, during which the entire Soviet-designed, Syrian air defense network was demolished by the Israeli air force in something under two days. After their analysis of the debacle, Soviet military theoreticians saw the convergence of several different technologies could engender a new form of warfare.