Academic Gamesmanship and the Realities of War

...Informed debate is still catching up with Blackett's remarks here, as well as with other of his strictures on limited war, tactical nuclear war, the problems of NATO...

...His recommendation against that disastrous program was overruled at the top...

...J. David Singer's book is, unhappily, a product of this tendency, in that he succumbs to the authority of the new science even while attempting to demolish its pretensions...

...One of the immediate reasons for the proliferation of this sort of thing has been the feeling that it is hard to criticize even spuriously authoritative pronouncements unless one has a firm base of opposing authority from which to do so...

...I think the essential prerequisite of sound military advice is that the giver must convince himself that if he were responsible for action, he would himself act so...

...Singer does this sort of thing less than most other U.S...

...Thus, even in the peace movement, those who might be accounted intellectuals rather than mere propagandists have too often been seduced by the idea of studying the theory of "conflict resolution" rather than conflict, models of "deterrence systems" rather than Cold War politics...

...Because he does not share either their vocabulary or their mode of thought, the Englishman Blackett is able to tear the new clothes off the emperors of academic strategy far more tellingly than Singer...

...As he puts it, he has recognized that all aspects of our armament policy must be evaluated by the same criteria and subjected to the same stringent mode of analysis...

...whether or not to engage in strategic bombing of German cities—these were real problems that Blackett and his wartime colleagues analyzed, and analyzed successfully...

...For this policy inevitably implies leaving Russia time to make at least some atomic bombs, and when this has happened there are only three possibilities open to the West: to wage preventive war before Russia has acquired a large number of bombs, that is under less favorable military conditions than at present...

...Blackett as a strategic thinker has only three qualifications...

...During the war, when the Operational Research Group at the Admiralty had proved intellectually to themselves that big convoys were safer than small ones, before we advised the Navy to make this major change, we had to decide whether we really believed in our own analysis...

...I thought at first glance that these pages would prove to be of little political interest...

...Insofar as this book is an act of criticism of received doctrine its publication is a helpful event...

...For suppose that no Russian aggression, say by expansion over the Yalta line, does take place in the next few years, and suppose further that this lack of aggression is widely held in the West as due to the threat of atomic bombing, then the West will, in its own view, have saved the world from a third world war at any rate for some years...

...Blackett's collected essays on military strategy...

...I think that occasionally analogous personal tests of belief in one's own recipes may be useful in the study of nuclear war...

...The result of his act of abstraction is his conclusion that all proposals for disarmament are impractical—except his...

...It is therefore all the more unfortunate that Singer feels compelled to couch his argument in the often obscurantist jargon of the trade, and worse, to build abstract models of deterrence capabilities and arms control systems, complete with "probability-utility" graphs which are pretentiously supererogatory...

...But if there are many proposals for disarmament more impractical than this one, then I think the world must be upsidedown...

...It may be, of course, that the Cold War does not generate the kind of experience that Blackett makes such excellent use of...

...But in the real world, the United States is building up a massive firststrike capability strategic force, which cannot be dismantled nearly so simply...

...The dilemma comes later...

...the reader may observe for himself the instructive fact that virtually every one of Blackett's attacks on English defense policy during the 1950's has been vindicated, in the sense that those policies have been abandoned...

...they are such that by the standards of many American social scientists he would be considered "untrained" for work in this specialized "discipline...

...deterrence theorists, but still he is caught up in what seems to be a national style of thought...

...Singer avoids the political world at many key junctures in order to build a Singer Theory of Disarmament, of the same old abstract variety...

...and he has the ability to observe events...

...Thus, even when politically on the outside, as he has been since World War II, he retains that knowledgeability about how military and political things are done, that all the RANDS in the world cannot synthesize out of their computers, and that is also sadly missing in intellectual outsiders such as Singer, Fromm, Etzioni, et al., valuable as their work may otherwise be...

...and the USSR turn over nuclear weapons to a UN "third force," until the latter is stronger than either of them, and can thus enforce a complete disarmament scheme...

...if so, we are all out of luck...

...Among all the spurious "sciences" that have grown up around the notion that to abstract one's propositions from reality is to be truly "scientific," most pernicious has been the new "science" of strategy...

...But the problem is that the "stringent" analysis of deterrence theory justifies a peculiar kind of rationalizing attitude toward the political world, in which possibilities are discussed as though they were likelihoods, potentialities as though they were realities, and practical alternatives as though they were logical ones, Thus, Singer argues that a "finite" (minimum second-strike capability) deterrence force, controlled at key points by various arms control measures which will lessen tensions somewhat, can lead logically to his disarmament scheme...

...His assault on the idea of civil defense, his wellargued preference for minimum deterrence rather than counterforce capability and a continued arms race, and his insistence that weapons create tension as much as tension creates the desire for weapons, are notions which I—undoubtedly like most DISSENT readers—find congenial...

...Reading Blackett, one suddenly sees that strategic modelbuilding is not so much an abstraction from reality as a substitute for knowledge about it...

...But then, that tells us something ominous about the Cold War: about the likelihood that a military definition of it can be anything but disastrous...

...The policies recommended by many of these studies seem not always to have been felt through to actual potential action...

...I really do not think this requires much comment...

...probably such a feeling of inadequacy oppressed the first men to whom came the wild speculation that phlogiston might not really exist after all...

...The most striking thing not only about this passage but about the whole book is Blackett's conception of "Operational Research," which he elaborates in Part II of Studies of War...

...What is really important about all these analyses, though, is not alone their content, but more particularly Blackett's method...

...He has a scientific training...

...the following passage is characteristic: The intellectual level of much of this discussion is of the highest, so high that I find much of it very hard to understand, and I wonder sometimes whether it is all rooted in military and political reality...

...I say "unhappily," because Singer is the deterrence theorist most sympathetic to the peace movement, because he has elsewhere written excellently on such matters, and because in this book he offers a useful and penetrating critique of Kahn, Kissinger, etc...

...In fact, however, these chapters form the core of Blackett's work...

...to initiate a new approach to control of atomic energy on terms much more favorable to Russia...

...Yet while "hard-headed" American analysts—who need a model, a team of researchers, and a computer before they can make their "scientific" statements—have been talking in their dream-language about dream-wars, fabulous missile gaps, legendary vulnerabilities, etc., Blackett has become a prophet for the nuclear age...

...or finally to continue the atomic arms race, with a devastating atomic war with bombs available to both sides as a final outcome...

...Indeed, after wading through the American approaches to what we call "operations research," I had begun to think the whole idea a gigantic hoax designed to give employment to out-ofwork economists...

...The difference is that Blackett writes as a military man and a political man: as an actor in the situation, rather than as a consultant to those who define it...

...He proposes that the U.S...

...Out of fear, perhaps, of having nothing to say unless they are "scientific," the new academic strategists have forgotten that experience and ability to reason intelligently about the evidence of one's senses are still the foundations of knowledge...

...The success of Blackett's analysis of strategic bombing lay only in its intellectual cogency, unfortunately...

...In 1948, for instance, Blackett, in setting forth an almost universally condemned viewpoint, showed such remarkable presciei '_° that fifteen years later one could adapt his argument with little change, as a criticiem of the same dominant kind of thinking he was criticizing then: If the American stockpiles of atomic bombs are looked on as the main deterrent to Russian expansion, rather than as a means of forcing her to contract her sphere of influence, then the diplomatic and strategic initiative is in an important sense handed over to Russia...

...It is with relief, therefore, that one turns even from the best results of the American approach to a book like Studies of War, P.M.S...

...Operational Research" is his expertise, and a real and important expertise...

...Armed by their supposed knowledge of game theory, social psychology, economics, and operations research— and occasionally (but only occasionally) military operations—a new breed of "scientist" has arisen, who declaim on their subject with all the authority of a professional Frothist lecturing on the Science of Frothism...

...This kind of writing and thinking reaches a level of common-sense political generalization that Singer, for example, never attains...

...he is experienced in military operations during wartime...

...he annihilates the pseudo-distinc tions between, or rather reifications of, "counterforce" and "countercity," first strike" and "second strike," "vulnerable" and "invulnerable," etc...

...In any event, if war is too important to be left to the generals, it is certainly too important to be left to the abstracted academicians...

...How to protect convoys...

...Singer can only come to a conclusion that defies common sense because he has bought the formalistic approach to deterrence peddled by his colleagues...

...Blackett's attacks are unsurpassably trenchant...

...how to get more sightings of surfaced U-boats...

...Disarmament of any kind may indeed be impractical because it may be rejected by those who count...

...Compared to Blackett's report on his work, Herman Kahn's "Report on a Study of Non-Military Defense," for example, is shown up for the meaningless performance that it is— one might as well call it "Study of Sara Lee's Cake Mixes" for all his contact with the reality of its supposed subject...

...I personally convinced myself that I did, by the conviction that if I were to send my children across the Atlantic during the height of the U-boat attacks I would have sent them by a big rather than by a small convoy...

...That is all: no immersion in the "science" of strategy or nuclear decision-making...