Somewhere in the writings of Herman Kahn there’s a perceptive remark about the difficulties of defense planning. I’m having to paraphrase it from memory, since at some point my copy of the book in question disappeared, But it was clearly made in the last half of the 1960s, and my guess it was in his Thinking About the Unthinkable, published in 1962, which is now out of print.

But I remember three (?) points he made that had a major impact on my thinking. I’ll get to the others below, but the essence of the remark went something like this.

The difficulty with defense planning was that you were trying to prepare for a future conflict without the certainty of knowing what would turn out the required, or even if what you planned for would happen.

Kahn is generally credited with articulating the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. That is, if our nuclear capabilities were sufficiently powerful that even if we were attacked by surprise, our counter-strikes would annihilate the attacker, he would refrain from an attack.

That subsequently was labeled the MAAD doctrine (Mutually Assured Destruction), which was a total misinterpretation of Kahn’s thinking, although he also attempted to calculate survive-ability in this scenario (the second point). The key question, he observed, was this: would the living envy the dead?

At the same time (the third point), he articulated the steps of escalation, that is, responses to aggression short of war. Initially, he posited sixteen, and in later works, he expanded that to forty-four—a number probably impossible to apply, but no matter.

But his point, which was well taken, was that given the rationality of the players, there were numerous steps to resolution short of actual all out war.

Kahn is usually tagged, correctly as a futurist, and since he was both a mathematician and a physicist, he didn’t concern himself with messy realities, although he was well aware of the difficulties involved in even getting people to consider the issue of survive-ability.

For example, he raised the question of what percentage of birth defects a society could withstand, since the effects of radiation were one of the chief horrors of a nuclear exchange. But the horrified response was that we couldn’t tolerate any—even though the actual data for birth defects established that we did. Thinking the unthinkable indeed!

The difficulty with Kahn’s ideas wasn’t that he was wrong, but that he simply didn’t consider the extent to which we humans excel not just at denial—in the example above, willful denial—but in our ability to screw things up.

Nor did he consider—or even realize—the enormous influence Marxist-Leninist thinking not only had on decision making, but the extent of the Soviet propaganda campaign and its successes in the west.

Moscow’s excellent propaganda machine did a fantastic job not just of portraying themselves as peace loving peoples only interested in enjoying the fruits of their ever receding Socialist Paradise, but in blackening the West as warmongering crazies, and the hapless Kahn became forever immortalized as Doctor Strangelove in Kubrick’s film of the same name.

The result being that nowadays large numbers of otherwise not unintelligent people react to the N word like late tenth century French peasants to the arrival of the next millennium. Come to think of it, a surprising number of their descendants did the same thing to the arrival of the third. Remember Y2K?

But the apocalyptic drumbeat of a ruinous nuclear war, accompanied by the rise of Marxian economics, wreaked havoc with rational defense planning. Certainly an understandable result. If almost any sort of hostility could trigger a nuclear holocaust, we were doomed. So why bother?

Facts and Fear

But it’s interesting to look at what we actually know—as opposed to what we fear.

Since 1945, about 2,065 nuclear devices have been detonated in tests. Slightly over 95 percent between 1955 and 1995, so about forty a year during this 40 year period. Current stockpiles are slightly under twenty percent of what they were in the late 1980s.

Given the number of explosions, their widespread dispersion, and the rate, we’ve been living with the environmental consequences of nuclear detonations for decades. I bring up the frequency and duration of nuclear detonations because fears about the results of those have historically been as much about the lingering aftereffects of radiation as about the immediate destruction caused by the blast. Probably more so.

Interestingly that led to two studies, one by the National Academy of Sciences and the other by the Office of Technology Assessment. The NAS study dealt with fallout, and the OTA report with “irreversible adverse consequences.” Their conclusions: no and impossible to estimate. Not that it made much difference to the anti-nuclear lobby; they pursued their aims with the same contempt for basic science that their forebears had shown with equally wild claims about the apocalyptic consequences of poison gas and bacteriologics.

However, no matter how you slice and dice the cake, two thousand nuclear explosions has released a lot of radiation, and it doesn’t magically disappear because it’s just a test. So you’d think by this time someone would have noticed something.

Then there’s the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

While it’s true that both cities were basically destroyed by the atomic bombing, currently, the city of Hiroshima has a population of nearly two million people, and another eight hundred thousand live in the prefecture.

Although the bombing killed an enormous number of people, less people died as a result of the nuclear explosion than were killed in the conventional bombing of Tokyo. Moreover, recovery was surprisingly rapid: the city had somewhat more people living there in 1950 than in 1940.

So cautiously I would suggest that hardly any of the apocalyptic scenarios envisioned have much merit.

I’m not much interested in finding out what could happen in the event of a massive number of detonations occurring in a short time span, or even two or three, but I would point out that both the data we have, and the earlier instance of the widespread 1930s panic over how conventional bombing would turn cities into rubble in a few days strongly suggests that running around in a hysterical panic is not just counterproductive, but unwarranted.

A far as blast damage goes, in 1908, we actually had a demonstration of the level of destruction that resulted from a mega-explosion, when an extra-planetary object, probably a meteor, exploded, apparently a few miles above the ground (as there was no impact crater), over what’s now Krasnoyarsk Krai in Siberia. The area was largely uninhabited, but the force of the explosion leveled an eight hundred square mile section of mostly forest.

The usual claim is that it was the equivalent of one thousand atomic bombs the size of the Hiroshima bomb exploding. In the sort of slugfest posited by the MAADdites, millions of people would die and lots of cities would be destroyed, but humanity survived the Black Death, and other only slightly less major epidemics. I would suggest reading Hans Zinnser’s 1930s classic, Rats, Lice, and History (widely available as a free download) as a corrective.

I should add a final point here. I’ve been bombarded by claims about the imminent environmental apocalypse since the early 1960s. Not one claim turned out to be true, and most of them, like the earlier claims of Thomas Malthus, were so obviously flawed as to be ludicrous. Just because they were, and are, widely believed, isn’t proof. On the contrary it was identified as a logical fallacy long ago: argumentum ad populum.

Now it would be easy to construct theoretical arguments arguing a future nuclear war would be totally different. But since there hasn’t been one, those arguments are basically just that. Based on theories. And the actual blast damage from the Tunguska meteor gives us the probable upper limit of the devastation resulting.

For that matter, as I’ve explained in earlier posts in some detail (and I’m not going to repeat myself), as we’ve already seen, the key figure with missiles is not how many you have, but how many you can launch in one concerted attack, and of those, how many will actually detonate somewhere near the target.

As both Tehran and Moscow have discovered, not anywhere near as many as you thought.

Of course the obvious counter is that each nuclear missile is far more destructive. That’s true, but there’s a catch. More than one. Nuclear weapons are much more difficult to detonate than their conventional equivalents; the consequences of a misfire at the launch site could be catastrophic for the country launching one; the triggering mechanism degrades rapidly; and since no missiles have been fired over the polar routes for the distances required, there’s always been a justifiable skepticism about what would actually happen.

And those difficulties are in addition to the surprising effectiveness of anti-missile defense systems. Comparisons between the beliefs of the strategic bombing enthusiasts at the start of the Second World War and what actually happened should serve as a cautionary tale.

Nor is that an isolated example.

Actually, when you examine the dramatic changes in militaries that have occurred in the last century and a half, and bearing Kahn’s insights about all the inherent difficulties involved, the case can certainly be made that armies have been reasonably successful in planning for future wars. And before you snort in disagreement, let me make some key points.

Contradictions and Myths

Now it has to be said that the armies that emerged after 1919 had absorbed a good many practical lessons. Long recoil weapons with high angles of fire had replaced the older “field” and “siege” guns, helmets replaced soft headgear, by and large motor vehicles replaced horses, more and more troops were equipped with automatic and semi-automatic weapons, as well as hand grenades, mortars, and flame throwers.

There was a realization about the future potential of tanks and self propelled guns, and the major combatants all realized the importance of airplanes, submarines, and even aircraft carriers.

So by those measures, the military leadership had definitely absorbed a good many lessons.

In fact, it could be argued that given the explosion of pacifism and the serious economic problems that all the countries faced, military commands were reasonably successful.

But then there are the paradoxes. Although The British boasted about the tank, not only as British invention (it wasn’t), but as a major game changer in land warfare, British tank development stagnated. By contrast, the European powers all developed armored forces that had the potential to be effective on the battlefield, as well as effective anti-tank guns

Although the war had seen the effectiveness of submarines, naval planners still remained fixated on developing powerful surface fleets which would engage in great naval clashes just as in the past. So the importance of both submarines and aircraft carriers was minimized.

Meanwhile, the newly independent (or quasi independent) air forces became obsessed with strategic bombing as a decisive weapon, even though none as late as 1939 none of the major powers had developed the aircraft this mission required.

Only the Germans emphasized the importance of tactical airpower, developed both the aircraft to execute it, and the anti-aircraft weaponry to protect their ground forces.

And after the Second World War, the major combatants all attempted to remediate their weaknesses. Their navies turned to submarines and aircraft carriers. Their air forces began to emphasize tactical air support and build the aircraft to accomplish both that mission as well as true strategic bombing.

They began a long overdue emphasis on training that simulated actual combat, started emphasizing firepower over manpower, attempted to make their infantry and artillery much more mobile.

In those efforts the major western powers all had a serious advantage, which the Ukrainian war brought out into the open. The Soviet State was hobbled by its political principles. On the one hand, it crippled their economic power so they lacked the resources to produce both the quality and quantity of their chief adversary. Us. I don’t quite see why that should be surprising. Marxian economics is to actual economics pretty much like astrology is to astronomy.

Even more damaging, their ideological roots precluded the development of the training and command structures that enabled combat effectiveness, as exemplified by the state’s early decision to eliminate noncomissioned officers who were vital to ensuring that their manpower had both the skills and the practice to enable them to function effectively on the battlefield.

Not that the military organizations didn’t have problems. And here’s the main one, which Colonel Adolfo Prada articulated towards the end of the Spanish Civil War.

The trouble with this war is that almost nobody tells the truth of what he sees and knows, while many responsible people are actually incapable of rendering an account of what they have seen.

What the colonel left out was that human beings excel at both denial and rationalization. Denial: I would argue they really don’t “see” the facts that contradict what they supposedly “know,” which is just a different way of phrasing Colonel Prada’s concluding phrase. People.

In a Word: People

Now I’m by no means suggesting that the militaries did a terrific job of preparing for future conflicts, but as my remarks sketching out the basic reasons behind the failures of the Russian military in Ukraine have suggested, a good deal of the blame resides in the governments themselves.

The situation in France during the Third Republic (1871-1940), although arguably the most extreme, is an excellent case study, because the elected leaders of the republic were very much in charge of France (insofar as anyone ever is).

But here are two pretty damning observations. Between 1871 and 1900, France had no less that forty ministers of war, and only one, Charles de Freycinet, lasted longer than a a year or so. Between 1904 and 1914 there were no less than fourteen. Clearly this made the sort of long range planning required extremely difficult. An understatement.

But the actual situation was much worse, because under Louis André, minister of war from 1900 to 1904, there was a real inquisition mounted to root out practicing Roman Catholics in the military, as the government felt those were the most politically unreliable.

Once the war began in 1914, the politicization of promotion had catastrophic consequences both for the army, and for the country. The process of promotion in peacetime armies is always suspect, because it tends to favor skills that have nothing much to do with fighting and winning wars. But demanding that only officers with certain political beliefs be put into leadership positions stacks the deck still further, not to mention destroying morale.

The leaders of the government demanded a politically aware general as chief; competence was irrelevant, and they got one. With a vengeance, as once the war began Joffre—who got the job because he was the only senior officer acceptable to the government who was willing to take it—promptly demonstrated his only real skill: making himself almost impossible to replace by eliminating all the other possible candidates. When, after over two bloody years of of catastrophic losses and no end in sight, the government finally sacked him, his replacement only made matters worse.

Ironically, the government eventually ended up with two officers who were the living embodiment of the government’s worst fears: Foch, whose brother was a bishop, and Pétain, who had previously told the president of the Republic that “he of all men should know that France was neither led nor governed.”

As far as Great Britain goes, here’s an excellent example of how that country’s elected leaders managed national defense planning.

In 1907, when the Wright Brothers had proved the practicability of their machines, negotiations were entered into between the brothers and the British War Office. On April 12th 1907, the apostle of military stagnation, Haldane, then War Minister, put an end to the negotiations by declaring that 'the War office is not disposed to enter into relations at present with any manufacturer of aeroplanes' The state of the British air service in 1914 at the outbreak of hostilities, is eloquent regarding the pursuance of the policy which Haldane initiated.

It was Haldane’s colleagues who never actually inquired what the navy’s defense planning was, then fought the war with an army commander in chief who made Joffre look like Napoleon. Think I’m exaggerating? He didn’t know that the gun tubes on heavy artillery wear out with repeated firings, reflected afterwards that the machine gun was “greatly overrated,” and felt that cavalry was still important. Not that Ferdinand Foch was much better: post-war he was still babbling about bayonets

Understandably, shock over two and a half million dead French and Commonwealth soldiers fueled both Pacifism and and Anti-militarism. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that the original political leaders succeeded in diverting the blame, since none of them survived the war by more than a few years. However, their successors, together with the dramatic political changes that occurred almost everywhere not only ensured an even greater conflict in the immediate future, but established Colonel Prada’s gloomy prescience.

The memorable characterization of Lord Haldane as an apostle of military stagnation by Vivien and Marsh (in A History of Aeronautics)could easily be flipped to apply to whole series of his successors as apostles of military theories, men who inadvertently proved Pétain’s sarcastic quip that “Nothing is more dangerous in war than theoreticians.” With the possible exception of professional politicians.