Considering the Value of Future History
Today, I believe that I can safely argue that the international system is evolving pretty rapidly. We are at one of those points in which trend lines from the past aren’t as helpful as they usually are in mapping out what lies ahead. In the face of epochal change, reading history allows us to think about how the past provides lessons for, or even shapes, contemporary politics. In the last few months, I’ve read that we are living through events similar to what occurred in 1918 (Spanish influenza), 1929 (beginning of the Great Depression), and 1968 (Vietnam and civil rights protests); and all at the same time! Nobody, however, has said things are anywhere like 1985. Here in the United States, in many ways 1985 was a great year. In large part that was because with each passing month, the likelihood of a major superpower conflict declined. Our trend line on conflict with the Soviets looked good.
It wasn’t always that way. Mikhail Gorbachev’s elevation to the General Secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985 gave indication that reform was afoot and importantly, that the Soviet Union was willing to begin returning to detente. But as Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko died in office one after the other, the overarching security concern was nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In a decade or so, focus had shifted from stopping the fall of dominos in Southeast Asia to concern over a war in Central Europe. Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: August 1985 (published in 1978) dispensed with the traditional channels of advising government via think tanks and professional associations, for what became a reasonably strong-selling work of fiction. As an alarm regarding Soviet resurgence and expansionism, it was a work of near future history, something that didn’t necessarily make sense at first view.
A little background
As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, I read history, learning from a superb faculty. At Madison were many wonderful professors embracing unorthodox approaches to teaching. One of them was Laird Boswell. I took France from Napoleon to the Great War with him in my first semester. It was fantastic. One of his heuristic tools for illustrating French history was in incorporating fiction of the period into the syllabus. I’d never seen that before. He showed that sociological history could be well-taught through the novels of the time. Boswell also made the point that fiction could spur change in politics and policy. His exemplar was Émile Zola’s Germinal, which explained the struggle between labor and capital revolving around a coal mine.
During my baccalaureate years, I also spent a semester at Oxford and studied Soviet military doctrine with James G. Sherr, a prominent British defense scholar, who occasionally was off to Brussels and elsewhere on the continent dealing with the breakup of Yugoslavia. Through him I learned how the Royal United Services Institute, Chatham House, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies contributed to strategic thinking in Britain government as well as the capitals of other NATO powers and beyond. The London think tanks illustrated how Britain’s economic and political interests received input of experts in making policy. Run by retired diplomats, spies, and military officers, they plied in dispensing wisdom to their own leaders as well as sheikhs, sultans, and ministers across countries in the UK’s orbit. Through that experience, I received a primer on how ideas become policy in foreign affairs and international security.
Fast forward to now. The current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has turned the world upside down. Being homebound, it also has allowed my kids and I to have some conversations about what is perhaps the first existential threat they have ever seen. In our talks, I try to explain that I’ve never experienced anything as scary as this pandemic. My maternal great-grandmother died in the 1918 Spanish flu. Pandemics are scary. And this pandemic reminds us that security dilemmas are not always abstract and held at arm’s length. They may also be immediate and personal. Covid falls into the latter category, producing fear in many. And that fear can be a driver for reappraisal and change. Above all else my children wonder what is happening and what will happen. Every week, I field dozens of questions on what may happen. The first thing I remind them, is, “What is it that we fear?”
The fear
The germ of the idea for this essay is this. Recently, my daughter asked what scared me most when I was her age. My immediate answer was nuclear war. When I was all of nine or ten years old, The New York Times ran an article on nuclear arms control. In it appeared a superimposed, large (1 megaton plus) blast diagram over New York City. The picture indicated that a majority of the residents in my suburban enclave would not be killed outright by the blast, but in a short amount of time afterword by radiation. The fear sank in. In 1982 or 1983, we were always, potentially, a half hour away from Armageddon, with death from a silent, invisible killer coming shortly after the bombs went off.
The thing about the Cold War was that at the time it seemed so permanent and then it wasn’t. I graduated high school the year after the wall came down. But when I was younger, I was confronted with all too many reminders that I was growing up under an international system kept in check by Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). What formed my fear of nuclear war was a confluence of opinion and fact. The years between Brezhnev and Gorbachev were tense. The KAL shootdown, all the protests in Europe and elsewhere, Grenada and Lebanon, Libyan hijinks — there was a lot of stuff going on. We had a president who joked of bombing Moscow on a live microphone. Staring down the Soviet Union might have been a necessity, but it certainly caused some jitters for me and lots of others.
What didn’t make sense to me, was how our nation would end up actually fighting an unthinkable war. The feeling was akin to waking up in Seoul when I lived there some years ago. No predawn bombardment shaking me awake? Things must be alright. Everyday that I woke up in the early 1980s, it was the same. There was something of which to be mighty fearful, but it just didn’t seem like it would happen. As a young person, I just didn’t understand how the Cold War could become incredibly hot. One work of fiction changed that.
The book
When I was maybe ten, I went to a parochial school fundraiser with games and whatnot as well as a book sale. With game tickets consumed, the book sale eventually got my attention. I saw the medium-sized hardback on a shelf at my eye-level. It said:
Hackett
The Third World War:
August 1985
That was in the future. Holy cow! I grabbed it and for maybe a buck, it was mine. For a kid into military history and science fiction, the book seemed a highly unusual creature: fiction about the near future that read like history. Eureka! It appeared to provide the answer to my question: How could the Third World War break out? Obviously many were thinking about it, as the book sold well. It’s likely Hackett’s commercial success opened the door for a great number of other works in the genre. Tom Clancy took a more novelistic swing at virtually the same narrative, with his take highlighting all the whiz bang weapons (that turned out to work, more or less, exactly as advertised in the war with Iraq in 1991).
At a West Point conference a while back dedicated to the question, “What’s the worst that could happen,” I had a chance to talk with Max Brooks about how Hackett’s book served as a stylistic guidepost for his Zombie epic World War Z. Another he saw as an influence for his book was Whitley Strebier (the Communion guy) and University of Texas administrator James Kunetka’s War Day, a collection of fictional interviews taken five years after a significant nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Side note: Kunetka’s The General and the Genius on Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves’s unlikely partnership in the Manhattan Project is a good read for anyone working in technology and policy.
Rereading Hackett’s book decades later is to revisit a slightly dry work of future diplomatic and military history that reads like non-fiction. It even has footnotes of other future fictional works. My favorite: “Taken from Black Horse and Red Star: American Cavalry at War by John S. Cleghorn, Col. US Army (retd), Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1986.” There’s no need to rehash the plot of Hackett’s book, but it’s hard to miss the point that The Third World War was clearly written with a purpose. It was also a group project. The thesis of Hackett’s team, which included two generals, an admiral, an air marshal, a senior diplomat, and the deputy editor of The Economist, was simple. NATO and the UK needed to make some sizable investments if the Atlantic Alliance was to credibly deter the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe. Deterrence could never be reliable if it was almost entirely a product of the Americans.
Back in the mid-1970s, deep was the concern that a sizable portion of the population in NATO’s members were increasingly hesitant to live under the nuclear umbrella of MAD. Furthermore, Europeans wondered if the U.S. would actually use their nuclear weapons. Would the United States sacrifice Washington to prevent the occupation of Bonn? Nobody knew for sure. To demonstrate resolve, the U.S. shared lots and lots of tactical nuclear weapons with the air forces and armies of the NATO allies. The U.S. still has some 150 of these bombs in Europe at bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Troops from those countries were fully integrated into plans for use of tactical nuclear weapons in collective defense and a small number still are trained to use them today.
Hackett’s team steered their narrative around the question of when would nuclear release occur, where, and by which side. Again and again, he writes of calls from NATO corps commanders for nuclear fire support. But in that narrative, they wrote a story offering many prescriptions for Britain and the other NATO members great and small. Hackett’s group believed that in the mid-1970s, NATO was in no shape to deter Soviet all-out attack by conventional means alone. “Invasion from a standing start in the late seventies, if it had ever been tried, would have almost certainly have brought the Russians to the Rhine in a very few days — unless NATO employed nuclear weapons,” they argued. At the time of writing Hackett saw that only tactical nuclear weapons would stop the Soviets in West Germany. The bad news was that nobody could guess how the escalatory chain after initial release would look. The worst case was global nuclear war, billions of deaths, nuclear winter, and a world possibly returned to the Stone Age. Side note: I did once meet a retired CIA analyst who covered the Soviet post-nuclear war economy. I must repeat, the study of the Soviet economy after a nuclear exchange with the United States.
Their policy prescriptions
Of utmost importance in the mid-1970s for the defense of Western Europe was creating a strategy more flexible than shared deterrence provided by nuclear aerial bombs on NATO F-104 Starfighters. But where to start? Military wonks watched as the Israelis employed weapons from French, British, and American sources to more than hold their own whilst vastly outnumbered. Yes, the Yom Kippur War was a close run thing, but ultimately both the 1967 and 1973 wars were resounding victories for Israel. If there was one certain component of Israel’s successes, it was that the Israelis could and did fight.
In NATO, resolve to fight was not such a sure thing among all of its members. Of those militaries on Europe’s Central Front, i.e. in West Germany, Hackett’s faith in the Dutch and Belgians was not high. Calling their services, “heavily — and dangerously — reliant on reservists with no more than short conscript training behind them,” he also bemoaned their unwillingness to put troops up close to the Inner German Border. Outside West Germany, Hackett assumed that the armed forces of Italy would also collapse. Only the Americans and West Germans could be assumed to be willing to show up and fight the Soviets, and of course the British. The book also made the case that France would show up with its sizable military and independent nuclear deterrent if West Germany was attacked.
But above else, the Hackett group were unabashed in including their prescriptions for Britain’s position in NATO, offering an appendix entitled, “British Defence Policy.” In it, they forwarded the idea to raise a much larger UK land contingent of active and reservist formations able to rapidly deploy to the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG) sector and form an entire second corps. (Hackett was NORTHAG’s commander from 1966–68 and was dual hatted as the head of the British Army of the Rhine.) Also recommended were additional investments in air defense and naval forces, including a naval version of the Harrier. Above all else, Britain needed to pick up the slack in assuring that reinforcements from the United States would be protected as they arrived at European air- and seaports. Many of Hackett’s ideas were orthodox recommendations of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Royal United Services Institute, Chatham House already. The difference is that The Third World War found a much larger audience than the papers of those organizations. Hackett’s book allowed a large audience (some 3m copies were sold in 10 languages) to ponder World War Three as well as what was needed to avoid or win it.
What happened?
Fortunately, NATO and the Warsaw Pact never went to war in Europe. By 1992, both the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union were no more. Throughout the 1980s, the Soviet Bloc dealt with increasingly capable NATO forces. My Oxford don, James Sherr convinced me that NATO countries had increased defense spending enough to have a significant effect on Soviet thinking regarding the ability of NATO to hold its own against it (not that Afghanistan, Chernobyl, the deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles, or the mid-80s oil crash didn’t also whittle away Soviet power).
While British defense spending grew under Margaret Thatcher, actions overshadowed budgets. Hackett published a follow-up novel, The Third World War: The Untold Story in 1982. That year, Britain did go to war, though not with the Soviet Union thankfully. In a spectacular miscalculation of British resolve, Leopoldo Galtieri’s invasion of the Falklands led to a fairly brief conflict marked by the extraordinary distance at which it was prosecuted from the UK. Operation Corporate, the ejection of Argentinian forces from the Falklands, impressed Soviet military thinkers. Vojtech Mastny, a U.S. Naval War College professor in the early 1980s, summarized Moscow’s observations on Britain’s conduct of the conflict. They were impressed that the British could rapidly mobilize, that its soldiers were willing to fight, and the quality of electronics found in missiles, radar, and other systems was high. “By demonstrating the preeminence of a military technology in which Moscow is relatively weak, the experience had a sobering effect on any Soviet readiness to challenge the West by force.”
With The Third World War, Hackett argued that Britain could make a meaningful contribution to the NATO alliance and its military proved as much in the Falklands. By the time Ronald Reagan was reading a yarn by a Maryland insurance agent about a defecting Soviet ballistic missile submarine, the Atlantic Alliance was well on its way to exerting a far more substantial level of conventional deterrence. Great Britain, the United States, and West Germany all increased spending on defense in the early 1980s. François Mitterand’s France indicated that it was increasingly willing to cooperate with NATO on the defense of Western Europe. It was also willing to send a sizable contingent to Saudi Arabia to participate in the removal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
That war, with Iraq in 1991, demonstrated that many of the weapon systems the U.S. and its allies had developed and fielded worked as well as they did in Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising. In armor alone, there had been great gains. The U.S. Army’s M1 tank was more than a generational improvement over the preceding M60. Beyond tanks, Western precision munitions were far more effective than the ones employed in Vietnam or Israel’s wars. They smashed key command and control, logistics, air defense, and other targets. Electronics and telecommunications advances allowed for a synchronization of effort and incredible capacity for targeting. Everything about the conduct of the 1991 Gulf War indicated that Soviet conventional forces would have suffered enormous casualties in an invasion of Western Europe in the late-1980s. The Russians were not the only ones who took note. A number of Chinese military theoreticians published articles that argued for a similar shift from quantity to quality in the forces the PLA would field through the 1990s and beyond. The development of PLA military power is incredibly important to our future ideas on U.S. diplomatic and military strategy. Much like the Soviet Union did from 1948 to 1989, China will occupy a central position in U.S. strategic thinking going forward.
Why does this matter now?
While we fear Covid-19 and its attendant social and economic effects now, the movements of the international system have not paused. Only a few weeks ago, an Indo-Chinese brawl resulted in the deaths of at least 20 soldiers in the Line of Actual Control (LAC) area high in the Himalayas. Other Chinese moves against Hong Kong, its Muslim minority, and its neighbors sharing the South China Sea demonstrate that China is indeed moving to assert itself among its neighbors. Furthermore, China’s significant investments in land, sea, and air power cannot easily be ignored. Not many days pass between the international affairs articles sounding the alarm on China’s military rise, with Thucydides’ trap frequently mentioned.
There is obvious concern in the West regarding China, a country that has not engaged in a major conflict since 1979 and last fought the United States in 1953. A decade ago, a colleague in one of the armed forces research labs threw out a challenge to me, “Why don’t you write up what you think a cyberwar with China would look like?” I wrote my response which was later published in the U.S. Air Force Air University’s Strategic Studies Quarterly. My colleague Gary Schaub later included an updated revision in his 2018 edited volume, Understanding Cybersecurity.
Over the years I have attended simulations and even a couple of DoD “mad scientist” events in which experts attempt to ascertain what could happen. The Atlantic Council did a great job last year in coming up for scenarios employed in its Cyber 9/12 cybersecurity policy competitions. The challenge today is to develop thinking on the future of conflict. Yes, there are plenty of contributions on cybersecurity issues and norms, a perceived gap in artificial intelligence development between the U.S. and China, and thought on a hybrid warfare/gray zone conflict, but is there a need for think tankers to be more creative (see Ghost Fleet). What the bounds on such creativity may be is an interesting question. Will some group eventually come forward with a graphic novel on the topic of a future conflict in graphical novel form? Will someone sketch out a diagram outlining how the two powers plausibly might collide? Maybe, we will have to wait and see.
Yogi Berra opined, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Nonetheless, the United States needs to consider how many forces for change — technological, geopolitical, environmental — are going to impact international security. Any prognostications of how the world may be in 10, 20, or 50 years will be, in some way, wrong. Hopefully they will not suffer the failing described by Thomas Fingar of, “Running a line through precisely one data point.” Needed today is solid thinking about future conflict aimed at avoiding it. More novels may be needed. Perhaps the title of British writer Hector Bywater’s scenario on a U.S.-Japanese conflict in the early 1930s, The Great Pacific War would fit one.