Fred Kaplan: So sadly so right

I blow hot and cold on old Fred Kaplan, who hangs his hat at Slate, most recently, cold, when Fred waxed hot, announcing that “America’s retreat from the world under Trump has shown why we’re still the indispensable nation”¹, vaguely claiming that all the world is crying out for American “leadership” to solve all their problems. Well, now Fred is hot, about nuclear nonsense being emitted by Secretary of State James Mattis, and this time he’s right on the money.

As Fred explains in some detail, and so will I, the once skeptical four-star appears to have plunged happily into the Never-Never Land of high-end nuclear strategy/fantasy, where enough is never enough, where windows of vulnerability are always opening, and where true security always requires just another hundred billion for another set of brand-new warheads. Otherwise, anything might happen! The whole world might blow up!

Fred describes Mattis’ descent from grace—and common sense—as follows:

“James Mattis has fully joined the nuclear tribesmen.

“As recently as 2015, Mattis urged Congress to reassess the need for the triad, the long-standing practice of placing nuclear weapons on three types of platforms—land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and long-range aircraft. He even advocated dismantling the land-based missiles. He argued that their hair-trigger posture increased the chance of nuclear war.

“His views at the time reflected his status as a just-retired Marine four-star general—the Marines being the only branch of the U.S. military that has never possessed nuclear weapons—and his friendship, as a fellow at Stanford University, with prominent arms-control advocates on campus, notably former secretary of defense William Perry.

“But now Mattis himself has been secretary of defense for a year, and, as he acknowledged at a House hearing Tuesday morning, his views have evolved. He came in to the Pentagon, he testified, “wanting to challenge just about everything,” but after speaking with experts of all stripes, he realized that the land-based ICBMs are “a stabilizing element” and that other weapons he once looked at askance also have their merits.”

As Fred points out (though not in so many words), this is total bullshit.² First, and most importantly (and it’s something Fred doesn’t emphasize enough), we don’t have any enemies. Yes, Vladimir Putin doesn’t want us in his front yard (or his back yard) and the Chinese don’t either, but no one wants us dead, the way the Soviets did. Saddam Hussein was quite possibly the last national leader who believed that he could increase his power through an old-fashioned war of conquest.

Mattis and his department will have none of that, of course. The department, in its recent Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy spouts a virtual parody of polysyllabic, neo-Trumpian trumpery:

“Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order—creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.”

Well, except that we aren’t. Every statement in this paragraph is false. Particularly amusing is the way the DoD dismisses the “War on Terror”, which apparently is no longer capable of justifying the kind of cash the department wants to throw around. I mean, those guys don’t even have tanks!

So we’re back to a good old fashioned Cold War, requiring a massively rejuvenated nuclear triad, spelled out in another DoD pub, “Nuclear Posture Review”, which assures that “The world is more dangerous, not less,” which is a complete lie, followed by more lies, claiming that, while the U.S. complied with the three post Cold War nuclear disarmament treaties, Russia and China, those cheaters, did not. Time for the U.S. to smarten up, time for Uncle Sucker to turn into Uncle Bust You A New One!

As Fred (remember him?) points out, this allows the Pentagon, with Mattis leading the way, to jump back into the warm, stagnant pond of “nuclear strategy,” where the more horrifying a scenario is, the more likely it is, a pond where the only sure reality is the dream, or rather the will-o-the-wisp, of absolute omnipotence. According to the myth generated by hysterical neo-cons, first during the administration of that damned hippie Richard Nixon, and then honed to stiletto sharpness during the reign of hillbilly Jimmy Boy, we cannot allow “the enemy” (which, I repeat, we no longer have) to achieve “parity”, because, because, well, suppose the enemy attacked us first. Well, sure, we’d still have enough firepower to wreak unimaginable havoc upon them, denying them any hope of victory, but would we do it? Suppose we had a sissy president, who, you know, wouldn’t have the balls to kill, say, 75 million people out of pure spite. And suppose the enemy knew that! Then they’d just blow the shit out of us, and we’d do nothing! And they’d win! So we can’t have parity! We have to have absolute, total, fucking overwhelming superiority in every aspect of, well, everything! So the enemy would be absolutely terrified of us!

Well, of course, “the enemy” doesn’t want to be absolutely terrified of us. They want to maintain what used to be called a “credible deterrent”. Which guarantees an unending arms race. Which of course is what the hawks really want. The neocons want endless international tension, requiring the sort of leadership that only the toughest of the tough can supply (meaning that Democrats will have to “prove” that they just as tough as Republicans, à la Hillary Clinton), while the military wants jobs!

Fred does a good job of describing our already massive (already grotesquely massive) “deterrent”, which is in its own right a massive waste of money, because no one wants a nuclear war! Because a nuclear war would be so destructive that, as John F. Kennedy was wont to say, “the survivors would envy the dead.”

But our military is at its wit’s end, a solution in search of a problem, sitting on a huge pile of useless weaponry, weaponry that, sadly, is, you know, boring and out of date and basically not cool and, worst of all, does not provide careers! If we don’t need this stuff, then we don’t need the guys who operate it either! One can wonder if the massive bribery scandal of “Fat Leonard”, which has led to the investigation of 60 (!) admirals, isn’t at least in part the result of years of sailing endlessly about, pretending to have a mission and purpose, when in fact the only purpose is to spend money. Hey, if wasting money is our job, we might as well enjoy ourselves!

Thanks to Trump, and the Republican party in general, the military is going to get a great big pot of new money to play around with, to waste on ever more esoteric and non-functioning weaponry (aka “jobs programs”—see my rants on our out-of-date-for-forty years and counting bomber program here). Furthermore, the Trump Administration continues to gin up hysteria regarding the “threat” of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, which does not threaten us, at all. In fact, one might say that we possess an overwhelming superiority in nuclear weapons vis-à-vis North Korea. But in the Trump Administration’s “final” (to date) refinement on nuclear “strategy”, even overwhelming superiority isn’t enough.

Afterwords
Fred expresses his skepticism regarding unthinkable thinkin’ folks in a more measured, not to say grown up manner: “As someone who has studied the nuclear world for 40 years and has interviewed hundreds of its denizens for a book (Wizards of Armageddon) and many articles, I have learned this: When it comes to nuclear strategy, there is no reality. The weapons are real, and their destructive power is cataclysmic. But the countless attempts to harness this destruction into an elaborate war-fighting strategy are excursions into metaphysics, not the hard-boiled realism that its purveyors like to believe.”

Fred is particularly hard on the new nukes folks’ latest hardon, a “mininuke”, which apparently the Russians have, and so we must have.

“Mattis’ argument, as laid out in the Nuclear Posture Review, is that the Russians have low-yield weapons and that they’ve simulated using them in military exercises that simulate a war with the NATO nations in Europe. Therefore, we have to match this capability, so the Russians don’t think that they can lob some mininukes at Western Europe, as a pressure tactic, leaving us no choice but to surrender or to fire back with much more powerful weapons, which would prompt the Russians to fire back at us.”

As Fred points out, we already have low-yield weapons, which generally run 5-10 kilotons, as compared to the Hiroshima bomb of 13 kilotons. But, to make an argument that Fred doesn’t, the Hiroshima bomb killed a minimum of 75,000 people. If the Russians used a number of “mininukes” on NATO forces, they would be guaranteed to kill thousands of American troops. How could any American president allow that to happen? All the war games developed back in the Cold War days indicated that general conventional war in Europe, not to mention a “mininuke” one, would rapidly escalate to an all-out exchange. In his (justly) little-read book, Thinking About National Security, Harold Brown, secretary of defense under Jimmy Carter, tried to justify our unjustifiable chemical weapons program. Brown acknowledged that chemical weapons don’t work very well, and also acknowledged that every study concluded that any Soviet use of such weapons against U.S. forces would inevitably result in a full-scale nuclear war. Well, when studies don’t tell you what you want to hear, you ignore them. Which is pretty much nuclear “strategy” in a nutshell.³

Fred also notes that Barack Obama arrived in the White House as a dedicated no nukes dude and ended up signing off on virtually whatever multi-billion-dollar must-have the hawks put on his plate. Why? Because 95% of the American “left” simply takes no interest in foreign policy or military affairs. Sure, they hate “war”, but other than that they won’t lift a finger. No politician is going to get in a pissing match with a bureaucracy as powerful as the Pentagon unless he knows he will have a strong, well-organized pressure group—something similar to the pro-choice movement—at his back. But liberal voters don’t care. When even Bernie Sanders is the Pentagon’s bitch—and as long as Vermont gets a cut of Pentagon cash, he will be—the chances for a “sane” nuclear policy are slim to none.