The Bureaucracy of Deterrence

Abstract

To remake U.S. nuclear weapons policy, the next president will need to overcome entrenched interests. How arduous a task will this be? Ask Bill Clinton.

Much as critics of the Bush administration may wish that January 20, 2009 would automatically change U.S. diplomacy and reignite nuclear disarmament efforts, national policy is not so easily remade. Current attitudes have deeper roots, and ushering in a new president will not in itself bring about cutbacks to the nation's nuclear arsenal or improvements to U.S. nuclear strategy. In fact, despite his stated good intentions, it was during President Bill Clinton's tenure that some of the progress made by the first President Bush ground to a halt. Clinton's blind spot was that he didn't understand enough about the nature of bureaucracy. Let this be a primer for the next president so that he or she can avoid making the same missteps.

Among the many factors working against fundamental change is the inherent resilience of bureaucratic culture. Large organizations tend to defend familiar, long-standing ways of doing business, resisting even urgently needed change. It is hard to get agencies to work together to undertake new directions even when told to do so by senior elected officials.

As the Nuclear Posture Review conducted during the first-term Clinton administration illustrates, career officials are capable of mounting a devastating defense against initiatives put forth by political appointees. This is especially so when a president prioritizes other matters, defers too much toward certain agencies, or neglects the demands involved with executing such initiatives. Only sustained, painstaking effort on the part of the new president and senior appointees–no matter how heartfelt their aspiration for nuclear reform–can possibly hope to surmount bureaucratic impediments to business as usual.

Bureaucratic institutions have two intrinsic shortcomings. First, they shroud themselves in administrative secrecy, defying public oversight and accountability. Second, well suited as they may be to routine functions, large organizations find it exceedingly difficult to shift course, even when the political context changes.

Secrecy and resistance to change are particular hallmarks of the agencies responsible for determining the content and direction of U.S. nuclear strategy. For decades, the Strategic Air Command (now the U.S. Strategic Command) has refined elaborate targeting plans and operational criteria to guide the use of nuclear forces in a crisis. But this apparatus, charged with implementing the substance of deterrence, remained largely immune from systemic political oversight or participation for decades.

The dichotomy between the planning and policy spheres underscores the distinction between “operational” doctrine (what would actually happen in the event that deterrence fails) and “declaratory” doctrine (the public statements made by leaders to assuage public and international concerns by stressing the peaceful or war-preventing purposes of the U.S. nuclear arsenal).

Nuclear weapons have commonly been intended strictly for deterring aggression. Forces must be designed to absorb and survive any nuclear attack while remaining able to strike a devastating retaliatory blow that negates any advantage an aggressor might hope to gain from a surprise attack. Since the earliest days of the nuclear age, however, both political and military authorities have accepted that deterrence only works if matched by the demonstrated ability and willingness to wage nuclear war.

Given the cataclysmic effects likely from even a limited nuclear strike on U.S. soil, military planners have steadfastly protected the option of launching prompt, massive attacks before an enemy's weapons have reached their targets. The political conception of “riding out” an attack has long been overshadowed by efforts to rely instead on high-alert counterforce weapons.

Evidence of the discrepancy between political and military conceptions of nuclear deterrence is particularly evident in the Oval Office. From the moment after taking the inaugural oath, a new president is granted sole authority to decide whether and when to use U.S. nuclear forces. But few presidents take the time to learn the numbers and kinds of weapons that would be launched in different contingencies, against what targets, and to what effect. Most of them lack the expertise about the content of nuclear war plans needed to make a decision of this magnitude.

One of the first tasks for all new presidents is to learn about the “football.” This briefcase, carried by a presidential aide at all times, instructs the president how to release the launch codes delegating the authority to initiate nuclear strikes. Before thinking about using the briefcase, the president is first briefed by the military command about U.S. nuclear war plans and targeting options. The history of such briefings is disturbing. Ronald Reagan is said to have fallen asleep during his. 1 Jimmy Carter, who displayed genuine interest in such matters, stunned his briefers when he asked why the United States couldn't replace the thousands of strategic warheads targeted against the Soviet Union with a force of “200 survivable missiles.” Compounding this lack of expertise in nuclear strategy, a president also has little time to make a decision–fewer than 30 minutes from the time Washington receives reliable warning of an impending strategic attack. Citizens can take some comfort knowing that current nuclear plans are more flexible in selecting targets than were plans for massive, centralized attacks against the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. But, notwithstanding the geopolitical changes since then, there has been no effort to abandon the imperative for large-scale, instantaneous attack against any conceivable enemy.

Despite countless changes in nuclear doctrine devised by political leaders over successive administrations, there has been a negligible impact on the configuration and operational objectives of U.S. nuclear forces. As a country, we have never had a real debate about how much deterrence is enough.

In tackling the challenge of changing U.S. nuclear policy, the next administration should take a few lessons about bureaucracy from German sociologist Max Weber. Perhaps history's foremost analyst of public administration, he held up the bureaucratic method of organization as a marvel of scientific efficiency. For him bureaucracy was a kind of mechanical extension of the will of a sovereign. 2

Weber maintained that the more centralized a bureaucracy is, the better. Because it concentrates power in the hands of a few officials accountable to the people, central organization is “finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations.” Weber insisted that appointing carefully selected individuals to preside over the bureaucracy is better than electing them. By installing like-minded officials in the bureaucracy, elected officials stand some chance of exerting control over organizations that are highly resistant to outside pressure–even from their formal superiors.

Though writing almost a century ago, Weber identified certain flaws in modern administrative organization that continue to bedevil policy makers today. He once observed, “fully established, bureaucracy is among those social structures which are the hardest to destroy.” Each individual official is “only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march. The official is entrusted with specialized tasks, and normally the mechanism cannot be put into motion or arrested by him, but only from the very top.”

Weber's analysis shows why bureaucratic institutions tend to reject or marginalize the importance of challenges out of sync with prevailing assumptions and familiar routines. While concentrating power in the hands of career officials bolsters the efficiency of the organization, it also buffers the organization against political and popular oversight, allowing the institution's interest to overrule that of the larger society it was created to serve. Administrative institutions, especially but not exclusively those with national security mandates, will reflexively attempt to pursue their activities out of public view. A corollary of this secretive approach: It allows career officials to preserve their comparative advantage in technical knowledge over elected officials and ordinary citizens.

Despite countless changes in nuclear doctrine devised by political leaders over successive administrations, there has been a negligible impact on the configuration and operational objectives of U.S. nuclear forces. As a country, we have never had a real debate about how much deterrence is enough.

Only the top leadership of an institution has much chance of instituting change. That said, the need to exercise genuine authority and deflate potentially fatal resistance requires leaders to understand the inner workings of the institutions they hope to reform. Inserting political appointees gives presidents the opportunity to institute real change only if they take an active interest in setting strategic priorities, and if they stand behind their appointees when resistance coalesces in the ranks–as it will.

Reshaping nuclear strategy is a difficult undertaking, not because the Pentagon is uniquely prone to bureaucratic politicking, but because it is so big and consequential. The resources funneled into defense annually have risen rapidly in the last three decades. It is difficult for Congress, let alone the public, to amass enough expertise to evaluate specific weapons programs or their price tags. Legislators seldom immerse themselves in such details. Along with bigger budgets, the Pentagon has gained in relative influence over other parts of the executive branch as a result of a succession of military interventions, from the Balkans in the 1990s to Afghanistan and Iraq today.

Budgets for nuclear weapons may have declined in relative terms since the end of the Cold War, but this reduction has had a marginal effect at most on nuclear planners' latitude to resist externally imposed policy changes. Long-held operational precepts prevail.

In evaluating national security policies, it is crucial to understand how rival institutional interests interact as they adapt to the White House's stated objectives. Like other cabinet agencies, the Defense Department has a distinct organizational culture. The Pentagon defies Weber's notion of government institutions obediently implementing a sovereign's decrees and does not behave as a simple extension of the presidential will. These realities are likely to endure as the United States prosecutes a global counterterrorist campaign that transcends the boundaries between war and peace–forcing government agencies to break with routine.

Recent presidential administrations have missed several opportunities for nuclear policy change. The post-Vietnam interval of military soul-searching and reform left more or less intact the nation's decades-old policy for countering the Soviet nuclear threat. Nuclear doctrines came and went throughout the Cold War, but the premise remained that the prospect of nuclear devastation unleashed in highly orchestrated operations would deter threats.

Technical constraints partially account for this. The Strategic Defense Initiative, the Reagan administration's one serious attempt to escape the straitjacket of offensive nuclear war, remains a futuristic vision, not least because progress toward developing even rudimentary technology for ballistic missile defense has been so halting. This is to say nothing of Reagan's aspirations for a nuclear-free world safeguarded by layered, space-based defenses. The technology to realize such aspirations remains too elusive to make much difference in the strategic calculus.

The core precepts of nuclear strategy did not come under significant challenge while the Soviet Union existed. But habitual–and, as some Clinton appointees saw it, less-than-optimal–ways of thinking about nuclear doctrine persisted after the Soviet Union collapsed, handing the incoming Clinton administration an opportunity to reorient and dramatically reduce the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal.

George H. W. Bush had set the stage by ordering bold changes to the nation's nuclear policy. By presidential edict he withdrew nearly all tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, took older missiles off alert, and terminated or retired a variety of weapon systems. Bush recognized that in place of deliberate Soviet strategic attack, the linchpin of U.S. deterrent strategy throughout the Cold War, new security challenges were emerging. Among other threats, the authority of the former Soviet states over the vast Soviet nuclear stockpile was wavering, and new states were ascending with overt nuclear ambitions.

When Clinton took office, many observers assumed he would continue or even accelerate the transformation of U.S. nuclear doctrine, allowing the United States to meet new threats with contemporary responses. In October 1993, Defense Secretary Les Aspin announced that the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review, the first fundamental examination of nuclear issues in more than 15 years, would involve “close work and extensive cooperation” among the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and the armed services. Everything–policy, doctrine, force structure, operations, safety and security, and arms control–was subject to comprehensive scrutiny.

The early days of the Clinton administration were full of bold talk. President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin issued a joint statement vowing to take “concrete steps to adapt the nuclear forces and practices on both sides to the changed international security situation.” Aspin and others pointed to the growing threat of “undeterrable” states that, despite minimal military capabilities relative to the superpowers, might be able to threaten U.S. interests with terrorist attacks using chemical, biological, or even rudimentary nuclear devices.

And there was reason to believe that resistance to reducing U.S. reliance on strategic nuclear forces had abated among the military services. Operation Desert Storm seemingly ratified the primacy of conventional weaponry. Senior officers and officials increasingly viewed strategic nuclear weapons as peripheral to future wars, if not a drag on their budgets in times of fiscal stringency. Indeed, by the time of the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, the professional military was urging the administration to consider implementing the lower force levels envisioned in the START III accord, whether or not the Russian Duma ratified START II. 3

Under these auspicious circumstances, Aspin, who had earned a reputation as a defense intellectual, evidently believed it would be possible to create a nuclear tabula rasa–a review of nuclear policy that reexamined the assumptions underlying the policy of deterrence and matched policy to force structure and doctrine. 4

Challenges to this grand vision soon surfaced. Despite the freewheeling spirit in which the Clinton political appointees at first approached the review, it quickly became obvious that the process would be neither as simple nor as collegial as the administration had hoped. Over the 10-month course of the Nuclear Posture Review, powerful dynamics appeared that illustrate the kinds of challenges likely to persist after 2008.

The Pentagon insulated itself from outside intrusion. The Clinton administration delegated the review largely to the Defense Department, where military officers and career bureaucrats could stymie the involvement of other agencies, “amateur” political appointees, and outside experts. “We certainly weren't about to invite any weirdos” from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to take part in the proceedings, declared one Pentagon participant. 5

The White House's hands-off attitude and the lack of direct presidential supervision of the process prevented meaningful interagency or outside review from taking place. Cold War orthodoxy won out. In all likelihood, the Clinton team would have fared better had it emulated the approach taken by the Bush Sr. administration, regarded the posture review as a true interagency endeavor, and backed it up with strong, insistent oversight on the part of the chief executive and his most senior advisers.

Career Pentagon officials operated within the confines of established orthodoxy. Especially striking was the role played by many senior career bureaucrats who served under Assistant Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who became the day-to-day supervisor of the posture review. It is a common dynamic for veteran players in bureaucracies to try to temper the sometimes-brash tendencies of political appointees, interpreting instructions from the appointees in terms the bureaucracy can understand. That is, tinkering with the wording and emphasis of written documents compiled in a review can subtly steer policy makers toward ground more familiar to career officials. In the case of the Nuclear Posture Review, the result was an emphasis on policy options favoring the nuclear status quo, accompanied by intense skepticism toward innovations seen as imperiling the existing consensus on nuclear weapons' central role in U.S. security.

Career Pentagon officials changed the subject. Resentful of the intrusive approach of the Clinton appointees and indifferent to the political dimensions of nuclear deterrence, they (perhaps unwittingly) shifted the terms of debate. What had been billed as an analytical process joining policy to strategy morphed into a struggle over arcane technical details surrounding the nuclear force structure.

Military officers churned out stacks of viewgraphs supporting traditional notions of deterrence based on longstanding targeting and war-fighting plans. The metric for judging nuclear requirements remained the same as during the Cold War years: the ability to hold at risk and destroy the Russian target base with a triad of forces, including assigning multiple weapons to the assets the enemy valued most. As a practical matter, how to define these assets–from missile silos to war-supporting industries–changed in no measurable way. A new posture was never seriously considered.

The workings of bureaucracy escaped the political appointees. Entranced by their Wilsonian conviction that dispassionate analysis and formal lines of authority could prevail over ingrained orthodoxy, they were unprepared for the ferocity of the defense waged by career officers and bureaucrats in the Defense Department. Nor did the president or his senior advisers intervene on behalf of political appointees–an essential element when trying to tip the balance of power in favor of reform. Open confrontation and civil-military tensions ensued, much of which was not only avoidable but also needlessly focused on prerogative rather than substance.

Senior officers, aided by career bureaucrats and by conservatives in Congress, found it easy to stall momentum toward innovation. High-level officials who had supported change capitulated quickly and didn't take the time to defend the process. The final report approved by Clinton's second defense secretary, William Perry, recommended only very modest force reductions, and it added new cautionary language about the need to hedge against the threat of a resurgent Russian hegemon.

Irony abounds in all of this. Bill Clinton, who came to office hoping to midwife a new nuclear order, in effect confronted the Russians not with efforts to relax tensions but with intransigence at a delicate moment in post-Soviet history. Worse still, new missions were added. The review contemplated the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, contravening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And any chance at a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty vanished amid debate over preserving a “war-fighting force,” along with the infrastructure for testing and possible new investment in nuclear weapons.

It is a common dynamic for veteran players in bureaucracies to try to temper the sometimes-brash tendencies of political appointees. In the case of the Nuclear Posture Review, the result was an emphasis on policy options favoring the nuclear status quo.

As Max Weber might have predicted, bureaucracy interpreted and acted on unfamiliar circumstances in familiar ways. The result: National policy deviated from the course ostensibly charted by a president and his appointees. So the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, with its talk of miniaturized earth penetrators and a strategy based on a “new triad” combining nuclear and non-nuclear weaponry, did not represent some radical departure masterminded by George W. Bush or Donald Rumsfeld. It had strong antecedents in the Clinton review–and the same thing may well happen again after 2008, absent forceful leadership from the top.

Several important factors kept the Clinton administration from reinventing U.S. nuclear strategy. For one, Clinton viewed domestic policy, the keystone of his victorious campaign for the White House, as his primary mission. Clinton also seemed cowed by his apparent lack of influence with the armed forces, exemplified by the controversy over whether gays should be allowed to serve in uniform. He tended to remain remote from the management or implementation of key decisions, especially if they involved controversies that might embroil him in new high-profile conflicts with the U.S. military.

Denied strong presidential support, many of Clinton's foreign policy appointees turned to other challenges looming on the horizon when the effort to do away with nuclear orthodoxy proved too arduous. They ceded the ground to military officers and career Defense Department officials.

The next U.S. president must re-member that nuclear strategy is as important as trade policy. Bush Sr. was known for doing the heavy lifting needed to achieve foreign policy goals, especially if they were bold and potentially controversial. Clinton, by contrast, was wary of engendering conflict with the military, the Pentagon, and Congress–and his wariness left subordinates to fight their battles alone, without enough political muscle to prevail.

Another piece of advice: Seasoned professionals, loyal to the president yet respected by careerists, stand a far better chance of defusing bureaucratic resistance than outsiders who come in seeking to impose aggressive–and unfamiliar–agendas on institutions that prize the familiar. Staffing a new administration wisely at the outset could be decisive for later endeavors.

The next commander-in-chief must also support appointees. Leadership is the art of superintending change. Presidents need to demonstrate their commitment to specific, high-priority strategic outcomes, state that these outcomes are nonnegotiable, and be prepared to intervene personally when the process encounters trouble. Tactics for implementation can be left to subordinates who can count on the president's full backing.

Finally, the president must realize that wholesale institutional change may be necessary to enable a new president to remake nuclear strategy and forces. Hiring, firing, promotions, and awards are some of the tools open to any administration, as are training and bureaucratic reorganization.

Incoming leadership must not assume it can impose its will on the Defense Department in matters of nuclear strategy. If anything, many in the Pentagon may be less inclined to accept significant alterations in the nuclear force posture now, when the strategic environment appears far more uncertain than it did in 1993 and 1994, when reasonable people declared that the end of history was at hand. Additional nations have joined the nuclear club in the meantime; others appear poised to do so, and rising great powers such as China are bolstering their own nuclear forces. The geometry of deterrence is far more complex than it was during the Cold War, tending to reinforce the conventional wisdom on the worth of nuclear arms.

Difficult work awaits a new president–but that's what Americans elect presidents to do.

Supplementary Material

Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START II)

Supplementary Material

Findings of the Nuclear Posture Review