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After summarizing the assumptions and evaluative methodology behind mainstream strategic theory, the study describes the current decentralized command and control system that, under conditions of surprise attack, could be unable to communicate with decision makers or with units responsible for executing the decisions.
During the past twenty-five years, U.S. strategists have argued that avoiding nuclear war depends on deterring a Soviet first strike by ensuring that U.S. forces could survive a surprise attack in numbers sufficient to inflict unacceptable damage in retaliation. U.S. military and political leaders have thus emphasized acquiring more powerful and accurate weaponry and providing better protection for it, while defense analysts have focused on assessing the relative strength and survivability of U.S. and Soviet forces. In the process neither has given sufficient attention to the vulnerability of the U.S. command, control, and communications system that would coordinate warning of an attack in progress and the response to it. In this study Bruce G. Blair examines accepted assumptions about mutual deterrence, force strength, and survivability, and concludes that the vulnerability of command, control, and communications not only precludes an effective retaliatory strike but also invites a preemptive Soviet first strike. After summarizing the assumptions and evaluative methodology behind mainstream strategic theory, the study describes the current decentralized command and control system that, under conditions of surprise attack, could be unable to communicate with decisionmakers or with units responsible for executing the decisions. Blair traces in detail the development of the system over three decades; the attempts to improve it through the use of procedural guidelines, alternative and redundant communications channels, and survival tactics; and the continuing vulnerabilities from improved Soviet weapons and the environmental forces engendered by massive nuclear detonations. Blair also analyzes the probable effects of proposals by the Reagan administration to strengthen command, control, and communications systems and provides recommendations for further strengthening and for altering related policies, deployments, and strategies to improve the stability of deterrence.
This book discusses command and control of strategic nuclear weapons. Its goal is to facilitate cooperation in this field between official and independent experts in Russia, the United States and other countries, and to make these matters a subject of public discussion.
The first overview of US NC3 since the 1980s, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications explores the current system, its vital role in ensuring effective deterrence, the challenges posed by cyber threats, and the need to modernize the United States' Cold War-era system of systems.
This history began as a project to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the US Strategic Command. As June 2002 approached, it became apparent that the command would be altered fundamentally by proposed modifications to the Unified Command Plan. We learned that a new command would be established that combined the missions of the United States Strategic Command and the United States Space Command. Names were proposed for the new command, but none of them seemed to fit. Then on July 11, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave the new command the same name as its predecessor. This unclassified history is of the US Strategic Command that was established on June 1, 1992, and disestablished on October 1, 2002. The original United States Strategic Command was established on the first of June 1992. It owed its existence to the end of the Cold War and a new view of the place of nuclear warfare in overall US defense policy. While the circumstances were changed, the idea of a unified command with responsibility for the employment of nuclear weapons was not new. When General George L. Butler was establishing US Strategic Command, he found it useful for cultural reasons to anchor the need for a STRATCOM in the past, and particularly to identify it with General Curtis E. LeMay, the widely acknowledged founding father of the Strategic Air Command. LeMay was an unapologetic advocate of a national defense strong enough to overwhelm any potential enemy, especially the Soviet Union, which he deeply distrusted. He was committed to a belief in air power's exclusive preeminence in achieving victory and, as a subtext to that, the possession of significant numbers of nuclear weapons and the airframes capable of delivering them to their intended targets. LeMay, who was not alone in this opinion, was successful in his argument and the emphasis in the post-Korean Conflict military build-up was in the production of nuclear weapons, the bombers to carry those weapons, and support structure for both. Another significant thread in the development of the early idea of a strategic command to control nuclear forces and targeting was interservice rivalry, particularly between the Air Force and the Navy. Until 1947, there were two services, the Army and the Navy. Air forces were part of the Army, and the US Marine Corps was under the Secretary of the Navy. The Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy were cabinet positions that had direct access to the President. Serious rivalries had existed between the two services as they competed for resources and during World War II friction had developed between the Army and Navy over coordination. Following the Second World War, the President and Congress sought to mitigate this rivalry through passage of the National Security Act of 1947. That act established the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, and the independent Air Force with its own Chief of Staff. The rivalry between the newly separate Air Force and the Navy was even more intense than that between the Army and the Navy.