Strategic Command and Control

by Bruce G. Blair

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.

355 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1984

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna]

H-Diplo

There have been many books written on NC3 issues over the years, both popular (like Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control) and scholarly (like Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety, Bruce Blair’s Strategic Command and Control, Paul Bracken’s The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces, and a tremendously useful volume edited by Ashton Carter, John Steinbruner, and Charles Zraket, Managing Nuclear Operations).

They range in their scale, scope, and underlying assumptions about the subject under study. Many of them are ultimately discussions about the underlying question of the control of nuclear weapons, if only because a lack of control (whether technical, physical, or political) over nuclear weapons is a very disturbing possibility, given their destructive potential. There is no consensus among them on this question of control, some arguing that control is very good, others emphasizing that it is not so good, others questioning the ultimate possibility of total control, and so on.

There is also a far less public side of this discourse which takes place almost exclusively in think tanks, military universities, and the Department of Defense itself. I speak not of classified studies, which must exist at some great length (a few have been declassified over the years), but rather of a sort of parallel unclassified discourse on this subject that sees its goals more as enabling “nuclear deterrence” than analyzing it.

This is its own “tribe” of sorts, with its own assumptions, norms, rules of membership, and general professional ecosystem.