Preventive Defense and U.S. Diplomacy
SJIR: In reference to the work you are now doing on preventive defense, how would you articulate the long-term strategic goals, specifically within a defense policy framework, that the United States must pursue as the post-cold war world system matures?
Perry: Let me start off at a level above defense, looking at the President’s point of view. President Clinton articulated the view that defense policy, economic policy, and political issues are all inextricably tied together. You could not pursue one without taking into account the others. So anything that I describe concerning defense policy or security policy should be thought of in that framework. One of the consequences was that the State Department and the Commerce Department have to work very closely with the Defense Department. Indeed we did, though there was not much precedent for those three departments working together.
Within the context of security policy, most Americans’ perceptions of what security policy is about today is influenced to a great degree by what they read in newspapers. They read about what’s happening in Bosnia, Haiti, or Rwanda, and they tend to think that national security is oriented around peacekeeping operations, or at most regional wars, like Desert Storm. To be sure, our military is sized to deal with regional conflict. With the end of the cold war, we brought down the size of the military dramatically and reduced the defense budget by about 40%. Because we envisioned that the tasks the military faced were regional wars and peace enforcement operations, we did not require the same size force as we had when we were trying to defend ourselves against a massive assault in Europe.
But while those events make the headlines, and indeed those events size the military, the major issue in my mind is what actions we can take in a preventive way to decrease the chance that a major threat to the United States will develop at some time in the future?a threat like we had in the cold war or a threat like we had during World War II—a threat to the very survivability of the nation. We have no such threat today. So in my mind, defense has two quite different components. One component is what we do on a day-to-day basis to prepare ourselves for regional conflicts and for the conduct of peace enforcement operations. The other component is what we do to prevent future major conflict or global wars. One example would be the actions we undertook in Russia and Ukraine to reduce dramatically the inventory of nuclear weapons and to safeguard the supply of fissile materials.
If I look at those preventive activities, I would divide them into three categories. The first category I would describe as those actions we take to deal with "what if" questions. What if Russia, early in the next century, goes the way of Germany in the 1930s? We should institute a whole set of programs that are designed to minimize the risk of that happening. What if China, early in the next century, were to go the way of Japan in the 1930s, and a Pacific conflict were to rise because of that? There is a great debate in our country today as to what our policy to China should be, and of course from a preventive defense point of view, the answer is one of constructive engagement, not a policy of isolation or containment. The third major component of preventive defense answers another "what if" question: what if terrorists or rogue nations were to get their hands on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, and use them against us? What if the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center, instead of 2000 pounds of high explosives, had used a tactical nuclear bomb or nerve gas or anthrax? We know from what they told us that what they were trying to do was kill hundreds of thousands of people, but they didn’t have the right tools for doing that. They had the intent, but not the capability. To the extent that we are successful in pursuing preventive defense, it will not make the headlines. It will be as Sherlock Holmes said, the dog that did not bark, and this a dog you don’t want to bark.
SJIR: What role does American economic power play in developing the kind of robust security relationships necessary for a successful preventive defense policy?Perry: There is a two-sided relationship between economics and security. The first and most obvious one is that establishing security and stability in a region allows for the development of a healthy economy. I have said in some of my speeches and papers that the amazing economic growth in the Western Pacific region in the last two decades has depended entirely on the fact that we have been able to maintain security and stability in that region. The economic growth in Western Europe in the last four decades is a result of the security that has been maintained there during that period. We now hope that the same economic growth will occur in Eastern Europe. That again will require the maintenance of security and stability. If you look at the economic shambles in some of the Balkan nations you can see the opposite effect. Because of the war in that region, the economy has been shattered. The maintenance of security is key to the health of the economy.
Similarly, the reverse of that is also true: a healthy economy in the United States permits us to maintain the kind of defense capability we need. One manifestation of that is that as our economy has grown in the last few decades, we have been able to maintain essentially a constant level of defense, with a declining percent of our GDP spent on it. We were spending during the cold war about 6% of GDP on defense and today it’s about 3%. To be sure, in the last ten years our defense has gone down in real terms, but it has decreased by about 40% rather than half.
SJIR: In 1992, you wrote that nuclear weapons should be relegated by nuclear powers to a "background role in security affairs." Would you advocate the same approach today in light of security developments in Asia?Perry: Yes. During the cold war, nuclear weapons were key to our strategy. Everything revolved around maintaining nuclear deterrence, and doing it in such a way that we would minimize the risk of accidental war rising from miscalculation. A major part of our defense budget was devoted to developing ever more capable and larger nuclear forces. When I was the Undersecretary of Defense in the late seventies we had in development a new ICBM, a new SLBM, a new family of cruise missiles?literally tens of billions of dollars a year would be spent on the development of this new generation of nuclear weapons. Today, none of those are in development. We have no ICBMs in development, no bombers in development, no SLBMs under development. Our budget has shrunk dramatically. That also has affected our operations. We used to keep nuclear bombers on constant airborne alert, and that has long since been stopped. We used to have our nuclear weapons targeted, ready to be fired at a target set in the Soviet Union, and that has all changed. Weapons today are not targeted at any nation or city.
So the thrust of our defense programs today is developing a conventional capability?one that can be used in regional conflicts, one that can be effective in peace enforcement operations. Nevertheless, we still keep nuclear forces on a stand-by basis which are much smaller but have still enormously destructive capability. We have not given up our nuclear capability, but I think the statement that it is secondary is certainly true.
SJIR: How important is technological superiority to defense operations, and how can it best be maintained by the United States?Perry: During the cold war, we depended on our technological superiority to offset the superior numbers of the Red Army. We did not want to have to maintain four to five million people in our armed forces, both because of the social disruption and because of the strain on our economy. We did want to be able to provide a strong deterrent force, and we did that by a dependence on nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, and technological superiority. We called that the offset strategy: using technology to offset superior numbers.
Today we’re not faced with that problem. When Desert Storm arose, we were in an actual war, but not against superior numbers. Allied forces were about equal in number to the Iraqi forces, and we faced weapons that had in fact been developed in Russia. In this case technological superiority was used against those weapons and against an equally sized force. What we got, then, was a quick, decisive victory with minimal casualties. Seeing the results of the Gulf War, we should maintain the ability to have such a quick victory against any regional power with whom we may enter a conflict, and to do this through technological superiority. So today, technological superiority is still an important part of our strategy, for different reasons than during the cold war, but still equally important. The primary component that we stress to achieve this technological superiority is information technology, through precision-guided weapons, through precision navigation, through digital communications systems. Those are the principle components which give us the technological superiority.
SJIR: Is the global dissemination of such information technology in the interests of U.S. foreign policy and a preventive defense agenda?Perry: In a sense, that question implicitly assumes that we have the ability to control the dissemination of such technology. Information technology is pervasive around the world today, and the United States is not in a position to control it. Many other countries?Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom?have a level of technology very close to our own, and therefore it is an existential fact that the technology is being disseminated all over the world. We have to plan our strategy on that knowledge. There are some elements of the technology whose transfer we try to control, particularly that technology which is useful for the development of weapons of mass destruction. It is a difficult task trying to control it, but we do. In general controlling information technology is like trying to sweep up the sand on a beach: it’s an enormous task. Therefore, we have to plan our strategy around the fact that this information is going to be disseminated.
Happily, from our point of view, simply having the technology available does not mean that it can be converted to military utility. Taking modern information technology and making it useful for weaponry is an art in and of itself. It involves systems engineering, in which you take components and make systems out of them. In fact, what you create in the technology of a modern army is a system of systems. What we demonstrated in Desert Storm, for example, is a system of systems in which we used components like radio, radar, and other communication systems and put them all together in a system of systems which controlled the information flow over the entire battlefield. We are the only nation that has developed that system of systems, and we are dramatically ahead of any other country in the world right now. That is where it is important for us to keep our edge, and we can do that even if the components are disseminated as they are.
SJIR: Does the persistence of the Turkish-Greek conflict demonstrate that NATO does not prevent hostility or the possibility of conflict between member powers?Perry: I would say just the opposite: that the fact that Greece and Turkey are both in NATO has prevented the long-simmering conflict between Greece and Turkey from erupting into military conflict. I think it has been one of the implicit successes of NATO. It has not been successful in helping them resolve these various disputes, but it has been successful in keeping those disputes from breaking out into military conflict.
SJIR: As it expands into Eastern Europe, how should NATO respond to serious friction among its member states?Perry: First of all, it should be careful as it expands not to bring into its fold problems of that nature. Indeed, when both Romania and Hungary applied for membership in NATO, one of the things we considered was the conflict that existed between those nations involving ethnic Hungarians living in Romania who were being mistreated by the Romanians. There were also border disputes between those two countries in the region of Transylvania that aggravated this problem. We told both of those nations that we would not entertain their membership in NATO if they could not resolve those disputes first, and they did. Five years ago, what looked as if it could break out into military conflict has been resolved since, and now one of the countries, Hungary, has been admitted to NATO, while Romania has an active application for admission. The first thing is to try to resolve conflicts like that before nations become members. The fact that both parties to a dispute are members of NATO has, I think, a dampening effect on the possibility that conflicts will evolve into military conflict.
While there is no 100% guarantee that NATO members will not fight each other, in general I believe that the principle function of NATO in Europe today is providing this zone of security and stability. First of all, NATO provides this security within its member states. It can also provide it externally in ways that prevent violence in the neighborhood from being imported into member nations. An example of that is Bosnia, where NATO nations banded together to provide peace enforcement operations to stop an ongoing war.
SJIR: Will the United States increasingly encounter difficulty in acquiring broad international support for military intervention in response to aggression?Perry: In every situation in which we have used our military forces we have sought to form a coalition both to share the burden of military operations and to gain the political approval of other nations. That has always been an important objective for us when we have been forced to use military operations. Bosnia was a classic case; we had dozens of nations banded together to provide peace enforcement during that conflict. But I don’t believe we should ever limit ourselves to coalition operations. There will be times when we strongly believe that our national interest requires us to conduct a military operation when our allies are unwilling to join us for whatever reason. In that case we have to be prepared to go it alone as well, although first we should seek a coalition.