‘Essentially sound and fundamental’: Historicizing the logic of deterrence in the counterforce debate

Peace through strength, victory through devastation ⁵

The creation of the USAF in 1947 coincided with the beginning of the Cold War and the atomic age, so the service needed to define its own role within this context. The organizational tradition commanders could draw upon offered interpretations of what the Cold War was, what strategy entailed, who practiced it and what role civilian experts might play in its construction. As its conceptual link, the tradition incorporated Clausewitzian guidelines, but also had specific roots in the theoretical work of pioneers of aviation such as Douhet or Mitchell: most importantly, the proposition that strategic air power was the symbol and embodiment of the American way of conducting war. ⁶ All strategic concepts developed by the USAF reflected the ‘one elemental and irrefutable truth’ that ‘the most influential element in international conflict is the application, or threat of application, of overwhelming destructive power’. ⁷ Theory was married to the recent experience of World War II (WWII): the USAF considered the strategic bombing of German and Japanese cities crucial to Allied victory. Thus, the doctrine was beyond doubt, ‘any weakness and fault [lay] in the manner in which [it had] been applied’. ⁸

The belief that strategic bombing had crippled the enemy’s economy and its ‘will to fight’ was a major rationale behind the creation of an independent air force. This not only helped the USAF secure a leading role in the postwar national security establishment as the service capable of delivering the A-bomb but also defined its understanding of general (nuclear) war. In terms of strategy, the USAF assumed that a future world war would also be an all-out war primarily fought via massive bombing campaigns targeting enemy cities. The nuclear revolution thesis, that atomic weapons had rendered war unthinkable and deterrence essential, ⁹ did not enter USAF thinking until the mid-1950s. As its first Chief of Staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg, put it, the bomb did not ‘alter our basic concept of aerial warfare. It has given us an additional weapon’. ¹⁰ Offense and defense were linked in the concept of a dominant force: offense targeted the enemy’s warmaking capacity (‘countervalue’) which also included his cities (‘counter-city’ or ‘counter-population’), while defense implied the destruction of the Soviet military (‘counterforce’). Both were to be carried out in a so-called ‘Sunday Punch’, a massive retaliatory attack that would hit Soviet cities, military installations and advancing troops alike. This strategy was presented as the operational translation of containment and massive retaliation, and the core of the Air Force’s approach to fighting a nuclear war. The requirements of the plan defined Air Force interests by creating a massive and expanding need for more and better weapons to maintain numerical and technological superiority.

Charged with carrying out the strategic bombing campaign, the USAF’s Strategic Air Command (SAC) spearheaded this institutional structure, perceiving itself to be a technologically cutting-edge, precise, highly trained elite force that could act as a deterrent force-in-being and, if deterrence failed, could also become a ‘primary instrument for winning the war’. ¹¹ Reliance on scientific advice both in terms of applied and basic research was a crucial element of this organizational tradition. Long-range manned bombers, nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles were all regarded as marvels of engineering, and veteran officers of WWII were aware of the scientific community’s contribution to strategy development, most notably in designing the German bombing campaign. Its institutional primacy was solidified with President Truman’s budget cuts that shifted funds away from conventional to nuclear weapons. Since SAC was the service capable of delivering these weapons, it could depict itself as ‘the nation’s and the free world’s main deterrent to war’. ¹² As will be elaborated below, this narrative of Air Force/SAC pre-eminence was repeatedly turned against the US Navy in interservice debates by arguing that weakening SAC would seriously jeopardize the security of the United States and its allies.

RAND’s science of warfare and entry points for its ideas

When plotting doomsday scenarios at institutions like the RAND Corporation, defense rationalists relied on a scientific tradition that included a belief in the superiority of the scientific method over the intuitive, experience-based approach of the military. Defense rationalism’s mode of reasoning claimed exclusive rights to rationality and objectivity. Arguing from the position of a nuclear revolution, defense rationalists questioned the relevance of historical experience, thereby attacking the core legitimizing element of the military tradition: that ‘this’ was the way things had been done since time immemorial. Instead of building on historical lessons, defense rationalism employed deductive reasoning for developing abstract theories of nuclear war. It imagined possible and impossible scenarios, yet often equated the possible with the theoretically permissible, thereby marginalizing any kind of outside criticism and developing methods and a language akin to a ‘nuclear priesthood’. ¹³ Nuclear strategy became ‘an ontology that confuses metaphorical concepts with real things’. ¹⁴ The widespread use of metaphors and analogies enabled defense rationalists to convey meaning to a wider audience by drawing on shared traditions, and simplifying formal arguments into more digestible narratives. This is how the plausibility, common sense, and legitimacy of abstract interpretations of the Cold War reality could be established. Put simply, defense rationalism was a constructivist exercise in ‘world-making’, ¹⁵ deploying persuasive narratives conveyed in a technological, exclusive language, the mastery of which elevated the audience into the elite group of defense intellectuals. ¹⁶

Defense rationalists at RAND took pride in their perceived intellectual independence, and did not feel they needed to cater to the USAF’s narrow interests. Yet RAND’s funding came from the Air Force, and its officers presented a primary audience for persuasion, as well as a source of up-to-date classified information. Consequently, Randites needed to take into account the patron’s perceived interests. Nevertheless, as RAND analyst Edward Quade recalled, systems studies often recommended changes ‘not only in how the policy-maker carries out his activity but in the objectives themselves’; thus, from the scientific point of view, ‘it would be self-defeating to accept the customer’s or sponsor’s view of what the problem is’. Hence for defense rationalists, persuading the Air Force meant ‘educating’ it. Trying to maintain the relationship while treating core USAF practices as an object of critical analysis, Randites sought to disseminate not only their findings in official reports and high-level briefings but also an appreciation of the science of warfare through seminars. The emphasis was on appreciation, however, not on a thorough understanding. As Quade put it, systems analysis is a form of art, not science, and art cannot be taught. ¹⁷ ‘Educating’ the patron thus involved metaphors and analogies as much as tables and statistics. These seminars could extend the links between analyst and officer, and could convey the ‘technostrategic’ ¹⁸ language that offered a sense of belonging to the nuclear cabal.

Due to the centrality of strategic nuclear bombing to US military policy, targeting became the key practice for the Armed Forces, and a source of contention among the services, with both the Navy and the Army offering alternatives to nuclear bombing. Thus, although the Air Force controlled the strategic bomber fleet, its primacy in supervising nuclear strategy was not self-evident, nor were its bids for the procurement of new and expensive technologies. In order to prevail in these interservice rivalries, the USAF relied on all of its assets, including the scientists at RAND. Although the Air Force did not actively seek RAND’s advice in specific issues during the initial years of the Cold War, aiding the service in the targeting debate seemed like a natural point of entry for defense rationalists. For RAND, the USAF acted as its primary audience: if the think tank was to influence nuclear policy-making, it needed to persuade the USAF first and foremost.

Dilemmas faced by the Air Force offered a continuous supply of entry points for defense rationalist ideas, with three prerequisites for influence. First, defense rationalists needed to demonstrate that their new methods produced better policies. Second, they needed to show that these same methods would give the patron an edge in policy debates through the scientific authority they conveyed. And finally, they needed to explain that the science of warfare was not antithetical to existing military traditions. All this amounted to an exercise in translation: often very technical basic research had to be translated through simplification, explanation, and education into a language that the military in and outside the USAF could understand.

Dilemmas and doomsday scenarios

In line with the framework used in this Special Issue (see the introductory article), dilemmas arise when material and ideational conditions can no longer be plausibly explained by a prevailing worldview. When encountering a dilemma, actors engage in a creative process of reformulation that may involve drawing on other traditions in order to construct ‘a new and more viable account of events’. ¹⁹ Due to its primary position in the targeting bureaucracy, the Air Force had always been the object of criticism, mostly by its arch rival, the Navy. Dilemmas arising from such challenges could be completely theoretical, such as criticism targeted at USAF strategies, or they could result from a need to assign meaning to external changes in technology, like the development of the hydrogen bomb, or to perceived changes in the Cold War status quo, such as the ‘bomber gap’ hysteria in the mid-1950s. These early dilemmas, however, could mostly be readily solved through the USAF tradition wherein nuclear strategy was framed as one of deterrence. War was assumed to be most likely initiated by a Soviet surprise attack, and deterrence was closely linked to being able to respond in kind (second strike deterrence). Not differentiating between the power to hurt (targeting cities) and the power to win (targeting enemy forces), operational strategies took all possibilities into account: both a conventional attack escalating into nuclear war and the aforementioned nuclear surprise attack. This master frame rested on SAC’s traditional role as the first and last line of defense, which in turn necessitated the maintenance of a large bomber force, well-defended bases, an arms race in missile technology, and a fairly centralized targeting bureaucracy headed by the USAF, with almost exclusive control over the allocation of the nuclear stockpile.

The so-called counterforce debate at the turn of the 1950s–1960s differed from these early bureaucratic parries. It combined both kinds of challenges: political-material and technological. On the political side, perceptions of growing parity between the two superpowers and the Soviet ability to strike the continental United States weakened trust in the Air Force’s interpretation of nuclear war as a quick knock-out blow to an inferior foe. On the technological side, the Navy’s new submarine-launched Polaris missile and the corresponding strategic concept of ‘finite deterrence’ offered to counteract these perceived shifts in the ‘balance of terror’, while rendering SAC’s entire posture obsolete. This time, critical points raised by the Navy – and partly by the Army – proved to be debilitating for USAF commanders as they challenged core beliefs, such as the superiority of manned bombers to other systems, or the precision, effectiveness and professionalism of the air corps. The existing tradition that the USAF could draw on proved to be insufficient to justify policies that were now regarded as wasteful, non-credible, inhuman, and potentially suicidal.

Consequentially, this particular dilemma necessitated a reinterpretation of the nature of nuclear conflict with the USSR and the specific mission the USAF should fulfill in the defense effort. The conceptual nature of the dilemma elevated the importance of strategic theorizing and forced the USAF to rely more on RAND’s expertise. Nevertheless, USAF commanders’ belief in the superiority of their own arguments was solid, and the use of defense rationalist theories rather served instrumental goals: RAND was to structure the conceptual debate, and devise ‘scientific’ talking points that could support the USAF narrative. This way of resolving the dilemma presented a perfect entry point for RAND ideas and policy beliefs, since the problem had to do both with framing the Cold War and the US defense effort itself.

The counterforce debate: An exercise in cross-tradition translation

With the advent of Soviet nuclear capabilities and the considerably more destructive hydrogen bomb technology, attention shifted from fighting toward deterrence and limiting the destructiveness of nuclear war. Yet war plans seemed to change little. By the end of the 1950s, the USAF narrative became untenable. The leaked Gaither report, commissioned by Eisenhower to make sense of the 1957 Sputnik affair, gave a pessimistic interpretation of SAC’s vulnerability as a deterrent while also spurring the ‘missile gap’ hysteria about a supposed gap between the United States and Soviet nuclear arsenals. The resulting public anxiety further strengthened critics of massive retaliation and USAF plans that would carry it out. With emerging parity (overblown by the missile gap), nuclear strategy had to be reinterpreted along a crucial question: what to do if deterrence fails?

The Navy used the missile gap to argue that, since the Soviets could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile fleet large enough to knock out SAC, the USAF was no longer capable of fulfilling its mission. The same argument the USAF previously used in budget negotiations could be turned against it: maintaining numerical parity and the expansive weapons requisitions it implied no longer mattered. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, rejected USAF strategies, arguing that they were excessively costly, potentially dangerous, and not credible due to SAC’s vulnerabilities. He suggested that instead of the bomber fleet, a small force of Polaris submarines targeting a ‘finite’ number of Soviet cities could stabilize deterrence. Polaris itself was a ballistic missile that could be fired undetected from a submerged submarine. Since the missile’s accuracy was rather low, it favored counter-city targeting that maximized ‘bonus damage’ (i.e. civilian casualties). As a counter-city weapon, Polaris supported minimum deterrence, that is, maintaining a limited nuclear arsenal that could survive a surprise attack and then hit enemy cities in retaliation. Burke first called for minimum deterrence as early as 1956, arguing that ‘military superiority in unlimited war no longer connotes ability to “win” – nobody wins a suicide pact. Thus all-out war is obsolete as an instrument of national policy’. ²⁰ The Polaris system, on the other hand, could offer security which ‘when achieved through mobility and concealment’ could even discourage an arms race. ²¹ This line of argumentation bore huge potential political costs for USAF, since it fitted neatly into Eisenhower’s philosophy of deterrence at the lowest possible cost.

The Navy’s campaign shocked the Air Force. ‘There is an all-out battle going on right now’, officers claimed, ²² and quickly realized that the solution to the problem lay in reframing deterrence. The USAF needed to be ‘much concerned with words if [they were] to defend successfully the concepts which [they] believe to be fundamental to national security’. ²³ So minimum deterrence was called ‘purely a bluff strategy’ ²⁴ while the USAF strongly emphasized that waging and surviving war was essential for deterrence. Therefore, an ‘optimum mix’ ²⁵ strategy – a combination of military, industrial, and urban targets necessitating a diversified posture – would be required instead of minimum deterrence. This USAF position was already framed in terms of an implicit counterforce strategy presented as ‘one leg’ of an optimum mix, but without a city avoidance element. Meanwhile USAF leaders tried to depict Navy ideas as risky for rejecting ‘war-winning’ objectives in a potential nuclear war. The optimum mix targeting solution, eventually endorsed by Eisenhower to save his massive retaliation, which was buckling under political pressure, was unsatisfactory for both services. The Navy could only weaken USAF dominance in nuclear targeting, and the USAF felt more and more uneasy as the Polaris project neared completion. The debate raged on in the preparatory process of the commissioned Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), a massive war plan that sought to coordinate strategy across services. ²⁶

General White, USAF Chief of Staff, saw the source of the theoretical debate in the black-and-white distinction between the Navy and USAF options. In a May 1959 letter, he argued that the dichotomy of positions was on the one hand confusing for the ‘layman’ as it presented an ‘all-or-nothing’ picture, and on the other hand, it implicitly validated the Navy’s restrictive position. This could not only lead to the validation of Polaris, White feared, but, as the next step, the elimination of ‘everything other than Polaris’. ²⁷ White interpreted the Navy’s challenge through the USAF tradition, as a danger to national security. He was convinced that ‘the quickest way for the United States to lose its life and freedom would be to adopt the city strategy’. ²⁸ So to challenge the Air Force’s hegemony still meant endangering national security. In order to gain the upper hand, White and his staff needed a conceptual tool that could present a nuanced position in-between two extremes, one that would still favor the USAF. Counterforce as developed at RAND could eventually fulfill this role and, due to the set of persuasive arguments associated with the idea, could be used to shift the interservice debate to the USAF ‘home base’ by problematizing the requirements and feasibility of counterforce, not the strategy itself.

At the time of the Polaris dilemma, the question of minimum versus maximum deterrence was still an unresolved issue for defense rationalism. For Randites, the central question was quite old: ‘thinking about the unthinkable’, that is, whether nuclear war was ‘winnable’ at all. Counterforce was first proposed as a control mechanism in case deterrence failed: by destroying enemy capabilities, it was to limit damage to the United States. The first conceptual breakthrough came from Victor Hunt in 1952 who not only suggested that cities should be avoided but also that enemy forces should be targeted instead. ²⁹ The new strategic idea was both to achieve psychological effects (pushing the Soviets toward avoiding US cities) and to reduce the risk to American cities and nuclear forces in case of a Soviet retaliatory strike (damage limitation through pre-emptive counterforce strikes). Hunt also outlined the basics of ‘intra-war deterrence’ by arguing that if the United States avoided cities, elements of deterrence could be extended even after war broke out. During this early stage, however, counterforce was only explored in theoretical terms because core empirical knowledge was lacking, for instance, about the location of Soviet missile sites. It was also opposed on grounds of its potential provocativeness. In sum, counterforce was still seen as primarily a damage limitation strategy, not as a deterrent or a war-winning strategy.

In its later form, counterforce was conceptualized around the primary metaphor of necessity, likening scenarios and actions to ‘compulsions foisted upon decision-makers’, that is, situations where they do not have a choice. ³⁰ Logical necessity in counterforce begs the question why one would retaliate once deterrence had failed. Defense rationalists explained this problem away through the aforementioned concept of intra-war deterrence, or deterrence as a bargaining process. According to this narrative, nuclear war would not be ‘spasmic’, but would involve a series of ‘exchanges’. The no-cities element gained importance at this juncture for three reasons. First, avoiding cities in retaliation could communicate consistency in US intentions, persuading the Soviets to avoid US cities in return. Second, by neutralizing the Soviet military, SAC could use the undefended cities as bargaining chips to end the war on ‘favorable terms’. ³¹ Finally, by targeting military forces and not cities, counterforce could theoretically be used at any level of intensity of a conflict without automatically escalating hostilities to all-out nuclear war. This nuanced conceptualization of deterrence-as-war-fighting finally delivered what the USAF wanted: something in-between finite deterrence and all-out war. However, initial USAF reactions were rather cold: avoiding enemy cities made little sense to the military mind.

The tension between stability (credible deterrence) and damage limitation (the ability to fight a war) was the basic theoretical problem with counterforce. ³² A mature variant of counterforce that synthesized these two concepts was elaborated in a 1959 RAND study, suggesting that ‘few measures for increasing deterrence lessen effectiveness for fighting war; and few measures for fighting war lessen the effectiveness of deterrence’. ³³ In order to directly appeal to resistant military commanders while conveying the core logic of counterforce, the authors rejected first wave city targeting on rational grounds, ³⁴ and – though praising counterforce – endorsed the then current mixed strategy. Despite being an ethical step back from no-cities due to its endorsement of ‘bonus damage’, the study was an important stage in the development of counterforce, as it dismissed pure city targeting on strategic grounds that were acceptable to the USAF.

Meanwhile, as the Polaris program neared completion, the Navy took its case to Congress, arguing that the expanding land-based forces of the USAF cost too much, and remained vulnerable. In response, the Air Force attacked finite deterrence and the invulnerability of Polaris while also making a bid for control over the system. Detaching counterforce targeting from countervalue or counter-city targeting as a stand-alone, in-between strategy was key to this campaign. As for defense rationalism, communicating counterforce to the USAF was a conflictual process, since defense analysts had praised the merits of Polaris on several occasions. As a reiteration and summary of RAND thinking, William Kaufmann prepared a study titled The Puzzle of Polaris in February 1960 that was forwarded to General White. ³⁵ Beyond explaining RAND’s position on counterforce, Kaufmann argued for Polaris as a deterrent, but highlighted its vulnerability and its questionable credibility toward European allies, effectively stating that a pure Polaris force would be a step back in terms of overall deterrence. Hence Kaufmann suggested a mixed force with a counterforce capacity, wherein Polaris submarines would threaten Soviet cities as an intra-war deterrent. ³⁶ The subsequent adoption of Kaufmann’s study marked a clear shift in the USAF’s discursive strategy. Finally, in possession of a conceptual framework that could link previous arguments, the USAF could argue on a scientifically authoritative basis.

In July 1960, White commissioned a study from RAND on the ‘feasibility and requirements of counterforce’ ³⁷ (co-authored by senior USAF officers) that later formed the conceptual basis of the USAF’s revamped discursive strategy in the interservice debate. ³⁸ The ideas within were disseminated as talking points to commanders via the issues of the Air Force Information Policy Letters for Commanders. When presenting to the USAF and external audiences, commanders were instructed to rely on RAND’s materials ‘in a simplified form’. ³⁹ Similar USAF-issued texts on mature counterforce, such as the widely circulated leaflet This Is Counterforce, ⁴⁰ reiterated RAND arguments in a coherent form, and directly targeted Navy points. Counterforce gained both scientific-rational and historical legitimacy. ‘Tested’ through countless war games, it became the ‘most rational military approach’ at every level of war, ‘essentially sound and fundamental’, one that built on ideas as old as the history of war, ‘as valid in the aerospace age as it was in the days of […] the musket ball’. Targeting enemy forces is what the military was supposed to do; therefore, counterforce was ‘traditional and fundamental and with few historical exceptions it has always been that way’. ⁴¹ This line of reasoning is a clear sign of ideational convergence between the military and defense rationalist traditions in its denial of the sui generis nature of the nuclear age.

According to the new discursive strategy, finite deterrence and city/countervalue targeting were products of a specific age, that of nuclear monopoly. But destroying the enemy’s ‘will to fight’ was no longer feasible, whereas destroying his capacity to harm the United States had become both feasible and reasonable. As the leaflet stated, ‘we have come full circle; back to the pre-strategic era’ where targeting cities ‘constitutes a desperate and illogical attempt to achieve deterrence through the threat of destroying organized society rather than achieving deterrence through the clear ability to gain military victory’. ⁴² The Navy thus wanted to kill civilians instead of soldiers, which was both senseless and barbaric. ⁴³ Unlike this non-credible, terroristic approach, counterforce ‘produces confidence in our strength’ since ‘effective deterrence is very closely linked to war-fighting and war-winning capabilities’. But counterforce was not only a substitute for city targeting: in the event of general war, it would also be flexible, providing ‘the widest possible range of choices if war developed from limited conflict’. As deterrence is never absolute, the superiority of military forces was the best way to deal with escalation and maintaining deterrence. This argument could, it was hoped, secure the continued primacy of the USAF in budget negotiations. Since war was ‘winnable’, the number of survivors defined the victor. Thus, survivability became integral to the arms race ⁴⁴ and synonymous with second strike counterforce: ‘the old adage that the best defense is a good offense is still valid. In the nuclear era, however, the best offense may also be the product of a good defense’. ⁴⁵

Polaris also had a place in a counterforce posture. A mixed posture would force the enemy to prepare for multiple kinds of attacks, ⁴⁶ and Polaris could play a crucial role in intra-war deterrence, holding Russian cities hostage. Additionally, if the United States openly communicated a counterforce posture, it could encourage the Soviets to reciprocate. In an absurd manifestation of defense rationalist logic, the document even claimed that ‘hostages’ would have a higher chance of surviving global nuclear war. But the ‘humanism’ of counterforce did not stop here – for the USAF, the concept even constituted a form of arms control:

as counterforce capabilities improve […] the total megatonnage required for a counterforce operation actually declines rather than increases. The whole philosophy of avoiding deliberate destruction of civilian populations […] is an important arms control measure, especially in view of the mutuality of interest implicit in the counterforce strategy. ⁴⁷

Thus, RAND ideas could be employed by the USAF to lend legitimacy to its position by collapsing deterrence and war-fighting into an ‘in-between’ solution. Offensive forces had a simple role: they were built to fight, whereas their deterrent effect was ‘only a peacetime by-product of their war waging capability’. ⁴⁸ To maintain a fighting force equaled maintaining deterrence.

Therefore, the Navy proposition was represented as nothing less than national suicide. Hence the new strategy, supplied by defense rationalists, gained a familiar role in the USAF tradition: one of justifying the Service’s position as the sole provider of national security. The Navy was depicted as inconsistent, ‘riding the “conceptual fence” – ready to go in almost any direction, if it suits their purpose and fits their current weapons system’, ⁴⁹ and its strategy, finite deterrence, was delegitimized through an exaggerated gambling metaphor, as ‘Russian roulette on a very grand scale’. The USAF’s efforts were eventually honored by the Eisenhower administration in 1960: the organizational mechanisms for developing the SIOP were practically put under SAC supervision. ⁵⁰ Targets pushed for by the Navy were included, but so were counterforce targets, and the Navy did not gain exclusive control over hitting its targets.

Whiz kids

The successful march of counterforce did not end with the adoption of a counterforce-heavy optimum mix solution in the SIOP. ⁵¹ The USAF also engaged the new Kennedy administration in an attempt to ensure the reproduction of its practices. Counterforce was presented to Secretary of Defense McNamara as the Air Force’s response to Kennedy’s forming strategic doctrine, and in opposition to the ‘incomplete rationalizations’ of the Navy that were ‘gambling some portion of our nation’s security’. ⁵² RAND’s presentation of the idea by William Kaufmann was especially appealing to the secretary. ⁵³ McNamara was familiar both with RAND’s approach and its staff: from the think tank he recruited some of the infamous ‘whiz kids’ who brought the methods and attitudes that defined defense rationalism into public administration.

Convinced by Kaufmann, McNamara began publicly promoting counterforce and indicated its possible endorsement as official strategy. In January 1962, he already stated that deterrence rested on the ‘capability to destroy the enemy’s warmaking capabilities’ and that nuclear weapons could be used to encourage the Soviets ‘to avoid our cities and stop war’. ⁵⁴ These remarks showed a shift in strategic thinking within the Kennedy administration: counterforce was endorsed in its no-cities variant, with damage limitation/intra-war deterrence in mind. In his 1962 Athens speech at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ministerial meeting, McNamara promoted counterforce – a strategy thought to be more credible than massive retaliation – in order to counter European aspirations for national nuclear forces. Later that year, McNamara publicly endorsed no-cities counterforce in his Ann Arbor speech:

The US has come to the conclusion that to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general nuclear war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives, in the event of a nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the Alliance, should be the destruction of the enemy’s forces, not of his civilian population. The very strength and nature of the Alliance forces make it possible for us to retain, even in the face of a massive surprise attack, sufficient reserve striking power to destroy an enemy society if driven to it. In other words, we are giving a possible opponent the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities. ⁵⁵

Note that McNamara reframed the essence of counterforce for his audience by emphasizing the humanitarian value of avoiding collateral damage in war. This rhetorical turn directly called upon sentiments of American exceptionalism, and expanded the discourse coalition around counterforce.

Although McNamara eventually backed away from the no-cities variant due to pressure from allies, his endorsement of counterforce marked ‘the high point of RAND influence’. ⁵⁶ Through the ‘McNamara revolution’, ⁵⁷ the defense secretary reshaped the Pentagon along RAND methods and guidelines which later acted as policy-making constraints across the US bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the USAF celebrated its success and increasingly came to rely on RAND ideas. Other services, starting with the Navy, also realized the potential of science-backed policy arguments, and started adopting the ‘RAND method’ within similar research institutions. Science and the military tradition were no longer seen as mutually exclusive, and military schools began adding defense rationalist subjects to their curricula. Meanwhile, civilian research was also affected by the turn in the military. During the Cold War, (nuclear) defense was ‘where the money was’, so research institutions and universities tried to cater to military needs, adjusting their research agendas as well as their methods according to the RAND template. ⁵⁸

Conclusion

This article has interpreted the counterforce strategy as an emerging narrative within the US armed services and professional defense analysts about how to achieve success for the United States in a potential nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. It has demonstrated how counterforce became the rational, historically plausible strategy that appealed to the military tradition, common sense, and moral considerations alike. Through the development of a counterforce narrative, the USAF could present itself as the most sophisticated service both in terms of its ideas, goals, and hardware, able to control the developing dangerous situation of numerical parity between the superpowers. This control not only extended to general war but also to limited conflict, thereby delegitimizing the Army’s bids for a conventional build-up. Defense rationalists for their part could successfully disseminate their ideas – and the policy beliefs they carried – on a crucial question in a fashion that could appeal to both their USAF patron and the wider policy elite, notably White House presidents and their national security advisers. Ideational influence was the result of a gradual process of persuasion, the molding of often contradictory concepts along a narrative that made sense to USAF. The adoption of counterforce – even in its limited form, within an optimum mix – shows the defense rationalists’ ability to establish links between their and the military’s traditions.

By the early 1960s, therefore, the particular kind of scientific tradition known as ‘the science of warfare’ had thus proven to be an excellent source for persuasive rhetoric, and consequently a source of stable institutionalization. As the holder of ultimate authority on ‘truth’ about ‘how the real world works’, defense rationalists could claim to be defining the essence of Cold War nuclear conflict. The multi-faceted dilemma of the Polaris program and minimum deterrence in the counterforce debate exemplifies how defense rationalists established and actively molded cross-tradition links, using armed service dilemmas and bureaucratic rivalry to improve the persuasiveness of their policy ideas. The underlying bureaucratic dilemma acted as a permissive condition for external advice: the USAF tradition was simply incapable of countering both the Navy’s technological and theoretical challenge at the same time. Turning to RAND, USAF officers allowed defense rationalists to not only provide a solution to the problem the patron raised but reframe the dilemma, as well as the whole policy discourse on what nuclear war was and how it should be fought. The successful reframing of the policy discourse along defense rationalist terms during the interservice debate through the idea of counterforce eventually led to the proliferation of defense rationalist policy beliefs across the US bureaucracy, with an impact that lasts to this day.