Counterforce Warfighting: A Chivalrous Approach to Nuclear War
What does "limited nuclear war" mean? What is this strategy, and is it still useful?
The strategies discussed both in this article and in the final part of this series deal with the question of the usefulness of nuclear weapons in an environment of Mutually Assured Destruction. These strategies reject the strategy of Nuclear Superiority, on the basis that you cannot develop enough weapons or countermeasures to escape MAD. At the same time, they reject the strategy of Pure MAD on the basis that MAD does not prevent intense security competition between states. The strategy of Counterforce Warfighting suggests that nuclear weapons may be used on select targets in a manner that does not provoke retaliatory use on civilian targets. In essence, it envisions a limited nuclear war in which both sides target the other’s nuclear weapons but refrain from attacking cities. This counterforce exchange is a step above mere conventional war or the detonation of a tactical nuclear weapon to break the nuclear threshold, but below a general exchange which would involve strikes on countervalue targets such as urban areas.
The strategy of Counterforce Warfighting argues that it is necessary to prepare for this kind of conflict. It argues that the state with the better counterforce capabilities possesses an advantage in a confrontation. This is on the basis that because its enemies know, should the conflict escalate to the level of a limited nuclear exchange, they would lose Therefore, they would choose to back down rather than escalate. Proponents of Counterforce Warfighting argue that MAD does not inherently prevent conflict between the nuclear powers. Just as the Stability-Instability paradox suggests that Mutually Assured Destruction allows nuclear powers to wage conventional war with one another, Counterforce Warfighting argues that a limited nuclear war can be fought without either side resorting to a general exchange, though the possibility remains on the table.
This is not to say that Counterforce Warfighting advocates for nuclear war, but that it argues that this kind of limited war is on the table, and exists as a level between conventional conflict and all-out nuclear war. As such, it argues the necessity of developing counterforce capabilities so as to be prepared in the event a confrontation escalates to that level. Under the assumptions of Counterforce Warfighting, failure to develop the capabilities needed to fight a war at the limited-nuclear level would leave a state in a position in which it is forced to concede to the enemy or fight an all-out nuclear war, something that must be avoided at all costs under MAD.
The Escalation Ladder
The most important theoretical concept to understanding the strategy of Counterforce Warfighting is nuclear theorist Herman Kahn’s Escalation Ladder. A system’s theorist, Kahn developed the ladder as a way to conceptualize the path to nuclear war. At each rung, both participants may test the strength and will of the other, with the weaker having the choice between escalating and conceding.
Within this, Kahn defined the concept of “escalation dominance,” as a situation in which a state possesses superiority at the current level of escalation and successfully deters its opponent from escalating. So, for example, if country A mobilized more rapidly than country B, country B was defeated at the “mobilization” level of escalation. From there, it has the choice between conceding the point at issue or moving up the escalation ladder, for example by beginning conventional war. If country B chooses to concede rather than escalate, whether because it does not believe it would have the advantage at a higher level of escalation or because it does not believe the matter in dispute is worth risking escalation over, country A can be said to have escalation dominance.
The strategy of Nuclear Superiority advocates for seeking escalation dominance at the very top of the ladder, trying to position to outright win a nuclear war. This strategy lost viability with the advent of Mutually Assured Destruction in the 1960s. While proponents of Nuclear Superiority remained, there was an imminent need to develop strategies that took MAD as a starting point. The strategy of Pure MAD argued that the dangers of nuclear warfare were so extreme as to preclude the higher rungs of the escalation ladder, including conventional war between the nuclear powers. This perspective rejects the concept of escalation dominance, arguing that MAD remains the ultima ratio that prevents one nuclear power from coercing another.
Counterforce Warfighting argues that while MAD is inescapable (at least for the time being), intense security competition is nevertheless common between nuclear powers and that states will seek to increase their own power at the expense of rivals. MAD, in their view, is not alone sufficient to deter this behavior. States cannot credibly threaten their rivals with nuclear war every time they do something that displeases them. Consequently, every level of the escalation ladder is in contention, and the more of them a state has superiority in, the more likely it can resolve any crisis that occurs favorably.
Most simply, the idea of Counterforce Warfighting is a way of thinking about how nuclear weapons might be used by a country to gain an advantage without causing a general nuclear exchange and suffering mutual annihilation. As the name suggests, it proposes that a limited nuclear war can be fought in which the two belligerents attack each other's arsenals with counterforce weapons, both sides safely retaining their second-strike countervalue weapons. Because these countervalue weapons are safe, both sides are deterred from escalating the conflict as mutually assured destruction remains in effect.
The Limits of Limited Nuclear War
An escalation ladder is a useful tool for explaining how something as unthinkable as a nuclear exchange might occur and for contextualizing the actions of states within a route to mutually assured destruction. Counterforce Warfighting is therefore seen as a step before general nuclear war, where warheads are used exclusively on enemy nuclear targets. However, a closer examination of the higher tiers of escalation make the practical distinction between levels of escalation difficult to believe. How could a country fight a “limited” nuclear war without causing a total response? How could any country trust that the nuclear weapons it sees its enemy launching are aimed only at “limited” targets? It is very difficult to tell a plausible story of how a nuclear war could be fought without either side resorting to a general exchange.
This is especially the case because the best defense against nuclear annihilation is preemption. Waiting to see whether an attack is limited or general means either losing the chance to retaliate or failing to destroy an enemy’s weapons on the ground, before they can be used to kill tens of millions of your civilians. As such, the situation biases states towards an all-or-nothing approach to nuclear war. Starting a limited nuclear war robs you of the opportunity to decapitate an enemy’s arsenal and gives you few reasons to believe that they will understand and abide by the terms of the limited exchange. You get the worst of both worlds, a total nuclear war and no opportunity to destroy any substantial part of your enemy’s arsenal.
Proponents of the strategy of Counterforce Warfighting argue that communication in a crisis can control escalation and that signaling preceding it can create the possibility of a limited exchange. After all, both sides have strong incentivizes to avoid total nuclear war, even if at some point nuclear war becomes inevitable. Making a limited exchange the first resort of the nuclear powers allows for an off-ramp. While even a limited nuclear war is a terrifying outcome, it’s undoubtedly preferable to mutual annihilation.
Nevertheless, there is a very large question mark hanging over the crucial assumption that a limited nuclear war can be fought in the first place. The strategy of Counterforce Warfighting only has utility if that assumption is valid. If you cannot conduct a counterforce strike without provoking a countervalue response, then nuclear weapons can only be used in the context of a strategy of Nuclear Superiority, where the attempt is made to escape MAD outright, rather than assuming the enemy will play by the same rules of “limited” nuclear war. If that strategy is not viable and MAD is in fact durable, then the escalation ladder has far fewer rungs than Kahn suggested, making investments in limited nuclear war superfluous.
A Theory of Victory?
A further criticism of Counterforce Warfighting is that it’s not clear what victory would look like. For this article’s obligatory Clausewitz quote, we may turn to the famous “No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.” Counterforce Warfighting can provide a method, but it does not provide a clear understanding of how its means can be used to attain political ends. The “victor” in Counterforce Warfighting is the side with the most of its counterforce capabilities intact. It’s not clear how this state of affairs would force the loser to concede anything of political value. Both sides remain deterred by the threat of MAD, so what does it matter who has more counterforce warheads left over?
In conventional warfare, the victorious party occupies territory and, by weakening the capacity of its opponent to resist, threatens to occupy more of it. This threat of occupation and of the forceful seizure of land is what induces a defeated opponent to come to terms. This is why Clausewitz considers war as not merely an act of policy, but a true political instrument. To be victorious, a state must inflict (or credibly threaten to inflict) sufficient suffering on its enemy that its enemy prefers to concede whatever political object is at question. After all, a country always has the option to continue a war, in some form or another. Victory means creating a situation in which the price of continuing the war is higher than that which the victor hopes to extract in the peace. The higher the victor aims in terms of political concessions, the more complete the victory (and the more suffering threatened, even implicitly by the helplessness of the defeated) must be in order to compel peace.
Counterforce Warfighting has no mechanism for inflicting suffering. It is deliberately sanitized of any threat to civilian populations for fear of prompting a countervalue response. As a result, “victory” in such a theorized limited nuclear war has no compelling power. The “defeated” party is under no compunction to concede the slightest thing to the nominal victor. If you’re losing a conventional conflict, it makes no sense to escalate to a counterforce exchange—the superiority in counterforce weapons that victory in an exchange would bring has no ability to reverse defeats on the battlefield or coerce your enemy to cede territory. In short, a counterforce battle is one in which winning has no clear connection with victory in the war (defined as gaining some political object, or denying to your enemy).
The Dual-Use Problem
The questionable usefulness of winning a limited nuclear war is enough to make the strategy unappealing on its own. In addition, to make use of a strategy of Counterforce Warfighting, one has to thoroughly answer the question as to how to ensure a limited nuclear war remains limited. Central to this question is what we might call the “dual-use problem,” which is that countries have not neatly partitioned their nuclear forces into counterforce and countervalue, so that one may clearly be targeted without endangering the other. Nuclear weapons are specialized towards one purpose or another, but each can be used for either purpose with reasonable efficacy. A counterforce warhead may not do as much damage to an urban area as one specialized for the countervalue mission, but in both cases the death toll will be counted in the millions.
For successful counterforce warfighting, targets such as early warning radars, anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs), and nuclear capable bombers and submarines, must be attacked and destroyed. If this list of targets rings a bell, that is because it is a subset of targets needed for a “splendid first strike” in the strategy of Nuclear Superiority. As a result, there is no way for a state to disambiguate the limited nuclear war envisioned by Counterforce Warfighting from the all-out approach of Nuclear Superiority. When you see your ability to respond to a nuclear attack start getting destroyed, the clear response is to launch your nuclear weapons before they are destroyed on the ground by an imminent first strike by your enemy.
As a result, a state cannot purely target another’s counterforce arsenal, without also destroying targets that would threaten its second strike capability, on which MAD depends. In turn, the receiving state cannot distinguish whether the attack is merely a limited exchange, or the first wave of an all-out attack intended to destroy its retaliatory capabilities. It is this difficulty that is ultimately fatal to the strategy of Counterforce Warfighting: attempting to implement the strategy relies on both sides trusting one another enough to believe that the nuclear war will remain limited and that neither side has any illusions of nuclear superiority. Yet, it is unimaginable that states on the brink of nuclear war could retain such a level of trust in one another. Relations between states are anarchic, with no higher authority to enforce adherence to any kind of preceding agreement or punish duplicity. If two states are at the point of resorting to nuclear weapons to resolve their differences, there can be no trust in antiquated notions of chivalrous intentions between them.
The History of Counterforce Warfighting
While there are strong arguments against the utility of Counterforce Warfighting as a nuclear strategy, it has nevertheless historically attained considerable investment and attention. The United States in particular, with its security commitment to defend Europe, looked to a doctrine of “Flexible Response” to develop a concept of nuclear use that did not result in Mutually Assured Destruction. This was not a challenge faced by the Soviet Union, as in the event of war in Europe, its homeland and existence would inevitably be threatened, leaving no doubt that it would use all means available to defend itself. The United States, an ocean away from Europe, did not have the same stakes riding on victory in Europe. If faced with a choice between Mutually Assured Destruction—and the deaths of millions of Americans—and a Soviet dominated Europe, the choice seemed clear. Thus, the United States possessed an enduring interest in Counterforce Warfighting as a means of reinforcing deterrence.
Scale and rhetoric are the only two factors that distinguished the policy suggestions of proponents of Counterforce Warfighting from the advocates of Nuclear Superiority. Those in favor of Nuclear Superiority advocated developing a large enough counterforce arsenal to destroy the enemy’s second-strike capability. Meanwhile, the advocates of Counterforce Warfighting argued that clear communication with the Soviet Union was needed to ensure that if it came to nuclear war, there was an understanding that it would be limited, at least initially, to allow for negotiations before urban areas were targeted. Both strategies advocated for the development of better counterforce capabilities, and therefore could be pursued in parallel, with priority towards one of the other depending on the preferences of various administrations.
The Legacy of Counterforce Warfighting
Ultimately, the greatest modern relevance of the strategy of Counterforce Warfighting is in the technological advancements it has brought that are applicable to a strategy of Nuclear Superiority against minor nuclear powers. While the limited nuclear exchange that it envisions is not believable between Great Powers, Great Powers nevertheless have value for the ability to conduct counterforce strikes on minor nuclear powers. Anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs) cannot insulate the United States from a Russian nuclear attack, but could protect it from a North Korean or Iranian attack. Likewise, the precision rocketry that was developed for nuclear weapons to be able to fulfill their counterforce mission without undue civilian casualties provide the United States with a first-strike option against minor nuclear powers.
While the ability to conduct a preemptive strike may not seem like a practical benefit, the capability provides important deterrent value. For example, because the United States has the counterforce capabilities to destroy the North Korean nuclear arsenal, North Korea is strongly incentivized to avoid nuclear confrontation with the United States. If the United States believes that a minor nuclear power is going to use its nuclear weapons, it has very good reasons to strike first.
As such, minor nuclear powers cannot use their weapons offensively, or appear that they are about to do so. Nuclear weapons are still useful to these states in that they nevertheless increase the costs of confrontation with them even by the United States, but especially when it comes to countries with lesser counterforce capabilities. Thus, while Counterforce Warfighting has little credibility when it comes to peer conflict, its tools are nevertheless invaluable for minor nuclear powers and controlling proliferation by limiting the utility of nuclearization.