Disarmament means disarmament – Looking at alternative defence strategies

Feature by Howard Clark

ImageYou may have noticed how terms “real defence” and “credible defence” have become popular in CND circles in the past year. They have a hard-nosed ring to them, indicating that the user isn’t a woolly-minded idealist or a wishy-washy pacifist. The Labour leadership’s failure to present a coherent defence policy in the general election seems to have prompted some people around CND to try to do the job for them.
Certainly one of the main obstacles to a majority acceptance of the need for nuclear disarmament is the idea that “we” would be defenceless. What has the peace movement to offer beyond alarms about nuclear strategies? I am writing this article largely because I feel too many people are being too glib about non-nuclear defence options and in particular overselling certain military alternatives.

Nonviolence and defence
Some pacifists dispute the right to self-defence, even by nonviolent means, but most people committed to nonviolence would probably like to advocate “social defence”. That means defending what we value—people’s rights, certain institutions, etc—by nonviolent means, defending them against attack from any quarter. In this perspective, the miners are engaging in social defence by trying to keep open pits which haven’t been worked out; likewise councillors who resist central government in the name of local democracy; likewise the staff at Thornton View Hospital, Bradford, who have been defying closure for the past nine months; and likewise the nuclear disarmament movement in trying to prevent the deployment of cruise missiles.

“Social defence”, however, is not a likely defence policy for a future British Government, it is based too much on people’s power and self-organisation and could too easily be used to resist state control. Nor are most people likely to accept it without other far-reaching social changes. “Social Defence” will only become “credible” – that magic word – when more people have successfully resisted the central state and earned confidence in their power to determine their own lives.

As few people accept the viability of nonviolent resistance as a form of defence, some pacifists have been willing to compromise their opposition to all military preparations so that we can at least get rid of the most dangerous weapons. What else is there for people committed to nonviolence to say about non-nuclear defence except to accept the lesser evil of a conventional military defence rather than nuclear weapons? If we might harm the prospects for nuclear disarmament by arguing against proposals for conventional defence, aren’t we condemned to the sidelines of the debate on non-nuclear defence?

While it would be too much to hope to get a pacifist policy in one jump, those of us committed to nonviolence cannot afford to resign ourselves to being on-lookers. Some non-nuclear defence policies may conceivably be possible points of transition, but at the moment, there are plenty of reasons to be disturbed by some of the arguments being used by people in the peace movement, by some of the proposals being advanced and sometimes by the blasé dismissal of objections to military strategies.

ImageOver-selling non-nuclear defence
In one version or another, the doctrine of “defensive deterrence” or “non-provocative defence” is rapidly becoming a new orthodoxy in the nuclear disarmament movement.

The basic idea is, as military ideas go, quite good: that the best form of defence is not attack but defence. You therefore construct a defence policy emphasising defensive weapons – for instance, fighter aircraft as opposed to bombers, ground-to-air missiles, anti-tank guns, etc – rather than weapons which would be more suited to offensive operations, Militarily, you are relying on the calculation that the defence has certain inherent advantages – knowledge of terrain, better supply fanes, etc – and so a smaller force can repel a larger force, and therefore instead of seeking equal armed strength to a potential adversary, you aim for just enough to put them off attacking. Politically, defensive deterrence signals that you have no interest in mounting an offensive against anyone else and so nobody should feel threatened. Some of the advocacy of forms of defensive deterrence, however, glosses over the problems. It’s as if people are looking for a technical fix – a new defence policy which doesn’t require a re-think of Britain’s role in the world, of the social impact of military policy, or of the moral and political basis of defence. Take, for example, this quote from a Bishop’s Stortford CND leaflet, re-published in Campaign, which has seized on the electronic solution to the problems of defence:

Recent advances in micro-electronics and guidance systems are the key to a new defensive stance. These advances are making the concept of a “balance” of similar conventional weapons meaningless. You don’t need tanks to stop tanks. You don’t need planes to stop planes. Modern precision missiles, guided by lasers, heat sensors or radar, have an extremely high kill probability and cost a fraction or a tank or an aircraft. Weapons like these can form a practical basis for real defence and cannot be regarded as offensive.

The essential feature of an alternative strategy is the removal of all nuclear weapons systems from western Europe coupled with the strengthening and re-deployment of high technology non-nuclear defence.

Entitled “Nuclear suicide or real defence”, this leaflet bristles with “credibility”, ‘practicality” and the ‘realism’ of people who find reassurance in “high kill probability”.

Conventional defence dangers
It perturbs me. To emphasise the hardware of defence is very short-sighted. So far, the development of precision-guided missiles has, I gather, increased the advantages usually enjoyed by the defence in war. This advantage is not permanent. Once upon a time, the long bow had a “high kill probability”. Today’s advanced technology is tomorrow’s museum piece; the weapons have obsolescence built in. In the laboratories of the superpowers, work is already in progress designing counter-weapons to weapons which have not yet even entered production. So this high-tech non-nuclear defence would commit Britain to a technological arms race – a costly and immoral waste of human resources.

Eurocentric argument
Even worse, however, is the Eurocentricity of any argument for the strengthening of non-nuclear defence. Many of the features of the “automated battlefield” – sensors and other remotely controlled weapons – were first used in battle by the US in the phase of the Vietnam War when they were replacing the too-human flesh and demoralised psyches of “our boys” with gadgets. The US military-industrial complex was letting its depraved imagination run riot, and enjoyed massive funding for its efforts. When the US and its allies are so willing to intervene in poorer countries’ affairs, how can anyone in the peace movement recommend strengthening of their non-nuclear forces? The equipment some European nuclear disarmers suggest for use as a high-tech defence could easily be turned against people in technologically less advanced societies.

Territorial defence
Another approach to defensive defence is “territorial defence”. Nuclear disarmers quite often invoke the examples of Sweden, Switzerland and Yugoslavia – three non-aligned countries. Their concept is to deter aggression by charging “a high admission price’; in other words, they would hope to make the cost of attacking them outweigh the gains the aggressor would be seeking. Clearly as a form of deterrence, this is morally preferable to threatening to annihilate civilians by either conventional or nuclear bombing.

In the case of these three countries, however, their defence policy also involves conscription and periodic refresher courses so that, as well as their standing armies these countries have large numbers of reserves who could be mobilised very quickly – not a policy that would commend itself to many members of Youth CND! Even without conscription, there are reasons to look more critically at the high entry price idea. The Japanese pursued a high entry price policy at the end of the Second World War. They were determined to defend every inch of every island against the invading Americans not because they still thought they would win the war but precisely to make an invasion so costly that the Americans would negotiate a peace. Their fanatical resistance did persuade the Americans to reconsider their invasion strategy: the US bombed Japan into submission instead – and not just with nuclear weapons. Territorial defence leads to a particularly destructive form of conventional war, if not as utterly destructive as nuclear war. At the same time, there is a terrible risk of escalation.

A trusty shield?
Much of the appeal of “defensive deterrence” to peace movement people is moral. It is one way that military preparations can tally with the “just war’ theory that not only should the cause of war be just but also the way it is fought. What is rarely acknowledged, however, is that defensive deterrence runs counter to most people’s assumptions about defence almost as much as does non-armed resistance.

To talk of “credibility” in defence policy means making assumptions about what are credible goods. Unfortunately, as we saw in the Falklands war, many people in Britain hanker after the incredible: the days when Britannia ruled the waves or the glory of fighting them on the beaches.
Of the advocacies of defensive deterrence I have read, only Defence Without the Bomb: the report of the Alternative Defence Commission Is explicit that the basis of this policy Is that we would rather be vulnerable to invasion and conquest than be totally destroyed. Unfortunately, like so much else in that report, the point is rather hidden. Because of this vulnerability, the Commission considered possible fall-back “anti-occupation” strategies in the event of military defeat, rejecting guerrilla warfare as unsuitable for an industrial society and as being likely to degenerate into terrorism but favouring nonviolent civil resistance. This vulnerability will be rather difficult to swallow for people brought up on the heroics of Britain “standing alone” from 1939.

It is all very well to stress the shield rather than the sword, but on closer inspection, how “practical” would a strictly defensive policy be?
First, although a smaller defending force might be able to repel a larger attacking force, the attacker chooses when and where to launch the offensive. Defenders have the advantage of knowing the terrain better, etc, only because it is their country that to being ravaged by war. To use a footballing analogy, the attacker is the team which does its defending in the opponent’s penalty area.

Second, no matter how sophisticated the technological shield – no matter how accurate the precision-guided missiles or how lethal the interceptor aircraft – the defence cannot guarantee to shoot down every weapon fired at its country. Without long-range bombers and missiles, the enemy’s war machine remains intact and its airfields ready. What would have happened to the morale of Londoners in the blitz, if they’d thought there was no possibility of counter-attack? In war, a purely defensive policy would leave only two choices in the face of aerial bombardment: suffer the bombing, or surrender and suffer occupation.

War is a disaster
By now my message should be plain; in Europe in the century of total war no military strategy should be called “practical”. War is a disaster. The prime objective of defence policy must therefore be to prevent war and, if it fails in that, to limit the destructiveness of war. No policy is foolproof; no defence policy can guarantee this – least of all a nuclear policy. When the comparative risks of non-nuclear policies are weighed, however it is a bogus realism which judges military policies as being inherently more “credible” than non-military.

As a military policy, the value of the defensive deterrence idea is not that it would assure us of military security, but that it is a move in the right direction. It can be considered a disarmament-oriented defence policy, and it is the one military strategy that could be a halfway house to living without weapons. But when you consider that the defender more often than not loses a war, isn’t it likely that we would be safer relying on the weapons we know best how to use – the weapons of non-armed struggle, of collective action?