The Age of the Unthinkable (11 page)

Future military historians will one day write about American airpower in the same tone they use for the Roman legion or the
Greek phalanx: an operational innovation that enabled a nearly invincible battlefield dominance. By the end of the Cold War,
the United States was spending billions annually building and maintaining the ability to take control of the sky over any
piece of earth at any time, in any weather. Training a rookie pilot cost the air force $3 million. Aircraft carriers ran $5
billion apiece. Some individual planes, such as the B-2 bomber, cost more than $1 billion a copy — so expensive that at times
war planners hesitated to actually send them into battle for fear one would be involved in combat.

Protecting planes in the air was an entirely separate business. The reason was that for every dollar the United States spent
on planes, its enemies and potential enemies spent good money to develop antiaircraft systems to track and destroy them. Every
leader on earth had seen in Iraq and Kosovo that letting the United States control the air over your country meant that, inevitably,
your country would pretty soon cease to be
yours
. Early surface-to-air missiles used to attack planes, called SAMs in war-fighter jargon, struggled with accuracy problems
or were so poorly made that a pilot who waited until the last second and then pulled a sharp turn could cause the missile
to arc so hard it would snap. But the missiles got better, and, starting in the late 1960s, when American planes in Vietnam
began falling to these improved SAMs, the United States developed a system of high-speed antiradiation missiles — HARMs —
in response. (At the Pentagon you sometimes have to wonder which came first, the acronym or the weapons system.) HARMs worked
like this: in advance of an air attack, a collection of specially armed planes would fly over the target and wait for the
hungry SAM sites (known, perhaps inevitably, as LBADs — land-based air defenses) to turn on their radars and scan the sky.
These LBAD radars, which sent out microwave beams and then waited for the return signal, were like miniature television or
radio stations broadcasting on a single frequency. The tactic of a HARM attack was simple and deadly: the missile tuned in
to that ground-based radar source the way you or I might tune in to a radio station. And then, at about 2,000 miles an hour,
it rode the beam directly back to the missile’s radar site. And blew it up.

Of course, once you, as a SAM operator, understood this, you were left with one of those fundamental “should I or shouldn’t
I?” choices that could keep you up at night, finding that there were some corners of your soul where patriotism didn’t quite
reach. You could either do your job and maybe try to be a bit cagey about it by switching the radar on and off as quickly
as possible, or you could decide that the logic of SAM vs. HARM was sharply, ineffably suicidal: broadcast–receive–fireball.
By the time of the First Gulf War, the outcome of this collision was painfully obvious. Twenty-four hours into Desert Storm,
American pilots discovered that they need only broadcast the call sign of a HARM flight over the radio frequencies Iraqis
monitored and the SAM sites would simply power down, as if on command. “Michelob, Michelob!” the pilots would broadcast, or
“Budweiser, Budweiser, inbound!” (The Iraqis had figured out that many of the HARM flights took the names of American brews.)
Off went the radars, a ring of defense that Saddam had built at the cost of tens of millions of dollars, rendered toothless
by what sounded more like a frat party than a battle plan.

Which brings us back to that innocent-looking package being sold so mildly at Zhuhai, a box about the size of a roll-on travel
suitcase. Packed inside were several thousand microtransmitters, and when you plugged the device in and turned it on, it broadcast
signals — 10,000 of them — on the frequency of a SAM site. From the perspective of an American fighter pilot — or, more precisely,
from the perspective of his HARM missile looking for a “lock” on a SAM radar signal — this meant an air-to-ground picture
that looked like 10,001 SAM signals, of which only one was real. And none of your satellites, your own radar, or your pals
back on the aircraft carrier could tell you which of those signals mattered and which didn’t, even as one of the signals —
the real one — sent a missile toward you at five or six times the speed of sound. As you sat there for your last minute in
your billion-dollar airplane, before you either bailed out or died — suddenly afflicted by the same logic that had haunted
SAM operators for a couple of decades — you might for a moment think of how well that little Radio Shack project sold at Zhuhai
encapsulated one of the oldest laws of warfare, that for every new bit of technology there was always an answer.

Chinese commanders liked to fire themselves up by repeating the trash-talking comment of the U.S. admiral Dennis Blair, who
insisted in an interview that “we respect the authority of the People’s Liberation Army in their mainland. Yet we must make
them understand that the ocean and sky [are] ours.” The PLA generals harbored a different plan, an ambition to be more like
the legendary autumn wind, which, as the Chinese Taoist classic the
Huainanzi
said, “brings frost and decline; all is rendered formless, yet we don’t see the effort.” This was that deadly roll-on transmitter:
it operated with the effortlessness of the seasons, producing the sort of natural surprise in which strength becomes useless.
Why was the box for sale in Zhuhai anyhow? Why were the Chinese tipping their hands that they had such a technology — and
that it was
for sale?
Well, the analysts and spies who followed the matter agreed, it must be because somewhere else, locked away, they had
another
technology that was even
more
disruptive. But the principle was probably the same, a little device that, for thousands of dollars, undid several billion
dollars of American killing power. You could shout “Budweiser!” all you wanted. That box being sold in Zhuhai, it didn’t care.
It would kill you anyhow.

There are moments in history when we might idly hope that the age of war has passed or that war has become knowable and manageable.
In 1899, for instance, the Polish mogul-intellectual Ivan Bloch argued that the combination of the industrial revolution and
the machine gun had made war awful beyond contemplation. Bloch’s book about his notion that technology had somehow conspired
to produce a peaceful order was a bestseller. It was also wrong: his dream was undone a decade and a half later by the most
violent war in human history, which set the stage for the most violent century ever. Fortresses, machine guns, nuclear bombs
— all these technologies of violence brought with them an initial hope of peace, of stability. But the progress of violence
always reasserted itself. The love of martial life seems to be an unquenchable human instinct and, when combined with new
technologies and fresh grievances, it can produce shocking shifts in our safety. George Santayana, the English philosopher,
was right: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Make us poor and we war out of fury; make us rich and we war out of greed.
The strange tensions of modern-day violence are bewildering. Two-dollar machetes murder a million people while billion-dollar
surveillance satellites watch overhead.

In the last chapter we saw how granular effects can produce big collapses like the end of the USSR and can spin out new ideologies
that will challenge our beliefs. Those same forces, we must also accept, are even now eating away at our physical security.
There is a great deal in today’s international violence to make one nervous: fresh technologies in the hands of thousands
of tinkering Chinese box makers, angry new actors who are a Wi-Fi link away from us, countries intent on asserting their place
in the world order, and cultures in which warfare is not a means to an end but an end unto itself, a kind of totem, as defining
on the streets of Mogadishu or Ramallah as the rhythms of the office and day care are in London or San Jose. At the same time
there is a growing list of the failures of large powers like the United States to defeat insurgents or terrorists and, more
worryingly, to defeat their ideas. Since the end of World War II, the last great fight of the industrial age, when nations
were retooled into giant factories, big industrial powers have faced embarrassment after embarrassment in war: the French
in Indochina and Algeria, the British in Kenya, the United States in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, the USSR in Afghanistan,
Israel in Lebanon — no major power has been able to defeat an insurgency anywhere in the world. The total record is something
like 22–0 (or 21–1 if you give the British credit in Malaya, which some historians don’t). It’s a commonplace of military
and foreign-policy chatter that at the end of the day terrorists never achieve their goals, that insurgencies are ultimately
weaker than any state, that the technological and information edge of the U.S. military can safeguard our homeland, even if
it does hiccup from time to time in places like Afghanistan and Iraq (or is mostly useless to deal with emergent challenges
like China, pandemics, and terrorism). But the United States was founded by an insurgency. Terrorism helped establish the
state of Israel. And in countries such as Vietnam, Algeria, Namibia, China, and Afghanistan, terror and insurgency led to
the creation of new nations. It’s mostly, after all, the revolutionaries and rebels who make history.

So we are slowly waking from a dream in which we thought we would fight other states, which could be annihilated, to a nightmare
reality in which we must fight adaptive microthreats and ideas, both of which appear to be impossible to destroy even with
the most expensive weapons. America’s hoped-for “information edge” — the seductive post–Cold War promise that our satellites
and airpower would give us an all-seeing, all-knowing security — had been reduced to this observation about the state of the
Iraq war by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2003: “We know we’re killing a lot, capturing a lot, collecting arms.
We just don’t know yet whether that’s the same as winning.” Just as we must resist the temptation of a “We Won the Cold War!”
celebration, we can’t regard military dominance as a given or as a reliable source of physical safety anymore.

Yet very little of our mainstream security thinking reflects the extreme and urgent demands of this new reality. Even when
our leaders do have the gnawing feeling that something is wrong, they often can’t figure out what to do about it. In 2008,
for instance, Pentagon officials fretted publicly about all those Chinese assassins’ maces — computer viruses, antisatellite
weapons, secret smuggled dangers we don’t even know about — and then offered this chestnut as a solution: buy more long-range
bombers. The poet Ezra Pound once observed of life in prerevolutionary Spain, “Hay aquí mucho catolicismo . . . y muy poco
relihion.” There’s a lot of Catholicism here . . . and not much religion. We might say something similar of our defense establishment:
we’ve bought a lot of destructive power with our record budgets, but not much ability to defend. You might wonder, then, if
the sorts of fresh ideas we’ve seen in places like Glenn Held’s laboratory can tell us anything about our future, about what
this strange imbalance between budget and security really means. Well, yes, there are lessons — and mostly they emerged because
of one scholar who just like Held took apart one of those simple-
sounding
questions and poked underneath to find the sandpile forces that were, and still are, lethally at work.

Let’s go back, for a second, to the battlefield question that baffled poor Ivan Bloch and his predictions: what to make of
the machine gun. Let me ask you a question, one that probably sounds like something out of a video-game manual rather than
a book on revolutionary power. Do you think the machine gun, when it was first invented, was better as an offensive or as
a defensive weapon? That is to say, would machine guns be of more benefit to an attacking army (think lead-spraying German
troops rushing across a frontier) or to a defense (think dug-in French soldiers)? This may seem irrelevant, sort of like asking
if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. But in fact, as we’ll see, it is a distinction whose cost was measured in several million
lives. It also gives us some insight into how we might go about thinking of our own security in terms of unpredictability
and fluctuation — the way in which the same forces now producing a revolutionary order have always, if more slowly, worked
on human history.

In January 1978 the American political scientist Robert Jervis published an essay in the scholarly journal
World Politics
that became one of the most cited papers in his field. It tackled one of the more interesting problems in international security,
and even though it was dealing with the very biggest of issues — why do countries fight? — it had its roots in the answer
to the machine-gun question. Jervis is a nerdy-looking Columbia University professor who has both the air and the facial hair
of a hipster. He looks as if he’d be more comfortable behind a drum set in some Greenwich Village bar than serving, as he
often does, as one of the most diligent “inside the room” critics of American intelligence operations. Jervis has said that
he was born into a left-leaning Manhattan family in which political debate was served with every meal, and that when he sat
down to write his formative paper, he was interested in a specific problem of nation-states that he called the “security dilemma.”
The dilemma went something like this: every state wants to feel secure, but it is doomed in this quest because the very steps
it takes to feel more secure almost always make other states feel less secure. The result is a sort of accelerating uneasiness,
a trap that ultimately makes everyone less safe. For instance, Britain’s nineteenth-century insistence on having a navy larger
than the combined navies of any two potential adversaries reflected the view in London that more warships meant more security.
But in Berlin or Paris, more warships looked like, well
, more warships
.