Fwd: [NEWSROOM-L] Background on Thomas Shelling (Vietnam war era)

[Henk Elegeert]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Henk Vreekamp wrote:
> REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
> Iets voor Marc Fluks, om uit te zoeken? Hij had iets met alternatieve
> Nobelprijzen. Een nobelprijswinnaar die de Amerikaanse oorlogsminister
> McNamara adviseerde bij het bombarderen van Noord-Vietnam?

http://slate.msn.com/id/2127862/

"
All Pain, No Gain
Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling's little-known role in the Vietnam War.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2005, at 10:43 AM PT

"His "game theory" didn't work so well in the real world."

His "game theory" didn't work so well in the real world
Thomas C. Schelling won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
this week. Today's papers note his ingenious applications of "game
theory" to labor negotiations, business transactions, and arms-control
agreements. But what they don't note—what is little-known in general—is
the crucial role he played in formulating the strategies of "controlled
escalation" and "punitive bombing" that plunged our country into the war
in Vietnam.

This dark side of Tom Schelling is also the dark side of social
science—the brash assumption that neat theories not only reflect the
real world but can change it as well, and in ways that can be precisely
measured. And it's a legacy that can be detected all too clearly in our
current imbroglio in Iraq.

Schelling made his mark in 1960 with a book called The Strategy of
Conflict, in which he applied principles of bargaining to the practice
of war. (He had been an international trade negotiator in the 1940s, and
while he wrote his book he was a strategist at the RAND Corp., the Air
Force think tank where nearly all the defense intellectuals cut their
teeth in those halcyon days.)

He saw war as essentially a violent form of bargaining. There were, he
wrote, "enlightening similarities between, say, maneuvering in limited
war and jockeying in a traffic jam, deterring the Russians and deterring
one's own children … the modern balance of terror and the ancient
institution of hostages."

The key dilemma among Cold Warriors of the day was the emerging nuclear
parity between the United States and the Soviet Union. President Dwight
Eisenhower was relying on a policy of "massive retaliation"—if the
Soviets invaded Western Europe, we would pummel their country with
nuclear weapons. But if the Soviets also had nukes, this policy would no
longer be credible, because they could strike back against our country,
too. So, what to do?

Schelling's answer was to retaliate "in a punitive sense" by "putting
pressure on the Russians" through "limited or graduated reprisals,"
inflicting "civilian pain and the threat of more"—in short by sending
signals with force, upping the ante in the bargaining round,
intimidating them into backing down.

In his next book, Arms and Influence, published in 1966 but conceived a
few years earlier, he went further. "The power to hurt," he wrote, "can
be counted among the most impressive attributes of military power. … To
inflict suffering gains nothing and saves nothing directly; it can only
make people behave to avoid it. … War is always a bargaining process,"
and one must wage it in a way to maximize "the bargaining power that
comes from the capacity to hurt," to cause "sheer pain and damage,"
because they are "the primary instruments of coercive warfare."

When, in the early months of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson and
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were looking for ways to step up
military action against North Vietnam, they adopted Schelling's concept.

The link was direct. McNamara's closest adviser was an assistant
secretary of defense named John McNaughton, who had been friends with
Schelling since their days administering the Marshall Plan in Paris.
They were both teaching at Harvard when Schelling got a call to come
work at the Pentagon; he didn't want the job, but he recommended
McNaughton. His friend objected that he didn't know anything about arms
and strategy, but Schelling told him that it was easy, that he would
teach him everything. And he did.

Schelling's lessons can be seen clearly in the classified memorandums
reproduced in The Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of the Vietnam
War that Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the New York Times.

On May 22, 1964, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy sent a memo to
President Johnson. "An integrated political-military plan for graduated
action against North Vietnam is being prepared under John McNaughton at
Defense," he wrote. "The theory of this plan is that we should strike to
hurt but not to destroy, and strike for the purpose of changing the
North Vietnamese decision on intervention in the south." Two days later,
Bundy sent a follow-on note recommending that the United States "use
selected and carefully graduated military force against North Vietnam,"
that troops be deployed "on a very large scale, from the beginning, so
as to maximize their deterrent impact and their menace. A pound of
threat is worth an ounce of action—as long as we are not bluffing."

In an interview 25 years ago for a book that I was writing about the
nuclear strategists, Schelling told me what happened next. McNaughton
came to see him. He outlined the administration's interest in escalating
the conflict in order to intimidate the North Vietnamese. Air power
seemed the logical instrument, but what sort of bombing campaign did
Schelling think would best ensure that the North would pick up on the
signals and respond accordingly? More broadly, what should the United
States want the North to do or stop doing; how would bombing convince
them to obey; how would we know that they had obeyed; and how could we
ensure that they wouldn't simply resume after the bombing had ceased?

Schelling and McNaughton pondered the problem for more than an hour. In
the end, they failed to come up with a single plausible answer to these
most basic questions. So assured when writing about sending signals with
force and inflicting pain to make an opponent behave, Tom Schelling,
when faced with a real-life war, was stumped.

He did leave McNaughton with one piece of advice: Whatever kind of
bombing campaign you end up launching, it shouldn't last more than three
weeks. It will either succeed by then—or it will never succeed.

The bombing campaign—called Operation Rolling Thunder—commenced on March
2, 1965. It didn't alter the behavior of the North Vietnamese or Viet
Cong in the slightest. Either they didn't read the signals—or the
signals had no effect.

On March 24, almost three weeks to the day after Rolling Thunder began,
McNaughton—again following Schelling's lesson—sent the first of several
pessimistic memos to McNamara: "The situation in Vietnam is bad and
deteriorating." Our aim at this point, he wrote, should be merely to
"avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat." Keep up the pressure to affect the
North's "will" and to provide the U.S. with "a bargaining counter" so
that we "emerge as a 'good doctor.' We must have kept promises, been
tough, taken risks, gotten bloodied and hurt the enemy very badly." But
victory was not in the cards, and we should seek a way out.

The bombing escalated. When that didn't work, more troops were sent in,
a half-million at their peak. The war continued for another decade,
killing 50,000 Americans and untold numbers of Vietnamese. McNamara grew
increasingly disillusioned but kept up the pretense of a light at the
end of the tunnel. In the spring of 1967, John McNaughton died in a
plane crash.* In November of that year, McNamara, exhausted and in
despair, resigned—or he was fired, it's never been clear which—and went
to wring his bloodied hands in the World Bank's fountains.

Tom Schelling didn't write much about war after that. He'd learned the
limitations of his craft. If Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz had
studied history better, they, too, might have appreciated those limits
before chasing their delusional dreams into the wilds of Mesopotamia.

Correction, Oct. 12, 2005: John McNaughton died in a plane crash, not a
helicopter crash as this article originally and incorrectly stated.

Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of The
Wizards of Armageddon.
Photograph of Thomas Schelling by Tim Sloan/Agence France-Presse.

"

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