The Age of the Unthinkable (25 page)

The immediate effect, of course, was to stop flights in and out of Stanley. But the Brits noticed something else happening:
the Argentine air force began shifting the disposition of its planes, readjusting them nervously, like a teenager rearranging
his hair before a date. Mirage fighters, which had been prepared to mount an aerial defense against the British, were moved
to Buenos Aires. Other planes, intended to attack the British navy, were moved into a defensive position. “Black Buck not
only reached and bombed the targets,” a British military study later concluded, “but in doing so it showed the Argentines
that the RAF had the potential to hit Argentina.” The effect of this information was electric: it convinced many of the generals
in Buenos Aires, almost immediately, that they were fighting a lost cause, and it triggered political shifts inside the government.
In short, the impact of that one blast radiated far beyond the tarmac. It wasn’t simply that Moffat had managed to take out
the Stanley airport; he had indirectly taken out a large chunk of the entire Argentine air force. This was good fodder, finally,
for stories to swap with the fighter jocks around the office. But Moffat knew he had stumbled onto something deeper. He had
discovered, almost by accident, a profound and even strange theory of action and reaction in global power, one that touched
on everything from why nations collapse to how we might control the forces that now seem the wildest in the international
system.

Remember one of Bak’s laws, that small things can have huge impacts? We’ve seen that this law is a fearsome force for unknitting
some of our most cherished ideas about how the world works. We’ve watched how it unraveled brilliant men as different as Gorbachev
and Greenspan. We’ve seen how our enemies use small events to trigger big changes in our lives (think of 9/11) and how the
new math of our age can also produce powerful sums when we mix harmless things like mortgages and securities trading. This
constant surprise, and the demand it makes for an “always-on” defense, is one of the reasons we need a deep-security immune
system instead of an old-style Grand Strategy. But how to engineer such a system? If the dangers we face seem able to hit
us where we are least prepared, is there some way we might do the same to them? Are there ways we can learn to hit at the
joints of the problems we face, to use indirect techniques? Particularly since our direct approaches — whether confronting
nations, terrorists, or crises like nuclear proliferation or financial panic — often seem to make the problems worse. Can
we make cascading avalanches work
for
us? Moffat’s one-bomb victory had been such a case: small input, dramatic output. The problem fascinated Moffat for twenty
years after that Argentine raid. It led to the question that would shape his career: what can we learn from the idea that
one bomb, exactly placed, is as powerful as an entire air force?

An awful lot, it turns out.

There’s a dangerous directness buried in the way we now confront the complex problems of a new-math world. When we want to
change something, we stab right for it, whether it is the Chinese policy on currency or Iranian plans to develop nuclear weapons.
Faced with a financial crises in banks, for instance, we worry about banks instead of, say, homeowners. Our approach to diplomacy
and other policies reflects this natural instinct for directness. Largely, of course, this habit is a holdover from a view
of power from a time when the map of a continent
could
be debated, imagined, and inked out directly by two men in a room in Dresden. You can see this instinct at work when a secretary
of state wings around the world to
persuade
enemies into agreements or when an American president caucuses with leaders of disenfranchised nations as he edges them (he
thinks) ever closer to a deal. Such moments are great theater. They reflect a lot of our biases about how the world ought
to work: that big global issues should be resolved as swiftly and directly as possible, that the shortest distance between
us and the world we want is a straight line, that charismatic leaders make history. But, like a lot of what we face today,
these old-style approaches are failing and — too often — backfiring.

Part of the reason a direct, head-to-head approach fails is that today we often can’t find or name the threats we face. You’ll
never corral most terrorists in a room long enough to negotiate with or persuade them. The new-spun mashup risks of modernity,
everything from greedy hedge funds to accidental bioreleases, can barely be understood, let alone confronted, in one place
at one time. And often, the minute we try to attack or pin them down, the threats morph into something unrecognizable and
even harder to name or confront. Frustrated intelligence analysts call these “self-negating prophecies”: as soon as you figure
out what your enemy is doing and move to stop him, he simply shifts to something else.

One way to understand this is to recognize that many of the dangers we confront aren’t easy-to-target objects like tank battalions
or even individuals, like Nasrallah or Osama bin Laden, so much as they are systems or networks. A group like Hizb’allah is
best seen as an interconnected web of ideology, technology, and nationalism. Press on the system directly at one part — say,
by bombing missile sites — and it simply adjusts elsewhere. Our enemies are masters of this sort of indirectness. They know
instinctively what we now have to learn, that the right force, applied in exactly the right place, can deliver an impact no
amount of force delivered in the wrong place ever can. The first two transitions to a deep-security view were learning to
look holistically instead of narrowly and then learning to focus on our own resilience instead of trying to attack everything
that looks scary (and making them more dangerous in the process). The third change, which we’ll turn to now, is to augment
our instinct for direct action with a new sense of the incredible power of an indirect approach.

A year or two after the Vietnam War ended, a few American air force officers began asking themselves an uncomfortable question:
“If we had to fight Vietnam over again, what would we do differently?” This sort of retrospective analysis is useful in any
context.
If we had to react to 9/11 again, what would we do differently? If we had to think about the nature of our global financial
markets all over again, how would we change what we did and did not do?
Such postmortems are rare in real life — time moves too fast. But something about the way Vietnam turned out was so searing
that the military, particularly the generation of officers who had flown in Vietnam, wanted to see what had gone wrong. The
pressure for new ideas, one study later remarked, came largely “from wartime experiences of young U.S. Air Force officers
who were appalled by the frequently mindless and ineffective use of air-power in Vietnam. When their turn to lead came, they
were determined to do better.” To some degree, the numbers of Vietnam spoke for themselves: the United States had dropped
more ordnance on the Vietnamese than they had dropped in all of World War II and had still failed. We already knew that so-called
strategic bombing didn’t work. The firebombing of German cities starting in 1942 had the effect of unifying the German population
instead of, as predicted, turning them against Hitler. The Vietnam campaigns were supposed to take those lessons into account.
But somewhere in the blur of politics and war, the strikes settled into the blunt math of sorties flown, bombs dropped, body
counts. It was proof, if any were needed, that you couldn’t beat an insurgency with B-52s.

Looking at the problem with fresh eyes after the war, a few of those frustrated officers suggested a radical idea: what if
the right way to win an air war was by dropping
fewer
bombs? This was, to be honest, the sort of idea designed to get you retired pretty quickly from the military. So before they
started pushing the notion in the halls of the Pentagon, they quietly arranged to test it in newly adopted computer simulations
and war games. The results were eye-opening. Take, for instance, the standard land-war puzzle of the Cold War: a fast-moving
Soviet army pouring into Western Europe through the Fulda Gap. Could any amount of power stop the probe at fifty miles inside
Western Europe? One hundred miles? This was a challenge so familiar to strategists — they still worry about it today in Korea
— that it had its own name, “the halt problem.” The usual answer came from the pages of Carl von Clausewitz’s strategic classic
On War
. Clausewitz’s logic said to aim for your enemy’s
schwerpunkt,
his point of greatest weakness. This was the military equivalent of trying to blow up a wall by battering one spot over and
over. If the Soviets would stop once you had killed a certain percentage of their soldiers — and three centuries of attrition
warfare suggested this was the case — then the faster you could get to that number the better. (The
schwerpunkt,
in case you needed any reminder of the Newtonian view at work here, was also often called the enemy’s “center of gravity.”)
Yet simulations of the Cold War halt problem showed that this battering approach took too long. It was like trying to stop
a flood with a bucket. The best case had the Soviets well across Germany before they even stopped for breath — and that would
happen only after NATO fired off tactical nuclear weapons. The necessary bloodbath would make previous wars look like skirmishes.

This failure of traditional approaches opened the door to alternative ideas like the ones those rebel officers had been cooking
up. And, as they began to try their ideas out in simulations, they found the “fewer bombs” approaches worked surprisingly
well. Say you brought the fury of concentrated fire just to the front line of the advancing soldiers, trying to pull them
down as you might peel a potato. This “leading edge” strategy was particularly disruptive as the Soviets tried to reinforce
losses all across the front. Or what if you used technology to blind the Soviets instead of killing them? What about aiming
to disrupt the army’s nervous system, putting most of your firepower on their fuel depots, supply trains, and command centers?
The simulations showed these direct attacks would stop an offensive far faster, maybe within fifty or one hundred miles. These
approaches to the halt problem became known as “effects-based operations” because they achieved their goals through mental
and physical effects. You could win, not by killing some magic number of enemy soldiers but by immobilizing the enemy’s brain.
Such an approach took a bit of stomach. It meant directing limited military resources, at a moment of intense peril,
away
from a big mass target. It meant accepting that the most brutal response might not be the one that involved the most explosives.
This was deeply counterintuitive, in much the way Niels Bohr had described quantum ideas. The standard dismissive joke among
old-line “ready-fire-aim” artillery officers was that it was like trying to call a bully’s mom even as he was slugging you
in the face.

The Cold War, fortunately, never produced a test. (In any event, it was hard to imagine the United States responding to a
Soviet attack with anything less than a full blitz.) But by the 1990s, many of the rebellious war planners who had championed
effects-based fighting had risen in the Pentagon. They inserted their indirect tactics into plans for the first Iraq war,
in which they moved to isolate and disable infrastructure rather than aiming to slaughter clueless masses of Iraqi recruits.
The plan worked brilliantly. (Norman Schwarzkopf, the commanding general in that war, called this one of his biggest gambles
— not least because a brigade of “pave Iraq” artillery officers had been pressing that bodies-equals-victory approach.) Effects-based
planners then tried their tactics in Belgrade, raining thin foil strips on the city’s electrical system in the opening hours
of that war, for instance, blinding and darkening the city instead of leveling it. Milosevic’s country was understood not
as a simple target but as a system. And by leaning on the most vulnerable part of that system, the United States was able
to exert pressure that no number of direct attacks could achieve. This was like aiming for the tires of a getaway car instead
of aiming for the harder-to-hit driver. That such an approach to warfare killed fewer people was, of course, a fine dividend
in a media age, when the PR battlefield can be as perilous and crucial as the real one.

In the second Iraq war and in Afghanistan, the fighting was run along these same effects-based lines; in fact, the tactics
worked almost
too
well. They remade the landscape so quickly that the U.S. forces were left without enough time (and without plans) to manage
a radically different postwar order. Resident Iraqi combatants and Afghan insurgents, however, caught on right away. After
all, the alternative for them was destruction. They swapped military uniforms for civilian garb, changed their habits and
became harder to isolate, and dispersed into places where they became essentially invisible. Then the enemy started using
effects-based operations of their own: roadside bombs, strategic kidnapping — the sorts of small but disruptive jabs that
rattled both American commanders on the ground and nervous politicians back home. It was Moffat in reverse, one roadside bomb
stopping a multimillion-dollar convoy, freezing a superpower. Effects did work. Now it was simply a race to see who could
master them.

-Effects-based operations have a completeness direct attacks never can, because they treat targets as systems and reach far
deeper and wider for leverage and information. For this reason they are useful as a way to think not only about military operations
but also about diplomatic puzzles or any complex situation, whether it is global warming or Pakistan’s management of its nuclear
weapons. Effects are less
replacement
for direct negotiations or conflict than enhancement. They operate everywhere, from an adversary’s skies to the hearts of
the people. They are as helpful in managing state-to-state conflicts as in dealing with new-era threats that linger in networks
or markets or laboratories. To be honest, effects do make planning far more complex, not least because of what war fighters
think of as the echo chamber of effects battles: it’s hard to predict exactly what effect the effects will have in practice
and what other effects they in turn will cause. This sounds like a very knotty way to fight — and it is. But the benefit of
such an approach is that it forces you to touch as many parts of the system as you can, constantly hunting for signs of unexpected
and dangerous echoes bouncing back at you. And in fast-changing systems, as Mike Moritz would remind us, that’s a
huge
advantage. It’s the logic of deep security as immune system again; after all, our immune system never switches off. It attacks
disease directly but also draws on all sorts of resources, from the vitamins in our bloodstream to our state of mind, to bring
disease under control. In the global body politic, real power isn’t always loaded into obvious implements like armies or bombers.
Milosevic’s electricity, for instance, was far more important than his army. One way to think of this is in terms of the most
modern cancer drugs: instead of attacking tumors directly (an approach that tends to kill healthy cells at a dangerous rate),
these drugs aim for the blood supply leading to the tumor. Better to strangle a tumor than ineffectively chop or cut at it.
This is the sort of medicine we now need.