CONTROL AND MANAGEMENT

The general state of affairs in the condi­tions of the Cold War between the two nuclear giants, USA and USSR, has made it impossible to expect a decisive victory in almost any military conflict, not only in the direct war between them.

The problem was split into two parts. One of them related to the cases of the open use of force. Here, the strategy of solution invented, as the reliable tool, the powers of the UN Security Council which can take decisions to stop fighting and to help the conflicting sides to freeze the military stage of the conflict. The technology for this type of development was not too sophisticated and its success depended mainly on the agreement of the superpowers, beginning with the Geneva Conferences of 1953 and 1954 where France, the UK, the USA and USSR together with China have succeeded in the termination of wars in Korea and Indochina. The UN Security Council helped to achieve a cease-fire in Kashmir, the Middle East, Congo, Balkans, East Timor and many other places All these efforts have played a role as a demonstration of a strong international capability to limit the scope of the open use of force and as a reminder of the preference for the searchfor peaceful solutions (McNamara, 1986).

There was a strong visible impact of this change on the concept and conduct of mili­tary conflicts. First, disregarding the official doctrines of “two and a half wars” shared by NATO and WTO during their confrontation in the years of the Cold War, in reality the idea to use WMD was completely reviewed: both sides agreed (Soviet-US Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, 1973) not to use nuclear and other WMD against each other or against the third parties (George, Farley, and Dallin, 1988). Unfortunately, this rather important gain was not followed by simi­larly important agreements on the complete destruction of the nuclear weapons. They were left as something like a “guarantee” of the proper conduct of the other side but in reality played a provocative role in encouraging a partial proliferation: for example, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

Second, the ideas of “big wars” in Europe or in Asia were also completely revised. While officially they continued to be on the national security agendas of both global adversaries, in reality they planned to limit them and, to the extent possible, avoid them. The whole effort of reduction of the conventional weapons in Europe and of the confidence building measures (CBM) were introduced as elements of avoiding the risk of another major war in Europe and Asia (Langlois and Langlois, 2005). The outstanding role here was attributed to intended lack of fixed rules of a possible transition from a conventional to nuclear conflict because of the existence of tactical weapons and the delegation of the authority to use it to regional commanders.

Third, as a result of these developments, the type of military planning and the general concept has significantly changed. The idea of using military means in a conflict was not dropped as such but was strongly conditioned by the time limits, theater borders and weapons capabilities. The ideas of a “blitzkrieg” have prevailed: orientation to a quick and decisive blow, massive use of air force against the centers of command, con­trol, and communications, military reserves, depots and industrial centers, quick ground forces operations, extensive use of airborne and special forces and the like (Bracken, 1983).

All these developments have significantly limited the possible scope of military con­flicts. Besides, though some measures were suggested to put a possible evolution of a military conflict to a higher level under firm control, they did not give a sense of a guarantee that any military conflict started as a “blitzkrieg” would inevitably be conducted within some rational limits. The idea of a limitation of the use of military force in case of open hostilities accompanied the development of the military doctrines of the leading nations up to the present. At the same time, it has put a stress on the necessity to develop an alternative: either freezing of a military conflict or the peaceful settlement of the cause which has given birth to this conflict.

The method of putting an end to open hostilities and to transfer a conflict into the stage of “searches for peace” is well known and widely used (Weeks, 1991). It helps to reduce the sphere of military conflicts and leaves aside only the cases when, due to different reasons, the nations do not adhere to the basics of the UN Charter. But what becomes extremely important is that without some established and acceptable technology of transforming cease-fire into the process of peaceful solution, the open hostilities simply become cold wars and thus continue for decades: for example, Korea, India-Pakistan, Arab-Israeli, Cyprus, USA- Cuba. So, the problem which appears as a result is two-fold: how to capitalize on the success of a cease-fire and promote a peaceful settlement and, second, how to work out a firm universal strategy of the resolution of military confrontation (Fortna, 2002).

From limitation to reduction

The cost-benefit analysis and the post­Hiroshima ethics have played an outstanding role in introducing the policy of limitation of the military conflict. Rather visible and tangible results of this policy were achieved through the bilateral US-Soviet agreements of the 1970s and 1980s. The UN Conference for Disarmament in Geneva has also played an important role.

What is really important is that it, on the one hand, continued the noble tradition of the Hague Conferences of the early 20th centuries to limit the use of “non-human” weapons but, on the other hand, also had the idea of some sort of control over the conflicts. These ideas were developed by some non-governmental organizations (UN associations) and governmental agencies (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency). In the conditions of the Cold War, this problem was understood and was almost automatically solved through mechanisms of the alliance relations. It has become more of a problem after the end of the Cold War when smaller nations felt they had some freedom in their choices, for example, the occupation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's forces in 1990.

The major focus of attention in the searches for the solution of military conflicts in the 1970s and 1980s was with the US- Soviet confrontation. An important fall-out of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 was the conclusion of the necessity to build a system of “safety fuses” which could substantially reduce the possibility of risk in the military relations between the superpowers.

The attempts to limit destructiveness of military conflicts very logically increased an interest in more substantial efforts to reduce violence in conflicts. The pressures were coming from two sides. On one side, it was the conclusion on the limits of coercion in the present world due to the nuclear stalemate and to the policy of active intervention by the international community. On the other, it was a strong position of the public on the use of weapons which were too destructive and did not increase the conflict settlement capabilities. The adherents of the idea of solving conflicts through non-coercive means rather than through the use of force have gathered a large audience worldwide, which observed both the failure of the USA in Vietnam and of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and came to a legitimate conclusion that the use of force, while helpful and efficient in some cases (the Desert Storm operation by US forces in Kuwait in 1991), in other, and much more numerous, cases is not that effective and desirable.

As a result, ideas of violence reduction have become rather popular in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War. They were mainly transformed into various con­cepts of “peace enforcement” and “peace intervention” (associated with UN or NATO) in cases when violence in a conflict exceeded a tolerable level and hurt human feelings, for example, hostilities in Bosnia in 1994­1995 (Williams and Caldwell, 2006).

That has not compromised a more general idea of conflict reduction policy. The ideas of conflict reduction have become extremely helpful in developing the strategy of military conflict resolution in the 1990s (Zartman and Kremenyuk, 1995). Of course, they did not include, at least in the beginning, a hope for the reduction of conflict potential generally. More than that, they used both humanitarian aspirations and pragmatic con­siderations in an attempt to prove that military conflicts have lost a significant part of their rationality and policy relevance (Stern and Druckman, 2000). But at the same time, they accepted the idea that conflicts were still sometimes necessary for the solution of other issues, like humanitarian inter­ventions (Kosovo), punishment of terrorism (Afghanistan) and destruction of dictatorial regimes (Iraq).

Conflict reduction, as a concept, should not be considered in isolation from the general trends in international relations in the late 1980s to early 1990s. It was too early at that time to speak about a possibility of moving to a much less volatile type of relationship. It was possible and desirable in the area of the alliance relationship where conflicts happened sometimes but generally were subject to special procedures and mechanisms which worked like automatic production lines and took the issues of the differences in interests and goals of the allies (Greece and Turkey, UK and Iceland, UK and Spain) as a subject for peaceful settlement. But in other cases, when conflicts happened between the neutrals or the adversaries, they could hardly be subjected to the same limitation policies forcefully.

It was in the period when, due to the reduction of tensions in the relations between global adversaries, the USA and USSR, the role of the UN had chances for proliferation (e.g. Gorbachev’s speech at the UN General Assembly in December 1988) which had set in motion conflict reduction possibilities. The capabilities of UN mechanisms in the conflict reduction area were grossly exaggerated but nonetheless played a certain role in propagating ideas of reduction of tensions. In order to make reduction a policy in conflict settlement, some additional measures were needed.

From reduction to stabilization: arms control and military balance

High crisis instability of a military conflict is conditioned by the existence of a “surprise attack” strategy which is an important element of the “blitzkrieg” thinking (Betts, 1982). It may also develop in another type of the conflict scenarios, the “Sarajevo case” (pre­World War I) because it triggers a sequence of developments which cannot be checked by any of the participants. As a result, the conflict development as such, because of its com­plicated nature, low predictability (or even unpredictability), and its possible outbursts, contains a large element of instability which becomes another threat to participants. It is one thing when any of them uses a strategy of blackmail and demonstrative aggressiveness as a tool of keeping the other side in a state of stress and hopes to control the conflict through this behavior (“strategy of blackmail”), and totally the other when the state of the conflict itself becomes a threat (Nye, Allison, and Carnesale, 1988). A major task of any rational player in a military conflict is to keep the state of the conflict under control and not to give the other side a chance to overtake it. Or, as an alternative, the task is to establish a system of joint control over the state of the conflict and to deny to any third party the possibility of interfering.

Usually, each side in a conflict wants to acquire the means to control the state of the conflict. There are means to achieve that goal: acquisition of the position of power through development of a unilateral military advantage, imposition of some sort of unilateral “rules of conduct”, creation of a biased friendly environment around the conflict, etc. Depending on the balance of forces in the conflict, this may either help indeed to acquire a unilateral capacity to control the state of the conflict, or, vice versa, to increase its instability and unpredictability: if both feel strong enough to counter a possible threat, it helps to stabilize; if the unilateral gain is regarded as destabilizing, the conflict becomes a source of danger itself. The important difference here is between the state of affairs when both sides individually try to keep the conflict under control and thus to stabilize it (what in reality very often leads to instability) and the state of affairs when they understand that they should do it together. Ajoint search for the stability of the conflict means a great step forward in the process of the conflict management and usually it comes together with the shared goal, first, to reduce the destructiveness of the conflict, and, second, to reduce the conflicting element of the relationship. When the dangers of confrontation are compared with the benefits of stability, very often the desire to continue the struggle becomes questioned (George, 1971).

The attempt to bring more stability into a military conflict usually begins with the problem of the military balance. This balance consists of two different but interrelated parts. On one hand, there are figures, the amount and the type of the weapons which each side may deploy and the resulting capacity to inflict damage on the other side. The methods of calculation of the offensive and defensive capabilities of the two sides (including the state of combat readiness) may be different but, taken together, they give a more or less clear picture of the military capacity of each side. And these capacities may be compared, thus giving the decision­makers the possibility of either considering the balance as a basis for stability or regarding it as a pre-condition for instability if the other side has an edge in some decisive areas (e.g. sophisticated weapons, air force, missiles, WMD, etc.).

On the other hand, there are military doctrines on each side and the level of training of their forces which can either make the existing weapons an asset or a liability.Agood example of such a balance is the Arab- Israeli ratio in 1967 or 1973: large amounts of the Soviet-supplied weapons to Egypt and Syria have never balanced the high combat readiness and high level of training of the Israeli troops. So, the military balance in itself is not yet a universal tool to keep the stability of the conflict under control. In order to become one, it has to be activated through a joint effort on both sides (Nuclear Weapons Freeze and Arms Control, 1983).

The central position of the military balance in an adversarial relationship presents a good opportunity for the policy of stabilization of the conflict and of making it hibernate. At the same time, it cannot give a full guarantee of the stability and predictability due to the possibility of a technical or human error which may, even involuntarily, destroy the balance and trigger escalation of the hostility. So, to develop a comprehensive strategy of conflict stabilization, as another step on the way to resolution, several ideas on military balance should be probed (Carnesale and Haass, 1987).

The first is arms control and the second is risk limitation (or control) policy. Arms control is an old and trusted idea. It may, if appropriately used, give a chance not only to establish a balance of military capabilities between the adversaries but also to make this balance verifiable, durable and operational. Generally, arms control may be unilateral, bilateral or multilateral. A good example of a unilateral arms control may be Japan which after World War II adopted a constitution in which the Japanese have pledged not to use their military force for any operations abroad (now reconsidered) and to use them only for self-defense. Another case of unilateral arms control is the commitment of the nations- signatories to multilateral agreements not to acquire certain types of weapons, WMD or conventional, and thus to contribute to some sort of stability of the military situation. Generally, the possibilities of unilateral arms control are grossly understudied: the US decision not to develop the neutron bomb and parallel US and Soviet unilateral pledges to destroy tactical nuclear weapons are good examples of this type of policy.

But the main areas of arms control arebilat- eral or multilateral agreements which give the possibility of keeping a certain military balance between the signatories in order to avoid arms race. These agreements may be of the “hierarchical” or of the “horizontal” types. An example of the “hierarchical” type is the Washington Conference of 1922 which tired to establish and legitimize a certain ratio of the naval armaments between the participants, fixing the dominant positions of the stronger nations and “recognizing” the rights of the smaller nations for some amount of the armaments. It considered it necessary to include the naval race in a framework which could combine two things: a “right” of the big powers to the maximum level of the armaments (the principle which was delivered into the Non-Proliferation Treaty, 1968) and the “agreement” of the weaker players to adhere to the levels assigned to them by the big powers. The principles of the “hierarchical” model of arms control, as is evident in NPT, are viable and can still be used in some cases. At least some elements of “hierarchical” arms control exist in the treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE).

An example of “horizontal” arms control is the case of Soviet-US agreements, mainly in the area of strategic weapons. Itbegan with the mutual agreement on the dismissal of the anti- ballistic systems, continued into the limitation of the most destabilizing weapons and ended with the establishment of ceilings on the levels and types of the allowed weaponry. In 2002, it evolved into the Agreement on the further reduction of the strategic potentials of the USA and Russia. The strategic balance between the two has become “non­provocative” and verifiable: it has established certain unilateral and bilateral verification procedures and generally contributed to the stabilization of the confrontation. The US- Soviet arms control arrangements have played an outstanding role as a means both of limitation of the conflict and of the creation of pre-requisites for the movement toward the end of the confrontation. In the current situation, it helps to keep alive the elements of co-operation between the two nuclear superpowers.

At the same time, there are some serious changes in this area which demand a thorough consideration and some new approaches. After the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABM) treaty of 1972 by the Bush administration in 2003, there is a perspective of deployment of the global US ABM system which to a large extent may take over some of the functions of strategic arms control. It may hurt the positions of Russia since it continued to be loyal to the dead ABM treaty and has stopped the work on its own ABM with the exclusion of the sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry. The nervous reaction of Moscow to the plans of the deployment of the US anti­missile facilities in Europe demonstrated that the value of the arms control agreements of the period of the end of the Cold War may be compromised (Krahman, 2005).

The importance of arms control in the strategic and other areas of the armaments (intermediate and tactical nuclear as well as conventional) was not only that it has created pre-conditions for the end of the Soviet- American confrontation in the late 1980s. It has given a rather reliable and promising tool for possible changes in other strategic nuclear dyads: USA-China, China-India, India-Pakistan. Disregarding the successes at the end of the Soviet-US Cold War, the state of relations in these areas has hardly changed the value of the “horizontal” arms control and is far from being exhausted.

Multilateral arms control usually includes arms limitations and commitments in differ­ent areas. The Conventional Armed Forces Agreement in Europe (1990) is an outstanding example of such a multilateral commitment which, at the time of coming into force, has helped greatly to stabilize the situation in Europe and to put an end to NATO- WTO confrontation (Ripsman, 2005). From this point of view, it is important to study further the fate of the CFE treaty which has already become a hostage of the US-Russian differences on the anti-missile defenses. Such important areas of arms control as nuclear- free zones in different parts of the world and other regional arrangements may become questioned if the idea of the conventional arms control in Europe falls victim to the differences in US-Russian relations. Limi­tation on the purchase and acquisition of some “provocative” types of weapons can also be regarded as cases of “horizontal” arms control, for example, the conventions on limitations and even the ban on the missile technologies transfer.

Arms control is dutifully considered a very effective means of reducing the level of military confrontation and making it more stable and controllable. The other element of the same policy is the risk reduction measures which were introduced by the two superpowers, the USA and USSR, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. One of the results of the assessment of the Cuban crisis was the conclusion of a high risk potential which accompanied the arms race between the two. As was mentioned, the risk was a result of a high probability of a technical or human error in the huge and complicated system of the strategic confrontation. Under some conditions, the technical systems could fail (especially the long-range observation and early-warning systems), while in others, the human factor could become crucial (in a mocking form, note the scenario of Stanley Kubik's “Dr Strangelove”).

Understandably, the cost of such a “failure” could be too high and absolutely unacceptable for both sides, given what they understood during the October days of 1962. And, as a result, the conflict strategy of both has been modified almost overnight: if before the Cuban crisis, the “massive retaliation” strategy was a main tool of the confrontation on both sides, one of the first lessons from the crisis was a change towards “stabilization” and “risk reduction”, or “stabilization through risk reduction”. It contained the establishment of a reliable communication between the two sides, agreement on the procedures if something like a new crisis would erupt, and negotiation on different possible scenarios of risk development.

All in all, it took almost a decade of intensive diplomatic effort for both superpow­ers to agree on the measures which could reduce the risks of confrontation and make the possibility of an inadvertent conflict much lower. Attempts to start a parallel track of arms control agreements, disregarding the conclusion of the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963, proved unsuccessful until the risk reduction phase was completed. The then leaders of both sides, US President Johnson and the Soviet Prime Minister Kosygin, at their historical meeting in Glassboro (October 1967), agreed that since negotiations on risk reduction were going at full speed (including US-Soviet joint efforts on the NPT), they could start planning for the beginning of the first substantial arms control negotiation of the strategic arms limitation (SALT) which began in 1969.

Neither risk reduction nor arms control brings an end to a military confrontation though they limit substantially the possibility of an outbreak of hostilities. But they open up a way toward a stable military balance between the adversaries and, thus, make it possible to think about a profound alternative to confrontation, especially if it threatens to exhaust the financial and economic resources of the sides. Further steps in the direction of resolution become possible in two ways. One, domestic, relates to serious measures of disarmament and reduction of the military expense. And this becomes one of the most difficult tasks because reconsideration of the policy in a confrontation includes changes in budget spending, in the appropriations policy, in military spending, in force deployment and other measures which may have hard conse­quences for the economic perspectives of the whole area, for the state of unemployment, and for the investment in research.

The other is associated with a complete reconsideration of the conflict strategy and of the relation toward the adversary (Blum, 2005). This means the necessity for a profound reassessment of the nature of threat and of its background which sometimes may be followed by critical consequences, as was the fate of the Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War. If a system of political, economic and social relations was built for the purposes of war, as was Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Reich, then with the reduction of tensions and forthcoming resolution of the conflict, the danger of disintegration of that system becomes real. The best minds in Gorbachev's Soviet government never gave due consideration to that.

From stabilization to resolution

There is a vast gap between stability of the conflict and its resolution. It is even possible to say that once a conflict is stabilized (as, for example, Korea in 1953), the incentives for its resolution sometimes become much less powerful than when the conflict was a war (Zagar and Kilgour, 2006). But no conflict may be solved without prior stabilization which is simply a pre-requisite for resolution. So, the problem is: what should be done when a conflict is stabilized, in order to move forward and to work out a resolution strategy?

To begin with, here we come to one of the most crucial questions asked at the beginning of the chapter: what is a “solution” for a military conflict and confrontation? When it is an open hostility, the answer to this question is simple and unequivocal: an end of hostilities, a cease-fire. And in the absolute majority of cases, this is the first, and very often, only answer: all the efforts on the part of those who are responsible for the international security (UN Security Council, regional security arrangements, big nations) are applied to put an end to the war. Very often, the end of the hostilities is regarded as even more important than a possible solution to the heart of the conflict: for example, the pressure of the UN, US administration, EC and others on Israel during the last war in Lebanon was so strong that the Israeli government had to cut down its operations, though maybe a resolute destruction of the Hezbollah could be more helpful for the further evolution of the conflict. But in any case, when a military conflict or a war takes place, the purpose of the response to it is absolutely clear: to stop the fighting!

And the ideal case would be if the end of fighting could be transformed into the end of the conflict itself (Williams and Caldwell, 2006). In reality, that happens mainly when the fighting is finished with a resolute defeat of one side and a complete victory of the other, complete in the full sense of the word: capitulation of the losing side. Only in this case, as is evident from the history of the end of WWII, does the possibility appear of putting an end to the conflict. The USA has correctly learned the lessons of WWI and that is why President Roosevelt suggested, first, declaring capitulation of the Hitler regime as the main purpose of the war (the Casablanca conference of 1943) and, second, occupying the defeatedAxis nations, in order to introduce such changes in their political and economic systems that they would never be allowed to become revenge seekers (the main sense of the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945). This was a genuine and 100 percent excellent end to the conflict. Such ends do not happen often, though there were also successful cases of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam's regime in Iraq (Rose, 2005).

What about confrontations? Or about con­flicts when the phase of the open hostilities is ended due to the pressure from the outside? And here, at least in theory, though there are some practical solutions, we come to two different strategies. One of them is concentrated mainly on a purely military aspect (disarmament), while the other goes much more deeply into the political area. The first resolution strategy is based on the cost­benefit analysis and uses as a starting point the assessment of the comparative evaluation: does the subject of the conflict deserve that much risk and expense? There is always the possibility of judging how much a positive end of the conflict may give to a nation and how much this nation should invest in the winning strategy.

It does not include such “non-material” values as prestige, influence, and glory but in general the level of the current knowledge gives the possibility of having a solid judgment on input-output ratio and its validity for the relevant strategy, including possible destruction and human losses if open hostilities happen. As a result, the decision­maker may always take a rational decision based on the comparison between expected gains and expected losses. And if the result is not in favor of the military strategy, there is the possibility of looking for a non-violent solution, following Lao Tse's advice: if you cannot afford a military solution, try non­military.

The other resolution strategy is much more complicated. If the adversary is not destroyed and has not capitulated and the confrontation is ended with the 0:0 score (even if the other side disintegrates after the end of the conflict, as did the Soviet Union), then the question is: how viable is this solution? Will it survive its success? The conflict resolution thinking in the area of military conflicts and confrontations usually ended at the stage of the peaceful settlement and never went further, while the cases of the US-North Korean, US-Vietnamese and SovietZRussian-Afghani relations after the end of hostilities showed that the end of hostilities does not mean the end of the underlying conflict. It continues in the form of a political confrontation which may one day resume the military dimension. All this was well known and did not cause much concern until the issue touched the nuclear powers.

Recent developments in the US-Russian relations raise one very important issue. Since the US-Soviet Cold War was ended without any “peace treaty”, that is, a document which would frame the legal and political aspects of this event (maybe because of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, or maybe because no one cared about such “formalities”), both sides experienced certain hardships in formulating their vision of the future of their relations. It concerned the type of their relations, identification of their interests which could either correspond to the interests of the other side or, at least, do not deny them; it also needed to prescribe mechanisms and methods of solution for both old and new problems in their relations.

In wider terms, this case tells us that a solution to a military confrontation, contrary to open military conflicts, is a much more complicated case. It is not enough to stop fighting (if it goes on) and to agree to a cease-fire. It is not enough to agree on some disarmament and verification procedure. It is not even enough to work out confidence building measures and to adhere to them strictly. What is needed and is extremely important is to find out carefully which were the sources of the initial conflict, why it has brought both sides to a confrontation, what role was played by the military factors, whether military factors could bring a desir­able solution to the confrontation and, finally, what should be done to ensure that in the future the partners will not go back to the trenches if the situation changes. Besides, there should also be some program of positive interaction, of co-operation. Otherwise, the efforts to leave the conflict behind may become pointless.

This subject becomes extremely important today. There is the problem of ending the US war in Iraq. There is the problem of ending military confrontations in areas which play the role of the sites of conflicts since the days of the Cold War (Korea, Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Cyprus, Balkans). There is the problem of “rogue states” or, in other words, “axis of evil”. There is Africa with its endless list of ethnic wars. There is a growing perspective of future conflicts between states in transformation, contenders for space and resources. In short, there is a whole agenda of possible military conflicts and this is the high time to work out acceptable procedures and means for the resolution and prevention of military conflicts.