Escalation and Intrawar Deterrence During Limited Wars in the Middle East
Authored by Dr. W. Andrew Terrill.
September 2009
124 Pages
Brief Synopsis
A central purpose of this monograph is to reexamine two earlier conflicts for insights that may be relevant for ongoing dangers during limited wars involving nations possessing chemical or biological weapons or emerging nuclear arsenals. These conflicts are the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the 1991 Gulf War. Both of these wars were fought at the conventional level, although the prospect of Israel using nuclear weapons (1973), Egypt using biological weapons (1973), or Iraq using chemical and biological weapons (1991) were of serious concern at various points during the fighting. This monograph will consider why efforts at escalation control and intrawar deterrence were successful in the two case studies and assess the points at which these efforts were under the most intensive stress that might have caused them to fail.
Summary
This monograph analyzes military escalation and intrawar deterrence by examining two key wars where these concepts became especially relevant—the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Intrawar deterrence is defined as the effort to control substantial military escalation during an ongoing war through the threat of large-scale and usually nuclear retaliation should the adversary escalate a conflict beyond a particularly important threshold. The deep contrasts between the 1973 and 1991 dangers of escalation underscore the range of problems that can occur in these types of circumstances.
In the first case, this monograph relies upon an extensive body of openly available scholarship and investigative reporting on the 1973 War to discuss the potential for Israeli nuclear weapons use during that conflict. Although Israel is not a fully declared nuclear power, virtually all serious academic analysis both in and outside of that country assumes that there has been a strong Israeli nuclear weapons program for decades. Most major studies of the 1973 war suggest that Israel had or probably had some sort of nuclear option that it could have gone forward with in the event of an existential threat. Broad “hints” by the Israeli leadership, as well as their ongoing spending on nuclear research and nuclear-capable missile delivery systems, tend to support this. The work has proceeded on the assumption that the vast majority of scholarship about Israeli possession of a nuclear option during this conflict is correct, and that strong evidence included in this scholarship (which will be recounted here) suggests that Israel probably had a nuclear weapons option in 1973. In the very unlikely case that it did not, the Israelis probably had a different weapons of mass destruction (WMD) option that it could have used in conjunction with systems such as the Jericho I missile.
This work asserts that the Egyptians and the Syrians attacked Israel in 1973 with limited goals that included the capture of important territorial objectives but did not include the destruction of the Israeli state. Waging war into Israel itself beyond the range of their integrated air defense systems was beyond the capabilities of the Arab militaries, and they knew it. The Arab leadership appeared to believe that this situation should have been obvious to the Israeli leadership, but it was not. Although some military professionals such as then- Major General Ariel Sharon immediately understood the situation, others such as Defense Minister Moshe Dayan feared an existential threat. The sudden onset of a new war that began with a series of Arab battlefield victories deeply disoriented some Israeli leaders and appears to have pushed some into serious consideration of a nuclear solution. This outcome appears to have been avoided by the ability of Israeli leaders to discuss the threat in an open, professional, and democratic fashion which in this case allowed the most reasonable voices to come to the fore. The decisive Israeli battlefield victory of October 14 eliminated the need for Israel to consider nuclear weapons use, although the Egyptians then faced defeat themselves and signaled that they also had serious options for escalating the war.
The case of Iraq in 1991 is also in need of some further examination primarily because the war itself was such a one-sided military victory, and the United States seemed almost effortlessly to deter Saddam Hussein from the use of his chemical and biological warfare options. The negative aspect of this very positive outcome is that there is some need to prevent this case from becoming too dramatic of a “false positive” of the ease in which intrawar deterrence can be implemented. Saddam Hussein throughout the crisis strongly believed that he would be able to fight the coalition troops to a standstill in conventional combat, and that this outcome would allow his regime to remain in place. With this deluded, but very real, conventional strategy for victory, he was reluctant to escalate beyond the conventional level where he expected Iraq to do very well. While Saddam Hussein feared escalation to nuclear weapons use by the United States, his tendency to be deterred was bolstered by his perceived conventional options. He might have become more reckless if he was fully cognizant of the conventional strength of the U.S. military which he dismissed as having less fighting spirit than the Iranian troops that Iraq had previously defeated.
A central conclusion of this monograph is that intrawar deterrence is an inherently fragile concept, and that the nonuse of WMD in both wars was a result of factors that may or may not be repeated in future conflicts. Additionally, the tactics for intrawar deterrence will require constant adjustment as war is waged and develops in unexpected ways. Signaling and political communication is inherently difficult in such crisis and few unequivocal statements are taken at face value. U.S. planners must never become too comfortable with the elegance of any plan involving intrawar deterrence, and the U.S. leadership must be prepared to accept the possibility that there are always a number of ways such strategies can break down.
Access Full Report [PDF]: Escalation and Intrawar Deterrence During Limited Wars in the Middle East
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
