Austin Long

Osirak Redux? Assessing Israeli Capabilities to Destroy Iranian Nuclear Facilities

Does Israel have the ability to conduct a military attack against Irans nuclear facilities similar to its 1981 strike on Iraqs Osirak reactor? The Israeli Air Force has significantly upgraded its equipment since the early 1980s, but the Iranian nuclear complex is a much harder target than was the Osirak reactor. Iran has three facilities that are critical for nuclear weapons production: a uranium conversion facility, an enrichment facility, and a heavy-water production plant and associated plutonium production reactor. This article analyzes possible interactions of Israels improved air force, including the addition of F-15I aircraft and U.S.-supplied conventional “bunker-buster” precision-guided munitions, with the Iranian target set and air defense systems. It concludes that Israel has the capability to attack Irans nuclear infrastructure with at least as much confidence as it had in the 1981 Osirak strike. Beyond the case of Iran, this finding has implications for the use of precision-guided weapons as a counterproliferation tool. Precision-guided weapons confer the ability to reliably attack hard and deeply buried targets with conventional, rather than nuclear, weapons. Intelligence on the location of nuclear sites is thus the primary limiting factor of military counterproliferation.

Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce, and Nuclear Strategy

Abstract Secure second strike nuclear forces are frequently held to be easy to procure. Analysts have long argued that targeting intelligence against relocatable targets like submarine launched and land mobile ballistic missiles is difficult to obtain. However, the scholarly consensus on intelligence for counterforce operations is seriously overdrawn. Both during and after the Cold War, the United States developed substantial intelligence capabilities to track and target submarines and mobile missiles. These efforts achieved important and under-appreciated success. Second strike forces have been far more vulnerable than most analysts are willing to credit.

The Perils of Shallow Theory: Intelligence Reform and the 9/11 Commission

Despite its unique influence on the current reorganization of American intelligence, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States (the 9=11 Commission) got it wrong. In examining the theories of failure presented by the Commission and assessing how closely its recommendations are linked to those theories, two principal arguments are here presented. First, the proposed reforms are mostly unrelated to the postulated causes of failure. Second, the theories are underdeveloped, contradictory, and basically unsatisfying on their own terms. For these reasons, large organizational reforms are unlikely to significantly improve intelligence performance.

Correspondence: Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq

Americans are inclined to remember their nation’s wars victoriously. “Let it be remembered,” President Barack Obama told the Minneapolis American Legion veterans of the Vietnam War on August 30, 2011, “that you won every major battle of that war.”1 He repeated this message on May 28, 2012, during the commemoration ceremony of the aftieth anniversary of this war at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.2 How soon might we hear talk of winning the major battles in Iraq? Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro (hereafter Biddle et al.) caution that “[t]he decline of violence in Iraq in 2007 does not mean that the war was necessarily a success.”3 Their implication, however, is that the war was not necessarily a failure either. Biddle et al. write that the 2007 drop in violence from 2006 was a “remarkable reversal.” They ask, “What caused this turnaround?” (p. 7). Their answer is that the United States devised a strategy that stopped the violence in Iraq with a “synergistic” combination of the U.S. troop surge and the U.S. subsidized Sunni Awakening that “stood up” the Sons of Iraq (SOI). Correspondence: Assessing the Synergy Thesis in Iraq

Going Nowhere Fast: Assessing Concerns about Long-Range Conventional Ballistic Missiles

In his article, Bruce Sugden provides a cogent, technically sophisticated assessment of the use of conventional ballistic missiles (CBMs) for the Prompt Global Strike (PGS) mission.1 To a large degree, however, the article elides one of the central issues in targeting, the “actionable intelligence” problem. Without actionable intelligence, CBMs will be of little use, so understanding the problems and prospects for acquiring such intelligence is central to evaluating their utility. In this letter, I critique the depiction of intelligence in Sugden’s article and provide additional information on the collection of actionable intelligence against the near-term target set, which Sugden describes as “emerging, time-sensitive, soft targets, such as exposed WMD [weapons of mass destruction] launchers, terrorist leaders, and sites of state transfers of WMD to terrorists or other states” (p. 117). I conclude by arguing that developing actionable intelligence on these targets is time consuming and requires the presence of U.S. assets, making both the prompt and global aspect of CBMs irrelevant.

The Limits of Damage Limitation

as international relations theory suggests, rapid shifts in the balance of power, such as that which would occur if the United States abandoned nuclear advantages over China, would be destabilizing.6 Preserving stability in Asia through the continued maintenance of U.S. predominance is a far better option. Glaser and Fetter rightly fear the possibility of a costly arms race and deteriorating relations with China if the United States attempts the near-impossible task of seeking to deny China’s nuclear deterrent altogether. There is a much better solution, however, than voluntarily shedding an important means of protecting the United States and its allies: accept that China will likely possess some minimal retaliatory capability regardless of the steps taken by Washington, while the United States continues to maintain quantitative superiority, including a damage-limitation capability. This arrangement (also advanced by former Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg and Michael O’Hanlon) has been warmly received in my many meetings with Chinese interlocutors in track II dialogues in Beijing and in Washington over the past two years.7 The Chinese would be comforted in knowing that their country possesses a secure, second-strike capability, which is all that its leaders desire.8 At the same time, the United States would maintain the robust nuclear force that allows it to extend nuclear deterrence in Asia and preserve strategic stability in the region. Indeed, such an arrangement provides the best hope for a stable strategic equilibrium between the United States and China. This outcome would certainly be much more desirable than abandoning an important source of U.S. and allied security and upending the regional balance of power. —Matthew Kroenig Washington, D.C.

After ISAF: partners and proxies in Afghanistan after 2014

Abstract The conclusion of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan at the end of 2014 has generated substantial uncertainty about the duration and level of international commitment to Afghanistan. The fate of local allies of international forces is therefore deeply in doubt. This article is of necessity speculative rather than empirical, but it attempts to draw on the history of previous intervention in Afghanistan as well as more general patterns of local and external alliance to sketch plausible scenarios for the fate of local allies. It proceeds in four parts. First, it draws distinctions between different types of local allies in Afghanistan based on position and relationship to the Afghan state and an external actor. Second, it examines the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan for relevant lessons for the fate of local allies. Third, it presents a scenario based on the foregoing that assumes there will be an ongoing small but significant international military presence and accompanying resources. Fourth, it presents a scenario that assumes there will be no or minimal international military presence and accompanying resources.

Strategy in the American War of Independence: A Global Approach edited by Donald Stoker, Kenneth J. Hagan, and Michael T. McMaster

Levels of complexity make the American War of Independence a difficult conflict to understand. An insurrection in Britain’s thirteen American colonies became a regional war fought by conventional forces. At the same time, irregular warfare did not cease but instead fanned the flames of conflict across the colonies. The instability resulting from Britain’s attempt to reestablish control over its thirteen colonies caused hostilities to expand beyond North America, leading to a global maritime struggle. Strategy in the American War of Independence approaches the war’s multilayered nature through a series of chapters highlighting the strategic imperatives faced by the principal combatants as well as certain tangential players. With each chapter written by a different area specialist, the book’s editors overcome language constraints that would make a single author book on the subject nearly impossible. Several chapters are particularly valuable, especially the ones on the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish. The Dutch are frankly forgotten in most studies of the conflict, yet Victor Enthoven’s chapter demonstrates that the war was a catastrophe for the Dutch state, damaging its maritime trade to such an extent that it never recovered. Enthoven also persuasively argues that the Dutch tried to maintain neutrality but other imperatives prevented this course of action. Though the role of the French is generally better known than that of the Dutch, most studies do not analyze French involvement from their perspective. James Pritchard’s chapter does a real service in this respect. Pritchard focuses on the French navy and how French leadership attempted to use it to obtain the state’s objectives. He clearly demonstrates the difficulty of balancing naval power in European waters with naval power in the peripheral colonies while trying to satisfy the requirements of several allies. In addition to assessing operational alternatives, Enthoven and Pritchard also succeed in tying broader diplomatic and economic considerations to issues of military strategy. Thomas E. Chavez provides a sympathetic description of Spain’s role in the FrancoThe Journal of Strategic Studies Vol. 34, No. 2, 281–293, April 2011