Thursday, October 9, 2024

Terminology: First Strike


            One of the most important elements of modern warfare, whether nuclear or conventional, is the first strike. As this concept figures prominently in my writings, I believe it is important to explain up front what I mean when I use the term.
A first strike is a major attack used by the initiating belligerent to either open a war or to rapidly escalate an ongoing conflict from a relatively limited level towards a more general level. It is characterized by the attacker’s employment of operational-tactical surprise, an intense tempo, massed firepower where appropriate, and precision-targeting where possible. A modern first strike unfolds over the course of a few hours to perhaps a bit longer than a day. It consists of multiple offensive tactical actions synchronized within a single major operation, or alternately within multiple parallel operations divided along geographical, service, or mission/task boundaries. These actions may occur not only within a contested zone, but also in depth within the defender’s territories and against his Command, Control, and Communications networks. They may even occur at widely separated locations throughout the combat theater, an example of which would be the Japanese air raids against U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Guam, and Luzon over the course of several hours on 7-8 December 1941.
An effective first strike disorients the defender’s political and military decision-makers as well as attrites the defender’s relevant military potential to such degrees that it becomes exceptionally difficult to prevent the attacker from achieving some or all of his political objectives. A defender’s overall prewar qualitative and/or quantitative military power advantages in theater relative to the attacker may be erased in a first strike’s aftermath if the defender’s positioning, capabilities, plans and doctrine, and/or relative combat readiness are inadequate for parrying the attack in its specific forms, timing, and scope.[1] In fact, the integration of wide-area surveillance and reconnaissance with precision-guided offensive conventional weapons suggests that under permissive circumstances, a successful modern first strike could be far more decisive in determining a conflict’s outcome than was possible during industrial-age warfare.[2] This echoes Clausewitz’s observation that a first battle’s impact upon the rest of a war “will be on a scale proportionate to its own.”[3] A defender’s deterrence policy must therefore be designed to convince its opponent that any conceivable first strike by the opponent would not be able to inflict enough damage or sow enough confusion to prevent the defender from preserving and rapidly reconstituting enough combat-effective forces to arrest or defeat the opponent's subsequent operations.


[1] Thomas C. Schelling. Arms and Influence. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 235.
[2] Richard K. Betts. Surprise Attack. (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1982), 155.
[3] Carl Von Clausewitz. On War, Edited and Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 80.

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