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The Medical Implications of Nuclear War (1986) / Chapter Skim
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24 Managerial Demands of Modern Weapons Systems
Pages 485-489

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From page 485...
... Contemporary military forces have a combination of properties that make them much more difficult to manage under crisis circumstances than were their historical counterparts: the extreme destructiveness of individual weapons, the rapid timing of the delivery vehicles, the technical complexity of weapons that imposes very intricate operational requirements on the forces that manage and operate them, and the worldwide scale of deployment. It is not frequently realized that the full maturation of the military situation has taken considerable time, and it probably has only been in the last decade that both sides have really had fully integrated and developed forces.
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From page 486...
... To some degree these state changes are explicitly thought out and organized in advance by formalized alert procedures, but they cannot be completely determined or centrally controlled in their entirety. Operational procedures are too complex, too widely dispersed, and too responsive to the immediate circumstances of individual weapons commanders for centralized direction to be feasible.
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From page 487...
... When that occurs, the outcome turns upon details of circumstances that the leaders must try to control. Given these situations, under a severe crisis or under one that is occurring with an ambiguous local balance, the managerial capacities of decision makers, no matter how stable psychologically or skilled politically they may be, are likely to be overwhelmed.
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From page 488...
... The extensive flows of information created by technical sensors directly observing the opponent's military operations would produce interacting perceptions by both military establishments that would tend to dominate the normal channels of diplomacy used to try to produce a constructive resolution. Finally, the background tension between the objectives that I discussed above would inevitably produce major differences in judgment between the civilian and political leadership on both sides, making it very difficult for completely consistent lines of action to be established.
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From page 489...
... system, making it virtually impossible for anyone to develop all the types of expertise that the circumstances of crisis would, in fact, demand. The open and adversarial political process of the United States protects against wide deviations from common judgment that make it very difficult to identify and correct mistakes emerging from a consensus of opinion.
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Key Terms

  • middle east
  • modern weapons
  • positive control
  • individual weapons
  • managerial demands

  • military organizations
  • coherent management
  • rapid timing
  • individual decision
  • crisis circumstances

  • military operations
  • contemporary military
  • military establishments
  • local balance
  • serious crisis

  • military power
  • prudent security
  • neither civilian
  • adversarial political
  • inevitably produce

  • reconnaissance plane
  • american actions
  • alert procedures
  • operational requirements
  • unauthorized incursion

  • severe crisis
  • extensively developed
  • central control
  • current world
  • warfare operations


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