Two cents on "Resource constrained environment"
We need both the Fulda Gap -or at least a mini-me version -capacity and COIN, the latter for reasons that need no explanation here.
Building and maintaining the former at a level all potential near-peer competitors find economically prohibitive acts as a systemic/environmental barrier to entry on restarting a serious arms race with the United States. If you can't win anyway from the inception then you avoid risking your entire economy on trying to do so. Much better investment for the U.S. to keep our relative strategic position intact than to risk regional arms races and reviving interstate warfare by trying to scrape to get Defense spending under 2-3 % of GDP and tempting foreign statesmen to roll the dice.
Ok, let's think these points through
Hi WM
You wrote:
Quote:
"(1) Money that would have been spent on such an arms race by potential opponents can be diverted to other uses that might make those potential adversaries believe that a non-conventional conflict is more winnable (or at least more likely) for them. By non-conventional here, I mean anything short of playing the the nuclear card--chem-bio weapons, terrorism, economic warfare, insurgent/guerrilla tactics, info/cyberwar, etc."
Hypothetically speaking, you and I are going to fight a war: Would you prefer to play the role of the United States with it's particular advantages and drawbacks or would you prefer to be regional power X who will base their strategy on deploying all the asymmetric weapons you mentioned?
States choose asymmetry options in conflict with America because they have had to do so not because their general staffs and statesmen preferred that alternative.
Quote:
(2) The temptation exists/forms for conventional "have-nots" to develop a nuclear weapons capability in order to be able to use the threat of nuclear war to gain political leverage/concessions (e.g., N.Korea, Iran, Iraq under Saddam perhaps). Not quite MAD, but still a potent threat to consider.
Nuclear weapons do not run on the same continuum of logic as do conventional arms, either for acquisition or purposes of deterrence.
The USSR was hardly a conventional "have-not" state when it exploded an atomic bomb in 1947. Most of the states that have subsequently developed nuclear weapons have been in a condition of conventional parity or near parity with whatever states they considered their primary threat or they were redressing an imbalance where a rival state had nuclear weapons in addition to conventional parity. Some, including Israel, India and the United States, enjoyed military superiority over their enemies when they developed nuclear weapons while some countries like Britain and France acquired nukes primarily for reasons of prestige than effective defense and elected to build only very modest nuclear arsenals.
Nuclear arsenals of third and fourth rate states are a potent factor, I agree, but their utility is of exceptionally limited value in the context of brandishing them against the United States or Russia. Pakistan's nuclear status was of no help in resisting an ultimatum from Washington in the aftermath of 9-11 thought it remained crucial for deterring India from going to war over Kashmir.
Isn't there some old saw about