Colin Gray
Strategist who advised Reagan on defence and fought the idea that nuclear war was ‘non-survivable’
COLIN GRAY, who has died aged 76, was a leading thinker on security and defence strategy. A Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, and founder of the National Institute for Public Policy in Washington, Gray, who held dual British and US citizenship, brought his knowledge of the history of war to bear in more than 30 books and some 300 articles on military history and strategy, which he wrote longhand using a Mont Blanc pen.
Gray served as a defence adviser to both the British and US governments, most notably in the 1980s as a member of the Reagan administration’s General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament.
Building upon the work of Clausewitz and Michael Howard, Gray emphasised the centrality of politics and political culture on strategy. He first made his mark in the 1970s with controversial articles on nuclear strategy in which he argued that differences in the Soviet and US approach reflected differences in historical experience, political culture and geography.
Gray contended that the American national historical experience, with few traditions of prolonged warfare or subtle statecraft, had resulted in an approach which stressed that nuclear wars could not be won because the human cost would negate any meaningful concept of victory.
US security experts tended to the belief that the country could preserve a technological capacity to provide an effective nuclear deterrent, and that armscontrol dialogue would bring the Soviets round to the American way of thinking, leading to strategic stability.
Gray argued that this was based on a misunderstanding of the strategic culture of the Soviet Union, a highly cohesive authoritarian state with a long tradition of warfare and a high tolerance of casualties, which resulted in the belief that a limited nuclear war could be fought and won.
The idea that nuclear war was nonsurvivable, Gray contended, was having a malign influence on Western defence planning at a time when emerging technologies were undermining the assumption that the threat of “mutually assured destruction” was a permanent condition of the nuclear age.
Gray thought it was essential to understand that war at any level could be won or lost and that the priority for the West must be to possess the ability to wage nuclear war by developing new technologies for ballistic missiles and defences that held the future possibility of offering a significant level of protection.
In the 1980s he became a fervent advocate of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense (“Star Wars”) Initiative (SDI), serving on various advisory panels, including that for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (SDI and space weapons) and for the US Space Command (future of space forces).
After the end of the Cold War Gray rejected the theories of “primordialists” who argued that the world is moving towards a situation in which new patterns of conflict would occur along the borders of different religions and cultures rather than secular political boundaries.
While, as Clausewitz observed, every age has its “own kind of war, its own limiting conditions and its own peculiar preconceptions”, Gray argued that “there is a unity to all strategic experience: nothing essential changes in the nature and function (or purpose) … of strategy and war.”
Poor strategy, like the wrong medicine, could still kill: “If policy makers seek the impossible – seize a world empire, build a ‘nation’ in a post-colonial society, or … construct a technical peace through arms control – then no choice of strategy can much help them. Similarly, if strategic ideas do not work tactically at the foxhole or deck plate level, assuredly they will fail.”
“The future of warfare,” Gray wrote, “will be very much like its past … strategic history much as usual.”
Colin Spencer Gray was born in Oxfordshire on December 29 1943.
His father, Bill, then serving as an RAF navigator, later worked for the Halliburton oil company; his mother was a secretary. He grew up at Rainham in Kent, and attended the King’s School, Rochester. He took a degree in Economics at Manchester University then a Dphil in International Politics at Lincoln College, Oxford.
He worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies as Assistant Director and in 1976 became Director of National Security Studies at the Hudson Institute, New York, before founding the National Institute for Public Policy in Washington, of which he became president.
Gray taught at universities in Britain, Canada and the US, latterly at Reading University, and he continued to give both colleagues and former students unobtrusive support at critical stages in their careers.
In a tribute, the former US Secretary of Defense, General Jim Mattis, described how Gray’s “rigorous examination of how to think strategically” filled in numerous gaps in his understanding: “No one had more impact on my approach to strategic problem solving than [he did].”
Gray enjoyed travel, watching cricket and American football and loved a succession of family pets, including golden retrievers and Siamese cats.
As well as defence advisory bodies in Britain and the US, he served as executive secretary of the Strategic Studies Commission at the Canadian Institute of International Affairs in Toronto and was a member of the editorial boards of academic journals including the Journal of Strategic Studies. In 1987 he was presented with the Superior Public Service Award by the US Department of the Navy.
Gray turned his later attention to why the US had failed or fallen short in so many of its recent military adventures – Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq. American culture, he argued, favours technology and firepower, which can be self-defeating. And the US defence community had proved to be “especially prone to capture by the latest catchphrase, the new-sounding spin on an ancient idea”.
At the same time the US often lacked the “extreme patience” required to achieve its political goals, largely because of pressures from a public clamouring for swift, decisive victories: “Time is a weapon, [and] the mindset needed to combat an enemy who is playing a long game is not one that comes naturally to the American soldier or, for that matter, to the American public.”
Colin Gray is survived by his wife Valerie, whom he met while studying at Manchester, and by their daughter.
Colin Gray, born December 29 1943, died February 27 2020