Deterrence as a strategic concept evolved during the Cold War. During that period, deterrence strategy was aimed mainly at preventing aggression against the United States and its close allies by the hostile Communist power centers--the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its allies, Communist China and North Korea. In particular, the strategy was devised to prevent aggression involving nuclear attack by the USSR or China. Since the end of the Cold War, the risk of war among the major powers has subsided to the lowest point in modern history. Still, the changing nature of the threats to American and allied security interests has stimulated a considerable broadening of the deterrence concept. Post-Cold War Conflict Deterrence examines the meaning of deterrence in this new environment and identifies key elements of a post-Cold War deterrence strategy and the critical issues in devising such a strategy. It further examines the significance of these findings for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Quantitative and qualitative measures to support judgments about the potential success or failure of deterrence are identified. Such measures will bear on the suitability of the naval forces to meet the deterrence objectives. The capabilities of U.S. naval forces that especially bear on the deterrence objectives also are examined. Finally, the book examines the utility of models, games, and simulations as decision aids in improving the naval forces' understanding of situations in which deterrence must be used and in improving the potential success of deterrence actions.
This report provides empirical evidence on the deterrent effects of U.S. overseas military forces. It also offers guidance about how the deterrent effects of forces may vary by their type, size, and location.
For decades, the rational actor model served as the preferred guide for U.S. deterrence policy. It has been a convenient and comforting guide because it requires little detailed knowledge of an opponent’s unique decision-making process and yet typically provides confident generalizations about how deterrence works. The model tends to postulate common decision-making parameters across the globe to reach generalizations about how deterrence will function and the types of forces that will be "stabilizing" or "destabilizing." Yet a broad spectrum of unique factors can influence an opponent’s perceptions and his calculations, and these are not easily captured by the rational actor model. The absence of uniformity means there can be very few deterrence generalizations generated by the use of the rational actor model that are applicable to the entire range of opponents. Understanding Deterrence considers how factors such as psychology, history, religion, ideology, geography, political structure, culture, proliferation and geopolitics can shape a leadership’s decision-making process, in ways that are specific and unique to each opponent. Understanding Deterrence demonstrates how using a multidisciplinary approach to deterrence analysis can better identify and assess factors that influence an opponent’s decision-making process. This identification and assessment process can facilitate the tailoring of deterrence strategies to specific purposes and result in a higher likelihood of success than strategies guided by the generalizations about opponent decision-making typically contained in the rational actor model. This book was published as a special issue of Comparative Strategy.
Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction adapts Clausewitz's framework to highlight the dynamic relationship between the main elements of strategy: purpose, method, and means. Drawing on historical examples, Antulio J. Echevarria discusses the major types of military strategy and how emerging technologies are affecting them. This second edition has been updated to include an expanded chapter on manipulation through cyberwarfare and new further reading.
China's recent reforms have led to unprecedented economic growth; if this continues, China will be able to turn its great potential power into actual power. The result could be, in the very long term, the rise of China as a rival to the United States as the world's predominant power; in the nearer term, China could become a significant rival in the East Asian region. In this context, the issue for U.S. policy is how to handle a rising power, a problem that predominant powers have faced many times throughout history. It is the contention of this report that the future Sino-U.S. context will illustrate many of the problems of deterrence theory that have been discussed in recent decades; deterrence theory will be, in general, more difficult to apply than it was in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War context. The key may be to seek nonmilitary means of deterrence, i.e., diplomatic ways to manipulate the tension to China's disadvantage.
This independent assessment is a comprehensive study of the strategic benefits, risks, and costs of U.S. military presence overseas. The report provides policymakers a way to evaluate the range of strategic benefits and costs that follow from revising the U.S. overseas military presence by characterizing how this presence contributes to assurance, deterrence, responsiveness, and security cooperation goals.
With many scholars and analysts questioning the relevance of deterrence as a valid strategic concept, this volume moves beyond Cold War nuclear deterrence to show the many ways in which deterrence is applicable to contemporary security. It examines the possibility of applying deterrence theory and practice to space, to cyberspace, and against non-state actors. It also examines the role of nuclear deterrence in the twenty-first century and reaches surprising conclusions.
Conventional Deterrence is a book about the origins of war. Why do nations faced with the prospect of large-scale conventional war opt for or against an offensive strategy? John J. Mearsheimer examines a number of crises that led to major conventional wars to explain why deterrence failed. He focuses first on Allied and German decision making in the years 1939–1940, analyzing why the Allies did not strike first against Germany after declaring war and, conversely, why the Germans did attack the West. Turning to the Middle East, he examines the differences in Israeli and Egyptian strategic doctrines prior to the start of the major conventional conflicts in that region. Mearsheimer then critically assays the relative strengths and weaknesses of NATO and the Warsaw Pact to determine the prospects for conventional deterrence in any future crisis. He is also concerned with examining such relatively technical issues as the impact of precision-guided munitions (PGM) on conventional deterrence and the debate over maneuver versus attrition warfare.Mearsheimer pays considerable attention to questions of military strategy and tactics. Challenging the claim that conventional detrrence is largely a function of the numerical balance of forces, he also takes issue with the school of thought that ascribes deterrence failures to the dominance of "offensive" weaponry. In addition to examining the military consideration underlying deterrence, he also analyzes the interaction between those military factors and the broader political considerations that move a nation to war.
In an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific, the United States, Australia and their regional allies and partners face a myriad of strategic challenges that cut across every level of the competitive space. Driven by China’s use of multidimensional coercion in pursuit of its aim to displace the United States as the region’s dominant power, a new era of strategic competition is unfolding. At stake is the stability and character of the Indo-Pacific order, hitherto founded on American power and longstanding rules and norms, all of which are increasingly uncertain. The challenges that Beijing poses the region operate over multiple domains and are prosecuted by the Chinese Communist Party through a whole-of-nation strategy. In the grey zone between peace and war, tactics like economic coercion, foreign interference, the use of civil militias and other forms of political warfare have become Beijing’s tools of choice for pursuing incremental shifts to the geostrategic status quo. These efforts are compounded by China’s rapidly growing conventional military power and expanding footprint in the Western Pacific, which is raising the spectre of a limited war that America would find it difficult to deter or win. All of this is taking place under the lengthening shadow of Beijing’s nuclear modernisation and its bid for new competitive advantages in emerging strategic technologies. Strengthening regional deterrence and counter-coercion in light of these challenges will require the United States and Australia — working independently, together and with their likeminded partners — to develop more integrated strategies for the Indo-Pacific region and novel ways to operationalise the alliance in support of deterrence objectives. There is widespread support for this agenda in both Washington and Canberra. As the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy makes clear, allies provide an “asymmetric advantage” for helping the United States deter aggression and uphold favourable balances of power around the world. Australia’s Minister for Defence Linda Reynolds mirrored this sentiment in a major speech in Washington last November, observing that “deterrence is a joint responsibility for a shared purpose — one that no country, not even the United States, can undertake alone.” Forging greater coordination on deterrence strategy within the US-Australia alliance, however, is no easy task, particularly when this undertaking is focussed on China’s coercive behaviour in the Indo-Pacific. Although Canberra and Washington have overlapping strategic objectives, their interests and threat perceptions regarding China are by no means symmetrical. Each has very different capabilities, policy priorities and tolerance for accepting costs and risks. Efforts to operationalise deterrence must therefore proceed incrementally and on the basis of robust alliance dialogue. To advance this process of bilateral strategic policy debate, the United States Studies Centre and Pacific Forum hosted the second round of the Annual Track 1.5 US-Australia Deterrence Dialogue in Washington in November 2019, bringing together US and Australian experts from government and non-government organisations. The theme for this meeting was “Operationalising Deterrence in the Indo-Pacific,” with a focus on exploring tangible obstacles and opportunities for improving the alliance’s collective capacity to deter coercive changes to the regional order. Both institutions would like to thank the Australian Department of Defence Strategic Policy Grants Program and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency for their generous support of this engagement. The following analytical summary reflects the authors’ accounts of the dialogue’s proceedings and does not necessarily represent their own views. It endeavours to capture, examine and contextualise a wide range of perspectives and debates from the discussion; but does not purport to offer a comprehensive record. Nothing in the following pages represents the views of the Australian Department of Defence, the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency or any of the other officials or organisations that took part in the dialogue.
