The Growing Complexity of Deterrence

The Growing Complexity of Deterrence

Today, the context in which deterrence must be applied has grown so complex that the military must find ways to apply it at the operational level of war. We cannot leave it exclusively to academics and policymakers. Four global trends drive our understanding of deterrence at the operational level.

We Live In a Multipolar Nuclear World

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, there are nine nuclear-armed states (the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea). This multipolar nuclear world will function systemically more like a balance-of-power world.

In a classic balance-of-power system, conflicts tend to be characterized by shifting coalitions rather than contending alliances. While this may mean that post–Cold War relationships among the United States, Russia, and China are more likely to be stable in strategic terms, it may also mean that medium nuclear powers, such as France and India, will become key to future coalition relationships among the three larger nuclear powers. It may also mean that the United States will have to devote greater effort to building and maintaining strategic relationships since no single player can dominate the smallest coalition in a balance-of-power system. However, actions taken to deter one nuclear state will affect the others in complex ways that may present unforeseen dilemmas in dealing with a particular crisis.

For example, if a crisis between the United States and China were somehow to devolve into a conflict in East Asia and both sides maneuvered large military forces across the region, how would nuclear-armed India comprehend and interpret the various moves and countermoves? While India might be confident that neither the United States nor China would threaten it directly, the outcome of the crisis would have a profound effect on India’s strategic interests. A risk-averse India would inexorably be drawn to the crisis and would find itself in a position of being solicited as the potential swing vote in terms of the weight of its own military power. This would not necessarily be explicit; it could quite easily take the form of precautionary mobilizations and movements of forces to deter China from taking advantage of opportunities to reengage in their long-standing border disputes. After all, China is the only nuclear power in history that has attacked another nuclear-armed opponent when it invaded Soviet territory in 1969. And how then would Pakistan respond to strategic actions by India? In some ways we may thus appear to be moving out of the twentieth century into the nineteenth.

We Also Now Live in a Proliferated Nuclear World

This means that lesser nuclear states and nonstates add increased risk of catalytic effects. Gone are the days when proliferation could be considered a good thing. The historic reasoning was if two countries were mutually deterred from going to war with each other by possession of nuclear weapons, then stability would increase as more countries acquired them. There would be fewer wars, and more countries would likewise be deterred. In reality, today’s proliferated world is the opposite case, with the most immediate and extreme dangers being nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Defiant proliferators seek nuclear weapons not to deter but to employ. At the same time, lesser nuclear states are much more likely to use the few nuclear weapons they possess. In a conflict situation, once deterrence has failed, lesser nuclear states’ incentives are to use nuclear weapons first, before greater and medium powers remove them by other means. Once such an adversary initiates use of nuclear weapons, it is not likely to be restrained from further use of a limited arsenal, since there will be enormous pressure to use them or lose them.

Nuclear proliferators are also more risk-acceptant than responsible nuclear-armed states. They are more likely to adopt a first-use policy, to use all they have, and to provoke their use by others. Another complicating factor is coalitions of nuclear states. Coalitions of lesser nuclear states can disperse the effects of a response from a larger opponent and thus absorb more destruction and suffer more punishment than could a single larger nuclear state. Responsible nuclear powers must develop concepts of deterrence operations that will prevent such opponents from taking those risks by deterring the smaller power’s use of nuclear weapons. US joint forces will therefore need new operational concepts for military capabilities to prevent such conflict and for operating on battlefields characterized by limited use of nuclear weapons.

The Behavioral Model of Deterrence Will Predominate

Cold War deterrence was built on the rational actor model, which emphasizes the intellectual nature of deterrence. It holds that the threat by an opponent to use nuclear weapons, resulting in sure destruction of the other, would be so risky that no one—regardless of cultural or behavioral attributes or institutional decision-making processes—would ever conclude they could prevail in such an ultimate nuclear contest. Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, and Thomas Schelling are generally recognized as the intellectual founders of the rational actor school of deterrence.

Theorists developed many ways to conceptualize this objective calculus, from game theory to expected utility models. Each Cold War crisis has been analytically dissected, with the result that the United States and the Soviet Union developed mutual understanding of the limits of escalation and the “redlines” of crisis behavior and military action, though, as a result of post–Cold War assessments, many of these understandings are now demonstrably known to have been inaccurate. Widespread acceptance of the rational actor model resulted in a prevailing strategic deterrence orthodoxy of variations on the theory of “mutually assured destruction” (MAD), which today still commands widespread adherents. Journalist James Fallows famously characterized strategic deterrence concepts and related arms control and defense policies based on the theory of MAD as akin to medieval theology.

In contrast, the behavioral school emphasizes the cognitive nature of deterrence as applied to individuals, groups, organizations, and nations. A number of Cold War analysts recognized the psychological basis of deterrence. Robert Jervis, for example, argued that understanding each side’s values, beliefs, and perceptions was necessary to comprehend their decision making. Ultimately, deterrence is in the mind of the deterred. Thucydides attributes to Hermocrates: “Nobody is driven into war by ignorance, and no one who thinks he will gain anything from it is deterred by fear . . . when there is mutual fear, men think twice before they make aggressions upon one another.”

In the 1970s, behavioral scientists began to open new windows into the mind. The 2002 Nobel Prize in economics went to Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman for his work in the 1970s and 1980s on the psychology of judgment and decision making. Kahneman and his colleagues argued that people do not employ rational decision making in their actual processes in life; they do not try to collect all the possible information available to maximize the payoff of existing choices. Instead, they place boundaries on the kinds and types of data they collect and then employ “rules of thumb” rather than complex formulas of utility to rationalize choices. Such “bounded rationality,” according to Kahneman, leads to errors of judgment from emotional bias and from using faulty decision-making heuristics.

 Real-world case studies have shed new light into the psychology of national leaders when nuclear weapons might be involved in crises. Many behavioral scientists have attempted to minimize the impact of such bias and develop methods to apply the ideal, rational decision-making model. In his famous book, Every War Must End, Fred Ikle wrote,

It is not enough that those who can deliberately start a war should at no time come to believe that their nation, or their “cause,” would be better served by going to war than if peace were maintained. For even if this condition is met, it will not be sufficient if wars can be started by . . . leaders who fail to think coherently about how the fighting will end, or who, in some perverse stubbornness, no longer care if it ends in disaster for their own country.

The reality of the growing complexity of deterrence means that we have much to gain from deeper understanding of how to apply the behavioral approach to deterrence operations.

Emerging Domains of War—Cyber and Space

Cyber and space domains are contributing a tremendous measure of complexity to the challenge of deterring future adversaries. Deterrence and escalation control now cross multiple domains of war. Attacks against space assets intended to blind or dazzle for tactical or operational effect may be perceived as precursors to broader, deeper strategic attacks. Computer network attacks may have huge unintended consequences for the entire global system. And new conventional capabilities may have far-reaching deterrent effects. In Europe, for example, while the United States and Russia argue over the role of ballistic missile defenses in our strategic relationship, some assert that the alliance can afford to trade off nonstrategic nuclear capabilities while deploying ballistic missile defenses. Also, there is an emerging debate on the deterrent value of conventionally armed intercontinental missiles that could fly a ballistic trajectory for part of their path and then shift to a more maneuverable mode during reentry. Such complex escalation and deterrence relationships heighten the potential for misperceptions and increase the risks of unleashing catalytic escalation forces.

In this milieu, Herman Kahn’s ladder of escalation is less helpful as a mental model of deterrence. In a bipolar world, escalation was linear. Now, escalation can function across many dimensions not limited to the nuclear escalation ladder. In the multipolar, proliferated nuclear world, deterrence exists across at least four domains simultaneously—conventional, nuclear, cyber, and space. Dr. Chris Yeaw, Air Force Global Strike Command’s chief scientist, likened this to a vortex in which each side could escalate or deescalate simultaneously across multiple domains and even jump from one ladder to another, making crisis management and escalation control much more complicated.

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