Do No Harm to the Stability of Central Strategic Deterrence

Do No Harm to the Stability of Central Strategic Deterrence

The nuclear great powers will watch any crisis involving the United States very closely. Even if the strategic nuclear balance among the United States, Russia, and China becomes more stable, this will not guarantee continued stability in economic, political, or diplomatic competitions. Regardless, in future conflicts we will continue to find ourselves risk-averse to provoking heightened concerns for the vital national interests of Russia and China. It will be particularly important to consider the implications military action against a particular adversary will have on its neighbors in this n-power game.

There is reason for special concern in this regard for the stability of our relationship with China, for we hardly know them. In the Cold War we devoted billions of dollars and enormous human resources in trying to learn how the Soviets made strategic decisions, to discern their intent, and to assess their true capabilities. And sometimes we still got it wrong. We have devoted nothing near that effort to understanding the intentions and capabilities of China.

It is equally important for them to understand us. At least Chinese strategists can study our Cold War crisis behavior. We can be sure that they read Schelling and Allison, but will that explain what our twenty-first-century redlines would be? How would the United States respond to a Chinese high-altitude detonation of an electromagnetic pulse weapon? Does the United States consider attacks in outer space to be akin to attacks on our soil? These kinds of questions go beyond our declaratory policy, reaching to the essence of our decisions. Not only are China’s military writings more guarded and enigmatic than ours, they have never had a nuclear crisis of their own from which to learn about the pressures and stresses that affect communication of intent when a strategic nuclear exchange potentially hangs in the balance.

Maintaining crisis stability in a multipolar nuclear world requires more stringent assumptions about communication, trust, and commitment than with only two players, where weaker assumptions might suffice. Since the permutations and combinations inherent in multiactor crises are more numerous, creating confidence-building measures among nuclear-armed states may become a particularly useful method for building crisis stability. Military-to-military exchanges cannot guarantee friendliness, but they can promote understanding.

Such exchanges could produce deeper understanding of the strategic cultures of nations and nonstate groups that might acquire nuclear weapons. Culture plays a large role in strategic relationships; therefore, it will serve us well to invest in the kind of cultural understanding only prolonged effort provides. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union both reflected the world of the enlightenment in advancing their own unique “internationalisms”—democracy in the case of the United States, communism for the Soviet Union—according to Prof. Paul Bracken, who notes,

Compare such noble internationalisms with nationalism driving the new nuclear states. Pakistan uses Islamic fundamentalism to try to build an extension of nationalism in Afghanistan and Central Asia; North Korea seals itself off from the outside world with a juche philosophy of self-reliance and convinces its people that they are respected by the countries of Asia. These behaviors arise out of an emotional nationalism that one people is better than another. The United States and the Soviet Union had their own absurd ideas, to be sure. But neither believed that their peoples were innately superior to each other, only that their core political beliefs were.

Understand the Limits of Conventional Deterrence

There have been many debates in the United States on the value of conventional deterrence. Indeed, the Nuclear Posture Review sets us on a path to zero nuclear weapons in part based on the belief that conventional means may one day fully substitute for nuclear weapons. Surely our 4,000 years of human history with conventional warfare—compared to 65 or so with nuclear weapons—can teach us something empirically about the efficacy of conventional deterrence.

In the 1980s Paul Huth and Bruce Russett conducted an interesting statistical study of deterrence. They looked at 54 case studies of twentieth-century warfare in which one side attempted an initial deterrence strategy and then applied a methodology to normalize all the appropriate factors so they could draw comparisons among the studies. They concluded that, historically, deterrence has worked a little more than half the time (31 out of 54 cases) and nearly always by denial of benefit rather than by imposing cost. They also found that it never worked in great-power wars, only in regional conflicts. And, when deterrence did work, there was usually both a strong relationship between a great-power defender and its protégé as well as a record of arms transfers from the defender to its protégé. In the six instances in which at least one side was a nuclear power, possession of nuclear weapons by the defender had no effect on the success or failure of deterrence in preventing the outbreak of war.

Conventional deterrence, then, might work about half the time. Cam­paign planners who must develop flexible deterrent operations should study Barry Blechman’s comprehensive analysis from the 1970s of what worked and what did not when conventional forces were employed to af­fect the decision-making processes of potential adversaries. This was an exhaustive analysis of dozens of Cold War–era case studies and is well worth rediscovery for the twenty-first century.

Plan for Operations on a Nuclear Battlefield

If it is now much more likely that some rogue state or nonstate actor will detonate a nuclear weapon in our lifetime, or if the consequence of a multipolar nuclear world is greater risk of nuclear war through miscalculation, then it stands to reason that we must prepare our forces for operations on a nuclear battlefield, even if we do not resort to first use or responding in kind ourselves. There is growing concern in the analytic community about the prospects for limited nuclear war in the near future. Even novelists are speculating on how radical Islamist organizations possessing a number of nuclear weapons might use them in an operational campaign as op­posed to the usual scenario of detonating a single device in a major Western city during a terrorist attack.

We are ill prepared for this. While there are regulations, procedures, and joint doctrine for managing the consequences of an adversary’s use of weapons of mass destruction, there is no doctrine for conducting combat operations on a nuclear battlefield.

Assess the Credibility of Deterrence

How do you judge a negative? That is, how do you know your attempts at deterrence are successful? What indicators and warnings reveal the enemy’s intent? What are the priority intelligence requirements for a deterrence campaign or line of operation? Is the opponent not attacking because it is deterred or because it is just biding its time for a massive response that you did not anticipate? There are many who argue that answers to these questions are simply unknowable and deterrence must rest on blind faith, or that the planner will have to conduct operations as if the deterrence phase will fail—a stratagem that, of course, risks self-fulfillment.

Some recent methodological and empirical work can help campaign planners discern whether deterrent threats are achieving the intended effects of creating fear of consequences in the opponent’s calculations. Daryl Press conducted case studies into instances of a country communicating deterrent threats to an opponent to prevent the outbreak of war among great powers. He looked at German assessments of British and French threats in 1938–39, British and US assessments of Soviet threats in the Berlin crises of 1958–61, and US assessments of Soviet threats in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Press found that deterrence works when a country makes threats that the opponent believes it is capable of carrying out and when the opponent believes its adversary has a strategic interest in doing so. In other words, the prerequisite for deterrence has less to do with rational calculations of risk and intent, even if the adversary has a reputation for bluff, bluster, and subterfuge. The success or failure of deterrence in those cases had more to do with perceptions of capability and willingness; what matters most is the here and now, not past behavior.

This suggests that assessing the credibility of a deterrent threat should begin with an objective look at what the Soviets called “correlation of forces,” or the military balance that can be brought to bear in a crisis. We discovered with the Soviets that different sides can have different ways of measuring military power, so it will be prudent to maintain a capacity to emulate the potential adversary’s military analysis and decision-making processes to reflect accurately its understanding of our military capability. It may use measures of merit quite different than our own and combine them in ways that would appear strange to our own method of conduct­ing campaign analysis. In any case it is vital not to fall prey to the tempta­tion of mirror imaging when conducting an assessment of the credibility of a deterrent threat.

Press also suggests several ways to assess intent. He asserts that “[t]he evidence for credibility is in the adversary’s private communications about their perceptions of our capabilities and intentions and their reasoning behind their own policies.”21 In his four case studies, Press found strong support for the conclusion that there are two primary sources of evidence about the credibility of a deterrent threat in the mind of the adversary. First, we can turn to the opposing decision makers’ statements about their adversary’s credibility. They often make statements about their expectation of the explicit likelihood that we will carry out our threats and promises. Second, Press says to look at the very policies that decision makers advo­cate during crisis. Credible threats generate more calls for concessions than do threats that are not credible. If the opponent decision makers advocate a hard-line policy, they do not believe our threat is credible. If they argue for caution, they assign higher credibility to our threat.

Press’ historical case studies rely on archival source material for a retro­spective look at what deterred and what did not. Campaign planners will, of course, not have the luxury of hindsight or even foresight to see into the enemy’s decision making in the future. However, today’s informa­tion operations tools can provide timely insights into the kinds of evidence that are needed to assess credibility of deterrent threats. We should be particularly capable of developing communications intercept and com­puter network exploitation that would allow collection of timely intelli­gence on the opponent’s internal communications. A number of tools exist for exploiting massive amounts of data to discern relevant content that would reveal the kinds of discussions Press suggests would shed light on the credibility of our deterrent threats in the minds of our opponents. Campaign planners need access to those kinds of intelligence capabilities and analytic tools.

Beware the Potential for Cascading Effects

If escalation is more like a vortex than a ladder, then chances are a crisis in the multipolar, proliferated nuclear world will be more like 1914 than 1939 in terms of its potential for spiraling out of control. The twenty-first century is fraught with risks of misperceptions among crisis participants from divergent cultural perspectives and with clashing strategic interests. These risks are compounded by the fact that every newly nuclear state goes through a period of learning about its new role; it must learn both how it intends to employ its nuclear capabilities to achieve their deterrent effects and how to keep them safe, secure, and reliable in their particular geo­political environment. Unanticipated consequences abound with emerg­ing warfare domains such as cyber and space. Timelines for decision, already made very short by the Cold War capabilities of ballistic missiles, will be even further compressed by nearly instantaneous and ubiquitous effects of a globally interconnected world order.

In this milieu, decision superiority will become a capability of military necessity. Decision superiority is simply the capacity to make better deci­sions faster than opponents. Sometimes this will depend on one’s own command of the “observe, orient, decide, act” cycle. But in many exer­cises, experiments, and war games, the military has discovered that it just cannot execute the “orient” phase fast enough to get inside some oppo­nents’ decision cycles. This is particularly evident in exploring how to conduct ballistic and cruise missile defense against a sophisticated oppo­nent who employs not only very capable missiles but also large numbers of them in complex operational concepts of attack (e.g., surge, swarm, multiple, and changing directions). There is an emerging concept for command and control that suggests we will need military capabilities to enable us to decide and begin to act well before we have traditionally suf­ficient information to conduct the military decision-making process. An­other complementary approach for achieving decision superiority may lie in the conduct of denial, deception, and disruption concepts to slow down and degrade the opponent’s decision cycle.

We can develop ways to make decisions faster, but will they be good decisions? How do we provide decision-making support that enables not only faster decisions but also better decisions? In carrying out twenty-first-century deterrence operations, we need to make decisions that are better in the sense that they produce actions that not only achieve our geopolitical objectives but also do not trigger a chain of consequences that result in nuclear weapons use. Here again, we need more work in the behavioral model of decision making rather than the rational actor model.

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