deterrence

I See We’re “Restoring Deterrence” Again

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Deterrence is a favored word among all too many military and defense strategists. It is wildly overused, to a point where its use stymies thought. If an action (or expenditure) is claimed to promote deterrence, well then it’s not to be questioned. For that reason alone the word should be retired. But it’s worse than that.

Deterrence implies agency on the part of the deterrer and powerlessness on the part of the deterred. It implies that actions on the part of the deterrer are determinative. It imparts a feeling of control over the situation that may not be there.

The phrase “restoring deterrence” has cropped up again. But what is to be restored, and by whom? We now know that Hamas has been quiet the past few years, not because it was deterred, but because it was preparing and waithing for the right time. I’ve seen the phrase used in connection with IDF actions against Hamas. Those actions seem to be retributive, or intended to destroy Hamas’s ability to strike, but neither of those is primarily about deterrence. Rather, they are direct military action.

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Five Tropes I Hope Not To See In The New Year (But We Will)

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

It’s harder to analyze events than to paste labels on them. Events come thick and fast, and pundits have to say something. It’s mostly pundits I’m talking about, but not entirely. History may not repeat, but it does rhyme, they say, and then they reach for one of these tropes. When the tropes are repeated again and again, they can influence policymakers. They flatten everyone’s thinking.

Here are five that I find particularly irritating.

Red Lines. Although they frequently appear in op-eds, nobody has identified these precious markers. Party A has a red line that Party B must not cross, or package of responses C will ensue. War doesn’t work this way. Most diplomacy doesn’t work this way. Each side has a number of options to choose from that depend on the situation in which a decision is made: timing, balance of interests, balance of power. The New York Times has an excellent explainer on red lines, although they couldn’t resist writing the headline as if the trope was worth considering.

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Furiously Writing Deterrence Theory

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

This is…not good.

The United States is “furiously” writing a new nuclear deterrence theory that simultaneously faces Russia and China, said the top commander of America’s nuclear arsenal—and needs more Americans working on how to prevent nuclear war.

The quote is from Navy Admiral Chas Richard, the head of STRATCOM, the United States Strategic Command, which is responsible for strategic nuclear deterrence, the conventional-weapon global strike, and operating the Defense Department’s Global Information Grid.

Writing “a new nuclear deterrence theory” is not a college essay. Nor can it “furiously” be done overnight, as if that essay were due tomorrow.

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Deconstructing Deterrence

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Deterrence is a peculiar concept. Its effectiveness is measured by actions that don’t take place. Actions that are often called deterrence may have nothing to do with the actions that don’t take place.

It’s hackneyed to start with a definition, but this is a confused enough subject that let’s do it. Here’s what Google gives me, from Oxford Languages:

de·ter·rence  /dəˈtərəns/  noun  the action of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences. “nuclear missiles remain the main deterrence against possible aggression”

To keep it simple, let’s assume two actors. Actor One may be contemplating an action that Actor Two finds undesirable. So Actor Two takes an action to instill doubt or fear of the consequences in Actor One’s mind.

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Reporter: Deterrence Didn’t Work. Biden: Do You Know What You’re Talking About

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Eena Ruffini of CBS News tried a gotcha on President Joe Biden in his press conference at NATO. “Deterrence didn’t work,” she declared. This is an alternative formulation for “Putin attacked Ukraine for no reason recognized in international law.” The advantage for a reporter is that it puts responsibility on Biden and the United States. Biden was not put on the back foot, however. He has been studying the political side of nuclear weapons since before Ruffini was born.

Ruffini’s question was the last, and Biden had noted he was running out of time. His answer was necessarily short and missed a lot. Richard Nephew expanded on the sanctions side of Biden’s answer. I’ll expand on deterrence.

“Deterrence” is a word that is almost always used badly, including by the military. It’s a difficult word. It means to convince another not to attack by preparations for that attack. It refers to the mental state of one party, influenced by the actions of another. Its meaning has slid from that interaction to the influencing actions by themselves When a reporter says “Deterrence didn’t work,” she is talking about something intended to deter. She probably could not say what specific measures those are.

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Thinking About Deterrence

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

I have always been suspicious of arguments about nuclear deterrence. After the Soviet Union broke up, it seemed to me that those arguments needed to be redrawn, since they had been based on the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nobody’s done that.

Back in the 1960s, Robert McNamara recognized that nuclear deterrence could easily deteriorate into a comparison of weapons. That’s what’s happened in the justifications for the lower-yield nuclear weapons introduced to nuclear submarines. That’s all the justification that’s been made. That’s not deterrence.

So I wrote a piece about that, and Foreign Policy published it. There’s another little piece that didn’t quite fit, that Inkstick Media published. All the talk about “restoring deterrence” vis-à-vis Iran is nonsense.

So please read those two.

What Is This “Re-Establish Deterrence” They Keep Talking About?

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

I have a short piece up at Inkstick Media. It’s short enough that I won’t quote it here, except to say that I have found the claims that the Trump administration killed Qassem Soleimani to “re-establish deterrence” annoying in multiple dimensions.

Besides, Inkstick is a new enterprise, trying to make this stuff more understandable, and I support that goal. If you like what I write here, you’ll probably like Inkstick. Go ahead, give them some clicks!

On The Lack Of Analytical Utility Of The Concept Of Deterrence

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

With the US withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, we will be hearing more about deterrence. That word is used far too broadly, muddying discussions of military strategy and focusing discussions of war and peace too narrowly.

As the Cold War progressed from open competition for bigger bombs in the 1950s, through the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the realization that Ronald Reagan expressed so nicely, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” slowly formed, although seldom expressed openly by the governments of the United States or the Soviet Union. Nuclear war became more unthinkable, and communication and arms control measures were instituted to make it less likely.

That uneasy standoff continued through the fall of the Soviet Union. It is often attributed solely to both countries’ possession of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other, that rough equality called deterrence. But there are many other reasons to avoid nuclear war, like developing a country’s economy and attending to other areas of instability. When those reasons are left out, discussions of strategy are distorted. Read More

Stephen Walt Agrees With Me

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

On the Nuclear Posture Review. He goes on about more aspects of it than I did yesterday, but his conclusions in that area are very similar to mine.

Moreover, I find the elaborate scenarios that nuclear strategists dream up to justify new weapons to be both militarily and politically unrealistic. They tend to assume that complex military operations will go off without a hitch the very first time they are attempted (and in the crucible of a nuclear crisis), and they further assume that political leaders in the real world would be willing to order the slaughter of millions for something less than existential stakes. My main concern has been that some gullible politician would actually believe that one of these elaborate scenarios would actually work and might therefore be tempted to try it. Just as bad: An adversary might think the United States thought it could win such a war and might decide it had no choice but to try to hit it first.

I also find the obsession with matching capabilities at every rung of some hypothetical “escalation ladder” to be slightly absurd. Is it realistic to think that U.S. leaders defending vital interests against a possible Russian threat would be stymied because they didn’t have a capability that exactly mirrored whatever Russia had or was threatening to do? Would a top advisor really say to the president: “Oh dear, sir, Russia just threatened to attack with a nuclear weapon with a yield of 7.2 kilotons. We have lots of 5-kiloton bombs and lots of 11-kiloton bombs all ready to go, but if we use the little one, they’ll think we’re wimps, and if we use the big one, then the onus of escalation will be on us. I guess they’ve got us over the whing-whang, sir, and we’ll just have to do whatever Putin says. If only we had built more 7.2 kiloton bombs than they did!”

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Levels of Deterrence

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) mentions some variant of “deter” 279 times. Deterrence is supposedly what today’s nuclear arsenals are about. The idea is that we have enough nuclear weapons so that if an enemy attacked us, we could still destroy them. That standoff, established after the nearly world-ending Cuban Missile Crisis, seems to have worked. Or it’s possible that the reason for no nuclear war in the past 56 years is that nations recognize that destroying the world is in nobody’s interests. Read More