In response to Pointer’s THE VIABILITY OF DETERRENCE STRATEGIES FOR NON-NUCLEAR STATES

DISCLAIMER:
This article was written to discuss generalized theories of strategy, war and deterrence as discussed by LTC Harris Tan Nan An in the internationally and publicly available Pointer publication. 
This writer holds great respect for Tan, his well-written and thought-provoking article and his personal and professional accomplishments. He also notes that the article was written in 2017 and hence may not represent the scholarship (and Tan’s assessment thereof) around grey-zone operations and deterrence which has developed since.  Hence, he emphasizes that this piece does not mean to criticize but rather add to and build upon past scholarship. Lastly, he thanks Tan for his kind and generous correspondence to help ensure that the essay responded and represented him in a fair and good-spirited manner.
All the diagrams were made by the writer solely for this essay.

In his Vol. 46 No. 1 Pointer article “The Viability of Deterrence Strategies for Non-Nuclear States”, LTC Harris Tan argued that, at least with regards to state actors, conventional deterrence can still work without substantial strategic reconceptualization. With new technologies like precision munitions, Unmanned Aerial Systems, THAAD and ARTHUR, the ability for states to establish certainties in adversary minds of punishment and denial is greater than ever before. However, this seems in contradiction to an enduring pattern of conflict and aggression. Even militarily stronger powers, or states covered by stronger security umbrellas, can often find themselves unable to deter attacks by relatively weaker aggressors. The costs have been substantial, ranging from blows to confidence in election results and social coherence to physical destruction towards critical infrastructure and nuclear facilities. Through using the same logic of the escalation threshold that Tan used to explain why nuclear deterrence is problematic, aggressors have been able to undermine conventional deterrence. To address these issues, this essay will attempt to build upon Tan’s piece through adopting and adapting the “escalation ladder” to think about deterrence with greater logical specificity and clarity.

Blitzkrieg: the (only?) Deterrent Failure

When answering what a Deterrent Failure entails, Tan cited “Blitzkrieg”, a short and decisive (presumably also profitable) “Lightning War”. When adversaries are convinced that their enemies are weak (or at least, not credibly strong) and that a short, decisive war is possible, they are more likely to gamble on the iron dice of conflict to pursue their objectives.

This kind of thinking is perhaps best exemplified in Hitler’s famous quote regarding his invasion of the Soviet Union – “You only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down”. Hitler viewed the Red Army’s overall capabilities to be inferior to the Wehrmacht, driven low by what he saw as a combination as Judeo-Bolshevik corruption, Stalinist purges and general low Slavic ability. This view was seemingly confirmed by terrible Soviet underperformance against little Finland in the Winter War compared to the Wehrmacht’s incredible 6-week total victory against mighty France. Furthermore, as WWII historian Chris Bellamy notes, “[German military intelligence] completely underestimated the strength of Russian reserves, and especially the strength of the Russian air forces”. This view was shared by top Nazi generals such as Luftwaffe general Huffman von Waldau who regarded Soviet statistics as “propagandaist exaggerations” and Head of Army Intelligence Colonel Eberhard Kinzel who assessed that “[the Red Army] would not dare to launch even a limited campaign against the Romanian oil fields, since ‘fear of the German Army paralyses the [Red Army’s] resolution.’” In this case, Soviet deterrence failed because of German underestimations.

To erase the “Blitzkrieg” Deterrent Failure, Tan concluded that advances in military technology along with strong diplomacy can allow potentially aggressive states to continue to appreciate the military capacity of their targets and hence maintain deterrence. So long as one kept up a sufficiently strong force, peace could be assured.

Conflict as a Spectrum

However, is blitzkrieg thinking truly the only form of Deterrent Failure? Do aggressors only attack when they suspect that their targets possess sufficiently weak total capabilities to allow a swift victory? 

Seemingly not. In 21st Century politics, with substantial numbers of Great and Middle Powers, threat perceptions by neutral powers becomes relevant and the question of proportionality becomes paramount. Aggressors can play this to their advantage: If they can launch a slightly escalatory attack that an opponent has no equivalent to, then their opponent must either make concessions to de-escalate or bear the heavy regional threat perception and reputational costs of overall escalation. To use Brookings scholar Thomas Wright’s phrase, aggressive powers use “all measures short of war”, while cognizant and wary of the costs of war themselves, carefully calibrating escalation appropriately. 

To fully appreciate this concept, one must stop thinking in terms of only war and peace. In an age where the formally continuing Korean War kills far less than in Libya or the Donbas (where men from foreign lands fight without declarations of war), the binary of War and Peace increasingly lacks relevance. One must thus abandon the total war/total peace dichotomies often proposed by scholars such as JJ Mearsheimer and adopt, as well as adapt, a new framework: the Escalation Ladder. Introduced by Herman Kahn in 1965 as a new framework from which to understand conflict in the nuclear age, the Escalation Ladder shows a linear progression of conflict, across several different “steps” or levels of escalation. The sequence of these steps were products of what can broadly be considered the inherent strategic logic of escalation, involving the scale, scope and intensity of actions taken. In practice though, how escalatory any action is can depend on the diplomatic framing built around it. 

In Kahn’s original 44-step Escalation Ladder, the sequence ranged from Subcrisis Maneuvering actions such as Political, Diplomatic and Economic Gestures to different types of Civilian-Central Wars such as General Controlled War, or Nuclear “Spasm” (also known as Massive Retaliation). However, this is not universal and new escalation ladders can be constructed for every strategic scenario based on the situation present. For instance, if no nuclear weapons are possessed by all parties in a conflict, the ladder might top off with another level such as general strategic war or perhaps mass biological or chemical weapon strikes. New steps in the ladder can also be constructed through the production of tactical and strategic understandings through building clear patterns of behaviour. For instance, the People’s Liberation Army has traditionally established that it is perfectly able and willing to fight battles with strict limits on airpower, through establishing a pattern of behaviour from limiting air operations below the 38th parallel during the Korean war to establishing tight constraints on airpower during the 1995-96 Third Taiwan Straits crisis.

Importantly, each step represents concrete action, which often have specialized and at least partially exclusive elements, people and forces involved. For instance, the step of “skirmishing” places a primacy on the skills, materiel, morale and overall capabilities of border troops that preceding steps such as “diplomatic signalling” (which does not involve soldiers) and succeeding steps such as “general war” (which involves the broader force) do not. The implication of this means that militaries can be specialized towards different steps on the escalation ladder. A state that spends exorbitantly on training and equipping border troops might be excellent at skirmishing but falls tremendously behind when escalation changes.

Sometimes the logic of escalation can be unintuitive: Weapons that might be appropriate for use in the steps of “Shows of Force/ Weapon Tests” and “General War” might not be appropriate for steps in between such as “Border Skirmishing”. Mass artillery fire might be appropriate for firing into the sea or uninhabited geographical features during diplomatic battles or against enemy forces during large scale battle, but can be immensely inappropriate during isolated encounters on the frontiers. To misunderstand the often unspoken rules and misinterpret the sometimes awkward signals of escalation could result in inadvertent acts of escalation themselves.

As an additional benefit, the Escalation Ladder is perfectly able to plot all forms of both conventional and non-conventional measures, forces and deterrents including cyber and nuclear weapons on the same logical framework. As a framework built for the rapid advances of the nuclear age, it is flexible by design.

There are a few general consistent rules that are products of the broader international structure that govern how the ladder works. In adversarial relationships, there are strong and consistent tendencies that compel states (even those that try to establish themselves as “good actors”) to match an opponent on the escalation ladder. This is because a comparatively less escalatory posture suggests weakness which could trigger major Deterrent Failure and broader regional predation and a comparatively more escalatory posture suggests aggression which could trigger broader regional threat perceptions. This could lead to a different form of Deterrent Failure as neighbours might feel compelled to fight a perceived regional threat in what realist International Relations scholars would call balancing action. Hence, most states fully appreciate the costs of exceeding or subceeding their rivals and calibrate their escalatory states to match and deter their opponents appropriately. This can be strategically straightforward, if still practically challenging when the ladder is balanced and symmetrical. Alas, as the next section proves, this is not always the case.

Asymmetrical Escalation

Of course, it is rather generous to assume that the arsenals of opposing forces will always be somewhat equivalent. The world is not a chessboard and all states are not created equal. Sometimes vast asymmetries can occur at the high end of escalation, such as the possession of nuclear arsenals or large saturation bombing capability. However, where Deterrent Failure most commonly occurs nowadays seems to be around asymmetries in the middle and lower ends of escalation, such as cyber warfare, disinformation, mercenary warfare and insurgency sponsorship. These capabilities can be built around the construction of new specialized forces such as China’s maritime fishing boat militias, Russia’s Fancy Bear hacking unit or Internet Research Agency (for disinformation) or simply the redistribution and respecialization of pre-existing forces for asymmetrical purposes, such as Russia’s use of ex-servicemen for overseas mercenary Wagner Group operations.

The implications of an unbalanced escalation ladder are major. When faced with a one-sided encounter that the unbalanced step entails, the disadvantaged country no longer has the best option of matching its opponent. It must either prove itself weak and make concessions for overall coordinated de-escalation, or it must prove itself aggressive through higher escalation. 

As the below diagrams show, one can possess all the great deterrents of higher levels of escalation –  the F-35 fighter jets, the THAAD and ARTHUR systems, the precision munitions, the Predator drones, but remain unable to retaliate or threaten retaliation at all in an equivalent and proportionate way when faced with an asymmetrical gray-zone threat. Certainly, one could abandon proportionality and choose to escalate – but to what end? With the increased threat perception cost, escalating to mere equivalency is often simply not worth it for a country hoping to maintain a decent reputation. It is by this same logic that NATO, theoretically the most powerful security actor in world history, found itself unable to react to or deter tremendous escalation in its conflict with Russia when “little green men” invaded the Donbas in 2014.

Further applicability of these theories is clear – In 2010, Israel launched a cyber attack against Iranian nuclear facilities with the Stuxnet virus. Iran had no equivalent response and did not want to risk creating massive regional threat perceptions through engaging in broader escalation such as missile strikes. Hence, it experienced Deterrent Failure that proved persistent until Iran developed and demonstrated its own offensive cyber warfare capability, shown in its 2012 Shamoon attack against Saudi Aramco.

Addendum: This author notes that cyber Deterrent Failure has resumed in the Iran/Israel dyad, as evidenced by the April 2021 attack. This does not necessarily draw the analysis of this piece in question – 9 years of deterrence from 2012 to 2021 (which due to evolving defensive and offensive capabilities, is always perishable – and even more so in the cyber domain) is substantial and would surpass the ambition of any strategic framework (barring grand strategic frameworks like Kennan’s). Certainly, all deterrence needs renewal and reminders and Iran has not adequately demonstrated anti-infrastructure capability for quite some time.

During a 2007 diplomatic spat with its Baltic neighbour, Russia launched massive cyber attacks against Estonia, taking down bank and government internet infrastructure. This meant that during a time of internal rioting, cash machines and electronic banking ceased to function, intra-government communications broke down and news companies found their ability to spread information (particularly important during periods of chaos and confusion) stonewalled. Both Estonia and the broader NATO security umbrella covering it did not have equivalent cyberwarfare capacity to establish deterrence before the attack or reestablish it after the attack.

This sort of Gray-Zone dynamic does not apply to cyber warfare in practice only either. Disinformation warfare is another sort of asymmetrical weapon that can do incredible societal damage to which many states lack exactly or justifiably equivalent responses. This can explain the complete and unabashed impunity with which Russia, China and more recently Iran have conducted disinformation campaigns within Europe, Asia and the Americas. While most media focus has zeroed in on Russian disinformation operations in the 2016 US Presidential Elections, it is worth keeping in mind that Russia frequently has launched disinformation campaigns across the world since the Soviet era. Some notable recent cases include the 2016 Lisa campaign in Germany (wherein a fake story of migrant rape of an underage girl attempted to divide the population along with the migrant question), the 2017 “Lithuanian Lisa” (the same story but with German NATO soldiers raping an underage Lithuanian girl) and the 2017 “Lithuanian Instructor Rapes” (Lithuanian military instructors raping underage girls in Ukraine). While not as adept as its northern neighbour, China has waged similar sorts of campaigns around the January 2020 Taiwan Elections and the early stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Clearly, deterrence has failed around disinformation.

Insurgency sponsorship is one of the older forms of grey-zone tactics, and a favourite weapon of militarily weaker states against their stronger counterparts. One could trace this tradition all the way to Athenian support of the Ionian Revolt against Achaemenid Persian rule in 499 BCE, to Serbian support of Serb Bosnian terrorists fighting Habsburg Austrian rule in the 1910s, to present-day Pakistani and Turkish insurgency sponsorship in Afghanistan and Syria respectively. While this writer has previously written extensively about insurgency sponsorship and will not delve too deeply, it is worth noting this field as another area where Deterrent Failure is incredibly common.

Furthermore, some militaries have taken large steps to specifically and systematically optimize their forces around these dynamics, effectively extrapolating grey-zone tactics to grey-zone strategy. The Russian military strategy, under the leadership of Valeriy Gerasimov, has invested in “new generation warfare” (or what the West terms “cross-domain coercion”) that aims to reimagine the phases of war in what defence researcher Michael Kofman terms “recognition of the fact that conflict outcomes are increasingly decided in peacetime and that military forces can be used under various guises without public acknowledgement of hostilities”. In real terms, this means an arsenal that integrates the power projection of “state-sponsored insurgency, covert operations, and other forms of political mobilization” with the deterrents of “cyber, electronic warfare and information warfare”. While not as strategically consolidated as Russia’s, China’s efforts at optimizing its asymmetrical capabilities have grown substantially as well. According to a RAND Corporation study, “Chinese leaders understand the importance of limiting escalation” and “Chinese writings are increasingly focusing on asymmetric strategies and information warfare to defeat the United States”.

As demonstrated in Figure 5, when a conventional military optimized towards conventional total war meets a force optimized towards escalations of the grey zone, the latter can succeed in systematically and consistently forcing opponents into making either craven concessions or dramatic super-escalations.

Implications and Conclusion

The lesson is clear: To deter an opponent, one cannot simply establish the presence of credible and substantial military punishment or denial able to respond to “aggression”. One must be able to distinguish between escalatory intensities and accordingly establish the presence of credible and substantial sets of military punishment or denial at every single step of the escalation ladder. Punishments must be either directly equal or justifiably equivalent to the possible aggression anticipated. This means that forces will have to engage at least somewhat in developing non-nuclear unconventional capabilities.

To deter a Stuxnet-style infrastructure cyberattack, a defending force must either possess an equivalent offensive cyber capability to punish or possess complete cyber impregnability to deny. To deter Wagner-style mercenaries from contesting an area of vital strategic interest, an opposing force must possess a similarly deniable force capable of fighting enemies and occupying land. While not every asymmetrical capability needs to be matched, most do and a lot of thought and work must be put into creating and justifying an equivalent defence and response. At the very least, unconventional cannot be a dirty word.

The only remaining alternative would be to use soft power to establish taboos around certain weapon systems that are strong enough to push the “escalation steps” up past the point of grey-zone usability, similarly to how the chemical weapons taboo and nuclear taboo have made those weapons escalatory to point of unusability in most conflicts. However, this is problematic and largely unworkable for two reasons. Firstly, establishing a truly international taboo is exceedingly difficult and often requires not just a weapon to be proven to be particularly devastating or cruel, but the concerted efforts of vast cultural power apparatus to make something appear especially egregious. Both the above-mentioned taboos required weapon use in incredibly destructive and broadly experienced world wars as foundations of historical memory. It could easily be argued that the poems of the likes of Wilfred Owen did more to tar the repute of chemical weapons than any actual chemical attack. Even with substantial cultural campaigns, activists have tried for decades to establish an international taboo against land mines but thus far work has been slow. Secondly, states can still try to evade and degrade taboos by constructing counter-narratives and inventing technical solutions. For instance, in efforts to maintain the useability of nuclear weapons, Pakistan pushed for small-scale tactical nuclear weapons to retain deterrent strength against its Indian rival. 

Ultimately, how we think and plan about war cannot be built around how past wars were fought or how we want to fight wars, but around how wars are and will be fought in the present and near future. With Gray-Zone conflict expanding in pervasiveness and complexity, with non-conventional asymmetries growing in sophistication and efficacy, conventional deterrence as it currently exists cannot guarantee safety. Changes must be made and the escalation ladder must be part of those changes.

Further Reading

Bellamy, Chris. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War: a Modern History. London: Pan Books, 2009.
Tan, Nan An Harris. “THE VIABILITY OF DETERRENCE STRATEGIES FOR NON-NUCLEAR STATES.” POINTER 46, no. 1 (2020): 1–11.
Fitzsimmons, Michael. “Horizontal Escalation: An Asymmetric Approach to Russian Aggression?” Strategic Studies Quarterly 13, no. 9 (2019): 95–133. https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/SSQ/documents/Volume-13_Issue-1/Fitzsimmons.pdf
Hersman, Rebecca. “Wormhole Escalation in the New Nuclear Age.” Texas National Security Review 3, no. 3 (2020): 91–109. https://tnsr.org/2020/07/wormhole-escalation-in-the-new-nuclear-age
Mukherjee, Rohan. “Climbing the Escalation Ladder: India and the Balakot Crisis.” War on the Rocks, October 1, 2019. https://warontherocks.com/2019/10/climbing-the-escalation-ladder-india-and-the-balakot-crisis/
Morgan, Forrest E., Karl P. Mueller, Evan S. Medeiros, Kevin L. Pollpeter, and Roger Cliff, Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008. https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG614.html. Also available in print form.
Radin, Andrew, Hybrid Warfare in the Baltics: Threats and Potential Responses. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2017. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1577.html. Also available in print form.
Barno, David, and Nora Bensahel. “Fighting and Winning in the ‘Gray Zone.’” War on the Rocks, May 19, 2015. https://warontherocks.com/2015/05/fighting-and-winning-in-the-gray-zone/.
INSIKT GROUP. “Chinese Influence Operations Evolve in Campaigns Targeting Taiwanese Elections, Hong Kong Protests.” Recorded Future, April 29, 2020. https://www.recordedfuture.com/chinese-influence-operations/.
Kofman, Michael. “The Moscow School of Hard Knocks: Key Pillars of Russian Strategy.” War on the Rocks, January 17, 2017. https://warontherocks.com/2017/01/the-moscow-school-of-hard-knocks-key-pillars-of-russian-strategy/.
McGuinness, Damien. “How a Cyber Attack Transformed Estonia.” BBC News. BBC, April 27, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/39655415.
Shen, Puma, and Yen-Zhi Peng. “China’s Disinformation Campaign in Taiwan about Covid-19.” The National Bureau of Asian Research NBR, July 24, 2020. https://www.nbr.org/publication/chinas-disinformation-campaign-in-taiwan-about-covid-19/