Functions of Arms and Interstate Violence: An Expanded Framework

There are few more popular questions in the field of international relations, foreign policy and even general current affairs than “What causes war?” It is a question that has garnered interest across class, ideological traditions and academic disciplines. Wars of scale are profoundly human experiences that tremendously define and are defined by our unique capacity of social categorization and its highest sustainable coherent form of the State. Only chimpanzees and incredibly eusocial insects can come close.

For the strategic and national security tribes, there have been many attempts to create generalizable attempts to explain war and more broadly interstate violence beyond specific case-by-case dynamics by describing violence’s instrumentalisation to attain particular ends. Yet, in practitioner and popular discourse, the language of violence remains often muddled. Strategic vocabulary discourses, in part created by Thomas C Schelling during the Cold War, have eroded during that unipolar moment of post-Cold War peace, and as a result coherence in strategic thinking has dipped.

This piece shall strive to act as a reminder and interpretation of as well as an update to Schelling’s classic work of strategic studies. Assisted by original diagrams that map out Schelling’s strategic theory, the first half shall seek to adapt Schelling’s Cold War US-centric theory for a more general model of conflict that broadly applies to security competition to all states (including the writer’s home of Singapore). In the second half, the writer will add to the model by introducing two new strategic functions of violence (power re-balancing and norm challenging), which are broadly categorized by the label of “direct action”.

On the Shoulders of Giants: Schelling as Foundation, Summarized

In his landmark text Arms and influence, Schelling argued that arms could do two things. Firstly, they could accomplish objectives directly, through what he broadly referred to as “brute force”. Secondly, they could use arms to persuade other states to fulfil their objectives for them, through what he referred to as “coercion”. This was then split into “deterrence” and “compellence”.

The acts and behaviours (crucially including visible behaviours) of rational executions of each function were delineated. Differentiating between coercion and brute force, he notes that “brute force succeeds when it is used” whereas coercion succeeds through persuading an adversary with latent violence – “violence that can still be withheld or inflicted or that a victim believes can be withheld or inflicted”. He notes that coercion’s difficulties can lie in trying to “know what an adversary treasures and what scares him” and communicating to the adversary that different behaviours can cause different forms of violence to initiate, vary or end. Sometimes these acts of communication might involve limited displays of actual violence to demonstrate willingness or capability to follow through or serve other communicative purposes. However, the focus on latent violence remains what distinguishes these acts in the field of coercion rather than brute force.

Another substantial distinction between coercion and brute force would be in the information needed to execute their respective strategies. Coercion is concerned with the national and state psychologies of pain, satisfaction and bargaining to avoid the former and attain the latter. On the other hand, Brute force requires no such information, only what is needed for specific operational objectives. With these distinctions in mind, Schelling proceeds to detail the various complexities within the strategies of deterrence and compellence.

Deterrence consists of three main components – the tripwire (what Schelling perhaps confusingly terms the “plate glass plane”), the punishment, and the connective tissue between the two. As a brief example, someone is deterred from stepping on a landmine as they know that the device’s trigger mechanism will work through the connective wiring to activate an extremely painful explosive. All these components must credibly exist and function properly so long as deterrence is needed.

Sometimes, as with landmines, the mechanisms are all quite integrated into a single object, and the diagram above can look almost like a blueprint. However, this is not so often the case in geopolitics. During the Cold War, there were US troops in West Berlin as a tripwire, there were US nuclear ICBMs around the world as punishment and there was the US C4I infrastructure (notably involving the US President) as the connective tissue. In this case, it is important to note that the tripwire is not meant to be the punishment, or at least in any way constitute the main part of the punishment. Indeed, the small contingent of US troops in West Berlin would be incredibly badly located and incredibly outnumbered by the Red Army in any actual defensive operation, and definitely unable to inflict deterring pain. The tripwire does not aim to trip but to be tripped – as Schelling notes, “What can 7,000 American troops do, or 12,000 Allied troops? Bluntly they can die. They can die heroically, dramatically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there.”

What can 7,000 American troops do, or 12,000 Allied troops? Bluntly they can die. They can die heroically, dramatically, and in a manner that guarantees that the action cannot stop there.
Thomas C Schelling

Crucially, all three components must be visible and visibly working. If troops in West Berlin could be perceived to flee an oncoming invasion and thus shift the tripwire, deterrence would fail. If the nuclear arsenal was perceived as not correctly functioning, deterrence would fail. If the US President or any other chokepoint in command was perceived as unwilling to launch a nuclear response, deterrence would fail.

Take one more step of abstraction and tripwires can be people or objects that move around. These can be military troops, vehicles or naval vessels. The important thing to note is that it is not the military nature or power of these things that make them commonly used tripwires – it is their quality of being commonly understood as important and valued. Embassies and diplomats can serve as tripwires as well. Indeed, for some states such as the US, even an ordinary citizen could be a sort of tripwire. Nevertheless, their geographical location can shift and can be unknown to adversaries at times and this ambiguity can both help and hurt deterrence depending on an adversary. A cautious and conservative adversary might not dare attack a large area at the risk of killing just one of the superpower’s embedded soldiers, thus provoking potentially heavy retaliation. For the deterring power, this creates a great economy of force. However, a more risk-tolerant adversary might be willing to roll the dice, hoping that its rival’s troops are simply not present, or can be spooked or otherwise driven from whatever particular area that adversary might wish to occupy. For this reason, Schelling notes that it is often in extremely confined spaces from which there is effectively no operationally reliable retreat, such as West Berlin, that deterrence can be most reliably created.

In addition, Schelling dives into some intriguing analysis on this question of carrying and communicating meaning when it comes to the particular question of naval vessels. He questions if and why an attack, or boarding onto a naval vessel carries lighter importance than doing the same to a piece of land or land military installation and hence carries a lighter deterrence. Ultimately, he concludes that naval vessels are considered lesser than land installations because of the easy connectedness on land – it would be far easier to invade the mainland United States from a 10-metre strip of Californian beach than occupying an entire aircraft carrier. People familiar with realist IR theory might see interesting parallels with the “stopping power of water” concept.

In practice, it is usually a composite of all these different varieties that are used to build a deterrent tripwire. For instance, one can examine the US deterrent tripwire against a North Korean attack on South Korea. In terms of a physical tripwire, there is the demilitarized zone, filled with razor wire, dozens of guard posts and more than 900 thousand landmines. In terms of slightly more abstract geographical boundaries, there is the national boundary of South Korea itself. South Korea trades with the US to the tune of around $150 billion per year, and its super developed capital city of Seoul of 9 million people is only around 50 kilometres from the DMZ. The trade quantities and population of Seoul matter for deterrence for two reasons. Firstly, they are things that can quite clearly be affected by any cross-DMZ incursions or activity. Secondly, they are things that the US has signalled it cares about a lot. As the final tripwire component, there are the moveable and moving US tripwires – the US troops stationed in South Korea themselves who usually exceed 25,000 and who bear even more importance in US national consciousness thanks to its particular cultural fondness for soldiers and veterans.

There are sometimes even more abstract forms of deterrent tripwires that concern themselves not with the place and time of arms, but rather their form. This often takes the place of arms control and arms-type deterrence for objects like certain classes of missiles and anti-missile weaponry, nuclear weapons and chemical and biological weapons. However, these were not very structurally examined in Schelling’s work. This writer suggests one of his previous pieces on “Escalation Ladders” for a more helpful framework.

The responsive connective tissue in operational contexts often takes the form of military Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (C4I) systems. While it includes incredibly technical elements like signals communications between military units, it also includes profoundly human aspects within the chain of command. For instance, the question of who should be allowed to verify, initiate and confirm a retaliatory strike (which in most cases would constitute an act of war) leans heavily into the balance of war-making, funding and undertaking powers balanced between different branches of government and segments of the state.

For organizations or states that are attempting to build, reform or otherwise restructure military structures, organizations or chains of command (such as new states or multinational organizations and alliances), this particular segment is particularly paramount. In a multinational union, should warlike acts or war-risking brinksmanship require unanimity between states? What about verifying the information leading to such acts? How can a civilian republic prevent its military from dragging it into a war it does not want, or out of a war it does want? On the other hand, how can a military prevent its civilian republic from dragging it into a war it is sure it cannot win, or out of a war it is about to win? Such are the classic civil-military relations questions that soon expose themselves when trying to formulate effective strategies and doctrine. When put in the pressure-cooker of limited time and imperfect information, these questions become even more raw and fundamental to the integrity of a nation’s character and the efficacy of a state’s strategy.

On the more technical side, there are questions on the speed of signals, the role of computer systems and artificial intelligence in communicating vital conflict-starting and conflict-making decisions, and the reliability or vulnerability of the infrastructure from which all this processing is happening. To understand the sheer importance of even the most technical aspects of this often-forgotten component in deterrence strategies, one need look no further than the militarization of space. Satellites lie at the very heart of most modern C4I systems, from the communications up and down the chain of command to the positioning and photography that inform decision-makers to the identification of targets for missiles. Hence, the development of anti-satellite kinetic weaponry should be of no surprise. Killing this critical node within all deterrent mechanisms would mean crippling most deterrent strategies for most countries in all directions.

Lastly, the punishment must be reliable and painful. It is important to once again remind ourselves that the core of coercion lies not in strength or power, but the contest of wills and perceptions. This can change drastically across contexts, particularly with regards to the local regime-types in each state. Some regime-types hold their temples dear, others their residential areas, others still their military bases. To ensure maximized pain, one must take care to craft a strategy designed around the peculiarities of the target state in question, as well as communicate it properly.

Compellence is similar in many ways to deterrence, particularly with regards to the importance of responsive connective tissue between components. However, as indicated in the above diagram, the incentives are structured to be quite radically different. Instead of being deterred from specific bounded areas or actions, a target is informed of the actions he takes through an initial application of pain, from which he must make a decision within a timeframe which will accordingly lead to greater or lesser pain. It operates on the same principle of a mugger pulling a gun and demanding money – compliance within the allotted time frame will bring relief, and non-compliance will bring much greater injury.

Alternatively, one can look to one of Schelling’s favourite examples – the car barrelling towards a target. The target can comply to move out of the way and escape with minimal harm, or refuse to comply and face the onslaught head-on. These chains of decisions – namely, initiation, timed response, and according escalation or reduction, represent the essence of compellence.

In addition, initiating pain must carry some connotation or relatability to the demands made or expected, in what Schelling terms the “idiom of military action”. The importance of this reliability lies in its ability to tighten up communication behind intents, demands, and intensities thereof. Given that diplomatic messaging and talk is cheap and hence often unreliable, communicating through idioms might also sometimes be the only real option in a chaotic and complex world. This is truer for compellence than deterrence, as deterrence usually has some communication pre-built into its tripwire mechanisms and hence may not rely so completely on this idiomatic communication. South Korea does not have to communicate much to its northern neighbour after placing down its machinegun posts, razor wire and landmines across the DMZ. However, compellence begins and ends with merely different degrees of pain and does not have the communicative capacities of the human and physical geographies of tripwires, a Compellent mechanism lives and dies on its idiomatic communicative power.

To illustrate this case, Schelling brings up the case of Soviet responses, both real or counterfactual, in the case of naval quarantine during the Cuban missile crisis. In this case, Soviet Union wanted to compel the United States to drop the quarantine.

If one did not consider relatability, the Soviets could have done many things with regards to demonstrating their ability to inflict pain. For instance, the USSR could have shelled West Berlin, it could have started a naval blockade of Norway or it could have flown the Red Army into Cuba. However, the fundamental flaw within those actions lies in their lack of relatability and resultant lack of communicative ability. A naval blockade of Norway might indicate demands on Norway, or NATO more broadly, instead of the United States specifically. Airlifting troops into Cuba en masse could have been perceived not as a coercive attempt to extract concessions, but as the prelude to a new ground conflict. Shelling West Berlin would be the worst option of all, granting no indication of the geographical domain or type of the demand. Hence, the best way to communicate both the geographical boundaries and form of its demands was the path that the Soviets chose in the end – to attempt to challenge the blockade with the Soviet Navy.

Schelling notes that Compellence operates on limited time scales. These limitations can be communicated, they can be implicit, or they can be kept secret as a tactical trick to deny an adversary certainty. However, they must exist. There must be a point in time where the adversary’s response to the initiating pain can be taken as effectively concluded so that it can be measured and then evaluated. This can be difficult. Sometimes, the urge to give an adversary “deadline extensions” or cancel the time limit itself might be tremendous. The buds of compliance might seem to start sprouting, too slow for the previously set deadline. However, extending a deadline, except in very specific conditions with clearly communicated limits and red lines, is likely to be disastrous. It risks weakening the credibility of the compellent, as well as every compellent after it, causing a near-terminal credibility deficit for the state in question.

Escalation can mean many, many things. It could mean an expanded scope of weapons systems used. It could mean an expanded scope of targets, in terms of geographical demarcations or target type (say, bases vs cities). It could mean simply persisting with pre-existing forms of pain through expanding the scope of time. Sometimes, the efficacy of the paradoxical “escalating by holding steady” action can depend on the nature of the action. “Holding steady” on a static set of sanctions might mean something very different from “holding steady” on a policy of gradual sanction expansion. However, for compellence, so long as the particular form of escalation is something common between compeller and target, this should not cause too many significant problems.

What it does mean, however, is that one cannot initiate with maximum or minimum pain. The ability to escalate or deescalate in response to behaviour remains of prime importance in the world of compellence. Setting initiating pain at too high an intensity risks making escalated punishment uncredible. Conversely, setting initiating pain at too low an intensity might make deescalation untenable. Both damage the power of the compellent.

In addition, a compelling power should avoid forms of pain that affect the ability of its target to feel that very form of pain, or what could otherwise be termed as its pain sensitivity. Assuming feasibility to do both in any order, a compeller probably should not decimate his target’s C4I infrastructure or senior political command before the application of other forms of pain. Just as it is not particularly fruitful to start ripping off the fingernails of someone after they have become numb with pain or shock, in compellence one should try to keep the target alert, conscious and calculating. It is regrettable that some “nerve damage” is probably somewhat inevitable to prevent the adversary from striking back, but it should still be carefully calibrated to a minimum.

A New Framework: A Case for Direct Action and Strategic Functions

If one thing has been established by the previous section, it is that coercion is fiendishly difficult and often frustratingly specific. There is such a large quantity of intentions and capabilities to signal and keep signalling for coercion to even stand a chance at succeeding. In a world where adversary states may not always be coherent, rational, capable or even attentive, sometimes coercion simply is not feasible, whether generally or in a specific time or place where it matters. For instance, how does one coerce a Taliban-type state, where power is loosely conglomerated in a vast network that can fold or turn in on itself and yet periodically stiffen in cohesiveness? How should such a state, in turn, coerce others when its own diplomatic apparatus may be too muddled? In this case, Direct Action might be preferred.

The use of the term “Direct Action”, while novel, is intentional. In activist and protest traditions, direct actions are characterized in opposition to negotiation and bargaining with adversarial or third parties, as a means of (for lack of better terms) directly accomplishing a few sets of objectives. Rather than campaign through the political process of the land to ban animal farms, vegan activists who subscribe to direct action break into farms and release or otherwise bring relief to the animals they champion. Importantly, it suggests a far more sympathetic strategic framing as opposed to Schelling’s “brute force” label, with its connotations of barbaric, purposeless and primarily emotional violence. As such, I borrow this terminology to describe actions that seek to change the setting (of power and norms, as I shall discuss) around which negotiations and bargaining occurs.

While Coercion focuses on signalling and communicating intent and strength to attain the upper hand in a negotiation, Direct Action eschews the communication and instead seeks to change the setting and structural features of the negotiation. For instance, while in Coercion, powers might seek to demonstrate their willingness to exploit particular relative power differentials, Direct Action would seek to modify the power differentials themselves. While coercive negotiations might structure themselves around particular norms and attached institutions, direct actions might seek to modify how the terms, discourses and attached institutions of those determine norms.

Furthermore, this writer carefully and deliberately shifts terminology from Schelling’s “Strategies” of Arms to “Strategic Functions” of Arms. This is done to downplay intentionality in strategic violence and arms. An act can have strategic effects that stretch beyond (or indeed, fail to meet) the intentions and imaginations of the original strategic actors. These kinds of geopolitical “Death of the Author” (or perhaps “Death of the Strategist”) situations can be especially common in contexts with devolved or occasionally dysfunctional strategic planning. In some cases, there can be no specific articulated strategy at all. Schelling himself hinted at this with the casual anecdotes of everyday life (cars compelling each other to swerve out of the way when in a collision course, or parents attempting to compel or deter their children), where there are certainly no formal strategic institutions or deliberate thoughts. In contexts like these, strategic functions (which can certainly be planned towards maximizing efficacy) are doubly necessary as a direction to examine from.

“Mowing the Grass”: Changing the Local Balance of Power

In some ways, changing a balance of power is the most intuitive motivation behind the application of interstate violence and destructive force. Men are killed, castles dismantled and farmlands razed or captured because their presence is threatening. Alternatively, a marginally more indirect variant would be occupying a security zone where other facts on the ground could be changed – the ethnic composition and national population could be engineered, whether by settlement, extermination, sterilization, or other policy levers. More palatable “facts on the ground” could be also changed such as the physical geography of a location or strategic infrastructure. These actions do not persuade anyone to do anything, nor do they aim to. The objective is to accomplish specific goals at the best possible economies of force, material resources, and strategic threat perceptions. For this reason, many covert operations of sabotage and subversion constitute direct actions to shift the balance of power and the stuff of many action hero movies – destroying a doomsday weapon or setting free, protecting, assassinating or capturing a particular person.

The specificity and straightforwardness of these objectives make the weapons systems involved simultaneously both splendidly straightforward and extremely diverse. The computer virus that causes a nuclear plant to meltdown, the aerial drone that picks off targets on the cheap, even the toxic social media meme that causes discord in the enemy camp (or society) are all useful for keeping adversaries low and keeping oneself strong. With this near limitless latitude of strategic creativity, one need only focus on what can accomplish the desired objectives at best economies of force.

There do remain some limits to what can be useful – weapons that cannot be specifically targeted like those that involve germs or geoengineering remain largely unusable due to the possible collateral damage towards other neighbours and more importantly, oneself. Ideological contagions also remain semi-useable for that purpose – one need only look at how letting Lenin destabilize Tsarist Russia bit Imperial Germany in the rear to see the dangers of playing with such exotic and chaotic fires. Another limitation would be understanding what exactly constitutes the balance of power before trying to change it. The same action could yield opposite results depending on the strategic context. Take border skirmishing for instance. If a country derives its strength from its great cities, it would not be profoundly strategic to seize or strike its uninhabited periphery borderlands. On the other hand, if a state maintains tenuous imperial relationships through promises of military assistance to its clients in that very periphery, exposing those promises as empty might bear disproportionately great returns. When considering these things, one should carefully keep note of the difference, or occasional overlap between what causes pain and what reduces power.

The prime example of this kind of action would be, fittingly, the very case study that popularized both the terms “mowing the grass” and “changing facts on the ground” – Israel’s contemporary policy towards Palestine and Hamas-led Gaza specifically (at least, during the Netanyahu/ Likud administration). Every few years, Gazan-Israeli tensions erupt into violence between Hamas (and broader anti-Israeli forces) and Israel. For this power-rebalancing campaign, the exact specifics of the cause is unimportant. What is important is its process and outcome – the systematic attrition of Hamas military power at an economy of force sustainable for the Israeli security apparatus for long periods, resulting in wider power differentials at the end of the escalated violence than before.

This effective and efficient attrition is no accident. Before each eruption of violence, Israeli intelligence painstakingly infiltrates Hamas thoroughly, compiling long target lists for assassination, sabotage and demolishment. Extensive, sophisticated planning is done. Weapons systems designed specifically to target key sources of Gazan military strength and the tactics and doctrine to use them are developed indigenously or imported from foreign partners. Conversely, systems designed to retard Hamas attacks on Israel are strengthened – most famously, the Iron Dome system which has shot down a large majority of Palestinian rockets. It is atop these large resource and time investment that a force designed for efficient asymmetrical attrition has been developed.

Note that this economy of force question does not suggest favourable kill/death ratios. The formulation for a successful grass-mowing operation is far more complex. Hamas remains more willing to spend Gazan blood and treasure at a greater rate than Israel. It can fire cheap rockets indiscriminately, while Israel must use much more expensive and more accurate weapons, with more care in targeting and clearing civilians. At the same time, Israel still maintains a substantial qualitative and economic edge which enables them to keep launching expensive precision strikes at greater rates than Hamas fires cheap rockets. The asymmetries are profound and must be thoroughly priced in, if not constitute the main part of the cost/benefit analysis.

Why are these outcomes not achievable by less violent, more coercive means? Hamas, at least as perceived by Jerusalem, is of an implacably apocalyptic disposition towards Israel. It does not seek mutual coexistence based on mere border adjustment. Hence, the direct “grass-mowing” action is not just preferred but necessary. As Israeli security academics Prof Efraim Inbar and Dr Eitan Shamir note, “Those who forlornly ask “when is this going to end?” and use the cliché “cycle of violence,” have psychological difficulties digesting the facts that there is no solution in sight and that the violent struggle against Hamas is not going to end any time soon (not as long as the enemy’s basic ideological motivations remain intact). But still, important periods of quiet are attainable by military action, and this is what explains Israel’s current offensive.”

Just like mowing your front lawn, this is constant, hard work. If you fail to do so, weeds grow wild and snakes begin to slither around in the brush
David M Weinberg, Israeli security academic

As earlier stated, direct action to change the balance of power concerns itself with what makes a country strong or weak, rather than what makes a country satisfied or angered. Interestingly, this can mean that “grass-mowing” can be on occasion less aggressive than coercion despite being more direct. For instance, cyber attacks have yet rarely resulted in any major diplomatic confrontation or balancing coalition. Sometimes, “grass-mowing” campaigns can even manipulate the internal divides within a state, regime and government to become innocuous or make the certainty of their existence controversial. The prime example would be a “grass-mowing” power hacking a major political party or figure in the target country for information to be passed over to competing constituencies as opposition research, such as the 2016 DNC hack by Russia. Alternatively, targeting a disadvantaged (or self-perceived as disadvantaged) group in the target state can mix and poison already tense internal discourses, hiding their campaign in the process (see Operation Infektion, a Soviet disinformation op that claimed that AIDS was invented to kill black people and homosexuals. Also see contemporary Russian influence ops viz a viz ethnic Russian minority in Ukraine and Baltics). Hence, a perhaps intuitive association between direct action and particularly heightened threat perceptions may not be entirely rock solid.

Eroding the Rules of the Game: Challenging International Norms

What are international norms? There is a tremendous body of scholarship (and crucially, active scholarly debate) on international norms, institutions and organizations, and this writer will not claim to be a great authority on any one of those. For this brief exploration, this writer elects to use one definition offered by Vaughn P. Shannon, i.e. “an established rule or guideline, the violation of which generates some kind of external sanction”.

These rules are not necessarily symmetrical or fair, in that all stakeholders are treated equally. Indeed, they are hardly ever even plausibly “fair”. A norm against chemical weapons disadvantages countries with large chemical industries that could otherwise serve new purposes in wartime. A norm against a particular type of weapon or vehicle disadvantages those which already invested large amounts into building the infrastructure to build and maintain such systems. A similar dynamic applies to particular domains of competition, such as space, cyber or even the polar caps. It is within this asymmetry that often the greatest room exists for action that serves security and strategic functions, and thus where states in competition find greatest interest.

One interesting example of this would be the norms around weapons in space. Not every state has capabilities in space due to the high technological and skills barrier to entry, but every state has interests in space, due to the usefulness of satellites for connectivity, communications, spying and other strategic or economic purposes. As such, states with less or no space power benefit from space cooperation, while states with greater space power benefit from increased space competition

There is also the phenomenon of space junk, which makes every space mission, especially every space weapon test, increase the barrier to space entry for future missions. What this ultimately means is that states that can conduct military space operations are incentivized to press their advantage through weakening the norm against space, while states that do not have such capabilities are incentivized to keep the norm in place.

So how do states challenge a norm? Simply put, they violate it and demonstrate the resultant punishment as either non-existent or ineffectual. To challenge the norm against space weaponization, states can simply keep launching military missions, test space weapons, and bit by bit unveil a lack of strong enforcement mechanism for the norm, which otherwise might have remained hidden through the uncertainty and inertia. Alternatively, one could also create special novel mechanisms to make punishment easily reducible, such as the creation of elaborate banking structures and financial mechanisms to evade sanctions and trade or investment restrictions.

As the norm becomes weaker, the parties responsible for enforcing it also become less willing to enforce it while those who benefit by its demise become more eager to challenge it, creating a cycle (vicious or virtuous depending on perspective) that ultimately spells that norm’s doom. In a sense, it is a communicative act, though not a coercive act.

Why “challenge” instead of the broader term of “change”? This writer proposes that international norms, with their own sets of enforcement mechanisms and created institutions, remain too complex to be created through the application of force in a way similar to compellence.

Still, this strategy is one only possible in an international order with rules and norms, to begin with. Possibly, this is why Schelling, who spent his career during the tumultuous bipolarity and nuclear anxiety of the Cold War, did not recognize its potential. This might mean that in a post-unipolar fragmentation of present global order, this form of strategic function might become less commonly usable and observed.

Implications: Analysis, Planning and Force Structure Investments

There are a few groups of implications for recognizing direct action as a substantial, if not legitimate, strategic function of arms and interstate violence.

Firstly, recognizing direct action has tremendous implications for the analysis of both the state intentions and effects of particular strategic actions. In strategic discourse, popular and practitioner discourse too often sticks to only one or two strategic functions and lambasts or lauds an action for its ability to achieve that function. The assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani is a prime example – both supporters and detractors in the US of such an action seemed to focus exclusively on such the action’s ability to serve a deterrent function. Of course, the answer would pretty flatly be a resounding “no”. Soleimani’s assassination lacked clearly defined tripwires and communicated punishment. If observers with US cultural and political backgrounds could not understand precisely how deterrence was being built or enforced through Soleimani’s assassination, one can pretty broadly assume that the Ayatollahs of Tehran were not exactly receiving a clear message that they could build exact strategic policy around.

However, focusing on deterrence was a red herring that ignored the largest outcome. Instead of deterrence, its primary strategic function, intended or not, was largely to change the balance of power within the Middle East. Assassinating a charismatic military leader with militia contacts could mean a lot in a region where devolved militia and clan loyalties meant that personalized ties and personalities were king. Clearly, for this case, it is only through recognizing both intentional and unintentional strategic functions, particularly in the arena of direct action, that one can achieve more comprehensive analysis.

Secondly, realizing the existence, relevance and importance of direct action has tremendous application for national security planning as well. Militaries often eschew the language of direct action, possibly because it seems at the surface too calculating, cruel or aggressive. Singapore, as an example, often uses the rhetoric of “deterrence and diplomacy” to describe the totality of its mission within its Armed Forces internal rhetoric, ranging from its mission statement to its POINTER military journal.

Now, it is certainly possible to build plans, doctrine and policy separate from and contrary to internal rhetoric. However, such a decision comes with trade-offs. Denying fundamental honesty and simple, elegant coherence in national security policy makes it harder to unify an already complex state organism in line with policies, especially new policies where there might be great bureaucratic inertia already opposing change. It makes it difficult to build rich, active and enduring intellectual (both academic and professional) explorations of each strategic function, such as that which currently exists for deterrence. It makes systems of accountability, leadership, education and command more difficult across all intrastate relationships. This includes between policymakers and practitioners, executive, judiciary and legislature, and government and public.

Lastly, as a semi-extension of strategic planning, there is the idea of force planning.

As mentioned throughout the piece, different weapons systems have different efficacies for different strategic functions. A secret and destructive computer virus has unique utility for “grass-mowing”, or power balancing direct action, but is not particularly useful for deterrence. An aircraft carrier might have great utility for compellence, but may not be great for “grass-mowing” action. If a military sees itself as surrounded by potential rivals who are resistant to coercion, it may elect to build a force with particular aptitude. This could resemble Figure 5, in which Point x represents a middle point of strategic specialization, where efficiencies are attained and certain dual-use functionality is achievable but clearly not fully efficient towards other functions. Point y represents the lowest degree of strategic specialization and point z represents a great degree of strategic specialization. When one considers the material and time investments into military force structures, this logic of specialization incentivizes militaries to build their forces around fulfilling specific strategic functions and neglecting others, whether they consciously recognize it or not. Recognizing this stands to provide fresh insights into both understanding other states in greater depth and building a sharper toolbox of violence to pursue specific strategic goals. Through this process, one could hopefully create a stronger, more resilient and crucially, more strategically favourable setting.

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Functions of Arms and Interstate Violence: An Expanded Framework

On the Shoulders of Giants: Schelling as Foundation, Summarized

A New Framework: A Case for Direct Action and Strategic Functions

“Mowing the Grass”: Changing the Local Balance of Power

Eroding the Rules of the Game: Challenging International Norms

Implications: Analysis, Planning and Force Structure Investments

Further Reading

One response to “Functions of Arms and Interstate Violence: An Expanded Framework”

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Functions of Arms and Interstate Violence: An Expanded Framework

On the Shoulders of Giants: Schelling as Foundation, Summarized

A New Framework: A Case for Direct Action and Strategic Functions

“Mowing the Grass”: Changing the Local Balance of Power

Eroding the Rules of the Game: Challenging International Norms

Implications: Analysis, Planning and Force Structure Investments

Further Reading

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One response to “Functions of Arms and Interstate Violence: An Expanded Framework”

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