Understanding Deterrence
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Understanding Deterrence
For decades, the rational actor model served as the preferred guide for U.S. deterrence policy. It has been a convenient and comforting guide because it requires little detailed knowledge of an opponent’s unique decision-making process and yet typically provides confident generalizations about how deterrence works. The model tends to postulate common decision-making parameters across the globe to reach generalizations about how deterrence will function and the types of forces that will be "stabilizing" or "destabilizing." Yet a broad spectrum of unique factors can influence an opponent’s perceptions and his calculations, and these are not easily captured by the rational actor model. The absence of uniformity means there can be very few deterrence generalizations generated by the use of the rational actor model that are applicable to the entire range of opponents. Understanding Deterrence considers how factors such as psychology, history, religion, ideology, geography, political structure, culture, proliferation and geopolitics can shape a leadership’s decision-making process, in ways that are specific and unique to each opponent. Understanding Deterrence demonstrates how using a multidisciplinary approach to deterrence analysis can better identify and assess factors that influence an opponent’s decision-making process. This identification and assessment process can facilitate the tailoring of deterrence strategies to specific purposes and result in a higher likelihood of success than strategies guided by the generalizations about opponent decision-making typically contained in the rational actor model. This book was published as a special issue of Comparative Strategy.
NL ARMS Netherlands Annual Review of Military Studies 2020
This open access volume surveys the state of the field to examine whether a fifth wave of deterrence theory is emerging. Bringing together insights from world-leading experts from three continents, the volume identifies the most pressing strategic challenges, frames theoretical concepts, and describes new strategies. The use and utility of deterrence in today’s strategic environment is a topic of paramount concern to scholars, strategists and policymakers. Ours is a period of considerable strategic turbulence, which in recent years has featured a renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons used in defence postures across different theatres; a dramatic growth in the scale of military cyber capabilities and the frequency with which these are used; and rapid technological progress including the proliferation of long-range strike and unmanned systems. These military-strategic developments occur in a polarized international system, where cooperation between leading powers on arms control regimes is breaking down, states widely make use of hybrid conflict strategies, and the number of internationalized intrastate proxy conflicts has quintupled over the past two decades. Contemporary conflict actors exploit a wider gamut of coercive instruments, which they apply across a wider range of domains. The prevalence of multi-domain coercion across but also beyond traditional dimensions of armed conflict raises an important question: what does effective deterrence look like in the 21st century? Answering that question requires a re-appraisal of key theoretical concepts and dominant strategies of Western and non-Western actors in order to assess how they hold up in today’s world. Air Commodore Professor Dr. Frans Osinga is the Chair of the War Studies Department of the Netherlands Defence Academy and the Special Chair in War Studies at the University Leiden. Dr. Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy in Breda.
Deterrence by Denial
*This book is in the Rapid Communications in Conflict and Security (RCCS) Series (General Editor: Geoffrey R.H. Burn). Deterrence theory helps conceptualize how threats can be used and communicated to influence or alter an adversary's behavior. In practice, deterrence works by weighing on an actor's perceived costs and benefits of pursuing an unwanted action. Deterrence-and its close relatives, coercion, compellence, dissuasion, and influence-can be accomplished by using threats of punishment (i.e., retaliation) or by denying adversaries the gains they seek (i.e., defense, resilience, and failure). During much of the Cold War deterrence by punishment largely overshadowed deterrence by denial. The proliferation of nuclear weapons, and later, of missile technology, tipped the deterrent calculus in favor of retaliation: the ultimate weapon epitomized the ultimate deterrent. Deterrence by denial largely fell to the wayside as a result and the logic of punishment came to pervade the classical literature on deterrence theory. Contemporary security dynamics, however, have changed dramatically. Security concerns are increasingly sub- and non-state in nature, and they are much more diffused. While nuclear weapons and deterrence by punishment still matter, the rise of sophisticated international terrorist organizations, conventional military challenges, digital-based threats, and threats short of open conflict have today cumulatively tipped the deterrent calculus in favor of denial. Deterrence by denial reduces the perceived benefits an action is expected to provide an adversary. Decision making takes into account both costs and benefits, so while punishment manipulates behavior by augmenting costs, denial works by stripping away benefits. Unfortunately, given the field's longstanding focus on deterrence by punishment, very little research has systematically explored denial theory and strategy in contemporary security settings. And the limited denial scholarship that does exist rests largely on the dynamics inherent to the Cold War, like great power rivalry, strategic weapons, and military power. Deterrence by Denial: Theory and Practice is the first study to focus exclusively on contemporary denial, bridging the theoretical gap that persists between classical deterrence theory and contemporary insecurity. The book significantly advances the scholarship on deterrence by denial with empirically driven and policy-relevant contributions written by leading international scholars of conventional military aggression, missile defense, terrorism and militancy, crime, and cybersecurity. Deterrence by Denial: Theory and Practice is an important and unique book, of interest to scholars of international relations, political science, terrorism and intelligence studies, and cybersecurity, as well as to policy analysts, practitioners, and members of the armed forces and intelligence community.