SCSP Call for Engagement Selection

William Healzer, Kyle Duchynski, and Jonathan Deemer Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation Stanford University

Since the Second World War, war has been a battle of coercion. No longer is conflict a measure of brute force, nor a series of forcible actions to destroy an opponent and control resources.¹ Rather, modern war is shaped by integrated deterrence, the violent bargaining and battle of threats against a specific target underlied by a latent expectation of pain that tests combatants’ nerve, risk tolerance, and fortitude. 

Over five decades since Thomas Schelling proposed that military strategy was “the diplomacy of violence,” the United States and its peer competitors have once again become locked in a cycle of brinksmanship as allies and adversaries brandish new technologies and capabilities to coerce their opponent to achieve their desired end state.² As unmanned drones govern the sky, autonomous vessels patrol the sea, and algorithms wreak havoc in the gray zone of cyberspace, modern militaries are evolving to take human belligerents out of the kill chain. In turn, this reduces the potential human costs of conflict, potentially altering the calculus for belligerents in favor of aggression. 

Accordingly, in order to address the shortcomings with modern U.S. conceptions of deterrence, U.S. policymakers’ understanding of deterrence must evolve in four key ways: (1) deterrence must be specific and bounded, (2) conventional deterrence requires a force that can be credibly sustained and reconstituted during conflict, (3) deterrence must address adversaries’ decision calculus, and (4) deterrence is not an end state unto itself.

Deterrence Must Be Specific and Bounded

Like many topics in international security, deterrence has become something of an academic exercise. Muddied by differing scholarly and popular interpretations, deterrence has devolved into a buzzword bingo where deterrence by denial, deterrence by punishment, and integrated deterrence among others swirl in popular discourse. But what does it really mean to “deter the PRC” or “deter Russia?” And is that even possible?

The United States needs to answer: what is it deterring? A maritime blockade of Taiwan by the PLAN? The illegal occupation of Ukrainian territory east of the Dnipro by Russian forces? Too often deterrence is conceptualized as targeted against an entire country or its leader. Instead of thinking about simply “deterring the PRC” or “deterring Vladimir Putin,” the United States must specify an action that we are deterring against, such as deterring the PRC from continuing aggressive territorial claims in the South China Sea, or deterring Russia from illegally invading Crimea. 

Rarely is deterrence expanded beyond our own myopic understanding to account for our adversaries’ perspectives, novel or newly integrated technologies, or the resources available in a given strategic scenario. U.S. decision makers need a workable and adaptable definition of deterrence which is informed by both the adversary they are trying to deter as well as the tools at their disposal. Put another way, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to deterrence; grandiose, sweeping academic exercises are useful as theory but become less so when inartfully applied to the real world as a substitute for in-depth strategic thinking. Strategic thinkers must then reframe deterrence in a clear series of effects from actions that we seek to deter.

Conventional Deterrence Requires Forces that Can Be Credibly Sustained and Reconstituted

Recent Russian struggles to achieve their invasion goals have demonstrated that in order for integrated deterrence to be credible, forces that generate kinetic effects must be sustained and reconstituted. With adversary’s anti-access area denial (A2/AD) capabilities extending further with new technologies and missile systems, simply put, sustaining American forces in Eastern Europe or the Western Pacific presents a profound challenge. This is further complicated by the shortcomings in current American logistics assets. An aging MARAD fleet is littered with ships that are not mission capable, and land-based systems struggled to provide effective logistics against nonstate actors with nowhere near the level of technical sophistication of great powers.³ Planned new logistics support vessels such as the Next-Generation Logistics Ship (NGLS) are similarly too slow, too large from a radar cross section perspective in light of the A2/AD threat and in their ability to access austere environments to support distributed lethality, too expensive per unit cost, and prohibitively designed such that they cannot be built or reconstituted during conflict quickly given limited shipbuilding infrastructure in the United States.⁴ This leaves the U.S. Joint Force without a way to handoff logistics between the strategic level and operational level and between the operational level and tactical level. Accordingly, the United States must invest heavily in distributed logistics systems that allow forward deployed forces to impose costs on the PRC and Russia. These technologies should be deployable as soon as possible with the ability to scale production rapidly, be grounded in existing or “near future” technologies, be easy to produce, inexpensive, complementary to existing platforms, and designed with CONOPs such that loss of that platform will not cause an operational or strategic level risk to mission. Walker Mills, Collin Fox, and Dylan Phillips-Levine have proposed that the Department of the Navy procure unmanned logistics vessels patterned after drug traffickers’ semi-submersible “narcosubmarines” in order to covertly deliver critical supplies across thousands nautical miles in the Pacific Ocean.⁵ Drug traffickers have developed lucrative and resilient supply chains using these inexpensive and virtually undetectable technologies with large carrying capacities. Once deployed, these unmanned vessels should be outfitted with autonomous navigation systems already deployed by the Navy. As such vessels are inexpensive they can be quickly scaled from prototypes, and mass production would enable them to be pre-staged throughout the Indo-Pacific. 

However, our conception of sustainment must expand beyond physical material alone to incorporate the need to sustain domestic support for any operations. As Ukraine has exemplified, no matter how noble the cause, stark partisan differences are already emerging over a willingness to continue to endure the costs of supporting Ukraine, namely higher inflation and gas prices.⁶

When it comes to Taiwan, how many Americans could find it on a map? Could they, or even all members of Congress, explain why exactly it is in the strategic interests of the U.S. to deter a potential Chinese invasion? We cannot forget that for U.S. deterrence to be sustainable, the American middle class must clearly understand why such a strategy is worth the costs, including the potential for American servicemembers losing their lives. Recent polling suggests that even today, with the ever-rising threat from the PRC, only 52% of Americans would actually support using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan should China invade.⁷ This matters because deterrence is far less effective if our adversaries can clearly see we are divided at home over how to respond. Here, the answer is not more expensive or exquisite military platforms, but rather a sustained, bipartisan public outreach campaign to explain why all Americans should care about what happens in Ukraine or Taiwan. 

Deterrence Must Address Adversaries’ Decision Calculus

Modern American understandings of deterrence are no longer in alignment with our adversaries’ decision calculuses, which increases the risk of conflict. Throughout the Cold War, both the United States and Soviet Union relied on largely qualitative cost-benefit analyses where temperature charts and appeals to human life averted conflict even as humanity perilously tiptoed around nuclear war.⁸ In the modern day, licking one’s proverbial finger for the direction of the wind is woefully inadequate to compete with peer competitors. While the U.S. relies heavily on tabletop wargames and embraces qualitative assessments, the PRC focuses on effects-driven analytical analyses to drive decision making from senior leadership to new military recruits. The Science of Military Strategy, the fundamental textbook for new PLA officers, makes this point explicit: “With the development of science and technology, strategic evaluation will pay more attention to quantitative evaluation … the principle of quantification has become an increasingly important principle of strategic evaluation.”⁹ Russian assessments of the correlation of forces and means have also become increasingly quantitative.¹⁰

This doctrine from the PLA offers not only a lesson for U.S. planners, but also an opportunity to paralyze the PLA’s decision making process. First, U.S. decision makers need to learn to speak our adversary’s language, and integrate the benefits of a more rigorous quantitative approach with qualitative strategies to adequately deter adversaries. While there are certain limitations to strictly quantitative analyses due to data availability and non-quantifiable metrics, the absolute “amount” of deterrence measured empirically matters less than the adversary’s perception of it even if it is wrong. Given that the PRC relies heavily on quantitative metrics this may cause them to perceive conditions of deterrence. Second, understanding that the PLA decision cycle is dependent on collecting data, the United States should flood the zone with data that paralyzes the PRC OODA loop, and pursue strategies that take advantage of the PRC’s analytic rigor. 

This strategy integrates into broader plans across the Department of Defense, as evidenced by Chief of Naval Research Rear Admiral Lorin Selby’s call for a force of “the small, the agile, and the many.”¹¹ As the PRC currently possesses a fires and ISR overmatch in the Western Pacific, fielding unmanned, attritable systems gives the U.S. a greater chance at mission success by flipping the tactical cost curve against the PRC. Instead of targeting large surface platforms, these systems complicate the PRC’s kill web as they seek to interdict a needle in a pile of needles.

Deterrence is not an end state unto itself

Central to any notion of deterrence is the resilience of how credible a state’s commitment is to respond. In Eastern Europe, with U.S. treaty obligations to NATO, the credibility of such a commitment is clear. With Taiwan, however, the U.S. has long pursued a policy of strategic ambiguity.¹² Yet, the U.S. has a clear strategic interest in Taiwan with respect to Taiwan’s semiconductor production capabilities. With Taiwan being the only state capable of producing the world’s most advanced semiconductors, there is an element of mutually assured destruction at play that no doubt aids the U.S. deterrence of a PRC invasion. How would deterrence change if such mutual dependence on Taiwan were not the case? U.S. policymakers must be cognizant how, inadvertently, our efforts to bolster our own domestic chip manufacturing might reduce our strategic interests in Taiwan and thus reduce the credibility of our tacit commitment to defend Taiwan. In other words, as the U.S. becomes more self-sufficient with respect to semiconductors, we must start to think of other ways to demonstrate and highlight our strategic interests in Taiwan and thus our commitment to its defense. Failure for Russia and PRC in their objectives (i.e. reunification with Taiwan) is an existential threat to their leaders’ grip on power. Therefore, the United States must acknowledge that, should Russia or the PRC roll the iron dice, there is no cost we can impose short of the complete elimination of their combat power that would cause them to back down. The United States should therefore be prepared to destroy adversarial combat capabilities in order to threaten ultimately defeating an adversary in the instance of conflict. 

Conclusion

As the United States seeks to deter an ascendant PRC and aggressive Russia, U.S. decision makers must develop a definition of deterrence ready for the 21st century. Specific and bounded language surrounding deterrence allows the United States to deliberately respond to adversarial provocation and emerging technologies. Focusing on credibly sustaining and reconstituting forces is another integral aspect of deterrence that should be a funding priority across the Department of Defense. Deterrence must also incorporate strategies to paralyze adversaries’ decision calculus in order to overcome changes in conventional cost-benefit analyses that no longer concern human life with the advent of unmanned systems. Ultimately, policymakers must embrace that deterrence is not an end state unto itself and pursue cost-effective strategies to combat the rising threat of the PRC and Russia. Platforms like containerized missiles, USVs, UAVs, seaplanes, and asymmetric weapons like Stingers and Javelins that have proven effective in Ukraine can be used to quickly flood the zone in the event of conflict and effectively deter an adversary. 

1. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)

2. Ibid.

3. Timothy Walton, Harrison Schramm, and Ryan Boone, Sustaining the Fight: Resilient Maritime Logistics in a New Era, (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2019).

4. “Navy Next-Generation Logistics Ship (NGLS) Program: Background and Issues for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, July 26, 2022.

5. Walker D. Mills, Dylan “Joose” Phillips-Levine, and Collin Fox, “Cocaine Logistics for the Marine Corps,” War on the Rocks, 22 July 2020.

6.  Shibley Telhami, “Americans’ preparedness to pay a price for supporting Ukraine remains robust,” Brookings Institute, July 5, 2022. “The West is Starting to Feel Ukraine Fatigue,” Financial Times, June 2, 2022.

7.  Dina Smeltz and Craig Kafura, “For the First Time, Half of Americans Favor Defending Taiwan if China Invades,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, August 26, 2021.

8.  Lt. Col. Chris Anzalone, “The Cold War: An Assessment of Strategy,” Air War College, April 1993.

9.  The Science of Military Strategy, trans. China Aerospace Strategic Institute, 2020.

10. See, Clint Reach, Vikram Kilambi, and Mark Cozad, Russian Assessments and Applications of the Correlation of Forces and Means, (Santa Monica: RAND, 2020).

11. Steve Blank, “The Small, the Agile, and the Many,” Proceedings 148 No. 1, January 2022.

12. “What is America’s Policy of “Strategic Ambiguity” over Taiwan?” The Economist, May 23, 2022.