So I hosting commander. But what I'm here to do is to offer you again so the practitioners you much,
much more Scalia an academic but focusing on the theory of deterrence and as it applies to modern conflicts today.
Part of the reason why is because functional topics like those are really at the heart of current debates of what to do with countries like Russia.
And a lot of times when you get into them, what you find is most of policy thinking is very much scenario based or wargame based,
but it really lacks a lot of foundational understanding and underpinnings, either in international politics or in cross-cutting functional fields.
So it becomes a conversation about what to do with a specific adversary over specific
problem set on a particular issue based a lot on scenarios and simulations of war gaming.
It's not very well grounded and broader thinking,
so that's kind of more of a foundational lecture on deterrence they'll try to make applied to the extent I can.
I am a huge fan of Dr. Strangelove, the film.
I don't know how many of you are familiar, but many are.
I will tell you from my experience in the Department of Defence, the film is not parody, it is a documentary and we made today.
I had these interactions with me and my colleagues and contemporaries and counterparts and they literally go like This movie, okay?
And there are people that are currently featured that are featured in the film as composites,
and you could safely make a movie about other people that are currently prominently featured in our defence establishment, right?
So there'll be a lot of references to it because the topic can be a little bit theoretical and still if you don't do some comedy.
So essence of deterrence, well,
it has some chances to make threats made by one party to convince another party from initiating a desired course of action.
Right. And one side must convince the others not to carry out an intended actions because the cost of would incur are
either too high or the benefits are too low to people that really or foundation to this debate were Herman Cain,
Thomas Schilling, Dr. Strangelove in the film is a composite of these characters,
along with others, probably mostly Herman Kahn rather than Schelling.
And the idea of some of the foundation books that were written at the time.
And this debate repeats and recreates itself in history.
So we now talk about great power, competition and conflict with countries like Russia and China, the triumph of Back in Vogue.
And a lot of people today are very much having the same debates that they were having in the fifties and sixties.
And oftentimes during the day, you'll hear people say, well, I'm a show and guy and I want a Herman Cain guy.
And you basically seeing this, the sort of ideological,
theoretical children of these individuals dominate the policy establishment today, at least in the United States.
Right. I will not speak to the UK in terms, of course,
being front and centre during the nuclear age because the consequences of war and nuclear war between pure nuclear
states was absolutely devastating and eventually nuclear war began to seem as something that was unwinnable.
So security became a lot of conversation about how to engage the right combination of behaviours,
probably communicate to adversaries what you will will not do in order to have them take certain actions.
All right. So, well, you get a theoretical sense of deterrence.
As always, this lecture is going to possibly be sort of a mile wide and deep,
but deterrence effect on the mind of the adversary generated by first promises.
So persuasion of the opponent, the cost of risk of a given course of action they might take are definitely going to outweigh the benefit.
Deterrence is really simple, right? It's important to remember strategy is not the same as convincing a plan.
Convincing that a plan for military victory will succeed.
So deterrence is not a plan for war fighting right to achieve military victory over narrative.
And at the same time, it's principally a psychological interaction with your opponent.
And it's you trying to convince them of something,
a particular intended action that won't succeed or that the costs greatly outweigh the potential benefit.
But deterrence particularly useful. Why? It's particularly useful in scenarios where military victory may not be achievable,
or when defence against an adversary's course of action is not possible.
There are two cases that we agree with you. One, you simply can't.
One, you can't overmatch or dominate or a particular opponent. Right to defence isn't very possible, such as with nuclear weapons, right?
And you simply can't sustain you can't mount an effective potential defence against them.
So how do you deter them against particular course of action? Deterrence is fundamentally a strategy of limited means.
It is based on proportionality. You have to balance the compliance of what your adversary is going to do with the amount of threat you pose to them.
And you also have to assure them this one part where the terms that from a practitioner review perspective, most people get wrong.
So World War II cases where deterrence doesn't work very well is one, it's not proportional or.
Sufficiently reciprocal. The amount of threat is not equal to what you're trying to prevent from doing.
It's not reciprocal. You're asking them for something they can't give you necessarily.
And third one is there's no assurance involved, which is part of deterrence that you told people if you do this, bad things will happen to you.
But if you don't do it,
I promise I will not do bad things to you just because it's important for other people to understand that there is a cause effect.
But you will not simply punish them because you have the power to do it. All right.
So they must be assured that actually you're deterring them for particular intended action and bad things won't happen with them nonetheless.
You know, and finally, a lot of deterrence is oriented around signalling bargaining.
Right. Which is there are strong challenge in deterrence oriented around how you establish course of credibility.
And particularly as we'll talk later in this lecture, the resolve part, of course, of credibility.
How would you communicate the fact that you have skin in the game, that you're vested in it,
that you have strong interests at stake and that you will actually fight and you'll follow through with what you say you will do.
Even though the entire concept of this, if you're trying to do so, you don't actually have the fight, right?
You tried the tour of the fight from happening. So you have to be as convincing as you can.
And as I assure you, that's not so easy. Important because whenever anybody's trying to prevent anything, they all sound convincing.
Right. So those are for you.
Right. So first part of deterrence in us,
mostly deterrence came about as a formulated discussion where the truth is really about establishing course of credibility of your adversary.
And of course, some credibility was formulated as capabilities plus resolve, time signalling.
So I will tackle what I find to be the much more important part of the deterrence location,
which is the issue of resolve resolves really correlated with interests at stake.
And whoever cares more about the object of contention and theory has higher resolve.
Right. And so what you get is robust capabilities that, you know,
are basically supported by strong resolve or conversely, a high degree of resolve that you may have.
But you have very little capability that you can actually show an adversary
what you can do about it and don't provide necessarily a credible deterrent.
So credibility is really important. The other big challenge is how you communicate to the adversary for both words and actions, right?
So you're basically targeting strategic communication to your audience.
And here's the real challenge.
So in order to make deterrence works, the two kinds of people needs two kinds of people behind closed doors normally fight.
You need subject matter experts for regional us on your adversary.
It's people like me and you, people who are functional and understand strategy and deterrence and compelling,
but normally don't know much about the countries involved with China, with Russia, with Iran, with North Korea.
The same thing. In theory, the theory should work right in practice, not always.
So this is a conversation where people who understand the theory and who are in
charge making policy and people can make policy are almost always journalists,
at least in the US policy community, have to get together with regionals who explain to them the psychology of the adversary so they can
tailor their message and convince them because it's a psychological interaction with the other side.
If you don't know them, you can't determine because how can you possibly tailor your message to signal them?
If you don't know much about them, what's going to work with Russia is probably not going to work necessarily with Iran.
Right. This is the reality. And why knowing that research is very important is because one proportionality.
Well, the first question on the charts is how much do they want it? If they want it a lot.
If you think they want a lot, then you need way more deterrence, right?
Way more course of credibility. Maybe you need to show much more resolve, maybe need much more capability in more policy, more policy debates.
People say, I need more both because there's an attraction, as I say, that, you know,
first of all, policy debates that I've seen in the United States are typically between two camps.
There's people who think we need more. And then there are people who think we need more and more.
And the debate is between the more and the more times to two or three or four.
Right. And and principally, I mean, that's generally more positive because more always has good stakeholders.
And people believe that more is better because they think activity is achievement and nobody's really attracted to us.
So it's important that you take words, actions to communicate the threat, but it does have to be very much adversary specific.
It does not work across all adversaries right next to the base.
Sort of denial versus punishment here. I'm simplifying a bit, but there are principally two strategic modes of deterrence.
One aims to deny the benefits of the actual because they won't succeed.
That's the easiest one, right? And that's deterrence by denial. And you're affecting the calculus of the adversary.
But basically tell them you won't succeed in your plan.
You won't be able to invade or take the territory you want when those punishment, which is basically raises prohibitive cost.
So you may succeed, but I'm going to pull such punishing costs.
The rule of thumb for how much you want to trust me, you're not going to win enough, right?
That ultimately the costs will be prohibitive to dissuade you from wanting to take on the sanction.
They are not exclusive. Brochures are meetings where they are complimentary. One example would be, let's say, flexible response,
nuclear strategy that's taken on by new professional companies where you combine both basically a graduate strategy,
reporting strategy or even around the now and a part of your strategies oriented around punishment.
Why? Well, you have conventional forces, let's say, for denial.
The adversary may not succeed. And you integrate that with tactical nuclear weapons.
And then your strategic nuclear arsenal is about punishment, right?
Retaliation. So you have two pieces of the puzzle right there.
One is you reduce the likelihood that the adversary will succeed in a military attack.
The other ones, you have a very credible threat of just, you know, mass retaliation and tremendous punishment.
No points for effort. So I have a lot argument with colleagues who say, well, we need to do more is always put more and more of people and ideas.
We need more. Deterrence is why will deterrence not good enough?
We need a little bit some action. We need robust deterrence and robust year deterrence.
That, for the record, is not a thing.
There's not what I call robust your deterrence or any other, though the term the term does not give a lot of good points for effort.
Here's a good example. There's a set of people, this Maginot Line construction of the war to that that would be good deterrence by denial.
Very stable thinking. Right. But this great line of German fortifications.
So people did not build their side of the line. Right.
They may be belligerent. Okay. So the front line doesn't build.
So now when you look at it, the terms of the give points for effort, so it either works or it doesn't.
And as I'll show you, it's incredibly difficult to prove when it's working,
but it's a lot easier to show when you're intended to deter your adversary from invading from a particular vector of attack.
And that does not succeed. Right. We've got my fair share.
So let's talk about nuclear versus conventional. So first, rules of conflict between nuclear,
conventional or nuclear deterrence kind of dominate a lot of deterrence theory up until the end of the Cold War.
You'll find most of the time when we spend our discussions on today is conventional deterrence.
Well, nuclear deterrence might be a little bit back and forth by the end of this month,
when U.S. nuclear posture and ballistic missile defence review come out and we discuss we get more into the conversation on modernisation,
new arsenal. But most of the conversation for the last 25 years has been about conventional deterrence.
So nuclear deterrence intrinsically based on deterrence by punishment worldwide,
because we just don't have the technology to deny another adversary strategic nuclear arsenal attack.
Right. So strategic nuclear deterrence is all around punishment, getting a survivable nuclear deterrent that can retaliate.
It's not about denial, camp denial.
And the only area where nuclear weapons were used in denial of strategy is tactical nuclear weapons as part of conventional war fighting.
Right. Where you basically say we're going to fire nuclear weapons at you in a conventional conflict, literally for battlefield employment.
Well, nuclear turns really highly credible, preventing nuclear conflict between nuclear powers.
This type of deterrence might prevent commercial conflict to the extent where there are strong escalation anxiety,
but it's very limited when there's mutually assured destruction.
So the question is how well does nuclear deterrence, deterrence by punishment deter regular conventional conflicts between peers?
Well,
if it's between United States and Soviet Union and you have very strong anxiety that any conventional conflict will rapidly weaken nuclear escalation.
It does a pretty good job most of the time. Right.
Although you will have crises, that's pretty well. How well does it deter other activities?
Not necessarily all that well.
And it has pretty limited deterrence value for things beyond the general conflict when there's mutually assured destruction.
Why? Well, look, if you have really good, good strategy oriented around punishment, um,
its effectiveness really begins to diminish if the person you're applying it to also has really good strategy in the round punishing you,
meaning they're just incredible. And that the cross you can impose on them.
They can impose very similar costs onto you. And there you start to run into problems, right?
So it's much more effective against people who you can threaten various types of asymmetric escalation, but they cannot retaliate against you in time.
Um, here is sort of outlined probably, you know, in our conversation today, but strategic nuclear deterrence is still for sale on punishment.
Tactical nuclear weapons. To the extent that some countries have an actual battlefield strategy around them, a more effort towards denial,
some about tactical nuclear weapons are left over, don't really clearly have an appointment doctrine.
Non-strategic nuclear weapons are kind of interesting.
Russia has a fairly capable arsenal that's a news department and divides its weapons into really three kinds of weapons tactical,
tactical, operational, non-strategic and strategic. Right and non-strategic weapons.
If you want to think about what that is, there are things probably between 520 500 kilometres.
And these are weapons that are flawed and improve deterrence in conflict.
Role deterrence in conflict is really escalation control, which is because people sometimes have a false dichotomy.
They think, right, in terms of working, there's no war worth art. Deterrence has failed.
No, not true. Deterrence can manage escalation in conflict, either horizontal or vertical.
You can re-establish deterrence once possibilities break out. So the war could be limited.
It can be limited in duration, it could be limited intensity and give you a limited geography.
There's many ways in conflict to actually bound the nature of the war,
and there are different capabilities that you can develop and apply and say, that's really going to be the role of these capabilities.
Right. I would I would like the bound of conflict. I would like to see if I can use them to control escalation.
So there's one potential use today for non-strategic nuclear weapons.
So the essence of modern debate today with countries like Russia and others is whether
denial or punishment is the best strategy when it comes to conventional deterrence.
And almost all bolshie establishments really prefer denial because at the last show you later they have a very rather negative view of punishment,
i.e. punishment is a great strategy for nuclear deterrence, but people don't really like it for conventional deterrence.
All right, Joe, versus immediate, this is fairly straightforward.
So, Joe, deterrence is basically governed by a relationship between you and another adversary where you both have robust forces capabilities,
but you don't expect any sort of immediate attack, meaning you don't believe that there is an impending attack or you're not a threatened state.
You need deterrence. These are cases where one side mobilise or both sides mobilise and there is a genuine threat planning attack.
And then there's a question of whether or not you can deter in that particular crisis scenario.
There's a big difference between a near term where you actually perceive that the other side does intend an attack or considering it,
versus what is our normal state of life, which is general deterrence.
We have nuclear weapons. They have nuclear weapons. Neither one of us thinks that tomorrow we're going to wake up and launch an attack on each other.
What are cases like that? Well, let's say zap a 2017 that just happened in September.
A fairly straightforward strategic plan by Russia, not very large.
The United States does a brigade rotation through the area of operations.
The United States decided to pause rotation out of the brigade that was being replaced at the same time as it introduced the second one.
So they were both there for that exercise. Why?
Well, because for whatever reason, undoubtedly as anxious people out of the world and reflected that in the United States,
somebody thought that having two brigades there at the same time pause for several weeks would have better
credibility on the deterrence scale in the event that there was any sort of mal intent on behalf of Russia.
That's right.
And that was clearly it's wishful thinking from general deterrence to the countries conducting a very large strategic operational exercise.
We understand their capabilities. We're not 100% certain of their intent.
So we want to increase our immediate deterrence. Now, the word to the effect of, you know, my personal opinion is if you're a nuclear state,
is willing to go to war, would you and roll over one brigade? Believe me, they're willing to roll over to brigade.
Just trust me. Okay. But what we're saying, there's no such thing as robust. Your deterrence, right?
It just. It. Trust me, they're willing to go to war with a pure nuclear power.
The difference in their decision making will not be between two one brigade in two months, for sure.
But that being said, I'm just giving you a case from just a few months ago to illustrate central versus extended.
This is really at the heart of modern deterrence for doing what people do not like punishment, and that's the heart of problems and deterrence.
So there's one country, the most ideal, that has the largest external deterrence network in the world.
It's painted in blue. These are all countries to which we extend deterrence.
Okay. And I congratulate you if you're on this list, because it means that in theory,
we have committed to trading New York for whatever capital it is you hail from or any other one of your cities.
Right. The real question comes into to whether or not we would actually do it if it came to it.
And therein lies the challenge. So central or direct deterrence? Very credible.
Everybody's credible in the fact that if you attack them, they'll fight back.
If you have nuclear weapons or other long range offensive weapon, you're very credible in the fact that you're fighting to defend yourself.
Right. Britain and France and Europe are very credible in that they have a central nuclear deterrent of
theirs and they usually reflect some extended deterrence and have a lot of fundamental problems.
Right. And what is external deterrence? Well, then deterrence of deterring attack on a third party.
But it's not inherently credible. It has to be made credible.
And the real challenge to external deterrence is how to make it credible.
It's pretty complicated and not that easy to manage.
Look, ultimately, extended deterrence is in the nuclear realm.
It's about trying to make the incredible credible.
How do you convince somebody that you'd be willing not only to just fight for a third party, but you'd be willing to commit suicide for this?
Very hard. It's incredibly hard to convince anybody that you commit suicide on behalf of a third person.
That's issue one on the conventional side of things.
The big challenge on extending the terms has always been unresolved.
You may have capabilities, but. But it's a constant struggle to demonstrate that you have interests at stake,
that you have the political resolve to actually go and fight on behalf in a sort of general historical case of extended deterrence.
One has not done very well. Is most of the conflicts that you see what you might consider to be a potential break down deterrence?
I think almost two thirds come from breakdowns of extend deterrence rather than central deterrence between powers.
And I'll get into maybe the nuances of that Q&A to some extent, deterrence, punishment, which historically works a lot less effectively than denial.
Why? Because if you're if you're posture towards punishment,
it's just very difficult to convince your adversary that you would actually be willing to commit to the conflict.
Right. It is very hard to build and establish their resolve.
It's much easier if you're there with your forces and have different policy communities like the much simpler answer of well, well, the Maginot Line.
Right. Or just put put brigades there and will line them up or go along the border and they'll be denial.
We'll do that in Korea and we'll do that in the Baltics and we'll do it elsewhere.
Wherever there's a problem, we'll put the forces and will help solve.
The credibility from this, of course, is overly simplistic, because I will assure you that even if you have a lot of capabilities,
actually a resolve is still much more important to establish.
And there are plenty historical cases where people had really good conventional deterrence by denial.
I think we're discussing that some other section, and I really command people to look at Foreign Affairs article,
I think September issue 2017 by Stephen Cochran, one of our great historians on Soviet Union, called One Face Hitler.
First of all, it's a brilliant read. Just in general. It's just a great article.
But second, towards the end of our will, it gives us something interesting to our discussion here, which was looking back in history.
For that particular case, it's very easy to understand why France or the U.K. couldn't deter Germany from being born.
Which was why could the Soviet Union not deter Germany from invading the Soviet Union in 1941?
So Soviet Union had like easily 170 divisions through Germany, 200 forward position.
It had a tremendous material advantage in armour and they had a tremendous quality advantage,
and they did a lot to signal the extent of US capability.
Why the Soviet Union invited lots of German officers to inspect its military formations so they could see what they had to convince them,
how much stuff they had, what the stuff could do, etc., etc.
It was a big question. So having had all the forces they could possibly need to effect conventional deterrence by the night against Germany,
they did not succeed in dissuading Germany from attacking them in 1941 really fast in case of World War II.
So it really came through an issue of resolve capabilities didn't do it.
Stalin became trapped in his own decision making cycle and path dependent.
He was desperate to avoid a conflict with Germany,
and he got trapped in a set of decisions that signalled very clearly to Hitler that he was desperate to avoid a war.
And then when he received indications that he had gone from general deterrence and potentially even needed,
the Turks received indications that Germany was very likely to attack.
He then got trapped and then he believed that anything he would do to try to further bolster his coercive credibility,
capabilities and resolve would actually lead to the outbreak of the conflict.
Meaning if he made certain moves, they would be perceived as escalatory.
It would be used by Germany as the causes for the war, which we know they ultimately declared.
And so he got trapped in really trying to avoid the conflict.
And then when the time came to take certain steps that may or may not have succeeded in re-establishing deterrence,
but at the very least would give him a much stronger fighting chance in the very various of the war.
He didn't want to do them. He didn't wanna do them because he was told the term.
He was afraid that that would be used as the German justification for invasion.
Right. In Germany. Germany read the Soviet Union incredibly well in 1941, and that's actually, to me,
a much more fascinating case of the outbreak of World War Two than what happened in 1939.
Although we can discuss that, too.
That was much worse than because Sweden had all the men and materiel could possibly want to go to Germany by denial and it didn't work.
Sorry, I kind of harped on this point a bit, but. Okay.
So. Weapons, of course, and capabilities and force structure have a role on how you strategize around deterrence.
One is you define as white flexible tasking around is so early on the strategy of mass retaliation
worked in so far as the United States could retaliate against the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons,
but the socioeconomic value against the United States.
So you could credibly have in the terms, by gosh, what strategy were nuclear weapons for an invasion in Europe?
And it would work. And as soon as the Soviet Union developed the credible capability to reach United States with ICBM and whatnot,
that strategy very quickly became incredible,
meaning the deterrence we extended to NATO's European allies wasn't crumbling more because we were basically making the argument the world view,
invade and think. The rest of Germany will trade Washington, D.C. in New York for it.
And the answer to that is that's really easy to say. I'm very sceptical.
You will do it right. And that's where flexible response came about, which was, okay, we did hear the strategy and it was still painful.
These are far from perfect solutions. Right.
KIMBALL To basically say we will have a warfighting fighting strategy of conventional deterrence by the now we
have a nuclear escalation strategy that will also be oriented around denial with tactical nuclear weapons.
And then if the conflict escalates beyond that. Then we will employ strategic nuclear weapons in retaliation.
Right. So it's great you're in here.
And it was a lot of effort was put into making the the first proposal strategic action credible because it wasn't even, for example,
tactical nuclear weapons were intentionally placed in the path of advancing Soviet comes so that that will put needle into a
user to lose that scenario to in some ways increase the likelihood that they would be used very early on in the conflict.
So again, because questions come in to, well, what would you really be the first to use tactical nuclear weapons in the war?
So these are different steps that historically we people have done to use in in setting up their
deterrence strategy in order to try to get credibility where it's not inherently there and.
Some players were very successful in case of France, because when France established a central nuclear deterrent,
they were very credible in the fact that they for sure would use it if the Soviet Union won passage, Germany invaded France.
Good alliance politics. And here is this.
When I hear discussions of it, a lot of times a modern discourse aligned politics is is confused with a deterrence conversation.
In fact, you hear it all the time. Even just recently, NATO's went from a European you're a European reassurance initiative to European deterrence and
I right like you just change the name last year as though you could simply change and say,
okay, we were doing reassurance for allies. Now we're doing deterrence with the same force and capability.
Yeah, that's not at all how it works. Right. So deterrence is principally a conversation with your enemy, your adversary.
Alliance politics is the conversation with the allies, your friends. And they're very two different people.
Right. And they're two different psychological conversations. And the problem you're trying to manage in these issues are very different.
They overlap. I draw a diagram, there's an area of overlap, but it's not like they're completely separate.
There are things that both deter enemies and reassure your allies at the same time.
You can do both for sure.
But it's important, our fear that things that deter don't necessarily assure and things that are sure don't necessarily deter at all.
Right. They're two different things, for example.
But let's let's say a couple of historic cases, introduction of intermediate range weapons in Europe right.
Early. So these might have had a good deterrent effect,
but they created a lot of issues in allied perception and they're worried about being in trap and escalation.
Right. Or where you place your force in them, which forces deployed some like US Marines or units,
let's say in Norway, where if you're in Norway and you're having a conversation during the Cold War,
um, Bosnia, for whatever reason, don't know that Norway border the Soviet Union still borders Russia the entire time of the Cold War.
But nobody had the same way to say, you know,
it'd be really easy for the Soviet Union to invade Natal from Norway and there's nobody there and they just take new territory.
This is a real confusing, though. The Court So what do we do?
Um, in the first sort of first maybe typical, your stance would be as I know the terms by the now I'll put troops over there right,
right on the border with Soviet Union and we go for the punishment.
They can be tripwire troops. Right. And the Norwegian answer might have been, you know, that's a great idea.
Let's get American troops in there. We get skin in the game, will make extend deterrence more credible.
But they're very worried that, well, while that may be a good deterrent, they would fall into the trap problem,
which is the Soviet Union would then respond and put more forces on the border with Norway,
and that would lead to a negative security outcome and then meaning and and that some that the minus and it would prove
escalatory and they would become a trap because now U.S. troops on Norway's border have a say in what happens in the conflict.
Right. Because they can't predict necessarily what the United States will choose to do with the forces, what the interactions will be.
So basically they said, well, you know, what would some let's it's great Doug your forces for assurance but let's put them somewhere much
further down south of Norway so they're not on the border so we don't suffer from these bombs.
So the two different problems you're trying to solve between alliance politics is that in last politics you're managing entrapment versus abandonment.
And this is constantly the Goldilocks zone between allies that you're trying to balance.
So you've got allies that are fearing abandonment, but you won't come to their aid, won't come to the rescue.
And then there is you, of course, being afraid that your allies will get you into a war that you're trying to avoid.
Right. And they'll engage in reckless behaviours.
And alternatively, when you deploy capabilities that your allies really say, look,
we're going to get these brigades, we'll get these capabilities here to deter your enemy.
I got it worse you give them your allies also begin to be a little worried because now they're entrapped by you.
They're not sure what you will do. Well, you don't look, let's say, for example, it's an Asia Pacific region.
Oh, we're maybe 60%. The United States power projection balanced towards the Asia-Pacific region versus Europe.
Okay. We have forces based in Japan. We have forces based in South Korea.
Um, when your allies who are hosting your forces understand that you might be happily willing to engage in a conflict with a pure adversary,
and that conflict will play out primarily on their territory, on their soil.
They're very worried about being potentially trapped.
Right, because you may well survive the conflict with minimal cost, whereas they assuredly will not.
And that's the same problem the Europeans typically air.
Um, so I typically find that, uh, deterrence is actually a lot simpler than alliance politics, and that assurance is almost a bottomless bucket.
Meaning for your own allies that are very full.
You have to consistently do things to assure them. And what's kind of the difference between these activities, what they look like.
So assurance measures typically start from political.
Statements of assurance and commitments by your political leadership to exercise with your allies,
to forward deployed forces on your allies territory that are already there,
to join forces that are integral under command, meaning yours and their are their in their country forward base.
So that you basically go from all establishing all these states to establishing capability to making it integrated.
And in cases, for example, like your idea, we basically don't do that.
We've checked all the box, all the boxes. So.
Conventional deterrence is really the essence of the debate today.
Denial has a much better track record than punishment.
And in some ways, this little picture illustrates to you why?
Because correlation of interests is much more important than the actual correlation of forces employed.
Why is that reliable? Well, because denial, if you have enough force, will convince your adversary that they can't win what works.
Punishment and punishment is problematic because your adversary decides how much is enough and you don't know how much is enough for them.
This is the biggest challenge. Example Kosovo bombing campaign, right.
In 1999. You don't know. Will you have to bomb Serbia for 30 days, 60 days?
78 days? What is actually the breaking point for them to say?
I've taken so much punishment. They are no longer willing to pursue the thing you're trying to target from pursuing.
And how you write that, how you estimate that.
So it's an unsafe bet where punishment, I think, to me is a much better strategy is in two cases, one where denial is basically unobtainium.
Gee, it's great to have the best, but sometimes, you know, you can't let the best be the enemy of the good.
Right. Two, it's way too expensive to do. And if you were to do it anywhere, you'd be bankrupt as a country,
especially if you're a country that handed out extended term guarantees to that large pool map I showed you.
All right. Three. There could be real problems with the things you would need to do to affect the terms by the now.
Because the terms by then, of course, means a very large military presence on somebody else's borders.
Right. And that can lead to serious security dilemmas and force bidding contests.
So the now the dark side is, of course, if everybody has a denial strategy, it can actually result in a really terrible war.
Right. Because what you get are spiral models, decision making.
That is, if everybody gets together and they make the best rational choices that are designed to avoid war,
and everybody says Muslim, in order to make sure that I am secure or to maximise my security, I just need three divisions here.
All right. And that other side sees your three division and says, okay, just to be safe from my end, I also need deterrence by denial.
And I'm going need four divisions on my side of that border.
And you will look back on and your people will have the the key bureaucrat guarding whether we should have more divisions or way more divisions.
And maybe you all decide that you need five now or you need eight or ten,
and we'll keep going and you'll result in a security dilemma and result in a force building contest.
Right. And it will be the consequence of very rational, judicious steps taken to achieve security, at the very least.
Example That's how we stack forces throughout the Cold War, right across across central Germany.
Right. Which we build, build, build, build, build, build, build.
Until we have millions of men under arms and millions of men behind them in ready for mobilisation.
Right. So if I show you the four stacks where that's the classical result of just the force bending contest, and you can get those.
You can make this happen literally anywhere. Prospect theory I had here is basically that, look, principally decision makers,
international affairs are much more willing to take risks to avert what they
perceive are losses rather than take risk to pursue opportunities and gains.
And so we'll have to live with the challenge of conventional deterrence.
By denial is when we create a security dilemma, countries are willing to take much greater risk not to live in a permanent state of insecurity.
If you put them to a decision whether or not option one for them is to live with a large amount of your forces on their borders.
So they're always insecure because you have the capability. They don't know you're in focus.
Your leadership changes, your time can change relations, can change your capabilities.
The write up they may choose to take risks to create a crisis, to avert a Cuban missile crisis, as an example.
All right. So you'd like to deploy Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Cuba, right?
I'm not willing to live with 5 minutes worth of north four flight time of missile from Cuba.
I will take the risk of an of a crisis that will lead to a nuclear escalation rather than live in a permanent state of insecurity.
And there are other cases historically, it doesn't always happen, but countries are much more wary about taking these sort of risk.
Right. So.
And here I'll just beat up to wrap up these last few slides.
So messaging and signalling for credibility is one of the biggest challenges, which is everybody tries to sound credible.
How you actually do it to be effective? Well, you need both political messaging where you make claims, commitments, whatnot,
so that going back on them would craft political consequences for your leadership, both in international and domestic politics.
The other one is you take things to basically build up your horde, your chips in chorus of credibility in the game.
You show that you're ready for war.
The Iraqi willing to accept casualties, loss of Russia, for example, dozens with all sorts of domestic readiness, exercise,
mobilisation exercises and civil defence exercise to demonstrate that actually they are preparing for a general total war.
They are willing to accept casualties and losses.
And there's all sorts of people involved in these processes in government that are actually planning for them.
And then in a crisis, you basically you're engaging in a game of competitive risk taking.
So you eliminate some of your own options intentionally to make yourself seem more credible.
But is it is less likely that you will turn away down the path?
You've taken an escalation because you burn your own bridges behind you.
So basically, the ramp up deterrence ultimately is the question around course of credibility,
which is how how would you establish the credibility both with your capabilities,
but mostly with the amount of resolve that you're able to signal to your adversaries?
Alliance politics tend to be, by and large, a quest for assurance how you assure your allies because they always want more and a lot of your allies.
The tricky thing you'll have, Bob, and close allies are sneaky.
At some point they feel assured already.
But because structurally they have an incentive to extract security benefits from their all powerful patron, they will keep not being assured.
Okay. And every year they will come to you for more assurance.
All right. Even though they were assured some time ago. But they will keep come back and say, you know, I'm still very scared.
Last year I needed naval battlegroups. This year I need pack three.
And next year, I'm going to come up with something else I need. And the year after that, I'll be something else.
You know why? Because everyone likes free stuff. Who doesn't like free things?
The security guarantees from the patron. And I can get you in and trap you more in their commitment to my own security guarantees.
Right. So this is why the alliance politics to me is a perpetual quest to get assurance, right?
Okay. Andrew, what about myself? Too much of my time.
I mean, I didn't want to use Ashley Pilgrim.