Recreating Western Deterrence

The art of deterrence seems to have been lost here in the liberal-democratic West.

Deterrence is, in no small part, about fear. In an authoritarian regime, deterrence occurs in the mind of the autocrat. And the leaders of authoritarian states fear different things than the leaders of Western liberal states. Western leaders of commercial republics fear things like a declining economy, supply chain disruptions or inflated prices on ever scarcer goods–especially with the approach of elections. But such economic deterrents to action do not hold sway to the same extent over the imagination of authoritarian adversaries. Only in commercial republics, where leaders are answerable to citizenry, is the logic of economic hardship likely to lead to a loss of authority and status.

Fear may be rational, based on a cold appraisal of the factual balance of forces, available manpower, technological superiority, war materiel, and will to fight. But more powerful, in many cases, is the fear of the unknown. Questions like the following are of the essence:  What surprises do our enemies have in store? What will they do that we cannot predict? What if we are unprepared or unable to counter? Perhaps they will do something that we regard as utterly irrational. The ideal scenario, from the perspective of deterrence, is that our autocratic adversaries’ leaders should feel confusion and panic at the prospect of war with the allies of the United States.

One fear that the United States and our allies might legitimately have is the use of nuclear weapons by the adversaries of the United States. Iran’s nuclear program is such a threat; the North Korean dictator threatens to use his nuclear arsenal to attack America; Russia’s Putin threatens to use tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine. There is no clear, public doctrine on the United States’ response to a nuclear strike, and it is unclear whether the United States would in fact be prepared to engage in nuclear escalation over any attack on an ally. Deterrence only emerges to the extent that adversaries anticipate, expect, or fear a response to certain contemplated actions.

In any event, nuclear weapons are only one of the tools that humans have developed for the destruction of cities. Witness Hama in 1982, Tokyo in 1944, Dresden in 1945, Grozny in 1999, and Carthage in 146 BC, among countless others. Each of these were acts of destruction that served as cautionary tales for those who might anticipate the same fate. Conventional weapons are both necessary and sufficient for strategic deterrence, especially in a world where leaders of great powers have a strong preference to avoid nuclear escalation.

What, one might ask, are the circumstances under which the United States would engage in a nuclear first strike against China or Russia, or their armed forces? It’s hard to imagine any such circumstance:  Even if China were to cross the Taiwan Straits and begin systematically rounding up and killing the citizens of Taiwan, does anyone seriously believe that the United States would launch a nuclear first strike on China, or even on a Chinese fleet in the Taiwan Straits, to stop it?  The leaders of Taiwan certainly should not act on the assumption that the United States would do so.

For any circumstance where the first use of an American nuclear weapon might be considered, there will, for the near term, always be a conventional alternative. And given realistic fears of nuclear escalation by the leaders of the United States, the conventional alternative will, for the foreseeable future, be the chosen solution for the United States.

As Halford Mackinder once argued, states that contribute to the balance of power remain effectively sovereign.  Such states have many more options than those which rely on others for their security. States that depend on allied nations are thus limited in their ability to execute effective deterrence. For small states on the periphery of expansionist autocratic regimes, the rapid development and deployment of their own credible deterrents, whether nuclear or conventional, should be considered a priority.

For Taiwan, this means several key things:

By contrast with Ukraine, which shares a long border with Russia and where Russian forces have demonstrated an ability to dig in and hold ground once taken, Taiwan has enormous advantages. Most notably, any invasion fleet needs to cross the Taiwan straits; stopping them from coming ashore by sinking the fleet will be radically less expensive and more effective than any form of fight on the beaches or on land.

In addition, small states can pursue the strategy that Taiwan and Korea have already deployed to great effect:  Wield economic specialization to create technical capabilities that are available in only one place, necessitating their defense by the United States on the grounds of an irreplaceable geo-economic choke point in a vital commercial supply chain. In effect, they contribute to what might be called technological power, which underlies much of military and economic power in the modern era. Unfortunately, this strategy also has an anti-deterrent effect, since the result is that any invasion of Taiwan will create dramatic harm to Western economies, creating a comparative increase in Chinese power. Ironically, creating a situation where Taiwan is essential to the United States’s economy makes Taiwan all the more attractive as a target for China.

In Ukraine, it may be that the greatest source of failure to deter conflict was inadequate signaling of the extent to which the United States was prepared to support Ukraine’s war effort. This in turn led to an intelligence failure on the part of the Russian leadership. While the West had been quietly supporting Ukrainian military training and providing limited armaments, these efforts were deliberately downplayed in order to avoid upsetting Russian leadership, which was perceived by some as a partner rather than an adversary regime. It seems, in retrospect, that what the West had provided the Ukrainians, coupled with the Ukrainian will to fight in the face of bald aggression, was far more effective than anyone expected, in Moscow or in Washington, D.C.

It would have been far cheaper and more effective for initial Western aid to Ukraine to have been more public and more expansive; a key component of deterrence is ensuring that the enemy understands that the cost of adverse action will be high. Making it crystal clear and obvious that Ukraine, even in the absence of strong and immediate Western support, would be a hard nut to crack, would have been key to effective deterrence. In this, the West failed utterly. Far more weapons, far more public training, and far more logistical and C4ISR support after the first Russian invasion of 2013 was needed to make it clear to Russia that Ukraine would not be an easy target.

But this alone would likely not have been sufficient.  Giving Ukraine the ability to grind down an attacking force, while incredibly valuable, creates a circumstance where the only thing at risk in an attack are the Russian forces used in the attack. In such a scenario, the attacking party gets to control the pace and place of aggression, and the scope of consequence in any downside scenario.

Deterrence also requires that the enemy fear punishment. While Russia uses precision-guided weapons to deliberately attack civilian targets in Ukraine, the Ukrainians have been largely unable to respond (until recently) with attacks even on military targets within Russian occupied Ukraine, let alone in Russia proper. While there have been isolated conventional and grey-zone attacks on a few targets in Russia – such as arms depots and staging areas, as well as isolated attacks on Moscow and on naval targets in port – and, allegedly, on the Nord Stream pipelines, these have been the exception rather than the rule. Had Ukraine been equipped with the capability to engage in conventional, sustained, deep strikes into Russia, Putin and his advisors might have appreciated the dramatically enhanced downsides of launching this war. Relying on threatened and after-the-fact economic sanctions and seizures of the yachts of Russian oligarchs is insufficient; our front-line allies need to have the capability, outside of any US veto or control, to strike the cities and critical infrastructure of aggressor states.

The lesson for Taiwan is obvious.

Nor should the element of surprise be slighted in reestablishing deterrence. The United States has, in this war, telegraphed every punch. Every new weapon system acquisition by the Ukrainians has been extensively and sometimes publicly debated, often for months, eliminating the opportunity for the Ukrainians to achieve any level of strategic or tactical surprise by their use. The United States’ leadership would be well-served to identify key capabilities (including but not limited to weapons systems) that can be provided to the Ukrainians, and provide them en masse, without warning, so that they can be used to achieve surprise.

This would seem at odds with the suggestion that effective deterrence requires instilling fear through public actions that are known to an adversary. And it’s true that hidden capabilities and surprises cannot, by their nature, contribute to deterrence directly from the perspective of a balance-of-forces analysis. But a demonstrated capability and willingness to create surprises for adversaries is absolutely essential to deterrence. It creates uncertainty in the minds of enemy commanders and requires them to prepare for scenarios beyond what their direct intelligence would suggest.  The performance of the Ukrainian military in the early stages of the war was one such surprise and was a major victory for Western arms.  The balance of forces required for a successful invasion of Taiwan undoubtedly changed dramatically, in the minds of PLA command staff, in the wake of the surprising performance of the Ukrainians.

Jerry Pournelle, in his book The Strategy of Technology, argued that ‘surprise is an event that takes place in the mind of an enemy commander.’  The United States has acted, since the invasion of Ukraine, to avoid creating surprise in the minds of the commanders of the Russian forces. But surprise, properly wielded, is one of the most powerful tools of warfare, and one that the United States and the West have sacrificed in the interest of avoiding escalation in Ukraine. For instance, NATO countries have decided to furnish F-16’s to Ukraine, but only after a long training period for their pilots. There are many retired, US military trained fighter pilots and crews here in the United States. It would not take much to allow and incentivize these folks to serve as PMC’s in the Ukrainian armed forces, and to furnish the Ukrainians with the cash to employ them; clear permission that doing so will not violate their obligations to the United States is probably all that would be required, along with providing competitive compensation at market rates.  A couple hundred fully armed, fully supported F-16’s showing up all at once, a month from now, staffed by trained contractors, would likely make a huge difference to the Ukrainians.  This would certainly be more impactful than a handful showing up a year from now when the Russians have had time to prepare for their arrival. 

Showing a capacity to generate these kinds of surprises will have a dramatic force multiplier effect with regard to deterrence in Taiwan and elsewhere.

The West now has a golden opportunity to re-establish deterrence by engaging in punishment by proxy, and to reestablish the threat value of the element of surprise. There are a variety of Russian economic and strategic assets (factories, mines, power plants, rail depots, pipelines, gas infrastructure, port facilities, museums, landmarks, etc.) that the Ukrainians can attack, through direct kinetic means, grey-zone warfare, support of insurgents, or special operations. Enabling them to do so should be a US and Western priority. In particular, facilities like ports and pipelines, which generate hard currency and enable exports to China and elsewhere, should be high-priority targets. 

One critical asset - perhaps the most important one - is the Black Sea fleet, which is a standing threat to the stability of the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. Certainly, nobody would debate the status of the Black Sea fleet as a legitimate target.  The ships of this fleet have been documented engaging in harassment of Romanian ships and oil exploration efforts, and they are the reason that Russia has been able to exercise significant leverage over Ukrainian grain exports. Since the sinking of the Moskva, the Russian fleet has stayed largely out of range of shore-based Ukrainian defenses. With the accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO, the Baltic has become a NATO lake; achieving the same effect in the Black Sea would radically curtail Russian force-projection capabilities in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond.  

Before the war in Ukraine is over, the West should ensure that the Ukrainians are able to acquire the weapons needed to utterly destroy the ships and shipyards of the Black Sea fleet.  Given the restraint that the US and NATO have exercised so far, providing the relevant munitions and intelligence for the Ukrainians to destroy the Black Sea fleet could be done in a way that generates surprise and chagrin among the Russian command staff and political leadership. It is a pity that these weapons and capabilities were not provided at the beginning of the war when the surprise could have been more severe.  Russia will not be able to rebuild the Black Sea fleet capability for decades if both the ships and the port facilities are destroyed, and destroying their offensive naval capabilities in the Black Sea and Mediterranean will be a major strategic victory, turning the Black Sea into a NATO lake for a generation. The destruction of this national asset will likely generate significant embarrassment and dismay for the Putin regime.

Furthermore, and in parallel with this effort, the West should enable the Ukrainians to destroy Russian port assets - especially but not exclusively on the Black Sea. Russia’s most significant export continues to be oil and oil derivatives.  Given that the Russians have announced unrestricted warfare against shipping in and out of Ukraine, there is no reason for the Ukrainians not to respond in kind. Attacking the Russians’ most significant source of revenue is one of the most efficient and asymmetric ways for the Ukrainians to undermine the Russian ability to wage war. Much of the oil exported by Russia has historically left from the Black Sea ports, which are certainly within Ukrainian reach with only modest and deniable Western support.

Demonstrating the ability to generate painful and punitive surprises for Russia will go a long way toward preventing a war in the Taiwan Straits. It’s time for the United States and NATO to stop telegraphing their punches.

Michael Hochberg earned his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Caltech, and currently runs Periplous LLC, a strategy consulting company.  He founded four companies, representing an exit value over a billion dollars in aggregate, spent some time as a tenured professor, and started the world’s first silicon photonics foundry service.  He co-authored a widely used textbook on silicon photonics, and has published work in Science, Nature, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Fast Company, etc.