Deterrence is Integrated in Theory, but not in Practice

Matthew Costlow

Source Link

Introduction

Deterring a strategic attack on the United States or its allies in the atomic age has always been a defense-wide mission, meaning that U.S. officials issued such deterrence threats knowing that crises could escalate into conventional conflicts, and conventional conflicts could escalate into nuclear war.[1] Deterrence, therefore, involved a wide range of military capabilities for each circumstance. Nuclear-armed states cannot completely separate conventional deterrence from nuclear deterrence conceptually because conventional deterrence may or may not function based on the adversary’s willingness to submit to nuclear deterrence. Indeed, as the scholar of strategy Colin Gray wrote, “There is an essential unity to military posture. If we choose to emphasize one element of the posture, particularly at the lower level of potential conflict, we virtually invite adversary escalation to a level where he has an advantage.”[2] Deterrence is integrated in theory, in this sense, because conflict is a continuum; the United States seeks credible deterrence threats, and the military forces that support those threats, to function at each point of a potential conflict.

In practice, however, scholars and practitioners of deterrence have created a host of distinctions that have often served to confuse as much as they clarify: conventional versus nuclear deterrence; deterrence by punishment versus deterrence by denial; offensive weapons versus defensive weapons. These distinctions, whatever their merit in other circumstances, have contributed however unintentionally to a degraded understanding of how and why deterrence functions as a unified whole. The U.S. government practice of issuing separate policy documents largely based on these distinctions (i.e., the National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review, and Missile Defense Review) only serves to promote the idea that these are separable areas of policy with only minimal reference to, much less substantive strategic dependence on, each other.