Deterrence theory achieved its most prominent expression in the context of the Cold War and after the development of nuclear weapons whose destructive power highlighted the need to avoid conflict rather than win wars. Still, the basic premise of trying to deter your adversary is relatively simple: create the conditions whereby your adversary concludes that it cannot achieve its objectives at a cost that it is willing to pay. Yet, this simple concept remains elusive to efficiently define, and nearly impossible to calculate. We never know how much deterrence is too much; we only know when there was insufficient deterrence, and by then it is too late. Thinking about the future of deterrence in a budget-constrained environment is always an exercise in risk management and educated guessing. What does one want to deter? What is one trying to achieve? And how much is enough to deter without “overpaying” for that deterrence.
Thinking about the future of deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region, in a world where President Donald Trump has upended major assumptions of U.S. foreign policy and strategy requires us to go back to the fundamentals.
What Are We Deterring? First Principles
Often, in discussions of deterrence in the region, we default to deterring the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from invading Taiwan, and indeed that is a relevant and important mission. However, there is and has always been a much broader set of interests for U.S. policy. Specifically, the United States should not want any country, but realistically we are looking at primarily China, to be able to use its military, diplomatic, and/or economic power to dominate the region to keep the United States from benefiting from access to the nations, markets, and resources of the region. As part of that, the United States needs to have the capability to deter or prevent China from being able to take over or coerce any nations in the region against its will. The United States also wants to make sure that its allies and friends are not prohibited or pressured by China to not cooperate with the United States on regional and/or global issues.
Deterring these activities is critical to U.S. wellbeing and prosperity now and into the future as it is impossible to imagine U.S. growth, prosperity, and security without access to the Indo-Pacific region, its resources, and its major powers. The strength of the U.S. economy and global prominence is key to this ability to deter China, but a critical foundation is also U.S. military power, either alone or in conjunction with U.S. allies and friends. The first of the two core elements of military deterrence is the ability of the United States to inflict sufficient damage on any aggressive actions by the adversary that it will be clear in advance that any action it takes will not allow it to prevail in the conflict or that the cost will be so significant as to not be worth the initial action. The second element is ensuring that the adversary believes that the United States will be willing to engage to punish the aggression. These are sometimes colloquially referenced as having the “skill and the will” to counter any aggression. Given that the “will” part of this equation is a political one, the remainder of this paper will focus on the “skill” elements.
Military Deterrence: Multiple Layers and Capabilities
Nuclear Deterrence: At the high end of the spectrum of deterrence is nuclear weapons. For years, the United States had a near monopoly on nuclear deterrence in the region as China was judged to not have a sufficient amount of deployed nuclear weapons to allow the country’s leadership to believe that they could prevail in any conflict that reached the level where a nuclear exchange was even considered. Many observers believed that nuclear weapons and deterrence were irrelevant in the construct of regional conflict or coercion. But Chinese leaders certainly did not think this, and the evidence is on how quickly the People’s Liberation Army has and is developing and fielding existing and new nuclear systems. Further, the U.S. nuclear arsenal, once so far ahead of anything China had produced, has for too long stayed stagnant and is beginning to lose its overwhelming lead in this area.
U.S. policymakers must now keep PRC nuclear forces in mind as they consider the escalation ladder in a conflict with China. Further, U.S. policymakers must ensure that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is sufficient and capable of continuing to deter any Chinese leadership and ensure that no one believes that they will benefit from even threatening a nuclear exchange. While U.S. nuclear forces are sufficient to this task today, both the Departments of Defense and Energy will need to commit substantial funds and effort to ensure that the U.S. arsenal continues to be able to deter not only any Chinese activity but also to do so in way that would not provoke adventurism from another nuclear-armed adversary.
Deterring High-End Military Activities/Invasion: Assuming that we can maintain a sufficiently stable nuclear posture, it is unlikely that a war with China will start as a nuclear one. The most likely scenario for nuclear use would be because of an escalation in a conventional conflict. For this reason alone, it would be critical for the United States to be able to effectively deter China from engaging in military activity in the region along the lines of invading Taiwan. However, even if a nuclear exchange were “off the table,” it would be in U.S. interests to deter this kind of military attack from China, and it is this conventional scenario that has been, and should continue to be, at the forefront of U.S. military and diplomatic planning. For many years, rapidly developing Chinese military capability has been seen as the pacing threat for U.S. military planners, and this is likely to continue for many years to come.
There are many hurdles that any U.S. military planner faces is considering how to defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but the key one is the same as it has always been: the disparity of distances between China and Taiwan and the United States and Taiwan. While the United States always had critical forces in the region, China can bring much more to the battle earlier than the United States can. In the past, the relative strength and sophistication of U.S. forces in the region, even when outnumbered by Chinese forces, were seen to be able to ensure that Taiwan could resist for enough time until the entirety of U.S. military might could be brought to bear.
The problem of distance hasn’t changed, but Chinese forces have grown in sophistication and lethality, raising questions about how long U.S. forces in the region could be effective and how much Taiwan could weather before capitulating to Chinese forces and pressure. Further complicating the situation is that China believes that it knows how the U.S. military fights and plans to fight after years of examining real-world conflicts. China may believe that it doesn’t have to fully defeat U.S. forces, but that all it has to do is to keep U.S. forces out of the region or make it so painful for U.S. leaders that the United States will give up.
If U.S. military planners keep thinking about the U.S.-China conflict in the same ways that they have for decades, China may be right. Numerous leaders in the U.S. Department of Defense have publicly and privately noted that they must change the way that the U.S. military thinks about fighting in a war in the Indo-Pacific and needs different systems and operational concepts to prevail. These efforts are well in train but must be continued. Not only does the U.S. military need to purchase new systems, but it also needs to purchase them in new ways. No longer can the U.S. military rely on only small numbers of exquisite systems that can seemingly do everything, but it must be able to acquire mass. This is the concept behind the Department’s “Replicator Project,” which represents this shift in military thinking so that the U.S. military looks to procure systems focused on mass, speed, and adaptability. Further, the defense acquisition system must be able to quickly procure systems, take risks on new ideas, and discard systems that do not work.
The U.S. military must also be on the forefront of using artificial intelligence in how its systems operate, not only as explicitly articulated in Replicator. While ceding decision-making to computers on the battlefield evokes thoughts of The Terminator, there has been some measure of systems making lethal decisions on the battlefield for years, e.g., firefinder radar systems that allow for immediate return artillery fire. U.S. policymakers should be watchful of AI in military weapon systems, but they cannot be afraid to examine the benefits within appropriate bounds for AI-enabled systems; it is hard to believe that U.S. adversaries will choose to ignore the potential advantages of these systems and so neither should the United States.
There are roles for other nations in the region in deterring China, and U.S. policy will be weaker and ineffective if these are ignored. Even with the best U.S. weapon systems, the war between China and Taiwan will be lost to China if Taiwan fails to be willing to fight for its survival. Taiwan is unlikely to deter a Chinese invasion on its own, even as it must procure more of the systems that are focused on defeating an amphibious invasion from China. Taiwan can only prevail if the United States engages in the fight and if Taiwan can endure any initial phases of conflict while waiting for more U.S. forces. There is also a critical role for U.S. allies to play in deterring a war in the region. Whether or not any nation decides to join in the conflict, that possibility creates uncertainty for Chinese military planners and complicates their decision making. Further, allowing for additional locations for U.S. forces to operate from—especially given the distance problem discussed earlier—makes even tactical decisions for the Chinese military more complex and hence adds to deterrence. There is no doubt that allies and friends have a critical role to play in deterring Chinese aggression even if during a conflict some decide to not participate or help.
Deterring PRC Coercive Activities: Fundamentally, the United States must be able to deter at the higher end of conflict as discussed. If that deterrence is not maintained, any further discussion is immaterial. However, if deterrence of a Chinese military operation in the region can continue to be maintained, U.S. leaders must turn to Chinese coercive strategies that it does, and is likely to, take that are under the threshold for a U.S. military response. There are far too many of these scenarios to discuss in this paper, from the efforts of the Chinese maritime entities to enforce a quarantine to Chinese fighter jets crossing the centerline of the Taiwan Strait. And deterring these operations is far less dependent on the equipment of the U.S. miliary, and far more dependent on U.S. decisionmakers to effectively wield convincing U.S. policy and influence. The Chinese believe that U.S. policymakers tend to see the use of coercive military forces as a binary choice rather than one than can be dialed up and down as needed. Recent history shows that the Chinese are correct. U.S. leaders will have to be far nimbler to react to Chinese uses of force or threatened uses of military force than they have been in the past to be able to deter Chinese adventurism and to show that U.S. leaders are willing to resist Chinese aggression whenever and wherever it may take place.
Final Thoughts and Concerns
Since the end of World War II, the United States and its allies have been able to deter nuclear war and major conflict between superpowers, and it has likely deterred many significant, regional wars even as the decades have seen major conflicts. With the continued emergence of China as a regional and even global competitor, the challenges to continue to maintain this deterrence are growing and are fundamentally different from those the United States faced in Europe. There is no doubt that the United States on its own and working with its allies can continue to deter even a growing threat from China, but it cannot maintain deterrence if U.S. leaders and the U.S. military think that more of the same is what will deter China. In particular, the United States must:
- Modernize the aging U.S. nuclear enterprise;
- Be creative about how to procure new weapon systems and allow for new types of systems to come into services— “buy new things and buy thing in new ways”;
- Be creative about how we operate in the Indo-Pacific, and ensure that new operational concepts are allowed to come into play in planning for a conflict with China;
- Be willing to explore the opportunities that exist with allowing systems to make use of AI, recognizing that China’s military will almost assuredly look to AI to overcome some of its traditional weaknesses and inexperience when it comes to battlefield experience; and
- Adapt to new ways of countering Chinese challenges and aggressive behavior that fall below the level of traditional military conflict.
