Conventional Deterrence Into The 1990s

A selection of ten lectures on the future of conventional deterrence is drawn together by a new essay on the subject. The study suggests how NATO policy, strategy and tactics must evolve to cope with new circumstances and limited budgets, and the role Britain should play in this.

Conventional Deterrence is a book about the origins of war. Why do nations faced with the prospect of large-scale conventional war opt for or against an offensive strategy? John J. Mearsheimer examines a number of crises that led to major conventional wars to explain why deterrence failed. He focuses first on Allied and German decision making in the years 1939–1940, analyzing why the Allies did not strike first against Germany after declaring war and, conversely, why the Germans did attack the West. Turning to the Middle East, he examines the differences in Israeli and Egyptian strategic doctrines prior to the start of the major conventional conflicts in that region. Mearsheimer then critically assays the relative strengths and weaknesses of NATO and the Warsaw Pact to determine the prospects for conventional deterrence in any future crisis. He is also concerned with examining such relatively technical issues as the impact of precision-guided munitions (PGM) on conventional deterrence and the debate over maneuver versus attrition warfare.Mearsheimer pays considerable attention to questions of military strategy and tactics. Challenging the claim that conventional detrrence is largely a function of the numerical balance of forces, he also takes issue with the school of thought that ascribes deterrence failures to the dominance of "offensive" weaponry. In addition to examining the military consideration underlying deterrence, he also analyzes the interaction between those military factors and the broader political considerations that move a nation to war.

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has emerged as a major topic of international security in the post-Cold War world. This compendium of articles, published in The Washington Quarterly between 1991 and 1995, describes the changing nature of the problem, dissusses new trends in nonproliferation and counterproliferation policy, identifies new arms control challenges at the regional and global levels, and concludes by addressing the global politics of proliferation.

Deterrence as a strategic concept evolved during the Cold War. During that period, deterrence strategy was aimed mainly at preventing aggression against the United States and its close allies by the hostile Communist power centersâ€"the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its allies, Communist China and North Korea. In particular, the strategy was devised to prevent aggression involving nuclear attack by the USSR or China. Since the end of the Cold War, the risk of war among the major powers has subsided to the lowest point in modern history. Still, the changing nature of the threats to American and allied security interests has stimulated a considerable broadening of the deterrence concept. Post-Cold War Conflict Deterrence examines the meaning of deterrence in this new environment and identifies key elements of a post-Cold War deterrence strategy and the critical issues in devising such a strategy. It further examines the significance of these findings for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Quantitative and qualitative measures to support judgments about the potential success or failure of deterrence are identified. Such measures will bear on the suitability of the naval forces to meet the deterrence objectives. The capabilities of U.S. naval forces that especially bear on the deterrence objectives also are examined. Finally, the book examines the utility of models, games, and simulations as decision aids in improving the naval forces' understanding of situations in which deterrence must be used and in improving the potential success of deterrence actions.

This open access volume surveys the state of the field to examine whether a fifth wave of deterrence theory is emerging. Bringing together insights from world-leading experts from three continents, the volume identifies the most pressing strategic challenges, frames theoretical concepts, and describes new strategies. The use and utility of deterrence in today’s strategic environment is a topic of paramount concern to scholars, strategists and policymakers. Ours is a period of considerable strategic turbulence, which in recent years has featured a renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons used in defence postures across different theatres; a dramatic growth in the scale of military cyber capabilities and the frequency with which these are used; and rapid technological progress including the proliferation of long-range strike and unmanned systems. These military-strategic developments occur in a polarized international system, where cooperation between leading powers on arms control regimes is breaking down, states widely make use of hybrid conflict strategies, and the number of internationalized intrastate proxy conflicts has quintupled over the past two decades. Contemporary conflict actors exploit a wider gamut of coercive instruments, which they apply across a wider range of domains. The prevalence of multi-domain coercion across but also beyond traditional dimensions of armed conflict raises an important question: what does effective deterrence look like in the 21st century? Answering that question requires a re-appraisal of key theoretical concepts and dominant strategies of Western and non-Western actors in order to assess how they hold up in today’s world. Air Commodore Professor Dr. Frans Osinga is the Chair of the War Studies Department of the Netherlands Defence Academy and the Special Chair in War Studies at the University Leiden. Dr. Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy in Breda.