Deterrence And The New Global Security Environment

This collection of papers rigorously examines the current place of deterrence in international security relations, delivering the best of contemporary thinking. This is a special issue of the leading journal Contemporary Security Policy. It shows how and why nuclear deterrence was the central organizing mechanism for international security relations in the second half of the twentieth century. It has been replaced by a new global security environment in which the central role of deterrence, both nuclear and otherwise, appears to have diminished. The Cold War has been succeeded by a new state of play. This book will be of interest to students of military and naval history and security studies.

From the earliest human records, warfare has been both an organizing focus and a prime source of political motivation. Countless battles have been fought in the course of colonizing the planet, and the experience has created a legacy of military confrontation that many people consider immutable. Since preparations for war and the occasional conduct of it have been central preoccupations for virtually all the major states throughout time, it is widely assumed that the pattern is rooted in human nature and will endure indefinitely. But contemporary civilization is undergoing a monumental transformation affecting its most basic features. The combined effects of information technology, population dynamics, and the globalization of economic activity are altering some of the critical operating conditions of human societies and appear to be inducing a new pattern of interaction. Correspondingly, fundamental changes in the practice of war-or what is now more politely called international security-can be expected to follow. Principles of Global Security anticipates the major implications of this massive transformation for security policy. John D. Steinbruner, one of the nation's leading specialists on defense issues, identifies formative problems and organizing principles relating to the predictable issues of security. He examines in sequence how the configuration of nuclear and conventional forces might be affected, how the problems of communal violence and dangers of technical proliferation might be managed, and how security relationships among the major states might be altered. One of the fundamental implications of globalization in a post-cold war environment is a shift in security policy from deterrence to reassurance, from active confrontation to cooperative engagement. Without an opponent to justify preparation for large-scale traditional missions, nations must establish safer and less volatile patterns of deployment. Maintaining global security in the twenty-

The scope of Security and International Affairs research has expanded tremendously since the end of the Cold War to include topics beyond the realm of war studies or military statecraft. The field—once devoted solely to the study of conventional military and nuclear security issues—has diversified to include foci often considered nontraditional, including peace and conflict, political, economic, environmental, and human security. In this exciting new volume, McGann has undertaken a quantitative and qualitative study of SIA think tanks, looking at global and regional trends in their research. He argues that the end of the Cold War marked a fundamental shift within the field of defense and security studies among think tanks and academics. Tracking the evolution of security as understood by researchers and policymakers is vital as the world follows the path of the Four Mores: more issues, more actors, more competition, and more conflict. As we move forward into a world of rapid change and ubiquitous uncertainty, think tanks will only become more prominent and influential. The volume concludes with an assessment of the future of Security and International Affairs studies and raises the possibility of a return to a traditional security focus driven by recent events in Europe and the Middle East. This will be an important resource for students and scholars of security studies, global governance, and think tanks.

The scope of Security and International Affairs research has expanded tremendously since the end of the Cold War to include topics beyond the realm of war studies or military statecraft. The field--once devoted solely to the study of conventional military and nuclear security issues--has diversified to include foci often considered nontraditional, including peace and conflict, political, economic, environmental, and human security. In this exciting new volume, McGann has undertaken a quantitative and qualitative study of SIA think tanks, looking at global and regional trends in their research. He argues that the end of the Cold War marked a fundamental shift within the field of defense and security studies among think tanks and academics. Tracking the evolution of security as understood by researchers and policymakers is vital as the world follows the path of the Four Mores: more issues, more actors, more competition, and more conflict. As we move forward into a world of rapid change and ubiquitous uncertainty, think tanks will only become more prominent and influential. The volume concludes with an assessment of the future of Security and International Affairs studies and raises the possibility of a return to a traditional security focus driven by recent events in Europe and the Middle East. This will be an important resource for students and scholars of security studies, global governance, and think tanks.

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.

World events have led some observers, starting in late 2013, to conclude that the international security environment has undergone a shift from the familiar post-Cold War era of the past 20 to 25 years, also sometimes known as the unipolar moment (with the United States as the unipolar power), to a new and different situation that features, among other things, renewed great power competition with China and Russia and challenges by these two countries and others to elements of the U.S.-led international order that has operated since World War II. A previous change in the international security environment-the shift in the late 1980s and early 1990s from the Cold War to the post-Cold War era-prompted a broad reassessment by the Department of Defense (DOD) and Congress of defense funding levels, strategy, and missions that led to numerous changes in DOD plans and programs. Many of these changes were articulated in the 1993 Bottom-Up Review (BUR), a reassessment of U.S. defense plans and programs whose very name conveyed the fundamental nature of the reexamination that had occurred. The recent shift in the international security environment that some observers have identified-from the post-Cold War era to a new situation-has become a factor in the debate over the size of the U.S. defense budget in coming years, and over whether the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 2011 as amended should be further amended or repealed. Additional emerging implications of the shift include a new or renewed emphasis on the following in discussions of U.S. defense strategy, plans, and programs: grand strategy and geopolitics as part of the context for discussing U.S. defense budgets, plans, and programs; U.S. and NATO military capabilities in Europe; capabilities for countering so-called hybrid warfare and gray-zone tactics employed by countries such as Russia and China; capabilities for conducting so-called high-end warfare (i.e., large-scale, high-intensity, technologically sophisticated warfare) against countries such as China and Russia; maintaining U.S. technological superiority in conventional weapons; nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence; speed of weapon system development and deployment as a measure of merit in defense acquisition policy; and minimizing reliance in U.S. military systems on components and materials from Russia and China. The issue for Congress is whether to conduct a broad reassessment of U.S. defense analogous to the 1993 BUR, and more generally, how U.S. defense funding levels, strategy, plans, and programs should respond to changes in the international security environment. Congress's decisions on these issues could have significant implications for U.S. defense capabilities and funding requirements.

Kay integrates traditional and emerging challenges in one study that gives readers the tools they need to develop a thoughtful and nuanced understanding of global security."--BOOK JACKET.