"Reestablishing Deterrence" Is a Lousy Phrase

It's slang for "time to beat someone down" because we can

I do not care for the new Secretary of Defense. I do not like his smarmy personality, his utter lack of experience on addressing national security issues, and his complete lack of integrity. He should have had the common sense to say “no thank you” to Trump when offered this position and returned to his easy, high-paying weekend Fox show. I have absolutely zero respect for the Republican senators who approved his nomination and passed on their constitutional privilege to “advise and consent” on political appointees and instead rubber-stamped the president’s nominees. This appointment is hard to see as anything but a brazen “screw you” to the Beltway establishment, and it will only weaken U.S. national security in the near term.

Now that I have gotten that off my chest, let’s talk about his “message to the force” that is on the Department of Defense’s website. My focus is on his repeated phrase on “reestablishing deterrence.”

“We will reestablish deterrence by defending our homeland — on the ground and in the sky. We will work with allies and partners to deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific by Communist China, as well as supporting the President's priority to end wars responsibly and reorient to key threats. We will stand by our allies — and our enemies are on notice.”

This is pretty similar to his testimony given at his confirmation hearing.

“First and foremost, we will defend our homeland — our borders and our skies. Second, we will work with our partners and allies to deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific from the communist Chinese. Finally, we will responsibly end wars to ensure we can prioritize our resources — and reorient to larger threats. We can no longer count on "reputational deterrence" — we need real deterrence.”

I don’t know when the United States “lost” deterrence or to whom and in what context. Real men understand what is meant by “real deterrence.” But it isn’t this guy. I don’t think he went to any service PME institution to learn about the term.¹

This is, however, a good opportunity to talk about the terms “reputational deterrence” and “reestablishing deterrence.” I’ll admit, I was not familiar with “reputational deterrence”, so I took a look around the Internet. In this column by Yuji Maeda, the author suggests that the importance of reputation in interstate bargaining “is a variable that provides important context for analyzing the workings of deterrence and compellence.” Specifically, this goes to the question of the political resolve of the state or state leader, as to whether an adversary would be influenced by a nation’s reputation alone to use force in a crisis situation. He stresses that, while there have been studies on the issue, in the current (post-Cold War) era, “we also need to accommodate a broader and more nuanced understanding of reputation.” It depends on the context as well as the actors.

Michael Mazarr of RAND has a different perspective.

Reputations, either national or individual, can matter in specific cases. States and leaders sometimes act partly based on impressions of national resolve that border on stereotypes, and individual leaders do cultivate images in the international system. But recent scholarship has mostly debunked the idea that national reputation is a single unified good, like a bank account, whose overall value affects potential aggressors’ calculations and is a dominant variable in determining deterrence outcomes. Multiple studies have demonstrated that leaders make situational, rather than dispositional, judgments about resolve—they ask whether a possible defender would fulfill a commitment in a specific case or context, rather than inferring general rules from a defender’s overall track record. Reputational commitments are not interdependent: A state’s failing to respond in one case does not necessarily have any bearing on an adversary’s belief that a state will respond on other issues.

Maybe Hegseth is suggesting that the Biden administration based its foreign policy on the United States’ reputation when addressing foreign actions against U.S. security interests, and, because Putin and Xi aren’t impressed by the United States’ reputation and flagging military capability, our adversaries believe that they can get away with bad behavior (invading Ukraine and pushing maritime boundaries, respectively). This judgment seems at odds with reality when you think about the significant U.S. security efforts toward Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel, moves to get Japan and South Korea to work together to strengthen security ties, orders for U.S. naval strikes against the Houthis, continued military deployments in Syria and Iraq, but whatever.

Here’s where I think we have to draw some context between conventional deterrence and nuclear deterrence. There’s no question that the United States, under any presidential administration, has maintained the safety of its homeland from nuclear threats through general deterrence. But how would the United States or NATO have deterred Russia from invading Ukraine? The nation isn’t a NATO member, is on Russia’s border, and Putin has a significant personal stake in taking its land. Exactly what threats of violence were going to dissuade Putin from invading? He ignored diplomatic threats, he suffered through economic sanctions, and no NATO member was going to risk escalation by putting combat forces into Ukraine. Deterrence is not a failsafe nor a guarantee, especially in conventional scenarios where the adversary is willing to take a heavy cost to win the conflict in which it has significant interests.

The same goes to China. As China increases its military forces to gain an advantage in the South China Sea, the U.S. military seeks to “deter” Chinese aggression with new basing agreements with allies and bringing in long-range cruise missiles. Are we “losing” conventional deterrence if their military assets outnumber those of the United States and its allies? Well, it depends on the context. There’s only so much that the United States can do if China uses its maritime militia and fishing fleet to throw its weight around, assuming that there’s no desire to escalate into a hot crisis in China’s regional waters. There are things that the United States can do to harden Taiwan and prepare its forces, but China seems willing to wait for the right moment. What threats of force would the United States need to deter China from quarantining all sea-based and air-based traffic into Taiwan? One cannot just say “we need to deter China,” one needs to identify a specific policy objective and communicate the willingness to use force to change the minds of Chinese political leaders. Again, deterrence is not a failsafe nor a guarantee, no matter how often DoD leaders chant the phrase “what we want is to deter — nobody wants to have a war.”

Conventional deterrence is always a higher risk game than nuclear deterrence.² The idea that China or Russia would be intimidated by U.S. military forces using conventional weapons and avoiding escalation to nuclear conflict in a regional conflict where they have considerable security interests and we do not is not grounded in reality. Because China and Russia have significant conventional and nuclear forces, the odds are strongly in their favor that they will not be coerced by threats of military force when advancing their interests in their backyards.

We aren’t privy to the new SecDef’s strategic thinking as to why he thinks that the Biden administration was coasting on “reputational deterrence” and not “real” deterrent capabilities, whatever he thinks “real deterrence” is.³ The Biden administration has taken significant steps in building both partner-building capacity and trade relations in Asia that has countered Chinese ambitions. Because of robust U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Russia’s combat initiatives have slowed significantly. Have these steps compelled China and Russia to meekly back away from their regional ambitions? No, of course not. This is to be expected. This isn’t a sprint. It won’t solved in one administration’s term.

Let’s switch gears to “reestablishing deterrence.” What does that mean? Where did we lose deterrence? To what state of relations do we need to “reestablish deterrence”? What exactly is the goal? Cheryl Rolfer states it best in this 2020 article:

“Reestablish” (or sometimes “restore”) implies that a desirable state existed in the past. But that state collapsed, so something was wrong with it.

Presumably that state of “deterrence” is when attacks are not taking place. It implies that the primary reason those attacks are not taking place is Iran’s fear of possible American response. It also implies that the United States controls the interaction.

To truly understand the situation, it would be wise to describe the current state and the desired state specifically. That is the only way to map out a path forward.

The abstract word “deterrence” has come to have exclusively military connotations. But the reasons that nations do not go to war are many, including prioritizing economic incentives and the health of their community. The threat to “reestablish deterrence” usually means, “bomb them.”

“Reestablish deterrence” sounds firm and yes, manly. But it is backward-looking and limits the possibilities for solving the problem it is aimed at. It cannot map out a path to peace.

“Deterrence” has become a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s painted as defensive, but responding to violence with violence is escalation, not deterrence.

Exactly right. I’ll admit right here that other people, military and civilian, have used the term “reestablishing deterrence” — usually right before a bombing campaign or other use of military force meant to compel the adversary to adhering to the United States’ direction. Either political leaders are naive about the use of force to solve a military crisis or they just want to show the public that they did something. This is not limited to the United States. Israel's leaders were more than put off by the Houthi rebels launching missiles against them. If Israel bombs Houthi forces to “deter escalating attacks” and the Houthis persist in sending more missiles and drones, then has Israel failed to “reestablish deterrence” in this context? What’s next?

The term “restoring deterrence” is another favorite term, maybe even more so than “reestablishing deterrence,” because it envisions an end state of going back to the relations that existed immediately before the crisis.⁴ It can also be a term used to justify the growth of military spending and capabilities to preventively threaten an adversary who is also growing military forces in a certain part of the world. If you don’t like what Iran is doing in the Middle East or what China is doing in Asia, “restore deterrence” by demonstrating that the United States can overmatch their military forces and “inflict terrible pain.” But again, what if the stakes of a particular context — whether it’s Russia taking Ukraine or China taking Taiwan — are so significant that Russia and China are willing to take the hit from U.S. forces? More to the point, what happens when both Russia and China threaten the use of tactical nuclear weapons if their strategic ends are threatened? How do you “restore deterrence” at that point? Certain U.S. nuclear advocates want to see a sea-based nuclear-armed cruise missile deployed into Asia to ensure that our allies are “encouraged” by a U.S. commitment to use TLAM-N against China. Presto, instant deterrence! Right up to the point where China’s DF-31 missiles start warming up and launch towards U.S. military bases in the Pacific such as Guam.

Madelyn Creedon and Rose Gottemoeller have defended the America’s Strategic Posture report in its desires to dramatically increase the number of U.S. conventional forces as a way to deter regional wars that might escalate to a nuclear conflict. I don’t buy this argument, I think the report was much more focused on justifying a nuclear superiority over Russia and China, but let’s stay with their idea. Is deterrence solely based on an adversary’s ability to recognize a significant amount of U.S. military weapon systems in a geographic region? Of course not. It’s equally about the credibility of the use of threat as well as the messenger. And this SecDef has zero experience by which to base credibility.

When China’s and Russia’s political and military leaders look over to the United States and see a retired Army major whose greatest achievement was to land a weekend talk show on Fox threatening to “reestablish deterrence” against them, are they going to view him as credible? When China and Russia start buying $TRUMP cryptocurrency and book reservations at Trump hotels, is the president going to refuse their influence peddling and force those countries pull back their military forces? Has President Trump made good on his promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war? Does the president have a clear stance on Pacific security issues? Maybe not.

An administration that is unenthusiastic about involving the United States in foreign wars does not have a good foundation to deter adversarial nations from using military force along their borders. I hope that this administration thinks long and hard about the rhetoric that it uses and, before beefing up the military toward that $1 trillion defense budget target, how exactly they think they’re going to deter those adversaries from degrading specific U.S. national security interests.

1. I say this with some irony that, having taught in a service PME institution for 12 years, there are a lot of service members who still don’t understand the concept of deterrence and compellence.

2. This is to say, when it comes to nuclear deterrence, the cost of gambling with the use of nuclear weapons is very clear on the potential destruction of an attack. Few nations are willing to go to war over the singular use of conventional weapons, and depending on the context of its use, they’re much more prone to using conventional military strikes to gain political points. That’s why North Korea will on occasion shell a South Korean island or Chinese ships will attack a Philippine ship and yet war does not break out.

3. We can go to Project 2025 and look at the chapter on DoD reforms. At the least, it has an academic discussion on deterrence — in a hard right discussion, but it’s defendable at least. Lots of mentions on how the U.S. military will “deter” China and Russia, starting with increases in the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The authors of that chapter see many other steps as necessary to ensure that the DoD can “deter war and ensure our national security.” Maybe Mr. Hegseth didn’t read this chapter.

4. This is an odd hope, perhaps, because if deterrence failed, then the previous state of relations must have been unfavorable to begin with. But people will make these statements nonetheless.