December 12, 2018
The Eroding Balance of Terror
Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars,” the American nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie wrote in 1946. “From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.” Brodie’s injunction summed up the grim lesson of the first five decades of the twentieth century: after two horrific world wars and the development of nuclear weapons, it was clear that the next major conflict would produce no winners—only survivors. As U.S. President John F. Kennedy put it a decade and a half later, in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis, “Even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.” For decades, U.S. policymakers followed Brodie’s and Kennedy’s lead, putting deterrence—preventing rivals from attacking in the first place—at the center of U.S. defense strategy.
Applied effectively, deterrence discourages an adversary from pursuing an undesirable action. It works by changing the adversary’s calculation of costs, benefits, and risks. A country can, for instance, convince its opponents that an attack is so unlikely to succeed that it is not even worth the attempt: deterrence through denial. Or a country may convince its opponents that defeating it would be so costly as to be a victory in name only: deterrence through punishment. In either case, a rational adversary will decide to stay put.
Through the threat of denial or punishment, deterrence has helped keep the peace among major powers for over seven decades. Even 30 years after the end of the Cold War, it remains at the heart of U.S. defense strategy. The 2018 National Defense Strategy, for instance, begins by declaring that “the Department of Defense’s enduring mission is to provide combat-credible military forces needed to deter war and protect the security of our nation.”
Read the full article in Foreign Affairs.
More from CNAS
-
Breaking Defense CCA: What Weapons and Engines Will Let Loyal Wingmen Drones Hit Their Potential?
Stacie Pettyjohn joins Breaking Defense to discuss the possible need for the US to develop new weapons, engines and communication links for Collaborative Combat Aircraft to re...
By Stacie Pettyjohn
-
Breaking Defense CCA Series: China, Russia and Others Want Their Own Loyal Wingman Drones
Stacie Pettyjohn joins Breaking Defense to discuss the US Air Force pursuing Collaborative Combat Aircraft drones, and how Russia and China have begun their own programs. Wa...
By Stacie Pettyjohn
-
Aiming higher: Accelerating US-Australia cooperation on precision-guided weapons
Both the United States and Australia have made deterring coercion in the Indo-Pacific the focus of their defence strategies and plan to do so by denying an aggressor the abili...
By Stacie Pettyjohn
-
Integration for Innovation
Executive Summary In August 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks made a clear case that the Department of Defense (DoD) must do better in “creat[ing] and exploit[i...
By Michael Brown, Ellen Lord, Andrew Metrick & Robert O. Work