My
SSQ
article on conventional deterrence last
winter focused primarily on deterring relatively low likelihood but severe
consequence ‘high-end’ contingencies involving Chinese aggression in East Asia.
One apt
commenter noted that I did not say much regarding deterrence of an opponent’s
low-level ‘salami tactics’ that do not cross the threshold into a traditional
conventional military offensive. Unlike the theoretical scenarios covered in my
article, China is presently and actively using People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
forces, coast guard forces, and ‘civilian’ activists such as its
state-sponsored
(and likely coordinated) fishing fleet to probe its neighbors’ maritime
defenses, perform coercive psychological operations, and occasionally seize individual
remote shoals. Even so, the extant body of conventional deterrence theory
contains little that addresses this segment of the conflict spectrum.
As I mentioned
in my article and in
another
piece here this fall, it would seem that forward-positioned constabulary
forces such as coast guards, gendarmeries, or national law enforcement agencies
with paramilitary capabilities are central to low-end conventional deterrence.
Given China’s use of its sizable fishing fleet as a paramilitary offset against
its neighbors’ uniformed maritime constabularies, it might also be reasonable
if not necessary for those neighbors to cultivate similar state-controlled
paramilitaries within their own respective fishing fleets. Doing so would
expand East Asian maritime states’ options for symmetrical responses to Chinese
probes, as well as introduce risk variables that they could manipulate to deter
further Chinese escalations. Indeed, a defender will seldom want to be the
party that sets the intra-crisis precedent of having one of its military assets
engage an opponent's constabulary asset or 'civilian' actors. It certainly
seems that one objective of China’s salami tactics is to maneuver East Asian
states into choices between setting these kinds of provocative and
diplomatically-exploitable precedents or otherwise conceding on their claims.
This kind of gambit would be even more applicable should Chinese leaders
manufacture a maritime crisis in order to induce a neighboring state’s
military into committing an act Beijing could
cite as a
casus belli.
It must also be
appreciated that constabulary and paramilitary forces are more readily
configurable and trainable for handling these kinds of ‘grey’ scenarios. Take
this year’s Russo-Ukrainian crisis, for example. Just as traditional police are
under-armed and under-trained for retaking civil infrastructure sites and the
like that have been seized by an adversary’s intelligence operatives, special
forces, ‘political tourists,’ or sponsored ‘indigenous’ militias, militaries
that are necessarily structured and trained for conventional inter-state
warfare are ill-suited for ‘high-end’ domestic law enforcement duties. What’s
more, professional military units’ esprit de corps may serve as a moral barrier
that dissuades them from employing force against people who appear to be
civilians, if not fellow citizens. One could make a strong argument that if the
Ukrainian government had been able and willing to quickly deploy reliable,
well-disciplined, and well-armed constabulary forces against the initial
seizures of Crimean and eastern Ukrainian civil infrastructure by Russian
operatives and proxies, Kiev might have been able to either prevent those
Russian
faits accompli or delay if
not deter their follow-on moves elsewhere in eastern Ukraine. The effective
deployment of such forces would certainly have presented the Russian regime
with additional costs, risks, and uncertainties;
at
least one of NATO’s Baltic members has evidently taken note of this for its own
contingency plans. Still, Ukraine’s lack of credible military forces (or
membership in a credible defensive military alliance) meant that effective
Ukrainian constabulary force employment against the ‘separatists’ early-on
might have prompted a limited but decisive Russian military invasion—which is
essentially what happened this past summer in response to the Ukrainian
military’s and Kiev-sponsored paramilitaries’ broader rollback operations in
the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. This is why the low-end conventional
deterrence provided by constabulary forces or state-controlled paramilitaries
must be latently supported by military forces positioned ‘over-the-horizon’
that possess the requisite qualities and asset quantities to bog down if not arrest
an adversary’s offensive. This tandem approach is the best way to create doubts
in an opponent’s leaders' minds about the wisdom of pushing salami tactics too
far in a given confrontation.
An even more
dangerous problem nevertheless emerges if circumstances reach the point that a
revisionist power runs out of cheap and relatively low-risk salami tactics that
can help it make progress towards achieving its political objectives. For
instance, if the revisionist has seized
de
facto control over all the waters or isolated territories that it contests
with an opponent, and if the revisionist still seeks to manipulate the opponent
into bending to his political will or otherwise score gains at the opponent’s
expense, then what low-stakes pressure points remain for military coercion? Alternatively,
the revisionist may assign high value to certain political objectives that
salami tactics simply cannot address. Contemporary Western crisis management
theory embraces the idea of providing an opponent ‘offramps’ to deescalate a
confrontation, usually through a combination of some demonstration of resolve
and the potential for further escalation combined with some diplomatic concession
(whether symbolic or substantive) that is designed to allow the opponent’s
leaders to ‘save face.’ This is all fine and good if the opponent can be
convinced that he overstepped and that a way-out is desirable. We must
appreciate, though, the opponent will only accept such an offer if one of his
most highly-valued political objectives is avoiding the uncertainties
associated with further escalation—if not the certainty of a war should the
defender’s deterrence policy be structured as such—more than the political
objective(s) that drove his aggressive moves in the first place. Not all
opponents at all times will take an offramp deal; sometimes the other side’s
leaders come to value some political objective(s) far more than they do
restoring the peace.
As
such, offramps may not work (or even be offerable) depending upon how the two
sides characterize and value their respective political objectives. Though
their calculus may seem ‘unthinkably’ irrational from our perspective, if the
aggressor’s leaders want something badly enough they will do whatever they
think they need to do and pay whatever costs they think they must pay to obtain
it.
--Update 11/24/14 9:17PM--
I highly recommend Robert Haddick's serendipitous article at the National Interest from earlier today on this very topic. I think he and I broadly agree on the importance of constabulary forces and the potential uses of state-sponsored fishing fleets. He makes several additional suggestions regarding maritime information-sharing and surveillance cooperation amongst America's East Asian allies and partners. I believe his most important idea is for these countries and the U.S. to begin developing mechanisms that could support cooperative management of crises.
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