Deterrence is faltering. To strengthen it, the U.S. defense community must reinvigorate how it approaches risk—specifically, manipulating adversaries’ risk. Over the past 30 years, U.S. discussions of risk have become myopic; risk became a euphemism for impediments to operational performance while concepts for manipulating adversary risks became ill-defined, conveyed by assumption and implication. To succeed in great power competition, the United States must think, discuss, and act on risk holistically—not just as an operational or safety factor, but as an element of the environment that it deliberately manipulates for rivals
and adversaries.
Risk, Escalation, and Deterrence
Cold War strategists certainly considered operational risks to U.S. forces, but they also understood how risk could be made to act on adversaries as well. Theorist Thomas Schelling recognized that “uncertainty—the sheer unpredictability of dangerous events—not only blurs things, it changes their character. It adds an entire dimension to military relations: the manipulation of risk.”1
Risk manipulation and escalation are close relatives thanks to the iterative nature of conflict. Schelling argued, “If ‘brinkmanship’ means anything, it means manipulating the shared risk of war.”2 Escalation ensues when each side exploits uncertainty by pushing a confrontation closer to the brink, raising the ante for both parties. Thus, risk manipulation, escalation, and deterrence operate in an interdependent state before and during a conflict.
Deterrence theory provokes additional considerations: perception, credibility, and will; inadvertent escalation or misinterpreted signals; and critiques that underscore flaws, such as assuming rational actors. Furthermore, risk manipulation is not purely escalatory; risk strategies must consider how to shift adversary risks laterally, reduce them, or constrain them in ways that are mutually tolerable, if not desirable (e.g., arms control treaties).
Nonetheless, deterrence boils down to risk. As Univeristy of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer succinctly wrote, “Deterrence—a function of the costs and risks associated with military action—is most likely to obtain when an attacker believes that his probability of success is low and that the attendant costs will be high.”3
Using Decision Trees to Visualize Deterrence
Decision trees offer a useful illustration of risk manipulation in deterrence.4 Consider an adversary’s basic choice between action or inaction, shown in Figure 1. Here, inaction means maintaining the status quo, whereas the result of action—i.e., success or failure—is unknown. The figure accommodates this uncertainty using estimated probabilities of success and failure. At the end of the tree are payoffs associated with each outcome. Because uncertainty clouds the payoff for acting, the decision maker must make an educated guess: the estimated value of action using a probability-weighted average of the payoffs for success or failure.
Of note, it is important to avoid mirror imaging when modeling adversary decision trees. Adjusting the probability and payoff variables is a powerful method for accommodating differing beliefs, preferences, and motivations but must be rooted in sound intelligence analysis.
This simplified model deliberately refrains from introducing uncertainty to the “inaction” branch. Although uncertainty should be accounted for in many scenarios in which one chooses inaction, holding it constant here at zero payoff—i.e., the status quo, nothing gained or lost by the decision maker—allows us to focus on deterrence fundamentals using a more straightforward scenario.
In deterrence, risk manipulation is concerned with influencing an adversary’s decision tree so that action becomes unattractive. Deterrence by denial operates by increasing the probability of failure, while deterrence by punishment (i.e., reprisals) reduces the payoff of success and increases the cost of failure, all of which can be influenced by manipulating the adversary’s risk perceptions. Conversely, neglecting the ways adversaries assess risk allows them the opportunity to favorably reshape their decision trees. Unfortunately, the U.S. defense community lost sight of this after the Cold War and turned inward, focusing on its own decision trees.
Losing the Way in the Unipolar Moment
The end of the Cold War was misunderstood as an end to strategic competition. Democracy and capitalism, some thought, had vanquished the scourge of Soviet communism. Meanwhile, if communist China could be incorporated into the global economy, Beijing would surely renounce its Maoist ways in favor of capitalism and liberal democracy.
Many believed the United States could therefore downsize its military, concentrate on promoting democracy, and respond as needed to threats from failed, failing, or rogue states. Absent the galvanizing focus of a primary adversary, the military found itself directed against a range of disparate challenges.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) inflation-adjusted budget declined from $617 billion in fiscal year (FY) 1985 to a post–Cold War low of $399 billion in FY 1997.5 In the 1980s, there were 22 authorizations for U.S. military deployments across 15 countries; in the 1990s, there were 67 authorizations across 24 countries.6 With fewer resources and more demands stretching from Haiti to the Middle East, business practices that emphasized metrics, efficiency, and optimization offered solutions for the challenge of doing more with less. Implicit in this approach was the need to mitigate any operational risks that threatened optimal performance.
Technological advancements simultaneously offered a shortcut around the work of manipulating adversary risk: a promise to make deterrence easy using capability dominance with programs such as ballistic-missile defense or exquisite surveillance and precision strikes. The United States tailored these capabilities for interdiction, denial, and superiority in the face of irregular threats, rogue states, and limited aggression. However, with exquisite systems came exquisite costs, leading to fewer platforms. Emeritus Professor of War Studies Sir Lawrence Freedman notes that, combined with casualty aversion, technology advancements put a high premium “on the protection of one’s own force rather than the actual mission objective . . . as if they must be kept out of harm’s way.”7
Over decades, these trends encouraged mind-sets, procedures, and linguistic habits focused on operational risk management while underappreciating risk manipulation. For example, Michael Mazarr, a senior political scientist at RAND, writes that deterrence policies should “focus on actions that [a country] takes to raise the costs and risks of an attack.”8 Technology-driven capabilities were prominent in the 13 national security, national defense, and national military strategies spanning 1995 to 2018. But consider the use of the word “risk,” which was mentioned 148 times—147 of them were about hazards to the United States.
Although one could argue that deter, deny, or defeat represent U.S. efforts to manipulate adversary risk, these words more properly describe an end state. Strategists must articulate the ways and means of risk manipulation much more plainly en route to “deter, deny, or defeat.”
The Return of Great Power Competition
None of this is to say that managing operational risk and pursuing advanced capabilities are unimportant. They are necessary but not sufficient. As Richard Rumelt, professor emeritus at UCLA Anderson School of Management, points out, prior “routines and methods act to preserve old ways of categorizing and processing information.”9 When it comes to great power competition, the old ways of categorizing and processing risk are also insufficient.
Returning to decision trees in Beijing and Moscow, leaders there have calculated that the payoffs and probabilities of success for their revisionist aggression outweigh their incentives for inaction. From China’s island building to Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the United States is confronting rivals who operate at the global strategic level and whose “methods skirt and sometimes violate perceived U.S. redlines by skillfully avoiding overt provocation and manipulating risk perceptions.”10
Deterring direct aggression against U.S. interests is a narrow measure of success compared to Chinese and Russian gains through gray zone activities, theft of intellectual property, criminal proxies, or incrementalist tactics. When deterrence by denial fails and deterrence by punishment fails to materialize, adversaries will revise their future decision trees. What some describe as increased Chinese and Russian assertiveness in fact reflects a twofold deterrence problem: Adversaries are successfully manipulating risk for the United States while the United States is not doing enough to manipulate theirs.
Discussing the 2020 SolarWinds hack and the history of Russian cyber intrusions, New York Times correspondent David Sanger observed:
There’s always been a great hesitance in the United States that if you push things too far, if you come back with a disproportionate response, you’re suddenly escalating into what could be a much larger conflict; and everyone’s always been cautious about that. Now, that is an understandable prudence, especially when you’re dealing with nuclear powers like Russia or China. But it also creates a gray space. . . . The problem is we had a failure of deterrence.11
Deterrence shortfalls are not limited to cyberspace. Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltics, Syria, and others have all witnessed Russia choosing aggression despite U.S. deterrence efforts. As the National Defense Strategy Commission reported, “The Putin regime has demonstrated a propensity for risk-taking backed up by enhanced military power.”12 Similarly, Indo-Pacific nations from Australia to Vietnam have felt the repercussions of China’s unyielding pursuit of regional dominance. On top of belligerency in the South China Sea and atrocities against the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, Beijing’s repression of democracy in Hong Kong suggests it may be testing tactics destined for Taiwan; meanwhile, experts characterized the list of grievances China levied against Australia as “designed for a foreign audience . . . a what-not-to-do list for governments around the Indo-Pacific region.”13
Leading by Example
Deterrence is operationalized by manipulating adversaries’ risks and influencing their decision trees. The United States needs a holistic approach to risk manipulation but, by definition, cannot limit that to one department, domain, or region. However, the Sea Services can lead the strategic community in revitalizing U.S. approaches to risk manipulation beyond technological overmatch.
Press the Engagement
Former U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Scott Swift once remarked that risk and the tempo of action are counterparts: Commanders accept increased risks to speed the tempo of operations and slow their tempo to control risk. A similar dynamic can be imposed on the adversary. Where they want to go slow, we must force them to go fast; and where they want to go fast, we must force them to go slow. This requires that the Sea Services aggressively locate and close with rivals. The global demand for the Sea Services is challenging, but as rivals deploy farther afield, it also offers opportunities to press the engagement with adversaries who find themselves far from home and with less operational experience or support than U.S. deployers.
Bring Friends
The Sea Services do not fight alone—they are part of a joint force and a deep network of allies and partners. Deliberate efforts to locate and close with adversary units should be multidimensional: A combined-arms approach to risk manipulation that sees close-air support to two-on-one surface challenges, missile defense demonstrations combined with amphibious raids, or cyber activity paired with airborne intercepts.
During the Cold War, the United States deliberately stationed troops in West Germany and Berlin to raise the risks of aggression for the Soviets. Similarly, the United States can manipulate adversaries by embarking U.S. personnel on willing partner nation platforms, especially when we are not bound by formal mutual-defense agreements. For example, embarking U.S. Coast Guardsmen on Finnish vessels or U.S. Marines with Vietnamese warships raises the risk for adversaries who may otherwise choose coercion, intimidation, or outright aggression.
A New Risk Culture
The Sea Services’ consistent forward presence provides personnel with more opportunities to compete. Army battalion commanders are unlikely to encounter their Chinese counterparts, whereas destroyer commanding officers may interact with multiple Chinese vessels during one deployment. This is even true at junior grades, where the Sea Services offer unique opportunities to deploy and command within engagement range of potential adversaries. This translates into career-long paths for mentoring and honing risk manipulation skills. Tactical decision games—familiar to Marines—should also be adopted throughout the Sea Services to develop rising leaders’ sense of risk manipulation.14
For operations and exercises alike, some specific questions should be asked of commanders and participants: How did your actions manipulate adversary risks? How did the adversary manipulate yours? To red teamers: What risks did you most fear that blue would exploit? What risks did blue fail to exploit that it should have? Commanders should also ask their intelligence professionals for insight on what the adversary considers its greatest risks and the most dangerous U.S. courses of action.
Conventional-Nuclear Integration
The Sea Services can be uniquely valuable with Conventional-Nuclear Integration (CNI) efforts. By reintroducing nuclear capabilities to the surface fleet and naval aviation, the United States gains multiple advantages for leverage in distant theaters. Naval forces capable of carrying nuclear weapons offer the mobility, visibility, and dispatchability of strategic aircraft but with increased stay time and fewer needs for shore support. Similarly, the potential presence of nuclear weapons introduces a measure of escalation uncertainty for any adversary considering a strike against that platform. Finally, refining how the fleet considers and prepares for combat operations in a post-nuclear blast environment increases an adversary’s risks that crossing the nuclear threshold will fail to achieve adequate effects in addition to being met with retaliation.
Reengaging with Risk
Deterring China and Russia from pursuing their revisionist ambitions requires U.S. strategists to reengage with the topic of risk. To borrow from Rumelt’s “kernel” of good strategy—a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action—the guiding policy should be to explicitly connect strategic initiatives with the adversary risks they seek to manipulate.15 Doing so now increases the United States’ ability to protect national interests before the brink of conflict, when situations are less stable and the options for risk manipulation more volatile.
1. Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 94.
2. Schelling, Arms and Influence, 99. Emphasis in original.
3. John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 23.
4. Edith Stokey and Richard Zeckhauser, A Primer for Policy Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), 201–54.
5. Seamus Daniels and Mariel de la Garza, “U.S. Federal Budget Interactive,” CSIS: Defense360, 22 September 2020.
6. Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2020 (Washington, D.C: Congressional Research Service, 20 July 2020).
7. Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History, 1st ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), 189.
8. Michael J. Mazarr, “Understanding Deterrence,” RAND Corporation, 29 April 2018.
9. Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (London: Profile Books, 2017), 204.
10. Nathan Freier, ed., Outplayed: Regaining Strategic Initiative in the Grey Zone (USAWC Strategic Studies Institute, June 2016), 76. Emphasis added.
11. Michael Barbaro and David E. Sanger, “Hacked, Again,” The Daily, podcast transcription, 16 December 2020.
12. Eric Edelman and Gary Roughead, “Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessments and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission,” United States Institute of Peace, 13 November 2018, 8.
13. Bonnie Glaser and Jeffery Wilson, “China’s Coercive Trade Measures toward Australia,” China Power Project, podcast transcription, 22 December 2020.
14. Doug Meyer, “Tactical Decision Games (TDGs),” The Company Leader, 31 August 2018.
15. Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, 77.