Coalition Management and Escalation Control in a Multinuclear World

By Jacquelyn Davis, Robert Pfaltzgraff and James Stavridis

Coalition Management and Escalation Control in a Multinuclear World examines the impact of new technologies on twenty-first-century crisis management and armed conflict, as well as the unprecedented number and types of actors involved in current and potential flash-points. The book's basic thesis is that new technologies are changing how wars are fought and providing a broadening range of escalation options. Cyber weapons and artificial intelligence, as well as social media, blur traditional escalation thresholds with important consequences for deterrence. Nuclear weapons possessors, especially nations and powers new to their use, may have differing strategies concerning how, when, why, or where such weapons should be used either for purposes of deterrence or as actual warfighting instruments. Today's global map differs drastically from all previous eras, not only in the types and numbers of actors but also in the level of lethality, as well as the range and accuracy of weapons available with which to threaten or actually conduct battle. A world of Great Power competition, together with non-state armed groups contains risks for miscalculation including the possibility of catalytic warfare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781682475423

Book preview

Preface

This book is the product of research and analysis conducted over several years under the auspices of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (IFPA) and Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The authors benefited from the insights and the ideas of many people, including members of IFPA’s international board of research consultants and key leaders in the United States and abroad. Equally important was the opportunity to exchange ideas with a host of experts from around the world brought together over the years by The Fletcher School and its International Security Studies Program.

The idea for this book arose from a project that was originally funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation, based upon the need to examine escalation and coalition management issues in the context of the twenty-first-century global crisis map. We owe a debt of gratitude to the foundation for supporting the initial work, without which this book would not have been possible. In particular, we wish to thank Dr. Marin Strmecki and Dr. Nadia Schadlow for their encouragement and support. We also thank Michael Gleba and the Sarah Scaife Foundation in Pittsburgh for sustained support to both IFPA and The Fletcher School, which made possible the seminars and simulations and contributed to the research that was an indispensable basis for our work.

These seminars included several years of interaction with advanced students at The Fletcher School studying political-military crises and crisis management, both on campus and in the school’s online Global Master of Arts Program (GMAP), under the able leadership of Dr. Deborah Winslow Nutter, senior associate dean and founding director of GMAP, the support of the GMAP staff, and the help of a valued friend and colleague, Dr. Richard Shultz, director of The Fletcher’s School’s International Securities Studies Program, who contributed to our simulations. The simulations were integral to the seminars, forming the basis for developing, testing, and analyzing escalation concepts and coalition management as well as deterrence and other dimensions of international crises. Several hundred participants took part in these simulation exercises. Their focus included escalation dynamics based on scenarios involving NATO-Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific area. SIMULEX, as these simulations were called, also brought together a large number of participants from the U.S. professional military educational community. Their names and organizational affiliations are too numerous to list. Nevertheless, we give special thanks to The Fletcher School’s military fellows, particularly the U.S. Air Force’s national defense fellows, who played a key role in organizing and conducting these many exercises. We also thank Alice Enos for administrative support at The Fletcher School.

Finally, we thank Glenn Griffith, acquisitions editor, and others at the Naval Institute Press, as well as the peer reviewers, whose critiques helped us to sharpen our focus. We owe a great debt of gratitude to IFPA, which generously contributed to the production of this book, and in particular to Polly Parke for administrative support in all phases of our work, as well as to Jack A. Kelly, senior staff member, who provided invaluable assistance.

1  Twenty-First-Century Escalation Dynamics

The world has entered a new era of strategic relations that holds important implications for deterrence, escalation control, and coalition management. Armed conflict, both real and potential, often based on geography, resources, ethnic differences, ideology, or religion, arises in interconnected domains—maritime, land, air, space, and cyber space. Great-power competition exists alongside terrorism; states and nonstate armed groups vie along a spectrum of conflict from high to low intensity. The global setting contains actors that have unprecedented capabilities and presents challenges calling for innovative crisis management strategies and policies. This volatile security setting contains the risk of miscalculation both by adversaries who become emboldened and by allies who feel more vulnerable or less secure. Enemies may be tempted to strike. Allies skeptical of U.S. resolve may act in ways that increase the chances that the United States might be drawn into a crisis that spirals out of control, escalating to catalytic warfare—in which combat breaks out not primarily as a result of U.S. decisions but rather because of the actions of an ally or adversary.¹

As we discuss in following chapters, miscalculation comes in many forms. First, it includes misperception of the motivations and intentions of adversaries in the early stages of the escalation. For example, an adversary’s messages may not be interpreted correctly, as a result of either cultural or psychological blinders. Strikes against conventional forces that also may seem to threaten nuclear capabilities or command-and-control facilities could well be misinterpreted as steps toward further escalation, and, taking into account attacks that were perceived as threatening nuclear forces or the assets necessary to command them, could be seen as escalatory steps even if they were not designed to be. Thus, the spread of nuclear and cyber warfare technologies is creating a volatile combination of capabilities that could cause a conventional conflict to escalate out of control to become a nuclear war.²

This potential for escalation also is shaped by artificial intelligence and social media. Nuclear command-and-control systems rely heavily on artificial intelligence, given the limited time available for crisis response in support of escalation or de-escalation strategies. Social media may be used to inject falsified information into the crisis decision-making process, creating fake events with doctored images that are rapidly disseminated, leading to perceived threats that seem to demand escalatory responses. Third parties may employ artificial intelligence and social media to generate or escalate conflict between states. A third-party state or nonstate actor may make a fake action appear sufficiently credible to create a crisis between two nuclear states, in a twenty-first-century variant of the catalytic warfare described by Herman Kahn.³

Although security guarantees and assurances that the United States provides to allies are designed to serve as stabilizing mechanisms, they nevertheless carry additional risks in the multinuclear, twenty-first-century world. This is not only a world of several nuclear states, but also one in which their numbers are likely to increase in the years ahead. It also means a world in which the number of threshold nuclear states will grow—states capable of having nuclear weapons if they chose to do so because of their advanced scientific technological infrastructure and know-how. Because both adversaries and alliance members increasingly have unprecedented access to escalatory capabilities and options, the need for intra-alliance planning and coordination has become even greater than it was during the Cold War. At that time efforts were made to raise the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons by developing conventional capabilities as an alternative to the initial or early employment of nuclear weapons. Although we have many more non-nuclear possibilities for escalation now than ever before, some strategists may regard nuclear bombs, guns, or other devices as instruments for initial strikes rather than as a last resort, used primarily to help deter armed conflict. The threshold will be lowered further if nuclear weapons come to be employed either to initiate or terminate a conflict or to counter an adversary such as the United States that has superior conventional forces.

We have entered a period in which larger numbers of actors seeking greater international influence have access to an unprecedented range of capabilities, such as nuclear weapons, cyber warfare techniques, and advanced conventional technologies. These include large states such as Russia and China and newer actors such as Iran and North Korea. Cyber weapons and other electronic warfare technologies also have begun to help shape crisis escalation and de-escalation strategies. The result has significantly broadened the number of options for limited war, crisis escalation, deterrence, escalation control, and crisis termination. Nuclear and non-nuclear escalation can be synchronized to support asymmetrical strategies that target enemy vulnerabilities in a multinuclear world. Russia, for example, deploys a modernizing strategic nuclear force along with a cyber warfare capability that together may enhance its options for escalating a crisis in Europe or Central Asia. Moscow has waged cyber warfare against civilian and military targets in Estonia, Georgia, and elsewhere. Russia has used military power against Georgia and Ukraine, states that once were part of the Soviet Union. In the Middle East, Russia again has become a major actor, providing direct military support that has enabled the Bashar Assad regime in Syria to remain in power.

In the Asia-Pacific, China has emerged as a competitor to the United States and other countries in the region, especially Japan. China is extending its power across a vast maritime domain stretching from the east coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and the Western Pacific. Clashing strategies and policies with pro-Western countries have put China on a path for crisis confrontations in the South China Sea and elsewhere to which the United States could be drawn. On the Korean Peninsula, there is a potential for miscalculation by Pyongyang in a crisis that could escalate out of control as North Korea expands its nuclear weapons capability. The close relationship between the United States and the Seoul-based Republic of Korea is formalized in a security treaty that includes a U.S. security commitment to a combined forces command and the deployment of some 30,000 U.S. troops in South Korea. As a result, any confrontation with North Korea risks immediate U.S. involvement—and the need to manage escalation against a hostile and unpredictable nuclear state. Whether or not nucleararmed state such as North Korea actually would use such weapons, it likely would feel emboldened to employ its arsenal of conventional and nonkinetic capabilities, including cyber weapons, as a basis for escalation.

In the Middle East, Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons has led Israel to consider preemptive action that could bring the United States into a major regional war. In Europe as well, there is potential for a crisis that could escalate out of control. Modern-day Russia, under Vladimir Putin, seeking to regain some semblance of its former status, resents U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) encroachments on territory that once had been part of the Soviet Union. The conflict in Ukraine, along with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, represents only one manifestation of Russia’s efforts to regain influence in its near abroad. NATO’s response has included decisions to bolster the alliance’s force posture in East and Central Europe with the deployment of capabilities such as a rapid-reaction brigade and missile defenses in Poland and Romania. Russia is modernizing its nuclear arsenal, while putting into place a de-escalatory doctrine that includes nuclear weapons as a means of prevailing in a conventional war. According to such Russian military doctrine, if Russia were to threaten to use or actually introduce nuclear weapons, its adversaries would stop fighting, presumably to avoid further escalation. Russia first experimented with this concept of de-escalation in the Zapad exercise in 1999. Ten years later, Russian forces also simulated the use of nuclear weapons in that year’s Zapad exercise, conducted with Belarus’ army; the Russian move ostensibly was intended to induce de-escalation on the part of NATO forces. From Moscow’s standpoint, this exercise achieved its strategic objective. However, from a Western perspective, Zapad 2009 succeeded in lowering the nuclear threshold with potentially dangerous consequences. Suppose, for example, that Russia’s first-use of nuclear weapons had led to a NATO nuclear escalatory response. A subsequent Zapad exercise, held in 2017, concentrated on command-and-control and operations based on multinational forces (i.e., those of Russia and Belarus), testing new concepts for escalation management and conflict termination. In Zapad 2017 there also were reports of simulated use of nuclear weapons. As a result, there is a heightened urgency in Washington for the United States to develop its own new strategies and tools for enhancing escalation control as well as de-escalation, conflict termination, and deterrence.

Russia and China are not alone in emphasizing the crucially important role of nuclear forces in security planning and crisis management. Lesser nuclear adversaries, such as North Korea and Iran, also see such forces as indispensable to crisis management. In a world of unprecedented capabilities—conventional and unconventional—in the hands of a wider range of actors, crises have the potential to spiral out of control as a result of either miscalculation or deliberate escalation by one of the parties. Escalation can be horizontal, in which the geographic scope of the crisis would be widened to encompass a third party or actor allied to an adversary. Or it can be vertical, in which advanced non-nuclear or nuclear weapons would be used to achieve a strategic effect, as for example, an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack resulting from a nuclear detonation that disables critical infrastructure of U.S. space-based assets. In either case, one of the major players would need to control the escalation spectrum, protect and reassure allies and key partners, and implement options for de-escalation or to terminate the crisis.

Cold War deterrence and escalation theorizing was developed principally within the context of the U.S.-Soviet strategic nuclear relationship. Efforts to understand escalation management included a focus in the 1950s on theorizing about whether wars in the nuclear age could be limited, in the sense that they could be kept beneath the nuclear threshold, or, if they did ultimately escalate to the nuclear level, whether they could be limited geographically or in the numbers and types of nuclear weapons used. In that same decade, however, the threat of massive retaliation based on nuclear weapons defined U.S. strategy and NATO depended heavily on nuclear weapons to deter a potential Soviet thrust into Western Europe in which Moscow would employ its numerically superior conventional forces.

At a time in which the international structure was based largely on alliances with either the United States or the Soviet Union, escalation control and coalition management were subjects of special interest to Cold War strategists, who developed models for dealing with a range of warfighting contingencies. These planners hypothesized that limited war might still be possible if nuclear adversaries pursued limited objectives, used limited weaponry, and confined the conflict geographically. Even so, however, massive retaliation included the fundamentally important assumption that the two sides might not be able to control nuclear escalation once the nuclear threshold had been breached. The unique U.S. ability to escalate to the nuclear level was assumed to be sufficient to deter crisis escalation. Yet, as the Soviet Union developed its own strategic nuclear forces in the 1950s, the U.S. strategy based on massive retaliation began to lose credibility. In its place, American strategists sought escalatory options below the nuclear threshold as a basis for deterrence. They argued that as the Soviet Union gained the capability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons, Washington would have to reconsider the implications for escalation as well as deterrence, crisis management, and long-term nuclear weapons strategies, especially within the transatlantic relationship.⁴

In a seminal contribution to the literature on escalation, Herman Kahn, in his book On Escalation: Scenarios and Metaphors, developed a series of potential escalatory steps, from the beginning of a crisis to the nuclear threshold and beyond, culminating in general nuclear war.⁵ Kahn’s work remains a useful point of departure for thinking about the twenty-first-century security setting, even though it is set within the bipolar Cold War structure, and despite technological advances in nuclear and non-nuclear strategic technologies and the emergence of a multinuclear world. Yet, today the dynamics of escalation control and coalition management include a broader range of technology options and the need to deal with allies and partners whose interests may not be similar to those of the United States in a crisis situation. Several examples come to mind—divergent interests leading to policy differences among NATO members about how to respond to an attack on one of them; or between Israel and the United States over how to deal with Iran; or between the United States and South Korea over North Korea; or a maritime contingency involving U.S. allies or partners in the South China Sea.

During the Cold War there were limits to the presumed symmetry of strategic interests between the United States and its allies, which led both the United Kingdom and France to acquire their own nuclear forces. In France there were deeply divisive transatlantic security debates that led it to withdraw from NATO’s integrated command structure while remaining a member of the Atlantic alliance. The existence of NATO provided a mechanism for reaching some level of transatlantic consensus on contentious security issues, including the role to be played by postwar Germany, which lay on the front lines of the East-West Cold War conflict. Even so, NATO debates focused more on means rather than ends—how rather than whether to achieve the strategic goal of containing the Soviet Union.

Another major planning assumption of the time was that the two primary actors—the Soviet Union and the United States—would be able to control their respective allies based on shared common or symmetrical interests, although in Moscow’s case this rested more on coercion and in the West more on consensus and shared values. Nevertheless, a nuclear France and United Kingdom were perceived in Moscow to be U.S. allies committed to containing and deterring the Soviet Union. From this perspective, the strategic rationale for the British and French nuclear forces included the need to gain additional deterrence against the Soviet Union. As a result, Moscow had to take into account not only the United States’ nuclear forces but also those of the British and French. China presented a similar problem in the 1960s, with the deepening Sino-Soviet conflict. A nuclear China increasingly was seen more as a threat to the Soviet Union than to the United States. Consequently, there was new thinking about third-party targeting. However, in the Cold War bipolar structure, coalition management was more an issue of allied targeting coordination rather than a more fundamental consideration of synchronizing national interests and understanding the basis for decision-making in autonomous centers of power.

This world contrasts sharply with the twenty-first-century security setting, which includes not only a larger number of actors but also many countries that have unprecedented capabilities that have altered the historic significance of distance and geographic barriers. Yale University professor Paul Bracken describes the new situation as the second nuclear age, in which a new system dynamics is taking shape.⁶ This world differs fundamentally from the first nuclear age, which was the Cold War interaction between two nuclear-armed powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The new dynamics emerged from a system of actors that include major powers—the United States, Russia, and China—and secondary powers such as Israel, Iran, and a nuclear-armed North Korea. The dynamics among the more numerous nuclear actors of the second nuclear age have larger potential for instability, based on greater decentralization and independent decision-making centers. Crisis decision-making becomes more complex and fraught, with the danger of miscalculation in coalitions that may contain nuclear allies against nuclear-armed opponents that are not necessarily bound by Cold War–era constraints.

The emergence of this multinuclear world underscores the need for a multidimensional approach to escalation control, tailored to particular circumstances and to an understanding of a diverse array of national and even substate actor strategies, motivations, and goals that in turn are based on new thinking about nuclear coalition management and strategies for anticipating, deterring, and controlling escalation. Although alliance management has long been the subject of strategic analysis, there has been scant discussion of escalation management and catalytic warfare—in which a third country tries to set off a war between the major powers—in a coalition context, especially in the contemporary era. There is an extensive nonproliferation literature devoted to allied reassurance and incentives for going nuclear. By and large, however, such discussions address the incentives for going nuclear in the first place rather than the ramifications for crisis management or for escalation and de-escalation control in a multinuclear world. As a result, unless we develop new doctrine, we risk being limited to the last century’s ideas and tools for managing and de-escalating potential crises before they spiral out of control.

The twenty-first-century strategic setting underscores the need for creative thinking about nuclear coalitions. The United States may find it necessary to deal with additional, less predictable nuclear partners and nuclear adversaries, each with its own ideas about deterrence and escalation control. NATO’s Cold War experience is instructive in that it led us to consider cooperative planning with France, an ally whose nuclear forces were outside NATO targeting or policy planning decisions. Even with France’s reentry into the alliance’s integrated military command structure in 2009, Paris still retained exclusive control over its nuclear weapons outside of NATO decision-making. France provides a model that may hold lessons for future nuclear coalitions. How might members of coalitions with more than one nuclear power function together? What would be the dynamics of adversary coalitions both of which contained more than one nuclear power? Consider a crisis in which a nuclear China and a nuclear Pakistan were arrayed against a nuclear India and the United States. The possibility that the United States could also face enemy coalitions in which two or more members possess nuclear weapons would have important implications for crisis escalation and its control. The question of how to maximize intra-alliance cooperation in a crisis escalation situation would have to confront the need to deal with opponents who were also part of a coalition in which one or more parties possessed nuclear weapons.

Closely related is how to cope with new and emerging nuclear actors whose perspectives on the use of nuclear weapons and on strategic and operational planning may differ fundamentally from those of the United States. Countries such as Iran or North Korea may not share the belief that nuclear weapons use should be restricted to major contingencies in which only the most vital national existential interest is at risk. The Cold War–era Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) framework envisaged that both Russia and the United States would be loath to be the first to use their nuclear weapons against the other because it would trigger massive retaliation that would destroy them as well—a rationale that presumed that both adversaries would base their decisions on a shared value of survival. Arguably, this assumption might be applied to a state that shared Western conceptions about the horrors of nuclear weapons, but not to a country whose leadership embraced a different worldview, let alone one that harbored an apocalyptic vision that employing nuclear weapons was necessary to achieve its goals. Such actors may view nuclear missiles and bombs as weapons of first resort, rather than last resort and may be prepared to accept risks that would be unacceptable to their enemies. In the twenty-first-century security setting, the United States is more than likely to face multiple potential nuclear opponents—some that possibly hold views similar to those of the United States about when and how such weapons would be used—yet have allies, partners, or enemies who may think very differently about nuclear weapons and their potential uses. Such a combination would make deterrence, escalation control, and alliance nuclear management issues all the more difficult.

Advances in non-nuclear technologies and in cyber warfare, space-based, and space-related capabilities have created unprecedented opportunities for managing deterrence and escalation. For example, hypersonic missiles carrying precision conventional munitions provide great advantages in shortening the time needed to target and penetrate defenses. Although hypersonic missiles could carry the same explosives as existing cruise missiles, they would be available in much larger numbers than massive ordnance weapons. As a result, non-nuclear response options could put the onus for nuclear escalation decisions on an adversary. New and emerging non-nuclear technologies can enhance our ability to disable an opposing nuclear force and eliminate or substantially reduce the threat of nuclear retaliation. Such technological opportunities heighten the need to consider how to synchronize nuclear and conventional options to shape and control escalation in a multinuclear world and to counter an adversary’s ability to leverage nuclear and advanced nonnuclear technologies—an important capability for the United States, which almost certainly will face increasing numbers of adversaries that have both nuclear and conventional options.

Understandably, deterrence literature during the Cold War era focused on nuclear weapons in the U.S.-Soviet relationship. But there also was a continuing preoccupation within NATO and the transatlantic security relationship about conventional deterrence as a means of raising the nuclear threshold. Whether NATO conventional forces could have withstood a Soviet-Warsaw Pact attack without escalation to the nuclear level will never be known. Writing in the 1980s, University of Chicago political science professor John J. Mearsheimer argued that NATO should be able to prevent the Soviets from winning a quick and decisive victory and then turn the conflict into a protracted war of attrition—in which the Soviets could not be confident of success.⁷ During the Cold War the United States had significant conventional forces permanently forward-deployed in Europe and annually practiced (through the Reforger exercises) reinforcing them from across the Atlantic using vast resources that no longer exist in the American reserve components. As successive chapters will illustrate—based in part on the simulations that formed part of the study on which this book is based—the fact that the United States and NATO might find it difficult to respond quickly to a crisis in Europe without much warning could lead Moscow to miscalculate NATO’s willingness to escalate.

Moreover, as our simulations also revealed, relatively little attention has been paid to the synergies between advanced non-nuclear strategic weapons and nuclear systems in either the United States’ strategic planning or that of other nations. With the use of atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki to terminate World War II and their central place in Cold War deterrence, the important role played by non-nuclear (conventional) forces faded into the shadows of strategic thought. There was discussion of a New Triad during the George W. Bush administration.⁸ But the United States never actually incorporated non-nuclear planning into its strategic options, except for four cruise missile–carrying submarines, designated SSGNs, built between 1974 and 1976 and adapted for Tomahawk cruise missile use, which were viewed as a theater-war asset and not as strategic platforms. SSGNs will be retired in the next decade and only slowly will be replaced by a new version of the Virginia-class boat, a fast-attack submarine with large missile tubes. The Donald J. Trump