Deterrence in the Australian Evolving Strategic Environment: The Perspective of Michael Shoebridge

The Williams Foundation seminar held on August 23, 2018 on independent strike was operating within the background of the overhanging issue, or the elephant in the room, of the second nuclear age.

The question of what deterrence looks like with the rise of new nuclear powers and a more powerful conventional military force in the possession of a global authoritarian state, namely China, is a key one facing Australia.

The alliance with its major ally, the United States, as a nuclear power is a key element of the equation, but what might Australia do as it builds out deterrent options to better protect its options and to enhance the probability that extended deterrence is credible to China, Russia and North Korea?

It can be overlooked that there are already three nuclear powers in Australia’s region, and for two of them, the classic Cold War equation is not operative.  For North Korea, this is obvious.  For China, it is less so, but ultimately the Chinese are shaping more credible conventional forces options using its territory as a base, with the clear assumption that their nuclear capabilities provide a strategic umbrella over the use of their own territory to project power into the Pacific.

This does mean that as the Chinese move out into the Pacific they will face the capabilities of major powers in the region who have the capabilities to cut those forces off from the mainland. Do the Chinese nuclear weapons play any role in trying to prevent this?

In the presentation by Michael Shoebridge, Director of Defence and Strategy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a number of these questions were addressed from the standpoint of Australian options.

Nuclear weapons are great equalisers.

But they can’t be the basis of equality between North Korea and the US. In coming years we’ll be struggling to unpack effective models of deterrence that stop Pyongyang from over-reaching.

The proliferation of offensive strike capabilities draws us deeper into a world of strategic uncertainty.

The world doesn’t have good deterrence models for the nuclear contests between a rogue state and a superpower.

Classic deterrence works best as a relationship between two responsible, risk-averse great powers, both of whom have a sound understanding of the costs of great power war.

Deterrence relationships between risk-tolerant rogues and risk-averse superpowers are likely to be more fraught—not because the risk-tolerant state lightly runs nuclear risks but because it runs risks at the sub-nuclear level because it believes itself to be immune from retaliation.

The doctrine of extended deterrence in a period where the non-proliferation regime has become seriously challenged is itself seriously challenged.

At a minimum, those emerging deterrence models threaten to make credible articulation of the US doctrine of extended nuclear deterrence more challenging.

That doctrine was built for a different age—the age of risk-averse near peer adversaries.

As I’ve mentioned above, it’s not obvious to me that the US will be willing to run nuclear risks on behalf of its allies in a more densely proliferated nuclear world, where rogue actor behaviour is less predictable.

Such a judgement clearly poses the question of what should Australia do to enhance its deterrent options?

Here the prescription really revolves around the question of how to reinforce the credibility of extended deterrence.

How might Australia do this?

Our first and by far most important line of reaction to the risks of nuclear proliferation should be to think what we and our partners can do to reduce that risk. 

One big step is to keep the transparency light on North Korea in the post-Summit afterglow – and underline the fact that the North Koreans are showing no signs of actual denuclearizing – which for anyone who has listened to Kim Jong Un at and after the Summit and watched North Korea in the past is entirely unsurprising.

But if that fails now what?

The intimidation effect of a nuclear armed state is sufficiently great that this seems to me to be very likely indeed to stop an Australian Prime Minister from using offensive strike beyond Australia’s territories.

To take a pretty clear example, the idea of posturing to reach out and touch Beijing’s leaders with precision conventional weapons just seems outlandish to me as anything but a way of ensuring a destructive counterstrike that is not conventional.

This does put aside the question of how then to directly strike Chinese forces operating in the region, and how to separate the threat of nuclear use from an ability of Australia to defend itself and work with allies to stop the Chinese in their tracks as the not only project power into the region but use it.

What then?

Kinetic strike is not the only kind that can deter others.  The rise of the cyber world has created a new potential form of long range strike: offensive cyber. 

The attraction of this new capability is its global reach and its uncertainty: this kind of logic will be very familiar to the submariners in the audience.

The value of uncertainty about where a cyber capability is and what it might be prepared to affect makes it a tool of potentially large importance in the world of deterrence.

Yet its opacity and uncertainty can also reduce its value.  And cyber tools tend to be boutique things that take a lot of preparation, but once revealed can be countered fairly rapidly. 

So, the problem of how to signal capability without exposing it is one that is still to be worked out.

A further limitation on broad use of offensive s cyber for strike is that containing the effect is not simple – think of the StuxNet virus that seems to have been intended for limited use on a non-internet connected system, but went beyond that, and of the cyber disruption brought about by Wannacry and NotPetya.

Even within kinetic strike, Australia might have options other than air launched. 

Pre-positioned Army units with ground launched anti-ship and aircraft systems could work with regional partners to strike adversary forces at a distance form Australia. 

Australia’s new naval combatants –—surface and sub surface—might be equipped with cruise missiles or missile systems that fit into the launcher cells of ships. These require pre-positioning.

The option of air delivered lethal effect at range needs to be considered along with such other strike options.

The good news is that any offensive strike capability Australia might consider needs many similar underpinning enablers and capabilities if it is to be targeted effectively and if decisions on use are to be made well. 

Among the enablers will be strong policy frameworks that put the posturing of strike and its potential use within a broader strategic framework. 

Long range strike if emphasized would thus be in a context and if it involved direct confrontation with China, the US would very much be involved and hence it boils down to finding ways to make sure extended deterrence as well as credible conventional options to influence Chinese thinking.

Deterring great powers or nuclear armed powers from attacking Australia still seems best dealt with by reinforcing our alliance relationship with the United States. 

Australia’s circumstance here is quite different to South Korea of Japan, as a situation where Australia’s security is threatened directly is likely to be one of a wider regional conflict in which America’s direct interests are more engaged even than in North Asia.

This makes sense but earlier in his presentation Shoebridge highlighted the problems he had with President Trump as a custodian of US national security policy.

US President Trump’s seeming willingness to give way on US allies’ interests in his negotiations with Kim Jong Un – most obviously with his unilateral decision to halt US-ROK military exercises (and to use DPRK boilerplate language to describe them as ‘provocative’ ‘wargames’) is big news not just for the South Korea but for Japan and for other US allies – including Australia.

This signals that America Firstmay not just mean trying to get allies to pay more for their defence, but also the potential for US security guarantees – including extended deterrence—to be less reliable. 

Secretary Mattis has been strong in saying this isn’t so, but Donald Trump, not Sec Mattis, is the President of the United States.

When it comes to something as fundamental as extended deterrence, saying that the undercurrent of US policy remains, or speculating about whether Trump will or won’t get a second term is not a great way of generating confidence.

So what is Plan B?

Appendix: Michael Shoebridge Presentation to the Williams Foundation, August 23, 2018

The Strategic Implications of Regional Proliferation of Offensive Strike Capabilities

(Text prepared with much input from my ASPI colleague, Rod Lyon)

Thanks for the opportunity to address the Williams Foundation this morning. I’m going to cover a bit of regional history and dynamics, the outline the effect of North Korea on proliferation thinking, before canvassing the broader issues of a framework for strike and some of the options.

The strategic implications of regional proliferation of offensive strike capabilities is the title of my presentation, but I’m first going to ask the question “How much proliferation of offensive strike capabilities are we seeing in in our region?

My answer is not as much as some may assume, given the pace and scale of regional military modernisation.  That’s if by ‘offensive strike’ we actually mean long range strike.

The Regional Environment

Regional militaries are buying advanced surface ships, radars, aircraft and submarines and equipping their platforms with advanced missile systems.

However, most regional nations have not yet really set out clear concepts for employment of these which involve power projection beyond their own territories. Nor are they acquiring long range strike options, although some – Japan amongst them—are musing on this.

India, China and North Korea are exceptions here.

Let me take you back to the Asia of yesteryear.

It’s not so long ago that understanding Asian security meant understanding a set of sub-regional strategic contests which operated alongside each other but existed substantially independent of each other.

So, in Northeast Asia we had a divided Korean peninsula, a situation where the US and Japan tried to balance the Soviet Union, a China-Soviet Union dynamic, and a China-Taiwan contest.

Elsewhere we had a divided Southeast Asia, Sino-Indian tensions, and a burgeoning nuclear contest in South Asia between Pakistan and India.

The vestiges of those sub-regional balances remain—indeed, they still produce a comparatively rich understanding of regional security.

The formerly latent territorial and sovereignty disputes that existed – in places like the East China Sea, the South China Sea, the Taiwan Straits, and on the Korean Peninsula have become active as force modernisation has allowed nations to understand who is coming into disputed territory and to think they might do something about it.

And that helps explain why long-range offensive strike capabilities have grown only slowly: for most regional countries, the core of their strategic interest was the sub-regional environment, not the regional one.

Range tended not to be a priority, even for countries like India and Pakistan locked in an enduring nuclear contest. Moreover, for a few lucky countries—the US allies including Australia—offensive strike was primarily a mission filled by the US, not by themselves.

Even Australia, which once deployed F-111s and aircraft carriers has drifted away from strategic strike.

But gradually, that Asia—the Asia of subregions and US alliances—has been overlaid by a different Asia–or Indo Pacific.

The three large regional players, China, Japan and India, all of whom once played relatively limited strategic roles (for different reasons) have come out of their shells.

Economics and technology have been forces for greater cohesion among the subregions. And the growing competition for regional influence crosses the different subregions.

So far, the growth of offensive strike capabilities in their arsenals has been relatively muted. China’s ICBM force, for example, is currently being modernised, but it remains a small force. So much so, that a determined North Korea might be able to deploy ten years from now an ICBM force larger than China’s!

As regional multipolarity grows, and as the three regional great powers begin to play their more central strategic roles, the picture of Asia as a set of subregions will fade somewhat, and the picture of Asia as one region will grow.

Already, one of the biggest debates in Asia is not over specific subregions. It’s over how we label the big region: is it the Asia Pacific, the Indo-Asia-Pacific, or the Indo-Pacific? My personal favourite is the “Globo-Pacific’.

As our picture of Asia shifts, so too the role of long-range offensive weapons seems likely to become more prominent.

The Effect of the North Korea Precedent

We have to accept that regional proliferation of offensive strike capabilities is now more likely in the wake of North Korea’s success with its missile and nuclear programs.

We might attribute part of that to mimickry, because weapons development patterns tend to suggest that mimickry follows upon success, just as avoidance follows failure.

Let’s remember that North Korea initiated its missile and nuclear programs back in the 1950s, under Kim Jong Un’s grandfather.

The decades of relative failure and the slow, halting progress of the NK programs diminished the likelihood that others would go down that path.

Now, though, North Korea has built, and tested, ICBMs!

It is, by far, the most primitive proliferator in nuclear history. But it has built, and tested successfully, a thermonuclear device!

Yes, at certain points Pyongyang has probably benefited from various forms of illicit technology transfer. Still, building ICBMs is hard work. North Korean proliferation says only this: if NK can do it, anyone can.

So, the successful testing of 2 ICBMs and a thermonuclear device in 2017 provide a demonstration model that others now are more likely to wish to follow, or a at least respond to.

That’s especially true given the rapid swing in North Korea’s strategic fortunes: its evolution from regional pariah to summit partner with a US President; and its seeming emergence as an economic partner for South Korea.

Still, there aren’t any other North Koreas in Asia.

The region’s most likely proliferators at this point are actually status-quo powers, like Japan and South Korea, that might be driven over the threshold not by just, or even mainly, by mimickry of North Korea—but by anxiety about US security guarantees.

US President Trump’s seeming willingness to give way on US allies’ interests in his negotiations with Kim Jong Un – most obviously with his unilateral decision to halt US-ROK military exercises (and to use DPRK boilerplate language to describe them as ‘provocative’ ‘wargames’) is big news not just for the South Korea but for Japan and for other US allies – including Australia.

This signals that America Firstmay not just mean trying to get allies to pay more for their defence, but also the potential for US security guarantees – including extended deterrence—to be less reliable.

Secretary Mattis has been strong in saying this isn’t so, but Donald Trump, not Sec Mattis, is the President of the United States.

When it comes to something as fundamental as extended deterrence, saying that the undercurrent of US policy remains, or speculating about whether Trump will or won’t get a second term is not a great way of generating confidence.

And who is to deny that a US President has a primary interest in securing the safety of US citizens, so taking steps to reduce the threat to the US mainland from DPRK missiles has a logic.

But that important, narrow logic comes with some very big broader strategic consequences.

A countervailing factor obviously is that North Korea had to doggedly pursue its missile and nuclear ambitions in the face of strident and pretty united international opposition, at a cost of significant economic and societal pain.  As I a said before, there are no more North Koreas in Asia.

But leaders considering the proliferation option would take some comfort from the way North Korea has been treated of late. Since proliferating, North Korea has been treated with greater respect and accommodation that it was previously.

Far from the international community cracking down on Pyongyang, precisely the opposite has happened! Kim Jong-un has become a recognised and accepted political leader on the international stage, a bearer of shared burdens in war avoidance.

What’s the biggest indicator of the likely growth of offensive strike?

The growth of nuclear latency.

Not just nuclear skills, technologies and materials, but delivery vehicles.

Fortunately, the world’s not filled with states champing at the bit to build nuclear weapons.

But the global non-proliferation structures are creaking badly.

It would take only one or two defections from the regime to make it quite likely for a wave of proliferation to unfold the like of which hasn’t been seen since the early days of the Cold War.

Ironically, as I’ve mentioned, the bulk of those proliferators would be status quo powers, states which have traditionally sheltered under the US nuclear umbrella. If those states do cross the nuclear threshold—and Japan and South Korea are well placed to do so, it will increase the pressure on other US allies to reconsider their own options.

Then there’s the issue of uncertainty. North Korea brings forth a suite of strategic problems. But some of the sharpest problems arise in relation to managing the relationships between current nuclear powers.

The cosy P5 club was disrupted by Israel, India and Pakistan proliferating. But none of those powers built ICBMs, weapons that threaten the global employment of nuclear weapons and not just regional employment.

Nuclear weapons are great equalisers.

But they can’t be the basis of equality between North Korea and the US. In coming years we’ll be struggling to unpack effective models of deterrence that stop Pyongyang from over-reaching.

The proliferation of offensive strike capabilities draws us deeper into a world of strategic uncertainty.

The world doesn’t have good deterrence models for the nuclear contests between a rogue state and a superpower.

Classic deterrence works best as a relationship between two responsible, risk-averse great powers, both of whom have a sound understanding of the costs of great power war.

Deterrence relationships between risk-tolerant rogues and risk-averse superpowers are likely to be more fraught—not because the risk-tolerant state lightly runs nuclear risks but because it runs risks at the sub-nuclear level because it believes itself to be immune from retaliation.

Members of the audience who have read Jeffrey Lewis’s recent novel, The 2020 Commission into the North Korean attack on the US, will know what I mean.

At a minimum, those emerging deterrence models threaten to make credible articulation of the US doctrine of extended nuclear deterrence more challenging.

That doctrine was built for a different age—the age of risk-averse near peer adversaries.

As I’ve mentioned above, it’s not obvious to me that the US will be willing to run nuclear risks on behalf of its allies in a more densely proliferated nuclear world, where rogue actor behaviour is less predictable.

Now, you might be gathering that I’m not an advocate of Australia, Japan or South Korea becoming nuclear weapons states.

My basic reasoning for this is that a world with more people possessing and being able to use nuclear weapons is a world that is inherently more dangerous than the world we live in now.

Our first and by far most important line of reaction to the risks of nuclear proliferation should be to think what we and our partners can do to reduce that risk.

One big step is to keep the transparency light on North Korea in the post-Summit afterglow – and underline the fact that the North Koreans are showing no signs of actual denuclearizing – which for anyone who has listened to Kim Jong Un at and after the Summit and watched North Korea in the past is entirely unsurprising.

What is the role of non-ICBM offensive strike in this world?

Reading over the background note to the seminar, I very much enjoyed reading the good sense in setting out the fact that effective strike capabilities are much more than just a weapon system.

They rely on underpinning intelligence about adversary intentions, and operational concepts, adversary weapon systems, command and control systems and the systems and sensors that cue adversary weapons.

Similarly, use of a strike capability depends on an effective targeting system and your own command and control system.

I wondered about some elements of the background description though: there was a theme that Australia obtaining an ‘independent strike capability’ would help control escalation to conflict. It would provide a ‘powerful deterrent’ and a ‘means of demonstrating strategic intent’.

The assumptions behind these statements are worth examining over the course of the day.

In a world where a potential adversary is a nuclear armed one, I am a sceptic about the deterrent impact of non-nuclear strike.

The intimidation effect of a nuclear armed state is sufficiently great that this seems to me to be very likely indeed to stop an Australian Prime Minister from using offensive strike beyond Australia’s territories.

To take a pretty clear example, the idea of posturing to reach out and touch Beijing’s leaders with precision conventional weapons just seems outlandish to me as anything but a way of ensuring a destructive counterstrike that is not conventional.

So, who might Australia deter from what were Australia to have an independent strike capability?

It must be that elusive sweet spot actor who is not too big, not too small, but just right: they must have sufficient military capability to pose a real and direct threat to Australia, but they must not be a great power or be nuclear armed.

What might be the response to Australia actually employing an offensive strike capability?

What happens on the escalation ladder?

It reminds me of a Winnie the Pooh story.  Kanga and her son Roo are new to the forest and the other forest residents—Winnie, Rabbit, Piglet—want to find a way to get them to leave.

Rabbit comes up with the plan.  They’ll kidnap Roo and replace him in Kanga’s pouch with Rabbit.  This will force them to leave.

Once Rabbit has explained his plan, Piglet asks “But what happens when Roo reaches into her pouch and finds me and not Roo?’

Rabbit says “Ah. Then yousay ‘AHA!’”.

Piglet is not convinced.

So, we need to think through what happens next, after offensive strike is used.

If Australia’s strike capability is limited to very small numbers, perhaps dependent on small numbers of high value enablers, then how does an offensive campaign get sustained enough to be credible?

Deterring great powers or nuclear armed powers from attacking Australia still seems best dealt with by reinforcing our alliance relationship with the United States.

Australia’s circumstance here is quite different to South Korea of Japan, as a situation where Australia’s security is threatened directly is likely to be one of a wider regional conflict in which America’s direct interests are more engaged even than in North Asia.

That brings me to another line of thinking: kinetic strike is not the only kind that can deter others.  The rise of the cyber world has created a new potential form of long range strike: offensive cyber.

The attraction of this new capability is its global reach and its uncertainty: this kind of logic will be very familiar to the submariners in the audience.

The value of uncertainty about where a cyber capability is and what it might be prepared to affect makes it a tool of potentially large importance in the world of deterrence.

Yet its opacity and uncertainty can also reduce its value.  And cyber tools tend to be boutique things that take a lot of preparation, but once revealed can be countered fairly rapidly.

So, the problem of how to signal capability without exposing it is one that is still to be worked out.

A further limitation on broad use of offensive s cyber for strike is that containing the effect is not simple – think of the StuxNet virus that seems to have been intended for limited use on a non-internet connected system, but went beyond that, and of the cyber disruption brought about by Wannacry and NotPetya.

Even within kinetic strike, Australia might have options other than air launched.

Pre-positioned Army units with ground launched anti-ship and aircraft systems could work with regional partners to strike adversary forces at a distance form Australia.

Australia’s new naval combatants –—surface and sub surface—might be equipped with cruise missiles or missile systems that fit into the launcher cells of ships. These require pre-positioning.

The option of air delivered lethal effect at range needs to be considered along with such other strike options.

The good news is that any offensive strike capability Australia might consider needs many similar underpinning enablers and capabilities if it is to be targeted effectively and if decisions on use are to be made well.

Among the enablers will be strong policy frameworks that put the posturing of strike and its potential use within a broader strategic framework.

That must include a deeper appreciation of escalation ladders – and de-escalation ladders—with the answer to what happens after use of the capability needing to be a much better one than Rabbit gave Piglet when Rabbit planned the kidnapping of Roo.