The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict

by Elbridge A. Colby

“indirect approach,” a strategy premised on cost imposition that he hoped would allow Great Britain to defeat a continental army at a fraction of the bloodshed the war had demanded.20 Giulio Douhet, similarly sobered by the war’s horrors, argued that nations could use airpower to punish enemy societies into submission while avoiding bloody ground campaigns.21

Thomas Schelling put it, “It is easier to deter than to compel.”23 In Schelling’s logic, it is to easier to persuade someone not to do something at all—including by accepting things as they are or have evolved—than it is to persuade that person to take an action he or she does not want to take.24

Compellence by punishment—by imposing costs—is also particularly hard to make work.

Last, a punitive campaign is more likely to encourage the targeted society’s hostility toward the compeller rather than opposition to its own government.

sum, compellence is hard, and compellence by punishment is especially difficult.

For the punishment approach to persuade a target to concede core goods, the attacker must be able and willing to do harsh, cruel, even terrible things, until the targeted state’s resolve breaks.

the punishment approach is likely to fail for China, even against a target as favorable as Taiwan. Although such a conflict over Taiwan could well culminate without a decisive victory for either side, with a high but reasonable degree of US engagement it could very likely stabilize with Taiwan resisting, thereby demonstrating both the United States’ differentiated credibility and the strength of the anti-hegemonic coalition. This would represent a major defeat for China and a success for the coalition.

In Schelling’s formulation, it then would be the coalition, not China, that would have to precipitate the collision.

The fundamental problem with the punishment approach, then, is that its success rests on two factors: first, the willingness of the target state to surrender at a level of violence below that which would provoke the state’s allies and partners to intervene effectively; and second, the unwillingness of those allies and partners to escalate—even moderately—to relieve the target state so as to keep it going.

Weakening a victim through steps like blockade and bombardment can make a difference, but on their own they are unlikely to be decisive against a resolute defender with sufficiently powerful and committed allies and partners.

In its purest form, without any element of coercion, conquest involves the killing or expulsion of all of the enemy.

the basic theory of victory remains the same. A fait accompli requires the attacker to persuade its victim, that victim’s allies and partners, or both to accept the new disposition after it has seized part or all of the victim’s territory. The attacker can do this through a number of ways. It can seek to persuade them that reversing its gains would fail, including by hardening its defenses over the seized territory. It can also try to convince them that trying to regain the lost territory would be prohibitively costly and risky, not only by such hardening, but also by explicitly or implicitly threatening escalation if they do mount the kind of counterattack needed to succeed. Last, by using force in as focused a manner as possible, the attacker can try to persuade them that intervening is unnecessary because the attacker does not pose a sufficiently compelling threat to those parties’ other important interests. The attacker can often achieve this last effect by halting its offensive advance somewhere short of what seems likely to trigger an effective intervention. The attacker can also employ these methods in combination. The

A successful fait accompli strategy depends on two conditions. First, the attacker must be able to seize the territory in question—meaning it must move into territory a defender has left unprotected or from which it has been ejected. If an attacker cannot do this, it gains nothing and therefore has nothing to defend.

Success simply requires that the attacker be able to seize the territory in question and that the victim and its allies and partners be unwilling to suffer the costs and run the risks needed to reverse the gains.

Second, the attacker must be able to hold the seized territory or consolidate its control over it. This

Although an attacker can use the fait accompli against an isolated target, the strategy tends to be especially attractive for use against coalitions, especially ones whose combined strength exceeds the attacker’s. That is because, if the coalition is weaker, the attacker is likely better off simply defeating it outright.

If the attacker can be readily ejected, the fait accompli has little appeal. As

If the aspirant can force or induce enough such states to separate from the coalition, it can eventually gain more power in the regional balance and be able to establish its hegemony over the region. It can do this sequentially, isolating states one by one in order to separate them from the anti-hegemonic coalition while avoiding a larger war that it will too likely lose, until the balance shifts. This is the focused and sequential strategy.

Beijing’s better course is to use the fait accompli against coalition members, conquering their key territory in order to compel their disaffiliation from the coalition. Therefore, from a practical military point of view, China will want to be able to conquer substantial parts of Asia. This is because only the ability to seize and hold the territory of its neighbors will give Beijing the degree of power needed to force key regional states to disaffiliate from alliance with the United States and from the anti-hegemonic coalition more broadly.

Beijing would very likely need to seize much of the main island of Taiwan itself, particularly Taipei and adjoining areas, to bring about Taiwan’s government’s capitulation. Seizing territory of lesser significance would not suffice. Taking Quemoy and Matsu, for instance, would be very unlikely to yield Taiwan’s surrender.

widening the war and imposing costs on China beyond the immediate area of battle—in order to compel Beijing to disgorge its gains.

Horizontal escalation is, however, a losing strategy for the United States in the face of Beijing’s use of the focused and sequential strategy.

There is, and we might call it denial defense. This approach focuses on denial rather than dominance—specifically, denial of China’s ability to fulfill the crucial victory conditions required to make its best strategy work.

In simpler terms, success for China is to subordinate the targeted state; defeat is to fail to do so. Success for the alliance, and thus for the anti-hegemonic coalition, is to keep the targeted state in the fold. As long as the defense is strong enough to keep the ally on side and affiliated with the coalition, then it is succeeding in its core strategic purpose.

focus of US defense planning should therefore be to deny China’s ability to effectuate a fait accompli against its allies within the anti-hegemonic coalition. And because Taiwan is the most attractive target within the coalition, the United States and (to the extent that they are willing to contribute) other coalition states must focus on preparing to deny a Chinese fait accompli against Taiwan. If they can deny China the ability to invade and hold Taiwan, they can almost certainly do the same for the Philippines, Japan, or other coalition members. So long as they ensure that Beijing is not able to subordinate such allies within the anti-hegemonic coalition, that coalition will cohere and balance a rising China.

As discussed in the preceding chapter, the two conditions of success for the fait accompli are: (1) for the attacker to seize the victim’s key territory; and (2) for the attacker to hold that key territory. If the defenders can deny either of these conditions, the fait accompli fails.

first option for defeating a fait accompli, then, is to deny the attacker’s ability to seize the target state’s key territory in the first place.

denying an attacker’s ability to seize key territory is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

Crucially, the geography of the area of potential military conflict between China and the anti-hegemonic coalition is likely to favor the defenders.

the defenders can eliminate the invading forces or expel them from the target state’s key territory before those forces are able to consolidate their defenses over—and as a consequence, their hold on—the seized territory, the fait accompli will fail. Until the attacker, in other words, is able to seize the target’s key territory and muster such defenses as required to convince the target state and its allies and partners that continuing to defend it would be in vain or prohibitively costly or risky, the attacker will not have consummated a fait accompli.

Rather than halt and reverse the invaders’ advances where they arrive, defenders might judge it more prudent to allow them to take some territory before confronting them on more favorable terrain. This

That said, a defense in depth would be much more likely to succeed for Taiwan if it were coupled with the first denial option and the defenders could weaken and reduce the invasion force before it reached Taiwan, disrupt and degrade cross-strait lines of communication for Chinese forces once they had landed, or both.

society.20 The most intuitive way for the United States and its partners to employ a denial approach against China would be to reduce its ability to reconstitute a capability to attack Taiwan or other members of the anti-hegemonic coalition.

In summary, then, the optimal strategy for the United States and other defenders of a threatened state in the anti-hegemonic coalition would be a combination of denial and cost imposition: denial defense against the fait accompli, with cost imposition layered on that effective denial to persuade China to accept the defenders’ preferred rule sets for limited war and as an option for inducing China to accept local defeat and agree to terminate the war. Denial would defeat China’s theory of victory against the vulnerable state; cost imposition layered atop denial would induce it to accept the defenders’ preferred rule sets and accept local defeat.

the United States needs to ensure the effective defense of a targeted ally.

The core idea of the binding strategy is to deliberately make China have to strengthen the coalition’s resolve if it tries to attain its ambitions.

the most important part of making the binding strategy work is to ensure that China clearly demonstrates the actual threat that it poses to the coalition states’ security.

Perhaps the clearest and sometimes the most important way of making sure China is seen this way is simply by ensuring that it is the one to strike first.

The concrete result would be to make China choose between allowing the United States and other engaged states to operate uncontested from these locations or striking widely at countries that might otherwise remain on the sidelines.

Successfully implemented, in other words, this strategy would keep the burden of escalation on China.

The crucial premise of the binding strategy is that military and other material power can be consciously employed to create political, perceptual effects that matter in the war.

The cardinal implication of this book’s argument is that the United States should focus on making denial defense a reality in the Indo-Pacific with respect to its allies, including Taiwan.

In particular, US nuclear forces should be able to destroy the most valued assets of any state that could wield such destructive force against Americans. This

the United States has established that it can conduct an effective denial defense of Taiwan, sustain the nuclear deterrent, and maintain an effective counterterrorism enterprise, it is prudent for the United States to do two things. First, it should make some provision for a simultaneous conflict in one particular scenario: between NATO and Russia in Eastern Europe. This is the only plausible scenario in the contemporary international environment in which the United States, if it did not act simultaneously, might be unable to defeat a plausible adversary’s theory of victory against an ally.31 Second, the United States should maintain missile defenses sufficient to defeat an intercontinental missile attack by any state other than Russia or China.

Most pointedly, the United States might very well not fill the gap in Eastern NATO left by any European unwillingness to strengthen their own defense efforts. Indeed, my argument in this book is that the United States should not plug these gaps.

Strategies and strategic choices cost money; in Bernard Brodie’s phrase, they wear a dollar sign.50 More