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

by Elbridge A. Colby

This all means that the fundamental way to ensure that more states intervene and invest more of their power is to make sure that their perception of threat and other sources of resolve are activated. This means that the war must unfold in a way that triggers this result.

Making China Fight in a Way That Changes the Coalition’s Threat Perception The key is that Beijing itself must alter the potential coalition’s perception of the stakes. China must not be allowed to precipitate and fight a war over Taiwan or the Philippines in a manner that makes it seem insufficiently threatening to other regional nations’ vital interests.

The United States in particular as well as its allies and partners must therefore prepare, posture, and act to compel China to have to conduct its campaign in ways that indicate it is a greater and more malign threat not only to the state it has targeted but to the security and dignity of the other states that might come to its defense.

An attacker like China may trigger other states’ resolve by revealing or being made to reveal its aggressiveness, ambition, cruelty, unreliability, power, or disrespect for the honor of such states.

If China needed only to attack Taiwan and its forces as well as perhaps those local US forces engaged in the island’s defense in order to subordinate the island, such a campaign is unlikely to seem so aggressive. But if, to ensure that its attack on Taiwan succeeded, it also had to attack US forces, territory, and assets farther afield as well as those of Japan, the Philippines, Australia, South Korea, and perhaps others, that would clearly show Beijing to be far more aggressive than it would want potential opponents to believe. In military terms, the most natural way to put an opponent in this position is by posturing and readying forces so that, if a state hopes to conduct a successful invasion or other coercive campaign, it must attack on a much grander scale, against more targets in more countries,

How, then, should the United States and its allies and partners seek to leverage these strategies to achieve their aims? The Binding Strategy and Denial Defense Principally they should do so by integrating the distinct but compatible approaches of a binding strategy and a denial defense. A denial defense is the use of American and other power to stop China from seizing and holding allied territory; the binding strategy is a deliberate effort to compel China to have to behave in ways that catalyze US, allied, and partner resolve if it pursues its hegemonic ambitions. These approaches can be either fully or partially integrated.

The optimal strategy is likely to be one in which the United States and its allies and, likely to a lesser degree, its partners in the Western Pacific intertwine their posture and activities significantly but not fully. The degree of binding may differ according to the scenario: coalition members might, for instance, bind their efforts more fully in order to defend Australia than they would to defend Taiwan. The practical output of this is likely to be the development of operating locations across a wide range of participating states and a higher degree of integration among their military postures and activities. At the same time, the United States and its allies will have to prepare for the possibility that some participating states will balk and make sure that they can still execute effective operational plans even in such circumstances.

Planning must deliberately shape the war and how it is fought in order to influence the combatants’ resolve. This simply follows Clausewitz’s dictum that war is a continuation of politics by other means—but not only that war is a continuation of politics in some general sense or solely in its purposes but rather that “the political view is the object, war is the means, and the means must always include the object in [their] conception.”

Most fundamentally, the book describes how the United States can ensure an international environment conducive to its own security, freedom, and prosperity in a world where America is no longer as dominant as it once was. It charts a way for the United States to correlate the costs it would incur and the risks it would face to deny China, the world’s most powerful other state, hegemony in the Indo-Pacific, the world’s most important region. And it demonstrates that the United States can deny China its aim of regional predominance in a way that is feasible and responsible. This itself is tremendously important because it shows that conceding the Indo-Pacific is not, as some contend, the only way to avoid catastrophic loss.

Facing such an effective balancing coalition, China will have to negotiate the terms of its continued rise on equitable rather than dominant terms. This will open opportunities for détente and engagement with Beijing from a position of strength.

At the same time, Taiwan is likely defensible to the standard of an effective defense laid out in the book.

This is a measured defense - seems to be not the kind of defense that is so intense that America can’t reach its objectives.

Taiwan itself must significantly augment and improve its defenses and make itself more resilient.

The Philippines is likely to be the second-best target among existing US allies for China’s focused and sequential strategy. It is a US ally and so enmeshes US differentiated credibility; it also occupies a critical position along the first island chain. At the same time, it has limited capacity for self-defense and is reasonably close to China.

In the context of China’s pursuit of regional hegemony in Asia, whether the United States sustains or eliminates its existing alliances, and whether and how it forms new ones, should be a function of the need to form and sustain an anti-hegemonic coalition that is stronger than China and its own pro-hegemonic coalition, especially in the context of a systemic regional war. US alliances should be designed to serve this goal by providing sufficient reassurance to nervous coalition members that they will be protected from China’s focused and sequential strategy.

The best plausible outcome for the United States is an alliance architecture that achieves its purposes while presenting as limited a threat surface as possible. To ensure that China does not establish predominance over Asia, the anti-hegemonic coalition must be more powerful than China in the event of a systemic regional war. If the coalition is to entice and retain enough states to meet this standard, those states must feel sufficiently secure in the face of Beijing’s best strategy, the focused and sequential strategy. The main purpose of the American defense perimeter is thus to provide enough reassurance to enough important states that might otherwise bandwagon with China that they can prudently work to balance it alongside the United States.

The United States should also sustain its close linkages with many of the archipelagic and island states of the Central and South Pacific, including Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands. Together, these form what has been termed a second island cloud, affording geography critical for effective US power projection, strategic depth, and resilient support. They are also highly defensible since they lie to the rear of the first island chain.10

The main questions for American defense strategy, then, are whether the United States should expand its alliance commitments, and if so, to which states, and how much it should seek to orient its alliances more toward collective defense than the legacy hub-and-spoke model.

The United States and other coalition members should seek to add as many states as are willing to join the coalition that are to the rear vis-à-vis China of those states already in the coalition—and, because of the greater potency afforded by US security guarantees, especially to the rear of US allies. In practice, this is likely to mean east of the first island chain or west of India. Because these states are already effectively defended from China’s best military strategy by the combination of distance and American and other allied and partner military power interposed between, there is little downside to including them in the coalition.

These states might include France, with its far-flung island possessions and vast economic exclusion zones in the South Pacific, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Their military efforts, however, are likely more efficiently allocated toward managing their own or nearby regions, thereby relieving the United States from the necessity of having to focus on Europe and the Middle East, rather than making what would almost certainly be marginal contributions in the Indo-Pacific.

the United States and the anti-hegemonic coalition have an interest in bringing important Southeast Asian states into the coalition and perhaps in Washington’s forming alliance relationships with them. The problems are twofold. First, some of these states are difficult to defend, and some may be simply indefensible. Second, many states in the area do not want to have to choose between aligning with either the United States or China; indeed, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam, among others, have strong traditions of nonalignment.14 Despite these difficulties, any shift in the power balance toward China and its pro-hegemonic coalition would impel the United States and its allies and partners to consider adding Southeast Asian states to the anti-hegemonic coalition. Moreover, because of the greater danger such a powerful China and its coalition would pose, the United States might need to offer at least some of these states a security guarantee in order to provide them with the degree of assurance required to affiliate with the coalition in the face of such peril.

In light of these factors, the coalition would likely benefit by adding Indonesia,

Vietnam is a significant and growing economy with a capable military and a reputation for resolute self-defense. Its proximity to China and fierce independent streak will likely lead it to join an anti-hegemonic coalition

if China and its pro-hegemonic coalition grow in power and Vietnam becomes increasingly nervous about its vulnerability to China’s focused strategy, would it make sense for the United States to ally with Hanoi? Vietnam’s traversable land border with China makes much of its key territory difficult to defend against Beijing, especially given that the US military’s advantages are particularly great in aerospace and maritime operations rather than on land. The United States should seek to avoid having to confront this dilemma by empowering Vietnam to defend itself.

Malaysia and Singapore are wealthy, significant economies. The narrow neck of the Malay Peninsula gives both countries a significant degree of defensibility. Still, the peninsula is closer to the Asian mainland than Indonesia, making it more accessible to Chinese military power, especially if Thailand affiliates with Beijing or permits Chinese forces to cross or use its territory. The United States should therefore seek to bring these two important states into the anti-hegemonic coalition but be reluctant to extend an alliance guarantee to them.

Thailand is likely to be a significant swing state in the region.

But there is reason to be skeptical of Bangkok’s willingness to join, and there are major risks to the United States of a full alliance relationship with Thailand. The two are technically allies now, but their relationship is generally understood to be considerably more ambiguous and thinner than Washington’s relationship with Tokyo, Canberra, or even Manila. It is not entirely clear what Washington’s defense obligations are if Thailand is attacked.15

the United States should field a nuclear deterrent that can survive any plausible first strike, that is large and destructive enough in its effects to manifestly outweigh the benefits for any opponent of a large-scale attack, and that is discriminate enough to allow for effective employment in a limited war. The United States should ensure that its nuclear deterrent is sized and shaped to achieve this.

American nuclear forces do not necessarily need to be greater or fewer than those of potential US opponents. Nor do all of them need to be ready on any given day. As long as they can survive, be mobilized, and achieve the effects designated, that level of effort should be sufficient.

The nuclear arsenal and the counterterrorism enterprise are relatively self-contained demands that require only a relatively modest share of US defense efforts and resources. Over the 2020s, recapitalizing the US nuclear arsenal is expected to consume approximately 5–7 percent of the total defense budget. The United States spends something on the order of 15 percent of the defense budget on the counterterrorism enterprise—a significant fraction, but valuable given the importance of the mission.28

The main question that follows for conventional force planning, then, is: Once this criterion has been satisfied, how much does the nation want to prepare for additional and particularly simultaneous contingencies? That is, what does the nation expect its military to do in addition and at the same time that it is conducting an effective denial defense of Taiwan or another threatened ally in the Western Pacific?

Once 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. No other contingency is sufficiently pressing to distract America’s attention from these core missions.

The United States should undertake an integrated approach to managing this problem. First, it should seek to inhibit as much as possible the maturation and growth of North Korea’s long-range missile and nuclear arsenals. An important part of this may be linking the development of North Korea’s arsenal with Chinese support and ensuring that China is properly incentivized to eliminate or at least minimize Pyongyang’s access to the technology and other resources needed for this effort.36 Second, the United States should seek to improve its missile defense systems while bending the cost curve back toward its favor, if possible.37 Third, the United States and others can seek to engage North Korea diplomatically to try to stem the growth of its nuclear and missile arsenals.

The one scenario for which the United States might reasonably make provision for simultaneous action is a potential Russian attack on NATO member states in Eastern Europe. The reason is twofold. First, unlike any potential US adversary other than China, Russia does have a plausible way by which it could seize and hold the key territory of a US ally even in the face of US resistance. Second, Europe is one of the key regions of the world. The fundamental stake at issue for the United States is denying Russia or any other state hegemony over Europe.

NATO has, however, grown much larger than is necessary to achieve the goal of denying another state regional hegemony over Europe. Today it encompasses most of the European continent, including all of its large states except for Russia and Ukraine. Measured solely by membership, it boasts much more than a favorable regional balance of power in Europe vis-à-vis Russia, something closer to an overwhelming preponderance. It could be considerably smaller and still fulfill the fundamental task of denying another state hegemony over Europe. This means that, from an American point of view, NATO could lose members and still perform its core function.

Consequently, although the alliance has room to give in terms of its power margin over Russia, it also must consider the implications of withdrawing commitments from existing members.

If they can be defended under those conditions, it makes sense to keep the alliance in its current form. If they cannot, it would be more sensible to redraw NATO’s defense perimeter to be consistent with this standard.

It does not have the practical ability to seize and hold noncontiguous NATO territory in the face of allied opposition; Moscow could not plausibly project such power across a resistant Ukraine or the Black Sea to seize and hold, for instance, Romania or Bulgaria. Northeastern NATO is different. Here Russia directly borders the Baltic states and Poland, and Moscow enjoys a substantial local conventional military superiority over the Baltics and possibly at least parts of Poland.

Nuclear forces would therefore be key to any Russian theory of victory. Russia’s nuclear weapons, which rival those of the United States in size and sophistication and exceed them in variety and applicability to the battlefield, could enable Moscow to threaten to inflict costs on the alliance far out of proportion to the stakes at issue. But as discussed previously, the primary challenge to employing nuclear weapons for coercive leverage in situations of mutual vulnerability is that their use must appear plausibly sensible in light of the nuclear retaliation that can be expected to follow.

Once the alliance had broken the back of Russia’s forces in Eastern Europe and possibly Western Russia, what, Moscow might wonder, would stop them from going farther, perhaps exploiting Russia’s defeat by dictating political terms that would infringe on Russia’s own sovereignty, at least as Moscow understood it? NATO might deny any such aspirations, but would Moscow believe such protestations, especially given that war aims can so readily change during a conflict? To Russian decision-makers—and to those wondering how they might act—such a set of circumstances might appear to make deliberate nuclear escalation a less unattractive option for Russian decision-makers than conventional defeat and relying on the alliance’s clemency. In a sense, the strength of Russia’s strategy would lie in its weakness—its vulnerability if its forces defending its gains in the Baltics and Eastern Poland were to be ejected. Without this fundamental weakness, Russia’s threat to escalate would not, paradoxically, seem so credible.42

The critical element in Russia’s theory of victory that NATO can most readily redress is its local conventional force advantages, and specifically its ability to seize and hold allied territory. Assuming that nuclear brinkmanship contests are most likely to end in a halt in place, the crucial thing is to ensure that Moscow cannot seize and hold allied territory. This is the sine qua non of Russia’s theory of victory; without an ability to hold allied territory, Moscow’s escalate to terminate strategy would not gain it much.

Properly postured and readied ground and air forces as well as their key enablers are likely to be crucial for achieving this standard. Such forces need not be postured far forward or fixed in place like a new Maginot Line. Rather, a growing body of analysis suggests that they can be mobile and flexible—indeed, this will make them more resilient and survivable—but they need to be ready to move forward swiftly to contest Russian advances. Fortunately, the United States and NATO as a whole have made considerable progress in recent years in rectifying gaps in their defense posture in the East through more realistic and larger exercises, improved readiness, and posture enhancements.44

It also means that, should a war break out with Russia in Europe, the United States should be sure that it maintains the ability to conduct a denial defense of Taiwan or another ally against China in the Western Pacific. This is critical because Beijing might take advantage of the opportunity afforded by a war in Europe to advance toward regional hegemony by conducting attacks on one or more US allies in Asia. Because China is so much more formidable and its actions are so much more consequential, the United States must ensure that it can defeat China’s theory of victory even if Russia has acted first.

A contingency in which conflict with Russia broke out first, followed by war with China, thus presents the most serious challenge to US defense planning. This contingency is manageable, though, for one reason in particular: the NATO allies, as well as other states concerned by the potential for a Russian attack, such as Finland and Sweden, have the wherewithal to address it.45 In simplest terms, these countries are together overwhelmingly richer, larger, and stronger than Russia, and if adequately prepared, they could readily defeat a Russian assault into NATO with much less American involvement than they currently depend on. America’s NATO allies constitute almost fifteen times the GDP of Russia and spend four times what Moscow allocates to defense.

If Germany today provided even a fraction of the capability that a smaller West Germany provided for alliance defense in 1988, the Russian fait accompli strategy would be seriously dented, if not denied.

NATO Europe, which maintained a stout military during the Cold War, substantially demilitarized after the collapse of the Soviet Union because it faced no meaningful threat. Now, however, Russia poses a significant threat to the alliance in the East, while the United States must focus on its essential role as the external cornerstone balancer on China and the Indo-Pacific.

If the American people do not want to make the effort needed for an effective defense of their allies, they have two options: they can accept Chinese regional hegemony or tolerate (or even encourage) some proliferation of nuclear weapons to US allies and partners.

Whereas general proliferation might promote some level of stability, then, it would come at an extraordinarily high level of risk. And widespread proliferation might not prove as stabilizing as these scholars have suggested, because it might not be quite as potent a deterrent as its advocates think. It is true that nuclear weapons introduce a fundamentally different level of caution for any prospective attacker, but they do not wholly suspend the rules of logic and reason.

selective nuclear proliferation might, rather than supplant the anti-hegemonic coalition’s defense, strengthen it, in particular by making the binding strategy more effective. This could be especially relevant if China were able to attain commanding conventional military superiority over the coalition or important parts of it. In such an eventuality, a binding strategy confined to conventional forces might not suffice, since China might be able to overcome even a consolidated coalition conventional defense and pick apart its members.

Selective nuclear proliferation to such states as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and even Taiwan might help bridge the gap between regional conventional defeat and US willingness to employ its nuclear forces, especially at scale.

This is a book about war, but it is about fighting a war to prevent China or anyone else from dominating a key region of the world. It is not anti-Chinese but is written with very high respect for China and long personal and familial experience with it. All it asks of China is that it leave aside any pretensions to hegemony over Asia. China could proudly live in a world in which this strategy had succeeded; it would be one of the greatest nations of the world, and its preferences and views would command respect. It would not be able to dominate, but neither would the United States or anyone else be able to dominate it.