American military's "integrated deterrence" hard to achieve expected effects

Source
China Military Online
Editor
Wang Xinjuan
Time
2021-08-02 16:40:12

By Fang Xiaozhi

The US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin proposed the "integrated deterrence" strategy at the recent Global Emerging Technology Summit held by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), claiming that the US needs massive innovation and investment in emerging technologies like AI to maintain its technological superiority and cope with the so-called "major-country competition". Austin emphasized that the strategy will be the cornerstone for America’s defense policies and military strategies.

The "integrated deterrence" concept proposed by Austin focuses on the tech competition between major countries, with a special emphasis on high and new technologies like AI, electromagnetic spectrum, and unmanned systems. It means "working closely with our friends and partners" which are distributed across multiple domains, "using the right mix of technology, operational concepts, and capabilities—all woven together in a networked way", building a new distributed but highly connected force, and taking collective actions to some extent.

In recent years, the US has kept stressing security threats from major countries and has shifted its military strategic focus from counter terrorism to major-country competition. It claimed that although traditional deterrence, mainly nuclear deterrence, continues to work in the IT age, the deterrence of space, information and network becomes more prominent, and only by maintaining its military and technological advantage in those areas can it stand undefeated in the competition.

The US military also said its new strategy is aimed at uniting the US and its allies to help itself effectively tackle global challenges, threats from mass destruction weapons and various low-intensity conflicts.

It's clear that an important goal of Washington's "integrated deterrence" strategy is incorporating the allies into its deterrence system to create the expected effects, just like the so-called "value alliance" it is currently forging. Meanwhile, due to limited defense budget and other factors, the US military believed it is facing no small difficulties in modernizing its nuclear arsenal, purchasing advanced weapons, and developing high techs, and the current platforms and capabilities are no longer able to effectively meet its needs for strategic deterrence and military operations. That’s why it hopes to borrow the allies’ strengths to reinforce strategic deterrence.

In this connection, the "integrated deterrence" strategy is also an important step for the Biden administration to reshuffle its ally system to increase the scale and speed of the overall operational force through complementarity. In particular, by working closely with its European and Pacific allies in fields of high technology and cyberspace, the US will forge a joint combat system and turn its own strategic deterrence into common, reliable, and flexible deterrence. The US military also tries to address the many problems appeared in its unilateral military operations through multilateral operations.

It must be pointed out that to what extent America's new deterrence strategy will take effect remains uncertain. The country has spent so much money in the past years on endless anti-terror wars that it's impossible for it to obtain absolute control in multiple domains and super strong deterrence in the short term, which may throw relevant countries into collective anxiety and impair their confidence and input in the "integrated deterrence" strategy. Besides, the uneven capabilities and strengths of the allies can hardly meet America’s strategic requirements and will also compromise the deterrent effects expected in the strategy. All in all, the implementation of America's "integrated deterrence" strategy will face many challenges going forward.

(The author is from the College of International Studies, National University of Defense Technology)

 

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