This podcast is inspired by Dr. Bettina Renz’s 2016 Parameters article “Why Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power.” Dr. Renz revisits her original work and shares her insights on the current situation in Ukraine.

Keywords: 21st Century Warfare, Europe and Russia, War and Society, Russia, Ukraine

Click here to read the article.

Episode Transcript:

Stephanie Crider Host

Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

The guests in speaking order on this episode are:

(Guest 1: Bettina Renz)

Host

Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Bettina Renz, author of “Why Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power,” published in Parameters’ summer 2016 issue. Renz is professor of international security at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. She obtained her (master of arts or) MA and (master of science or) MSc in Russian studies at the University of Edinburgh and completed her PhD at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham.

Welcome, Dr. Renz. Thank you for sharing your time with us today. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s talk about your 2016 article “Why Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power.” In it, you note that this was about more than preparing for offensive action. Russia wants to be seen as a world power. Please lay the groundwork for our listeners and briefly walk us through your article.

Renz

I wrote this article in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea in 2014. And pretty much what I’m calling for in the article is that we need to view what is going on in Russia at all times really within more historical context—and, in particular, the annexation of Crimea and what happened afterwards—not as a sudden turnaround or an unexpected event. Because I think we encounter this problem quite often in Western assessments of Russia again and again.

I think we are again in danger of making the same mistakes. There’s a tendency to hyperbole when assessing Russian military capabilities and intentions. So, during the 1990s, there was very much the view in the West that Russia was finished as a global actor. It had a very weak conventional military. There was the assumption that Russia no longer had any ambitions in that respect, and it was only interested really in fighting small wars in its periphery and performed very badly there.

Against this background and sort of lack of attention paid to Russia, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 came as a surprise to many. And then, assessments of Russia and of the military capabilities and ambitions pretty much flipped to the other extreme almost overnight. So all of a sudden, there was the assumption that Russia pretty much now had almost surpassed the United States or the West when it comes to military capabilities; a lot of focus spent by analysts, and so on, on new technology that the Kremlin and (Vladimir) Putin were propagating, like the hypersonic weapons and so on; a lot of emphasis on hybrid warfare as a major danger to Russia and to its neighbors.

And now in 2022, of course, we have a clear escalation of the war in Ukraine that in fact has been going on since 2014. This is clearly a very offensive and aggressive military operation that has a very serious danger of escalation beyond Ukraine. But the focus seems to be, by many analysts now, on how poorly the Russian armed forces are doing operationally—even talking about the Russian military as a paper tiger and so on. So these assessments are not useful, and I deal with that in the article.

In the article, I show that conventional military power, in addition to nuclear deterrence of course, was actually always important to Russia. It was important for upholding the Soviet Union’s power during the Cold War. It was seen as important under (Boris) Yeltsin; even already in the 1993 military doctrine, very ambitious plans were laid out for conventional military capabilities that were only affordable at the time. And then, since 2000 also, President Putin immediately focused on conventional military power as important. And the military reforms that occurred in Russia then—especially, since 2008, military modernization—were conducted not only to fight wars more efficiently, but especially, really, to recreate a powerful military for Russia as a symbol of a great-power status. Because Russia—again, this is nothing recent—Russia always saw itself as a great power. Even during the 1990s where, when it came to military capabilities, it wasn’t really the case.

So there is a challenge for the West, and this is what I pose in the article as well: How do we deal with this? How do we deal with Russian great-power ambitions and its preparedness also to use military force?

The West and the United States and its allies and coalition partners have been used to being able to stand up to opponents, various dictators, and so on—intervene in various humanitarian situations—since the 1990s. But, of course, Russia is different from these opponents. And there’s only so much that we can do, that the West can do, about stopping or preventing Russia from using conventional military power because of the danger of nuclear escalation, as we also see now in the war in Ukraine.

Host

Here’s a quote from your piece: “Russia has used armed forces to pursue a variety of policy objectives throughout the post-Cold War years, including various ‘peace enforcement’ operations across the former Soviet region at the beginning of the late 1990s, the Chechen wars, the war with Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine started in 2014, and most recently in Syria.” And as you mentioned, the current situation—the continuation of that in Ukraine. Do you think Russia is just feeling emboldened as you predicted in your article, or is this something else?

Renz

Russia, of course, has been using military force to pursue various interests, objectives—and this is nothing new—since the early 1990s. And, again, this is something we have to bear in mind.

So what Russia was dealing with there, especially in its neighborhood, were, yeah, various security concerns: concerns about destabilization and so on, extremist movements. But also very importantly, status concerns were always important to Russia, especially regionally; so what Russia, the Kremlin, has long called or sees as its sphere of influence in the former Soviet region. And they became involved in various armed conflicts, civil wars, and so on in the early 1990s. But they kept forces, Russian military units, in all of these areas— Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan—that they were involved in as so-called “peacekeepers” since 1992.

And as such, really, then, the war in Ukraine is nothing new. Very much 2014, the annexation of Crimea, was also about regional status concerns first of all. So from the Kremlin point of view, and we see that in an extreme form now in 2022, they have been seeing an independent Ukraine that is pursuing its own independent foreign policy as a threat to Russian interests in this particular region in what Russia sees as its sphere of influence.

So, the war has been ongoing since 2014, but of course escalated significantly since February 2022 all over Ukraine. But also, we shouldn’t disregard, then, the international status concerns. These are also important. And what is important here, from the point of view of the Kremlin, is to show that Russia is a force to be reckoned with, to show this to the West and to the United States.

There has been a lot of talk over the last decade or more about multipolarity: the wish to, you know, have a multipolar system where Russia would play an important role. And the foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, was just again talking about this with regard to what is going on now in Ukraine. There’s a lot of discussion in Russia—and criticism, really—of what they have been seeing as a US monopoly on the use of force; a tendency to portray humanitarian interventions then by NATO, and so on, throughout the years, going back especially to the Kosovo war (the Kosovo conflict), Operation Allied Force, in 1999 as an excuse of the West to expand power; dismissing that this is about humanitarian issues and so on. And this of course has been going on for two decades after the Cold War already.

So the war in Ukraine now, in 2022, first of all is about Ukraine, about the Kremlin’s refusal to accept that Ukraine is a sovereign and independent state that can decide on its own politics internally and internationally. It’s about destroying Ukrainian national identity in the state. But it also is to show to the West—to the United States, in particular, and to NATO—that there are limitations on the use of force by the United States and by the West—more or less saying, well, we can do what we want in our sphere of influence, and you have to stand by, and you can’t do anything about it unless you want to risk nuclear war. And this is of course a very difficult situation.

Host

One of the implications you bring up is the possibility of a potential shift in the global power structure. Does that apply here? Or maybe I should be asking, how does that apply here?

Renz

Well, from the Kremlin’s point of view again, yes, this applies here—so, again, the Kremlin, the foreign minister, Lavrov, again just speaking about the dawn of a new multipolar era and so on. I see it at a little bit dif...

This podcast is based on a compendium that resulted from a conference on “Military Operations in an Urban Environment” cosponsored by the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in conjunction with the Kentucky Commission on Military Affairs, the U.S. Army War College, and the Association of the United States Army. At the time of the conference, the concept of homeland defense was emerging as an increasingly important mission for the U.S. military.

Click here to read the compendium.

​

Keywords: urban terrain, NATO, Ukraine, US Army, civil-military relations, Military Strategy and Policy, US military doctrine

Episode Transcript: Soldiers In Cities

Episode Transcript: Soldiers In Cities

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Host

Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Michael Desch, editor of Soldiers in Cities: Military Operations on Urban Terrain, published by the US Army War College in 2001. A graduate of Marquette University, he holds master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago.

I’m so glad you’re here, Michael. Thank you so much for taking time to go through this with me today.

Michael C. Desch

My pleasure.

Host

Military Operations on Urban Terrain: Please briefly walk us through the basic concepts of this monograph.

Desch

Military operations in cities is not a new topic. But the period of time in which we put together this collection of papers saw a renaissance of interest in the topic. It really was connected with a series of high-profile, urban operations that sort of reminded us all that operating in urban areas presented great challenges—challenges much greater and unique to those of military operations on other sorts of terrain.

You know, the big thing on the American side, of course, was the famous Battle of the Bakaara marketplace (Battle of Mogadishu), chronicled in Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down: (A Story of Modern War). But there was also the First Battle of Grozny, in which the Russian military tried to suppress the Chechen uprising and felt that they had to do so, in part, by assaulting the capital of Chechnya, Grozny. Neither of these operations was pretty. And neither of them, I think it’s safe to say, was fully satisfactory to the respective militaries involved.

And so military operations on urban terrain became a hot topic. There was a lot of doctrinal attention to it. But also, at least in the United States, there was an effort to build or improve the infrastructure for (military operations on urban terrain or) MOUT training at various Army combat training centers and other Army facilities. I was at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky, at the time, and one of the US Army facilities that was investing in a significant upgrade of its MOUT training facilities was the (US Army) Armor School at Fort Knox in Kentucky. Why Kentucky and why MOUT? That was the reason that we undertook this study.

Host

Let’s talk about military operations on urban terrain today. What did the monograph get right?

Desch

Well, military operations on urban terrain have been a pretty much consistent part of military operations in recent conflicts. So, most famous, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, were the operations in the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

Today, we’re seeing military operations in conjunction with the Russian special military operation in eastern Ukraine. And the Russian case is interesting both for instances in which the battle is taking place in urban areas, particularly in the southeast, in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, but also where, at least so far, they’re not being undertaken, which is the capital city of Kiev or Kyiv, as the Ukrainians call it.

And so, in looking back over the collection of papers in the volume, I’m pretty happy with a lot of things that we said. I think that they continue to read well. But what didn’t we get right; what would I rethink? I think is what you really want to know. I think there are at least three things that, on the basis of all that’s happened since then and reflecting on it, I would have done differently.

First of all, in our discussion of technology and urban military operations, we talked hardly at all about drones. And of course, drones have been the most important military innovation since 9/11 (the September 11 attacks). And I think, as we’re seeing in Ukraine, airborne, unmanned vehicles continue to be an important weapon system and one that could have a lot of direct effect on military operations in urban terrain. So why we talked so little about drones in terms of the technologies that might shape or affect MOUT operations, I can’t really say. But certainly, if we were rewriting that paper today, drones would have a bigger place.

Another time-bound element of the essays was military operations in American cities were an important, potential mission at the time the original volume came out and, sadly, are continuing to be a topic that has relevance, particularly to the National Guard. We talked about it very much in the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks in terms of the role of the US military and, particularly, the various state National Guard units in terms of (weapon of mass destruction or) WMD consequence management. And that, thankfully, has not been a major issue. And frankly, I don’t think that, with the standpoint of 20 years, that particular urban threat is as pressing as it once seemed to us.

Conversely, civil support to local authorities unfortunately is, it seems to me, a growth industry. And of course, in the racial justice protests and the associated violence after the George Floyd incident, you saw a lot of local law enforcement and other local civilian authorities somewhat overwhelmed and needing to call on the Guard and (US Army) Reserve for support. And I think that’s going to continue, for the foreseeable future, to be a big, domestic MOUT mission that we didn’t talk enough about.

I guess the third and final thing that I would have thought about differently with 20 years’ hindsight is we sort of had this distinction between different levels of intensity of urban military operations, from all-out combat to (counterinsurgency or) COIN to stability-and-support operations. And I still think, as points on a spectrum, they make sense. But we didn’t treat it enough, in the volume, as a spectrum—and particularly appreciate the fact that urban counterinsurgency can easily go to all-out combat. This is sort of the lesson of Fallujah. And it should have been the lesson, for example, of the Israeli incursion in Beirut in 1982.

So those are the three things sort of off the top of my head that I think if we didn’t get them right—but, certainly, the emphasis was not what I would give them today.

Host

You touched on this a little bit earlier when you were talking about Russia and Ukraine and how this applies to today’s world. Any final thoughts on how this piece of work is still relevant?

Desch

I think it’s relevant in two senses. Barry Posen from (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or) MIT wrote a really terrific wrap-up conclusion in the book that was characteristically incisive and thoughtful. And he talked about military operations in urban terrain in two particular contexts: the tactical context and the strategic context. And I think both of those elements are evident and will remain evident in terms of Russia’s special military operation in eastern Ukraine.

At the tactical level, Russian military forces are fighting inside—or trying to fight inside—a number of cities. And I think that the basic message of the book, that urban operations heavily favor the defender, is being borne out at the tactical level in spades. But the other thing that’s interesting is what Posen called the strategic level. And by that, I think he meant whether you decide to go into urban areas or not. And there, I think, we’re going to see this play out in Ukraine as well in two ways.

One is, in the northeast, Russia ran into pretty stiff resistance in Kharkiv and a couple of other towns close to the border. And after getting a bloody nose, Russian forces made the decision to bypass those urban areas. And the key question is: What were they thinking, aside from getting punched hard in the nose? And I think what they were thinking is there was some modification of the overall strategy in eastern Ukraine. I had thought then and still think now that the Russian military is pivoting toward a notion of trying to isolate and maybe reduce the Ukrainian forces that are engaged along the line of contact with the Donbas (Donets Basin) and Luhansk republics. So in a sense, the strategic decision was to avoid built-up areas and focus on a different strategy.

So that’s one strategic decision. The second is, I think that the Russians made a strategic decision not to go into Kiev immediately. And part of that was probably based on tactical concerns or considerations that it would have been a pretty tough fight. But I think it also may have reflected a particular theory of how they wanted to wage the war. You know, you always want to try to strike at the enemy center of gravity. But on the other hand, if the center of gravity is an urban a...

​This podcast analyzes the cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and explores the counter-arguments from Part 1 of this series.

Read the original article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/4/

Keywords: China, Taiwan, CCP, PRC, Broken Nest, USA

Episode Transcript:

Stephanie Crider Host

(Prerecorded Conversations on Strategy intro) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast’s guest and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Cliff

Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Roger Cliff. Dr. Cliff is a research professor of Indo-Pacific Affairs in the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College. His research focuses on China’s military strategy and capabilities and their implications for US strategy and policy. He’s previously worked for the Center for Naval Analyses, the Atlantic Council, the Project 2049 Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Host

The Parameters 2021-22 Winter Issue included an article titled, “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan.” Authors Dr. Jared M. McKinney and Dr. Peter Harris laid out an unconventional approach to the China-Taiwan conundrum. Shortly after the article was published, Parameters heard from Eric Chan, who disagreed with them on many fronts.

We’ve invited you here today, Roger, to provide some additional insight on the topic. Let’s jump right in and talk about “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan. What is the essence of Jared McKinney and Peter Harris’s article “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan?”

Cliff

So this article is an attempt to find an innovative solution to the Taiwan problem that has bedeviled the United States since 1950. In this particular case, the author’s goal is not to find a long-term, permanent solution of the problem, but simply to find a way to deter China from using force against Taiwan in the near term. Specifically, a way that doesn’t entail risking a military conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers. Their proposed solution is a strategy of deterrence by punishment, whereby even a successful conquest of Taiwan would result in unacceptable economic, political, and strategic costs for Beijing.

The premise of the article is that China’s military is now capable enough that it could conquer Taiwan, even if the United States intervened in Taiwan’s defense. The result, they argue, is that the long-standing US deterrence-by-denial strategy for deterring a Chinese use of force against Taiwan—in other words, by threating Beijing with the risk that a use of force against Taiwan would fail—is no longer credible. Unlike most strategies of deterrence by punishment, the strategy that McKinney and Harris proposed does not primarily rely on military attacks on China. Instead, the punishment comes in the form of imposing other costs on China for a successful use of force against Taiwan.

This has several elements. One is the United States selling to Taiwan weapon systems that will be most cost-effective and defending against a Chinese invasion. This would make a successful invasion of Taiwan more difficult and, therefore, more costly for China.

Related to this, they also recommend that Taiwan’s leaders prepare the island to fight a protracted insurgency, even after Taiwan’s conventional military forces have been defeated. The most important element of their strategy, however, consists of the United States and Taiwan laying plans for what they call “a targeted, scorched-earth strategy” that would render Taiwan not just unattractive, if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain.

According to McKinney and Harris, this could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which they say is the most important computer chipmaker in the world. They would also encourage Taiwan to develop the means to target the mainland’s own microchip industry and by preparing to evacuate to the United States highly skilled Taiwanese working in its semiconductor industry. McKinney and Harris say that a punishment strategy should also include economic sanctions on China by the United States and its major allies, such as Japan. And possibly giving a green light to Japan, South Korea, and Australia to develop their own nuclear weapons.

At the same time as threatening increased cost to China for using force against Taiwan, the authors also advocate decreasing the cost to Beijing of not using force against Taiwan. Specifically, they recommend that Washington reassure Beijing that the United States will not seek to promote Taiwan’s independence.

Host

We got some pretty strong pushback from Eric Chan. In fact, he wrote a reply to this article. Can you break that down for our listeners and explain the essence of Chan’s response to the article?

Cliff

In his response to McKinney and Harris’s article, Eric Chan of the US Air Force makes three main critiques. First, he questions their assertion that attempting to maintain deterrence by denial would result in an arms race between the United States and China, pointing out that China has already been engaged in a rapid buildup of its military capabilities for the past quarter century, even while the United States has been distracted by the war on terror and its counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second, Chan finds McKinney and Harris’s recommendations for reducing the cost to Beijing of not using force against Taiwan to be unconvincing. In particular, he disagrees with their claim that Taiwan is moving farther away from mainland China, pointing out that polling in Taiwan has repeatedly found that the vast majority of people there favor a continuation of Taiwan’s current ambiguous status.

Therefore, Chan implies, there is essentially no cost to Beijing for not using force against Taiwan as Taiwan is not moving farther in the direction of independence. Chan also points out that the reassurances that McKinney and Harris recommend that the United States offer to Beijing are in fact things that the US is already doing.

Chan’s third critique is that the cost of China of the punishments that McKinney and Harris recommend compared to the costs that Beijing would already have to bear as a result of fighting a war of conquest over Taiwan are insufficient to provide any additional deterrent value.

For example, he points out that the economic cost to China of destroying the Taiwanese and Chinese semiconductor industries would be minor compared to the enormous economic damage that any cross-strait war would inevitably cause to China. Similarly, he argues that the prospect of Taiwan fighting a protracted counterinsurgency campaign would be of little deterrent to a Chinese government that has decades of experience brutally crushing popular resistance.

After critiquing this strategy recommended by McKinney and Harris, Chan asserts that the only way of deterring China is to demonstrate an ability to destroy a Chinese invasion force while systematically grinding the rest of China’s military to dust.

Host

Thanks for laying the groundwork for this conversation. So what I would like to hear from you is how would you analyze these arguments?

Cliff

Yeah, so to better understand both the McKinney and Harris article and the Chan critique of it, I think it’s useful to examine the decision-making model that is implicit in McKinney and Harris’s argument. Their analysis treats Beijing as a unitary, rational actor that is faced with a choice between two alternatives. It can either use force against Taiwan or it can continue not to. If it chooses not to use force, then Taiwan will continue in its current, unresolved state.

In addition, however, McKinney and Harris argued that, over time, the likelihood of Taiwan voluntarily agreeing to unification with the mainland is diminishing—and, therefore, that the cost of Beijing of not using force against Taiwan is, in fact, gradually increasing over time.

On the other hand, if Beijing chooses to use force against Taiwan, then there’s two possible outcomes. It could, of course, fail, in which case Beijing would be worse off than before because not only would Taiwan remain independent, but China would also have incurred the human and material costs of fighting and losing a war.

If the use of force succeeded, however, then they assume Beijing would be better off because the benefits of conquering Taiwan would outweigh the costs of the war fought to achieve that. They argue that, up until now, Beijing has been deterred from using force against Taiwan because of the likelihood that the United States would intervene on Taiwan’s side and defeat China’s efforts. Thus, from Beijing’s point of view, the expected costs of using force against Taiwan have exceeded the costs of not using force.

Since they do not believe it is feasible to restore the military balance in the favor of the United States and Taiwan so that a Chinese use of force against Taiwan would likely fail, they now propose a strategy to raise the cost of even a successful use of force against Taiwan, while reducing the co...

Deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan without recklessly threatening a great-power war is both possible and necessary through a tailored deterrence package that goes beyond either fighting over Taiwan or abandoning it. This podcast explores cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and offers counter-arguments as well.

Read the original article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/4/

Keywords: Broken Nest, China, Taiwan, PRC, CCP

Episode Transcript:

Stephanie Crider Host

Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

The guests in speaking order on this episode are:

(Guest 1 Jared M. McKinney)

(Guest 2 Peter Harris)

(Guest 3 Eric Chan)

Host

Today we welcome Dr. Jared McKinney and Dr. Peter Harris, authors of “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan,” featured in Parameters Winter 2021–22 issue. We are also pleased to welcome Mr. Eric Chan.

Dr. McKinney is the chair of the Department of Strategy and Security Studies at the eSchool of Graduate Professional Military Education—Air University, and reviews editor of the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Dr. Harris is associate professor of political science at Colorado State University and Indo-Pacific perspectives editor of the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Mr. Chan is the senior Korea/China/Taiwan strategist with the Headquarters (Department of the) Air Force’s Checkmate Directorate and a reviewer for the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. He also serves as an adjunct fellow with the Global Taiwan Institute. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Conversations on Strategy.

Let’s talk about the China and Taiwan conundrum. Jared and Peter, your article, “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan,” proposes an unconventional approach to China’s relationship with Taiwan. The article garnered worldwide attention, including from the (Chinese Communist Party or) CCP, which condemned the strategy. Jared, Peter, please give us a brief recap of your article.

McKinney

Thanks for having us here today, Stephanie. The Taiwan conundrum is how to have great-power peace without abandoning Taiwan to Chinese domination and how to preserve Taiwan’s independence without a great-power war. Is there a way out of this conundrum? Peter and I have argued that there is, and we’ve termed this approach “the broken nest.” Chinese leaders, even pathological ones like Mao, have long understood that grand strategy is all about balancing different vital interests. We took some inspiration for the strategy from a 1975 meeting Henry Kissinger had with Mao Zedong, in which Taiwan was discussed. Kissinger asked Mao when Taiwan would return to the mainland. Mao said, “In 100 years.” Kissinger replied, “It won’t take 100 years. Much less,” and then Mao then responded, “It’s better for it to be in your hands, and if you were to send it back to me now, I would not want it because it is not wantable. There’s a huge bunch of counterrevolutionaries there.” This is the bottom line of the broken-nest strategy, to make Taiwan, given the (People’s Republic of China’s or) PRC’s broader interests, “unwantable.” The phrase “broken nest” comes from a Chinese proverb that asks, “Beneath a broken nest, how can there be any whole eggs?” We designed this approach according to what political scientists call “deterrence by punishment” and the literature on tailored deterrence, which asks analysts to try to match techniques to a specific adversary. We proposed a tailored deterrence package composed of four elements. We argued, first, that Taiwan should invest more money in weapons designed to make the island costlier to invade. Second, that Taiwan should threaten China with a preplanned resistance campaign to demonstrate to the mainland that subduing Taiwan would not be cheap, quick, or easy. Third, we called for a targeted scorched earth strategy, whereby Taiwan’s semiconductor industry would be destroyed in the event of a Chinese invasion. And, finally, we proposed that regional actors such as Japan and Australia threaten Beijing with massive military buildups in the event of force being used against Taiwan. While none of these elements can stand on their own, together, we suggest that they’re sufficient to make Taiwan “unwantable.” The bottom line is that we think this could be the beginning of a solution, at least for now, to the Taiwan conundrum—and, although one might proffer this or that objection, to our knowledge, there is no more realistic or credible option in the current marketplace of ideas. But if there’s a solid alternative, we want to hear about it, and so we’re looking forward to the conversation today.

Host

Wonderful, thank you. Shortly after we published your article, Parameters heard from Eric Chan from the US Air Force’s Checkmate Directorate, who took issue with some of the main points in the “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan” article. What’s your perspective, Eric?

Chan

Hello Stephanie, thank you for having me. This is a very good discussion, and I’d like to thank the authors for making a very interesting point and a lot of very interesting ideas about how to do a tailored deterrence theory. However, the main issue that I have with this tailored theory is that it’s really designed to deter a pre-Xi Chinese Communist Party. This doesn’t really cover the aggressiveness of Xi Jinping and his ideological bent in terms of finishing what he calls a Taiwan problem. Because there’s such a focus on the ideological portion of this conflict, many of the proposed solutions to this deterrence theory fails against this newly aggressive China. For instance, scorched earth, especially targeting things like (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or) TSMC, fails primarily because the economic portion is not as important to Xi as it was to party leaders from a generation ago. And, moreover, this imposes significant political costs on Taiwan, on any Taiwanese political leadership that would advocate for such a strategy. And I think if we have learned any lessons from Afghanistan, that is that we shouldn’t be proposing military solutions that are disconnected from the political realities. So, when you talk about deterrence against Xi’s China, because deterring an aggressive power is really hard to do, especially when they’re bent on ideological confrontation with the United States, that means the US really has no other choice than to be able to threaten a great-power war against China, and especially because we’re looking at the party entering what we can deem as the most dangerous decade. This really means that the US needs to be able to propose realistic methods of deterrence that aren’t really limited by either economic deterrence or even by Taiwan being able to advocate for a bloody insurgency campaign. Economic deterrence alone isn’t enough to properly deter the party, nor is insurgency campaign raged by Taiwan; that would not be sufficient to deter the Chinese Communist Party. Instead, the US must be able to credibly threaten a massive, great-power war. Taiwan needs to be able to pose the tactical and operational problems to the party that makes the US threats even more credible. So, unfortunately, despite the very clever ways that we’re trying to tailor deterrence here, it is likely insufficient to properly deter the party of today.

Host

Thank you for your thoughts on that. Jared and Peter, back to you for a brief response before we dig a little bit deeper into this topic.

Harris

Thanks Stephanie, and thanks to you, Eric, for engaging with our argument. You make some very good points—points that we agree with, some points that we have honest disagreements about, and then some points that we look forward to exploring with you further today. The first thing I want to clarify, a point of agreement between the three of us, is that nothing in our article should suggest that we absolve Beijing of responsibility, the heightening tensions across the strait. We agree that China has become more aggressive. We agree that China has become more assertive, and it’s the root cause of the problem or the urgency that the problem now has. I’m in print elsewhere as arguing that China is responsible for worsening the security environment, for empowering hawks here in the United States, and that Beijing should take steps to reassure Taipei and Washington that it has no plans to invade. We take China’s increase in power and its increase in assertiveness as context where a challenge to be overcome. The second point I’d like to clarify is that we do not argue that China wants Taiwan so that it can control the island’s semiconductor industry. From your written response, I took that that’s what you understood our argument to be, and that’s been a common misperception in some of the other commentary that we’ve seen since our article’s publication. But we do not argue that China wants Taiwan to control its semiconductor industry. Rather, our argument is that China has become dependent on Taiwan’s semiconductors to a nontrivial degree, so that Beijing can now be threatened with the withholding of those technologies. To be clear, we are open to debate about how costly it would be to China to lose access to TSMC chips, but we need to see some logic and evidence to conv...