Deterring without Dominance: Discouraging Chinese Adventurism under Austerity

Between punishment and denial: Uncertainty, flexibility, and U.S. military strategy toward China

“…The end-game, rather, would be to prevent Chinese primacy, through some form of regional balance of power (Posen, 2014;Ross, 2013). Militarily, this means the United States would focus on leveraging its regional alliances to deny the Chinese an advantageous position in the Western Pacific (Biddle & Oelrich, 2016;Hammes, 2012;Heginbotham & Heim, 2015). Denial can also be informed by pragmatic considerations.…”

“…5 In turn, those concepts aimed at denying the Chinese a dominant position in the Western Pacific rest on the assumption that the United States should come to terms with the harsh reality of Chinese A2/AD capabilities, and accept it will be unable to maintain the level of military access and movement it has traditionally enjoyed in the area. Instead, it should develop more realistic military-strategic objectives, aimed not at maintaining unhindered access and freedom of movement to/within the Western Pacific, but rather at denying China those very goods (Biddle & Oelrich, 2016;Hammes, 2012;Heginbotham & Heim, 2015) (Table 1).…”

“…Deterrence by denial is about how the United States should exercise A2/AD itself, with a view to enforcing a distant blockade against China (Heginbotham & Heim, 2015;Mirski, 2013). One prominent example of deterrence by denial is Offshore Control, a concept that seeks to minimize the probability of escalation to a nuclear conflict with China (Hammes, 2012).…”

“…How does the high uncertainty around the nature and scale of the Chinese military challenge in the Western Pacific affect U.S. deterrence strategy? Over the last decade, scholars and experts have hotly debated whether it would be more appropriate for the United States to leverage its global escalation dominance and thus exercise deterrence by punishment, or instead take the Chinese on their own terms and seek to deny them a militarily advantageous position in the Western Pacific (see, for example, Beckley, 2017;Biddle & Oelrich, 2016;Hammes, 2012;Heginbotham & Heim, 2015;Khong, 2013Khong, / 2014Montgomery, 2014;Thornberry & Krepinevich Jr, 2016). Notwithstanding possible synergies, punishment and denial present important tradeoffs in relation to the capabilities required to operationalize them, the role they attribute to U.S. regional allies, and the importance they attach to the problem of escalation.…”

“…Punishment prioritizes long range air and sea strike capabilities that can directly strike Chinese territory (Harris Jr., 2017, p. 15). In turn, denial emphasizes the value of a disperse and resilient regional military footprint, or that of short-and medium-range missiles in Japan, Taiwan, or the Philippines to complicate China's military movement within the first island chain (Beckley, 2017;Heginbotham & Heim, 2015;Hunzeker & Lanoszka, 2018;Thomas, 2013). The latter become more important as the demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty opens the door for deploying US "theater range" missiles in the Western Pacific, and offset Chinese advantages in the missile domain (Cohn, Walton, Lemon, & Yoshihara, 2019).…”