Understanding Deterrence

Keith B. Payne

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317980292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

For decades, the rational actor model served as the preferred guide for U.S. deterrence policy. It has been a convenient and comforting guide because it requires little detailed knowledge of an opponent's unique decision-making process and yet typically provides confident generalizations about how deterrence works. The model tends to postulate common decision-making parameters across the globe to reach generalizations about how deterrence will function and the types of forces that will be "stabilizing" or "destabilizing." Yet a broad spectrum of unique factors can influence an opponent's perceptions and his calculations, and these are not easily captured by the rational actor model. The absence of uniformity means there can be very few deterrence generalizations generated by the use of the rational actor model that are applicable to the entire range of opponents.

Understanding Deterrence considers how factors such as psychology, history, religion, ideology, geography, political structure, culture, proliferation and geopolitics can shape a leadership's decision-making process, in ways that are specific and unique to each opponent. Understanding Deterrence demonstrates how using a multidisciplinary approach to deterrence analysis can better identify and assess factors that influence an opponent's decision-making process. This identification and assessment process can facilitate the tailoring of deterrence strategies to specific purposes and result in a higher likelihood of success than strategies guided by the generalizations about opponent decision-making typically contained in the rational actor model.

This book was published as a special issue of Comparative Strategy.

 

Introduction

 

During much of the Cold War, U.S. deterrence strategies and related strategic force acquisition measures of merit were influenced to a considerable extent by expectations of opponent decision making and behavior derived from a narrowly defined “rational actor” model. That model was largely borrowed from the field of economics. The model, as generally applied, presumed that a rational opponent would base its decision making and behavior on expected utility calculations governed by norms, goals, and values judged to be “rational” by standards familiar to the authors of that work, i.e., Western cultural standards. Opponents were expected conveniently to perceive, interpret, and respond to U.S. deterrence threats in a roughly predictable fashion because opponents’ expected utility calculations were presumed implicitly to reflect shared, familiar values, goals, and norms. This narrow definition of rationality and the presumption that it would apply to all rational opponents constituted a convenient starting point for the creation of U.S. deterrence strategies: it permitted U.S. planners to base those strategies on the expectation of an opponent whose decision making could be predicted with confidence because it would follow known norms, goals, and values.

The National Institute for Public Policy has undertaken a nine-volume study entitled Understanding Deterrence, which examines eight separate factors that can underlie opponent decision making in response to U.S. strategies of deterrence and may move opponent decision making beyond the convenient and comfortable boundaries of this narrow rational actor model. The ultimate goal of Understanding Deterrence is to enable U.S. policymakers to better anticipate the functioning of deterrence strategies and to strengthen the basis for the U.S. planning for and practice of deterrence. The study examines the potential significance of eight separate factors that may shape opponent decision making, but that typically are not included in deterrence considerations that are based largely or exclusively on traditional expectations of a familiar, “rational” opponent. These factors include the potential effects of cognitive processes (as revealed by the study of evolutionary psychology), ideology, religion, political structure, domestic politics, culture, proliferation, and geopolitics. These eight factors included in this study are not exhaustive; rather, the study is intended to examine how these particular factors, among many possible, may shape the functioning of deterrence and thus be important to our understanding of and planning for deterrence. If the potential importance of these types of factors for opponent decision making in response to U.S. deterrence strategies can be demonstrated, the value of understanding them and other factors that typically lie outside the narrow rational actor model will be apparent.

The hypothesis behind this study is that these types of factors—some common to decision makers and others unique to specific decision makers—can be salient to opponent decision making pertinent to deterrence, but typically are not captured by expectations based on the narrow rational actor model that has so dominated U.S. deterrence theory and policy. Expectations of foreign decision making are at the heart of deterrence planning; they determine how we anticipate strategies of deterrence will function and the requirements we identify for the purposes of deterrence. An underlying thesis of Understanding Deterrence is that expectations about enemy behavior pertinent to the success of U.S. deterrence planning can be made more accurate if they are informed by the careful examination of psychology, history, religion, ideology, political structure, culture, proliferation, and geopolitics, inter alia; U.S. deterrence strategies will be less vulnerable to error and surprise if they are informed by a multidisciplinary approach to understanding how a broad set of factors can contribute to opponent decision making in contexts of interest. More informed U.S. expectations of opponent decision making should help facilitate the tailoring of U.S. strategies of deterrence to specific opponents and for specific purposes.

This special issue of Comparative Strategy draws from this study. The initial article is adapted from a volume of Understanding Deterrence. It examines the rational actor model as generally applied to deterrence theory and policy in the United States and identifies the inadequacies of that approach to deterrence planning. This article also provides concise summaries, adapted from separate volumes of Understanding Deterrence on psychology, history, religion, ideology, political structure, culture, proliferation, and geopolitics, and a discussion of how these factors may affect opponents’ decision making. Finally, it outlines an alternative multidisciplinary approach that seeks to move beyond the confines of the narrow rational actor model. This initial article is followed by three articles, again adapted from Understanding Deterrence, that examine in detail three of the many possible factors that may contribute significantly to opponent decision making and thus to the success or failure of U.S. deterrence strategies—religion, human cognitive processes, and an opponent’s possession or aspiration for nuclear weapons. These three articles are by Shmuel Bar, Tom Scheber, and Kurt Guthe, respectively. Each of these three articles includes historical references to help illustrate the potential significance of these factors to the functioning of deterrence. A conclusion to be drawn from this work is that many factors can contribute to opponents’ unique calculations of costs and benefits. Thus, informed U.S. strategies of deterrence will seek to understand these factors and unique calculations. Doing so is the heart of “tailored deterrence.”

Keith B. Payne

Understanding Deterrence

KEITH B. PAYNE

During the Cold War, academic theorists and senior U.S. policy makers planned strategies of nuclear deterrence according to a particularly narrow application of the rational actor model. Their assumptions were that the Soviet leadership would make decisions pertinent to deterrence per an instrumental rationality, and that the parameters of that rational decision making would be bounded by a familiar and largely Western world-view with regard to perceptions, values, goals, and behavioral norms. The fundamental problem with this narrow application of the rational actor model is that it typically does not take into account a wide range of factors that can shape decision making decisively and vary widely across time, place, and opponent.

Section I.
Introduction: Deterrence and the Rational Actor Model

The Rational Actor Model and Procedural Rationality

During the Cold War, U.S. deterrence strategies and related strategic force acquisition measures of merit were predicated on specific but typically implicit expectations of opponent decision making and behavior. These expectations followed from the application of a narrowly defined “rational actor” model to the question of how opponents should be expected to make decisions and behave in response to U.S. deterrence strategies. U.S. policymakers and planners did not obviously use this model in a formal sense (although formal modeling can be seen in some academic writings on the subject), but it frequently was reflected in officials’ confident expectations that the Soviet leadership would respond reasonably and thus predictably to U.S. deterrence strategies, and also in their correspondingly confident predictions about how U.S. deterrence policy would function.¹

This rational actor model, as applied, postulated that an opponent’s decision making would follow from a predictable structured process deemed by U.S. observers to be rational and ultimately reasonable by Western cultural standards: the opponent was expected to ascertain its specific conditions and identify alternative courses of action; it then would estimate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action and choose the specific course expected to have the highest utility in serving its hierarchy of goals, i.e., the chosen alternative(s) would have the highest expected utility value. In short, the opponent’s response to U.S. deterrence threats would be determined logically by its drive to maximize value—with the calculation that some options would be more likely than others to serve that goal.² This decision-making process has been labeled “procedural rationality.”³ The confident expectation that the opponent’s decision making would follow this process is prevalent in the study of international relations,⁴ and nowhere more so than as the core assumption of U.S. deterrence theory and policy.⁵

As applied in U.S. deterrence theory and policy, the unstated assumption was and often remains that any truly “rational” opponent’s cost-benefit calculations of expected utility will be governed by a generally predictable set of perceptions, norms, goals, and values. Most Western authors of U.S. deterrence theory and policy essentially deemed their own set and hierarchy of perceptions, norms, goals, and values to be virtually universal—shared by all “rational” opponents. Foreign decision making and behavior in this regard was considered essentially predictable precisely because foreign leaders were expected to follow these known, familiar perceptions, norms, goals, and values, i.e., those that were deemed rational by Western observers. Any rational opponent was expected to perceive, interpret, and respond to U.S. deterrence threats in a reasonable and therefore predictable fashion because rational decision making was defined implicitly according to familiar Western perceptions, values, goals, and norms.

Only deviations from reasonable qua rational decision making would lead an opponent to truly surprising actions likely to upset U.S. deterrence planning.⁶ Thus, the rational actor model as applied to U.S. deterrence policy included the profoundly important assumption that universal characteristics defined as rational would set the boundaries for procedural rationality, and those characteristics were reflections of Western culture and thought. As a deterrence formula, this logic was that rational foreign leaders would be reasonable and thus predictably deterrable.

This presumption and expectation is illustrated today by the common assertion that only supposedly bizarre, “irrational” actors such as terrorists are likely to be “undeterrable,” while state leaders (including the leadership of North Korea) will ultimately prove deterrable because they are not “irrational.”⁷

Procedural Rationality: Convenient and Comforting

Acceptance of the rational actor model and the expectation that familiar, universal parameters would govern all rational perceptions and cost-benefit calculations—and thus decision making—constituted an extremely convenient starting point for planning U.S. deterrence strategies: it permitted U.S. planners to base deterrence strategies on the presumption of an opponent whose decision making could be understood easily and thus predicted with confidence because the opponent would make choices according to familiar perceptions, goals, values, and patterns of thought. U.S. observers, for example, could be confident in their expectations of Soviet responses to U.S. deterrence threats because Soviet decision making would be rational and thus motivated and constrained according to the same general parameters that governed their own understanding and decision making.

This convenient view of Soviet decision making rendered U.S. deterrence planning relatively easy: Soviet decision making would follow this definition of a rational process and thus Soviet leaders could be expected to respond predictably to U.S. deterrence threats. With only modest variation possible for rational actors, they would perceive what U.S. planners perceived; they would generally fear what U.S. planners would fear; they would calculate costs and protect values as would U.S. planners; and, ultimately they would respond to U.S. deterrence threats predictably—in the same ways that U.S. planners themselves would consider rational responses. The expectation of “rational” behavior as applied to U.S. deterrence theory and policy, in fact, was the expectation of decision making that would be considered reasonable by known Western standards.⁸

The rational actor model, so narrowly applied, has been a preferred guide for the basic parameters of U.S. strategic deterrence policy, in part because it requires so little detailed knowledge of an adversary in the areas of its unique decision calculus, and yet leads to confident generalizations about the functioning of deterrence. And, because Western values typically have been inserted as the basis for enemy cost-benefit calculations, the conclusions drawn from this model have been used to suggest the relative ease of successful deterrence: severe threats to societal targets are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Understanding Deterrence
• 3. God, Nations, and Deterrence: The Impact of Religion on Deterrence
• 4. Evolutionary Psychology, Cognitive Function, and Deterrence
• 5. Nuclear Weapons Acquisition and Deterrence
• Index