Emerging Technologies and International Stability

Todd S. Sechser, Neil Narang, Caitlin Talmadge, Todd S. Sechser, Neil Narang, Caitlin Talmadge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032017617
• eBook ISBN: 9781000485561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Technology has always played a central role in international politics; it shapes the ways states fight during wartime and compete during peacetime. Today, rapid advancements have contributed to a widespread sense that the world is again on the precipice of a new technological era.

Emerging technologies have inspired much speculative commentary, but academic scholarship can improve the discussion with disciplined theory-building and rigorous empirics. This book aims to contribute to the debate by exploring the role of technology – both military and non-military – in shaping international security. Specifically, the contributors to this edited volume aim to generate new theoretical insights into the relationship between technology and strategic stability, test them with sound empirical methods, and derive their implications for the coming technological age.

This book is very novel in its approach. It covers a wide range of technologies, both old and new, rather than emphasizing a single technology. Furthermore, this volume looks at how new technologies might affect the broader dynamics of the international system rather than limiting the focus to a stability. The contributions to this volume walk readers through the likely effects of emerging technologies at each phase of the conflict process. The chapters begin with competition in peacetime, move to deterrence and coercion, and then explore the dynamics of crises, the outbreak of conflict, and war escalation in an environment of emerging technologies.

The chapters in this book, except for the Introduction and the Conclusion, were originally published in the Journal of Strategic Studies.

Part I
Introduction

Emerging technologies and international stability

Todd S. Sechser, Neil Narang and Caitlin Talmadge

Technology has always played a central role in international politics. The invention of tanks, jet engines, ballistic missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons, and other technologies changed the way states competed in peacetime, maneuvered during crises, and fought during wartime. These technologies revolutionized the nature of power, shaped the way conflicts were fought and prevented, and changed the complexion of diplomacy and competition among major and minor powers alike.¹

Today, significant advancements in autonomous weapons, artificial intelligence, remote sensing, cyber technology, hypersonic vehicles, additive manufacturing, stealth, precision guidance, and other areas have contributed to a widespread sense that the world is again on the precipice of a new technological era. In Washington and other world capitals, these new technologies have sparked intense interest. U.S. Defense Department studies recently have examined the potential impact of ongoing developments in cyber warfare, electronic warfare, ballistic and cruise missiles, and autonomous systems, among other technologies.² Numerous think tank reports have delved into the long-term implications of these technologies as well.³

It is increasingly uncontroversial that emerging technologies have the potential to be “game-changers” in military and strategic affairs. A recent Center for a New American Security (CNAS) report sums up this technological consensus: “The next decade is likely to be the most disruptive since the early 1980s, when military planners in the Soviet Union began to worry openly about a ‘military-technical revolution’ emerging in the United States.”⁴

Many defense experts view these coming technological disruptions with deep concern. In particular, it is widely believed that the proliferation of new technologies poses a threat to the long-term foundations of U.S. military dominance. During his term as Secretary of Defense, for instance, former U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel warned that “potential adversaries have been modernizing their militaries, developing and proliferating disruptive capabilities across the spectrum of conflict. This represents a clear and growing challenge to our military power. I see no evidence that this trend will change.”⁵ Weaker powers, according to this view, will be able to harness new technologies to make sudden and dramatic improvements to their capabilities, ultimately challenging U.S. military superiority. Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work explained in a 2016 speech: “Almost all of the technology that is of importance in the future is coming from the commercial sector, and all of the technology base is global. So that means any competitor and any adversary is going to have access to these types of technologies, and they can quickly mimic even the most powerful state.”⁶

The U.S. Defense Department’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review likewise drew a worrisome conclusion about the ways in which emerging technologies might combine with other factors to threaten the U.S. military edge. “The security environment is rapidly shifting,” the report argued. “Our aging combat systems are increasingly vulnerable against adversaries who are modernizing—many of whom have invested in leap-ahead technologies—making our ability to develop and employ leading-edge technologies, systems and concepts even more urgent.… All of these factors diminish our present military advantage and complicate our ability to meet ambitious strategic objectives.”⁷

Nongovernmental analyses reach similarly pessimistic conclusions. For example, the aforementioned CNAS report argues that “the rise of new powers and the accelerating diffusion of advanced technology throughout the international system will pose significant challenges to U.S. technological dominance in military affairs.”⁸ In the same vein, Robert Martinage, former Acting Undersecretary of the Navy, warns that “dealing with emerging threats is increasingly difficult as traditional sources of U.S. military advantage are being undermined by the maturation and proliferation of disruptive technologies.”⁹ And a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies report argues that “while previous technological advantages gained by the United States have endured for significant periods, the pace of technological innovation, and the pace at which new technology diffuses across the world, means that most new technological advances will provide DoD with only a temporary advantage, assumed to be no more than five years.… The effect of these changes has been the gradual erosion of significant military advantages that the United States has long enjoyed.”¹⁰

Fears about the effects of emerging technologies have driven significant changes in U.S. defense planning, particularly the Obama administration’s so-called Third Offset Strategy, which aimed to harness advanced technologies to gain an edge over U.S. adversaries. As Work explained, “‘Offset’ means that we will never try to match our opponents or our competitors tank for tank, plane for plane, person for person.… So what we do is we seek ways in which to offset our potential adversary’s advantages. And this is exactly what we did do in the Cold War twice, because we were vastly outnumbered by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in conventional forces.”¹¹ More recently, the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy pointed to rapid technological change as one of the defining challenges of the future security environment.¹²

Reframing the discussion

Yet the history of technological revolutions counsels against alarmism. Extrapolating from current technological trends is problematic, both because technologies often do not live up to their promise, and because technologies often have countervailing or conditional effects that can temper their negative consequences. Thus, the fear that emerging technologies will necessarily cause sudden and spectacular changes to international politics should be treated with caution. There are at least three reasons to be circumspect.

First, very few technologies fundamentally reshape the dynamics of international conflict. The consensus view today is that new technologies are on the horizon, and that the fundamentals of strategy and warfare stand on the brink of inevitable dramatic transformation. From a historical perspective, some technologies do indeed have lasting effects on strategic relationships. The atomic weapon is perhaps the most obvious example of a technology that fundamentally altered the dynamics of strategic stability. By posing a risk that international confrontations could escalate into clashes that threaten a nation’s very survival, nuclear weapons likely have helped some armed conflicts remain limited, and prevented others altogether.

Yet, historically, most technological innovations have amounted to incremental advancements, and some have disappeared into irrelevance despite widespread hype about their promise. For example, the introduction of chemical weapons was widely expected to immediately change the nature of warfare and deterrence after the British army first used poison gas on the battlefield during World War I. Yet chemical weapons quickly turned out to be less practical, easier to counter, and less effective than conventional high explosives in inflicting damage and disrupting enemy operations.¹³ Some technologies have become important only after advancements in other areas allow them to reach their full potential: the invention of firearms, for example, had little effect on military power until armies finally began to develop effective tactics for employing them in combat. Other innovations are rendered quickly obsolete by other technological developments. The use of barbed wire and machine guns in World War I, for example, had an immediate impact on the war, inhibiting ground offensives and contributing to the war’s bloody stalemate. Yet before these and other defense-dominant innovations could inaugurate an era of stable deterrence in Europe, they were quickly countered by yet another emergent technology: armored tanks designed to traverse battlefields laden with barbed wire, craters, and machine gun nests. And even when technologies do have lasting strategic consequences, these consequences may take decades to emerge, as the invention of airplanes and tanks illustrates. In short, it is easy to exaggerate the strategic effects of nascent technologies.¹⁴

Second, while contemporary analyses of emerging technologies are often narrowly focused on whether they will benefit or harm particular countries, the effects of new technologies may in fact be systemic. Indeed, throughout history, new technologies have shaped not only the fortunes of individual nations, but the dynamics of the international system itself. Technological innovations have reshaped the ways in which both large and small powers compete with, deter, coerce, and fight one another. The invention of nuclear weapons, for example, is sometimes credited for transforming international relations, improving deterrence, and reducing the likelihood of war among the great powers.¹⁵ By contrast, the innovations of ballistic and cruise missiles may have contributed in some ways to instability, compressing crisis decision times and creating pressures to preempt by raising the possibility that one could become the victim of a rapid and disarming first strike.¹⁶ It therefore is important for any assessment of the effects of emerging technologies to look broadly, beyond their effects on America’s position in the global military hierarchy.

Third, even if today’s emerging technologies are poised to drive important changes in the international system, they are likely to have variegated and even contradictory effects. Technologies may be destabilizing under some conditions, but stabilizing in others. They may fuel competition in some arenas, while at the same time also giving states new ways to cooperate, as the case of nuclear weapons illustrates.¹⁷ Furthermore, other factors are likely to mediate the effects of new technologies on the international system, including geography, the distribution of material power, military strategy, domestic and organizational politics, and social and cultural variables, to name only a few.¹⁸ Consequently, the strategic effects of new technologies often defy simple classification. Indeed, more than 75 years after nuclear weapons emerged as a new technology, their consequences for stability continue to be debated.¹⁹

In short, although scholars and policy makers have devoted considerable attention to the narrower implications of emerging technologies for U.S. national security strategy, the more general systemic effects of these technologies have remained largely unexplored. While the United States undoubtedly faces daunting challenges in an era of artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons, and other new technologies, other states will also encounter challenges and opportunities of their own. But we have not yet grasped how individual national responses might aggregate to generate international outcomes. Adapting U.S. strategy for a new technological age requires that we first understand the systemic international effects of emerging technologies.

Shifting from strategy to strategic stability

This book considers the effects of emerging technologies – including non-weapons technologies – on the overall stability of the international system.²⁰ It aims to consider new technological developments in light of existing theoretical models of strategic stability. The following chapters focus on three main areas of stability:

1. Deterrence, coercion, and the outbreak of war. Because military technology shapes how states fight and win wars, it is also inextricably linked to the causes and prevention of conflict. Technologies that allow states to impose high costs on their adversaries are believed to strengthen deterrence, whereas technologies that permit surprise and deny information to the enemy are believed to undermine it.²¹ How will emerging technologies shape the overall likelihood of military conflict in the international system? Will emerging technologies contribute t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: COMPETITION AND COERCION IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL AGE
• PART III: CRISIS, CONFLICT, AND WAR
• PART IV: OFFENSE, DEFENSE, AND STABILITY
• PART V: LESSONS LEARNED AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
• Index