Bomber Deterrence Missions: Criteria to Evaluate Mission Effectiveness - Case Studies of North Korea in 2013, Russia's Ukraine Aggression in 2014, Six Criteria for Strategic Command Future Missions

This report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. Richard Lebow, in an article he wrote called Conventional or Nuclear Deterrence: Are the Lessons Transferable, reviewed a series of wars and crisis from 1898 to 1987. He concluded the major factor in determining the success of deterrence was not the size of the military or its capacity to fight. Instead, "it was the degree to which the challenger felt driven to attack" and a belief in the success of that attack. In order for deterrence to be successful, a defender must convince the aggressor not only will it be unsuccessful in its attack, but also the potential cost associated with its aggression far outweighs the chance it will succeed. Patrick Morgan's immediate deterrence example is the most effective way to persuade the enemy into believing an attack will be unsuccessful. A review of two case studies, North Korea in 2013 and Russia's aggression into Ukraine in 2014, reveals immediate deterrence is the most effective when six criteria are used. These include: 1) A punctuating event occurs, leading to a requirement to display deterrence. 2) A specific defender (the deterrer) and aggressor can be identified. 3) An established security connection exists with the defender and that connection has a defined security response towards aggression. 4) A sufficient amount of force is used in the deterrence effort. 5) The defender or the sum of the defender and its allies is militarily stronger than the aggressor. 6) The greater the effort put forth to deter action, the more effective the deterrent. US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) should use these six criteria when planning for and evaluating the effectiveness of future bomber deterrence missions.

This compilation includes a reproduction of the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

In order to evaluate whether deterrence works, one must understand what is meant by deterrence. Several definitions are found in political science writings, however, Patrick Morgan, one of the most respected authors of deterrence theory, defines it this way: "Deterrence is a matter of convincing someone not to do something by threatening him with harm if he does." In the international security arena this generally means convincing a nation not to attack by threatening retaliation so fierce, the cost would be too great for it to bear, and thus it will decide not to attack in the first place. This is different from a nation who never considers attacking. If this were the case, it would mean "deterrence works best with our friends, or pacifists!" According to Morgan, inherent within deterrence there must be the threat of an attack. When evaluating effective deterrence, the question becomes if a nation does not attack did deterrence actually work or was it never going to attack in the first place? One can easily determine when deterrence fails because a deterrence action was taken and yet the attack still occurred. An example of deterrence failing was the French built Maginot line constructed after WWI. The idea of the Maginot line was to slow down the advancing army enough to allow massive reinforcements to arrive, thus making any invasion of France a delayed and costly endeavor. However, in this case, deterrence failed and Germany still invaded. On the other hand, analyzing the effectiveness of successful deterrence cases or even determining which ones those are, is much more difficult. Patrick Morgan says to understand the effectiveness of deterrence, it should first be broken down into two different types. The first type is general deterrence.