Ph D. in political science from Stanford before joining the most graduate school yet was at the Monterey Institute Center for Nonproliferation Studies another venue that many of us have been through. He was also a assistant profit University of Southern California. I did my undergrad just as the author looks most recently one on us our export policy is on track and so that's the older one. OK The first one that I actually found was the domestic society and international cooperation book The Bridge University Press which I first encountered when I was doing some work looking at De Mestre sponsor to see W. eliminate Jeff has published widely on most three or one of his most recent ones our most recent publications fourth wave of deterrence research. I'm very security policy from April of this year and I hope to hear you speak soon much of what was mentioned. That's a big basis for the talk. Thank you very much Dr Kozol. Really pleased to be here. You know I've had the great benefit of getting to spend time at two of the research centers in California. That work on the strategic and W M D issues. C sac at Stanford University where I was for many years and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies and I was thinking about you know where else in the country. Do you have these kinds of research centers that have the specialized focus and there's actually not very many places and so you know one of the remarkable things is that two of the other top centers in this area both in Georgia the one I here at Georgia Tech and the Center for Social train security at the I had tried to campus. So you were also very. You know be in this area and have access to this kind of cross disciplinary research expertise and for me it's a great honor and a pleasure to get a chance to actually come and see Georgia Tech in this center intend to meet all of you. So here's the title of my talk continuity and change in deterrence theory and practice. And that somewhat bland title was intended by me to sort of just give me an opportunity to do something that's going to be a little bit selective and idiosyncratic but to talk about some recent trends and some recent developments in deterrence that have been of interest to me and to try to summarize those and evaluate them for you guys a little bit since I've been given lots of toys I'll play with a lot of the evidence could be a little bit more on the change side of things than the continuity side but I wanted to include both of those in the title because one of the points I want to make is that you know it's not the case that everything has changed and it's a brand new day there is actually a lot of continuity worth noting and paying attention to because we'll see how I do here. All right so good. Powerpoint fashion I've tried to put up the agenda for the talk here it looks a lot longer than it is that I think I probably talk thirty thirty five minutes and then we'll have you know hopefully lots of time for discussion. Q. and A and so forth. But I want to start by kind of setting up some recent history in a series of events will be familiar to everybody that really Custer lot of doubt on and called into question the viability of deterrence and those were sort of the motivation for me to then get into researching deterrence for several years and thinking about it again after a long time away from working on the concept. And then I'll start out very conceptually talking about my understanding of what deterrence really means and how we can define it and really if there's sort of one take away to talk a good. The bottom line up front here at this point here. I think that there is in fact already a trend underway towards moving toward a broader conceptualization of what deterrence. And I agree with and have been trying to encourage and push that trend in my own small way to set that up. We'll kind of go back into the way back machine a little bit and very briefly I'll summarize some of the past deterrents research which then will set up the discussion of what some other people have started to call the fourth wave in deterrence and then. The next several different aspects of the fourth wave one thing which I think has been under appreciated is how the yardsticks for measuring the utility of deterrents have changed and that's very important to understanding where some of the more recent research is coming from. So we'll talk about the change context and then get into a series of very specific domains for deterrence dealing with W M D R D seeking rogue states dealing with non-state terrorists. Very briefly I'll talk about the cyber issue I haven't really studied that much. So that's going to be real short and with some thoughts about nuclear weapons then we can open it up. OK so I guess my list of challenges to deterrence is up to sort of five bullets now we go back about twenty years in time there's been a series of things that have happened in the real world. Each of which in different ways really was directed frontal challenge to deterrence and whether or not. Deterrence was sort of going to stay on the map is sort of a key strategy. You know so the first an obvious one was that the cold war ended right in the Cold War deterrence was king. That was the overriding strategic imperative as far as U.S. national defense strategy was concerned deterrence was what was keeping us safe from the Soviet Union keeping us safe from the threat of nuclear war and so forth. So at the end of the Cold War. You've got kind of a very brief period of optimism in which you know some people say well maybe we don't need to turns anymore maybe it's not even relevant anymore. And then that optimism kind of quickly flipped over to sort of extreme pessimism as you know a series of new threats emerged which seem to call into question the viability of deterrence is it even feasible anymore in the one nine hundred ninety S. the focus was primarily on the problem of W M D proliferation and particularly to the so-called rogue states where these countries who were just so non-rational in their thinking that the standard model of deterrence would not work anymore. I would say the biggest challenge to deterrence came from nine eleven. You have people who are willing to commit suicide in order to carry out attacks motivated by extreme religious beliefs that may have their focus more on heavenly reward than on earthly consequences. And so right after nine eleven there was a lot of hand-wringing and a lot of despair suggesting that deterrence just isn't going to work with this kind of threat anymore and that was followed up very soon after by a very dramatic U.S. policy response. The so-called Bush doctrine which at least in the rather Rick associate with the unveiling of the Bush doctrine made it sound as a matter of U.S. strategy the United States was going to use deterrence anymore deterrence is not reliable enough. We're going to use preemption we're not going to wait for people to strike us and strike back we're going to go out and take them out first and then in very recent years there's also been the whole notion of cyber war cyber attacks is yet another domain in which deterrence might not operate anymore. So lots and lots of reasons to discount and maybe dismiss deterrence and I guess people in academics are sort of contrarian and cranky crowd because the reaction of myself and quite a large number of other scholars in the field was to say wait a minute. You know is there. Really true that deterrence is just not relevant to today's world anymore do these threats really eliminate the value of deterrence and so somewhere in the time period between nine eleven and the start of the Iraq War I started revisiting the question of deterrence and doing some research in this area and one of the things I quickly discovered was that I was very much not alone there are lots and lots of other people producing lots of output and my efforts to sort of keep track of what other people were doing it was eventually the basis for the. Article that Dr Cosell mentioned in describing the fourth wave of deterrence research. You know and so a couple things came out from this work very very quickly. You know one is that in practice deterrence never went away for all of the rhetorical dismissing of deterrence it continued to be part of the U.S. strategic toolkit throughout the Bush years continues into the Obama administration deterrence is still an element of the national security strategy. But as I kind of highlighted in the previous slide. The key trend the key development that I think I see happening. Is that there is a general move toward broadening the way we think about deterrence understanding deterrence in a broader way and I use the word broadening very deliberately here it's not that we have rejected and dismissed past thinking and replaced it with something brand new Instead a lot of what was figured out and thought about during the Cold War continues to be valid and continues to influence theory and practice today. But the Cold War focus was so specific. It was so narrow that what's happening is that we're adding to that if it's in broadening the way we think about and practice determines. So what I want to do is go back to first principles here before we talk about specific applications and think about deterrence just as a concept what what just. I mean you know the debate that emerged after nine eleven was is deterrence still relevant anymore. And in a way the way you answer that question is going to find out how you define deterrence but it depends what you think deterrence by some definitions maybe it's not relevant anymore but by other definitions you know it still could be and I found it helpful to just go ahead. Well let me back up a second here. You know as I was tracking both U.S. strategy documents that were coming out after nine eleven and also tracking the academic literature. I thought that there was to me a lot of evidence of confusion about what deterrence is and I found this really ironic. You know probably most people in the room have at least some background in our theory right international relations is an academic discipline talk a block with really obscure jargon. You know if we were to go outside and do man or woman on the street interviews in downtown Atlanta and say you know quick what's an epidemic community. OK you can get a lot of black and puzzled looks and maybe some people hurrying away because they're not quite sure what loony bin. You just got a letter from but you wouldn't have that problem with the terms that's a word. Everybody knows but most people could offer up I think a pretty reasonable definition but what I think is really ironic about that is the very fact that deterrence was so familiar to people I think actually enabled all sorts of confusion to creep into the way that people were thinking about deterrence and one example which I've put up on the slide here. You could read things or or hear people give talks. Soon after nine eleven the to me contained and outright contradiction in them so you would hear somebody say in one sentence go. They can't be deterred for all the reasons we're familiar with the individual terrorists are willing to give up their lives are going to punish somebody who's already taken their own life. The groups lack a return address how are you going to know where to strike back at cetera. And then right after that they go into an analysis of how nine eleven happened well the reason nine eleven happened was that the U.S. basically invited it by being weak in its responses to terrorism in the past we didn't strike back at all after the U.S.S. Cole. We didn't strike back hard enough after the African embassy bombings. We didn't do enough after Blackhawk Down in Somalia and if only we had demonstrated our toughness sooner would have know not to mess with us. But that's deterrence people that you hit back hard. They learn not to hit you. Deterrence so sends one deterrence doesn't work against the size sentenced to we could have deterred them of all that we could deter them in the past like whoa OK folks. What's going on there right. You're saying. Completely contradictory things within two breaths of each other. So let's let's back up a little bit and try to figure out what deterrence really is what are we really talking about you know I think the problem was that deterrence has a cumulate an awful lot of baggage over time but it was so central in the Cold War that the word deterrence conjures up all sorts of imagery nuclear weapons massive retaliation mutual assured destruction and so you look you know are we going to engage in massive nuclear retaliation in response to terrorism. Probably not. And if that's the image you have in mind when you're talking deterrence then yes it makes sense to say deterrence. You know doesn't apply anymore but maybe deterrence is more than just nuclear weapons and I think even the academic literature has traditionally defined deterrence too narrowly the foil that I like to use here is the work of Patrick Morgan who has done excellent excellent work over the years on the concept of deterrence and in his work in the one nine hundred seventy S. one nine hundred eighty S. He argued for a definition of deterrence that was to the effect deterrence is using the threat of military retaliation to prevent military attacks. And implicit in that because we didn't think about non-state actors in those days was I think the additional phrase by states. And that definition has a lot of advantages from a social science point of view in terms of focusing research but I again personally think that it's too narrow a way to think about deterrence it builds in the ways and means of practicing deterrence into the definition of deterrence that we use military means through punishment through retaliation is the way of achieving deterrence. You know and so one way in which I set up the argument for moving to a broader definition of deterrence is to say well just think about how deterrence has been used. Historically in reality and in fact deterrence is a lot more widespread than just the military is a lot more widespread than just the Cold War nuclear weapons or even as a tool of statecraft you can go back at least to the Roman Empire and saying which is often attributed to the Romans you know if you want peace prepare for war that's essentially a theory of deterrence or if you're prepared for war. You don't have to fight it. The other side will be deterred. And of course deterrence exists in all sorts of domains outside of state craft deterrence is central to how we think about crime prevention. You know the locks on your doors bars on your windows police patrols threats of jail. Those are all meant to have to turn to facts. Anybody who's a parent in this room. You know the students I teach at the Naval Postgraduate School they're almost all parents I want to write teach deterrents the first analogy they reach for is dealing with their kids how to lie going to keep my kids from misbehaving what deterrent threat will work and of course there's examples all throughout the plant and animal kingdom as the ones on the road with the spikes on a porcupine are these are key predators away. OK So deterrence exists in a lot of places. How can we think about deterrence in a way that would capture all of those different domains in which you might encounter deterrence. So one way that I have found useful to thing. About this is just to go for complete tautology. Let's let's work from the end and then work back to the beginning. So imagine if you will that there was some actor that was thinking of doing something and they end up feeling deterred from doing it well anything which produced in that Act or the feeling of being deterred by definition that has to be a form of deterrence right the verb can't be defined differently from the noun. Right to deter deterrence. They have to have the talk at the same thing. So really anything that can produce a feeling of being deterred could potentially become used strategically as a form of deterrence and so for me. The goal the trick has been to say well how can we define this concept in a way that would fit the tautology that anything that creates deterrence is you know is a form of deterrence. You don't want to limit the concept that you don't want to turns to be equivalent to all of policy or you have to have some non determined alternatives or you can't use deterrence versus the alternative. So it has to be bounded in some way but I wanted to buy bounded in a way that still allowed it to be as broad and flexible as possible so for me there's really three key defining characteristics and I think all of these are going to be really familiar there's nothing unusual or weird here right. Deterrents in the classic understanding is generally used for preventive purposes. An actor is thinking about or might in the future. Think about doing something and you want to prevent them from taking action. This is the classic deterrence versus Kampala distinction. You know Compellent you're trying to stop somebody from doing something they've already started or to undo it were to start doing something new. You know and there's a whole other set of strategies that tried to initiate changes in behavior deterrence is distinctive in that it tries to prevent preserving the status quo trying to prevent a change in behavior. Second key characteristic is that deterrence works through through influencing the other side's decision making. And again this is a. Well established distinction in the literature referred to it as the distinction between coersion and brute force. Larry Friedman has done it's coercive strategies versus control strategies but sometimes an actor may choose to take control of events physically go and dominate and impose your will on the other side and really quite literally leave them no other choice when one country invades another country changes its government disarms its military might. That's imposing control that's not influence that's control. We leave the other side. No choice. Deterrence works. By leaving the ultimate choice up to the other side but trying to influence that choice and shape it to the outcome that is to deter or hoped to see this is one of the reasons why I think that deterrence. People often are very uncomfortable with deterrence. Because it is always the case that the ultimate final determinant of whether or not. Deterrence succeeds or fails. Is the decision of the other side about whether or not they're going to choose to be deterred right and they can choose not to be deterred. And the fact that the decision always rests with the other side is one of the reasons why a lot of strategists don't really love deterrence that much. Right. They'd rather just impose their will on the other side of leave them no choice but that's very costly and difficult and a lot of times deterrence is your best bet. And you're going to do that by trying to influence the other side's decision making. And the final defining characteristic is how that influence works. It's going to put negative incentives in the forefront in practice to make deterrence effective. You usually have to pair it with some type of positive incentive as well but the balance is very uneven right deterrence is primarily about bad things that are going to happen where we can also try to influence people through bribes side pavements and rewards that would be a strategy of positive incentives for all the good things that will happen but to me that's distinct from deterrence deterrence is about these are the bad things that are going to happen and. Classically we distinguish between deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial and I think both of those in their different ways fit that definition punishment is about bad consequences. You'll get away with what you want to do but. The punishment will make it not worth it. You know denial is about bad results you'll try to do something and you'll fail will frustrate you in your efforts to make it happen. And of course I think I'm sort of doing something here which is common which is talking about deterrence we always at least in the United States we assume that we are the deter and somebody else is the deter but of course these things will be working in reverse. There can be other people trying to deter the United States and all of this still applies. OK so that's you know my notion of how we could set up a concept in the definition of deterrence. That would let us broaden the concept while still bounding it in a reasonable way. Let's let's go back again as we do through a parallel thing now through sort of the academic literature. Although the concept of deterrence is really ancient kind of scholarly theorizing about deterrence is actually still pretty a pretty modern development and it really takes off for obvious reasons with the invention of the atomic bomb. So Robert Jervis in a widely cited article from about nine hundred seventy nine thousand nine hundred eighty at that point in time did a literature review in which he identified what he described as three previous waves of deterrence research. The first wave came right after World War two And it really didn't say anything much more than that. Hey. With the invention of nuclear weapons. The focus of strategy is going to have to shift from fighting and winning wars to deterring them in the first place. The second way one nine hundred fifty S. one nine hundred sixty S. gave us most of what we now think of as the conventional wisdom about deterrence and. Developed mostly by people who had economics game theory kind of background used rational actor models and came up with concepts like strategic stability the importance of second strike a lot of emphasis on how to make deterrent threats credible and the importance of credibility. All of that came out of the second wave. The third wave was what really started to introduce some skepticism some doubts about deterrence starts in the late one nine hundred sixty S. a lot of people see some of the key work being George and spokes one nine hundred seventy four book on deterrence in American foreign policy. Because of wave the flag. I was in Alex George a Ph D. student so this is sort of like returning to the room in some ways to work on deterrence for me the literature sort of got away from rational actor models through on findings and psychology organization theory other bodies of literature to identify limits on rationality that could produce deterrence failure and really I think there were two major claims that came out of the Third Wave. One claim was simply the observation that determines can fail even when all of the requirements of the second wave are met to deter does everything right. They do everything they can to establish a credible deterrent unfortunate turns out that at least in conventional deterrence cases even when you do everything right. Some percentage of the time deterrence will fail and you can't guarantee success and because of that the argument was made that we have to get away from having a stand alone theory of deterrence and instead embed deterrence theory in some larger theory of influence that would identify alternatives to deterrence What are your other influence strategies. So that you would know when to pick deterrence versus say anything from preventive war to positive incentives and reassurance and diplomacy and so forth and I'll just highlight you know if you see that below the lectern there that argument I think is still very. True and important and has not been superseded by what we've said sense. OK So we are now seeing what I believe can be designated a fourth wave in deterrence research and what I think is very funny. Here is that I thought I was being all insightful and original when I started writing this paper on the fourth wave and I discovered that there are two other people who simultaneously with me and each of us unknown to the other two also decided that there was a fourth wave of deterrence research underway a move all the find it differently. So you can decide which of the three descriptions of the fourth wave is correct. My focus has probably been the most so that the fourth wave was really about responding to the new policy problems on the agenda how do you determine rogue states how do you deter terrorism how do you deter in the cyber domain. Vesna who I think is a University of Georgia. Somewhere in this is the station that armory and a co-author have also described a fourth wave in which they just talk about essentially the statistical and game theory research that's been done since Jervis published one of the latest academic developments and then a mere loop of Vicki who's up at University of Toronto has what may be the winning definition is the broadest he sort of combined my sense of the policy stuff with also work that has introduced notions of social constructivism into the study of deterrence and said that the fourth wave is sort of the coming together of those two domains so he's probably going to get his definition accepted because sort of the most inclusive. But I will talk to my version of the fourth wave for the rest of the time here. One thing that's important in the first in the fourth wave which I think is. Been under appreciated even by some of the authors who are writing about deterrence Now how much the context for practicing deterrence has changed in the Cold War The goal really had to be one hundred percent perfection and I'm not as you will see when we get to the end I am not such an enthusiastic about deterrence that I think we had a foolproof deterrent in the cold war. But I certainly believe that desperate efforts were made to try to make sure it was foolproof. But in the end the reason for that is pretty obvious right once the US in the Soviet started shooting at each other at any level. You didn't know where the Escuela Torrie process would end. And so there was always some danger that the escalation would continue up to all out nuclear war which would in effect of destroyed the world right so the goal had to be one hundred percent because we didn't achieve one hundred percent you might have the apocalypse. OK So you know a lot of deterrence there actually isn't about deterrence it was about stability in the Cold War and how do you create a stable deterrent balance I think the context is very different right now we don't absolutely need one hundred percent perfection and I want things very carefully. I don't think deterrence failures are good. If we could achieve a hundred percent of faction that would be lovely. I would be that would be well worth doing. But the survival of the world is not at stake. National survival is not at stake. You know even in the single worst terrorist attack that has happened on a single day in world history. Three thousand people died a couple buildings were destroyed their amount of economic damage a lot of fear United States survival was not put at risk. Most people's personal survival was not put at risk. So to me this change is the goal of deterrence right you're not trying to make it perfect right. You're just trying to get some benefits at the margins. Can I get some leverage from deterrence right if I can deter some things. That's better than deterring nothing. And so that's actually the goal now right. The goal is to deter some things as well as we work through this you'll see that I don't think we're going to get to one hundred percent but you know the simple numerical example of it is this is technical as I'm going to get from Georgia Tech. I'm afraid the only numbers in the entire presentation you imagine some hypothetical period of time in which if the deterring side took no actions whatsoever. You would suffer ten terrorist attacks. You know. Now imagine that there were some series of deterrents steps you could take that were fifty percent effective right in the Cold War fifty percent effective deterrent will look awful but if you can go from suffering ten terrorist attacks over X. period of years suffering five. That's an improvement worth having the five attacks you still suffer going to be awful for some people but it's better than suffering ten. So the goal here is just to you know how much can we improve deterrence at the margins we're not going to get perfection but deterrence remains relevant because the context is different. A little deterrence is worth having. So let's talk about some specific scenarios in which people are talking about trying to implement deterrence and I'll start with the the armed rogue state scenario. This is really where you get the continuity. Right. The almost everybody who has looked at these debates has made the observation that this really familiar I don't think we've advanced much since the Cold War So any of you who are old enough to remember the Cold War be have studied the debates of that period we recognize there was throughout the whole Cold War period a vigorous debate in the United States and its Western allies about whether or not the Soviets thought about nuclear weapons thought about nuclear deterrence in the same way as the United States or not and there were vigorous proponents on both sides of this debate the skeptics basically argued that the Soviet Union had a completely different. Strategic culture the Soviet leaders had a completely different set of values. Maybe the most famous or infamous example of this was a an article by the Russian historian Richard Pipes and the magazine commentary in the late one nine hundred seventy S. you know why the Soviets think they could fight and win a nuclear war are the exact title something to that effect. You know the pipes said you know what does Soviet leaders care a bunch of Soviet citizens get killed in a nuclear retaliation right as long as the communist party survives and the Soviets think they came out on top in a nuclear war. They'll run the risk. Right. And so there was an argument that the they were completely different an alien in the United States was making the mistake of engaging in mere imaging and assuming something that would deter the United States or deter the Soviets and we had other people. The other side of that argument who completely disagreed right that the Soviets in fact were just as much subject to nuclear deterrence as the United States their leaders were sufficiently grounded in reality testing to understand what a nuclear war would mean they didn't want to suffer that deterrence would work for them just like us. Well if you look at the debates. You know for example the debates in the run up to the Iraq war where the debates today about should we try to take out Iran nuclear infrastructure before they cross the threshold to having a bomb there really really similar to those Cold War debates. Even some of the same individuals on both sides making the same arguments. You know. And so right the skeptics you're saying you know these leaders are not fully rational they're prone to this perception they're insulated from reality check. And people are afraid to tell them the truth. They have very unreasonable aggressive ambitions of their deterrence failures waiting to happen on the defenders argue no they're shrewd political calculators they're survivors. You know they know what it takes to stay in power and the defenders I think also of deterrence also have on their side. The historical evidence up to date tends to support them. If you look at every past iteration when these debates broke out. Stalin. He's brutal he's crazy. Khrushchev he bangs his shoe at the U.N. Cultural Revolution nuts. You know the two Kims who ruled North Korea Saddam before the Iraq War eight masseur in Egypt. Each of these people have been accused of being too crazy to extreme to be deterred. And yet you know knock on wood when it comes to use of capabilities in their possession chemical in some cases nuclear and others. None of them have used you know against anybody who could strike back in kind. So you know Egypt under Nasser probably used chemical weapons in Yemen but the Yemenis couldn't do anything about it. They fought a whole lot of wars against Israel and they kept those things you know safely in the storage shed so the empirical evidence to me tends to favor the defenders of deterrence. But I wouldn't push that point too far. There is what what people in logic call the inductive ist fallacy. Right. Just because something has happened a certain way in the past. There's no guarantee that it will continue to happen that way in the future investment or investment banker will say the same thing right past performance is no guarantee of future performance deterrence could fail. We've been lucky so far it's succeeded. That makes it possible to make a rough probability estimate when dealing with rogue states. The odds favor success of deterrence the historical evidence indicates that they will likely be deterrent successes but it's a probabilistic estimate it's not a lot like guarantee you can't guarantee one hundred percent success. So for me. You know this really gets into you know how you do policy analysis and I think one thing which causes a lot of skepticism about deterrence is that people don't always define what it is they're trying to deter. Right. One of the red lines you don't want people to cross. So for example if you follow the discussions about Iran. People will say well we've given Iran lots of warnings and they've ignored all the warnings so far you know they keep adding more centrifuges to enrich more uranium. They haven't been deterred from doing that that is correct. They have not been deterred from adding more centrifuges to enrich more uranium. Does that mean they will launch a nuclear weapon. Once they have it. That's an awfully big heap of logic to think that. So you know one of the things that has to be done is people have to define what are the real red lines what we're really concerned about We'd like Iran not to continue enriching more uranium. But we only care about if they don't get to the point where they can use a nuclear weapon or give it to Hezbollah or something like that. So the find that red line a little more I think we've given a red pointer here right. Make your red light really clear where it is. And focus your deterrent strategy around that understand that you're in a realm of probability. You can't guarantee the success of deterrence. So you have to do a comparison against the alternative policy options right if you've got a better option than deterrence then by all means use it but the problem is that most of the alternatives have their drawbacks and liability. You know so if you look at the U.S. experience in Iraq so far since we launched a preventive war there that was billed as having to do with preventing acquisition and use you know do you want to repeat that experience in Iran in or do you want to take your chances with deterrence I can see arguments both ways. But you have to compare the alternatives fairly against each other. What are the odds of success or failure of both or the cost. What are the risks. You know and so forth and I think deterrence will often emerge as a good choice. Not because deterrence is great but because the turn it has a really awful. So that's the rogue state problem. You know to me the much more interesting stuff has had to do with terrorism. This is where the new in. Evasive creative original thinking is coming right this is not your grandfather's you know Oldsmobile this is new. I'm going to summarize a whole ton of work here. The people who have argued for armor to believe that deterrence can be applied against terrorism have generally coalesced around. The RE approaches to doing this one approach is what some people have come to call indirect deterrence right in the idea here is OK the suicide terrorist who has hijacked an airplane and is piloting it towards a building that individual terrorists probably cannot be deterred at that point they're willing to die. There's nothing left. You can do but that individual suicide attacker is part of a larger system is part of a larger network. There's a whole background that has to be in place to enable that individual terrorist attack to happen. And there may be other people there may be other nodes in that network or individuals are not suicidal. You know don't want to be martyrs for the cause and those other actors can be deterred. So the idea here is to figure out the various third parties whose assistance is necessary to enable terrorism to attack and roll your deterrent threat back in time to deter those third party enablers and thereby indirectly by deterring them. You deter terrorism in this camp out of both non-state actors like for example. Wealthy individuals who make financial contributions to support terrorism but would be willing to give up their lives for dinner. Five of those fine I'm serious. Are you can threaten them but also state sponsors right maybe the states are happy to use Hamas or Hezbollah or something like that is their tool but they're not willing to put their own regime survival at risk to do it and when you come to. Terrorism especially nuclear terrorism this means putting a lot of emphasis on what's called nuclear forensics or chemical or biological forensics right. Sigur out because terrorists are going to build their own nuclear bomb from scratch. Somebody's going to have to give them the materials to do it. So if you can figure out who supplied the nuclear materials you can retaliate against the actor that supplied the nuclear materials but to do that you need to do some technical things to figure out you know whose plutonium or enriched uranium it was. So the second thing that has come about in thinking about to turn terrorism is is the return in a big way of deterrence by denial nuclear strategy in the Cold War was all about deterrence by punishment denial preventing successful attacks wasn't really feasible. You know we vested a little bit in missile defenses but it never reached a point where you could count on the missile defenses to intercept everything that was going to come in to not is not an option. So it's got to be punishment with terrorism punishment starts to look trickier but denial starts to look a whole lot more promising right. You know terrorists may be highly motivated to carry out their attacks but they do want those attacks to succeed. So if you can create a very strong impression in the minds of terrorists that their efforts will fail. You know they're not going to waste their resources on failed efforts. You know and that can be done at tactical operational or strategic levels everything from We've hardened the target and your guy won't get through with tactical level of denial. The harder one with the more important to a strategic to not which basically says we think you have some larger set of political objectives and we'll make sure you never achieve them. And then finally the most interesting and I don't know how to evaluate it. It's a very new idea and I I like it because it's interesting but I have some doubts about it is what's come to be called deterrence by counter-narrative or deterrence by dealing in the terminology hasn't totally settled yet. And this is mostly folk. Just again on possible terrorist use and I think the person who first came up with this idea was done. A long time analyst at sea. Although it's been picked up by a lot of other people since then but the basic idea here is you try to convince especially al Qaeda but other groups who might contemplate use of W M D. That if they ever did do that for an act of terrorism. They would suffer an enormous backlash from within their own constituency from within their own support base that they're hoping to cultivate so for Al Qaida. This would mean basically that the Muslim population of the world and leading Muslim clerics would condemn this attack and say it was wrong and would withdraw sympathy or support for Al Qaida that they had previously enjoyed. So if you could convince them that this would be seen as so beyond the pale so illegitimate that even their own sympathizers and supporters would condemn it and see support for them. Again you might change the calculus about the desirability of carrying out this kind of attack or not is this a totally untested idea. It's kind of nifty. I don't know if it would work or not I don't I don't see any costs to pursuing it. But one thing which is true of this is it's a great example of how the use of deterrence has been broadened there's no threat of military retaliation in this whatsoever right it's all about information discourse narrative right using strategic communication not military retaliation. I will say that at the time I finished writing the fourth wave article which summarize all the literature one of my conclusions was that there was pretty much consensus surprisingly there was consensus that deterrents had some viability against terrorism. If I was updating that article today I would say that's maybe not one hundred percent consensus I've been at some meetings and workshops with some of the people who came up with some of these ideas and. A lot of those people are thinking about practical implementation operationalizing these things they're having some second thoughts about how hard it's actually going to be to make these things work. So these are the ideas which have some potential people still aren't sure if it's really going to work or not. We have to wait and see. I don't want to say much about cyber because it's not a domain I've worked in but it's so in the news these days that I didn't feel up to talk about deterrence without saying something and I will say that anybody who knows about deterrents and knows about cyber space can within about thirty seconds I think figure all of the essential things that have been said about cyber deterrence so far. It's going to be hard. And it's going to be hard for at least two big problems. One is the attribution problem right who launched that malicious code very hard to tell and the other one is the probable problem of blowback or spillover effects right. You know suppose you launch a computer counter attack. Can you control where your own malicious code goes can you keep it from coming back and infecting your own computers in the computers of your friends and your allies and so forth. There's been a lot of publicity about this stock's net from memory the name correctly worm or virus or whatever it is that seems to have gotten into some of the equipment in the Iranian nuclear program but it didn't stay there and that's one of the problems right would you be willing to retaliate if it might come in. In fact your own computers. So given that is there any way to get cyber deterrence and I think there's at least three avenues that people will probably explore right one. This could be another domain for denial. Right. Let's just try to make our own stuff sufficiently hardened that it can't be attacked or create resilience in our society in our economy more generally so that if there is a cyber attack. We can handle it and it doesn't crash the whole economy. Play on this possibility of spillover a blowback effect educate others about that. So that they're afraid to launch cyber attacks in the first place. Think about retaliation that's not uncommon and right. You may attack me with cyber stuff but I'm going to attack you with financial sanctions. You know in retaliation. Very early days for working on cyber deterrence I've only seen stuff published on this in the last one to two years really cutting edge brand new stuff. It's been a while since I've worked on the nuclear domain so again I'm not going to say too much. There you know one of the purposes of my talk was to slice these things right separate deterrence from nuclear strategy and say look these are really two different things. That said you can't talk about nuclear weapons or nuclear strategy without talking about deterrence so you then diagram it right you have a great big circle for good turns the nuclear weapons are like a little or circle inside there. There's going to be at least three. I think perpetual questions are going to come up every time nuclear strategy and policy are discussed. You know one is how much are you trying to deter with nuclear weapons is the purpose of nuclear weapons only to deter nuclear attacks by other actors or do we want to stretch nuclear deterrence to cover other contingencies or not if you followed the debates that went into the nuclear posture review released earlier this year by the Obama administration. There was apparently an enormous internal debate in the drafting of the Posture Review and they sort of finesse that nuclear weapons are mostly almost entirely about to turn other nukes but maybe not so. Long running debates about whether United States needs to design and develop new nuclear weapons to make deterrence credible can we continue to exercise nuclear deterrence with an aging nuclear arsenal or do we need nifty new weapons with smaller yields and the ability to get hardened and deeply buried targets and so forth. Is it worth reopening the nuclear production infrastructure and then you know this army. At least notionally on the table these days since President Obama's speech in Prague last year some other statements advocating nuclear disarmament. You know what happens if you know Glory Be we actually get a nuclear global nuclear disarmament agreement. Can you still maintain deterrence against somebody who might want to break out in the future after that happens is a much more hypothetical question but I think if people really want to get serious about nuclear disarmament the question that's going to have to be tackled. So no I'm not giving any answers here but I can tell you that these these are going to be I think hardy perennials on the question list. I'm so let me wrap up. Here's my bottom line. I still remember an article from the one nine hundred eighty S. written by Joe not. In which they were responding to some moves towards greater unilateralism in U.S. policy under the Reagan administration and they wanted to defend the historical use of multilateralism in their article was titled to cheers for multilateralism I don't quite willing to give it the full three cheers so I was going to be a two thirds defense. If I had ever given one of my pieces under turns an equivalent title my title would have been one and a half years so I'm probably not even as enthusiastic about that right. I don't see any possibility that deterrence is going away. I think it's just it's an inbuilt feature of life. It's an inbuilt feature of strategy it's going to be with us. It's still relevant. It's still useful. We have to continue to study it and think about how to practice it and be creative and imaginative in getting the most possible use out of deterrence. That said you know I think deterrence has a lot of limitations. You know one problem is that when people focus too much on deterrence. You can become very wrapped up in turning every policy debate into an argument about how does this affect my credibility how does this affect my reputation and I think you can do a lot of. Damage to a country's foreign policy when every move gets filtered through how will this affect my reputation for being tough because sometimes you've got to make concessions or somebody's got to enter negotiations it's international interest to do that and getting too wrapped up in deterrence becomes a roadblock. To doing that and of course deterrence you know as I sort of emphasized can fail it's not foolproof. You know you always have to be thinking What are your alternatives you have a better alternative. But given that deterrence is still relevant is still necessary and is still going to be used. You know I think the way forward is to have as broad and flexible and understanding of deterrence as possible and to be creative in thinking about new ways of applying it that might improve the performance of determinants. So that I'm happy to take questions and I can't resist putting this fabulous photo of myself. On the slide here. One of things that we do at the Naval Postgraduate School is that we send out teams of faculty to deploying naval ships to give lectures to the ship's officers while they're at sea go into their new destination and I only did this once I did it on an aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt and one day when they weren't doing flight ops I got to jog on the flight back in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and then they were just the coolest thing along with that I will happily take questions. Absolutely. Sure sure. Adam has one way in the back where you're. You know we're all of this and let me guess I can answer I guess both empirically and normative like this. So try to tell you what is my sense of what the role of deterrence actually is today in U.S. policy that is about what should it be you know I have to confess that I'm actually more familiar with the strategy documents from the the previous administration the Bush administration because I wrote all of those in great detail for an article I wrote whereas I haven't studied the stuff from the Obama administration nearly as closely. I'm not working this issue anymore but the I think the general thing that has happened is that deterrence has gone from being the long pole in the tent from being the central strategic goal of defense strategy national security strategy in the cold war. To being one tool among many in the tool kit so deterrence in go away. We still have deterrence it still is officially listed in all of the key guidance documents is the goal of U.S. strategy but it's not the only goal anymore so you know in the Bush administration they sort of had to Terence's like one of four goals along with assurance of friends and allies dissuasion of weapons acquisition and being able to defeat people if it comes to war. I don't think the Obama folks have laid out their goals in quite that bullet point form but certainly if you listen to their speeches or read their documents you know determine. Continues to be one goal but so is you know promoting development promoting democracy I mean there's a whole set of strategies the U.S. pursues in which deterrence is just one element of a very multifaceted strategy for trying to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals and preserve U.S. defense because actually the normative answer is not any different. I think that's about right and I don't I don't think deterrents should be the be all and end all of strategy but I think there was this brief period after nine eleven when the skepticism got too far and people were overly dismissive of deterrence and now we're kind of rebalancing too I think more appropriate point as last you know what are your fears that there is this just about our resources to get into her sister's Texas right right right right resources second that has ever really turned green terrorists killed every member. Right right right right right. So there's that those are both great questions. The first I have a hard time to give you a good answer. No I mean this is definitely an experience being at a military school you know the students they're all operators right. And anytime we interface with people in D.O.D. or Stracke com or places like that. You know they're all operators or they want to know how to implement this in PROC to solve people conflict. Well how do we deter North Korea. I'm like I don't know that I have anything to tell you you know I'm not really academic in that sense I'm not a very conceptual plane so you know how do you make the budgeting decisions about how much to invest in deterrence versus alternatives. You're absolutely right to ask that question. That's a key policy question is when do you stop investing in one thing in order to shift resources somewhere else. All I was his I think that's the right question. I don't you know somebody in government will hopefully be answering that in a sensible way but it's not going to be me. The second point is that you make is a great point there is another one of the presses I studied with in graduate school that no American is named packin him is famous for the observation that US foreign policy makers tend to make this assumption that all good things go together right. If we promote democratic elections that must be good. Wait. Hamas just won. You know right. Is that so good after all and then you got was very much true about some of the strategic thinking of the Bush administration they made the argument for example that using military force preemptively or preventively might not be good just for eliminating the threat you directed against but they would also be good for deterrence. Right. If people knew that they were on notice and that they could get preempted they would start to behave better and when you invade one country you send a message to everybody else that they might be next. But I think that was probably not true right. If you understand the you know classic work of Thomas Shelagh and other people about what makes for effective and stable deterrence or not you know one of the things the shelling pointed out long ago was that deterrence threats work best when you can also convey a credible assurance that if the other side doesn't cross the red line. You know you won't implement the punishment on them and if people think that regime change is coming. Just because they're an odious regime. No matter what they do that probably has the tendency of undermining your deterrent throughout so you can't say I'm going to retaliate against you if you use nukes but I'm coming to get you no matter what at that point you undermined your deterrent strategy and the same thing you know could be true for certain you know uses of deterrence against terrorism and I completely agree with the example you gave I can imagine and this. This is one place where there's not consensus in the literature there's a huge debate among people who do terrorism and deterrents about whether targeting family members communities religious symbols. You know would be an effective deterrent or not right and I think you know the I think the point you make is right it probably would have some deterrent effect but it would have other second order and third order effects in terms of whipping up sympathy for the terrorist organization and hurting the image of United States that would outweigh any deterrent benefits you get so this is you know trade off. You know what the best thing I learned in all of graduate school life is full of trade offs where you can't have everything and if you want more of one thing you're often sacrificing something else very hard lesson for policymakers to take to heart those trade offs in the real world those trade offs have to be acknowledged and weighed there yes. Whatever else you know. Yes yes yes yes I'm going to go ahead and happily rely on people who are smarter and more famous than me for good reason and some things that Robert Jarvis has written in response to that question. I mean Jervas And again this is you know a lot of this literature was such a direct reaction to the whole Bush doctrine and debates about preemption and the Iraq war. You know in that time period Jervis wrote some things in which he said you know there's this really funny irony here in which U.S. officials talk about deterrence again in two different ways when it comes to the United States deterring other people although deterrence is totally unreliable it doesn't work anymore or it just can't be part of the tool kit when they talk to other people being able to deter the United States was like my god. All these pipsqueaks are getting the ability to deter us you know we can't let any of these weapons spread anymore will completely lose our freedom of action everywhere because we're so easily deterred. You know. Does it make sense to treat any it might be true but the different countries have different deterrents thresholds. You know in the United States we're wimps and lightweights and we're deterred by anything and other countries aren't deterred by anything at all. But that's not that doesn't strike me as being all that plausible. You know so countries have gained some ability to deter the United States from doing some things and absolutely the North Koreans are the world masters at it right now. You know and I guess for me that you know if they were going to question that keeps me up at night it would be sort of the question of do they have any estimate of what's the real red line. You know so the thing that happened earlier this year where they are. Seemingly torpedoed and sank a South Korean navy vessel and they got away with that in the end there was no real retaliation for that. OK So as they are readjusting their own estimates about how much they can push and how much they can get away with you know it's a real question about how hard it I think they can go. I'm not a North Korea specialist I don't have any insight into Kim Jong Il or his son. But I haven't seen anything in North Korea's behavior pattern so far that tells me that they think they can get away with absolutely anything they want to do by this world like the old fashioned salami tactics or taking a little slice a little slice a little slice to see how far they can go but can they get from here to here and think they can get away with it. I don't know I haven't seen anything that makes me think that that's probably true but I would worry about them probably more than anybody else because they have been the most reckless putting together. Yes. I mean that very well I actually I think that rhetoric on their part is I actually take that as being fairly legit because you know they were they were listed on the axis of evil. Right. We were pursuing the policy of regime change with enthusiasm. They certainly would be overwhelmed at the conventional level of the United States did decide to invade and try to impose regime change. So you know for that nuclear weapons aren't just about deterring nuclear attack they're also about to turn conventional invasions no doubt that was that was a good half. Salami whatever you call the whole thing but you know that's why that's why I you know have tried to put some emphasis on this thing here. You know what's the real red line and I think that ironically one of the difficulties that the United States has created for itself is that we have been literally at the same time that we were casting doubt on deterrence. We were also getting more ambitious about to turn three we were simultaneously say we were going to ask deterrence to do less and asked to do more at the same time raising all those weird irony paradoxes of deterrence in the twenty first century we don't really believe in deterrence. But while we're at it. We're not just going to tell countries that they should not invade their neighbors. We're not going to tell countries just that they shouldn't launch nuclear weapons at us. But we're not also going to tell countries they shouldn't acquire capabilities. We're going to tell countries that they shouldn't try to match us at the conventional level and those are both part of dissuasion we're going to tell countries that they shouldn't support terrorism right. There's a whole lot of things that were added to the list of things that the United States wants to deter we want to prevent you from doing that's going to prevent you from doing that and of course the more things you add to that list the harder your task becomes And I I think it's a whole lot harder to convince somebody not to acquire a weapon than it is to convince them not to use it because they can always say that they're acquiring it for defense and deterrent purposes of their own that this is legitimate. Why do we not have a right to this weapon but when they attack you. They've attacked you can't. You know that's a much clearer red line that they've crossed. So I agree you know North Korea getting nuclear weapons is not desirable in my book. I wish we could have been able to stop it if I suspect Iran is going to cross that threshold at some point or we're not going to be able to stop it either. I'm not convinced by that that the use the weapons and I think deterrence strategy would have been better served to be more focused on narrowly prioritizing what are the things that. The real real honest to God red lines. Yes I was wondering where you stood on the idea that this is and that is there are weapons weapons of mass destruction by this is something we really want here who are we're going to get hold of this therefore becomes more attractive. You know these I think you know these were you know we're right in a row now I think I agree. I think that's totally true. This is very much. Yeah US India nuclear deal that's a whole that's a talk for a whole whole another day. I think that was a terrible mistake. I understand the just thinking about it and I know enough about India to know that they really are going to make that the centerpiece of their relationship with United States and really be pissed off if we didn't follow through on that but I think in the nonproliferation realm boy did that open a Pandora's Box when you're playing those over your shoulders. So it turns out you're up to a point I think that's true. You know I mean one of things. I'm very interested in some of the other work I've done is the whole concept of learning and I got invited to write the concept paper keynote paper for a conference year and a half ago many close to two years ago on whether or not there had been nuclear learning in the India Pakistan relationship so it was me. Who knows almost nothing about South Asia and a bunch of people from India and Pakistan and American South Asia scholars but I I define what nuclear learning is in the rest of the response to talk about whether or not to tap into the answer is mostly no. By the way. But you know countries that acquire nuclear weapons if they have time to adjust to that status and if they are capable of going through a learning process the historical track record has been that they generally figure out that there's not a whole lot they can do with those weapons. There's the end of the day they really do with their nuclear weapons is keep other people from launching major attacks against them and other that they just want to keep quiet and not rattle the saber. You know to that extent it does it clarifies things and it probably makes the deterrence relationship easier but there's a whole lot of assumptions associate that you know a that they make the transition successfully without the instabilities of the transition time. Leading to a preventive attack or something. You know believe that they're capable of learning. You know and see that we just don't have some crazy squirrely accident that nobody could have foreseen that that wrecks the whole thing. So you know I'm very much a nuclear nonproliferation person I'm with Sagan and not with Walt's in the waltz Sagan debate but I you know I don't I don't have to discount everything that's on the Walt side of that debate and I think the political and optimists are right that the most likely outcome of nuclear proliferation is stable deterrence between nuclear dyads But again it's a probability claim not a not a law right and the consequences if you get the one that turns out bad are just so awful that rather not take the risk negative one. Well. You can come I chant for the question back to you more about what you're thinking like you're going to use as an excuse to grab a slice of pizza talk for a couple minutes not an hour period. Where the government asserted you or at the time your country's interests with this. Well you're right. Praise the Lord. But you're a good honest after three years the router's runs it round runs it's not as it was so cold that you know what you're in Europe hearing there from correlation with the cold National Fire terrorism to get the troops are going to be a buyer or likely right. But not the Western world market. I'm still around with great national security advisor for drugs for knowledge. Everything was actually working there someone had absolutely nothing to do with it and you think it's a great exam. Well you know in some ways. My response is to say that I'm not sure that. Deterrence is the key here right. I mean we we can do the bend. Diagram thing again. Right. You know prevention is the bigger circle and deterrence is one strategy for achieving preventive affects but just going to be vaccinated. You know that's prevention to right and so you know countering I mean how do you counter crazy rumors that spread. You know. The notion that the person who has sort of the better argument will always prevail I think is big decisively disproven by the experience of the twenty first century so far but you know if you can convince people who have bought into all of these weird conspiracy rumors about. You know what it's the hidden agenda behind the vaccinations that these were false and they should just vaccinate their babies. You know that's going to be a thousand times more effective than I think anything else you can do but you have the bio realm. You know I think in a way the fact that bio chem and new sometimes get lumped together in this W M D rubric you know this is sort of not a new point but it really makes them appear more similar than they are and I don't think the nuclear experience is going to be a very good one for thinking about determinants right it's going to be much more similar to the cyber or the terrorism then it is to the right I mean we're not going to release the private plague or anthrax on somebody because they attacked us West at this to absolute nonstarter. So any deterrent that's going to come. It's going to come from denial. It's going to come from counter-narrative. You know it's going to come from something that came to leverage there's some other technique and I totally agree with your point about not limiting deterrence to the classic tools of the National Security toolkit Public Health has a really big role of play here communications has a really big world to play here. All right let's do this you know was there you know last thing here. Well what then. I guess is that it is there. Or maybe there are security with or are these cases really realistic. There's a real life would be probably just really just you know. You know that you would just look at questions. I kind of have a I think inbuilt resistance to sort of simplistic frameworks for doing things I keep wanting to not get sucked into this one particular friend from very useful a lot of the U.S. strategy documents like to talk about what they call an EMS ways and means framework. You know one of the means you're going to use towards what ads and what what way are they going to be used to achieve the end and in you know calling for broadening the concept of deterrence. I was mostly thinking about the Ways and Means part of the right we can get to terms without always making it nuclear or even always making it military we can get deterrence through ways other than punishment and there's other techniques for achieving deterrent leverage but in the end side of that I'm not as enthusiastic about broadening that I think I think that U.S. strategy overloaded the agenda for the number of things we want to use deterrence for and so on that one specific part of thinking you know I want to broader concept but I want to apply to a smaller problem set in that it's still worth prioritizing the things you really want to deter no matter how careful you are about defining your redlines I think you're right there's always going to be somebody who comes up to them or crosses them which is for me one of the reasons to think about the list carefully and to leave it fairly short you will. What what does deterrence which is classic deterrence theory tell you to do when somebody crosses the red line tells you to implement the threat right there because otherwise you're deterrent credibility will be shot for everybody else to deal with in the future. So think about the cases where if somebody crossed that red line you think you really would want to implement the threat. Right. Somebody has you know unleashed sarin gas in the New York subway system God forbid I expect that the United States will respond to that. So that's worth making that a red line because once you know Madge in our head someday when something awful like that happens we're going to imagine yeah we're going to want to respond. OK You know you know North Korea kicks out the I.A.E.A. and UN seals you know it's plutonium reactor. Did we think that we would respond to that when they did it right if we didn't we should have defined it as a red line. You know so you pick the redlines based on what things you think you'll really respond to when they really happen in the real world and I don't want to overstate any of the points. There was a lot of discussion peaked in the Clinton years. But again never really went away about the value of calculated ambiguity and we're going to give just a certain amount uncertain about what will respond to and how will respond to leave the other side guessing on the assumption that they would be risk averse and they would want to take chances and you know because one disadvantage of defining your redlines really clearly is in the sense that you invite people to do things below that threshold right well we're not saying anything about that we would respond to doing X. just Y. so that people think you can get away with X. you know it's a it's a trade off again I'm not impressed with the values of calculated ambiguity I think it's better to communicate clearly to people and some red lines make sense because other people. I think can anticipate just as much as you can that yes you would respond when you attack me. I'm not going to take it sitting down but that yeah there are costs you know what I mean everything involves trade offs so there are costs to doing that to talk. I agree. I feel that I end up. Contradicting myself sometimes. And those potential contradictions right now broader concept of deterrence the doesn't limit. You know that said early book will of the culture review that came out in the joint mission one of the things that the Nuclear Posture Review did is that some of the additional distinctions between nuclear weapons and conventional web out of a new triad in which nuclear weapons conventionally armed strike weapons would pair. Just the often so leg of the triad along with defenses and structure a real mistake because I think that the nuclear taboo clear weapons as a category apart and distinct from all other types this is actually very important and worth maintaining but that does some what kind of grain of my argument for broadening to be more than just nuclear weapons. There's just you know there's more than one goal keep the policy well maintaining the sense different and and you should be taboo is important to them together with mention of weapons but thinking about deterrence. You know requires thinking about all the tools in your tool kit nuclear conventional nonmilitary maybe even not controlled by the state and all sorts of things can be used as means for achieving Pan's What's your intended but as to whether they're being used primarily for deterrence or for some other but I think the disadvantage or the difficulty with of a range of conventional weapons in most cases is. Deterrents isn't their primary mission merry mission but we were talking a breakfast this morning he's arrested in a reminded of vehicles as a potential deterrent or they might I can absolutely imagine that they could have to turn to facts and that's a very plausible idea but that's not the main reason that the U.S. military is buying them and deploying think and Taliban members because I'm often sieve and any deterrent effect you get are going to be a secondary things that are changing every second Street. That's right. Yes I did my best to constrain very important. They really exist and they really if it turns are any strategy. Let me have the thought which is to get to my tongue trips. Sorry let me think for a second here because I've got something else I want to say in response to that. Besides Yes that's right. That's I want to make a catty comment about the academic literature that's why I can't you know there's been this whole fairly robust research program about the advantages of democracy. You know the democracies are more likely to win the wars they fight the threats from democracies are more credible and so forth and the argument has been that because you have to go through this open and transparent parent political process to get buy in from all the components of your system in order to make threats. You know the threats should be that much more credible but I think that's nonsense. I mean I think I could. You actually capture the reality much more which is that other countries find it unbelievably hard to read U.S. signals because there's just so much noise because of the domestic political process. You know I don't you know politically a constitutional at all that this is a really desirable thing that the president has come to have so much unilateral ability to make decisions about use of force but I think that's the reality that if the president announces a threat involves use of the military. I think in practice these days the president can implement that threat in a matter WHAT you know also is happening in the political so I don't think it's actually desirable but I think it mitigates some of the problems that you're talking about and what you do you know to I mean it is that this is yet again another sort of trade off situation. You know is it is it more valuable to stigmatize and you legitimize biological weapons and create a legal and political a normative pressure for their elimination by upholding the B W C. You know words are more important to have an ability to strike back in kind as a potential deterrent and I'll say this and I said I said to you earlier which is I don't know. You know if the United States suffered a really nasty biological attack from somebody else. And we. Had to be Officer B. W. capable Would we use it in retaliation for a hard to predict that you know but in a way I find it almost easier to find it easier to imagine nuclear retaliation than the biological retaliation and it may just be that because we have more familiarity with thinking about that but there's also I think as destructive as nuclear weapons are there. Facts are still geographically circumscribed except for the fallout. But the harm from fallout is not it's not on the same level as the harm from a really lethal B. W. agent. You know if your beat up you were telling a Tory agent was something good infectious and contagious mixed up to one that can spread. You know you probably won't want to use it you just don't know where it's going to be bounded where the outbreak is going to go. So I think it would be there would my senses be more inhibitions on striking back in kind with B.W. even them with nuclear weapons which to me makes it not that valuable to have them to see them as a deterrent. Yes yes there is and you know I mean Richard Price has done. You know some work in this area the genealogy of that he just does seem to be right. The chemical weapons taboo. But you know I mean it's an interesting question. Theoretically Why do some weapons come to be seen as illegitimate. Whereas others are accepted as legitimate and it's hard to do a one to one correspondence between the physical effects of the weapons and what gets ruled and what gets ruled out. You know weapons that can have quite painful and horrific a factor still accepted is as OK in some cases where other weapons that don't seem to be particularly more awful. You know get thrown in the taboo category so it's interesting to explore the historical evolution of why some go down one path and some go down others and of course it can change over time right down. You know landmines cluster munitions things like that have been targeted very successfully by humanitarian you know human rights groups even more than disarmament groups as you know they should be taboo to run it mostly has to do with the indiscriminate I mean it has a lot of the indiscriminate effect that you can limit it from continuing to harm civilians long after the military contingency was over nuclear weapons are in an ambiguous category in that sense right on the one hand you know they're probably going to kill a hell of a lot of civilians put on the other hand after they've exploded. Most of the damage is done. Where is something like infectious be deadly wage it could linger and continue to cause you know harm long after that. There's Yeah I mean you know what is what I didn't talk about I mean there's a set of people who write about what's sometimes called self deterrence right. The problem with certain things is is that the deterred. It will be inhibited from doing certain things because of their own domestic political constraints moral beliefs larger fears of escalation or whatever as the normative discourse has evolved over time and it's really striking that happened very fast you look at how World War two was fought less than seventy years ago during the lifetime of you know our parents or grandparents and you look at least the way people think today and World War two was just like I just go bomb every city you can you know Dresden Tokyo Rose from a level All right. How many civilians die right. We don't think that way anymore. Right. There's a real concern with limiting collateral damage. You know with not doing broad counter society kind of punishment with really targeting leaderships political leadership military leadership key warfighting assets be focused on our targeting. You know and to the extent that that has become routine and internalized in the way American policy makers in planners think you know it becomes we become self deterred becomes more and more non-credible that we will use nuclear weapons as a retaliatory force that we will start a biological off of biological weapons program. You know and so in that sense have an alternative tools that can do the things we're still willing to do and do them reasonably a fact of life becomes really important. You know let's just rely less on the things that were less willing to use it was what is the work of Patrick Morgan on this because he's really the guy since I sort of used him as a sort of straw man to criticize earlier in my talk but maybe let me build him back up now. Patrick Morgan has in a couple of things he's done now introduced a term that he calls collective act or deterrence meaning deterrence practiced by collective actors like international organizations and he's I think he's really said everything that could kind of be said just by sort of a thoughtful person thinking it through right now. He talks about it. I think had a chapter on it in his book deterrence Now that was published in two thousand and three or so and then he updated that for a project that I was also part of the complex deterrence that T.V. Paul Morgan and my colleague Jim Worth's put together came out last year. It's hard to do for I think obvious reasons. You know any time you're you have a coalition right. You have to keep all the coalition partners on board and that tends to push you down towards the lowest common denominator solutions. You know the advantage he sees a couple of advantages to it which I think is why it's sort of on the table. You know one is that it has a legitimate the advantage. You know when you sort of act unilaterally. How do you differentiate legitimate concern for collective security from seeking unilateral advantage or just attacking somebody who is what a. International institution does it inherently has more legitimacy receives a multilateral consultative process and everybody agreed that this was morally right and that gives it some some credibility advantages because it will be harder for the target of that action to sort of complain about it is being sort of not legitimate. But those are probably still over you know outweighed by the difficulties of just making it work in the first place. I mean I guess has a practical matter it. It's I think it has become part of reality and so in that sense it's not you know is it a good idea or is it a bad idea. It's a real idea that's really happening. You know so the trick is to get to figure out. Given that this is really happening. What can be done to make it as effective and least costly as possible but a lot of it's GOOD have to do with those internal procedures for reaching agreement and maintaining a common front of you know inside the collective actor.