The Problem of the Strategic Defender

Wars of rapid decision

The strategic task of the incumbent world powers is to deter and defeat attempts by revisionist powers to revise the international order in their favor with the use of force. This means that incumbent powers are necessarily strategic defenders; they have no choice but to cede the strategic initiative to the challenger. This introduces an important and irredeemable structural asymmetry between the challenger and the defender. The challenger enjoys the first mover’s advantage.

Historically, there was only one decisive solution to the problem of the strategic defender. That was to wage preventive war. This is the traditional solution. It is at the heart of Gilpin’s theory of hegemonic war. It is also central to Dale Copeland’s dynamic differentials theory, and Organski’s power transition theory of war. In fact, this goes all the war back to Thucydides. “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear that caused in Sparta.”

The traditional solution to the problem of the strategic defense ceased to be attractive in the modern era because great power wars became stupendously destructive and costly. The first evidence of the new destructiveness was the US Civil War, which showed for the first time what the new industrial era weapons were capable of—and the scale of slaughter they admitted in a struggle between peers. And that was well before the range and accuracy of firearms matured at the turn of the century.

In the Russo-Japanese of 1904-1905, the sheer volume and accuracy of shells, combined with the new smokeless powder turned open battlefields into killing fields. The Japanese sank the entire Russian fleet at Tsushima with the first use of radio in battle. At the Battle of Mukden, the casualties on both sides with staggering, with total casualties topping 160,000. The conflict, particularly the brutal Siege of Port Arthur, saw extensive use of trenches, barbed wire, and fortified positions by both sides, providing a chilling preview of the static, attritional warfare that would come to define the Western Front a decade later.

In fact, before this real-life demonstration, the coming industrial-scale slaughters in great power wars was anticipated and much talked about already at the turn of the century. Ivan Bloch, a Russian railroad baron and military analyst, had predicted in The Future of War (1900) that future conflicts between great powers would result in an unprecedented, prolonged stalemate characterized by immense casualties due to advancements in firepower. He argued that the defender’s advantageous were so overwhelming that offensive maneuvers would be suicidal, leading to a war of attrition where victory would go not to the strongest army, but to the nation with the greatest economic endurance, ultimately culminating in societal collapse of the losing nation rather than a decision on the battlefield.

Bloch argued that war—real, great power war—was going to be so destructive and costly that no one in their right minds would think of waging one. Yet, as Paul Schroeder compellingly argued, the European great powers had ‘placed a bomb in southeastern Europe.’ The refusal of the sea powers to countenance any durable solution or compromise that would address Austria-Hungary’s vulnerabilities left Vienna with only desperate options. The encirclement of the German powers by the Entente meant that any conflagration on the Eastern question would almost certainly end in a general European war. The tightening alliance system and the lack of a viable safety valve for the mounting tensions meant that a general European war was a question of not if but when. In the event, it was triggered by the explosive force of Serbian ultranationalism—the Black Hand was an arm of Serbian intelligence.

On the killing fields of the Western Front, the full horror of modern great power war was revealed. Here, miles of mud, barbed wire, and craters became the tomb of millions, as ceaseless artillery bombardments and machine-gun fire shredded entire generations in battles like the Somme and Verdun. Nations were stretched to their absolute breaking point, mobilizing every man, woman, and resource in a total war that consumed entire economies and irrevocably transformed societies under the relentless strain of unprecedented attrition.

Contemporaries described this nightmare as ‘total war.’ There was no appetite for another round among the incumbent powers who had emerged victorious but bloodied. In Germany, however, defeat would soon lead to radicalization. The idea gained currency that the war had not been lost by the armed forces. Rather, the diagnosis in the German armed forces was that the home front had collapsed, in part due to economic weapon of the sea powers. The Germans eventually became convinced that their inherent resource constraints could only be lifted through conquest and colonization of the East, providing the agricultural land and raw materials that would be required in a future war against the sea powers.

The Germans were not alone. All powers came to see that waging total war required secure access to raw materials and immense industrial strength. The Japanese army set out to turn Manchuria into a vast defense industrial base, a source of vital resources immune to blockade by the incumbent sea powers. The Soviets too converged on a policy of autarky and forced-paced industrialization, ruthlessly developing their heavy industry and agricultural collectivization in preparation for what they fully expected would be a great war waged by the combined capitalist West against Socialism.

The policy of autarchy became even more attractive with the collapse of global capitalism in the early-1930s. But autarchy wasn’t enough. In the language of the military men of the time, ‘totalitarian war’ required ‘totalitarian control.’ Maiolo documented that the immense demands of preparing for and waging modern industrial warfare necessitated an unprecedented level of state intervention and control over every aspect of national life.

In all anti-systemic powers, the specter of totalitarian war led to the formation of ‘super-agencies’ – vast, centralized bureaucracies like Germany’s Four Year Plan Office, Japan’s Cabinet Planning Board, and the Soviet Union’s Gosplan– through which planners sought total control over the labor force, raw materials, and industries. Military and bureaucratic elites were gripped by ‘planomania’. All-outers could be found in Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union arguing for the total subordination of the nation to the military-strategic imperative. In the Soviet Union, Tukhachevsky demanded a 300-division army. Even Stalin balked at the sheer scale of industrial capacity required to equip an army of such stupendous scale.

Unlike the World War, the midcentury struggle was not unintended. The Germans planned their war of aggression. This gave them the strategic initiative. In fact, Max Werner described how the idea of ‘time table war’ gripped the German military mind in the feverish years of the mid-1930s.

The highest possible development of war potential is time-table war. This means the preparation of war to be launched suddenly on a day previously decided on. The aggressor country therefore accumulates the greatest possible reserves raw materials, material for the outbreak of war, and arranges for the mass production of war materials and for the war mobilisation of its industry as a whole. Thanks to its preparations for a definite time it will have a tremendous material advantage over its opponent both in quality and quantity. The aggressor country can begin with the mass production of the latest and best weapons of war, and it will begin hostilities not only with much more powerful armaments than its enemy, but also with a war industry already fully mobilised and ready to supply its war needs from the very beginning. The victim of its aggression, on the other hand, will have fewer armaments to begin with, and some time will elapse before it can organise its own war industry to supply its needs. From the very outset the victim will receive the full force of a blow from the maximum armaments of the enemy supported by the full capacity of his industry, which will already be mobilised for war purposes.

Max Werner, The Military Strength of the Powers (1939), p. 16-18.

In effect, time-table war is the application of the military principle of force concentration to the time axis. It represents the ultimate expression of the aggressor’s first-mover advantage, allowing him to launch his entire economic and military potential at a predetermined moment of his choosing, timed precisely to the peak of military preparedness.

Germany’s strategy for a totalitarian war of aggression extended well beyond time-table war. Werner vividly describes how many military men became enthusiastic about a ‘strategy of lightning decision.’ The chief aim of a war of rapid decision was to achieve strategic surprise and deliver an overwhelming knockout blow at the very onset of military operations. This implied a complete shift from defensive considerations. German strategy, Werner wrote in 1939, ‘does not even reckon with the possibility that Germany will be attacked, and no provisions have been made for the possibility of defence or even of counter-attack.’

To be sure, not everyone was convinced. But crucially, Panzer leader Guderian was a true believer. He apparently defied Hitler when he rushed to cross the Meuse and make a dash for the channel to cut the Anglo-French position in half and thereby deliver a knockout blow to what was considered Germany’s most powerful military adversary. This successful application further solidified the belief in rapid, decisive operations. Consequently, Operation Barbarossa, the planned attack on the Soviet Union, was explicitly conceived and planned as a war of rapid decision, intended to achieve a swift victory before the vast Soviet Union could fully mobilize its potential, thus avoiding the resource-intensive, prolonged conflict that Germany sought to avert based on the lessons of World War I.

Germany, as a committed aggressor, exploited its first mover advantage in another way. The great achievement of Hitler’s foreign policy was solve Germany’s two front problem with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. This non-aggression treaty neutralized Germany’s eastern flank, freeing it to concentrate its full military might against the Western Allies. The logic of the policy of alliance with Japan was the same: the Japanese threat from Manchuria pinned down forty Soviet divisions in the East and dissuaded Stalin from intervening in the struggle in the West.

The problem of the strategic defender did not go away after the World War. Indeed, until the Soviet capitulation, the problem of the defense of Europe, where the US was the strategic defender, was paramount. The Red Army was widely considered the most formidable land army, posing an immense conventional threat to Western Europe. In response, NATO and the United States initially grappled with this imbalance with the doctrine of massive retaliation, where any significant Soviet aggression, conventional or nuclear, would trigger a full-scale nuclear response against the Soviet homeland.

However, as the Soviet Union developed its own robust nuclear arsenal, the credibility of massive retaliation for lesser provocations diminished. This led to the emergence of doctrines advocating limited war, a concept that envisioned conflicts, possibly even those involving the discriminate use of tactical nuclear weapons, below the threshold of all-out strategic nuclear exchange. Finally, as the Cold War progressed and the dangers of any nuclear use became overwhelmingly clear, Western strategists increasingly emphasized building a stronger conventional defense to deter and, if necessary, defeat a Soviet conventional invasion, thereby raising the nuclear threshold and aiming to avoid nuclear war altogether.

John Mearsheimer argued in his 1980 doctoral dissertation that conventional deterrence is a function not just of force posture but also of military-strategic possibilities. Deterrence is most likely to succeed, he argued, when a potential attacker believes that a war of rapid decision is unlikely to succeed. He assessed that conventional deterrence was reasonably robust in Europe during the 1980s.

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These historical patterns offer crucial insights when considering a future great power conflict involving China, especially given the overwhelming fact that the Chinese Communist Party is explicitly committed to reunification with Taiwan, peacefully if possible, forcibly if not. The United States is the incumbent power in Asia. It is perhaps the clearest instance of a strategic defender. China therefore enjoys all the advantages of the first mover and the US all the disadvantages of the strategic defender.

If and when China decides to absorb Taiwan by force or kick the US out of Asia, we should expect China to exploit this initiative in several ways.

We can anticipate that China will attempt to achieve its objectives through a meticulously planned ‘time-table war,’ where its full military and economic potential is unleashed at a predetermined moment of its choosing. The strategic goal will be to achieve a swift, overwhelming knockout blow at the very outset of hostilities, designed to present a fait accompli to the United States.

The CCP’s long-term military modernization efforts are geared towards reaching a specific peak of preparedness for the Taiwan scenario. This allows them to choose precisely when to initiate conflict, timing their move to coincide with a perceived window of vulnerability for their adversaries – whether due to their own temporary qualitative or quantitative advantage in the arms race, or external distractions facing the incumbent powers. If Chinese decision-makers perceived that they had the upper hand in the arms race during a brief window, they would very much like to seize that window of opportunity.

China’s authoritarian system is well-suited for waging ‘totalitarian war.’ China has perhaps the most formidable state capacity in the world. Executive level decision-making in China is hyper-competent, certainly relative to the West and especially the contemporary United States. When they set out to do something, they get it done. And the state reaches very deep into everyday life. As Tooze put it recently, ‘China takes social engineering literally!’ This enables China to direct its stupendous human capital, world-dominating industrial capacity, and rapidly rising technological prowess towards military-strategic goals with unparalleled efficiency and focus, allowing for rapid and comprehensive mobilization akin to the ‘super-agencies’ and ‘planomania’ seen in Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. When China goes to war, we can be certain it’s be fully prepared.

Just as Germany used the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its alliance with Japan to mitigate a two-front problem and pin down Soviet divisions, China may employ opportunistic foreign policy maneuvers to isolate potential intervenors, deter third-party involvement, or divert US attention. If somehow Japan could be neutralized via intimidation or seduction, that would be a real coup for China. South Korea is almost already neutralized—there is no appetite in Seoul for intervening in a Taiwan scenario. These scenarios of losing fighting allies in Asia is what is worrying Bridge Colby these days.

The ideal scenario for China would be to entrap the US in a capabilities-consuming major war far away from the Western Pacific. If the US got into a war with Iran, for instance, that would be a significant window of opportunity for China. When the US expended a THAAD battery defending Israeli cities in the 12 Day War, no doubt at least some toasted in Chinese military circles. We have previously argued that Iran will now give up its policy of self-reliance and seek a strategic alliance with China. The Chinese have a great interest in Iranian strength as part of this ‘strategy of distraction.’ The same is true even more so with respect to Russia. The worse Russo-American relations get, the better for China. The best case scenario for China is escalation in Ukraine and a protracted proxy war that consumes American strength.

It is the thesis of this analyst that China’s exploitation of the first-mover advantage would involve a carefully orchestrated, rapid, and overwhelming assault, executed at a moment of its choosing to capitalize on its maximum military potential and strategic surprise. The enduring challenge for the strategic defender is to deny this ‘strategy of rapid decision.’ A strategic objective that will become increasingly difficult as the Chinese military buildup proceeds.

The great question for US China policy is whether it is worth it. Is this a hill we want to die on? Should we not in fact secure a modus vivendi with China well before this nightmare scenario arrives? The Anglo-Saxon powers refused to accommodate Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. Was it worth it? And those were smaller powers relative to the US. China is bigger and about to get much bigger still.