Michael Hochberg
To date, the formula for the United States’ strategic interaction with most allies has been fairly direct: It revolved around the idea that allies need to defend themselves from attack until US forces can sweep in to their rescue, bringing a professional military with long-range weapons, modern aircraft, deep lockers of munitions, and other advanced capabilities to bear. Where these capabilities were crucial, the U.S. established forward bases, rather than handing the relevant capabilities to allies. This defensive formula was marvelously successful during the Cold War in preventing US allies from perceiving one another as significant threats, while serving as a guarantee of American support should the USSR or its proxies threaten an ally.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, this defensive strategy was allowed to atrophy; the absence of a peer adversary enabled the United States and its allies to imagine that a rules-based international order would dominate without robust western enforcement.
Though reliance on this strategy has persisted, it is fundamentally inapplicable to today’s problems: Small states on the border of large, nuclear-armed autocracies face an ongoing, existential threat from conventional attack. Only the local balance of forces and the assessed probability and cost of victory stop their autocratic neighbors from exploiting local weakness and attacking them. The autocratic, nuclear armed neighbors have the option to limit the response of the United States by threatening to use their nuclear arsenals.
The reality of intimidation and invasion is utterly foreign to the voting public in the United States, who have grown used to the idea that conventional wars are only fought overseas. The oceanic moats, coupled with the peaceful southern and northern borders of the United States, have limited the threats from foreign powers – the attacks on Pearl Harbor and 9/11 being the two notable exceptions of the 20th century.
For US allies located along the borders of China, Russia, and Iran, however, the threat of invasion – and the likelihood of genocide directed against nations and ethnicities opposed to these autocratic regimes – remains a real threat. For them, successful deterrence is an existential strategic consideration. For the United States, a successful attack on one of these states would be a disaster in terms of prestige and in some cases would cause severe economic disruption. But such an attack falls short of constituting an immediate, existential threat to the United States.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated an enduring truth: While the United States’ polity is willing to support allies to fight ‘good wars,’ the US lacks the patience required to remain unambiguously committed to long, expensive wars, an appetite for taking on significant risk, and a willingness to commit the requisite resources for decisive victories in distant conflicts with even near-peer adversaries.
Deterring the United States
Russian threats of nuclear escalation have shaped US policy in Ukraine to a massive extent: Rather than providing the Ukrainians with the means to achieve a swift and decisive victory, the US and NATO allies have held back, contributing only enough support to keep Ukrainians from being defeated or to achieve small, tactical victories. Even advanced air defense systems, which could clear the sky of Russian aircraft and support the Ukrainians’ ability to achieve air superiority over their own territory, have been largely withheld. In order to avoid provoking the Russians, the systems provided by the United States and NATO have been deliberately crippled to prevent their use outside the historical borders of Ukraine.
Furthermore, by publicly debating and discussing every new capability long before providing it, Western allies have eliminated the element of surprise from the Ukraine arsenal. Consequently, the Russians are free from diverting resources toward self-defense, operating from a geographic sanctuary. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military and state has no such sanctuary from Russian attack – though much of their logistics, and almost all their supplies, are provided from NATO states. Russia is war with all of Ukraine; Ukraine is able to wage war only on the forces that Russia chooses to expose.
With rare exception, the Ukrainians can attack only the Russian forces that are actually on Ukrainian territory (including Crimea and Donbas). Russian bombs and drones regularly target Ukrainian infrastructure, including electrical stations, dams, hospitals, schools, and shipping terminals; the Ukrainians have almost no ability to match these attacks. And when the NATO allies provide advanced, long-range weapons, they come with provisions that these weapons not be used in Russia, because very few policy makers in NATO want to risk escalation with the potential of nuclear consequences.
This fear of nuclear escalation has spread to private citizens and corporations. Elon Musk crippled the capabilities of Starlink, for example, to prevent the Ukrainians from engaging in effective attacks on Russian assets, including in Crimea. This sort of restraint can only teach autocrats to expect that they will be treated with the same level of appeasement if they can make nuclear threats. So how is the United States to deter a Russian invasion of the Baltic republics, an Iranian attack on its oil-rich neighbors along the Persian Gulf or Israel, and a Chinese attack or blockade of Taiwan?
The answer is simple: The United States can’t be the state making the tactical decisions about how to respond and when to escalate in the face of an imminent or ongoing invasion. When US allies are faced with existential, non-nuclear threats, they need to have the capability not only to fend off the threat, but also to engage in direct reprisals on the attacking power, in order to both degrade the attacker’s capabilities and to extract a high economic and political price. If these capabilities are provided only when they are urgently needed, their deployment will depend on ever-fluctuating political will in the United States.
Distributed Deterrence and Taiwan
The essence of distributed deterrence lies in providing the allies of the United States with the capability not only to defend their own territory, but also to engage in muscular reprisals and conventional escalation without the United States being a direct part of the tactical decision loop.
The lessons for Taiwan are obvious: If Western behavior in Ukraine is any guide, we can expect that any advanced capabilities that the United States provides after an invasion, or in the midst of one, are going to be limited in utility. They are going to be constrained by the difficulty of shipping materiel through an active naval war zone, and anything that could generate surprise or escalation will be slow in coming, limited in quantity, and most likely disabled so that it cannot be used outside Taiwan.
Taiwan needs to have all the weapons, ammunition, food, medicines, and other supplies on hand to sustain a long confrontation with China, and Taiwan needs the ability to escalate on their own behalf, since they are the ones under existential threat. While Taiwan does not have a nuclear capability at the moment, failure to provide a robust conventional deterrent may lead its leadership to develop such weaponry. For Taiwan, nuclear escalation is particularly unattractive: The international condemnation of Taiwan and the hardening of Chinese that would come from Taiwan launching a first nuclear attack, even in the context of a conventional invasion, would almost certainly result in a Chinese victory, albeit at potentially devastating cost to the CCP. The time to develop an effective strategic nuclear deterrent does not match against the short timelines for a likely invasion, unless the Taiwanese have managed to secretly run such a program over the past several years.
In the lead-up to an invasion, it is easy to imagine the CCP expanding their ongoing grey-zone warfare against Taiwanese assets. In addition to today’s ongoing, flagrant violations of Taiwanese airspace and maritime territory, China could begin intercepting shipping, engaging in cyber-warfare, or attacking key targets with missiles or air strikes. Such maneuvers would degrade Taiwanese warfighting and economic capabilities while attempting to cow the population. The Taiwanese require the capability to respond to attacks on their key economic and military assets with attacks on similar assets in China. The goal would be to increase the perceived costs of such attacks, by giving Taiwan the ability to use conventional forces to cause considerable damage and embarrassment to the CCP. Conventional and sudden escalation is currently outside the scope of Taiwan’s capabilities, but this needs to change.
Taiwan does have some substantial, differentiated advantages which the United States can reinforce. First, China is far from being an autarchic regime; China’s economy is dependent on the maritime import of raw materials. Without foreign food, the Chinese population starves. Without foreign energy supplies, the lights don’t stay on. Taiwan is perfectly situated to interdict shipping to and from China; Tomahawk missiles based in Taiwan would have the range to attack facilities and ships in every Chinese port.
The approximately 1,500-mile range of a Tomahawk missile based in Taipei allows attacks on every Chinese port.
Secondly, Taiwan has built up a culture and infrastructure that specializes in extremely efficient manufacturing for complex electronic systems. The popular perception of Taiwan is as a manufacturing and technological powerhouse centered on building advanced computer chips at TSMC; in fact, this is only a fraction of the outsize role that Taiwan plays in the global semiconductor and electronics supply chain. Taiwan is good – perhaps the best – at rapidly ramping up from prototype to mid-or-large scale production for complex electronic products. There are places that offer cheaper labor (i.e., inland China, Vietnam, and Penang), but Taiwan has one of the most dense concentrations of skills and equipment, and thus is one of the most attractive places to bring electronics into production quickly, at scale.
Today, many military systems look a lot like consumer electronics. In fact, many consumer products, like drones (a market dominated by China’s DJI at the moment) are being routinely repurposed as munitions and as armed ISR platforms. Even high-end military systems like missiles and torpedoes are essentially very complex sensing and processing platforms that happen to include propulsion systems and explosive payloads. Manufacturing these systems can be done with the same kind of tooling and cost reduction in scale that is routinely achieved in consumer electronics.
The United States and NATO could benefit from encouraging Taiwan to become a center for the manufacturing of such weapons systems. Today, advanced munitions are reliant on a highly bureaucratic, antiquated manufacturing and contracting system. As a result, a Tomahawk missile costs $1.5-2M today, the United States only has about 4,000 of them, and the supply is likely to shrink to less than 1000 units[i] as part of an ongoing modernization program. Similarly, a modern torpedo costs as much as several million dollars. Lightweight Mark 54 systems are cheaper but still in the million dollar per unit range, a Harpoon anti-ship missile costs $1.5M, and Patriot anti-aircraft missile unit costs are in the $4m range. Even systems that are intended for much wider deployment are quite expensive: Javelin missiles go for about $80,000, with a $100,000 launcher. A shoulder launched Stinger anti-aircraft missile is now priced at about $400,000.
These munitions are being hand-built like Ferraris, not churned out in volume like iPhones. In short, the industry is in a low-volume, high-price, sole-sourced trap.
These are, as a result, expensive munitions that can be expended profligately, and the numbers of them that are being manufactured – low hundreds per year of the Tomahawks, for instance – are not nearly adequate to support a distributed deterrence model. The Taiwanese alone need thousands of each of high-end munitions (and much more) in order to have a credible deterrent against China. It is essential to the security of the United States to ensure that the Taiwanese have an unambiguous ability to sink a thousand-ship invasion flotilla, with capacity to spare to attack infrastructure and other targets: In addition to a ~800-ship navy, China has hundreds of civilian amphibious transport ships available for sea lift, and hundreds of maritime militia ships; this count does not include the many thousands of merchant ships either owned or flagged in China.
An obvious solution would be for the United States, in conjunction with the companies that supply arms to the U.S. military, to license the Taiwanese to manufacture these kinds of munitions in quantity. Simple commercial contract vehicles, like those commonly used for consumer electronics, would serve to create dramatically improved incentives for cost reduction compared to what currently dominates the defense contracting world. By offering take/pay contracts for large volumes of these munitions and launch systems, the United States could harness the enormous skill and power of the Taiwanese manufacturing ecosystem to rapidly drop the cost of these systems: Imagine doubling or tripling the spend on Tomahawks, but getting 10 or 20x the number of munitions. This is the kind of volume and price ramp that the Taiwanese electronics ecosystem routinely achieves for consumer goods, and they do it in time for the Christmas shopping season, again and again. By moving to commercial contract vehicles and enlisting the help of Taiwan’s mighty electronics industry, the United States can help the Taiwanese to defend themselves.
Furthermore, as the volumes go up and the costs come down, these manufacturing lines and suppliers can be duplicated here in the United States, in a transfer of manufacturing capability and expertise. Reducing the costs of these munitions will create a situation where the United States can afford to enable distributed deterrence by our allies across the globe.
One objection that many will raise: What happens if China does successfully invade Taiwan, and Taiwan is a manufacturing center for these munitions? One response: All of these munitions have been around for decades and have been expanded around the world. While the most recent upgrades may hold some mystery, the older generations have surely all been reverse engineered. In addition, the plants where these munitions will be manufactured can be set up so that, in the event of an invasion, they can be rapidly and comprehensively destroyed. And lastly, the key recent upgrades are embodied in specific subsystems, chips, and software - providing the chips and the finished subsystems is not necessarily the same as providing the means to replicate them at scale. Key technologies that are encapsulated in isolated subsystems - and especially in chips made in the US - could be held back and only manufactured in the United States, for the most advanced platforms. And given the extensive nature of Chinese espionage here in the US, it’s time to think less about keeping secrets and more about delivering capabilities.
Right now, the CCP would be reasonable in viewing a fight in the Taiwan straits as one in which they would likely lose only ships and planes that they put into play. This is much like Putin’s situation before the Ukraine invasion; the Russian army units put into Ukraine were at risk, but assets within Russia were safe from attack. Enabling the Taiwanese to attack Chinese assets far afield and deep within China fundamentally changes this calculus.
Victory in the Taiwan straits is a matter of maintaining the status quo, while in parallel driving a rapid reduction in Western dependence on key and strategic goods production in China. As Hal Brands points out, China has engaged in the fastest buildup of military capability in modern history over the past few years, and our current deterrence strategies are failing. Distributed deterrence is less about what we will do to deter an invasion, and more about enabling deterrence for our allies, who are under direct and existential threat.
The Chinese leadership explicitly declared their intent to have the capability to invade and integrate Taiwan by 2027; given their record in Hainan, the South China Sea, Tibet, and Hong Kong, we should take them at their word. The most straightforward path for deterring China from an invasion is to furnish the Taiwanese with the capabilities and technology required to defend themselves, and to punish Chinese aggression. A commitment to sail to Taiwan’s aid, while valuable, is insufficient.
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