Deterrence has long been a cornerstone of interaction among states.
This was especially true when state interests clashed and when
political leaders sought to avoid direct military conflict. In
traditional deterrence relationships, calculations of military,
economic, and diplomatic power determined the degrees of deterrence
effectiveness. This seemed to change with the advent of the Cold
War. The potential destructiveness of nuclear weapons combined with
the relatively small numbers of states that possessed them
suggested a need for new concepts of deterrence tailored to govern
the nuclear competition among the Soviet Union, the United States,
and their allies. Deterrence thinking came to mean nuclear
deterrence-and as the Cold War wound down, there was a general
perception that the absence of nuclear confrontation among the
great powers required less emphasis on deterrence as a key feature
of national strategy and a corresponding decrease in the
instruments of deterrence that had prevailed during the Cold War.
As the collapse of the superpower confrontation became more
distant, however, states began to confront threats that were
present during the Cold War but were perceived to be less
important- what some have termed lesser included threats. These
threats involved state failure, mass migration of populations, and
drug, small arms, and human trafficking. Also included were
environmental and humanitarian disasters, traditional state
competition, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their
components, and the emergence of nonstate actors empowered by new
communication and information technologies that give them global
reach. Taken individually, few of these threats have the potential
to overthrow established and functioning states-especially in the
developed world. However, these threats present challenges that
policy makers struggle to meet using traditional diplomacy.
Economic sanctions and incentives have exerted little apparent
effect toward solving some of these post-Cold War challenges. In
the end, states-and particularly the United States and its partners
and allies-relied on military intervention to cope with an
increasingly complex set of challenges and crises. To help
understand and begin to develop alternative policy frameworks that
fit the current and emerging security context, the US Air Force's
Air Force Research Institute (AFRI), the Royal United Services
Institute (RUSI), and King's College, London, hosted a two-day
conference at the RUSI offices in London on 18 and 19 May 2009. We
sought to bring together some of the best thinkers on deterrence to
examine how to reinvigorate this essential tool for today's policy
community. The conference exceeded our expectations, as readers
will observe from the excellent products in these proceedings. From
the pre-conference thought pieces by RUSI's Michael Codner and
AFRI's Adam Lowther-the presentations by the keynote speakers and
case study developers-to the post-conference Quick Looks by AFRI
personnel, the outcome reflects the creativity and the seriousness
with which the attendees and the planning staffs approached the
topic. We see this conference as a beginning conversation that has
the potential to inform policy makers on how to develop richer
options for coping with the increasingly complex and lethal
security challenges of the world in which we live. We are grateful
to the participants and to those who contributed to the success of
the endeavor.
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