Preparing to deter an enemy sounds nice in theory. But it counts on understanding how much pain you can inflict and how much pain an enemy finds unacceptable.
This makes sense but it costs more than the optimistic mind-reading path:
Political leaders can always talk about deterrence, but if it is little more than an optimistic prediction, the military cannot use it as a strategic framework. Only a maritime strategy grounded in warfighting can fully prepare the Sea Services to fight the war that will follow deterrence’s failure.
That applies more generally to all of the military, of course. And to other countries. Russia and Hamas still fight long after exceeding reasonable calculations of what kind of pain would deter them from starting a war.
I have complained that focusing on deterrence is insufficient, and actually leads to worse madness:
Just as there is no substitute for victory in war, there is no substitute for American military power to deter an enemy from attacking. So let's just put away that "integrated deterrence" nonsense. ...
America faces military threats. The proper measure for defeating those threats is American military power.
By all means, use all elements of our power to defeat enemies in peace and war. But don't pretend any of the non-military elements matter when it comes to defeating an enemy military in combat.
Not that calculating what is needed to win is any less subject to over-optimistic assessments. But at least preparing for a higher objective gives a little more margin of error.
And it lets an enemy know you are serious about actually defeating them. Which has real deterrence value, no?
Also, bonus point to the author for the Zulu quote.
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