Tactical Vs. Strategic Deterrence

Exquisite Tactical Deterrence is the Road to Love.

The best victory is won without fighting at all.

This is what makes deterrence such a valuable capability.

Nuclear deterrence, for instance, prevents massive interstate conflict from breaking out by posing a credible threat of catastrophic retaliation. It isn’t pretty, but the post-WWII era is the longest time that the Western powers have gone without trying to obliterate each other.

This is in part due to nukes, a form of strategic deterrence.

But tactical deterrence is trickier. It focuses on preventing specific, localized violent actions by an actor through the immediate threat of response. A police response to a shooting call might be an example of this. But police and/or security guards aren’t always just standing there. They can’t be.

So the fact is our tactical level deterrence options aren’t as strong as our strategic ones. If they were, we wouldn’t see as many instances of localized skirmishes, shootings, stabbings, etc around the globe. It is a trickier problem to solve.

Further, we are approaching a moment in time where the two are converging, in that tactical-level actions can have strategic implications, because the price of massive destruction is decreasing more and more. This means small, agile rogue actors can punch way above their weight class as a consequence of getting their hands on the right stuff.

My bet is that drones will impact both forms of deterrence, particularly as they gain autonomy (meaning they don’t need a pilot to operate), and can be deployed in a ‘set it and forget it’ fashion. This is a when, and not an if. It’s actually already a thing, at some levels.

There are pessimistic and optimistic takes on what fully autonomous drones with say, facial recognition, gait recognition, thermal capabilities, and other advanced surveillance technology would imply.

The pessimistic take is that these things could be armed with small shape charges, and simply face-ID large sets of pre-programmed political dissidents, local criminal rivals, or ideological enemies, and hunt them down to the last man, woman, or child. If you want an example of this, watch this speculative short film titled “slaughter bots”. Fair warning, it is disturbing.

If an adversary assumes a low expense, danger, or attribution risk when attacking you, why wouldn’t they? And how could that even be challenged?

I don’t know yet. But something tells me that the same properties which make drones a potential driver of a dystopian nightmare make them a candidate for highly effective, immediate, and non-violent local threat responses.

In other words, they could be the thing that allows “winning without fighting” to happen. This would be ideal. But it is no guarantee.

Consider, for instance, hypothetical autonomous drones which live in specialized lockers at a school, a mall, a concert venue, or whatever other venue a mass shooting is liable to occur.

Upon hearing gunfire, these drones are activated, and can gain a positive ID on the active shooter (as well as successfully distinguish it from any reactionary shooters in law enforcement), and take action accordingly to neutralize the threat.

And in this instance, ‘neutralize’ wouldn’t necessarily mean ‘kill’.

Consider further the psychological implications of a persistent drone presence over conflict zones capable of immediate and precise action. But immediate and precise does not necessarily need to mean “lethal” - the drone could instead tailor its approach to match the threat.

Nets? Blinding lasers? Tear gas? It all depends on what is happening, and soon, drones will be able to understand, decide, and act upon what is happening with a level of speed, depth, and accuracy that make humans look like dinosaurs. It’s just physics.

In any case, a non-violent yet effective threat neutralization capability would be a game changer. And maybe the thing that shifts Guardian institutions towards giving at least as much as they take. It is a step towards reducing the institutional fear element.

There is a pathway to moral high ground - the non-violent one- as much as there is a path to moral disaster. And the path we end up taking won’t happen on purpose. We have to walk that way intentionally.

But humans aren’t out of the loop quite yet, so don’t get too comfortable.

-LH