Alexander Lanoszka

Russian hybrid warfare and extended deterrence in eastern Europe

Russias use of force against Ukraine since early 2014 has prompted some observers to remark that it is engaging in ‘hybrid warfare’. This form of military statecraft has made other former Soviet republics, such as the Baltic countries, fear that Russia would use subversion rather than pursue a conventional military engagement against them. Despite this concern about Russian hybrid war, existing descriptions of this form of war suffer from conceptual weaknesses. In this article hybrid warfare is conceived as a strategy that marries conventional deterrence and insurgency tactics. That is, the belligerent uses insurgent tactics against its target while using its conventional military power to deter a strong military response. The article then outlines why some former Soviet republics are susceptible to Russian hybrid warfare, allowing it to postulate inductively the conditions under which hybrid warfare might be used in general. The analysis yields two policy implications. First, military solutions are not wholly appropriate against hybrid warfare since it exploits latent ethnic grievances and weak civil societies. Second, only under narrow circumstances would belligerents resort to hybrid warfare. Belligerents need to be revisionist and militarily stronger than their targets, but they also need to have ethnic or linguistic ties with the target society to leverage in waging hybrid warfare.

To Arm or to Ally?: The Patron's Dilemma and the Strategic Logic of Arms Transfers and Alliances

How do great powers decide whether to provide arms to or form alliances with client states? This “patrons dilemma” revolves around a decision about how to best provide security to clients without becoming entrapped in unwanted conflicts. Strong commitments worsen the risk of entrapment, whereas weak commitments intensify fears of abandonment. This traditional alliance dilemma can be addressed through the provision of arms and alliances. Great power patrons primarily make such decisions on the basis of two factors: first, the extent to which the patron believes it and its client have common security interests; and second, whether the patron believes that its client has sufficient military capabilities to deter its main adversary without the patrons assistance. Patrons assess the degree of shared threat and the local balances of capabilities in determining whether to support their clients with arms, alliances, or both. As demonstrated in the U.S. provision of security goods to Taiwan and Israel during the Cold War, this strategic logic explains how great powers manage the patrons dilemma.

Confronting the Anti-Access/Area Denial and Precision Strike Challenge in the Baltic Region

The Baltic States are once again worried that their security is under threat. The US and NATO have responded with air patrols, joint exercises, and battalion-sized ground-force deployments. As important as these efforts have been, they do not fully address Russia’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) and precision strike capabilities, both of which undermine NATO’s stratagem for deterring aggression in the first place. Alexander Lanoszka and Michael A Hunzeker assess the current military imbalance and describe two conflict scenarios to show how A2/AD and precision weapons threaten extended deterrence. They conclude with a discussion of the policy implications.

Do Allies Really Free Ride

American decision-makers and security analysts often complain that allies ‘free ride’on the United States. This charge serves a political end.

Goodbye to all that? Institutionalist theory, U.S. alliances, and Donald Trump

ABSTRACT In an important and stimulating article, Stephan Frühling and Andrew O’Neil argue in favor of applying institutionalist theory to understand the alliance politics of U.S. nuclear weapons strategy. But what promise does institutionalist theory really hold in thinking about highly unequal alliances nested in their particular threat environments? I argue that much work remains to be done to determine how much better institutionalist variables explain intra-alliance dynamics over alternative arguments that emphasize power and interests. Balances of power and the nature of threat environments may already account for key aspects of extended deterrent relationships supported by the United States in Europe and Asia. Ironically, the implication of this more traditional interpretation of alliances is that more continuity than change will characterize how Donald Trump will manage U.S. security relationships as President.

Rage of Honor: Entente Indignation and the Lost Chance for Peace in the First World War

Why the First World War ended in 1918 and not earlier remains a major puzzle. We propose a new theory that emphasizes how honor prolongs wars beyond what rationalist theories can explain. It argues that when honor is insulted, an affronted actor will strive to punish the offender. Absent an apology, the pursuit of a satisfactory punishment leads the affronted belligerent to ignore unfavorable battlefield information, hold logically irreconcilable beliefs, process information in emotional terms, and obsess over status. We predict that wars of prevention and territorial occupation are most likely to elicit honor considerations. We test our argument against an obscure episode in the war where Germany and the United States made peace overtures in December 1916. We demonstrate that honor concerns made Entente decision makers see German aggression as an affront to their honor that only the destruction of Germanys political regime could redress.

Tangled up in rose? Theories of alliance entrapment and the 2008 Russo-Georgian War

ABSTRACT Recent tensions between Russia and the United States have sparked debate over the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). One controversy surrounds the extent to which NATO raises the risk of war through entrapment—a concept that scholars invoke to describe how states might drag their allies into undesirable military conflicts. Yet scholars have advanced different, even conflicting arguments about how entrapment risks arise. I offer a typology that distinguishes between the mechanisms through which entrapment risks allegedly emerge on the basis of their institutional, systemic, reputational, and transnational ideological sources. I use the 2008 Russo-Georgian War to illustrate how the purported mechanisms of entrapment fare in elucidating that conflict. In analyzing why entrapment risks emerge, and thinking counterfactually about The 2008 War, I argue that scholars need to disentangle the various mechanisms that drive both alliance formation and war to make sure that entrapment risks do indeed exist.

Nuclear ambiguity, no-first-use, and crisis s­tability in asymmetric crises

ABSTRACT The United States has long embraced calculated ambiguity over the conditions under which it might use nuclear weapons against adversaries, a trend that President Donald J. Trump has continued. This ambiguity could unsettle some observers, especially those who believe that the United States should declare a no-first-use (NFU) policy such that it would not be the first state to introduce nuclear weapons in either a crisis or an armed conflict. NFU advocates identify three potential pathways whereby a more ambiguous posture can lead to increased danger: downward spiral, accidental war, and use-it-or-lose-it. For evidence, they invoke Saddam Hussein’s risk-accepting decision to pre-delegate chemical-weapons use following US nuclear threats in the 1991 Gulf War. In analyzing the reasoning and evidence of these arguments, we argue that the alleged benefits of NFU may be overstated, at least for crisis stability in asymmetric crises, defined by one side’s overwhelming conventional military superiority. Each of the three foregoing pathways is logically inconsistent and the empirical case is misinterpreted. Nuclear ambiguity may not be so dangerous as NFU advocates claim.

Arms, Alliances, and Patron-Client Relationships

In “To Arm or to Ally?” Keren Yarhi-Milo, Alexander Lanoszka, and Zack Cooper present an elegant and powerful theory that explains conditions under which a great power (in their case, the United States) offers a client state arms, an alliance commitment, or both.1 Their article does not give due attention, however, to what motivates a patron to provide security assistance to clients in the arst place—especially its desire to inouence its clients to obtain concessions in military, political, economic, and other policies.2 Below I explain how Yarhi-Milo, Lanoszka, and Cooper’s conceptualization of key variables inadvertently plays down the role of inouence-seeking in U.S. policy. First, Yarhi-Milo, Lanoszka, and Cooper’s conceptualization of arms transfers does not reoect the wide range of ways in which a patron can support a client and the signiacant differences among the types of arms transfers with regard to buying inouence. Their conceptualization of arms transfers, in which “a state gives another state weapons to augment its military capabilities” (p. 95), “covers multiple methods of provision, including sales, grants, and loans” (p. 97). As they discuss at the beginning of the article, however, the United States spends large sums of money on security assistance worldwide, a signiacant portion of which is spent on things other than U.S. arms (p. 91). Israel, for example, has been allowed by the U.S. government to use about

From Ottawa to Riga: Three tensions in Canadian defence policy:

In June 2016, Canada joined the United States, Great Britain, and Germany in becoming a Framework Nation that leads a multinational battalion-sized battlegroup in Latvia. Canada thus appears to be reprising the role it played during the Cold War as a leading participant in North Atlantic Treaty Organization deterrence and reassurance initiatives in Europe. Yet the three tensions that made Canada reduce its military commitments to allies over the course of the Cold War might resurface in the Baltic region. These three tensions relate to conventional specialization amid alliance nuclearization, low defence spending despite that specialization, and the potential decoupling of Canadian security interests from those of its European partners. Canada might find itself lacking the willingness and ability to sustain the tasks attending the Latvia deployment if the threat environment intensifies.