Weekly Alliance Research Round-Up 1
Some new and notable pieces of scholarship on military alliances that I find worth highlighting.
I barely use X these days and my engagement on Bluesky is minimal. Yet, ‘back in the day’, one thing I enjoyed doing on Twitter was sharing with the community those pieces of scholarship that piqued my interest. Usually those articles would be about some aspect of alliance politics or international security more broadly, with a regional focus on Europe and, to a lesser extent, East Asia. I would post a screenshot of the abstract and title in addition to offering a link to the article. It was a good way to promote thought-provoking work, especially by junior scholars.
As I have reconsidered my engagement on social media, and because I do like the format that Substack provides, I decided to do something slightly different on this platform: I will identify a few articles each week and engage with them constructively. Of course, I have to be selective because my attention is limited. This weekly round-up will not pretend to be exhaustive of the large and ever growing body of scholarship being put out there. Still, I hope it serves as a useful scan of what is being published.
Without further ado, here are two notable scholarly articles that have come out recently. One touches on Japanese counterstrike capabilities, the other on military logistics in European NATO.
Rintaro Inoue, “Will Japan Have the Political Resolve to Use Counterstrike?,” The Washington Quarterly, vol. 47, nol. 4 (2024): 45-61. LINK.
Just over two years ago, the Government of Japan declared its intention to pursue the development of long-range counterstrike capabilities. Having these weapons can confer Japan with the ability to attack adversarial military assets—China’s and North Korea’s—before they could be launched and used against Japanese interests in a wartime situation. Japan is hardly alone among U.S. treaty allies in making such a choice: South Korea comes to mind. However, the December 2022 decision by Japan does break with longstanding policy that had limited the Self-Defence Forces to acquiring what can be strictly defined as defensive capabilities.
Long-range counterstrike capabilities in theory should enhance deterrence because they can help deny an adversary success in its military campaign. However, capability alone is insufficient for achieving deterrence. If there is no will to use that capability in circumstances that call for it, deterrence may yet fail and the adversary could carry out whatever undesirable course of action it presumably wishes to undertake. Hence Rintaro Inoue is right to ask whether Japan really would have the political resolve—the will to accept additional cost and risk—to use counterstrike capabilities against an adversary.
Inoue is skeptical because of what he persuasively argues to be two main obstacles that would confront Japanese decision-makers in wartime. The first is that the Japanese Diet can shape the SDF’s rule of engagement on using counterstrikes. The second is that there may be a lack of clarity on what exactly should prompt the use of counterstrike—what Inoue calls the “the vagueness of the red line.”
I would add here a third obstacle, one that Inoue mentions in passing but contextualizes both hindrances that he identifies: that Japanese leaders might not be psychologically prepared to answer force with force. This problem is not unique to Japan by any means. However, Inoue points out that “there is a widely shared philosophy in the Japanese strategic community that designating a situation as an armed attack could be considered an escalation by the enemy, inducing inadvertent escalation” (emphasis added). He proceeds to write that “[s]uch perception has also affected the actions of simulation exercise participants. Reports on tabletop exercises con ducted by members of the Diet and former SDF officers have tended to emphasize this risk, and in many cases, actors have delayed defense operations as a result.”
This paragraph stood out most to me. It reminds me of the problem that we have seen more broadly across NATO, especially on issues relating to so-called “hybrid warfare” or “grey-zone tactics”. That is, we have become reluctant to apply our own legal, policing, and military instruments appropriately lest we draw a negative response from the transgressor. It is self-defeating and reflects a lack of confidence in oneself.
The solution to the proverbial “grey-zone” is thus more straightforward than often made out to be: make grey black and white again. As Oscar Jonsson notes, "hybrid” or “grey-zone” tactics are effective only because the leaders of the societies targeted allow them to be so, by exploiting their risk-aversion and reluctance to apply legal, police, and military powers necessary for curbing the aggression outright.
What worries me about that paragraph is that, to the extent that it really represents the case of Japan, adversaries may not even have to play in that zone of purported ambiguity in order to realize the same effect.
Alexander Sollfrank and Sergei Boeke, “Enablement and Logistics as Critical Success Factors for Military Operations: Comparing Russian and NATO Approaches,” The RUSI Journal, vol. 169, no. 7 (2024): 10-22. LINK.
Everyone knows that sound logistics are essential for successful military operations, but it is more exciting to think about international conflict as if it were a simple game of Risk, with big personalities and their leadership style affecting the course of war. It is much less exciting to think about railway gauges, bridge load ratings, and axle weights. And yet, as Alexander Sollfrank and Sergei Boeke point out with justified snark, academics have failed to heed General Omar Bradley’s oft-quoted observation that amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics. The implication is obvious.
This piece offers one of the best descriptions that I have read of the various enablement and sustainment challenges that NATO would face in any major military showdown with Russia. It does so by illuminating as well how Russia goes about supplying its own military forces. Although mocking Russia for tactical and strategic incompetence is an easy temptation, the fact of the matter is that military logistics on the side of NATO is fraught with many bureaucratic and political hurdles.
To consider one set of problems, Sollfrank and Boeke note that:
“Allies diverge on many regulatory issues: the size of a military convoy; its standard composition; how it should be flagged; the maximum number of vehicles it can have without military police protection; whether foreign soldiers can be armed; when other ministries need to be involved, to name just a few. Not only have many NATO members changed or ‘gold-plated’ the old Standardization Agreements (STANAG’s), environmental and other rules have created a complicated, bureaucratic process. Some states, in their cross-border permission forms, not only require the registration numbers of each vehicle, but also the names of the drivers. This is feasible for a platoon or company, but not in a collective defence scenario when dozens of brigades will rush to reinforce Europe’s front line states.”
Of course, allies recognize the need to ease military mobility and so are making important efforts in this regard. Letters of intent for agreed upon multinational military corridors are in the books, for example.
Nevertheless, general (ret.) Ben Hodges has been speaking of a “military Schengen” in Europe since at least 2017. That such a paragraph has to be published in December 2024 is stark evidence of how deep and persistent that these problems are for the Alliance.