The Mechanism for Strategic Coercion

In the post-cold war environment of shrinking budgets and uncertain threats, America can no longer politically, nor economically, afford strategies that rely on our traditional military strategy of annihilation and exhaustion. Furthermore, America's position as the single remaining superpower virtually guarantees that our vital interests will not be directly challenged. This means that the use of military force is becoming even more politicized. Despite military leaders' apparent adherence to Clausewitz's maxim that war is an extension of policy, they usually approach strategic planning as if the application of force can be planned separately from the political effort. The traditional American military brute-force strategy does not always meet our national needs in this new world order.


Strategic Coercion offers one alternative to this brute-force approach. Simply stated, strategic coercion is the act of inducing or compelling an adversary to do something to which he is averse. It involves using force and threatening action to compel an adversary to cease his current activity, or coerce him to reverse actions already taken. Two contemporary theories of strategic coercion seem to offer promising alternatives to brute force.


First, Robert Pape's Denial Theory is based on the assumption that states make decisions as if they are rational, unitary actors attempting to maximize the utility of their choices. Essentially, nations perform a cost-benefit evaluation to determine the best course of action. Theoretically, one may be able to coerce a target nation by raising the expected costs to a prohibitive level, but Pape advocates that this is generally ineffective in conventional conflicts. Instead, coercion requires that the target nation be denied the probability of achieving the sought-after benefits. Denial Theory proposes that the specific means for coercion is the opponent's military vulnerability: defeating an opponent's military strategy denies him the probability