Confidence-building defense
Confidence-building defense (German: Vertrauensbildende Verteidigung) is a military school of thought developed in the 1980s focused on conventional defense, with the founding purpose of defusing the East-West confrontation and was later applied to other regions of military tension and conflict.
Concept
The fundamental
The Dutch Physicist Egbert Boeker has called this a "spider-in-the-web" approach, suggesting that a spider remains deadly only as long as it operates within the web.[2] It is argued that when national political leadership adopts a C-BD posture, they are no longer compelled to pursue military parity or superiority to other nations. This allows leadership to forego "arms racing" and opens the opportunity to significant disarmament. C-BD structures make efficient use of several historically proven advantages of fighting on one's own prepared territory, thereby enhancing stability between neighboring states despite asymmetry in their military postures. Advantages of confidence-building defense postures include:[3]
- Intimate knowledge of the home terrain allows for pre-engineering multiple defensive positions in likely zones of combat, enabling practiced fields of fire from dispersed sites that cover and "thicken" the battlefield.
- C-BD presents intruding forces with a complex system of diverse elements, namely network and cooperating counter-attack forces, making it difficult for them to adapt their tactics as the battle develops.
- Lines of communicationand supply are short, reliable, redundant, and hardened.
- In comparison to invading forces, troops fighting to protect their homeland have the advantage of a very considerable morale boost.
- The structure reduces fear of invasion on the side of (and builds trust with) one's potential adversary while at the same time having flexible and steadfast home protection.
- The home population increasingly believes in the reliability of their national defense.
The benefits that derive from confidence-building defense optimization provide a significant operational margin of security. This margin allows for self-limiting the military structural capacity for large-scale cross-border offensives. A confidence-building military posture signals reassurance to neighboring states that military investments are intended for defense sufficiency rather than domination of regional relations. When a potential adversary also begins to make confidence-building structural changes to their military, the opportunity to achieve mutual changes and disarmament is enhanced. Progressive reduction of cross-border invasion threats through reciprocal confidence-building force restructuring can create a virtuous circle of reinforcement of peaceful relations. Beyond the terrestrial dimension, scholars have considered applying the C-BD spider-in-web-model to sea and air forces.[4] There have been historical reviews of the advantages of strategic and operational defense on battlefields.[5] Furthermore, there have been discussions of the validity of C-BD as a universal principle.[6]
Origins of the concept
By 1980, when the Cold War was 33 years old, there was a broadly-shared perception of increasing conventional military threat at the "central front" of a divided Germany. NATO and the Warsaw Pact (WTO) adopted deep offensive counter-attack formations and operational doctrines to dissuade, deter, and defeat an attack by the other side. In the 1980s, both sides in the Cold War were installing a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles in Europe. Consequently, public concern grew that offensive conventional military preparations and doctrines would make nuclear war more likely. Confidence-building Defense is one of several related concepts developed by European thinkers as "stabilizing" and "non-provocative" alternatives to NATO and WTO doctrines. Other names used to describe this group of ideas are Non-Provocative Defense, Non-Offensive Defense, and Defensive Defense.
Confidence-building defense was conceived and elaborated by Lutz Unterseher as chairman of the European Study Group on Alternative Security Policy (SAS),
Investigation and evaluation
The basics of the SAS approach – namely the synergetic interaction of mobile intervention with quasi-static web elements – was outlined as early as 1980. It then took about four years to develop a detailed concept for ground troops – with designs for maritime and air forces to follow. The degree of specification of the ground force element was sufficient to render possible meaningful critical investigation and evaluation. Systematic qualitative evaluations were conducted by Egbert Boeker at
All evaluations concluded that the SAS approach offered a viable combination of military efficiency with the potential of defusing the military confrontation in Central Europe: thereby enhancing stability. The validity of these evaluations was broadly supported by computer-based operational research examining "reactive defense" models conducted at the
Political relevance
An indication of the political relevance of this school of thought at a critical point in history comes from the American political scientist Matthew Evangelista.
Further reading
- Knight, Charles; Unterseher, Lutz, "Korea versus Korea: Conventional Military Balance and the Path to Disarmament," Lit Verlag, Munster, Germany, April 2020.
- Knight, Charles, "A Path to Reductions of Conventional Forces on the Korean Peninsula," in Knight and Unterseher, "Korea versus Korea," 2020. https://comw.org/pda/fulltext/2102%20A%20PATH%20TO%20REDUCTIONS.pdf (accessed 18 March 2022)
- Knight, Charles; Carl Conetta, "Principles for Building Confidence and Stability into National Defenses and International Security – toward sufficient, affordable, robust, and reliable defense postures," 1 February 2021. https://comw.org/pda/confidence-and-stability (accessed 18 March 2022) Adapted from Carl Conetta; Charles Knight; Lutz Unterseher, "Building Confidence into the Security of Southern Africa," PDA Briefing Report #7. Commonwealth Institute, 1996.
- Unterseher, Lutz, "Pleasant Lunches: Western Track-Two Influence on Gorbachev′s Conventional Forces Initiative of 1988," August, 2018. https://comw.org/pda/fulltext/1811Unterseher-Romberg.pdf (accessed 18 March 2022).
- Evangelista, Matthew, "Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War," Cornell University Press, 1999. Pg. 314.
- Unterseher, Lutz, "Interventionism Reconsidered: Reconciling Military Action with Political Stability," Project on Defense Alternatives Guest Publication. Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute, September 1999. https://comw.org/pda/9909interv.html (accessed 18 March 2022).
- Conetta, Carl; Charles Knight; Lutz Unterseher, "Building Confidence into the Security of Southern Africa," PDA Briefing Report #7, Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute, July 1996, revised November 1996. https://comw.org/pda/sa-fin5.htm (accessed 18 March 2022).
- Conetta, Carl; Knight, Charles; Unterseher, Lutz, "Defensive Restructuring in The Successor States of the former-Yugoslavia," Project on Defense Alternatives Briefing Report #6. Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute, March 1996. https://comw.org/pda/bozfinal.htm (accessed 18 March 2022).
- Conetta, Carl, "Transformation of US Defense Posture: Is Nonoffensive Defense Compatible with Global Power?" Project on Defense Alternatives. 1995. Paper presented at The Global NOD Network International Seminar Nonoffensive Defence in Global Perspective, Copenhagen, 4–5 February 1995 https://comw.org/pda/nodglob.htm (accessed 18 March 2022).
- Møller, Bjørn; Wiberg, Hakan, (Eds.), "Non-Offensive Defence for the Twenty-First Century," Westview Press, 1994.
- Conetta, Carl; Knight, Charles; Unterseher, Lutz, "Defensive Military Structures in Action: Historical Examples," May 1994. https://comw.org/pda/fulltext/Defensive-Military-Structures-in-Action.pdf (accessed 18 March 2022)
- Study Group on Alternative Security Policy (Bonn, Germany) and Project on Defense Alternatives (Cambridge, MA, USA), "Confidence-Building Defense: A Comprehensive Approach to Security & Stability in the New Era," https://comw.org/pda/fulltext/9405%20CBD-Euro%20Primer.pdf (accessed 18 March 2022).
- Conetta, Carl; Unterseher, Lutz, "Confidence-Building Defense: Fundamental Design Principles," Study Group on Alternative Security Policy and Project on Defense Alternatives, a selection from slides prepared for seminars in Belarus, the Czech Republic, Holland, and Hungary, 1994. https://comw.org/pda/fulltext/Fundamental%20Principles%20of%20CBD.pdf (accessed 18 March 2022).
- Conetta, Carl; Charles Knight; Unterseher, Lutz, "Toward Defensive Restructuring in the Middle East," Project on Defense Alternatives Research Monograph #1. Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute, February 1991. https://comw.org/pda/9703restruct.html (accessed 18 March 2022).
References
- ISBN 3-88350-271-5.
- ISBN 90-6256-942-0 cip.(accessed 18 March 2022)
Grin, John; Unterseher, Lutz, "The Spiderweb Defense," in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 44, No. 7, 1988, Pg. 139-148. https://comw.org/pda/fulltext/88%20spiderweb%20defense.pdf - ISBN 0-521-38063-4, Pg. 293-342.
- ISBN 3-88350-271-5, op. cit. Pg. 165-187.
- ^ Conetta, Carl; Knight, Charles; and Unterseher, Lutz, "Defensive Military Structures in Action: Historical Examples," May 1994. Published initially in "Confidence-Building Defense: A Comprehensive Approach to Security & Stability in the New Era," Study Group on Alternative Security Policy (Bonn, Germany) and Project on Defense Alternatives (Cambridge, MA, USA).
- ISBN 9780908140992, Pg 185-194.
- ISBN 1-55587-386-3, Pg. 88, 286-288, 314.
Ströber-Fassbender, Ralph, Die Studiengruppe Alternative Sicherheitspolitik: Eine Dokumentation, in SAS (eds.), Vertrauensbildende Verteidigung, op. cit., Pg. 271-198. - ISBN 9789062564965, Pg. 62 ff.
- ^ Voigt, K., ″Konventionelle Stabilisierung und strukturelle Nichtangriffsfähigkeit – Ein systematischer Vergleich verschiedener Konzepte,″ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament), B18/88 (29 April 1988), pp.21-34.
- ^ Fernau, H.; Palmisano, S., "KVAE: VSBM-Perspektiven, Arbeitspapier," (Vienna: Institut für Militärische Sicherheitspolitik an der Landesverteidigungsakademie, 1987).
- ^ Hofmann, H. W.; Huber, R. K.; and Steiger, K., "On Reactive Defense Options, Bericht Nr. S-8403," (Munich: Hochschule der Bundeswehr, 1984).
- ^ Evangelista, Matthew: Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War. Cornell University Press, 1999. Pg. 314.