McNair Paper Number 45 Chapter 3, October 1995
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, Lebow and Stein's main argument that "weakness at home or abroad" leads challengers to challenge deterrence even when the defender's threat is credible, is not supported by the evidence. The War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War, as well as other deterrence encounters in the Egyptian-Israeli rivalry, indicate that highly motivated challengers challenge deterrence only when they perceive an opportunity in terms of an incredible deterrent threat, but refrain from a challenge when the deterrent threat is credible even when the pressures to challenge are great.189 A longitundinal study of deterrence demonstrates that the motivation and the desire of the Egyptian leadership to challenge deterrence existed throughout the period, that the Egyptian leadership did not micalculate the balance of capability because of the political pressures to challenge deterrence, and that deterrence failed only when the Egyptian leadership believed that an opportunity existed. Thus, the role of deterrence policies in adversarial relations must be understood in terms of their long-term cumulative impact. Short-term deterrence failures may be a necessary condition for long-term deterrence success.
The policy implication of this finding is that, when confronted with a determined challenger, policy makers need to design their policies with a long-term perspective in mind because the requirements for deterrence stability can only be created through war.190 Specific reputations for capability and will, the variables which make deterrent threats credible, are created, in the conventional world, through the ultimate test of capability and resolve, war.
This finding, which interestingly enough is supported by the deterrence encounters between the United States and Iraq in the 1990s, requires further empirical support before it is adopted by policy-makers. But it can be explained deductively.191 To deter, resolute defenders need to distinguish themselves from irresolute actors. Demonstrating resolve is achieved by maintaining control over the escalatory ladder of the conflict192--which implies the need to go over the brink--actions which are too costly for irresolute actors to mimic. The problem that defenders confront is that nothing short of a tough policy will work. This is due to what Frank calls the "costly to fake principle."193 This principle tells us that the credibility of signals between adversaries depends on how costly or difficult it is to fake them. Because retaliation or mobilization may be "cheap," and even a defender who bluffs is likely to behave this way, convincing the challenger that the defender is tough requires that the defender adopt the kind of policy which an impostor would consider too costly to adopt and mimic. Taken to its logical conclusion this argument implies that a defender must adopt a policy of retaliation, escalation, and war. The willingness to go to war is the ultimate test of resolve.
Defenders find it even more difficult to demonstrate their resolve when extrinsic interests are challenged and there is uncertainty about a government's will to pay the high costs that may be necessary to attain them. Not only are the costs higher than the benefits, but they are incurred immediately, while the benefits may be reaped sometime in the future. We saw that, in the absence of a peace treaty, Israel had to demonstrate its will to hold on to the canal during the War of Attrition. Thus, the dilemma for leaders is that acting tough may require going to war, which is costly immediately and only may have payoffs in the future. "Impulse control problems," the well-documented tendency in which individuals prefer immediate gains at the expense of larger benefits in the future, are not easily overcome and irresolute actors back down.194
The reasons that reputations for capability can also only be created through war is two-fold. First, demonstrations of capability in situations short of a general war can be discounted by the challenger as not reflecting the overall balance of capabilities. The performance of the Israeli air force just before the Six Day War, for example, did not convince the Egyptians that this capability existed in the other branches of the Israeli army or that in a general war such demonstrations could be repeated on a larger scale.
Second, even a general war may not be sufficient to create reputations for capability. The reason being that, as the Egyptian case indicates, leaders in challenging states, in the initial phases of the conflict, tend to attribute the unsuccessful outcome of the war not to the capability of the defender but to shortcomings in their own military organizations. Thus, once the problems are identified at the tactical and strategic levels, and are corrected, challengers believe they can embark on new challenges. In addition, because the balance of capabilities depends on many variables, changes in any one of them can make certain reputations irrelevant. Reputations created during any particular cycle can erode because the challenger believes that new arms transfers or new technological breakthroughs might offset any particular superiority a defender is able to display. To convince a challenger that the defender has a certain fundamental advantage, a human resource capability for example, and that short term changes, such as arms transfers and/or technological breakthroughs, are not sufficient to offset the superiority of the defender requires repeated failures. Repeated failure force a challenger to confront the more fundamental conditioning factors that are responsible for the outcome.195 It is then that reputations for capability are created and sustained.
In conclusion, deterrence works, and it works even against highly motivated "non-deterrables." Unfortunately, in order to make deterrence work in the conventional world states may have to fight wars to create reputations for capability and will: the requirements for deterrence--success; and the foundation for long-term deterrence--stability.