This commentary was originally published by The Lowy Institute.

The latest AUKUS announcement ignited a furious debate. How should we weigh the risks and rewards of the plan for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines? Critics, from former prime ministers to sceptical analysts, questioned the plan’s strategic efficacy, its opportunity cost, its feasibility, and its impact on Australian sovereignty. Well may these debates continue, but the intent is plain: to change the military balance of power in the region.

With that, AUKUS stands in bold contrast to another grouping of partners, the Quad, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States. It may now be time for the Quad to take some lessons from AUKUS.

In purpose and composition, AUKUS and the bilateral partnerships that underpin it can scarcely be compared to the Quad. The Australia-US alliance is a treaty-bound security pact resting on decades of trust and institutional connections. The Quad has no formal mandate, no military role, and brings together major powers that have only recently begun to consult on regional matters. The Quad cannot be expected to function like an alliance.

But if the Quad’s members decide to assume a security role in the region, they could learn something from the Australia-US alliance.

As part of a research project last year, my collaborators and I invited Australian government officials to study and role-play whether the Quad could deter Chinese aggression. In the “matrix game” we designed, the officials tried to dissuade Beijing mostly by signalling their displeasure in a range of ways. They issued statements clarifying their position, sent ships on patrol, and offered more statements. Conspicuously, they rarely sought to change the material balance of power to make aggression more difficult or costly. China, in that exercise, was undeterred and achieved its objectives.

By contrast, the notable feature of the Australia-US alliance in recent years is its attempt to change the material balance of power in the region. Since US Marines began rotational deployments to Darwin a decade ago, the force posture initiatives by the United States and Australia plan to position fighter and bomber aircraft, ships and soldiers in Australia. Critics can and should debate the merits of each of these steps, but there is no denying they are changing facts on the ground – and, with AUKUS, under the water.

These material changes in military power are the types of action that would be necessary to deter a potential adversary from aggression. If they can reduce the chances that the aggressor could successfully pull off an attack at acceptable cost, they may force it to think twice. China, for example, will only be dissuaded from attacking Taiwan if it fears the military odds are stacked against it, or the overwhelming international response would scupper its “national rejuvenation”. Sternly worded letters will not do.

Sending signals designed to show resolve is an integral part of effective deterrence, but alone they are not enough. In the absence of material effects, “cheap talk” may even send the opposite message. Signals without action lack credibility. As in our matrix game simulation, they may convince the adversary it faces no real consequences, inadvertently green-lighting its plans for aggression.

If the Quad chooses to take on a deterrence mission, it could use a range of material actions, drawing inspiration from the Australia-US alliance. Over the long term, and most ambitiously, changing the material balance of power would involve its members building new military capabilities. AUKUS sets a high bar, but Australia’s recent Defence Strategic Review is expected to have likely recommended a host of other, more achievable modernisation initiatives.

Quad members could also shift the material balance quickly and cheaply by repositioning existing military forces. Quad members have valuable real estate that, with new access and basing arrangements, could significantly disrupt Chinese military planning. Australia’s Cocos Island, and India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, for example, both lie within tantalisingly close range of key chokepoints and China’s military facilities in the South China Sea.

This is a risky business. The Quad taking on a new military role would trigger political sensitivities, among its members and especially in the region. So delicate messaging would be of utmost importance. Indeed, new military activities undertaken by Quad members need not even be branded as Quad initiatives. Observers also fear that new capabilities or operational ties may constrain Australia’s future political choices. But the lack of those capabilities or integration would be even more constraining – lacking the military means to act would pre-emptively deny Australia the option to act if its political leaders so wished.

The Quad’s military preparations may also provide opportunities for China. Beijing’s intent to gain control over Taiwan, by force if necessary, is clear, abiding and immutable. But it could still exploit others’ military preparations as a pretext to make material preparations of its own. These are serious risks that demand consideration. But without risk, there can be no deterrence.

This commentary was first published in The Hindu.

India and China appear to be mending fences, gingerly. Relations have been icy since China launched multiple incursions across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh in mid-2020. After years of inconclusive military talks and halting “disengagement” from sites of confrontation, the rivals made inching progress last week. They completed disengagement in an area known as Patrolling Point 15 (PP15), pulling troops back to create a demilitarized buffer zone, and their leaders met in person at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Samarkand.

The tentative conciliatory steps between two nuclear-armed rivals are important; but they also carry risks, especially for India.

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Despite the latest round of disengagement, the LAC remains deeply unsettled. Observers have pointed out that the buffer zones produced by the crisis inhibit India’s ability to patrol its own territory. And India and China have tacitly agreed to postpone settlement at two other confrontation sites, including a particularly tactically valuable area known as Depsang. The buffer zones and Depsang’s status both suit China’s objectives because they limit India’s military activities near the LAC, which analysts judge had partly motivated China’s initial incursions in 2020.

Similarly, the military threat on the border is not only undiminished, but has actually grown over the course of the crisis. The reinforcements that each side deployed since 2020 have not returned to garrison. Even if future rounds of talks continue “disengagement and de-escalation,” and reduce those forces, returning to the status quo ante is now impossible. Both sides have raced to build permanent military infrastructure near the border, to help them surge forces to the border. Unsurprisingly, China seems to have outpaced India in building these roads, helipads, and communications nodes. 

China still claims Arunachal Pradesh as its own, and just as it has pressed its maritime claims once its growing capabilities permit, its military build-up may portend increasing pressure in coming years. Even without a deliberate attack, the increasing capabilities and mobility on both sides of the border means that a crisis can more quickly escalate to a large military stand-off anywhere on the LAC, and possibly even trigger a conflict.

Strategic implications
 

As vexatious as the tactical picture may be on the border, the strategic implications are more dire. For over two years, the land border has become the overwhelming priority in India’s military competition with China. India has reassigned one of three originally Pakistan-facing Strike Corps to the China front. It has deployed its newest artillery, fighter jets, and drones to the China border. 

At the same time, India has not significantly improved its capabilities or posture in the Indian Ocean region. Granted, a suite of impressive new capabilities — from cruise missile-equipped fighters and U.S.-origin naval helicopters to a brand-new indigenously-built aircraft carrier — are inching towards fruition. But these programmes were all initiated before the border crisis, when the Indian military was incrementally modernising its capabilities for the Indian Ocean.

Whether or not by design, this must delight Beijing. As India and China jostle for security and influence in Asia, the contest in the Indian Ocean will inevitably intensify. Their respective capabilities to project military force across the Ocean, to coerce or defend smaller regional States, and to establish an enduring strategic presence there, will determine the Asian balance of power. With the border crisis, China seems to have successfully fixed India’s gaze to the land border, at the expense of that more consequential competition over the Indian Ocean.

Disengagement at PP15, and especially continued “disengagement and de-escalation,” has the potential to ameliorate this strategic trap. A progressively less urgent threat will tempt New Delhi to de-emphasise military readiness on the border. This could be a golden opportunity for Indian planners to work towards long-term military modernisation and political influence across the Indian Ocean region. But a likelier and riskier outcome is that decision makers will prioritise other, more politically salient issues, like gaining quick wins in the campaign for Atmanirbharta in defence industry — which may come at the expense of modernisation.

Paradoxically, then, a cooling crisis on the border may teach India the wrong lesson: that the short-term expedient of greater readiness is enough to see off the Chinese threat. In fact, and especially for the strategic prize of the Indian Ocean region, the challenge posed by China cannot be met without long-term growth in Indian national capacity. That, in turn, requires coherent strategic assessments and the political will to balance readiness with modernisation.

Problems with Intelligence Orthodoxy

Using the case of Iran, Tarapore argues that estimates adopting the view from somewhere could have warned Washington of critical decision points while it still had leverage to act, explained how U.S. policy had inadvertently shaped the Shah’s ineffectual response to unrest, and assessed opportunities for effective policy alternatives. For Tarapore, the view from nowhere and its surrounding orthodoxy is driven by “a concern over politicization in its many forms – a concern that is fundamentally sound, but often overblown or applied dogmatically…in some cases this aspiration to a view from nowhere is itself the impediment to effective estimates.”

Tarapore rules out traditional explanations of estimative failure that suggest the fault lies with insufficient data collection, weak analysis, or unreceptive audiences. “While more data and better analysis would always be welcome, they may not materially reduce uncertainty; and explanations centering on the intelligence-policymaker relationship offer no systematic critique of the orthodoxy that keeps intelligence and policymakers at arm’s length,” he writes.

The danger of dogmatic adherence to a view from nowhere orthodoxy is that estimative assessments of the unfolding events offer little actionable insight to their policy customers when they do not take into account the policymaker’s actual and potential impact on the target. According to Tarapore, “sometimes the problem is not a simple case of customers ignoring intelligence advice, but a more fundamental flaw in the intelligence-policymaker orthodoxy, which limits the types of questions intelligence estimates address.” By explicitly accounting for customer’s actual and potential impact on the situation – in those cases where policymakers had some influence on the target – analysts would have better prepared customers for change.

Limits to the View

As with any intelligence or security concept, there are limits to the view from somewhere. First and foremost, this concept does not reduce uncertainty, Tarpore notes. Data collection and deft analysis using social science methods remain as critical elements of an effective intelligence enterprise. Another caveat is that bringing the customer to the center of the intelligence problem means that intelligence analysts must track two moving objects: the target and the customer. The desired end-states, priorities and other constraints of the customer are also dynamic – they will shift as a function of political evolution, bureaucratic arrangement, or other policy developments.

As with all intelligence advice, the intelligence community can only do so much to shape the customer’s views and prepare them for change. Policymakers, Tarapore argues, would be unwilling to act solely on the strength of early, uncertain warning signs. The view from somewhere, however, would have been a useful tool to sensitize customers to the risks of not changing course – that failing to even tentatively prepare for change could result in an even costlier policy catastrophe, as with the case of revolutionary Iran.