ARGUMENT: RUSSIA’S NUCLEAR DOCTRINEEscalation Management and Nuclear Employment in Russian Military Strategy

On 2 June 2022 Russia released the Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Sphere of Nuclear Deterrence. Michael Kofman and Anya Loukianova Fink write in War on the Rocks that characteristically, the long and awkwardly worded title preceded a brief six-page declaratory policy that is intentionally ambiguous on key considerations, substantiating a spectrum of nuclear employment options and strategies. True to its word, the policy offers some basic principles, wrapped in normative language to forearm Russian arms control negotiators, but its contents will not settle the debate on Russian nuclear strategy anytime soon.

Kofman and Loukianova Fink write:

Russian nuclear strategy has been the subject of vigorous debates in recent years. Some believe it hides a plan to compel war termination through early use of nuclear arms after a case of aggression, i.e., escalate to de-escalate; others see it primarily as a defensive deterrent to be used in exigent circumstances. Analysts have argued that Russia’s lowered nuclear threshold is a myth, a temporary measure born out of conventional inferiority. Others believe that “escalate to de-escalate” does not exist as a doctrine, or that the term itself should be terminated because the real strategy is escalation control.

Each perspective offers a kernel of truth, but none of these views captures Russian nuclear strategy and thinking on escalation management in a satisfactory or comprehensive manner. The debate on escalate to de-escalate and Russia’s supposed lower nuclear threshold has often missed the plot and degenerated into two camps with broadly divergent interpretations. More importantly, the Russian military’s theory of victory and how it developed, or why the military thinks these specific stratagems might work, are often missing considerations.

CNA’s Russia Studies Program recently concluded a study on Russia’s strategy for escalation management, or intra-war deterrence, across the conflict spectrum from peacetime to nuclear war. The research consulted a representative sample of over 700 Russian-language articles from authoritative military publications over the past three decades. Delving into the current state of Russian military strategy and thinking on these subjects, we found that the Russian defense establishment has developed a mature system of deterrence and a coherent escalation management strategy, integrating conventional, strategic, and nonstrategic nuclear weapons. Russian thinking on deterrence and escalation management is the result of decades of debates and concept development. Official policies, strategies, and doctrines offer glints of the thinking behind Russian nuclear strategy, using refereed terms and concepts whose actual contents are discussed extensively in military writings.

They add:

In this article we lay out key components of Russia’s nuclear strategy and thinking on escalation management, premised on deterrence by what the Russian military calls “fear-inducement” and deterrence through the limited use of force. The simplistic view characterizing Russian strategy as “escalate to de-escalate” or “escalate to win” is not correct, but neither are the commonly voiced counterarguments that suggest no Russian strategy for limited nuclear use exists, or that it was simply a stopgap measure born out of conventional inferiority. Russia does have a strategy for escalation management, seeking to dissuade, intimidate, or achieve de-escalation at key transition points and early phases of conflict, from peacetime through large-scale and nuclear war. These stratagems work by integrating the threat to inflict damage with nonnuclear and nuclear capabilities, ideas based on “dosed” damage, and applying force in a progressive manner, in an attempt to raise the adversary’s expected costs well above the desired benefits.

Kofman and Loukianova Fink conclude:

Any conflict with Russia will always be implicitly nuclear in nature. If it is not managed, then the logic of such a war is to escalate to nuclear use. The United States needs to develop its own strategy for escalation management, and a stronger comfort level with the realities of nuclear war.