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 purpose to defuse the East-West confrontation.

Concept

The fundamental military operational and structural concept in a Confidence-Building Defense (C-BD) is that a national defense can be optimized by creating a relatively large and lightly-armed network force structure specializing in defense preparation and tactics. This network serves as a force multiplier for mobile and heavily-armed elements, which have considerable offensive capabilities while operating within the network. Because of the synergy inherent in this arrangement, the nation can reduce the number and unit size of attack-capable maneuver elements.

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. 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:

• 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 communication and 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. There have been historical reviews of the advantages of strategic and operational defense on battlefields. Furthermore, there have been discussions of the validity of C-BD as a universal principle.

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), Bonn, founded in 1980. Following the Cold War, Unterseher, in association with Carl Conetta and Charles Knight, co-directors of the USA–based Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA), applied C-BD principles and structural concepts to the security conditions of other states, pairs of states, and regions, including the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, the former Yugoslavia, and Korea. In 1995 Carl Conetta explored the issue of reconciling C-BD concepts with US global power.

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. He recounts that Andrei A. Kokoshin, a close adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, was significantly influenced by the concept of C-BD. Unterseher reports that beginning in January of 1987, a diplomatic agent of the Kremlin was routinely collecting and transferring SAS open-source documents to Moscow, presumably at the request of researchers at several institutes responsible for preparing material for Gorbachev’s consideration. In December of 1988, in his historic speech before the UN General Assembly, Gorbachev announced substantial Soviet force reductions in Europe, including significant defensive-restructuring measures for those forces that would remain. This Soviet decision was a momentous event on the road to ending the Cold War.

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,” Lit Verlag, Munster, 2020.
• 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 06 December 2020).
• 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 07 Dec 2020).
• Conetta, Carl; Knight, Charles; and 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 07 Dec 2020).
• Conetta, Carl; Knight, Charles; and Unterseher, Lutz, “Principles of National Military Stability,” Section 3 of “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#3 (accessed 07 Dec 2020).
• Conetta, Carl; Knight, Charles; and 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 07 Dec 2020).
• 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 07 Dec 2020).
• Møller, Bjørn; Wiberg, Hakan, (Eds.), “Non-Offensive Defence for the Twenty-First Century,” Westview Press, 1994.
• 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). https://comw.org/pda/fulltext/Defensive%20Military%20Structures%20in%20Action.pdf (accessed 07 Dec 2020).
• 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 07 Dec 2020).
• Conetta, Carl; Charles Knight; and 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 07 Dec 2020).