Threat Assessment
Militarystrategy, and the designing and equipping of a nation’s defence
posture, requires some assessment of the dangers which need defending against.
Part of this process is a purely political decision by a government’s foreign-
affairs experts—ultimately only politicians can tell themilitarywho are to be
seen as the potential enemies. But even when the potential enemies have been
identified for them, the military planners have to decide how real the potential
threats from these countries are, how strong the threat is, and the particular
form which the threat may take. The total process is usually called ‘threat
assessment’. Some aspects of threat assessment are objective and even simple,
because they deal with the basic economic capacity of a potential enemy to
build and operate military hardware with which the threat might be made.
Other aspects involve very difficult matters of intelligence gathering. An
enemy may be capable of several different kinds of threat, and some assessment
has to be made about the most likely strategy for them to adopt, as it is unlikely
that it will be possible to defend against all forms of attack. By far the hardest
calculation is the likelihood that a potential enemy will, in fact, do any of the
things they are capable of. This was particularly important in strategic nuclear
planning when the whole question of the credibility of nuclear strategy was
vital. There was never any doubt that the Soviet Union had the capacity to
launch a huge strategic nuclear strike against the USA (and vice versa), but just
how credible was it, given all the consequences of nuclear warfare, that they
would ever do so? Military planners avoid, at all cost, getting into this area of
psychological analysis. For them what a countrycoulddo becomes what they
willdo in terms of threat assessment. This is obviously too simple, and it can be
problematic even in the simpler case of assessing the level of conventional
hardware. For example, a combat aircraft may be ‘nuclear capable’, but mainly
designed for a conventional war role. Because of the doctrine that the threat is
what the enemy could do, the dual capability is going to increase the nuclear
threat estimate, without any good reason based on enemy intentions. Similarly
questions of the reliability of the enemy’s troops will be ignored, because threat
assessment is always made from a ‘worst case’scenario. The problem with such
threat assessments is that they force up the assessors concept of what is needed,
thus boosting defence expenditure. Worse, because the enemy is making the
same sort of assessment, perhaps from the position of knowing that they intend
no threat, your extra expenditure itself becomes evidence of a threat and
contributes to an expensive and futilearms race. Threat assessment has
become even harder at the beginning of the 21st century because the general
nature of the threat to Western societies is much more vague. Even where a
government, concerned principally aboutterrorism, identifies certain states
as potential supporters of this threat, it is much harder to calculate how to deter
Threat Assessment