The volatile and increasingly violent state of international affairs has made deterrence the de rigueur strategic policy objective of the West for many years now. As the US-led liberal international order has decayed, it has been reasoned that new capabilities and new partnerships are required to provide the kit and credibility to effectively deter emboldened and brazen adversaries; namely China, Russia, Iran and their autocratic acolytes.  

Essential to the effectiveness of any nation’s deterrence efforts is having one’s adversaries believe that your society possesses the resources and resolve to endure conflict should it need to arise. As such, the material and psychological components of a nation’s resilience are just as important to credible deterrence as military capabilities. Yet the deterrence policies being collectively pursued by the West—read the US and her allies—have so far placed insufficient attention on improving each other’s resilience for conflicts in the near term.  

To improve the chances of deterring conflict, especially with China, Western governments need to urgently focus on bolstering the basic preparedness of one another to endure conflict, as well as other states in the Indo-Pacific. This needs to be done by securing the supply chains of essential goods and improving critical sovereign production capacities. 

Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden, has outlined a program by the administration to move forward a critical supply chain initiative to safeguard key commodities and advanced equipment for America’s alliance network. The initiative, to include the G7 nations plus Australia and South Korea, will focus on reconfiguring the supply chains of advanced electronics, energy technology, and military equipment. This scheme for “friend-shoring” and diversification is principally aimed at reducing the exposure of America and her allies to China and other less friendly or unstable nations that may disrupt the West’s technology supply chain. It is in-line with the Biden administration’s desire to mobilise the full spectrum of statecraft of America and her allies in a strategy of so-called “integrated deterrence.”  

If credibly established, this latest project could have a useful deterrent effect by both practically muting the effectiveness of Chinese economic warfare and bolstering the capacity of the world’s advanced democratic economies to endure a global conflict. The project must however convince nine states with very different economies to find new frontiers of integration for their most important, complex goods—with higher prices a likely result. 

More importantly, it is not clear that this latest initiative will make a meaningful shorter-term impact on the preparedness of America’s allies to respond to a conflict in the Indo-Pacific within the next decade, which is arguably the more urgent priority. Another challenge, at least for the allies, is the American-centric nature of the initiative, focused on securing America’s supply of advanced weaponry and technical components, as opposed to prioritising reducing allies’ exposure to China for essential goods like pharmaceuticals, electronics, and energy technology.   

America is the largest, most advanced economy in the world. It has the capacity for effective energy independence in wartime as well as the capacity to meet most other fundamental day-to-day needs for its population, such as medicine and food. Its focus is therefore on securing access to goods higher up the value chain, such as complex materials and components necessary for digital devices, advanced military platforms, and resupply.  

Yet the preparedness needs for the United States’ other allies are closer to Australia’s than America’s, with most of these countries having at least one (but typically more) critical supply vulnerabilities that could directly impede national resilience and social stability. For example, both South Korea and Japan each rely heavily on external sources of food and fuel. Meanwhile, the Philippines and Thailand require foreign sources of electronics and digital components, with heavy dependencies on China.  

This is to say nothing of the supply chain vulnerabilities of other states in the Indo-Pacific whose capacity to withstand conflict will be key to deterring future conflicts, especially from neighbouring China. For these reasons, Western efforts to harden supply chains and improve preparedness should be focused regionally, not just within the US alliance network, and should seek to address those vulnerabilities to states’ supplies of essential goods. 

I’ve written elsewhere of the utility of a “first 90-days” preparedness policy for improving Australia’s domestic readiness for a crisis. The 90-day rule would have utility at a regional level as well, with the premise being to focus supply chain reconfigurations and other preparedness initiatives on bolstering the capacity of target economies to endure the first 90 days by securing supplies of goods essential to societal continuity, such as fuel, pharmaceuticals, and essential digital components.  

Bolstering the resilience of states across the region by improving supply chain preparedness could be advanced through existing Western multilateral groupings or new ones. For example, talk of an Asia-Pacific NATO (a revival of the ill-fated SEATO of old) should focus the minds of US allies on how deterrence can be rapidly and credibly strengthened; especially in a regionally-led manner where the effectiveness of deterrence initiatives should not solely depend upon the contributions of the United States.  

Policy thinking and investment on deterrence in the West has become infatuated with the pursuit of exquisite weaponry and strategic technologies. These will doubtless be key to long-term integrated deterrence, but the mobilisation of Western industry for this purpose—the manufacturing of apparent silver bullets, if you will—has arguably come at the expense of investing in the rudimentary economic and social underpinnings of societal resilience and deterrence, which are those goods and resources that underpin daily life. With a large number of analysts supposing that the pivotal period for a potential conflict with China lies in the next five years, signalling our national and collective resolve by securing supplies of basic goods would more rapidly contribute to deterring conflict than advanced weaponry and platforms that are still a decade or more away. 

Dr William A. Stoltz is Lecturer & Expert Associate at the National Security College, Australian National University.

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.