Description
Combat experience is commonly regarded as an important source of military effectiveness and successful deterrence. Consequently, the absence of recent combat experience is often viewed as a strategic disadvantage. Yet strong but untested military powers continue to deter potential challengers. This paper asks why deterrence persists despite the absence of peer combat experience.
The paper identifies performance uncertainty—uncertainty over how an acknowledged strong military would perform against a peer adversary—as a distinct source of deterrence. Such uncertainty generates a deterrent premium by increasing challengers’ caution toward military escalation. This premium is inherently temporary: once peer combat reveals actual performance, uncertainty disappears. If performance falls short of expectations, deterrence weakens; even when expectations are met, the uncertainty-based premium is exhausted, making deterrence more costly to sustain through demonstrated capability alone.
The paper develops sustaining and collapsing mechanisms and examines them through process tracing of Russia before and after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine alongside contemporary China. It contributes to deterrence theory by incorporating performance uncertainty into existing accounts of deterrence and suggests that misreading the lessons of Russia may encourage overcorrection in assessing China’s largely untested military, thereby increasing the risk of strategic miscalculation under conditions of persistent strategic insecurity in East Asia.