Maximizing Leverage: China's Strategic Force Posture Choices in the Information Age

How do nuclear-armed states coerce their adversaries in wars with limited aims without using nuclear weapons? In this talk, Dr. Cunningham develops a theory of strategic substitution to explain why some states use space, cyber, and conventional missile weapons instead of nuclear weapons to maximize leverage against their adversaries. She also explains how they select space, cyber, and conventional missile force postures, defined as weapons and plans for using them. Threats to use space, cyber, and conventional missile weapons are more credible sources of strategic leverage against adversaries in wars that do not threaten a state's survival. She demonstrates the plausibility of the theory using China's cyber force posture. China developed space, cyber, and, conventional missile weapons to solve a common problem: giving Beijing the leverage it could not gain from its nuclear weapons in a future war over Taiwanese independence involving the United States. Using original Chinese-language written sources and interviews conducted during extensive fieldwork, Cunningham shows that Chinese leaders pursued cyber weapons to maximize their strategic leverage after the United States bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. As China's vulnerability to cyber attacks grew during the 2000s, its appetite for risk in using cyber weapons declined, resulting in a change to its military cyber force posture in 2014.

Fiona Cunningham is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her current research project explains how and why states use space, cyber and conventional missile weapons as substitutes for threats to use nuclear weapons for coercion in limited wars. Her research on China's nuclear strategy has been published in International Security. Fiona received her PhD in 2018 from the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a member of the Security Studies Program.