On Monday night, Chinese soldiers killed at least 20 Indian soldiers, including the Commanding Officer of a battalion at Galwan valley in the ongoing violent standoff between Indian and Chinese forces at the Galwan river valley. The question that South Block has been, and will be agonising over is, how to effectively respond to continued Chinese aggression in the region? China is militarising along the Line of Actual Control and is increasing its presence in the Galwan valley, in response to the construction of border infrastructure in the North-Eastern Leh region by India. Will the Indian government prolong the standoff in stalemate, withdraw, or strike the Chinese positions?
Ultimately the best outcome will be de-escalation of conflict, the question remains which course of action is the most sustainable long term? How will India deter China from asserting themselves more aggressively along the LAC to put an end to the current standoff and prevent the escalation of future disputes?
While many will call for graduated escalation and retaliatory strikes in the case of further changes to the status quo, effective military deterrence can solely be built through unpredictable and overwhelming reprisals, something which can be understood through the application of game theory to the study of military history.
Game theory is useful for providing very clean mathematical examples, to articulate and reason about real-world situations in a logical way. They help you think through who the actors are, what their preferences are, which actions they can take and what possible outcomes could occur.
One of the most famous examples of the uses of game theory, is the “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” To illustrate this paradox in decision analysis which is applicable across multiple disciplines, here is the scenario. There are two prisoners accused of a crime. Authorities put them in different rooms and interrogate them separately so they can’t communicate with each other. The setup supposes that each can do one of two things: remain silent or betray their partner. If both remain silent, they both get a light jail sentence. If both betray the other, they each get more significant sentences. If one remains silent, and one betrays, the traitor goes free and the other gets a particularly stiff sentence. Each prisoner has every incentive to betray their colleague, even though the best outcome for them collectively is to remain silent.
Similarly, the best outcome to any conflict including the present standoff, is restraint from increased conflict, and the assurance of peace for both sides. Yet it is always the case that an aggressor attempts to maximise geopolitical gain by taking advantage of it’s victim, and the victim undoubtedly defends it’s sovereignty only leading to increased tensions between both sides, and no real gains for either, because these gains are squandered through diplomatic and military expenditure or through loss of territorial integrity, strength and international standing.
The prisoner’s dilemma is a good way to characterise much social interaction of any kind in fact, where cooperation is beneficial for all sides, yet cheating and aggression results in higher gain for the aggressor if the victim is caught off guard. The applications of prisoner’s dilemma are countless, in our case for military strategy, but otherwise being used even in such fields such as evolutionary biology to explain the development of evolutionarily stable strategies which facilitate cooperation in different species of animals, most notably us human beings (who were able to scale cooperation massively, leading to our current evolutionary pre-dominance and complex social systems and hierarchies).
The only difference between the scenario of prisoner’s dilemma to that in real life, is that usually prisoner’s dilemmas are not one time games, but happen repeatedly in iterative fashion. Prisoner’s dilemmas in real life are played out over hundreds of interactions whether it’s between individuals or nation-states, where the past decisions of each ‘player’ affect future outcomes due to the slow development of a reputation for either aggression or cooperation between parties.
Experimenting with Monte Carlo simulations of prisoner’s dilemmas, we find that over millions of iterations, the most effective strategy for a player in a prisoner’s dilemma is to employ a strategy in game theory called ‘tit for tat’. What this strategy calls for, in essence, is for an agent to first attempt to cooperate, and then to subsequently replicate an opponent’s previous action.
If the Chinese are willing to cooperate and stay faithful to the de-escalation process, India must be committed to this as well, without appeasing and giving in to Chinese demands. If the Chinese are unwilling to de-escalate and continue to muscle flex, show strength and infiltrate into Indian territory, overwhelming retaliation is the only solution to put an end to this aggression.
Looking at military history we can see appeasement and détente, as being short term solutions to long term problems at best. Détente has it’s time and place but when faced with relentless provocation from the PLA, immediate retaliation is called for.
Famously the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Neville Chamberlain among other western leaders proclaimed ‘peace in our times’ at the conclusion of the Munich agreement in 1938, when Hitler was allowed to seize the Sudetenland from the erstwhile Czechoslovakia, only to be confronted with the ultimatum ‘Danzig or War’ a year later when Nazi Germany’s expansionism was not sated. How well did de-escalation and appeasement work then? It very clearly did not stop the inevitability of World War 2.
The same could be said of the slightly less passive strategy of graduated escalation used by the Americans during the Vietnam War, when the Viet Cong was allowed to trespass and violate South Vietnamese territory, without retaliation, unless they initiated a serious change in the status quo. This slow infiltration of South Vietnam by the Communist guerilla forces of the North, inevitably resulted in American withdrawal from Vietnam and a shameful defeat, when in reality overwhelming force should have been utilised at the very start of the conflict.
Even having a look at past Indo-Sino relations, we can see that in the ‘50s and ‘60s the policy of pursuing friendship backfired when in ‘62 we were unprepared for Chinese invasion and ultimately had to cede the Aksai Chin region as a result, in a humiliating defeat.
Wherever the Chinese government claims territory, it directs it’s military apparatus to expand relentlessly especially if they are not met with resistance. Throughout their modern history the Communist Chinese government has pushed the envelope repeatedly: whether it was the annexation of Tibet, island building in the South China Sea or threatening military exercises off the coast of Taiwan (which it claims is it’s own as a part of it’s one-China policy).
The only force stopping China in the latter two instances are the pressure of American deterrence and retaliation, and even so, China has slowly inched its way to further control of it’s claimed territories.
The Candid Contrarian 