Denial (Military Strategy)

"For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." - Sun Tzu

Denial is a military defensive strategy where the defender makes it prohibitively difficult for an opponent to obtain a military objective.^[1]

A denial strategy is different than a deterrence strategy. A deterrence strategy threatens reprisal. It attempts to changing the opponent’s mind about pursuing a certain course of action. On the other hand, a denial strategy does not seek to change an opponent’s mind. It merely makes an opponent’s objective impossible or prohibitively expensive, regardless of whether or not the opponent chooses to pursue it.^[2]

Occasionally, a strategic point is of no use to a defender, but of immense strategic value to an attacking party. Under the doctrine of denied access, the defender often occupies the point to deny access to the opposing party.

A wall is an example of a denial measure. It hinders an opponent’s attacks without changing the opponent’s inclination to attack.^[3]

Many American conservatives and right-wing activists want to finish building a southern border wall across the Mexican border to protect the United States from an invasion of illegal immigrants and some terrorists as well. Although many secular leftists in the United States are for open borders, they fail to realize that illegal/legal immigration from Latin America and other religious areas is a force of desecularization in the United States. In their 2010 journal article entitled, Secularism, Fundamentalism or Catholicism? The Religious Composition of the United States to 2043 published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Eric Kaufmann, Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon wrote: "The relatively low fertility of secular Americans and the religiosity of the immigrant inflow provide a countervailing force that will cause the secularization process within the total population to plateau before 2043. This represents an important theoretical point in that demography permits society to become more religious even as individuals tend to become less religious over time."^[4] See also: Religion and migration

Quote related to the strategy of denial[edit]

"For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." - Sun Tzu

See also[edit]

• List of military strategies and concepts

Notes[edit]