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Dangerous thresholds : managing escalation in the 21st century

Escalation is a natural tendency in any form of human competition. When such competition entails military confrontation or war, the pressure to escalate can become intense due to the potential cost of losing conflicts of deadly force. Cold War-era thinking about escalation focused on the dynamics of bipolar, superpower confrontation and strategies to control it. Today's security environment, however, demands that the United States be prepared for a host of escalatory threats involving not only long-standing nuclear powers, but also new, lesser nuclear powers and irregular adversaries, such as insurgent groups and terrorists. This examination of escalation dynamics and approaches to escalation management draws on historical examples from World War I through Somalia in the early 1990s. It reveals that, to manage the risks of escalatory chain reactions in future conflicts, military and political leaders will need to understand and dampen the mechanisms of deliberate, accidental, and inadvertent escalation. Informing the analysis are the results of two modified Delphi exercises, which focused on a potential conflict between China and the United States over Taiwan and a potential conflict between states and nonstate actors in the event of a collapse of Pakistan's government.

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  • "Managing escalation in the 21st century"
  • "Managing escalation in the 21st century"@en

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  • "Escalation is a natural tendency in any form of human competition. When such competition entails military confrontation or war, the pressure to escalate can become intense due to the potential cost of losing conflicts of deadly force. Cold War-era thinking about escalation focused on the dynamics of bipolar, superpower confrontation and strategies to control it. Today's security environment, however, demands that the United States be prepared for a host of escalatory threats involving not only long-standing nuclear powers, but also new, lesser nuclear powers and irregular adversaries, such as insurgent groups and terrorists. This examination of escalation dynamics and approaches to escalation management draws on historical examples from World War I through Somalia in the early 1990s. It reveals that, to manage the risks of escalatory chain reactions in future conflicts, military and political leaders will need to understand and dampen the mechanisms of deliberate, accidental, and inadvertent escalation. Informing the analysis are the results of two modified Delphi exercises, which focused on a potential conflict between China and the United States over Taiwan and a potential conflict between states and nonstate actors in the event of a collapse of Pakistan's government."@en
  • "The subject of escalation has received little attention in U.S. strategic thought since the end of the Cold War. With prospects of conflict between nuclear-armed superpowers receding in memory, few policymakers, security analysts, or military leaders have worried about the danger of wars spinning out of control or considered how to manage these risks. Yet there are important reasons to examine the dynamics of escalation in the current security environment. Although the United States retains its nuclear superiority and has demonstrated the ability to pro- project overwhelming force in most conventional conflicts, strategic conditions have changed considerably in the past 15 years, and new adversaries have emerged. These developments could find the United States in escalatory situations that its leaders, schooled in ideas developed during the Cold War, are ill equipped to anticipate or manage. Understanding escalation is particularly important to the U.S. Air Force because of its unique ability to strike deep within enemy territory and the emphasis in Air Force doctrine on rapid strategic attack to achieve shock, paralysis, and escalation dominance. The Air Force recognizes the importance of understanding and managing the risks of escalation. In 2004, Director of Air Force Strategic Planning Major General Ronald J. Bath sponsored a war game in which uncontrolled escalation occurred, surprising players and controllers alike. Because this experience was just one in a series of escalatory events occurring in major war games over the past several years, General Bath recommended to Air Force Chief of Staff General John P. Jumper that the RAND Corporation be tasked to examine the risks of escalation in the current security environment and offer recommendations on how the Air Force can best anticipate and manage those risks."@en

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  • "Electronic books"@en

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  • "Dangerous thresholds : managing escalation in the 21st century"
  • "Dangerous thresholds : managing escalation in the 21st century"@en
  • "Dangerous thresholds managing escalation in the 21st century"@en
  • "Dangerous Thresholds. Managing Escalation in the 21st Century"@en

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