Military escalation is the process of increasing the intensity and geographic scope of conflict. It performs a variety of functions, including communicating stake and resolve, and it is critical to deterrence. Despite its utility, a generation of national security professionals has been trained to see escalation in only negative terms, and this view creates real problems for pre-conflict deterrence, conflict termination, and achieving desirable outcomes from conflicts.
Historically, the most significant force causing war escalation has been technological, with successive generations of explosives, weapons, and vehicles allowing more destruction in shorter periods of time. Although there have been periods of technical regression, warfare has, overall, progressively intensified, and battlefield casualties reached their zenith in World War I.
The escalation problem is far larger than nuclear weapons, however. Many revisionist powers initiate conflict not to “save face” or to preserve the status quo but to overturn it. Thus, a conflict between revisionist powers can start well below the nuclear threshold and escalate to it over a period of years or even longer.
Too often, during multi-celled wargames in which they are emulating Red decision makers in a revisionist power’s conflict, military officers and civilian defense policy makers offer premature offramps to the contest, with disastrous in-game consequences. Instead, they should be focusing on learning how to use escalation strategically, as one tool within a broad set of options that is useful at times and dangerous at others. This approach requires a deep and critically reflective understanding of risk acceptance, and the willingness to be the first to escalate to the nuclear threshold and beyond when it is in our nation’s interest to do so.
About the Author
