Military escalation is the process by which opponents increase the intensity and geographic scope of a conflict. It performs a variety of functions, from communicating stake and will to demonstrating capability, and is critical for deterrence. Yet a generation of national security professionals have been trained to see escalation exclusively in negative terms, which creates real problems for pre-conflict deterrence, conflict termination, and achieving desirable outcomes.
In the past, the ability to escalate was limited by the number and quality of men available for combat, the speed at which reinforcements could reach the battlefield, and the length of time that battles lasted. Modern weapons technology, however, has greatly increased the amount of destruction that can be incurred in a given period of time and the amount of territory that can be targeted. This has opened up a much wider range of potential escalatory options, but also has made it harder to control the pace and extent of a war.
Consequently, when our nation’s military officers find themselves losing a conflict with a revisionist adversary they are too often eager to offer off-ramps, usually with disastrous “in-game” consequences. To avoid this, our leaders must understand escalation dynamics and think deeply and critically about risk acceptance, and understand that avoiding operational risk to show restraint may put the United States at greater strategic risk. This requires a wide array of domestic and outward-facing agencies to build caches of knowledge about where an adversary may go next and a robust toolkit for seizing escalation control.
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