Thinking About Escalation Management in East Asian Strategy

There are plenty of articles and monographs published each year regarding U.S. strategy options for defending our allies in East Asia from Chinese or North Korean military aggression. The debate is not lacking for new strategy proposals, or debates over doctrine and operating concepts, or examinations of how each country’s forces stack up against each other. It is sorely lacking for serious examinations of escalation management.

Too often I come across a piece that claims the Chinese nuclear arsenal makes any wartime strike against a target on Chinese soil a fool’s errand, or that the Kim regime’s nuclear arsenal makes any military retaliation against a violent North Korean provocation an exercise in extreme risk. Both are perverse oversimplifications. If there’s anything we learned during four and half decades of thinking about deterrence policies and contingency plans during the Cold War, it’s that confrontations between nuclear-armed powers are competitions in extreme risk taking that don’t have predeterminable answers. Hence, the concepts of escalation dominance, escalation management, and “threats that leave something to chance.”

That’s what makes Vincent Manzo’s article in the latest Joint Forces Quarterly an absolute must-read. Manzo delves into the myriad escalation management considerations U.S. leaders would have to deal with in an East Asian crisis or conflict. His piece is one of the few I’ve seen that invokes the deterrence theories of Thomas Schelling in Sino-American or Korean Peninsula contexts. Manzo leaves few stones unturned in identifying the major escalation dynamics that would define crises or conflicts involving those countries. Beyond the calculus of deliberate escalation, he explores the many potential sources of accidental or inadvertent escalation that might occur on both sides in an East Asian clash.

Manzo’s article is heavily influenced by RAND’s seminal 2008 monograph on escalation management in the 21^st Century, and makes for an excellent companion piece to Forrest Morgan’s outstanding 2012 paper on escalation management with respect to Russia. I can’t recommend all three of these works enough: they are essential reading for informed commentary on contemporary strategy with respect to these potential adversaries.

My sole quibble with Manzo’s arguments is a very minor technical one. While he does address means of bounding hypothetical attacks in the physical and cyber realms in order to attempt to signal restraint as well as capability, he does not note that the same is possible in the electromagnetic realm. Attacks against an adversary’s command and control networks, or wide-area surveillance and reconnaissance systems for that matter, do not necessarily risk extreme provocations or retaliation. It depends on the what, when, and how of the attack. There’s a fundamental difference in risk between jamming or exploiting a datalink to missile-carrying aircraft at sea vice one to missile Transporter Erector Launchers on land. Likewise, there’s a big difference between attacking a datalink to a definitively known non-nuclear capable unit vice one that might be nuclear-capable. The same is true with jamming or deceiving a sensor designed to detect and track surface vessels vice one that is clearly used for ballistic missile early warning. Some forms of electronic attacks leave no immediate calling cards; after-action signals analysis may be required to realize that it even occurred. Others attacks involve passive means: presenting false targets to a surveillance or reconnaissance system, or using obscurants to prevent detection by that system. All these carry far less escalation risk than deliberate electronic attacks against known strategic forces. But again, this issue is minor in the scheme of Manzo’s first-rate work.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.