This is a good post. Thank you for sharing. I disagree somewhat with your framework, because I think it is extremely important to differentiate factors that increase the likelihood of armed conflicts between nuclear powers and factors that increase the risk of nuclear escalation given a conventional conflict. I think that you’ve over-focused on the latter, and that drivers of the former are fairly important
For example, your analysis of UAVs and UUVs doesn’t consider a risk I find highly salient: mutual misunderstanding of escalatory strength. That is, if the US shoots down an uncrewed Chinese intelligence balloon over US airspace, the escalatory action was China sending the balloon at all. If the US had shot down a crewed Chinese stealth fighter, reactions would have been very different. This holds even if the capabilities of the fighter and the balloon were identical.
Now, if the sole impact of UAVs is that there’s a new step on the escalation ladder, that would probably be slightly beneficial. But if there’s a step on the escalation ladder and Chinese and American political leadership disagree on where that step is, the potential for a situation to turn into a shooting conflict that takes lives increases substantially.
A similar point about escalation uncertainty can be raised by cybersecurity capabilities: militaries across the globe have made some steps towards defining how they think about cyberattacks. I believe that the most explicit statement on the topic comes from the French, but there are also advantages to strategic ambiguity, and genuine uncertainty about how publics in both authoritarian and democratic states would react to a cyberattack that, say, impaired the power grid.
Cybersecurity has the additional problem of, in the view of some experts, having incentives towards more provocative action, with a bias towards attackers under some circumstances.
As always, I do not speak for my employer or the US government.
This is a good post. Thank you for sharing. I disagree somewhat with your framework, because I think it is extremely important to differentiate factors that increase the likelihood of armed conflicts between nuclear powers and factors that increase the risk of nuclear escalation given a conventional conflict. I think that you’ve over-focused on the latter, and that drivers of the former are fairly important
For example, your analysis of UAVs and UUVs doesn’t consider a risk I find highly salient: mutual misunderstanding of escalatory strength. That is, if the US shoots down an uncrewed Chinese intelligence balloon over US airspace, the escalatory action was China sending the balloon at all. If the US had shot down a crewed Chinese stealth fighter, reactions would have been very different. This holds even if the capabilities of the fighter and the balloon were identical.
Now, if the sole impact of UAVs is that there’s a new step on the escalation ladder, that would probably be slightly beneficial. But if there’s a step on the escalation ladder and Chinese and American political leadership disagree on where that step is, the potential for a situation to turn into a shooting conflict that takes lives increases substantially.
A similar point about escalation uncertainty can be raised by cybersecurity capabilities: militaries across the globe have made some steps towards defining how they think about cyberattacks. I believe that the most explicit statement on the topic comes from the French, but there are also advantages to strategic ambiguity, and genuine uncertainty about how publics in both authoritarian and democratic states would react to a cyberattack that, say, impaired the power grid.
Cybersecurity has the additional problem of, in the view of some experts, having incentives towards more provocative action, with a bias towards attackers under some circumstances.
As always, I do not speak for my employer or the US government.