Escalation Dominance

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Escalation dominance is a term used in conflict research and military-strategic considerations and describes the “ability to determine the time and degree of military aggravation of a conflict”.

history

The concept of escalation dominance was proposed by Herman Kahn and further developed by Henry Kissinger in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and foreign policy . The two authors demanded that the United States should respond to every step of an enemy power with an escalation up a higher ladder, in order to destroy any hope of that power that it can achieve its war aims.

Such an escalation ladder could look like this:

  1. Covert actions by the CIA (e.g. Operation Ajax in Iran)
  2. Open intervention with own armed forces
  3. Armed Intervention ( Vietnam War )
  4. Limited Conventional War
  5. Nuclear weapons dropped over an uninhabited area as a warning
  6. Limited nuclear war in one place with tactical nuclear weapons
  7. Lengthy nuclear war in several locations with tactical nuclear weapons
  8. Decapitation strike against the enemy high command.
  9. Preemptive strike as nuclear war with all available strategic weapons.

The Soviet Union considered any attempt to localize a nuclear war to be futile and reacted by announcing that the use of tactical nuclear weapons against its own armed forces could also be answered with a counter-attack with strategic weapons. The concept has since lost its importance.

Further use

The term is found even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the debate about ending the so-called balance of terror and the departure from the MAD doctrine ( "MAD": English. Mutually assured destruction , "mutually assured destruction") and fear of Russia before a military superiority of the USA .

In 2012, the then chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the German Bundestag , Ruprecht Polenz ( CDU ), pointed out in connection with the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip (" Operation Cloud Pillar ") that Israel was claiming this for itself.

In a radio interview in autumn 2014, political scientist Andrew B. Denison attributed the property to the USA for the rapid advance of IS in Iraq .

In 2015, the term appeared in the reception of the second Minsk Agreement in connection with the war in Ukraine since 2014 , here the escalation dominance was attributed to Russia .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Deutschlandfunk - editor Christoph Heinemann in an interview with the incumbent Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz , February 13, 2015, deutschlandfunk.de: No reason for euphoria.
  2. ↑ Michio Kaku / Daniel Axelrod: To Win a Nuclear War, Boston 1987, pp. 113-131
  3. ↑ Deutschlandfunk , Interview, Ruprecht Polenz in conversation with Sandra Schulz, November 19, 2012, deutschlandfunk.de: Polenz: Israeli ground offensive harbors great potential for escalation.
  4. ↑ Deutschlandfunk , Interview , Andrew Denison in conversation with Tobias Armbrüster , June 18, 2014, deutschlandfunk.de: “We have malicious people out there”.