So-called hybrid war, which is the fourth rung, has long been a topic of discussion in Russian military discourse as a way of describing US and Western actions to weaken and undermine unfriendly countries. Information confrontation, gray zone activities in competition and crisis, and hybrid methods in war-all of which were presumably approved by Shliakhturov given his time leading the GRU from 2009 to 2011 – are discussed at the lower rungs prior to the employment of military force. The content of these new rungs is unsurprising given the backgrounds of the co-authors. The Escalation and Deescalation volume includes a total of 17 rungs on the escalation ladder (see Table 1). believe that the start of the use of nuclear weapons will create such a complex political and psychological atmosphere and an operational-strategic situation that will inevitably lead to a massive exchange of nuclear strikes with the most catastrophic consequences for the existence of states, and for life on Earth”. On limited nuclear war, they note that “many Russian and foreign experts. Briefly on the latter topics, the authors echo official Russian denial of an escalate-to-deescalate doctrine and cast serious doubt that limited nuclear war is possible. The authors also address several well-known debates within the Western and Russian strategic communities, such as the escalate-to-deescalate theory and the plausibility of limited nuclear war. They are Iurii Baluyevsky, a former Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces and now General Inspector of the Ministry of Defense’s Directorate of General Inspectors, retired Colonel-General Viktor Esin, who served as Deputy Commander of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces and now a Professor-Researcher in the National Research University in the Higher School of Economics, and retired Colonel-General Aleksander Shliakhturov was the Chief of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff and is now also a Professor-Researcher at the Higher School of Economics.Įscalation and Deescalation is a short work of just over 12,000 words whose primary purpose is to include additional detail to the original escalation ladder. Kokoshin’s co-authors are all highly qualified and experienced policy makers. While Kahn presented 44 rungs in his escalation ladder, Kokoshin reduced that number to 10, beginning with crisis and ending at strategic nuclear exchange.Īnd Kokoshin has recently returned to the subject with another book, entitled, Escalation and Deescalation of Crises, Armed Conflicts, and Wars, in which he is joined by co-authors with broad military experience and expertise to revisit and expand on ideas related to conflict escalation. In it, he drew on Herman Kahn’s work on escalation to develop a version that is applicable to the current era of state competition and warfare. In 2018, for instance, Andrei Kokoshin, who has served in a number of senior positions, including as the Secretary of the Russian National Security Council, and remains a prominent thinker about defense and security matters, published a book, Issues in the Applied Theory of War, in which he presented a conflict escalation ladder. But what do Russian sources suggest about escalation? There are numerous Russian language documents and books that help to clarify this. The evolving crisis in Ukraine has generated much discussion about whether Moscow would escalate the conflict, whether in frustration at the slow progress of its military operations, or in response to actions of other states, even possibly resorting to nuclear weapons. Vooruzhennykh konfliktov i voin LENAND, 2021, 88 pages)Īndrei Kokoshin, Iurii Baluevskii, Viktor Esin, Aleksandr Shliakhturov (Voprosy eskalatsii i deeskalatsii krizisnykh situatsii, Escalation and Deescalation of Crises, Armed Conflicts, and Wars
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