Escalation and the War on Terror

摘要

This article makes a case for treating escalation in irregular warfare as different in kind from the regular variant that was originally theorized during the Cold War. The regular variant emphasizes the role of clearly defined and commonly recognized 'thresholds' as a means of organizing cooperation within conflict. In contrast, the irregular variant can reward efforts by weaker terroristic actors to erode the moral significance of the combatanton-combatant threshold, just as it can reward efforts by their stronger adversaries to bolster it.