By Steven Stashwick
“The record suggests that miscalculation concerns over incidents in the maritime realm are exaggerated.”
The threat of “miscalculation” is again in vogue. What was once a preoccupation of accidental war theorists has resurfaced in discussions about maritime disputes in Southeast Asia and Sino-U.S. relations. During the Cold War, policymakers and scholars worried about nuclear annihilation sparked by misinterpreted warnings, rogue officers, technical glitches [PDF] in command and control systems, or a lower-level confrontation spiraling out of control. Absent the Cold War’s looming nuclear threat, today’s oft-repeated concerns focus on “miscalculation” causing a local or tactical-level incident between individual ships or aircraft (harassment, collision, interdiction, and so on) to lead to broader military confrontation. Some variation of this theme has been featured in public remarks by former U.S. Defense Secretaries Gates, Panetta, Hagel, and current Defense Secretary Carter, as well as Commanders of the U.S. Pacific Fleet [PDF] and the U.S.Pacific Command, and was a topic of policymaker discussion going back at least to the1996 Taiwan Strait incident. These concerns are likewise found in too many op-eds,reports, interviews, commentaries, and articles to count (see also here [PDF], here [PDF], here, and here, etc.) However, while history shows that strategic miscalculations can lead states to war, or dangerously close to it, evidence does not support the worry that miscalculation may cause a local or tactical-level incident to spiral out of control.
To understand the risks associated with miscalculation, we must distinguish between miscalculation at the strategic level and miscalculation stemming from a localized incident between naval or air forces. At the strategic level – that is, a nation’s a priori willingness to escalate a conflict [PDF] and use military force to achieve its objectives – no country starts a war expecting to lose. Yet, “most wars…end in the defeat of at least one nation which had expected victory,” implying all wars result from some degree of strategic miscalculation. That may be a plausible danger in Southeast Asia, but a distinct one. Instead, much of the discourse about localized maritime incidents in the South China Sea conflates strategic and local miscalculation risks, focusing on the latter’s potential to lead to a wider conflict.
Read the full story at The Diplomat