Uncertain wars and escalation below the shooting threshold

Cold War force planning gives way here to the difficulty of predicting where, when, and at what level a conflict will begin. Both sides act on imperfect assumptions about what an opponent will tolerate, making escalation a reciprocal calculation rather than a controlled schedule. Clashes on the India-China border illustrate how rivals may deliberately fight with limited weapons to stay below a feared threshold. At sea, trawlers and other nominally civilian vessels can harass warships while undersea activity remains even harder to observe or attribute. A navy must prepare for ambiguous coercion as well as declared war, because strategy cannot assume the enemy will select a convenient form of conflict.