NEW from Andrew Metrick, Philip Sheers, and Stacie Pettyjohn, Over the Brink: Escalation Management in a Protracted War 🧵⬇️

In this Breaking Defense piece, Andrew Metrick & Phil Sheers unpack the implications of China's nuclear build up...BLUF it isn't good & the DoD needs to think a lot more about the intersection between conventional warfighting & nuclear deterrence breakingdefense.com/2024/08/into-t…

Andrew Metrick, Philip Sheers & Stacie Pettyjohn new report, "Over the Brink: Escalation Management in a Protracted War" posits a conventional-nuclear crossfade: in a protracted Sino-American conflict, an inversion of conventional & nuclear escalation risks may render limited nuclear

Fascinating paper. Heart of it is argument that tactical nuclear weapons would have different targets in Asia & that those—mainly maritime—targets would be less escalatory than cold-war land-based ones. Plus long Taiwan war -> lack of conventional PGMs -> TNWs more attractive.

Researchers CNAS conducted tabletop exercises to explore scenarios and found unsettling logics that could compel use of nuclear weapons. Listen to their findings rss.com/podcasts/nucle… ANWA Deterrence Center #deterrence #china #nuclear #alliances

I wrote this week's Banyan column on a recent CNAS tabletop exercise which looked at how a Sino-American nuclear war might begin & why theatre (low-yield) nuclear weapons might be more appealing in Asia than in Europe economist.com/asia/2024/08/2… x.com/shashj/status/…

Thanks to Shashank Joshi for writing this great piece in The Economist on Andrew Metrick, Philip Sheers, and my recent CNAS report on some wargames that we ran exploring nuclear dynamics in a potential US-China war over Taiwan. economist.com/asia/2024/08/2…