Conflict escalation

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Conflict escalation" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. Please help clarify the article. There might be a discussion about this on the talk page. (August 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article is written like a personal reflection, personal essay, or argumentative essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings or presents an original argument about a topic. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (May 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article may need to be rewritten to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards. You can help. The talk page may contain suggestions. (May 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Conflict escalation is the process by which conflicts grow in severity or scale over time. That may refer to conflicts between individuals or groups in interpersonal relationships, or it may refer to the escalation of hostilities in a political or military context. In systems theory, the process of conflict escalation is modeled by positive feedback. Conflict escalation can be modeled with game theory.^[1]

While the word escalation was used as early as in 1938, it was popularized during the Cold War by two important books: On Escalation (Herman Kahn, 1965) and Escalation and the Nuclear Option (Bernard Brodie, 1966).^[2] In those contexts, it especially referred to war between two major states with weapons of mass destruction during the Cold War.

Conflict escalation has a tactical role in military conflict and is often formalized with explicit rules of engagement. Highly-successful military tactics exploit a particular form of conflict escalation such as by controlling an opponent's reaction time, which allows the tactician to pursue or trap his opponent. Both Napoleon Bonaparte and Heinz Guderian advocated that approach. Sun Tzu elaborated it in a more abstract form and maintained that military strategy was about minimizing escalation and diplomacy was about eliminating it.