ABSTRACT
Several recent events, however, from the severe supply-chain and workforce disruptions experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine, with its prodigious consumption of munitions, have heightened concerns in US defence circles over the nation’s state of preparedness for future wars. Russia’s brutal invasion of a neighbouring sovereign country may currently dominate the headlines, as well as the daily agendas of US national-security managers, but Beijing’s military expansionism, calcifying authoritarianism and bellicose regional behaviour are cause for even deeper concern. Interestingly, China’s concept of system destruction warfare appears closely tied to its perceptions of escalation management, or ‘war control’. The devastating psychological impact of a crippling assault on the command-and-control apparatus of a bewildered foe, it was posited, would help precipitate the latter’s surrender. Historiographical quibbling aside, these debates serve to highlight a broader issue in the history of peer-to-peer military rivalry: the difficulty of bringing such confrontations, once initiated, to a decisive close.
