In the months following the February 2019 crisis between India and Pakistan, reports emerged that India had deployed its naval assets—including the nuclear powered submarine the INS Chakra and the nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) the INS Arihant—during the crisis. As resurfaced in a recent SIPRI report, India’s deployment of an SSBN, particularly in the midst of a crisis, has been seen in Pakistan as a move towards preemption. This assessment was reinforced by the Indian Army Chief statement in March 2020 that: “Balakot demonstrated that if you play the escalatory game with skill, military ascendancy can be established in short cycles of conflict that do not necessarily lead to war.”

For Pakistan, the lessons from 2019 represent a dangerous move towards limited war below the nuclear threshold. The crisis should by no means be upheld as an example of successful maneuvering as claimed by New Delhi—and policymakers should be careful to assume that any future escalatory games and attempts to achieve escalation dominance will remain within perceived limits. As even a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would have devastating global consequences, drawing the wrong conclusions from the crisis could prove to be perilous.

Limited War, Escalation Dominance, and Crisis Risks in South Asia

In a 2004 joint statement, India and Pakistan duly acknowledged that the overt nuclearization of South Asia has augmented stability, however, strategies for limited war continue to foster volatility. The idea of “limited war” is generally used to distinguish a conflict from “total war,” or imply a level of constraint in the political objective of a conflict, which determines its limited geographic scope and/or military means. The term was developed in the context of U.S.-Soviet competition in the Cold War, and many have since pointed to the high-levels of risks of limited conflict between two nuclear-armed states. As Henry Kissinger contended: “no war in the nuclear age can ever be completely free of the specter of nuclear weapons.”

For Pakistan, the lessons from 2019 represent a dangerous move towards limited war below the nuclear threshold. The crisis should by no means be upheld as an example of successful maneuvering as claimed by New Delhi—and policymakers should be careful to assume that any future escalatory games........

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