In the latest of a series of articles assessing recent hostilities between India and Pakistan, Brigadier Syed Imran-ul-Hassan says that applying doctrines of limited war and escalation dominance during crises hinders the pursuit of regional stability. The views expressed belong solely to the author of the article and do not necessarily reflect their government’s position, any affiliated institutions, or that of BASIC.
Deterrence stability has long been regarded as the most viable means of preventing war in regions that lack robust arms control regimes or confidence-building measures. Between two nuclear-armed neighbors such as India and Pakistan, deterrence ideally stabilises the security environment – provided that military doctrines, force postures, and defence modernisation remain proportionate. By contrast, strategies based on limited war or escalation dominance tend to erode that stability. While overt nuclearisation has diminished the probability of full-scale war, doctrines designed to operate below the nuclear threshold carry serious risks for regional peace. The May 2025 India-Pakistan military stand-off provided a vivid illustration of these dangers.
The concept of limited war traces its intellectual lineage to Carl von Clausewitz and B. H. Liddell Hart, both of whom argued that military means must align with political objectives. Limited war was conceived as a means of achieving specific political aims without resorting to total war. In the nuclear age, Liddell Hart contended that unlimited war had become mutually suicidal, while Henry Kissinger argued in Limited War: Conventional or Nuclear? that no modern conflict can be completely insulated from nuclear risk and that control over the escalation path is rarely unilateral. However, as Glenn Snyder’s stability-instability paradox suggests, the very existence of nuclear weapons can generate a countervailing dynamic: strategic stability at the nuclear level may paradoxically encourage states to undertake limited conventional or sub-conventional operations in the belief that the adversary’s fear of catastrophic escalation will enforce restraint – although such behavior remains fraught with grave risks.
Escalation dominance further complicates the picture. Typically defined – as in US Air Force strategic doctrine – as the capacity to impose rising costs on the adversary while denying them the ability to escalate or respond effectively, the doctrine presumes a degree of control over escalation that is rarely borne out in practice. Herman Kahn’s “escalation ladder” metaphor captured the theoretical complexity of such contests, yet real-world crises – as in South Asia – seldom follow disciplined, linear escalation. Perception, miscommunication, and unintended triggers often dominate. As such, escalation dominance remains more a philosophical construct than a reliable operational policy.
The South Asian Context: Cold Start and the Escalation Dilemma
In the South Asian theatre, India’s long-standing accusations regarding Pakistan’s support for insurgency in Kashmir have underpinned the evolution of its so-called Cold Start doctrine – designed to enable rapid, limited conventional operations under the nuclear threshold. Pakistan, conversely, treats the Kashmiri struggle as a legitimate self-determination movement and accuses India of supporting groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). In 2017, Indian Army Chief General Bipin Rawat publicly acknowledged the doctrine’s existence, signaling the willingness of India’s military leadership to operationalise limited-war concepts. Meanwhile, a 2020 study by the NASA Goddard Institute warned that even a “limited” nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would produce catastrophic climatic and food-supply disruptions globally – emphasising the stakes embedded in South Asian crises.
Pakistan’s posture aims to reinforce deterrence and preserve strategic stability in the region. In this context, few analysts describe it as a “stabilisation-destabilisation dilemma”, highlighting the inherent complexities of crisis management in a nuclearised environment. As Thomas Schelling’s notion of “threats that leave something to chance” underscores, posturing with earlier deployment deliberately introduces uncertainty into the adversary’s calculations, a logic distinct from Herman Kahn’s model of tightly-controlled escalation dominance. This uncertainty, while meant to reinforce deterrence, may also increase the probability that misperception, friction, or compressed decision timelines could push a crisis onto an escalatory trajectory neither side initially intends. Simultaneously, Indian ambitions of escalation dominance in an already volatile nuclear environment further heighten regional instability. Yet, this challenge is itself embedded in the very logic of the stabilisation–destabilisation dilemma, which rests on the inherent possibility and unpredictability of escalation in a nuclearised setting. When both sides field capabilities and doctrines that push against the perceived thresholds of deterrence, the region acquires multiple escalation vectors – political, conventional, sub-conventional, and nuclear – each capable of interacting with the others in unpredictable ways. Under such conditions, the idea of “controlled” escalation becomes increasingly tenuous, as the interplay of signaling, misperception, and risk-taking behavior renders crisis trajectories difficult to manage or contain.
The 2025 Crisis as a Stress Test for Doctrinal Assumptions
The May 2025 confrontation between India and Pakistan served as a stress test for both limited-war and escalation-dominance assumptions. Both states undertook conventional and precision-guided strikes below the nuclear threshold, yet the risk of escalation was immediate and acute. The use of drones, long-range stand-off weapons and high-velocity missiles compressed decision-making timelines and intensified the potential for misjudgment. Contrary to New Delhi’s assumption of achieving escalation dominance, the episode revealed the impossibility of controlling escalation once reciprocal retaliation commenced. The nuclear threshold, while acting as a psychological and operational constraint that preserved deterrence, also exposed how fragile the system is when faced with rapid escalation dynamics.
This episode also underscored the enduring relevance of classical deterrence theory. Thomas Schelling’s dictum – that the mere possibility of nuclear use can preserve peace – holds true, yet its efficacy today depends upon mutual perceptions, credible second-strike capabilities, and disciplined restraint. The drive for limited-war escalation dominance contravenes this principle by introducing ambiguity and fluidity into operations at a time when predictability and clarity are essential. Cold War experience shows that deterrence stability does not depend on offensive adventurism but on credible, survivable deterrent forces, transparent signaling, and strategic prudence. Bernard Brodie’s insight that the primary purpose of military forces is not to wage war but to prevent it remains profoundly relevant in the South Asian strategic environment.
Emerging Post-2025 Dynamics
The aftermath of the 2025 crisis has ushered in further complexities, tightening the nexus between technology, doctrine, and crisis stability. India’s public acknowledgment of using artificial-intelligence-enabled decision-support and precision systems marked an unprecedented development in South Asian military transparency. Both states continue to develop low-yield and short-range nuclear and high-end conventional military capabilities as part of their modernisation programmes. These shifts reflect an emerging multi-domain contest – across cyber, AI, and precision strike – that drastically compresses escalation timelines and elevates the risks.
At the same time, divergent strategic interpretations of the 2025 crisis have surfaced. Indian analysts argue that deterrence held because India managed to operate within the conventional space under the nuclear shadow; Pakistani analysts maintain that deterrence succeeded precisely because nuclear restraint held. This divergence in strategic learning produces a dangerous misalignment: each side perceives validation of its own assumptions, increasing the probability that subsequent crises will be approached with misplaced confidence.
Beyond the military domain, non-military instruments of escalation have assumed significance. India’s June 2025 declaration of intent to withdraw from the Indus Waters Treaty represented a deliberate move to leverage hydrological resources as a strategic instrument, highlighting the use of environmental and resource instruments as strategic leverage. Concurrent regional realignments, including shifts in Afghanistan’s diplomatic engagement with India, have contributed to a more complex strategic environment for Pakistan. The information and cyber domains have similarly intensified escalation pressures: the May 2025 crisis featured major disinformation campaigns, deep-fake imagery, and cyber operations targeting critical infrastructure, constraining the space for de-escalation long before kinetic engagement began.
Implications for Deterrence Stability and the Path Forward
These developments collectively reinforce a sobering conclusion: the operational buffer between conventional conflict and nuclear escalation in South Asia has effectively collapsed. The interface of AI-enabled precision, cyber sabotage, and hydrological manipulation has erased much of the previously assumed margin of error. In this new landscape, deterrence credibility, doctrinal transparency, and crisis-communication mechanisms are indispensable for preserving stability. Any misperception or ambiguous signaling in this compressed environment risks transforming a localised clash into a strategic crisis.
Moreover, the notion of controlled escalation appears obsolete. Technological diffusion, regional entanglements, and political volatility mean that once conflict begins, it is more likely to diffuse across domains than remain confined in conventional or tactical space. Therefore, the pursuit of escalation dominance in South Asia is not just impractical – it is strategically reckless. Given this environment, renewed emphasis must be placed on arms control, institutionalised dialogue, and strategic restraint. Escalation control now depends less on doctrines of war-fighting and more on crisis-management architectures – hotlines between military leaderships, robust diplomatic channels, confidence-building measures that include emerging domains such as cyber and AI, and transparency around military postures.
Conclusion
In sum, the South Asian security environment – already tested by the May 2025 crisis – now faces unprecedented complexity shaped by technological innovation, regional interlinkages, hydrological competition, and cyber-narrative warfare. Doctrines of limited war and escalation dominance, when applied to a nuclear-armed subcontinent, are inherently destabilising. Conventional and tactical strikes below the nuclear threshold, even when seemingly calibrated, remain fraught with miscalculation risks; the margin of error is exceptionally narrow. Deterrence stability therefore remains the central anchor of regional peace. For both India and Pakistan, the imperative is clear: prioritise diplomacy, institutionalised crisis management, doctrinal realism, and strategic restraint. As the post-2025 environment demonstrates, strategic prudence – not the illusion of dominance – is the only viable path to maintaining peace and stability in a region where the next misstep could prove catastrophic.
Brigadier Syed Imran-ul-Hassan is a strategic affairs practitioner and scholar with extensive experience in defence policy, nuclear strategy, and South Asian security. He is a graduate of Command and Staff College, Quetta; Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad; and the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey. He also holds an MPhil in Strategic Studies from the National Defence University. He served as Director of Arms Control and Disarmament Affairs at Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), London. He has been awarded the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Military) for distinguished national service.