Understanding the potential sources of escalatory risk is an increasingly important priority for U.S. policymakers. If rivalries produce a series of crises or even proxy or limited conflicts, the danger of those confrontations escalating to higher levels of violence will be an ever-present concern for U.S. decisionmakers. To support current planning, U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and U.S. Army Pacific requested that the RAND Arroyo Center investigate potential sources of escalatory risk from U.S. policy actions and build a tool to assess such risks. This report summarizes that work and concludes with the components of the framework. The analysis combines theoretical and historical research with a current assessment of Chinese and Russian views of escalation and a recognition of the way emerging technologies are changing the context for escalatory dynamics. Escalatory pressures can be highly unpredictable and derive from many independent factors. The tool developed in this research can help decisionmakers think more broadly about such risks. However, an actual crisis or wartime situation will involve a complex and nonlinear interaction of these and other factors, including mistakes and accidents, that can be very difficult to control.

Improvements in Russian and Chinese counterspace capabilities could endanger the space-based capabilities that the United States relies on for a broad array of military and economic functions. The proliferation of U.S. and adversary capabilities could lead to unstable competition in space, raising the risk of unintended military escalation. In this report, the authors examine the conventional wisdom on escalation in the space domain to offer recommendations for how the U.S. Space Force (USSF) and other stakeholders can better prepare to deter and manage escalation. They investigate the implications of six propositions related to stability: (1) the incentives to employ offensive capabilities early in a conflict, (2) the benefits of leveraging foreign and commercial systems, (3) the utility of communications channels for crisis prevention and de-escalation, (4) the feasibility of promoting shared norms of responsible behavior, (5) the strategic benefits of selective revelation, and (6) the use of reversible capabilities to manage escalation.