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This chapter summarizes the key empirical findings and address extension of the basic argument to cyberconflict and violence within states (i.e., civil wars, terrorism). A consistent theme of the book is that the backstage of war sometimes features direct combat encounters by outside powers that were publicly understood to have avoided such entanglements. The chapter then presents a brief case study of a post-Cold War conflict: the Iranian covert weapons supply program during the U.S. occupation of Iraq (2003–2011). The U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Iranian covert intervention that followed suggest the links between limited war, covertness, and collusion continue to be relevant. Though conclusions about the case are necessarily preliminary, the chapter reviews this conflict to illustrate how the claims of the theory travel to a more recent case. It also addresses questions about the initial choice to intervene, mistakes and exploitation, and the possible implications of social media and leaks in the contemporary era. It concludes by discussing the implications of secrecy's role in escalation control for policy and scholarship.

This chapter argues that escalation control and a shared desire to limit war can motivate covert intervention up front, collusion by major powers that detect it, and official non-acknowledgment if it is widely exposed. Since World War I, large-scale escalation of war has become unacceptably costly, yet leader control of the escalation process has been simultaneously weakened. While a range of factors influence the escalation potential for war, this chapter focuses on two specific escalation-control problems: constraints created by domestic hawks and misunderstandings among adversaries about the value of limited war. It claims that backstaging military intervention allows rival leaders to insulate themselves and one another from domestic hawkish constraints. In addition, embracing the backstage communicates shared interest in keeping war limited. This basic relationship provides a unifying logic for the initial decision to intervene covertly, a detector's decision to collude after detection, and an intervener's continuing non-acknowledgment of a widely exposed intervention.

This chapter focuses on the covert side of the Vietnam War. Secrecy famously helped Richard Nixon cope with dovish domestic opposition toward the end of the war. In contrast, the chapter highlights the role of covert intervention in helping both sides compete in Vietnam while keeping the war limited during the earlier Johnson years (1964–1968). Even as he greatly expanded U.S. military activity in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson acted to avoid provoking a larger war with China or the Soviet Union. Covert U.S. military operations in places like Laos, though an open secret, were a way to prosecute a counterinsurgency while keeping a lid on hostilities. China and the Soviet Union similarly sought to control escalation dangers through covertness. Both communist patrons provided military personnel covertly to improve air defense in North Vietnam. The chapter suggests that all three outside powers worked hard to avoid public and acknowledged clashes up through 1968.

This chapter analyzes foreign combat participation in the Spanish Civil War. Fought from 1936 to 1939, the war hosted covert interventions by Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. The chapter leverages variation in intervention form among those three states, as well as variation over time in the Italian intervention, to assess the role of escalation concerns and limited war in the use of secrecy. Adolf Hitler's German intervention provides especially interesting support for a theory on escalation control. An unusually candid view of Berlin's thinking suggests that Germany managed the visibility of its covert “Condor Legion” with an eye toward the relative power of domestic hawkish voices in France and Great Britain. The chapter also shows the unique role of direct communication and international organizations. The Non-Intervention Committee, an ad hoc organization that allowed private discussions of foreign involvement in Spain, helped the three interveners and Britain and France keep the war limited in ways that echo key claims of the theory.

This chapter describes the confluence of political, technological, and social changes that prompted the emergence of covert military intervention as an escalation-control technique. It lays the foundation for assessing how more recent political and technological changes, such as cyberwarfare and drones, influence the covert sphere. In particular, this chapter highlights the special role of World War I. It conceptualizes the Great War as a critical juncture that dramatized the dangers of large-scale war escalation and accelerated political, social, and technological developments that influenced escalation control. These changes sharpened the problem of escalation control by making leaders more vulnerable to hawkish domestic constraints and making intentions about limited war harder to discern. Yet it also made possible new ways of using military force anonymously through, for example, the development of airpower. World War I prompted major powers to experiment with ways of limiting war; this included manipulation of the form of external military intervention.

Chapter 5 explains why and how South Africa intervened in the Angolan civil war in late 1975, showing how the intervention ultimately came to be seen as satisfying both of the major policy impulses in Pretoria: working with independent Africa, and confronting communism. The chapter refutes the dominant thesis that this intervention was largely a response to direct American entreaties and rationalized as a means to strengthen the bilateral relationship with Washington. If anything, it was the other way around: after their military operations were exposed, South Africa begged the United States and others to get more involved in the conflict. Ultimately, the analysis shows how the regime became deeply entrenched in precisely the sort of military conflict with racial overtones that it sought to avoid through the careful statecraft of détente, resulting in regional confrontation instead of the stability and coexistence that Pretoria had tried so hard to nurture.