Escalation is a natural tendency in any form of human competition, and today's security environment demands that the United States be prepared for a host of escalatory threats. This analysis of escalation dynamics and approaches to escalation management draws on a range of historical examples from World War I to the struggle against global Jihad to inform escalation-related decisionmaking.

In 1959, Alexander George reconstructed a methodology the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) used to analyze Nazi propaganda during World War II. This same methodology, with adjustments for differences in culture and ideology, might have been used to analyze North Vietnamese propaganda to help evaluate the effectiveness of America's coercive air campaign against North Vietnam. Throughout the war, North Vietnamese leaders used political propaganda to manipulate the opinions of the people it controlled and others they wished to influence. The analysis of this propaganda during Operation Rolling Thunder suggests the North's decision calculus remained insensitive to the effects of bombing, which helps explain why Rolling Thunder was unsuccessful in compelling Hanoi to stop supporting the insurgency against South Vietnam.

This report examines how Joint Task Force Haiti (JTF-Haiti) supported the humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts in Haiti. It focuses on how JTF-Haiti was organized, how it conducted Operation Unified Response, and how the U.S. Army supported that effort. The analysis includes a review of existing authorities and organizations and explains how JTF-Haiti fit into the U.S. whole-of-government approach and the international response.