FLASHPOINT:2027 · GLOSSARY · TERMS OF ART

Glossary

Working definitions for terms used in the exercise. These are seminar-grade summaries, not legal advice; for the law-of-the-sea and use-of-force questions, follow the citations on the Sources & Method page.

◢ LAW OF THE CRISIS

Blockade: A belligerent act under the law of naval warfare. A blockade seals an enemy's coast or ports to all traffic, must be declared, effective, and impartially enforced, and — critically — is a method of warfare: establishing one is an exercise of belligerent rights that presupposes (and in practice announces) an international armed conflict. That is why, in the exercise, lawyers on every side flinch at the word: to call an interdiction a "blockade" is to concede, legally, that a war has begun.
Quarantine: A political euphemism with no independent legal status. The term was chosen by the Kennedy administration in October 1962 precisely to avoid the word "blockade": a selective interdiction of offensive weapons shipments to Cuba, framed as regional collective action under the OAS rather than an act of war. The workaround was rhetorical and diplomatic, not doctrinal — a "quarantine" that stops and turns back ships is, in function, a partial blockade, and its lawfulness remains contested. FLASHPOINT:2027's Taiwan Strait "customs quarantine" deliberately replays this move: coercion engineered to stay under the legal threshold of war while forcing the other side to choose between acquiescence and escalation.
Article 5 (North Atlantic Treaty): The collective-defence clause: an armed attack against one ally is considered an attack against all. It is deliberately elastic — each ally decides for itself what assistance is necessary — and it says nothing automatic about sub-threshold sabotage, cyber operations, or "little green men," which is exactly the ambiguity gray-zone strategies exploit.
Innocent passage / freedom of navigation: Law-of-the-sea regimes governing transit through territorial seas and international waters. Freedom-of-navigation operations (FONOPs) assert these rights physically; the coercive counter-move is to treat routine transit as provocation.
Good offices (UN): The Secretary-General's quiet diplomatic function: offering channels, framings, and face-saving formulas without formal mandate. Its power is credibility, not compulsion — which is why the UN seat in this exercise tracks "SG credibility" as a depletable resource.
P5: The five permanent, veto-holding members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, UK, US). In a great-power crisis the Council is structurally paralysed on the merits, which pushes crisis management toward the Secretary-General's informal tools.

◢ ESCALATION & DETERRENCE

Escalation ladder: Herman Kahn's heuristic of ordered rungs from crisis to central nuclear war. Its value is the idea of thresholds and firebreaks; its danger is implying that escalation is controllable and that both sides read the rungs the same way. They rarely do.
Escalation dominance: Holding a credible advantage at the next rung so the adversary escalates at a loss. Sought by every player in this exercise; genuinely possessed by almost none of them.
Inadvertent escalation: Barry Posen's mechanism: escalation neither side chose, produced when conventional operations degrade capabilities the other side counts as strategic (early-warning radars, submarines, C2 nodes). The orbital act of this exercise is one long exercise in the concept.
Entanglement: The overlap of nuclear and conventional command, control, communications and warning systems — attack the conventional function and you blind the nuclear one. James Acton's work on entanglement underpins the exercise's space-war escalation logic.
Brinkmanship / the threat that leaves something to chance: Thomas Schelling's insight that states can exploit shared risk: you need not threaten deliberate war if you can credibly raise the probability that events slip out of control. Manipulating that shared risk is the core mechanic of every seat in this game.
Commitment / audience costs: Public threats and red lines bind leaders before domestic and allied audiences (Fearon). They make deterrence credible and retreat expensive — often simultaneously.
Security dilemma: Robert Jervis's spiral: measures one state takes to feel safe (mobilisation, dispersal, higher readiness) look offensive to its rival, who responds in kind. Both end up less secure without anyone intending attack. Play a NATO seat and then the Moscow seat to watch the same actions change meaning.
Fait accompli: Seizing a limited objective quickly and quietly, then transferring the burden of escalation to the side that must undo it. The quarantine, the cable cuts, and the enclave scenarios all open with one.
Salami tactics: Advancing in slices each too thin to justify war, until the cumulative position is transformed. The defender's counter-problem: which slice do you finally fight over?
Off-ramp: A face-saving exit both sides can take while claiming essential objectives. Crisis-management doctrine holds that you build off-ramps early, while you still can; several endings in this exercise turn on whether anyone did.
Counterforce / countervalue: Targeting the adversary's forces versus its cities and society. The distinction organises nuclear doctrine and haunts every "limited" strike option on the board.
DEFCON / readiness conditions: Graduated alert levels for forces (the US DEFCON scale runs 5, peacetime, to 1, maximum readiness). Raising readiness deters and reassures — and is itself a signal the adversary must interpret, correctly or otherwise. Russian and Chinese systems use their own scales; the exercise renders each seat's ladder in its own terms.

◢ GRAY ZONE & DOCTRINE

Gray-zone operations: Coercive activity engineered to stay below the threshold that would trigger a conventional military response: sabotage with deniability, militia and "fishing fleet" actions, cyber operations, lawfare. The Baltic act opens here by design.
Hybrid warfare / active measures: The blend of military pressure, subversion, disinformation, and political interference. "Active measures" is the Soviet-era term of art for the subversion and influence component, still used in Russian practice.
Reflexive control: A concept from Russian military thought: shaping the information an adversary receives so the adversary voluntarily makes the decision you want. Not deception at the margin but the engineering of the other side's decision calculus — the Moscow seat's signature instrument.
Escalate to de-escalate (contested): The Western shorthand for a posited Russian option of limited nuclear use to freeze a losing conventional war. Russia's published deterrence principles (2020, revised November 2024) do not state such a doctrine, and analysts dispute whether it exists; the exercise treats it as a live argument inside the Russian seat, not settled fact.
Winning without fighting: The classical Chinese strategic ideal (Sun Tzu: subduing the enemy without battle), operationalised in the PRC seat as coercion, quarantine, and fait accompli calibrated to make resistance costlier than accommodation.
A2/AD (anti-access / area denial): Layered sensors and long-range fires designed to hold an intervening force at arm's length — the military architecture behind the Taiwan Strait act.
ASAT (anti-satellite weapon): Any capability for degrading or destroying satellites: direct-ascent missiles, co-orbital systems, directed energy, jamming, cyber. Kinetic ASAT use also creates debris fields that endanger every actor's assets indiscriminately.
NC3: Nuclear command, control, and communications: the sensors, links, and procedures through which nuclear forces are warned, authorised, and directed. The system entanglement makes most dangerous to touch.
Dual-capable system: A platform or missile able to deliver conventional or nuclear payloads. Its inherent ambiguity means the adversary must guess which is inbound — with minutes to decide.

◢ WHO IS IN THE ROOM: ABBREVIATIONS ON THE SEAT CARDS

POTUS · SecDef · SecState: President of the United States; US Secretary of Defense; US Secretary of State.
NAOC: National Airborne Operations Center: the E-4B aircraft that serves as a flying command post for the President and the Secretary of Defense in a crisis.
DNI: Director of National Intelligence, head of the US intelligence community.
NSA: National Security Adviser to the President. (The same letters also stand for the National Security Agency, the US signals-intelligence agency.)
SPACECOM · STRATCOM: United States Space Command, responsible for military operations in space; United States Strategic Command, which commands US nuclear forces.
SG · Deputy SG · North Atlantic Council: NATO's Secretary General and deputy; the Council is NATO's main political decision-making body, where the allies' ambassadors decide by consensus.
SACEUR: Supreme Allied Commander Europe: NATO's senior military commander, by convention a US officer.
COBRA · CDS · No.10: Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms, where the UK government's crisis committee meets; Chief of the Defence Staff, the UK's senior military officer; 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's office.
Zhongnanhai · CMC: The leadership compound in Beijing; the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party body that commands China's armed forces, chaired by the paramount leader.
MOFA · MSS · NDRC: China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Ministry of State Security, its civilian intelligence and security service; National Development and Reform Commission, its economic planning body.
MID · SVR: Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (from the Russian abbreviation МИД); the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.
Security Council of the Russian Federation: The Russian President's advisory body on security and defence; not to be confused with the UN Security Council.
UNSG · Article 99: The UN Secretary-General; Article 99 of the UN Charter lets the Secretary-General bring to the Security Council any matter that may threaten international peace and security.
DPPA · Chef de Cabinet: The UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs; the Secretary-General's chief of staff.
The other side of the hill: Wellington's phrase for working out what the enemy is doing where you cannot see. Here: play a seat on the other side next time.

FLASHPOINT:2027 · GLOSSARY · THIS IS A SIMULATION, NOT A PREDICTION