Following is being attributed to a former Retd 3 star in PA.
India is escalating hostilities to see where it can go. Our rhetorical responses may convince him of our lack of political and military will. Seeing a weak resolve India may attempt a limited military conflict/surgical strike. It may be a serious miscalculation where the probability of a full scale mobilisation and war will be very high. The logic to the present situation:
1. Deterrance is a mindset and never a tangible posture. Its an outcome of a possibility.
2. Continual Indian claims of cross border initiatives will erode our position of deterring war through our nuclear capability.
3. Once the possibility of deterrance begins to gradually lack credibility we become more and more vulnerable to an assymetric conventional threat or be subjected to test our resolve where we may lack the will to show resolution.
4. Our response should be to escalate and push the envelope of hostilities so that nuclear war is a likely outcome and a real possibility. The deterrance then comes into play. Otherwise, we would not have ever tested our strategic potential in deterring war and would succumb to external and internal pressures exposing our own vulnerabilities.
5. Will India, that has so much to lose, go down this road? No. Arguments against this posture are that a miscalculation can lead to a nuclear exchange. Not likely and certainly a lesser probability than described above but nevertheless, the alternative is to surrender. However, it is not likely to escalate beyond reasonable boundries because the rungs in the escalation ladder are so many that signatures leading to a total war will reveal themselves well before war actually breaks out. Even then the choice must be ours to go for mutual destruction or not. There lies deterrance and not in rhetoric alone or owning a capability that you repeatedly continue to show lack of willingness to test.