Success and Failure in Limited War

Information and Strategy in the Korean, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, and Iraq Wars

Spencer D. Bakich

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226107851
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Common and destructive, limited wars are significant international events that pose a number of challenges to the states involved beyond simple victory or defeat. Chief among these challenges is the risk of escalation—be it in the scale, scope, cost, or duration of the conflict. In this book, Spencer D. Bakich investigates a crucial and heretofore ignored factor in determining the nature and direction of limited war: information institutions.Traditional assessments of wartime strategy focus on the relationship between the military and civilians, but Bakich argues that we must take into account the information flow patterns among top policy makers and all national security organizations. By examining the fate of American military and diplomatic strategy in four limited wars, Bakich demonstrates how not only the availability and quality of information, but also the ways in which information is gathered, managed, analyzed, and used, shape a state's ability to wield power effectively in dynamic and complex international systems.Utilizing a range of primary and secondary source materials, Success and Failure in Limited War makes a timely case for the power of information in war, with crucial implications for international relations theory and statecraft.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE

1. William C. Fuller Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 260–64; Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War, 1854–56 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 91–102.

2. A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 201–28; Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 453–56.

3. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 5–7, 133–34.

4. For a sampling of these works, see Michael C. Desch, Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); and Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002).

5. The vast majority IR scholarship understands the problem of information to be intractable, especially in situations of conflict. As such, scholars posit that other variables serve as proxies in the design and execution of foreign policy. For realism, uncertainty regarding others’ intentions necessitates a focus on material power. Dale C. Copeland, “The Constructivist Challenge to Structural Realism: A Review Essay,” International Security 25 (Fall 2000). For constructivism, states deal with complexity in international affairs by relying on collectively held ideas about the world. Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). For liberalism, domestic regime type serves as a critical signal of intentions and thus conditions how a democratic state will behave toward it. John M. Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

6. Coordination among leaders and organizations is a prominent feature of organizational theory, discussed below. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 24–29.

7. On international institutions, see John Duffield, “What Are International Institutions?” International Studies Review 9 (2007). On domestic political institutions, see Peter Trubowitz, Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Helen V. Milner, Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

8. This definition borrows from Doris A. Graber, The Power of Communication: Managing Information in Public Organizations (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003), 5.

9. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Roger T. Ames (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 113.

10. On the role of uncertainty in causing war, see James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49 (Summer 1995); Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: Free Press, 1973), 53–56. For a general assessment of bargaining theory, see Dan Reiter, “Exploring the Bargaining Model of War,” Perspectives on Politics 1 (March 2003).

11. James D. Fearon, “Signaling Foreign Policy Interests: Tying Hands versus Sinking Costs,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 41 (February 1997).

12. On information revelation during war, see Dan Reiter, How Wars End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 14–18.

13. On the identification of (and an imperfect solution to) the problem of information endogeneity in affecting strategic choice, see Charles L. Glaser, Rational Theory of International Politics: The Logic of Competition and Cooperation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 48–49.

14. Spencer D. Bakich, “Institutionalizing Supreme Command: Explaining Political-Military Integration in the Vietnam War, 1964–1968,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 22 (October 2011): 699–701.

15. David A. Lake, “Two Cheers for Bargaining Theory: Assessing Rationalist Explanations of the Iraq War,” International Security 35 (Winter 2010/11).

16. Glaser, Rational Theory of International Politics, 182.

17. Stephen Peter Rosen, War and Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crises (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); and Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychology Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

18. Richard C. Snyder, H. W. Bruck, and Burton Sapin, eds., Foreign Policy Decision Making: An Approach to the Study of International Politics (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962).

19. Gregory M. Herek, Irving L. Janis, and Paul Huth, “Decision Making during International Crises: Is Quality of Process Related to Outcome?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 31 (June 1987).

20. Mark Schafer and Scott Crichlow, Groupthink: High-Quality Decision Making in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 183–87.

21. William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 114.

22. Bartholomew H. Sparrow, “Realism’s Practitioner: Brent Scowcroft and the Making of the New World Order, 1989–1993,” Diplomatic History 34 (January 2010): 152.

23. Milner, Interests, Institutions, and Information, 18.

24. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5.

25. Douglass C. North, “Epilogue: Economic Performance through Time,” in Empirical Studies in Institutional Change, ed. Lee J. Alston, Thrainn Eggertsson, and Douglass C. North (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 346.

26. Masahiko Aoki, Toward a Comparative Institutional Analysis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Economics and Institutions: A Manifesto for a Modern Institutional Economics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988).

27. Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999); John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision: New Dimensions of Political Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).

28. David A. Welch, Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 33.

29. David A. Welch, “The Organizational Process and Bureaucratic Politics Paradigms: Retrospect and Prospect,” International Security 17 (Autumn 1992); Jonathan Bendor and Thomas H. Hammond, “Rethinking Allison’s Models,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 2 (1992); Robert J. Art, “Bureaucratic Politics and American Foreign Policy: A Critique,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973); Stephen D. Krasner, “Are Bureaucracies Important? (Or Allison Wonderland),” Foreign Policy 7 (1972).

30. Arthur A. Stei...