Logics of War

Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Conflicts

Alex Weisiger

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801468162
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Most wars between countries end quickly and at relatively low cost. The few in which high-intensity fighting continues for years bring about a disproportionate amount of death and suffering. What separates these few unusually long and intense wars from the many conflicts that are far less destructive? In Logics of War, Alex Weisiger tests three explanations for a nation's decision to go to war and continue fighting regardless of the costs. He combines sharp statistical analysis of interstate wars over the past two centuries with nine narrative case studies. He examines both well-known conflicts like World War II and the Persian Gulf War, as well as unfamiliar ones such as the 1864–1870 Paraguayan War (or the War of the Triple Alliance), which proportionally caused more deaths than any other war in modern history. When leaders go to war expecting easy victory, events usually correct their misperceptions quickly and with fairly low casualties, thereby setting the stage for a negotiated agreement. A second explanation involves motives born of domestic politics; as war becomes more intense, however, leaders are increasingly constrained in their ability to continue the fighting. Particularly destructive wars instead arise from mistrust of an opponent's intentions. Countries that launch preventive wars to forestall expected decline tend to have particularly ambitious war aims that they hold to even when fighting goes poorly. Moreover, in some cases, their opponents interpret the preventive attack as evidence of a dispositional commitment to aggression, resulting in the rejection of any form of negotiation and a demand for unconditional surrender. Weisiger's treatment of a topic of central concern to scholars of major wars will also be read with great interest by military historians, political psychologists, and sociologists.

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Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Wars

War is, if not common, a persistent feature of international politics. Most wars between countries are, however, limited, lasting days, weeks, or months rather than years, and killing thousands rather than hundreds of thousands or millions. The few conflicts in which intense fighting persists for years, which I call unlimited wars, are thus responsible for a highly disproportionate amount of suffering. I argue that a good explanation for the most destructive conflicts should account both for why these wars did not end more quickly and for why other wars remained more limited. My argument is that unlimited wars are driven by a different mechanism—a different logic of war—from most limited conflicts. In particular, the commitment problem mechanism lacks an internal logic that guarantees that opponents in the war will reach a negotiated settlement after some period of fighting, whereas under the two most prominent alternate logics of war, which I refer to as the informational and principal-agent mechanisms, the revelation of information through fighting ultimately creates a situation in which a mutually agreeable settlement is reached.

In the discussion of the commitment problem mechanism, I distinguish between two types of commitment problems, which I refer to as situational and dispositional. Situational commitment problems are associated with shifting power: in a situational commitment problem, declining powers fear the implications of their decline and thus launch aggressive revisionist wars to prevent the decline from occurring. Given the centrality of preventing decline in this argument, I often refer to this explanation as the preventive war mechanism. The basic logic of this mechanism is quite well understood, although some of its implications are less well appreciated, and even well understood implications have not necessarily been subjected to rigorous empirical tests. Because the mechanism is well understood, however, my theoretical discussion is relatively short.

The second—dispositional—type of commitment problem is less well understood, however, and thus merits closer analysis. In this case, leaders decide to fight not because of fear of relative decline but because of a sincere belief that they face an opponent who is by nature committed to aggression, and thus that a viable peace requires at a minimum the replacement of the opposing leadership and possibly a thoroughgoing reform of the opposing society. This belief logically implies that almost any political settlement is unacceptable, with the consequence that only the opponent’s unconditional surrender is an acceptable basis for war termination. While the commitment problem logic here is clear, the reason why people come to believe that their opponents are implacably aggressive is less obvious. I argue that these beliefs emerge when the targets of preventive wars misattribute the motivation for the initial attack. In these cases, one side initiates a war out of fear that impending decline will force unpalatable political concessions on it in the future. Their opponents, however, believe that the stated preventive motivation for war is merely rhetorical cover for a war of expansion, motivated not by the situation that confronts the declining power but by the character of the opposing leader, regime, or society. This belief is most likely when the target of the preventive war does not in fact intend to do what the declining power fears. It is this process that produces the refusal to negotiate that is a characteristic of some of the worst wars.

For both the informational and principal-agent mechanisms, the central dynamic keeping war limited concerns information. In informational conflicts, the two sides in the war disagree about the likely consequences of fighting. Events on the battlefield and at the bargaining table confront combatants with developments that contradict their expectations, forcing them to revise their expectations of victory and to accept political concessions that ultimately allow for settlement. In principal-agent conflicts, leaders must lie to their publics to maintain support for the war, but their ability to do so diminishes as others in government and the public more generally observe developments in the war that contradict the leader’s claims. The internal limitations in both these mechanisms imply that, while they may account for many of the wars that we observe, they will not be individually responsible for the long, high-intensity wars that produce a disproportionate amount of human suffering.

The chapter begins with a short summary of the bargaining model of war, from which the three mechanisms are drawn. I then turn to explanations for unlimited wars, starting with the situational commitment ­problem and preventive wars and then turning to the dispositional commitment problem and unconditional surrender. This discussion identifies both general hypotheses about the destructiveness of these conflicts and more specific hypotheses that widen the range of possible empirical tests, ultimately allowing for greater confidence in the general argument. The final section examines the two mechanisms that are associated with more limited wars, focusing in particular on the informational dynamics that ultimately lead to settlement in each case.

THE BARGAINING MODEL OF WAR

The arguments in this book are developed out of what has come to be the dominant framework used in the study of war in the international relations field, the bargaining model of war.1 This model starts from a few central assumptions about the nature and purpose of war and derives the important implication that most of the time there should be political agreements that both sides in a dispute prefer to the costly gamble of war. From this perspective, a cause of war is something that prevents a settlement from being reached; theory has identified a range of such potential causes.

The core assumptions of the bargaining model are that war is political and that fighting is costly. Both of these assumptions are generally accepted. Thus, for example, Clausewitz started his magisterial study of war with the observation that “war is merely a continuation of policy by other means”; in other words, war is the attempt to gain through force what could not be acquired through diplomacy.2 But if war is fought to divide a political stake, and if diplomacy could also divide that stake without imposing the costs of fighting, then even people who disagree vehemently about the appropriate division have a strong reason to resolve their dispute without resorting to war. This finding accords with the empirical observation that there are many more political disagreements in the world than there are wars. In contemporary politics, we have disagreements over territory (Israel and Syria or Bolivia and Chile, among many others), the pursuit of nuclear weapons (opposition to North Korea and Iran), economic or environmental policies (e.g., disputes about plan to dam rivers like the Nile or the Jordan), access to natural resources (e.g., disagreements over access to oil and other resources in the South China Sea), the treatment of ethnic minorities (e.g., ongoing tensions related to the treatment of ethnic Serbs, Albanians, Hungarians, and others in Eastern Europe), and many other issues, yet wars arising from these disputes are rare. The puzzle of war, then, is why leaders sometimes fail to agree on a division of the political stake and instead opt to resort to force, with the costs that that decision entails.

Many logically coherent answers to this question exist. Leaders might choose war because they disagree about the likely result on the battlefield, because they doubt that an agreement today would be upheld in the future, because they simply cannot divide the issue at stake without destroying its value, because they do not suffer the costs of war personally and thus do not share their constituents’ preferences, because they are unusually acceptant of risk, because they (or their constituents) actually enjoy the experience of fighting, because they fail to coordinate on an efficient equilibrium settlement, or because the costs of maintaining a suitable deterrent are higher than the costs of war. That said, some of these explanations are empirically more important than others. The remainder of this section thus discusses these different logics, explaining why I choose to focus on the three that are central to my analysis while disregarding the others.

The three mechanisms on which I focus have been the subject of significant scholarly research. The idea that war may happen when leaders disagree about how the war is likely to go draws strength from Blainey’s finding that mutual overoptimism has been present in a tremendous number of wars through history; it is thus unsurprising that this explanation for war has received more attention than any other.3 Similarly, the idea that fears associated with decline may bring about war has a long history, traced back to Thucydides’ argument that the Spartans started the Peloponnesian War because they feared the rise of Athens.4 Arguments about a link between domestic politics and war likewise have a long history, drawing on Kant’s argument that war happens because leaders do not suffer its costs, and building on a range of cases in which diversionary motives or other domestic political processes are believed to have accounted for one side’s decision to fight.5 All of the mechanisms that are discussed in this project thus have been the subject of intensive prior inquiry, largely because scholars believe them to be quite important in the real world.

The remaining potential explanations do not meet this standard, and moreover for several there are significant obstacles to their identification in individual cases. Issue indivisibilities likely constitute the most controversial omission from this study. In practice, however, few issues are truly indivisible—even something like control over government can be divided through power-sharing—and even a dispute over truly indivisible issues can be resolved short of war if leaders have recourse to side payments.6 The stance that indivisible issues are not particularly important has met some criticism, but from an empirical perspective an approach grounded in indivisible issues faces the significant challenge that actors frequently claim that stakes are indivisible but subsequently proceed to divide them.7 Thus, for example, rebel groups such as the Free Aceh Movement in Indonesia or the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka long insisted on independence as an indivisible and nonnegotiable position only to backtrack to accepting autonomy once war turned against them. Given that people are ingenious enough to find ways of dividing even the most apparently indivisible of goods, in practice convincing demonstrations that indivisible issues prevent settlement are rare and typically arise not because a good is actually indivisible but because it comes to be seen as such.8 Relatively few examples of this process have been observed, however, and existing examples are drawn almost exclusively from internal conflicts. In a study of interstate wars, therefore, this mechanism can be safely discounted.

A number of other potential mechanisms exist, but all are ultimately problematic. Explanations grounded in a positive utility for the experience of fighting or risk-acceptant preferences both dramatically overpredict the frequency of war and are thus theoretically uncompelling. For example, if war occurred because people enjoyed fighting, we would expect war to be a constant feature of politics, at least wherever those who enjoy fighting are found. From a more social scientific perspective, scholars have typically found explanations for inefficient behavior such as war that are grounded directly in preferences—people fight because they enjoy fighting, or because they like risk—to be theoretically unsatisfying. At base, they explain away outcomes that we believe to be undesirable by claiming that the people involved actually enjoyed them, an unsatisfying and, for an empirical perspective, typically unconvincing approach.9 In this sort of case, it would be better if the preference were explained by a more general theory, as for example is done later in this chapter by demonstrating that the preventive logic of war provides a rationale to engage in more risk-acceptant behavior. Empirically, I am unaware of any cases in which scholars have made convincing arguments that a preference for war or a simple preference for risk led to war in the modern international system absent other, stronger explanations.

The remaining possibilities also have not been demonstrated to account for many wars empirically. The possibility that difficulties coordinating on an efficient equilibrium might lead to war, while theoretically coherent, relies on the existence of multiple equilibria, making it very difficult to sort out empirically; it is unclear why leaders would ever coordinate on an equilibrium that is nonobvious even for game theorists.10 Likewise, the argument that the cost of maintaining a deterrent might be high enough to justify going to war is unconvincing at least for the modern era given the extraordinarily high costs of war, especially of a war that would be sufficient to allow a country to abandon the need for significant spending on deterrence.11

EXPLANATIONS FOR UNLIMITED WARS

The central argument in this book is that the most destructive wars are driven by commitment problems. I start by discussing the best-known source of commitment problems, in which a declining power fears that its rising opponent will make intolerable demands in the future and launches a war to prevent the decline from occurring. After discussing the reasons why starting a war under these circumstances may be rational, I examine the ways in which such a war might end, highlighting in particular the absence of reasons why a negotiated settlement should necessarily become more likely over time. This argument, which implies that preventive wars driven by shifting power can be unlimited, has a number of testable implications for the destructiveness of war as well as the conduct of the war and the way in which it is ended.

The second half of this section then turns to a novel commitment problem logic that leads to a categorical refusal to negotiate with one’s opponent despite unusually high costs. I argue that this behavior arises when targets of preventive wars conclude that the initiator of the conflict is a war lover who will repeatedly attack absent a fundamental revision of its government or society. This inference occurs when the target of the preventive war does not in fact want to do what the initiator fears; given the inference, no negotiated settlement to which the initiator would ever agree is acceptable, leading to a sincere demand for unconditional surrender. Again, this argument identifies a number of testable implications about when unconditional surrender demands will arise.

Shifting Power and Preventive War

The idea that fear of decline might lead someone to launch a preventive war is certainly not new: Thucydides famously attributed the Peloponnesian War to “the growth of Athenian power, and the fear which this inspired in Sparta,” and just about every systemic war in the modern state system has been attributed to one side’s belief that time favored its opponents.12 The rise and decline of great powers lies at the core of the power transition theory of war and of related cyclic theories of international politics.13 There is thus precedent for believing that power transitions will tend to be associated with great power wars. More recently, work on the bargaining model of war has built on this logic, clarifying the rea...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Wars
• 2. Research Strategy and Statistical Tests
• 3. War to the Death in Paraguay
• 4. World War II: German Expansion and Allied Response
• 5. Additional Commitment Problem Cases: The Crimean, Pacific, and Iran-Iraq Wars
• 6. Short Wars of Optimism: Persian Gulf and Anglo-Iranian
• 7. The Limits on Leaders: The Falklands War and the Franco-Turkish War
• Conclusion: Recapitulations, Implications, and Prognostications
• Notes
• Bibliography