Military Strategy, Private Information, and War

Abstract

In conventional crisis bargaining models, bluffing provides the primary rationale for states to misrepresent their private information, and war occurs because strong states are unable to credibly demonstrate strength to their opponents. Here, I argue that military strategy supplies an alternative reason for states to misrepresent their private information. Both strong and weak states may misrepresent themselves because of the battlefield benefits of fighting against an uninformed opponent, who may choose a suboptimal military strategy. Under appropriate conditions, the military gains for concealing information exceed the diplomatic gains available for revealing that information. Thus, states will choose to keep secrets and fight. To demonstrate this, I incorporate military strategy into the standard bargaining framework, showing that military concerns incentivize both strong and weak states to conceal information, even when they are able to reveal that information costlessly and credibly. As in the usual model, war may occur when states underestimate their adversaries, but it may also occur when states overestimate their adversaries. I further show that a mere willingness to fight does not reveal that a state is strong. I conclude the paper with two brief case studies.

Moving Forward vs. Inflicting Costs in a Random-Walk Model of War

“…Despite the growing theoretical literature on the process of war especially since Smith (1998) and Wagner (2000), there have been limited theoretical studies on how military strategies are adopted during war (Intriligator and Brito 1984;Lindsey 2015;Powell 1987Powell , 1988Powell , 1989Wagner 1991;Tarar 2016). We have conducted the …rst theoretical attempt to incorporate military strategies into a random-walk model of war, where two belligerents choose to move their forces forward, punish each other, or surrender in each battle.…”

“…This article also aims to contribute to the theoretical literature on military strat-egy, which have remained understudied as of today. Recent bargaining models of war have incorporated military strategies such as concealment of strength (Baliga and Sjöström 2008;Meirowitz and Sartori 2008;Slantchev 2010), indirect strategy (Lindsey 2015), and fait accompli (Tarar 2016), but they commonly presume the relative strength between belligerents to be …xed throughout war. 4 Unlike them, our model illuminates the shift of military balance by incorporating the random walk.…”

The Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Uncertainty and Conflict in International Relations

“…Finally, uncertainty about capabilities may endogenously arise due to strategic behavior by the actors when they have incentives to avoid being predictable (Baliga and Sjöström 2008;Meirowitz and Sartori, 2008;Jackson and Morelli, 2009;Debs and Monteiro, 2014;Lindsey, 2015). Meirowitz and Sartori (2008) describe incentives for an arming state to intentionally generate strategic uncertainty about its capabilities.…”

Denial vs. Punishment: Strategies Shape War, But War Itself Affects Strategies

“…Into bargaining models with incomplete information, some forms of military strategy have been incorporated such as feigning weakness (Slantchev 2010), fait accompli (Lindsey 2015), and indirect strategy (Tarar 2016). In a non-bargaining context, the choice problem as to the allocation of military resources has been theorized at the operational level in the sense that the models focus on speci…c battles or certain theaters rather than on war as a whole ( With few exceptions (Bennett and Stam 1998; Goemans 2000; Pape 1996: 52), most of the existing empirical and theoretical studies have commonly presumed military strategies to be chosen at war's onset and …xed throughout.…”