War Aims and War Outcomes

Abstract

Why are states with tremendous advantages in capabilities and resources often unable to attain even limited objectives vis-à-vis much weaker adversaries? The theory I develop focuses on how the nature of a strong state's war aims affects prewar uncertainty about the cost of victory. I argue that the relative magnitude of the effect of military strength and resolve on war outcomes varies with the nature of the object at stake and that strong states become more likely to underestimate the cost of victory as the impact of resolve increases relative to that of war-fighting capacity. I evaluate the empirical implications of this theory against the historical record provided by the universe of major power military interventions since World War II. The results challenge both existing theories and conventional wisdom about the impact of factors such as military strength, resolve, troop commitment levels, and war-fighting strategies on asymmetric war outcomes.

Resolve in International Politics

“…"extremely difficult to measure objectively", Rummel (1975b, 318) calls it "the most elusive and ambiguous of psychological variables", and Cline (1994, 98) notes that the study of resolve is "a region where numbers can only be notations of highly subjective judgments, nothing more" -or complains that too many of the measures are derived ex post (March, 1966, 61;Baldwin, 1979;Jervis, 1979, 316;Ray and Vural, 1986;Morrow, 1989;Merom, 2003;Sullivan, 2007). Rather than study resolve away the intervention would be taking place, whether the intervention would be taking place in an ally, and so on -and thus likely to factor into the initial decision of whether to intervene in the first place.…”

“…It is frequently argued that the United States has been so enamored with the capital-intensive warfare favored by the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) because of concerns that the American public is willing to spend money, but not lives (Smith, 2005). Similarly, a number of scholars of international conflict have argued that states deciding whether to continue to prosecute a war must pay attention both to the cost of continuing to fight, and the costs of terminating the war (Filson and Werner, 2007a;Sullivan, 2007Sullivan, , 2008, the latter of which involves a sunk cost argument (Arkes and Blumer, 1985), concerns about how withdrawal will affect reputation for resolve (Mercer, 1996), and an acknowledgment of the greater concessions that must be made at the bargaining table (Koch and Sullivan, 2010).…”

“…In this sense, one can imagine a wide range of situational theories of resolve based upon the particular types of costs that matter, whether reputational, economic, or otherwise. What all of the theories at this portion of the spectrum share, though, is the automaticity through which these costs translate into action: sufficiently raise the costs, and all actors will back down (Pape, 1996;Sullivan, 2007), irrespective of political ideology, regime type, or any other internal factor inside the actor that might affect how they respond to these external stimuli.…”

“…Similarly, both formal theorists and empirical IR scholars have noted that actors vary in their sensitivity to costs: Mueller (1980) suggests that one of the American strategic failures in the Vietnam War was assumption that sufficient costs would push the North Vietnamese past their "breaking point"; Pape (1996) similarly notes that states vary in their vulnerability to coercion, Jervis (1976, 51) refers to states varying in their "willingness to pay," while Rosen (1972) argues that states vary in their "willingness to suffer." 13 Two of the dominant research traditions in the democracies in war literature -the "selection effects" work that predicts that democracies are more likely to win their wars because they are more cautious in choosing which wars are worth fighting (Siverson, 1995;Reiter and Stam, 1998b;Valentino, Huth, and Croco, 2010), and the literature investigating whether the advantages of democracy in battle decline over time because democratic publics are too casualty-shy to sustain lengthy combat operations (Bennett and Stam, 1998;Gartzke, 2001;Reiter and Stam, 2002;Sullivan, 2007Sullivan, , 2008Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler, 2009;Lyall, 2010) -both acknowledge the importance not just of costs, but of cost sensitivity. In much of the literature, the issue is not whether democracies have higher costs of war than autocracies (although see Schultz 1999), but how tolerant they are of the costs.…”

Exploring the utility of force: some conclusions

“…When confrontations involve the use of force to change the behavior of the opponent, violence is not very effective. 42 The only cases of terrorist activity that have been linked to some measure of success are nationalist or decolonization struggles. This follows the logic that force can create a condition, which can be followed up by clearly linked political action.…”