When is Strategic Bombing Effective? Domestic Legitimacy and Aerial Denial

Belkin, Aaron; Clark, Michael; Gokcek, Gulriz; Hinckley, Robert A.; Knecht, Thomas; Patterson, Eric J.

doi:10.1080/714005350

Cited by 10 publications

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“…Traditionally, a critic of the military, Milošević reached out to the military and praised their actions during the 78-day air campaign (Djukić 2001). Despite these efforts, the military was not an important base of his political support, and the war in Kosovo exacerbated tensions between the military and Milošević as the country's inability to inflict costs on NATO became apparent, echoing the predictions of Belkin et al (2002).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bombing to Bargain? The Air War for Kosovo

Allen

Vincent

2010

Foreign Policy Analysis

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Given the prominence of air power as a foreign policy tool, we attempt to clearly link the military process of dropping munitions on the target state to the accompanying diplomatic process between the attacker and the adversary. To explore the connection between the two processes, we look at the 1999 NATO bombing campaign over Kosovo, which allows us to isolate the influence of air power. Why were 78 days of NATO bombing needed to convince Milošević to make concessions? Comparing expectations from both bargaining models and traditional coercive models, we find that the intensity of bombing, the duration of bombing, and mediation were important predictors of the Serbian government's behavior during the Kosovo crisis.There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win a war. My reply to that is that it has never been tried … and we shall see.Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur ''Bomber' ' Harris, 1942. Clausewitz famously suggested that war is an extension of diplomacy, but many of our empirical models of conflict do not explicitly consider the relationship that battlefield engagement has with the underlying diplomatic process that will likely end the conflict. Studies of coercion are frequently framed around a clear cut dichotomy between success and failure, but numerous scholars have noted that coercive success is seldom an all or nothing proposition. 1 In addition to this oversimplication of winning and losing, coercion is also a dynamic process involving not just the actions of the attacking state but also the responses of the adversary state. These realities of coercive episodes make them difficult to model empirically. In this paper, we make an effort to link battlefield decisions and actions to conflict outcomes. In recent decades, the United States has greatly increased its reliance on the use of aerial bombing, employing it in the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq, in the later

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When a denial strategy is employed, the military bears the costs of the bombing. Belkin et al. (2002) argue that denial strategies are more likely to succeed against target states governed by regimes that lack domestic legitimacy, resulting from efforts by these leaders to undermine the effectiveness of their militaries.…”

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confidence: 99%

Bombing to Bargain? The Air War for Kosovo

Allen

Vincent

2010

Foreign Policy Analysis

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“…are regarded as a more e¤ective means of coercion than punishment campaigns (Belkin et al 2000;Biddle 2002;Pape 1996; for drone strikes, Johnston and Sarbahi 2016), the punishment models have been more prevalent than the denial models in the theoretical literature (Pape 1996: 7-8). The discrepancy between the aerial and theoretical literature has been persistent, possibly because we still lack a proper theoretical instrument with which to address the choice between (counterforce) denial and (countervalue) punishment in war.…”

Section: Many Military Strategists and Commanders During Wwii-includimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…7 This choice problem has little relevance to army or navy but is signi…cant for the use of air force (Freedman 2003: 5) and nuclear weapons (Ball 1983;Long 2008: 23-52). 8 We thus develop a formal model in a synthetic approach that incorporates both denial and punishment campaigns as alternatives. In other words, our model features a dilemma faced by belligerents in choosing the target of attacks between force ("guns") and value ("butter").…”

Section: Many Military Strategists and Commanders During Wwii-includimentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Nakao

2017

SSRN Journal

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Formal models of war termination have been developed along two major approaches: in one, war is interpreted as a series of battles, where belligerents exchange denial campaigns; in the other, war is illustrated as a process of bargaining with mutual punishments. In integrating these two approaches,we build a dynamic model of war, where two belligerents choose to attack each other on either force or value in every period. In the early stage of war when military strength is balanced between the belligerents, they both conduct (counterforce) denial campaigns. However, toward the end when one side has depleted its capabilities of …ghting, the other side switches to (countervalue) punishment campaigns to coerce the opponent into capitulation. Accordingly, while denials largely determine a war's outcome, punishments can in ‡uence its duration. Unlike existing studies, our theory illuminates the two-way causal relationship, where military strategies shape war, while war itself a¤ects the strategies.JEL classi…cations: D74; F51.

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“…4. Belkin et al 2002;Castillo 2014;Lyall 2014;McLauchlin 2010;Reiter and Stam 1997. of exceptions, 5 political scientists have mostly avoided looking below the aggregate level of war, in large part because of the selection problems and limited scope of existing battle-level data sets. 6 Despite the recent proliferation of "micro-comparative" studies of civil war, similarly disaggregated data have been mostly absent from research on conventional war.…”

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confidence: 99%

Until the Bitter End? The Diffusion of Surrender Across Battles

Lehmann¹,

Zhukov²

2018

Int Org

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Why do armies sometimes surrender to the enemy and sometimes fight to the bitter end? Existing research has highlighted the importance of battlefield resolve for the onset, conduct, and outcome of war, but has left these life-and-death decisions mostly unexplained. We know little about why battle-level surrender occurs, and why it stops. In this paper, we argue that surrender emerges from a collective-action problem: success in battle requires that soldiers choose to fight as a unit rather than flee, but individual decisions to fight depend on whether soldiers expect their comrades to do the same. Surrender becomes contagious across battles because soldiers take cues from what other soldiers did when they were in a similar position. Where no recent precedent exists, mass surrender is unlikely. We find empirical support for this claim using a new data set of conventional battles in all interstate wars from 1939 to 2011. These findings advance our understanding of battlefield resolve, with broader implications for the design of political-military institutions and decisions to initiate, continue, and terminate war.

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When is Strategic Bombing Effective? Domestic Legitimacy and Aerial Denial

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Bombing to Bargain? The Air War for Kosovo

Bombing to Bargain? The Air War for Kosovo

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

Until the Bitter End? The Diffusion of Surrender Across Battles

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