Logics of War A volume in the series Cornell Studies in Security Affairs edited by Robert J. Art, Robert Jervis, and Stephen M. Walt A list of titles in the series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Logics of War Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Confl icts Alex Weisiger Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges receipt of a subvention from the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania which aided in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2013 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2013 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weisiger, Alex, 1977– Logics of war: explanations for limited and unlimited confl icts / Alex Weisiger. p. cm. — (Cornell studies in security affairs) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5186-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. War—Causes. 2. Limited war. 3. Low-intensity confl icts (Military science) 4. Total war. I. Title. JZ6385.W45 2013 355.02—dc23 2012043954 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fi bers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Explanations for Limited and Unlimited Wars 11 2. Research Strategy and Statistical Tests 54 3. War to the Death in Paraguay 86 4. World War II: German Expansion and Allied Response 105 5. Additional Commitment Problem Cases: The Crimean, Pacifi c, and Iran-Iraq Wars 141 6. Short Wars of Optimism: Persian Gulf and Anglo-Iranian 159 7. The Limits on Leaders: The Falklands War and the Franco-Turkish War 178 Conclusion: Recapitulations, Implications, and Prognostications 203 Notes 219 Bibliography 261 Index 281 [v] Acknowledgments This book has been in the making for many years, and in that time I have accumulated an unusually large number of debts. Columbia Uni- versity was and is a wonderful place to study international politics—this book benefi ted tremendously from the mentors and friends from whom I learned there. Robert Jervis is as brilliant an adviser as one could want— I hope that anyone who reads this manuscript will be able to discern the ways in which his ideas and suggestions have infl uenced me. I benefi ted equally from an excellent cohort of then-junior faculty—Page Fortna, Erik Gartzke, and Tanisha Fazal—whose comments and suggestions on matters both large and small consistently improved the argument and evidence that I present. Perhaps even more important was the commu- nity of fellow graduate students, most notably the regular attendees at the international relations seminar, especially Marko Duranovic, Leila Kazemi, Thania Sanchez, Ivan Savic, Zach Shirkey, Jessica Stanton, Matt Winters, Catharina Wrede-Braden, and Maria Zaitseva, whose early dis- satisfactions led me in directions that greatly improved the manuscript. I also benefi ted from regular conversations with Josh Baron, Megan Gilroy, Georgia Kernell, Paul MacDonald, Joe Parent, Sharon Sprayregen, and Rob Trager. Beyond Columbia’s walls, I was fortunate to have enjoyed the fi nancial and intellectual support of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Olin Institute at Harvard University, who gave me two years to complete my research and then begin revising it into this book in a particularly supportive academic environment. If I was fortunate in the opportunities I had in graduate school, I have been equally fortunate to fi nd a similar intellectual home in the political [vii] Acknowledgments science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Ed Mansfi eld and Avery Goldstein have been everything that one could want in mentors, welcoming, generous with their time, and cogent in their advice. I am particularly indebted to Ed and to the Christopher H. Browne Center for funding a book conference, and to Hein Goemans and Dan Reiter (along with other participants in that conference) for reading the full manu- script and providing extensive, detailed, and constructive advice. I bear a similar debt to Robert Art and an anonymous reviewer, whose sugges- tions improved the argument and evidence advanced here, and to Roger Haydon, Karen Laun, and others at Cornell University Press for com- ments that have greatly improved the presentation. Among my col- leagues, I have benefi ted from conversations with Daniel Gillion, Mike Horowitz, Ellen Kennedy, Matt Levendusky, Ian Lustick, Marc Meredith, and (once again) Jessica Stanton. Rosella Cappella, Barbara Elias, Kris- han Malhotra, and Bashak Taraktas all provided invaluable research as- sistance. Last, but certainly not least, Sarah Weisiger has provided constant support and repeated (and necessary) reality checks. It has been a long time since I started working on this book, but its genesis in many ways lies even earlier. My undergraduate adviser, Ste- phen Krasner, played a critical role in my transition from student to re- searcher. Well before him, my parents, Richard Weisiger and Jane Martin, shaped the way in which I think about the world. Their willingness to endure unending questions and their encouragement to seek out an- swers for myself, more than anything else, led me to a life that I would not trade for any other. It is to them that this book is dedicated. [viii] Introduction In the summer of 1866, Prussia and Austria went to war to determine who would be dominant in Germany; one battle, on July 3 at Könnig- grätz, was suffi cient to resolve the issue, and the war ended less than two months after it started. In the summer of 1914, Austria again went to war, this time to establish dominance over the South Slavs; this confl ict lasted more than four years, with deaths in the millions rather than the thou- sands. The contrast between these two confl icts—wars that appeared quite similar at the outset but differed dramatically in their eventual du- ration and destructiveness—is hardly unique. To cite another example, in 1929, the Soviet Union invaded China, which was riven by internal confl ict, to secure its hold on the Russian Manchurian Railway; this con- fl ict ended quickly and at low cost. In contrast, Saddam Hussein’s effort in 1980 to take advantage of Iran’s temporary weakness following the revolution in 1979 to advance territorial claims along the Iran-Iraq bor- der dragged his country into what turned out to be an eight-year war in which hundreds of thousands of people died. With the benefi t of hindsight, the relative severity and length of these wars may seem intuitive, yet for contemporaries there were good reasons to expect quite different outcomes. The outcome that occurred in 1914— expansion of a localized dispute into a general European war—was pos- sible in 1866: Bismarck’s policies were heavily infl uenced by the possibility that France or Russia might intervene on the side of Austria. 1 On the other hand, the conventional view of World War I has been that the initial par- ticipants expected the war to end quickly and decisively; from this per- spective, the trench warfare that developed was a complete surprise.2 In the Sino-Soviet case, Stalin apparently considered using the confl ict over the Manchurian railway as a pretext to launch a broader war with the aim of replacing the Nationalist government in China with a communist one; Iran in fact (unsuccessfully) used the confl ict with Iraq as an opportunity to spread the revolution. 3 Thus wars that appear quite similar at the outset [1] Introduction Duration Short Long Russo-Finnish War World Wars Persian Gulf War Iran-Iraq War High 29% of wars 10% of wars 3% of deaths 86% of deaths Intensity Falklands War Vietnam War Kosovo War Franco-Turkish War Low 43% of wars 18% of wars 2% of deaths 9% of deaths Figure 1.1 The frequency and destructiveness of interstate wars ultimately diverged dramatically, with some ending quickly and at low cost while others dragged on for year after painful year. Indeed, the extremely destructive confl icts like World War I or the Iran-Iraq War are remarkably unrepresentative, as fi gure I.1 demon- strates. This fi gure differentiates between long and short wars, where long wars last over a year, and between low- and high-intensity confl icts, where intensity references the rate at which deaths accumulate. 4 Most wars are short, lasting less than a year; indeed, median war duration is about four months. Very few are both long and intense, as was the case in the World Wars and the Iran-Iraq confl ict. Yet these few wars are re- sponsible for a disproportionate amount of human suffering: the 10 per- cent of wars that are both long and intense are responsible for 86 percent of all deaths in battle over the past two centuries. What separates the few unusually destructive wars from the many that are limited, either in duration or in intensity? The primary goal of this book is to answer this question. The Argument Writ Short My answer to this question relies on the observation that there are multiple logics of war. In the jargon of academia, war is characterized by equifi nality—there exist multiple independent causal pathways that can lead to war.5 We can think of all of these paths as containing individual causes of war, with each cause being a reason why the adversaries in the confl ict would rather fi ght than accept peace on the opponent’s terms.6 [2] Introduction Each of these causes thus is individually suffi cient to bring about fi ght- ing, although multiple causes may be at work in any real-world case.