1 Stephen Van Evera July 2001 Massachusetts Institute Of

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by DSpace@MIT 1 Stephen Van Evera July 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology CHAPTER 2: MILITARISM H6. War is more likely when professional militaries have large influence on national security policy and on civilian perceptions of foreign affairs. I. MILITARIES AND WAR This chapter argues that professional militaries foster policies and misperceptions that raise the risk of war. The classic anti-military argument that "militaries live by war, hence they prefer war, hence they start wars" is wrong. However, militaries do cause war as an unwanted side-effect of their efforts to protect their organizational interests. For organizational reasons militaries favor military doctrines and force postures that raise the risk of war; hence war is more likely if militaries shape defense policies, even if they prefer peace. More importantly, militaries also infuse society with organizationally self-serving myths that have the unwanted effect of persuading society that war is expedient. Militaries purvey these myths to persuade society to grant them size, wealth, autonomy, and prestige--not to provoke war. Yet these myths also support arguments for war; hence societies infused with military propaganda will be warlike, even if their militaries prefer peace. Thus militaries are both unwarlike and war-causing. They have no innate preference for war, but they create conditions for war by the policies they back and the ideas they purvey. In this view militaries are governed by the laws of organizational survival. Like all organizations they must sell themselves to their environment if they hope to endure and prosper. They cause war because they have large influence on national security policies and perceptions, and because their organizational interests are served if civilians adopt policies and perceptions that harm peace. War is not their goal, but it is their result. Militaries purvey eight principal war-causing misperceptions. They exaggerate other states' hostility, painting a world of hostile adversaries and unreliable allies. They exaggerate the tendency of states to bandwagon with threatening powers and underestimate states' tendency to balance against threats; hence they underestimate the self-defeating nature of belligerent policies. They portray a world of easy conquest, understating the obstacles to aggression; hence they exaggerate the insecurity of their own state and the feasibility of gaining security by aggressive action. They exaggerate the size of first-move advantages and windows of opportunity and vulnerability; hence they 2 exaggerate the benefits of starting preemptive or preventive wars. They exaggerate the benefits of conquest--the strategic and economic value of empire--while underestimating the problems that come with victory. They underestimate the economic, political, and psychological costs of war. In peacetime they tend toward pessimism about the likely results of possible future wars, but in wartime they tend toward false optimism, leading them to favor prolonging lost or stalemated wars. These ideas all exaggerate the importance or usefulness of military force. Militaries produce force; hence their organizational sales pitch stresses the need for force, the utility of force, the cheapness of force, and the benefits of using force. It exaggerates both the number of problems that only military force can solve, and the ability of force to solve them. It also understates the costs and risks of using force. Militaries seek to persuade civilians to buy force, not to use it. But selling force to civilians requires persuading them that they can use force, or might need to use it. This creates a climate for civilians to decide that they can or must use it. As a result, states come to believe that incentives to fight are larger than in fact they are. Militaries cause war in three ways. Most importantly, the military's message can persuade civilians that war or war- risking policies are expedient, leading the civilians to risk or launch war. Wilhelmine Germany illustrates this scenario. Secondly, a military can come to believe its own arguments after hearing them repeated to civilians, persuading itself to advocate war.1 This is the "blowback" scenario: the military's arguments blow back into the organization, making it victim of its own propaganda. Wilhelmine Germany and imperial Japan both illustrate.2 Thirdly, militaries can persuade their governments to adopt offensive and preemptive military doctrines and force postures. Militaries prefer such doctrines and postures but they raise the risk of war. The continental European powers before 1914 illustrate; the Soviet 1 In this scenario the military becomes a war lobby, but only after imbibing its own myths. Since myths are the taproot cause at work, not an innate military interest in war, this scenario does not fit the classical anti-military argument, outlined below, which posits a military interest in war. 2 Another path to war is also possible: militaries might infuse a younger generation with militarist myths, leading it to start wars after it assumes power in later years. Nazi Germany illustrates if we believe that Wilhelmine-era militarist propaganda shaped the thinking of Nazi leaders and their supporters. 3 military also illustrates.3 Hence undue military influence causes both dangerous perceptions and dangerous policies, although the perception dangers seem the larger of the two types. What states are prone to militarism?4 States whose militaries live apart from society as a separate culture are more prone, since mutual isolation fosters sour civil-military relations that animate militaries to purvey militarism. States that grant their militaries broad autonomy are more prone, since autonomous militaries are more likely to develop separate cultures. Societies that are unimbued with the dangers of militarism are more prone, since knowledge of the danger can inoculate both military and civilian against it. Societies with norms and legal barriers that proscribe military involvement in politics are less prone to militarism. Democracies are less prone to militarism because militarist myths can be challenged and weeded out in a democracy's free marketplace of ideas. Great powers and isolated powers are more prone, since the militaries of lesser powers and powers with strong allies gain less by purveying militarist myths. States that face large security threats are more prone to militarism, since they will have larger, more prestigious militaries that are better able to dominate the civilian sphere. States whose civilian publics are ignorant of military affairs are more prone to militarism because their civilians more quickly accept militarist myths. Virulent militarism is rare because these conditions are rare. Many societies have been touched by low-grade militarism, including pre-1914 Austria-Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Serbia, and France; and interwar Hungary. Other possible cases include interwar Poland; modern South Africa, 3 I outline the dangers of such doctrines and postures in Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), chapters 3 and 6. 4 I use "militarism" to denote situations where militaries play a large role in shaping civilian ideas about security policy, and use this role to imbue society with ideas that emphasize the necessity and utility of military force. This combines common usages, which denote ideas that glorify the utility of force, or the predominance of the military in politics or public mind. On definitions of militarism see Volker R. Berghahn, Militarism: The History of An International Debate, 1861-1979 (New York: St. Martin's, 1982): 2-3. Surveying writings on militarism is ibid. A review of other issues in civil-military relations is Peter Feaver, "Civil-Military Relations," in Nelson W. Polsby, ed., Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 2, 1999 (Palo Alto: Annual Reviews, 1999): 211-242. 4 Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Pakistan; and Paraguay in the 1860s. The United States arguably suffered mildly from militarism in the early Cold War. But only Wilhelmine Germany and imperial Japan have suffered full-blown cases of militarism. Hence militarism theory explains only a few cases. It cannot explain most wars through the ages. It says little about warfare before the industrial revolution, since professional militaries with distinct organizational interests only appeared when the industrial age arrived, bringing a far sharper division of labor. And it says little about the many modern conflicts involving states that suffer little or no militarism. But the theory explains a great deal about the behavior of Wilhelmine Germany and imperial Japan, so it says a great deal about the origins of World War I and the Pacific half of World War II. Thus the theory has good explanatory power. It covers few cases but it explains a lot about those cases. Two of these cases--the world wars--are of great historical importance. If militarism theory holds water it also holds the key to these wars and thus to much recent history. An older anti-military argument has claimed that militaries favor war because war serves their organizational interests. In this view militaries have an innate preference for war even without ingesting their own propaganda; hence they often lobby for war. For example, Alexis de Tocqueville argued in 1835 that militaries want war because war satisfies their organizational impulse

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