Page 19
from 1919 to 1921 (100,000 dead) and the Russo-Turkish war from 1828 to 1829 (130,000 dead)
offer no immediately discernible reason for having no issued declarations.
16
The Russo-Polish
war took place in an extremely unstable environment and was only one of six wars that were
fought in East-Central Europe shortly after WWI and neither participant was a model for a
unified state during that period. The even older Russo-Turkish war was fought for a specific
goal, the Russian czar’s fixation on obtaining Constantinople which became an attractive target
after the Greek war of independence. The war escalated from a series of border skirmishes and
ended in 1829 with the Treaty of Andrianople so it is possible that this truly was a case of both
sides becoming mired in a conflict neither wished to see last as long or claim so man lives. It is
worth mentioning that in a much bigger Russo-Turkish war in 1877 both parties did issue formal
declarations of war.
The really interesting cases are the next two large wars without declarations of war. The
1950 Korean War with 910,000 battle deaths and the Vietnam War with just over 1,000,000
battle deaths. In both of these cases, the United States fought a foreign enemy very far from its
base of power and inflicted disproportionate losses. In the Korean War, the US lost only 34,000
men over a period of four years. In the Vietnam War, the total number of battle deaths was
around 47,000 stretched over an eight year period. While much has been made of US’ aversion
to seeing its soldiers die, the losses from these two wars combined are only about 25% of the
number of dead American soldiers during World War II. Simply put, they’re not large losses,
especially when compared to losses many magnitudes higher suffered by US’ enemies.
17
Moreover, both wars were proxy wars and if there was a threat to the American soil, it was a
16
Both of these wars are somewhat obscure and suffer from not having a lot of scholarship on them. It is possible
that something like a declaration of war was issued during the war but was missed by historians and that a closer
look would uncover it. However, I doubt that this is a case as it’s hard to miss a declaration of war if it was issued.
17
Consider that more US citizens die annually in motor vehicle accidents than all the casualties of the Vietnam war.
Convention