If states want to minimize costs while maximizing benefits, why would they ever resort
to war? Why wouldn’t adversaries strike an agreement in accordance with their relative power
and avoid costly military conflict? Is war best though of as a bargaining failure? How central is
the role of information asymmetries in such bargaining failures? These questions lie at the
center of important debates in political science.
1
Attempts at strategic coercion, responses to
such attempts by others, decisions to cross the use of force threshold, to escalate in a limited
conflict, these all depend on a state expecting some positive return from its action.
2
That
assessment, in general, depends of some evaluation of the relevant military balance, but as this
paper will make clear, that is not a trivial undertaking. Further, the conduct of international
diplomacy depends on the ability to send signals, and nations often use military force, explicitly
or implicitly, to do this. But again, assessing the military balance and evaluating an adversary’s
military signals can be more difficult in some cases than in others. This paper studies
misperceptions and false optimism that stem from different theories of military victory that can
lead to costly uses of force.
3
Nations have different doctrines and hold different beliefs about the
nature of effective military strategies and capabilities. That is, they have different beliefs about
how to win wars, different theories of military victory. This paper suggests that when these
differences are large, diplomacy and signaling will be more difficult and this will lead to
deterrence failure and escalation or conflict
1
For a good summary of the issues involved here, see the debate between Fearon and Kirshner. James D.
Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War," International Organization 49, no. 3 (1995); Jonathan D. Kirshner,
"Rationalist Explanations for War?," Security Studies 10, no. 1 (2000). See also Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes
of War, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies
in International Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), see especially Chapter 3:
"Bargaining in the Shadow of Power" and Chapter 4: "Bargaining in the Shadow of Shifting Power"; Kenneth
A. Schultz, Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
2
At least, positive relative to the expected alternate outcome.
3
On the importance of false optimism as a cause of war, see Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the
Roots of Conflict, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
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