War

War. This essay consists of five articles, which deal broadly with different large aspects of war. The first provides an interpretation of the changing Nature of War from ancient times to the present. The second examines Levels of War—tactical, operational, strategic—comparing recent historical examples with modern American military thought. The third explores the degree to which there has been an American Way of War. The fourth, which shows American perspectives on the Causes of War, assesses historic interpretations of the causes of war by American policymakers, scholars, and activists. The fifth, examining the American experience, probes the debate over the Effects of War on the Economy.
War: Nature of War Definitions of war have varied, but any attempt to understand it must include the following critical elements. First, war is an organized violent activity, waged not by individuals but by men (sometimes joined by women) in groups. Second, war is a mutual activity; whatever takes place in it relates, or should relate, primarily to the enemy's movements with the aim of defeating him and avoid being defeated oneself. Third, the conduct of war is conditioned on the hope for victory, or at the very least self‐preservation. Where that hope does not exist there can be no war, only suicide.

War being an organized activity, the best way to classify it is neither by tactics nor by weaponry but by the nature of the human communities that wage it. Thus we find that some very small and very loosely organized communities, such as the South African Bushmen or Arctic Eskimo, did not have war but merely more or less violent duels among individuals. More complex “tribes without rulers,” such as the Indians of the North American Plains, did engage in war; yet there was still no specialized organization for waging it, since every healthy adult male was a warrior by definition. Probably the first individuals who were in any sense specialized warriors were the retainers of tribal chiefs such as still existed in areas of Africa until recently. The classical Mediterranean city‐states were, in this respect, less advanced: they did not have armies but only militias that were mustered as war broke out and went home as it ended. The task of building standing forces was left to empires, like those of ancient Egypt or Assyria or China or Rome. For a long time these remained the strongest military‐political organizations.

The characteristic modern way of organizing war, which grew out of the transformation of feudal into modern society, is to entrust it to be directed by the state. For 300 years, since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years War, states alone have been authorized to wage war; conversely, whenever aggression and violence were used by individuals, or by other groups and organizations, it was known as crime, uprising, rebellion, or civil war. Inside each state a distinction was drawn between the government, which alone could conduct the war at the highest level; the armed forces, whose task was to fight; and the civilian population, whose assigned role was to pay and sustain the effort. By setting up an organization whose members, even at the higher levels, were selected for their professionalism rather than their loyalty (which had been the case in empires and feudal societies) and who were dedicated solely to war, the state and its resources led the way to unprecedented technological development in the military field. So great were the modern state's military and warmaking capabilities that by 1914, some half‐dozen industrialized states had come virtually to dominate the world.

Not only did the modern state wage war more effectively than any other organization, but war itself played a great role in the construction of the modern state. First came the establishment of civilian bureaucracies, whose primary function was to obtain resources for war and extract the taxes that would be used to pay the troops. Next came such institutions as the national debt and paper money, both of which had their origin in the need to finance war. During the nineteenth century, the advent of railways and telegraphs for the first time enabled large states to begin to harness virtually their entire resources for military purposes; this culminated in the era of “total war” (1914–45) when such governments took over control of almost every aspect of their citizens' lives from the wages that they were paid to the temperature of the water in which they could bathe. These trends affected the United States, which was relatively isolated and safe, much later than they did the main European powers, which confronted each other directly. Still, even in the United States the task of building a strong centralized state was linked to war, initially in the Civil War, but more dramatically in World War I and World War II. In the long run, the United States built a military‐industrial complex larger than any other in the world.

As the warmaking communities developed and became more sophisticated, so did the scale on which they fought and the methods they used. Early tribal societies counted their warriors in the dozens and knew only the raid, the ambush, the skirmish, and sometimes the setpiece encounter (agreed upon in advance) that can be seen as part war, part sport. With the establishment of chiefdoms, there appeared forces numbering in the hundreds or at most thousands, as well as battle and siege operations, whereas empires could count their troops in the hundreds of thousands and were capable of conducting sophisticated operations that lasted for years on end. However, all premodern political entities were hampered in their conduct of war by problems of both logistics and communications. The former meant that armed forces spent more time looking after their supplies than actively campaigning, and indeed that war itself was usually a seasonal activity—in the summer. The latter not only prevented the coordination of operations from the capital but made it virtually impossible for the armed forces of any one state to cooperate with each other on anything larger than a tactical scale once they had been united on the battlefield.

Modern technology during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century put an end to these limitations. Instead of coming about by tacit agreement between the commanders on both sides, battles could be developed into coherent campaigns; campaigns waged in different theaters could be integrated with the conduct of war as a whole, and the latter coordinated from the national capital, which also controlled the mobilization of demographic and economic resources. The different levels of war—from minor tactics through tactics and the operational art and strategy all the way to grand strategy—made their appearance. More and more, war came to be waged by vast powers or coalitions of powers, each counting their subjects in the dozens if not hundreds of millions. Once unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, military technology mushroomed. Between 1815 and 1945, it took war from flintlocks to tanks and from foot‐slogging soldiers to long‐range bomber aircraft and the first ballistic missiles.

Throughout these millennia of organizational and technological growth, the character of war as a mutual activity remained unchanged. War involves the use of organized violence to achieve one's end, often to the maximum extent possible; but that violence is directed against a living, reacting enemy, who in turn uses violence to achieve his ends. Hence, the real essence of war, in whatever form and at whatever level, is the interplay between the two sides' moves and countermoves.

Assuming that the force on one side is not overwhelming—in which case little or no military art will be required—to achieve victory it is necessary to strike at a point that is both vital and vulnerable. To force the enemy to expose his vulnerable point, it is necessary to deceive him as to one's intentions. To deceive him, it is usually necessary to pretend to strike at some other point or points; but this in turn means diverting force for the purpose, which will weaken one's ability to launch the decisive stroke as well as to defend oneself.

In this way, war is subject to a peculiar logic of its own, which has been aptly called “paradoxical.” It differs from engineering activities, whose object is to mold inorganic matter, but in some ways resembles games such as football or chess; like them, it consists of action, counteraction, and counter‐counteraction, all of which are accompanied by a bodyguard of secrecy, lies, feints, and sometimes even espionage. The resulting uncertainty, the friction that is inherent in the activity of large bodies of people, and the sheer risk to life and limb that is involved, combine to make the conduct of war extraordinarily difficult. As Napoleon once said, intellectually it poses problems worthy of a Newton or an Euler; however, the character attributes that it demands—such as courage, endurance, determination, the ability to keep one's mind clear in a crisis—are, if anything, even greater.

Still, assuming a rough balance between opposing sides, in theory, victory goes to the side that, reading the enemy's intentions while concealing its own, is able to strike hardest at the decisive point without exposing itself. In practice, the necessary calculations are often much too complicated for any one brain or combination of brains, with the result that, as in the case of many games, the outcome depends on making the fewest mistakes, as well as pure chance.

With the advent of nuclear weapons—themselves made possible by the tremendous scientific and industrial resources at the disposal of the modern state—warfare seems to have undergone a decisive change. Hitherto, it had often been possible for one side to use some combination of force and guile in order to achieve victory at a cost acceptable to itself. Now, the prospect had to be faced that victory, instead of guaranteeing one's existence, would lead to annihilation as the defeated side fell on the nuclear button. Indeed, the more resounding the victory, the more acute the danger that this would happen. Under such circumstances, it is scant wonder that those states that possessed nuclear weapons—meaning, by and large, the most powerful ones—generally began taking very good care not to commit suicide and to avoid escalating conflicts between each other. The more nuclear weapons proliferated, the less important and less powerful the states against which large‐scale, conventional warfare (as in the period 1648–1945) could still be fought.

Reflecting these developments, military organization and military technology reversed direction. Throughout the years since A.D. 1000, armies and navies had been getting larger and larger, culminating in the tens of millions of uniformed personnel who served during World Wars I and II; now, all of a sudden, they began to shrink as the most important states abandoned the system of mass mobilization of the kind that initially appeared after 1789. For the first time in history, some weapons—specifically, the most important ones by far—were deliberately made less, rather than more, powerful. Neither the most powerful missiles, such as the American Titan, nor the monster hydrogen bomb of 58 megatons (58 million tons of TNT) that the Soviets exploded in 1961 had successors. Research and development were redirected in an effort to develop more accurate delivery systems such as multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) and cruise missiles carrying more limited warheads: Both reflected the feeling that their city‐destroying predecessors had grown too indiscriminate and too dangerous to serve any useful purpose.

As nuclear weapons put a ceiling on the size and violence of wars between nations, such wars became rarer at the end of the twentieth century. Beginning in the so‐called Third World and spreading to the Second, their place as an agent of political change was increasingly taken by another form of war. This new form of war was not based on the customary division of labor among government, armed forces, and people. Since it did not require a large, continuous, statelike territorial basis, it was immune to those weapons and could be waged even in their presence. Guerrilla warfare and terrorism and counterterrorism were, in fact, anything but new phenomena; however, the fact that they were directed against the occupying Axis powers during World War II had given them a new respectability as well as legitimacy in international law. As Europe's overseas expansionism shows, until 1914 its armies had usually been able to confront with overwhelming force peoples who did not have states, governments, or regular armed forces. But from the moment Adolf Hitler invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, this clearly ceased to be the case, as the Yugoslav partisans prevented even the German Wehrmacht from conquering all of their country.

Though the forces at their disposal were usually small and their weapons primitive, guerrillas and terrorists in dozens upon dozens of cases since 1945 have defeated the most modern armies and the most powerful modern states that ever existed. In the 1990s, they continued to resist successfully the armed forces of many states around the world, nor, to judge by cases from Algeria to Bosnia to Somalia, does it appear modern states know how to deal with them. For those states and their armed forces, the writing is on the wall. Under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, a new form of war that is simultaneously very old is reemerging and asserting itself. Either modern states learn to cope with it, or they themselves will soon disappear into the dustbin of history.

Bibliography

Sun Tzu , The Art of War, 1963.
Carl von Clausewitz , On War, 1976.
Edward Luttwak , Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, 1987.
Martin van Creveld , The Transformation of War, 1991.

Martin Van Creveld

War: Levels of War Modern military analysts view warfare as an undertaking that can be broadly examined on three complementary and somewhat overlapping levels: tactics, operational art, and strategy. Recent American military thinking, influenced by the Vietnam War and then accelerated by the Goldwater‐Nichols Act of 1986, has matured and become much more sophisticated in its analysis and understanding of the nature and conduct of war. With the notable exceptions of Alfred T. Mahan and Billy Mitchell, until recently civilian defense analysts have done the majority of innovative theoretical thinking in the United States about warfare. There is now, however, an intellectual renaissance within the ranks of the government defense community. Still prodded by civilian thinkers and critics, the American military establishment has recently developed a paradigm that views warfare as an activity to be conducted and understood on the three levels: tactical, operational, and strategic. The latest and least‐developed concept concerns the nature and conduct of war at the strategic level.

The United States's military education system, particularly its Senior Service Colleges (War Colleges), provides a thorough grounding in the classics of military thinking. Sun Tzu, Antoine Henri Jomini, Carl von Clausewitz, and others are studied in depth for applicable lessons for current military practitioners. Learning from the past, from recent military experiences, and from a study of foreign armies, particularly in the former Soviet Union, American military thinkers have begun to view war in somewhat overlapping constructs. These levels of war are useful in framing activities by military echelons within a theater of operations and in establishing a structure for ordering activities in time and space. They provide civilian decision‐makers and military commanders with a method to visualize an orderly sequence of operations, the resources necessary, and the specific tasks to be accomplished. Each level of warfare is defined by the intended outcome and not by the size of the specific unit tasked to accomplish it.

The most basic and thoroughly understood is the tactical level of warfare. It is concerned with the planning and executing of battles and engagements to accomplish military objectives that are assigned to tactical units or to task forces. With army and Marine forces, these are normally division‐size units or smaller; in the air force and navy, the force size is roughly the squadron and battle group level, respectively. At the tactical level, the focus of activities is the ordered arrangement and maneuver of combat elements to achieve combat objectives. Actions here are focused on specific missions, and victory in battle and engagements is attained by achieving superiority over an enemy by exercising adroitly the principles of war: objective, initiative, maneuver, mass, surprise, security, simplicity, economy of force, and unity of command. Success or failure at this level may determine victory or defeat at the operational and ultimately strategic levels. Tactics employ both the art and science of warfare to use all available means to defeat the enemy; normally, there is more emphasis on the science and less on the art of warfare. In essence, the tactical level of warfare involves battlefield problem solving.

The operational level of warfare is the level at which campaigns and major operations are planned and conducted. It provides the linkage between the tactical level, where individual battles and engagements are fought, and strategic‐level objectives. The operational level focuses on conducting joint (multiservice) operations through the design, structure, and execution of subordinate campaign plans and major operations. Emphasis here is on operational art, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) define as “the skillful employment of military forces to attain strategic and/or operational objectives within a theater through the design, organization, integration, and conduct of theater strategies, campaigns, major operations and battles.” The essence of operational art is to determine when, where, and for what end forces will fight. At this level, warfare is more an art than a science as senior commanders seek to balance the ends sought with the ways to accomplish those ends in light of the resources available.

The study of the strategic level of war is the most recent area of development in American military thinking. At this level, there is the closest linkage between military and civilian leaders in defining and articulating national objectives. Military leaders must then translate national objectives into national security objectives attainable by military means. The pursuit of these military objectives is often done as a member of a coalition of nations. The strategic level then determines national or multinational security objectives and guidance, and uses national resources to achieve these aims. According to the JCS, the strategic level of warfare includes activities to “sequence initiatives; define limits and assess risks for the use of military and other instruments of national power; develop global plans or theater war plans to achieve these objectives; and provide military forces and other capabilities in accordance with strategic plans.”

At the strategic level, again, warfare is much more an art than a science. Contemporary analysts are still debating and refining the concept of strategic art. In 1995, the JCS had yet to publish an accepted definition of what constitutes “strategic art.” Because of the level at which it is applied, practitioners of the strategic level of warfare must have an appreciation for all the realms of national power—economic, diplomatic, and informational, as well as the purely military dimension. Those who would master the strategic art must embody three complementary roles: leader, practitioner, and theorist.

The strategic leader is one who exercises strategic art, or in military parlance, “makes it happen.” A strategic leader provides vision and focus of effort; applies leadership and consensus‐building skills in ambiguous, often multicultural associations; coordinates ends, ways, and means; and inspires others to think and to act. Recent historic examples include the American generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George C. Marshall, and the British leaders Gen. William J. Slim and Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill.

The practitioner of strategic art can be defined as one who translates political and military guidance into broad, attainable military objectives. A strategic practitioner both develops and executes strategic plans. Such an individual must have a thorough mastery of all the levels of war and must be able to employ force and the other dimensions of military power. A list of recent strategic practitioners might include Erwin Rommel, Matthew B. Ridgway, and H. Norman Schwarzkopf. All were adept at the art of applying ends, ways, and means to solve military problems in a variety of strategic environments.

The strategic theorist, as the name implies, is one who develops strategic concepts and theories. Such an individual would be a student of the history of warfare who also might have practical experience in war, although this would not be a sine qua non. The theorist's understanding of warfare would permit him to analyze and synthesize concepts of war to develop even finer understanding and distinctions. Examples of strategic theorists would include Thucydides, Sun Tzu, and Carl von Clausewitz.

Contemporary American military thinking views military operations as a continuum. This spectrum extends from general war to large‐scale combat operations, possibly including weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological, and chemical), down through military operations other than war. Under this last rubric are a number of operations that have become the most prevalent types of warfare conducted in the last decade of the twentieth century. They include noncombatant evacuation operations, strikes and raids, support to insurgency, counterdrug operations, antiterrorism, disaster relief, civil support, peace operations (peace enforcement, peacekeeping, and peace building), and nation assistance. Each of these operations can be viewed through the prism of the three levels of war: tactical, operational, and strategic. Some involve the destruction of enemy forces; many do not. All represent the use of the military element of power in pursuit of national objectives.

This paradigm of warfare as a tiered and interlocking system will be particularly useful as our understanding of warfare continues to evolve. Military operations other than war have already begun to blur the traditional understanding of the uses of military power. Military observers in the future will have to analyze such disparate acts as electronically crippling a nation's banking system, or the insertion of a virus into the computer‐controlled mass transit system of a city, and then decide whether these are acts of war. Their level of analysis—tactical, operational, strategic—will be important for the conclusions they draw about the ever‐changing nature of war.

Bibliography

Michael Howard , The Theory and Practice of War, 1965.
Russell F. Weigley , The American Way of War, 1973.
Peter Paret, Gordon Craig, and Felix Gilbert, eds., Makers of Modern Strategy, 1986.
Michael I. Handel , Masters of War: Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Jomini, 1992.
Joint Chiefs of Staff , Joint Pub 1‐02: Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, 1994.
Richard Chilcoat , Strategic Art: The New Discipline for 21^st Century Leaders, 1995.

John D. Auger

War: American Way of War Like shadows on a parade field, military institutions and war reflect in part the society that creates them. Although many Americans view themselves as a peace‐loving people and war as an aberration, war has been a regular part of American history, integral to the way the nation developed.

Despite divisions among Americans, the United States has justified its wars as in defense of American lives, property, or ideals. Policymakers have also taken the nation into war for various strategic, economic, and political reasons. But since the idea of Old World balance‐of‐power wars or wars of subjugation over other nations has been anathema to Americans' self‐image, the United States has usually mobilized for war in highly idealistic crusades—for liberty or democracy.

America views itself as antimilitaristic because for most of its history, the nation relied in wartime on ad hoc citizen armies rather than large standing forces, and because civilian control of the military is seen as a fundamental principle. This antimilitarism was reinforced by isolationism. Secure behind vast oceans, the United States did not develop large peacetime standing forces until the Cold War.

Another paradox is that although Americans generally view themselves as peaceloving, they have been capable of engaging in the most devastating kind of warfare—war aimed at total victory and complete elimination of the enemy threat, sometimes of the enemy themselves. This view of warfare emerged from European Americans' wars with Native Americans.

Eastern woodland Indians' warfare was originally much less bloody than that of Europeans, who were accustomed to vicious religious crusades and to the savage subjugation of peoples from Ireland to the Indies. Even as the horrors of religious wars were replaced in the Old World by limited warfare using newly organized professional armies, they were repeated in the New World by amateur soldiers of the militia.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonial militiamen were mobilized in terms of crusades against the “heathen savages.” Unable to entice Indian warriors, who preferred raiding, sniping, and ambushing, into open‐field European‐style combat, frustrated militiamen turned to complete destruction of Native Americans' crops and villages, killing men, women, and children, or selling them into slavery. Although the Indians responded with escalating violence, the superior numbers and resources of the colonists ultimately led to the destruction or removal of entire Indian nations. An American view emerged that military threats to society could indeed be eliminated by the extirpation of the enemy—a result that was impossible among European nations.

This American view of war was reinforced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the French and Indian War (1756–1763), the Americans claimed credit for aiding the British army and navy drive the French out of Canada and the trans‐Appalachian West. Later, in the Revolutionary War, Americans won complete independence from Great Britain. The apparent British threat to American interests and liberties was again defeated in the War of 1812.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States remained free from any external threat (the Civil War was internal and viewed as an aberration). The country was protected by its geographical isolation, the balance of power in Europe, and relatively weak and nonaggressive neighbors. Its formative experiences with war had produced a dichotomy in which the nation was perceived as either wholly secure or wholly insecure. In the latter case, a crusade could be waged that would eliminate the threat and thus restore Americans to total security.

A pattern had emerged in America's wars. War usually began with setbacks, largely because the nation, although willing to go to war, was militarily unprepared. Early defeats were followed by preparation and retaliation, and ultimately decisive redeeming victories—at Quebec, at Saratoga and Yorktown, at New Orleans, and at Gettysburg (at least for the Union). The belief in the inherent righteousness of the cause, in the natural fighting ability of the American citizen‐soldier, and in the nation's ability to mobilize its resources gave Americans an extraordinary optimism about what they could achieve militarily. Wars against Indians, Mexicans, and Spaniards in the nineteenth century reinforced these views, as with relatively small loss of life suffered by U.S. citizens the United States gained enough territory to claim overwhelming, if not always total, victory. In World War I, President Woodrow Wilson called for a crusade to “end all wars” and to make the world “safe for democracy.” The American war effort helped defeat the German empire, create a German republic, and make the United States the financial capital of the world.

The Civil War had led the United States to adopt the warfighting doctrine of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, which emphasized overwhelming and continual military force applied directly against the enemy army and indirectly through deprivation of the enemy's civilian population and resources. In the twentieth century, during two world wars, and limited wars in Korea and Vietnam, the U.S. Army would pursue this strategy against the enemy forces, while the air force and navy pursued the indirect campaign, through bombing and blockade, against the enemy's material resources and political will.

As the United States industrialized, optimism about America's fighting ability focused on superior weaponry. At the turn of the century, Adm. Alfred T. Mahan's doctrine of Sea Power emphasizing the use of a modern fleet promised swift and total victory. In the 1920s and 1930s, Gen. Billy Mitchell of the Army Air Service helped develop the doctrine of Strategic Airpower as a technological means to achieve quick and total victory. In World War II, in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and in a crusade against fascism, Americans waged war on land, sea, and air, including conventional and ultimately nuclear bombing of urban areas to achieve decisive victory and unconditional surrender of the enemy.

The Cold War posed a major challenge to American views of war and the military. Containment of the Soviet Union led to large standing military forces, but even these did not produce a sense of military security, for the USSR also developed intercontinental ballistic missiles and thermonuclear weapons. Before it ended in 1991, with the total collapse of the Soviet empire, the forty‐year Cold War represented an unprecedented period of U.S. uncertainty over national security.

During the Cold War, the U.S. government refrained from the use of total military force in Korea and Vietnam. But the policy of limited war clashed with the traditional goal of total victory. The Korean War ended in a frustrating stalemate, the Vietnam War ultimately in defeat. After the United States had fought for more than seven years to prevent it, the Communist victory in Vietnam was a severe blow to Americans' optimism, sense of righteousness, and sense of military prowess, which did not return until the collapse of the USSR and the American victory in the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

The U.S.‐led coalition assault in Operation Desert Storm seemed quite justified and resulted in a quick, decisive victory that drove the forces of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Although the Baghdad regime continued in power, its threat to the region was dramatically curtailed. More than any other U.S. military engagement since World War II, the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait conformed to the traditional American way of war.
[See also Civil‐Military Relations; Internationalism; Isolationism; Strategy; War: Causes of War; War: Levels of War; War: Nature of War.]

Bibliography

Russell F. Weigley , The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy, 1973.
John Shy , A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence, 1976.
Michael Howard , War and the Liberal Conscience, 1978.
Lloyd C. Gardner , A Covenant with Power: America and World Order from Wilson to Reagan, 1984.
Stephen Watts , The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820, 1987.
Geoffrey Perret , A Country Made by War: From the Revolution to Vietnam—The Story of America's Rise to Power, 1989.
John E. Frehling , Struggle for a Continent: The Wars of Early America, 1993.
Michael Sherry , In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s, 1995.
John Whiteclay Chambers II and G. Kurt Piehler, eds., Major Problems in American Military History, 1999.

John Whiteclay Chambers II

War: Causes of War Americans' assumptions about the causes of war have shaped important U.S. foreign and security policies. However, these assumptions were often poorly grounded and sometimes simply wrong.

Ideas on the causes of war held by various American peace and antiwar movements, for example, often had little basis in reality. Since the early nineteenth century, these movements have, at various times, offered eight main prescriptions that embody their central ideas: (1) arbitration treaties and an international court to arbitrate disputes (popular ideas from the 1840s until 1914); (2) treaties forbidding resort to force (such as the 1920s movement for the “outlawry of war”); (3) disarmament or quantitative arms reductions; (4) collective security (popular during and after World War I); (5) some form of world government; (6) U.S. isolationism or strict neutrality (popular in the late 1930s); (7) pacifist noncooperation with national military programs; (8) dovish U.S. policies toward U.S. adversaries (e.g., Vietnamese Communists or Nica raguan Sandinistas). Some peace groups have also emphasized the need to cultivate pacific values through public moral education and by emphasizing the horrors of war.

When tried, these prescriptions usually proved infeasible or ineffective. Many arbitration treaties were signed before 1914, but they proved useless: governments freely ignored arbitration rulings that went against them. The Kellogg‐Briand Treaty supposedly “outlawed” war in 1928, yet it proved to be an empty stunt that had no political effects. Quantitative disarmament rests on a proposition—that the incidence or intensity of warfare increases with the quantity of modern weapons available—that remains unproven and seems wrong. (Ancient history offers evidence against it, recording many immensely destructive wars fought wholly without modern weapons.) The collective security idea, embodied in the League of Nations, proved ineffective in the 1930s while distracting Americans from more feasible ways to prevent World War II, such as early U.S. moves to deter or contain Germany and Japan. World government is now among those ideas so discredited they are no longer seriously discussed. U.S. neutrality, codified in the U.S. Neutrality Acts of 1935–39, helped embolden Adolf Hitler to start World War II while failing to keep the United States out of that war, and thus must be reckoned as more a cause of war than peace. Pacifism also helped embolden Hitler, who saw British and American pacifism as easing his road to European hegemony. Pressure for dovish policies did end one or two wars (e.g., the Indochina and Nicaraguan Contra wars), but only after these wars had burned for years. Overall, peace movements' main prescriptions seem generally unsound in retrospect.

Another misdirected approach to the causes of war has come in the twentieth century from anti‐Communist conservatives. Their analysis rested on two main hypotheses: (1) communism causes war because Communist states will seek to expand by force against capitalist states; and (2) appeasement of communism causes war by emboldening Communist states in their expansionism. Their second hypothesis was arguably valid, at least in some situations, but their first was not. Communist states proved to be only modestly aggressive. The USSR was an opportunistic but cautious aggressor, not a Hitlerian juggernaut. Soviet leaders committed vast crimes against their own people but only modest international aggressions.

After three great victories—in the wake of World War I and World War II, and after the Cold War, which ended in 1991—the United States has sought to shape a durable peace based on its assumptions about the causes of war. Twice the United States failed, but its third attempt has had some success.

Woodrow Wilson's post–World War I policies rested on poor theories of war's causes. Wilson offered six main prescriptions, framed in his famous Fourteen Points: (1) Replace balance‐of‐power politics and competitive alliance making (which Wilson believed caused war) with a collective security system. But collective security was infeasible, as the League's later failure showed. (2) Reduce armaments to “the lowest level consistent with national safety.” Here Wilson was misled by the myth that quantitative disarmament could reduce violence between states. (3) End secret diplomacy in favor of “open covenants … openly arrived at,” a change Wilson believed would bolster popular control of foreign policy, promoting peace. This soon‐forgotten notion was a false corollary to the stronger hypothesis that democracy promotes peace. (4) Grant self‐determination to freedom‐seeking peoples. But this was infeasible in a post‐1919 Europe of much intermingled ethnicities. (5) Remove trade barriers. This was a sound economic idea but a poor peace program, because free trade can cause war as well as peace, as illustrated by the way U.S. trade with the Allies helped draw the United States into World War I. (6) End colonialism. This was a humane idea that addressed a non‐cause of the world war (European colonial rivalries had largely ended by 1914).

In World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ideas about the causes of war and peace echoed Wilson's in part and differed in part. Like Wilson, Roosevelt believed that arms reductions, free trade, and national self‐determination would promote peace. Unlike Wilson, Roosevelt also believed that aggressor states could best be tamed by completely defeating, disarming, and occupying them. His core belief, however, was that the best cornerstone of peace would be a concert system resembling the 1815 Concert of Europe, run through the cooperation of the “four policemen” (the United States, Britain, Nationalist China, and the Soviet Union). Roosevelt's concert scheme failed because a concert requires an underlying consensus among the great powers—something rare in history and absent after 1945.

In the 1990s, the administrations of George Bush and Bill Clinton built their post–Cold War peace on better ideas and got better results. They continued U.S. security guarantees to primary U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, backed by a continued overseas U.S. military presence. They pressed Europe's newly freed states to respect the rights of ethnic minorities. Echoing Wilson, they pressed Europe's dictatorships to democratize, believing that democracies seldom fight each other. Finally, they pushed former Communist states to “marketize” their economies, believing that marketization would promote prosperity, which would bolster democracy and peace. These post–Cold War policies, produced a softer landing than the policies of 1919 and 1945.

Social scientists have developed a large body of theories on the causes of war since World War II, some of them useful and influential. Two major theories have identified military factors as key causes of war and implied military‐ related prescriptions. What became known as “stability theory” warned that the risk of war increased with the size of the military advantage accruing to the side that struck first. With a large first‐strike advantage, a “reciprocal fear of surprise attack” could set in, with each side thinking that “they fear we fear they will attack; so they might attack; so we must.” Developed by nuclear strategists of Albert Wohlstetter and Thomas Schelling in the 1950s and 1960s, the theory led some strategists to advise against deploying strategic nuclear forces that were designed for surprise attack on the adversary's nuclear forces. However, the theory had only modest influence on policy, largely because the U.S. Air Force rejected it.

What became known as “offense‐defense theory” warned that the risk of war increased as offensive forces grew stronger and conquest grew easier. When conquest is easy, this theory holds, aggressors are tempted to attack by prospects of easy gain, and status quo powers grow more aggressive because they desire more defensible borders. The theory drew mention before the 1970s but was first developed by the political scientist Robert Jervis in 1978, and then elaborated by others. It is now widely accepted in academe and in many policy circles, although the U.S. military remains skeptical. Its proponents have used it to explain historical events, such as the outbreak of World War I, and as a guide for policy, warning against unduly offensive military doctrines and force postures, and recommending giving security guarantees to others as a way to preserve peace in other regions. It influenced the European peace movement to call for a more defensive NATO conventional military posture during the mid‐1980s; it helped persuade the Soviet reform government of Mikhail Gorbachev to adopt a more defensive military posture in the late 1980s; and it encouraged the decisions of the Bush and Clinton administrations to extend defensive security guarantees in Europe and Asia.

What could be called “misperception theory” has warned that governments are subject to a wide range of war‐causing misperceptions. Its dominant version, also developed in the 1970s by Robert Jervis and others, argues that national misperceptions stem from the cognitive errors of policymakers. These psychological errors lead governments to underestimate their own role in provoking others' hostility, to learn slowly, to exaggerate the order and coherence of others' actions, and to fall into spirals of self‐reinforcing mutual hostility. Another variant of the theory, elaborated by Geoffrey Blainey in the 1970s, warned that wars of false optimism erupt when states underestimate others' capacity or will to fight.

During the 1970s and 1980s, scholars also explored the hypothesis, asserted in the eighteenth century by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant but never tested, that democracies are more peaceful than other types of government. This led to the growth of “democratic peace theory,” and the discovery that while democracies are as war‐prone as other states, they almost never fight each other. Democratic peace theory informed official policy in the 1980s and 1990s, fueling a return to Woodrow Wilson's goal of fostering democracy overseas. Most notably, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy to support democracy abroad, and the Bush and Clinton administrations put priority on supporting democracy in the former Soviet empire.

Other recent scholarly theories of war have had less policy impact. A “structural realist” school argued that a bipolar world of two superpowers is more peaceful than a multipolar world of three or more great powers. A “liberal institutional” school argued that international institutions and regimes ease international cooperation, and, its proponents implied, promote peace. Others offered a “power transition” theory, positing that wars break out during transitions from the leadership of one great power to another. However, these theories are controversial within academe and have had little impact outside it.

Theories of war that drove U.S. policy for much of American history have often proved erroneous. Both the left and the right have frequently treated war's causes as a question to be settled by reference to movement dogma rather than by study. Americans have paid in blood for mistaken policies that stemmed from these errors. On the other hand, social science has made progress on the problem of war in recent years, and this progress may promise better policies in the future.
[See also Disciplinary Views of War: Political Science and International Relations.]

Bibliography

Robert Jervis , Perception and Misperception in International Politics, 1976.
Robert Jervis , Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma, World Politics, 30 (January 1978), pp. 167–214.
Geoffrey Blainey , The Causes of War, 3rd ed. 1988.
Alexander L. George , Domestic Constraints on Regime Change in U.S. Foreign Policy, in G. John Ikenberry, ed., American Foreign Policy, 1989, pp. 583–608.
Jack Levy , The Causes of War: A Review of Theories, in Philip E. Tetlock, et al., eds., Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, 1 (1989), pp. 209–333.
Nils Petter Gleditsch , Democracy and Peace, Journal of Peace Research, 29 (1992), pp. 369–76.
Greg Cashman , What Causes War? An Introduction to Theories of International Conflict, 1993.

David Mendeloff and and Stephen Van Evera

War: Effects of War on the Economy The most persistent and perhaps most important question relating to the effects of America's wars and their related costs on the U.S. economy is whether military expenditures have been a prop or a burden for economic growth. This question has continued relevance because the United States in the 1990s spent a larger part of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defense (3.8% in 1995) than any other G7 industrial nation, almost four times Japan's expenditure and nearly twice as much as Germany's—America's two most important economic competitors. The fact that Russia in the 1990s spent almost three times more of its GDP on defense—and was in economic chaos—only strengthened this concern.

Historians and economists have waxed and waned with regard to the effect of military expenditures on the U.S. economy. Charles and Mary Beard in The Rise of American Civilization (1927) and Louis Hacker in The Triumph of American Capitalism (1940) argued that the Civil War destroyed not only slavery but also the Southern slaveocracy, thus allowing the balance of political power to shift to Northern industrialists and hence spurring American economic growth. Prior to these accounts, the classical economists ( Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus) were concerned with the effects of war on aggregate demand. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw very high levels of military expenditures in Britain, for example, which these economists believed had a negative impact on industrial growth. The national debts resulting from war, Smith believed, “enfeebled every state … enriching in most cases the idle and profuse debtor at the expense of the industrious and frugal creditor.”

Critics of the capitalist system in more recent years have argued that capitalist societies are prone to periodic stagnation, and that only wars of the magnitude of World War II are capable of curing massive unemployment. Alternatively, liberal economists argue that war, and particularly World War II, was the strongest influence establishing Keynesian economics as a guideline and a justification for U.S. government fiscal policies for the postwar era—policies that led to widespread employment, high earnings, and a modest measure of income redistribution. Even some strong opponents of the Vietnam War began to argue in the mid‐1990s that full employment was only possible in the late 1960s because of that war.

Paul Kennedy, in his widely read Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), is perhaps the best known historian for the view that persistent and high military expenditures have played an important role in the relative economic decline of major nations since 1500. In this and subsequent works, he argues that the United States now runs the risk of “imperial overstretch”; that America's global commitments are greater than its capacity to fund them. For him, war is not only a burden, but continuous high levels of defense spending can and generally have turned major nations into minor ones. Although his is a popular view, he had yet to persuade the experts that the United States was well down the road to relative economic decline.

The most sophisticated studies on the prop v. burden issue—whether defense spending contributes to economic growth and well‐being by stimulating the economy, or whether defense spending uses up scarce resources or diverts resources into less productive channels—tend to emphasize that growth in the GDP has been rather constant, with little lasting impact from the nine major wars America has fought since independence. Wars temporarily reduce long‐run productive capacity by reducing the growth of population and the inflow of immigrants; but the general burden of any given war falls largely on the current generation, according to Chester Wright in a seminal study on the more enduring economic consequences of American wars to 1940. More recently, Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley demonstrated that defense spending generally inhibits economic growth in developed countries by crowding out public and private investment, and siphoning off of R & D resources. Indeed, since the late 1980s, world military expenditures as a percentage of GDP have decreased dramatically without any evidence of harmful effects on the world economy. In truth, the overall economic burden of America's wars is less significant than the inequitable manner in which so much of that burden has been placed upon the working class and those with modest education, while others largely escape or even profit from such wars.

If the effect of military spending during the war years is the most obvious point of impact on the economy, the most lasting one has to do with veterans' benefits paid after the war to veterans and their dependents. Veterans' benefits have been paid for every war since the American Revolution. They amounted to about two‐thirds of the total dollar cost of the Revolutionary War; more than half the cost of the War of 1812; and 3.7 times the cost of mobilizing the Union forces in the Civil War. Surprisingly, these benefits continued to rise for about forty to sixty years after the end of each of these wars and did not cease until well over a century later. Benefits for Civil War veterans and spouses ceased only in the 1980s; World War II benefits will be paid until sometime after 2070. To date, World War II veteran's benefits have amounted to more than $300 billion, only somewhat less than the original cost of that war in current dollars. Clearly, veterans' benefits have been a major infusion of funds into the economy, and were the major direct federal subsidy to families prior to the welfare state. Compared to other countries, American soldiers and their dependents received benefits much earlier (since 1783) and in more generous amounts than elsewhere. The average payment to a still‐living World War I veteran, for example, was $6,500 in 1992. Confederate soldiers, of course, received no federal veterans benefits, although some southern states sought to add them.

The most troubling problem concerning the impact of war on the economy has to do with rapidly rising public debt. Large but temporary public debts have occurred in all of America's wars; all were paid off in time until the 1970s, when U.S. public debt rose dramatically owing to large defense increases and major tax cuts under President Ronald Reagan. In the 1990s, U.S. net public debt (most of which is war‐related) was at an unprecedented peacetime level. High public debt levels—a problem in all G7 nations—boost real interest rates, retard the accumulation of private capital, and limit gains in living standards, according to the International Monetary Fund. Reducing this unsustainable public debt, the most significant legacy of recent American wars, will be one of the United States's greatest challenges in the twenty‐first century.
[See also Disciplinary Views of War: Economics; Economy and War; Industry and War; Military‐Industrial Complex; Public Financing and Budgeting for War].

Bibliography

Charles and and Mary Beard , The Rise of American Civilization, 1927.
Louis Hacker , The Triumph of American Capitalism, 1940.
Chester W. Wright , The More Enduring Economic Consequences of America's Wars, in the Journal of Economic History (1943).
James L. Clayton, ed., The Economic Impact of the Cold War, 1970.
Steven Rosen, ed., Testing the Theory of the Military‐Industrial Complex, 1973.
Paul Kennedy , The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1987.
Paul Kennedy , Preparing for the Twenty‐First Century, 1993, esp. chaps. 13 and 14.
Todd Sandler and and Keith Hartley , The Economics of Defense, 1995.
International Monetary Fund , World Economic Outlook May 1996, “Focus on Fiscal Policy,” 1996.

James L. Clayton