Paradoxes of War

On the Art of National Self-Entrapment

Zeev Maoz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367609733
• eBook ISBN: 9781000259339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do reasonable people lead their nations into the tremendously destructive traps of international conflict? Why do nations then deepen their involvement and make it harder to escape from these traps? In Paradoxes of War, originally published in 1990, Zeev Maoz addresses these and other paradoxical questions about the war process. Using a unique approach to the study of war, he demonstrates that wars may often break out because states wish to prevent them, and continue despite the desperate efforts of the combatants to end them.

Paradoxes of War is organized around the various stages of war. The first part discusses the causes of war, the second the management of war, and the third the short- and long-term implications of war. In each chapter Maoz explores a different paradox as a contradiction between reasonable expectations and the outcomes of motivated behaviour based on those expectations. He documents these paradoxes in twentieth century wars, including the Korean War, the Six Day War, and the Vietnam War. Maoz then invokes cognitive and rational choice theories to explain why these paradoxes arise. Paradoxes of War is essential reading for students and scholars of international politics, war and peace studies, international relations theory, and political science in general.

1

On Paradoxes and Wars

Were insurance companies to infer the risk propensity of the population from the behavior of most soldiers on the battlefield, they would reach the conclusion that this line of business has no chance of ever being profitable. Were military strategists to infer soldiers’ willingness to take risks from their insurance policies, their conclusion would be unavoidable: With cautious people like these, it is impossible to run a decent war, let alone win one. Is it possible that the same person who one day carefully looks both ways before crossing the street will the next day never pause to look back while crossing enemy lines?

Yet, governments are capable of performing this magic. They do it all the time and they do it everywhere. Mobilizing a nation for war involves transforming people from cautious human beings who put their personal safety above many other values into fighting animals who put such vague values as honor, patriotism, and glory far above personal safety. When people are called to rally around the flag, even the most alienated and apolitical go without question. They go regardless of what they think of their own government, of their own economic and social condition, and, sometimes, without paying much attention to what the issues of the war are.

Communists had high hopes when World War I broke out. Because it was a war among the principal capitalist powers, they believed that the working classes in those states would realize that their class interests contradicted the propaganda of the regimes. They reasoned that the oppressed workers could not but rebel against their capitalist bosses instead of killing each other on the battlefield while the capitalists sat back and made more profits. The worldwide communist revolution seemed to be just around the corner. How wrong they were! Soon the oppressed Austro-Hungarian proletariat were fighting against the starved Russian peasants, while the German workers were killing their French comrades and being killed by the British coal miners. How the corrupt and decadent governments of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the Russian Czar were able to ignite widespread nationalistic fervor that persisted for the four most bloody years in human history up to that point is still a mystery.

And it is not the only puzzle about the conduct of war. There are many such puzzles. Not all are paradoxes in the sense I will use here. Many can be explained with the help of a little imagination, and, once explained, they cease to be puzzling. But many aspects of war seem counterintuitive even after a good explanation has been given. Worse, even if we understand why a seemingly illogical event happens, we cannot prevent its recurrence if the circumstances leading to it arise again, no matter how hard we may try.

This book explores two issues that carry major theoretical and empirical implications: (1) Why do reasonable people sometimes lead their nations into self-made traps of tremendously destructive proportions? (2) Why is it that nations that find themselves in a mess of their own doing—and know it—sometimes deepen their troubles, making it harder to escape the trap? The stories told here are about processes that take place before the outbreak of wars, during their courses, and following their termination. They have one thing in common: all are unintended consequences of intentional human action; they happen despite the will of those involved and because all involved wish to prevent them. But even as unintended consequences, wars are not necessarily the outgrowth of human stupidity, malice, or cognitive fallibility. Some of the most disastrous wars may stem from the application of rational logic or from choices that, on the face of it, seem quite reasonable. Yet, those wars turn out to be the precise opposite. of what their participants expected them to be. Worse, this contradiction between expectations and outcomes is a consequence of those “reasonable” choices. And the awareness that one is in trouble does not make escape from war easier; in fact, it may make escape even more difficult.

This chapter sets the stage for a story of perverse aspects of a perverse social behavior. The next section discusses some general approaches to the study of war and places the present approach next to other schools of thought on the topic. The following section discusses the notion of paradox, defining and illustrating it in a social and philosophical context. The methodology of the study is then reviewed, and, finally, the plan of the book is discussed.

The Study of War

The systematic study of war goes back to ancient China, with the perceptive observations of Sun Tzu in the sixth century B.C. (see Sun Tzu, 1983). Research on the deadly art (or science) is also noted for historical continuity. I have no intention of providing a survey of the writings on this phenomenon;¹ rather, my intention is to characterize the various stages of war and briefly discuss several key approaches to the study of war. These approaches do not cover the full spectrum of perspectives on war, but they are relevant because they bear some relationship to the present approach.

Before continuing, a definition of the term war is in order. The dictionary definition of war is that of a series of sustained combats between the armies of two or more states that involve large-scale violence and result in numerous fatalities. Typically, wars extend for prolonged periods of time, but that is not a general rule. The key characteristics of wars are mass participation, sustained combat, and extensive bloodshed.² What distinguishes war from other forms of interstate violence is that it is large scale in terms of the number of people participating and being killed in its violent confrontations. The line separating war from other forms of organized violence seems to be one of magnitude. This gets a concrete meaning in Singer and Small’s (1972) definition. But there is also an issue of intensity. The battles that make up a war are intense in that they are separated by relatively short intervals.³

While bloodshed is their most important characteristic, wars start long before the spilling of the first drop of blood, and they end long after the guns quiet down (Maoz, 1982a). Even when actual hostilities are intense but brief, wars are dynamic processes. They are dynamic not only because troops move on the battlefield in complex maneuvers, but also because of the political processes that accompany the violence and the interplay of politics and military considerations.

The Stages of War

The process of war is usually taken to consist of three stages, only one of which entails pure fighting. These stages are as follows:

1. The initiation stage: This stage consists of political and diplomatic maneuvers that set the stage for the actual outbreak of military hostilities. The stage ends with the first large-scale confrontation of the war. Because this stage precedes actual fighting, it is here where scholars usually look for the causes of wars. In this context we will be looking at both remote causes of war, such as arms races and deterrence policies, and immediate causes of war, such as international crises.⁴
2. The management stage: This stage features maneuver and manipulation of sustained violence. The focus of studies of war management is on how strategy is used (or misused) in the service of politics. For this stage I will examine paradoxical aspects in one of the most ancient arts known to humankind: military strategy. Politics of war management are important because they typically involve struggles and trade-offs between political goals and military considerations, often expressed in terms of civil-military disputes. Politics in this context may become a struggle over the limits to be placed on military activity. Generals wish the politicians to define for them clearly the war aims and then let them do their job without interference. However, just as generals prepare for war in times of peace, politics and diplomacy do not lay dormant in times of war.⁵ This interplay between military considerations and political ones while the guns are active is what war management is all about. (3) The termination stage: This stage covers the processes by which wars end and the traces they leave on the participants far beyond the termination of hostilities. Just as there are underlying and immediate causes of war, there are short-range and long-range consequences of war. When the guns are silenced it is time for those who are engaged in peaceful endeavors to take over. It is time for the winners to start plucking the fruits of victory, and for the losers to start healing and recovering from their defeat. Theories of war termination deal with how nations decide it is time to stop fighting and how they go about actually ending a war. Explanations of the political and economic consequences of war explore the effects that war has on the societies that participated in it. Analysis of these issues will focus on the paradoxical consequences of war.

Obviously, these stages are interrelated: the factors causing nations to resort to arms also affect the opening move in war. The nature of the opening move has a profound effect on how the war is managed. The management of war shapes its outcome. The end of war defines to a large extent the destiny of the nations that took part in it. However, I shall try to demonstrate throughout the study that this causal chain is anything but straightforward.

Approaches to the Study of War

War has been studied from every possible angle, hence any classification of the various approaches to war becomes an exercise in reductionism. It must be stated that the approaches discussed in the present section only scratch the surface. They were selected primarily because they are related to the approach used in the present book and provide a more general context within which we can place the paradoxes of war, not because they are more important than other approaches that are not discussed herein.

The Strategic Approach

Strategy is the art of using military force to accomplish political ends.⁶ The strategic approach is one of the oldest and most influential approaches in the study of war in terms of its impact on the practice of war through the ages. The continuity of this approach is significant not only because certain ideas about when, why, and how military force is to be employed seem to have passed the test of time, but also because it has developed a consistent logic of its own and a set of almost universal principles and lawlike maxims. Technology has changed a great deal from the times of Sun Tzu or Thucydides, yet such principles as force economy, envelopment and pincer movement, the importance of surprise and deception, and the advantages and disadvantages of warfare in external lines predate such eternal books as the Bible. Even seemingly novel principles of strategy that many believe are unique to the nuclear age, such as deterrence, are actually very ancient (Luttwak, 1976; Harkabi, 1983).⁷

Traditional strategic approaches assume that the strategist takes over when political elites have decided to take the military route in pursuing their goals. The strategist’s tasks are to accomplish the military objectives that will assure politicians the best terms at the bargaining table and to do so at the minimum possible human and material cost. Since the advent of nuclear weapons, the function of the strategic approach has expanded to include the prevention of war through military maneuver, the deployment of armed forces and military hardware, and the development of weapon systems, without actually firing a single shot. This expansion of strategy was influenced to a large extent by the ideas of people from outside the armed forces of the state. Most of the civilian strategists were academics from a variety of disciplines.⁸

The strategic approach is not distinguished by methodological sophistication. It is difficult to find a coherent scientific logic in the array of premises, prescriptions, and lawlike maxims that have developed over the years. It is not clear how they were established, what kind of evidence they rely upon, and what the limits are of generalizability of principles such as the significance of surprise and the advantage of offense versus defense in the conduct of war. In spite of this—perhaps because of this—many of its maxims sound terribly persuasive. Yet, many of these maxims fall apart when examined closely via a systematic logic that differs from the straightforward commonsense logic that characterizes strategic analyses of international politics.

The strategic approach is characterized by its reliance on informal rational logic and by its assumption that states are unitary rational actors that are out to maximize their national interest, often defined in terms of various elements of power. Military actions are the instruments of politics, and they may be resorted to as an extension of diplomacy, as a substitute for diplomacy, or in conjunction with diplomacy. Common criticisms of strategic approaches focus on the validity of the underlying assumptions of unitary rational act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 On Paradoxes and Wars
• Part I Paradoxical Causes of War
• Part II Paradoxes of War Management
• Part III Paradoxical Consequences of War
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index