The War Ledger

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1980 by the University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1980

Paperback edition 1981

Printed in the United States of America

00 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91      5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN 978-0-226-35184-1 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Organski, A F K, 1923–

The war ledger.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. War.   2. International relations.   I. Kugler, Jacek, joint author.   II. Title.

U21.2.07       355.02       79-23366

ISBN 0-226-63279-2 (cloth)

        0-226-63280-6 (paper)

A. F. K. Organski Jacek Kugler

The War Ledger

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For Christian, Elizabeth and Eric

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Of Power

Of Size and Growth

Of Nuclear Weapons

Plan of the Book

One. Causes, Beginnings and Predictions: The Power Transition

Three Models

Comparison of the Three Models

Preparation for the Testing of a Model

Empirical Tests of the Power-Distribution Models

Conclusion

Two. Davids and Goliaths: Predicting the Outcomes of International Wars

Power Indicators: Existing Measures

The Missing Measure of Political Development

Construction of a Measure of Political Development

An Index of Governmental Extraction

A New Measure of National Capabilities

Tests, Hypotheses, and Findings

Conclusion

Three. The Costs of Major Wars: The Phoenix Factor

Theoretical Propositions

Indexing National Capabilities or Power Resources

Estimating Consequences of War

Choice of Test Cases

Actors

Empirical Propositions

Findings

The Phoenix Factor

Conclusion

Four. Nuclear Arms Races and Deterrence

Deterrents and Deterrence

Testing Deterrence: Outcomes of Crises

Testing Mutual Deterrence: The Nuclear Arms Race

Conclusion

Five. Conclusion

A Note on Architecture

Major Wars: Beginnings

Predictions of War Outcomes

The Phoenix Factor

Deterrence and Arms Races

Beyond the Data

Appendix 1: Index of Political Development

Appendix 2: Postwar American Aid

Appendix 3: Analysis of Models

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Almost ten years have passed from the time this book was conceived. This has permitted us, the authors, to understand better the problem we were exploring, and, we hope, to improve the manuscript as well. Research collaborations are never easy, but, when successful, they permit some distinct pleasures to the participants. And so in this instance. This book began as a common enterprise between a teacher and a student, and has permitted the authors to become true collaborators and fast friends. We are both thankful for the opportunity and would like to acknowledge publicly our debt to each other. But we also have a joint debt to many people who deserve our thanks for having helped us. We cannot list all of them. We must pick and choose.

Scholars, by necessity of academic life, are mendicants. To do their work they must beg for money, data, and help. All who know the economics of research in the academic setting also know what researchers owe to patrons. We wish to acknowledge publicly our debt to the Earhart and Ford foundations and to DARPA. The officers of these institutions who, over the years, were directly involved in decisions to support pieces of this research—Drs. Stephen Andriole, Judith Daly, Kalman Silvert, Antony Sullivan, Robert Young, and Mr. Richard Ware—truly deserve our thanks. Their understanding of what we were about and their encouragement were as important to us as the financial support provided by their institutions.

Those who have done cross-national empirical work with census and national account data understand full well our dependence on people who have special knowledge of the meaning of the numbers they have put together. Gaining access to them and to additional necessary unpublished sources was a major problem. We cannot list all who generously helped us with their data and with information on what these data meant. There are too many of them. We should like, however, to acknowledge the help of Drs. Ronald Tammen and Arthur House, legislative assistants of Senators William Proxmire and Abraham Ribicoff, and to Dr. Richard Solomon, director of the social sciences at the Rand Corporation, who worked mightily to obtain such access for us. Without the efforts of these persons this study could not have been completed. The extensive data-sets we obtained that made possible the calculations necessary to test the hypotheses underpinning this book will be deposited in the ICPSR at the Center for Political Studies and the Crisis Management Center of DARPA for all to use.

We should like to acknowledge special assistance from Drs. Raja Chelliah, formerly of the International Monetary Fund, Roy Bahl of Syracuse University, and Elliott Morss with the United States government, who helped us at a critical juncture in our efforts to measure political capacity. That work is still going on. And we also wish to thank Mr. Daniel Fox of the Statistical Bureau of the University of Michigan, an unerring guide through the uncertainties of mathematical statistics.

A number of other people merit special thanks. Professors James Caporaso, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and Robert North read the entire manuscript and made very valuable comments. Their efforts improved this book. Dr. William Domke, Mr. Michael Horn, and Mr. Steven Rood labored unceasingly to put our data in order and helped with the analysis. Mr. Christopher Braider and Mrs. Barbara Skala edited the manuscript in its entirety and their advice and literary skills helped us to pare and improve our prose. Miss Deborah Eddy kept control of all the pieces of a vast project, typed, and did endless copy editing on the manuscript.

Chapter 2 of this book is a revised version of an article by A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, David and Goliaths: Predicting the Outcomes of International Wars, that was published in Comparative Political Studies 11, no. 2 (July 1978): 141–80, and is used by permission of Sage Publications, Inc. We also wish to thank the editors of American Political Science Review and International Security for permission to use material that originally appeared in those journals.

Both authors, moreover, wish to acknowledge their indebtedness to Cheryl Kugler, who cheerfully put up with deprivations inevitable in the lives of those tied with bonds of family and affection to those who do research and write books.

One person who had always helped could not this time. Katherine Fox Organski died on February 15, 1973, when the first findings of this research were just beginning to be put on paper. Throughout, we missed her knowledge of the matter at hand, her judgment, her critical bent of mind, and her unparalleled editorial skills. Yet her influence on this work remained very marked. Her high standards in research and writing were made our goals.

We need hardly add that all who helped us most did not always agree with us. The responsibility for all we have written is ours alone.

A. F. K. Organski

Ann Arbor, 1980

Jacek Kugler

Boston, 1980

Introduction

The story we are about to tell is a tale of conflict among nations. The wars we will be concerned with are few in number, but they are the fiercest and most lethal ever fought. Our book is not a series of case studies, however. A clinician’s exploration of a single war is a very different task from the one undertaken in this volume, and the deep probing of individual cases requires skills we do not possess. The deadliness of wars in which the combatants fight with all-out efforts was a major criterion for our selection of a tiny sample of conflicts, but not for the obvious reasons. The vast size, scope, and ferocity of the fighting are important because they help to create the conditions of high stress essential to test our notions about the causes and consequences of armed conflicts.

In our examination of these wars, then, we will be primarily concerned less with the wars themselves than with four general kinds of questions that can be posed about them. First, why do major wars begin? What are the conditions that provoke the most powerful nations in the world to fight with one another? Second, why exactly does one side win and the other lose? The obvious explanations of clever generalship, the size and self-sacrifice of armies, the quality and quantity of the weapons used, or combinations of all these, did not seem to us entirely persuasive. Third, we were interested in the rules that govern behavior of the contestants after the actual fighting has ceased. Some countries obviously recover faster than others after a war. How do some of the obvious factors such as victory and defeat influence the recovery of the combatants? Is there a predictable pattern in the behavior of the winners and losers? Fourth, and finally, have the rules governing conflict behavior between nations been drastically altered since the advent of the nuclear era? Popular credence argues that they have been largely, if not entirely, changed. The explosive power and sheer horror of the new weapons make this conception seem plausible. But is it true? We had our doubts.

There is a charmed circle of ideas about war that has been passed on from one generation of war students to the next, in spite of evidence. There is the belief, for example, that men who wish peace should prepare for war. The Roman motto si vis pacem para bellum is often quoted. The Romans, however, fought all the time. There is the belief that love, understanding, and turning the other cheek can avert war; but there are many cases within memory of unsuccessful appeasement. There is the belief that hunger, population pressure, and the like lead to war; but the evidence is conclusive that the weak, the hungry, and the over-populated nations are the meek of the world and have never attacked anybody. On war everyone plays expert, and it is a bore.

But experts do not seem to know much more. It is appalling how little is really known or, at least, how little is known by those who have to make decisions affecting peace and war. Think a moment about the questions to be treated in this book—beginnings, outcomes, and consequences of war—and think about the performance of leaders in recent military conflicts. For example, the leaders of the major powers at the beginning of World War I did not realize that a war was coming or the nature of the war their nations were going to have to fight. The comment made by one German general on the behavior of British soldiers, they fight like lions but they are led by asses, should not, in justice, be restricted to the British alone. Did French, Italian, or heaven help us, Russian leaders perform any better in World Wars I or II? Stalin, even after being told by both Roosevelt and Churchill that the USSR was about to be invaded, refused to believe that Hitler would violate the 1939 pact and was immensely surprised when he did.

And what about the problem of the factors determining victory or defeat? Think, for example, of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. How incredible it is today that most of the Japanese leaders believed they could win a war against the United States. Even those who worried—their most far-sighted leaders (who were in the minority)—calculated that Japan could win, although only if the war were of short duration. But what did these leaders expect? That after they had destroyed a portion of the American fleet and captured the Philippines from the United States, but without even denting American potential strength, the United States would simply quit and turn the other cheek? And again, how incredible that the Germans, and much of the world along with them, could seriously think that World War II would end differently than had World War I, despite the fact that Germany had fought the same countries just twenty years earlier and been badly defeated for her pains. Nor are American leaders immune to deadly blunders. Did our own best and brightest know how the war in Vietnam had to end? Evidently not, even after the stalemate the United States was forced to accept in Korea, fighting underdeveloped China. Should not that signal have been picked up?

Finally, did anyone at the end of World War II guess what the ultimate consequences of that war would be? Did anyone think at the time that Germany and Japan would recover as rapidly as they have after the devastation they suffered at Allied hands? Would anyone in 1945 have believed that Germany would pass France in the production of steel by 1950?

Yet the picture of leaders at their job is not as dismal as we have just implied. Some leaders seem to have shown better sense in regard to war than others. French generals at Versailles in 1919 feared that, after her defeat in World War I, Germany would attack France again within twenty years. It is amazing how right they were. Italian generals feared that Italy would lose if she entered World War II. They, too, were right. Franco was not impressed by Germany’s defeat of France, guessed the strength of England, and refused to let Hitler strong-arm him into joining the Axis powers as a belligerent. Hitler was furious at Franco’s pusillanimity and ingratitude, but it was Franco who died in his bed. What made these leaders guess right? What exactly did they sense about the outcome of the war that made them properly wary?

There is much that cannot be known about war because the information is lost. Our ledger has no entry for the human pain caused by war. One can measure the physical havoc wrought: the cities destroyed, the houses demolished, the forests burned, the roads torn up. Such damage can be calculated with estimates filling gaps in the real data. But the suffering and the diminution in the quality of life cannot be measured: the data base is gone. For lives disorganized, for the displaced and the dispirited, for the suffering of persons wrenched from roots and routine, for the countless number of those who tried to fit in again after the fighting stopped, there is no adequate information. How many times in interviews with survivors has one heard, I was doing this or that, but then the war came. or, What can I do now? No account of war can be considered complete which does not include such things, but no such data can possibly be made available, and we can only note their omission from our ledger.

But though there is much that cannot be known, yet there is also much that could and should be known, and is not. It is to this area that we will devote ourselves in the pages that follow. The reader should be aware that the kind of things about which no positive knowledge can be obtained are only remotely relevant to the questions we seek to answer here. For these, quantifiable data may be gathered.

Of Power

A close and complex connection exists between war and power. Shifts in the international distribution of power are often believed to create the conditions likely to lead to at least the most important wars, and power is the most important determinant of whether a war will be won or lost. And power, again, is the resource that leaders hope to preserve or to increase by resorting to armed conflict. Inevitably, this book will pay a great deal of attention to questions of power: the differences between strength and military might, the limits of power, the resources of power, the problem of measuring power. It is from the answers to all these questions that we have derived the substance of this book. Nevertheless, we will be chiefly concerned only with the last two, for reasons that will become apparent after a brief consideration of the differences between national power, national capability, and military might.

These three concepts, despite the close relations by virtue of which they tend to be confused, are not identical. National power is the broadest of the three and can be defined simply as the ability of one nation to control the behavior of another for its own ends.¹ Such control may result from quite intangible factors: for example, from the fact that the arguments advanced by one nation in defense of its position may be thought persuasive by other nations; or from the circumstance that some nations are simply willing to follow one nation’s lead because its requests are also in their own interests—or because they simply don’t care, or because that nation enjoys great esteem and is viewed as a model by the other nations that deal with it. For a long honeymoon period after World War II the United States wielded a great deal of power simply because it was held in the highest esteem by a majority of the nations outside the Russian sphere. To take another example, Russia has been able to exercise a great deal of power for some fifty years now because millions of non-Russians have espoused the Communist ideology.

Of course, fear can be persuasive as well. It is another intangible but extremely effective resource for international control. The United States, the USSR, China, and Japan, to name but a few nations, have all exercised a considerable degree of power over their neighbors for various periods of their history simply because the smaller states were frightened, and with good reason, of what the giants might do to them if they didn’t comply with their requests.

An attractive aspect of exercising power through persuasion is the cheapness of the method. But persuasion is not always effective, and it is certainly not the only means available. One nation can influence the behavior of another by directly rewarding or punishing it for what it does. This is the most frequent and the most stable way of exercising power. Each nation has needs that only other nations can supply. Wherever a nation controls something another nation wishes, and can give or withhold its prize at will, it commands the means of influencing the behavior of that nation. There is an endless variety of ways by which one nation can reward another: by providing it with goods for consumption and for defense, with funds and technology for the building up of its economy, with markets for its products. The rich industrial nations employ such means continuously to have other nations do their bidding. England was the most powerful country in the nineteenth century not only because of the might of the British Navy but also and, indeed, primarily because, as the first industrial power, she generated a large fraction of all that went into the international trade of the time and because her home market consumed much of what the rest of the world produced. Similarly, the United States today looms large in international politics because her economy produces so much of what the rest of the world wants, and her large and prosperous population represents a huge market for other peoples’ products. Even the poorer nations may have rewards to give. Because they do not produce what other people want, they often give as rewards the riches of their subsoil, or pieces of their territory on which richer and more powerful nations can establish bases for their ships, their planes, their missiles, their soldiers, and their businesses.

The capacity to reward implies, of course, capacity to punish. This means of exercising power requires no lengthy explanation. The record of international politics is replete with instances where the haves have withheld sales or aid, or threatened to do so, as signals to the have-nots to mend their ways. And recipients of foreign help, displeased with their benefactors, have, ironically, on occasion turned the tables on their patrons and changed suppliers. In the late seventies, in Africa alone, the Egyptians and the Somalis, dissatisfied with Russian support, or incensed with Russian interference, kicked the Russians out and sought help from the United States, while Ethiopia went the other way, switching from the American to the Russian side. Sometimes punishments backfire. Our chastisement of Argentina and Brazil on human rights, or the Russian attempt to punish the Chinese, did not compel these countries to alter their behavior but simply induced them to become even more independent or more hostile than they were. Most of the time, however, the withholding of goods or assistance that other nations really need does work.

The last and most obvious way in which nations exercise control over the behavior of others consists in the use of military force. This is the face of power with which we shall be most concerned because war obviously constitutes the extreme use of force in the exercise of control. But force can also be employed as punishment.

Force used as punishment differs at least theoretically from force deployed in war because, in the case of the former, the wielder of force hopes that the punished nation will change its behavior of its own accord. Since World War II, the Arab-Israeli, Cambodian-Vietnamese, Ethiopian-Eritrean, Saudi-Yemani, American-Vietnamese conflicts, and the frequent acts of terror and counterterror witnessed everywhere in the world, all furnish examples of force being employed in order to persuade adversaries to change their behavior. Such acts, successful or not, have that as their purpose. In the case of all-out war, however, disagreement between the combatants is of such a nature and degree that the goal each sets itself is no longer just to induce the other party to change its mind and course of action but to crush the other’s resistance and control its behavior regardless of its wishes. At the stage of punishment, an element of choice remains; the object of war is the elimination of the power to choose.

Two additional general points should be made. The use of force to control behavior is the most demanding and infrequent of all the ways in which power is exercised in international relations. The second point is most important for much that is to follow in this book. National capability and military might are two distinct quantities. A nation’s strength goes far beyond its military might. To confuse the two can be disastrous, as the colossal blunder committed by the Japanese in attacking the United States at Pearl Harbor amply testifies. To know a nation’s strength, one must look at its capacity to generate the resources that represent the major source of any nation’s might.² Three extremely large and complex factors are primarily involved: (1) the number of people in a nation who can work and fight, (2) the skills and productivity of the active population, and (3) the capacity of the governmental system to mobilize the human and material resources at its disposal and devote them to national goals.

Of Size and Growth

The sources of strength and power just mentioned are not constants. They vary in slow, intricate, and, in the long run, largely predictable ways, with changes in one master variable reinforcing changes that have already taken place and creating opportunities for new changes in each of the other two. It is this interactive process that is at the core of what has come to be called national development or growth. And it is this process of development that determines the power available to a country, that is, increases the pools of national capabilities (or power resources) available to central elites in their dealings with other countries. Power and development go together, and as one changes so does the other. The order of the international system rests on such a connection.

It is the thesis of this book that the manner and the speed of national growth and development change the pools of resources available to nations and that such changes create the conditions in which international conflicts occur. Such changes also determine the outcomes of wars and, further still, so rigorously shape the politicoeconomic future that nations driven to fight in order to preserve or alter an existing distribution of power do so to no avail. Indeed, nations electing to fight in order to accelerate trends favorable to them eventually come to enjoy the superiority they seek, even if they lose. Critical to any understanding of the way the system of international power works is the realization that the developmental process is not uniform across countries. There are major differences in the timing, the sequences of growth, and the speed with which changes take place. There is no single road of development most nations must follow, and the different combinations of forces that determine the different ways in which development occurs exert an important influence on the level of power available to any given nation, because alternate developmental patterns produce different kinds of resources for the elites to draw upon in their dealings with other nations.

One or two examples will clarify what we mean. The high level of political capacity of the system of North Vietnam gave that country’s elite the kind of control over human resources that made it possible to repulse the American assault, but the lack of economic development left the same elite in a weak position in their dealings with other countries once the war was over. Again, the wealth of the Saudis will make them privileged customers in any industrial country but will not enable them to defend themselves against attack. If, then, one wishes to make reasonable estimates of the strength of nations, and of the kinds of effort they can make when pressed (and this is precisely the information one requires if, as here, one studies international military conflicts), one must first understand the patterns of national growth that provide the pool of critical resources necessary for a war and the capacity to deploy them usefully. It is in the relative size and the patterns of growth of the members of a system that the rules governing behavior in international military conflicts are to be found.

Of Nuclear Weapons

The last portion of this book will deal with one final set of questions. Are the principal mechanisms of international conflict the same now as they were before the advent of nuclear weapons? Does the connection between growth and power still hold in the nuclear age? Have not nuclear weapons reduced to secondary importance the need for a large population, increased productivity, and highly developed political capacity? In view of the immense strength of these new and terrible weapons and the swiftness of their means of delivery, are not strength and military might finally the same, as military thinkers for the last hundred years have said was the case? Have events caught up with Mao’s assertion that power grows out of the barrel of a gun—or, to update it, a missile launcher—and made it true? If this has happened, the international pecking order is being radically reordered. If the strength of nations does in fact, solely, or at least primarily, depend on nuclear weapons, then small, unproductive, and weakly governed systems can be as strong as the largest, most productive, and well-run systems because nations with all these deficits have, or are said to have, nuclear weapons. The unkempt giant, India, has nuclear weapons, and she is both poor and badly governed; a favorite lilliputian of international politics like Israel is rumored to have nuclear weapons; an economically unproductive country like China has nuclear weapons. Have, then, nuclear weapons made such a difference in the way conflict is carried out in international politics? If not, what difference have they made?

Plan of the Book

We have ordered our inquiry to obtain maximum information about two cardinal interests that underpin this volume: national growth and international war. Because the two are so closely connected, it is possible to use one as an instrument in the study of the other. In this book, we consider the evolution and nature of the influence exerted by size and growth on war. It is our hunch that, at the inception of the modern international system, war and the preparation for it had much greater effect on development than the other way around. But in modern times growth is really far more influential on war than war on growth, hence this is the way that war should be studied. But precisely because in an examination of the intersection between development and conflictual behavior,