War in a Changing World [3 ed.] 047211185X, 9780472111855

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
Preface
Global Change and the Transformation of War /
Azar Gat and Zeev Maoz
Continuity and Change in the Evolution of Warfare /
Jack S. Levy, Thomas C. Walker, and
Martin S. Edwards
Blood and Computers: The Crisis of Classic Military Power
in Advanced Postindustrialist Societies and the Scope of
Technological Remedies /
Edward N. Luttwak
Isolationism, Appeasement, Containment, and Limited War:
Western Strategic Policy from the Modern to the "Postmodern" Era /
Azar Gat
Hot Wars, Cold Peace: An International-Regional Synthesis /
Benjamin Miller
Democratic Networks: Connecting National, Dyadic, and Systemic Levels of Analysis in the Study of Democracy and War / Zeev Maoz
Political Survival and International Conflict /
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow,
Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith,
Forecasting the Future of War: Foundations for an Algorithm /
Gil Merom
Author Index
Subject Index
Back Cover

Citation preview

ZEEVMAOZ AZARGAT

War ina Changing World

The purpose of the Jaffee Center is, first, to conduct basic research that meets the highest academic standards on matters related to Israel's national security as well as Middle East regional and international security affairs. The Center also aims to contribute to the public debate and governmental deliberation of issues that are-or should be-at the top of Israel's national security agenda. The Jaffee Center seeks to address the strategic community in Israel and abroad, Israeli policymakers and opinion makers, and the general public. The Center relates to the concept of strategy in its broadest meaning, namely the complex of processes involved in the identification, mobilization and application of resources in peace and war, in order to solidify and strengthen national and international security.

War ina Changing World EDITED BY

Zeev Maoz and Azar Gat

~~ Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies ~

TEL AVIV UNIVERS11Y

Published in conjunction with the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies

Ann Arbor THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2001 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America § Printed on acid-free paper 2004

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2002

2001

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data War in a changing world I edited by Zeev Maoz and Azar Gat. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-11185-X (cloth: alk. paper) 1. War. 2. World politics-1989- I. Maoz, Zeev. II. Gat, Azar. U21.2 .W374 2001 355.02-dc21

00-047943

Contents

Contributors Preface Global Change and the Transformation of War

Vll

IX

1

Azar Gat and Zeev Maoz

Continuity and Change in the Evolution of Warfare

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JackS. Levy, Thomas C. Walker, and Martin S. Edwards

Blood and Computers: The Crisis of Classic Military Power in Advanced Postindustrialist Societies and the Scope of Technological Remedies

49

Edward N. Luttwak

Isolationism, Appeasement, Containment, and Limited War: Western Strategic Policy from the Modern to the "Postmodern" Era

77

Azar Gat

Hot Wars, Cold Peace: An International-Regional Synthesis

93

Benjamin Miller

Democratic Networks: Connecting National, Dyadic, and Systemic Levels of Analysis in the Study of Democracy and War

143

Zeev Maoz

Political Survival and International Conflict

183

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith,

Forecasting the Future of War: Foundations for an Algorithm

207

Gil Merom

Author Index Subject Index

227 233

Contributors

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Hoover Institution Stanford University

Gil Merom Department of Political Science Tel Aviv University

MartinS Edwards Department of Political Science Rutgers University

Benjamin Miller Department of International Relations Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Azar Gat Department of Political Science Tel Aviv University jackS Levy Department of Political Science Rutgers University

james D Morrow Department of Political Science The University of Michigan Randolph M Siverson Department of Political Science University of California, Davis

Edward N Luttwak Center of Strategic and International Studies Georgetown University

Alastair Smith Department of Political Science Yale University

Zeev Maoz Department of Political Science Tel Aviv University

Thomas C Walker Department of Political Science Rutgers University

Preface

This volume emerged out of an international conference held under the auspices of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University in the fall of 1996. It represents an effort to understand the various interrelations between global changes and armed conflict in the wake of the Cold War. Rather than a comprehensive overview of this interrelationship, it attempts to provide selective insights into what we consider as key aspects of the transformation of war in today's changing world. Several people and institutions helped make this project possible. The Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies provided a home for this enterprise, as well as financial and logistical support. We wish to thank the current head of the center, Professor Shai Feldman, for his support of the project. Other sources of support came from the Israeli National Science Foundation and the special fund of the rector of Tel Aviv University. We are grateful to them all. Needless to say, the writings in this volume do not necessarily represent any official opinion or point of view. Chuck Myers at the University of Michigan Press was of immense assistance in putting the book together, as well as in helping negotiate sometimes minute details of the contract between the Press and Tel Aviv University. He showed a great deal of patience and insight throughout the process. We also want to thank two anonymous referees for their perceptive comments on the manuscript, many of which found their way into the final version. Last, but definitely not least, we wish to thank Ms. Lesley Terris, who has done a wonderful job in putting a diverse set of materials into one more-or-less coherent final product. Her help in preparing the final manuscript was immeasurable.

Global Change and the Transformation of War AZAR GAT AND ZEEV MAOZ

The peaceful end of the Cold War with the abrupt collapse of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union ignited numerous reassessments of world politics and strategy (Mueller 1989; Mearsheimer 1990; Jervis 1991; Fukuyama 1992; Gaddis 1993; Huntington 1996). The revolution in the structure of the international system is one of the sources of a widespread feeling that the role, nature, and distribution of war in the international system are undergoing far-reaching transformation. The extent of this transformation and its causes are issues about which opinions diverge. In this introductory chapter we review some of the major themes concerning continuity and change in war and warfare in the recent past and possible near future. Our review is necessarily less than comprehensive. It reflects some of the issues covered in more detail in the remainder of the volume, attempting to place them in a broader context.

Is War Declining? There are three main hypotheses regarding the future of war and warfare.

War is obsolete. It ceased to fulfill its function. Thus it will disappear. The argument is based on the idea that war, like all social institutions, is liable to change and can even disappear (e.g., Mueller 1989). Like slavery or dueling, war served an important function for long stretches of time and was part of the norms of social conduct. Like dueling, it was a social institution whereby disputing parties sought to resolve their differences. However, like dueling, war has become dysfunctional and obsolete. Modern societies have outgrown it, finding it incompatible with their economic conditions, social norms, and the enhanced destructiveness of their war-making capabilities. Evidence for this assertion is

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the total disappearance of major power war in the post-World War II era, a period of more than fifty years. This trend is interpreted as an indication that war has ceased to be an instrument for conflict resolution in precisely the areas where it had been most commonly used. Because major powers have been the most war-prone states in the international system, and because the most intense war making was experienced in Europe prior to 1945 (Levy 1983; Modelski and Thompson 1995; Gochman and Maoz 1984), the near absence of interstate war in Europe in the postwar era is indicative of the shape of things to come.

Plus le change, plus le meme: the basic structure of war will not change. Warfare is an ancient social institution that accompanies humankind throughout its history (Cioffi-Revilla 1996; Gat 2000a, 2000b, 2000c). Organized, collective violence predated the formation of social institutions. Indeed, it is a primordial force, rooted in human nature (Lorenz 1966; Van Creveld 1991). Warfare affects and is affected by social, economic, technological, and political developments. The shape of warfare thus changes over time. However, the phenomenon itself, and its principal manifestations, does not and will not disappear. Proponents of this view point out that those who hypothesize that war is declining base their prediction on a seeming trend that is at most fifty years old or, indeed, less than a decade old. Compared to the whole history of humankind, which is littered with wars and warfare of all sorts, these time spans are far too short to allow any meaningful generalization. For example, it is true that we have not witnessed a major power war since Korea and a general war since World War II (Levy 1985). However, this is not an unprecedented "long peace." Forty-three years elapsed between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and World War I, and the time span between the Napoleonic Wars and the next general war was nearly one hundred years. Other statistics about warfare provide evidence for its persistence. For instance, in the 1980s four interstate wars broke out, resulting in over 1.25 million battle-related deaths. This figure is more than ten times the total number of the battle deaths (111,000) of the eight interstate wars that broke out in the 1970s (Singer, Wayman, and Sarkees 1995). Thus, any deterministic assertion about the death of major war or any other type of war is premature and based on slim evidence.

War will not disappear, but it is undergoing fundamental changes in scope, regional distribution, and character. The world has witnessed dramatic changes over the last fifty years and especially over the last decade. These changes cover almost all aspects of human existence: social, political, economic, and technological. They affect our lives in

Global Change and the Transformation of War

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quite fundamental ways. They do not make our lives totally different than in the past-we still do many of the things that our parents and grandparents did many years ago-but these changes cause us to do even traditional activities differently. This applies also to war and warfare. War has not disappeared, but certain types of war-for example, interstate wars-have become less frequent, while others-for example, civil and internationalized civil warshave become more prevalent. Likewise, wars that involve large-scale maneuvers and use of extensive firepower are less prevalent, while wars that involve limited engagements and attrition, guerrilla, terrorism, and other types of lowintensity conflict become more frequent. Whereas in the past virtually any new weapon system that had been invented was used in order to achieve military decision, the new, so-called unconventional weapons, especially nuclear weapons, are so lethal that they are developed only not to be used. As the means for escalating violence have become more sophisticated and more destructive, people have deliberately imposed upon themselves severe limitations on the use of organized violence (Van Creveld 1991). Large-scale war has become less frequent in the post-World War II era, although it did not disappear completely. The major powers were still highly involved in warfare during that period but were less dominant in the conduct of warfare. Europe still witnessed international conflicts and Cold War crises, but most wars in the postwar era took place in the newly formed areas of the world: the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Africa. Latin America, which has always exhibited relatively low levels of military conflict and war, preserved its place in the regional hierarchy of conflict. The postwar era witnessed the revolutionary rise of new means of destruction especially in the area of long-range missile technology, as well as other platforms that make force projection on a global scale a real possibility. These technologies have expanded considerably the potential for global warfare that was amply demonstrated in World War II. Yet the post-Cold War period has led many to foresee a trend of regionalization of conflict (Lake and Morgan 1997; Stein and Lobell1997).

The Causes and Scope of the Transformation of War In trying to assess the hypotheses regarding the future of war, one must look at the varying application of the changes in war in different parts of the globe and carefully examine the underlying causes of these changes. A fundamental rift seems to exist here between "North" and "South," the advanced industrial parts of the world and its industrially more backward parts. Historically, international relations have always been dominated by wars among the great powers. In today's world, however, the prospect of war between advanced modern pow-

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ers seems almost unthinkable. Several explanations have been proposed for this fundamental change. These explanations, which focus on economic, politicalsocial, and strategic factors, may be complementary rather than competing. (For reviews of the vast literature on the causes of war, see Levy 1991; Vasquez 1993; Holsti 1991, 1996). The Economy

Preindustrial societies were fundamentally autarkic, predominantly deriving their wealth from their control of arable land. Command of trade routes was another major source of wealth. Wars in such societies were largely waged for domination over resources such as territories, labor force, raw materials, and markets. By contrast, industrialization progressively put the premium on a skilled home-based workforce while steadily increasing international economic interdependence through global division of labor and global trade (Rosecrance 1986; Gilpin 1987). For more than two hundred years, since Adam Smith and the Manchester school, liberal economists have been claiming that these processes make war increasingly counterproductive economically and thus herald its demise. Before World War I trade and economic interdependence among the great powers reached record levels, equaled only in recent decades. Nonetheless, the two world wars appeared to fly in the face of the more optimistic predictions. Liberals pointed out that these wars were largely, perhaps chiefly, caused by worsening conflict over access to raw materials and markets, brought about by the colonial race of the late nineteenth century and the Great Depression of the 1930s, with the resurgent neomercantilist and protectionist policies that they entailed. In the opinion of liberals, what was needed was more free trade that would forever remove the fear of political severance of economic access. President Wilson opposed colonialism during World War I. And one of the United States' principal goals during World War II, which it was largely able to impose on the postwar order, was to dismantle imperial trade blocs. These trade blocs, mainly the British, had indeed been established in the 1930s. The result was in many ways a remarkable success story. Since World War II the world economy has grown tenfold, with global trade, global communications, and global interdependence growing several times more. To be sure, many would doubt that free trade is the unqualified blessing for all that liberal economists make it to be. However, in view of the considerable empirical evidence that economic interdependence tends to significantly reduce the probability of conflict and war (Oneal et al. 1996; Oneal and Russett 1997; but see Barbieri 1996 for a dissenting view), the question arises: Will free trade and economic interdependence continue their march, or are we likely to witness the resurgence of protectionism, in various forms and various regions, with the attendant risks to peace?

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Politics, Society, and International Relations

The emergence of advanced industrial and technological society and the ascendance of global trade and information flow via Cyberspace surely have much more to do than is normally recognized with the so-called democratic-peace syndrome. This syndrome has dominated much of the recent debate over the transformation of war, and for a good reason (see overviews in Brown, LynnJones, and Miller 1996; Maoz 1998, 1997a). It has been strikingly shown that in modern times democracies, although no less warlike than other types of regimes, have hardly ever fought one another. Indeed, the more democratic they have become the more the chances of their fighting each other have been reduced to zero (Maoz 1998). This idea itself is not new; Immanuel Kant first suggested it in the late eighteenth century. He predicted that, as government would pass from ruling elites to the peoples, become accountable to them and serve their interests, and as "republican" societies would increasingly expect the codes and norms to which they are accustomed in civil society to apply to the international arena, a "perpetual peace" would gradually come into being (Kant [1795] 1983; Doyle 1983). To be sure, the rise of the peoples and of liberal democracy was not necessarily the same thing as Kant and many of his contemporaries had believed. The French Revolution heralded the advent of mass society in Europe and demonstrated the impact of popular participation on war. The mass armies created by the French and adopted by the rest of the powers of continental Europe were much larger, easier to mobilize and replace, and more highly motivated than had been the professional armies of the ancien regime. By the same token, the elites' monopoly over power was compromised. Rulers and cabinets could no longer conduct their businesses free from popular interference. Participation in war now had to be legitimized in the eyes of the peoples by national and ideological reasons; indeed, the governments were often swayed into war by the pressure of popular passions. The so-called Clausewitzian Triad, a bond between government, the people, and the armed forces, became the hallmark of modern war (Gat 1989; Van Creveld 1991; Keegan 1994). As industrialization and urbanization spread, mass society reached its apogee. Wars became total, absorbing all of the nation's resources to the limit. In general this was true of fascist, communist, and parliamentary liberal-democratic regimes alike. There was a difference, however, which worked itself out over time. For various reasons, either connected or unconnected to the development of modernity, the totalitarian ideologies and regimes, which call for personal sacrifices in the name of social and national interests, have declined in the advanced industrialized world. At the same time, the ever-growing strength of individualism in liberal societies has rendered their mobilization for war increasingly difficult. Willingness to sacrifice life or,

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indeed, personal well-being for national or international goals has been drastically reduced, even when major interests are involved-and certainly when they are not. The increasing reliance of liberal democracies on professional armed forces does not change the trend, as experience in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and even the Gulf War and Kosovo demonstrates (Maoz 1998; Gat 1998 and this volume). Assuming then that increasing evidence seems to support the argument that modern liberal democracies do not fight each other and are increasingly reluctant to fight seriously at all, will we witness the continuation of the recent impressive expansion of democracy as part and parcel of the process of "modernization"? Or are alternative models of modernization-based on different historical traditions than the West and possibly with a different attitude to war-also feasible, as is claimed, for instance, in China and some other developing countries of the Asia-Pacific region?

Strategy Nuclear weapons brought about a quantum leap in the potential destruction of war, thus altering its rationale. No benefit could possibly outweigh the horrible guaranteed penalty. Especially when a state of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) was established between the United States and the Soviet Union, the wholesale use of nuclear weapons for anything other than deterrence was effectively ruled out. Still, the potency of nuclear weapons and the fear of escalation helped to prevent the eruption of limited nuclear wars, large-scale conventional wars, or indeed any sort of direct clash between the Cold War rivals. War was allowed to occur only between a major power and Third World rivals, or within the Third World, and was kept well under the nuclear threshold. Guerrilla warfare and terror have been widely used there because of the nuclear factor, according to some, or because they have always been the traditional weapons of the weak, as the Third World actors have invariably been. Indeed, here may lie a crucial factor in determining the future effect of nuclear proliferation. Some hold that further proliferation will establish everywhere the same nuclear balance of terror that prevented the eruption of active war between the former superpowers (Waltz 1982; Van Creveld 1991). Others, however, suggest that the conditions that prevailed between the Cold War's particular rivals were in many ways unique and do not necessarily apply in the same way elsewhere. Furthermore, the conditions that lead to war-and possibly to the use of nuclear weapons-may generally be very different between advanced industrial and developing societies. Because nuclear weapons are the ultimate double-edged instrument, a failure to achieve a stable nuclear peace may result in a catastrophe of traumatic global repercussions. Worse still, what if nonaccountable elements within unstable state apparatuses or unidentifiable nonstate actors-

Global Change and the Transformation of War

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against which deterrence is ineffective-obtained, employed, or threatened to employ nuclear weapons?

IINorth" versus

~~south"

So far we have focused on the advanced industrial part of the world. There is, however, a profound division within today's world. If war has become almost unthinkable between advanced industrial societies (the "North") for either or all of the already-mentioned reasons, warfare between or within industrially less advanced societies (the "South") is very much alive for all of the old reasons. Ethnic forces, demographic pressure, economic stagnation, depletion of resources, and domestic instability increase the prospects for new conflicts (Maoz 1997b, 26-34). Western opinion has been particularly shocked by the eruption of widescale and often genocidal violence of a seemingly primordial ethnic nature in the former Yugoslavia and in central Africa. The world thus seems to be divided between a "zone of peace" and a "zone of war," corresponding to the deep rift between its affluent and poor parts. Will these gaps close over time or are they here to stay or perhaps even deepen? Indeed, parts of the South, where a modern nation-state structure was a tenuous Western import, are increasingly confronted by instances of failed states, that is, the collapse of the network of institutions with monopoly over the use of force. This collapse creates a vacuum that often results in a Hobbesian social chaos and indiscriminate war of all against all. In contrast to "ordinary" civil wars, this form of wide-scale violence seems random and nonsystematic. The actors, their aims, and political and military structures are difficult to define in standard political terms. Are these old-new forms of violence an indication of the sort of things to come in parts of the developing world? According to some, law-intensity conflict and nonstate forms of violence are on the rise even in the North, challenging the very logic of the state as a war-making organization (Van Creveld 1991). But have these forms-guerrilla, terror, bands' fighting, armed civil conflictreally become more prevalent than they used to be, or do they merely attract more attention now that ordinary war seems to be declining in the developed world? Within the "zone of war" it is not only industrially developing rivals that fight each other but also developing versus advanced adversaries. On paper the latter appear to be immensely stronger, but appearances are in some respects deceptive. In the first place, as mentioned previously, involvement in warfare, either for national, international, or humanitarian aims, arouses extreme negative responses in advanced industrial societies, which practically almost paralyzes their ability to wage war. A sort of equilibrium has thus been established between the powers of the advanced North, which are alone "able to kill" effectively, and the powers of the backward South, which are the only ones still

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"capable of getting killed." The advent of the electronic battlefield has enhanced the already much greater potential lethality of advanced industrial powers, as well as their ability to escape losses. Precision-guided munitions (PGMs), relying on highly advanced systems of electronic surveillance, tracking, and guidance, are able to hit targets from unprecedented long ranges and with unprecedented accuracy (Keany and Cohen 1995; Lambeth 1997). However, while these revolutionary weapon systems are vulnerable to equally sophisticated electronic countermeasures, designed to disrupt the delicate communication, processing, and tracking networks on which these systems depend, they are also impotent against enemies from the lowest scale of the military range. As the Gulf and Yugoslavian wars have shown, the new technologies are highly effective against inferior conventional adversaries, who lack advanced electronics themselves and who present numerous well-defined civil and military targets. However, against guerrillas who lack heavy-weapon systems, identifiable infrastructure, or any kind of "address" at all, PGMs are of very limited use (Van Creveld 1989, 1991; Maoz 1997c). For example, during the two major Israeli operations in Lebanon (Operation Accountability in 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996), a small force of Hizbollah guerrillas was able to launch numerous Katyusha rockets on towns and villages on Israel's northern border, despite highly sophisticated Israeli equipment and the massive fire power and airpower used by the Israeli armed forces. Recognizing this, Israel has recently withdrawn from southern Lebanon altogether, replacing its presence there with the threat of retaliation against Lebanese and Syrian infrastructure. The paradoxical nature of strategy reveals itself over and over again in the realm of technology (Luttwak 1987; Van Creveld 1991; Maoz 1997c). These asymmetries in military motivation and capabilities between the North and South carry important implications for the post-Cold War world order and for the future of war. Will the forces that drive conflict in the South persist, and will the participants of such conflict be willing and able to import the technologies of modern warfare from the North? The use of ballistic missiles in the IranIraq war and the Gulf War and the use of chemical weapons by Iraq in 1988 suggest that this is not merely a theoretical prospect. The use of Sarin gas in the terrorist attack in the Tokyo subway in 1994 provides a terrifying prospect of nonconventional terrorism. The continued arms race-especially in the spheres of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles-in such regions as the Middle East and Southeast Asia is a major source of concern. The increasing economic asymmetries between the North and the South and the juxtaposition of such asymmetries with cultural differences suggest to some scholars that there is increased prospect for long-term confrontations between these two segments of international society (Huntington 1996). Thus, whereas the decline of the EastWest conflict has generated a greater degree of global stability, the North-versusSouth divide may become a source of long-term instability.

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How have all these issues presented themselves in the past, and how may they be reflected in future trends of war and warfare? The contributors to this collection address some of these issues that will shape the post-Cold War order from a wide array of theoretical, empirical, and methodological perspectives.

Overview of the Volume JackS. Levy, Thomas C. Walker, and MartinS. Edwards broadly survey the changes in the frequency and intensity of wars since the end of the fifteenth century, when the modern European great power system came into being, and explore the reasons behind these changes. They find that in the long run wars became less frequent but more intense, processes that the authors suggest may be interrelated. They specify the rationalization, concentration, and professionalization of military power under the state, the commercialization and popularization of war, and the technological revolution-all deriving from the major changes that shaped the early modern and modern world-as the salient factors that affected the transformation of war. The authors suggest, however, that some of these trends may now cease to be in force. In parts of the underdeveloped world the state is weak, collapsing, or nonexistent. Nonstate actors with diffuse resources and primitive means seem to be behind much of today's interand intrasocial armed conflicts. Against the background of the North-South divide, Edward N. Luttwak attempts to explain the advanced societies' loss of willingness to wage war. He proposes that the major factor behind this change is none of the reasons usually stated but is instead the falling birthrate in all advanced industrial societies and the related expectation of families that all their children will survive. Intraditional societies, he suggests, child death, while always tragic, was an inseparable part of normal human existence. The loss in war of one child among many was therefore not that unusual a risk as it is in today's advanced societies. Because advanced societies still find themselves in conflict with traditional societies in which there is still a willingness to sustain losses owing to the large family size, how should the former best conduct themselves? According to Luttwak, they ought to opt for limited, loss-conserving strategies, employ as much as possible foreign, nonnative contingents, and, above all, use their superiority in high-tech electronic armament to wage war effectively from a safe distance. Azar Gat addresses much the same problem as Luttwak and in many respects comes to similar conclusions. He denies, however, that the advanced industrial societies' "loss of belligerency" is a new phenomenon explained solely by the recent decline in birthrate and infant mortality-or, as others claim, by the nuclear factor. He suggests instead that the phenomenon is due to a whole

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cluster of processes that together characterize advanced industrial societies, most notably of the liberal-democratic sort. These cannot be reduced to one factor. He mentions in particular the emergence of affluent mass society and "atomistic" individualism, which led to the erosion of traditional social controls, of communal bonds of solidarity, and of state control over society. Western liberal-democratic societies were particularly apt to develop these trends in an antimilitaristic direction. In the wake of World War I they had already grown to regard the idea of another total war as wholly unacceptable, an attitude that underlay their response to the Axis's challenge. Gat argues that it was then, rather than after the advent of the atomic bomb, that these societies' particular pattern of strategic response became discernible. It ranged across a spectrum leading from isolationism, if the threat could be ignored, to appeasement, if it could be bought off, to containment and cold war-chiefly by creating defensive diplomatic coalitions augmented by tightening economic pressure-to limited war. In the end this method failed against the Axis powers and escalated to all-out war. But it was revived against the (still nonnuclear) Soviet threat, maintained through the Cold War, and remains with us today. Benjamin Miller proposes to replace the peace-war dichotomy with the more refined fourfold spectrum of hot war, cold war, cold peace, and hot peace. He suggests that changes and shifts along this continuum of stability and instability are determined by both international factors and internal political factors. He proposes that the move from "peace" to "war" outcomes is due primarily to international/global factors, whereas the move from "cold" to "hot" outcomes is produced principally by domestic/regional factors. Thus, for example, hot, shooting wars are the result of challenges to regional and domestic legitimacy; warm peace is the outcome of regional liberal compatibility; cold wars are derived from a competitive great power involvement in a given region; and cold peace emerges under a great power hegemony or a great power concert vis-a-vis the region in question. Zeev Maoz addresses the national, regional, and global levels of analysis from another angle, setting out to explain what he calls the "democratic-peace puzzle": why it is that the observed fact that democracies do not fight each other is discernible at the dyadic level of analysis but does not extend to lower (i.e., national) or higher (i.e., regional and global) levels of analysis. Most important, why has the democratic-peace phenomenon not translated into a substantial reduction in the number of international conflicts and wars, as democracies multiply in the international system? Maoz suggests that this puzzle can be explained by the concept of democratic networks. He proposes that one must look at this problem from the perspective of who is interacting with whom. If democracies are placed in a network that brings them in interaction with nondemocratic actors, they are likely to be bellicose as any other state, with the result being that the occurrence of war in the system is not reduced. Only if most of democracies' span of strategic interactions is with other democraciesthat is, if most of the network of democracies is made up of other democracies-

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will they reveal their pacifist side. There is clear empirical evidence to support this notion, suggesting that war may well disappear in regional democratic networks. But for war to disappear as a global phenomenon, a global democratic network of sufficiently large critical mass must develop, and the distance of that reality is quite long. The focus on democracy and other factors related to the liberal account of international politics tends to oversimplify to some extent the complexity of the two-level game of domestic and international politics. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith examine the effects of conflict and war involvement on the survival of political leaders between 1920 and 1992 in thirty-five European and North American states. They find that the leaders of democratic states became involved in disputes earlier in their tenures than did nondemocratic leaders. Furthermore, all leaders who engaged in conflict derived the benefit of longer tenures in office than those who did not, all else being equal. Differences appear between democratic and nondemocratic leaders in that the former benefited more from war involvement and the latter from winning. Finally, Gil Merom wryly reminds us that attempts to forecast the future of war have had a dismal record. He suggests that at least part of the problem is that forecasts usually have been made on the basis of a single factor rather than a combination of and interaction among several "prediction fields," which include technological, economic, systemic, societal and institutional, and cultural factors. Contrary to the prevailing outlook, Merom claims that it is complexity rather than parsimony that may lead to better understanding of the real world. Any algorithm designed to forecast the future must be multilayered and highly circumstantial. These observations can perhaps serve as the motto that emerges from many of the contributions to this volume. Taken together, these studies offer a wide variety of views and approaches to the questions pertaining to the transformation of war in a changing world. They represent both the insights of social and military historians and the rigorous analyses of social scientists. The difficulties of forecasting wars notwithstanding, as long as war remains with us, the topic of this investigation is not only of scholarly value but is politically pertinent.

References Barbieri, Katherine. 1996. Economic Interdependence: A Path to Peace or a Source of Interstate Conflict? journal of Peace Research 33 (1): 29-50. Brown, Michael E., Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds. 1996. Debating the Democratic Peace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio. 1996. The Origins and Evolution of War and Politics. International Studies Quarterly 40 (1): 1-22.

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Doyle, Michael. 1983. Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs. Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (2-3): 205-35, 323-57. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History. New York: Basic Books. Gaddis, John Lewis. 1993. International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War. International Security 15 (3): 5-58. Gat, Azar. 1989. The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - - - . 1998. Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell-Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. - - - . 2000a. The Human Motivational Complex: Evolutionary Theory and the Causes of Hunter-Gatherer Fighting, Part 1: Primary Somatic and Reproductive Causes. Anthropological Quarterly 73 (1): 2-34. - - - . 2000b. The Human Motivational Complex: Evolutionary Theory and the Causes of Hunter-Gatherer Fighting, Part II: Proximate, Subordinate, and Derivative Causes. Anthropological Quarterly 73 (2): 73-88. - - - . 2000c. The Origin and Causes of Primitive Warfare: An Exchange with R. Brian Ferguson. Anthropological Quarterly 73 (3). Gilpin, Robert. 1987. The Political Economy of International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gochman, Charles S., and Zeev Maoz. 1984. Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1976: Procedures, Patterns, lnsights.]ournal of Conflict Resolution 29 (4): 585-615. Holsti, Kalevi ]. 1991. Peace and War: Armed Conflict and the International Order, 1648-1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. - - - . 1996. The State, War, and the State of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huntington, Samuel. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Jervis, Robert. 1991. The Future of World Politics: Will It Resemble the Past? International Security 16 (3): 39-73. Kant, Immanuel. [1795] 1983. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals. Edited by Ed Humphrey. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Keany, Thomas A., and Elliot A. Cohen. 1995. Revolution in Warfare? Air Power in the Persian Gulf Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Keegan, John. 1994. A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred Knopf. Lake, David. 1992. Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War. American Political Science Review 86 (1): 24-37. Lake, David, and Patrick Morgan. 1997. The New Regionalism in Security Affairs. In Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World, ed. David Lake and Patrick Morgan. University Park: Penn State University Press.

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Lambeth, Benjamin S. 1997. The Technology Revolution in Air Warfare. Survival39 (1): 65-83. Levy, JackS. 1983. War in the Great Power System, 1495-1975. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. - - - . 1985. Theories of General War. World Politics 37 (3): 344-74. - - - . 1991. The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence. In Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, ed. Philip E. Tetlock, Roy Radner, and Robert Axelrod, 1:209-333. New York: Oxford University Press. Lorenz, Konrad. 1966. On Aggression. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Luttwak, Edward N. 1987. Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maoz, Zeev. 1997a. The Debate over the Democratic Peace: Rearguard Action or Cracks in the Wall? International Security 22 (1): 162-98. - - - . 1997b. Regional Security in the Middle East: Past Trends, Present Realities, Future Challenges.]ournal of Strategic Studies 17 (1): 1-45. - - - . 1997c. Security for the People, Security by the People: The Paradox of Security in Modern Societies. In The Clausewitzian Dictum and the Future of Western Military Strategy, ed. Gert De Nooy. Amsterdam: Kluwer Nijhoff. - - - . 1998. Realist and Cultural Critiques of the Democratic Peace: A Theoretical and Empirical Reassessment, International Interactions 24 (1): 3-89. Mearsheimer, John]. 1990. Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War. International Security 15 (1): 5-56. Modelski, George, and William R. Thompson. 1995. Leading Sectors and World Power: The Coevolution of Global Economics and Politics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Mueller, John. 1989. Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War. New York: Basic Books. Oneal, John, Frances Oneal, Zeev Maoz, and Bruce Russett. 1996. The Liberal Peace: Interdependence, Democracy, and International Conflict, 1950-1985. journal of Peace Research 33 (1): 11-28. Oneal, John, and Bruce Russett. 1997. The Classical Liberals Were Right: Democracy, Interdependence, and Conflict, 1950-1985. International Studies Quarterly 41 (2): 267-94. Rosecrance, Richard. 1986. The Rise of the Trading State. New York: Basic Books. Singer,]. David, Frank W Wayman, and Meredith Sarkees. 1995. International and Civil War, 1816-1995. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, CA. Stein, Arthur, and Steven Lobell. 1997. Geostructuralism and International Politics: The End of the Cold War and the Regionalization of International Security. In Regional

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Orders: Building Security in a New World, ed. David Lake and Patrick Morgan. University Park: Penn State University Press. Van Creveld, Martin. 1989. Technology and War. New York: Free Press. - - - . 1991. The Transformation of War. New York: Free Press. Vasquez, John A. 1993. The War Puzzle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waltz, Kenneth N. 1982. The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better. Adelphi Papers, no. 171. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Continuity and Change in the Evolution of Warfare JACKS. LEVY, THOMAS C. WALKER, AND MARTIN S. EDWARDS

After a millennium of frequent violence between polities, there is much discussion of the possibility of a turning point in the history of warfare. Hypotheses about the obsolescence of war among advanced industrial states deriving from the nuclear revolution (Gaddis 1987; Jervis 1989) have been reinforced by arguments about the pacifying effects of increasing economic interdependence (Keohane and Nye 1977; Rosecrance 1986), the rapid spread of democratic political systems (Doyle 1983; Russett 1993; Ray 1995), the end of the Cold War, the "end of history" (Fukuyama 1992), and changing attitudes toward war in the West (Ray 1989; Mueller 1995). Although there has indeed been a "long peace" (Gaddis 1987) among advanced industrial states since World War II, this period has been anything but peaceful for many of the world's peoples. It is more accurately described as a long great power peace, but one that has been accompanied by a shift in the concentration of war from Europe to other regions of the world (Singer 1991). This shift in warfare away from Europe has been reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet empire and by the increasing salience of ethnonational and religious identity, which has contributed to the steady occurrence of civil and regional wars in the last decade (Wallensteen and Sollenberg 1999; Holsti 1996). This has led some to suggest that the wars between states and political ideologies of the last several centuries (Luard 1986) may give way to a "clash of civilizations" defined in terms of cultural identity (Huntington 1996). These changes in where war is fought, by whom, and over what issues may be accompanied, some argue, by a dramatic if not revolutionary change in how wars are conducted. Some scholars and policy analysts argue that "low-intensity conflict" may increasingly replace conventional warfare (Van Creveld 1991). Others argue that conventional wars themselves-at least those that involve technologically advanced states-are being radically changed by a revolution in information and communications. Some suggest that this technological revolution may generate a much broader revolution in military affairs that will affect

15

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the way militaries are organized, the conduct of civil-military relations, and the very nature of international conflict (Krepinevich 1994; Cohen 1996; Biddle 1998). The enormous uncertainty surrounding the evolution of the global political system and the future of international war is all the more reason to place current debates in a broader historical context and to examine current trends and future scenarios in terms of long-term patterns and trends in war. For these purposes we begin with a descriptive analysis of historical patterns and trends in warfare. We start with the origins of the modern system at the end of the fifteenth centuryl and continue through the last five centuries. We focus on secular trends and avoid the more problematic question of cyclical trends in war.2 We then undertake a more detailed analysis of trends in international war during the last two centuries of the modern system, with particular attention to the periods since World War II and since the end of the Cold War. We interpret these trends in terms of some of the major military, economic, and sociopolitical revolutions of the past, and we use this interpretation of past and current trends as a point of departure for speculation about the future of war in a rapidly changing global system.

Historical Trends in War We define war as large-scale organized violence between political systems,3 and we distinguish among different types of war depending on the types of political units involved: wars between great powers (great power war, or majormajor war), wars between great powers and other states (major-minor war), wars between smaller states (minor-minor war), wars between states and "nonmembers" of the international system (which Singer and Small [1972] label "extra-systemic" or imperial or colonial wars and which we define later), and civil wars within states. An important subset of great power wars is the small set of "general" or "global" wars that involve nearly all of the great powers, that are long and costly in human and economic terms, and that have a profound impact on the structure and processes in the global system (Levy 1985; Rasler and Thompson 1994). Our quantitative analyses of historical trends in war for the period since 1815 rely on the Correlates of War (COW) data on interstate, extrasystemic, and civil wars (Singer and Small1972; Small and Singer 1982). We supplement this with the SIPRI!Uppsala data for the period since 1989.4 For the period before 1815 we rely on data from Levy (1983; Levy, Morgan, and judd 1990) and for some questions, from Wright (1965) and Sorokin (1937). Because this is not the place for a major data-collection effort, we restrict our analyses of trends spanning the last half millennium primarily to great power wars and general wars and save a more thorough treatment of trends in different types of war for the period since 1815.

Continuity and Change in the Evolution of Warfare

17

Great Power War since 1495

Great powers play a central role in the diplomacy and warfare in any international system, and that has certainly been true of the modern international system that emerged in Europe in the late fifteenth century and remained centered in Europe until the twentieth century.5 Taylor (1954, xix) represents the conventional wisdom, arguing that "the relations of the Great Powers have determined the history of Europe."6 The great powers have been involved in a disproportionately large number of European wars over the last five centuries. Of the hundreds of European wars since 1480 that Quincy Wright (1965) identifies in his classic A Study of War, 70 percent involve at least one of the great powers. France alone has participated in 47 percent of the 2,600 battles involving European states. Moreover, states have had a significantly higher rate of war involvement during the years when they were great powers than when they were not (Levy 1983, 3). This pattern has continued to hold for the last two centuries. Small and Singer's (1982, 71-72) compilation of all international wars since 1816 indicates that 60 percent of the interstate wars and 75 percent of "extrasystemic" (imperial and colonial) wars have involved a great power.? The great powers have also accounted for a disproportionate amount of the loss of life from interstate war.s Moreover, nearly 80 percent of fatalities from interstate wars that involved at least one great power were from the ten general wars (or world wars) that involved nearly all of the great powers (Levy 1983, 1985). It is clear that for much of the last five centuries the great powers have played a key role in international warfare and that much of that warfare, like the great powers themselves, has been centered in Europe. Within this Europeancentered great power international system there have been some clear trends in the frequency and seriousness of war.9 One such trend is the unambiguous decline in the frequency of great power war (which involves at least one great power on each side of the conflict) over the last five centuries. This is reflected in figure 1, which shows the number of great power wars for each twenty-five year period since 1500. This decline has been nearly continuous, with each century experiencing fewer great power wars than the previous one, the only exception being the upturn in the twentieth century. There were twenty-two great power wars in the sixteenth century, eleven in the seventeenth century, eight in the eighteenth century, five in the nineteenth century, and six in the twentieth century.lO Aggregating the data slightly differently, we find that only about 20 percent of the half-decades since 1815 have witnessed the initiation of a great power war, compared with nearly 60 percent in the previous three centuries. In terms of the relative absence of great power war, the nineteenth century was the most peaceful period of the modern system. It is true that there was a

18

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high concentration of great power wars between 1854 and 1870, but these wars were fairly limited in their severity. Moreover, the nineteenth century was the first to have substantial periods of time without a great power war, as reflected by the absence of war in the second and fourth quarters of that century. The great power peace of the late twentieth century is even more profound and constitutes the longest period without a great power war in the last five centuries of the modern system (Gaddis 1987).11 It is clear, then, that the frequency of great power war has been declining throughout most of the last half millennium, with a slight upturn in the twentieth century. Moreover, this trend was underway not only long before the nuclear revolution but before the industrial revolution as well, a point to which we will return in our interpretive section. Although the frequency of great power war has been declining over time, those wars that do occur have been getting more serious in several important respects. The most widely used indicator of the seriousness of war is its severity, or battle-related deaths.l2 The severity of great power wars has increased fairly rapidly over time, to the point that it has doubled every llO years or so (Levy 1983, 292).13 There has also been a rather sharp increase in the extent of war, defined as the number of great power participants in a war.l4 A closer look at the data shows that whereas no war involved more than four great powers before the Thirty Years' Warl5 after that time over ten wars involved more than four great powers, and the two world wars of the twentieth century involved

Continuity and Change in the Evolution of Warfare

19

seven and eight great powers, respectively. The proportion of great power wars that expand into larger wars involving several powers has increased over time.l6 Whereas less than half of the great power wars before the Congress of Vienna expanded into wars involving three or more great powers, two-thirds of the wars since then have expanded. Increases in the severity and extent of war are not associated with comparable increases in the duration of war. The duration of great power war is basically unchanged over the last five centuries.l7 Since the Napoleonic Wars no great power war has lasted longer than six years, whereas prior to that there have been over ten wars lasting ten years or more and three wars exceeding fifteen years in length, but a number of very short great power wars as well (Levy 1983, chap. 6). Although the average great power war is no longer than before, it is clear that relatively protracted great power wars are a thing of the past. Any analysis of trends in the duration of war over time may be extremely sensitive to measurement procedures, however, and we should be cautious in interpreting our findings.lS Given the unchanging duration of the average war and the sharply increasing extent of war, it is perhaps not surprising that the magnitude of war-defined in terms of the nation-years of war-has increased gradually over time. It is interesting to note that all but one of the ten most serious wars along this indicator occurred between 1625 and 1815.19 Many of these high-magnitude wars are general wars that involved nearly all of the great powers, extended duration, and enormous casualties. Following Levy's (1985) identification of ten general wars over that period, we find no discernable trends in general wars other than that they have involved an increasing number of casualties over time.20 The evidence is fairly strong that great power wars have been diminishing in frequency but increasing in seriousness over the last five centuries of the modern great power system.21 This raises the question of whether this inverse relationship between the frequency and seriousness of war holds for shorter periods of temporal aggregation. If we broaden the analysis to include all wars involving a great power, including imperial and colonial wars, we find modest evidence in support of an inverse relationship, both for the system as a whole and for individual great powers (Levy and Morgan 1984; Morgan and Levy 1990). This is consistent with the conventional wisdom that wars are either frequent but moderate in intensity or infrequent but more serious. One exception to this relationship is the nineteenth century, for which both the frequency of warfare and the severity of wars were fairly low.22 International and Civil Wars, 1815-1995 Figure 2 shows the frequency of interstate, extrasystemic, and civil war, aggregated by decade, for the period since 1815.23 Interstate wars account for 29 percent of the 236 wars in the system, with the remainder being extrasystemic and

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