1,720,991 research outputs found
Success matters: casualty sensitivity and the war in Iraq
No full textSince the Vietnam War, U.S. policymakers have worried that the American public will support military operations only if the human costs of the war, as measured in combat casualties, are minimal. Although the public is rightly averse to suffering casualties, the level of popular sensitivity to U.S. military casualties depends critically on the context in which those losses occur. The public's tolerance for the human costs of war is primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial factors: beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war, and beliefs about the war's likely success. The impact of each belief depends upon the other. Ultimately, however, beliefs about the likelihood of success matter most in determining the public's willingness to tolerate U.S. military deaths in combat. A reanalysis of publicly available polls and a detailed analysis of a series of polls designed by the authors to tap into public attitudes on casualties support this conclusion
Paying the human costs of war: American public opinion and casualties in military conflicts
No full textLet’s Get a Second Opinion: International Institutions and American Public Support for War1
No full textRecent scholarship on international institutions has begun to explore potentially powerful indirect pathways by which international institutions may influence states’ domestic politics and thereby influence the foreign policy preferences and strategies of state leaders. In this paper, we provide evidence documenting the indirect impact of institutional cues on public support for the use of force through an analysis of individual-level survey data and a survey-based experiment that examines support for a hypothetical American intervention in East Timor. We find that institutional endorsements increase support for the use of force among members of the American public who value the institution making the endorsement and among those who do not have confidence in the president. These individual-level analyses show that international institutions can affect domestic support for military action by serving providing a valuable “second opinion” on the proposed use of force
Strong Horse or Paper Tiger? Assessing the Reputational Effects of War Fighting
No full textThis dissertation examines whether war has reputational consequences by analyzing the conditions under which third party actors are more or less likely to challenge combatants after the war is over. I develop a theory of reputational effects that emphasizes how information generated during wartime interacts with expectations and the characteristics of third party states to determine when war outcomes influence the decision making of potential challengers. I test this theory against competing explanations using three methodological approaches. First, I analyze the effect that the outcomes of conventional wars have on the initiation of militarized disputes using cross-national time series data from 1816-2004. Second, I use process tracing to assess whether the decision making by Japan and Germany after the Winter War and the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Cuba after Vietnam is consistent with the causal logic of my theory. Finally, I combine qualitative historiography with time series intervention analysis to assess whether the Vietnam War increased or decreased the number of challenges initiated against the United States. I find that the reputational effects of revealed effectiveness are quite broad, but are most pronounced when the fighting environment is similar. Combatants that perform poorly on the battlefield are more likely to be challenged by their potential adversaries, especially when those adversaries expect to fight them in an environment that is similar to the past war. On the other hand, the reputational effects of revealed cost tolerance are much more limited. The statistical analysis found that information about the combatant's willingness to suffer costs only influenced very weak challengers, while the case studies found that it only influenced the behavior of states that were concerned about issues that were similar to those over which the past was fought. When the issues at stake were similar, weak challengers were more emboldened than strong challengers but weak challengers with different issues at stake did not alter their behavior.</p
Reputation Cascades In Terrorism
No full textThis research analyzes one central question and two supporting questions. First, how do individual and group interactions influence aggregate behavior toward terrorism? Second, how does societal reputation impact support of terrorism? Finally, how does the structure of a terrorist organization impact reputation cascades? Applying a theoretical framework of a reputation cascade provides policy-makers and researchers a means to understand aggregate behavior patterns in support for terrorism. A reputation cascades may occur independent of government interventions. Government interventions can influence conditions that enhance a cascade of decreasing support for terrorist activity. Building on the reputation cascade framework, a computational model with government interventions along the two dimensions of information and physical policies is developed. This model indicates that governments' that increase physical intervention policies face a tipping point where increases in physical intervention increase the level of terrorist support in a society. The optimal mix of information and physical policies is determined by the level of individual value for terrorism, the costs to terrorism, and the level of cohesion in a society.</p
Bumbling, Bluffing, and Bald-Faced Lies: Mis-Leading and Domestic Audience Costs in International Relations
No full textIn a democratic society, does the electorate approve of truth and disapprove of deception, do opinion patterns exclusively mimic partisan elite views, or do opinion patterns react exclusively to successful or failed outcomes? Do citizens hold leaders accountable for the perceived truthfulness of foreign policy claims or do they only evaluate whether or not the policies were successful? The existing literature on public opinion and foreign policy calls the accountability role for the public "audience costs," and specifies that concerns about audience costs constrain leaders. However, the literature is not clear on what role normative issues may play in generating audience costs. This gap in the literature is notable because so much of the debate surrounding significant policy issues, especially war-making and military action, is couched in retrospective, normative, moralizing language. These debates make no sense if the pragmatic, forward-looking dimensions of audience costs - reliability and success - are all that exist. Through a survey experiment and four historical case studies developed with primary and secondary historical sources, news articles, and polling data, I find that there is a complex dynamic at work between the public's desire for successful outcomes and the high value placed upon truth-telling and transparency within a democracy. Studying justifications for military action and war, I find that the public will be motivated to punish leaders perceived as deceptive, but that imposition of audience costs will be moderated by factors including partisanship, degree of elite unity, and the leader's damage control strategy in response to disapproval.</p
Presidents Fighting the Last War?: Sunk Costs, Traumatic Lessons, and Anticipated Regret in Vietnam’s “Shadow”
No full textExisting security studies literature focuses on causes of war onset and conditions for war termination. Yet presidents regularly face major inflexion points where they must make a major war policy change, whether to deescalate, escalate, or conduct a hybrid approach. These decision points come after significant sunk costs, including lives lost, treasure invested, and political/diplomatic capital spent. The gap in research on mid-conflict policy adaptations, and on theoretical frameworks to explain them, presents an empirical puzzle that is the subject of this dissertation. This dissertation further scopes that topic, answering the following question. Why did presidents in the “shadow” of the Vietnam War make major war policy changes to cut losses and bring troops home, or to double down? To answer that question, this dissertation conducts a structured, focused comparison of four case studies: Lebanon (1984), Somalia (1993), Iraq (2007), and Afghanistan (2009). It is structured in that it uses the same questions to uncover presidents’ rationale across each case. It is focused in that it orients each case on a specific presidential “sunk cost trap” decision. It uses a variety of primary and secondary material, including archival research and new, senior level interviews with former administration officials and military generals. This dissertation finds that historical “lessons” act as a filter for strategic calculations among policy elite, ultimately influencing decision outcomes. Between the Vietnam War and 9/11, the Vietnam lesson to avoid quagmires by treating sunk costs as sunk and avoiding incremental escalation was dominant. The fear, or anticipated regret, of their own “Vietnam” created deescalatory pressures on presidents, demonstrated in the exits from Lebanon (1984) and Somalia (1993-1994). After 9/11, the logic flipped due to new lessons learned, including the need for proactive counterterrorism overseas and counterinsurgency strategies. This created escalatory pressures in Iraq (2007) and Afghanistan (2009) because of presidents’ desire to avoid another “9/11” on their watch.</p
Who Will Serve? Education, Labor Markets, and Military Personnel Policy
No full textContemporary militaries depend on volunteer soldiers capable of dealing with advanced technology and complex missions. An important factor in the successful recruiting, retention, and employment of quality personnel is the set of personnel policies which a military has in place. It might be assumed that military policies on personnel derive solely from the functional necessities of the organization's mission, given that the stakes of military effectiveness are generally very high. Unless the survival of the state is in jeopardy, however, it will seek to limit defense costs, which may entail cutting into effectiveness. How a state chooses to make the tradeoffs between effectiveness and economy will be subject to influences other than military necessity. In this study, I argue that military personnel management policies ought to be a function of the interaction between the internal pressures of military mission and the external pressures of the national economic infrastructure surrounding the military. The pressures of military mission should not vary significantly across advanced democratic states, but the national market economic type will. Using written policy and expert interview data from five countries, this study analyzes how military selection, accessions, occupational specialty assignment, and separations policies are related to the country's educational and training system, the significance of skills certification on the labor market, and labor flexibility. I evaluate both officers and enlisted personnel, and I compare them across countries and within countries over time. I find that market economic type is a significant explanatory variable for the key military personnel policies under consideration, although other factors such as the size of the military and the stakes of military effectiveness probably also influence the results. Several other potential explanatory factors such as the ease of recruiting appear to be subordinate to market economic type in predicting policy
Testing Obama's Withdrawal Timeline Hypothesis in Afghanistan
No full textThe Obama Administration argued that a publicly announced withdrawal timeline would help further US counterinsurgency (COIN) objectives in Afghanistan by incentivizing better behavior from the Karzai government and the Afghan people. An endless troop commitment, the Administration believed, fostered a dependency that allowed, and possibly even encouraged, poor governance and rampant corruption to persist - a timeline, it claimed, would sever the continual dependency by signaling that US commitment would not last forever, serving to focus, energize, and quicken the Karzai government's efforts to build a secure, durable, self-sufficient state. Moreover, it argued, a timeline would send a message of urgency to the Afghan people to take charge of their own affairs and to consent to their government's rule in greater numbers. In this essay, I test the "Obama timeline hypothesis" in order to determine whether it is truly likely to produce the positive change that the Administration claims it will. By utilizing a mix of consistent historical predictors, deductive logic based on contemporary COIN theory, and currently available evidence, I conclude that the withdrawal timeline has not produced, and likely will not produce, the results that the Administration claimed it would and that, on the whole, it has likely engendered perverse incentives for the Karzai government and the Afghan people that run contrary to America's desired COIN objectives. More broadly, the Afghan case, along with America's recent experience in Iraq, should make US policymakers deeply skeptical of assertions that withdrawal timelines can serve as an effective policy tool for changing the behaviors of key regional actors.</p
How the Media Affect U.S. Foreign Aid Allocations? Evidence from the Aid Allocation Pattern to Muslim Countries
No full textThe previous literature fails to reach consensus on the role of media in the foreign aid allocation. My paper attempts to answer following questions by examining Muslim countries: Are there any media effects on the pattern of aid giving? If the media influence the amount of aid, then how does it play its role? In addition, although previous studies show that different donors have prioritized specific groups, no study systemically shows the reason why a donor prioritizes certain recipients. Examining all recipients and donors cannot control the circumstantial factors generated by different regions and ethnicities. In other words, donors allocate international aid to different group of countries for various reasons and much of the research fails to examine the reasons that cannot be generalized. This paper conducts the OLS time series regression analysis with robust standard errors for U.S. foreign aid allocations, specifically for 46 Muslim/Arab countries. The results of my empirical analysis are threefold. First, Muslim/Arab related factors such as oil reserves, Millennium Challenge Account, and the existence of terrorist groups affect aid variation. Second, the more media attention a country acquires, the more it is likely to receive more generous allocations of aid. Finally, and most importantly, there is a negative interaction effect between the level of media coverage and the number of U.S. soldiers present in that country on aid allocation. When a Muslim recipient maintains more number of U.S. soldiers than the yearly mean U.S. troop level of Muslim countries, the media effect on aid volume decreases. This finding provides guideline for the plausible links around the public, media and governing bodies.</p
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