weapons and war (16) Flashcards
what is the conventional wisdom on weapons and war
o Eliminate the tools of war»_space; remove temptation & capacity to make war»peace
weapons cause war
o Much of the inspiration for this comes from the studies of the link between handgun availability and crime in society.
o This has had more influence on the link between firearms and intra-state wars typical of Africa than inter-state wars.
o It is generally widely accepted even if it is not well explained.
Classic or typical cases of weapons causing war:
- The European railway system and the cause of the First World War: emphasis on rapid mobilization.
- EG: Problem: the same railway system is also believed to have caused peace in the preceding 40 years period because it was easier for the defender to use the railway than the attacker in assembling forces.
simple facts about weapons (6)
- (1). Weapons are inanimate and without people are idle.
- (2). You don’t need weapons to have a war:
o EG: in Rwanda in 1993 800,000 people were massacred largely with household implements such as sharpened brooms. - (3). Some weapons can cause peace: nuclear weapons are too terrifying to be used, and may explain in part the peaceful resolution of the Cold War.
- (4). Some societies with easy availability of small arms, such as the Swiss reserve military system, are relatively peaceful, and do not suffer from much domestic-level crime. 650,000 citizens keep weapons at home.
- (5). There is a tradition, ancient in fact, that it is weakness that causes war, not strength and the availability of arms.
o This is captured by the Roman General: Vegetius: Si vis pacem, para bellum: this is the basis for deterrence theory and we can recall how deterrence failure was a cause of the Egyptian attack on Israel in 1973.
o Weapons can therefore cause peace as well. - (6). Weapon accidents do not matter (the image of the two armies facing each other and on weapon misfires): there is no war that has ever occurred by accident: there always existed a prior political decision or readiness to exploit an opportunity to resolve a dispute.
Weapons as causes of policy can be conceptualized in any or all of three ways
(1). Weapons as Provocative causes of war:
(2). Weapons as Facilitative causes of war:
(3). Weapons as Generative causes of war:
what is (3). Weapons as Generative causes of war:
- These are instances in which the sudden availability of weapons in a country’s arsenal stimulates or generates a new policy for that state based on the characteristics of the weapon it obtained. This is a cause of war if the weapon is interpreted as optimal for aggressive use and influences the state to pursue offensive goals, such as attack or conquest.
- These are not facilitative causes because the new policy the state was not dormant and did not precede the availability of the weapon system.
- Generative policy influenced can also happen when the weapons purchased for an earlier purpose must be reinterpreted because the previous goal has been attained, forgotten or rejected.
what is (2). Weapons as Facilitative causes of war:
- These are instances in which a state has a pre-existing policy, which remains dormant in the absence of the available means. Once the means are available war occurs because they can facilitate the desired policy of the government.
what is (1). Weapons as Provocative causes of war:
- These are instances in which war is driven by the simulative or provocative effect weapons have on the opposing state.
o EG: State A purchases arms, and this makes State B insecure, and State B then attacks State A. - This is also captured by the notion of the security dilemma, in which preparations for defense by either state A or B cumulates until eventually one or the other attacks.
- The problem with ascribing weapons as a cause of war in this instance is that there has never been a conflict driven entirely by insecurity provoked by the provocative acquisition of arms. Instead, underlying all arms races are political disagreements.
- Israelis attacked Egypt in 1956 due to Egyptians buying weapons from Russia.
what are the six different possible explanations for the link between weapons and war
(1). Armaments Spending.
(2). Arms Merchants:
(3). The Conflict Spiral – Arms Race.
(4). Imbalance in Armaments.
(5). Loss of Control.
(6). Instability.
what is (1). Armaments Spending.
- Military spending: States, with high levels of military expenditure or military personnel per capita of population, are more likely to be involved in an inter-state war (G&S:58). Militarized dyads are six times as likely to go to war (Bremer 1992). However, this finding is undetermined by the endogeneity problem that mutually hostile states will engage in weapons purchases because they are hostile.
- Alternative Interpretation of the Findings: Again, it might simply be that the state is anticipating war defensively, and that this evidence is a symptom rather than the cause of war.
- A state may have a constant high level of military burden which is not an arms race.
what is (2). Arms Merchants:
accusing arms merchants of seeking war, and there were similar accusations of war profiteering during the First World War. However, thirty years later he disavowed his famous book as the product of a youthful mind (Brodie 1973).
* Picture: Global Small Arms Trade.
* EG: The popular myth that arms merchants had played a crucial role in bringing the United States into the First World War in 1917 was widespread enough that it led in 1934 to an inquiry committee headed by Senator Nye. Many isolationist Americans were afraid that munitions manufacturers would trick the U.S. to enter the worsening problems emerging in Europe in the mid-1930s. The Du Pont family, to avoid endless suspicion for responsibility of U.S. involvement in the upcoming war, declared his family’s corporations would not longer be involved in munitions manufacturing.
what is 3). The Conflict Spiral – Arms Race.
- A conflict spiral-driven arms race is an action-reaction process in which two states are competitively engaged in the build-up of arms, which results in an increase in insecurity-generating misperceptions.
- In conflict spirals, adversaries tend to act on the perception of rapidly closing windows of opportunity (choice of attacking now or later), thereby escalating the dispute and increasing the likelihood of pre-emptive wars.
o A war is preemptive if it breaks out primarily because the attacker feels it will itself be the target of a military attack in the near future: couple of hours or days. The goal of attacking first is that you disrupt their plans for attack. During war these are called spoiling attacks because armies that are about to attack are more vulnerable as they are not dug in - States can attack for both motives: you fight a preventive war against an enemy that is getting stronger, and you attack them now because they are about to attack you.
- Windows result from the fact that most arms-driven action-reaction processes are actually erratic and uneven responses to an adversary.
- Eventually it gets to a point where the crisis triggers mutual preemption attempts in which two states attack each other in expectation that the other would attack.
what are preventive wars
Preventive War: is one in the attacker attacks a defender because it believes that the defender is becoming stronger over time in the medium to long-term, typically measured in the number of years. The goal here is simply to assume that the attacker attacks before becoming too weak.
what is solution to arm race
The principal arms control method of managing conflict spirals is to slow it down by specifying limits on the number of weapons procured.
o EG: 1922 Naval Washington Treaty, Rush-Bagot agreement of 1817 (limits the number of British and American naval forces on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain) START II (signed in 1993).
Important point: Most political scientists believe that the focus on weapons and war is..
flawed since there has never been an arms race between two states in which the spiral began with the acquisition of weapons first and the generation of mutual hostility later: all weapons purchases follow from pre-existing disputes.
* States go to war because of some underlying political disagreement.
* The relevance of weapons is that they may make tensions worse than they would otherwise be, they may increase suspicion and insecurity, and they may even provoke disputes and provide triggers for war.
* The great challenge in understanding an arms race is disentangling across each progressive step of escalation what portion can be explained by the conflict spiral itself and what additional escalation was caused by the weapons themselves.
o Since weapons are never the sole cause, we always have this decomposition problem.
what are Arms Races
an arms race is an action-reaction process in which two states are competitively engaged in the build-up of arms, which results in an increase in insecurity-generating misperceptions that cause decision-makers to choose to go to war.
