John J. Mearsheimer - Conventional Deterrence

This is a book about the origins of war. Why do nations faced with the prospect of a large-scale conventional war decide to attack in some cases but not in others? Why did the British and the French, for example, after declaring war against Germany on 3 September 1939, take no military action? Conversely, why did the Germans end the so-called Phoney War on 10 May 1940 by attacking the Allies in the West? Most important, when two large armies face each other in a crisis situation, under what conditions should we expect deterrence to fail?

The following chapters examine a number of crises that led to major conventional wars. By identifying certain common elements, I hope to generate propositions that will shed light on the success and failure of conventional deterrence. My purposes are two. First, I seek to explain why deterrence failed in some historically important cases. For example, I am concerned with the failure and success of deterrence at the start of World War II and in the Arab-Israeli wars. Second, I aim to illuminate some important issues in contemporary policy.

A study of past deterrence failures should shed light on the prospects for deterrence in Central Europe as well as elsewhere in the world. I am also concerned with relatively technical issues, such as precision-guided munitions and the debate between advocates of maneuver and attrition warfare. My book, in short, has much to say about the conduct of conventional warfare. I address questions of military strategy and tactics at length. Although such a discussion is obviously essential for an analysis of the more technical issues, an understanding of military strategy is also absolutely essential for an explanation of past deterrence failures and successes. As willbecome evident, conventional deterrence is largely a function of military strategy.

The topics of strategy and tactics suggest an important point about the books scope. A variety of factors, many of them nonmilitary, act upon a nation contemplating war. I shall focus first on the military considerations that underlie the decision-making processin other words, the military thinking that leads to or away from war. Second, I shall devote much attention to the interaction between those military factors and the broader political considerations that move a nation toward aggression.

Surprisingly little has been written on the subject of conventional deterrence. Two other subjects that fall under the rubric of military deterrence have received most of the scholarly attention. The first is nuclear targeting strategymore specifically, how different strategies such as counterforce and countervalue affect deterrence between the superpowers. The second I term the credibility-of-commitment issuethe question of whether, given the great risks and costs associated with the use of military force, a nation will use it, especially outside national borders, to defend certain interests. I do not doubt the importance of these topics. I believe, however, that discussion of them has obscured a third important area, conventional deterrence, which equally merits analysis.

This book originated during the spring of 1976, when, as a first-year graduate student at Cornell University, I took Richard Rose-crances seminar on strategy. Early in the course he suggested that I investigate any of several topics, one of which was conventional deterrence. I had never given any thought to the subject, and as I quickly discovered, very little had been published about it.

The theory outlined in my seminar paper in some respects resembles that presented in this book. There are, however, many important differences, and without a doubt this final product is a vast improvement over that initial effort. I did not find the task of writing easy. In the first place, theories are extremely difficult to develop. Second, because my predecessors had been few, there were not many signposts to guide me. I was more fortunate in finding help of other sorts: I owe a great debt of gratitude to numerous individualsand institutions.

George Quester and Richard Rosecrance, two leading experts on my chosen subject, helped me formulate and refine my basic argument and assisted me in countless other ways. Their support and encouragement were of tremendous importance, the more so inasmuch as the following pages directly challenge some of their principal ideas. Robert Art, Michael E. Brown, Jack L. Snyder, and William Tetreault each made very detailed and helpful comments on various drafts, significantly influencing the final version. Members of the Domestic Politics and Security Policy Working Group at Harvard University who also read large portions of the manuscript closely include Michael Mandelbaum, Steven E. Miller, Barry Posen, Jack L. Snyder, and Stephen Van Evera. The discussion at two meetings of the group was particularly useful in forcing me to clarify my arguments. I thank the following other individuals for their advice: Robert P. Berman, Richard K. Betts, Heinrich Buch, Eliot Cohen, Werner Dannhauser, Steven David, Mary Hughes Durfee, Joseph Grieco, Michael Handel, Lothar Hbelt, William Mako, Matthew Murphy, Williamson Murray, Stephen P. Rosen, William L. Schwartz, Janice Stein, Sidney Tarrow, Stephen Walt, and Dani Zamir.

I received financial support from various sources. Funds from the Cornell Peace Studies Program permitted me to do research in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. I also received support from: the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship), the Brookings Institution, the Walter S. Carpenter Chair at Cornell, Cornell University (Summer Research Fellowship), the Ford Foundation, Harvard Universitys Center for International Affairs, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Jewish Vocational Service of Cleveland (the Morris Abrams Award in International Relations), and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Without this generous assistance I could never have written the book.

During the summer of 1978, I held an internship at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. There I benefited greatly from the opportunity to talk with experts about various technical issues. I particularly thank Phillip Karber, who spent many hours that summer talking to me about armored warfare. From September 1979 to August 1980, I was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, where I wrote the first major draft. From September 1980 to August 1982, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Universitys Center for International Affairs. There I rewrote the manuscript several times. I thank the many individuals at these two institutions, particularly Samuel P. Huntington (director of Harvards CFIA) and John D. Steinbruner (director of the Brookings Foreign Policy Studies Program), who were so helpful to me. I also gratefully remember the many people in Europe and the Middle East as well as in the United States who spoke with me at length about the various aspects of my subject.

Chapter 6 of this work appeared in somewhat different form as an article in the summer 1982 issue of International Security, while Chapter 7 appeared in altered form in the MarchApril 1979 issue of Survival. I thank both journals, and the M.I.T. Press, publisher of International Security, for granting me permission to include the two articles in the present volume. The Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at Kings College, University of London, has also kindly given me permission to use various citations from the personal papers of B. H. Liddell Hart.

In Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, Martin Van Creveld argues, Logistics make up as much as nine tenths of the business of war (