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Heltaher
Heltaher

The Calculus of Conflict: Why Those Who Decide Rarely Pay

Key Insights
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  • The decision to initiate war is often made by elites using a calculus that heavily discounts the human and economic costs borne by the public.
  • Historical cases like WWI and the Iraq War demonstrate how inflated success probabilities and low accountability lead to catastrophic miscalculations.
  • World War II represents a rare alignment of elite and public interests due to existential threats, enabling sustained mobilization.
  • Cognitive biases, groupthink, and institutional insulation amplify the divergence between deciders’ perceptions and reality.
  • Engineering higher accountability through legal, financial, and informational mechanisms can prevent future wars of choice.

References
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  1. Berman, E., Shapiro, J. N., & Felter, J. H. (2011). Can hearts and minds be bought? The economics of counterinsurgency in Iraq. Journal of Political Economy, 119(4), 766-819.

  2. Clark, C. (2012). The sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914. HarperCollins.

  3. Hausken, K. (2016). Cost benefit analysis of war. International Journal of Conflict Management, 27(4), 454-469.

  4. Jervis, R. (1976). Perception and misperception in international politics. Princeton University Press.

  5. MacMillan, M. (2013). The war that ended peace: The road to 1914. Random House.

  6. Ricks, T. E. (2006). Fiasco: The American military adventure in Iraq. Penguin Press.

  7. Stiglitz, J. E., & Bilmes, L. J. (2008). The three trillion dollar war: The true cost of the Iraq conflict. W.W. Norton & Company.

  8. Tuchman, B. W. (1962). The guns of August. Macmillan.

  9. Weinberg, G. L. (1994). A world at arms: A global history of World War II. Cambridge University Press.

  10. Woodward, B. (2004). Plan of attack. Simon & Schuster.