Denial vs. Punishment: Strategies Shape War, but War Itself Affects Strategies

Keisuke Nakao

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Formal models of war termination have been developed along two major approaches: in one, war is interpreted as a series of battles, where belligerents exchange denial campaigns; in the other, war is illustrated as a process of bargaining with mutual punishments. In integrating these two approaches, we build a dynamic model of war, where two belligerents choose to attack each other on either force or value in every period. In the early stage of war when military strength is balanced between the belligerents, they both conduct (counterforce) denial campaigns. However, toward the end when one side has depleted its capabilities of fighting, the other side switches to (countervalue) punishment campaigns to coerce the opponent into capitulation. Accordingly, while denials largely determine a war's outcome, punishments can influence its duration. Unlike existing studies, our theory illuminates the two-way causal relationship, where military strategies shape war, while war itself affects the strategies.

Keywords: aerial bombardment; choice of target; counterforce vs. countervalue; denial vs. punishment; military strategy; reverse causality; use of force (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 F51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/81418/1/MPRA_paper_81418.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:81418

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().