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"Caverley, Jonathan D"
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Democratic militarism : voting, wealth, and war
\"Why are democracies pursuing more military conflicts, but achieving worse results? Democratic Militarism shows that a combination of economic inequality and military technical change enables an average voter to pay very little of the costs of large militaries and armed conflict, in terms of both death and taxes. Jonathan Caverley provides an original statistical analysis of public opinion and international aggression, combined with historical evidence from the late Victorian British Empire, the US Vietnam War effort, and Israel's Second Lebanon War. This book undermines conventional wisdom regarding democracy's exceptional foreign policy characteristics, and challenges elite-centered explanations for poor foreign policy. This accessible and wide ranging book offers a new account of democratic warfare, and will help readers to understand the implications of the revolution in military affairs\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Leaders but Not Authorities? Gender, Veterans, and Messages about National Security
Politicians’ ability to provide national security to the public is deeply enmeshed in conceptions of the state and of leadership. This article incorporates securitization, feminist, and political communication theories to consider whether gendered and militarized conceptions of national security have different effects for politicians who are women and those who are men. Although scholarship suggests that signaling military bona fides—such as invoking one’s veteran status—can help politicians claim that certain policies are a matter of national security, we consider whether this ability will be gendered. Relying on two national studies, we find results that are contrary to our original predictions. First, we find that military bona fides do help women be seen as leaders. However, we do not find evidence that bona fides increase the “authority” to identify and address national security threats for any politicians.
Journal Article
When human capital threatens the Capitol: Foreign aid in the form of military training and coups
How does aid in the form of training influence foreign militaries' relationship to domestic politics? The United States has trained tens of thousands of officers in foreign militaries with the goals of increasing its security and instilling respect for human rights, democracy, and civilian control. We argue that training increases the military's power relative to the regime in a way that other forms of military assistance do not. While other forms of military assistance are somewhat fungible, allowing the regime to shift resources towards coup-proofing, human capital is a resource vested solely in the military. Training thus alters the balance of power between the military and the regime resulting in greater coup propensity. Using data from 189 countries from 1970 to 2009 we show that greater numbers of military officers trained by the US International Military Education and Training (IMET) and Countering Terrorism Fellowship (CTFP) programs increases the probability of a military coup.
Journal Article
Aiming at Doves: Experimental Evidence of Military Images' Political Effects
Politicians (and journalists covering them) assume that association with the military has political consequences. We propose and experimentally test conditions under which military images have such effects. We presented subjects with images of the US president before varying backgrounds—including soldiers, students, children, and \"ordinary\" people. Only the image of soldiers has any significant effect, shifting participant preferences toward spending money on defense over education. The image does this by increasing respondent sense of threats to national security, despite the military's depiction out of combat and in the background. The soldiers image does little to shift opinion about the president. However, the image has the largest hawkish effect on both the president's copartisans and the strongest supporters. Given the routine use by many democracies of tactics unlikely to produce images of one's fellow citizens in combat, the power of more sanitized images to cue hawkish policy preferences requires increased attention.
Journal Article
The Myth of Military Myopia: Democracy, Small Wars, and Vietnam
A capital- and firepower-intensive military doctrine is, in general, poorly suited for combating an insurgency. It is therefore puzzling that democracies, particularly the United States, tenaciously pursue such a suboptimal strategy over long periods of time and in successive conflicts. This tendency poses an empirical challenge to the argument that democracies tend to win the conflicts they enter. This apparently nonstrategic behavior results from a condition of moral hazard owing to the shifting of costs away from the average voter. The voter supports the use of a capital-intensive doctrine in conflicts where its effectiveness is low because the decreased likelihood of winning is outweighed by the lower costs of fighting. This theory better explains the development of the United States' counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam during Lyndon Johnson's administration compared to the dominant interpretation, which blames the U.S. military's myopic bureaucracy and culture for its counterproductive focus on firepower and conventional warfare.
Journal Article
Military Technology and the Duration of Civil Conflict
Why do some civil conflicts end quickly, while others last for years? We argue that an incumbent government’s military forces play a crucial role in conflict duration. Specifically, combined arms militaries—which bring to bear a mixture of mechanized infantry, armor, and aircraft—make short conflicts more likely. The use of mechanized ground forces in combination with airpower increases the likelihood of decisive engagements early in a conflict, helping to mitigate information asymmetries that can drive violence. By contrast, less-mechanized forces face greater difficulty bringing the fight to the enemy. Combined arms militaries therefore tend to bring conflicts to more rapid conclusions. However, like maneuver warfare in conventional interstate conflict, these outcomes do not always favor incumbent governments. To test this argument, we employ new, detailed data on military mechanization and airpower from civil conflicts between 1967 and 2003. The results indicate that national militaries with high combined arms capabilities are associated with significantly shorter conflicts. Perhaps surprisingly, this relationship remains robust even when we limit the analysis to insurgencies.
Journal Article
Slowing the Proliferation of Major Conventional Weapons: The Virtues of an Uncompetitive Market
Proliferation of major conventional weapons (MCW) in larger numbers, at greater levels of sophistication, and to more actors is at best a waste of valuable resources and at worst fuel for more and bloodier conflicts. Given a track record of violence, repression, and corruption, norms against exporting weapons to active conflicts and human rights abusers, as well as norms in favor of transparency in weapons transfers, have grown more salient in recent years. Yet international efforts such as the UN Conventional Arms Trade Treaty show little promise for mitigating these ills. This article finds an alternate route toward moderating global arms transfers. It shows, with supporting data, how the United States, pursuing its own political interests, leverages its massive market power to slow the proliferation of dangerous technology, reduce resources spent in the developing world on weapons, stymie the deadweight losses of corruption in the arms industry, and lower the rewards for human rights abusers.
Journal Article
Explaining U.S. Military Strategy in Vietnam: Thinking Clearly about Causation
Cost distribution theory suggests that the costs to the median voter in a democracy of fighting an insurgency with firepower are relatively low compared to a more labor-intensive approach. Therefore, this voter will favor a capitalintensive counterinsurgency campaign despite the resulting diminished prospects of victory. Primary and secondary sources show that President Lyndon Johnson and his civilian aides were very much aware that, although they considered a main force-focused and firepower-intensive strategy to be largely ineffective against the insurgency in South Vietnam, it was politically more popular in the United States. Importantly, civil-military agreement on warfighting strategy does not undermine this explanation, which assumes that civilian leaders, and ultimately the public, play an essential role in that strategy's determination. Appointing and supporting Gen. William Westmoreland was just one means by which the Johnson administration ensured that the U. S. military emphasized the fight against conventional enemy units and relied on the use of firepower for the fight against Vietcong insurgents. Civil-military disagreements over strategy, however rare, therefore provide the essential test of cost distribution theory's explanatory power. When officials suggested that the U. S. military adopt more labor-intensive pacification approaches to fight the insurgency, the Johnson administration rejected them.
Journal Article
