Peter D. Feaver

Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq

Since the Vietnam War, U.S. policymakers have worried that the American public will support military operations only if the human costs of the war, as measured in combat casualties, are minimal. Although the public is rightly averse to suffering casualties, the level of popular sensitivity to U.S. military casualties depends critically on the context in which those losses occur. The publics tolerance for the human costs of war is primarily shaped by the intersection of two crucial factors: beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of the war, and beliefs about the wars likely success. The impact of each belief depends upon the other. Ultimately, however, beliefs about the likelihood of success matter most in determining the publics willingness to tolerate U.S. military deaths in combat. A reanalysis of publicly available polls and a detailed analysis of a series of polls designed by the authors to tap into public attitudes on casualties support this conclusion.

Paying the Human Costs of War: American Public Opinion and Casualties in Military Conflicts

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS viii LIST OF TABLES ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii CHAPTER ONE: Theories of American Attitudes toward Warfare 1 CHAPTER TWO: Americas Tolerance for Casualties, 1950-2006 23 CHAPTER THREE: Measuring Individual Attitudes toward Military Conflict 67 CHAPTER FOUR: Experimental Evidence on Attitudes toward Military Conflict 98 CHAPTER FIVE: Individual Attitudes toward the Iraq War, 2003-2004 125 CHAPTER SIX: Iraq the Vote: War and the Presidential Election of 2004 167 CHAPTER SEVEN: The Sources and Meaning of Success in Iraq 188 CHAPTER EIGHT: Conclusion 236 BIBLIOGRAPHY 265 INDEX 283

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick? Veterans in the Political Elite and the American Use of Force

Other research has shown (1) that civilians and the military differ in their views about when and how to use military force; (2) that the opinions of veterans track more closely with military officers than with civilians who never served in the military; and (3) that U.S. civil–military relations shaped Cold War policy debates. We assess whether this opinion gap “matters” for the actual conduct of American foreign policy. We examine the impact of the presence of veterans in the U.S. political elite on the propensity to initiate and escalate militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 1992. As the percentage of veterans serving in the executive branch and the legislature increases, the probability that the United States will initiate militarized disputes declines. Once a dispute has been initiated, however, the higher the proportion of veterans, the greater the level of force the United States will use in the dispute.

Brother, Can You Spare a Paradigm?: (Or Was Anybody Ever a Realist?)

In “Is Anybody Still a Realist?” Jeffrey Legro and Andrew Moravcsik craft a curiously rigid doctrine for realism and then puzzle over why the aeld is crowded with apostates.1 The answer, I propose, is that the church of realism can be a bit more catholic than Legro and Moravcsik claim. Legro and Moravcsik have written out of the book of realism a crucial insight that informs most realist theories (at least implicitly) and have thereby inadvertently excommunicated too many of the faithful. But they are wrong in a productive way, and correcting their mistake points in the direction of a fruitful research agenda for scholars—realists and antirealists alike.

The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision

President George W. Bushs Iraq surge decision in late 2006 is an interesting case for civil-military relations theory, in particular, the debate between professional supremacists and civilian supremacists over how much to defer to the military on decisions during war. The professional supremacists argue that the primary problem for civil-military relations during war is ensuring the military an adequate voice and keeping civilians from micromanaging and mismanaging matters. Civilian supremacists, in contrast, argue that the primary problem is ensuring that well-informed civilian strategic guidance is authoritatively directing key decisions, even when the military disagrees with that direction. A close reading of the available evidenceboth in published accounts and in new, not-for-attribution interviews with the key playersshows that the surge decision vindicates neither camp. If President Bush had followed the professional supremacists, there would have been no surge because his key military commanders were recommending against that option. If Bush had followed the civilian supremacists to the letter, however, there might have been a revolt of the generals, causing the domestic political props under the surge to collapse. Instead, Bushs hybrid approach worked better than either ideal type would have.

Crisis as Shirking: An Agency Theory Explanation of the Souring of American Civil-Military Relations

The alleged crisis in American civil-military relations is best explained by grounding it in a general theory rather than in an ad hoc exegesis of recent events. This article introduces the agency model, a simple game-theoretic understanding of civil-military relations. According to agency theory, the current friction in American civil-military relations reflects the conflict associated with intrusive monitoring by civilians coupled with military shirking. Such a concurrence is one of the predicted outcomes of the agency model and, consistent with the model, there are demonstrably strong values on several of the parameters the model identifies as important in producing this monitoring/shirking outcome. The model suggests that post-Cold War developments have had a profound effect in reducing the perceived costs of monitoring, reducing the perceived expectation of punishment, and increasing the gap between what civilians ask the military to do and what the military would prefer to do.

Managing Nuclear Proliferation: Condemn, Strike, or Assist?

The nonproliferation regime, which denies countries access to critical materials, makes it more likely that defiant proliferators will develop unsafe arsenals. In order to manage proliferation, the U.S. could continue to uphold the regime, hoping to persuade the proliferator to return to non-nuclear status. It could attack, thereby ensuring that the proliferator is unable to join the nuclear club. Or it could concede the nonproliferation goal and render assistance to address the attendant safety concerns. Through a series of deductive models we argue that three factors are important in determining the right option: (1) U.S. preferences on proliferation, whether purist or pragmatist; (2) the proliferators type, which can vary by size, affinity, and risk tolerance; and (3) the phase in the proliferation process to which the proliferator has advanced: preweaponization, after weaponization but before deployment, the deployment phase, and, finally, full deployment. We analyze the special case of proliferation by a small enemy of the United States such as North Korea as a signaling game wherein each side attempts to push the outcome toward its own preferred equilibrium. The North Koreans prefer the equilibrium in which the United States never attacks regardless of its type, whereas the United States prefers the equilibrium in which North Korea never deploys regardless of its type.

Optimists, Pessimists, and Theories of Nuclear Proliferation Management: Debate

I am indebted to Damon Coletta, Joseph Grieco, Ole Holsti, Peter Lavoy, David Welch, and especially Ben Frankel for their comments on earlier drafts.

Civilian Monitoring of U.S. Military Operations in the Information Age

Recent research on U.S. civil-military relations has applied principal-agent logic to analyze the post-cold war friction between civilian authorities and top military commanders. This article proposes a greater emphasis on bargaining to focus on the effects of new monitoring technologies available to the civilian principal in the information age. As monitoring capabilities increase and military agents perceive their autonomy disappearing, tacit bargaining over the president’s level of resource commitment to a crisis should become more prevalent. This idea receives support from a comparison across case studies of the limited use of force taken from different technological eras. A new style of civil-military bargaining presents both challenges and opportunities to the traditional conception of military professionalism.

Stress-Testing American Grand Strategy

US officials will have to get used to operating in a world in which they can take less for granted.