The Trade-Offs of Fighting and Investing: A Model of the Evolution of War and Peace ¹

1A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2007 International Studies Association Meeting in Chicago, Illinois and at the Reopening the Black Box of War: Politics and the Conduct of War Conference, hosted by Scott Gartner at the University of California at Davis, October 26th–28th, 2006. This research is based on work by Morey (2002). We thank Scott Gartner for organizing this conference, prompting us to return to this line of research, and providing excellent feedback. We also thank Cary Covington, Douglas Dion, Caroline Hartzell, Brian Lai, Lukas Pfaff, Kenneth Schultz, Ezra Sidran, Branislav Slantchev, Patricia Sullivan, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. All errors remain our own. Authors appear in alphabetical order. View all notes

International competition occurs in many different forms. Just as a state would be in danger if it allowed its opponent to gain a military advantage, one that falls behind a rival in an economic contest similarly faces risks. States must weigh the trade-offs between economic and military growth, as well as deciding on the best strategy to follow should war erupt. We use a formal, dynamic model to explicitly capture the trade-offs that states face in their search for security and dominance. The deductions from the model demonstrate that by considering the long-run results of a peacetime rivalry, weaker states might conclude that their only hope of winning or surviving a rivalry lies in fighting a counterforce war, explain why and how stalemates evolve during counterforce wars, and indicate that targeting industrial objectives shortens the duration of wars.

Keywords

• competition,
• dynamic model,
• strategy,
• trade-offs,
• war