The signaling model of war is valuable but can be taken too far: if leadership focuses too much on the signals they’re sending, that can get in the way of actually fighting the war; Vietnam is often pointed to as an example of this. From Friedman’s The Fifty Year War:
Soon Johnson began a program of continuous air attacks against North Vietnam, Rolling Thunder, which would last through March 1968. In line with current nuclear escalation ideas, Johnson and McNamara treated air attacks as messages to the North Vietnamese. They personally selected the targets in order to control the messages they were sending. The area attacked gradually was extended towards Hanoi. To Johnson and his advisors, Hanoi was being given a choice either to negotiate an end to the war, or to suffer worse pressure. Johnson halted bombing seven times to allow the North Vietnamese a chance to negotiate. The North Vietnamese saw the pattern of restraint as proof of Johnson’s weakness.
The bombing pauses were McNamara’s idea. The JCS strongly resisted them, because they gave the North Vietnamese time to repair damage and recover...
The JCS demanded attacks that would do real damage; it had no use for signals. Destroying North Vietnamese oil storage would paralyze the country, and thus would probably dislocate its support for the war in the South. However, most oil tankers were around Haiphong, the port of the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. Bargaining required that at each stage of bombing the Americans had to be able to threaten something worse if the North Vietnamese refused to negotiate. Attacks on their capital seemed to be the worst the United States could do. It took Johnson about seven months to agree to the JCS attacks (in June 1966). Washington was so leaky that the North Vietnamese were undoubtedly forewarned; they dispersed their oil.
Of course there were a lot of other things going on that contributed to the failure in Vietnam besides a poor understanding of the signaling model of war.
If there were perfect knowledge among participants in a war, then each party could agree upon, and enter into, the very terms struck at war’s end.
I think this is often incorrect because the costs imposed by fighting the war aren’t just signals, they also form part of the outcome of the war. It’s hard to get people to agree to a settlement like “you get to take over Eastern Examplestan, but have to sacrifice several hundred thousand of your military-aged males” without, y’know, actually fighting the war.
The costs being part of the outcome is an interesting point. But the example is maybe weaker than it first seems. If both sides knew perfectly in advance that the cost of taking Eastern Examplestan by force is 300,000 fighting-aged males, then the aggressor could probably find something that they valued less than 300,000 of their own lives, but that the defender valued more highly than their deaths. Eg. The aggressor might think paying $100 -million was better than all that death, and the defender might rather have $100 million than to inflict those casualties. In other words, by negotiation both sides could do strictly better than by fighting.
This obviously involves a few assumptions, firstly that both sides know exactly what the military outcome would be. Secondly, that the governments involved actually like good things (less people dead, yay!) rather than personal reputation/posing (“You coward, you surrendered!”). Thirdly, that both sides can actually be trusted, (so the aggressor won’t use the soldiers saved by negotiating to try and force a second round of negotiation).
Personally I strongly gravitate to the idea of trust, that wars are generally avoided if the two sides can trust one another to some extent. Appeasement before WW2 is a good example, if it had worked (IE avoided the war) it would obviously have been “super worth it”. That it didn’t work was largely down to the fact that a trust was betrayed.
The signaling model of war is valuable but can be taken too far: if leadership focuses too much on the signals they’re sending, that can get in the way of actually fighting the war; Vietnam is often pointed to as an example of this. From Friedman’s The Fifty Year War:
Of course there were a lot of other things going on that contributed to the failure in Vietnam besides a poor understanding of the signaling model of war.
I think this is often incorrect because the costs imposed by fighting the war aren’t just signals, they also form part of the outcome of the war. It’s hard to get people to agree to a settlement like “you get to take over Eastern Examplestan, but have to sacrifice several hundred thousand of your military-aged males” without, y’know, actually fighting the war.
The costs being part of the outcome is an interesting point. But the example is maybe weaker than it first seems. If both sides knew perfectly in advance that the cost of taking Eastern Examplestan by force is 300,000 fighting-aged males, then the aggressor could probably find something that they valued less than 300,000 of their own lives, but that the defender valued more highly than their deaths. Eg. The aggressor might think paying $100 -million was better than all that death, and the defender might rather have $100 million than to inflict those casualties. In other words, by negotiation both sides could do strictly better than by fighting.
This obviously involves a few assumptions, firstly that both sides know exactly what the military outcome would be. Secondly, that the governments involved actually like good things (less people dead, yay!) rather than personal reputation/posing (“You coward, you surrendered!”). Thirdly, that both sides can actually be trusted, (so the aggressor won’t use the soldiers saved by negotiating to try and force a second round of negotiation).
Personally I strongly gravitate to the idea of trust, that wars are generally avoided if the two sides can trust one another to some extent. Appeasement before WW2 is a good example, if it had worked (IE avoided the war) it would obviously have been “super worth it”. That it didn’t work was largely down to the fact that a trust was betrayed.