This is why I like Carroll Quigley’s argument, that war is for resolving uncertainty in power relations.
This is likely insufficient due to analogues of no-trade theorems and Aumann. With fully rational actors and common knowledge of rationality, you can’t just have uncertainty, you need some reason why the uncertainty is not adjudicated via some means that’s less destructive than war.
Fearon’s (partial) explanation is that there are incentives to deceive about your advantages and disadvantages (an example I gave in my summary + extension is that telling you about a new technology we developed might make it easier for you to subvert it), and relatedly that there are incentives to bluff about your military advantages.
But it’s all pretty messy and while I tend to be pretty pro-Rational Actor Model in general as an explanation for various phenomenon (including for organizations bigger than individuals), I do think the positive story for war being explained by positive EU to go to war has major theoretical (not just empirical) flaws.
If the alternative uncertainty-resolution method is a negotiated settlement, the act of starting negotiations potentially changes the balance of force by the end of the negotiation, since opposing power will learn that you are considering a war and have time to prepare itself. Many modern military conflicts have started with a surprise attack intended to knock out or demoralize the enemy before they could build up their full strength. Once the attack begins, the fact that the defender resists might indicate that you were overconfident, but it could also be a bluff or a result of their own overconfidence—in any case there is no time to negotiate and find out. But this doesn’t explain why wars continue for years if the initial attack fails.
This is likely insufficient due to analogues of no-trade theorems and Aumann. With fully rational actors and common knowledge of rationality, you can’t just have uncertainty, you need some reason why the uncertainty is not adjudicated via some means that’s less destructive than war.
Fearon’s (partial) explanation is that there are incentives to deceive about your advantages and disadvantages (an example I gave in my summary + extension is that telling you about a new technology we developed might make it easier for you to subvert it), and relatedly that there are incentives to bluff about your military advantages.
But it’s all pretty messy and while I tend to be pretty pro-Rational Actor Model in general as an explanation for various phenomenon (including for organizations bigger than individuals), I do think the positive story for war being explained by positive EU to go to war has major theoretical (not just empirical) flaws.
If the alternative uncertainty-resolution method is a negotiated settlement, the act of starting negotiations potentially changes the balance of force by the end of the negotiation, since opposing power will learn that you are considering a war and have time to prepare itself. Many modern military conflicts have started with a surprise attack intended to knock out or demoralize the enemy before they could build up their full strength. Once the attack begins, the fact that the defender resists might indicate that you were overconfident, but it could also be a bluff or a result of their own overconfidence—in any case there is no time to negotiate and find out. But this doesn’t explain why wars continue for years if the initial attack fails.