Civil-military Pathologies and Defeat in War

• DOI: 10.1177/0022002716684627
• Author: Vipin Narang,Caitlin Talmadge
• Date: 01 August 2018
• Published date: 01 August 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Civil-military Pathologies

and Defeat in War: Tests

Using New Data

Vipin Narang

1

and Caitlin Talmadge

2

Abstract

This article uses an original data set, the Wartime Civil-military Relations Data Set,

to test arguments about the causes of victory and defeat in war. Our analysis pro-

vides strong initial support for the notion that civil-military relations powerfully

shape state prospects for victory and defeat. Specifically, states whose militaries have

a significant internal role or whose regimes engage in coup-proofing appear to have a

substantially lower probability of winning interstate wars, even when we account for

the role of other important variables, including regime type and material capabilities.

Crucially, our measures of civil-military relations include coup incidence but also

move beyond it to detect more subtle indicators of civil-military relations. The

resulting analysis should give us confidence in acknowledging the importance of

nonmaterial variables in explaining war outcomes, while also paving the way for

further research that can utilize and extend the data set.

Keywords

war outcomes, war, military power, interstate conflict, international security,

internal-armed conflict, domestic politics

1

Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

2

Department of Political Science, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University,

Washington, DC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Caitlin Talmadge, George Washington University, 2115 G Street, NW, Monroe Hall 440, Washington,

DC 20052, USA.

Email: ct2@gwu.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2018, Vol. 62(7) 1379-1405

ªThe Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0022002716684627

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War is the ultimate contest in international relations, responsible at times for reshap-

ing the entire international system. Yet our understanding of why countries win or

lose these contests still contains significant shortcomings. Past research has heavily

emphasized the role of material factors in war outcomes, perhaps taking its cue from

Napoleon’s rumored remark that ‘‘God favors the big battalions.’’ This work has

focused on variables such as wealth and economic development in explaining

military performance (Lake 1992; Desch 2008; Beckley 2010).

A second wave of literature has questioned t his materially focused approach

(Brooks and Stanley 2007). In an effort to explain why even countries with material

advantages sometimes lose wars and even countries with material disadvantages

sometimes win, this literature points to the importance of factors such as regime

type and political institutions (Reiter and Stam 2002; Avant 2007), societal structure

and identity (Castillo 2014; Rosen 1996; Lyall 2015), military organizational culture

(Kier 1999; Long 2016) and capacity (Horowitz 2010), global norms (Farrell 2007),

and civil-military relations (Brooks 1998, 2006; Quinlivan 1999; Biddle and Zirkle

1996; Talmadge 2013, 2015; Nielsen 2005; McMahon and Slantchev 2015). Nota-

bly, this emphasis on civil-military relations—that is, on the relationships connect-

ing political leaders, military officers, and society in a given regime—is consistent

with a long-standing body of qualitative work suggesting that such factors are

broadly important for military performance (Huntington 1957; Janowitz 1960). Yet

efforts to probe the generalizability of the findings in this qualitative literature have

foundered on a lack of good cross-national measures of civil-military relations that

can be used to explore the concepts of interest quantitatively.

For example, one of the most commonly used measures, recent coup incidence

(Biddle and Long 2004; Grauer and Horowitz 2012), has been problematic because

the absence of coups in a given country can result from diametrically opposed civil-

military relations. Cons ider the fact that neither the United States nor Iraq had

experienced recent coups when the two states fought each other in 1991 and thus are

coded as equivalent under this approach. The two states’ civil-military relations,

however, were starkly different, and inways that had critical implications for military

performance(Biddle and Zirkle 1996). TheUnited States had not experienceda recent

coup because it has a strongdemocratic norm against military intervention in politics,

whereas Iraq had n ot experienced a rec ent coup because S addam Hussein sys tem-

atically purgedhis army of anyone who might have been capableof unseating him and

packed the officer corps with men chosen for their loyalty rather than their compe-

tence. In short, past coups are not irrelevant to civil-military relations (Powell and

Thyne 2011), but the context in which a country has become coup-free is critical to

accurately assessing the likely implications for military performance.

Indeed, even scholars who employ this me asure have noted a wide range of

consequential civil-military patterns besides coup incidence (Biddle and Long

2004, 533, fn 10) and called for more refined measures of civil-military relations

that can capture this important variation (Grauer and Horowitz 2012, 109, fn 77).

Recent scholarship offers useful progress in this direction (Weeks 2008, 2012, 2014;

1380 Journal of Conflict Resolution 62(7)