Essay: Common Fates, Common Goals—A Response to Cyr

• Author: Katherine Durante,Thomas David Evans,Ciera Graham,Steve Carlton-Ford
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X19845021
• Subject Matter: Commentaries

Commentary
Armed Forces & Society
2020, Vol. 46(3) 523-527
Essay: Common Fates,
ª The Author(s) 2019
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Common Goals—A
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X19845021
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Response to Cyr
Steve Carlton-Ford1, Katherine Durante2,
Ciera Graham3 and Thomas David Evans1
Abstract
“The Soldier, the State, and the People—Costs and Benefits of Military Regimes”:
Evaluating the Essay “Guns and Butter: Child Mortality and the Mediators of Mili-
tarization” raises several concerns about the theory and analyses in our article. We
address what we see as the three most important: (1) the necessity of both quali-
tative and quantitative analyses in the study of militarization; (2) correlational versus
causal analysis; and (3) the value of Huntington’s analysis of praetorian militarization.
We have varying levels of agreement.
Keywords
qualitative research, quantitative research, causality, praetorian militarization, child
mortality
In his response to our article (Carlton-Ford, Durante, Evans, & Graham, 2019),
Professor Cyr (2019): (1) argues that studies of militarization cannot rely solely
on quantitative analyses; (2) suggests that we provided only correlations, with an
insufficient discussion of the problems of establishing causality; and (3) maintains
1 University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
2 Nevada State College, Henderson, NV, USA
3 Everett Community College, Monroe, WA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Steve Carlton-Ford, University of Cincinnati, Box 210378, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA.
Email: carltosl@uc.edu

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Armed Forces & Society 46(3)
that the work of Samuel Huntington would be particularly instructive in conceptua-
lizing praetorian militarization. We address each of these issues in turn.
Qualitative Research
We agree with Professor Cyr that researchers need both qualitative and quantitative
analyses. Successful causal analyses of macro-level change require “rigorous theori-
zing . . . that explicitly considers the...