War is an inefficient outcome and therefore states ought to prefer to bargain over areas of conflict instead of fighting. However, in the anarchy of international relations there is no actor with a monopoly of power to enforce contracts between states. States then face a commitment problem when bargaining to prevent war. This dissertation explores three models where this commitment problem can lead to war. The first chapter presents a model that allows for shifts in the distribution of power which play out over an arbitrary number of time periods. This leads to a sufficient condition that implies war under a broader set of conditions than previously shown in the literature. This condition implies that preventive war may be caused by relatively slow, but persistent shifts in the distribution of power. As theorized in power transition theory, differential rates of economic growth can potentially cause war under this mechanism. Relaxing the unitary actor assumption of the first chapter, the second chapter analyzes how the domestic institutional structure of countries affects the likelihood of war. We model institutional divergence by comparing an infinitely lived dictatorship to a democracy with a replaceable leader and allow a range of leader incentives within these institutional frameworks. We show that dictators, even welfare maximizing ones, may lead to war if the initial distribution of resources is highly imbalanced whereas a democracy with a forward looking electorate is always peaceful. Yet when a democratic electorate is myopic, preventive war may result. Political parties act as a mechanism to prevent this outcome. In the third chapter, I investigate adding a third actor to the bargaining model of war. In a static setting, the model uses a notion of cooperative stability to predict balancing and bandwagoning behavior in alliance formation. When extended to a dynamic setting, changes to the system that result in alliance shifting may cause war. Additionally, alliance formation need not correspond to the static solutions, suggesting that the dynamics of power are as important as the distribution of power in alliance formation. / text

Master of Arts / Department of Security Studies / Carla Martinez Machain / BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Recent studies regarding war termination and the bargaining model of war focus on how belligerents use coercion to reach a war settlement, but neglect the importance of tactical decisions. Although strategies are the principal tool used to conduct war, only significant tactical achievements lead to significant strategic achievements. METHOD: In this paper I analyze the tactics employed in two case studies, the Second Boer War between Great Britain and the South African Boers and the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland. Using the bargaining model of war, I discuss two categories of tactics. Targeted tactics focus on destroying the enemy’s critical vulnerabilities and dislocating their strengths while minimizing one’s own vulnerabilities. Nontargeted tactics focus on centers of gravity, employing military strength in an effort to overwhelm enemy forces with superior resources and technology. RESULTS: I demonstrate that tactics have a marked impact on the duration and outcome of warfare and targeted tactics minimize the cost of fighting in order to achieve strategic objectives and increase the bargaining advantage. CONCLUSION: Targeted tactics are a significant tool in warfare that affect war termination and hold the potential to increase the bargaining advantage at a lesser cost.

This thesis contributes to the cross-domain deterrence literature by examining how states use their various sources of power across its Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic (DIME) instruments in order to determine the outcome of immediate deterrence stand-offs. With the increased complexities nation-states face in the 21st century, an update of the old framework was overdue. This study considers the Taiwan Strait Crisis and the Russian Invasion in Ukraine to expand the military-focused literature to incorporate all different sources of state power. This paper finds that cross-domain signals, through an interaction of the bargaining position and bargaining power, decide the outcome of immediate deterrence cases.

This dissertation examines why military decision makers struggle to evaluate their policies and why they often stick to unsuccessful strategies for so long. The core argument is that strategic assessment involves genuine analytic challenges which contemporary scholarship typically does not take into account. Prominent theoretical frameworks predict that the longer decision makers go without achieving their objectives, the more pessimistic they should become about their ability to do so, and the more likely they should be to change course. This dissertation challenges those ideas and explains why we should often expect the very opposite. The theoretical crux of this argument is that standard models of learning and adaptation (along with many people’s basic intuitions) revolve around the assumption that decision makers are observing repeated processes, similar to the dynamics of slot machines and roulette wheels – but in war and other contexts, decision makers often confront cumulative processes that have very different dynamics, along with a different logic for how rational actors should form and revise their expectations. Empirically, this dissertation examines U.S. decision making in Iraq, Vietnam, and the American Indian Wars. These cases demonstrate how cumulative dynamics affect strategic assessment and how understanding these dynamics can shed light on prominent theoretical frameworks, ongoing policy debates, and salient historical experience.