ISSUE 183 : Nov/Dec - 2010 - Australian Defence Force Journal

How Wars EndDan ReiterNew Jersey, US: Princeton University Press, 2009ISBN: 978-0-6911-4059-9Reviewed by Colonel Chris Field, Australian ArmySo long as I have not overthrown my opponent, I am bound to fear he may overthrow me.Carl von Clausewitz 1For the Australian Defence Organisation, ‘strategy’ means the calculated relationship betweenends, ways and means, and is defined as a process that ‘identifies goals [ends], determineshow to pursue these goals [ways] and decides what resources are applied [means] 2 ’. In HowWars End, Dan Reiter focuses on national strategic ends, using an analysis of six wars, placingan emphasis on understanding national goals in support of war termination.Despite Reiter’s belief that ‘quantitative analysis [is] the most productive way to test scientificpropositions’, in How Wars End he decides to ‘let go of quantitative tests and really embracecase studies’. This led Reiter to survey 22 war-termination decisions—employing empirical wartermination models—for the following six wars: Korean War 1950-53, the Allies from 1940-42,Finland and the USSR 1939-44, American Civil War 1861-65, Germany from 1917-18 and Japanfrom 1944-45. His analysis supports the premise that warfighting is a human endeavour thatrequires a synthesis in the art and science of war.Reiter argues that while we have ‘mountain ranges of ideas and scholarship … about howwars start …. [we] know relatively little about how wars end’. Readers who have struggledwith selecting, defining and measuring an ‘end state’ for an operation can sympathise withDan Reiter’s challenge. Another theme of the book is understanding how to make the endingof wars permanent, with Reiter noting that ‘over the 1914-2001 period, nearly one third of allinterstate war ceasefires (56 out of 188) eventually broke down into renewed war’. These areasof analysis make How Wars End a valuable reference for practitioners, especially during thisperiod of persistent ADF operational deployments.In simple terms, Reiter’s book ‘describes two functions of war, two purposes that fighting ismeant to serve: providing information and solving commitment problems’. More formally, thesix case studies are analysed using the bargaining theory of war termination. Reiter arguesthat this theory incorporates two insights about international relations: first, that uncertaintyabout the power and intentions of states pervades the international system; and, second, thatstates cannot make binding commitments to each other. He notes, for example:After 9/11, the George W. Bush Administration thought about wars in the context of commitmentproblems, that rogue states like Iraq could not be trusted to adhere to international commitments,meaning that war culminating in absolute victory, such as foreign imposed regime change, may bethe only way of assuring American national security.111