In response to a post a few weeks back on the economics of COIN, WPR reader and Northwestern University professor Jon Caverley directed my attention to some related work he’s done (.pdf) on the question of why democracies choose to wage counterinsurgencies, despite firepower-heavy military doctrines that are ill-suited to winning them. Caverley uses a process analysis of the Vietnam War to argue that: . . .capitalized military doctrine results in a condition of moral hazard for the average voter, shifting the costs away from the median voter and leading a democratic state to pursue attempts at military coercion whose […]
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