What Makes a War End?

H. A. Calahan

New York: The Vanguard Press, 1944; Pages: 260

Written at the height of the Second World War, Lt. Commander Calahan's book was a timely inquiry into the causes of war termination. Without a theory to work with, he endeavored to analyze nine major wars, both international and civil, and to distill the causes of their endings. (The peculiar choices, which without exception are wars with clear winners and losers, have led him somewhat astray in his conclusions, as I note below.) The book is lucidly written, in a very engaging style but is tantalizing because none of the quotations are properly cited, so even though there's a wealth of factual material, it is very hard to ascertain its accuracy. Short bibliography.

The argument. The first step is to define the sides in terms of their relationship to the ante bellum status quo (p. 192). The aggressor is the side that seeks to alter the status quo (in modern parlance, the "challenger"), and the aggressee is the side that is content with its position and seeks to keep it (modern term: "defender"). The next step is to define the outcome of war in terms of victory and loss for the challenger and the defender, which also determines their war aims. The question then becomes: what makes one side quit? "...war is pressed by the victor, but peace is made by the vanquished. Therefore, to determine the causes of peace, it is always necessary to take the vanquished's point of view. Until the vanquished quits, the war goes on" (p. 18). Thus, successful military pressure is necessary to compel the losing side to reevaluate its commitment to fighting and induce it to stop. "...many wars end because the war aims cannot be attained, or can be attained only at too great a price. Others end when further resistance is impossible" (p. 228). The objective is to destroy the opponent's ability to resist, and it can be achieved with a decisive victory or through attrition (p. 231). Military action can also be directed against national life too, not just the armed forces (p. 243).

It is not difficult to see that there's a huge selection bias in his case studies. Calahan takes nine conflicts: the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, and World War I, with extensive discussions of World War II, whose outcome, according to the author, was already determined. (Calahan was correct in this, although no revolutions toppled the German or Japanese governments.) The most striking commonality of all these conflicts is that they ended with clear-cut military victories for one of the belligerents. This has led Calahan to overemphasize, in good Clausewitzian tradition, the importance of gaining the upper hand on the battlefield. Many wars, however, are not so well defined: they may end in stalemate, or with the utter exhaustion of both sides, in which case they may or may not be resumed at a later time, or they may end with victory where the winner "wins the war but loses the peace" (i.e. the peace terms and the aftermath did not reflect its military success). Why do states quit fighting in these cases? Maybe, after all, it takes two to tango, not just one to cry "Uncle!".

This book is heartily recommended because it is thought-provoking and, despite its shortcomings, pretty good on several famous, but perhaps mythologized, events. See, in particular, Calahan's discussion of the American Revolution, where he basically says that the British gave it to the Americans --- that is, despite their defeat, the Empire could put, if it wished to, many more troops in the field, against which Washington would have been helpless. Also, the analysis of the Russo-Japanese War has interesting implications for Pearl Harbor: twice in their history after the Meiji restoration the Japanese military had gambled on a surprise attack with little to keep up a prolonged war effort. They were correct in both cases, so it is perhaps not too difficult to understand why they would try the same tactics against the US. They were wrong, but they were not idiots.

June 29, 2001. BLS

@BOOK{calahan-44:war-end,
    TITLE     = {What Makes a War End?},
    AUTHOR    = {H. A. Calahan},
    YEAR      = {1944},
    PUBLISHER = {The Vanguard Press},
    ADDRESS   = {New York},
    NOTE      = {Pp. 260}
}