- Castles, Battles, & Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History
An economist (Brauer) and a historian (van Tuyll) have collaborated to illustrate how principles of economics can explain military history. Following an introductory chapter on economic theory, written in accessible language for non-specialists, they present six case studies drawn from Western military history throughout the last millennium. Each case study focuses on one economic principle, while also demonstrating in brief how each of the six economic principles might be applied to five sub-themes (manpower, logistics, technology, planning, and operations). A final chapter applies the principles to three contemporary military problems—terrorism, manpower, and private military companies.
Though all of the cases are well researched and reliably presented, some of them work better than others. The condottieri of the Italian Renaissance, for example, yield refreshing insights when their contracts are subjected to the economic principle that incentives affect behavior. The authors are less engaging when they apply the principle of opportunity costs to conclude that medieval lords chose castles over standing armies because they were more cost-effective. Many readers will be surprised to learn that almost 72 percent of the bombs dropped on Germany during World War II fell in the last eleven months of the war, a statistic intended to support the authors’ conclusion about the diminishing returns of the allied strategic bombing offensive. But military historians will find none of the book’s conclusions novel. Researching almost exclusively in secondary literature, the authors explain only what military historians already knew.
The weaknesses of the book flow from conflicting claims by the authors about their methodology and results. At some points, they claim to [End Page 569] be applying microeconomic theory to military history, which they correctly identify as a seriously underconceptualized field in a generally undertheorized discipline. In practice, however, they apply economic principles, which they see as building blocks of theory. These principles achieve their universality at the price of specificity. To say, for example, that “unequal information creates power favoring one party over another” is to belabor the obvious. One hardly needs economics to achieve such an insight.
So, too, with results. The book’s subtitle claims that “economics explains military history.” Between the covers, however, the authors claim more modestly to show “how military history can be infused with economic reasoning and that from this new insights can be gained” (321). This pronouncement comes closer to the considerable achievement of this book. War and warfare are emotional and dramatic topics, freighted with moral and philosophical implications. Framing them in the rational calculus of economic behavior aids both understanding and insight. To view international terrorists as rational actors calculating their opportunity costs, information asymmetries, cost/benefit trade-offs, and substitution possibilities marks a welcome departure from the demonization and hyperbole that has characterized so much of the public discourse on the war on terror. Military history does need more conceptualization, and this book offers some useful tools.