- Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History
This book’s subtitle requires explanation. By “economics,” Brauer and van Tuyll mean the basic analytical principles of the field of economics, not the influence of economic factors on historical events. There is thus, as the authors admit, little about state finance (that is, taxation, borrowing, and expenditure), or the character of national security as a public good (p. 288), although the problem of economic mobilization for the purpose of war in a particular case is addressed in a chapter on strategic bombing. Instead, Brauer and van Tuyll contend that the entire history of armed conflict and preparation for armed conflict can be productively illuminated by viewing military decision-making in terms of six economic concepts. These are: opportunity cost; expected marginal costs and benefits; substitution; diminishing marginal returns; asymmetric information and hidden characteristics; and hidden actions and incentive alignments. Brauer and van Tuyll take a case study approach— that is, they attempt to show that the dynamics of six historical events and certain matters in the present can be understood in terms of the operation of economic principles. The subjects covered are the medieval castle and opportunity cost; mercenaries and the labor market in the Renaissance; decision to offer battle from 1618 to 1815 as a problem of cost/benefit assessment; the economics of information asymmetry in the American Civil War; diminishing marginal returns and the problem of the strategic bombing of Germany; capital-labor substitution and France’s decision to build an independent nuclear deterrent; and in the present the economic dimensions of terrorism, military manpower, and private military companies.
Brauer and van Tuyll do not, as their subtitle seems to say, believe that their chosen set of economic principles “explain” the dynamics of military decision, but rather adopt the more moderate and to a degree more tenable position that the application of economic analysis can offer useful points of departure for productive historical reflection. In general, the chosen sample of historical subjects is open to the criticisms, as the authors concede, of being both small and capricious (pp. xvii, 39–42). Some chapters work better than others— for example the examination of mercenary contracts in the Renaissance, a subject whose basic nature is economic, struck this reader as useful, while the consideration of commanddecision with respect to the problem of offering battle, a subject fraught with psychological [End Page 1271] complexity and difficulty and not only a matter of strategic logic, seems highly reductionist, and thus unpersuasive. In the opening to their final chapter, Brauer and van Tuyll state that their analysis had imposed “a framework of thought on ages in which the principles we discuss were not yet articulated, at least in a formal sense,” and that “such is the role of science and scholarship” (p. 287). Military historians who believe that the past ought to be understood in terms of the actual and particular especially when it comes to the matter of decision-making motive, with due appreciation of the enormous play of chance and personality, will find such an approach to history and characterization of the nature of all critical inquiry, problematical, if not fundamentally misguided. Ceteris paribus (“all other things being equal”), the economist’s dodge, is the historian’s bane.