The Political Economy of Military Objectives

The most prominent security scholarship to date focuses on war's causes and resolutions. Yet the operational conduct of war remains understudied. Building on ideas from economics, political science, and military doctrine, I suggest a political economy theory of how states design operational campaigns. I theorize that war planners design campaigns to emphasize the protection of friendly assets that intensively use the state’s relatively scarce economic factor of production, the targeting of hostile assets that intensively utilize an enemy’s scarce factor, and the selection of civilian objectives based on a campaign’s expected duration. I test these three notions using an operational objectives dataset constructed from 25 declassified American war plans. The analysis confirms that (a) Heckscher-Ohlin notions of comparative advantage apply to warfighting, and (b) comparative advantage and expected conflict duration strongly condition civilian objective selection. These findings have significant implications for understanding the relationship between economies, trade theory, and war.