Passive Aggression: Explaining The Strategic Logic of Military Attrition

Attrition wars are costly. Why do states choose to wage expected wars of attrition over an ex-ante bargaining settlement? Conventional wisdom suggests that the expectation of defense favorability induces rational deterrence. I propose a novel theory of Passive Aggression to explain the strategic logic of military attrition: the defender can strategically conceal private information about military readiness and organizational effectiveness to prevent the attacker from updating the assessment of the offense-defense balance in crisis bargaining. Under persistent ex-ante military optimism, the rational attacker is likely to blunder. Empirically, my research identifies bait-and-bleed strategies through descriptive inferences from policy actions and strategic deliberations. Then, I use time-slice process tracing as a plausibility probe on the causal link between perceived offense-defense balance and bait-and-bleed. I find that Passive Aggression Theory provides critical insights into explaining the strategic behaviors of the USSR, China, and Vietnam during the unfolding of The Third Indochina War.