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 science and doctrine, I suggest a political economy theory of how states design operational campaigns. I theorize that war planners design military campaigns to emphasize the protection of friendly assets that intensively use the state’s relatively scarce economic factor of production, prioritize the targeting of hostile assets that intensively utilize an enemy’s scarce factor, and select civilian objectives based on a campaign’s expected length. I test these notions using a campaign objectives dataset derived from 25 archival American war plans. The analysis yields two findings: (1) Notions of comparative advantage apply to warfighting, and (2) perceptions of comparative advantage and war length strongly condition civilian objective selection. These findings have significant implications for understanding war, political economy, and military science.