The first posts by Becker and Posner on their new blog explain lucidly why preventive war is a great idea.
Sceptics like me will be easily convinced by pearls of wisdom like
"Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time, when he has completed a military build up, that the attack will, if resisted with only the victim’s current strength, inflict a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), but that the expected cost can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further that at an additional cost of only 5, the victim can by a preventive strike today eliminate all possibility of the future attack. Since 5 is less than 35 (the sum of injury and defensive costs if the future enemy attack is not prevented), the preventive war is cost-justified."
The same interesting theory is explained in detail in a recent Posner article named "Optimal War".
When talking about aggressive war, there are certain words that come to mind, like "stupid", and several others not suited for publishing here. "Optimal" was not one of them for me. I have learned from this article that it is theoretically possible to discuss war in the framework of an economic formula.
Of course, some people in the cynical anti-war crowd might point out that this kind of calculating "optimal" wars is much more fun in the safety of an American university office than in an Iraqi home bombed for the reason that, to quote from the paper
"preemptive attack is justified if the cost of such an attack are less than the discounted expected costs of conflict in period two" (page 12 of the paper)."
Disgusting.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at December 6, 2004 04:21 PM | TrackBack