Delay in contests

Why is there delay in contests? In this paper we follow and extend the line of reasoning of Carl von Clausewitz to explain delay. For a given contest technology, delay may occur if there is an asymmetry between defense and attack, if the expected change in relative strengths is moderate, and if the additional cost of investment in future strength is low. -- In Konfliktsituationen findet der ’showdown’ häufig mit einer Verzögerung statt. Das ist überraschend, weil sich mit der Verzögerung die Konfliktsituation bestenfalls für einen der beiden Kontrahenten verbessern kann. Derjenige, dessen Position im Konflikt sich verschlechtert, sollte eigentlich auf eine schnelle Konfliktlösung drängen. Carl von Clausewitz erklärte die mögliche Verzögerung aus der Vorteilhaftigkeit der Defensive: wer eine schnelle Konfliktlösung erzwingen will, muss in die Offensive. Wir bestätigen diese Einsicht von Clausewitz in einer formalen Analyse. Die Analyse ergibt ferner, dass auch ein schwacher Gegner zum Angreifer werden kann, wenn sich seine Position im Zeitablauf erheblich verschlechtert, und zeigt, dass zukünftige Kosten der Konfliktvorbereitung eher eine frühe Konfliktlösung begünstigen.Delay,contest,conflict

War Through the Ages

Review of John Keegan, A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993

Michael Howard and Clausewitz

The English translation of Carl von Clausewitz’s On War by Michael Howard and Peter Paret has had a major impact on how Clausewitz is read today, especially in the United States and Britain. Howard in particular was determined to make Clausewitz doubly relevant – as one soldier speaking to other soldiers and as an author whose views on war had continuing purchase. However, the result is a text which, in reflecting the issues of its day, is not fully reflective of what Clausewitz himself said and has itself become dated.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Howard Caygill: author of 'Resistance: a philosophy of defiance' - interviewed by Alastair Gray and Philip Holmburg

An interview with the philosopher Howard Caygill, primarily concerning his book 'Resistance', conducted in December 201

'The most beautiful of wars' : Carl von Clausewitz and small wars

Carl von Clausewitz was both an avid analyst of small wars and people’s war and, during the wars of liberation, a practitioner of small war. While Clausewitz scholars have increasingly recognised the centrality of small wars for Clausewitz’s thought, the sources and inspirations of his writings on small wars have remained understudied. This article contextualises Clausewitz’s thought on small wars and people’s war in the tradition of German philosophical and aesthetic discourses around 1800. It shows how Clausewitz developed core concepts such as the integration of passion and reason and the idea of war in its ‘absolute perfection’ as a regulative ideal in the framework of his works on small wars and people’s war. Contextualising Clausewitz inevitably distances him from the twenty-first-century strategic context, but, as this article shows, it can help us to ask pertinent questions about the configuration of society, the armed forces and the government in today’s Western states.PostprintPeer reviewe

Strategy and slaughter

Colin Gray's ‘Clausewitz Rules, OK’ was the one contribution to the Interregnum special issue of this Review that engaged the problem of modern war in general. Issues of war and peace were represented only patchily in a volume aiming to reflect on the ‘post-Cold War’ decade, but put together before ‘9/11’ brought it to an abrupt end. The Balkans didn't play a large part in William Wallace's account of Europe; unstable Asian great-power rivalries and local wars, which could make Rosemary Foot and Andrew Walter's ‘Pacific Century’ anything but pacific were barely noted; while Caroline Thomas wrote about the Third World without mentioning Africa's wars. The Middle East, Rwanda and genocide were not covered. Bruce Cumings' wise reflections on the military bases of American liberalism, a brief discussion of the ‘new interventionism’ by Geoffrey Hawthorn, and dutiful mentions of Kosovo across the chapters, hardly compensated for these omissions

War And The Business Corporation

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39811/3/wp427.pd

Intelligence Secrets

Review of James Rusbridger, Betrayal at Pearl Harbour: How Churchill Lured Roosevelt into World War II and Bradley Smith Eric Nave: The Ultra-Magic Deals and the Most Secret Special Relationship, 1940-194