Showing papers in "International Security in 2008"

What Terrorists Really Want: Terrorist Motives and Counterterrorism Strategy

Abstract: What do terrorists want? No question is more fundamental for devising an effective counterterrorism strategy. The international community cannot expect to make terrorism unprofitable and thus scarce without knowing the incentive structure of its practitioners. The strategic model—the dominant paradigm in terrorism studies—posits that terrorists are political utility maximizers. According to this view, individuals resort to terrorism when the expected political gains minus the expected costs outweigh the net expected benefits of alternative forms of protest. The strategic model has widespread currency in the policy community; extant counterterrorism strategies seek to defeat terrorism by reducing its political utility. The most common strategies are to fight terrorism by decreasing its political benefits via a strict no concessions policy; decreasing its prospective political benefits via appeasement; or decreasing its political benefits relative to nonviolence via democracy promotion. Despite its policy r...

Great Powers and Hierarchical Order in Southeast Asia: Analyzing Regional Security Strategies

Abstract: The small and medium-sized states in Southeast Asia have faced significant geostrategic changes with the end of the Cold War and the rise of China. Over the last decade, scholars have debated how these countries would cope with growing Chinese power, and how their relations with the other major powers in the region would change. Some analysts have suggested that the region is shifting toward a more China-centered order, but this view is premature. Eschewing the simple dichotomy of balancing versus bandwagoning, Southeast Asian countries do not want to choose between the two major powers, the United States and China. This avoidance strategy is not merely tactical or time-buying; instead, Southeast Asian states have actively tried to influence the shape of the new regional order. Key Southeast Asian states are pursuing two main pathways to order in the region: the “omni-enmeshment” of major powers and complex balance of influence. They have helped to produce an interim power distribution outcome, which is a...

Postconflict Reconstruction in Africa: Flawed Ideas about Failed States

Abstract: Postconflict state reconstruction has become a priority of donors in Africa. Yet, externally sponsored reconstruction efforts have met with limited achievements in the region. This is partly due to three flawed assumptions on which reconstruction efforts are predicated. The first is that Western state institutions can be transferred to Africa. The poor record of past external efforts to construct and reshape African political and economic institutions casts doubts on the overly ambitious objectives of failed state reconstruction. The second flawed assumption is the mistaken belief in a shared understanding by donors and African leaders of failure and reconstruction. Donors typically misread the nature of African politics. For local elites, reconstruction is the continuation of war and competition for resources by new means. Thus their strategies are often inimical to the building of strong public institutions. The third flawed assumption is that donors are capable of rebuilding African states. Their ambit...

Assessing the Dangers of Illicit Networks: Why al-Qaida May Be Less Threatening Than Many Think

Abstract: Theoretical work on networked organization informs a large swathe of the current literature on international organized crime and terrorism in the field of international relations. Clandestine networks are portrayed as large, fluid, mobile, highly adaptable, and resilient. Many analysts have concluded that this makes them difficult for more stable, hierarchical states to combat. The prevailing mood of pessimism about the ability of states to combat illicit networks, however, may be premature. International relations scholars working in the area have often been too quick to draw parallels to the world of the firm, where networked organization has proven well adapted to the fast-moving global marketplace. They have consequently overlooked not only issues of community and trust but also problems of distance, coordination, and security, which may pose serious organizational difficulties for networks in general and for illicit networks in particular. Closer attention to a wider body of historical and contemporary research on dynamics of participation in underground movements, the life cycle of terrorism and insurgency, and vulnerabilities in organized crime reveals that clandestine networks are often not as adaptable or resilient as they are made out to be. An analysis of the al-Qaida network suggests that as al-Qaida adopts a more networked organization, it becomes exposed to a gamut of organizational dilemmas that threatens to reduce its unity, cohesion, and ability to act collectively.

The Rise of Afghanistan's Insurgency: State Failure and Jihad

Abstract: In 2002 Afghanistan began to experience a violent insurgency as the Taliban and other groups conducted a sustained effort to overthrow the Afghan government. Why did an insurgency begin in Afghanistan? Answers to this question have important theoretical and policy implications. Conventional arguments, which focus on the role of grievance or greed, cannot explain the Afghan insurgency. Rather, a critical precondition was structural: the collapse of governance after the overthrow of the Taliban regime. The Afghan government was unable to provide basic services to the population; its security forces were too weak to establish law and order; and there were too few international forces to all the gap. In addition, the primary motivation of insurgent leaders was ideological. Leaders of the Taliban, al-Qaida, and other insurgent groups wanted to overthrow the Afghan government and replace it with one grounded in an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam.

A Cold Start for Hot Wars? The Indian Army's New Limited War Doctrine

Abstract: In response to the perceived inability of the Indian military to leverage its conventional superiority to end Pakistan's “proxy war” in Kashmir, the Indian Army announced a new offensive doctrine in 2004 intended to allow it to mobilize quickly and undertake limited retaliatory attacks on its neighbor, without crossing Pakistan's nuclear threshold. This Cold Start doctrine marks a break with the fundamentally defensive military doctrines that India has employed since gaining independence in 1947. Requiring combined arms operating jointly with the Indian Air Force, Cold Start represents a significant advance in India's conventional military capabilities. Yet, despite the Indian Army's intentions, it risks provoking or escalating a crisis on the subcontinent that could breach the nuclear threshold. Recent military exercises and associated organizational changes indicate that although the Indian Army has made progress toward developing an operational Cold Start capability, particularly in the area of network...

America's Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy

Abstract: Why has the United States, with its long-standing Liberal tradition, come to embrace the illiberal policies it has in recent years? The conventional wisdom is that al-Qaida's attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terrorism have made America less Liberal. The logic of this argument is straightforward: interstate war has historically undermined domestic liberties, and the war on terrorism is causing the United States to follow this well-worn path. This explanation confronts a puzzle, however: illiberal U.S. policies—including the pursuit of global hegemony, launching of a preventive war, imposition of restrictions on civil liberties in the name of national security, and support for torture under certain circumstances—manifested themselves even before the September 11 terrorist attacks and were embraced across the political spectrum. Indeed, it is precisely American Liberalism that makes the United States so illiberal today. Under certain circumstances, Liberalism itse...

No Sign until the Burst of Fire: Understanding the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier

Abstract: The Pakistan-Afghanistan border area has become the most dangerous frontier on earth, and the most challenging for the United States’ national security interests. Critically, the portion of the border region that is home to extremist groups such the Taliban and al-Qaida coincides almost exactly with the area overwhelmingly dominated by the Pashtun tribes. The implications of this salient fact—that most of Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s violent religious extremism, and with it much of the United States’ counterterrorism challenge, are contained within a single ethnolinguistic group—have unfortunately not been fully grasped by a governmental policy community that has long downplayed cultural dynamics. The threat to long-term U.S. security interests in this area is neither an economic problem, nor a religious problem, nor a generic “tribal” problem. It is a unique cultural problem. In both southern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, rather than seeking to “extend the reach of the central government,” which simply foments insurgency among a proto-insurgent people, the United States and the international community should be doing everything in their means to empower the tribal elders and restore balance to a tribal/cultural system that has been disintegrating since the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

Closing Time: Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz

Abstract: How might Iran retaliate in the aftermath of a limited Israeli or U.S. strike? The most economically devastating of Iran's potential responses would be closure of the Strait of Hormuz. According to...

Power Shifts and Escalation: Explaining China's Use of Force in Territorial Disputes

Abstract: Although China has been involved in twenty-three territorial disputes with its neighbors since 1949, it has used force in only six of them. The strength of a state's territorial claim, defined as its bargaining power in a dispute, offers one explanation for why and when states escalate territorial disputes to high levels of violence. This bargaining power depends on the amount of contested land that each side controls and on the military power that can be projected over the entire area under dispute. When a state's bargaining power declines relative to that of its adversary, its leaders become more pessimistic about achieving their territorial goals and face strong preventive motivations to seize disputed land or signal resolve through the use of force. Cross-sectional analysis and longitudinal case studies demonstrate that such negative shifts in bargaining power explain the majority of China's uses of force in its territorial disputes.

Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia

Abstract: The tenth anniversary of India's and Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests enables scholars to revisit the issue of South Asian proliferation with a decade of hindsight. What lessons do the intervening years hold regarding nuclear weapons' impact on South Asian security? Some scholars claim that nuclear weapons had a beneficial effect during this period, helping to stabilize historically volatile Indo-Pakistani relations. Such optimistic analyses of proliferation's regional security impact are mistaken, however. Nuclear weapons have had two destabilizing effects on the South Asian security environment. First, nuclear weapons' ability to shield Pakistan against all-out Indian retaliation, and to attract international attention to Pakistan's dispute with India, encouraged aggressive Pakistani behavior. This, in turn, provoked forceful Indian responses, ranging from large-scale mobilization to limited war. Although the resulting Indo-Pakistani crises did not lead to nuclear or full-scale conventional conflict, such ...

Security and Displacement in Iraq: Responding to the Forced Migration Crisis

Abstract: Since the 2006 bombing of the al-Askari Mosque, 4.5 million Iraqis have fled their homes, and displacement has become a central strategy in the civil war. Militant groups have engineered these colossal population movements to consolidate their power and expand their territorial claims. As this crisis demonstrates, displacement can expand and intensify violence during a civil war. In addition, refugee flows increase the risk that conflict will spread across international borders. In some cases, refugee militarization can lead to international war and regional destabilization. Even if the displaced Iraqis do not join militant groups, their mere presence will exacerbate political tensions. To prevent the wide-scale militarization of the displaced Iraqis, donors and host states should heed the following policy recommendations. First, provide a massive infusion of humanitarian aid. Second, resist the temptation to build camps to house the displaced. Third, do not return the displaced people home against their ...

"New Fighting Power!": Japan's Growing Maritime Capabilities and East Asian Security

Abstract: Japanese leaders struggled for decades to overcome legal, political, and normative constraints on the expansion of the Self-Defense Forces so that Japan could field a robust military. Their progress was steady and significant, but slow. Now, having reframed the nature of the threat Japan faces and having borrowed creatively from the U.S. model, they have found new traction by empowering the Japan Coast Guard (JCG). Today's JCG has what its publicists, citing capabilities explicitly banned by Japan's constitution, call “New Fighting Power!” Remarkably, however, JCG modernization and expansion are being achieved without much objection from Japan's neighbors or from the domestic public. Although the JCG is not a “second navy,” it is already a fourth branch of the Japanese military. Tokyo is now able to project additional diplomatic influence as well as “fighting power.” Japan's “new fighting power” is thus greater than the sum of its military parts.

Making the World Safe for Partial Democracy? Questioning the Premises of Democracy Promotion

Abstract: Democracy promotion is a favored strategy to advance the cause of world peace, especially in the Greater Middle East, but undifferentiated democracy promotion has two faulty premises First, all progress toward the establishment of democratic regimes does not necessarily make the global community safer Second, regime change is not something external actors have the capacity to direct along desired pathways The first assumption fails to consider the well-documented security problems caused by partial democracies The second assumption overstates the ability of powerful outsiders to induce transitions to full democracy These research findings are grounds for cautious and selective democracy promotion, not a blanket approach that is indifferent to the composition of the regimes designated to be reformed and democratized

Wishful Thinking or Buying Time? The Logic of British Appeasement in the 1930s

Abstract: Scholars typically define appeasement as a policy of satisfying grievances through one-sided concessions to avoid war for the foreseeable future and, therefore, as an alternative to balancing. They traditionally interpret British appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s as a naive attempt to maintain peace with Germany by satisfying his grievances. The standard conceptualization of appeasement and the empirical treatment of the 1930s, however, are theoretically limiting and historically incorrect. Appeasement is a strategy of sustained, asymmetrical concessions with the aim of avoiding war, at least in the short term. There are three distinct variations of appeasement: (1) resolving grievances (to avoid war for the foreseeable future); (2) diffusing secondary threats (to focus on a greater threat); and (3) buying time (to rearm and/or secure allies against the current threat). British appeasement was primarily a strategy of buying time for rearmament against Germany. British leaders understood the Nazi me...

Nuclear Stability in South Asia

Abstract: An examination of the onset, evolution, and termination of the 1999 and 2001–02 crises between India and Pakistan suggests that nuclear deterrence is robust in South Asia. Even though the 1999 crisis erupted into a war, its scope and dimensions were carefully circumscribed. Despite its conventional capabilities, India chose not to cross the Line of Control (the de facto international border in the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir), and it avoided horizontal escalation of the conflict. India's restraint cannot be attributed either to timely U.S. intervention or to a concern about avoiding a bellicose international image. Instead a highly jingoistic regime, which had defied international public opinion the previous year through a series of nuclear tests, chose to exercise restraint because of Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons. In 2001, despite grave Pakistani provocation through a series of terrorist attacks, India could only respond with a strategy of coercive diplomacy.

Partitioning to Peace: Sovereignty, Demography, and Ethnic Civil Wars

Abstract: Some scholars have proposed partition as a way to solve ethnic civil wars. Partition theorists advocate the demographic separation of ethnic groups into different states, arguing that this is the best chance for an enduring peace. Opponents argue that partition is costly in terms of its human toll and that its advocates have yet to demonstrate its effectiveness beyond a limited number of self-selected case studies. This analysis systematically examines the outcome of partition, highlighting the centrality of demography by introducing an index that measures the degree to which a partition separates ethnic groups. This index is applied to all civil wars ending in partition from 1945 to 2004. Partitions that completely separated the warring groups did not experience a recurrence of war and low-level violence for at least five years, outperforming both partitions that did not separate ethnic groups and other ethnic war outcomes. These results challenge other studies that examine partition as a war outcome. Th...

Divining Nuclear Intentions: A Review Essay

Abstract: Although projections of nuclear proliferation abound, they rarely are founded on empirical research or guided by theory. Even fewer studies are informed by a comparative perspective. The two books under review—The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy, by Jacques Hymans, and Nuclear Logics: Alternative Paths in East Asia and the Middle East, by Etel Solingen, are welcome exceptions to this general state of affairs, and represent the cutting edge of nonproliferation research. Both works challenge conventional conceptions of the sources of nuclear weapons decisions and offer new insights into why past predictions of rapid proliferation failed to materialize and why current prognoses about rampant proliferation are similarly flawed. While sharing a number of common features, including a focus on subsystemic determinants of national behavior, the books differ in their methodology, level of analysis, receptivity to multicausal explanations, and assumptions about decisionma...

The Window of Vulnerability That Wasn't: Soviet Military Buildup in the 1970s—A Research Note

Abstract: The Soviet strategic modernization program of the 1970s was one of the most consequential developments of the Cold War. Deployment of new intercontinental ballistic missiles and the dramatic increase in the number of strategic warheads in the Soviet arsenal created a sense of vulnerability in the United States that was, to a large degree, responsible for the U.S. military buildup of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the escalation of Cold War tensions during that period. U.S. assessments concluded that the Soviet Union was seeking to achieve a capability to fight and win a nuclear war. Estimates of missile accuracy and silo hardness provided by the U.S. intelligence community led many in the United States to conclude that the Soviet Union was building a strategic missile force capable of destroying most U.S. missiles in a counterforce strike and of surviving a subsequent nuclear exchange. Soviet archival documents that have recently become available demonstrate that this conclusion was wrong. The U.S. es...

How American Treaty Behavior Threatens National Security

Abstract: In recent years, American treaty behavior has produced growing concern among both allies and less friendly nations. On such fundamental issues as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, human rights, civil liberties, environmental disasters, and commerce, the United States has generated confusion and anger abroad. Such a climate is not conducive to needed cooperation in the conduct of foreign and security policy. Among U.S. actions that have caused concern are the failure to ratify several treaties; the attachment of reservations, understandings, and declarations before ratification; the failure to support a treaty regime once ratified; and treaty withdrawal. The structural and historical reasons for American treaty behavior are deeply rooted in the United States' system of government and do not merely reflect superpower arrogance.

No Sign Until the Burst of Fire

Abstract: This article explores the reasons why religious and political extremism in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region ends neatly at the borders of the Pashtun lands. It begins with a brief overview of the geography and typography of the border, followed by a condensed study of the key ethnographic and cultural factors. An understanding of the tribal and social framework of the border, particularly its alternative forms of governance, is critical to the subsequent discussion of the current instability and radicalization. In addition to religion, tribal mores that predate Islam shape insurgent behavior and should inform all aspects of engagement on both sides of the border. The article concludes with an examination of the history and the unintended consequences of border politics, and offers policy recommendations to begin to reverse the ongoing slide into Talibanization.

The Role of Hierarchy in International Politics

Abstract: In “Escape from the State of Nature: Authority and Hierarchy in World Politics,” David Lake makes a strong case that hierarchy matters.1 Building on his previous work on the subject,2 he argues that security and economic hierarchy fundamentally constrain the security behavior of subordinate states in international politics. His approach to the topic, however, raises a variety of questions about how best to deane, measure, and test the effect of hierarchy in international politics.

Defensive Realism and the “New” History of World War I

Abstract: Keir Lieber argues that new historical research undermines the claims of defensive realists and offense-defense theorists about the origins of World War I.1 Because those theories have relied heavily on the war as an illustrative case, Lieber says this “new history” undermines their persuasiveness more generally. Lieber does a service by alerting International Security readers to these recent historical works. There is nothing in this new historical research, however, that undermines the “cult of the offensive” interpretation of the origins of World War I or defensive realism generally. The most important anding of the new research is that German military planners were well aware that their offense strategy might not end the war quickly. The literature on the cult of the offensive made the same point in 1984 and incorporated the implications of this into its overall arguments. Indeed, Stig Förster, the most important source for this claim, explicitly endorses my argument about the origins of the offensive German plan in the military’s self-serving organizational ideology.2 Lieber asserts that “common depictions of World War I being triggered by a ‘cult of the offensive,’ a ‘short-war illusion,’ spiral dynamics, or preemptive strike incentives do not accord with the empirical record. Instead, the evidence suggests that German leaders went to war in 1914 with eyes wide open. They provoked a war to achieve their goal of dominating the European continent, and did so aware that the coming conoict would be long and bloody. They neither misjudged the nature of modern military technology nor attacked out of fear of Germany’s enemies moving arst” (p. 156). What the cult of the offensive literature actually argued is that European militaries promoted a belief in the necessity of the offensive strategies, which increased both security fears and the lure of conquest among European military strategists, political leadCorrespondence: The “New” History of World War I

ASEAN, Regional Integration, and State Sovereignty

Abstract: David Martin Jones and Michael Smith argue that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is only “making process, not progress.”1 In their view, ASEAN scholars and regional scholars who have faith in the development of an ASEAN community should nonetheless acknowledge that the association has not achieved much in three important areas: economic integration, antiterrorism cooperation, and relations with China. Jones and Smith’s critical article deserves credit for revisiting these issues; the authors, however, have an incomplete understanding of ASEAN. With regard to economic integration and antiterrorism cooperation, Jones and Smith are making issues out of nonissues. In other words, most ASEAN scholars and regional scholars would probably not object to the claim that ASEAN diplomacy has not borne fruit in these two areas, but this is not surprising given that they are new areas of cooperation for its members. Nor does this lack of progress necessarily lead to the conclusion that ASEAN is insigniacant. More likely, the scholars’ main focus is on the activities of the Southeast Asian countries in the security aeld, for example, intraregional conadence building and the management of ASEAN’s relations with external powers. In this respect, I have two main concerns regarding Jones and Smith’s claim that ASEAN’s attempt to promote its norms has been manipulated by China. First, the authors do not acknowledge ASEAN’s success in socializing Beijing into its cooperative security norm. Second, this oversight has profound implications for determining the most serious security threat in Southeast Asia—the human security threat—and for understanding the complexity of this threat.

Time and the Intractability of Territorial Disputes

Abstract: what’s time got to do with it? Time seems integral to Hassner’s theory, creating intractable territorial disputes through three processes. First, conquered territory undergoes material entrenchment, as lines of transportation and communication link territory to the core of the state. Second, functional processes, such as mapping, make borders less ambiguous and less negotiable. Third, time creates symbolic attachments: as individuals aght, live, and die in conquered land, they construct myths to legitimate their territorial claims. Although Hassner’s arguments are intuitively plausible, it is unclear what effect time really has in his theory. Neither the duration of a territorial conoict nor a lack of settlement proves that disputes become more intractable over time. For example, territorial conoict could endure because initial conditions make it difacult to solve. Hassner claims that he controls for these conditions and that variables such as initial power and material value are unrelated to the conoict’s duration or resolution (p. 114 n. 19). But by his own account, it is initial perceptions of territorial value and cohesion that most affect the dispute’s entrenchment. If this is the case, it is not time but actors’ existing perceptions that make territorial disputes persist: conoict is not entrenched; it starts out as more difacult to solve. Hassner might respond that although initial perceptions explain variable rates of entrenchment, entrenchment occurs in all conoicts, even if the territory is initially perceived as worthless. Thus entrenchment is not reducible to initial conditions. This argument would be more convincing if Hassner provided evidence that disputes become intractable in the absence of initial perceptions. His two cases where initial perceptions of value are absent—Antarctica and the Spratly Islands—exhibit no entrench-

Of Polarity and Polarization

Abstract: Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz argue that bipartisan support for liberal internationalism in U.S. foreign policy is gone for the foreseeable future, and that the United States should trim its grand strategic ambitions accordingly.1 Their article is timely and insightful, but has three major oaws: (1) claims that are unsupported by the evidence, (2) endogeneity issues that obscure causal relationships, and (3) pessimistic conclusions that do not follow from the analysis. First, Kupchan and Trubowitz’s claims exceed the evidence with respect to economic forces and gerrymandering. They contend that the rise of foreign policy moderates was caused by economic growth, which acted as a balm to ease tensions, and the economic downturn of the 1970s dealt a heavy blow to moderates (pp. 19, 23).2 Contrary to their logic, however, the remarkable economic rallies in the 1980s and 1990s correlate with serious weakening of moderates. So, too, blaming partisan polarization on gerrymandering lacks support. Unaided by redistricting, the Senate has polarized just as the House of Representatives has. Although the number of competitive congressional districts declined in the mid-1960s and generally stayed low in the 1970s and 1980s, this number actually increased in the 1990s, an era of pronounced partisanship.3 Second, the independent variables in the article may be less independent than they Correspondence: Of Polarity and Polarization

Do Small Arsenals Deter

Abstract: Ward Wilson’s article “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima” provides a startling explanation for the end of World War II in East Asia.1 Wilson argues that, contrary to established wisdom, Japan’s decision to surrender stemmed not from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but from the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan on August 8, 1945. He bases his argument on the following propositions: (1) in the context of the massive destruction caused by the conventional bombing of Japanese cities at the time, the atomic bomb was not qualitatively different; (2) the havoc caused by these attacks did not undermine Japan’s determination to press on with the war in hopes of obtaining favorable terms of surrender; (3) the Japanese leadership’s reaction to the devastation of Hiroshima does not reoect a perception that the atomic bomb was decisive in its effects; and (4) in contrast, the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, by eliminating available options for a favorable end, compelled Japan to surrender quickly. Wilson’s analysis concludes that small nuclear arsenals may not deter aggressors. Whereas large nuclear forces may have such a capability (200 weapons is where the author draws the line), “the logic of deterrence may be different where small arsenals are concerned. If destroying one or two cities does not coerce an opponent, then perhaps the threat of limited nuclear retaliation does not deter when the stakes are high enough” (p. 179). In short, small nuclear powers are inherently unstable and, logically (though the author does not state this explicitly), such states can achieve deterrence stability only if they expand their armories. Wilson’s basic argument about the Japanese decision is a plausible one, drawing considerable evidence from archival sources, though it is thin with respect to the Soviet factor, as only a single source is cited (pp. 174–175). I question, however, his inference regarding the requirements of deterrence today. Contrary to Wilson’s claim, the size of a nuclear arsenal does not matter, and more speciacally, small arsenals are adequate for obtaining deterrence. A review of how nuclear powers behave when war is nigh demonstrates that the concept of “assured second-strike capability” based on the capacity to inoict casualties into the millions is a mythical notion that does not accord with histori-