Civil-military balance of resolve: The domestic politics of withdrawal from protracted small war

This dissertation examines and seeks to explain the behavior of the powerful state engaged in small war after military intervention has proven more costly, more difficult and/or of greater duration than expected at the outset. Why do some states persist despite mounting casualties, domestic turmoil at home and little hope of victory in the foreseeable future? And why do others determine the need to cut their losses and withdraw? More broadly, this dissertation addresses the domestic politics of the powerful state under a balance of resolve framework and seeks to better specify the concept of "political will" within this framework.;Towards this end, the dissertation focuses on the causal role of military defection, defined here as the divergence of political and military leadership preferences with this divergence providing the impetus for military intervention in the political domain. The central claim is that the presence, absence or threat of military defection shapes fundamentally the content and timing of political leadership decision-making, and thus state behavior, in terms of persistence versus withdrawal.;The conventional wisdom regarding military leadership preferences and war termination decision-making posits military leadership, being driven by bureaucratic-organizational incentives, as maintaining a relatively constant preference of persistence. The present study argues that, within the context of protracted small war, military leadership preferences are often motivated to a greater extent by the demands of institutional legitimacy. The upshot is the potential for significant variation in military leadership preferences, and thus a range of military defection conditions, across cases and over time within cases.;This range on the independent variable of military defection condition helps explain variation in the content and timing of powerful state behavior. And the `military variable' does not merely represent one factor among many. The distinct domestic political dynamics associated with protracted small war tend to amplify existing avenues, and also create new avenues, through which military leadership can promote its preferences. Accordingly, military defection condition can influence outcomes directly; but it also plays a unique and powerful role in moderating the effects of other, more widely-recognized, causal factors and processes. In particular, military defection condition alters the politics of withdrawal, and thus influences small war outcomes, through the mechanisms of cost framing, elite bargaining and blame attribution.;The dissertation assesses the validity of the proposed causal logic through cross-case analysis of 21 costly, protracted small wars fought since 1945 and more detailed within-case analysis of four strategically-selected cases. The cross-case analysis looks in particular at how the novel measure of withdrawal process duration varies across different military defection conditions. This analysis yields two specific findings. First, counter to the conventional wisdom, military leadership plays a facilitating role in the war termination process at least as often as it plays an obstructionist role. Second, in aggregate, it is easier for military leadership to overcome a divergent political leadership preference than it is for political leadership to overcome a divergent military leadership preference. And this pattern holds across a wide range of political and institutional settings. The case study analysis, in turn, looks more closely at the specified causal mechanisms as they relate to these broad trends and suggests a strong causal linkage between military defection condition and powerful state behavior in terms of persistence versus withdrawal.