Unfortunately, wars are again all the rage. It’s difficult to find good political economy commentary on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, possible incursions into Taiwan by the CCP, and the like because military history, and its buddy economic history, were casualties of university culture wars decades ago. Few people study the “sinews of war,” the connection between economic and military outcomes, anymore because it just doesn’t fit easily into Woke U curricula. That’s a shame because perspectives from military economic history could help policymakers to make better policies, ones that lead to less blood and treasure being spilt.
Anybody conversant with the writings of Frederic Bastiat knows that wars, or in other words lots of broken windows and shattered lives, hurt the economy. But sometimes wars have to be fought nonetheless. The United States used to have substantial checks against entering into hostilities without due cause. Today, not so much, which makes winning the many armed conflicts it enters as cheaply as possible more important than ever.
Many of America’s recent military victories have been Pyrrhic in that it (arguably) successfully achieved objectives, but only at tremendous cost. One might object that the country’s “safety” or “freedom” are priceless, but if those same objectives had been achieved more cheaply by other means, resources would have been freed up to achieve additional national security objectives. Inefficiency always lurks, an unseen but substantial additional foe.
Consider, for example, the recent decision to send $40 billion in arms and ammunition to Ukraine. Maybe it will bring an end to the war by signaling to Putin that America means business. Maybe it will just prolong the conflict. Maybe prolonging the war is what some Americans want. If that is the case, $40 billion might just be the first of many installments totalling hundreds of billions and perhaps eventually trillions of dollars. If that sounds like an exaggeration, remember inflation runs rampant and that the U.S. spent over $2 trillion and over $2.3 trillion prosecuting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively.
How else might the United States have spent the $40 billion it sent to Ukraine? Well, $40 billion divided by the 280,000 Russian soldiers is over $140,000 each. Could America have ended the war by offering money directly to Russian soldiers to defect to the West?
Recent history suggests yes, though what one researcher recently called “an analytical blind spot” makes making the case more difficult than perhaps it ought to be.
In March, Ukraine offered Russian soldiers 5 million rubles to lay down their arms and additional funds, in the millions of dollars, for turning over military equipment when they surrender. The offer was not easily disseminated to Russian troops, however, and was not widely perceived as credible. Plus, it would mean living in Ukraine during and after the war. Nevertheless, the incentives worked in at least one case, when a Russian turned in his tank for $10,000.
According to one of the few studies focusing on past attempts to harness defection, promises must be communicated to enemy troops in credible ways and the total compensation, including amnesty and future region of residence, must be adequate, while remaining credible. The U.S. could make a more credible commitment than Ukraine to pay what is promised, plus provide a path to a more attractive U.S. or EU citizenship. With Ukrainian help, it might have a better chance of using fancy technology, like leaflets dropped from drones, to get the offer in front of Russian troops with the lowest morale.
History provides additional examples of harnessing the power of defection to weaken opposing armies.
During the U.S. Civil War, Union general Benjamin F. Butler offered slaves working on Confederate fortification projects military protection and paid work if they defected to the North. Hundreds of them soon fled to Fort Monroe, the strategic Union stronghold at the confluence of the James River and Chesapeake Bay in Virginia that Butler commanded. Although technically “contraband of war” owned by the Union military, the slaves knew they were better off working for the North than the South. The British had employed a similar strategy during the American Revolution.
The number of “contraband” runaways swelled during the Civil War to the point that although the vast majority of slave conscripts had been relegated to non-combat roles in the Confederate Army, their shift from working for the South to working and fighting for the North helped to speed the Union’s victory. Armies need cooks and ditch diggers as much as they need generals.
Victory might have come more quickly, and cheaply, if Lincoln had considered paying poor white Southerners not to fight rather than paying much richer plantation owners for their slaves. Many poor Confederate soldiers deserted or defected anyway. Some 6,000 of the so-called “Galvanized Yankees” joined the Union Army and were dispatched to the West to fight Indians and protect transportation routes to the Pacific states.
Defection (going over to the other side) and desertion (fleeing military service) have both influenced the course of many military conflicts, including the Russian Civil War (1918-22), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the struggle for Slovenia and the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and the wars for the Korean peninsula, Southeast Asia, and hundreds of millions of hearts and minds worldwide during the Cold War. Various forms of military insubordination, including desertion and defection, also played major, if still somewhat murky, roles during the Arab Spring.
In many cases, no payment was needed to induce conscripts to flip, or at least stand down. In some instances, however, the United States employed seldom studied strategies designed to induce enemy defection and desertion during the American Revolution, the Philippine insurgency, and the Vietnam war, among other conflicts. The Chieu Hoi Program allegedly resulted in “the defection and neutralization of over 194,000 VC/NVA” in Vietnam between 1963 and 1971. In the Philippines, the Economic Development Program (EDCOR) promised rebels who surrendered themselves and their arms amnesty, land, and agricultural capital on the underpopulated island of Mindanao.
Other nations have also paid poor soldiers to sit out conflicts that did not directly affect their personal interests. Most famously, though vastly outnumbered, British Colonel Robert Clive won the Battle of Plassey in the Bengal section of India in 1757 in part because a rich Hindu known as the Jagat Seth (“banker to the world”), paid about a third of the enemy soldiers to not join the fight. It helped that the soldiers were headed by a traitor who had been promised a leadership spot if the British prevailed and that the loyal Indian troops did not manage to keep their powder dry during a timely downpour.
British attempts to pacify rebels in Malaya proved less successful than they might have, however, because their promises to help defectors “to regain their normal life” were too vague. That was a shame because, as one study of defection inducement strategy noted in 1971, “defection saves human lives on both sides.”
All is fair, they say, in love and war but what strategies will be most likely to work cannot be known in advance because many factors are at play, including an unknowable critical mass or tipping point at which military units dissolve via mutiny or surrender, as Iraqi units did during both Gulf wars. National histories, religious and ethnic divisions, and customs may play a role too. Some 500 U.S. soldiers of Irish birth, for example, defected to the side of their fellow Catholics during the Mexican-American War (1846-48) and took up arms against their former comrades. Apparently, switching sides is a well-accepted practice in Afghanistan but punishable by summary execution in other places, including the former Soviet Union, which employed “blocking units” to dissuade deserters.
In short, we cannot know if paying Russians not to fight in Ukraine would work without actually trying it. Perhaps Russian conscripts are not as demoralized as claimed, or, maybe, knowing what happened to the families of deserters and defectors in Chechnya (2000-2005), they fear too much for the fate of their families. Of course policy success or failure will occur at the margin but on its face a $140,000 average payment seems like it would be a sufficient trigger as, despite the recent inflation, it remains a good chunk of cash, even for most Americans.
The point here is that U.S. policymakers did not even have a discussion about defection because too many self-proclaimed experts, many beholden to interests within the military-industrial complex, pound on the save Ukraine at any expense mantra coming out of the Roosevelt Room. It’s like Covid policy censorship all over again. And that bodes ill for America’s national debt, national security, and national sanity.
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