How to Stop a War

by James F. Dunnigan, William Martel

Two leading experts in high-level war games reveal remarkably consistent patterns that lead to war, dissect the six stages of every war, and explain how to avert major conflicts

298 pages, Hardcover

First published September 16, 1987

Reviews

[Max Lybbert]

I read this book because I couldn't think of any case where sanctions had prevented a war (I could think of cases where sanctions had been placed on a country and no war resulted -- such as the US embargo on Cuba -- but, in those cases, I didn't think sanctions should take the credit for the lack of war). To be clear: this book doesn't even mention sanctions, but it does mention things that have an actual track record of working -- such as giving disgruntled populations territory and autonomy.

Like the cover says, the book draws lessons from roughly four hundred conflicts and almost-conflicts from between 1787 and 1987. The longest chapter in the book is named Data Base, and consists of the raw data used in the analysis, organized in what looks like spreadsheets (for the record: no, I did not actually read every page of that chapter).

James Dunnigan has consulted with the US military and has written several books about the military and "dirty little secrets" about various wars. But I know him from his published war games. As Dunnigan explains in The Complete Wargames Handbook: How to Play, Design, and Find Them, war games are simple war simulations, and war game design involves rating things like military prowess, willingness to negotiate, and weapon quality; a skill that came in handy when compiling data for this book. I don't know much about William C. Martell, other than the fact that he worked for RAND when the book was published, and has published several other books.

The book itself is well-written, entertaining and insightful. It was published in 1987 so the Cold War plays a prominent role. Even so, the book's lessons still apply.

[Jay]

When I was a tween and teen, my friends and I were heavily into boardgaming, which is playing wargames on a map spread over a table. We got into that hobby during its golden age of the early '70s through early '80s, and Jim Dunnigan and his New York City-based company, SPI (Simulations Publications Inc.) were one of the two main forces in the industry, the other one being Baltimore's Avalon-Hill.

My love of recreating and re-fighting battles in game form--in essence, reducing them to date and modeling the engagement--led me to go to work in the mid-'80s for a company where I could do that for a living. Through the tutelage of my mentor, Col. Trevor Dupuy, I learned about numerical analysis and all the various models of combat theory that had been evolved since the advent of the field of operations research in the 1940s--Lanchester's equations, Markov modeling, Monte Carlo simulations, stochastic versus deterministic...you get the idea. We got to create huge historical databases of wars and battles in order to mine them for the numerical data we needed for simulations, and that meant reading tons of history books and hundreds of trips to the National Archives. This is stuff I was doing for fun anyway, and now someone was paying me to do it! It was a great time.

Anyway, this book by Dunnigan is one of a series he wrote--How to Make War, A Quick and Dirty Guide to War, How to Play and Design Commercial and Professional Wargames, etc.--that use the same kind of numerical analysis we were doing at HERO. It goes into the numbers in order to back up his conclusions, but Dunnigan overlays some social theory on top of the numbers to try to explain why the numbers mean what they do. For someone like me who sees the world as data, where everything (and everyone) is just an entity with attributes and methods, it's a fun read and a great validation of my world view. And it helps make sense of human behavior, which is something I'm not very good at understanding.