notes-politics-war

What is the nature of the game-theoretic conditions that favor war?

In Spamhaus vs. Cyberbunker, we see something that looks like war. But it shows few of the usual things we associate with war; death, governments, guns. This example helps us pare down our concept of war to its game-theoretic essentials.

War seems to be a situation in which there are multiple entities organized into two or more sides in which at least one of these entities is or has been threatened by other(s), in which each party has means of destruction to an extent great enough that there seems to be some chance that another party's policy might be affected by the threat of it, in which one or more sides feel that the stakes are great enough to enter an 'ends justify the means' mentality in which 'collateral damage' which would normally be seen as immoral is seen as acceptable and in which third parties who trade with the enemy, even if not doing anything more threatening than that, are seen as potential targets of attack by the enemies of their trade partners.

Note that a key part of this is the potential for the unwilling drawing-in of third parties. If this is not present (if no party feels that the ends justify the means w/r/t third parties), i would call it a fight but not a war. It's possible to have a fight to the death or a dirty fight without that being a war.

(some problems with this definition: 'trade with' is overly narrow (what about donations of communications services?) and also overly broad (dunno if its really a war if you only target the enemy and their weapons merchants, but not other merchants who trade them raw materials for them to build their own weapons); 'the ends justify the means' is just a shorthand; there may be parties who feel that philosophically, the ends justify the means, but that the present situation does not justify deviating from commonly accepted rule-based ethical norms nor does it justify threatening to do so, in which case they are not really acting as if 'the ends justify the means')

This definition fits well with a common definition of terrorism; terrorism is when you target civilians directly (rather than just allow them as collateral damage). This can be seen as a special case of targetting third parties who trade with the enemy. Perhaps there is a spectrum of what the target trades/how free they were; if you only directly target people who willingly make weapons for the enemy, some see that as not so bad; if you directly target people who are forced to pay taxes to the enemy (terrorism), that's seen as worse.

Above, i say "at least one of these entities is or has been threatened by other(s)". Will any degree of threat do or must the threat be existential? I think it's possible for two entites to have a war without either one feeling very threatened, provided that third parties are unwillingly drawn in, however, it's unlikely to turn out this way; if the entities are willing to involve third parties, then the contest is probably very important to them

A more compact and general definition might be "a situation in which two or more entities take sides and threaten with destructive force not just their enemies, but also neutral third parties who assist their enemies, thereby causing a 'with us or against us' dilemma for third parties (see [1]).".