Political factors like pain tolerance decide wars but get excluded from strategic analysis

Evidence

In the same way, political factors that would have influenced the outcome of a limited war were left out of most analyses of the strategic balance. We hardly need to be reminded that the victor in Vietnam was incomparably weaker than its adversary on all standard military indicators. The outcome of any war that ends through negotiations will be strongly influenced by the stakes each side has in the conflict, each side’s willingness to bear pain, each side’s fear that the war will continue and grow even more destructive, and each side’s perception of how the other side stands on these dimensions (see Jervis, 1984). But since these factors—which may be highly situation-specific—are so hard to estimate and complicate analysis enormously, they too are neglected. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2611

Categorization

• XREF: This foreshadows the later literature on ‘resolve’ — the bargaining theory of war (Fearon, Schelling) turned this intuition into formal models.
• SHARE: For anyone who studies bargaining theory or rationalist explanations of war — this is an early pre-formalization statement of resolve-based accounts.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2611