Learning from losing: How defeat shapes coalition dynamics in wartime

ABSTRACT

When and why do coalitions adapt in wartime? Drawing on insights from organizational research and bargaining theories of war, this paper develops a model of coalitional military adaptation. I argue that coalition members are slow to adjust their wartime fighting arrangements owing to collective action problems as well as the military and political practicalities inherent in coalition warfare. I illustrate my argument with a case study of the Austro-German coalition in World War I.

KEYWORDS:

• Coalitions
• military adaptation
• wartime learning

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Ryan Grauer, Rosella Cappella, Stefanie von Hlatky, Dan Reiter, as well as anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Patricia Weitsman, ‘Alliance Cohesion and Coalition Warfare’, Security Studies 12/3 (Spring 2003), 79.

² The focus here is on battlefield coalitions, configurations which arise when units from more than one political community operate in a shared battlespace. On the distinction between alliances, wartime coalitions, and battlefield coalitions, see Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Ryan Grauer, ‘Understanding Battlefield Coalitions’ (this issue) and Patricia Weitsman, ‘Alliances,’ in Keith Dowding (ed.), Encyclopedia of Power (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage 2011), 14–17. On military adaptation, see: Williamson Murray, Military Adaptation in War: With Fear of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011), 2; and Theo Farrell, Frans Osinga, and James Russell, (eds.), Military Adaptation in Afghanistan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2013). Following Murray, I use the term innovation for peacetime changes and adaptation for wartime changes.

³ David Auerswald and Stephen Saideman, NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2014).

⁴ Dan Reiter, ‘Learning, Realism, and Alliances: The Weight of the Shadow of the Past’, World Politics 46/4 (July 1994), 490–526; and Alex Weisiger, ‘Learning from the Battlefield: Information, Domestic Politics, and Interstate War Duration’, International Organization 70/2 (March 2016), 347–375

⁵ Alfred Chandler, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1962); Richard Cyert and James March, A Behavior Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1963). James March and Johan Olsen, ‘The Uncertainty of the Past: Organizational Learning Under Ambiguity’, European Journal of Political Research 3 (1975), 147–171; and James Wilson, ‘Innovation in Organizations: Notes Toward a Theory’, in James Thompson (ed.), Approaches to Organizational Design (University of Pittsburgh Press 1966), 193–218.

⁶ Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: Free Press 1988); and James Fearon, ‘Rationalist Explanations for War’, International Organization 49/3 (1995), 379–414.

⁷ Weisiger, ‘Learning from the Battlefield’; See also Eric Min,‘Speaking with One Voice,’ this issue.

⁸ Adam Grissom, ‘The Future of Military Innovation Studies’, Journal of Strategic Studies 29/5 (2006), 920–4; and Theo Farrell, ‘Improving in War: Military Adaptation and the British in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2006–2009’, Journal of Strategic Studies 33/4 (2010), 567–594.

⁹ Murray, Military Adaptation in War, 6; Farrell, ‘Improving in War’, 571; David Barno and Nora Bensahel, Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime (New York: Oxford University Press 2020), 3. For the argument that defeat in wartime is not necessary for innovation, see Stephen Rosen, ‘New Ways of Understanding War: Understanding Military Innovation’, International Security 13/1 (Summer 1988), 135.

¹⁰ Grissom, ‘The Future of Military Innovation Studies’, 907; Farrell, ‘Improving in War,’ 569; and Murray, Military Adaptation in War, 28, 98; and Barno and Bensahel, Adaptation Under Fire, 9.

¹¹ James March, The Ambiguities of Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2010), 2; Royston Greenwood and C.R. Hinings, ‘Organizational Design Types, Tracks and the Dynamics of Strategic Change’, Organizational Studies 9/3 (1988), 293–316; and Bo Hedberg, ‘How organizations learn and unlearn’, in Paul C. Nystrom and William H. Starbuck (eds.), Handbook of Organizational Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1981).

¹² March, The Ambiguities of Experience, 6.

¹³ I thus exclude adaption that involves changes to only individual militaries that may be part of a coalition.

¹⁴ This definition departs from existing conceptualisations of military adaptation in one important way: it is agnostic on the issue of whether the adaptation in question improves the performance of the organisation.organisation Grissom, ‘The Future of Military Innovation Studies’, 906–7; Barno and Bensahel, Adaptation Under Fire, 9, 22; and Farrell, ‘Improving in War’, 567–9.

¹⁵ Scott Gartner, Strategic Assessment in War (New Haven: Yale University Press 1997); and Weisiger, ‘Learning from the Battlefield’, 350–1.

¹⁶ Barno and Bensahel likewise argue that ‘disruptive shock(s) on the battlefield’ led to doctrinal adaptation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Farrell, ‘Improving in War’, 510; Murray, Military Adaptation in War, 6; and Barno and Bensahel, Adaptation Under Fire, 3.

¹⁷ In contrast, Min,‘Speaking with One Voice’ (this issue) argues that that battlefield losses can prompt coalition members to seek a negotiated exit. Empirically, coalition defection remains quite rare, with most cases occurring when countries are fighting alone on a front. Alex Weisiger, ‘Exiting the Coalition: When Do States Abandon Coalition Partners during War?’ International Studies Quarterly 60/4 (December 2016), 753–765.

¹⁸ Another variable of interest is regime type. A large research agenda argues that democracies exhibit lower levels of tolerance for casualties than do non-democracies. Hugh Smith, ‘What Costs Will Democracies Bear? A Review of Popular Theories of Casualty Aversion’, Armed Forces and Society 32/4 (2005), 487–512.

¹⁹ While losses incurred by a coalition partner in another theater of war are likely to also be viewed with alarm, defeats occurring in a shared battlespace will cause fellow coalition members greater anxiety because the consequences for their own situation are more immediate.

²⁰ Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1965).

²¹ Grissom, ‘The Future of Military Innovation Studies’.

²² Some states also worry today’s friend could become tomorrow’s enemy. Nora Bensahel, ‘The Coalition Paradox: The Politics of Military Cooperation’, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford, 1999; and Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Structural Realism after the Cold War’, International Security 25 (Summer 2000) 10.

²³ Rosen, ‘New Ways of Understanding War’, 140.

²⁴ Martin Van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1985), 9; Kenneth Allard, Command, Control, and the Common Defense (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University 1996),18; and Anthony J. Rice, ‘Command and Control: The Essence of Coalition Warfare’, Parameters (Spring 1997), 152–67.

²⁵ See Moller, Fighting Friends, 88–89; and Daniel Morey, ‘Military Coalitions and the Outcome of Interstate Wars’, Foreign Policy Analysis 12 (2016), 536.

²⁶ Grauer identifies four ideal-type organisational forms based on differentiation and centralisation, while Grauer and Cappella Zielinski, following Chandler, distinguish between two broad types: unitary form (U-form) and multidivisional (M-form) command structures. Ryan Grauer, Commanding Military Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016); Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Ryan Grauer, ‘Organizing for performance: coalition effectiveness on the battlefield’, European Journal of International Relations 26/4 (December 2020), 953–978.

²⁷ U.S. doctrine identifies three types of multinational command arrangements, called integrated; lead nation; and parallel; while NATO uses the terms fully integrated; lead nation; and framework nation. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 1: Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States, II-22; Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Publication 3–16: Multinational Operations, II-4, II-15; North Atlantic Treaty Organization, AJP-01 (D): Allied Joint Doctrine, 3–4, 3–5.

²⁸ Morey also adopts a triptych typology but calls the second category ‘joint command.’ Because ‘joint’ doctrinally refers to inter-service coordination, not cross-national coordination, I use the term ‘combined.’ Morey, ‘Centralized Command and Coalition Victory’, 721–22.

²⁹ Independent command structures do not preclude operational cooperation between militaries, though often it will make it more difficult. See Moller, ‘Fighting Friends’, 73.

³⁰ During the Lopez War (1864–70), Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay agreed to rotate command based on geography. Command of all operations undertaken within Argentine territory or along the Argentinian-Paraguay border was assigned to the Argentinean commander, while command of all other operations was given to the Brazilian commander. Chris Leuchars, To the Bitter End: Paraguay and the War of the Triple Alliance (Westport: Greenwood Press 2002), 44, 164, 178; Thomas Whigham, The Paraguayan War: Causes, and Early Conduct, vol. 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2002), 357–9.

³¹ Rice, ‘Command and Control’, 156.

³² Patricia Weitsman, Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions and Institutions of Interstate Violence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2014), 18, 190; Moller, ‘Fighting Friends’, 83–85, 115; Cappella Zielinski and Grauer, ‘Organizing for Performance’, 954; Weitsman, ‘Alliance Cohesion and Coalition Warfare’, 104; Morey, ‘Centralized Command and Coalition Victory’, 730; and Grieco, ‘Fighting and Learning in the Great War’, 33.

³³ Perfect unity of command is never fully achieved in coalitions since some military authorities are never relinquished. Moller, ‘Fighting Friends’, 70–79.

³⁴ Richard Leighton, ‘Allied Unity of Command in the Second World War: A Study in Regional Military Organization’, Political Science Quarterly 67/3 (September 1952), 399–425.

³⁵ All adaptation in war in at least one sense begins on the battlefield since that is where the impetus for improved performance originates.

³⁶ Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006); Grieco, ‘Fighting and Learning in the Great War’; and Michael Hunzeker, ‘Perfecting War: The Organizational Sources of Doctrinal Optimization’, PhD dissertation, Princeton Univ., 2013.

³⁷ Jack Levy, ‘Case Studies: Types, Designs, and Logics of Inference’, Conflict Management and Peace Science 25 (February 2008), 1–18.

³⁸ While the Austro-Hungarian armies were multiethnic as well as multilingual, the language of command (Kommandosprache) was German. Richard Bassett, For God and Kaiser: The Imperial Austrian Army (New Haven: Yale University Press 2016), 367.

³⁹ Holger Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austro-Hungary,1914–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 53.

⁴⁰ Hew Strachan, The First World War: To Arms vol.1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 350–7; Herwig, The First World War, 89; Ronald Louis. ‘The Tragic Alliance: Austro-German Military Cooperation, 1871–1918’, PhD dissertation, Columbia Univer., 1970, 143, 148. Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914–1917 (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1975), 88.

⁴¹ Among the dead was Conrad’s son, Herbert, who fell at the Battle of Ravaruska. Russian losses are estimated at 290,000. Herwig, The First World War, 92, 94–95; Stone, The Eastern Front, 90–1; Strachan, The First World War: To Arms 354–6; Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1494–2007, 3^rd ed., (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 436–7.

⁴² Without informing Conrad, Hindenburg ordered the Ninth Army to retreat all the way to Thorn, near the Silesian border. The Austrians were thus forced to pull their own forces back to the Dunjac-Biala line, the very line along which they had launched their offensive. OULK, vol. 1, 534–8. 548; Prit Buttar, Collision of Empires; The War on the Eastern Front in 1914 (Oxford: Osprey Group 2014), 349–353.

⁴³ The Russians by contrast lost 70,000. Buttar, Collision of Empires, 355.

⁴⁴ Despite the unusual arrangement, the offensive was to be an entirely German-managed affair, with Woyrsch’s forces tasked with protecting Mackensen’s southern flank. Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, ed., Österreich-Ungarns Letzter Krieg, 1914–1918 [Austria-Hungary’s Last War, 1914–1918, 7 vols.] Translated by Stan Hanna. Vienna: Publisher of Military Science Releases, 1930, vol. 1, 562. (Hereafter, OULK). Ernharth, ‘The Tragic Alliance’, 164–5; and Buttar, Collision of Empires, 224.

⁴⁵ Strachan, The First World War: To Arms, 370–2; Stone, The Eastern Front, 105–6; OULK, vol. 1, 582–4, 603; Herwig, The First World War, 109; and Winston Churchill, The Unknown War: The Eastern Front (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1931), 264.

⁴⁶ Ernharth, ‘The Tragic Alliance’, 168, 172; Herwig, The First World War, 111; and Richard DiNardo, Breakthrough: The Gorlice-Tarnow Campaign, 1915 (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger 2010), 21–2.

⁴⁷ Ernharth, ‘The Tragic Alliance’, 179–80; OULK, vol. 2, 117–119.

⁴⁸ DiNardo, Breakthrough, 25; Herwig, The First World War, 137; and Graydon Tunstall, Blood on the Snow: The Carpathian Winter War of 1915 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2020), 3, 99.

⁴⁹ OULK, vol 2, 508–559, 660–1; Dinardo, Breakthrough, 83, 99, 132–3.

⁵⁰ OULK vol. 4, 466, 482, 494; Herwig, The First World War, 209; and Falkenhayn, General Headquarters, 249.

⁵¹ OULK vol. 4, 503–4.

⁵² Nicholas Golovin, ‘Brusilov’s Offfensive: The Galician Battle of 1916’, The Slavonic and East European Review 13 (April 1935), 585–6.

⁵³ OULK, vol. 5, 132–3; Herwig, The First World War, 215; Falkenhayn, General Headquarters, 250–52, 272; August von Cramon, Unser Österreich-Ungarischer Bundesgenosse im Weltkriege (Berlin: E.S. Mittler 1920), 66–70; and Hermann Cronn, Geschichte des deutschen Heeres im Welkrieg 1914–1918 (Berlin: Siegismund 1937), 55.

⁵⁴ Although the Kaiser was assigned the title of ‘Supreme Commander,’ Hindenburg and Ludendorff were in charge. By September 1916, the only Austro-Hungarian unit not directly under German control on the Eastern Front was Archduke Karl’s Army Group. However, here too, Berlin managed to exert its influence by insisting that Seeckt serve as Karl’s chief of staff. Herwig, The First World War, 215.

⁵⁵ Ernharth, ‘The Tragic Alliance’, 47.

⁵⁶ Falkenhayn, General Headquarters, 20

⁵⁷ Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts, 437.

⁵⁸ Ernharth, ‘The Tragic Alliance’, 160; OULK vol 1, 477.

⁵⁹ OUL vol 1, 53, Buttar, Collision of Empires, 211.

⁶⁰ Hindenburg and Ludendorff were not alone. Falkenhayn also supported giving the Ninth Army ‘greater liberty of movement’ from the Austrians. Falkenhayn, General Headquarters, 27; and OULK, vol 1, 552–3.

⁶¹ Falkenhayn, General Headquarters, 53–55; Ernharth, ‘The Tragic Alliance’, 179–80; OULK vol 2, 117.

⁶² During the course of the campaign, Linsingen refused to follow the agreed upon chain of command and report to AOK, reporting instead to the OHL in Posen. Tunstall, Blood on the Snow, 193; OULK vol. 2., 131, 163–5.

⁶³ Cramon, Unser Österreich-Ungarischer Bundesgenosse im Weltkriege, 10.

⁶⁴ The Austro-Hungarian Second Army was latter added to Mackensen’s command, as well. The command arrangements for Gorlice-Tarnow did not achieve perfect unity of command, however. Although Mackensen was put in charge of the entire operation, at Conrad’s insistence Falkenhayn agreed to have him subordinated to the AOK provided the Austrian’s first consulted OHL before issuing any orders. In practice, however, the AOK functioned as little more than a transmission belt. Herwig, The First World War, 141–6; Gordon Craig, ‘The World War I Alliance of the Central Powers in Retrospect: The Military Cohesion of the Alliance,’ Journal of Military History 37 (Sep., 1965), 342; DiNardo, Breakthrough, 42, 97; OULK vol 2. 327.

⁶⁵ While Conrad attacked in the direction of the Lutsk-Rovno line, Hindenburg ordered his armies to advance north of the Pripet Marches. Hart, The Great War, 157–8, f. 131, Stone, The Eastern Front, 190–1.

⁶⁶ Cramon, Unser Österreich-Ungarischer Bundesgenosse im Weltkriege, 61–66; and Krauss, Die Ursachen Unserer Niederlage, 181–5.

⁶⁷ OULK, vol 3., 602–3.

⁶⁸ OULK vol 3, 323, OULK vol 4, 205–6; and Herwig, The First World War, 159.

⁶⁹ OULK, vol 4, 503–4.

⁷⁰ OULK vol 5, 132–3; Herwig, The First World War, 214; Falkenhayn, General Headquarters, 250–2, 272; and Cramon, Unser Österreich-Ungarischer Bundesgenosse im Weltkriege, 66–70.

⁷¹ Nor was the relationship entirely one-way. During the fall 1914 operations in southwest Poland, a German corps was placed under the command of AOK. OULK, vol. 1, 403, 454, 474.

⁷² Herwig, The First World War, 108; Strachan, The First World War: To Arms vol.1, 372; and Ernharth, ‘The Tragic Alliance,’ 163.

⁷³ OULK, vol. 1, 53; Buttar, Collision of Empires, 21; Ernharth, ‘The Tragic Alliance,’ 160; OULK, vol. 1, 477.

⁷⁴ When Franz Joseph died two months later his successor, Emperor Charles I, insisted that the command be dissolved so that he could assume personal command of his armies. Because of the effect the emperor’s death had on coalition command arrangements, a German officer described the death of Franz Joseph as the ‘most serious’ event of the war short of the Battle of the Marne. Von Cramon, Unser Österreich-Ungarischer Bundesgenosse im Weltkriege, 86.

⁷⁵ Weisiger, ‘Learning from the Battlefield’.

⁷⁶ James March, ‘Footnotes to Organizational Change’, Administrative Science Quarterly 26 (1981), 564–66.

⁷⁷ Glenn Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1997).

⁷⁸ Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Ryan Grauer,‘A Century of Coalitions in Battle’ (this issue).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Bjerg Moller

Sara Bjerg Moller is an Assistant Professor at the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, where she directs the International Security specialization. She is currently completing a book manuscript on wartime coalitions. Moller has held fellowships with the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NATO Defence College, Security Studies Program at MIT, Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, and Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She received her PhD from Columbia University and has a Masters degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.