Dan Lindley is the 2005-06 recipient of the Kroc Faculty Associate Fellowship.

He explains his fellowship project, “Is War Rational?," below:

This project assesses the extent to which miscalculation and misperception dominate decisions for war. Is war a purposive activity of states, an act which generally increases a state’s security or wealth? If, as Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has argued, war is a rational pursuit, war initiators will tend to win their wars and the bet of war will generally "pay off." In contrast, if decisions for war are dominated by miscalculation and misperception, then outcomes will not correlate with initiation. I have found that, in the 1800s, war initiators won 73% of their wars. From 1945, initiators win less than 33% of the time.

The major conclusions from these and related findings are that:
1. The utility of war has declined markedly. War used to be a good bet. Now it is a bad bet.
2. Miscalculation and misperception have come to dominate decisions for war.
3. The rational choice approach to the study of the causes of war is undermined as the utility of war declines. My findings suggest that scholars should pay more attention to sources of miscalculation and misperception in decisions for war.
4. Policy makers should know that war is a bad bet. Apparently they do not, because the initiation rate of interstate war remains constant over time (about one every two years). If leaders continue to initiate war at a constant rate, and the payoff of war is declining dramatically, then not only are leaders miscalculating and misperceiving their way into individual wars, they are failing to learn from the overall trend against initiator victory in war. The problem of miscalculation and misperception is even greater looked at in this way.

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