The Vision of War without Casualties

Abstract

Casualty aversion is understood to be one major factor influencing the way Western democracies have been fighting theirwars since the end of the cold war. However, only a few studies have systematically tested its influence on state behavior. Consequently, important questions about the scope and depth of its relevance remain unanswered. This study opens up a new way of testing the casualty hypothesis by systematically comparing 587 advertisements for weapon systems placed in fifteen volumes of Jane's International Defence Reviewby Western-style democracies. The authors suggest that casualty aversion is an important argument in the advertisement of Western defense industrial companies for modern weapon systems and has grown in importance since the end of the cold war. Their findings are based on a multivariate analysis in which they control for the most prominent factors brought forward in the current casualty aversion debate.