Coalitions in Battle: Sharing Battlespace and Organizing to Fight

• In Event: Foreign Military Interaction

Abstract

Under what conditions do states fight together on the battlefield? When they choose to fight together, how do they initially organize themselves to execute combined operations? Existing literature on multinational coalitions offers myriad explanations for why states fight wars alongside one another and contribute to shared war efforts, but says little about why non-institutionalized coalition partners sometimes share battlespace during combat actions and how matters of sovereignty, operational capacity, and strategy are resolved in such settings. Such dynamics, to the extent they are addressed, are typically conceived of in one-sided terms that seek to explain outcomes as a function of the dispositional characteristics of individual coalition members. This is problematic for at least two reasons. First, many of the coalition members’ dispositional characteristics that are thought to matter—regime type, economic development, and the like—do not change over the course of a war while their participation in shared battlespace combat operations and systems of organizing multinational forces do. Second, factors like leader insecurity and time horizon considerations that do vary over the course of wars ignore the fact that decisions to fight in the same battlespace and organize systems for ensuring effective combat operations require, at minimum, dyadic international, inter-military, and interpersonal negotiation and collective decision making. We seek to set the agenda for a new research program investigating why non-institutionalized coalition partners sometimes choose to fight together in the same battlespace and how they organize to facilitate the efficient and effective achievement of joint combat objectives. Drawing on a wide array of discrete scholarly traditions, we propose initial hypotheses that address political, organizational, strategic, operational, and tactical level considerations that condition both why coalitions sometimes fight battles together and how they choose to organize themselves when doing so. We then provide initial assessments of our hypotheses using a series of mini cases drawn from our new Belligerents in Battle Dataset.

Authors

• Rosella Cappella, Boston University

• Ryan D. Grauer, University of Pittsburgh