Browsing by Author "Feaver, Peter D"

Examining the full set of leaders and their spouses in both China and the U.S. during the last quarter century, this paper explores how the first lady of China has become a more important position, why she has become a more public figure, how this compares with the American first lady, and why her position in China is similar to, but different from that in the U.S., in determining whether the recent change in Chinese First Ladyship is due to systematic development or just the relationship between Mrs. Xi and her husband. After investigating the current relationship in China, furthermore, this paper also intends to discuss what we can expect with the new First Ladyship in the future.

Credibility has long been a subject of interest in international relations. However, recent works minimize some of the earliest and most intriguing credibility questions. To what degree is accuracy related to credibility, do private signals exist solely in the shadow of their public counterparts or do they have credibility of their own? Moreover, how do leaders weigh concurrent public and private signals during a crisis? In this thesis, I examine the nature of public and private signals in the Cuban Missile Crisis in an inductive, qualitative manner. I find that in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis, despite some rationalist assertions, private signals are at times meaningful. Moreover, the divergences between public and private signals are limited. As such, the two exist in an interactional, almost double-helical state. This finding has distinct importance for the future of credibility scholarship.

In a democratic society, does the electorate approve of truth and disapprove of deception, do opinion patterns exclusively mimic partisan elite views, or do opinion patterns react exclusively to successful or failed outcomes? Do citizens hold leaders accountable for the perceived truthfulness of foreign policy claims or do they only evaluate whether or not the policies were successful? The existing literature on public opinion and foreign policy calls the accountability role for the public "audience costs," and specifies that concerns about audience costs constrain leaders. However, the literature is not clear on what role normative issues may play in generating audience costs. This gap in the literature is notable because so much of the debate surrounding significant policy issues, especially war-making and military action, is couched in retrospective, normative, moralizing language. These debates make no sense if the pragmatic, forward-looking dimensions of audience costs - reliability and success - are all that exist. Through a survey experiment and four historical case studies developed with primary and secondary historical sources, news articles, and polling data, I find that there is a complex dynamic at work between the public's desire for successful outcomes and the high value placed upon truth-telling and transparency within a democracy. Studying justifications for military action and war, I find that the public will be motivated to punish leaders perceived as deceptive, but that imposition of audience costs will be moderated by factors including partisanship, degree of elite unity, and the leader's damage control strategy in response to disapproval.

What is the utility and relative efficacy of positive inducements and sanctions in international politics? Are inducements and sanctions actually different or just the two sides of the same coin? How have inducements and sanctions been used and how effective have they been? My dissertation examines the effect of carrot and stick-like foreign policies in international relations. Dominant works on risk-taking and decision-making—like loss aversion – have shown that people are more sensitive to potential losses than gains, which would suggest that sanctions should be utilized more in order to achieve preferred outcomes. I find, however, that inducement policies that require concessions from the target state can be framed to gain the target state’s public support and allow target state leaders to “save face.” In contrast, I find that sanctions provoke nationalism, creating a rally around the flag effect, resulting in negative consequences for the sender state. Using a presence-absence framework of positive and negative outcomes, utilizing experimental methods to study the micro-foundations of inducement and sanction perceptions, as well as a case study of the Six-Party Talks based on field work consisting of archival work and interviews, my dissertation aims to bridge the policy-academy gap by translating a perennial policy-level problem of “carrots vs. sticks” to an academic question assessing the utility and relative efficacy of positive inducements versus sanctions.

In the relationship between military leaders and their civilian masters, the Secretary of Defense (SecDef) plays a unique role. He or she represents both the military enterprise and the non-military policymakers that control it. As a result, in civil-military relations literature the SecDef role is inconsistently categorized as sometimes military, sometimes civilian. Although this is an understandable conflation, it warrants attention. By law, the SecDef is a civilian, but he or she is required to demonstrate expertise in military matters. In some ways, the position sits in both spheres. Yet, the SecDef plays a key role in civilian control of the military, and so it is important to both draw distinctions and understand overlap. This paper examines the nuances and functions of the SecDef role, and argues that Secretaries must be successful in both the civilian and the military aspects of the job in order to provide effective civilian control of the military. Intriguingly, a variety of leaders have filled the SecDef position—from decidedly civilian ones like Ash Carter, who started his career in theoretical physics, to martial legends like George Marshall. The range includes Secretaries with combat experience, ones with long careers in the Reserves, and ones with prior appointments in the Department of Defense. Every Secretary has brought a unique level of military knowledge, connection and cultural familiarity to the office. These varied personal experiences each affected civilian control of the military in their own right. This paper provides a comprehensive new dataset covering the military experience of historical SecDefs, cross-tabbed with descriptive variables in order to better understand the background and expertise each secretary has brought to the position. Finally, the paper uses five mini case studies to analyze the effect of extensive military experience on civilian control of the military. It is the first empirical study designed to explore this effect. I find, first, that all Secretaries struggle in the role in some capacity. Additionally, I find that, a SecDef’s military experience is not a strong driver in determining whether a Secretary will enhance or degrade civilian control of the military during his or her tenure.

The main research question of this thesis is how do grand strategies form. Grand strategy is defined as a state's coherent and consistent pattern of behavior over a long period of time in search of an overarching goal. The political science literature usually explains the formation of grand strategies by using a planning (or design) model. In this dissertation, I use primary sources, interviews with former government officials, and historical scholarship to show that the formation of grand strategy is better understood using a model of emergent learning imported from the business world. My two case studies examine the formation of American grand strategy during the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras. The dissertation concludes that in both these strategic eras the dominating grand strategies were formed primarily by emergent learning rather than flowing from advanced designs.

Abstract

Neither technological nor numerical superiority accounts for the outcome of most battles. Instead, some intangible factor has historically mattered more. The political science literature has termed this factor `military effectiveness', yet using this phrase to refer solely to efficiency in one of the many tasks militaries are asked to perform can be dangerous. Armies which are good at conventional combat may be less effective at internal security, for instance. I therefore propose a new term `destructivity' to refer exclusively to military effectiveness in high intensity, conventional warfare.

Previous literature has suggested a number of factors which may account for variation between states in their levels of destructivity. Wealth, human capital, regime type, ethnic heterogeneity, culture and the external pressures of the international system have all been suggested by past scholars. Quantitative literature has uncovered many broad level correlations which could map onto numerous plausible causal mechanisms, while the qualitative literature has pointed to numerous theories which have remained untested outside the small number of cases which motivated them.

My dissertation puts forward a unified theory of destructivity based on the recognition that armies are not unitary actors but must be understood in light of the motivations and interactions of the individual officers and men which comprise them. Borrowing a concept from organizational economics, I suggest that an Army is a large scale `rank order tournament' in which individuals enter in the hope of advancement through mastering military skills and performing well in battle. The broader the funnel of entry into these tournaments, the stiffer is competition for advancement and hence the higher the Army's level of skill. It follows from this that whatever restricts entry into the tournament - low literacy, politically motivated restrictions from coup vulnerable leaders and poor prospects for post service employment - reduces destructivity.

Motivating troops to fight is a complex undertaking. The broader goals of the war by themselves are insufficient as any given soldier's marginal contribution to the outcome of the war is minute. Regrettable though it is to concede, harsh negative punishments such as the death penalty can be effective in deterring the most obvious and observable forms of military shirking. In situations where soldiers' actions are hard to observe, however, negative sanctions are less effective. Here, the concept of peer monitoring, taken from microfinance, is more important - soldiers are deterred from shirking by the prospect of censure from other members of their small groups.

I first test my theory on a dataset of battles taken from Biddle and Long, Pilster and Boehmelt and Clodfelter. I then proceed to use four case studies to illustrate my causal mechanisms. Using original archival material and interviews with retired Iraqi military personnel, I show how both low literacy and coup proofing undermined Iraq's destructivity relative to the United States. I then examine the British and German cases to answer the question - what happens when two states of equal literacy, with no history of coups, fight one another? I suggest that market structure, by affecting the relative opportunities for military recruits inside and outside the service, is the key factor in providing a marginal advantage to one side relative to the other.

This study seeks to describe the political profiles of Army officers through data scraping the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) and LinkedIn platforms. After creating and analyzing a database of 500 Army officers, the thesis finds that (1) the majority of Army officers on Twitter are not partisan and are not extreme in its political views; (2) most Army officers on Twitter appear to tilt to the Republican Party over the Democratic Party; (3) a slight majority of field grade officers on Twitter, specifically majors and lieutenant colonels, appear to tilt to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party; (4) politically interested officers express more politically liberal sentiments than conservative sentiments; (5) female officers appear to tilt to the Democratic Party and express more liberal sentiments compared to male officers.

These findings were the result of data scraping the number of Democratic or Republican politicians each officer follows and the political content of what each officer tweets to determine partisan tilt and ideological preferences. These findings demonstrate little evidence of a politicized and partisan Army officer corps. Army officers are also unaware of how much political and personal information they expose on social media platforms. Army organizations and officers may benefit from reconsidering their use of social media as the information they provide may degrade the leadership of their units and bolster our adversaries’ information operations capabilities.

This dissertation project argues that high levels of religious commitment within a population-that is, high levels of importance attached to religious identities and ideas-can increase a state's propensity for initiating conflict. Following a three-article framework, the project contains three interlocking empirical studies, each speaking to religion's role in conditioning interstate conflict and connections between domestic culture and global politics.

Article 1, "Religiosity and Bellicosity: The Impact of Religious Commitment on Patterns of Interstate Conflict," explores whether states with religiously committed citizens are more likely to initiate conflict than states with less committed populations. The article builds upon findings within the literature on American politics that link individuals' levels of religious commitment to their attitudes about foreign policy, and tests whether the implications of these findings have cross-national applicability and explanatory power for interstate conflict. Using a novel, robust measure of the proportion of a state's population that is religiously committed, as well as monadic and dyadic statistical models, the analysis finds widespread connections between religious commitment and bellicose state behaviors. The results show that states with more religiously committed populations demonstrate higher propensities for initiating conflict with other states. This relationship is most severe when both states in a dyad have high levels of religious commitment, while it does not appear to be conditioned by whether majorities within the populations of each state ascribe to different religious traditions.

Article 2, "Sacred Bonds? Leaders, Religious Constituents, and Foreign Policy in Turkey," outlines a theory to more deeply analyze the empirical phenomenon identified in the first article, explaining why countries with religiously committed populations are likely to be prone to international conflict. The article builds the theory and then tests it on a case study of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's tenure as prime minister and president of Turkey. The theory posits that in highly religious societies such as Turkey, leaders have incentives to compete for and maintain the support of their religious citizens when they perceive credible threats from domestic challengers. To effectively compete, leaders use religious signals to "outbid" their opponents and establish themselves as trustworthy champions of the faithful. As part of this process, leaders are incentivized to religiously outbid into the realm of foreign policy in pursuit of "rally-round-the-sacred-symbol" effects, and so will "spiritualize" foreign threats with religious framing. In framing foreign affairs as having implications beyond the material world, however, leaders find the domestic costs of backing down from addressing the threats particularly high and their audiences especially unforgiving of inaction. Ultimately, this increases the likelihood that leaders will follow through on combative rhetoric and results in higher overall likelihoods that they will initiate conflict. The case study leverages original field interviews and both Turkish and English-language resources to test and refine the mechanisms of the general theory.

Finally, Article 3, "Choose Your Words Faithfully: Religious Commitment, Elite Rhetoric, and the Formation of Individual Foreign Policy Opinion," takes a micro-level approach to the relationship between religious commitment and state foreign policy behaviors. The project focuses on why and how religious signals, like those identified in the macro theory of Article 2, may influence the foreign policy opinions of religiously committed people and elicit their support for a particular issue. Existing public opinion research in the United States has shown a connection between individuals' levels of religious commitment and their opinions about foreign affairs. However, relatively little is known about what drives this association, particularly when foreign policies do not have clear partisan stakeholders. The article posits that the relationship is at least partially attributable to how religiously committed people process elite cues about foreign policy issues, as they will most privilege the opinions of elites who use religious signaling. The results of an original survey experiment administered to a national sample of American adults tentatively support this argument, though the analysis suggests that not all religious signals are created equal. Religiously committed respondents show the greatest support for a foreign policy recommendation when it has been made using religious rhetoric, while a recommendation made by elites simply identified as being religious receives no more support-and often less-than one made by a non-religious group. The study contributes to our understanding of how members of the public develop foreign policy preferences in relation to their religious convictions and also helps to identify the audience for whom religious rhetoric may be an effective framing tool. The empirical evidence presented by the article contains a great deal of uncertainty, so these conclusions are ultimately preliminary, however, one final result about which there is no ambiguity-only consistent statistical significance-is that individual religious commitment matters for shaping foreign policy opinion, even in the absence of elite religious framing. Future research must therefore continue to grapple with explaining the significance of religious commitment to how individuals develop views on foreign policy.

This study seeks to determine how the Army institutionally selects its 3 and 4-star officers. The central focus, What patterns are evident in the output of the Army’s 3 and 4-star selection process? has three main findings: 1. The Army has institutional preferences, 2. Multiple paths are possible to the senior leader level, 3. The Army’s most preferred path is operational and command experience. These findings were the result of a comprehensive analysis of a database developed utilizing the standardized resumes of 3 and 4-star generals who have served or retired after 1985. The database, along with the results presented here can help determine if the Army is selecting the right senior leaders and meeting its senior leader development goals. In addition, by understanding the breadth of experience of the Army’s senior leaders, we can identify potential shortcomings in experience or skills required to meet current and future threats. The Army is tasked with defending the nation, we must therefore continually assess how it adapts and evolves with contemporary events and adversaries. The database, while extensive by itself, serves as a starting point for future researchers. The paper’s narrow lens will offer insight into the Army process of selecting senior leaders and provide a follow-on analysis template.

The previous literature fails to reach consensus on the role of media in the foreign aid allocation. My paper attempts to answer following questions by examining Muslim countries: Are there any media effects on the pattern of aid giving? If the media influence the amount of aid, then how does it play its role? In addition, although previous studies show that different donors have prioritized specific groups, no study systemically shows the reason why a donor prioritizes certain recipients. Examining all recipients and donors cannot control the circumstantial factors generated by different regions and ethnicities. In other words, donors allocate international aid to different group of countries for various reasons and much of the research fails to examine the reasons that cannot be generalized.

This paper conducts the OLS time series regression analysis with robust standard errors for U.S. foreign aid allocations, specifically for 46 Muslim/Arab countries. The results of my empirical analysis are threefold. First, Muslim/Arab related factors such as oil reserves, Millennium Challenge Account, and the existence of terrorist groups affect aid variation. Second, the more media attention a country acquires, the more it is likely to receive more generous allocations of aid. Finally, and most importantly, there is a negative interaction effect between the level of media coverage and the number of U.S. soldiers present in that country on aid allocation. When a Muslim recipient maintains more number of U.S. soldiers than the yearly mean U.S. troop level of Muslim countries, the media effect on aid volume decreases. This finding provides guideline for the plausible links around the public, media and governing bodies.

I present three papers that demonstrate how the cultural and technological advances in the machine learning literature can and should impact quantitative security studies. Although the math behind many machine learning techniques is not dissimilar to many statistical techniques, machine learning is heavily focused on predictive capacity. I argue that quantitative security studies should take a similar approach and take advantage of the advances made in the machine learning literature. In the first paper I analyze the practical utility of economic shocks as a tool for forecasting violence in four African countries. Several similar studies have published statistically significant findings that carry implicit or explicit recommendations to policy makers. However, I find that despite the technical sophistication of the original papers, the mechanism fails to add value to otherwise similar forecasting models, casting serious doubt on the actual utility of similar models. In the second paper I present PEMA: a flexible and powerful new system for creating event data using machine learning. Stagnation in the data available for quantitative analysis frustrates progress and can lead to erroneous findings and PEMA can play an import role in addressing that problem. In the final paper I argue that digital insecurities reduce conflict and encourage cooperation by decreasing the amount of private information between states. Testing my argument requires dealing with complex systems and data for which common statistical tests would be inadequate. Again, I turn to machine learning to show that digital information can play a strong role in encouraging interstate cooperation.

Intelligence is an integral part of states’ foreign policy formation and implementation. In the American context, the intelligence community is involved in essentially every national security discussion occurring in government, yet it remains relatively obscure to academia and the broader public. The inherently secretive nature of intelligence impedes the collection and analysis of reliable and representative data. Consequently, broad generalities and sensational accounts pervade public discussions and even academic research. We can have little confidence that we have a complete picture of how these clandestine organizations operate, their success as instruments of policy, or their effectiveness in warning.

Congress is nominally endowed with the primary responsibility for piercing this curtain of secrecy and ensuring the community’s primary goals are pursued efficiently and lawfully. Unfortunately, the secrecy that makes congressional oversight necessary also perversely disincentivize it. These efforts largely occur in private, taking members away from electorally beneficial activities. Inattentive voters, few interest groups, incomplete control of intelligence budgets, and no natural voting constituency exacerbate this problem. Despite these shortcomings, intelligence committee service has been highly coveted in recent years.

I argue that Congress members see other electoral benefits to intelligence committee service. At the institutional level, party and committee leadership see opportunities to search for failures or executive malfeasance in closed hearings and to bring salient issues to public attention in open sessions. At the individual level, committee members perceive that service bolsters foreign policy credentials and provides regular opportunities to take critical policy positions. Finally, while the public may be uninformed and inattentive on intelligence, they do pay attention to salient crises or alleged malfeasance, providing an electoral connection to the above partisan motivations.

I provide evidence of these incentives in a quantitative analysis of oversight hearing data, natural language processing of committee member communications on Twitter, and a national online survey with two survey experiments. I find that partisan political factors like divided government, election cycles, and party identity can influence patterns of committee and individual behavior, as well as the beliefs held by the public. In short, for intelligence oversight its politics as usual.

Existing security studies literature focuses on causes of war onset and conditions for war termination. Yet presidents regularly face major inflexion points where they must make a major war policy change, whether to deescalate, escalate, or conduct a hybrid approach. These decision points come after significant sunk costs, including lives lost, treasure invested, and political/diplomatic capital spent. The gap in research on mid-conflict policy adaptations, and on theoretical frameworks to explain them, presents an empirical puzzle that is the subject of this dissertation.

This dissertation further scopes that topic, answering the following question. Why did presidents in the “shadow” of the Vietnam War make major war policy changes to cut losses and bring troops home, or to double down? To answer that question, this dissertation conducts a structured, focused comparison of four case studies: Lebanon (1984), Somalia (1993), Iraq (2007), and Afghanistan (2009). It is structured in that it uses the same questions to uncover presidents’ rationale across each case. It is focused in that it orients each case on a specific presidential “sunk cost trap” decision. It uses a variety of primary and secondary material, including archival research and new, senior level interviews with former administration officials and military generals.

This dissertation finds that historical “lessons” act as a filter for strategic calculations among policy elite, ultimately influencing decision outcomes. Between the Vietnam War and 9/11, the Vietnam lesson to avoid quagmires by treating sunk costs as sunk and avoiding incremental escalation was dominant. The fear, or anticipated regret, of their own “Vietnam” created deescalatory pressures on presidents, demonstrated in the exits from Lebanon (1984) and Somalia (1993-1994). After 9/11, the logic flipped due to new lessons learned, including the need for proactive counterterrorism overseas and counterinsurgency strategies. This created escalatory pressures in Iraq (2007) and Afghanistan (2009) because of presidents’ desire to avoid another “9/11” on their watch.

This research analyzes one central question and two supporting questions. First, how do individual and group interactions influence aggregate behavior toward terrorism? Second, how does societal reputation impact support of terrorism? Finally, how does the structure of a terrorist organization impact reputation cascades? Applying a theoretical framework of a reputation cascade provides policy-makers and researchers a means to understand aggregate behavior patterns in support for terrorism. A reputation cascades may occur independent of government interventions. Government interventions can influence conditions that enhance a cascade of decreasing support for terrorist activity. Building on the reputation cascade framework, a computational model with government interventions along the two dimensions of information and physical policies is developed. This model indicates that governments' that increase physical intervention policies face a tipping point where increases in physical intervention increase the level of terrorist support in a society. The optimal mix of information and physical policies is determined by the level of individual value for terrorism, the costs to terrorism, and the level of cohesion in a society.

This dissertation examines whether war has reputational consequences by analyzing the conditions under which third party actors are more or less likely to challenge combatants after the war is over. I develop a theory of reputational effects that emphasizes how information generated during wartime interacts with expectations and the characteristics of third party states to determine when war outcomes influence the decision making of potential challengers. I test this theory against competing explanations using three methodological approaches. First, I analyze the effect that the outcomes of conventional wars have on the initiation of militarized disputes using cross-national time series data from 1816-2004. Second, I use process tracing to assess whether the decision making by Japan and Germany after the Winter War and the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Cuba after Vietnam is consistent with the causal logic of my theory. Finally, I combine qualitative historiography with time series intervention analysis to assess whether the Vietnam War increased or decreased the number of challenges initiated against the United States. I find that the reputational effects of revealed effectiveness are quite broad, but are most pronounced when the fighting environment is similar. Combatants that perform poorly on the battlefield are more likely to be challenged by their potential adversaries, especially when those adversaries expect to fight them in an environment that is similar to the past war. On the other hand, the reputational effects of revealed cost tolerance are much more limited. The statistical analysis found that information about the combatant's willingness to suffer costs only influenced very weak challengers, while the case studies found that it only influenced the behavior of states that were concerned about issues that were similar to those over which the past was fought. When the issues at stake were similar, weak challengers were more emboldened than strong challengers but weak challengers with different issues at stake did not alter their behavior.

The Obama Administration argued that a publicly announced withdrawal timeline would help further US counterinsurgency (COIN) objectives in Afghanistan by incentivizing better behavior from the Karzai government and the Afghan people. An endless troop commitment, the Administration believed, fostered a dependency that allowed, and possibly even encouraged, poor governance and rampant corruption to persist - a timeline, it claimed, would sever the continual dependency by signaling that US commitment would not last forever, serving to focus, energize, and quicken the Karzai government's efforts to build a secure, durable, self-sufficient state. Moreover, it argued, a timeline would send a message of urgency to the Afghan people to take charge of their own affairs and to consent to their government's rule in greater numbers. In this essay, I test the "Obama timeline hypothesis" in order to determine whether it is truly likely to produce the positive change that the Administration claims it will. By utilizing a mix of consistent historical predictors, deductive logic based on contemporary COIN theory, and currently available evidence, I conclude that the withdrawal timeline has not produced, and likely will not produce, the results that the Administration claimed it would and that, on the whole, it has likely engendered perverse incentives for the Karzai government and the Afghan people that run contrary to America's desired COIN objectives. More broadly, the Afghan case, along with America's recent experience in Iraq, should make US policymakers deeply skeptical of assertions that withdrawal timelines can serve as an effective policy tool for changing the behaviors of key regional actors.

Foreign military bases are anomalies in a world of sovereign states. Why do major powers station their finite military forces to protect other countries and how does the distribution of these bases relate to a country’s grand strategy? Why do host-nations give up their sovereignty and allow foreign forces, capable of existential violence, to deploy within their borders? This dissertation takes a mixed method approach to each of these questions. For the first, I combine descriptive case studies relating the basing postures of five major powers and to their respective grand strategies with a quantitative analysis of the correlates of the US military basing network. To answer the second, I test the role of host-nation security conditions on US military access and then conduct an in-depth process tracing of US-Philippine basing relations. I find that foreign military bases are essential for super-power status and are an arena for great power competition. I conclude that the US foreign basing posture is strongly aligned with American trade relationships and against US enemies. For host-nation motivations, I conclude that security threats to the host-nation matter, but not uniformly. External threats have the greatest influence in increasing foreign military access, but low-intensity revolutionary threats actually tend to decrease a host-nation’s willingness to accommodate foreign forces.

Since the end of the Cold War, the US Government’s difficulties in implementing policies requiring integrated responses from multiple agencies have led to a number of calls to reform USG inter-agency policy-implementation; similar to how the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act improved the “jointness” of the various military services. All of these major studies and reports, most prominent being the 2008 “Project on National Security Reform”, similarly recommended adopting a Unity of Command approach that authorizes a single manager to synchronize the operations of all departments and agencies in time, space, and purpose. All of these studies directly or indirectly base their recommendations off a single case study from the Vietnam War that implemented the policy of pacification (counter-insurgency)- CORDS (Civil Operations Revolutionary Development Support). However, the causal relationship between single management and effective pacification has never been established as a fact; it is a rather a widely-held, but untested, assumption. This project will supplement archival research from the US and Communist perspectives with current qualitative and quantitative research on counter-insurgency (COIN) and CORDS in Vietnam to test the assumption that single management made CORDS effective. By generating a detailed list of alternative explanations for improved pacification in Vietnam in addition to CORDS, it will use three different political science methods (comparative, congruence, and process-tracing) to eliminate the infeasible hypotheses and rank order the remaining feasible hypotheses. The triangulation of this research question shows that, while the causal connection between single management and effective pacification in Vietnam is not an absolute fact, it is an extremely strong and likely assumption.