Those of us who value analytic thinking about public policy and, in particular, about war, can learn a great deal from reading “Cost Benefit Analysis of Discretionary Wars” by Diane Hu and her coauthors.1 The article also raises many questions, and considering them spurs learning too. Their article contributes to the literature by formulating and implementing an approach to the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of war that is tractable and amenable to empirical use. Notably, the authors add value by operationalizing several dimensions of war’s benefits, by introducing certain simplified methods of estimating the costs of war, and by applying their framework of measuring costs and benefits to five case-studies of discretionary war. As the authors note, they build on the work of Nordhaus (2002), Stiglitz and Bilmes (2008), and others regarding the costs to the United States of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, as well as on Hausken’s important theoretical framework for conducting a CBA of war (Hausken 2016). By abstracting from many complexities articulated by Hausken, the authors create an empirically oriented framework that can be populated with data from their case-studies of U.S. discretionary war.2 By examining a war’s benefits and assigning monetary values to them, the authors are able to juxtapose these monetized benefits to their estimates of these wars’ costs, thereby answering the question: Did the costs of these wars outweigh their benefits? The authors’ extensive attention to war’s benefits is distinctive, especially in estimating these benefits for five wars. (Other studies of a U.S. war’s monetized benefits focus on one war.3) Furthermore, they obtain a striking result: costs exceed benefits for all five wars. None, not even the First Gulf War or Korea, escapes the article’s grim verdict: negative net benefits should have ruled out these wars.

中文翻译：

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自由裁量战争，成本效益分析和罗生门效应：寻找避免战争的分析引擎

我们当中那些重视公共政策，尤其是战争的分析思想的人，可以从阅读Diane Hu和她的合著者的“自由裁量战争的成本收益分析”中学到很多东西。1本文还提出了许多问题，并考虑了他们也刺激学习。他们的文章通过制定和实施一种对战争的成本效益分析（CBA）的方法，可以为文献做出贡献，该方法可控且易于经验使用。值得注意的是，作者通过操作战争利益的多个维度，引入估算战争成本的某些简化方法，并将其衡量成本和利益的框架应用于五个自由战争的案例研究，从而增加了价值。正如作者所指出的，他们以Nordhaus（2002），Stiglitz和Bilmes（2008）的工作为基础，其他有关阿富汗和伊拉克战争给美国带来的成本，以及关于豪斯肯进行CBA战争的重要理论框架（豪斯肯，2016年）。通过从Hausken阐述的许多复杂性中抽象出来，作者创建了一个以经验为导向的框架，该框架可以使用美国自由裁量战争案例研究中的数据进行填充。2通过研究战争的利益并为其分配货币价值，作者可以将这些货币化收益与他们对这些战争成本的估计并列，从而回答了一个问题：这些战争的成本是否超过了其收益？作者对战争收益的广泛关注与众不同，尤其是在估计五场战争的收益时。（有关美国战争货币化收益的其他研究都集中在一场战争上。3）此外，他们获得了惊人的结果：在所有五场战争中，成本都超过了收益。没有哪怕是第一次海湾战争或朝鲜，都无法逃避该文章的严厉裁决：负净利益本来可以排除这些战争。