Pieter Balcaen
With the war in Ukraine approaching the end of its third year, the military conflict has become a war of attrition. Russia has understood the importance of shifting to a war economy to sustain this war of attrition, devoting a large share of its industrial capacity to the war effort. Hence, while analysis of the war must account for the military attrition taking place, it is equally or even more important to consider the economic dimension of this attrition.
Contemporary discussions on economic warfare and economic coercion, including those examining the war in Ukraine, focus primarily on diplomatic and legislative actions (e.g., the use of negative sanctions). These sanctions consist of a series of boycotts, embargos, blacklists, quotas, and asset freezes that are widely accepted as a low-risk, less-costly alternative to military force. From a historical point of view, however, economic coercion often takes a much broader form, as was the case in the major conventional wars of the twentieth century. Furthermore, strategic thinking about economic warfare during those conflicts reserved an important role for the military, including the use of naval power to impose blockades in World War I and the use of strategic bombing to accelerate the effects from blockades in World War II.
An exploration of economic warfare in historical high-intensity conventional conflicts highlights the importance of disorganizing an opponent’s economy using military means as part of the total war effort. By understanding this fact and the strategic perspective that undergirded it, we can complement the current prevailing Western views of economic coercion, which predominantly focus on using economic (nonmilitary) means such as sanctions to weaken an adversary.
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