In his review, Caverley provides thoughtful—and generous—commentary on my book, and I appreciate the opportunity to respond to some of the many valuable points he raises.

Caverley’s main critical focus is to ask whether decisionmakers who stem from the military ranks, rather than having civilian backgrounds, are really more belligerent internationally (he does not take issue with the arguments or evidence about personalist dictators being more conflict-prone). I’ll devote my brief space to responding to some of those important comments.

Caverley points out that there are reasons for military officers to be more reluctant to use military force, for example because the costs of war are highly salient. In contrast, I emphasized the benefits, such as greater resources, that can accrue to the military from fighting wars, and that military officers are socialized to view military force as an effective tool.

Both perspectives on military officers’ preferences are plausible, so the question of whether military officers are ultimately more dovish or more hawkish (or neither) than their civilian counterparts is an empirical one. As Caverley notes, I find that nonpersonalist juntas initiate significantly more military disputes than nonpersonalist civilian machines, and I find similar evidence using the raw indices rather than typologies (Table 2.3). However, as Caverley points out, juntas are not statistically different than machines when it comes to war outcomes and post-war punishment; the broad patterns I observe fit (juntas are 1.5 times as likely to lose wars as machines, and strongmen are 1.3 times as likely to lose as bosses) but the small number of military juntas makes it difficult to distinguish between regimes with certainty. This is, in part, why I carried out case studies demonstrating how military officers responded differently to the same situations from their civilian counterparts.

Caverley also asks whether survey data from U.S. shed useful light on the preferences of military vs. civilian leaders in other countries, arguing that the U.S. case is unlikely to be representative even of other democracies, much less autocracies. In my view, it seems likely that the effects of the “military mindset” should be muted in the American context, where officers receive unusually broad training. Moreover, recent data from other countries bear out similar patterns. For example, Stewart and Zhukov (Reference Stewart and Zhukov2009) find evidence from political speeches in Russia that military elites “display attitudes that are considerably more permissive toward the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy” than civilian elites. In another context, Grossman, Manekin, and Miodownik (Reference Grossman, Manekin and Miodownik2015) carry out an original survey of former Israeli soldiers. Their data do not allow a comparison between military officers and civilians, but they find strong evidence that exposure to combat results in more hawkish attitudes about foreign relations. Both of these studies support the idea that greater involvement with the military is associated with more hawkish, not more dovish, preferences, even in a non-U.S. context.

That said, unraveling the relationship between military experience and policy preferences, as well as the mechanisms behind those relationships, is clearly a rich avenue for further research. I hope that our exchange will spur further research into this important question.