The Commonsensical Economics of the Nonsensical Warfare: between Free Markets and State Planning

Current military conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine and other latent conflicts worldwide, have rendered economic perspectives on the issue much more necessary now, even more so than in the recent past. Unfortunately, various theoretical approaches of the libertarian, pro-market kind, which have been put forward over the past few decades, such as those of Murray Rothbard and David Friedman, either remain unnoticed or are even deliberately ignored. It stands to reason to assume that an overall lack of knowledge as to how to properly end a military conflict as quickly and with as few casualties as possible is a significant factor in this whole otherwise already extremely complicated context. This article aims to put forward a bi-dimensional economic solution to war, dealing with both the (national) economy side of the issue, as well as with the dimension of warfare economics, with the research question being formulated as follows: “Which are the best sets of economic policies and military strategies a country undergoing war and its National Defence Forces should adopt?”. As such, through a methodologically (mainly) qualitative framework, the present paper attempts to make use of what the free-market economics literature has to say about human incentives during times of war, with the authors’ academic contribution consisting in having contextualised said theoretical knowledge both into the national policy and the battlefield fire exchanges layers of the conflict.