The arguments in the previous chapter outlined the general approach to crisis bargaining scholars have employed for decades. By constructing a stark stylized world of the basic crisis game, we were able to explore the interrelated problems of credibility, commitment, and communication that must lie at the heart of any theory of coercion. Although I was at pains to argue about the theoretical and substantive shortcomings of many of the proposed mechanisms, the real motivation for a new investigation of military coercion comes from the simple insight that the military instrument does not fall into any of the idealized tools of statecraft we have discussed. This is somewhat surprising because when we speak of coercion in a serious interstate crisis, we usually mean threats to use force, military force to be exact.

Threats to use force can be delivered verbally, or they can be tacit, implicit in the physical deployment of military units, or they can be a combination of the two. Physical military moves are a very often an indelible feature of crises. Consequently, I will focus on such preparations to use force because they can be used for signaling and commitment; that is, they can be used for bargaining purposes. Military moves are a suitable candidate for coercive bargaining because they have both informational and functional aspects that do not suffer from the empirical implausibility of other commitment tactics.