Essay: Common Fates, Common Goals—A Response to Cyr

Abstract

“The Soldier, the State, and the People—Costs and Benefits of Military Regimes”: Evaluating the Essay “Guns and Butter: Child Mortality and the Mediators of Militarization” raises several concerns about the theory and analyses in our article. We address what we see as the three most important: (1) the necessity of both qualitative and quantitative analyses in the study of militarization; (2) correlational versus causal analysis; and (3) the value of Huntington’s analysis of praetorian militarization. We have varying levels of agreement.