Insuring Security

Abstract

Alliances for collective defence are likened to mutual insurance arrangements. External attack is seen as a risk in much the same way that illness is a risk to a bread-winner, who will often want to insure against it by combining with other persons in similar circumstances to pool the risks involved (usually mediated by an insurance company). Here, alliance members' defence budgets become insurance premiums entitling them to group protection against attack. In such alliances size is strongly beneficial since there are always economies of scale in risk-sharing. Indefinite geographical expansion of such arrangements is checked by the comparatively slow speed with which alliance forces may be brought to bear on behalf of an endangered member and the difficulties of harmonizing within the same arrangement members who belong to different statistical categories of risk.