Scott Sigmund Gartner is the Provost and Academic Dean of the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California having previously served as Director of the Penn State School of International Affairs. His publications include Strategic Assessment in War (1999), The Historical Statistics of the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and articles in the American Political Science Review, American  Sociological Review, and other leading journals. His honors include the Jefferson award for the best government resource.

1. Introduction; 2. A price theory of war; 3. Calculating war's price: what's it worth, and how much will it cost?; 4. The price theory of war in action: experimental demonstrations of the impacts of expected costs and valuable war aims; 5. Conflict dynamics across space and time: public opinion in the Korea and Vietnam wars; 6. Getting wartime information from over-there to over-here: news media and social networks; 7. Elite opinion formation and its electoral consequences; 8. Conclusion: wars, casualties, politics and policies.