What caused the agricultural manpower shortage in World War II? Historians have proffered a variety of explanations that attribute linear causality to a handful of independent variables. No scholar, however, has attempted to study the manpower shortage in its full causal complexity. This paper, following the muse of analytic eclecticism, assembles a variety of cutting-edge political-science scholarship to develop a modified version of the Institutional Analysis Framework. I apply this framework to the study of the agricultural manpower shortage during World War II. I argue that the agricultural manpower shortage is the result of emergent causality, which has significant implications for scholarly practice and strategic planning and intervention. Strategists and military planners must become adept at understanding both linear causality, wherein independent variables and dependent variables shed causal light on the world, and emergent causality, which--however intractable it is to strategic levers--is an ineliminable component of sociopolitical affairs and war.