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Forces & Society

Dangerous Drafts? A Time-Series, Cross-National Analysis of Conscription

and the Use of Military Force, 1946 −−2001
Jeffrey Pickering
Armed Forces & Society 2011 37: 119 originally published online 20 January 2010
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X09358651

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AFS358651AFS

Armed Forces & Society

37(1) 119-140
Dangerous Drafts? © The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X09358651
Analysis of Conscription http://afs.sagepub.com

and the Use of Military

Force, 1946–2001

Jeffrey Pickering1

Abstract
Conscription has been claimed to both increase leaders’ propensity to use military
force abroad and constrain them from doing so. The author sheds new light on this
longstanding controversy by presenting the first time-series, cross-national quantitative
analysis of the impact that state military manpower systems (either conscription or
volunteerism) have on the initiation of both traditional, belligerent military missions
and “operations other than war” (OOTWs). Using negative binomial regression on
166 states from 1946 to 2001, the author finds that states with conscript militaries
have a significantly higher propensity to use belligerent military force than states
with volunteer armies. Countries that practice conscription are also more likely
than countries with volunteer forces to launch a specific type of OOTW, military
operations against nonstate actors such as rebels or terrorists. Neither form of
military manpower system seems, however, to be significantly related to the initiation
of humanitarian military operations.

Keywords
conscription, draft, all-volunteer force, use of military force

In the first few years after 9/11, debate about the relative merits of conscription briefly
returned to the U.S. national scene. It was a rare example of an issue that crossed party
lines in contemporary American politics, with prominent Democrats and Republicans

1
Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS

Corresponding Author:
Jeffrey Pickering, Kansas State University, Department of Political Science, Waters Hall 244, Manhattan,
KS 66506
Email: jjp@ksu.edu

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120 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

both supporting and opposing the return of the draft.1 Although many arguments have
been given in support of conscript and all-volunteer militaries, much attention has
focused on the relationship these military manpower systems (MMSs) might have
with the president’s ability to use military force overseas. Perhaps the most interest has
been generated by U.S. representative Charles Rangel’s repeated attempts to reinsti-
tute the draft as a way to constrain the president’s ability to launch inadvisable foreign
military adventures. He maintains that military service spread across a wide segment
of society that includes the political and business elite would give the president and
Congress reason to pause before dispatching troops abroad on dangerous missions. As
Rangel puts it, “Decision-makers . . . would more readily feel the pain of conflict and
appreciate the sacrifice of those on the front lines if their children were there too.”2
This article puts Rangel’s contention to an empirical test. To date, only two studies
analyze arguments about MMSs and the use of military force using large-N, quantita-
tive methods.3 Unfortunately, these articles reach opposite conclusions. They also fail
to analyze the full range of overt missions on which leaders can dispatch the military.4
They study only military operations that directly challenge a target government or its
policies, a phenomenon often termed dyadic force. They do not analyze missions that
have sometimes been collectively referred to as “operations other than war” (OOTWs)
and that have been growing increasingly prevalent over recent decades. OOTWs
include operations for humanitarian purposes, to stabilize postconflict societies, and to
target nonstate actors that employ nonconventional military means.5 This article
employs a newly updated data set to quantitatively analyze the impact that MMSs
have on decision makers’ propensity to use either traditional, dyadic military force or
OOTWs from 1946 to 2001. By doing so, it provides a fresh, and arguably more com-
prehensive, analysis of an important, policy relevant question. It also offers the first
large-N study of the subject that extends into the post–cold war period.
My article proceeds in five sections. The next section outlines extant arguments on
the effect that MMSs have on the use of military force abroad and provides my hypoth-
eses. The third section reviews the empirical literature on the topic, while the fourth
outlines my research design. Empirical findings for both traditional military opera-
tions and OOTWs are presented in the fifth section, and conclusions follow in the final
section.

MMSs and the Use of Military Force

The argument that conscription constrains leaders from dispatching troops on military
missions is well established in democratic thought. This line of reasoning stretches
back at least until the time of Kant, who argues in “Perpetual Peace” that standing
armies, which in modern terms equate with all-volunteer forces (AVFs), are a “cause
of offensive war” because they are not representative of the population.6 When the
population has broad representation in the armed forces, citizens in a republic will, in
Kant’s words, be “very cautious” about using military force for fear of “decreeing for
themselves all of the calamities of war.”7

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Pickering 121

Kant’s argument can be expanded beyond republics and their modern democratic
equivalents. To the extent that the draft calls up young men and women from politi-
cally important groups within society, it has the potential to act as a brake on any
leader’s foreign military ventures. After all, even the most ruthless autocrats depend
on elite constituencies to retain power.8 Many despots in personalist regimes, in fact,
use the armed forces as a form of patronage by appointing members of the ruling
clique or their children to prestigious positions within the military.9 It could thus be
argued that decision makers will be wary of using military force in any political sys-
tem where elite segments of society have to bear some of the costs of interstate
conflict.
Conscription may not only constrain today’s leaders from using military force
overseas but also bring a new generation of leaders to power that are cautious about
using the military as a foreign policy tool. The number of veterans who serve in politi-
cal office will tend to increase in the years following an introduction of the draft, and
those who have donned the uniform tend to be more keenly aware of the potential
human costs and the uncertainties associated with military operations than those who
have not.10
Scholars and policy makers who maintain that the draft tends to restrain decision
makers believe that a volunteer military has the opposite effect. Since AVFs are typi-
cally drawn from the less privileged in society and volunteers are well aware of the
conditions of their service, political leaders have little reason to fear a political back-
lash when they deploy them.11 Leaders may also be more prone to use volunteer forces
than conscripts because they have more confidence in their skills and their training.12
AVFs typically have higher retention rates than conscript militaries, which results in a
higher proportion of soldiers who have combat experience and who have had time to
hone their craft. Extended periods of service may be an especially important determi-
nant of military readiness in today’s specialized, high-tech militaries.
Although it did not receive as much attention in political debates when the issue of
conscription resurfaced in the early 2000s, a compelling counterargument to this per-
spective has nearly as distinguished a pedigree. For at least a century, it has been
argued that the “ready supply of manpower” associated with conscript armies provides
policy makers with opportunities to use foreign military force that typically smaller
volunteer forces do not.13 Woodrow Wilson espoused this view during the Versailles
peace talks, although it was perhaps put best at the time by South African Premier Jan
Smuts who asserted that “conscription is the taproot of militarism and war.”14 This
view echoes to this day. Steven Morse, of the Central Committee for Conscientious
Objectors in the United States, states bluntly that “the purpose of the draft is, and has
always been, to serve an expanding militarism and to provide cannon fodder to do
that.”15 Advocates of this view thus contend that conscript armies, not volunteer
forces, tend to be correlated with an increased use of military force by states.
Empirical evidence supporting this argument can be traced back at least to the
1960s when Leonard Berkowitz advanced his well-known theory on aggressive cues.16
Berkowitz found that individuals who are ready or “primed” to respond aggressively

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122 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

are more likely to react to cues in the environment in a series of experimental studies.
Certain conditions lead to this readiness to act aggressively. For individuals, Berkow-
itz noted that being caught in unpleasant situations such as experiencing pain, heat, or
noise can prime individuals for aggression. Extrapolating this idea to collective group-
ings of national decision makers, it might be argued that a large, well-prepared stand-
ing army can serve a priming function by increasing the likelihood that decision
makers will respond to negative external stimuli, or aggressive cues, with military
force.
Proponents of this view also challenge two claims advanced by those asserting that
the draft limits decision makers’ ability to dispatch troops overseas. First, they main-
tain that veterans in positions of political power often tend to be more, not less, willing
to use military force than policy makers who have no military background.17 As Choi
and James put it, this perspective contends that “since military leaders are what Lass-
well called ‘specialists on violence,’ they have a lower average level of aversion for
interstate war than do civilian leaders.”18
Second, they dispute the claim that AVFs tend to be more battle ready than con-
scripts. Proponents of this view argue that decision makers will have concerns about
using AVFs because, as Marlowe observes, “the marketplace is an intermittent and
insecure source for the quality of soldier needed in future wars.”19 During certain
periods of time, such as when the economy is struggling or national morale is high,
all-volunteer militaries may have little difficulty recruiting soldiers of a high caliber.
At other times, however, it may be hard to enlist the types of soldiers needed on the
modern high-tech battlefield.20
The evolution of the U.S. AVF provides an example. The U.S. military had great
difficulty finding high-quality recruits in the 1970s, the decade the AVF was created.
Partially as a result, U.S. armed forces were rife with drug and discipline problems by
the late 1970s, and various measures of combat effectiveness declined sharply. This
trend was reversed in the early 1980s when the U.S. military began to draw in more
than enough high-quality recruits, as measured by high school graduation rates and
Armed Forces Qualification Test scores.21 The quality of U.S. military recruits
remained high through the mid-1990s but began to erode in the late 1990s and early
2000s before rebounding again late in the decade in the midst of a historic recession.22
In contrast, draft armies have the potential to consistently draw in talented individuals
from all socioeducational levels of society, ensuring that the armed forces have ade-
quate numbers of intelligent, capable soldiers for the modern battlefield.23 Leaders
may consequently be more confident about deploying draft militaries than AVF, which
may result in the former being used more frequently than the latter.
A related argument asserts that volunteer soldiers may lack motivation to fight for
their country. While there can be little doubt that many soldiers join the military out of
patriotism and a sense of duty to their country, a good proportion may enlist because
it is the best economic opportunity available to them. For recruits who fall in the latter
category, the military is merely a way to improve their career prospects. Having indi-
viduals who enlist for economic gain or because “of consumerism, even hedonism”

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Pickering 123

form the backbone of the military may give leaders contemplating the use of force
abroad pause.24 Questions may be raised about the willingness of such individuals to
fulfill their duties under fire, no matter whether these duties involve traditional combat
or OOTWs. A different set of questions may, of course, be raised about the motivation
and the patriotism of draftees.
Since both of these conflicting viewpoints cannot be equally valid, my hypotheses
assume that a positive relationship exists between conscription and the use of military
force abroad, either for traditional, belligerent missions that challenge target govern-
ments or for OOTWs.25 If the empirical evidence supports my hypotheses, it will lend
credence to those who claim that draft armies are more readily deployed by decision
makers than are volunteer forces. If the findings contradict my hypotheses, those
asserting that decision makers find it easier to deploy AVFs will gain empirical back-
ing. Either way, my results will shed new light on well-worn arguments about MMSs
and the use of foreign military force.
My two hypotheses are the following:

Hypothesis 1: States with conscript militaries are more likely to initiate military
missions that are hostile to target governments than states with volunteer
militaries.
Hypothesis 2: States with conscript militaries are more likely to initiate OOTWs
than states with volunteer militaries.

Previous Research
Most empirical studies on MMSs focus on the factors that cause decision makers to
implement one system over the other rather than the consequences of their choice. For
example, a series of articles by economists in the late 1960s and early 1970s compared
the economic viability of volunteer and conscript armies, with a consensus maintain-
ing that volunteer militaries are superior to conscript armies because of greater eco-
nomic efficiency and lower social costs.26 Two economic studies in the early 1990s
reached the opposite conclusion, however.27
The first large-N empirical study of MMSs and the use of armed force abroad is
Choi and James.28 Although their article is designed to answer questions about the
dyadic democratic peace rather than the more general category of foreign military
force, they provide considerable insight on the latter subject. They find that countries
with conscript armies were significantly more likely to be involved in dyadic milita-
rized interstate disputes from 1886 to 1992 than countries with AVF, which leads them
to conclude that MMSs should be added to the retinue of variables that help to explain
the dyadic democratic peace.
Although Vasquez does not analyze the use of foreign military force as his depen-
dent variable, his findings contradict those of Choi and James.29 Vasquez focuses on
the number of casualties that democratic militaries tend to suffer when they have
either conscript or volunteer militaries. After controlling for the number of conflicts a

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124 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

state is involved in and other factors that might be related to casualty rates, he finds
that from 1950 to 1985 volunteer militaries endured 30 percent more casualties than
conscript militaries in democracies. Since conscript militaries tend to be larger than
AVFs,30 other things being equal, this leads him to surmise that democratic leaders are
more tolerant of casualties among AVFs than they are of casualties among conscript
forces. Following this logic further, Vasquez concludes that decision makers tend to
have fewer reservations about deploying AVFs in combat situations than draft forces.
AVFs thus “free leaders to act military.”31
Both of these studies are pathbreaking in that they offer valuable insight into the
long-neglected study of MMSs and the use of foreign military force, but more than
their conflicting findings suggest that the topic deserves further research. The dyadic
orientation of both articles raises questions about the scope of the knowledge they
provide on the subject.32 Among others, Fordham and Sarver have demonstrated that
dyadic studies do not offer adequate insight into the factors that lead policy makers to
use foreign military force.33 The central problem with using dyadic analyses to study
foreign military force is that they do not account for the full range of military missions
initiated by states because not all military operations directly challenge other state
governments.
Over the past half-century especially, an increasing number of foreign military
operations have targeted nonstate actors such as rebel groups, insurgents, and terror-
ists. Examples include Turkish interventions against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
strongholds in northern Iraq beginning in 1983 and growing increasingly common in
the 1990s, periodic Israeli military actions against Hezbollah and other nonstate actors
in Lebanon beginning in 1965, and various operations by Western militaries against Al
Qaeda and other terrorist organizations since at least the mid-1990s.34 Data from the
International Military Intervention (IMI) database demonstrate that these cases are not
anomalies.35 Of the foreign military interventions recorded in IMI from 1946 to 2001,
29 percent have nonstate actors as targets. A further 30 percent are considered to be
neutral toward the target government and thus would not be included in conventional
dyadic studies of military force. Missions targeting nontraditional actors (i.e., those
that are not other state governments) thus constitute a significant proportion of the
cross-border military force that has been employed by state actors over the past half-
century. As the examples above illustrate, for many states these missions are as politi-
cally and strategically important as more traditional dyadic military force used against
other state governments.
Since dyadic studies exclude this important category of foreign military force, they
do not provide a complete account of the influences that compel decision makers to
use military force abroad. They explain only the factors that lead decision makers to
use one particular type of foreign military force, which represents a subset of the
larger population of cases. This study attempts to improve our understanding of the
relationship between MMSs and the use of military force abroad with the first large-N,
cross-national analysis to evaluate both the belligerent missions targeting state gov-
ernments common to dyadic studies and OOTWs.

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Pickering 125

Research Design
I employ a time-series, cross-sectional (TSCS) design of 166 countries from 1946 to
2001. The temporal coverage of the design is a product of data availability. Data for
my dependent variables begin in 1946, and information on many of my control vari-
ables ends in 2001.36

Dependent Variables
I use the IMI data set to operationalize the use of unilateral foreign military force.37
IMI records the “movement of regular troops or forces of one country into the territory
or territorial waters of another country . . . in the context of some political issue or
dispute.”38 In the IMI conceptualization, the single most important characteristic of
unilateral foreign military intervention is political authorization at the national level.
Foreign military intervention is considered first and foremost to be a policy tool,
which is the result of a conscious decision by national leaders. The IMI database con-
sequently excludes soldiers concentrated in foreign bases, in transit, on leave, or trans-
porting materials. It also omits troops on training missions and military advisors unless
they are involved in active combat.39 The events cataloged in IMI thus correspond
well with common conceptions of the use of military force abroad.40
The breadth of the IMI conceptualization allows researchers to analyze the subset
of foreign military activity most pertinent to their research question.41 I focus on mili-
tary operations with one thousand or more intervening troops. Decision makers will
often not have to consider the quality or the socioeconomic makeup of the full comple-
ment of the country’s armed forces when deciding to launch small-scale operations
with fewer than one thousand soldiers.42 I also use a six-category IMI variable labeled
intervention direction to distinguish belligerent military missions, the traditional focus
of the empirical literature, from OOTWs. The original six-part variable is coded 0 if
the intervention neither directly supports nor opposes the target government. It is
coded 1 if the intervention is intended to support the target government, 2 if it opposes
rebels or opposition groups, 3 if it is intended to oppose the target government, 4 if it
supports rebel or opposition groups, 5 if it supports or opposes a third-party govern-
ment, and 6 if it supports or opposes rebel groups in a sanctuary. Since traditional,
belligerent military missions are designed to challenge target governments, interven-
tions coded 3 or 4 on the direction variable are used to delineate this type of force.43
OOTWs are best captured by missions coded 0, 5, or 6. Since some OOTWs, such as
relief operations, might be construed as supportive of the target government, I care-
fully examined cases coded 1 or 2 on the intervention direction variable and added a
handful of cases from these categories to my catalog of OOTWs.
In addition, since OOTWs cover a wide range of military missions and remain
broadly defined, I use an additional set of IMI variables to further refine my categori-
zation of OOTW. IMI includes nine “motivation” variables that attempt to capture the
issues that cause state leaders to use military force. These motivation variables

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126 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

encompass the usual culprits, such as territorial disputes, economic incentives, and
strategic concerns.44 Of most interest for OOTWs are variables coding foreign mili-
tary interventions launched for humanitarian purposes or against nonstate actors such
as rebels or terrorist groups. Although both of these activities represent archetypical
OOTWs, they are substantially different types of missions. Humanitarian missions
involve troops delivering supplies, services, and/or policing functions rather than
engaging in combat. Operations that target nonstate actors such as rebels or terrorist
groups involve combat but usually highly asymmetrical, nonconventional fighting
that is not intended to challenge the target state’s government. In my sample of OOTW,
fully 93 percent of the cases are coded either nonstate operations (68 percent) or
humanitarian operations (25 percent). To develop more precise knowledge on MMSs
and the initiation of OOTWs, supplemental estimates are presented on these two dis-
tinct forms of OOTWs.
My final sample includes ninety-six hostile military operations and fifty-three
OOTWs that include thirty-six nonstate operations and thirteen humanitarian mis-
sions.45 Since some actors launch multiple interventions in the same year, each depen-
dent variable is operationalized as a count variable.

Independent Variable
Conscription is a dichotomous variable coded 1 if the draft is enforced in a country and
0 if it is not. Data are taken from volumes by Horeman and Stolwijk and by Prasad and
Smythe, the two most comprehensive resources for information on MMSs after 1945.46

Control Variables
I employ a standard set of control variables for the use of foreign military force. The
first is the Correlates of War (COW) Composite Index of Military Capabilities (CINC),
termed capabilities in this study for brevity. CINC includes information on six vari-
ables: energy consumption, iron and steel production, military expenditure, military
personnel, total population, and urban population. The CINC index is produced by
converting state-year data for each of these variables into the country’s share in the
international system in a given year and then averaging across the six variables for
each state-year. Since CINC capabilities scores have been found to be positively
related to the use of military force in a wide number of quantitative studies of interna-
tional conflict, I expect capabilities to be positively related to state use of military
force in both belligerent operations and OOTWs.47
My second control variable captures the acting state’s regime type. Polity score is
operationalized with the polity2 variable in the Polity IV data set.48 A widely used
measure of democratization in the quantitative international conflict literature,49 pol-
ity2 subtracts a state’s autocracy score from its democracy score to create an index
ranging from −10 to +10. The Polity IV democracy index includes four components:
openness of executive recruitment, competitiveness of executive recruitment,

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Pickering 127

competitiveness of participation, and legislative constraints on the executive. The

autocracy index includes all of the components of the democracy index plus one addi-
tional one, the regulation of participation. Since higher values on my control variable
polity score indicate that countries are becoming more democratic, these states may
have somewhat less of a tendency to initiate belligerent military force.50 It is more
difficult to speculate on how changes in polity score affect OOTWs.
My third control variable is troop quality, which provides an indication of how well
funded and presumably well trained a country’s military forces are. It divides COW
data for annual military expenditures by COW data on the number of military person-
nel in a country. Following Vasquez’s study previously discussed, Reiter and Stam,
and others, I assume that decision makers with high-quality soldiers stand more chance
of dispatching them on belligerent missions or OOTWs than counterparts with low-
quality troops.51 Of course, I also realize that this presumed general relationship will
not hold in all cases. A number of historical states with limited military budgets have
deployed extremely well-trained, high-quality soldiers. Some leaders may be perfectly
happy to dispatch soldiers with low levels of readiness as well. War and civil war are
binary variables that also use information from COW. They are coded 1 if a state was
involved in a war or a civil war in a given year. It is conceivable that involvement in a
war or a civil war may preclude decision makers from dispatching troops on additional
belligerent operations or OOTW.52 At the same time, given the contagion affects of
armed conflict, involvement in internal or external wars could also prompt decision
makers to dispatch troops into countries neighboring the war zone to combat forces
loyal to their enemies.53 Since COW data on interstate and intrastate wars end in 1997,
I extend my data using Armed Conflict Database information on these two phenom-
ena.54 Finally, regional crisis counts the number of crises that occur in an actor’s
region annually using the International Crisis Behavior data set.55 Regional crises
should increase the probability that decision makers will use belligerent force or
OOTW. Along with war and civil war, regional crisis also helps to control for the
selection effects that may characterize decisions to use foreign military force.56

Statistical Methods
Dispersion α scores indicate that negative binomial regression will provide the best
estimates of my count dependent variables.57 Three methodological issues are raised
when using a negative binomial TSCS design. First, the aggregation of data into
annual units may produce instances in time t when dependent variable events precede
independent variable events such as implementing or rescinding conscription. I conse-
quently lag my independent variable and control variables one year. Second, autocor-
relation is common in TSCS count data. To control for it, I include lagged dependent
variables (t − 1) in each of my estimates. Since concerns have been raised about the
inclusion of lagged dependent variables with heavy trending in TSCS analyses, I ran
supplemental estimates of each of my models omitting the lagged dependent vari-
able.58 The results were substantively the same. Third, multicollinearity is a potential

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128 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

Table 1. Time-Series, Cross-Sectional Negative Binomial of Belligerent Foreign Military

Intervention and Operations other than War (OOTWs)

Belligerent intervention OOTW

Conscription 0.617** 0.461*
(0.315) (0.351)
Capabilities 8.504*** 8.746***
(3.070) (2.141)
Polity score −0.019 0.013
(0.021) (0.021)
Troop quality 0.083 0.177*
(0.085) (0.109)
War −1.996** 1.405***
(1.028) (0.404)
Civil war 0.073 0.575*
(0.334) (0.353)
Regional crisis −0.042 0.134**
(0.074) (0.069)
Lagged dependent variable −0.211 0.374
(0.683) (0.711)
Constant −9.203*** −12.770***
(0.897) (1.213)
Log likelihood −399.182 −262.532
Wald χ2 19.22*** 82.05***
N 6,207 6,207
Note: Standard errors are in parentheses below the estimates.
*p < .10, one-tailed. **p < .05, one-tailed. ***p < .01, one-tailed.

concern in any multivariate regression. I assessed all estimates with variance inflation
factor (VIF) tests. VIF scores for individual variables never exceed 2, indicating that
multicollinearity does not represent a problem in these estimates.

Reviewing the Empirical Evidence

Table 1 presents my findings on belligerent intervention and OOTWs. The model χ2
outcomes for both models suggest that they fit reasonably well. The most notable find-
ing from Table 1 is the support it lends to hypothesis 1. From 1946 to 2001, states with
conscript militaries had a significantly higher probability of initiating belligerent mili-
tary interventions than did states with volunteer forces. This outcome is statistically
significant at the .05 level in a one-tailed test, holding control variables such as democ-
racy level constant.
I ran a number of supplemental estimates to determine the temporal boundaries of
my outcomes and to test their robustness. I broke my sample into cold war (1946–89)
and post–cold war (1990–2001) subsamples to see if the results for conscription hold
across both periods. They do. I also substituted the COW military personnel variable

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Pickering 129

for capabilities and troop quality to determine if my findings were being driven by
variations in size between conscript and volunteer armies. Military personnel provides
an annual count of the number of men and women who are active in a country’s uni-
formed military.59 The statistical significance of conscription does not diminish with
the inclusion of this direct measure of military size. It may be that decision makers are
prone to use conscript armies not because they are large but because they, as Choi and
James state, “provide quicker and higher military readiness or preparedness than all-
volunteer forces.”60
The substantive impact of conscription is considerable. When other variables in the
model are held at their means, the predicted probability that a state with conscription
will use belligerent military force is 58 percent higher than the probability that a state
without the draft will use belligerent force. Conscription’s substantive effect is com-
parable to that of full-scale war, undoubtedly a phenomenon with the potential to alter
a state’s propensity to use hostile military force in other theaters. In my sample
involvement in an ongoing war reduces the likelihood an actor will use belligerent
military force against another state by 65 percent. Not surprisingly, however, state
capabilities have the strongest impact on belligerent intervention. A one standard devi-
ation increase (0.26) in a state’s capability score from the sample mean (0.008) raises
the probability of using belligerent military force by 123 percent.
Conscription is statistically significant in my estimate of OOTWs in Table 1 as
well, but only at the .10 level. This outcome lends initial support to hypothesis 2,
which states that countries with draft armies are more likely to initiate OOTW than
countries with AVFs. This finding also remains consistent in supplemental estimates
that analyze cold war and post–cold war subsamples and that include military person-
nel as a control variable. Holding other variables in the estimate at their means or
medians, countries with conscript armies are 39 percent more likely to launch OOTWs
than states with AVFs. However, since OOTW is a broad classification that arguably
encompasses conceptually distinct forms of military force, this relationship requires
further investigation.
My control variables in Table 1 are all in the appropriate direction. The negative,
statistically significant coefficient for war in my belligerent intervention model coupled
with the positive, statistically significant coefficients for war and civil war in my
OOTW model are of particular interest. These findings suggest that actors involved in
wars tend not to initiate additional hostile military actions against other states, but they
are prone to use military force against nonstate actors (militias, rebel groups) in neigh-
boring countries that are aligned with their foes. U.S. attacks on Vietcong positions in
Cambodia during the Vietnam War offer one well-known example. Ethiopian opera-
tions against militia members that took harbor in Somalia during the 1998–2000
Eritrean–Ethiopian War provide an illustration of one of the many less publicized cases.
Table 2 sheds new light on the relationship between MMSs and OOTWs by sepa-
rating out the two most prominent types of foreign military force included in the
OOTW category, operations against nonstate actors and humanitarian missions. The
utility of breaking OOTWs down into more precise categories is immediately

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130 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

Table 2. Time-Series, Cross-Sectional Negative Binomial of Nonstate and Humanitarian

Interventions

Nonstate operations Humanitarian operations

Conscription 1.119** 0.191
(0.522) (0.729)
Capabilities 7.826** 10.588***
(4.353) (3.712)
Polity score 0.009 0.324
(0.029) (0.296)
Troop quality −0.126 1.176***
(0.120) (0.382)
War 0.906** 1.728***
(0.506) (0.839)
Civil war 1.589***
(0.381)
Regional crisis 0.125 −0.160
(0.080) (0.399)
Lagged dependent variable 0.601
(0.793)
Constant 2.652 −27.260***
(5.836) (5.151)
Log likelihood −185.024 −56.696
Wald χ2 41.38*** 31.40***
N 6,207.00 6,207.00
Note: Standard errors are in parentheses below the estimates. Civil war and the lagged dependent vari-
able are dropped from the estimate of humanitarian operations because they predict failure perfectly.
*p < .10, one-tailed. **p < .05, one-tailed. ***p < .01, one-tailed.

apparent. While conscription is positive and statistically significant in the estimate of

nonstate operations, it does not even approach statistical significance in the estimate
of humanitarian operations. These findings remain consistent across cold war and
post–cold war subsamples.61
The substantive impact conscription has on nonstate operations is sizeable. Coun-
tries with the draft have a 227 percent higher probability of using military force against
nonstate actors than countries with AVFs, holding other variables at their means from
1946 to 2001. Perhaps conscript armies’ preparedness influences decisions to use
force against nonstate actors as well as state governments. Operations against rebels
or terrorist groups can, after all, be as challenging and lethal as the use of traditional,
dyadic military force.
The fact that conscription is statistically insignificant in the estimate of humanitar-
ian interventions is as enlightening as the statistically significant finding in the non-
state actor model. There may be a number of theoretical explanations for this
nonfinding. One is the casualty sensitivity that typically accompanies the use of mili-
tary force for humanitarian missions. There is a good deal of evidence that decision

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Pickering 131

makers launch humanitarian operations only when they believe that the costs of the
operation will be low, particularly with regard to their soldiers’ lives.62 Wheeler notes
that Western governments and publics, at least, have a “strong reluctance . . . to plac-
ing their soldiers in harm’s way” during these types of missions.63 In part because of
this sensitivity to casualties and other costs, many cold war and even post–cold war
humanitarian interventions were initiated only when logistics allowed for safe deploy-
ments and when consent about the need for an external intervention existed among
key political actors in the target state.64 Given this context, it is understandable why
decision makers might not give too much consideration to the country’s MMSs when
deploying troops on humanitarian missions. Since decision makers often presume that
their armed forces will not be tested in any serious way during these deployments,
they do not weigh considerations of troop quality or troop readiness heavily when they
initiate these operations.
Added to this, many post–cold war humanitarian interventions have been multi-
lateral actions, which help to diffuse accountability for the mission’s outcome.65 As
a result, some participating states may tend to “free ride” by not providing either
their best troops or a sufficient number of troops.66 When troop readiness and suc-
cessful mission outcomes are not crucial in decisions to dispatch soldiers abroad,
decision makers have little reason to consider the impact that MMSs may have on
mission performance and ultimately on decisions about whether or not to send
troops.
Control variable outcomes also vary across the two types of OOTW estimated in
Table 2. Most of the control variable results are intuitive, such as the powerful influ-
ence capabilities have on the initiation of both types of missions. Two are not, how-
ever. The insignificance of troop quality in the estimate of nonstate operations was not
expected and may reflect the limitations of this control variable. Although it is com-
mon in the quantitative conflict literature, Biddle contends that measures such as troop
quality are too crude to adequately capture military preparedness.67 War’s positive,
statistically significant relationship with humanitarian operations was also unantici-
pated. Since my control variables are lagged, this finding appears to be driven by the
1992 Somalia relief operations that were undertaken by some of the same actors that
participated in the coalition war against Iraq in 1991. Both of these relationships
deserve future empirical scrutiny, however.

Conclusions
My results suggest that Vasquez is correct to assert that “quantitative IR scholars
would benefit from examining not just states’ material capabilities and weapons, but
also their MMSs, which may constrain or facilitate their ability to use force.”68 In the
first large-N test of the relationship between MMSs and the initiation of both belliger-
ent military force and OOTWs, I find that decision makers with conscript armies were
significantly more prone to use military force against both state and nonstate actors
than counterparts with volunteer militaries from 1946 to 2001. When this result is

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132 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

added to Choi and James’s publications and Vasquez’s article, it seems increasingly
evident that the empirical literature on conflict has neglected an important causal vari-
able for too long.69 MMSs appear to be a significant part of the explanation of the use
of foreign military force.
While this study should help to improve future quantitative analyses of the use of
military force overseas, I would urge caution before using the results of this research
to inform policy makers or policy debates. Large-N statistical research has many
advantages, with the most notable being the ability to incorporate a large number of
cases over lengthy periods of time and to build generalizations across these cases.
Such breadth comes at a price, however. The variables included in large-N studies will
never capture all of the historical and contextual issues that help to shape different
MMSs and that influence decisions to dispatch armed forces to other countries. Future
case study research may be able to account for such complexities and to build on
large-N analyses such as the one presented in this study. Until such in-depth research
is completed for specific countries, however, this study’s findings can be considered
to highlight only general tendencies. One cannot claim that they offer insight into dif-
ferent countries’ propensities to use external military force or into the consequences
associated with the adoption of different MMSs by specific states. In short, the results
presented here provide a good deal of broad knowledge on the relationship between
MMSs and the use of force, but additional research will be needed to refine our under-
standing of this relationship.
Even with this important caveat, however, this study’s findings begin to cast some
doubt on the claim that conscription constrains leaders from using military force
abroad. This common argument contends that when the sons and daughters of promi-
nent politicians and business leaders are drafted into the military, elites will be hesitant
to send the country’s armed forces into harm’s way. Although this view has practically
become conventional wisdom over recent years, it has yet to be tested in a large-N
analysis that spans both cold war and post–cold war time periods. This study provides
such a test and, in doing so, offers an initial challenge to this prevalent view. Hope-
fully, in-depth, qualitative research that builds on large-N findings from this and future
studies will begin to map out the ways that different MMSs affect policy makers’ deci-
sions to use military force. Increasingly precise knowledge about the relationship
between MMSs and the foreign policy decision-making process will, of course, be of
more than just academic interest; it has the potential to benefit both military and civil-
ian decision makers.

Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2009 annual meeting of International
Studies Association in New York and at a seminar hosted by the Political Science Department
at Oklahoma State University (OSU). I would like to thank the participants at the OSU seminar,
editor Patricia Shields, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions that improved
the article.

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Pickering 133

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author wishes to thank the National Science Foundation for generous funding to update the
International Military Intervention data used in this article (NSF Award SES-0518294, 2005).

Notes
1. For example, bills calling for reinstating some form of the draft were introduced both by
Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001 to 2003. The
Universal Military Training and Service Act of 2001 (HR 3598) was introduced by Republi-
cans Nick Smith and Curt Weldon and was cosponsored by Republican Roscoe Bartlett. The
Universal National Service Act of 2003 (HR 163) was introduced by Democrat Rangel in the
House and by Democrat Fritz Hollings in the Senate (S 89). Senator Hagel was an outspoken
Republican favoring reinstating some form of conscription at this time, while Representative
Murtha (one of two Representatives to vote for HR 163) was a notable Democrat making
relatively similar arguments. In contrast, Republican Representatives John J. Duncan and Ron
Paul joined Democrats John Conyers, Jr., Cynthia McKinney, and others in cosponsoring
H.CON.RES 368 in 2002 that explicitly opposed conscription. The nonpartisan character of
this issue had largely evaporated by the time Rangel reintroduced the Universal National
Service Act in 2006 and again in 2007. By that time, the bill had scant support and tended to
be seen as a symbolic measure in opposition to the war in Iraq. Among others, see “Legisla-
tive Background: Recent Action on Compulsory National Service,” Congressional Digest 85
(2006): 193-224.
2. “Legislative Background,” 206.
3. Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James, “No Professional Soldiers, No Militarized Interstate
Disputes? A New Question for Neo-Kantianism,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47 (2003):
796-816; Joseph Paul Vasquez III, “Shouldering the Soldiering: Democracy, Conscription,
and Military Casualties,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 (2003): 849-73.
4. Fordham and Sarver spell out the conceptual problems associated with equating military
force used against other state governments (dyadic force) with the more general category of
state use of force, which can include actions against nonstate actors and various “friendly”
uses of force such as humanitarian missions. Benjamin O. Fordham and Christopher C.
Sarver, “Militarized Interstate Disputes and US Uses of Force,” International Studies Quar-
terly 45 (2001): 455-66.
5. Charles Moskos, “What Ails the All-Volunteer Force: An Institutional Perspective,” Param-
eters (Summer 2001): 29-47; Michael E. O’Hanlon, Defense Strategy for the Post-Saddam
Era (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2005).
6. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reis, trans. H. B. Nesbit (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 94.
7. Ibid., 95.

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134 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

8. Mark J. Peceny and Caroline C. Beer, with Shannon Sanchez-Terry, “Dictatorial Peace?”
American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 15-26.
9. See Barbara Geddes, “Stages of Development in Authoritarian Regimes,” in World Order
after Leninism, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Marc M. Howard, and Rudra Sil (Seattle: Univer-
sity of Washington Press, 2006), 161-63; and Barbara Geddes, Paradigms and Sand Cas-
tles: Theory Building and Research Design in Comparative Politics (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2003). Geddes observes that in personalist dictatorships, rulers tend
to politicize the military by recruiting elite political supporters into leadership positions
within the military. These supporters may represent important political or ethnic groups
within society. Furthermore, she finds that from 1945 to 1999 nearly half of all authoritarian
regimes created by militaries or political parties were fully or partially personalized within
three years of the regime’s creation. “Stages of Development,” 164. For an example of the
personalization of an African military, see Kisangani N. F. Emizet, “Explaining the Rise and
Fall of Military Regimes: Civil-Military Relations in the Congo,” Armed Forces & Society
26(2000): 203-27.
10. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military
Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Richard K. Betts, Soldiers,
Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Mor-
ris Janowitz, “The Logic of National Service,” in The Military Draft: Selected Readings on
Conscription, ed. Martin Anderson and Barbara Honegger (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institu-
tion Press, 1982); Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American
Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004).
11. Lawrence J. Korb, “Military Manpower Training Achievements and Challenges for the
1980s,” in The All-Volunteer Force after a Decade: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. William
Bowman, Roger Little, and G. Thomas Sicilia (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1986);
Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James, Civil-Military Dynamics, Democracy, and Interna-
tional Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2005); John Byron, “The Failure of the All-Volunteer
Force,” Proceedings of the US Naval Institute 132 (2006): 12-14. The bulk of the literature
on the U.S. all-volunteer force claims it is overwhelmingly made up of individuals from
lower socioeconomic classes. See Moskos, “What Ails”; Vasquez, “Shouldering.” Bandow
and O’Hanlon, however, argue that it may be more representative of U.S. society than is
typically claimed. See O’Hanlon, Defense Strategy; Doug Bandow, “Mend, Never End, the
All-Volunteer Force,” Orbis 43 (2000): 463-75.
12. Bandow, “Mend, Never End.”
13. Ibid., 470; Choi and James, Civil-Military Dynamics. White finds that conscript armies are
on average 34 percent larger than volunteer armies after controlling for a number of factors
that affect military size. Michael D. White, “Conscription and the Size of Armed Forces,”
Social Science Quarterly 70 (1989): 772-81.
14. Denis Hayes, Conscription Conflict: The Conflict of Ideas in the Struggle for and against
Military Conscription in Britain between 1901 and 1939 (New York: Garland, 1973), 346.
15. Steven Morse, “Should the All-Volunteer Force Be Replaced by Universal, Mandatory
National Service?” Congressional Digest 85 (2006): 219.

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Pickering 135

16. Leonard Berkowitz, Aggression: Its Causes, Consequences, and Control (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1993). I thank an anonymous reviewer for noting the relevance of
Berkowitz’s ideas to this argument.
17. Roger W. Benjamin and Lewis J. Edinger, “Conditions for Military Control over Foreign
Policy Decisions in Major States: A Historical Explanation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution
15 (1971): 5-31; Graham T. Allison, Albert Canesale, and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Hawks, Doves,
and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War (New York: Norton, 1985); Guy D. Whit-
ten and Henry S. Bienen, “Political Violence and Time in Power,” Armed Forces & Society
23 (1996): 209-34; Julian Schofield, “Militarized Decision-Making for War in Pakistan,
1947–1971,” Armed Forces & Society 27 (2000): 131-48.
18. Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James, “Civil-Military Relations in a Neo-Kantian World,
1886–1992,” Armed Forces & Society 30 (2004): 229.
19. David H. Marlowe, “The Manning of the Force and the Structure of Battle,” in ed.,
Conscripts and Volunteers, ed. Robert K. Fullinwider (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allan-
held), 50.
20. Byron, “Failure”; Charles Moskos, “Should the AVF be Replaced by Universal, Mandatory
National Service?” Congressional Digest 85 (2006): 220-22.
21. Bandow, “Mend, Never End”; James Fallows, “Why the Country Needs It,” in The Mili-
tary Draft, ed. Jason Berger (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1981), 75-82; John G. Kester,
“The Reasons to Draft,” in The All-Volunteer Force After a Decade: Retrospect and
Prospect, ed. William Bowman, Roger Little, and G. Thomas Sicilia (New York: Pergamon-
Brassey’s, 1986), 286-315. Moskos maintains that “there is clear relationship between
socio-educational background and soldierly performance.” Charles Moskos, “National
Service and the All-Volunteer Force,” in The Military Draft, ed. Jason Berger (New
York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1981), 36. Also see Marlowe, “The Manning,” 50; Kester,
“Reasons,” 295.
22. As measured by Armed Forces Qualification Test scores and high school graduation rates.
Byron, “Failure”; Moskos, “Should the AVF be Replaced”; Ann Scott Tyson, “A Historic
Success in Military Recruiting: In the Midst of Downturn, All Targets Are Met,” Washing-
ton Post, October 14, 2009.
23. Choi and James, “No Professional Soldiers,” 802. Fick takes the opposite view. Nathaniel
Fick, “A Draft Will Lower the Quality of the Military,” in Military Draft, ed. George Milite
(New York: Greenhaven, 2007), 36-42.
24. Charles Moskos, “The Marketplace All Volunteer Force: A Critique,” in The All-Volunteer
Force after a Decade: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. William Bowman, Roger Little, and G.
Thomas Sicilia (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1986), 17; Choi and James, “No Profes-
sional Soldiers.”
25. This article does not directly address the possibility that there may be a reciprocal relation-
ship between conscription and interstate conflict. In other words, it is theoretically possible
that conscription leads to a higher propensity to become involved in interstate conflict and
that involvement in interstate conflict simultaneously tends to increase decision makers’
proclivity to implement conscription. To increase confidence that causality does in fact
run from military manpower systems (MMSs) to the use of force, I ran all of my statistical

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136 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

estimates after lagging my independent variable conscription two and then five years. The
substance of my findings remains the same.
26. W. Lee Hansen and Burton A. Weisbrod, “Economics of the Military Draft,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics 81 (1967): 395-421; Milton Friedman, An Economist’s Protest: Col-
umns in Political Economy (Glen Ridge, NJ: Thomas Horton, 1972).
27. Dwight R. Lee and Richard B. McKenzie, “Re-examination of the Relative Efficiency of
the Draft and the All-Volunteer Force,” Southern Economic Journal 58 (1992): 644-54;
John T. Warner and Beth J. Asch, “The Economics of Military Manpower,” in Handbook
of Defense Economics, ed. Keith Hartley and Todd Sandler (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1995),
347-98.
28. Choi and James, “No Professional Soldiers.”
29. Vasquez, “Shouldering”; Choi and James, “No Professional Soldiers.”
30. White, “Conscription.”
31. Vasquez, “Shouldering,” 870. Research on the long-term impact that MMSs have on the use
of force is similarly divided. Feaver and Gelpi find that the U.S. propensity to initiate mili-
tarized interstate disputes (MIDs) declined significantly when the number of veterans in the
U.S. Congress increased during the period 1816 to 1992. Choi and James, however, reach
the opposite conclusion in a cross-national study of MID involvement from 1886 to 1992.
Feaver and Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles; Choi and James, “Civil-Military Relations.”
32. Choi and James have limited utility for understanding state use of force for a second reason.
They analyze MID involvement rather than MID initiation as their dependent variable.
Decision makers can become involved with MIDs by being drawn into ongoing conflicts
rather than consciously choosing to initiate armed force. Choi and James, “No Professional
Soldiers.” Choi and James look specifically at MID initiation in a 2008 article, but again
analyze only dyadic disputes. Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James, “Civil-Military Struc-
ture, Political Communication, and the Democratic Peace,” Journal of Peace Research
45 (2008): 37-53.
33. Fordham and Sarver, “Militarized Interstate Disputes.”
34. A host of other examples could be given, ranging from Chinese intervention into Burma
to attack Kuomintang troops active on the Chinese–Burmese border in 1951 to Rwandan
military missions against Hutu militias operating in eastern Congo after 1994.
35. For further information on the International Military Intervention (IMI) database, see note 37.
36. Note that many former colonies enter my sample decades after 1946. After accounting for
these former colonies, there are still 1,096 missing observations in my sample. The bulk of
these (726) are a result of missing information in my control variable troop quality. As a
robustness check on my results, I removed this control variable and reran my estimates. The
results were substantively the same.
37. On IMI see Jeffrey Pickering and Emizet F. Kisangani, “The International Military Inter-
vention Data Set: An Updated Resource for Conflict Scholars,” Journal of Peace Research
46 (2009): 589-99; Frederic S. Pearson and Robert A. Baumann, “International Military
Intervention, 1946–1988” (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research
[ICPSR], Data Collection 6035, University of Michigan, 1993); Emizet F. Kisangani
and Jeffrey Pickering, “International Military Intervention, 1989–2005” (ICPSR, Data

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Pickering 137

Collection 21282, 2008). Unilateral force is defined as a mission under the control of the
nation’s military high command. Unilateral actions may be taken in coordination with other
states’ armed forces. These operations are termed multilateral actions. In contrast, multi-
national operations are missions where two or more states operate under the command
of a single nation’s military high command or under the command of an international or
regional organization. See Pickering and Kisangani, “International Military Intervention
Data Set,” 593; Patrick Regan, Civil Wars and Foreign Powers: Outside Intervention in
Interstate Conflict (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 102)
38. Pearson and Baumann, “International Military Intervention,” iii.
39. IMI is an event data set on military intervention that records a wide range of information
on these incidents, from actors, targets, and initiation and termination dates to specific
characteristics of military operations. As is common in international conflict events data,
IMI codes a new event for each country that is targeted and for each actor intervening
in the country, including multinational actors. For example, the U.S. use of force against
Iraq in Kuwait in 1991 is coded as a separate event than the U.S. invasion of Iraq the same
year. IMI also includes multinational operations against states, but these are not included
in the present analysis. The data set does not aggregate multilateral uses of force. IMI
includes 1,115 military interventions from 1946 to 2005. The present study examines
large-scale military interventions with over one thousand intervening troops from 1946
to 2001.
40. For studies using IMI, among others see Mark J. Peceny, “Forcing Them to Be Free?” Polit-
ical Research Quarterly 52 (1999): 549-82; Dan Reiter, “Does Peace Nurture Democracy?”
Journal of Politics 63 (2001): 935-48; Matthew Krain, “International Intervention and the
Severity of Genocides,” International Studies Quarterly 49 (2005): 363-87; Emizet Kisan-
gani and Jeffrey Pickering, “Diverting with Benevolent Military Force,” International Stud-
ies Quarterly 51 (2007): 277-300.
41. On the conceptual breadth of IMI, see Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Margaret G. Hermann,
“Putting Military Intervention into the Democratic Peace: A Research Note,” Comparative
Political Studies 30 (1997): 81; Peceny, “Forcing Them,” 560.
42. Countries with both types of MMSs may also have highly trained “special” forces available
for smaller missions. On the one-thousand-soldier threshold for large-scale interventions,
see Jeffrey Pickering and William R. Thompson, “Stability in a Fragmenting World: Inter-
state Military Force, 1946–1988,” Political Research Quarterly 51 (1998): 241-63.
43. Among others, Krain, “International Intervention,” and Pickering and Thompson, “Stability
in a Fragmenting World,” use the same operationalization of belligerent military force.
44. Diehl observes that IMI is relatively unique among quantitative conflict data sets in cod-
ing contentious issues. His article on this topic, of course, predates Issue Correlates of War
database. Paul F. Diehl, “What Are They Fighting For? The Importance of Issues in Inter-
national Conflict Research,” Journal of Peace Research 29 (1992): 333-44.
45. The number of humanitarian missions is small because a large proportion of the humani-
tarian operations in IMI are undertaken by international organizations such as the United
Nations or the African Union. Also, many unilateral missions of this type include fewer
than one thousand troops.

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138 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

46. See Choi and James, “No Professional Soldiers,” 803. Bart Horeman and Marc Stolwijk,
eds., Refusing to Bear Arms: A World Survey of Conscription and Conscientious Objection
to Military Service (London: War Resister’s, 1998); Devi Prasad and Tony Smythe, eds.,
Conscription: A World Survey (London: War Resister’s, 1968). The annual Military Bal-
ance publication from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 1970–2003) was used to cross-check these sources.
47. See J. David Singer, “Reconstructing the Correlates of War Dataset on Material Capabilities
of States, 1981–1985,” International Interactions 14 (1987): 115-32; Scott D. Bennett and
Allan Stam, “EUGene: A Conceptual Manual,” International Interactions 26 (2000): 179-
204. Bennett and Stam describe a prominent computer program used to generate data sets
for quantitative studies of international conflict. In doing so, they describe the most com-
mon operationalizations of control variables used in the quantitative international conflict
literature, including the operationalizations of capabilities, polity score, war, and civil war
employed here.
48. Monty Marshall and Keith Jaggers, “Polity IV Project,” www.cidcm.umd.edu/polity
(accessed November 12, 2007).
49. On the common practice of subtracting the Polity IV autocracy score from the democracy
score in the quantitative literature, see, among others, Gretchen Casper and Claudiu Tufis,
“Correlation versus Interchangeability: Empirical Findings on Democracy Using Highly
Correlated Data Sets,” Political Analysis 11 (2003): 197-98. As a robustness check, I reran
all of my statistical analyses with the 11-point Polity IV democracy index instead of polity2.
The results were substantively the same.
50. Among others, see John MacMillan, “Beyond the Separate Democratic Peace,” Journal of
Peace Research 40 (2003): 233-43.
51. Vasquez, “Shouldering the Soldiering,” 860; Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies
at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
52. Among others, see Benjamin O. Fordham, “Another Look at Parties, Voters, and the Use of
Force Abroad,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (2002): 572-96.
53. See Harvey Starr and Randolph M. Siverson, “Cumulation, Evaluation, and the Research Pro-
cess: Investigating the Diffusion of Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 35 (1998): 231-37.
54. ACD version 3.0 (2004) was used since version 4.0 (2007) does not include war as a sepa-
rate category in the intensity variable. Håvard Strand, Lars Willhelmsen, and Nils Peter
Gleditsch, “Armed Conflict Database,” version 3.0 (Oslo: International Peace Research
Institute, 2004).
55. I employ Correlates of War’s (COW) standard demarcation of six regions: the Americas,
country codes 1–199; Europe, country codes 200–399; Africa, country codes 400–599; the
Middle East, country codes 700–899; and Oceania, country codes 900–999. A more nar-
rowly defined categorization of subsystems based on regions in the International Crisis
Behavior dataset was also used in supplemental analyses. The substantive results were simi-
lar. Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2000).
56. The following descriptive statistics summarizing my control variables include the mean,
standard deviation, minimum, and maximum for each variable, respectively: capabilities:

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Pickering 139

0.008, 0.023, 1.00e-05, 0.364; polity2: −334, 7.542, −10, +10; troop quality: 8.435, 1.542,
0, 14.700; war: 0.0339, 0.180, 0, 1; civil war: 0.107, 0.310, 0, 1; regional crisis: 1.750,
2.041, 0, 10.
57. Since the use of military force is an uncommon phenomenon, I also employ zero-inflated
negative binomial (ZINB) regressions to estimate my first two models (in Table 1). Since
the substantive results for negative binomial and ZINB estimates are the same and various
bayesian information criterion scores strongly favor the standard negative binomial regres-
sions, I present results from my standard negative binomial estimates akaike information
criterion scores comparing the two estimators were indeterminate. ZINB regressions would
not converge for my last two models (in Table 2), presumably because of limited variation
in the dependent variables. I converted these dependent variables to binary variables and
estimated the models with relogit. Since my original negative binomial estimates, logit
estimates, and relogit estimates are substantively the same, I present negative binomial
regressions below.
58. Thomas Plümper, Vera E. Troeger, and Philp Manow, “Panel Data Analysis in Comparative
Politics: Linking Theory to Method,” European Journal of Political Research 44 (2005):
327-54.
59. Since the COW military personnel variable is a component of both capabilities and troop
quality, it cannot be included in the full estimate without generating high levels of multicol-
linearity. In addition, since capabilities and troop quality are created with overlapping COW
information, I ran them separately in each of my estimates in supplemental analyses with no
change in the results. As noted above, variance inflation factor scores are uniformly low in
my models even with the inclusion of both capabilities and troop quality.
60. Choi and James, “Civil-Military Relations,” 236.
61. I tested the robustness of each of the models in Tables 1 and 2 by identifying influential
cases in each model, removing them from my data, and rerunning the estimates. Pregibon
D-Beta, deviance, Hosmer and Lemeshow Delta chi-squared, and Hosmer and Lemeshow
Delta-D influence statistics were used to identify influential cases. For example, in my bel-
ligerent intervention model in Table 1, Libya’s intervention into Chad in 1979, Pakistan’s
use of force in Afghanistan in 1989, and Somalia’s incursion into Ethiopia in 1977 were
identified as influential cases. My independent variable conscription remains statistically
significant after these cases are omitted from the estimate. Conscription’s z score actually
increases from 1.77 to 2.03 when these variables are removed. Conscription retains its sta-
tistical significance when influential cases are removed from the operations other than war
(Table 1) and nonstate operations (Table 2) estimates as well.
62. See Nicholas J. Wheeler, “Introduction: The Political and Moral Limits of Western Military
Intervention to Protect Civilians,” in The Dimensions of Western Military Intervention, ed.
Colin McInnes and Nicholas J. Wheeler (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002); William A.
Boettcher III, “Military Intervention Decisions Regarding Humanitarian Crises,” Journal
of Conflict Resolution 48 (2004): 331-55.
63. Wheeler, “Introduction,” 7.
64. Andrea Kathryn Talentino, Military Intervention after the Cold War (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2005), 282; Dominick Donald, “The Doctrine Gap: The Enduring Problem

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140 Armed Forces & Society 37(1)

of Contemporary Peace Support Operations Thinking,” in The Dimensions of Western Mili-

tary Intervention, ed. Colin McInnes and Nicholas J. Wheeler (Portland, OR: Frank Cass,
2002), 107-39.
65. Pickering and Kisangani, “International Military Intervention Data Set,” 595.
66. See Boettcher, “Military Intervention Decisions”; and Joseph Lepgold, “NATO’s Post-Cold
War Collective Action Problem,” International Security 23 (1998): 78-106.
67. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princ-
eton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
68. Vasquez, “Shouldering,” 870.
69. Choi and James, “No Professional Soldiers”; Vasquez, “Shouldering.”

Bio
Jeffrey Pickering is professor and department head of political science at Kansas State
University in Manhattan, KS.

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