• Determinants of Military Strategy,

1903–1994: A Quantitative Empirical

Test 17 December 2002
Dan Reiter and Curtis Meek
Emory University

• The remainder of this article is in five parts.

The first part defines strategy and presents a typology for classifying
military strategy, concluding with a discussion of literature that uses
military strategy as an independent variable determining patterns of war.
The second part presents hypotheses of factors proposed to determine
military strategy.
The third part discusses data and operationalizations of the variables.
The fourth part presents quantitative empirical results.
The final section offers conclusions.

• Military strategy is centrally important to understanding the causes,

conduct, and outcomes of war.

• Several foreign policy theories make predictions as to what military

strategies a state will choose.
• This article presents the first quantitative, empirical tests of hypotheses
of strategy choice. Analysis was conducted on a random sample of
country-years taken from the population of all countries from the years
1903 to1994.
• For millennia, generals, leaders of state, and historians have all sought to
understand the practice of warfare through a careful study of military
strategy.

Recent scholarship has largely focused on a small set of cases, mostly

great power military strategy during and between the world wars.
This has limited the generalizability of past research.

This article presents the first quantitative empirical tests on the

sources of military strategy.
• What is Military Strategy?
In his grand historical survey of strategy, the twentieth-century British
analyst B. H. Liddell Hart (1962:335) offered a definition of military
 strategy that serves our purposes here: “The art of distributing and
applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy.”
Military strategy is also distinct from political doctrine, a state’s
politically determined foreign policy goals, which might range from
the security of the homeland to a bid for empire (see Stam, 1996).
Lastly, military strategy is distinct from tactics, which concerns the
application of small military units for the achievement of very specific
battlefield goals (see Millett and Murray, 1988:ch. 1).

• Classification of Military Strategy

The third strategy is punishment, in which the basic aim is to break the
resolve of the opposing state as opposed to defeating its military.

• Strategy has also been hypothesized to affect war outcomes. Indeed,

generals have been motivated for millennia to study strategy as a key
to victory on the battlefield. Arguably, the study of military history has
been primarily a study of how military strategies have or have not
contributed to victory.
• In modern international relations scholarship, Stam (1996; see also Reiter
and Stam, 1998b) found that strategy is a very strong determinant of
victory in war. He found that states with maneuver strategies tend to
win more often, though the best strategy is one that is made in the
context of the opponent’s strategy.
• The dependent variable is the choice of a state in a particular year for a
principal national strategy for its armed forces. Independent variable the
factors and circumstances of the state.
• We do not include such a control variable here, for two reasons. First,
it is often difficult to judge which country the most likely adversary
at a specific point in time. Second, knowing the other side’s strategy
choice does not generate determinate predictions.
This is because modeling interactive strategy choice is dependent on
assumptions about the availability of information (how confident and
accurate are states’ judgments about their adversaries’ strategy choices),
the number of moves (i.e., whether or not states continually and infinitely
observe the strategy choice of the other state and adapt appropriately),
and whether moves are simultaneous or sequential.
There are likely to be as many possible predictions as there are options in
making these assumptions. Even if we make assumptions about these
conditions, the other side’s strategy choice may be irrelevant for one’s own
strategy choice.
• How are tools of foreign policy chosen?
• To what extent are they determined by objective, structural constraints
faced by the state?
• To what extent are they determined by the preferences of bureaucratic or
subnational political factions and domestic political structure?
• To what extent are they determined by the beliefs of individuals? These
approaches are often framed in the context of alternative levels of analysis
(Waltz, 1959).
• We lay out below four theories of strategy
choice: realism, domestic politics, civil–military
relations, and learning.
• Hypothesis 1: Flat, open terrain is most likely to permit the
implementation of a maneuver strategy.
• Hypothesis 2: The more threats that a state faces, the more likely
that it will adopt a maneuver strategy.
• Hypothesis 3: The higher the level of industrialization, the more
likely it is that a state will choose a maneuver strategy.
• Hypothesis 4: States with higher quality troops are more likely to
choose a maneuver strategy.
• Hypothesis 5: Democracies are especially likely to choose maneuver
strategies.
• Hypothesis 6: Military governments are more likely to adopt
maneuver strategies.
• Hypothesis 7: Mixed regimes are more likely to adopt maneuver
strategies.
• Hypothesis 8: Democratizing states are more likely to adopt
maneuver strategies.
• Hypothesis 9: States are more likely to adopt strategies that have
been used towin wars in the recent past, and less likely to adopt
strategies that have been used unsuccessfully.
• Hypothesis 10: States are more likely to adopt strategies that were
used successfully in recent wars in which they participated, and less
likely to adopt strategies that they have used unsuccessfully.

• To build our sample of cases, we began with the population of all state-
years(for example, France 1967 is a state-year) for all years from 1903 to
1994, for all nation-states in the Polity III data set. We set the lower
temporal limit at 1903 for two reasons. First, information on
military strategies on states is inherently scarce, and this scarcity
increases the further back one goes in time. Limiting our purview to
the twentieth century, therefore, decreases measurement error. Second,
maneuver and punishment strategies become more technologically feasible
in the twentieth century.
• From this population of 8,917 country-years, we randomly selected 200 cases
• Of those 200 cases, ten were dropped because the state was under military
occupation by a foreign power during the year selected. Of the remaining 190, 8 cases
were coded as having punishment strategies, 23 as having maneuver strategies, and
167 as having attrition strategies.
TABLE #1
• We used a probit model to analyze the effects of the various factors
hypothesized to determine strategy choice. Probit is an appropriate method for
 analyzing our data, which includes a discrete dependent variable and is a
random sample not involving time-series characteristics.
• Model 1 includes several independent variables. Some were excluded because of
problems with multicollinearity or missing data.26 Model 2 includes the same set of
independent variables as Model 1, except that Military Regime (whether or not the
state is a military regime) is exchanged for Quality, which is necessary because
otherwise missing data precludes accurate estimation. Many of these variables are
not statistically significant. However, we fear that the standard error estimates of
some of the variables that do appear to be statistically significant may be affected
because of multicollinearity with irrelevant variables.

• Model 3 includes only Polity, Steel Production, and Direct Experience. Among
these variables, Polity, Steel Production, and Direct Experience are all statistically
significant at the .05 level or better with signs in the expected direction
(positive). This offers preliminary support for hypotheses 3, 5, and 10, and
evidence against hypotheses 1, 2, 4, 6, and 9.

• Model 3 enjoys a moderate global fit with the data, as indicated by the pseudo
r-squared of .318, and a 92 percent correct prediction success rate as
described in Table 1a. Predicting 92 percent of the cases correctly might not awe
some critics, who would argue that the impressiveness of this statistic is undercut by
the lopsided nature of the dependent variable (88% of the cases are 0), and by noting
that predicting attrition all the time would offer a slightly higher prediction success
rate.
Two points are worth making here. First, the individual independent variables
have substantive significance (discussed below), which demonstrates that the
factors our model isolates (such as steel production) have a very real impact
on the dependent variable.
• Remaining is the question of substantive significance, that is, what is the magni-
tude of the impact of the independent variables on the dependent variable?
Because this is a probit model, the coefficient estimates in Table 1 cannot be
directly compared. Tables 2 and 3 provide a sense of substantive significance by
indicating the predicted values for the dependent variable given different
combinations of the independent variables.
TABLE #2
• Going from the least democratic state (polity = –10) to the most democratic
state (polity = 10) increases the probability of the adoption of a maneuver
strategy from .05 to .16. Certainly, when repressive governments adopt attrition
strategies they expose themselves to less of a domestic political threat.
• Iraq in 1988—one of our cases—was using an attrition strategy in its eighth
year of bloody, inconclusive warfare with Iran.
• Had Iraq been more democratic, its leadership might have felt more domestic
political pressure to end the war sooner, leading it to adopt a maneuver
strategy.
• Steel production has a more marked effect. The odds of choosing a maneuver
strategy are relatively low at low and moderate levels of industrialization but
escalate quickly at higher levels of steel production.
• The low industrialization of Africa has served as a barrier to the adoption of
maneuver strategy there; only 2 of the 33 African cases
• The direct experience variable also exerts a substantively significant effect.
The predicted probability of maneuver goes from .002 to .60 if a state switches
from having a directly experienced lesson favoring attrition to a lesson
favoring maneuver.
• Israel’s experience demonstrates this point: its commitment to maneuver has
been bolstered by its success with maneuver in wars with its Arab neighbors.
• Since this analysis is done with a probit model, the effects of a particular
independent variable may change when other independent variables are set at
different values. This is as opposed to a linear model, where the effect of an
independent variable is assumed to be the same regardless of the values of the
other independent variables.
TABLE #3
• Table 3 explores the effects of the other independent variables on the dependent
variable when the steel value is set at one standard deviation above the mean,
18746. Here we observe higher levels of substantive significance for both polity and
direct experience.
• Under these conditions, the chances of a state choosing a maneuver strategy
increase from .27 to .53 as its Polity score changes from –10 to 10. Also, the
likelihood of choosing maneuver changes a tremendous amount, from .03 to .91, if the
state has a directly experienced lesson favoring maneuver as opposed to one that
speaks against maneuver.
FIGURE 1
• The different relationships between Polity and choice of maneuver are
demonstrated in Figure 1, in which the lower curve graphs the predictions for
the dependent variable when Polity varies and steel production is held at its
mean, and the upper curve graphs the predictions when steel production is
held at one standard deviation above the mean.
• It provides support for the rationalist, structural view of the link between domestic
politics and international relations, that leaders take foreign policy actions with
the likely domestic political consequences of their actions in mind.
• It also sheds more light on the puzzle as to why democracies seem
to win the wars they fight. In addition to the findings that democracies virtually
only start wars they go on to win (Reiter and Stam, 1998b), that soldiers fight
harder for democratic governments (Reiter and Stam, 1998a), and that enemy
soldiers are more likely to surrender to democratic armies (Reiter and Stam,
1997), it now also appears that for domestic political reasons democracies are more
likely to choose the more effective maneuver strategies
• Why aren’t all states, or at least all industrialized states, equally likely to
choose maneuver strategies?
• We discussed two costs of maneuver strategies earlier in the article, that maneuver
strategies impose higher material costs, and maneuver strategies present certain
domestic political risks to civilian leaders.
• We offer one additional possible explanation here. At the beginning of the century,
leaders may have believed that maneuver strategies increased the chances of
having a short, low-casualties war, but they may have been uncertain as to
whether maneuver strategies are associated with victory, especially given the
absence of experience in combined arms warfare (especially air-armor
integration), and concerns about possible risks that maneuver strategies might
introduce.
• As states observed its successful use, fears of the risks of maneuver strategy
decreased and confidence in its effectiveness grew, leading states to become
increasingly likely to use it. Notably, the statistical and substantive significance
of the direct experience variable provides evidence that states are more likely
to choose maneuver strategies as they observe their successful use.
• Regarding terrain, our findings may indicate that the proposition
that terrain strongly constrains and even determines what strategy choices are
 possible may be incorrect. Instead, it may be the case that militaries are more
flexible at adapting their strategies to existing conditions.
• Aggregate steel production has a moderate, positive effect on the likelihood a
state will select a maneuver strategy, providing supporting evidence for hypothesis
3. Notably, Table 3 reveals that the effects of democracy and learning are
substantively greater as steel production goes up. This may indicate that high
levels of steel production make the choice of maneuver strategy possible, so
an industrialized society with a democratic government will be politically
motivated to exercise this option and choose a maneuver strategy.

CONCLUSION
• We found that democracies are more likely to choose maneuver strategies, that
greater steel production makes the selection of a maneuver strategy more likely,
and that direct experience plays an important role in strategy choice. We found
that whether or not the state was a mixed, military, or democratizing regime had no
effect on strategy choice, and neither did the extent of external threat, the type of
terrain, or the amount of money spent per troop.
• Our findings hold important implications for understanding the relationship
between domestic and international politics.
• One key insight offered here is that while the analytical concept of strategy must be
apolitical, the selection of strategy itself seems to be a political act. The finding
that democracies choose maneuver strategies is consistent with the emerging body of
empirical research that indicates that democracies seek to fight wars that are
short, relatively bloodless, and successful.
• This total set of findings indicates that democratic governments are not
intrinsically more pacifist than other governments, but rather that democratic
political structures guide democratic leaders to avoid wars that promise
domestic political disaster.
• This means that among the population of potential war initiators democracies are
more likely to initiate wars, and that this increased likelihood of war initiation
becomes insignificant when strategy is accounted for. We leave empirical testing
of this point to future research.
• Contrary to the findings in a number of mainstream case studies, we did not find
that military regimes, democratizing regimes, or mixed regimes are more
likely to choose maneuver strategies
• Geographical factors or the extent of threat is not found to be significantly
related to the choice of maneuver, but we did find that aggregate steel
production is.
• As in other areas of foreign policy characterized by significant uncertainty, the choice
of military strategy is greatly determined by a state’s own experience but not by the
experience of others. This points to the larger conclusion that a complete
understanding of the foreign policies of states must account for their historical
experiences.
• On the empirical level, future work could expand on the analysis offered here,
perhaps analyzing the strategy choices of states across time as well as across space,
permitting an opportunity to examine when and why states change strategies.