Military strategy and the outbreak of international conflict - Quantitative empirical tests, 1903-1992

Military strategy is an area of growing interest in the study of internatio nal conflict. It is linked to the outbreak, duration, and outcome of wars. This article presents the first quantitative empirical tests of the proposi tion that military strategy affects the outbreak of international conflict. The focus is on maneuver-oriented military strategies, such as the German blitzkrieg in World War II, which are hypothesized to be particularly confl ict prone. Tests were conducted on the initiation and escalation of militar ized interstate disputes for a sample of states from 1903 to 1992. The resu lts indicate that states with maneuver strategies were significantly more l ikely to initiate disputes in general, although not disputes that escalate to the use of force. However, dispute participants with maneuver strategies were significantly more likely to escalate a dispute to war if the adversa ry employed a military strategy that emphasized attrition.