Military strategy is centrally important to understanding the causes, condu
ct, and outcomes of war. Several foreign policy theories make predictions a
s to what military strategies a state will choose. This article presents th
e first quantitative, empirical tests of hypotheses of strategy choice. Ana
lysis was conducted on a random sample of country-years taken from the popu
lation of all countries from the years 1903 to 1994. Military strategy is c
lassified as being either maneuver, attrition, or punishment. Empirical fin
dings reveal that democracies and industrialized states are more likely to
choose maneuver strategies, and that a state's own experiences affect the l
ikelihood of it choosing maneuver. Factors found not to affect strategy cho
ice include terrain, the level of external threat, troop quality, whether a
state is democratizing, whether a state is a mixed regime, whether a state
is a military regime, and vicarious experiences.