Determinants of military strategy, 1903-1994: A quantitative empirical test

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.