What Determines Military Victory? Testing the Modern System

Abstract

This paper assesses the relative importance of force employment as a cause of military victory. It focuses on the adoption of the modern system in interstate wars since 1917. Using cases, contingency tables, and regression analysis, we find that war participants who use the modern system are significantly more likely to succeed in decisive battlefield engagements. However, the modern system does not predict victory at a higher rate than more traditional unit-level explanations for combat effectiveness, suggesting that it might function as a causal mechanism linking factors like regime type and material endowments with martial capabilities. Exploring the possible links between unit-level explanations of military power and the organizational-level force employment indicators, we find that more materially powerful states and democracies tend to implement the modern system at a higher rate than other types of actors, but more extreme autocracies also frequently adopt. Combined, these findings suggest the relevance of continuing to explore how organizational-level variables impact military effectiveness.

Air superiority and battlefield victory

“…It was (see Figure 1), and quite strongly so. Model 1 reproduced the main findings from Grauer and Horowitz (2012) in our shorter time frame. Adoption of the modern system, democracy, and national capabilities (as measured by the Correlates of War Composite Indicator of National Capabilities (CINC)) increased the probability of winning.…”

“…To test our hypothesis, we built on the work of Grauer and Horowitz (2012). The primary difference between their research design and other prominent research on military effectiveness such as Reiter and Stam (2002) is that Grauer and Horowitz focus on decisive battles in conventional wars.…”

“…3 We measured air superiority at the time of the decisive battle for two reasons. First, by Grauer and Horowitz's (2012) definition, the decisive battle represents a point in time in which the outcome of the war is in doubt. By measuring air superiority at this point rather than over the war in total, we reduced the possibility that our measurement of air superiority was endogenous -simply crowning the ultimate war winner as having won in the air as well.…”

“…Why are some militaries more likely to win in battle than others? Some of the most common answers to this question are material resources (Desch, 2002), regime type (Reiter and Stam, 2002), adoption of the modern system (Biddle, 2004; Grauer and Horowitz, 2012), civil–military relations (Brooks, 2006; Narang and Talmadge, 2018), and military strategy (Bennett and Stam, 1996). We argue that a specific aspect of military power is critical to victory in modern conventional battles: air superiority.…”

Centers of gravity and war outcomes

“…Biddle (2004) focuses on explaining battle outcomes and argues that the key to victory in modern warfare is modern system force employment because it dampens the effects of technological change and insulates its users from the full lethality of their opponents' weapons. Grauer and Horowitz (2012) conduct a quantitative test and find evidence supporting Biddle's theory. However, there is not a direct relation between battle and war outcomes.…”