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Abstract
What makes some states more militarily powerful than others? A growing body of research suggests that certain ‘non-material’ factors significantly affect a country's ability to translate resources into fighting power. In particular, recent studies claim that democracy, Western culture, high levels of human capital, and amicable civil-military relations enhance military effectiveness. If these studies are correct, then military power is not solely or even primarily determined by material resources, and a large chunk of international relations scholarship has been based on a flawed metric. The major finding of this article, however, suggests that this is not the case. In hundreds of battles between 1898 and 1987, the more economically developed side consistently outfought the poorer side on a soldier-for-soldier basis. This is not surprising. What is surprising is that many of the non-material factors posited to affect military capability seem to be irrelevant: when economic development is taken into account, culture and human capital become insignificant and democracy actually seems to degrade warfighting capability. In short, the conventional military dominance of Western democracies stems from superior economic development, not societal pathologies or political institutions. Therefore, a conception of military power that takes into account both the quantity of a state's resources and its level of economic development provides a sound basis for defense planning and international relations scholarship.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for comments from Richard Betts, Stephen Biddle, Risa Brooks, Tanisha Fazal, Page Fortna, Michael Horowitz, Robert Jervis, Dianne Pfundstein and Stefano Recchia on earlier drafts of this article.
Notes
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5Edmund Dubois, Wayne Hughes and Lawrence Lowe, A Concise Theory of Combat (Monterey, CA: US Naval Postgraduate School 1998), Ch.1.
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7John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Assessing the Conventional Balance: The 3:1 Rule and Its Critics’, International Security 13/4 (Spring 1989), 54–89.
8See, e.g., ‘Defense Analysts: Limited War to Free Kuwait Could Cut Casualties by Over Half,’Inside the Army, 10 Dec. 1990, 11; Crisis in the Persian Gulf: Sanctions, Diplomacy and War, Hearings Before the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, House Armed Services Committee No. 101-57 (Washington DC: US GPO 1991), 448, 462, 463, 485, 917; ‘Air Strike on Iraq, the Favored Strategy, Means Big Risks for Both Sides’, New York Times, 23 Oct. 1990, A10; Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, The Generals’ War (Boston: Little, Brown 1995), 132–3, 174; US News and World Report, Triumph Without Victory (New York: Random House 1992), 129, 141; Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York: Simon & Schuster 1991), 349; Tom Matthews, ‘The Secret History of the War’, Newsweek, 18 March 1991, 28ff.
9Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton UP 2004).
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12Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 127.
13For a summary, see, Brooks, ‘The Impact of Culture, Society, Institutions, and International Forces on Military Effectiveness’.
14Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton UP 2002), Ch.3.
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16Kenneth M. Pollack, ‘The Influence of Arab Culture on Arab Military Effectiveness’, PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1996, 37–82, 541, 586, 579.
17Stephen Biddle and Stephen Long, ‘Democracy and Military Effectiveness: A Deeper Look’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 48/4 (Aug. 2004), 525–46.
18Stephen Biddle and Robert Zirkle, ‘Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare in the Developing World,’Journal of Strategic Studies 19/2 (June 1996), 171–212; Risa A. Brooks, Political-Military Relations and the Stability of Arab Regimes (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies 1998).
19Biddle, Military Power, 2.
20Biddle, Military Power, 21–4; Arreguin-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars, Ch.1; Steven Rosen, ‘War Power and the Willingness to Suffer’, in Bruce Russett (ed.), Peace, War, and Numbers (London: Sage Publications 1972), 167–84.
21Blainey, The Causes of War, Ch.3.
22Biddle also uses territorial gain as a dependent variable, but the results are mixed. In particular, he finds that the defender's force-to-space ratio has a significant effect on the attacker's ability to gain territory. As he points out, this result is consistent with materialist conceptions of military power. See, Biddle, Military Power, 170–3.
23Jonathan R. Adelman, Revolution, Armies, and War: A Political History (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 1985), 88–92.
24Thanks to Richard Betts for passing on this phrase.
25Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War I (Cambridge: CUP 2005); Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II (Cambridge: CUP 1998); Klaus Knorr, Military Power and Potential (Lexington, MA: Heath Lexington Books 1970); Klaus Knorr, The War Potential of Nations (Princeton UP 1956).
26Obviously economically developed countries may, for various reasons, decide not to invest in military power. The point here is that given a fixed quantity of resources devoted to defense, economically developed states will produce more effective forces and therefore be more militarily powerful than less developed states. In other words, this paper is not about whether states have an interest in military power, but rather whether they have the capacity to produce and employ it.
27Figures calculated from data in, Angus Maddison, ‘Historical Statistics, World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1–2003 AD’, 2007, accessed at <www.eco. rug.nl/∼Maddison/>.
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30Enzio Bonsignore, ‘Gulf Experience Raises Tank Survivability Issues,’Military Technology 16/2 (Feb. 1992), 64–70.
31Robert L. Paarlberg, ‘Knowledge as Power: Science, Military Dominance, and US Security’, International Security 29/1 (Summer 2004), 123–4.
32Ibid., 136.
33Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books 1987), 294; Maddison, ‘Historical Statistics, World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1–2003 AD’.
34Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 295.
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37Cohen, ‘Distant Battles’, 166.
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39Biddle, Military Power, 38–48.
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48Brooks, Political-Military Relations and the Stability of Arab Regimes, 23–9.
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54Edward N. Muller and Mitchell A. Seligson, ‘Civic Culture and Democracy: The Question of Causal Relationship’, American Political Science Review 88/3 (September 1994), 635–52; Robert W. Jackman and Ross A. Miller, ‘A Renaissance of Political Culture?’American Journal of Political Science 40/3 (Aug. 1996), 632–59.
55Joel Mokyr, ‘Long-Term Economic Growth and the History of Technology’, in Phillippe Aghion and Steven N. Durlauf (eds.), Handbook of Economic Growth (Amsterdam: Elsevier 2005), Ch.17.
56David Mitch, ‘The Role of Education and Skill in the British Industrial Revolution,’ in Joel Mokyr (ed.), The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1998), 241–79.
57Lant Pritchett, ‘Where Has All the Education Gone?’World Bank Economic Review 15/3 (Oct. 2001), 367–91.
58Glaeser et al., ‘Do Institutions Cause Growth?’, 271–303.
59See, for example, Stam, Win, Lose, or Draw.
60Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, Ch. 3; Biddle and Long, ‘Democracy and Military Effectiveness’.
61Gary King, ‘Publication, Publication’, Political Science and Politics 39/1 (Jan. 2006), 119–26.
62Michael C. Desch, ‘Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters’, International Security 27/2 (Fall 2002), 39–41.
63Biddle and Long, ‘Democracy and Military Effectiveness’, 533–5.
64Dupuy, Numbers, Predictions and War, 45–6; Stephen Biddle, ‘Explaining Military Outcomes’, in Brooks and Stanley, Creating Military Power, 213–14.
65Arthur S. Banks, Cross-National Time Series, 1815–1973 (Computer file). ICPSR ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (producer and distributor).
66Data were compiled by Biddle and Long using, CIA, The World Factbook 2001 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office).
67Maddison, ‘Historical Statistics,World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1–2003 AD’.
68Singer, ‘Reconstructing the Correlates of War Dataset on Material Capabilities of States, 1816–1985’.
69Data for these variables was obtained from the National Material Capabilities dataset, version 3.02. For a description of the dataset see, Singer, ‘Reconstructing the Correlates of War Dataset on Material Capabilities of States, 1816–1985’.
70Sevket Pamuk, ‘The Ottoman Economy in World War I,’ in Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War I (Cambridge: CUP 2005), 112–36.
71The highest variance inflation factor (VIF) value is 8.98 (for the per capita income variable), but only values greater than 10 suggest a multicollinearity problem. On this point, see, John Neter, William Wasserman, and Michael H. Kutner, Applied Linear Regression Models: Regression, Analysis of Variance, and Experimental Designs, 3rd ed. (Homewood, IL: Irwin 1990), 408–11.
72Brooks, Political-Military Relations and the Stability of Arab Regimes.
73See, for example, Havard Hegre, Tanja Ellingsen, Scott Gates and Nils Petter Gleditsch, ‘Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816–1992’, American Political Science Review 95/1 (March 2001), 33–48.
74The same robustness checks were employed as for hypothesis 1 (except for using the Correlates of War data). Dropping extreme cases and controlling for momentum did not alter the results. The alternate codings for economic development (iron/steel production and energy consumption) are significant in regressions without the culture dummy variables. Once the culture dummies are added, however, both of these proxies for economic development become insignificant while the PCBU and JEMU culture variables are statistically significant. There was also an attempt to control for pairwise fixed effects by adding dummy variables for every dyad in the dataset. However, this increased the number of independent variables to 64. Since there are only a few hundred observations in the data set, there were simply not enough degrees of freedom to produce any significant results.
75Jiang Zemin, Lun guofang yu jundui jianshe[On National Defense and Army Building] (Beijing: Jiefangjun chubanshe 2002), 83.
76Thomas J. Christensen, ‘Posing Problems without Catching Up: China's Rise and Challenges for US Security Policy’, International Security 25/4 (Spring 2001), 5–40.
