Battlefield Effectiveness in Interstate War: New Measurement and a Test of its Causes.

I propose an intuitive concept of effectiveness in interstate war: the ability to achieve consistent battlefield victory. An effective belligerent rapidly locks in future battle victories and curbs the opposite effort of its enemy. This paper has three goals: (i) to validate the concept by establishing that a well understood cause of military effectiveness (relative advantage in material resources) associates with effectiveness, (ii) to advance the debate over the impact of regime type on battlefield effectiveness, and (iii) to explain why past studies concluded that democracies fight more effectively. I analyze a new data set of battlefield outcomes in interstate war dyads from 1914 to 2001. I find that relative advantage associates with effectiveness as expected, but regime type does not. Democracies are not more effective belligerents, but they appear to be more effective because they negotiate peace after winning series of battles. The analysis also reveals the costliness of unlimited war aims, including foreign imposed regime change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]