Military Adaptation and War Termination
Principal Investigator: Jacob Aronson, University of Maryland
Years of award: 2024-2027
Managing Services Agency: Army Research Office
Project Description:
This project will advance scholarship about war termination, including both the conditions under which fighting stops (duration) and the terminal outcome (the division of spoils). War termination may be implicit, involving no formal settlement when hostilities end, or explicit, with a formal settlement between involved parties. The division of spoils may be balanced or highly lopsided, where one party secures most or all contested spoils. Our research will investigate how military adaptation during war—local, bottom-up and institutional, top-down—affects the duration and outcome of war. Our main theoretical expectation is that wartime adaptation delays war termination until both sides believe that they no longer have viable adaptation policies left to pursue. When this is true, war termination will follow. We will assess the impact of specific adaptations on war termination (adaptation as independent variable), while accounting for exogenous sources of variation in the dynamics of adaptation during war (adaptation as dependent variable). Insights from this project will help US policymakers provide more effective foreign support (facilitating adaptation), calibrate their foreign policy to avoid problems such as undersupplying an ally, understand when war settlements (including ceasefires) are likely to be durable, and understand the types of military adaptations likely to lead to rapid and favorable war termination.