The utility of force: War aims and asymmetric war outcomes

Despite their immense war-fighting capacity, major power states failed to attain their primary political objective in almost 40% of the military interventions they have conducted against weak state and non-state targets since 1945. Why do strong states frequently fail to achieve even limited objectives when they use military force against vastly weaker targets? In contrast to extant theories of war outcomes, I focus on the interaction of uncertainty about the probability and cost of victory in war and the nature of a state's war aims. I argue that militarily strong states fail to attain their war aims vis-a-vis militarily weak actors when they underestimate the cost of attaining their objectives through they use of military force and choose to initiate armed conflicts they do not have the resolve to sustain to victory. And I present an argument that links the nature of a strong state's war aims to the level of pre-war uncertainty the state faces regarding the cost of forcibly achieving those objectives.; I test the empirical implications of the theory for asymmetric war duration and outcomes on an original data set of all major power military operations against both state and non-state targets since World War II. Employing almost two hundred primary and secondary sources, I collect data on major power political objectives, target and intervening state characteristics, type and magnitude of military force employed, intervention duration, and intervention outcome for 127 major power military operations from 1946 to 2000. I conduct statistical analyses employing logit and multinomial logit models.