LOC17:35
14:35 GMT
WASHINGTON, June 12 (KUNA) -- Despite overwhelming military superiority,
the most powerful nations in the world failed to achieve their objectives in
39 percent of their military operations since World War II, according to a new
University of Georgia (UGA) study.
The study, by assistant professor Patricia L. Sullivan in the UGA School of
Public and International Affairs, explains the circumstances under which more
powerful nations are likely to fail and creates a model that allows
policymakers to calculate the probability of success in current and future
conflicts.
"If you know some key variables ? like thee major objective, the nature of
the target, whether there is going to be another strong state that will
intervene on the side of the target and whether you will have an ally ? you
can get a sense of your probability of victory," said Sullivan, whose study
appears in the June issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Sullivan said the most important factor influencing whether the more
powerful nation is successful is whether its strategic objective can be
accomplished with brute force alone or requires the cooperation of the
adversary.
Driving the army of Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and
overthrowing his government in 2003 was a brute force objective that was
accomplished relatively quickly, for example, but quelling sectarian violence
and building support for the current government in Iraq has been much more
difficult because it requires target compliance.
"We can try to use brute force to kill insurgents and terrorists, but what
we really need is for the population to be supportive of the government and to
stop supporting the insurgents," Sullivan said. "Otherwise, every time we kill
an insurgent or a terrorist, they are going to be replaced by others."
Based on Sullivans model, the current war in Iraq has a probability of
success of nearly 26 percent with an estimated duration of 10 years.
Sullivan analyzed all 122 post-World War II wars and military interventions
in which the United States, the Soviet Union, Russia, China, Britain or France
fought a weaker adversary. She examined factors such as the type of objective
(on a continuum from brute force to coercive), whether the target was a formal
state, guerilla or terrorist group, whether the target had an ally and whether
the more powerful nation had an ally.
She tested her model and found that it was accurate in 80 percent of
conflicts. It predicted a 7 percent chance of success for the Soviets in the
1979 to 1988 war in Afghanistan and a 93 percent chance of success for the
United States in the 1991 Gulf War.
Previous researchers have hypothesized that more powerful states fail
because of poor strategy choices or a lack of resolve. Sullivan agreed that
those factors play a role, but stressed that those factors do not adequately
explain or predict why powerful countries fail. She points out that more
powerful countries have a greater ability to absorb losses from poor strategy
choices and can more easily change strategies. An emphasis on resolve fails to
explain victories such as the first Gulf War, when many analysts predicted a
difficult war against a highly resolved but much weaker Iraqi army.
Sullivan said several factors contribute to the relatively low probability
of success in the current Iraq war. Most important, the objective requires the
support of the population and cannot be accomplished by force alone. Factional
infighting, the insurgency and possible insurgent support by countries such as
Iran and Syria further undermine the chance of success.
"No one could have predicted exactly what would happen after we overthrew
the regime of Saddam Hussein," Sullivan said. "But what my model could say was
that if the population was not supportive of whatever new regime we put in
power and the American strategic objective shifted from regime removal to
maintaining the authority of a new government, the likelihood of a successful
outcome would drop from almost 70 percent to just under 26 percent." (end)
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