War-Time Decisions

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, most predictions leaned toward one outcome: a quick defeat for the smaller country.

But more than two years later, the conflict drags on, and Ukraine has even occupied a small but storied area of Russia—Kursk—where the Soviet military defeated Nazi Germany in history’s largest tank battle. Why the current war remains unresolved is one of the questions University of Maryland researchers seek to answer in a new, three-year study of how conflicts from 1945 to the present have concluded, supported by a $2.5 million U.S. Department of Defense award.

“There's a conventional wisdom about how wars start and how wars end, which is that all these things kind of look a little bit like World War II,” meaning they start for clear reasons and end with a decisive victory or defeat for the initiating country, said government and politics Assistant Research Professor Jacob Aronson, a co-principal investigator of the study. “But as we know, the real world is a lot more messy than that.”

The majority of wars end without a clear cut military victory, said Aronson, part of UMD’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM). Usually, one or both sides have the capacity to keep fighting, but they opt not to once they believe they can no longer gain from doing so. What “military adaptations”—essentially, how combatants change their approaches to gain the advantage over their adversary as wars progress—lead military and political leaders to the conclusion that it’s time to end a war is what Aronson and his colleagues plan to zero in on.

“We are looking at military adaptability through both a bottom-up and a top-down approach,” he explained. “A bottom-up approach seeks to understand the changes in tactics or activities used by soldiers on the ground when they’re faced with setbacks that force them to change how they operate. A top-down approach seeks to understand how military leadership changes their strategy, their targets, or their military production.”

To capture this data, Aronson and his study colleagues—CIDCM Director and government and politics Professor Paul Huth (the grant’s principal investigator); Georgetown University Associate Professor Yuri Zhukov; and Columbia University Professor Stephen Biddle—will collect new quantitative data using AI-assisted techniques, analyze satellite imagery and develop case studies to understand common characteristics of post-World War II conflicts, and the role of military adaptation in their termination.

“Ukraine is a really good example of how adaptation has sort of prolonged the armed conflict in a situation where the balance of power initially looked pretty clear. The war in Gaza is another situation in which both sides have sought to change how they fight to get as many concessions out of their opponent as possible,” said Aronson.

The researchers are optimistic that they will be able to use their findings to create causal models that can produce insights about likely trajectories of different conflicts including duration and how they might end.

“We hope that the project will contribute to ongoing debates about how the U.S. can help to terminate wars more quickly and on terms more favorable to the U.S. and its allies,” said Huth. “We also anticipate that findings will have significant policy implications for understanding how military adaptation affects war termination, including the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza.”