A Georgia professor has created a model calculating the chances of military success:
Despite overwhelming military superiority, the world’s most powerful nations failed to achieve their objectives in 39 percent of their military operations since World War II, according to a new University of Georgia 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 the major objective, the nature of the target, whether there’s going to be another strong state that will intervene on the side of the target and whether you’ll 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.
This is one of those, “damn, I should have done that” situations. I mean, I’m designing a sim right now that could just have easily been used for something like this. She does very well to focus ont the distinction between the situations where brute force is enough to procur the objective and where it isn’t.