The Effectiveness of Drones, Air Power, and Modern Coercion

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

Countries have a compelling interest in combatting state and nonstate opponents who threaten them or their allies without the need to deploy significant ground forces. Large ground commitments are slow, generate political costs, and can limit the ability to respond flexibly to or deter near-peer competitors. Offshore coercion—air/missile strikes (a) launched from remote bases that (b) do not hold territory—provides a lower-cost way to advance these interests. Unfortunately, existing work provides little reason to be optimistic about its utility: airpower is viewed as a cheap signal that is effective only when used to support capable ground forces. This work, however, studies old technology and frequently relies on inferences from very few cases. The development of new cross-country data, theory, and generalizable empirical results provide new insights on modern means and strategies of armed coercion. New data and findings on how combatants produce, respond to, and mitigate coercion also advance the study of armed conflict, including its duration, severity, and outcome, and the occurrence of harm to civilian populations. This project studies the effect of: (a) the development, threat, and/or deployment of offshore military capabilities in interstate disputes; and (b) offshore missile strikes on non-state armed activity during intrastate conflicts. The study generates cross-country data of offshore coercion, theory on offshore coercion and its impact on conflict dynamics, and new quantitative and qualitative results. These data, covering 2001-2021, include dyad-month information on offshore coercion used during interstate disputes by six countries, and grid-month information on offshore strikes used during intrastate conflicts by fifteen states. The PI uses matching, fixed effects, and placebo and sensitivity tests to account for observed and unobserved confounding. Furthermore, the PI uses process tracing to examine the causal mechanisms at work in offshore coercion processes. Project outputs advance research on armed coercion (1) by contributing to a research agenda on how changing military tactics and technology affect the use and utility of armed coercion, (2) by advancing understanding of counterinsurgency, and (3) by distinguishing tactical vs. strategic effects associated with non-territorial coercive activity, rebel territorial control, and civilian targeting. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.