"While the media have given frenzied coverage to the short-term ups and downs of the still-early war with Iraq, history would never have suggested that the war would be as short as some pundits predicted," says Dr. D. Scott Bennett, associate professor of political science. "Rather, history reveals that half of the wars fought since 1816 have lasted more than five months, with the average length of a war being 17 months.
"Wars are rarely as short as the media wanted to make this war out to be in its first days," Bennett notes. "A longer-term perspective suggests that the odds always favored a significantly more protracted war. In the absence of other stories to cover, many media outlets have chosen to portray every advance and setback as a major indicator of what the future holds. In forecasting the length of Operation Iraqi Freedom, we would do better to look back at other conflicts and compare government types, respective strengths of both sides, battlefield terrain, opposing strategies and other variables."
The Penn State researcher is co-author of the forthcoming book "The Behavioral Origins of War: Cumulation and Limits to Knowledge in Understanding International Conflict" (University of Michigan Press), along with Dr. Allan C. Stam, associate professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College.
Since 1994, Bennett and Stam have been using data from the long-term Correlates of War (COW) project to probe the causes of all international wars, as well as crises that ended short of war. They published their initial findings on war length in the paper, "The Duration of Interstate Wars, 1816-1985," in the June 1996 issue of the American Political Science Review. In this article, Bennett and Stam conducted a statistical analysis of wars to determine what characteristics influence their length.
Bennett says, "The factors included military strategies used by the two sides, the terrain on which the war was fought, the relative strength and technological sophistication of the two sides, whether one side achieved surprise, the nature of the political systems on each side, the number of combatant states (if there were more than two) and the intensity of the stakes as viewed by either side. Given that model, we can apply what we learned about the relative weight of those factors and make a forecast of the length of the current war."
The researchers applied similar factors from the current Operation Iraqi Feedom to their model.
"In estimating the length of this Iraqi war, the critical feature is whether or not the United States becomes involved in major battles of attrition and significant urban warfare," Bennett notes.
The nature of the terrain is a critical part of any war, and has a major effect on the expected length of war. When the terrain consists of swamp, jungle or mountain - or densely populated cities - the progress of attacking forces is slow, and defenders are able to mount fierce resistance. In contrast, open terrain (desert, fields or rolling hills) allows mobile attacking forces to move quickly, surround and isolate defending units, and to strike easily visible targets from the air.
"If the United States were able to fight the entire war in the open desert, then our prediction of the war's length is 3-4 weeks," Bennett says. "However, the coalition forces have already had to turn their attention to cities in Iraq, and indeed, Baghdad is the primary objective. In a mixed environment of open country and urban terrain, our analysis suggests that a war will last two and one-half months.
"Although the historic average war length is 17 months, and with half of all wars lasting over five months, the United States has a number of advantages that lead us to expect the war to be shorter," Bennett says.
The United States holds an enormous edge in both the size of its military forces and the technology that those forces can bring to bear. The U.S. also is focusing on using a movement or maneuver strategy to break through Iraqi lines rather than fight attrition battles everywhere.
"As long as the coalition forces can protect their supply lines from Iraqi attack, they can bring to bear ground and air forces on selected targets in a combined arms operation that maximizes their technological and training advantages," Bennett adds.
To obtain the most updated report by Bennett and Stam, go to this web site: http://polisci.la.psu.edu/faculty/bennett/warduration.html
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