Deterrence: Empirical Results

Conflicts since 1989 are 6X more lethal in places without a US troop presence

This is an early draft of research I’m doing on a study of conventional deterrence. I am sharing the full text with subscribers only since the results are officially unpublished and preliminary.

We created a panel dataset of US troop deployments by country for the years 1989-2022 along with battle-related deaths using the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED) Global version 23.1. The codebook for the Uppsala dataset offers a best estimate for battle-related deaths which “refer to those deaths caused by the warring parties that can be directly related to combat.”