Campaign Analysis: Demystifying the Method

• In Event: New Research Methods in Security Studies

Abstract

Campaign analysis, a method for examining the interaction of military forces to estimate the outcomes of scenarios under varying assumptions, is an important method in academic security studies. While many campaign analyses have been published, campaign analysis has not been formally defined as an analytic technique. We introduce a definition of campaign analysis and lay out a set of existing shared practices with the aim of increasing the breadth, quality, and usefulness of research employing the method. We also introduce two new advancements of the method: a focus on extendible models as a core contribution of campaign analysis, and a technique for propagating uncertainty through the model. We successfully replicate and extend three campaign analyses published in "International Security": Posen's 1991 analysis of the conventional balance in 1980s Europe, Lieber and Press' 2006 study of United States nuclear primacy, and Wu's forthcoming study of nuclear counterforce strikes on China. We demonstrate how generalizable, interactive models can illustrate where Posen's model breaks down, how Lieber and Press’ United States--Russia counterforce model can be easily used to answer new questions with little additional work, and even extended to the United States-China counterforce scenario. By introducing uncertainty into model inputs, we show that deviations from Posen's well-defended values produce different findings, and that varying treatments of uncertainty lead to different assessments of the survivability of China’s strategic arsenal.

Authors

• Rachel Tecott, U.S. Naval War College

• Andrew Halterman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology