Why Are Wars Less Deadly? Analysis of Precision Warfare and Military Economic Expenditure

Gone are the days of carpet-bombing and indiscriminate artillery, conflict today is more precise and less deadly. Advancements in aviation and targeting technologies have contributed to a reduction in battlefield deaths by facilitating limited and discriminate operations, often producing infrastructural damage while decreasing direct combat deaths. The transformation in targeting doctrine presents both conceptual and empirical challenges for measures of war, particularly datasets that utilize battlefield deaths to identify instances of armed conflict and their severity. The main argument of this thesis is that precision technologies help explain why war has become a less deadly event as a result of a shift in targeting outcomes away from combatants to system-level targets. Should this argument hold, the definition of which conflicts constitute "war" requires increased scrutiny as death rates alone are no longer a meaningful heuristic for capturing the political behavior of armed conflict. Instead, the increased financial expenditure in the precision technologies as they are deployed serves as a more appropriate mechanism to capture what constitutes war and measures war severity. As a result, this thesis seeks to propose military economic expenditures as a new measure to quantify war severity and potentially capture less deadly but expensive wars. To explore this phenomenon, a comparative case-oriented study of select contemporary United States conflicts from 2003 to 2026 is analyzed through a case-oriented comparative case study research design. From this, there are two claims being made in this paper: first, that precision targeting technologies have made warfare less deadly and second, that the measure of military economic expenditure will enable the continued collection of conflict data to be robust and relevant. As wars increase in precision and decrease in lethality, these new instances of less-deadly war can be accounted for by including the measurement of military economic expenditure. This research design utilizes a comparative case-oriented study of contemporary United States conflicts. By using military economic expenditures as a new metric for quantifying war severity, a more accurate conceptualization of war can be developed.