IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hoo/wpaper/16101.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Decline of American Engagement: Patterns in U.S. Troop Deployments

Author

Listed:
  • Tim Kane

Abstract

The number of U.S. troops deployed has been trending downward over the short and long terms, and is projected to reach zero before mid-century. This paper analyzes a unified dataset of U.S. troop deployments from 1950 to 2015, including annual estimates of "boots on the ground" in hundreds of countries. Linear and nonlinear forecast models of troop levels agree that total and deployed U.S. troop levels are declining rapidly. The trends are paradoxical as they contrast with an increasing number of countries where U.S. troops are based above three different threshold levels of troops in country per year. Econometric tests of causality indicate a link runs from total troop levels to deployments, but not vice versa, implying that a smaller U.S. military will indeed cause foreign policy to be less directly engaged.

Suggested Citation

  • Tim Kane, 2016. "The Decline of American Engagement: Patterns in U.S. Troop Deployments," Economics Working Papers 16101, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
    • Handle: RePEc:hoo:wpaper:16101
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/16101_-_kane_-_decline_of_american_engagement.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eugen Dimant & Tim Krieger & Daniel Meierrieks, 2017. "Negative Returns: U.S. Military Policy and Anti-American Terrorism," Economics Working Papers 17106, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
    2. Travis Sharp, 2019. "Wars, presidents, and punctuated equilibriums in US defense spending," Policy Sciences, Springer;Society of Policy Sciences, vol. 52(3), pages 367-396, September.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hoo:wpaper:16101. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/hostaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.