For information on reprint and reuse permissions, please visit The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.

Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial purposes. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited linking directly to this product page is encouraged. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law.

All RAND reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity. RAND reports present research findings and objective analysis that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. This report is part of the RAND Corporation Research report series. The research described in this report was conducted by the RAND Arroyo Center. military and its forward posture may contribute to the further global decline of deadly armed conflict. military preponderance may be a part of the explanation for the decline in armed conflict in the first place. land forces for military interventions rose substantially. In fact, even as armed conflict declined in the post–Cold War era, the frequency of deployments of U.S. Moreover, even if armed conflict continues to decline, this fact does not necessarily indicate lower demand for U.S. There are also substantial regional differences in incidence of armed conflict, and global trends do not necessarily reflect those trends. military prepares to defend the United States in periods of crisis, not just for the 'average' level of threat or in response to 'average' incidence of conflict. Of the alternative future scenarios we examined, only a few produced large spikes in armed conflict.īut the defense policy implications of these findings are not straightforward, since conflict trends do not follow straight lines and the U.S. Many factors have contributed to the long-term decline in conflict and most of those factors remain in place.

Similarly, intrastate conflict (that is, civil wars and related political violence) had declined steadily for two decades before an uptick in conflict sparked by the wars in Syria and Ukraine in 2014. Interstate war (that is, war between states) has become a rare event. From a decades-long perspective, the incidence of armed conflict has decreased.

Armed conflict current event