Limited Intervention: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Limited Stabilization, Limited Strike, and Containment Operations

The foreign policy and defense communities have intensively debated the efficacy of low-cost and small-footprint military options for crises such as those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. This report provides a statistical analysis of hundreds of cases, supplemented by case studies, to evaluate the strategic effects of each option across a range of irregular warfare operations and in a range of operational environments.