Officer Staffing: Political Loyalty and Combat Performance

• In Event: Innovations in the Study of Militaries and International Conflict

Abstract

Does military leadership determine military effectiveness? This paper examines the effects of military leadership turnover on combat performance. Using a newly constructed, geo-referenced dataset of daily troop movements of over 15,000 units of the Soviet Army in WWII, battlefield data on hundreds of combat operations involving Soviet troops, quantitative evidence on thousands of career appointments of personnel holding combat commands within the Soviet Army, and detailed biographies of senior military and political personnel of each combat unit, I study the Soviet military leadership’s role in the success and failure of battlefield operations. The findings advance our understanding of the effects of leadership turnover on the combat performance of military units by examining the micro-level strategic and political decisions that drove the war.

Author

• Roya Talibova, Harvard University