Military transformation processes in democratic countries are often said to be informed, first and foremost, by the political need to limit the number of casualties during military operations. Only by doing so, liberal scholars argue, can decision-makers hope to get enough public support for sustained military engagements. Thus, ‘democratic warfare’ requires military capabilities of a particular kind: Precision-guided munitions, unmanned aerial combat vehicles or even cyber-attacks. This analysis evaluates the timing and programmatic choices of armament policies of thirty countries by using QCA- methodology as a way to assess the relative causal weight of a number of factors (regime type, defence commitments, enduring international rivalries etc.) which might explain the procurement of so-called information-warfare capabilities. Our study has both methodological and explanatory aims: (1) to improve the inclusion of sequential developments into QCA-frameworks and (2) to compare the explanatory power of both liberal and non-liberal accounts of military transformations.
