Sarah Paine

Using the Ukrainian battlefield as an example, Paine pointed out that Russia pushed Ukrainians into a death trap, but Ukrainians did not abandon resistance as some observers expected; instead, they displayed astonishing resilience.

Paine believes that unlimited war is conceptually simple (the objective is simply regime change) but extremely difficult to execute, because putting an opponent in a death trap will inspire a will to resist beyond imagination.

Strategic scholar Sarah Paine proposed the fundamental difference between unlimited war objectives and limited war objectives: the objective of unlimited war is regime change, while the objective of limited war is specific limited demands.

Paine said the United States could have executed Hirohito at the end of World War II but chose to keep him because he was useful to the United States.

Paine believes that the difference between unlimited war and limited war lies not in the intensity of the means but in the fundamental arrangement of the postwar political order: the endpoint of unlimited war is that the old regime no longer exists, while limited war means coexistence with the old regime.

Historian Sarah Paine's analysis points out that Britain's abandonment of the Thirteen Colonies in North America was the result of a global strategic trade-off, rather than a purely military failure.

Sarah Paine's analysis argues that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, through the chain reaction of shrinking global trade, intensified Japan's sense of existential anxiety and ultimately became one of the indirect factors pushing it toward war.

Paine argues that Japan did not have sufficient military manpower to fight the war to its conclusion, but did assemble sufficient financial resources.

Historian Sarah Paine argues that the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War was largely determined by international credit markets rather than the battlefield, and that Russia's fundamental reason for seeking peace was its inability to afford the cost of the war.

The conflict escalation chain proposed by Paine: bilateral miscalculation in a civil war → third-party intervention → war escalates into regional and potentially global risk → the winning side overreaches past the culminating point of victory → a third party is triggered to intervene again → the conflict spirals further out of control.

Sarah Paine is a military historian.

Sarah Paine is the author of The Wars for Asia

Sarah Paine is a professor of history at the U.S. Naval War College, specializing in East Asian military history and grand strategy

Paine argues that Russia gained nothing from the Russo-Japanese War and would have been far better off had it not fought it

Paine argues that clarity of objectives is itself a core variable of strategic capability, and that the side able to precisely define 'what counts as winning' before a war begins is more likely to succeed

Sarah Paine argues that whether a war is successful depends not on whether all battles were won, but on whether the goals for which the war was launched were achieved