The famous PD game is frequently applied to arms races between two countries. It is assumed that each country has a choice between a high or low level of arms. Each country’s most-preferred outcome is assumed to be where they choose high arms and their rivals low, gaining a clear military advantage. Their least-preferred outcome is the reverse. However, the second best outcome for each is where both choose low; if no advantage is gained, it is assumed to be cheaper and more secure to avoid the arms race.

Each player’s “dominant strategy” is to choose high arms, as whichever choice the rival has made, they do better by choosing high than low. This outcome illustrates the Nash equilibrium—named after American mathematician and economics Nobelist John F. Nash—in which each player has chosen the optimal strategy in a noncooperative situation or zero-sum game (compare positive-sum game), given the other player’s strategy. The Nash equilibrium outcome of the game is therefore that both choose high. It is an equilibrium because neither player would change their own choice, given the choice of the rival. However, this arms race outcome is worse for both players than if both had chosen low arms. The logic of their rivalry traps them in a mutually disadvantageous situation.

However, the picture may not necessarily be so bleak, as in reality the “game” is not played once and for all but is an ongoing series of decisions, which can be modeled by the “iterated prisoner’s dilemma” (IPD), where the PD game is played repeatedly by the same players. This opens the possibility for cooperation to emerge through reward and punishment strategies such as “tit for tat”—start by choosing low arms but then match the strategy chosen by the other player in the previous round. Experiments have shown this to be a highly successful strategy in IPD games.

While greatly simplifying real-world situations, the PD may be a useful metaphor to capture the essential dilemma facing countries engaged in an enduring rivalry.

The Richardson model and its elaborations

In his seminal work Arms and Insecurity (1949), the British physicist and psychologist Lewis Fry Richardson proposed a model (which he applied to the dreadnought race) of an arms race between two countries where each country sets its military expenditure or arms acquisition level in each period based on its own and its rival’s level in the previous period in an “action-reaction” pattern. This is modeled by the following equations: M1_t = –a1M1_t–1 + b1M2_t–1 + g1, M2_t = –a2M2_t–1 + b2M1_t–1 + g2. Here M1_t and M2_t refer to the military spending levels of countries 1 and 2 in years t and t − 1, respectively. The coefficients a1 and a2 (assumed to be positive) are “fatigue” coefficients, representing the difficulty of maintaining high levels of military spending. The coefficients b1 and b2, also positive, are “reaction” coefficients, measuring the tendency of each country to respond to the military spending of its rival, while g1 and g2 are autonomous “grievance” or “ambition” terms, representing each country’s desire for military capability apart from the rivalry. Depending on the relative size of the fatigue and reaction coefficients, the arms race can either reach a stable equilibrium or spiral out of control.

The basic Richardson model has been extensively developed by other authors, both theoretically and empirically. Developments include taking into account the stock of weapons of each country as well as the rate of spending, introducing explicit economic criteria, and modeling the strategic dynamics of the relationship. Richardson models can easily be applied to empirical military spending data, using regression analysis to estimate the parameters of the equation for a pair of countries. The key question is whether the reaction terms b1 and b2 are significantly greater than zero—if so, an “action-reaction” or Richardsonian arms race is said to exist. A wide variety of theoretical models and statistical techniques starting from the Richardson framework have been applied to various pairs of countries.

While the Richardson model has proved extraordinarily fruitful in generating scholarly analysis of arms races, the Richardson approach has a rather poor empirical record in demonstrating the existence of actual arms races. Some, though not all, studies of India and Pakistan have found evidence of a Richardsonian arms race, but few other enduring rivalries have produced such empirical results and none consistently.

A problem of the Richardson model is that it assumes that the parameters of the relationship (the values of a, b, and g) remain constant, whereas in reality they may change over time, depending on the changing relationship between the countries. A second is that it is most applicable to pairs of countries where the rivalry is the overwhelming factor for each country’s security, which is relatively rare.

One suggestion is that the changing levels of tension or hostility between countries may be a better way of explaining their military spending decisions than the Richardson action-reaction framework, or perhaps a combination of levels of hostility with the rival’s military spending. This would suggest that arms races are characterized more by short bursts of rapidly increasing spending during periods of high tension than by long-term stable relationships between their levels of spending.

Economic models

A third approach is to assume that countries’ military expenditure decisions are the outcome of an economic resource-allocation process whereby the government seeks to achieve a set of economic, political, and security objectives by allocating spending between military and civilian sectors. Neoclassical rational choice models are most frequently employed, but others are also used. When two rival countries are considered, each country’s level of security is assumed to depend on both its own level and its rivals’ level of military spending. Each country makes its decision taking into account the likely response of the other. The resulting models are similar to certain elaborations of the Richardson model: while one starts from the arms race and builds in economic allocation issues, the other starts with the allocation problem and builds in the rivalry.