Comments on the Articles by Sample and Diehl & Crescenzi

The recent article by Susan Sample (1997) has performed an enormous service to the debate over the arms race / war relationship In particular, two nagging issues have now been put to rest. The first concerns the best index to use when converting military expenditure data into a measurement of arms races. She makes a second important contribution by sorting out the different criteria to choose the test population of arms races in the various competing studies.