Militarized interstate dispute

Militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) are conflicts between states that do not involve a full-scale war. These include any conflicts in which one or more states threaten, display, or use force against one or more other states. They can vary in intensity from threats of force to actual combat short of war. A MID is composed of a sequence of related militarized incidents, all but the first being an outgrowth of or response to a previous militarized incident. An initiator of a war need not necessarily be the same as the initiator of a preceding MID, since a MID can be started by a show of force, whereas the initiator of a war begins the actual combat. Under this definition, over 2400 MIDs have been identified from 1816 to 2014 in the Correlates of War project.

For example, although the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition would be considered a full-scale war, the bombings and disputes related to American, British, and (until 1996) French control of the Iraqi no-fly zone in the 1990s are described by Frank Wayman as a MID.