Creating Military Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804753997 ISBN 13: 9780804753999

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Creating Military Power examines how societies, cultures, political structures, and the global environment affect countries' military organizations. Unlike most analyses of countries' military power, which focus on material and basic resources―such as the size of populations, technological and industrial base, and GNP―this volume takes a more expansive view. The study's overarching argument is that states' global environments and the particularities of their cultures, social structures, and political institutions often affect how they organize and prepare for war, and ultimately impact their effectiveness in battle. The creation of military power is only partially dependent on states' basic material and human assets. Wealth, technology, and human capital certainly matter for a country's ability to create military power, but equally important are the ways a state uses those resources, and this often depends on the political and social environment in which military activity takes place.

About this title

About the Author

Risa A. Brooks is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Elizabeth A. Stanley is Assistant Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and in the Department of Government at Georgetown University.

From the Back Cover

"Rigorous social science too often treats military power as the epiphenomenon of economic or technological resources. This impressive volume helps rectify that common mistake. It explores and details how what really matters--the actual effectiveness of militaries--depends on complex social, political, diplomatic, and organizational underpinnings." --Richard K. Betts, Director, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University
"Creating Military Power is creative and rigorous, attentive to historical detail, and concerned with policy implications. It will undoubtedly be read with great enthusiasm by specialists on international security in both the academy and think tanks."
--Ronald R. Krebs, University of Minnesota

From the Inside Flap

Creating Military Power examines how societies, cultures, political structures, and the global environment affect countries' military organizations. Unlike most analyses of countries' military power, which focus on material and basic resources--such as the size of populations, technological and industrial base, and GNP--this volume takes a more expansive view. The study's overarching argument is that states' global environments and the particularities of their cultures, social structures, and political institutions often affect how they organize and prepare for war, and ultimately impact their effectiveness in battle. The creation of military power is only partially dependent on states' basic material and human assets. Wealth, technology, and human capital certainly matter for a country's ability to create military power, but equally important are the ways a state uses those resources, and this often depends on the political and social environment in which military activity takes place.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Creating Military Power

The Sources of Military Effectiveness

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5399-9

Contents

Contributors..........................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments.......................................................................................................................................ix1. Introduction: The Impact of Culture, Society, Institutions, and International Forces on Military Effectiveness Risa A. Brooks.....................12. Nationalism and Military Effectiveness: Post-Meiji Japan Dan Reiter...............................................................................273. Social Structure, Ethnicity, and Military Effectiveness: Iraq, 1980-2004 Timothy D. Hoyt..........................................................554. Political Institutions and Military Effectiveness: Contemporary United States and United Kingdom Deborah Avant....................................805. Civil-Military Relations and Military Effectiveness: Egypt in the 1967 and 1973 Wars Risa A. Brooks...............................................1066. Global Norms and Military Effectiveness: The Army in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland Theo Farrell.................................................1367. International Competition and Military Effectiveness: Naval Air Power, 1919-1945 Emily O. Goldman.................................................1588. International Alliances and Military Effectiveness: Fighting Alongside Allies and Partners Nora Bensahel..........................................1869. Explaining Military Outcomes Stephen Biddle.......................................................................................................20710. Conclusion Risa A. Brooks........................................................................................................................228Index.................................................................................................................................................239

Chapter One

Introduction: The Impact of Culture, Society, Institutions, and International Forces on Military Effectiveness

RISA A. BROOKS

WHY ARE SOME STATES, at some times, better able to translate their basic material and human strengths into fighting power? Why are some militaries able to make the most of their limited resources on the battlefield, whereas others perform poorly despite significant material advantages? These questions are the central themes of this volume. The study explores why states vary in their military effectiveness. It seeks to explain how states organize and prepare for war and ultimately create military power.

This book's overarching argument is that states' military effectiveness often depends on the global environment and the particularities of their political cultures, social structures, and institutions. The creation of military power only partially depends on states' material and human resources. Wealth, technology, and human capital certainly matter for states' ability to create military power. Equally important, however, are how a state uses those resources.

Cultural and societal factors, political institutions, and pressure from the international arena all shape how a state uses its resources. They constitute the environment in which a state's military activities take place: for example, they influence how patterns and routines emerge and evolve for strategic and operational planning, selection of leaders, procurement of weapons, training of soldiers, and creation of doctrine. By influencing these activities, a state's society and its international environment affect how well it uses its material and human resources in the process of organizing and preparing for war and therefore its ability to create military power.

This book examines these social and political forces in an effort to understand the sources of states' military effectiveness. Each of the following seven chapters examines a different potential "cause" of effectiveness. These include the impact of nationalist sentiments, ethnic divisions, civil-military relations, domestic political institutions, and the international pressures induced by interstate competition, international organizations, and global norms. Chapter 9 assesses the implications of effectiveness for outcomes in war.

Here I introduce the common framework that provides the analytical infrastructure for each of these individual chapters. Specifically, in assessing military effectiveness we are interested in the degree to which a military exhibits four central attributes: integration, or the ability to ensure consistency in military activity, create synergies within and across levels of military activity, and avoid counterproductive actions; responsiveness, which is the degree to which a state accommodates both internal and external constraints and opportunities in preparing itself for armed conflict; skill, including the capacity to ensure that military personnel are motivated and prepared to execute tasks on the battlefield; and quality, or the capacity of the state to supply itself with essential weapons and equipment. The more a military exhibits these attributes, the more capable it is at generating military power.

Before presenting this framework in greater detail, I begin by discussing why military effectiveness is such a critical issue worthy of study. The chapter then addresses previous studies of military effectiveness, emphasizing the strengths of individual research traditions and the need for a more unified, coherent research program to allow for greater accumulation of knowledge in this area. The book's analytical framework follows.

Why Study Military Effectiveness?

Studying military effectiveness provides insight into a core concept of international relations: military power. Military power is central to a vast range of research questions in political science, yet few scholars of international relations have examined a key component of military power, that of effectiveness. Conventional assessments of military power in international relations tend instead to emphasize basic resources. For example, large-n studies often use gross national product (GNP) as a proxy or core indicator of military power. Some studies include industrial capacity and population size; more detailed studies may use numbers of troops or weapons on the two opposing sides as measures of power. At best, however, studies try to equate capital expenditure per soldier, estimated by dividing total defense dollars by number of personnel in the armed forces. Power generally is reduced to basic human and military inputs.

Although economic and technological resources are essential to any assessment of potential military power, they are not the sole important factor affecting the ability to project force in war. The actual creation of military power involves two things: the basic resources a state has-GNP, technology, and the like-and how it uses those resources, or effectiveness. Resources are important in assessing potential power, but effectiveness tells how well a state can translate those resources into actual power in war. Effectiveness is the difference between what a state's raw resources suggest it could potentially do, and what it is actually capable of doing in battle.

Recent empirical analysis by Stephen Biddle confirms that purely resource-based methodologies for measuring power have limited explanatory utility. Biddle finds that even efforts to estimate the odds of victory in war with five indices-GNP, population, military personnel, military expenditure, and a composite of these-can explain at best just 60 percent of outcomes.

Clearly, more is involved in the generation of power than raw material resources. Yet, as I elaborate in the next section, we still have limited insight into what else beyond money and manpower actually influences the capacity to create military power. How, for example, do features of states' societies, politics, and international environments shape their military activities and therefore their abilities to make the best use of their resources in wartime? In an effort to help answer this question, this book examines an array of factors beyond the realm of traditional military analysis as we seek to understand the sources of states' military effectiveness.

In turn, by expanding our knowledge of the origins of military power, we gain insight into an even more pivotal concept in international relations: state power. Military capability is one (and, by many accounts, the most important) basis of state power. By implication, if the creation of military capability is not simply a matter of generating wealth and technology but is indeed heavily influenced by broad characteristics of states, such as their cultures, social structures, institutions, global environments, and so forth, it potentially requires us to revisit our ideas about the origins of state power. Thinking about the origins of military effectiveness raises critical questions about what exactly makes states powerful.

In addition, by studying effectiveness, we gain valuable practical insight into which states are, in fact, more and less militarily powerful in the contemporary interstate arena. By understanding the processes through which states create power, we can anticipate when states are truly capable of dominating their adversaries militarily and when their threats to use force should be taken seriously. In turn, because the balance of military power often shapes states' strategic interactions-how they bargain with one another, when and how much they concede in disputes, and when they decide to fight-by having a more complete understanding of the determinants of the balance of power, we can learn more about the nature of those interactions.

By incorporating effectiveness into military analysis more systematically, we may even alter our assessments of powerful states in the international arena. It may well be, for example, that a country like China is far more, or less, powerful than its wealth, population, and technology suggest when we more fully consider the intangible aspects of effectiveness and how they bear on its capacity to use those resources: when we better understand how its political structure, cultural traditions, civil-military relations, economic institutions, and global environment shape its military activities and effectiveness. Alternatively, some less developed states and nonstate actors may be far more powerful than their human and capital resources imply, whereas others, like Iraq under Saddam Hussein, may be capable of much less. The case of Iraq, in fact, perhaps best underscores the importance of incorporating nonmaterial factors into our assessment of military power: nearly universally prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf war analysts in the United States overestimated the Iraqi regime's military capabilities because they failed to recognize the limitations on training, leadership, and command and control posed by the regime's autocratic nature, social structure, and civil-military relations. In short, by focusing on military effectiveness, this study raises profound questions about how political scientists think about military power, state power, and the origins of both. See Figure 1.1.

The Study of Military Effectiveness

There is considerable research in sociology, operations research (OR), military history, and, more recently, in political science on the topic of military effectiveness. Although this literature offers important insight, much remains to be done. Unsurprisingly for such a diverse literature, definitions vary, approaches are sometimes narrow or discipline specific, and linkages across traditions are infrequent. This volume is an effort to bridge these gaps and contribute to a more coherent, more cumulative literature on this critical subject.

Sociologists have long been interested in studying military effectiveness. These studies date back to inquiries into the sources of German and American soldiers' motivation to fight in World War II. Today, much of this literature is concerned with similar motivational issues and seeks to explain those factors that make individuals or units perform well in combat. In particular, a central debate revolves around the main source of human motivation in battle: unit cohesion versus ideology. Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz and others view an effective military as one whose soldiers exhibit high levels of unit cohesion. The willingness to fight hard or even to die stems from the interpersonal bonds among soldiers: individual soldiers fight for one another, not for their countries. By contrast, Omer Bartov argues that effective militaries are those that exhibit high levels of morale, in which soldiers are motivated by beliefs about the worthiness of their country's cause and the honor of risking their lives on its behalf. Other sociologists and scholars working in this tradition emphasize the importance of individual initiative, discipline, courage, or nationalism. Yet another strand of literature emphasizes the impact of the social integration of specific groups, such as African Americans, women, or homosexuals, on organizational activity.

The sociological research has addressed questions vital to the study of military effectiveness, but its analyses tend to be concerned with a relatively discrete set of questions concerning individual and small-unit behavior in tactical operations. It does not explore a broad variety of factors beyond individual motivation and small-unit social dynamics that affect military effectiveness, such as an organization's strength in strategic and operational planning, training, military education, or doctrinal development. In addition, this scholarship tends not to link these phenomena systematically to an explicit definition of military effectiveness.

The discipline of military-related operations research (sometimes referred to by the acronym MOR) represents a second tradition of analysis. MOR originated with British and U.S. efforts during World War II to model the effects of different technologies and systems such as radar, antisubmarine warfare, or antiaircraft defense. During the Cold War, the main goal of MOR was to test which conventional or nuclear weapons specifications and battle formations the U.S. military and its allies should adopt to deter or halt a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact attack. As such, MOR was used to examine force design, force structure, and resource allocation issues at the operational level, and systems requirements and tactics at the tactical level. But MOR's most important objective has been the development of a set of system characteristics to be used as performance requirements for developers to design the next generation of weapons systems. Characteristics of these systems include vehicle speed, target detection probabilities, hit probabilities, firing times, and survivability.

Today, military operations research involves mathematical modeling and computer simulations of battle and war outcomes. Despite these models' growing sophistication, from the perspective of understanding military effectiveness, they have some weaknesses. First, given their purpose, these models are primarily focused on the tactical level of war; thus larger questions of operational planning and strategy, which affect a military's effectiveness, are beyond their scope. However, as several scholars emphasize in this book, strategic assessment and higher-order military planning are crucial to how a state employs its resources in the course of war; they set parameters for tactical action. These activities are also crucial to any comprehensive study of military effectiveness.

Second, MOR models often tend to measure a military's effectiveness almost exclusively in terms of its hard assets, neglecting the organizational and other forces that allow a military to use those assets productively. These models draw heavily on technological and numerical indicators of military power, primarily because these are easily quantifiable. They place much less emphasis on intangible factors such as leadership, training, morale, and doctrine that affect a military's proficiencies in using its weapons and equipment. Such intangibles often have a major impact on a state's ability to take advantage of its weapons systems because they affect its military's skills in handling the weapons and integrating them with training and doctrine. The quality of a military's weapons is only part of the military effectiveness equation.

Political scientists, too, have evinced growing interest in studying military effectiveness. Stephen Rosen, for example, has explored the effects of class stratification or caste on the Indian army's military effectiveness. Dan Reiter and Allan Stam have analyzed the effects of regime type on military effectiveness. Stephen Biddle and Robert Zirkle have examined how differences in Iraqi and North Vietnamese civil-military relations affected their armies' relative capacities to assimilate sophisticated technology. One of the important contributions of this research is to focus attention on a range of factors beyond the realm of traditional military analysis that may influence states' effectiveness.

However, here, once again, the literature is more a point of departure than a conclusive resolution. A wealth of possible social and political variables seems likely to shape military effectiveness; the still-small political science literature on the topic touches only a fraction of these. With some important exceptions, much of this literature is focused chiefly on the tactical level of war; operational and especially strategic issues remain understudied. Definitions are also inconsistent. Some studies eschew a formal definition of military effectiveness. Those studies that do attempt a more systematic treatment of the concept lack a common definition or approach. For example, some political scientists analyze military effectiveness in terms of a military organization's capacity to prevail over an adversary-in terms of victory or defeat. Here the more effective military in a conflict dyad is indicated by victory over its adversary in a battle, controlling for differentials in raw resources; effectiveness is indicated by success in battle. Other scholars place greater weight on the degree to which military organizations and their personnel exhibit particular attributes essential to the planning and preparation for war. They point to specific features of a military, rather than focusing on its battlefield victories and defeats, as indicators of its effectiveness. Here the properties of military activity and the organization itself provide evidence for its (in)effectiveness.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804753997
• ISBN 13: 9780804753999
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Brooks Risa A., Stanley Elizabeth A.