Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment - Softcover

Brooks, Risa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691136688 ISBN 13: 9780691136684

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Good strategic assessment does not guarantee success in international relations, but bad strategic assessment dramatically increases the risk of disastrous failure. The most glaring example of this reality is playing out in Iraq today. But what explains why states and their leaders are sometimes so good at strategic assessment--and why they are sometimes so bad at it? Part of the explanation has to do with a state's civil-military relations. In Shaping Strategy, Risa Brooks develops a novel theory of how states' civil-military relations affect strategic assessment during international conflicts. And her conclusions have broad practical importance: to anticipate when states are prone to strategic failure abroad, we must look at how civil-military relations affect the analysis of those strategies at home.


Drawing insights from both international relations and comparative politics, Shaping Strategy shows that good strategic assessment depends on civil-military relations that encourage an easy exchange of information and a rigorous analysis of a state's own relative capabilities and strategic environment. Among the diverse case studies the book illuminates, Brooks explains why strategic assessment in Egypt was so poor under Gamal Abdel Nasser prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and why it improved under Anwar Sadat. The book also offers a new perspective on the devastating failure of U.S. planning for the second Iraq war. Brooks argues that this failure, far from being unique, is an example of an assessment pathology to which states commonly succumb.

About this title

About the Author

Risa Brooks is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University.

From the Back Cover

"Brooks has made a significant contribution to the study of decision making and military strategy. Her case studies repeatedly demonstrate how pathologies in civil-military relations produce ineffective decisions in crises and conflicts."--Scott D. Sagan, Stanford University

"Brooks articulates the problem of strategic assessment in a new way, does a very good review of the literature, introduces a simple model with profound implications, and makes a compelling case for her claims. Her general argument--that strategic assessment varies with the balance of power between civilian and military leaders and the degree to which their preferences diverge--is intriguing."--Deborah Avant, University of California, Irvine

"Risa Brooks's theory of why some states are good at strategic assessment while others are not is novel, persuasive, nuanced, and elegant. Her discussion of the failure of U.S. strategic assessment following the second Iraq war shows that this issue is of much more than theoretical relevance. This book is an important contribution to the study of civil-military relations and strategic decision making."--Michael Desch, Texas A&M University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Shaping Strategy

The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic AssessmentBy Risa Brooks

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2008 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13668-4

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT

IN MAY 1967 EGYPT'S President Nasser initiated a crisis with Israel that would end in a war he was bound to lose. The crisis began when Nasser received a report that Israel was sending forces to its border with Syria. Despite soon learning the report was false, Nasser nevertheless escalated tensions by requesting the United Nations withdraw its forces stationed in the Sinai Peninsula to make way for deployments of Egyptian troops. Shortly thereafter, on May 22, Egypt's president took the even more dire step of closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. On the morning of June 5, Israel attacked Egypt's airfields. Egypt's role in the ensuing war ended just a day and a half later in a devastating defeat that changed the complexion of Middle East politics forever.

Curiously, despite the potential stakes involved, Egypt's decisions to initiate and later hold firm to its demands that spring were taken in an internal environment ill-prepared for the gravity of the situation. Decision making was reportedly sorely lacking on Egypt's political and military situation. Historical accounts reveal that Nasser was competing with his military chief for control of military policy. Intelligence was politicized, and coordination between political and military authorities inadequate. As a result, and by his own admission, Nasser went to war with a poor assessment of how miserably Egypt's military would fare in the conflict and the devastation his regime would bear as a result.

In striking contrast, Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, was able to plan and implement a series of political and military initiatives in the 1970s aimed at achieving his security goals. He developed, in consultation with military authorities, a sophisticated, limited war plan based on analysis of Egypt's strategic situation. He was able repeatedly to overrule his military chiefs and implement unpopular plans, including the controversial plan for the October 1973 war, subsequent disengagement agreements, and a peace treaty with Israel. Unlike Nasser, Sadat appeared to benefit from a decision-making environment that allowed him and his military leaders to evaluate critically Egypt's strategic and military options and their consistency with political objectives.

Why are some leaders, at some times, able to assess their capabilities and reconcile their political and military objectives? Why are others prone to poor estimates and disintegrated policies? In sum, why do some states excel at strategic assessment while others fail miserably?

A major reason is the nature of states' civil-military relations. Domestic relations between political and military leaders shape the institutional processes in which leaders evaluate their strategies in interstate conflicts. Those processes affect how leaders appraise their state's military options, plans, and the broader diplomatic and political constraints that bear on them. In short, civil-military relations affect how states engage in strategic assessment.

Strategic assessment is vital to state security and to international peace and stability. Egypt provides a vivid illustration why. Nasser's poor assessment of his capabilities and his devastating loss in the ensuing war in 1967 exposed to the world the failings of his regime and its military. Nasser's claim to regional leadership was irrevocably damaged. The war the leader precipitated also ended with Israel occupying critical areas of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt-areas today, with the exception of the latter, that remain the subject of dispute and a catalyst for tensions in the region. In the 1970s, in contrast, Egypt's strengths in strategic assessment proved an enormous advantage to Anwar Sadat. Egypt got the Sinai back, repositioned itself in the Western camp, and in the process signed the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.

Today the United States must contend with the results of its own debacle of strategic assessment: the failure to evaluate adequately the postwar security environment and prepare accordingly for the 2003 Iraq War. Many analysts focus on rivalries between the State Department and Pentagon or on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's abrasive personality to explain weaknesses in postwar plans. Less understood are how civil-military relations predisposed the country to poor strategic assessment. As I argue in chapter 7, the underlying structure of power and preferences in U.S. civil-military relations was a major cause of inadequate planning for the security vacuum after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. The absence of comprehensive contingency plans and the ensuing breakdown of security alienated the population and fueled a nascent insurgency against American forces.

In these cases, as in the other empirical studies in this volume, failures of strategic assessment had enormous consequences for the states involved. In this book I explain why these failures occur and discuss the conditions under which we are likely to get better strategic assessment.

The Argument in Brief

In its approach to studying strategic assessment, this book bridges the disciplines of comparative and international politics. It begins with insights from comparative politics about the importance of the military's domestic relationship with political leaders. Comparativists have long recognized that the balance of power and intensity of substantive disagreements between political and military leaders can differ significantly across and within states, over time. These moreover can affect the military's bargaining power within ruling regimes and consequently the institutional features of states, broadly defined and specifically in security-related areas. Civil-military relations are vital from this perspective in understanding the internal features of states.

Janus-faced, civil-military relations also have a significant international dimension. During interstate conflicts, military leaders provide advice to a country's political leader about the state's relative capabilities. They guide him or her in assessing the utility of different military plans and options. Military leaders have important informational advantages about these issues, both as a result of their expertise in "the management of violence" and because of their regular contact with the military organization. Political leaders are in charge of a much broader array of policy concerns-not just military and security issues-and therefore even if they, for personal or professional reasons, are well versed in military matters, must rely on those who run the armed forces on a daily basis for information and analysis.

A state's processes for strategic assessment intersect these domestic and international facets of civil-military relations. Clashes over security and other corporate issues and the balance of power between military and political leaders affect the routines through which they share and analyze information, consult with one another, and make decisions at the apex of the state. These processes, in turn, constitute the environment in which political leaders evaluate and select their strategies in interstate disputes-the institutions in which they engage in strategic assessment.

This book explores the causes and consequences of these institutions for strategic assessment. Theoretically, it seeks to explain why states' assessment institutions vary, in the process drawing on the insights of comparative and other scholarship on civil-military relations. In turn, empirically, in each of eight case studies, the book demonstrates how these processes mattered for understanding outcomes of critical importance to international relations.

As I elaborate in chapter 2, in developing this book's theory about how civil-military relations affect strategic assessment, I rely on what I term a "distributional approach": an approach that emphasizes the effects of individuals' and groups' distributional conflicts on the features of institutions. Institutions in this view emerge from the interactions of actors, with varying resources and interests, competing to advance rules and structures that advantage their preferred outcomes. In the current context, I anticipate that studying underlying conflicts between political and military leaders and how these are shaped by their preferences and relative power will illuminate the processes through which they interact in strategic assessment.

Specifically, two variables are key to my theory. The first, the intensity of preference divergence over corporate, professional, or security issues, determines military and political leaders' underlying incentives to contest processes essential to strategic assessment. The second causal variable, the balance of civil-military power, shapes how these conflicts are resolved. Both variables interact, generating particular "logics" that drive the emergence of institutional features in assessment within the state at any given time.

In my theory, I disaggregate strategic assessment into four constituent attributes, or sets of institutional processes: routines for information sharing between political and military leaders about military capabilities and plans, which vary in whether they facilitate fluid exchange or compartmentalize information; strategic coordination, or the structures in existence for assessing alternative political-military strategies, and whether or not they promote rigorous debate about costs and risks and help to coordinate military activity with political and diplomatic objectives and constraints; the military's structural competence in monitoring its own internal activities and procedures for evaluating foreign militaries and the degree to which these promote self-critical analysis about the state's capabilities and sound analysis about its adversaries' forces; and the authorization process, or the mechanisms for approving and vetoing political-military strategy and activity, which vary in whether they promote clearly defined, coherent decision-making processes or contested, ambiguous procedures. Each category reflects formal as well as informal processes; in fact, the "institutions" associated with assessment are much more likely to be unwritten patterns of interaction, conventions, and routines than formalized or legislated phenomena.

In chapter 2 I hypothesize about how various configurations of power and preference divergence affect these four attributes and therefore the overall quality of strategic assessment in the state. I anticipate, for example, that when political leaders dominate and preference divergence is low, such that divergences over security and corporate issues are not entrenched and profound, important obstacles to strategic assessment are absent. Both political and military leaders lack incentives to contest assessment processes. This allows relatively functional institutions to emerge. Consequently, information sharing should be relatively fluid. Strategic coordination is eased as political dominance facilitates the integration in advisory processes of the military with the political offices of the state. The authorization process is also clearly defined, providing structure to decision making. Overall, in these environments debate between political and military leaders can flourish, without risk of it devolving into disputes over control of decision making, or being undermined by mutual alienation born of deep-seated and enduring differences over corporate or security issues: civil-military relations provide the structural preconditions for the sort of rigorous deliberation essential to assessing state strategy. These are the best conditions for engaging in strategic assessment.

The worst conditions occur when political and military leaders are sharing power and their preferences diverge. Assessment institutions become implicated in underlying substantive disputes between political and military leaders and themselves become objects of competition; each side tries to ensure that routines and conventions of interaction protect their preferred strategies or policy outcomes. Military leaders guard access to their private information and favor institutional processes that allow them to do so, compromising routines for information sharing. The authorization process also becomes convoluted as political and military leaders vie for the right to approve and veto military plans and strategy. Strategic coordination deteriorates as military leaders grow wary of participating in joint forums with political representatives and engaging in open-ended analyses. Intraregime competition also corrupts the military's organizational processes for intelligence and internal monitoring. Consequently, in interstate disputes capabilities estimates are apt to be poor, and the analysis of military options and their integration with political objectives superficial. Leaders also struggle to make authoritative decisions about state strategy and ensure they are implemented. These states are devastatingly unprepared to manage their international relations.

I anticipate strategic assessment will be also be poor-but not quite as atrocious-when power is shared and preference divergence is low. Although military and political leaders have few incentives to try to control access to their private information about security issues, and therefore information sharing is relatively unproblematic, the military's autonomy from the diplomatic apparatus of the state weakens joint consultative entities, undermining strategic coordination. Civil-military relations also generate ambiguities in authorization processes, as ultimate rights of veto and approval over military activity remain ill-defined. Together these weaknesses complicate both the quality of deliberation and clarity of decision making about state strategy in international disputes.

Other civil-military relations generate divergent trends and, overall, fall between the extremes in their competencies in strategic assessment. For example, political dominance and high preference divergence generates clarity in the authorization process and provides tools to political leaders that mitigate problems in information sharing. Improvements in structural competence are also possible. However, the oversight methods leaders employ in this setting to protect their interests can truncate dialogue with military leaders and therefore compromise strategic coordination. The balance sheet for the four attributes of assessment is therefore mixed in these states: we should observe clear strengths in three critical areas essential to gathering and sharing information and making decisions, but also notable weaknesses in one-in the comprehensiveness and rigor of debate in advisory forums.

Finally, cases in which the military dominates politically also exhibit strengths as well as notable weaknesses. Here, regardless of the intensity of preference divergence with political leaders over substantive issues, much of the evaluative and decision-making process is internalized within the military organization. This clarifies the authorization process, giving the military ultimate control over political-military strategy. One negative byproduct of this setting, however, is that analysis of these strategies may be insulated from the political apparatus of the state, which impairs strategic coordination. In short, a specific pattern in assessment should be observed in these settings: flaws in how military and political considerations are integrated in deliberative processes, but strengths in the capacity to decide and implement strategy in interstate conflicts. See figure 1.1 for an overview of these hypotheses.

In chapter 2 I develop the theory and explain these hypotheses in greater detail. Before proceeding, however, I elaborate on the importance of studying strategic assessment.

The Problem of Assessment: Why Study It?

Why should scholars study strategic assessment? The main reason is to understand why states sometimes succumb to strategic failure. Analytical completeness requires studying successes as well as failures, but the latter are especially important if we are to understand the causes of war and conflict in the international arena. Accordingly, in this section I highlight a number of particularly dangerous weaknesses in strategy and pathological international outcomes that may result from poor evaluation and decision making at the civil-military apex.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691136688
• ISBN 13: 9780691136684
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328