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Vol. 8, No. 1 (Autumn 1998)
It is widely believed that warfare is being revolutionized at the end of the 20th century. In the emerging “RMA” (Revolution in Military Affairs), it is argued, traditional struggles between massed land armies are being replaced by exchanges of remotely delivered precision air and missile strikes, with close combat being overtaken by the struggle for information supremacy as the decisive issue for success in war. In fact, some have come to believe that the collection and destruction of information per se may come to be the main focus of hostilities, leading to “strategic information warfare” in which no physical objects are destroyed. If true, the RMA thesis has sweeping implications for defense policy, international security, and international relations theory. Yet while this argument has become very influential, it has yet to be subject to systematic test; the perception of revolutionary change has achieved the status of conventional wisdom before the scholarly community has been able to examine its underlying premises and evidence. This paper provides such an examination and test, comparing the two major schools of revolutionary military thought with a contrasting theory of military outcomes which predicts much less radical change. The latter is found to be more consistent with the available evidence — suggesting that the dramatic policy changes advocated by RMA proponents would be ill-advised, and that the implications now being drawn for offense–defense theory, organizational innovation, and theories of great power emergence are premature at best.
Iraqi Scud missile attacks against Israel’s civilian population, and against military targets in Saudi Arabia, during the Persian Gulf War shocked Western defense communities into hard thinking about the use of missiles during war, and the means to counter such use, including theater missile defense. A considerable amount of attention in the military press and even U.S. military doctrine has been dedicated to the examination of historical precedents of missile attacks and measures to thwart them. Among such precedents were the Allied campaign — known as CROSSBOW — against German V-weapons during the Second World War. Recent analyses of this campaign have attributed its lack of success to disunity of command, and a failure to recognize that the civil-military roots of discord could not have been eradicated by simple organizational restructuring. Comparison of the civil-military relations of the CROSSBOW campaign and of the “Scud-hunt” reveals the tendency among American military officers to denigrate the strategic importance of aerial terror weapons such as missiles, employed against allied civilian populations, because of the intangible, political nature of the use of such weapons. The political stakes were different in each of the cases: the maintenance of Britain’s will to fight in the Second World War and the integrity of the diverse coalition during the Persian Gulf War. American officers, however, consistently resisted any diversion of resources to missions aimed to attack the missiles. To meet such challenges in the future, America needs military leaders with great diplomatic sophistication, and civilian leaders capable of reigning in military tendencies to sacrifice political imperatives to the “main effort,” which military leaders usually define in narrow military terms.
When France signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1992, many Americans interpreted this action as a vindication of US theory and practice in non-proliferation. Gradually over more than twenty years, France had come to share American ideas on the fundamental causes of proliferation, the “best” ways to prevent it, and the strong (even over-riding) interest that the current nuclear powers have in maintaining the NPT “regime”. A country that at one time had held very different views on each of these questions, had converged onto American policy.
We argue in this paper that this common interpretation is not correct. We offer an alternative interpretation of French behavior, that depends less on (mostly unexplained) convergence. We stress the persistence of national institutions and ideas about non-proliferation, which have not converged. The US and France currently follow broadly similar non-proliferation policies, but similar policy outcomes here reflect contingent overlap based on particular historical circumstances. We argue that the lack of a more profound convergence has important implications for policy and for theoretical understandings of state behavior in the area of non-proliferation. Our “historical institutionalist” argument sheds light on how academics and policy makers have thought about cooperation in non-proliferation, and suggests ways in which that debate could be linked up interestingly with broader debates in comparative and international politics.
The emergence of ethnic fear and the onset of ethnic violence is an issue that preoccupies practitioners and scholars alike. As a contribution to the literature on ethnic conflict, this paper uses a constructivist approach to complement recent rationalist works on the strategic intricacies of interethnic relations. The paper argues that social identity — a set of meanings that an actor attributes to itself while taking the perspective of others — endows interethnic interactions with predictability around a set of expectations. Changes in the social identities of ethnic groups destabilize established patterns of interethnic relations and create uncertainty about future interethnic relations. As political entrepreneurs and ethnic activists modify the practices and modes of interethnic interaction, currently held expectations about interethnic relations increasingly become unrealistic. Each ethnic group thereby seeks updated information on other groups, inquires about the degree of commitment of other groups to future interethnic bargains, and reconsiders its security and welfare assurances. Salient ethnic historical memories, the structure of ethnic cleavages, and state institutional arrangements strongly shape this dynamic. As currently held expectations begin to wane, ethnic leaders politicize their group’s ethnic historical memory, mobilize their coethnics, demonize the “Other,” and reciprocate each other’s strategic practices, an ingroup/intergroup dynamic takes hold and produces aggressive social identities — groups consider one another as enemy. As this dynamic becomes a routinized way of interacting with the “Other,” ethnic fear thus takes hold, creating a strong potential to ethnic violence. The argument is used to explain the deterioration of interethnic relations between the Serbs and Croats in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
In 1992 the Working Group on Arms Control and Regional Security (ACRS) was established as one of the multilateral “tracks” of the Middle East peace process. ACRS’s record thus far has been mixed. On the one hand, the progress made in its first three years was greater than many expected, or even deemed possible. On the other hand, by late 1994–early 1995 ACRS had virtually broken down. A number of factors contributed, but the main one was the Egyptian–Israeli dispute over the “Nuclear issue.” Two questions thus are raised: why the progress that was made, and why then the problems? Realist theories, with their emphasis on external security factors such relative military capabilities and the balance of regional power provide a strong explanation for the progress question but cannot adequately answer the problems one. Domestic politics theories have limited explanatory power on both questions. We argue for an alternative approach, which both shifts the focus and bridges the level of analysis divide through an emphasis on competition for political-diplomatic status as linked to constructivist conceptions of identity. The status-identity arguments fits the ACRS cas, and has broader theoretical implications and policy relevance for understanding and seeking to affect the scope and limits of regional muiltilateral security cooperation.