P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

C 2004) Sociological Forum, Vol. 19, No. 3, September 2004 (

Thinking About War Ian Roxborough1

Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America. Miguel Angel Centeno. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics, and Economics in Britain and France, 1938–1940. Talbot C. Imlay. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations. Peter D. Feaver. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. Eliot A. Cohen. New York: Free Press, 2002. Quest for Decisive Victory: From Stalemate to Blitzkrieg in Europe, 1899– 1940. Robert M. Citino. Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2002. The Russian Way of War: Operational Art, 1904–1940. Richard W. Harrison. Lawrence, KS: Kansas University Press, 2001. Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919–1939. Mary R. Habeck. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945. Tami Davis Biddle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. The Forgotten Air Force: French Air Doctrine in the 1930s. Anthony Christopher Cain. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 2002. Sociologists know surprisingly little about war and seem to care even less. The number of works on war by sociologists that appear in any given year, irrespective of quality, is miniscule. This needs to change. As Leon 1 Department of Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook, New York 11794-4356;

e-mail: [email protected]. 505 C 2004 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 0884-8971/04/0900-0505/0 

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

506

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

Trotsky once said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” In the late 1970s historical sociologists discovered the centrality of war to the accounts they were developing of the dynamics of macrosocial change. As the framework for understanding historical change shifted from one focused primarily on the endogenous dynamics of a national society to one focused on interstate competition, the emphasis on economic and cultural factors was supplemented by a new understanding of the centrality of the state as a factor in social change. In what might be termed the neo-Weberian synthesis, historical sociologists discovered that war and preparation for war were central to the formation of the modern state: in Charles Tilly’s phrase, “War makes states, and states make war.” War, in Theda Skocpol’s brilliant reconceptualization of the sociology of revolution, was the key explanatory factor in the complex processes leading up to state collapse and popular insurgency (Skocpol, 1979). A talented and self-conscious group of historical sociologists and sociologically minded historians (e.g., Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, Michael Mann, John Hall, Martin Shaw, Paul Kennedy, Arthur Marwick, and Jay Winter) was quick to note the manifold ways in which war affects social change, altering the terms of popular contention, changing fundamental cultural frameworks, retarding or accelerating economic growth, promoting citizenship and democracy, influencing the rise and fall of great powers. Within a few years, the work of these scholars had firmly placed war at the center of most accounts of macrohistorical change. Yet, curiously, the actual business of war, the killing and the dying, remained a sort of black box, a largely unexplored area of research best left to the rather ghettoized subfield of military historians. The result was a sociology of war with combat left out. Not only is this odd, since killing and dying are at the heart of warfare, it is also a great pity. In recent years, paralleling the rise of historical sociology, there has been a renaissance among military historians. Beginning in 1976 with John Keegan’s efforts, in his Face of Battle, to write military history from the bottom up, to see battles from the point of view of ordinary soldiers, the frontier between military history and social history, once rigidly demarcated as if by a regiment of grenadier guards on parade, has now largely dissolved. Military historians now do real history. The new military history is no longer a dreary compilation of battles, heroics, leaders, and campaign plans. The new military historians have resituated warfare firmly and squarely in its social and cultural context. Sociologists have been slow to catch on to this. Their ventures into the waters of military history have been attempts to grasp the impact of war on civilian society. “What did you do in the war, Mom?” is the programmatic slogan here. Without in the least minimizing the great worth of such studies,

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

Thinking About War

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

507

it nevertheless remains the case that sociologists have left the study of war— that is, the study of the actual fighting—to historians and political scientists. It is necessary to immediately enter some caveats. Social historians have recently done stellar service in detailing the practical aspects of the daily lives of soldiers: how they were recruited, what they ate, the diseases from which they suffered, and the kind of medical care they could expect. On a larger scale, some very good work has been done on the whole business of financing and supplying armies. There is a saying in the military: Amateurs talk about strategy; professionals talk about logistics. The ability of an economy to raise the necessary resources and then to get them to the armies in the field often makes all the difference between success and failure in war (see Brewer, 1989; Ferguson, 2001; Lynn, 1993; Mann, 1986, 1993; van Creveld, 1977). In addition, a small but dedicated band of military sociologists has done sterling and seldom-appreciated work on how modern military organizations go about their business of raising and training armies in peacetime.2 Nevertheless, military sociologists have been at one with the rest of the profession in shying away from the study of combat. There are, of course, exceptions. Janowitz and Shils (1948) published an article on the reasons for the combat effectiveness of Wehrmacht units. In 1949 Samuel Stouffer and his colleagues, mainly social psychologists, produced The American Soldier, (Stouffer et al., 1949–1950) which had much of interest to say about American soldiers in combat. Since then, the few studies of combat by sociologists have stood out principally by virtue of their rarity. Such work as has been done on the actual business of combat has been carried out primarily by historians and political scientists. There is now, for example, a fascinating debate among historians on the role of culture in shaping the way different societies make war.3 War is waged by societies, and they bring a lot of cultural and social-structural baggage with them to the business of waging war. Disputes between Greek city-states, for example, were typically resolved by a few minutes of pushing and stabbing between rival phalanxes of heavily armed warriors. This form of combat required intricately elaborated (and shared) cultural expectations about the conduct of war. In the American Civil War, to cite another example of shared expectations of the meaning of battle, it was generally assumed that the side that abandoned the battlefield had “lost” the battle. Casualties or strategic purpose were less important than the loss of honor in defining victory and defeat. Or, to take an example of clashes between culturally dissimilar societies, part of the reason Europeans were able to conquer much of the world 2 In

addition to the classic work of Janowitz (1960), especially The Professional Soldier, good overviews of recent work in military sociology are to be found in Moskos and Wood (1988), Burk (1998), Moskos et al. (2000), and Kummel and Prufert (2000). 3 Two representative recent works are Hanson (2001) and Lynn (2003).

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

508

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

so easily was their expectation that the purpose of battle was to kill as many of the adversary as possible. Cultures that understood battle as a ritualized display of individual bravery were astonished at the murderous propensities of the Europeans and were decimated by small numbers of highly disciplined men standing in neat lines, firing on command. War, as a human activity, is inescapably bound up with its social and cultural context. Sociologists, who have much professional expertise to contribute, have made no contribution to this debate. What is wrong with us that we fear to tread this territory? Surely we are not timid about crossing disciplinary boundaries. I suspect that the stance of most sociologists with respect to the study of war is somewhere between a muffled yawn and a vague suspicion that we ought not to soil our hands with the devil’s work. Between a polite but bored disinterest and a poorly articulated concern for our intellectual innocence, sociologists are missing out on a fascinating and important field of human activity.

WHAT NEEDS TO BE STUDIED? Although we live in a time of war, the study of the military remains an anemic, minority interest among sociologists. A relatively small number have examined such things as racial integration of the armed services, gender and sexual preference in the military, whether or not military careers are increasingly seen as “just another job,” the impact of the “greedy” military institution on families, and on public attitudes to the military. There has been little research by sociologists on military operations, on the causes of wars, on the political role of the military, or even on the military as a complex organization. As a result, these matters have been largely left to political scientists and historians, who have produced first-rate work. Of the books reviewed in this essay, only one—that by Miguel Centeno—is by a sociologist. Two are authored by political scientists and six by historians. This is not unrepresentative of the field. The relative absence of sociologists in this area is striking, since there is much here of great interest to sociology. There are many questions about war that are the legitimate concern of sociologists in addition to the relatively narrow set of issues that have been studied by military sociologists—questions such as the following: How has warfare changed historically, and what social forces have driven these changes? What are the causes of war? How are military forces recruited, organized, financed, motivated, and prepared for battle? What are the politics of war? How is war conducted, both at the level of strategy and at the faceto-face level of killing? Are there cultural variations in the understanding and conduct of war? What sorts of belief-systems do members of the military

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

Thinking About War

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

509

hold? What are the effects of war, and what impact does war have on other aspects of social change? With the exception of a handful of historical sociologists, these questions have generally been left to historians and political scientists. The result is an impoverished sociological understanding of the dynamics of the contemporary world.

Causes of War Let us begin with Miguel Centeno, who has produced a superb book that is original, stimulating, and packed with new thoughts. He begins by asking why there have been so few wars between states in Latin America. To be sure, there have been rebellions, revolutions, insurgencies, and civil wars aplenty, but the instances of one state fighting another have been remarkably few. The contrast with the history of Europe is striking. Given that much sociological theorizing stems from the European experience, Centeno has raised an important question. Why have Latin American states spent relatively little effort fighting each other? If states make war, and war makes states, as Tilly says, why haven’t Latin American states made war? Centeno’s proximate answer is that Latin American states have been weak: fiscal dwarfs, with little effective control over their territories. Although they were despotic, they were also infrastructurally weak. The weakness of the state meant that they were less likely to engage in wars. Centeno puts it pithily: “No states, no wars” (p. 26). Latin American states had neither the organizational, financial, or ideological capacity to go to war with each other. He suggests, moreover, that in the absence of external enemies, Latin American militaries identified the critical enemies as internal. “Each nation’s military remained too busy killing its own peasants to bother with someone else’s” (p. 91). Wars were superfluous. His answer basically confirms the propositions developed on the basis of the European experience: There is a positive correlation between the strength of the state and the likelihood of interstate warfare. Centeno goes on to develop a subtle analysis of the class structure of Latin American states, which leads to further insights into the relationship between state-making and war. He argues that “war only makes states when there already exists some form of union between a politically or militarily dominant institution and a social class that sees it as the best means with which to defend and reproduce its privilege” (p. 106). The dependent nature of Latin American economies and their reliance on external funding for development meant that efforts to deal with fiscal deficits did not, as had been the case in Europe, require conflict and compromise with other social forces. Given the pattern of economic activity, few

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

510

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

factions within the elite saw the development of the state as being in their interest. The pursuit of close ties with foreign capital and foreign markets was more advantageous to Latin American elites than efforts to expand citizenship. The resulting pattern of popular political contention was thus different from the European one. Rather than a pattern of contestation leading to the accommodation and incorporation of subordinate classes, Latin American elites opted to rely on repression of class conflict. Further consequences followed from the external orientation of Latin American economies. Latin American societies generally, in Centeno’s view, lacked a cohesive ruling class. Instead, they were deeply fissured by class, regional, and ethnic divisions, which impeded the formation of strong states. Partly as a result of elite disinterest and the absence of a salient external enemy, national identities in Latin America were weakly developed. Centeno’s fine book highlights the importance of a complex, multilevel, sociological explanation for the outbreak of war. Explanations based largely on security issues, important though these undoubtedly are, tend to minimize the importance of social structure and culture in the inner workings of the state apparatus. Sociologists interested in the causes of war still have much work to do in exploring the various ways in which domestic social structure impinges on decision making at the level of the state. There are now a number of promising works which attempt to fuse domestic and external factors in an integrated analysis. One such work is Talbot Imlay’s careful comparison of British and French strategy in the approach to the Second World War. Facing the Second World War is divided into three parts which discuss, sequentially, military strategy, domestic politics, and political economy. Imlay shows how strategic decision making in Britain and France was constrained by domestic politics and, in particular, by the nature of industrial relations in the two countries. Political leaders in both countries initially believed that their economies were stronger than Germany’s and concluded that time was on their side. The strategy initially adopted, therefore, was to avoid premature military action until they had built up forces sufficient to launch a war-winning offensive. However, as analysts increasingly became convinced that Germany was growing stronger, the assumptions on which war planning had been based were seen to be increasingly at odds with military realities. “As the prospects of victory in a long war grew increasingly uncertain, French planners concluded that the Allies had to win a short war. The need for a war-winning solution bred desperation, producing ever more radical and dangerous proposals for military operations beyond the Western Front” (p. 9). As the crisis deepened, French strategy grew increasingly divorced from reality. Military strategy turns out to be at least partly about the management of fear and anxiety. In the French case, perceptions of a domestic threat (class struggle)

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

Thinking About War

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

511

spilled over onto perceptions of the external threat. The Right was more concerned with an internal threat from a supposedly revolutionary working class than with the threat of war with Germany. France’s northern neighbor was seen as just another power with whom one could reach compromise. The Republican left, on the other hand, saw Nazi Germany as a power with which compromise was impossible and believed that France needed to prepare for total war. This would mean greater intervention by the state in the day-to-day management of the economy. With the collapse of the Popular Front government under the stress of impending war, French politics lurched to the right. The laissez-faire approach adopted in France to the economy generally, and to armaments production in particular, “proved to be at odds with an expanding war economy, which required greater direction and coordination. The resulting chaos, evident in disappointing production figures, obvious inequities, and fear of the subversive designs of French workers, fostered a sense of economic failure among French leaders, further sapping confidence in a long war strategy” (p. 244). Over time, the British came to share the French view of the strategic situation. Faced with the same challenge, and increasingly perceiving the challenge through a similar strategic lens, British and French leaders nevertheless responded in different ways to the challenge of imminent war with Germany. The explanation of the different responses of Britain and France, according to Imlay, is to be found in their different political systems and, more profoundly, in their different political economies. In France, given the tense history of the Popular Front, the state sided with industrialists against labor; in Britain, where parliamentary politics predisposed politicians toward more conciliatory stances, the government developed forms of corporatist accommodation between capital and labor. The upshot was that Britain, with a less politically polarized class conflict, was better prepared for a long war. The British, as a result, remained more confident of their ability to eventually prevail and did not collapse into the kind of multifaceted crisis that stymied French resistance. While Imlay’s study is more narrowly focused than Centeno’s, they both conceptualize preparation for war as a complex interplay between domestic and foreign factors. Both place a sophisticated analysis of political economy at the heart of their explanations. They serve as models of the kind of research that is needed in this area. Politics All thinking about the purpose of war begins with the nineteenthcentury Prussian theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, and his celebrated dictum that “war is an extension of politics by other means.” There is a double

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

512

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

implication here: On one hand, every activity in war must ultimately be subjected to the question of whether or not it furthers the political aim of the war. On the other hand, the military, as the armed force of the state, should be the servant of those who run the state; military leaders can have no absolute autonomy from their political masters. It follows that one of the central questions concerning the military is how to ensure its subordination to its civilian masters. The military is, after all, usually the more or less exclusive possessor of coercive power in the state. Soldiers are in many ways the ultimate backstop of state authority. This puts them in an unusual position within the state apparatus. They are seldom (though by no means entirely) given the legitimacy to rule directly; civilians, elected or otherwise, are normally the legitimate rulers. The military, in this sense, is nothing but an instrument wielded by civilian rulers as appropriate to defend the state, whether against external foes or against internal enemies and recalcitrant subjects. The problem is that whether the military is simply a willing instrument of civilian rulers cannot simply be taken for granted. There is here what Peter Feaver, in Armed Servants, has described as a principalagent problem. How can unarmed civilians ensure that armed soldiers obey them? This question takes several forms. The most obvious and extreme version of the principal-agent problem occurs when the military overthrows a civilian government and directly assumes power. In a slightly less extreme case, the military may act to veto one set of civilian rulers and place in power another set. There is a well-established sociological and political science literature on this form of military intervention, mainly focused on Third World countries, and there is little need to comment on that body of research here. Feaver is concerned with a more subtle and pervasive form of military insubordination. Described by the loose phrase “civil–military relations,” a series of issues concerns how effective civilian rulers are at getting the military to do what they want it to do. It is commonly assumed that this is not a significant problem in democracies: The military has technical expertise in the employment of violence, while its civilian masters make decisions on whether or not to use military force. This distinction turns out to be a useful fiction. In a complex political system, in which organizational actors such as the military necessarily have considerable bureaucratic autonomy, it is far from obvious how civilian political leaders can ensure that the military carries out their wishes. This is a tricky matter, even in highly institutionalized democracies. There are numerous ways in which military organizations resist, subvert, or flatly refuse the orders of their civilian leaders. During the Clinton administration, for instance, military leaders resisted efforts to improve the position of gays in the military. The Clinton years saw relations between

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

Thinking About War

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

513

the military and its civilian masters reach “their stormiest level in decades” (p. 2). During the Vietnam war, top military leaders were constantly at odds with both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson on how to conduct the war, and in many instances they went ahead and did things their way, despite clear evidence that the president’s intentions were otherwise. The instances are legion: they constitute the empirical ground for asking questions about the state of civil–military relations. Peter Feaver has provided us with an elegant theoretical framework within which to understand the issues. The question for Feaver is how civilians monitor the military and what sorts of expectations they have about how faithfully the military will do what civilians want. In the vocabulary of principal-agent theory, will the military “work or shirk?” The military, for its part, decides whether to work or to shirk (that is, do something other than what the civilians want) on the basis of its beliefs about whether its shirking will be detected and, if so, whether the military will be punished for it. Earlier work by Feaver, Holsti, and others demonstrated that the American officer corps had become politicized. In 1976, 33% of officers identified themselves as Republicans, and 12% as Democrats. Just under half, 46%, claimed to be independent of party politics. By 1988, the number of officers identifying as Republicans had risen to 59%, while those identifying as Democrats had fallen to 9%. Most important, the number of independents had dropped to 27%. While there had been some shifts in the party identification of civilian elites during this period, they were much less pronounced. Something had happened to the American officer corps, and it raised disturbing questions for military subordination to civilian masters (see Holsti, 2001). Political partisanship of this sort, while troubling, is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to thinking about civil–military relations. Feaver begins with the fundamental assumption that in a democratic polity, the elected civilian leaders set policy. He notes that there is no particular reason to assume that the military are any more competent to identify threats and appropriate responses than civilian experts on national security, but adds immediately that this is not the issue: “[O]nly the civilian can set the appropriate level of risk for society . . . the claim of democratic theory is that even when civilians are less expert, they are still rightfully in charge . . . civilians have a right to be wrong” (p. 6). From the standpoint of democratic theory, Feaver is indisputably correct. However, to pose the question in this way is to pass over the empirical question of whether civilians are more or less likely to be wrong about military matters than their military advisors. This is a matter of judgment, but it is not difficult to make the case that military strategists often have a limited and distorted view of what the war is about and how it should be conducted.

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

514

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

Feaver’s concern in the first half of his book is to develop a formal model of civil–military relations based on principal-agent theory. As he does this, he provides a crisp and insightful critique of previous work on civil–military relations. Feaver then moves into a survey of civil–military relations during the Cold War and its aftermath. Some of the instances of military insubordination (shirking) are truly troubling, as when General LeMay (head of Strategic Air Command) announced that he would adopt a highly provocative launch-on-warning policy. When informed that this was not national policy, LeMay is reported to have replied, “I don’t care. It’s my policy. It’s what I’m going to do” (p. 129). Most cases of shirking are less dramatic than this, but they often have major consequences for foreign policy. During the early phase of the war in Vietnam, President Kennedy attempted to persuade the US Army to pay more attention to counterinsurgency doctrine. The Army, the “big green machine,” distrusted Special Forces and was skeptical of much counterinsurgency theory. When it went to Vietnam, it took with it the mind-set of a conventional military that had built itself as an organization around the scenario of a massive clash of armored forces with the Soviets on the North German plain. This mind-set led the US Army to seek to bring the main forces of its Vietnamese enemy to battle so that it could destroy them with superior firepower. The result was a fruitless effort to destroy enemy forces in large-unit operations and the counterproductive obsession with body counts. As a number of commentators have argued, the Americans might have been better advised to concentrate on winning hearts and minds in Vietnam. While a well-conceived pacification program would have been no guarantee of victory in Vietnam, the conventional warfare favored by the Army brass was almost certain to fail. Kennedy’s failure to exert civilian authority over the Army on the issue of how to conduct the war was one of many reasons for the American defeat in Vietnam.4 Feaver concludes that civilian leaders need to engage in an energetic interchange of views with senior military officers on all aspects of military policy and refuse to accept that there is a sphere of decisions that only professional military officers are competent to make. He is right that “the Republic would be better served even by foolish working that by enlightened shirking” (p. 302). Feaver has written a first-rate book on how to understand the problem of civil–military relations; Eliot Cohen has provided us with an equally excellent book on how to tackle the issue in practice. Supreme Command is organized around four in-depth cases where a civilian leader was relatively successful in getting the military to do what he wanted. The chapters dealing 4 Among

the better works on this subject are Krepinevich (1986), Race (1972), Record (1998), and Shafer (1988).

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

Thinking About War

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

515

with Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion are jewels of lucidity and precision. In each case, Cohen asks, what made for success? His answer is simultaneously convincing and at odds with conventional wisdom on the subject. Let us begin with the conventional wisdom. In what is usually termed the “normal theory” of civil–military relations, civilian leaders state the overall political goals of a war or campaign and then leave the military to decide how to carry it out. This “normal theory” assumes a clear distinction between the political goals of a military operation (the desired end state) and the technical means by which this goal is achieved. The military are the technicians of violence, and their actions are, in this sense, “a-political.” The prescription that flows from the “normal theory” of civil–military relations is that the civilian leadership should set clear and unambiguous goals and then leave the military to get on with its job. Close scrutiny of military operations by civilian leaders is “meddling,” “micromanagement,” “political interference,” and invariably results in soldiers fighting with “one hand tied behind their backs” and a poorly managed war. That this is the current conventional wisdom in the United States is, I think, beyond dispute. That this “normal theory” is a poor guide to the effective conduct of military operations is the central thesis of Cohen’s book. Restating Clausewitz’s dictum, Cohen writes, “[P]olitics pervades all of war: the notion that politicians step aside during it is empirically untrue and theoretically undesirable” (p. 84) The four leaders studied by Cohen “exhibited in different ways similar qualities of ruthlessness, mastery of detail, and fascination with technology. All four were great learners who studied war as if it were their own profession, and in many ways they mastered it as well as did their generals. And all found themselves locked in conflict with military men” (pp. 6–7). The real problem in the Vietnam war, according to Cohen, was not that the civilian political leaders attempted to meddle in the details of military operations. In fact, apart from restraining—for perfectly sensible reasons— military officers from escalating a peripheral war and running the risk of drawing China into a full-scale conflict, civilian leaders generally allowed the military to carry on the war much as they wished. They refrained from the kind of detailed interrogation of their military advisors that Cohen recommends. The result of this abdication of serious political leadership of the war by the civilians was that military officers were not forced to clarify their concepts of operations and continued to muddle along with inappropriate methods. The upshot was the catastrophe familiar to everyone: “During the period of the escalation of the commitment to Vietnam there was no comprehensive politico-military assessment of American strategy. . . . At some level,

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

516

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

one might almost say that the JCS chose irrelevance rather than accepting and working within the political constraints that America’s civilian leaders believed they had to live with” (p. 180). Although both McNamara and Johnson knew that the war was not going well, “their scrutiny of operations in Vietnam focused chiefly on the level of effort being made, not on its fundamental direction. One searches . . . in vain for any probing of the assumptions of ‘search and destroy” (p. 182). By selecting four cases of successful civil–military relations, Cohen has provided us with good pointers for what to look for. The choice of cases, of course, leads the analyst to particular kinds of conclusions. It would be interesting to see a study of unsuccessful cases of civil–military relations. Why, for example, was David Lloyd George, British prime minister during the latter stages of the First World War, unable to restrain his generals from their apparently mindless determination to keep throwing men into the slaughterhouse of the Western Front? Lloyd George was no fool, and he had a prodigious capacity for organization. Nor was he impressed with the intellectual credentials of many of the British high command; indeed, his memoirs are filled with complaints about their obtuseness. The sad fact is that, even when competent and energetic civilian leaders wish to control the military, they often fail. It would be good to know why. Moreover, given the propensity of democracies to elect presidents who fail to live up to the exacting standards suggested by Cohen, his is a counsel of perfection rather than a useful guide to political action. The prerequisites for a fruitful interchange between civilian and military leaders are that each group be intelligent, open-minded, and willing to pursue the truth. Sadly, there is little in recent history to suggest that this is the norm. There is also the interesting question of the political education of officers. Clausewitz’s argument about the intimate relations between war and politics cuts both ways. Just as effective civilian leaders must immerse themselves in the details of military operations, so too effective military officers must understand the political implications of their advice. How military officers are to be selected and trained to operate as political actors and yet accept their subordination to civilians is a topic that urgently needs further exploration. Since there can be no definitive bright line between war and politics, since war is inherently political in all its manifold aspects, civil–military relations must always be an arena of tension. There is no escaping this; the question is how best to manage the inevitable tensions. Part of the problem arises from the fact that soldiers often fail to fully understand the nature of the war that they are called upon to fight. This is the subject of several books on military doctrine.

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

Thinking About War

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

517

Doctrine and Innovation Military doctrine is the phrase used to describe the body of theory that a military organization relies on to think about how to wage war and conduct military operations. Doctrine is a theory about how to conduct war. It answers such questions as What must I attack in order to win? How can I convince the enemy to give up? How can I coordinate all the instruments at my disposal? How will the various forces and weapons fit together? Which are most important? How will things change as the conflict develops? These are not simply technical questions, though military organizations often present them as such. They are, in large part, questions about social organization, about psychological states, about culturally accepted ways of doing business. Doctrine tells the military leader what sort of armed forces to raise, how to equip these forces, how to integrate the various components into an effective fighting force, and how to lead them. It tells the military leader whether to strike at the enemy’s military, capital city, economic resources, territory, or population. It tells the military leader what he must to do to cause the enemy to accept defeat. Military thought is not purely technical; at every level it is suffused with sociological and cultural assumptions, with hopes and fears. War is, in many ways, an intellectual process. In the modern age, the complex specialization of military organization and the intimate connections between men and complex machines mean that many military officers devote a considerable amount of time to solving abstract intellectual puzzles. Understanding war is a genuinely difficult enterprise. War is complex and multidimensional, full of sound and fury, and distilling its component parts and understanding how they relate to each other is not easy. In trying to understand the present and predict the future—efforts that no military organization can forgo—some military organizations are better (or luckier) than others, and this gives them an initial advantage. Military organizations generally spend only a small fraction of their time actually fighting wars. Most of the time, they exist in a state of latency, training and preparing for the next war. Wars are infrequent. They are also highly idiosyncratic events. This makes it difficult to discern exactly what lessons should be drawn from recent wars. Unsurprisingly, military officers tend to refight the last war. While they are generally criticized for this, it is hard to see what else they could do. Should they fight the last war but one? Recent wars are the only source of empirical data available on trends in the nature of warfare. In modern times warfare changes rapidly, largely because of technological developments. Sociologists of science and technology are interested in how technology is socially appropriated, and there is a wonderful book by Mackenzie (1990) on the interplay between missile-targeting

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

518

Roxborough

technology and nuclear strategy. To really understand military thinking, it is necessary to delve deeply into the technical details of doctrine. There is now a substantial literature on doctrine and innovation in military organizations, mostly written by historians and political scientists.5 These scholars study exactly the issues that sociologists of organization deal with: how organizations actually operate, what makes some organizations more effective than others, why organizations in a particular field tend to resemble one another, and so forth. It is a great puzzle that organizational sociologists have decided to virtually ignore the organizations of the state (including the military) and there is a compelling case to be made that work in this area needs to be integrated with the cases that organizational sociologists normally examine. Military organizations are not the monolithic, salute-and-obey hierarchies of popular stereotype. In matters of doctrine, they are typically sites of intense debate. While some military organizations are less open to discussion than others (e.g., the military in interwar France), gadflys and reformers usually abound, even if they are not always enthusiastically welcomed. Which ideas win out depends, of course, not simply on their intellectual merit, but on the complex interplay of rank and organizational imperatives. This is a wonderful, unexplored field for organizational sociologists. The title of this essay has, of course, a double meaning. On the one hand it is a call to sociologists to think more about war, particularly about the more intimate and perhaps more technical business of combat itself. On the other hand, thinking about war is what military strategists, civilian experts on security issues, and political leaders do “as a practical matter.” Here the suggestion is that this body of thought, this doxa that informs a particular practice, ought to be the object of sociological study. Tanks and the Operational Level of War The task of a historian or social scientist writing about military doctrine is to understand why a particular military organization thought about matters in one way rather than another. For example, tanks were invented in 1916 and used in the First World War to crush barbed wire and other obstacles and to silence enemy machine-gun nests so that the infantry could advance and occupy enemy trenches. As this new technology developed in the years following that war, military doctrine writers asked themselves how tanks might best be used in the next. They had little guidance in the way of practical experience, and what they had could be positively misleading. Theories about the use of tanks in warfare were, therefore, both speculative 5 Some of the better works are Goldman and Eliason (2003); Murray and Millett (1996); Winton

and Mets (2000); Rosen (1991); Mahnken (2002); Knox and Murray (2001); and Posen (1984).

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

Thinking About War

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

519

and diverse. Different schools of thought contended with one another, without there being any very definitive way to adjudicate between them. On the one hand tank enthusiasts thought that massed tank formations might operate independently of other arms, raiding deep behind enemy lines. At the other extreme, conservatives wanted tanks to continue to do what they had done in the First World War: act as an infantry support weapon. Which theory one adopted had consequences, since the design features of future tanks would be radically different if they were intended as fast raiders or as heavily armed and plodding accompaniments to an infantry advance. More to the point, the theory or doctrine guiding a military organization might simply prove inadequate to deal with the challenge presented by the enemy. Doctrine matters. With hindsight, we know that the most effective use of tanks was to integrate them into combined-arms formations. The slow infantry support tank simply failed to realize the potential of the new technology, and tankonly formations were too vulnerable to attacks from a variety of weapons systems to be really viable. The answer was to integrate the tank and all other weapons systems into a new kind of organization. Tanks, infantry, artillery, and other weapons would be used together. In this way, the weaknesses of one weapon could be compensated for by the use of another. Together, the varied weapons of a combined-arms team would be mutually supporting. But to say this was merely to state the most rudimentary proposition. What sorts of ratios of the different arms would be needed, and how would they communicate with each other? How would their actions be coordinated, and how would the ensemble operate? These questions had no obvious answers. In the end, the process of trial and error during wartime offered guidance, but this was a costly way of learning, and most military organizations wished not to be caught flat-footed at the outbreak of war. Indeed, those military organizations that innovated correctly would be at a decided advantage during the initial stages of a war. Thus there was—and still is—a premium on getting doctrine right (or, at least, not getting it completely wrong) prior to the onset of hostilities. Getting doctrine right meant designing and building the right kinds of machines, forming and training the right kinds of military organizations, designing and implementing the right kinds of standard operating procedures. Robert Citino’s Quest For Decisive Victory is intended, in the author’s words, “to be a broad synthesis of European warfare during the first half of the twentieth century, centered around the loss and recovery of operational decisiveness” (p. xv). Citino succeeds admirably in providing a clear overview of this very complicated period of military history. His discussion culminates in the maturation of blitzkrieg tactics by the German armed forces in the opening phases of the Second World War. Unlike many authors

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

520

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

of standard military histories, Citino spends some time discussing less wellknown conflicts in the periphery (the Boer War of 1899–1901 and the RussoJapanese War of 1904–1905, for example), not simply for the lessons that the Great Powers drew from these conflicts, but also for their intrinsic role in the development of military technique. If you want to read only one book on the topic, this is as good as any. Reading any history of modern military operations will convince a sociologist that there is an urgent need for in-depth studies of military ideology. Understanding military doctrine requires taking a stance regarding the validity of military theories about the world more generally. Some of the authors reviewed here, such as Tami Davis Biddle, take an independent, critical position, contrasting the claims of military thinkers with reality as seen by social scientists. Others, like Robert Citino, Richard Harrison, and Anthony Cain, are more inclined to accept the basic thought patterns of the military and operate comfortably within them. Citino, for example, seems to believe that “decisive victory” is the “normal” and desirable state of affairs. He argues that the ability to achieve decisive victory in combat was interrupted for a century (1850–1940) and then reestablished early in the Second World War when the twin notions of the “operational level of war” and “combined arms warfare” were integrated into the thinking of all the major military powers. As professional military thinkers came to understand that the operational level of war had an autonomy of its own and that it could not be reduced to tactics or elevated to strategy, they learned how to use the new weapons effectively as an integrated and mutually complementary set. Simply put, the operational level of war concerns the conduct of campaigns consisting of several battles but which have a discrete objective and are thus less than the strategy of the war as a whole. The premise of this approach to doctrine is that there was a golden age when great military leaders could win battles decisively, mount lightening campaigns, and deliver swift victory in war. At American staff and war colleges, the campaigns of Napoleon and Robert E. Lee are studied intensively by military officers seeking inspiration in their craft. The acme of military professionalism is seen as delivering the swift “knock-out punch” that will bring decisive victory in a short war. The long, grinding attrition and slaughter of the First World War stands, in this way of thinking, as the polar opposite, the model of what is to be avoided. In the United States, swift victory in the Gulf War of 1991 and in the recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has reinforced this view of what constitutes success in military operations. Here is surely a classic example of military ideology at work: It matters not that both Napoleon and Lee lost their wars, nor that achieving the political objectives of recent US military operations remains an open-ended source of contention. What matters to the military professional is whether

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Thinking About War

521

the campaign was conducted brilliantly at the operational level. This repression of politics from military consciousness flatly negates the Clausewitzian maxim that war is an extension of politics. It is the kind of professional ideology that sociologists have no difficulty discerning in other spheres of social life; it should not surprise us to see it here. Decisive victory in battle is, of course, of no use if the political objectives of the war are not attained. To be fair to those who think that strategy and operational art are more or less self-contained sciences, Clausewitz himself is difficult to read on this issue. While at times he asserted that war was an extension of politics, at other times Clausewitz talked about war having its own “grammar,” and implied that war had its own internal dynamics. These sorts of statements are, in my view, Hegelian lapses, and do not serve the modern reader well.6 This view of the autonomy of the operational level is simultaneously useful and misleading. It is helpful in that it leads military officers to think of war at different levels of abstraction. War is, of course, most usefully thought of as a continuum, running from the minor tactics of how to take out an enemy machine gun, through the tactics required to win battles, through the plans at the operational level that link battles together to produce a campaign outcome, to the strategy designed to win the war. Practitioners and theorists of war need to make these conceptual distinctions. But to assume that each “level” has some ontological reality and that it can somehow be considered in isolation from the other “levels” is to reify what is nothing more than an intellectual convenience. To argue that the military stalemate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (if indeed there was such a thing) was broken only when military thinkers discovered the operational level of war is to buy into the official mystification of military doctrine writers. The notion that “decisive victory” is the norm in military history is not generally accepted. Historian Weigley (1991) has argued that the “quest for decisive victory” has often been a chimera. Many battles and campaigns have been indecisive, and the outcomes of most wars have been determined by economics, logistics, political will, and diplomacy rather than by the clash of arms. We may speculate that the notion of “decisive victory” is one of those professional icons that sometimes bears little relationship to the brute realities of war but is an important part of professional identity. The German Army is justly famous for the introduction of blitzkrieg tactics in the early days of the Second World War, with tanks and dive-bombers thrusting deep through enemy lines. However, in the end, it was Soviet innovations in the use of tanks, particularly the concept of “deep battle,” that proved central to winning the war. What characterized the Soviet approach to military operations in the Second World War (and generated nightmares 6A

sociologically framed discussion of Clausewitz can be found in Roxborough (1994).

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

522

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

for NATO planners during the Cold War) was the ability to conduct massive assaults over a front of hundreds of miles, penetrating deeply into enemyheld territory, destroying entire armies in the process. How the Soviets developed this theory of “deep battle” is ably told by Richard Harrison in The Russian Way of War. Like Citino, Harrison believes that the operational level of war is more than a convenient heuristic, and, again like Citino, he believes its intellectual discovery was the central factor enabling the Red Army to operate so effectively (once it had recovered from the surprise German attack and the self-inflicted wound caused by Stalin’s prewar purge of the Soviet officer corps.) The story is intrinsically interesting. Among the books reviewed here, Mary Habeck’s Storm of Steel provides the most detailed discussion of doctrine. It is a careful, step-by-step analysis of the debates in the interwar period within the German and Soviet armies on the question of how to use tanks in a future war. It is clear from her detailed account that there was considerable uncertainty in both armies about how to employ tanks. Both countries were receptive to thinking about using tanks in new ways to break through enemy lines, but it took military thinkers in each country a long time to develop the concepts of blitzkrieg and the theory of “deep battle” to the level where they could be put into practice. According to Habeck, “Why the Germans, forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to own even a single tank, embraced an innovative and effective technique for using their mechanized forces, while the Soviet army adopted and then rejected a similar theory, is the central question in the development of armor doctrine in these two countries” (p. ix). Like many armies, the Red Army had its share of visionaries who had sweeping (and ultimately unrealistic) views of what tank formations could accomplish. It would take a great deal of experimentation and debate for workable organizational and doctrinal solutions to emerge. Innovation in military doctrine was a complicated process. Military strategists had to take into account the likely future capabilities of new technologies; the ability of the economy to support new types of military organizations, solve a range of problems concerning communications, command and control, and the supply of the new formations; decide on how best to employ the new forces; and simultaneously try to fathom what was going on in the armed forces of likely adversaries. No part of the puzzle could be solved in isolation, and solutions to major problems often depended on difficult-to-predict technological breakthroughs elsewhere. That both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were revolutionary societies may have fostered a climate of innovation among military thinkers, but Britain was hardly a revolutionary society, and during the 1920s military theorists such as Basil Liddell Hart and J. F. C. Fuller led the world in new thinking about the employment of tanks. Because of the difficulty of

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

Thinking About War

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

523

coming to any conclusive resolution of the debates, some military organizations switched back and forth between different doctrinal positions. In the Soviet case, the Red Army was an early adopter of ideas of offensive tank formations, and the theories of deep battle and the operational level of war were developed, at least in rudimentary form, quite early. However, when the Second World War broke out in 1939, the Red Army found itself unprepared to deal with the German blitzkrieg, and spent the last year before the German invasion, as Richard Harrison notes, “desperately trying to relearn what they had so foolishly discarded” (p. 273). Harrison’s judgement of foolishness only makes sense with hindsight, and it depends on the notion that the principal task facing Soviet military thinkers was to discover the operational level of war. In reality, Soviet military thinkers not only faced serious intellectual challenges (shared with all armies), but also had to maneuver in a forbidding political climate. Perhaps the most important difference between the Soviets and the Germans, stressed by Mary Habeck, was the differing industrial structures of the two countries. The Soviet economy was well organized to produce large numbers of tanks and aircraft. The German economy, less fully mobilized, and heavily reliant on craft technique, tended to produce more models and fewer numbers of tanks. In the end, it was industrial production that decided the day. In an example of how the accidents of political alignments can affect military decisions, considerable resistance to the development of armored forces came from horse cavalry commanders closely tied to Stalin. Worse was to come in the form of massive purges of the Soviet officer corps in 1937–1938. Strategic Bombing As with tanks, the new technology of aircraft presented formidable challenges to military thinkers in the interwar period. Air-power theorists were concerned to understand how the new technology of powered flight could be used most effectively in war. The First World War had provided some clues, but the technology at that time had been relatively underdeveloped, and the full potential of aircraft clearly had not been properly explored. In a masterly synthesis of the burgeoning literature on theories of air power, Tami Davis Biddle dissects the grandiose expectations of the theorists of strategic bombing. Air-power theorists had to guess at new ways to use the improved airplanes that were becoming available throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The most significant innovation proposed was strategic bombing. Enthusiasts believed that strategic bombing of enemy territory might enable a war to be won without the horrendous carnage associated with trench

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

524

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

warfare during the First World War. Aircraft would be able to “leap over” the enemy’s armies and defenses to deliver a “knock-out” blow and end the war swiftly without major loss of life in grueling ground combat. Two principal causal mechanisms were identified. One school of thought believed that devastating aerial raids on the enemy’s centers of population would lead to panic in the cities and pressure on the enemy government to seek terms. It was thought that “the bomber [would] always get through” enemy air defenses, and that there were no effective defenses or countermeasures. In this line of thinking, bomber fleets acted as a deterrent during peacetime and, if employed early once war broke out, could guarantee speedy victory. The second causal mechanism identified was the use of strategic bombing to destroy the enemy’s economy. American military thinkers in particular believed that economies had vulnerable nodes and bottlenecks, such as ballbearing production, oil supplies, and transportation hubs, which if targeted would bring the entire economy to a grinding halt. Known as the “industrial web” theory, the implementation of this approach to strategic bombing required the technical ability to deliver bombs more or less precisely on target and depended crucially on the assumption that bottlenecks could be identified that would bring the economy to a halt. As the Second World War was to demonstrate, the assumptions underlying both the attack on enemy morale and the “industrial web” theory were generally wrong, and the technology for precision bombing was not yet adequately developed. Moreover, air defenses turned out often to be more formidable than had been anticipated. Much ink has been spent on the question of whether of whether strategic bombing repaid the resources devoted to it in the Second World War. Given the difficulty of separating the costs and benefits of strategic bombing from other kinds of military operations, the debate is unlikely to be resolved definitively. A small number of determined air-power theorists notwithstanding, however, the weight of evidence seems to suggest that strategic bombing in the Second World War generally failed to live up to its promise. This did not deter those with a vested interest in air forces from continuing to pursue it, both during the war and afterwards, even when there was little evidence to suggest that in cost-benefit terms it was a rational approach. “As scholarship reveals more and more about the wartime German economy, it becomes possible to piece together ever more sophisticated analyses of what bombing contributed to the Allied war effort. But, because it is a difficult and complex question, there is unlikely ever to be a final answer to it” (p. 286). It will be obvious to sociologists that the central assumptions underpinning each variant of strategic bombing theory were implicit sociological theories about how modern societies operate. Strategic bombing required

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

Thinking About War

September 21, 2004

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

525

the identification of critical vulnerabilities and linkages in the enemy society. This is yet another case of military strategists operating on the basis of “Sociology 101” to develop their theories of how to wage war. Of course these developments in air-power thinking did not occur in a vacuum. There were immense organizational pressures to demonstrate that air power could either win a war on its own or that, at the very least, it needed to act as an independent medium for waging war, not tethered to the terrestrial objectives of armies and navies. If it could be shown that air power achieved its best effects when employed independently of armies and navies, that is, in a strategic role, then the case for organizational autonomy would be unassailable. Organizational autonomy for air forces meant, in turn, better career paths for air-minded officers as well as more resources for the organization. Theories of strategic bombing were the perfect solution to the growing pressure for organizational autonomy. One of the great biases of military history is the concentration on the wars and military organizations of the advanced countries and on victorious, rather than defeated, powers. There is much to be learned, however, from the study of defeated military organizations, and Anthony Cain’s book on French air doctrine in the 1930s fills a gap in our knowledge. The book suffers, however, from rather uncritically buying into current US Air Force thinking about air power. There is something of a tendency to read current American debates back into French thinking in the interwar period, as in the assertions that “air power is inherently offensive,” and that the organizational autonomy of air forces is an unquestionable good. According to Cain, when the Second World War broke out, the French Air Force had no clear idea of how to employ air power effectively, and this was one factor among many in the rapid defeat of France in the 1940 blitzkrieg. The French, unlike the Americans, had failed to properly grasp the intrinsically offensive nature of airpower. By trying to do everything, the French Air Force did nothing well. The implied lesson is that air forces should focus on their unique tasks of achieving air superiority and carrying out strategic bombardment, and not be distracted by an excessive concern to provide direct support for the army. This claim continues to be controversial, to say the least. There is a great deal in this informative book that will be of use to anyone attempting to understand the ease and speed with which France was defeated in 1940. However, given the problematic record of strategic bombing during the Second World War, as chronicled by Tami Davis Biddle, it comes as something of a surprise to discover no such reservations or doubts on the part of Anthony Cain. One can only assume that his otherwise excellent book has succumbed to the lure of military special pleading and theoretical fantasy.

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

19:9

526

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough

CONCLUDING ADMONITIONS Thinking about war is neither easy nor particularly pleasant. Yet it remains imperative that we focus our collective intelligence on this intractable topic, if only because its practitioners—in the form both of professional politicians and of career military officers and strategic analysts—have not always done a stellar job. Military thinkers have developed an entire corpus of work that attempts to grasp the nature of warfare. This has developed on a number of different levels of abstraction, from the high theory of Carl von Clausewitz through notions of combined arms warfare and the levels of war to more mundane and prosaic doctrine about tactical procedures. As we have seen, there are several powerful ideas central to professional military ideology: the normal theory of civil–military relations, the notion of decisive victory, the autonomy of the operational art, notions of strategic bombing. Military organizations embrace such “master doctrines” because they legitimate professional autonomy and provide a clear set of professional aspirations. While such beliefs are highly functional in this sense, that does not mean that they are adequate and accurate guides to the empirical reality of warfare, and the social scientist should keep a critical distance from such notions. Indeed, these ideas should be an object of study for the sociologist. All these theories are intrinsically sociological in nature, involving as they do propositions about the nature of societies, organizations, and social change. Military doctrine—like any body of theory—is thus a set of implicit lay sociological beliefs. As such, it is something that sociologists ought to take an interest in, particularly since the stakes are so high. The notion that, as the practitioners of state-monopolized violence, military strategists have a professional monopoly on truth only appears to be true when sociologists and citizens abdicate their responsibility to interrogate the claims made by strategists. Military thinkers have no monopoly on truth. They are often wrong. Their claim to exclusive competence is at times little more than a self-serving professional ideology. As Cohen, Feaver, Biddle, and others demonstrate, we have been only too willing to allow a misconceived distinction between “politics” and “technical military matters” to dominate our thinking about war. This pernicious distinction has enabled the military—by claiming to be professionals—to assert a right to the monopolization of thought and action in this sphere. It is time that we stopped being complicit in this. The military monopoly on thinking about military affairs would matter less if we could be assured that they would always act for the best. But this is a dangerous illusion. Of course sociologists who research the military must understand the technical aspects of debates about strategy and doctrine, just as they would have to reach a similar understanding in studying any profession. As in

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

Thinking About War

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

527

studying any other profession, there is no need to buy into the professional ideology in question; indeed, a critical distance is generally to be preferred. There is a dimension to war which is both cultural and conceptual. Indeed, we have deeply held and culturally specific notions of what war is about. At times they blind us to key aspects of reality. Our thinking is imprisoned in a series of conceptual straitjackets, of which the “normal theory” of civil– military relations is one, our simple black-and-white distinction between war and peace another, and our widespread technophilia yet another. We need to think about war more precisely, and explore the empirical complexities of the subject in some detail. If you want peace, prepare to think about war. REFERENCES Brewer, John 1989 The Sinews of Power. London: Unwin Hyman. Burk, James (ed.) 1998 The Adaptive Military. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Ferguson, Niall 2001 The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700–2000. New York: Basic Books. Goldman, Emily, and Leslie Eliason (eds.) 2003 The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hanson, Victor Davis 2001 Carnage and Culture. New York: Random House. Holsti, Ole 2001 “Of chasms and convergences: Attitudes and beliefs of civilians and military elites at the start of a new millenium.” In Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn (eds.), Soldiers and Civilians: the Civil-Military Gap and American National Security: 15–99. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Janowitz, Morris 1960 The Professional Soldier. New York: Macmillan. Janowitz, Morris, and Edward Shils 1948 “Cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II.” Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (summer). Knox, MacGregor, and Williamson Murray (eds.) 2001 The Dynamics of Military Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Krepinevich, Andrew 1986 The Army and Vietnam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kummel, Gerhard and D. Prufert (eds.) 2000 Military Sociology: The Richness of a Discipline. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft. Lynn, John A. 2003 Battle: A History of Combat and Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview. Lynn , John A. (ed.) 1993 Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present. Boulder, CO: Westview. Mackenzie, Donald 1990 Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mahnken, Thomas 2002 Uncovering Ways of War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mann, Michael 1986 The Sources of Social Power (vol. 1). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1993 The Sources of Social Power (vol. 2). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Moskos, Charles C., John Allen William, and David R. Segal (eds.) 2000 The Postmodern Military, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moskos, Charles C., and Frank R. Wood (eds.) 2000 The Military: More Than Just a Job? Washington, DC: PergamonBrassey’s. Murray, Williamson and Allan Millett (eds.) 1996 Military Innovation in the Interwar

P1: IZO Sociological Forum [sofo]

PP1332-sofo-493911

September 21, 2004

528 Period. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Posen, Barry 1984 The Sources of Military Doctrine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Race, Jeffrey 1972 War Comes to Long An. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Record, Jeffrey 1998 The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Rosen, Stephen 1991 Winning the Next War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Roxborough, Ian 1994 “Clausewitz and the Sociology of War.” British Journal of Sociology 45:619–636. Shafer, D. Michael 1988 Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S.

19:9

Style file version June 4th, 2002

Roxborough Counterinsurgency Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Skocpol, Theda 1979 States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stouffer, Samuel A., et al. 1948–1950 The American Soldier, 4 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press. van Creveld, Martin 1977 Supplying War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Weigley, Russell 1991 The Age of Battles. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Winton, Harold and David Mets (eds.) 2000 The Challenge of Change: Military Institutions and New Realities, 1918– 1941. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.