An increasingly common refrain in international relations scholarship is that democracies enjoy special advantages in international security affairs. Over the past several years, scholars have argued that democratic states are better at signaling resolve during crises, making credible alliance commitments, financing wars, overcoming distrust, and even fighting battles. One recent claim along these lines holds that democracies make smarter strategic choices about when to fight wars. In this view, free and open debate within democratic governments helps ensure that crucial information makes its way into the strategic assessment process, thereby minimizing serious misjudgments in decisions about war and peace. Yet, at times, democracies have exhibited very poor strategic judgment, while the decisions of autocracies are sometimes quite wise. What explains this variation?
Risa Brooks argues that a more reliable guide to the quality of a state's strategic assessment—that is, its ability to evaluate, select, and coordinate political-military strategy—lies in its civil–military relations. Her theory emphasizes two factors. First, she argues that strategic assessment depends in part on the degree to which military and civilian preferences diverge. Sharp disagreements between military and civilian leaders can motivate to hoard information, pursue maverick initiatives, emphasize loyalty over competence in internal promotions, and adopt other practices that undermine healthy policy evaluation. The second factor is the balance of power between civilians and military leaders, which dictates the clarity of decision-making authority and, in turn, shapes the assessment process. When power is shared, according to Brooks, policy authorization procedures are ambiguous, civil–military consultation is minimal, and strategic assessment degenerates into a factional contest for influence.
Eight engrossing case studies illustrate the author's argument, with the centerpiece being a compelling two-chapter comparison of Egyptian military planning prior to the 1967 and 1973 wars. Brooks demonstrates that during the mid-1960s, intraregime competition between President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his military chief, Abdel Hakim Amer, played a major role in escalating the crisis over the Straits of Tiran, which led to Egypt's decisive defeat in the Six-Day War. In Brooks's telling, Amer prompted Nasser to adopt an aggressive, inflexible strategy by limiting Nasser's access to information about Egyptian capabilities, undertaking unilateral actions to limit Nasser's options, and failing to fully carry out instructions that might have dampened tensions during the crisis. By contrast, Anwar Sadat's rule, beginning in 1970, imposed civilian dominance in national security policy. With civil–military competition suppressed, Egypt was able to plan and launch a well-coordinated surprise attack against Israel in 1973. The Egyptian military ultimately fell short of its objectives, but it performed far better—and achieved a substantially more favorable political settlement—than in 1967.
Brooks's other case studies—which include Turkey and Pakistan in the 1990s, Germany prior to World War I, Britain prior to and during World War I, and the United States before 2003—elegantly resolve other puzzles as well. For example, scholars have long debated whether Germany's strategic missteps prior to World War I were owed primarily to cartel politics, fears of encirclement and decline, or a “cult of the offensive” among military leaders. But each of these accounts leaves an important question unanswered: Why did Germany's leadership lack the oversight capacity that might have prevented the risky decisions that led it into a catastrophic war? Brooks's study of strategic planning in Wilhelmine Germany offers a novel answer, demonstrating that an ambiguous division of authority between military and civilian officials precluded meaningful coordination between German diplomats and generals. Without well-defined institutions for reconciling political and military aims, Germany adopted strategies that privileged pure military objectives. One consequence was the infamous Schlieffen Plan, whose prescription to invade France through Belgium satisfied the army's demand for speed and surprise, but in violating Belgian neutrality, also subverted the vital diplomatic campaign to keep Britain out of the war (pp. 185–86).
At the same time, the case studies provide only tepid support for the first part of Brooks's argument: that divergent civilian and military preferences undermine strategic assessment. Notwithstanding the author's claims of variance, all eight of her cases feature, to some extent, serious policy clashes between civilians and military officers—an observation consistent with organizational theories of civil–military relations, which expect persistent rifts between civilians and the military. What distinguishes the book's cases of successful strategic assessment, however, is not the severity of these clashes, but rather the dominance of one faction over the other. In these narratives, when lines of authority are clear, even the most serious civil–military disputes are largely contained, thereby limiting the impact on overall strategic assessment. Brooks's already-parsimonious theory thus might be simplified still further to emphasize the civil–military balance of power over the degree of preference similarity.
The book also overstates its finding that civilian-dominated regimes conduct better strategic assessment than military-dominated governments (pp. 51–52, 264–65). The claim is odd to begin with because it derives from ad hoc assertions about military parochialism, rather than from the theory's central independent variables. But more importantly, the only evidence offered to support this claim is a debatable contention that (military-dominated) Turkey's suppression of Kurdish separatists during the 1990s was ill-advised in light of its desire to join the European Union, which frowned on the policy. Undoubtedly there was tension between these goals, but Turkey's inability to reconcile them reveals more about their incompatibility than about the quality of Turkey's assessment process.
Overall, Shaping Strategy is a major contribution in several respects. First, the book artfully exposes the limits to which we can productively generalize about regime type in international politics. Brooks's case studies cast doubt on claims that democracies boast superior strategic-assessment abilities, showing that smart choices are not inevitable simply because a government is popularly elected. Conversely, she demonstrates that, under the right institutional conditions, autocratic regimes are quite capable of excellent strategic judgment.
Second, Brooks offers a systematic approach for thinking about errors and miscalculations in international politics. In general, the field of international relations suffers from an undersupply of testable hypotheses about the conditions under which states are likely to misread information, misinterpret signals, err in policy implementation, and otherwise make “mistakes” despite having incentives to the contrary. The author takes a big step here by identifying observable characteristics of civil–military institutions that interfere with states' abilities to interpret and process information, evaluate their own capabilities, and make choices that best suit their interests. Her explanation for these phenomena is doubly valuable in that it can be tested outside of a laboratory, setting it apart from many psychological accounts.
Third, the argument raises serious questions about the relevance of contemporary literature on U.S. civil–military relations, which tends to fixate on the civil–military “gap” as the key variable of interest. Brooks shows that whether military and civilian leaders share views is less important than whether spheres of authority are distinct and clearly defined. Divergent preferences need not preclude a well-integrated political-military strategy (as in Egypt during the 1970s), just as overlapping preferences do not necessarily prevent strategic dysfunction (as in Wilhelmine Germany). What matters is whether there is sufficient clarity of authority to tamp down internal competition. Therefore, if Brooks is correct, the focus of the vast literature emphasizing the civil–military gap as the key barometer of civil–military relations ought to be reconsidered.
