Considerations of military effectiveness regularly appear in discussions of strategies, victory and defeat in wars, military doctrines, and individual wars. Trade-offs are inherent in choices and decisions. And yet, a focused discussion of the trade-offs involved in the pursuit of military effectiveness has received scant scholarly attention. Dan Reiter’s edited volume directs the spotlight onto this unilluminated corner of international relations research. The volume aspires “to help scholars and policy makers better understand the pursuit of military effectiveness, past, present, and future [and to] push the study of military effectiveness in new directions” (p. 1). Overall, The Sword’s Other Edge fulfils its promise. It is timely and its agenda is well justified, and only more so as we witness the current consequential changes in technology, society, and politics—the interrelated determinants of military effectiveness.
Edited volumes vary in value. Short-format, cutting-edge research primarily targets leading academic journals. Only a handful of edited volumes address fundamental questions in innovative ways while meeting the research standard of the former. Peter Katzenstein’s (1996) call for disciplined constructivist research in security studies—The Culture of National Security—is an excellent example. Most edited works seem to be published for more mundane purposes, which Thomas Kuhn exposed in his seminal book (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. On the spectrum of edited volumes, Reiter’s represents a middle ground.
Reiter’s introduction reviews the core literature and main ideas around military effectiveness. His discussion is superbly embedded in a concise history of military and strategic thought. Crucially, he gives a crisp, original, and well-reasoned definition of military effectiveness: “the degree to which militaries can accomplish at acceptable costs the goals assigned to them by political leaders” (p. 3). To his credit, he sorts out the potential problem of including the subjective term “acceptable costs” in the definition.
The introduction is followed by eight chapters, including a conclusion, that focus on various military effectiveness trade-offs in the domains of “political support, security threats, and war fighting” (pp. 2, 7). Three of the essays are particularly rewarding: Reiter’s introduction, Jason Lyall’s discussion of coerced fighting, and Caitlin Talmadge’s discussion of the nuclear escalation potential involved in effective conventional fighting against a nuclear protagonist.
Lyall’s chapter (pp. 88–125) is the gem in the volume. Lyall looks at the causes, consequences, and trade-offs involved in using “blocking detachments”—that is, units authorized to punish deserters and defectors so as to force wavering detachments to fight rather than run away. The chapter is a masterful navigation of the literature, giving an exemplary research design and data set, a wealth of information, a compelling discussion of trade-offs, and intriguing findings. It could perhaps have benefited from more emphasis on the cost formula presented for observing units or recruits. The icing on the cake might have been a reference to Verdun.
Talmadge’s chapter is also of particular value. The author looks at the trade-offs that conventional effectiveness generates in conflicts involving one or two nuclear protagonists (pp. 197–226). She provides an original and insightful extension of the stability–instability paradox, weaving seminal strategic literature through her discussion. Ultimately, she warns that great effectiveness at the conventional level, which threatens the territorial integrity, strategic arsenal, or a conventional defeat of a nuclear enemy, elevates the risk of escalation at the nuclear level. Her compelling discussion of escalation scenarios is illustrated with examples of budding cross-levels of escalation in cases of extended deterrence in Europe, the Israeli–Arab wars, and the India–Pakistan crises.
The other five chapters take on specific angles and cases of military effectiveness, including the consequences of taking various force-protection measures (Emanuele Castelli and Lorenzo Zambernardi); war finance (Rosella Cappella Zielinski); the performance of different counterinsurgency units in the Philippines (Joseph Felter); the cutting edge of revolution in military affairs (RMA) (Michael C. Horowitz); and the dubious value of national security assessments absent numerical probabilities (Jeffrey A. Friedman). Each chapter brings an interesting perspective, but collectively they seem to exhibit two shortcomings.
First, the legitimate focus on particular trade-offs in specific issue areas—military and weapon performance, unit type and effectiveness, fighting methods and effectiveness, and so on—no matter how well presented, is less interesting than higher-order, cross-domain trade-offs, for example, between force protection and political autonomy or war finance and economic development.
Second, the chapters reflect, in different ways, the contemporary preference in international relations and international security for conceptual and theoretical analysis at the expense of empirical research. Castelli and Zambernardi assume that force protection motivation leads to greater collateral damage. Their logic is sound and they are certainly correct regarding the past. However, data pertaining to the rapid improvements in target identification and accurate destruction (with smaller yields), including in counterinsurgencies, increasingly suggest that at least some forms of force protection may involve decreased collateral damage. Talmadge’s important insight involves the mistaken claim that Israel risked being “cut . . . in half” in 1973 (p. 206).
Zielinski—the award-winning author of (2016) How States Pay for War—misrepresents the American leverage over Israel during (and immediately following) the 1973 war (pp. 76–79). The key issues at the time were technological and diplomatic, rather than “an American loan to Israel that was crucial to sustaining the Israeli war effort” (p. 76). First, Israel desperately needed replacement and replenishing of weapon systems and munitions (as she notes), and then the American capacity to contain the Soviets and broker cease-fires and disengagement between the protagonists. Felter’s analysis is based on a massive data set on killed insurgents and innocent civilians provided by the Philippine Army (p. 142). However, the accuracy of such data is inherently suspect, as students of civilian casualties of war know well. The tale of body counting in Vietnam comes to mind as a proper reference point.
To conclude, The Sword’s Other Edge is of value for academics, but even more so for military officers and colleges. Still, there is one last aspect of the volume on which I wish to differ with Reiter: the undoubtedly well-intentioned idea of “scholarly engagement” (pp. 18–19), which relates to our occasional wish to “make a difference” by providing decision makers with advice, in this case concerning the trade-offs involved in military effectiveness. I would not proscribe such advice in extreme circumstances, say, confronting threats on the material and moral scale of Nazi Germany. However, I believe that we are better-off keeping a distance from advising policymakers about the effectiveness of military instruments and methods, as a subjective “good” could ultimately reveal itself to be an objective bad. Let John Bruce Jessen and James E. Mitchell’s (neither a university researcher) Dr. Strangelove–like involvement in the case of “enhanced interrogation” be the warning tempering our temptation to become policy relevant.
