A sprawling set of agencies collect and analyze information while helping to formulate and execute policy when the United States goes to war. How does the structure of the relationships between these agencies vary over time, and does this variation substantially affect diplomatic and military outcomes? These are the primary questions Spencer Bakich investigates in Success and Failure in Limited War. He convincingly documents how the structure of the U.S. “information institution” (abbreviated II; pp. 3–4) dealing with matters of national security has fluctuated since 1950, with significant implications for whether policymakers reached the goals they sought to achieve. Bakich does so by examining cases of limited war in which the United States pursued what were seen as vital interests while trying to limit escalation of the use of force during each conflict. Although one may challenge aspects of his interpretation of the different cases, Bakich’s theoretical contribution to the literature on strategic assessment in war is important and his consideration of competing explanations fairly judicious.

The book argues that to be successful in war, leaders must be able to extract information from diverse sources in the diplomatic, military, and intelligence communities. These sources must be further linked in a dense information network to facilitate coordination between agencies. A robust II in this mold will help leaders craft a strategy that can defeat their opponent militarily and also achieve diplomatic success by preventing the escalation of a conflict vertically (referring to the intensity of violence vis-à-vis its opponent), horizontally (the entrance of new hostile forces into the war), and in terms of duration. This constitutes a “double success” (pp. 24–25). Alternatively, in situations in which the state’s national security II is “truncated” (p. 31) by excluding key agencies from the decision-making process, subordinate and principal policymakers alike will have difficulty collecting and analyzing relevant information and coordinating the military and diplomatic elements of their overall strategy. If important diplomatic agencies are unable to make contributions to policy, the state is less likely to prevent escalation and is thus prone to “win the battle but lose the war” (pp. 25–26). Conversely, when military organizations are isolated or excluded from the strategic process, it is less likely the state will defeat its opponent even if it can limit escalation—“little consolation” (p. 26). The book contrasts this explanatory framework with what Bakich considers its two most direct competitors: theories of civil-military relations in democracies, which focus on preference divergences between civilian and uniformed officials; and theories that highlight the military’s organizational culture, which refers to military actors’ beliefs about what constitutes effective strategy, as well as their preference for autonomy from civilian leaders during war.

Each of the book’s four case studies following the introductory theory chapters does a good job linking the key variables of the II theory to observed outcomes. There are still some questionable aspects of Bakich’s interpretation of certain pieces of evidence (or exclusion thereof). In the case of the Korean War, the book demonstrates that Washington’s dependence on General Douglas MacArthur’s command for crucial intelligence limited the range of alternative perspectives available to decision-makers, hindering estimates of how likely China was to enter the fighting. At the same time, the book downplays the importance of MacArthur’s political power: His popularity relative to President Harry S. Truman and his willingness to publicly criticize policies that diverged from his own preferences meant that MacArthur had considerable political influence domestically. Acknowledging this point would add explanatory heft to civil-military explanations for how strategy was made during the first year of the war. The book shows that President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration was not dependent on military sources of information to the same extent during the Vietnam War, but General William Westmoreland’s command nevertheless had a great deal of autonomy from civilian leaders and agencies in how it conducted ground combat operations. However, Bakich arguably exaggerates the difference a warfighting strategy focused on counterinsurgency rather than firepower and attrition would have made against Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces (cf. Dale Andrade, “Westmoreland Was Right: Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Vietnam War,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 19 [June 2008]: 145–181). Furthermore, the book emphasizes the diplomatic success of the air campaign in Vietnam in that it did not provoke China into assuming an active combat role as it had in Korea. This is consistent with the II theory, but the failure of bombing to coerce leaders in Hanoi to make concessions is framed as a rational tradeoff rather than a flaw inherent in any strategy that sought to prevent horizontal escalation while simultaneously achieving battlefield success.

The book’s greatest empirical strength lies in its juxtaposition of the U.S. wars against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 2003. Bakich shows how officials like Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates effectively utilized the Deputies Committee and staff of the National Security Council to extract information from numerous different sources and coordinate policy formulation and execution. The structure of the national security II checked President George H.W. Bush’s impulse to pursue regime change in Iraq, an aim many administration officials saw as incompatible with the diplomatic goals of maintaining a broad international coalition and limiting the duration of the war. George W. Bush had more ambitious aims than his father did in regards to Iraq, but Bakich also convincingly shows how an “empowered stovepipe” (pp. 196–198) of like-minded analysis done by the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dominated pre-war planning. Thus, dubious assumptions about the nature of a post-Hussein Iraq were not effectively challenged by more skeptical parties in the CIA, State Department, and elsewhere. One could argue that, regardless of the structure of the II, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would have rejected criticism of their underlying assumptions. One could also point out factors beyond Washington’s control, such as the absence of a powerful adversary shared by Iraq and the United States that made Iraqi cooperation with occupying forces unlikely, as David Edelstein does in Occupational Hazards (2008). However, it is plausible that a less biased system of information dissemination would have made Bush and his principal advisors more cognizant of the types of obstacles Edelstein puts forth, influencing their private assessments (if not their public pronouncements) about the ease of regime change.

A pressing question, one that is briefly addressed but perhaps is beyond the book’s scope, is the degree to which the structure of the national security II is the product of leaders’ beliefs, values, and situational preferences. Though Bakich characterizes psychological explanations of policymaking as overly narrow, he does acknowledge that the state’s broader institutional structure is partially the product of choices made by individuals. On the whole, though, the book demonstrates how psychological inclinations can be checked and shaped by institutional context, as well as the idea that leaders can acquire useful information about their opponents even in the absence of costly signaling. Bakich thus presents a promising framework for thinking about policymaking during limited wars as well as other endeavors where it is difficult to alleviate uncertainty.