Making strategy: Civil-military relations after Iraq

Survival

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 59-82

  Strachan, Hew ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33746640143     PISSN: 00396338     EISSN: 14682699     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00396330600905510     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Colin Gray, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (London: Orion, 2005), p. 111.
2. For Clausewitz, strategy was the use of the engagement for the purposes of the war. Most generals would have subscribed to this definition, at least before 1918. But during the course of the twentieth century, strategy has lost its precision; it has become conflated with policy, and governments rather than armies have become its repository. The result has been conceptual and doctrinal confusion. We now confront the consequences of that confusion. This point is developed in Hew Strachan, 'The Lost Meaning of Strategy', Survival, vol, 47, no. 3, Autumn 2005, pp. 35-54.
3. Butler Report, Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction, HC 898, July 2004, http://www.archive2.official-documents.co.uk/document/ deps/hc/hc898/898.pdf
4. 'Timeline: The Kelly Affair', CNN.com, http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/ europe/01/25/kelly.timeline/index.html.
5. Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (London: Pantheon, 2006), p. 81.
6. Gray, Another Bloody Century, p. 53.
7. Ewen Mackaskill, 'Rice and Rumsfeld Bury the Hatchet for Iraq Visit', Guardian, 27 April 2006, p. 24.
8. Donald Rumsfeld, 'Transforming the Military', Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 3, May-June 2002, pp. 20-32.
9. On 'non-linearity' in war, see Alan Beyerchen, 'Chance and Complexity in the Real World: Clausewitz on the Nonlinear Nature of War', International Security, vol. 17, no. 3, Winter 1992-93, pp. 59-90.
10. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 128-9
11. see also pp. 84, 174.
12. Ibid., pp. 135, 321.
13. Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 148.
14. See James Fallows, 'Blind into Baghdad', Atlantic Monthly, January-February 2004.
15. Tommy Franks, American Soldier (New York: Regan Books, 2004), p. 440; emphasis original.
16. Ibid., p. 441.
17. H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), esp. pp. 328-9.
18. Deborah D. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 49
19. see also p. 10.
20. Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002).
21. Greg Newbold, 'Why Iraq Was a Mistake', Time, 17 April 2006, pp. 40-41
22. Evan Thomas and John Barry, 'Anatomy of a Revolt', Newsweek, 24 April 2006, pp. 24-9
23. see also the Guardian, 14 April 2006, 15 April 2006, 17 April 2006
24. International Herald Tribune, 17 April 2006, 24 April 2006.
25. John Kampfner, Blair's Wars (London: Free Press, 2003), pp. 23, 305.
26. Douglas Hurd, 'This is More like Major's Nosedive than Thatcher's Fall', Guardian, 18 May 2006, p. 34.
27. Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).
28. See especially Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003),
29. and Cohen, Supreme Command. Cohen summarises the criticisms of Huntington on pp. 225-51.
30. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, p. 456.
31. Ibid., p. 71.
32. Ibid., p. 329.
33. Cohen, Supreme Command, p. 8
34. for the implications of this for Britain, see Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 1-19.
35. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, book VIII, chapter 6B, translated by O.J. Matthijs Jolles (Washington DC: Infantry Journal Press, 1950), p. 599.
36. Feaver, Armed Servants, p. 145.
37. Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 177.
38. Feaver, Armed Servants, p. 215.
39. See John Reid, 'Twenty-first Century Warfare - Twentieth Century Rules', Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies, vol. 151, no. 3, June 2006, pp. 14-16.
40. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change, pp. 103-26, uses the Malayan example in a similar way.
41. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 39.
42. Clark A. Murdock et al., Beyond Goldwater-Nichols: Defense Reform for a New Strategic Era (Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, March 2004), p. 10.
43. See also Martin J. Gorman and Alexander Krongard, 'A Goldwater-Nichols Act for the U.S. Government: Institutionalising the Interagency Process', Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 39, 2005, pp. 51-7. I am grateful to Dr Audrey Kurth Cronin for drawing my attention to both pieces.
44. Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, p. 47.
45. Murdock et al., Beyond Goldwater-Nichols, pp. 7-8.
46. For example, Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II, pp. 53-4.
47. Bacevich, The New American Militarism, p. 210.
48. Murdock et al., Beyond Goldwater-Nichols, p. 10.
49. Sixth Report from the Expenditure Committee. The Future of the United Kingdom's Nuclear Weapons Policy, HC 348, session 1978-9
50. Fourth Report from the Defence Committee. Strategic Nuclear Weapons Policy, HC 36, session 1980-1.
51. Guardian, 30 June 2006, p. 10.
52. For a much fuller exploration of the politicisation of American officers, see Peter Feaver and Richard Kohn (eds), Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), esp. pp. 289-324.
53. Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, esp. pp. 269-71, for recent cases.
54. See not only Cohen, Supreme Command, but also Cohen, 'The Unequal Dialogue: The Theory and Reality of Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force', in Feaver and Kohn, Soldiers and Civilians.
55. Feaver, Armed Servants, p. 62.