Shaping Strategy : The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment / Risa Brooks.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brooks, Risa, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Strategy--History--20th century.

Strategy.

Civil-military relations--History--20th century.

Civil-military relations.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 315 p. :) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Good strategic assessment does not guarantee success in international relations, but bad strategic assessment dramatically increases the risk of disastrous failure. The most glaring example of this reality is playing out in Iraq today. But what explains why states and their leaders are sometimes so good at strategic assessment--and why they are sometimes so bad at it? Part of the explanation has to do with a state's civil-military relations. In Shaping Strategy, Risa Brooks develops a novel theory of how states' civil-military relations affect strategic assessment during international conflicts. And her conclusions have broad practical importance: to anticipate when states are prone to strategic failure abroad, we must look at how civil-military relations affect the analysis of those strategies at home. Drawing insights from both international relations and comparative politics, Shaping Strategy shows that good strategic assessment depends on civil-military relations that encourage an easy exchange of information and a rigorous analysis of a state's own relative capabilities and strategic environment. Among the diverse case studies the book illuminates, Brooks explains why strategic assessment in Egypt was so poor under Gamal Abdel Nasser prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and why it improved under Anwar Sadat. The book also offers a new perspective on the devastating failure of U.S. planning for the second Iraq war. Brooks argues that this failure, far from being unique, is an example of an assessment pathology to which states commonly succumb.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: The Significance of Strategic Assessment

TWO: Explaining Variation in Strategic Assessment

THREE: Egypt in the Mid-1960s

FOUR: Egypt in the 1970s

FIVE: Britain and Germany and the First World War

Six: Pakistan and Turkey in the Late 1990s

SEVEN: U.S. Postconflict Planning for the 2003 Iraq War

CONCLUSION: Findings and Implications

REFERENCES

INDEX

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [275]-301) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691188287

0691188289

OCLC:

1132217821