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Editorial Reviews
Review
"This is a scholarly and conceptually ambitious work which seeks to explain how military doctrine takes place and its role in 'grand strategy.' The core of the study examines military doctrines in the interwar period, discussing the German blitzkrieg and British air defense system as successes, and the French army's Maginot Line doctrine as a great failure. Posen develops many intriguing ideas and theoretical insights, and debates those of his academic peers, in a rich volume that has to be studied as well as read."―Foreign Affairs
About the Author
Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the Security Studies Program at MIT. He is the author of The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (winner of the Furniss Award and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award), Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks, and Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, all from Cornell.
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Product Details
Series: Cornell Studies in Security Affairs
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Cornell University Press (August 26, 1986)
This is a scholarly work of political science written in the late 1980s that is perhaps best known for a few ancillary conclusions on the nature of military innovation in peacetime, which was a topic of great interest in the 1990s.
The purpose of the book was to explore how and why states develop their military doctrine and to assess whether organizational theory (a theory quite popular at the time) or balance of power theory best explained the behavior of French, British and German military and civilian policymakers during the interwar period. Much of the book explores the assumptions each theory holds as to likely state behavior. For instance, organizational theory suggests that military services tend to pursue offensive doctrines that maximize their autonomy and their slice of the defense budget, and that doctrine is often non-innovative as those in positions of authority in hierarchical organizations usually stick with what they know.
One of the conclusions reached by Posen is that militaries tend not to innovate and when they do, it is usually due to a combination of direct civilian interference in military affairs along with the support of a maverick, often unpopular, military officer who challenges convention and "breaks crockery" in his attempt to instill a new way of waging war.
The two cases of such unlikely innovation addressed by Posen are the development of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command for strategic air defense, which has been credited for winning the "Battle of Britain" in 1940, and the development of blitzkrieg by the Germans, which was responsible for the stunning German conquest of France in 1940.
Posen argues that both the fledgling RAF and the rebuilt Wehrmacht opposed these innovations.Read more ›
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Barry Posen's work is a comparison of 33 hypotheses drawn from organizational theory and balance of power theory. The test of these hypotheses is the military strategy of interwar France, Germany and Great Britain. While Posen's work has great explanatory value for the formation of military doctrine, what it does in actuality is refute the richness of organizational theory for explaining the sources of military doctrine. The problem is that Posen did not seemingly intend to refute organizational theory. The book offers a well balanced response to the work of Jack Snyder on the ideology of offensive military strategy. I would highly encourage graduate students and facutly of international relations and military science to read this work.
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In this book Mr. Posen draws heavily on "Balance of Power" and organizational theories on how military doctrine is created and implemented. Using these theories, Mr. Posen analyzes how Germany, France, and Great Britain formulated their military doctrines with the results of World War II in 1940 showing how well those military doctrines served their countries' grand strategy. Mr. Posen shows how militaries tend to keep doctrine just as they want it when civilian leadership doesn't push hard for innovations and he also shows how disastrous it can be when both civilian and military leadership fail to match their military doctrines with their overall grand strategies. Obviously, France scores low marks here as her political leaders couldn't match the two, while Britain receives the highest marks due to the push by the civilian leadership in the last years of the interwar period to innovate its military doctrine. Germany receives mixed marks because Hitler's push for highly offensive warfare ("Blitzkrieg") served Germany well against France, but poorly when it was time to deal with Britain. Although I am not fond of balance of power theories, it is hard to deny Mr. Posen's conclusions. This book could also stand a little update since it was first written in the mid-1980s. Though I doubt Mr. Posen's conclusions would change, it would be interesting to see how he might try to fit his conclusions in with how the world has changed since the end of the Cold War. Although this book has a lot of political scientist jargon, it is still a fine book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in the theories behind military doctrines and strategies.
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Posen's reasoning is lucid and his writing is a pleasure to read. Usually identified as part of the Waltzian or neorealist school of thought in international relations, Posen argues for the primacy of structural factors in explaining unit-level outcomes (in this case, military doctrine). One thing he does not address is potential influence of another unit-level characterisitic, regime type, in determining military doctrine. But overall, an ambitious and cleanly laid out argument.
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This item: The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)
