Shaping Strategy

by Brooks, Risa

• ISBN13: 9780691136684
• ISBN10: 0691136688
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-03-24
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

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. InShaping 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.

Author Biography

Risa Brooks is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: The Significance of Strategic Assessment	p. 1
Explaining Variation in Strategic Assessment	p. 15
Egypt in the Mid-1960s	p. 62
Egypt in the 1970s	p. 102
Britain and Germany and the First World War	p. 143
Pakistan and Turkey in the Late 1990s	p. 195
U.S. Postconflict Planning for the 2003 Iraq War	p. 226
Conclusion: Findings and Implications	p. 256
References	p. 275
Index	p. 303
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