Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (review)

The United States is today presented with a series of disturbing and incongruous images as it attempts to apply force in pursuit of its objectives in various theaters around the world. Why, for example, did the United States and its 1.2 million soldiers, supported by more than $500 billion in defense expenditures (nearly half of all defense spending in the world), have such difficulty controlling the 13-mile road connecting Baghdad's airport to the city center? Why do those rumored to be harboring Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants in the northwest frontier provinces of Pakistan not turn him over to the United States and avail themselves of the $25-million reward? Why was the stunningly successful phase of "conventional" military operations in Iraq in March and early April 2003 not followed by a similarly successful counterinsurgency campaign?

These and other incongruities are the subject of frequent commentary, consuming voluminous quantities of airtime and congressional debate, not to mention more than $100 billion in taxpayers' money in 2006 alone to fund continuing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the truth is that much of the commentary in the mass media is ill-informed and provides viewers with entertainment as opposed to cogent analysis.

Searching for sound content on the national security issues of the day has become an increasingly difficult proposition for educators, policy professionals, and interested scholars. Stephen Biddle's new book, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, not only provides sound content but does so in addressing a topical issue of paramount importance. Readers seeking content in the form of a theoretical framework, interesting case studies backed by statistical analysis, and well-formulated implications for policy will not be disappointed by Biddle's rigor.

As explained by the subtitle, Biddle, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, takes on the issue of why some states succeed and others fail in battle. He places the issue of conventional combat in a theoretical framework that can be supported through modeling and statistical analysis for specialists interested in those techniques. Although Biddle's work provides the operations research modeler with an interesting methodology, his book can also be read and easily appreciated by a wider audience of national security professionals.

Biddle's argument will not necessarily be well-received in the Pentagon, which is trumpeting concepts such as "transformation" and "network-centric warfare" that supposedly represent fundamentally new ways of conducting warfare in the twenty-first century. Precision-guided munitions operating at greater standoff ranges all tied together by secure communications offer the promise of enhanced lethality on the battlefield with a greater economy of force, according to transformation advocates. The Defense Department is now awash with "transformation roadmaps" and is implementing something called "capabilities-based" defense planning that aims to consign Robert McNamara's programming, planning, and budgeting system (PPBS) to the dustbin of history. The promise of transformation was on display in Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which an array of sensors and long-range precision-guided munitions supported by an imaginative targeting scheme called "effects-based operations" (or "shock and awe") undermined the will of the Iraqi army to continue its otherwise futile resistance.

Biddle's work pours cold water on the idea that the new technologies underlying the Pentagon's "transformation" represent a true "revolution" in military affairs. Biddle believes that an important and enduring change occurred in the nature of conventional military warfare in the latter stages of World War I, when the stalemated armies finally broke out of the static trench warfare that had led to the slaughter of countless soldiers over the previous three years. Popular wisdom holds that the introduction of the tank broke this stalemate.

Biddle notes, however, that the supposed technological breakthrough represented by the tank actually had comparatively little impact. More important was the way that both armies—the Germans notably in the second battle of the Somme in March–April 1918 and the French and British...