The Ideology of the Offensive (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Karen Malzahn, editor The Ideology ofthe Offensive. By Jack Snyder. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. pp. 267. Reviewed by Michael Vlahos, codirector and professor of security studies at SAIS. Jack Snyder is a political scientist writing about history. This means several things. First, he tends to look at the past not on its own terms, but as a source of lessons and hidden truths. These recognitions exist to be culled because all human action and historical behavior fits into certain universal patterns that can be discerned and codified by the political scientist. If human history can be so determined, then it can serve as evidence and warning for contemporary circumstance. History as resource, universal models of human behavior, and cautionary lessons for the present: These are the three hidden biases toward the past the separate the political scientist from the historian. Now add to this the current chic trend among historical lessons: the 1914 analogy. World War I has been rediscovered, in part out of exhaustion with the World War II comparison, in part from its dimness in modern memory which permits loose reshaping, and in part from its alluring malleability as a mirror of contemporary critiques of American security policy. Mr. Snyder wants us to know that strategy takes two forms, offensive and defensive. He tells us that "offensive" strategies make war more probable and, in fact, usually lead to war. The great powers of Europe, of course, all adopted "offensive" strategies before 1914. We all know what happened then. Today, similar offensive strategies are being adopted by the United States and the Soviet Union. You know what that means. In order to make his thesis work, Mr. Snyder must not only force the military institutions of pre-1914 Europe to fit his model of offensive war planning, but he forces them to do so on his own terms. Military staffs and corporate groups must think and act according to his schema. They must be driven by a deterministic pattern of thinking; they must wish to fight certain 255 256 SAIS REVIEW kinds of war—that is, offensive wars—out of a structural genetic code he calls "motivated bias." As "cybernetic theory" suggests, decision-making units of various types, from bees to bureaucrats, employ similar strategies ..." Unfortunately, Mr. Snyder ignores the overwhelming context of culture in shaping national behavior. National behavior, or ethos, creates its own imperatives , its own reality, as well as the limits and the possibilities of individual and institutional action. This is true as much for military institutions and their strategic plans as it is for political groups, economic concerns, and social constituences. Variation between national cultures leads to variations in the style and substance of strategic plans. The incremental spirit of the age, a Zeitgeist unconsciously informed by a changing collective vision of national-tribal history, leads to an evolution of national ethos. Military institutions will of course reflect corporate bias, but group bias in national society is subsumed by an overriding cultural milieu. Variations in national ethos created distinct and variant war plans among the European powers of 1914. There was no robotic institutional mechanism directing these plans toward "offensive" war. War was an extension of national mission, and war plans reflected not only national goals, but national values. Strategies, like industry or art, expressed different cultural identities. The manner in which nations prosecuted war in 1914 should be examined in the context, time, place, and thought of its own world. Mr. Snyder is seeking lessons for our own time, however, and the actions of another age must be made to fit his commentary. This personal imperative can be detected in his use of the slogan "offensive doctrine" or "offensive war." He deliberately transposes the positive sense of the offensive as it was used in 1914— a style or attitude conducive to ultimate victory—with the contemporary sense of the word as a shorthand for a mindset focused on unleashing nuclear Armageddon . How satisfying to imbue the general staffs of the great powers of 1914 with an irrational obsession with "the offensive," an ingrained "motivated bias" that triggered a horrible, debilitating war which might have been avoided had certain rational hedges against...