The Sources of Military Doctrine (review)

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 such bias been implanted in time. How similar will be our fate unless we soon awake. 0 Tempora, 0 Mores! The Sources ofMilitary Doctrine. By Barry R. Posen. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984. pp. 283. Reviewed by Michael Vlahos, codirector and professor ofsecurity studies at SAIS. Barry Posen is also a political scientist, writing a study on military doctrine published in the same year as Mr. Snyder's, focusing on the "offensive" in the 1930s, before World War II. A similar cautionary tale unfolds. Mr. Posen, like Mr. Snyder, is concerned neither for what happened in history nor why, in either a temporal or cultural context. In fact, he all but states that theories not merely explain national behavior, they are in themselves the basis for behavior. People do not make decisions; theories do. The planners of military institutions, whether raf Bomber Command or the German General Staff, act according to the iron rules of "Organization Theory." Nations, whether BOOK REVIEWS 257 France, Britain, or Germany, must act in conformity to the dictate of "Balance of Power Theory." The historical actions of the 1930s were directed by the universal, deterministic rules of these two models. The only tension for Mr. Posen in the source and resolution of historical action is in the relative weight of influence assigned to each model. Worse than his manipulation of human decision making is his reduction of human behavior to a litany of sterile absolutes. Military institutions "prefer offense," "oppose innovation," and "attempt to go their own way." At the state level, "expansionist powers prefer offensive doctrines" and "states preparing to fight in coalitions must also please their prospective coalition partners." Is the richness and nuance of human debate and choice in three very different national cultures—the drama and the tragedy that is their own—to be so casually debased simply to extract some morsels of received "truth" in order to illuminate our present path? Mr. Posen, like Mr. Snyder, fortunately has a higher calling. His metamorphosis of another world, a part of our...