Cambridge University Press World Politics: This Content Downloaded From 205.155.65.56 On Mon, 10 Feb 2020 15:24:34 UTC

Should Strategic Studies Survive?
Author(s): Richard K. Betts

Source: World Politics, Vol. 50, No. 1, Fiftieth Anniversary Special Issue (Oct., 1997), pp. 7-
33
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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SHOULD STRATEGIC
STUDIES SURVIVE?
By RICHARD K. BETTS*
A specter
soundsisoddhaunting strategic
so long after the studies?the
burst of euphoria specter of peace. This
at the end of the
cold war, which dissipated into so many nasty little wars. Political sci
ence, however, has been less interested in war per se than in cataclysmic
war among great powers, war that can visit not just benighted people
far away, but people like us. Haifa century of world war and cold war
provided that impetus for strategic studies. After the cold war, however,
universities face other demands as resources shrink. Has the warrant for
feeding this field expired? Certainly not.
First, one interest alone fully justifies keeping the flame burning: to
have expertise on the shelf in case great-power conflict arises again,
which is more likely to happen than not. For whatever reason, the
United States finds itself in a war or crisis in almost every generation.
Second, confusion continues about what U.S. foreign policy should
expect military power to do for less vital interests. What force can ac
complish in a specific situation does not follow directly from standard
international relations theories or rational choice models; the answer
depends on military technology, organization, and doctrine, and how
they fit with local political and geographic circumstances. After the
cold war, liberals, on the one hand, who spent the last thirty years try
ing to reduce American military power, demanded that Washington
"do something" with the armed forces to suppress atrocities, promote
democracy, and keep peace in places like Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti.
Conservatives, on the other hand, insisted on buying hefty forces but
not using them. Vague notions that military power can impose political
solutions at a reasonable cost, or that outside military power is useless
for doing so, were subjected to little analytical discipline after 1990. If
capacity for informed strategic analysis?integrating political, eco
* Thanks to Robert Art, David Baldwin, Michael Desch, Peter Feaver, Stephan Haggard, Michael
Handel, Samuel Huntington, Robert Jervis, Miles Kahler, David Lake, Michael Mandelbaum, John
Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, Cynthia Roberts, Gideon Rose, John Ruggie, Warner Schilling, Jack Sny
der, Barry Steiner, Marc Trachtenberg, and Stephen Walt. The value of their criticisms exceeded my
ability to incorporate them within length restrictions, which also limited bibliographical footnotes to
illustrative examples rather than recognition of the full range of important works.
World Politics 50 (October 1997), 7-33
8 WORLD POLITICS
nomic, and military judgment?is not preserved and applied, decisions

on the use of force will be uninformed and, therefore, irresponsible.
Third, the size and composition of the U.S. defense budget are cru
cial, affecting fiscal and social policy as well as foreign affairs. Who can
rationally recommend whether the budget should be higher or lower,
or what it should buy, without any expertise on the nature of military
forces and what combinations of them are necessary to achieve objec
tives set by elected officials? If civilian strategists are not to decide along
with the professional military, either ignorant civilians will do it, dis
joining political and military logic, or the military will do it alone.
Fourth, U.S. civil-military relations are problematic. The armed
forces were reformed and rejuvenated over the same time that political
leadership loosened oversight. Reagans romantic nationalism made for
laissez-faire civilian control, and Clinton s impaired moral authority,
owing to his own draft evasion, precluded vigorous guidance as com
mander in chief. After Vietnam, the military became more popular
with the mass public as the elite distanced itself from it. Fewer civilian
policymakers have experienced military service themselves, while the
military institution as it shrinks is growing apart from society after a
half century of closeness enforced by the mass mobilization of world
war and cold war. There is no danger of direct insubordination, but a
larger proportion of military officers now feels more competent and
more moral than the rest of their country and less respectful of their
government. Education in strategy will not solve problems in civil-mil
itary relations and might even aggravate conflict if it emboldens civil
ians to question military judgments. But if checks and balances matter,
it can only help.
Strategic studies is both necessary and contested because it focuses
on the essential Clausewitzian problem: how to make force a rational
instrument of policy rather than mindless murder?how to integrate
politics and war. This requires the interdisciplinary joining of military
grammar and political logic, in Clausewitzs terms, a marriage that gets
lip service in principle but is often subverted in practice by those who
identify more with one half of the union than the other. Soldiers often
object to politics permeating war because it gives civilians the right to
meddle in operations, while many intellectuals object to dignifying war
as an instrument of policy or an academic priority. For all these reasons,
political science became the main academic home for the field, and the
place of military affairs within it is periodically challenged.
Within a field of international relations constantly riven by sectarian
debates about overarching frameworks like realism, liberalism, and their
STRATEGIC STUDIES 9
"neo" variants, the murky boundaries of strategy fuel controversy

clarify where strategic studies shouldfit, think of a subfield of three
centric circles: at the core is military science (how technology, organi
tion, and tactics combine to win battles); the outer, most inclusive rin
is security studies (everything that bears on the safety of a polity); and in
the middle lies strategic studies (how political ends and military means
interact under social, economic, and other constraints).
The distinctions are relevant in principle, because they illustrate why
strategic studies should be the most important part of the subfield?
broader in scope than stricdy military problems, but more focused than
security studies, which is potentially boundless. In practice, however,
the distinctions solve few problems because the dividing lines between
strategic studies and the other two layers can never be clear, and the
distinctions are not recognized institutionally. Only security studies has
academic standing, so the place of strategic studies emerges through
debates about defining security. Most scholars of security identify it
with strategic studies, but much of what they do strikes some in other
subfields as too close to military science for comfort. Critics then argue
for reorienting the security subfield to so many other issues that the
military core may become a pea lost in an amorphous ball of wax. The
intellectual coherence of strategic studies increases with linkage to the
military core, but institutional status and legitimacy grow with distance
from it.
One danger in strategic studies is missing the political forest for the
military trees. That danger was greater during the cold war than now.
The opposite danger?that defining security broadly will squeeze out
work on the military aspects?is greater now. There is no consensus
that attention to military matters remains an important responsibility
for social science, or even that knowledge of military systems is as vital
for studying security as knowledge of economic systems is for studying
political economy.
The Case for Scientific Strategy

The case for strategic studies had to be made a half century ago as well.
Bernard Brodie s 1949 article, "Strategy as Science," was a brief for de
veloping strategy as a systematic field of analysis because it was "not
receiving the scientific treatment it deserve[d] either in the armed ser
vices or, certainly, outside of them."1 The only scholars who had paid
much attention to the subject up to that point were historians. The
1 Brodie, "Strategy as a Science," World Politics 1 (July 1949), 468.
10 WORLD POLITICS
methodological model that Brodie endorsed was the one represented by

the discipline of economics.
Perhaps Brodie should have heeded the warning to be careful what
you wish for, lest you get it. Much of what he recommended came to
pass, but with results that did not entirely please him or critics who had
little use for his aim from the beginning. Brodie had in mind an instru
mental science for solving practical problems. This evoked skepticism
on two fronts. Although the services sometimes welcomed analysis by
civilian scholars, many military professionals regarded outsiders' work
on strategy as impertinent interference. Although scholars of strategy
established lodgments in universities and think tanks, many intellectu
als saw them as unprofessional or immoral, considering instrumental
science inferior to loftier theoretical work, or, when applied to manag
ing violence, the work of the devil.
Most scholars of international relations recognize that war is an im
portant problem but are interested only in the before and after, not in
war itself?in war's causes and consequences, but not its conduct,
which is considered somehow epiphenomenal or intellectually puerile.
Strategic studies is concerned with all three phases of war because they
are interdependent; conduct becomes cause, as mechanisms of violence
shape decisions about its political application. It is impossible to un
derstand impulses and choices in the political dimension of war or
peace without understanding constraints and opportunities in the mil
itary dimension. Options for how to make war affect whether war is
made, who wins or would win, and thereby the shape of the postwar
world (or the peacetime world, if anticipated results of combat affect
diplomatic deals). For example, it is not possible to understand how
Germany managed to rule Europe for half of the 1940s without under
standing how it overcame the opposing might of France and Britain as
it had not been able to do in 1914. This cannot be explained by indices
of power (GNP, population, the size of armed forces) that are accessible
to nonspecialists but only by grasping innovations in the process of
combat?how the Wehrmacht adapted the technology and doctrine of
armored warfare to revolutionize operations. Similarly, one cannot un
derstand why Germany ultimately failed by looking at military science,
but only by looking to wider dimensions of strategy?the ideological
and psychological reasons for Hider's miscalculations in invading the
Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States.
Intellectual support for strategic studies parallels cycles of interna
tional conflict and calm. When the danger of war obtrudes in the real
world, the study of war prospers, because the academy considers it un
strategic studies 11
avoidable. When danger slackens, academic interest or tolerance falter.

Two decades after "Strategy as a Science" was published, as Vietnam
was destroying the cold war consensus, Hedley Bull noted that the pro
fessional strategist s status was tenuous due to controversy over the le
gitimacy of the very question at issue: "What shall the state do with its
military force? . . . [Tjhere will not be general agreement about the
worth and utility of students of strategy, in the way that there is . . .
about that of students of medicine, architecture, or economics."2 Nearly
half a century after Brodie s article, in the happy wake of the cold war,
David Baldwin argued that "perhaps the time has come to abolish the
subfield of security studies."3
The intellectual advances Brodie sought in 1949 did not solve all the
problems he saw, and created some new ones. In the enthusiasm for sci
ence, strategic studies developed a scientistic strain and overreached.
Nevertheless, with later leavening of the scientism by better compara
tive historical analysis in the second half of the cold war, Brodie s brief
yielded progress. If Baldwin s advice prevails, the problems that moti
vated Brodie?the superficial quality of analysis available to support
public decisions about war and peace, and the absence of civilian analyt
ical checks on preferences of the professional military?will grow again.
Brodie spoke as the Clemenceau of the academy: strategy was too
important to be left to the generals. As one who knew military history
and moved among those in uniform as a wartime officer and peacetime
consultant, he was frankly cynical about the cultural and organizational
constraints that inhibited serious strategic analysis by soldiers them
selves. He considered professional officers unattuned to strategy be
cause the complexity of military operations made them preoccupied
with tactics and technology. He believed that regular officers view strat
egy in terms of the hallowed "Principles of War" (maxims about "the
objective," "economy of force," "unity of command," and so forth that
appear in manuals of most Western armies), that they have difficulty
grasping the real meaning of Clausewitzs insight on the relation be
tween war and politics, and that anti-intellectualism and hierarchy pre
vent trenchant thought. In Brodie's view, "political scientists ... are
concerned with the context of military operations," whereas "to the mil
itary, the means available, rather than the object, are what determine
the character of a war" (pp. 467-68,473,486).4
2 Hedley Bull, "Strategic Studies and Its Critics," World Politics 20 (July 1968), 596.
3 David Baldwin, "Security Studies and the End of the Cold War," World Politics 48 (October 1995), 135.
4 See also Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965),
11,13; idem, War and Politics (New York Macmillan, 1973), 9?11; idem, "Scientific Progress and Po
litical Science," Scientific Monthly 85 (December 1957), 317.
12 WORLD POLITICS
Since military authors are tied to their services, it is hard for anyone
but a civilian to proffer analysis independent of service doctrine. (There
are exceptions. Perry Smith published an unflattering account of his
service's strategic planning, yet survived, through the support of a pa
tron, and reached two-star rank himself. Andrew Krepinevich savaged
his service's doctrine in the Vietnam War, but finished his career as a
lieutenant colonel working in the civilian reaches of the Pentagon.5
Most officers who challenge their services wait until retirement.)
Moreover, the nuclear revolution put the dominant level of warfare be
yond experience, which is the main teacher in the military ethos. Thus
when strategic studies burgeoned in the 1950s, most of the writing was
by civilians.
As Brodie noted in 1949, "The military profession is by no means
alone in its frequent recourse to the slogan as a substitute for analysis?
certain scholarly disciplines, not excluding political science, have been
more than a little untidy in this regard" (p. 471). He saw economics, the
most developed social science, as the model because strategy is about
"problems involving economy of means, i.e., the most efficient utiliza
tion of potential and available resources" (p. 475). Choices in weapon
procurement, for example, should not be governed by slogan-like con
cepts like "balanced force," but by marginal utility (pp. 478-81).
All of this anticipated currents that would dominate the develop
ment of strategic studies in the first half of the cold war. Brodie wrote
his article while at Yale, but at the same time that he was beginning his
affiliation with the fledgling RAND Corporation. Established by the Air
Force, RAND became a magnet for those who wrestled intellectually
with the strategic challenge of the nuclear revolution. Some like
Brodie, William Kaufmann, and Alexander George were political sci
entists versed in history, but most were mathematicians, physicists, or
economists like Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling,
James Schlesinger, Andrew Marshall, Henry Rowen, Malcolm Hoag,
Carl Kaysen, and Daniel Ellsberg. This group spawned much of the
theoretical corpus that undergirded academic study of strategy during
the cold war.6
5 Smith, The Air Force Plans for Peace, 1943-1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970); Kre
pinevich, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
6 Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983); Lawrence Freed
man, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989); Barry Steiner,
Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1991).
STRATEGIC STUDIES 13
The First Cycle of Cold War Strategic Studies
The year after Brodie's article appeared the Korean War confirmed the
militarization of the East-West conflict, U.S. defense spending tripled,
NATO became the centerpiece of foreign policy, and strategy became big
business. In universities, realist theory and security policy took over the
field of international relations, eclipsing the subfields of international
law and organization that had dominated in the interwar years. In the
1950s and 1960s the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) Com
mittee on National Security Research under William T. R. Fox built a
network of academics. University programs sprang up at: Princeton's
Center of International Studies, where Klaus Knorr theorized about
war potential, economic mobilization, and NATO strategy, and which
produced works on deterrence by Glenn Snyder, William Kaufmann,
and Herman Kahn; Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies,
which sponsored research by Kenneth Waltz, Samuel Huntington, Paul
Hammond, Warner Schilling, and others on causes of war and defense
policy-making; Ohio State's Mershon Center, which supported not
only mainstream research on security, but critics as well, such as Philip
Green; Harvard's Center for International Affairs, where Henry
Kissinger continued to make his mark after the publication of his
Woodrow Wilson Award-winning book on nuclear strategy for the
Council on Foreign Relations; and MIT's Center of International Stud
ies (and later its Defense and Arms Control Studies Program). In Lon
don, the International Institute for Strategic Studies was established
and has since provided a steady stream of analytical publications and
unclassified data compilations.7
Professors jumped into policy prescription, beginning with The Ab
solute Weapon, edited by Brodie.8 Strategy might not have developed
academically outside of military history if not for the nuclear r?volu
7 Knorr, The War Potential of Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); Knorr, ed., NATO
and American Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); Snyder, Deterrence and Defense
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Kaufmann, ed., Military Policy and National Security
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1960); Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959);
Huntington, The Common Defense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962); Schilling, Ham
mond, and Snyder, Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962);
Demetrios Caraley, The Politics of Military Unification (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966);
Michael Armacost, The Politics of Weapons Innovation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969);
Green, Deadly Logic (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966); Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and
Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1957). IISS publications include the journal Survival, the Adelphi
Papers, and the annuals Military Balance and Strategic Survey.
8 Brodie, ed., The Absolute Weapon (New York Harcourt, Brace, 1946).
14 WORLD POLITICS
tion. Nuclear war spurred theorizing because it was inherently more

theoretical than empirical: none had ever occurred. Except for Hi
roshima and Nagasaki, where there was no question of retaliation, there
was no messy store of historical evidence to complicate elegant abstrac
tions. Available empirical data were technical?the physics of fission,
fusion, and ballistics?and the implications appeared simple: for the
first time, great powers would have the option to annihilate enemy so
cieties overnight. Since no one had experience, intellectuals felt less in
hibited by military expertise. Alain Enthoven, the prototypical
Pentagon "whiz kid," was notorious for his arrogant comment in a dis
pute over strategic plans: "General, I have fought just as many nuclear
wars as you have."9
With scant empirical grounds for testing propositions, nuclear strat
egy and deterrence seemed perfecdy suited to deductive logic and game
theory. A few simple ideas, based on a small number of assumptions
and variables, seemed extremely powerful. By the 1960s theorists had
highly developed ideas about how to organize nuclear capabilities to
stabilize U.S.-Soviet deterrence. Arguments among strategists from the
ivory tower about logical effects of "invulnerable second strike capabil
ity," "reciprocal fear of surprise attack," "counterforce options," "mutual
assured destruction," "graduated escalation," and "crisis stability" had a
profound influence on civilian leaders.10
As long as nuclear weapons remained leashed and strategy seemed
successful, strategic studies prospered. At the opposite end of the spec
trum from nuclear war, however, strategy did not prosper. After the
Cuban missile crisis, the focus of East-West competition shifted to the
Third World. Many strategists turned their attention to problems of
counterinsurgency. In this realm, in contrast to nuclear abstraction, the
ories were mercilessly subjected to testing. Most nonspecialists saw
Vietnam (rather than successful cases of counterinsurgency in Greece,
Malaya, and the Philippines) as the test and as evidence that theories
failed when applied. Most of the work on counterinsurgency by profes
sional analysts, however, was case-study research, and most of the the
ories came from practitioners.11 Theoretical breakthroughs in the first
9 Quoted in Kaplan (fh. 6), 254.
10 Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), chap. 1;
Patrick Morgan, Deterrence, 2d ed. (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983); Richard Berts, "Nuclear
Weapons," in Joseph Nye, ed., The Making of Americas Soviet Policy (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1984); Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1984); Colin Gray, Nuclear Strategy and National Style (Lanham, Md.: Hamilton Press, 1986);
Lynn Eden and Steven Miller, eds., Nuclear Arguments (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
11 Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 2 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965); Jay Mallin,
ed., "Che" Guevara on Revolution (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1969). Academics
cycle of strategic studies had been more about deterrence, nuclear strat
egy, and escalation than about revolution, intervention, and subconven
tional war. Apart from whatever credit it might claim for helping to
prevent World War III, the field's weakness in the first cycle was the
overwhelming attention given to the least likely type of war and the late
consideration of the most likely. Given the utilitarian rationales for the
field, it is hardly surprising that critics saw the Vietnam disaster as a re
flection on it.
The other area in which analysts became influential in policy was de
fense program management. RAND provided not only deterrence theo
rists but cost-effectiveness experts to McNamara's Pentagon. Along
with the unprecedented supervision of military operations in the air
wrar over Vietnam, the managerial revolution was a prime precipitant of
civil-military friction. To some, the military reaction to the civilian an
alysts evinced the anti-intellectualism that Brodie complained about in
1949, with military vested interests resisting dispossession as new play
ers sought to rationalize the allocation of marginal resources.12 In other
respects, proponents of cost-effectiveness criteria overplayed their
hand, blithely overruled traditional military judgment, and revealed the
limits of economic analysis as a basis for military decision.13
In the 1960s Brodie made a midcourse correction. He rethought his
enthusiasm for economic conceptualization of strategy, worrying that
the approaches he had recommended in 1949 had been taken much
developed limited war theories mosdy about Korea and NATO, not subconventional war. Robert Os
good, Limited War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Henry Kissinger, The Necessity for
Choice (New York: Harper, 1961); Morton Halperin, Limited War in the Nuclear Age (New York: Wiley,
1963). On unconventional war in the third World, French and British colonial veterans wrote theo
retical statements: David G alula, Counterinsurgency Warfare (New York: Praeger, 1964); Robert
Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency (New York: Praeger, 1966). One of the few theoretical
works by academics that holds up is Samuel Huntington, "Patterns of Violence in World Politics," in
Huntington, ed., Changing Patterns of Military Politics (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962). Ex
amples of case studies include Lucian Pye, Guerrilla Communism in Malaya (Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1956); Douglas Pike, Viet Cong (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966); Jeffrey Race, War Comes to
Long An (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). For postmortems, see Douglas Blaufarb, The
Counterinsurgency Era (New York: Free Press, 1977); Larry Cable, Conflict of Mythr. The Development of
American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1986);
D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Timothy Lomperis,
From People's War to Peoples Rule (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
12 The seminal cost-effectiveness work on defense management is Charles Hitch et al., The Eco
nomics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). See also E. S. Quade
and W. I. Boucher, eds., Systems Analysis and Policy Planning Applications in Defense (New York: Amer
ican Elsevier, 1968).
13 Robert Art, The TFX Decision (Boston: Litde, Brown, 1968); Robert Coulam, Illusions of Choice
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). McNamara's aposdes claimed not to claim too much.
See Charles Hitch, Decision-Making for Defense (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 76;
but as correctives, J. A. Stockfisch, Plowshares into Swords (New York: Mason and Lipscomb, 1973),
197; and James Schlesinger, "Uses and Abuses of Analysis," in U.S. Senate, Committee on Govern
ment Operations, Planning Programming Budgeting (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1970).
16 WORLD POLITICS
farther than he had expected, and that tools that were useful for limited
purposes had been abused to answer questions beyond their applicabil
ity. Leaving RAND for UCLA in 1966, he was appalled by the "astonish
ing lack of political sense" and the ignorance of diplomatic and military
history that he saw among economists who had become eminent
strategists. "It is not that they have no time for history but rather that
the devotees of any highly developed science ... tend to develop a cer
tain disdain and even arrogance concerning other fields." In 1949 he
had seen professional soldiers as too limited by soft intuition and folk
lore; in the 1960s he believed economics could do no better without in
corporating more of the knowledge that scientists often consider soft.14
By the 1970s, however, he need not have worried. Having played a cen
tral role in development of deterrence theory, economists were by then
found hardly anywhere in the academic study of military affairs. RAND
had also evolved into a bureaucratized contract research organization as
much as a think tank and was no longer the hothouse of theoretical fer
ment it had been in the 1950s.
For a time no one took up the slack. Vietnam poisoned the acade
mic well, and d?tente removed the urgency about deterrence. For a
decade after the late 1960s, little serious work on military affairs was
undertaken in universities, apart from arms control studies. The 1970s
produced ample work on U.S.-Soviet negotiations, much of it a valu
able extension of ideas developed earlier,15 but most of which was tech
nical and ahistorical. The Ford Foundation established research centers
that concentrated on arms control at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Cor
nell. Systems analytic techniques were applied to defense program is
sues in monographs put out by the Brookings Institution, which
influenced Washington policy debates of the 1970s but were not de
signed to advance theoretical debates (subsequent Brookings studies
moved in that direction).16 Later, the MacArthur Foundation dispensed
numerous grants but emphasized nonmilitary subjects.
14 Trachtenberg (fn.lO), 13n; Brodie, quoted in Steiner (fn. 6), 196-97; Brodie, "Why Were We So
(Strategically) Wrong?" Foreign Policy, no. 5 (Winter 1971-72), 154. One of the principals who im
posed economic analysis in the Pentagon foresaw the problem; Charles Hitch, "National Security Pol
icy as a Field for Economics Research," World Politics 12 (April 1960), 448.
15 Donald Brennan, ed., Daedalus 89, special issue (Fall 1960); Thomas Schelling and Morton
Halperin, with the assistance of Donald Brennan, Strategy and Arms Control (New York: Twentieth
Century Fund, 1961).
16 Examples of Studies in Defense Policy published by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C,
in the trough between the first and second cycles include Martin Binkin, Support Costs in the Defense Bud
get (1972); William White, U.S. TacticalAirpower (1974); Barry Blechman, The Control of Naval Arma
ments (1975). More academic Brookings publications in the second cycle include Joshua Epstein, The
Calculus of Conventional War (1985); Richard Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (1987); Thomas
McNaugher, New Weapons, Old Politics (1989); Bruce Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (1993).
There was also a counteroffensive against the dominance of strate

gic studies over the field of international relations. Scholars advocated
shifting the focus to interdependence and political economy because
the importance of states and the utility of force had declined.17 By the
end of the 1970s, however, the tide turned. Klaus Knorr?an early col
league of Brodie, editor of World Politics, one of the few economists
who kept working on questions of national security after the 1960s, and
one of the few strategists to integrate political, military, and economic
analysis?had been among the first to argue the declining utility of
force. Like Brodie, however, Knorr became alarmed by those who took
his argument too far and within a decade was publishing reconsidera
tions.18 Within a few years of publishing Power and Interdependence,
moreover, Joseph Nye turned his own interests toward security issues.
The Second Cycle and After

The hiatus in strategic studies ended with the revival of the cold war at
the close of the Carter administration. The logistical base for the field
grew. In the first cycle, World Politics was the main oudet for academic
articles on strategy. In the second cycle, specialized journals came to the
fore, especially International Security}9 In the first cycle, ideas revolved
around basic concepts (deterrence, stability, credibility). In the second
cycle, debate was about the elaboration of concepts, variations on old
themes, and how specific configurations of capability would buttress or
undermine peace.20 In the second cycle, the most novel research and
theoretical development took an empirical turn.
One area that opened up at the end of the 1970s was strategic intel
ligence. A few excellent works on the subject had appeared early in the
cold war because political pressure to account for disasters eased re
17 Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977),
chap. 2.
18 Knorr, On the Uses of Military Power in the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1966); idem, "On the International Uses of Military Force in the Contemporary World," Orbis 20
(Spring 1977); Richard Betts, Michael Doyle, and John Ikenberry, "An Intellectual Remembrance of
Klaus Knorr," in Henry Bienen, ed., Power, Economics, and Security (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,
1992), 17-19.
19 See also The Journal of Strategic Studies, Survival, Defense Analysis, Comparative Strategy, Arms
Control, and Small Wars and Insurgencies. One of the better journals, Security Studies, began publishing
after the cold war ended. Official journals include Naval War College Review, Parameters, and Joint
Force Quarterly.
20 Creative revisitations included Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution (New York: Cam
bridge University Press, 1981); Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management (Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell
University Press, 1987); Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1989). See also Michael Howard, "The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy," Foreign
Affairs 57 (Summer 1979).
18 WORLD POLITICS
strictions on information about a few cases. Roberta Wohlstetters clas
sic book, Pearl Harbor, was based on thirty-nine volumes of congres
sional hearings, and Klaus Knorr s article, "Failures in National
Intelligence Estimates," drew on his involvement in the postmortem of
the Cuban missile crisis by the intelligence community's Board of Na
tional Estimates.21 Declassification surged in the 1970s. The revelation
of secrets from World War II (such as "Ultra" code breaking) produced
a spate of historical studies.22 More theoretical works capitalized on
these and on information about cold war intelligence activities that
started to become available with the congressional investigations
of 1975-76, as well as on ideas from psychology and organizational
sociology.23 The subject sustained two new journals: Intelligence and Na
tional Security and The International Journal of Intelligence and Counter
intelligence.
The bulk of research in the second cycle remained preoccupied with
how to prevent World War III. (Lessons were often sought by revisit
ing World War I.)24 New empiricism corrected prevalent assumptions
about policy that had been inferred from deductive theories of deter
rence. Scholars who burrowed into declassified documents and inter
views revealed that much conventional wisdom among civilians about
nuclear targeting did not in fact reflect strategy in practice?the doc
trine embodied in the military's Single Integrated Operational Plan for
nuclear war. ("Counterforce" targeting, which mainstream theory and
political leaders' rhetoric had rejected as destabilizing, had never been
abandoned.)25 Others showed that much of the fundamental logic of
21 Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); Knorr, "Failures in Na
tional Intelligence Estimates," World Politics 16 (April 1964).
22 J. C. Masterman, The Double-Cross System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972); R. V.Jones,
The Wizard War (New York Coward, McCann and Geoghehan, 1978); F. H. Hinsley et al., British In
telligence in the Second World War, 5 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979-90); Ernest
May, ed., Knowing Ones Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Wesley Wark, The Ul
timate Enemy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Michael Handel, ed., Strategic and Oper
ational Deception in the Second World War (London: Cass, 1987); Barry Katz, Foreign Intelligence
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
23 Harold Wilensky, Organizational Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1967); Michael Handel,
"The Yom Kippur War and the Inevitability of Surprise," International Studies Quarterly 21 (Septem
ber 1977); Richard Berts, "Analysis, War, and Decision," World Politics 31 (October 1978); Lawrence
Freedman, U.S. Intelligence and the Soviet Strategic Threat, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1986); Ariel L?vite, Intelligence and Strategic Surprises (New York: Columbia University Press,
1987); Richard K. Berts, "Surprise, Scholasticism, and Strategy," International Studies Quarterly 33
(September 1989); Ephraim Kam, Surprise Attack (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Loch
Johnson, Americas Secret Power (New York Oxford University Press, 1989); Arthur Darling, The Cen
tral Intelligence Agency (University Park Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990; James Wirtz, The
Tet Offensive (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
24 International Security 19, special issue (Summer 1984).
25 Aaron Friedberg, aA History of U.S. Strategic 'Doctrine'?1945-1980," Journal of Strategic Stud
ies 3 (December 1980); Desmond Ball, "U.S. Strategic Forces," International Security 7 (Winter
STRATEGIC studies 19
canonical theories about nuclear "stability" that academics and civilian

policymakers had come to take for granted was utterly confounded by
the realistic operational limits of command and control systems.26
The other main strand of empirical work was in conventional strat
egy. This shift in attention was prompted entirely by the nuclear im
passe. None of the convoluted theorizing about how to use or threaten
to use nuclear weapons had managed to discover a consistendy rational
solution to the contradiction between the aims of stabilizing mutual
nuclear deterrence between the superpowers and deterring a Soviet
conventional attack against NATO. The former required that any nuclear
first strike would be suicidal and therefore unthinkable; the latter re
quired that an attack by enemy conventional forces could be blocked
without nuclear escalation. Conventional wisdom in the West held that
NATO s nonnuclear defenses were too weak and required reliance on the
threat of nuclear first use?which meant that it must not be unthink
able. This in turn prevented Washington and Moscow from accepting
any hint of inferiority in their respective nuclear forces. If nuclear com
petition was to be dampened, more confidence in conventional alterna
tives would be the price.
A new generation of analysts focused on assessing whether, why, and
how NATO could achieve more such confidence, by examining in detail
the data and assumptions behind standard estimates of the balance of
forces and strategic alternatives in Europe. Questioning official as
sumptions, models, and calculations, and applying new conceptual
frameworks, they took up where McNamaras whiz kids had left off in
the mid-1960s but approached the problem in more depth. Theoreti
cally, they transposed the concepts and categories of nuclear deterrence
theory, whereby particular configurations of forces and emphases in op
erational doctrine were alleged to foster stability.27
1982-83); David Rosenberg, "The Origins of Overkill," International Security 17 (Spring 1983). Scott
Sagan corrects both the "expert's myth" that nothing changed at all and the "layman's myth" that mu
tual assured destruction represented U.S. strategy. Sagan, Moving Targets (Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1989).
26 The definitive work is Bruce Blair, Strategic Command and Control (Washington, D.C: Brook
ings Institution, 1985). See John Steinbruner, "Beyond Rational Deterrence," WorldPolitics 28 (Janu
ary 1976); idem, "National Security and the Concept of Strategic Stability," Journal of Conflict
Resolution 22 (September 1978); Desmond Ball, Can Nuclear War Be Controlled? Adelphi Paper 169
(London: IISS, Autumn 1981); Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1983); Peter Feaver, Guarding the Guardians (Ithaca, N.Y. Cornell University
Press, 1992).
27 Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1984); Stephen
Van Evera, "The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War," International Security
9 (Summer 1984); George Quester, Offense and Defense in the International System, 2d ed. (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988); Steven Miller, ed., Conventional Forces and American Defense Pol
icy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Richard Betts, "Conventional Deterrence," World
20 WORLD POLITICS
This wave of attention to conventional forces brought new emphasis

on comparative analysis of historical cases. Writing primarily in Inter
national Security and Studies in Security Affairs, a series published by
Cornell University Press, scholars sought additional analytic leverage
on questions of relative capability to supplement debates about quanti
tative models of the military balance. New literature investigated polit
ical, economic, social, technological, organizational, and doctrinal
issues that determined military effectiveness, and thereby focused the
academic consideration of the essence of strategy: how to integrate po
litical ends and military means.28 A Clausewitz revival ensued in the
same period, beginning with a new translation of On War (to which
Brodie contributed a commentary). The classic Makers of Modern Strat
egy was also updated.29
Scholars who did this work prospered in the 1980s. Political science
departments that had grown blas? about strategy in the period of d?
tente scrambled to build their staffs again as superpower competition
reheated, the Vietnam hangover dissipated, and realist conceptions of
world politics rebounded. Opposition to identifying security with
strategic studies existed all along,30 but the identification prevailed in
academic hiring in this period. A generous supply of fellowships (espe
Politics 37 (January 1985); William Kaufmann, "Nonnuclear Deterrence" and "The Arithmetic of
Force Planning," in John Steinbruner and Leon Sigal, eds., Alliance Security (Washington, D.C:
Brookings Institution, 1983); John Leppingwell, "The Laws of Combat?" International Security 12
(Summer 1987); Eliot Cohen, "Toward Better Net Assessment," International Security 13 (Summer
1988); John Mearsheimer, "Assessing the Conventional Balance," International Security 13 (Spring
1989); Joshua Epstein, "The 3:1 Rule, the Adaptive Dynamic Model, and the Future of Security Stud
ies," International Security 13 (Spring 1989); Charles Kupchan, "Setting Conventional Force Require
ments," World Politics 41 (July 1989); Stephen Biddle, "The European Conventional Balance,"
Survival30 (March-April 1988).
28 See, for example, Cornell University Press books such as John Mearsheimer, Conventional Deter
rence (1983); idem, LiddellHart and the Weight of History (1988); Eliot Cohen, Citizens and Soldiers
(1985); Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (1984); Stephen Rosen, Winning the Next War
(1991). Examples of historically oriented analysis included John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York
Viking, 1976); Martin van Creveld, Supplying War (New York Cambridge University Press, 1977);
idem, Command in War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Richard Betts, Surprise Attack
(Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution, 1982); Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Mili
tary Effectiveness, 3 vols. (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1988); Edward Luttwak, Strategy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1987); Michael Handel, War, Strategy and Intelligence (London: Cass, 1989);
Joseph Bouchard, Command in Crisis (New York Columbia University Press, 1991).
29 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Prince
ton University Press, 1976); Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear
Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Edward Mead Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strat
egy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943). See
Harry Summers, On Strategy (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), which set off an unprecedented
wave of attention to Clausewitz in the U.S. Army, and Michael Handel, ed., Clausewitz and Modern
Strategy (London: Cass, 1986).
30 Richard Ullman, "Redefining Security," International Security 8 (Summer 1983); Joseph Nye and
Sean Lynn-Jones, "International Security Studies," International Security 12 (Spring 1988); Jessica
Mathews, "Redefining Security," Foreign Affairs 68 (Spring 1989).
cially through Harvard s Olin Institute and Center for Science and In
ternational Affairs, the Brookings Institution, and arms control centers
sponsored by the Ford Foundation) kept up the corps of researchers in
politico-military affairs. This renaissance lasted as long as avoiding
World War III remained at the top of the real-world agenda.31
The end of the cold war turned security studies back to basics: ques
tions about causes of war and peace, effects of the general distribution
of power in international relations, economic and ideological influences
on patterns of conflict and cooperation, nationalism, and so forth. Aca
demic research on the operational and technical questions that domi
nated the 1980s stopped almost completely, but more general work on
military institutions, history, and strategic issues thrived.32 In what we
may call either the third cycle of post-World War II strategic studies
or the first post^-cold war phase, research is advancing on civil-military
relations, organization theory, arms control, strategic culture, coercion,
grand strategy, and other subjects.33 In contrast to the cold war, when
analysis revolved around deterrence and the East-West military bal
ance, no one policy problem dominates the agenda. This makes the en
terprise richer than ever. But without the danger of apocalyptic war at
the center, the force of the claim to relevance that overrode intellectual
skepticism about the field during the cold war has weakened.
31 Stephen Walt, The Renaissance of Security Studies," International Studies Quarterly 35 (June
1991). For other reviews, see Colin Gray, Strategic Studies and Public Policy (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1982); Helga Haftendorn, "The Security Puzzle," International Studies Quarterly
35 (March 1991); Neta Crawford, "Once and Future Security Studies," Security Studies 1 (Winter
1991).
32 Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992); Charles Kupchan, The Vulnerability of Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1994); Kimberly Martin Zisk, Engaging the Enemy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
Bruce Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York: Free Press, 1994); Williamson Murray, Mac
Gregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1994); Jeffrey Legro, Cooperation under Fire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995);
Richard K. Betts, Military Readiness (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995). Two books on
crucial military topics would have been blockbusters had they appeared during the cold war, but were
little appreciated after it: Barry Posen, Inadvertent Escalation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1991); Paul Stares, Command Performance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1991).
33 Chris Demchak, Military Organizations, Complex Machines (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1991); Scott Sagan, The Limits of Safety (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Robert
Kaufman, Arms Control during the Prenuclear Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Emily
Goldman, Sunken Treaties (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Elizabeth Kier,
"Culture and Military Doctrine," International Security 19 (Spring 1995); Alastair Iain Johnston, Cul
tural Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert Pape, Bombing to Win (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? (Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1996); Stephen Rosen, Societies and Military Power (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University
Press, 1996); Robert Art, "A Defensible Defense," International Security 15 (Spring 1991); Michael
Desch, When the Third World Matters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Peter Feaver,
"The Civil-Military Probl?matique," Armed Forces and Society 23 (Winter 1996); Jonathan Mercer,
Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).
22 WORLD POLITICS
Where should strategic studies go? The current trajectory, on which

a wider array of research topics rides than during the first two cycles, is
a good one. Weak spots in the earlier cycles could still stand more work
today: the political dimension of internal or civil war, and the opera
tional dimension of irregular or subconventional war. Since 1945 schol
ars focused most on interstate war and nuclear or conventional strategy,
but most of the conflicts that actually occur are of the other sorts. The
comparative politics field in political science attends to internal conflict,
and there is plenty of atheoretical policy literature on "low intensity"
conflict, but not yet enough academic attention within international re
lations and strategic studies.34 Another topic that merits special atten
tion is the evolution of Chinese forces, doctrine, and strategy, and
whether China's military development can match its economic surge.
The cold war spawned an impressive corps of analysts of the Soviet
military (Christopher Donnelly, John Erickson, Mary Fitzgerald, Ray
mond Garthoff, David Holloway, Arnold Horelick, Roman Kolkowicz,
Stephen Meyer, Michael MccGwire, William Odom, Thomas Wolfe,
and many others); there are counterparts on China (such as June
Dreyer, Paul Godwin, John Lewis, Jonathan Pollack, David Sham
baugh, and Arthur Waldron), but the list is shorter.
Despite the widening ambit after the cold war, skeptics who never
liked the ascendancy of strategic studies see less reason to indulge it and
demand that "security" studies be broadened.35 The effect of accepting
these arguments would be to slash attention to military strategy in uni
versities. The best solution to intellectual controversy is to let a hundred
flowers bloom, but departments do not have a hundred flower pots.
Few, as it is, have found room for more than one expert on military af
fairs, and some have none. Broad definitions of security would allow
departments to hire specialists in areas far afield from war and strategy
and still claim that they cover the security slot.
The Missing Discipline

As Thomas Schelling argued in 1960, strategy's theoretical develop
ment has been retarded because "the military services, in contrast to al
34 Stephen R. David, "Explaining Third World Alignment," World Politics 43 (January 1991); Barry
Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival'35 (Spring 1993); Chaim Kaufmann,
"Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars," International Security 20 (Spring 1996).
35 Edward Kolodziej, "Renaissance in Security Studies?" International Studies Quarterly 36 (Decem
ber 1992); Ronnie Lipschutz, ed., On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Peter
Katzenstein, "Conclusion," in Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996); Keith Krause and Michael Williams, "Broadening the Agenda of Security
Studies," Mershon International Studies Review 40 (October 1996).
most any other sizable and respectable profession, have no identifiable

academic counterpart."36 Strategic studies has piggybacked on other
disciplines?mainly history and political science?instead of securing
an autonomous institutional home. There are no departments of strat
egy or war studies in U.S. universities (in contrast to Britain). This in
itself is not damning; not all interdisciplinary fields have departmental
status. But there is still a disjunction between intellectual and institu
tional logics. The essence of strategy should be the integration of two
disciplines?military science and political science?but one of them is
missing. Interdisciplinary strategy suffers from the lack of an estab
lished academic discipline of military science to anchor it.
First, there is no institutional redoubt to fall back on when support
for interdisciplinary work declines. To understand the causes, conduct,
and consequences of war, one should know something of politics, eco
nomics, psychology, sociology, geography, technology, force structure,
and tactics. When world developments favor strategic studies, the in
terdisciplinary character is an advantage, since it exploits strengths of
several fields. Otherwise it is a vulnerability, since enthusiasm for inter
disciplinary research falters when making room for it encroaches on
one's own department.
Second, specialists in strategy are spread thinner. Unlike political sci
entists in international political economy (iPE), they have no analogue
to economics as an allied field to draw on. They must develop the mil
itary science aspects of their work themselves, as autodidacts. (Then
they smuggle military science into political science, where colleagues
sometimes wonder whether what they are doing belongs there.) IPE
does not focus on the technical functioning of markets but can assume
that serious students have at least taken a basic course in economics.
Strategists must cram the relevant military science into their own
teaching, since students do not get it anywhere else. Economics is as
sumed to be fundamental for education in international affairs, but el
ementary military science is not. (In my own university's master's
program, all students must take three economics courses; none but the
few specializing in security policy are required to take any course on
military matters.) In a world of limited resources that keeps many
claims at bay, none of this means that military science should be a full
36 Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 8. There is also
constant debate (as among students of politics) over whether strategy is science or art. Clausewitz and
Sun Tzu are usually identified with art and Jomini with science, but Michael Handel shows that there
is more agreement among the three than generally assumed. Handel, Masters of War, 2d ed. (London:
Cass, 1996).
24 WORLD POLITICS
fledged discipline in the arts and sciences. But without an institution

ally established discipline at the core, strategy must either be welcomed
into other disciplines as a sideline or exiled from universities.
Academic work on strategy is sponsored elsewhere, primarily the
service war colleges and the National Defense University. In "Strategy
as a Science," Brodie wrote, "We need to make of our war colleges gen
uine graduate schools" (p. 487). This aim has been best approximated in
the Naval War College, which has a strategy department dominated by
civilian historians. These islands within military organizations, how
ever, will never sustain strategic studies on their own, nor should they.
Understanding of military affairs should not become a closed system,
where none outside the uniformed establishment can claim expertise.
If serious strategic studies is to survive, it needs a niche in real univer
sities. Given the interdisciplinary and policy-oriented nature of strate
gic studies, graduate schools of public policy and international affairs
should be a logical locus. But although such schools now give Ph.D. s,
they do not have an autonomous underpinning. Scholars staffing them
still come mostly from the arts and sciences, which is where a viable
academic enterprise must have roots.
Most social sciences have dealt with military subjects. For example,
sociologists such as Morris Janowitz and Charles Moskos built the
Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society and its journal
Armed Forces and Society. Few of the social sciences, however, have gen
erated a critical mass of scholars fully conversant with strategy Econo
mists got involved in strategic work as consultants, or by moving to
RAND or Washington, not by establishing it as a field within their par
ent discipline. In practice, history and political science are the homes
for strategic studies.
Military history is essential knowledge for anyone prescribing strat
egy, but it does not fare well within the history profession. Few major
departments beyond Yale, Duke, and Ohio State have kept even a sin
gle military historian on their rosters. Strategic studies has been more
welcome in political science. In part this is because political science has
been an eclectic and permissive discipline, without a rigidly au
tonomous agenda, method, or qualifications. (Several major political
science departments even appointed faculty with other degrees to cover
strategy?mathematician Albert Wohlstetter at the University of
Chicago, chemist George Rathjens at MIT, and economist Robert Pow
ell at Berkeley. It is hard to imagine departments in any of those other
disciplines hiring a political scientist for anything.) Most researchers in
international relations exploit other disciplines for much of their work.
Empirically oriented ones look to history, those interested in deductive

theory look to economics and philosophy. The most zealous social sci
entists, however, see methodological eclecticism as flabby indiscipline.
Strategy will not fare well if scientistic impulses achieve hegemony in
the political science guild. Strategic studies can and should be as rigor
ous as any discipline, but it has a natural interest in a permissive writ
for political science, if that discipline is to be its main home.37
Lack of a military science discipline also limits institutional links be
tween military and academic cultures. Both camps have come a long
way since "Strategy as a Science." Officers have become civilianized,
getting M.B.A.S or social science Ph.D.'s, complementing the tradi
tional military orientation to engineering; and civilians have become
militarized, serving in the Defense Department or getting more
rounded educational backgrounds in military operations than McNa
mara's systems analysts had. Blurry boundaries among the realms of
policy, strategy, and operations, however, keep the proper balance of
civil-military power uncertain. Most accord civilians the right to make
policy, and the military the right to run operations, but strategy is what
links the two. Pulled in two directions, strategic choices are inevitably
seen by some as primarily political and civilian and by others as pri
marily operational and military.38
Brodie did not consider the professional military equipped to ac
complish the integration of policy and operations that is the essence of
strategy, but American society would really not have it otherwise. Strat
egy sucks the military into high politics. Professional soldiers usually
prefer a division of labor, segregating policy and operations into neat
compartments, assuming that strategy will be their own mechanistic
translation of policy guidance into military programs and plans that
they can execute to the stipulated ends. Civilian strategists worry that
military tunnel vision may yield dangerous and unrecognized political
consequences?for example, building incentives for preemptive attack
into the configuration of capabilities.
If strategy is to integrate policy and operations, it must be devised not just
by politically sensitive soldiers but by militarily sensitive civilians. Either of
these types makes third parties in politics or academia uncomfortable. Ironi
cally, many academics who endorse strong civilian control of the mili
37 A dean of the profession's brief for eclecticism is Gabriel Almond, "Separate Tables," PS 23 (Fall
1988), 829-30,839-40.
38 Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957);
Samuel Finer, The Man on Horseback (New York: Praeger, 1962); Amos Perlmutter, The Military and
Politics in Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, States
men, and Cold War Crises, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
26 WORLD POLITICS
tary prove reluctant to support it by promoting civilian strategic studies.

Amateurs should not control what they do not understand, especially
in a business that puts legions of lives at stake. Yet many academic crit
ics share military skepticism (albeit for different reasons) about intel
lectual attention to details of military operations.
The main problem is not the pacifist or radical fringes of the acade
mic world, despite the distaste they evince for a field they associate with
support for U.S. policy. Neither group has as much clout in political
science as elsewhere in academia. The problem is that many in the lib
eral mainstream concede that strategic studies is legitimate, but when
major war appears to recede as a prospect in the real world?as it did in
the 1970s and again after the cold war?they resist ranking the subject
highly when their own fields* priorities are at stake. Seen as legitimate
in principle, strategic studies faces marginalization in practice when de
partments see it as a second-rate claim on their discipline.
Strategic Studies and Security Studies
The intellectual and institutional status of strategy is confused by per

sistent lack of consensus on how much attention military aspects of se
curity should get and where lines should be drawn between narrow
military science, integrative strategic studies, and all-encompassing se
curity studies. In "Strategy as a Science" Brodie noted that military
strategy was subordinate to the larger problem of how
to increase one s advantage without unduly jeopardizing the maintenance of

peace or the pursuit of other values. This broader enterprise, which might be
called "security policy," can be construed to cover the total preparation for war as
well as the waging of it. It would thus deal. . . with political, social, and eco
nomic as well as military matters in both domestic and foreign contexts, (p. 477)
Brodie s "security policy" was closer to what I have called strategic stud
ies, as his discussion of "strategy" was closer to military science, perhaps
because he did not foresee vigorous arguments that security involves far
more than preparation for war. His later frustration with economists'
approach to strategy was their inattention to factors he lumped with
"security" in 1949. Today it is fair to distinguish strategic and security
studies in order to recognize that security includes things besides mili
tary concerns, as long as no doubt is left that security policy requires
carefiil attention to war and strategy. Security studies today embraces
many related topics such as diplomacy, policy formation, social and
economic mobilization, scientific innovation, arms control, and terror

ism.39 Some, however, regard even this breadth as inadequate.
As semantic commentary on the term "security," arguments that se
curity studies should consider problems ranging from economic perfor
mance to environmental damage are quite fair. They do not help to
organize the field of international relations, however, because they do
not delimit a subfield. A subfield must be broad enough to encompass
a significant range of problems, but narrow enough to be a coherent
area of inquiry, distinguishable from other subfields and the parent
field. Expansive definitions of security quickly become synonymous
with "interest" or "well-being," do not exclude anything in international
relations or foreign policy, and thus become indistinguishable from
those fields or other subfields. Recognition of this boundary problem led
Baldwin to suggest that security studies be abolished as a subfield and
"reintegrated" into international relations. If the point was to reverse
fragmentation and encourage the r?int?gration of all specializations,
this argument would be reasonable, but he denies that the other main
subfield of international relations, IPE, should be reintegrated as well.
First, Baldwin argues, no other subfield but security is "defined in
terms of techniques of statecraft."40 Even if this is true, the difference is
less significant than the similarities. IPE is as much or as little about
economic phenomena as security studies is about military phenomena.
Both trade and war involve conflict and cooperation, negotiation, and
ultimate media of exchange and settlement (cash payment and com
bat). Both combat and commerce are modes of interaction in which
purposes, constraints, instruments, and procedural dynamics produce
outcomes and overlap with other realms of interaction.
Second, Baldwin suggests, "the rationale for subfields is to ensure
that important subtopics are not neglected,"41 and security topics are
established at the core of the parent field of international relations
where realism is the dominant paradigm. Specialization, however, is at
least as much for deepening knowledge on important subjects as for
39 Examples of breadth beyond strictly military aspects include Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of
the Great Powers (New York Random House, 1987); Aaron Friedberg, The Weary Titan (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988); Richard Ullman, Securing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991); Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991); Douglas
Macdonald, Adventures in Chaos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Stephen Walt, The
Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1987); idem, Revolution and War (Ithaca,
N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1995).
40 Baldwin (fn. 3), 140. See also Baldwin, "The Concept of Security," Review of International Stud
ies 23 (1997).
41 Baldwin (fn. 3), 140.
28 WORLD POLITICS
guarding against neglect. Moreover, it has been twenty years since one
could worry that IPE might be neglected, and realism has been on the
defensive again since the cold war ended. Considering that interna
tional relations has more or less broken down into two main subfields,
it hardly seems necessary to drop to one. If anything, more subfields
should be strengthened (for example, environmental studies, which
covers subjects ultimately as important as the regnant subfields and is
more neglected than either security or IPE).
Clarity and claims might best be served by renaming the security
subfield "IPM" (international politico-military studies). This would con
firm the focus on strategic integration of ends and means, highlight the
parallel to IPE, and circumvent the dispute over "security" that mixes le
gitimate semantic claims with objectionable attacks on strategic studies.
The deal would concede the case for identifying the scope of security
with international relations in general, in exchange for recognition of
an "ipm" subfield (strategic studies) on a par with any other. Practically,
however, there is no constituency on either side for such recategoriza
tion, so strategy's academic status will continue to be set through argu
ments about security studies.
As consensus on standards remains elusive, students of strategy reg
ularly encounter criticisms of the field s quality, occasionally in print but
most often in professional badinage. One objection is that mainstream
strategic work is theoretically weak or has not advanced since the de
terrence theory of the early cold war.42 John Ruggie laments failures to
consider possible transformations of international politics: "the worst
offender by far is the American field of security studies," because "no
epochal thought has been expressed by any serious specialist in that
field since 1957, when John Herz published 'Rise and Demise of the
Territorial State.'"43 This confuses disagreement with closed minds:
there is no evidence that those who disbelieve in transformation have
refused to consider it, any more than that those Ruggie admires have
refused to consider the case for continuity.
Have other subfields done much better in producing knowledge?
Not by standards of cumulation or cross-fertilization. Work on deter
rence and arms control represented as much cumulation as found in
most of political science. Indeed, if work in the later cold war amounted
to refinements of earlier breakthroughs rather than new ones, this rep
resented progress based on cumulation. Debates on war causation and
civil-military relations have filtered into other subfields via levels-of
42 Nye and Lynn-Jones (fh.30), 12,21-22,26.
43 Ruggie, "Territoriality and Beyond," International Organization 47 (Winter 1993), 143.
analysis and bureaucratic politics arguments, and security studies

adapted cognitive theory and organization theory before IPE did.44
Even if it were true that theoretical innovation in strategic studies
has been less paradigm-shattering than in other fields, this would not
ipso facto demonstrate weakness rather than strength. Critics would
have to demonstrate that more recent and numerous theories in other
fields are better theories?more useful for understanding the world?
than the fewer and older ones of strategy. Theories may endure because
they prove durable, or may change constantly because each new one
proves wanting. One Clausewitz is still worth a busload of most other
theorists.
Are technical discussions about weaponry or operational doctrine
evidence of strategists' atheoretical fixation on particulars? Such criti
cism has some merit in regard to technically denominated literature of
the cold war (though most of it was not in political science) and is un
derstandable when provoked by hardware fetishists often taken for rep
resentatives of strategic studies. Otherwise, it is no more reasonable
than it would be to denigrate political economy for attention to specific
commodities, financial instruments, or trade agreements.
Some critics such as rational choice theorists who deride traditional
empirical work as "just telling stories," or quantitative researchers who
criticize it as "anecdotal," see emphasis on comparative case studies as
generically weak compared to deductive theorizing or "large-N" stud
ies. These other approaches thrive and compete effectively in universi
ties with mainstream strategic studies as practiced in Brodie s tradition.
Such work appears mainly in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Ameri
can Political Science Review, and International Studies Quarterly *s
Distaste for military studies sometimes comes from moral suspicions
that it embraces war rather than attending to how to abolish it. Amer
ican strategic research, however, is mainly about how to avoid war.
Most work in strategic studies is profoundly conservative, in the literal
sense, because it is concerned with stability, a value that privileges peace
44 Thanks to Peter Feaver for this point. See John Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in Interna
tional Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976); Graham Allison, Essence of Decision
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Harvey Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1972).
45 See also Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981);
Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992);
Jack Levy, War and the Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975 (Lexington: University Press of Ken
tucky, 1983); Paul Huth, Extended Deterrence and the Prevention of War (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1988); Robert Powell, Nuclear Deterrence Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
George W. Downs and David M. Rocke, Tacit Bargaining, Arms Races, and Arms Control (Ann Arbor
University of Michigan Press, 1990).
30 WORLD POLITICS
over revisionism. In this respect, liberals interested in arms control have

been the most conservative. Few academic works promote schemes for
using force to change the status quo. Rather, they focus on deterrence or
defense, to discourage the resort to violence to effect political change.
Focusing intendy on how to manipulate the threat of deadly force,
for whatever benign purpose, strikes some as fatalistic, selling short the
search for cooperative strategies. Why waste time and foundation
grants on finding better ways to do a bad thing when we might apply
our talents to making it unnecessary? But accepting the occurrence of
war and considering how to cope with it more effectively are no more
fatalistic than accepting liberal capitalism, and considering how to op
timize trade within it, would seem to a Marxist. Realist assumptions
about group conflict that underlie most strategic studies require no
more and no less validation than those of optimists who believe in the
obsolescence of war. Debate over these assumptions lies at the heart of
political theory and has been recycled and unresolved for centuries. It
would be foolhardy to bet that social science can resolve it and arrogant
for either side to deny an academic place to the other.46
Strategy for What?

Are scholars of strategy too policy-oriented (not sufficiendy theoreti
cal) or too involved in government consulting to keep straight the con
flicting demands of truth and power? (At different times, critics have
given it both ways?denigrating the field for being too relevant in the
era when there were huge security problems and dismissing it now for
not being relevant enough.) At high points of the cold war, analysis
often did fixate on the U.S.-Soviet balance of military power and the
relative merits of particular weapons programs. It is also true that few
strategists apologize for wanting to affect prospects for war and peace
in the outside world. Apart from aesthetic fascination with the elegance
of theory itself?theory for theory's sake?the rationale for valuing the
oretical over policy analysis in the intellectual pecking order is that the
former can subsume and inspire a wider range of analysis, and thus re
veals more and lasts longer than work on a transient issue. This utili
tarian rationale means that one good theory can illuminate many policy
questions?but also that some link between theory and practice is ulti
mately the test of a theory's value. Neither theory nor policy can be opti
mized apart from each other. Central theoretical insights often flow from
46 See Christopher Davis, "War and Peace in a Multipolar World," Journal of Strategic Studies 19
(March 1996).
grappling with concrete questions rather than a priori constructs. For

example, Albert Wohlstetter drew basic precepts about strategic insta
bility from his work on a RAND study of choices in bomber deployment
patterns.47
Two academic pathologies should raise the stock of policy studies.
One is that the professional premium on theorizing tends to proliferate
theories, promote constant revision of theories, and encourage produc
tion of second-rate theories over first-rate applications. Albert Hirsch
man, with impeccable credentials as a theorist, long ago indicted "the
tendency toward compulsive and mindless theorizing?** One sure sign of
intellectual degeneration in a field is when the logical relationship be
tween generalization and specification is inverted, theories threaten to
outnumber their applications, and the shelf life of theoretical work
turns out to be hardly longer than that of policy analysis. Some social
scientists are untroubled that professional incentives encourage such
imbalance, because never having had to meet a payroll in the policy
world, they overestimate the ease with which an effective application
can be derived from a theoretical insight. Every intellectual would
rather be an Einstein than an engineer, but usefiil knowledge is not ad
vanced if the academy generates a horde of would-be Einsteins but few
competent engineers. Strategists are not just engineers, but they con
sider empiricism and application no less important than the theoretical
part of their work.
The other pathology is when theorization becomes a closed system,
with no connection through which insights can be applied to the out
side world?when theorists communicate effectively with no one but
each other. When this happens, a theory may remain beautifid but it
loses the claim to utility. It is the widespread perception in the outside
world that theorization is a closed system that makes "academic" a pe
jorative adjective in normal parlance. A system can be closed in two
senses: lack of feedback from policy application, or lack of interest in
testing theories against evidence. Both problems are addressed in typi
cal strategic studies research programs that proceed from policy issues,
to theoretical formulation, to empirical testing, to policy application.
Intellectuals who spend much time in Washington sometimes worry
that much theoretical work in contemporary political science reflects
both pathologies and has not proved much less ephemeral or more use
fill than good applications of old theory. Unless academics themselves
47 Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Foreign Affairs 37 (January 1959).

48 Hirschman, "The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding," World Politics 22
(April 1970), emphasis in original.
32 WORLD POLITICS
become involved on the periphery of policy-making, the only way that

their work can have effect outside the closed system in universities is if
practitioners read it. Few high-level staff in the U.S. government read
anything more academic than Foreign Affairs, and high-level policy
makers seldom have time to read any unofficial material but op-ed
pieces. One academic journal that is read occasionally in Washington is
International Security, because it melds policy analysis and theory. This
is one reason it has had a circulation 50 to 80 percent higher than its
IPE counterpart International Organization and that academics in other
fields sometimes denigrate its academic quality.
Some academics may value the aesthetic qualities of theory as much
as the utilitarian. Strategists can get as excited as anyone over the ele
gance of an idea, but see elegance without empirical confirmation and
applicability as no more science than art. As Brodie suggested, any cri
terion for strategy but a utilitarian one is a contradiction in terms: "The
question that matters in strategy is: Will the idea work?_Strategy is
afield where truth is sought in the pursuit of viable solutions."*9
In the first half of the cold war, academic strategists played a visible
role in U.S. defense policy. There have been many officials with Ph.D. s
since. For better or worse, however, few practicing academics in strate
gic studies have been directly influential since the 1960s, except for
Henry Kissinger. Most scholars who have held high national security
offices have been generalists (McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Zbig
niew Brzezinski) or ones from strategic studies who left academia early
in their careers (Michael Armacost, Paul Wolfowitz, Arnold Kanter,
Dennis Ross, Lynn Davis). Some academic strategists are consultants
to foreign affairs agencies, but few are reputed to be powers behind any
throne. Ironically, in the past quarter century, policy experience has en
riched academic research more than the reverse, since many prominent
scholars of strategy spent brief periods early in their careers working at
middle levels in the government (usually thanks to fellowships from the
Council on Foreign Relations).
The direct effect of strategic studies on the outside world may be
greater than that of much other social science. It remains quite limited,
however, perhaps because scholarship in the field became more acade
mic after the first cycle. Thus the field is more like others than it is dif
ferent, in the sense that the influence of education is hard to pinpoint.
It percolates through students who go into the outside world, through
the few policymakers who read research, or through other channels dif
49 Brodie, War and Politics (in A), 452-53, emphasis in original.
ficult to trace. In any case, to whatever extent strategic studies is not a

closed system, it is cause for celebration, not criticism.
Brodie s disappointment with the first cycle reflected the failure of
strategists then most prominent to integrate the analytic rigor of eco
nomics with the broader expertise in military science, politics, and his
tory that he himself had. Strategic studies improved in those terms in
the second cycle. Now the question is whether strategic studies, larded
as it is with military science, will remain at the center of security stud
ies or will wither as academic guilds drive the focus of research to other
subjects.
Strategy is not the whole of security and need not be anointed as the
first priority of international relations. This defense of strategic studies
is not a special pleading to return the field to a dominant position, but
simply a case for keeping its status equal to any other subfield. What
ever resources are available for hiring, faculties should decide what to
cover on the basis of long-term evidence of what has mattered in world
politics rather than recent events, intellectual fads, or moral hopes. A
department that can afford only one professor of international relations
needs a generalist and cannot demand that she know much military sci
ence. A department that can hire in separate subfields, however, should
ensure that coverage of "security" includes as much emphasis on strate
gic studies as if the slot were defined as in "IPM."
War has always been an essential phenomenon in world politics.
There is nothing wrong with asserting that it is waning as long as such
propositions (which have been popularized and discredited three times
before in the past century) are not allowed to strike the issue from the
agenda of highest priority problems. If war does become obsolete, the
wasted intellectual effort in continuing to study it will have been a small
price. If it does not, and if research ever has any usefiil impact at all, fu
ture generations may be glad that we kept our intellectual powder dry.

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Should Strategic Studies Survive?

Author(s): Richard K. Betts

World Politics 50 (October 1997), 7-33

nomic, and military judgment?is not preserved and applied, decisions

"neo" variants, the murky boundaries of strategy fuel controversy

The Case for Scientific Strategy

methodological model that Brodie endorsed was the one represented by

avoidable. When danger slackens, academic interest or tolerance falter.

tion. Nuclear war spurred theorizing because it was inherently more

There was also a counteroffensive against the dominance of strate

The Second Cycle and After

canonical theories about nuclear "stability" that academics and civilian

This wave of attention to conventional forces brought new emphasis

Where should strategic studies go? The current trajectory, on which

The Missing Discipline

most any other sizable and respectable profession, have no identifiable

fledged discipline in the arts and sciences. But without an institution

Empirically oriented ones look to history, those interested in deductive

tary prove reluctant to support it by promoting civilian strategic studies.

Strategic Studies and Security Studies

The intellectual and institutional status of strategy is confused by per

to increase one s advantage without unduly jeopardizing the maintenance of

economic mobilization, scientific innovation, arms control, and terror

analysis and bureaucratic politics arguments, and security studies

over revisionism. In this respect, liberals interested in arms control have

Strategy for What?

grappling with concrete questions rather than a priori constructs. For

47 Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Foreign Affairs 37 (January 1959).

become involved on the periphery of policy-making, the only way that

49 Brodie, War and Politics (in A), 452-53, emphasis in original.

ficult to trace. In any case, to whatever extent strategic studies is not a

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