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Biological weapons have threatened U.S. national security since at least World War II. Historically, however, the U.S. military has neglected research, development, acquisition, and doctrine for biodefense. Following September 11 and the anthrax letters of 2001, the United States started spending billions of dollars per year on medical countermeasures and biological detection systems. But most of this funding now comes from the Department of Health and Human Services rather than the Department of Defense. Why has the U.S. military neglected biodefense and allowed civilian organizations to take the lead in defending the country against biological attacks? This book addresses this puzzling and largely untold story about science, technology, and national security. The book argues that organizational frames and stereotypes have caused both military neglect and the rise of civilian biodefense. In the armed services, influential ideas about kinetic warfare have undermined defense against biological warfare. The influence of these ideas on science and technology challenges the conventional wisdom that national security policy is driven by threats or bureaucratic interests. Given the ideas at work inside the U.S. military, the book explains how the lessons learned from biodefense can help solve other important problems that range from radiation weapons to cyber attacks.

Since 1898, the United States and the United Nations have deployed military force more than three dozen times in attempts to rebuild failed states. Currently there are more state-building campaigns in progress than at any time in the past century—including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Sudan, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Lebanon—and the number of candidate nations for such campaigns in the future is substantial. Even with a broad definition of success, earlier campaigns failed more than half the time. This book looks at the question of what causes armed, international state-building campaigns by liberal powers to succeed or fail. The United States successfully rebuilt the West German and Japanese states after World War II but failed to build a functioning state in South Vietnam. After the Cold War the United Nations oversaw relatively successful campaigns to restore order, hold elections, and organize post-conflict reconstruction in Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere, but those successes were overshadowed by catastrophes in Angola, Liberia, and Somalia. The recent effort in Iraq and the ongoing one in Afghanistan are yielding mixed results, despite the high levels of resources dedicated and the long duration of the missions there. The book outlines different types of state failure, analyzes various levels of intervention that liberal states have tried in the state-building process, and distinguishes among the various failures and successes those efforts have provoked.

Nuclear technology is dual use in nature, meaning that it can be used to produce nuclear energy or to build nuclear weapons. Despite security concerns about proliferation, the United States and other nuclear nations have regularly shared with other countries nuclear technology, materials, and knowledge for peaceful purposes. This book argues that governments use peaceful nuclear assistance as a tool of economic statecraft. Nuclear suppliers hope that they can reap the benefits of foreign aid—improving relationships with their allies, limiting the influence of their adversaries, enhancing their energy security by gaining favorable access to oil supplies—without undermining their security. By providing peaceful nuclear assistance, however, countries inadvertently help spread nuclear weapons. This book draws on several cases of “Atoms for Peace,” including U.S. civilian nuclear assistance to Iran from 1957 to 1979; Soviet aid to Libya from 1975 to 1986; French, Italian, and Brazilian nuclear exports to Iraq from 1975 to 1981; and U.S. nuclear cooperation with India from 2001 to 2008. It also explores decision making in countries such as Japan, North Korea, Pakistan, South Africa, and Syria to determine why states began (or did not begin) nuclear weapons programs and why some programs succeeded while others failed. The book concludes that, on average, countries receiving higher levels of peaceful nuclear assistance are more likely to pursue and acquire the bomb—especially if they experience an international crisis after receiving aid.

How do alliances curb potential or actual cases of nuclear proliferation, if at all? Many scholars assert that alliances are effective tools for bridling the nuclear ambitions of states and that the United States can especially take credit for suppressing nuclear proliferation among its allies around the world. This book challenges this widely-held view by arguing that alliances can be most useful for preventing potential nuclear proliferation but much less useful for curbing actual nuclear proliferation. Drawing on deep archival research it shows how allied decision-makers often evaluate American security guarantees with reference to in-theater conventional military deployments. It also demonstrates the significant difficulties in mounting alliance coercion in order to extract non-proliferation commitments. The book mainly explores the three cases of supposed alliance non-proliferation success--West Germany, Japan, and South Korea—while examining in lesser detail the case of Great Britain, France, Norway, Australia, and Taiwan.

There exists the belief that with sufficient motivation and material resources, states or terrorist groups can produce bioweapons easily, cheaply, and successfully. This book challenges this perception by showing that bioweapons development is a difficult, protracted, and expensive endeavor, rarely achieving the expected results whatever the magnitude of investment. The book's findings are based on extensive interviews conducted with former U.S. and Soviet-era bioweapons scientists and on careful analysis of archival data and other historical documents related to various state and terrorist bioweapons programs. Bioweapons development relies on living organisms that are sensitive to their environment and handling conditions, and therefore behave unpredictably. These features place a greater premium on specialized knowledge. The book posits that lack of access to such intellectual capital constitutes the greatest barrier to the making of bioweapons. It integrates theories drawn from economics, the sociology of science, organization, and management with empirical research. The resulting theoretical framework rests on the idea that the pace and success of a bioweapons development program can be measured by its ability to ensure the creation and transfer of scientific and technical knowledge. The specific organizational, managerial, social, political, and economic conditions necessary for success are difficult to achieve, particularly in covert programs where the need to prevent detection imposes managerial and organizational conditions that conflict with knowledge production.

This book seeks to explain why great powers adopt such different strategies to protect their oil access from politically motivated disruptions. In extreme cases, such as Imperial Japan in 1941, great powers fought wars to grab oil territory in anticipation of a potential embargo by the Allies; in other instances, such as Germany in the early Nazi period, states chose relatively subdued measures like, oil alliances or domestic policies, to conserve oil. What accounts for this variation? Fundamentally, it is puzzling that great powers fear oil coercion at all because the global market makes oil sanctions very difficult to enforce. This book argues that two variables determine what strategy a great power will adopt: the petroleum deficit, which measures how much oil the state produces domestically compared to what it needs for its strategic objectives; and disruptibility, which estimates the susceptibility of a state's oil imports to military interdiction—that is, blockade. Because global markets undercut the effectiveness of oil sanctions, blockade is in practice the only true threat to great power oil access. That, combined with the devastating consequences of oil deprivation to a state's military power, explains why states fear oil coercion deeply despite the adaptive functions of the market. Together, these two variables predict a state's coercive vulnerability, which determines how willing the state will be to accept the costs and risks attendant on various potential strategies. Only those great powers with large deficits and highly disruptible imports will adopt the most extreme strategy: direct control of oil through territorial conquest.

This book challenges the claim that winning “hearts and minds” is critical to successful counterinsurgency campaigns. Good governance, this conventional wisdom holds, gains the besieged government popular support, denies support to the insurgency, and makes military victory possible. The book argues that major counterinsurgent successes since World War II have resulted not through democratic reforms but rather through the use of military force against civilians and the co-optation of rival elites. The book offers new analyses of five historical cases frequently held up as examples of the effectiveness of good governance in ending rebellions — the Malayan Emergency, the Greek Civil War, the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and the Salvadoran Civil War — to show that, although unpalatable, it was really brutal repression and bribery that brought each conflict to an end. By showing how compellence works in intrastate conflicts, the book makes clear that whether or not the international community decides these human, moral, and material costs are acceptable, responsible policymaking requires recognizing the actual components of counterinsurgent success — and the limited influence that external powers have over the tactics of counterinsurgent elites.

Why do some military and rebel groups commit many types of violence, creating an impression of senseless chaos, whereas others carefully control violence against civilians? A classic catch-22 faces the leaders of armed groups. Leaders need large groups of people willing to kill and maim—but to do so only under strict control. How can commanders control violence when fighters who are not under direct supervision experience extraordinary stress, fear, and anger? This book argues that discipline is not enough in wartime. Restraint occurs when fighters know why they are fighting and believe in the cause—that is, when commanders invest in political education. Drawing on evidence about state and non-state groups in El Salvador, and extending the argument to the Mano River wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the book shows that investments in political education can improve human rights outcomes even where rational incentives for restraint are weak—and that groups whose fighters lack a sense of purpose may engage in massive violence even where incentives for restraint are strong. It concludes that high levels of violence against civilians should be considered a “default setting,” not an aberration.

How do states overcome problems of collective action in the face of human atrocities, terrorism and the threat of weapons of mass destruction? How does international burden-sharing in this context look like? This book addresses these questions. It demonstrates that coalitions do not emerge naturally; rather, pivotal states deliberately build them. They develop operational plans and bargain suitable third parties into the coalition. Pulling apart the strategy behind multilateral military coalition-building, the book looks at the ramifications and side effects as well. Via these ties, pivotal states have access to private information on the deployment preferences of potential coalition participants. Moreover, they facilitate issue-linkages and side-payments and allow states to overcome problems of credible commitments. Finally, pivotal states can use common institutional contacts as cooperation brokers, and they can convert common institutional venues into fora for negotiating coalitions. The theory and evidence presented force us to revisit the conventional wisdom on how cooperation in multilateral military operations comes about. The book generates new insights with respect to who is most likely to join a given multilateral intervention, what factors influence the strength and capacity of individual coalitions, and what diplomacy and diplomatic ties are good for. Moreover, as the Trump administration promotes an “America First” policy and withdraws from international agreements and the United Kingdom completes Brexit, this book is an important reminder that international security cannot be delinked from more mundane forms of cooperation; multilateral military coalitions thrive or fail depending on the breadth and depth of existing social and diplomatic networks.

Over the past two decades, many states have been called on to recognize and apologize for historic wrongs. In response, some states have apologized for past crimes, while others continue to silence, deny, and relativize dark pasts. What explains this tremendous variation? When and why do states change the stories they tell about dark pasts? Based on a comparative analysis of the trajectories of Turkey’s narrative of the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide and Japan’s narrative of the 1937-8 Nanjing Massacre, Dark Pasts argues that international pressures increase the likelihood of change in official narratives of dark pasts, but domestic considerations determine the content of such change. Rather than simply changing with the passage of time, persistence, or rightness, official narratives of dark pasts are shaped by interactions between domestic and international politics. Combining historical richness and analytical rigor, Dark Pasts unravels the complex processes through which such narratives are constructed and contested, and offers an innovative way to analyze the content of and changes in historical memories. The book sheds light on the persistent presence of the past and reveals how domestic politics functions as a filter that shapes the ways in which states’ narratives change – or don’t – over time.

This book examines how U.S. presidents have deceived the American public about fundamental decisions of war and peace. Deception has been deliberate, it suggests, as presidents have sought to shift blame for war onto others in some cases and oversell its benefits in others. The book views that such deceit is a natural outgrowth of the democratic process because elected leaders have powerful incentives to maximize domestic support for war and retain considerable ability to manipulate domestic audiences. They can exploit information and propaganda advantages to frame issues in misleading ways, cherry-pick supporting evidence, suppress damaging revelations, and otherwise skew the public debate to their benefit. These tactics are particularly effective before the outbreak of war, when the information gap between leaders and the public is greatest. When resorting to deception, leaders take a calculated risk that the outcome of war will be favorable, expecting the public to adopt a forgiving attitude after victory is secured. The three cases featured in the book—Franklin Roosevelt and World War II, Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, and George W. Bush and the Iraq War—test these claims. The book concludes that democracies are not as constrained in their ability to go to war as we might believe and that deception cannot be ruled out in all cases as contrary to the national interest.

Civilian displacement is a regular, massive feature of civil war violence. This book provides a new way to think about displacement, by connecting it to how armed groups target violence against civilians, and how civilians respond. Individuals escape selective violence, civilians relocate together to avoid indiscriminate violence, and groups experience political cleansing following collective violence. Political cleansing is the expulsion of civilians from their communities based on a shared identity or trait. While it is difficult to detect civilians’ loyalties, the book shows that elections can both facilitate and incentivize displacement by revealing civilians’ political preferences; and giving elites a stake in the electoral composition of a community, motivating them to ally with armed groups. The book traces how democratic reforms triggered both processes in Colombia, leading to a major intensification of the war and to one of the highest populations of internally displaced people in the world. Combining evidence collected from remote archives, interviews with ex-combatants and displaced people, and quantitative data from the government’s displacement registry during nearly two years of fieldwork, the book connects Colombia’s political development and the course of its civil war to displacement.

This book examines the personal and political factors behind soldiers' choices to stay in their unit or abandon their cause. The book explores what might spur widespread desertion in a given group, how some armed groups manage to keep their soldiers fighting over long periods, and how committed soldiers are to their causes and their comrades. To answer these questions, the book focuses on combatants in military units during the Spanish Civil War. The book pushes against the preconception that individual soldiers' motivations are either personal or political, either selfish or ideological. Instead, it draws together the personal and the political, showing how soldiers come to trust each other — or not. In doing so, it demonstrates how the armed groups that hold together and survive are those that foster interpersonal connections, allowing soldiers the opportunity to prove their commitment to the fight. It argues that trust keeps soldiers in the fray, mistrust pushes them to leave, and political beliefs and military practices shape both. The book brings the reader into the world of soldiers and rigorously tests the factors underlying desertion. It asks, honestly and without judgment, what would you do in an army in a civil war? Would you stand and fight? Would you try to run away? And what if you found yourself fighting for a cause you no longer believe in or never did in the first place?

What is the value of diplomacy? How does it affect the course of foreign affairs independent of the distribution of power and foreign policy interests? Theories of international relations too often implicitly reduce the dynamics and outcomes of diplomacy to structural factors rather than the subtle qualities of negotiation. If diplomacy is an independent effect on the conduct of world politics, it has to add value, and we have to be able to show what that value is. This book sets forth a comprehensive theory of diplomacy, based on understanding that political leaders have distinct diplomatic styles—coercive bargaining, reasoned dialogue, and pragmatic statecraft. Drawing on work in the psychology of negotiation, the book explains how diplomatic styles are a function of the psychological attributes of leaders and the party coalitions they represent. The combination of these styles creates a certain spirit of negotiation that facilitates or obstructs agreement. The book applies the argument to relations among France, Germany, and Great Britain during the 1920s as well as Palestinian–Israeli negotiations since the 1990s. The book shows how different diplomatic styles can successfully resolve apparently intractable dilemmas and equally, how they can thwart agreements that were seemingly within reach.

Policy makers and pundits debate the utility and desirability of various forms of grand strategy. They advocate one specific approach, chosen from a spectrum that stretches from global primacy to restraint and isolationism. These strategies generally share three features: first, a nostalgia for the Cold War, when America’s grand strategy was clear and consistent. Second, a common belief that the United States can shape the global system according to its values and need if only the country has the right leadership and strategy. Third, a propensity to prescribe instead of explaining American strategy. In The End of Grand Strategy: Maritime Operations in the 21^st Century, Simon Reich and Peter Dombrowski challenge this common view. They eschew prescription in favor of describing and explaining what America’s military actually does. They argue that each presidental administration inevitably resorts to each of the six variant of grand strategy that they implement simultaneously as a result of a series of fundamental recent changes – what they term ‘calibrated strategies.’ Reich and Dombrowski support their controversial argument by examining six major maritime operations, stretching from America’s shores to every region of the globe. Each of these operations reflects one major variant of strategy. They conclude that grand strategy, as we know it, is dead.

What is the role of intelligence agencies in strategy and policy? How do policymakers use (or misuse) intelligence estimates? When do intelligence–policy relations work best? How do intelligence-policy failures influence threat assessment, military strategy, and foreign policy? These questions are at the heart of recent national security controversies, including the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq. In both cases the relationship between intelligence and policy broke down—with disastrous consequences. This book explores the complex interaction between intelligence and policy and shines a spotlight on the problem of politicization. Major episodes in the history of American foreign policy have been closely tied to the manipulation of intelligence estimates. The book describes how the Johnson administration dealt with the intelligence community during the Vietnam War; how President Nixon and President Ford politicized estimates on the Soviet Union; and how pressure from the George W. Bush administration contributed to flawed intelligence on Iraq. It also compares the U.S. case with the British experience between 1998 and 2003, and demonstrates that high-profile government inquiries in both countries were fundamentally wrong about what happened before the war.

On both sides of the Atlantic, restrictive immigration policies have been framed as security imperatives since the 1990s. This trend accelerated in the aftermath of 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks in Europe. This book raises two central questions with profound consequences for national security and immigration policy: First, does the securitization of immigration issues actually contribute to the enhancement of internal security? Second, does the use of counterterrorism measures address such immigration issues as the increasing number of illegal immigrants, the resilience of ethnic tensions, and the emergence of home-grown radicalization? This book questions the main assumptions that inform political agendas in the United States and throughout Europe, analyzing implementation and evaluating the effectiveness of policies in terms of their stated objectives. It argues that the new security-based immigration regime has proven ineffective in achieving its prescribed goals and even aggravated the problems it was supposed to solve: A security/insecurity cycle has been created that results in less security and less democracy. The excesses of securitization have harmed both immigration and counterterrorist policies and seriously damaged the delicate balance between security and respect for civil liberties.

Armies fight battles, states fight wars. To focus solely on armies is to neglect the broader story of victory and defeat. Military power stems from an economic base, and without wealth, soldiers cannot be paid, weapons cannot be procured, and food cannot be bought. War finance is among the most consequential decisions any state makes: how a state finances a war affects not only its success on the battlefield but also its economic stability and its leadership tenure. This book clarifies several critical dynamics lying at the nexus of financial and military policy. The book combines a database on war funding over the past two centuries with qualitative analyses of Truman's financing of the Korean War, Johnson's financing of the Vietnam War, British financing of World War II and the Crimean War, and Russian and Japanese financing of the Russo-Japanese War. The book argues that leaders who attempt to maximize their power at home, and state power abroad, are in a constant balancing act as they try to win wars while remaining in office. As a result of political risks, they prefer war finance policies that meet the needs of the war effort within the constraints of the capacity of the state.

This book looks at the threats that rulers face from their own armed forces. Can they make their regimes impervious to coups? This book shows that how leaders organize their coercive institutions has a profound effect on the survival of their regimes. When rulers use presidential guards, militarized police, and militia to counterbalance the regular military, efforts to oust them from power via coups d'état are less likely to succeed. Even as counterbalancing helps to prevent successful interventions, however, the resentment that it generates within the regular military can provoke new coup attempts. And because counterbalancing changes how soldiers and police perceive the costs and benefits of a successful overthrow, it can create incentives for protracted fighting that result in the escalation of a coup into full-blown civil war. Drawing on an original dataset of state security forces in 110 countries over a span of fifty years, as well as case studies of coup attempts in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, the book sheds light on how counterbalancing affects regime survival. Understanding the dynamics of counterbalancing, the book shows, can help analysts predict when coups will occur, whether they will succeed, and how violent they are likely to be. The arguments and evidence in this book suggest that while counterbalancing may prevent successful coups, it is a risky strategy to pursue — and one that may weaken regimes in the long term.