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Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars. By Deborah D. Avant. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. 161p. $29.95.
Deborah Avant's book provides a creative and useful application of institutional political economy to a new field -- the development of military doctrine in democratic states. Her well-argued first and second chapters provide a host of examples of how concepts commonly used by those studying the behavior of firms and legislatures can also be applied to the issue of innovation in democratic military organizations. She casts military officers as agents of political leaders, who are themselves agents of the electorate; portrays the military's propensity to innovate as a function of the structure of employment incentives that officers face and writes of the ensuing strategic choices that officers make; and describes the moral hazard confronting political leaders when they rely on specialized information controlled by military officers. To my knowledge, her effort to apply this perspective to civil-military relations is unprecedented, making this a truly pathbreaking book.
Avant uses this perspective to explain why British forces did a better job of integrating military doctrine with political grand strategy, in both the Boer War and the Malayan Emergency, than did the American forces in the Vietnam conflict. The American picture she paints is of a dominant army wedded to concepts appropriate to the European theater and able to dance around presidential attempts to instill counterinsurgency plans by focusing on a...