Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle

by Stephen D. Biddle

In war, do mass and materiel matter most? Will states with the largest, best equipped, information-technology-rich militaries invariably win? The prevailing answer today among both scholars and policymakers is yes. But this is to overlook force employment, or the doctrine and tactics by which materiel is actually used. In a landmark reconception of battle and war, this book provides a systematic account of how force employment interacts with materiel to produce real combat outcomes. Stephen Biddle argues that force employment is central to modern war, becoming increasingly important since 1900 as the key to surviving ever more lethal weaponry. Technological change produces opposite effects depending on how forces are employed; to focus only on materiel is thus to risk major error--with serious consequences for both policy and scholarship.


In clear, fluent prose, Biddle provides a systematic account of force employment's role and shows how this account holds up under rigorous, multimethod testing. The results challenge a wide variety of standard views, from current expectations for a revolution in military affairs to mainstream scholarship in international relations and orthodox interpretations of modern military history.



Military Power will have a resounding impact on both scholarship in the field and on policy debates over the future of warfare, the size of the military, and the makeup of the defense budget.

Genres: War, Military Fiction, History, Nonfiction, Military History, Politics, International Relations

352 pages, Hardcover

First published July 6, 2004

Reviews

[Sean Chick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A persuasive book in its broad contention that doctrine is more important than firepower, the understanding being that any nation able to have a modern doctrine can also put up a respectable amount of firepower. While compelling, I still found the book a bit too convenient. It needed more examples. For instance, does it predict success at El Alamien? What about the Eastern Front? The Vietnam War?

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 5 out of 5]

His first job after earning his degree was at a public policy think tank in the Washington, D.C. area that worked with the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He went on to operate 400,000-line Fortran models of combat scenarios outcomes between the Warsaw Pact and NATO from 1981 to 1983. Biddle's suspicions about the model's accuracy and about Defense Department statistical planning in general would later inspire the material in his first book, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle.

[Samrat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and convincing - at least without being able/willing to actually read the stats behind the argument. Most of my interest in military history and theory is an outgrowth of military themes in fantasy and science fiction; I'd love to read something that uses the discontinuity between modern-systems and traditional militaries in a compelling way.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

What determines the outcome of battles and wars? This is a question that has plagued the study of military science since its founding. During the George W. Bush administration, particularly the years Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense, the main theory was that a revolution in military affairs had come due to the technology that the United States possessed. In this book, Mr. Biddle punctures the arguments of the RMA theorists and instead argues that force employment, how well an army implements the modern-day system of "cover, concealment, dispersion, suppression, small-unit independent maneuvers, and combined arms at the tactical level, and depth, reserves, and differential concentration at the operational level of war" (p. 3), is what determines the outcomes of battles and wars. He starts by examining three different battles from World War I, World War II, and Operation Desert Storm, then running his model through a sophisticated computer program that runs simulations on hypothetical battles. In it, he discovers evidence to support his claim and shows that even an army that is badly outmatched technologically can make their enemy pay dearly for victory by implementing the modern system of force employment. I would say that I agree with him as I was never convinced by the RMA theories, but the language of the text is so technical at times that it is very easy to lose track of the argument. I'm currently studying IR and even I lost the plot at times! This is a book that is written for a very specific and very narrow audience, so the average armchair general may want to skip over this or read a review instead. Still, I think this is a very important book on military power that policy makers in the defense and intelligence community should read and take to heart when planning the next wars.

[Jake Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book Biddle details the "Modern System" of force employment, which is essentially the optimal military doctrine in response to the increase in lethality of weapons. Biddle convincingly explains how the modern system works, going into detail as to its offensive and defensive tactics, and shows how better technology and superior numbers employed by a military that does not use the modern system will fail to win the day. More importantly, he explains what technology would be necessary to make the modern system obsolete, revealing how backwards our R&D funding priorities are.

The only problem I have with this book is its repetitiveness. After the first case, it's really clear how the modern system works and Biddle spends too much time proving a point he has already beaten to death, while not providing enough evidence as I would like in the case of Desert Storm to show that force employment was more important than technology. Still, he makes a strong case and the various theory and policy implications he outlines in the last chapter are worth the price of admission themselves.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I agree with Biddle's main argument. But I'm not sure military advantages can be quantified as easily as he suggests--whether it's technological or tactical.

[Christopher Paludi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biddle clearly argues his “force employment” theory, contra Off-Def systems thinking and RMA. He then presents three persuasive case studies, three operations, from WWI, WWII, and the Gulf War. (He also offers a statistical chapter and an appendix, but that sort of talk goes over my head.)

Although RMA dominates especially American popular understanding of war, what he’s talking about is the modern continuation of the fundamental historical truth of employment over materiel. Reading this, I thought of the Greek phalanx, as well as Rome’s maniple and Marian legionary reforms to that phalanx, how they demonstrated the relative inferiority of sheer numbers and the importance of soldier superiority. This is the classic story, of which Biddle does well to remind us.

[Richard Subber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Military Power is a fastidiously wonkish analysis of combat and military power.
Biddle makes his case for considering that “force employment,” i.e., combat doctrine and tactics, is at least as important in understanding the outcomes of battle as the count of who has the most guns and the biggest armies.
Earlier authors might have called it “leadership.”
Biddle offers remarkably detailed blow-by-blow commentary about the second battle of the Somme River in 1918, the Allies’ Normandy breakout in 1944, and Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
It’s not an easy read. Military Power will reward the reader who wants to know more.
Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com

[Brian W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Does an incredible job create empirical data on how essential tactics, doctrine, training, and leadership play into combat power? Refutes the idea that combat power is all about physical quantities. Uses a battle in Desert Storm to show how the enemy could have employed modern defensive tactics, and the fight's result (simulated) is entirely different from what occurred in real life. Very interesting. It is an excellent book on helping people determine enemy and friendly combat power.

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Assigned for SWAMOS, and I can see why. A great example of a very rigorous examination; excellent theoretical development, along with mixed methods, and an honest self-assessment of the trade-offs at every step. I'm not completely convinced the technological incentives of two "modern system" adversaries was completely investigated, but regardless, this is a very rigorous analysis worth your consideration.

[Will Atkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of the SWAMOS curriculum. Biddle proposes a new way to measure and analyze military capability, with profound implications for the study of international relations and military policy. As a political scientist, if we followed his recommendations, it would change much of how we analyze things. But in many cases, the data just doesn’t exist.

[Sam Seitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am very late to the party with this book, which has been out for around two decades now, but I’m very glad I read it. Biddle’s argument has to be understood in the context of the 1990s debate over the revolution in military affairs (RMA). Starting in the late 1970s, the US military began developing a bevy of new technologies designed to enable deep strikes against Soviet follow-on formations in Europe. This was what undergirded the US doctrine of AirLand Battle, which sought to win fast and early and relied on airpower to knock out the Soviet Union’s numerically superior reserves in Europe. Although the doctrine was, thankfully, never tested against the Soviets, the Gulf War proved a useful test case. And the overwhelming dominance of Coalition forces suggested to many that this AirLand Battle concept had fundamentally revolutionized the way wars would be fought. Instead of relying on massed maneuver formations, as the argument went, the future belonged to stealth and sensors. This is the position against which Biddle is reacting, and he offers a powerful rejoinder. His central claim is that technology is largely window dressing. It impacts warfare on the margins, but the central manner in which wars have been fought has largely remained constant since World War One. According to Biddle, the enormous increase in firepower afforded by heavy artillery and machine guns at the turn of the century created a significant break in warfare, and much of World War One was spent testing ways out of this stalemate. The solution was what he terms “the modern system,” an approach that emphasizes force employment rather than force composition. The core insight, according to Biddle, was that the key to overcoming the massed firepower of the modern battlefield is dispersion, cover, concealment, and small unit autonomy. The book is an exemplar of multi-methods analysis (especially for its time), and employs case studies from WWI, WWII, and Desert Storm as well as computer simulation and regression analysis. The cases all helpfully flesh out some of the more abstract theorizing, and they lend plausibility to the argument. Though, as with all small-N work, one worries about selection effects and external validity. The simulation component was particularly interesting and novel, but the program itself is a black box with, if I understood correctly, data coming exclusively from the Battle of 73 Eastings (which is also a major part of one of the case studies). Given the suspect data fed into programs like TACWAR, I must say I am inherently skeptical of these kinds of DoD programs. The regression analysis was a bit more compelling, though I struggled to fully understand how the selected proxy variables corresponded to elements of the “the modern system.” But this is more a criticism of the writing style than the methodology. Overall, I found the book quite persuasive, and I think it’s a particularly useful corrective, especially within the American strategic culture that so obsessively focuses on platforms and tech at the expense of capabilities and doctrine. That said, I still had reservations. The first concerns the increasing prevalence (though let’s not pretend this is something novel) of insurgencies and sub-state warfare. These guerilla conflicts do not map clearly onto the kinds of battles Biddle concentrates on, and so I wonder if by posing the late Cold War RMA as his foil he is chasing a red herring. That said, Biddle just published a new book related to this issue, which I very much look forward to reading. The second concern I have is simply that we may not have given the new technology enough time to mature and diffuse. After all, there were many decades between the discovery of electricity and the electrification of the US (much less the rest of the world), and of course Solow famously remarked that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” The point is that it takes a very long time for new ideas to be fully developed and adopted, and so I worry that Biddle might be too quick to dismiss this alleged RMA. With attritable aircraft being developed and other uncrewed platforms entering the American arsenal, perhaps concealment and small unit flexibility aren’t going to be so important after all. I have no idea, but I suspect it might still be too soon to tell.

[Sam Maloney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, this is one of the best poli sci books I think I've ever read, very patient yet fact-filled and explains large n regression modeling well enough to the layperson to get its point across. Slightly concerned about heteroskedasticity in the model though.

[Janessa Singley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably actually deserves five stars. Biddle is a god at Columbia and rightly so. He’s a walking encyclopedia and not just on war! But that is his speciality. Nobody analyzes war and military technology better than he. I so idolized him before joining SIPA and he made my time there entirely worth it educationally.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Textbook for one of my courses. So far, so good. I like Biddle's thesis, however, I'll save my final judgment until the end of the term