Abstract
A nation’s strategy usually reflects its geo-strategic situation, resources, history and military experience and political beliefs.1 These factors influence how a country perceives, protects and promotes its interests and values and, in time, shape its strategic culture. Portrayal of a strategic culture as highly homogeneous or consistent, though, may neglect important influences and thus prove unsuitable for understanding action or policy. Even disparities between national ideals and actual behaviour can be distinctive traits.2 The study of US national style or strategic culture, in particular, is enriched by recognition of its political pluralism and of the various dualisms and dilemmas (and of the compromises by which they are at times resolved) that result from differing interpretations of American values, experience, and strategic challenges. The focus of this essay is thus the US process of strategy-making, its evolution, and inputs to it more than the output of the American approach to strategy.3
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Notes
For a definition of strategic culture, see the Commentary by Ken Booth at the end of Part I. Numerous observers have written of strategic culture (Jack Snyder, The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations, Santa Monica, CA, Rand, R-2154-AF, September 1977
Ken Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, New York, Holmes and Meier, 1979
Colin S. Gray, Nuclear Strategy and National Style, Lanham, MD, Hamilton Press, 1986
Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs, New York, Knopf, 1983
B. H. Liddell Hart, The British Way in Warfare, London, Faber 1932
Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War, New York, Macmillan, 1973)
For a treatment that stresses outputs, and produces rather different conclusions, see Ken Booth, ‘American Strategy: The Myths Revisited’, in Ken Booth and Moorhead Wright (eds) American Thinking about Peace and War: New Essays on American Thought, New York, Barnes and Noble, 1978.
For an excellent comparison of the American pluralist approach and the Soviet authoritarian approach to national security decisions, as applied to weapons development, see Matthew Evangelista, Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1988.
For the contemporary impact of this cyclical approach to military budgets, see Jacques S. Gansler, The Defense Industry, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1980.
Among other sources on the period, see Ernest R. May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961
George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy. 1900–1950, New York, New American Library edn, 1951.
Colin, S. Gray, ‘National Style in Strategy: The American Example’, International Security, vol. 6, no. 2 (1981) 25
On the nineteenth-century development of military thought and civil-military relations, including views on standing armies and general staffs, in the USA, see Russell F. Weigley’s, The American Way of War and ‘American Strategy from its Beginnings through the First World War’ in Peter Paret (ed.) Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Princeton University Press, 1986
Philip A. Crowl, ‘Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian’. On the managerial revolution, see Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press reprint, 1981
John Keegan, The Mask of Command, New York, Viking, 1987.
On the derivation of deterrence and air power theory see George Quester, Deterrence before Hiroshima: The Airpower Back-ground of Modern Strategy, New York, Wiley, 1966
See the essays by Weigley and Crowl in Paret, Makers of Modern Strategy, on coastal fortification and naval programmes. The present interpretation, emphasizing the inconsistency of American strategic response to external threats, may be at odds with that of James Chace, who, in America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars, New York, Summit Books, 1988
On the opposition, see Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968.
On firmness and patience, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategics of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, New York, Oxford University Press, 1982.
It was also persuasively argued by intellectual émigrés from Middle Europe, of whom the most influential was Hans Morgenthau, the ‘pope of realism’, whose Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York, Knopf, 1949
The analysis herein of security policy orientations and the distinctions between élite and popular attitudes derives from William Schneider’s model of conservative and liberal internationalists; see his ‘Conservatism, Not Interventionism: Trends in Foreign Policy Opinion, 1974–1982’, in Kenneth A. Oye, Robert J. Lieber and Donald Rothchild, Eagle Defiant: United States Foreign Policy in the 1980s, Boston, M.A., Little, Brown, 1983.
Deterrence attempts to restrain an action, while compellence seeks to reverse it and thus requires a stronger threat, since the opponent has already committed itself to a course. Philip Bobbitt’s excellent study, Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy, London, Macmillan Press, 1988
On the relationship of arms control to deterrence, see the author’s ‘Arms Control or Arms Coercion’, Foreign Policy, no. 62 (Spring 1986). The relevant work in development theory is W. W. Rostow’s The States of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1960.
On the theories and their adoption, see Bernard Brodie, ‘The American Scientific Strategists’, Santa Monica, CA, Rand Corp., October 1964, mimeo, P-2979
Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1983.
For two treatments of the impact of service preferences on US forces and strategy, see Frederic A. Bergerson, The Army Gets an Air Force, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980
Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
On American theories of limited war, see Robert E. Osgood’s Limited War Revisited Boulder, CO, Westview, 1979.
See Samuel P. Huntington, The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics, New York, Columbia University Press, 1961, pp. 25–29
Among prominent social science critics are: Alexander L. George, David K. Hall and William E. Simons, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, Boston, MA, Little, Brown, 1971
Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice, New York, Columbia University Press, 1974
Roberts Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1984.
For examples of various types of resistance to military-technological innovation see the following: I. B. Holley, Jr, Ideas and Weapons, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1953
Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1966
Merrit Roe Smith (ed.) Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1985.
These phenomena are discussed by former Department of Defense official and defense industry executive Norman R. Augustine in Augustine’s Laws, New York, Viking, 1983, ch. 16
On Soviet and American negotiating styles, see Robert J. Einhorn, Negotiating from Strength: Leverage in US-Soviet Arms Control Negotiations, New York, Praeger, 1985
Leon Sloss and M. Scott Davis (eds) A Game for High Stakes’. Lessons Learned in Negotiating with the Soviet Union, Cambridge, MA, Bellinger, 1986.
On these developments, see Richard N. Cooper and Ann L. Hollick, ‘International Relations in a Technologically Advanced Future’, In Anne G. Keatley (ed.), Technological Frontiers and Foreign Relations, Washington, D.C., National Academy Press, 1985.
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© 1990 Carl G. Jacobsen
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Kincade, W. (1990). American National Style and Strategic Culture. In: Jacobsen, C.G. (eds) Strategic Power: USA/USSR. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20574-5_2
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