The Relative Power and Its Perception

Abstract

What are the pre-existing strategic threats that Pakistan, India, and Israel have faced? How these threats are perceived by the political and military decision-makers in these countries? How these perceptions affect the warfighting preference of their armies? How nuclear weaponization affected their fighting patterns? To address these questions, we start with a brief review of the pre-existing strategic threats of the countries, which consist of relative material power components vis-à-vis their adversaries: the countries’ geostrategic situation, size of the armies, and the budgets allocated to defense purposes. Then, we proceed with the review of the strategic cultures, through which the Pakistani, Indian, and Israeli decision-makers perceive the strategic threats. We continue the discussion by presenting the warfighting patterns, which derived from the strategic culture beliefs and attitudes and adopted by the three armies in the pre-weaponization period. As demonstrated below, different threat interpretation could cause adoption of similar patterns of warfighting. Subsequently, we analyze the nuclear weaponization effect on the patterns of conventional warfighting, as expressed by the three weaponization influence models, i.e., Aggression Encouragement, Restraint Imposition, and Nuclear “Ignorance”.