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Book Cover
E-book
Author Brooks, Risa.

Title Shaping strategy : the civil-military politics of strategic assessment / Risa A. Brooks
Published Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, ©2008

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Description 1 online resource (viii, 315 pages) : illustrations
Contents Introduction: The significance of strategic assessment -- Explaining variation in strategic assessment -- Egypt in the mid-1960s -- Egypt in the 1970s -- Britain and Germany and the First World War -- Pakistan and Turkey in the late 1990s -- U.S. postconflict planning for the 2003 Iraq War -- Conclusion: Findings and implications
Summary Good strategic assessment does not guarantee success in international relations, but bad strategic assessment dramatically increases the risk of disastrous failure. The most glaring example of this reality is playing out in Iraq today. But what explains why states and their leaders are sometimes so good at strategic assessment--and why they are sometimes so bad at it? Part of the explanation has to do with a state's civil-military relations. In Shaping Strategy, Risa Brooks develops a novel theory of how states' civil-military relations affect strategic assessment during international conflicts. And her conclusions have broad practical importance: to anticipate when states are prone to strategic failure abroad, we must look at how civil-military relations affect the analysis of those strategies at home. Drawing insights from both international relations and comparative politics, Shaping Strategy shows that good strategic assessment depends on civil-military relations that encourage an easy exchange of information and a rigorous analysis of a state's own relative capabilities and strategic environment. Among the diverse case studies the book illuminates, Brooks explains why strategic assessment in Egypt was so poor under Gamal Abdel Nasser prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and why it improved under Anwar Sadat. The book also offers a new perspective on the devastating failure of U.S. planning for the second Iraq war. Brooks argues that this failure, far from being unique, is an example of an assessment pathology to which states commonly succumb
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-301) and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Print version record
Subject Civil-military relations -- History -- 20th century
Strategy -- History -- 20th century
HISTORY -- Military -- Other.
TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING -- Military Science.
Civil-military relations
Strategy
Strategie
Lage Militär
Zivil-militärische Zusammenarbeit
Weltkrieg 1914-1918
Vorgeschichte
Civil-military relations -- History -- 20th century.
Strategy -- History -- 20th century.
Großbritannien
Deutschland
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780691188287
0691188289