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World culture shapes the way states generate military power: norms of conventional warfare provide the template for military organization, and norms of humanitarian law define what is morally acceptable in military operations. Sometimes, however, local strategic circumstances can challenge these worldwide technical scripts and moral codes for military action. Accordingly, this article advances an approach—cultural adaptation theory—that accounts for the role of power and politics in the worldwide normative structuring of military action. This theory explains how actors may modify their military practices in response to rising threats, in ways that avoid norm violation. Two case studies explore this theory: Irish military organization in the lead up to the Second World War, and NATO air operations in the Kosovo war. Some tentative conclusions are reached regarding suboptimal organization by weak states and operational restraint by powerful states. Overall, the article advances the case for dialogue between constructivist and rationalist approaches to security studies.
Acknowledgments
Various versions of this paper were given in spring 2004 in Montreal at the annual convention of the International Studies Association and at a workshop on military effectiveness at Northwestern University, and in fall 2004 to departmental seminars at Cambridge University, the University of Exeter, and King's College London. I am grateful to the participants at all these forums for their comments. For helpful suggestions I should like to thank, in particular, David Armstrong, Debbi Avant, Tarak Barkawi, Nora Bensahel, Steve Biddle, Risa Brooks, Mike Desch, Eug Gholz, Emily Goldman, Chris Hill, Tim Hoyt, Hélène Lambert, Bice Maiguashca, Colin McInnes, Amrita Narlikar, Dan Reiter, Mike Smith, Al Stam, Liz Stanley-Mitchell, and Terry Terriff. Special thanks go to Tim Dunne and Daryl Press for their extensive feedback. I am grateful to Tom Postmes, Alex Haslam, and Thomas Morton for introducing me to relevant literatures in social psychology. The two anonymous reviewers for Security Studies pushed me to make significant improvements to the paper, and Sue Peterson provided superb editorial guidance.
Notes
1Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1–27. See also Allan R. Millett, Williamson Murray, and Kenneth H. Watman, “The Effectiveness of Military Organizations,” International Security 11, no. 2 (1986): 37–71.
2Military organization covers all aspects of force posture, including both force structure and military strategy.
3Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979); Joào Resende-Santos, “Anarchy and Emulation of Military Systems: Military Organization and Technology in South America, 1870–1930,” Security Studies 5, no. 3 (1996): 193–260.
4For a more wide-ranging comparison of realism and pluralism, see Paul R. Viotti and Mark V. Kauppi, International Relations Theory: Realism, Pluralism, Globalism, and Beyond (Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1999).
5Graham T. Allison, The Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1974).
6Glenn H. Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); John S. Duffield, Power Rules: The Evolution of NATO's Conventional Force Structure (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
7Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 92–138. For literature surveys see Jeffrey T. Checkel, “The Constructivist Turn in International Relations,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 324–48; Ted Hopf, “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations,” International Security 23, no. 1 (1998): 171–200; and Theo Farrell, “Constructivist Security Studies: Portrait of a Research Program,” International Studies Review 4, no. 1 (2002): 49–72.
8W. Richard Scott, John W. Meyer, and Associates, eds., Institutional Environments and Organizations (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994); John W. Meyer et al., “World Society and the Nation-State,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 1 (1997): 144–88; John Boli and George M. Thomas, ed., Constructing World Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
9The one constructivist study that has focused on this question assumes that under such circumstances actors must violate norms. See Vaughn P. Shannon, “Norms Are What States Make of Them: The Political Psychology of Norm Violation,” International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2000): 294.
10For constructivist accounts of military inefficiency see Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Constructivist accounts of military restraint are offered in Jeffrey W. Legro, Cooperation under Fire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Richard Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Ward Thomas, The Ethics of Destruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
11Indeed, one study suggests that militaries are so sensitive to foreign military developments that they may even engage in “doctrinal races.” Kimberley Martin Zisk, Engaging the Enemy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Moreover, as might be expected, states are also responsive to threats to wartime strategies. See Scott Sigmund Gartner, Strategic Assessment in War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
12Martha Finnemore, “Norms, Culture, and World Politics: Insights from Sociology's Institutionalism,” International Organization 50, no. 2 (1996): 339. More recently, Jeffrey Checkel has repeated his complaint that constructivists also need to take “domestic politics more seriously.” Checkel, “Social Constructivisms in Global and European Politics: A Review Essay,” Review of International Studies 30, no. 2 (2004): 237.
13These expressions and this argument are from Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 273–86.
14Bertrand Badie, The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Amitav Acharya, “How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism,” International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 239–75.
15This label is adapted from “strategic adaptation theory” (SA theory), which examines how state action is shaped by both the economic shocks and the market structures generated by the global system. SA theory is proposed and developed in Eugene Gholz and Daryl G. Press, “The Effects of Wars on Neutral Countries: Why It Doesn't Pay to Preserve the Peace,” Security Studies 10, no. 4 (2001): 1–57.
16Waltz offers the classic neorealist account of states as power balancers in Theory of International Politics. On states as power maximizers, see Randall L. Schweller, Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler's Strategy of World Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
17Resende-Santos, “Anarchy and Emulation,” 210.
18Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 127.
19Resende-Santos “Anarchy and Emulation,” 211. The same argument is advanced in John A. Lynn, “The Evolution of Army Style in the Modern West, 800–2000,” International History Review 18, no. 3 (1996): 505–56.
20Barry R. Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” International Security 18, no. 2 (1993): 82.
21Allison, The Essence of Decision; Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy.
22Snyder, Alliance Politics; Duffield, Power Rules, 18–21.
23Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Stephen van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” in Military Strategy and the Origin of the First World War, ed. Stephen E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 58–107.
24Suzanne Werner and Douglas Lemke, “Opposites Do Not Attract: The Impact of Domestic Institutions, Power, and Prior Commitments on Alignment Choices,” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1997): 529–46.
25The seminal work on this is Dana Eyre and Mark C. Suchman, “Status, Norms, and the Proliferation of Conventional Weapons,” in The Culture of National Security, ed. Peter Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 79–113.
26Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 64.
27DiMaggio and Powell, “Iron Cage,” 70–74.
28Theo Farrell, “Transnational Norms and Military Development: Constructing Ireland's Professional Army,” European Journal of International Relations 7, no. 1 (2001): 63–102; for a similar argument in the context of human rights and trade norms, respectively, see Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Norms, Institutions, and National Identity in Contemporary Europe,” International Studies Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1999): 83–114; and Andrew P. Cortell and James W. Davis, “When Norms Clash: International Norms, Domestic Practices, and Japan's Internalisation of the GATT/WTO,” Review of International Studies 31, no. 1 (2005): 3–26.
29Emily O. Goldman, “The Spread of Western Military Models to Ottoman Turkey and Meiji Japan,” in The Sources of Military Change, ed. Theo Farrell and Terry Terriff (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 41–68.
30Terry Terriff, “U.S. Ideas and Military Change in NATO, 1989–1994,” in Farrell and Terriff, Sources of Military Change, 91–118.
31John M. Meyer, John Boli, and George M. Thomas, “Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account,” in Scott, Meyer, and Associates, Institutional Environments and Organizations, 9–27.
32Michael Desch, “It's Kind to be Cruel: The Humanity of American Realism,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 415–26.
33John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decisionmaking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
34Thomas Berger, “Norms, Identity, and National Security in Germany and Japan,” in Katzenstein, The Culture of National Security, 326–7; John S. Duffield, World Power Forsaken: Political Culture, International Instututions, and German Security Policy after Unification (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 251; Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 7; Deborah D. Avant, “From Mercenaries to Citizen Armies,” International Organization 54, no. 1 (2000): 48–49; and Jeffrey W. Legro, “Whence American Internationalism,” International Organization 54, no. 2 (2000): 263.
35This gap in the constructivist literature is noted in Sonia Cardenas, “Norm Collision: Explaining the Effects of International Human Rights Pressure on State Behavior,” International Studies Review 6, no. 2 (2004): 213–33.
36Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 59–61, 74–78.
37Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Randolph Silverson, “War and the Survival of Political Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 4 (1995): 841–55; and Joseph Lepgold and Brent L. Sterling, “When Do States Fight Limited Wars? Political Risk, Policy Risk, and Policy Choice,” Security Studies 9, no. 4 (2000): 127–66.
38Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Randolph Silverson, and Gary Woller, “War and the Fate of Regimes: A Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 86, no. 3 (1992): 644.
39Steven R. David, “Explaining Third World Alignment,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (1991): 233–56; Richard J. Harknett and Jeffrey A. VanDenBerg, “Alignment Theory and Interrelated Threats: Jordan and the Persian Gulf Crisis,” Security Studies 6, no. 3 (1997): 112–53; and Mark L. Haas, “Ideology and Alliances: British and French Balancing Decisions in the 1930s,” Security Studies 12, no. 4 (2003): 34–79.
40Robert Axelrod, “An Evolutionary Approach to Norms,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1095–111; and Aaron Wildavsky, “Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation,” American Political Science Review 81, no. 1 (1987): 3–21. Norm instrumentality is explored in Frank Schimmelfennig, The EU, NATO, and the Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
41Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 29; and James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions (New York: Free Press, 1989).
42James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “The Institutional Dynamics of International Political Orders,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 952.
43Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
44For a recent and comprehensive literature review see S. A. Haslam and N. Ellemers, “Social Identity in Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Concepts, Controversies and Contributions,” International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology 20 (2005): 39–118 (uncorrected proof).
45S. A. Haslam et al., “Sticking to Our Guns: Social Identity as a Basis for the Maintenance of Commitment to Faltering Organizational Projects,” 2005, p. 9. See also B. Dietz-Uhler, “The Escalation of Commitment in Political Decision-Making Groups: A Social Identity Approach,” European Journal of Social Psychology 26 (1996): 611–29; and M. A. Hogg and S. C. Hains, “Friendship and Group Identification: A New Look at the Role of Cohesiveness in Groupthink,” European Journal of Social Psychology 28 (1998): 323–41.
46The importance of justification for determining norm adherence and violation was noted by the International Court of Justice in the Nicaragua case. For discussion of this criterion and the community-reaction criterion, see Theo Farrell, The Norms of War: Cultural Beliefs and Modern Conflict (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005), chap. 5.
47J. G. Noel, D. L. Wann, and N. R. Branscombe, “Peripheral Ingroup Membership Status and Public Negativity towards Outgroups,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68, no. 1 (1995): 127–37; T. Postmes et al., “Comparative Processes in Personal and Group Judgements: Resolving the Discrepancy,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 2 (1999): 320–38.
48Shannon, “Norms Are What States Make of Them,” 294.
49Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), x.
50Thomas A. Morton, “When Deviance Is a Good Thing: Responses to Strategic Deviance Within Groups,” 2005.
51Ethan Nadelman, “Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in International Society,” International Organization 44, no. 4 (1990): 479–526; Kenneth W. Abbott et al., “The Concept of Legalization,” International Organization 54, no. 3 (2000): 401–19; and Andrew P. Cortell and James W. Davis, Jr., “Understanding the Domestic Impact of International Norms: A Research Agenda,” International Studies Review 2, no. 1 (2000): 65–90.
52Legro, Cooperation under Fire, 15–16.
53There are 191 members of the United Nations, plus the Vatican (which has sovereign status) and Taiwan (which is counted here as a state).
54The following states have no military expenditures: Andorra, Dominica, Gambia, Grenada, Iceland, Kiribati, Liechtenstein, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. The following states do have military expenditures (2003 figures indicated in brackets in millions of U.S. dollars) but not standing militaries: Bhutan (9.3), Comoros (6), Costa Rica (69), Gambia (1.2), Haiti (50), Maldives (34.5), Mauritius (9.7), Panama (128), San Marino (0.7), Sao Tome and Principe (0.4), Swaziland (20), and Tonga (23.7). Data from 2003 CIA World Factbook, http://www.cia.gov/cia/download2003.htm.
55Moldova does not have a navy either, even though it does have access to the Black Sea.
56Other puzzling cases include Benin, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, and Suriname, all of which have tiny independent navies and air forces (i.e., each service has less than 250 personnel). Data from International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance, 2003–2004 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
57Alexander Wendt and Michael Barnett, “Dependent State Formation and Third World Militarization,” Review of International Studies 19, no. 4 (1993): 328. This conclusion is supported by analysis of data from 2003 which shows high levels of capital-intensive militarization in African force structures. See Farrell, The Norms of War, chap. 2.
58Wendt and Barnett, “Dependent State Formation,” 325.
59 IISS, Military Balance, 2003–2004, 81.
60Guerrilla defense may fail, however, if the aggressor wages an unrestrained barbaric counterinsurgency campaign. Ivan Arreguín-Toft, “How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict,” International Security 26, no. 1 (2001): 93–128.
61The importance of light infantry over mechanized operations in counterinsurgencies is well illustrated in Deborah D. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), chaps. 3–4.
62Indeed, conventional offensives formed the mainstay of communist strategy in 1965–66. See James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 17–50.
63Jacques Van Doorn, The Soldier and Social Change (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1975), 29–46.
64Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–24; and William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 128–43.
65M. D. Feld, “Middle-Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism,” Armed Forces and Society 1, no. 2 (1975): 419–42.
66Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State Making,” in The Formation of Nation States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42.
67Barton C. Hacker, “Engineering a New Order: Military Institutions, Technical Education, and the Rise of the Industrial State,” Technology and Culture 34, no. 1 (1993): 1–27.
68McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 158–59; and Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 50–53.
69David B. Ralston, Importing the European Army: The Introduction of Military Techniques and Institutions into the Extra-European World, 1600–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Philip D. Curtin, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
70G. Teitler, The Genesis of the Professional Officers Corps (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977), 34–37; Huntington, Soldier and the State, 19–58.
71This is highlighted in Eyre and Suchman, “Status, Norms and the Proliferation of Conventional Weapons.”
72John A. Cope, International Military Education and Training: An Assessment, McNair Paper no. 44 (Washington: National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies, 1995), 11–12.
73Meyer et al., “World Society,” 164.
74This case study draws on some empirical material published in Farrell, “Transnational Norms and Military Development.”
75General Staff (GS), “Memorandum on the Development of the Defence Forces in the Period 1923–1927,” A/0876, Irish Military Archives (IMA), 3.
76Ronan Fanning, “Britain's Legacy,” in Irish Studies 5: Ireland and Britain since 1922, ed. P. J. Drudy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 45–63.
77Army Chief of Staff, “Formative of a Special Reserve,” 12 November 1925, GS/0/2, IMA.
78 GS, “Estimate of the Situation That Would Arise in the Eventuality of a War between Ireland and Great Britain,” no. 1, October 1934, DP/00020, IMA.
79 GS, “Memorandum on the Development of the Defence Forces,” 6.
80John P. Duggan, A History of the Irish Army (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1991), 155–62; and Peter Young, “Defence and the New Irish State, 1919–1939,” The Irish Sword 19 (1993–94), 6–7.
81 GS, “Estimate of the Situation,” 89, 91.
82 GS, “Fundamental Factors Affecting Saorstát Defence Problem,” May 1936, G2/0057, IMA, 77–78.
83Capt. R. Boyd, “Memorandum on ‘Present Commitments and Future Policy and Programme’ period about 1937,” 9 February 1945, Bryan papers, P71/27, University College Dublin Archives (UCDA), 9.
84Eunan O'Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and Its Enemies Since 1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 132–44.
85General Staff (G-1), “Memorandum No. 2: Observations on General Staff Estimate of the Situation No. 1,” 1940, Emergency Defence Plans (EDP) 1, IMA.
86General Staff (G-1), “Outline of General Defence Plan No. 2 (Final Draft),” 28 November 1940, EDP 1/2, IMA.
87Maj. James Flynn, “Memo: General Defence Plan 2—Final Outline,” 29 November 1940, EDP 1/2, IMA, 1–2.
88 GS, “Report on Army Exercises,” Parts I & II, January 1943, IMA.
89GS, “Training Directive 1941,” G.1/199, 21 November 1940, EDP 1/12.
90Department of Defence to Department of Finance, 23 December 1938, MacEntee papers, P67/196, UCDA.
91Col. Michael J. Costello, “Notes on the Proposition That We Need Only One Brigade,” 24 November 1938, MJC/13. PC586, IMA.
92Department of Finance, “Memorandum,” 10 December 1923, Department of Finance files (D/F) 747/148, National Archives of Ireland (NAI).
93 GHQ, General Staff Training Memo No.1: Syllabus for One Month's Progressive Training for an Infantry Company (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1923), Mulcahy Papers, P7a/71, UCDA.
94 Defence Force Regulations: Annual Training (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1926).
95G-1, “Instructions for the Training of Infantry Units of the Class B Reserve,” 19 March 1931, MB3, IMA; and G-1 “General Staff Training Memoranda,” 1940, MB5/27, IMA.
96Maj. B. C. Dening, “Problems of Guerrilla Warfare,” An t-Óglách (October 1927): 45–50; and Col. J. J. O'Connell, “Guerrilla Warfare as Standard Form,” An t-Óglách (April 1930): 50–52.
97This account of “norm transplantation” is developed in Farrell, “Transnational Norms and Military Development.”
98Maj. Gen. Hugo MacNeill, “The Defence Plans Division,” An t-Óglách (April–June 1928): 7.
99Trevor C. Salmon, Unneutral Ireland: An Ambivalent and Unique Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 152.
100Robert Fisk, In the Time of War: Ireland, Ulster, and the Price of Neutrality 1939–45 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), 187, 224.
101Fisk, In the Time of War, 116–17.
102General Dan McKenna, “Defence Problems 1939–45,” address to the Military College, 1968, SCS 01/0, IMA, 7.
103 GHQ, “Operational Order No. 2,” 10 July 1940, EDP 1/1, IMA.
104 GHQ, “Notes on Conference Held in the Plans and Operations Branch on 21 Nov. 1940 to Discuss Tentative Outline of Defence Plan No. 2,” EDP 1/2, IMA.
105“Copy Telegram Sent to Washington, 7 Nov. 1940,” Department of Foreign Affairs files, P2, NAI. The Irish government suspected that the British authorities were behind such press campaigns. Irish High Commissioner to the Department of Foreign Affairs, memo no. 50, 5 August 1940, D/FA, P10, NAI.
106“Copy Cablegram Sent to Washington, 26 Nov. 1940,” D/FA, P2, NAI.
107“Minutes of Conference re: GDP 2 held in An Taoiseach's Office, Government Buildings at 20.00 hours, 15 Dec. 1940,” EDP 1/2, IMA, 1.
108General Staff, “Minutes of Conference re: GDP 2 and Operational Order No. 3/1940,” 16 December 1940, EDP 1/2, IMA, 1.
109Minister of Finance to Minister of Defence, “Defence Estimates,” 16 January 1939, MacEntee papers, P67/196, UCDA, 5, 8.
110“Notes on Meeting with An Taoiseach at Government Buildings at 20.00 hours, 19 June 1940,” EDP 1/2, IMA, 4.
111Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), 190–200.
112Denis Parsons, “Mobilisation and Expansion, 1939–40,” The Irish Sword 19 (1993–94), 17.
113See the correspondence from June to December 1940 between Dublin, London, and Washington in D/FA, P1a, NAI.
114Dáil debates, 16 November 1927, cited in Col. Michael Costello, “Some Features of Our Defence Problem,” An t-Óglác (January 1928): 5.
115Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff, “Editors Introduction,” in Documents on the Laws of War, 3d ed., ed. Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 9–10.
116Christopher Greenwood, “The Law of War (International Humanitarian Law),” in International Law, ed. Malcolm Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 790.
117Antonio Cassese, International Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
118Data from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) database on national implementation of humanitarian law, at http://www.icrc.org/ihl-nat.
119Data from the official ICC website at http://www.icc-cpi.int/home.html&l=en. For analysis of this development in international criminal law, see Rolf Einar Fife, “The International Criminal Court: Whence It Came, Where It Goes,” Nordic Journal of International Law 69 (2000): 63–85.
120For testimony on this, see Joanna Burke, An Intimate History of Killing (London: Granta, 1999).
121This is explored in Martin Shaw, War and Genocide (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); and Omer Bartov, Germany's War and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
122This tension is also recognized in Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, 164.
123NATO brief, “The Conduct of the Air Campaign,” 30 October 2000, at http://www.nato.int/kosovo/repo2000/conduct.htm.
124Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 103.
125Interview with Gen. Mike Short, NATO air commander, in War in Europe: 2 Vanishing Targets, Channel 4 documentary, 2000.
126Stephen P. Aubin, “Operation Allied Force: War or ‘Coercive Diplomacy?”’ Strategic Review (summer 1999): 6.
127Cited in Benjamin S. Lambeth, The Transformation of American Air Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 217–18.
128Aubin, “Operation Allied Force,” 5–6.
129Lambeth, Transformation, 196–97.
130Gen. Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Conflict (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 220–42; and Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 118–19.
131House of Commons, Defence Select Committee, Fourteenth Report, 23 October 2000, para. 86.
132Barry Posen, “The War for Kosovo: Serbia's Political-Military Strategy,” International Security 24, no. 4 (2000): 72.
133Stephen T. Hosmer, Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did (Santa Monica: RAND, 2001): 49–52. Daalder and O'Hanlon conclude that the growing threat of land invasion by NATO was as crucial as the escalating air campaign in persuading Milosevic to surrender. Winning Ugly, 198–206. For more recent analysis that comprehensively critiques this argument (principally on the grounds that the NATO threat was not clearly and convincingly communicated to Milosevic), see Andrew L. Stigler, “A Clear Victory of Air Power: NATO's Empty Threat to Invade Kosovo,” International Security 27, no. 3 (2002–2003): 124–57.
134David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 440, 445. For a defense of this approach to strategic bombing by the intellectual father of “system shut-down” air strategy, see John A. Warden III, “Success in Modern War: A Response to Robert Pape's Bombing to Win,” Security Studies 7, no. 2 (1997–98): 172–90.
135Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 127–28.
136Duffield, Power Rules, 18–21. This tension between the costs and benefits of alliance membership is also explored in Snyder, Alliance Politics.
137Thomas Risse-Kappen, Cooperation among Democracies: The European Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
138In total, U.S. aircraft flew 60 percent of all sorties, and 53 percent of all strike sorties in Operation Allied Force. Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 149.
139Pressure began to build within the NATO military hierarchy in late May and early June for the alliance to prepare for ground invasion. Clarke told NATO leaders that he would need 175,000 troops, of which 75,000 were expected to come from the European allies. Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 156–60.
140Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 100–101. Weapon payloads were also adjusted to comply with humanitarian law. See Lambeth, Transformation, 204.
141Clark, Waging Modern War, 224.
142Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, 162–63.
143Clark, Waging Modern War, 201.
144Cited in U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), Kosovo Air Operations: Need to Maintain Alliance Cohesion Resulted in Doctrinal Departures, GAO-01-784 (Washington: GAO, July 2001), 8.
145Clark, Waging Modern War, 225.
146Nicholas J. Wheeler, “The Kosovo Bombing Campaign,” in The Politics of International Law, ed. Christian Reus-Smit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 197.
147Paolo Benvenuti, “The ICTY Prosecutor and the Review of the NATO Bombing Campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,” European Journal of International Law 12, no. 3 (2001): 503–29.
148Amnesty International, NATO/Federal Republic of Yugoslavia: “Collateral Damage” or Unlawful Killings? June 2000 (AL Index: EUR 70/18/00). For a more critical report, see Human Rights Watch, Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign, 2000, at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/nato/Natbm200.htm.
149The Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 181.
150Clark, Waging Modern War, 304.
151 GAO, Kosovo Air Operations, 8.
152 GAO, Kosovo Air Operations, 9.
153Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 149.
154Greenwood, “Law of War,” 797–98.
155Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report, 177.
156A.P.V. Rogers, Law on the Battlefield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 33–41.
157This orthodoxy can be traced back to pre–Second World War U.S. airpower doctrine. For discussion, see Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
158Michael MccGwire, “Why Did We Bomb Belgrade?” International Affairs 76, no. 1 (2000): 17; see also 8–9. For contemporaneous analysis of the challenges then facing the alliance, see David S. Yost, “The New NATO and Collective Security,” Survival 40, no. 2 (1998): 135–60.
159Daalder and O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly, 137–38, 161–64; and Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, 468–70.
160Ignatieff, Virtual War, 107–8; Thomas, Ethics of Destruction, 165–66; and Wheeler, “Kosovo Bombing Campaign,” 204–6.
161Note that in the 2003 Iraq war, the coalition did not target the Iraqi civilian electrical-supply infrastructure because while all Iraqi military command posts had backup power generators, all Iraqi hospitals did not. Gen. Tommy Franks with Malcolm McConnell, American Soldier (New York: Regan Books, 2004), 480–81.
162 NATO brief, “The Conduct of the Air Campaign,” 30 October 2000 (emphasis added). Similarly, the North Atlantic Council refers to “alliance air operations against the Yugoslav war machine” in its “Statement on Kosovo” from the NATO summit in Washington, D.C., 23 April 1999, at http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1999/p99-062e.htm.
163Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo Report, 184.
164Frederic L. Kirgis, “The Formative Years of the American Society of International Law,” American Journal of International Law 90, no. 4 (1996): 559–89; Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), chap. 2.
165Typical on this score is the exchange in John S. Duffield et al., “Isms and Schisms: Culturalism versus Realism in Security Studies,” International Security 24, no. 1 (1999): 156–80.
166Patrick Thaddeus Jackson et al., “Bridging the Gap: Toward a Realist-Constructivist Dialogue,” International Studies Review 6, no. 2 (2004): 337–53.
167Alexander Wendt, “Driving with the Rearview Mirror: On the Rational Science of Institutional Design,” International Organization 55, no. 4 (2001): 1021.
168Caroline Fehl, “Explaining the International Criminal Court: A ‘Practice Test’ for Rationalist and Constructivist Approaches,” European Journal of International Relations 10, no. 3 (2004): 384.
169Friedrich Kratochwil, “The Force of Prescriptions,” International Organization 38, no. 4 (1984): 705.
170Hence the Iraqi irregulars that were hastily pulled together to resist the invaders, the so-called fedayeen, were not trained or prepared for guerrilla warfare; instead they acted as untrained light infantry and were slaughtered when they launched direct assaults against heavily armed U.S. units. Williamson Murray and Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, Jr., The Iraq War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1001–2, 213–16.
171“US. Faces Complex Insurgency in Iraq,” 5 October 2004, at http://www.military.com/.
172Bryan Bender, “Study Ties Hussein, Guerrilla Strategy,” Boston Globe, 11 October 2004, at http://www.boston.com/.
173See, for example, International and Operational Law Department, Judge Advocate General's School, U.S. Army, Operational Law Handbook (2002); Chairman, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Instruction 3121.01A, Standing Rules of Engagement for U.S. Forces (15 January 2000); and North Atlantic Military Committee, MC 362 encl. 1, NATO Rules of Engagement (9 November 1999).
174Michael W. Lewis, “The Law of Aerial Bombardment in the 1991 Gulf War,” American Journal of International Law 97, no. 3 (2003): 481–509.
175A number of agencies—from the National Security Council staff to the U.S. Agency for International Development—specified thousands of “no-strike targets.” Moreover, the evolving target lists were reviewed by the secretary of defense and the president. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 277–78, 331–32.
176Kelley Reese Friel, “Emerging Military Capabilities: Normative and Legal Challenges,” report of workshop sponsored by the Project on the Means of Intervention, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University, and the McCormick Tribune Foundation, 13–14 April 2004, Washington D.C., 6, available at http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/cchrp/Apr04Agenda.shtml#Apr04Agenda.
177 U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Doctrine for Targeting, joint publication 3-60, 17 January 2002, A-4(b), available at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/new_pubs/jp3_60.pdf.