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Abstract
Why do some states generate competent, professional military organizations, while others fail to do so even when they have the required economic, demographic, and technological endowments? Variation in states’ military organizational practices—their core policies related to promotion patterns, training regimens, command arrangements, and information management—holds the key. This article develops a typology of such practices and explains why and how they vary in response to the internal and external threats facing particular regimes. The article then subjects this argument to a carefully designed plausibility probe comparing the threat environments and military organizational practices of two states whose differences are both intuitively and theoretically puzzling: North and South Vietnam during the period 1954–1975. The initial evidence provides support for the theory and casts doubt on existing explanations of military organizational behavior focused on external threats, democracy, or the degree of political intervention in the military. The findings have important implications for foreign policy, as well as for future research on authoritarianism, civil-military relations, and military effectiveness.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their feedback and guidance on this research, the author thanks Dick Betts, Steve Biddle, Risa Brooks, Bruce Dickson, Alex Downes, Peter Feaver, Taylor Fravel, Charlie Glaser, Brendan Green, Mike Horowitz, Jim Lebovic, Austin Long, Vipin Narang, Roger Petersen, Barry Posen, Merle Pribbenow, Steve Rosen, Josh Rovner, Elizabeth Saunders, Paul Staniland, and Steve Walt, as well as the editors and the anonymous reviewers at Security Studies. All errors are the author's alone.
Notes
Otto Hintze, “Military Organization and the Organization of the State,” in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992); Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Peter Gourevitch, “The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources of Domestic Politics,” International Organization 32, no. 4 (Autumn 1978): 881–911.
James T. Quinlivan, “Coup-Proofing: Its Practice and Consequences in the Middle East,” International Security 24, No. 2 (Fall 1999): 131–65; Risa Brooks, Political-Military Relations and the Stability of Arab Regimes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Stephen Biddle and Robert Zirkle, “Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare in the Developing World,” Journal of Strategic Studies 19, no. 2 (1996): 171–212; Steven R. David, Choosing Sides: Alignment and Realignment in the Third World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Steven R. David, “Explaining Third World Alignment,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (January 1991): 233–56.
The most prominent example is Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979). That said, some realist work has shown that military organizations do not always respond appropriately to external threats. For example, see Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Randall L. Schweller, Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Quinlivan, “Coup-Proofing,” 151–52.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). For critical views, see Peter D. Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Jessica L. Weeks, “Strong Men and Strawmen: Authoritarian Regimes and the Initiation of International Conflict,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 2 (May 2012): 326–47; Jessica L. Weeks, “Autocratic Audience Costs: Regime Type and Signaling Resolve,” International Organization 62, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 35–64; Jessica L. P. Weeks, Dictators at War and Peace (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Mark Peceny and Caroline C. Beer, “Peaceful Parties and Puzzling Personalists,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 2 (May 2003): 339–42; Mark Peceny, Caroline C. Beer, and Shannon Sanchez-Terry, “Dictatorial Peace?” American Political Science Review 96, no. 1 (March 2002): 15–26; Brian Lai and Dan Slater, “Institutions of the Offensive: Domestic Sources of Dispute Initiation in Authoritarian Regimes, 1950–1992,” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 1 (January 2006): 113–26.
Barbara Geddes, “What Do We Know about Democratization after Twenty Years?” Annual Review of Political Science 2 (1999): 121.
See also Caitlin Talmadge, “The Puzzle of Personalist Performance: Iraqi Battlefield Effectiveness in the Iran-Iraq War,” Security Studies 22, no. 2 (April–June 2013): 180–221; Caitlin Talmadge, The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
For more on the centrality of promotion patterns, see Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). On the importance of cohesion, see Jasen J. Castillo, Endurance and War: The National Sources of Military Cohesion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Wm. Darryl Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element in Combat; Leadership and Societal Influence in the Armies of the Soviet Union, the United States, North Vietnam, and Israel (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1985).
Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Martin van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
On information pathologies, see Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
On North Vietnam, see the next section. On the Israelis, see Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and Peace in the Middle East from the 1948 War of Independence to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1982); Martin van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defense Force (New York: Public Affairs, 2002). On the United States, see Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Rosen, Winning the Next War.
Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” 42. See also Jeffrey Herbst, “War and the State in Africa,” International Security 14, no. 4 (Spring 1990): 117–39; Cameron G. Thies, “War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (July 2005): 451–465; Miguel Angel Centeno, “Blood and Debt: War and Taxation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 6 (May 1997): 1565–605.
Successful coups almost always involve military participation or at least acquiescence. Jonathan M. Powell and Clayton L. Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups from 1950 to 2010: A New Dataset,” Journal of Peace Research 48, no. 2 (March 2011): 249–59.
Quinlivan, “Coup-Proofing”; Brooks, Political-Military Relations; and Biddle and Zirkle, “Technology, Civil-Military Relations, and Warfare in the Developing World.”
Quinlivan focuses on Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Brooks focuses on Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Biddle and Zirkle focus on Iraq.
Quinlivan, “Coup-Proofing,” 133.
Ibid., 151–52.
On Iraq, see Talmadge, “The Puzzle of Personalist Performance.” On Argentina, see Nora K. Stewart, Mates and Muchachos: Unit Cohesion in the Falklands-Malvinas War (Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1991), and Daniel Kon, Los Chicos de la Guerra (Dunton Green, UK: New English Library, 1983). On the Soviets, see David M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998); Donald Cameron Watt, “The High Command: Who Plotted against Whom? Stalin's Purge of the Soviet High Command Revisited,” Journal of Soviet Military Studies 3, no. 1 (1990): 46–65; Earl F. Ziemke, “The Soviet Armed Forces in the Interwar Period,” in Military Effectiveness, Vol. 2: The Interwar Period, ed., Allan R. Millet and Williamson Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–38; Roger R. Reese, Red Commanders: A Social History of the Soviet Army Officer Corps, 1918–1991 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2005), chap. 3. Notably, as World War II progressed and Nazi Germany became the greatest threat to both Stalin's rule and the Soviet Union's existence, Stalin pushed for adoption of more conventional war practices, which, combined with Allied aid, resulted in some improvement in Soviet military effectiveness. See sources above, as well as Reese, Red Commanders, 159–60; and Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 117–21.
Terence Lee, “Military Cohesion and Regime Maintenance: Explaining the Role of the Military in 1989 China and 1998 Indonesia,” Armed Forces and Society 32, no. 1 (October 2005): 80–104; Terence Lee, “The Armed Forces and Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Explaining the Role of the Military in 1986 Philippines and 1998 Indonesia,” Comparative Political Studies 42, no. 5 (May 2009): 640–69; Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Theoretically, states could try to forge a third path by creating a separate coercive organization to monitor or counterbalance the military and then allowing the regular military to adopt conventional war practices. Many leaders do, in fact, adopt such counterweights, and Erica De Bruin finds that although they do not reduce coup attempts, they do decrease the incidence of successful coups. See Erica De Bruin, “Coup-Proofing for Dummies: The Benefits of Following the Maliki Playbook,” Foreign Affairs, 27 July 2014, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iraq/2014-07-27/coup-proofing-dummies; De Bruin, “Preventing Military Coups: The Efficacy of ‘Divide and Rule’” (working paper, 8 August 2014, available from author). That said, leaders facing intense coup threats are unlikely to feel comfortable using parallel security forces as their sole protection against military overthrow. Even a very good internal security organization or paramilitary is unlikely to have an assured ability to beat a conventionally effective professional army in a contest for domestic power. As a result, even regimes with sizable parallel forces (for example, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs [NKVD] in the Soviet Union, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] in Iran) usually engage in other coup prevention measures as well.
On the concept of offense and defense dominance, see Robert Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30, no. 2 (January 1978): 167–214.
Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 1.
Geddes, “What Do We Know,” 121–22.
Ibid., 130.
This approach echoes that used in Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 12–13.
John B. Londregan and Keith T. Poole, “Poverty, the Coup Trap, and the Seizure of Executive Power,” World Politics 42, no. 2 (January 1990): 152; and Aaron Belkin and Evan Schofer, “Toward a Structural Understanding of Coup Risk,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 5 (October 2003): 611.
Geddes, “What Do We Know,” 121.
Huntington, Political Order, 91.
Geddes, “What Do We Know,” 115–44; Jennifer Gandhi and Adam Przeworksi, “Authoritarian Institutions and the Survival of Autocrats,” Comparative Political Studies 40, no. 11 (November 2007): 1279–1301; Beatriz Magaloni, “Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule,” Comparative Political Studies 41, no. 4–5 (April 2008): 715–41; Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jennifer Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Carles Boix and Milan W. Svolik, “The Foundations of Limited Authoritarian Government: Institutions, Commitment, and Power-Sharing in Dictatorships,” Journal of Politics 75, no. 2 (April 2013): 300–16.
On the slow pace of change in military organizations, see Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine; Rosen, Winning the Next War.
Thi Minh-Phuong Ngo, “Education and Agricultural Growth in Vietnam,” (working paper May 1, 2006), 21. http://www.researchgate.net/publication/228992727_Education_and_Agricultural_Growth_in_Vietnam.
Nguyen Duy Hinh and Tran Dinh Tho, The South Vietnamese Society (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1980), 3–5, 9.
A large literature suggests that civil–military relations are important in explaining military professionalism and performance, though there is disagreement about which forms of civil–military relations are best. For a few examples, see Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Huntington, The Soldier and the State; Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine; Feaver, Armed Servants; Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command.
Jessica M. Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 74–77.
Cao Van Vien, Leadership (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1981), 22.
Hinh and Tho, The South Vietnamese Society, 30.
Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–1960 [United States Army in Vietnam] (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1985), 225.
Hinh and Tho, The South Vietnamese Society, 30.
Thomas R. Cantwell, “The Army of South Vietnam: A Military and Political History 1955–1975,” (PhD diss., University of South Wales, 1989), 60–61; Nguyen Cao Ky, How We Lost the Vietnam War (New York: Stein and Day, 1976), 28–29.
Vien, Leadership, 42–49; Hinh and Tho, The South Vietnamese Society, 32; Jeanne S. Mintz, Herbert M. Silverberg, James E. Trinnaman, A Short Guide to Psychological Operations in the Republic of Vietnam (Washington, DC: Special Operations Research Office, 1965), 27–34. Unclassified assessment available at the Center of Military History, Fort McNair, Washington, DC; Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance; Robert Brigham, “Why the South Won the American War in Vietnam,” in Why the North Won the Vietnam War, ed. Marc Jason Gilbert (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 100–1; Vien, Leadership, 55; Allan E. Goodman, An Institutional Profile of the South Vietnamese Officer Corps, report for the Advanced Research Projects Agency, RM-6189-APRA (June 1970), 3. Available through Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC): http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0514242.
Quoted in Spector, Advice and Support, 301.
Quoted in Jeffrey J. Clarke, Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965–1973 [United States Army in Vietnam] (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), 47.
James Lawton Collins, Jr., The Development and Training of the South Vietnamese Army, 1950-1972 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1975), 75.
Goodman, An Institutional Profile, vi.
Tran Van Don, quoted in Stephen T. Hosmer, Konrad Kellen, and Brian M. Jenkins, The Fall of South Vietnam: Statements by Vietnamese Military and Civilian Leaders, report R-2208-OSD (HIST) (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1978), 45.
Collins, Jr., The Development and Training of the South Vietnamese Army, chap. 5.
Ibid., 123.
Clarke, Advice and Support, 378.
Quoted in Hosmer, Kellen, and Jenkins, The Fall of South Vietnam, 58.
Clarke, Advice and Support, 161.
Ibid., 161.
“RVNAF Leadership,” October 1969, in A Systems Analysis View of Vietnam War: 1965–1972, vol. 6: Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces, ed. Thomas C. Thayer (Washington, DC: OASD(SA) RP Southeast Asia Intelligence Division, 1975), 3.
Vien, Leadership, 39; quoted material is from Collins, Jr., The Development and Training of the South Vietnamese Army, 10–11, 90.
Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988), 122–23.
Goodman, An Institutional Profile, 14.
David M. Toczek, The Battle of Ap Bac, Vietnam: They Did Everything but Learn from It (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 41.
Collins, Jr., The Development and Training of the South Vietnamese Army, 32.
U.S. Army Comand and General Staff College (USACGSC), Staff Study on Army Aspects of Military Assistance, C-20. Quoted in Spector, Advice and Support, 279.
Spector, Advice and Support, 347.
Ibid., 316.
Ibid., 279.
Clarke, Advice and Support, 31; Cantwell, “The Army of South Vietnam,” 166; Hosmer, Kellen, and Jenkins, The Fall of South Vietnam, 23.
Andrew Wiest, Vietnam's Forgotten Army: Heroism and Betrayal in the ARVN (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 48.
Ibid., 62.
Ibid., 53.
Ibid., 50.
Ibid., 63.
Cantwell, “The Army of South Vietnam,” 310 and Wiest, Vietnam's Forgotten Army, 63, 70.
Ibid., 69–70.
Ibid., 99.
Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), 151, 154.
Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), chaps. 1 and 2, esp. 21, 49.
Ibid., 54–55, 63–70, 81–83, 88, 91–92, 102–3, 155–57, 197–98, 262–63.
Ibid., 34–5; Military History Institute of Vietnam (MHI), Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975, trans. Merle L. Pribbenow (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 32, 211, 431.
William S. Turley, “The Vietnamese Army,” in Communist Armies in Politics, ed. Johnathan R. Adelman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), 63.
William S. Turley, “Civil–Military Relations in North Vietnam,” Asian Survey 9, no. 12 (December 1969): 880; Turley, “The Vietnamese Army,” in Communist Armies, 68.
For a representative example, see Tu Van Vien, “Political Achievements Within the Armed Forces to be Perpetuated,” translated from Hoc Tap, no. 12 (December 1964), 39. Available through the Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, document no. 2321310012.
See, for example, General Nguyen Chi Thanh, quoted in Muoi Khan, “Notebook II: Notes Taken by Muoi Khan: Some Matters Pertaining to Organization and Working Methods for Strengthening the Leadership of the Party over the Troops and Armed Forces,” Document no. 34, in Vietnam: Documents and Research Notes Series: Translation and Analysis of Significant Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Documents, ed. Robert E. Lester (May 1968), 4. Available through the Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, document no. 4080316008; Vo Nguyen Giap, People's War, People's Army: The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 129.
“Prospects for North and South Vietnam,” National Intelligence Estimate Number 63–59 (May 26, 1959), available through foia.cia.gov, 9.
For example, “Prospects for North and South Vietnam,” National Intelligence Estimate no. 14.3/53–61, (15 August 1961), 8. http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001166422.pdf.
Douglas Pike, PAVN: People's Army of Vietnam (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1986), 157.
MHI, Victory in Vietnam, 35.
Song Hao, “Party Leadership is the Cause of the Growth and Victories of our Army,” Document no. 72, Vietnam Documents and Research Notes, (January 1970), 24. Available through the Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, document no. 4080319006.
Pike, PAVN, 21.
Khan, “Notebook II,” 9.
MHI, Victory in Vietnam, 99; Giap, People's War, 59.
Giap, People's War, People's Army, 138.
MHI, Victory in Vietnam, 39.
Ibid., 39–42, 104, 106.
Turley, “The Vietnamese Army,” in Communist Armies, 72.
Pike, PAVN, 147.
Pike, PAVN, 167.
Khan, “Notebook II,” 9.
Pike, PAVN, 164.
MHI, Victory in Vietnam, 103.
Pike, PAVN, 153–55; Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg, Inside the VC and the NVA: The Real Story of North Vietnam's Armed Forces (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 85–86.
For example, “Report on Political and Ideological Situation,” Document no. 19, Vietnam Documents and Research Notes (19 November 1967), 5–6. Available through the Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, document no. 2120908016; MHI, Victory in Vietnam, 113.
MHI, Victory in Vietnam, 173.
Ibid., 25.
William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), 230.
Duiker, Communist Road, 250, 254–55; Duiker, “Victory by Other Means: The Foreign Policy of the Democratic Republic of Vietam,” in Why the North Won the Vietnam War, 66; Brigham, “Why the South Won,” in Why the North Won the Vietnam War, 110–11.
Logevall, Embers of War, 17, 78, 110.
Logevall, Embers of War, 18, 77, 151; Marc Jason Gilbert, “Introduction,” in Why the North Won the Vietnam War, 14.
Brigham, “Why the South Won,” in Why the North Won the Vietnam War, 99.
Duiker, “Victory by Other Means,” in Why the North Won the Vietnam War, 53.
Tuong Vu, Paths to Development in Asia: South Korea, Vietnam, China, and Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 5; Nguyen, Hanoi's War, esp. chaps. 1 and 2.
The term comes from Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952).
Logevall, Embers of War, xviii.
Brigham, “Why the South Won,” in Why the North Won the Vietnam War, 100–1.
William J. Duiker, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), chap. 3.
Reiter and Stam, Democracies at War, esp. 24, 70.
Biddle, Military Power; Ryan Grauer and Michael C. Horowitz, “What Determines Military Victory? Testing the Modern System,” Security Studies 21, no. 1 (January 2012): 83–111.
See also Talmadge, “The Puzzle of Personalist Performance;” Talmadge, The Dictator's Army.
For more on these dilemmas, see Walter C. Ladwig III, The Trouble with Allies in Counterinsurgency: US Indirect Intervention in the Philippines, Vietnam, and El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); Stephen Biddle, Ryan Baker, and Julia Macdonald, ”Small Footprint, Small Payoff: The Military Effectiveness of Security Force Assistance” (working paper, 8 September 2015). Available at http://tinyurl.com/na6mau4.