The Sword's Other Edge
Trade-offs in the Pursuit of Military Effectiveness

Military effectiveness can only be fully understood by accounting for its political and military tradeoffs. This book explains those tradeoffs.

Dan Reiter (Edited by)

9781108416726, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 November 2017

288 pages, 10 b/w illus. 5 tables
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.54 kg

'An excellent read for advanced students of military theory or the history of warfare, and policy makers.' D. N. Nelson, Choice

This book is the first work to build a conceptual framework describing how the pursuit of military effectiveness can present military and political tradeoffs, such as undermining political support for the war, creating new security threats, and that seeking to improve effectiveness in one aspect can reduce effectiveness in other aspects. Here are new ideas about military effectiveness, covering topics such as military robotics, nuclear weapons, insurgency, war finance, public opinion, and others. The study applies these ideas to World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the 1973 October War, as well as ongoing conflicts and public policy debates, such as the War on Terror, drone strikes, ISIS, Russian aggression against Ukraine, US-Chinese-Russian nuclear competitions, and the Philippines insurgency, among others. Both scholarly and policy-oriented readers will gather new insights into the political dimensions of military power, and the complexities of trying to grow military power.

1. Confronting tradeoffs in the pursuit of military effectiveness Dan Reiter
2. Force protection and its tradeoffs Emanuele Castelli and Lorenzo Zambernardi
3. War finance and military effectiveness Rosella Cappella Zielinski
4. Forced to fight: coercion, blocking detachments, and tradeoffs in military effectiveness Jason Lyall
5. Sources of military effectiveness in counterinsurgency: evidence from the Philippines Joseph Felter
6. Military robotics, autonomous systems, and the future of military effectiveness Michael C. Horowitz
7. Too much of a good thing? Conventional military effectiveness and the dangers of nuclear escalation Caitlin Talmadge
8. Making tradeoffs without assessing probabilities: the costs and benefits of vague information in national security decision making Jeffrey A. Friedman
9. Conclusion: the complexity of military effectiveness Filippo Andreatta.

Subject Areas: Defence strategy, planning & research [JWK], Warfare & defence [JW], Diplomacy [JPSD], International relations [JPS], Comparative politics [JPB], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP], Society & social sciences [J]