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Risa Brooks is assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University.

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"Brooks has made a significant contribution to the study of decision making and military strategy. Her case studies repeatedly demonstrate how pathologies in civil-military relations produce ineffective decisions in crises and conflicts."--Scott D. Sagan, Stanford University

"Brooks articulates the problem of strategic assessment in a new way, does a very good review of the literature, introduces a simple model with profound implications, and makes a compelling case for her claims. Her general argument--that strategic assessment varies with the balance of power between civilian and military leaders and the degree to which their preferences diverge--is intriguing."--Deborah Avant, University of California, Irvine

"Risa Brooks's theory of why some states are good at strategic assessment while others are not is novel, persuasive, nuanced, and elegant. Her discussion of the failure of U.S. strategic assessment following the second Iraq war shows that this issue is of much more than theoretical relevance. This book is an important contribution to the study of civil-military relations and strategic decision making."--Michael Desch, Texas A&M University

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Shaping Strategy

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

IN MAY 1967 EGYPT'S President Nasser initiated a crisis with Israel that would end in a war he was bound to lose. The crisis began when Nasser received a report that Israel was sending forces to its border with Syria. Despite soon learning the report was false, Nasser nevertheless escalated tensions by requesting the United Nations withdraw its forces stationed in the Sinai Peninsula to make way for deployments of Egyptian troops. Shortly thereafter, on May 22, Egypt's president took the even more dire step of closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. On the morning of June 5, Israel attacked Egypt's airfields. Egypt's role in the ensuing war ended just a day and a half later in a devastating defeat that changed the complexion of Middle East politics forever.

Curiously, despite the potential stakes involved, Egypt's decisions to initiate and later hold firm to its demands that spring were taken in an internal environment ill-prepared for the gravity of the situation. Decision making was reportedly sorely lacking on Egypt's political and military situation. Historical accounts reveal that Nasser was competing with his military chief for control of military policy. Intelligence was politicized, and coordination between political and military authorities inadequate. As a result, and by his own admission, Nasser went to war with a poor assessment of how miserably Egypt's military would fare in the conflict and the devastation his regime would bear as a result.

In striking contrast, Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, was able to plan and implement a series of political and military initiatives in the 1970s aimed at achieving his security goals. He developed, in consultation with military authorities, a sophisticated, limited war plan based on analysis of Egypt's strategic situation. He was able repeatedly to overrule his military chiefs and implement unpopular plans, including the controversial plan for the October 1973 war, subsequent disengagement agreements, and a peace treaty with Israel. Unlike Nasser, Sadat appeared to benefit from a decision-making environment that allowed him and his military leaders to evaluate critically Egypt's strategic and military options and their consistency with political objectives.

Why are some leaders, at some times, able to assess their capabilities and reconcile their political and military objectives? Why are others prone to poor estimates and disintegrated policies? In sum, why do some states excel at strategic assessment while others fail miserably?

A major reason is the nature of states' civil-military relations. Domestic relations between political and military leaders shape the institutional processes in which leaders evaluate their strategies in interstate conflicts. Those processes affect how leaders appraise their state's military options, plans, and the broader diplomatic and political constraints that bear on them. In short, civil-military relations affect how states engage in strategic assessment.

Strategic assessment is vital to state security and to international peace and stability. Egypt provides a vivid illustration why. Nasser's poor assessment of his capabilities and his devastating loss in the ensuing war in 1967 exposed to the world the failings of his regime and its military. Nasser's claim to regional leadership was irrevocably damaged. The war the leader precipitated also ended with Israel occupying critical areas of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt-areas today, with the exception of the latter, that remain the subject of dispute and a catalyst for tensions in the region. In the 1970s, in contrast, Egypt's strengths in strategic assessment proved an enormous advantage to Anwar Sadat. Egypt got the Sinai back, repositioned itself in the Western camp, and in the process signed the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state.

Today the United States must contend with the results of its own debacle of strategic assessment: the failure to evaluate adequately the postwar security environment and prepare accordingly for the 2003 Iraq War. Many analysts focus on rivalries between the State Department and Pentagon or on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's abrasive personality to explain weaknesses in postwar plans. Less understood are how civil-military relations predisposed the country to poor strategic assessment. As I argue in chapter 7, the underlying structure of power and preferences in U.S. civil-military relations was a major cause of inadequate planning for the security vacuum after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. The absence of comprehensive contingency plans and the ensuing breakdown of security alienated the population and fueled a nascent insurgency against American forces.

In these cases, as in the other empirical studies in this volume, failures of strategic assessment had enormous consequences for the states involved. In this book I explain why these failures occur and discuss the conditions under which we are likely to get better strategic assessment.

The Argument in Brief

In its approach to studying strategic assessment, this book bridges the disciplines of comparative and international politics. It begins with insights from comparative politics about the importance of the military's domestic relationship with political leaders. Comparativists have long recognized that the balance of power and intensity of substantive disagreements between political and military leaders can differ significantly across and within states, over time. These moreover can affect the military's bargaining power within ruling regimes and consequently the institutional features of states, broadly defined and specifically in security-related areas. Civil-military relations are vital from this perspective in understanding the internal features of states.

Janus-faced, civil-military relations also have a significant international dimension. During interstate conflicts, military leaders provide advice to a country's political leader about the state's relative capabilities. They guide him or her in assessing the utility of different military plans and options. Military leaders have important informational advantages about these issues, both as a result of their expertise in "the management of violence" and because of their regular contact with the military organization. Political leaders are in charge of a much broader array of policy concerns-not just military and security issues-and therefore even if they, for personal or professional reasons, are well versed in military matters, must rely on those who run the armed forces on a daily basis for information and analysis.

A state's processes for strategic assessment intersect these domestic and international facets of civil-military relations. Clashes over security and other corporate issues and the balance of power between military and political leaders affect the routines through which they share and analyze information, consult with one another, and make decisions at the apex of the state. These processes, in turn, constitute the environment in which political leaders evaluate and select their strategies in interstate disputes-the institutions in which they engage in strategic assessment.

This book explores the causes and consequences of these institutions for strategic assessment. Theoretically, it seeks to explain why states'...