Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael C. Horowitz is assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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"Michael Horowitz's The Diffusion of Military Power is a model for twenty-first-century security studies: an important question (how do military innovations spread), interdisciplinary theory, solutions to important historical puzzles, insight into contemporary policy problems, and the use of rigorous qualitative and quantitative methods. A triumph."--Dan Reiter, Emory University

"At the core of this valuable piece of work is the notion of 'adoption capacity,' a concept that Horowitz develops and explores in a set of well-chosen case studies that he examines using a variety of methodologies. In cases as diverse as the introduction of carrier-based naval warfare and suicide bombing, he explores the ways new forms of warfare are adopted, and the systems-level consequences that result. An original, thoughtful, and useful piece of scholarship."--Eliot A. Cohen, Johns Hopkins University

"In The Diffusion of Military Power, Michael Horowitz explains how and why military innovations are adopted by state and nonstate actors. These insights are particularly valuable at a time of rapid technological, strategic, and organizational change such as we are living through today, and have immediate implications for the balance of power and the international system. Highly recommended."--John A. Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security and author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife

"This book makes an important contribution to the scholarship on military diffusion and international power. It will be of much interest to scholars of international security, strategic studies, and military affairs. The book's greatest theoretical contribution is its discussion of the systemic consequences of diffusion."--Emily Goldman, United States Central Command

"Horowitz makes an excellent contribution to the international relations literature generally and work on military innovations particularly. His theory has immediate relevance to discussions about the future of American military strategy, and is helpful in understanding the decisions states face in threatening environments. This is a very good book."--Glenn Palmer, Pennsylvania State University

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The Diffusion of Military Power

Princeton University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations......................................................viiPreface....................................................................ixChapter 1 Introduction....................................................1Chapter 2 A Theory of the Diffusion of Military Power.....................18Chapter 3 Carrier Warfare.................................................65Chapter 4 The Nuclear Revolution..........................................98Chapter 5 Battlefleet Warfare.............................................134Chapter 6 Suicide Terrorism...............................................166Chapter 7 Conclusion......................................................208Appendix 1 Suicide Terrorism Group Linkages...............................227Appendix 2 Nuclear Diffusion Survival Model...............................232Bibliography...............................................................237Index......................................................................265

Chapter One

Innovations in the production, deployment, and application of military power are crucial to international politics. Unfortunately, most assessments of the international security environment fail to incorporate either the relevance of military innovations or the importance of their spread. For example, in a thirty-year period, from 1850-80, the French Navy became the first to develop shell guns, and the first to deploy a steam-powered warship, an ironclad warship, a mechanically powered submarine, and a steel-hulled warship. These developments should have helped the French Navy gain superiority over its bitter rival, the British Royal Navy, but they did not. Moreover, barely a decade after the introduction of the steel-hulled warship in the 1870s, a new innovative school of naval theorists in the French Navy argued that the future of naval power lay with emerging technologies like torpedo boats and submarines, not the battleship. France was going to jump ahead once again. Yet despite this foresight and demonstrated initiative, most people generally do not consider France a great naval innovator of the period. Why is this? What advantages did it get from its introduction of a series of useful technologies into naval warfare?

The real answer is that the French Navy received no advantage. Unlike the U.S. Navy, whose mastery of the technology and organizational practices associated with carrier warfare provided it with a sustainable edge in naval power in the second half of the twentieth century, the French could not institutionalize their advantage. While the French excelled at inventing new technologies, crippling organizational debates prevented the integration of those technologies into French naval strategy. In each case, the French were the first to introduce a new naval warfare capability, while the British Admiralty appeared, in public, disinterested in French developments. Yet in each case the British, who had been carefully studying French advances in private, quickly adopted the new capabilities, improved on them, and used Great Britain's superior industrial production capabilities to eliminate France's ability to gain a relative power advantage from its inventions.

A prescient analysis in 1902 of submarine warfare by Herbert C. Fyfe, the "Sometime Librarian of the Royal Institution, London," includes an appendix on the French Navy that expresses French feelings on the matter:

"We have seriously believed," says a writer in the Journal de la Marine, "that in all the great modifications that have been brought about in the construction of submarines is the result of the important changes which the last fifty years of the century have produced in the art of naval warfare. All these changes have been sought out, experimented upon, studied, and finally realized by France, who has also been the first to apply them. These results have established in a brilliant and incontestable manner the skill of our engineers; but our rivals have not only appropriated the results of our labours, but they have not been slow to place themselves on equal terms with us, and finally to excel us in the application of these discoveries.... We have been only the humble artisans working for them to establish their superiority." (Fyfe 1902, 281)

While France was the technological first mover in several cases, it failed to harness its advances into an actual war-fighting innovation in a way that increased France's relative naval power. Instead, it was the British Royal Navy that came to exemplify naval power in the mid- to late nineteenth century as it entered an era of naval superiority.

The failure of the nineteenth-century French Navy to exploit its technological inventions in sea power yields two important lessons for a general understanding of military power and international relations. First, inventing technologies or even being the first to use them does not guarantee advantages in international politics. There is a big difference between the introduction of a technology on to the battlefield and the full integration of that technology into national strategy, including warfare and coercive diplomacy. It is the difference between the two, in fact, that often determines success or failure in international politics. It is the employment of technologies by organizations, rather than the technologies themselves, that most often makes the difference.

Second, in contrast to most prior work on military innovation, which has tended to focus on who innovates and why, it is the diffusion of a military innovation throughout the international system that most determines its influence on international politics. The study of military power is incomplete at best without a theoretically coherent understanding of how states respond to major military innovations, and how the pattern of their responses helps drive the rise and decline of nations as well as the patterns of warfare frequently analyzed by other scholars. By developing a theoretical framework that can bring together empirical topics like suicide bombing and carrier warfare that scholars have tended to study separately, this book presents a new, more efficient, way to think about approaching the diffusion of military power.

The introduction and spread of new means of generating military power, sometimes called major military innovations (MMIs), have played a critical role throughout history in determining the global balance of power along with the timing and intensity of wars. The infamous Mongol armies, with their mastery of the composite bow and a new form of cavalry strikes, toppled nations from China to those in the eastern part of Europe because of their leaps in technology and strategy. Hundreds of years later, the German debut of blitzkrieg warfare at the outbreak of World War II helped them rout French forces and consolidate control over Western Europe. But despite their significance in terms of driving change in international politics, the processes that govern the spread of innovations and their effects are little understood in the field of international relations. Several questions about military power remain unanswered: Is it best to be the first mover, to borrow a term from economics, and the first to figure out...