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Arms races and other pathetic fallacies: a case for deconstruction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 1996

Colin S. Gray
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Extract

It is only fair to readers that I declare my unusually personal interest in the book that is the principal subject of this review essay. I was a (overall favourable) reviewer of an early version of Plowshares into Swords—albeit for a university press other than the one finally chosen by Grant Hammond—as the author attests in a generous acknowledgement. In addition, and rather more to the point, Hammond suggests strongly that the conceptual provenance of his study owes some debt to a 1971 article of mine. In Hammond's words:

Type
Review Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , July 1996 , pp. 323 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1996

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References

1 , Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, pp. 12–13Google Scholar. His reference is to my article, ‘The Arms Race Phenomenon’, World Politics, 24 (Oct. 1971), pp. 39–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See Fairbanks, Charles H., ‘Arms Races: The Metaphor and the Facts’, National Interest, 1 (Fall 1985), pp. 75–90Google Scholar.

3 Grant T. Hammond is a political scientist rather than a historian. His historical research for this ambitious book, while adequate, is not extraordinary. Hammond's ‘value added’ to extant scholarship is conceptual rather than historical. Given the opportunity costs imposed by the breadth (a century and a half) of his evidential base, Plowshares into Swords must stand or fall on the merit in its conceptual apparatus.

4 ibid., p. 235. Also see Wohlstetter, Albert, ‘Legends of the Strategic Arms Race, Part I: The Driving Engine’, Strategic Review, 2 (Fall 1974), pp. 67–92Google Scholar, and ‘Legends of the Strategic Arms Race, Part II: The Uncontrolled Upward Spiral’, Strategic Review, 3 (Winter, 1975), pp. 70–86Google Scholar.

5 Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, p. 7.

6 ibid., p. 9.

7 ibid., p. 8. Emphasis in original.

8 ibid., p. 243. Emphasis in original.

9 Morgan, Patrick M., Deterrence: A Conceptual Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA, 1977)Google Scholar, ch. 2.

10 Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, pp. 200–7.

11 ibid., p. 263.

12 ibid., p. 31.

13 ibid., p. 246.

14 ibid., p. 37.

15 ibid., p. 31.

16 I explore this idea and related notions in ray book The Soviet–American Arms Race Lexington, MA, 1976)Google Scholar, ch. 4.

17 This is not to suggest that ‘threats’ from abroad simply are necessary fuel to justify the profit–making (or other benefit–garnering) activities of those betes noires of liberal theorists, military–industrialcomplexes. My point is that a country's defence programme is severely limited in its ability to respond in an agile way on short order to ever–shifting perceptions of threat. Foreign policy can be changed in an afternoon; defence policy cannot be. Those who would theorize about the dynamics of arms races need first to be exposed to the reality test provided by, for the leading examples of the genre, The Force Planning Faculty, College, Naval War (eds.), Fundamentals of Force Planning, 3 vols. (Newport, RI, 1990–2)Google Scholar, and Strategy and Force Planning Newport, RI, 1995)Google Scholar. From time to time, though, basic assumptions do need to be revisited. In that connection see Dewar, James A. et al. (eds.), Assumption– Based Planning: A Planning Tool for Very Uncertain Times Santa Monica, CA, 1993)Google Scholar, and Builder, Carl H. and Dewar, James A., ‘A Time for Planning? If Not Now, When?’, Parameters, 24 (Summer 1994), pp. 4–15Google Scholar.

18 Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, p. 31. Emphasis added.

19 ibid., p. 49.

20 ibid.

21 ibid., pp. 47–8.

22 Hammond discovered four arms races (Japan vs Russia, 1895–1904; Germany vs UK, 1902–12; France vs Germany, 1911–14; and Japan vs US vs UK 1916–22); three military competitions (France vs Germany, 1874–94; UK vs France and Russia, 1894–1904; and UK vs US, 1922–30); one rearmament race (US and UK vs Germany and Japan, 1938–39/41); and one space race (a race in technology rather than weapons, 1957–69). In addition, he identified numerous abortive arms races, or panics (1847–8, 1851–3, 1859–61, 1885–9, 1892–3, 1909–10, 1913, 1923–5, 1953–7, and 1957–61). ibid., pp. 39–43, 53 n.17, and 246. If a ‘panic’ is an abortive, one–sided, race within a rivalry, arguably there have been many more than Hammond chooses to identify. If there was not a ‘panic’ in the United States in 1950–1 then the term truly must lack for meaning. In addition, in the late 1970s The Committee on the Present Danger was proclaiming the imminent need for what would amount to a ‘panic’ reaction. In the 1980 election both President Jimmy Carter and candidate Ronald Reagan ran against the USSR.

23 Hammond claims modestly, ‘I seek to explain something more than a concept but less than a theory.’ ibid., p. 44. Arms

24 Buzan, Barry, An Introduction to Strategic Studies: Military Technology and International Relations New York, 1987), pp. 69–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 ibid., p. 70.

26 In Gray, C. S., ‘Arms Race Phenomenon’; ‘Social Science and the Arms Race’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 39 (June 1973), pp. 23–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The Urge to Compete: Rationales for Arms Racing’, World Politics, 26 (Jan. 1974), pp. 207–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Predicting Arms Race Behaviour’, Futures, 6 (Oct. 1974), pp. 380–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘How Does the Nuclear Arms Race Work?’, Cooperation and Conflict, 9 (1974), pp. 285–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Soviet—American Arms Race.

27 Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, p. 15.

28 Gray, Colin S., House of Cards: Why Arms Control Must Fail Ithaca, NY, 1992)Google Scholar, and ‘Arms Control Does Not Control Arms’, Orbis, 37 (Summer 1993), pp. 333–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, p. 15.

30 ibid., p. 7. Emphasis in original.

31 With gratitude to Milne, A. A., Winnie–the–Pooh (London, 1989 [1926])Google Scholar, ch. 3, ‘In which Pooh and Piglet go hunting and nearly catch a Woozle.’

32 In recent times the most obvious candidate for the category of ‘excellent but too small’ is the Wehrmacht of World War II. The god of war is on the side of the bigger battalions. Outstanding illustration of this maxim is provided in Keegan, John, Six Armies in Normandy: From D–Day to the Liberation of Paris, June 6th–August 25th, 1944 New York, 1982)Google Scholar. van Creveld, Martin, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939–1945 Westport, CT, 1982)Google Scholar, and Murray, Williamson, German Military Effectiveness Baltimore, 1992)Google Scholar, are also relevant.

33 Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, p. 35. Emphasis in original.

34 Which is to say from the launching of the University of Chicago's great study of war in 1926 until the present day. For the results of the Chicago study see Wright, Quincy, A Study of War, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1942)Google Scholar. If good intentions and careful scholarship could solve the problem, or find a cure for the ‘disease’ of war, then surely the problem would have been solved or the disease cured. In a report adopted by the Conference on the Cause and Cure of War in January 1925, the delegates recognized ‘that we lack not so much the desire to efface war as the scientific knowledge of causes of war’. ‘Causes of War’, in Johnson, Julia E. (ed.), War—Cause and Cure New York, 1926), p. 117Google Scholar. Nearly seventy years on, a leading scholar of the causes of war offered the opinion that ‘[i]t is h a rd to avoid the conclusion that there is little agreement on the identity of the most important causes of war, the methodology through which these causes might be discovered, the conceptual framework that might permit the integration of these factors into a general and logically consistent theory of war, or even the criteria by which one theory might be said to be better than another’. Levy, Jack S., ‘The Causes of War: A Preview of Theories and Evidence’, in Tetlock, Philip E. et al. (eds.), Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, vol. 1 (New York, 1989), p. 295Google Scholar. Many excellent books have been written on this subject, Waltz, Kenneth N., Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis New York, 1954)Google Scholar, for example, but the scholarship remains massively inconclusive. War, in common with arms races and arms control, defies ‘solution’ in minor part because it presents the dedicated theorist with an indigestible array of possible data, and in major part because it is a dependent variable. In short, the key to war, arms race and arms control (or even, more realistically, the control of arms) does not lie in those phenomena per se, but rather in the conditions that promote them.

35 This argument, central to my House of Cards and Weapons Don't Make War: Policy, Strategy and Military Technology Lawrence, KS, 1993)Google Scholar, has yet to be challenged powerfully by reviewers.

36 Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, pp. 265–6.

37 ibid., p. 264. Emphasis added.

38 ibid.

39 ibid.

40 Downs, George W., ‘Arms Race and War’, in Tetlock, Philip E. et al. (eds.), Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, vol. 2 (New York, 1991), p. 103Google Scholar.

41 ibid., p. 75.

42 Howard, Michael, The Lessons of History New Haven, CT, 1991), p. 96Google Scholar.

43 Howard, Michael, Studies in War and Peace London, 1970), p. 227Google Scholar. Also see his ‘War a n d Technology’, RUSI Journal, 132 Dec. 1987), pp. 17–22Google Scholar.

44 Hammond provides both a n excellent brief analytical review of the alternative approaches to arms race theory (pp. 271–98) and a superior bibliography. The scholarship on arms races is more substantial than it is distinguished. In addition to the works already cited in this review, several studies are particularly noteworthy: Huntington, Samuel P., ‘Arms Races: Prerequisites and Results’, in Friedrich, Carl J. and Harris, Seymour E. (eds.), Public Policy, 1958 Cambridge, MA, 1958), pp. 40–86Google Scholar; Isard, Walter, Arms Races, Arms Control, and Conflict Analysis: Contributions from Peace Science and Peace Economics Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar; and Glynn, Patrick, Closing Pandora's Box: Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War New York, 1992)Google Scholar.

45 ‘There should be two or more parties perceiving themselves to be in an adversary relationship, who are increasing or improving their armaments at a rapid rate and structuring their respective military postures with a general attention to t he past, current, and anticipated military and political behaviour of the other parties’. Gray, ‘Arms Race Phenomenon,’ p. 40. Emphasis in original.

46 Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, p. 249.

47 ibid.

48 ibid., p. 254. ‘Peril points occur when the marginal utility of continuing the competition is equal to o r less than the marginal utility of going to war to accomplish one's aims by force.’ Unfortunately for confidence in analysis, usually there are more than just those two stark alternative options.