Realism’s Military/Technical Wing and International Politics1

Abstract

The Limits of U.S. Military Capability: Lessons from Vietnam and Iraq. By James H. Lebovic Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 297 pp., $50.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-89472-5). The Problem of Force: Grappling with the Global Battlefield. By Simon W. Murden Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009. 233 pp., $55.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-588-26649-1). The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution. By Keith L. Shimko New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 249 pp, $27.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-12884-1). The Vietnam War and the Iraq wars of 1990–91 and 2003 extended debates on military doctrine which had been under way since President Truman and General MacArthur's fallout over the more appropriate military strategy for the Korean War in 1950. In purely military terms, since then the division has been between the Never-Again School on the one hand and the Limited War School on the other. The former argued for all-or-nothing interventions, that is, “either the United States should be prepared to do everything necessary to win or it should not intervene at all” (George/Craig 1995:261). As for the latter, it suggested that the United States “might well have to fight limited wars again” after Korea and, in order to prevent escalation in the nuclear age, “the United States would most likely have to limit its objectives and the military means it employed” (ibid., 261, 262). The 1991 Iraq War reflected the Never-Again approach, while both the Vietnam War and 2003 Iraq War, in their respective ways, drew on the Limited War School . Since the most recent of these wars is a major concern in the books under consideration, the interplay between technological change and the conduct of foreign policy should be expected to deserve extended attention. This is especially true since one line of thinking about US foreign policy was to proactively take advantage of the “unipolar moment,” which was assumed would last only for a limited period in time, and the use of cutting-edge RMA technologies for specific policies (for example, regime change) under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would have offered an interesting field for the analysis of the tension between technology and politics (Buzan/Hansen 2009:53–4).2 Unfortunately, the books do not assess this aspect. From the viewpoint of a recent sociology of International Security Studies, the …