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

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.

Author: Dan Reiter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 11/09/2017
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.51h x 6.48w x 0.83d
ISBN: 9781108416726

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2018

About the Author
Reiter, Dan: - Dan Reiter is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University, Atlanta. He is the award-winning author of three books, Crucible of Beliefs: Learning, Alliances and World Wars, Democracies at War (with Allan C. Stam, 1996), and How Wars End (2009), as well as dozens of articles about the causes, prosecution, and termination of war, alliances, domestic politics and international relations, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and other topics. He is a recipient of the Karl Deutsch Award, given annually to the leading scholar of international relations under the age of 40 or within ten years of having received a Ph.D.