Yagil Levy, Center for Studies of Social Change, New School for Social Research
Wars produce contrasting effects on the state's status in the domestic arena: they bolster its internal control but, at the same time, create opportunities for collective action of which domestic groups can take advantage and weaken state autonomy. As the case of Israel suggests, within the confines of geo-political constraints, states modify their military doctrine to balance the two contradictory impacts. The main purpose of the paper is to lay the foundation for a Sociology of Strategy by drawing on the case of Israel.
The Two-Faced War: A Conceptual Background
States produce power from wars. A state's monopoly on the use of the societal means of violence is the ordering principle of its internal control (Weber, 1972, 78). Monopoly control over violence is also the basis of a state's sovereignty relative to other members of the international system. Sovereignty, in turn, gives the state powers of coercion over internal activities (see Schmitt, 1976; Tilly, 1985a; Thomson, 1994). In practice, states exploited the state of anarchy in the international system that unintentionally resulted in the creation of bureaucratic coping mechanisms (Tilly, 1985b; see also Lake, 1992).
Historically, needs originating externally and state rulers' manipulation of domestic power centers worked together to centralize the modern state. The introduction of massive artillery and gunpowder in warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries propelled state agencies to extract resources for military buildup whenever (competition-oriented) geo-political conditions necessitated and/or permitted it (Tilly, 1985a; 1992). Conscription was imposed on the domestic population when growing needs for disciplined manpower could no longer be met by mercenaries (Thomson, 1994). The state then became the exclusive entity able to underwrite and maintain a military (Andreski, 1971, 98-99; Finer, 1975; Tilly, 1985b; Weber, 1972, 221-223). At the same time, state activities, aimed at preparing for and legitimizing war, also became a lever for internal state expansion. Civilian bureaucracies dealing with mass conscription, tax collection, military production, and territorial centralization were products of this process (see Barnett, 1992; Hooks, 1990; Hooks and McLauchlan, 1992; Giddens, 1985; Jaggers, 1992; Mann, 1988; Porter, 1994; Skocpol, 1988; Tilly, 1992).
Administrative power was also evident in the ability of the state to penetrate and regulate societal relations which was due in part to civilian roles the military assumed. Among the impacts of that penetration were: 1) shaping the criteria for granting citizenship (see Janowitz, 1976); 2) internalizing habits of discipline and obedience among the individuals subjected to military rule and thus assisting in molding the entire social order (see Foucault, 1977, 139-170, and Mitchell, 1991a, 92-94 for interpretation of Foucault); 3) providing a new source for individual commitment and loyalty, in many cases overshadowing former objects of those attitudes and cutting the individual off from traditional ties such as ethnic groups. This also results in the inculcation of loyalty towards the state, a process which is especially significant during state-building (see for example Harries-Jenkins, 1982; Migdal, 1988, 23); 4) affecting the state's capacity to regulate interethnic/interclass relations in the civilian sphere by monitoring groups' differential access to positions in the armed forces (Enloe, 1980).
But war-making had a contradictory impact as well. Drawing from approaches focused on collective action, "state building creates an opportunity structure for collective action of which movements take advantage" (Tarrow, 1994, 62). Within this framework, mass mobilization, by bringing together many people, produced new channels of communication. Moreover, the heavy burden of war also provided both opportunity and target for political action (ibid., 65-68).
Historically, the scope of citizenship in Europe increased from the end of the eighteenth century onward in return for the imposition of direct statist rule with the constitution of mass armies based on conscription of the domestic population rather than mercenaries (Thomson, 1994). Social groups then capitalized on their participation in war and in preparation for war, which encompassed taxation, production, and particularly conscription (hereafter: "military participation"), to claim and attain political and material resources and/or rights from the state. As for the state, it was willing to accede as a means to mobilize for war. Consequently, wars accelerated the allocation of civil, political, and social rights to those who had borne the burden of war (Andreski, 1971; Feld, 1975; Janowitz, 1976; Marwick, 1988; Tilly, 1994; 1995; Titmus, 1976, 75-87). After all, as "the voice of the people is heard loudest when governments require either their gold or their bodies in defense of the state" (Porter, 1994, 10).
War-incited growth in the living standard together with the stimulation of social demands propelled state expansion to meet the new demands and so forth. At the extreme, states lost a great deal of their autonomy over internal agents and, hence, became more constrained by those agents' preferences (as state-centered theories have conceptualized state autonomy, see for example Krasner, 1978, 10; Skocpol, 1985) and even experienced a crisis (see for different versions dealing with Keynsian state crisis: Brittan, 1975; Crozier et al, 1975; Habermas, 1975; O'Connor, 1973; Offe, 1975; Wolfe, 1977).
It follows that the state, in fact, copes with a structural tension, stemming from the contradiction between the accumulation of power by means of war and the creation of an opportunity structure for political action that undermines state autonomy, i.e., the contradictory impacts of military participation. Force-oriented behavior on the part of the state thus not only serves its needs for internal control but, on the contrary, this behavior might actually increase the political costs of internal control. If this is so, how does the state in practice deal with this dilemma? The underlying schools leave us in the dark with regard to this question.
Going one step further, the state can aggravate or mitigate this structural tension by modifying its military doctrine, hence modifying the volume of military participation, as figure 1 summarizes.
FIGURE 1: MODIFYING MILITARY DOCTRINE [@ <http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ley02/>]
According to the neorealists, military doctrine embodies rational action on the part of the state in dealing with the perceived anarchic nature of the international system (see mainly Waltz, 1979). Accordingly, military doctrine explicitly deals with military means -- the character and methods of employment alike--which are available to the state. This multiplied by previously created resources and calculated by the effects state's behavior might have on its adversary by choosing either defense or offense (Glaser, 1994/95; Posen, 1988).
Nevertheless, military doctrine reflects not only rational calculations but also reflects and affects, simultaneously, the distribution of power in the society mainly through the pattern of recruitment. From this pattern derived the power held by the military itself and the groups controlling and staffing its ranks and the social order aimed at extracting the resources needed to maintain this mode of recruitment. Hence, under the constraints of the geo-political arena, military doctrine is crafted by internal, political processes whereby state agencies (including the military itself) and social groups bargain over the levels of military participation.
Bargaining may take three forms (sometimes simultaneously), each of which impacts groups' capacities to participate in shaping the polity and are inspired by the actual or expected outcomes of military participation:
1. A direct discourse on military doctrine as the cases of the U.S. and France exemplifies. Traditional debates between the left and right in France about the length of conscription (with implications for the use of armed forces for domestic purposes) attest to the important role domestic considerations play in shaping the mode of military service within the confines of previously constructed political and military culture (see Kier, 1995; Silver, 1994, 321-329). Likewise, the libertarian American political culture "largely considered obligatory military service to violate the social contract between citizens and the nation" (Silver, 1994, 330), because of the very nature and the power it grants to the government. Invoking this cultural pattern, the Congress and social movements occasionally impeded presidential attempts to extend recruitment during peacetime and played a leading role in the abolition of the draft in 1973. 2. A blatant attempt to disempower peripheral groups by preventing access to arms. Demobilization of Afro-Americans from the U.S. Military after wars exemplifies this pattern (Enloe, 1980, 68-75). This paper, however, is focused on the third, one that is neglected in scholarship: 3. A political process that directly shapes presumed military affairs but actually, in an indirect and covert manner, determines the extent of the military burden and, hence, the level of military participation. Two main issues are at stake: (a) Changing offensive/defensive methods: Defensive tenet prolongs war by allowing for a protracted defense posture until reserve/rear-based forces can be mobilized and reach the front to mount an offensive. By contrast, an offensive doctrine eliminates this time-consuming process by means of a preemptive strike or a preventive war. The war is thus potentially concluded more quickly and is consequently of shorter duration. This permits the reduction of civil participation in wars, which in turn, vitiates the potential political claims to be made by the participants in return for having taken a part. (b) Altering the armament composition of the military: Infantry soldiers engage in direct contact with the enemy-victim. Arguably, soldiers who had experienced face-to-face combat are more likely to be motivated to act politically after the war because they become aware of the human meaning of war for victims and victimizers alike. If so, the more soldiers distanced from their enemy-victim, the more likely their political consciousness remains dormant (see Barnet, 1972, 13-15 on the Vietnam War).
By changing doctrine according to this line and in reaction to the impacts of military participation on political participation, states in practice balance the contradictory impacts of military participation. If the state empowers social groups through its military doctrine, i.e. giving groups access to political power via arms, it might also disempower groups by reducing this access through the very same methods. Put differently, if intensive military participation might be translated into political action, lower military participation, ceteris paribus, might lower the intensity of political participation. However, whereas state agencies and social groups are highly conscious of empowerment as we may infer from the cases of the U.S. and France, disempowerment is in many cases an unintended consequence of a state rational action.
I will therefore blend the underlying arguments of statist theoreticians, IR scholars, and the proponents of culture-centered approach (such as Kier and Silver) to move one step farther by using the case of Israel as an illustration. The next sections present the main milestones through which Israel's military doctrine was developed. The concluding section infers from the case in point broader theoretical implications....
Conclusions
Israel's military doctrine underwent three transformations pertinent to its domestic effects as figure 2 summarizes.
FIGURE 2: THE EXCHANGE BETWEEN MILITARY PARTICIPATION AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION [@ <http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ley02/>]
From 1948 to the 1970s, instrumental to state empowerment was the gradual transformation from a defensive, infantry-based army to an offensive, armor- and air-force-based one, and from a small standing army dependent upon reserves to a large standing army. Owing to the durable balance between the conflicting effects of military participation, the state could maintain the state of war while delaying the moment in which it has to pay the political costs needed to de-escalate the Arab-Israeli conflict. Going beyond this balance typified the second transformation which took place in the 1970-1980s. The growing military burden-produced political participation in the post-1967 period undermined the state capacity to steer its military policies autonomously. In the third transformation, modification of military doctrines by de-escalating the conflict interlocked with the transition to a technology-based, selective conscription. This trend might help the state regain its autonomous control of the military sphere.
To a large degree, figure 2 mirrors other cases in the Western world to which the process described in Figure 1 is applicable. The sturdy linkage between war-making and state-making also elevated democratization: Mass mobilization of the local population under the state's direct auspices strengthened the power of civilian bureaucracies supplying people relative to the military. In exchange, participants in wars demanded rights and citizenship interwoven with protection from arbitrary state action. Subordination of the military to civilian control was the result (Tilly, 1995).
Wide political participation and limitations imposed on military action engendered the downscaling of wars. As some scholars maintain, democracy might restrain war-prone orientations against other democracies (Lake, 1992; Russett, 1990; Russett and Maoz, 1990; Weede, 1992). But as the cases of the Vietnam War and Lebanon War suggest, democracy restrains warfare against non-democratic states as well. Within the confines of global possibilities, domestic changes then stimulated many democratic states to trade their military doctrine of a mass, conscription army to a technology-, even nuclear-based volunteer military.
A nuclear-based doctrine permitted the state both to call its citizens to participate and, at the same time, to prevent them from engaging in public action. The minimal access to armaments of this kind played a key role in constructing a model of "perverse democracy", in Wolfe's terms (1984), or as Mann (1987) has put it, a "spectator sport militarism." There, the political community is well-informed about wars and armament but participates only indirectly. If so, "... wars...are not qualitatively different from Olympic Games. Because life-and-death are involved, the emotions stirred up are deeper and stronger. But they are not backed up by... commitment..." (ibid., 48). Consequently, the more technology employed in place of human combatants, the more states acquired the autonomous capacity to maintain war preparation and even to initiate war, as they faced, to a lesser extent, political resistance originated from military participation (see Shaw, 1988, 45-46).
For example, grasping the lesson of the Vietnam War (see Barnet, 1972, 13-15), the U.S. initiated the Gulf War as a "Third Wave" war. Remoteness of the combatant (becoming an "operator") from his victims, and the shift from labor-intensive to technology-based weapon systems are central to this shift. Waging a "clean war" externally and internally alike, the U.S. as their Western counterpart came closer to the underlying point of balance. "Third Wave" armaments also enable states to avoid stimulation of internal resistance to nuclear weapon. At the same time, strategic reorientation also led to the strengthening of defensive capabilities. They might increase military participation in the case of war. However, as the likelihood of immediate war decreases, a defensive posture paves the way for short-term reduction of military participation.
To sum up theoretically, military doctrine is also the mechanism by which states unintentionally regulate the volume of military participation within the previously constructed geo-political and domestic political conditions. The bargain between state groups created impediments for keeping certain methods of war preparation. But bargaining may also serve as the impetus for incorporating technological innovations and the alteration of defensive/offensive methods (as the shift in Israel from war to de-escalation suggests).
Nevertheless, the underlying exchange between military participation and political participation and their implications for state autonomy is invisible. It has partially been addressed by scholars but without addressing the strategic implications of those relations, and completely neglected by statesmen. Only when elites suspect non-elite groups as disloyal to the existing political order (Afro-Americans until the late 1940s, for example), that exchange becomes tangible. This neglected dimension of the relations between states and social groups merits further conceptualization. A sociology of strategy is needed.
[The case study of the Evolution of Israel's Military Doctrine and References are omitted. The full article is available at <http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ley02/>.] -- Yoshie
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