Military Power:
Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle

Stephen Biddle

ost people know far less than they think about military strategy. Members of the news media, news pundits and politicians, in particular, despite their boundless self-confidence, often seem completely clueless about what factors are necessary to provide a strong military. Even ex-generals and self-proclaimed war heroes often give contradictory advice, much of it nonsensical and some of it potentially disastrous, about how to handle a given crisis.

Even within the military, there are conflicting opinions about the relative merits of logistical superiority and force employment. Computer predictions of casualty rates are often off by an order of magnitude. Enthusiastic academics often take the position that nothing important about strategy was known before their spiffy new theory. These factors compel military strategists to support their ideas with statistics and complicated computational models in order to distinguish themselves from the army of armchair generals that populate our living rooms, classrooms, and news studios.

Military Power is not a textbook, but a proposal of a new theory and some thoughtful analysis. Since most of the gory mathematical details are in the appendix, Biddle's knowledgeable presentation will also acquaint lay readers with the issues and concepts that defense analysts grapple with. The theory itself is nothing fancy. It consists of simple equations that calculate scalar parameters such as assault velocity and attacker to defender ratio. These formulas cannot take into account psychological and political factors such as shock, morale, intelligence and surprise, or the inherent time-dependent nonlinearities of a battle. However, they can provide valuable rules of thumb that give commanders confidence in their logistical plans, and can also provide some important qualitative results. Biddle's main conclusion is that material wherewithal is a poor indicator of real military outcomes. This view is disputed by many anthropologists of war, such as Lawrence H. Keeley. The implications of this conclusion are far-ranging. For one, it calls into question the idea that Allied industrial superiority predetermined the outcome of WWII.

Biddle, an Army academic, concentrates exclusively on the use of ground forces such as artillery, tanks, and infantry in conventional land battles, mostly ignoring missiles, which have forced the invention of radical new strategies, especially for naval and air forces. Biddle says that modern warfare (that is, ground warfare) has changed relatively little since World War I. He contrasts this "modern system military", which employs defense in depth, to the old system of fixed emplacements and massed infantry. The disadvantages of the old system are readily apparent, but the newer tactics are more difficult to implement. However, even when two armies employ similar tactics and have similar objectives, predicting which army will prevail is still a difficult challenge. This is especially true in areas such as naval combat, missile warfare, and unconventional warfare, all of which are well beyond the scope of Biddle's theory.