Planning to Escalate to Deescalate: Military Alliances and Innovation during France's Cold War

Abstract

Military innovation’s salience within international relations is growing as the world evolves towards increasing multipolarity. Political leaders, whether in the United States, Europe or China, are pushing their states’ armed services to develop the capabilities they regard as strategically essential. Many of states’ contemporary military innovations aim, however, to either dissolve hostile coalitions or bind their own alliances more closely together. To improve our understanding of this phenomenon, I advance a rationalist alliance-based theory of military innovation that improves upon this state of affairs. Political leaders in states whose security depends significantly, but not entirely, on alliance relationships, will seek to shape their militaries’ doctrines and force postures to maximize the security benefits they receive through the alliance. Military innovation, to the extent that political decision-makers control the process, will consequently be shaped by governments’ efforts to buck-pass or chain gang vis- à-vis their alliance partners. The extent to which states’ military doctrines both reflect leaders’ alliance preferences and are militarily viable will, in turn, be shaped by the quality of the institutional structures by which political leaders’ preferences are translated into military plans and policies. My study demonstrates the plausibility of this approach by applying the analytic framework provided by actor-centred institutionalism (ACI) to three major modifications to French military doctrine between 1958 and 1981.

Panel: Military Innovation in the Long Peace

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EISS 2019 programme

@inproceedings{eiss-2019-planning-to-escalate-to-deescalate-military-alliances-and-innovation-during-fran,
  author = {Marc R. De Vore},
  title = {Planning to Escalate to Deescalate: Military Alliances and Innovation during France's Cold War},
  booktitle = {European Security Studies Conference 2019},
  year = {2019},
  url = {https://eiss-europa.com/papers/2019-planning-to-escalate-to-deescalate-military-alliances-and-innovation-during-fran.html}
}