Evolution or Revolution?

Note

This essay appeared in a roundtable review and discussion of Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle by Stephen Biddle (Princeton University Press, 2004).

Stephen Biddle has written a book which is a major contribution to the analysis of military power and, in doing so, has done a great service both to the world of policy analysis, which seeks to generate and use military power in the most reasonable ways, and to political science, which uses power as a central concept in its theories, but often only with minimal efforts to understand its sources and character. Biddle is an expert on the subject, is deeply immersed in the technical analyses of military power, but makes every effort to make his arguments accessible and relevant to the broader audience of educated readers. There are two clear themes to this book. Both can be stated briefly, though the first is the more straightforward of the two.

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