Reforming for Wars of the Future

REVIEW BY ROLAND DANNREUTHER

School of Social and Political Studies, Edinburgh University, U.K.

Nations, Alliances and Security. By Chris N. Donnelly. Edited by Sebestyen Gorka.Budapest: Akademiai Kaido, 2004. 204 pp., $35.00 (ISBN: 963-05-8127-2).

Since he joined NATO in 1989 (the year of the velvet revolutions), Chris Donnellyhas served as a Special Advisor for Central and Eastern Europe to four NATOSecretary Generals. If any one man has played a central role in the process ofNATO enlargement and in providing constructive support for military reform inthe newly liberated countries of East-Central Europe, it has been Chris Donnelly.Nations, Alliances and Security brings together a diverse collection of Donnelly’spresentations, analyses, and think piecesFmainly from the period 2000 to 2004.These speeches and essays have been assembled and edited by Sebestyen Gorka,the Director of the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security,the organization responsible for publishing the book. Gorka has brought togetherDonnelly’s works under three broad headings: military reform in East-CentralEurope, the new post-Cold War security environment, and Russia’s military reformprocess.

Briefly skimming through the book, readers, particularly academic readers,could easily dismiss Nations, Alliances and Security. The various chapters of the bookconsist largely of presentations that have not been developed into more polishedprose. At various points, the text is reduced to a series of undeveloped bullet points.Moreover, the book is not a scholarly work. It contains no footnotes or any otherreferences to the literature on the topics discussed. A genuflection now and againto the strategic genius of Karl von Clausewitz represents the book’s only attemptto provide a more theoretically informed framework. The book also suffers fromsloppy editing. Certain sections are repeated verbatim in the text. Gorka has alsoadded a lengthy postscript that has little or no connection to the essays by Donnellyand is of a significantly lower intellectual standard.

However, it would be a mistake to dismiss Nations, Alliances and Security withoutgiving it further consideration. The book may not conform to the standards ofacademic scholarship, but the analysis offeredFin an admittedly unstructured andscattergun approachFhas a depth and illumination at times that is not alwaysevident in more academic volumes. The collection comes across clearly as thedistillation of many years of work by an intelligent, dedicated, and empatheticpolicy analyst who has grappled with the demands of post-Cold War militaryreform in a rapidly changing security environment. Donnelly also wrestles withsome of the fundamental questions regarding the changing nature of contempor-ary international security. In the process, he shows at least a good, if perhapsindirect, awareness of the more academic literature dealing with the new securityagenda (for example, Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1997; Brown et al. 2004).

It is Donnelly’s willingness to engage in deeper reflection combined with hisdirect and sustained engagement with the practical problems of military reformthat make this book worthwhile. The starting point for Donnelly’s analysis isthe structural demands of the Cold War, when the armed forces of the WarsawPact and NATO prepared for the prospect of World War III. The tragedy for the

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International Studies Review (2005) 7, 289–291

Soviet Union and the East bloc countries was that their militaries and societiesactually did prepare themselves for the mass mobilization required for fight-ing such a war. The result was a capable and effective military force, but thatforce was bought at a catastrophic economic cost. That cost delegitimizedthe ideological and political structures of the East, which, as a result, could notsustain this mass war-readiness. This is the legacy that the beleaguered armedforces of the Warsaw Pact countries must overcome in the post-Cold Warenvironment.

Some of the most interesting insights in Nations, Alliances and Security, however,come from Donnelly’s reflections on the legacy of the Cold War for NATO’sEuropean allies. In practice, the Europeans were happy to rely on the protectionprovided by the United States through the policy of extended deterrence.Consequently, ‘‘it was more important to maintain a show of military power thanit was to develop real combat performance’’ (p. 61). In one of the most interestingsections of the book, which develops Clausewitz’s notion of ‘‘friction’’ in warfare,Donnelly argues that the last 50 years, which were characterized by an ‘‘absence offriction,’’ have led to ‘‘complacency, inefficiencies and ultimately failure’’ (p. 101).This history has made most European armies simply unprepared for the demandsof fighting real wars. More important, the Western armed forces forged throughthe Cold War are not structured for the new security threats of illegal migration,organized crime, proliferation of military or dual-use technology, ethnic conflict,and information warfare. Donnelly makes a passionate cry against the continuingcomplacency in Western Europe. He also argues strongly against the reliance ontechnological superiority that characterizes US policy because it is both ‘‘historicallyephemeral’’ and of little utility in any large-scale war. In sum, the need for radicalreform following the Cold War looms as a challenge for the West as well as for theEast.

Donnelly clearly does not underestimate the difficulties and challenges of post-Cold War military reform, especially in East-Central Europe. In fact, his mainobservation is that there has been almost no fully successful reform of the militaryin these countries to date. The problem is that these countries are not only adaptingto a radically changed security environment, they are also undertaking militaryreform in the midst of a revolutionary social, political, and economic transforma-tion. The armed forces of the East-Central European countries have perhapssuffered more than other NATO and Warsaw Pact forces during this period oftransition, having lost the prestige and relatively high level of respect accorded tothem during the communist period. They have also suffered from a degenerationof their capabilities and a collapse in morale. The major structural problems thatneed to be addressed include the development of civilian expertise and oversight,the institution of clear budgeting and financial controls, and a change in cultureamong the bloated officer classFwhich continually seeks to resurrect the oldsystem and thus opposes essential reforms. Donnelly is also honest about howNATO and the Western countries generally have often exacerbated the problems ofreform, by selling expensive and inappropriate weaponry and seeking to imposemodels of reform that are often divorced from the particular culture and conditionsof the countries concerned.

Overall, Nations, Alliances and Security provides a sobering and penetratinganalysis of the current international security predicament and how significantchallenges remain for military reform in both NATO and former Warsaw Pactcountries. Donnelly’s fear is that a degree of complacency has developed, not unlikethe attitudes in Europe prior to World War I. As a result, our armed forces aresimply not prepared for the rigors and demands of future wars. In that light,Nations, Alliances and Security raises issues that should be confronted by everyonewith an interest in contemporary security studies and in the challenges andobstacles to military reform in both East and West.

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References

BUZAN, BARRY, OLE WÆVER, AND JAAP DE WILDE. (1997) Security: A New Framework for Analysis.Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

BROWN, MICHAEL E., OWEN R. COTY, SEAN M. LYNN-JONES, AND STEPHEN E. MILLER. (2004) GlobalDangers: Changing Dimensions of International Security. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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