Book Review - Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism

Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism

Written by: Michael C Desch,

John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 2008, 

ISBN: 9780801888014232 pp.

Reviewed by: Ross Mallett

Democratic triumphalism—a term coined by Michael Desch in this book—is defined as a belief that ‘not only does the spread of democracy make the world more benign by reducing the likelihood of wars among liberal states, but democracies enjoy certain advantages in their relations with nondemocratic states, particularly when they are at war with them’. Historian Victor Davis Hanson put it this way in The Soul of Battle:

Democracy, and its twin of market capitalism, alone can instantaneously create lethal armies out of civilians, equip them with horrific engines of war, imbue them with a near-messianic zeal within a set time and place to exterminate what they understand as evil, have them follow to their deaths the most ruthless of men, and then melt anonymously back into the culture that produced them. It is democracies, which in the right circumstances, can be imbued with the soul of battle, and thus turn the horror of killing to a higher purpose of saving lives and freeing the enslaved. ¹

If true, democratic states have a powerful advantage in wartime. The question remains whether it is true. The debate about whether democracy is a liability or an asset in war goes back a long way—indeed, all the way back to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who, in his classic History of the Peloponnesian War, blamed Athenian democracy for that conflict, which was mismanaged by and ultimately disastrous for Athens. Since then conventional wisdom has been that democracies are at a disadvantage when fighting other states. Until very recently that is, when democratic triumphalism began to take hold, assuming more than academic importance when it became accepted at the highest levels of government in the United States, and probably elsewhere as well.

As real and important as this debate might be, it still seems suspiciously made of straw in the light of the botched and all but lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the more recent economic crisis that has dealt a body blow to the reputation of market capitalism. The similarities between ancient Athens and the United States of the present day have been discussed and debated by many historians, including Hanson in A War Like No Other,² and Desch in the conclusion of this book.

Desch attempts to be objective about the matter. The first problem is to define how democratic a country is. This is no easy matter, but there are some published indexes that provide numerical values for democracy, such as the POLITY IV index that Desch uses.

The empirical analysis of military power is not new either. Back in 1920, in his Australian Victories in France, John Monash provided a series of metrics that showed the Australian divisions in France in 1918 were between 2.24 and 2.47 times as effective as the average of their British counterparts.³ In 1963, the Correlates of War project was begun at the University of Michigan as a systemic study with the stated objective of coming up with an integrated theory of war. In the 1980s, Trevor N Dupuy created a numerical theory of combat in Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat.⁴ This has been taken further by other historians, notably Stephen Biddle in Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle.⁵ Potentially, such models could be extremely useful tools for the military planner, for example, to predict casualty rates. This after all is how we estimate fuel and ammunition consumption, and various other logistical factors. At the moment though, they do not work well enough.

I had a go at this myself once. Applying the Dupuy model to the Western Front upheld Monash’s metrics. Though when applied to Gallipoli, the surprising result indicated that the relative effectiveness of the Australian and Turkish armies was about the same as in 1918, implying that over the course of the war both armies improved at a similar rate. This is a feature of models, in that the answers they produce tend to fall into one of three categories: the obvious, the interesting, and the downright bizarre. My result fell into the second category, which is what we are usually looking for.

Desch plugs POLITY democracy scores as variables into the Correlates of War model, looking for correlation. As it turns out, there is one, but is very weak. What does correlate strongly? Well, showing up with a much larger army for one thing, which I categorise under ‘the obvious’.

Desch then examines a few cases in detail, including the Russo-Polish War (1919-1920); the Arab-Israel Wars of 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982; and the Falklands War (1982). In each of these conflicts, the nature of both sides is examined with reference to the arguments put forward both for and against democratic triumphalism.

At times he gets confused over the nature of democracy, which in its modern form probably owes less to the Greeks than the Romans, who employed representative democracy and bicameralism. This is not normally made much of because Roman democracy ultimately failed under the social pressures created by Rome’s expansion from a city state into an empire. Representative democracy in its modern form places decision-making in the hands of a few elected representatives. In a democracy at war such as Israel in 1973, Britain in 1982 or Australia in the Second World War, decisions are often taken by an even smaller than usual war cabinet. This is not undemocratic, but part and parcel of democracy as we know it. Similarly, just because Israel has a multiparty proportional representational system does not make it a ‘dysfunctional democracy’ (p. 99)—just one in a form less familiar to American eyes. Indeed the American system might look less democratic to Israelis or Australians than their own—and with good reason.

In the end, the book is one long polemic demolishing an idea that few readers are likely to entertain for long in the first place.

Endnotes:

1    Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, Free Press, New York, 1999, p. 4.

2    Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, Random House, New York, 2005.

3    John Monash, The Australian Victories in France in 1918, Hutchinson & Co, London, 1920, p. 286.

4    T N Dupuy, Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat, Paragon House, New York, 1987.

5    Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004.