Institutions at the domestic/international nexus: The political-military origins of strategic integration, military effectiveness and war

Civil-military relations, as it has been studied, frequently operates on two distinct levels of analysis---an internal game concerned with leadership survival and regime transition and an external dimension focused on international conflict and war-fighting. This project explores linkages across these two levels of analysis through the medium of states' civil-military (or more broadly, political-military) institutions: the rules and procedures that regulate the military establishment and its relations with political offices.; Domestic factors are essential to understanding why states develop different institutional environments. Two variables are key: the degree to which systematic conflict is observed between the political leadership and officer corps over military strategy, corporate issues, and/or professional codes of conduct ("preference divergence"), and the ability of the military to threaten a leader's tenure in office, indicated both by its position in the ruling coalition and internal cohesion ("military power"). Forgoing the conventional dichotomous concept of civilian control, the project identifies five different institutional settings, each with distinct properties.; These political-military institutions affect states' propensities to integrate military strategies with political objectives, to win the wars they fight, and even to find themselves at war in the first place. Some states are prone to strategically ineffective policies, due to the lack of viable mechanisms for political-military coordination. Others are vulnerable to war due to the information political-military institutions provide them and their allies about state preferences and military capabilities. Especially dangerous are cases in which institutions produce inflated estimates of a state's capabilities, or where they heighten uncertainty about its preferred outcomes in inter-state disputes. In all states, the features of their political-military institutions affect the integration and quality of military activity. Consequently, some states are better able to translate basic resources in men and equipment into fighting power.; These hypotheses are tested with a comprehensive longitudinal case study of Egypt in the 1960s and 1970s. Supplemental case studies were chosen to increase variation on independent variables, and to introduce regional and temporal variation into the analysis. These studies include turn-of-the-century Britain, Wilhelmine Germany, and contemporary Pakistan and Turkey.