| In 2002, the heads of state and government of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began to create a force structure comprised of lighter, faster, and more readily deployable headquarters and forces to be known as the NATO Rapid Deployment Corps (NRDCs). This marked the beginning of the end of a process of significant post-Cold War doctrinal and command and force structure revisions for the alliance. But in 2002, as NATO began to implement significant changes in its command and force structures, why did the alliance waste money on capabilities it did not need? Why did it develop more high readiness forces and commands than it said it needed, while allowing other capabilities---capabilities that NATO itself identified as crucial to fulfilling alliance strategy, such as in sustainment and deployment---to be shortchanged? Military command and force structures typically flow from military doctrine, and the case of how NATO responded to the end of the Cold War by developing rapid response capabilities and shifting away from territorial defense provides an interesting, unique window through which we can examine the sources of military doctrine generally and the integration of doctrine, structures, and strategy more specifically.; Most traditional academic approaches to the sources of military doctrine emphasize structural or functional arguments---that is, they argue military doctrine is a result of the structure of the international system and hence of threats, or of the functional characteristics of organizations and their subcomponents. Other academics have found both structural and functional approaches somewhat lacking and, in response, have developed an array of alternative approaches that often emphasize more actor-specific cultural, institutional, or political factors as the determining elements shaping an entity's doctrine. As a result, the debate over the sources of military doctrine is still very much unsettled.; This dissertation will show that a threat-based perspective is necessary but insufficient for explaining NATO's response to the changing environment of the post-Cold War era for a variety of reasons. In order to get a complete picture of the process and outcome of NATO's post-Cold War doctrinal and structural reviews, intra-alliance political bargaining factors are necessary as an additional explanatory tool, and it is here where we must draw on theoretical means beyond those offered by most traditional approaches in order to explain what happened. In presenting the post-Cold War story of how NATO went from a heavy military doctrine and structure to a lighter, more deployable, expeditionary doctrine and structure, this dissertation will also show how NATO's attempts at doctrinal and structural change throughout the 1990s were suboptimal, leaving the alliance poorly prepared for security challenges during the first decade after the Soviet Union's demise that its own strategy said it should have been ready to handle. |
