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Abstract
Under conditions of intensifying strategic competition, great powers and less-than-great powers alike are reappraising their national-security strategies. Central to such reviews are assessments of power and strategic advantage – in an era of great-power competition, states need to know who is winning. This is the function of strategic net assessment, recently revived in the United Kingdom through the Secretary of State’s Office for Net Assessment and Challenge. This paper sets out the conceptual challenges involved in making assessments of power, considers the main historical efforts to do so, and offers some practical guidance as to how strategic net assessment may be used to inform strategy.
Notes
1 See Michael J. Mazarr, ‘Understanding Competition: Great Power Rivalry in a Changing International Order – Concepts and Theories’, RAND Corporation, 2022.
2 See Daniel Nexon, ‘Against Great Power Competition: The U.S. Should Not Confuse Means for Ends’, Foreign Affairs, 15 February 2021.
3 See Matthew Kroenig, The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy Versus Autocracy from the Ancient World to the U.S. and China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. xiii.
4 See Michael Pillsbury, The Hundredyear Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, 1st ed. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015).
5 White House, ‘National Security Strategy’, October 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wpcontent/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf.
6 HM Government, ‘Integrated Review Refresh 2023: Responding to a More Contested and Volatile World’, pp. 2–3, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/641d72f45155a2000c6ad5d5/11857435_NS_IR_Refresh_2023_Supply_AllPages_Revision_7_WEB_PDF.pdf.
7 Office of the National Security Council, Thailand, ‘Executive Summary: National Security Policy and Plan B.E. 2566–2570 (2023–2027)’, p. 15, https://www.nsc.go.th/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ExcutiveSummary.pdf; and National Security Council, Philippines, ‘National Security Policy 2023–2028’, p. 12, https://nsc.gov.ph/images/NSS_NSP/National_Security_Policy_Manual_FINAL_E-COPY_with_WATERMARK_140823.pdf.
8 Government of Vanuatu, ‘Vanuatu National Security Strategy: Secure and Resilient’, 2019, p. 16, https://www.gov.vu/images/publications/Vanuatu_National_Security_Strategy.pdf.
9 See Gabriel Elefteriu, ‘A Question of Power: Towards Better UK Strategy Through Net Assessment’, Policy Exchange, November 2018, https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/A-Question-of-Power-Net-Assessment-Gabriel-Elefteriu-Policy-Exchange-November-2018.pdf.
10 See Jeffrey S. McKitrick and Robert G. Angevine (eds), Reflections on Net Assessment (Jaffrey, NH, and Alexandria, VA: Andrew W. Marshall Foundation and Institute for Defense Analyses, 2022).
11 Elefteriu, ‘A Question of Power’, p. 5.
12 Gabriel Elefteriu, ‘The MoD’s Newly Independent “Net Assessment” Capability Can Make a Huge Difference’, Policy Exchange, 18 January 2022, https://policyexchange.org.uk/blogs/the-mods-newly-independent-netassessment-capability-can-make-ahuge-difference/.
13 Daniel Frei, ‘Vom Mass der Macht’, Schweizer Monatshefte, vol. 49, no. 7, 1969, p. 646. I am grateful to Vera Linke for her assiduous translation of Frei’s work.
14 Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), p. 246.
15 See David A. Baldwin, Power and International Relations: A Conceptual Approach (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Robert A. Dahl, ‘The Concept of Power’, Behavioral Science, vol. 2, no. 3, 1957; Harold Lasswell and Abraham Kaplan, Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950); and Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
16 See Dahl, ‘The Concept of Power’.
17 See Baldwin, Power and International Relations.
18 See Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 191–3.
19 See Peter Morriss, Power: A Philosophical Analysis, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).
20 See Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, ‘Power in International Politics’, International Organization, vol. 59, no. 1, 2005.
21 In 2014, a statistical ‘re-basing’ of GDP statistics saw Nigeria’s GDP grow by 89% overnight. See Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
22 Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Notes on the Elusiveness of Modern Power’, International Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, 1975. See also Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, ‘State Building for Future Wars: Neoclassical Realism and the Resource-extractive State’, Security Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, July–September 2006, pp. 464–95.
23 For more on characterising power by form, see Lukes, Power. For more on characterising it by structures, see Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). For more on characterising it by means of operation, see Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, 1st ed. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004).
24 See Stefano Guzzini, ‘Fungibility of Power Resources’, in Keith Dowding (ed.), Encyclopedia of Power (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2011), pp. 266–7.
25 See Robert J. Art, ‘Force and Fungibility Reconsidered’, Security Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, Summer 1999, pp. 183–9.
26 See David A. Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 167.
27 A 2001 RAND Corporation study notes that ‘it is not always clear which resources are appropriate as measures of real power, or whether the resources nominally possessed in any given instance are actually usable by the actor in question’. ‘Despite these difficulties’, the report continues, ‘the concept of power as resources has remained attractive enough and will not be easily discarded’. Ashley J. Tellis et al., ‘Measuring National Power in the Postindustrial Age’, RAND Corporation, 2000, p. 14.
28 The point that there is no form of power that is ‘basic to all the others’ is made in Lasswell and Kaplan, Power and Society, p. 94. For more on realist perspectives, see Edward Hallett Carr and Michael Cox, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Waltz, Theory of International Politics.
29 See Dominic D.P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
30 David A. Baldwin, ‘Force, Fungibility, and Influence’, Security Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, Summer 1999, p. 175.
31 See Carl Kaysen, ‘Is War Obsolete? A Review Essay’, International Security, vol. 14, no. 4, Spring 1990, pp. 42–64; Michael Mandelbaum, ‘Is Major War Obsolete?’, Survival, vol. 40, no. 4, Winter 1998–99, pp. 20–38; John Mueller, ‘The Obsolescence of Major War’, Bulletin of Peace Proposals, vol. 21, no. 3, 1990, pp. 321–8; and Nina Tannenwald, ‘The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Normative Basis of Nuclear Nonuse’, International Organization, vol. 53, no. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 433–68.
32 Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Net Assessment: An American Approach’, Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 1990, p. 4.
33 Stephen Peter Rosen, ‘Net Assessment as an Analytical Concept’, in Andrew W. Marshall, J.J. Martin and Henry S. Rowen (eds), On Not Confusing Ourselves: Essays on National Security Strategy in Honor of Albert & Roberta Wohlstetter (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), p. 290.
34 See International Institute for Strategic Studies, ‘The Military Balance’, https://www.iiss.org/publications/the-military-balance/.
35 Andrew W. Marshall, ‘Problems of Estimating Military Power’, RAND Corporation, August 1966, p. 2.
36 Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Toward Better Net Assessment: Rethinking the European Conventional Balance’, International Security, vol. 13, no. 1, Summer 1988, p. 85.
37 Cohen, ‘Net Assessment: An American Approach’, p. 4.
38 Allan Millett and Williamson Murray’s three-volume history of military effectiveness was commissioned by Andrew Marshall for the Office of Net Assessment, and deals with both world wars and the interwar period. See Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, Military Effectiveness: Volume 1, The First World War, new ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, Military Effectiveness: Volume 2, The Interwar Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, Military Effectiveness: Volume 3, The Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The question of the sources of military effectiveness is fundamental to the classics of strategic studies, as well as being the animating concern of military-operations research, and a wealth of work in sociology and political science that considers the vast array of social and political variables that may underpin a state’s capacity to translate basic resources into military power. Stephen Biddle, ‘Military Effectiveness’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), https://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-35.
39 See George E. Pickett, James G. Roche and Barry D. Watts, ‘Net Assessment: A Historical Review’, in Marshall, Martin and Rowen (eds), On Not Confusing Ourselves, p. 177.
40 Rosen, ‘Net Assessment as an Analytical Concept’, p. 284.
41 This conceit often obscured some of the more subtle insights of the Chicago School’s leading lights. Frank Knight, for example, highlighted the importance of both risk – where probabilities could be determined – and uncertainty – where probabilities could not be known. Frank Hyneman Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1921).
42 See Andrew F. Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy (New York: Basic Books, 2015), pp. 13–15.
43 See Dmitry Adamsky, ‘The Art of Net Assessment and Uncovering Foreign Military Innovations: Learning from Andrew W. Marshall’s Legacy’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 43, no. 5, 2020.
44 Marshall, ‘Problems of Estimating Military Power’, p. 9.
45 Quoted in Mie Augier, ‘Thinking About War and Peace: Andrew Marshall and the Early Development of the Intellectual Foundations for Net Assessment’, Comparative Strategy, vol. 32, no. 1, 2013, p. 6.
46 See United States National Security Council, ‘Memorandum for Record: National Net Assessment’, 10 April 1973.
47 See Stephen Peter Rosen, ‘The Impact of the Office of Net Assessment on the American Military in the Matter of the Revolution in Military Affairs’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, August 2010, pp. 469–82.
48 Cohen, ‘Toward Better Net Assessment’, p. 89.
49 Thomas Skypek, ‘Evaluating Military Balances Through the Lens of Net Assessment: History and Application’, Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, Winter 2010, pp. 20–1.
50 Franz-Stefan Gady, ‘Is the Pentagon’s Andrew Marshall the Leo Strauss of Military Analysis?’, Diplomat, 14 January 2015, https://thediplomat.com/2015/01/is-the-pentagons-andrew-marshall-theleo-strauss-of-military-analysis/.
51 The Russian term sootnosheniye sil has been variously translated as ‘correlation’, ‘alignment’, ‘ratio’ and ‘relationship of forces’. While some US translators opted for ‘balance of power’, Soviet translations avoided this term since the balance of power was anathema to progressive class struggle. Instead, they drew a clear conceptual distinction between the terms. Michael J. Deane, ‘The Soviet Concept of the “Correlation of Forces”’, Stanford Research Institute Strategic Studies Center, May 1976, pp. 43–5.
52 See ibid., p. iv.
53 See Julian Lider, ‘The Correlation of World Forces: The Soviet Concept’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 17, no. 2, June 1980, p. 151; and Vernon V. Aspaturian, ‘Soviet Global Power and the Correlation of Forces’, Problems of Communism, vol. 29, May–June 1980, pp. 9–10.
54 See Deane, ‘The Soviet Concept of the “Correlation of Forces”’, pp. 23–4.
55 See A. Sergiyev, ‘Leninism as a Factor of International Relations’, International Affairs (Moscow), May 1975, p. 101.
56 See Aspaturian, ‘Soviet Global Power and the Correlation of Forces’, p. 10.
57 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992); and Nicholas Kitchen and Michael Cox, ‘Just Another Liberal War? Western Interventionism and the Iraq War’, in Amitav Acharya and Hiro Katsumata (eds), Beyond Iraq: The Future of World Order (Singapore: World Scientific, 2011), pp. 65–84.
58 The authors of a 2017 study on ‘protean power’ cite Mary Sarotte’s description of the historical accident that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall as an example of how radical uncertainty pervades international politics. See Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic Books, 2014), cited in Peter J. Katzenstein and Lucia A. Seybert, Protean Power: Exploring the Uncertain and Unexpected in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 5.
59 Aaron B. Frank, ‘Toward Computational Net Assessment’, Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation, vol. 14, no. 1, 2017.
60 See Barry Buzan, ‘A New Cold War? The Case for a General Concept’, International Politics, vol. 61, no. 2, March 2024, pp. 1–19.
61 See John Clark, ‘Left in the Dark: How a Lack of Understanding of National Power Generation Threatens Our Way of Life’, Policy Exchange, July 2019, https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Left-inthe-dark.pdf.
62 Observing how US intelligence assessed the Soviet Union’s early nuclear-weapons programme, David Lilienthal, then chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, wrote: ‘The thing that rather chills one’s blood is to observe what is nothing less than lack of integrity in the way the intelligence agencies deal with the meagre stuff they have. It is chiefly a matter of reasoning from our own American experience, guessing from that how much longer it will take Russia using our methods and based upon our own problems of achieving weapons. But when this is put into a report, the reader, e.g., Congressional committee, is given the impression, and deliberately, that behind the estimates lies specific knowledge, knowledge so important and delicate that its nature and sources cannot be disclosed or hinted at.’ David Eli Lilienthal, The Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Volume 2: The Atomic Energy Years, 1945–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 376.
63 Andrew W. Marshall, ‘Long-term Competition with the Soviets: A Framework for Strategic Analysis’, RAND Corporation, April 1972, p. v.
64 See Krepinevich and Watts, The Last Warrior, pp. 153–92.
65 Peter Roberts and Sidharth Kaushal, ‘Strategic Net Assessment: Opportunities and Pitfalls’, RUSI Journal, vol. 163, no. 6, 2018, p. 70.
66 Ibid., p. 74.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nicholas Kitchen
Nicholas Kitchen is Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Power Competition (CGPC) and Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Surrey.