THE UNITED STATES NAVAL WAR COLLEGE NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS DEPARTMENT

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1 THE UNITED STATES NAVAL WAR COLLEGE NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS DEPARTMENT Theater Security Decision Making Course LEVELS OF ANALYSIS: A CONCEPTUAL APPROACH TO UNDERSTANDING NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS David T. Burbach May 2015 TSDM 1-1/2-1

2 National security analysts and decision makers operate in very complex world one shaped by global and regional security environments, political systems, organizations, and networks of actors, and the individual traits and backgrounds of leaders. In trying to anticipate and shape developments in the world, there is a tremendous range of factors strategists must consider. Looking to the future global security environment, will the world be multipolar or unipolar? How will technologies ranging from UAVs to Twitter change global politics? Would a world filled with democratic regimes lead to a more peaceful international system? A quick perusal of journals like Foreign Affairs will reveal a wide range of arguments about which factors, from local to global, most powerfully shape world politics. Another large collection of arguments focus on what the U.S. should do in response to global trends, or how we can make our national security institutions effective at implementing our responses. Any student of national security affairs faces the challenge of making analysis of these interrelated issues conceptually manageable. One useful framework for organizing complex security issues is commonly referred to as levels of analysis : where each level is a broad category into which arguments and policy recommendations can be grouped, based on the types of actors and forces addressed by that argument. Political scientist Kenneth Waltz is credited with developing this approach in his book Man, the State, and War. 1. Waltz suggested that the causes of war and peace could be looked at from three levels: within man, within the structure of the separate states, and within the state system. 2 To rephrase, Waltz first level or within man means causes at the level of individual statesmen, or from human nature generally. The second level, structure of the separate states, includes factors relating to type of political system of specific nations, their domestic politics, and the behavior of organizations within a state. Finally the third level or within the state system covers arguments about how the nature of global politics itself affects the behavior of the states within it. In proposing this framework, Waltz did not mean that there are only three theories about the causes of war. On the contrary, each level is a category, and each category includes many theories. For example, while many people argue that democracies are the least war-prone type of government, others have claimed that history shows military dictatorships also start very few wars. Those arguments oppose each other, yet they both belong to the second level or statebased category of theories. Waltz argued that any theory about international politics could be 1 Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959). 2 Looking back farther, Waltz levels can be related to Thucydides trinity of honor (human level), interest (state level) and fear (international system). Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War,

3 placed into one of the three categories, and that doing so was a useful intellectual construct. Theories operating at the same level share some common emphases and assumptions about what drives world politics, and thus there are related questions one might ask or similar types of evidence one might want to examine to assess those theories validity. In the fifty years since Waltz introduced his framework, it has become widely used for studying and teaching international relations. Not long after Man, the State, and War was written, J. David Singer suggested the levels of analysis perspective was useful for international relations research broadly not just for the study of war. 3 Today the levels framework is usually one of the first things introduced in international relations courses. For example, Joshua Goldstein (American Univ.) and Jon Pevehouse (Univ. of Chicago) succinctly describe levels of analysis in their popular textbook as: One way scholars of IR [International Relations] have sorted out the multiplicity of influences, actors, and processes is to categorize them into different levels of analysis. A level of analysis is a perspective on IR based on a set of similar actors or processes that suggests possible explanations to why questions. IR scholars have proposed various level-of-analysis schemes, most often with three main levels: individual, states, and international system. The individual level of analysis concerns the perceptions, choices, and actions of individual human beings. Great leaders influence the course of history, as do individual thinkers, citizens, soldiers, and voters. Without Lenin, it is said, there might have been no Soviet Union. If a few more college students had voted for Nixon than Kennedy, the Cuban Missile Crisis might have ended differently The state or societal level of analysis concerns the aggregations of individuals within states that influence state actions in the international arena. Such aggregations include interest groups, political organizations, and government agencies. These groups operate differently, with different international effects, in different kinds of societies and states. For instance, democracies and dictatorships may act differently from one another The politics of ethnic conflict and nationalism play increasingly important roles in the relations among states. Within governments, foreign policy agencies often fight bureaucratic battles over policy decisions. The interstate or systemic level of analysis concerns the influence of the international system upon outcomes. This level of analysis therefore focuses on 3 J. David Singer, The Levels-of-Analysis Problem in International Relations, World Politics, vol 14, no 1 (October 1961), pp

4 the interaction of states themselves, without regard to their internal makeup or the particular individuals who lead them. This level pays attention to states relative power positions in the international system and the interactions among them. 4 Pevehouse and Goldstein are not alone; many of the most respected university-level texts on international relations use levels of analysis as a basic scheme for organizing their material. 5 help visualize the relationship between these levels, Paul Viotti and Mark Kauppi offer the following simple diagram: 6 To 4 Joshua S. Goldstein and Jon C. Pevehouse, International Relations, 8 th Ed. (New York: Pearson-Longman, 2008), p For example, John T. Rourke, International Politics on the World Stage (New York: McGraw- Hill, 2001); Charles W. Kegley and Eugene Wittkopf, World Politics: Trend and Transformation (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2001); and Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, Causes of War (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 6 Paul R. Viotti and Mark V. Kauppi, International Relations Theory: Realism, Pluralism, Globalism, 2 nd Ed., (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1993), p

5 There are many examples of how the levels framework can be applied to analyze international behavior at global and regional scales. First, the individual level highlights the importance of specific leaders in making and implementing foreign policy like Goldstein & Pevehouse s example of Lenin. Clearly, different leaders have different goals for their nations, and an individual-level assessment would point to those views as an important explanatory factor in world politics. 7 Many Germans hated the Versailles Treaty, but would every possible German leader have been consumed with genocidal anti-semitism like Hitler? Did Napoleon s victories depend on extreme personal competence on his part or would swapping McLellan and Lee have changed the outcome of any campaigns? Beyond specific personalities, individual level analyses also look broadly at issues of human character and cognition. 8 For example, psychological experiments show humans (and other primates) care more about losing something they already have than gaining something new of equal value an emotional pattern that could affect decisions for war or peace negotiations. 9 Other examples could be whether humans are hard-wired for conflict and violence, or whether male and female leaders make different foreign policy decisions? The state / society level also encompasses a broad range of issues. A basic question is how; if at all, different governmental systems affect the international behavior of nations. For example, it is commonly argued that democracies are less warlike than other regime types a claim believed not only by scholars, 10 but that has become a bedrock assumption of U.S. National Security Strategies. Different cultures too, might behave differently in the international arena. This level of analysis also points to the importance of governmental organizations and domestic political systems in setting national security policy. Indeed, scholars often distinguish between analyzing foreign policy the output of national policy processes -- versus analyzing international 7 Most IR scholars emphasize state and system level factors, but for an example of scholars making a case for individual-level effects see Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back In, International Security, vol 25 (2001), no 4, pp For a survey, see Levy and Thompson, chapter 5. 9 Robert Jervis, Political Implications of Loss Aversion, Political Psychology, vol. 13, no. 2 (1992), pp For articles making the case both for and against the democratic peace, see Michael Brown, Sean Lynn-Jones, and Steven Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 4

6 relations. 11 U.S. policy does not emerge from an Oracle of strategy, but from an elected President and elected Congress, working in a milieu of interest groups, mass media, and public opinion. The U.S. embargo on selling grain to the Soviet Union after their invasion of Afghanistan was ended not due to a change in President Carter s Soviet policy, for example, but due to pressure from farm state interest groups and senators. The second level also highlights the fact that any strategy, no matter how well-designed, must be carried out by organizations. Whatever goals might exist in a leader s mind, the nature, interests, and capabilities of the organizations implementing that vision will shape actual foreign policy outputs. 12 Thus, organizational behavior and culture can be important influences on how policy is developed. The international system level includes a wide range of potential forces. At the core of this approach is looking to the power relationships between states and to the rules of the game that shape the international system at any given time. At a minimum, understanding how two states relate involves not just the nature of the states, but the strategic interaction between them. 13 More broadly, some theories attempt to describe behavior from a global perspective. For example, a classic question is how international politics differs depending on whether the world is bipolar (as in the Cold War), multipolar (as in 19 th Century Europe), or has a single hegemonic power (such as the U.S. post-cold War). There is no agreement among scholars about which types of polarity are more peaceful vs more conflict-prone, but there is widespread agreement that it matters; states with the same domestic systems and same leaders would behave differently in a world dominated by a single hegemon vs a world characterized by multipolar competition. Some scholars focus only on these power relationships, 14 but most consider other global-level forces and trends. Changes in military technology can change international dynamics. Many argue, for example, that nuclear weapons have made great power war less likely and may 11 See for example Valerie Hudson, Foreign Policy Analysis: Classic and Contemporary Theory (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2013) or Steve Smith, Amelia Hadfield, Tim Dunne, eds., Foreign Policy: Theories, Actors, Cases (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 12 A classic study on this theme is Graham Allison and Phillip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2 nd Ed (New York: Longman, 1999). 13 Levy and Thompson, p 55. International relations scholars use the term dyadic to refer to theories that predict how two nations interact, and systemic for theories that predict overall behaviors within a population of many states. 14 Ken Waltz went on to write Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), which offers a framework for world politics driven only by system-level relationships. A more recent and more readable author emphasizing geopolitical relations above all is John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2003). 5

7 actually facilitate international cooperation. 15 Global environmental trends, like climate change or resource scarcity, could also have systemic effects. The existence of supranational institutions like alliances, free trade areas, or formal organizations like the United Nations is another variable that shapes international behavior -- one that varies greatly from region to region (e.g., Europe with the EU is very different than East Asia with weaker institutions). 16 In a recent International Studies Review article, Parent and Barron described the relationship of these levels well: At one extreme are theories of international politics [which] deduce broad, long-term patterns produced by the interaction of units within a system, such as the extent to which a group of states will tend to coexist in peace or fight wars. At the other extreme are theories of decision making they detail how specific choices were made and the processes that produced them. Between theories of international politics and of decision making are theories of foreign policy, which focus on the grand strategic behavior of individual states. 17 The three levels provide an integrated framework for analysis, not competing independent theories. As Levy and Thompson explain, international relations scholars today accept that powerful theories need to incorporate variables from multiple levels. 18 Goldstein and Pevehouse put this clearly: There is no single correct level for a given question. Rather, levels help suggest multiple explanations and approaches to consider in trying to explain an event. 19 If you are analyzing a foreign policy problem and have not considered factors at all three levels, you probably have left out important dimensions of the prediction or decision. The three levels provide useful cuts individually, but are most powerful when viewed together. 15 Kenneth Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper no. 171 (London: IISS, 1981). 16 Waltz focused only on relative national power as a system-level factor. Some authors add additional fourth, fifth, and more levels for factors such as the environment, technology, or ideas and norms. Others include such factors as additional third-level concerns. For simplicity, TSDM follows the latter approach and keeps the number of levels at three. 17 Joseph Parent and Joshua Baron, Elder Abuse: How the Moderns Mistreat Classical Realism, International Studies Review, vol 13 (2011), p Levy and Thompson, pp Waltz himself was arguing in Man, the State, and War that one level the systemic or third level -- was more important than the other two, but most scholars accept that monocausal theories offer very limited predictions and explanations for international behaviors. 19 Goldstein and Pevehouse, p

8 To illustrate, consider an analyst who jumps to the personal preferences of a particular leader to explain that nation s actions. It would be easy to conclude that with a different leader, that nation would behave differently, perhaps more favorably to U.S. interests. Possibly, but the analyst should also ask whether that country s political system might have led to the action and would do so again with a different individual on top. Likewise, there might be forces in regional security relationships that create incentives for that action. Similarly, analysts who see only grand systemic forces should remember that states are not black boxes: leaders, nations, and regions differ from one another. For example, Ayatollah Khamenei and other top leaders in Iran clearly decide whether Iran will have a nuclear program, but any Iranian leader would face a difficult regional security environment, and would know that the nuclear program is a source of technological pride and is popular with the Iranian public (as nuclear weapons have been in India or Pakistan too). Individual subject matter expert may need to focus on just one level in their work, but as consumers of strategic analysis and producers of national security decisions, military officers, diplomats, and other professionals should remember the broad range of perspectives to consider. Useful as the levels framework is, one should also have a healthy understanding of the limits of a theoretical approach to world politics. The behavior of humans and human institutions is simply not as predictable as that of a physical system. As Columbia University s Richard Betts stated, simple visions, however powerful, do not hold up as reliable predictors of particular developments. Visions are vital for clarifying thinking about the forces that drive international relations, the main directions to expect events to take, and one's basic faith in matters of politics, but they cannot account for many specifics in the actual complexity of political life." 20 The TSDM course will employ levels of analysis and other frameworks, but they should be understood as heuristics rather than precise laws. LEVELS OF ANALYSIS AND TSDM As with many others who teach international relations and foreign policy, the National Security Affairs faculty has found that the levels-of-analysis framework is a useful way to organize the material we teach. This is true not only for gaining an intellectual understanding of world affairs, but we think the levels-of-analysis approach also maps well onto the skills that national security professionals need to develop to become well-rounded analysts and practitioners. Selfaware leaders, working within organizations and a broader political system, need to understand the myriad complexities in order to respond to challenge of making and implementing theater- 20 Richard Betts, Conflict or Cooperation: Three Visions Revisited, Foreign Affairs, September/October

9 level strategy. Understanding a security environment is not enough; military and civilian national security leaders need to able to make decisions, and to guide large, complex organizations as they implement those decisions. To illustrate how the three levels operate simultaneously, consider one of the basic tasks for a Combatant Command: theater security cooperation planning. At the international level, planners need to understand emerging threats, regional security relationships and how regional concerns fit into the worldwide U.S. strategy. They must be able to assess the regional implications of assisting a given nation: will doing strengthen a regional security organization, could it heighten tensions with that nation s neighbors, or could it undermine U.S. strategy in another theater? At the second or state-society level, security cooperation requires a great deal of interagency coordination and is subject to close Congressional oversight. Theater planners need to be able to effectively advocate their priorities, and to implement programs such that they complement, not impede actions by fellow U.S. agencies. Understanding the political and organizational contexts in partner nations is also essential for cooperation to succeed. Finally, at the individual or first level, theater commanders and their subordinates who lead planning groups must be able to make decisions, assess implementation, and lead high-functioning teams in a very complex environment. They especially need to be able to empathize and interact with different cultures whether different culture means other nation s militaries, other nation s citizens, the media, or the White House staff. To capitalize on this framework, we have organized the TSDM course into three parallel subcourses, each one operating primarily at one of the three levels of analysis. Each sub-course has an internal logic running from the beginning to end of the term; readings and assignments are organized in terms of these sub-courses. Likewise, your seminar will have a three member teaching team, each teaching one of the sub-courses (this model also allows NSA faculty to lead the part of curriculum in which they have the most appropriate scholarly and professional expertise). Those subcourses are described below. The Leadership Concepts sub-course tracks the individual level of analysis. In this sub-course, you will focus upon your personal role as a leader, and especially on the ways in which that role will differ as you move into higher positions of responsibility within larger organizations. This course will ask you to reflect on your own leadership style and understanding of professional ethics, will offer a framework to help with the assessment, decision-making, and implementation challenges facing senior leaders, and will work to develop individual skills important to higherlevel leadership roles. The Policy Analysis sub-course operates at the state and societal/organizational level of analysis. In this sub-course you will study the complex internal and external influences on national decision making (focusing primarily on the United States), including key actors within the international political system, as well as the impact of society-specific characteristics like culture 8

10 and religion. You will also learn more about the U.S. domestic political system, specifically as it relates to national security decisions interactions among the President, Congress, and other key actors, defense resource allocation, as well as frameworks for understanding organizational behavior to provide structure to that analysis. Particular attention will be paid to the role of organizations within the national security apparatus in shaping and executing theater security policy. The Security Strategies sub-course focuses on the international system level of analysis. In this sub-course you will examine key trends that will shape the international security environment in coming years. You will also study in depth one geographic region, corresponding to one of the five theater commands designated by the U.S. Defense Department. 21 You will gain a better understanding of the economic, political, and military relationships at play in your region. The Security Strategies course will also examine national and theater strategies, not from the perspective of the bureaucratic processes that generate them, but understanding them in the context of the international system, and how those strategies can provide guidance to theater planners. For teaching purposes, we find it helpful to address these levels in parallel tracks. Unlike JMO or S&P, at any given moment only one member of the teaching team will be in the room with the seminar. Typically, each day will include a lesson from two of the three subcourses. 22 On some 21 That is, AFRICOM, CENTCOM, EUCOM, PACOM, or SOUTHCOM. 22 On the first day of the term, all three instructors together will give you more guidance on the teaching calendar, where to find readings, and other administrative details. 9

11 days the sub-courses might cover related topics or cases from their different perspectives, on others the material will be independent to each sub-course. In addition to these sub-course based lessons, there will be several practitioner sessions where we meet with a senior leader, then discuss their presentation from all three levels. Finally, our capstone Final Exercise brings all three levels together. You will be asked to conduct a major project, as a seminar group, in which you apply all that you have learned to develop a theater strategy and an implementation plan for it. The intent of the TSDM course is for each of these sub-courses to play an important part in your professional development as a well-rounded strategic leader. They provide a foundation that is much stronger in combination than in isolation. For example, someone with an excellent understanding of the regional security environment and brilliant theater strategy ideas, but with little understanding of how a Combatant Command functions and with poor leadership skills could not successfully implement strategy. Conversely, an outstanding leader with no familiarity with the politics, culture, and security challenges of their region would have little idea where to take his or her organization. TSDM will apply these three parallel approaches most directly to theater-level strategic concepts. Your seminar s assigned region will be emphasized when discussing the security environment and many examples of organizational processes and leadership challenges will relate to theater-level decision-making. This approach is intended to build regional awareness and to help prepare students to serve on or interact with theater-level staffs. The concepts we will explore have broad application, however, and will be relevant to students moving on to the whole range of higher-level command and staff roles. Professional Military Education is aimed at developing leaders who can make and implement strategic decisions. We believe the TSDM course with its three-level approach will help you to reach that goal. 10