Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of ...

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spurned these conclusions, contending that the war was a “lost victory.” In this paradigm, the war was won after the 1968 Tet Offensive only to be lost due to the ...
Book Reviews

Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation. By Matthew Ford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-1906-2386-9. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 248. $39.95. In the early stages of the Iraq War, the U.S. Army’s Chief of Infantry, Major General Russel L. Honoré, complained that America had spent hundreds of billions of dollars to develop weapons to find and kill the enemy beyond the range of 400 meters, but next to nothing to help the infantryman fight the remaining quarter of a mile. In Weapon of Choice, Matthew Ford, a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Sussex, examines in keen detail the personal, bureaucratic, national, and corporate competition surrounding the provision of ammunition, rifles, and machine guns to U.S., U.K., and eventually NATO forces throughout the Cold War and into today’s conflicts. Ford’s analysis suggests the limits of science for settling bureaucratic disputes, and highlights the degree to which even small arms procurement is the product of social construction. In several well-researched and coherent chapters, Ford demonstrates that national and coalition small arms development suffers from many of the same problems that plague large weapons systems procurement. In short, when money, pride, and professional status are at stake, all participants will fight over every detail and employ all manner of subterfuge and bureaucratic maneuver to win, which means, in this case, achieving agreement on ammunition caliber and weapon type in the hope that they might win the contract to provide the ammo and weapon. For scholars and practitioners of military innovation, Ford adds to the current body of political science theory by arguing for a “middle-out” model as an adjunct to the current “top-down” or “bottom-up” processes. Specifically, he demonstrates the role of engineers and scientists, as members of the “middle,” in developing solutions and convincing both soldiers and policy-makers of their worth. To that end, he follows in the wake of historian Paul Kennedy, whose Engineers of Victory (Random House, 2013) focused on the “middlemen” who solved the most intractable problems of World War II. Additionally, Ford’s analysis of how the Belgian weapons maker Fabrique Nationale and similar corporations filled the gap created by the loss of government engineers with outsourced corporate “know-how” characterizes a dramatic shift in procurement power. With the loss of in-house expertise, arms makers now “advise” military professionals, both directly and indirectly, regarding how the military should fight and which expensive, complicated weapons the military should buy. To properly connote the extent of influence arms manufacturers wield, it is necessary to coin a fourth category of, as termed by this reviewer, “outside-in” innovation. Ford, however, does not stop there. In a rich and complex narrative, he introduces the reader to the subject of wound ballistics, a topic critical to the science of small arms development; the doctrinal, training, and technical tradeoffs between marksmanship, firepower, willpower, and stopping power; and the transfer of power and decision authority from battle-tested soldiers to budget-wary administrators to scientists and engineers, and finally, to corporations. Implicitly and explicitly, Ford acquaints the reader with two political science theories that may inform the 1234    

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Book Reviews

work of military historians seeking to reveal the nuance of an innovation’s causal factors. The first is the Social Shaping of Technology (SST), which argues that various groups’ subjective interpretations of technical and technological change shape or alter the design of specific technologies. The second concept concerns the three dimensions and dynamics of power in decision-making, as articulated in Stephen Lukes’s Power: A Radical View (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and serves as both a template and a measure of each group’s ability to achieve its goal. Both theories ask questions about power and perspective that could point traditional historians toward areas of inquiry otherwise previously unconsidered. For historians, fortunately, Ford does not overplay the theoretical angle, relying instead on solid research and deft writing to tell the story. Ford’s contribution is significant, and his study of the battles over small arms procurement within the NATO alliance is extremely informative. Weapons aficionados will find themselves at ease learning the history of the American M-14, M-16, and Squad Automatic Weapon as well as the British SA80 rifle and squad weapon and the Light Machine Gun, to name a few. To his credit, Ford explains the very technical aspects of the topic in a manner most informed readers will understand easily. One does not need to be a Green Beret or a member of the SAS to follow his argument or understand the details girding his analysis. While the United States and the United Kingdom will still spend untold sums of money on advanced weaponry for the long-range or “stand-off ” fight, at least now the history of small arms procurement is out in the open in its full, socially constructed complexity. To paraphrase a leading contemporary politician, “who knew that shooting people was so complicated?” Well, Matthew Ford does, and thanks to his in-depth and excellent examination of U.S. and UK small arms development, now the rest of us do as well. Bryon Greenwald Joint Advanced Warfighting School Norfolk, Virginia Losing Binh Dinh: The Failure of Pacification and Vietnamization, 1969–1971. By Kevin M. Boylan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. ISBN 978-0-70062352-5. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Charts. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. x, 366. $34.95. Nearly half a century after American troops departed Vietnam, debate and division over the United States’ involvement remain. No longer taking the form of protests in the streets, the arguments about the Vietnam conflict have migrated to the more placid halls of academe. While most historical scholarship over the intervening decades has coalesced around an orthodox view (U.S. involvement in Vietnam was misguided and the war was unwinnable), revisionist scholarship has spurned these conclusions, contending that the war was a “lost victory.” In this paradigm, the war was won after the 1968 Tet Offensive only to be lost due to the MILITARY  HISTORY

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