Research Methods in Defence Studies

A Multidisciplinary Overview

Delphine Deschaux-Dutard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429582356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This textbook provides an overview of qualitive and quantitative methods used in different social sciences to investigate defence issues.Recently, defence issues have become of increasing interest to researchers in the social sciences, but they raise specific methodological questions. This volume intends to fill a gap in the literature on defence studies by addressing a number of topics not dealt with sufficiently before. The contributors offer a range of methodological reflections and tools from various social sciences (political science, sociology, geography, history, economics and public law) for researching defence issues. They also address the increasingly important question of data and digitalization. The book introduces the added value of quantitative and qualitative methods, and calls for a cross-fertilization of methods in order to facilitate better research on defence topics and to fully grasp the complexity of defence in the 21st century.This book will be of much interest to students, researchers and practitioners of defence studies, war studies, military studies, and social science research methods in general.

Part I

Qualitative methods in defence studies

1 Defence studies and geographic methodology

From the practical to the critical approach

Amaël Cattaruzza

Introduction

The relationship between geography and defence issues may seem old and obvious. Maps have always been tools for soldiers on the battlefield and in staffs, from tactical to the strategic scale. Military geography also appeared as an autonomous discipline at the end of the 19th century. At the same time, the first geopolitical works were published in the United States and Europe. The link between defence studies and geography is complex. It concerns the study of the terrain as a place of confrontation, the study of the military organization and its geographical distribution, and also the study of the spatial distribution of power in its various dimensions (political, strategic, economic, and symbolic).

Geographers have thus been integrated into military staffs and have developed a technical approach of places in order to serve as a decision-making tool for military purposes both for strategists and politicians. This tradition still exists today through the use of geospatial intelligence. Relying on a set of digital technologies, military geography aims at informing the military staff about the battlefield, and it is now crucial in operational planning. However, geographers have also sought to guide the strategies and policies of their leaders and rulers with their discipline. Relying on geostrategy and geopolitics, they talk about the distribution of forces and power games worldwide. By studying geographical factors, they provide an interpretation that was once considered purely objective and scientific, and that could have served as a legitimization for imperialist claims (American imperialism, Third Reich conquest strategy, among others). The place of the military issues in these studies has always been important. It would, therefore, be difficult to discuss the methodological questions raised by defence issues investigated by geography without considering both approaches.

The geographical perspective on war and defence issues has nevertheless evolved in the last decades with the development of a critical school in geography and geopolitics. The critical approach aims at revealing the balance of power at stake behind all territorial and political constructions. In this sense, the military field, and more generally, the question of war, was the subject of a revival within the geography field during the 1990s. The goal of critical geography is to reveal power relations and strategies hidden behind the spatial dimensions of the military domain.

In this chapter, we consider the question of methodology by first presenting a genealogy of the links between geography and defence studies and show how intertwined geography and military issues have been for a long time. In the second part, we focus on the recent evolutions of geography in defence studies by examining more precisely the critical turn and the new methodologies developed. Finally, we analyse the crucial role of data and digitalization processes and stress on their consequences for methods in defence studies.

Geography, a science serving military action or an ideological tool dedicated to the legitimization of power?

Geography, as a discipline, has always had a dual dimension: both physical and human geography, natural and social science. Thus, it provides both an expert voice on the interactions between man and his physical and social environment, and develops a critical approach about how knowledge and control of places may strengthen and legitimize the expression of power in society. Therefore the knowledge of the field has early been considered as a strategic knowledge. From Sun Zi to Clausewitz, the great thinkers of military strategy have always stressed the importance of this field knowledge in the context of armed conflicts (Motte 2018).

From a tactical point of view, geographical knowledge enables military forces to adapt the intervention of troops to different environments in which they can evolve (land, sea, air, mountain, desert, etc.) and to reflect on the most relevant action needed to take the lead over the opponent. Geography is also primarily conceived as an objective tool to investigate theatres of operation. The emergence of military geography in the 19th century is part of this framework. But knowledge of the geographical context also makes it possible to formulate analyses on a broader scale. The gradual and parallel structuring of disciplines such as geostrategy and geopolitics also need to be taken seriously and indeed, officers or former officers have played a role in this development (such as Giacomo Durando, inventor of the term “geostrategy” in 1846, or in the early 20th century Karl Haushofer, thinker of German Geopolitik). Whether at the tactical or strategic level, the objective of this use of geography was to support political and military decision-making based on an scientific-analysis considered objective, since it was based on undeniable physical factors.

The 19th century, a time for the emergence of strategic geographic knowledge

This desire to “technicize” the decision-making process tells us a lot about the intellectual context of the 19th and early 20th centuries, marked by the industrial revolution and the progress of social sciences on the one hand, and by colonial domination by the European powers on the other hand. These powers were seeking intellectual tools to strengthen and legitimize their leadership positions in the world.

On a scientific level, several developments contributed to making geography a first-rate science in the military and strategic fields. First of all, the progress in cartography made during the 17th and 18th centuries made the map a significant tool for the conduct of wars. The publication in 1793 of the first scientific map of a State, the Geometric Map of France, produced by the Cassini family, marked a turning point in cartographic science. As Luca Muscarà points out, this evolution of geography has quickly become a tool of political and military power and control:

With Napoleon, the French army was reorganized and mapping was the key to military conquest and administration. The ingénieurs-géographes (engineers-geographers) of the renamed Dépôt général de la Guerre et de la Géographie accompanied and sometimes preceded the army in mapping operations designed to consolidate French control.

(Muscarà 2018: 368).

This use of geography to support decision-making is in line with the perspectives established by the tenants of positivism. In the continuity of the Enlightenment, this school of thought intended to apply the scientific method to the social field in order to go beyond knowledge based on tradition (Kremer-Marietti 2017). In doing so, the foundation of social sciences building was based on the recognition of positive facts and systematic data collection. Thus, social scientists believed they could deduce universal laws and be able to anticipate social phenomena. First, this approach has led to enormous progress in the geographical and geological sciences. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Keneth Cukier refer in particular to the case of the US Navy naval officer, Matthew Fontaine Maury, who drew up the first maritime cartography for navigation (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2014: 95). In 1855, he published a Geography of the Sea based on more than 1.2 million data points. Significant progress has therefore been made insofar as intuitive assumptions, once taken for granted, could finally be confirmed or invalidated by a systematic empirical approach. These advances have been put to good use in the military field, and fostered the illusion of certainty that would be dictated by the intrinsic characteristics of the regions and the geographical terrain.

However, the development of military geography is also due to a particular political context. Indeed, the colonization carried out by the European powers required the various armies to adapt to environments that were very different from their traditional theatres of operations. The neutral and “apolitical” knowledge offered by physical geography allowed the military to learn about operations in desert environments, or in exotic climates, while limiting thinking to simple technical and operational arguments. Nevertheless, colonial anthropology and geography offered an often caricatured and essentialized vision of local societies. Thus, they strengthened the idea of the civilizing dimension of Western administration. As Rachel Woodward notes, “Military geography has a long history, its roots tangled up with the imperial ambitions and military requirements that late-nineteenth-century Geography emerged to serve” (Woodward 2004: 6). Thus, Anne Godlewska’s observation concerning the ingénieurs-géographes (engineers-geographers) of the Napoleonic administration still finds echoes in the practice of this kind of military geography. For her, military geographers believed in “a developing certainty that the inherent value of a region, terrain or people could be accurately measured through the use of French scientific methods… of which the non-European cultures appeared incapable” (Godlewska 1994: 41–42). In parallel, the rise of Geostrategy and Geopolitics has also been used as a legitimization discourse for colonization.

So, the 19th and early 20th centuries were key periods in the relationship between geography and defence studies, through three different approaches, military geography, geostrategy and geopolitics. If strategists have always taken into account the field in the art of warfare, advances in the geographical sciences made it possible to move from practical use to a rigorous and systematic study of operations theatres. Nevertheless, this period also brought a particular vision of geography within the military, tinged with determinism.

Military geography, or the application of geographic methodology to the conduct of military campaigns

The emergence of an autonomous military geography within geography dates back to the second half of the 19th century, with the first works by Théophile Lavallée, professor of geography at the Ecole spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr in France (Boulanger 2002). Strongly inspired by the German school, Lavallée sketched a discipline in which topographical and geological data were put in perspective with the strategic thinking of the time, and in particular with the works of Jomini. For the first time, he raised the idea that knowledge of the natural environment could be used for military purposes (Boulanger 2002: 26).

Subsequently, new specialists emerged in Europe (Coutau-Bégarie 2006). Nevertheless, the discipline remained very academic and developed at the beginning of the 20th century “very systematic geological inspirations theories, increasingly disconnected from the operational needs of the armies” (Coutau-Bégarie 2006). As Rachel Woodward notes, military geography

is primarily concerned with how military activities and armed conflict are shaped by terrain and environment. (…) Yet, as an academic discipline, Military Geography has failed to evolve. The application of topographical and environmental knowledge to the conduct of military campaigns, and the strategic and tactical considerations to be taken into account, were set out by T. Miller Maguire in 1899. Over the 20^th century and in the 21^st century, this understanding of Military Geography held fast.

(Woodward 2004: 6)

In fact, the discipline suffered in the United States and Europe from the anti-war opinions of the 1960s and 1970s caused by the movements surrounding the decolonization wars and the Vietnam War. Military geography had practically disappeared in France after World War II, supplanted by geostrategic thinking (Boulanger 2002). While Military Geography in the United States has a specialty group within the Association of American Geographers, its definition in the early 2000s remained traditional: “Military Geography is (…) the application of geographic information, tools, and techniques to military problems” (Woodward 2004: 6). In France, Philippe Boulanger’s work shed light on the history of this discipline between 1871 and 1945 (Boulanger 2002) and helped to update its practice, by taking into account new environments and issues (Boulanger 2006, 2011). Nevertheless, the work of Military Geography remains attached to a utilitarian vision of geography, often considered in a descriptive and essentialized way.

Geostrategy, a strategy for large areas

General Giacomo Durando first used the term geostrategy in 1846. He gave two definitions to this word. Geostrategy would be both the study of how geographical data determine the “social bonds” that found the nation, but also, in a more military sense, the study of the influence of geography on the use of organized forces at the national level (Motte 2006). Unlike military geography, geostrategy is not about tactical and operational dimensions, but about the “strategy of large areas” (Motte 2018). This discipline has had a strong resonance in diplomatic circles and quickly led to the definition of strategies dedicated to each environment (land and naval strategies, and soon air, space, and cybernetics strategies). This way of thinking based on the geographical constraints of each environment leads to broader analysis about the nature of power, involving classical oppositions like land/sea, land power/sea power, upon which geopolitics is subsequently based. It is sometimes difficult to classify thinkers and to distinguish what in their thinking is geostrategic or geopolitical. The case of Admiral Mahan (1840–1914) is exemplary in this respect.

Mahan’s researches are mainly focused on Sea Power. Mahan was first and foremost a sailor marked by his experience in the US Navy, from 1856 to 1896. He took part in the American secession wars and analysed the innovations they brought. At the time, the southerners’ maritime blockade had been decisive in winning the victory. This strategy had only been possible thanks to the technical progress of the navy and the switch from steam sailing to sailing. One of his major contributions has been to perceive the consequences of the industrial revolution in world geopolitics. From 1885 onwards, he became a teacher and devoted himself to historical research, which led him to formulate a theory based on maritime power ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: why methods matter in defence studies
• PART I: Qualitative methods in defence studies
• PART II: Quantitative methods and defence studies
• Index