Dima Adamsky, The Culture of Military Innovation: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia, the US, and Israel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010)
Author: Dima Adamsky is Associate Professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the IDC Herzliya. In addition to his academic career, in his positions in the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the IDF, Dr. Adamsky has carried out intelligence analysis and strategic policy planning.
Synopsis: Adamsky sets out to show the extent that different strategic cultures digest revolutions in military affairs—particularly the RMA and Military-Technical Revolution of the late Cold War. He ascertains that the Soviet Union had the first intellectual theories for what to do with emerging technology. The US were the first to produce RMA equipment, but the Israeli’s were the first to put it into practice. Having studied the Soviet military journals and kept abreast of Amer-ican technological developments, the Israelis were the first to wage an RMA-style war. They successfully fused Soviet principles and American technology in the First Lebanon War in 1982. He argues that each countries different strategic culture played a role in this timeline of events and how these ideas were eventually put into practice. He illuminates, through a chapter each, the impact of cultural factors on how countries interpret differently the changing character of war. He determines that the Soviet anti-technology atmosphere did not allow it to put its ideological underpinnings into practice. The US, for Adamsky, was ill-prepared due to its industrial approach to war and annihilating the enemy and so sought to channel new tech into a narrow set of threats. Israel, on the other hand, interpreted the RMA through practitioners and thought of new technology as a force multiplier for existing concepts of operations rather than wholesale change—allowing them to put it into practice faster.
Central Argument: The variation in the military innovation in the USSR, the US, and Israel was ultimately shaped by the impact of each state’s strategic culture.
Historiography: He found that there was no systemic, cross-cultural, comparative analysis of the intellectual history of the RMA in the three countries at the time of his publishing. He also characterizes American military and strategic culture as one predicated on annihilation through firepower—firmly placing him within Weigley’s American Way of War but neglecting new scholarship that suggests a more varied approach to these concepts.
Commentary: Adamsky engages in some serious cultural determinism and tends to describe each country as a monolithic culture rather than the nuanced, complex, and contingent actors that they are. Also, he presents a rudimentary understanding of culture, choosing to use broad strokes rather than understand the complex nature of every level of culture and its influence on each other. The theory he uses leads to a form of cultural determinism that makes little sense given his level of analysis—groups of intellectual elites competing within national defense establishments.