125 Book Reviews Book Reviews Book Reviews Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 337 pp. Reviewed by James A. Russell, Naval Postgraduate School The United States is today presented with a series of disturbing and incongruous im- ages as it attempts to apply force in pursuit of its objectives in various theaters around the world. Why, for example, did the United States and its 1.2 million soldiers, sup- ported by more than $500 billion in defense expenditures (nearly half of all defense spending in the world), have such difªculty controlling the 13-mile road connecting Baghdad’s airport to the city center? Why do those rumored to be harboring Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants in the northwest frontier provinces of Pakistan not turn him over to the United States and avail themselves of the $25-million reward? Why was the stunningly successful phase of “conventional” military operations in Iraq in March and early April 2003 not followed by a similarly successful counterinsurgency campaign? These and other incongruities are the subject of frequent commentary, consum- ing voluminous quantities of airtime and congressional debate, not to mention more than $100 billion in taxpayers’ money in 2006 alone to fund continuing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the truth is that much of the commentary in the mass me- dia is ill-informed and provides viewers with entertainment as opposed to cogent anal- ysis. Searching for sound content on the national security issues of the day has be- come an increasingly difªcult proposition for educators, policy professionals, and in- terested scholars. Stephen Biddle’s new book, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, not only provides sound content but does so in addressing a topical issue of paramount importance. Readers seeking content in the form of a theo- retical framework, interesting case studies backed by statistical analysis, and well- formulated implications for policy will not be disappointed by Biddle’s rigor. As explained by the subtitle, Biddle, now a senior fellow at the Council on For- eign Relations, takes on the issue of why some states succeed and others fail in battle. He places the issue of conventional combat in a theoretical framework that can be supported through modeling and statistical analysis for specialists interested in those techniques. Although Biddle’s work provides the operations research modeler with an interesting methodology, his book can also be read and easily appreciated by a wider audience of national security professionals. Biddle’s argument will not necessarily be well-received in the Pentagon, which is Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 9, No. 4, Fall 2007, pp. 125–178 © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology