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Changing Military Doctrine: Presidents and Military Power in Fifth Republic France, 1958-2000. By Sten Rynning. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001. ISBN 0-275-97286-0. Figure. Tables. Notes. Sources. Index. Pp. xxviii, 219. $59.00.
Rynning's study is based on the simple practical recognition that initiatives in major French defence policy (even if not always successfully carried through) lie with the French President, and a not so simple theoretical frame, "Neoclassical Realism," or NCR. By NCR Rynning means that changes in a nation's relative power shape its policy and doctrine, the actual shaping being a process in which many people and factors, civil and military, international (major crises and minor crises), and economic and social groups arguing different interpretations of the shifts of power, all play parts, often conflicting. In this theoretical approach Rynning sees doctrine as "What means are to be used" and "How are they to be used" in three possible frames-Offensive, Defensive, and Deterrence, Ile goes on to delineate types of changes: first-order major changes being from one of the three frames to another, second-order changes being changes within any one of them. Firstorder changes result from any two of three measures: allied threat collusion, institutional reform in the armed services and presidential receptivity to new ideas. Second-order change involves all three. Armed with this somewhat ponderous theoretical structure the work proceeds to analyze in detail French policy, its making and its critics, in the chapters that follow.
The era of de Gaulle and Pompidou...