Strategic and Military Culture

Abstract

I offer a definition of strategic culture that enables students of NATO, and of international relations and security more broadly, to identify observable dimensions of strategic culture, separate them conceptually from behavior, and test their relationships with material behavior. I embed this definition in strategic culture debates and offer suggestions for scholars of multiple methodological and epistemological approaches to apply strategic culture to the study of NATO. Finally, I ask two straightforward research questions of interest to NATO scholars: is there an emerging NATO strategic culture? How do national strategic cultures affect their behavior as allies? I demonstrate how strategic culture can indeed be operationalized for empirical research addressing these two important questions.

Keywords: Strategic Culture, NATO, Political Economy of Security, DAG, Content Analysis