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Weapons standardization in NATO: collaborative security or economic competition?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

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Rationalization, standardization, and interoperability (RSI) has been an important issue in NATO throughout the 1970s. Increasingly, national political and military leaders have expressed the concern that doctrine, procedures, and materiel should be harmonized more effectively as one means of counterbalancing the Warsaw Pact. However, in the past decade RSI initiatives have been largely unsuccessful. Weapons standardization in NATO depensupon the scope and degree of ideological advocacy for the collaborative security imperative and the influence of economic competition in arms production and sales among the members of the Alliance. An analysis of the disparate views of the member-states and of threecase studies—the MX-1 tank treads, the ribbon bridge, and ROLAND II—indicates that ideological advocacy has been high among international and national elites (if not among subnational elites), but that the increased economic competition following the rise of European defense industries during the last fifteen years has exacerbated national policy differences and decreased the prospects for RSI success.

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Articles
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Copyright © The IO Foundation 1982

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References

1 Indeed, the “father” of the neofunctionalist school, Ernst Hans, recently argued that integration theories have become obsolete because the assumptions on which they were based are becoming less relevant to the behavior of international organizations. Haas suggested that the behavior of nonstate actors no longer can be explained on the basis of disjointed incrementalism, but rather on a new decision-making rationality he called “fragmented issue linkage.” According to Hans, this condition is unlikely to lead to any permanent structure of institutions in international organizations. Haas, Ernst, “Turbulent Fields and the Theory of Regional Integration,” International Organization 30, 2 (Spring 1976): 173212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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8 See, for example, statements by government and business leaders from many NATO states in Meeting Report: International Symposium on Nato Standardization and Interoperability, March 8–9, 1978, Los Angeles, CA and Meeting Report: Fourth Annual Executive Seminar on Foreign Military Sales and Arms Control, December 5–6, 1978, Washington, D.C. (Washington: American Defense Preparedness Association, 1978).Google Scholar

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29 ibid., p. 2.

30 Based on interviews in Washington, January 1981.

31 ”Arms Transfer Restraint and NATO Arms Cooperation—The Unity of Seeming Opposites,” remarks by the Honorable Lucy Wilson Benson, under-secretary of state for security assistance, science and technology, before the EUCOM Conference, 4 April 1979 (unpublished).

32 It is likely that the Soviets had given the bridge to the Egyptians and that the Israelis captured the bridge in the 1967 war, subsequently passing it on to the United States.

33 Stratton's letter is coded by DoD as 11028, 1-8282/79.

35 The State Department internal memorandum was appropriately titled, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.”

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50 The military services want new weapon systems designed to their specifications in the field as soon as possible. RSI negotiations are time-consuming and inevitably require compromises on technical specifications. Doctrine has been a problem as well. On a summer 1980 joint exercise in Norway, the U.S. Marines ignored procedures that had been carefully negotiated over a long period of time in Brussels. The marines explained that though the procedures worked out were suitable for Norway, they intended to use procedures consistent with their worldwide mission requirements.

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52 There are many interpretations of the “family of weapons.” The most common is a scheme that would introduce a variation of a producers' union in the Alliance. In such an arrangement, the Americans might produce the NATO fighter aircraft, the Germans, the NATO battle tank, the French, SAM systems, and so on.