Chapter One: Sixty years of The Military Balance

Abstract

tenth edition in 1968–69, now solely titled The Military Balance (as it had been since the 1963–64 edition), contained information on 59 states; in the 2019 book, the tally is at 171. As Sir Michael Howard has pointed out, Alastair Buchan and his successors were ‘later to lament that they had got themselves stuck with the title The Military Balance, providing as it does so stark and conceptually misleading an idea of the complex nature of military power’. But, he continued, ‘stuck they are, and “MilBal” has become the Institute’s flagship’. In some respects the increase in the number of countries assessed in the book has reflected the internationalisation of the Institute, from the early 1960s onwards, in terms of the composition of its Council, the scope of its research activity as well as its staffing. The word ‘International’ was adopted as a prefix by the organisation in the early 1970s. Not 20 years ago, the editorial team for The Military Balance was mainly composed of former commissioned officers from the UK armed forces. Today we are an overwhelmingly civilian and increasingly international team. The way in which we display our data has also changed significantly over the years. Today, the book contains detailed lists of military organisations subdivided according to role, while military equipment is broken down according to its type. In doing this, we are mindful of the need to maintain categories that can be compared between states, as well as the wish of the Institute’s Council in 1964 that The Military Balance retain the compression of the original edition, so making it easier to find information. This also helps ensure that the book remains portable. The 2019 edition may be heavier than the first, but it remains a one-volume publication that can easily be carried in an attaché case. This is one of the features that continues to distinguish The Military Balance from other publications in the field. In deciding which information to prioritise in the book, we are mindful that we cannot accommodate the complete range of military systems operated by states. We display data that we think is essential to national military power. Naturally, this starts This 2019 edition of The Military Balance marks 60 years since the publication first appeared, in late 1959, as a slim pamphlet of just 11 pages. The latest edition has been compiled by the IISS’s Defence and Military Analysis Programme, the Institute’s largest research team with 14 permanent staff. That first volume was produced single-handedly by Alastair Buchan, the first Director of what was then called The Institute for Strategic Studies. The Foreword stated that it was published ‘as a contribution to the growing concern that is developing throughout the world about the arms race’. It is apparent, from these early editions, that the focus was very much on nuclear capabilities and missile systems. The rationale behind the first pamphlet was that there would be considerable value in collating published information ‘into one simple comparative analysis [...] in order to provide a firmer basis, not only of the discussion of “the balance of terror”, but of the problems of disarmament’. It is also true that the appearance of that first volume stemmed in part from concerns expressed to the Director by senior Western defence officials about a lack of public understanding over the size and nature of the Soviet military challenge to Europe. Indeed, the short paper Making Headway, The First Five Years of the ISS said that ‘the responsible private citizen ... had little but occasional official statements and the sensational reports of newspapers to judge whether, for instance, there was a “missile gap”, how strong the Russian army was, or what was the state of India’s defences’. Today, the problem is of a different character. There is a torrent of accessible information from a profusion of sources. But making sense of it all is another matter. Indeed, for an audience that is reacquainting itself with the degree to which information can be manipulated, there is still a place for sober, evidence-based and independent sources of information and analysis, like The Military Balance.