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This book advances North Atlantic Treaty Organization (henceforth, NATO) burden analysis through a decomposition of the political, financial, social, and defense burdens members take on for the institution. The overemphasis of committing a minimum of 2% of member state Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to defense spending, as a proxy indicator of alliance commitment does not properly reflect how commitments reduce risks should Article V be invoked through attack (i.e., 2% is a political & symbolic target adopted by Defense Ministers in 2006 at Riga). Considering defense burdens multi-dimensionally explains why some members overcontribute, as well as, why burden sharing negotiations cause friction among 30 diverse members with differing threats and risks. In creating a comprehensive institutional burden management model and focusing on risks to members, the book explores the weaknesses of major theories on the study and division of collective burdens and institutional assets. It argues that member risks and threats are essential to understanding how burdens are distributed across a set of overlapping institutions within NATOs structure providing its central goods. The importance of the USA, as a defense underwriter for some, affects negotiations despite its absence from research empirically; new data permit testing the argument (Kavanaugh 2014). This book contributes conceptual innovation and theoretical analysis to advance student, researcher, and policymaker understanding of burden management, strategic bargaining, and defense cooperation. The contribution is a generalizable risk management model of IO burden sharing using NATO as the case for scientific study due to its prominence. Anessa L. Kimball is Director of the Center for International Security at the Ecole superieur Detudes Internationales and Professor in the Department of Political Science at Universite Laval, Quebec City. Professor Kimball is also the Co-Director of Security for the Canadian Defence and Security Network, a SSHRC partnership network.

This article presents and examines a model of legalization on an original dataset of informal Canadian–US defence and security arrangements (DSA) formed between 1955 and 2005. Non-treaty arrangements permit US presidents to bypass Senate ratification, resulting in expediency and secrecy, both assets in defence and security relations. That withstanding, informal arrangements contain provisions responding to certain strategic problems. They detail aspects of legalization: delegation; obligations; and precision. Leaders select informal arrangements to incur fewer public commitments, but design them to ensure credibility. In that context, what factors shape informal DSA legalization? Propositions developed from delegation and rational institutionalist arguments identify the factors influencing informal DSA legalization. The Canada–US case is germane due to its "rules-based" nature and heterogeneity. An original dataset of the legal design of eighty-two bilateral DSA is introduced and analyzed. Results confirm cabinet shuffles and unified governments decrease DSA legalization while Democrat presidents and rising military threats increase it.

Despite differences in scale, Canada and the U.S. face common challenges in military procurement and there is much Canada can learn as both countries pursue reforms. The U.S. employs a system of systems approach, based on requirements, resource allocation and acquisition. The process begins with the Joint Capabilities and Development System, focused on identifying and prioritizing needs and assessing alternatives. This is followed by the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution System, which leads to the creation of a budget and provides guidance for the project's execution. The third and final step is the Defense Acquisition System, which oversees the development and purchase of the new equipment. While deceptively simple in summary, U.S. defence procurement is dogged by problems — particularly cost overruns, a surfeit of key players and delayed schedules which degrade troops' performance in the field. Additionally, the defence products market is restricted, inevitably limiting competition, encouraging misbehaviour on the part of business and driving up prices. The DoD is in the midst of consultations with contractors and Congress is undertaking an effort to rewrite acquisition laws. But the most pressing questions remain: Does a best procurement practice exist? If so, what criteria define it? In light of Canada's new Defence Procurement Strategy (DPS), some lessons are clear. Further analysis is needed to figure out whether reforms can succeed in so narrow a marketplace. More attention must be paid to shaping contracts and clarifying expectations about sticking to schedules. And Ottawa must think carefully about the military's needs, as it pushes ahead with the DPS. In surveying change at the DoD, this brief draws pointed conclusions to which Canada's defence planners must pay heed, if they're to leave the military stronger than they found it.

Existing work cannot explain why countries form alliances when direct security threats are not a key political issue, though we know countries routinely do engage in that behavior. Countries form alliances to manage the essential problem that they must use finite budget resources to provide social policy and national security; the 'guns versus butter' dilemma. States ally to 'contract out' national security via the formation of alliance contracts so they can allocate more resources to domestic concerns. Alliances increase the efficiency of security policy by providing the same level of security with fewer resources, thus freeing those resources for use in other domains. Not only should alliances form when security threats do not dominate the political agenda, but also domestic political and economic demands will influence alliance decisions. In positing a domestic politics-based explanation for alliance formation, this article argues that increased demands for social policy goods increase the chances of alliance formation as leaders seek greater policy allocation efficiency. The use of a production possibilities frontier illustrates the central argument. Those claims are examined on a sample of all country-years from 1816—2000 using a probit model. Empirical results suggest changes in the demand for social policy goods, operationalized as changes in the infant mortality rate, are an important cause of alliance behavior.

Existing research on the connection between alliance formation and conflict initiation has explicitly focused on the direct effect of alliances on conflict by including some measure of alliance behavior as an independent variable in models of conflict behavior. Existing research misspecifies the relationship between alliances and conflict, because alliance formation and conflict initiation are shaped by many of the same factors (in particular, regime type and capabilities), and alliance formation decisions are endogenous to conflict initiation decisions. Thus, alliance formation and conflict initiation should be modeled in a system of equations where a set of variables shapes alliance formation and conflict directly, and indirectly affects conflict through the decision to ally. The author estimates a two-equation probit model that accounts for the endogenous nature of alliance formation decisions and, thus, for the indirect effects of variables like regime and power on conflict. Results suggest that the effect of regime on alliance behavior differs across time periods. Finally, the model provides evidence that the total effects of variables like power and regime on conflict are, in fact, mediated by how those variables influence the decision to ally.