ABSTRACT
The ‘what’ questions of weapons acquisition have tended to be more exciting: ‘What do new weapons systems allow militaries to accomplish?’, ‘What are the doctrinal and organisational changes that have resulted from weapons acquisition?’, and so forth. By contrast, the ‘how’ questions – ‘How are the performance characteristics of weapon systems – in other words, quality – determined?’ and ‘How do countries decide what quantities to acquire of a particular piece of equipment’ – have failed to seize the imagination to the same extent. Nevertheless, such questions, although prosaic, are of great importance to policy makers and military professionals, as well as being fundamental to the scholarly fields of public policy and defence economics. While the other chapters in this volume focus on the ‘what’ questions, this chapter examines the ‘how’ issue by way of developing a theoretical model to examine how weapons acquisition decisions are arrived at.
