The socialization of military power: security cooperation and doctrine development through multinational military exercises

Multinational Military Exercises (MMEs) are often viewed by states as opportunities to increase interoperability, improve cooperation, and solve common security problems. We argue that in addition to this, MMEs work as tools to shape the shared beliefs of coalition partners surrounding threat. Specifically, MMEs allow multinational forces to identify best practices, consolidate beliefs, and codify behavior through doctrine, typically by means of some institutional process. We examine our argument on MMEs through an analysis of various multinational and coalition partner efforts to identify security threats and cooperate through the development of common doctrine at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of warfare. Our analysis suggests that the use of MMEs for doctrine development does help to socialize states in terms of identifying common threats and subsequently sharing a process by which to address them.