The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective

"It’s a collection of essays that has to do with the contemporary direction of war and how to use history, historical examples, and some strategic theories to clarify what’s going on and what needs to happen. These are essays he published in Survival and elsewhere, and they were directly relevant to what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a way of trying to get people to pay attention, whether Members of Parliament or the US defence establishment. He was trying to speak directly to them, as well as to lower ranking military and policy practitioners. The burden of it is that strategy is not just about the approach you have going into the campaign—your objectives, your resources, and how you expect to use the latter to achieve the former. It is also the way you direct the war while you’re in it to ensure your purposes are met. You tend to find, in any war, that people don’t always understand what the objective is, and consequently they work at cross-purposes to it. Often they don’t realise they are, or maybe, in extreme cases, they are deliberately hijacking the opportunities afforded by the war to settle scores or to gain profit. Those things run counter to the overall war effort and need to be reined in. Whoever is in charge of running the war needs to be alert to those situations. Those are some of the messages that come out in his essays. If you’re the political leadership, you can’t turn the war over to the military to run. You have to stay actively involved in it, steering it, you have to communicate. You have to have good civil-military relations in order to make sure you get across the cultural barriers and pick the right people to do the job. Many people look to strategy as if it should come before policy, or transcend politics, or that it should put diplomacy to work for it. None of these things ceases for the sake of strategy, but they all have a part to play in making a strategy work. Just as they can be responsible for making it fail. On a related point, one of the things I’ve faulted political science and international relations for is the exaggerated attention they give to the idea that war is an instrument of policy or politics. This idea comes out of Clausewitz, of course. But some have taken the expression out of context and treat it as if it were the only thing he said. It is as if the political dimension of war is the only one that matters; but accomplishing one’s policy objectives at the cost of severe social cleavages, or unrest and revolution, is not going to amount to much of a victory. Focusing on the political dimension of war, at the exclusion of the others, makes our understanding of war unidimensional, and it necessarily makes strategy unidimensional—which comes back around to agreeing that we may not be sure about what war is and what strategy is. Yes. To highlight one example, in the Cold War many scholars worried that military objectives might exceed policy objectives and thereby lead to an escalation, an all-out war, or a general war you didn’t want. So, they argued that we’ve got to keep a tight rein on military leaders—and rightly so. But, they wrongly assumed that policy itself will be rational enough to avoid escalation. History, recent and ancient, shows us that is not true. But, we’ve lost our sense of what war is, partly because the assumptions of the Cold War experience are still with us. Under today’s political conditions we’ve also over-legalised war in order to live with the fact that we sometimes need it. But in so doing, we have steadily eroded war’s utility as a legitimate instrument of policy. We rationalize our use of war by calling it an instrument of policy, but it has actually many more dimensions to it. I think the coverage tends to sensationalise war too much. They’re going for the headlines, making everyday occurrences appear as if they’re bigger than they are. That sensationalism is as old as the press, it’s always going to be there—but it is difficult for civilians to separate that sensationalism from reality, and I think that that’s not a good thing. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Loss of life is always tragic, but to zero in on the loss of life in one particular incident, while losing the larger picture seems, to me, a distortion not only of the brutality of war but the extent to which the populace needs to be engaged and involved in it. They shouldn’t just be sitting back horrified at what they see on their TV screen or on their iPad. We have more traffic fatalities in the US every year than we’ve lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined for the whole 15 years. And yet we zero in on numbers of people killed. It is always tragic but we’ve lost sight of the larger aspect of how to prosecute a war, of understanding society’s role in that, and what a good strategic decision is and what a bad one is. Knee-jerking our way out of a war, making impulsive decisions based on the latest headlines is not doing strategy. It is probably going to make things worse in the long run. But it is really, really hard for us to see it that way. In terms of the best overall strategic leader, someone who could guide the crafting of military strategy and had the ability to direct it successfully to win a major war, and to keep his key allies in the game, while dealing with a large number of strong personalities, would have to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had the strategic sense to appreciate what was happening in Europe by late 1938 and early 1939—before Germany attacked Poland—and he was already looking for ways to increase aid to the UK and other Western countries. He was also able to deal with the political opposition at home, which didn’t want to get into another European war. The American public had already been bloodied and disillusioned by World War I—with a quarter of a million dead—and which turned out not to have solved anything. Many immigrant communities in the US did not care particularly for Mussolini or Hitler, but they didn’t want to go to war with the Old Country either. He also had to deal with a congress and a military that did not always support his decisions. But he had to maintain the larger perspective. Roosevelt somehow managed to handle all of that while also being physically debilitated. So, for me, he is the one strategist who ranks top. Chinese names can cause confusion because of the different ways Chinese characters have been romanized over the centuries. Today, when you study Chinese, you learn the ‘pinyin’ system. In pinyin, ‘Sun Tzu’ becomes ‘Sunzi’ or ‘Sun Zi.’ The character ‘zi’ is an honorific suffix. So we are talking about Master Sun."