Modern Strategy

"This book is a great place for people to begin who want to learn more about strategy. Gray does what he says he is going to do: he talks about modern strategy. He talks about everything from the principles of nuclear strategy to the basic fundamentals of strategy itself, the importance of Clausewitz, and of strategic context. I don’t agree with everything he says, but no strategist agrees with everything another one has to say. But his book is a great place to begin. It depends what he meant, because he and I have debated the nature of war. He believes that the nature of war is unchanging—that the character of war changes, but the fundamental nature of war doesn’t. I disagree with that. I think Clausewitz was trying to tell us that the whole thing changes. It is not just a chameleon. A chameleon changes externally but it doesn’t change its internal composition. War is more than a chameleon, according to Clausewitz, because its internal make up—which parts of a society participate, for instance, and how—too can change, and it is really important for us to understand that. If we’re going in against a citizen army or nation-at-arms in the wake of a massive social and political event like the French Revolution, we may be looking at a fundamentally different nature of war than if we were going up against a small force of mercenaries that doesn’t have much public support. Right. He would say war is still war and its fundamental nature doesn’t change. For me that’s a tautology that doesn’t get us very far. The weather is still the weather, but if you’re walking out into a blizzard, you’re going to want to know that, especially if you’re the military, because you have to prepare very differently—strategically and tactically. And if you’re walking out into a blistering heat wave, you’re going to want to know that too. It’s important to look at his discussion of politics and ethics and its relationship to strategy. Ethics is something Clausewitz doesn’t really touch on, for instance, but it is so important today. It is one of the things that really gets in the way of achieving an advantage over your opponent because there are certain things that you will not, or must not, allow yourself to do. Ethics help preserve our values when we’re in the chaotic environment of war, and we need to appreciate that. I think most practitioners will tell you that they do. They feel caught between the rules of engagement and what they think they need to do in order to achieve their military objectives. If you’ve having to call in and get legal approval for every missile strike, it takes time to do that and in the meantime the target may have moved away. That might have been an individual high up in the enemy’s ranks, so you miss an important opportunity. The military is naturally frustrated by that kind of restriction. On the other hand, without some restrictions you might have some indiscriminate killing, and that’s obviously not a good thing for your society. Probably, in the long-run, it would run counter to the goals you want to achieve. So we have to find a balance between those two. It’s really difficult. Military culture and political culture often don’t see eye to eye. They don’t use the same language, often. Civil-military relations are key to good strategy and that’s one of the things that Hew Strachan brings out in his volume."