As I dive into these books in preparation for meeting with you today, there seems to be quite a bit of ink devoted to deciding what military strategy is. What is it? I realized that “strategos” is the ancient Greek word for “general”.
yes, there are a couple of variations of what military strategy is; some say it’s the general’s business, or the general’s art, the general’s concern, the things the general needs to be an expert at, etc. It’s the general’s business, so to speak. Later, many definitions appeared throughout history until reaching a point where the art of strategy is almost synonymous with the art of war.
You are reading: Books on military strategy
I would define military strategy as finding your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses and using them in the best possible way to get what you want. it requires understanding your opponents, not only what their material capabilities might be, but also their psychology, their habits, what they might be willing to do or not do, and what they might want from you.
From all that information, you build an idea of their strengths and weaknesses relative to yours. then you use your strengths against their weaknesses to the best of your ability to achieve whatever it is you want. maybe you want to beat them up enough that they leave you alone, maybe you want to dissuade them from trying to hurt you in the first place, or maybe you want more than that. there are many possibilities.
Usually what you get at the end of it all depends on the success of that beating, if it came to that; thus, the terms of peace may rise or fall depending on the magnitude of victory or defeat that occurs on the field or at sea, or, at present, in the air, or, one day, in space. .
And isn’t it an important part of military strategy, to quote one of your chosen authors, that you don’t go to war at all? according to sun zi [also known as ‘sun tzu’; see note on Chinese names at the end of this interview], “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
yes, but there is a bit of deliberate hyperbole in that saying. There are many theories as to whether or not there was an individual named Sun Zi that we can point to, or if this was a collection of writings by various Chinese masters. there may have been a sun zi long ago but, over time, other sayings and aphorisms were added to his works, so what we have today is an expanded version, a collection of ancient Chinese wisdom, so to speak, about wage war. other scholars say, ‘no, we have some evidence that there was indeed an individual named sun zi’.
“the nature of politics goes against the nature of strategy, in a way”
of course, when sun zi wrote, you had to have a sponsor. Like any artist or builder, you had to market yourself as a strategist to get on someone’s payroll. so you had to give the impression of being the best strategist, one who could beat anyone else. you were attentive to the competition and tried to be the most attractive candidate. so such hyperbole would not have been uncommon.
There’s also the hook aspect, to grab your audience’s attention so you can get across what you really want to say. now all your students are very attentive, ready to hear how you are going to beat the opponent without even having a battle.
so sun zi’s book is usually published as the art of war in english. as you say, it’s not clear exactly when it was written, but certainly more than a couple of millennia ago. I’m intrigued that something so old is still on your list and still relevant.
well, that’s the thing, it has survived, partly because of the way it was written, as aphorisms or pearls of wisdom on how to see strategy or fight wars. that made it easily transferable from one historical era to another.
There may be some ambiguities due to language differences, but we can usually work them out. the translators will do their best and other performers will add their own takes. it may not be a perfect representation of what the original wisdom was, but it is flexible enough to be applied, and people come back to it again and again.
It is also seen as being diametrically opposed or different in character from Western wisdom on how to wage war. in fact, there are many similarities, but because it is seen as “the other” so to speak, it is often used as something to balance what is the western way of warfare or what could be the western way of strategy. is essential in that sense. It will probably always be part of the canon for understanding strategy, making strategies, or teaching strategies.
Can you give an example of one of those aphorisms that you think is particularly useful today?
The one you quoted (“the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”) is perfect to start with, because much of strategy requires being in the right position. all of that starts long before a battle.
A result per se cannot be guaranteed and there is always an element of chance. but, in any number of areas, not just your military forces, but your diplomatic influence, the number of allies or coalition partners you may have, the will of your population at home and the extent to which you support the conflict, you may be in a position so strong as to have the initiative and all possible cards in his favor. so that’s probably what that expression really means.
In other words, the strategist’s job begins long before the battle begins. You must always think about how to acquire an advantage, how to gain influence over your opponent. that’s a constant struggle because you have to assume that your opponent is trying to do the same thing. he or she is also moving to gain a positional advantage over you, and whoever gets the upper hand has the upper hand.
“Every time junior officers are taught how to plan operations, they are required to have a deception plan. It becomes a bit of a joke between them, but it makes them understand that they have to think about psychologically annoying the enemy”
That’s an idea that still applies today. we probably don’t do that enough in the west. There are a number of reasons for this. part has to do with the nature of multilateral institutions, the law of war, what is allowed and what is not allowed.
there are restrictions in nato, for example. article 5 says that nato must come to the defense of any nato member that is attacked. that’s a very defensive stance. prevents you from taking offensive actions or moving aggressively to gain a positional advantage over your opponent.
so, with the nature of the deals we have, we’ve lost some of the things that previous strategists would have considered natural or essential to successful strategy execution. but we have agreed to have those limitations, in a way. it fits with our values as a western society and for the most part we agree with that. the military isn’t necessarily happy about that, but has agreed to accept the risks that come with putting those values first.
do you think that, in general, when governments, like the us. Have you been preparing for wars, have you paid enough attention to strategy? there are a lot of people like you studying it, but is enough of that knowledge taken into account when preparing for a war, like in iraq?
It really depends on the personality of the head of state. in some cases a lot of attention is paid to the strategy, in other cases not. In part, that’s because he must start thinking about his goals, the ends he wants to achieve, even before he begins to deploy his forces.
ideally, the way we think about strategy in the west is: first you decide what you want to achieve, then you analyze the resources you have available to achieve it, and then you develop the ways, the methods you want to achieve. use to achieve what you want.
Often, the nature of politics is what it is, a struggle for the distribution of power, which makes it difficult to establish what the ends really are. the nature of politics goes against the nature of strategy, in a way. strategists always say, ‘tell me what you want so I can start planning,’ but it’s not always possible for a sitting administration to articulate what it really wants because, if it leaked to the public before the public was prepared for it, it could cause a stir that could backfire. that’s why it’s much more difficult, in a way, to deal with the nature of politics today because the public can be informed of anything almost instantly, especially with social media.
I understand that the first emperor of china, qinshihuang, famous for his terracotta soldiers, as well as mao zedong, took sun zi very seriously, is that correct? I suppose they had more freedom to do what he advocated.
yes, but mao also took clausewitz seriously. he agreed that war is essentially born within the womb of politics, so whatever the political situation, the particular struggle for power, is going to shape how war is viewed. That is one of the things Clauswitz was trying to say in his extensive tome on war. Mao is on record as saying that he agreed with the fundamental principles that the witz clause advanced.
sun zi certainly took it seriously, as far as we know. he appears to have been an avid reader. he was vying for control of the communist party, so he had other rivals within his own party to contend with besides the nationalists. Then the Japanese invaded China in the late 1930s, in the midst of the Chinese Civil War.
so he had a lot of competitors, a lot of adversaries to deal with, and the fact that he successfully emerged from all of that suggests that he knew something about strategy.
the art of war is full of aphorisms, but then when it talks about other things, it transports you through the millennia. you can almost feel that you are in a pre-modern porcelain, surrounded by swamps. it’s quite evocative, I thought, which surprised me. one more quote that caught my attention. sun zi says: “all war is based on deception”. is that true?
again, this is a bit of hyperbole. it is the idea that during the warring states period, which we believe to be the era in which sun zi wrote, the war was just a brutal clash of not very well trained armies: frontal assaults, many casualties, many cities leveled . So, to avoid that kind of destruction, try to introduce a new approach to strategy, which involves using what the opponent wants to believe about you to your advantage. that’s where deception comes in, pretending to be weak, to invite attack and take advantage of your opponent’s aggressiveness.
we still cheat. it is still considered very important today. If you remember the invasion on D-Day during World War II, Patton was used as a decoy. there was a dummy army in the south of england to keep the germans worried about an invasion in calais, which is where they wanted to believe the allied invasion would occur. instead, the allies landed in normandy. so that was a hoax on a grand scale.
All campaign plans today must include some kind of deception plan. and whenever junior officers are taught how to plan operations, they are required to have a deception plan. it becomes a bit of a joke between them, but it is understood that they have to think about psychologically disturbing the enemy.
It’s hard to imagine d-day being kept a secret in the modern world.
Given communications and what they are today, yes, it’s hard to imagine. for example, Ukrainian civilians can take selfies next to Russian armored vehicles as they line up, warm up their engines, or prepare to march down the road, and that instantly tells us the grid coordinates of that column.
How the hell can someone execute a deception plan and stay serious about it? Remember the famous expression “little green men”, and the Russians insisted that they were not actually annexing Crimea or trying to seize the Donbass. it was all the work of separatists and irregulars and such.
but we were able to take that narrative apart piece by piece and rebuild its command structures. we knew which Russian organizations, which special operations teams were involved, and who was in charge. yes, they ran some militiamen and irregulars, some gangs and whatever, but there was also a regular structure at work. it was run by a cadre of well-trained officers and NCOs. we were able to discover all that.
“the term ‘strategy’ dates back to the Greco-Roman period but then didn’t come back into vogue until the 18th century or so”
so how can we, in the age of cyber communications and satellites, execute the deception and pull it off? an emp or electromagnetic pulse would eliminate all communication within a certain radius. you could do that: delete everything and then make your move. but eventually the lights will come back on.
See Also: Anne Tyler – Book Series In Order
It’s an interesting question and there are several ways to approach it: one involves the strategic communications your party puts out. you can set up a narrative about what you want people to believe you’re doing and make it plausible, and then do something that looks a lot like what you said you were going to do, but can actually be “unique” in order to accomplish what you want. it’s more complicated but it can be done.
let’s move on to your next book, carl von clausewitz’s on war. he was a Prussian general who served in the Napoleonic wars. I was about to say that he lost, but he didn’t: he just suffered a lot of humiliation on the way to the final victory over napoleon. What does the book say about him and why is he still so important?
The key message is that the strategic principles that we as professionals might use in war depend on what the nature of the war is. which is where we hit shaky ground because there are so many ideas about what the nature of war is.
This book is based on the premise that understanding the nature of war makes some principles valid and others invalid. we have to use our judgment in applying those principles, so there’s a great emphasis within warfare on using the commander’s judgment, of exercising that judgment, training that judgment, so that he can do better, because there are no absolutes or certainties in the conduct of war. sometimes it’s almost instinct, but it can be trained instinct or trained judgment that responds as quickly as instinct. that’s one of the things he refers to.
The nature of war itself boils down to what are the main institutions involved in warfare, how are the armed forces structured, how well can they operate within the realm of chance and uncertainty. furthermore, to what extent does the population support the war? what level of hostility is present or not? what is the role of the population in the army? are you talking about citizen soldiers, who might be fired up with their passion for war? Or could the population actually go the other way and be very much against the war?
“Ukrainian civilians can take selfies next to Russian armored vehicles as they line up, warm up their engines, or prepare to march down the road, and that instantly tells us the grid coordinates of that column.”
In the United States in the Vietnam era of the 1960s, there were growing anti-war sentiments, but the White House failed to appreciate the importance of these. he began to lose support for the war from under his feet. Then came the Tet Offensive in 1968. That was almost the nail in the coffin that killed our hopes of any kind of long-term victory. public support simply dried up, white house credibility was lost, and so on.
The other element is the government itself. what is the overall purpose? Even if there are specific purposes that are not going to be disclosed to the public, what does the government itself want to achieve? because if you’re just looking for a limited negotiated settlement of some sort like the korean war, you want to push the communists and the north koreans over a certain line, and come to an armistice and preserve south korea as a free state, then that is a thing.
If you want to conquer someone else’s territories, that changes the nature of the war because it raises the stakes, at least for you. it puts you in different territory, in terms of your calculations. Likewise, if your opponent wants to conquer and you feel like that opponent won’t stop short of that, then that also ups the ante for you.
then the nature of the war depends on the interrelation between those 3 things, according to clausulawitz.
He would say, for example, that defense was stronger than attack in the Napoleonic era because of the concept of the nation in arms. you could cheer up the population, enter into the passions of patriotism or nationalism, or even openly hate your opponent. even if their regular forces were defeated in a major battle, as the Prussians were, they could continue to hold out as guerrillas, making life miserable for the French occupiers.
He advocates that course of action, along with several others. the Prussian king does not accept it for a good reason. i think at the end of the day prussia would have been crushed and would have been more of a disaster. many civilians would have died in the process.
if they had opted for guerrilla warfare?
there were a couple of attempts, there were some uprisings. they were eventually put down by the French. Clausewitz misconstrued public support for such adventures. he thought that the population would be behind because they hated the French so much. he was projecting that onto Prussian society, which just wasn’t ready for that.
so clausewitz was disappointed and fought for the tsar when napoleon invaded russia in 1812.
If you’re using primarily an elite professional force (even mercenaries) who aren’t really connected to the population, and the population isn’t really involved in the war, that can change what principles are valid. If you put a small professional army against citizen soldiers or a nation in arms, Clauswitz believed that the latter would win 9 times out of 10, probably because they would continue to hold out until the professional force was crushed or the government. he decided it was no longer worth the cost and withdrew everyone.
And you don’t agree?
no, I think there’s a lot of validity to that. that’s where the Maoist theory of people’s war comes from. Mao doesn’t credit Clausewitz for giving him the idea, but many of the principles of guerrilla warfare closely resemble what Clausewitz was writing about small warfare and the nation in arms. doesn’t mean he’s necessarily the basis for them, but there are enough similarities that we can’t ignore.
You’ve seen an example of this in iraq with the anbar awakening. that was the iraqi population taking the insurrection in their hands and trying to expel al-qaeda.
“every year we have more traffic accidents in the united states than we have lost in iraq and afghanistan combined over the 15 years. and yet we focus on the number of dead people.”
in iraq, the west took a little longer than it should to change its principles to protect the population and be its guardian instead of just going after the “bad guys”. It’s always important to go after the “bad guys”, but if you create more damage and are killing more noncombatants in the process, you’ll turn that hostility against yourself.
Let’s talk about some of the trendiest books on your list. Book number 3 is Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History, which is, as the name suggests, the history of strategy from the earliest times.
explains quite well how complex and convoluted that story is. The term “strategy” dates from the Greco-Roman period, but then didn’t come back into fashion until the eighteenth century or so. people are still doing strategy, they just don’t call it that. that makes it difficult if you’re tracking the history of an activity. but he does it very well. articulating the business of the general is what we’re talking about here as far as what is strategy, which is different from business strategy.
but it all comes down to gaining some sort of advantage or influence over any competition you face. If you have no competitors, all you need is a plan. if you’re in an environment where you have competitors, you need a strategy because you have to deal with the competition in some way and that’s where strategy really comes into play. it is a practice rather than a theory.
Do you agree with the strategy being used in business? some of these books you’ve chosen are a bit scathing about how it’s all called strategy now… strategy this and strategy that.
oh, it’s become kind of crazy. If you want to sell a book, put the word strategy somewhere in the title. when things happen at the international political level, when we begin to lose conflicts, the protest of the experts is: “we have no strategy!” or “the strategy we have is broken!”
then, books start to appear on how to make strategy better or what are the real principles of strategy. So now you have this natural attraction to the term and people are starting to use it more and more.
see more courses developed on strategy, what it is or not. You can really gain a lot of attention if you become one of those strategists overnight, maybe not enough to make a small fortune, but at least you can get some recognition.
Do you think those criticisms are true, that we don’t have a strategy? is that what went wrong in the middle east, shall we say?
There was a strategy. whether it was good or not is the issue, and whether the goals were actually achievable. once again, the nature of politics goes against the nature of strategy because there are always political wars between various parties involved, and the struggle for power never really ends. so whichever party is in office, republican or democrat for us. In the US, there is an opposition that seeks to find weaknesses and seeks to reduce the credibility of the administration in office, to show that it is incompetent, to undermine it.
meaning that people are sometimes reluctant to articulate what their ends really are. without that knowledge, the military really can’t accomplish everything they need to make the strategy work.
“There are many ideas about the nature of war”
on the other hand, that ambiguity can also benefit a party. he can claim victory, even if his original ends were not exactly fulfilled. you can state ‘all we really wanted to do was x and we did it; so we were successful, and now we can start to withdraw. the war is over, major combat operations are over.’ you try to shape perceptions of what you did versus what you wanted to achieve. It’s your own internal deception plan, I guess. whether people will buy it or not is something else.
Also, wars go through different phases. what the goals were at the beginning are not necessarily what they will be in the middle or at the end. is constantly open to change.
as in vietnam: originally the us goals were quite limited, but they got absorbed more and more, didn’t they?
I sure do. There are many theories as to why it happened, but the objectives were initially very limited and only involved special operations forces advising South Vietnamese soldiers. then there was a gradual escalation over time for various reasons, there was a “mission creep” as it is called in the military. in a sense, it can also have “war advance” or “strategy advance”.
Is that coming from the military side or the civilian side?
can be a bit of both. Part of it was that Johnson didn’t want to be seen as the first American president to lose a war, so he gradually stepped up to prevent that from happening. but he really didn’t want to be in the war. he wanted to continue his great partnership program. he wanted to devote energy, attention, and resources to improving living conditions, living standards, education, civil rights, all of those things. he found that war was an albatross around his neck, but he couldn’t get out of it, so he was advised, without climbing. but that only drew him deeper. The military, of course, didn’t want to lose either, so they also sought to climb, although they would have preferred to go in with maximum effort from the beginning.
when you read books about what went wrong for america in vietnam, such as the best and the brightest, you get the feeling that not enough attention was paid to “knowing the enemy” (to go back to sun zi). what surprises me is that when iraq arrived, everything was the same again. there were a lot of people on the ground saying, ‘don’t invade this place! That’s a really bad idea!’ Is that your feeling too, that not enough attention is paid to knowing the enemy?
yes. sometimes there is an arrogance of power, and there certainly was in vietnam. Racial attitudes also came into play: there was an arrogance that prevented a full understanding of the Vietnamese people.
See Also: Counting Books for Little Learners – Pocket of Preschool
Intelligence sources were also missing, aside from CIA estimates, etc. By that I mean that the intelligence networks that we had were not as productive as they were, say, in World War II when we had cracked the German and Japanese codes. those advances told us a lot. Of course, we had to use that information wisely, but it told us when the Germans or the Japanese were making big moves. It wasn’t always 100% actionable, sometimes they still pulled off surprises, but overall we had the intelligence advantage.
in vietnam, we didn’t have that kind of information. Some of the sources that emerged after the war from Vietnamese archives, including Chinese and Russian sources, show that at times we came closer to winning than we thought. we just didn’t know. the Chinese and the Russians wondered how much more material they would have to throw into the war. Had we had that kind of information instead of making estimates, perhaps we could have taken a different course of action.
next is modern strategy, a book by colin gray. this is more of a textbook, right?
This book is a great place to start for people who want to learn more about strategy. Gray does what he says he’s going to do: he talks about modern strategy. He talks about everything from the principles of nuclear strategy to the basic fundamentals of the strategy itself, the importance of Clausewitz and the strategic context.
I don’t agree with everything he says, but no strategist agrees with everything another has to say. but his book is a great place to start.
a quote from the beginning of the book: “there is an essential unity in all strategic experience in all periods of history because nothing vital to the nature of war and strategy changes.” do you agree with that?
It depends on what he meant, because he and I have debated the nature of war. he believes that the nature of war does not change, that the character of war changes, but the fundamental nature of war does not.
I don’t agree with that. I think clauswitz was trying to tell us that everything changes. it’s not just a chameleon. a chameleon changes externally but does not change its internal composition. war is more than a chameleon, according to clausewitz, because its internal composition (which parts of a society participate, for example, and how) can also change, and it is very important that we understand that. If we are facing a citizen army or a nation under 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 warfare than if we were facing a small force of mercenaries that did not has a lot of public support.
so they’re both fans of clausewitz, but they interpret it a little differently.
correct. I would say that war is still war and its fundamental nature does not change. to me that’s a tautology that doesn’t get us very far. weather is still weather, but if you run into a blizzard, you’ll want to know about it, especially if you’re in the military, because you have to prepare very differently, strategically and tactically. And if you’re walking into a scorching heat wave, you’ll want to know that, too.
Is there anything in the book that particularly stands out to you, that is particularly useful?
It is important to look at his analysis of politics and ethics and their relationship to strategy. ethics is something that clausewitz doesn’t really touch on, for example, but it’s very important today. it’s one of the things that really gets in the way of gaining an advantage over your opponent because there are certain things you won’t or shouldn’t allow yourself to do. ethics help preserve our values when we are in the chaotic environment of war, and we should appreciate that.
Do soldiers really feel caught, when they are in the field, between what they feel they must do to win and what they know they cannot do as representatives of a democracy?
I think most practitioners will tell you yes. they feel caught between the rules of engagement and what they think they must do to achieve their military objectives. if you have to call and get legal approval for every missile strike, it takes time to do so, and in the meantime, the target may have moved away. that could have been an individual high up in the enemy’s ranks, thus missing an important opportunity. the military is naturally frustrated by that kind of restriction.
On the other hand, without some restrictions you could have some random killings, and that’s obviously not good for your society. In the long run, it would probably go against the goals you want to achieve.
“I would say that war is still war and its fundamental nature does not change. to me that’s a tautology that doesn’t get us very far.”
so we have to find a balance between those two. it is very difficult the military culture and the political culture often do not agree. they don’t use the same language, often. civil-military relations are key to good strategy and that is one of the things that hew strachan highlights in his volume.
yes, let’s talk about your book, the direction of the war now. he used to be a teacher at oxford and now he’s at st. Andres is a war historian. he majored in the first world war, but was later brought up to the present. tell me more about his book.
is a collection of essays dealing with contemporary warfare and how to use history, historical examples, and some strategic theories to clarify what is happening and what must happen. these are essays he published in survival and elsewhere, and they were directly relevant to what was happening in iraq and afghanistan. it was a way of trying to get people to pay attention, whether they were members of parliament or members of the American defense establishment. he was trying to speak directly to them, as well as to lower-ranking military and politicians.
The burden of this is that strategy is not just about the approach you have for the campaign: your goals, your resources, and how you hope to use the latter to achieve the former. it’s also how you conduct war while you’re at it to ensure your purposes are served. you tend to find, in any war, that people don’t always understand what the goal is and consequently work at purposes opposed to it. they often don’t realize they are, or perhaps, in extreme cases, they are deliberately taking advantage of the opportunities of war to settle scores or to make a profit.
Those things go against the overall war effort and need to be controlled. Whoever is in charge of directing the war must be alert to such situations.
“ethics is something that clausewitz doesn’t really touch on, for example, but it’s very important today.”
Those are some of the messages that emerge from his essays. if you are the political leader, you cannot hand the war over to the military to run. you have to be actively involved in it, directing it, you have to communicate. you need to have good civil-military relations to ensure you cross cultural barriers and pick the right people to get the job done.
writes, “one of the reasons we’re not sure what war is is that we’re not sure what strategy it is or isn’t. it is not politics. it is not politics. it is not diplomacy. it exists in relation to all three, but does not replace them. what do you mean by that?
many people see strategy as if it should come before politics, or transcend politics, or put diplomacy to work for it. None of these things stop for the sake of strategy, but they all have a role to play in making a strategy work. in the same way that they can be responsible for its failure.
On a related point, one of the things I’ve criticized political science and international relations for is the exaggerated attention they give to the idea that war is an instrument of politics or policy. This idea comes from Clausewitz, of course. but some have taken the expression out of context and treated it as if it were the only thing he said. it is as if the political dimension of the war were the only one that mattered; but achieving one’s political goals at the cost of severe social divisions, or riots and revolutions, will not amount to a great victory. focusing on the political dimension of war, to the exclusion of others, makes our understanding of war one-dimensional, and necessarily makes strategy one-dimensional, again agreeing that we may not be sure what is war and what is strategy.
this is the famous clausewitz quote, that war is just a continuation of politics “by other means”.
yes. To highlight an example, in the cold war, many academics were concerned that military goals might exceed political goals and thus lead to escalation, total war, or general war that you didn’t want. So, they argued that we have to keep a tight rein on military leaders, and rightly so. but they wrongly assumed that the policy itself will be rational enough to prevent an escalation. history, recent and ancient, shows us that this is not true.
but we have lost our sense of what war is, in part because the assumptions of the cold war experience are still with us. under current political conditions, we have also over-legalized war to live with the fact that we sometimes need it. but in doing so, we have steadily eroded the usefulness of war as a legitimate instrument of policy. We rationalize our use of war by calling it an instrument of policy, but in reality it has many more dimensions.
how do you find the kind of coverage of the war in the media and the general understanding of what’s going on in iraq, afghanistan, our contemporary wars?
I think the coverage tends to sensationalize the war too much. they seek out the headlines, making everyday events seem bigger than they are. That sensationalism is as old as the press, it’s always going to be there, but it’s hard for civilians to separate that sensationalism from reality, and I think that’s not a good thing.
loss of life is always tragic, but focusing on loss of life in a particular incident while missing the big picture strikes me as a distortion of not only the brutality of war, but also the extent to which the population needs to commit and get involved in it. they shouldn’t be sitting around horrified by what they see on their TV screen or iPad.
we have more traffic deaths in the united states each year than we have lost in iraq and afghanistan combined for the entire 15 years. and yet we focus on the number of dead people.
It’s always tragic, but we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture of how to conduct a war, of understanding the role of society in that, and what is a good strategic decision and what is a bad one. instinctively getting out of a war, making impulsive decisions based on the latest headlines is not strategy. It’s probably going to make things worse in the long run. but it’s very, very hard for us to see it that way.
Of all the leaders, throughout history, who do you think is the best military strategist? Do you have someone you particularly admire?
in terms of the best overall strategic leader, someone who could guide the making of military strategy and had the ability to lead it successfully to win a major war and keep key allies in the game, while dealing with large numbers of strong personalities, it would have to be franklin delano roosevelt. He had the strategic sense to appreciate what was happening in Europe in late 1938 and early 1939, before Germany attacked Poland, and was already looking for ways to increase aid to the UK and other Western countries.
He was also able to deal with political opposition at home, who did not want to enter another European war. the American public had already been bloodied and disillusioned by World War I—with a quarter of a million dead—and it turned out to have solved nothing. Many immigrant communities in the United States didn’t particularly care about Mussolini or Hitler, but they also didn’t want to go to war with the old country. he also had to deal with a congress and a military that did not always support his decisions. but he had to keep the bigger picture.
Roosevelt somehow managed to handle all of that while also being physically weakened. so for me he is the only strategist who ranks first.
note on Chinese names
Chinese names can cause confusion due to 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 ‘zi’ character is an honorific suffix. then we are talking about the master sun.
See Also: 20 Life-Changing Books That Shape Your Thinking