The New Makers of Modern Strategy, page 2
John H. Maurer is the Alfred Thayer Mahan Distinguished Professor of Sea Power and Grand Strategy and served as Chairman of the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Global View Columnist at the Wall Street Journal, and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York.
MICHAEL COTEY MORGAN
Michael Cotey Morgan is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War.
MARK MOYAR
Mark Moyar holds the William P. Harris Chair in Military History at Hillsdale College. He is the author of seven books, most recently, Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965–1968, and he is currently writing the final volume of a Vietnam War trilogy. He received a B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
WILLIAMSON MURRAY
Williamson Murray received his BA and PhD in history from Yale University. He served five years in the United States Air Force. He has written and edited numerous books and is currently professor emeritus at the Ohio State University and the Marshall Professor at Marine Corps University.
S.C.M. PAINE
S.C.M. Paine, the William S. Sims University Professor of History and Grand Strategy, Strategy & Policy Department, US Naval War College, has published Wars for Asia, 1911–1949, Japanese Empire, and, with Bruce A. Elleman, Modern China: Continuity and Change 1644 to the Present, as well as co-editing five books on naval operations.
SERGEY RADCHENKO
Sergey Radchenko is a historian of the Cold War and the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
ISKANDER REHMAN
Iskander Rehman is the Senior Fellow for Strategic Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, in Washington, DC, where he leads a research effort on applied history and grand strategy. He holds a PhD from the Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), in Paris.
THOMAS RID
Thomas Rid is Professor of Strategic Studies at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is best known for his work on the history and risks of information technology in conflict. Rid is the author of Active Measures, Rise of the Machines, Cyber Will Not Take Place, and other works.
JOSHUA ROVNER
Joshua Rovner is an associate professor at American University, where he teaches and writes on intelligence and strategy. Rovner is also managing editor of H-Diplo’s International Security Studies Forum, and deputy editor of the Journal of Strategic Studies.
PRIYA SATIA
Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History at Stanford University and the award-winning author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East; Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution; and Time’s Monster: How History Makes History.
KORI SCHAKE
Kori Schake leads the foreign and defense policy studies team at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony and has worked in the National Security Council, State Department, and Department of Defense.
MATT J. SCHUMANN
Matt J. Schumann (Ph.D., University of Exeter, 2005) teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Bowling Green State University. He has published on the trans-Atlantic Seven Years’ War and both continental and Atlantic dimensions of the Anglo-French strategic rivalry. He is currently pursuing a global history of the 1748 Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.
BRENDAN SIMMS
Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of European International Relations and Director of the Forum on Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Europe, the Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present Day, Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation, and Hitler: Only the World was Enough.
JASON K. STEARNS
Jason K. Stearns is Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University and is director of the Congo Research Group at New York University. He is author of The War That Does Not Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo.
HEW STRACHAN
Sir Hew Strachan is the Wardlaw Professor of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews and an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he was the Chichele Professor of the History of War, 2002–15. His books include The First World War, Clausewitz’s On War, and The Direction of War.
SUE MI TERRY
Sue Mi Terry is the Director of the Wilson Center’s Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy. A former CIA analyst, she served on the National Intelligence Council in 2009–10 and the National Security Council in 2008–9.
TOSHI YOSHIHARA
Toshi Yoshihara is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He was previously the John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies at the US Naval War College. He is co-author of Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy.
THE NEW MAKERS OF MODERN STRATEGY
Introduction
THE INDISPENSABLE ART: THREE GENERATIONS OF MAKERS OF MODERN STRATEGY
Hal Brands
There’s no substitute for strategy. Strategy is what allows us to act with purpose in a disordered world; it is vital to out-thinking and out-playing our foes. Without strategy, action is random and devoid of direction; power and advantage are squandered rather than deployed to good effect. The mightiest empires may survive for a while if they lack good strategy, but no one can thrive for long without it.
Strategy is very complex, and strategy is also very simple. The concept of strategy—what it is, what it encompasses, how it is best pursued—is subject to unending debate, confusion, and redefinition. Even the most talented leaders have struggled to conquer strategy’s dilemmas. Yet the essence of strategy is straightforward: it is the craft of summoning and using power to achieve our central purposes, amid the friction of global affairs and the resistance of rivals and enemies. Strategy is the indispensable art of getting what we want, with what we have, in a world that seems set on denying us.
In this sense, strategy is intimately related to the use of force, because the specter of violence hangs over any contested relationship. If the world was harmonious and everyone could achieve their dreams, there would be no need for a discipline focused on mastering competitive interactions. Indeed, this book was completed as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave Europe its largest interstate land war since World War II, thereby reminding all of us—tragically—that hard power has hardly gone out of style. Yet strategy encompasses the use of all forms of power to prosper in an unruly world. It is, in fact, a fundamentally optimistic endeavor, premised on the idea that coercive means can serve constructive ends, that leaders can impose control on events rather than being dominated by them.1
Strategy, then, is timeless, but our understanding of it is not. The basic challenges of strategy would have been familiar to Thucydides, Machiavelli, or Clausewitz, which is why their works are still required reading today. The field of strategic studies is rooted in the belief that there is a basic logic of strategy that transcends time and space. But the basic meaning of the term “strategy” has never been fixed, and we forever reinterpret even the most enduring texts through the lens of our own preoccupations. If strategy seems to be such an elusive, protean creature, it’s because every era teaches us something about the concept and the requirements of doing it well.
It is essential to renew our understanding of strategy today. Serious people can no longer believe, as was sometimes argued a generation ago, that war—and perhaps strategy itself—have become passé in an era of post-Cold War peace. Fierce competition, punctuated by the threat of catastrophic conflict, is the grim reality of our time. The democratic world faces sharper challenges to its geopolitical supremacy and basic security than at any point in decades. Strategy is most valuable when the stakes are high and the consequences of failure are severe. This means that the premium on good strategy, and on the deep understanding of the history that informs it, is becoming high indeed.
I
“When war comes, it dominates our lives,” wrote Edward Mead Earle in his introduction to the first edition of Makers of Modern Strategy.2 That volume was conceived during some of the worst moments of history’s worst war; it was published in 1943, as that conflict raged across oceans and continents. This setting lent the book extraordinary urgency by underscoring that the study of strategy had become, for the world’s few remaining democracies, a matter of life and death.
The contributors, a collection of American and European scholars, sought to promote a better understanding of strategy by tracing the evolution of military thought through key individuals from Machiavelli to Hitler.3 Yet the volume emphasized another reality made inescapable by World War II—that a country’s fate depended on far more than its excellence in combat. “In the present-day world,” Earle wrote, “strategy is the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation—or a coalition of nations—including its armed forces, to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed.”4 It was a discipline that involved multiple dimensions of statecraft and operated in peace as well as war.
Makers of Modern Strategy drove home the point, made during the interwar period by British thinkers such as J.F.C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart, that strategy was not simply the preserve of great military commanders. It was the province, also, of economists, revolutionaries, politicians, historians, and all the concerned citizens of democracies.5 The book showed how an immersion in history could produce a richer, more rigorous engagement with the intricacies of strategy and the dynamics of war and peace. The first Makers thereby helped establish strategic studies as a modern academic field, one that used the past as a primary source of insight on present problems.
If strategic studies was a child of hot war, it matured during the Cold War. The United States became a superpower, with vast intellectual needs to match its sprawling global commitments. The nuclear revolution raised fundamental questions about the purpose of war and the relationship between force and diplomacy. A new generation of scholars studied and, in many cases, revised the body of historical knowledge upon which the discipline drew. Scholars and statesmen reinterpreted old works, such as the writings of Carl von Clausewitz, through the prism of Cold War challenges.6
This was the context that eventually led, after more than one false start, to a second edition of Makers of Modern Strategy in 1986.7 That volume, edited by Peter Paret with the assistance of Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert, dipped into issues, such as nuclear strategy and violent insurgency, that had come to the forefront of Cold War politics.8 It considered World War I and World War II as part of a discrete historical era rather than more-or-less current events. The second edition paid increased attention to the historical development of American strategy, while also bringing the interpretation of key issues and individuals up to date. Yet interestingly, the Paret volume took a somewhat narrower view of strategy, defining it as “the development, intellectual mastery, and utilization of all of the state’s resources for the purpose of implementing its policy in war.”9 The overall thrust of the book was that the incalculably high stakes of modern war made an understanding of military strategy essential.
Both volumes were—and remain—classics, which can still be read profitably for the insights of individual essays as well as the window they provide into the evolution of strategic analysis in the Western world. Both were models of how to employ academic knowledge for the purpose of educating democratic publics so that they could better defend their interests and values. But both volumes have aged, unavoidably, since publication, and so both remind us that the state of the art does shift over time.
II
Since 1986, the world has changed dramatically. The Cold War ended and America won a degree of primacy unrivaled in modern history, only to face problems old and new. Nuclear proliferation, terrorism and insurgency, gray-zone conflict and irregular warfare, and cybersecurity all joined—or rejoined—a growing list of strategic concerns. New technologies and modes of warfare challenged accepted patterns of strategy and conflict. For a time, America enjoyed a respite from great-power geopolitical competition. But that holiday is now unmistakably over, as China challenges for hegemony, Russia seeks dramatic revisions to the European balance, and an array of revisionist actors test Washington and the international order it leads.
Today, the global status quo is sharply and unceasingly contested; the prospect of war between nuclear-armed states is frighteningly real. There is no guarantee that the democracies will prevail, geopolitically or ideologically, in the twenty-first century as they eventually did in the twentieth. After a period of unprecedented dominance that cushioned the effects of strategic lassitude, America and its allies find themselves in an era that will demand strategic discipline and insight.
As the future has grown foreboding, our understanding of the past has changed. In the last forty years, scholarship on international politics, war, and peace has become increasingly internationalized, with the opening of new archives and the incorporation of new viewpoints. Scholars have brought fresh insights to the study of seemingly familiar subjects, from the meaning of classic texts to the causes and course of the world wars and the Cold War.10 It may be a challenging time to do strategy, but it is also a good time to update our understanding of it.
There is, first, the question of who and what counts as a “maker.” Theorists and practitioners of war remain fundamentally important. Many of the great men of strategy whose ideas and exploits filled earlier volumes—Machiavelli and Clausewitz, Napoleon and Jomini, Hamilton and Mahan, Hitler and Churchill—reappear in this one.11 Individual makers still receive top billing, because it is people who formulate and execute strategy, and it is through their ideas and experiences that we can best comprehend the unrelenting demands of those tasks.
Yet individuals do not make strategy in a vacuum; it is molded, as well, by technological change and organizational culture, social forces and intellectual movements, ideologies and regime types, generational mindsets and professional cohorts.12 It is debatable, for instance, whether America’s Cold War nuclear strategy flowed primarily from elegant analysis by the Wizards of Armageddon or from opaque, unglamorous, and often-impersonal bureaucratic processes.13 Perhaps more importantly, strategic thought and actions by non-Western makers—Sun Zi and Mohammed, Tecumseh and Nehru, Kim Jong-Un and Mao Zedong, among others, individuals largely absent from earlier volumes—have powerfully shaped our world and must inform our comprehension of the art. This isn’t a matter of faddishness or political correctness: looking for strategy in unfamiliar places is what prevents the intellectual stagnation that can come from merely playing the greatest hits again and again.
What counts as “modern” has also shifted. New domains of warfare have emerged; the digital age has transformed intelligence, covert action, and other long-standing tools of strategy. The list of issues that will preoccupy policymakers in the coming decades—and influence what is seen as relevant history—is not the same as it was in 1986 or 1943. Today, moreover, a bloody, tumultuous twentieth century can be studied in its entirety; both the Cold War and the post-Cold War era represent discrete historical periods that have a great deal to teach us about issues ranging from nuclear strategy to counter-terrorism and to the survival mechanisms of rogue states. Consequently, roughly half of the essays in this volume deal with events in the twentieth century and later.
Finally, what counts as “strategy?” The term originally connoted tricks or subterfuges that generals used to outwit their opponents. In the nineteenth century, it came to be associated with the art of military leadership. Later, amid the world wars and the Cold War, a larger concept of strategy became more common, even as the concept was still associated primarily with military conflict.14 Here, too, a certain revision is warranted.
Some of the greatest American strategists, such as John Quincy Adams and Franklin Roosevelt, have been diplomats and politicians rather than soldiers. Strategies of peacetime competition can be as consequential as strategies of military conflict, not least because the former often determine whether, and on what terms, the latter occurs. Geopolitical rivalry plays out in international organizations, cyberspace, and the global economy; tools as varied as finance and covert action, and as intangible as morality, can be potent weapons of statecraft. Even strategies of non-violent resistance have profoundly influenced international order.
To be clear, the study of war and preparations for war remains utterly central to the study of strategy, if only because violent conflict is the final arbiter of the disputes that strategy is meant to address. When war comes, it does indeed dominate our lives; the history of military coercion and organized violence could hardly be more relevant given the many contemporary threats to international peace. But if Napoleon, who mastered the use of violence, led his country to ruin, while Gandhi, who mostly abhorred violence, helped lead his country to freedom, then surely that tells us something about what qualifies as strategy after all.
III
This book represents an effort to grasp the enduring realities of strategy, while taking new insights and perspectives into account. Its essays are essays organized into five sections.
Section I examines “Foundations and Founders.” These essays grapple anew with the classics of the genre, exploring their contested meanings and continued relevance. They examine ongoing debates in our understanding of strategy, while also discussing how foundational issues such as finance, economics, ideology, and geography shape its practice. And they show how modern strategy is still heavily influenced, for better or worse, by the thoughts and actions of individuals who have been dead for centuries or even longer.
