War and Power, page 1
Copyright © 2025 by Phillips Payson O’Brien
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Originally published in 2025 by Penguin Viking in Great Britain
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2025936159
ISBNs: 9781541606975 (hardcover), 9781541606982 (ebook)
E3-20250911-JV-NF-ORI
To the people of Ukraine,
who had to endure the worst depredations of war because of a basic inability in others to understand power
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: The Failure
PART ONE: POWER 1. Economic/Technological Strength
2. Leadership
3. Society and Structure
4. Constructing a Military
5. Allies
PART TWO: WAR 6. Battles vs Wars
7. Weapons vs Complex Operations
8. Human vs Metrics
9. Starting vs Sustaining
10. States vs Alliances
Conclusion: War and Power in the Indo-Pacific
Acknowledgements
Discover More
Notes
About the Author
Introduction: The Failure
‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’1 When Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly said this on 25 February 2022, he was speaking with a US government official who was offering to have the Ukrainian president spirited out of his country. While most people have focused on Zelensky’s bravery and defiance in the face of the full-scale Russian invasion,i what has been missed is that Zelensky was also offering a stunning rebuke to the US government’s vision of war and power. That the offer of a US emergency evacuation was being made to Zelensky speaks volumes about how the US government understood the power balance between Ukraine and Russia, and how the US believed a conventional war between the two was bound to play out. On the other hand, faced with the reality of the Russian Army attacking all around the Ukrainian border, Zelensky was convinced Ukraine could fight – and fight well.
In the US government’s mind, Russia was and had been for many years a great power with a modernized and technologically advanced military that was a peer or ‘near peer’ to America’s own.2 Ukraine, in comparison, was a much weaker state – riddled by corruption and a divided identity – which would be able to offer only limited resistance to mighty Russia. As such, the result of a war, to the US government, seemed certain. In a matter of days, the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, would be enveloped and Ukrainian conventional resistance devastated, if not completely ended.3 If Zelensky were not evacuated immediately, the US government judged, he would be imminently overrun by the fast-moving, awesomely powerful Russian military.
This is no overstatement. In closed-door briefings to Congress in early February 2022, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, made deeply pessimistic claims about the ability of Ukraine to resist a Russian attack. The senior military adviser to the President of the United States, with the resources of the Pentagon at his fingertips, Milley asserted that if the Russians launched an invasion, Kyiv could fall in only seventy-two hours.4 With more than 100,000 Russian troops massed on the border of Ukraine, Milley judged that the Russians had the firepower and military capabilities to undertake modern ‘combined arms’ warfare against their Ukrainian target.5 Indeed, the Russian advantage was considered so great that, even though it was the Russians that would be doing the attacking, Milley estimated that Ukraine would suffer almost four times as many battle deaths. He stated that, should a major Russian invasion occur, the Ukrainians would suffer 15,000 battle deaths in comparison to a Russian total of 4,000. 6 In short, Ukraine would be overwhelmed.
This view was also shared widely in the analytic community that was advising the US government. It’s worth stepping back here and pondering the importance of these views of Russia’s military strength and the war it would be able to wage. For years it was argued by the supposedly most knowledgeable experts on the Russian state and military that Russia was a ‘great power’ with battle-tested and devastating forces. As Samuel Charap, one of the leading analysts of the Russian military for the Rand Corporation – arguably the US government’s most important strategic studies think tank – described the situation, Russia was so strong that the west should not even bother to arm Ukraine:
Russia has the ability to carry out a large-scale joint offensive operation involving tens of thousands of personnel, thousands of armored vehicles, and hundreds of combat aircraft. It would likely begin with devastating air and missile strikes from land, air, and naval forces, striking deep into Ukraine to attack headquarters, airfields, and logistics points. Ukrainian forces would begin the conflict nearly surrounded from the very start, with Russian forces arrayed along the eastern border, naval and amphibious forces threatening from the Black Sea in the south, and the potential (increasingly real) for additional Russian forces to deploy into Belarus and threaten from the north, where the border is less than 65 miles from Kyiv itself. 7
As Charap and his co-author argued, US weapons could ‘do nothing’ to change the basic flaws in the Ukrainian military, nor did they represent a threat large enough to deter Russia. As such, it would be best to leave Ukraine to accept its doomed fate and throw itself on the mercy of Putin’s Russia. This was no one-off. It was a vision of Russian power and Ukrainian weakness that had been used for years to argue against providing Ukraine with modern weaponry – on the assumption that Ukrainian conventional resistance against the great power of Russia and its military was doomed.8
In speaking this way, Charap and others were parroting (without properly interrogating) the great power paradigm that has been in wide-scale operation since the nineteenth century.9 Even more unfortunately, Charap and other analysts who believed Russia would conquer Ukraine easily argued publicly for strict limitations on weapons to be sent to Ukraine.10 It was part and parcel of why Ukraine was so short of advanced weapons when the Russians invaded, and has arguably resulted in the limitation of what Ukraine has been sent since. This has led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainians (and Russians), and shaped a war that could have been over far more quickly. It should have been the nail in the coffin of a concept that never made much sense to begin with. Sadly, the idea of great powers, probably because of its deceptive ease, has lived on. But we need to drop the whole phrase entirely – before it gets even more people needlessly killed in wars that cannot be won by non-existent ‘great’ powers.
The Dangers of Great Power Thinking
The notion of there being great powers residing in some upper tier of puissance, lording it over normal states, is usually first seen as emerging out of the post-Napoleonic European world – the time period that this book will cover.ii It is the German historian Leopold von Ranke who is said to have first coined the phrase in print, in 1833.11 To him a great power was one that could ‘maintain itself against all others, even when they are united’.12 Right away a problem should have been seen in this analysis – by Ranke’s standard there had not been a real great power, at least in Europe and arguably around the world, for millennia. Certainly Napoleon’s brief period of European continental domination – which lasted from approximately 1804, when he had himself crowned Emperor of France, until his 1812 invasion of Russia – showed that even France at its high point could not stand against all others. For all the success of French armies, Napoleon was incapable of competing with Britain on a global stage – if anything, he was losing power and territory around the world while he ruled much of Europe.
It should be noted that the same year he became emperor, 1804, Napoleon was forced to sell the vast Louisiana Territory to the United States – losing France the bulk of its overseas empire. A year later, Napoleon’s fleet would be decimated by the Royal Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar, des
Sadly, in the almost two centuries since Ranke coined this inadequate phrase, things have got even worse. Indeed, the threshold for being a ‘great power’ has been regularly redefined, muddied and even lowered, to such a degree that by 2022 an economically weak and politically corrupt systemiii such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia was widely hailed as one. The foundational problem of the great power paradigm was and remains the fact that the criteria for membership in the great power club are unclear. Even the phrase ‘great power’ has meant vastly different things depending on when and where it is used – which means ultimately it has meant everything and nothing.
In the mid-nineteenth century, there was some discussion of the great powers who were and supposedly would go on to dominate the globe. A number of nineteenth-century geopolitical thinkers, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Brandon Boynton, believed that the fate of the world was to be decided by the USA and Russia (in the case of the former) or those two plus the British and French (according to the latter).13 In the run-up to World War I, Europe was often said to be divided between its five ‘great powers’, all empires, who supposedly dominated its fate. They were Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Austria-Hungary.14 Yet, none of them, except for possibly Britain, would have been able to stand against all the others. Austria-Hungary, for instance, with its relatively undeveloped economy, inefficient political system, and society that was divided into many groups with different identities, was even incapable of functioning as an independent power.
World War I also showed that no power could really stand alone in Europe, but that all powers had strengths and weaknesses that made comparison all but impossible – and it was their differences that mattered more than anything else. At the top of the power table were Britain and Germany, the two largest economies in Europe, who produced the largest amount of war materiel and headed their different alliances. Both had to provide massive assistance to their allies in terms of finance and war materiel (France, Russia and later Italy in the case of Britain; and Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire in the case of Germany). However, the military power the British and Germans generated was very different, and this meant that comparing them was highly subjective. While both created large armies and navies, the British remained dominant at sea, winning a long maritime struggle with the Germans, while the German Army remained the most powerful on the continent – able to hold the Allies at bay until being overwhelmed in 1918.
Of course, by the end of the war neither of the most powerful states in Europe was the most powerful state in the world. Between 1914 and 1918 the United States had interjected itself into the equation, and with an economy that towered over that of any European state (or indeed combination of European states) and no immediate military threat on its own borders, the US represented a different class of power. For the rest of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first it maintained a position almost as a Rankean great power. Even then, as the US would show repeatedly, being able to ‘stand alone’ against any combination of possible enemies was very different from being able to impose yourself on them – or even win wars against much smaller powers.
However, the limits that even the US would show have made little difference in the great power discussion. Often, great powers are grouped together based on their supposed military success. Writing at the end of the interwar period, E. H. Carr – the British historian, diplomat and leading international relations theorist – claimed that a state’s ‘recognition as a Great Power is normally the reward of fighting a successful large-scale war’. He then mentioned Germany in the Franco-Prussian War and Japan after the Russo-Japanese War, which should set alarm bells ringing.15 Both were limited, state-on-state wars, confined in their geographic location and very short in duration. If that was the great power threshold, it would hardly be an exclusive club, and it would be very different from one composed only of powers able to stand against all others.
The results of World War II only reinforced the idea that the great power paradigm was meaningless. Both Germany and Britain had maintained their positions as the economic leaders of Europe and their relative military strengths, which meant that neither was able to existentially threaten the other (Germany dominated the European landmass from 1940, but the British were able to secure command of the sea and air in the North Atlantic). Moreover, in Asia, Japan showed just how ephemeral great power status really was. At first, it had seemed a real force, capable of conquering much of China and the South Pacific – and then winning a series of naval engagements against the United States and the British Empire. However, once the US fully mobilized its economic and technological resources, Japan was shown to be completely out of its depth and was ground down to impotence by the US, using only about half of its resources. The USSR, on the other hand, while a significant power (though its relative strength has been greatly overstated), had to receive massive amounts of aid during the war.16 Indeed, I believe that the extreme overrating of the USSR’s contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany (the Soviet Union both engaged and destroyed much less of German production than people realized) gave false impetus to the great power idea – which contributed to the extreme overrating of Russian power before 24 February 2022. The USSR never possessed the full range of power that the US did, but instead of understanding that, people seemed obsessed with the scale of casualties that the Soviets suffered and created an idea of Soviet power, which was often directly referenced as a reason why Russia was a great power.17
The reality was that the US, which was a power still in its own league when World War II started, only grew in relative strength during the conflict. Possessor of approximately half the world’s production by 1945 (with so much money it really did not know what to do with it), and also with the most powerful armed forces in the world and the only working atomic bomb, the US had reached a global power status that was arguably unmatched in human history. Yet, even then, at the height of its power, with the world seemingly at its feet, the ability of the US to achieve clearly stated goals at the end of the war, in countries that it thought were of vital interest, such as China, was shown to be shockingly weaker than expected. So, there was certainly no one standard of great power in World War II that might help us understand the power relationship between the states involved, and nor could the greatest of the so-called great powers in many centuries – the United States – achieve many of its goals.
The fact that the great power paradigm was basically useless between 1914 and 1945 did not stop the phrase from exploding in usage after World War II. Arguably the greatest push behind this was the growth of ‘realist’ thinking on international relations, which grew in the interwar years and then spread widely afterwards. Realism itself mutated into different forms, including structural realism, neorealism, defensive realism and offensive realism. Regardless of the type of realist someone might claim to be, all realists believed that power relationships defined the international system. That being said, realists of all stripes tended to be either extraordinarily broad in their understanding of power or far too fixated on military variables – such as Carr. The best example of the former is Hans Morgenthau, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of realism – or what is sometimes called ‘classical realism’.18
Morgenthau argued that every state’s national interest drives it on a similar course to maximize its power in relation to others. He contrasted his supposedly hard-headed vision of power with, for instance, lawyers who want to see state actions through a prism of legality or ethicists who want to use moral tests.19 This might have seemed tough and honest, but then Morgenthau made classical realism impossible to actually use by saying that power is made up of almost every variable imaginable (with one glaring oversight). For Morgenthau, national power was affected by geography, access to natural resources, industrial capacity, and military preparedness. Of course, ‘military preparedness’ itself is a broad term, and Morgenthau considered technological sophistication, leadership quality and the size of a state’s armed forces as matters of importance. However, this was just the start. He also argued that population size, national character (defined quite broadly), national morale, the quality of a state’s diplomacy and the quality of its government needed to be considered when discussing how powerful a nation was.20 It’s hard to think of a factor that Morgenthau overlooked – except for a vitally important one, the policy choices of individual leaders, which realists tended to maddeningly, and erroneously, downgrade from then on.
