War and Power, page 2
Morgenthau’s realist notion of power is both determinative and includes so many categories as to be meaningless as a tool of comparison. As a test, try to compare two states using all of Morgenthau’s categories and then make a useful judgement of the balance between them. I’ve tried it a few times, and have never made it work. However, the basic impracticality of Morgenthau’s great power understanding did not stop realists, and later neorealists, from making sweeping claims that they understood how power works. In practice, however, the normal realist tendency was to err towards a simplistic understanding of power, saying relatively little beyond that it had something to do with military power.21
The offensive realists – such as John Mearsheimer, who played a major role in the academic, and public, discussion of Russian and Ukrainian power before 24 February 2022 – have often fallen back on this. In his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer gives a non-quantifiable, military-based definition of what makes for a great power: ‘To qualify as a great power, a state must have sufficient military assets to put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state in the world.’22 I defy anyone to define ‘serious fight’ in a sensible way, and ‘all-out conventional war’ seems to be a deliberately obscure tautology.
That such a vague formulation could be accepted by offensive realists should call into question their whole idea of what makes a great power. Still, in the run-up to the Russian invasion, Mearsheimer – along with Stephen Walt and others – proceeded to blithely label Russia as a great power and Ukraine as not. This reveals one of the general weaknesses in realist thought, and one that is a major problem for offensive realists in particular: even though they have a very weak definition of ‘great power’, they have turned the phrase into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It did not matter that there was no commonly accepted notion of a great power; as long as Russia was labelled one and Ukraine was not, that gave the former’s claims of interest the greater legitimacy. Basically, in the great power world, the great powers are subjects, and the lesser powers are objects with which the great powers can toy. As Stephen Walt said in a piece in Foreign Policy, released only a month before the invasion, lesser power Ukraine was an object of great power Russia’s interest – with all that entailed. ‘Unpleasant as it may be, the United States and its allies need to recognize that Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment is a vital interest for Russia – one it is willing to use force to defend – and this is not because Putin happens to be a ruthless autocrat with a nostalgic fondness for the old Soviet past. Great powers are never indifferent to the geostrategic forces arrayed on their borders.’23
It’s fascinating that, after a century of seeing supposedly smaller powers getting their way against supposedly great ones, an international relations scholar would speak in such a way. Great powers have regularly had countries on their borders redefine their alignments and even flout the greater power’s apparent dominance. From Ireland breaking away from the United Kingdom, to Vietnam regularly defying China (and even besting China in a war in 1979), to Mexico openly flouting US desires at times, these less powerful neighbour states have shown that they are far more than subjects of interest.
And this indicates maybe the greatest problem with the realist conception of power. If you build a supposedly hard-headed school around the overriding importance of power, particularly military power, then it is a major drawback if you don’t understand war and power. The fact that realists see both as an immutable phenomenon, regardless of regime or leader, reveals one of the flaws in their outlook. They discount the roles of regimes and leaders in determining how military power is both assembled and used. As Mearsheimer has said, echoing Walt’s claim about Putin’s supposedly minor role in the decision to invade Ukraine, realism ‘is a theory that basically says states care about the balance of power above all else. States want to make sure that they have as much power relative to other great powers as possible. It’s a theory that pays little attention to individuals and pays little attention to domestic politics.’24
In fact, the opposite is true – leadership and political structure play a massive role in how power is accumulated in peace and employed in war. Over the last two centuries it certainly has mattered who has ruled a country, and within what political or governmental system that person has operated. No German leader had to invade Poland in 1939, but Adolf Hitler did (over the doubts of other senior Nazi leaders). On the other hand, Franklin Roosevelt had a very keen interest in having US power interjected forcefully into Europe to stop Hitler, particularly after the German Army conquered France in May–June 1940. However, even then, the very popular American president had to manoeuvre within a political system that constrained his wishes. Roosevelt had to wait until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the US before he was allowed to go to full-scale war against the Nazis.
It’s arguably impossible to look at any of the larger powers in the two world wars and not see that it was a combination of the personalities of the different leaders and how each was moderated (or not) by the political system in which they operated that determined when each nation not only entered each war, but also on which side.iv Italy, which had been allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary when World War I started, left that alliance and joined the Allies a few months later, when the two leading Italian politicians of the day – the prime minister Antonio Salandra and foreign minister Sidney Sonnino, operating with almost no oversight – engaged with horse trading between the British and Germans about what each would promise Italy. In Japan in 1941, on the other hand, the civilian leadership had been so emasculated by a political system that allowed them no control over the Japanese armed forces that, even though many were sceptical, they gave up and followed the military as the latter pushed the country into war by, foolishly, attacking the United States.
Certainly, it did matter that Vladimir Putin was a dictator/autocrat who had constructed a political system that fed him the information he wanted to hear which confirmed his prejudices towards Ukraine and suppressed any doubts about his decision to invade. On 22 February 2022, in a very public moment broadcast on Russian (and later global) television, Putin humiliated supposedly very senior and powerful members of his state who had doubts about the invasion of Ukraine that he was about to unleash.25 He was determined to have his invasion.
Not surprisingly, considering how much realists and others have misunderstood power, they, like General Milley, misunderstood how the Russian invasion of Ukraine would proceed. Take, for instance, Michael Kofman, one of the most well-known analysts of the Russian military, who spent the years before 2022 arguing constantly that Russia was a great power that represented a direct military challenge to the US.26 Just before Putin launched the invasion, Kofman prophesied that it would be an overwhelming and amazingly fast operation, which would see Russia seize more than two-thirds of Ukraine and end the war in just a few ‘weeks’.27 And Kofman’s prediction of Russian conventional victory in only weeks seemed remarkably slow in comparison to some other analysts. Rob Lee, a senior analyst of the Russian military at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, stated to the New York Times that Russia would achieve victory in such a short time period that it would make the Russian military one of the greatest forces in world history. He claimed just before the invasion that the Russian military could ‘devastate the Ukrainian military in the east really quickly, within the first 30–40 minutes’, and also stated confidently that if the Russians committed their conventional forces, they could win the war in just a few days.28
While these errors of war understanding were particularly egregious, there have been other mistakes in the past. This idea of the short, clinical and decisive war is one of the enduring myths of strategic studies, even though it has been shown to be regularly false. For the past 200 years, states have often gone to war with confident predictions that the war will be decided quickly in decisive battle – or in one common phrase, that it will be over by Christmas. When World War I started, many on both sides believed that Europe was in for a short war, and that the opening engagements would determine the outcome. At one point Germany was said to have gone to war in August 1914 governed by a ‘short-war illusion’ and that any conflict would be over by Christmas.29 Even those who challenge that notion argue that German generals who believed the war would be longer, still held that it would last between six months and two years.30 Today in the US, the push to believe in the short-war idea remains strong – and is arguably a major flaw as the US approaches the idea of war in the Indo-Pacific region.31
One of the reasons for such a flawed understanding of war is the focus on wars being decided by decisive battles or large military engagements. This ‘battle’ idea of war is widespread, though repeatedly shown to be deficient. Both world wars were in their early stages dominated by this notion. In August 1914, when the alliances went to war, the different states enacted plans that they had previously worked out and which would, they thought, result in a military victory that would win the war. The Germans had their well-known Schlieffen Plan, which involved concentrating almost all their force against the French to try to knock France out of the war quickly, before turning to confront Russia. In exchange, the French had their also well-known Plan XVII, which involved attacks directly over the French border into Alsace and Lorraine. The Russians, meanwhile, started assembling their large armed forces under Mobilization Plan 19, to invade eastern Germany. Each one of these plans failed.
A different kind of decisive battle idea appeared early in World War II. Adolf Hitler certainly thought he had won a decisive battle when the German Army conquered France in only two months, in May–June 1940. He started pushing to redesign Berlin as a gaudier, grotesque imperial capital, and believed that he had determined the course of European history for generations. However, by the end of 1941, the Germans found themselves confronted by an alliance that dwarfed them economically, and soon militarily. Just over three years after that, Hitler’s empire would be a few blasted streets in central Berlin, and his only option was to put a bullet either through his temple or up through his mouth – depending on the telling.
This idea that military engagement is what decides war would bedevil far greater powers than Nazi Germany. In the 1960s, the supposed superpower United States found itself at war with a relatively tiny North Vietnam, an economically undeveloped, much smaller power by any metric. Yet the insertion of US ground forces, beginning in the 1960s, began a process of more and more troops appearing, always with the premise that the next increase of military force would allow the United States to win the war. Eventually the US deployed more than half a million troops and some of the most advanced military equipment in the world, and yet it made no difference – the US still lost. It won every battle but lost the war.
The US in Vietnam might be the best example, but it is certainly not the only one, that illustrates how you need to look far deeper at the process of war beyond war-gaming what happens when armies meet in the field. Though the US almost always prevailed when its military forces engaged the North Vietnamese in battle, after more than a decade of commitment the US lost the war. This was down to a combination of military variables, including morale and commitment, and larger leadership and societal factors that shaped the American political response.
The pre-24 February 2022 analysis of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine reads eerily like the precisely written war plans of 1914. The Russian Army was supposed to work efficiently and methodically through phases of war, from an initial and devastating air-power and precision strike phase, to a fast-moving and overwhelming ground attack led by armoured columns with plentiful artillery, to a mopping-up phase when the Russians were to destroy Ukrainian conventional resistance. Everything was supposed to run like clockwork, with the Ukrainians having limited ability to alter their own fate.
In such a clinical view of war, there is little time to discuss the huge problems that normally arise once war breaks out. These can be divided into what might be called ‘the systemic’ and ‘the human’. The human concerns how individuals are prepared (and prepare themselves) for war. This can involve how well trained they are to undertake the operations that will be expected of them. Often, whether it be the Russian Army before the invasion of Ukraine or the Italian Army before World War II, the performance of soldiers in set-piece manoeuvres – even choreographed parades – has been considered indicative of their ability to execute in war. The same goes for morale.
The systemic involves the complex operations needed for a military to be effective. In the case of modern war, arguably the most important are air power (for which in Ukraine it was assumed that the Russians could easily undertake complex operations) and logistics (which was almost entirely ignored). Such assumptions were quite common in the past, but it is interesting to see how they were even more exaggerated when it came to Russia and Ukraine. Going into World War II, for instance, it was widely assumed that modern strategic air power (bombers) would be able to get through to destroy vital targets of the enemy – be they whole cities or specific factories. The ‘bomber will always get through’ maxim (first uttered by the UK prime minister Stanley Baldwin in 1932) was widely shared and repeated in different forms by people as different as Walt Disney and Benito Mussolini.32 However, as the war showed, running an efficient strategic bombing campaign was perhaps the most difficult complex operation of the war. It took until 1944 before the western Allies were able to bomb Germany and have the strategic effect desired – and by that point it was the most complex and expensive campaign that the Allies were waging anywhere in the globe.33 The situation for logistics is the opposite. Hardly mentioned in detail before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, logistics have often been ignored in the study of war, because of the obsession with battle. It might be that the study of production and deployment has less appeal in general to notions of combat and life-and-death human struggle, but regardless it is a major oversight in how we generally understand war and prepare for future conflicts.
This idea of war developing efficiently as planned was one of the most frustrating things about the pre-24 February 2022 analysis. War almost always leads to breakdowns and failures, and ends up going down unexpected (and far longer and bloodier) roads. When in January 2022 I argued against abandoning Ukraine to its supposed fate, I said that Russia was not a great power and should not be deferred to, but also that if Putin were foolish enough to undertake a full-scale invasion, it would more than likely be a disaster for Russia:
If we have relearned any lesson over the last two decades it is that military operations are expensive, usually counterproductive, and with the constant possibility of going disastrously wrong for the richest and most advanced economies – let alone weak ones. Certainly Russian military deployments over the last 20 years, from Georgia to Syria, have revealed significant shortcomings. If Russia were actually stupid enough to attack Ukraine, it would tax their military in a way not seen since the Cold War ended.34
Wars go off the rails because they are extremely complex and difficult interactions that end up taxing militaries, economies, governments and societies, from the beginnings of the productive process all the way to the battlefields. They are not decided on the battlefield; rather, the battlefield reveals the state of the powers involved. The cause and effect that people normally assume between battles and wars needs to be reversed. Battles don’t cause the war to end a certain way; they reveal how a war is developing.
Understanding War and Power
Understanding war and power in such a way that the catastrophic errors made before and since the Russian invasion of Ukraine are not repeated is not just an analytic matter. Overhanging everything in the world today is the possibility that the two most powerful nations (along with their allies) are confronting the very real possibility of war. The United States and China, easily the two largest economies in the world with the two most powerful militaries, stand poised and armed in the western Pacific. The result of a war between them would be a catastrophe far greater than the one we have seen in Ukraine.
This book has been written with the possibility of such a war very much in mind. What it aims to do is provide a methodology of sorts, or an analytical framework, through which to understand war and power. This methodology will not produce one answer, such as the United States is definitely more powerful, or China will definitely win a long war. Instead, what it will provide is a way of judging how the power of these countries can be compared, and what questions will be important if they ever do go to war.
The first five chapters address what needs to be considered when assessing the power of a state – which boils down to the foundation of power and how that foundation is shaped. For a state to have power, it must have economic/technological strength. It needs not only to make ‘stuff’, but also to make the most complex and advanced stuff in large amounts. It must also have the economic capacity to maintain and recreate a significant mass of this stuff, and the ability to finance all of this efficiently. You cannot fake economic/technological capabilities, nor make them up quickly on the spot. Normally the greatest disaster that can befall a state is to take on a strategic burden that its economic/technological base cannot sustain.
