John Lewis Gattis is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, an expert on the Cold War, and a Professor of Military History at Yale University. In his new book, Grand Strategy, he explains why the best strategists combine fox-like and hedgehog-like mindsets, examples from history of great leaders who had both, and how he helps students see the relationship between principle and practice.
00:06:32.440So how does strategy differ from tactics?
00:06:35.500I think there is no sharp line that divides them.
00:06:39.280It seems to me that tactics obviously relate more to immediate efforts that you're making as opposed to long-term planning.
00:06:48.480But I don't see any boundary really between these two things.
00:06:51.680I think one shades into the other because what happens at the tactical level, what happens when you try taking the next hill or crossing the next river,
00:07:01.460can certainly affect your larger objectives.
00:07:04.560Something as small as that can be the difference between victory and defeat.
00:07:09.560So in the end, I think it's a gradation between them rather than a sharp line.
00:08:21.520But Berlin revived it in the 1950s as just the framework and the title for an essay on Tolstoy.
00:08:28.280And the framework, the foxes and the hedgehogs, the animals, quickly overshadowed the subject of the essay, which was poor Tolstoy, who got left behind.
00:08:38.440And it was the equivalent of going viral back in the early 1950s before there was such a thing as the Internet.
00:09:07.960So that's why Berlin's aphorism took off, I think, Archilochus' aphorism.
00:09:13.260And it's a starting point for the book.
00:09:15.140It's also too simple, of course, because it implies that people are one or the other.
00:09:21.340In fact, I argue in the book people have to be both.
00:09:24.700It's important to know where you're going, which could be the one big thing.
00:09:29.320But it's important also to know what's around you and what you're likely to run into, which is knowing many things.
00:09:35.360And so I try to have some case studies in the book of historical figures who were firmly one or the other but could not master whatever the opposite was.
00:09:46.540And then I have other case studies of people who I think did, for one reason or another, manage to be both.
00:09:53.860And more important, they knew when to be which.
00:09:56.660And so if there was a simple one-liner as to what the book is about, it's this.
00:10:02.340How can you be both a fox and a hedgehog and know when to be which?
00:10:08.140Gotcha. So let's talk about some of these case studies that show someone who's clearly just a hedgehog and someone who's clearly a fox.
00:10:14.960So the one that I liked, you start off with the book with, is Xerxes, the Persian king crossing the Hellespont.
00:10:21.400So what can Xerxes teach us about foxes and hedgehogs?
00:10:24.900Well, it's a great scene to open a book with because it's in Herodotus.
00:10:28.740It's Xerxes standing on a mountain overlooking the Hellespont, having built pontoon bridges across the Hellespont.
00:10:35.280This is in 480 BC and crossing a great army into Europe to invade Greece.
00:10:42.120And he's looking down at this and his uncle, Artabanus, who is an advisor, according to Herodotus, tugs at the king's sleeves and says, looking down,
00:10:53.680Sire, are you really sure you want to do this?
00:10:56.260And it was a little bit late to be asking that question.
00:10:58.660But they immediately launch into two very typical statements for foxes and hedgehogs.
00:11:05.700Artabanus, who is a fox, says that there are all kinds of things that could go wrong along the way before you ever meet the enemy.
00:11:14.060The armies are so big that they will drink rivers dry before they cross them.
00:11:17.840There's not enough food along the way.
00:11:20.200There are lions in the mountains who may eat your camels.
00:11:23.280And they're not ports along the way, no ports for the ships and so on.
00:11:29.160You could be defeated before you ever begin to meet some patriotic Greeks who will fight back.
00:11:35.280And Xerxes draws himself up and Artabanus says, you have to think of everything.
00:11:40.420Xerxes draws himself up and says, Artabanus, if I had to think of everything, I would never do anything.
00:11:47.460And so he orders the invasion to go forward.
00:11:51.560Well, what happened was exactly what Artabanus foresaw.
00:11:54.860All of these things came together so that by the time Xerxes actually got to Athens and was able to capture the city and burn the Acropolis and whatnot, he was in a severely weakened position.
00:12:06.660And the Greeks finally were able to defeat his fleet just outside of Athens in a great battle, the Battle of Salamis.
00:12:13.520But at the same time, if it had been left to Artabanus, nothing would have happened.
00:12:18.860Everybody would have turned around and they would have dismantled the bridges and gone home.
00:12:22.440So that was a little bit implausible too.
00:12:27.280It's a beautiful case study in polarities.
00:12:29.740But then I try to look at the people who managed for one reason or another or in some way or another to be both thinking of everything, but at the same time retaining one big thing as a focus.
00:12:42.580And who would be a good example of combining the two?
00:12:46.140Well, I think my best early example is Octavian, who later became the Emperor Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, who was designated by Julius Caesar as his heir at the age of 18.
00:12:59.500And this was when Caesar was assassinated.
00:13:21.940And it's a very good example of starting from weakness and winding up with strength by playing adversaries off against each other.
00:13:30.380What's interesting about Octavian is having conquered the world at age 30, he then decided that the empire that he ruled, the Roman Empire itself, was now big enough.
00:13:43.760There was nothing else left to conquer.
00:13:46.760And he could turn to consolidating and cultivating institutions that would embed the Roman Empire over the long term for the future.
00:13:56.040And so he shifts from being a fox to a hedgehog.
00:14:00.080But I think he was always both along the way.
00:14:02.760He saw that sequence and balanced it magnificently.
00:14:06.720So he's the first of my combined foxes and hedgehogs.
00:14:12.120I put Queen Elizabeth I in that category for sure.
00:14:16.260I put the Founding Fathers of the United States to some extent in that category.
00:14:21.080Certainly Lincoln falls into this category and certainly Franklin Roosevelt falls into this category as well.
00:14:28.400All confronting different situations, but all very skillful in their ability to hang on to a big long term destination while being extremely flexible as to how they got there and what they dealt with.
00:14:41.020Yeah, the Lincoln example, you talk about this sort of antidote story of him talking about compasses and swamps that sort of encapsulate.
00:14:56.020It's in Spielberg, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln movie.
00:14:58.800Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay for this.
00:15:01.960And it's a scene in the movie toward the end of the movie when Lincoln is trying to get the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery once and for all, through the House of Representatives.
00:15:14.140And Lincoln is wheeling and dealing and bribing and intimidating and pontificating and everything you can think of short of murder to get twist enough arms to get that vote through the House of Representatives, which would abolish slavery once and for all.
00:15:30.860And Thaddeus Stevens, in the movie, who's played by Tommy Lee Jones, asks Lincoln how he can possibly justify such malodorous methods in the pursuit of such a noble objective.
00:15:43.240And Lincoln, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, just points out that as a youth, as a surveyor, he knew the value of having a compass.
00:15:53.140A compass told him where True North was.
00:15:56.300He could find the proper direction just by looking down at his compass.
00:16:00.360But if all he did was to look at the compass and nothing else, he could easily fall off a cliff or stumble into a swamp or starve in a desert or something.
00:16:12.320He had to be looking at the compass, but he had to have situational awareness also of what was around him.
00:16:19.180And I think that, in a nutshell, exemplifies what leadership is when it combines the attributes of the hedgehog and the fox.
00:16:28.460And what's interesting about all these individuals, even going back to ancient Greece, there weren't a lot of text about strategy like we have today.
00:16:39.160So what are some of the famous strategists who made explicit these implicit ideas that Octavian was using, that Xerxes knew or was using or not using?
00:16:53.600Well, I think the starting point for writing about this, of course, is Thucydides and his great history of the Peloponnesian War.
00:17:02.460This is the war between the Athenians and the Spartans, which breaks out in the late 430s BC.
00:17:08.840And it's not that Thucydides is putting forward himself some particular grand strategy, but in his extremely detailed history, he is writing about the grand strategies of the belligerents in this war.
00:17:25.100It's probably not the case that they actually thought of themselves as having grand strategies because this term was not yet widely known.
00:17:32.580But the Spartans had traditionally followed a strategy simply of cultivating military power and being more powerful than anybody else in Greece and thereby intimidating all possible opponents.
00:17:47.140And the Athenians concluded they could not possibly compete with these military skills, but they were a maritime power.
00:17:55.620They were a naval power, something that Sparta was not.
00:17:59.880And so they embraced a strategy for simply walling off their city, the city of Athens and the port of Piraeus, from the rest of Attica, so that when war came, they could just bring everybody in within the walls.
00:18:13.140They could rely on their ships and their colonies elsewhere in the Aegean to supply them, and they could wear the Spartans down in this way.
00:18:22.140So it's almost as if the Spartans decided on the grand strategy of a tiger and the Athenians decided on the grand strategy of a shark.
00:18:31.480Two very, very different approaches in a common struggle.
00:18:37.700We can just conclude it from what Thucydides tells us of what happened.
00:18:42.320But it has become a model for people thinking about grand strategy ever since.
00:18:46.340And in fact, it's exactly what I was teaching back at the Naval War College long ago in the 1970s that first got me interested in this subject.
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00:21:22.600Yeah, and you had individuals in the East, like Sun Tzu, making explicit this idea of, you know, you have to be flexible in your military strategy.
00:21:34.120And then I guess the big treatise on strategy that came out was Clausewitz.
00:21:38.940That was probably the most – tell us about Clausewitz.
00:21:41.000What was his idea about grand strategy?
00:21:43.580Well, part of the problem – Clausewitz, first of all, was a Prussian officer who, when Napoleon defeated Prussia, became disgusted and actually joined the Russians instead.
00:21:57.700And so he was on the Russian side in 1812 when Napoleon invaded Russia.
00:22:03.100After that was all over, he wrote a great book, which is probably the greatest of all books on grand strategy, called On War.
00:22:10.340And this was published in 1830, a year after Clausewitz died.
00:22:16.320He never actually completed this text.
00:22:23.800It has the complication, of course, of having been written originally in German, so it depends on the quality of the translations if you're reading it in English.
00:22:31.660It's been debated by strategists ever since it came out.
00:22:35.760But if you read it in a certain way, if you read it, as I say in the book, from a high altitude, trying to look at the overall picture instead of trying to find consistency of detail in it, it is profoundly sophisticated in its view of grand strategy.
00:22:52.840And what is, I think, so sophisticated about it, what is so rewarding about it, is that it's a work of theory, for sure.
00:23:01.420So it's meant to guide the hand and the mind of future strategists.
00:23:06.800But at the same time, it's a theory of when not to have a theory.
00:23:11.640So it explains that theories cannot cope with all situations.
00:23:15.840There are too many uncertainties in the application of theory.
00:23:19.680Clausewitz himself called it friction and coined the use of the term friction to describe what he also calls the fog of war.
00:23:29.180And his point is simply that no theory can predict everything that can possibly go wrong.
00:23:36.140So you could ask the question, well, why have a theory in the first place?
00:23:40.360And Clausewitz says, well, it's a little bit like military training.
00:23:44.060Anybody who's venturing onto a battlefield will bring, any officer who's venturing onto a battlefield, will bring some training to that experience.
00:23:54.660But the battle will never go in just the way that the training prepared that person for.
00:24:00.040You have to be willing, you have to be able to respond instantly to situations as they're developing.
00:24:06.120But nobody would say that somebody will fight more effectively on a battlefield for having had no training at all.
00:24:12.920So training is important in that sense, but it does not predict the future.
00:25:25.620But I would say mental models, John Boyd's concept, doesn't quite get at what Clausewitz is talking about because I think that makes it sound a little bit too formal.
00:25:35.480Clausewitz was himself profoundly skeptical of models, and he saw them as great oversimplifications.
00:25:41.760What he trusted, what he sought to incorporate into his thinking was simply experience.
00:25:52.060Experience is the strength that you need, the stamina that you need, the level-headedness that you need, the ability to remain calm when bullets are flying around you.
00:26:02.440But I doubt very much that most people who are on battlefields are thinking about mental models right at that point.
00:26:09.900They're thinking at a much more immediate and elemental level.
00:26:14.600And Clausewitz knew this because he was a combat officer.
00:26:17.240He had actually, he was drawing on the experience of being at the Battle of Bardino when he wrote his great book.
00:26:23.900And so I think he knows what combat is like.
00:26:43.860If you think about what a coach does, the coach draws on the history and the lore of the game, how it has been well played and how it's been badly played in the past.
00:26:54.200He makes sure that his young athletes know this stuff.
00:26:58.020He puts them through strength building, exercises, discipline.
00:27:01.720He teaches them how to fail and how to recover, all of these things.
00:27:05.600But when they get out on the playing field, whatever the game is, there's not much left that the coach can do but just jump up and down on the sidelines.
00:27:13.440And perhaps destroy a chair or something like that.
00:27:16.940It's up to the guys that are playing the game to make the snap instant decisions.
00:27:21.260I think that's consistent with Uta, but I think it's a little bit simpler and maybe even easier to grasp.
00:27:27.200Because if you're teaching students and you put it in these terms, they immediately understand what you're talking about.
00:27:43.620The point that he was making, the point that others make, is that when you're in a crisis, you've got to have your training either at your fingertips or at whatever the intellectual equivalent of fingertips might be.
00:27:57.920You've got to be able to draw on this instantly.
00:28:00.580It's quick impressions in the sense of sizing up the situation, which is, I think, what Uta means by observation, but also quick impressions as to how you deal with that.
00:28:14.220And Uta does refer to acting faster than the adversary does.
00:28:19.460And that, I think, is consistent with Clausewitz.
00:28:24.120But I just find that it's easier to explain coaching and athletics to students than it is to explain Uta.
00:28:38.340So one thing you talk about throughout the book is that some of these leaders who were able to encapsulate both hedgehog thinking, fox thinking, they were able to connect that grand vision to the day-to-day, the practice.
00:28:53.860One of the issues is that once you've gained success, there's a tendency to become more of a hedgehog.
00:29:05.620Well, for that one, we actually have social science evidence to confirm it.
00:29:10.060And I'm referring to the political psychologist Phil Tetlock, who was, in the 1980s, began a very elaborate study of decision-making.
00:29:18.560Why do some people seem able to predict the future accurately and others don't?
00:29:25.920And so being a social scientist, what he did was to collect thousands of predictions on public issues from hundreds of public intellectuals and code them and arrange them and categorize them and whatnot.
00:29:41.060And then revisit them some five years later, 10 years later, 15 years later, and rate them for accuracy.
00:29:48.780And the problem he ran into as he did that, he was looking for variables.
00:29:52.480He was looking for the possibility that liberals might predict the future better than conservatives, or maybe men would do it better than women or vice versa.
00:30:01.760Or maybe the electorals would do it better than practitioners or whatever.
00:30:05.680Nothing correlated, nothing made any sense, except that just for fun, he had stuck into his questionnaire that he passed out to everybody.
00:30:16.060Also, the question, do you self-identify as a fox or a hedgehog?
00:30:20.500And he explained Isaiah Berlin's use of those terms.
00:30:24.820That's the only thing that made sense, because the record of those who identified as hedgehogs was terrible for prediction.
00:30:32.300And Tetlock says it approximates that of a dart-throwing chimpanzee.
00:30:37.260But those who identified as foxes actually had much more success.
00:30:42.860Then Tetlock got interested in why it was that the hedgehogs nonetheless seemed to rise faster and higher in organizations.
00:30:51.460And he decided that it has to do with sound bites in the modern world, being foxes, having one big idea.
00:30:59.620Whether they were right or wrong in prediction, they were at least good in interviews, like this one.
00:32:32.720So it was a different age in that period.
00:32:35.980And leadership had very different qualities in that period.
00:32:39.980Everything happened more slowly then than it does today.
00:32:43.940So I think it was a very different situation for him.
00:32:48.220What Octavian did that I think is really quite fascinating is that he was trying to update the Roman Republic, turn it into an empire, because he thought that would be the way to make it run more efficiently.
00:33:02.500But he knew that the Romans themselves profoundly distrusted kings.
00:33:09.680And so he did it so gradually that the Romans did not even realize that their republic was being transformed into an empire.
00:33:18.860And one of the very clever things that he did in this respect, he said that any great state, any great empire needs a national epic.
00:33:28.280So he commissioned one of the great classical texts of all time.
00:33:33.560And this is Virgil's Aeneid, which is unlike Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, in that it was a sponsored product.
00:33:41.080And it was Octavian who was sponsoring it.
00:33:43.300And it was for the purpose of making this transition from the republic to the empire.
00:33:49.120So you might think of the Aeneid as being kind of the ancient equivalent of a modern sound bite.
00:33:54.180But, of course, it's very different in length, it's very different in eloquence, and it's very different in the extent to which, of course, it has lasted and will last.
00:34:03.280So as I'm listening to you, I can see why this course would be appealing to undergrads.
00:34:08.960Because you have these young people who, they're probably, they're trying to figure out life.
00:34:13.620They're trying to, they have these grand visions.
00:34:16.040And I'm sure they're looking for that one big answer that will solve everything.
00:34:19.120But this course teaches them, well, there's not one big answer.
00:34:21.720Well, the big, the one big answer is there's not one big answer.
00:35:14.340So for them, I think it was useful as a lesson in how people can disagree and still like each other, still be civil to each other.
00:35:23.120I think it was a useful lesson in the number of things in life that don't have simple answers, where you have to be comfortable with contradictions and you will never completely reconcile the contradictions.
00:35:36.600And I think in the end, it's a more accurate preparation for life if you don't try to tell them what they should know, but tell them how they can find out and how they can discover for themselves what will be most useful to them.
00:35:54.900So the very manner in which the course was taught all this time, and still is, I think was meant to reinforce that message.
00:36:01.680So I imagine the best way to learn how to connect principles to practices is through actually just living, right, making decisions, but also don't downplay the role of example.
00:36:14.500So I think Clausewitz talked about that, right?
00:36:20.560We had another way of teaching that relationship between principle and practice in the course.
00:36:25.820The course was and is a full-year course, which starts in the spring, which has a summer component to it, some kind of an individual project, and then a fall semester.
00:36:36.140In the spring, it's spent on the classics.
00:36:38.260The fall semester is spent on current policy issues.
00:36:41.920But in the summer, what we do is to send our students out on what we call individual odysseys.
00:36:48.540And for a lot of students, that would just be an internship somewhere.
00:36:56.840We want it to be things that they can never do again in life because they'll be too busy or too many responsibilities or whatnot.
00:37:05.160So, for example, if they are learning a new language, we will send them to the country that speaks that language, Russia, China, whatever, and just tell them, don't get a job.
00:37:15.120Just travel around the country on our budget.
00:37:18.280And talk to people, speak only Russian, speak only Chinese, go to exotic places, get off the tourist path, etc.
00:37:26.360And if you are being trailed by the security police, as has actually happened to several of our students, and you're on the verge of being thrown into jail, just think of what Machiavelli would have done in a situation like that.
00:37:40.100And they are equipped then for the relationship between principle and practice in a very immediate way.
00:37:48.200And then they come back and write this all up and then apply it to current situations.
00:37:54.760We find that it's a very effective teaching device.
00:37:57.820And the exotic locale we have most recently chosen for our students or recommended to our students is America.
00:38:05.820We're just saying, most of you don't know much about America.
00:38:09.180Just, we will pay for you to take a road trip, get a jalopy or get a motorcycle or whatnot, and just cross the country and do it slowly and talk to people in small towns and actually see how they live.
00:38:22.300Get out of the East Coast, the West Coast academic bubble and see the rest of the country.
00:38:28.200And that has proven to be quite a popular project for our students as well.
00:38:32.400I think it's very healthy to be able to do that.
00:38:35.180Well, Professor Gattis, this has been a great conversation.
00:38:36.940Is there some place people can go to learn more about your work?
00:38:39.960Well, I guess, Brad, if I can, I would recommend the book, first of all, because I think that's a useful introduction.
00:38:48.060What I really meant it to be was a book about teaching, just to kind of sum up at least my own perspective on what we were trying to do in this course.
00:38:56.340I very deliberately did not try to co-author it with my teaching colleagues, Kennedy and Hill.
00:39:01.920In fact, I didn't even show it to them until it came out because I knew they would disagree.
00:39:07.380But they have written their own books in various ways on this subject.
00:39:12.080So I think start with that as just a kind of a guide to what to do.
00:39:17.000And then from that, selective reading, it never hurts to go back to the classical texts.
00:39:22.160And if you know what you're trying to get out of them, if you're not trying to memorize every detail, but looking for the larger pictures for the what I call the TTPs, the timeless transferable principles, it can be immensely rewarding to that.
00:39:36.820And it's very important to have people that you can talk with about these texts as well.
00:39:42.140So several, quite a number of our alumni of this class who are now out in the world and they have jobs and they have families and whatnot.
00:39:50.740But they also have secret cells or meetings where they just get together with each other late at night and they pull out their copies of Thucydides or Clausewitz or Machiavelli.
00:40:02.080And they relive the glory days of the grand strategy class because they find it rewarding and refreshing just to come back to these texts periodically in life.
00:40:12.100And I think that's very important as well.
00:40:13.920There's no reason why you have to have had this course to be able to do that for sure.
00:40:18.320Well, John Gattis, thank you so much for your time.
00:40:24.420He's the author of the book on Grand Strategy.
00:40:26.960It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:40:29.440Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash grandstrategy where you can find links to resources, including some suggested readings, some books you can read taken from Professor Gattis' book on Grand Strategy that you can check out to delve deeper into this topic.
00:40:48.320Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:41:02.600For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com.
00:41:06.920And if you enjoy the show, the podcast, you've gotten something out of it, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher.