#664： The Masters of the Art of War
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Summary
Andrew Wilson is a professor at the Naval War College and the lecturer of the Great Courses course, Masters of War: History s Greatest Strategic Thinkers. In this episode, we begin our conversation with a brief overview of what martial strategy is, why civilians should study it, and how the contrast between generals Eisenhower and Patton delineated the difference between strategy and operations. We then survey several of history s most influential war strategists in the context in which their theories and doctrines were born. And we end the show with how military strategy has or hasn t changed in the 21st century.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Looked at from the heart of combat, war can seem disorganized and chaotic, but overarching
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the conflict is typically some kind of thoughtful, well-ordered, even scientific strategy that
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is influencing when, where, how, and why dueling forces have met.
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My guest today will introduce us to a few of the military philosophers and tacticians
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who made the most significant contributions to the art of strategy over the last couple
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He's a professor at the Naval War College, as well as the lecturer of the Great Courses
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course, Masters of War, History's Greatest Strategic Thinkers.
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We begin our conversation with a brief overview of what martial strategy is, why civilians should
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study it, and how the contrast between generals Eisenhower and Patton delineate the difference
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We then survey several of history's most influential war strategists in the context in which their
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This tour includes a discussion of how the art of war argues that a new type of war and
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a new type of society required a new type of general who could process conflicts like
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We also do a dive into how Carl von Clausewitz emphasized the importance of understanding
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how complexity, irrational passions, and creative genius underlie contemporary warfare.
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We end our conversation with how military strategy has or hasn't changed in the 21st century.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash mastersofwar.
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So you are a professor of strategy at the Naval War College.
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How did you end up at the Naval War College teaching the art of strategy?
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Yeah, well, first things first, for those who aren't familiar with a war college, a war
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college is much more about the college, much less about war.
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It's not like we're out doing exercises in the field during the day.
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Most of my students are mid-career professionals in their 30s, 40s, sometimes 50s, mostly from
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the various U.S. armed services, but also from allied nations.
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And we have a fair number of students from the diplomatic intelligence communities, a whole
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range of really wonderful professionals mid-career.
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So what we did was, it's a year-long course, and they get a master's degree in national
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And I teach in a department called strategy and policy, where we look at historical case
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studies through the lens, not just of military and strategic history, but through strategic
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Can the great masters of strategic thought tell us about why it was that the statesmen and
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military commanders of the past succeeded or failed, and how we can take those lessons
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Actually, a Chinese historian by training, I did a degree in modern Chinese history with
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But being a student of the 19th and 20th century in China is unfortunately an extended period of
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You know, China brought low in the course of the 19th century.
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And then, of course, the Second World War and the rise of the People's Republic of China
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and Mao Zedong is, you know, it's a blood-dimmed history, but it also translated well to the
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war college, where they were looking to add more Asian content, specifically Chinese content.
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So I started off doing Mao Zedong and revolutionary warfare, and then I branched out into ancient
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Chinese classics, particularly Sun Tzu's Art of War.
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So you spend your career teaching officers about strategy, but the way I discovered you,
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you have a course or a lecture on the great courses called the Masters of Strategy, and
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Why do you think it's useful or important for civilians to understand high-level military
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Because as civilians, we vote for our governments, and it's our political leaders that determine
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the policies that our military is then employed to serve.
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So I think the connection between policy and the actions that the military take is absolutely
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And I think as an educated citizenry, we just should understand that, understand the vernacular
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And besides helping citizens become more informed, you know, a lot of times you see people, particularly
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in business, talk about, or even like football coaches who will like read the Art of War by
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Sun Tzu to gain insights about strategy in those domains.
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I think it is useful if it's done judiciously and rigorously.
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I mean, these texts are essentially about using the asset at your disposal in a competition.
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And that competition could be between corporations.
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So the value, for example, intelligence and what we call net assessment, knowing the enemy,
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knowing yourself, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, and anticipating
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how a contest between the two of you would evolve, therefore being better prepared for the ensuing
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So you would never imagine, you know, any football coach not watching film on, you know, next
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So that's a process of, you know, figuring out how it is the other team plays and crafting
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your game plan to maximize your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses, while at the
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same time exploiting their weaknesses and not allowing them to bring their strengths to
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So, you know, that process of net assessment as the basis of strategy is exportable to a
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Yeah, the way we usually parse it is that we start at the top with policy.
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So these are the, this is the political purpose for the war.
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What it is that the political leadership is seeking to achieve, say, peace and stability in
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the Middle East, or the liberation of Kuwait back in the first Gulf War.
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Strategy is the means by which you translate political purpose into military action, and how
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it is that you anticipate military action to deliver your political purpose.
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So strategy is the nexus between policy and the other dimensions of the other levels of war,
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the dimensions of war that we're, we're more familiar with, which are operations and tactics,
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operations being essentially the big muscle movements, the battles, and tactics being
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the individual unit actions taking place on the battlefield.
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So strategy is the bridge between policy and military actions.
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You're staying, like, you're playing a 10,000 level.
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Well, and in your, your lecture, you give the examples of General Eisenhower and General
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Patton's as their different leadership styles, as examples to delineate the difference between
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Can you walk us through that, those two guys and their examples?
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You know, Eisenhower, of course, as the, as the, the commander of allied forces in the
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European theater in the late stages of the second world war, he, he sits at the nexus
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And he's a trusted agent of President Roosevelt.
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He's conducts diplomacy on a daily basis, balancing the interests of the Brits and the
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Canadians and the Americans and the French, dealing with the conflicting personalities of
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So he's, he's, he's, he's a perfect choice to, to operate at that strategic level where
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you see that overlap between military operations and political purpose.
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Patton, however, is, is most famed as being an operational genius, someone who was just a
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great student of war, developed a great knowledge of war throughout history, but also somebody
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So he could make snap decisions on the battlefield and pursue victory with creativity and audacity.
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And he's exactly what you want at the operational level of war.
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He's a flamboyant and somewhat volatile figure, of course.
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And the way I explain it is you have to think about it as Eisenhower is the coach and Patton's
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Brilliant on the field, but you wouldn't want to reverse that relationship.
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You wouldn't want to bring the skillset of the coach, try to get them to master the operational
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level in the way Patton does, nor would you want to have the, the operational expert necessarily
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And it sounds like that could be tough as a, as a leader to figure out who is a strategic
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Cause it's typically the way we think of like promoting people, like in a corporation, even
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the military, it's like, well, if you're good at operations, then maybe you'll be good
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Like you'll kind of get out of your area of competence.
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And, and so, I mean, I guess, I mean, I imagine that's a challenge to figure out.
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There's a, the Prussian military theorist Clausewitz actually made a, I'll summarize one of his
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points, which is that actually the strengths that make you a great tactical and operational
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leader can actually become a liability as you're promoted because the lower levels of war quite
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often about routine and method that there's doctrine, there are right ways to do things
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There's a lot of science at that, that level of warfare and that the mastery of those methods
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and those routines can sometimes handicap an officer as she moves up, you know, through,
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through the ranks to the position where they're, they're, they're leaving behind most of the
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science and doctrine of war and entering the realm of art where they're balancing political
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considerations against military considerations and doing, you know, as much diplomacy as they
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And so as you evaluate, or as, you know, strategic thinkers like yourself evaluate strategic theories
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from, you know, from ancient Greece through ancient China to today, like, what are you,
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What are the criteria you're looking at on determining whether a strategic theory is sound or even
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And in the sense that many of the great strategic theorists and the products of those strategic
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theorists are created in or immediately after periods of revolutionary change in the conduct
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of warfare and political systems, a whole range of things that demanded a fresh take.
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So as the great strategic theorists are products of a very specific time and place,
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and you have to understand them in that, in that context of their creation, but it should be
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durable in the sense that it's, it, it doesn't become a formula for success throughout the
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course of history, but rather it has insights that are timeless, that it is, it gives you
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tools of analysis that when you're evaluating a strategic challenge in the future, allows you
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to unpack it in organized ways to kind of discern the extent to which you can follow this precept
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So they're guiding, but more of the classics of strategic theory are supposed to foster
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And you want a pretty big shelf of strategic theory because Clausewitz says war is more than
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Every war is different, but, you know, some ways at its heart, every war is the same and
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has the same, you know, balance between reason and passion and the completely non-rational
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So ways of thinking about making that connection between military action and its higher purposes,
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and that gives you tools that cultivate those habits of analysis.
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That, that, that's what gets you onto the varsity squad when it comes to strategic theory.
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I think John Boyd talked about this with his OODA loop, like mental models that you can
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Theory doesn't give you the answers, but what it allows you to do is you don't have to
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start on page one every time you're confronting a strategic problem or a political crisis.
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Because, and also all the great strategic theorists have an eye towards history.
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Many of them, you know, got, got their start as historians, but what they're trying to distill
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from history are lessons, not, not rule books per se, but takeaways.
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And part of the reason for this is no matter how long or intense your, say, military career
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has been, your personal experiences, your professional experiences are inadequate to
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dealing with the, the immense complexity of war.
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So how better to prepare yourself for future conflicts rely, of course, on your own personal
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experience and professionalism, but learning from the experiences of others that give you
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insight into all the different forms that war can take and all the different, you know,
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strategic quandaries you might find yourself in.
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So let's take a sort of a, do a survey of some of these masters you highlight in your,
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And he wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars.
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And it's a, it's a text that's still read by military, military strategists taught at the
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So I think to understand Thucydides, we have to put into context, his strategic insights,
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So it's about the history of the Peloponnesian War kind of summary, like how did it start?
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And then how did the Peloponnesian War finally end?
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Thucydides is an Athenian, we'll call him an aristocrat.
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He actually served as a triarch, as essentially a commander of a small naval squadron during
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the Peloponnesian War and was actually cashiered for a conspicuous military failure.
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So as I like to tell you, my students, tell my students that that failure costs Thucydides
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his citizenship and his military career, but it ended up only costing them a weekend in
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the sense that Thucydides used his forced retirement to expand and complete his history
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Now, this Peloponnesian War begins in 431, and it's essentially a struggle between the
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Athens, this dynamic, commercial, rambunctious democracy, the classic sea power, and Sparta,
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We call this sort of the whale versus elephant issue.
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And Thucydides chalks it up, not just to the crises of the day, you know, the Sarajevo
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moment that leads to the outbreak of the First World War.
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He sees the roots much deeper in terms of this long-term struggle for sort of hegemony among
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And he sees this sort of deep abiding fear in Sparta, a much more conservative status quo type
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power with the rising dynamism of Athens, which is becoming an empire and not just pushing
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its commercial interest, but also its political interest.
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So it starts with a series of minor events in 431, but the war lasts for 27 years.
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And part of the reason for the protraction of the war is that we have such a radical asymmetry
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It's very difficult for Sparta as a land power to bring its strengths to bear in some sort
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of decisive land battle against Athens that has almost infinite strategic flexibility and
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So the war begins with these sort of the two sides sort of fighting past each other rather
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than being able to bring their strengths to bear, you know, directly on the others.
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Ultimately, Sparta has to become something of a sea power.
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It has to either build or borrow or rent a navy, become competent at naval warfare, begin to
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dismantle the Athenian commercial empire, which stretches across the Aegean, and ultimately face
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Like, how did Sparta and Athens fare years after the war?
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Many look at this war as sort of a turning point in Greek history.
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In part, one view is that Sparta is so materially and morally depleted by this struggle that its
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status as the dominant land power in the Greek world is fundamentally undermined and that later
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thieves, for example, other land power competitors managed to best Sparta and become the hegemon.
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Athens actually, after a major defeat, recovers fairly well.
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It doesn't rebuild the vast empire it had in the 430s, but it puts together a modest maritime
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But, I mean, the Greek states are—these polis are not particularly well-suited for empire,
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In fact, the whole purpose of the polis is to be singular, to be a local entity.
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And the idea of the ability of the institutions of a polis to be able to run, you know, an
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hegemony is pretty much asking too much of them.
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And then, of course, there's this internecine warfare between the Greek states that ultimately
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opened the door first for the Macedonians, Philip and Alexander, to become hegemons of
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Greece, and then later for the Romans to do something very similar.
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Like, what timeless insights about strategy can we take away from his book, The History of the
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And you mentioned earlier that, you know, military students read Thucydides.
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I would say even more students of politics read Thucydides.
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I first was introduced to it in, you know, Ancient History 101, where it's sort of a—it's
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a window on, you know, life in classical Athens, in classical Greece.
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Later, if you do poli-sci or IOR courses, you know, Thucydides is quite often trotted
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out as the ultimate realist or the founder of the realist school of international relations.
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So, every generation of policy pundits finds their own Thucydides.
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So, you know, George Marshall at the advent of the Cold War said, you know, I can't imagine
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anyone being able to deal with this emerging situation without having understood the tensions
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between Athens and Sparta, between the democracy and the oligarchy, between the conservative
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land power and the dynamic democratic sea power.
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So, the overlay on the Cold War, the sort of the dramatic climax of the Peloponnesian
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War is a completely misguided adventure by the Athenians in an attempt to go conquer Sicily,
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you know, this vast piece of territory at the other end of the Greek world.
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And when that expedition gets bogged down, they double down.
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They send more and more forces, and they're ultimately completely militarily humiliated.
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And that misguided overseas adventure became, you know, became code for the Vietnam War,
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Today, we're talking about Thucydides' attention to the plague that ravaged Athens early on in
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the war, some sort of fever, some sort of respiratory, you know, syndrome, as it were,
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devastated, perhaps killed 20% of the population of Athens while it was trying to wage a war
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and the kind of psychological shock, you know, what happens to a society when, you know, it's hit
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You also see in Thucydides this sort of, you know, where other theorists focus on the more
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operational levels of war, connecting the military actions to the political purposes.
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Thucydides forces us to interrogate how societies wage war and what war does to those societies,
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especially a protracted war, and how it can challenge political institutions.
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So, it's a history, but it has so much insight of lessons that can be carried.
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If you do it judiciously, carefully and rigorously, there's a lot of loose application of Thucydides,
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but, you know, that can be applied to a lot of different circumstances.
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There are profiles in leadership, brilliant, awful, and everything in between.
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And there are these characters that, you know, clearly Thucydides knew personally, interacted
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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It's around the same time, there was another work of strategic theory that came out at the
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same time, about the same time the cities are doing the history of the Peloponnesian
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I think everyone's had, I'm not everyone, but a lot of people have this like a copy of
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Businesses like to put it on PowerPoint slides or whatever.
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But let's get some historical context for this text.
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And what was the sort of political and military situation in China at this time that caused
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Yeah, the art of war, I'm in the school that places the art of war in sort of the, say,
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So, it's about the same time as, say, Alexander, Philip and Alexander in Macedon.
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The purported author of it actually lived a couple of hundred years earlier at the end
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But what this later book does, it kind of appropriates the military bona fides of this
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earlier general and uses him as the cipher to make an argument.
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And that argument is about new requirements of military leadership and organization.
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And I talked earlier about how revolutionary changes in the nature of warfare and the political
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systems and things like that demand fresh strategic appraisals.
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Well, one of these is going on in ancient China.
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And it spans that entire period from when this general Sun, from whom we get master Sun,
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Sun Tzu, to the actual crafting of the book, to the sort of culmination of this.
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And this is a period we generally refer to as the warring states, which runs from, you know,
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the 6th and 700s BCE up to the first unification of China.
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And what's happening there is that, you know, once small aristocratic, you know, small states,
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principalities ruled by a warrior aristocracy are giving way to ever larger territorially,
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you know, states that are larger territorially, larger in terms of population, and increasingly
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And rather than loose confederations of aristocrats, like you see in feudal Europe, you start to
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see the creation of something we might understand as kind of a modern state, where you have a
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centralized government with a centralized administration built on merit.
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And what this does by the state being able to reach down into society and mobilize, you know,
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hundreds of thousands of young men for, you know, infrastructure projects for the military,
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be able to collect taxes from a much, much wider population base, you know, creates this
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revolutionary, it creates the sea change in what these states are able to do militarily,
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for example, but all these states start to develop those capabilities.
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So as they're in this fierce struggle with each other for hegemony in ancient China, they're
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constantly trying to outdo the others in terms of how it is that you exploit these new capabilities
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And what the art of war does is it tries to create the general, the new general, someone
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who is master of the new realities of warfare, its scale, its organization, its logistical and
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manpower requirements, the dangers of war, because, you know, war in antiquity was a seasonal
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affair, a few thousand aristocrats would go out, hack each other up, set up trophies, you
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know, sacrifice the gods and, you know, war's over and they'd go back and do it again and
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But now we have these ever larger states and these ever larger states are starting to be
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So it's this kind of cage match in ancient China and the art of war is an answer to that
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political and strategic crisis in ancient China.
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So it sounds like the states were getting larger, but they were still fighting like they
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You know, because you had this tension because as these states become more bureaucratic, you
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are relying more on, you know, promotion by merit, you know, organizational competence,
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But these states are still ruled by aristocrats, people who have these sort of antiquated notions
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Like, you know, the duke of one of these states believes that he's the duke, you know,
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because the gods favor his clan and the way to keep the favor of the gods is to spill the
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So battle is actually kind of a holy place in this aristocratic construct, right?
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Whereas the author of the Sun Tzu comes in and says, no, you know, war is a means to an
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Therefore, if the use of it does not bring profit, if you're not stronger at the end of
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a battle, well, that's the route to destruction.
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And only by this much more rational, organized, professional approach to the recruitment, training,
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equipping, feeding, and then ultimately leading in the field of these new militaries, that's
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the only way you're going to survive in this death match.
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So what are the big, you know, theoretical prescriptions that the art of war has for
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One of them is to make the most efficient use of your resources.
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But just because they are abundant in terms of manpower, the introduction of essentially
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mass-produced standardized weapons, where the state is producing weapons rather than the
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warriors, aristocrats showing up with their own chariots and armor, where the state takes
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over all that stuff, where these aren't private armies.
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So your resources are now abundant, but that doesn't mean you can be profligate with them
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because the state, you know, one state over is just as powerful, has just as much strategic
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And it really comes down to how well you use those resources.
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Don't get involved in these long sort of hot and cold wars where you're constantly, you
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know, maneuvering against your adversaries because that's exhausting, right?
00:28:50.040
The longer that an army is away, the higher the taxes are, the more levies of troops.
00:28:55.520
So this starts to attack the very core of national power.
00:28:59.660
And I think the third and most important thing is that this is an approach to war that puts
00:29:07.760
The general, the supreme general is the master organizer.
00:29:12.160
But when you see him operating on the battlefield, he's kind of a supercomputer.
00:29:17.840
He's absorbing and processing massive amounts of information.
00:29:23.260
And he has the organizational wherewithal of translating that information, the power of
00:29:34.920
It's just not about whether he's not, he's personally brave.
00:29:39.680
You know, he's, he's manipulating this vast new machine of war from behind.
00:29:45.020
And that can only be achieved with supreme intellect and supreme professionalism.
00:29:50.200
So it sounds like there's a lot of net assessment going on.
00:29:52.440
I think it's for him, for Sunset, like the, the supreme general would actually think things
00:29:57.400
over before, like, do I even actually, should I even go to war?
00:30:02.560
Yeah, because, you know, says the, the supreme excellence, the acme of skill is to, is to
00:30:07.620
essentially achieve your political objectives, defeat the enemy without resort to combat.
00:30:15.480
I mean, combat, that's, that's where we, you know, spill the blood of the enemies.
00:30:21.820
This is where we honor our ancestors and the gods.
00:30:25.780
But the argument builds on the fact that the risks of war are now, not just the cost of
00:30:32.000
war have grown up, but the risks of war have exploded.
00:30:34.540
So you have to approach war and the use of the military very coolly, rationally, in some
00:30:42.780
You have to, in the first chapter, which is literally called assessments, you have to wage,
00:30:50.240
sort of weigh the, the strengths and weaknesses of two belligerents.
00:30:53.800
First, in terms of the sort of psychological coherence, the moral coherence, the, that sort
00:31:02.660
Then you have to think about advantages in terms of terrain and weather, sort of the
00:31:08.280
physical world in which this, this, the physical context in which this military contest is going
00:31:15.220
And then you have to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing generals, your
00:31:21.880
And that assessment is, is not just about assessing the adversary.
00:31:25.940
In fact, the self-knowledge part where he says, know the enemy, know yourself.
00:31:30.080
Knowing yourself is actually quite often much more difficult because you, you don't interrogate
00:31:37.020
So this process of net assessment is absolutely crucial to figuring out essentially, if you're
00:31:47.780
And is the political purpose you're seeking, is the piece of territory you're, you're trying
00:31:53.140
to annex worth the type of costs you're likely to run into when trying to.
00:32:00.080
You know, convince this particular adversary to give up that piece of territory.
00:32:08.100
I mean, is the art of war, is it theory actually applicable?
00:32:10.900
Cause I mean, it sounds like you have to be very like a supercomputer in your brain to
00:32:14.960
And I mean, it doesn't really take into account the interactive and ever-changing nature of
00:32:21.520
Yes, because it's, it's almost, you know, some have looked at it as a kind of really
00:32:26.880
antiseptic approach to war that, you know, basically you just have to get the math right.
00:32:33.820
And, you know, you follow the recipe, you get the math right, you know, you're basically
00:32:41.700
But that doesn't take into account fog, friction, interaction.
00:32:47.520
Some people criticize the art of war as, as not giving nearly enough credit to the adversary.
00:32:53.300
You know, this is the, I call this the Patton-Rommel dialectic where, you know, as smart and as
00:32:59.080
brilliant as Rommel is, well, Patton's read his book.
00:33:02.360
So he, he's, he knows how this guy is inclined to fight and understands the strengths and weaknesses
00:33:10.420
So you have to be constantly interacting because as much as you're trying to compel your enemy
00:33:15.220
to do your political will, your strategic will, he's trying to do exactly the same to
00:33:20.300
It's a, it's like a physical wrestling match on the battlefield, but also in the minds of
00:33:26.720
But my take is that the book goes to those sort of rhetorical extremes to push this sort
00:33:38.220
That's quite different than, you know, the strutting, preening, bold, personally courageous
00:33:44.780
aristocrats of old who charge into battle to seek glory with the stark new realities.
00:33:52.280
So I think the author kind of pushes this idea that this new generals is essentially the exact
00:33:59.240
polar opposite of that older general who was all about the slugfest.
00:34:06.300
Let's move on to another strategic mask you highlight in your course.
00:34:10.780
And this one, so you mentioned a lot of words when you're describing some of the problems of
00:34:16.960
And there was one strategic theorist that he used these terms and that's Clausewitz.
00:34:20.860
We've been saying his name throughout this conversation, but what's Clausewitz's story?
00:34:24.560
Who was he and why are we talking about him in the 21st century?
00:34:29.000
Clausewitz is, is, is kind of the, the, the theorists theorists.
00:34:36.640
He, you know, pretty much brings it all to bear all the criteria of, you know, truly insightful,
00:34:47.520
He's a Prussian military officer, minor aristocrat, hence the Karl von Clausewitz.
00:34:56.440
Prussia is, is one of the German states that had, had risen to sort of great power status
00:35:02.160
in Central Europe under Frederick the Great, but had been brought low by a series of humiliating
00:35:08.420
defeats at the hands of Napoleon in the early 19th century.
00:35:14.820
He enters the army, enters the artillery, I believe it is, at the age of 12 and spends
00:35:22.540
He's not a battlefield commander by any stretch of the imagination.
00:35:26.340
I mean, he has commanded, but he's primarily a, he's a staff officer.
00:35:32.860
His great love in life, his great passion was the study of history and how it was that you
00:35:39.160
could make history useful in the cultivation of a new, every new generation of military
00:35:46.780
officers who had to confront ever new and challenging circumstances in the future.
00:35:52.720
But through the, the careful, you know, systematic approach to the study of great commanders and
00:35:59.280
failed commanders in the past, you could, you know, there, there are ways of developing
00:36:05.180
So another tremendous impact of the period in which Clausewitz lives, he's born before
00:36:11.820
the French Revolution, the wars of the French Revolution.
00:36:15.560
He sees the spectacular eruption of French power, the genius of Napoleon.
00:36:21.700
He's the god of war, but also Napoleon's undoing, particularly with the invasion of Russia and
00:36:27.480
the, and the, this ill-fated campaign in the Iberian Peninsula.
00:36:31.680
But Clausewitz identifies at the very center of that, of his life experience, the true sea
00:36:38.920
change, which is the impact that the French Revolution had on warfare.
00:36:45.200
And in fact, on the nature of war writ large, it wasn't just about the weapons and the organization
00:36:55.080
And what's changed is that war has become national again.
00:37:00.380
Wars in the 17th and 18th century in Europe, where particularly the, the armies generally
00:37:07.060
small, lots of mercenaries, the, the, you know, what citizen soldiers there would, were,
00:37:15.980
They would essentially be ripped out of society and therefore war in society did not have a particularly
00:37:22.820
intimate linkage, but with the French Revolution and, and the death ground that, that France
00:37:29.280
finds itself on, it undertakes national mobilization in which the people, you know, the entire people,
00:37:36.200
the nation become part of these considerations.
00:37:40.480
And kind of like that revolution and warfare in ancient China bring just so much more mass and
00:37:50.820
So warfare goes from being a pretty limited affair, both materially and in terms of what, you know,
00:37:58.780
what changes on the map, little things to, you know, becoming nearly sort of an ideal type of total war,
00:38:07.220
total mobilization for huge stakes, you know, the conquest and mastery of entire continents.
00:38:13.980
And Clausewitz says, basically we need new type of thinking to, to deal with this, this particular
00:38:22.940
As things get bigger, things become more complex.
00:38:38.020
Well, I mean, you know, the enlightenment, you know, the, the era in which Clausewitz grew
00:38:44.160
up, when that came to the, the military realm, there was an effort to sort of subject war to
00:38:53.660
And there's, there is a lot of science in war, lots and lots of science, but there's, you
00:39:00.520
know, the idea that you could bring science almost to the realm of strategy.
00:39:03.700
And that if you just sort of got the math right, you would have a formula for success.
00:39:10.460
And Clausewitz admits that there's lots of mechanical sciences in war, but it's an inherently
00:39:27.620
The bigger war gets as war becomes nationalized, the greater the fog and the friction.
00:39:32.780
So, you know, it's pretty easy to get your son and maybe his best friend to the airport,
00:39:39.000
you know, to catch a flight on Saturday morning.
00:39:42.020
Imagine if you had to do that with your son and 10,000 of his closest friends.
00:39:47.160
What is essentially an easy task as you increase the scale becomes so much more complicated.
00:39:54.720
And the general has to be able to adapt to these elements of fog and friction.
00:40:00.620
And one of Clausewitz's most brilliant additions to strategic theory is this concept, I've sort
00:40:07.680
of danced around it before, called the Trinity, which is, well, every war is different.
00:40:13.940
At its core, each war, by his definition, has three component elements.
00:40:30.500
So it serves a sort of, you know, rational political reason.
00:40:37.920
And that's usually in the hands of the politicians.
00:40:40.880
But war by its very nature, both in terms of its origin, what gives rise to wars, but also what happens in the course of wars,
00:40:48.640
can be increasingly dictated by passions, by irrationality, where, you know, we go to war against the opposing state not because we value territory X, it's because we hate them, right?
00:41:06.400
You know, there's some sort of primordial hatred at the root.
00:41:09.680
And then as war goes on, these irrational forces can, you know, ebb and flow in the course of a war.
00:41:17.880
So you have this tension between war as a rational political act and war as this irrational paroxysm of primordial hatred.
00:41:28.560
If that wasn't complicated enough, war takes place in the physical world.
00:41:33.180
It is a contest between armies made up of human beings operating on terrain, in weather, it can rain, you know, beer supply can run out, all sorts of things can happen in this sort of contest.
00:41:49.640
And in that realm, where it is the government that usually has control of the political reason, the population is usually the wealth, the people are usually the wellspring of that passion, those irrational forces.
00:42:03.100
It is the general, in particular, the genius who rises above and who excels in that realm of what he calls chance and probability, within which he says the creative spirit is free to roam.
00:42:16.460
And he sees this in someone like Napoleon, whose actions on the battlefield, you know, even when he was just a general before he sees power, could have outsized effects on popular passions.
00:42:30.220
So things he achieved on the battlefield could resonate with the passions of the people.
00:42:35.280
He could achieve greater things on the battlefield than the politicians could ever hope for.
00:42:40.460
So there is this tension between these three elements.
00:42:44.320
And that's, without a doubt, Clausewitz's most important contribution among many.
00:42:53.440
One scholar says he's a child of the Enlightenment.
00:42:56.220
So he brings to his study of war a lot of the apparatus of the Enlightenment.
00:43:03.220
He thinks about war as an abstract versus war in reality.
00:43:07.600
It's a sort of Newtonian approach, but he's a child of the Enlightenment, the scholar says, but a man of the Romantic era.
00:43:16.680
So the Romantic era is not just about romance per se.
00:43:20.880
It's about there are these forces that are not, you know, subject to the laws of reason.
00:43:35.700
All happening in that ever-changing, complex, friction-filled world.
00:43:41.800
So at first glance, it looks so Enlightenment, but you're right.
00:43:46.080
It just, it's so, has that so much, you know, indefinability of the Romantic mindset.
00:43:52.000
So Klausowitz, this was in the 19th century, correct?
00:44:06.300
And he was sort of a foundational force in the educational system for the Prussian military.
00:44:11.020
So this 19th century, a lot has happened since then.
00:44:14.240
But Klausowitz, people still, you know, we're still talking about him.
00:44:19.540
And during that time, new developments of strategy have come into place.
00:44:22.440
You've had, you know, the changes in sea power.
00:44:29.020
What's the state of strategy in the 21st century?
00:44:31.920
Are you seeing any new developments in the works in terms of military strategy?
00:44:35.440
Or are we sort of remixing, sort of like a postmodern thing?
00:44:38.500
We're just remixing stuff from the past over and over again.
00:44:42.780
For example, in the realm of cyber, you know, we think about cyber as an utterly new technology.
00:44:49.620
It creates new, it's a new type of, it's a form of terrain.
00:44:56.160
So that sort of terrain and weather that Sunza talks about is entirely new.
00:45:00.820
So that would seem to demand fundamentally new approaches.
00:45:04.120
And the things you can do with cyber, for example, you know,
00:45:07.440
getting inside the adversaries, you know, intelligence gathering system, you know,
00:45:11.720
to sow deception or to, you know, get information or to, you know, subvert their political process,
00:45:20.020
So there are some that say, well, there, cyber, you know, completely new realm,
00:45:24.660
like air power was a century ago, requires a new set of theorists.
00:45:32.320
But others say, well, what cyber is really doing is essentially espionage, sabotage, and propaganda.
00:45:41.120
And there's nothing new under the sun about those three things.
00:45:45.680
And therefore, we can still learn from sort of classic approaches.
00:45:53.320
Terrorism, for example, you know, we've been waging this war on terrorism for, you know,
00:45:58.320
essentially the entire careers of pretty much all of my students.
00:46:02.260
And, you know, terrorism in the information age, when an ISIS video can be splashed all over computers
00:46:10.940
in, you know, France or Northern California or, you know, wherever it is,
00:46:15.720
radicalizing these youths who are so, you know, info savvy, but also feel so divorced from society,
00:46:23.740
as it were, so radicalizable in the technology for radicalization.
00:46:28.920
These sort of postmodern appeals to, you know, identity groups and the ability to, for example,
00:46:38.200
a terrorist or a group of terrorists to get to achieve totally outside strategic effects
00:46:44.660
with a fairly, when you think about how a state would do it,
00:46:48.320
with a fairly modest outlay of manpower and materiel.
00:46:52.380
I mean, if you think about the September 11th attacks,
00:46:54.720
we're talking several hundred thousand dollars, you know, a couple of hundred people involved in the operation itself.
00:47:03.360
But think about the strategic and political effects of that relatively modest operation
00:47:09.980
and how those were compounded by the information age.
00:47:12.540
So wouldn't that itself demand, you know, a completely new set of approaches to strategy,
00:47:18.600
both understanding, you know, the strategic logic of 21st century terrorism,
00:47:23.820
but also coming up with contextually appropriate, technologically savvy responses,
00:47:35.140
And a lot of the, when you're going through these rapid periods of technological and political change,
00:47:41.160
you get a lot of churn, a lot of new strategic theories that are just sort of reflexively
00:47:49.020
But what you usually end up with is, is, you know, Clausewitz does better on Machiavelli.
00:47:54.880
There's a lot in Clausewitz that is carried on, you know, by air power theorists and sea power theorists.
00:48:01.840
So, and, you know, Clausewitz is alive and well in the 21st century,
00:48:05.460
but that doesn't mean that you ignore the changes in the character of warfare
00:48:11.180
and technology and society and politics, all those things.
00:48:14.240
So that's understanding the environment in which you're operating.
00:48:18.260
Well, Andrew, this has been a great conversation.
00:48:19.640
Is there somewhere people can go to learn more about your work and what you do?
00:48:22.860
I've got some products on the Great Courses website, thegreatcourses.com.
00:48:29.500
which is kind of a survey of the great strategic theorists
00:48:33.140
or the ones that I was able to fit into a 24 lecture course.
00:48:41.580
kind of getting back to my roots as a Chinese historian.
00:48:57.600
Masters of War, History's Greatest Strategic Thinkers.
00:48:59.920
You'd find that at the Great Courses Plus or the Great Courses.
00:49:02.460
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash mastersofwar,
00:49:11.580
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
00:49:21.180
where there's thousands of articles written over the years.
00:49:22.900
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00:49:48.780
Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you