The Art of Manliness - #664： The Masters of the Art of War

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.940 Looked at from the heart of combat, war can seem disorganized and chaotic, but overarching

00:00:14.980 the conflict is typically some kind of thoughtful, well-ordered, even scientific strategy that

00:00:19.320 is influencing when, where, how, and why dueling forces have met.

00:00:22.960 My guest today will introduce us to a few of the military philosophers and tacticians

00:00:26.060 who made the most significant contributions to the art of strategy over the last couple

00:00:29.720 of millennia.

00:00:30.420 His name is Andrew Wilson.

00:00:31.600 He's a professor at the Naval War College, as well as the lecturer of the Great Courses

00:00:34.920 course, Masters of War, History's Greatest Strategic Thinkers.

00:00:38.380 We begin our conversation with a brief overview of what martial strategy is, why civilians should

00:00:42.380 study it, and how the contrast between generals Eisenhower and Patton delineate the difference

00:00:46.220 between strategy and operations.

00:00:47.900 We then survey several of history's most influential war strategists in the context in which their

00:00:51.960 theories and doctrines were born.

00:00:53.220 This tour includes a discussion of how the art of war argues that a new type of war and

00:00:56.980 a new type of society required a new type of general who could process conflicts like

00:01:00.780 a supercomputer.

00:01:01.660 We also do a dive into how Carl von Clausewitz emphasized the importance of understanding

00:01:04.940 how complexity, irrational passions, and creative genius underlie contemporary warfare.

00:01:09.660 We end our conversation with how military strategy has or hasn't changed in the 21st century.

00:01:13.500 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash mastersofwar.

00:01:17.200 All right, Andrew Wilson, welcome to the show.

00:01:27.700 Hi, thank you very much.

00:01:29.240 So you are a professor of strategy at the Naval War College.

00:01:32.820 Let's talk about your career.

00:01:33.520 How did you end up at the Naval War College teaching the art of strategy?

00:01:36.980 Yeah, well, first things first, for those who aren't familiar with a war college, a war

00:01:41.560 college is much more about the college, much less about war.

00:01:45.540 It's not like we're out doing exercises in the field during the day.

00:01:48.760 It's a very academic place.

00:01:50.600 In fact, it's a mid-career institution.

00:01:53.920 Most of my students are mid-career professionals in their 30s, 40s, sometimes 50s, mostly from

00:02:00.180 the various U.S. armed services, but also from allied nations.

00:02:04.720 And we have a fair number of students from the diplomatic intelligence communities, a whole

00:02:09.960 range of really wonderful professionals mid-career.

00:02:13.500 So what we did was, it's a year-long course, and they get a master's degree in national

00:02:18.520 security and strategic studies.

00:02:20.000 And it's a very intensive course.

00:02:22.120 And I teach in a department called strategy and policy, where we look at historical case

00:02:26.680 studies through the lens, not just of military and strategic history, but through strategic

00:02:32.420 theory.

00:02:33.060 Can the great masters of strategic thought tell us about why it was that the statesmen and

00:02:40.880 military commanders of the past succeeded or failed, and how we can take those lessons

00:02:44.540 forward into the 21st century.

00:02:47.420 Actually, a Chinese historian by training, I did a degree in modern Chinese history with

00:02:52.560 a fair bit of ancients thrown in.

00:02:54.520 But being a student of the 19th and 20th century in China is unfortunately an extended period of

00:03:00.060 war.

00:03:00.900 You know, China brought low in the course of the 19th century.

00:03:03.760 And then, of course, the Second World War and the rise of the People's Republic of China

00:03:08.480 and Mao Zedong is, you know, it's a blood-dimmed history, but it also translated well to the

00:03:14.900 war college, where they were looking to add more Asian content, specifically Chinese content.

00:03:19.600 So I started off doing Mao Zedong and revolutionary warfare, and then I branched out into ancient

00:03:25.780 Chinese classics, particularly Sun Tzu's Art of War.

00:03:28.440 So you spend your career teaching officers about strategy, but the way I discovered you,

00:03:33.340 you have a course or a lecture on the great courses called the Masters of Strategy, and

00:03:37.720 this is directed to civilians.

00:03:39.820 Why do you think it's useful or important for civilians to understand high-level military

00:03:43.720 strategy?

00:03:44.620 Because as civilians, we vote for our governments, and it's our political leaders that determine

00:03:50.160 the policies that our military is then employed to serve.

00:03:54.080 So I think the connection between policy and the actions that the military take is absolutely

00:04:01.480 fundamental to how our government works.

00:04:04.660 And I think as an educated citizenry, we just should understand that, understand the vernacular

00:04:10.540 of strategic theory and practice.

00:04:13.980 And besides helping citizens become more informed, you know, a lot of times you see people, particularly

00:04:18.780 in business, talk about, or even like football coaches who will like read the Art of War by

00:04:24.460 Sun Tzu to gain insights about strategy in those domains.

00:04:27.380 Do you think it's useful for that?

00:04:28.680 Or is that too tenuous?

00:04:30.660 I think it is useful if it's done judiciously and rigorously.

00:04:36.240 I mean, these texts are essentially about using the asset at your disposal in a competition.

00:04:42.300 And that competition could be between corporations.

00:04:44.740 It could be between sports teams.

00:04:47.740 So the value, for example, intelligence and what we call net assessment, knowing the enemy,

00:04:53.660 knowing yourself, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, and anticipating

00:04:59.580 how a contest between the two of you would evolve, therefore being better prepared for the ensuing

00:05:08.240 struggle.

00:05:08.640 So you would never imagine, you know, any football coach not watching film on, you know, next

00:05:15.200 week's opponent.

00:05:16.120 So that's a process of, you know, figuring out how it is the other team plays and crafting

00:05:22.580 your game plan to maximize your strengths and compensate for your weaknesses, while at the

00:05:28.720 same time exploiting their weaknesses and not allowing them to bring their strengths to

00:05:33.200 bear.

00:05:33.460 So, you know, that process of net assessment as the basis of strategy is exportable to a

00:05:40.680 lot of different domains.

00:05:42.580 Well, let's talk about definitions.

00:05:43.560 High level, what is strategy?

00:05:46.420 Yeah, the way we usually parse it is that we start at the top with policy.

00:05:53.540 So these are the, this is the political purpose for the war.

00:05:57.480 What it is that the political leadership is seeking to achieve, say, peace and stability in

00:06:02.480 the Middle East, or the liberation of Kuwait back in the first Gulf War.

00:06:07.320 Strategy is the means by which you translate political purpose into military action, and how

00:06:14.480 it is that you anticipate military action to deliver your political purpose.

00:06:20.400 So strategy is the nexus between policy and the other dimensions of the other levels of war,

00:06:27.320 the dimensions of war that we're, we're more familiar with, which are operations and tactics,

00:06:31.520 operations being essentially the big muscle movements, the battles, and tactics being

00:06:36.360 the individual unit actions taking place on the battlefield.

00:06:40.780 So strategy is the bridge between policy and military actions.

00:06:46.300 So strategy is pretty high level.

00:06:48.220 You're not getting into the details so much.

00:06:50.160 You're staying, like, you're playing a 10,000 level.

00:06:53.460 10,000, yeah.

00:06:53.820 10,000.

00:06:54.360 Exactly.

00:06:54.880 Yeah, 10,000 feet.

00:06:55.480 Well, and in your, your lecture, you give the examples of General Eisenhower and General

00:07:01.000 Patton's as their different leadership styles, as examples to delineate the difference between

00:07:05.520 strategy and operations.

00:07:07.460 Can you walk us through that, those two guys and their examples?

00:07:10.140 Sure.

00:07:10.500 You know, Eisenhower, of course, as the, as the, the commander of allied forces in the

00:07:15.580 European theater in the late stages of the second world war, he, he sits at the nexus

00:07:21.060 between political and operations.

00:07:25.360 And he's a trusted agent of President Roosevelt.

00:07:29.620 He's conducts diplomacy on a daily basis, balancing the interests of the Brits and the

00:07:35.800 Canadians and the Americans and the French, dealing with the conflicting personalities of

00:07:40.800 his subordinate officers.

00:07:41.940 And he's almost perfectly suited to that task.

00:07:45.900 So he's, he's, he's, he's a perfect choice to, to operate at that strategic level where

00:07:50.660 you see that overlap between military operations and political purpose.

00:07:55.820 Patton, however, is, is most famed as being an operational genius, someone who was just a

00:08:03.240 great student of war, developed a great knowledge of war throughout history, but also somebody

00:08:09.300 who'd honed his intuition.

00:08:10.560 So he could make snap decisions on the battlefield and pursue victory with creativity and audacity.

00:08:18.180 And he's exactly what you want at the operational level of war.

00:08:22.180 He's a flamboyant and somewhat volatile figure, of course.

00:08:26.220 And the way I explain it is you have to think about it as Eisenhower is the coach and Patton's

00:08:31.840 your, your franchise quarterback.

00:08:34.380 Brilliant on the field, but you wouldn't want to reverse that relationship.

00:08:39.100 You wouldn't want to bring the skillset of the coach, try to get them to master the operational

00:08:44.320 level in the way Patton does, nor would you want to have the, the operational expert necessarily

00:08:49.820 be at that strategic nexus.

00:08:52.580 And it sounds like that could be tough as a, as a leader to figure out who is a strategic

00:08:57.080 expert and who is an operations expert.

00:08:59.420 Cause it's typically the way we think of like promoting people, like in a corporation, even

00:09:03.300 the military, it's like, well, if you're good at operations, then maybe you'll be good

00:09:07.080 at strategy too.

00:09:08.300 Right.

00:09:08.540 So, but that's like the Peter principle.

00:09:10.120 Like you'll kind of get out of your area of competence.

00:09:14.200 And, and so, I mean, I guess, I mean, I imagine that's a challenge to figure out.

00:09:17.380 Yeah.

00:09:17.560 There's a, the Prussian military theorist Clausewitz actually made a, I'll summarize one of his

00:09:23.260 points, which is that actually the strengths that make you a great tactical and operational

00:09:29.320 leader can actually become a liability as you're promoted because the lower levels of war quite

00:09:36.740 often about routine and method that there's doctrine, there are right ways to do things

00:09:41.560 and wrong ways to do things.

00:09:43.420 There's a lot of science at that, that level of warfare and that the mastery of those methods

00:09:50.840 and those routines can sometimes handicap an officer as she moves up, you know, through, 0.92

00:09:57.560 through the ranks to the position where they're, they're, they're leaving behind most of the

00:10:02.120 science and doctrine of war and entering the realm of art where they're balancing political

00:10:07.400 considerations against military considerations and doing, you know, as much diplomacy as they

00:10:12.940 are doing operational planning.

00:10:14.400 And so as you evaluate, or as, you know, strategic thinkers like yourself evaluate strategic theories

00:10:19.880 from, you know, from ancient Greece through ancient China to today, like, what are you,

00:10:25.140 what are you looking at?

00:10:26.040 What are the criteria you're looking at on determining whether a strategic theory is sound or even

00:10:31.000 brilliant?

00:10:31.720 It's, it's got staying power.

00:10:33.960 And in the sense that many of the great strategic theorists and the products of those strategic

00:10:39.760 theorists are created in or immediately after periods of revolutionary change in the conduct

00:10:48.080 of warfare and political systems, a whole range of things that demanded a fresh take.

00:10:54.240 So as the great strategic theorists are products of a very specific time and place,

00:10:58.720 and you have to understand them in that, in that context of their creation, but it should be

00:11:04.500 durable in the sense that it's, it, it doesn't become a formula for success throughout the

00:11:11.240 course of history, but rather it has insights that are timeless, that it is, it gives you

00:11:16.980 tools of analysis that when you're evaluating a strategic challenge in the future, allows you

00:11:24.020 to unpack it in organized ways to kind of discern the extent to which you can follow this precept

00:11:33.140 or that precept.

00:11:34.760 So they're guiding, but more of the classics of strategic theory are supposed to foster

00:11:39.840 habits of thought.

00:11:42.000 And you want a pretty big shelf of strategic theory because Clausewitz says war is more than

00:11:48.380 a true chameleon.

00:11:49.300 Every war is different, but, you know, some ways at its heart, every war is the same and

00:11:54.760 has the same, you know, balance between reason and passion and the completely non-rational

00:12:01.180 chance, probability, fog, friction.

00:12:04.160 So ways of thinking about making that connection between military action and its higher purposes,

00:12:11.920 and that gives you tools that cultivate those habits of analysis.

00:12:17.000 That, that, that's what gets you onto the varsity squad when it comes to strategic theory.

00:12:21.080 It's all about developing.

00:12:22.300 I think John Boyd talked about this with his OODA loop, like mental models that you can

00:12:25.700 use.

00:12:26.040 Exactly.

00:12:26.780 Yeah.

00:12:27.380 You know, it's theory.

00:12:28.860 Theory doesn't give you the answers, but what it allows you to do is you don't have to

00:12:32.100 start on page one every time you're confronting a strategic problem or a political crisis.

00:12:39.200 Because, and also all the great strategic theorists have an eye towards history.

00:12:45.140 Many of them, you know, got, got their start as historians, but what they're trying to distill

00:12:50.200 from history are lessons, not, not rule books per se, but takeaways.

00:12:56.580 And part of the reason for this is no matter how long or intense your, say, military career

00:13:04.740 has been, your personal experiences, your professional experiences are inadequate to

00:13:12.200 dealing with the, the immense complexity of war.

00:13:17.080 So how better to prepare yourself for future conflicts rely, of course, on your own personal

00:13:24.000 experience and professionalism, but learning from the experiences of others that give you

00:13:29.320 insight into all the different forms that war can take and all the different, you know,

00:13:35.280 strategic quandaries you might find yourself in.

00:13:37.420 So let's take a sort of a, do a survey of some of these masters you highlight in your,

00:13:42.300 your lecture on the great courses.

00:13:43.320 And the first one from the West is Thucydides.

00:13:46.540 And he wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars.

00:13:49.580 And it's a, it's a text that's still read by military, military strategists taught at the

00:13:53.660 war college.

00:13:54.500 So I think to understand Thucydides, we have to put into context, his strategic insights,

00:13:58.680 historical context.

00:13:59.660 So it's about the history of the Peloponnesian War kind of summary, like how did it start?

00:14:04.840 Why did it last so long?

00:14:06.160 And then how did the Peloponnesian War finally end?

00:14:09.040 Yes.

00:14:09.560 Thucydides is an Athenian, we'll call him an aristocrat.

00:14:12.640 He's from a wealthy, prestigious background.

00:14:15.380 He actually served as a triarch, as essentially a commander of a small naval squadron during

00:14:21.020 the Peloponnesian War and was actually cashiered for a conspicuous military failure.

00:14:26.420 So as I like to tell you, my students, tell my students that that failure costs Thucydides

00:14:33.400 his citizenship and his military career, but it ended up only costing them a weekend in

00:14:39.500 the sense that Thucydides used his forced retirement to expand and complete his history

00:14:45.780 of the Peloponnesian War.

00:14:46.860 Now, this Peloponnesian War begins in 431, and it's essentially a struggle between the

00:14:52.560 two great powers of the Greek world.

00:14:55.620 Athens, this dynamic, commercial, rambunctious democracy, the classic sea power, and Sparta,

00:15:03.740 a more conservative land power.

00:15:06.420 We call this sort of the whale versus elephant issue.

00:15:09.340 And Thucydides chalks it up, not just to the crises of the day, you know, the Sarajevo

00:15:16.340 moment that leads to the outbreak of the First World War.

00:15:19.600 He sees the roots much deeper in terms of this long-term struggle for sort of hegemony among

00:15:26.080 the Greek states.

00:15:27.920 And he sees this sort of deep abiding fear in Sparta, a much more conservative status quo type

00:15:34.560 power with the rising dynamism of Athens, which is becoming an empire and not just pushing

00:15:41.680 its commercial interest, but also its political interest.

00:15:45.300 So it starts with a series of minor events in 431, but the war lasts for 27 years.

00:15:52.640 And part of the reason for the protraction of the war is that we have such a radical asymmetry

00:15:58.800 between Athens and Sparta.

00:16:00.860 It's very difficult for Sparta as a land power to bring its strengths to bear in some sort

00:16:07.680 of decisive land battle against Athens that has almost infinite strategic flexibility and

00:16:14.660 has a complete mastery of the seeds.

00:16:17.480 So the war begins with these sort of the two sides sort of fighting past each other rather

00:16:22.400 than being able to bring their strengths to bear, you know, directly on the others.

00:16:27.240 And it takes decades for this war to resolve.

00:16:30.540 Ultimately, Sparta has to become something of a sea power.

00:16:35.080 It has to either build or borrow or rent a navy, become competent at naval warfare, begin to

00:16:43.280 dismantle the Athenian commercial empire, which stretches across the Aegean, and ultimately face

00:16:49.980 and decisively defeat an Athenian fleet.

00:16:53.420 That happens in 404 BC.

00:16:55.380 And with that, the war comes to an end.

00:16:57.920 And Sparta dictates terms to Athens.

00:17:00.920 What was the lasting outcome of that?

00:17:03.260 Like, how did Sparta and Athens fare years after the war?

00:17:07.100 Many look at this war as sort of a turning point in Greek history.

00:17:11.660 In part, one view is that Sparta is so materially and morally depleted by this struggle that its

00:17:18.780 status as the dominant land power in the Greek world is fundamentally undermined and that later

00:17:25.740 thieves, for example, other land power competitors managed to best Sparta and become the hegemon.

00:17:33.320 Athens actually, after a major defeat, recovers fairly well.

00:17:37.860 It doesn't rebuild the vast empire it had in the 430s, but it puts together a modest maritime

00:17:45.560 consortium, as it were.

00:17:47.660 Its economy recovers.

00:17:49.700 But, I mean, the Greek states are—these polis are not particularly well-suited for empire,

00:17:56.520 for hegemony.

00:17:57.800 In fact, the whole purpose of the polis is to be singular, to be a local entity.

00:18:03.040 And the idea of the ability of the institutions of a polis to be able to run, you know, an

00:18:08.840 hegemony is pretty much asking too much of them.

00:18:12.020 And then, of course, there's this internecine warfare between the Greek states that ultimately

00:18:16.220 opened the door first for the Macedonians, Philip and Alexander, to become hegemons of 0.99

00:18:22.700 Greece, and then later for the Romans to do something very similar.

00:18:27.160 So, why are we still reading Thucydides?

00:18:28.420 Like, what timeless insights about strategy can we take away from his book, The History of the

00:18:32.680 Peloponnesian Wars?

00:18:33.780 Oh, there's so much.

00:18:35.120 Thucydides is the gift that keeps on giving.

00:18:38.340 And you mentioned earlier that, you know, military students read Thucydides.

00:18:42.940 I would say even more students of politics read Thucydides.

00:18:48.200 I first was introduced to it in, you know, Ancient History 101, where it's sort of a—it's

00:18:55.340 a window on, you know, life in classical Athens, in classical Greece.

00:19:00.480 Later, if you do poli-sci or IOR courses, you know, Thucydides is quite often trotted

00:19:06.400 out as the ultimate realist or the founder of the realist school of international relations.

00:19:13.400 So, every generation of policy pundits finds their own Thucydides.

00:19:19.520 So, you know, George Marshall at the advent of the Cold War said, you know, I can't imagine

00:19:27.880 anyone being able to deal with this emerging situation without having understood the tensions

00:19:33.260 between Athens and Sparta, between the democracy and the oligarchy, between the conservative

00:19:38.740 land power and the dynamic democratic sea power.

00:19:43.240 So, the overlay on the Cold War, the sort of the dramatic climax of the Peloponnesian

00:19:52.120 War is a completely misguided adventure by the Athenians in an attempt to go conquer Sicily,

00:19:59.100 you know, this vast piece of territory at the other end of the Greek world.

00:20:02.960 They launch a massive expedition.

00:20:05.120 And when that expedition gets bogged down, they double down.

00:20:08.000 They send more and more forces, and they're ultimately completely militarily humiliated.

00:20:14.540 And that misguided overseas adventure became, you know, became code for the Vietnam War,

00:20:21.900 for the Iraq War.

00:20:23.340 So, every generation finds its own Thucydides.

00:20:27.160 Today, we're talking about Thucydides' attention to the plague that ravaged Athens early on in

00:20:34.360 the war, some sort of fever, some sort of respiratory, you know, syndrome, as it were,

00:20:40.400 devastated, perhaps killed 20% of the population of Athens while it was trying to wage a war

00:20:47.100 and the kind of psychological shock, you know, what happens to a society when, you know, it's hit

00:20:53.140 with a massive biological weapon.

00:20:55.060 You also see in Thucydides this sort of, you know, where other theorists focus on the more

00:21:04.480 operational levels of war, connecting the military actions to the political purposes.

00:21:10.640 Thucydides forces us to interrogate how societies wage war and what war does to those societies,

00:21:19.920 especially a protracted war, and how it can challenge political institutions.

00:21:24.240 and bring them down.

00:21:26.420 So, it's a history, but it has so much insight of lessons that can be carried.

00:21:31.760 If you do it judiciously, carefully and rigorously, there's a lot of loose application of Thucydides,

00:21:38.020 but, you know, that can be applied to a lot of different circumstances.

00:21:42.580 One of my favorites is leadership.

00:21:44.060 There are profiles in leadership, brilliant, awful, and everything in between.

00:21:49.780 And there are these characters that, you know, clearly Thucydides knew personally, interacted

00:21:56.280 with on all sides of the conflict.

00:21:58.820 So, there's these profiles in leadership.

00:22:01.120 It's just, it's the gift that keeps on giving.

00:22:02.940 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:22:09.160 And now, back to the show.

00:22:11.400 So, let's move east.

00:22:12.740 It's around the same time, there was another work of strategic theory that came out at the

00:22:17.040 same time, about the same time the cities are doing the history of the Peloponnesian

00:22:19.580 War, and that's the art of war. 0.60

00:22:20.840 And this is from China.

00:22:21.920 This is your area of expertise.

00:22:23.820 I think everyone's had, I'm not everyone, but a lot of people have this like a copy of

00:22:26.460 the art of war.

00:22:27.220 They quote it.

00:22:28.120 Businesses like to put it on PowerPoint slides or whatever.

00:22:30.000 But let's get some historical context for this text.

00:22:33.060 When was it written?

00:22:34.180 And what was the sort of political and military situation in China at this time that caused

00:22:38.680 this to come to bear?

00:22:40.820 Yeah, the art of war, I'm in the school that places the art of war in sort of the, say,

00:22:47.460 around the 320s, 330s BCE.

00:22:50.360 So, the late 4th century.

00:22:53.020 So, it's about the same time as, say, Alexander, Philip and Alexander in Macedon.

00:22:58.620 The purported author of it actually lived a couple of hundred years earlier at the end

00:23:07.140 of the 6th century.

00:23:08.260 He was operational about 520, 530 BCE.

00:23:12.840 But what this later book does, it kind of appropriates the military bona fides of this

00:23:19.860 earlier general and uses him as the cipher to make an argument.

00:23:27.100 And that argument is about new requirements of military leadership and organization.

00:23:34.600 And I talked earlier about how revolutionary changes in the nature of warfare and the political

00:23:39.840 systems and things like that demand fresh strategic appraisals.

00:23:44.100 Well, one of these is going on in ancient China.

00:23:46.020 And it spans that entire period from when this general Sun, from whom we get master Sun,

00:23:52.800 Sun Tzu, to the actual crafting of the book, to the sort of culmination of this.

00:23:58.920 And this is a period we generally refer to as the warring states, which runs from, you know,

00:24:03.660 the 6th and 700s BCE up to the first unification of China.

00:24:07.960 And what's happening there is that, you know, once small aristocratic, you know, small states,

00:24:15.160 principalities ruled by a warrior aristocracy are giving way to ever larger territorially,

00:24:23.400 you know, states that are larger territorially, larger in terms of population, and increasingly

00:24:29.020 bureaucratic.

00:24:29.960 And rather than loose confederations of aristocrats, like you see in feudal Europe, you start to

00:24:37.000 see the creation of something we might understand as kind of a modern state, where you have a

00:24:41.940 centralized government with a centralized administration built on merit.

00:24:47.960 And what this does by the state being able to reach down into society and mobilize, you know,

00:24:53.900 hundreds of thousands of young men for, you know, infrastructure projects for the military,

00:24:59.560 be able to collect taxes from a much, much wider population base, you know, creates this

00:25:05.460 revolutionary, it creates the sea change in what these states are able to do militarily,

00:25:12.500 for example, but all these states start to develop those capabilities.

00:25:16.640 So as they're in this fierce struggle with each other for hegemony in ancient China, they're

00:25:22.740 constantly trying to outdo the others in terms of how it is that you exploit these new capabilities

00:25:28.700 And what the art of war does is it tries to create the general, the new general, someone

00:25:36.060 who is master of the new realities of warfare, its scale, its organization, its logistical and

00:25:43.760 manpower requirements, the dangers of war, because, you know, war in antiquity was a seasonal

00:25:50.200 affair, a few thousand aristocrats would go out, hack each other up, set up trophies, you

00:25:55.740 know, sacrifice the gods and, you know, war's over and they'd go back and do it again and

00:26:00.460 again and again.

00:26:01.640 But now we have these ever larger states and these ever larger states are starting to be

00:26:06.980 extinguished one by one.

00:26:08.740 So it's this kind of cage match in ancient China and the art of war is an answer to that 0.99

00:26:15.200 political and strategic crisis in ancient China.

00:26:19.400 So it sounds like the states were getting larger, but they were still fighting like they

00:26:22.980 were heroic, small-time aristocrats.

00:26:25.800 Exactly.

00:26:26.440 You know, because you had this tension because as these states become more bureaucratic, you

00:26:31.320 are relying more on, you know, promotion by merit, you know, organizational competence,

00:26:36.980 as it were.

00:26:38.120 But these states are still ruled by aristocrats, people who have these sort of antiquated notions

00:26:44.740 about warfare and about military command.

00:26:47.840 Like, you know, the duke of one of these states believes that he's the duke, you know,

00:26:52.900 because the gods favor his clan and the way to keep the favor of the gods is to spill the

00:27:01.020 blood of his enemy.

00:27:01.660 So battle is actually kind of a holy place in this aristocratic construct, right?

00:27:08.440 Whereas the author of the Sun Tzu comes in and says, no, you know, war is a means to an

00:27:14.800 end.

00:27:15.140 It is a very expensive means.

00:27:18.280 Therefore, if the use of it does not bring profit, if you're not stronger at the end of

00:27:23.780 a battle, well, that's the route to destruction.

00:27:27.500 And only by this much more rational, organized, professional approach to the recruitment, training,

00:27:35.560 equipping, feeding, and then ultimately leading in the field of these new militaries, that's

00:27:40.940 the only way you're going to survive in this death match.

00:27:43.720 So what are the big, you know, theoretical prescriptions that the art of war has for

00:27:48.780 generals?

00:27:50.220 One of them is to make the most efficient use of your resources.

00:27:54.200 And these resources are abundant now.

00:27:56.560 But just because they are abundant in terms of manpower, the introduction of essentially

00:28:02.420 mass-produced standardized weapons, where the state is producing weapons rather than the

00:28:07.360 warriors, aristocrats showing up with their own chariots and armor, where the state takes

00:28:12.460 over all that stuff, where these aren't private armies.

00:28:15.240 These are national armies, as it were.

00:28:18.880 So your resources are now abundant, but that doesn't mean you can be profligate with them

00:28:24.680 because the state, you know, one state over is just as powerful, has just as much strategic

00:28:31.400 potential.

00:28:32.300 And it really comes down to how well you use those resources.

00:28:37.140 The other danger is to avoid protraction.

00:28:39.320 Don't get involved in these long sort of hot and cold wars where you're constantly, you

00:28:45.900 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 0.93

00:29:05.740 a premium on the intellect.

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

00:29:29.860 his intellect into military action.

00:29:32.600 And that's going to be the decisive advantage.

00:29:34.920 It's just not about whether he's not, he's personally brave.

00:29:37.740 He's not leading from the front.

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?

00:29:59.820 It might be better not to go to war.

00:30:02.200 Absolutely.

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.

00:30:13.240 To an aristocrat, that's, that's offensive.

00:30:15.480 I mean, combat, that's, that's where we, you know, spill the blood of the enemies.

00:30:19.620 We're satisfied, satisfied blood vendettas.

00:30:21.820 This is where we honor our ancestors and the gods.

00:30:24.200 You're telling me I'm not supposed to fight.

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

00:30:41.120 ways, almost arithmetically.

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

00:31:00.060 of spiritual strength of your adversary.

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

00:31:14.280 to take place.

00:31:15.220 And then you have to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing generals, your

00:31:21.200 own generals.

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

00:31:35.360 your assumptions quite often.

00:31:37.020 So this process of net assessment is absolutely crucial to figuring out essentially, if you're

00:31:43.960 going to fight, what is it going to take?

00:31:46.200 What is it going to cost?

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.

00:32:04.160 That's a very, very difficult thing to do.

00:32:06.820 Well, yeah.

00:32:07.000 I mean, it's, it sounds difficult.

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

00:32:13.940 figure all this stuff out.

00:32:14.960 And I mean, it doesn't really take into account the interactive and ever-changing nature of

00:32:19.320 warfare.

00:32:20.420 On the face of it.

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

00:32:40.300 guaranteed victory.

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

00:33:09.540 of that approach.

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

00:33:19.860 you.

00:33:20.300 It's a, it's like a physical wrestling match on the battlefield, but also in the minds of

00:33:25.260 the leaders of both sides.

00:33:26.720 But my take is that the book goes to those sort of rhetorical extremes to push this sort

00:33:35.660 of radical new approach to warfare.

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.

00:34:05.160 So that's the art of war.

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

00:34:14.620 warfare, friction, fog, et cetera.

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?

00:34:28.760 Yeah.

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,

00:34:44.740 durable, useful strategic theory.

00:34:47.520 He's a Prussian military officer, minor aristocrat, hence the Karl von Clausewitz.

00:34:55.280 He's a Prussian. 0.55

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.

00:35:12.120 And Clausewitz lives through this period.

00:35:14.820 He enters the army, enters the artillery, I believe it is, at the age of 12 and spends

00:35:19.680 his entire career in the military.

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.

00:35:30.120 He's an organizer, but he's also an educator.

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

00:36:03.320 those habits of thought.

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.

00:36:14.620 He lives through them.

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

00:36:51.080 and the uniforms.

00:36:52.180 It is something has fundamentally changed.

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,

00:37:13.600 would serve incredibly long terms of service.

00:37:15.980 They would essentially be ripped out of society and therefore war in society did not have a particularly 0.83

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

00:37:47.480 energy volatility to warfare.

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

00:38:19.920 challenge.

00:38:21.200 And yeah, the challenge is, is complexity.

00:38:22.940 As things get bigger, things become more complex.

00:38:25.720 And he talks about that, like warfare.

00:38:27.320 Now there's this fog, there's this friction.

00:38:29.620 Sometimes you don't know what's going on.

00:38:31.140 It's not, you know, one plus two equals three.

00:38:34.000 It's like one plus X.

00:38:36.080 And I don't know what X is.

00:38:37.580 Exactly.

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

00:38:51.800 the rules of science.

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

00:39:16.280 interactive thing.

00:39:17.940 It's a political thing.

00:39:20.600 So, you know, war is a political act.

00:39:23.680 So policies can change.

00:39:25.560 Political leadership can change over time.

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.

00:40:20.080 One is that it serves a political purpose.

00:40:23.460 So there's a rational reason.

00:40:26.420 There is some item to be gained by it.

00:40:30.500 So it serves a sort of, you know, rational political reason.

00:40:35.320 So there is reason there.

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?

00:41:03.780 They're Yankees fans, for Christ's sake.

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.

00:42:50.080 It sounds romantic, his ideas.

00:42:52.660 It is.

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.

00:43:01.060 He talks about ideal versus real.

00:43:03.220 He thinks about war as an abstract versus war in reality.

00:43:06.380 What are the intervening variables?

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.

00:43:26.520 And in war, that is, you know, that is fear.

00:43:31.540 It's genius.

00:43:33.060 It's moral forces, he calls them.

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?

00:43:55.460 Yeah, he lived through the Napoleonic Wars.

00:43:58.380 He served the Napoleonic Wars.

00:44:00.420 And I believe he died in the 1830s.

00:44:03.220 So he sits astride the French Revolution.

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.

00:44:17.360 You still teach him to your officers.

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.

00:44:24.740 We've had air power now.

00:44:26.440 Nuclear weapons change strategy.

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.

00:44:41.020 That's a great question.

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.

00:44:54.420 It's an environment.

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,

00:45:19.200 all those things.

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.

00:45:29.900 And there are those theorists emerging.

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.

00:45:50.400 So that's sort of the cyber domain.

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,

00:47:31.020 approaches to counterterrorism.

00:47:32.880 So there is that tension.

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

00:47:46.880 jettisoning the old ones.

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.

00:48:26.880 I have a course there on Masters of War,

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.

00:48:36.940 I've got a course on Sun Tzu's Heart of War.

00:48:39.480 I recently did one on Imperial China,

00:48:41.580 kind of getting back to my roots as a Chinese historian.

00:48:44.840 And I just really recommend that.

00:48:47.040 Fantastic.

00:48:47.440 Well, Andrew Wilson, thanks for your time.

00:48:48.460 It's been a pleasure.

00:48:49.900 Oh, my pleasure, Brett.

00:48:51.640 My guest here is Andrew Wilson.

00:48:52.980 He is a professor at the Naval War College,

00:48:55.300 also the lecturer of the Great Courses course,

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,

00:49:05.480 where you find links to resources.

00:49:06.640 We delve deeper into this topic.

00:49:11.580 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:49:17.800 Check out our website at artofmanliness.com,

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00:49:46.700 As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:49:48.780 Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding you

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The Art of Manliness - November 30, 2020

#664： The Masters of the Art of War

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