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book reviews
strategy booksreviewed by T. Nelson |
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book reviews
strategy booksreviewed by T. Nelson |
by Cara Wrigley and Murray Simons
Routledge, 2025, 160 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson
he challenge faced by the reader in an opinion book like this is
how to identify how much of what the writer says is true. The task
of the writer is threefold: establish his credibility, prove the
problem is real, and convince us the proposed solution will help.
This short open-access book skips all that and jumps right to their pep talk. Australians Wrigley and Simons assert that the military is ‘fighting the last war’ and while good at innovating technologically, needs a more innovative mindset. They define this as ‘a way of thinking that embraces creativity, openness to new ideas, and a willingness to take risks via experimentation.’
They say there are several ‘unexamined self-stabilizing influences’ that resist change. Change can come from:
Countries are threatening to dissolve the rules-based international order (RBIO).
An 'evolving security environment'.
Technological advancements
Threats by new tech like drones to operational effectiveness
Increased complexity by wars being fought not just on geographic lines on a map
Domestic pressures from automation
As an illustration, they say the Cookie Effect is when a complex system breaks down, like a cookie, into a fragmented system. Toward the end, the discussion gets a little more sophisticated and they say things like this (without any evidence to back it up):
Findings suggest that teams composed of individuals with diverse backgrounds, credentials, expertise, roles, genders, personality traits, and problem-solving approaches tend to be more successful.
The authors love making lists. In Chapter 6, New Horizons, we get a doozy with 38 of them, including:
Promote unity in decision-making Use effective facilitators Discourage perfectionism Create safe thinking space Consult widely Reallocate time for creativity
I suppose a general who attended their creativity workshop (or whatever the authors do) is supposed to tape this list over his desk. Maybe the list would be useful if the consultants told him to become more creative. He could, for example, decide to “consult more widely” and hire a different bunch of consultants.
The authors do include a few stories to back up their ideas, such as the need for understanding the Iraqis' fear of Ba'ath resurgence, but not enough to convince the reader that they have much insight into what creativity is all about. I was not convinced there's an actual problem, and I'm really not convinced that willingness to take more risks is such a hot idea for the military.
Fuff! At least it's free. It's open access and available at www.taylorfrancis.com.
mar 04, 2025
This book is neither an in-depth military history nor an in-depth discussion of naval warfare theories. It's for us landlubbers who think US Joint Doctrine is “Don't bogart the reef, man.”
According to Ian Speller, the two greatest naval theorists were Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose basic philosophy was “sink the enemy fleet in a decisive battle”; and Julian Stafford Corbett, who believed that maritime power is only one element and the ultimate focus must be on land. Most subsequent thinkers didn't go into much more depth than this and generally followed one school or the other.
Speller emphasizes that maxims are no substitute for judgment. Some admirals, like Tirpitz, who blindly followed Mahan's principle that an attacker needs one-third superiority in numbers to be successful, led their country into catastrophic failure. The German build-up he advocated only stimulated an arms race with the British and it was the German government's budget, not the enemy, that was sent to the bottom.
Speller says a proven rule is that inferior navies are at more of a disadvantage against stronger navies than inferior armies are against stronger armies. Thus, their strategy is usually harassment and commerce raiding. The French tried this against the British but it failed, in large part because their Revolution killed off many experienced officers. Then there was the Jeune École (young school) theory, which advocated an irregular, asymmetric approach of sinking civilian passengers as well as sailors. This strategy also failed, as it tended to enrage the population. This happened in WWI, where the sinking of RMS Lusitania brought the United States into the war.
Examples include the Sino-Japanese war, Spanish-American War, Russo-Japanese war, World War I (where there was only one big naval battle), and WWII. As for more recent conflicts, Speller says if the Argentinians had been able to conduct effective joint operations, they could have won the 1982 Falklands war. On the other hand, if the British hadn't foolishly decommissioned their only big carrier (the Ark Royal) four years earlier, thereby forcing them to send in civilian ships like the QE2, the war might never have started. He doesn't say this, but this thinking is in line with Sun Tzu, who said the best battle is the one you don't have to fight.
Speller has some good suggestions for books on military history. As for technology, I'd recommend James Genova's Electronic Warfare Signal Processing as a start.
jan 31 2025
by Hal Brands, ed.
Princeton, 2023, 1158 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson
his is a new version of a highly regarded 564-page 1943 book titled
Makers of modern strategy: Military thought from Machiavelli to
Hitler by Edward Mead Earle. The second one (1986) expanded that
to 941 pages. This one, with 45 essays, is even bigger!
The editor asks: What is strategy? Is it operations, military tactics, policies, or politics? The answer seems to be that strategy is whatever these academics happen to be interested in. What we get is a mixture of military history lessons and opinion articles, some outstanding and some absolutely dreadful.
That means the book is mostly not really about strategy, but more like general thoughts, sometimes well considered, like a Foreign Affairs article that gives general concepts. Some of the articles are well reasoned and factual, drawing conclusions from historical truth, while other authors seem to have difficulty extricating their ideas from their ideology. An 1100-page book with 45 authors is necessarily repetitive and full of stuff everybody already knows, like the fact that there was no such thing as a Blitzkrieg strategy in WWII—two authors say this—but that Hitler just did everything by intuition.
There are three basic types of articles: (1) reviews of famous writers about strategy, such as Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Jomini, and Mahan; (2) Encomiums to the writer's favorite politician, such as Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Gandhi, Alexander Hamilton, or LBJ; and (3) Brief history lessons about important campaigns, emphasizing the mistakes and the weaknesses of each side. This third category, which includes Napoleon, France after Richelieu, and Japan after the Meiji restoration, is the most interesting.
There are some good quotes, like this one from Churchill, which says more in one sentence than some authors do in 25 pages:
Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would be no war if the other man did not think he also had a chance. [p. 521]
For most of the contributors, though, the real battle is whether strategy is politics, foreign policy, or history. In the first two sections, the strategists outmaneuver the others, but their forces are divided and in the third part a spearhead of neocons shows up, followed by the guys who still think there's anything more to nuclear strategy than “Try not to use them too much, okay?” Eventually the policy wonks get the upper hand. They're outmaneuvered and seriously outgunned by the historians in the first half, but they have the advantage of numbers. Their unsupported opinions are a reminder of why Foreign Policy was forced to regroup to four issues a year.
mar 19, 2025
by B.H. Liddell Hart
Meridian, 1991 (reprint of 1954 ed.), 426 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson
his book is an influential discussion of military
strategy, first written during the interwar period of the 1930s and updated
in 1954 to include changes in strategy brought about by nuclear weapons. Capt.
Hart defines strategy as "how to get to the battlefield" and tactics as "what to
do when you get there", and formulates his idea, widely employed by the Germans
in WWII, of "strategic dislocation", i.e., bypassing the enemy's strongest point
and attacking from the rear, or in other words, taking the "line of least
expectation". Surprise is attained by demoralizing the enemy so that they
believe there is no exit: "Psychological dislocation fundamentally springs
from [the enemy's] sense of being trapped." This is achieved with a
multi-pronged attack: "A plan, like a tree, must have branches," Hart says,
"if it is to bear fruit."
Hart contrasts this principle with the theory of absolute warfare codified by Clausewitz, which is embodied in grand but misunderstood statements like "Only great and general battles can produce great results", "Blood is the price of victory", and "We have only one means in war -- the battle". Hart employs his own strategy of the indirect attack against Clausewitz's ideas, saying that because of his premature death by cholera in 1830, Clausewitz never had the time to finish the planned redactions to his great work that would have added needed elements such as economy of force and the importance of maneuver and misdirection.
In the last chapter, Hart expresses his misgivings about guerrilla warfare, which plants seeds of violence in the population that create disorder decades after the war is over. Even in this age of information warfare, Hart's book is still relevant, and while much narrower in outlook than brilliant works such as Sun Tzu's Art of War, it compensates by giving detailed examples throughout military history, concentrating principally on Napoleon and Hitler, demonstrating the superiority of the sudden and indirect attack as a strategy of warfare.
apr 21, 2002