The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present by Beatrice Heuser

“War. War never changes”. So begins the latest hit video game Fallout 4. In reality however, war has changed immeasurably.

Examining 2000 years of warfare, with an emphasis from the age of Napoleon to the early War on Terror, Heuser shows the evolution, change, and variations of strategy and conflict. While bloodshed, suffering, fog and friction are common of every conflict, the how, where, when, and why of war has as many fashions as well…fashion.

Heuser’s concern is how people have written about and talked about the use and management of war and violence. Treating this entire field as focused on ‘strategy’ is a methodological risk. Most people in history haven’t used the term ‘strategy’ as we understand it today. While we should be careful not to put new words into old mouths, this is a risk worth taking.

Evidence of strategic behaviour is common across all human history and all human cultures. Even if our ancestors would not have used the term, they were undertaking the same essential task as we do today: Thinking about how to manage and use force to achieve political ends. And if we are to understand our challenges, we need to learn how those before us overcame theirs.

To manage an intellectual history of this scope, Heuser identifies five broad areas, bookended by analysis of the use of the term ‘strategy’ (from the Greek ‘stratagos’ meaning a General), and a fascinating discussion of the long term trends and future challenges.

Heuser merges the period from covering Antiquity to the Middle Ages, covering issues such as leadership, moral, mercenaries, sieges and technology. The book then explores on the Napoleonic era and the development of ideas of total war. She highlights a ‘Napoleonic paradigm’ focused on decisive battles, and increasingly the targeting of foreign populations as a constant from the late 18th century till the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945. Forces such as the development of the modern state, technology, nationalism and Social Darwinism all contributed to this trend. The outcome was a shift from a war where people could sit on the hillside and watch during the American Civil War, to a world where civilians were the target of war.

Total war, pitting the entire resources of the state against an opponent in a struggle for survival found its apotheosis in the Second World War. Many expected its appearance during the Cold War, and its core ideas such as aiming for decisive, unconditional victories still drive many modern militaries, particularly the USA.
Following this analysis, and in line with the chronology, though more thematically organised, Maritime Strategy, Airpower and Asymmetric conflicts are explored. These chapters are useful to show just how new many of our ideas about warfare are, and how important technological change has been to dramatically shaping its nature, focus and use.

This is a long book, with a lot of history to chew through. While consistently solid in its prose, some of these areas can drag for the non-specialist. Or seem not deep enough for those with something of a background in the area. It’s useful to know some of what Thucydides, Jomini, Mahan, Corbett and other ‘masters’ of strategy thought, as Heuser tends to try and spread around her focus, showing the wider context of the debates and spread of ideas about war through (largely European) societies.

A highlight is the concluding section on ‘The quest for new paradigms after the world war’. Here the narrative seems to slow down, trying less to highlight all the major debates and authors. Instead it trace just a few ideas and pulls them apart. You hear more of Heuser’s own views through this section, which is to be appreciated, and reminiscent of the historically grounded essays of Hew Strachan’s Direction of War.

It’s a truism that general fight the last war AND that they are obsessed with how new technology makes all past experience obsolete. As Heuser masterfully shows, there have always been historically grounded and material/technologically oriented schools of thought about strategy. Its use and application has always been a debate, wrapped up with our notions of ethics, technology, geography, identity and logic. Strategy changes because war changes. Notions of linear experience might work for a fictional video game, but reality is far richer and more varied. The catch – and there always is one – is that to make sense of this change, we need to know what has stayed the same. If you can work your way through Heuser’s volume, you’ll be well on your way to separating fact from fiction.

The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective by Hew Strachan

I work at a ‘Strategic & Defence Studies Centre’ and like to use the word strategy. But I confess to not being really sure what the word means. In this confusion I am not alone.

In The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective Hew Strachan (pronounced ‘strawn’) examines the ‘lost meaning of strategy’. Today most government departments try to be ‘strategic’ as do businesses, health coaches, schools and caterers.

This is a far cry from what the term classically meant. Strachan compelling argues that for 18th and 19th century thinkers such as Clausewitz and Jomini, strategy meant ‘the use of the battle for the purposes of the war’. This was the notion which World War One generals carried with them into the conflict. The change in meaning occurred after World War Two and with the rise of the nuclear age.

No longer could states use battles for war, because war could no longer be risked. The total war of Hitler, Stalin and Hirohito was too high a burden, and nuclear weapons made conflict seem cataclysmic. As Bernard Brodie famously wrote ‘Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have no other useful purpose’. Ever since, Strachan laments, strategy has been broad, grand, and banal. It covers peacetime and war, economics and policy and is thoroughly confused about its purpose and role.

Through a series of thematic essays Strachan traces this change and the harm it has done to our modern understanding and use of war. While total wars between powerful states have thankfully paused, warfare continues in a variety of forms.

In one fascinating chapter, Strachan highlights and critiques the emergence of the ‘operational’ level. This is a domain of thinking that had not existed in the past and represents an attempt by the military to recapture that original element of strategy — and their control of this highly valued term.

While Strachan rightly attacks the sloppy thinking and misuse of the term strategy, I admit to still being unclear exactly how he thinks we should use it. Perhaps a re-reading would help. This is a detailed, analytical book that weaves its way to a conclusion rather than setting out easy to follow guideposts. As a series of reprinted and updated works from other contexts the book is coherent but not comprehensive.

If I have caught the thread, Strachan believes that strategy should not be thought of as a constant but a discussion. An intersection between policy (what the nation wants) and tactics (the use of force by the state). In the middle, and negotiated between those with responsibility for policy (the politicians) and tactics (the military) is strategy.

Where we have gone wrong is to try and split the term. So the relationship between policy and strategy occupied the West during the Cold War, leading to meaningless Presidential rhetoric about a “forward strategy of Freedom”. At the same time, the operational concept only looks at the relationship between strategy and tactics. This ignores the purpose of fighting and confuses military concerns with the resources and approach of the nation undertaking it.

Strachan also usefully highlights the temporal shift in our thinking about strategy. Instead of a discussion between past and present it is now between present and future. As a historian who resents this shift, he lays blame for this change at the feet of two groups.

First theorists from the Navy and Air Forces who either don’t have much of a history to draw on. Or who believe their machines sufficiently different and perfectible in the future as to be ‘revolutionary’. The other group is political scientists, particularly those after WW2 who Strachan believes got lost in abstract game theories and formal logics that ignored actual human conflict.

In The Direction of War, Strachan judges strategic studies a very troubled discipline. He demonstrates it is confused about its key terms, divorced from its origins, and subverted in its purposes. At the heart of this is the inability of many in the discipline to shake the romance of World War Two. That is, wanting to plan for, discuss and debate grand strategy in total war scenarios without being sullied by looking at the actual occurrences and use of strategy in mundane, limited, and localised conflicts today.

There’s much to this. We have a generation of Western leaders who think every crisis is Munich, and Churchill is the only model of good leadership. And this generation, in war and peace has been terrible at using force to support national interests. Too willing, too reticent. Too fearful, too hubristic. And rarely clear minded in why and how the conflict will serve their nation. But we can’t just blame the leaders. Those who advise and write on these matters need to also take responsibility.

This is a slow read but a valuable one. There is wisdom on every page, but not every page seems to take you in the same direction. The essays wander through history, shift to theory and then back again. Unsurprisingly for a Professor at Oxford, European and especially British experience is the go-to, though Strachan does an admirable job of providing as much information as you need to understand the reason why he is raising each example.

Ultimately, I still feel some confusion about strategy. Restoring strategy to its original meaning seems an unhelpful move. It would seem to exclude many critical peacetime choices, such as the development of alliances and much of defence planning (do we build ships to defend the air-sea gap, or land forces to be interoperable with coalition partners overseas?).

The present wide use of the term also suggests a need for a term that helps us connect policy and action to secure the nation and its interests. Thanks to Strachan’s consistent effort to demand clear, historically grounded thinking I now feel I at least have a firm foundation upon which to build my own views

Restless Continent: Wealth, rivalry and Asia’s new geopolitics by Michael Wesley

If you go into a good bookstore these days, the international politics section is bound to be focused on ISIS/Terrorism, and the rise of Asia. Meanwhile, survey show 40% of US international relations professors consider Asia the most strategically important region for the US today, with that number jumping to 66% for those looking twenty years ahead. Both data points may seem surprising given Asia has been at peace for forty years.

Why the interest in Asia? Michael Wesley’s excellent new book Restless Continent: Wealth, Rivalry and Asia’s new Geopolitics, gives four big reasons for this focus: Scale, muscle memory, pride and location. In short, Asia is bigger, has stronger states, greater pride and more important location than any comparable region in the world. And Restless Continent is as good an explainer of the key trend and challenges as you will find on the bookshelves today.

This is a foxes’ book. There’s no big “one trick you didn’t know to explain the world” claims here. Rather dozens of trends, forces, and processes are highlighted to build an insightful, complex and even contradictory picture of Asia, as fits the actual diversity of the region.

This is a significant achievement for a book which is written for the general public (published by Black Inc). Wesley has a mature writing style that comfortably balance speaking to the public while drawing on the academic books and articles which offer detailed insight into specific issues. Not many can pull this off so well, so it’s worth highlighting.

Restless Continent focuses on three key areas, economics, politics and geography. Along the way themes of interdependence, colonialism, civilisations, hierarchies, and strategy are explored. The section on economic interactions – such as global production sharing, regional infrastructure and energy arteries, along with the way humans think about and engage geography are particular stand outs.

There’s a sense balance in the analysis that recognises the way the big trends and key actor’s concerns intersect. In some instances cooperating, more often contradicting, yet the implications are still unknown, if not unknowable. For instance, urbanisation is the force that has driven Asia’s economic rise and taken an average of 1 million people out of poverty every single week since 1990.

Yet this same process also increases the pressure on often weak states to deliver services and maintain public legitimacy. Urban based insurgencies are the nightmare situation for any military, yet 1/3 to 1/5th of the urban population of the region is packed into slums, with governments increasingly worried about the implications.

What I particularly liked about Wesley’s approach to Asia is that it is not just about China. As important as the Middle Kingdom is, he gives the other states their due. Indeed, his conclusion seems to imply it is the choice of the mid-sized countries, whether to follow or resist which will the key ‘choice’ of regional leaders.

Wesley defined Asia in its broadest sense ‘from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, and the Artic to the Indian Ocean’ (p.63). He argues that this is both more natural given the regional patterns pre-colonialism, and irresistible in an interconnected world. Yet while there is occasional discussion of ‘West Asia’ (Iran, Israel, Persian Gulf etc), the book tends to focus on the sweep from India, through Southeast Asia up to North Asia. Indeed Wesley seems to admit the need to subdivide, separating a Northern Tier of Central Asia, Russia and Mongolia from a Southern Tier which is the main focus of the book.

If I did have one major disagreement, it was with Wesley’s argument that ‘all policy – what governments are able to do within but particularly beyond their borders – is enabled or prevented by an underlying distribution or structure of latent force’ (p.126). This is a common view, and since Thucydides and Machiavelli political science has always tried to look at the power behind the throne, the steel inside the velvet glove. Yet I think it’s far too simple, if not outdated an explanation of Asia today.

The evolution of the region has been far from pre-determined by the distribution of force. While the US has championed many of the current rules and structures, it achieved much of this by negotiation, compromise, and traditional diplomatic politics. There is no evidence the region simply rolled over to accommodate it. Likewise China is not finding the running all going its way as its capacity for force grows. The most notable thing about the South China Sea is how much trouble the emerging giant is having trying to achieve its will against much smaller countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan etc.

The rules of the region are at essence negotiated. Military power helps countries seeking to shape those rules, but so does legitimacy, diplomatic skill, coalition building and the capacity to mount a persuasive argument. Wesley’s claim to see a substructure of force underneath that determines ‘all’ behaviour, also seems to contradict the important focus he places on psychological factors such as identity and history as key shapers of the relations between countries in Asia.

This criticism aside, I’m slightly surprised this book hasn’t had a bigger reception. Wesley is a charismatic speaker and engaging writer, with a significant CV and recognition around Australia’s corridors of power. The lack of one “big trick to understand Asia” probably hurts the PR pitch, but makes for an infinitely more engaging and interesting book.

While most US IR professors see Asia as the most important region, it is notable how few work on it. And fewer still among those can translate the work of their field into publicly engaging prose. Michael Wesley is one of the rare few who can do both. Restless Continent is therefore self-recommending.

* Disclaimer – Michael Welsey is Director of the Coral Bell school of Asia Pacific Affairs at ANU, within which sits the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre where I work.

The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power
by Thomas J. Christensen

There’s a quite useful series of books called Physics for Future Presidents. Thomas J. Christensen’s The China Challenge: Shaping the choices of a rising power feels something like a ‘China for future Presidents’.

Christensen is well placed to offer such insight. He is a leading scholar on China and US Cold War policy. He also worked in the Bush Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2006-08, focused on China, Taiwan and Mongolia. Given this reputation I had been looking forward to this book for a while.

Christensen’s essential thesis is that while everyone knows about the security problem — avoiding a conflict between China and the US and its allies in Asia— there’s also a governance problem. This one ‘is arguably more difficult to solve: how do we persuade a large but still developing country with a nationalist chip on its shoulder to contribute to the international system’ (p.288).

Where we have a proliferation of theories on how to stop conflict, our experience about how to encourage governance and co-leadership is much thinner. The subtitle notwithstanding, the book demonstrates that everyone should stop thinking of China as a ‘rising power’. It has risen, it is here, and every major global issue requires its support, consent or at least acquiescence. This is not just aimed at nervous westerners. According to Christensen, China’s own sense of still developing is a significant handbrake on its contribution to international affairs

This is a strong and engaging theme, but there’s not much beyond the set up. We get a consistently solid but hardly original or persuasive analysis of the current debates about China and global challenges. If you wanted to know what the general trends of opinion were, this is a good start. But this seems somewhat of a waste given the flood of books and material on this subject, and the opportunity Christensen had given his scholarly and policy basis.

The book also suffers from a somewhat chaotic organisation. We get chapters saying “This time should be different”, then “Why Chinese power will not surpass US power anytime soon” and then “Why China still poses strategic challenges”. These are all interesting, but seem odd ways of organising and developing an argument. It’s only with Chapter 5 that we get back to the set up idea of Global Governance.

The second half of the book is even odder, posing as a potted diplomatic history of China on key issues of US concern such as non-proliferation – especially North Korea— climate change, Iran, Taiwan, and so on. But this ends up overlapping and repeating much of what was covered earlier. This led me to put down the book several times, so my reading took place over a month, with some long gaps in between. But on flicking through it again, I still struggle to see the threads that bind it, and the justifications for telling me about these issues and at this level.

Christensen is a great scholar, but this book feels much more like the former Administration official held the pen. It’s not that important whether he worked for Bush or Obama, rather he struggles to separate US interests from the global governance problems he wants to talk about. There are aspects of criticism of the US — he rightly shows the confused nature of Obama’s approach. But ultimately the book ends up falling between the two styles of analysis. Neither an inside beltway tome with new details about big events, nor an outsiders scholarly objectivity.

Notably, while the book begins by saying the problems are so big, the degree of policy changes it urges for the US are actually rather small and uncontroversial. A little more clarity, a little less liberal idealism, a bit more resilience, and she’ll be right it seems. Christensen seems to believe China will come to embed into the global system in a way that doesn’t fundamentally challenge the role or actions of the United States. It might be that is true, but this book doesn’t properly justify that view. It’s just sort of assumed, as so many Americans do.

The other strange thing about this book is that for someone who has spent so much time in China, and knows the country so well, I never got the feeling of real insight into the place. It’s always China as an object, to be pushed, pulled and directed, but never as a mass of humanity with its own views, needs, desires and emotions.

So, if you want a good overview of the current western debates about China, then Christensen offers a handy primer. But for someone who had the potential to break new ground, this public refresher seems a missed opportunity. It’s unlikely any of the 20 or so individuals running for US President will ever read this. What we need more from those like Christensen who have seen so far, is new and better theory and knowledge to help deal with the problem, rather than primers on what we already know.

MIKTA, Middle Powers, and New Dynamics of Global Governance: The G20’s Evolving Agenda by Mo Jongryn (Editor)

I was recently invited to attend a MIKTA ‘Young Professionals Camp’, leading a delegation of Australian university students to South Korea. So naturally I needed to find out some more about this MIKTA initiative. Despite my work on middle powers, I hadn’t paid it much attention, unsure of what it actually stood for.

After this book and several days of the camp, I’m….still not sure. MIKTA (involving Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey, Australia) emerged from the sidelines of the G20, bringing together those countries which did not fit the G7 and were not members of the BRICs. MIKTA foreign ministers have now committed to meet 3 times a year, a substantial commitment in their busy schedules. It’s a key concern of Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop.

While I am all for more middle power cooperation, and think its significance is substantially under recognised by the wider literature, this is still an organisation in search of a purpose as this book, edited by Professor Mo makes clear. The strength of this text is that none of the authors pretends this initiative is world changing or without challenges. Yet they do see much promise in the platform and offer a variety of ways it could feasibly contribute.

This is very much a book for scholars, and only those interested in these countries, middle powers or diplomacy at that. The chapters by Andrew F. Cooper (author of two classic books on middle powers) and Choi Heenam are stand outs, and there is an intriguing thread in Thomas Wright’s contribution on the need for a multilateral pivot to help re-shape and sustain the international order. But these are all very short chapters, and the lack of a clear thread and history to focus on leaves many having to speculate and write in very general language.

I’m still slightly skeptical of MIKTA. Not of the states, but the notion of cooperating without a purpose. I tend to think middle power influence works best along niche lines, where a specific issue platform and coalition is built. But if this is a way for more countries to see the potential for such initiatives and share the skills they need to lead, then I’m all for it. Whatever it is…

The Korean War: A History  by Bruce Cumings 

I recently visited South Korea, and to help orientate me towards this new destination, I headed to a bookshop to help get a sense of the place. I often think bookstores tell much about a country. Are they looking only for their own stories (America) or keen to learn how to engage others (Taiwan), are they focused on escapism (Australia) or do they want to learn how to succeed and get rich (Singapore). These are just one side to any culture, but where else can you directly see what the people want to bring into their minds just laid out before you.

‘The Korean War: A History’ is by one of the best known American scholars of Korea Bruce Cumings and many parts of this book show a fine scholar at work. One fascinating aspect of this book is the focus on memory as part of history. This is currently a major theme in the field, and producing some fascinating work and important insights. Much of what drives us when we invoke history is less the events themselves than our memory of them. Often it’s not so much the act as the memory of it that has so much impact in the world (The Holocaust being a prime example). Cumings argues Korea is not just a ‘forgotten war’ but one we never knew in part because we never wanted to know just what US actions had resulted in and what the US supported ROK government was doing.

But while we can hopefully correct the record about these acts, we can almost never correct memories. Perhaps appropriately, Cuming’s often displays an anger that fits the tragic material that he covers, and which those with deep ties to these threads of history must feel. But angry memories by those without direction connection to the acts often feels alien, especially coming from such a distinguished scholar.

As such, this is often an angry book, and to the uninformed reader in the wider debates – such as myself- it’s not often clear who Cumings is arguing with or why exactly the topics he picks are the best focus as the book jumps around. Towards then end Cumings reveals he is partly angry at the effect of the war on his own country, first in the move away from Keenan-esq containment to military globalism and then the parallels with the Iraq war. But this seems somewhat to downplay the significance and importance of careful contextual understanding which the book tries to begin with and condemn others for not recognising.

One advantage of this anger however is to recognise just how much history the people of East Asia have to chew through (to borrow Churchill’s famous quip about the Balkans). One of the things I find strangest about the IR theory of ‘Realism’ is how often its advocates assume away so much history as irrelevant. For many who look at the relationship between Japan and Korea or Japan and China or Russia and everyone else, there is a sense of ‘just get over it will you’ in realist scholarship. Their grand balancing schemes require everyone else to shift along desired axis, and for some reason all this history stuff keeps getting in the way.

This is absurd for a doctrine which claims to ‘seeing the world as it is’ to be so wilfully ignorant of what actually drives human behaviour. Of course, that’s not true of the original set, your Thucydides, E.H. Carr & Hans Morgenthau. But starting with Waltz and exemplified by the quantitiative turn, the notion of ‘knowing something’ about particular states seems positively unhelpful in their analysis. This is even stranger for American realists, given the see similar historical struggles on a daily basis in places such as South Carolina and Texas where the legacies of the Border Wars and the Civil War still reverberate through American life. You can’t understand the South without understanding the Civil War, but as Cumings points out, a lot of people try and understand the Korean War, or Korea (North and South) today without recognising its civil war history.

While I do try to engage with material that challenges received wisdom, and appreciate the importance of trying to upend dogma, my weathervane for appreciation of this turns on whether I think the author a ‘fair’ judge. At one point Cuming’s argues that a ‘democratic conception of justice is not dignified by assuring ourselves’ that our side killed less than the others. And he’s right. But somehow a lot of this book also fails to try and show they matter equally. While I trust Cumings as a historian he tends to put forward eye witnesses as truth-tellers of South Korean atrocity while questioning deeply official records and histories that look at the North. The book obviously isn’t about what the North did and continues to do, and does not need to repeat it. But it should not feel like it is dismissing it either, and unfortunately too often in my reading, it did.

Throughout the book Cumings wrestles with the notions of memory, but it seems to me his central message is backwards. He praises memory and condemns our forgetfulness. He also directly attaches the party of memory label on the North while tagging the South as the party of forgetfulness. And that may be true, but what if that’s also why the North stays paranoid within its garrison walls, while the South stands fair and free? It may well be that justice to our parents requires memory, while justice for our children requires forgetfulness.