Dear Rebecca,
My Studies in Military Thought course is now entering its third week. It addresses many issues that would benefit the non-military history specialist (NMHS for short) in gaining a better understanding of the field.
Although there are numerous points of entry into the field of military history, a good one is the study of strategy, particularly grand strategy. An NMHS may not want to delve into the nitty gritty of commanders and campaigns, but if you’re going to address war at all, you need to be able to explain the relationship between the objective of a given war, the resources — military, economic, demographic, etc. — available to achieve that objective, and the policy adopted to exploit those resources so as to achieve success as quickly and inexpensively as possible. That’s grand strategy in a nutshell.
Here are the required and supplementary readings for the first session:
Required: Richard K. Betts, “Is Strategy an Illusion?” International Security 25/2 (Fall 2000):5-50.
Suppemental:
Brian Bond, The Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
Colin S. Gray, War, Peace, and Victory: Strategy and Statecraft for the Next Century. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2001
Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars, and Other Essays. London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1983.
Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Allan R. Millett, Williamson Murray, and Keneth H. Watman, “The Effectiveness of Military Organizations,” in Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds. Military Effectivess 3 vols. London: Allen & Unwin, 1988, vol. 1, 1-30.
Martin van Creveld, The Art of War: War and Military Thought. London: Cassell, 2000.
Strategy is assumed to emerge from a process of rational calculation. The Betts article, which is frequently assigned in courses similar to mine, systematically challenges this assumption:
Strategy is the essential ingredient for making war either politically effective or morally tenable. It is the link between military means and political ends, the scheme for how to make one produce the other. Without strategy, there is no rationale for how force will achieve purposes worth the price in blood and treasure. . . .Because strategy is necessary, however, does not mean that it is possible. . . . To skeptics, effective strategy is often an illusion because because what happens in the gap between policy objectives and war outcomes is too complex and unpredictable to be manipulated to a specified end.
The article then goes on to identify ten arguments that suggest that strategy is indeed an illusion. He spends a section explicating each, then rebuts it. Betts plainly wants to believe that strategy is not an illusion, but he creates no “straw men.” Each critique is presented in a full and fair way.
The ten critiques are organized into four sets. The first set argues that “strategy cannot reasonably be judged in advance because anything goes. Virtually any choice — even one that later proves disastrous — can be justified before it is tried.” Conversely, you can’t judge a good strategy based on the outcome, either, because often there is little correspondence between plans and outcomes.
The second set discusses psychological (and ideological) barriers to the formulation of rational strategy. The third addresses organizational processes and pathologies that arguably thwart the creation of rational strategy as well, while the fourth looks at political complications; e.g., “good strategy depends on clarity of preferences, explicitness of calculation, and consistency of choice, [whereas] democratic competition and consensus building work against all of these.”
Ultimately, Betts decides, “Strategy is not always an illusion, but it often is. The defenses of strategy offered in the responses to each critique are valid but wobbly.” He concludes the article by spelling out the implications of this and suggesting some cautions that would-be strategists would do well to follow.
The purpose in assigning the article was to get the students thinking critically about strategy,the core theme of most military thought. In this it succeeded very well, and Betts’s liberal use of historical illustrations effectively grounded the discussion and encouraged the use of additional historical illustrations of our own.
It seems to me that you could take any conflict — the American War for Independence, for instance — assign students to read the Betts article, and then discuss whether and to what extent Whig or British strategy was rational or illusory, and why. The exercise couldn’t help but yield a deeper understanding of the complex interweaving of rational calculation, political ideology, personalities and ideologies that shaped the course of the conflict and its outcome.
3 Comments
Edward Luttwak offers an interesting perspective in an essay published in the Feb 2007 edition of Harper’s Magazine, titled DEAD END – Counterinsurgency warfare as military malpractice.
Strategy isn’t entirely an illusion.
If you do things because you have a strategy, you might accidentally do the right things for the wrong reasons.
How likely is that if you don’t have a strategy at all?
The degree to which strategy is an illusion should correlate with the degree to which analysis of real-world conditions gives way to illusions, right?