On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

details dim the flames fireships require. They disconnect ends of arguments from their beginnings.

Paine and Jefferson thought it necessary first to tilt history, and only at that point to begin to make it. Rhetoric, their lever, had to be clearer than truth, even if necessary an inversion of it.37

Paine saw “something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.” Franklin pointed out that the British had spent three million pounds in 1775 to kill only “150 Yankies.” During that year, 60,000 Americans had been born.

He fulfilled it, triumphantly, by connecting time, space, and scale.

What’s clear, though, is that few in the young republic questioned—at least not openly—what so many in the mature republic would give their lives to change: the anomaly that a Constitution promising a “more perfect Union” assumed slavery’s legality.69

It acknowledged, in doing so, what the Declaration of Independence couldn’t say: that all men were not created equal. The men of 1776 feared—Jefferson not least among them—that if they freed the slaves along with the country, they’d have no state.

the Founders could have Union or Emancipation but not both, at least not in their generation. And so they chose Union now, postponing Emancipation on the assumption—infrequently expressed—that the prospects for it would be better in a single strong state than in several weaker ones.72 It was a wager: whether with God or the Devil depended on your point of view.

Few if any others have thought more deeply or written more perceptively about time, space, and scale than the horseman who passes and the novelist who portrayed him.

greatest military genius since Julius Caesar assumed the attributes of a dog who’d chased a car and caught it: what do you do next? Meanwhile, as his humblest private could have reminded him, winter

was coming on.

Clausewitz called this the “culminating point” of Napoleon’s offensive, by which he meant that the French had defeated th...

Perhaps because common sense is indeed like oxygen: the higher you go, the thinner it gets.

As each triumph topped its antecedent, Napoleon’s grammar became his logic. Like Caesar, he rose so far above fundamentals as to lose sight of them altogether. Such ascents can be awe-inspiring: so too, in their day, were hot air balloons. But gravity is always present.

Clausewitz agrees, with the qualification that if laws can’t contain “the diversity of the real world,” then “the application of principle allows for a greater latitude of judgment.” The proverb speaks of “an exception to every rule,” not “to every law,” suggesting that as abstractions approach reality, they permit “a more liberal interpretation.”15 That would be consistent with Tolstoy, who seeks at such length to subvert all laws.

Here, for instance, is Tolstoy’s “theory” of recent European history:

Clausewitz

The opening page of On War,

War is . . . an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will. . . . Attached to force are certain self-imposed, imperceptible limitations hardly worth mentioning, known as international law and custom, but they scarcely weaken it. Force—that is, physical force, for moral force has no existence save as expressed in the state and the law—is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object.

“that, in theory, is the true aim of warfare.” So what should its practice be? “The maximum use of force is in no way incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect,”

For if “civilized nations do not put their prisoners to death or devastate cities and countries, it is because intelligence plays a larger part in their

methods of warfare and has taught them more effective ways of using force than the crud...

exasperated

Two Russian generals—“Famine” and “Frost”—had completed the destruction, so that “[i]n all human probability the career of Napoleon’s conquests is at an end. France can no longer give law to the continent. . .

“Genius,” Clausewitz writes,

“does not consist in a single appropriate gift—courage,

Instead it requires “a harmonious combination of elements, in which one or the other ability may predominate, but none may be in conflict with the rest.”

“The man responsible for evaluating the whole must bring to the task the quality of intuition that perceives the truth at every point.

Otherwise a chaos of opinions . . . would arise, and fatally ...

How, though, can anyone perceive “truth at every point”? Clausewitz answers by linking strategy to imagination.39

Artists approach truth, he observes, with “a quick recognition” of what “the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection.”

an “inwar...

So when your troops get sick, or their horses begin to starve, or tsars don’t follow the scripts you’ve written for them, you sketch what you know and imagine—informed by the sketch—what you don’t: this allows recovering from surprises and moving on.

But how can planning anticipate surprises? Only by living with contradictions,

Asymmetries in aspirations and capabilities have always constrained strategies,

He’s highly original, though, in specifying friction as the cause, while showing that it can occur at any level:

the passage of time and extension across space make i...

Where, then, did Xerxes and Napoleon go wrong? They failed, Clausewitz would probably say, to perceive “truth at every point,” which in these instances meant landscapes, logistics, climates, the morale of their troops, and the strategies of their enemies. They missed what their own soldiers understood: that Greece and Russia were traps, just as the English Channel was for the Spanish Armada. “The

“what sort of mind is likeliest to display . . . military genius,

is the inquiring rather than the creative mind,

the comprehensive rather than the special...

the calm rather than the excitable head to which in war we would choose to entrust the fate of...

irritation in which a man has to talk and talk and talk, only so as to prove his rightness to himself.”

Theory exists so that one need not start afresh each time sorting out the material and plowing through it, but will find it ready to hand and in good order. It is meant to educate the mind of the future commander, or, more accurately, to guide him in his self-education, not to accompany him to the battlefield; just as a wise teacher guides and stimulates a young man’s intellectual development, but is careful not to lead him by the hand for the rest of his life.

Clausewitz sees theory, then, as training.

It’s what “hardens the body for great exertions, strengthens the heart in great peril, and fortifies judgment against first impressions.” It’...

It “breeds that priceless quality, calm, which, passing from hussar and rifleman up to the general himself, will ...

the role of chance in war—and in life.

He values theory as an antidote to anecdotes: as a compression of the past transmitting experience, while making minimal claims about the future. He relies on theory for training, not as a navigational chart for the unforeseen.

The modern term for sketching in strategy is “net assessment,”71 an evocation—never simply a list—of the elements, in environments, most likely to determine outcomes. If done well it will include “knowns”—geography, topography, climate, your own capabilities, the objectives you’re seeking; “probabilities”—the goals of adversaries, the reliability of allies, the constraints of cultures, your country’s capacity to endure adversity; and, finally, a respectful acknowledgment of the “unknowns” that will lurk in the intersections of the first two.

the configuration is triangular, although in two ways. For as you balance knowns, probabilities, and unknowns, you’re also doing so across time, space, and scale.