The New Makers of Modern Strategy: A scene-setter

ABSTRACT

There are reasons to celebrate the recent publication of The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age. This is the third edition of a venerable series, which began with the Makers of Modern Strategy first published in 1943 at the height of World War II, followed in 1986 by a second edition during the Cold War. Taken together, these books are a touchstone of strategic studies, the applied multidisciplinary field that encompasses the full range of military and non-military themes concerned with global and national security, defense, and war. The New Makers reflects the evolution of strategy during the past 80 years, and its greatly expanded scope incorporates a number of firsts. Reaching backward to the classics, Sun Zi and Thucydides now join Carl Von Clausewitz at the top of the strategic pantheon, while the range of contributors, geography, and themes reflects the maturing of the field well beyond the Western world. As the two previous editions did for their own eras, The New Makers is a call to action and will be our current generation’s guide to the multiple strategic challenges that are transforming our 21st century world.

KEYWORDS:

• Makers of Modern Strategy
• strategic studies
• security studies
• strategy
• history
• theory

I

This article is a scenesetter for The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age, published in May 2023 by Princeton University Press. There are reasons to celebrate, beginning with The New Makers’ legacy as the third volume of a venerable series. The first Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler came out in 1943, the second Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age in 1986, and this edition, representing a third generation, is certain to join the other two as touchstones of strategic thought. Taken together, they are core endowments of the strategic studies canon, the applied multidisciplinary field that encompasses the full range of military and non-military themes concerned with global and national security, defense, and war.¹

The historiography of Makers of Modern Strategy reflects the evolution of approaches to strategy during the past 80 years. No mere edited collections, the contributors to all three are consistent in their use of history and theory while uniquely addressing the principal preoccupations of their time – World War II for the first edition, the Cold War for the second, and the multiple challenges to strategy in the 21^st century for the third. The publication of the first edition marked the origin of strategic studies, a status that leading scholars in the field like Eliot Cohen and Lawrence Freedman affirm, as does New Makers editor Hal Brands in his introduction.² Partisan cousins make the same claim for the birth of security studies, but wherever you sit or stand among the porous distinctions between the two, studying the Makers of Modern Strategy in any schoolhouse is a good idea, because OJT has proven to be a rough master when it comes to strategy, whether you find yourself in the White House or on the battlefield.³

The first Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler was the inspiration of its editor, historian Edward Meade Earle. More than an academic, Earle was an activist who joined Albert Einstein and fellow members of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in urging President Franklin Roosevelt to support Britain in its struggle against Nazi Germany in 1939. He went on to organize a seminar on American foreign policy and national security at the Institute in 1941, and the book emerged from it 18 months later. Earle’s introduction was a manifesto, an exhortation that appealed to ‘enlightened and informed citizens’ as well as ‘soldiers and statesmen’ to commit themselves to the global war that had engulfed Europe and Asia. As he wrote, the purpose of Makers of Modern Strategy was:

[T]o explain the manner in which the strategy of modern war developed, in the conviction that a knowledge of the best military thought will enable … readers to comprehend the causes of war and the fundamental principles which govern the conduct of war.

To defeat fascism, he continued, was not solely a matter of geopolitics but a contest of ideologies in which:

[W]e believe that eternal vigilance in such matters is the price of liberty. We believe, too, that if we are to have durable peace, we must have a clear understanding of the role which armed force plays in international society.

Earle’s definition elevated strategy from the art of the commander to the expansive, multidimensional, civil-military concept we hold today:

In the present-day world, then, strategy is the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation – or coalition of nations – including its armed forces, to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed. The highest type of strategy – sometimes called grand strategy – is that which so integrates the policies and armaments of the nation that the resort to war is either rendered unnecessary or is undertaken with the maximum chance of victory.⁴

The first Makers of Modern Strategy established an intellectual architecture that the succeeding editions follow. It is organized chronologically and thematically into five sections and 21 chapters, most first-rate, with the Second World War its inevitable focus. The book ranges wide, from Machiavelli and the early origins of modern war in the Renaissance to an epilogue by Earle on Hitler and the Nazi concept of war. There are chapters on the impact of science on war, Napoleon and total war, European theorists including Jomini and Clausewitz, the economic foundations of military power, the Russian Social Revolutionaries, French colonial warfare, civilian leaders in World Wars I and II, and Soviet concepts of war. There are three chapters on sea power, including one on Alfred Thayer Mahan, while a single chapter on the evolution of air power includes Billy Mitchell, the only other American strategist who receives mention.

The European and American authors, most of them prominent historians, were an interesting cast. Some had participated in Earle’s seminar at the Institute of Advanced Study, while others were at Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and Michigan. Six were refugees who had come to the U.S. from German universities, which particularly qualified them to write about Fascist strategic culture. The single woman author, Margaret Tuttle Sprout, is listed in her biographic sketch as the wife of her historian husband, although her rigorous chapter on Mahan demonstrated that she was a crack analyst and writer in her own right. After finishing their drafts, several of the American authors literally helped make modern strategy by joining the war effort as civilian and military officials, including in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Other Princeton alumni played prominent roles during World War II and the early Cold War, among them CIA Director Allen Dulles, State Department author of containment strategy George Kennan, and Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb, who became director of the Institute of Advanced Study in 1947.⁵

It was a surprise at the time that the war had prompted a strong appetite for high-quality strategic thought and made the original Makers of Modern Strategy an instant success. Widely and respectfully reviewed in journals and the press, it remained in print until the second edition appeared four decades later.⁶ Earle had envisioned editing a follow-up volume, although he was not able to complete the task before he died in 1954.⁷ Nevertheless, the concept, quality of authorship, and Princeton’s institutional sponsorship of the first edition has endured.

II

Building on the reputation of its predecessor 43 years earlier, Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age was also an immediate success. The subject of generous reviews, it has remained in print since Princeton published it in 1986.⁸ The second edition stays true to the original thematic and chronological design, delivering strategic theories according to their corresponding historical eras in five parts. It opens again with Machiavelli and the origins of modern war, while three succeeding parts cover the Napoleonic and Industrial eras, bringing us to the end of the Second World War. The subject of Part Five is the contemporary aftermath – the ongoing geopolitical, ideological struggle of the Cold War and the challenge of nuclear strategy.

Notwithstanding the apprehensive global developments of the second half of the 20^th century, editor Peter Paret’s short introduction is more reserved in tone than Edward Meade Earle’s dramatic call to action in the midst of World War II. Paret also shies from Earle’s broad conception of applied grand strategy. Rather, he reverts to a narrower definition concerned primarily with the use of military means to achieve political aims, while allowing ‘utilization of all the state’s resources for the purpose of implementing its policy in war’. Keeping within this military framework, he recognizes that, ‘[s]trategic thought is inevitably highly pragmatic’ and multidimensional, ‘… dependent on the realities of geography, society, economics, and politics, as well as on other, often fleeting factors that give rise to the issues and conflicts war is meant to resolve’.⁹ Interestingly, Paret’s focus on war belies the unprecedented inversion of the purpose of strategy which drove protraction of the Cold War, then entering its fourth decade – to avoid major war between the two superpowers rather than seek victory by force of arms.

The biographies of the several scholar-practitioners who contributed to both the first and second editions display the intertwined family tree of our modern strategists. Americans, British, and Germans who focused on the Second World War in the original Makers of Modern Strategy remained important as they handed off to a second generation of contributors concerned with the challenges of the Cold War. Earle’s pioneering essay on the economic foundations of military power in the first edition reappears unchanged in the second. His two collaborators on the first edition at the Institute for Advanced Study, the American historian Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert, one of the émigrés from Nazi Germany, also assisted Peter Paret with the second edition. Gilbert’s 1943 essay on Machiavelli and Craig’s on Delbrük reappear with some revision, along with a new chapter on civil–military relations by Craig titled ‘The Political Leader as Strategist’.

Like his senior colleague Felix Gilbert, Paret fled Germany in 1937. After serving in World War II, he received his doctorate in history under Michael Howard, Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford and founder of the War Studies Department at Kings College London. Paret first came to the Institute of Advanced Study in 1966–67 at Gilbert’s invitation, and he returned there from Stanford in 1986. Ten years earlier, Paret made his reputation with a biography of Carl von Clausewitz and as the editor and translator of Clausewitz’s 1831 classic, Vom Krieg (On War).¹⁰ Michael Howard, Paret’s former supervisor, co-edited On War with him and contributed an essay on World War I to the second edition of Makers.

The concurrent publications of Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age and On War illustrate new and old streams of strategic thought in the second half of the 20^th century – the interdisciplinary conjoining of history with political science and international relations. Political scientist Bernard Brodie joined Paret and Howard in On War, contributing an introductory essay and guide that helped contemporary readers relate to Clausewitz. This version of On War remains authoritative, despite critiques by leading Clausewitz scholars (including two contributors to the forthcoming New Makers.)¹¹ Brodie himself was regarded as ‘the American Clausewitz’ for his role as a founder of nuclear strategy. As a senior staff member at the new RAND Corporation think tank in the 1950s, Brodie was a mentor for economist Thomas Schelling and other young social scientists who became preeminent strategists of the nuclear era.¹²

Through this pedigree, Clausewitz retained his status as a fountainhead of strategy, embraced by historians and social scientists alike. Clausewitz was a firm believer that the human factor made strategy an art not a science. Although the modern emphasis on technology and quantitative analysis would have been alien to him, his use of scientific analogies to bolster his theories on war was cutting edge Enlightenment thinking in the first part of the 19^th century and remains part of his transcending appeal.¹³ Clausewitz is by no means the exclusive theorist in Makers of Modern Strategy, but no one has displaced him as a presiding intellectual center of gravity for strategic thought and action.

One chapter in the second edition that fits comfortably within this thematic framework and is worth noting, as much for the career of its author as its content, is ‘The Making of Soviet Strategy’, written by an assistant professor of political science at Stanford, Condoleezza Rice. Rice begins by explaining how Lenin and his Bolshevik cohort militarized Marx through careful reading and application of Clausewitz’s interpretation of politics and war. Her central thesis is that this became the Soviet Communist Party’s deterministic version of permanent political-military struggle, dictated by history and adapted to necessity.¹⁴ (Stripped of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the consistency in the strategic behavior of Putin’s Russia appears evident today.) As with Margaret Tuttle Sprout in the first Makers, Rice featured as the single woman contributor to the second. After her turns as the first female national security advisor and the first African-American woman secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration from 2001–09, she became president of the Hoover Institution at Stanford in 2020. In the spirit of applied scholarship, Rice’s pioneering distinguishes her as far and away the highest-ranking practitioner to have contributed to Makers of Modern Strategy.

In its four concluding chapters, the second edition takes up the American experience following victory in World War II and the advent of the Cold War, with its challenges of deterrence and limited war in the nuclear age. In his essay on nuclear strategists, Lawrence Freedman observes that history has been of limited use in, ‘ … the quest for a nuclear strategy that can serve definite political objectives without triggering a holocaust’.¹⁵ Chapters on conventional and revolutionary war pay concerned attention to the post-1945 American experience of war, ruminating on lessons from the draw in Korea and loss in Vietnam, although the absence of a chapter dedicated to the strategy of containment seems a hiatus.¹⁶

In a largely pessimistic concluding essay, Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert contrast the clarity of the challenge to strategy of World War II that prevailed in 1943 with the strategic complexities of the global Cold War. They too questioned how the past might be relevant to nuclear strategy. Surveying the militaristic causes and passions that had led to disaster in World Wars I and II, they praised the rationality that had prevailed in Truman administration decision-making at the onset of the Cold War. They also worried that two industrial age wars had produced instruments that were infinitely more lethal and destructive than anything that had proceeded them. In a prescient foreshadowing of the future of war, they saw the potential strategic danger of technological predetermination: ‘When strategy is freed from effective political control, it becomes mindless and heedless, and it is then that war assumes that absolute form that Clausewitz dreaded’.¹⁷

In retrospect, 1986, the year that Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age appeared, proved to be a watershed. As peripheral wars raged in the Third World, détente had given way to hostility and President Reagan declared the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’. Yet, Reagan and Gorbachev managed to cultivate an inimitable relationship, agreeing that, ‘A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’.¹⁸ No one knew at the time that the Cold War had entered its final phase and was about to end without victory or defeat when the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. Over four tense decades the two superpowers struggled to manage the opposed demands of confrontation and cooperation.¹⁹ We have come full circle. Not only has the discipline of strategy exploded, the prospect of great power war makes a new edition of Makers of Modern Strategy all the more compelling today.

III

What can we expect from The New Makers of Modern Strategy? First, this third edition continues the legacy of the 1943 and 1986 versions as a foundation of strategic studies. It is a sweeping expansion, nothing short of an interpretation of the history of war, representing significant evolution in strategic thought and the profession. True to its original purpose, The New Makers applies its cumulative wisdom to the strategic challenges in all their complexity that redefine our current era.

To highlight some basics, New Makers has grown from 21 chapters in 1943 and 28 in 1986 to 45 chapters and a hefty 1,140 pages. This expansion achieves greater depth and reach, both thematically and historically. Like a play, this story unfolds chronologically in five parts: Foundations and Fathers, Strategy in an Age of Great-Power Rivalry, Strategy in an Age of Global War, Strategy in a Bipolar Era, and Strategy in the Post-Cold War World, this concluding section bringing us up to the third decade of the 21^st century.

With so much new to cover, and to learn, I will not diminish surprise and risk tedium by attempting a summary of each chapter. What impresses foremost is the array of authors, with their great variety of expertise, backgrounds, and public-minded engagement illustrating how much the field has grown. Their contributions adhere to the applied purpose of strategic thinking, some sticking close to historical narrative and others taking up more conceptual themes. Among the former is Lawrence Freedman, the single bridge from 1986, who leads the way in the first chapter with a history of strategy as an idea from the ancients to the moderns. In contrast, John Lewis Gaddis’ concluding chapter, ‘Grammar, Logic, and Grand Strategy’, is a meditation on the long history of strategy as a guide that ‘may help us to anticipate what’s to come’, an overarching intent that appears frequently throughout the book. Other examples of thematic dimensions of strategy include Williamson Murray with chapters on decisive war vs. attrition and total war, Frank Gavin and Eric Edelman on nuclear strategy, Tom Mahnken on long-term strategic competition, and Thomas Rid on the revolution in intelligence.

American contributors again predominate, along with a strong British presence showing how the special relationship survives, at least in a literary sense if not as consistently in practice. In fact, in addition to his chapter reaffirming Clausewitz at the top of the strategic pantheon, no author receives more citations throughout the volume for his contributions to modern strategic thought than Hew Strachan. Among other features of the expanded group, rather than one woman author, there are now six. Exemplary among them are Sally Paine, doyen of the Strategy and Policy Department at the Naval War College, with chapters on the strategies of Japan and Mao Zedong, along with a chapter on World War One by prize-winning historian Margaret MacMillan. The wider scope is also geographical; authors with non-Western backgrounds appear for the first time, breaking new ground on strategic issues far afield, such as Tanvi Madam on Nehru and non-alignment, Guy Laron on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Ahmed Hashim on strategies of jihad.

While Princeton University continues as the publisher, the institutional center of The New Makers shifts to the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where a strategic tradition dates to its founding in 1943 and currently is home to the editor as well as multiple contributors. U.S. military service schools appear for the first time, belatedly but deservedly since not only are they the core institutions for professional military education, but because of their influence on strategic thought. They include Tony Echevarria at the Army War College, whose chapter on Jomini represents one slice of his extensive critiques of strategists, as well as his recently retired colleague Tammi Davis Biddle, who writes here on democracy and coalition warfare. This is particularly true of the Naval War College, where over a half-dozen authors are based or have former associations. There is good reason for this. All three editions of Makers acknowledge the role of the Naval War College as the founding home of American strategy. This is due primarily to Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, as John Maurer, who not incidentally holds the Mahan chair at the Naval War College, explains in his chapter. Mahan rose to fame in the late-19^th century not as a seagoing naval officer but as a professor at Newport, where his book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, made him an intellectual author of America’s rise as a great power.²⁰ Much of the recent growth in strategy programs at civilian universities began with the reform that Naval War College President Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner launched in 1972, as the United States grappled with defeat in Vietnam. The centerpiece of the reform was to re-ground the study of strategy in history, alongside political science and international relations. The reasoning Turner gave in his commencement speech that year requires only a modest edit, accounting for America’s post-Cold War ‘unipolar moment’ and post-9/11 wars, to apply today:

Our courses of instruction have hitherto concentrated too exclusively on the brief period of military strategy since the close of World War II. The domination of this period by only two world powers will likely prove to have been a temporary aberration. The current trend toward a multipolar world would seem to confirm this. Studying historical examples should enable us to view current issues and trends through the broader perspective of the basic elements of strategy. Approaching today’s problems through a study of the past is one way to ensure that we do not become trapped within the limits of our own experience.²¹

The genius of the reform began with a new Strategy and Policy course (since renamed Strategy and War) and its first case study, Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the 5^th century BC. Valued in the English-speaking world since the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ translated him in 1629, including by the American founding fathers, Vice Admiral Turner affirmed in his commencement speech that Thucydides had indeed written ‘a possession for all time’ asking:

What could be more related to today than a war in which a democratic nation sent an expedition overseas to fight on foreign soil and then found that there was little support for this at home? Or a war in which a seapower was in opposition to a nation that was basically a landpower? Are there not lessons still to be learned here?

Again, beyond prompting us to remember the lessons of Vietnam, such Thucydides-inspired questions are no less worth asking today, as Walter Russell Mead reminds us in his chapter, ‘Thucydides, Polybius, and the Legacies of the Ancient World’.²²

There are other ways The New Makers of Modern Strategy remains consistent with the original design while reflecting significant maturing of the field. There are new interpretations of the usual suspects – Machiavelli, Napoleon, Clausewitz, Jomini, Wilson, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Mao. A panoply of other putative makers of strategy make a first appearance – Nehru, Ben-Gurion, Marshall, Gerasimov, Bush, Obama, Soleimani, Xi. Themes from the earlier editions, such as the economic foundations of strategy and the relationship of strategy to liberal democracy, receive deeper exploration. The 11 chapters in the final section on strategy in the post-Cold War world bring us to the complexity and intensity of the current strategic environment: return to globalized competition among great powers, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, along with new domains and technological acceleration that are delivering the future of war today. These are all meaningful and welcome achievements, as we would expect.

But as a title, The New Makers of Modern Strategy From the Ancients to the Digital Age is partly a misnomer. Ancients like Thucydides and Sun Zi make their first appearances, but the only thing new about them is their resurrection as makers of strategy. By displacing Machiavelli in the leading chapters, Thucydides and Sun Zi assume their places as primus inter pares along with Clausewitz in the first rank of strategists. To the extent that grounding strategic studies in the classics represents an evolution, you could call it going back to go forward.

The 1986 edition of Makers mentioned Admiral Turner’s ‘enlightened and innovative presidency’ at the Naval War College in passing in the chapter on Mahan but without mentioning the significance of his reform.²³ Revived attention to the classics led to successively sophisticated iterations of the Strategy and Policy curriculum, and in 1992, esteemed professor Michael Handel published Masters of War, the first work to compare classical texts by strategists, including Clausewitz, Sun Zi, and Mao.²⁴ Others who served at Newport went on to start strategic studies programs in a similar vein, as John Lewis Gaddis and his co-founders did with the Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program at Yale and Eliot Cohen did at the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at SAIS. An archipelago of strategic studies courses and programs has formed at institutions from Stanford to St. Andrews to Singapore, and it would be unusual for anyone receiving their strategic education today not to study classics like Thucydides and Sun Zi.

The maxim that strategy remains more art than science may be destined for perennial debate, particularly among social scientists and confirmed techno-optimists. Nevertheless, history remains too elemental to be devalued, first because chronology establishes how we got where we are today, and second because the purpose of history is, as Hobbes paraphrased Thucydides:

For the principall and proper worke of History, being to instruct, and enable men, by the knowledge of Actions past, to beare themselves prudently in the present, and providently towards the Future … .²⁵

The is no substitute for good translators, but classics also require interpreters to bridge time and place for current applications. This is how, since 1943, Makers of Modern Strategy and a few related works have contributed to building a common language and basis of knowledge. The more civilizations and cultures they encompass and the further back they go the more powerful their explanations become. If we read that fear, honor, and interest drove Athens and Sparta to war in 5^th century BC Greece and then recognize how these same motives drove our 21^st century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have learned something important. Foundational parallels such as these may not be strictly actionable, but they can make us better strategy makers. They inoculate against slogans and strategic fallacies like ‘forever war’, because Clausewitz explains that what determines the level of effort and duration of a conflict is the value of the object to the adversaries. Rather than striving to reduce strategy-making to a linear formula or checklist of ends, ways, and means, we appreciate that war is dynamic, subject to passion, rationality, and chance, and we learn to make better strategy by applying tools like behavioral psychology, strategic planning, and net assessment.²⁶

In his chapter, ‘Sun Zi and the Search for a Timeless Logic of Strategy’, Toshi Yoshihara encourages creative application of the ancient Chinese strategist, but counsels ‘caution and some humility’ using an enigmatic text subject to continual exegesis.²⁷ Fresh interpretations naturally seek insight into contemporary Chinese strategy, whatever his aphorisms may have meant to Chinese warriors in the distant past. ‘Winning without fighting’ shows Sun Zi’s ability to bridge time and embody an entire theory of victory, evoking the dynamics of deterrence and diplomacy.²⁸ ‘Know your enemy, know yourself’ may be an ubiquitous power point slogan, but what matters for strategists is the embedded warning that comes with the full citation:

Know the enemy and know yourself; in

a hundred battles you will never be in peril.

When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself,

your chances of winning or losing are equal.

If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are

certain in every battle to be in peril.²⁹

By including classics that preceded Machiavelli and Clausewitz, The New Makers creates a richer and deeper repository for the ABCs of strategy.

IV

Keeping with the design of first two editions, The New Makers of Modern Strategy draws inferences from the classics, recounts the history of wars that made the world the way it is today, and grapples with current challenges. In his introduction, Hal Brands concludes about the stakes involved:

The global status quo is sharply and unceasingly contested; the prospect of war between nuclear-armed states is frighteningly real. There is no guarantee that the democracies will prevail, geopolitically or ideologically, in the twenty-first century as they eventually did in the twentieth.

The increasing complexity and acceleration of change itself is a strategic problem. Clausewitz’s distinction between the nature of war and its changing character is now a staple of the lexicon.³⁰ Discriminating between what is new and what is fundamental to good strategy-making and one of The New Makers’ most important contributions. In that spirit, and hoping to entice further reading, I will conclude with some questions and notes on four themes that feature throughout the book – technology and the future of war, regular vs. irregular war, liberal war, and war termination.

Technology and the future of war

Is technological change changing the purpose of strategy? Is technology changing not only the character of war but the nature of war itself?

Discussion of nuclear weapons and theory in chapters by Frank Gavin, Eric Edelman, Dan Marston, and elsewhere illustrate how the problems that emerged following the Second World War continue to preoccupy us today. To state the primary change in the character of war as briefly as possible, nuclear technology transformed the purpose of strategy from how to fight and win wars to how to avoid and deter them. It has proven equally true that the fundamental dictates of strategy continue to apply. Less clear is the general case for the future of war, which is on display now in Ukraine, as well as from cyberwar to counterterrorism, from geopolitics to outer space.³¹ What is evident, for example, in Tom Mahnken’s discussion of arms racing, Thomas Rid’s on intelligence, and Joshua Rovner’s on new domains, technological innovation is transforming traditional relations between national security organizations and the private sector, and in the broader sense, reshaping warfare itself. Many have faith in technological solutions as the sure path to victory.³² This is a dubious proposition. Dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima did not automatically compel Japan’s surrender in 1945, just as Donald Rumsfeld’s vaunted ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ did not culminate America’s post-9/11 wars quickly and decisively.³³ In the 1986 edition, Craig and Gilbert worried about the dangerous potential for technology to preempt human decision-making; today it is a clear and present concern.³⁴ Rather – and here history is clear – as the instruments of war have become more precise and lethal, it is not technology or the gods but mankind who remains ‘the destroyer of worlds’.³⁵

Regular vs. irregular war

Do gray zone war and hybrid war represent a brave new world of warfare demanding innovative strategic theories, or are they merely new to us, fuzzy labels that muddle the binary distinction between peace and war?³⁶

Numerous authors in The New Makers help replace confusion with historical and conceptual insight regarding the relationship between regular and irregular war, beginning with Sally Paine on Mao and continuing through Carter Malkasian on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism to Seth Jones on Soleimani and Gerasimov. The American preference for fighting conventionally has fared poorly when it could not change the complex and asymmetrical realities of war, beginning with Vietnam. But it also does well to recall that during the Cold War the United States fought open-ended, indirect wars in gray zones like Angola, Central America, and Afghanistan. Pointing to deeper roots, America became a nation by fighting a successful hybrid war for independence against Great Britain. Even further back, Thucydides’ history of the struggle between Athens, a sea power, and Sparta, a land power, is filled with multi-dimensional revolutions and civil wars within the greater Peloponnesian War. For those who wish for a clear-cut distinction between war and peace, maybe it’s better to recognize that hybrid and gray zone war are merely useful contemporary terms that encompass the irregular complexities of war itself.³⁷

Liberal war

What significance do the ideals and norms of liberal war have for strategy in practice?

The ideology of liberal war, descendent of our Enlightenment, infuses the first two Makers of Modern Strategy. In the expanded New Makers, it is the explicit subject of no fewer than seven chapters, beginning appropriately with ‘Kant, Paine, and Strategies of Liberal Transformation’ by Michael Morgan.³⁸ The narrative arc encompasses the promise of enhanced global, national, and human security, anchored in the principle of sovereignty, bolstered by international law and organizations, and safeguarded by the U.S.-led international security architecture, as Bob Kagan and Tammi Davis Biddle recount in their respective chapters on the evolution of American power in the First and Second World Wars. Today, these fruits of liberal war frame the ideological and geopolitical challenges to U.S. leadership that range across indirect limited war against Russia in Ukraine, four decades of confrontation with theocratic Iran and the stand-off with nuclear-armed North Korea, and great-power, systemic competition with rising China above all.

Yet, as a general problem of strategy, wars that abound in the world today reveal multiple, unresolved contradictions between liberal war in concept and in execution.³⁹ Since the Korean War, Permanent Five veto in the Security Council has ensured that the peace imperative enshrined in the UN charter works only as a lowest common denominator, when competing national interests are low or absent. A similar dynamic infects international conflict resolution initiatives, peacekeeping missions, and humanitarian assistance where too small an effort can result in positive harm or these efforts unintentionally sustain the same wars they are trying to alleviate and end.⁴⁰

More specific to the United States, the moral and strategic dilemmas of liberal war have produced a troubled record of interventions that dates to the Spanish American War and is very much with us today. The indispensable American mission to impose ‘democracy at the point of bayonets’ has tended to yield low-quality results, especially when attempted in haste and so-called ‘proxies’ have ambitions that do not align with those of their American patrons.⁴¹ Perhaps it is inevitable that misconceived and hurried nation-building turns into a shambles, or in the worst case leads to folly. The logic of violence in war among the people habitually contradicts liberal norms, but a mirror reveals the same truth.⁴² In his chapter on Vietnam, Mark Moyar argues that more proficient use of force would have produced U.S. victory, without reference to the high value of the cause that motivated its Vietnamese opponents. However, the strategic insufficiency of the American way of war, or what Tony Echevarria calls the ‘American way of battle’ and Michael Handel refers to as ‘the tacticization of strategy’, is a serial source of failure in wars where the utility of force is limited.⁴³ From George Kennan to Robert Gates, officials have long decried overmilitarization as a fundamental and self-inflicted flaw in U.S. policy and strategy.⁴⁴ The cases in point for the current generation are the protracted wars that followed 9/11, when ‘the nation’s … holiday from history came to a shattering end’.⁴⁵ Not only did the Global War on Terrorism lead initially to corrosive fear-driven excesses, the invasion of Iraq was a nearly disastrous debacle, and accidental counterinsurgency in Afghanistan ended in complete strategic failure. Although little remarked, perhaps the most glaring contradiction to the professed principles of liberal war are the grossly disproportionate body counts of the hundreds of thousands who died as a consequence of the 2,996 people killed in New York and Washington, DC on 11 September 2001.⁴⁶

War termination

If the most important thing about a war is how it ends, why, since World War II, has the United States had such difficulty terminating its own wars?

The New Makers does not dedicate a thematic chapter to war termination, but the commonplace that it is much harder to end a war than to begin one describes an elemental strategic problem. This is because, as Fred Iklé wrote in his slim classic Every War Must End, ‘… it is the way a war is brought to an end that has the most decisive long-term impact’.⁴⁷ U.S.-led victory in World War II culminating in the unconditional surrenders of Germany and Japan, set the gold standard for modern war termination. Since then, America has often been a good shepherd of ending other peoples’ conflicts.⁴⁸ This makes it all the more puzzling that the U.S. has done so poorly terminating its own modern wars, of all types – limited and unlimited, conventional and irregular, internal intervention and covert action, in defeat and even in victory.

War termination means merely the end fighting, and exit should not be confused with peace.⁴⁹ The problem began in 1950 in Korea, the first contemporary war where the U.S. stopped short of victory. As Dan Marston’s chapter details, after seesawing for the first year, talks dragged on for the next two, without significant changes in territory and accounting for one-half of the 36,000 American dead, until an armistice was signed in August 1953. In the 1973 Paris Peace Accord that ended U.S. combat in Vietnam, ‘peace with honor’ was nothing of the kind. The terms were the same as those the North Vietnamese put on the table when negotiations began in 1969, while in the intervening three years the Nixon administration secretly invaded Cambodia and conducted a bombing campaign that killed hundreds of thousands and added 22,000 U.S. casualties to the American tragedy, before the 1975 evacuation of Saigon in final defeat. A generation later, flawed termination of prior wars set the stage for America’s two protracted post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Christopher Griffin, in his chapter on post-Cold War strategy, refers to the George H.W. Bush administration’s abrupt exit from the first Gulf War, an unusual case of the winner not the loser deciding when to stop fighting. Failure to consolidate Saddam Hussein’s decisive defeat in 1991 was the festering background to the American invasion and his overthrow in 2003. President George W. Bush’s unilateral declaration of ‘Mission Accomplished’ manifested magical thinking rather than a theory of war termination. Rather than decisive victory, fecklessly truncated post-overthrow planning and poor decision-making predictably provoked a virulent insurgency, and Iraq metastasized into protracted counterinsurgency and a counterterrorist war against ISIS. The way the first Afghan ended war was, if anything, even more egregious. Although it would be excessive to have expected clairvoyance of U.S. leaders, failure to stabilize Afghanistan by setting conditions among mujahedin factions after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 led to anarchy and the first Taliban Emirate, and ultimately the road to 9/11. After quickly overthrowing the Taliban, destroying Al Qaeda, and setting up a new Afghan government, the U.S.-led coalition squandered victory by persisting in combat without bringing order, and never sustained the initiative as the Taliban reverted to insurgency. Two decades later, the 2020 ‘Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan’ was another alibi for American exit (among the many parallels with Vietnam.) While President Biden could have chosen to persevere, the chaos of the end game and the return of the extremist Taliban to power merely culminated two decades of strategic failure in America’s longest foreign war.

Accepting the liberal proposition that ‘the object in war is a better state of peace’, these fiascos are evidence of a serious flaw in U.S. war termination strategy-making and performance.⁵⁰ Michael Handel observed in the premier issue of this journal in 1978 that strategic studies did not appear to have made much of a contribution, and recommended that ‘war studies’ and ‘peace studies’ should be closely integrated.⁵¹ Judging by results since then, despite the enormous attention given to studying peace, including university programs, dedicated journals and abundant literature, even the founding of organizations like the U.S. Institute for Peace, there is still little to show for the effort.

VI

Making strategy is hard to do. As Richard Betts skeptically put it:

Those who experience or study many wars find strong reasons to doubt that strategists can know enough about causes, effects, and intervening variables to make the operations planned produce the outcomes desired.⁵²

Whether you judge by history or current events, there is not the slightest indication that strategy will get easier or less serious, in war or peace. Edward Meade Earle agreed with Thomas Jefferson that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. For him, the original Makers of Modern Strategy was a call to vigilant action addressed to leaders and citizens alike. Just as history condemns those who forget, taking a holiday from the fundamental principles of strategy is bound to be inescapably costly. The New Makers of Modern Strategy is our current generation’s guide to strategic thinking applied to the challenges that are transforming our world. As a living record of the results, the Makers of Modern Strategy that will succeed it is already in formation.

Acknowledgments

With appreciation for the opportunity to review the pre-publication proof, and particularly to Hal Brands, Hew Strachan, Antulio Echevarria, and Thomas Mahnken for counsel and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Todd Greentree

Todd Greentree is a member of the Oxford University Changing Character of War Centre. A former U.S. Foreign Service Officer with experience in five wars, including El Salvador and Afghanistan, he has taught Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval War College, was a visiting scholar in the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies, and teaches with the Global and National Security Program at the University of New Mexico. His most recent article in this journal, “Strategic Failure in Afghanistan,” appeared in 2021.

Notes

¹ Edward Meade Earle (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP 1943); Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton UP 1986); and Hal Brands (ed.), The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton UP 2023).

² Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought From Machiavelli to Hitler’, Foreign Affairs 76/5 (Sept./Oct. 1997), 220; Lawrence D. Freedman, ‘Books for the Century: Military, Scientific, and Technological’, Foreign Affairs 101/5 (Sept./Oct. 2022), 247–49; and Brands, The New Makers, 1–13.

³ John Lewis Gaddis, ‘History, Theory, and Common Ground’, International Security 22/1 (1997), 75–85; Richard K. Betts, ‘Should Strategic Studies Survive?’ World Politics 50/1 (1997), 7–33; Joshua Rovner, ‘Warring Tribes Studying War and Peace’, War on the Rocks, 12 Apr. 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/04/warring-tribes-studying-war-and-peace/; Stephen M. Walt, ‘The Search for a Science of Strategy: A Review Essay’, International Security 12/1 (Summer 1987), 140–65; Walt, ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly 35/2 (June 1991), 211–39; and David Ekbladh, ‘Present at the Creation: Edward Mead Earle and the Depression-Era Origins of Security Studies’, International Security 36/3 (2011), 107–41.

⁴ Earle, Makers of Modern Strategy, vii-viii; Michael P.M. Finch, ‘Edward Mead Earle and the Unfinished Makers of Modern Strategy’, The Journal of Military History 80 (July 2016), 781–814 and Making Makers: The Past, the Present, and the Study of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press forthcoming 2023); and Francis J. Gavin, ‘What’s Modern about Modern Strategy?’ War on the Rocks, 5 Aug. 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/08/new-elements-of-modern-strategy/.

⁵ Anson Rabinbach, ‘The Making of Makers of Modern Strategy: German Refugee Historians Go To War’, Princeton University Library Chronicle 75/1 (2013), 97–108; and Elyse Graham, ‘The P Source: How humanities scholars changed modern spycraft’, Princeton Alumni Weekly, Dec. 2020, https://paw.princeton.edu/article/p-source.

⁶ Walter Lippmann, ‘The Serious Study of War’, New York Herald Tribune, 30 Oct. 1943; Max Werner, ‘The Science of War’, New Republic, 6 Dec. 1943; Col. Joseph I. Greene, ‘War and War-Makers Down the Centuries’, New York Times Book Review, 17 Oct. 1943, and Hans Kohn, ‘Reviewed Work: Makers of Modern Strategy’, The American Political Science Review 38/1 (Feb. 1944), 180–82.

⁷ Finch, ‘Edward Mead Earle and the Unfinished Makers of Modern Strategy’, 812.

⁸ Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy; William C. Fuller, Jr., ‘Reviewed Work: Makers of Modern Strategy’, The Journal of Modern History 61/1 (Mar. 1989), 133–35; SM Walt, ‘Makers of Modern Strategy – from Machiavelli to the Nuclear-Age’, International Security 12/1 (June 1987), 140–65; and John Keegan, ‘Grand Illusions: The Makers of Modern Strategy’, New York Review, 17 July 1986, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/07/17/grand-illusions/.

⁹ Paret, Makers of Modern Strategy, 3.

¹⁰ Peter Paret and Michael Howard (eds. & trans.), Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton: Princeton UP 1976); and Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford: Oxford UP 1976).

¹¹ Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s on War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press 2007); Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe (eds.), Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford UP 2007); Antulio J. Echevarria, After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers Before the Great War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2001); and Clausewitz and Contemporary War (Oxford: Oxford UP 2007).

¹² Reginald C. Stuart, ‘Clausewitz and the Americans: Bernard Brodie and Others on War and Policy’, in B. Bond & I. Roy (eds.), War and Society Volume 2: A Yearbook of Military History (London: Routledge 1977), 166–72; Barry H Steiner, Bernard Brodie and the Foundations of American Nuclear Strategy (Lawrence: UP of Kansas 1991); Thomas C. Schelling, ‘A Tribute to Bernard Brodie [and (Incidentally) to RAND’, RAND Paper, July 1979, https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6355.html; and Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Strategic Thought in America, 1952–1966’, Political Science Quarterly 104/2 (Summer 1989), 301–34.

¹³ Milan Vego, ‘Science vs. the Art of War’, Joint Force Quarterly 3/66 (2012), 62–70.

¹⁴ Azar Gat, ‘Clausewitz and the Marxists: Yet Another Look’, Journal of Contemporary History 27/2 (Apr. 1992), 363–82.

¹⁵ Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy, 735.

¹⁶ John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford UP 1982, revised edition 2005); Robert L. Jervis, ‘Review: Containment Strategies in Perspective’, Journal of Cold War Studies 8/4 (Fall 2006), 92–97.

¹⁷ Earle (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy, 865–66; Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel P. Huttenlocher, The Age of AI and Our Human Future (New York: Little, Brown 2021), 135–78.

¹⁸ Joint Soviet-United States Statement on the Summit Meeting in Geneva, 21 Nov. 1985, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/joint-soviet-united-states-statement-summit-meeting-geneva

¹⁹ Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution 1985).

²⁰ Captain A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1669–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company 1890); and John H. Maurer, ‘Alfred Thayer Mahan and the Strategy of Sea Power’, The New Makers, 169–92.

²¹ Stansfield Turner, Commencement Speech, ‘Challenge! A New Approach to Professional Education at the Naval War College’, Naval War College Review 25/2 (Nov.–Dec. 1972), 1–9.

²² Turner, Commencement Speech; Thomas Hobbes (trans.), Eight Bookes Of the Peloponnesian Warre Written by Thucydides … Interpreted with Faith and Diligence Immediately out of the Greeke by Thomas Hobbes (London 1629); Robin Sowerby, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translation of Thucydides’, Translation and Literature 7/2 (1998), 147–69; Robert B. Strassler (ed.) and Richard Crawley (trans.), The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: Free Press 1996), 1.22, 16; Karl Walling, ‘Thucydides on Policy, Strategy, and War Termination’, Naval War College Review 66/4 (Autumn 2013), 47–86; Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (New York: Harper 2020), 6, 184, 265, 269; and Walter Russell Mead, ‘Thucydides, Polybius, and the Legacies of the Ancient World’, The New Makers, 41–66.

²³ Philip A. Crowl, ‘Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian’, in Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy, 476.

²⁴ Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought (London: Frank Cass 1992, rev. 2001); Naval War College, Strategy and Policy Department, https://usnwc.edu/Faculty-and-Departments/Academic-Departments/Strategy-and-Policy-Department.

²⁵ Thomas Hobbes, Eight Bookes Of the Peloponnesian Warre (Introduction), cited in Sowerby, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translation of Thucydides’, 154–55.

²⁶ Frank G. Hoffman, ‘The Missing Element in Crafting National Strategy’, Joint Forces Quarterly 97/2 (Apr. 2020), 55–64; Hew Strachan, ‘Strategy in theory; strategy in practice’, Journal of Strategic Studies 42/2 (2019), 171–90; H-Diplo/ISSF, Robert Jervis (multiple), 9 Dec. 2022, https://issforum.org/tag/robert-jervis; C.V. Christianson and George Topic, ‘Strategic Planning’, Joint Force Quarterly 74/3 (2014), 80–83; Michael J. Mazarr, et al, The U.S. Department of Defense’s Planning Process: Components and Challenges (Santa Monica: RAND 2019); and Thomas G. Mahnken, Net Assessment and Military Strategy (Amherst: Cambria Press 2020).

²⁷ Toshi Yoshihara, ‘Sun Zi and the Search for a Timeless Logic of Strategy’, The New Makers, 67–90.

²⁸ John F. Sullivan, ‘Sun Tzu’s Fighting Words’, The Strategy Bridge, 15 June 2020, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/6/15/sun-tzus-fighting-words; Bradford A. Lee, ‘Strategic Interaction: Theory and History for Practitioners’, in Thomas G. Mahnken (ed.), Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century: Theory, History, and Practice (Redwood City: Stanford UP 2012), 28–46.

²⁹ Sun Tzu, Samuel B. Griffith (trans.), The Art of War (Oxford: Oxford UP 1963), 84.

³⁰ Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (eds.), The Changing Character of War (Oxford: Oxford UP 2011).

³¹ Defense Innovation Unit, https://www.diu.mil; U.S. Department of Defense, ‘Department of Defense Announces Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability Procurement’, press release, 7 Dec. 2022, https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3239378/department-of-defense-announces-joint-warfighting-cloud-capability-procurement/; Hew Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2013), 166–92; National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, Mar. 2021, https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalTrends_2040.pdf.

³² J. Bendor and J. Shapiro, ‘Historical Contingencies in the Evolution of States and Their Militaries’, World Politics 71/1 (2019), 126–61.

³³ Stephen D. Biddle, Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare (Carlisle: US Army War College Press 2002), https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/809; ‘Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare’, Foreign Affairs 82/2 (Mar.–Apr. 2003), 31–46.

³⁴ Craig and Gilbert, Makers of Modern Strategy (1986 ed.), 863–72; Vego, ‘Science vs. the Art of War’, 68; William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982); David Ignatius, ‘Why artificial intelligence is now a primary concern for Henry Kissinger’, The Washington Post, 24 Nov. 2022; U.S. Department of Defense Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), https://www.ai.mil/html; Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future (New York: Little, Brown and Company 2021), 35–78; and Avi Goldfarb and Jon Lindsay, Artificial Intelligence in War: Human Judgment as an Organizational Strength and a Strategic Liability, Brookings Institution, Nov. 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/fp_20201130_artificial_intelligence_in_war.pdf.

³⁵ Periscope Film, ‘The Decision to Drop the Bomb’, Documentary with Chet Huntley, 1965, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvsiSpfd5XY; Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwood, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf 2005), 579; and Hari Cheta, Bhagavad Gita (Independent pub. 2021), 11:32, 128.

³⁶ William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1 (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library n.d.), https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/act-5-scene-1/.

³⁷ Frank G. Hoffman, ‘Examining Complex Forms of Conflict: Gray Zone and Hybrid Challenges’, Prism 7/4 (2018), 30–47; Robert Johnson, ‘Hybrid War and its Countermeasures: A Critique of the Literature’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 29/1 (2018), 141–63; Antulio J. Echevarria II, Operating in the Gray Zone: An Alternative Paradigm for U.S. Military Strategy (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College Press 2016), https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/425; Donald Stoker and Craig Whiteside, ‘Blurred Lines: Gray-Zone Conflict and Hybrid War-Two Failures of American Strategic Thinking’, Naval War College Review 73/1 (2020), 12–48; Todd Greentree, ‘America Did Hybrid Warfare Too’, War on the Rocks, 7 Apr. 2015, https://warontherocks.com/2015/04/america-did-hybrid-warfare-too/; Linda Robinson, et al, Modern Political Warfare: Current Practices and Possible Responses (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation 2018); and NATO Innovation Network, Cognitive Warfare Project – Reference Documents, https://www.innovationhub-act.org/cw-documents-0.

³⁸ Michael Cotey Morgan, ‘Kant, Paine, and Strategies of Liberal Transformation’, The New Makers, 193–217.

³⁹ Cécile Fabre, Cosmopolitan War (Oxford: Oxford UP 2012), and Cosmopolitan Peace (Oxford, 2016); Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Age of Liberal Wars’, Review of International Studies, 31:Force and Legitimacy in World Politics (December 2005), 93–107; Lukas Milevski, ‘Modern liberal wars, illiberal allies, and peace as the failure of policy’, Defense & Security Analysis 36/3 (2020), 300–13; Sarah Sewall (Introduction), in The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007), xi-xliii; and Samuel Moyne, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021).

⁴⁰ Clausewitz, On War, Book Eight, 585; Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, https://www.globalr2p.org/what-is-r2p/; Alex J. Bellamy, Sara E. Davies, and Monica Serrano (eds.), Global Politics and the Responsibility to Protect book series (London: Routledge 2010 – present); and Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford: Stanford UP 1999).

⁴¹ Mark Peceny, Democracy at the Point of Bayonets (University Park: Penn State UP 1999); and Walter C. Ladwig III, The Forgotten Front: Patron-Client Relationships in Counterinsurgency (New York: Cambridge UP 2017).

⁴² Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge UP 2006).

⁴³ Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought (London: Frank Cass 2001), 34, 353–60; Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Knopf 2007); Antulio J. Echevarria II, Reconsidering the American Way of War: US Military Practice from the Revolution to Afghanistan (Washington, DC: Georgetown UP 2014); and Echevarria, ‘The Persistence of America’s Way of Battle’, Military Strategy Magazine 8/1 (Sept. 2022), https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/the-persistence-of-americas-way-of-battle/.

⁴⁴ Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism (Oxford: Oxford UP, updated ed. 2013); and Robert M. Gates, ‘The Overmilitarization of American Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs 99/4 (July/Aug. 2020), 121–32.

⁴⁵ George F. Will, ‘The End of Our Holiday from History’, The Washington Post, 12 September 2001; Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. foreign policy and the rise of the post-Cold War order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2016), 357–58.

⁴⁶ US Department of Defense, Casualty Status, https://www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf; ‘Costs of War’, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/; Todd Greentree, ‘What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?’ Parameters 51/4 (2021), 7–22.

⁴⁷ Fred Charles Iklé, Every War Must End (New York: Columbia UP 1971, rev. 2005); Bradford A. Lee, ‘Winning the War but Losing the Peace? The United States and the Strategic Issues of War Termination’, in Bradford A. Lee and Karl F. Walling (eds.), Strategic Logic and Political Rationality: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel (London: Routledge 2003), 249–73.

⁴⁸ For example, the Camp David Accords, Israel-Egypt (1978), the Tlateloco Peace Accords, Salvadoran Civil War (1992), the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland (1998), Dayton Accords, former Yugoslavia (1995).

⁴⁹ Richard Caplan (ed.), Exit Strategies and State Building (Oxford: Oxford UP 2012).

⁵⁰ B.H. Liddell Hart, ‘The Objective in War’, Naval War College Review 5/4 (Dec. 1952), 1.

⁵¹ Michael Handel, ‘The study of war termination’, Journal of Strategic Studies 1/1 (1978), 51–75.

⁵² Richard K. Betts, ‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’ International Security 25/2 (Fall 2000), 5–50.