The struggle for power never really ends
February 28, 2018 7:03 AM   Subscribe

Five Books: The best books on military strategy recommended by Dr. Antulio Echevarria II of the US Army War College.

The Books
(Links to The Art of War and On War go to full online texts. Remaining book links go to Amazon.)
* The Art of War by Sun Tzu
* On War (Vom Kriege) by Carl von Clausewitz
* Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman
* Modern Strategy by Colin Gray
* The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective by Hew Strachan

Additional Reading
* Interview with Antulio J. Echevarria II
* An American Way of War (pdf)

Videos of Lectures given by Echevarria
* CSPAN (2016): U.S. War Strategies from the Revolution to Afghanistan (America’s war strategies from the Revolutionary War through battles in Afghanistan, including shifts in fighting methods, the introduction of airplanes and the development of technology, as well as how these factors have transformed strategies and practices since the first American war.)
* US Army War College National Security Seminar 2017: The Army’s Ability to Fight a Great Power War
* US Army War College Lecture: Clausewitz's “On War” - A Theory for Military Theorists
posted by zarq (15 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've always been amused at the way that The Art of War is coopted in that Orientalist "it's not just about war, it's about life, man" way. It's exactly the same sort of book as Clausewitz, just written for a different era of warfare. (And also it's way shorter, of course.)
posted by tobascodagama at 8:16 AM on February 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


I mention it mainly because it's actually refreshing to see Sun Tzu recommended in the appropriate context for once.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:17 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'm surprised not to see the writings of Võ Nguyên Giáp on that list.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:43 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


Nice, that will help me improve my Quidditch skills
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 8:55 AM on February 28, 2018


I've always been amused at the way that The Art of War is coopted in that Orientalist "it's not just about war, it's about life, man" way

I know this is unfair to the text, but hearing it quoted is, for me, a "this person is probably an idiot" tell, because of its conversion into a kind of airport bookstore business classic.
posted by thelonius at 9:05 AM on February 28, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've always been amused at the way that The Art of War is coopted in that Orientalist "it's not just about war, it's about life, man" way.

That's not always limited to Orientalism; the tourist shops of Reykjavík are full of books of Viking-age proverbs formatted into “how-to-prevail-at-business” guides.

Though I am half-wondering whether someone in China is currently preparing an edition of Clausewitz framed as a “Western secrets for life/love/business/prosperity”, riding a current of Chako Paul City-era Occidentalist fetishism.
posted by acb at 9:11 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'm surprised not to see the writings of Võ Nguyên Giáp on that list.

I read the 'Military Art of People's War' many years ago and would definitely recommend it. It's a collection of his writings from a 20-25(?) year period.

Worth mentioning: Giáp ordered / led a million soldiers to their deaths over three decades and he also was responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Many of whom were his own people. He was a brilliant military strategist but his extraordinarily high casualty rates and lack of care for human life in the pursuit of victory (both the lives under his command and those he was supposed to be protecting) should be looked at as a cautionary tale and obviously not something for our forces to emulate.
posted by zarq at 9:21 AM on February 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


He was a brilliant military strategist but his extraordinarily high casualty rates and lack of care for human life in the pursuit of victory (both the lives under his command and those he was supposed to be protecting) should be looked at as a cautionary tale and obviously not something for our forces to emulate.

Following the finest Stalinist tradition; apparently during WW2, when there was a shortage of supplies but not of soldiers in the USSR, Stalin ordered the Red Army to give each soldier either a rifle or ammunition, and pairs of soldiers to fight to the death for the complete set, the rationale being that the survivors would be the fittest, and would have no qualms about whatever they needed to do.
posted by acb at 9:27 AM on February 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


Following the finest Stalinist tradition; apparently during WW2, when there was a shortage of supplies but not of soldiers in the USSR, Stalin ordered the Red Army to give each soldier either a rifle or ammunition, and pairs of soldiers to fight to the death for the complete set, the rationale being that the survivors would be the fittest, and would have no qualms about whatever they needed to do.

That's gotta be apocryphal. Even the penal battalions usually had guns. In any case, plenty of use for extra bodies in the battlefield, even without guns. Just give them bayonets on a rod, or even pointy sticks. Penal battalions were sometimes used as decoys to draw fire, for example.

Stalin's bad enough that we don't need to make up stuff about him.
posted by leotrotsky at 10:10 AM on February 28, 2018 [6 favorites]


Stalin's bad enough that we don't need to make up stuff about him.
posted by leotrotsky


don't make me say it
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:12 AM on February 28, 2018 [10 favorites]




i’ve been thinking about misinterpreting “The Science of Hitting” as a guide to life.
posted by vogon_poet at 1:19 PM on February 28, 2018 [2 favorites]




in a more serious thought about the actual post, it's always struck me as interesting how... ecumenical? and genuinely intellectual professors at war colleges are. i would have expected them to directly provide intellectual justification for the particular strategy that is most profitable or beneficial to the people in charge, but it seems like instead they are honest scholars and are co-opted in the same way as other academics.
posted by vogon_poet at 2:10 PM on March 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Interesting... if I were the interviewer I would have been fascinated to ask a few questions of a military academic (a) What does he make of the use/manipulation of Social Media & internet forums by nation-states as part of military strategy (does it fit neatly into 'propaganda')? (b) Related, Cyber-warfare appears to have no rules or boundaries - how will strategy evolve? (c) Does he consider the war on the public by multi-national corporate entities of no fixed abode (whether it be media-outlets like Fox or the types of behaviours that led to the GFC or the nascent monopolies like Amazon or the flaunting of regulation by Uber etc) to be a form of warfare or is it just commerce ?

Its a little stream-of-consciousness blurting, but I think it does tie into a new form of asymmetric warfare that the traditional nation-state is struggling to deal with due to the accelerated rate of change.
posted by phigmov at 4:50 PM on March 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


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