Poised outside of the newly re-enforced capital of Sparta, the Theban general Epaminondas knew that beginning a siege against the city would only wear down his troops who had already campaigned deep into Spartan territory during the mid-winter of 370BC. His force was a collection of Arcadian peoples and included a large number of Helots — the Spartan underclass — among other “disaffected elements”. Epaminondas decided on a new tack. Rather than conquering the Spartans, he would contain them.

At Mount Ithome, the natural citadel of Messenia, he founded a city as the capital of a new Messenian state, established there all the insurgent elelments that had joined him, and used the booty he had gained during the invasion as an endowment for the new state. This was to be a check and counterpoise to Sparta in southern Greece. By its secure establisment she lost half her territory and more than half her serfs. Through Epiminondas’s foundation of Megalopolis, in Arcadia, as a further check, Sparta was hemmed in both politically and by a chain of fortresses, so that the economic roots of her military supremacy were severed.

Epaminondas’s strategy successfully dislocated the power base of Sparta after just a few months campaigning, and no victories in the field. After all, the object of war is not to destroy your opponent’s military force, but to “obtain a better state of peace — even if only from your own point of view.”

This gem of a story (from pp. 15) is a rarity in BH Liddell Hart’s Strategy, which is otherwise a tiresome slog of a read. Rather than a well argued, economically written thesis, Strategy is a wordy, meandering narrative of the author’s own journey to his theory. Liddell Hart re-tells history with hints and side comments about a hypothesis that is not revealed to the reader. The key term “strategy” itself is finally defined on page 321 (as “the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy”)! The first three quarters of the book are not about understanding history, but a guided tour of how Liddell Hart came to his conclusions. Those conclusions are finally revealed in the last section of the book, which I would almost recommend skipping the rest to read.

This style of presentation, as well as several passages in the book, indicate the level of Liddell Hart’s egotism. Self promotion is almost a second thesis of the book, especially in the latter third. It is an insight into the man behind the controversy.
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Lots of activity about military thinking on the blogosphere recently. I have already given my two yen on military thought and ranted about military PowerPoint skillz, or lack thereof. Our good pal the strategist has continued his quest to find the current military thinkers both inside and outside of the military. Military thinker John Robb also has an interesting angle on the paucity of military thinking. Then of course is the eminent Chicago Boyz roundtable on Frans Osinga’s new book Science, Strategy and War which looks at the theories of John Boyd.

This is all great stuff for anyone preparing for a course in strategic studies. Check em all out.

Peter the strategist struggles to answer the question Who and Where are Today’s Military Thinkers? He observes that military thinkers with real military experience, practical or otherwise, seem to be losing out to “today’s military thinkers in universities and think tanks (e.g., Martin van Creveld and Willam Lind), in aid agencies and private military companies, in IT companies, or, heaven forbid, in the blogosphere.”

My off-the-cuff take

I think this is a great observation. The thinkers out there today like Berkowitz, Lind and Gray are likely going to come from the think tank side of things for two reasons: 1) economics, and 2) military education.

The first reason has to do with training time. Today’s soldier has a lot on his plate and does not have the time to dedicate to study sweeping issues of strategy, like an academic with a dedicated research budget and the freedom to “think.” Our militaries are focussed on tactics. This feeds into the second reason: military education is seen as a means rather than an end in itself. It is simply a box to check off for promotion. This is a sorry state of affairs. I think a closer relationship with civvie institutions will not only help to better the caliber of military education, but will also legitimize military educations in the eyes of academia. War is no longer a battlefield issue, and exposure to a wider set ideas would benefit both milthinkers and civthinkers.

I don’t want to hijack his post so head on over to thestrategist to see some examples of military thinkers old and new, and put in your two yen.

Related: The strategy pendulum

Chuck Spinney, one of the Boyd Acolytes, discusses the problems of a strategic bombing campaign on Iran.

Though he doesn’t say the words he is criticizing the EBO logic that dates back to Douhet. I think it is a solid point. To get the other side of the argument see John Robb’s year-and-a-half old post Collapsing Iran. Note that both of these gentlemen — while representing opposite sides of the EBO debate — are former airmen.

via Zenpundit’s snazzy new site zenpundit.com

Robert Kaplan follows up his pre-Patraeus report analysis by widening his bottom-up tribalism theory to include Pakistan, Baluchistan and Afghanistan in his latest article in The Atlantic It’s the Tribes, Stupid!:

Where democratic governance does not exist, we must work with the material at hand. … Throughout the Arab world, old monarchial and authoritarian orders are now weakening. Keeping societies stable will depend largely on tribes, and the deals they are able to cut with one another. In the Middle East, an age of pathetic, fledgling democracies is also an age of tribes.

via Soob who also links to Adrian’s article How to attack an national identity as well as a pretty map.

Is it prescriptive or descriptive?

In other words, is grand strategy a tangible policy developed by nations? Or is it an abstract tool of analysis imposed by observers?

Lex brought to our attention a couple of criticisms of Kaplan’s latest article in the Atlantic from both the left and the right. I don’t think these criticisms are fair. First of all, I didn’t read the article as a throwback to another era or as the prioritization of the navy over other services. I read it simply as a warning to the right hand not to forget what the left hand is doing. This is a timely warning, and is a reflection of the swinging pendulum of strategic thought.

In the post-cold war the first new influential thinking that came out was net-centric warfare, developed by an admiral. The army guys read up on that stuff and loved it, and it is reflected in the RMA literature filled with visions of “the network” and “total battle space awareness.” Well, that platform-based stuff doesn’t translate too well on the ground. There are important functional differences between air and sea operations and ground operations. Some theorists tried to modify NCW to fit the ground war (NEOps, ADO etc.) but others simply abandoned it. Now the pendulum has swung the other way. All the current conceptual work is in xGW, COIN, UW etc. None of this fits the platform-based services particularly, but they are still reading the stuff.

With all the attention focused on the ground fighters, there is a lack of visionary thinking for the navy. I do not condone the fickle North American strategic culture always searching for the “Next Big Thing,” but there seems to me to be a lack of conceptual work on naval theory. For example, the only theories that appeared in the Kaplan, Farley and Lind articles were the old, barnacled tomes of Mahan and Corbett. I have already spoken about the difference between the two but I think the ever-vituperative Bill Lind summed it up well in his article: “Mahan in essence wrote naval theory for children … Corbett in contrast writes for adults.”

I ask you: who are the naval equivalents of Lind, Hammes and van Creveld? We need a Boyd of the sea. The only strategic theorist I know that is working on these issues is Colin S. Gray, of whom I am only barely familiar.

So, before you go “spanking” old Kap over his article, remember this: How many “experts” do we have on Afghanistan, Iraq and COIN popping out of the woodwork now? Academic journals on security are jam-packed full of articles on that stuff. Naval arms races in northeast Asia on the other hand? There may be lots from the mid-90s when we were preparing for “war with Japan” and a fight over Taiwan, but since then it has dropped out of the headlines. Unfortunately the situation there has yet to be defused. There is lots of build-up still happening but it is a page 10 story. That is the kind of stuff that Kap has made a career drawing attention to. Remember the Balkans? In about 10 years when there is a boomer war going on in the Pacific, and DOD only has a shiny new COIN manual to turn to, the US president will be calling Kap to the White House once again for a chat.

In reading Securing Japan I thought Richard Samuels summed it up quite nicely (pp. 109):

There are few truly new ideas about how nations can protect themselves. Each country is armed with its military, its diplomats, its mix of resources, its ambition, and its wits. The rest is, as ever, derivative. This is why students studying international relations, diplomacy, and national security are still required to read The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Ideas about strategy endure because geography, demography, and technology endure as constraints on the ability of leaders to make their people prosperous and safe. But if there are few original ideas about strategy, there are limitless combinations of existing ones. Because the balance among constraints is always in motion, and because the power of neighbors rises and falls, new circumstances always await the application of old ideas. Contexts change, but ideas endure.

QED, see the reading list from my first year of War Studies.