Fighting Words

One of the more common things said about military strategy is that military leaders all too often plan to fight the last war, and only wake up to a new reality when it's either too late or almost too late. Former 82nd Airborne paratrooper and private military contractor Sean McFate, now a professor at Georgetown and espionage thriller author, draws on all of his experiences and studies in outlining how 21st century warfare will differ from 20th -- and how ill-prepared the United States is to fight it -- in The New Rules of War.

McFate patterns his book on the ancient classic by Chinese military genius and philosopher Sun Tzu, The Art of War. He lists ten rules of how technology and time have changed the way that war is likely to be fought, moving away from the realities that have dominated military thinking since the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. Decisive outcomes, with clear victors and clear losers, will give way to achieved objectives and contained disorder. Massed armies and immense war machines will be overtaken by weaponized cyber tech and media. Rather than send national armies into harm's way, private military contractors will be hired to press the fight and carry the burden. And some of their employers might be corporations and international agencies instead of nation states.

McFate writes clearly and directly, offering plain-language explanations of his premises, deductions and conclusions without getting into too much technical jargon. He evaluates the shortcomings of current military thinking and thinkers with enough zest that you could think he's replaying some actual conversations in which those thinkers didn't listen to different points of view, but his tone is overall that of a reporter advocate rather than polemicist. Some of his points seem self-evident in light of headlines while others are less convincing, but there's enough substance to New Rules to make listening to McFate's arguments well worth the time.

-----

While we often speak of "World War II" as a unified conflict, historian Victor Davis Hanson points out that the battlefields around the world between 1939 and 1945 offered several very different war experiences. Different enough, he says in The Second World Wars, that it's more accurate to talk about them in the plural. Fighting in the North African desert was not the same as attacking Italy, which was not the same as the push south through France from Normandy, which differed from the aerial battle in the skies of Britain, which itself was nothing like the experience of the Marines attacking the Empire of Japan through the Pacific.

In fact, even the combatants weren't identical. U.S. forces were active in both European and Pacific theaters, as were the British, but French and Italian fighters were mostly at work on their respective sides in the Old World, and Russian forces were next to nonexistent outside Europe until the very end of the conflict. According to Hanson, it was the varied theaters of combat, combined with the more or less untouched manufacturing capacity of the United States, that made the Axis defeat almost a certainty from the time they drew the US into fighting.

Hanson's primary field of study is classical Greek and Roman history rather than the modern era, but he notes that several of the mistakes made during WWII fighting echoed those made in that classical era. While Axis forces could easily dominate the European continent, they lacked the ability to project their power any distance beyond those shores. Germany, for example, did not have a single aircraft carrier and thus completely lacked any capability to slow the American war manufacturing effort. And it was the manufacturing capacity of the Allies, Hanson points out, that ultimately defeated both Germany and Japan. When a plant in Michigan is turning out one B-24 every 63 minutes, that makes for a lot of airplanes to drop bombs -- too many for either enemy to stop, and far more than either enemy could produce.

This capacity, Hanson points out, was obvious to the Axis leaders and should have deterred them at least from trying to fight the US -- and probably should have made them leery about starting hostilities at all. Had they stopped with their initial gains, they might have had time to consolidate them enough to strengthen their hand for later fighting, but once they engaged forces beyond their ability to project power, the outcome was close to certain. And the tragedy, Hanson says, is that millions of people around the world, military and civilian alike, died in order to prove true an answer that should have already been seen.

Hanson offers great detail of how badly the Allied manufacturing capacity outstripped the Axis powers -- in some cases to an almost repetitive degree. But that fact in itself highlights the point he makes about the lopsidedness of the resources both sides brought to bear. He's published several books on classical history and has an easily understood authorial voice, communicating large amounts of information without jargon or fuzzy language. The Second World Wars does travel some familiar ground, but it does so from a very interesting and unexplored perspective, shedding new light into the arena.