With war and the prospect for more upon the world, this may seem an inopportune time to delve into a book titled Why America Loses Wars. It is not. Wars shape our world, threatening a descent into chaos while promising a better peace. China’s rise, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s revanchism, the US involvement in the Middle East, even the road to 9/11, arose from the consequences of World War II, the Cold War, and the nuclear age. US national security strategy is a legacy of the global security architecture that the US has sustained with its allies for 80 years. It was designed to keep US preeminence and prestige intact and to deter major war by practicing “peace through strength,” which was a Roman policy long before it was President Ronald Reagan’s.[1] Notwithstanding many blunders and battle defeats throughout US history, all this has come about because the United States wins it wars. After all, victory is the aim, is it not?
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 109
Donald Stoker. Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. ISBN: 979-1-108-47959-2. (hardcover, $28.44; rev. ed., paper 2022). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108611794.
Review by Todd Greentree, University of Oxford
12 November 2024 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE109 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
With war and the prospect for more upon the world, this may seem an inopportune time to delve into a book titled Why America Loses Wars. It is not. Wars shape our world, threatening a descent into chaos while promising a better peace. China’s rise, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s revanchism, the US involvement in the Middle East, even the road to 9/11, arose from the consequences of World War II, the Cold War, and the nuclear age. US national security strategy is a legacy of the global security architecture that the US has sustained with its allies for 80 years. It was designed to keep US preeminence and prestige intact and to deter major war by practicing “peace through strength,” which was a Roman policy long before it was President Ronald Reagan’s.[1] Notwithstanding many blunders and battle defeats throughout US history, all this has come about because the United States wins it wars. After all, victory is the aim, is it not?
Except, there is a problem. The United States also lives with the consequences of its failures. Although there is comfort in forgetting, the most important wars in which US troops have fought in combat since World War II did not end with victory. An entire sub-genre of literature warns with evocative and progressively sardonic titles. Two limited wars within the Cold War. A painful draw in Korea where, in 1950, it began: David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter; Samuel Wells, Fearing the Worst; Callum MacDonald, The War Before Vietnam.[2] Defeat and national tragedy in Vietnam: David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest; Les Gelb, The System Worked; Bob Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing; Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie; H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty.[3] Two misconceived “forever” wars in the aftermath of 9/11. Folly in Iraq: Tom Ricks, Fiasco; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City; Dexter Filkins, The Forever War. Strategic failure in Afghanistan: Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue; Anand Gopal, No Good Men among the Living; Theo Farell, Unwinnable. [4]
These authors, who are experienced practitioners along with historians, political scientists, and journalists, are by no means the only ones who assess US strategic behavior with sophisticated reasoning that cannot be reduced to a checklist of lessons learned or translated into a formula.[5] They arrive at various answers for America’s failures to achieve the decisive victories it had assumed were its birthright. They point to over-reliance on technology and military means to achieve political ends that are obscure or at least badly communicated; leaders who are saddled with misperceptions and pursue wildly ambitious aims; politically astute military commanders, strategically naïve civilians, and presidents, with whom decisions ultimately rest, who were concerned less with fighting the last war than trying to avoid its costs. They also point to flawed national security and foreign policy institutions in a democratic system of divided authority; classic strategic errors that aggregate into outcomes that are not so much how the weak win but how the strong lose. In the body politic, protracted wars lead to frustration, public controversy, and increasing sensitivity to casualties that makes sending US troops to fight overseas anathema. They further discuss correspondingly troubled war termination: two years of excruciating negotiations at Panmunjom that finally ended the fighting but not the state of war between divided Koreas; alibis for exit in Vietnam and Afghanistan that masqueraded as peace with honor; and in Iraq, no conclusive negotiations at all. Judging by the results, each of these authors circles back to the single conclusion that the United States’ failures were self-inflicted.
Donald Stoker, whom I first met at the Naval War College over 20 years ago, echoes them in Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present.[6] He has dedicated most of his career to Professional Military Education (PME), and even if the book does not have wide outside readership, what he has to say about strategy matters because it is intended to shape the US and foreign military officers and civilian officials who fill his classes at the service schools where he has taught. Stoker is a devoted theorist and confirmed follower of Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general, staff officer, and military scholar whose wisdom, which was derived from experience during the trials of the Napoleonic Wars in the first part of the nineteenth century, continues to be an omnipresent foundation for strategic thought in the twenty-first.[7] He is also a rationalist like Clausewitz, whose central tenet is that war is not an act of senseless passion but should be controlled by its political object.
The book is an exemplar of what we can learn from the rational approach to strategic theory, and what we cannot. Its tone is didactic, explaining principles that leaders should apply for the ideal conduct of war. Using a standard narrative method, Stoker cites a smorgasbord of strategists from multiple disciplines, alternately criticizing and enlisting them to support his propositions, using historical examples across the ages for illustration. The six chapters apply the theoretical principles to an established set of strategic themes, including the causes of war, the relationship of military means to political aims, problems of leadership and decision-making, constraints on the use of force, and war termination. In the concluding summary, Stoker announces that his new theory of war has “gored seventy years of political oxen” and, evoking Clausewitz, challenges critics “to suggest a better alternative” (231). However, Clausewitz was more circumspect, rejected dogma, and died considering his work unfinished. So profoundly did he penetrate the changing character and unchanging nature of war that anyone who claims strategic originality is also unavoidably his scribe.[8]
Chapter 1 opens with a severe accusation (italics in the original): Following World War II, “…all US thinking about war…is so broken and illogical that it has poisoned the US ability to fight any war.” (3) Every president from Harry Truman to Joe Biden is guilty of strategic incompetence. The case for this malfeasance rests foremost with the failure to clearly define political aims, which is the most important responsibility of leaders. This principle is Clausewitzian, although such immoderate criticism is not. No doubt, each of the thirteen presidential administrations between 1945 and 2024 made errors, some far more egregious than others. But can the principle be universally applied to all presidents in all wars?
The book’s more focused topic is limited war—those wars in which the political objective stops short of overthrowing the enemy. The formative war for the Truman administration and the Cold War itself was Korea (1950–1953), and it is the central case that runs throughout Why America Loses Wars.[9] Stoker’s opening criticism is that the Korean War began a generalized failure to define and understand limited war, which was never corrected. Among strategic thinkers, the first and principal target is Robert Osgood, whom Stoker dismisses as “nebulous,” principally for having emphasized means at the expense of aims. There is some truth in this charge, but there is also an explanation. Written after Korea, Osgood’s Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy is a challenging and complex read, because his analysis puzzled through a complex reality; contrary to the grain of Stoker’s criticism, he hewed closely to Clausewitz.[10] Korea was an unanticipated war within the hardening Cold War, and the challenges to a strategy that limited both aims and means were unprecedented. Intelligence regarding Soviet intentions in Europe as well as in Asia was lacking. The Truman administration feared the worst of Premier Joseph Stalin, who had green-lighted North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s surprise invasion after the US declared South Korea to be outside its security perimeter. Attendant risks of escalation, including Chinese intervention or even an attack on Berlin, were uncertain. Allies, who were previously in short supply, rallied to US leadership under the UN flag but raised their own concerns, especially when use of nuclear weapons came under consideration. Democracy magnified the difficulties. World War II had ended just five years earlier, and popular support waned as Korea stalemated and American casualties mounted. Osgood’s book remains widely cited as a seminal analysis of modern limited war; his work is relevant for the United States today, most immediately and consequentially in Ukraine.
Stoker takes his criticisms on Korea a step further, asking whether US leaders wanted to win the war and, if not, why. His sympathies lie with Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Far East, and the general’s famous claim that, “In war there is no substitute for victory.”[11] Here is the core of the argument. Accordingly, the Truman administration “failed to pursue victory wholeheartedly, even when the opportunity stared at them” (10). Instead of following military advice and returning to the offensive when the Chinese ran out of steam after intervening, they “took council of their fears” and negotiated (12). It is crucial, however, that the success of unconditional surrender in World War Two had conditioned MacArthur and, after his firing by Truman for insubordination, the US commanders who succeeded him. They had difficulty perceiving how a rational calculation of what Clausewitz called “the value of the object” could prioritize negotiation over seeking to win at any cost.[12] Stoker concludes the chapter by attributing the same sources of failure to the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His solution is to understand the nature of the war, declare a clear political objective, devise a strategy for winning, then dedicate sufficient effort and resources to achieve it (15). Logical, orderly, simple.
Chapter 2 further assembles a formula for winning. Continuing primarily with Korea, Stoker rejects Osgood’s caution that limited war in the modern world is too complex to be determinate. Cold War theorist Thomas Schelling’s use of game theory also comes in for criticism because it uses violence and the threat of violence for signaling and bargaining to contain and deter rather than to seek victory.[13] Preferably, winning a war begins with the definition of the political object that in turn drives a hierarchical sequence of grand strategy, strategy, operations, and tactics. The logic does help crystalize orderly strategic thinking, but the sacrifice of context and contingency exposes a shortcoming. The problem has been the focus of historian John Lewis Gaddis, who recently observed that “theory … privileges parsimony as a path to predictability but too often confirms what’s obvious while oversimplifying what’s not.”[14]
Having contended that strategic thinking is hopelessly confused, in chapter 3, Stoker claims to “fix this problem” with an original theory of limited war. While not quite such an ambitious accomplishment, this is one of the more useful parts of the book. The discussion covers why nations fight, why determining political objectives has primacy, includes a typology of aims and includes problems that arise when clear aims are absent or unclear, and complications that arise within alliances and coalitions. Stoker’s illustrations from Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War suggest also that aims change, but the political and military contingencies that compel them to do so tend to receive short shrift.
Chapter 4 considers how constraints and limits affect the conduct of war. By incorrectly assessing risks and rewards, US leaders accept “unwise” self-inflicted limits on the use of force (81). Stoker’s example is the crossing the Demilitarized Zone that separated North and South Vietnam by US forces. When they “fail to use the means necessary to finish the struggle, unless one is willing to accept defeat, the war will go on and on” (81). Again, the chapter includes a useful inventory of the sources of constraints and limits considers opponents with disparate values of the object, time, geography, military instruments and technology, internal and international political environments, public opinion, and unknown or misunderstood issues.
Chapter 5 is an admittedly cursory albeit instructive survey of limited war theories. Building on his belief that the purpose of strategy is to fight a better war, Stoker cites Sun Tzu, the ancient Romans, Niccolò Machiavelli, the Bolsheviks, Mao, the Nazis, and others, with Clausewitz always in mind. Examples range the history of war—warfare in the Middle Ages, the American Revolution and Civil War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First and Second World Wars, Korea, of course, and, with special attention, Vietnam.[15] The menu of themes includes the stages of limited war, problems of assessment and intelligence, the utility of force, types of strategies, limited nuclear war, and irregular warfare. What is missing in the emphasis on winning militarily is the principle that strategy should also contribute to achieving a better peace.
War termination is the subject of chapter 6, which contains more criticism of Western leaders and intellectuals who do not plan for wars to end because they are “infected” with fear, having forgotten that, “victory matters,…wining is the point of war” (176). The keys to a purportedly new method for tackling war termination lie in three questions, which have in fact long been standards of strategy-making: What is being sought politically? How far to go militarily? Who will maintain the settlement and how? (180). In a recent article written with Michael W. Campbell, Stoker proposes a framework for war termination in Ukraine that applies the three questions.[16] The article sets aside assertive optimism to conclude that even the most clearly conceived theoretical exercise will not improve the low odds for bringing the war in Ukraine to an end any time soon.
The chapter does admit some other complicating realities. For example, US negotiations to withdraw from Vietnam and Afghanistan did not produce authentic peace agreements. Nevertheless, the theoretical ground under Clausewitz’s formulation of the strategic dynamics that underlie war termination is solid:
Since war is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political object, the value of the object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration. Once the expenditure of the effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow.[17]
But Clausewitz, who was not immune to contradicting himself, stated a contrary truth: “In war the results are never final.”[18] Even the greatest of victories is no guarantee that peace must follow, and if the most important thing about a war is how it ends, unforeseen consequences inevitably flow. Not only did the “crucible of World War II” compel the transformations of Germany and Japan, but the Cold War and militarized containment emerged from the aftermath. As noted in the opening paragraph, the legacies are still very much with us.[19]
A few concluding comments concerning method and substance.
Like strategy itself, Why America Loses Wars is a “thick” book, even at just 230 pages. Much can be gleaned from it. To see how the field has evolved and expanded, see The New Makers of Modern Strategy, the third edition of a venerable series that dates to 1943, published last year and coming in at over 1,000 pages.[20]
Rather than a systematic analysis of why the wars America has fought since Korea have been so error-plagued, the book diagnoses failures to win victory and prescribes better theory to fight better war in the future. The proposition rests on a major counterfactual: What if our leaders used force more rationally? Counterfactuals are a useful tool for historians and social scientists alike, when conservatively conceived and applied. However, they are also problematic, because the further speculation departs from evidence, the less convincing it becomes, while logically something that did not happen is not subject to proof.[21] Would a repeat version of the Inchon landing after Chinese intervention have guaranteed US-led victory and reunified Korea, or would it have destabilized Asia and further aggravated the emerging Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union? Would more determined military force, including air power, have defeated the North Vietnamese and the Afghan Taliban, or were those wars simply unwinnable?
Back to the original question: Is “victory” the thing? There have been many substitutes for victory in the long record of history that did not necessarily arise from weak minds, nor was failure the inevitable result. The meaningful recent case would be the Cold War itself. By implication, what it means “to win” at the strategic level—to achieve the political object—requires a broader concept than victory through “the American way of battle,” a concept like “to succeed.”[22] These considerations are not meant to dismiss the value of theory, much less to excuse the blunders that fuel the complaints of Why American Loses Wars, or to suggest that force lacks utility, if and when effectively used. The point is that a win by any other name would still be win. Take, for example, Sun Tzu’s ancient and subtle “acme of skill,” winning without fighting.[23] A theory of success that does not demand victory holds answers to the riddle of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and vitally, to long-term competition between great powers.[24]
Robert Osgood’s theories also stand; political aims matter in limited war, but so do means.[25] As he divined from the Korean War, the challenge to American strategy was how to conduct limited war in a democracy, once Chinese intervention made quick decisive victory (often hoped for but rarely achieved) impossible and protraction resulted. That meant, instead of persevering heroically regardless of cost, a negotiated agreement to leave North and South Korea divided at the 38th Parallel. As for the larger contest, not only was the US not going to gather allies to march on Moscow, but the Cold War gamble was worse than Russian roulette because the risk of escalation by a nuclear-armed opponent was uncontrollable and amounted to a suicide pact. This is the place where theory that relies on rationality becomes insufficient, even with precise definitions and the clearest of aims. The situation in Ukraine is evocative. Lawrence Freedman does his best to thread the existential needle by labeling Putin an unreasonable strategic fanatic for aiming to eradicate Ukraine as a nation-state, who, by threatening to use nuclear weapons to constrain the United States and NATO, is also behaving rationally.[26]
Unusually perhaps in the age of science and technology, strategic thinking remains anchored in its forebearers. One of Clausewitz’s ABCs is that war is a dynamic trinity of passion and chance as well as reason. To use current language, his trinity is a three-body problem, the essence of a complex system. [27] The problem concerns historians and social scientists alike and is as old as Thucydides and as contemporary as Robert Jervis.[28] How are scholars to submit strategic behavior, and human nature itself, to reason? Fear and honor are powerful motives for war, even when clothed in the guise of national interest. Here lie the inexorable explanations for why America loses. Witness Douglas MacArthur in Korea, hubristically dismissing intelligence that the Chinese were going to intervene as US-led forces approached the Yalu River and provoking the longest retreat in US history; President Lyndon Johnson agonizing over sending US combat troops to Vietnam, acquiescing to the hyper-rational best and brightest advisors he had inherited from assassinated President John F. Kennedy, who insisted that firepower would see the US through and spawned quagmire instead; the best and brightest 2.0 after 9/11, inflating international terrorism into a grand strategy, and, convinced that having the most power was the same as having all the power, launching not one but two accidental counterinsurgency wars in the greater Middle East that consigned the US to two decades of distraction, instability, and strategic failure instead of victory.
All strategists must find their way. My own experience concurs with Hew Strachan, exemplary historian and strategist: “We have confused strategy in theory with strategy in practice.”[29] No human endeavor surpasses the irreducible complexity of war and its paradoxical, perhaps irrational, dedication to destruction rather than creation.
A final reflection. The epigraph with which Stoker opens Why America Loses Wars is the famous quotation by Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington: “There is no such thing as a little war for a great nation” (1).
The wisdom may appear self-evident, but the leap from theory to practice can prove less parsimonious and far more complex than it seems. Historical context is revealing. Wellington, the famous victor over Napoleon at Waterloo, England’s greatest hero, and one of its worst prime ministers, was commander-in-chief of the British Army when he used the line in a speech before Parliament on 16 January 1837. He was arguing that British troops should be sent to suppress an uprising to protest lack of reform in Canada. The political aim and how military means would achieve it were obscure, but Wellington perceived purposes beyond interest. No matter how small the war, the honor of Pax Britannica demanded stomping out the rebels and containing suspected gray zone subversion—by the Americans, whose intentions they feared.[30] Great Britain would suffer more embarrassments until its empire collapsed under the blows of two twentieth-century wars. So far, the United States has managed to stumble through its own serial misfortunes, but this is no guarantee that Pax Americana will shrug them off in the future.
Todd Greentree, a former Foreign Service Officer, served in five wars, including El Salvador and Afghanistan. He was on the Strategy and Policy faculty at the US Naval War College, a visiting scholar at the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS, and is currently a member of the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University. His recent publications include, “The New Makers of Modern Strategy: A scene-setter,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 46:3 (2023): 707–730. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2023.2212131 (open access).
[1] Ronald Reagan, “Peace: Restoring the Margin of Safety,” Speech Given at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Chicago, Illinois, August 18, 1980, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/peace-restoring-margin-safety; Elizabeth Speller, Following Hadrian: A Second-Century Journey Through the Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 69.
[2] Callum A. MacDonald, Korea: The War before Vietnam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986); David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York: Hyperion, 2007), Samuel F. Wells, Jr., Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
[3] David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972); Robert Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on US-GVN Performance (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1972); Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1979); Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988); H.R. McMaster, Dereliction of duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the lies that led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
[4]Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003–2005 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Knopf, 2006); Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (New York: Knopf, 2008); Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban (New York: Penguin Press, 2007); Anand Gopal, No Good Men among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014); Theo Farrell, Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 (London: Vintage, 2017).
[5] Amy B. Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and DOD (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Random House, 2005); Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Antulio J. Echevarria II, Reconsidering the American Way of War (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014); Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Robert Gates, “The Overmilitarization of American Foreign Policy: The United States Must Recover the Full Range of Its Power,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (July/August 2020): 121–32.
[6] See also, Donald Stoker, Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
[7] Carl von Clausewitz (Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds. & trans.), On War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
[8] Clausewitz, On War, 69-71; Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s On War: A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007): 191-94.
[9] Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1969).
[10] Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957); Michael Howard, in Clausewitz, On War, 42-43; and Antulio J. Echevarria II, War’s Logic: Strategic Thought and the American Way of War (Cambridge University Press, 2021): 59-81.
[11] To-woong Chung, “General Douglas MacArthur: The Commander of the Far East,” Asian Perspective, 4:2 No. 2 (Fall-Winter 1980): 233-244; General Douglas MacArthur, Farewell Address to Congress, 19 April 1951, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurfarewelladdress.htm.
[12] Clausewitz, On War, 92.
[13] Thomas C. Schelling, “The Strategy of Conflict: Prospectus for a Reorientation of Game Theory,” Conflict Resolution, 2:3 (1958): 203-46.
[14] John Lewis Gaddis, “Why Would Anyone Want to Run the World? The Warnings in Cold War History,” Foreign Affairs, 103:4, (July/August 2024): 155-61.
[15] Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt,1999).
[16] Donald Stoker and Michael W. Campbell, “Clausewitz, Theory, and Ending the Ukraine War,” Military Strategy Magazine, Special Issue, “What Would the Greats Say About War in the 21st Century,” 9:3 (Spring 2024) 12- 20.
[17] Clausewitz, On War, 92.
[18] Clausewitz, On War, 80.
[19] Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); John M. Curatola, Autumn of our Discontent: Fall 1949 and the Crises in American National Security (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2022), Fred Iklé, Every War Must End (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
[20] Hal Brands, ed., The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).
[21] Francis J. Gavin, “What If? The Historian and the Counterfactual,” Security Studies, 24:3 (July-September 2015): 425-30.
[22] Frank G. Hoffman, “The Missing Element in Crafting National Strategy: A Theory of Success,” Joint Forces Quarterly, 97:2 (2020): 55-64; Antulio J. Echevarria II, “The Persistence of America’s Way of Battle,” Military Strategy Magazine, 8:1 (Summer 2022): 12-18; Brian M. Linn, “‘The American Way of War’ Revisited,” The Journal of Military History, 66:2 (April 2022): 501-33.
[23] Sun Tzu, Samuel B. Griffith (trans.), The Art of War, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963): 77; John F. Sullivan, “Sun Tzu’s Fighting Words,” Strategy Bridge, June 15, 2020, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/6/15/sun-tzus-fighting-words.
[24] Thomas G. Mahnken, ed., Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
[25] Osgood, Limited War, 7, 13-15, 149, 274-78.
[26] Lawrence Freedman, “Strategic Fanaticism: Vladimir Putin and Ukraine,” in Hal Brands (ed.), War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024): 55-70.
[27] Clausewitz, On War, 89; Brian Cole, “Clausewitz’s Wondrous Yet Paradoxical Trinity: The Nature of War as a Complex Adaptive System,” Joint Force Quarterly, 96:1 (2020): 42-49; Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers eds., The Changing Character of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, eds., Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Bradford A. Lee and Karl F. Walling, eds., Strategic Logic and Political Rationality: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel, (London: Routledge: 2003).
[28] John Lewis Gaddis, “History, Theory, and Common Ground, International Security, 22:1 (Summer, 1997): 75-85; Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
[29] Hew Strachan, “Strategy in Theory; Strategy in Practice,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, 42:2 (2019): 171-90.
[30] Arthur Wellesley, The Speeches of the Duke of Wellington in Parliament, Vol. II (London: J. Murray 1854): 259.
259; Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: Pillar of State (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1972): 398-99; Eliot A. Cohen, Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles along the Great Warpath that Made the American Way of War (New York: Free Press, 2011).