The New Makers of Modern Strategy

Welcome to shield the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter mentoring World War II that a strong and balanced foreign policy is the essential shield of our Democratic Republic. Eric Edelman, counselor at the Center for Strategic and budgetary Assessment, a Bulwark contributor and a nonresident fellow at the Miller Center, My normal partner and cohost in this endeavor, Elliott Cohen is traveling and will report back next week on his very interesting travels. But I have today, as my very special guest, Hal Brands, a longtime friend of Schilda public, now back for I think his third appearance on shield and Tom Mankin, the President of the Center for Strategic and budgetary assessments and we’re here to discuss a book that was edited by Hal called The New Maker of Modern Strategy in which Tom and I both have essays, How, who of course, is well known to our listeners, but is the Henry A Kissinger professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and also a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in a Bloomberg opinion columnist was the editor of this volume and it was really remarkable achievement that he’s pulled off.

Tom, of course, is the President and CEO of CSBA, where I worked for him, but he’s also been a colleague in government where he was the deputy assistant Secret Podcast for strategy and plans in the Department of Defense. Also I can’t even spend all the time listing all the books that he has written or edited but he’s also been a colleague of mine on the National Defense Strategy Commission, where he and I are serving in its most current incarnation. So welcome, Hal and Tom.

Thanks, Eric. Good to be here.

Great to be with you.

So Hal, tell us a little bit if you could about new makers modern strategy, how the book came to be, and what its sort of genealogy is, if you would.

So makers of modern strategy is a book that has always been connected to America’s role in the world and the trajectory of global politics over the past eighty years or so. This version, which was just released, which we all were involved in a couple months ago, is essentially the third edition of a larger franchise. The first edition makers of modern strategy was initially published in nineteen forty three, that date was not by coincidence. There was very much a sense, with Edward Mead, the editor of that volume and a number of his contributors, that the United States had entered a new era in its career as as a power, it was going to be involved in global affairs with greater regularity and with greater intensity than had been the case. In the past, the fact that was obvious to him even before the United States got into World War two, but it become obvious to pretty much everybody by the time the book.

Was actually published. And so the purpose of that initial volume was to provide a grounding in military thought in a strategic analysis that would be useful, not just to experts in the field, certainly it was, but to sort of the general educated readership of the United States to the people who would have to deliver the votes and provide the political backing for policies that the United States would pursue henceforth. And so this was really a book that was deeply connected with America’s emergence as a global power. The second edition came out in nineteen eighty six, it was edited by a scholar named Peter Peray, and it was basically an effort to bring not just the volume, but kind of the larger field of strategic studies, which had emerged from the initial volume in some ways, up to date in light of the realities of the Cold War. And so it dealt with issues like nuclear strategy, irregular warfare, insurgency, and so on for, things that had come to the forefront of international relations, during the cold war.

And again, the idea was to provide the readership, most of which would have been in the West. Or the free world or the non communist world at that point, grounding in strategic affairs, which would be necessary to prosecute that competition successfully. Now, fast forward thirty some odd years, and the United States finds itself entering a new era of pretty intense geopolitical rivalry that won’t need a whole lot of explanation to people who listen to this podcast. And so in partnership with Princeton University, press, I worked to bring out a new volume that would help use history to equip readers to make sense of strategic realities today.

Tom, I wonder if I might just ask you before asking how to kind of pull some of the main themes out of the many, many chapters that range, as the subtitle says, from the ancient world to the digital age, how did this book actually affect you as butting young scholar that franchise, I should say.

Yeah, thanks for that. The first edition of makers of modern strategy is one of a handful of books that lit literally changed my life. I encountered it first as a junior in college. I can remember where I was when I first read it. I couldn’t remember when it was.

It was in context of International Relations three eighty one introduction to strategy. I remember opening up the book, reading it, and just it opening up a new world for me. And the things that I remember about that first edition, certainly carried through to the second edition and and and and very much carried through to the third edition. And and those things were well, first, it was about history. And, you know, history was something that I loved and I loved.

Second, it was a book about ideas. Right? And and ideas are things that I find fascinating, big big ideas. But it was also that third part, which is it was and it’s there in the title of all three books in the franchise. It was about makers.

Right? It was about people. So it wasn’t just about the flow of historical events. It wasn’t just about ideas, it was about the people who had those ideas and the people who enacted those ideas. And and from the very beginning, That that was a very powerful a very powerful combination.

So I remember reading the the that first edition of of the book. I still have it. It’s in my home library, I then taught from the second edition that that Hal described, throughout my professional career at the Naval Bulwark College and at Johns Hopkins Sice. And now, you know, I’m so honored to be part of the lineup for the for the third edition?

Yeah. I have to say it is an incredible honor to be a part of this as well. You know, one of the things that is really striking about this volume is the breadth So it’s not just as the first volume was, you know, sort of limited to the West, and really for the most part, Anglo American strategy as the first volume was. I mean, there were other you know, things addressed in the first two volumes, but this really you’ve really opened the aperture by going well, you know, beyond the normal geographic confines of the two first volumes in the franchise, and and as well expanding sort of subject matter, you know, beyond pure warfare. You know, we had, for instance, Khureshaki on of weeks ago talking about her essay about TacomSA and the Shawnee confederation and the diplomacy in which she engaged.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the big themes that you describe in the introduction that emerge from this thousand page volume now that brings all this material together?

Yeah. I’d I’d be happy to. May maybe though, just briefly, I could make a couple of comments about points you just made. And and the first is that, you know, when I was crafting the initial approach this volume in in cooperation with a couple of colleagues who unfortunately weren’t able to continue on with the the project. You know, what we basically tried to do was think about What are what are the issues that the contemporary strategists would need to understand to make sense of the world?

And then working backward from that, what are the historical subjects, the historical figures that one would need to make sense of these present issues? The one could use as an aid in making sense of these present issues. And so, just getting to the point you made Eric about having less of an overwhelmingly western focus in this volume than in in prior ones. Very difficult, obviously, to make sense of the world today without understanding something about, say, the Chinese strategic tradition, and so that’s a subject of figures in a number of chapters throughout the book. Another point I’d make, which actually occurred to me more in hindsight than it did in in Foresight, I’m embarrassed to admit, is that makers is a is a franchise that’s always been connected with particular institutions in one way or another.

It was connected, obviously, with the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, initially. And when I looked back at the way that this volume came together, This volume is is very strongly connected with a couple of institutions that the three of us are are closely connected with. And so one of them is the naval war college. Particularly the strategy and policy department there. I was giving a talk there today and realized in preparing it that I think nine out of the forty five chapters were written by someone with some sort of connection to that particular department, which it’s not a coincidence.

It’s not because I like going to Newport or anything like that. It’s it’s because that institution really invested in the study of strategy and diplomatic and military history at a time when most of academia had forsaken it and has helped build up intellectual capital and intellectual relationships that helps sustain the field today. But the other one, of course, is the institution with which we’re all associated, which is Johns Hopkins Sice. And I think there’s probably roughly an equivalent number of chapters written by folks who are associated with that institution in in one way or another, whether that’s the three of us or Frank Gavin, my colleague, or Carter Amalcajon who wrote a great chapter on strategies of counterinsurgency, counter terrorism, and and so on and so forth. And so I I think going forward, people will associate volume with with those institutions.

So that that’s a long preface, Eric. Let me rather than going through sort of six themes, let me just mention one or two. Both the the cool and the daunting thing about organizing and undertaking like this, is you get to read forty five chapters, and then try to figure out what are, like, the five or six key themes that cut across them knowing that you’re not going to do justice to the entire corpus. And maybe just, you know, a couple that I think are particularly Sailian, one, which relates to a point that you made a moment ago, is that while strategy is intimately connected to the use of force, there would be much less need for strategy if we were in a world that was totally harmonious and the threat of force not hangover international affairs. It’s also far too important to be left simply to the generals.

And so if you think about strategy really is the use of all the tools you have at your disposal, to attain whatever objective it is that you are seeking. It frequently involves synchronizing the use of a variety of different aspects of of national power to achieve those objectives. And so when we think back to World War II, for instance, there were great military strategists in uniform, in a variety of different countries during that conflict, but probably the greatest strategy I would argue were the civilian leaders, people like Roosevelt and and Churchill, who really had to master the art of bringing it all together, bringing economics coalition diplomacy, domestic mobilization, military operations on multiple continents and multiple theaters. Together into some larger scheme of what they were trying to achieve. I think that that’s really the apotheosis of strategy.

And and so that’s where I tried to hit that point pretty hard in in the introduction. A second point I’ll make is that doing this book, narrowly. And then the study of strategy more broadly, I think, has to be an instrumental affair. It’s it’s not a value free affair. And so, Edward Mead Earl, when he edited the first volume, was very clear if you read the introduction, that his purpose was to help make the United States and other democracies more effective in international affairs by equipping their leaders and their populations with a stronger understanding of strategy.

That wasn’t a choice. I think he would have had to spend a lot of time justifying in nineteen forty two, nineteen forty three, when the fate of the world and the fate of human freedom really did hang in the balance. But it’s a critically important part of the book. And and so that is, Similarly, the goal that I hope this edition of makers will will serve. The idea here is that if you read these chapters, if you immerse yourselves, if you immerse yourself in their insights and their lessons, you will be better equipped for the challenges of strategy in a world where the price of strategic literacy.

The price of strategic failure is becoming very, very high because the stakes of international affairs are very, very high. Because the United States and its and its allies are confronting very sharp challenges from Russia, from China, from Iran, from a variety of other actors around the globe. So those are two themes I would highlight.

Hel. Let me ask you one question before I turn to Tom and ask him to talk a little bit about his essay in the book which is very Apropos of some of the things you just said. And that is, you make a point in the introduction, that the cost of strategic and historical illiteracy can be quite high. I mean, you also make the point that, you know, and I think you quote Henry Kissinger on this point, that history doesn’t give you a cookbook or a cookie cutter to provide solutions for today’s problems. But the failure to appreciate the historical origins of contemporary problems and the range of human, you know, responses to different kinds of situations can be really disastrous.

Could you just comment maybe briefly on that before we turn over to Tom’s chapter?

I think there’s maybe two aspects of that that are worth discussing. The the first is the point that you know, it’s not as though studying history gives you, like, the blueprint for doing strategy well in in any era And you can figure that out by reading the book because the authors of the various chapters will point to you know, a particular dynamic that may have worked really well in one circumstance and much less well in another. Right? And so maybe strategy is supposed to be about pitting your strengths against the opponent’s weaknesses, but maybe there are cases where you actually have to pit your strengths against the opponent’s strength or whatever whatever the case may may be. And so one of the themes that really emerges is the strategy is as much about learning, about adaptation about figuring out how to respond to unexpected challenges when they arise.

As it is about coming up with some brilliant design or some universal principles of strategy in the first place. And And so what you see in a variety of the cases that are examined in the book is the importance of adaptation. And and so, you know, there’s a great chapter in the book that talks about basically the rise and fall. Napoleon making the point that he was able to generate unprecedented levels of military power. He was able to harness social and political changes and and turned them into military innovations.

They gave him a dramatic advantage on the battlefield for a while until his opponents wised up and sort of changed their approach accordingly. Right? And so it’s not necessarily the first move, no matter how brilliant it is, that decides the outcome of some contest to maybe the subsequent moves as as well. But this gets to the second point. If you’re trying to figure out what makes for good strategy, or what makes for good strategic thinking, or good leadership, there really isn’t any other place to turn, but history.

Right? That that’s the only repository of insight we have about what has worked in particular circumstances, what has not worked in particular circumstances. What challenges, even the best strategies are likely to encounter over time? It’s the only way you can gain a sort of vicarious experience without having to pay the cost of of getting that experience in in real time. And so there’s one of these great quotes from Bismarck, which is probably apocryphal, but but who cares?

We basically said that you know, fools learn by experience, wise men learn by other people’s experience. Right? And that’s essentially the heart of the historical endeavor and something that I think we try to honor in this volume?

Well, Bismarck is a perfect segue into Tom’s chapter which is a really fascinating excursion on arms races, arms control, and piece time competition between great powers. And Tom, you talk about in this chapter two good examples. One is the Anglo German arms race, naval arms race before world war one and also the US Soviet competition in the cold war, tell us a little bit about the chapter. I mean, you talk about this is the realm of strategic competition between conflict and cooperation, and explain a little bit to the listeners how how you think about that.

Yeah, Chad. I would I would very much associate myself with, you know, what Hal just said. You know, when we think about strategy, you know, strategy is not just something that one carts out in time of war, strategy is also a a feature of of peacetime interaction. Right, in peacetime competition. And and what I wanted to bring to the fore in my chapter was was various strategies of of peacetime competition.

And that includes arms competitions or arms races, and it also includes efforts to limit competition, limit interaction through through arms control. And here, you know, I I’ll I’ll admit, I think I’m I’m going up against at least, you know, some received wisdom. I think, you know, some of the received wisdom is arms races are bad. Right? Arms races Generally, when we hear the term arms race, it’s with a negative comment connotation.

Right? They’re portrayed as reflective, almost unthinking accumulation of armaments, and it’s it’s expensive and it leads to war. Conversely, when we hear arms control, we generally think of that as being something that’s good under all circumstances. Right? And that’s all about reducing the amount of ours and it’s about saving money.

And and the the general argument in, you know, in in this chapter is, the most fruitful way to think about those things, those ideas, is as instruments of competition. Right? And and so you can think about arms competitions as being fruitful as the Anglo German naval arms competition was for Great Britain. Or you can think about them as being, you know, unfruitful. And so really what I’m trying to do in in the chapter is is bring discussions of arms races, arms competitions, arms control into a broader conversation about peacetime strategy.

And the the makers that I chose because again, this is it’s all there in the title. You know, was Admiral sir John Fisher, Jackie Fisher, the author if they’re primary author, if there was one of of British strategy for competing with Imperial Germany prior to prior to world war one. Very much a doer. Tom shelling, very much a thinker as as one of the original thinkers when it came to arms competitions or sorry, arms control. Andy Marshall and also to a lesser extent Albert Wolstetter as as makers, thinkers about arms competition And then finally, and maybe most controversially, I I end with Ronald Reagan as very much a doer when it came to combining arms competition and arms control in bringing the the Cold War to a successful conclusion.

You talk about in the essay as you just did in your comments about the notion that arms races are, you know, sort of unthinking and you quote the phrase common in the cold war that, you know, the US and the Soviet Union were two apes on the treadmill just mindlessly mimicking each other, and that it normally is the so called action reaction model of arms races a title, which was I think awarded it by Robert McNamara when he was Secret Podcast of defense. Talk a little bit about the action reaction model and why it’s not really a perfect explanation of arms races by any means.

Yeah. Look like like many, you know, like many theories, you know, the idea of an action reaction arms race represents a a simplification. Right? A simplification of of interaction. You know, the notion you know, the notion is of, you know, sort of two gunfighters standing at opposite ends of a of a straight dusty street in the old west, maybe with a tumbleweed blowing between them.

Right? Each is is intimately focused on the other, and each is responding only to what the other is doing. And I think it’s a tremendous simplification. Historically, it’s a tremendous simplification of of how powers who are even even intensely competing with one another act. And thus, it’s, you know, it’s one of these simplifications that I think is has has done a lot of harm to our to our understanding of of peacetime interaction.

So first, It’s not as if states act as unitary actors, right? States are sort of national security bureaucracies. They’re the result. They’re complex organizations with their own histories, their own cultures, their own proclivities, and they not they don’t just react to what going on in the outside world, they also react to what’s going on internally. So they suffer from divided focus.

You know, they’re so we we even in the midst of the cold war, even in the depths of the cold war, you know, the United States was not just react acting to what the Soviet Union was doing, but it was reacting to all sorts of domestic political pressures, economic pressures, you name it. And same thing for the Soviets. And and, oh, by the way, the information that we were getting about the Soviets was partial misleading and imperfect and the same with the soviets about us. And that partial misleading imperfect information didn’t all bend towards doing more quicker, it also bent in other directions. So, you know, I find that the whole action reaction view of of arms competitions.

Again, notice I’m I’m consciously avoiding the use of the word arms race or the phrase arms race. I find that view of arms competitions to be very dissatisfied.

You mentioned a few names. You mentioned Sheling and Andy Marshall and Albert Wolfeter, all all of whom actually figure prominently in my own chapter on nuclear strategy in theory and practice and how the the theory and the practice of nuclear strategy really diverged quite a bit by the end of of the cold war and really up to this day. Talk a little bit about, if you would, about about Andy Marshall, whose spirit I think really infuses your chapter, and and I would say, and Hal might want to comment as well that one can feel the spirit of Andy Marshall in any number of the chapters that were, you know, written for the volume. And we had our colleagues Andy Hone from Ron DeSantis Tom Schanker, formerly of the New York Times who just written a book age of danger, which also is sort of suffused with the sort of spirit, I would say, of Andy Marshall yet I think he’s a figure who remains sort of elusive and unknown for much of the broader public. So what would you say, Tom, about Andy Marshall and how if you want to comment, I’d welcome your comment as well.

Yeah, Eric. I think that’s a great observation. Look, I I was lucky enough to work for Marshall briefly in the Pentagon, and I was I was even luckier to get to know him even better, you know, after I after I stopped working for him. Throughout his time in the Pentagon and then after after he he retired, and I think, you know, he he was an extraordinary figure. And I mean, that in in several ways.

I mean, first, professionally, he really had two full careers. I mean, a full career as an analyst at the rand corporation, really from the founding of the rand corporation, till the mid nineteen seventies. And frankly, it’s it’s mainly in that career that he I think he he figures most heavily in my chapter, And, you know, in that career, he made some key contributions to the field of strategic studies, right, to the way we think about strategy. And and then he went on to a second career, you know, in the Pentagon. Where he served as an appointee of every administration from the Nixon administration to the Obama administration, which that’s extraordinary in its own way, right?

From a twenty first century perspective to have a man who was as a political appointee of every administration from from Nixon to Obama. That’s, you know, that’s something that’s unheard of these days. So I think that’s one way in which he was extraordinary was just that that he had these two careers. And I think that the the other thing relatedly that made him extraordinary was, again, the insights that those two careers gave him. And so first, you know, I think this idea that and this comes, you know, comes from his early years at Rand where he was part of a very small and select group of people that had access to the most sensitive information that we had about the Soviet Union.

And and that gave him an insight that, you know, that the Soviets were doing things. They were investing scarce resources in ways very different than what we were doing. And so from that, just comes this basic insight that you could be in a competition, you know, with with another state that again views things very differently that act very differently than than you did. And And that was certainly in the the case of the Anglo German naval rivalry. Right?

The the the German Navy did things very differently than the Royal Navy, and and and in this case, Jackie Fisher appreciated that and and the British really structured their naval program to exploit the differences between the German Navy and and and the Royal Navy. So that was one insight, just the fact that the two sides in a competition can see things very differently and act very differently. The other insight I really take from from Marshall is the fact that and we I already touched on this, that National Security decisions are are not made by at least in the twenty first century. They’re they’re not merely made by individuals they’re not made by states acting as unitary actors. It’s not the collision of these billiard balls against one another.

National decision and security decisions are made by big complex bureaucracies that have their own preferences, their own culture, their own history, and that understanding that that organizational context both on your own side and then also thinking about a competitor really is central to success when it comes to formulating let alone implementing strategy?

Yeah. I mean, Marshall, you know, plays a role in my chapter nuclear strategy that’s actually quite interesting and important, because although our colleague Frank Gavin, who’s chapter on nuclear strategy is a companion to mine in the in the volume, argues that it’s really hard in most cases to see the impact of put makers of strategy on the actual US force structure and policies that were implemented. Marshall’s actually part of that very rare sort of moment where at the end of the 50s, he’s involved at Rand in a number of important studies that start to move the United States away from the initial emphasis on targeting large urban industrial areas, which was a carryover from the World War II strategic bombing theories that were being implemented by Curtis La May as head of Strategic Air Command, and into the notion that the thing you really wanted to hold at risk was the adversary’s own nuclear forces and command and control, and that those ideas actually pass into the actual Department of Defense through William Kaufman, who was one of Marshall’s colleagues at Rand, who carried these ideas in with him, with Robert Macnamara. So he’s really a very important figure in the essay I wrote as well Haldee, do you also detect the spirit of Andy Marshall, lurking through the volume?

Yeah, I’ll make two points about Marshall. And so so one is that sometimes an individual will capture an intellectual shift that’s happening in strategy and really distill it in an interesting way, and serve as the person who articulates it most clearly, even if the people who are subsequently implementing strategy may or may not know who this person is and and what they are viewed. And you can make an argument that that was Marshall with respect to US strategy in the late seventies and nineteen eighties. And and so one of the key insights that Marshall comes up with in some of these papers that he writes for Rand, and then once he moves over to the Pentagon in the nineteen seventies, is this idea that in an increasingly competitive US Soviet relationship, where the US just no longer has the same margin of raw power and resources that it had at nineteen forty nine or nineteen fifty seven, that success is going to be determined by whether the United States can apply its resources in ways that make the Soviet Union spin disproportionately in response. And he’s talking mostly about the strategic arms competition at that point.

But you can see that idea carry over into a host of aspects of US policy during the nineteen eighties. Everything from the Carter Reagan military buildup to the Reagan doctrine of support for anti communist insurgents in the third world to the intensified informational struggle against the Soviet Union and and so on and so forth. And so I I think Marshall is one of the perhaps most important underrated strategists or strategic thinkers of blake Cold War in that respect. But the other thing that makes him really important and, frankly, that makes him as German as anything else to this volume, is he was also a patron of strategic studies and of military history and of the sort of work that goes into this volume. And so, you know, the office of net assessment didn’t just do net assessments.

It also sponsored quite a lot of research that might not have gotten done. Otherwise, and and Dema Damsky, a friend of ours who who has a good chunk of text on Marshall and his contributions to this volume points out that Marshall, as much as anybody else, was really the father of the literature on military innovation, which is a very important subfield of strategic studies. And it illustrates a larger point, which is that the development of military history, diplomatic history, strategic studies as fields has always relied very heavily on people and institutions that we’re willing to invest in And so you would not have gotten the emergence of the field in the first place without the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which helped underwrite some of the initial work. You would not have gotten the field as it exists today without the investments that the office of net assessment made beginning under Andy Marshall.

To your point, Hal, and you’ve written about this, of course, in in a variety of contexts, including in the twilight struggle, which you discussed on on this podcast a year or so ago, maybe more now. The idea of the Reagan doctrine, right, which was to contest Soviet gains in the third world which had completely upended the whole arms control enterprise in the late seventies under Ford and Carterter, was not just purely some whim, you know, of Ronald Reagan. There was intellectual underpinning that stemmed from the offices in that assessment and the work that it sponsored it ran by Charlie Wolf on how much these overseas adventures in the third world were actually costing the Soviet Union and to Tom’s earlier point about Thomas shelling and the idea of costs in position, this was an additional way of imposing costs and overstressing the Soviet system. Everybody knows about the Reagan doctrine, not so many people know about you know, the role that the office of that assessment and Andy Marshall and Rand played in providing an intellectual scaffolding for for the idea. Tom, what makes based on your study of this for a success strategy for peacetime competition as opposed to actual, you know, strategy in war.

Well, actually, Eric, you just you just touched on on one element of it, which is a real deep understanding of your competitor. You know? That’s that’s something that we acquired during the cold war. It’s not something that we had at the beginning of the cold war. At the beginning of the Cold War, there was you know, you could’ve filled up a room with all the things we didn’t know about the Soviet Union as a competitor.

But over time and as as Hal pointed out through a lot of investment, societal investment, governmental investment, but even broader than that societal investment. We discovered a a a great deal about the Soviet Union, the Soviet system, at Soviet bureaucracy, that we were able to turn to competition and being successful in competing with the Soviets. So I think that’s one. And, again, you you see that in the in the previous historical era when it comes to the the Anglo German naval rivalry as well. The British developed a good under a good deep and useful understanding of Imperial Germany as a competitor and and was actually able to use the the the features of the Imperial German constitutional monarchy you know, against Germany as as a competitor.

So I think that that deep knowledge, you know, is is is is key related to that. Is the is the fundamental understanding that both sides in a competition face constraints. I think it’s all too all too easy for us to understand and wallow in our own constraints without looking outward and realizing that our competitors also face constraints. Right? So so good strategy comes from an understanding of the constraints that both sides face.

And using them to your advantage. And then and then finally, it’s it’s being able to think in time, you know, and and whether it was great Britain in the early years of the twentieth century, the United States, in the, you know, during the cold war, it was eventually being able to understand the time dimension of competition and then be able to use it to best effect.

I wanna ask both of you to talk a little bit about the arms control element of of this that you talk about, Tom. And one of the things you suggest in your essay And actually, it’s also in mind on nuclear strategy is that arms control as it was originally conceived has come a little bit unmoored from its initial conception by among others, Thomas Shelling, which is to say that, you know, it was conceived of initially as a part of the ongoing competition, not as the pure solution to the competition. And yet the notion of what John Mauer, who’s been on this podcast, is called competitive arms control, that is to say using ARM’s control to not as a, you know, money saving device necessarily, but as a way of stabilizing ARM’s competitions but also by doing it in a way that is favorable to your interests seems to have been totally lost. And it’s now just seen as a sort of panacea for any kind of competitive relationship that is souring, whether it’s our relationship with China or Russia. The answer is always arms control.

How did this happen, Tom? How did it kind of come on board? And why have we lost this notion of competitive arms control? How you’ve discussed this as well in in the twilight struggle.

Yeah. I think I think well, I think you’re you’re right. First and foremost, I mean, as formulated by people like Tom Shelling and his co author, Martin Halperin in their book Strategy and Arms Control. And again, it’s it’s all there in the title, right, that arms control was an instrument of strategy, and the notion was that strategy that arms control was a way to help avert war, and it might involve in investing in more weapons rather than less. It might require more spending rather than less.

But the focus really needed to be on on strategy and on enhancing one’s position and enhancing stability. I think I think it became on board for a couple of reasons. I mean, one is that you have some people that are that are strategic thinkers and others who aren’t. I mean, and I I say that just I think the the propensity for strategic thinking, like any other trait, any other quality is not evenly divided across the population, And so for some, the, you know, the competitive aspect of arms control came easier than to others. Right?

And so for many, over time, they saw arms control as an alternative to competition. Right? It was cooperation as opposed to competition, as opposed to the the initial notion that you could have cooperation within an overall competitive framework. I think that’s one. I think the other had to do with sort of bureaucratization that over time, the arms control enterprise became bureaucratized With its own bureaucracy, we had the arms control and disarmament agency.

Their business was what? Well, it was arms control and disarmament. So you had a vested bureaucracy that that was in the business of perpetuating arms control rather than stepping back and saying, well, what what can arms control or arms limitation do as an instrument of a broader a broader strategy?

Yes. And even with the disestablishment of the arms control and disarmament agency in the Clint administration, the functions actually, you know, still were transferred into the t family of of bureaus in the state department, so the bureaucratic impulse, you know, remains to this day. How do you have any thoughts on that?

The role is to approaches to arms control or or two sources of support for the arms control agreements that the US and the Soviet Union concluded particularly in the nineteen seventies, and and one was from what you might think of as the arms control community, which tended to think of arms control as a good in and of itself. And then the other was from the people who saw arms control as a competitive tool, which may or may not be good depending on whether it strengthened your competitive position. President Nixon was in the latter category and really didn’t have a whole lot of patience for people who were in the former category. He would, you know, at the same time that he, you know, right before he’d fly to Moscow to sign Sauls in the IBM Treaty, he would talk about the pathetic idealism of the arms controllers within his own administration, in some cases, who were negotiating the those accords. And I think what happened was that what kept those two things together was the combination of sort of the nuclear danger on the Jonathan Last then also the reality of this very intense rivalry with the Soviet Union on the other.

And and so the reality was that you just couldn’t succeed strategically in that competition. If you didn’t have at least a somewhat competitive approach to arms control, but you also frankly needed the arms control community. You needed the arms controllers because if you weren’t seen to be doing something to control the nuclear threat, it was actually difficult to sustain political support or diplomatic support for US policy. So in a couple of different respects, the cold war had a disciplining effect on debate within the US policy community. The cold war ends, of course.

We no longer have to worry so explicitly about how some arms control measure advantages or disadvantages the United States and some competition. And so I think things come out of balance at that point. You know, in sort of the the bad news is good news or good news is bad news category, arms control is dead as a door nail right now. We are we are rapidly reaching the end of basically the new Star treaty, which is essentially the last remnant of the Cold War, an early post Cold War era, arms control agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union of the United States and Russia, as the case may be. Doesn’t look like the prospects are great for doing something to extend its provisions because you can’t actually extend the treaty again without senate ratification, and and so on and so forth.

So there’s not China doesn’t look particularly interested in in arms control of a sort that would be appealing to us at the moment. So we’re gonna go through a period of a number of years where there’s just not gonna be a whole lot happening in kind of the traditional arms control. Area that’s, you know, that can be bad news to a certain extent. The good news though is that it may force you to think a little bit more carefully about what you’re trying to get out of arms control in the first place, how you reconcile it with strategies of competition, how you approach arms control in an era where it’s it’s no longer simply a bilateral affair between Washington and Moscow, but has to take into account an environment where you’ve got three nuclear peers or rough nuclear peers by the early to mid twenty thirties and and so on and so forth. So there’s some time ahead of us that we can use to start addressing some of these shortfalls if we think creatively about it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, on June second, gave a speech to the Arms Control Association in which he talked about in his speech something how that you’ve written about in your Bloomberg columns and which Frank Miller and I have testified about in front of the senate armed services committee, which is the fact that we are now facing a totally unprecedented situation in which the United States has to deter too. And I wouldn’t even say near peers, I mean, certainly Russia in some respects is not just pure, it has potentially superior nuclear forces at least numerically to ours. And China is rapidly moving towards being a peer. I mean if you look at department of defenses reports on Chinese military power. Their projections are that the Chinese will be up at the level that we’re limited to under the NewStar treaty of fifteen fifty warheads, sometime around two thousand and thirty five, which is not that far away.

So, Jake, Sullivan noted that and offered to unconditionally have negotiations with both Russia and China on these very important arms control issues that is to say not linking them to you know other issues, like the South China Sea or Ukraine, the Chinese were pretty quick to say they have no interest in this, which is a standard a position that the PRC has taken for many years that they’re not interested in what they call superpower arms control and President Putin in his remarks at the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum Not sure. I mean, this is, you know, this is not an r rated podcast. So I I can’t really actually even say what his response was, but suffice it to say was an invitation to the, you know, United States National Security Advisor to perform an unnatural act on Putin. So I think Hal you’re right, the prospects for arms controller pretty slim right now. I want to wrap up by sort of going to the question of what surprised you most as you put this together, Hal, and Tom be interested in what you found most surprising in the essays.

I know what my candidate is, but Now I’m I’m interested in what you found really surprising.

The number one thing that most surprised me is that I’m still on speaking terms with everybody who participated in this Project, I’ve done edited volumes before, that is by no means assured, and so I was surprised and delighted by by that and take a lot of pride in it actually. But but more seriously, you you you could pick a number of of essays that I think will revise the conventional wisdom in in one way or another. Let me just mention two that I like quite a lot. One was written by Matt Krenig, and it is a somewhat subversive take on Machiavelli pointing out that Machiavelli was actually a a proponent of Republican forms of government, and that in some ways, he was, as Matt calls him, the father of of modern strategy in the way that he thought about the relationship between essentially political ends and the use of whatever means one has to use in order to achieve them. In some of those ways, he prefigures ideas that we see from clausewitz and others.

The up which leads me to the second one, which I think is is surprising, which is Huston’s essay on on clausewitz, is, I think, probably the most explicitly revisionist piece in in the book, because what Hugh is arguing is essentially that we’ve all gotten clausewitz wrong, that essentially the the translation of of clausewitz that went gangbusters and during the cold war, basically rewrote clausewitz for the purposes of the cold war. And that what he was really saying in a number of cases about war, about strategy, about different types of conflicts was somewhat different than we think we understand. And and so I think that essay is is going to really shake up the the field of clausewitz studies, and I look forward to seeing the reaction that it

Of course, that addition of clausewitz was published by Princeton University press and came out coterminously with the second volume of new makers. So Tom, what what did you find surprising? And then I’ll tell you what I found really surprising.

Well, I I won’t I won’t give you surprising I Will Saletan, first, I I learned a lot from reading the essays. And I think, again, it’s a it’s it’s a tribute to what Howell’s put together here and the the breadth and diversity of the essays. And even more than that, I’ll say that I will learn a lot more when I continue to read the book, which is a book that you learn a lot from on the first reading, but like any good book I expect to learn more the next time I read it and when I reread it again and reread it again. The other thing that I would say and it wasn’t so much surprising as it was reassuring, which was you know, I think we we look, we live in an age today where it’s so easy to fall into strategic nihilism. Say like this idea of strategy is just sort of a it’s an artifact and real people can’t are not competent enough to formulate, let alone, implement successful strategies.

I think what this book reassured me of was the fact that that’s false. Then in fact, you know, they’re perfectly mortal human beings are capable of doing good strategy. And I think that’s I think that’s a very important lesson for us today in in twenty twenty three.

The the chapter that I found and and I agree with Tom, I think this is gonna be something I return to, you know, periodically, this volume and we’ll be learning more from it in years to come because all these things of course take on kind of different meanings as events play out. But you mentioned it earlier, Hal, essay by our friend, Dema Adomski, about the two Marshalls, Andy Marshall and Marshall Olarkov, and their relationship to the so called revolution and military affairs. It was a juxtaposition that you know I hadn’t really thought about, you know, although I kind of knew that it was there, but, I mean, I think FEMA really teases it out. And one of the things I took from that was at least a part of an answer to the conundrum about why the Russian military intervention in Ukraine has been so different from the way General Gerasimov and other Russian theorists had written about the conduct of war. I mean, and it’s sort of a point that Tima is implicit in Dema’s book, which is the Russians are capable of really great deep thought about war and conflict, but not very good at executing it.

And so this is that was one of these things that both surprised me and helped solve a kind of contemporary puzzle. And as I think an example of why this book is so rich and and deserves such a a wide readership. Well, we’ve we’ve run out of time because we could go on and on because there is just so much in this book but I wanna thank Hal Brands, the long suffering editor of the new makers of modern strategy, how you were a model editor I have to say in terms of my own experience. And Tom Mankin, author of a very important essay in his book. Thank you for joining us on Shield of the Republic, and you can purchase new makers of modern strategy from Amazon or directly from Princeton University Press, I commend it to all of our listeners.

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