Initial NS6 Post; is Sun Tzu still right?

Gents,

As per the 2d QTR TNG Guidance, we will make a noble attempt at using this blog site as a professional forum.  Primarily we will use it to share observations and thoughts regarding the No Slack Professional Reading List.  Secondarily we will also use it to share additional thoughts on our profession; thoughts that we have developed from reading and thinking about other topics outside the reading list.  I will use my first post as an opportunity to exercise the secondary function; specifically to discuss my thoughts regarding the BCT LPD with Dr. Kori Schake and how it relates to another book and a Sun Tzu quote I received via e-mail.

As you may know (or may not given most of you were likely still fully engaged at Fort Knox), the BCT had its second LPD last Thursday.  The guest speaker was Dr. Kori Schake from the Hoover Institution.  Among other duties and responsibilities, Dr. Schake is both a guest professor at West Point and a foreign policy advisor to the Mitt Romney campaign.  She is a well respected strategic thinker and she came to Fort Campbell to simply share her thoughts on how she saw the world, in particular as it relates to foreign and military affairs.

Dr. Schake has an interesting perspective on globalization.  She does not see the current "connectedness" as anything new but rather as an evolution on how the world has been coming together in various stages since the 16th century.  She sees this current round of globalization as a phenomena on how information is being shared with a resultant erosion of the states' monopoly on information.  The states that are most struggling with this erosion tend to be Muslim societies but this has more to do with political culture than Islam.  The reason the erosion is so threatening to Muslim political culture is because information globalization can be equated to Americanization.  This Americanism is inherently destabilizing not because our values our bad but because, as our history and present reflect, getting to and maintaining Americanism is very, very hard.  Dr. Schake went on to provide several examples of how this dynamic is playing out in several regions of the world and where instability could lead to military intervention.

Dr. Schake's LPD coincided with me finishing a chapter from Gideon Rose's book How Wars End.  In this particular chapter, Rose explores how the U.S. fights war on a macro scale.  Essentially, we clear, hold and build.  We defeat the enemy (clear); we occupy the foreign soil so the enemy force does not recuperate (hold); then recognizing that holding is costly and politically unsustainable we attempt to establish stable institutions reflective of our values (build).  This macro strategy naturally follows from the fact our wars tend to have military, economic and political connotations.  Military to eliminate security threats; economic to protect and acquire foreign resources and markets; and political-a quest to spread American ideals and institutions abroad.

The night after the LPD, I received an e-mail from another strategic thinker in the Pentagon.  The e-mail was a simple quote from Sun Tzu:  "Victorious warriors win first then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win."

So given Dr. Schake's view on emergent instability and Rose's view on the U.S. method of war, is Sun Tzu still right?

I don't think so.

In Sun Tzu's day, war was linear, symmetric and contiguous.  Though the variables were numerous, the definition of winning is such a war could remain relatively static.  Today's wars are nonlinear, asymmetric, non-contiguous and given the the hyper-connectedness of information and peoples' reaction to it, the variables are infinite.  In such an environment, the definition of winning must remain dynamic.  This fact is only exacerbated by the fact that once we go to war, we tend to go beyond clearing to take on holding and building as well, ie. the very nature of our intervention changes.  And in such an environment, we will go to war because we think we must given the information at the time.  After hostilities commence, the warriors will then innovate towards whatever definition of winning emerges.

Think of Clausewitz paradoxical trinity - violence, chance and politics (culture and reason).  In the future, it may be that the triangle becomes increasingly irregular with chance and politics being not even fixed and being far more significant than violence.

Welcome your feedback.

bps