The Classic Art of War Requires Integrating All Elements of Power

Only the study of history can prepare us for the strategic challenges of the future.

U.S. tanks preparing for the assault on Fallujah, November 4, 2004. Scott Nelson via Getty Images.

U.S. tanks preparing for the assault on Fallujah, November 4, 2004. Scott Nelson via Getty Images.

Response
Jan. 29 2025
About the author

H.R. McMaster retired from the U.S. Army in 2018 with rank of lieutenant-general, after serving in the Iraq and Afghan war. Between 2016 and 2018, he was the U.S. national security advisor and is currently a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

In Ran Baratz’s essay “What’s Wrong with the Postmodern Military” and Victor Davis Hanson’s response, titled “What We Have Forgotten About War,” the authors lament the disease of strategic incompetence in Israel and the United States. They also diagnose its causes and prescribe therapies. In so doing they advance arguments that are important to consider and act upon. The inability to employ military forces effectively in combination with other instruments of national power is dangerous as Israel and the United States face persistent threats to their security. Sadly, their examination of the erosion of strategic competence across eight decades indicates that we remain unlikely to learn from even our most recent strategic failures and disappointments.

Baratz and Hanson trace the erosion of competence to the displacement of classical strategy and military history with social science-based theories during the cold war. Baratz’s critique is consistent with that of Colin Gray in his 1971 Foreign Policy essay, “What Rand Hath Wrought,” in which Gray lamented the “economic conflict model” that “men of ideas” used without recognizing the impracticability of that model in “the world of action.” Their analysis is also consistent with my interpretation of U.S. failure in the Vietnam War in my 1997 book Dereliction of Duty. Robert McNamara, who served as secretary of defense from 1961–1968, and the “whiz kids” who joined him in the Pentagon viewed human relations through the lenses of rational-choice economics and systems analysis. Their conceit made them vulnerable to mirror-imaging an enemy driven by an ideology they did not comprehend.

Baratz points out that the belief that social-science theories combined with new technologies can reduce dramatically or eliminate the uncertainty of war is particularly problematic. He and Hanson agree that the orthodoxy associated with the “revolution in military affairs” or RMA in the 1990s considered war in a way that was alien to its nature. In a 2003 monograph on the principal assumption that underpinned the RMA-related concepts for future war, I observed that “despite its enthusiastic embrace, the assumption of near-certainty in future war is a dangerous fallacy” and predicted that “transformation efforts based on that assumption would disadvantage rather than advantage our forces and create vulnerability rather than build strength.”

In 2009, after returning from my third consecutive tour of duty in the Middle East where I saw how the belief in “dominant knowledge in future war” led to many of the frustrations encountered after the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I penned an essay for World Affairs titled “When Gadgetry Becomes Strategy.” In it I observed that, in Vietnam and the U.S. war in Iraq that began in 2003, a “fixation on American technological superiority and an associated neglect of the human, psychological, and political dimensions of war doomed one effort and very nearly the other.”

Hanson argues that social dynamics within “more affluent and leisured Western capitalist consensual societies” combine with the continued belief that technological advantage to inspire “self-restraint” and a rejection of “the traditional aims of war to defeat, humiliate, and win concessions from the defeated.” Baratz argues that postmodernist thought eroded the IDF’s military professionalism, diverted its focus away from its “traditional national-security objective—namely, to fight and defeat the enemy,” leaving the IDF ill-prepared to prevent, or respond effectively to, the heinous attacks of October 7,2023.

Baratz and Hanson are right to place equal blame on military leaders as well as their civilian bosses for softheaded thinking that resulted in strategic incompetence and failures in wartime. Their arguments resonate with what I learned from practical experience as well as from the study of history. In Afghanistan and Iraq I witnessed inconsistent and flawed strategies that did not satisfy the simple definition of strategy taught in the U.S. military’s professional education system: the intelligent identification, use, and coordination of resources for the successful attainment of an objective. Put more bluntly, strategy is the use of the military’s available means to achieve a desired end.

And I had concluded that strategic incompetence was a moral failure as well as a failure of logic and reason. As commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in the summer of 2005, I briefed my division and corps commanders on our plans for a major offensive operation in western Ninewa Province against al-Qaeda in Iraq (the organization that later became Islamic State). Our mission statement communicated clearly our intention to “defeat the enemy” in our area of operations and “set conditions for sustainable security” in the region. My senior commanders objected, asking “why do you have ‘defeat the enemy’ in your mission statement? We are not asking you to do that.” I responded that “we are engaged with modern-day barbarians who are the enemies of all civilized people, we have the means to defeat them, and, since we did come all this way, I thought we would knock it out.”

My answer did not go over well, but our soldiers, fighting alongside Iraqi Army and police units, inflicted a devastating defeat on the enemy and allowed life to return to normal for the people of a city and a region that had been beleaguered and living in abject fear for over a year. The true test of strategy, I came to believe, is whether a captain can explain to the soldiers in his or her company how the risks they will take and the sacrifices they may make will contribute to an end worthy of those risks and sacrifices.

I believed that the strategies in both Iraq and Afghanistan had become morally untenable because they did not describe to the American people how they would achieve outcomes worthy of the cost in blood and treasure. As in Vietnam, the wars of 9/11 suffered initially from a form of strategic narcissism based on the conceit that American military and technological prowess obviated the need to think deeply about the nature of the enemy or the political and human complexities of the war. That conceit was made possible through the neglect of history and, in particular, neglect of continuities in the very nature of war. It is easy to ignore continuities and assume that future war or future competitions short of war will be fundamentally different from the past.

Baratz is therefore right to call for a “return to a classical military mindset.” The problem with the orthodoxy of the RMA in the 1990s and today’s emerging theories of future war based on the assumption that artificial intelligence-related technologies render land warfare and close combat obsolete, is that they neglect continuities in the nature of war. To improve strategic competence, military and civilian leaders should study military history to develop an appreciation for four continuities, the neglect of which has contributed to strategic setbacks and failures in recent wars.

First, war is political. In Afghanistan and Iraq and, later, in Syria, our strategies violated the 18th-century philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that “war should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.”  Although they were limited by space, Baratz and Hanson might have devoted more attention to the need to consolidate military gains to achieve sustainable political outcomes. There was no simple or purely military solution to the problem of Vietnam just as there was no military-only solution for more recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and the multi-front war inflicted on Israel since October 7, 2023. As the IDF is experiencing in Gaza, successful military operations are not ends in and of themselves; they are only one instrument of power that must be coordinated with others to achieve and sustain political goals.

Second, war is human. As Hanson observed in his concluding paragraph, “human nature stays constant across time and space.” Indeed, people fight today for the same fundamental reasons the Greek historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor, and interest. In Vietnam, as was predicted, covert raids and “tit-for-tat” bombing did not convince Ho Chi Minh and the leaders of North Vietnam to desist from supporting the Vietnamese Communist insurgency in the South. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon, we have relearned that strategies that simply target enemy leaders or forces do not address the human as well as the political drivers of violence. That is why breaking the cycle of violence, restoring hope, reforming education, and isolating populations from ideologies that foment hatred and perpetuate violence are essential to enduring victory.

It is equally important to remember that the battles that comprise military campaigns and are the building blocks of victory are directed toward the disintegration of human groups. While Hanson is correct to remind us that killing and the prospect of death are inherent in war and it is vital to overmatch the enemy in battle, it is also important to apply firepower with discipline and discrimination lest the indiscriminate use of force undermine one’s objectives or lead to the undoing of moral character in military units and the erosion of the warrior ethos.

Third: war is uncertain. War is uncertain because it is political and human and because, as the saying goes, the enemy gets a vote. As Baratz points out, militaries must be capable of operating at sufficient scale and for ample duration to cope with uncertainty and impose its will on the enemy. Forces designed for efficiency based on flawed assumptions are likely to result in longer and costlier wars. And because the enemy has a say in the future course of events, military forces must be designed to operate under conditions of uncertainty and adapt continuously to retain the initiative. The United States Army’s recent decision to eliminate its reconnaissance and security squadrons from its light infantry brigades is utterly inconsistent with the lessons of recent and ongoing conflicts.

Fourth, war is a contest of wills. As General George Marshall observed in his address to the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in 1939, “In our democracy where the government is truly an agent of the popular will,” foreign policy and military policy are “dependent on public opinion,” and our policies and strategies “will be as good or bad as the public is well informed or poorly informed regarding the factors that bear on the subject.” The unexpected length and difficulty of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sapped American will. U.S. leaders did not devote sufficient effort to explaining what was at stake in those wars and how the sacrifices of their fellow citizens were contributing to a worthy outcome. War reporting focused on casualties or troop levels while portraying soldiers as victims who had no authorship over their fate. Over time, post-9/11 “endless wars” became conflated with the trauma of Vietnam and drained the reservoir of America’s will.

While it is proper to focus initially on improving the competence of the militaries in Western societies, I imagine that Baratz and Hanson would agree that it is also important to improve an understanding of war and warfare in government, academia, and the private sector. Understanding war is necessary if citizens are to grasp what is at stake and how they can help prepare for and ideally prevent it. Threats do not stop at the border and enemies will attempt to exploit vulnerabilities across all of society. Because new arenas of warfare transcend the limits of geography and reach into society and industry, every citizen should understand how they might contribute to defending the nation. Civilians play vital roles in countering hostile actions such as cyber-attacks and cyber-enabled information warfare. Engineers and scientists are vital for maintaining competitive advantages in military technology.

As the historian Zachary Shore observed, “the greatest source of national strength is an educated populace.” Reinvigoration of history in higher-level education is particularly important as many courses in diplomatic and military history have been displaced by theory-based international-relations courses that tend to mask the complex causality of events and obscure the profound cultural, psychological, social, and economic elements that distinguish cases from one another. Many universities do not teach military and diplomatic history or teach it only in relation to social history. Equating the study of military history to militarism is illogical. Thinking clearly about war and warfare is necessary for preventing as well as fighting wars. The analogy drawn by the late historian Dennis Showalter is apt: no one would ever accuse an oncologist of being an advocate for the disease he or she studies.

 

Full disclosure: Victor Davis Hanson and I are friends and colleagues. We occupy offices on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower at the center of Stanford University’s campus. Herbert Hoover founded the institution that bears his name a century earlier after witnessing the horrors of the Great War. Hoover, an orphan who graduated from Stanford University’s inaugural class and would later become America’s 31st president, resolved to do all he could to help prevent another war. The experience of World War I, a conflict that took the lives of over 16 million people, highlighted the need to understand the political and historical basis for violent conflict as critical both to preserving peace and ending wars. He meant the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace to be a place where scholars might study past wars to prevent future conflicts and preserve peace. As we know, however, the “war to end all wars” was instead the first of two world wars that marked the bloodiest century in human history. The tower that contains the vast collection of the Hoover Archive, a collection meant to provide scholars with materials that might help explain both the origins of wars and uncover prospects for peace, was completed in 1941, the year the United States entered World War II.

Hoover’s hopes that humanity would find a way to end war were thus dashed, and it is unlikely they will be fulfilled in the foreseeable future. But wars are best avoided, and it takes a good deal of political wisdom and effort to do so. Once one is in a war, however, it is best to win it, and to do so as swiftly and decisively as possible. New technologies may change tactics, but will not change the fundamental nature of war. And that nature can only be understood by the study of history and the classic art of integrating all elements of power and connecting military means to strategic ends. The future of Israel, and America, depends on whether generals and political leaders learn from the past.

More about: Iraq war, Military history, U.S. military