Trump’s Generals Must Be Willing to Sacrifice Their Careers (w/ Elliot Cohen) | Command Post

Hi, I'm Ben Parker from the Bullwork. Welcome back to another episode of Command Post on the Bullwork Takes Feed. I am joined as always by our very own lieutenant general, Mark Hurtling, and a special guest friend of the Bullwork friend of Command Post, for sure, Dr. Elliot Cohen, who is the Arleigh Berkterian Strategy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Professor Emeritus is Strategy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, my former professor, and author of the new book, The Strategist, which is out on Tuesday. We both read it, and we cannot wait to talk about it. You can get it wherever books are sold, starting Tuesday, you can pre-order it now. Dr. Cohen, welcome to the program. Well, Ben, it's great to be back with you, and my old friend, Mark Hurtling, as well. Let's, like, family. Well, I think I have to amend something you said a minute ago, Ben, because not only is Elliot all of those things you mentioned and a friend of the Bullwork, but he's a friend of both of ours, and I have to state, he was your professor. He was not my professor at Johns Hopkins, but he, I did get invited by him once to attend one of the staff rides, the World War I staff ride, when our youngest son was a student of Dr. Cohen's. And so I've been hearing about Dr. Cohen for years and years from both our family member and from my good friend, Ben, on the Bullwork. So we're so happy to see you, Elliot, and really fascinated by the book, both of us read it. It's released when, again, what is it really states? It's October, October 20th. By the way, I should also add to what you just said. I have a very vivid memory of visiting with you in Iraq. That's right, in the middle of a sandstorm. You came with a group of individuals to see how we were going, as I recall. Yeah, so I think it was when I was counselor, and I was coming with Doug Loot, who was the Deputy National Security Advisor, and I got to see you exercise command, and that leadership at that level, and an inspiring thing that was too, which I hope means you'll be very gentle about the book. Well, thank you, and we will, but I do remember that occasion. It was great. Thank you for reminding me, and you didn't report on me, not being a good strategist in the book, so I guess I'm okay so far. I'm careful. I'm careful with people who do podcasts. Okay, Ben, take it away. You've got the first question. Sure, I mean, it was a really interesting book. I had a lot of questions in a good way, so I can't wait to start talking about it. But the first one, I wanted to ask, a little bit of background, if people have been able to read the book yet. The book defines strategy in its sort of most classical sense, which is strategy is about using force, or the threat of force to achieve a country's aims. It's national security aims. It's whatever it wants to do. And the question I have is who does strategy? You have these great examples of Churchill at the right of the United States, centering into World War II, sort of manipulating the alliance to get what he wants and secure Britain's place in the world and all of that. So is it one person at the very top who does strategy in a country or a group of people? Is it mostly civilians? Is it military officers? And what role does the citizen have in strategy for those of us who are not in government or in who maybe just are fans of command post and rereading the book? What should we take from it about our role in strategy? Sure, so I, as you know, I took a deliberately very restrictive definition of strategy. In part, because I have felt for some time that the word has gotten bloated and to cover a wide range of things which make very little sense. And I think it's also gotten the way of people thinking very hard about the core of this book, which is the use of military power. And people would like to talk about everything else for a whole bunch of reasons. And I wanted to stay focused on that. I'm very clear, by the way, I am not a strategist. I have taught the subject. I've had some students who've gone on to become strategists, but that's not really what I do. I think when you talk about real strategists, it's a very small group of people, civilians in military, at the very top of government, who not only kind of forge the ideas that animate the conduct during the war, but actually then are in a position to oversee and direct the implementation. One of my points is, it's a mistake to think of strategy as just being about ideas. It's also about implementation. So where does that leave the rest of us? Well, I would say a couple of things. First, as citizens in a democratic republic, it's our job to hold our leaders, political leaders and military leaders accountable for what they do well and what they do poorly. And to be able to form an accurate judgment of that, you have to know something about the activity in which they are engaged. I would also say, and this is in a way why I'm in the field to begin with, it's very, very interesting. And I think if you want to understand past conflicts and a lot of this book is about history, if you want to understand how we got to where we are, then you should know something about, you should know something about strategy, but the actual strategist, really very few, I think. So my next question is, in that case, for whom did you write this book? Is it for people like me who are interested and sort of tangentially, maybe professionally related to strategy, but at a great remove? Or is it for people who are interested in just learning more about it? And why did you decide, you list a bunch of the other works of strategy, makers of modern strategy or Lawrence Friedman's writings that people can go to? Why did you decide that they needed to be a book that was this digestible and accessible for people on a subject that is this complicated and elevated? Well, let me begin with that last question, which is, I deliberately decided to write a book. And I'll give you the profile as opposed to the front of it. And the reason why I did that is, most people to be perfectly blunt about it don't read excessively long books. And I want this to be a book that will be read and that people will really think about. Look, I do believe in writing for people who are simply curious about a topic, but as I said earlier on, I believe in writing for citizens who are in a position to influence things. And I wouldn't underestimate what you do with a podcast or what you do with a bulwark in terms of helping to set a political environment and to hold people to account. That's absolutely what we should all be doing. But my point is that in order to understand that subject, you have to go into it fairly deeply to go back again to the question of why I decide to write it. First, I decided to write it a short book, which actually takes a lot of work. It's a lot easier to write a long book in many ways than a short book. I'm also really writing it towards the end of my career. I'm retired now from Hopkins, I'm at CSAS. And it is the product of about 40 years plus of teaching and thinking, but also a certain amount of government service. And of course, I've been in the Washington DC area for about 36, 37 years now, and have been in a position to see a lot of powerful people, including people who are making strategy strategists at work. And so I thought I had something to add by virtue of having been, I think, somebody once called an observer participant, a very modest participant, but a very close observer with an unusual perspective. And so I tried to add that element as well. I've got one more question, but I think it properly belongs at the end. So general. I hope you have more than one more bend, because this is going to be a great conversation. Elliott, if I can, you just lifted your book up and turned it sideways. And it struck me because the, the, the tone that I read on strategy was one year student, my son gave me a couple of Christmas as ago. And that was Laurence Friedman's strategy. Yes. And that is not as thin as yours. That's about, I think, about 900 or a thousand pages long. And it takes the history of strategy. Yours really got into the living room language I thought of strategy. The, I thought the most intriguing chapter and I didn't expect it in this book was your chapter six on the strategist virtues. And you list several virtues that strategist should possess. And truthfully, it was fascinating because I teach leadership to MBA students. I teach a little bit of strategy to them. And I try and make them all values based. You call them virtues. I would call them values, but you list a couple of them empathy, curiosity, which I think is a critical element of of any thinker humility, which was interesting, honesty and courage. I actually think humility is something that all great leaders possess. And it's, and it's an earned virtue. So I'm wondering in that particular chapter, you didn't pick too many virtues, too many values, but can you be a brilliant striker? strategy with a strategist without being a good person. - Oh, yes. - All of those virtues is being associated with good people. And can you be a brilliant strategy and kind of be a jerk at the same time? - Oh, I think, unfortunately, I think you can be a real stinker. (laughing) And have most of those virtues. So for example, and I'm actually trying to be pretty clear about that. So when I talk about honesty, I'm not saying, I'm not, you know, George Washington, I cannot tell a lie, I cut down the cherry tree. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about honesty in the sense of being able to admit to yourself what the truth really is about things, which is very, very hard to do as, you know, from senior position leadership. And it's one of the things that's always struck me when I see very, very powerful people. Being empathetic, you know, monsters can be empathetic in that they can sort of get inside the skins of their victims and imagine what it's like. And for, you know, certain kinds of sadistic personalities. I think empathy is, you know, it's one of their traits. People have been very, very brave to talk about courage. And awful causes. And I think that's, you know, also all the, what all this adds up to, I mean, I would like to think that the best strategies are the best human beings. I'm not sure that that's always the case. I wish it were so. And I think if you have these virtues, the chances are probably a little bit better that you're a good person. But, you know, I don't, alas, I'm not sure you can, you can always bet on it. You know, I deliberately also chose the word virtues because I know a lot of people would go virtue, strategy went, what the hell's this about? And I think it's important because one of the things I suppose I'm reacting against is the idea that strategy is a form of esoteric military knowledge and that it is, it is primarily about knowledge. That it is, you know, either mysterious secrets or arcane principles or something like that. Or that it's, or yes, or, and it's all stuff that's going on inside your head. And I don't think that's true at all. I mean, I think that's, it's obviously absolutely essential to have ideas. But, but one of the points I try to make is, for example, when I talked about political objectives earlier on in the book is, you know, all this stuff is going to change. So, and the question is, how are you best positioned to adjust to the fact that the political objectives that you went into a war with are not going to be the political objectives that you come out of the war with? And so, you know, for that, I end up actually falling back on what for, you know, for one of a better word, although, you know, values is fine too, virtues is the word that I, that I ended up choosing to use. Well, I mean, if I can, I'm going to dig down a little bit on the one that you didn't mention as humility. Because one of the greatest challenges I think and I've reflected on in senior leadership is that the very qualities that help individuals rise to positions of authority who are making the strategic decisions, qualities like competence, decisiveness, strong relief in their own judgment, can become liabilities when they begin making strategic decisions. You emphasize humility and curiosity. In a world where you start becoming a strategic leader, an ego is associated with who you are and what you're doing. How can leaders maintain the kinds of things that they need to make sharp decisions and strategic judgment by maintaining their humility and curiosity? What's the trick on that? So you put your finger on a critical problem and it's one that only gets worse. The longer people have been in power, you know, my experiences, and I think in a certain way we're seeing this with the current Secretary of Defense, that once they've been in power for a couple of years, they feel I've got this and it's much harder to change things. You know what I think the best antidote to that is marrying the right person. You're exactly right. And I think Ben and I both agree with that. And I'm really not joking. There's a wonderful episode. I don't think I quoted it in the book where in-- so it's late June of 1940, maybe beginning of July 1940, the French are out of the war. You know, the Nazis have occupied just about all of Western Europe. Soviet Union is hostile. The United States, you know, President Roosevelt has not been communicating as much with Winston Churchill as much as he should. You know, the blitz is coming. The yes, they got everybody off the short done clerk, but they're, you know, without weapons. And there's this amazing letter that Clementine Churchill slips under the door of Winston's bedroom. They had separate bedrooms, but that's just the way they did things back then. In which she gently calls him to task for being kind of caustic and intemperate and not treating his subordinate as well. And she says, you know, I've been used to everyone who worked for you, loving you as well as admiring you. And you cannot behave this way. It's amazing. Partners are incredible. I told Ben a story when I was first name commander of US Army Europe that we were going from Rome to a NATO conference in the middle of Rush Hour traffic. And my hard car was surrounded by Italian carabineria. And they were clearing a path for us through Rush Hour traffic. And we're going 60 miles an hour as these guys are around us. And my wife turned to me in the back of the car. And it was like our first week, my first week in command. And she said, you know, you're really not this important. [LAUGHTER] And from then on, it was all downhill. I have another question for you. You had a chapter in the book, which I thought was fascinating, called holistic thinking. And I'm curious-- a two-part question. And I'll turn it over to Ben. How do you think we can develop strategic judgment? Because it just doesn't appear in the next generation of leaders. And is it-- what are the ways we can do that beyond professional military education, historical study, war games, and those kind of things? And if you could redesign-- because you're having-- once been a part of the Defense Department-- if you could redesign how we educate and develop future American strategists, how would you do so? Oh, what a great question. You know, we're both teachers. There is a wonderful collection of essays that was put out by the Harvard Business School, originally edited by C. Rowland Christensen, who, as he used to describe himself, a seventh generation Danish school teacher, who taught a course that I remember taking on how to teach. And it was mandatory for anybody to the business school because they had to learn how to use the case study method. And they opened it up to a couple of ringers from the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, where I was the best pedagogical experience in my life. The name of the book is called Education for Judgment. And his point was, the beauty of the case study system is that it is about developing judgment. It is one of the reasons why we do those staff rides. Honestly, I have felt all along-- so for the benefit of people don't know. When I came to Johns Hopkins, we launched this staff ride program, which ended up being two-day domestic staff rides in one international one for about four or five days during spring break. And I have long considered that to be the most important thing that I did, because it's immersive. It's going into the totality of a problem. It's driven by role plays, so you're trying to take very seriously the way people make judgments. I think that's the key. Particularly for adults, there's no question that active learning, things like the case study method, but also history are there. It's not so much, I think, a total redesign of the curriculum. It's having the right teachers and them having the right mission. The mission has to be developing judgment, and particularly developing judgment at that highest level. I think fruitfully escapes people. If you hire a political scientist, they will sometimes think, well, my job is to teach them political science. If you hire an historian, it's, well, my job is to teach them history. If you-- forgive me for saying so. You hire a lieutenant colonel or a colonel or commander or captain of the Navy. It's to teach them to be just like me. Or, you know, how to run a brigade or but which is not what this is all about. And I think that it is a terrific pedagogical challenge. The way I would approach it is, and I think this is something actually that will come up once the shadow of Mr. Hexeth is departed. First make it clear to the higher level professional military educational institutions that that is their job. That they are in the education business. I mean, in some ways, alas, a lot of folks are currently against the idea of these institutions being about education. And then it's a question of how you recruit faculty. I continue to think the best thing is the blend of civilians and military people. And that you really focus on excellence in that domain. And it's not easy, you know, teaching is as you well know. It's an art, it's a discipline. You don't learn it right away. And people have to be coached through it and worked with it. It's why I, you know, for many years while I was at SIS, I ran a workshop on how to teach in this field. Because I felt that there was a real, a real need for it. The last thing I'll just say is I do think by the way, there is going to be, or there should be, you know, a really serious assessment of professional military education, including at the most junior levels, once this period in our history is over. I know I promise I'd ask one more question at the end, but I do have a follow-up to the question of a professional military education. And it's a question about how to educate the civilians and the politicians. Years ago, you and I were having a conversation in your office. I was a student at SIS and SIS was designed to be a professional school that sends people into government to work on foreign affairs problems at the, you know, staff and career level. And I said to you, this is great that all these people are learning economics and languages and strategy and all these things, who are then going to go on to be the staffers for the actual people make the decisions, who are at business school or law school or running card dealerships or running for town council. So you've written, you wrote another book about how the dialogue between the civilians and the material is always an unequal one and the civilians are always ultimately have to be in charge. So it doesn't seem to me like we have a lot of good strategic thinking in our civilian leaders right now. How do we change that? Is that just a matter of picking better people or is it a matter of changing the credentials they need or how they're educated? How do you think about that? So a couple of thoughts. One is I think to the extent that it's possible you try to figure out how to deliver education to some of those folks in ways that they can do it. I mean, they're not going to go off to a war college for a year by the time they're in senior positions, you know, they're not going to take off for a master's degree. On the other hand, I think a lot of people who've had leadership positions in business in politics and education. The good ones have learned to learn, you know, they know they don't need anything and honestly what I always felt at size was what I can do is I can prepare people to be outstanding staff in their early, the early part of their career to help those people and the good ones will recognize really good staff and they will listen to them. And take advantage of it, which is, by the way, is one of the reasons why I don't know if you remember, I never is when I gave, you know, memorandum assignments, pretend you're thus and such and you're writing with us and such, I never said, pretend you're the secretary of state or pretend you're the secretary of defense. You're working for the secretary of state and the thing is, you know, people can go from a master's degree program in very, very short order to be in a position where they are writing memorandum that will go directly to somebody that senior or they will be, you know, filling the role of a special assistant. So that you can exercise a lot of influence as an advisor and in a way that's that's how the book begins it's called the strategist's advisor, which is how I, you know, describe some parts of my career, you can really work on that and have a real impact there. But for the rest, you know, I just think it's the nature of things you're not going to get people who are, you know, who kind of move laterally into this world from the business world or law or something like that, they're not going to get the same background, just hope that they'll recognize the value of the people who do have it. You know, when you were in Iraq, I remember I do remember one thing you said now that you reminded me of it, we were sitting around a table after a battle update brief and it was a time that was particularly difficult for me, we were, we were in the mode of constantly taking three steps forward and two steps back on a good day and some days four steps back. In your book, you talk a little bit about how a strategist distinguishes between a temporary setback that requires perseverance and evidence that the strategy is actually working or that you have to change because it's fundamentally flawed. You talk a little bit about that how someone who's in the arena at the time, who's continually questioning him or her, their actions will overcome that and get back on the right track. Well, first and foremost, don't you think it's about time we were on a first name basis? Keep her burning back to Dr. Cohen. I'm sorry. Well, and I'll have to begin calling a general hurtling and I don't want to do that. We don't want to do that. Look, that's a that's a powerful question and there isn't an easy answer to it. At the beginning of the book, I have my seven strategic questions. And the last one I always say is, what is the theory of victory, which put it even more simply, why do we think what we're going to do or what we are doing is going to work? And one of the points I try to make there is that unfortunately, this is the kind of question which you can't ask very often because it's a distraction from doing whatever you're doing it by definition, it instills out, but periodically you have to ask it. And I guess here's where I say I would say real judgment does come in. I mean, that ability to discriminate between stuff that is, you know, just the way things are. And as you say, some days are three steps forward, two steps back. Sometimes it's two steps forward, three steps back. And other times, you know, this is an indication of something that's really wrong. I suppose the only thought I would, I would have is if you really have reasonable evidence that there's a fundamental assumption here that is wrong. That is probably the time to question the strategy. So actually, I think it's an example, I mentioned the book, if I didn't, I should have. Yeah, when I was counselor of the State Department in 2007, 2008, I began spending a lot of time in Afghanistan. The great thing about being counselors, you're, you're disposable. I mean, they don't, the department doesn't really need you, but, but you're senior enough that you can get answers. That senior, other senior people have to treat you with a modicum of respect. And you get to listen in on the big people's conversations. So what struck me at the time was the secretary was being briefed and the president that 75% of the violence in Afghanistan was occurring in only 10% of the districts there. And working with a, a wonderful thoughtful Australian soldier scholar, David Kilcolon, it just doesn't feel right. So we began digging in and, you know, and you begin asking very simple questions like how many districts are there in Afghanistan 376? Do we have people in all of them? No. How do we know how much violence is occurring and once we're not present? How do you define violence? Well, violence against us. That's the right measure and insurgency. Then you dig a little bit further and you realize the way the counting rules work is if you diffuse an ID, that counts as a violent act. That's what happens up in the database. And in a case, it's kind of an absurd metric, you know, if you go into one valley and you have a dozen fire fights and you wipe out the Taliban there. And in another valley, there are no fire fights, but every now and then a village head gets assassinated in the body left in the town square, which one do you think the Taliban controls? The real conclusion that I came to is actually things are going badly for us in Afghanistan and that the state of strategy didn't work. David came up with a brilliant solution to this, he, we got the go-no-go maps that the UN makes for non-governmental organizations. And I just sat in front of the secretary and said, okay, this is what it looked like in 2001, after we came in, 2002, 2003 and so on. And basically it was divided into red, which is, don't go there, you're going to die, yellow, be careful, green, you can go. And you could just see the green and the yellow shrinking and the red growing. That was a case where I think, you know, there was just like a fundamental assumption which you're saying, this is not right. The idea that the violence in this war is really localized because that was, you know, the key takeaway for a beleaguered precedent and a beleaguered secretary of state was who were worrying about Iraq all the time was, okay, you know, most of the bad stuff is happening in a very limited area in Afghanistan. The rest is going fine. That assumption was wrong. And I think it's when you run across moments like that where there's an assumption that's critical to how you're proceeding that has become questionable. That's the point where you really need to think about some sort of serious change. Yeah. You know, you wrote this book and I think it's timely. So I'm going to follow up on your statement just now and ask this question. We're in a period that some might call strategic dysfunction. Can you assign the attributes that cause it to be the way it is right now with our strategic leaders and why things are so disconnected from the kinds of topics you discuss in the book. And as kind of a closing comment on that particular question, what would not necessarily this president, but if you were advising any president, what would you tell him or her about the qualities that you would consider indispensable in someone that they were asking to give them advice, either a chairman of the joint chief or a combat and commander or the national security advisor in terms of strategy. I know that's a hard one, but there we in such strategic dysfunction right now. So I think what we're in the middle of is there's obviously central issues, the personality of the president, how he does business, absence of process, the, I mean, there's a long litany, which, you know, you've written about, I've written about, Ben's written about. But I think it's also important to remember that in there are certain ways in which this president has been a as much a catalyst or a symptom as a cause. He isn't some ways of cause. I mean, this is, we've never had anybody like this before, you know, and in all the ways that you and I could discuss at a long time, but he's also the catalyst of things or a different way to think about it, he may be an accelerant. So for example, the impatience with the Europeans over defense spending, it's been building up for a very, very long time. I mean, I wouldn't say Trump is Bob Gates with very bad manners, but the truth is, if you look at Gates' speeches when he was President Obama's Secretary of Defense, they were pretty ferocious. Part of this is, you know, we're dealing with a new world in which you have China, which is economically comparable to us, technologically comparable to us. We haven't had to deal with that kind of challenge in a very, very long time. We have the disruptions dropped by the information technologies by social media. So it's not, I mean, I think the first thing I would say to a new president, to presumably is, better is don't assume that all of the dysfunction has been caused by your predecessor. A lot of it has. That's the easy stuff to remedy in some ways. The second thing I would say if you're picking advisors, the most important thing is this somebody who will be candid with you, really candid, which is really, really hard. You know, I, there are number of occasions where I met with the president of the United States President Bush, who, you know, was willing to hear me out. I'd been invited into the Oval Office, and it's very hard to look at the president squarely in the eye and say, you know, I just think you're screwing up, or things are much worse than you think. That's a very difficult thing to do. The third thing I would say is try to divide the issues that you're up against between those things where there's going to need to be some sort of dramatic shift or change. And those things which are really, a last going to be incremental. So for example, the amount of damage done to our aligned system is one of the worst setbacks to American strategy to our position in the world that we've ever seen. The way you're going to restore, there won't be a single dramatic thing that will restore that. George Schultz, who is Ronald Reagan's secretary of the state very famously said that managing alliances is like gardening. You know, you're hoeing, you're weeding, you're watering, you're fertilizing. It's just steady and incremental work. And that's really, I think, how one has to approach it. There'll be other things where you'll have to do some fairly dramatic things. Lastly, I want to say, and actually, I'd be very curious to know what your view of this is. So it's been widely reported that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thinks that his only job is to say, okay, here are the mill, you want us to do X, Y and Z. Here are the military options. And here's what we think, you know, it would potentially cost and casualties or money. And that's it, as opposed to saying, I think this is an unwise course of action. And I don't think that's right. It may be necessary with this president alas. But I think, you know, the president's senior military advisors have to be capable of both saying, I think this is unwise. But then when they make the decision, you go, okay, you're the one who gets paid to make the decisions, not me. That's not an easy thing. I would add to that that I'm a firm believer in that the role of the chairman is as a principal military advisor along with the secretary of defense. However, context is involved as it is any time and leadership in my view. And when you have, as you mentioned before, a group of people who only tell the president what they want to hear as a military officer, you not only have to tell them what he needs to hear, but perhaps you ought to take the advice one step farther further and give him the risk and the potential for mitigating those risk or not being able to mitigate those risk and what it would mean to the country. Now he, the president is still the key decision maker. He can ignore you. But I think it's the duty, especially if you take a look around the room and realize there's not a whole lot of other people in that room, especially in the current cabinet, that can give implications of military action, then the role of the chairman in this particular situation, even more so than the secretary, because he has a little bit of military experience, but not enough at the strategic and operational level to say, okay, if you're going to choose this particular option of the ones I've given you, here's what we expect to may happen or could happen, and do you really want to face that. But that gets into a much longer discussion, and I don't think, what do I know? I've never been in the room with them, but from what's been reported, the current president doesn't have the patience to try and understand the implications of risk and risk mitigation. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. You know, at various points in both the previous, the first trumpet term and this one, I've had the opportunity to talk to some very, very senior military leaders who have been, you know, they wanted thoughts about how do you deal with a situation like this. And my line has always been, you're not allowed to quit. You're allowed, you're certainly, you're expected to disobey an unlawful order. You are absolutely expected to be candid in the ways you were just talking about. And unfortunately, the thing you have to be willing to risk is being fired, which nobody likes. And I think it's particularly hard when you're a four star, you know, you're used to a certain level of deference and you're at the top of your profession. So the idea that you're going to be sacked is really uncomfortable. But you have to be willing to accept that. You don't get to, what you don't get to do is just say working for this guy's intolerable. I agree with that, and Ben and I have talked about that before on this show about the loyalty that a very senior officer has, not just to the Constitution and to their boss, but also to the soldiers that can't quit because they're under enlistment. So there's a three-headed loyalty that's involved, and I think that's critically important. And most Americans don't understand that because I think a lot of Americans would love to see a generation of senior ranking officers quit and do it very openly. And I agree with what you just said, you can't do it. It would be extraordinarily damaging to our norms of civil military relations. Because it's also a thing that Trump and Hexath would love to see. I mean, that is what they are trying to accomplish by reducing the ranks of senior officers. That's good point. Undoubtedly. It's also a political act, a four-star, in particular, quitting over whatever the issue is in a public way. That becomes a political act, and it's that's a pretty bad precedent, I think. This really fascinated me. You talked earlier about changing political objectives and how what you end up wanting to do at the end of a war is not necessarily what you wanted to do at the beginning. That can be good, because things go better than you expected. It can be bad. We've seen some of that lately. You write that victory is kind of a slippery concept, and it was in the course of making another point. You sort of moved on and I went, no, no, wait, say more about that. So now I'm going to ask you, please say more about that. How do you know when you've won? Well, one of the points that I make, which is really, you know, bound to frustrate people, I taught at the Naval War College for four years, and unfortunately part of the role of the civilian faculty was to be really frustrating for the hapless kernels and naval captains there, because what they wanted, I think, was a set of victory conditions and objectives, which in a way kind of mirror what you're familiar with from tactics, you know, if the mission is to take the hill, you kind of know when you've taken the hill, maybe a follow on mission, which is different, but it's pretty clear cut. I think that's true at the tactical level. It's also basically true at the operational level. You know, we're going to conduct a big scheme of maneuver that'll get us to Baghdad or something. Unfortunately, when you get to the strategic level, I just don't think that applies. You have political objectives. They are absolutely transformed by war. One of the, I mean, I give a number of examples, but one of them is, think about it this way. Why did the British go to war in September 1939? At least, nominally, it's to rescue the Poles. By 1945, the Poles, who had fought valiantly in Italy, where they were the ones who took Monte Cassino in Normandy, all the way into Germany, who had provided a substantial percentage of the flyers in the RAF during the battle of Britain. The Poles were prevented, prohibited from marching in the victory parade. It was a disgraceful thing, by the way. And that was because Soviets had occupied Poland, and the Soviets were now, you know, the more important allies, and so you were ditching one of your objectives, or it takes something a little bit less painful, and I think this is where it really hit me. You know, I ran the Air Force's study of the first Gulf War, and that had always been presented as, okay, this is the model. President Bush gets up there, he says, we've got four objectives. And whenever somebody has said that to me, I said, can you tell me what they were? And, usually they can't. So I said, okay, I'm going to tell you what they were. The first one was to ensure the safety and security of American citizens in the Persian Gulf. That was because the crisis began with Saddam Hussein taking a whole bunch of American hostages. They were all released before the shooting started. The only American citizens whose lives were in jeopardy were the soldiers and Marines and Airmen who were going to go into Iraq. So, okay, that objective kind of goes by the way, son. Second objective was getting the Iraqis out of Kuwait. That was a concrete objective, and that was achieved. The third objective was restoring the legitimate government of Kuwait, a somewhat dicey proposition given that, you know, here we are, a bunch of, it's a democratic republic, right? This is a hereditary monarchy in a country where, I think, barely a quarter of the population were citizens. And the fourth objective was ensure the security and stability of the Persian Gulf. Yeah, like that was really well achieved. The point is, and so we defaulted to the concrete objective, get them out of the Kuwait theater of operations. When you talk to political, when you talk to the senior decision makers, excuse me, which I did, there were unstated objectives. We intended Saddam Hussein to be overthrown. We just didn't want to say that, but we assumed that was going to happen. We wanted to go after the nuclear program, but we didn't really want to talk about it. And then there were other objectives that showed up without us thinking about it, which is we basically end up with a mission to both protect the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south, at least with a certain degree of air cover. So in all objectives, there's the implicit, there's the unstated, sometimes I think people may not even acknowledge their objectives to themselves at a certain level. You know, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I think, was determined to use World War II to break up the colonial empires. It kind of did, to a certain extent, that was not something he was going to say publicly, or he kind of hinted at it, but not very directly. So this question of objectives is really very murky. And I think people have to, unfortunately, they sort of have to accept that. And one of the things I think people find hardest to accept is that sometimes you're going to war because the alternative is worse. You know, it's not like building a bridge where you say, I'd be great if we had a bridge across this river. It's, we're doing this because if we don't do it, worse things are going to happen. So obviously, victory has a meaning for population, it has a meaning at certain levels of war. But in strategy, you're just going to move on from one thing to another. And any problem that you fix is going to breed other problems. And all you can hope is that this set of problems is better than the other set of problems that you would have had if you hadn't done anything. I think that's right. And actually, if it's okay, I want to ask one final question, which I am sure will be delighted to answer. This has come up in the comments of Command Pose multiple times. If people want to learn more about strategy, besides reading your book, The Strategist, which is out on Tuesday, what and how should they read? I know you have a really interesting answer to this question that people probably won't get anywhere else. Well, as I say in the book, I continue to think the best book on war in general is on war by Carlin Closowicz. I think it is the deepest thought about the nature of war. It is, of course, limited. He didn't talk about naval warfare. He didn't talk about aerial warfare, obviously. He's not writing about a time when technology played his larger role in war as it does now. There are a lot of limitations to it, but I think that's sort of the deepest thing. I think the second thing would be, it's important to read Sunza, in particular, the Art of War, partly because I think he's right about certain things, but to understand what strategy looks like, as seen from a completely different context, from a completely different cultural context, because the Western way of war is distinctive. Within the American way of war is very distinctive. The American way of war is very different from the German way of war, for example. I think after that, the thing to do is to go to history, both biography, as you can see behind me, I'm a Churchill fiend, and to read in depth into some key decision makers and leaders, and you'll find things in high places. For example, if somebody wanted to read one book by Churchill, they would teach you something about strategy. I wouldn't say the World War II memoirs. I would say his biography of the Duke of Marlboro. Six volumes, fantastic, beautifully written, still from a scholarly point of view, quite sound, because the Duke of Marlboro had to manage a very difficult coalition war, and that's what Churchill was writing about. I think you need to read history in some considerable width, so I'm echoing the great his story and Michael Howard is it. And you need to study some things in depth. You also need to study some things in width. And you know, do that for about 20 or 30 years and you'll be great. (laughing) How is that all it takes? - I mean, this is great. And one more time for our listeners, the strategy, how to think about war and politics. I am actually taking this. It's on the side of my desk here at home because I'm taking it to my class tonight and comparing it to Sir Lawrence's book on strategy and saying, which one would you rather read and then say, this is the one I'd rather read to? This is the best book I have read on strategy other than on war by Karl von Klauswitz and I think that's pretty high praise. - Wow, that's very high praise, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. - I will tell you, I attended the school of Advanced Military Studies at Leavenworth as a young major. And while there, we used to participate in what was called the Book of Day Club. So we had all sorts of military histories we had to read overnight and come back in and report. But the Klauswitz on war was a month-long seminar and every day was a book club dissecting his words and talking about and it's still relevant to me today as Ben Well knows because I keep citing it in some of my articles for the bulwark. So Elliot, thank you so much for your time, for your information, for your knowledge, but most of all for your friendship. - Yeah, same here, thank you both so much. - Thanks, and thank you everyone for watching, Command Post, we'll see you again next week.