The Committee of Public Safety

Fighting Talk

Colin S. Gray’s Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy should be a great book. It should decisively fill the unmet need for a work that explains high Clausewitzian strategy to the masses.

In this it fails.

It is too self-referential, with Gray constantly referring to himself as “this strategist” or as a “practicing strategist”. There’s too much transparent humility, too many defenses against being a war monger, and too much insider jargon. It’s too stuck in 2006, a very dreary year that may hold little interest a generation from now. The construction of sentences is often ludicrously overwrought. It could use a good editor to strike out the layers of accretion that disguise what are actually some very good points. It reminds me of John Keegan’s A History of Warfare. A potentially great book by a distinguished author that is fatally flawed, in Keegan’s case by a stunningly awful ignorance of Clausewitz.

There are excellent parts of the book. Some flavor of the better parts of the book can be captured by Gray’s actual forty maxims, which I’ve reworked here for my own amusement:

1. The overlapping contexts of war are all important.
2. War is about peace. Peace can be about war.
3. It’s harder to make peace than it is to make war.
4. War works but beware the unexpected side effects.
5. Peace and order aren’t self-enforcing. Somebody has to create and maintain them.
6. When a political community makes war and peace, its society and culture make war and peace.
7. While reason controls war, passion and chance are always plotting against it.
8. There is more to war than warfare.
9. While politics rules war, it is frequently ignorant of just what it’s gotten itself into.
10. War is always a gamble.
11. Knowledge of strategy is vital: the flame of strategic understanding must be kept burning.
12. Strategy is more difficult than politics and tactics.
13. Bad strategy kills but bad politics and bad tactics are accomplices to the crime.
14. If Thucydides, Sun Tzu, and Clausewitz didn’t say it, it’s probably not worth saying.
15. Today’s hip new strategic concept is tomorrow’s stale left-over, at least until it’s rediscovered, recycled, and revealed as a new strategic gospel handed down from on high.
16. The enemy gets a vote. Bugger for us.
17. Time is the most unforgiving dimension of strategy.
18. You can’t escape friction but it doesn’t have to kill you.
19. Geography is the medium through which all strategy must act.
20. Strategy deals with more than the military.
21. The impossible is impossible: impossible is a permanent condition, not a passing problem.
22. People matter most.
23. Military power is the final arbiter of politics.
24. The only test of military excellence is performance in war.
25. Military excellence can’t guarantee strategy success.
26. Victory in battle does not guarantee political or strategic success but defeat all but guarantees failure.
27. There is more to war than firepower: the enemy is more than a set of target coordinates.
28. Logistics is the arbiter of strategic opportunity.
29. Bad times return.
30. There are always thugs, villains, rogues, and fools out there who’re out to get us.
31. Existential threats happen.
32. Prudence is the supreme virtue in statecraft and strategy.
33. Strategic history punishes good intentions.
34. Defense costs are certain. Security benefits are uncertain and debatable.
35. Arms can be controlled but not with arms control.
36. Nothing of real importance changes: modern history is not modern.
37. History can be twisted to prove anything. But it’s the only guide to the future we have.
38. The future is not foreseeable: nothing becomes outdated faster than today’s tomorrow.
39. Surprise is unavoidable but its impact is not.
40. Tragedy happens.