Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  5. Glenn Snyder, Deterrence and Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).

  6. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 126 ff. and 282 ff. It was originally going to be known as “Three Lectures on Thermonuclear War.”

  7. Barry Bruce-Briggs, Supergenius: The Megaworlds of Herman Kahn (North American Policy Press, 2000), 97.

  8. Ibid., 98. Noting the appalling style, Bruce-Briggs concludes that: “The artlessness imparts authenticity; were the author a hustler, he would have been slicker and ingratiating.”

  9. Jonathan Stevenson, Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable (New York: Viking, 2008), 76.

  10. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2005/#.

  11. Schelling’s major books were The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Arms and Influence (New York: Yale University Press, 1966); Choice and Consequence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); and, with Morton Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961).

  12. Robin Rider, “Operations Research and Game Theory,” in Roy Weintraub, ed., Toward a History of Game Theory (see chap. 12, n. 19).

  13. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 10.

  14. Jean-Paul Carvalho, “An Interview with Thomas Schelling,” Oxonomics 2 (2007): 1–8.

  15. Brodie, “Strategy as a Science,” 479 (see chap. 12, n. 7). One possible reason was the skepticism of Jacob Viner, professor of economics at Chicago and Brodie’s mentor. Viner’s 1946 essay on the implications of nuclear weapons was one of the foundation texts of the theory of deterrence and clearly influenced Brodie.

  16. Bernard Brodie, “The American Scientific Strategists,” The Defense Technical Information Center (October 1964): 294.

  17. Oskar Morgenstern, The Question of National Defense (New York: Random House, 1959).

  18. Bruce-Briggs, Supergenius, 120–122; Irving Louis Horowitz, The War Game: Studies of the New Civilian Militarists (New York: Ballantine Books, 1963).

  19. Cited in Bruce-Biggs, Supergenius, 120.

  20. Schelling, in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, then edited by Kenneth Boulding, in 1957.

  21. Carvalho, “An Interview with Thomas Schelling.”

  22. Robert Ayson, Thomas Schelling and the Nuclear Age: Strategy as a Social Science (London: Frank Cass, 2004); Phil Williams, “Thomas Schelling,” in J. Baylis and J. Garnett, eds., Makers of Nuclear Strategy (London: Pinter, 1991), 120–135; A. Dixit, “Thomas Schelling’s Contributions to Game Theory,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 108, no. 2 (2006): 213–229; Esther-Mirjam Sent, “Some Like It Cold: Thomas Schelling as a Cold Warrior,” Journal of Economic Methodology 14, no. 4 (2007): 455–471.

  23. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 15.

  24. Schelling, Arms and Influence, 1.

  25. Ibid., 2–3, 79–80, 82, 80.

  26. Ibid., 194.

  27. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, 188 (emphasis in the original).

  28. Schelling, Arms and Influence, 93.

  29. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, 193.

  30. Dixit, “Thomas Schelling’s Contributions to Game Theory,” argues that many of Schelling’s formulations anticipate later developments in more formal game theory.

  31. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, 57, 77.

  32. Schelling, Arms and Influence, 137.

  33. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, 100–101.

  34. Cited by Robert Ayson, Hedley Bull and the Accommodation of Power (London: Palgrave, 2012).

  35. Wohlstetter was one of the most influential RAND analysts. See Robert Zarate and Henry Sokolski, eds., Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U. S. Army War College, 2009).

  36. Wohlstetter letter to Michael Howard, 1968, quoted in Stevenson, Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable, 71.

  37. Bernard Brodie, The Reporter, November 18, 1954.

  38. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 233. This essay on “Surprise Attack and Disarmament” first appeared in Klaus Knorr, ed., NATO and American Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959).

  39. Schelling, Strategy and Conflict, 236.

  40. Donald Brennan, ed., Arms Control, Disarmament and National Security (New York: George Braziller, 1961); Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961).

  41. Schelling and Halperin, Strategy and Arms Control, 1–2.

  42. Ibid., 5.

  43. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, 239–240.

  44. Henry Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice (New York: Harper & Row, 1961). This particular essay first appeared in Daedalus 89, no. 4 (1960). The first reference that I (and the OED) can find is an article by the English writer Wayland Young, an active proponent of disarmament, who referred to “the danger of what strategists call escalation, the danger that the size of the weapons used would mount up and up in retaliation until civilization is destroyed as surely as it would have been by an initial exchange of thermonuclear weapons.” In his glossary, we find the following: “Escalation-Escalator: The uncontrolled exchange of ever larger weapons in war, leading to the destruction of civilization.” Wayland Young, Strategy for Survival: First Steps in Nuclear Disarmament (London: Penguin Books, 1959).

  45. Schelling, Strategy of Conflict.

  46. Schelling, Arms and Influence, 182.

  47. Schelling, “Nuclear Strategy in the Berlin Crisis,” Foreign Relations of the United States XIV, 170–172; Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 224.

  48. I deal with this in my Kennedy’s Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  49. Fred Kaplan, Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 302.

  50. Kaysen to Kennedy, September 22, 1961, Foreign Relations in the United States XIV-VI, supplement, Document 182.

  51. Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 (London: Macmillan, 1969), 69–71, 80, 89, 182.

  52. Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

  53. Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, Controlling the Risks in Cuba, Adelphi Paper No. 17 (London ISS, February 1965).

  54. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 226, 139.

  55. Herman Kahn, On Escalation (London: Pall Mall Press, 1965).

  56. Cited in Fred Iklé, “When the Fighting Has to Stop: The Arguments About Escalation,” World Politics 19, no. 4 (July 1967): 693.

  57. McGeorge Bundy, “To Cap the Volcano,” Foreign Affairs 1 (October 1969): 1–20. See also McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988).

  58. McGeorge Bundy, “The Bishops and the Bomb,” The New York Review, June 16, 1983. For a discussion of “existentialist” literature, see Lawrence Freedman, “I Exist; Therefore I Deter,” International Security 13, no. 1 (Summer 1988): 177–195.

  14 Guerrilla Warfare

  1. Werner Hahlweg, “Clausewitz and Guerrilla Warfare,” Journal of Strategic Studies 9, nos. 2–3 (1986): 127–133; Sebastian Kaempf, “Lost Through Non-Translation: Bringing Clausewitz’s Writings on ‘New Wars’ Back In,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 22, no. 4 (October 2011): 548–573.

  2. Jomini, The Art of War, 34–35 (see chap. 7, n. 5).

  3. Karl Marx, “Revolutionary Spain,” 1854, available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1854/revolutionary-spain/ch05.htm.

  4. Vladimir Lenin, “Guerrilla Warfare,” originally published in proletary, No. 5, September 30, 1906, Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), Vol. II, 213–223, available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/gw/index.htm.

  5. Leon Trotsky, “Guerrilaism and the Regular Army,” The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 2, 1919, available at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1919/military/ch08.htm.

  6. Leon Trotsky, “Do We Need Guerrillas?” The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, Vol. 2, 1919, available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1919/military/ch95.htm.

  7. C. E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Theory and Practice, reprint of the 1906 3rd edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).

  8. T. E. Lawrence, “The Evolution of a Revolt,” in Malcolm Brown, ed., T. E. Lawrence in War & Peace: An Anthology of the Military Writings of Lawrence of Arabia (London: Greenhill Books, 2005), 260–273. It was first published in the Army Quarterly, October 1920. It forms the basis of Chapter 35 of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London: Castle Hill Press, 1997).

  9. Basil Liddell Hart, Colonel Lawrence: The Man Behind the Legend (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934).

  10. “T. E. Lawrence and Liddell Hart,” in Brian Holden Reid, Studies in British Military Thought: Debates with Fuller & Liddell Hart (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 150–167.

  11. Brantly Womack, “From Urban Radical to Rural Revolutionary: Mao from the 1920s to 1937,” in Timothy Cheek, ed., A Critical Introduction to Mao (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 61–86.

  12. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

  13. Andrew Bingham Kennedy, “Can the Weak Defeat the Strong? Mao’s Evolving Approach to Asymmetric Warfare in Yan’an,” China Quarterly 196 (December 2008): 884–899.

  14. Most of the key texts—“Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War” (December 1936), “Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War Against Japan” (May 1938), and “On Protracted War” (May 1938)—are found in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. II. “On Guerrilla War” is in Vol. VI. They can be found at http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/index.htm.

  15. Mao Tse-Tung, “On Protracted War.”

  16. Beatrice Heuser, Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002), 138–139.

  17. John Shy and Thomas W. Collier, “Revolutionary War,” in Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, p. 844 (see chap. 6, n. 2). On Maoist strategy, see also Edward L. Katzenback, Jr., and Gene Z. Hanrahan, “The Revolutionary Strategy of Mao Tse-Tung,” Political Science Quarterly 70, no. 3 (September 1955): 321–340. In “On Protracted War” he made the classic distinction between strategies of attrition and annihilation, which began with Delbrück, but Mao probably got it through Lenin (see below pp. 289).

  18. Mao Tse-Tung, “Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War Against Japan.”

  19. Mao Tse-Tung, “On Protracted War.”

  20. Mao Tse-Tung, “On Guerrilla War.”

  21. “People’s War, People’s Army” (1961), in Russell Stetler, ed., The Military Art of People’s War: Selected Writings of General Vo Nguyen Giap (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 104–106.

  22. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (London: Penguin, 1969), 61. The contemporary importance of Greene’s critique of American naïveté in Vietnam and the debates this prompted comes over in Frederik Logevall, Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012). William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: Fawcett House, 1958), 233. Hillendale was not the “Ugly American” of the title. Cecil B. Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Edward G. Lansdale, “Viet Nam: Do We Understand Revolution?” Foreign Affairs (October 1964), 75–86. For an appreciation of Lansdale, see Max Boot, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), 409–414.

  23. On counterinsurgency thinking and its development during the Kennedy administration, see Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: US Doctrine and Performance (New York: The Free Press, 1977); D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of US Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); and Larry Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counterinsurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1986). Apart from some work undertaken on the stresses and strains in newly independent states in the third world, there was very little academic work on the requirements of a counterinsurgency strategy prior to President Kennedy’s embrace of the concept at the start of his administration. The early development of the doctrine within the administration is normally credited to Walt Rostow and Roger Hilsman. For the flavor of the doctrine, see W. W. Rostow, “Guerrilla Warfare in Underdeveloped Areas,” address to the graduating class at the U.S. Army Special Warfare School, Fort Bragg, June 1961. Reprinted in Marcus Raskin and Bernard Fall, The Viet-Nam Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1965). See also Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dell, 1967).

  24. Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences in Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966).

  25. Boot, Invisible Armies, 386–387.

  26. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Wesport, CT: Praeger, 1964).

  27. Gregor Mathias, Galula in Algeria: Counterinsurgency Practice versus Theory (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2011).

  28. M. L. R. Smith, “Guerrillas in the Mist: Reassessing Strategy and Low Intensity Warfare,” Review of International Studies 29, no. 1 (2003): 19–37; Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–1962 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 480–504.

  29. Charles Maechling, Jr., “Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: The Role of Strategic Theory,” Parameters 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1984): 34. Shafer, Deadly Paradigms, 113.

  30. Paul Kattenburg, The Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy, 1945–75 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1980), 111–112.

  31. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, 62–66.

  32. Jeffery H. Michaels, “Managing Global Counterinsuregency: The Special Group (CI) 1962–1966,” Journal of Strategic Studies 35, no. 1 (2012): 33–61.

  33. See, for example, Alexander George et al., The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy, 1st edition (Boston: Little Brown, 1971). John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of PostWar American Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 243.

  34. See in particular an address at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, December 19, 1962, discussed at length in William Kaufmann, The McNamara Strategy (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 138–147.

  35. Schelling reported that the response was that “Schelling’s games demonstrate how unrealistic this Cuban crisis is.” Ghamari-Tabrizi, 213 (see chap. 12, n. 10).

  36. William Bundy, cited in William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), Vol. II, p. 349.

  37. The Pentagon Papers, Senator Gravel Edition: The Defense Department History of the U.S. Decision-Making on Vietnam, Vol. 3 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 212.

  38. Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War: 1961–1964, 254.

  39. Ibid., 256–259. See Chapter 4 of Arms and Influence.

  40. See Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars (see chap. 13, n. 48) .

  41. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 332–336.

  42. Arms and Influence, vii, 84, 85, 166, 171–172. Given this analysis, Pape “Coercive Air Power in the Vietnam War,” is unfair to Schelling in assuming that he would have advocated only attacks on civilian targets as part of Rolling Thunder.

  43. Richard Betts, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” World Politics 50, no. 1 (October 1997): 16.

  44. Colin Gray, “What RAND Hath Wrought,” Foreign Policy 4 (Autumn 1971): 111–129; see also Stephen Peter Rosen, “Vietnam and the American Theory of Limited War,” International Security 7, no. 2 (Autumn 1982): 83–113.

  45. Zellen, State of Doom, 196–197 (see chap. 12, n. 5); Bernard Brodie, “Why Were We So (Strategically) Wrong?” Foreign Policy 4 (Autumn 1971): 15
1–162.

  15 Observation and Orientation

  1. Beaufre’s two key works were published in French as Introduction à la Stratégie (1963) and Dissuasion et Stratégie (1964). Both were published with English translations by Major-General R. H. Barry in 1965 as Introduction to Strategy and Dissuasion and Strategy, respectively, by Faber & Faber in London. This quote comes from Introduction, p. 22. Beaufre is discussed in Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy, 460–463. See Chapter 6, n. 4.

  2. Bernard Brodie, “General André Beaufre on Strategy,” Survival 7 (August 1965): 208–210. For a more sympathetic review, at least of Beaufre’s thought if not his policy advocacy in France, see Edward A. Kolodziej, “French Strategy Emergent: General André Beaufre: A Critique,” World Politics 19, no. 3 (April 1967): 417–442. While he was unimpressed with Brodie’s complaint about “majestic concepts” that got in the way, he acknowledged that Beaufre ideas were often expressed too vaguely to be convincing.