The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective

The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective By Hew Strachan New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013 335 pages $29.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This book, a collection of papers composed over a ten-year period, is subject to multiple legitimate readings. Some British reviewers have seen it simply as a critique of contemporary British and American military policy. However, the theme announced by the author, the Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford, is an exploration of "strategy, what we understand by it, and how that understanding has changed" (4). That seems to be the proper basis for evaluation. Strachan indicts Huntington's Soldier and the State with corrupting professional-political dialog in both the United States, where he acknowledges it may reflect Constitutional norms, and in the United Kingdom, where he argues it does not (76-77). Indeed, much of the book is engaged with criticism of institutional arrangements for strategy formulation in the United Kingdom and United States. Not surprisingly, the author is better informed about the complexities of the former than the latter; he probably overstates the influence of the Weinberger and Powell doctrines, while understating the role of the National Security Council system and the effects of the Goldwater-Nichols Act. He undergirds his arguments with what he sees as a corrective to an overly Anglophone reading of Clausewitz (5) and Thucydides (257). The most prominent idea in the Direction of War is the argument that the understandings of policy and strategy have become so confused the distinction between them has been lost, largely to the detriment of strategic practice. In part, this confusion has been the result of the intensification of wars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, critically in the First World War, when the higher direction of war in the form of grand strategy came to comprehend the mobilization of all national (and allied) means in pursuit of military victory. This result was compounded after the Second World War by the speculative theoretical flights of deterrence theorists, mostly American academics. The greatest insight in Strachan's argument lies precisely in his separation of policy and strategy as distinct and diverging influences with often conflicting logics, both of which must be accommodated by the policy maker and strategist. He does this first by pointing to the need to set strategy in the context of the adversarial nature of war; doing so corrects for what he indicts as overemphasis on the instrumental function of war derived from Clausewitz's statement that "war is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means" which first appears in a Note of 10 July 1827 and later in Book I, "On the Nature of War." This is not, he reminds us, "a statement about the nature of war." It is a statement about the use of war, something made clearer, he feels, in Book VIII, "War Plans." He then expands on this point with the Policy-Politics distinction, more or less glossed by Clausewitz's use of the German term Politik for both. "Politics," he reminds us, "are inherently adversarial ... Policy has a more unilateral thrust ... a policy ... remains a statement of one government's intent ... War," he concludes, "is therefore no longer the unilateral application of policy but the product of reciprocal exchanges between diverging policies" (13). In short, Strachan restores competitive reciprocity to the practice of national strategy, which, in turn, accounts for the unpredictability of strategic outcomes that reflect not the logical extension of one's own efforts but the sum of conflicting efforts of all actors to achieve diverging goals. …