Search Results for: West Point

On Strategic Thinking: Patterns in Modern History

March 14, 2012

It is precisely during the historical lulls, the quiet backwaters, that the most thinking about strategy should be done—by officers and by political leaders, both serving or aspiring to service. Nor are democracy's other citizens free to ignore defense and foreign affairs; they too might attend to Kipling's poem of warning. Thinking about strategy in peacetime is even more vital than material preparation, though both are vital. Because when war comes, it may be too late. During war, it may be too difficult. In defeat, it will be of no use.

U.S. Grant, The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (1885)

Patrick J. Garrity +

August 27, 2008

What was, and is, extraordinary about Grant's Memoirs is its clarity, which reflected the clarity of thought that distinguished Grant as a military commander. "There is one striking feature of Grant's orders," General George Meade's chief of staff noted, "no matter how hurriedly he may write them on the field, no one has ever had the slightest doubt as to their meaning, or even has to read them over a second time." With good maps at hand—one must have good maps—the logic and power of Grant's operational approach to the war stands out even to the unschooled reader.

Circumspect Foreign Policy: Washington and Eisenhower’s Farewell Addresses

Michael R. Gonzalez

January 17, 2024

While Washington famously urges America in his 1796 Farewell Address to focus on preserving union at home for the “permanency of [its] felicity as a people,” Eisenhower in his 1961 Farewell Address identifies extensive foreign involvement as a necessity to preserve peace and “enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among people and among nations.” These two presidents seem to offer very different visions of American foreign policy’s basic purposes. Can the principles of the two speeches admit reconciliation?

Strategy as a Way of Life: Universality in the “Book of Five Rings”

David Guenni

May 19, 2022

Musashi’s main contention in the Book of Five Rings is that the secrets of the ultimate style of successful samurai swordsmanship contain the secrets to success in warfare itself. Therefore, a revelation of such secrets is as important to the front-line combatant on the ground, as it is to the commander and to the planner(s). My argument is, in turn, that Musashi’s equation of perfection in the Way of combat strategy, to perfection in any Way (tradecraft, art, or profession) means that Musashi’s manuscript was intended to transcend its immediate reception. If such an argument were to be accepted as a premise, one may partially begin to comprehend how Musashi’s work has ended up being read by students of any competitive discipline, indeed utterly transcending the time and the space which gave birth to it. Miyamoto Musashi (1582-1645) is considered Japan’s greatest swordsman—and perhaps one of the most famous swordsmen anywhere. He was born in Harima’s Yonedamura Village as the second son of Tabaru Iesada. At some point in the late 1580s, Miyamoto Munisai of Mimasaka adopted the young Musashi. Musashi lived a considerably long life, becoming supremely accomplished in all aspects of the world of a bushi or warrior. In 1643, he began writing the manuscripts of the Five Rings. He died on the nineteenth day of the fifth month of the very year in which he passed the aforementioned manuscripts to his student Terao Magonojo. With both folklore and popular culture elevating his story to legend status, Musashi epitomizes the ideal of the warrior-scholar of late feudal, pre-modern Japan.

Kaiser Wilhelm II points out an event of interest to the British Junior Minister at the Colonial Office, Winston Churchill, during the summer manoeuvres of the Imperial German Army in 1906.

“Unvarying Courtesy” or “Unbending Determination”? The 1907 Eyre Crowe Memorandum and the Dilemmas of Strategic Forecasting

Eric Fleury

March 02, 2022

Two general schools of thought regarding Crowe and his famous Memorandum have emerged. Some scholars paint Crowe as a latter-day Cassandra who foresaw the structural trends that were hurling the two powers toward confrontation and articulated the necessary course of action, which his government failed to undertake until it was too late. Harvard’s Graham Allison compares the Crowe Memorandum to the writings of Thucydides, whose History of the Peloponnesian War identified the dilemma that a dominant power faces when it must either accede to the rise of a challenger or risk eventual war with it. The other school of thought argues that Crowe delivered only self-fulfilling prophecies by helping to institutionalize an attitude of anti-German animus. One prominent German historian even dubbed Crowe the “evil spirit of the Foreign Office.” With these two schools of thought forming in play, the bulk of the literature on Crowe has accordingly sought to determine the precise extent and manner of his influence on British-German relations both before and after the First World War.

Alfred Thayer Mahan: “The Influence of Sea Power Upon History” as Strategy, Grand Strategy, and Polemic

Thomas Jamison

February 09, 2022

As a history of naval war Influence makes for dull reading. Rather, Mahan is interested in the more fundamental relationship between national primacy and the sea. Without commerce, territorial infrastructure, and political will, naval preponderance is unsustainable. Momentary superiority in tonnage or deployable warships often masks a deeper brittleness. As Mahan puts it when discussing the War of the Spanish Succession: “The sea power of England therefore was not merely in the great navy, with which we too commonly and exclusively associate it; France had had such a navy in 1688, and it shriveled away like a leaf in the fire.” In this respect, Mahan actually shares a great deal with later critics who highlight the importance of a dynamic economy as the ultimate source of national or imperial power. Today, U.S. strategists concerned with the vulnerability of sea lines of communication, a retreat from global commitments, or the hollowing out of the domestic industrial base, could find common cause with Mahan’s logic. Without those elements of Sea Power, pure military or naval strength is a colossus with feet of clay.

A Most Ancient Statecraft: The Idrimi Statue Inscription

Paul Edgar

December 22, 2021

The Idrimi Statue Inscription is perhaps the earliest complete biography of a political figure that has been discovered to date. Written on a statue of Idrimi sitting on a throne, the inscription is a generally chronological abridgement of King Idrimi’s political and military activities in fifteenth century northern Levant (BCE). While there exists more biographical information about the lives and acts of earlier political figures, information about those figures is usually spread among many sources, requiring synthesis in order to construct something that resembles a complete biography. In contrast, Idrimi’s inscription presents a whole story. It addresses his youth, his rise to power, his activities while in power, and, implicitly, his death.The advantage of an inscription like Idrimi’s is that it provides access to a complete political story of a known leader, composed by his political and familial associates in their own words, from their own perspective. While telling us about Idrimi and his work, the inscription also identifies what made for successful strategy and statecraft in a particular milieu.

Uncovering the French Origins of COIN

M.L. deRaismes Combes

September 25, 2021

The history of COIN doctrine can be traced across Francophone Africa and Southeast Asia to better understand how it is used or misused today. Perhaps because many counterinsurgency tactics have evolved and been adapted away from those used in the nineteenth century, analysis of contemporary COIN often ignores the doctrine’s colonial origins. Doing so, however, fails to consider how the foundational assumptions of the doctrine may well still limit its successful application in the twenty-first century. This essay, accordingly, sets out to unearth the possible repercussions of adopting the heart of a doctrine without a firm understanding of its initial purpose, seeking to understand whether that is compatible with today’s geostrategic objectives.

War By Other Means: An Examination of Clausewitz and Modern Terrorism

Eric Fleury

July 01, 2021

Clausewitz can help us to think about the historical evolution and present character of terrorism. A handful of scholars, notably M.L.R. Smith and Peter Neumann, have applied Clausewitzian ideas to terrorist campaigns. They show how his foundational idea of the “trinity”—composed of popular passion, military strategy, and political objectives—describes a terrorist cell just as readily as a conventional army or guerrilla outfit. As they describe it, terrorism is one option among many in the complex strategic environment of a decidedly weaker force struggling to “maximize its advantage vis-a-vis an opponent.” Here, Eric Fleury argues that terrorism is not merely one example of modern warfare among many that exhibits the continuing relevance of Clausewitz, but rather occupies a more fundamental role within his theory.

JQA, Chronicles of an American Diplomat: Dispatch 9

Patrick J. Garrity +

May 08, 2021

While waiting for the decision by the States General on his status, John Quincy received a letter from the Amsterdam Bankers. It was bad news: The Bankers had done nothing on the loan of 800,000 dollars, lacking the notice of commission that David Humphreys, the American minister in Lisbon, was supposed to send them. They added that under the present circumstances the loan would be altogether impracticable, and they could not foresee a time when it might again be feasible. John Quincy sent this information to the US Secretary of State, assuming that he and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton had already been made aware of this.