President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
The contributions in the text are easy to follow and highly interesting to read. The book is also very timely. It contributes a wide range of interesting material to ongoing debates about the future of war, the place of hybrid or grey operations as well as reminding us about the role of narratives, myth, and belief in shaping our understandings of what constitutes a win.
The United States’ cultural obsession with winning precludes an effective grand strategy. Since 1945, and increasingly since the end of the Cold War, American military and economic dominance has been so great this fixation was unimportant. However, with China’s rise, America no longer has this luxury and needs a bona fide grand strategy. Americans’ distaste for the sporting tie has fostered a national culture whose tendrils have infested foreign policy decision making. Absent a dominant global military position, the U.S. must learn to prioritize and take risk.
Cian O’Driscoll has written a thoughtful, erudite book that manages to insightfully explore both just war theory and the nature of war. Across seven pithy chapters plus an introduction and conclusion, O’Driscoll develops an extended argument about why the concept of victory in war is problematic for just war theory and how the integration of victory into just war theory can lead to a more realistic, though tragic, appraisal of just war theory. His conclusions should interest not only just war scholars, but also the broader community of war studies scholars and military practitioners.
Strategy is about making a whole series of choices about one’s goals, priorities, resources, and risk tolerance. Strategy involves choices that respond to others’ actions and to changes in the environment. Sometimes all of the available choices will be less than optimal. Almost never is there a single perfect solution to a given problem—strategic choices require tradeoffs. Overwhelmingly, though, strategic aims and choices are framed in terms of winning and losing; this tendency, however, reflects poor strategic thinking and leads to false choices about what can and should and must be done. The language of strategy requires more options, more nuance, and better metaphors.
The Battle of Monocacy, in part because of its relative obscurity, but also because of the complexity of its strategic effect, opens up interesting questions about historical contingency, the meaning of victory and defeat, the duality and ambiguity of war and strategy, and the narratives that take hold and those which fade away.
Since World War I, powerful nations victorious on the field of battle struggled to achieve political objectives because their post war settlements set conditions that facilitated future conflicts instead of ensuring lasting peace. The victorious strategist must not only ensure their pre-war political objectives are codified in the post war settlement, but the emissaries must also take great care and vigilance to end the war with strategic foresight that translates the military victory into lasting peace.
