I have a friend who likes to criticize this book by noting that, although Operation Desert Storm was ‘good’ strategy, it[1]:
Took out 96% of civilian electricity production
Took out most of the civilian dams & sewage treatment
Took out civilian telecommunications, ports, bridges, railroads, highways, and oil refineries
Killed 2,278 civilians and wounded 5,965, including 408 sheltering in an air raid shelter
The Gulf War more generally directly killed ~100k Iraqis, of which ~25k were civilians[2]. The subsequent uprisings killed another ~50k, mostly civilians. And then, because basically all infrastructure was gone and the US imposed trade sanctions, hundreds of thousands more died from starvation and inadequate health, of which ~47k were children[3].
Okay, but aside from the gotcha with the obvious moral wrongs, this friend argues that Desert Storm was terrible strategy because obliterating an entire country’s infrastructure might have looked cool on TV, but we’re still seeing the destabilizing effects that had on the region, essentially taking economic value the U.S. could’ve slurped up offline for decades and also costing them $8,000,000,000,000 in future wars[4].
It is unlikely that these externalities were counterfactually necessary. In fact, it is probably the most salient example of ‘winning the battle but losing the war’ in all of human history.
My friend wraps it up by arguing that this exemplifies the book’s blind spots:
It ignores essentially all externalities of ‘good’ strategies on an object level
It ignores those externalities for their moral harms
It ignores those externalities when they produce blowback that affects your own goals
In particular, it advocates for strategies that produce more harms than counterfactually necessary by ignoring the above
We can extend the book’s definition of good strategy by adding precision to the goals; to generally pick the strategy with the least externalities in order to minimise unnecessary moral harms and blowback. (And I would also advocate for not having any ‘necessary’ moral harms, but that seems out of scope for this post).
I think this is outside the scope of the book, the example of Operation Desert Storm wasn’t that the general was trying to do the most good, but was given an objective by people higher up (who maybe made mistakes with their own strategic thinking).
I’m not even sure the book would suggest you ignore these externalities if that was the goal you were aiming for, it’s about providing a framework and some tools to help come up with better strategies.
Hello! I am the aforementioned friend. I guess part of the problem is the deliberate narrowing-in of scope that the book proposes (see the Diagnosis summary above). To some degree, this narrowing of scope is a necessary and valuable part of creating a plan of action to achieve a limited objective.
But I think that this Desert Storm example in the book is an entertainingly good example of ‘win the battle, lose the war’ as Huw mentioned.
There are many examples throughout history of bureaucrats and leaders narrowing striving to achieve the objective most clearly in front of them, at the long-term cost to the organisation or society they are ostensibly acting on behalf of (even putting aside the question of wider wellbeing).
Given this history, I think that any book attempting to discuss ‘good strategy’ shouldn’t shy away from this issue. I don’t think it’s valid for the author (or reviewer) to just deem that topic as out of scope.
It’s been a long time since I read the book, so apologies if my recollection is mistaken, but I don’t recall it engaging with this topic. At the very least, it definitely ignores it in the Desert Storm example.
To be clear, I found other parts of the book valuable, and I think that the calling out of different types of ‘bad strategy’ in particular is useful.
[Framed a different way: GSBS criticises ‘bad strategy’ as failing to grapple with the largest challenges that exist in a given situation; in Operation Desert Storm it is fairly obvious that the biggest challenge was not ‘how do we defeat this military force, give our overwhelming technological & air superiority?’ but rather ‘how do we achieve our political goals via this military operation, given the obvious potential causes for civilian unrest and unhappiness?‘. When you look at it like this, Desert Storm might have been a great example of the importance of choosing a single coherent plan of attack, but also a great example of failing to identify the actual largest issue faced by the American military, and therefore a good example of ‘bad strategy’].
Oh, I thought I already anticipated these points in my post. In some extremely narrow sense, sure, Schwarzkopf achieved his handed-down objective and was celebrated as a hero and probably even died without a guilty conscience. I think a strategy book is bad if it only defines how to blitz through your own objectives without any greater sense of ‘am I helping my cause?’. Even if you value Iraqi lives at 0, he cost his country trillions of dollars, led to 35 years and counting of civil conflict and destabilization in the region, and got thousands of his military colleagues killed.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue that a framework for better strategies should implore its readers to consider a strategy in its own context, and to factor in the effects of your strategy on your broader cause (whether team, country, organisation, what-have-you). Perhaps this does not make the strategies more or less likely to achieve their objectives in the narrowest sense, but it does help move your cause & vision for the world forward.
(Ex. I have seen companies achieve near-term objectives at the cost of reputation and trust, which invariably makes it harder to achieve other objectives in the long-term; this is such an externality which the book should be considering)
I have a friend who likes to criticize this book by noting that, although Operation Desert Storm was ‘good’ strategy, it[1]:
Took out 96% of civilian electricity production
Took out most of the civilian dams & sewage treatment
Took out civilian telecommunications, ports, bridges, railroads, highways, and oil refineries
Killed 2,278 civilians and wounded 5,965, including 408 sheltering in an air raid shelter
The Gulf War more generally directly killed ~100k Iraqis, of which ~25k were civilians[2]. The subsequent uprisings killed another ~50k, mostly civilians. And then, because basically all infrastructure was gone and the US imposed trade sanctions, hundreds of thousands more died from starvation and inadequate health, of which ~47k were children[3].
Okay, but aside from the gotcha with the obvious moral wrongs, this friend argues that Desert Storm was terrible strategy because obliterating an entire country’s infrastructure might have looked cool on TV, but we’re still seeing the destabilizing effects that had on the region, essentially taking economic value the U.S. could’ve slurped up offline for decades and also costing them $8,000,000,000,000 in future wars[4].
It is unlikely that these externalities were counterfactually necessary. In fact, it is probably the most salient example of ‘winning the battle but losing the war’ in all of human history.
My friend wraps it up by arguing that this exemplifies the book’s blind spots:
It ignores essentially all externalities of ‘good’ strategies on an object level
It ignores those externalities for their moral harms
It ignores those externalities when they produce blowback that affects your own goals
In particular, it advocates for strategies that produce more harms than counterfactually necessary by ignoring the above
We can extend the book’s definition of good strategy by adding precision to the goals; to generally pick the strategy with the least externalities in order to minimise unnecessary moral harms and blowback. (And I would also advocate for not having any ‘necessary’ moral harms, but that seems out of scope for this post).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War#Civilian
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1513350/
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
I think this is outside the scope of the book, the example of Operation Desert Storm wasn’t that the general was trying to do the most good, but was given an objective by people higher up (who maybe made mistakes with their own strategic thinking).
I’m not even sure the book would suggest you ignore these externalities if that was the goal you were aiming for, it’s about providing a framework and some tools to help come up with better strategies.
Hello! I am the aforementioned friend. I guess part of the problem is the deliberate narrowing-in of scope that the book proposes (see the Diagnosis summary above). To some degree, this narrowing of scope is a necessary and valuable part of creating a plan of action to achieve a limited objective.
But I think that this Desert Storm example in the book is an entertainingly good example of ‘win the battle, lose the war’ as Huw mentioned.
There are many examples throughout history of bureaucrats and leaders narrowing striving to achieve the objective most clearly in front of them, at the long-term cost to the organisation or society they are ostensibly acting on behalf of (even putting aside the question of wider wellbeing).
Given this history, I think that any book attempting to discuss ‘good strategy’ shouldn’t shy away from this issue. I don’t think it’s valid for the author (or reviewer) to just deem that topic as out of scope.
It’s been a long time since I read the book, so apologies if my recollection is mistaken, but I don’t recall it engaging with this topic. At the very least, it definitely ignores it in the Desert Storm example.
To be clear, I found other parts of the book valuable, and I think that the calling out of different types of ‘bad strategy’ in particular is useful.
[Framed a different way: GSBS criticises ‘bad strategy’ as failing to grapple with the largest challenges that exist in a given situation; in Operation Desert Storm it is fairly obvious that the biggest challenge was not ‘how do we defeat this military force, give our overwhelming technological & air superiority?’ but rather ‘how do we achieve our political goals via this military operation, given the obvious potential causes for civilian unrest and unhappiness?‘. When you look at it like this, Desert Storm might have been a great example of the importance of choosing a single coherent plan of attack, but also a great example of failing to identify the actual largest issue faced by the American military, and therefore a good example of ‘bad strategy’].
Oh, I thought I already anticipated these points in my post. In some extremely narrow sense, sure, Schwarzkopf achieved his handed-down objective and was celebrated as a hero and probably even died without a guilty conscience. I think a strategy book is bad if it only defines how to blitz through your own objectives without any greater sense of ‘am I helping my cause?’. Even if you value Iraqi lives at 0, he cost his country trillions of dollars, led to 35 years and counting of civil conflict and destabilization in the region, and got thousands of his military colleagues killed.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to argue that a framework for better strategies should implore its readers to consider a strategy in its own context, and to factor in the effects of your strategy on your broader cause (whether team, country, organisation, what-have-you). Perhaps this does not make the strategies more or less likely to achieve their objectives in the narrowest sense, but it does help move your cause & vision for the world forward.
(Ex. I have seen companies achieve near-term objectives at the cost of reputation and trust, which invariably makes it harder to achieve other objectives in the long-term; this is such an externality which the book should be considering)