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Planning for protraction

2022; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 62; Issue: 496-497 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/19445571.2022.2274677

1944-5571

Iskander Rehman,

International Relations and Foreign Policy

AbstractAs Sino-US relations have deteriorated, concerns have grown in Washington over its ability to defeat China in a major conflict. A conflict between such peer competitors would likely become a protracted war of attrition drawing on all dimensions of national power, but this reality has yet to receive a sufficient degree of analytical attention.In this Adelphi book, Iskander Rehman provides a historically informed and empirically grounded study of protracted great-power war, its core drivers and characteristics, and an examination of the elements that have most often determined a competitor’s long-term strategic performance. A detailed analysis of the contemporary Sino-US rivalry assesses how both parties might fare in the event of a protracted war, while highlighting some of its key significant differentiating aspects – most notably its nuclear and cyber dimensions. Notes1 For a stimulating discussion of the 2018 NDS and its revived focus on great-power competition, see ‘Policy Roundtable: A Close Look at the 2018 National Defense Strategy’, Texas National Security Review, 26 January 2018, https://tnsr.org/roundtable/policy-roundtable-close-look-2018-national-defense-strategy.2 Most notably, the 2022 NSS baldly states that the US has now ‘broken down the dividing line between foreign policy and domestic policy. We understand that if the United States is to succeed abroad, we must invest in our innovation and industrial strength, and build our resilience, at home.’ See The White House, ‘National Security Strategy’, October 2022, p. 8, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf.3 For a small sampling of these growing concerns, see Conrad Crane, ‘Too Fragile to Fight: Could the US Military Withstand a War of Attrition?’, War on the Rocks, 9 May 2022, https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/too-fragile-to-fight-could-the-u-s-military-withstand-a-war-of-attrition; Anna Jean Wirth et al., ‘Keeping the Defense Industrial Base Afloat During COVID-19: A Review of the Department of Defense and Federal Government Policies and Investments in the Defense Industrial Base’, RAND Corporation, 2021, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1392-1.html; and Hal Brands, ‘Ukraine War Shows the US Military Isn’t Ready for War with China’, Bloomberg, 18 September 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-18/ukraine-war-shows-the-us-military-isn-t-ready-for-war-with-china#xj4y7vzkg.4 For a good overview of China’s growing tendency to resort to economic coercion, see Evan Feigenbaum, ‘Is Coercion the New Normal in China’s Economic Statecraft?’, MacroPolo, 25 July 2017, https://macropolo.org/coercion-new-normal-chinas-economic-statecraft. For an excellent examination of China’s coercive diplomatic behaviour writ large, see Fergus Hanson, Emilia Currey and Tracy Beattie, ‘The Chinese Communist Party’s Coercive Diplomacy’, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2020, https://www.aspi.org.au/report/chinese-communist-partys-coercive-diplomacy.5 On the drivers and implications of this renewed ‘overconcentration of power’, see Susan L. Shirk, ‘China in Xi’s “New Era”: The Return to Personalistic Rule’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 29, no. 2, 2018, pp. 22–36, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/china-in-xis-new-era-the-return-to-personalistic-rule/; and Bjorn Alexander Duben, ‘Xi Jinping and the End of Chinese Exceptionalism’, Problems of Post-Communism, vol. 67, no. 2, 2020, pp. 111–28.6 On China’s growing jingoism and increasingly confrontational public diplomacy, see, for example, Jessica Chen Weiss, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Jude D. Blanchette, China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); and Peter Martin, China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). As Susan Shirk notes in her excellent recent analysis of Chinese foreign policy, clear signs of China’s growing truculence, or hubris, could already be detected in the 2000s, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. See Susan Shirk, Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).7 See Ben Blanchard and Yew Lun Tian, ‘Polishing the Gun: China, US Tensions Raise Taiwan Conflict Fears’, Reuters, 26 August 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-china-security-analysis/polishing-the-gun-china-u-s-tensions-raise-taiwan-conflict-fears-idUSKBN25M0VE; ‘Philippines Flags Incursion by Nearly 300 Chinese Militia Boats’, Reuters, 12 May 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/philippines-flags-incursions-by-nearly-300-chinese-militia-boats-2021-05-12; and ‘China Faces Fateful Choices, Especially Involving Taiwan’, The Economist, 20 February 2021, https://www.economist.com/china/2021/02/20/china-faces-fateful-choices-especially-involving-taiwan.8 Oriana Skylar Mastro, ‘The Taiwan Temptation: Why Beijing May Resort to Force’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-03/china-taiwan-war-temptation.9 For a discussion of the notion of ‘windows of opportunity’, see Richard Ned Lebow, ‘Windows of Opportunity: Do States Jump Through Them?’, International Security, vol. 9, no. 1, Summer 1984, pp. 147–86.10 See, for example, the compelling arguments laid out by Michael Beckley and Hal Brands in Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022).11 There is an extensive literature on preventive war. See, for example, Jack S. Levy, ‘Preventive War: Concept and Propositions’, International Interactions, vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, pp. 87–96. On the drivers undergirding the fateful decision to launch a preventive war, see, for example, Dale Copeland, ‘A Tragic Choice: Japanese Preventive Motivations and the Origins of the Pacific War’, International Interactions, vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, pp. 116–26; James D. Fearon, ‘Rationalist Explanations for War’, International Organization, vol. 49, no. 3, 1995, pp. 379–414; Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Preventive War and U.S. Foreign Policy’, Security Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–31; and J. Kugler and A.F.K. Organski, The War Ledger (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980).12 See Kirstin Huang, ‘US Marines Chief Calls China the Pacing Threat for the Next Decade’, South China Morning Post, 4 March 2021, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3123944/us-marines-chief-calls-china-pacing-threat-next-decade; and Jim Garamone, ‘Official Talks DOD Policy Role in Chinese Pacing Threat, Integrated Deterrence’, DOD News, 2 June 2021, https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/2641068/official-talks-dod-policy-role-in-chinese-pacing-threat-integrated-deterrence.13 The White House, ‘National Security Strategy’, October 2022.14 On how ongoing shifts in the balance of power call for a revised military approach, see Christopher M. Dougherty, ‘Why America Needs a New Way of War’, Center for a New American Security, 2019, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/anawow; and Thomas G. Mahnken, Grace Kim and Adam Lemon, ‘Piercing the Fog of Peace: Developing Innovative Operational Concepts for a New Era’, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2019, https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/piercing-the-fog-of-peace-developing-innovative-operational-concepts-for-a-/publication/1.15 See, for example, David C. Gompert, Astrid Stuth Cevallos and Cristina L. Garafola, ‘War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable’, RAND Corporation, 2016, pp. 71–3, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1140.html.16 Jim Mitre, ‘A Eulogy for the Two-war Construct’, Washington Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4, 2018, pp. 7–30.17 See David Vergun, ‘DOD Focuses on Aspirational Challenges in Future Warfighting’, DOD News, 26 July 2021, https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2707633/dod-focuses-on-aspirational-challenges-in-future-warfighting; and Frank Wolfe, ‘Joint Warfighting Concept Assumes “Contested Logistics”’, Defense Daily, 6 October 2020, https://www.defensedaily.com/joint-warfighting-concept-assumes-contested-logistics/pentagon/.18 The commonly employed acronym C4ISR stands for command, control, communications and computers (C4) intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).19 Joshua Rovner, ‘A Long War in the East: Doctrine, Diplomacy, and the Prospects for a Protracted Sino-American Conflict’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, vol. 29, no. 1, 2018, pp. 129–42.20 These include Mao Zedong’s own writings on protracted and guerrilla warfare, derived from the Chinese Communist Party’s combat experience during the Chinese civil war and the Sino-Japanese War. For a useful compilation and discussion of these seminal texts, see Arthur Waldron (ed.), Mao on Warfare: On Guerilla Warfare, On Protracted War, and Other Martial Writings (New York: CN Times Books, 2013).21 One influential and much-cited DOD-commissioned document from the late 1990s provided a particularly memorable definition of network-centric warfare (NCW) as it was perceived at the time: ‘We define NCW as an information superiority-enabled concept of operations that generates increased combat power by networking sensors, decision-makers, and shooters to achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and a degree of self-synchronization. In essence, NCW translates information superiority into combat power by effectively limiting knowledgeable entities in the battlespace.’ See David S. Alberts et al., Network Centric Warfare: Developing and Leveraging Information Superiority, 2nd ed. (Washington DC: DOD C4ISR Cooperative Research Program, 1999). There is a vast literature on the centrality of technology to the American way of war. For a balanced and nuanced perspective, see Thomas G. Mahnken, Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).22 See US Department of Defense, ‘Summary of the Joint All-domain Command and Control (JADC2) Strategy’, March 2022, https://media.defense.gov/2022/Mar/17/2002958406/-1/-1/1/SUMMARY-OF-THE-JOINT-ALL-DOMAIN-COMMAND-AND-CONTROL-STRATEGY.PDF.23 Nina A. Kollars, ‘War at Information Speed’, in Stenn Rynning, Oliver Schmitt and Amelie Theussen (eds), War Time: Temporality and the Decline of Western Military Power (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), pp. 230–52.24 For a stimulating take on timing in combat operations and John Boyd’s famed focus on the observe–orient– decide–act (OODA) loop, or iterative feedback loop, see Alastair Luft, ‘The OODA Loop and the Half-beat’, The Strategy Bridge, 17 March 2020, https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/3/17/the-ooda-loop-and-the-half-beat.25 China Aerospace Studies Institute, ‘In Their Own Words: Science of Military Strategy’, p. 238, https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/CASI/Display/Article/2485204/plas-science-of-military-strategy-2013/.26 See Alison A. Kaufman and Daniel M. Hartnett, ‘Managing Conflict: Examining Recent PLA Writings on Escalation Control’, CNA China Studies, February 2016, https://www.cna.org/cna_files/pdf/DRM-2015-U-009963-Final3.pdf; and Forrest E. Morgan et al., ‘Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century’, RAND Corporation, 2008, p. 54.27 See Jeffrey Engstrom, ‘Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare: How the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Seeks to Wage Modern Warfare’, RAND Corporation, 2018, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1708.html; and David C. Gompert and Martin Libicki, ‘Cyber Warfare and Sino-American Crisis Instability’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 56, no. 4, 2014, pp. 7–22. On the tendency in Chinese writings to simply skirt the issue of protraction in order to focus more on short-lived conflict scenarios, see also Timothy R. Heath, Kristen Gunness and Tristan Finazzo, ‘The Return of Great Power War: Scenarios of Systemic Conflict Between the United States and China’, RAND Corporation, 2022, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA830-1.html.28 Mao Zedong, On Protracted Warfare, cited in John Costello and Peter Mattis, ‘Electronic Warfare and the Renaissance of Chinese Information’, in Joe McReynolds (ed.), China’s Evolving Military Strategy (Washington DC: Jamestown Foundation, 2016), p. 75. Mattis and Costello both note that pre-emption and system-of-system paralysis form the two structural pillars of Chinese information-warfare operational strategy.29 For more background on Chinese ‘blinding’ concepts, see Zi Yang, ‘Blinding the Enemy: How the PRC Prepares for Radar Countermeasures’, China Brief, vol. 18, no. 6, April 2018, https://jamestown.org/program/blinding-the-enemy-how-the-prc-prepares-for-radar-countermeasures; Elsa B. Kania and John Costello, ‘Seizing the Commanding Heights: The PLA Strategic Support Force in Chinese Military Power’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2021, pp. 218–64; and Edmund J. Burke et al., ‘People’s Liberation Army Operational Concepts’, RAND Corporation, 2020, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA394-1.html.30 Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (New York: Praeger, 1954), ch. 15. For Fuller’s description of how armoured thrusts could unleash a ‘barrage of demoralisation’ and trigger ‘strategic paralysis’, see J.F.C. Fuller, The Reformation of War (London: Hutchinson and Company, 1923), p. 89. On how the British school’s focus on the psychological impact endures in some of the ideas underpinning so-called ‘effects-based operations’ in American strategic thought, see Brian Holden Reid, Studies in British Military Thought: Debates with Fuller and Liddell Hart (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).31 As Aaron L. Friedberg has noted, the possibility of a tense confrontation between opponents ‘armed with highly capable, but potentially fragile, conventional precision-strike complexes could replicate the “two scorpions in a bottle” problem that so troubled nuclear strategists during the Cold War’. See Aaron L. Friedberg, Beyond Air–Sea Battle: The Debate over US Military Strategy in Asia (London: IISS, 2014), p. 90.32 On the escalatory pressures inherent in both states’ concepts of operation, see Craig Neuman, ‘The Cult of Accelerated War: How US and Chinese Warfighting Doctrines Increase the Risk of Escalation’, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep24234.9.33 Justin Kelly and Michael Brennan, ‘Alien: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy’, US Army War College Press, 2009, p. 58, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/620.34 Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 21.35 Klaus Knorr, ‘Strategic Surprise: The Incentive Structure’, in Klaus Knorr and Patrick Morgan, Strategic Military Surprise: Incentives and Opportunities (London: Transaction Books, 1983), pp. 173–95.36 See Patrick Morgan, ‘The Opportunity for Strategic Surprise’, in Knorr and Morgan, Strategic Military Surprise: Incentives and Opportunities, pp. 195–247.37 On the PLA’s historic fondness for strategic surprise, see Mark A. Ryan et al. (eds), Chinese Warfighting: The PLA Experience Since 1949 (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Mark Burles and Abram N. Shulsky, ‘Patterns in China’s Use of Force: Evidence from History and Doctrinal Writings’, RAND Corporation, 2000, https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1160.html. On how this intellectual predilection is still manifest in Chinese military writings, see Toshi Yoshihara, ‘Chinese Views of Future Warfare in the Indo-Pacific: First Strike and US Forward Bases in Japan’, in John H. Maurer and Erik Goldstein (eds), The Road to Pearl Harbor: Great Power War in Asia and the Pacific (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2022), pp. 162–82.38 For a good overview of Chinese operational concepts regarding Taiwan, see Lonnie Henley, ‘PLA Operational Concepts and Centers of Gravity in a Taiwan Conflict: Testimony Before the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission Hearing on Cross-strait Deterrence’, 18 February 2021, https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2021-02/Lonnie_Henley_Testimony.pdf.39 See, for example, Bonny Lin and John Culver, ‘China’s Taiwan Invasion Plans May Get Faster and Deadlier’, Foreign Policy, 19 April 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/19/china-invasion-ukraine-taiwan.40 See Antulio J. Echevarria II, ‘Toward an American Way of War’, US Army War College, 2004, p. 10, https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/14216/Toward%20and%20American%20Way%20of%20War.pdf; Phillip S. Meilinger, ‘Time in War’, Joint Force Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 4, 2017, pp. 93–100, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/1326002/time-in-war; and Thomas Hughes, ‘The Cult of the Quick’, Aerospace Power Journal, vol. 15, no. 4, 2001, pp. 57–68, https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&u=googlescholar&id=GALE|A82777339&v=2.1&it=r&sid=AONE&asid=895d2708.41 For two useful examinations of various scenarios that could lead to Sino-US conflict, see Gompert et al., ‘War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable’; and Todd South, ‘What War with China Could Look Like’, Military Times, 1 September 2020, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2020/09/01/what-war-with-china-could-look-like. It is important to note that this study does not argue that the victim of the first salvo would necessarily be severely crippled, or that each protagonist is equally vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike – indeed, as we shall see, the PLA may well possess a ‘localised hardening advantage’ vis-à-vis the US military’s more dispersed and less well-defended basing structure. That said, there is no question that the combat environment would be radically transformed and universally more degraded in the wake of the first multi-domain battle network exchanges, regardless of who the pre-emptor was.42 On the importance of deterring a Chinese or Russian fait accompli, see Elbridge Colby, ‘How to Win America’s Next War’, Foreign Policy, 5 May 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/05/how-to-win-americas-next-war-china-russia-military-infrastructure. For an excellent examination of the concept of fait accompli, see Daniel W. Altman, ‘By Fait Accompli, Not Coercion: How States Wrest Territory from Their Adversaries’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 4, 2017, pp. 881–91, https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/61/4/881/4781720.43 See, for example, Lawrence Freedman’s analysis of the literature on the future of warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (New York: Hachette Books, 2017).44 There is a vast literature on war termination as well as on the rhetoric and psychology of sunk costs in foreign policy. For a brief sampling of some of the more relevant material, see B.M. Staw, ‘Knee-deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action’, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, vol. 16, no. 1, June 1976, pp. 27–44, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0030507376900052; William A. Boettcher III and Michael D. Cobb, ‘“Don’t Let Them Die in Vain”: Casualty Frames and Public Tolerance for Escalating Commitment in Iraq’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 53, no. 5, 2009, pp. 677–97; and H.R. Arkes and Catherine Blumer, ‘The Psychology of Sunk Cost’, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, vol. 35, 1985, pp. 124–40, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4812596_The_psychology_of_sunk_cost.45 Fred Charles Iklé, Every War Must End (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 42.46 For ‘calculated act of terror’, see Joseph Strayer, The Albigensian Crusades (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. ix. See also Elaine Graham-Leigh, ‘Justifying Deaths: The Chronicler Pierre des Vaux-De-Cernay and the Massacre of Béziers’, Mediaeval Studies, vol. 63, 2001, pp. 283–303. On the controversy surrounding Henry V’s slaughter of the French prisoners at Agincourt, see Andy King, ‘“Then a Great Misfortune Befell Them”: The Laws of War on Surrender and the Killing of Prisoners on the Battlefield in the Hundred Years War’, Journal of Medieval History, vol. 43, no. 1, 2017, pp. 106–17. On brutalisation in protracted medieval warfare more broadly, see Sean McGlynn, By Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2014).47 See Marion Girard, A Strange and Formidable Weapon: British Responses to World War I Poison Gas (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008); and L.F. Farber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).48 Interestingly, during the Second World War, mutual restraint regarding the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield was observed by Germany and the Allies (although not by Germany’s Italian ally in Ethiopia, or by the Japanese in China). Jeffrey Legro has argued that the Wehrmacht’s restraint, rather unsurprisingly, was primarily for practical and bureaucratic, rather than ethical, reasons. See Jeffrey W. Legro, ‘Military Culture and Inadvertent Escalation in World War II’, International Security, vol. 18, no. 4, 1994, pp. 108–42.49 See Williamson Murray and Kevin M. Woods, The Iran–Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Efraim Karsh, The Iran–Iraq War: 1980–1988 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2002); and Pierre Razoux, The Iran–Iraq War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).50 Detailed historical examples of such instances – when defeat in protracted war was either precipitated or was the result of internal political upheaval – will be provided later in this study. For some academic examinations of how shifts in governing coalitions or political leadership can accompany war termination, see Elizabeth A. Stanley, Paths to Peace: Domestic Coalition Shifts, War Termination and the Korean War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Harold Calahan, What Makes a War End? (New York: Vanguard Press, 1944); and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason: Domestic and International Imperatives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).51 Cathal J. Nolan, The Allure of Battle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 7.52 Philippe Contamine, La Guerre de Cent Ans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), pp. 118–99. Author’s translation from the French.53 On this categorisation issue, see Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System: 1495–1975 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp. 50–76.54 For two excellent biographies of Bismarck, see A.J.P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (New York: Vintage, 2011); and Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a good overview of the literature on early German nationalism and its anti-French emotional stimulants, see Mark Hewitson, ‘Belligerence, Patriotism and Nationalism in the German Public Sphere, 1792–1815’, English Historical Review, vol. 128, no. 533, 2013, pp. 839–76.55 The term ‘Hundred Years War’ was first employed by the French historian Chrysanthe-Ovide des Michels in his Tableau Chronologique de L’histoire du Moyen Âge. It was then imported into English historiography by the English historian Edward Freeman. For a good retracing of the genealogy of this descriptor, see George Minois, La Guerre de Cent Ans: Naissance de Deux Nations (Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2008), pp. 10–11.56 See Andrew Roth, ‘Putin’s Security Men: The Elite Group Who Fuel His Anxieties’, Guardian, 4 February 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/04/putin-security-elite-siloviki-russia. For an excellent recent discussion of memory politics in today’s Russia and the role certain key chapters in Soviet history play therein, see Jade McGlynn, Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).57 Polybius, The Histories, Book III.4, Loeb Classical Library edition, 1922, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/3*.html.58 See Andrew Sweet, The Strength of the City: Morale in Thucydides’ Histories, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2011, https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/29224.59 See, for example, Rachel M. Stein, Vengeful Citizens, Violent States: A Theory of War and Revenge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Peter Liberman, ‘An Eye for an Eye: Public Support for War Against Evildoers’, International Organization, vol. 60, no. 3, 2006, pp. 687–722; Peter Liberman and Linda J. Skitka, ‘Revenge in US Public Support for War Against Iraq’, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 81, no. 3, 2017, pp. 636–60; and Peter Liberman, ‘War and Torture as “Just Deserts”’, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 1, 2014, pp. 47–70.60 For an excellent examination of national sentiment (and revanchism) during this fraught period in French history, see Karine Varley, Under the Shadow of Defeat: The War of 1870–71 in French Memory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).61 See Daniel Markey, ‘Prestige and the Origins of War: Returning to Realism’s Roots’, Security Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 1999, pp. 126–72; Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Mark L. Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics 1789–1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Stacie E. Goddard, ‘Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy’, International Organization, vol. 60, no. 1, 2006, pp. 35–68.62 And, more specifically, the desire to regain the lost continental holdings of the former Angevin Empire. See Malcolm Vale, The Angevin Legacy and the Hundred Years War, 1250–1340 (London: Blackwell, 1990). On the development of French royal exceptionalism in the centuries leading up to the Hundred Years War, see Robert Fawtier, The Capetian Kings of France: Monarchy and Nation, 987–1328 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1960); John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986); and James Naus, Constructing Kingship: The Capetian Monarchs of France and the Early Crusades (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).63 See Marjorie Reeves, The Prophetic Sense of History in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Alexandre Y. Haran, Le Lys et le Globe: Messianisme Dynastique et Rêve Impérial en France aux XVIe et XVIIe Siècles (Paris: Éditions Champ Vallon, 2016).64 Michael Howard, ‘The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 57, no. 5, 1979, pp. 975–86, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1979-06-01/forgotten-dimensions-strategy.65 Two exceptions, which both provide compelling and useful intellectual points of departure, are Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr, ‘Protracted Great-power War: A Preliminary Assessment’, Center for a New American Security, 5 February 2020, https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/protracted-great-power-war; and Hal Brands, ‘Getting Ready for a Long War with China: Dynamics of Protracted Conflict in the Western Pacific’, American Enterprise Institute, 25 July 2022, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/getting-ready-for-a-long-war-with-china-dynamics-of-protracted-conflict-in-the-western-pacific.66 For three examples of Cold War-era thinking on the issue of conflict protraction, see Robert Strausz-Hupe et al., Protracted Conflict (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959); John K. Setear, ‘Protracted Conflict in Central Europe: A Conceptual Analysis’, RAND Corporation, 1989; and Joseph W. Russel, ‘Concepts for Protracted War: A Report Prepared for the Director of the Defense Nuclear Agency’, Boeing Aerospace Company, 1 December 1980, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a956120.pdf.67 For an excellent overview of US grand strategy during the Cold War and how it can inform present-day thinking on great-power competition, see Hal Brands, The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-power Rivalry Today (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022).68 See, for example, Ali Wyne, ‘America’s Blind Ambition Could Make It a Victim of Global Competition’, National Interest, 11 February 2019, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-blind-ambition-could-make-it-victim-global-competition-44227; and Katie Bo Williams, ‘What’s Great Power Competition? No One Really Knows’, Defense One, 13 May 2019, https://www.defenseone.com/news/2019/05/whats-great-power-competition-no-one-really-knows/156969. On the debate over whether China and the US are currently caught in the throes of a new cold war, see Iskander Rehman et al., ‘Policy Roundtable: Are the United States and China in a New Cold War?’, Texas National Security Review, 15 May 2018, https://tnsr.org/roundtable/policy-roundtable-are-the-united-states-and-china-in-a-new-cold-war.69 See, for example, Peter Trubowitz, Emily O. Goldman and Edward Rhodes (eds), The Politics of Strategic Adjustment: Ideas, Institutions, and Interests (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Emily O. Goldman, Power in Uncertain Times: Strategy in the Fog of Peace (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).70 On the importance and utility of applied history, see Iskander Rehman, ‘Why Applied History Matters’, Engelsberg Ideas, 20 November 2021, https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/why-applied-history-matters/; Hal Brands and William Inboden, ‘Wisdom Without Tears: Statecraft and the Uses of History’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 41, no. 7, 2018, pp. 916–46; and Robert Crowcroft (ed.), Applied History and Contemporary Policymaking: School of Statecraft (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).71 On the Clausewitzian coup d’oeil, ‘an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth’, see Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I. On Patton’s passion for history, see J. Furman Daniel III, Patton: Battling with History (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2020). For an excellent examination of the power the myth of Alexander exerted over Roman elites, and most famously Julius Caesar, see Diana Spencer, ‘Roman Alexanders: Epistemology and Identity’, in Waldemar Heckel and Lawrence A. Tritle (eds), Alexander the Great: A New History (Chichester: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 251–75.72 Polybius, The Histories, Book I.36, Loeb Classical Library edition, 1922, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/1*.html.73 Jim Mattis and Bing West, Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead (New York: Random House, 2019), p. 12.74 Quoted in Jay Luvaas, ‘Military History and Officer Education: Some Personal Reflections’, The Army Historian, no. 6, Winter 1985, pp. 9–11, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26303404?seq=1.75 See, for example, Toshi Yoshihara, ‘Chinese Lessons from the Pacific War: Implications for PLA Warfighting’, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 5 January 2023, https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/chinese-lessons-from-the-pacific-war-implications-for-pla-warfighting; Lyle Goldstein, ‘China’s Falklands Lessons’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 50, no. 3, 2008, pp. 65–82; Lyle Goldstein, ‘Why China’s View of the Battle of Guadalcanal Matters’, National Interest, 21 October 2021, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/why-chinas-view-battle-guadalcanal-matters-194825; and Fumio Ota, ‘Sun Tzu in Contemporary Chinese Strategy’, Joint Force Quarterly, no. 73, April 2014, pp. 76–80, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/JFQ/Joint-Force-Quarterly-73/Article/577507/sun-tzu-in-contemporary-chinese-strategy.76 On the importance of leveraging asymmetries and identifying enduring sources of advantage as part of a strategy of long-term cost imposition – including by exacerbating an adversary’s select tendencies toward self-damaging patterns of behaviour – see Stephen Peter Rosen, ‘Competitive Strategies: Theoretical Foundations, Limits, and Extensions’, in Thomas G. Mahnken (ed.), Competitive Strategies for the 21st Century: Theory, History, and Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 12–28.77 See James G. Roche and Thomas G. Mahnken, ‘What Is Net Assessment?’, in Thomas G. Mahnken (ed.), Net Assessment and Military Strategy: Retrospective and Prospective Essays (New York: Cambria Press, 2020), pp. 11–27; Andrew W. Marshall, ‘The Nature and Scope of Net Assessments’, National Security Council Memorandum, 16 August 1972, p. 1; and Stephen Peter Rosen, ‘Net Assessment as an Analytical Concept’, in Andrew W. Marshall et al. (eds), On Not Confusing Ourselves: Essays on National Strategy in Honor of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 283–301.