Angry Planet - What Star Wars Can Teach the American Military

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Luke Skywalker is a household name. Carl von Clausewitz not so much. Learning about the military—especially about strategy and tactics—is a jargon filled slog. War has a language all its own and for decades, military minds have struggled to find an easy way to teach conflict to the common citizen and aspiring officer alike.Star Wars is that language. That’s the theory behind a new book, Strategy Strikes Back, How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict, which teaches military lessons using language and stories from a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away. This week on War College, Military strategist ML Cavanaugh and Max Brooks (author of World War Z) take us through the connections between George Lucas’ battlefields and our own.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollege.co. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. There's a very dangerous trend where we're going right now because like the Jedi, the present military is too small for the growing challenges. But you also see the rise in automation. And so you see a lot more political will to automate the armed forces. horses rather than ask the American people to share some of the burden. And that's clone troopers. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Field.

Hawth, Indoor, Crate. Names that to a certain portion of the population mean China. childhood, fun, and war. Yes, this week on War College, we're going to talk Star Wars and Military Strategy. It's the subject of a new book, Strategy Strikes Back, how Star Wars explains Modern Military Conflict. Here to help us with the subject are two of the book's editors, Matt Kavanaugh and Max Brooks. Kavanaugh is a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point and a U.S. Army strategist. Brooks is also a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute, as well as the best-selling author of World War Z and the

Harlem Hellfighters. Max, Matt, thank you both so much for joining us. Good to be here. I'm super excited to be here. Well, not as excited as we are to be able to nerd out on Star Wars with, you know, honest to God, military strategists. Can you tell us a bit about the project, you know, what it is, what was the kind of the thought process behind it?

Maybe I should kick off because I was actually, the inception comes at a time where I, where I intersected with your show. I had been teaching at West Point for three years. And after that, I served in an assignment in headquarters in Korea. And so whether I was talking to cadets or with Koreans, I found that it was actually often difficult to have a conversation about military strategy when you don't have a common frame of reference. So if you're talking to cadets,

they don't often have the same kind of depth of knowledge about, say, the Korean War. And if you're talking to a Korean military officer, they often don't know much about the American Civil War. So I very much felt that one of the best approaches would be to find a common piece of terrain or a war that we all knew something about. and the one war that we all know pretty well is Star Wars. It crosses languages, cultures, generations, whether you're a cadet or a Korean. You know something about Star Wars. And so here's where I intersect with your show. When I left that assignment in Korea, I was on my way to Army, Space, and Missile Defense Command.

And I actually listened to your program when you did an episode in 2015 on Star Wars. on space war. And that was actually the moment of the book's inception. I fired off a note to Max and said, hey, I'd like to do a book on film and fiction and its relation to real strategy. And this is, he earns all the kudos in the world by saying, you know, when he said,

we've really got to focus and firm up on one subject. And so let's let's start. start at the mountain top, let's start with the biggest war there is, Star Wars. So that's in 2015. No, it would be the summer of 2016 was when we really started the project. And the book is out in just a few days, May 1st. And did you find that there's just that much commonality around Star Wars? I mean, anybody who sees the book already knows what you're talking about. Is there enough of a common language there? Max, go ahead.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can say that from the civilian world, we all know Star Wars. And what's great about Star Wars, it's been around long enough that it's multi-generational. You know, the fact that you now have people who are running the country and running the military were young and just starting their lives when the first three came out. So it's not just, it's not just broad. as far as its appeal, it's deep as far as how far back generationally it goes. And I'll piggyback on that.

So General Stan McChrystal wrote the forward of the book, and he describes in that forward having just finished Ranger School as a young lieutenant sitting in the theater watching the very first Star Wars film. So everyone, literally everyone in uniform today has a lot of. some kind of experience with Star Wars. Not everybody loves it. The book isn't for everybody, but nearly anybody could benefit. So we see it really as a cross-generational, fresh perspective on war and strategy. Who do you think the book is for? Who needs to read it? Young officers, policy people, or just the general public? Well, I'm coming from a civilian point of view,

and I know Matt's initial impetus was how do I get my students excited about strategy and how do I communicate with allies about strategy. So he's coming from the military point of view. I'm coming from the civilian. And I can tell you that what has been bothering me pretty much since 9-11 is this chasm, this divorce between the American people and those tasked with protecting them. And the American voter doesn't really understand anything about war or strategy. the way they used to a couple generations ago. Therefore, you can see that ignorance in elections, the people that we vote for, and then the policies that are elected officials make.

So I thought it was a great way to reintroduce the American people to the sort of big ticket, big picture items that affect each and every one of us. And I want to jump on the back end of that. Max is absolutely right. My initial sense for the book was that the audience was cadets and colonels. And I think that it's wider than that, that it's civilians as well. It just, it sounds like hyperbole, but it's not to say that for folks in uniform, including myself, you know, my life and our wars depend on the American public's choices.

So this book very much is an attempt to try and make these issues, modern war and military strategy, more relatable and interesting to the wider public. So, Max, just to sort of bring this to a more specific level, you wrote about Endor right at the beginning of the book. I think it's actually the first story. And can you just take us through how the Ewoks became the Taliban? at least that's my reading your story. No, that's exactly right. And you would think initially that's kind of silly that these little fuzzies could become so deadly and so dangerous to us. But when you look at Return of the Jedi, it perfectly mirrors the 1980s war in Afghanistan,

where we, the great power, co-opted an indigenous force by proxy. to fight another great power, a very primitive, very tribal force. We use them as pawns, and they helped us win. And so what I have in this chapter is a letter to the new Republic Senate saying, listen, we cannot abandon our EWAC allies. Their culture has been decimated. Their land has been annihilated, we have to rebuild them and we have to rebuild those structures that keep them together. Otherwise, in this vacuum, there's going to be radical forces that are going to take over. Nature abhors a vacuum because all we've left them at this point is a shattered culture and mountains of high-tech weaponry. And that is a recipe for disaster, which is exactly what happened in Afghanistan,

where we use them to win a war and then we abandoned them. And all they were left with was mountains of Soviet hardware. The result was a new class of young, scrappy radicals took over we'll call the Taliban, which I think is ironic, considering that the British Empire used to refer to the Afghans as the fuzzy-wuzzies, sort of harmless and cute, but not really dangerous on a geopolitical level. And look where that's gotten us. So that's actually only one of the stories. I mean, that's the whole thing, is that these are individual essays that, Take an element of Star Wars and analyze it and turn it into strategy. It's another really fun look at how, whether or not Han shot first against Grito, one of the most famous controversies since George Lucas decided to remake it four different times.

And the difference between preventative war and I'm sorry, what's the other term? Preemptive War. Preemptive Strike. And so that actually brings me to one other question, which is how much did these writers know about Star Wars in the Star Wars universe? Because I'm assuming that most of them started from a standpoint of knowing a lot about strategy. They started out with a love and a passion for both. But here's why we know they really love Star Wars because we got them to do these essays. They're not making any money.

In fact, the lion's share of the royalties are going to the Wounded Warrior Project, to that point about the Hans Shot Grito thing, Hanshot First, whatever, you know, whatever your take is on that. The writer for that particular essay was Chuck Beas, who's another major in the Army, and he had just won the highest award at Fort Leavenworth for Army mid-career officers because, frankly, he knows how to plan military operations like the best of back of his hand. And that essay that he wrote, he put it together very quickly while he was training for rotation at the National Training Center. And it actually, that essay can teach someone a lot

about the so-called bloody nose strike option with North Korea. He's describing the difference between a strategic threat in a generalized sense and an imminent threat. And you can actually see parallels between whether or not Grito actually lifted his blaster and whether or not the North Koreans actually have a weapon on the pad, which I think pretty much everybody, atheist or not, is praying that they don't and they won't, especially after the next month. First of all, I just want to get everyone on record that Hanshot first, right? Yeah. Okay.

I'm fully in for that one. Yes. Okay. So one of the things I think is really wonderful about this book is that so much of it is written in universe, meaning that the author is assuming the role kind of a person actually living in that universe and writing from their perspective. Not all of them are like this, but some of them are. One of the most striking to me was suffer the weak or suffer the weak bust by Craig Whiteside, which is an imperial officer's history of the Galactic Civil War written after he lost,

or after his sight is lost, rather. Did you push some writers to go in universe, or did they come to that themselves? And what do you think is the power and effect of doing it that way, as opposed to kind of being detached and talking about it as if it is fiction? Well, I think that, no, we didn't really push anybody to do anything. I think it was sort of, if you have a passion for this project, go for it. You could see that people had been thinking about their essays for quite some time.

And the advantage of writing, really of writing from the character in that universe is it humanizes them. Because the thing about Star Wars is that the movies exist as the primary source material. You know, it's not like there were books and then there was a movie. The movies start first. So if you've seen the movies, you've done your homework, which makes it pretty easy to have gotten a handle on everything in that universe. And so that's why writing from those points of view, I mean, how many of us have had these conversations with other people or in our heads? How many of us have imagined what if we were an imperial officer writing the after action report? Or what would it be like if you were Tarkins aid to camp and you had to deal with all this?

So putting yourself in their shoes is a pretty easy thing to do because at some point or another, we've all lived it. and we we very much did not straightjacket anybody um in fact actually when i when i received drafts i was i was surprised a little bit at uh what some people were capable of i mean i i know what the stereotype is uh you know short haircuts type a um and one of one of our writers uh colonel Liam Collins, who's the Modern War Institute's director at West Point, has a PhD in international relations from Princeton, and his dissertation was on counterinsurgency theory. And he wrote a scene with dialogue of a group of imperial officers talking through different counterinsurgency strategies, which is a 180 degree turned from the horrible, horrifying,

academic writing you might find in his dissertation, and I'm sure that he would actually agree with that. That's not a knock. This book, in a lot of ways for him and a lot of us, it was our opportunity to get out of our policy writing, our military writing, and our academic writing, and write for fun, translate normally somewhat dusty ideas and make them more interesting and relevant to a wider audience. And this goes back to one of the initial premises of the book is breaking the stove pipes. And this is the problem is whenever a major crisis goes wrong, everyone asks, well, how could this have happened? And one of the reasons you always come up with is that people don't speak the same language. We live in a very hyper-specialized society where people do just their narrow-focused jobs,

and they have their own language. I mean, I've been to a bunch of these national defense conferences where the techies cannot talk to the soldiers, the soldiers cannot talk to the politicians, and none of them can speak to me the voter. And so what a great opportunity to speak a common language of movies we've all seen. And whether you love them or whether you don't, you all know what you're talking about.

And you simply cannot accomplish that with von Klausowitz or Sun Suu. I'll ask a weird speculative question. do you think that it's possible that Star Wars becomes lingua franca or has it already? You know, parts of it might because you do need a popular language that everyone can understand. And I think that becomes, it's becoming harder and harder because with the rise of social media and also even with television where you can watch your little niche program and binge on it, we don't have water cooler moments anymore. You know, there was a famous statistic where during the last episode of MASH, literally the reservoir in New York City went down a few feet every time there was a commercial break because everybody ran to the bathroom because everybody was watching it. We don't really have that anymore.

And so you have something like Star Wars, which is one of the last true pop culture threads that really does reach a truly diverse audience. And I'll, you know, I'll give you a non-weird, non-speculative answer. I hope it does from my perspective because there are so many things with what I do professionally that I want to be discussed with the wider American public. And then within the military, we've already, we've mined history and we've mined theory for ideas. So the Civil War has given us 70,000 books since the end of the war, more than one a day. You know, we've mined that for what we can get out of it. The art of war, Sun Tzu, the Song Dynasty in China alone, there were 43 different thousand page commentaries. We've mined the theory, including Klausovitz.

And we've done that for good reason, but I think it's time for a new lens, for a new way to have these discussions. And so, yeah, I hope it does become a lingua franca, because I think we need one. So one of the lenses that you use based on Star Wars is the idea of the Jedi as being a separate professional military force with weak ties to the civilian world. And I think Max you've already sort of gotten at this. But I felt like that was a theme, this weak tether, that came up more than once in these stories. Do you see that and the Jedi as a good way of talking about a very important problem? Oh, most, most definitely. You know, it sounded like a great idea after Vietnam to get rid of the draft and have an all-volunteer force.

And, you know, during the relatively peaceful Reagan years, that was great. And even during the 90s, that seemed like a great idea. But we're in the midst of what is turning out to be two full decades of constant war. and we're seeing the toll it is taking on our military and we're seeing the lack of participation on the part of the American people. And it is truly dangerous. A few years ago when I was at the Scusa conference up at West Point, I used the term warrior class and I said we're in danger of creating a warrior cast. And coincidentally, suddenly it all became, that term warrior cast I found going all over other articles. Everyone has started using it. And I would love

to say that it was my genius that had thought of warrior cast. But I took that from another sci-fi show, Babylon 5, J. Michael Strzinski's show, which there was an alien race, the Minbari, which had a warrior cast, bred and born and trained for nothing but war. And that is what I started to see happening with military families, having kids, and really retreating from the larger society. That looks to me like the first seeds of a warrior cast. And from my perspective, I actually just came back from a couple of conferences where we were talking about the relationship between the uniformed military and the rest of civilian society.

And there's some strong reasons to be greatly concerned. I'm emblematic to some degree. My family was never in the military until my generation and myself and both my brothers have served in the army. It has very much become a family business. We are often segmented and separated from large swaths of the American public just by virtue of the fact that training areas happen to be more cost effective in lower density parts of the country. But also politics, we live in a very divisive age and politics is starting to creep in. and separate troops from within and separate the military from the rest of society. So there's an awful lot of concern about that,

and I think the book echoes that contemporary concern. So that story didn't end well for the Jedi. No. Right. What are the lessons, what are the takeaways from their fall? Do you think that we can apply here? And how do we avoid it happening to us? So we bridge that divide?

I'll jump very quickly and respond with partisanship and politicization. Those can't enter into the military profession in any way as divided as society is now. It gets a lot worse and much more terrifying if those divisive elements shimmy their way into the military. And it hasn't yet, but there are signs that partisanship is growing within the military. and nothing but bad things happen if that's the case. Yeah. And I'll also add to that by saying that there's a very dangerous trend where we're going right now because like the Jedi, the present military is too small for the growing challenges.

But you also see the rise in automation. And so you see a lot more political will to automate the armed forces rather than ask the American people to share some of the burden. And that's clone troopers. That's why they did the clone army, was the Jedi Council and the Republican Senate did not want to spread out some of the suffering and the burden on the rest of the population. So a clone army seemed efficient and simple, which is exactly how you have an automated force possibly in our world. And yet, just like the clone troopers, that automated force can one day be hacked. It's so strange the way that you guys talk about it, though. You know, most people think of the prequels in particular as George Lucas kind of losing it.

And you're making him sound prescient. Yeah. I disagree, actually. Just to throw my two cents in there and irritate Star Wars fans, hardcore ones, I think those movies are great. And it's exactly for these kinds of discussions. Oh, yeah. No, I know.

I'm going to jump in and say that that I think it's time for us. us to look back at those three movies and see what Lucas was trying to do. Certainly now when we look at the new movies that are coming out, which are very tame and very safe and, ergo, very profitable. But those prequels have so much to say about the world we're living in. They came out at a time when things were peaceful and calm. And yet now, when we talk about situations where democracy is inefficient,

dictatorship gets things done. They shake things up, so to speak. There's a lot of very dangerous threads. I keep thinking back and forth to Natalie Portman's line when she says, so this is how democracy dies, to thunderous applause. Okay, so you've convinced me of everything except for Jar Jar Binks, but we can leave that to something else. Jar Jar Binks does not escape criticism in our book.

You'll find several layered elements that take on Jar Jar. But that's, you know, that's kind of the fan. You know, those first three episodes when George Lucas went back, I see why fans didn't love them. But if you're looking for lessons for modern war and military strategy, there's actually like you guys were just saying, there's an awful lot there. So once you get past Jar Jar Jar, there's a lot of goodness under there.

And yet Jar Jar Jar was uneducated. and well-meaning and helped elect a dictator. And isn't that how dictators get elected all over the world? I love it. Yeah. Max has a lot of the takes on Jarjar. If it weren't for Jarjar, we wouldn't have gotten Pulpatin. Right.

And yet, isn't that how dictators rise all throughout history is sort of unthinking, well-meaning people say, wow, we're really in a crisis. But, you know, this guy seems to have all the answers. So I think we should give him the sword. Okay, well, now I'm completely convinced. I'm rewatching the movies tonight. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think they're good.

I like them. Okay. All right. Well, let's just get to. That actually brings me to my next question, which is, if you are a strategist, can you make Star Wars point out any lesson you want to? or are there certain lessons built into the movies that are immutable by themselves? You know, you're not going to get a lot out of the jaw ones,

but you do have to obey some sort of basic, I think, common sense rules and set aside the things that just don't apply. I'm not going to be able to just wave my hand and get someone to agree with me. Persuasion is going to be more difficult in the real world than if you're a Jedi in Star Wars. But I do think generally there are some good lessons that we can pick up, you know, about others, lessons that we can pick up about ourselves, you know, as a mirror or a magnifying glass on our own world and some lessons about strategy. And the lessons about strategy, really fiction and film can force you to think, what would I do in this given circumstance? To some extent, Max's book, World War Z, is fantastic. You know, it's not real.

But it does force me to think about what I would do as a military strategist in the face of a growing and spreading global pandemic. And my next assignment is actually at U.S. Northern Command to protect the homeland. And so I'll actually be thinking about those things. Similarly, in the book, Admiral James DeVredis, the former Supreme Allied commander in Europe wrote about, But essentially answering the question, how do you beat a death star when you can't possibly build one yourself? That's the essential problem if you're a rebel. And that's the essential problem on a modern battlefield if you're facing the United States. And for those of us wearing the American flag, that's a perspective that we really need to adopt more and more if we're going to be successful.

I would say from a civilian citizen point of view that the average American needs to step up and start thinking harder about big issues. And because the times have changed. And we see this now. We see that the world has changed in a way that would have been inconceivable in the 90s. And I think about Lena Dunham's character in girls, Hannah, who basically said, I don't give a shit about anything. but I have an opinion about everything. And that's cute for a bygone era. But the world has become too complex and too dangerous for the citizens of the world's

most powerful democracy not to give a shit about anything. All right. Well, one final question. And it's related to the earlier one. But is there a single important lesson that you would like someone to take away from, the book. I wrote the epilogue and while we don't take our films seriously, we do take strategy seriously. And so we wanted to make strategy relatable and interesting. But if you look carefully at the movies and you start to list the characters that die in the films, you know, war demands death.

and it gets overlooked an awful lot in these movies because they're they're droids or their Jedi that don't seem to mind getting waxed because they just show up as an apparition later but in the real world nope we don't we don't get to come back and i you know there's a reason why that that line there's one line that's been used in all the films all of the films i've got a bad feeling about this And when we get closer to real war, that's how I feel. I get that sort of pit in my stomach feeling. I've been feeling that an awful lot about North Korea. So the takeaway I want for people is that this is a sort of a lighter, more relatable way and maybe interesting way to talk about strategy. But I really want, like I said, cadets, colonels, Koreans, and citizens.

to read this because they'll make those decisions. And I hope that they make the best ones that they can. And I would say that throughout history, the enemy of education has always been the professional educators. Too often academics tend to be elitist and tribal and therefore make their teachings cryptic in order to justify their jobs. And I've always found that the greatest educators are willing to be seen as populist. I literally was just at a film symposium last night where Martin Scorsese called movies the Great American Art Form. And I would take a step further and say that moving pictures are America's greatest gift to humanity's education. All we have to do is pay attention.

Thank you very much, both of you for joining us. If Max Brooks, Matt Kavanaugh, the book is, Strategy Strikes Back, How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict, and it should be out today as you are listening to this right now. Thanks very much for listening to this week's show. If you enjoyed it, let the entire world know by leaving a review on iTunes, just like a werewolf 23 did. back to a school, five stars.

Excellent, well-researched, great guests, very informative journalism. I'd be very happy if there were more frequent episodes. Well, to tell you the truth of Werewolf 23, we'd be happy if there were more episodes too, but don't expect it to happen anytime soon. If you want to reach out to us on social media, which a bunch of you have been doing recently, you can find us at facebook.com slash warcollege podcast and we're also on Twitter at war underscore college. Have a great week.