School of War - Ep 101: Iskander Rehman on Wars of Protraction

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

Iskander Rehman, Ax:son Johnson Fellow at SAIS’s Kissinger Center and author of Planning for Protraction: A Historically Informed Approach to Great-power War and Sino-US Competition, joins the show to talk about how future wars might be more a test of national endurance than expected. ▪️ Times      •    01:56 Introduction      •    04:01 Sharp and short wars     •    09:07 After the first salvo     •    12:33 Geography as a predictor     •    15:21 Will nuclear deterrence work?     •    21:16 “An informationized local war”     •    25:13 What matters in protracted wars     •    28:59 Innovation and adaptation     •    33:51 The role of national leadership in protracted conflict     •    38:49 Sino-U.S. competition      •    44:50 Absorbing massive casualties     •    48:06 Polybius Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack  

The American military likes to win, and doctrinally, it likes to win quickly to execute battle plans that seize the initiative from the enemy and press a technological advantage leading to rapid victory. We've done it before. Take the Persian Gulf War in the 90s as a shining example of what I'm talking about. But what if a war isn't short and sharp? Maybe because in a war with a great power like China, our technological advantage, such as it is, isn't decisive anymore. Or maybe because it turns out the history of great power conflict shows that short and sharp isn't the norm at all. There's a long history of protracted wars of attrition between the great powers. And many in Washington are now paying attention to the fact that the war with China might

end up being just that. Let's talk about why and about what would be required to win such a war. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram. And also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks so much for joining School of War. I'm joined today by Skander Raymond. is the Axon Johnson Fellow at the Kissinger Center at Johns Hopkins Seiss.

He's also a senior fellow for Strategic Studies at the American Forum Policy Council. He is the author most recently of the book we're going to talk about today, planning for protraction, a historically informed approach to great power war in Sino-US competition. Iskander, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks so much for having me back on the show. Delighted to be here. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. And so I open with them a quick word of praise for your book on a couple of grounds.

One, it's extremely well written, I have to say, which you can, there are all sorts of books that have actually thoughtful things to say about strategy and grand strategy that nevertheless, I don't think I would praise for their prose. But your writing is often just extremely vivid and clear, and I appreciate that. And then also the book is... That's a great thing. No, it's a real feast for references, which I feel like is a real nerd. way to praise something, but I like books that they almost, if you work your way through the notes,

you're almost sort of working your way through a bit of a curriculum, or you could write a curriculum based on the notes. And I noticed that about these. I have now many open tabs and many additions to my Amazon wish lists, courtesy of your notes. So thank you to you that my pocketbook has suffered. Sure, sure, sure, sure. I'm happy to contribute to that. And an acquaintance of mine actually said that he bought the book for the footnotes, and I'm not sure whether that's a complex or whatever. That's a more strong phrasing than I just used. I wouldn't go quite that far.

The argument is good too, but the notes are very good. So, well, let's just get right into it. The title, well, it doesn't say it all, but it does say the most important thing, that protraction or long wars, wars of attrition, in your view, ought to be on our mind as we think about Sino-U.S. competition. You posit at the start of your book, something that I think is true.

I think everyone would generally agree that the United States has a preference doctrinally. And beyond that, wherever you turn, there's often an expectation for wars that are sharp and short. And I want to ask you, first of all, what does that mean? You know, put a little flesh on those bones for us. And second of all, how did we get here? Why is that not only what we plan for, which I think there's good reasons why you could imagine planning for that, but why is it what we seem to expect? Sure.

Well, I guess I should perhaps begin by specifying that this is a research project of mine has been a practed process in and of itself, a labor of love that was a long time in the making. So I actually started working on these issues during the pandemic in the hermit-like seclusion of my home office. And at the time, I was producing a series of monographs for the Office of Net Assessment. And the goal then was to engage over the course of about a year and a half in a detailed examination of past protracted high-intensity wars. So looking slightly beyond the usual suspects, such as, you know, the First and Second World Wars that feature very heavily in the security studies literature, although, of course, I do delve into those conflicts.

but I also range back much further to the Punic Wars, for example, in addition to the Peloponnesian War, the 100 Years War, the Franco-Spanish Wars of the early modern era. There are references to conflicts such as the Iran-Iraq War, for example, and of course the contemporary conflict in Ukraine. So I hope that it comes across as something that is relatively digestible, that it's a sort of nutritious soup for students of strategic studies in many ways that contains a lot of different ingredients or sort of a minestrone, if you will. But the ultimate goal was

to tease out certain shared principles or common explanatory factors of past Great Power Actors, successes or failures in protracted broken back warfare with an eye to applying these various insights to the current sign of U.S. military competition. And already at the time, of course, the major global upheavals tied to the rapid spread of COVID-19 had cast a harsh and often flattering light on the brittleness of U.S. and allied defense industrial bases on their acute vulnerability to sudden economic downturns and workforce disruptions and to the fragility and tenuousness of global supply chains. And since then, the war in Ukraine, with its prodigious consumption of munitions, fuel, and material has only heightened concern in U.S. defense circles over the nation's.

state of preparedness of future wars. And so now, of course, to get back to your question, everyone writes and threats about munition stocks, supply chains, and shipyard capacity, and rightly so. Yet for all the shared declarations of anxiety over the parlous and atrophied state of the defense industrial base, it was not clear to me that beyond these mere, these more immediate material and industrial concerns, the Overton window had shifted that much and that we're necessarily thinking more deeply and profoundly about, about

what a protracted great power war against a major peer competitor would fully entail, whether that's strategically, operationally, societally, diplomatically, politically. And I'd argue that whereas during the Cold War, defense intellectuals devoted substantial attention to prevailing in the long twilight struggle against the Soviet Union and to planning across varied time horizons. And this is something that my colleague at the Kisinger Center, Hull Brands has written a book about. I would argue that current thinking on protracted competition, let alone on the issue of protracted war still remains somewhat underdeveloped. And so this book seeks to sort of modestly aid in this collective process of mental adjustment.

So first it provides an empirically grounded study of protracted Great Power War, and then it applies the various collated insights to the current sign of U.S. military competition. Why they're focus on China? Well, simply because there's a clear bipartisan consensus that the PRC constitutes the U.S.'s most, formidable long-term competitor, Orchwyn-Boy current DoD jargon, it's its prime pacing threat. So I want to read a passage here from your book that gets to the heart of the matter. It also, I think, shows off the writing well. Whereas for Fuller and Liddell Hart, mechanized deep thrusts constituted the prime vectors of enemy

dislocation, 21st century planners visualized such a role being fulfilled via intricately assembled reconnaissance strike complexes with close-knit networks of sensors and platforms. forms, standing ready to disgorge tightly focused pulses of military power at a moment's notice. What happens, though, when two such battle networks interlocking fields of fire are arrayed against each other, like two nervously twitching duelists facing off on an ice-rhymed field in a Tolstoy novel. And you go on to predict that someone's inclined to strike first, that they see an incentive in striking first, and then, to paraphrase, everyone's really expensive, exquisite stuff, gets wrecked pretty quickly. But for a variety of reasons, the war then very possibly doesn't end.

Say why. The Chinese, since the Gulf War, built something to counteract what the United States can bring to bear. We can now both bring similar-ish things to bear. Why isn't this going to be fast? So I think despite the growing realization of the potential for protraction in the United States, US and Chinese military doctrines are remarkably similar in some ways, and that they still place an overwhelming emphasis on blinding campaigns, on rapidly seizing the initiative, and on combat speed in a near mark by the diffusion of precision strike and an increased dependence on exquisite multi-led C4 ISR networks. But the question that comes across in the, I'm in the section that you quoted is what happens the day after the first salvo, when both battered

sensorially impaired actors face off in a new casualty, in a new casualty-stricken and communications degraded environment. And what I argue is that little in the history of great power war would suggest that momentous conflicts in between great power actors can be resolved in the aftermath of the first folly, no matter how surgical devastating or demoralizing that first volley may be, and short war thinking has all too often run aground on the jagged shoulders of political reality, with I think states repeatedly underestimating the amount of pain, devastation, and economic loss that determined adversaries can absorb prior to even contemplating surrender. The opening phases of a high-intensity

conflict are often critical, but they're rarely determinate if the moral center of the adversary has not been neutralized in the sense that if the desire to continue the conflict to achieve one's war aims has not been eradicated, there is a very little likelihood that the conflict will stop then and there. I suppose just to this question just occurs to me off the cuff, so if it doesn't make sense, just explain why. The one area that I suppose I have a little bit of hope for in terms of avoiding the otherwise extremely realistic and plausible sounding scenarios that you lay out in the Pacific is that what we all seem to anticipate for obvious reasons is some sort of scenario to seize an island.

And so, you know, unlike just to go to the 20th century examples, unlike the invasion of France, right? It's harder to get a toehold in the first place. And if you could succeed in preventing a toehold or a significant beachhead complex or series of complexes, could things continue? Yes, of course. But at that point, it does seem like the PRC's ability to, you know, as it were, make a second go of it would be, you know, it's just, it's just a harder thing to ask a military to do than it is to ask a military to say, hang on. in the way that the German military hangs on towards the end of 1914. Does that make sense that just something about the geography of the theater

might give us some reason for hope that actually in a defensive way, you could win this thing quickly? And if not, just tell me why I'm being foolishly optimistic. No, I think that that is an excellent question. And one that's worth exploring in depth. I mean, we could look at various specific scenarios, whether it's a full-scale invasion and or blockade of Taiwan, a conflict surrounding the Sankaku Islands, or Thomas Scholl,

as we've recently seen, tensions increase in between Chinese vessels and the assets of the Philippines. But I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that it would be very difficult for either China or the United States, considering the current force laydown on balance of power to achieve any of their putative wartime objectives without striking fast, striking hard and going big. So in the case of China,

if it wishes to prevail in a Taiwan-type contingency, it would be very difficult for China to attain its military objectives without targeting U.S. bases, either in allied territories such as Japan or sovereign territories such as Guam. And even if it eschewed conducting strikes on those U.S. bases, which wouldn't really make operational sense, one can only imagine how, for example, the loss of a U.S. aircraft carrier with its thousands of associated personnel, how that would affect American public opinion and escalation dynamics. So I think it would be very hard for China to conduct.

any kind of campaign, which doesn't immediately lead to some form of escalation. Conversely, the United States, and this is something that I delve into quite deeply in certain sections of the book, I think it would be very difficult for U.S. forces to deny China's military efforts without engaging in some form of rolling strike campaign against Chinese assets that are positioned on the Chinese mainland, whether it's in the form of integrated air, defenses, missile launch lights, et cetera, et cetera. So in both cases, if the parties wish to prevail, they have to adopt certain military strategies that, in my mind, would inevitably lead to some form of protraction and escalation to high intensity exchanges. Well, just to stick with escalation

for a second then, and you discuss this at some length towards the end of the book. But why, why doesn't this thing just go nuclear? You know, what's to, what's to prevent that? Why isn't your book, in a way, a kind of fantasy exercise about what could happen if everyone just makes the reasonable decision not to use nuclear weapons when in fact, in general, I think people think that this sort of war hasn't happened since 1945 because of the existence of nuclear weapons, because everyone wants to avoid a nuclear war. So what are we all missing here? Sure. And that's that's an excellent question. And I think it's a question that features at the heart of the book, does the fact that both countries possess robust and in the case of China,

rapidly growing nuclear arsenals mean that it is unlikely that they will ever go to war? So I argue in the book that it certainly exerts a dampening effect, but that it can actually be extremely difficult to gauge what precise kind of role that nuclear deterrence might play on pre or even intra-war dynamics for that matter. So one reason is that there appears to be a great deal of ambiguity or perhaps even confusion in Chinese thinking on in terms of what they think when it comes to nuclear deterrence and escalation dynamics or what they term war control. And indeed, many U.S. and European sinologists have pointed to the seeming underdevelopment or barrenness of Chinese strategic forge on these issues, particularly in

comparison to the Soviets, for example, during the Cold War. And the fact that the PRC has stubbornly refused until relatively recently to engage in proper bilateral discussions on nuclear arms control, only sort of adds to this general opacity. And second, as the book argues, it remains difficult to ascertain whether both countries' possession of nuclear weapons in and of itself reduces the possibility of a protracted high-intensity war. Of course, one could say that, you know, we haven't yet, thank God, had witnessed a high-intensity conflict in between two nuclear armed states. That said, we have witnessed more limited forms of war in between nuclear armed capacities. We point to the 1969 Sino-Soviet War, the 1999 Cargill War, during the Sino-Soviet

War. At the most, there were hundreds of casualties. During the cargo conflict, there are about 500 casualties on the Indian side, maybe somewhat more on the Pakistani side, and although we don't have a clear sense of the figures. In this case, of course, it would be something completely different and unprecedented. But yes, as I was saying, so it remains very challenging to ascertain whether both countries' possessions of nuclear weapons would reduce the possibility of a protracted conventional war or somewhat perversely render it more likely. Arguments have been advanced in both directions. Some believe, you know, the Great Power War is a relic of the pre-atomic age. But I think that all things considered, the fact that neither great power competitor seems to view then

the nuclear dimension of their rivalry as being somewhat antithetic. to the prosecution of large-scale and ambitious military strategies suggest that the potential for a large, stale, conventional war has not been neutralized in and of itself by the joint possession of nuclear weapons. And I think another issue that is particularly interesting to look at is what effect the presence of the nuclear shadow, if you will, might have on intra-war dynamics during the conflict itself. Might it, for example, encourage the adoption of more indirect or restrained military strategies

which somewhat inadvertently foster protraction in and of themselves? So, for example, there has been a pretty vivid debate in recent years amongst U.S. defense strategists over the necessity or wisdom of conducting strikes on the Chinese mainland in the event of a conflict, whether it's on the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere, those who oppose it, various escalation-related reasons have often argued in favor of alternative military approaches, such as a maritime blockade, for example, which in fact encouraged further protraction. And one could also posit that once, once the first sort of pulses of firepower have been disgorged, as we were discussing earlier, there might be a phase in the conflict where both

factors step back somewhat for fear of further escalation, sort of ratchet, down their levels of aggression and decide to restrain some of their military behaviors or or not engage in the same level of intensity of military operations, in which case that would also lead to traffic. Yeah. One more question about, as it were, the precursors to protection, then I want to get into the nature of protection itself, which is, of course, the bulk of your book. But I was struck by one thing that you.

you point out and it was it was somewhat news to me I just don't follow Chinese military doctrine or defense planning that closely it's it's not my subject it's mostly in a language I can't read but I you know the fact that we plan on campaigns that are you know that aim to seek a decision right that we have a kind of maneuverous mindset this is not news to me I was sort of raised in this cult this was my this was my religion I was an acolyte of it in Quantico some years ago and my you know my my reports are bit dated at this point, but the way it was explained to us, young officers, was almost as a moral imperative that there's something about a traditional warfare that is immoral, and that it is the duty of a commander to spend lives and to a lesser extent material only in pursuit of a

decision, and that if you can avoid fighting where no decision is possible, then that's, in order, you know, in order to get into a position to achieve a decision, that's preferable. And this clearly, you know, there's the historical experiences of the 20th century and a certain kind of understanding of them, however arguably superficial at times, hanging over this mindset. My question for you is, where does the Chinese embrace of this thinking come from? I mean, there may be more to the American embrace of it than what I just outlined. That was just my experience of it as one officer going through relatively junior level schools. But where does the Chinese embrace of it come from?

Yeah, so I should probably caveat my remarks, first of all, by stating that I, like you, am not a sinologist. I do not read Chinese, so I'm forced to rely on the excellent work of my colleagues who are sinologists and who do master this material. And they are extensively quoted and footnoted throughout the book. I do know relying in large part on their analyses that even though the PRC does have a rich history of thinking on protracted warfare, going back of course to Mao's own ruminations on the issue during the Civil War and the War against the Japanese.

In recent years, Chinese thinking has been heavily dominated by the idea of prevailing in what they call an informationized local war. And of course, we could devote a podcast in and of itself to the evolution of Chinese thinking since the Chinese military thinking since the early 1990s. But most people would say that this is largely in reaction to China's concerns over the US militaries, in their eyes, unexpectedly effective and devastating performance during the first Gulf War and how Chinese thinkers have been thinking about revolutions and military affairs, the proliferation of precision strike, etc., etc. So in many ways, Chinese thinking is a reaction to what they see happening in the United States. And in fact, many of their recent concepts,

whether it's, you know, multi-domain precision warfare, for example, seem in many ways to mimic American operational concepts, albeit with, you know, Chinese characteristics, one might say. So I think that there's that aspect of things. I also think, as I was mentioning earlier, that there is a whole bit of a barrenness of Chinese thought when it comes to issues such as deterrence, escalation management, intra-war dynamics, etc., etc. And there's a whole bit of There is also a clear, how would I say this, not a positivist bent, but a clear sense that advances in technology and the massive Chinese investment in emergent technologies may allow them to technologically leapfrog their opponents in the United States in particular and

conduct wars that are so devastating, so surgical and so seamlessly executed that they wouldn't necessarily have to worry about what happens after the first salvo. There's a certain amount of magical thinking and their discussions on the intelligentization of warfare, for example, the use of AI, quantum computing, et cetera, to sort of override the issues they have with regard to civil military relations, command and control, conducting complex joint operations, etc., etc. Okay, so on to the main subject, which is how to protracted wars work.

What are the factors that we ought to pay attention to when we're thinking about protraction? What are, you know, one way in would be what makes some powers successful in the long run and others fail in the long run when they find themselves locked into these longer, potentially multi-year struggles? And just sorry, brief digression side question. How to even think about, you raise this as sort of a historiographical detail, but I actually I slightly disagree. I think it's actually a very important point in your book, which is how do you

even think about the full totality of the unit you're talking about? The notion that World War I and World War II are parts of a continuum is not a new notion. You take it back to the Franco-Prussian War, which as a historian of French military history is a reasonable thing to do. But how do we even think about the nature of protraction, I think is a question I would add on top of the first one. Sure. So down to your last question first. Yes. historiographical quibbling aside, one of the fundamental challenges historians often face is that it can be it can be somewhat analytically difficult to delimit when and how a protracted war actually begins. So, for example, we now commonly refer to the series of conflicts that opposed England and France during the

during the 14th and 15th centuries, we refer to that now as the 100 years war. But in fact, that historical moniker was only introduced in the 19th century by a French historian, and then it was subsequently imported into English medievalist studies. Similarly, as you mentioned earlier, should one view the long period of Franco-German rivalry opposing France to Germany from the Franco-Prussian war, to the end of World War II. Will historians, you know, a century from now, consider that to be another 100 years war,

or, you know, are we accurate and disaggregating that into a series of conflicts? Things can be rendered further complex by the fact that one protagonist and a great power rival we may consider that that conflict never ended. In the case of Vladimir Putin, for example, did the Cold War ever end for him and his ideological bedfellows? The members of the former security services

that form part of his close entourage. I'm not sure that it ever did. So yes, it can occasionally be difficult to sort of accurately delimit what a protracted war is. For the purposes of this study, I just assumed that it was a war that lasted at least several years in duration. Remind me again of your first question.

What are the fact, no, no worries. I hit you with two at ones. Something which we should probably be ready for it on the battlefield. Yes, in fact. What are the factors that we ought to be paying attention to? What matters in protractive? wars. Oh, yes, of course. So I think that the first somewhat sobering but altogether unsurprising

observation is that protracted great power of wars are immensely destructive whole of society affairs, the effects of which typically extend well beyond their point of origin, spilling across multiple regions, and siphoning huge amounts of personnel, material, and resources. And when thinking about how to prevail in such draining marathons, beat quantifiable metrics such as ship, munitions, stockpiles, and logistical inventories certainly matter, but so do other less easily measurable factors. What Sir Michael Howard famously termed as the forgotten dimensions of strategy, a state's capacity for scientific innovation, its societal resilience and the quality and robustness of its alliances, for example. And final victory, this book argues, rests on a

combination of three core factors that are not so much distinct but inevitably lead into each other because of the whole of society nature of great power conflict. So the first one is the state's military effectiveness and adaptability, which includes most crucially intra-war adaptability, the ability to adapt over the course of a conflict. Second, it's socioeconomic power and resiliency. And third, the soundness of its alliance management and grand strategy. So let's drill into these then on adaptability. What are the markers of success in adaptability? Who tends to adapt well and who tends to adapt poorly?

And then talk us through into the conflict itself, because obviously, as you write, adaptability after the starting gun is just as critical, if not arguably more critical. Sure. Well, I think it's important to specify, first of all, that peacetime innovators are not necessarily successful wartime adapters and vice versa. So I give two examples of what one could term, on the one hand, proactive intra-war military adaptation and on the other hand, reactive military adaptation. So one I think illuminating example of proactive military adaptation is Rome's remarkable maritime transformation during the first Punic War, which lasted 23 years, so from 264 BC to 200,000.

141 BCE. At the beginning of the conflict, Rome had virtually no maritime tradition or naval heritage to speak of, whereas Carthage was by far the leading maritime power in the Western Mediterranean. Infamously, a Carfaginian general, rather, awfully told his Roman counterparts that they shouldn't intervene in Sicily because they wouldn't be able to even wash their hands in the Mediterranean for fear of Carfaginian retribution. In the event, though, what happened rather remarkably is that over the course of the first years of the first Punic War, the Romans successfully reverse engineered a Carfaginian vessel engaged in their own massive program of naval expansion and succeeded in resting control

of the Western Mediterranean away from Carfage in the space of little less than a decade. And that subsequently shaped much of the trajectory of the future Punic wars over the following century because it rendered the resupply of Carfijian forces during the Second Punic War, for example, on Italian territory, exceedingly difficult. So that's one example of proactive intra-war military adaptation. One example of reactive intra-war military adaptation is the transformation of the Spanish infantry during the Franco-Spanish Wars of the Renaissance. So I give the example of a famous Spanish commander, El Grand Capitan, who, after being subjected to a crushing defeat on Italian soil when facing more heavily armored and well-equipped French troops, completely restructured Spanish, the force structure of the Spanish infantry, creating a new form of sort of pike and shop tactics that would subsequently be emulated by every European power in the early modern era. combining pikemen with archibousiers in a very innovative mix, and then going on to use that retailored force design to inflict a series of crushing defeats on French forces during the

Italian wars. In both cases, those are examples of remarkably effective and relatively rapid intra-war adaptation that were relatively unexpected at the time. And sorry, this question is not really going to go in order of the thing. you identified as important, but something that's on my mind, and it's very concerning to me, actually, as we think about these protraction scenarios that you lay out, what is the role of national leadership in military strategy in these wars? And does it differ from the role that national leaders might play in shorter, sharper wars? And what I'll flesh out what I mean a little bit. There's something about, you can take the two Bush administrations, either the Gulf War or

the invasion of Iraq, where, you know, the president and the government sort of decide upon their, what they want, they decide upon their strategic goal, and they tell their military, go and do this thing, and then the military goes and does this thing. And there's not necessarily, I'm radically oversimplifying here for the purpose of asking this question, but you, I think, you know where I'm headed. And the military either does it or it doesn't, in this case, in the short term at least in both cases it did. Though the fact that in the second case in the longer term it didn't starts to point to the problem. And there's this almost a separation between the work of the civilian leader sitting atop the apparatus or civilian leaders and the work of the military

conducting the war fighting. Maybe it's healthy and beneficial in some ways. But the problem I could see, and I'm curious to know if you agree in what you have to say about this and protracted warfare is because it becomes this whole of nation effort and because the violence, and because the violence, is so widespread and the competition is widespread across, you know, the military itself and the battlefield, across economic warfare, across, you mean, name a dozen other things. You really need a strategist at the top, a team of gifted strategists if you want to have your best shot. And just my question is, is that more that my instinct is somehow that's more necessary in protracted warfare, that you get less of the separation, but maybe I'm overthinking it. How do you

Yes, I think you're right that the quality of leadership is essential over the course of a protracted conflict. The ability as well to pursue a coherent and unified long-term strategy across administrations or different forms of leadership if it's an authoritarian government. The nature of the civil military makeup of the countries in question and this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. is something that I explore in quite great depth when I look at the nature of civil military relations in Xi Jinping's China, for example, and how that might affect their prospects for military effectiveness. So yes, yes, to answer your question, perhaps a rather brief and unsatisfying fashion, the nature and quality of leadership is hugely important. Well, you're citing Xi and your work there, I want to ask about that because I would have,

up until, you know, February of 2022, I would have said that the leaders of democracies are just having their lunch money taken every day by the leaders of autocracies on the strategy front. That there's, and I would have, I even, I even wrote at the time, there's, there's something about the way that autocratic systems produce their leaders, that those leaders just come up in very hard schools. And that, you know, a career in the U.S. Senate is just not the same as surviving and rising to power in, you know, post-Cold war. Russia or, you know, the cultural revolution and beyond in the PRC. That said, whatever his successes here and there, Putin did obviously badly misplay his hand and sort of revealed himself to be, at least in certain respects, one very big example, a very poor military strategist in Ukraine. And she, of course, is not a military man.

So, you know, what do we expect from the quality of military leadership from someone like she and his closest lieutenants in China? Do you estimate that they are up to the kind of complex? But the anxiety of my earlier question is based on my ongoing anxiety about the quality of democratic leadership. Do I have any reason to hope about poor quality and autocratic leadership? Or how should I be thinking about it? Yes, I think recent events have definitely highlighted the enduring weaknesses of authoritarian systems.

And they do allow for a certain glimmer of hope. Yes, it's true that autocratic leaders in order to attain the, positions of prominence that they've sought have had to go for a school of hard knocks and have no doubt learned to develop certain ruthless qualities that one would hope most members of the US Senate would not have to nurture. At the same time, what history, what both the long history of state craft and recent events would indicate is that over time, the weaknesses of autocratic rule tend to become ever more pronounced. The more entrenched leader is in power, they tend to become more isolated, more paranoid. They surround themselves with yes men and sycophants who don't provide

them with the best forms of advice. And I think one of the best anatomists, one of the best anatomists, if you will, of the weaknesses of authoritarian rule is actually the Roman historian Tastas. And I'd encourage all your listeners to read Tacitus, because in my mind, he provides the most soulful and thoughtful reflections on the various pathologies that affect authoritarian rule. And reading Tacitus or even reading the chronicles of court dynamics in early modern Europe should provide a lot of your listeners with a much greater degree of faith, I would say, in the abiding strengths of democracy, notwithstanding all its travils. So this question of resilience, both materials,

and moral. This is probably the area where you need to demonstrate its importance the least in the sense that it's a bit obvious, even if we haven't been taking it seriously until recently, that if this thing goes on for a while, you'll just need lots of stuff and you'll need people to stick to it. This is also the area where I think people are most worried specifically about the U.S.-China competition on the material end, for the obvious reason that China is an industrial powerhouse and the United States has decided to move a lot of its industrial power to China for what seemed like sensible commercial reasons at the time. Are we basically, I mean, is this all just fun in games? But in the end, we're just a little bit screwed here because

the Chinese will just be able to outproduce us in the event of a protracted U.S. Sino war. Are there grounds for hope? Are there historical examples? I don't remember one off the top of my head from reading through your book, but maybe I've missed something of a mismatch like this in industrial terms that was upended. or sort of fixed? Or is this the kind of thing that once the balloon goes up, you better be starting from the right place? Yes. So I argue in the book that there are two aspects of Sina U.S. competition that should really foster grave and immediate concern in Washington as well as in allied capitals. And the first is, as you mentioned, China's raw industrial might and the sheer scale

and scope of its military buildup, which in many ways is historically unprecedented. Since the end of the Cold War, as we all know, the U.S. industrial base is severely atrophied, as has its merchant fleet. And a combination of cyber and supply chain vulnerabilities in critical minerals such as rare earths, for example, have rendered U.S. procurement far more exposed to external disruption, the country's capacity to rapidly replenish munitions in the event of a protracted conflict as in serious doubt, and decades of underinvestment in logistics from forward position And stocks to air and maritime connectors mean that when it comes to guaranteeing the U.S. capacity for industrial resiliency and mobilization, military production, sustainment, and regeneration,

all factors that would prove increasingly critical in the event of a protracted conflict with China. The U.S. is indeed facing a severe uphill battle. And I think ongoing military operations in Ukraine have obviously reminded us all of the importance of mass, magazine depth, and large-scale production in high-intensity industrial warfare. And these defense industrial-based-related concerns are hardly confined to Washington in passing. So, whether in Paris, London, or Tokyo, Allied security managers are all increasingly concerned over the parlous state of their logistical slack capacity, the dwindling munitions reserves and

the steady decline in their domestic manufacturing capacity. So I remember reading one Rusci report and that came out last year that observed that at the height of fighting and the Battle of the Dombas during the late spring and summer of 2022, Russia was expending more ordinance in two days than the entire British Army currently had in stock. So yes, if the US wishes to maintain a viable conventional deterrent in Asia, it will need to launch a once-in-a-generation construction procurement program effort all while encouraging. it's often even more industrially atrophied allies in Europe and Asia to do the same. And so that doesn't just mean reinvesting massively in its defense industrial base, merchant marine and logistical enablers, but it also means enlarging and upskilling labor force, whether it's for accelerated domestic education and training programs.

It also means engaging in a revamped and bipartisan, skilled-based immigration policy to ensure that the US maintains a technological edge. But given the level of investments required to even approach the intensity of China's frantic ship building efforts, it's my belief that the US really needs to raise defense spending to well above its current levels. So I'm not saying that the US needs to go back to Korean war levels of defense expenditure necessarily,

but it definitely becomes apparent to me that 2.7% of GDP is known or cut it, given just the immensity of the challenges that lay ahead. On the moral side of resilience, let's talk about casualties and tolerance for just pain, human pain. You know, the United States, I'll make a broad comment here, and you can correct me if I'm off here, but it just strikes me if you use the Second World War as a comparison. The United States, as a proportion of its population, not had to sacrifice the same number

of people as, for example, the Soviet Union did at World War II or China did fighting the Japanese empire over the course of the same sort of long conflict. And thank God for that. That said, I can't remember the number off the top of my head. It's hundreds of thousands, if I'm not mistaken, in the Second World War and not a great deal less in the First World War. But my point, which will stand is then thereafter, Korea and Vietnam were both sort of five figures, 30-some in one case, and 50-some in the other. And then since then, the numbers have been smaller, smaller by orders of magnitude. I think the combined casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are still in the four digits. Combine killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are still in the four digits, I should say I was speaking of

killed throughout here, which, you know, you could lose over the course of a campaign in the Second World War. And yet, you know, our, our tolerance for casualties nationally, if anything, you know, seems to be, seems to be lower, even though the numbers themselves are lower. We seem to feel almost, this is probably not a completely defensible claim in every dimension, but there are ways in which it seems like we feel more pain for fewer casualties. And that might be for all sorts of different reasons, some quite defensible. And yet, in the scenarios, Eskander, that you are describing, we are back into World War II, World War I casualty rates. In the day one scenarios that I've reviewed of just, just, you know, just think tank type products that I reviewed about an attempt

to seize Taiwan with strikes on Japan or Guam or both. You're in four figures on the first day. Yeah. Easily. Absolutely. How does the United States deal with that? Will we deal with it? You know, and here it seems my instinct is that the advantage obviously goes to an authoritarian country like China, but there are others, you know, Edward Lookback has written about how demographic collapse in Russia, for example, to him seems like it will be a limit on Russian efforts. I don't know if that's proved to be the case thus far. But I suppose there's another side of the question, but it does, the casualties, of course, worry me just in their own right, and then just our ability as a nation to be resilient in the face of the more as me too.

Yes. Well, of course, the ability to absorb and weather pain and masculine, human losses is of course something that is of enormous importance in a protracted great power war, but it's also one of the things that is perhaps the hardest to accurately gauge or measure prior to a conflict. Folks will often point to the fact that as you mentioned, the US has not experienced a high intensity war and truly terrible levels of devastation on its own soil, at least on the American mainland since the Civil War, whereas China, of course, experienced some very dark chapters of its own history during the 20th century and had to, as you know, as the Chinese would say, swallow a lot of

bitterness, whereas, you know, in the form of the terrible war against the Japanese, the Chinese Civil War and the Great League forward, etc., etc. That said, I think people tend to over-emphasize this supposed comparative advantage that the Chinese might have in terms of weathering loss and in the sense that China hasn't actually fought a war since 1979. And as the years go by, those Chinese citizens who do retain memories of the dread years of the early Chinese revolution or the Japanese invasion, well, those folks are going to progressively pass away. So it's not clear to me that within the next decade or so, there will be that many

many more individuals in China with this sort of, with this generational transmission of shared sacrifices than in the United States, for example. Then what could also point to other societal factors that might affect China's societal resiliency in the event of great power. One of course that people often point to is China's demography. The fact that, for example, an estimated 70% of PLA soldiers are are only children? How would the loss of thousands of only children affect Chinese resilience

and social stability? I also think that precisely because we don't have access to much data on Chinese public sentiment, it can sometimes be very, very difficult for us to pick up on the frustrations and divisions that are seething under a seemingly placid surface until they eventually erupt. For example, I think very few Western analysts would have predicted that the Chinese government would do a complete about U-turn on its COVID policy, largely in a reaction to protests within China. And that, to me, points to the underlying brittleness of a lot of authoritarian regimes, and it shows that, to my mind, they're not necessarily more resilient in any way than

their democratic adversaries. I'll close with kind of a silly question, but I'm still curious to hear your answer, which is of all the periods you went back to, we mentioned several of them here in the course of our conversation. Puneic Wars, 100 years war, etc. What is the period that you think bears the most relevance, is the most resonance for the current complex? And if you can't pick just one, try to keep it to a limited number. Where do you see the strongest parallels? Sure. Well, it's been a longstanding frustration of mine, and I may have vented you privately about this in the past, that when folks in the strategic studies community do

look back at history, they tend to look quite closely at the 20th century, somewhat closely at aspects of the 19th century, the Civil War, for example, the Franco-Prussian War, now and then they may sprinkle in a passing reference to Westphalia. But then in between Westphalia and the Peloponnesian War, there's this sort of huge gaping void of military history that is either deemed too esoteric or not worthy of study. And I would argue that the Punic wars really should be part of every self-respecting strategic studies curriculum, if only because it's one of the best documented examples we have of a genuinely bipolar, multi-regional great power competition that lasted over a century.

And it's absolutely fascinating. And what's wonderful about reading Polybius, for example, is that he's a sort of Forrest Gump of the age. He was a, you know, a Greek captive who subsequently became a protégé of the Scipionic family, and he provides riveting eyewitness testimony to the final destruction of Carthage and other major historical events that you're hard pressed to find elsewhere. So I'd say go read more about the Punic Wars and the Hundred Years' War II for that matter. Alexander Raymond, author most recently of planning for protraction, historically informed approach to great power war in Sino-US competition.

It was a fascinating conversation. As always, maybe you'll come back sometime soon and we can talk about the Punic Wars as an episode. I'd love to do that. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.