School of War - Ep 131: Thomas Mahnken on Strategic Fallacies (War in Ukraine #3)

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Thomas Mahnken, President and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and contributor to War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, joins the show to talk about how strategic fallacies have played a role in Ukraine. ▪️ Times      •      01:33 Introduction      •      02:30 Fallacies of rationality      •      05:36 Is war irrational?      •      10:02 Germany willed WWI to happen     •      15:40 Fallacy of the irrational/hyper-rational adversary       •      22:53 Rational/irrational Hitler      •      28:09 Wrapped around the rational axle         •      30:34 Fallacy of over/underestimating the adversary     •      37:53 Losing the contingency       •      41:08 Fallacies of interaction         •      45:56 Learning but not doing     •      50:53 Building defenses against fallacies Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

This is the third installment in our ongoing summer 2024 miniseries focused on the war in Ukraine. Today's guest, Tom Mankin, zeroes in on what has become a recurring theme on School of War, how we think strategically or more specifically, how we often fail to think strategically. We'll discuss the patterns of error that humans are prone to when it comes to thinking about war in competition and how these errors have affected the prosecution of the war in Ukraine on both sides. Let's get into it. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a staleing. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We'll 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 for joining School of War.

I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Tom Mankin, who is Professor of Practice with the Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins Seiss. He's the president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He is a contributor, as are all the guests in this mini-series of episodes, to war in Ukraine, conflict strategy and the return of a fractured world. Tom, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Thanks, Aaron.

It's a pleasure to be with you, as always. So your contribution to this volume concerns strategic fallacies or fallacies of strategic thinking when it comes into, comes to the war in Ukraine. And I thought your chapter was, was really, really interesting not only because of what it reveals about Ukraine and what's happening there specifically, but because the, the failure of clear thinking that you identify are sort of universal. You encounter them in all walks of certainly military analysis and decision making, but I think even beyond. So I want to get right into it with you, and you identify these three different categories of fallacies, fallacies of rationality,

fallacies of assessment, fallacies of interaction will probably linger, that the fallacies of rationality are kind of an obsession of mind. So we may linger there for a while. But let's get right into it. What are what are fallacies of rationality and how do they how do they play out in the context of the war in Ukraine? Yeah, well, Aaron, first, I'm glad you found the chapter interesting. It grew out of a long-term project and I mean long-term project, both in good and bad ways. One could say a project I should have wrapped up a long time ago. But a long-term project on strategic thinking and rather than thinking about strategy in terms of positives, like all the things we should do and the way we should think about strategy, rather to view it through the lens

of, well, how do decision makers actually perform? And like, what are the pitfalls, you know, rather than talking about the bullet train or the interstate highway to good strategy, let's talk about all the potholes and the dead ends that all too often people go down. So that was the, that's the origins of this frame of strategist fallacies. And it just so happened that the Ukraine war, unfortunately, you know, offered a rich menu of fallacies to explore. So, yeah, when it comes to fallacies of rationality, we talk about the most fundamental one. And that is, you know, this idea, this fallacy of the irrationality of war, you know,

and it's this idea, and I think we hear it all the time. And it was certainly the case in the run up to the Ukraine war. But we hear it, you know, even now when we think about, say, the prospect of a war across the Taiwan Strait. It's the fallacy of the irrationality of war is all about the notion that war only comes about because of a breakdown of policy rather than being, as Klausovitz and others tell us,

you know, an extension of politics. So, you know, in the lead up to the Ukraine war, there were unfortunately people who said that, well, the only reason this is going to happen is because, you know, because of, a breakdown in politics, a breakdown in negotiation, failure to, you know, some sort of miscommunication, some sort of mistake. And I just think that that's a pervasive notion in, you know, in Western thought, quite frankly. Let's pull the thread right there where you

finished. What are the deeper causes? Why is it that this mistake gets made so consistently? And I mean, we could without too much effort go back in time and identify this mistake being made over and over again. My favorite example that I've been giving some attention to this year is as a whole book devoted to the subject of why war is irrational by Norman Angel famously, the great illusion. And I believe the title specifically refers to the illusion in question is that war will benefit one. That is the illusion. He unfortunately publishes this in 1910, 1911. So it's kind of right up there in the classics of, you know, whoopsies. But, you know, that's over a hundred years ago making the argument, literally makes,

the argument that war is irrational just doesn't make sense anymore. So, you know, it's not, his defense of himself would probably be like he doesn't actually quite come out and say, no one will do it. He says no one ought to do it slash no one probably will do it. So he's slightly limited. No, look, I mean, as you say, right, this is a recurring theme. And, and when I actually finish the book, the lens for the book is going to be the American experience, really, from the 20th, beginning of the 20th century on. So, yeah, these, you know, these, these themes, that we saw in the lead-up and to the war in Ukraine and in the war itself really do reflect some deeper held views.

And I think on the irrationality of war, ultimately it's because we in the West, or I could just say we Americans, but I think it goes beyond the United States, but particularly true in the United States. You know, we are children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. We're descendants of the Enlightenment, and we tend to view peace. as the natural state of things and wars as temporary inconvenient disruptions from this natural order of peace. And so if that's your, you know, if that's your orientation, it's all too easy to say that,

well, the only reason that a war would break out is because there's some misunderstanding or, you know, just it, it, you know, somebody did something that's irrational. So we can, we can move from like war to, you know, irrational adversaries. And again, there's a whole, there's a whole stream of thinking going back centuries that that's, that that's the case. Unfortunately, you know, if you hold that view, you tend to dismiss what would I, you know, think is the reality, which is no, wars happen because somebody, you know, a political leader or their government decides to use force. and they reach a rational decision that force is better than not using force. And then another that the, you know, so that's the aggressor. And then the the side that's attacked also makes the decision that not just to give up.

They make the decision that the things that are at stake are of sufficient gravity that they're going to use force to respond. Again, if we go back to the Ukraine war, look, I think Putin and company, were betting on the Ukrainians not really resisting, right? So this special military operation was just going to, they were going to walk in and they were going to have turned various people. They were going to have folks who were on their side. And it wasn't really going to be a war because the other side was going to just lay down its arms and or there'd be sporadic, you know, sporadic resistance. So yeah, I think this notion of the irrationality of war is a pervasive

of one, and particularly as we go forward, you know, I worry that it's all too often a narrative even today, even having experienced the Ukraine war when it comes to China, Taiwan, that, and how many times have we heard this, right? A war between the United States and China will only happen because mistakes were made on both sides. Now, that's not to deny that mistakes don't happen. Of course they do. Just in my reading of history, as a historian, I find that thesis of accidental war, utterly uncompelling, because I can't find a case in history where wars occurred just because of accident. So there's an upcoming episode of the show where Matt Pottinger and I are going to get

into this precise issue with regard to Taiwan, but also with regard to World War I, because Matt and I are both in our respective, with our amateur historian hats on, kind of obsessed with the summer of 1914. And with the trope, it sounds like you sort of shared the general view. view, that the whole thing was, was another sort of big whoopsie, you know, that nobody really meant for the war to happen and kind of nobody's at fault, but kind of everybody's at fault. Whereas both Matt and I have the general view that the Germans kind of did this thing. It's complicated. There were definitely mistakes made on all sides, but the notion that there was no, that there's no

blame to be laid is sort of strange to us. And as you know, the proponents of the kind of worldview, I mean, many serious people and very smart people, the proponents of the kind of vision of war that you're discussing, tend to look to the summer of 1914 as their principal source, their principal example, if you like, just like those of us who don't like appeasmen are always looking at the 1930s. Do you, it's your view?

Yeah, no, look, I agree. World War I occurred because Imperial Germany wished it to occur. Now, again, there was blame in all sorts of places. I wouldn't let the, you know, the government of Serbia off the hook for basically engaging in state-sponsored terrorism against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. German operational planning wasn't great, didn't give the Kaiser all sorts of options. And, you know, yeah, that's also true. The, you know, the German-Austrian alliance, did that contribute? Sure, all those things are true.

But it's also true that, yeah, the war proceeded. because the government of Imperial Germany willed it to continue. There were all sorts of different off-ramps. And please explain to me why, you know, if the Cassus Belli is in the Balkans and involves Serbia and involved Austria, how that automatically translates into, you know, an offensive against France. If it wasn't for broader German political objectives at that time and Imperial Germany's belief that it was being hemmed in.

So yeah, no, absolutely. Let's put it this way. There have been plenty of accidents, plenty of mistakes in history, even if you want to talk to U.S. China. Think about the EP3 shootdown on April Fool's Day, 2001. That was an accident. I would say that, you know, China, the PLA acted very irresponsibly and very recklessly. Didn't lead to war, right? So, look, I want to move on to the fallacy of the irrational adversary.

But before, I can't remember if I've told this story on the show before, but just one last point on the question. In some ways, this speaks both to the irrationality of war and rational adversary. But the moment that for me clarified that my nice upbringing in the suburbs and going to decent schools and basically being treated well and so forth had not fully prepared me for the diversity of human psychology was when I was a young infantry officer in Afghanistan and had deployed. fully signed on to the notion that we would remove the Taliban boot from the neck of the oppressed Afghan farmer who would then naturally rise up and sort of want all the things that people want. He'd want to vote. He'd want access to markets and so forth and so on. And sort of discovering pretty rapidly that that was not exactly the case.

And there was one incident in particular where I was having a meeting, having tea in his very lovely tea garden. The whole thing could have been in some mini series about British India or something with a Taliban commander who lived in our area. It's a complicated situation, complicated war, who he claimed to have no operational role in the local Taliban structure. He was just from there, and he had a poppy farm, and he had identified himself to us, and it had become a source. And the agency and others, people were always flying in to talk to this guy. I was basically his cop on the beat. I was the Marine who ran the closest outpost. And so I would check in with him from time to time, and I

have this vivid recollection of a meeting with him where it was early in the deployment, and I was using my sort of, you know, brigade-approved talking points for why he should embrace the American presence in Afghanistan. He was a very savvy guy, too. He had been to university. His father had served in the Afghan parliament, and he would listen to the BBC and tease me about Barack Obama saying that we were going to pull all the troops out and everything, BBC Persian. And he had these lines he would use with me. Like, he'd never seen a bridge in Afghanistan stamped made in Pakistan or made in Iran on it. The point being that, you know, he had some affection for Americans. He was he was a very savvy sort of guy who was working me over more probably better than I was working him over.

And so I was going through my talking points and saying, you know, don't you want, you know, more prosperity for the community and this and that. And his kid was there. He had this 10-year-old boy as his son was at the meeting. And I remember saying, you know, in 10 years from now, don't you want your son to have gone to university like you did and to be a, you know, on the path to being a professional like a lawyer or a doctor? And he responds with these, these compelling sort of cold gray eyes looking me directly in the eye. In 10 years, my son will have died fighting in the jihad. And, you know, I don't remember exactly what I responded with. There's no easy response to that. I mean, the kid was standing right there. And that was, for me, an epiphanic

moment that I, that had to spend years sort of processing, as it was so shocked that someone would say that. And someone so apparently urbane by any standard would say something like that. And that there was more out there than I had been prepared for in my nice Western, modern liberal upbringing. Well, look, I mean, that's, I mean, it's a powerful anecdote. Think about our own, you know, our own history. You know, my father served in World War II. Now, there were three ways that he was going to come home from World War II in victory, which turned out to be the case.

So that was good. Wounded or dead. Right. I mean, that was, that was the nation. of that war. And we're just, in my case, we're just one generation removed from that. But that very notion that, you know, your interlocutor expressed is not an alien one to us, although it's an alien, maybe, it's an alien one to us in 2024 or in, or in this century, earlier in this century when you encountered this. But, you know, when it actually comes down to it,

when we're engaged, are we as a people capable of giving it our all? Yeah. But from the other end of it, you know, I think we have a real difficulty in, in imagining those, you know, those situations. All too often we, we downplay them as being irrational. So the irrational adversary and the hyper-rational adversary are two other fallacies you identify in the context of the Ukraine war. How do, how do these play out? Yeah, these are, these are sort of fraternal twins. I mean, they're, they're, they're a pair of fallacies. They're not, you know, they're not identical or not mirror images of each other. But, you know, the fallacy of the irrational adversary, again, this is, you know, we've seen this when it, when it comes to Vladimir Putin, I think we still

continue to see it, but we also have seen it historically. And it's the notion that the adversaries that we face, right, so this is distinct from the irrationality of war as a human phenomenon. This is that, you know, the adversaries we face are irrational, that the only reason that they're going to war is because they're irrational. Rather than, no, they're going to war because of things that they value, objectives that they hold, that we may find not just we might find terrible, but still animate them. And so, you know, in the lead up to the Ukraine war, there were plenty of people that were

willing to dismiss Vladimir Putin as irrational, right? He can't possibly believe these things. And just as, you know, there were people who dismissed Saddam Hussein as irrational, Osama bin Laden as irrational, Kim Il-sung as irrational, the leadership of Imperial Japan as irrational, Adolf Hitler is as irrational. And we could go back. And by the way, when I say they're not irrational, I were not irrational, I'm not approving of their objectives.

I'm not saying that their objectives, would be my objectives or the objectives of an American leader. But we have to concede that by and large, our adversary, oh, by the way, I'm also not, I'm not saying, I'm not ruling on their psychology. So you could be a sociopath and you can also be, or you could be a genocidal individual. You can also be rational. When I talk about rational, what I mean is I have objectives and I devise a strategy to achieve those objectives.

And I would say in each of those cases, you know, those adversaries were rational. And so it's sort of strategic laziness, frankly, or a lack of strategic empathy, different from sympathy, that we routinely employ when it comes to our adversaries. We just, by calling them irrational, we kind of give ourselves license to not think, to not put ourselves in their shoes, and not understand them deeply. Now, if I flip it over to the fallacy of the hyper rational adversary, that's about, if you will, substituting, you know, logic, like a universal logic for that understanding. So the fallacy of the hyper rational adversary is the adversary should behave this way. If the, and that, you know, dot, dot, dot, the adversary should behave that way if they behave just like us, or if they were a value maximizing adversary, or, you know, homo-strategicus,

like strategic man. And that's also a fallacy. And it's also a variety of laziness where we just import a certain logic and say, well, it must be this logic that this adversary follows. And again, similarly, we saw that in the lead up to Ukraine when it comes to Vladimir Putin. So the Hitler example is interesting for. for a variety of reasons. And I want to stick with that for a second because, and I'm going to kind of make this up as I go along. So forgive me if this goes off the rails, we'll cut up from the episode

and no one will be the wiser. So I, by the way, this is a subject of some extended discussion in that Mearsheimer book, How States Think, that I think both you and I have complicated feelings about maybe not complicated. But, you know, Mearsheimer and you agree, and I think I agree, that, you know, to call Hitler in 1939 or 1940 or 1941, well, 40 at least, we'll get to 41 in a second, actually, I think that's the interesting trouble starts, is exactly as you say. It's a kind of self-gratifying, self-congratulatory, non-empathetic misunderstanding of somebody, that by his own lights, he had objectives that did not prioritize peace, and he was pursuing them. And so his irrationality is only a function of your not being able to understand his fundamental priorities or the principles

from which he is reasoning. If you understand the principles from which he is reasoning in that they're not your own, they're not material comfort, they're not, you know, peace, et cetera, then it starts to make sense. Where the Mearsheimer argument gets interesting and I think more, in the sense that it gets more problematic, is Meersheimer amounts a really sort of passionate case that the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 41, and then the Declaration of War on the United States in December of 41 are both rational acts. I think the first one, I don't know, I could kind of see it, maybe sort of, kind of, sort of. I mean, they almost pulled it off. The Declaration of War on the United States, I'm starting to, I'm not pushing the I believe button as enthusiastically

anymore when we get to that one, especially since elsewhere in the book, Mirschimer and his co-author, Sebastian Rosado say that the George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003 is obviously irrational. And I just, I don't know, this scheme where that one's irrational, but declaring war on the United States in December of 1941 and the situation Nazi Germany was in was rational. I'm not sure how that works or how that adds up. And then, sorry, just to finish my brief summary here, and I'm curious to know your response, there's this kind of amazing twist in the Mearsheimer argument, whereas they continue the discussion of Hitler, they'll say, actually, his behavior at the end of the war is one of the few

examples of state irrationality we can identify, because for the most part, states always behave rationally in their view, set aside whether or not states are capable of rationality or not. But states always behave rationally in their view. But at the end of the war, Hitler and his regime make decisions that are manifestly suicidal, that they could have pushed in the direction of saving Germany on some level, but they don't, and they achieve their utter destruction. And they say, well, that's obviously irrational because you have to focus on survival.

I mean, survival has to be the fundamental principle before all others. Of course, to me, that's like actually, like it's much easier to show that Hitler's being totally rational in those circumstances because a conquered Germany is the end of the Third Reich. It's the end of Hitler.

By his light, he's not surviving anyway. So who gives a damn about Germany from from his perspective, right? So anyway, it's just this, it's this, the, the Hitler example is, is, is complicated when it comes to rationality. Do you, where, where do you come down on these later decisions of his? How would you, how would you understand them in terms of rationality? Yeah, so, and this is where, look, I think the term rationality as, you know,

can, as, as, as, as, as, as used in political discourse, academic discourse in the United States today has become so kind of loaded, you know, such a loaded term where rationality means, you know, like what I would do. That's kind of my shorthand, right? So, and I think that's what that is one of the problematic aspects of the book that you mentioned. Whereas, again, for me, it's all about, okay, do you have goals? Do you set about purposely trying to achieve those goals? And maybe, again, not the most effective way, right? So I'll come to the later decisions. But like, so look, I mean, for multiple reasons, Hitler and Nazi Germany had their sights set on, you know, the communist Soviet Union. Some of those because of resources, the need, again, a very rational need for Nazi Germany to seize and hold resources.

But then some of them ideological. And and I think, you know, part of our impoverished notion of the world and impoverished notion of rationality these days is that we've factored. out ideology. And to your, you know, to your point, but yeah, look, for Hitler and those around him at the end of the war, a world without Nazism, national socialism was a world that was not worth living in. And so, you know, a number of them chose to take their lives. So right, not just metaphorically suicidal, but actually suicidal. And also they believed that a Germany that would ultimately succumb to invasion didn't deserve national socialism. And so they were okay with, right, this gets to the rationality or irrationality of, well, why don't you just surrender when

the end is in sight? Well, no, no, Germany didn't deserve because Germany did not, you know, endure and stick up for national socialism. So Germany didn't deserve to survive. So I think we factor out ideology and just ideas in driving people. And then the other thing that we tend, you know, although we're talking a lot about Hitler, it's, it's there in the title of Mearsheimer's book, we tend to factor out leaders, right? So the book is what states think and, and as you and I have talked about separately, like, you know, that's an anthropomorphism, right? States are incapable of thinking.

Leaders can think and groups of individuals can think, you know, but states are incapable of thinking. And so I think there's another sense in which are, our sense of the world has become impoverished in that we tend to discount leaders, human beings, and their beliefs, even their pathologies. Again, so this is not about Hitler, you know, was an evil person. And I will say it. I'm perfectly comfortable talking about evil as existing in the modern world. But look, one of the things he was able to do, and I think this is why he was underestimated

by some of his adversaries was, he was able to portray himself as rational, not just in the way that I talk about it, having goals purposely setting out to achieve them, but rational in the broader Western sense of reasonable, right? He had this gift, and I say gift, not to put it in a positive sense, but I mean, as in he was born with it. I don't, you know, he didn't learn it anywhere. he had the gift of being able to read his adversaries. And so if you go back to the transcripts of his meetings with Chamberlain, with Czech leaders, with Austrian leaders, he had the ability to portray himself, not just as rational, but reasonable. And too many people early on fell into that trap.

Now, by the end, the mask was off. But as you say, I think by the end, it's not just. about Hitler's personal survival, but the survival of national socialism in a post-war world. You know who does a really good job capturing this aspect of Hitler, and this is literature, not history, but Herman Woke. Oh, absolutely. Who, I mean, first of all, he gives these brilliant, he writes these brilliant chapters where Hitler himself is a character, but also in the way he's a brilliant chronicler or

imaginer in some ways of how people misread Hitler by Hitler's own design. And the first volume in particular, Winds of War, is just replete with characters saying how they kind of like him, saying how he can be reasoned with. And woke's got a very light touch with it. You know, the narrative prose is not judgmental in any way. But of course, there's this dramatic irony because we all know how the story ends. And it's exactly to your point. It's a depiction of how effective his ability to conceal the kind of, you know, I was about to say the kind of madness that there obviously was there. And this is part of me, Tom, that just wants to just ban the term rational, that it gets so wrapped around the axle on it that it's almost unhelpful.

That's probably not the most helpful response to all this. Yeah, look, I mean, I sympathize because the word is misused so, you know, so frequently. So, you know, bring it more, you know, in a more contemporary way, Saddam Hussein, you know, Saddam, again, a murderer, a thug. he had goals. And Paramount goal was to remain in power, right? And so to remain in power, he had to do a whole bunch of things. He had to be very attentive to threats to his power. And those included internal threats and included external threats. And in the end, it caused him to behave what many would say irrationally, right? Concealing the fact that Iraq did not have weapons, of mass destruction and thus bringing on an invasion that ended his rule. But that concealment was instrumental in that he was, at least in part, concerned that revealing the fact that he had disarmed would show weakness and would open Iraq up to attack from others, not just including us, but Iran, others.

So, yeah, I think it's all too easy to either dismiss our, our, adversaries as crazy irrational or kind of substitute this sort of, you know, Euclidean geometry of rationality and not do what we really should do, which is develop strategic empathy. And again, I want to, you know, differentiate empathy from sympathy. You can empathize with somebody while still realizing that they're a repulsive individual following horrible goals and horribly destructive goals. But I think to be effective, encountering our adversaries, we need to understand them and we need to understand them on their own terms because they're operating in their own reality, not in our reality, and not in,

you know, again, some shared perfect reality. So I'll move on to your second category of strategic fallacies of strategic thinking, the fallacies of assessment. And this really relates to what we discussed the last time you were on the show, on the show the questions of net assessment and how to measure balances of power. What are these fallacies of assessment? What is the fallacy of overestimation that you talk about specifically? Yeah. So again, this is a set of fraternal twins, right? There's a fallacy of overestimating the adversary. And I could say like, you know, in parentheses, that would be, that would also involve

underestimating ourselves and a fallacy of underestimating our adversary, you know, in parentheses. And that's, that's overestimating ourselves. And you could cut to the chase and say, well, the real answer is to get it right. Yeah, well, easier said than done. But there are these enduring fallacies. Let's start with a fallacy of overestimating the adversary. Now, first, or actually if I think about them as a pair,

like first, I think we have to admit that in peacetime, it is challenging to actually understand an action. adversary and understand ourselves to really know how good or bad we or they are. Right. So I think there is a certain amount of uncertainty that's just inherent to warfare. You know, Klausovitz has a wonderful, a wonderful quote, so-called Bologna Flask quote, where, you know, before, essentially, it's before the first shot is fired. It's really difficult to tell whether that first shot will harden the adversary. will to resist or whether they will like a volonia flask, which like a clay, a clay wine flask,

it'll just, they'll just shatter. And I think that's, I think that's true. But I think there also is a tendency. It was clearly the case when it came to assessments of the Russian military before the attack on Ukraine to overestimate. Right. So part of it is you could just say it's prudent planning. It's, you know, if you're an intelligence organization, it's avoid avoiding surprise attack. But in trying to do those things, which are meritorious, we tend to build the adversary up. And we tend to look at, because you can only understand certain things about a military and peace time, we tend to, and in the case of the Russian military, we tended to look at things that maybe were secondary to actually battlefield performance. So, you know, the number of,

well, the existence of the T-14 Armada tank, the fact that the Russians had fielded, a or a couple dozen T-14 Armada tank was taken and was was was conflated to become like a qualitative judgment about the Russian army overall, right, that a couple dozen modern tanks. Okay, that means they'd modernized. Well, no, not really. And you could kind of multiply that out. But I think that the the challenge of or the problem of overestimating an adversary and then underestimating ourselves is it can, lead to timidity. It can it can cause us to believe that we don't have strategic options that we in fact do. And I would say, look, in the case of Ukraine, it led us to be timid when it

came to supporting Ukraine. Because of course, in this case, the, the misassessment was overestimating the Russians and underestimating the Ukrainians. And I think both of those things happened. And I think the result of that was the United States government, others were too timid in in supporting Ukraine. Now, the flip side of it, you know, overest or underestimating an adversary and overestimating ourselves, that's bad as well, right? That allows you to to delude yourself into believing that you have the ability to do things that in fact you don't and you discount an adversary. And I can find cases of that historically as well. My favorite case of that is after the Inchon landing in the Korean War, after we surprise the North Koreans and we have the

North Koreans on the run, we actually imagine that we are more powerful than we are. And that sets up the North Korean counteroffensive backed by the Chinese. It doesn't really set up the Chinese intervention because I think the best scholarship shows that the Chinese were planning on getting into the war after we crossed the 38th parallel. So it wasn't, again, back to mistakes. The mistake wasn't crossing the Yalu. The Chinese had already decided to intervene. The mistake there was probably not,

was actually not having a fallback position for when we actually encountered the Chinese and the intelligence mistake of not fully understanding that the Chinese were in the war and in such numbers. But the magical thinking occurred after Incheon, where you have, you know, you have the North Koreans on the run and you think he can push them all the way back to the Chinese border. So look, it's hard.

So I will start, you know, I will start with that stipulation. It's hard. But in the case of Ukraine, I think overestimating the Russians and underestimating the Ukrainians really led to timidity and led to delays in helping Ukraine that could have been manifesting themselves, you know, under a different timeline. for months now. So you could talk about the F-16s, you know, we're still training you for F-16s and talking about it. That decision had been made. I think a lot of these decisions should have been made pre-war, frankly, but let's just imagine that they were made at the beginning of the war. We'd be a lot

farther along than we are now. These questions of assessment, again, this is something we talked about during your last appearance, but it's very relevant here. It's especially relevant as we think as we try to transpose what we're learning about Ukraine over to the Pacific, it seems to me, and I'm just going to ask you to respond to this, that the sort of, though maybe you'd actually challenge that even the being countery assessments were themselves that good. It sounds like you're not super impressed, but that, you know, the counting up of Russian tanks, the being impressed by how many modern Russian tanks there are and how on balance,

there's just a lot more Russian stuff than Ukrainian stuff. Turns out to matter less in these highly contingent. opening, maneuver-oriented phases where leadership and excellence, operational excellence, other kinds of excellence, chance itself, luck, weather, matter a lot, such that an outmatched Ukraine actually can defend itself and preserve Kiv, where, correct me if I'm wrong here, but France in the spring of 1940 looks pretty good in the assessment, the bean-counting assessment against Nazi Germany. And yet Nazi Germany wins. Nazi Germany successfully pulls off its quote unquote blitzkrieg. But as time goes on and things become protracted and positional,

actually then there's less room for chance and for leadership. I mean, they're not, they don't disappear. They're all relevant. But actually then just the brute structure of things start to impose itself over time. Is that, is that fair? And then what, how does that, how does that help us think about? How does it help us understand what's happened in Ukraine? And how does that help us start to think about Taiwan? Or I should say we've got a ton of stuff about the second time of Scholl in the news this week. So just to be the South China Sea. Yeah. No, look, I, I completely agree. And I agree with what you say. I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, a challenge is that once Once history occurs, we look back at history and we tend to lose the contingency, right?

Whereas when we think about the future, we can't help but think about contingency because it hasn't happened. And so, look, you know, we are where we are with Ukraine, but to your point, things could have turned out very differently. if Zelensky had lost his will and decided to take the plane flight out of Kiev, we would be talking about the Ukraine war as a historical fact. It would be done, and we would be talking about why it happened the way it did. If, you know, one of the Russian hit teams managed to assassinate Zelensky similarly, if the Russians had had, as they had planned, you know, taken Hostomel Airport initially, held it, used it as a springboard into Kiev. Again, with the, in accordance with the Russian slash Soviet script, that's what the Soviets did when they invaded in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

It's what they did when they invaded Afghanistan, Christmas Day, 1979. That's what they do, right? That's part of their standard operating regime. If they had done that, again, we would be talking about things differently. if the political conditions in Ukraine were as the Russians imagined them to be, if they were able to flip a lot of Ukrainian officials and basically be welcomed into the country, then we would be talking about things very differently. And so you're right that will probability and chance leadership matter a lot.

Now, I think they, to your point, I mean, I think they matter throughout a war, but they matter in different ways. And so I think certainly when we think about Taiwan, a real, you know, key dimension to this, obviously the military balance matters. But so does Taiwanese political will. So does the willingness of the Taiwanese population to resist.

That matters a lot. And then the ability to, if you will, endure that initial campaign and then transition to what's like, to be a protracted war. All of those are extremely, extremely important. So I want to ask you about your last set of fallacies, the fallacies of interaction.

Yeah. In this notion that they're, there are, you discuss how it's a common mistake to think that some new weapon, some, some weird new trick is going to render your wars quick and victorious. It's always your wars, quick and victorious forevermore.

you know, I guess the ultimate such development in a way was was the atom bomb. And even that, it was true in the short term and it hasn't proved to be true in the longer run. So anyway, please talk us through these fallacies of interaction. Yeah. So look, I think interaction is central to strategy. Interaction is central to war, right? Again, as Klausovitz tells us, you know, war is not the action of one party against an inanimate object, but it's, it's true. parties grappling with each other and whether, you know, the metaphor is wrestling or you can imagine, you know, any combat sport or if you want like football, you know, it's it's two sides grappling with each other and interacting with each other.

That's just, that's warfare and that's strategy in peacetime and in war. But again, I think, and this is very much in line with our, you know, enlightenment roots and our Western nature, we're uncomfortable with that. And so one of the ways out of that reality is what I call the fallacy of the silver bullet. And I actually don't think I coined the phrase. I think it was actually, if I'm right, my late friend and colleague Michael Handel first coined that phrase some time ago. But the notion is that, yeah, some new instrument of war holds the key to escape this depressing

reality. I mean, that's really what it's all about. you know, and there's some new invention will free us from the depressing reality of war that it is rational, that it is bloody, that it is interactive. And, you know, we saw that first, well, first we can go back centuries, you know, crossbow, the long bow, but look, in the 20th century, really the advent of strategic bombing. You know, one, you mentioned, you know, Norman Angel, but then after, you know, after that, you know, the advent of strategic, There was a whole school of thought that strategic bombing was going to be so terrible.

And by the way, we should remember that was strategic bombing that included air-delivered chemical weapons and incendiaries, that it was going to free us from war. And then, as you say, the atomic bomb, again, not as initially used to end World War II, the advent of nuclear weapons more broadly. And then kind of most recently, you know, there was a whole wave of cyber enthusiasm, You know, that cyber war was going to be so terrible that, you know, it was going to render war obsolete. And in each case, right, that these predictions have been wrong. There is no silver bullet.

And I think that's, you know, that's the important point is even today, strategic bombing is a reality. Nuclear weapons are a reality. Cyber war is in cyber instruments and cyber dimension is a reality. But none of those things free us from war. And so, you know, it's something that we need to continue to think about. The other thing that we, you know, that we encounter a lot when it comes to failure or fallacies of interaction is the fallacy of script writing. And again, because, boy, it's tough to think about war being interactive and not only about

what we can do to our adversaries, but what they can do to us, we tend to imagine that we can dictate the script or, you know, one side can dictate the script to the other and they don't have to plan for interaction. And certainly Vladimir Putin fell prey to his own script when it came to Ukraine. We talked about that script. The fact that, you know, there would be a special military operation. It wouldn't really be a war. It would just be coming in. And the real, the real task in Ukraine would be pacification. It wouldn't be the initial campaign. And boy, boy, did the Russians fall prey to that script. Yeah.

There's an issue for planners and strategists isn't there in the nuclear age. In a way, it's a function of a very good problem, which is there's just not, there's not, there's not enough war. There's not, certainly, I'm knocking on great power war, great power on great power power war. And so as a result, these iteration, whether it's at whatever level, tactical, operational, they're kind of happening in shadow land. You know, weapon A is invented and countermeasure B is, is invented.

to deal with weapon A, which leads to modification C. But it's, you know, maybe you see it tested in smaller wars, like we're seeing in Ukraine now. And Ukraine in some ways is on a much larger scale than anything prior to it, not including great power wars themselves. So it's just, it's hard. It's hard to think through how it's all going to work because the iterations in technology and operating concepts and so forth are occurring, but they're not really being tested.

So you just don't entirely know where you stand. That's absolutely right. And I think what you put your finger on is one of the fundamental things, maybe the most fundamental thing, that differentiates the military profession from other professions. When I say the military profession,

I don't simply refer to men and women wearing their nation's uniform. I mean, those of us, who are concerned about strategy and war. The military profession is a profession, like other professions, meaning there's specialized knowledge and, you know, there's kind of boundaries to the profession and so forth. But it's a very peculiar profession because unlike others, as you say, that the nature of experience is scarce.

It's rarely definitive. It's very tenuous. Again, think about it. Like, compare the military profession to, you know, the medical profession, particularly today's medical profession. So my wife, a handful of years ago, broke her shoulder. More properly, our dog broke her shoulder. My wife didn't break her shoulder. Our overly exuberant dog broke her shoulder. And my wife had to have surgery on her shoulder. She went to a surgeon, a specialist who did a very fine job. But, you know, that that surgeon performed,

I don't know, maybe like a half dozen to 10 shoulder surgeries every week, repeatable. And, you know, was an outstanding surgeon. And he could evaluate how well he did and others could evaluate how well he did because he had, again, maybe, I don't know, six to 10 reps a week and week in, week out. Think about stock brokers, stock traders, you know, hundreds, thousands of transactions a day, lawyers, you know, litigators, they experience their profession on a day-to-day basis. For members of the military profession, by and large, I don't know, you could serve a whole career in the military and never go to war.

Or you go to war once or twice. And even then when you are really truly practicing your profession, it's highly situational, Right. So to go back to the medical metaphor, it's sort of like a surgeon who, again, is highly professional in that they read all the medical journals. They might even use AI and virtual reality to practice operations, but they only enter the surgical theater maybe once a decade. And again, to extend the metaphor, every time it's a different operation. And to extend the metaphor, and sorry in kind of a ghoulish sort of way, but back to interaction. They're operating on a patient who's not under anesthesia, but is awake during the operation

and is reacting to the operation. That's the military profession. So I think, again, what you said is spot on. It really is a profound insight into the challenges of understanding war. And so given that, like, what do we have? I think we have two things. We have history. and that has its own challenges, because as you say, we only have the wars that we have,

and each is fought under unique conditions by unique individuals and probability chance, so many things weigh in. We have history, and we have theory. And theory is, you know, itself imperfect. But that's all we got. We got history and we got theory. And to really tie this up, I mean, what the strategist fallacies is all about is how leaders analysts imperfectly use history and theory with an emphasis on imperfection to understand strategy

and war. That's really, really interesting. It's also a really good place to finish. That it occurs to me, I've left off the fallacy of decisive victory and your fallacies of war termination, which we can discuss now or even another time. This is actually one of the more interesting conversations we've recorded on the show. And, you know, I was also going to, you kind of got to it a bit just there. Feel free to talk about fallacies of war termination for a minute if you'd like. And I also want you to expand on what you just said because you, you know, you have an audience here on this show not totally dissimilar from the one you teach at Sice. A lot of young national security professionals, a lot of military officers, rational staffers, occasional member.

You know, you point to history and theory, you have this chapter outlining all these mistakes people always make. And frankly, you know, we're prone to them too. I've, I've definitely made, mistakes and my understanding of things that you identify in your chapter. Say a little bit more, you know, history and theory is all well and good, but what can these practitioners or aspiring practitioners, whether they're operational types, whether they want to be strategic thinkers, how should they build their defenses against making the kinds of mistakes that you identify in your book? Yeah, well, I think job one is be aware of them. And again, that's what this project is all about, right? It's we lay out the fallacies and describe,

not to name and shame, although we have plenty of examples in the, you know, in the chapter. We're doing it not to name and shame individuals who fell prey to these fallacies, but rather to highlight the fact that these fallacies exist and that they are pervasive. So I think job one is being aware of, again, this tendency to characterize adversaries as irrational, right, again, the strategic laziness, or to substitute this. homo-strategicists to imagine that they're hyper-rational. So I think stage one is to understand that these fallacies are out there, and they're pervasive, and they're because of the way our human brains are wired.

I think that's stage one. Stage two is to understand history, right, to understand how wars have actually unfolded. I think that's important. Stage three is also to understand theory, and not because theory is. perfection, but theory helps, helps explain things. And when I think about theory, I'm again, kind of a traditionalist here. I'm thinking about the classics of strategic theory and, you know, they're classics because they have enduring value.

So, and then finally, I think one of the things that both history and and theory teach us, and this kind of is stage four is to realize that there is still a lot of uncertainty that, and back to this, you know, this transition from peace to war, to my mind, although I think, you know, strategy exists in peacetime, it exists in wartime. I believe that, that, you know, wars are extension of peacetime policies and thus not irrational. But still, that transition from peace to war is pervaded with lots of uncertainty. And we shouldn't delude ourselves that we're going to get everything right and we should posture ourselves accordingly. Again, I go back to Ukraine or even we could think forward to wars that haven't happened

and hopefully won't happen. We shouldn't imagine that we have everything right and that everything will go according to plan and that'll be over when we think it's over. And part of the problem of diluting ourselves that way, again, is sort of in delayed action. If we had postured ourselves for a protracted war, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere, would be in a far better position than we find ourselves in today. Good news is, and this is why it's great to be the United States, you know, an insular power, a maritime power. Traditionally, what happens is, you know, those first warning signs come overseas. And whether it's World War I, World War II, or now, the first shots are fired overseas.

And we have time, it's precious time, but we have time to adjust. And if I'm worried about something now, I'm worried that we're not adjusting enough, soon enough, quickly enough, with enough purpose to the world that we find ourselves in. But we need to do that. Yeah, there's an optimistic take that you just alluded to. I've been reading Walter Meads God and Gold lately where he expresses this precise thought that the United States, like the British Empire before it, you know, because of geostrategic circumstances.

When we win, they lose. And when we lose, they still tend to lose. And that was all well and good for the British Empire, you know, until the 1940s when they just kind of lost. And now we find ourselves in a similar position, but without the backstop of another United States behind us. Absolutely. Tom Mankin, contributor to war in Ukraine, conflict strategy in the return of a fractured world. Thank you so much for your time for the really, really interesting conversation. Aaron, always a pleasure to be with you.

And I look forward to seeing again soon. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.