School of War - Ep 195: John Hillen on Strategic Thinking

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

John Hillen, James C. Wheat Professor in Leadership at Hampden-Sydney College and author of The Strategy Dialogues: A Primer on Business Strategy and Strategic Management, joins the show to talk about how to think strategically in war, business, and life. ▪️ Times      •      01:55 Introduction     •      02:31 An Army start      •      05:17 Cold War ends     •      10:14 The Gulf         •      13:15 Changing styles        •      18:00 73 Easting       •      22:59 Policy and business           •      26:09 Strategos      •      29:04 In the doing     •      32:17 Inside out & outside in         •      36:41 Seeking horizons      •      42:22 Goals are not strategy     •      43:42 Call of Duty        Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

My guest today, John Hillen, fought in Iraq during the Gulf War. Actually, alongside School of War's very first guest, H.R. McMaster at the Battle of the 73 Easting. And then he went on to a really interesting career in government and business, where he's been a serial CEO of major companies. Today he spends a lot of time thinking about strategy, strategic thinking itself as a subject, counseling business leaders and others about how to succeed and outsmarting the competition. I think a lot of us probably wonder about how the kind of thinking that works on a military campaign might apply to other kinds of human endeavor. We talk about that today and more. Let's get into it. It is a script for war to be some of us which will live.

What the experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in grand. We'll fight on the beaches. We'll fight on the landing grounds. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And 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 to the show today. John Hillen, who is the incoming Distinguished Resident Fellow at the Center for Politics and at the Duke American Grand Strategy Center, the Center for American Grand Strategy at Duke University. He's the James C. Wheat Professor. in leadership at Hamden, Sydney, for at least a couple more weeks. You teach in the School of Business at George Mason. You've been in the State Department.

You've been in the Army. You're an author. You're the author most recently of a book called The Strategy Dialogues, a primer on business strategy and strategic management. John, thank you so much for joining the show. Great. Thanks to be here. I am excited to talk to you about a number of things, but can we start kind of at the start,

which is, can we go back to your Army career because I was the light. to learn that you are a veteran of the Battle of the 73 Easting, the significance of which for School of War is that our very first episode some years ago was with H.R. McMaster, and the subject of that episode was the Battle of the 73 Easting. And now we get to hear it from John Hillen's perspective. Why were you in the Army and how did you find yourself in the middle of the desert in Iraq? Yes, so I grew up in an Army family and like a lot of Army families, even though I was born in Oklahoma and moved around, we ultimately settled in northern Virginia.

We're Army back to the Civil War with a couple of breaks, and my father had a full career as an infantryman and Special Forces Officer. And very badly wounded on a second tour of Vietnam, he wound up at Walter Reed, and we wound up following him in the Washington, D.C. area. So I think like you, I went to Fairfax County Schools. Where'd you go to high school?

Yeah, and I was very fortunate. I went to an expensive, private school, but I did it in the middle of the Reagan buildup in the mid to late 1980s, when the Reagan administration was almost doubling the size of the force for reasons you covered with others on the podcast in the past. And so I got a four-year ROTC scholarship to Duke University. Ended up doing well enough to pick my branch in my assignment. And I picked the cavalry because my father had been an infantry officer and I thought cavalry sounds much more, it sounds dashing. There's a certain

Ilan about it, and perhaps I just want to do what every 21-year-old wants to do to their parents, is one-up them. So I became a cavalry officer and ended up in Germany, and as a tank platoon leader and a scout platoon leader, and sometime in the summer of 1989, a

very energetic young captain walks in to our small cavalry troop to take over. And I often tell people, because I teach leadership now, I've written books on leadership, and people say, how do you know leadership when you see it? I say, let me tell you about when H.R. McMaster walked into Eagle Troop, Second Squadron, Second Armory, Caval Regiment. And thus, we went on a great couple-year relationship working together in the second squadron, both on the border the night the

wall came down and then the middle of the biggest tank battle, you know, since World War II. It is a curious thing about the Marine Corps, which is, I believe still, an infantry-centric organization and certainly was in my day. And so the infantry is a sought-after field and people want to be in the infantry. And, you know, I also come from an Army. family where not that there's anything wrong with the infantry in the army, but every now and then, if you said something like, I'm joining the army and I want to be in the infantry, other people associated with the Army might give you a funny look. It doesn't have quite the same obvious and universal appeal as it does to Marines. It depends you talk to. The tribal, I found when I served

on the Navy's Policy Advisory Board for nine years that the tribal pull of all our services and the sub-tribes within that is quite powerful. So let's stick for a while with your your service in the cavalry, because this is really interesting. So you are, you're there in, in Europe as the, as the wall comes down? What was that like as a young officer to witness? So the Cold War was the defining conflict of my youth, my coming of age, right? I mean, I'm in high school and watching movies like Red Dawn and, you know, the day after and things like that. These are the things sculpting, you know, my burgeoning political senses. So, You know, for me, the Frontiers of Freedom were the Iron Curt in 1988 when I was commissioned.

And it wasn't clear at that point. The temperature had gone down a little bit because the extraordinary grand strategy that Reagan had put into place in the cooperation he was receiving from Gorbachev. But it was by no means over. And so we rotated regularly up to the actual border in between the two Germany's of the time and then Czechoslovakia. And we always had a cavalry troop up there patrolling the border 24-7 along with the German border police. And so November of 1989 happened to be the year for Eagle Troop, newly commanded by Captain H. Armamentmaster, and I was the senior scout platoon leader at the time. So we were up there and there was confusion. Like with a lot of autocratic systems, they turn out to be more brittle than people expect.

the confusion that has been told elsewhere had been leading up for a couple of days and that night in November, 1989, like all good automaton's due an autocratic, you know, surveillance states when given no orders, they did nothing. And the border guards stood aside and the people started pouring over.

And we were told that this was a German to German affair and to stay out of the way unless Russian tanks started following East German trabants. So we just got to witness it, which was magnificent. And there's a couple of things stick in my mind. The East Germans would stop at the first store they saw in a village that they drove through, and they would just stare in the window.

They hadn't seen a choice of vacuum cleaners before. They hadn't seen that kind of abundance of things available. They were shocked by, and they would say they were shocked by how much people smiled. They had spent two generations not smiling in some ways, not in public anyway. It was a bit suspicious. And that was really interesting to watch the difference. Because as far as they're concerned, they were all Germans. And in the part of German, they were all Franconians.

It's kind of a region of northern Bavaria that got split by the Iron Curtain. So it's very powerful. And then on a geopolitical level, which I had studied at college, but even if I had, you could feel the tectonic plates of the world's geopolitics shifting quite literally under your feet. It's this very, very momentous moment that we just got to watch there. And it ended up starting my writing career. I wrote a sort of first person account about it because it just felt so momentous to me, you know, to be there at the end of this conflict we had all been preparing for. And one that we thought would define not only the geopolitical shape of the world, but sort of define end times, if you will.

And here we were at the end or the beginning of the end. What was that piece that you wrote called, just so people can look it up? Gosh, it was in Duke Magazine. The alumni magazine is still available, but I can't quite remember the title, but I sort of walk through the – And, you know, really it struck me at the time that it wasn't a military victory per se. What really came across pretty clearly it was a victory of systems, political and economic and social systems, because these were the same people. people, these Germans that we got to witness. And the one side was shocked that in a couple of generations, one part of the exact same society had gone with the same DNA had gone in one

direction and one side had gone in a totally different direction. And the outcomes were so stark. And then not just in terms of consumer abundance, but in terms of political freedom, social mores, you know, economic freedom. So that's what I really started thinking about, how does this military stuff, I'm sitting here on a tank, there's no tanks involved, how does this military stuff connect

to the larger world of grand strategy? Yeah, the great illustrative image, for me, having not had that experience that you had, is those satellite photos at night of the Korean Peninsula. Right. And South Korea lit up, you know, looks like the rest of prosperous Asia

and in North Korea, dark sort of foreboding, Obviously, the lack of light is just a function of poverty amongst other factors. It's such a stark illustration of the choice of the two polities. So then you find yourself on the way to the Gulf. What's going through your mind at this point? You've not been in combat. The Gulf War will be your first experience of combat.

What are you thinking as that invasion approaches? That's right. So in August of 1990, you know, we wake up and we read that Sanam Hussein has essentially extinguished the state of Kuwait, and Kuwait was not a treaty partner of the U.S. The U.S. had had up until, you know, that point for about 12 years or so had been honoring, you know, the original Carter doctrine, the strategic intent of which was to not let a single power, a hegemonic power dominate the Persian Gulf or the Middle East, because this would be a threat to U.S. vital national interest. But it wasn't tied. There was nothing tied to that strategy in the way we have treaty agreements in Asia or treaty agreements in Europe. And so it didn't go unnoticed.

But it wasn't until a few days later when George Bush and in some people's tellings at the beheldth, you know, at the urging of Margaret Thatcher and others, George H.W. Bush, is she just famous words, this will not stand. And this will not stand was when we started paying attention. because at that point we say, okay, well, it's going to be negotiated to reverse this or it's going to have to be reversed by force of arms. At that time, as you might remember, the real threat was not how do we fix the wrong done to Kuwait, but how do we protect Saddam from going further into Saudi Arabia? And the Saudi offense force was quite small. Much of the Saudi royal family were now in hotels in Jeddah, not in Riyadh. They were that worried about the Sanam Saddam, the fourth largest army in the world and a well-equipped, modern Soviet one and well-trained that they thought it would just roll on through and take over Saudi Arabia as well. And so the first wave of American forces came quickly from the U.S., the 82nd airborne and ones you could quickly deploy the Marines in the region for a defensive mission, defensive Saudi Arabia.

When we were notified in November that heavy forces from Europe, hundreds of thousands of us, an entire armored corps, would be going after there was, you know, the threat to Saudi Arabia was probably nascent from Saddam, made no moves it going further. When we were notified, we were going, it looked like it was going to be the other option, the offensive option, to forcibly expel the Iraqi army from in and around Kuwait. So at that point, we had to start thinking about how to fight an offensive war in a featureless desert versus what we had trained 24-7 to do, fight a defensive. in the forested hills of Europe.

That's really interesting. So what did that mean in practice? I mean, the Gulf War ends up, of course, being famous as a Brewera demonstration of the superiority of American arms. And technology obviously played a big role in that, amongst other factors. But I'm sure that prior to that demonstration being performed, reasonably, you felt a little bit more anxious about it. Like, walk us through what the thinking was and what the conversation was. So two totally different kinds of warfare. We used to joke that our role in the general defense plan of Europe as a cavalry unit, as a reconnaissance unit, was to be speed bumps for the Soviets.

And in fact, much of our, and we used to practice, we used to get called in the middle of the night in drills. We'd have to roll out to our defensive positions on the border and so on and so on. And there was some truth to that. And we fought in micro elements, you know, an hour there, depending on the situation. fall back one kilometer, move two kilometers. We were all cramped with lots of forces into this tiny space in West Germany. In offensive in the desert, you had to expand your mind, expand your strategic thinking, and all of a sudden you were looking at moving 50, 60 kilometers a day. You were looking at bypassing huge areas in order to swing into other areas, whether there was

enemy there or not. You had to, all the logistics had to be different. Everything had to be mobile. We ended up throwing out, you know, 75% of the stuff on our tracks, tents, boards to brief visiting generals when they would stop by, you know, where you were in the woods in Germany during an exercise. And we just went down to bare bones. And all we thought about was two basic loads of ammunition and constant access to fuel. Of course, that was the reconnaissance viewpoint. We actually went into a rocket day before the main ground war started to get ahead. start on everybody else. And our job was to race quickly through the desert, find the Iraqi Republican Guard, determine their disposition, and then ultimately lead the rest of the American forces onto

the big fight against the Republican Guard. A fight that never really happened because the reconnaissance Ellen ended up having the fight. But the whole flow of how to think, how to prepare what things to care about, whether you were a general or a sergeant and everything in between, completely changed, and we had to figure it out on the fly. A lot of us were just grabbing books off shelves about the U.S. Desert Warfare in 1942, 43, and trying to figure out, you know, how do we put some of those things into practice versus what we were preparing for throughout the 80s. Was your first experience of direct combat the Battle of the 73 Eastine, or did you have anything before that? We had some run-ups before that. We had been encountering,

regular Iraqi troops because we were, as I mentioned, a day ahead of the rest of the American ground forces, we had been encountering regular Iraqi troops who were mostly surrendering, were seeking to surrender. They were non-Republican Guard. There were occasional sharp, small fights with some of our scouting elements. But the battle happened almost by accident in some ways. I was up front with Eagle Troop in a Bradley fighting vehicle, and I was the forward command post. And so I was putting all the pieces together as we moved along as as the operations officer did all the planning. And we were rolling through and we, and there was a shemal blowing, you know, sort of sandstorm. And we were three kilometers past our limit of advance.

And I got a call from our headquarters saying, well, you're past your limit of advance. When I reported in our position, you guys need to pull back. And about the time that was happening, we quite literally stumbled on in Iraqi Republican Guard Brigade, perfectly arrayed in a beautiful classic textbook reverse slope defense with brand new T-72s and highly trained troops. And they wanted to fight. And so as HR has told you and others, the battle happened quite quickly.

And HR and the other officers in the squadron made the right decision, which is when you are in contact, you deal with the contact. and we went to a tank's lead formation to put the more vulnerable Bradley fighting vehicles behind the tanks that essentially just attacked with a real muscularity and really ferociousness in many ways. Our tanks were firing every three, four seconds, and their tanks were firing at a lesser rate.

But there was a lot of exchange fire. They reorganized. They counterattacked. We had to use artillery to stop one part of a counterattack. They were flanking operations. So the battle is a much-studied one because you can study the different decision cycles and moves of people within it, even though it happened pretty quickly. And folks who want to, we're going to talk about other things, people who want to really

learn about the battle in more detail. It is literally episode one of School of War with HR. But one or two more questions on it before we move on. What's the most important thing you learned from that battle, from that experience of combat? Yeah. So I'll elevate it above what I'll call the normal, I don't want to say, normal, but common reflections on men in combat. And I say this, having been very exposed to that, in fact, I release on Memorial Day every year on National Review's website a list of books

and movies people should read or watch to really understand Memorial Day. And they generally tend to be ones that really capture the sacrifice and the grittiness of combat and war. And you'd be happy to know, you know, like sledge is on there, right, with the old breed and things of that nature. And I've got books, memoirs, narrative histories, movies from every campaign and every part of American history. So I'll put that aside for now. When people ask me and what I saw on the ground and experienced on the ground, when people ask me, who won the battle of the 7-3 Easting? Was it at HRMabaster? I'm like, oh, yeah, central, absolutely central player, made some of the key decisions.

Was it this person and this person? I say it was a fellow named Shuba Wastazaga. Most people have never heard of. He was a one-star general who, after the Army, reached its real nadir after Vietnam, and was really struggling for an identity, a mission, a doctrine that was not tied to the painful episode of how Vietnam ended for the Army. Army, which performed well in Vietnam on the battlefield, but still came out, you know, as a wounded institution. Huba Wastazaga founded the School of Advanced Military Studies in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was one of the founders, and started revising the Army's doctrine, how we should fight with what we should be equipped,

whom we should recruit, and how we put it all together to train and think and study and practice. The sustainable competitive advantage of the American military to this day, and in the Battle of 7-3 Easting, is training, not technology. And the training of how we use and pull all these things together, including doctrine. So when we went into battle, we went into battle with a form of warfare that had been originally put into place to make up for the superiority of numbers the Soviets would have over us in World War III on the European Front. And so we seamlessly wove deep air support, close air support from brand new helicopters at the time, Apaches, heavy, very fast armored units, artillery, including. long range and short range. We were fighting a deep battle, a close battle, a reserve battle, all at the same time. And we integrated all this. And the war in Iraq operation desert

and ended up the place where it all came to fruition. So when I think about the Battle of Seventh-Easing, all those things came together. All the things that Chiba Wastazzaa and others had designed to reinvent the army, to reinvent soldiering, to reinvent the doctrine, the way we fight the equipment, the kit. It all came together in that. one, you know, 28-minute battle. So that's kind of an enduring thing, the connection between institutional reform, thinking, recruiting training, and equipping, and then fighting the actual fight. It all seamlessly came together because I lived that as an Army kid coming out of a Vietnam Army family and then into my own Reagan era army. And you told me that not only were you

an H.R. McMaster there at the battle, but so was Douglas McGregor, which I did not know that It's the three of you. I mean, it's just a small world and demons still active in our current politics and policy debates. McGregor who's gone on to, I'll just say somewhat in my view, Zaney. I'll just, that's me being restrained. Zany career as a commentator, but a serious defense intellectual in his younger years, and there are alongside you and H.R. at the battle. Yeah, and the one surviving picture of the battle that we really have is a black and white photo taken from a fire support vehicle.

my Bradley and Douglas McGregor's tank and H. Armour Master's tank. And McGregor was also, I mean, as a young officer, he was, he was outstanding, one of a very fine combat commander. But I mean, we also had a fellow named Tony O'Rarty who went on to be a three-star in there. And so in our little cavalry unit, we were packed with a lot of talent. And that paid off. That paid off. We were confident in ourselves and in our soldiers. And we were confident enough to try the system that had been design for us at its fullest potential. So life goes on. You've gone into business. When I was getting out of the Marines, I went into, you know, politics and policy and journalism. I've had many opportunities to question that decision. My smarter peers all went and either went directly into

some sort of business role or got their MBAs and then went into business. What was the appeal of that way of life to you? You've obviously stayed involved in policy, so it's a bit of a false choice. Nevertheless, why have you chosen to take your skills and talents, as it were, to the for-profit community? Yeah. Well, you know, I tried both. I went back to school and I got a couple of policy-oriented degrees. You know, I ended up doing pretty well in the policy world. You know, I was in foreign affairs a couple of times as a young analyst and worked for the right think tanks and all those sorts of things.

But I had a mentor who had been in both business and policy at very high levels of both. His name was Phil Merrill. And he once said to me, he said the only way to be a good and honest public servant is to have an independent source of living outside of policy. He said, need to be, you know, have an endowed chair at a university you can always return to. You're a partner in a mainline law firm where you can take time off, going to government, come back, your clients are still there. Or he said, you need to have an independent source of wealth to be a really good honest public service because you don't want your public service job to be the best job you've ever. head. And I thought to myself, well, that's terrible. I'm 0 for three on those things in my career planning. So, you know, I set out to get the most doable due of those three. I'd never

had an interest in the business world. I'd never an interest in, you know, we're a family of service. I almost look down on it. It's grubby. It's grubby this thing. But I also knew in the back of my mind, you know, it's actually a big theme of a chapter I've got a forthcoming book about American civics, that our grand strategy, our strategic character as a nation has always been more commercial in nature than governmental, right? We are a country with a government, not vice versa. And that country is a commercial nation, you know, not a governmental one. It's a private nation, a voluntary association, not a compelled one of governmental assignment. And so it made sense at some level in my mind. But at the end of the day, I was able to adopt rather easily because I just

focused on the things in which I was interested and I had been good at in the military and the policy world, which was the leadership dimension of life, how to get people to work together to accomplish something, and the strategy dimension of life. Where's this organization going? Why and who's doing what along the way and how do we know we get there? And so I focused on those things and all the rest were just X's and O's, whether I was working on Wall Street in a financial services firm or whether I was, you know, running my own defense technology company and selling it to, you know, Booz Allen or CICI, and I've, you know, and I've done both. So for me, by focusing in areas that were common threads throughout my policy career, the State Department, the uniformed

military, the X's and O's of the business world and the difference trees in that and the public policy world were not just ended up not being that important. You also teach business strategy and that's the subject of the of the latest book, the strategy dialogues. Talk for a moment, if you would, about how the phrase business strategy makes sense. That is to say, how does, I think, you know, the original content of the term strategy has a military dimension. It's things that are going to happen. It's, you know, it's the business of generals. What does it mean in principle to talk about business strategy?

Yeah, so, you know, I had this great mentor when I, I was doing a degree in war studies at King's College, London, Sir Lawrence Friedman, who's kind enough to blurb this book. But I remember the very first words of his very first lecture on the very first day where, you know, strategy comes from the Greek word strategos for general. And don't forget that. So I think of strategy, even though it's rooted in the military art, as you just pointed out, as like a basic science.

and then business strategy or grand strategy, something else, is the applied science of the basics. And the basics are the same. And here's what I'll say it's a way to think, not a what to think. Okay, a lot of people misinterpret strategy because they go in looking for a formula that delivers a perfect answer. And this happens in military affairs. This happens in public affairs, and this definitely happens in business. But it is, in fact, a way to think. thought process. It's a way to interpret your surroundings. It's a way to put a thought process together

to understand options about potentially different futures, to run them through a kind of filter set of frameworks that allow you to organize your thinking, put together some possible courses of action, test them, and then ultimately make a decision. And the decision is always and only probably going to be a kind of intelligent bet about the future, because strategy is meant to bring you to a different future and the future hasn't yet happened. So that's a process. One I'm, I outline, you know, in broken down details in the book, not just for strategy in general, but particularly for business strategies, because that's what occurs me. That's what ties it all together. So the general exercises this process on the field of battle. The grand strategists exercises this process in the halls of

power and diplomacy and the international conferences and the conferences of war and so on. And the business strategists exercises this on the competitive field of their industry or their firm. So this is going to sound super nerdy, but as you laid that out and thinking about my own classical education, your account of strategy sounds a lot like the classical or Socratic account of philosophy. That is to say, it's not the result. It's not something you can write down in one place, the answers to the questions, as it were. It is a way of questioning, and you're not really doing it unless you're doing it. That is to say, unless you are engaged in the act of thinking in a certain way, you're not really doing philosophy. Like, in that moment,

you're doing it. By the time you write it down and walk away, it's already done. In the same way, strategy isn't it is something that the general or the business leader or what have you is doing it as they act right and and that's exactly right and i even doubled down on the socratic because i chose the method to explain this to the exact same method you know the book is a series of socratic dialogues because i found this how people learn strategy is i've done a ton of consulting work around strategy led my own firms which were all very strategically oriented and then also teach strategy, I found the aha in happens after a conversation where you tease these ideas out. So instead of looking for great strategic outcomes, what I look for is what in Vegas they might

call a tell about whether you have a strategic mindset. Are you thinking long range, not short-term? Are you thinking broadly in scope and big picture, not narrow in focus? Are you trying to connect things, looking for patterns in the environment in which you compete or need to come to some kind of victory and seeing how these ecosystems connect and mind affect you. You know, analysts break problems down using their left brain in order to solve problems. Strategists pull things back together. It's almost the opposite skill set. And I talk about the brain science in the book. It's actually the opposite parts of your brain. Different parts of your brain light up when you're doing this kind of thinking. Strategists are very good at a strategic mind. It's very good at seeing things in relation

to each other. Context. Right. They import context. They look for advantage. What's a better place, what's a better neighborhood in which to live in my town? What does it even mean? How do I define what a better neighborhood is? Who's living where? And what would it take to move from one place to another? And they ultimately think this way in order to have a process to make hard choices and explain the purpose and the pathways to doing something different to a place of more sustainable advantage. And that's the strategic process. And that's what's way more important than any particular outcome. I figured out how to beat Rome on their home turf, says Hannibal, right? The process of getting to whatever Hannibal decided upon before the invasion of Italy would be the more

important evidence that he was thinking strategically rather than a particular outcome. How do you help people understand the competitive dimension of the situations that call for strategy or strategic thinking? That is to say, any of us can have a strategy for a lot of things, and it's a kind of fair use of the word. I can have a strategy about how to get lunch. Right. I have a goal, which is to eat. I have preferences. I have means in terms of the money in my wallet and I'm going to go walk across the courtyard and buy a sandwich at the shop and I sort of had a strategy. Maybe there were some decisions in there. It's not the real thing because no one's really trying to stop me. That's right. No one's trying to get the sandwich first or prevent me from getting

my sandwich or, you know, anything like that, which of course in both war and business is sort of the defining feature of those worlds. How do you help people, everything you just described sound very sensible. And if you could just sit in a room and on your own time, just do it without anyone and bothering you, you'd probably likely come, a reasonably intelligent person would come to reasonably good outcomes most of the time. But as we all know, armies lose and businesses fail. Right. How do you help people think about that?

So we have an expression in the strategy business. We say strategies are formulated outside in, but they're conducted inside out. So you always start with the external environment when you formulate your strategy. What kind of world do I live in? What other actors are in it? with the dynamics and trends shaping this world, how might those same things exert themselves as competitive forces, not just not direct competitors, but things having a competitive impact? And then how do I map all that and understand it and then move to a place where I can best

exploit opportunities or protect myself from threats in the market? And I actually have a series of exercises. One is sort of a fun one. I call it the Map of Paris exercise, and I do this with groups I work with, and I'm facilitating their strategic thinking off-sites and such. I say everybody draw a map of Paris in 90 seconds. And people start laughing. I said, no, in average, someone said, I haven't been to Paris.

I said, I don't care. You have some idea of Paris in your head. Even if you just draw a baguette and a beret, that's fine. I want to see what you're thinking. And the idea is, and I get some very accurate maps, I get subway maps, I get tourist maps. I get sort of cultural, iconic guides to the different Adirondi. these moments. People are more, are better at this than they think sometimes. And it shows that everybody has the ability to see things in relation to each other and make value judgments around it. And then I go

on, I've exercised, look for people can map the competitive environment they're in. They map the characteristics of the environment. And there's other tools and frameworks to understand forces of competition. But the takeaway is you really have to understand the world in which you live before you turn the lens on yourself and say, okay, based on that world and where opportunities and threats may be for anybody, let alone me, what's accessible to me because of who I am? You know, so if you think about this at a grand strategy level, right? For me, the U.S. should, the United States, should constantly be rooting its strategy and its enduring sources of competitive advantage. A lot of times we don't do that. We make a move. It may or may not be part of a strategy,

but it's not really rooted in the things we do to. that are valuable, rare, difficult for others to imitate and can't be substituted for. These are your sources of your core companies, your source of advantage. The linking up of those two things, the outside world and its characteristics, and thinking about it dynamically because it's always being shaped and changed, and then your core characteristics, that the dominant gene in your DNA is an organization, the linking up of those two things provides the basis of your strategy. Only then can you put some goals behind it?

Can you put some sequencing into it? Can you understand the dependencies, how you link actions to move from one place to another? But it's always got to start there. Formulated outside in, conducted inside out. So beyond competition in the existence of people who want, you know, what you have, another parallel between military strategy and business strategy is technological change. There's a human dimension in both that, you know, sitting here in 2025 still seems as though it's been constant for a long time and it's going to probably stay more or less constant-ish. Though I guess for the first time with AI, maybe we have reason to question that I'm skeptical.

I think the human element stays human for the foreseeable future. But that doesn't mean that, say, for example, AI isn't going to play an enormous role in warfare. It seems clear that it will in some ways already is in places like Ukraine and around Israel. how do you help a business leader think strategically. I mean, we can use AI as the example. Presumably you're getting pinged with questions about this right now. I mean, every business in the world, it seems like for the most part has to think about, it's like the introduction of gunpowder. Like some of us are going to navigate this well.

Some of us are going to navigate it poorly. It's kind of hard to actually picture. I mean, imagine sitting there having never seen a musket fired and someone's trying to explain it to you. It's sort of hard to picture what this actually mean. You know, how do you see to the other side of the event horizon on something like this? And how do you think about it strategically? Yeah, so horizon. That's a great word to put in there.

It shows you're kind of naturally fall into strategic thinking, which is unnatural, by the way. You know, the I cite a big study in there showing that only 4% of executives naturally think strategically. They cast their mind forward. They connect pieces. most executive, two-thirds of executives are either achievers. They're oriented on getting things done, which is great. Task accomplishment or they're experts. They're looking for data to make decision.

That's where the AI comes in. AI can process a lot of information and give you data and write answers. Here's the challenge with that. And when I talk to my people I'm working with on strategy about, one of the things that prevents people from truly thinking strategically is they confused strategic planning with strategic thinking. They're not only not the same thing, they often act in contravention to each other. So strategic planning in which you are seeking data, you're working from a baseline of past performance. If you have any futuristic thoughts in a general

corporate strategic planning, it's usually a small extrapolation of past trends. You and I know that discontinuities really mark future as opposed to, you know, accurate linear projections. But that tends to be the way planning goes. So if you're doing traditional strategic planning, which is often a thinly disguised annual budget drill, I get a lot of calls in September saying, can you run our strategy offside? It's time to think about strategy. And I often say, oh gosh, I'm so glad you've managed to tame your incredibly dynamic, competitive environment such that it only has you need to refresh your strategy at a certain time of the year. That's extraordinary. It's like controlling the weather. And once we get over, you know, that mockery,

then we start to think about, why do you always wait for a budgetary drill offsite to talk about strategies? You should be part of your everyday conversations. But if you're doing it the traditional way and doing strategic planning that is based upon data, many of which can be really helped by AI, which processes data, very quickly. My last, you know, firm, which I sold to Booz Allen a couple years ago, used AI machine learning models to process signals intelligence. It's very AI-driven. So I understand it at a pretty decent level. But that simply assembles the data, which pulls your mind backwards because the data is known. Strategic thinking, you need to cast your mind forward. It's contingent. It takes place in an environment of ambiguity, the future. It is situation-dependent.

It really is, as I mentioned, an intelligent bet on the future. So that's where you need judgment. if you have a problem or a potential path to the future, a lot of times AI will just say, based on what we know, that won't work. The strategic mind says of all these different potential paths to the future, different potential ways to work ourselves out of a problem, we don't say no. What we say is, what would have to be true for this to happen? That's the strategic question. And then we, it's a different idea.

AI really can't provide that. That's sort of a judge because it asked it to act outside of logic. So, you know, I tell people, think about the book of kings. You know, when Solomon has a very tough job, he's got to manage this really difficult people. And God says to him, I get it. They're really tough. All right, I'll give you one gift to help you out. Solomon doesn't ask to be the strongest, the most processing power, the longest life.

He asks for wisdom. I would like a wise and discerning heart. And I think that for me really captures. The difference between the human element is strategic thinking and then what AI can really help with, which is the gathering of the data about past performance and related things. You know what my favorite account in book form of what strategy actually looks like in practice is? I'm curious to know if you'll agree with this or what your reaction will be. Henry Kissinger's White House years, the first volume of his memoir is which covers his tenure as National Security Advisor. It's first of all, it's it's really well written. I mean, it's a really good literary product and I recommend it to anyone actually interested in Cold War history or, you know, Washington.

Like more about Washington has stayed the same than has changed since I guess and Joe wrote that. But to the, you know, to illustrate a few of the things you've been saying, you know, here you have somebody and his team as it were strategizing every day. And you see it, you see, you know, whatever the issue is in the book, the, the, the, the, you know, the, the, chapters are sort of thematics. It'll be, you know, the Middle East chapter. There'll be a Europe chapter. There'll be a China chapter, obviously. And you see them going day to day and the iterating on the different problems as they evolve

and as people come in, you know, the North Vietnamese come in with a different view of things and try to change the game. And you see that, you know, the activity has human content. I mean, a lot of the conversations is, who do you call and what do you say to this person and make sure not to call that person and make sure you don't have to say it this way. Right, right. It's very practical. as very human.

There aren't, I mean, by the time you're the National Security Advisor, there are not a lot of exercises where you sit around with big blue arrows on a map. You know, you are kind of in the crisis, but you are, and this is, Kissinger, you know, was, you know, uniquely gifted at this. You are even in the crisis trying to connect it to the way in which it will affect the crises to come. And that's the trick. And I just, I've always thought that book, it, I recommend it to young people all the time, even though it's kind of a weighty book.

It's like you want to see what it actually looks like. This is a good record of what it actually looks like. Yeah, no connecting a deeply strategic mind, right? And I think this alludes a lot of people, including very senior policymakers and national leaders, which is they confuse a goal for a strategy. Goals can be good. They can be bad, but they're not a strategy. They confuse aspirations for a strategy.

Missions, visions, values, these are all can inform a strategy. But a strategy is a coordinated game plan. a blueprint to move to a different future that that interconnects a series of moves in a sequence and with the dependencies ironed out that will then deliver to you to a place of advantage in the future. And that requires deciding what does advantage mean to me and what is that place and why is it better than today? And then what has to happen along the way? What forces are resisting me? Because we do it in a competitive environment. What things keep long and things get right? Who's doing what around here? How do I keep score along the

way. These are the kinds of questions that you see come out in the White House years, because this is a way to think strategically. Last question for you, John. I can't let you go without asking how you came to be the advisor. I want to get the actual term correct here. The military advisor on the original call of duty World War II series. How did that come about? And how was that? Right. So after 9-11, because I had a bit of a counterterrorism expertise. I was a talking head for ABC News. And I eventually expanded to do all military things that ABC News would ever be interested in.

And among the things we did, was a special around the time of, you know, the greatest generation celebration, saving Private Ryan was coming out. There was a World War II veteran sentimental moment about 23, 24 years ago. And a gaming studio, a gaming publisher, Activision, which was doing a called duty video game series oriented on World War II and wanting

to be a scrupulous historical accuracy and so much as you can capture that in a video game, called me up and said, you seem to know a lot about World War II. Would you work with us? And I thought, well, I'm a serious guy. I've got a PhD. I don't do games. And they said, no, just fly out here and take a look. And within 10 minutes of landing in L.A. and going to the gaming studio, I'm having an argument with a 19-year-old developer with nine nose earrings about whether the 442nd regimental combat team was on the beach and Anzio on this day versus that day. And whether a smoke grenade of a 1942 vintage was that much worse than one of a 1944 vintage and how to portray that in the game and so on. And I thought, wow, these guys are

serious. So it ended up being a lot of fun. I've always been passionate about civics in American history education. I'm involved in a couple of efforts on that now. And we use those games to try to drive people to World War II military history and capturing the accuracy in each scenario what actually happened in World War II. Every single bit of accuracy that we tried to replicate and capture, the sounds, none of those sounds were invented. They were all actual recordings of actual World War II weapons being fired in real life. We did that on a range and outside Las Vegas. None of that's apparent to an average player, but when you put them all together,

it gives the game a very different feel. It feels very authentic. And at the end of every scenario, we would guide people to books and movies about that thing, and the sales of those books spiked every year. So I think, I mean, I passed it off to somebody else when they went to modern warfare and zombies. I have no experience with zombies myself.

But the World War II games, I thought of as a great, in the same way I think of the musical Hamilton, and a great civic gift to the nation to get people interested in its history and what made us, you know, who we are. So that was really, really fun to do. John Hillen, author of The Strategy Dialogues. It's been a really interesting conversation. Thank you for coming on School of War.

Thank you, Aaron. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.