School of War - Ep 75: Toshi Yoshihara on Sun Tzu (New Makers of Modern Strategy #5)

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Toshi Yoshihara, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, author of Mao’s Army Goes to Sea, and contributor to the New Makers of Modern Strategy, joins the show to talk about Sun Tzu and Mao’s strategic thought. ▪️ Times      •    02:14 Introduction      •    02:33 Who was Sun Tzu?       •    05:38 Spring and Autumn      •    08:27 Legitimizing the text     •    11:18 Rational analysis      •    13:51 Clausewitz versus Sun Tzu     •    20:28 A dangerous optimism      •    24:40 Shih     •    29:59 Mao in ’49 and ’50     •    34:11 Chinese intervention in Korea     •    38:36 The origins of Chinese sea power      •    43:11 Amphibious operations     •    47:33 D-Day without any advantages  Andrew Rhodes Map D-Day Invasion compared to potential Taiwan Invasion Follow along on Instagram

Now, an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness, and as water shapes its flow in accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy, and as water has no constant form, there are in war no constant conditions. Thus, one able to gain the victory by modifying his tactics in accordance with the enemy situation may be said to be divine. With slightly nomic but basically commonsensical observations like this, the authors or editors of the text that has come down to us as Sun Su's Art of War, establish their work as a foundational account of strategic thinking,

with an emphasis on quote-unquote Eastern concepts, like, for example, that it is better to win without fighting at all. But are insights like that regional or are they simply universal? and to what extent to Sun Tzu's vision of strategy influenced the modern world, including with regard to the CCP's approach to warfare. In this latest edition of our New Makers of Modern Strategy series, we'll address these questions and more. 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 stale. We continue to face a grave. situation in Iran. We'll fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. You can follow us on Instagram at School of War. Please check it out. I'm delighted to be joined today by Toshi Yoshihara. He is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He is a contributor to the New Makers of Modern Strategy volume. He's the chapter on, I've always said Sun Su, but you're going to correct me, I think,

on how I should actually say this here in a moment. He's the author of numerous books. Most recently, Mao's Army Goes to Sea, the island campaigns and the founding of China's Navy. Toshi, thanks so much for joining the show. Thank you for having me. Well, why don't we start with, again, as I've always said, Sun Su, you have a fascinating chapter in New Makers of Modern Strategy on the, the volume and the semi-mythical man behind it.

Actually, let's start with that. Who is Sun Su meant to have been? And what is the nature of this volume of writings that has come down to us and which is widely read and widely appreciated as a foundational text of strategy? Sure. One of the things that I wanted to convey in my chapter is to highlight just how problematic that text is as a historical artifact. The problem with the text comes in two forms.

The first is the historical origins and authenticity of the text itself and also the historical authenticity of the author, the supposed Sun Tzu, I don't mind pronunciation either way. So let me first of all start with the text. The text is problematic because the text claims to speak from one era, the spring and autumn period, which started in about 770 BC on. But really, the substance of the text, its discussion about the character of warfare, actually reflects a period of a much later period, the Warring States period, that began around 470 BC or so,

ending around 220 BC. And so there is this weird, historical, disjuncture between what the text claims to be talking about and what the text is actually talking about. And I think the view now is that the text actually is talking about the warring states period and that there are some theories as to why there is this historical distructure, something that perhaps we can talk about a little bit during this interview. Let me now turn to the historical authenticity of the author himself. Sunza, which translates into Master Sun, is, again, a problematic figure in the sense that we know very little about him from the historical record. He has what we might consider to be a pretty skimpy biography, if he will. And again,

the view now is that Sunza's art of war was not, in fact, written by a single, historical figure in a specific place in time in ancient China. Rather, the text evolved over time. It was handled essentially by a group of nameless, faceless curators, as I described them in my chapter, who basically put the text together, drawing from multiple sources, accumulated them over time, and it essentially congealed into the 13 chapters that we now understand as as art of war. Well, talk to us a bit about these two periods of Chinese history, spring and autumn, which the book purports to be said in and then warring states, which you argue it's actually

a reflection of the dynamics of that later period. What is different about that later period? What has changed about Chinese warfare? Yeah. What I point out in the chapter is that even if we have disagreements about exactly who Sunza is, whether he existed or not, or the historical authenticity of the text in terms of dating its origins, is that the substance of the text tells us quite a bit about the, you might say, the transformation of warfare, of the waging of war between these two periods.

In the spring and autumn period, warfare was relatively small scale. The armies typically didn't number more than 10,000 people. It was waged by noblemen or aristocrats. And the war that they waged were what you might call ritualistic warfare or war by ritual, where they waged war on a seasonal basis in sort of what you might consider blood sacrifice, acts of violence. And again, the combat was waged by the nobleman themselves, riding chariots, supported by troops on the ground. By contrast, by the time we get to the warring states period, we witnessed a transformation in the way war was waged, primarily because of the increasing capacity of the state to organize a society, material, revenue, resources, and so forth. What we saw emerge then in the

warring states period was mass conscript armies that used new technologies like the crossbow and the ability of the state to harness manpower and material to field huge armies that could engage in battles of annihilation. And what we saw then was unprecedented carnage and destruction on the battlefield as a result of this transition. And so again, even if we might dispute, where the text exactly came from and who Sunza was, we can say for sure that the warring states period, you know, represented one of those periods, as we've seen in the West, transformations in the way war was waged because of all of these larger factors, political, social, economic, technological, doctrinal, organizational, and so forth.

And you argue in the chapter, and feel free obviously to correct my framing of this, that the book speaks for a kind of new class. of military professionals who would be required to manage such a large state enterprise, like the one that comes about in the warring state's period, as opposed to presumably a more aristocratic dilettante might overstate it, but an aristocratic class of general that would have preceded this period. Why do you think that's the case? And how does the book reflect the views of such a class of leader? Yeah. So I'd like to take the opportunity to plug one of my first,

my former colleagues works at the Naval War College, Professor Dex Wilson and his co-author, Andrew Meyer, who made a really interesting hypotheses about the actual purpose of Srenza's Art of War. The text, in their view, was designed to the reason that they harken back, that these faceless, nameless curators harken back to the spring and autumn period was to create a sort of an analytic top cover to lend legitimacy to the text by making this supposed master Sun a contemporary of Confucius. And by going by projecting backwards and lending Sunza this authoritative, this authority, these authors speculate that the text was designed to make an argument for a new professional class, and that was this new general that would replace the old system

in which aristocrats and noblemen called the shots, essentially, in waging and managing war, and that these curators of this text were basically trying to make the case for a professional military general, whose only goal is to, of course, to wage, and win wars because of the growing complexity of warfare as these states were able to feel these much larger armies. And so you needed somebody who spent their entire professional careers focused on war and warfare and the management of troops, the development of doctrine and so forth. And so according to this hypothesis, the art of war was a way to make way essentially for this new professional class, this new general that would be needed to wage this new kind of war.

You make a really interesting observation in the chapter that would never have occurred to me independently, that an important implication of the book makes is twofold, that war is grave and it's also susceptible to rational analysis, that reason ought to be king in one's approach to war. And sitting here in 2023, it's, you know, sort of impossible to think of war as anything other than a very grave matter. I don't think anyone really, any adult thinks about war as a light matter. And of course, it's susceptible to rational analysis, right? But you point out that these things may need to have been established by the authors of this volume.

Why do you say that? Well, I mean, I think, again, if you think about the way that war was conceived and waged in the earlier period, there were things like honor. There were things about, you know, concerned with the ritual that, cast a long shadow over the way people conceived of warfare. But as warfare transitioned to this much deadlier form in the warring states period, it was increasingly important to take passion out of the waging of war, to impose rationality. And in some ways, Sunza's art of war really reflects hyper-rationality, if you will, about war. But what the text teaches us, I think,

is to take war seriously and to adopt a highly calculative strategy, a dispassionate approach to war that encourages the general and the commanders to engage in what we might call net assessment today, to look carefully at the strengths and weaknesses of your opponent and of yourself, to have greater self-awareness and so forth to enhance the chances of success on the battlefield.

And as you indicate, this might say, seem self-evident to us. But if we project ourselves backwards into that time, that was potentially a fairly radical departure from the way people thought of war. So you don't have to have read the art of war, and you don't have to have read Klaus Fitts, I think, to have in mind a couple sort of stereotypes about them, that Klaus Fitz represents, you know, a particular Western way of thinking about war that is concerned with with the defeat of the enemy's army in a decisive fashion, right? And that Sun Su's work represents a somehow more eastern approach to war that is more about winning without fighting about the employment of leverage in all kinds of clever ways. And you go into

this distinction and you go issue by issue in a comparison with Klausfits in a way that I thought was really interesting. And I guess the upshot is it's complicated. Maybe you would take us through a couple of these issues and compare a bit with Klaus Fitz as a way of speaking for a sort of broader European or Western way of thinking about war. Is there anything too, for example, this notion that Klaus Fits is more interested in decision on the battlefield and Sun Tsu is interested more in things that happen off the battlefield. And if so, what does that mean? Yeah, maybe I'll pick up on your last point first and then go through these apparent contrast or different contrast and differences between the two strategic theorists.

Actually, maybe I'll back up a little bit and see a few words about the reason that I wrote this chapter and how I approach the topic. So I really approached this topic as an educator. I was a professor of the strategy department at the Naval War College, where I taught for over a decade. And the curriculum used for the strategy course

really uses Klaus Viz and Swenza as the main strategic theorists, as the foundational theorists that laid the groundwork for all of the subsequent case studies that are examined in the course. And so the course in some ways manufactures this dialogue, if you will, or the dialectic between Klausvitz and Sunza. And I find it a useful pedagogical device to convey foundational principles of strategy and war to senior officers. at the Naval War College. And it was really through that experience that I had the opportunity to learn about Sunza text, to think more deeply about strategy,

and to wrestle with some of these problematic aspects of the text. And so that's really how I approached the chapter. And that's why I spent quite a bit of time drawing these, what I would emphasize again, apparent contrasts and comparisons, because in my view, Klaus Witz and Sunzaa actually agree on far more than I think we typically give them credit for. And so, for example, there is a tendency to view Sunza as somehow being a grand strategist

that he talks about, you know, deterrent actions, essentially peacetime maneuver to force your opponent to react in certain ways in peacetime and to really operate at the higher level of of strategy. But if you simply read the actual title of the work, the art of war is actually a mistranslation. The Chinese title, Sun Zi Bingfa, is actually master Sun's military methods. What the title suggests is actually very much concerned with operations and tactics and so forth. And of course, Klausvitz, which I think, you know, some can pigeonhole him as someone who focus focuses on operations is also very much concerned with things like coalition warfare, the role of alliances. He makes it very clear that there are other means that are used prior to during

and after war that would be essential to achieving a state's objectives. And so I think while pedagogically useful to think about these two theorists as highlighting different levels of strategy, I actually think that they have a lot more in common than we typically a attribute them for. As for the differences, I also try to highlight these as apparent contrast. So, for example, when we talk about the differences between Klausvitz and Sunza, we talk about the apparent divergence on this issue of civil-military relations. Sunza talks about this idea that there are under certain circumstances in which the commander can defy the will of the sovereign. And we see this as a kind of occupying sort of the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to civil

military relations and Klaus Fitz's notion that policy must always have primacy over all military matters. To me, I think Sun's discussion of this aspect of civil military relations simply highlights to me the tendency of military institutions to want to have independent agency. the tendency of military commanders wanting to have less interference from their political masters. These are simply impulses that are universal across all military institutions. And from a pedagogical teaching perspective, to the extent that this manufactured dialogue can generate this discussion about civil military relations across the spectrum, I think that's all to the good.

The other issue I wanted to bring up is, again, this idea of a manufacturer dialogue. One of my former colleagues at the War College, Professor Carl Walling, used to give a really popular lecture to the students. And he basically creates this dialogue. He asked the students to imagine Klaus Witz and Sunza sitting down in a coffee shop having a debate about strategy. And one of the things, one of the really sort of effective teaching devices that he uses is to ask the students to imagine that that Klaus Fitz is represented by the frowny face emoji and that Sunza is the happy face emoji. And those sort of contrasting images are designed to convey this idea about Klauswitz's skepticism, about the ability of the commander to control events on the

battlefield, to have a full grasp of fast-moving events, the fast-moving events, the ability to obtain the right kinds of intelligence at the right time at the right place to be effective. Klaus says is very skeptical about that, whereas Sunza's texts tend to hold in high esteem the role of intelligence, the role of surprise, and things like maneuver, deception, the ability of the commander to control the battle space and so forth. And again, I think while this is a vast oversimplification of that two very complex nuance text, I think from a pedagogical perspective, it creates this really interesting dialogue

that helps to generate discussion among students about strategy. Well, let's stick with this for a moment because I found this portion of the chapter just fascinating, and in particular, the way that you framed it as Sun Tzu's somehow being more optimistic about, you know, the lot of the commander and the commander's ability

to achieve his ends and Klaus Fitt somehow being more pessimistic, but Sun Tzu's optimism being, in some way, dangerous and you drew you drew parallels with you know American strategic thought or doctrinal thought military doctrinal thought in the last generation or so so what what you know why is why is the kind of optimism evinced by Sun Tzu potentially dangerous yeah so I think you know Sun Tzu's art of war if read selectively or or if read out of context can convey this idea that war can be a one-sided affair, right, that the commander can basically impose its will on the adversary by, you know, through maneuver, through deception, through surprise,

through superior intelligence, and so forth. And it seems to me that there is, and to me, I think, that actually highlights a lot about some of the debates that we've had over the past 20 years, that some of the ideas articulated by Sunza seemed to parallel some of the discourse that emerged, say, beginning in the 1990s, the discourse about the revolution and military affairs that was powered by the information technology revolution. And what we saw in those debates was a very sort of Sun Tzuian discourse about the ability of the commander to have this omniscience, if you will, because of this information technology revolution, to be able to know the environment,

to be able to see everything on the battle space, and therefore to be able to act and react faster than the adversary. In fact, the idea is that you could obtain such information superiority that you can not only act and react faster than the adversary, but you can actually impose friction on the enemy, and that you can maneuver faster than the enemy, you can disperse, concentrate forces better than the adversary, and so forth. And it seems to me that you don't have to have ever read Sunza to succumb to the temptations of the promises of some of these technological changes.

And so I think reading Sunza, if you choose to read it that way, it offers in some ways a cautionary tale, the danger of succumbing to the promise of technology, the ability to lift the fog of war and so forth. You know, it seems to me, again, the optimism as represented by a selective sort of reading of Sunza can lead to these, I think, huge sort of overconfident conclusions about how you can control the flow of war. If you don't mind, spell it out a bit for us, you know, what, what's wrong with that belief, with that kind of confidence in one's belief to occupy this supreme position of information dominance and the ability to impose friction on the other guy and escape it yourself? Like what in the last 20 years has shown, you know, Joint Vision 2020 to have been perhaps over-optimistic? Well, I think what what we found is that despite the technical means to gather information, to disseminate information and so forth, is that that itself becomes a problem because you become inundated with information and you now have trouble trying to figure out what's useful

information and what's not? Because information technology can actually generate too much noise. That actually creates its own kind of friction. What we've also found, of course, in line with Klausvitzian principles of interaction is that the adversary will at some point obtain similar technologies and to be able to compete, perhaps even out-compete you. There are adversaries who will, who either have the technology to compete with you symmetrically, but there are also adversaries, as we've seen with insurgents and terrorists during our global war on terror, where they use very basic primitive technologies to counter, effectively counter our technological information superiority. And so I think information itself could be a cause of friction.

And I think we should never forget that, you know, as the saying goes, you know, it's almost a trope that the adversary gets a vote. And so I think it was tempting to succumb to the the promise of technology, but we found over the past two decades in some ways how right Klaus Witz was after all. Let's talk a bit about this concept of Shi, which is famously difficult to translate idea from the art of war. Maybe I'll start there. How do you translate Shi or what are the various ways in which it can be translated and what does Sun Su mean by it? Yeah, so this idea, and I'm going to pronounce it in the Chinese, but it's shih. And it is a

a difficult term to translate. Western scholars have interpreted in a variety of ways. Some have called it the strategic configuration of power. Sunza himself in the art of war uses metaphors to describe this concept. One metaphor, it's a very powerful image, is shir is like a rapidly descending hawk that strikes its prey and breaks its back. And I think what that metaphor conveys is that something as light as a bird can, because of speed, momentum, the accuracy of its descent can generate so much kinetic power that it can break the back of its prey. Another really interesting metaphor that Sunza uses is this idea that Shi is like the

latent energy just before a crossbowman. unleashes the arrow, that it's about that it's, it's about the configuration of power that allows the crossbow to generate so much power that it can unleash an arrow, which is of course very light, to strike with great accuracy and lethality. Another metaphor is about pushing a rock off the edge of a precipice. And it is the, the weight of the rock, its speed of descent as it tumbles down the precipice, and also importantly, the person pushing the rock to unleash, to unlock that latent energy. Those are all different ways, visual ways of imagining what the Shi is like. So there has been a debate in the West among Western scholars about what Shi tells us about Chinese strategy.

And that was really the approach that I took with the chapter, which is to, and it actually conforms to my broader framework, which is to problematize Sunza in these ways in talking about how Sunza fits into some of our larger debates about the universal logic of strategy and the apparent peculiarities of Chinese strategy. And Shi is a really good example of how it has helped to stimulate this debate. And so there are those in the West who argue that Shi is sort of peculiarly Chinese uniquely Chinese as very much part of China's military traditions. And they claim that if you look at more recent Chinese war fighting, that there's evidence of Shi in those approaches, whether it's Mao Zedong's campaigns during the Chinese Civil War, particularly the last year the Chinese Civil

War, where Mao's forces engaged in mobile combat operations or Mao's calculations in intervening in the Korean War and the first phases of that Korean War when the Chinese people's volunteers engaged in surprise and deception, used superior positioning to overwhelm the over-extended UN forces on the Korean Peninsula. On the other hand, there are those who would argue that, you know, there's a tendency among some to sort of overly mystify the concept of Shi, and these folks, essentially argue that there really isn't anything that's uniquely peculiar about shir, that it is explicable, it is understandable to really any Western commander, right? I mean, who wouldn't want to have superior positioning?

You know, who wouldn't want to engage in deception and surprise when it benefits your own side? Who wouldn't want to unleash tremendous amounts of latent energy and power to destroy your adversary in a quick, decisive operation? So, you know, I think Shih is useful in both cases, in my view, right? To me, I think there is something about Shih that seems very attractive to Chinese military strategists. And I document in the chapter how the People's Liberation Army, you know, various analysts and military officers have used their own ancient battles of the past to elucidate this concept

of Shih as a way to understand future warfare. And so I think I see value in both sides of that debate. Could you maybe give us a little bit more color on how Mao's approach to war fighting in 49 and 50 represents, you know, arguably his adoption of this concept? You know, what is it about the defeat on the mainland of the KMT or infiltration and surprise in Korea that actually exemplifies this idea? Yeah, so Mao launched what's considered one of the largest, actually, operations in the Chinese Civil War in 1948 and 1949, the Hawaii campaign in the central plane of China. and one of the reasons for launching this massive operations against the nationalist was this idea about taking advantage of momentum, taking advantage of increased morale as a result of an earlier campaign success, and to try to essentially ride the momentum of those earlier victories to

larger victories. And so that would seem to conform with this idea of, of, of, And so to me, I think, you know, in talking about Mao and the extent to which he's been influenced by the concept of Shi or by Sunza, I think the story is far more complex. In my view, and I make the case in the chapter, is that Mao was really influenced by a variety of ideas. And in fact, some of the most important ideas animating his revolution were actually Western in origin. If you think about it, he was first and foremost a Marxist Leninist.

That was the ideological motive that drove him to pursue this revolutionary cause. And so he truly believed in this Marxist idea of class struggle, this teleological view of history, that there was a utopia that could be created in this new China that he was trying to achieve. And he essentially twisted Marxist theory, bent it to his will. and made it fit into China's local circumstances, right, which was that the revolution would not happen in the cities, it would happen in the countryside, and that the class struggle was between the rapacious landowners

and the helpless peasants, and that the peasants would rise up and overthrow the system. He was also a classic Leninist in a sense that he believed that you need strong organization. You need people dedicated to the cause to wage this revolution. He was also Klaus Witsian. And in fact, he quotes Klaus Wids in his writings.

There is now new evidence suggesting that he actually did read Klaus Fitz very carefully. And of course, his understanding about the primacy of policy over strategy and military means was something that was inspired or informed by his reading of Klauswitz. And really, it's only at perhaps the operational tactical levels where Sunza makes an appearance. So it seems to me that even Mao himself brought to the battlefield a mix of influences, of which arguably the majority and the most important ones were actually Western in origin. And to go back to the last year of the Chinese Civil War, I think what it highlights is that he never believed that you can win without fighting. He was actually an anti-Sensuian. He believed that the only way to achieve his revolutionary objectives was to physically destroy the adversary through violent means. There was no shortcut to his path to revolutionary victory.

It was by means of killing, wounding, capturing, inducing mutinies and surrenders to physically take the enemy's forces off the battlefield. And in that sense, he's nothing like the image that we have of. Sunza, which is, you know, finding indirect means or finding roses and deceptions to, to, you know, win without fighting. And so it seems to me that even Mao's own beliefs and behavior suggest, again, this, this danger is of conflating Sunza's writing to Chinese strategic thought and behavior. Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, and I'm making this up as I go along, so I'm sure you'll enjoy ripping it apart. But I take your point, Mao is easily stereotyped to misunderstood if one is thinking of it in some sort of mystical Eastern sense and that his communism and his Western influences are clear. That said, the infiltration of the Chinese people's volunteers into Korea in the fall of 1950 is this

extraordinary maneuver, right? Hundreds of thousands of troops into the hills undetected, and even when they're detected, you know, MacArthur and his lieutenants fail to recognize what it actually is that they're dealing with, such that, you know,

tremendous surprise with really significant consequences can be dealt as, as Winter sets in. It's hard to imagine any Western, I'll just say, any American commander conceiving of such a scheme

or indeed successfully executing such a scheme. So is that somehow an argument for, you know, something different, something in a military tradition that is distinct from the military tradition of the American military at that time? And if not, why not? Yeah, I guess my hypothesis would be, and again, you know, I don't mean to say that somehow

that Shi or readings of Sunza or Chinese, you know, strategic traditions didn't have any role in Mao's thinking. I mean, I tend to think that there is a mix of, of influences. And the question is, how do you weight those various influences? I think one of the key factors in my view, this is my hypothesis, that led Mao to devise this very bold plan was in part his experiences, in my view, of the previous year. The massive envelopment encirclement campaigns that he engaged in in 1948 led to tremendous success against an adversary that was, at least on paper, technologically and qualitatively

superior. So it's possible to speculate that part of the reason that he decided to engage in this bold gamble was that he was, in a way, tearing a page from his old playbook that proved to be successful early on. And it's worth noting, for example, that his theater commander in charge, he's, you know, of the Chinese forces, Peng Da Huai, wrote in his memoirs, largely a post hoc assessment of the decision making talked about how, you know, the Chinese side very deliberately stoked the arrogance of MacArthur, right? Very deliberately engaged in deception to lure MacArthur's forces to

overextend themselves and positioning themselves in a way that they're exposed to this massive counterattack. And yet, if you sort of people, back and look closer at the debates that actually took place on the eve of Mao's intervention, many of his colleagues, many of his subordinates disagreed with him and did not want to go into Korea because they understood America's conventional military superiority, dominance in the air, and so forth. And it was really, in some ways, by dint of his charisma, by his personal will, his authoritative standing within the party center that allowed him to overrule the objections of his subordinates to take this bold gamble. And so there is something about Mao as an individual,

I think, that had a significant role in that decision as well. And again, this is not to deny that there is something about the concept of Shi, that seems to parallel the planning and the execution of those first phases of the Korean War. I want to give you a chance to talk about your most recent book, and the period we're discussing is the perfect opportunity to transition to it. So Mao's Army goes to sea is about the foundations of the PLA Navy and its earliest operations, whether under that name or not, against nationalist forces operating in China's rivers or offshore,

and ultimately, in a board of attempt to, to get to Taiwan. So talk a little bit about that aspect of Mao's career and why you wrote that book. Yeah. So, you know, Western historiography of the origins of Chinese sea power is a ritual blank slate. I mean, there is just very little written about communist China's first encounters with the sea. Most of the focus of the literature has been sort of the most recent efforts to modernize the Chinese Navy to make it into a regional and now, increasingly global navy. So the focus has typically been on the present. The sort of the conventional wisdom is that it really was China's reform and opening where Deng Xiaoping realized that as China engaged with the rest of the world, that China needed to be tapped into maritime commerce

to become part of the global economic system. And therefore, China needed a coherent naval strategy. And he had his right-hand man, General Liu Hua Qing, to sort of develop this coherent naval strategy. While that storyline is largely correct, I think it tends to overlook this much earlier in my view formative period of China's attempts to go to sea. This is a really remarkable story in my view because it tells the story of essentially an army that was focused primarily on land warfare that had to adapt to an entirely new domain, had to stand up an entirely new service, and had to essentially improvise a series of amphibious operations, as well as naval engagements,

to push the nationalist off various offshore island outposts. And that this attempt to go to sea actually led to both significant failures and successes. One of the great successes, and it's something that I think we all should know more about, is the communist success in taking Hainan Island. Hynon Island is, and it's, significant strategic terrain comparable in size to Taiwan. It's about the size of Maryland. And despite the fact that the communists had no Navy and no Air Force to speak of, didn't have the means to contest nationalist use of the air and the seas, they nevertheless were able to conduct

one of the largest post-war amphibious operations involving about 45,000 troops to successfully take the island and push the nationalist off. And so what I wanted to do was to not only talk about this under explored history, but then to speculate about the kinds of institutional legacies that this may have left in the PLA and in the Chinese Navy. And I argue basically that, you know, we shouldn't sort of look down on China's earliest years, that in fact, the Chinese Navy believes that it has a proud history that it can look back to. And it uses this history as an element of its institutional memory, as an element of its esprit core, and that if we neglect or overlook this history or downplay this history, I think we potentially risk misdiagnosing

the Chinese challenge at sea. So talk a bit about why the PLA and PLA Navy, why they were successful in taking Hainan Island, as opposed to the failed effort with some of Taiwan's offshore islands in particular. By the way, I'm going to, by the way, I'm going to continue with my practice of using probably inappropriate anglicized versions of Chinese names. I think it seems to me to be superior to my mispronouncing Chinese names, but in particular sort of spectacular failure on Kinmen Island. You know, why did they fail there? Why do they succeed in Hainan?

And what do they take away from these experiences? Yes. And what I try to do in the book is to draw attention to that sharp contrast between the disaster at Kingman in October of 1949. then this spectacular success in May of 1950 over Hainan. Maybe I should talk a little bit about Kingman and then use that as a basis talking about the success. So at Kingman, the communists basically committed a series of mistakes.

And they did basically everything wrong. The communists engaged in basically bad assessment of the adversary, really underestimated the strength of the garrison. they didn't have enough shipping, which is a real problem. They basically used up all their ships and taking another objective. And by the time they turned to Kingmen, they only had enough to send in the first wave of forces. And they had hoped that they would then use those boats to bring the second wave ashore. So that gets to things like, you know, optimistic assumptions about how you can wage amphibious operations.

There was also a problem with command and control and unity of effort where you had one core organization overseeing operations and units from another core. And that led to all sorts of command and control problems once the forces got ashore. I think one of the biggest factors in explaining the failure was the shipping problem. And so when that first wave of boats got ashore and they offloaded the troops, they had failed to understand the hydrology of that environment. And what happened was right after the ships got ashore, the tides receded. And they basically trapped all of these.

And there, by the way, civilian boats entirely trapped on those mudflats. And when day broke, the nationalists used their superior air and sea power to systematically destroy every single one of the boats. So you now had essentially about 9,000 troops trapped on the island. And there was no hope of reinforcing them because that's really all they had. And I talk about in the book how the troops that were on the mainland side were watching helplessly at the fiery wreckage, knowing that their comrades were trapped and that they had no way of helping them. And that disaster at Kingman really awakened Mao and its subordinates to the complexities and the dangers of amphibious operations. And what I trace is essentially a very quick institutional learning process where they, they, they, they, They got briefs from the field army that conducted the failed operation in Kingman and tried to

apply those lessons to the subsequent campaign on Hainan. And you can see that in Hainan, they did everything right. They were very serious about gathering as much intelligence as possible. They were very serious in having the logistical infrastructure to support the amphibious operations. They actually deployed what we now call anti-access area denial forces using air defense artillery to keep the air clear of nationalist air units that might harass and interdict the coming offensive. They actually coordinated with the local insurgent force on Hainan Island, where they were able to ship in advanced PLA units, link up with these insurgent forces,

to tie down the nationalist from the rear. And it was a combination of all of those factors that explained Hainan's success. And I think part of it is attributable to the learning process from the previous failure in Kingman. I want to close with a really big question. So I've always been struck or been struck for the last couple of years by this map of Taiwan off the shore of the mainland. This by this guy, Andrew Rhodes, you've probably seen it. And it superimposes Operation Neptune, you know, the invasion of Normandy, the naval operation

specifically and the different corridors. And it sort of superimposes the Normandy coast and the British coast over the Taiwan coast and the Chinese coast and shows like kind of fascinatingly that actually is very similar in physical scale Neptune in any purported or a potential invasion of Taiwan. And I've had folks on the podcast who take completely opposite views of the feasibility of an invasion scenario from the Chinese perspective. I've had folks on the show who think the Chinese think this is doable and that they they have some justice in thinking so. And I've had others on the show who, you know, make the comparison explicitly to Neptune and to overlord

and point out that, you know, you're trying to do basically D-Day, but without the extraordinary advantages in air superiority and naval maritime superiority that the Allies enjoyed in the summer of 1944. And how would we have done on those beaches with the Luftwaffe operating overhead and, you know, German submarines marauding through the channel? And so as such, you know, the Chinese, if they think they can do it, they're insane, but in reality, they're not insane. And so we probably should contemplate something more like a like a blockade scenario. As somebody who has just, you know, written the book about foundation, national Chinese naval thought and in operations, where do you come down? Do you think an invasion scenario is feasible in their eyes?

And do you think it's feasible? Yeah. So I think what the book highlights in my view is the fact that the PLA has its own history to draw from in order to understand the opportunities and difficulties of a cross-sea invasion of Taiwan. In fact, both the failures and the successes, including Kingman and Hainan and the other offshore campaigns, have formed, in my view, in kind of an analytic framework by which they evaluate both the risks and benefits of conducting an invasion of Taiwan or an attack on Taiwan. So while there is obviously a natural analog for us to look back to our own experiences in the West like Normandy,

my view is that I think the Chinese also take a lot from their own experiences in 49 and 49 and 50 and then to apply those to the Taiwan case. Maybe I'll talk about sort of how the various offshore campaigns potentially offer typologies for how the PLA thinks about strategy against Taiwan. So it seems to me that the Kingman campaign is what might be represented as kind of the direct approach, right? a direct assault on the beaches on on kynmen and that the PLA would do something similar with with Taiwan which is to have lodgments land large forces and then engage in battles on on the island to seize major strategic objectives like Taipei that's that's one model there's also another model based on their historical experiences which is the joshan island campaign which is essentially a series of sequential steps to take other smaller

island objectives to get you closer to the main objective, which was Zhou Shan, to surround Zhou Shan and then ultimately using their newly acquired positions for the main offensive to take Zhou Shan. You might see this applied in a Taiwan scenario in the sense that China may choose to seize offshore islands, whether it's Kingman or Penghu or maybe even Ito Abba in the South China Sea, as possible states. areas or as a rehearsal for the main offensive against Taiwan. And then the third typology or the third model would be the Hainan campaign in the sense that there are these indirect approaches that the PLA could adopt to weaken Taiwan's defenders.

And that includes, of course, on Pai Nang, the use of insurgents. The parallel there would be the use of fifth column forces on the island to disrupt Taiwan's defenses, to potentially decapitate the regime by assassinating Taiwan's political and military leaders, but also to engage in a variety of sabotage activities to weaken Taiwan's defenses. The way in which the PLA shipped, secretly shipped troops ashore along the east and west coast of Hainan as a way to bypass the strongholds to the north, suggests that, you know, PLA strategy against Taiwan might be to go after the east coast of Taiwan where it is relatively less well defended compared to the West Coast.

And to me, I think, of course, none of these typologies are mutually exclusive. You can see these typologies employed sequentially or perhaps simultaneously. So I guess my argument from the book is that I think, you know, looking back to this history suggest that the PLA has a lot to draw from from its own past to think about strategies against Taiwan. That's really interesting. I appreciate it. I've been in those mountains you probably have as well on the eastern side of Taiwan. I'm not sure. I'm not sure I'd want to succeed in landing on the east coast of Taiwan and then have to get through those mountains. Yeah. Sorry. What I meant was, you know, using using the eastern front to conduct air attacks essentially, right? Oh, I see.

I see. Got it, got to, got to. That struck me as like a first. That struck me as like a first prize you land a division on the east coast of Taiwan, second prize you land two divisions on the east coast of Taiwan. Yeah. That makes, that makes much more sense. Yeah, yeah. You know, what I meant was the use of power projection forces to bypass the strength and defenses on the west coast to go around sort of to the underbelly or the soft underbelly or the weak, the, you know, relatively weakly defended areas to the east to attack the island. And it's, It's just another way of sort of thinking about an indirect approach to the Taiwan problem. Toshi Yoshihara, really interesting conversation.

Appreciate your contribution to New Makers of Modern Strategy, your new book, Mao's Army Goes to Sea. And thanks so much for making the time to join the show. Thank you for the opportunity to share my chapter. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.