Masters of War - Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought - Review

Parameters, Autumn, 2001 by Dr. David Jablonsky

Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought. By Michael I. Handel. 3d ed.; Portland, Ore.: Frank Cass, 2001.482 pages. $24.95.

Michael Handel's Masters of War is a work of stunning originality and intellectual depth. This third edition was published shortly before the author's untimely death earlier this year. The centerpiece of the book is a comparison of Carl von Clausewitz's On War with Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Using these two works, Handel convincingly demonstrates that there is no unique eastern or western approach to the art of war-that in fact the basic logic of strategy is universal, involving political direction and the correlation of ends and means. War, in short, is complex and reciprocal in nature; involves moral or nonrational dimensions; and must always deal with friction, uncertainty, chance, and luck. But in the study of the classical works on strategy, to paraphrase Clausewitz, "the result is never final." Handel understood this and in this edition added new chapters and expanded discussion on other classical theorists ranging from Thucydides, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Antoine-Henri de Jomini to Julian Corbett and M ao Tse-tung. The result is a dynamic, nuanced, and sophisticated examination of classical strategic thought with direct application to the strategic issues of today.

To aid the reader in this intellectual smorgasbord, Dr. Handel includes six appendices, five pullout maps and charts, 29 figures, and six tables. He also provides extensive footnotes, many of them miniature essays that alone are worth the price of admission. Equally important, Handel uses quotes from "the masters" throughout the book to great effect in illustrating differences and similarities. And in addition to the normal general reference index, he provides an index that captures the key concepts of the classical theorists. This is an invaluable help in pulling together thoughts of the strategists that are not always assembled together in their works. On War, for example, has no chapter on war termination. But Clausewitz does address this important concept throughout the book in a diffuse manner-all captured in Handel's special index as well as in a separate chapter on the subject.

Another such concept is levels of analysis, which Professor Handel uses to make important distinctions between the two principal philosophers of war. Sun Tzu's framework is broader than that of Clausewitz, whose treatise is focused for the most part at the operational level on the art of waging war--at that point, in other words, when diplomacy has failed. For the Chinese theorists, as Handel illustrates in both a separate chapter and an appendix, political, diplomatic, and logistical preparation for war, as well as the actual fighting, are all considered part of the same activity at the strategic level of analysis. All this in turn leads to a rich discussion with examples ranging from the Gulf War to Kosovo of what Handel calls the "tacticization of strategy"--the operational or military tail wagging the political-strategic dog.

Such differences, Handel emphasizes, are intertwined with many more similarities and complementary ideas. For instance, in two important chapters concerned with the rational calculus of war, he demonstrates that both Sun Tzu and Clausewitz were aware of the crucial effect on that calculus of intangible, nonquantifiable "moral factors" that could include the personality, experience, and intuition of leaders; the passions and characteristics of the people; and the training and motivation of the military. Of the two, Sun Tzu is the more optimistic that rational calculation can still bring about intended results. For Clausewitz, too, war is a rational instrument for leaders to promote and protect a state's interest. But he did not consider it possible for war itself--permeated as it is by "moral factors"--to be waged as a rational activity. All this, as Handel outlines in marvelous detail, has important implications for today's military organizations, which are often so preoccupied with the material and technolo gical aspects of war that they tend to overlook its "moral" dimensions. The current milieu of "information war," "cyber war," and "revolution in military affairs" often suggests that war has been transformed into a rational activity based on nearly perfect information. If anything, Handel concludes in typically succinct and elegant prose, the role of moral factors has expanded, and "war is and will remain a relentlessly reciprocal activity in which all participants can counter each other with different methods, weapons, and technologies."

The key to this approach is to understand the nature of war--the supreme act of judgment. For this task, Professor Handel illustrates why Clausewitz has no peer among classical war theorists in establishing a conceptual framework. At the heart of that framework is the analysis of the three dominant tendencies of violence (the people), chance (the military), and reason (the government) that make up what Clausewitz termed the Remarkable Trinity. Beginning with this analysis, Clausewitz provided all the elements necessary for the conceptual structure, but never fully articulated the framework. Handel believes this is fortunate since that very lack of articulation forces each reader to develop an individual structure for the Clausewitzian system--to interpret in different holistic ways the interactions, connections, and relative significance of the various concepts, each of which if considered separately causes the total of On War to appear to be less than the sum of its parts. To illustrate this approach, Hande l devotes an entire appendix to the examination of Clausewitz's work as a complex system of interrelated concepts. At the same time, using two flow charts to summarize the Prussian theorist's systematic study of war in a simplified visual manner, Handel sorts out many of the issues and provides a heuristic stimulus for further discussion.