Loading summary
Transcript58 lines
- [00:05]
A
Welcome to Books to Battles, where we explore academic insights for real world air and space strategy. I'm Dr. Wendy Whitman Cobb, professor of Strategy and Security Studies and Deputy Commandant at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Before we get any further, we want to note that all opinions expressed here are our own and do not necessarily represent the Department of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any affiliated organizations. Welcome to our new Year at sas. For to our listeners and to our new students, welcome. Hopefully you've listened to previous episodes of Books to Battles and kind of have a sense of what this is about. Typically, we're a podcast about the SAS life, which is largely centered around books, and this year is going to be no different. It is a little different today. You'll notice that my co host, Corey Holland, was not able to join us today, but in his place, I have a great co host and a great. She's going to be joining us for multiple episodes this season. Lieutenant Colonel Rachel Reynolds. Welcome.
- [01:06]
B
Hi. I'm so glad to be here. And it's just you and me today.
- [01:09]
A
Yeah. And we're doing our. Instead of talking about class or anything, we're jumping right into our Fiction A Day series. And if you tuned in last season, you'll recall that we are going to do, instead of talking about each of our SAS classes individually, we're going to take this year a little bit different and we're going to look at each class through the lens of a different fiction book. And this, this month's edition is for SAS601, which is intro to Strategy. And the book for it is the Heroes by Joe Abercrombie. And so today we will be talking about that book, how it connects with 601 and what we can sort of learn from it. And, and so I think, you know, the Rachel, the way you sort of frame this is what does this sort of give us? And bridging the stress, bridging the gap. I'll let. Instead of me putting words in your mouth, how would you explain this approach that we're taking this year?
- [02:02]
B
Right. So the series that we're doing kind of tacked on to the Books to Battles podcast is this little miniseries. Every month, the last Wednesday of the month, we're going to present a fiction a day. It's not really a fiction a day, it's a fiction a month. But in keeping with that SASS theme, we're going to have a fictional book, a fictional work that exemplifies some of the themes from our coursework. And so like you Mentioned today is the Heroes by Joe Abercrombie. This is a grim dark fantasy novel in a land where there are wizards and things like that. But the book itself is, is this gritty, very kind of hyper realistic and dark battle over the course of three days for a meaningless hill that doesn't really help anybody on either side. And so it is this kind of very gritty, almost Thucydidean in a way as opposed to being a sweeping history. It's this very microscopic look. Some of our other books will be high fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, uh, but today we jumped right in with a 550, 580 page desk weight Whopper. Yeah, that's right.
- [03:17]
A
Yeah. And that surprisingly the size of it or the length of it really wasn't my first concern. When I saw the list, you'll recall like when I first saw the list and I was going to buy the, the books, I, I noticed this is part of a series. So I went right to you and I was like wait a minute, do I need to read all of them?
- [03:32]
B
That's right. And so also for our listeners, if you're worried and you saw the syllabus, we mentioned it at the end of last season. But this particular book is part of a universe and a series that's by Joe Abercrombie. However, this particular book is one of a few that are standalone stories or novels. You don't have to know the characters stories to get into it. Some people do and they have. Oh my. I never thought that such and such character was going to do that. But if you're not that person, you could pick this up and just have a self contained novel can confirm.
- [04:08]
A
Although I have to say after reading it I actually googled the book cause I wanted to see what actually ends up happening to these characters. And there is sort of a wiki for this series. And so I found myself like delving. I want to know what happens to them. So not having necessarily the time for more tomes of this length in the series, I definitely found myself wanting to know more.
- [04:29]
B
Yeah, and this book came as a recommendation to me. I also had not read, I knew of Joe Abercrombie, I had not read his books. I think my closest brush with something along these lines is probably watching Game of Thrones or reading maybe Tolkien or something like that. And it's not quite this Game of Thrones, probably a much closer, you know, approximation of something that's Joe Abercrombie which is, you know, gritty and dark and that sort of Thing, but, you know, and maybe, Wendy, I might pitch it to you first, but was there anything that in particular stood out to you that said, oh, this was a good choice, or I can see where the ties came in to tie this to our 601 course or foundations of Strategy course?
- [05:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, definitely, because, like, I. I brought the book in with me today, and I definitely ear dogmarked it and left notes across it. You know, so it is a. So I'm, you know, the audience will know by now. I'm a political scientist. You know, a political scientist. This is. This is, I guess, a personal problem. When I. When I read our history books and, you know, I. A lot of historians tend to get bogged down in the details, the tactical details of a battle. I tend to go, well, okay, cool, I'm. I'm skipping over this. I don't have any interest in this whatsoever. What was the meaning? I want to know. All right, what. What was the outcome of this battle? What were the significant consequences? And so on and so on. So, you know, there's definitely a lot of that in there. And. And while it didn't cause me to glaze over like some history tomes do, I'm not knocking history for our historian colleagues, but it was one of those, you know, when a book is engrossing, when an author is really writing it and you're being entertained, it's not a task to read all of it. So there's definitely that in there. But I did appreciate that there's several points in here that sort of speak to the nature of. Nature of war, the nature of strategy, the relationship between politics and war, giving us that sort of individual level as well, of how these wars, how these battles are impacting individual people. How about you?
- [06:37]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I thought. I mean. And there's kind of a monologue early on in one of the early chapters, and this character is essentially saying exactly the things that we say, that it's tying something to a political aim. He's talking. It's one of the notes. It's your.
- [06:53]
A
One of my.
- [06:53]
B
One of your highlights. He's talking about logistics. He's talking about kind of that there's more to it than just kind of the pieces on the map, which is one of the things that we certainly talk about. I will. Before I go into too much farther, I will say spoiler alert. We don't say spoiler alert when we go to SAS because we assume everyone has read the book. It. If you haven't read the book, then maybe just accept that you're watching the movie before you, you know, read the book. But. Oh, spoilers possibly ahead. But I will say I think one of the themes that came out to me most strongly, at its heart, this is a gritty, gory book that drags you through every nook and cranny of. Of a battle.
- [07:35]
A
Of a useless hill.
- [07:37]
B
Of a useless hill for no real gain. The characters themselves, honestly maybe a couple, but the characters largely find themselves in the same place as they were when they started. So there's not really a hero's journey exactly. Like they're not accomplishing something. It is, I think this very meta. I'm not the first person to say this, but is a meta critique of what war is, what heroicism is and what can really be gained. I think it's an anti war book wrapped up in a great grim dark fantasy.
- [08:09]
A
I. Yeah, 100% agree. So maybe we'll start there with the sort of. Because it comes very early on in the book. If you're got the paperback like I do, it's actually page 29. So this actually like comes very early. And what I find interesting is it's talking about the relationship between politics and war. The speaker is the. The wizard in the spires and the magical. One of what, two magical ish figures. We never actually see Baez do any magic per se, but he's regarded as this magical figure who has come to visit the battlefield on behalf of the king and on behalf of this closed council, which we take to be the sort of Politburo of Solar. Yeah, that's great. Politburo. Who's ordering what's going. Going on and. And Bias starts to lecture to the generals who are there, that they are. They are like masons actually putting stones together, whereas the politicians. The closed council is the architect. Our response, the. Our responsibility. The closed council is not the fitting of one stone to another. It is the design of the building overall, the politics rather than the tactics. An army is an instrument of government. It must be used in such a way that it furthers the interest of government. Otherwise what use is it? Only an extremely costly machine for minting metals. The room shifted uncomfortably. Hardly the sort of talk the toy soldiers appreciate.
- [09:43]
B
Yeah, I think that's fantastic. And that kind of highlights one of the other major themes of this book, which is that it is this. Both you get kind of every level of warfare looked at every lens. You get the strategic, you get the operational and you get down to the very tactical individual soldier look. And I think it also highlights something That I think is a personal critique. I think, again, I'm not alone in thinking this of our students when they come to sas. It's a really hard thing to pull back a little bit if you've just come from Air Command and Staff College or the joint all domain strategy program, or you've just come from doing all this joint planning and operational planning. And this is not a planning school. And so they may find themselves. If you're listening to this, you may find yourselves really tending toward. Yeah, but how does this stone fit into the other stone? What grout will we use? What angles will we draw? As opposed to being the architect and saying, this is the way that the building should be functional and be planned. This is how it's going to be in relationship to the other buildings in the neighborhood. All these other things that are just. We need you to pull back a little bit. We see this with our students. I think they're about to here. In a month or so, they'll be in their first air power history course. They. They'll do a Battle of Britain exercise. And during that, I think there is often a tendency. This is my spoiler alert for you. There's this tendency to stay at the tactical, if you know, at best, operational level. And really it's this pull a little bit farther back. And so I really appreciated that kind of little monologue right at the beginning. I was like, oh, this is a perfect object lesson right here in the book.
- [11:25]
A
Well, and even connects with the course that our students are in now, which is military theory. And it's very Klaus Wiscient Clausewitzian. And I know if Corey were here, he would pick up on that. So I feel like I have to mention that to begin with. But it's very Clausewitzian in this notion of war is a continuation of politics by other means. And it's not connected to anything else. It is just this useless thing for printing up medals. Right.
- [11:53]
B
Yeah, yeah. Another. And kind of maybe shifting gears here, another major theme that I really took from the book is is this the way that it's written? So Joe Abercrombie writes this book in kind of this point of view or POV switching format, where each chapter is told from a point of view from a different character. That's a pretty common technique in a fiction work. He spans like six different POV characters. You ultimately get the stories of many more characters through those lenses. But I think this part where sometimes you can't tell or you can't remember, like, wait, which is this guy fighting for the north or for the Union. And I think there's a point to that. And I think it really also kind of previews in the way that 601 or 601 course, the foundations course, is kind of a survey of what's to come, that you're getting some of the hints of stuff that will come up in our curriculum. So when we talk about strategic empathy is a little bit of a buzzword right now, but ability to take on the perspective and understanding of somebody else, the viewpoint of someone else doing model one, two, and three, the way that Allison and Zeliko do in essence of decision, the ability to look at the same happening through multiple lenses and to get a little bit lost almost in that. I think there's some. Again, some of these are a little bit more meta about the book, but it's the way the book is structured that echoes some of the things that we do in our course. And that's one of the things I felt like, oh, this is teaching that lesson without it just being telling an Aesop's fable.
- [13:26]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, while we're on that, I mean, we might as well stick with Allison and Zelikow for a moment. For those of you who don't know, Alison and Zelikow are the authors. Essence of Decision is the title. And it's this really well known political science examination of models of behavior, let's say. And so there's. There's three different models. And so that becomes sort of the buzzword around here, at least for, you know, for the students after reading this. There's model one, model two, and model three. And model one is rational actor that people are behaving in a rational, value maximized way. Model 2 is the, the organizational process that behavior is a result of bargaining and pushing and pulling between different organizational actors. And finally, model three is bureaucratic politics are sort of the. The way that we get to an ultimate decision. And. And so that becomes fairly foundational around here with our students once they read it. But I think you've pointed out here you do get a sense for each of those models. In this telling, rationality is sort of thrown out the window. There's nothing rational at all about what is happening, why they are fighting over this useless hill.
- [14:40]
B
And yet you have individuals who are value maxing for themselves. You have the war profiteer and you have the ones who are kind of chasing glory or who are exaggerating the number of kills that they made a day and the story grows to their credit or that, you know, the wizard who's kind of in the shadows trying to operate behind the scenes to do. Make pawns of others, to make what he can make out of it. So there certainly are these individual. There's a person model, an individual level model, the rationalism, you know, they're seeking something. So you get those, you get that lens.
- [15:17]
A
I think, yeah. At the individual level, there's entirely rational. But once you start acting as this organization, as this sort of larger entity, other forces get in the way that end up resulting in not so rational outcomes.
- [15:31]
B
Right, yeah.
- [15:32]
A
Yeah. So I think that's, that's one really clear connection here that, that you see is. Is despite people wanting to behave in a way that is value maximizing, the best intentions are sometimes scuttled because they are representing the organ their organization or the various bureaucrats are doing their job or, you know, this was another note I had. There's a point in the middle of the book that really explains sort of fog and friction, that there is all. All of these things that are happening that makes actually carrying out the battle difficult. They did not. The weather in particular was prone to ignore orders. There was a balance of politics to consider, the whims of the monarch, the mood of the public. The. There were a galaxy of logistical concerns. If one managed by some miracle to prod this unwieldy mass into a position to actually fight, a headquarters had to be well behind the lines. And then you're not going to see everything. If anything, orders might take half an hour or longer to reach their intended position. This is pages 257 and 258, if you're following along. But all of these problems that stem from then, you know, the, the organization required the politics that, that result in what Clausewitz calls fog and friction, but we might otherwise know as organizational or bureaucratic problems.
- [16:49]
B
Right. Yeah, I think that's excellent. I think in addition to some of that kind of the political science of it, there is also a lot of what we would maybe consider history here. So for the political scientists like us, I absolutely appreciate kind of the different lenses and these things, but there is certainly a telling of a fictionalized history here and it absolutely echoes some of the history books that our students pick up. So in our first course here at sas, everybody's going to read Thucydides. We love talking about that because, I mean, the first line is Thucydides wrote the history. You know, it's this idea that we're going to tell something objectively in some way that we're going to Lay out the facts as they happened. And this book kind of subverts that in a way. In a way of saying which facts, from whose point of view? And in some way do facts matter? It is a pretty tough feeling to say, I know the order of operations. I know exactly who went where and which units were engaged in this part of the battle. And yet, at the end of the day, did we actually draw something? So people talk a lot about, and we talk about this at sas. Are there lessons from history? Are there echoes from history? Are there insights from history? What do we gain from that? And so I think early on, we ask our students to grapple with the value of history. In fact, I'm not giving any spoilers for our first course that the students right now have just finished writing a paper about thinking historically, historicity, kind of this.
- [18:31]
A
What.
- [18:31]
B
What does that mean to do that? What value does it add to you? And then how do you do it? So I thought that was a great aspect of this book.
- [18:40]
A
Yeah. So, you know, like we talked about the beginning, this is within the context of a larger story. And there's very clearly hints in there of this larger backstory and. And the extent to which that matters or doesn't in this case, because, you know, you get the sense that it does matter, that the history does matter. But when you read did it, did it?
- [19:01]
B
Yeah.
- [19:02]
A
Right. So, yeah, no, I think you're right. There's this really interesting take on history here and even, you know, memory and how. What. What people remember and don't remember are very interesting in this telling.
- [19:18]
B
Yeah. Another book that our students pick up in this first course is the Every War must End. That's Eclay. Fred Eclay. And I thought there's something to that as well. In this book, when we get to the end, a. Is the war over? Not exactly. But this battle has had to come to some sort of termination. And these characters. And you just think, gosh, do fantasy novels really grapple with negotiated settlement versus an actual military full defeat? And do. Do I see this in other writing? This was very unique experience to me to see in a fiction novel, effectively political and military leaders grappling with. We started this. Now how do we end it? That sounds an awful lot like real life stuff that we go to fantasy to escape, you know, to a fantasy novel to escape. Well, we get confronted with it in this book.
- [20:15]
A
Absolutely. That same lecture from Baez at the beginning about war and politics. That is where he's telling these generals that in page 30, the closed council requires a swift Conclusion. Do they mean by the end of the campaigning season? The end of the season? No, no, considerably sooner than that. And, and then of course, all the generals burst out. But we cannot possibly. We cannot there. This is not reasonable. The. These other leaders are not reasonable. We, we can't rush this. And, and so it's this very interesting thing where the politician is clearly telling the military, no, no, no, you need to end this and you need to find a way to end it now. Not when you want to, but now. And they are not happy about that at all. And I think Eagles book is one that has found it sort of meandered its way through the curriculum here at SAS over the past couple of years. It's in 601 this year. Sometimes it's been in military theory, it's been in 627, air power and Total War. But it's one of these books, small but influent. The point where we've sort of tried to find a home for it somewhere, but influential because it brings up this very real strategic problem of how it. Wars are really easy to find a way into.
- [21:36]
B
Right.
- [21:37]
A
Or find an excuse war, but finding a way to get out of it is very difficult. And, and E, you know, writes this in the wake of Vietnam, it becomes very influential for General Colin Powell in the first Gulf War. And in that first Gulf War, you clearly see they had very specific war termination criteria. They had a specific limit. This is what we're going to do and go no further. And you can very easily compare and contrast that to other conflicts we've had in recent times.
- [22:09]
B
Absolutely. And I mean, it was certainly on the minds of our students this past spring who had just recently graduated in the summer since the advent of some hostilities over the spring. And it can't be far from the minds of our students who have just joined the school this fall that we're suddenly faced with. Well, every war must end. And how. And what advice are you called upon to give, you know, a year from now when you go to your next assignment, SAS graduate and not just give,
- [22:43]
A
but I mean wicked problems that they. They're going to need to solve. And, and ending a war that doesn't have clear termination criteria, I think becomes a wicked problem of itself. Yeah. And like, how do we actually extricate ourselves from this situation? So it's not even just a matter of, I think just giving the advice, but also just of solving the problems to begin with. And, and that's really What I think 601 overall is about, is you here Is this introduction to all of the problems that you're going to face when you are in that strategist seat?
- [23:17]
B
Yeah. Well, let's see. I guess we probably can't name drop every book from the first hours. I worry too much, but maybe to at least one more touch point. I'm curious if you think that this had something to say about Thomas Kuhn. So this is one of the first books that our students always read, kind of every year. And it's. There's a quote, I wish I had the page number. So somebody who has the electronic version of the Heroes will have to control f find this for me. But the quote is from the book. A man who can't change his mind when the world changes around him is a fool, not a leader. And so this kind of harkens to this idea of if you have some orthodoxy, some paradigm that you adhere to, and that's an explanation for the way the world works, how many anomalous occurrences, how many things that are edge cases that don't quite fit that explanation have to occur for you to start suspecting maybe that explanation isn't accurate or complete. And what do I need to do to find a better explanation that incorporates or encapsulates some of these other outlying anomalous events? So, in fact, I think it's. Dr. Tom Hughes on our faculty is very fond of, of saying that you have to be able to change your mind, but it, but it also should be hard. It should require evidence and some impetus to change it, and you should be capable of doing that thing.
- [24:46]
A
Yeah, no, Tom absolutely is the one who says that actually I had the privilege of sitting in on one of his 601 seminars just last week, and he made that point in the book of that day was Jervis's Perception and Misperception. So another one of these where you're talking about how hard it can be to change minds and all of the potential fallacies and problems that we run into when we're perceiving to begin with. And so I think both Kuhn and Jervis have definitely have something to say there because, yeah, at some point we're all going to run into information that is discordant with what we already know. And at some point you're going to have to change your mind. But I think I loved how Tom put it that day in terms your mind should not be easy to change. I think for a strategist that, you know, that's a. It's a difficult balancing act where, and I think the danger is that keeping your mind open could lead to an paralysis by analysis. And there's always going to be new information coming in. At what point do you actually stop the information coming in? And I think we run into this problem when we do research, right? There's always going to be new research out there that's coming in. At what point do you just say stop and start writing the thing that you're working on? And our students are going to run into this with the thesis too.
- [26:13]
B
That's right.
- [26:14]
A
And so that is a. It's a really difficult balancing act, as both a strategist and a researcher to say, do I have. I hit like that 90% solution? And you're not going to be entirely sure.
- [26:27]
B
Right.
- [26:28]
A
And that's, I think, both horrifying in a way because I think, you know, as the. I've experienced this as I've got, you know, gone on further in my education and now here, the more you go on, the more you realize how much you don't know. And that is a really difficult thing because you're so sure, you know, when you're younger. Oh, I absolutely know this to be a fact. But the longer you go on, the more you learn about things, you realize you don't know as much as you thought you did.
- [26:58]
B
I think there are some characters who overplay their hand occasionally in this book, kind of exactly along those lines, like, I'm either more certain of this fact than I should have been or I, you know, hesitated and, you know, in waiting for more information, let the war happen to me and to, you know, to their detriment. So, yeah, I think, for me, I thought overall this was. It was a heavy lift as far as jumping into our fiction series. So for those who took on the task, you know, right off the bat, well done.
- [27:32]
A
They're not all this long, I promise.
- [27:34]
B
Although we are doing Robert Heinlein next. So I'll tease the next book here in a moment. So you're not quite off the hook, but you've got a month. It's not really a fiction a day, it's a fiction a month. I thought that this book for me checked a lot of the boxes of kind of this survey of strategic thinking, historical thinking, thinking about thinking, metacognition and that really, to me, that that's what we. What we do in our first course.
- [28:01]
A
Sums it up. Yeah. When I course directed 601 a few years ago, I included Ender's Game. Ah, yes, the last book. And I had our paper assignment, had asked the students to compare and contrast Thucydides with Ender. And thinking about what you can learn, how similar strategy is in both of them, and what you can learn from that. Because as Dr. Hutchinson will often argue, Thucydides is fiction.
- [28:29]
B
Yes.
- [28:30]
A
I'll leave that to the historians. I won't wade into that battle. But I think, yes, I think you're right. The Heroes is another one along these lines where it connects incredibly well with just this sort of getting your feet wet in terms of thinking about strategy, all of the different things that can affect it, all of the things that can go wrong. Because there's a lot more things that can go wrong in, in creating a strategy than will probably go right. Yeah. And I think this is, this book of, is a perfect illustration of that.
- [28:59]
B
Awesome. Well, I had fun. I'm, I'm already. Now that we kind of have this, the feel, the look and feel of how that's going to go, I'm really, really excited. I was excited before, but now I'm like, okay, let's go. Here we go. So for next month's assignment, which is gonna be the last Wednesday of August,
- [29:17]
A
we'll come out with another episode that'll be August 26th. For those looking for dates.
- [29:22]
B
August 26th, we'll be talking about Robert Heinlein, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress. So we'll go from fantasy novel to kind of deep space sci fi novel.
- [29:35]
A
And that'll be in connection with our SAS 600 military theory course, which is ongoing now.
- [29:40]
B
Yeah. And so we'll see what, what that book can tell us about what we're reading in Clausewitz and Mahan and Jomini and all the big name strategists that our students are getting, getting to know right now.
- [29:53]
A
And I love that in particular because in Military Theory, there aren't any readings about space strategy or space theory, Space power theory. So I think this is absolutely great as the resident space cadet that we are reading a space science fiction novel to talk about military theory. I think this is awesome.
- [30:10]
B
Perfect. So you have your assignment and I'm excited to see you for the next Fiction a Day episode.
- [30:16]
A
And if you have any comments, other questions, as you're reading along this month, go ahead and email it to us. Our contact info you'll find in just a few seconds at the end of this podcast. But thank you, Rachel, for joining me today. This has been awesome. I am looking forward to a great Year of Books to Battles.
- [30:32]
B
Perfect. Thanks for having me.
- [30:33]
A
Thanks.
- [30:35]
C
Thank you for tuning in to Books to Battles. We hope you enjoyed today's discussion. If you liked today's episode, please be sure to like and subscribe and even tell a friend about us. Also, don't forget to send us any questions you'd like answered or suggest future episodes. You can contact us@bookstobattlesu.af edu. For Colonel Corey Holland, I'm Dr. Wendy Whitman Cobb. And don't forget, strategy doesn't stop at the page.