On Grand Strategy

very informative

Through a series of historical anecdotes, beginning with Ancient Greece and proceeding through Napoleon, Elizabeth I, the Founding Fathers and Finally FDR, among others, he guides the reader to the conclusion that a moral compass is necessary but not sufficient. Sometimes you have to do what is possible in time and space.Throughout the book, the expertly weaves in ideas from Clausewitz. Demonstrating the master of strategies genius.He uses the framing metaphor of foxes, who know a little about a lot, compared to hedgehogs who know a lot about a little. It is based on an essay by Isaiah Berlin, which itself is based on an Ancient Greek quote.In general, foxes are more successful as they are not as rigid. As he aptly notes in the book, if you use only a compass, you will end up in a lot of swamps and unpleasant places. But if you have no compass, you have no idea of where you are trying to go.The ideas sometimes get lost in the details and he often couches ideas in somewhat convoluted sentences (like the first one in this review). On the whole, this book teaches a valuable lesson about strategy whether it be in politics, war, or business. There are no easy answers. You need both an end and be willing to adjust to the local topography and operate in time and space to get as close to the end as realistically possible.

A Journey in Search of Deep BalanceStrategy is a slippery word; being at once abstract and concrete, and massively scalable. Appending the modifier grand to it pushes it into the realm of esoterica, which perhaps suits just fine those whose business it is to teach it. Gaddis, in one rather short book succeeds in lassoing all of those issues and binding them together like the legs of a steer that has just been roped, making them unable to slip out from the reader's grasp. Gaddis takes us on an historical journey, not in search of principles but in search of balance. Although he never mentions it, his approach is akin to the concept of dialectical materialism; thesis, antithesis, and ultimately synthesis. He helps the reader find synthesis through balancing incompatible and contradictory ideas. Grand strategy is both personal and specific and broad and abstract; men with specific character traits make decisions that affect whole populations and history. There are no principles, only mental states, balancing antonyms. He uses the metaphor of foxes, who know many things with hedgehogs who know one big thing. As he proceeds through history, his narrative is a bit like a murder mystery; which of these approaches is superior? Who dunit? He leads us step by step through the evidence. He finds much guilt along the way, but in the end takes us to a place where we find new criteria for judgment. I won't short circuit the plot by giving away the verdict, but I can say that while Gaddis is successful in finding clarity, it is not something that can be expressed quickly and easily.If I had a critique of the book it would be that I was disappointed that Gaddis does not take on more recent examples such as Vietnam or even Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor does he address the current geopolitical struggle between the United States and China. There is some wisdom to this, as it reflects the guidance Admiral Stan Turner gave to the Naval War College Strategy and Policy faculty in 1972 that to avoid the emotions that would cloud any discussion of Vietnam in the classroom, the curriculum should employ cases from more distant history. Certainly, in this book as in the Strategy and Policy course at Newport, one can detect underlying logic that attended the Peloponesian War in current events, but that synthesis is left to the reader. Nonetheless, I would have liked to see him parse George W Bush and his advisors the way he did Pericles and Lincoln.This is an enjoyable book, if such an adjective is possilbe for one on grand strategy, and is especially so if the reader has already read Lawence Friedman's book on strategy.

Definitely a great read. I have learned a lot about historical figures I already knew quite a bit about and those I knew little of, like Isaiah Berlin.

This book is in some regard a love letter to someone named Isaiah Berlin. If this name is familiar to you, or if he has already influenced you, you are well ahead of where I was when I picked up the book and you can likely skip this review and pick up your copy of ‘On Grand Strategy with confidence. For those uninitiated in the works of Isaiah B. though, this review may provide some insight that the sweepingly vague title does not afford.The book begins by highlighting what may be earliest thread of political and military strategic thought - the dichotomy in Spartan and Athenian philosophies. This thread is then traced through important political-military movements throughout the next +/- 2000 years – including the motivation and actions of several Roman leaders, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I and others. These early chapters are interesting and easy to follow and generally give insight into how the military, often expansionist, ambitions of various powers in history can be reflected in the strategies of that earliest military history. These chapters lend introduction to a diverse set of leaders and circumstances that piqued my interest in their subjects.Somewhere around the half way point however this thread gives way to a new dichotomous thread in strategic thinking, found through comparing the philosophies of Tolstoy and Clausewitz. Here is where things begin to break down for me as a reader. I gather that things have becoming more complex in strategic thought since the Napoleonic era but in general this new paradigm of strategic thinking does not seem to be very cohesive. Histories of the American Civil and the two World Wars are just difficult to comprehend in this book. This is perhaps the nature of modern history – as we have access to so many first-person accounts, we simply haven’t developed the succinct theories that we have for earlier histories. Perhaps we are still living their legacies. This difference makes the modern histories of strategy far less convincing if not less comprehensible.I will admit I am not much of a student of history, though this book did pique my interest in several ‘moments' of history, especially those before ~1600 AD. If you have a strong background in military-political history, this book will likely hit on ideas that you know well, perhaps reinforcing your existing perception of how major historical events are in some intangible way connected by something called ‘strategy’. For someone less well versed, but newly interested in, military political history, the book sort of failed to express this notion of ‘strategy' in a literal sense. That is, at the end of the day, I have no real notion of what makes up a ‘strategy’. I do have a stronger idea of how political thought has evolved through military ‘strategy’. An early chapter on the basics of strategic theory (if there is such a thing) would have been much to my benefit.