Sarah Paine — Why wars are so difficult to end

It's such a pleasure to be here with you all. I'm going to talk about war termination today—good idea,right?—and these things. Turns out it's really easy to get into wars; it's awfully difficult to get out of them, and it is even more difficult to get out of them what you wished you could have gotten out of them.

So I'm going to start by talking about the Russo-Japanese War, which from the Japanese point of view is pretty much model war termination. Why? Let's do this math on Russia and China back in the day. Russia was a multiple of these quantifiable measures over Japan by territory, population, industrial base, resource endowment, size of army, size of navy.

Russia and most of those things is a multiple of Japan. And you've got to ask yourself, well, how did Japan win? Good question. And I'll talk about it. Allright, so here is my plan. I'm going to start about talking about how the Russo-Japanese War ended, use it as a model.

But then I'm going to talk about termination of other regional wars, because this war isn't a global war, it's a regional war. Then I'm going to talk about two pathologies, and one of them is if your regional war escalates into a global war, a real problem.

This is a great fear of the Ukraine-Russian thing today, if it spikes up and all of a sudden you get a global war out of it. Another pathology is if you conventionally defeat someone, but they don't give up.

They wage an insurgency on you. And what that is, is a victory denial strategy, incredibly costly for the person being denied victory, because they're there forever and ever, but it's even more costly for the one who's waging this insurgency under very difficult conditions.

So that's the overall what I'm up to. And in order to examine the Russo-Japanese War, as promised, I'm going to give you some concepts, and many of them are from Carl von Clausewitz. His concepts I'm going to elaborate on are culminating point of attack, culminating point of victory.

He has an image of a bloony flask—I'll get there—and decisive battle, the war-winning battle, and limited, unlimited objectives. And then I'll add in some Sun Tzu, the great theorist from the East, on death ground. So that's what I'm going to doright now.

But before I get into terminating this war, I think I better explain what happened in the war. So here you see a map. Manchuria up there is, was, and for a long time has been, it is Chinese territory.

What went on is both Japan and Russia are interested in expanding empires into Japan, into the Korean Peninsula, Russia, and Manchuria. Russia had built a really extensive railway system—you can see some of it here—coming down from Harbin, going all the way south to Port Arthur, where it had a big naval base, because that'sice-free, unlike Vladivostok, which closes up in this period for several months of the year.

So Russia had invested in all of these expensive railway systems. And then the Boxers, the Al-Qaeda of their day, wanted Westerners to leave—big nationwide rebellion in China, and part of it goes on in Manchuria, and the Boxers are busy tearing up these railway concessions.

So as you can imagine, Russia sends troops to prevent that. But once the rebellion's over, the Russians don't withdraw. And the Japanese tried to negotiate with them and said, "Hey, you recognize our sphere of influence in Korea, and we'll recognize yours in Manchuria."

Trade,right? The Russians not interested, because their idea is they're going to get the whole thing, and who cares about Japanese anyway? Well, the Japanese are looking at this, and they're like, "The clock is ticking," and the Russians are procrastinating, procrastinating.

So the Japanese decide that they're going to sort this out militarily. So what they do is attack Port Arthur, and you go, well, what are they doing with Port Arthur? It's because Russia has its naval base there, and if the Russian navy is out and about, Japan cannot protect its sea lines of communication.

And that's how all of its supplies and troops go between Japan. So it's got to neutralize that navy. So they blockade it in Port Arthur, but that also requires an army by land to invest Port Arthur by land.

Japan only has four armies until the very end of the war, when it cobbles together a fifth. So one quarter of Japan's armies are stuck at Port Arthur. But what Japan is envisioning to win this war is to go up the railway system towards Harbin, fighting a series of battles, and that they're going to have this big annihilating battle, and then the Russians are going to come to the bargaining table.

The problem is the Japanese don't have enough soldiers to do it. They really need that army that's investing Port Arthur to come concentrate with its other armies way up north there. Okay, therefore, General Nogi, who is in charge of the siege of Port Arthur, he's under tremendous pressure to reduce the fortress, and he does a series of frontal attacks.

You lose lots of people if you do a frontal attack on a fortress, and he does four. And eventually what he realizes, in order to get rid of the fleet, Japan has got to have a high point, which is called 203-meter hill.

And if you have spotters up there, and you also haul in really, really large caliber siege guns, and Japan doesn't have many of those, then the spotters will adjust the line of fire so that those shots will actually hit the ships that are anchored in harbor.

And it takes a while for that to happen. And lots of what Nogi is losing is an army in the meantime, a lot of people. While this is going on, the Tsar decides to send his navy from the Baltic fleet in order to relieve the siege of Port Arthur, which falls, and then instead of reversing course, he doubles down and he sends all the rest of his naval assets.

So the big things are going around Africa, the little things are going through the Suez Canal, and it's very difficult for Russia doing all of this. And they wind up fighting on Japanese terms at Tsushima, and spoiler alert, the Japanese are going to sink that navy.

Allright, so this war is a limited war. What I mean by that is that each side is fighting for limited objectives. An unlimited objective is regime change. Japan never intended to change or overthrow the regime in St. Petersburg.

Not happening. Russia, Nicholas II, initially thought he could invade Japan and overthrow the Japanese government, but he rapidly learned that that was not going to be feasible. So it's basically getting the Japanese out of Manchuria. So both sides are fighting for limited objectives.

Japan's objective—this is why when you define whether a war is successful or not, it is not but whether you win all the battles. The United States won all, most of the conventional battles in the Vietnam War, and I don't believe that war is registered as a win.

It has to do with whether you achieve the objective for which you're fighting the war. And Japan's objective is Russians out of Korea. Well, they certainly got that one, but they also get the southern half of the Russians' railway concessions in Manchuria, plus the naval base and other things.

So boy, the Japanese have done incredibly well. They got more than they initially wanted. The Russians don't get anything. They would have been much better off never fighting this war. Story gets worse. Another concept for you: opportunity cost.

If Russia spends money on this war, it means it's not spending all that money in, say, doing something useful, which would be expanding its railway system in European Russia that would have been really helpful fighting World War I.

And Nicholas II is going to lose that war, and as a result, he and his family are going to be wound up, shot in a Siberian basement,right? And the whole Romanov dynasty is going to be done. He's going to go down to food riots, which has to do with getting food to St.

Petersburg. If you'd done railways in theright places so that allies could supply you, you might have had a different outcome. So the opportunity costs are huge. Allright, to more terminology that I promised you from Clausewitz. I'm going to give you two terms: culminating point of attack, culminating point of victory.

They're paired. According to Clausewitz, most attacks only lead up to the point where their remaining strength is just enough to maintain the defense and wait for peace. So he's talking about culminating point of attack in terms of a battle or a succession of battles, which is called a campaign.

He says, "Beyond that point, if you go too far, the scale turns and the reaction follows, with a force that is usually much stronger than that of the original attack." That's what we mean by the culminating point of attack.

Go too far, you ruin yourself. So culminating point of attack, operational term, applies to a battle or succession of battles. Culminating point of victory pertains to the entire war. In a battle, it may be, "I'm going to reduce the fleet in Port Arthur, get rid of it, that might be my battle objective."

That's not my war objective. My war objective is Russia out of Manchuria or something. In either case, if you don't go far enough, you don't reach your culminating point of attack or victory, it means you could have achieved more at acceptable cost, and you fail to.

If you exceed the culminating point, you've either assumed risks and costs that exceed any benefits of whatever it is you do, and you're probably weaker as a result. One of the key indicators that you've gone beyond the culminating point of victory is a third-party intervention that may change the nature of the war if the third party is a big one.

So that's the term. And then I'm going to apply the terms, and I'm going to start with culminating point of attack and pick a particular battle. Here's some choices for culminating points. I'm going to choose the Port Arthur for looking at when is the culminating point of attack for the battle of Port Arthur.

Why? Well, that's the battle that starts the war, goes on for nearly a year, and as a result of winning it, Japan destroys Russia's fleet in theater. So it's a significant one. So if you look back to these frontal assaults that General Nogi is sending one after another, because he's desperate to reduce this fortress, and you're going, "Well, when's the culminating point?"

One of the takeaways here is Nogi loses about 45,000 men by the time he's done with these frontal attacks. That's the size of a Japanese army. Japan's only got four armies. That's a lot of people to lose. And here's why he really wants this 203-meter hill.

It's just, I think it's interesting to look at it. So this is from below, but if you're up there and you have a spotter, you can adjust the line of fire about what thing is getting sunk there and what isn't.

Once they take 203-meter hill, it takes another week to get the guns in, and then if you look, it's like three days they sink everything in harbor, and then the Russians scratch their heads for about a month, and then they decide to capitulate.

However, if you look at all the food they had there, the Russians, they could have gone on for at least another month, and probably longer, because I look up there and they got 3,000 highly edible horses, if they really want to stick around,right?

And what the Russian

war plans had never considered is the use of Port Arthur as a fortress in being, that it tied up tons of Japanese. You're pinning a lot of Japanese assets, and if the Russians had been a little more clever, they would have thought of how to use that to their advantage, but they didn't.

So back to the question: what's the culminating point of attack? If someone asked you this analytical question, and you can pick various points there of what you would want, and I'm going to choose 203-meter hill and say, once Japan's taken that, that is the culminating point of attack.

But I'm also going to show you an alternate way to answer the question. It's about how you use evidence coming to your own conclusions. So if you want to do 203-meter hill is the culminating point of attack, the sort of argument that you might make is that the fleet in being there is key, and without the hill, Russia no longer has sanctuary for that fleet, so it's going to lose it.

It's just a matter of time. But you could have a perfectly good counterargument, someone who has completely different the thesis B up there, says, "No, no, no, no, no. It's really the destruction of the fleet." Until you've done that, you haven't reached your culminating point.

And why? Because the fleet pins so much of the Japanese army and navy, and the destruction of the fleet is the operational goal. So if you haven't achieved it, you just aren't there yet. And then you'll notice that the rebuttals, depending upon which way you go, are different.

You don't want to, in the rebuttal, repeat your main argument. But I think it's really useful thinking in terms of arguments and counterarguments about which way do you actually think you would argue. Maybe you come up with a different thing that I haven't even got up there, but that's one way of looking at it.

Anyway, a related concept that might help you with culminating points of attack and culminating points of victory is decisive battle. And I'm going to use the term the way Mao and Clausewitz mostly used it. And here's Clausewitz. He says, "Campaigns whose outcome have been determined by a single battle have become fairly common only in recent times."

That's a campaign. It's not a war. And those cases in which they've settled an entire war are very rare. So I'm going to use decisive, meaning war-winning battle. Because if you use it to mean important, you're actually not conveying anything.

Important in what way? And for instance, I would use different words for a battle where the casualty rates are really skewed. I would use the word lopsided. And if I use the word lopsided, you immediately get it. One side lost a lot more people than the other.

Another alternative would be pivotal battle. Port Arthur is not a decisive battle. Other battles follow. But it is pivotal. Once that happens, certain things are foreclosed for Russia, and certain things are opened up for Japan, and they're terribly important.

Allright, so if we were looking at this theater up there and thinking about Japan's slow crawl up that railway in the direction of Harbin, which is where the east-west and the north-south lines meet, and you're thinking about a culminating point of victory, not just a battle, but the whole war, you can ask yourself, does this war end before, after, or exactly at Japan's culminating point of victory?

If you do it exactly at the culminating point, it's like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The parridge is justright. So here are some choices for culminating points of victory, and I'm going to go through five alternatives. One is the implosion of the home front, which has to do with the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Another has to do with the big land battle at the end, the Battle of Mukden. Another possibility is, no, no, it's all about money and Russia going broke. Another possible answer would have to do with the big naval battle, Battle of Tsushima.

And the last one has to do with Japan taking some Russian territory to trade back, the Battle of Sakhalin. So I'm going to go through them each in turn, and you can come to your own conclusions what you think the culminating point of victory was for Russia.

Allright, one answer will look at Russia's domestic politics and say, this place was one of the more backward places politically in Europe. Some things never change. And the people were becoming more urbanized, more highly educated. They wanted more political say.

They had zero. And so they started hitting the streets,right, and demonstrating strikes and petitioning the Tsar because they wanted a legislature, which is in Outlandjist. Only three places in Europe didn't have a legislature in this period, and that would be Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Montenegro.

And Montenegro isn't very big. Japan had a legislature, so what's Nicholas's problem? Meanwhile, by the end of the year in 1904, that war is really not going very well, and Russians are not thrilled about fighting in a place that they can't even identify on the map, so the reserves are rioting at

the places where they're concentrating in European Russia to be sent out to Asia. And in European Russia, i.e., where the Tsar lives, reserves grossly outnumber the regular troops. And this is scary numbers for an unpopular Tsar with an even more unpopular wife.

So when the Russian people have a big demonstration that's peaceful and they're heading towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to the Tsar, he isn't even in town. His troops panic and they open fire and they kill a lot of people.

And this severely damages the credibility, the legitimacy of the Tsarist government, and makes them look terrible. And so Nicholas very shortly starts compromising and sets up a very weak legislature. So Clausewitz has interesting terminology, has to do with this thing over here, a baloney flask.

What it is, is a flask that you can literally use like a hammer and hammer a nail. It's really strong. But if you get to the inside of it and just scratch it, the thing shatters. And Clausewitz is using this to describe war termination, where you're going at an enemy and you have no idea, is it going to act like a hammer or is it going to shatter?

The question is whether the first shock of battle will steel the enemy's resolve and stiffen his resistance, which is what happened to Putin in Ukraine, or whether, like the baloney flask, it will shatter as soon as it surfaces crash.

Good question. And it's hard to know,right? In wars, assessing the other side, will they fight forever, which is what the North Vietnamese did, or are they going to be like Nicholas II? So his personal baloney flask apparently wasn't doing very well, and he's an autocrat.

So where he lives, it's his decisions that matter. And so when the autocrat decides game up, it's game over. So that's one explanation, if you want to say the reason the culminating point of victory has to do with this 1905 revolution, Nicholas just gave up.

Another way of looking at it is, no, no, no, it's the Battle of Mukden, this really large land battle. The Japanese, through every last person they could throw into this thing, they were getting people who were too young to fight, people too old to fight, and a lot of people who were too tired to fight.

And even so, Japan could muster 125,000 fewer people than could Russia. And Japan was really counting on a window of opportunity before the Trans-Siberian Railway could really transport a lot of people to the front. So if you look at it, at the beginning of the war, the Trans-Siberian could transport between 20,000 and 40,000 Russian troops per month to the front.

By the Battle of Mukden at the end, it's 100,000. That's a lot of people. And if Russia had had this carrying capacity at the beginning of the war, it would have had numerical superiority from beginning to end, and Japan would have been toast.

As it was, if you look at it, at the beginning of the war, Russia has something shy of 100,000 men in this Asian theater. By the time you get to August, this is the Battle of Liaoyang-ish, just before, you've got almost 150,000 Russian troops, and this is 20,000 more than the Japanese have.

So now the numbers are starting to change. And then when you get to the next August, 1905, this is a month before the Portsmouth Peace Treaty finishes the thing, Russia's got nearly 800,000 troops, but it's only 40% of its army, whereas Japan has sent every last thing there, and it's less than 700,000.

And Russia, I think, has 3 million troops total. Japan could have been in a world of hurt if Nicholas II had steeled himself to fight one more battle, but they didn't. The Japanese understood this. And therefore, even before they attack Port Arthur, they have already figured out their exit strategy.

And the exit strategy is going to be President Theodore Roosevelt, whom they're going to use to mediate the end of the war. They're counting on Americans being busy bodies. Yes, and they calculated correctly. So what happens is, at this meeting, Ito Hirabumi, the Prime Minister, decides that he's going to use Viscont Kaneko, who is a Harvard graduate and acquaintance of Theodore Roosevelt, who is also a Harvard graduate, to contact Roosevelt about mediating.

And then when the negotiations happen, they'll be conducted by another Harvard alum, which is Baron Kamura. And so this is all being set up in advance so that at the Battle of Mukden, when Field Marshal Yamagata knows he's absolutely out of men, this is when he goes, "America card.

It is time to call in Roosevelt," because here's Yamagata's take, "The enemy's never going to request peace unless we've invaded Moscow or St. Petersburg. Not feasible." And he goes, "Look, first of all, the enemy still has powerful forces in his home country.

We have already exhausted ours. Second, while the enemy still doesn't run short of officers, we've lost great numbers since the opening of the war, and we can't replace them, so we need to be prudent." And here is the Chief of Staff of the Manchurian Army agrees, "If you start a fire, you got to put it out."

So it's time to call the fire department over in the United States to end this thing. Okay. Allright, so that's another possibility. Maybe you think Mukden is it. But I'm going to give you another different culminating point of victory, a financial one, different instrument of national power, not just military.

Both Japan and Russia depended on loans to fight this war, very expensive. But because Japan had battlefield successes, the interest rates go down, and it gets cheaper for them. Still expensive, but the interest rates go down. And the last two loans, it secures after the Battle of Mukden, so Japan has got itself geared.

It doesn't have enough men to do it, but it's got enough finances to do it. Russia is broke, and this precedes the war, where the Russians had had a recession the prior year, bad harvest, and that influences government income in a bad way.

And so Russia is not doing well. And then after the Battle of Mukden, when Russia absolutely needs another loan, no one will pay for that loan, because they don't think Russia is a good bet. And indeed, after the Portsmouth Peace, Russia then did raise a loan, and it needed that money simply to transport its troops out of Asia back to European Russia.

So you could argue Nicholas II's piggy bank had run dry, and so he had to call it off. Okay. Now for a naval explanation, if you don't like the other ones, I got another culminating point of victory for you, and it's this incredibly lopsided naval battle.

Russia doesn't need to fight this battle. It's got the Trans-Siberian Railway, and that's how all of its supplies are coming in. Nothing is coming in by sea. Why on earth do you want to fight a naval battle on Japanese terms when the terms by land are getting better by the day with Russia, with all the new troops they're putting in?

Well, Nicholas does it. Great, Nicholas. He loses his entire fleet, and it's even worse than that for him. So the Japanese lose a total of three torpedo boats, but they commandeer a whole bunch of Russian ships so that the Japanese fleet grows in size as a result of this battle.

I mean, how do you mess it up that badly? Some smaller things do make it back home, but they're basically small and they're obsolete. So go, Nikki. So that would be another explanation. Maybe you think Tsushima is the culminating point.

Okay, here's the final possibility, is Sakhalin Island. The Japanese take it. Apparently, President Roosevelt said, "Hey, you should take Sakhalin Island. This is at the very end, because the Russians can't do anything about it. It's Russian territory, and then you can trade it back at the peace negotiations for something you actually care about."

And for Russia, this is such a loss of prestige to lose its own territory, let alone given the racial prejudice of the time, they're losing it to an Asian country, which doesn't suit Nicholas at all. And for Japan, Sakhalin's nice fishing grounds.

You can get great crab, but it's not a central thing. But you could argue that maybe that was the thing that bust good old Nikki's baloney flask. So who knows why some countries fight on and on and never give up?

Often, it has to do with unlimited objectives when others put them on death ground, and then they fight bitterly. What Nicholas II's baloney flask definitely did shatter, and a decade later, he is going to wind up dead in a Siberian basement for losing World War I.

And he was a devoted husband, a beloved dad, and an incompetent Tsar, and it ended very poorly. So on the culminating points of victory, it's your problem, which one of the five you want? The domestic implosion, the big land battle, the financial mess, the naval battle, or the territorial thing at the end?

Okay. That's Japan model termination, and I'll get to a couple more successes before getting into the pathologies. To recapitulate here on Japan, why I think it's a model case of war termination. Look, they got their war objectives. It was Russia out of Manchuria, Japan gets Korea.

Without a doubt, it gets that, but it gets even better. They get this big Japanese sphere of influence in Manchuria. Manchuria is big. It's the size of Germany and France combined, and Japan gets the southern half of that.

And it's got this very expensive Russian railway concession line in there, plus the naval base and all the equipment that goes with that. They do incredibly well. And then they also get the southern half of Sakhalin Island. They don't get the whole thing, but the Russians are willing to trade them half.

And then it confirms a result of a previous war, the First Sino-Japanese War, 1894-95, when Japan had defeated the largest land empire in Asia, China. And it confirms the result that Japan is the dominant regional power of Asia.

Okay, Gulf Won, even better results, because in this war, the United States didn't even pay for it. Hardly anybody died, like less than 1,000. I think less than 500. I'll get there. And given how many hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed, it's got to be a first in military history.

So to give you a backdrop of what happened, Saddam Hussein was broke because he's fought a big war with Iran. And what he wanted to do, and he did, he invaded Kuwait because he wanted to eliminate his war debt to Kuwait, but also to take over Kuwait's oil fields, because together, Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil fields in those days might well have made Iraq the swing producer of oil, with a dominant position on the oil market.

And so that looked good from Saddam's point of view. In unlimited wars, the policy objective is pretty obvious. It's regime change. In limited wars, it's really hard to know, because you have a whole continuum from the most minor thing possible to regime change, which is unlimited.

But there can be huge disagreement of where on that continuum you're going to be. And most times, governments won't actually explicitly state what their limited objective is. They're kind of thinking, "Maybe I get a little more." Who knows?

And it's very hard for military officers, because they don't really know what the objective is. But in this war, Bush Senior made it clear. There's National Security Directive 54. He laid it out, and the United States was successful.

Yes, the United States and the coalition partners forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Yes, the Kuwaiti government was restored, and yes, the lives of Americans were protected even before the war, because with the help of allies, Americans got out of Iraq.

And these three things together did indeed promote, didn't create, but they promoted security and stability in the Persian Gulf. If Saddam had remained in control of Kuwait, less stability, less security. So George Bush Senior, he got all those things.

It gets better. He didn't pay for it. This is what his 34 allies did for him. Let's do the aggregates. A, they sent over 200,000 troops. Okay, the United States sends 700,000. Small potatoes. Here are the big potatoes.

They pay the United States over $50 billion to pay for all the US troops and other things. Plus, they pay an additional $14 billion to various coalition partners to help them do what they want to do. So the United States didn't even pay for this war.

Other people did. Now let's look at the casualties. The Iraqis lost between 20,000 and 35,000 military deaths and up to 3,000 civilians from the bombing. Okay, coalition forces, 392 total deaths of those Muslim Americans. It's 258. I don't know of any wars that have a million belligerents where the deaths rate for one side is this small.

And here's what was going on. Remember the Russo-Japanese War? Russia was completely diplomatically isolated, whereas Japan had an Anglo-Japanese alliance. So Britain was a silent partner for them, helping that thing war work out. Well, look at Iraq. Talk about being diplomatically isolated.

Like all the rich countries in the world, plus just about all of its neighbors, are ganging up on them. So here's the problem. In a situation where you're going to face a massive coalition, it just isn't going to go well for you.

Okay. Now for the Korean War. That doesn't go remotely as well as the Gulf War. But at least you wind up with the, at one point, and was a goal, which is just return to the status quo ad bellum as a divided peninsula.

But let's look at the geography. The border between North and South Korea, the land border, is only 250 kilometers. So that looks plausible if you're going to fight in there. Then it's got all these maritime borders. So if the dominant naval power is coming in, which the United States was, you can probably blockade all of that, particularly if the other power has no navy.

If they have a navy, it might be more complicated. But if they don't, you might be able to deal with that. And that means you can put your aircraft there, and you can do shore artillery on everybody. And the Korean railway systems, a lot of them ran on the shoreline of the peninsula, so you can get all those things within range.

But here's the problem, is that's a big northern border. The one with Russia is pretty small. It's like 17 kilometers, I think. But China, look at it, it's like 1,400 kilometers and change. And Manchuria back in Mao's day was where China's industrial base was located.

So you're never going to isolate that theater. Your enemy has big buddies with an uninterdictable supply line. That's a problem. And then it gets better. Both sides have big buddies. So if you have big buddies on both sides who are going to pour in the aid, you're going to have a war that's going to go on for a while, and a lot of people are going to get killed, and a lot of territory is going to get wrecked.

That is the story, the sad story of that setup. And then the story gets a little worse. Unlike the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War, who knew exactly what their minimum objective was, and unlike Bush Senior, who knew exactly what he was after in Gulf One.

In Korea, the United States couldn't decide, do we want just half the peninsula, like the Gulf War, where we're just going to return to the territorial lines prior to the whole thing? Or if we're on a roll militarily, maybe we should take the entire peninsula, the unlimited objective.

And this waffling was really costly. And Clausewitz has real comments about this. So his idea is the political objective is always primary. It is never the military objective. The United States is going, "Oh, maybe we can take the whole peninsula.

Let's go for it." That's where you're letting the military objectives. Like, why are you even in Korea? What is it you want to achieve here? And Clausewitz says, "No other possibility exists than to subordinate the military point of view to the political."

The degree of force that must be used against the enemy depends on the scale of the political objective on either side. The political object, the original motive for the war, will thus determine both the military objective to be reached, like how far up the peninsula you need to go, and the amount of effort it is required.

And one of the reasons this man is considered brilliant is because he believed that the primary discriminator determining what type of war you're dealing with is not the amount of effort, like of how many resources you're pouring into it.

He argues that, no, that's about means. What's key are the goals, your ends, whether it's limited or unlimited. So unlimited is regime change, limited is something else. And here's his comment. Wars have all degrees of importance and intensity ranging from war of extermination down to a simple observation.

So you've got this long continuum. But he believes on that continuum, ultimately, there are really only two types of wars, limited and unlimited. Here's his take. War can be of two kinds, in the sense that either the objective is to overthrow the enemy,right, regime change, to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to sign whatever peace we please.

That's an unlimited objective. Or merely to occupy some of his frontier districts so that we can annex them or use them for bargaining at the peace negotiations. And these limited objectives, there's much argument about where on this continuum you want to be.

And I think it's helpful for the unlimited objectives to pair this with Sun Tzu's much earlier work by several millennia. There's a concept of death ground. And what's that? Ground in which the army survives only if it fights.

With courage of desperation, it's called death. Soldiers fight to the death when there's no alternative. The idea, if you have an unlimited objective, that means at minimum the regime

that is on the receiving end of this is slated for annihilation. And then if you have genocidal ambitions against the population, that affects them too. And people in that situation tend to fight to the death. And you've seen it in your own lives in Ukraine, where they have defied all expectations of people who don't get death ground.

The Russians have put them on death ground, and the Ukrainians aren't giving up if they possibly can avoid it, because they're dead men, many of them. Allright, so unlimited wars are conceptually simple. It's regime change. Everyone can get that.

But executing them is really difficult, because you put people on death ground and they fight with incredible desperation. And you can transform a failed state into a lethal adversary. Limited wars are conceptually difficult, because you're going to be arguing about what the optimal limited objective is going to be, and that's troublesome.

But they're much easier to execute, particularly if you have a very limited objective. Maybe your enemy doesn't regard giving it up as too terrible. Anyway, sum up on this limited/unlimited, because it's counterintuitive, but it's really helpful for analyzing wars.

An unlimited policy objective generally concludes with regime change. The key is that the defeated has no choices. So yes, the United States kept Emperor Hirohito around. The United States could have executed him at the end of World War II, but kept him around because he was useful.

He would sign things like the Constitution, and so the United States could implement its political reform program, and Hirohito gave it some legitimacy. But it's an unlimited war against Japan. A limited war is something less, and it means that the defeated government's going to be around.

You're going to be negotiating with them, whether you like it or not, and they may come back to cause you problems later. Okay, back to Korea and culminating points. The culminating point wasn't exceeded, a victory wasn't exceeded by just once.

It was exceeded twice. How does one do this? Here's how. Kim Il-sung invades the South, and he thinks if it's just a tussum, that he can win that thing. And he wasright. He was roaring down the peninsula. He looked as if he had it all covered until he triggered the third-party intervention from hell, which is when the United States and UN partners got involved.

And then what was a civil war becomes a regional war with potential to become a global war, and you're off to a completely different race, much higher costs. So he might have done much better doing a slow insurgency than what he did.

Okay, so then it's the United States' turn to go beyond culminating points of victory. And there's a whole story about the Chinese, but I haven't got time for that one. So MacArthur does his Incheon landing, which is halfway up the peninsula, and it goes really well.

So his idea is, "Hey, we're going to reunite the whole thing,right? Because it's militarily possible." It's like, Clausewitz has already told you. It's the political objective. It's not the military objective that determines what you're going to do. Well, when he gets too close to the Chinese border, the Chinese are in.

And now we're into a world of hurt. They're sending hundreds of thousands of people in, and we got a completely different war on our hands doing this. And not too long, before too long, MacArthur gets himself cashired. So I think it's worth thinking in terms of culminating points of attack and victory before wars, during wars.

What might it be? What might it, like in the Ukraine war, what would it take on either side to get a culminating point of victory? Is it reachable? Or a culminating point of attack on different campaigns? Is it even feasible to get there?

That there are helpful terms. But understand, a key measure of culminating point of victory going sour is when the third party intervenes. Okay, the Korean War yielded a divided peninsula at really high cost, because if you exceed the culminating point of victory, one of the measures is you're paying a lot more than you had to.

But that was the minimum objective, is keeping the South Koreans around for, and they are. But we've had troops there ever since, and it's expensive. Okay, now for the pathologies, where starting with the regional war that escalates into a global war.

Talk about expensive. American Revolution. Think about it. The 13 revolting colonies, they had no intention of doing regime change in London, so it was limited from their point of view. But flip it around. London, however, wanted to get rid of the Continental Army and Continental Congress, so that would be regime change.

And so the colonists fought harder because they're on death ground. It's big theater. It protracts, and it gives Britain's many rivals ample time to consider their options, because a lot of people want to take Britain down a peg in this era.

So the French ally with the colonies in 1778, then the Spanish ally with the French in 1779, and then Britain attacks the Dutch in 1780. So what was a regional war becomes a global war. The French attack Savannah, the Spanish attack Louisiana.

The French want to work there, trying to invade England from the Isle of White. The British are trying to fight with the French at Oushant. And then the French and the Spanish are attacking British possessions of Gibraltar, Menorca.

And the French, I guess, are attacking British possessions, Cape Verde Islands, off Africa. The British attack French possessions at Mahé and Pondicherry in India. And there's an awful lot of fighting going over the really valuable stuff, which are the Caribbean theater, because these are the sugar islands in those days.

That's what's valuable. And the British decide, get rid of the revolting colonies. They aren't worth much in this day, and keep things in the Caribbean. And so they reassess and decide to bail. So, okay, that's one that didn't work out well for Britain.

Well, World War I doesn't work out well for anyone. It just goes, everyone before World War I thinks they're going to run a little regional war, and they're going to poach some territory from somebody else in Europe. Or on the basis of whatever they do to them in Europe, that country is going to seed some colonies somewhere else.

That's the plan. The problem is, everybody wants different things, even within our alliance system. So Britain wants the status quo. No one else does. France wants Alsace-Lorraine back. It's what Prussia had taken from in the Franco-Prussian War. Italy wants more territories on the Eastern Mediterranean.

Russia wants the Balkans, and it wants Catholic Austro-Hungary out of the Balkans. And Russia particularly wants Austria-Hungary out of Serbia, which Austria-Hungary has no intention of doing, because the Serbian nationalist just offed the Habsburg heir to the throne.

So that's not going to happen. So Austria-Hungary wants more of the Balkans. The Ottomans want more of the Balkans. Germany just wants lots of colonies. So what it means is that even within alliance systems, objectives don't align in this war.

Primary theaters, generally speaking, don't align. And everybody's off for different things. And so you get these parallel wars for different places. Well, if everybody joins the party, the party you start off with and the party you end up with can wind up being completely different things.

And one of the reasons nobody can settle is because within your alliance system, you cannot come up with a settlement that'll satisfy everyone within your alliance, let alone satisfy the other side enough so they'll give up. And no one dares ditching their allies in this thing, because they can't fight alone.

So this thing goes on and on. Okay, another regional war that goes up, up, and away is Japan's problems in Asia. So back in the day, in the Great Depression, the original America firsters wanted to protect American jobs.

So they passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, raises US tariffs through the roof. Economists went to President Hoover and said, "Don't do it, because our trade partners are going to retaliate, and it's going to really hurt trade globally. It won't help us."

He signs the law anyway. They retaliate, tanks trade globally. But then stop playing half-court tennis of just what's going on in the US side of the net. Let's look at the other side. Other people are far more desperate than the United States was.

Other places didn't have remotely our standard of living back then. It's deepening the Great Depression. That's going to set hothouse conditions for someone like Hitler to come to power. And in Japan, a country which had long cooperated with the international system, they'd been founding members of the League of Nations, which we couldn't be bothered to join.

They're looking at it and going, "We're trade dependent, and our best allies, trading partners, have just left us out in the cold. What are we going to do?" They decided they're going to invade Manchuria because they're going to practice autarky independence.

If they can have enough resources within their own empire, they don't have to worry about trade. So they go into Manchuria. It's a regional war. So far, so good. And then they decide they're going to extend the program to all of China.

And that doesn't go very well, because now they've lost, instead of taking a very large part of China away from the Chinese, which wasn't great, now they're trying to take everything away, and they're putting the Chinese on death ground.

And the many bickering factions of China stopped fighting each other, because they understood that Japan posed this existential threat, and they fought Japan to a stalemate. And the Japanese economy is starting to tank as a result of all of this.

They're getting more and more desperate. This victory denial strategy that the Chinese have got going. And so this is when the Japanese decide, "Okay, we're going to cut off all the foreign aid going into the nationalists, and then surely they'll cave and we'll take over China, and that'll be good."

So Americans are just remarkably self-focused on this Pearl Harbor. The December 7, 8 has to do with what side of the date line you're on. But basically, it's the same day, same moment, that the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.

They also attack Malaya, Philippines, Singapore, Wake Island, Guam, Thailand, international settlement in Shanghai, because they're trying to get rid of all the places that might help the Chinese, except the boomerangs, because the great powers far from leaving Asia, they double down, bringing great power allies to Shanghai check.

The United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand are all over this fight. So it truly does not work out well. So when you think about the regional wars that really go up, up, and away and turn into global wars, they have certain commonalities.

The regional war itself involves a really large theater, where it's really hard to close that thing off. So you get the intervening power gets frustrated, because it's hard to garrison the place. Also, as this protracts, all kinds of third parties have time to intervene.

And when that happens, you're really in trouble. And then, you know, if your enemy has friends, expect more trouble. And particularly if you're going to try to do an unlimited objective, you're going to have an enemy that wants to fight forever.

And then as you rack up losses, you're less and less willing to compromise. So that's those pathologies. So that was pathology number one. And here's the last pathology of you've defeated another country conventionally, but they don't give up.

They send this lethal insurgency at you, where you can never stabilize anything. If you think about Japan, this happened to them as well. And this whole theater is useless to them until they can stabilize it. They don't want to be spending income garrisoning it.

They want to be generating income from the economics of it all. Well, that's not happening when there's an insurgency going on. And what happened is they fought a series of conventional battles with the nationalists, who lost them, but always reconstituted and kept fighting.

But the nationalists and the communists also set up separate guerrilla forces. So this puts Japan on the horns of dilemma. Are you going to concentrate your forces to fight the nationalist conventional forces? But if you do that, you're leaving the rear areas open to the guerrillas.

Okay, if you try to stabilize the rear, then you've got to disperse your forces to go deal with the other problem. And then you're letting the army, your enemy army, do things. So it's a very expensive proposition pioneered by this country.

This is what George Washington and friends come up with. So you have the Continental Army, forces the British army to concentrate, but you have all these militias all over the country. Washington wasn't so keen on them, but by the end of the war, he understood the benefits of it.

And it just, it's a cost imposition strategy. And then what you're counting on, another concept here, value of the object. What is value of the object? It means it's the value to you of whatever your political objective is in the war.

And Washington's counting on that the American value of the object is higher than the British value of the object. And that tends to be true. If you live in theater, it's home. It's existential. Value of the object tends to be very high.

If you're intervening, the further away you're intervening from, probably the lower the value of the object. And so he's counting on ratcheting up the cost high enough so the outsider leaves. And this strategy has been replayed on this country multiple times, much to US sorrow.

It was played in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, where, you know, we eventually call it a day. Speaking of Iraq, the war that didn't go remotely as well as the first one. The first one was for limited objectives. This one's for unlimited objectives.

Regime change in Baghdad. That part turns out to be easy. But the problem when you do regime change is the loaded diaper is yours,right? Because now what? And here's what really is going on. Iraq and neighbors are mosaic societies.

There are all these different peoples there. And certainly in Iraq, primary identities seem to be associated with ethnic identities more than national identities. And if you can pick a color on that map, the chances are it might want to kill one or two more colors on that map,right?

And vice versa. So when you're trying to build state institutions, very difficult proposition. In Korea, Koreans do not have an issue about national identity. They all agree they're Koreans. The fight is over state institutions. In these mosaic societies, where you haven't even gotten a national identity, you are not going to be able to build state institutions as everyone's trying to kill each other over the national identities.

So it gets worse in Iraq. And this is something you can know in advance. Okay, in the Kuwait War, Gulf Won, you're only dealing with 158 miles of that border. In the taking over the whole place, you're dealing with over 2,000 miles of that border.

That's a lot of border to try to wall off from interested parties. And oh, by the way, who are the neighbors? Three of them have real ambitions for regional influence: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. They're going to be involved, whether you like it or not.

And it often doesn't take that much involvement to really set things off,right? Sometimes a car bomb will do it. This is a sacred Shia shrine. Car bomb or whatever, blow it up. It's set off a big sectarian war.

It's very, very difficult to stabilize these places. So to conclude, useful questions to ask, certainly before you get into a war, but even on ongoing ones, is take a look at who's involved, who's interested. And then this is where I would get into my big matrix for me, is who's got limited versus unlimited objectives, and vis-à-vis whom,right?

Is it limited against several neighbors or all neighbors or one? Is, for instance, Russia has an unlimited objective vis-à-vis Ukraine, but Ukraine has a limited objective vis-à-vis Russia. And what does all this yield? What is the alignment of policy objectives among all these different countries?

How do primary adversaries align by all these different parties? Relative values of the object, for whom is it existential, for whom is it nice to have? I would wager that what happens in Ukraine is of much more interest to Ukrainians than it is to Russians,right?

Now, Russians have suffered really large losses, so that is of interest. But for Ukrainians, it would be more so, because that's where they live. Also, you want to look at geographic access, where I pointed this out with the map of Iraq, and also sanctuary areas.

Certain places are invulnerable to attack, so you don't have much leverage over them. But anyway, and is there any asymmetries of this? What lines up? It'll give you a sense of who can actually align with whom and who can't.

So that is what I had prepared for you this evening, and thank you for bearing me out.