Book Review - War, Strategy, and Military Effectiveness
Written by: Williamswon Murray
Cambridge University Press, 2011, 332 pp
Paperback ISBN: 9780511996252
Reviewed by: Chris Roberts
Professor Emeritus Williamson Murray, a Vietnam veteran, has written, and co-edited over 20 books on strategy, military effectiveness and military history. All are worth reading. Murray bases his works on sound research of past events, keen analysis, and a deep understanding of the realities of politics, strategy and war. Underlying his work is a strong belief in the value of studying military history as an aid to guide current policymakers and military leaders in confronting the problems of the future. Murray does not argue that a study of history provides a clear path for understanding the future—rather he believes that, despite the uncertainty and ambiguity of its lessons, and its discontinuities, history writ large provides the best laboratory we possess for understanding the future and avoiding the disastrous mistakes of the past. Both the introduction and the initial chapter of this book provide thoughtful essays on this theme.
War, Strategy, and Military Effectiveness presents 13 essays written during Murray’s productive career. They cover a range of issues, from a comparative study of the value of the writings of Thucydides and Clausewitz, to an analysis of the air effort during the First Gulf War. In between, he discusses a diverse range of topics, including the intrinsic value of military culture; German military effectiveness between 1900 and 1945; an analysis of the Combined Bomber Offensive of the Second World War; the effectiveness of red teaming in challenging assumptions; British intelligence during the Second World War; and questioning the value of a set of ‘Principles of War’.
All of these chapters are insightful and, while one may not agree with some of Murray’s comments, they are persuasive and thought provoking and they make compelling reading. Underpinning each of them is the historical analysis that supports Murray’s case, and his firm belief that we can learn from the past.
Running through several of these essays is the underlying theme that many military leaders since the Second World War have been sadly lacking in a truly professional education. Instead they have relied on their own combat experience as junior or middle-ranking officers, which is hardly a basis for providing sound strategic advice. Consequently their knowledge of past events and of the political, cultural and historical background of potential adversaries is weak. Others, in more recent times, have been seduced by the theoretical, technological and template-based approaches to war, which claim to provide a panacea for solving what in reality are the complex human activities through which strategy, war and military effectiveness evolve. Murray eschews these fads and quick fixes, disdaining the fallaciousness of their assumptions and demonstrating their failure to deliver in recent wars. Instead he emphasises that, while technology plays a key role, war is a social phenomenon in which human thinking and decisions, good and bad, have driven events, and that human genius is a rare commodity. He argues, therefore, that today’s leaders ‘must possess the historical and cultural background to offer sage political and strategic advice about the consequences involved in war’. In reading his essays, it is hard to disagree with him.
War, Strategy, and Military Effectiveness is a book seeking to understand these complex issues and the factors that influence them. Presented in an easily readable style, it covers subjects that are at the core of planning and preparing a militarily effective force to meet the challenges of the future, and issues associated with strategic considerations in a complex world. This is where its real value lies. Although initially written for an American audience, Murray’s reflections have a universal message, and one the Australian Army should heed as it grapples with the future in an increasingly fraught international environment. Part of that future lies in the professional military education of its senior officers and, importantly, practising in demanding exercises and scenarios. Today’s military leaders would do well to place this book on their essential reading lists and, more importantly, take heed of the messages it conveys.
