Putin Repeats Napoleon’s Mistake: Strategy Wins, Not Power By Hal Brands Bloomberg Opinion May 14, 2023

Putin Repeats Napoleon’s Mistake: Strategy Wins, Not Power

By Hal Brands

Bloomberg Opinion

May 14, 2023

There’s no substitute for strategy. Strategy is what allows nations to act with purpose in a chaotic world; it is vital to out-thinking and out-playing their foes. Without strategy, action is random and devoid of direction; power and advantage are squandered rather than deployed to good effect. The greatest empires may survive for a while if they lack good strategy, but none can thrive for long without it.

Strategy is very complex, and it is also very simple. The concept of strategy — what it is, how it works — is subject to unending debate. Even the savviest leaders have struggled to conquer strategy’s dilemmas. Yet the essence of strategy is straightforward: It is the craft of using power to achieve one’s central purposes, amid the friction of global events and the resistance of enemies. Strategy is the indispensable art of getting what we want, with what we have, in a world that seems set on denying us.

Strategy, then, is timeless, even if the world never stops changing. Great powers rise and fall; leaders come and go; one revolutionary technology gives way to the next. But the basic challenges of strategy we face today would have been familiar to Thucydides, Machiavelli or Clausewitz, which is why their works are still required reading for anyone involved or interested in global affairs. And major conflicts, with the hard choices they require and the hardships they inflict, have a way of reacquainting us with the fundamentals of the task. 

In 1943, during the worst war in history, the historian Edward Mead Earle produced Makers of Modern Strategy, a landmark collection of essays that introduced Americans to the history of strategic thought. In 1986, at the climax of a cold war that put the free world to the test, a second edition of Makers brought our understanding of the subject up to date. In 2023, I’ve had the good fortune to lead the writing of a third edition, The New Makers of Modern Strategy. The book traces the ways in which strategy has been conceived and practiced from ancient Greece to the digital age. Combined with the most globally consequential war of our era — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal assault on Ukraine — it brings us back to strategy’s most enduring truths.

First, strategy is too important to be left to the generals.

Yes, strategy is intimately related to the use of force, because the threat of violence hangs over global affairs. We pay most attention to strategy at moments when the difference between good and bad choices can mean the difference between life and death, for individuals and entire nations.

Yet strategy involves using all forms of power to prosper in an anarchic world. The apotheosis of strategy is synergy: Combining multiple tools, whether arms, money, diplomacy or even words to attain one’s ends.

In World War II, for instance, the average German soldier was better than his American, British or Soviet opponent. What allowed the Grand Alliance to prevail was not simply superior resources, but superiority in mastering the many tasks — mobilizing economies, managing a fractious coalition, allocating limited manpower and materiel across multiple theaters — that went into winning a total war on a global battlefield.

The greatest strategic leaders in that war were not generals and admirals, talented as they may have been. They were civilians, such as Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, who put all the pieces together — while also mastering the politics of strategy by rallying their populations to the cause.

This insight looms large today. Russia’s neo-imperial onslaught on Ukraine reminds us that force is still central to world affairs. But Ukraine’s inspiring resistance shows why strategy is a many-faceted thing.

Ukraine has survived not simply through feats of military skill, but also through adept diplomacy that has secured international solidarity and the shrewd use of information to rally its population and tell its story to the world. The most impressive strategist of this war may be President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who was initially an amateur when it came to military operations but was, critically, a virtuoso at using rhetoric and fortitude as weapons in their own right.

The war’s worst strategist, surely, is Putin. In blundering into this conflict, he gave his Western enemies a chance to use economic sanctions, export controls, intelligence sharing, military assistance and other tools to make the costs of Russia’s war as high as possible. He largely nullified forms of leverage, namely energy exports, that Moscow had previously used to suborn Europe; he condemned his country to economic and technological servitude to Beijing.

If strategy encompasses all the things that shape a country’s global position, Putin’s performance has been a master class in strategic self-harm.

This relates to a second truth: The best strategies reveal power in unexpected places. Admittedly, acumen can’t always overcome arithmetic. Having bigger battalions and deeper pockets never hurts. Yet the outcome of wars or rivalries isn’t determined solely by the material balance, and sharp strategists know how to shift that balance by finding novel sources of advantage.

In the 7th century, the Prophet Muhammad harnessed religious zeal in the service of military conquest: The ideological commitment of his followers unlocked new and deadly ways of warfare. In the late 1940s, Mao Zedong triumphed in the Chinese civil war because he manipulated the dynamics of a regional conflict, involving Japan, and a global conflict, involving Britain and the US, to win a local one, against Chiang Kai-shek.

Strategy, these examples show, is a deeply intellectual discipline: It requires sizing up complex situations and finding some crucial point of leverage.

Consider, again, the war in Ukraine. Judging simply by the initial balance of forces, Ukraine should not exist today. Yet Ukrainian strategy found power in unexpected places. The commitment of its population enabled an all-of-society defense that Putin’s forces were not expecting. The creative use of terrain, hit-and-run tactics, and relatively cheap technologies such as commercial drones also allowed Ukraine to blunt the Russian advance.

Contrast that strategy to Russia’s, which created weakness in unexpected places by dispersing too few troops across too many lines of advance, failing to centralize command and force Putin’s military to work as a team, and hazarding everything on a collapse of Ukrainian will that never occurred.

Why, though, has Russia underperformed so epically? The answer involves a third truth: Strategy is suffused with politics. The challenges of strategy may be universal, but the content of strategy can never be divorced from the political system that produces it.

The bloody history of the modern era proves the point. The great tyrants of the 20th century — especially Hitler and Stalin — saw domestic transformation as the precursor to global transformation. The geopolitical revolutions they sought to achieve were simply the outward expressions of the political and social revolutions they pursued at home.

In the same way, the totalitarian nature of their regimes shaped the strengths that made them so formidable: ruthlessness, ideological fervor, tactical cunning. But that nature also shaped the weaknesses — brutality and aggression that turned much of the world against them, personalized rule that encouraged terrible decision making over time — that ultimately brought them down.

Strategy is thus a test of political systems as much as it is a test of individual leaders. To date, thankfully, democracies have usually done it better: The concentration of authority can produce brilliance for a while, but the diffusion of authority makes for stronger societies and wiser decisions in the end.

This isn’t a bad way of understanding the long arc of Putin’s project. From 2008 onward, Russia won three small wars in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. “Putin-envy” took hold as Western observers marveled at the apparent dexterity and skill of Putin’s statecraft.

But autocrats often get dumber over time, because they become more intolerant of dissent and more isolated from reality. What the world discovered, in February 2022 and after, was just how bad this tyrant’s judgment had become.

So many deficiencies of Putin’s war plan — from the fact that it was based on his own unshakable belief that Ukraine wasn’t really a state, to the fact that it was hatched in secret and communicated to the relevant units just days before the attack — were rooted in the pathologies of a regime run by a long-tenured autocrat whose own “advisers” were visibly terrified of contradicting him.

The very nature of that strategy, which seeks the forcible conquest of a neighboring country and features murder and atrocity on a massive scale, reflects the gangster’s ethos that characterizes Putin’s Russia. And the execution of that strategy, which involves throwing poorly equipped, sometimes-unwilling units into the meat grinder, bespeaks the same fundamental disregard for human dignity and individual rights. From the halls of the Kremlin to the trenches of Bakhmut, Putin’s war has been pervaded by politics.

A fourth truth is coming into focus as this war goes longer: Strategy is about adaptation as much as design. There is no universal formula for strategic success. An approach that works beautifully in one scenario can backfire catastrophically an another. The enemy gets a say in war and competition; it will always try to spoil the savviest plans. So, strategy is a never-ending process, one in which flexibility and good judgment are as important as the brilliance of any initial scheme.

America’s Cold War strategy, containment, was continually revised and modified over a 40-year period, as conditions changed and the Soviet Union experimented with new methods of expansion. Napoleon’s revolutionary style of warfare nearly gave him mastery of Europe, until his adversaries wised up and changed their own methods. Advantage is perishable, so adaptation is essential.

So far, Ukraine — with Western support — has been winning the adaptation battle. Kyiv found ways of neutralizing Russia’s initial advantages: In mid-2022, it used American-supplied High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and other capabilities to target Putin’s ammo dumps and logistics nodes, thereby beating back a Russian artillery onslaught that was threatening to break Ukrainian forces in the east. Ukraine then turned the tables on overextended Russian forces, with offensives that reclaimed large chunks of land around Kharkiv and Kherson.

But the adaptation battle won’t end until the conflict does. Can Ukraine build the forces and master the tactics necessary to break through layered defenses that Russia, in its own delayed adaptation, has now constructed? Can Putin generate enough support from his allies — China, Iran and North Korea — to tilt the playing field in his favor? If the history of strategy teaches us anything, the most crucial tests of this war may lie ahead.

Finally, the study of strategy is so vital because the stakes are so high. Different decisions at key moments might have allowed Athens to win the Great Peloponnesian War or Germany and its allies to win World War I and even, perhaps, World War II. The strategy that US leaders chose after World War I helped cast the globe into depression and violent chaos; the strategy they chose after World War II helped foster an era of prosperity, progress and peace.

The course of the current war was not predetermined, either. A smarter attack plan by Putin, a less tenacious Ukrainian defense, or a more diffident American stance might easily have produced a Russian victory that would have reordered Eastern Europe and reverberated around the world. Ukraine, or large chunks of it, might have been incorporated into a “union state” with Russia and Belarus; the global axis of autocracies led by Moscow and Beijing would be riding high.

Even now, the outcome is far from certain. Choices made in Moscow, Kyiv, Washington and Beijing will determine when and how the conflict ends, and whether it bolsters or batters an international order that has been under growing strain.

Serious people can no longer believe, as was sometimes argued a generation ago, that conflict and perhaps strategy itself have become passé in an era of post-Cold War peace. Fierce competition, punctuated by the threat of catastrophic violence, is the grim reality of our time. There is no guarantee that the democracies will prevail in the 21st century as they eventually did in the 20th. Strategy matters most when dangers are extreme and the price of failure is steep. So welcome to a world in which the premium on good strategy — and on the knowledge of history that enables it — is high indeed.