AMERICA and the FUTURE of WAR: The Past as Prologue, by Williamson Murray

https://www.amazon.com/America-Futur...8-2&ref=sr_1_2

I found this book to be a helpful review of strategy and relevant history, both are shortfalls in the American culture today. All leaders and planners should read this book and discuss it its numerous cautionary stories of what happens when we drift to far from the essence of reality when it comes to war and strategy. How cool ideas like information dominance, network theory, and confusing by, with, and through as meaningful strategic frameworks are going to fail, and arguably have failed.

He points out that without an understanding of their political, strategic, and international context, a discussion of military operations has no basis in reality, since it is these factors that shape military choices. We would be hard pressed to clearly explain those factors for Syria today. Maybe it is simple as Simon Sinek's book start with why, then how and what. The military today all too often starts with what in the form of concepts (tactics), and then confuse them with strategy.

Based on this trend, I suspect Murray is right about his criticism of our military education.
Most of the huge system of professional military education ignored history, the study of strategy, and military theory in favor of obtuse and superficial discussions on of area studies, international relations, and other topics favored by academics. As for war and the profession of arms, forget it.
He repeatedly attacks our intelligence community and military writ large for its lack of foreign language and cultural knowledge and how this all to frequently leads to serious mistakes in judgment and faulty assumptions. He also criticizes the false claims of there will be no more wars. This has been a misguided view since at least the late 18th Century, and even in Pinker's misguided argument that violence around the world has been reduced, which is far from the case.

Some of following are paraphrased:

In 1792 a famous British statesman claimed they could reasonably expect 15 years of peace, yet in a matter of months they declared war on Revolutionary France. This particular statesman was far from stupid, he was reading the cards he could see, but even those he misunderstood due to the major social changes taking place in France he didn't understand.
Another example of misguided, or muddled thinking, was the British assessment of Hitler. They assessed since he was a Corporal in WWI and knew the horrors of war he surely wouldn’t lead his country into war again. Chamberlain and his fellow politicians lacked any understanding of the culture, context, and aspirations of Hitler and the German people.
Jumping to our love of models:
Thus, in every respect the rational actor model so beloved by American political scientists is utter nonsense. Had such a model existed in Germany in 1943, the Germans would have surrendered at that point, had such a model existed in Britain in June 1940, the British also would have quit before the Battle of Britain. As Clausewitz points out, theory "must also take the human factor into account and find room for courage, boldness, even foolhardiness. The art of war deals with living and moral forces.”
I am becoming more and more convinced our efforts to leverage design thinking and military planning processes to hopefully lead to better decisions will fail if we don't have knowledgeable people (culture, history, and strategy) in these groups. Processes can compensate for the lack of knowledge and unfounded assumptions that lead to stupid.

One area where Murray's book fell short is there was no real discussion on deterrence, which admittedly is often shaped by the faulty rational man theory. Still, it is a critical component of our strategy.