We want to thank Rob for the introduction and thank the Fulbright Committee and the Fulbright Scholar at the Diplomatic
Academy this year and the Fulbright Commission as one that's actually funded the trip here and recording the lecture.
Rob said, For a long time I talked to the Naval War College Program in Monterey and generally taught a class called Strategy in War and in the Class.
And we looked at a lot of different conflicts, including a lot of the recent American conflicts.
And, well, one of the things that I got interested in is group teaching and teaching various case studies.
And, you know, every time every war you look at since 1945, the United States has been involved in has been branded a limited war.
Whether that time actually fits and is not particularly relevant and whoever is doing the branding.
Sometimes it fits. Sometimes it does. At the same time, you know, we've been in all these conflicts that we sometimes have not won them or the U.S.
hasn't won them in the manner that ought to or with the speed that it hoped to.
And another question to think about as we go through this,
and the question I'll offer up to you and not answer I'll let you come to your own conclusions is once we get through this,
is this the kind of war that, you know, the type of war, the type of struggle that we're more likely to be involved in?
But the the place to start is the place that I found when I started doing the research on this.
And I'm writing a book on this for Cambridge University Press and and why that talk.
And I also give Rob credit for the subtitle of the talk as well. You know, how do you think about going to war?
Because the conclusion I came to is that we really don't understand how to think about it.
Despite a literature of the modern literature dates to shortly after the Second World War,
and the basic problems that I discovered that we see with this mess is that the
first thing is and these are the main things I'm going to talk about here today,
we don't understand how to define it. And I'll talk about that here in detail a little bit.
But because we don't understand how to define we don't understand the political objective, we don't understand the effects from that.
This has follow on effects from not being able to link the that the ways in the means with the objective, you know, being sort, you know as well.
And if you don't understand all these things,
then you can't really successfully calculate how the constraints that are going to be involved in prosecuting this war,
these wars are going to affect what goes on.
At the same time, the thing that I found most surprising is this here in the literature, there's no insistence upon victory very often.
And some the literature will say, you're not supposed to win. No.
And I think those of you are military officers. They just sent you to war and they told you fight the war for seven years, don't win.
And that and not teach this class called strategy in policy for the last 18 years.
And the unofficial motto of the class is how to win wars.
And so that struck me as being just very odd. But I'll get to that a second as well.
Now and then a failure to end this conflict now as well and the problems that this produces.
And so so I really this that the guts of my research question in some sense is some of the most important elements of it.
And so the problem I've got, I've been reading all this stuff for years, okay, how do I deal with these issues and the solution?
First, you've got to get back to the basic principles of what you're even thinking about when you're talking about a strategic subject.
But one of the great weaknesses in strategic studies, literature and historical literature and political science literature that releases as well,
is that it's not explained very often or very well on many occasions by the authors.
They don't explain very well what actually they're talking about. You know, what are they really trying to get at?
What do they mean when they use these terms? They use kind of they're thrown about kind of like confetti very often.
And so you have to start from this, you know, with all of the basically all the writing,
almost all the writing I do on military subjects now, I so I start with does the policy what do you want?
What is the objective? What are you trying to get? How are you using your elements of national power to get it?
How are you using your military power to get it? What campaigns are operations are you mounting in order to get this?
And then the tactical stuff, the battlefield stuff, what are the concerns of that?
So you've got to know this before you can really start doing start doing your analysis.
Now, we will apply this to the whole idea of limited war. I have two definitions here.
You know, on on the board. I'm not going to read them to you and hopefully you can see them and read them, but I'll talk about them a little bit.
The first one is from a man named Robert Osgood, who's famous for writing a book on limited war, and it's considered the book on limited war.
And the bottom definition is romance. And Bernard Brody, both American and British.
Brody is also considered one of the other big pillars, you know, in this literature and when you see.
I give you their definitions because what they write about,
everybody else that writes about the war essentially digs into this and digs into the stuff that they talk about now.
But what you see is they don't even know what it is. They don't even agree on what limited war is.
You have these very mixed definitions where with Brody, obviously with Osgood, who's I think one of the better writers,
he talks about the objective, which is good, but he talks about the geographies, part of what this means.
He talks about how the effort. He talks about settlements.
He talks about selected targets. He talks about, you know, you can't commit all of your resources.
BRODY He talks about limited war in relation to total war, which is an issue all of its own.
You can't it's not a limited war. If you use nuclear weapons and other issues, you know, you have to constrain yourself and mutual constraint.
There are two different views of what is going on here. They're supposed to be the the authorities, you know, on this.
So the problem is you really don't have a definition because the way it is generally defined is they mix the political
objective with the way you're going to get the political objective with the level of means that you're going to use.
BRODY And a lot of other writers, not just Brody, they define limited war or to total war.
The problem is the term total war doesn't mean anything. You can't really define it.
So I've read entire books that don't define it. So you've got this means based problem.
And they also they talk about things that affect the nature of the war, the geography, the level of force, you know, and so on.
But but all of this boils down to means it means being an element of their definition.
This is too subjective. How do you tell when someone has used all their means?
I mean, how much is the means we total? You can't.
It just doesn't work for thinking about it very clearly. So.
So, you know, based on your analysis, you know as well what I conclude after reading it anyways.
So you got to fix the problem before you even start.
And so, I mean, you go back to basic principles, you know, again, you know, you've got to go with the rejected.
And so thinking about Clausewitz and thinking about the way that Sir Julian Corbett, the maritime theorist, uses Clausewitz,
he kind of imposes a little bit on and and you essentially you can divide all wars
into this war fought for regime change a war fought for something less than this.
And everything that you do based upon the political objective, what is the political objective being sought?
Everything else, you know, flows from this.
This gives us a really solid basis that then answers all these other problems, you know, and analytical perspective that I showed earlier.
Now, so why do I say this? Well, we did Clausewitz.
He talks about the object, the political object, the value of it.
The war will go on until people aren't willing to pay the price anymore.
So one side says we don't want to pay the blood and treasure or prestige, of course that it is that we're paying for this.
We will end. But it really critically what solves part of it, what solves the in ways means problem is that the political object,
the original motive for the war, will thus determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it required.
There. Again, why they rejected is so important because you will do things to get the political objective.
And so this gives us a solid, you know, basis with historical how do we think about this?
How do we analyse it? Now you have all of these other issues that Brody and in some better respects Oscar come up with the geography,
the means, political will and the list goes on.
All these things are really critically important for influencing the nature of the war, but they don't define it.
You know that you can't define a war fought for a limited political objective,
which I think is a better way to describe it by these things, because they're too subjective.
So so if you're fighting the war for every political objective, what would these objectives commonly be?
Well, you're fighting defensively. You're trying to hold what you've got just to keep what you got to preserve yourself in the face of an invasion.
The most common thing for an offensive war, but for an offensive, limited objective, is territory historically.
That's what people fight wars for, but they're also other things you know as well, political concessions, economic reasons.
For example, the 19th century in Asia, it's famous for the Americans and for the European colonial powers,
using military force to force political and economic and trade concessions from China, India and Japan and other places.
You know what other and you can, in theory, have as many objectives as you have politicians, which is that's a lot.
So no. Now, so how does this work in the real in the real world, then, if you're thinking about how do you use this for analysis?
And the main case studies I'm looking at are the Korean War, the Vietnam War in the Gulf War, the Korean War,
the objective for the United States, you know, preserve South Korea, hold South Korea, supported by U.N. resolutions in this the Vietnam War.
Some of the literature on the Vietnam War insists that the Americans don't have a political objective.
You know, that is wrong. I mean. Here. It is spelled out very clearly in NSA and to create an independent non-communist South Vietnam.
That's a limited political a war fought for a limited political objective to hold South Vietnam, the Gulf War.
The primary political objective is the liberation of Kuwait.
There are other things as well, but in the policy, documents have spelled out very clearly what this is.
We are trying to change any of these other regimes.
We're trying to preserve regimes in North and South Vietnam and South Korea or to liberate take something away from north from from the Iraqis.
No problem. Sometimes the political objectives change.
And this has a whole new wrinkle to this this whole equation.
And, you know, and it's also a problem why using the term limited war is kind of a blanket.
It is very difficult. And why I prefer to think about war support for a limited political objective,
because in Korea, Korea, in the literary war literature, this was the archetype.
There are books and books and articles about Korea, the limited war.
But in September 1950, the political objective changed for the United States.
The Truman administration says, we will unify Korea.
You're no longer fighting a war for a limited political objective at that point.
Here's why I understand the political objective so important because you change the political objective.
You change the nature of the war. And that's exactly what the Truman administration does.
The Truman administration decides to invade a Soviet, Soviet and Chinese client state, essentially.
You know, that changes everything because everybody else says, okay, what is going on here now?
You get the attention that you perhaps did not want. So in your view, to change the war, sometimes the political objectives,
fuzzy and the political leaders get, we're not really sure what they want at the end of the first Gulf War.
President Bush the first President Bush twice. He calls for revolts in Iraq and that they happen, that probably would happen anyway.
But it just doesn't this doesn't matter. It certainly arguably feeds it.
Do they want he says if Saddam is overthrown, this is the way to end the war.
But they really don't want Saddam overthrown. But really they do. They really not.
I mean, they want both, but they're afraid of what happens if he's overthrown.
But they're afraid of what happens if he stays. So they get a little fuzzy on what they really want there.
The second Iraq war in 2011 did the Obama administration doesn't get a status of forces agreement.
They don't really want one. A lot of controversy around this. Would this have made the situation a little different?
I'm sorry. I'm getting ahead of myself. That's for later. For. But in the Second World War, initially we had U.S. invades Iraq.
Reject is very clear is regime change. This is a war fought for a limited political objective, even though you see it branded a limited war.
But then things change. We move from overthrowing a regime to building and protecting a new regime.
This changes the objective. This changed the entire situation, the entire dynamic of what you're doing,
which then changes the influence this has on the other powers in Iran and Syria and the effect it has on the internal population as well.
So things change now. This is a good idea, bad idea to change the objective.
It depends. Somehow to change the objective might be a good idea.
But the problem that I found with the United States changing the objective is
we don't think about it very clearly or think about it as deeply as we should,
or when we do think about it. There's actually a lot of discussion about changing the objective in Korea,
but they don't seem to take seriously enough the problems that they can see from the intelligence they might have from this.
So it's a very complicated like all it's all very easy to control.
And so if you're the policymaker, it's easier to know. So. So we understand why they would not want to stay any objective, determined so much.
Okay. How does this affect all the constraints, the things, the geography,
the means and national will all these other things that Brody and others have so clearly identified?
Well, the first thing to think about is what is the other objective, meaning the objective of the other combat involved.
And this is really critical.
And again, why lumping things is a limited war, very, very difficult, because you might be fighting a war for limited political objective.
What do they want and how much value do they place on it?
And then how do these things then how are the constraints generally affected because of this value?
How does it contribute to how much means you're willing to to produce to it so well.
Well, I'll come back to that in a second in detail.
But this is a concept of kind of taken from one of Robert Osgood's later books to think about the constraints.
It says he talks to it. Are the constraints actual meaning you don't have any choice but to deal with.
You cannot alter it. Korea is a peninsula. That's a fact.
You can't get around that. That is the situation you have to deal with.
Or are the constraints self-imposed, meaning we place them on ourselves if we do that?
Is this why? Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is an example in the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration.
It would not allow American ground forces to operate north of the 17th parallel in Norfolk, Iraq.
Their reasoning for doing this is they were very certain they would end up having to fight China in North Vietnam.
And so this is a self-imposed constraint and it's a very wise one because they're absolutely correct.
The Chinese government had made commitments to North Vietnam that they would help them fight the Americans if the Americans invaded.
And at times, the Chinese government sometimes had as many as 170,000 troops in North Vietnam.
So that's a fairly significant other issue to deal with. So it's a it's an imposed constraint, but it is a smart one.
Now, how does how do these other things and we think about these constraints, you know, work out this work out and, you know, Korea and Vietnam.
When you think about the objectives, again, of the various combatants,
not just you and the United States perspective, we also have to consider the other combatants and their allies.
What do they want? You know, how does that affect what's going to happen?
What are the values of their objects, the geography?
How does this work? Well, in for constraint. One of the things that the Truman administration does in is restrict the war in Korea to Korea.
It will not allow American military forces in launch attacks in China because it fears that because the Chinese are a Soviet ally,
that they would get a third world war. And so this is a constraint.
The political elements of it, you know, filter into this as well.
In Southeast Asia, one of the constraints that is placed on American forces for much of the war,
not all of it is that they cannot operate in Laos and Cambodia.
This was something the Truman administration very much restricted now.
Okay, then you got to think about what is the effect of has have sanctuary lines, communications for the enemy, you know, and so on.
And certainly a lot of this, the fear of third party country affects this as well.
Why not go to North Vietnam again? Why not go in to China?
That is always there is an element and then you have the coalition aspects to bring into this.
Again, what are their objectives? You know, what matter to them?
What is the value of the object to them?
And with the Cold War perspective it has is a whole new wrinkle with this, because you have this something called nested.
Some people call nested wars where so much of what the United States is doing is big in Korea
and Vietnam is constrained or limited by the fears of getting a larger a larger conflict.
But what's interesting when you look at this look at that idea in relation to the first and the first Gulf War,
the Bush administration doesn't have that same fear. There's no Cold War.
So the external situation has changed. The fear of third party act or intervention is not there anymore.
So this gives you so much more freedom to do so many other things that militarily you couldn't have done.
Yeah. In some of these other and some of these other conflicts. Now the problem, the means element of this.
Almost every definition that you will see and almost everything written about a little bit more that you will see,
talks about the needs and says, oh, you have to restrict your means for this to if it's a limited war, if you're using a lot of a lot of stuff.
Define a lot, then it's not a limited war. Again, the problem is too subjective.
The reality is you should use sufficient means. Now, when you decide you wish to get this political objective,
the the know sufficient means to get what you want, because if you have this self-imposed idea that,
oh, we can't use sufficient means or enough means, and this really increases the chances of not winning not winning the war.
Now, how does this play out?
You know, in our in our Korea, Vietnam, you know, in Gulf War example, one of the many controversies in Korea is that in 1958,
President Truman signs an order dispatching four Army divisions to Europe to fulfil our narrow commitment to Europe.
This is the height of the Chinese offensive in North Korea.
And so there are writers and say Kissinger and Brody and others, a better use of these four divisions is in in Korea or sending in labour.
And in this May made the spring of 1951, you can end this war more quickly with a little bit more force in Vietnam.
So the argument then boils down to you don't ever use sufficient means to to end the war quickly.
Vietnam. One of the points of argument is always the American military forces.
Ground force Commander Westmoreland is never given the forces he is asked for by from the from the Johnson administration,
always giving a piece of that. You have this driven draft. You can argue about the efficacy of that, but that's the argument.
Gulf War, different. Colin Powell, the American military commander.
At one point, he asked President Bush for corps, some more carriers or some more air wings and says he needs these.
President Bush says, give me the order. I'll sign it. And Bush says later he said, I told you I want.
He said, I didn't want them to be able to say to me they didn't get what they needed.
But guess what? The situation is different as well. Instead of trying to get this means issue right.
You know, it can be. It's obviously one of the main. So many difficult things.
But if we don't use sufficient means, can you end the war? The problem is also how you use these means, which will come to in just a second.
And another big topic in the limited war literature is limited nuclear war.
There is no large amount of literature on this, but at the same time,
there's literature saying that if you use nuclear weapons, it's not a limited war.
It's what is forgotten in all this is that nuclear atomic weapons are a means issue.
No. Yes, it has enormous political impact if you use these, obviously.
But this is an element of means. And in a lot of the literature, early limited war literature, limited nuclear war, literature,
discussion is okay, we can use atomic weapons later nuclear weapons and just use a few of these.
So you to be okay with that if we're fighting and this won't produce a nuclear nuclear exchange on a global scale.
The Soviet writers at this time are looking at this and they're saying no.
And they say once these are used, all bets are off.
No one knows what's going to happen here because no one can predict it.
So you get a lot of a lot of interesting and frightening sometimes writing about this.
But there is enormous literature written by Indian and Pakistani, all particularly Indian authors on a war within.
It touches on a lot of these issues here today. And of course, this is relevant to think about in the South China Sea, Korean Peninsula.
It also be with countries that have nuclear and atomic weapons when they are involved in any war.
Sometimes you have potential issues here that could be very bad things,
which is something certainly certainly to think about here as we as we look at this and other Soviet related subjects now.
So you've got these means at their disposal.
Hopefully you've got sufficient means, but you've got to be able to use them in a manner that gives you what you want,
as in theory, if you're fighting a war that's doing what you're doing.
Now, obviously, to talk about strategy in detail, this is a subject for a number of series of lectures,
but just some big things that think about, you know, understanding what you want.
Having a vision of what the peace should look like.
Clear political objectives, clear assessment of yourself, your enemy, making sure that you can actually accomplish this goal with military power,
because sometimes you can't, you know, understanding your opponent, you know, and just no solid operational planning to back this up.
All these things are important. But in a nutshell, the in a nutshell, what Clausewitz says, what you're doing militarily,
it should be affecting the enemy's ability to prosecute the war or the will to prosecute the
war if it's not affecting their ability to prosecute the war are not affecting their will.
You really need to question what it is you're doing. Is this a worthwhile thing that you're undertaking?
Now, the problem is, okay, we're looking at our means issue here and the strategy issues.
Give me a limited strategy. But when you look at the limited war literature, you see this insufficient interest in victory.
So, yes, we know we want sort of sometimes or usually means we'll maybe try to get it, but we really don't think we should win the war.
And so when I give you these four, four quotes here, one is from the top,
one is from the American Navy captain, 1951 veteran, the Pacific War grad for the Naval Academy.
He's actually a professor at the National Defence University at the time.
He writes this, which makes it even more interesting to me.
The second one man in Ghana, who's one of the fathers of modern strategic studies, a British, British author.
President Barack Obama in 2015 and a Canadian brigadier, you know, from late last year.
So I have dozens and dozens and dozens of bizarre quotes and interesting quotes now to talk about this.
And one of the things that I haven't quite figured out completely in my mind is why you have this and a lot of different reasons.
One of the reasons is when the writers in this, when they mentioned these things,
they often confuse victory on the battlefield or victory in a battle with victory in the war or achieving your political objective in the war.
Sometimes that's the problem. Sometimes it's the one in the first the first one.
He his concern seems to be that if you have a decisive victory, military victory in Korea, you maybe you're escalating, you'll get a bigger war.
You get a war of the Soviet Union. So there's some of that this fear of you'll get a bigger war, certainly in the Cold War context.
The criticism of that is,
is that the people that are writing this way are letting the letting the fear of what potentially might happen in the future cloud,
their ability to actually deal with the problem that they have on their hands.
You know, and they're not addressing the problem because they're afraid of something that may or may not happen.
You know, it's you can argue that argue that both ways.
But, sir, you see this in the literature. And again, having taught a class where the motto is how to win wars, it just struck me as being interesting.
So what do we get from all this, all of this? You know, again, we don't really.
Scan the literature, how to define it. This will make use of that in ways meaning relationship.
It confuses our understanding the constraints. At the same time, you don't have this emphasis and a sufficient emphasis on winning.
Winning meaning, achieving the political objectives, establishing a peace.
And there's not really a lot of thought given to how to actually end these things, you know, and how to get peace out of it.
And the result of that, you could argue.
And again, I'm still part of the way here with this is, you know, we get maybe you got a protracted war or perpetual war.
Sometimes we very much frown on protracted wars. You can make some arguments you get some do.
But some of his points about bleeding the country are pretty hard to.
Pretty hard to. Pretty hard to argue against. This quote here is from a late name, Caroline Holmquist, who's a Swedish political science.
And she talks about this problem. She basically chalked it up to a lack of vision.
A lot of Western leaders took the American leader. She's right in this respect.
Is she right? I don't know. But she's one of the best explanations I've found yet.
So but again, it's something still involved in writing it. And we'll see what I get from this now.
So. So we don't really have a way to end, you know, these wars.
And one of the things that Osgood wisely points out, he says, look,
limit wars are all worthwhile for limited political objectives are only solved by negotiations.
You don't usually put your boot on the person's neck and dictate the terms from that.
You know, that usually you usually negotiate an end to the settlement.
The problem is, no one plans for this and almost no one plans for this.
One of the rare exceptions that are found is the rest of Japanese war where the excuse me, where 92 for 92 five.
The Japanese know they're going to have to negotiate an end to this war with the Russians when they started.
And so they plan ahead for this to say, okay, we're going to cultivate the Americans, we'll get them to mediate.
We will send one of our diplomats as our representative to Washington, D.C.,
who just happened to go to Harvard with, you know, President Theodore Roosevelt.
And they know each other very well. So so they're kind of stacking the diplomatic deck before they even go to war.
Now, why do people not think about this? I think it's a hard question to answer.
Part of it is, I think the pressure of the war so often overwhelms the policymaker,
which is understandable, you know, with especially if your country's been invaded,
just surviving and prosecuting the war is such a big thing and any war is such an enormous it's the most complicated thing that human beings do.
And so that just overwhelms the policymakers very much.
But at the same time, often I found I found quotes from President Johnson in quotes from the first President Bush, but the first Gulf War.
How do we get out of this? How do we get out of this?
And how do we bring this thing to a conclusion where the question is raised sometimes repeatedly, but no one ever tried to answer it?
You know, no one ever sits down, okay, how do we actually do this?
And the problem that I have with this, I think historically is we don't do it right.
You might get to do it again because, well, we never are World Wars, for example.
Now so and I use the three Gulf Wars, you know, as an example, you know,
for this the first Gulf War, 1990, 91, the Iraq War brought war one, as I call it.
It just suddenly stopped. They don't really think about the U.S., doesn't we think about how it's going to ended.
And General Schwarzkopf, the CENTCOM commander on the ground, he's given very, very little instruction.
Essentially, they tell him to strike a cease fire in the war.
Schwarzkopf is yes, sir. He goes negotiated, comes back and says, here's what I got.
And they're like, what did you do?
It was they're mad at him for essentially his first mistake with doing what he was told, but he wasn't giving them instruction.
What the second Iraq war of 2011. Again, the problem of the status of forces were there.
Would this have mattered? There's a lot of controversy with that and obviously would have done very well.
And then you get starting in 2014, you get the third Iraq war for the United States.
Is it going to end with a any better war termination?
And we'll see. You know, so maybe after the fourth one, you know, figure it out.
So, okay, so so you've got this problem that is a just a massive problem.
And to me and I could be wrong about this, I think this is harder than the war in some respects for the policymakers.
I feel just horribly sorry for any policymaker that has to deal with this.
And the American military experience is often the American military commander on the ground who is the guy who is charged with sorting this out,
sometimes with absolutely no preparation and no instruction from his bosses as well.
So you've got the added added wrinkles with that. So the question, you know,
the difficulty I had is trying to figure out how to address this and has done some ideas from something like some of the ideas from the.
The horse that we've been teaching the teaching for years. And three.
There's a lot of things obviously to think about here, but three big things to think about.
What do you want politically? What are the political objectives? How far are you willing to go militarily?
Or do we need to go militarily without going too far to get these objectives?
How are you going to enforce the peace?
You have to think about the step beyond, you know, after the war and what is the peace going to look like here?
What does victory look like? What does success look like?
But the difficulty that I'm having in writing this, these three these three things are completely intertwined.
You can't think of them as one, two, three. They relate so much together.
They're so intertwined. And there's so many factors that overlap with this.
It's difficult to to decipher it, but they're all three of them are there.
You know, Clausewitz, again, stresses how much this is the political objective, you know, the peace treaty, which will resolve the conflict.
You know, that's what you want. But he also says sometimes the peace treaty is just temporary.
The person signs it because they want out, they want to break or whatever. How do you secure the peace?
Well, you've got to get them to make the peace, too.
How do you bring the people to to make the peace clauses give us kind of a laundry list now?
Is it very much you said this is a war. Here's how you do it. You can destroy their forces.
Now, this goes against the grain of a lot of women.
Limited war, actually, almost all the living in war literature, they say, no, you can't destroy the enemy's force.
No, nowhere in the great book of War does that is to say that because you're fighting a war for a limited political objective,
that you can't bring the enemy around to your point of view.
And that way you can take their territory, which is a common way temporary occupation, a temporary invasion, something of political purpose.
And if you're fighting a defensive war, well, you just simply absorb what you've got to do.
If you can fight long enough to take it for Clausewitz, what's the right answer?
What is the situation that you have? You've got to understand the situation you have in order to understand what the right answer is.
So other things to keep in mind when you're trying to end the war again.
What is peace look like? What does victory look like here?
You know, in this having that, that is something we really should figure out before we start again.
Sometimes you don't get that option. You don't get that choice. But ideally, you should have ideal versus real.
The timing of this can be critical. One of the criticisms about the Truman administration is that in 1951, excuse me, 1950,
they have won the Korean War when the American army and Korean armies reached the 38 South Korean armies reached in parallel.
They've won it. Now is the time to try to consolidate that and make a deal, if you can, you know, but the the the criticism is magnificent.
They missed the chance. One thing to think about, one of the weaknesses I found, I think,
is some of the American side of this is not understanding that the negotiations are a weapon, where negotiations are a tool for getting what you want.
We haven't been able to get it on the battlefield, maybe even going into peacetime, you know,
so and that's the other side sometimes understands that much better that the Chinese negotiators
understood that much better now in Korea than we did the coalition issues with this.
This matters, you know, and we forget this matters when you go to war.
It also matters when you want to end the war, because every combatant has their own objectives.
They are negotiating the ends to the Korean and the Vietnam War, to the United States.
We had to bludgeon we essentially bludgeoned our South Korean and Japanese allies into accepting the peace that we wanted them to accept,
bludgeoned with threats, money, whatever it took.
But that's just the reality of how business is done. And it's better to get a peace instead of a cease fire.
But sometimes that's all you're going to get. And sometimes you have to take what take what you can get from it as well.
So. Okay, yet why even look at this. I mean, a limited war sport for limited political objectives.
You could look at what's going on, what happened in the Ukraine in the last few years.
Putin If I don't pretend to understand his objectives, but just from what I've read and seen,
it appear to have limited political objectives in the Ukraine.
They use subversion, military force, cyber, all kinds of different elements of national power to get what he wanted.
Hasn't been able to negotiate an end to that. Maybe he doesn't want to get it.
Depends on who you ask. Enormous.
Again, there's an enormous body of women war literature written by Indian authors.
And some people look at this. I look at the South China Sea and think about that.
You think about Korea, you think about, well, is just more likely, you know, the kind of war to get.
You know, again, I'll leave that question to you. And I conclude with this.
The first the Supreme, the most far reaching active judgement that the statesman and commander,
the political leader and military leaders and it's important to bring that out have to make is to establish the kind of world in which they
are embarking and mistaking a port or trying to turn to something that's alien to its nature is the first of all strategic questions.
And so when I started looking at the. Limited war did that we we don't know how to think about what we're doing.
We don't even know how to define it. We can't even agree on what we're doing.
And then we can't agree on the various things that we're doing in this thing that we can't agree upon.
So if you can't even define it, you can't understand it or explain it clearly.
How are you going to get to the end of it? How are you going to solve the problem to figure it out?
Thank you very much. And I'll take any questions that you might have.