Arbitrage
I don't read a lot of books about war
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I was having a conversation with one of my colleagues, a fellow combat arms officer, about books and reading habits a few weeks ago. I made the rather bold claim that for officers at our skill and experience level, we don’t need to read that much about war and conflict. He strenuously disagreed and took the opposite position: that it should be the primary focus of our reading. I suggested a ratio of about six non-war related books for every war related book, and he argued that the ratio should be reversed.
His case is eminently reasonable and makes perfect sense. We are officers in a demanding and complex profession. We can’t possibly know all there is to know about war and its history and practice, and so we should focus most of our reading on it. We need to try to understand conflict and all of its myriad complexity by aggressively reading and trying to learn more about it. There’s nothing unreasonable about this argument, but I think it misses some crucial nuance.
I already know a great deal about war stuff, and reading more war stuff will only lead to marginal improvements. Most of what I do, especially at the staff level, is technical in nature. My colleagues and I have already read dozens of books on war and military leadership and we’ve demonstrated high-performance commanding units in combat (albeit at small scale). War in concept is simple and boring: find the bad guys before they find you, sneak up on them and hammer the sh*t out of them, then quickly move on to the next thing before he can muster the strength to counterattack.
It isn’t the simple concepts of war that are difficult, but the execution of war in detail. The two things that will help make you successful leading in war are the technical and operational art skills to be able to execute war at scale, and the leadership skills to leverage the power of large groups. These are skills which neither I nor my colleagues have mastered, but the best teacher will be experience in the coming years, rather than books.
The largest increases in our skills and abilities, outside of experience, will come from reading and studying fields other than war, and then applying lessons from other fields to the practice of war.
The books that have impacted me the most have been books that are not about war. The reason they were impactful was because they contained lessons that I could apply to my practice of the profession of arms. These are books like The Timeless Way of Building, The Systems Bible, The Incerto (Taleb’s books), Making Things Work, Gut Feelings, The Beginning of Infinity, The Mythical Man Month, How Innovation Works, Human Action, The Dao of Capital etc. And if you were to read what I write in the margins of these books, you would see that they are heavily cross-referenced with each other and other books. This is because I have found that the usefulness of books comes in connecting and combining their content, rather than reading a book in isolation. It is much better to try to connect the book you are reading with other books and combine the lessons, rather than trying to glean lessons from each book individually. When it comes to military leadership and the practice of war, you can go much farther by arbitraging information from other fields into the practice of war, than reading about war in relative isolation.
John Boyd makes a similar argument in his Conceptual Spiral briefing. He uses a snowmobile thought experiment to demonstrate the value of analyzing and then synthesizing elements from seemingly unconnected domains to create something new. Combine skis with outboard motor with rubber treads with handlebars and you get a snowmobile. In application, his theory of war, conflict, and human survival was derived from synthesizing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem’s, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, none of which are about war directly. To learn more about Boyd I highly recommend Mark McGrath’s newsletter:
.The point here is that there is only so much you can learn about war by studying only war. If you want to generate new ideas to be able to operate in uncertainty, you have to go outside of your field and try to arbitrage the best ideas into your own field. Of course, this argument generalizes to other fields as well.
This argument is also centered around the idea that one should develop a basic framework with heuristics and rules of thumb, and approach problem solving from a first principles perspective, rather than a “if this then that” approach to every problem. If you only read about war, then you will always be looking for opportunities to pattern-match from your previous reading. When you are faced with a difficult river-crossing scenario, you will look to previous lessons about successful river crossings to try to match what you already know with the situation in front of you.
The danger, here, lies in the risk of incorrectly pattern-matching. Success in military operations, and with most things, is highly overdetermined. In other words, when a military operation is successful, there are an uncountable number of variables that contributed to that success. When you study a successful military operation, a few lessons might standout, but the lessons learned from one success do not necessarily, and in fact probably do not, apply under different circumstances. As good as historians are, they are limited in the number of pages they can publish, so they must publish only what they think is relevant. They cannot possibly capture history in all of its complexity. In other words, the things that you think might have led to the success of an operation might not have been the key factors. And if they were the key factors in that success, they may not be the key factors in the situation you currently face.
This is why when I do read about military history, I prefer to study failures and blunders. It is much easier to learn what mistakes to avoid, than to try to learn what tactics and techniques to emulate.
In summary, war is too complex a thing to be studied in relative isolation. You need only to understand some the basics of war and its history to get 80%-90% of the benefits of reading about war. Rather than read dozens or hundreds of additional books about war to eek out a few additional percentage points of value, read widely on other topics and focus on applying them to war. Likewise, take what you learn from war and apply it to the other fields that you read about.
Caveat
For ROTC cadets and brand-new lieutenants, you probably need to read books about war because you are still learning the basics. Here are a few that I have found valuable:
-Steel my Soldiers Hearts by David Hackworth
-Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy by Max Hastings
-The Battle for the Falklands by Max Hastings
-This Kind of War by T. R. Fehrenbach
-The Generals by Thomas Ricks
I agree and I would submit that many people, maybe even most, are not good at assessing their own needs. Many officers think they *need* to read about war at the expense of reading other things. My argument here is that, for officers who have a good grasp of the basics, additional reading of books not directly related to war will have a higher payoff on average.
“This is why when I do read about military history, I prefer to study failures and blunders.”
Not a professional military officer or enlisted men myself. Nonetheless, I’ve spent my entire life for the military history. I agree with this. I also think studying smaller wars and lesser known wars and mostly forgotten wars, to the extent you can find material about them is also helpful. The battle of Gettysburg is over studied and over theorized. But what the hell was happening in Paraguay in the 19th century? There’s not that much in English, it’s a very strange conflict. There have to be lessons there. Memoir literature from older wars is also helpful. Getting people’s thoughts right after the conflict, before the official narrative has hardened into place, is helpful. For example, the memoirs about World War I written immediately afterward did not suggest that the conflict was futile and pointless and that the British leadership were incompetent, and that their men were slaughtered for no reason. There was some of that, certainly. But they did after all win the war. And also their army was the only one that did not crack. They must’ve been doing something right. Good post.