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Executive Summary

The Zeitenwende, or “watershed moment”—announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in February 2022, days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—outlined a set of policy shifts, including the development of Germany’s first-ever National Security Strategy, that appeared to signal a greater role for Germany in the defense and security of Europe. The German National Security Strategy draws a clear connection between the need for a robust defense-industrial base and the foundation for the capabilities needed to meet North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense and deterrence commitments, support Ukraine, and provide for the recapitalization of allies and partners. To date, however, there has been less focus on the extent to which the Zeitenwende galvanized change in Germany’s important defense-industrial base. This study assesses the extent to which the strategic shift signaled by the Zeitenwende is reflected and being implemented in Germany’s defense-industrial base policy and the implications for transatlantic security.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the serious deficiencies in the ability of transatlantic allies to quickly surge defense production. The unprecedented expenditures of munitions and other military equipment are indicative of the serious defense-industrial base challenges that face NATO allies as European militaries attempt to recapitalize and rearm after decades of underinvestment, while still maintaining support for Ukraine. It also points to significant industrial challenges in any future high-intensity conflict or crisis with a near-peer adversary. Weaknesses in the transatlantic defense-industrial base threaten NATO’s defense and deterrence posture by reducing military readiness and raising questions about NATO’s ability to deter future conflict.

Strategists and scholars have also questioned whether the United States can sustain a deterrence strategy in both Europe and the Asia-Pacific beyond 2026. This raises the prospect of heightened risk from 2027–2035, when the United States and its allies may find it necessary to deter or defeat both Russia and China simultaneously. In the event of a conflict with China that absorbs U.S. bandwidth and resources in the Indo-Pacific, European and NATO allies would be vulnerable to Russian opportunism. Europe must be able to defend itself, and a militarily stronger Germany, with a defense-industrial base to match, is a critical ally with the potential to offset risk in Europe and play a far greater role in transatlantic security.

Without a sustained transformation by Germany that appreciably strengthens the European pillar of security within NATO, the burden will fall disproportionately on others, and demand for U.S. engagement in Europe will grow in tension with the strategic bandwidth and U.S. warfighters needed for the Indo-Pacific. To strengthen the transatlantic defense-industrial ecosystem, the United States should provide consistent bilateral political support for German rearmament; encourage and support the reform of defense-industrial base laws, regulations, and authorities; work to expand defense-industrial cooperation bilaterally and through NATO formats; and work cooperatively to incentivize and expand German defense-industrial base cooperation with Ukraine. By exploring the defense-industrial Zeitenwende from 2022 through 2024, this study contributes to the ongoing debate around the extent of Germany’s defense and security transformation; the Zeitenwende; the role of the defense-industrial base as a foundation for defense and deterrence; and a stronger European pillar within NATO.

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Excel file with data used in Chinese Military Diplomacy

Executive Summary

• Chinese military diplomacy serves both strategic and operational goals. The main strategic goals are supporting Chinese foreign policy and shaping the strategic environment; operational goals include supporting People’s Liberation Army (PLA) modernization and collecting intelligence on foreign militaries.
• Military diplomacy is a tool for building foreign relations and an indicator of the quality of China’s bilateral relationships. When relations are strained, military-diplomatic engagements decrease or stop; when relations are good, engagements tend to increase.
• Military activities are limited by partner willingness and capability, Chinese domestic constraints, and Chinese Communist Party control over the PLA. PLA engagements with foreign militaries often emphasize form over substance and do not necessarily build much trust or interoperability with military partners.
• The total number of PLA senior-level visits, exercises, and port calls grew significantly from 2002–08, stayed relatively constant from 2009–19, and dropped dramatically in the COVID-19 years of 2020–22 before gradually beginning to rise again starting in 2023. Senior-level visits are the most common form of activity, but military exercises and port calls make up an increasing share of PLA foreign military engagements.
• Asia is the highest priority region for Chinese military diplomacy, with Europe in second place and Africa a distant third. Southeast Asia has emerged as a battleground for U.S.-China competition in military diplomacy.
• Russia, Pakistan, and the United States are the PLA’s top three partners, but the volume of U.S.-China engagements has declined significantly from its peak in 2015, while engagements with Russia and Pakistan have continued apace.
• Initially suspicious of multilateral forums, the PLA now participates in six annual multilateral security dialogues and hosts several other meetings in China. These forums provide a platform for Chinese messaging and an opportunity for regular bilateral meetings with Chinese partners.
• As China’s diplomatic weight has grown, more countries are willing to send their senior officials to China without reciprocal visits. This highlights the increasing willingness of other countries to engage on Chinese terms. China has also followed U.S. practice and initiated new “2+2” foreign ministry/defense ministry dialogues with South Korea, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
• Multilateral exercises sponsored by organizations such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) make up a modest but increasing proportion of PLA exercises. The PLA has also increased exercises with Southeast Asian militaries in recent years, including with countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines that have territorial disputes with China.
• Military exercises play a symbolic role in demonstrating friendly political relations. Most PLA exercises involve nontraditional security issues such as humanitarian assistance and antiterrorism, but exercises with Russia, Pakistan, and the SCO are more focused on combat-relevant skills. China and Russia also started to conduct operationally focused joint air and naval patrols in 2019.
• The COVID-19 pandemic had a significantly negative impact on PLA military diplomacy. Port calls stopped entirely from March 2020 to November 2022, and senior-level meetings were mostly conducted by video teleconference or phone call, with little travel by senior PLA leaders. Military engagements decreased by 75 percent, but the PLA became more active in delivering COVID-19 medical supplies, personal protective equipment, and medical expertise to countries in South and Southeast Asia. Activity began to recover in 2023, but has not returned to pre-COVID-19 levels.
• Purges of senior PLA leaders have become an obstacle to the PLA’s ability to maintain consistent relations with foreign counterparts.
• The volume of PLA engagements does not necessarily equate to influence. U.S. allies and partners, especially in Southeast Asia, use military diplomacy as a means of managing their broader relationships with China and sometimes engage with the PLA to balance more substantive security cooperation with the United States. Close U.S. allies such as South Korea and Australia have seen a decrease in engagements with the PLA as U.S.- China security tensions have deepened.
• U.S. policy should focus on limiting the PLA’s ability to use military diplomacy to improve its operational capabilities or to build strategic relationships that give it access to ports and bases. The United States should not dissuade U.S. allies and partners from engaging the PLA as part of their China policy but should insist that friendly militaries not teach the PLA tactics, techniques, and procedures they have learned from the United States and be cautious when engaging the PLA in exercises.

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Robert D. Kaplan’s early 2023 book, The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, is the latest of his nearly two dozen books over the past 35 years. Like its predecessors, The Tragic Mind features Kaplan’s impressive powers of observation and analysis at the junction of politics, history, and world geography. Unlike his prior prodigious, geographically focused works including Balkan Ghosts (1994), Monsoon (2010), and In Europe’s Shadow (2016), this is a short work. It contains his personal musings unbound by specific geography and focused on both his experiences reporting from war zones since the early 1980s and his reflections about them in the context of great philosopher-thinkers from ancient Greece to modern America.

In The Tragic Mind, Kaplan describes the leader’s historic dilemma about the use of force. That choice is never truly one between good and evil but rather between one good and another or between lesser evils. That choice also is destined to cause suffering. Kaplan observes that leaders—political and military—must keep this in mind and be humble in their decisions and realistic in execution. They must think tragically to avoid tragedy.

Spanning 14 pithy chapters, The Tragic Mind is written with a foreboding tone. Kaplan has reported on Yugoslavia’s fragmentation and collapse into civil war after Josip Broz Tito’s death; Romania’s chaotic plight after the fall of its dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu; and the tumult, turmoil, and suffering that convulsed Iraq, Libya, and Syria when external interventions, military and cyber, wracked long-standing tyrannical regimes. In this book, Kaplan works to make sense of the extraordinary human suffering during these dramatic events by consulting the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare for insights into the frailty of the human condition. He also references the philosophical wisdom from European thinkers like Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and G.W.F. Hegel to chronicle the patterns of human behavior, both noble and flawed, throughout the ages.

Kaplan’s literary journey blends with his personal war-zone tribulations to produce a work with chapter titles like “The Battle of Good Against Good,” “Order and Necessity Must Be Obeyed, Even When They Are Unjust,” “Because War Is Ever-Present, the Burden of Power Is Overwhelming,” and “Imperial Wars Are Decided by Fate.” There are more. All are signposts to Kaplan’s major insights and cautions. He reminds the reader that since the ancient Greeks and Persians, the eternal political struggle for humankind is that of “tyranny against anarchy.” Neither is an absolute good or an absolute evil. But for  Kaplan, 40 years of personal history with human suffering convinced him that the ancient Persian philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali had it mostly right when he argued that 1 year of anarchy is worse than a hundred years of tyranny. And so is Shakespeare, in whose works Kaplan observes, “[O]rder is the first step toward civilization. Only after order is established can the work begin to make order less coercive.” The tragic mind understands this and values order over chaos even while it understands that that order can descend into tyranny. The tragic mind does not wallow in passivity. It acts when necessary and with the humility that comes from the historic understanding that the dangers of hubris, pride, and human ambition are always present and will lead to tragedy if the “terrible power of the irrational” is allowed to drive a choice to use force in pursuit of “grand ambition.”

Kaplan laments Washington’s recent military forays in its pursuit of the “grand ambition” of making the world in America’s image as a liberal democracy. He views America’s last great statesman to be George H.W. Bush—“the last American President to embrace the use of military power while thinking carefully and tragically about it.” Kaplan defines Bush’s humility, prudence, and tempered determination to have exemplified the tragic mind and successfully guided the United States to win the first Gulf War, manage the fall of the Soviet Union, and sustain U.S. relations with China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. He finds Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump wanting in comparison.

Most of The Tragic Mind looks back at examples of unsatisfactory U.S. military interventions to end tyranny. The book’s epilogue looks forward. Kaplan warns modern American politicians, pundits, and intellectuals that a “tragic sensibility” is required today to manage intensifying Great Power rivalry in Europe and the Indo-Pacific region. A tragic mindset is not afraid to take military action but proceeds deliberately. It analyzes rationally and acts with temperance, prudence, and an understanding that action generates counteraction, and leaders who fail to appreciate the worst possible outcomes will only exacerbate human suffering with little to show for it.

In the context of America’s ongoing Great Power competition with Russia and China, the choices made in Washington are consequential. The tragic mind must consider whether pursuit of an absolute defeat of Russia in Ukraine could result in national collapse like that of a century ago when post-czarist Russia descended into anarchy and millions died. The tragic mind must also contemplate whether the prospect of Ukrainian success could lead Moscow to use nuclear weapons—taking the world to a new, dangerous threshold of destruction and encouraging other countries to acquire them. Likewise, would an overt American military engagement of China over its struggle to incorporate Taiwan be worth the impact on the global economy, or could such a clash unleash a series of destructive military, cyber, and space-based exchanges that would permanently shift today’s world of strategic competition into one of persistent war?

Kaplan’s insights urge American politicians and their military advisors to display humility and be mindful of history when evaluating the proper means to challenge China and Russia in this era of Great Power competition. The tragic mind requires “an awareness of the narrow choices we face and however vast the landscape, the knowledge that not everything is possible, regardless of the conditions.” Military planners are used to developing alternative courses of action based on best- and worst-case possibilities and narrowing the options to those that best mitigate risks. The Tragic Mind suggests that America’s most senior civilian and military leaders need to adopt and enhance this military planning technique, seasoning it with an understanding that actions taken to sustain order, however imperfect, are inherently less destined for tragedy than those targeted at ending tyranny without certainty that a better form of order will swiftly follow. JFQ

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The war in Ukraine has been going on for 3 years now, and much has been written about Vladimir Putin’s strategic failures and the valor of the Ukrainian defenders. The conflict has transformed from a poorly executed coup de main into a grinding war of attrition. It is time to take stock of this conflict. Learning from contemporary conflict is harder than it seems, but it is a small investment with big payoffs from crucial insights into the changing character of war.

These three books—War in Ukraine, The War for Ukraine, and A Call to Action—collectively offer wide-ranging perspectives from this violent contest of wills. Learning from this and any war is complicated by limitations in access to battle data, from determining what did or did not work and why, which is often blurred in the fog of war. This set of books provides history’s first cut of the confrontation, and each uses a different analytical lens across all three levels of war. 

At the strategic level, War in Ukraine offers a set of penetrating insights from an all-star cast of commentors. This well-edited anthology provides the reader with a study of the first 2 years of the war. While it is replete with incisive analysis, it contains no Ukrainian or Russia voices.

JFQ readers will find the chapter by Thomas Mahnken and Joshua Baker reveals numerous strategic insights that could be applied beyond Ukraine. Mahnken is a well-recognized defense strategist and leads a Washington-based think tank, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Baker is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Their chapter offers an analysis based on several decisionmaking pathologies. These fallacies include the irrationality of war, the irrational adversary, the hyper-rational adversary, overestimation, silver bullets, and the faith of decisive victory. All of these can be seen in this contest by the antagonists or by commentators. It is a great case study for teaching strategy. As Mahnken and Baker note, “an awareness of the pitfalls that soldiers, statesmen, and scholars frequently fall prey to is a useful starting point to formulating and implementing sound strategy” (198). For that reason, this chapter should be mandatory reading in all U.S. professional military educational programs; it offers a diagnostic framework that might be applied in every case study in any policy and strategy department.

The chapter written by Alexander Bick is also noteworthy. It offers an insider’s perspective on National Security Council efforts to anticipate the implications of the alarming crisis in Ukraine. This illuminating chapter shows how the Joseph Biden administration learned from its planning shortfalls that led to the ignominious withdrawal from Kabul in the summer of 2021. This time the staff proposed—and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan approved—the charter of a “tiger team” that worked full time in late 2021 to assess the likelihood of a Russian invasion and possible U.S. policy responses. Bick details the tabletop exercises that this cross-functional team employed to explore its assumptions and the policy playbook it prepared for the President. The author is honest about the failings of imagination in the team. However, he concludes the team helped. Bick writes, “It enabled us to foresee challenges and requirements that had not yet arisen. And it provided a vehicle to explore and develop ideas that otherwise would have languished as agency leadership prioritized near-term demands” (149). The question that should be asked now is how these processes are institutionalized so that U.S. strategic competency is not subject to a sine wave of costly learning during turnovers in administrations. (See Frank Hoffman, “Risk: A Weak Element in U.S. Strategy Formulation,” JFQ 116, 1^st Quarter 2025).

Critics of the Biden administration’s risk aversion will find much to agree with in the critique of Washington’s strategy in a sharp chapter crafted by Kori Schake, a veteran policy practitioner and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She notes a persistent pattern in Washington’s slow responsiveness to Kyiv’s continual requests for advanced arms. While the Ukrainians were in an existential battle, the administration initially denied them requested weapons until other allies stepped in or when public and allied opposition reached a crescendo. Only then would “the Biden Administration bowing to public criticism and inter- national pressure and slowly relenting [provide] the systems months and even years later than when they would have been most effective” (164). History may ultimately find this era’s risk and escalation assessments to have been contradictory to U.S. interests.

The second book examined in this review, The War for Ukraine, was penned by retired Australian Army Major General Mick Ryan. He is no stranger to these pages (see his article “The Intellectual Edge: A Competitive Advantage for Future War and the Strategic Continuum,” JFQ 96, 1st Quarter 2020). Since his retirement, General Ryan has written three books, including both fiction and nonfiction accounts. (His War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict was reviewed in JFQ 108, 1^st Quarter 2023.) This third product is the result of several trips to Ukraine and offers two overlapping themes that have shaped the Russo-Ukrainian war: strategy and adaptation. The book is evenly divided by these interactive factors. In his net assessment of the contending strategies, the author uniquely defines Kyiv’s strategy as one of “corrosion,” which presumably fits in the middle of Hans Delbrück’s famous binary set of annihilation and exhaustion. In Ryan’s telling, this form of strategy includes the expanded competitive space of social and informational interaction between societies and the vulnerability of civil society due to cybersecurity weaknesses or the increased reach of long-range strike systems. This concept has utility in this conflict and may be a useful distinction worthy of further case studies and incorporation into military doctrine.

Ryan’s strategy discussions are excellent, particularly his discussion and comparison of Russia and Ukraine’s respective “theories of victory” in his superb dissection of the two countries’ strategies. Strategic scholars including Colin Gray and Williamson Murray put more stock into a larger conception of a theory of success rather than the narrower concept of a theory of victory that may focus on achieving military victory at the expense of attaining the better peace that proper political guidance would frame (see Frank Hoffman, “The Missing Element in Crafting National Strategy: A Theory of Success,” JFQ 97, 2^nd Quarter 2020). General Ryan appreciates the distinction; he declares “postwar prosperity, reintegration, reconstruction, and justice will all be necessary elements of a more enduring ‘victory’ for Ukraine” (65).

Ryan touches on one other enduring constant in war: the human dimension. Though he identifies several critical technologies displayed in the conflict, including Starlink, rocket systems, artillery fires, targeting mesh networks, artificial intelligence, and drones, he underscores the centrality of war as a human endeavor. “While machines and information are vital elements in human competition and war,” Ryan observes, “it is humans who decide how these are used, where, when, and in what organizational constructs that ultimately decide victory and defeat” (11).

The third book, A Call to Action, is an anthology based on a research study conducted by the U.S. Army War College. The project was overseen by John A. Nagl and Colonel Katie Crombe and contains 18 chapters, most penned by students at the Army’s top-level school. The design of the team’s effort is based around battle functions, which generate a comprehensive assessment of the conflict at the operational level. While the project is sponsored by an institution focused principally on land warfare, the book includes chapters on naval operations in the Black Sea and the air war in Ukraine. Every chapter concludes with relevant lessons for application by the Army, with clear and actionable recommendations. The book finds that Ukraine offers lessons similar in importance to those the U.S. Army culled from Israel’s struggles in the Yom Kippur War five decades ago, which were translated into a successful U.S. Army transformation.

The chapter devoted to fires is chockfull of insights on Ukrainian adaptability. The author, Lieutenant Colonel John “Jay” B. Bradley III, also provides a critique of Russian fires systems, including Russia’s “nearly fanatical” reliance on artillery (92). He attributes the Russian Army shortfalls to its poor automated command and control systems and its overly centralized command structures. Conversely, “Ukraine’s ability to make decisions at the lowest level has yielded increased success” (99). Kyiv’s leaders adopted mission command and introduced command and control systems that allowed the Ukrainians to efficiently apply precision munitions and fires against high-value targets. This chapter details the entrepreneurial agility of the Ukrainians.

The author makes explicit the need for the Army to be ready for constant movement and increased force protection. He also recommends adopting systems supported by artificial intelligence (AI) for both dynamic targeting and air space management. Bradley writes, “The targeting process must incorporate AI, autonomous solutions, redundant communication capabilities, and permissive control measures” so that organic fires can match the pace of large-scale and dynamic operations (107). One critical note, however—there is little appreciation for the role of drones as sensors or as a form of fires. Readers will find this topic covered in detail in Ryan’s The War for Ukraine.

Another key chapter, written by U.S. Army Colonel Jamon K. Junius, deals with Mission Command, a leadership philosophy that is central to joint doctrine in the United States. Ukrainian fighting forces are operating far from their major headquarters, which are led by senior officers who may retain too much of the centralized Soviet doctrine they were initially trained with. However, in Ukraine’s prewar training, Ukrainian generals understood the benefits of promoting the trust and initiative that are synonymous with Mission Command. General Valery Zaluzhny, then the head of the Ukrainian defense establishment, sought to promote “a decentralized, empowered, more agile way of warfare than the Russian model” (119). Mission Command has proved itself again in Ukraine, despite the lack of the mutual trust and cohesion normally generated by doctrine, repeated exercises, and extended association.

In toto, War in Ukraine, The War for Ukraine, and A Call to Action represent the best of a growing flood of analyses of the ongoing tragedy in eastern Europe. Brands’s book is especially invaluable on U.S. national security considerations and has exceptional value to top-level schools and civilian security studies curricula. General Ryan’s book is particularly suited for a larger audience, including command and staff colleges, due to its extensive links to foundational literature for students of the profession of arms. A Call to Action will interest anyone who wants to absorb insights from the battlefield and the ever-changing character of warfare.

Further studies about the war in Ukraine will eventually emerge, once the drones and bullets stop flying and historians can interrogate the facts and the fictions. For now, this set is the best collection of insights at each level of war and across all battlefield functions. Understanding the present in context is a requisite step to learning and for preparing for the future. JFQ

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Winning Without Fighting is an excellent new book crafted by four veteran scholar-practitioners that presents a strategic framework for winning the competition between the United States and its allies on the one side and an emerging authoritarian axis that includes China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea on the other. It explores irregular warfare (IW) in the broadest sense, but it makes little reference to insurgency, terrorism, or unconventional combat. Rather, the authors focus on IW as a broad set of competitive activities where “violence and coercion have their place but are unnecessary for an action to be part of an IW campaign.” In this book, irregular warfare is much like George Kennan’s political warfare: “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” The ends of these competitive efforts are “achieving relative power, influence, and legitimacy in the international system.” The means include information, military, economic, and diplomatic assets. The authors add resilience, both national and alliance-wide, to this set.

Rigorous and systematic in analysis, Winning Without Fighting begins at a key source of policy, the complex issue of strategic cultures. With thorough references to the scholarly literature, the authors conclude that U.S. strategic culture is not well suited to strategic competition in peacetime. Americans tend to see a clear division between war and peace and prefer to use overwhelming force in clear-cut situations. The Departments of Defense and Treasury dominate our coercive approach to deterrence. While the United States is poorly postured for gray zone warfare, “authoritarian regimes . . . prioritize centralized and coordinated IW campaigns as integral to strategic competition.” The authors write, “Unlike the [United States], Chinese strategic culture conceives of a fluid relationship between war and peace; indeed, all statecraft is essential to achieving power in their never-ending struggle.” Russia is less risk averse than China and is currently engaged in trying to restore greater Russia by attacking Ukraine and subverting Moldova and Georgia. The authoritarian nature of Russia and China helps them in some aspects of IW but drives them to excess and frequently alienates foreign clients and neighbors.

To build a bridge to the future, Winning Without Fighting examines the U.S. record of political warfare during the Cold War, an era roughly analogous to the present. During the Cold War, the United States waged political warfare by backing noncommunist parties, funding dissidents, and supporting various anticommunists. It “formed alliances whose purpose was to contain the spread of communism.”

To facilitate a strategy of containment, the United States formed key institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Information Agency, and Radio Free Europe. Even the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine can be seen as instruments of political warfare. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration—working with allies and friends, like Pope John Paul II—orchestrated a coordinated campaign of rearmament and political warfare to help bring down the Soviet Union. Despite a strategic culture that did not lend itself to this type of conflict, the United States had significant successes in Cold War political warfare. At the same time, the authors argue that it is important to not mythologize the capabilities and limitations of the force in that 50-year era.

The next four chapters of Winning Without Fighting assess the various tools of statecraft: military, economic, information, and resilience. While necessary, these chapters are dense and focused on nonkinetic competition. Each of the chapters ends with strategic recommendations that make perfect sense. Some recommendations, however, like “avoid [economic] protectionism,” are out of fashion among U.S. politicians of both major parties.

The most interesting aspect of the analysis is considering resilience as a tool of statecraft. Nations and systems of governments have long recognized the importance of resilience, but few have set out to cultivate it. In this era, it is essential. Hostile powers will use their assets, particularly in disinformation, to break down trust in governments and prevent nations from adapting effectively to challenges. It is essential to combat disinformation and to plan for natural disasters and pandemics. The authors point out the importance of alliance-wide approaches in furthering resilience. They then turn their attention to the often ignored topic of measuring success in strategy in terms of power, influence, and legitimacy.

The concluding chapter is a worthy summation and set of recommendations. To summarize, the authors believe that:

Conventional military capabilities alone—or even primarily—are as insufficient for the coming era as they proved to be for the last one. American strategic and military culture must expand the aperture and embrace the thinking of Sun Tzu and Kautilya. Their emphasis on winning without fighting, prioritizing non-military tools of statecraft . . . and embracing myriad uses of information and disinformation provide a useful framework (224).

The authors conclude that this will require reinvestment in the assets like regional expertise and language skillshat “bolstered American competitive
statecraft during the Cold War.” More specifically, they recommend a focus on security cooperation, use of trade and economic statecraft, and  increasing collective resilience.

This is a welcome approach. We need better statecraft and integration of all instruments of national power. We need better policy assessment and a greater focus on resilience and restoring trust between the American people and its government. On the other hand, the recommendations here will not replace the importance of more defense spending. In fact, they may add marginally to overall government spending at a time of gargantuan budget deficits. An approach that is less Defense Department–centric will also put more planning and programmatic weight on the State Department.

None of these objections should detract from this excellent and original book. As we move into yet another novel security environment, it is essential that we get beyond buying another next-generation system, enlarging the iron mountain, and finding different terminology to describe the need to deter, fight, and win the first battle of the next war. We need to focus on how to succeed in competitive statecraft, which just may be the best way to avoid World War III. The authors of Winning Without Fighting are to be commended for their contribution to the discussion of IW and strategic competition. JFQ