Our view

When President Barack Obama again turned his attention to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay—the same facility he promised to close quickly when campaigning back in 2008—it reminded us that our response to the 9/11 attacks has now consumed almost a dozen years.

This nation’s political leaders, unfortunately, seem unable to fully grasp Clausewitz’s assertion that war is an extension of foreign policy and therefore must be conducted with a clear (and achievable) outcome in mind. They receive less than valuable advice from this nation’s military leaders—which we consider odd, given that American officers are not, in general, ill-prepared for decisions great and small that guide our strategic causes.

Those who attend the military academies read Sun Tzu’s classic “The Art of War.” Yet they forget his dictum that “there is no instance of a country having benefitted from prolonged warfare.”

History suggests that weaker powers often do, in fact, gain from lengthy conflicts. The American colonies won independence in part by dragging out their rebellion. Likewise the North Vietnamese understood that ultimate victory lay not in success on the battlefield, but in their ability to continue the fight, year after year.

To Sun Tzu, prolonged warfare only softened the stronger power and exposed its shortcomings.

In his mind combat served only as a last resort. “To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence,” he wrote. “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” The cost is much less and the victory far more lasting.

From Harry Truman through Bill Clinton, presidents generally based their foreign policy on the preservation of U.S. interests and the support of friendly free nations. Although we often fell into political quicksand when backing questionable anti-Soviet leaders, we rarely tried to create friends by force, build other nations in our image or micromanage their governments with great hubris.

The exception—Vietnam—should stand as a lesson.

So many years after the invasion of Iraq, the fuzzy outline of something called the “Bush Doctrine” and Obama’s hesitancy to act, we are reminded of warfare’s most famous disregarded lesson, as expressed by Sun Tzu:

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks … Hence the saying ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

Charging in with limited knowledge of a complex situation, committing forces with no clear and achievable goal that directly benefits the nation and its foreign policy goals—well, we can see the outcome of such actions by our most recent leadership.