 And his question mark, what does this mean? Are there American ways of war? Is the concept ways of war even a useful concept? I'll give you a hint. I think it's useful. That's why I'm talking about it. So what might ways of war or a way of war look like? Well, we have ways of life. Way of life in a particular region might be farming. It might be sailing. It might be factory work. So why not ways of war? Experiences and memories can dictate ways of war. You remember, one nation will remember what it was like fighting a nation a decade earlier, or 20 or 30 years earlier, so they're going to try to refight that war. Iconic theorists and leaders can set the tone for ways of war. Alfred Thayer Mahan or Carl von Klauswitz, any number of these people can set up a particular way of war or ways of war for a nation or region. Geography and environment can affect ways of war. I mean, it's no wonder that the British Empire was very sea power oriented. It's an island, and the British Empire had possessions all over the globe at one point. So that environment or that geography can help to affect how nations fight wars, the ways in which nations fight wars. Technology can affect the ways nations fight wars. Think of what the German Blitzkrieg would look like without the Panzer, wouldn't go very far. So technology, natural resources can also dictate how and why nations fight. For example, the ancient Greeks didn't have enough food to supply their city-states. So as soon as harvest is over, it's time to go to war, attack the neighboring city-state, and take their food. So natural resources can affect things. Economics, economic factors can affect. Then we're getting into something a little more squishy and kind of controversial. But culture, religion, and ideology can affect the ways nations fight. Culture, religion, ideology, these are all kind of overlapping. Traditions, traditions that a certain group of people or a certain unit or certain branch of the armed forces has always fought wars this way, so they've got to continue to fight wars in the future. Institutions, if there is a dominant institution, an educational center or a particular command group, that institution can help to kind of nudge ways of war. The other thing that happens is the enemy has a vote. Sometimes, depending on who you're fighting, that enemy will actually have a very strong influence on how you yourself fight. So that's kind of conceptually what's going on there. There's been some, before Russell Weigli published his landmark book, The American Way of War in 1973, there have been other historians and theorists that talked about ways of war. For example, Liddell Hart talked about a British way of war at one point. But in 1973, Russell F. Weigli's The American Way of War kind of really popularized this concept and brought it into sort of kind of the historical dialogue and the military theory and strategy dialogue. He believed that from 1864 through World War II, the United States was fighting wars that were efforts for survival and victory, efforts for survival and victory, and that the United States would mass its forces and achieve decisive victory by what he called a strategy of annihilation. And the key campaigns that he would point to would be Sherman's March to the Sea and then March through the Carolinas or the D-Day invasion followed up by the race across France and into Germany over the next 11 years. So the strategy of annihilation. But note that he's talking about one way of war. Several historians have challenged this. In 2007, Brian Lin at Texas A&M published The Echo Battle, which challenged Weigli's sort of singular monocausal way of war and argued that there was actually a way of battle, not so much a way of war, but a way of battle. Just a couple of years ago, Tony Echeverria at the Army War College wrote what I think is the best book on The American Way of War. He does a very thorough literature search and summarizes how different people have talked about The American Way of War and kind of synthesized them together. It's a fantastic book. The problem with both these books, though, is that they're army-centric. They talk about the army. So the army is a frontier army in the 19th century and land army, ground power in the 20th century, that sort of thing. Well, that doesn't necessarily apply to the Navy and it certainly doesn't apply to the Marine Corps or more recently to the Air Force. So they're good on the army, but they're not very inclusive. Then in 2014 and again in 2018, the book I co-authored, Ways of War, basically tries to add some complexity and add some factors that would help us understand American ways of war if indeed they exist. All right, one of the things we see throughout American history, particularly in the 20th and 21st century, though, is that if the nation goes to war, the government and the military needs to harness the pluralistic institutions, get society and politicians behind the war effort. Because without the home fires burning and without home front support, wars become much more difficult to maintain. Big conventional wars are preferred. Big conventional wars are preferred in the 20th and 21st century. Not only can't always get those, but they're preferred. And then we've got this sort of American, roll up their sleeves and American know-how. Every problem can be fixed. I think that Americans are hardwired to fix problems. And so if the United States military is losing a battle or losing a war, then that's a problem to be fixed. So these are, I think, relatively positive aspects of the ways of war. But then I also see some negative aspects of the ways of war that Americans, some Americans leaders and so on strategists are sometimes hardwired with. They see the world through a particular lens or lenses. I think that too often there's cherry picking from history, finding the one example that you can plug in to something else to make that something else seem smart. So cherry picking from history, picking only historical examples or historical leaders that would agree with what you're trying to do. Script enemy actions. If you look in the inner war years in 1920s and 30s, the war games that were initiated and run here at the Naval War College with the Americans against the Japanese, war playing orange, all that sort of thing, those war games usually had the Americans winning and the Japanese were doing their own war games and the Japanese already won those. So script and scripting enemy actions can be a problem because sometimes the enemy doesn't read that script. They do things you don't expect, culturally ignorant. It's one thing to fight other Caucasians in Western Europe. There's a certain shared set of beliefs and so on, but when the United States has gone into other regions, third world regions of the Middle East and so on, the United States has gone in being culturally ignorant of the ways of life, of the religions, of gender relations, of the economies and so on, and it's a very painful learning process to bring the American service personnel that are in country sort of up to speed on what these other cultures are like. Blind faith and technology and firepower. Now technology and firepower are great things. Technology and firepower. You call it an artillery strike in World War II or Korea, that can make the difference, but having, putting your eggs all in that, those baskets of technology and firepower can be a problem. It's just technology and firepower are arrows in a bigger quiver. Fear of attrition. One of the reasons why widely talked about the strategy of annihilation was because he recognized that representative democracies like the United States aren't gonna necessarily be able to fight long, bloody wars. We wanna get it over quickly. And so that's why he points to 1864 and 18, or 1864 in the American Civil War as a prime example and then the D-Day invasion in 1944. But it doesn't really fit in the Pacific War. The Pacific War goes on from, you know, the first landing Guadalcanal in August of 1942, almost to that same month, three years later, and you've got the atomic bombs. That's a long sort of episodic battles and engagements every few months, but then it's also attrition. It's not annihilation, it's attrition. It's a long slog through New Guinea and to the Philippines and across the Central Pacific. So these things are all tied to American values, to American political ideas, to the American economy, to the American psyche, if you will, I think. All right, so I'm gonna run through the 20th century really quick. I've just given you kind of concepts and now I wanna hang these on a chronology. So with the 1890s and the end of the frontier and the United States stretching from sea to shining sea, you have a watershed change in American military strategy and policy in the 1890s. You have the rise of a bigger Navy. You have the Spanish-American War. You have possessions across the globe that are controlled by the United States after the Spanish-American War and they require protection. So this is a transition to great power during this time frame. You have the Great White Fleet. Then 1917, 1918, I would say that the experience for the Americans in World War I was almost total war. Combat on the ground was only about six or seven months, really, maybe eight months and then, of course, the American Navy had been involved a little bit longer than that but it really, the United States was not in World War I long enough to get the full measure of what the brutality of World War I was like. Of course, if you were there on the trenches with Harry Truman or whoever, then you did get your fill of what total war was looked like but the nation as a whole didn't. Then from 1918, 1941, you have what I think is the US military kind of flailing about trying to learn how to fight and what to fight with. You've got tanks, you've got army aviation, you've got naval aviation, you've got amphibious operations. How are they gonna find the right missions, the right equipment, the right doctrines, the right force structure and it just becomes very messy and they're doing all of this with a very, very meager budget, no money for real research and development. A lot of this is theoretical. Then World War II, that's the apogee or the epitome of Weigli's way of war thesis or maybe it isn't. As I said, if you look at the Pacific War it's not really a fast strategy of annihilation. Now, by August of 1945 when they dropped the atomic bomb the atomic bombs are pretty annihilating, right? But the Americans are fighting three years before that. Before they make that move. Then by 1947 up until the 1990s we have the Cold War coming on and containment. Containing the Soviet military threat or containing the communist ideology which was like a virus, an ideological virus that could infect nations, particularly in the third world if they're hungry or underemployed or poor then communism as an ideology spoke to those people and represented a threat to American interests. After the Cold War is over and right around 1991 or so depending on how you wanna date that there's a transition from the Cold War to the post-Cold War world. Some people call this Pax Americana, the American peace. And as I was writing the last chapter of my book The Ways of War I was trying to figure out what the pivot point is for the last chapter which runs 1973 to 2018. That's a long time period. So I stumbled upon the early, Clinton's first term of office and his national security strategy of engagement and enlargement. This is Clinton's in the mid 1990s. There were three key parts of this national strategy. One was to sustain, to credibly sustain our security with military forces that are ready to fight. That's pretty standard, right? You know, we gotta be ready for a fight even if it never comes. To bolster America's economic revitalization. To bolster America's economic revitalization. Again, not necessarily an outlandish notion but then to promote democracy abroad. These things are tied together and I would argue that promoting democracy abroad is really interventionism. So this comes through in the 1990s but Clinton doesn't really use the full range of these ideas whereas after 9-11 the US government will use the full range of this to intervene. Now I cannot take this concept. I cannot say that I came up with this concept originally. I worked at the US Army Engineer School from 2009 to 2013 and Brigadier General retired now but not then. Peter DeLuca was the commandant of the engineer school and he was giving a lecture to the senior staff and he talked about this concept. So I must footnote him because he's the one that really helped me sort of articulate this. So I'm grateful to that. So as we're moving into 9-11 and post 9-11, you have warfare 9-11 and thereafter that's mostly asymmetric or guerrilla warfare or fourth generation warfare, unconventional warfare, whatever sort of name you have for that. It's kind of a flavor of the month but it's mostly asymmetric. Then I would argue, I know this gets a little bit political but I would argue that Bush and the Neo-Conservatives in his administration latched on to the ideas in Clinton's national security strategy and used those as applications for American power and used those as interventionism. So that maybe may or may not be controversial but certainly the Neo-Conservatives that were in Bush's administration were not in the Democratic administration beforehand before that under Clinton and so they came into power and then with the tragic losses of 9-11 that followed I think that those Neo-Conservative advisors were able to take the blueprint and the ideas that Clinton had laid down and activate them, operationalize them. Then as I'm working through the second edition of the book I have to try to figure out how to understand Barack Obama's military policies and I flailed about on this and it's very recent so when I'm writing this chapter in the book, this section, it's much more like political journalism than history to be honest, it's more journalistic but I looked at it and he likes technology or he liked technology. He would have seven and the first four years of his administration from 2009 to 2013 he used drone strikes that are unclassified examples that we know of, drone strikes in four years seven times more total than George Bush had used in eight years of his administration, seven times more and of course when you use drone strikes that's often an act of war technically. You're violating Pakistani airspace or wherever to strike at an enemy. The other thing that President Obama liked were covert operations. The identification and execution of Osama bin Laden for example and as I'm looking at this I'm trying to say well which president or which kind of idea might Barack Obama sort of somewhat look like? He also is reducing the size of the number of men and women in the U.S. military towards his second term, he's shrinking the U.S. military so I decided that he was like Dwight D. Eisenhower on some levels, Dwight D. Eisenhower, more bang for the buck, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the new look, Dwight D. Eisenhower trying to reduce the defense department's budget so that was kind of, that was the only way that I could really kind of get a memory peg or a historical example that seemed to work and of course now with the current administration there's more question marks and I hope I have a third edition to write here in another couple of years and I'll worry about how to interpret the current administration in a couple of years when I have to write that edition. So I've talked a lot about just sort of general American ways of war but many of you are from the Seaborn Services so and I've already criticized Doctors Echeveria and Lynn for being too army centric to be too ground power centric in their theories so I wanna just summarize a little bit about what I think are American Seaborn ways of war from the 1890s to the present. U.S. Navy is being used to protect American interests and project American force, protect American interests around the globe and project American force. I'm not the only one to say this but I would argue that the U.S. military in the United States and the U.S. Navy in particular right now is similar to the British Royal Navy in about 1900, very powerful, very large but stretched very thin and also dealing with lots of localized or regional conflicts that could flare up at any time. So very, very powerful Navy, very potent Navy but spread awfully thin with lots of challenges. This is all sort of Mahanian and Outlook I think. Then U.S. Marine Corps, many missions that can contribute to every conflict, pragmatism. So they're gonna be a second land army in World War I. They're gonna do small wars. They're going to do amphibious operations. Each conflict in the 20th century, the Marines sort of adapt like chameleons so they can get a piece of the action. Even if it's not what the Marines are necessarily expected to do such as deploying division-sized units to Iraq to fight a ground war or in this case it ends up becoming a small war counterinsurgency but the Marine Corps becomes very pragmatic. Being able to make sure that the Marines have a piece of the action in every conflict. Few more factors than what I think are the U.S. Navy's ways of war. One of the questions I always ask my students as I am teaching the amphibious warfare course at Norwich that I've developed, co-developed is is the United States in the 20th and 21st century a land power, a sea power or some sort of hybrid power? That's really the key question. Is the United States a land power, a sea power or a hybrid power? And I don't know, my students argue back and forth and I end up trying to basically arguing that you gotta consider the United States a hybrid power because the United States can't attack anyone without a Navy to protect the convoys and to provide naval gunfire support and to put the Marines or the Army on the beaches. Likewise, no one can attack the United States on the ground in any meaningful way without crossing those oceans. So I would say that U.S. Navy is or the United States rather is a hybrid power and the U.S. Navy is very well positioned to support that whether it's transport or naval gunfire support or destroying enemy fleets, destroying enemy warships along the way. Mahan said that the United States was shaped by maritime geography and I think that still holds true. The United States Navy in the 20 and 21st century wanted to become a Navy second to none. So it clips the British Royal Navy eventually and the emphasis was on sea control, sea control, control of the seas, so control of trade routes, communication lines and elimination of any enemy threats to those. Of course, within the Navy and within the Department of Defense, there's all kinds of tensions that play up, tensions over war plans and missions. If you don't have a clear mission, how can you come up with a good war plan? How can you come up with the right infrastructure? If the mission is not clear or the missions are too many, there's inter-service rivalries that the Navy has had to deal with, thinking of the revolt of the admirals in the late 1940s. There's intra-service rivalries within the Navy, you know, the submarines and the surface vessels and the aviation and the aircraft carriers, they're all competing for a piece of the pie. And then of course, there's also politics, politics with a little P within the US Navy and the Department of the Navy and the Marine Corps and such, and also politics with a capital P in terms of which party is in control of the purse strings. And there's also tensions over technology. What technology is going to be adopted when? How much do you spend on research and development before you pull the trigger and or pull the lanyard or whatever and mass produce some new weapon system or some new vehicle? Or, and how long will that weapon system or that vehicle or that ship or whatever, how long will that be an effective deterrent to the enemy? Is it 10 years? Is it 20 years? Is it five years? Or something obsolete as soon as it goes on its first mission or on its first voyage? So I think these things, these are factors that can affect the Navy's way of war. And I'm not, I got a credit John Coon who is a retired naval officer and now teaches out at Command and Journal Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and also George Baer. These are some of the ideas I drew out of their writings or borrowed and elaborated from their writings. So conclusions, I'm biased of course because I believe there's a way of war. I'm also ways of war plural. I also, I also took a class from Russell Wigley during my PhD program at Temple University and then he died which was distressing but I did get to take a class from him and so having read his works earlier in my education and then being able to sit like a disciple at his feet and listen to him talk, I was influenced with the way of war concept but like others I would say that he's too, too focused on one way of war. I believe that there are many ways of war in the United States history and in other nations histories and these ways of war will change and shift over time. The US Army and US Navy's ways of war in the 19th century are very different from the ways of war in the 20th century for those two branches. Just as national strategy and policy is also very different. So I hope that at any rate, at any rate regardless of what you may or may not think that I have at least encouraged you to think in some of these terms and maybe help to drive some of the questions and answers. So thank you very much.