Dedication

David Petraeus: "To the men and women in US, coalition and

host-nation uniforms, as well as the diplomats, spies

and development experts, with whom I was privileged

to serve during nearly four decades in uniform and

government service."

Andrew Roberts: "To Simon Sebag Montefiore

and our forty-year friendship"

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1. The Death of the Dream of Peace, 1945–1953

2. Wars of Decolonization, 1947–1975

3. America’s War in Vietnam, 1964–1975

4. From the Sinai to Port Stanley, 1967–1982

5. Cold War Denouement, 1979–1993

6. The New World Disorder, 1991–1999

7. The War in Afghanistan, 2001–2021

8. The Iraq War, 2003–2011

Appendix A: Security Incidents in Iraq, January 2004–August 2008

Appendix B: Headquarters, Multi-National Force, Baghdad, Iraq, 15 July 2008

Appendix C: Anaconda Strategy versus al-Qaeda in Iraq, September 2008

Appendix D: The Battle of Sadr City, March–April 2008

9. Vladimir Putin’s Existential War against Ukraine, 2022–

10. The Wars of the Future

Acknowledgments

Maps

Bibliography

Notes

Index

Photo Section

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

There are not many positive services which the historian can do . . . higher than that of tracing the causes of wars, describing the means by which they are fought, ascertaining the reasons that led to victory on one side or the other, describing the effects, and estimating the conditions likely to produce future wars in which they would be fought.

Professor Cyril Falls, Inaugural Address as Chichele Professor of War at Oxford, 1946¹

In the early hours of Thursday, 24 February 2022, President Vladimir Putin of Russia unleashed what he hoped would be swift and devastating attacks on Kyiv and other points in Ukraine, intended to topple its government by a coup de main. Although, as this book will show, military conflict has evolved significantly since 1945, Putin deliberately chose to wage Second World War-style hostilities, with devastating consequences for both Ukraine and Russia.

One intention of this book is to put Putin’s actions in Ukraine and his methods of engagement into their proper historical context, but it has greater ambitions than just that. It will also attempt to show how militaries around the world have learned – or failed to learn – from each previous war when trying to fashion the means to fight the next, and it will investigate the personal qualities needed for successful strategic leadership.

It is important to establish what this book is not. It is not intended as a comprehensive history of all conflict since 1945, which would be nearly impossible in a single volume. Instead, it concentrates solely on conflicts that have contributed to the evolution of warfare. Nor is it a book about politics and why wars break out; rather, it is about what happens on battlefields once they have. If a conflict saw warfare evolve in some manner – such as in tactical concepts, or a crucial new weapon, or when defense became superior to offense (or vice versa) – then we have included it. The effect of increased accuracy in anti-tank weaponry in the Yom Kippur War, say, or the tactics of massed tank attack in the Gulf War, will find a place in this book, whereas we do not examine a series of lesser, often guerrilla, conflicts that were essentially fought according to much the same precepts as each other.

The Prussian military philosopher and theorist Carl von Clausewitz described warfare as politics by other means, and just as politics did not end in 1945, neither has warfare. Indeed, conflict has continued at least somewhere on the globe every year since the end of the Second World War. The twentieth century was the most brutal of all the many centuries of human existence; it is estimated that more people had already perished violently in the first half of the twentieth century than in all the previous centuries put together.

As for the twenty-first, within a month of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia had lost twice as many military personnel killed as the United States had in twenty years in Iraq, and by March 2023 the Russian death toll is thought to have reached five times the 13,300 soldiers that the USSR lost after a decade in Afghanistan in the 1980s. War is thus still very much worth studying.

The first eight of the following chapters form a chronological account of how warfare has evolved since the end of the Second World War. The ninth analyzes the Russo-Ukrainian War, highlighting those areas where it might provide clues to what war will look like in the future. Chapter 10 then draws lessons from both Ukraine and the earlier chapters about what we might expect in the wars of the twenty-first century. We concentrate upon the importance of being at the cutting edge of the latest military technology as well as on the critical roles played by leadership, training, morale, coalition-building, doctrine, the significance of highly professional non-commissioned officers and the importance of contesting the information sphere.

Strategic concepts have evolved faster since the Second World War than at any comparable period in history. A commander in that war was essentially using the same structures – corps, divisions, regiments, battalions – that Napoleon had employed in the early nineteenth century (albeit with the addition of much greater mobility, artillery and other indirect fire and airpower). Since then, however, warfare has evolved at a dizzying pace, particularly over the past two decades, and this book delineates how and why crucial changes have taken place – as well as the dramatic developments we can expect in the coming decades. Unlike any previous works on the subject, it has been written through the collaboration of a renowned battlefield commander and an established military historian, who have each brought to bear their different expertise and viewpoints.

In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we recognized that there was very little literature that places that struggle in its military history context, despite the avalanche of often excellent works on its political, economic and geostrategic contexts. In a world that has expensively and painstakingly developed precision weaponry and smart bombs, the Russians deliberately chose to revert to a brutal, Second World War – and, in parts of the Donbas, First World War – style of fighting. With military strategy and tactics evolving hugely since 1945, where each conflict teaches lessons for the next in multifarious ways that we show in the following chapters, what can explain Russia’s decision to fight a throwback war reminiscent of the Great Patriotic War – only this time with Russia as the aggressor rather than the victim?

Russia won untarnishable glory in 1945 for having provided the oceans of blood necessary to rid the world of the evil of Nazism. For every five soldiers killed fighting Nazi Germany on the battlefields of the Second World War, four died on the Eastern Front. Yet ever since 1945, Russia has been drawing down on its credit for that great service to humanity, and never more so than in President Putin’s unprovoked, reckless and unbelievably vicious invasion of Ukraine. By showing how warfare has evolved in different climes and with different weaponry and political situations over the decades since the death of Adolf Hitler, we hope to highlight just how strangely regressive is the present Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Warfare evolves; it does not ossify. Yet it is clearly also capable of being suddenly and shockingly thrown into reverse.

In each chapter we also provide examples of how, when done well, successful strategic leadership can transform even the most seriously disadvantageous situations for the better. Yet, when it fails, it can turn likely victory into certain defeat. Leaders, some of whom are politicians in this book while others are soldiers, must be able to master four major tasks.² Firstly, they need comprehensively to grasp the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach – in essence, to get the big ideas right. Secondly, they must communicate those big ideas, the strategy, effectively throughout the breadth and depth of their organization and to all other stakeholders. Thirdly, they need to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, driving the execution of the campaign plan relentlessly and determinedly. Lastly, they have to determine how the big ideas need to be refined, adapted and augmented, so that they can perform the first three tasks again and again and again. The statesmen and soldiers who perform these four tasks properly are the exemplars who stand out from these pages. The witness of history demonstrates that exceptional strategic leadership is the one absolute prerequisite for success, but also that it is as rare as the black swan.

One

The Death of the Dream of Peace

1945–1953

A third world war may well prove beyond the limits of what civilized society can endure, perhaps even beyond the limits of our continued existence as a human world.

Jan Christian Smuts’ speech to the United Nations, 1 May 1945

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, so terrible had been the suffering, with up to 60 million killed, that a dream arose that there might be peace on earth. This hope was perpetuated by the seeming end of ultra-nationalism and the birth of the United Nations, whose founding Charter stated that it hoped to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war by ensuring that nations would practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors.¹ Almost a million people signed a register of world citizens and pledged to abolish war by abolishing nations and creating a United States of the World. In a similar bout of idealism, within a month of Japan’s surrender, President Truman abolished the Office of Strategic Services, the United States overseas intelligence operation (and precursor to the CIA).

After the Nuremberg Trials, whose indictments had focused more on senior Nazis for waging aggressive war than on the Holocaust, the hope of mankind was that invasions and warfare might be abandoned as a way of solving international disputes. The universal cry of Never again applied as much to the practice of invading countries as to the monstrous crimes of the Nazi era. It was as noble as it was naive.

The immediate post-war period started off well with regard to actual cross-border warfare, although the two British partitions of the period – of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and of Mandatory Palestine in 1948 – embedded severe and traumatic conflicts that endure to this day. Similarly, the Chinese Civil War led to an independent Formosa (modern-day Taiwan) which is still a potential global flashpoint. The late 1940s might not have seen actual cross-border invasions, therefore, but they sowed the seeds for festering resentment and tensions that even today might ignite into open conflict. As the nineteenth-century British jurist Sir Henry Maine put it, War appears to be as old as Mankind, but peace is a modern invention.² Even two centuries after his observation, peace is an invention that still has teething troubles.

Far more powerful than the dreams of peace in preventing cross-border invasions in the late 1940s was the threat of nuclear annihilation, at least once the Soviet Union had tested RDS-1, its first plutonium device, at the Semipalatinsk site in Kazakhstan on 29 August 1949. By the end of the first Cold War, the United States had conducted 1,032 nuclear tests and the Soviet Union a further 715. More than half of the Soviet tests were conducted at Semipalatinsk, a sequence that had severe consequences for the local population in the generations to come, including high cancer rates, genetic defects and birth deformities.

After 29 August 1949, the world faced for the first time the real possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction, usually referred to by its insightfully neat acronym. MAD changed the Cold War, because, as one military historian succinctly put it, A total war between states possessing [atomic and nuclear weapons] carried the risk of total suicide, which imposed a new upper limit on the rationality of force.³ Dr. Henry Kissinger, an early theorist of nuclear strategy, put it in equally bleak terms when he wrote that Not long after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the risks of fielding nuclear weapons became incalculable, the stakes disconnected from the consequences.⁴ In light of this, the overriding US strategy became one of deterrence – what Kissinger would describe as a psychological strategy of negative objectives.⁵

Although President Dwight Eisenhower had privately wondered with his advisers why tactical nuclear weapons couldn’t be used just exactly as you would a bullet or anything else in the Taiwan Straits, he was far more circumspect in public.⁶ In Geneva in July 1955, at the first Anglo-American–Russian summit since the end of the Second World War, he emphasized just how mutually assured the destruction of a nuclear war would be, through the sowing of radioactive isotopes by a carrying wind, devastating to life in all its forms across the northern hemisphere.⁷

This became even truer once the megatonnage possessed by the nuclear powers grew exponentially. Hiroshima had been destroyed by a 14-kiloton bomb and Nagasaki by one of 20, or the equivalent of 14,000 and 20,000 tons of TNT. These were minuscule compared to today’s megaton warheads, which have reached the power of 1 million tons of TNT.⁸ If exploded at the optimum height, a 1-megaton bomb would destroy every brick building within a 3½-mile radius and cause significant damage for up to 13 miles. Dry leaves would ignite as far as 11 miles away, with people suffering second-degree burns inside their houses. Downwind, radiation would swiftly kill victims or slowly cause cancer over a period of months – their skin burning, their bodies bleeding internally. As Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels, historians of nuclear strategy, have pointed out, nuclear weaponry in the Cold War was a palpably blunt instrument and would be used in a blunt manner.⁹

After the First World War, many assumed that a build-up of armaments was fundamentally destabilizing, but the Cold War served to disprove this notion: leaders with vast nuclear arsenals found that a nuclear threat concentrated the minds of world leaders and successfully disincentivized superpower-on-superpower conflict, albeit in favor of limited conflicts and proxy warfare. In 1952, the US tested its first hydrogen bomb (cheerfully nicknamed Ivy Mike), and the following year found the Soviets successfully testing their counterpart, Joe 4. Not to be outdone on the world stage, Winston Churchill announced that Britain had produced its own atomic bomb in February 1952 (with a hydrogen bomb following in 1957), after which China acquired nuclear capacity in 1967, Israel (probably) by 1967, France in 1968, India in 1974, Pakistan in 1998 and North Korea in 2006.

It was not until 1972 that President Richard Nixon of the United States and Leonid Brezhnev of the USSR both recognized that the introduction of multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) meant that the number of warheads could be increased so dramatically that it would overwhelm any antiballistic missile (ABM) defenses. The result was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that limited ABMs and MIRVs to minimal numbers. What prevented the offensive from completely overwhelming the defensive, and thus increasing the attraction of a surprise attack (first strike), was the invulnerability of nuclear-armed submarines.

The deterrence effect of MAD depended upon the assurance that both adversaries would retain enough nuclear weapons even after a first strike to inflict unacceptable damage on the other.¹⁰ In the 1980s, rapid technological improvements in MIRV technology produced increased accuracy and flexible targeting, meaning that targets could be moved from massive urban areas to specific military structures. This in turn led to the concept of a controlled or limited or tactical nuclear war, of the sort that has been described as a more subtle, benign, and surgically accurate nuclear war; a possible extension of conventional war more reminiscent of the kind Eisenhower had envisioned in the Taiwan Straits, and Vladimir Putin likes occasionally to threaten in Ukraine.¹¹

In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative project to explore a space-based system for antiballistic missile defense, but it was in its infancy in September when a malfunctioning Soviet satellite early-warning system falsely reported an American missile attack, which was in fact the result of sunlight reflecting off the top of clouds.¹² Fortunately, common sense prevailed at the Soviet local command level and no doomsday scenario took place. In September 1987, a joint US–Soviet summit statement by Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev declared their solemn conviction that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.¹³

Yet, if such a war were fought, much would depend on the personality of individual world leaders – and their reaction to news of an attack. As Freedman and Michaels put it, such a response might encompass a reckless fury, lethargic submission, craven cowardice, or a firm and resolute action, the first and last of which could end in the annihilation of the human race.¹⁴ Nor do those amount to a complete checklist. Some critics of nuclear power argue that life on earth will be extinguished by the greatest nuclear catastrophe, but this is not true: merely the lives of humans and other larger animals. Even before the last human in the last cave succumbed to nuclear-induced cancer, cockroaches, rats and other such species will have inherited the earth, and the evolutionary cycle will have started again among the cities that were turned into seas of glass. The blue planet would continue to orbit the sun, simply without us on it.

The upshot of this all too easily envisaged, tangible scenario has been the refusal to employ nuclear weapons since August 1945, which have therefore not killed anyone since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed over three-quarters of a century ago (although the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 came close). In one sense, nuclear weapons have kept the peace by limiting wars: they have helped limit post-Second World War warfare to smaller, frequent but lesser armed conflicts, of which there have been, depending on how they are counted, between 150 and 300 since 1945.¹⁵ The fifty million who have died in war since that date, wrote the military historian John Keegan two decades ago, have, for the most part, been killed by cheap, mass-produced weapons and small-calibre ammunition, costing little more than the transistor radios and dry-cell batteries that have flooded the world since that period.¹⁶

Despite the fact that the dangers of a nuclear exchange have largely produced caution among superpowers in international politics over the past seven decades, praise for MAD has been scarce. No fewer than eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded to individuals and organizations for their advocacy of nuclear disarmament, and only one proponent of nuclear deterrence has been honored – Thomas Schelling in 2005 – and that was in the field of economics.¹⁷

Historians long debated who was responsible for the Cold War that broke out only a matter of months after Japan’s surrender and was well under way before it almost got hot at the time of the Berlin Airlift of June 1948 to May 1949. Since the opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s, however, it has become clear that, from the very moment the Second World War ended, Joseph Stalin was intent on extending Marxism-Leninism wherever he found a lack of Western resolve. Lenin had, after all, stated that a clash between communism and capitalism was inevitable and unavoidable, and the timing of a Cold War when Germany was weak and Europe impoverished seemed propitious to his successor, as did the relative disposition of military forces. The power to create an unappeasably hostile world power and a complete confrontation was in the hands of one man, concluded Robert Conquest, the greatest of the Kremlinologists. The dream of peace did not die of its own accord; it was murdered by Joseph Stalin.

The diplomat George Kennan, writing from Moscow, recognized Stalin’s intentions in the famous Long Telegram he sent in February 1946 which was subsequently published in the influential magazine Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym X. That March, Winston Churchill also warned of Stalin’s intractability in his Iron Curtain Speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The world was made aware that a purveyor and instigator of terror was in control of a vast, monolithic army – and quickly growing an empire of his own.

Everything that followed, as pluralist politics were crushed in Eastern Europe, stemmed directly from Stalin’s intention to degrade relations and fight an ideological war with the West: mass intimidation during Poland’s elections in January 1947, King Michael of Romania’s forced abdication in December 1947, the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 and the Berlin Blockade four months later.

It was therefore a necessary act of reactive statesmanship for President Truman to establish the Central Intelligence Agency in September 1947, and for his National Security Council to authorize it to perform covert actions two months later. Technically the attempted blockade of Berlin by Russia the following June was a casus belli, but Truman and the British premier Clement Attlee sensibly chose to interpret it more as one of intense provocation.¹⁸ They responded by airlifting supplies into the city at huge expense in a remarkably efficient operation that lasted eleven months. The result of Russia’s provocation was the precise opposite of what Moscow wished, a phenomenon that will recur regularly in this book. In April 1949, ten months into the Airlift, NATO was founded by twelve states united in their desire for collective security against Russian aggression. Seventy-three years later, as a result of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, both Sweden and Finland applied to join the by then thirty-country alliance.

The Chinese Civil War: the Generalissimo’s failure of centralized command

Because of their doomsday qualities, nuclear weapons have provided an umbrella under which conventional warfare has often thrived rather than withered away. But their existence did not affect the Chinese Civil War, which is still easily the largest military engagement since the Second World War in terms of the number of people involved, a war that determined Chinese history for succeeding generations, and thus the modern experience of the whole world to this day.

The Second World War had seen China suffer cruelly during the military expansion of Imperial Japan into its territory in the preceding years, and when it ended, 80,000 Chinese soldiers of Chiang Kai-shek’s Sixth Army were flown into Nanjing to reclaim their capital. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, poor peasant soldiers of the Ninety-Fourth Army were greeted as heroes by the wealthy Chinese citizens of the city: the liberated finely dressed in silk gowns, the liberators lucky to be wearing straw sandals.¹⁹ Yet the Chinese Nationalists knew that their fight was not over, for an earlier foe was re-emerging from the ruins of the Japanese defeat. The Soviet Union had acquired control over all strategic points in Manchuria, a crucial area in the north, and it was not Chiang Kai-shek (also known as Jiang Jieshi) whom they wanted to inherit it.

Mao Zedong had been fighting the Chinese Nationalists for nearly two decades. By the end of the Second World War he controlled hundreds of thousands of guerrilla fighters, mostly dispersed in the remote rural areas of northern China. The Japanese invasion had benefited Mao’s guerrillas in their fight against Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang Army, which had suffered significant losses at the hands of the Japanese. By 1945, Mao’s National Revolutionary Army numbered well over a million fighters, and 100 million Chinese lived in areas controlled by the communists.

To China, today one of the world’s two superpowers, the circumstances of its modern founding as a communist regime are important. A myth has developed, sedulously propagated by the Chinese Communist Party, that it won because the Chinese people were yearning for Marxism-Leninism. This is nonsense. In fact, the key to understanding the outcome of the war is to appreciate how, sometimes through no fault of his own, Chiang failed to perform properly the four tasks of a strategic leader set out in our Introduction, whereas Mao Zedong eventually came to master them all successfully.

In October 1945, soon after the Japanese surrender, Mao and Chiang Kai-shek met for the first time in twenty years at Chongqing, the latter’s wartime capital; Mao was accompanied by the American Ambassador to China. Any hope that both parties might be able to cooperate following Mao’s declaration that all parties must unite under the leadership of Chairman Chiang to build a modern China evaporated soon afterwards. Upon returning to his supporters, Mao informed them that he considered the declaration a mere scrap of paper.²⁰ Fighting broke out in the late spring of 1946. Although they won some victories against the communists’ northern bases, capturing 150 towns from January to March 1947, the Guomindang afterwards failed to win a single major victory for the whole of the rest of the war.

From 1937 to 1945 there had been two wars going on in China – the national war of resistance against the Japanese and the continuing Guomindang–communist civil war – in the former of which the Guomindang had taken a far greater part, with concomitantly far greater losses.²¹ During the war against Japan, in which between 14 and 20 million Chinese had died, China suffered appalling rural poverty and there had been a good deal of collaboration between the Chinese coastal urban elites and the Japanese, which weakened the state and its leaders, not least because corruption and inflation were also rife.²²

Corruption was (and is) dangerous, not only because it diverts resources from the war effort but also because of the way it utterly demoralizes the troops and citizens who are its victims. As he tasted the moment of victory, the historian Rana Mitter has pointed out, Chiang Kai-shek looked out over ruin both foreign and domestic . . . American disillusionment with the Chongqing government was fuelled by the wreck of the regime that ruled China. The nation had grand visions, but the reality was mass hunger, official corruption, and a brutal security state.²³

This was largely because the Guomindang rather than the communists had to a considerable extent borne the brunt of fighting against the Japanese, and were almost exhausted by the time of Japan’s sudden surrender on 1 September 1945.²⁴ Yet they were still the government of China, with all the powers of taxation, conscription and political patronage that went with that.²⁵ And Chiang, who had attended the Allies’ Cairo conference in 1943 and met Churchill and Roosevelt, was still a recognized figure on the global stage. Thus the story of the Chinese Civil War is essentially one of Chiang and his senior commanders throwing away every advantage they had, while Mao survived until such time as he was able to launch devastating counter-offensives.²⁶

Indeed, looking at the forces on paper, it is surprising that a civil war even broke out in 1945, let alone that it was lost by Chiang. The Guomindang had 2.6 million men under arms, whereas the communists had fewer than half a million, only half of whom had rifles.²⁷ The Guomindang controlled most of the key cities of China, whereas the communists were initially confined to their rural bases in the north. Yet the unruly nature of the Guomindang, which was riddled with competing egos and factions, kept the focus internal rather than on the common enemy, little guessing what horrors the communists would eventually wreak on their country.

In the light of Mao’s impressive fighting force and territorial gains, the weakening of the Guomindang government and military and Stalin’s crucial footholds in Manchuria, a clear opportunity arose for Mao to unite with the Russians and create a stretch of communist-controlled territory that swept from Mongolia across Manchuria and up to the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese communist troops marched northwards to meet the Red Army, and in April 1946 the Soviets finally left Manchuria to the communist Chinese.

The Chinese Civil War is usually divided by historians into three great campaigns: the Liaoshen campaign for the control of Manchuria between May and November 1948, the Pingjin campaign for Beijing and Tianjin from November 1948 to January 1949, and the contemporaneous Huaihai campaign in north China. It was in the Huaihai campaign that the communists won the civil war, which until then could probably have gone either way. During those three campaigns alone, the Guomindang suffered over 1.5 million casualties to the communists’ quarter of a million.²⁸

If the first task of a strategic leader is to get the big ideas right, Chiang failed dramatically. He ostracized the civic leaders who had collaborated with the Japanese in the coastal cities at just the time when he desperately needed their support. He over-centralized power in himself and thus alienated important Guomindang leaders in Manchuria, Xinjiang and south-west China. He attacked the communists too soon after meeting Mao, and thus lost the support of key figures in the Truman administration. Even though he took territory in late 1946 and early 1947, he failed to hold it. His policy towards the powerful local warlords* who controlled much of China was to fight rather than conciliate them, and he made several important tactical errors in late 1948.²⁹

Chiang’s strategy of concentrating forces in cities and scattering them along railway lines made them vulnerable to highly mobile communist guerrillas. In a country as vast as China, supply lines were always in danger, and those of the thinly spread Guomindang forces were cut regularly. Chiang’s decision to extend his lines of communication to try to recapture the north-east where the communists were receiving support from the USSR was badly misjudged.³⁰ This litany was all the more surprising because he had been an impressive commander when fighting Japan. Perhaps because of this, he was venerated by his staff who, an historian records, tended to vie with each other for his favor. This limited their independence and speed of action, since they waited on his word rather than using their initiative.³¹ This is not a phenomenon confined to the Chinese Civil War, of course. However much it might be comforting to hear one’s opinions parroted back, a general’s staff requires some professional naysayers if it is to be effective.

By contrast, Mao understood both the strategic and tactical situations he faced and he got the big ideas right. He grasped the importance of remaining agile, rather than, in his own words, make holding or seizing a place our main objective.³² He had studied The Art of War by Sun Tzu, the Chinese theorist of war of c.550–500 BC, and learned the advantages of avoiding direct confrontations if a strategy of indirect maneuvering was preferable. Despite the initial weakness of his positions, his reading of Sun Tzu had also taught him how to use strength and evaluate risk, practice deception and whenever possible do the opposite of what the enemy is expecting.³³

It helped that Mao had ultimate control over policy and strategy, with dictatorial powers of which Chiang, who was nonetheless accused of being a dictator, could only dream. Moreover, Marxist ideology was interpreted very flexibly at the local level, because unlike the Guomindang the communists were willing to do deals with virtually anybody under any circumstances; they even employed the 200,000 Manchuguo troops who had fought for Japan. Any actual opposition to communist rule was dealt with summarily; no fewer than 150,000 soldiers were executed during the war, often after torture.³⁴

The communists implemented a ruthless policy of rural land redistribution, enthusiastically beating and executing 1 million local landlords and landowners after their People’s Courts delivered guilty verdicts. With some 90 percent of the Chinese population made up of rural peasantry, coercive recruitment to the communist Army was made sweeter by promises of land and liberation. For a Chinese landlord, ownership of as little as two-thirds of an acre constituted a death sentence. This was not the spontaneous acclaim of the Chinese peasantry for the precepts of the Marxist-Leninist dialectic so much as a land grab, and often the settling of ancient local grievances.³⁵ That said, as one historian has pointed out, Both the Nationalists and the Communists resorted to horrendous strategies, including scorched earth policies, flooding vast tracts of land and engaging in urban terror campaigns, murderous purges and the use of starvation as a military tactic.³⁶

In this case, as we shall see often over the coming years, the United States hesitantly and inconsistently supported one side (the Guomindang), while the Russians supported the other (the communists). Proxy warfare of this nature would soon became so ubiquitous in the post-Second World War period that direct superpower intervention was to become the exception rather than the rule.³⁷ This use of proxies to fight the superpowers’ wars opened them both to the charge of being hypocritically willing to fight to the last Chinese, or Angolan, or Nicaraguan – or latterly Ukrainian.

The Americans withdrew from China in January 1947, although they continued to provide the Guomindang with advisers and equipment until mid-1948. By then, Chiang had lost over a million men, and was clearly losing the war. Historians will continue to debate whether President Truman lost China, but the accusation would follow him for the rest of his career – adding to the triumvirate of Truman’s huge, haunting decisions in East Asia, which already encompassed the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and would soon include American involvement in the Korean War. Historically, however, foreign intervention in civil wars rarely affects their outcome, as the Spanish and Russian Civil Wars had already shown.

Over the two years from August 1945, the communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) quadrupled in size by forcibly conscripting the peasantry in captured areas and accepting Guomindang deserters into its ranks. The Guomindang were initially armed with 3 million rifles and 200,000 machine guns captured from the Japanese, but rather than abandon positions that were impossible to defend they tended to send in further elite forces which were later surrounded and annihilated, leading to further demoralization.³⁸ Make wiping out the enemy’s effective strength our main objective, ordered Mao. In every battle, strive to wipe them out thoroughly and do not let any escape from the net.³⁹ On those occasions when they were offered a choice between annihilation and changing sides, many Nationalist soldiers chose the latter.

Desertion from the Guomindang Army was perfectly understandable considering how brutally its soldiers were treated. Some 40 percent of conscripts deserted during basic training, while another 20 percent died of starvation.⁴⁰ Once in the field, a desertion rate of 10 percent per unit per month was not uncommon. If the man next to you deserted, you were beaten and denied rations. Sometimes troops had to be roped or even chained together to prevent desertions during marches, and they could be tethered together at night too. Troops were allowed to relieve themselves only at prescribed times and it had to be done collectively.⁴¹ It was almost a laboratory experiment for demoralization. The brutalization was infectious: many Guomindang troops had formerly belonged to warlords’ bandit gangs for whom, as an historian puts it, Looting, rape, torture, execution and the burning of villages were the usual – not the exceptional – behavior.⁴²

Hyperinflation also helped to destroy Nationalist morale, as military pay became next to worthless. Officers began to steal the wages of their subordinates, sell military supplies and equipment and shake down civilians.⁴³ They also used bribery to get desk jobs away from the front line, where they could make money by selling troops’ rice rations to local dealers. Too often, notes an historian, soldiers existed on handfuls of rice which they carried compressed in their pockets.⁴⁴ Officers’ private enrichment at their soldiers’ expense is a recurrent phenomenon in badly run armies.

Capitalizing on the inflation-induced poverty ravaging China, the communists laid siege to city after city, starving the populations into capitulation, the most horrific example of which was the five-month siege of Changchun, the largest city in Manchuria. Lin Biao, commander of the PLA’s Manchuria Field Army, ordered it to be turned into a city of death. The civilians of the city – cut off from all other Nationalist-held areas nearby – resorted to eating grass, bark and the human flesh that was eventually bought and sold on a black market. Some 160,000 died of starvation, while heavy artillery hammered the city at all hours. Changchun was like Hiroshima, wrote one PLA lieutenant colonel in a memoir that was later banned. The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.⁴⁵ By the time the siege ended, every leaf and blade of grass had been consumed.⁴⁶ Daughters had been sold for minute amounts of food, the stuffing of pillows had been ingested by starving families and entire households were found frozen as if in sleep, having starved to death.

Later in the war, city after city capitulated to the communists without resistance: none wished to become another Changchun. The small guerrilla skirmishes of the early part of the war had transformed into vast, merciless arenas of attrition; Changchun represented medieval warfare with anti-aircraft guns. In Manchuria alone, writes the historian Frank Dikötter, the communists recruited or conscripted approximately one million men. In battle after battle, Chiang’s best government troops were destroyed.⁴⁷

An example of Chiang’s inability to impose his will on his own army was seen during the battle of Jinzhou in October 1948. A month before, Mao had ordered Lin Biao to capture that key city, which would seal off Manchuria from any Guomindang relief forces for Changchun and Shenyang – To close the door and beat the dog, as he put it.⁴⁸ From high ground close to Jinzhou, PLA heavy artillery made the city’s sole airfield inoperable before Guomindang forces could be sent from Shenyang to reinforce it. Despite that, Chiang still hoped to use the assault on Jinzhou to pin Lin Biao down while reinforcements arrived from Shenyang and northern China. The plans made and the orders given were sound, General David Barr, Chiang’s American adviser, later averred, and, had they been obeyed, the results would probably have been favorable.⁴⁹ Lin Biao himself agreed, later suggesting, We prepared a feast for one table, but now we have two tables of guests – what are we to do? Mao ordered him to attack the city before any more guests could arrive.

But it was not enough to get the strategic ideas right. The second task of a strategic leader highlights the importance of effectively communicating the big ideas to subordinates, and the third is to oversee their effective implementation. Chiang was able to communicate his counter-attack proposals to his powerful subordinates such as General Wei Lihuang, the commander in Shenyang, and General Fu Zuoyi, who commanded in northern China, but neither was willing to dilute his own forces to help save Jinzhou, so the implementation of the strategy was not driven through in time. Chiang had to spend no fewer than nine days flying back and forth between Shenyang and Beijing trying to persuade his overmighty subjects to come to the city’s aid, losing valuable time in negotiation.⁵⁰

By contrast, Lin Biao’s army of a quarter of a million men used the time profitably, digging miles of trenches surrounding Jinzhou, shutting off the water supply and all communications into the city, and subjecting it to a 900-gun bombardment. On 14 October, his forces breached the city wall and they took Jinzhou by nightfall, capturing 400 trucks and enough ammunition for 60,000 troops.

The loss of Jinzhou proved disastrous for Chiang Kai-shek: six days later Changchun surrendered too, and on 2 November the communists took Shenyang itself. Ten days later the Liaoshen campaign ended in Guomindang defeat. In January 1949, Xuzhou fell to the communists and the Huaihai campaign ended in a defeat too. Beijing surrendered to the communists without resistance on 22 January, and Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on 1 October. Chiang fled to Taiwan on 10 December 1949, after which no formal peace treaty, or even armistice, was ever signed.

In January 1950 China and the USSR signed a security agreement which laid the seeds for the Korean War less than six months later. The Chinese Civil War had cost a staggering 6 million lives, and left profound consequences that last to this day.⁵¹ Most importantly, Taiwan has evolved into a thriving democratic outpost of anti-CCP belief and activity whose sovereignty is threatened by an increasingly assertive China. This is arguably the most sensitive and dangerous situation in the world today. The United States has stated that, while it does not support independence for Taiwan, it would come to its aid if it were invaded, making the island a possible cause of direct conflict between the world’s two superpowers.

The Chinese Civil War was important for the evolution of warfare for a number of reasons, but most significantly because it demonstrated to the world that guerrilla warfare undertaken according to Maoist military principles by smaller forces could ultimately be successful against a Western-backed government. The infiltration of communist guerrillas into French-held Vietnam predated Mao’s victory, but the Chinese Civil War provided the Vietnamese communists with a template for what to do next, first against the French and then against the Americans.

The Korean War: getting the big strategic idea right

On Sunday, 25 June 1950, North Korean forces attacked south of the 38th Parallel border* into South Korea, with 135,000 troops, T-34 tanks and Yak warplanes. Kim Il-sung, the North Korean dictator, had been given the green light by Stalin the previous January, and with a ten-to-one superiority in a narrow sector, fighting with the advantage of surprise, his Army attacked in Blitzkrieg style redolent of the Second World War.⁵² Just as with Blitzkrieg, the Army was followed closely by the country’s secret police, which murdered POWs and suspected political opponents.⁵³ The Army of South Korea, whose President Syngman Rhee was an authoritarian American puppet, lacked heavy weaponry and has been described as little more than a lightly armed gendarmerie.⁵⁴ It retreated quickly before the onslaught.

The United States had only 500 troops in Korea at the time, and as late as a week before the invasion CIA reports had indicated that any attack that might have been planned had been called off. Its concluding judgment – that North Korea would simply rely on propaganda and subversion to undermine the South rather than on force – was woefully misguided.⁵⁵ The invasion was the first overt military assault across an internationally recognized border since 1945, and a powerful and self-confident United States quickly sought to counter it. By 30 June, after the Truman administration had decided that the attempted coup de main must not be allowed to stand, the United States had deployed thousands of troops to South Korea.

The operations covered in this book rarely equate in size with those of the Second World War. Even the US-led attack in the Gulf in 1991 and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were carried out by roughly the same number of troops that landed in Normandy on D-Day, but the latter operation was backed up by a million troops within a month of the landings. Yet they were all small in comparison with the Red Army’s contemporaneous Operation Bagration, which numbered in the millions and which killed, wounded or captured 510,000 Germans. The only post-war conflict to approximate these vast figures were the Chinese Civil War and Korea.

Kim Il-sung had one advantage that all totalitarian leaders tend to share: they can undertake a truly surprise attack, with no preparation needed to win over the opinion of the general public or dissenting politicians. As the military historian Sterling Pavelec notes, surprise attacks open wars so often because they can leverage immediate – if usually short-term – advantage over the enemy.⁵⁶ They were used by Hitler against the USSR in Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, by Japan against the United States that December and, as we shall see, by the Israelis in the Six-Day War in 1967, by the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, by the Argentines against the Falkland Islands in 1982, by the Iraqis against Kuwait in 1990 and by al-Qaeda on 9/11, among many other examples. As the senior Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz once observed, Surprise attacks happen so often that the surprising thing is that we are still surprised by them.

Yet surprise attacks have pitfalls, as Kim Il-sung and several other dictators have found. In particular, they tend to shock the enemy into a more active response than would a slow build-up. They also need adequate reinforcement if they enjoy early success, and that support might not always be developed because of the need to maintain the element of surprise. A final disadvantage is that they leave no one in any moral doubt as to who was the aggressor. Kim Il-sung’s surprise attack launching the Korean War left the United States and the United Nations convinced that North Korea needed to be stopped from swallowing the South – and if possible punished for the attempt.

President Truman, still wounded by the accusation that he had lost China to the communists in 1949, felt he could not allow the same damaging results to manifest themselves in Korea – especially as Kim Il-sung was supported militarily, financially and politically by both China and Russia. Two days after the North Korean invasion, therefore, he stated unequivocally that The attack on Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war.⁵⁷ Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the President of Columbia University and soon to assume command of NATO forces, agreed, saying, We’ll have a dozen Koreas if we don’t take a firm stand.⁵⁸ Korea was thus a new evolution of conflict in the immediate post-Second World War period: it was a war of warning that stemmed directly from what statesmen had learned from the Munich Agreement of 1938 about appeasing dictatorships.

In stark contrast to later episodes in the twentieth century, the response of the United Nations was powerful. The timing of North Korea’s invasion had been unfortunate for Kim Il-sung because the Soviet Union was boycotting the United Nations for allowing the Guomindang to occupy China’s seat on the Security Council, rather than giving it to the Mao regime. The boycott allowed the Western powers to pass Resolutions 82 and 84, authorizing a United Nations force to go to South Korea’s aid if the North did not withdraw to the Parallel. With these two resolutions, the Security Council turned the Korean War into a United Nations military operation.

The United States would become by far the largest contributor of troops from outside the peninsula, providing 88 percent of the 341,000 UN soldiers and bearing the greatest financial cost, in return for controlling the operation.⁵⁹ Alongside South Korea and the United States, troops from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey and the United Kingdom saw ground action. Eight of those countries sent warships, and five sent warplanes. Transport ships and planes were provided by eight countries, including Norway, and medical units by seven countries, including Denmark, India, Italy and Sweden.⁶⁰ The offer of three infantry divisions from the Guomindang was sensibly turned down, as it would have been likely to inflame China.

On 30 June, Truman authorized the naval blockade of North Korea and the dispatch of large numbers of ground troops. The Korean War occupies a unique place in history, the military historian Max Hastings wrote, as the first superpower essay of the nuclear age in the employment of limited force to achieve limited objectives.⁶¹ Having been stopped from expanding any further in Europe and denied any role in the pacification of Japan, Stalin turned to Asia to advance the proletarian revolution. He believed after the communist victory in China that he could prod and harry the capitalist West without provoking too heavy a backlash.⁶² In May 1950, he had confidently informed Chairman Mao that the Americans were not ready at present for a big war . . . together we will be stronger than the USA and England, while the other European capitalist states . . . do not present serious military forces.⁶³ In this he had miscalculated badly, but 5 million people were to die before that became clear.

Such underestimation of the West’s willingness to engage, believing it to be too decadent, has been all too common in post-war history. Terrorist clerics, godless Marxists and other enemies of the West share few beliefs, writes the commentator Janan Ganesh. One is that free societies have an innate flakiness: a sort of will to impotence.⁶⁴ Yet this theory, which was also shared by the Axis powers between 1936 and 1941, has constantly been proved wrong, most recently in the West’s willingness to ship enormous quantities of lethal weapons to Ukraine and to impose significant sanctions and export controls on Russia.

Each of the three American commanders in Korea – Douglas MacArthur, Matthew Ridgway and Mark Clark – were all veritable stars of the Second World War.⁶⁵ The personality of generals has always been extremely important in determining the conduct and success of warfare, but few modern commanders demonstrate this truth to the extent of General Douglas MacArthur, whose reputation has undergone ups and downs reminiscent of a Coney Island rollercoaster. For all his undoubted intelligence and great personal bravery – he was one of the most highly decorated American officers of the First World War – and his successful island-hopping strategy against Japan in the Second, the credit for which he must share with Admiral Chester Nimitz, there were many drawbacks to his character that would probably preclude him from holding general rank today.⁶⁶

Despite his stellar, if highly self-curated, reputation, the then seventy-year-old MacArthur – the American Caesar as one of his many biographies was entitled – suffered from a series of character flaws that had already emerged before and during the Second World War and were to re-emerge even more powerfully in Korea. Principal among these were hubris and vanity. Even by the standards of the mid-twentieth century, MacArthur was a monster of egotism. MacArthur is the type of man who thinks that when he gets to heaven God will step down from the great white throne and bow him into his vacated seat, wrote Harold Ickes, the Interior Secretary of the Roosevelt administration. Marshal Foch wrote in his book Precepts and Judgments in 1919 that The power to command has never meant the power to remain mysterious, but MacArthur took the opposite phenomenon to its limits, putting out scores of press releases covering his doings in minute detail. Of the 142 communiqués he sent from Corregidor during the Second World War, 109 spotlighted himself.

Yet mere egotism alone would not have prevented MacArthur from reaching the upper ranks of today’s armies.⁶⁷ His relationship with the sixteen-year-old half-Scottish, half-Filipina vaudeville star Isabel Dimples Rosario, who called him Daddy, would have given modern colleagues pause for thought, although it was his secret acceptance of $500,000 in recompense and reward from the Filipino President Manuel Quezon on 3 January 1942 – worth around $18 million in today’s money – that would have sunk his career if it had come out any earlier than it did, in 1979.

MacArthur’s major problem in Korea was that he ultimately got the big strategic idea for the conflict wrong, thus failing in the performance of the first and most important task of a strategic leader. His big idea was that it would be relatively easy to destroy the North Korean Army with superior American firepower, and that it did not matter if China sent an army across the Yalu River to North Korea’s aid, as he could always destroy that too. Nor did he have senior lieutenants who questioned these two fundamentally mistaken beliefs. It did not help that he conducted the war from Tokyo, over 600 miles away, and hardly ever visited Korea.

Rarely has the lesson of war been better proven that although a commander does not need to be on the front line, a commanding general does at least need to be in the same country as the theatre of operations. The study of large-scale maps, Lord Salisbury once said, drives men mad, and MacArthur was at such a distance from the conflict that, in historian Michael Neiberg’s words, he presented an extreme case of the inability to make the adjustment from total war to limited war.⁶⁸ Unfortunately, such an assessment would only become obvious as the war progressed.

Seoul, the capital of South Korea, fell to Kim’s forces on 29 June, only four days into the conflict. The US–British–South Korean coalition armies were forced down the peninsula to the Pusan Perimeter, while the US Navy blockaded the North. Coalition reinforcements started to arrive on 1 July under Major General William F. Dean, but when they first came into contact with the North Korean Army north of Osan on 4 July, they were forced to retreat. MacArthur was appointed supreme commander of UN forces in Korea three days later.

The Korean War was fought by Second World War generals, and so it tended to conform to that previous war’s strategies and tactics, but there was new equipment. Jet planes had entered service at the very end of the Second World War, and in Korea they predominated. Another evolution saw the use of helicopters, which were only in their very infancy before 1945 but by Korea were used to evacuate the wounded. Thereafter, helicopters were to become a crucial factor in warfare, both for moving large numbers of troops swiftly and (in general) safely and after Korea also as offensive platforms in the form of attack helicopters.

By 1 September 1950, the North Koreans had attacked across the Naktong River, and