Andrew Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And in fact, this might be a good opportunity for you to discuss the four key tenets of strategic leadership that you discuss in the book. Yes, well, what we found in the book very much, very strongly, and it’s interesting you should have mentioned the Chinese Civil War because you get that very powerfully as well, is that the side that wins wars very often is not the one that controls the cities or has the largest amount of men or has the best weaponry. As you mentioned the Chinese Civil War, let’s look at that for a second. The Guomindang Nationalist forces, at the outset of that war, had all the major cities, they had four or five times the number of men, and they also had all the advanced weaponry that they’d taken off the Japanese at the time of the Japanese surrender in 1945. Yet they still lost that war. One of the reasons was that they didn’t have very impressive strategic leadership. And Chiang Kai-shek, even when he did come up with good plans, often had warlords below him that refused to carry them out. So what we discovered in war after war is that the thing that matters most is this concept of strategic leadership, by which we mean having a leader at the top, either civil or military, but the ultimate decision-maker. And it’s usually best when there’s somebody who represents the civil and somebody who represents the military and they get along, and they need to get the big idea for the war right. They need to then be able to communicate that to their lieutenants effectively and indeed to the wider country. They need to be able to implement it aggressively and efficiently. And then they need, as the fourth of the levels, to continue to adapt the big idea to circumstances on the ground and to the way in which the war develops. Because obviously, no war carries out according to plan. The enemy always has a say, and then to refine it again and again and again. And so the people who are able to do that are very often victorious, even though they start off the campaign with many more disadvantages than their enemy. You know, I think this might be a good opportunity to start talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, which obviously your coauthor can speak to like nobody else. I found it really interesting in reading his accounts of what happened in those two countries, especially Iraq, which was a premeditated invasion. It wasn’t something we had to just immediately do. It had a completely different casus belli with the weapons of mass destruction than 9/11.…

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