Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…What are the mistakes and biases that come about from self-studying history, as opposed to formally studying it? In what ways is your understanding of strategy or history most likely to be incomplete as a result? Let's do history. I think about my education at Columbia. I had the most absentee landlord professors. They just didn't waste their time on me. I just did a tremendous amount of reading, and while I was there, I did the equivalent of two PhDs of coursework as a graduate student. Because going to graduate school is such an expensive event. It costs time and money and everything else. So I just took massive numbers of courses to read the reading list of what they had given me and having some guided readings was tremendously helpful. On the strategy part, this is where the Naval War College has been essential to my publications. In the strategy and policy department, what we do and what civilian academia doesn't do, and it's tragic because they're better positioned, is a big team-taught course, the strategy course. All the students at the War College have to take the main strategy course, the main joint military operations course, the main national security affairs course. It's a one-year MA. In that one trimester in which we have them, our course is four-fifths of their coursework. And then there's a junior and a senior course, so we do teach two trimesters out of three. Alright, so because it's team-taught and the lectures are given by different faculty members, so I attend everybody else's lectures, or I did originally, and I attend all the new ones. You learn so much from your colleagues and then they learn from each other. You were asking me about Bismarck. Why would I know about Bismarck? Because I had colleagues who actually knew something about him, which I don't, and I listened intently and I did the readings. And then from teaching strategy, I learned all these concepts and I've given you some of them, and they're tremendously useful for studying wars. I never would have learned about maritime powers without being at the Naval War College. It is the only institution of higher education in the United States that focuses on the strategic prerequisites for and possibilities of being a maritime power. It is essential to know this to practice U.S. foreign policy. Why? Because unlike Ukraine, if you have a continental position, if someone threatens you and invades on a given day, you have a choice on that given day, the day they chose, either you're going to capitulate or you're going to fight. So they determine when the war is going to begin. In our insulated position, unless we start doing terrible things to the Mexicans and the Canadians. Mexico is our biggest trade partner, and Canada must be not far behind. When there are wars that are important to our national security, we decide, like in World War I and World War II, do we get in? If yes, when do we get in? In Afghanistan, and in Iraq, do we get in? Do we not get in? We could have avoided Iraq altogether if we wanted to, and I'm not a Middle Eastern expert, so you'd have to talk to those people about pros and cons. tan, and in Iraq, do we get in? Do we not get in? We could have avoided Iraq altogether if we wanted to, and I'm not a Middle Eastern expert, so you'd have to talk to those people about pros and cons. Afghanistan, since we had been attacked, the chances were we were going to be in on that one because of a direct attack on us. It is incredibly important to understand this maritime position. That's why I've co-edited all these books with my husband, the ones I mentioned to you about maritime things, which took us years to do. But if you want a short course, you get half a dozen of these books and it’s actually a fast way of learning about what the maritime instrument can and can't do for you. The strategy course was absolutely essential from what I know about strategy. I have done my best in books to put what I have learned there. The one I'm working on in the Cold War is going to be organized around these strategic concepts of — How did each side try to manipulate the other? How did the medium powers try to wing in on the game? And what are the strategies that they're using? The paradigms, etc. So I'm going to try and pour as much of this in there. Because this is what education is. It's passing the baton from one generation to another saying this is what I've learned over the course of my career.…

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