How do your book choices hang together?

Of the five books that I’ve chosen, two of them are analyses of war as a whole, that is to say, Clausewitz On War and Sun Tzu The Art of War. The other three describe the actual experience of war as it is fought, which gives a three-dimensional picture of the whole activity.

I’d like to start with Clausewitz who sets the whole scene. Clausewitz himself was a Prussian general who fought in the Napoleonic wars from the very beginning to the very end and saw how the whole nature of war changed. He started in the 1790s and the early years of the French Revolution when war was still fought by regular armies. By the end, by 1815, it was being fought by whole nations. The very limited activity of 18th-century warfare had expanded into something like the total war which was to distinguish warfare in the 19th and the 20th centuries. So that set him analysing the whole thing and trying to see what was the essence of war and how it was changed by its political, ideological and social context.

I know that some people consider ‘Clausewitzean war’ to be over. Would you agree with that?

Clausewitz’s definition of war applied to all the various changing natures of war. He comes from giving a broad analysis of what war is and what war was going to be to then focus on the kind of war he experienced. From the point of view of his own experience, a great deal of what he said has changed and is no longer relevant, but overall his analysis of war and the nature of war and the problems confronting anybody going to war still do remain as valid now as they were then. ‘Clausewitzean war’, as describing the war which he experienced in his own lifetime, is very narrow and a mistaken interpretation of him. In the first place he says that war must be regarded as a method of conducting national strategy, the way in which nations or states conduct their relationships with one another. The use of force is one tool they use in that. The use of force is determined by the policy of the states and that applies irrespective of the kind of force used. Certainly the kind of force which people now use is quite different from that used in Napoleonic times, but the use of force as a tool of politics is still there, as much in applying a no-fly zone to Libya as it was when the Duke of Wellington was fighting Napoleonic armies in the peninsula. To that extent Clausewitz remains a universal guide as to the nature and the conduct of war.

Let’s move on to the Sun Tzu.

Sun Tzu is completely outside the whole Western way of looking at politics and at states. For him, war was an art and an art being practised by generals, by individual commanders. In a way it was a game and he describes how apparently weak players can outsmart strong players, how strong players can apparently misuse their strength to be baffled by weak players, how war is really determined by the mental calibre of the actual generals fighting it. In one way it was a very much more limited way of looking at war, but in another it was very much more ingenious and imaginative.

And how did he think weak players could outsmart stronger players?

Oh, you’ll have to read him. It’s not very long. The thing is, he regards war as a sort of chess, one which could be played by all kinds of players against one another. He powerfully influenced Mao Zedong and developed a way of looking at war, which was then use by Mao Zedong first against the Japanese and then against his rivals. He was basically a rebel, building up from the status of a rebel commander in a tiny outpost in the provinces until he expelled the Japanese, the nationalists and the Americans and was ruling the whole of China by the use of totally different kinds of tricks which took Western armies completely by surprise. Those ideas have been inherited by rebels and partisans throughout the whole of the last three or four decades and Sun Tzu is regarded as being a valuable guide to irregular or partisan warfare.

Can you give me an example of one of the tricks Sun Tzu suggests using?

The main thing he said was that if you are weak you must give the appearance of being strong and if you are strong you must give the appearance of being weak. You persuade people you are weak and are going to be a pushover so that the adversary attacks.

It would be quite difficult for America to pretend to be weak. There is so much public knowledge these days.

Well, let me give you an example. In the Second World War when we, the British, were very, very weak in dealing with the Germans, we used deception in order to give the impression that we and the Americans had built up an enormous army, so that when we actually landed in Normandy and were very vulnerable there, the Germans did not use their entire force to destroy us because they believed we were going to land in the Pas-de-Calais with a very much stronger force at any moment. In fact we didn’t have such a force, but the Germans held back a lot of their force, which made it possible for us to establish ourselves in Normandy as we did. That was an excellent example of Sun Tzu’s type of strategy, although we’d never heard of him then.

Were you personally involved?

I was not personally involved in that particular bit.