Sarah Paine on Why Wars Are Easy to Start and Hard to End
Dwarkesh Patel
Sarah Paine's lecture is about war termination. Her starting point is that getting into wars is easy, getting out of them is hard, and getting out of them with what you wanted is harder still. She uses the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 as a model of successful war termination from Japan's side, sets it beside other regional wars that ended reasonably well, and then turns to two pathologies. In the first, a regional war escalates into a global one. She notes this is a major fear about the war in Ukraine today. In the second, a country is defeated conventionally but refuses to give up and wages an insurgency. She calls this a strategy of victory denial, expensive for the occupier and even more expensive for the people fighting the insurgency.
Her analytical tools come mostly from Carl von Clausewitz: the culminating point of attack, the culminating point of victory, the image of the "Bologna flask," the decisive or war-winning battle, and the distinction between limited and unlimited objectives. She adds Sun Tzu's concept of "death ground."
The Puzzle: How Did the Smaller Power Win?
Paine opens with a quantitative comparison. By almost every measurable standard (territory, population, industrial base, resource endowment, size of army, size of navy), Russia was a multiple of Japan. That raises the question of how Japan won.
Before discussing how the war ended, she explains how it began. Manchuria was, and long had been, Chinese territory. Japan and Russia both wanted to expand their empires into the region, Japan into the Korean peninsula and Russia into Manchuria. Russia had built an extensive railway system running south from Harbin to Port Arthur, where it kept a major naval base. Port Arthur mattered because it was ice-free, while Vladivostok froze for several months of the year in that period.
The Boxer Rebellion, which Paine calls "the al-Qaeda of their day," was a nationwide uprising in China aimed at driving Westerners out, and Boxers in Manchuria tore up Russia's railway concessions. Russia sent troops to protect them but kept the troops there after the rebellion ended. Japan proposed a trade: Russia would recognize Japan's sphere of influence in Korea, and Japan would recognize Russia's in Manchuria. According to Paine, the Russians weren't interested because they expected to get the whole thing and didn't take the Japanese seriously. The Japanese concluded that the clock was running while Russia stalled, and they decided to settle the matter militarily.
Port Arthur and the Problem of Too Few Soldiers
Japan attacked Port Arthur first because the Russian fleet was based there. If that fleet could operate freely, Japan could not protect the sea lines of communication that carried all its troops and supplies to the mainland. Japan blockaded the port by sea, but taking it also required investing it by land. Japan had only four armies, plus a fifth cobbled together near the end of the war, so a quarter of its army was tied down at Port Arthur.
Japan's plan for winning was to advance up the railway toward Harbin, fight a series of battles culminating in a great annihilating battle, and so bring Russia to the negotiating table. Paine says Japan did not have enough soldiers to do this. It needed the army besieging Port Arthur to join the other armies in the north, which put General Nogi, who commanded the siege, under enormous pressure to reduce the fortress quickly. He launched four frontal assaults, which are very costly against a fortress. Eventually he realized the key was 203-Meter Hill. With spotters on that height and very large-caliber siege guns, of which Japan had few, the Japanese could adjust their fire onto the ships anchored in the harbor. Taking that position took a long time, and meanwhile Nogi was losing an army's worth of men.
On the Russian side, Tsar Nicholas II sent the Baltic Fleet to relieve Port Arthur. The port fell before the fleet arrived, and instead of turning back, Nicholas sent the rest of his naval assets as well. The large ships went around Africa and the smaller ones through the Suez Canal. The Russians ended up fighting on Japanese terms at Tsushima, where, in Paine's words, the Japanese sank that navy.
Limited Objectives and What "Winning" Means
Paine describes this as a limited war, meaning each side fought for limited objectives. An unlimited objective is regime change. Japan never intended to overthrow the government in St. Petersburg. Nicholas II at first thought he could invade Japan and topple its government, but he soon learned this was not feasible, and his aim narrowed to getting the Japanese out of Manchuria.
Her larger point is that a war's success is not measured by battles won. The United States won most of the conventional battles in Vietnam, and she does not believe that war is recorded as a win. Success means achieving the objective you fought for. Japan's objective was to get Russia out of Korea, and it achieved that. It also got the southern half of Russia's railway concessions in Manchuria, the naval base, and more. Japan ended up with more than it originally wanted. Russia got nothing and, in her view, would have been far better off never fighting.
She adds the concept of opportunity cost. The money Russia spent on this war could have gone into something useful, such as expanding the railway network in European Russia, which would have helped greatly in World War I. Nicholas II lost that war, and he and his family were shot in a Siberian basement, ending the Romanov dynasty. Paine connects his fall to food riots, which were a problem of getting food to St. Petersburg. She suggests that railways built in the right places, where allies could have supplied Russia, might have produced a different outcome.
Clausewitz's Culminating Points
Paine then introduces two paired Clausewitzian terms. She quotes Clausewitz as saying that most attacks lead only to the point where the attacker's remaining strength is just enough to hold a defense and wait for peace. Beyond that point, "the scale turns and the reaction follows with a force that is usually much stronger than that of the original attack." That is the culminating point of attack. It is an operational concept that applies to a battle or a campaign, meaning a series of battles. The culminating point of victory applies to the war as a whole. Reducing the fleet at Port Arthur might be a battle objective, while the war objective is something like getting Russia out of Manchuria.
In either case, stopping short of the culminating point means you could have gained more at acceptable cost. Going past it means you have taken on risks and costs larger than any benefit, and you are probably weaker as a result. One key sign of having passed the culminating point of victory, she says, is intervention by a third party, which can change the nature of the war if that party is a large one.
Where Was the Culminating Point at Port Arthur?
To apply the concept, Paine asks when the culminating point of attack came at Port Arthur. She picks this battle because it started the war, lasted nearly a year, and ended with Japan destroying Russia's fleet in the theater. By the end of his frontal assaults, Nogi had lost about 45,000 men, the size of a Japanese army, out of an army of only four such formations. After Japan took 203-Meter Hill, it needed another week to bring up the guns, and then about three days to sink everything in the harbor. The Russians deliberated for about a month and then surrendered.
Paine points out that the garrison had enough food to hold out at least another month and probably longer, noting that it also had 3,000 "highly edible horses." Russian war planners had never considered using Port Arthur as a "fortress in being" that pinned down large Japanese forces. A cleverer Russian command, she suggests, might have turned that to its advantage.
She presents the question as an exercise in using evidence. One could argue that the culminating point came with the capture of 203-Meter Hill: the fleet was the key, and once the hill fell the fleet had no sanctuary and its loss was only a matter of time. An equally good counterargument holds that the culminating point came only with the destruction of the fleet itself, because the fleet tied down so much of Japan's army and navy and its destruction was the operational goal. She stresses that the rebuttals differ depending on which thesis you take, that a rebuttal should not repeat the main argument, and that listeners may come up with answers she hasn't listed.
"Decisive," "Lopsided," and "Pivotal" Battles
A related concept is the decisive battle. Paine uses the term as she says Mao and Clausewitz mostly did, to mean a war-winning battle. She quotes Clausewitz: campaigns whose outcome was determined by a single battle had become fairly common only in recent times, and cases in which a single battle settled an entire war were very rare. Using "decisive" to mean "important" says nothing, she argues, because it doesn't tell you in what way the battle mattered. For a battle with very skewed casualties she would say "lopsided." For a battle that closes off some options and opens others, she would say "pivotal." Port Arthur was not decisive, since more battles followed, but it was pivotal: certain things were foreclosed for Russia and certain things opened up for Japan.
Five Candidates for Russia's Breaking Point
Paine then asks whether the war ended before, after, or exactly at Japan's culminating point of victory. Ending exactly at that point is the Goldilocks outcome. She lays out five candidate explanations for why Russia gave up and leaves the choice to the audience.
The domestic implosion. Russia was among the most politically backward places in Europe. Its population was becoming more urban and better educated and wanted a political voice it did not have. Paine notes that only three European states lacked a legislature at the time: Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Montenegro. Japan had one. By the end of 1904 the war was going badly, and Russians had little enthusiasm for fighting in a place they could not find on a map. Reservists rioted at their assembly points in European Russia, where they greatly outnumbered the regular troops, which was a frightening situation for an unpopular tsar with an even more unpopular wife. When a peaceful crowd marched on the Winter Palace to present a petition, Nicholas was not even in town. His troops panicked, opened fire, and killed many people, badly damaging the regime's legitimacy. Nicholas soon compromised and set up a very weak legislature.
Here Paine introduces Clausewitz's image of the Bologna flask: glass strong enough to hammer a nail with, but one that shatters completely if its inner surface is scratched. The question in any war is whether the first shock of battle will steel the enemy's resolve, which she says happened to Putin in Ukraine, or whether the enemy will shatter. It is hard to know in advance whether a side will fight on indefinitely, as the North Vietnamese did, or give up, as Nicholas II did. Because Nicholas was an autocrat, his decision was the only one that counted. When he decided the game was up, it was over.
The Battle of Mukden. On this reading, the turning point was the huge land battle at Mukden. Japan threw in everyone it could, including men too young, too old, or too exhausted to fight, and still fielded about 125,000 fewer troops than Russia. Japan had counted on a window of opportunity before the Trans-Siberian Railway could move large numbers of troops to the front. Paine's figures: at the start of the war the railway could carry 20,000 to 40,000 Russian troops a month, and by Mukden about 100,000. Had Russia had that capacity from the beginning, it would have had numerical superiority throughout and, in her words, Japan "would have been toast." Russia began with somewhat fewer than 100,000 men in the theater. By August 1904, around the Battle of Liaoyang, it had nearly 150,000, about 20,000 more than Japan. By August 1905, a month before the Portsmouth peace treaty, Russia had nearly 800,000 troops in the theater, which was only about 40 percent of an army she puts at roughly 3 million, while Japan had sent everything it had and still had fewer than 700,000. Japan could have been in serious trouble if Nicholas had steeled himself for one more battle.
Paine says the Japanese understood this. Even before attacking Port Arthur, they had planned their exit strategy: President Theodore Roosevelt would mediate the end of the war. They were counting on Americans being busybodies, and they calculated correctly. The arrangements were made in advance. Viscount Kaneko, a Harvard graduate and acquaintance of Roosevelt, himself a Harvard man, would approach the president, and the negotiations would be conducted by another Harvard alumnus, Baron Komura. After Mukden, Field Marshal Yamagata knew Japan had run out of resources and decided to play the American card. Paine quotes his reasoning: the enemy would never ask for peace unless Japan invaded Moscow or St. Petersburg, which was not feasible; the enemy still had powerful forces at home while Japan had exhausted its own; and the enemy was not short of officers while Japan had lost many it could not replace, so prudence was needed. She also cites the chief of staff of Japan's Manchurian army making the same point: if you start a fire, you have to put it out. Paine's gloss is that it was time to call the American fire department.
Money. A third explanation uses a non-military instrument of national power. Both countries borrowed to fight the war. Japan's battlefield successes lowered its interest rates, and it secured its last two loans after Mukden, so it had the finances even though it lacked the men. Russia had already suffered a recession and a bad harvest the year before the war, which hurt government revenue. After Mukden, when Russia badly needed another loan, no one would take it. After the Portsmouth treaty, Russia did raise a loan, and Paine says it needed the money just to bring its troops back from Asia to European Russia. On this view, Nicholas's piggy bank had run dry.
Tsushima. The fourth explanation is the naval battle, which Paine calls extraordinarily lopsided. Russia did not need to fight at sea at all, since its supplies came over the Trans-Siberian Railway and nothing came by sea, and conditions on land were improving for Russia daily. Nicholas fought anyway and lost his entire fleet. Japan lost three torpedo boats and captured a number of Russian ships, so its fleet actually grew as a result of the battle. The few Russian vessels that made it home were small and obsolete.
Sakhalin. The last candidate is Japan's seizure of Sakhalin Island at the very end of the war. According to Paine, Roosevelt suggested Japan take it because Russia could do nothing to stop it, and Japan could then trade it back at the peace talks for things it actually cared about. For Russia, losing its own territory, and given the racial prejudices of the time, losing it to an Asian country, was a serious blow to prestige. For Japan, Sakhalin offered good fishing grounds and "great crab" but was not central. Perhaps, Paine suggests, this was what finally broke Nicholas's Bologna flask.
She does not choose among the five. She observes that some countries fight on indefinitely, often because they face unlimited objectives that put them on death ground, while Nicholas's flask did shatter. A decade later he was dead for losing World War I: "a devoted husband, a beloved dad, and incompetent tsar."
Why Japan's Termination Was a Model
Paine summarizes why she treats this as model war termination. Japan achieved its war objective and got Korea. It also gained a large sphere of influence in southern Manchuria (she notes Manchuria is the size of Germany and France combined), including Russia's expensive railway concession, the naval base, and its equipment. It got the southern half of Sakhalin, which Russia was willing to trade. And the outcome confirmed the result of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, when Japan had defeated China, the largest land empire in Asia: Japan was the dominant regional power in Asia.
The Gulf War: A War the U.S. Didn't Pay For
Paine's second success story is the 1991 Gulf War, which she says turned out even better, because the United States didn't pay for it and very few people died on the coalition side. Saddam Hussein was broke after his war with Iran. He invaded Kuwait to wipe out his war debt to Kuwait and to take its oil fields; combined with Iraq's, those fields might have made Iraq the oil market's swing producer with a dominant position.
She stresses a general difficulty with limited wars. In an unlimited war the objective is obvious: regime change. In a limited war, objectives lie along a continuum from the most minor aim up to regime change, and there can be deep disagreement about where to land. Governments often do not state their limited objectives explicitly, perhaps hoping to get a bit more, which leaves military officers unsure what they are trying to achieve. In the Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush spelled it out in National Security Directive 54, and the United States achieved each goal. Iraq was forced out of Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government was restored, and American lives were protected, since Americans had been gotten out of Iraq with allied help even before the fighting. Together these promoted, though they did not create, security and stability in the Persian Gulf.
Then there was the cost. By Paine's figures, the 34 coalition partners sent over 200,000 troops alongside America's 700,000, paid the United States over $50 billion to cover its costs, and paid about $14 billion more to other coalition partners. Iraq lost between 20,000 and 35,000 military dead and up to 3,000 civilians killed by bombing. The coalition lost 392 dead in total, 258 of them Americans. She says she knows of no other war involving about a million combatants in which one side's death rate was so low.
She draws a parallel with 1904. Russia had been diplomatically isolated while Japan had the Anglo-Japanese alliance, with Britain as a silent partner. Iraq was even more isolated, with nearly all the world's rich countries and most of its neighbors lined up against it. Facing a massive coalition, she concludes, does not go well.
Korea: Geography, Big Friends, and Shifting War Aims
The Korean War went much less well, Paine says, though it did at least end with one of the goals the United States had held at one point: a return to the prewar status quo of a divided peninsula.
She starts with geography. The land border between North and South Korea is only 250 kilometers, which looks manageable. The rest of the peninsula has long maritime borders, which a dominant naval power like the United States could blockade, especially against an enemy with no navy. That allows carrier aircraft and naval gunfire to reach much of the country, and many Korean railways ran along the coast within range. The problem is the northern border. The border with Russia is short, about 17 kilometers by her recollection, but the border with China runs over 1,400 kilometers, and in Mao's day Manchuria held China's industrial base. The theater could never be isolated, since the enemy had powerful friends with an uninterrupted supply line. Both sides had big backers pouring in aid, and in that setup, Paine says, the war goes on for a long time, many people die, and much territory is wrecked.
What made it worse was indecision about war aims. Japan in 1904 knew its minimum objective and Bush knew his in 1991, but in Korea the United States couldn't decide whether it wanted only the southern half, a return to prewar lines, or, while it was winning, the whole peninsula, which is an unlimited objective. Paine says this waffling was very costly. She quotes Clausewitz to the effect that the political objective is always primary: there is no alternative to subordinating the military point of view to the political. The political object, the original motive for the war, determines both the military objective, such as how far up the peninsula to go, and the effort required. Deciding to take the whole peninsula because it looked militarily possible meant letting the military objective drive policy.
Clausewitz's Two Kinds of War and Sun Tzu's Death Ground
Paine sees part of Clausewitz's brilliance in the claim that the fundamental way to classify wars is by their ends, not by the resources poured into them. Wars range, in the passage she quotes, from wars of extermination down to simple armed observation, but ultimately there are only two kinds. One aims to overthrow the enemy, making him politically helpless or militarily impotent so that he must sign whatever peace is dictated. That is the unlimited objective. The other aims merely to occupy some of his frontier districts, either to annex them or to use them as bargaining chips at the peace talks.
For unlimited wars she pairs Clausewitz with Sun Tzu's concept of death ground: ground on which an army survives only by fighting with the courage of desperation. With an unlimited objective, the enemy regime at minimum faces annihilation, and if there are genocidal aims against the population, so do the people. People in that position fight to the death. Paine points to Ukraine as an example in her audience's own lifetime: the Ukrainians have defied the expectations of those who don't understand death ground, because Russia has put them on it, and they are not giving up if they can avoid it.
She sums up the asymmetry, which she calls counterintuitive but useful. Unlimited wars are conceptually simple, since everyone understands regime change, but hard to execute, because putting people on death ground makes them fight desperately and can turn a failed state into a lethal adversary. Limited wars are conceptually hard, because there will be arguments over the optimal objective, but easier to execute, especially if the objective is narrow enough that the enemy does not consider conceding it terrible. In an unlimited war the defeated side has no choices. The United States kept Emperor Hirohito rather than executing him because he was useful: he would sign documents such as the constitution and lend legitimacy to the American reform program. It was still an unlimited war against Japan. In a limited war the defeated government survives, you must negotiate with it whether you like it or not, and it may come back to cause trouble.
Korea Passed the Culminating Point Twice
Returning to Korea, Paine argues that the culminating point of victory was exceeded not once but twice. Kim Il-sung invaded the South expecting to win if it stayed a two-party fight, and he was right as he raced down the peninsula, until he triggered "the third-party intervention from hell" by the United States and its UN partners. A civil war became a regional war with the potential to go global, at much higher cost. She suggests he might have done better with a slow insurgency.
Then it was the United States' turn. MacArthur's landing at Inchon, halfway up the peninsula, went very well, and he aimed to reunify the whole country because it was militarily possible. When his forces approached the Chinese border, China entered with hundreds of thousands of troops, creating an entirely different war, and before long MacArthur was relieved. Paine mentions there is a whole story on the Chinese side that she lacks time for. The result was a divided peninsula at high cost. She notes that exceeding the culminating point of victory shows up as paying far more than necessary. The minimum objective, keeping South Korea in existence, was achieved, but American troops have been stationed there ever since, which is expensive.
She recommends thinking in terms of culminating points before and during wars, and applies the question to Ukraine: what would it take for either side to reach its culminating point of victory, whether that point is reachable, and whether particular campaigns can reach their culminating points of attack. She repeats that a key sign a victory is going sour is third-party intervention.
Pathology One: Regional Wars That Go Global
The American Revolution. The colonists had no intention of changing the regime in London, so their war was limited from their side. London, however, wanted to eliminate the Continental Army and the Continental Congress, which amounted to regime change, so the colonists were on death ground and fought harder. The theater was large and the war dragged on, giving Britain's many rivals time to weigh their options. France allied with the colonies in 1778, Spain allied with France in 1779, and Britain attacked the Dutch in 1780. The fighting spread: the French at Savannah, the Spanish in Louisiana, a French plan to invade England via the Isle of Wight, the naval battle at Ushant, Franco-Spanish attacks on Gibraltar and Minorca, French attacks on British possessions off Africa, British attacks on French possessions at Mahé and Pondicherry in India, and heavy fighting in the Caribbean, where the valuable sugar islands were. Britain reassessed, decided the rebellious colonies weren't worth much at the time compared with the Caribbean, and pulled out.
World War I. Paine says this war worked out badly for everyone. Before it began, each power expected a short regional war in which it would take some territory in Europe or force a defeated rival to cede colonies elsewhere. The problem was that everyone wanted something different, even within alliances. Britain wanted the status quo and no one else did. France wanted Alsace-Lorraine back from the Franco-Prussian War. Italy wanted territory in the eastern Mediterranean. Russia wanted the Balkans, and in particular wanted Austria-Hungary out of Serbia, which Austria-Hungary would not accept after Serbian nationalists killed the Habsburg heir. Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans each wanted more of the Balkans, and Germany wanted colonies. Objectives and primary theaters did not align even among allies, producing parallel wars over different places. As more countries joined, the war people ended up in was very different from the one they had started. No one could settle, because no alliance could devise terms that satisfied all its own members, let alone offer the other side enough to quit, and no one dared abandon allies they could not fight without. So the war went on and on.
Japan from Manchuria to Pearl Harbor. Paine begins with the Great Depression. The "original America Firsters" wanted to protect American jobs and passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Economists warned President Hoover that trading partners would retaliate and global trade would suffer. He signed it anyway, partners retaliated, and trade collapsed. She urges listeners to stop playing "half-court tennis," looking only at the American side of the net. Other countries were far more desperate than the United States, with nothing like its standard of living, and the deepening Depression created the conditions for someone like Hitler to take power. Japan had long cooperated with the international order and was a founding member of the League of Nations, which the United States had not joined. As a trade-dependent country cut off by its best trading partners, it turned to autarky: if its empire held enough resources, it would not need trade. It invaded Manchuria. That was a regional war, and "so far so good," as Paine puts it.
Japan then extended the program to all of China. Taking a large piece of China was bad enough, but trying to take all of it put the Chinese on death ground. China's quarreling factions stopped fighting each other, recognized Japan as an existential threat, and fought it to a stalemate. Japan's economy began to suffer, and under this Chinese victory-denial strategy it grew more desperate. It decided to cut off all foreign aid reaching the Nationalists, expecting them to collapse. Paine says Americans are remarkably self-focused about Pearl Harbor. On the same day, allowing for the date line, Japan also attacked Malaya, the Philippines, Singapore, Wake Island, Guam, Thailand, and the International Settlement in Shanghai, trying to eliminate everything that might help China. The move backfired badly. Far from leaving Asia, the great powers doubled down, and the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand all joined the fight.
From these cases Paine draws common features of regional wars that go global. The theater is very large and hard to close off, so the intervening power becomes frustrated trying to garrison it. As the war drags on, third parties have time to intervene, which is when real trouble starts. If your enemy has friends, expect more trouble, especially if you pursue an unlimited objective, because the enemy will then fight indefinitely. And as your losses mount, you become less willing to compromise.
Pathology Two: Insurgency as Victory Denial
The second pathology is conventional victory followed by an insurgency that prevents any stabilization. Japan faced this in China. The occupied territory was useless to Japan until it could be stabilized, and Japan wanted to earn income from it, not spend money garrisoning it. Japan kept defeating the Nationalist armies in conventional battles, but the Nationalists always reconstituted and fought on, and both Nationalists and Communists also fielded separate guerrilla forces. This left Japan with a dilemma. Concentrating to fight the conventional armies left the rear open to guerrillas, and dispersing to secure the rear freed the enemy's regular army to act.
Paine says this expensive approach was pioneered by the United States itself. George Washington's Continental Army forced the British army to concentrate while militias operated across the country. Washington was not keen on the militias at first, but by the end of the war he understood their value. It was a cost-imposition strategy that relied on another Clausewitzian concept, the value of the object: how much the political objective is worth to each side. Washington counted on Americans valuing the objective more than the British did, and Paine says that tends to hold. For people in the theater it is home and existential, so they value it highly, while an intervening power values it less the farther away it is. The insurgent's aim is to raise costs until the outsider leaves. She says this strategy has been used against the United States repeatedly, "much to U.S. sorrow," in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and each time the United States eventually called it a day.
Iraq 2003: Regime Change and What Comes After
Paine contrasts the second Iraq war with the first. The first had limited objectives; the second had an unlimited one, regime change in Baghdad. Toppling the regime proved easy. The problem, in her blunt phrasing, is that after regime change "the loaded diaper is yours."
She describes Iraq and its neighbors as mosaic societies made up of many peoples. In Iraq, she says, primary identities seem tied more to ethnicity than to the nation, and nearly any group on an ethnic map might want to kill one or two others, and vice versa. That makes building state institutions very difficult. She contrasts Korea, where Koreans do not dispute their national identity and the fight is over state institutions. Where there isn't even a shared national identity and people are killing each other over it, she argues, state institutions cannot be built.
She says geography made things worse, and this could have been known in advance. In the 1991 war the coalition dealt with about 158 miles of border. Occupying all of Iraq meant dealing with over 2,000 miles of border, which is hard to seal off from interested parties. Three of the neighbors, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey, have serious ambitions for regional influence and would get involved whether the United States liked it or not. It doesn't take much outside involvement to set things off. Sometimes one car bomb is enough: the bombing of a sacred Shia shrine set off a major sectarian war. Places like this, she says, are extremely hard to stabilize.
Questions to Ask Before Any War
Paine closes with questions to ask before entering a war and during an ongoing one. Who is involved, and who has an interest? Then comes what she calls her big matrix: who has limited and who has unlimited objectives, and against whom, whether one neighbor, several, or all. Her example is that Russia has an unlimited objective toward Ukraine, while Ukraine has a limited objective toward Russia. How do the policy objectives of all the parties line up, and how do the primary adversaries align? What are the relative values of the object: for whom is the war existential, and for whom merely nice to have? She says she would wager that the outcome in Ukraine matters more to Ukrainians than to Russians. Russia has suffered very large losses, so the war does matter to Russians, but it matters more to Ukrainians because it is where they live. Finally, she says to look at geographic access and sanctuary: are some places invulnerable to attack, leaving you little leverage over them, and are there asymmetries in any of this? Working through these questions, she says, gives a sense of who can actually align with whom and who cannot. She presents the matrix as a framework for analysis, not a prediction of how the war in Ukraine will end.
It's such a pleasure to be here with you all. I'm going to talk about war termination today. Good idea, right? End these things. Turns out it's really easy to get into wars. It's awfully difficult to get out of them. And it is even more difficult to get out of them what you wished you could have gotten out of them.
So, I'm going to start by talking about the Russo-Japanese War, which from the Japanese point of view is pretty much model war termination. Why? Let's do this math on Russia and China back in the day. Russia was a multiple of these quantifiable measures over Japan by territory, population, industrial base, resource endowment, size of army, size of navy. Russia in most of those things is a multiple of Japan. And you got to ask yourself, well, how did Japan win? Good question. And I'll talk about it.
All right. So, here is my plan. I'm going to start talking about how the Russo-Japanese War ended. Use it as a model, but then I'm going to talk about termination of other regional wars because this war isn't a global war. It's a regional war. Then I'm going to talk about two pathologies. And one of them is if your regional war escalates into a global war, a real problem. This is a great fear of the Ukraine-Russian thing today. If it spikes up and all of a sudden you get a global war out of it.
Another pathology is if you conventionally defeat someone but they don't give up, they wage an insurgency on you. And what that is is a victory denial strategy. Incredibly costly for the person being denied victory because they're there forever and ever, but it's even more costly for the one who's waging this insurgency under very difficult conditions. So that's the overall what I'm up to.
And in order to examine the Russo-Japanese War, as promised, I'm going to give you some concepts and many of them are from Carl Clausewitz. His concepts I'm going to elaborate on are culminating point of attack, culminating point of victory. He has an image of a blown flask. I'll get there. And decisive battle or the war-winning battle, and limited, unlimited objectives. And then I'll add in some Sun Tzu, the great theorist from the east, on death ground. So that's what I'm going to do right now.
But before I get into terminating this war, I think I better explain what happened in the war. So here you see a map. Manchuria up there is, was, and for a long time has been, it is Chinese territory. What went on is both Japan and Russia are interested in expanding empires, Japan into the Korean Peninsula, Russia into Manchuria. Russia had built a really extensive railway system. You can see some of it here coming down from Harbin going all the way south to Port Arthur, where it had a big naval base because that's ice-free, unlike Vladivostok, which closes up in this period for several months of the year. So Russia had invested in all of these expensive railway systems.
And then the Boxers, the al-Qaeda of their day, wanted Westerners to leave. Big nationwide rebellion in China. And part of it goes on in Manchuria. And the Boxers are busy tearing up these railway concessions. So as you can imagine, Russia sends troops to prevent that. But once the rebellion's over, the Russians don't withdraw. And the Japanese tried to negotiate with them and said, "Hey, you recognize our sphere of influence in Korea and we'll recognize yours in Manchuria. Trade, right?" The Russians not interested because their idea is they're going to get the whole thing and who cares about Japanese anyway. Well, the Japanese are looking at this and they're like, "The clock is ticking and the Russians are procrastinating, procrastinating." So, the Japanese decide that they're going to sort this out militarily.
So what they do is attack Port Arthur. And you go, well, what are they doing with Port Arthur? It's because Russia has its naval base there. And if the Russian Navy is out and about, Japan cannot protect its sea lines of communication. And that's how all of its supplies and troops go between Japan. So it's got to neutralize that navy. So they blockade it in Port Arthur. But that also requires an army by land to invest Port Arthur by land. Japan only has four armies until the very end of the war, when it cobbles together a fifth. So one quarter of Japan's armies are stuck at Port Arthur.
But what Japan is envisioning to win this war is to go up the railway system towards Harbin, fighting a series of battles, and that they're going to have this big annihilating battle and then the Russians are going to come to the bargaining table. The problem is the Japanese don't have enough soldiers to do it. They really need that army that's investing Port Arthur to come concentrate with its other armies way up north there.
Okay. Therefore, General Nogi, who is in charge of the siege of Port Arthur, he's under tremendous pressure to reduce the fortress. And he does a series of frontal attacks. You lose lots of people if you do a frontal attack on a fortress. And he does four. And eventually what he realized is in order to get rid of the fleet, Japan has got to have a high point, which is called 203 Meter Hill. And if you have spotters up there and you also haul in really, really large caliber siege guns, and Japan doesn't have many of those, then the spotters will adjust the line of fire so that those shots will actually hit the ships that are anchored in harbor. And it takes a while for that to happen. And lots of what Nogi is losing is an army in the meantime. A lot of people.
While this is going on, the tsar decides to send his navy from the Baltic Fleet in order to relieve the siege of Port Arthur, which falls, and then instead of reversing course, he doubles down and he sends all the rest of his naval assets. So the big things are going around Africa, the little things are going through the Suez Canal, and it's very difficult for Russia doing all of this, and they wind up fighting on Japanese terms at Tsushima and, spoiler alert, the Japanese are going to sink that navy.
All right. So this war is a limited war. What I mean by that is that each side is fighting for limited objectives. An unlimited objective is regime change. Japan never intended to overthrow the regime in St. Petersburg. Not happening. Russia, Nicholas II initially thought he could invade Japan and overthrow the Japanese government. But he rapidly learned that that was not going to be feasible. So it's basically getting the Japanese out of Manchuria. So both sides are fighting for limited objectives.
Japan's objective. This is why when you define whether a war is successful or not, it is not whether you win all the battles. The United States won most of the conventional battles in the Vietnam War, and I don't believe that war is registered as a win. It has to do with whether you achieve the objective for which you're fighting the war. And Japan's objective is Russians out of Korea. Well, they certainly got that one, but they also get the southern half of the Russians' railway concessions in Manchuria, plus the naval base and other things. So, boy, the Japanese have done incredibly well. They got more than they initially wanted. The Russians don't get anything. They would have been much better off never fighting this war.
Story gets worse. Another concept for you, opportunity costs. If Russia spends money on this war, it means it's not spending all that money in, say, doing something useful, which would be expanding its railway system in European Russia that would have been really helpful fighting World War I. And Nicholas II is going to lose that war, and as a result, he and his family are going to wind up shot in a Siberian basement, right? And the whole Romanov dynasty is going to be done. He's going to go down to food riots, which has to do with getting food to St. Petersburg. If you've done railways in the right places so that allies could supply you, you might have had a different outcome. So the opportunity costs are huge.
All right, two more terminology that I promised you from Clausewitz. I'm going to give you two terms: culminating point of attack, culminating point of victory. They're paired. According to Clausewitz, most attacks only lead up to the point where their remaining strength is just enough to maintain the defense and wait for peace. So he's talking about culminating point of attack in terms of a battle or a succession of battles, which is called a campaign. He says beyond that point, if you go too far, the scale turns and the reaction follows with a force that is usually much stronger than that of the original attack. That's what we mean by the culminating point of attack. Go too far, you ruin yourself.
So culminating point of attack, operational term, applies to a battle or succession of battles. Culminating point of victory pertains to the entire war. In a battle it may be, I'm going to reduce the fleet in Port Arthur, get rid of it. That might be my battle objective. That's not my war objective. My war objective is Russia out of Manchuria or something. In either case, if you don't go far enough, you don't reach your culminating point of attack or victory. It means you could have achieved more at acceptable costs and you failed to. If you exceed the culminating point, you've either assumed risks and costs that exceed any benefits of whatever it is you do, and you're probably weaker as a result. One of the key indicators that you've gone beyond the culminating point of victory is a third-party intervention that may change the nature of the war if the third party is a big one.
So that's the term, and then I'm going to apply the terms, and I'm going to start with culminating point of attack and pick a particular battle. Here's some choices for culminating points. I'm going to choose Port Arthur for looking at when is the culminating point of attack for the battle of Port Arthur. Why? Well, that's the battle that starts the war, goes on for nearly a year, and as a result of winning it, Japan destroys Russia's fleet in theater. So it's a significant one.
So if you look at, back to these frontal assaults that General Nogi is sending one after another because he's desperate to reduce this fortress. And you're going, well, when's the culminating point? One of the takeaways here is Nogi loses about 45,000 men by the time he's done with these frontal attacks. That's the size of a Japanese army. Japan's only got four armies. That's a lot of people to lose. And here's why he really wants this 203 Meter Hill. I think it's interesting to look at it. So this is from below, but if you're up there and you have a spotter, you can adjust the line of fire about what thing is getting sunk there and what isn't. Once they take 203 Meter Hill, it takes another week to get the guns in. And then if you look, it's like three days. They sink everything in harbor. And then the Russians scratch their heads for about a month and then they decide to capitulate.
However, if you look at all the food they had there, the Russians could have gone on for at least another month and probably longer, cuz I look up there and they got 3,000 highly edible horses if they really want to stick around, right? And what the Russian war plans had never considered is the use of Port Arthur as a fortress in being, that it tied up tons of Japanese. You're pinning a lot of Japanese assets. And if the Russians had been a little more clever, they would have thought of how to use that to their advantage, but they didn't.
So back to the question, what's the culminating point of attack? If someone asks you this analytical question, you can pick various points there of what you would want, and I'm going to choose 203 Meter Hill and say once Japan's taken that, that is the culminating point of attack. But I'm also going to show you an alternate way to answer the question. It's about how you use evidence coming to your own conclusions.
So if you want to do 203 Meter Hill is the culminating point of attack, the sort of argument that you might make is that the fleet in being there is key, and without the hill, Russia no longer has sanctuary for that fleet, so it's going to lose it. It's just a matter of time. But you could have a perfectly good counterargument. Someone who has a completely different thesis up there says no, no, no, it's really the destruction of the fleet. Until you've done that, you haven't reached your culminating point. And why? Because the fleet pinned so much of the Japanese army and navy, and the destruction of the fleet is the operational goal. So you haven't achieved it, you just aren't there yet. And then you'll notice that the rebuttals, depending upon which way you go, are different. You don't want to in the rebuttal repeat your main argument. But I think it's really useful thinking of arguments and counterarguments about which way do you actually think you would argue. Maybe you come up with a different thing that I haven't even got up there. But that's one way of looking at it.
Anyway, a related concept that might help you with culminating points of attack and culminating points of victory is decisive battle. And I'm going to use the term the way Mao and Clausewitz mostly used it. And here's Clausewitz. He said campaigns whose outcome have been determined by a single battle have become fairly common only in recent times. So that's a campaign. It's not a war. And those cases in which they've settled an entire war are very rare. So I'm going to use decisive meaning war-winning battle, because if you use it to mean important, you're actually not conveying anything. Important in what way?
And for instance, I would use different words for a battle where the casualty rates are really skewed. I would use the word lopsided. And if I use the word lopsided, you immediately get it. One side lost a lot more people than the other. Another alternative would be pivotal battle. Port Arthur is not a decisive battle. Other battles follow, but it is pivotal. Once that happens, certain things are foreclosed for Russia and certain things are opened up for Japan, and they're terribly important.
All right. So if you were looking at this theater up there and thinking about Japan's slow crawl up that railway in the direction of Harbin, which is where the east-west and the north-south lines meet, and you're thinking about a culminating point of victory, not just a battle but the whole war, you can ask yourself: did this war end before, after, or exactly at Japan's culminating point of victory? If you do it exactly at the culminating point, it's like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The porridge is just right.
So, here are some choices for culminating points of victory. And I'm going to go through five alternatives. One is the implosion of the home front, which has to do with the Russian Revolution of 1905. Another has to do with the big land battle at the end, the Battle of Mukden. Another possibility goes, "No, no, it's all about money and Russia going broke." Another possible answer would have to do with the big naval battle, Battle of Tsushima. And the last one has to do with Japan taking some Russian territory to trade back, the Battle of Sakhalin. So I'm going to go through them each in turn, and you can come to your own conclusions what you think the culminating point of victory was for Russia.
All right. One answer will look at Russia's domestic politics and say this place was one of the more backward places politically in Europe. Some things never change. And the people were becoming more urbanized, more highly educated. They wanted more political say. They had zero. And so they started hitting the streets, right, and demonstrating, strikes, and petitioning the tsar because they wanted a legislature, which isn't outlandish. Only three places in Europe didn't have a legislature in this period, and that would be Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Montenegro. And Montenegro isn't very big. Japan had a legislature. So, what's Nicholas's problem?
Meanwhile, by the end of the year in 1904, that war is really not going very well, and Russians are not thrilled about fighting in a place that they can't even identify on the map. So that reserves are rioting at their
the places where they're concentrating in European Russia to be sent out to Asia, and in European Russia, i.e. where the Tsar lives, reserves grossly outnumbered the regular troops, and these are scary numbers for an unpopular Tsar with an even more unpopular wife. So when the Russian people have a big demonstration that's peaceful and they're heading towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to the Tsar, he isn't even in town. His troops panic and they open fire and they kill a lot of people. And this severely damages the credibility, the legitimacy of the Tsarist government and makes them look terrible. And so Nicholas very shortly starts compromising and sets up a very weak legislature.
So, Clausewitz has interesting terminology that has to do with this thing over here, a Bologna flask. What it is is a flask that you can literally use like a hammer and hammer a nail. It's really strong, but if you get to the inside of it and just scratch it, the thing shatters. And Clausewitz is using this to describe war termination, where you're going at an enemy and you have no idea: is it going to act like a hammer or is it going to shatter? The question is whether the first shock of battle will steel the enemy's resolve and stiffen his resistance, which is what happened to Putin in Ukraine, or whether, like the Bologna flask, it will shatter as soon as its surface is scratched. Good question.
And it's hard to know, right? In wars, assessing the other side: will they fight forever, which is what the North Vietnamese did, or are they going to be like Nicholas II? So his personal Bologna flask apparently wasn't doing very well. And he's an autocrat. So where he lives, it's his decisions that matter. And so when the autocrat decides game up, it's game over. So that's one explanation, if you want to say the reason, the culminating point of victory, has to do with this 1905 revolution, that Nicholas just gave up.
Another way of looking at it, say no, no, no, it's the Battle of Mukden, this really large mad battle. The Japanese threw every last person they could throw into this thing. They were getting people who were too young to fight, people too old to fight, and a lot of people who were too tired to fight. And even so, Japan could muster 125,000 fewer people than could Russia. And Japan was really counting on a window of opportunity before the Trans-Siberian Railway could really transport a lot of people to the front.
So if you look at it, at the beginning of the war, the Trans-Siberian could transport between 20 and 40,000 Russian troops per month to the front. By the Battle of Mukden at the end, it's 100,000. It's a lot of people. And if Russia had had this carrying capacity at the beginning of the war, it would have had numerical superiority from beginning to end and Japan would have been toast. As it was, if you look at it, at the beginning of the war, Russia has something shy of 100,000 men in this Asian theater. By the time you get to August, this is the Battle of Liaoyang-ish, just before, you've got almost 150,000 Russian troops, and this is 20,000 more than the Japanese have. So now the numbers are starting to change.
And then when you get to the next August, 1905, this is a month before the Portsmouth Peace Treaty finishes the thing, Russia's got nearly 800,000 troops, but it's only 40% of its army, whereas Japan has sent every last thing there and it's less than 700,000, and Russia I think has 3 million troops total. Japan could have been in a world of hurt if Nicholas II had steeled himself to fight one more battle, but they didn't.
The Japanese understood this, and therefore, even before they attack Port Arthur, they have already figured out their exit strategy, and the exit strategy is going to be President Theodore Roosevelt, whom they're going to use to mediate the end of the war. They're counting on Americans being busybodies. Yes. And they calculated correctly. So what happens is at this meeting, Itō, the prime minister, decides that he's going to use Viscount Kaneko, who is a Harvard graduate and acquaintance of Roosevelt, who is also a Harvard graduate, to contact Roosevelt about mediating. And then when the negotiations happen, they'll be conducted by another Harvard alum, which is Baron Komura.
And so this is all being set up in advance so that at the Battle of Mukden, when Field Marshal Yamagata knows he's absolutely out, this is when he goes: America card. It is time to call in Roosevelt. Because here's Yamagata's take: the enemy is never going to request peace unless we've invaded Moscow or St. Petersburg. Not feasible. And he goes, "Look, first of all, the enemy still has powerful forces in his home country. We've already exhausted ours. Second, while the enemy still does not run short of officers, we've lost great numbers since the opening of the war, and we can't replace them. So we need to be prudent." And here the chief of staff of the Manchurian Army agrees: if you start a fire, you've got to put it out. So it's time to call the fire department over in the United States to end this thing. Okay. All right. So that's another possibility. Maybe you think Mukden is it.
But I'm going to give you another, different culminating point of victory, a financial one, a different instrument of national power, not just military. Both Japan and Russia depended on loans to fight this war. Very expensive. But because Japan had battlefield successes, the interest rates go down and it gets cheaper for them. Still expensive, but the interest rates go down. And the last two loans it secures after the Battle of Mukden. So Japan has got itself geared. It doesn't have enough men to do it, but it's got enough finances to do it.
Russia is broke. And this precedes the war, where the Russians had already had a recession the prior year, a bad harvest, and that influences government income in a bad way. And so Russia is not doing well. And then after the Battle of Mukden, when Russia absolutely needs another loan, no one will pay for that loan because they don't think Russia is a good bet. And indeed, after the Portsmouth peace, Russia then did raise a loan, and it needed that money simply to transport its troops out of Asia back to European Russia. So you could argue Nicholas II's piggy bank had run dry and so he had to call it off.
Okay, now for a naval explanation. If you don't like the other ones, I've got another culminating point of victory for you. And it's this incredibly lopsided naval battle. Russia doesn't need to fight this battle. It's got the Trans-Siberian Railway, and that's how all of its supplies are coming in. Nothing is coming in by sea. Why on earth do you want to fight a naval battle on Japanese terms when the terms by land are getting better by the day for Russia, with all the new troops they're putting in? Well, Nicholas does it. Great, Nicholas. He loses his entire fleet, and it's even worse than that for him. So the Japanese lose a total of three torpedo boats, but they commandeer a whole bunch of Russian ships, so that the Japanese fleet grows in size as a result of this battle. I mean, how do you mess it up that badly? Some smaller things do make it back home, but they're basically small and they're obsolete. So, go Nicky. So that would be another explanation. Maybe you think Tsushima is the culminating point.
Okay, here's the final possibility: Sakhalin Island, and the Japanese take it. Apparently, President Roosevelt said, "Hey, you should take Sakhalin Island." This is at the very end, "because the Russians can't do anything about it. It's Russian territory, and then you can trade it back at the peace negotiations for something you actually care about." And for Russia, this is such a loss of prestige to lose its own territory, let alone, given the racial prejudices of the time, they're losing it to an Asian country, which doesn't suit Nicholas at all. And for Japan, Sakhalin's nice fishing grounds. You can get great crab. But it's not a central thing. But you could argue that maybe that was the thing that bust good old Nicky's Bologna flask.
So who knows why some countries fight on and on and never give up. Often it has to do with unlimited objectives, when others put them on death ground, and then they fight bitterly. But Nicholas II's Bologna flask definitely did shatter, and a decade later he is going to wind up dead in a Siberian basement for losing World War I. And he was a devoted husband, a beloved dad, and an incompetent Tsar, and it ended very poorly. So on the culminating points of victory, it's your problem. Which one of the five do you want? The domestic implosion, the big land battle, the financial mess, the naval battle, or the territorial thing at the end?
Okay, that's Japan, model termination. And I'll get to a couple more successes before getting into the pathologies. To recapitulate here on Japan, why I think it's a model case of war termination: look, they got their war objectives. It was Russia out of Manchuria. Japan gets Korea, without a doubt it gets that. But it gets even better. They get this big Japanese sphere of influence in Manchuria. Manchuria is big. It's the size of Germany and France combined. And Japan gets the southern half of that. And it's got this very expensive Russian railway concession line in there, plus the naval base and all the equipment that goes with that. They do incredibly well. And then they also get the southern half of Sakhalin Island. They don't get the whole thing, but the Russians are willing to trade them half. And then it confirms the result of a previous war, the First Sino-Japanese War, 1894–95, when Japan had defeated the largest land empire in Asia, China. It confirms the result that Japan is the dominant regional power of Asia.
Okay, Gulf One. Even better results, because in this war the United States didn't even pay for it. Hardly anybody died, like less than a thousand, I think less than 500. I'll get there. And given how many hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed, it's got to be a first in military history. So to give you a backdrop of what happened, Saddam Hussein was broke because he'd fought a big war with Iran. And what he wanted to do, and he did, he invaded Kuwait, because he wanted to eliminate his war debt to Kuwait, but also to take over Kuwait's oil fields, because together Kuwaiti and Iraqi oil fields in those days might well have made Iraq the swing producer of oil, with a dominant position on the oil market. And so that looked good from Saddam's point of view.
In unlimited wars, the policy objective's pretty obvious. It's regime change. In limited wars, it's really hard to know, because you have a whole continuum from the most minor thing possible to regime change, which is unlimited, but there can be huge disagreement over where on that continuum you're going to be. And most times governments won't actually explicitly state what their limited objective is. They're kind of thinking, maybe I get a little more, who knows? And it's very hard for military officers because they don't really know what the objective is.
But in this war, Bush Senior made it clear. There is National Security Directive 54. He laid it out, and the United States was successful. Yes, the United States and the coalition partners forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Yes, the Kuwaiti government was restored. And yes, the lives of Americans were protected even before the war, because with the help of allies, Americans got out of Iraq. And these three things together did indeed promote, didn't create, but they promoted security and stability in the Persian Gulf. If Saddam had remained in control of Kuwait, less stability, less security. So George Bush Senior, he got all those things.
It gets better. He didn't pay for it. This is what his 34 allies did for him. Let's do the aggregates. A, they sent over 200,000 troops. Okay. Hey, the United States sends 700,000. Small potatoes. Here are the big potatoes. They pay the United States over $50 billion to pay for all the US troops and other things. Plus, they pay an additional 14 billion to various coalition partners to help them do what they want to do. So the United States didn't even pay for this war. Other people did.
Now, let's look at the casualties. The Iraqis lost between 20 and 35,000 military deaths and up to 3,000 civilians from the bombing. Okay. Coalition forces, 392 total deaths. Of those, most of them are Americans. It's 258. I don't know of any wars that have a million belligerents where the death rate for one side is this small. And here's what was going on. Remember the Russo-Japanese War? Russia was completely diplomatically isolated, whereas Japan had an Anglo-Japanese alliance. So Britain was a silent partner for them, helping that war work out. Well, look at Iraq. Talk about being diplomatically isolated. Like all the rich countries in the world, plus just about all of its neighbors, are ganging up on them. So here's the problem: in a situation where you're going to face a massive coalition, it just isn't going to go well for you.
Okay. Now for the Korean War, that doesn't go remotely as well as the Gulf War, but at least you wind up with what at one point was a goal, which was just return to the status quo ante bellum as a divided peninsula. But let's look at the geography. The border between North and South Korea, the land border, is only 250 kilometers. So that looks plausible if you're going to fight in there. Then it's got all these maritime borders. So if the dominant naval power is coming in, which the United States was, you can probably blockade all of that, particularly if the other power has no navy. If they have a navy, it might be more complicated, but if they don't, you might be able to deal with that. And that means you can put your aircraft there and you can do shore artillery on everybody. And the Korean railway systems, a lot of them ran on the shoreline of the peninsula. So you can get all those things within range.
But here's the problem: that big northern border. The one with Russia is pretty small. It's like 17 kilometers, I think. But China, look at it, it's like 1,400 kilometers and change. And Manchuria back in Mao's day was where China's industrial base was located. So you're never going to isolate that theater. Your enemy has big buddies with an uninterrupted supply line. That's a problem. And then it gets better: both sides have big buddies. So if you have big buddies on both sides who are going to pour in the aid, you're going to have a war that's going to go on for a while, and a lot of people are going to get killed, and a lot of territory is going to get wrecked. That is the sad story of that setup.
And then the story gets a little worse. Unlike the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese War, who knew exactly what their minimum objective was, and unlike Bush Senior, who knew exactly what he was after in Gulf One, in Korea the United States couldn't decide: do we want just half the peninsula, like the Gulf War, where we're just going to return to the territorial lines prior to the whole thing, or, if we're on a roll militarily, maybe we should take the entire peninsula, the unlimited objective? And this waffling was really costly.
And Clausewitz has real comments about this. So his idea is the political objective is always primary. It is never the military objective. The United States is going, oh, maybe we can take the whole peninsula, let's go for it. That's where you're letting the military objective... Like, why are you even in Korea? What is it you want to achieve here? And Clausewitz says no other possibility exists than to subordinate the military point of view to the political. The degree of force that must be used against the enemy depends on the scale of the political objective on either side. The political object, the original motive for the war, will thus determine both the military objective to be reached, like how far up the peninsula you need to go, and the amount of effort it requires. And one of the reasons this man is considered brilliant is because he believed that the primary
discriminator determining what type of war you're dealing with is not the amount of effort, like of how many resources you're pouring into it. He argues that no, that's about means. What's key are the goals, your ends, whether it's limited or unlimited. So unlimited is regime change, limited is something else. And here his comment: wars have all degrees of importance and intensity ranging from war of extermination down to a simple observation. So you got this long continuum, but he believes on that continuum ultimately there really are only two types of wars, limited and unlimited. Here's his take. War can be of two kinds in the sense that either the objective is to overthrow the enemy, right? Regime change, to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to sign whatever peace we please. That's an unlimited objective. Or merely to occupy some of his frontier districts so that we can annex them or use them for bargaining at the peace negotiations.
And these limited objectives, there's much argument about where on this continuum you want to be. And I think it's helpful for the unlimited objectives to pair this with Sun Tzu, much earlier work by several millennia. There's a concept of death ground. And what's that? Ground in which the army survives only if it fights with courage of desperation is called death. Soldiers fight to the death when there's no alternative. The idea, if you have an unlimited objective, that means at minimum the regime of who that is on the receiving end of this is slated for annihilation, and then if you have genocidal ambitions against the population, that affects them too, and people in that situation tend to fight to the death. And you've seen it in your own lives in Ukraine, where they have defied all expectations of people who don't get death ground. The Russians have put them on death ground and the Ukrainians aren't giving up if they possibly can avoid it, cuz they're dead men, many of them.
All right, so unlimited wars are conceptually simple. It's regime change. Everyone can get that. But executing them is really difficult because you put people on death ground and they fight with incredible desperation. Then you can transform a failed state into a lethal adversary. Limited wars are conceptually difficult because you're going to be arguing about what the optimal limited objective is going to be, and that's troublesome, but they're much easier to execute, particularly if you have a very limited objective. Maybe your enemy doesn't regard giving it up as too terrible.
Anyway, to sum up on this limited, unlimited, because it's counterintuitive, but it's really helpful for analyzing wars. An unlimited policy objective generally concludes with regime change. The key is that the defeated has no choices. So yes, the United States kept Emperor Hirohito around. The United States could have executed him at the end of World War II, but kept him around because he was useful. He would sign things like the Constitution, and so that the United States could implement its political reform program, and Hirohito gave it some legitimacy. But it's an unlimited war against Japan. A limited war is something less, and it means that the defeated government's going to be around. You're going to be negotiating with them whether you like it or not, and they may come back to cause you problems later.
Okay, back to Korea and culminating points. The culminating point of victory wasn't exceeded just once. It was exceeded twice. How does one do this? Here's how. Kim Il-sung invades the South. And he thinks if it's just a twosome that he can win that thing. And he was right. He was roaring down the peninsula. He looked as if he had it all covered until he triggered the third party intervention from hell, which is when the United States and UN partners got involved. And then what was a civil war becomes a regional war with potential to become a global war, and you're off to a completely different race, much higher costs. So he might have done much better doing a slow insurgency than what he did.
Okay. So, then it's the United States's turn to go beyond culminating points of victory. And there's a whole story about the Chinese, but I haven't got time for that one. So MacArthur does his Inchon landing, which is halfway up the peninsula, and it goes really well. So his idea is, hey, we're going to reunite the whole thing, right? Because it's militarily possible. It's like Clausewitz has already told you. It's the political objective, it's not the military objective that determines what you're going to do. Well, when he gets too close to the Chinese border, the Chinese are in. And now we're into a world of hurt of they're sending hundreds of thousands of people in, and we got a completely different war on our hands doing this. And before too long MacArthur gets himself cashiered.
So I think it's worth thinking in terms of culminating points of attack and victory before wars, during wars. What might it be? What might it be like in the Ukraine war? What would it take on either side to get a culminating point of victory? Is it reachable? Or culminating point of attack on different campaigns. Is it even feasible to get there? They're helpful terms. But understand, a key measure of a culminating point of victory going sour is when the third party intervenes.
Okay. The Korean War yielded a divided peninsula at really high cost, because if you exceed the culminating point of victory, one of the measures is you're paying a lot more than you had to. But that was the minimum objective, keeping the South Koreans around, and they are. But we've had troops there ever since and it's expensive.
Okay. Now for the pathologies, starting with the regional war that escalates into a global war. Talk about expensive. American Revolution. Think about it. The 13 revolting colonies, they had no intention of doing regime change in London. So, it was limited from their point of view. But flip it around. London, however, wanted to get rid of the Continental Army and Continental Congress. So, that would be regime change. And so, the colonists fought harder because they're on death ground. It's big theater. It protracts. And it gives Britain's many rivals ample time to consider their options, because a lot of people want to take Britain down a peg in this era. So the French ally with the colonies in 1778. Then the Spanish ally with the French in 1779, and Britain attacks the Dutch in 1780. So what was a regional war becomes a global war. The French attack Savannah. The Spanish attack Louisiana. The French want to work there trying to invade England from the Isle of Wight. The British are trying to fight with the French at Ushant. And then the French and the Spanish are attacking British possessions at Gibraltar, Minorca. And the French, I guess, are attacking British possessions, Cape Verde Islands off Africa. The British attack French possessions at Mahé and Pondicherry in India. And there's an awful lot of fighting going over the really valuable stuff, which is the Caribbean theater, because these are the sugar islands in those days. That's what's valuable. And the British decide: get rid of the revolting colonies, they aren't worth much in this day, and keep things in the Caribbean. And so they reassess and decide to bail.
So okay, that's one that didn't work out well for Britain. Well, World War I doesn't work out well for anyone. Everyone before World War I thinks they're going to run a little regional war and they're going to poach some territory from somebody else in Europe, or on the basis of whatever they do to them in Europe, that country is going to cede some colonies somewhere else. That's the plan.
The problem is everybody wants different things even within an alliance system. So Britain wants the status quo. No one else does. France wants Alsace-Lorraine back. It's what Prussia had taken in the Franco-Prussian War. Italy wants more territories on the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia wants the Balkans and it wants Catholic Austria-Hungary out of the Balkans, and Russia particularly wants Austria-Hungary out of Serbia, which Austria-Hungary has no intention of doing because Serbian nationalists just offed the Habsburg heir to the throne. So that's not going to happen. So Austria-Hungary wants more of the Balkans. The Ottomans want more of the Balkans. Germany just wants lots of colonies. So what it means is that even within alliance systems, objectives don't align in this war. Primary theaters generally speaking don't align, and everybody's off for different things. And so you get these parallel wars for different places. Well, if everybody joins the party, the party you start off with and the party you end up with can wind up being completely different things. And one of the reasons nobody can settle is because within your alliance system, you cannot come up with a settlement that'll satisfy everyone within your alliance, let alone satisfy the other side enough so they'll give up. And no one dares ditching their allies in this thing because they can't fight alone. So this thing goes on and on.
Okay. Another regional war that goes up, up and away is Japan's problems in Asia. So back in the day in the Great Depression, the original America Firsters wanted to protect American jobs. So they passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, raises US tariffs through the roof. Economists went to President Hoover and said, "Don't do it because our trade partners are going to retaliate and it's going to really hurt trade globally. It won't help us." He signs the law anyway. They retaliate. Tanks trade globally. But then stop playing half-court tennis of just what's going on in the US side of the net. Let's look at the other side. Other people are far more desperate than the United States was. Other places didn't have remotely our standard of living back then. It's deepening the Great Depression. That's going to set host conditions for someone like Hitler to come to power. And in Japan, a country which had long cooperated with the international system, they'd been founding members of the League of Nations, which we couldn't be bothered to join, they're looking at it and going, "We're trade dependent, and our best allies, trading partners have just left us out in the cold. What are we going to do?" They decided they're going to invade Manchuria because they're going to practice autarky, independence. If they can have enough resources within their own empire, they don't have to worry about trade. So, they go into Manchuria. It's a regional war. So far so good. And then they decide they're gonna extend the program to all of China. And that doesn't go very well because now, instead of taking a very large part of China away from the Chinese, which wasn't great, now they're trying to take everything away. And they're putting the Chinese on death ground. And the many bickering factions of China stopped fighting each other because they understood that Japan poses an existential threat, and they fought Japan to a stalemate. And the Japanese economy is starting to tank as a result of all of this. They're getting more and more desperate. This victory denial strategy the Chinese have got going. And so this is when the Japanese decide, okay, we're going to cut off all the foreign aid going into the Nationalists and then surely they'll cave and we'll take over China and that'll be good.
So Americans are just remarkably self-focused on this Pearl Harbor. The December 7/8 has to do with what side of the date line you're on. But basically, it's the same day, same moment that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. They also attacked Malaya, Philippines, Singapore, Wake Island, Guam, Thailand, the International Settlement in Shanghai, because they're trying to get rid of all the places that might help the Chinese, except it boomerangs, because the great power is far from leaving Asia. They double down, bringing great power allies to Shanghai. The United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand are all over this fight. So it truly does not work out well.
So when you think about the regional wars that really go up, up and away and turn into global wars, they have certain commonalities. The regional war itself involves a really large theater where it's really hard to close that thing off. So the intervening power gets frustrated because it's hard to garrison the place. Also as this protracts, all kinds of third parties have time to intervene, and when that happens you're really in trouble. And then, you know, if your enemy has friends, expect more trouble, and particularly if you're going to try to do an unlimited objective. You're going to have an enemy that wants to fight forever. And then as you rack up losses you're less and less willing to compromise. So that's those pathologies. So that was pathology number one.
And here's the last pathology, of you've defeated another country conventionally, but they don't give up. They send this lethal insurgency at you where you can never stabilize anything. If you think about Japan, this happened to them as well. And this whole theater is useless to them until they can stabilize it. They don't want to be spending income garrisoning it. They want to be generating income from the economics of it all. Well, that's not happening when there's an insurgency going on. And what happened is they fought a series of conventional battles with the Nationalists, who lost them, but always reconstituted and kept fighting. But the Nationalists and the Communists also set up separate guerrilla forces. So this puts Japan on the horns of a dilemma. Are you going to concentrate your forces to fight the Nationalist conventional forces? But if you do that, you're leaving the rear areas open to the guerrillas. Okay? If you try to stabilize the rear, then you've got to disperse your forces to go deal with the other problem. And then you're letting your enemy army do things. So it's a very expensive proposition, pioneered by this country. This is what George Washington and friends come up with. So you have the Continental Army force the British army to concentrate, but you have all these militias all over the country. Washington wasn't so keen on them, but by the end of the war, he understood the benefits of it. And it's a cost imposition strategy.
And then what you're counting on, another concept here, value of the object. What is value of the object? It means it's the value to you of whatever your political objective is in the war. And Washington's counting on the American value of the object being higher than the British value of the object. And that tends to be true. If you live in theater, it's home. It's existential. Value of the object tends to be very high. If you're intervening, the further away you're intervening from, probably the lower the value of the object. And so he's counting on ratcheting up the cost high enough so the outsider leaves. And this strategy has been replayed on this country multiple times, much to US sorrow. It was played in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, where, you know, we eventually call it a day.
Speaking of Iraq, the war that didn't go remotely as well as the first one. The first one was for limited objectives. This one's for unlimited objectives. Regime change in Baghdad. That part turns out to be easy. But the problem when you do regime change is the loaded diaper is yours, right? Cuz now what? And here's what really is going on. Iraq and neighbors are mosaic societies. There are all these different peoples there. And certainly in Iraq, primary identities seem to be associated with ethnic identities more than national identities. And if you can pick a color on that map, the chances are it might want to kill one or two more colors on that map, right? And vice versa. So when you're trying to build state institutions, very difficult proposition. In Korea, Koreans do not have an issue about national identity. They all agree they're Koreans. The fight is over state institutions. In these mosaic societies
where you haven't even got a national identity, you are not going to be able to build state institutions if everyone's trying to kill each other over the national identities. So it gets worse in Iraq, and this is something you can know in advance.
Okay, in the Kuwait war, Gulf One, you're only dealing with 158 miles of that border. In taking over the whole place, you're dealing with over 2,000 miles of that border. That's a lot of border to try to wall off from interested parties. And oh, by the way, who are the neighbors? Three of them have real ambitions for regional influence: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. They're going to be involved whether you like it or not.
And it often doesn't take that much involvement to really set things off, right? Sometimes a car bomb will do it. This is a sacred Shia shrine, car bomb or whatever, blow it up. It set off a big sectarian war. It's very, very difficult to stabilize these places.
So to conclude, useful questions to ask, certainly before you get into a war, but even in ongoing ones, is take a look at who's involved, who's interested, and then this is where I would get into my big matrix for me: who's got limited versus unlimited objectives, and vis-à-vis whom, right? Is it limited against several neighbors, or all neighbors, or one? For instance, Russia has an unlimited objective vis-à-vis Ukraine, but Ukraine has a limited objective vis-à-vis Russia.
And what does all this yield? What is the alignment of policy objectives among all these different countries? How do primary adversaries align, by all these different parties? Relative values of the object: for whom is it existential, for whom is it nice to have? I would wager that what happens in Ukraine is of much more interest to Ukrainians than it is to Russians. Right now, Russians have suffered really large losses, so that is of interest, but for Ukrainians it would be more so, because that's where they live.
Also, you want to look at geographic access, right? I pointed this out with the map of Iraq, and also sanctuary. Are certain places invulnerable to attack, so you don't have much leverage over them? But anyway, are there any asymmetries in this? What lines up? It'll give you a sense of who can actually align with whom and who can't.
So that is what I had prepared for you this evening. And thank you for bearing with me.
Article published · Updated