Why War Still Surprises
It’s as old as humankind and has been closely studied by great minds—yet it continues to defy predictions.
War and Power
Who Wins Wars―and Why
by Phillips Payson O’Brien
PublicAffairs, 276 pp., $30
WHY DO COUNTRIES WIN OR LOSE wars? With a major war raging in Europe, and a possible conflagration with China looming in the decade ahead, no question is of more urgent importance.
Phillips O’Brien, an American professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, argues that an answer can be derived by studying the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. O’Brien, a prolific military historian, has been a close observer of the Russian–Ukrainian war, writing about it on his invaluable Substack, and is now the author of War and Power, a book that promises a new “methodology” for understanding how states interact in armed conflict and what makes them “strong” or “weak.”
Before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the consensus among Western military analysts was that it would be a cakewalk. The U.S. government was making plans to spirit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky out of the country to safety in the West. In a classified briefing to Congress shortly before the tanks rolled across the border, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley predicted that Kyiv would fall in 72 hours, and that Ukraine would suffer 15,000 battle deaths compared to a Russian total of 4,000.
Such pessimism was by no means confined to the Pentagon. It was widespread in think tanks and in the analytic community that was advising the U.S. government. Policy choices flowed from such dire predictions. It would be futile for the United States to aid Ukraine with weapons, the thinking went, because the Russian onslaught would be so rapid and devastating. Samuel Charap, a top analyst at the RAND Corporation, argued that the United States could “do nothing” to alter the outcome. And as O’Brien notes, this was “no one-off. It was a vision of Russian power and Ukrainian weakness that had been used for years to argue against providing Ukraine with modern weaponry—on the assumption that Ukrainian conventional resistance against the great power of Russia was doomed.” (O’Brien dissented from this analytic consensus at the time, noting the weaknesses of the Russian military and Ukraine’s underappreciated strengths.)
O’Brien traces such colossal misjudgment in part to the widely embraced concept of “great powers” and the blithe assumption that Russia was one of them, which he closely examines and finds wanting. The term itself, coined by the German historian Leopold von Ranke in the mid-nineteenth century, is vague to the point of uselessness. Indeed, writes O’Brien, “the threshold for being a ‘great power’ has been regularly redefined, muddied, and even lowered, to such a degree that by 2022 an economically weak and political corrupt system such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia was widely hailed as one.”
In O’Brien’s telling, the problem of defining the “great powers” is just one manifestation of the problem of defining power in general. Too often, commentators, theorists, scholars, and military and diplomatic professionals treat power as a thing that can be quantified, directly compared, and used to predict the outcome of something as complicated, chaotic, and contingent as war. Certainly, the United States has the technological and economic advantages necessary to work its will on an impoverished basket case like Venezuela. But matters are rarely so simple. Merely counting up guns and ships and airplanes and troops is profoundly misleading.
O’Brien seems skeptical of the idea of predicting who will win any given war at all: “If there is one general truth in war,” he writes, “it is that how a war ends bears very little resemblance to how people imagine it will end when it starts.” (His observation here is unfortunately contradicted by the book’s subtitle, “Who Wins Wars—And Why,” which does suggest that his “methodology” can be predictive.)
Instead, what O’Brien offers is a less arithmetic, more nuanced view of what gives states their strengths—attributes that, in general, make states more likely to win wars, though they don’t guarantee victory in any particular conflict.
The base of state power is economic and technological capacity: “the ability to develop and make the most advanced ‘stuff’ in very large numbers. . . . the ability to raise capital quickly and efficiently. . . . to be able to make the best military equipment in mass, and then develop more and better systems when the time comes to use that equipment.”
A vivid example O’Brien adduces are the conditions that allowed for the creation of HMS Dreadnought and subsequent modern battleships in Great Britain prior to World War I:
These were the technological marvels of the early twentieth century, the highest expression of industrialized economies, and cost more than any moving thing on earth (and most immobile things as well). They were made of steel and iron, propelled by enormous yet finely engineered engines, and sported guns of immense weight and precision, capable of firing shells for many miles.
The appearance of Dreadnought by itself was, while revolutionary in naval architecture, not a major shift in the European balance of power. By the time World War I began just eight years after Dreadnought was launched, it was already obsolete. Rather,
the British started an entirely new race for naval dominance—one in which any state in the world could compete, if their economic/technological might allowed it. . . . The French and the Russians, the second- and third-largest naval powers in the world in 1900, lacked the economic/technological might to compete. . . . Only the US and Germany could think of competing with Britain, and the three of them, not surprisingly, were the largest industrial economies with the most advanced technological capabilities.
In other words, it was what Dreadnought revealed about underlying British productive capacity that made its christening such a strategically important moment.
To take a more contemporary example, at the outset of the Russia–Ukraine war, Ukraine had no capacity to speak of to produce drones. By 2024, it was producing a variety of configurations of drones in the millions. Russia, at one point reduced to importing drones from unstable allies abroad, notably Iran, has also greatly expanded its capacity for drone production.
AFTER ECONOMIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL CAPACITY, the next source of power is leadership. The great man theory of history is today denigrated by historians and political theorists, but as O’Brien argues, “fashion is flawed.” Individual personalities often influence the destinies of states, and alternative concepts like “national interest” are either circular or smokescreens for the wills—and hubris—of powerful leaders.
Adolf Hitler is an extreme case in point, leading Germany to ruinous defeat. But even today, a figure like Donald Trump, exercising almost unfettered executive power over foreign affairs, has the first and final say over whether the United States will enter a war—for example, with Venezuela or Iran—and a great deal of influence over whether it will prevail.
Leaders are constrained and enabled in various ways by the systems and environments in which the operate. Geography provides some of this influence—hence the remarkable consistency in the foreign policies of American Democrats and Republicans for so much of the country’s history, or the persistent themes linking the Romanov dynasty to the Soviet Union through to Putin’s Russia.
And leaders also exist in a mutually influential relationship with their societies. The Vietnam War illustrates how important the character and mood of a society can be in a war. The United States and its allies had overwhelming superiority over the poor and backward North Vietnamese Communists. We never lost a battle in the war, and we inflicted massive casualties on the enemy—approximately 1.1 million dead, in exchange for about 58,000 U.S. dead—and yet we suffered a humiliating defeat.
Part of the reason has to do with the alliance relationships on both sides—about which more below. But what O’Brien terms “societal commitment” also helps explain why the United States lost a war without losing a battle.
A society that believes that it is going to end up on the winning side of a war or that it is has no alternative but to fight a war has a significant advantage. On the other hand, a society that loses faith in victory or comes to the conclusion that getting out of the war (even to the point of surrender) is preferable to continuing the fight will almost always seriously weaken its government’s ability to continue prosecuting the war.
This goes some distance toward explaining why Ukraine has done as well as it has. It is fighting for its very existence. Russia, on the other hand, is fighting a war of Putin’s choice. Endemic corruption has permeated Russia’s military, and societal opinion, to the extent it matters in a dictatorship, is ambivalent.
THE LAST ELEMENT O’BRIEN EXPLORES is allies. “Rarely does one power win a war,” he writes. “They are almost always won by coalitions, often large and wieldy ones, where a range of allies bring different strengths to the table.” Allies are critical to a state’s ability to keep fighting long after the initial battle plans have become obsolete and the original military force is spent. Here Ukraine would appear to have the edge, with almost all of Europe and—at least for a time—the United States behind it, while Russia has the autocracies of China, North Korea, Iran, and Belarus on its side. But the United States under both Biden and Trump has been a finicky and fickle friend, putting severe restrictions on the use of the weapons it has provided and pressuring Ukraine to agree to disastrous Russian terms.
From World War I through World War II and the Cold War, the United States enjoyed the support of reliable allies in virtually every war it fought. They did not guarantee success, but when success came, it was always a critical contributor. Today, the United States is almost systematically jettisoning its allies, casting doubt on its commitment to NATO, waging a trade war against friendly powers across the globe, and even threatening, as in the cases of Denmark and Canada, to annex their territory by force of arms. This is perverse. Trump is severely jeopardizing American security.
O’Brien concludes War and Power with a kind of net assessment of a potential U.S. conflict with China over Taiwan. Our ability to mobilize an alliance on our side is a critical part of the picture. We have been frittering away a key advantage in exchange for nothing apart from tariff revenue. The picture he paints is bleak. In a short war, the United States might prevail, but the longer the conflict lasts, thanks to China’s huge advantage in manufacturing capability, the better the Chinese will fare. Whatever the outcome, the consequences of such a conflict will likely be more terrible than anything we have witnessed since 1945.
From these fundamental strengths—economic/technological capacity, leadership, societal commitment, and leadership—armies are built. They are not instruments of power themselves, as Putin or Saddam Hussein or Benito Mussolini could attest, but rather imperfect representations of the underlying strengths and weaknesses of the states and societies that create them. These factors combine during warfare in a set of complex interactions that are difficult to predict—O’Brien analyzes them in the second half of the book, addressing them by contrasting pairs of concepts: the difference between thinking in terms of battles and thinking more broadly in terms of war; how getting started in a conflict entails challenges that are fundamentally different from those involved in sustaining one; how metrics and other attempts at quantifying, for all their value, cannot do away with the need for qualitative human insight.
The complexity of warfare as not just a military and technological comparison but an unpredictable human experience is the central, important lesson taught by a book rich in historical and contemporary detail. There are no simple answers. For anyone seeking to understand some of the most terrifying problems of our time, War and Power is an indispensable volume with which to start.
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