Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: I wanted to know what. What differentiates successful strategic leadership from those that aren't successful. There's a moment at the beginning of December of 1776 where Washington is outnumbered greater than four to one, and he is on the run from the British pursuit. Grant fought a continuous string of battles all the way through the spring, summer, and into the fall of 1864. And he did it knowing that it would hurt the UN but he also knew that it would hurt his adversaries even more. Eisenhower wrote later wrote about that particular decision, the airborne drops, as he called it, one of the most soul wracking decisions he ever made in his life.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Hey, welcome back to the MWI podcast, brought to you with the generous support of the west point class of 1974. I'm John Amble, and this episode features a discussion about Supreme Command.
Specifically, it examines the question of what makes a successful strategic military leader. What differentiates those that plan, lead, inspire, fight, and win from those who fail.
I'm joined for the conversation by Matt Kavanaugh, a retired army officer whose PhD explored that question and who wrote a recently published book on the subject called who Wins Wars? Matt's book dives deep into three case studies of Supreme Command. George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower.
Collectively, those three offer a framework to explore the enduring imperatives of successful Supreme Command across time and across different political, military and technological contexts.
It's a really interesting discussion, but before we get to it, just a couple quick notes. First, a very special thank you to the west point class of 1974 for their generous support to MWI. And second, as always, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and don't represent those of West Point, the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government.
All right, here's my conversation with Matt Kevin.
Matt, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the MWI podcast.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: No, I'm so excited to be here, John. I listen all the time. And the chance to jump in the water with everybody else and start to swim as best I can. I'm thrilled to do it.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: So you are the author of a recently published book called who Wins Wars? The subtitle is Lessons in Leadership Power and Supreme Command From Washington. Grant and Eisenh and I asked you on the podcast to talk about the book, to talk about Supreme Command. What makes good generals good, great generals great.
Before we get started, you and I know each other very well, but for if you could just give listeners kind of a sense of who you are, tell them a little bit about your background.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: Look, I, you know, I'll make it simple because there's nothing more oppressive and boring than some dry military biography.
But I went to school at West Point. I graduated in 2002, and within a few months in early 2003, I was fighting in Iraq for my first deployment. And I'll tell you like the, that was the starter's pistol on what became this book because I fought in OIF one, I fought in three under then Colonel H.R.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: mcMaster.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: And you might recall if you can find it in the dusty recesses of your mind, that that OIF3 deployment under Colonel McMaster became known as the clear hold build model of transition in Iraq. And I started to think, I started to ask myself questions which is dangerous as a lieutenant and captain, but I wanted to know what, what differentiates successful strategic leadership from those that aren't successful.
And you know, just like a lot of kids, I, you know, I was a 23 year old lieutenant when I, when I fought for the first time.
And the goal of this book on some level is to put it in some future 23 year old kid's hands in order to empower them to better understand what it, what right. Looks like, what the top of the military profession when it's at its very best looks like.
You know, I, I went through the rest of my career. I got a chance to teach back at West Point. I taught a military strategy course. I know, you know that I got a, a PhD in, in political science in International relations. And I actually wrote my dissertation around that very idea. And that's what sort of brings us around third base into home, the book that, that's out there on shelves right now, distributed by Simon and Schuster and Matt Holt Books and what we're talking about today.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: So if we could sort of set the stage. Can you define what you mean when you, when, when we say Supreme Command? You know, I think most listeners will have a sense of what that is. Eisenhower, he was supreme Commander during World War II, right. NATO has a supreme commander. But what differentiates a supreme commander from and you know, other senior command positions?
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Yeah, so it's, it's the individual that has responsibility and authority for military strategic performance at war.
Like, and it, it looks different sometimes. You know, different political systems produce different figures to fit those and fill those shoes. Like for example, you just brought up Eisenhower.
He's the product of, of a democracy and with a, with a division of power. In that particular case, General Eisenhower's opposing military supreme commander wasn't a military officer. It was Adolf Hitler. Because of 650 major strategic decisions made by the German High command over the Second World War, 95% of them were made by Adolf Hitler, to include all the major decisions surrounding breaking onto the European continent in 1944 and into 1945. So, um, in that particular case, it's not someone wearing a uniform with a, with a slouch cap on, for example.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: So does that mean that every war effort does ultimately have some form of supreme commander? You know, Eisenhower, we look at him, he was given the title Supreme Allied Commander. Yeah, we didn't have that say in our more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But would you. Would you say that the commander of Multinational Force Iraq, who was the coalition commander, was a supreme commander, was not, or the commander of isaf, which was, you know, the overall coalition Conventional Forces organization in Afghanistan, was that supreme command?
[00:06:42] Speaker A: So it depends. This is one of those academic answers. It depends. But someone ultimately has to be responsible for making the core decisions for a particular military effort, and that's the individual that ought to be held responsible for whether those decisions are superior or inferior. And, and I think that gets us to sort of our most important point, which is that when we're talking about evaluating military supreme Command, we're often doing so in a competitive environment.
There is some opponent, and so the words good and bad. There is no sort of objective good or bad. There's superior and inferior. And that's what we're looking for. And that's actually the, the gut core of this book. It's. It's evaluating military supreme commanders in context against their adversaries in a given moment. You know, in the highest stakes conflicts, in the ones that have the, that are the closest run. You know, that's, you know, it's. It's almost like we're going to climb to the top of the mountain to better understand the peak, to better understand the rest of the mountain.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: You know, I just read for another podcast that we just launched at MWI called MWI Book Club, the second episode we're featuring Defeat into Victory by William Slim. And he makes a point in there after, you know, a series of. Of failures, really. Defeat in the first part of the book, when they're, when they're retreating out of Burma, that he could console some of the soldiers, could console themselves because they did their duty. Yes, the battle was lost, but they did their part. But a general's duty is to win, and so he failed to uphold his duty by, by failing to win in that initial phase of, of of the conflict in the Indochinese theater.
Are you saying then that there is no good or bad independent of, you know, that who you're fighting against? Does that mean that, you know, Supreme Command?
Good Supreme Command is Supreme Command that wins. And I asked that because of your three case studies, Washington, Grant and Eisenhower, they all won.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Yeah, 100%.
So what we're doing in this particular moment, and like I really wanted to unpack what makes a great general great. Not just why, but how. And you know, if you're looking at General Washington, you could easily argue that he's our losing as tactical general in, in, in American history, But he won the war that mattered the most. And if you dig in, in 1776, the Continental army is facing disaster.
British troops were much older and far more experienced compared to the Continental army, which were essentially a bunch of pickup soldiers to say the least. And when the British invasion fleet arrived off the coast of New York harbor in the summer of 1776, so 250 years ago, it was the largest invasion armada the British Empire had ever sent anywhere at that point. 42,000 troops, over 400 ships, and the British were led by a hand picked supreme commander, Lieutenant General William Howe. Right. And like, this is the moment, you know, Washington and the Continental army get beat and they get beaten and they get beaten and they get pushed all the way out to New Jersey. Thomas Paine is riding with the Continental army and this is the moment where he publishes the words.
These are the times that try men's souls. And this is why, like Ken Burns, the historian and filmmaker a few months ago, pointed out that at the very beginning, you would have looked at these two sides and said the American and Continental war effort had, as he put it, zero chance of working out. And so I, I really wanted to sort of take a look at how he did that. You know, it's, it almost feels like a magic trick when you look at how the, the, the deck cards was stacked against one another. And the way that I approached it was I wanted to look inside the minds of these opposing supreme commanders. And obviously we can't do that. We can't. Like there's no sort of medical device that we can attach to a piece of someone's dead bones to be able to understand what was going on in the given moment. But, but we have artifacts of their thinking through dispatches, through memoranda, councils of war and major decisions that were made. And I think that through digging into those decisions that were made on both sides, it's almost like getting A peek under Napoleon's hat. And it's not just limited to a battlefield. It's bigger than that. It's about strategic leadership. Beyond it, I think, gives us insights into those sorts of things. Yes, winning matters, but you can make every mistake along the way, and you can still win. And in these particular cases, I think that when you put down the historical record, balancing commander on commander in the given moment with the resources they had, objectively speaking, we can say one came out over the other, not because they had more stuff, not because they had better technology, but because they exercise superior judgment.
Superior judgment is the critical characteristic that we're looking for in a supreme commander.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Why'd you pick these three as your case studies? You mentioned Napoleon. You mentioned how there are obviously other cases.
Clearly, you know, you chose three Americans. So I think that was, I'm sure, deliberate. Um, but these aren't the only three supreme commanders that this country has ever produced or had.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: So. So these. These three offered us, I think, a unique window.
So a lot of folks will argue that having more and better resources is. Is what wins. You talk to a lot of international relations scholars. It's preponderance or it's technology, that sort of thing.
I just described to you the scenario that Washington found himself in, that was not the case.
You know, Grant had a resource advantage, but the Union army had eight senior general officers that preceded General Grant, and they had the same resource advantage.
Why didn't they win? Or with Eisenhower landing on the beach, the beaches in Normandy, and then pushing across the continent, to simply say that Ike made the decision to go on June 6, you know, to wait on the 5th and then go on June 6, was not the sum total of his decision.
So, for example, he not only had to decide how to use air power, which is to stay in a short, sharp bombardment or. Or a longer rolling bombardment, he had to make the critical decision on where and how to use the airborne drops.
So I'll just give you, like, a sort of a brief snapshot of that particular decision.
Many people would know that there were two American airborne divisions that were dropped right behind the German defenders on the beach. And then there was a Brit. A combined British Canadian force as well.
What a lot of folks don't know is that the air component commander, one week before the drops, put in writing and in argument to General Eisenhower that it was his professional military opinion that should we make those airborne drops so close to the beach that the.
That the force would be rendered combat ineffective, that they would see somewhere between 70 and 80% casualties.
General Omar Bradley wanted those air drops right there behind the defenders on the beach because it would free up some of the, you know, it would make the job a little bit easier for the troops that are coming from ashore.
There was even a third opinion. General Marshall, way back in Washington D.C. set up a group of staff officers to write a professional military estimate and send it to Ike to suggest and tell him that he should try a deep envelopment to send those airborne troopers two thirds of the way to Paris.
And by doing so that you would force some of the mobile reserves off of the beach.
So this is the, this is the role of the supreme commander. He or she is like a decision funnel. There's all these ideas and options and ways to go forward that come in the top end and only one has to go through.
So you have to pull off this amazing trick. I think you have to be open to some new ideas, but at a certain point you have to make a decision and you have to carry it through no matter what.
And Eisenhower wrote, later wrote about that particular decision, the airborne drops and as he called it, one of the most soul wracking decisions he ever made in his life. Because he knew full well that if he got that decision wrong, he would be responsible for the deaths of so many young men. Right.
And in some ways that's why I put that image, that iconic image from the day before D Day on the COVID because he's literally having a conversation with a, a particular troop, an airborne trooper from the 101st Airborne Division.
That's a kid from Michigan, he's a lieutenant. The reason that he was picked to talk to Ike was that was his 22nd birthday.
And you know, you can see why Eisenhower not only when he got back in the car with his driver after he took that decision and left the troopers on the beach, why he started to tear up and then later, you know, 10 years after the fact was still got teary eyed when he went to a group a reunion of, of, of those officers.
But that's only part of the story.
The other part of the story of Supreme Command is that on the other side of the field there is the German High Command.
So the Nazis had decided that or particular Adolf Hitler in particular had written a Fuhrer principle, which is sort of one of his highest edicts, that the war would be won in 1944 in the west, and which is why he dispatched Erwin Rommel to shore up the Atlantic Wall.
Rommel and General, one other senior general officer in the west made recommendations to Hitler where to put the 10 divisions of German armored mobile reserve. So Hitler had 10 divisions to spend.
Rommel wanted all 10 of them at the beach based on the idea that he knew Allied air power would deny them the ability to move those reserves after the invasion began.
General von Rundstedt, the other individual part of this decision, wanted them pushed back toward the rear, wanted to hold all 10 of them further off the beach so you could allocate them where. Where wherever the Allies landed.
Hitler literally split the baby in the dumbest way possible. I mean, he just did. He put three up front at the beach, he put three under Runed sort of in the middle, and then he held four in the deep, deep reserve. And that's the whole point of a reserve, right, is that you have punching power with it.
So when the Allies made it through the beachhead, the German mobile reserves weren't really able to make much of an impact.
So what I'm getting at is Eisenhower made, you know, he made a decision, Hitler made a decision. Those decisions interacted in the months that followed the landings. Right. And you can, we can see through the consequences of those decisions that one was better than the other.
That sort of engagement of decisions that, that cycle, you know, there's a particular military challenge, there's a choice that must be made, there's a clash of forces, and then we see the consequences. And in this particular case, we see them pretty bright and clear.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: Sure.
You know, there's, there's two ways you can go about trying to learn from a collection of case studies. In this case, three case studies. Right. In Supreme Command, you can look for continuities. What is it that ties these three together? What is it that contributed to success in all three cases? The other is what can I learn specifically from this one supreme Commander? I kind of want to talk about both, although you've already alluded to, you know, this idea of judgment being a continuity between successful supreme commanders. We've talked about Eisenhower. Now if we flip back to Washington, you know, was there anything that stood out, that made him unique not only compared to, you know, to his peers, to his contemporaries, compared to his counterpart. How.
But also compared to your other case studies, to Grant and to Eisenhower.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: So with Washington, he's put in this amazingly challenging circumstance. Right. He's at a material disadvantage.
He knows that his adversary has hordes and hordes of well trained troopers and that he's working with soldiers that are new is, would be, I think, a clever dodge at a, at a criticism.
So his objective very Much is to preserve his army, he is given the assignment from the Continental Congress to hold New York.
And so he has this, this very difficult trade off to pull off in New York.
It's, it's not just how to defend New York best, but then at a certain point, it also becomes, how do you preserve your army? And then how do you, how do you make that trade off between a political judgment and one of military necessity? And that's what, when you get into his dispatches with, with others, whether it be in the Continental Congress or other general officers, you see him making this trade off in real time. The upshot is that his general officers at the councils of war that they held were telling him over and over again, New York is indefensible. We must leave. And, and as an extension of that, Major General Nathaniel Greene wanted to burn New York. He wanted to burn it to the ground, to deny the British army the ability to have it as a garrison for the winter.
But Washington is able to both keep his political superiors informed and respected, while also maintaining the respect and appreciating the military judgment of those that's. That. That he's fighting alongside. So he takes sort of a stepped withdrawal out of the city of New York.
They go through a phased withdrawal all the way out across New Jersey. And this is the point where the material imbalance is at its greatest. There's a moment at the beginning of December of 1776 where Washington is outnumbered greater than four to one, and he is on the run from the British pursuit. And that is the moment that General Howe decides to suspend his campaign for the winter to go to garrison to put the Hessian allies closest to the Continental Army.
And that's the moment that Washington spots an opportunity.
[00:23:08] Speaker B: What about if we fast forward, what, some 90 years to grant, the supreme commander of Union forces during the Civil War? As you mentioned, he was the last in a long string of general officers given overall charge of the Union war effort.
What set him apart again from his peers, from his contemporaries, from his adversaries, and also from your other case studies.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: So he, he changed the game. I mean, he just completely changed the game. And it. Sometimes strategy is simple, but it's hard in the sense that you can see what you ought to do, but you may not want to do what you must do.
In the summer of, in the spring of 1864, General Grant faced roughly the same military situation that a previous Union army commander, Joe Hooker, faced in terms of the numerical imbalance of forces.
You know, the Confederate army did not have the Same amount of resources in terms of men or material that the Union army did, but they did not. They still had sufficient resources to be out there fighting. And Lee was winning at. At various points and. And moments of the conflict. Grant had the guts to not simply fight a battle, lick your wounds and then go back to find the next opportunity to fight a battle. He fought a continuous string of battles all the way through the spring, summer, and into the fall of 1864. And he did it knowing that it would hurt the Union.
In fact, actually, Arlington National Cemetery was. Was born of Union army casualties in that spring and summer of 1864, but he also knew that it would hurt his adversaries even more. And that's, you know, like, when you get down to it, I think that's an expression of what I said earlier that you're not looking for sort of good or bad. You're looking for superior or inferior. You know, something may hurt you, but if it hurts your adversary even more, then it's. It may be worth pursuing, it may be worth doing. And by. By moving forward simultaneously on all fronts, not just against the main Confederate army in the army of Northern Virginia, but in other subsidiary efforts.
That simultaneous pressure was what eventually threw the Confederate army over the ledge. And, you know, it. Like I.
I can have true military professional respect for a general officer like Robert E. Lee, and I can still see that general Grant was superior because Grant played, you know, Grant may, you know, a lot of folks will point out he had the better hand, but he also played that better hand better. And I, you know, that's why I think we are a nation, you know, a single nation, as opposed to two.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: And Lee had played his weaker hand better than all of Grant's predecessors.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:26:36] Speaker B: And I think that, you know, you mentioned Arlington National Cemetery was born of the. Of the casualties from that period in early 1960 or 1864.
That tells you what a close run thing this was, because the fact that the cemetery was there shows you how close the fighting was to Washington, D.C. the consequences were that high. And I think one of the. One of the most interesting things that your comments that you made, one of the most interesting points that you made, was that he not only decided to stop fighting individual battles, he strung them together into a coherent campaign. He also unleashed forces in other theaters to lessen the pressure from the Union forces, you know, in Virginia by, you know, Sherman's march to the sea, you know, burning Atlanta, all of that stuff, which is a difficult decision. You know, we're going to target infrastructure That's a difficult decision for a commander to make. You know, knowing that that's going to have an effect not just on the armies that you're, that you're facing, but on civilians as well.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: 100. And like, I, I can look at that campaign, you know, some historians refer to it as the Overland Campaign from the spring to the early summer of 1864. I'm looking out over a longer period of time, closer to a year. And I do that deliberately because I, I want to eliminate luck.
So I think luck can be important on a particular day or in a particular tactical engagement here and there. But in terms of a campaign or a war, no, I think that you are either, you are either going to press your advantage or not. And I, I look at General Lee and I can. He, he made exceptional decisions on where to fight in Virginia in 1864. He used terrain to his advantage. I was impressed with that. And the, the casualty figures bear it out. You know, he took, he took more than a pound of flesh for, for the less, the less than a pound that his forces sustained.
He sent Lieutenant General Jubal early on a raid of the District of Columbia in early July of 1864. And that was a prudent measure, I think, to take some pressure off of the particular fight that he was a part of. But at the same time, Grant had a decision on how, you know, what to, what to do with that core, core size raid element. And I think he parried, he parried Lee's thrust effectively and kept focused on the main thing. Look, Supreme Command doesn't matter so much if you're the New York Yankees playing a team of Little Leaguers. But when you're playing in close run contests with really high stakes, hell yeah, it matters a lot. You know, supreme commanders make decisions and these decisions are what, what become our history.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: The, the photo that you put that we talked about on the front of the book with Eisenhower. So speaking to a Lieutenant from the 101st Airborne, you know, I think all of these, these three case studies are general officers who also had a way with the troops. They were, you know, player coach. Players, players, coaches. They call them like man managers. You know, they, they, they had a rapport that was, that's difficult to kind of describe, but they all shared that. Is that a necessary component to, to effective Supreme Command, or is it just something that happens to usually go hand in hand with it?
[00:30:00] Speaker A: So this is one of those parts of this that I can't, it's, it's, it's never going to be provable. But, you know, objectively speaking, in the, in these cases, I can say one made superior judgments to the other. And so working back from that, you start looking into nuances and signs and anecdotes and patterns that might help you better understand what made those judgments better. And I think one of them is empathy.
All three of these guys, all three of them, they were guys. And going forward in the world, they won't be, they'll be, they'll be women as well, but they're guys.
General Washington cried on the battlefield while watching some of his troops being bayoneted to death on the far side of a riverbank.
General Grant, there's at least two documented instances in the historical record where he shed two years as well, knowing full well that he was sending off thousands and thousands of young people to die. And Eisenhower on June 5 and June 6 shed tears. And then later, there's actually video footage that you can find online of him speaking to a group of airborne troopers decades after that airborne drop, remembering the emotion that it took to get through and stomach those decisions. I, I think empathy is.
I, I, I wouldn't say I, I think it's necessary, frankly, because when you are seeking to change the world in some way, like the world exists it, the world is X, and you want to make it Y, you are doing that within, with, and amongst, and against human beings. And in order to secure that change, you need to understand and feel what others feel. And I think all three of these had that sort of emotional intelligence that business books talk about nowadays, and you can see it in their writing.
I also think that that's the part of the funnel I described. It's that open end of it to be able to really hear and understand, you know, other, other ideas before they go into that final judgment phase.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Probably also helps explain why each of these three generals also then went on to become presidents.
[00:32:29] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly like they understand. They understood their roles in a democracy.
They maximize. I, I like to think of this book as a flip side of the coin to Elliot Cohen's sort of Supreme Command book. He wrote about presidents and prime ministers, and God love him for it, but he missed a very important part of the equation, I think. And I think if, if we get it right, those two play well with one another.
So you have a political leader who is maximizing decisions of political consequence, and then outsourcing and satisficing, to use a political science term, the military strategic judgments. And then on the other side, you have a military supreme commander who's maximizing the military and strategic decisions, but still keeping a fingertip feel on the political scenario and situation. So, for example, you have General Grant, for the first time in our nation's history, supporting widespread soldier vote in the fall of 1864.
You should read what he wrote. It is breathtaking about the moral necessity for these troops to exercise their democratic right to vote from the field because they had been called away to fight for that democracy. At the same time, he made abundantly clear that there would be no political speeches, no. No canvassing, no leaning on anybody. You know, I mean, it's. It's amazing to me. And yeah, like, on some level, I all. I kind of think that all three of these supreme commanders were successful not just because of their time in leadership on the battlefield, but because in peacetime they secured those strategic gains they made at war.
Right.
Think of Grant waging a guerrilla war against the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War, or Eisenhower securing the Second World War, or the gains in the Second World War in the early stage of the Cold War as well. So I do think that some of those characteristics shine through, not just on a battlefield, but in politics as well.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: We've seen from, you know, I don't think this is a controversial statement. We've seen from our own recent US War efforts how challenging it can be sometimes to connect military success with enduring political strategic success.
That necessarily means linking policy decisions, strategic decisions made by civilian policymakers to. To what actually happens on the battlefield.
These three individuals all did that. Well, in a lot of ways, Grant's relationship with Lincoln is the sort of easiest to kind of understand because it's, you know, a commander in chief and a senior military officer. Washington's is unique because you've got a Continental Congress right. There isn't. There isn't a president at this point in time.
Eisenhower's is also unique because he's a supreme allied commander, which means he does have, you know, political leaders. In Washington, that relationship matters. But also with Winston Churchill, that one matters as well with, you know. What did you learn about that relationship? Management from each of these case studies.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: Yeah. So no matter what, even across time. So with. With Washington, it's councils of wars and letter writing.
With Grant, it's.
It's also dispatches and memoranda back and forth. But it's, you know, it's. It's faster paced, obviously. And with Eisenhower, he's got some.
A full staff that we would recognize today, I think, in terms of, like, the way that they organized it.
It's funny that you bring up Churchill because, you know, this is, this is what I mean.
The, the individual responsible for the strategic performance of a particular side at war.
There were numerous instances in 1944 and into early 45 where Churchill was directly opposed in the most vehement terms to the decisions that Eisenhower was making.
Whether we're talking about where to put the second landing, whether to, whether to do a second landing in the south of France or not, Churchill was, was, was dead set against it, how to use air power. Like I mentioned before, there was a moment in March of 1944 actually, where Eisenhower said, either we will go with the decision that I have made or I will relinquish this command. He, you know, he threatened to sort of relieve himself because he fully understood that one person needed to make these decisions and, and it could not be undertaken by a committee.
I think that whether to fall on one side or the other, if I'm, if I'm sort of trying to get it down to the simplest actionable lesson for someone listening, it's the ability to toggle between grit and empathy, being open to different options and ideas for some period of time, but then having the guts and the stomach to be able to close those off at the right moment and say, this is how we're going forward, and it's all on me if it goes wrong. I mean, you know, folks remember that Eisenhower wrote two messages for D Day, and he was, he was so caught up in the moment that he actually wrote down the date on it as July instead of, instead of June.
And when he actually went back and revised it, revised the, the failure message, he revised it to make it take it out of passive voice and in, into active voice.
He changed it so that it was abundantly clear to every civilian on planet Earth that I was the one that made this decision. I failed beyond that. On May 7, 1945, when, when the war was over and everybody knew it, Eisenhower's staff, a number of them, drafted these grand, eloquent victory messages, like, you know, because they knew it would be recorded for all history. And, and a lot of people will remember the message. You know, Eisenhower said no to all of them. He said the mission of this Allied headquarters was, was, you know, successful at 0345 hours on May 7, 1945, something like that.
What I'm getting at is this, this cycle, this funnel that I've talked about.
When the stakes are this high, when the contest is this close, this is hard, and you need a confident person in that role, but a confident person that is leavened by a sense of humility. You need a humble, confident person and that is not easy to come by. Right? Like you need someone who's willing to say, I made the decision, it's all on me. And then someone who's self assured enough to accept the responsibility if things go wrong. I mean, this is not a hard human, an easy human being to find. Like, it's just not. And it, it's not as if I'm propping these three commanders that were successful up on a pedestal because I'm pointing out in several different parts of the book where they failed in, in small tactical engagements or for example, Washington.
He was, he, he, he liked to complain. He was, he was a complainer. And he was right to complain because the, the Continental army was a, a wreck. I mean, I couldn't even imagine it. And still, you know, you sort of step back and you look at the sum total and you're, you're, you're odd. I mean, you just, you really are.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: So you said that that combination is a, is a hard human being to find.
But is it trying? Is it about finding that human being or is it about creating that human being through our, you know, professional military education and fostering cultures that sure, they're not going to turn every single leader in a military force into somebody embodied with, you know, that, that has these characteristics, but maybe optimizing your chances of producing one when you need it.
[00:41:51] Speaker A: I think we can, I also think you can't lab grow this. I'm going to be blunt. I don't believe that AI for example, could ever replace Supreme Command, that we are, we are human beings.
And the, the most, the most important moral judgments about reordering human affairs will not come from a machine or a computer. I, you know, at one point of the book, so I, I stepped back and I, I interviewed a whole bunch of modern contemporary general officers.
I had conversations with Admiral Jim Stavridis, the former Supreme Allied Commander, the former Commandant of the Marine Corps. I talked to four stars from each one of the services, all of them, and I, you know, I, I sort of, they become almost like a Greek chorus in the book.
And because I was looking to, to, to see whether or not these examples from the past echo today.
And the thing that came through the most true, I think for our, our modern military leaders was that the thing that shaped them the most wasn't just their adversaries. It was their own independent curiosity, their own independent willingness to learn.
So it told that part taught me that formal schooling, you Know, a successful supreme commander, a war college alone cannot make.
But what the modern military does really, really well is mentorship. It creates these opportunities in these scenarios where you get to learn from others and there's an accumulation like a snowball effect, where you really are giving young people an opportunity to learn lessons that very well may be important on some future field.
So, you know, one of them being that just, you know, pops out is Eisenhower spent several years working with the American battle monuments commissioned in France, which is like the education you would want.
A commander who is looking to break across the English Channel onto the continents in northwest France, you, you see these, these sorts of things pop up over and over again. And you know, with Eisenhower, it's also his experience with Fox Connor that a lot of others, a lot of historians in particular, particular have written about.
[00:44:39] Speaker B: And O Connor, this, this sort of ultimate army mentor, he's kind of for sure, he epitomizes what we talk about when we talk about mentorship culture in a military force when it's done at its best.
[00:44:50] Speaker A: For sure, for sure. And you know, the way that I would want to land on that too is that one of the more provocative things that I think you'll find in this book is that I think that the army is, is too consumed with leadership. You know, it's, it's leadership this, leadership that leadership, everything. The reality is that at war both sides have leaders.
We need, we need something more than just leadership that's part of the military profession, but it's not all of the military profession. And I think we need to understand that. We need to focus on superior judgment and developing what gets us to that, that point. And I think mentorship is part of what gets us there.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: The comment you made about AI never replacing judgment that, that, you know, that is necessary for effective supreme command is a really interesting one because, you know, you think, you imagine a scenario in which a Washington, a Grant or an Eisenhower has an AI decision tool, you know, helping to decide whether or not to launch the Cross channel invasion on June 5 or June 6, whether or not to withdraw from New York City or hold it like the Second Continental Congress wanted, whether or not to, to expand the geographic scope of, of the Union Army's campaign in, in 1864. And if we're, if, if the purpose of writing this book is to extract lessons that will be useful on the future battlefield, that future battlefield will have AI assistance. It will have technologies that did not exist in any of these three case studies. What are the sort of eternal characteristics when you know, there will be a future when a supreme commander is making these difficult decisions with artificial intelligence assistance, for instance.
[00:46:49] Speaker A: Assistance, yes. A tool, yes. A replacement, no. I, I think that at the tactical level, you can make a real great argument that artif, you know, machines can, can process information faster and may make more successful engagements. I'll grant that. And you know, we're seeing that in Eastern Ukraine right now. You know, we're, we're watching, we're witnessing what machine, you know, future machine warfare looks like. And it looks pretty, pretty darn awful to, you know, to be honest, to live under that.
But at the strategic level, no, we're not there yet. And, and I, I doubt that we will ever be in, in any kind of sense of it. You know, I, I don't, you know, from the standpoint also that I've seen this, this movie before, you know, you get writer Hart, for example, who will argue that the indirect, you know, the, you know, always choose the, the indirect method.
You know, always pick the, pick the road that your adversary doesn't think that you'll be on. But what you end up getting into is this never ending algorithm of finding the unexpected. And it becomes predictable by the by, by that very fact.
So I, I do think that Supreme Command will stay with human beings as long as there are human beings around with, you know, that are fighting.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: So to close out, I kind of want to zoom in on, on maybe a very narrow audience. You taught at West Point. We're recording this during the summer. Incoming cadets have just shown up. They're undergoing their, their initial summer training.
If you, you know, if you focus in on, on those individuals 18 years old that are just starting their military journey, they're just starting to, to take in some of the inputs that are going to frame the way they think about leadership, the, the way they think about their service going forward. There is very likely a cadet in the woods at West Point right now who 35, 40 years from now could find him or herself in, in, you know, wearing four stars and in a position where this sort of judgment is required in a position of supreme command or senior leadership.
What, you know, if, if those cadets had this book out there with them in the woods, what are you hoping that they take away from it?
[00:49:18] Speaker A: What right looks like in four words? That's it. I mean, in the 18th century, Washington outlasted the British in America survives.
In the 19th century, Grant Ground down the Confederates and America holds on. In the 20th century, Ike drives back the Nazis and the country stays safe. Just like the past three, our 21st century may yet rest on the soul, the shoulders of that particular listener that you're describing.
There's no strategic silver bullet, but I think this is what silver but you know, that strategic silver buckshot looks like. And on some level American greatness has become almost like this loaded political phrase. But I think this book puts its finger on the very genesis and nucleus of what might be called American greatness. Because without which there wouldn't be this country, you know, this country wouldn't exist. I, I mean you can't just sort of hand someone a book and say this is the answer. But I think it helps a young person.
The Department of, you know, this department, you know, the War Department, the Department of Defense, it's the biggest organization on planet Earth. It's bigger than the People's Liberation army, it's bigger than Walmart.
And then beyond that, when we send a young person to war, we put them in the most disorienting environment, disorienting environment that you can possibly imagine. Those two things, it's hard to understand your place in all of it. So even if you are not someday going to be that next supreme commander, it really matters that you can understand what the one that is your supreme commander, who is making those decisions, what right looks like. So then you can act accordingly. You know, you can operate independently and effectively and you can be the best officer that you can be or non commissioned officer.
[00:51:22] Speaker B: Well Matt, I think that is an excellent note to end on. I want to thank you again. The book is called who Wins Wars? Lessons in Leadership, Power and Supreme Command from Washington, Grant and Eisenhower.
It is out now. I hope listeners that pick it up will enjoy it. I trust that they'll also have enjoyed hearing from you on the episode today today. So thanks for joining me.
[00:51:41] Speaker A: Awesome to be here. Awesome.
[00:51:50] Speaker B: Hey, thank you so much for listening to the MWI podcast. One last thing, if you aren't following MWI on social media, you can find us on Twitter X Facebook or LinkedIn. It is a great way to stay up to date on all of the new articles, podcast episodes, research and more that we're publishing every day. Thanks again.
