The New Rules of War

If there is anything to learn from military history, it’s this: warfare evolves before fighters do.

In the future, wars will move further into the shadows. In the information age, anonymity is the weapon of choice. Strategic subversion will win wars, not battlefield victory. Conventional military forces will be replaced by masked ones that offer plausible deniability, and nonkinetic weapons like deception and influence will prove decisive. Shadow war is attractive to anyone who wants to wage war without consequences, and that’s everyone. That is why it will grow.

In the future, we will need more than warriors—we will need war artists. War is more like jazz than engineering, and we need strategists who can think this way.

The West needs to relearn how to win strategically. Strategy is art while tactics is science, so Western militaries need people who can think about war creatively. This will require a new kind of strategist.

tactics are complicated, but strategy is complex.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

This strategy succeeds because it is cheap to carry out and expensive to suppress.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the North Vietnamese military, read a lot of Lawrence, and here is how he explained his victory:

The American soldiers were brave, but courage is not enough. David did not kill Goliath just because he was brave. He looked up at Goliath and realized that if he fought Goliath’s way with a sword, Goliath would kill him. But if he picked up a rock and put it in his sling, he could hit Goliath in the head and knock Goliath down and kill him. David used his mind when he fought Goliath. So did we Vietnamese when we had to fight the Americans

Hanoi used secret agents to manipulate the American press pool in Saigon by acting as trusted sources who fed misinformation. Some even became major journalists. Pham Xuan An was a reporter for Reuters and Time magazine, and also a frequent unnamed source for major outlets like the New York Times. After the war, he was revealed to have been a colonel in the North Vietnamese Army the whole time.

if you cannot defeat the US military in battle, then persuade its boss, the American people, to withdraw the troops.