Review: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy

I’ve written about this before here, but I think this book actually gives bad strategic advice:

I have a friend who likes to criticize this book by noting that, although Operation Desert Storm was 'good' strategy, it^[1]:

• Took out 96% of civilian electricity production
• Took out most of the civilian dams & sewage treatment
• Took out civilian telecommunications, ports, bridges, railroads, highways, and oil refineries
• Killed 2,278 civilians and wounded 5,965, including 408 sheltering in an air raid shelter

The Gulf War more generally directly killed ~100k Iraqis, of which ~25k were civilians^[2]. The subsequent uprisings killed another ~50k, mostly civilians. And then, because basically all infrastructure was gone and the US imposed trade sanctions, hundreds of thousands more died from starvation and inadequate health, of which ~47k were children^[3].

Okay, but aside from the gotcha with the obvious moral wrongs, this friend argues that Desert Storm was terrible strategy because obliterating an entire country's infrastructure might have looked cool on TV, but we're still seeing the destabilizing effects that had on the region, essentially taking economic value the U.S. could've slurped up offline for decades and also costing them $8,000,000,000,000 in future wars^[4].

It is unlikely that these externalities were counterfactually necessary. In fact, it is probably the most salient example of 'winning the battle but losing the war' in all of human history.

My friend wraps it up by arguing that this exemplifies the book's blind spots:

• It ignores essentially all externalities of 'good' strategies on an object level
• It ignores those externalities for their moral harms
• It ignores those externalities when they produce blowback that affects your own goals
• In particular, it advocates for strategies that produce more harms than counterfactually necessary by ignoring the above

We can extend the book's definition of good strategy by adding precision to the goals; to generally pick the strategy with the least externalities in order to minimise unnecessary moral harms and blowback. (And I would also advocate for not having any 'necessary' moral harms, but that seems out of scope for this post).