Military Strategy for Writers

I’d love to see a book that can concisely explain strategic concepts to non-army nerds. But Stephen Kenneth Stein’s Military Strategy for Writers is not that book.

The biggest problem is the tone. It’s less “here’s what strategy is and why it’s often overlooked” and more “The generals are idiots, the writers are idiots, but I the great Historian shall tell you why all of them are wrong”, a tone that at absolute best is unhelpful.

It doesn’t help that I see typical pop-history cliche sneers that trigger alarm bells. WRT Vietnam and Iraq, for example it,s “hurr durr greeted as liberators” (during the actual invasion, that was largely accurate) and “Hurr durr us did big conventional war in Vietnam not smart coin like the British in Malaysia ” (they did that because the north was also doing it, with large northern armies being a complication that pure guerilla wars never had).

Ironically you could use Vietnam and Iraq to show the limits of strategy. Like the best case in Vietnam was going to be a Korea-style divided country, likely without South Korea’s economic boom. As a powder keg held together solely by a dictator’s lash and with a neighbor that had the ability to stir up trouble and the reasonable fear it could be next, Iraq was always going to pose a challenge.

Anyway, it fails to balance storytelling. Like yes, you get unrealistic amounts of decisive battles in fiction, but that’s because not every work needs or wants to be a hazy grey tale and because decisive conflict works for storytelling.