“MAXIMUM LETHALITY”
Strategy – the word comes from the Greek strategos, meaning “general” or “commander” – is the domain that Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, should be concerned with but aren’t.
The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is the continuation by other means of policy – or of politics, the German word Politik could mean either. That has often been misinterpreted as a cynical endorsement of warfare.
In fact, Clausewitz meant something closer to the opposite: the need to limit war and subordinate it to achieving clearly defined political objectives. This is what Trump and Hegseth don’t get.
When Trump announced the name change, Hegseth, the Fox News personality who is all-in on Trump’s reality-TV shtick, bloviated again that the new label expresses the “warrior ethos” that he and the president are trying to revive after its alleged near-death under “woke” leaders and elites. The Department of War, Hegseth said, is henceforth about “maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.”
To people who think deeply about war, and know that it is hell, this vacuous bellicosity is hard to bear. Christopher Preble, who runs a “grand strategy” program at the Stimson Center in Washington, thinks that the Trump-Hegseth obsession with lethality “risks a focus on killing for killing’s sake, and comes at the expense of strategic clarity”.
Even and especially when a nation has the most powerful military in world history, its leaders need humility and wisdom in deploying that force. America didn’t lose in Iraq and Afghanistan because it was insufficiently lethal – “because it didn’t kill enough Iraqis and Afghans,” as Preble puts it – but because it lacked a strategy that was well considered, realistic and attainable.
