Goliath: Why the West Doesn’t Win Wars. And What We Need to Do About It.

by Sean McFate

'An important book' SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE, FORMER DIRECTOR, MI6

'The Freakonomics of modern warfare' CONN IGGULDEN
Everything you think you know about war is wrong. War is timeless. Some things change - weapons, tactics, leadership - but our desire to go into battle does not. We are in the midst of an age of conflict: global terrorism, Russia's resurgence and China's rise, international criminal empires, climate change and dwindling natural resources. The stakes are high, and we are dangerously unprepared. As a former paratrooper and military contractor, Sean McFate has been on the front lines of deep state conflicts. He has seen firsthand the horrors of battle and as a strategist, understands the complexity of the current military situation. The West is playing the same old war games, but the enemy has changed the rules. In this new age of war: -technology will not save us,
-victory will belong to the cunning, not the strong,
-plausible deniability is more potent than firepower
-corporations, mercenaries, and rogue states have more power than nation states, and loyalty will sit with the highest bidder. Learn how to triumph in the coming age of conflict in ten new rules. Adapt and we can prevail. Fail, and size and strength won't protect us. This is The Art of War for the 21st century.

Genres: Military Fiction, Nonfiction, Military History, Politics

368 pages, Paperback

Published January 23, 2020

About the author

I have been a paratrooper in the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. A para-military contractor. An operative in the private intelligence world (think: Wall Street meets CIA). I’ve dealt with African warlords, raised armies for U.S. interest, rode with armed groups in the Sahara, conducted strategic reconnaissance for oil companies, transacted arms deals in Eastern Europe, and helped prevent an impending genocide in the Rwanda region. In between this, I earned degrees from Brown, Harvard, and a PhD from the London School of Economics.

Now I’m an author, my favorite job by far. I write about the world as I’ve witnessed it. Unlike most, I write both serious non-fiction and fiction. What I can’t discuss in my non-fiction ends up in my novels, which are like Tom Clancy for the 2020s.

You can learn more about me here http://www.seanmcfate.com and you can follow me on twitter or Instagram @seanmcfate. I appreciate your support, and answer emails from readers.

Reviews

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Q:
The world is changing faster now than ever before, and unsurprisingly, new styles of leadership will become more important than ever. We can no longer rely on the flexible iconoclast or the by-the-book manager alone—we must combine outside-the-box and ordered thinking. This kind of hybrid leadership will be necessary not only for success in warfare, but in other worlds as well. (c) Translatable.
Q:
War is one of humanity’s constants. No matter how enlightened we become, we’ll still spend our time killing one another. As such, it is inevitable that today’s younger generation will experience war. The only question is when. In the future, some conflicts will be regional, while others will affect us all. Some will be small, others will be big. All will be horrifying.
The good news is that we can still win. (c) Sure someone can. But those someones are going to need another planet right after that. So, maybe not?

A modern attmpt at writing another Art of War (and bake some fortune cookies).
The good:
- The author's aware of Sun Tzu and other works of great minds.
- Some ideas are not just sane but widely transferable.
The bad:
- Underresearched history.
- Facts twisted at many points.
- The writing is a bit chunky in places.
- A lot of warmongering hudge-fudge. Wars are not an inevitability. They are a fragging luxury, from an economist's POV. Humanity should progress at some point beyond the tribalistics or what is all the enlightenment going for?
The ugly:
- The militaristic ideas on needing to wage wars. Come on: humanity needs solutions not extra wars and new ways of conducting warfare.
- The memo on the Cold War being over: amazing how many people never got it. All the villainizing of China and Russia

Q:
It is daunting to face an enemy whose singular goal is to destroy you.
When I arrived in Iraq… (c) Ahem.
Q:
Why has America stopped winning wars? (c) Ow, did it start doing that at some point? How quaint, since apart from the Independence one (proxy, basically, should it count?) and the 1812 one, there just weren't any serious ones won: the Mexican shouldn't count, obviously.
The Indian one shouldn't count, that was mostly genocide, not war.
The Civil one, that was an internal thing, so one can't say that America won it, since some states won and some lost…
WW1 ended in Armistice, not a win, I'd think.
WW2 was entered into by the US on 8 Nov 1942, while the USSR had been successful in fighting the Nazis between 5 Dec 1941and, well, the end of the WW2, so it's safe to assume it was won by the USSR by a large margin and joined by the US only the dice were cast. Very commendable behaviour, duh.
Q:
The last time the United States won a conflict decisively, the world’s electronics ran on vacuum tubes….
The United Kingdom and other Western powers have struggled in their conflicts since World War II... (c) Nope. It did not. Just goes to show that you can twist the history in the textbooks and maybe steal a part of someone's victory but that won't make one victorious. Or even a good decision maker.
Q:
Iran has its tentacles in Baghdad… (c) As well it should since they are historically deeply interconnected.
Q:
Wars since 1945 have squandered American blood, wasted trillions of tax dollars, and damaged national honor, while resolving nothing on the ground. …
As a taxpayer, I’m disgusted that our government has blown trillions of dollars abroad and only made the situation worse on the ground. (c) Amen.
Q:
everything—Congress has been AWOL since the Truman administration. The last time it officially declared war was World War II, despite armed conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, and Syria. What exactly did our soldiers die for? As a former troop leader, I want to know. I’m sure I’m not alone. (c)
Q:
France was defeated in Algeria and Indochina, Great Britain in Palestine and Cyprus, the USSR in Afghanistan, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Waging war the same way in the future is not the answer. (c) How about not waging any unreasonable wars anymore? Is it not the answer? Would save large chunks of those billion-dollar budgets as well.
Q:
Nor did it challenge Russia’s theft of Crimea … (c) Was it a theft? Come on. Why did no one bother when Ukraine got the land that wasn't, its ever, in the 1st place?
Q:
The favorite weapon of such dreamers is the strongly worded memo, which explains much. (c) Well, if neither arms nor memos work, why not use the latter ones? Less senseless bloodshed, at least.
Q:
We lose because of our own strategic incompetence. (c)
Q:
Minds are too inelastic today. Western militaries have become paradigm prisoners of something called “conventional war” strategy. (c)
Q:
Conventional war is dead. Those stuck in the traditional mind-set will probably not even recognize future conflicts as wars at all, until it is too late. (c) Maybe yes. Maybe no. What did the citizens of Hiroshima & Nagasaki recognize those nukes as?
Q:
The modern Western world is no different. Nothing lasts forever, and barbarians are nearing the gate. (c) Come on! The Cold Was has been over for decades! Are we expecting an aliens attack or what?

Fun:
Q: In reality, the USSR was never a threat to the West in the 1980s, not even close. That military officers thought Red Storm Rising prescient displays how clueless they were about the enemy. Then again, the CIA missed it, too—“missed by a mile” according to one former CIA director—in one of the biggest intelligence failures in history. Perhaps they were reading Clancy instead of intel reports, as the agency depicted an expansionist, invulnerable Soviet Union in its briefings from the late 1980s. (c) LOL! Maybe they did operate on Clancy, after all.

Military futuristic:
Q:
In the coming decades, we will see wars without states, and countries will become prizes to be won by more powerful global actors. Many nation-states will exist in name only, as some practically already do. Wars will be fought mostly in the shadows by covert means, and plausible deniability will prove more effective than firepower in an information age.
...
Terms like “war” and “peace” will come to mean nothing. The laws of war will fade from memory, as will the United Nations, which will prove useless in the face of conflict. If it persists, it will be only as letterhead stationary. (c)

[Kumar Rishabh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new look at the art of warfare. The author has been unorthodox in approaching warfare. His central theme has been the Westphalian and Claustzwiz concept of warfare is over. He is saying the era of battles between state/ nation armies is over. He has set out 10 rules of present and future wars, but I would like to call them characteristics rather than rules. Instead of being theoretical, the author has tried to explain the concepts through a plethora of examples from David vs Goliath to Roman wars to current wars in the Middle East.

Though I disagree with him on numerous points, listening to him (on Audibles) opened new dimensions in my thinking process. I would recommend this book to be read by all politicians, military persons, and bureaucrats.

[Dimitrios Mistriotis]

Knew from the moment I saw a YouTube video of the author that I would eventually buy this book and that from the moment I would open the first pages I would not stop until I finished it.

Engaging, alarming, educational but most of all necessary reading.

Bonus for me: I think I got some ideas to steal for things I write.

[Graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has one intriguing theme: the changing nature of warfare and the difficulty of persuading policy makers and generals that the nature of warfare is not the same as it was when they were rising through the ranks. The author illustrates this point from his experience and suggests that the West is not investing its money and people to meet current needs. To that extent this book is worth reading. BUT, and it is a big but, the book is written in a hectoring style which becomes very tiresome. More seriously, the author seems to have no little understanding of the morality of war (he would dispute that there is any such thing). For him, might is right and whatever is effective is permissible.

This is not a balanced or nuanced book. Might is right would appear to be his argument and any means of winning will do and had best be used lest the enemy use it first. This is back to total war with no methods barred. Goodbye Hague Convention. Hello torture, mercenaries and a 'nasty, brutish and short' existence.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful treatise on where the West is lacking.

[David Steele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever, inventive and relevant.
I don’t think I’ve ever annotated a book as much.

[Andrew Carr · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the early 2000s, the big strategic studies debates were about issues such as terrorism, insurgency, failed states and private contractors. In the 2010s, many shifted away from from these concerns believing the rise of China heralded a return of state-based, conventional concerns.

In 'Goliath' (more aptly titled 'New Rules of War' in the US), McFate argues this is a mistake. He's in a position to know, as a former a US Army paratrooper, private mercenary, with a PhD in international relations from LSE and now lecturer at Georgetown University and the National Defence University. Rather than returning to comfortable old forms of conflict, the future of war, both state and non-state based will be a disconcerting mix of the two: Multiple actors, multiple motives, based on denial and confusion, and vastly unlike your grandfathers' preference for organised, regulated mass tank battles ala WW2.

This book is at its best describing the return of mercenaries, painting a genuinely worrying picture of the capacity and significance of modern guns for hire. Not just as marginal individuals but large corporate fielding armies of their own. I'd previously not paid much attention to this issue, seeing the privatisation of local security and services as a minor shift, but McFate through his own experience and references makes clear this represents a potentially significant shift in both who and how force occurs. There are also interesting ideas about foreign legions, shadow conflicts and propaganda and military education.

The flip side, is if McFate is a warrior-scholar, it is the warrior who chose the tone of the book. This may have been a choice pushed by the publisher and their marketing arm, but while there are references they are slight, and the book brashly asserts most of its views, rather than arguing and demonstrating. My reading of this book wasn't helped by also reading at the same time a book about Clausewitz's approach to On War, which details the Prussian's desire to write in a very structured way to avoid presenting simply a assortment of military insights.

Still, this book serves as a useful reminder that rather than seeing the 2000s as worrying about one set of issues and the 2010s about another, there is a need for a more apt synthesis of the two if we are to understand the modern threat environment. In its willingness to challenge conventional wisdom and push the need to think afresh, this is a quick and useful read.

[Mart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the book’s forecasts are easy to contest. Written before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, several predictions seem to have aged poorly when looking superficially. The supposed macro-shift toward PMCs, for example, lacks solid reasoning IMO.

That said, the work still delivers valuable insights. Its larger thesis on the evolving nature of war tracks closely with what we’ve seen since, and with what is likely to come.

One of its most important points - routinely ignored by Western politicians - is that our defense posture is built on a narrow definition of war: tanks crossing borders. Russia and China have adapted to this by operating in the gray zone, calibrating their actions so that the West hesitates to call it war at all. The result undermines deterrence and, at worst, corrodes the credibility of Article 5 itself. Imagine little green men in Narva - how do you imagine the conversation in Washington, Brussels etc to trigger Art 5?

[Warren Gossett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely thought provoking and inspiring. This message by a US expert in military and defence strategy and tactics says we need to stop our failed Western and American war strategies. Stop now and recalibrate. For the 21st century, as in some ages past, we can win by unconventional war, by winning the information contest, by becoming artists of shadow war to achieve political and survival necessity. Israel has learned this the hard way in Lebanon, etc. The US should admit it it lost mainland China, north Korea, south Vietnam, Iraq (after the first three weeks), ditto for Afghanistan, western Georgia, and eastern Ukraine.

Instead, we should save the successful advanced democracies. The impoverished Third World is made of failed states, failed ideologies and failed religions. We should let them fall and not contaminate the progress we are still making.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book on why conventional warfare no longer works for the west. A brilliant analysis of what went and is continuing to go wrong; I only hope his prescriptions - shadow wars, mercenary armies etc - are incorrect, otherwise life is going to become much more miserable for most of us

PS something wrong with the bibliographical details as I have the hardcopy ed published by Michael Joseph in 2019, ISBN9780241364031

[C Corbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has some great points that are still valid today, but unfortunately other elements have been proven wrong by the Russo-Ukraine War of 2022. Perhaps this says more about the dramatic unpredictability of Putin’s war footing than the inaccuracy of this book’s predictions.

[AG · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sean McFate is FANTASTIC. Will be reading all of his books

[Mark Shurville · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the most important book I’ve read this year, every serious Western politician should read.