{"id":27,"date":"2025-12-18T19:02:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T19:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mouthwash.blog\/?p=27"},"modified":"2026-03-08T03:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T03:45:09","slug":"phillips-obrien-on-his-new-book-war-and-power-who-wins-wars-and-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mouthwash.blog\/?p=27","title":{"rendered":"Phillips O’Brien on his new book, “War and Power: Who Wins Wars and Why?”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

11\/17\/2025 at the Aspen Institute in Washington D.C. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Phillips O\u2019Brien is a professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews, and the writer of How the War Was Won<\/a> and War and Power<\/a>.  He also has one of the beefiest substacks<\/a> on the net.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*All quotations are paraphrased.  I write down quotes to the best of my ability, but it may not be word-for-word accurate.  Paraphrased quotes are in \u201c\u201d, while \u2018\u2019 are my own snarky air quotes.<\/em> <\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Phillips O\u2019Brien warned the audience that his visions of the future are dark.  Very dark.  But the darkest it got was that his new framework indicates that China would win a war in the Indo-Pacific with the US.  And that because of this, the US might not bother fighting China at all.  He mentioned that his pals at CSIS were much more optimistic, but as an armchair newspaper reader, I was surprised that his assessment wasn\u2019t more depressing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The talk was a book launch of O\u2019Brien\u2019s new book, War and Power<\/a>.  The book came together in the aftermath of Russia\u2019s 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine, when many news outlets and analysts (some even in the Pentagon!) completely flunked their predictions.  They believed the war would be over in a matter of days, that Russia\u2019s military capabilities were a \u201cnear peer\u201d of the US, and that as a Great Power, Russia was sure to dominate the smaller power of Ukraine.  \u2018How could so many get it so wrong?\u2019 O\u2019Brien asks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Word Salad:<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Brien thinks that think tanks and national security agencies are getting less helpful.  There are so many of them, producing too much intelligence.  In order to secure government contracts, these agencies present themselves as the Oracle.  Everyone needs to have<\/em> an answer, with no room for uncertainty.  Everyone is competing for the same contracts too, meaning that there is an inevitable temptation to write what they think the employer wants to hear.  Or at least what will keep them coming back for more. And that leads to lots of analysis being dead wrong\u2014 like with Russia-Ukraine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when you look back, for example to intelligence gathered before the outbreaks of WWI and WWII, there are hardly any drastic miscalculations.  Back then, analysts were much more forthright about uncertainty.  Maybe this will happen, maybe not.  We don\u2019t know enough about this, and we aren\u2019t foolish enough to assume we know everything.  It isn\u2019t new that intelligence is flawed.  This limitation comes up in the introductory chapter any time you pick up a book about intelligence. But what was devilishly interesting was that intelligence assessments of yesteryear were more accurate, while today\u2019s are more precise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second standout moment has to do with terminology.  Even after years of paging through Cold War history books and complaining about buzzwords which lack proper definition, I never realized that \u2018Great Power\u2019 was one of those slippery terms.  Because what even is it?  \u2018Great Power\u2019 has no standard definition.  Those that do exist are often linked to military might: Russia is a Great Power while Japan is not, even though Japan\u2019s economy is far stronger than Russia\u2019s. Russia has nuclear weapons, but then so does North Korea.  And no one is calling North Korea a Great Power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Strangely, nuclear weapons were almost entirely absent from O\u2019Brien\u2019s talk, so perhaps it needs revisiting.  Check in when I do my review of the launch event for CSIS\u2019 Project Atom 2025 Report<\/a>.)  Quoting someone whose name I didn\u2019t write down because I had better things to do, O\u2019Brien said, \u201cA Great Power is one that can stand against all other powers in the world\u201d.  It has a nice ring to it, but then he said that no nation can do that.  The term can mean so many things, so be careful when using. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Brien was full of zingers.  \u201cAmateurs discuss tactics, experts study logistics,\u201d he said.  \u201cAlthough, if that were true, we would have no experts\u201d, since barely anyone studies logistics.  No one is as excited about trucks and aluminum shipments as they are about tanks.  And that\u2019s a damn shame. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is important to question \u201cMirror Image\u201d narratives.  In the runup to 2022, there was the assumption that Russia, being a great power, was a \u201cnear peer\u201d to the US, leading analysts to grossly overestimate Russia\u2019s capabilities.  This wasn\u2019t just in terms of equipment or types of operations the Russians could have pulled off, it was also the assumption that the Russian military would take the same actions as the US military on their A-game.  American analysts looked at conflicts the US had been a part of to try and see what Russia would do, instead of using conflicts that Russia had participated in to inform their analysis.  So, for the aspiring analyst, make sure you have a solid cultural and historical understanding of the country you\u2019re looking at.  Russia will act like Russia, the US will act like the US, and (presumably) China will act like China, and we cannot assume that they will be mirroring each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

China was the elephant in the room, and O\u2019Brien did get the chance to speak about US-China tensions.  For him, Taiwan is of the utmost importance.  If China takes Taiwan, they have the naval reach to cut off Japan, completely disrupting the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.  No shipments would be able to reach Japan without China\u2019s permission.  Considering that China\u2019s comportment in the South China Sea would serve as a blueprint for the rest of the Pacific, that scenario would suck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Brien brought up briefly the strategies China might employ to \u2018reunify\u2019 Taiwan with the Mainland, including \u201cthe Hong Kong way\u201d.  This would be by having a Mainland-backed party win elections in Taiwan, and then start \u2018democratic\u2019(?) processes to reunify with the mainland. O\u2019Brien said many things, much of which can be summed up as, \u2018if China gets Taiwan, it\u2019s so over\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not sure how convincing O\u2019Brien\u2019s arguments were when it comes to China, simply because I don\u2019t think that\u2019s his area (but it\u2019s the area everyone wants to know about).  After all, Taiwan and Hong Kong are quite different in practically every way.  Taiwan is actively rooting out PRC-backed politicians.  They have their own military.  It\u2019s a very different situation from Hong Kong.  No doubt the PRC will try something like that, but they would likely face a Euromaidan movement, or an Umbrella Movement, but much more intense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe I\u2019m using the minutiae to disqualify the larger argument, which is dangerous.  All the points O\u2019Brien raised are true, and need to be addressed if the USA wants to preserve the current rules-based world order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meat and Potatoes:<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

But back to the meat of the talk.  O\u2019Brien outlined four overarching factors that influence the ability to wage and win wars:<\/p>\n\n\n\n