Kautilya and the Arthashastr: Lessons in Statecraft

good morning to everyone and welcome to this noontime lecture on Cal Tia and the arthashastra lessons in statecraft I'm Larry Goodson of the Department of National Security and strategy and also seminar 11 ready to take the fields with softball today weather permitting and hopefully concur in the way that katia recommends so it was about six years ago that we introduced Cal Tia into our curriculum and our intent was twofold when we did that I just want to give you this little bit of history first we wanted other non-western theorists theorists of war beyond sons ooh or sons of Witcher you also have for your class tomorrow to help you know War College students develop a wider aperture about human thought on war to that end you might also consider the thought of Genghis Khan Mao Zedong Khalid ib'n Walid Hasani Sabah and Miyamoto Musashi Musashi as as other non-western theorists who have been important in human history in the application or their thought about the use of force and military power second and for me in some ways more importantly we wanted to expose our students to statecraft theorists statecraft is the art of using the instruments of power so if you will the dime toolkit as you you know as far here at the War College to achieve the interests of the state most of us Westerners grew up thinking of niccolo machiavelli as providing the ultimate expression of statecraft but as you know from your reading from Roger Boucher on calcia Max Weber told us in nineteen nineteen that compared to the arthashastra the prince Machiavelli's classic work the prince is harmless immediately upon introducing calcia to the curriculum the War College faculty found that while Clausewitz sunzha and other theorists were very familiar to our students katia was almost unknown indeed the first time I gave this lecture the room that your end was full not only of students but also a faculty who were here trying to like al was just saying who were here going oh I've got the class on this tomorrow I better I'd better revisit this this thinker and so I decided then based on that experience and I've maintained it in this lecture ever since that I would help everyone out by doing the unthinkable at the Army War College that is I will give you the answers today and not just ask you a bunch of questions your tws course focuses on some central questions for the course on pages 1 & 2 of the course directive you're encouraged to think about how each strategist or theorist of war answers those questions what is war why Dewar's occur how are they fought how do they end right there a set of questions like that and at the end of this lecture I'm gonna answer these questions for you with respect to calcia so if you didn't do the reading you're in great shape because I'm gonna give you those those answers so those are my credentials for delivering this lecture my major field for my PhD is ir theory international relations theory so seminar 11 we've been talking a lot about realism liberalism constructivism level of analysis sovereignty all those concepts from from that stuff my focus area within that field is war and conflict studies as a regionalist I not only focus on the Middle East obviously if I'm the professor of Middle East Studies but also on South Asia of course we started on that several years ago in 1986 and 1987 I did my fieldwork for my dissertation in Pakistan and Afghanistan where I spent a good bit of time with the Afghan mujahideen and their supporters that would include some of the Arab folks who were there under Osama bin Laden and as you see in that picture I demonstrated the ability to grow a marvelous beard which as you can see from me here is no longer quite that glorious dark color that it once was I also want to show you this picture just for a second just for a little detour into a cultural lesson this is me sitting at the dais of the emergency Loya Jirga or the grand assembly that selected Hamid Karzai in 2002 for Afghanistan as the as the transitional president for that country I served as the one of the international monitors for that first post Taliban election the elections took place in three phases first in the districts then the provinces then in the big tent in Kabul that was in the big tent and Kabul where I was the advisor or the technical adviser to the Loya Jirga Commission for election so those people around me were my poll workers if you will the people that were in charge of the actual polling that we did at the end my phase one in two elections were in the West so any of you who know Afghanistan knows that that's where Ismail Khan was the Emir he was considered the Emir of the West for fun I sometimes tied my head cloth like Ismail Khan as you can see in that picture if you know Afghanistan and know Ismail Khan when I got to come the delegates were arriving from the provinces contractors were still working on the site and I was walking over to the big tent I passed some of the delegates from Herat where Ismail Khan was from and they recognized me and they sort of teasingly said to me a mirza meaning you know mr. amir meaning we know that you look like ismael Khan like that then I passed some construction work as I went by I heard this perfect sort of California Western twang dude I didn't know Jerry Garcia was here at this day and I realized then that the cultural prisms we had you know that we have of how we see the world really shape how we see the world so I I give you Cal T and now in the spirit of of that so what I'm going to do is follow Craig nations approach he gave youth acidities with regard to the six questions right who when where what why and how is the order I'm gonna give you those questions for County and the arthashastra so here we go Cal Tia was also known as Chanakya or Vishnu Gupta or is also known depending on which part of the world you're from and how you see it he was the king maker or the first minister or the prime minister of the great Marion ruler Chandragupta Maurya in the period that you see there 340 297 BCE that was the time of Chandra Gupta who founded the Mauryan Empire which is you can see his area of rule sort of stretching from all virtually all of present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh and then the northern part of of India a little more on that in a few minutes sorry katya is also considered the first great realist and some would consider him the greatest of realist and the sense of being the purest realist or as i call him and in seminar 11 the stone-cold realist may be the classical realist and you see the quote that i referenced just a moment ago compared to the arthashastra Machiavelli's The Prince is harmless we believe that the earth the Shastra and there's debate about this among scholars that it was written by multiple people kind of like the Sun zu or it was written by one person but we're not quite sure of the time but we believe that it was written between the 4th century BCE and the 2nd century Christian era so in that period of time if it was written by someone other than Tanaka Katya he lived during the period that you see there from 370 to 83 BCE and he lived as you see in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent now I think you have to think about kal Tia just as you have to think about through Siddha teased or Clausewitz the other day or Germany or any of these theorists that are coming that you haven't yet heard about or read in the context of the period of history and the end the area in which they lived so kaltaka was studying at one of the ancient universities in the world and I'm talking about taxila here which is in present-day Pakistan or its ruins are and he went from there across India to Magadha right here kind of in the ERISA Eastern being or Western Bengal part of India today where he was insulted by the ruler so he decided he would overthrow that ruler this is the story anyway and replace him with this young impressive fellow he had met Chandragupta Maurya and he did so using clever deception which if you read the Boucher reading we don't give you the actual arthashastra because it's tedious hard to follow and maybe not even translate it very well so we gave you the Boucher reading if you read that you you got the clear impression I'm sure or you won't have to read it because I'm giving you all the answers don't tell the Dean nice that they whoops this is probably being broadcast isn't it oh dear me actually it's a short reading that I picked out so you know it's it's not a bad reading but but anyway you'll get the impression that deception is a key part of of kouchi is theoretical approach so the other bit I want you to get is that this is the so-called mahajanapadas of indian history where you have all of these states as you see if they're one of sixteen states in northern india nor in a northern subcontinent I don't mean India the state today but the region that we know it historically is the Indian subcontinent and you had all these little states that are kind of pitted against each other neighboring city-states so you've recently done a paper on the Peloponnesian War you have a familiarity with this with this situation however after Chandra Gupta comes to power you see that the Mauryan Empire is created now this room is full of Americans like me who went to public schools and don't know much about world history except you know the little bits that they tell us about in public schools so the Mauryan Empire I mean correct me if I'm wrong but it probably was just at most mentioned in passing one day if that Scot over there saying no I've never you know we never even touched on it so just to give you a couple of historical facts this would expand to be one of the largest empires in the world in its time 50 to 60 million people or at that time 33 to 40 percent of the world's population was under the Mauryan Empire so if you think about that in present-day terms that's pretty huge at its height the Mauryan Empire had an army of more than six hundred and thirty thousand men which would make it the eighth largest in the world today they had a whole capability I don't even want to compare it to cores or divisions or whatever but if you heard my podcast on war room with Jackie Witt about this you know that I talked a little bit about war elephants they had lots of war elephants okay that sounds funny dust today but if you put it in the context of the time the war elephants are you know airship aircraft carriers or f-35s or tank formations I mean they're big capabilities to bring on the battlefield so what is the arthashastra which is the core of this man's work it is translated by most of its readers as the science of politics or the science of political economy it's the oldest surviving piece of literature from this era that is of this field of sort of a mirror for the prints right that Machiavelli's notion of it that this is a handbook to help the leader the king the prince the general to do his his business as the leader of a society it's divided into fifteen books I think the war room write-up about it has a mistake and says it's divided into fourteen books it's divided into fifteen books and they cover everything you can think of economics law politics the behavior the duties of the ruler and the lesser officials underneath the ruler military and logistics matters infrastructure spies and intelligence there's a big section on that including a whole thing devoted to how to make different kinds of poisons really kind of obscure but and frightening reading and then a section on foreign policy this text was lost in the twelfth century although it was known throughout Indian history so I mean people knew of it during the period when it was lost it was rediscovered by Rudra Putnam Shama Shastri in 1904 who found it on palm leaves you see the image of it there at the Oriental Research Institute in southern India and published in translation in 1915 in the first translation which is the version that is in our library so this is another of these ancient bits of literature that tells us it's written in Sanskrit by the way which is very different from English in terms of your ability to take the meaning and understand it exactly I'm going to do my best with that here in just a bit so this is the one of these ancient bits of literature that tells us about how to use the instruments of power to achieve national interests why do we study the arthashastra I'm going to go in a different direction I'll come back to the hal in just a few minutes it's not only a manual of statecraft but as Boucher says in your reading Machiavelli would have been easily outmatched by generals reading either sons or Cal Tia and owl was joking with me earlier that the last couple of years when we get to the comprehensives when we get to the end of course papers when people are writing about which theorists really you know helps them understand the world better and that sort of thing we found that students increasing their saying I kind of dig this Cal to you guy because he's really summarizing things that that the others don't quite do and I wouldn't say it's because of if that's true and I've observed the same thing that Professor Lorde observed that a lot of students are saying that not so much to me oh he's the Kelty guy we have to go tell him Cal T he's great but I hear it from my colleagues I see it in the comprehensives that I'm sitting in on and so forth and I think the reason for that is not so much that Cal Tia has some interesting insights although I think he does and I'm gonna give you those but I think it's because he's a statecraft theorist he's trying to talk about using all the instruments of power not just sort of how do we use the military on the battlefield but how do we use diplomacy and economics and information to achieve national ends and so that's what I just want to tell you one other thing about what he says in in in terms of IR theory and then I want to talk about how he says you use power so with IR theory you look at this political realism anarchic international system powers the key to state security oh yeah he's a realist right I mean if you remember the readings on on the theories this is clearly realism and in his day at his time the point of strategy is conquest because he lives in a world where it is conquer or be conquered the mahajanapadas is okay I've got all these neighbors and if I don't conquer them sooner or later they're gonna try to conquer me so I've got to build my capability and I've got a conquer or I'm gonna be conquered so if you want you see that I put that up there in the context of ends those are the ends what are the ways well always to achieve conquest can be used there are no sort of constraints or rules except those that are there in the religious context of the time right which is hinduism buddha at buddhism and in that part of the world in that era of history those notions about what is virtuous and not virtuous behavior and we could talk a bit about that as we go along as well and then what are the means well the reason that this is this text is viewed as the political economy the science of political economy is that although we read it for the chapters near the end on war and diplomacy and foreign policy most of the text is devoted to the economic well-being of the people why do the people why is it better for the people to have economic well-being and to be ruled well because if the people are favorably disposed to you the leader and if your society is economically sound then you have the resources to pursue conquest and finally you have a question in your directive about how wars end and kal tia is very clear about this when all the kingdoms are conquered peace will obtain or if you will you will have victory or peace or a stable in state or however you want to conceptualize the point of war in the first place so let me go to his text how is war to be fought he says depending on how you read the text that there are three types of war I actually read it as there are four types of war because in a different point in the text he adds the one at the bottom montre Yoda or the Battle of intrigue which we'll get to in just a minute should be a close quote their battle of intrigue open war let's start with the part that you get from Boucher open war conventional combat operations bring out your war elephants it's shock-and-awe time right I mean that's open war it's force-on-force and he definitely says this is the most righteous form of war he also says to avoid this form of war okay we'll talk about that in just a minute concealed war folk is sort of what we would consider surprise and deception I think of it as guerrilla war it's the recourse of the weak King so if I'm weak and I'm being overrun I send the forces out to blend into the population to go into the forest to strike from time to time right that's what I do if I'm the weak King or if I'm if I'm struggling in open war the part that students all often kind of find really interesting and I swear this is a true story maybe my colleagues in the room will remember this but when I first the first or the second time I did this lecture a seminar not mine went and had coins made for their seminar that said snakes and concubines on one side and Katia on the other side because they really they really kind of thought the whole silent war thing was was I guess missing in our curriculum otherwise and they liked it I don't know but he's very clear you should use covert action you should employ secret agents especially women of pleasing you know appearance and what-have-you to get in close to the ruler or the generals so dissension maybe slip a cobra into somebody's bed or or or whatever so using assassination bribery disinformation propaganda dirty tricks etc etc etc this is the silent war piece of the how do you use war in a later part in the text he also talks about war by counsel by which he means diplomacy where he says this is a subtle act of war diplomats are warriors they wear a different uniform they have a different skill set than the guy writing the war elephant right but they're there to make treaties to do things to delay war until the conditions are right they make treaties that are made to be broken because allies are eventually going to be future adversaries or enemies I think I said in that podcast think of the molotov-ribbentrop pact by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that basically said we won't fight each other with both sides knowing now we're just buying time sooner or later one of the other is going to attack into Poland and then we're gonna fight each other World War two and that's what happened so these are the four types of war these are a few thoughts that he said about war and I want you to think about him in light of the readings and the subjects you've already covered in your seminars basically his view is avoid war by which he means avoid open war because one can lose the wars easily as one can win open wars inherently unpredictable open war is also expensive so avoid it in seminar 11 we like to quote Shakespeare and Julius Caesar who said what cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war now that specifically refers to the medieval English and other approaches to war which said oK we've defeated the enemy on the field and now we're giving the order to cry havoc which means off to rape plunder pillage and all the other atrocities that were common in those days at the end of you know combat operations but it's come to be a metaphor in the modern era for us going boy war is unpredictable once you let slip the dogs of war you don't quite know how it's all going to play out and so open war is expensive unpredictable it's dangerous it's risky so you should avoid it instead you should try Dhupia the side gun yeah I'm gonna talk about these here in just a second understand the opponent seeked out with him and only when everything else fails and circumstances are best for it would you resort to military force about the OOP ayahs the four strategies these are what I don't know if anyone knows salmon alright go ahead yes the four strategies some Donna bed Donda all right which are in order conciliation gifts dissension and force which if you're an IR theorist and this is how some of us end up in the arthashastra in the first place these are very similar to Hans Morgenthau discussion of balance of power theory one of the great realist the 20th century he said the balance of power can be carried on either by diminishing the weight of the heavier scale or by increasing the weight of the lighter one his his section on this and his great book politics among nations the struggle of power says divide and rule compensation armaments and alliances or these four ideas these four strategies are how you use power or if it's easier for you to think of it in light of the recent readings you've done think of your author Joseph Nye who's talked about soft power and hard power and smart power and how you use different instruments of power to in different strategic ways maybe you can think about all of this in relation to the ongoing crisis with North Korea which strategies would you use would you try to conciliate would you try to provide payments or gifts would you try to sow dissension or would you try to use force I'm also going to talk about side guna here in just a moment this is that the six fold royal policy or the six fold foreign policy are there only peace and war when you think about those questions about war is just peace and just war or are there other states that are somehow in-between Cal T it breaks it down into six forms of policy and I've laid them out for you there on that slide and he argues that the king or the king or the state's relative strength or weakness is what determines the type of policy that the king should adopt against another state based on the judgment of that state's strength and weakness that's the relative peace of it right so if you are strong against another state for example you might engage in offensive operations to achieve your national interest if if not you might adopt something less offensive perhaps marching perhaps a temporary peace perhaps seeking an alliance and so on and it's actually more complex than than that because of course there are multiple actors in this equation which leads us to maybe the part that's most known in the West which is the mandala theory of foreign policy all right based on the notion of the rajah mandala mandala is a very common concept in in this part of the world in this case the circle of Kings right Raja or the circle of states so in this diagram here your king is the conqueror he's in the middle of this circle or actually looks more like some DNA yeah mitochondria of it anyway he's in the middle of this sort of diagram of all these states and he says two states sharing a common border are intrinsically hostile to each other or the enemy of my enemy is my friend which is often attributed as an Arab proverb and it is an Arab proverb it's original expression is in ancient Hindu literature and we normally attribute it in this context to the arthashastra and to cow to you so it's very simple if David here is my neighbor I'm going to make an alliance with Aziz and we're going to carve up his kingdom right if if we judge that the strengths and weaknesses and so forth they're going to work because behind disease is Ryan and David's maybe gonna try to make an alliance with Ryan right and so forth and send someone's behind me and so forth and so on but if David seems to be Poland in the earlier Molotov Ribbentrop pact example that I gave to you then yes he is and we're going to try to do what Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War two did to Poland to David but then what now I've got half of his kingdom or maybe all of it and now who in this case becomes my enemy oh Aziz I love disease five minutes ago but now I love Ryan because on the backside of his ease and I mean this is I'm presenting it in a simplistic fashion but this is in a sense how the mandala theory operates as you see in this slide right here and so in this matter or in this manner rather eventually the conqueror if he is skillful and if he judges correctly relative strength and weakness can conquer the world and peace can obtain for all and by the way the focus of this there's a lot of ethical and morality dimensions in the arthashastra even though this is presented as a great treatise of realism it's sort of you know realism with a healthy dose of hey the people provide the foundation of your ability to do things so don't abuse the people so Aziz and I aren't an attack David in the first place unless he's a bad ruler and the people don't really like him because right if the people are very supportive of him he's gonna be tough to defeat so we don't want to attack him if he's a good ruler on the other hand hey I got secret agents they can go in there and so dissension spread propaganda slip Cobras into people's beds etc etc they can do things to kind of help create the conditions for me to eventually conquer him right and I need to conquer him because it's conquer or be conquered there's a healthy dose of both defensive animal offensive realism in this if you want to think of the modern derivations this was back before we divided it up in those ways so consequently when I do take over his kingdom I don't want to do it in the way that is going to turn the people against me I just want to get rid of him and then the people can join with my people and so all along in the background the well-being of the people is important to this science of politics or of political economies not just about conquering therefore these are the elements of sovereignty that he writes a great deal about the king and under the king the Minister of the country the fort the treasury the army I put in parentheses some sort of modern-day interpretations of those words so if you're studying determinants of power these would be the determinants of power if you've got a good strong government if the people are loyal and have good morale if your infrastructure is is sound if your economy is sound if your military is strong then you're probably a strong nation relative to a lot of others the capabilities of your friends and your enemies those are also part of the equation remember the Peloponnesian League and the Delian League right I mean there's that whole piece to the puzzle as well that goes on and all of these are the elements of strategy and so mindful that the Commandant is coming in a bit and mindful of the promise I made at the outset that this would save you some heavy reading if you had strategic softball this afternoon or something like that that was going to get in the way here are my answers to what I consider the five questions I know that we have multiple questions in past years we've had four questions we've had five questions now we have various sets of questions kind of scattered throughout the directive but I'm going to summarize it in terms of five core questions what is war this is what calcia says war is a way to increase power although and I give you his quote there if there is equal advancement in peace or war one should resort to peace or in any event avoid open war which is risky costly right and uncertain another way of saying risky why do Wars occur or put another way what is the object of war well clearly his worldview is conquer or be conquered war is for conquest and after having conquered the world the Conqueror shall enjoy it which by which he means in the context of Hindu and and Buddhist traditions as well but Hindu traditions that it doesn't mean he should enjoy it in a sort of hedonistic way woohoo I'm the big ruler no it's not like that it's he should then create this sort of just and stable society where everyone's well-being is is is improved how should war be fought well defense of the realm of course is necessary but it's not sufficient since it's a conquer or be conquered world you've got to actually conquer so that leads you to the four types of war that I talked to earlier thus for strategies the six fold royal policy or foreign policy and the mandala theory these are all ideas offered to the literature on on war that that calcia gives us and how our wars won well now you're back to the type and the purpose of war let me make a small digression here we do have a little bit of time so one of the questions I've been asking my students and seminar 11 is whether war or peace is the natural state of human existence so if you're Cal Tia for whom your Secretary of State is a five-star general just like your chairman of your Joint Chiefs of Staff well he's a four-star general but anyway you know a very senior official of the state who is a warrior because he or she is out there you know making treaties to delay things to extend things to set things up for 20 or 30 years down the road when one day I'm gonna go to war against Ryan having conquered David and Aziz right so down the road eventually that's going to happen so you might if you're Cal Tia you might say so the natural state of existence is war we're always in a state of war we may not actually be fighting in an open sense with our war elephants or you know whatever the modern-day equivalent is we may not be fighting anyone in that sense but we're at war I got secret agents in David's country sowing dissent right I've made a treaty with Aziz that I'm gonna break one day so my diplomats are doing that so my chief of secret agents my CIA chief is busy in David's country my Secretary of State is busy and Aziz country Jesus country my sitcom or PACOM commander or whatever is busy and Ryan's country right building partner capacity and all of that or maybe not building it as well as we might since sooner or later we're going to take Ryan on right so all of these things are going on because I see the world as being in a kind of permanent state of conflict maybe war is the wrong term but a permanent state of conflict if I'm Kal to you and then of course a corollary of that as I've already said is conquest brings victory yay but it also changes the equation of states which is a little bit of an unstable thing to have happen right because maybe conquering David is great but now what signal does that send to Aziz Ryan and all the other people scattered around us oh he might come for me next maybe we need to band against him right I mean so all of this kind of this is not something that's static it happens in a very dynamic way and then lastly are there concepts of enduring relevance because that is in your directive this year right what do any of these theorists give us I mean this guy wrote almost back not quite as far back as sunzha and Thucydides but back in the same general era of history 2500 years ago really war elephants I mean come on is any of this relevant today so here's my answer to that my recent article or paper which is about to be published upon revision as an article which also appeared as a piece of the last National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan from October last year and a separate intelligence community assessment in February of this year and we had the National Intelligence Council leadership here for a conference on this here and what was that April of May May I think it was April May I think it was my conference I should probably remember when it was but I think it was May so that is all centered around this idea that I've been talking about that there's a new great game going on in and around Afghanistan Afghanistan today that is a manifestation of Raja Mandela and I put some alphabet soup there underneath that does anyone know all that alphabet soup so those are the acronyms for the intelligence services of Pakistan India Iran Saudi Arabia Russia China and oh yeah the United States one of our intelligence agencies anyway right we have we have 16 of those but anyway when that's not all of that all of them have that there is this intelligence game that goes on in and around Afghanistan Afghanistan being sort of a playing field I didn't put the NDS up there which is the Afghan version of the alphabet soup but but I could have I also put down there the the the map of the area of New Delhi the city of Chania is chacha nakamori which is the diplomatic Enclave when I first gave this lecture I remember this room was full with people hanging from the rafters and I remember the Indian Brigadier was sitting back there I won't say his name non attribution right but the end of the lecture were into the Q&A and people are asking me questions and finally a student turns to this gentleman it says is it true what he's saying I mean you know word so that effect sort of insulting to me but anyway and he said well you know we don't know Klaus it's in India well we know clouds woods I'm just using that as an example but we know Janaka and then he he runs for about 5m it was really wonderful he gave a great little mini lecture about all the things that are in the arthashastra a lot of little details and things that I just didn't spend time on but he mentioned and I hadn't thought about this until then Chanakya Puri he said you know I don't even know if the American diplomats in India know that they're in the city of Chanakya that they're actually on Chandra Gupta pointed out here Chandra Gupta street and panchal Street right which is the five principal or the five principles of peaceful coexistence that agreement that China and India made but it really references a much earlier notion in Hindu and ancient Hindu literature and then if you go further up there you'll get to Cal to U Street I mean this this is the diplomatic and rich community within New Delhi where all the diplomats are and it is named for this theorist so maybe that gives you a little bit of insight into what the Indians and the Pakistanis and the people in that part of the world think about the importance or the enduring relevance of this theorist and then finally I'll just give you a couple of quick maps so back in the nineteenth century during the period that we think of as the great game right between British and Russian imperialists during that era that's what the map looked like yeah there's Afghanistan actually those borders get drawn during the 19th century but anyway there's Afghanistan surrounded by a bunch of little states here and by India which was much more phlex than that back in 19th century with you know 500 plus princely states and so forth but anyway it gives you a feeling for what this looked like as we turned into the 20th century so maybe not all that different from the mahajanapadas period in terms of how the geopolitics on the map looked so there's Afghanistan today with you know the modern map the current map so Pakistan is caught between India and Afghanistan if you think in terms of the mandala Theory the Pakistan is big enemy in the world big adversary big rival I don't want to necessarily label it but who has Pakistan to focused its military against since its creation India right so India's the big threat to Pakistan and then during the last decade India and Afghanistan establishes strategic partnership agreement right so now if you're looking at the world through the mandala Theory you're going oh I'm David caught between Aziz and Larry this is just not gonna be good for me so what is Pakistan where does it turn to who's its big friend in the world China who's China's rival for supremacy and Asia India or anyway somewhat rivals right and we could go on and on with this my point being and this is the notion of my new great game article my point being that that may be in a part of the world where the diplomatic Enclave of New Delhi is named for this theorist maybe some of these ideas have enduring relevance in the way the intelligence services or in policy communities see their neighborhood and see through the prism of a kind of fundamental realism lastly looking ahead to our Lord's favorite subject see power when you study geopolitics you saw that this could be done on the sea as well as on the land that maybe McKenna started out with this notion of the heartland and you know the eurasian center of power but maybe Mahan another said wait a minute brother it's the sea lanes that give you power in any event when we think of this new great game we can think about the Indian Ocean and the area around Asia not just the area overland through Asia and it's for a reason that China has a one belt one Road notion that it's through overland through Asia that they want to expand and through the South China Sea the Strait of Malacca the Indian Ocean the Arabian Sea and on on to the west by sea as well and so we have the string of pearls strategy where and all of them aren't on here but where China has been building naval installations or upgrading them all around here these black squares our port authorities assisted by China and then India has tried to do the same the most obvious case was when the Chinese built Gwadar in the last decade and immediately India in what you military folks call a flanking maneuver upgraded the port at Chabahar and built the road up to the ranch in Afghanistan so that there would be they would be further to the west and closer to the Strait of hormuz and the oil of the Persian Gulf now more recently China is building or has been building a port right down the road from our camp in Djibouti and so I'm waiting for the next Indian move along the Red Sea or or the the coast of Africa so again a modern-day manifestation of what we might think of as the mandala theory and I said finally but this is the finally part thoughts from the arthashastra I just leave these with you to read and learn from my personal favorite and I know this from when I lived in Pakistan and ISI and other intelligence folks since I was there at the height of the cia-run war against the Mujahideen or with the Mujahideen against the Soviets I mean to say in the 1980s we used to joke there was an old hotel that a lot of spies would go hang out in in Dean's hotel in Peshawar where I lived and we used to say that if I whispered something in my bedroom and Dean's you know on a Wednesday evening it would be known in raw pen D a GHQ you know down with the Pakistani government the next morning so I always like number two never share your secrets with anybody it will destroy you don't tell your wife or your husband don't tell your kids don't tell anybody your secrets and then lastly this is what you really need to take away to have a successful year here yes softball success is cool and all that but really let not a single day pass without you're learning a verse or at least something or without attending to charity study and other pious activity for the life of an uneducated man is as useless as the tale of a dog which neither covers its rear end or protects it from the bites of insects so that's what I have for you on Cal Tia you've we've got five more minutes if anyone has questions but otherwise I hope I have set you up for success in tomorrow's class are there any questions yes yeah so the this goes back to the Hindu understanding of righteous behavior I mean would be my answer to this question and that you know you do what you have to do to win but if I'm meeting you on the open field of battle this is viewed by people as the righteous way if I'm going to fight a war doesn't mean it's the smartest way or the most effective way or the way that comes with the least risk to my own kingdom and to that in Danny if I can just segue off of this so the theme of my article on the new great game is that there are rules that since we labeled these events in modern history right the 19th century and now the current one a great game that there are rules and that the rules haven't really changed very much and so not to spoil the scintillating read of my article for any of you I won't give you all five rules plus in three minutes you have to go see the comment down so I'll just tell you this one the one that I think is most relevant in this case is don't play to win play not to lose that's how everyone has traditionally approached the situation in Afghanistan think about Afghanistan in light of recent presidential pronouncement guided by HR McMaster and you know secretary mattis and you know secretary Tillerson presumably about what we're going to do in Afghanistan so you don't want to try to go in there heavy and win because winning exposes you to a lot of risk you you'd rather make sure that you don't lose and try to prevent your enemy from winning and that's a different strategic approach and and maybe not quite as righteous but but certainly maybe less risky and more likely to produce good result yes one more question then I'll let you go see the general sure so I was wondering about the how wars are to be fought the third option in terms of secret the secret approach so in my reading of kind of the six schools of Indian philosophy which you term as Hinduism very quickly so just I was in my reading of the the different philosophical schools there's an equality between the sexes so I'm just a little surprised and I'm wondering how you might compare and contrast you said bellum and use in Bello with his use of or suggestion that women could be used as a tool of war which seems to be in contrast with the philosophical schools which had equality the sexes so how did he reconcile the cultural mores of men and women being equal during this time period and actually justifying women as secret agents so the answer to that in terms of the frame that you put it in is complex and would take too long to say given the time however I'll just say this he specifically references the hence the seminar that made the concubines of snakes coin that you're using concubines or professional women shall we say and actors and a whole set of a whole class of secret agents the women part goes to the inherent susceptibility he believes that powerful men have to the lure of beautiful women that are trying trying to suborn them so the modern-day honey trap notion that many intelligence services employ very successfully you know is clearly something he's talking about even though this is divorced from some of the schools of philosophy of ancient India that you're referencing and that's a fantastic question we talk more offline I'm mindful that I was told you had to have 15 minutes because you're Colonels and it might be hard for you to get from here to Bliss all in just 15 minutes so thank you for your attention I appreciate a chance to talk to you

Channel: USArmyWarCollege

Views: 43,908

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Keywords: Kautilya, state craft, usawc, army war college, theories of war, dr. goodson

Id: 8_eNQ462nXo

Length: 61min 15sec (3675 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2017