War and Power: Logistics, Industry, and the Reality Behind Victory

Phillips Payson O'Brien's War and Power is one of the most thought-provoking books on military history I have read in recent years. It complements Graham Allison's Destined for War in an unexpected way. Allison asks why great powers find themselves on a path toward conflict. O'Brien asks a different question: once war begins, what actually determines who wins?

His answer challenges many of our assumptions. O'Brien argues that we have been captivated by the myth of the decisive battle. History remembers names such as El Alamein, Stalingrad, Kursk, Midway, and the Somme because they are dramatic moments with enormous casualties and unforgettable stories. Yet he contends that these battles were often symptoms rather than causes of victory. The real decisions had already been made elsewhere—in factories, shipyards, railroads, ports, oil fields, and supply depots.

The book repeatedly demonstrates that armies do not lose because they suddenly fail on the battlefield. They lose because they can no longer replace men, tanks, aircraft, ammunition, fuel, and food. By the time many famous battles occurred, one side had already exhausted its ability to sustain the war. The battlefield merely revealed a defeat that logistics and industrial production had already made inevitable.

O'Brien applies this argument particularly well to the world wars. His discussion of the First World War is especially illuminating. The conflict is often remembered as a succession of horrific battles with staggering casualties but little territorial gain. O'Brien shifts the focus away from individual offensives to the broader industrial struggle. By 1918, the Allies had achieved overwhelming superiority in the production of artillery, aircraft, tanks, trucks, ships, and munitions. Germany's armies continued fighting bravely, but the nation itself was running out of the means to wage war. Retreat at the front and revolution at home were the consequences of an economic defeat that had been developing for years.

His treatment of the Second World War follows the same pattern. El Alamein, Stalingrad, and Kursk remain immensely important, but O'Brien argues that they should be understood within larger campaigns in which logistics, industrial capacity, and strategic resources had already shifted the balance. Empty fuel depots, broken transportation networks, and factories unable to replace losses mattered as much as battlefield tactics.

One of the book's greatest strengths is its willingness to challenge familiar narratives without diminishing the courage of the soldiers who fought. O'Brien never suggests that battles were unimportant or that individual acts of leadership and bravery did not matter. Rather, he places them within the larger systems that made victory or defeat possible. Soldiers fight battles; nations fight wars.

War and Power is a superb work of military history because it changes the questions we ask. Instead of focusing exclusively on generals and battlefields, O'Brien reminds us to look at the factories, railroads, merchant fleets, oil supplies, and industrial workers who sustained the armies. His arguments are persuasive, clearly written, and supported by an impressive command of historical evidence.

After finishing this book, I found myself looking back at both world wars with a different perspective. We remember the great battles because they are dramatic. O'Brien reminds us that wars are often decided long before the decisive battle begins. It is a compelling reinterpretation, and one that has encouraged me to read more of his work.

 

Destined for War: Ancient Greece and the Shadow Over the Twenty-First Century

 

A friend with deep connections in China recommended Graham Allison's Destined for War after President Xi Jinping warned President Trump that the United States and China were falling into the "Thucydides Trap." Xi spoke confidently about a Greek historian who died twenty-four centuries ago. Trump appeared unfamiliar with both the history and the warning. Watching him respond to Xi, Trump seemed to be willing to dive into the Thucydides Trap rather than just fall into it. That exchange vividly displayed that ideas born in ancient Athens still shape the diplomacy of the twenty-first century.

Destined for War asks a question that has haunted statesmen for nearly 2,500 years: What happens when a rising power challenges an established one? Drawing on the insight of the Greek historian Thucydides, Allison argues that such moments create enormous structural pressures that can make war more likely—not inevitable, but dangerously plausible. His book is both a work of history and a warning directed at the relationship between the United States and China. If you follow the link above you will see Allison's Thucydides Trap project at Harvard.

The concept at the heart of the book is the "Thucydides Trap," named for Thucydides' explanation of the Peloponnesian War. Writing about the conflict between Athens and Sparta, he observed that it was "the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable." Allison examines sixteen historical cases in which a rising power confronted an established one, showing that many ended in war while others escaped it through exceptional diplomacy, restraint, or luck.

I read The History of the Peloponnesian War in translation and studied portions of it in the original Greek. I found Allison's treatment of Thucydides both thorough and engaging. He avoids reducing the ancient historian to a slogan. Instead, he demonstrates how Thucydides analyzed fear, honor, ambition, miscalculation, and political leadership—forces that remain as relevant today as they were in the fifth century B.C.

When Destined for War was published in 2017, the United States still largely understood itself as the defender of the liberal international order. Allison's analysis therefore assumed a strategic competition between an established democratic superpower and an increasingly powerful authoritarian China. Reading the book today, however, reminds me how much the world has changed. The international landscape has shifted, and so has American politics. The structural rivalry Allison describes remains, but the political assumptions underlying his analysis are very different than when the book was published. Trump admires dictators and undermines democracy at home and in foreign policy.  

The book's greatest strength is its insistence that history is not destiny. The Thucydides Trap is a warning, not a prophecy. Structural pressures matter, but leaders still make choices. Misjudgment, arrogance, fear, and nationalism can accelerate conflict; prudence, communication, and strategic imagination can help avoid it.

What makes the book unsettling is not that Allison predicts war, but that he demonstrates how intelligent leaders throughout history have stumbled into wars they neither wanted nor expected. Thucydides understood that nations often drift toward catastrophe through a series of decisions that seem reasonable at the time.

For me, Destined for War was more than an exercise in strategic analysis. It was painful to read because Thucydides has long been one of my favorite historians. To see an ancient warning become part of the political vocabulary of our own age—and to watch leaders in both Washington and Beijing invoke it—is to recognize that under Trump we are a declining power because he ignores history in his arrogant ignorance. 

Allison cannot tell us whether the United States will avoid the Thucydides Trap. But he reminds us why understanding history matters. The first great historian still has something urgent to say to the twenty-first century, and we ignore him at our peril.