The war you think you are fighting: "Conflict" by David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts

Most of the wars in this book open the same way: with someone confidently misdescribing the war they are about to fight. The French in Algeria took themselves to be suppressing a criminal insurrection, won most of the engagements and lost the country. The British in Malaya concluded early that they were in a political contest that happened to involve soldiers, and organized accordingly. The two campaigns share an era and comparable problems, and reached opposite results.

That contrast sits near the center of Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine, by General David Petraeus and the historian Andrew Roberts. It is a long book with a short thesis: what decides a conflict is rarely the technology and almost never the opening plan, but whether those in charge understood the contest they entered and could notice when they were wrong.

Substitute “market entry” or “crisis response” for “campaign” and the failure mode is familiar — a strategy fixed at the moment of least information, then defended long after the facts have moved.

What the book actually covers

The survey is chronological and unusually wide: the wars of decolonization in Indochina, Malaya, Algeria and Kashmir; Korea; the Arab–Israeli wars; Vietnam; the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; the Falklands; the Iran–Iraq war; the Gulf War; the Balkans; Somalia and Rwanda; then Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. Roberts supplies the historian's range, Petraeus the commander's account of campaigns he ran.

Holding it together is Petraeus's framework of the four tasks of strategic leadership. The first is to get the big ideas right, and the second to communicate them through the breadth and depth of the organization. The third is to oversee implementation, and the fourth to work out how the ideas must be refined before repeating the cycle. Leaders who manage all four, the authors note, are rare; the fourth is the one routinely skipped.

Campaign after campaign is then examined for which task was fumbled, and when. The longest treatment goes to Iraq and Afghanistan, where Petraeus writes from command experience, including the counterinsurgency doctrine he oversaw and the 2007–08 surge. That is also the book's plainest limitation: he is assessing decisions he was party to.

Ukraine is the framework's clearest test case. Russian assumptions about Ukrainian cohesion, about their own logistics and about the Western response were wrong in nearly every particular, and the machinery for correcting them was slow. Alongside runs the book's second theme: the battlefield has become very hard to hide anything on. A closing chapter extends that to unmanned systems, artificial intelligence and cyber, without declaring mass obsolete.

Why it matters for your risk posture

Read it for the diagnostic value of the four tasks, which transfer intact to any organization with a plan and a hierarchy. Most institutions manage the first three tolerably. Very few build a real mechanism for the fourth: a standing process that asks whether the original premise still holds, owned by someone empowered to say it does not.

Read it because the book is a long study of how a bad initial assessment survives contact with contradictory evidence. The mechanism is institutional rather than personal — reporting lines that reward confirmation, metrics chosen to flatter the plan, a shrinking group willing to send bad news upwards. The executives we work with will recognize the pattern from due diligence files.

Read it for the material on transparency, which has the most direct commercial application. If armies can no longer conceal formations from commercially available imagery, assumptions about the confidentiality of your sites, shipments, movements and personnel deserve a fresh look.

Political risk work is exposed to the failure the authors trace through seventy years of campaigns. A reading formed when information was thinnest hardens into the plan and is then defended against new evidence. Where an exposure is large or long-lived, our political risk assessments agree a short list of indicators to be reviewed on a schedule. That gives a board its own version of the fourth task, a fixed point at which someone must say whether the first reading of the country still stands.

Key takeaways

• The opening assessment does the most damage. Errors made when information is thinnest get locked into budgets and public commitments, and grow harder to reverse as investment accumulates.
• Adaptation is a process, not a temperament. Willingness to change one's mind is useless without a routine that forces the question on a schedule.
• Communication is a command task, not a comms task. The authors treat transmitting a strategy through an organization as core leadership work, not something delegated after the decision.
• Assume you can be observed. The tools that stripped concealment from the battlefield are cheap, commercial and widely held.

About the authors

David Petraeus served thirty-seven years in the United States Army. He commanded the 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, oversaw production of the US Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual, led coalition forces in Iraq during the 2007–08 surge, then US Central Command, then international forces in Afghanistan, before serving as Director of the CIA, a post he resigned in 2012. In 2015 he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified material. His Princeton doctorate examined the American military and Vietnam.

Andrew Roberts is a British historian whose books include Napoleon the Great, Churchill: Walking with Destiny and The Storm of War. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society, he is a visiting professor in War Studies at King's College London and was created Baron Roberts of Belgravia in 2022.

Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine by General David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts, HarperCollins, 2023.