In this issue:

• Podcast: Dr. Gary Gregg on "Justice & Leadership" in Plato's Republic
• SBS Student Project: Jeff Fanelli, SBS 2018, on "Building a Soldier: Educating Soldiers to Win in a Complex World"
• Book Recommendation: John Lewis Gaddis' On Grand Strategy
• Video of the Month: U.S. Sen. John McCain's 2009 Veterans' Day Speech at the McConnell Center
• Next Reading Assignment: Target 2 (due Dec. 15)

Earlier this week we took time to remember and celebrate you and your brothers and sisters who have served in America’s armed forces. Thank you for your service, and I hope this message finds you and your families doing well.

This newsletter introduces my first podcast, which discusses some of the most important lessons I find in the first 40 pages of Plato’s Republic. Here Plato begins the discussion of what justice might be and, in so doing, raises several important questions about our own personal ethics, but he also challenges us to consider what values animate our foreign policy and military decisions. I hope you listen to it with profit and are excited to keep going with us on our journey to read and think seriously about this classic text.

We have received some great feedback from our SBS alumni on this new initiative, and I hope that we are able to continue to serve you in the years ahead. I know at least one of you has started a small reading group of field officers that follows our guide to discuss the text. What an exciting development that is! Please let us know how you are using this service and how it can be improved.

And, remember that we want to highlight your own work, too. If you have reflections on how you have used SBS programming in your career or any other related topic, please consider sharing them with us so that we can feature it here and with the wider Army that may look in on us from time to time.

If you have not done so already, please join our new Facebook group of SBS McConnell Center Alumni so that we can also keep up and share that way.

See you again Dec. 15 with the next installment of Meditations!

Dr. Gary L. Gregg
McConnell Center Director

{SBS Student Research Project}

Jeff Fanelli (SBS 2018) on "Building a Soldier: Educating Soldiers to Win in a Complex World"

{Bookshelf Recommendation}

Are you a Hedgehog or a Fox?

John Lewis Gaddis, distinguished historian of the Cold War from Yale University, has just published On Grand Strategy, a look at decision making, leadership, and strategy from the Ancient Greeks to the Cold War.

There is a fragment of a poem that has survived from ancient Greece that goes like this: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In the 20th century, Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin resurrected this statement as a way to think about Tolstoy and his work. Since then, many have used this insight, and Gaddis uses it as the overall point structuring this book. Among great thinkers, Plato, he says, is a hedgehog, while Aristotle is a fox.

Within this context, grand strategy is the way of aligning potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities. To be both a hedgehog and a fox, which the good grand strategist must be, takes considerable education in what has been done and thought before. This is something that, as Gaddis points out, is particularly problematic in today’s society in which we have so sharply segregated “general education, professional training, ascent within an organization, responsibility for it, and then retirement.” Put another way by Henry Kissinger, the problem is that when leaders reach their pinnacle, there is no longer time and encouragement to learn and they must live on their accumulated intellectual capital.

Now is the time to accumulate that capital! Make the most of it, and this book might be a good place to start (along with reading Plato, of course!).