Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion each made his share of mistakes. Each, on occasion, misjudged his opponents, indulged incompetents or penalized the merely unlucky, ignored unpleasant realities and feared chimeras. Each adhered to flawed strategic views, meddled, or judged too harshly. Had their generals simply saluted and acceded meekly to their opinions, disaster would have resulted. Much of their genius lay in their ability to tolerate disagreement; even more in their ability to retreat from their own poor decisions or simply to change their minds.
Still, if in these respects they resembled normal politicians in kind, if not in degree, they clearly stand out as active statesmen—querying, prodding, suggesting, arbitrating, and on rare occasions ordering their professional subordinates. None of them lived by the “normal” theory of civil-military relations—accepting in their commanders a large sphere of professional independence into which they would not intrude. All of them drove their generals to distraction, eliciting a curious mixture of rage and affection as they did so. Yet despite their rejection of the idea of clear-cut divisions of responsibility between politician and general, we generally judge them to have succeeded, and decisively so.
To be sure, how one judges the effectiveness of statesmen (or for that matter, generals) poses an interesting analytic problem. In the conduct of affairs one searches for a standard other than that of arithmetical certainty or scientific precision. All of these statesmen failed in some respects, yet so too did their subordinates, and even more so their allies and their opponents. To what standards should one turn to judge the quality of war statesmanship?
The test of ultimate success, although one of the most important tests, is not the only one. No one can judge final results, for, as Churchill commented in his biography of his ancestor the first duke of Marlborough, “It is not given to princes, statesmen, and captains to pierce the mysteries of the future, and even the most penetrating gaze reaches only conclusions which, however seemingly vindicated at a given moment, are inexorably effaced by time.”1 Nonetheless, in each of these cases, there can be little doubt that the outcomes of these struggles—the maintenance of the American Union and the destruction of African-American slavery, the defeats of the first and second attempts to create a Germano-European Empire, and the rebirth of a Jewish state after nearly two millennia of statelessness—were the achievements of the four men discussed here. The odds in each of these cases were so finely balanced that leadership could and did make the difference. Take away each leader, and one can easily imagine a very different outcome to “his” conflict.
But what lessons can one really extract from the exploits of men who were, by all accounts, extraordinary leaders? Could lesser statesmen hope to act as these men did? Might one not reasonably suggest that these men were sui generis, and that their styles of leadership would fail the average politician in the average conflict? Even if we admit that they succeeded by what looks like meddling and micromanaging, could we not suggest that they succeeded either despite such behavior, or merely because genius knows no rules? To answer these questions, let us see what happens when the style of war leadership approximates the “normal” theory of civil-military relations, whereby politicians maintain a more distant relationship with their generals and refrain from engaging in the kind of active, harassing, interventionist probing of their military leaders about military matters that characterized these four. For better or worse, there are more than enough contemporary cases against which one may test such a proposition. Let us consider the most important, namely the United States, which from 1965 through the end of the century waged war according to the “normal” theory of civil-military relations.
The Vietnam war cost the lives of nearly 60,000 young Americans, left many more maimed, and for a generation tore apart the fabric of American society. The legacy of bitterness and suspicion resulting from that war persists in America today, even as the generation of young men whose lives were most touched by it have come to maturity and beyond. It may seem odd to suggest that the United States fought in Vietnam using something like the “normal” theory of civil-military relations. Indeed, one of the war’s legacies is the pervasive belief that the United States failed to achieve victory because civilian leaders “made the military fight with a hand tied behind its back,” and that the key to success in the future would be soldiers given a free hand to do their jobs. This diagnosis, radically incomplete at best and downright false at worst, affects American civil-military relations to the present day. The standard account of the Vietnam conflict treats it as a prime example of civilian micromanagement of military operations, with appalling consequences. But was it really? Did a manipulative and domineering president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and an arrogant and impatient secretary of defense, Robert Strange McNamara, act as a Churchill or a Lincoln would have but—lacking the masterly touch—with disastrous results?
That Johnson and McNamara exercised close supervision of some elements of the war is no doubt true. In what has come to symbolize for a generation of civilian and military leaders a gross overplaying of the proper role of a civilian commander in chief, Johnson did indeed review lists of targets to be struck by American aircraft in Hanoi and Haiphong, imposing limits on the numbers of sorties and in some cases setting rules of engagement. It is an image that has left its mark on American civil-military relations, and hence deserves closer scrutiny. Was this the unequal dialogue at work, but in the hands of an insecure and overreaching politician who, lacking the wisdom of a true statesman, made an appalling mess with the means he might have used more successfully?
Consider the prime example of overweening civilian control—Johnson’s control of target selection. The most careful study of the conduct of the air war over Vietnam notes that in fact Johnson ended up approving most of the targets submitted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.2 To be sure, the process of approval meant a drawn-out air campaign rather than the sudden shock that is (in theory, at any rate) critical in order for air power directed against a national economic and political entity to work. Undoubtedly too, the exclusion of certain areas from bombing (early on, antiaircraft sites, but also targets in Hanoi proper and the port of Haiphong) sharply reduced the US air war’s effectiveness, both as a way of bringing pressure to bear on the North Vietnamese government and in support of the nominal operational mission: cutting off supplies coming in to feed Hanoi’s aggression in the South. There are, however, two mitigating arguments.
First and most important, Johnson and his advisers feared and sought to avoid an extension of the war by Chinese intervention in it. As we now know, this was no idle fear, for in fact the Chinese sent over 300,000 troops into Vietnam and lost over a thousand killed in action.3 At the time too, it must be remembered, the Korean war was less than fifteen years in the past, and the Cuban missile crisis less than five. Both events had taught the American decision makers that the threat of escalation by the major Communist powers was real. Korea seemingly taught the lesson that pressing too far—as the Americans had when they advanced to the Yalu River, in particular—could indeed widen the war, while restrictions on the use of military power (e.g., refraining from bombing Chinese and Soviet installations supporting Communist units in Korea) could confine it. The Cuban missile crisis demonstrated the artfully restrained use of force—while providing evidence that in some military quarters the urge to use massive violence required civilian restraint. Today historians might qualify or object to these readings of what occurred in 1950-1953 and in 1962, but at the time the lessons seemed altogether clear.
In 1964-1967 America’s civilian and military leaders shared the view that Indochina was not the place to again commit US forces in a protracted Asian war with what they believed, at the beginning of the conflict, to be a solid Sino-Soviet bloc. The politicians simply shared the assumption of their military advisers that Communism indeed presented a united front against the West, and that further colored their understanding of what kind of force they could apply. Fearing that a few errant bombs might produce an international crisis and hoping to contain a war that would, in any event, be decided in South Vietnam, Johnson had his reasons to restrict US bombing. An Air Force general who commanded the Seventh Air Force in Vietnam wrote after the war that he
deeply resented the proscription of attacks on North Vietnamese airfields, SAM and AAA sites, and other targets. Airmen are bound to resent such restraints.… But self-imposed restraint has been a fact in all US conflict since World War II, and obviously our hope in the age of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons is that some restraint will be exercised by all superpowers in all future conflicts.4
When, a quarter of a century later and in a far more benign world environment, a mistargeted bomb struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade—in the course of a war half a world away from Beijing and marginal to its interests—China’s relations with the United States were visibly disrupted for over a year—and embittered well beyond that. Knowing that fact, one is inclined to give Johnson a bit more of the benefit of the doubt.
To be sure, the second aspect of the centrally controlled bombing of Vietnam—the modulated application of violence—resulted from a theory of strategic signaling and gradual escalation that proved calamitously false. The Communist leadership in Hanoi was simply too determined, too tough, too willing to accept suffering to yield to graduated pressure—or to “diplomatic” signals conveyed by bombs whistling their way into power stations or radar installations. Johnson and McNamara operated from a false strategic concept—a “theory of victory” that rested on a radically inadequate understanding of the opponent and, for that matter, of their own society. The argument thus becomes less a question of how they exercised civilian control than one of how well—or poorly—they thought about strategy.
The argument against their style of civilian leadership would be infinitely stronger if one could adduce evidence that Johnson’s professional military advisers had a better idea of how to fight the war. That they supported the war we know. That they favored waging it more aggressively we also know. But one searches in vain for evidence that they had any strategic concept other than more intense bombing or the dispatch of even more men to the fighting front. Consider, for example, the following exchange between the president and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral D. L. McDonald at a critical White House meeting on July 22, 1965:5
ADMIRAL MCDONALD: Sending in the Marines has improved the situation. I agree with McNamara that we are committed to the extent that we can’t move out. If we continue the way we are now, it will be a slow, sure victory for the other side. But putting more men in it will turn the tide and let us know what further we need to do. I wish we had done this long before.
THE PRESIDENT But you don’t know if 100,000 men will be enough. What makes you conclude that if you don’t know where we are going—and what will happen—we shouldn’t pause and find this out?
ADMIRAL MCDONALD: Sooner or later we will force them to the conference table.
THE PRESIDENT But if we put in 100,000 men won’t they put in an equal number, and then where will we be?
ADMIRAL MCDONALD: Not if we step up our bombing…
THE PRESIDENT Is this a chance we want to take?
ADMIRAL MCDONALD: Yes, sir, when I view the alternatives. Get out now or pour in more men.
THE PRESIDENT Is that all?
ADMIRAL MCDONALD: Well, I think our allies will lose faith in us.
THE PRESIDENT We have few allies really helping us now.
ADMIRAL MCDONALD: Take Thailand for example. If we walk out of Vietnam, the whole world will question our word. We don’t have much choice.
A decision of the first magnitude—whether to embark on a large-scale war in Vietnam—took place with remarkably crude strategic judgments by the uniformed military. As H. R. McMaster points out, “The chiefs’ inability to formulate a specific proposal or estimate of the situation left the initiative for planning with the proponents of graduated pressure.”6
Or take another example, from the account of one aide present at a meeting in November 1965 between President Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a meeting characterized, in his recollection, by a violent explosion of presidential temper. The chiefs had come to a different political conclusion from that of their civilian superiors, albeit with no evidence to back it up:
They decided unanimously that risks of violent Chinese or Soviet reactions to massive US measures taken in North Vietnam were acceptably low, provided we did not delay. Unfortunately, their opinions and judgments were not commonly held in the Pentagon, at least by those who were actually steering military strategy—namely, McNamara and his coterie of civilian “whiz kids.”7
This judgment, however, reflected the chiefs’ instincts, not their expertise in international politics. There is no evidence that they understood any better than the civilian leadership the mentality of friend or foe, or that they had any ideas for bringing the war to a conclusion on terms acceptable to American diplomacy and bearable for the American public. Some of the early air-war concepts (for example, an extensive program of bombing of industrial targets in North Vietnam) reflected an unthinking application of World War II-era concepts to a very different enemy.8
The fundamental ground-war concept—attrition designed to grind the enemy into incapacity—was, as it turned out, impossible to achieve. McNamara finally left his position as secretary of defense, exhausted and embattled, in 1968. His successor, Clark Clifford, described the following conversation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in March of that year:
How long would it take to succeed in Vietnam? They didn’t know. How many more troops would it take? They couldn’t say. Were two hundred thousand the answer? They weren’t sure. Might they need more? Yes, they might need more. Could the enemy build up in exchange? Probably. So what was the plan to win the war? Well, the only plan was that attrition would wear out the Communists, and they would have had enough. Was there any indication that we’ve reached that point? No, there wasn’t.9
Thus, criticism of the American military for “failing to stand up to civilian leadership”—a frequent theme in American military writing on the war—largely misses the point. They had no argument to use, no alternative to offer, no “professional judgment” that applied to the war. And indeed, decades after the Vietnam débacle, professional soldiers were still debating whether the United States could have won the war and what the proper strategy would have been. A conventionally manned and supported linear barrier running from the sea to the Thai frontier to block Northern infiltration of the South? An aggressive campaign of counterinsurgency? Massive aerial bombardment from the outset?10 As so often occurs, the professionals disagreed, and still disagree, over the largest questions.
In fact, Johnson’s and McNamara’s conduct of the Vietnam war reveals the opposite of the methods of a Lincoln, a Clemenceau, a Churchill, or a Ben-Gurion. After the initial decisions to enter the war, the American civilian leadership held back from the kinds of bruising discussions with their military advisers that caused so much grief to Churchill’s subordinates. It was not until October 1967 that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff joined the Tuesday lunches at which the president, the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, and the president’s press secretary discussed Vietnam.11 During the period of the escalation of the commitment to Vietnam there was no comprehensive politico-military assessment of American strategy. Nor could there be. The chiefs’ recommendations for an all-out effort seemed so inappropriate to the nature of the enemy and the international political circumstances that the civilian leaders decided to make war their way, without their military advisers’ counsel. At some level, one might almost say that the JCS chose irrelevance rather than accepting and working within the political constraints that America’s civilian leaders believed they had to live with.
To be sure, much of the blame for the ineffectiveness of the Joint Chiefs lay with an administration that chose its top military leaders for political pliability. The truth was that the military system had brought to the top generals like Maxwell Taylor and Earle Wheeler, who were either politically too close to the civilian leadership to offer it real alternatives, or too desirous of consensus to lay out sharp choices for them to make.12 One recent student of the war goes so far as to argue that Taylor, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recommended senior officers for those posts who “were less likely than their predecessors to challenge the direction of the administration’s military policy.”13 In any event, the civilian leadership—unlike the four leaders discussed here—did not attempt to force a discussion of the essential strategic problem of ends and means. Thus, at the Guam conference of 20–21 March 1967, when key American leaders, including the president, met with their Vietnamese counterparts and General William Westmoreland, the American commander in South Vietnam, there was little “detailed discussion or reevaluation of the military situation.” Not surprising, given General Westmoreland’s view that the war was going well—a view resulting from a variety of quantitative indicators all of which would later turn out to be suspect.14
The standard indictment of civilian leadership during the Vietnam war includes a criticism of its preference for incremental uses of force rather than the sudden, massive application of power that the military would have preferred. This may have been applicable to the air war in the North, but the same could hardly be said of operations in the South; the American buildup in South Vietnam proceeded very quickly indeed and was limited as much by logistical constraints as by deliberate decisions. With one major port—Danang—there was a limit to how much US materiél South Vietnam could absorb; as it was, vast base areas soon mushroomed, stocked with huge, unusable quantities of supplies for the American forces in the field. Indeed, what is most striking is McNamara’s and Johnson’s willingness to write large checks on American military manpower through 1968, extending up to, but not including, a full mobilization of the reserves.
Combat developed rapidly, largely in response to increased North Vietnamese efforts against the Republic of Vietnam, but also as a result of the aggressive American military style. That style—largely unrestrained by civilian political authority—included a vast volume of firepower, the poisoning of large areas of vegetation, and a continuous effort to find the enemy and bring him to battle with American troops.
Arguably American strategy might have been better served by greater reliance on population protection and development of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). “One of the great mysteries of the American involvement in the Indochina wars is why the Vietnamese army failed to develop into a first-rate military force, as did the ROK [Republic of Korea] army,” wrote one of America’s most senior Vietnam intelligence officers.15 It is not such a mystery, unfortunately: the development of the South Vietnamese military was not the highest priority for a US Army focused overwhelmingly on closing with the enemy. To the extent that American soldiers did focus on training the ARVN it was for the purpose of fighting a conventional war.16 In this respect, and most notably in the development of the operational concept of “search and destroy,” the military had its way.
American forces did, of course, chafe under all kinds of constraints during the Vietnam war, at least until 1970; they could not cross international borders (e.g., into Laos or Cambodia) in large numbers; they had to respect the prerogatives of corrupt local political leaders and commanders; they could not use firepower indiscriminately in densely built-up areas. But some of these restraints stemmed from humanitarian inhibitions, others from the nature of guerrilla conflict, and still others from the conditions found in all wars and particularly in coalition conflicts. In the same way that the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, found that he could not control the behavior of Free French forces nominally under his command, so too the Military Assistance Command Vietnam was infuriated at the behavior of some South Vietnamese generals. Interestingly enough, however, it was the military commander, General William Westmoreland, who decided not to seek a joint command that might have given the Americans greater control over the selection and promotion of officers in the ARVN. In the view of Robert Komer, “the very massiveness of our intervention actually reduced our leverage. So long as we were willing to use US resources and manpower as a substitute for Vietnamese, their incentive for doing more was compromised.”17
Westmoreland himself operated under remarkably little civilian oversight. During his four and a half years in Vietnam he received a few visits from McNamara and Johnson; he also flew to Washington. Yet his chief memory of his visit in November 1967 with President Johnson was not of analyzing strategic choices, but rather of his impression of LBJ: “I have never known a more thoughtful and considerate man than Lyndon B. Johnson.”18 McNamara certainly, and Johnson possibly, knew that the war was not going well from the beginning—as early as 1966. Yet their scrutiny of operations in Vietnam focused chiefly on the level of effort being made, not on its fundamental direction. One searches the “Pentagon Papers” (published in 1971, but compiled earlier in the war on the direction of Secretary McNamara himself) in vain for any probing of the assumptions of “search and destroy.” In a conscience-wracked memoir McNamara recalls:
Looking back, I clearly erred by not forcing, then july 1965] or later, in either Saigon or Washington—a knock-down, drag-out debate over the loose assumptions, unasked questions, and thin analyses underlying our military strategy in Vietnam. I had spent twenty years as a manager identifying problems and forcing organizations—often against their will—to think deeply and realistically about alternative courses of action and their consequences. I doubt I will ever fully understand why I did not do so here.19
Westmoreland, the straitlaced and, on the whole, unimaginative commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), would not have lasted four and a half years in command under Lincoln. A Clemenceau would surely have visited him more than once or twice in his theater of war (and for just a few days). A Churchill would hardly have let him slip away without a constant, even brutal questioning of his strategic concept. And a Ben-Gurion would, after massive study, have discovered the impossibly haphazard organization that divided the air war (to take just one example) among at least three separate and uncoordinated commands, and that prevented the American commander in South Vietnam from overhauling his ally’s corrupt army.
It is striking, in retrospect, to what extent soldiers and civilians alike avoided such critical issues as the need for a unified command in Southeast Asia, or the need to gain control of and reform the South Vietnamese military—an issue Westmoreland dismissed as smacking of colonialism. He did not understand the issue even in retrospect. “We were in Vietnam to help the Vietnamese, not do the job for them.… If we did it for them, how were they to learn? Junior and senior commanders alike learn to assume responsibility only from experience.”20 That the United States was in fact doing the job for the South Vietnamese did not escape observers, and Westmoreland’s peculiarly finicky regard for local sensibilities meant that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam remained corrupt and inept (with some notable exceptions) for much of its unhappy existence.
The civilian leadership may have disagreed with Westmoreland’s conclusions, but they never called him to task for them. Nor did the civilians impose, as is sometimes suggested, a numbers-driven operational understanding of the war in lieu of a more sophisticated or traditional military view. The “body count” and similar quantifiable systems were developed by civilian and military leaders alike, with the latter often embracing them enthusiastically. Nor was there anything terribly sophisticated in some of the military’s preferred modes of operation: “The best way to defeat the enemy and to protect the South Vietnamese people was to utilize maximum force against the entire Communist system,” wrote Lieutenant General Julian J. Ewell and Major General Ira A. Hunt in a study promoting the use of the body count and a counterinsurgency strategy based on attrition.21 “Once one decided to apply maximum force, the problem became a technical one of doing it efficiently with the resources available.” Not entirely coincidentally General Ewell, commanding general of the 9th Division in the Mekong River delta, acquired the nickname “The Butcher of the Delta” for his obsession with the body count.
The problem lay not in the intelligence or strength of will of Johnson and McNamara, nor yet in their desire to run the details of a war from a Washington command post. It lay first and foremost in their problematic judgment about what force could achieve in Indochina—but also in their inability to pick the right generals, to conduct a strategic (and, for that matter, operational and tactical) dialogue with them, to set priorities and maintain proportion in a secondary conflict. It lay, in short, in their lack of any sound sense of what they needed to do to run a war.
Vietnam bred a generation of embittered American officers, not only because their country lost a war and (in the view of many veterans) blamed them for it, but because of the pernicious effects of the war on the US military for years after. A corruption of the officer’s code of honor through the numbers game of body counts, a dilution of the quality of noncommissioned and commissioned officers, a hollowing out of conventional forces in Europe and the United States—these and other problems persisted until the 1980s and even a bit beyond. They resulted, in part, from the failure of the American high command to balance the requirements of war-fighting with that of maintaining a workable Cold War military establishment. Whereas in Korea the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the capping of a commitment in order to build up forces in Europe—where war, they believed, might occur with little notice—in Vietnam they made no attempt to maintain a balanced force. To the end they recommended increased force, not less.
None of this in any way exculpates the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense or President Johnson for their handling of the war. Just the reverse, in fact, for they were ultimately responsible for the armed forces’ performance. The point is, however, that contrary to received opinion, the fault in Vietnam was a deadly combination of inept strategy and excessively weak civilian control. It was a failure to understand its tasks, not its desire to micromanage, that constituted the fatal flaw of civilian leadership during the war. Some of the fault may have lain in their unwillingness to accept the notion that this was indeed a war, as opposed to a bit of violent diplomatic signaling.22 Their arrogance may have been the hubris intrinsic to a technocratic as opposed to a political or even artistic view of the world, a view in which simple indices of success replace politico-military judgment of a more traditional type. Perhaps, and more importantly, the war was simply unwinnable.23 But it is difficult to imagine that it could have been directed any worse than it was.
In the aftermath of Vietnam the senior leadership of the armed forces learned its lessons. The United States Army, led by General Creighton Abrams, hero of the relief of Bastogne in 1944 and the canny commander of American forces in Vietnam during the last, dismal phases of the war, supported the creation of the Total Force—a force structure in which reserve and active duty units would be intermingled. An expanded sixteen-division Army would rely on National Guard and other reserve units in order to mobilize for conflict. “They’re not taking us to war again without calling up the reserves,” Abrams declared.24 “They” were the politicians, and the object was not merely efficiency, but forging and maintaining a bond with the American people. No more wars in cold blood. No more wars without a mobilization of popular support. No more of the derision and contempt that were showered upon American soldiers returning from duty in Southeast Asia.
This was a bold move. The regular Army had always disdained the National Guard, which provided the bulk of combat units in the reserve forces. The National Guard had evolved from the old state militias and retained some of their less attractive qualities, most notably a promotion system in which political connections played a substantial role. The Guard had, moreover, served as a haven for young men who wished to escape duty in Vietnam but who were unwilling to declare themselves conscientious objectors or, more extreme yet, to flee the country. And, on top of it all, few professional soldiers believed that part-timers could ever acquire the discipline and technical competence to serve effectively alongside regulars in time of war. Still, in order to secure the tie with American society that the senior leadership of the Army believed had been ruptured, they would swallow all of these objections.
Creighton Abrams was a brave and competent soldier, a patriot and surely, in his own mind, a loyal believer in the Constitution and civilian supremacy. This was, nonetheless, an extraordinary effort by the military to limit the choices available to their civilian masters, to tie the hands of policymakers through the seemingly technical manipulation of organizational structures. Nor were the civilian leaders weak or incompetent: the secretary of defense at this time was none other than James Schlesinger, a tough-minded former analyst at the RAND corporation who had a firm grasp of the technical issues facing the Department of Defense. It does not seem to have occurred to either soldier or statesman, however, that there was something highly improper, to say the least, in allowing the armed services to thus determine the ways in which they could be used in combat. What is all the more remarkable is that the military in doing this deliberately chose to place its reliance on forces that it mistrusted. When the test came in 1990 the United States Army flinched from mobilizing the “roundout” brigades of National Guard units that it had insisted it would send into battle. The 24th Mechanized Infantry Division departed for the Persian Gulf without its third brigade—the 48th brigade of the Georgia Army National Guard—despite the promises its commanders had always made that it would only go to war with its citizen soldiers by its side.
The civilian leadership accepted the Total Force, with all of the constraints that it was intended to impose upon the politicians, because it had accepted much of the military’s (incorrect) reading of what had happened in Vietnam. The military had fought “with a hand tied behind its back.” The civilians had interfered and micromanaged. Political objectives were left murky and unclear. It was the “normal” theory of civil-military relations (and with it, of strategy) with a vengeance. As often happens, the clearest articulation of military views came from the mouth of a civilian. In November 1984 Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who had served under General Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific and had admired him greatly, articulated six principles for the use of force by the United States that became canonical within the defense establishment; they embodied, for a generation of officers, the “normal” theory of civil-military relations.
(1) The United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest.
(2) If we decide it is necessary to put combat troops into a given situation, we should do so wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning. If we are unwilling to commit the forces or resources necessary to achieve our objectives, we should not commit them at all.
(3) If we do decide to commit forces to combat overseas, we should have clearly defined political and military objectives. And we should know precisely how our forces can accomplish those clearly defined objectives. And we should have and send the forces needed to do just that. As Clausewitz wrote, “No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war, and how he intends to conduct it.”
(4) The relationship between our objectives and the forces we have committed—their size, composition, and disposition—must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary. Conditions and objectives invariably change during the course of a conflict. When they do change, then our combat requirements must also change. We must continuously keep as a beacon light before us the basic questions: “Is this conflict in our national interest?” “Does our national interest require us to fight, to use force of arms?” If the answers are “yes,” then we must win. If the answers are “no,” then we should not be in combat.
(5) Before the United States commits combat forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance we will have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress.
(6) The commitment of US forces to combat should be a last resort.25
The Weinberger rules did not survive long in practice (they represented an impossible standard of purity) but they represented an ideal to which succeeding political and military leaders pledged allegiance, often with astonishing directness. In the 1990s one retired four-star general would recall: “As a young officer, I literally carried a copy of that for ten years with me in my briefcase because I thought it was so important, and it had such a dramatic effect on me when I read it, to think, ‘Holy mackerel, it’s really as simple as this.’ I said, ‘Finally, there’s a realization about what a military can and cannot do for a democracy.’”26
The Weinberger speech sparked vociferous opposition from another veteran of World War II, George Shultz, who as secretary of state was loath to see America’s hands tied by a reduction of strategy to rules of thumb. Within the military, however, the Weinberger principles were celebrated as strategy of the soundest type. Widely reprinted, the speech appeared in the syllabi of staff colleges and became, in fact, a kind of dogma. It was reinforced by what became known as the Powell Doctrine, after the powerful and charismatic then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell (secretary of state as this goes to press), who announced his commitment to a doctrine of “overwhelming force”—not appropriate force, or force adequate to meet the objectives, but “overwhelming force.” When in 1986 Congress (which also paid lip service to the conventional reading of Vietnam) strengthened the Joint Staff and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it reinforced these lessons. Henceforth the civilians would have one primary military adviser—the chairman of the JCS—overshadowing all others, and behind him a powerful staff under his personal control, rather than that of the services. The president and the secretary of defense would have a single authoritative source of professional military advice, and even if the chairman did not formally occupy a place in the chain of command (which ran, in theory, from the secretary of defense to theater commanders in chief) he would, in practice, act as a conduit for military advice to the president, and relay orders from him and the secretary to the military. The “normal” theory had triumphed.
If in American military mythology Vietnam was the dark and foreboding tale, the Gulf war of 1991 has become the opposite: a tale of war conducted as it ought, i.e., a war in which the politicians set objectives, established simple guidelines for the conduct of operations, and got out of the way. In short, the Gulf war seemed to vindicate the “normal” theory of civil-military relations. President George H. W. Bush, who presided over the war, articulated this view after it:
[Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Colin Powell, ever the professional, wisely wanted to be sure that if we had to fight, we would do it right and not take half measures. He sought to ensure that there were sufficient troops for whatever option I wanted, and then the freedom of action to do the job once the political decision had been made. I was determined that our military would have both. I did not want to repeat the problems of the Vietnam War (or numerous wars throughout history), where the political leadership meddled with military operations. I would avoid micromanaging the military.27
There can be little doubt that the first Bush administration ran the Gulf War in a considerably more hands-off fashion than the Johnson administration did the Vietnam war. This reflected to some extent the civilians’ interpretation of the lessons of Vietnam; it reflected as well the extraordinary stature of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, who accrued enormous power from a combination of charisma, bureaucratic skill, and the enhanced powers of the Joint Staff under the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986.
Powell successfully preempted a good deal of civilian control in the Gulf war through his own highly developed political skills. This was, after all, an officer who had learned as a White House Fellow working in the Nixon White House that “you don’t know what you can get away with until you try.”28 The wildly popular general—who declared himself a Republican shortly after retiring from the military, and who came close to a run for the presidency itself a year later—shared many policy outlooks with his civilian superiors. Having served as national security advisor in the Reagan administration, he understood the workings of government better than anyone else in uniform, and just as well as any of the civilians. He would need little guidance, then, in those matters.
There was, to be sure, far less need for close civilian control of the kind exercised by a Lincoln or a Churchill here. The enemy, Iraq, was utterly isolated. Its prewar patron, the Soviet Union, was collapsing; its Arab neighbors were hostile; and potential allies such as China did not as yet see the need to tip the balance against the United States. The Iraqi army was war-weary. The United States led a coalition of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, and itself brought to bear an armed forces superbly trained and equipped as a result of the Reagan-era defense buildup. The technological, tactical, and even numerical superiority of the coalition forces was overwhelming. In retrospect, although not necessarily at the time, it becomes clear that the stunning success of January/February 1991 was overdetermined.
And yet, even the story of supreme command in the Gulf war suggests something other than a vindication of the “normal” theory of civil-military relations. To begin with, it is apparent that Powell opposed war with Iraq; the dramatic account by Woodward—for which Powell apparently served as a source—makes that quite clear.29 As Powell himself indicates in his memoirs, it took a sharp rebuke by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to remind him that he was supposed to execute policy, not make it.30
The Goldwater-Nichols legislation had made the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the primary military adviser to the president, and in Powell’s hands the chairmanship became an exceptionally powerful position and one which shut off many other sources of military advice to civilian authority. Powell’s jealousy of his position as the preeminent adviser erupted when he learned that Cheney had had his military assistant, Rear Admiral William Owens, canvass the Pentagon for options other than those provided by Powell—an operation that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff regarded as “freelancing” even if it came by the secretary’s direction.31 Nevertheless, the civilians managed to find unorthodox military advice, particularly when it appeared that mainline military planning was confining itself to a straightforward thrust into Kuwait.32
The plan for air operations in the Persian Gulf, for example, emerged from a small planning cell in the Air Staff—a military organization reporting not to the theater commander in chief, General Norman Schwarzkopf, but to the chief of staff of the Air Force and the secretary of that service. Under the leadership of Colonel John Warden, a zealous proponent of air power as the decisive arm in war, and the author of a book on air-campaign planning, a plan called INSTANT THUNDER was devised. (Warden and his staff self-consciously chose that code name in order to reject explicitly the incrementalism of the ROLLING THUNDER campaign of Vietnam.) Warden headed the Air Force’s long-range war planning cell but had no place in the chain of command. Nonetheless he briefed Powell and then, two weeks after the crisis began, the theater air commander, Lieutenant General Charles Horner, on his plan. Horner, who disliked Warden, disparaged his plan at first and sent him back to Washington but retained several of his staff. In the meanwhile, however, Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael Dugan and Secretary of the Air Force Donald Rice protected Warden, who continued to support Riyadh planning efforts from his office in the basement of the Pentagon.
Powell, deeply mistrustful of the Air Force and its claims, did his best to contain the Air Staff’s efforts. He may have played a role in Dugan’s subsequent dismissal, after the Air Force general had incautiously commented to reporters traveling with him to the Persian Gulf that an air campaign would go after the circle immediately around Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and not just against more conventional military targets. But civilian patronage for the air campaign plan, together with the transfer of some of Warden’s staff to the planning operation in Saudi Arabia, and a broader concern about the prospect of large numbers of casualties in a ground war, allowed it to flourish, and indeed become a centerpiece of the war.
The development of the ground campaign plan proceeded far more slowly. Here too, a civil-military interaction was critical. In October Schwarzkopf sent his chief of staff to brief the option that had been developed for the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait using the single corps then deployed in Saudi Arabia. Much of the civilian leadership was appalled at the proposal for a frontal assault into Kuwait, although in truth the strength of the forces available did not appear to allow for much more than that. Two key civilians—National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney—were particularly upset.33 President Bush quickly approved the military’s request for an additional, even larger collection of heavy forces from Europe—VII Corps under Lieutenant General Frederick Franks. The size of the force, and its eventual commitment to a plan that involved a sweep around the Iraqi front lines as well as a punch through to Kuwait City proper, reflected civilian scrutiny and more than a little civil-military tension in the months leading up to the war.
Dick Cheney mastered the final plan down to a considerable level of detail. The secretary of defense, a tough Wyoming politician, had, like many politicians of his generation, been of draft age during the Vietnam war but had never served—a fact that may have colored the attitude of some of the senior officers with whom he dealt. He had become secretary of defense in difficult circumstances, in the wake of the disastrous failed nomination of Senator John Tower to that position, and he quickly made his mark by publicly (and, as it turned out, unfairly) castigating Air Force Chief of Staff General Larry Welch for unauthorized discussions with Congress and by dismissing the commander in chief of Southern Command, General Fred Woerner, and later Dugan. A palpable disdain for Cheney persisted. Welch remarked, “I’ve been shot at by professionals and I’m still here. So being shot at by an amateur is not likely to cause me any pain.”34 When Cheney had finished being briefed on the Gulf war plan the Joint Staff staged a ceremony at which he was awarded a “certificate stating that Richard Bruce Cheney was now an honorary graduate of all the war colleges.”35 It was the kind of patronizing humor that one finds it difficult to imagine an officer daring with Clemenceau. Cheney made no modifications in the plans, nor does it appear that he or any other civilian leader interacted with Schwarzkopf except through Powell during the war. Indeed, with the exception of Cheney’s visits to the theater, it is not clear that he and the theater commander spoke regularly during the war at all.
During the war itself, in fact, only two issues seem to have elicited political control, in both cases exercised preemptively by Powell. One involved the bombing of Baghdad. Early in the morning of 13 February 1991 (Riyadh time) American planes attacked an Iraqi command-and-control center that, unknown to coalition planners, housed a shelter for families of the Iraqi élite. Several hundred casualties resulted, according to the Iraqis, who moved swiftly to show the smoking wreckage on CNN. The result was cessation of attacks on Baghdad for several days, followed by extreme restriction of attacks thereafter, each target being personally approved by the theater commander in chief.36 Air Force planners report that the guidance for this came directly from Powell.37 The suspension of bombing in Baghdad did not trouble Powell or even the Air Force commander in Saudi Arabia. Neither had had high expectations of attacks on so-called “strategic” targets, preferring as they did attacks on ground forces and the infrastructure that supported them.
The second case of interaction was more serious. On the second night of the war Iraq fired eight surface-to-surface missiles at Israel. The warheads were crude and the missiles inaccurate, but the potential for damage to the coalition was severe—or at least so the leadership of the American government believed.38 The initial air plan had called for attacks on the Iraqi launch sites for the so-called SCUD missiles (actually, Iraqi modifications of Soviet SCUD missiles), these occurred at the outset of the campaign, but planners belatedly learned that the Iraqis had shifted the missiles to mobile launchers. As a result, coalition forces began an extensive air search for the Iraqi missiles—a fruitless task that took some of the most effective aircraft in the inventory out of the broader air campaign.39
The impetus for an active air campaign against the Iraqi missiles came from Washington and was resisted in the field. Because the SCUD missiles were notoriously inaccurate, one general openly shrugged off the mobile missiles as being militarily unimportant—a remark that demoralized air crew and helped convince the Israelis that their concerns did not rank high with the Americans. When the secretary of defense was briefed on the handful of aircraft sorties that Central Command would throw against the misile launchers, he erupted. “Goddamn it, I want some coverage out there. If I have to talk to Schwarzkopf, I’ll do it.”40 Once again, it was the politically adept Powell who stepped in before civilian leaders could communicate their displeasure directly to the theater commander. What was interesting here was the assumption that it would be odd or even improper for the secretary of defense to communicate directly to a theater commander, rather than through a uniformed intermediary who was not technically in the chain of command.
In retrospect, all three civil-military disputes—whether to go to war at all, what kind of plan to adopt, and how much effort to put into SCUD-hunting—were resolved by Powell’s preemptive injection of political concerns into the directives issued to Schwarzkopf, with whom he was in daily contact by telephone. Behind this, however, lay a decisive condition: a plenitude of military power so great that commanders and politicians alike had no hard choices to make. The great and bootless SCUD-hunt did not mean that hundreds (or even scores) of American soldiers would die in attacks against insufficiently bombarded Iraqi positions. The decision to proceed to war despite the reservations of the military did not pave the way for postwar recriminations about the price of this vast expedition sent halfway around the world. The military’s inability to come up with a ground-war plan that made sense to civilian leaders did not force a crisis at the top—it merely elicited another surge in men and machines to a theater already inundated with troops and the paraphernalia of war.
The uncertainty of civilian control, however, became clear at the end of the war. After six weeks of pounding from the air and less than four days of ground combat the Iraqi army in Kuwait and southern Iraq had disintegrated or fled. The question of when and how to terminate the war—which seems not to have been the subject of high-level discussions, although there was staff work along these lines early on—now arose. Two critical decisions had to be made: when to stop the war, and how to handle the armistice negotiations. In both cases, the military made the critical decisions—and in both cases, it appears in retrospect, they made the wrong ones.
The end of the ground war was driven by a discussion in the Oval Office on 27 February 1991. In a decision that National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft described as “too cute by half,” the cease-fire was declared to begin at midnight, so that the ground war would have lasted precisely one hundred hours.41 General Powell made the recommendation, arguing that the president’s victory conditions had been fulfilled: Bush had articulated those objectives on August 8, well before a decision to use force against Iraq had, in fact, been made.
Four simple principles guide our policy. First, we seek the immediate, unconditional, and complete withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Second, Kuwait’s legitimate government must be restored to replace the puppet regime. And third, my administration, as has been the case with every president from President Roosevelt to President Reagan, is committed to the security and stability of the Persian Gulf. And fourth, I am determined to protect the lives of American citizens abroad.42
By all accounts, the political leadership went along with Powell’s recommendation; Powell reported that Schwarzkopf, with whom he had just spoken, agreed with it. Shortly after the war General Schwarzkopf had a different version of events, telling British television interviewer David Frost that he had recommended a continuation of operations in order to complete the annihilation of Iraqi forces. Whatever the truth of the matter, the suspension of offensive operations was a mistake at two levels. First, it soon appeared that American forces had not, in fact, sealed the exits from the Kuwait Theater of Operations (KTO). And second, the most important part of the enemy force—the élite Republican Guard armored divisions—had in fact escaped intact, and were thus able to maintain the Saddam Hussein regime in power after the war.
Powell’s rationale for pushing the end of the war at this juncture reflected two political judgments. He feared that pounding the Iraqi forces along the route out of Kuwait City (the so-called “Highway of Death”) would hurt American standing in international public opinion, and he believed that the main objective—driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait—had been achieved. Both, of course, were not military but political judgments and both, in retrospect, appear questionable. The so-called “Highway of Death” was littered not with bodies but with the carcasses of vehicles, most of whose occupants had fled once American aircraft had begun strafing the columns of retreating Iraqi troops. No images of it had yet appeared on television, and there was nothing to indicate that any unacceptable public reaction overseas or at home was about to occur. In any case, a definition of “unacceptable” in these circumstances clearly rested with the political leadership. As for the achievement of the president’s objectives, those had been narrowly interpreted to mean the physical eviction of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and their neutralization as a threat to coalition forces. Here a more serious error occurred.
Even the formal statement of Bush’s objectives made it clear that the restoration of the Kuwaiti status quo ante was insufficient reason to terminate the war; in that text the broader objective of ensuring the stability of the Persian Gulf carries equal weight with the eviction of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. In fact, however, the crispness of Bush’s statement of objectives—so much admired at the time and thereafter—was illusory. Only the first objective, driving the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, seemed unambiguous. The restoration of the legitimate government of Kuwait was almost as straightforward, assuming that one did not insist on excessively democratic interpretations of the word “legitimate.” The third objective was a vague statement of the obvious, namely that the United States cared about the stability of the world’s oil supply. The objective of protecting the lives of American citizens ended when Saddam returned Western hostages before the war, an act that meant that the only lives of American citizens to be jeopardized would be those of servicemen and -women sent to war in the Gulf.
In retrospect, two implicit and unstated objectives stood out: the destruction of Iraq’s program of weapons of mass destruction and the replacement of the regime. The attack on Iraq’s nuclear and biological program began during the war and continued afterward through UN inspections and sanctions. As the American intelligence-collection effort directed against that program assembled and processed information about it, it loomed ever larger in the minds of political leaders. As for the ensuring of peace and stability, that clearly implied the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. Although American leaders shied away from making this an explicit objective—fearing the consequences of appearing to target an individual political leader for death or removal, and being uncertain of their ability to achieve the former—they nonetheless believed that the catastrophic war would doom Saddam’s regime.43
The act of waging war leads- -in fact, forces—statesmen to alter their objectives and purposes, thereby frustrating those who hope to reduce strategic aims to checklists. The end of the Gulf war brought in its wake new purposes, such as the permanent large-scale presence of American forces in the Persian Gulf as guarantors of order there; subsequently it also entailed the air policing of large areas of Iraq. It led to further purposes as well, including the use of the upheavals in the Gulf to bring about partial resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The premature termination of the Gulf war also had consequences, still felt a decade later, after the Saddam Hussein regime had wriggled out from under an onerous United Nations weapons-inspection and sanctions regime.
The problem of the early ending of the war was compounded by the manner in which the American theater commander conducted the armistice negotiations at Safwan. After conversations with Powell (who relayed White House guidance), Schwarzkopf had, at Powell’s bidding, prepared proposed military conditions for the defeated Iraqi forces to meet. Two days later, on the eve of the talks, Schwarzkopf joked that “it would be interesting to see which came first: authorization to conduct the talks, or the talks themselves.” Just before the negotiations began the terms of reference came back, with the only change being that the State Department had changed the word “negotiate” to “discuss.” In other words, Schwarzkopf had no guidance at all beyond the purely technical terms (e.g., requirements that the Iraqis point out minefields and biological-weapons storage sites) that he had himself drawn up.44
Thus, General Schwarzkopf entered the armistice negotiations with no directives from his civilian leadership. Left to his own devices, he concluded a relatively generous settlement with his Iraqi interlocutor—a relatively junior lieutenant general, whose unease at being the vanquished Schwarzkopf attempted to reduce by having himself patted down for weapons by American military police.45 More to the point Schwarzkopf, proceeding from his narrow interpretation of the objectives of the war, then permitted the Iraqis the use of helicopters; these proved invaluable in their suppression of the Shi’ite uprisings against Saddam’s régime. The subsequent massacres—which occurred in direct view of outraged American soldiers—ended the immediate threat to the continuity of the Iraqi dictator’s rule.
Schwarzkopf’s indulgence towards the Iraqi government reflected a deep conviction on the part of American military leaders—particularly in the Army, but shared by many civilians—that having won the war the thing to do was to declare victory and come back home for victory parades of a type not seen since the end of World War II. Indeed, Schwarzkopf and Powell discussed having the armistice negotiations take place on the quarterdeck of the battleship USS Missouri, site of the Japanese surrender in 1945. This desire (thwarted, according to Schwarzkopf, by the length of time required to bring the battleship to the theater) reflected an astonishing lack of historical perspective as well as their misperception of the completeness of the military’s success.46
The military’s urge (understandable in light of its experiences in Vietnam) to define the war in purely conventional terms had led it to oppose in the most resolute way any prolonged occupation of southern Iraq or any support for an anti-Saddam resistance movement in the north (under Kurdish auspices), in the south (the Shi’ites), or any direct move on Baghdad. Ironically, the United States Army was following the 1966 advice of Senator George D. Aiken of Vermont, whose solution to the Vietnam conflict was then “to declare victory and come home.” In many ways the military’s predilections mirrored those of the Bush administration itself, which feared getting bogged down in Iraqi politics and which had, as it later appeared, an entirely excessive fear of the “Arab street.” There was, in fact, no evidence to suggest that more robust action at the end of the war—to annihilate rather than expel the Republican Guard, to aid Kurdish or Shi’ite insurgents, or simply to insist that there could be no peace with Iraq until Saddam was removed from power—would have met with unacceptable opposition from the Arab world.
The civilian leadership appears, in some measure, not to have thought through the longer-term consequences of the war or the follow-through that even a smashing victory requires. They had come to accept, by default, the military’s definition of victory as a battlefield outcome, in which the relationship with political objectives was defined as narrowly as possible. In this case that nominal political objective was the restoration of the previous government of Kuwait, but in point of fact—as soon became clear—larger, vaguer, and even more consequential purposes were entailed. The elimination of the Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction programs really began only after the war ended, and as ten years of cunning and determined Iraqi resistance revealed, even a decision on the battlefield could not yield final victory absent a strategy for achieving it. Within a decade UN inspections had ceased, repeated bombing of Iraq had achieved little of consequence, while sanctions and an embargo had gained the Iraqi people, if not Saddam himself, sympathy in many quarters of the world. A substantial American force was now required to police the Persian Gulf, including Iraq proper, and the victorious coalition of the Gulf war had reduced itself to the United States, Britain, and a handful of anxious and not entirely reliable local Arab allies.
The tale of the Gulf war and its aftermath is not one of usurpation of strategic control by the military but rather, in large part, one of abdication of authority by the civilian leadership. They had their reasons, of course. Like their military subordinates, they believed that civilian “micromanagement” had brought about the calamity in Vietnam; they confronted an extremely forceful, popular, and sophisticated chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; they trusted the technical competence of the forces under their command; and they feared the consequences of a protracted commitment in a region that they viewed as culturally alien and of secondary importance as the Cold War ended. They yielded, finally, to the understandable temptation to bask in the admiration and approval that is the lot of successful warriors home from their wars. But war, like politics itself, almost never has a clear-cut terminus. The creation of strategy resembles Penelope’s web—beautiful loom-work by day unraveling at night. Perhaps the greatest error a strategist can make, in fact, is believing in the chimerical notion of “victory”—as opposed to incremental and partial successes, which then merely give way to new (if, one hopes, lesser) difficulties. Small wonder, perhaps, that President George H. W. Bush, himself a decorated war hero, who led the United States to dazzling battlefield successes that cost only a handful of lives and virtually no treasure, whose approval ratings reached the highest levels pollsters had ever seen, found himself evicted from office less than two years later in a humiliating defeat by the governor of a small, poor Southern state—Bill Clinton, who had avoided the draft during Vietnam.
Many soldiers and politicians thought that the Gulf war had put to rest the ghosts and demons of the Indochina war. Throughout the Gulf war President George H. W. Bush, by his own account, brooded about Vietnam—indeed, his exuberant declaration at the end of the war revealed how much it had preyed upon his mind. His diary for 26 February 1991, two days before the end of the war, includes a passage, “It’s surprising how much I dwell on the end of the Vietnam syndrome.”48 “Vietnam will soon be behind us.” He regretted that the war had not ended with a “battleship Missouri surrender. This is what’s missing to make this akin to WWII, to separate Kuwait from Korea and Vietnam.…”49 The very insistence on the “end of the Vietnam syndrome” (by which Bush seems to have meant sloppy, unsatisfying endings, internal divisions, and a hampered military) reveals, of course, just how painfully present that experience remained for him. The sloppy ending of the Gulf war—which left Saddam Hussein still in power, still a menace, and increasingly free of externally imposed sanctions a decade later—showed that the president had fallen short of his immediate objective as well.
For, in fact, the Gulf war did not end the “Vietnam syndrome” but, if anything, strengthened it. The lessons of the Gulf war learned by the American defense establishment amounted to a powerful reinforcement of deep-seated beliefs that go back to Vietnam and that amounted to a tremendous reinforcement, to the point of distortion, of the “normal” theory of civil-military relations. In the decade that followed, the twinned lessons of Vietnam and the Gulf combined to create a version of the “normal” theory of civil-military relations that ended by weakening the principle of civilian control of the military in the United States, deepening mistrust between senior officers and politicians, and even, in some measure, politicizing the officer corps.
The lessons of Vietnam and the Gulf war did not disappear with the gradual retirement of the Vietnam generation of military officers. Extensive surveys of officers conducted by social scientists from the Triangle Institute for Security Studies in 1999 asked officers whether they should be neutral, advise, advocate, or insist on control of certain elements of the use of force. The results revealed that officers believed that it was is their duty to “insist” on the adoption of certain courses of action (rather than advise or advocate), including “setting rules of engagement” (50 percent), developing an “exit strategy” (52 percent), and “deciding what kinds of military units (air versus naval, heavy versus light) will be used to accomplish all tasks” (63 percent).50 What “insist” meant in this context was, of course, unclear. Still, something profound had changed in American civil-military relations. Officers, their self-confidence strengthened by two decades of increasing prestige and by a generally accepted version of civil-military relations marked by the morality tales of the Vietnam and Gulf wars, had come to believe that civilians had little business in probing their business.
The TISS survey data indicate that the post-Gulf war American military had a view of who should control the use of force very different indeed from the unequal dialogue discussed here. Nor is it the case that these views were theoretical propositions only, not reflected in action. When, for example, sources on the Joint Chiefs of Staff leaked military opposition on the conduct of the 1999 Kosovo war to the press, the stated objection was that “I don’t think anybody felt like there had been a compelling argument made that all of this was in our national interest”—as if the determination was the military’s to make.51 Indeed, by the turn of the twenty-first century it was the norm for military officers to leak to the press their opposition to government policy involving the use of force. This is a far cry from the outraged but dutiful muteness with which the chiefs of staff of the Army and Navy accepted President Roosevelt’s decision to invade North Africa in 1942, against their explicit and firm advice.
In the Gulf war, and in the host of small wars since then, military “advice” has not really been “advice” at all, but something different: a preparation of options, and sometimes a single option, for the civilian leadership. American civilian decision-makers hesitated before demanding much of their military subordinates. Having earlier denounced the passivity of the first Bush administration in Yugoslavia and particularly in Bosnia, the Clinton administration in 1992 was paralyzed by military estimates that it would take 400,000 troops or more to intervene there.52 When American forces were used, it was with virtually no cooperation and communication with—let alone subordination to—a broader political effort. Indeed, Richard Holbrooke, America’s chief negotiator in the Balkans in 1995, recalls that his military counterpart, Admiral Leighton Smith, viewed himself as an independent force: “… he told me that he was ‘solely responsible’ for the safety and well-being of his forces, and he would make his decision, under authority delegated to him by the NATO Council, based on his own judgment. In fact, he pointed out, he did not even work for the United States: as a NATO commander he took orders from Brussels.”53 Smith’s mulish opposition to the man charged with implementing American policy reflected the same kind of presumptuousness that, in far graver circumstances, had afflicted the relationship between Foch and Clemenceau. It was a reminder that coalition operations, now a staple of peacekeeping and limited interventions, produce their own difficulties in the area of civil-military relations.
The Somalia intervention of 1993 offered another such case. A commitment of American forces under the auspices of the United Nations allowed for the pursuit of parallel and conflicting policies, which culminated in a disastrous attempt to kidnap a Somali warlord whose cooperation was essential to any stable arrangement in Mogadishu. Here too civilian abdication, not military arrogance, was to blame. Deferring to a zealous United Nations high commissioner—an American—neither the president nor the secretary of defense regarded American forces operating in Mogadishu as forces fighting a low-level war, but a war nonetheless, in which some effort should be made by national authority to harmonize ends and means. Far from abusing the military by micromanaging it, the Clinton administration abused it by failing to take the war seriously and inquire into means, methods, and techniques. Its civilian leadership failed (to take just the Somalia case) by refusing to ask why American forces in Somalia were operating under several different commands—commands which communicated with one another poorly and in some cases not at all.
Particularly in the years after the Gulf war, it became expected that civilian leaders, not their military subordinates, would take responsibility for military failure. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin resigned following the death of eighteen Rangers ambushed in downtown Mogadishu in 1993—even though his military advisers had not urged upon him a course of action other than that undertaken by American forces there, and had, in fact, favored the withdrawal of the one system that might have rescued the Rangers, the AC-130 aerial gunship. In a similar if less extreme vein, Secretary of Defense William Perry, confronted by the Senate Armed Services Committee, took responsibility for any failures associated with the bomb attack on the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed nineteen servicemen in 1996, while the theater commander in chief sat silently beside him. Lower-level officers might suffer for sins of omission and commission (an Air Force brigadier general was denied promotion after the Khobar attack, which he could neither have prevented nor defended against more effectively than he did), but higher commanders were not penalized. For civilian leaders to hold military leaders accountable for their operational performance far graver failures, apparently, would have to occur.
The decline in the quality of American civil-military relations at the top has coincided with the emergence of an American military edge—technological, organizational, and quantitative—that stems from the United States’ extraordinarily prosperous economy and the overall quality of its armed forces. Yet even in successes such as the 1999 Operation ALLIED FORCE, the NATO war with Serbia led by an American, General Wesley Clark, the failure of statesmen and commanders to come to terms with one another had deleterious consequences. Clark, a bright, ambitious, and politically sophisticated general, supported American policy as articulated by the secretary of state:
One of his colleagues asked him where his civilian pals were going to be if things went sour. Would they, like the civilians behind the Vietnam débacle, go off to write their books and take their big jobs, the way Mac Bundy and Bob McNamara had done? … In the military, someone who was too nimble, too supple with words, too facile, someone who was able to go to different meetings and seem to please opposing constituencies, was not regarded with admiration; he was regarded with mistrust.54
Clark paid dearly for getting crosswise of military colleagues who had no use for the Kosovo war or for the president who had led them into it. But neither the president nor the secretary of defense chose to speak with their theater commander, who found himself on the receiving end of admonitions from a hostile chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and uncooperative generals at home. “I had little idea, and never had during the entire crisis, how the commander in chief, or the secretary of defense were making their decisions.”55
For their part the civilians scrutinized target lists but generally approved the requests of their theater commander, who faced far more unwillingness from NATO allies. President Clinton, seeking to avoid casualties which he felt himself peculiarly unable to justify, declared early on that the United States would commit no ground forces to Kosovo—an indiscretion that virtually guaranteed a prolonged air campaign, during which Serb forces could massacre the Albanian Kosovars at leisure. This decision seems to have preceded rather than followed any strategic discussions with military leaders. An unthinking requirement for “force protection” as the first mission for American soldiers, ahead of any objective for which they might be put in harm’s way, reflects an unwillingness to come to terms with what the use of force means; today, rather than the reckless dissipation of strength, it means an only slightly less reckless conservation of it.56
The Kosovo war ended with no American combat casualties, and with the eviction of Serb forces from Kosovo. For this success Clark, who had no friends in the military high command and who had alienated Secretary of Defense William Cohen—a civilian leader who had absorbed the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—found himself unceremoniously retired early. In his place General Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had expressed all of the conventional military reservations about fighting the Serbs, moved up to become Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
At one level, civil-military relations today are smooth and easy; senior military leaders mix far more easily with their civilian superiors than they did in Lincoln’s or even Churchill’s day. They attend the same meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations and converse with equal ease on political, although not often military subjects. They share offices in the bureaucracy and interact easily in interagency meetings. This superficial harmony has even led some scholars to talk of a theory of concordance as a more attractive paradigm for civil-military relations.57 This is, however, a mirage.
During the Cold War the American military accumulated, while scarcely being aware of it, an enormous amount of power and influence. It divided the world into theaters of operation; these have mushroomed into commands whose staffs dwarf those of the immediate office of the president.58 In order to fight a Cold War characterized by multiple and often delicate alliances, it schooled its senior officers in politics, beginning when they were cadets at the military academies, by having them serve as interns in Congress. It taught politics, under the name of strategy, in its war colleges. At the same time, particularly after Vietnam, it deprecated efforts by civilian leaders to become overly expert in the details of military affairs. As for explaining its failures or half-successes since World War II, even thoughtful general officers declared that to have victories, “You must have the political will—and that means the will of the administration, the Congress and the American people. All must be united in a desire for action.”59 If accepted, such an extreme precondition—a unity that has escaped the United States in every major war except the World Wars—means that the civilians will always disappoint the military and the soldiers will always have an excuse.
There was nothing deliberately malign in this hardening of military views about the use of force, very much along the lines of Weinberger’s rules and the Powell doctrine.60 More deeply disturbing at the end of the century were signs that the American military was increasingly willing to take sides in politics in order to preserve its own interests. This politicization occurred as much at the top of the hierarchy as it did lower down. Having successfully wooed a group of recently retired general officers to endorse his candidacy in 1992, President Bill Clinton found himself trumped by the son of the man he had defeated. George W. Bush collected a longer and more impressive list, topped by three men who had retired only weeks or even days earlier from military service: the professional chiefs of the Navy and the Marine Corps, and the commander of the American forces in the Persian Gulf.61 The use of senior generals as props for political campaigns, and the flags’ willingness to sign up as partisans, was a long way from the standards of behavior set by men like George C. Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff during World War II. Marshall chose not even to vote (admittedly an extreme choice) in order to avoid any partisan taint. In 1943 he lectured a subordinate: “We are completely devoted, we are a member of a priesthood really, the sole purpose of which is to defend the republic.” Hence, he insisted, public confidence in a politically neutral military was “a sacred trust” to be borne in mind “every day and every hour.”62
There was a paradox here. The “normal” theory, which called for sealing the military off from civilian meddling in the details, had eventually given way to a military willing to involve itself, if only tentatively at first, in politics. Yet this willingness follows from the “normal” theory’s unrealistic view of the use of force as something divorced from politics in all but the broadest sense of the word. The post-Cold War world being one in which the interplay of force and politics has grown ever more complex, it is not surprising that soldiers tend to engage in politics, albeit with the best of motives. The tendency to do so was reinforced by the increasing gap between traditional military values of hierarchy, order, loyalty, and self-sacrifice and a civilian world that seems increasingly egalitarian (at least in work habits), fluid, individualistic, and acquisitive. Both the steady spread of gender integration in the modern military and weakening barriers to homosexual participation in the armed forces have quietly reinforced a sense of siege among more traditionally minded officers, even as they have blurred the barriers between institution and interest group for others.63 These subtle but powerful societal forces exacerbated a sense of civil-military tension, if not of crisis, by the time a new president took office in 2001. Not entirely coincidentally his new secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who had held the same job a quarter-century before, began his tenure with an elaborate set of defense reviews that ostentatiously excluded the active-duty military from participation save as a kind of uniformed research assistants. Until the outbreak of a new and different kind of war following the terror attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the Rumsfeld Pentagon exhibited levels of civil-military mistrust as bitter as anything seen in the Clinton administration.
For the leaders of America today, the strong temptation in a world dominated by American military power is to brush aside the lessons of civil-military relations hard won over a century of total wars. There is a danger that absent recent or current experience of really dangerous war—war in which the other side can inflict damage and has options—civilian and military decision-makers alike will forget the lessons of serious conflict. Those lessons are, above all, that political leaders must immerse themselves in the conduct of their wars no less than in their great projects of domestic legislation; that they must master their military briefs as thoroughly as they do their civilian ones; that they must demand and expect from their military subordinates a candor as bruising as it is necessary; that both groups must expect a running conversation in which, although civilian opinion will not usually dictate, it must dominate; and that that conversation will cover not only ends and policies, but ways and means. “Our highest civilian and military heads [must] be in close, even if not cordial, contact with each other…,”64 declared a weary but wise general officer veteran of the Vietnam war.
Just before the turn of the twenty-first century, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was reviewing the 1999 war fought by the United States and its NATO allies against Serbia. “I was troubled,” Senator Gordon H. Smith, (R-Oregon), who was chairing the hearing, remarked, “over the degree to which political considerations affected NATO’s military strategy.” He was disturbed that matters had gotten “even to the point where politicians … questioned and sometimes vetoed targets that had been selected by the military.” He continued:
I firmly believe in the need for civilian control of the military in a democratic society, but I also believe we can effectively adhere to this critical principle by clearly outlining political objectives and then, within the boundaries of those objectives, allowing the military commanders to design a strategy in order to assure the achievement of those objectives.65
The “normal” theory of civil-military relations was alive and well.
A great statesman is a rarity, and an average politician who poses as a Churchill or a Lincoln may come to grief. But it is also the case that a mediocre statesman who resorts to rules of thumb—including “defer to the professionals”—is heading, and probably by a shorter path, to ruin. Interestingly enough, General Colin Powell himself took as a life lesson, “Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own back yard. Just as important, never neglect details, even to the point of being a pest.”66 Except under uniquely favorable conditions (as, for example, in 1999 when the United States and its allies went to war with Serbia—a country whose gross national product was one fifteenth the size of the American defense budget) the outcome of civilians taking military advice without question is unlikely to be a good one.
The hopeful belief in bright dividing lines between civilian and soldier, political matters and military ones, is what Carl von Clausewitz termed a “theory of war”—a set of beliefs and doctrines that seem to make the use of force more manageable. As he also noted, however, in the absence of “an intelligent analysis of the conduct of war … routine methods will tend to take over even at the highest levels.”67 The “normal” theory of civil-military relations is, in effect, an effort to make high command a matter of routine. The unequal dialogue, to which we turn next, is the essence of the technique of the successful war statesman discussed in previous chapters, and the opposite of Clausewitz’s “routine methods.”