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Re-Assessing the American Way of War
Review Essay Re-Assessing the American Way of War by F.G. Hoffman Frank G. Hoffman is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, a national security analyst in Washington, D.C., and a former FPRI Senior Fellow.
Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (New York: Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 2009, 482 pp., $27.99).
Derek Leebaert, Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010, 352 pp., $26.00).
Dominic Tierney, How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (Boston: Little, Brown, 2010, 352 pp., $27.99).
# 2011 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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Review Essay Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Harper Collins, 2010, 400 pp., $27.00).
America’s decade long conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia have stimulated a number of scathing critiques about the Global War on Terrorism in particular, and American foreign policy adventures in general. Not long after the first bombs were launched, the American Way of War was under fire for its tactical and apolitical orientation, along with its failure to give proper appreciation to the political and socio-cultural context in which military force was being applied. One scholar labeled the military’s narrow fixation with the fighting component of warfare ‘‘A Way of Battles’’ instead of a comprehensive grasp of what war is truly all about.1 Others bemoaned the U.S. military’s fascination with technological panaceas for complex challenges.2 The larger problem however, despite the U.S. military’s adulation of Clausewitz, is that it too often fails to appreciate his fundamental conclusion that force is applied to serve policy, which directly influences both the conduct and ending of a war.3 A second wave of writing followed the initial critiques of military mindsets and culture, extending criticism beyond the military into the strategic realm. These new works focus on the American Way of War at the level of national policy and many wonder if the United States is able to soberly develop and implement any form of strategy at all.4 This essay evaluates four of these 1
Antulio Echevarria, Towards an American Way of War (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College, Jan. 2004). 2 Frederick Kagan, Finding the Target (New York: Encounter Books, 2007) and H.R. McMaster, ‘‘Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future,’’ Orbis, Fall 2008. For a useful corrective on this critique see Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 3 For a detailed evaluation of U.S. strategic culture, see Colin S. Gray, Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American Way of War Adapt? (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College, March 2006). For a brief evaluation of the interpretations of Clausewitz within U.S. military culture see Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s On War, A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007). 4 Aaron Friedberg, ‘‘Strengthening Strategic Planning,’’ Washington Quarterly, Winter, 2007–08, pp. 52–59; F.G. Hoffman, ‘‘America’s Strategic Thinking Deficiency Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure,’’ Fort McNair, Washington, DC, Institute for National Strategic Studies, conference paper, 2008, and Mackubin T. Owens, ‘‘Civil-Military Relations and the U.S. Strategy Deficit,’’ FPRI E-Note, February 2010.
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Review Essay new assessments of American strategy. The books focus on the influence of strategic culture on the ideals and impulses that affect how the United States enters into, plans for, conducts, and concludes its wars.
Planning for Wars American exceptionalism, unbridled optimism, and the United States’ overwhelming material resources have produced one of the world’s greatest empires. However, as in Greek tragedies, periods of great success and inherent flaws can result in remarkable examples of temptation and disaster. The gods can be temporarily ignored but they cannot be mocked endlessly. In The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic and political writer at The Daily Beast, details the recurring pattern of American foreign policy failures. Beinart adapts the classical story of how Icarus ignored the warnings of his father, Daedalus, and soared too high with his wings of feather and wax. He falls to his death in the sea, mortal after all. Ultimately, it is not the gods, but Icarus’ own ignorance and pride that takes him too high towards the sun. It is the prototypical story of what the Greeks called ‘‘hubris.’’ Beinart has sought and believes he has found a similar cycle of hubris in the conduct of American foreign policy. Written with great verve and sweep, Beinart captures the past 100 years of America’s flying into the sun and organizes it into three cycles. The first cycle focuses on the idealism and progressive spirit of Woodrow Wilson, which the author characterizes as the Hubris of Reason. Wilson’s embrace of inevitable progress and belief in the inherent goodness of both human nature and international behavior did not match well with Europe’s gloom in the aftermath of the slaughter in the trenches. Wilson’s political agenda and rationalism were outmatched by more embittered protagonists on the Continent who felt that the real world was based on power, not progressive ideals or collective security framed within a toothless League of Nations. But ‘‘for a glittering constellation of American intellectuals,’’ Beinart concludes, ‘‘it was the crusade of a lifetime, a high-water mark of American optimism that would not be reached again until our own time.’’ Beinart’s chapter on the genius of FDR is political analysis at its finest. Realizing that he needed to be Janus-like with the Wilsonian impulse in U.S. domestic politics, the President acted upon the core lesson he drew from the World War I in order to create the conditions for a post-World War II global security framework. Roosevelt believed that America could not isolate itself from an admittedly imperfect world and that, in order to secure a better peace; it would have to practice power politics. In Beinart‘s assessment, Roosevelt sought to ‘‘hide the discrepancy between ideals and reality as much as possible until America was firmly ensconced in a system of postwar security. Then, no 526
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Review Essay matter how disillusioned Americans became, they would be unable to retreat from the world.’’ FDR successfully guided America’s missionary drive and vast industrial power into a satisfactory peace, but one with its own imperfect ending. From the ashes of global war, a new challenge arose in the form of the Soviet Union, and also the seed of a new doctrine, that of containment. Here the lessons of Munich became a dogma in Beinart’s take, formed by World War II’s trauma and seared into memory. For the policy elite of its day, reason was cast aside. ‘‘The world contained evil people and evil regimes,’’ the author summarizes, ‘‘which were impervious to reason’’ they had to be confronted, by force if necessary, and held back at bay. This lingering lesson from Munich created the second cycle of tragedy, a Hubris of Toughness. Dwight Eisenhower constrained the impulse to confront the Soviets and communism at any time or place was limited in the 1950s. He stressed economic power and restraint. However, by the early 1960s, Beinart argues that ‘‘toughness connoted something more aggressive, something more like a crusade.’’ This crusade became the nemesis of the Camelot generation, producing the costly conundrum in Vietnam, where American innocence melted once again. Beinart, today’s modern Daedulus, has a third act in this tragedy—our current age, which he calls a Hubris of Dominance. As the Soviet Union dissolved and American power reigned supreme, a combination of liberal interventionists and neo-conservatives found common cause in the regular exercise of U.S. military power. Pentagon planning documents in the postCold War period echoed the need to extend American hegemony to the point that competitors would not even consider entering the geopolitical game or contending against its dominance. Beinart takes on the neo-conservatives when their hubris of dominance crashed against reality: The post-cold warriors inflated the lesson of 1989 until they believed that virtually every foe could and must be smashed. By 2003 the ethic of dominance had become the equivalent of the ethic of reason in 1917 and the ethic of toughness in 1965; a good idea pushed too far, a theory that explained too much, its own version of American hubris.
One limitation in Beinart’s critique is his failure to come to terms with his own liberal hawk illusions or square his own rhetorical excess supporting the war during the same period. Moreover, his conclusions about what we can learn for American strategy in the future are less than ordinary. He contends ‘‘we have learned that there are prices we cannot pay and burdens we cannot bear.’’ The idea that we ‘‘must ruthlessly accommodate ourselves to a world that has shown, once again, that it is not putty in our hands’’ should not be taken too far, however. Yes, America has constraints and our power base is insolvent, but that foundation can be rebuilt. Beinart finishes with a more optimistic note calling on the Administration to ‘‘redefine our national faith, to decouple American optimism from the project of American global mastery.’’ Summer 2011
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Review Essay Magic Not Myth Another candidate in the emerging ‘‘Can America Do Strategy Right’’ canon is Derek Leebaert’s Magic and Mayhem. The author covers a shorter sweep of U.S. history than Beinart, and with a more acid tone. He is also equally critical of both political parties. His book bears much the same polemical base as Andrew Bacevich, a prolific critic of the Iraq war and current American strategy.5 Leebaert, author of a superb book on special operations, as well as a history of the Cold War, among his many works, seeks to discern why the United States, a powerful and enterprising country, keeps producing serial shortfalls in major interventions and wars. The mayhem results from a massive pattern of self-deception he calls ‘‘magical thinking.’’ He argues that magical thinking is a by-product of six factors in American political life and culture: An overreliance on highly credentialed but flawed Emergency Men and too many political appointees: policy experts or wizards who step to the fore in crisis, more informed by a sense of urgency than a comprehensive grasp of the issues of the day. Star Power: an obsession Americans have with ambitious, promotion seeking, self-identified experts, who rise in the national spotlight or the apex of government for fleeting moments. The Stars are long on personality and press connections, and less credible in the complexities of the challenge at hand. An infatuation with the Mystique of Management: a marked tendency of policy mavens to impose policy templates, ideology or management on the unmanageable or the unfixable in foreign policy. One symptom of this mystique is the inordinate faith placed in high-tech silver bullets, helicopters in Vietnam or armed drones over Pakistan. The intersection of Emergency Men and mystical illusions produces false Expectations of Wondrous Results from Nominal Effort. We can engineer solutions to intractable problems with enough resources and American know how. We are prone to accept easy answers to complex problems from prominent so-called experts who proclaim them. The Abuse of History: Leebaert criticizes those who too often troll at the surface of history for past outcomes to justify new solutions, without understanding its vast ambiguities. The presumption that The World Wants To Be Like Us: This false assumption feeds upon our mirror-imaging conceit that the rest of the world wants to evolve into some versions of Main Street, U.S.A. 5
See Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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Review Essay Leebaert saves his most barbed criticisms for the national security establishment, including think-tankers, academics and appointees. He’s an equal opportunity cynic, expressing as much opprobrium for the idealism of the Kennedy clan as the realism of the Nixon and Reagan eras. To ward off the Emergency Men, he argues for cuts in the number of political appointees and seeks a strengthened foreign service with more resources for diplomacy instead of military spending at the Pentagon. To diminish the management mystique, he urges Americans to accept what cannot be changed and to be ‘‘alert to the absurdities of national security experts unable to recognize the things that lie beyond their rational control.’’ He takes on leading universities for their provision of intellectual safe harbor for fallen stars (something his own Georgetown University has been guilty of). To enhance our chances of being better prepared, he is counterintuitive when he questions the ‘‘troublingly unanchored’’ field of security studies. Had the author endorsed the rigorous study of history for helping frame hard questions, teaching humility, and for promoting a sense of contingency and tragedy in human endeavor, his critique would have been more useful.6 The CIA comes in for sharp commentary as dysfunctional and unaccountable with the ‘‘insular, turf-obsessed office culture of a savings bank in Buffalo.’’ His solution is an overly simplistic demand for a ‘‘smaller, leaner and more focused’’ community.
Fighting Wars Whereas Beinart focused principally on the role of major policy makers, the third book this article examines is concerned with wider public belief systems and the larger cultural perspective that is the foundation for the American way of war. Dominic Tierney, a professor at Swarthmore College and a FPRI Senior Fellow, contends that Americans in general are very comfortable with the decisive application of conventional military power against states to conduct regime change, but rarely display the same enthusiasm when fighting insurgents or other irregular scenarios. In How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War, Tierney plumbs the inherent tensions between our preferences and reality in the battlespace that have led us into our current ongoing conflicts. In an often breezy overview of 200 years of U.S. foreign policy, Tierney assesses how Americans think about and understand war. This assessment incorporates an erudite overview of America’s major conflicts, as well as interesting insights in social and political affairs. Tierney’s bottom line is that Americans are generally ‘‘addicted to regime change, but allergic to nationbuilding.’’ Our infatuation with short, conclusive and conventional conflicts, 6
Walter A. McDougall, ‘‘The Three Reasons We Teach History,’’ FPRI E-Note, vol. 5, no. 1, Feb. 1998.
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Review Essay whipped by wrath, fervor and morality represents what the author calls the Crusader Tradition. This tradition blindly prefers the exception, the surrender ceremony of the Japanese empire aboard the battleship USS Missouri, over the more frequent and frustrating reality of human conflict. This evaluation is completely consistent with McDougall’s classic Promised Land, Crusader State. Tierney recognizes, appropriately, that our limited conception about how wars are fought and ended is flawed, and requires modification. The author juxtaposes the interstate war tradition with its polar opposite. The opposite of short wars between states is labeled nation-building, which has a pejorative connotation in both conservative policy circles and the U.S. military culture. Our military, leery of ambiguous contexts, uncertain missions and tepid political support, prefers its warrior ethos and a narrow conception of its professional sphere to simply ‘‘fighting and winning the Nation’s wars.’’ Tierney labels our nation-building experience as the Quagmire Tradition. Our cultural dispositions often urge us forward into what we think of as ‘‘bad wars’’ without heroes, battle hymns and honor. Tierney deftly explores the history of these conflicts, and exposes both the myths and realities of non-state conflict. He notes that Americans normally perceive of these messy expeditions as failures, regardless of the gains made in major nationbuilding enterprises in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the Balkans. Smaller sacrifices with big payoffs like in Somalia, Africa and Kosovo are also presumed to be failures, despite saving thousands of lives. This dichotomous distinction comes across forced at first. However, over the course of the book, its utility as a lens bears fruit. This is particularly true with the penultimate chapter on the Bush administration’s conduct of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. ‘‘The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq reveal the stark dangers,’’ Tierney notes dryly, ‘‘that results when the crusade and quagmire traditions combine.’’ To Tierney, the Bush administration ‘‘was a pure exponent of the crusade and quagmire traditions. Officials were determined to overthrow tyrants, defeat evil, and transform the world. But the administration was also allergic to the idea of nation-building. This was a very American combination of beliefs,—and one that had disastrous consequences.’’ Given Tierney’s bi-polar extremes, one would expect him to recoil from present day arguments that the U.S. military refashion itself into a more effective counterinsurgency and nation-building force. Counter-intuitively, he argues that the squaring this circle is something that the Founders’ wrestled with. To Tierney, the founding tradition ‘‘highlights the wisdom of restraint during interstate war and promotes the military’s involvement in a range of duties beyond conventional fighting.’’ Their ‘‘belief that the soldier’s role was to build, not just destroy’’ justifies that we preserve our own multipurpose military—‘‘an Army and Marine Corps with duties that extend far beyond winning tank battles against enemy states, or engaging in tank duels . . .’’ Tierney argues for a military capable of what today’s U.S. Army calls full 530
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Review Essay spectrum operations. He sees the military as a Swiss Army knife, rather than a broad axe, able to fulfill both traditions as needed. Yet, he also believes that conventional wars should be limited in duration and objective, more restrained than seeking regime change. This assessment is predicated upon Tierney’s narrow and possibly dated conclusion that the primary threats we face today arise not from great powers but from the transnational problems including terrorism, rogue states, failed states, and weapons of mass destruction. In this environment, Tierney properly recognizes that we cannot allow our military to pursue only those military campaigns that fit an idealized mode of war. But the face of modern war does include more stressing scenarios and Tierney’s dismissal of the capacity to crush enemy tyrants/rogues via overwhelming military might may go too far. While the Founders might have favored restricted campaigns against other countries, they did not have the global obligations or interests we now have. Nor are our oceanic moats the same defensive barrier they once were. True, the last decade highlights the costs of having a military force myopically oriented on its cultural preferences for conventional wars. But the past may not be prologue if reduced military spending forces the Pentagon to make hard decisions on how to apply constrained resources to sustain a smaller military with a broader mission set that also includes homeland security, cyberwarfare, and missile defense; in addition to the prospects of an arms race in East Asia that will sorely test our maritime strength. Tierney’s larger point remains valid, as a global power with extended commitments but constrained resources, America must operate with greater discrimination in both employing force and in building tomorrow’s military.
Ending Wars In contrast to Tierney, who focuses on the general application of the American Way of War, in How Wars End, Gideon Rose evaluates the sticky and ageless problem of war termination. Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, takes on the enduring difficulty of wringing out desired political outcomes from the use of arms by the United States. He assesses American behavior in the concluding or terminal stages of the war, ranging in major conflict from World War I through Iraq. Rose strives to help the reader understand the choices and ambiguities that our presidents and their advisers confronted as they attempted to achieve stated American objectives in the conflicts at hand. To students of Clausewitz, war is merely a continuation of politics, and policy must be the master of force not its servant. American history on this point is mixed. Rose observes that ‘‘[t]ime and again throughout history, political and military leaders have ignored the need for careful postwar planning or approached the task with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads.’’ Summer 2011
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Review Essay Too often, Rose contends, U.S. political and military leaders have focused narrowly on the military aspects of planning to defeat an adversary. U.S. policymakers often overlook the creation of what Liddell Hart described as war’s purpose, the creation of ‘‘a better peace.’’ What happened in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 are only the most recent cases of phenomena that Rose argues are characteristic of the American Way of War. The reader is pulled into this well-written story starting with the first time American forces deployed to Iraq. In 1991, the American military made short order of Saddam Hussein’s armored forces and his vaunted Revolutionary Guard. But General Norm Schwarzkopf had little guidance from Washington when it came time to negotiate the end of hostilities. Even with six months to think about it, and the invigorated office of a powerful Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, American leaders were not sure how to translate military victory into a ‘‘better peace.’’ U.S. armed forces trounced the Iraqi army in a rather lopsided contest of arms, but then raced home quickly for a ticker tape parade. Ten years of containing Hussein, with no fly zones and economic sanctions, was the result. Surprisingly then, in the aftermath of a shorter blitzkrieg to Baghdad in 2003, the United States did it again. Ignoring our own experience (reinforced in Panama, Somalia, and the Balkans), the strongest power astride the globe with more destructive firepower at its fingertips than any other in history, managed to enter into and fight two wars against the same opponent about a decade apart. In both cases, however, it fought without a clear vision for how to translate its military gains into concrete or even soft political outcomes. In both cases, the United States was woefully unready in terms of political guidance, unchallenged but highly inconsistent assumptions, lowball cost estimates and rosy projections. Essentially, why do Americans tend to read Clausewitz but forget his most enduring strictures about the political aspects of war? How Wars End focuses on the same major case studies that framed The Icaraus Syndrome, the two world wars and the long war with Iraq. Rose details how President Woodrow Wilson took America into World War I with high minded principles and vision for international relations. Combined with Germany’s fatigue, the fresh levies from America tipped the balance. The stage was set for an acrimonious endgame, with the Germans hopeful over preserving their territory and minimizing reparations, and the Allied powers equally vengeful in their opposing demands. Wilson, holding some leverage, sought to play off both sides, all the while seeking to ‘‘midwife a new world.’’ While Wilson sought to keep his principles and leverage American contributions to the Allied victory, he failed to gain his end state partly because he did not appreciate the domestic challenges of his democratic partners or how his ideals could be applied to Africa or the Middle East. Nor did he employ the leverage that America’s entry into the war generated. Instead he relied on his own personality, and his perception of his capacity to mold world opinion and 532
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Review Essay domestic politics to his cause. ‘‘The tragedy of Versailles,’’ Rose observes, ‘‘where the Allies brushed off American attempts to promote a generous peace—was merely the final working out of the tensions inherent in the war’s final acts.’’ Quite perceptively, Rose draws a number of critical insights from this case study; the importance of realistic war aims, the design of a practical strategy for their achievement, and close attention at the end game of a conflict, where contingency and politics reigns. Americans should have learned the need to confront squarely inherent tensions and inconsistent coalition war goals in their next conflict. Franklin Roosevelt understood Wilson’s mistakes, in Rose’s view, but was forced to make a pact with the Devil to win the war. Only later, when victory seemed more certain, did Roosevelt begin to figure out how to arrange for the implementation of his vision for the postwar order. Rose’s chapter on the Korean armistice contains an arresting critique of American slips throughout the conflict. As Rose tells it, the Truman administration established and insisted on rule sets for voluntary North Korean and Chinese prisoner repatriation as a war aim without consideration of whether the costs of a longer war were worth it. In How Wars End, it appears that very little was gained in the resulting 18 month standoff, at a cost of some 45 percent of the United Nation’s total casualties for that conflict, including 9,000 Americans dead. Unsuccessful belligerents face greater challenges in disengaging or concluding conflicts than winning parties. Vietnam shows how difficult American leaders found it to bring a war to a close, a consistency for the American Way of War throughout Rose’s period of study. During the conflict in Southeast Asia, the Kennedy (and Johnson) administration slowly dug themselves deeper into Vietnam without a feel for the South Vietnamese ally the United States was propping up, the true character of the conflict, or a valid appreciation of the North Vietnamese. Rose concludes that ‘‘Nixon managed to extricate the United States from the fighting and leave Saigon a chance of survival—no more and no less.’’ Rose’s section on the Vietnam War is an effective summarization of American policy in its most expensive lesson in ambiguous and asymmetric conflict. Rose feels that the Johnson administration had no plan to get out and no effective way of winning and that this only made it more difficult for the Nixon team to extract America from its over-investment in Southeast Asia. Rose does not spend a great deal of time discussing the delusion of the domino theory—the idea that American failure in Vietnam could trigger a wave of communist revolutions in Asia—and American geopolitical constraints, but he does an excellent job at evaluating the role of domestic politics and the perceived importance of America’s credibility in the end game. Rose next transitions to U.S. interventions against Saddam Hussein, another conflict where false lessons from a previous war substantially Summer 2011
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Review Essay influenced the next conflict. The first Gulf War reflected erroneous lessons about the separate roles of policy makers and military professionals, creating a gap in which civilians avoided micro-managing military plans, while the professionals avoided dealing with policy or politics. Thus, while President George H.W. Bush famously stated after the first Gulf War that he and the country had ‘‘whipped’’ the Vietnam Syndrome for good, the way the United States fought the war actually demonstrated that he was still captive to flawed lessons drawn from Vietnam.7 The ghosts of Vietnam were also evident in the planning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2002-2003. Rose writes that ‘‘the Iraq War ended up being one of the oldest and most straight forward stories in the book—a classic realist cautionary tale of unchecked power leading to hubris, then folly, then nemesis.’’ Rose, like Beinart, understands the intoxication of great amounts of physical power. Both authors highlight the frequency of poorly understood lessons from previous conflicts, erroneous assumptions or cognitive blinders about analogies, and how awesome might underwrites extraordinary cases of folly. More significantly, as Rose writes, a ‘‘dysfunctional national security decisionmaking process allowed the operation to proceed without serious questioning of heroically optimistic assumptions or proper contingency planning.’’ This evaluation goes on further and blames a too obedient military and an obliging Congress. Rose’s critique echoes conclusions found in Tom Rick’s now classic Fiasco, which also blamed an uncritical press.8 While Rose’s writing is fluid and his logic more lucid and consistent, his optimism that the American Way of War can be improved with the application of a few learned lessons is under done. He enjoins future policy makers to take heed of history and their solemn obligation to ‘‘Plan ahead and work backwards’’ from their vision of the desired political endstate. He advocates that the national command authority define its goals with precision and carefully examine the price ‘‘before buying.’’ Such a process would invoke a measure of discipline, and remind leaders of the need to keep ends and means in balance. This comes off as the analytical equivalent of driving through Iraq (and now Afghanistan) with the benefit of the rear view mirror. Rose’s final conclusion is that American leaders must better fulfill their moral obligation to conduct a more disciplined process of planning for the end not just the beginning of wars, instead of an afterthought. He admits that much of this argument is common sense, but that such sense is all too uncommon. The entire suite of books reviewed in this essay only underscore Rose’s sense of understatement. 7
On the impact of the Vietnam war in general see pp. 175–191 and p. 199, in Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002). 8 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco, The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), p. 4.
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Review Essay Conclusion At present, it is easy to be critical of American strategy both in tone and substance. Reading these four books, one wonders whether or not American policy has ever been successful. As President Barack Obama noted in his speech at Oslo in 2009, while we have made mistakes, the simple reality is that we also ‘‘helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.’’9 The United States, simply put, has been responsible for some extraordinary foreign policy successes. Over the long haul, however, the American Way of War repeats a number of faults all too frequently. U.S. strategy is often simply a list of unprioritized desiderata of aims or alliterative bullets on a Power Point slide. As these books reveal, the intellectual foundation for policy aims or strategic plans are often thin or inadequately challenged. Even more often, American strategies sometimes fail to take into account the actions or even existence of a thinking opponent, whose own behavior will be framed by political, social and cultural norms. Good strategy must account for a dynamic political context and the interaction with an adversary with his own goals and options. This is what makes effective strategy a difficult and all too rare event. At the end of the day, strategy serves as the critical bridge between policy and military actions. Flaws in conception or execution, the crash of the metaphorical bridge, may be found at either end. These books tend to place blame at the policy side, and blame civilians, but strategy is really a combined exercise that cannot be laid at the feet of just policy makers or military strategists—the bridge has to connect the two no matter how far the span. As preeminent strategic historian Colin Gray has commented, ‘It is the duty of the strategist to try to match purposeful military effort and its consequences with the country’s political interests expressed as policy. This can be a mission of heroic difficulty, even to the point of impossibility.’’10 Difficult maybe, but not impossible. Strategy remains the foundation for connecting political goals with diplomatic action and military means. It is not an illusion or an exercise in futility, it is essential for rationalizing the purpose, costs and means of war. As noted by Richard Betts of Columbia University, ‘‘without strategy, there is no rationale for how force will achieve purposes worth the price in blood and treasure.’’11 9
Barack Obama, Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009. Accessed at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize. 10 Colin S. Gray, Schools for Strategy: Teaching Strategy for 21st Century Conflict (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College, Nov. 2009), p. vii. 11 Richard Betts, ‘‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’’ International Security, Fall 2000, p. 5.
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Review Essay There is much discussion these days about educating strategists at America’s war colleges, and improving planning procedures at the National Security Council to rectify acknowledged shortfalls.12 Contrary to some perspectives, process is important in the development and vetting of strategy and policy.13 Good process is needed to ‘‘weigh imponderables through structured debates and pare away personal, organizational and national illusions and conceits.’’14 Surely, a broad education in both the liberal arts and strategic history is at least commendable. So, too, is a historicallygrounded sense of skepticism, a sense of humility about contingency in human affairs, and a deeper understanding of both the continuities and discontinuities of war. Structure, process, and especially education are contributory components to resolving the defects in how we think about war and apply American military power. Yet, the greatest shortfall may not be a failure of process, but as Walter McDougall has argued, a failure to understand ourselves.15 Despite their various shortcomings, this provocative suite of books is an invaluable antidote to that particular form of hubris and ignorance.
12
Patrick M. Cronin, ‘‘A Strategic Education,’’ Marine Corps Gazette, June 2010, pp. 60–64. Ionut C. Popescu, ‘‘The Disputed Importance Of Process In The Making Of American Grand Strategy,’’ Orbis, Fall 2010. 14 MacGregor Knox, ‘‘Continuity and revolution in the making of strategy,’’ in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 645. 15 Walter A. McDougall, ‘‘Can the United States Do Grand Strategy?’’ The Telegram, April 2010, vol. 3, unnumbered, but last page. 13
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Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (New York: Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 2009, 482 pp., $27.99).
Derek Leebaert, Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy from Korea to Afghanistan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010, 352 pp., $26.00).
Dominic Tierney, How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (Boston: Little, Brown, 2010, 352 pp., $27.99).
# 2011 Published by Elsevier Limited on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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Review Essay Gideon Rose, How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle (New York: Harper Collins, 2010, 400 pp., $27.00).
America’s decade long conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia have stimulated a number of scathing critiques about the Global War on Terrorism in particular, and American foreign policy adventures in general. Not long after the first bombs were launched, the American Way of War was under fire for its tactical and apolitical orientation, along with its failure to give proper appreciation to the political and socio-cultural context in which military force was being applied. One scholar labeled the military’s narrow fixation with the fighting component of warfare ‘‘A Way of Battles’’ instead of a comprehensive grasp of what war is truly all about.1 Others bemoaned the U.S. military’s fascination with technological panaceas for complex challenges.2 The larger problem however, despite the U.S. military’s adulation of Clausewitz, is that it too often fails to appreciate his fundamental conclusion that force is applied to serve policy, which directly influences both the conduct and ending of a war.3 A second wave of writing followed the initial critiques of military mindsets and culture, extending criticism beyond the military into the strategic realm. These new works focus on the American Way of War at the level of national policy and many wonder if the United States is able to soberly develop and implement any form of strategy at all.4 This essay evaluates four of these 1
Antulio Echevarria, Towards an American Way of War (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College, Jan. 2004). 2 Frederick Kagan, Finding the Target (New York: Encounter Books, 2007) and H.R. McMaster, ‘‘Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future,’’ Orbis, Fall 2008. For a useful corrective on this critique see Keith L. Shimko, The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 3 For a detailed evaluation of U.S. strategic culture, see Colin S. Gray, Irregular Enemies and the Essence of Strategy: Can the American Way of War Adapt? (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College, March 2006). For a brief evaluation of the interpretations of Clausewitz within U.S. military culture see Hew Strachan, Clausewitz’s On War, A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007). 4 Aaron Friedberg, ‘‘Strengthening Strategic Planning,’’ Washington Quarterly, Winter, 2007–08, pp. 52–59; F.G. Hoffman, ‘‘America’s Strategic Thinking Deficiency Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure,’’ Fort McNair, Washington, DC, Institute for National Strategic Studies, conference paper, 2008, and Mackubin T. Owens, ‘‘Civil-Military Relations and the U.S. Strategy Deficit,’’ FPRI E-Note, February 2010.
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Review Essay new assessments of American strategy. The books focus on the influence of strategic culture on the ideals and impulses that affect how the United States enters into, plans for, conducts, and concludes its wars.
Planning for Wars American exceptionalism, unbridled optimism, and the United States’ overwhelming material resources have produced one of the world’s greatest empires. However, as in Greek tragedies, periods of great success and inherent flaws can result in remarkable examples of temptation and disaster. The gods can be temporarily ignored but they cannot be mocked endlessly. In The Icarus Syndrome, Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic and political writer at The Daily Beast, details the recurring pattern of American foreign policy failures. Beinart adapts the classical story of how Icarus ignored the warnings of his father, Daedalus, and soared too high with his wings of feather and wax. He falls to his death in the sea, mortal after all. Ultimately, it is not the gods, but Icarus’ own ignorance and pride that takes him too high towards the sun. It is the prototypical story of what the Greeks called ‘‘hubris.’’ Beinart has sought and believes he has found a similar cycle of hubris in the conduct of American foreign policy. Written with great verve and sweep, Beinart captures the past 100 years of America’s flying into the sun and organizes it into three cycles. The first cycle focuses on the idealism and progressive spirit of Woodrow Wilson, which the author characterizes as the Hubris of Reason. Wilson’s embrace of inevitable progress and belief in the inherent goodness of both human nature and international behavior did not match well with Europe’s gloom in the aftermath of the slaughter in the trenches. Wilson’s political agenda and rationalism were outmatched by more embittered protagonists on the Continent who felt that the real world was based on power, not progressive ideals or collective security framed within a toothless League of Nations. But ‘‘for a glittering constellation of American intellectuals,’’ Beinart concludes, ‘‘it was the crusade of a lifetime, a high-water mark of American optimism that would not be reached again until our own time.’’ Beinart’s chapter on the genius of FDR is political analysis at its finest. Realizing that he needed to be Janus-like with the Wilsonian impulse in U.S. domestic politics, the President acted upon the core lesson he drew from the World War I in order to create the conditions for a post-World War II global security framework. Roosevelt believed that America could not isolate itself from an admittedly imperfect world and that, in order to secure a better peace; it would have to practice power politics. In Beinart‘s assessment, Roosevelt sought to ‘‘hide the discrepancy between ideals and reality as much as possible until America was firmly ensconced in a system of postwar security. Then, no 526
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Review Essay matter how disillusioned Americans became, they would be unable to retreat from the world.’’ FDR successfully guided America’s missionary drive and vast industrial power into a satisfactory peace, but one with its own imperfect ending. From the ashes of global war, a new challenge arose in the form of the Soviet Union, and also the seed of a new doctrine, that of containment. Here the lessons of Munich became a dogma in Beinart’s take, formed by World War II’s trauma and seared into memory. For the policy elite of its day, reason was cast aside. ‘‘The world contained evil people and evil regimes,’’ the author summarizes, ‘‘which were impervious to reason’’ they had to be confronted, by force if necessary, and held back at bay. This lingering lesson from Munich created the second cycle of tragedy, a Hubris of Toughness. Dwight Eisenhower constrained the impulse to confront the Soviets and communism at any time or place was limited in the 1950s. He stressed economic power and restraint. However, by the early 1960s, Beinart argues that ‘‘toughness connoted something more aggressive, something more like a crusade.’’ This crusade became the nemesis of the Camelot generation, producing the costly conundrum in Vietnam, where American innocence melted once again. Beinart, today’s modern Daedulus, has a third act in this tragedy—our current age, which he calls a Hubris of Dominance. As the Soviet Union dissolved and American power reigned supreme, a combination of liberal interventionists and neo-conservatives found common cause in the regular exercise of U.S. military power. Pentagon planning documents in the postCold War period echoed the need to extend American hegemony to the point that competitors would not even consider entering the geopolitical game or contending against its dominance. Beinart takes on the neo-conservatives when their hubris of dominance crashed against reality: The post-cold warriors inflated the lesson of 1989 until they believed that virtually every foe could and must be smashed. By 2003 the ethic of dominance had become the equivalent of the ethic of reason in 1917 and the ethic of toughness in 1965; a good idea pushed too far, a theory that explained too much, its own version of American hubris.
One limitation in Beinart’s critique is his failure to come to terms with his own liberal hawk illusions or square his own rhetorical excess supporting the war during the same period. Moreover, his conclusions about what we can learn for American strategy in the future are less than ordinary. He contends ‘‘we have learned that there are prices we cannot pay and burdens we cannot bear.’’ The idea that we ‘‘must ruthlessly accommodate ourselves to a world that has shown, once again, that it is not putty in our hands’’ should not be taken too far, however. Yes, America has constraints and our power base is insolvent, but that foundation can be rebuilt. Beinart finishes with a more optimistic note calling on the Administration to ‘‘redefine our national faith, to decouple American optimism from the project of American global mastery.’’ Summer 2011
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Review Essay Magic Not Myth Another candidate in the emerging ‘‘Can America Do Strategy Right’’ canon is Derek Leebaert’s Magic and Mayhem. The author covers a shorter sweep of U.S. history than Beinart, and with a more acid tone. He is also equally critical of both political parties. His book bears much the same polemical base as Andrew Bacevich, a prolific critic of the Iraq war and current American strategy.5 Leebaert, author of a superb book on special operations, as well as a history of the Cold War, among his many works, seeks to discern why the United States, a powerful and enterprising country, keeps producing serial shortfalls in major interventions and wars. The mayhem results from a massive pattern of self-deception he calls ‘‘magical thinking.’’ He argues that magical thinking is a by-product of six factors in American political life and culture: An overreliance on highly credentialed but flawed Emergency Men and too many political appointees: policy experts or wizards who step to the fore in crisis, more informed by a sense of urgency than a comprehensive grasp of the issues of the day. Star Power: an obsession Americans have with ambitious, promotion seeking, self-identified experts, who rise in the national spotlight or the apex of government for fleeting moments. The Stars are long on personality and press connections, and less credible in the complexities of the challenge at hand. An infatuation with the Mystique of Management: a marked tendency of policy mavens to impose policy templates, ideology or management on the unmanageable or the unfixable in foreign policy. One symptom of this mystique is the inordinate faith placed in high-tech silver bullets, helicopters in Vietnam or armed drones over Pakistan. The intersection of Emergency Men and mystical illusions produces false Expectations of Wondrous Results from Nominal Effort. We can engineer solutions to intractable problems with enough resources and American know how. We are prone to accept easy answers to complex problems from prominent so-called experts who proclaim them. The Abuse of History: Leebaert criticizes those who too often troll at the surface of history for past outcomes to justify new solutions, without understanding its vast ambiguities. The presumption that The World Wants To Be Like Us: This false assumption feeds upon our mirror-imaging conceit that the rest of the world wants to evolve into some versions of Main Street, U.S.A. 5
See Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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Review Essay Leebaert saves his most barbed criticisms for the national security establishment, including think-tankers, academics and appointees. He’s an equal opportunity cynic, expressing as much opprobrium for the idealism of the Kennedy clan as the realism of the Nixon and Reagan eras. To ward off the Emergency Men, he argues for cuts in the number of political appointees and seeks a strengthened foreign service with more resources for diplomacy instead of military spending at the Pentagon. To diminish the management mystique, he urges Americans to accept what cannot be changed and to be ‘‘alert to the absurdities of national security experts unable to recognize the things that lie beyond their rational control.’’ He takes on leading universities for their provision of intellectual safe harbor for fallen stars (something his own Georgetown University has been guilty of). To enhance our chances of being better prepared, he is counterintuitive when he questions the ‘‘troublingly unanchored’’ field of security studies. Had the author endorsed the rigorous study of history for helping frame hard questions, teaching humility, and for promoting a sense of contingency and tragedy in human endeavor, his critique would have been more useful.6 The CIA comes in for sharp commentary as dysfunctional and unaccountable with the ‘‘insular, turf-obsessed office culture of a savings bank in Buffalo.’’ His solution is an overly simplistic demand for a ‘‘smaller, leaner and more focused’’ community.
Fighting Wars Whereas Beinart focused principally on the role of major policy makers, the third book this article examines is concerned with wider public belief systems and the larger cultural perspective that is the foundation for the American way of war. Dominic Tierney, a professor at Swarthmore College and a FPRI Senior Fellow, contends that Americans in general are very comfortable with the decisive application of conventional military power against states to conduct regime change, but rarely display the same enthusiasm when fighting insurgents or other irregular scenarios. In How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War, Tierney plumbs the inherent tensions between our preferences and reality in the battlespace that have led us into our current ongoing conflicts. In an often breezy overview of 200 years of U.S. foreign policy, Tierney assesses how Americans think about and understand war. This assessment incorporates an erudite overview of America’s major conflicts, as well as interesting insights in social and political affairs. Tierney’s bottom line is that Americans are generally ‘‘addicted to regime change, but allergic to nationbuilding.’’ Our infatuation with short, conclusive and conventional conflicts, 6
Walter A. McDougall, ‘‘The Three Reasons We Teach History,’’ FPRI E-Note, vol. 5, no. 1, Feb. 1998.
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Review Essay whipped by wrath, fervor and morality represents what the author calls the Crusader Tradition. This tradition blindly prefers the exception, the surrender ceremony of the Japanese empire aboard the battleship USS Missouri, over the more frequent and frustrating reality of human conflict. This evaluation is completely consistent with McDougall’s classic Promised Land, Crusader State. Tierney recognizes, appropriately, that our limited conception about how wars are fought and ended is flawed, and requires modification. The author juxtaposes the interstate war tradition with its polar opposite. The opposite of short wars between states is labeled nation-building, which has a pejorative connotation in both conservative policy circles and the U.S. military culture. Our military, leery of ambiguous contexts, uncertain missions and tepid political support, prefers its warrior ethos and a narrow conception of its professional sphere to simply ‘‘fighting and winning the Nation’s wars.’’ Tierney labels our nation-building experience as the Quagmire Tradition. Our cultural dispositions often urge us forward into what we think of as ‘‘bad wars’’ without heroes, battle hymns and honor. Tierney deftly explores the history of these conflicts, and exposes both the myths and realities of non-state conflict. He notes that Americans normally perceive of these messy expeditions as failures, regardless of the gains made in major nationbuilding enterprises in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the Balkans. Smaller sacrifices with big payoffs like in Somalia, Africa and Kosovo are also presumed to be failures, despite saving thousands of lives. This dichotomous distinction comes across forced at first. However, over the course of the book, its utility as a lens bears fruit. This is particularly true with the penultimate chapter on the Bush administration’s conduct of Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. ‘‘The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq reveal the stark dangers,’’ Tierney notes dryly, ‘‘that results when the crusade and quagmire traditions combine.’’ To Tierney, the Bush administration ‘‘was a pure exponent of the crusade and quagmire traditions. Officials were determined to overthrow tyrants, defeat evil, and transform the world. But the administration was also allergic to the idea of nation-building. This was a very American combination of beliefs,—and one that had disastrous consequences.’’ Given Tierney’s bi-polar extremes, one would expect him to recoil from present day arguments that the U.S. military refashion itself into a more effective counterinsurgency and nation-building force. Counter-intuitively, he argues that the squaring this circle is something that the Founders’ wrestled with. To Tierney, the founding tradition ‘‘highlights the wisdom of restraint during interstate war and promotes the military’s involvement in a range of duties beyond conventional fighting.’’ Their ‘‘belief that the soldier’s role was to build, not just destroy’’ justifies that we preserve our own multipurpose military—‘‘an Army and Marine Corps with duties that extend far beyond winning tank battles against enemy states, or engaging in tank duels . . .’’ Tierney argues for a military capable of what today’s U.S. Army calls full 530
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Review Essay spectrum operations. He sees the military as a Swiss Army knife, rather than a broad axe, able to fulfill both traditions as needed. Yet, he also believes that conventional wars should be limited in duration and objective, more restrained than seeking regime change. This assessment is predicated upon Tierney’s narrow and possibly dated conclusion that the primary threats we face today arise not from great powers but from the transnational problems including terrorism, rogue states, failed states, and weapons of mass destruction. In this environment, Tierney properly recognizes that we cannot allow our military to pursue only those military campaigns that fit an idealized mode of war. But the face of modern war does include more stressing scenarios and Tierney’s dismissal of the capacity to crush enemy tyrants/rogues via overwhelming military might may go too far. While the Founders might have favored restricted campaigns against other countries, they did not have the global obligations or interests we now have. Nor are our oceanic moats the same defensive barrier they once were. True, the last decade highlights the costs of having a military force myopically oriented on its cultural preferences for conventional wars. But the past may not be prologue if reduced military spending forces the Pentagon to make hard decisions on how to apply constrained resources to sustain a smaller military with a broader mission set that also includes homeland security, cyberwarfare, and missile defense; in addition to the prospects of an arms race in East Asia that will sorely test our maritime strength. Tierney’s larger point remains valid, as a global power with extended commitments but constrained resources, America must operate with greater discrimination in both employing force and in building tomorrow’s military.
Ending Wars In contrast to Tierney, who focuses on the general application of the American Way of War, in How Wars End, Gideon Rose evaluates the sticky and ageless problem of war termination. Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, takes on the enduring difficulty of wringing out desired political outcomes from the use of arms by the United States. He assesses American behavior in the concluding or terminal stages of the war, ranging in major conflict from World War I through Iraq. Rose strives to help the reader understand the choices and ambiguities that our presidents and their advisers confronted as they attempted to achieve stated American objectives in the conflicts at hand. To students of Clausewitz, war is merely a continuation of politics, and policy must be the master of force not its servant. American history on this point is mixed. Rose observes that ‘‘[t]ime and again throughout history, political and military leaders have ignored the need for careful postwar planning or approached the task with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads.’’ Summer 2011
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Review Essay Too often, Rose contends, U.S. political and military leaders have focused narrowly on the military aspects of planning to defeat an adversary. U.S. policymakers often overlook the creation of what Liddell Hart described as war’s purpose, the creation of ‘‘a better peace.’’ What happened in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 are only the most recent cases of phenomena that Rose argues are characteristic of the American Way of War. The reader is pulled into this well-written story starting with the first time American forces deployed to Iraq. In 1991, the American military made short order of Saddam Hussein’s armored forces and his vaunted Revolutionary Guard. But General Norm Schwarzkopf had little guidance from Washington when it came time to negotiate the end of hostilities. Even with six months to think about it, and the invigorated office of a powerful Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, American leaders were not sure how to translate military victory into a ‘‘better peace.’’ U.S. armed forces trounced the Iraqi army in a rather lopsided contest of arms, but then raced home quickly for a ticker tape parade. Ten years of containing Hussein, with no fly zones and economic sanctions, was the result. Surprisingly then, in the aftermath of a shorter blitzkrieg to Baghdad in 2003, the United States did it again. Ignoring our own experience (reinforced in Panama, Somalia, and the Balkans), the strongest power astride the globe with more destructive firepower at its fingertips than any other in history, managed to enter into and fight two wars against the same opponent about a decade apart. In both cases, however, it fought without a clear vision for how to translate its military gains into concrete or even soft political outcomes. In both cases, the United States was woefully unready in terms of political guidance, unchallenged but highly inconsistent assumptions, lowball cost estimates and rosy projections. Essentially, why do Americans tend to read Clausewitz but forget his most enduring strictures about the political aspects of war? How Wars End focuses on the same major case studies that framed The Icaraus Syndrome, the two world wars and the long war with Iraq. Rose details how President Woodrow Wilson took America into World War I with high minded principles and vision for international relations. Combined with Germany’s fatigue, the fresh levies from America tipped the balance. The stage was set for an acrimonious endgame, with the Germans hopeful over preserving their territory and minimizing reparations, and the Allied powers equally vengeful in their opposing demands. Wilson, holding some leverage, sought to play off both sides, all the while seeking to ‘‘midwife a new world.’’ While Wilson sought to keep his principles and leverage American contributions to the Allied victory, he failed to gain his end state partly because he did not appreciate the domestic challenges of his democratic partners or how his ideals could be applied to Africa or the Middle East. Nor did he employ the leverage that America’s entry into the war generated. Instead he relied on his own personality, and his perception of his capacity to mold world opinion and 532
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Review Essay domestic politics to his cause. ‘‘The tragedy of Versailles,’’ Rose observes, ‘‘where the Allies brushed off American attempts to promote a generous peace—was merely the final working out of the tensions inherent in the war’s final acts.’’ Quite perceptively, Rose draws a number of critical insights from this case study; the importance of realistic war aims, the design of a practical strategy for their achievement, and close attention at the end game of a conflict, where contingency and politics reigns. Americans should have learned the need to confront squarely inherent tensions and inconsistent coalition war goals in their next conflict. Franklin Roosevelt understood Wilson’s mistakes, in Rose’s view, but was forced to make a pact with the Devil to win the war. Only later, when victory seemed more certain, did Roosevelt begin to figure out how to arrange for the implementation of his vision for the postwar order. Rose’s chapter on the Korean armistice contains an arresting critique of American slips throughout the conflict. As Rose tells it, the Truman administration established and insisted on rule sets for voluntary North Korean and Chinese prisoner repatriation as a war aim without consideration of whether the costs of a longer war were worth it. In How Wars End, it appears that very little was gained in the resulting 18 month standoff, at a cost of some 45 percent of the United Nation’s total casualties for that conflict, including 9,000 Americans dead. Unsuccessful belligerents face greater challenges in disengaging or concluding conflicts than winning parties. Vietnam shows how difficult American leaders found it to bring a war to a close, a consistency for the American Way of War throughout Rose’s period of study. During the conflict in Southeast Asia, the Kennedy (and Johnson) administration slowly dug themselves deeper into Vietnam without a feel for the South Vietnamese ally the United States was propping up, the true character of the conflict, or a valid appreciation of the North Vietnamese. Rose concludes that ‘‘Nixon managed to extricate the United States from the fighting and leave Saigon a chance of survival—no more and no less.’’ Rose’s section on the Vietnam War is an effective summarization of American policy in its most expensive lesson in ambiguous and asymmetric conflict. Rose feels that the Johnson administration had no plan to get out and no effective way of winning and that this only made it more difficult for the Nixon team to extract America from its over-investment in Southeast Asia. Rose does not spend a great deal of time discussing the delusion of the domino theory—the idea that American failure in Vietnam could trigger a wave of communist revolutions in Asia—and American geopolitical constraints, but he does an excellent job at evaluating the role of domestic politics and the perceived importance of America’s credibility in the end game. Rose next transitions to U.S. interventions against Saddam Hussein, another conflict where false lessons from a previous war substantially Summer 2011
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Review Essay influenced the next conflict. The first Gulf War reflected erroneous lessons about the separate roles of policy makers and military professionals, creating a gap in which civilians avoided micro-managing military plans, while the professionals avoided dealing with policy or politics. Thus, while President George H.W. Bush famously stated after the first Gulf War that he and the country had ‘‘whipped’’ the Vietnam Syndrome for good, the way the United States fought the war actually demonstrated that he was still captive to flawed lessons drawn from Vietnam.7 The ghosts of Vietnam were also evident in the planning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2002-2003. Rose writes that ‘‘the Iraq War ended up being one of the oldest and most straight forward stories in the book—a classic realist cautionary tale of unchecked power leading to hubris, then folly, then nemesis.’’ Rose, like Beinart, understands the intoxication of great amounts of physical power. Both authors highlight the frequency of poorly understood lessons from previous conflicts, erroneous assumptions or cognitive blinders about analogies, and how awesome might underwrites extraordinary cases of folly. More significantly, as Rose writes, a ‘‘dysfunctional national security decisionmaking process allowed the operation to proceed without serious questioning of heroically optimistic assumptions or proper contingency planning.’’ This evaluation goes on further and blames a too obedient military and an obliging Congress. Rose’s critique echoes conclusions found in Tom Rick’s now classic Fiasco, which also blamed an uncritical press.8 While Rose’s writing is fluid and his logic more lucid and consistent, his optimism that the American Way of War can be improved with the application of a few learned lessons is under done. He enjoins future policy makers to take heed of history and their solemn obligation to ‘‘Plan ahead and work backwards’’ from their vision of the desired political endstate. He advocates that the national command authority define its goals with precision and carefully examine the price ‘‘before buying.’’ Such a process would invoke a measure of discipline, and remind leaders of the need to keep ends and means in balance. This comes off as the analytical equivalent of driving through Iraq (and now Afghanistan) with the benefit of the rear view mirror. Rose’s final conclusion is that American leaders must better fulfill their moral obligation to conduct a more disciplined process of planning for the end not just the beginning of wars, instead of an afterthought. He admits that much of this argument is common sense, but that such sense is all too uncommon. The entire suite of books reviewed in this essay only underscore Rose’s sense of understatement. 7
On the impact of the Vietnam war in general see pp. 175–191 and p. 199, in Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002). 8 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco, The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), p. 4.
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Review Essay Conclusion At present, it is easy to be critical of American strategy both in tone and substance. Reading these four books, one wonders whether or not American policy has ever been successful. As President Barack Obama noted in his speech at Oslo in 2009, while we have made mistakes, the simple reality is that we also ‘‘helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.’’9 The United States, simply put, has been responsible for some extraordinary foreign policy successes. Over the long haul, however, the American Way of War repeats a number of faults all too frequently. U.S. strategy is often simply a list of unprioritized desiderata of aims or alliterative bullets on a Power Point slide. As these books reveal, the intellectual foundation for policy aims or strategic plans are often thin or inadequately challenged. Even more often, American strategies sometimes fail to take into account the actions or even existence of a thinking opponent, whose own behavior will be framed by political, social and cultural norms. Good strategy must account for a dynamic political context and the interaction with an adversary with his own goals and options. This is what makes effective strategy a difficult and all too rare event. At the end of the day, strategy serves as the critical bridge between policy and military actions. Flaws in conception or execution, the crash of the metaphorical bridge, may be found at either end. These books tend to place blame at the policy side, and blame civilians, but strategy is really a combined exercise that cannot be laid at the feet of just policy makers or military strategists—the bridge has to connect the two no matter how far the span. As preeminent strategic historian Colin Gray has commented, ‘It is the duty of the strategist to try to match purposeful military effort and its consequences with the country’s political interests expressed as policy. This can be a mission of heroic difficulty, even to the point of impossibility.’’10 Difficult maybe, but not impossible. Strategy remains the foundation for connecting political goals with diplomatic action and military means. It is not an illusion or an exercise in futility, it is essential for rationalizing the purpose, costs and means of war. As noted by Richard Betts of Columbia University, ‘‘without strategy, there is no rationale for how force will achieve purposes worth the price in blood and treasure.’’11 9
Barack Obama, Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009. Accessed at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/remarks-president-acceptance-nobel-peace-prize. 10 Colin S. Gray, Schools for Strategy: Teaching Strategy for 21st Century Conflict (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, Army War College, Nov. 2009), p. vii. 11 Richard Betts, ‘‘Is Strategy an Illusion?’’ International Security, Fall 2000, p. 5.
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Review Essay There is much discussion these days about educating strategists at America’s war colleges, and improving planning procedures at the National Security Council to rectify acknowledged shortfalls.12 Contrary to some perspectives, process is important in the development and vetting of strategy and policy.13 Good process is needed to ‘‘weigh imponderables through structured debates and pare away personal, organizational and national illusions and conceits.’’14 Surely, a broad education in both the liberal arts and strategic history is at least commendable. So, too, is a historicallygrounded sense of skepticism, a sense of humility about contingency in human affairs, and a deeper understanding of both the continuities and discontinuities of war. Structure, process, and especially education are contributory components to resolving the defects in how we think about war and apply American military power. Yet, the greatest shortfall may not be a failure of process, but as Walter McDougall has argued, a failure to understand ourselves.15 Despite their various shortcomings, this provocative suite of books is an invaluable antidote to that particular form of hubris and ignorance.
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Patrick M. Cronin, ‘‘A Strategic Education,’’ Marine Corps Gazette, June 2010, pp. 60–64. Ionut C. Popescu, ‘‘The Disputed Importance Of Process In The Making Of American Grand Strategy,’’ Orbis, Fall 2010. 14 MacGregor Knox, ‘‘Continuity and revolution in the making of strategy,’’ in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein, eds., The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 645. 15 Walter A. McDougall, ‘‘Can the United States Do Grand Strategy?’’ The Telegram, April 2010, vol. 3, unnumbered, but last page. 13
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