The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (14 page)

But, as Boot demonstrates, their seeming advantages proved transitory. In the Second World War, the American bomber plant at Willow Run, Michigan—a mammoth 3.5-million-square-foot structure that, by August 1944, was producing one B-24 every hour—ultimately counted much more heavily toward the outcome of the conflict than the innovation and craftsmanship that had given the Nazis V-2 missiles and a few hundred advanced ME-262 jet fighters. The initial battlefield successes of the Axis powers were made possible by surprise and a head start in rearming; but this was eventually reversed by the wartime defense bureaucracies of the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States, all three of which, in their various ways, proved better at mastering the principles of interchangeable parts, the assembly line, and the fielding of millions of conscripts. The key again was not just whether a nation could produce sophisticated weapons, but whether it could do so in large numbers that were readily accessible and easily used by soldiers in the field—and in a manner that might ensure tactical victory in accordance with strategic goals.

Concluding his survey with the present revolution in information systems, Boot sketches the ironies inherent in our own recent experience. Today’s battlefield, in the Middle East as elsewhere, tends to favor decentralized and unconventional forces. In a globalized and interconnected world, terrorists underwritten by the petrodollars of despots can buy weaponry off the shelf and have it FedExed to Beirut or Damascus, giving them near parity in this respect with Western militaries that, for a variety of practical and ethical reasons, appear restrained from bringing their full array of advantages to the conflict.

For our part, as ever more American dollars have been invested in ever fewer high-end military “platforms”—that is, advanced computerized ships and planes—we have seen our attenuated forces in the field becoming increasingly vulnerable and risk-averse. Who would want to send even a single B-2 bomber over terrorist enclaves when a cheap shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile might take out a near-billion-dollar investment?

Still, Boot warns against too single-minded a focus on asymmetrical warfare and its vulnerabilities. When it comes to blasting away at terrorists a few feet from American troops in the Hindu Kush, the cannons of an old A-10 Warthog will indeed do a better job than the new F-22 Raptor, which is by far the most expensive and sophisticated jet in the world. But should the Chinese decide to storm Taiwan—hardly a fanciful possibility—it would be better to have that F-22 in the skies to ensure our strategic air superiority.

What this flexibility suggests is the need to avoid complacency—of any kind. In this fine book, Boot sees the five-hundred-year history he reviews as a warning. The rise and fall of past militaries remind us that the United States is not foreordained to maintain its present edge. Therefore, we must recognize and replenish the font of our power by continuing to incorporate unconventional ideas and approaches into our military operations—remaining aware all the while that the category of the newly “unconventional” can still include some old-fashioned and allegedly outmoded ideas.

Eternal Challenge and Response

T
HERE HAVE ALWAYS
been unexpected and abrupt changes in the way men fight—even in preindustrial times. Military practice is most often turned upside down during wars of great savagery, in which states in breakneck fashion invest their human and material capital in trying to stave off annihilation. During most of the early fifth century
B.C.
, the Hellenic city-states preferred to settle their border disputes by means of conventional collisions between phalanxes of hoplites.

But during the almost-three-decades-long cauldron of the Peloponnesian War (431–404), such traditional warfare fell by the wayside. Both conservative, landlocked Sparta and imperial, maritime Athens turned to other avenues and methods—triremes rowed by mercenary and slave oarsmen, innovative techniques in siege-craft, the use of light cavalry, even terrorism. These set off a cycle of challenge and response like nothing seen before in Greek history.

By the time of Athens’s defeat in 404
B.C.
, this early RMA had changed Western warfare seemingly for good. Just as states could no longer envision armed conflict as a series of pitched battles among ranks of hoplites, so the old social classifications of the battlefield—with the wealthy on ponies, small property-owners in the phalanx, and the landless poor as skirmishers and rowers—no longer prescribed how and where men would fight. Moral philosophers and conservative generals decried these changes. These reactionaries complained that the rabble, war machines, and money were now the decisive factors in war—but to no avail.

This seeming break with the past, however, was hardly the end of the matter. In ancient Greece, exactly as today, sudden innovation did not completely overturn the old order. And those who believed otherwise would often come to regret it. Despite the obsolescence of hoplite phalanxes, the general idea of spearmen in close order—eventually modified to become mercenary soldiers with pikes—persisted for centuries after the Peloponnesian War. Generals from Epaminondas to Alexander the Great learned that phalanxes were still integral to armies—provided they were given ample support by siege-craft, artillery, and horsemen—and were especially useful for shattering enemy infantry and cavalry.

In much the same way—and despite the introduction of satellites, computers, and radically new metals and munitions—tanks not so different in appearance from those of the 1920s remain invaluable in modern warfare. They still fulfill the age-old need for a powerful mobile artillery providing protection for foot soldiers. Even horses have not been entirely displaced—as we saw in the famous photos of mounted Special Forces soldiers typing GPS coordinates into their laptops in the wilds of Afghanistan. It is instructive that today’s sophisticated ceramic body armor makes modern soldiers look like nothing so much as medieval knights or indeed Greek hoplites, reminding us that the tension between offense and defense is eternal.

Certain laws of war—the need for unity of command, for integrating tactics with strategy, for devising strategy with political objectives in mind—have been immune to technological revolution. This is no surprise: War remains an irreducibly human phenomenon, and human nature itself has not changed over the ages. Thus, although the 1991 Gulf War was a memorably high-tech conflict, and although American M-1 Abrams tanks almost always destroyed their Iraqi counterparts in a first computer-guided shot, this by itself did not deliver lasting strategic advantage. The reason was that American planners were unsure of their ultimate goal: Was it to defeat the Iraqi army in Kuwait while maintaining the unity of the wartime coalition, or to bring down the regime in Baghdad that was fielding that army? In contrast, an outclassed Saddam Hussein understood that the survival of his regime, and his continued control of Iraq’s oil wealth, might mean a victory of sorts after the end of the Kuwaiti war, in the sense that unless there was a constant American military presence to monitor his behavior (in his view eventually a dubious proposition), he would be free to resume regional aggression and the subsidy of terrorism.

Military preeminence is often transitory. By the end of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta had fashioned the best hoplite army in the world; yet between 371 and 369
B.C.
, the Thebans proved it tactically and strategically obsolete. Thirty years later, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander showed that even the once-innovative Thebans were no match for pike-bearing, mercenary phalangites supported by heavy cavalry with
sarissas
. Yet by the second century
B.C.
, Hellenistic pikemen had ossified, and their dinosaur-like phalanxes fell easy prey to far more mobile and articulated Roman legions. Victors that rest on their laurels, whether today’s or yesterday’s, often have to play catch-up when the fighting starts, and can stumble badly.

We should note that almost every technological transformation of consequence has taken place under Western auspices—if not Western in the strict geographical sense, then Western in the notion of a cultural landscape shaped by free thought and the chance for profit. Even non-Western innovations, like stirrups and gunpowder, have been quickly modified and improved by Western militaries. Jet fighters, GPS-guided bombs, and laser-guided munitions are all products of Western expertise. Even the jihadists’ most innovative and lethal weapons—improvised explosive devices and suicide belts—are cobbled together from Western-designed explosives and electronics.

But, as we have seen, this too is no cause for complacency. Precisely because such novel weaponry is a Western domain, there is always the danger that Westerners will underestimate the capacities of others. Crazy Horse at Little Big Horn, the Zulus at Isandlwana, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Sunni Triangle—all have been able to import and use sophisticated weapons that they can neither make nor easily repair to kill Westerners with ease.

Where does that leave us? With reason for caution and circumspection, but also with clear advantages that are sometimes scanted by analysts fixated on our errors and missteps. True, our enemies may be able to exploit some of our advances, but unless they wish to alter their very culture, they will never match our intellectual dynamism. No society in the present age is so self-critical, so ready to embrace foreign ideas, or so transparent and merit-based as the United States. Far more lethal to the U.S. military than a new form of IED would be censorship of ideas back home in the United States, or religious restrictions on research, or politically guided rules of investigation and publication, or government-run monopolies on labor, management, and production. Innovative military technology, then, is not so much a catalyst of change as much as a symptom of a dynamic military that understands that new weapons still operate within the eternal laws of conflict.

Indeed, future historians may well attribute our recent successes—toppling the two worst regimes in the Middle East, presiding over the birth of consensual governments in their places, and losing fewer soldiers in the effort than during many individual campaigns of the Second World War or Korea—to an ever-innovative American military that learned quickly from mistakes of the kind described in
Finding the Target
and
War Made New
. The sometimes dour work of Frederick W. Kagan and Max Boot is itself emblematic of one of our society’s greatest strengths: the capacity to adjust to changing events with the help of thinkers who rely on a more deeply informed sense of historical reality than is conveyed in the panicked conclusions of the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

Yet even recognizing our shortcomings, and even our strengths, is not enough. Military revolutions are missed not only because of military sloth, delusional leadership, or a reactionary romance with the past; they are also missed because of a failure at the elite levels of society either to perceive real threats posed by real external enemies or to countenance the sacrifices necessary to meet those threats. Notable examples include ancient Athens and Rome, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russia, and France in the 1930s, which in varying degrees felt somehow that their long-entrenched habits, economic exceptionalism, or particular worldview ensured that they were immune from how war has operated over the centuries. In that sense, the principal challenge today is not only to hone our military in the face of constantly evolving challenges, but also to convince an affluent, leisured, and often cynical American public that that we should even try to do so.

CHAPTER 10

The American Way of War—Past, Present, and Future

Why does America fight the way it does?
*

Culture!

W
AR REFLECTS CULTURE.
Weaponry, tactics, notions of discipline, command, logistics—all such elements of battle arise not just from the constraints of terrain, climate, and geography, but also from the nature of a society’s economy, politics, and sociology. This is as true for the American military today as it was in ancient and medieval times, and as valid for non-Western as for Western civilizations.

For example, the files of the ancient Greek phalanx and the preference of its heavy-armored hoplites for quick, decisive shock battles over farmland grew out of a society of freeholding agrarian hoplites who purchased their own armor, worked farms of roughly equal size, and voted in land-owning assemblies on the condition of their own military service. Compare this with the rapid mounted onslaughts of nomadic horse-peoples of the steppes, or the huge imperial, multiethnic, and bureaucratic armies of autocratic and palatial Egypt and Persia. The infantry-minded Greeks of the city-state, it is true, lacked the large plains of Thessaly to the north that nurtured a horse-rearing culture of aristocratic grandees, but they also preferred panoplies of some fifty pounds that otherwise made no sense in a hot, dry Mediterranean climate. In the scorching heat of the Attic summer, Athenians in loin clothes might have been seen as more logical warriors.

Geography and climate influence the brand of war, but in themselves are not determinant. The small inland valleys of Persian Anatolia, for example, were not all that much different from those found in Greece; but the culture of farmers who worked the soil there most certainly was. The armies of Mycenaean Greece were far different from what followed in the age of the Greek city-state, even though the weather, the landscape, and the agriculture of Greece were roughly constant from 3000
B.C.
to 338
B.C.
In other words, culture changed the way these very different Greek-speaking peoples of these two diverse eras fought—not climate or geography, which remained largely constant.

Western warfare in general over two and a half millennia has shown a dynamism in its exercise of military power abroad that is not explained by the rather small population and territory of Europe, much less its natural resources. Why is this so?

To generalize broadly: Reliance on group discipline, confidence in a greater degree of personal freedom and individualism, a faith in rationalism more likely to be divorced from cultural or religious stricture, open markets, civic militarism arising out of consensual government, and civic audit of military operations—sometimes in piecemeal—filtered down to the battlefield, embodying both the contradictions and unique achievements of Western civilization. Such advantages—sometimes nearly lost or vastly altered over 2,500 years—allowed Western armies, from Alexander the Great and the Crusaders to colonialists and present-day European and American militaries, to trump the usual criteria that explained tactical victory or defeat: weather, geography, numbers, location, individual genius and bravery, and simple chance. Once Xenophon’s Ten Thousand were trapped in Asia, the army became a veritable itinerant polis, as committees and assemblies delegated responsibilities and elected new leaders, and individuals sought to craft novel strategies and adopt weaponry to radically different challenges. In contrast, after Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis, he sailed back home, abandoning the fight, and entrusting his huge army to Mardonius, who was later defeated and killed at Plataea, and the survivors left to retreat home under Artabazus.

A key component to the rise of Western military influence has been the role of military technology. Again, Westerners did not invent triremes, stirrups, or gunpowder. But their greater propensity to encourage unfettered research and profit through free exchange and markets ensured that Europeans soon improved on such inventions in a way impossible elsewhere. European navies and armies went to Tenochtitlán, Zululand, and China rather than vice versa because of singular oceangoing ships, superior guns, and better supply—not out of some singular savagery or monopoly on imperial grandeur. It is not that the West did not suffer occasional battle defeats, or learn from other illustrious military traditions, or steal military inventions from abroad. But rather Westerners were able to fashion a flexible military culture that could overcome setbacks and spread influence well beyond the shores of an often divided and warring Europe.

While American military practice is inexplicable apart from this larger Western tradition, the American character and the peculiar history of the United States make its military force exceptional in ways that transcend the nation’s large territory, plentiful resources, and population. This military power by the mid-twentieth century became unmatched by contemporary Europe—a fact that suggests, as many have written, that America and Europe may be heading in different cultural directions. This exceptionalism has much to do with both America’s origins and recent past—both our democratic culture and frontier history—but also our unique role in the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, when leaders were determined after two global conflagrations to intervene permanently in world affairs and craft some sort of stable economic and political system contingent on U.S. security guarantees.

In particular, the United States has taken preexisting Western notions of political and economic freedom, the culture of individualism, and the commitment to constant self-critique and change, and advanced these practices nearly to their theoretical limits—certainly in a manner unlike what is found in contemporary Britain, France, or Germany. While there is much to say about the divide between America’s military and civilian cultures, the shared dynamism of both is far more significant for understanding the future of American military power.

Why We Fight as We Do

W
HAT, THEN, IS
the American way of war? Without a national religion or a common race or ethnic culture, Americans are united first by shared ideas and commitments, such as the ideals of equal opportunity and individual merit, as well as the history and legends that give these ideas concrete meaning. Our military functions more as a reflection of our national meritocracy, where wealth and breeding, or tribal affiliations and favoritism, do not necessarily guarantee rank, privilege, and promotion.

In theory, this allowed that a gifted but shabby-looking general like Ulysses S. Grant—a failure in both earlier civilian and military life—could more successfully lead the Army of the Potomac than the aristocratic ex-railroad president George McClellan. We admire the uncouth George Patton for his often crude genius, despite, not because of, his aristocratic roots—in the same manner that the plebian background of Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower often seemed to work to their advantage by suggesting both were self-made men who had advanced without wealth or social connections, and they therefore easily resonated with the American public and press. This reliance on presumed merit rather than class has sometimes given American armies singular commanders who were swashbuckling and unseemly—an unlettered Nathan Bedford Forrest, a shabbily dressed William Tecumseh Sherman, a cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay—and who might otherwise have found little opportunity in more aristocratic or tribal militaries.

Second, the frontier experience on such a vast continent made Americans by needs conquer time and space, explaining why European inventions in transportation and communication came into their own in America on a scale undreamed of elsewhere—railroads, steam engines, the telegraph and telephone, and electric power. America’s role as a “receptacle of the unwanted”—an arena where audacious individuals, fleeing from poverty or discrimination, were in a hurry to start over and succeed rapidly—only added to the restless fascination with machines that were so disruptive of the traditions and tranquility of the past. Mechanization was equated with a culture of youth, restless and eager to go places, the more distant and more quickly, the better.

To meet General John Pershing’s promise of getting “a million men” to France before the end of the war—in truth, forty-eight divisions of 28,000 men made it to Europe by the 1918 armistice, or over 1,200,000 combat troops—Americans overnight reorganized their rail systems, built and commandeered hundreds of ships (building more tonnage in April 1918 than America had in all at 1914), and managed to implement a draft that sent hundreds of thousands from farms in the heartland to France without losing a single recruit to German submarines or surface raiders on the routes over. The Army of the Potomac and the Union navy started off with flintlocks and wooden sailing ships and fought a mere four years later with dreadful new weapons, such as repeating rifles (lever-action Spencers spitting seven shots in twelve seconds), Gatling guns (two hundred shots per minute), and ironclad warships with eleven-inch guns. There was rarely an American version of a Spartan king, a Chinese mandarin, or an aristocratic knight to deplore the unchivalrousness and egalitarianism of such new tools of mass killing.

A sort of breakneck quality to American life arose where immigrants sought to find immediate status and economic security—often through an embrace of modernism and a rejection of tradition and custom. In reaction, American militaries in the technological sense have always reflected just that emphasis on impatient mobility and mass production—made easier because our youths are intimately acquainted with equipment of all sorts, from Model Ts to video games. By the mid-twentieth century, American sixteen-year-olds drove, owned, fixed, and customized cars. We entrust them at an early age with expensive and sometimes dangerous machines, whether pickup trucks, tractors, or forklifts, perhaps explaining why twenty-year-olds drive seventy-ton Abrams tanks and wave fifty-million-dollar jets onto the decks of five-billion-dollar carriers.

Those who “rolled with Patton” across France were at home with tank, truck, and jeep engines; they were eager and able to fix broken equipment that was analogous to what they had grown up with in both farm and town. Unlike that of modern Arab armies, Patton’s problem was not an inability to keep his motorized fleet in good repair, but rather the shortage of gasoline and the ensuing boredom—and danger—when thousands of restless G.I.s ground to a halt in September 1944. It was no accident that American divisions in the Second World War were the most mechanized of all those in the conflict—with almost four thousand vehicles in each division, allowing sixteen thousand men to move at almost fifty miles per day across poor roads. The great American contribution to the Red Army was not just food stocks and strategic materials but nearly four hundred thousand heavy transport trucks, which eventually allowed Stalin a mobility and rapidity lacking among his Nazi enemies on the eastern front.

In contrast, the supposedly modern Wehrmacht largely was fed and fueled by horse-drawn transport. In 1991 and 2003, Americans moved hundreds of thousands of troops to new Persian Gulf quarters in the same way they built housing tracts here at home—rapidly, en masse, and with an eye to the next project even before the present job was done.

Unlike Hitler with his finely crafted and calibrated Panther and Tiger tanks, which were qualitatively superior in terms of firepower and protection but harder to maintain and not so easily mass produced, Americans sought to turn out almost limitless supplies of easily accessible weaponry—Sherman tanks, B-24 bombers, and M1 assault rifles—to achieve quantitative advantage. True, a ponderous fifty-six-ton German Tiger tank could blow apart dozens of Shermans. But there was no guarantee that it would be running when hordes of the latter swarmed German rifle brigades. In general the mass-produced, standardized Sherman tank required far fewer hours of maintenance per hours driven—and was far more easily serviced by those who manned it than any of its better armored, better armed, and more lethal German counterparts.

By late 1942 and early 1943, U.S. industry was already turning out more warplanes annually than Germany, Japan, and Britain combined, despite America’s virtual disarmament until the late 1930s. While German technical and engineering genius at war’s end produced the world’s first guided missile (the V-2), the first jet fighter (the Me-262), and the first surface-to-air missile (the Waterfall), it was the American propensity for mass production, coupled with constant debate about the mission and nature of such weapons, that made their successors appear in such great numbers in the Cold War arsenal of the United States.

Despite the wizardry involved in crafting guided missiles and jet fighters, we should remember that neither weapon in the Second World War did a fraction of the damage done by thousands of more-pedestrian and more-practical B-17 bombers and P-51 fighters, which were mass-produced, reliable, easily piloted, and constantly improved. Hitler’s madcap directives for V-2 production—without American-style audit and consensus—cost as much money as the Manhattan Project, but one atomic bomb had more concentrated firepower than all the German V-2s put together.

Alternatively, had Hitler invested in something akin to the B-17 or B-29 (which also cost more than the Manhattan Project), rather than in the more expensive research and development involved in guided missiles, he might well have been able to bring untold damage to Great Britain even in the latter months of the war. American pragmatism—in the tradition of a Henry Ford or Henry J. Kaiser—of delivering x-amount of explosive ordnance to the target at y-cost in men and materiel ultimately was at the foundation of most debates over military investment.

In addition, unlike the Soviet experience or even modern European practice, Americans tend to distrust central government and state-run industries. A nation of citizens with the constitutional right to bear firearms has kept most of the American arms industry outside state arsenals, or at least in the hands of private subcontractors with government licenses. Such companies usually operate more on free market principles, for the most part guaranteeing a greater propensity to produce cheaper and more plentiful weaponry. It is hard to think of other militaries that have produced better or more numerous carriers, jet fighters, or tanks since 1945. For nearly thirty years, the Soviets achieved theoretical military superiority in central Europe, but the Warsaw Pact’s advantages in the numbers of tanks and artillery were explained by its favorable location and Russia’s spending 30 to 40 percent of its GNP on defense versus the 6 percent allotted by the United States. In the end, as we learned, this “superiority” was unsustainable.