The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (16 page)

Consequently, emphasis on defense—from body armor to antiballistic missile systems—will become an ever-higher priority, as ever more affluent Americans, like Greek hoplites or medieval lords of old, grow increasingly sensitive to the casualties of war. The current weight of fifty to eighty pounds of gear that so burdens individual soldiers is not so much to provide them with additional offensive power as to achieve better communications, body protection, and survivability. This effort to ensure the absolute minimum of casualties may ultimately lead to the removal of the human agent whenever possible. After all, there is no strategic reason why the robots we now see in the sky will not soon descend to the battlefield itself—the cheaper and more numerous, the better.

At the same time, America’s latent suspicion of the costs of military service abroad will reassert itself in the century to come. With the demise of the Soviet Union and disappointments with our allies in the present conflicts, we may see a gradual tendency to return to pre–Cold War characteristics of muscular independence, including the development of new technologies that explicitly serve this purpose. The United States is often criticized as interventionist, but in fact America’s traditional propensity has been more isolationist—willing to act forcefully in the world when absolutely necessary, but preferring to be unencumbered. That urge is long-standing and bipartisan, and perhaps will be accelerated under more liberal administrations: When conservatives question the expense of the Atlantic Alliance, they are sometimes portrayed as gratuitously punitive of Europe. When liberals wish to pull back in the same manner, it is more palatably seen as an overdo effort to bolster multilateralism and transnational institutions by allowing Europe some breathing space, and encouragement to develop their own forces as partners rather than subordinates.

Either way, over time, Americans may look for ways—strategic and technological—to keep the global peace without involving ourselves in the political and cultural quagmires abroad that we usually associate with traditional alliances and bases. Sadr City and Mogadishu are precisely landscapes that the U.S. military wishes to avoid, but fears will most likely be our next theaters of confrontation. As a result, the Pentagon is desperately looking for technologies and radical changes in tactics that might ensure that any future interventions into such classic traps are far lass lethal and humiliating.

American planners will probably seek not merely alternate bases in Eastern Europe but also a greater reliance on lightly manned military depots, multifaceted sea- and land-based antiballistic missile systems, renewed commitment to carrier forces, and novel technologies that might provide floating logistical caches, mobile airfields, rapid ship transport, and increased airlift capacity. America’s tendency toward isolationism will never really disappear, even as our global responsibilities increase. We will seek new technologies that will allow Americans to serve abroad in ways that require the least amount of political concessions and obligations to foreign hosts while preserving an ever wider range of military options.

For example, if we believe that a nuclear North Korea means to blackmail the United States by holding Hawaii hostage or threatening to shell our South Korean allies or our troops in the demilitarized zone, the way of facing such a crisis will not just be to rally a tentative Seoul or a worried Tokyo around a conventional coalition of ground troops. Instead, we might prefer to encircle the peninsula quickly and unilaterally with stealthy submarine-based antiballistic missile systems that could hit Pyongyang’s nukes in their nascent trajectory, keep our forces at sea ready for blockades and embargos, but uncommitted, and then let the concerned powers ask us for advice and support, rather than the reverse. A small air base, with fortified and subterranean hangars in little-populated areas far to the south in Korea, might be more advantageous to our national interest than exposing conventional forces right on the demilitarized zone, where they would be held hostage, in a sense, by enemy Koreans to the north and serve as catalysts for political disparagement from allies in the south.

“The Human Thing”

I
T IS, OF
course, always a fool’s errand to predict too far into the future. The most dangerous tendency of military planners is the arrogant belief that all of war’s age-old rules and characteristics are rendered obsolete under the mind-boggling technological advances or social revolutions of the present. Tactics alter, and the respective roles of defense and offense each enter long periods of superiority vis-à-vis each other. The acceptance of casualties is predicated on domestic levels of affluence and leisure, fueled by the degree of instantaneous communications with the front.

But ultimately the rules of war and culture stay the same—even as their forms change. Efficient modern pumps throw out far more water than their predecessors, but the essence of water remains unchanged. If robotics removes more and more humans from the battlefield, it is still likely that the people who pilot, direct, and make such machines will become targets—however far away they are ensconced from the frontline killing. The body-armor-piercing bullet is already near production, as is the body-armor-piercing bulletproof vest. What remains the same is the age-old calculation of how to use and protect precious infantry for tasks that even the most sophisticated technology cannot quite absorb. As long as war involves what Thucydides called “the human thing,” even in our brave new world of war to come, there will be a need for real live soldiers walking amid the robots to win hearts and minds, or to survey and assess the carnage of the battlefield, or to dispense wisdom among the civilian population.

If, in our growing moral repugnance for war, we develop more discriminating weapons that stun rather than kill our adversaries, we may be confronted with the dilemma of letting those with evil pasts and bloody hands escape, only to inflict more deadly misery on the innocent. At least some wars are matters of trying to stop killers from killing the innocent—killers who could not be stopped by anything short of lethal force. General Curtis LeMay may have been uncouth, but he was not necessarily wrong when he suggested that ultimately wars are won when large numbers of enemy combatants are killed—inasmuch as each represents a potential to do great harm to one’s own cause.

The paradoxes of contemporary war will not stop with LeMay’s observation. The American controversy over terrorists incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, reveals the dilemma, indeed the contradiction, that a postmodern, lawful society is confronted with when it tries to detain lawless jihadists and treat warriors in detention as civilian criminal suspects.

At present, much of the Western legal world deems the American detention at Guantánamo of terrorists caught on the battlefield, and the interrogation techniques used to extract information from them, as inhuman and out-of-bounds. But apparently they do not object as strenuously to the simultaneous judge-jury-and-executioner practices of incinerating their suspected counterparts, along with family and friends, in Waziristan by Predator drone missiles, or blowing apart the heads of Somali pirate hostage-takers by sniper fire as they negotiate over ransom. In the former, widely condemned case, one is trying to get information from a handful of suspected terrorists to save civilian lives; in the latter, more correct instances, one decides such nonuniformed terrorists are already guilty and deserving of execution.

Apparently, the United States took great efforts to ensure that former Guantánamo detainees were sent to Bermuda, and photographed strolling the beaches, and that suspected terrorists in Pakistan were vaporized and their ashes scattered to the winds. Who can sort out the comparative morality? One might argue that there is far more precision and care taken in categorizing the range of prisoners at Guantánamo than in obliterating a house full of people in the Hindu Kush on the knowledge that a Taliban terrorist of some sort is inside.

As technology and purported morality evolves, the old politically incorrect notion that cruel enemies stop their mayhem only when their troops and leaders face death as a consequence of their aggression may be replaced by the promise that instead they will be merely stunned on the battlefield, detained in bases, tried in courts, and rehabilitated in long-term detention areas. Future generations will learn whether human nature has remained constant—and thus enemies who face only a temporary loss of freedom will prove more, not less, bloodthirsty against both soldier and civilian.

Americans will always remain deeply ambivalent about, but very good at, fighting wars abroad. As in the past, they will be increasingly restless, impatient, and intolerant of delays and losses, as planners continue to seek ways to win quickly through overwhelming firepower without incurring fatalities—in accordance with the perceived pulse of public opinion. Our weapons and strategies will continue to reflect just those unchanging realities, as we face a future in which American troops not only are not supposed to die in war but also, in the thickening fog of battle, perhaps not supposed to kill either.

Part IV

How Western Wars
Are Lost—and Won

CHAPTER 11

Your Defeat, My Victory

The Nature of Past and Present Military Error
*

A Little Humility?

A
S WE HAVE
seen, lacking familiarity with our military past, we suffer from the affliction of “presentism.” That is the notion that our current generation at war is mostly unique, in both its accomplishments and its pain and suffering. We claim technological advances as our own—themselves based on the steady, incremental research and contributions of those of the past—and then compound such egotism by confusing material improvement with cultural or even moral progress.

That conflation in turn prompts us—the most affluent and leisured in civilization’s history—to convince ourselves that we are a kinder and more reflective generation than those before us, who faced a far more brutal and unforgiving world, and that for some reason we are exempt from the rules that accompany human nature and its expression during conflict. This infatuation with the present self, again coupled with ignorance of history, convinces us that the mess of a Vietnam, a Mogadishu, or an Iraq is unlike anything in the past. The result is that we are deluded into thinking that our near mastery of the physical world through technology should likewise make conflict equally domesticated—that the uncertain events of war must never be uncertain at all. Yet conflict is not as controllable and predictable as talking across the globe on our cell phones or calling up a Web address on the Internet.

“Iraq,” said former vice president Al Gore, “was the single worst strategic mistake in American history.” Senate majority leader Harry Reid agreed that the war he voted to authorize became “the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history,” and indeed was already “lost.”

Many of such historically minded politicians and commanders weighed in with similar “—est” and “most” superlatives. Retired General William Odom called Iraq “the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” Senator Chuck Hagel, who voted for the war, was somewhat more cautious, calling Iraq “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” Jimmy Carter took the loftiest view: The Iraq War, and Great Britain’s acquiescence in it, he said, constituted “a major tragedy for the world” and proved that the Bush administration “has been the worst in history.”

Certainly there were legitimate questions about Iraq, as there have been about all wars. Why, for example, did Tommy Franks, the Centcom commander who led American forces in a brilliant three-week victory over Saddam Hussein, abruptly announce his retirement in late May 2003—prompting a disruption in command just as the successful conventional war ended and an unexpected insurgency in Iraq gathered steam? Would General George Patton have declared victory and then resigned when Third Army crossed the Rhine River?

Why were looters allowed to ransack much of Baghdad’s infrastructure following the defeat of the Baathist army? Would the conquered Japanese in August 1945 have been allowed to strip what was left of Tokyo’s power grid?

Why “disband” the Iraqi military and not reconstitute its officer corps of Baathists at precisely the time that law and order—not tens of thousands of unemployed youths—were needed?

And weren’t there too few occupying troops in the war’s aftermath, along with too restrictive rules of engagement—but too prominent a profile for the American proconsuls busily dictating to the Iraqis? What can be worse than the foreign infidels who both bother you and yet cannot keep you safe?

The queries don’t stop there, alas. Why in advance weren’t there sufficient new-model body armor and armored Humvees to protect American troops? Why did we begin to assault Fallujah in April 2004, only to pull back for six months and then have to retake the city after the American election in November? Why were the country’s borders left open to infiltrators, and its ubiquitous ammunition dumps kept accessible to terrorists who ransacked them for future explosive devices that would kill thousands of Americans? Did we really think that neighboring Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia were going to play supportive roles when democracy in Iraq might result in a Shiite-dominated government that threatened their own Sunni-dominated autocracies?

The catalog of military error and postbellum naïveté could be multiplied ad nauseam. Then there are also the inevitable strategic conundrums over the need to attack Saddam’s regime in the first place, given the nature of the terrorist threat, the ascendant Iranian theocracy next door, and the colossal intelligence failures concerning imagined vast depots of chemical and biological weapons.

But what was missing from the almost ritual national denunciation of the “worst” war in our history was much appreciation of past American military errors—political, strategic, technological, intelligence, tactical—that once nearly cost us victory in far more important conflicts. Nor do we accept the savage irony of war—that only through errors, tragic though they may be, do successful armies adjust in time to discover winning strategies, tactics, and generals. We completely miss the paradoxes of war through which events that were never imagined during a war’s planning transpire, and often prove providential. And we forget that sometimes one can still win a poorly conceived war—and that to do so may be better than losing it.

Preoccupied with the daily news from Baghdad, we seemed to think that our generation in the twenty-first century was unique in experiencing the heartbreak of an error-plagued war. We forgot that victory in every war goes to the side that commits fewer mistakes—and learns more from them in less time—not to the side that makes no mistakes at all. A perfect military in a flawless war has never existed—though after Grenada and the air war over the Balkans, Americans apparently thought otherwise. Rather than sink into unending recrimination over Iraq and Afghanistan, we should reflect about comparable errors in America’s past wars and how they were corrected.

Intelligence Failures

T
AKE ONE OF
the Iraq War’s most controversial and enduring issues: intelligence failures. Supposedly we went to war in 2003 with little accurate information about either Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or its endemic religious factionalism. As a result the U.S. government lost credibility and goodwill at home and abroad, and was soon plagued by enormous political and military problems in trying to stabilize a constitutional government in Iraq. This may prove to be true in large part, but is it unusual? And have lapses of this magnitude been infrequent in past wars?

Not at all, in either a strategic or a tactical context. American intelligence officers missed the almost self-evident Pearl Harbor attack, as an entire Japanese carrier group steamed unnoticed to within a few hundred miles of Hawaii. After fighting for four long years, we were completely surprised by the Soviets’ efforts to absorb Eastern Europe, and their rejection of almost all wartime assurances of elections to come. Almost no one had a clue about the Communist invasion of South Korea in June 1950—or the subsequent Chinese entrance en masse into North Korea months later in October and November. Americans were as surprised as Israelis by the sudden 1973 joint Arab attack on Israel. Neither the CIA nor the State Department had much inkling that Saddam Hussein would really gobble up Kuwait in August 1990, or that Pakistan was about to detonate a nuclear weapon in 1998.

We should remember that long before the WMD controversy, the triggers for American wars have usually been odd affairs, characterized by poor intelligence gathering, inept diplomacy, and plenty of duplicity—and thus endless controversy and conspiracy mongering. Consider, for example, the so-called Thornton affair that started the Mexican War; the murky circumstances surrounding the defense and shelling of Fort Sumter; the cry of “Remember the Maine!” that heralded the Spanish-American War; the disputed claims surrounding the 1915 sinking of the
Lusitania
that turned public opinion against the kaiser; the Pearl Harbor debacle; an offhand remark in January 1950 by Secretary of State Dean Acheson that South Korea was outside our “defense perimeter”; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; and an American diplomat’s apparent signal of nonchalance to Saddam Hussein immediately before he invaded Kuwait. It is no overstatement that almost
every
American war involved some sort of honest intelligence failure or misinterpretation of an enemy’s motives—or outright dissimulation.

At the battlefield level, America’s past intelligence failures were even more shocking. On April 6, 1862, on a quiet early Sunday morning, Union forces at Shiloh allowed a large, noisy Confederate army under General Albert Sidney Johnston to approach unnoticed (by superb generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman) to within a few thousand yards of their front with disastrous results. Grant—still clueless as to the forces of nearly sixty thousand arrayed against him—compounded his error by sending an ambiguous message for reinforcements to General Lew Wallace, resulting in a critical delay of aid for several hours. Hundreds of Union soldiers died in the meantime. Following the battle, victorious Union generals knew even less concerning the whereabouts of the retreating, defeated Confederate forces and thus allowed them to escape in safety—and to reform into new units to kill more Northern soldiers. The hard-won Union victory became an object of blame-gaming for the remainder of the nineteenth century—as was true of Antietam, and as was true of Gettysburg.

Perhaps the two costliest intelligence lapses of the Second World War preceded the Battle of the Bulge and Okinawa—both toward the end of the war,
after
radical improvements in intelligence methods and technology and long experience with both German and Japanese modes of attack. Americans had no idea of the scope, timing, or aims of the massive German surprise attack through the Ardennes in December 1944, despite the battle-tested acumen of our two most respected generals, Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and British and American intercepts of Wehrmacht messages. Days into the German offensive, there was no consensus about German aims or the proper way to push back the salient. Again, in such circumstances we are talking about errors costing the lives of tens of thousands of Americans in a matter of days, not four thousand Americans over several years in Iraq.

At Okinawa, American intelligence officers grievously underestimated the size, position, and nature of the Japanese deployment, and thus vastly overestimated the efficacy of their own pre-invasion bombing attacks. Army commanders—in near insane fashion—persisted in head-on attacks against the nearly impenetrable Shuri Line, without a clue how well prepared the Japanese were for just such an unimaginative strategy. Yet Okinawa was not our first experience with island-hopping. It unfolded as the last invasion assault in the Pacific theater of operations—supposedly after the collective wisdom gleaned from Guadalcanal, the Marianas, Peleliu, the Philippines, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima had been well digested. Yet this late in the war, still more than 140,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing in the Ardennes and on Okinawa.

Strategic and Tactical Lapses

A
T THE GEOSTRATEGIC
level, American diplomats have had to make devil’s bargains far more morally suspect than going into Iraq. General George Patton and others lamented that the Second World War had broken out in 1939 over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe from totalitarianism—only to end, through the broken 1945 Yalta accords, ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile Soviet ally whose military we had supplied lavishly. In 1776, Americans, bent on establishing a free republic, looked to the soon-to-be-dethroned monarchy in France and its court aristocracy for help in a war against a more liberal parliamentary Great Britain.

Today we worry whether the United States should have armed some anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan in the 1980s or whether it was moral to watch with unrestrained glee as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq nearly annihilated each other between 1980 and 1988—each in some small part occasionally helped by U.S. arms or intelligence. We forget that even worse choices than those have confronted us in the past—like sending billions of dollars of aid to Joseph Stalin to stop Adolf Hitler, just a few years after the former had slaughtered or starved to death twenty million Soviets, invaded hapless Finland, carved up Poland with Hitler, and sent strategic materials daily to the Third Reich as it firebombed London. America in the past has offered support for authoritarians such as General Somoza of Nicaragua and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to prevent both countries from falling into the sphere of an even worse Soviet Union, apparently on the logic that a right-wing anti-Communist dictatorship could either evolve or be pressured to reform in a way that a Stalinist satellite could not.

The Carter administration by 1979 was confused over whether to support, abandon, or ignore the longtime allied, but increasingly beleaguered, shah of Iran—the object of hatred of thousands of Iranians (the Iranian left despised his repression and corruption, the Islamic right his efforts at modernization and secularization). In the end, the United States somehow simultaneously managed to lose a strategic ally in the Cold War, ensure the beginning of a three-decade-long aggression of Iranian-backed Islamic terrorists against American interests, and leave left-wing socialist reformers to be butchered by second-wave revolutionary Islamic fundamentalists. “The Great Satan” originally arose as a slur against Jimmy Carter’s kinder and gentler United States—at the same time democratic allies from Europe to Asia condemned America as an equivocal and unreliable ally. Thousands of Iranians flocked in waves to the United States, furious—depending on their own circumstances and politics—that a naive Carter either had sold out a staunch American Cold War ally or had sold out principled and secular left-wing reformers.