Interesting Column by Elliot Cohen From "WSJ.com"
AT WAR
Generals, Politicians and Iraq
Military leaders must defer to their civilian bosses.
BY ELIOT A. COHEN
Sunday, August 18, 2002 12:01 a.m.
Clemenceau was right: "War is too important to be left to the generals." The 85-year-old dictum applies no less to an attack on Iraq than to the concluding stages of World War I. Not because the generals are incompetent and the politicians strategic geniuses, but rather because they have different roles, perspectives and vantage points. Healthy civil-military relationships rest not on milky comity, which usually means that one side or the other has failed to do its job, but on friction and tension, tempered by unflinching candor, grudging respect and, ultimately, military deference to civilian intentions.
This is the context in which one should understand the murmurings of uniformed discontent that journalists are discovering in the Pentagon in recent days. They have various sources, some less than profound: the fractiousness of those who think they should be in on the planning and are not, or the result of clashes of personality. But three causes of civil-military conflict merit discussion, if not quite the level of anxiety portrayed in the press.
The first of these is the fundamental caution of any well-trained and conscientious military professional. Officers, and American officers more than most, have a deep sense of their responsibilities to the young men and women who fight our wars. These are no longer--if they ever were--the generals who could rap a pointer on a map and say, "I'd give a thousand men to take that hill." Moreover, they have a deep sense of what can go wrong in any use of force; they know that accident, mistake and surprise stalk even modern battlefields covered with a grid of sensors.
As Lord Salisbury once put it, "If you ask the soldiers, nothing is safe." To which the politicians must respond, "Neither is inaction." It is the job of a political leader to take into account the soldier's reservations, to probe for differing opinions and press for innovative solutions.
The second, and more troubling cause of open civil-military friction, is the pattern of behavior set following the Gulf War. The sentimentalization of American troops after the Gulf War--a conflict celebrated like a giant Super Bowl in some quarters--was followed by an intense, indeed venomous, disappointment of the American military with President Clinton. The Clinton administration rarely asserted itself on military affairs after its disastrous efforts, largely stymied, to lift the ban on homosexuals serving openly in uniform. Worse yet, a weak-kneed administration tolerated open expressions of disdain for the commander-in-chief, and an irresponsible Republican opposition encouraged it. The senior military leadership eventually came to its senses and gently quashed behavior that could have been grounds for court-martial.
But the upshot was a perceptible politicization of some portion of the officer corps, and a climate of toleration for open criticism of the civilian leadership. The distasteful bipartisan practice of using recently retired generals and admirals as campaign props compounded the problem. When the second Bush administration took office and--surprising only the Pentagon--refrained from dramatically increasing the defense budget, some officers felt doubly betrayed. What was worse, they had by now gotten into the habit of saying so.
There is, finally, the lingering shadow of Vietnam. For nearly 40 years, American politicians, pundits and soldiers have told themselves that the war was lost because of civilian micromanagement. That view reflects a gross misunderstanding of an exceedingly complex war, in which civilian laxity was as much to blame as civilian control. For four years LBJ kept in place a theater commander who seems, in retrospect, singularly unsuited for the difficult task that confronted him. The senior military leadership, for its part, never came up with a metric of success better than the body count, or a concept of operations better than more bombing. The civilians, of course, have ultimate responsibility for the ensuing disaster; it is incorrect, however, to think that they were alone in causing it, or that they did so by exerting too much control.
The myth of civilian control in Vietnam, and the equally inaccurate depiction of a hands-off waging of the Gulf War, have led too many people in and out of uniform to have a horror of everything that history has to teach us about sound civilian wartime leadership. Lincoln, Churchill and Clemenceau were great wartime leaders because they queried, nagged, harassed and prodded. "It is always right to probe," Churchill insisted. Judging by the reports, that's what the administration is doing.
What is different today is the willingness of some, presumably in uniform, to whine to the press about it. During the summer of 1942, FDR ordered the Army and Navy to invade North Africa in November of that year. Gen. George C. Marshall and Adm. Ernest J. King, his two senior military advisers, were convinced that this was a gross strategic error. They made their case as forcefully as they could, lost and saluted smartly. Even after the war, Marshall privately described it disdainfully as a decision made to entertain the American public. But he would never have considered airing that view publicly.
Of all the many difficult requirements we levy upon soldiers, not the least is the obligation to present their views with utter honesty in private, but to maintain silence in public. That tradition has eroded; indeed, there are those who no longer understand its importance, and others who are willing to evade it by surreptitious leaks to journalists. But judging by the behavior and pronouncements of senior military leaders, from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on down, there are more than enough who understand and value the heritage of George C. Marshall to carry us through yet another difficult period of civil-military tension, sensational stories about unhappy generals notwithstanding.
Mr. Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is author of "Supreme Command" (Free Press, 2002). |
