Reading Cohen was a big activity here last year. Here is an excellent article reviewing and commenting on "The Commanders". From "The Public Interest"
Commanding the commanders
By Jay Winik
A snapshot in time: One evening, early in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of state, William Seward, called upon the Union General-in-Chief, George McClellan, at his house. McClellan was out, so they waited. When he returned, the general flatly refused to see the president, strolling past the parlor where he sat, and going upstairs to bed. Lincoln?s response? Not anticipating such an insult, the president continued to sit there, in that parlor, in near silence, for more than an hour. Unthinkable as it is to us today, he never reprimanded McClellan.
But the parlor incident was only the beginning of his troubles. More often than not, Lincoln seemed downright paralyzed about his reluctant general: He believed McClellan a brilliant organizer who could make superb preparations for a titanic struggle, but he also worried that McClellan became ?nervous and oppressed? when battle neared, fabricating excuse after excuse for not fighting. What to do? Lincoln consulted his Cabinet. The Cabinet was not so restrained: McClellan?s behavior, they said, was ?imbecilic,? and they lectured the president to ?command the commanders.?
Command the commanders? Not yet. The next year, when McClellan simply refused to attack the Confederates, Lincoln?s response was again muted. For his part, Seward was positively enraged - furious that Lincoln should leave an ?utter incompetent? in command of the finest Northern army. Lincoln tepidly responded: ?I did not feel disposed to take responsibility of overruling him.?
Others thought differently. When the barons on Capitol Hill, led by Senator Ben Wade, openly clamored for McClellan?s head, Lincoln asked, almost feebly, ?If I remove McClellan, whom shall I put in command??
?Well, anybody!? Wade said.
?Well, anybody will do for you, ? Lincoln said, ?but not for me. I must have somebody.? This was 1862 - the worst was still to come.
Whatever else may be said, Lincoln made his share of mistakes, and history should not obscure his patchy record - often erased by the brilliant final year of the war. Indeed, never before had a president had so much arrayed against him - or been so ill-prepared for such a momentous conflict. Members of his own Cabinet openly derided him behind his back: Stanton called him ?the original baboon? and a ?western hick?; his first attorney general called him ?unexceptional?; one of his own generals, Joseph Hooker, called him a ?played out imbecile.? And why shouldn?t they have said this?
Until his surprising election as president, Lincoln was an obscure legislator, an equally obscure one-term congressman, and a failure in his bid for U.S. Senate. Everything about his career smacked of the persistent efforts of a political hack, a hanger-on, a man who didn?t know when to quit. He had not a shred of executive experience, and his sole military experience was an uninspired, undisciplined 80 days in the Black Hawk war. He had never lived abroad, or even been abroad, let alone served as a minister to a foreign country. Nor could he claim the benefit of a powerful mentor, or having apprenticed as secretary of state, or war, or vice president, like a number of his distinguished predecessors. And there was the unsettling matter of his temperament, the fact that he was prone to bleak depressions. How, ultimately, would this be the man to rise to the challenge?
Indeed, if Lincoln were president today, one can imagine what the foreign policy establishment, the Washington elites, and the high-minded columnists would say: Get out of the way, defer to the professionals, listen to the experts, don?t ignore public opinion, seek diplomatic avenues, and most of all, listen to the military men in high command.
That, of course, as Eliot Cohen points out in his timely and important book, Supreme Command ,? is precisely what the standard theory of civil-military relations counsels - that civilian leaders should defer to the military professionals. But that is precisely what Lincoln ultimately did not do; when those around him called for peace and compromise, he resolved to save the union at all costs and waged total war. Therein, Cohen reminds us, is the rub.
At the heart of Cohen?s book is the notion that contrary to the conventional wisdom today - soldiers should be isolated from politics but given a free hand in military matters - war is an inherently political enterprise, requiring the close supervision of political leaders. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and one of the nation?s leading strategic thinkers, draws out this theme through four case studies of civilian leaders who led their nations to stunning successes: Lincoln; Georges Clemenceau, who guided France to victory over Germany in World War I; Winston Churchill, who led Britain and rallied the West in the darkest hours of World War II; and David Ben-Gurion, who steered Israel to independence in the late 1940s.
Each of them was, to an extent, fanatical; each struck many of his countrymen as a madman. Each, in his own way, was a profound dreamer, with a kind of mystical belief in his nation. All, ultimately, were prepared to act alone, without encouragement, relying solely on their own inner resolve. And as Cohen demonstrates, each of these men, rather than sitting back passively, threw himself into the process of war: pestering and harassing generals, immersing himself in the nitty-gritty details. All of them relentlessly asked questions, probed standard assumptions, and even fired their generals when they had to. Cohen further notes, perceptively so, that as rigid as these men could be, they also were able to exercise flexibility and restraint in pursuit of their objectives.
Giants now in our day, they were often reviled in theirs. Churchill, for instance, was widely viewed as ?undisciplined,? ?erratic,? a ?fantasist? and ?reactionary? who peddled harebrained schemes that could have had disastrous results. But to his credit, he allowed himself to get talked out of the worst of his ideas (including an amphibious assault on northern Norway). And he was right on the big issues - on Hitler, on the importance of the American relationship, on Soviet intentions - as well as some of the smaller ones, like the need for high-tech equipment for a cross-channel landing. He was also determined not to repeat the timidity of military leaders in World War I. ?You may take the most gallant sailor,? Churchill memorably wrote, ?the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - What do you get? - the sum total of their fears!?
Cohen is on to something, especially when one considers both the zeitgeist of the present day (a near blind deference to uniformed advice) and the results of such recent conflicts as Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War. In one of his more fascinating discussions, he takes issue with the accepted wisdom that many military men - and much of the cognoscenti - derived from the Vietnam War. Didn?t Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, and the other whiz kids, brimming with degrees from Yale and Harvard and bearing flow charts and statistical analyses from RAND, unduly intervene in the planning and the fighting? Doesn?t the terrible specter of Johnson approving bombing targets rightly haunt us to this day? Weren?t we fighting that war with one hand tied behind our back, hampered by esoteric theories such as ?intra-war deterrence,? ?signaling,? and ?limited warfare?? Well, yes - and no.
If the civilian leadership in Vietnam, for all its glitter and credentials, was mediocre, Cohen tells us that the Joint Chiefs were even worse. President Johnson, it turns out, gave his approval for most of their targets; when he didn?t, it was usually because he found the targets too provocative and feared that the military men had underestimated the threat of massive Chinese intervention of the sort that had led to disaster in Korea less than 15 years before. In one of Cohen?s most trenchant observations, he writes: ?There is no evidence that the generals understood any better than the civilian leadership the mentality of friend or foe, or that they had any ideas for bringing the war to a conclusion on terms acceptable to American diplomacy.?
A different cloud hangs over the Gulf War. Here, unlike in Vietnam, the first Bush administration resisted interfering in military operations. But it then went a step further and, in Cohen?s view, unwisely allowed the military to make crucial political judgments. The results were almost as predictable as they were tragic: Colin Powell played a significant role in calling for the ground war to end at its one-hundredth hour, thus ending the so-called ?highway of death? (the administration feared negative media publicity), and leaving Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guard in place. One doesn?t have to minimize the extraordinary achievement of the Gulf War in evicting Iraq from Kuwait to come to the conclusion that we are now living with the results of the disastrous decision to abort the war too early. In Cohen?s formulation, both the Vietnam and Gulf War are telling examples of a deadly combination of what he calls ?inept strategy and excessively weak civilian control.?
Given this, one must wonder how we got to the point that the nation?s civilian leadership finds itself in such thrall of the military. For context, Cohen quotes Lincoln biographers John Nicolay and John Hay on this issue: ?War and politics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese twins, inseparable and interdependent; and to talk of military operations without the direction and interference of an administration is as absurd as to plan a campaign without recruits, pay or rations.? Is the problem, then, the ghost of Vietnam? (Yes, says Cohen.) Are sweeping pieces of legislation like the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols law, meant to enshrine ?the lessons of Vietnam,? the answer? (Not so fast, argues Cohen.) And is the answer simply a matter of rejecting the standard theory of civil-military relations in favor of Lincolnian statesmen who bone up on military strategy, set overarching goals, and exert careful oversight? This is where the matter gets somewhat stickier.
The harder cases, of course, involve not the rare few - leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, Ben-Gurion, and Clemenceau - but the more commonplace, mediocre, and flawed leaders, those whose judgment is lacking, whose perception is poor, or whose timing invariably seems ill-fated. Take Jimmy Carter, for instance. Well-meaning and one of the brightest men to inhabit the presidency, he exercised such a mastery of detail that he knew the throw weights of nuclear missiles better than his own generals. Armed with tabbed briefing books, which he often took home overnight, he too refused to play to the tune of the normal civil-military relations. But Carter?s dismal attempted rescue of the Iranian hostages in Desert One stands as one of the most flawed military operations in this nation?s history. (Under very different circumstances, Gerald Ford?s botched Mayaquez rescue attempt wasn?t much better.)
Cohen writes: ?A great statesmen is a rarity, and an average politician who poses as a Churchill or a Lincoln may come to grief. But it is also the case that a mediocre statesmen who resorts to rules of thumb - including ?defer to the professional? is heading, and probably by a shorter path, to ruin.? This is a subtle but crucial point. Cohen is almost certainly correct that blindly deferring to military professionals is a path to ruin, but it is also clear that successful civilian leadership cannot on its own be reduced to lists or rules or precooked prescriptions.
Consider the Vietnam and Gulf War examples again. While it is true that Johnson and to some extent Bush Sr. failed to ask the right questions, they hardly failed to ask questions, to set overarching goals, or to impose their visions, however limited. It remains a fact that in almost every administration, the actions of civilian and military leaders reflect the wisdom and judgment at the top, not the other way around. For all his meddling, Johnson never stumbled into finding the right generals, or the right civilian aides, or the right strategy, or the right way to deal with the morass of public opinion. And to the extent that the elder Bush ceded political judgments to the military, their views perfectly accorded with his own.
Leadership remains one of the great mysteries of history. Why do some have it, and others don?t? Why are second-rate leaders always shaped and prodded and manipulated by the forces of history in terrible crises, while great ones find ways to bend those forces to their goals? Why do some leaders lose winnable wars and others win losable wars?
One should not come away from Cohen?s book thinking that we don?t need sound military leadership - we desperately do. But sound military advice is rarely sufficient on its own. With considerable verve and rigor, Cohen?s Supreme Command has convincingly spelled out an important corrective to the deadly tonic that civilian leaders should automatically defer to the military. In the final analysis, in the great matters of war and peace, there is no substitute to having vigorous and wise leadership at the top.
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