Practicing History: Selected Essays

  High on the list of a general’s essentials is what I call the “Do this” factor. It is taken from the statement which Shakespeare put in the mouth of Mark Antony: “When Caesar says, ‘Do this,’ it is performed.” This quality of command rests not only on the general’s knowledge of tactics and terrain and resources and enemy deployment in a specific situation, but on the degree of faith that his subordinates have in his knowledge. “When Stilwell told you what to do in Burma,” said an officer, “you had confidence that was the right thing to do. That is what a soldier wants to know.” If officers and men believe a general knows what he is talking about and that what he orders is the right thing to do in the circumstances, they will do it, because most people are relieved to find a superior on whose judgment they can rest. That, indeed, is the difference between most people and generals.

  I come now to the second category: that is, professional ability. This encompasses the capacity to decide the objective, to plan, to organize, to direct, to draw on experience, and to deploy all the knowledge and techniques in which the professional has been trained. For me to go further into this aspect and enter on a discussion of the professional principles of generalship does not, I think, make much sense; first, because if you do not know more about them than I do, you oughtn’t to be here, and, second, because it seems to me very difficult to select absolutes. The principles depend to a great extent on time, place, and history, and the nature of the belligerents. I will only say that the bridge that joins the two categories—that connects personal leadership to professional ability—is intelligence, which is the quality De Saxe put second on his list after courage.

  The kind of intelligence varies, I suppose, according to occupation: In a doctor it must be sympathetic; in a lawyer it is invariably pessimistic; in a historian it should be accurate, investigative, and synthesizing. In a military man, according to De Saxe’s fine phrase, it should be “strong and fertile in devices.” I like that; it is a requirement which you can tell has been drawn from a soldier’s experience. It closely fits, I think, the most nearly perfect, or at any rate the least-snafued, professional military performance of our time, that of the Israelis in the Six-Day War of 1967.

  In that microcosm, caught for us within the visible limits of six days, the qualities of resolution and nerve, the “Do this” factor, the deployment of expert skills, and a governing intelligence “strong and fertile in devices” all meshed and functioned together like the oiled parts of an engine. I need not go into the circumstances that made this happen, of which the chief one perhaps was that no retreat or defeat was possible—either would have meant annihilation in that sliver of a country the size of the state of Massachusetts. The Israelis’ concept of generalship, however, does contain principles that can apply beyond their borders. To anticipate is one. To be skeptical, critical, flexible, and, finally, obstinate—obstinate in the execution of the mission—is another. This quality, which I have already mentioned in connection with Stilwell, seemed to be the requirement which the Israelis most emphasized in an officer.

  The principle I found especially stressed, although more on the planning level than in the field, was knowledge of the enemy—of his capabilities, his training, his psychology—as complete and precise as prolonged study, familiarity, and every means of intelligence-gathering could make it. In this realm the Israelis have the advantage of knowing in advance the identity of the enemy: He lives next door. Yet it seems to me that Americans could learn from this lesson.

  If we paid more attention to the nature, motivation, and capabilities, especially in Asia, of the opponent whom we undertake so confidently to smash—not to mention of the allies whom we support—we would not have made such a mess, such an unexpected mess, in Vietnam. We would not have found ourselves, to our confusion and dismay, investing more and more unavailing effort against a continually baffling capacity for resistance, and not only resistance but initiative. In the arrogance of our size, wealth, and superior technology, we tend to overlook the need to examine what may be different sources of strength in others. If in 1917 Edith Cavell could say, “Patriotism is not enough,” we now need another voice of wisdom to tell us, “Technology is not enough.” War is not one big engineering project. There are people on the other side—with strengths and will that we never bothered to measure. As a result of that omission we have been drawn into a greater, and certainly more ruinous, belligerent action than we intended. To fight without understanding the opponent ultimately serves neither the repute of the military nor the repute of the nation.

  Having brought myself down to the present with a rush, I would like to examine generalship from here on in terms of the present. I know that military subjects are generally studied and taught by examples from the past, and I could go on with an agreeable talk about the qualities of the Great Captains with suitable maxims from Napoleon, and references to General Grant, and anecdotes about how King George, when told that General Wolfe was mad, replied, “I wish he would bite some other of my generals”—all of which you already know. Besides, it might well be an exercise in the obsolete, for with the change in war that has occurred since mid-twentieth century there must necessarily follow a change in generalship.

  The concept of total war that came in with our century has already, I think, had its day. It has been backed off the stage by the advent of the total weapon, nuclear explosion, with its uncritical capacity for overkill. Since, regardless of first strike, there is enough nuclear power around to be mutually devastating to both sides, it becomes the weapon that cannot be used, thus creating a new situation. If war, as we have all been taught, is the pursuit of policy by means of force, we are now faced by the fact that there can be no policy or political object which can be secured with benefit by opening a nuclear war that wrecks all parties. Consequently, limited wars with limited objectives must henceforth be the only resort when policy requires support by military means. Upon investigation I find that this was perceived by some alert minds almost as soon as it happened, by former Ambassador George Kennan for one, who wrote in 1954, when everyone else was bemused by the Bomb, that nuclear weapons had not enlarged the scope of war but exactly the opposite, that “the day of total wars has passed, and that from now on limited military operations are the only ones that could conceivably serve any coherent purpose.”

  The significance of this development for the military man is bound to be disturbing because, as the British General Sir John Winthrop Hackett recently said in a talk to our Air Force Academy, “Limited wars for political ends are far more likely to be productive of moral strains … than the great wars of the past.” The United States, it is hardly necessary to remark, is already suffering from the truth of that principle.

  The change has been taking place over the past twenty years while we lived through it without really noticing—at least I as a civilian didn’t notice. One needs to step outside a phenomenon in order to see its shape, and one needs perspective to be able to look back and say, “There was the turning point.” As you can now see, Korea was our first political war. The train of events since then indicates that the role of the military is coming to be, as exhibited by the Russians in Egypt and ourselves in Southeast Asia, one of intervention in underdeveloped countries on a so-called “advisory” or “assistance” level with the object of molding the affairs of the client country to suit the adviser’s purpose. The role has already developed its task force and training program in the Military Assistance Officers Program at Fort Bragg. According to its formulation, the task is to “assist foreign countries with internal security problems”—a nice euphemism for counter-insurgency—“and perform functions having sociopolitical impact on military operations.”

  In short, the mission of the military in this sociopolitical era is to be counter-revolution, otherwise the thwarting of communism or, if euphemism is preferred, nation-building, Vietnamizing, or perhaps Pakistanizing or Africanizing some willing or unwilling client. This is quite a change from defense of the continen
tal United States which the founders intended should be our military function.

  What does the change imply for generalship? “Has the Army seen the last of its great combat leaders of senior rank?” I quote that question from the recent book Military Men by Ward Just, correspondent of the Washington Post. Will there still be scope for those qualities of personal leadership that once made the difference? In the past it was the man who counted: Clive, who conquered India with eleven hundred men; Cortez, who took Mexico with fewer; Charles Martel, who turned back the Moslems at Tours; Nelson, who turned back Napoleon at Trafalgar (and incidentally evaluated one source of his prowess when he said, “If there were more Lady Hamiltons, there would be more Nelsons.” Though that might be thought to please the Women’s Lib people, who are down on me already, I am afraid it won’t because from their point of view it’s the wrong kind of influence. Anyway, that factor too may vanish, for I doubt if love or amorous triumph will play much role in inspiring generals to greater feats on the advisory or Vietnamizing level).

  Above all, among the men of character who as individuals made a historic difference, there was Washington. When on his white horse he plunged into the midst of panicked men and with the “terrific eloquence of unprintable scorn” stopped the retreat from Monmouth, he evoked from Lafayette the tribute, “Never have I seen so superb a man.”

  Is he needed in the new army of today whose most desired postgraduate course, after this one, it has been said, is a term at the Harvard Business School? To fill today’s needs the general must be part diplomat, part personnel manager, part weapons analyst, part sales and purchasing agent. Already General Creighton Abrams has been described by a reporter as two generals: one a “hell-for-leather, jut-jawed battlefield commander and the other a subtle and infinitely patient diplomat.” For his successors the second role is likely soon to outweigh the first.

  Out of that total human activity, physical, intellectual, and moral, how much will be left for the general to do? Given chemical detectors and people-sniffers, defoliators and biological weapons, infrared radar and electronic communication by satellite, not to mention, as once conceived by our planners, an invisible electric fence to keep out the enemy, the scope for decision-making in the field must inevitably be reduced. Artillery and even infantry fire, I understand, will be targeted by computers, extending from pocket-size models in the soldier’s pack all the way to the console at headquarters. This is supposed to raise the dazzling prospect of eliminating human error, like Professor Skinner’s vision of eliminating human evil by the teaching machine. The realization of either of those prospects, I can guarantee you as a historian, has about the same degree of probability as the return of the dinosaur.

  The change that could be the most momentous would be a change in the relation of the military to the state. This is sensitive territory with potential for trouble, and I am entering here into an area of speculation which you may find refutable, and certainly arguable.

  So that it may carry out the orders of government without hesitation or question, the officer corps has traditionally maintained, on the whole, a habit of non-partisanship, at least skin-deep, whatever individual ideological passions may rumble beneath the surface. Can this attitude last when the military find themselves being sent to fight for purposes so speculative or so blurred that they cannot support a legal state of war? You may say that it is a matter of semantics, but semantics make a good test. As a writer I can tell you that trouble in writing clearly invariably reflects troubled thinking, usually an incomplete grasp of the facts or of their meaning.

  One wonders what proportion of officers in Southeast Asia today get through a tour of duty without asking themselves “Why?” or “What for?” As they make their sociopolitical rounds in the future, will that number uncomfortably grow? That is why the defunct principle that a nation should go to war only in self-defense or for vital and immediate national interest was a sound one. The nation that abides by it will have a better case with its own citizens and certainly with history. No one could misunderstand Pearl Harbor or have difficulty explaining or defining the need for a response. War which spends lives is too serious a business to do without definition. It requires definition—and declaration. No citizen, I believe, whether military or civilian, should be required to stake his life for what some uncertain men in Washington think is a good idea in gamesmanship or deterrence or containment or whatever is the governing idea of the moment.

  If the military is to be used for political ends, can it continue to be the innocent automaton? Will the time come when this position is abandoned, and the Army or members of it will question and judge the purpose of what they are called upon to do? Not that they will necessarily be out of sympathy with government policy. Generally speaking, American policy since the onset of the cold war has been the containment of communism, with which, one may presume, the Army agrees. But the questions grow complex. What about Russia vis-à-vis China? What about India vis-à-vis Pakistan, where recently we skirted the consequences of folly by a hair? What about the Middle East? Suppose we decide that unless we rescue Syria from Russian influence, Iraq will fall? or suppose we transpose that principle to South America? You can play dominoes on any continent. What happens if we blunder again into a war on the wrong side of history?

  That is not the military’s fault, the military will reply. It is a civilian decision. The military arm remains under civilian control. Did not Truman fire MacArthur?

  It is true that in America the military has never seriously challenged civilian rule, but in late years it hardly needs to. With a third of the national budget absorbed by military spending, with the cost of producing nuclear and other modern weapons having evidently no limits, with 22,000 defense contractors and 100,000 subcontractors operating in the United States, the interlocking of military-industrial interests grips the economy and pervades every agency of government.

  The new budget of $83.4 billion for defense represents five times the amount allotted to education and nearly forty times the amount for control of pollution (our government having failed to notice that pollution by now is a graver threat to us than the Russians). It costs an annual average of about $10,000 to maintain each man in uniform compared to a national expenditure of $1,172.86 for each person in the United States; in other words, the man in uniform absorbs ten times as much. The Pentagon, where lies the pulse of all this energy and activity, spends annually $140 million on public relations alone, nearly twice as much as the entire budget of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. When military and military-connected interests penetrate government to that extent, the government becomes more or less the prisoner of the Pentagon.

  In this situation, the location of ultimate responsibility for policy-making is no longer clearly discernible. What is clear is that while the military exerts that much influence in government, it cannot at the same time retain the stance of innocence.

  It used to be that any difficulty of assignment could be taken care of under the sheltering umbrella of Duty, Honor, Country. As long as you had a casus belli like the Maine or the Alamo you could get through any dubious expedition without agony. The West Point formula may no longer suffice. Country is clear enough, but what is Duty in a wrong war? What is Honor when fighting is reduced to “wasting” the living space—not to mention the lives—of a people that never did us any harm? The simple West Point answer is that Duty and Honor consist in carrying out the orders of the government. That is what the Nazis said in their defense, and we tried them for war crimes nevertheless. We undercut our own claim at Nuremberg and Tokyo.

  When fighting reaches the classic formula recently voiced by a soldier in the act of setting fire to a hamlet in Vietnam, “We must destroy it in order to save it,” one must go further than duty and honor and ask, “Where is common sense?” I am aware that common sense does not figure in the West Point motto; nevertheless soldiers are no less subject to Descartes’ law, “I think, therefore I am,” than other mortal
s. Thinking will keep breaking in. That is the penalty of abandoning the purity of self-defense as casus belli. When a soldier starts thinking, according to the good soldier Schweik, “he is no longer a soldier but a lousy civilian.” I do not know if it will come to that, but it serves to bring in the civilian point of view.

  Does civilian society really want the Army to start thinking for itself? Does this not raise all sorts of dread potentials for right-wing coups or left-wing mutinies? While the military normally tends to the right, there have been other cases: Cromwell’s New Model Army overturned the King, the naval mutiny at Kronstadt and desertions from the front brought on the Russian Revolution. Already we have a dangerously undisciplined enlisted force in Vietnam, which admittedly does not come so much from thinking as from general disgust. While this development is not political, from what one can tell, it is certainly not healthy.

  I know that I have wandered far from my assignment, but I raise these questions because it seems to me that generalship will have to cope with them from now on. The trouble with this talk, as I imagine will now have become visible, is that I have none of the answers. That will take another breed of thinker. I can only say that it has always been a challenge to be a general; his role, like that of the citizen, is growing no easier.