Military Misfortunes

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Military Misfortunes Page 32

by Eliot A Cohen


  Sometimes a very severe deficiency in organizational structure can be easily identified even though it does not result in defeat. The fact that, in October 1944, the two naval officers in command of the major fleet units involved in the Battle of Leyte Gulf reported to different superiors meant, in the judgment of one American military historian, that “the American naval situation at Leyte was a disaster waiting to happen.”42 In this case a stroke of sheer good fortune-the loss of nerve of the Japanese naval commander, Admiral Takeo Kurita, and the consequent withdrawal of the Japanese task force at the eleventh hour, when Admiral Thomas C. Kincaid’s escort carriers had all but exhausted their defensive capabilities-averted disaster. But the Battle of Leyte Gulf is most certainly a case of military failure.

  When all is said and done organization and system in the military world operate at the behest of generals. If our line of argument is correct, a general or admiral who can transcend military misfortune must be willing to entertain the possibility of large flaws in how his organization operates, and be willing to risk much to correct them. But commanders cannot indulge themselves too much in reflection about potential—as opposed to present—failure, and indeed, some of the greatest commanders are those who deliberately shunt the very possibility aside. William Tecumseh Sherman once told a subordinate what made Ulysses Grant his superior in the art of war:

  Wilson, I’m a damned sight smarter than Grant; I know more about organization, supply and administration and about everything else than he does; but I’ll tell you where he beats me and where he beats the world. He don’t care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight but it scares me like hell. I’m more nervous than he is. I am much more likely to change my orders or to countermarch my command than he is. He uses such information as he has according to his best judgment; he issues his orders and does his level best to carry them out without much reference to what is going on about him. . . .43

  This relentless focus on imposing one’s will on the enemy typifies the Western approach to war, and lends it much of its vigor. In the case of Grant, such apparent imperviousness to the environment paved the way for the near catastrophe of Shiloh, but it also enabled him to conduct the bloody campaigns of 1864 with a ferocity that doomed the Confederacy by the autumn of that year.

  The difficulties—and indeed the dangers—of giving way to excessive reflection on potential failure have been poignantly captured by Field Marshal Sir William Slim, a defeated general who did not allow reflection to shatter his nerve following the rout of British forces in Burma in 1942.

  Defeat is bitter. Bitter to the common soldier, but trebly bitter to his general. The soldier may comfort himself with the thought that, whatever the result, he has done his duty faithfully and steadfastly, but the commander has failed in his duty if he has not won victory—for that is his duty. He has no other comparable to it. He will go over in his mind the events of the campaign. “Here,” he will think, “I went wrong; here I took counsel of my fears when I should have been bold; there I should have waited to gather strength, not struck piecemeal; at such a moment I failed to grasp opportunity when it was presented to me.” He will remember the soldiers whom he sent into the attack that failed and who did not come back. He will recall the look in the eyes of men who trusted him. “I have failed them,” he will say to himself, “and failed my country!” He will see himself for what he is—a defeated general. In a dark hour he will turn in upon himself and question the very foundations of his leadership and his manhood.

  And then he must stop! For if he is ever to command in battle again, he must shake off these regrets, and stamp on them, as they claw at his will and his self-confidence. He must beat off these attacks he delivers against himself, and cast out the doubts born of failure. Forget them, and remember only the lessons to be learned from defeat—they are more than from victory.44

  Slim’s fortitude, strength of character, and sheer intellectual capacity allowed him to escape from the entangling coils of the paradox of command. He was able to analyze the causes of his defeat and then move forward to plan for victory on the basis of that hard-won knowledge. But if military misfortune is to be avoided, reflection must precede and preempt defeat. A general must conjure up the phantasm of disaster, as it were, encouraging it into being for the very purpose of exorcising it. This kind of activity is all too likely to bring on an attack of the very fears and anxieties engendered by the real thing, and so paralyze the will and weaken the firmness of purpose as to cause the very thing it seeks to avoid. It is old advice that generals “should not take counsel of their fears.”

  Shrewd intervention by senior political leaders can diminish the vulnerability of military organizations to misfortune.45 It is, of course, one of the great responsibilities of statesmen to select the leaders of their armed forces. The judgments to be made here concern not technique but character—the variety of human types required for a balanced and effective military organization. It was by no means the smallest of Franklin Roosevelt’s contributions to American success in World War II that he selected George Marshall and Ernest King to lead the U.S. army and navy. Neither was an obvious choice, and each was uniquely suited to the challenges faced by his service at the time he was appointed.

  Beyond selecting senior commanders, however, the civilian heads of a military establishment must query their generals, and not merely on broad problems of strategy but about the operational plans and concepts used to meet those problems and the fitness of the organizations at their disposal to implement those plans and concepts. This was Churchill’s role as a war leader in 1940–45, and although it had considerable costs, it had very great payoffs as well.46 Yet even such a style of leadership did not and could not prevent—as Churchill warned the House of Commons in October 1940—“not only great dangers, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments.”47

  In peacetime this cross-examination may take a different form, and concern, in particular the nature of the command systems—including the promotion and educational systems, as well as the shape of the organization charts—which govern the armed forces. The task is a delicate one, for ill-informed civilian intervention can do enormous damage, and efforts to dictate will backfire or be subverted by a recalcitrant bureaucracy. The great statesmen who have been most successful in reforming military organizations—the turn-of-the-century American Secretary of War Elihu Root, for example—worked with senior officers to overhaul command systems shown to be unsuited for the tasks before them.48

  The causes of military misfortune are complex. For this very reason it would be foolish to proffer any antidotes to failure without first seeking to understand fully the nature of the problem of command in the age of large and complicated organizations. But command does not equate merely to the responsibilities borne by an individual, no matter how august his rank or extensive his powers. The problem of command is not universal but particular, and it is defined by the nature of each military organization and the unique strategic, operational, and tactical challenges it faces. Each commander is, as we have seen, bound by a unique set of organizational fetters. Only by understanding those bindings can he take action to make them less confining or crippling, but never can he hope to strike them, once and for all, from his wrists.

  Afterword

  Since this book appeared, the United States has waged two wars in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, and two in the former Yugoslavia, and conducted scores of minor operations, some quite bloody. While most of these campaigns were successful, not all were—the 1993 fighting in Mogadishu, Somalia, in which eighteen American soldiers lost their lives, was a tactical success but a strategic defeat. Shortly after the engagement (commemorated in the book and film Blackhawk Down) the United States withdrew from Somalia, leaving its opponent, Mohamed Farah Aideed, in control of the contested city.

  Even successful operations, such as the Afghan war of 2001, or the war with Serbia in 1999, had their setbacks—the misplanned operation ANACON
DA against al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Shah-i-Kot mountains, for example, was almost a disaster, as was the hapless deployment of army forces (Task Force HAWK) into Albania during the Kosovo war. Above all, the most interesting and disturbing recent “misfortune,” as we have defined it here, was the insurgency waged against Coalition forces in Iraq following the swift toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003.

  Misfortune is the failure of a competent military organization to learn, anticipate, or adapt. How does that schema apply to Iraq?

  When American forces began the march up from Kuwait to Baghdad they anticipated dangers aplenty. No one then knew whether the Iraqis had usable stocks of chemical and biological weapons that might be deployed against the Americans and their allies, and so American and British troops took preparations against that sort of attack very seriously indeed. On the basis of the experience of the first Gulf War, they expected a variety of Iraqi attempts to create ecological disaster or economic catastrophe by sabotaging oil wells, and so special units moved swiftly to secure key oil fields. The American high command contemplated the possibility of massive refugee flows—and therefore laid in large supplies of emergency rations and water purification equipment. These calamities did not occur, partly because Coalition actions had forestalled them, but chiefly because the Iraqis did not attempt them.

  What did occur, however, was a vicious irregular war against Coalition supply lines, waged by units whose very existence had been either unknown or discounted by Allied commanders, as American commander Lieutenant General William Wallace freely acknowledged. But here, as elsewhere, American forces displayed that quality of adaptation that their adversaries had long noted. Shifting some infantry units to security operations along the lines of communication, and then hurling armored formations through Baghdad itself, the American-led Coalition brought down the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath party in a three-week campaign.

  Most knowledgeable observers assumed that, barring the use of unconventional weapons, such would be the result; the Iraqi military, demoralized, ill-equipped, and psychologically overawed by the superpower whose forces had crushed them a decade before, could not be expected to put up much of a fight. But what happened next was a surprise. An insurgency began, not acknowledged as such by American leaders for a good half year after the overthrow of the regime. The United States stumbled repeatedly as it attempted to wage counterinsurgency warfare. Two years after the war, a force of 140,000 American troops remained in a country which, it had been anticipated, they would have long since largely evacuated. Through mid-2005 the Americans suffered approximately 10,000 casualties, a number utterly unanticipated before the conflict. Though the Americans had cleared some cities of insurgents (most notably the Sunni town of Falluja), others (Mosul, most notably) had gone from pacified if uneasy urban centers to dangerously violent centers of opposition to the Americans and the Iraqis working with them. The war was also vastly more expensive than anticipated. Far from living off its oil revenues, the fledgling Iraqi state required tens of billions of dollars of aid. Electrical power had barely returned to prewar levels of supply.

  Part of what made this phase of the war so puzzling was the nature of the enemy. Unlike classic insurgencies of the past—the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) operating against the French in the 1950s, for example, or the Viet Cong of the 1960s, the Iraqi resistance was internally divided between Sunnis and Shi’a, former Ba’athists and foreign jihadis, criminals and tribal groups, who only periodically worked with each other. The only notable leader among them, Musab al Zarqawi, was a Jordanian, viewed with suspicion by a xenophobic population. The insurgents had no unifying message of independence or ideology, and their tactics—horrific suicide bombings of civilians—antagonized as much as they intimidated. Although their tactics improved over time, they displayed little of the battlefield competence of other insurgent movements, and they were up against a military whose advantages in every sphere of military technology and training were extraordinary.

  And yet the war burned on.

  Early on in the insurgency some commentators explained the difficulty simply in terms of numbers—and indeed the American military itself took this view. Using such hoary rules of thumb as that attributed to Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer in Malaya, that it requires ten regulars to every guerrilla, the Americans would have seemed to need twice as many troops as they had. But numbers alone did not count for American missteps. When set against the historical record, much of American behavior appeared baffling.

  In particular, two American failures stand out. All successful counterinsurgencies require a blending of civilian and military measures; such wars are about security, to be sure, but also about the provision of electrical power, jobs, and the basic requirements of a decent life such as sewage treatment and schools. To that end, security and civic action walk hand in hand, and successful counterinsurgency almost invariably requires unified action and unity of command, under a politically sophisticated general or a militarily knowledgeable civilian leader. In Iraq, the United States put in place an occupation structure that separated the two and, in particular, during the first critical year after the overthrow of Saddam, was headed by a civilian (Ambassador Paul Bremer) and a military commander (Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez) who came to loathe one another.

  If unity of command escaped the Americans, so too did one of the cardinal requirements of counterinsurgency—developing local forces. Beginning with the abrupt dismissal of the Iraqi armed forces, followed by implausible schemes to develop an Iraqi military purely for external defense (rather than internal threats), and continuing with the training of security forces by contractors rather than American units, the United States did an abysmal job of developing the only kinds of units that could ultimately defeat the insurgency—units composed of Iraqis, not Americans.

  These critical failures were accompanied by others, less grievous, perhaps, but serious enough. The preference for expensive, large-scale reconstruction projects run by American or European companies over smaller, local enterprises that would employ Iraqis and thereby take aggrieved and restless young men off the street, for example, meant that the insurgents could find plenty of recruits willing to take a potshot at the Americans for a modest sum of money. Botched negotiations with the Iraqi transitional government meant that a large insurgent stronghold in Falluja was allowed to develop until the spring of 2005, when United States Marines wiped it out in a bloody assault. But the two core failures—absence of unity of command at the top, and failure to develop Iraqi forces—made others more likely, and more serious.

  What is peculiar is that these two failures represent in turn a dismal failure to learn from the past. Unity of command was a critical ingredient of the British counterinsurgency in Malaya in the 1950s, and an important one in the American Civil Operations Rural Development Support (CORDS) program in Vietnam in the late 1960s (despite the larger failure of that war). For that matter, unity of command was crucial for American counterinsurgency in the Philippines a century earlier. Successful American counterinsurgency in El Salvador in the 1980s rested first and foremost on the development of local forces, which had also proven indispensable at the very same time in Afghanistan.

  To some extent, the story of the Iraqi insurgency represented an American failure to anticipate the chaos of a society subjected to decades of exceptionally brutal dictatorship and prolonged warfare. Having listened too much, perhaps, to Iraqi exiles, the American government failed to anticipate that once the clamps of Saddam’s rule were removed, what would remain were not the structures of a fairly normal society, but a deeply fractured and distressed collection of individuals and groups, too traumatized for real self-rule and certainly for reconstruction.

  The unexpected, sustained violence after the spring of 2003 represented even more a failure to learn—and this from a military that prided itself on the quality of its military educational system. Following the Vietnam war the American mi
litary self-consciously turned its back on that experience, and even as it fought small or irregular wars it attempted to define those experiences as marginal, or even in some respects illegitimate. The counterinsurgency manuals of the new century either dealt with peacekeeping, or were simply the leftovers of the Vietnam era—as if modern insurgents were still Communist-led peasants. The staff schools and war colleges focused on high intensity warfare, scanting the study of insurgency and in some ways denying its legitimacy. For many military and political leaders the lessons of Vietnam had to do not with strategy and operations—with how the United States might have succeeded, in other words—but with the parlous decision-making that took the country into that conflict. Postwar conflicts such as the El Salvador insurgency received attention only from specialists and sub-communities such as special forces officers.

  The military studied its past as a set of morality plays, the failures of Vietnam set against the successes of the first Gulf War. In the former, the common civilian and military narrative had it, ill-defined objectives, a lack of public support, and timid or dishonest civilian and military leadership got us into a war which either should not have been fought or that could have been won by purely conventional means. In the latter, the narrative continued, victory came through a tightly controlled, massive application of force in pursuit of simple and limited objectives.

  This narrative was at best grossly simplified, and at worst wrong. By understanding history in this way, the American defense establishment set itself up to forget much of what it had known about fighting insurgencies. It may not have been able to anticipate the problems it would face in Iraq (although some would argue that it should have), and it certainly displayed a remarkable ability to adapt, as small unit leaders reacquainted themselves with some of the lasting verities of irregular warfare, but it had failed to learn, and its men and women paid a high price for that failure.

 

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