The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

by Victor Davis Hanson

  American culture and military technology have also shaped our approach to multilateralism, or the desirability of using force only under the auspices of international authorities. In fact, America’s deep-rooted individualism, coupled with our distance from Europe and Asia, has never made us very comfortable with fighting in coalitions, despite protestations to the contrary. For the first 130 years of our history, we conducted no major wars outside our own continent; and while the United States intervened constantly in South America, Asia, and North Africa, nineteenth-century American marines and gunboats usually did so solely under the direction of the president.

  We came into both the First World War and the Second World War late, and were always somewhat uneasy with our allies, preferring to work mostly alone in the Pacific war from 1942 to 1945. The story of the European theater of the Second World War is a narrative of acrimony between General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Bernard Montgomery, and their legions of lieutenants who bickered constantly over everything from adaptations in American-supplied equipment to the strategy of a narrow- or broad-front advance into Germany. To read the memoirs of General John J. Pershing is to learn of daily strife with his French and British counterparts who wished to incorporate American troops under their own command aegis. The United Nations participation in the Korean War was a fluke, due to a temporary Soviet boycott of the Security Council that facilitated international sanction and support to what began and remained, in terms of aggregate troop strength on the ground, largely an American effort. Most nations agreed to send troops only when it seemed that, after Incheon, American forces were quickly going to reach the Yalu and unify the peninsula—and then became horrified that their battalions were instead facing hundreds of thousands of advancing Chinese.

  NATO was not involved in Vietnam, a war that remained, for good or evil, mostly an American unilateral affair. And looking back to the first Gulf War, the chief criticism of the first Bush administration was the failure to invade Baghdad and remove Saddam Hussein. This controversial decision is usually attributed to the fear of losing Arab support and dividing our U.N.-mandated coalition—a restraining multilateralism not repeated against Milošević or in the subsequent campaign against Saddam Hussein, despite the presence of allies in both later conflicts. It mattered little to the reluctant Europeans—who had no desire to send sizable combat contingents to Afghanistan to bulk up NATO expeditionary forces—whether George W. Bush or Barack Obama was the American commander in chief begging them to participate in more bellicose fashion along the Pakistani border.

  For all the depression over the long war in Iraq, the worry about the global financial crisis, and calls for far more American consultation with allies, this spirit of American military independence nevertheless has grown with our increasing confidence in the unrivaled capability of our military power, as well as our vague sense of being the only force on the world scene capable of ensuring order in the post–Cold War, post–September 11 world. America’s long commitment to a blue-water navy, multistage guided missiles, long-range bombers, antiballistic missile systems, Mach 2 interceptors, Star Wars, and airborne divisions reflects this desire to project military power abroad, with minimum reliance on other nations, while keeping the battlefield away from the continental United States.

  When we talk of properly acting in concert with either Western or democratic allies, we really mean the desire to obtain global legitimacy, additional financing, the assistance of “soft power” allied boycotts and embargoes of rogue nations, or bases proximate to the front. Allied support does not usually entail an additional Indian aircraft carrier, German air wing, French armored division, or Dutch Special Forces brigade.

  The Future of American Warfare

  WHAT IS THE future of American military practice, both technological and strategic? Will it conform to these general cultural traits so deeply embedded in our past? Technologically, the United States will continue to seek ways of conducting small-scale wars rapidly with few casualties—along the lines of employing current GPS-guided bombs and cruise missiles that can be accurately controlled by a few highly trained ground operatives with laptops, cell phones, and radios.

  That said, our enemies know better. The way to check American power by nonstate belligerents such as terrorists and insurgents is to draw Americans into urban warfare or operations on difficult terrain, with plenty of civilian bystanders who, in the enemy’s mind, can conveniently become collateral damage, protest on global television, or serve as human shields for the terrorists among them. Only that way can American technological superiority be nullified, and American soldiers killed by the dozen, photographed, and broadcast instantly around the globe.

  The best path for a Hezbollah terrorist or Iranian Revolutionary Guardsman to kill Americans is not to be exposed in open terrain like the Serbians of 1998 or Saddam’s Baathists in 1991. The more American officers emphasize counterinsurgency, the obvious need for a greater mastery of foreign languages, closer affinity with diverse cultures, and more subtlety in winning hearts and minds, the less likely the public will wish to deploy their “special operations” contingents that cannot promise either traditional victory or a short and clearly-defined war. In contrast, the American character has always been more at ease with instantaneous bombing, shelling, and sweeping across open terrain in firing tanks—not nation-building, counterinsurgency, and theaterless battlefields where victory takes years and progress is not measured in the number of enemy dead or miles of enemy territory gained. Indeed, postmodern Americans are on the horns of a dilemma, in a variety of contexts.

  We concede that American success in fostering democracy in postwar Germany, Italy, and Japan was predicated by age-old, rather dark assumptions that the Nazis, Fascists, and Japanese militarists had to be defeated, humiliated, and only then helped—and in that order. But whereas we now welcome the latter step of aiding a former enemy in the building of democracy, we loathe the first two requisites of inflicting a level of damage to ensure its success.

  In terms of the tools of war for larger, more conventional theater conflicts, we may return to the past practice of “more, not just better,” as the costs of high-tech weaponry and training reach astronomic levels. In the Second World War, America produced tens of thousands of durably built and simply operated fighters and bombers. We may see a similar reliance on mass-produced and inexpensive weapons in wars to come. The exorbitant expense of individual aircraft—B-2 bombers, for example, cost $1 billion each, older B-1 bombers cost $250 million—coupled with the idea of the inviolability of our pilots’ lives, is already turning our attention to the mass production of drones. Sending a fleet of one hundred Predator drones with Hellfire missiles against a target might be as cheap and effective as two Air Force F-22 strike fighters—together costing $300 million, apart from their multimillion-dollar arsenals.

  In short, we sense that the Pentagon is spending too much money on too few weapons, thus raising constant worries over the catastrophic financial consequences of losing a B-2 or F-17—even as we see spectacular one-sided punitive air victories precisely because of the qualitative superiority of assets like these.

  The entrepreneurial genius of Silicon Valley and its epigones, coupled with the engineering and technological savvy of our universities, has ensured space-age weaponry far in advance of anything seen abroad. But the very temptation to constantly evolve and improve this technology has meant that we are now caught in the position of having ever fewer near-perfect arms rather than a plethora of very good weapons that will do. Given the horrors of 1941-43, when prewar disarmament ensured that thousands of American soldiers were killed in substandard tanks and planes, and given American chauvinism that we must be “best” in the world in terms of our weaponry’s performance, it is ever harder for war planners to adopt a “good enough” attitude that would accept munitions far better than those available to our enemies, but not as good as the United States in theory could design and produce, albeit in smaller numbers.
/>
  Americans apparently cannot fathom the idea that a ragtag bearded jihadist, without formal education and burdened by seventh-century cultural prejudices, is often in fact an adroit strategic thinker, with an uncanny understanding of American national character, both our strengths and fallibilities. He rightly senses that a roadside bomb and a propane tank can not only take out a four-million-dollar tank but also, more important, cause a level of frustration and demoralization even greater than the material loss. To resolve this paradox of cost and protection, planners will have to find a way to make more weapons more cheaply, while at the same time reducing the requirement for more manpower—and the concurrent rising risk of greater exposure to death and dismemberment. And yet, as we have seen in prior chapters, there is no substitute for manpower on the ground, despite the killing power of new high-tech weaponry.

  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”

  IT 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.