Chapter 12
The Unequal Dialogue:
The Theory and Reality of
Civil-Military Relations and the
Use of Force
Eliot A. Cohen
In The Edge of the Sword, a short but profound work on civil-military relations written a bit more than a decade after World War I and reflecting its
experiences, Charles de Gaulle captured some of the differences between
the soldier and the statesman of his day:
The soldier often regards the man of politics as unreliable, inconstant, and
greedy for the limelight. Bred on imperatives, the military temperament is as-
tonished by the number of pretenses in which the statesman has to indulge. . . . The impassioned twists and turns, the dominant concern with the
effect to be produced, the appearance of weighing others in terms not of their
merit but of their influence-—all inevitable characteristics in the civilian
whose authority rests upon the popular will-cannot but worry the professional soldier, broken in, as he is, to a life of hard duties, self-effacement, and
respect shown for services rendered. . . .
Inversely, the taste for system, the self-assurance and the rigidity which, as
the result of prolonged constraint, are inbred in the soldier, seem to the politicians tiresome and unattractive. Everything in the military code which is ab-
solute, peremptory and not to be questioned, is repugnant to those who live
in a world of rough and ready solutions, endless intriguing and decisions
which may be reversed at a moment's notice (De Gaulle 1960, 98-99; see also
Hoy 1996; Spector 1999).
Half a century later, Ariel Sharon, an Israeli soldier turned politician,
expressed an even greater sense of bafflement:
Like politics, military life is a constant struggle. But with all the difficulties
and bitterness that may develop, at least there are certain rules. In politics
there are no rules, no sense of proportion, no sensible hierarchy. An Israeli
430 l SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
military man setting foot in this new world has most likely experienced great
victories and also terrible defeats. He has had moments of exultation and moments of deepest grief. He knows what it is to be supremely confident, even
inspired. But he has suffered the most abject fear and the deepest horror. He
has made decisions about life and death, for himself as well as for others.
The same person enters the political world and finds that he has one
mouth to speak with and one hand to vote with, exactly like the man sitting
next to him. And that man perhaps has never witnessed or experienced anything profound or anything dramatic in his life. He does not know either the
heights or the depths. He has never tested himself or made critical decisions
or taken responsibility for his life or the lives of his fellows. And this man—it
seems incredible—but this man too has one mouth and one hand (Sharon
1989).
Sharon had been a dashing paratrooper, hero of Israel's border
conflicts in the early 1950s, as well as the 1956, 1967, and 1973 Arablsraeli wars. As a civilian defense minister, he led his country into the ruinous Lebanon War of 1982. Nonetheless, there is something candid in
the disdain that he expresses for politicians, and one suspects that many
others in uniform have shared his views.
That a gap of personality, outlook, and personal background exists
between civilian and military authority, particularly in wartime, is generally acknowledged to be the case. These two excerpts suggest that it can
hardly be otherwise. The democratic statesman claws his way to the top
in an unstructured environment characterized by shifting coalitions, unsparing and often unfair criticism from journalist, foe, and even friend,
and the constant possibility of swift and humiliating defeat at the polls.
“There is, in time of peace, organised opposition which with tireless industry assembles all the worst possible facts, draws from them the most
alarming conclusions, and imputes the most unworthy motives,” wrote
Winston Churchill in the 1920s. The soldier, by contrast (at least as seen
from Churchill's vantage point, different than that of de Gaulle and
Sharon), “is in the main surrounded by smiling and respectful faces,” a
staff whose loyalty and “sense of discipline, lead them to try to win his
favour, or at least to spare his feelings, on every occasion” (Churchill
1927, 195).
One might multiply such psychological sketches, but they are common from all wars. The modern military commander and the politician
are, in most cases, very different kinds of ambitious people whose careers
have taken them on very different paths; the one having risen, usually
over decades, through gradually ascending ranks of responsibility, the
other having struggled in the chaos of politics. One has learned to exercise command; the other to win favor and exert influence. The soldier has
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431
passed most of his life in a peaceful, structured, hierarchical environment
dominated by the rhetoric, and often the reality, of duty, fidelity, and
honor; the politician, ironically, has engaged in daily, swirling combat, albeit of a bloodless kind, in which seniority and experience may suddenly
count for very little. The general or admiral may be expected, in modern
times, to have mastered the technology and techniques of the peculiar
craft of war; the politician is a generalist, whose interest in things military
is, in most cases, intermittent but intense, and except in the rarest of circumstances, amateurish. It is to be expected that there would be a gap between individuals with such different experiences of life. Indeed, it
would be astounding were anything else the case. It is at least as large as
the gap between a doctor and patient, a lawyer and client, or architect
and prospective mansion owner, although different from all of these and
often greater.
To be sure, individuals have often bridged the gap in background
and values between civilians and soldiers. The politician become soldier
has been rare since the nineteenth century, although not entirely unknown: a Theodore Roosevelt, for example. There have long been politicians who crave the company and defer to the judgment of generals,
which is not so much an obliteration of the gap as a unilateral bridging of
it. But most often it is generals who have become politicians, like those
mentioned above. In the American experience one thinks of Dwight D.
Eisenhower as the most successful of these, leaving aside George Washington as a man sui generis. For the most part, American generals have
made odd or awkward politicians, as in the case of Ulysses S. Grant, failing utterly (like William Westmoreland and before him Leonard Wood
and Winfield Scott), or prudently withdrawing from the field (like Colin
Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf), perhaps out of unwillingness to suffer the abuse that is normally the lot of an elected official. The general-as-politician flourishes in the aftermath of a great war, or at a time of
great crisis, but even successes such as Charles de Gaulle or Yitzhak
Rabin never really shed the aloofness and discomfort with routine democratic politics that characterized them as professional soldiers. The gap
between khaki and mufti, “brass” and “frocks” persists, even after soldiers have doffed the uniform, or if civilians attempt to don it.
There is a second kind of gap, however, and one that is more problematic because it is normative, rather than positive--a description of
how things should be, rather than how they are. This second gap is one of
responsibilities, function, and expectation. It is the gap often declared desirable by soldier and statesman alike with respect to how wars should be
fought. In this view—what we may term the normal theory of civilmilitary relations at the top—the politician and the soldier have very dif-
432 I SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
ferent functions. The politician sets goals and makes policy. He or she
alone authorizes the use of force, setting broad boundaries for its use, establishing the objectives of war, and concluding it with peace negotiations. Providing the resources the military needs, the politician balances
them with the other requirements of national life; he selects, and if necessary removes, the most senior commanders. He arranges alliances and
pacts, and sets, in conference with his military advisors, the broad outlines of strategy. From the commander he has the right to expect candid
advice, dedication to the mission at hand, and technical competence.
The soldier, within these limits, is the master of operations and tactics; his voice must be heard, if not entirely controlling, in the setting of
strategy. He should be freed from scrutiny in matters of detail, such as the
selection of weapons of war, the choice of subordinate commanders, the
timing of military operations, the methods of attack or defense, and the
arrangement of command relationships with other components of the
armed forces. From the politician he has the right to expect unambiguous
objectives, discretion, and public support. He must understand political
constraints, but should have a free hand. Soldiers and political authorities
should "divide the nation’s war-making responsibilities, leaving each
group to perform its own essential function in an optimal manner”
(Matthews 1998, 3).
This theory of the normative gap reflects as well a view about the
way in which countries should use force. Perhaps best articulated in the
six rules devised by U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, it calls
for the use of force only for vital interests, with a clear commitment to
winning, in support of simple and clear objectives, and the ensuring of
public support before the actual conduct of military operations
(Weinberger 1984, 21; Powell 1995; Cohen 1995, 102-110). If there is a
clear gap between soldiers and politicians—between those who obediently but independently use force, and those who ordain its purposes—the objectives set for the use of force must be clear and simple.
Thus, a theory of civil-military relations contains within it a theory of
strategy.
The reality of wartime civil-military relations is far different. At its
best—in the hands of a great statesman like Abraham Lincoln, Georges
Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, or David Ben Gurion—it consists rather
of an unequal dialogue between politician and soldier. In practice, as opposed to theory, the bounds of civilian and military authority seem far
blurrier than either might like, or than scholars might expect. Rather than
a comfortable division of labor, we observe in history a far more tense
and exhausting interaction over matters of detail and not simply the
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broad outlines of strategy. The reasons for this difficult partnership, in
which civil authority must hold the upper hand, lies not merely in the individual peculiarities of powerful leaders, but in the nature of war itself.
Because strategy consists so often of seemingly detailed judgments that
have broader implications, and because of limitations on the very nature
of military professionalism itself, civilian authority must prepare itself to
engage far more actively with its military subordinates than the normal
theory would suggest.
The Normal Theory of Civil-Military Relations
The “normal theory" of civil-military relations rests, in the United States
at any rate, on two pillars: a conception of professionalism most clearly
described by Samuel P. Huntington in his classic work, The Soldier and the
State, and on a reading of the experience of the Vietnam War. The Soldier
and the State set the terms of debate about civil-military relations in this
country. Huntington describes officership as a profession, much like
medicine or the law. Like those vocations, officership was distinguished
by expertise in a particular area of human affairs, a sense of responsibility
that lends an importance transcending monetary rewards to one’s activ-
ity, and corporateness, a social awareness and commitment to members of
one’s group (Huntington 1959, 8-11). For Huntington, the central skill of
the soldier is the “management of violence," the arts of planning, organizing, and employing military force, but not applying it oneself. To be
sure, this may mean that "not all officers are professional military
officers” (Huntington 1963, 785-786). Those who specialize in career areas not directly related to the management of violence are not truly military professionals. Neither, by implication, are those whose specialty is
the application of violence rather than its management and planning.
Huntington believes in the distinctiveness of the military mindset. It
is, he says in a notable passage, “pessimistic, collectivist, historically
inclined, power-oriented, nationalistic, militaristic, pacifist, and instrumentalist in its view of the military profession. It is, in brief, realistic and
conservative” (Huntington 1959, 68). To be sure, this is an ideal type. But
Huntington maintains that it is powerful nonetheless, and that this military ethos is a source of great strength, not merely for the military but for
society more broadly. In the concluding pages of The Soldier and the State,
he draws a striking contrast between the appearance and the inner reality
of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the neighboring town of
Highland Falls: appearances that reflect cultural differences. The dazzling
heterogeneity and anarchy of democratic society have something to
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learn, he argues, from the austerity and purposefulness of the military
order.
I
Huntington’s recipe for ensuring civilian dominance over the armed
forces requires a sharp division between civilian and military roles. “Objective control”—a form of civilian control based on efforts to increase the
professionalism of the officer corps, carving off for it a sphere of action independent of politics——is, in his view, the preferable form of civil-military
relations. He contrasts "objective control” with what he calls “subjective
control,” which aims to tame the military in various ways, chiefly by joining military and civilian elites, as in aristocratic armies, rendering it politically aware and possibly active, but also a self-conscious extension of the
body politic. In the contemporary world those who support this latter
means of control are ”fusionists,” who believe that the old categories of
political and military matters have blurred (Huntington 1959, 80ff.,
351-360). In a previous age they would have asserted civilian control by
keeping officership the preserve of the ruling social class; in the current
era they seek to blur the autonomous nature of military professionalism.
"The essence of objective civilian control,” by way of contrast, “is the recognition of autonomous military professionalism" (Huntington 1959, 83).
Armies do best when military matters are left solely to officers, and when
clear distinctions are drawn between their activities and those of politicians. Officers motivated by dedication to a politically sterile and neutral
military ideal—”the Good Soldier,” and "the Best Regiment"—will turn
in a performance superior to those motivated by ideology or merely personal drives such as ambition or vainglory (Huntington 1959, 74).
For Huntington, then, the statesman is in the position of a patient under the care of a surgeon. He may freely decide whether or not to have an
operation, he may choose one doctor over another, and he may even
make a decision among different surgical options, although that is more
rare and problematic. He may not, however, supervise a surgical procedure, select the doctor's scalpel, or rearrange the operating room to his
liking. Even the patient who has medical training is well-advised not to
attempt to do so, and indeed, his doctor will almost surely resent a
colleague-patient’s efforts along such lines. The result is, therefore, a limited degree of civilian control over military matters. Huntington quotes
approvingly a 1936 Command and General Staff College publication:
Politics and strategy are radically and fundamentally things apart. Strategy
begins where politics ends. All that soldiers ask is that once the policy is set-
tled, strategy and command shall be regarded as being in a sphere apart from
politics. . . . The line of demarcation must be drawn between politics and
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strategy, supply, and operations. Having found this line, all sides must ab-
stain from trespassing (Huntington 1959, 308).
This sharp separation—the normative gap in civil-military relations—is possible because military expertise is, in Huntington's view,
definable and capable of being isolated. “The criteria of military
efficiency are limited, concrete, and relatively objective; the criteria of political wisdom are indefinite, ambiguous, and highly subjective” (Huntington 1959, 76). Political leaders enhance their control by making the
military austerely professional, while reserving to themselves alone the
passing of judgments on matters of policy, as opposed to technical military matters. Military expertise, in Huntington's view, is a constant:
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The peculiar skill of the military officer is universal in the sense that its essence is not affected by changes in time or location. Iust as the qualifications
of a good surgeon are the same in Zurich as they are in New York, the same
standards of professional military competence apply in Russia as in America
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and in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth (Huntington 1959, 13).
The Huntingtonian conception of military professionalism remains
the dominant view within the U.S. defense establishment. As a practical
matter, the Huntingtonian concept was most clearly vindicated in debate
leading up to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which substantially increased the power of the Ioint Staff and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff at the expense of the military services and even, to some extent,
the Office of the Secretary of Defense (U.S. Congress 1985). Not only did
the originators of that legislation explicitly endorse Huntington's reading
of American military history; they saw their responsibility as one of providing more and better centralized autonomous military advice to civilian leaders (U.S. Congress 1985).
The Huntingtonian view of civil-military relations has been reinforced by the popular reading of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, the one
viewed as a conflict characterized by civilian interference in the details of
warmaking, the other a model of benign operational and tactical neglect
by an enlightened civilian leadership (Iohnson 1997). The belief that the
Vietnam debacle resulted primarily from civilian micro-management
shaped the attitudes of, for example, President George H. W. Bush. In recounting the crisis leading up to the Gulf War, Bush recalled General
Colin Powell’s demand for “freedom of action to do the job once the political decision had been made. . . . I did not want to repeat the problems
of the Vietnam War (or numerous wars throughout history), where the
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political leadership meddled with military operations. I would avoid
micromanaging the military" (Bush and Scowcroft 1998, 354).
And, indeed, Bush is generally viewed as having refrained from doing just that. The chief of staff to General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in Southwest Asia, declared: “Schwarzkopf was
never second-guessed by civilians, and that's the way it ought to work”
(Gertz 1993). Bush declared, when he received the Association of the U.S.
Army’s George Catlett Marshall Medal, “I vowed that I would never
send an American soldier into combat with one hand tied behind that
soldier's back. We did the politics and you superbly did the fighting”
(Masters 1993). Small wonder, then, that the editor of the U.S. Army War
College's journal has recently written to his military colleagues:
there will be instances where civilian officials with Napoleon complexes and
micromanaging mentalities are prompted to seize the reins of operational
control. And having taken control, there will be times when they then begin
to fumble toward disaster. When this threatens to happen, the nation’s top
soldier . . . must summon the courage to rise and say to his civilian masters,
"You can't do that!" and then stride to the focal point of decision and tell
them how it must be done (Matthews 1996, 36).
Such an understanding of the roles of civilian and soldier reflects
popular understandings as well. The 1996 movie, ”Independence Day,”
for example, features only one notable villain (aside, that is, from the
aliens who are attempting to devastate and conquer the Earth)—an arrogant Secretary of Defense who attempts to direct the American military’s
counterattack against the invaders from outer space. Only after the interfering and deceitful civilian is out of the way can the president, a former
Air Force combat pilot who gets back into the cockpit to lead the climactic
aerial battle and, with his military assistants (aided by one civilian scientist in a purely technical role), get on with the job of defeating the foe.
In the modern American theory of civil-military relations—partly
theory as understood by academics, but also theory as articulated by politicians and journalists-—the failure of Vietnam resulted from civilian
meddling and interference with the conduct of military operations; the
Gulf War success resulted from a healthy constriction of the civilian role
to ordering, launching, and then ending the war, and nothing in between.
The shadow of the earlier war still loomed thirty years later, its gloom
seemingly the darker for the bright example of the Gulf War. Thus, when
American and European aircraft began bombing Serbia in March 1999,
Air Force generals, unhappy about political restraints on targeting, “fretted privately about a ‘new Vietnam” (Harden 1999). A month into the
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campaign, Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times began a generally
negative account with an ominous reference to President Lyndon B. ]ohnson, “who insisted on having almost absolute control over what to bomb
and when to bomb it” (Myers 1999a). When reporters discussed civilmilitary relations at the top, it was to contrast, almost always unfavorably, the tense relationships between Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Chairman of the Ioint Chiefs of Staff General Henry Shelton and
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, with the
closer relationships between Secretary Dick Cheney and Generals Powell
and Schwarzkopf (Myers and Schmitt 1999). Interestingly, and despite
the critical account of civil-military relations in that war, the Kosovo
conflict ended by evicting Serb forces from that unhappy province, as desired, without a single American combat casualty. The Serb dictator who
had provoked American intervention fell from power, in contrast to his
Iraqi counterpart who had, in the decade since the Gulf War, wriggled
out from under the sanctions regime that was supposed to bring his rule
to an end.
The Historical Record vs. the Normal Theory
Does military history really bear out the "normal" theory of civil-military
relations, as President Bush believed? If the normal theory of civilmilitary relations were valid, one would expect the most successful war
efforts to be characterized by the kind of civilian remoteness from military operational decision-making that it prescribes. This is not, in fact, the
case. Indeed, it is precisely those cases in which the military has had the
freest hand—Germany in World War l and Iapan in World War II-—-that
have produced the greatest ruin to a state. And ruin has stemmed not
simply from political and hence strategic errors, but from egregious operational blunders as well. The catalogue of mistakes that emerge from military considerations untrammeled not only by political considerations,
but by the sober scrutiny of mere common sense, is a large one. Thus,
Germany's naval staff launched unrestricted submarine warfare against
Great Britain in 1917 with a handful of submarines capable of operations
in the North Atlantic, misjudging completely the ability of Great Britain
to control losses by using of convoys, substituting for certain imports,
and outbuilding the merchant-ship sinkings that it suffered, not to mention the calamitous effects, for Germany, of bringing the United States
into the war (Herwig 1997). No less notorious was the Schlieffen Plan, by
which Germany attempted to win the war in 1914 with a single throw of
the dice. In World War II the Iapanese military, obsessed with the big battle, ignored the importance of waging war against the tenuous American
438 I SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
lines of communication to Australia and the South Pacific, and neglected,
until too late, the imperative of fortifying the ring of islands it hoped to
hold against American counterthrusts.
Nor have democratic militaries done much better when civilian leadership has failed to probe their technique, and test their assumptions. All
of the militaries in World War I operated, to a remarkable degree, free of
civilian constraints, yet, to a depressing degree, the generals of that war
proved themselves incapable of changing their mental frameworks and
patterns of command to adapt to the circumstances of trench warfare.
Whether it was General ]ohn Pershing deprecating the need for even
such essential tools of trench warfare as light machine guns, or British
generals hoarding masses of cavalry for a breakthrough that never came,
or French generals hurling masses of brightly clad men across open
ground, the catalogue of general officer-induced errors—gross and even
grotesque misjudgments about how to wage war—is no less impressive
than that of politicians (Millett 1986, 235-256).
Nor were such errors peculiar to the first World War, for they recurred in the second. The U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II clung to a
doctrine of unescorted precision bombing that dissolved in the slaughter
over the skies of the Third Reich. The Army Ground Forces invested
heavily in a technology and a concept—the tank destroyer—-that failed
miserably. The British army struggled for years to devise an organization
suitable for armored warfare. In more recent times, the Israeli military in
1967 and afterwards has operated with remarkably little civilian oversight of its professional activities. Yet the dazzling campaigns of that war,
shaped largely by a professional general staff, not only exceeded the
goals set by civilian authority (who wished a halt at the Sinai passes, not
along the Suez Canal); they paved the way, in some measure, for the disastrous war that followed only six years later. In that latter conflict the
leaders of the Israel Defense Forces, clinging to an obsolete doctrine that
scorned infantry and even, in some measure, artillery, in favor of tanks
and jet aircraft, fell victim to their own arrogance as Egyptian and Syrian
forces surprised the IDF and dealt it humiliating defeats in the first days
of the 1973 War.
For Americans, much of the argument about “meddling” or “micromanagement” reflects the real or remembered experience of the Vietnam
War. In that conflict, President Lyndon Iohnson did indeed control the
selection of targets in North Vietnam. However, as Mark Clodfelter
has pointed out, the Ioint Chiefs of Staff ultimately got most of the
points they wished to hit (Clodfelter 1989, 203-210). What is often forgotten is how little scrutiny politicians gave the war in South Vietnam,
which they left very largely in the hands of the American military, and
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in particular the commander of American forces there, General
William Westmoreland. It was a military, not a civilian, decision to
wage attritional warfare resting on the concept of search and destroy;
indeed, the first critiques of the Vietnam War by military officers tacitly
acknowledged just that point. Military operational concepts—especially
Westmoreland’s attritional strategy of killing more Communist guerrillas
and soldiers than the other side could replace—-were often proven wrong,
particularly from the broadest strategic point of view. Beyond this, the record suggests that the ]oint Chiefs of Staff had no alternative operational
conception beyond increased bombing of North Vietnam, a course that
risked widening the war, and whose payoffs were unclear. The extraordinarily rapid build-up of American forces in Vietnam from 1965
on—nearly 165,000 troops permanently stationed in a country with minimal infrastructure, nearly half a million within two years——-bespeaks anything other than timid civilian incrementalism. Micro-management of the
air war in the North—where the international political stakes were so
much higher—certainly occurred, although its effects remain a matter of
dispute; it is less accurate to say the same of the more complex struggle in
the South.
Lincoln Finds a General
If the normal theory of civil-military relations is suspect, what have been
the successful practices of the past? To begin with, effective war statesmen have acted well beyond the minimal roles assigned to them by the
normal theory of civil-military relations, viz. the setting of purpose, the
approval of action, and the termination of conflict. Success in the waging
of war seems to have been accompanied by a great deal of crossing of the
civil-military gap by politicians probing, testing, haranguing, and manipulating their military subordinates about technical matters as well as
strategic ones. It has begun, however, with the selection and control of
military leaders, a process far more complicated than one might think. A
number of cases illustrate the point.
Abraham Lincoln’s trials with his generals, beginning with his struggles with the self-pitying, operationally timorous, vainglorious commander of the Army of the Potomac from the summer of 1861 through
the fall of 1862, Major General George McClellan, have assumed something of the status of parables. (Indeed, when a White House official in
1991 compared General Norman Schwarzkopf, the theater commander in
the Persian Gulf, to McClellan, Schwarzkopf exploded in fury: he understood perfectly the implied aspersions on his competence and subordination to civilian authority.) The story of McClellan, and the corresponding
440 l SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
rise of Ulysses S. Grant, who suffered from neither his predecessor’s
overweening ego nor his reluctance for battle, has led many authors to
define Lincoln’s achievement as a war president as a task chiefly, though
not exclusively, of finding the man who could get the job done (Basler
1955, VII:324; Williams 1952, 7-8, 13). However, the closer one examines
the record, the more difficult it becomes to sustain the thesis that the
problem of high command in the Civil War boiled down to the problem
of merely finding a general, rather than guiding and directing the one
Lincoln found. Lincoln did not have a competent cadre of generals at his
disposal; indeed competence itself was and is a slippery term. Some of
these men, such as McClellan, were excellent drill masters, suitable for
organizing an army and teaching it the fundamentals of its business, but
no more. Others could provide outstanding service, but only in particular
tasks (cavalry raiding, for example) or particular operational contexts
(e.g., the defense). When the war came, none of them (with the possible
exception of General Winfield Scott, the octogenarian commander of the
Army in 1860) had the comprehensive military experience Lincoln required. Still others would show their talents only after a series of errors
and mishaps that called their abilities into question. This is most notably
true of Sherman and Grant. The former's mental instability, the latter’s alcoholic bouts and failure on the first day at Shiloh, raised doubts about
their military qualities that took some time to dispel. In considering his
generals, Lincoln had to develop his own military judgment in order to
know which personal traits and military failures to ignore, and which bespoke a fundamental lack of fitness for the job.
From the first Lincoln tended not to order, but to question, prod, and
suggest. He did this, however, after soliciting military advice from various sources. He queried junior officers about the possibility of relieving
Fort Sumter; he consulted General Scott after the latter’s replacement by
George McClellan; and he turned often to General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, grandson of the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, and former
inspector general of Scott's army in Mexico.
Lincoln also learned directly about the conduct of military operations
from personal observation and interviews with senior military leaders. In
]uly of 1862, for example, he visited the Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula, questioning McClellan and his chief subordinates on the army's
health, morale, and operational prospects (Basler 1955, V:309-312). He repeated such visits to the front on a number of occasions, including in October of that year after the battle of Antietam and in April of 1863 before
General Hooker’s abortive Chancellorsville campaign as well as immediately thereafter. Although Lincoln often did not like what he heard—he
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warned Hooker of the cliques that had formed among the senior generals
of the Army of the Potomac—the president thereby kept his finger on the
army’s pulse (Basler 1955, VI:217). On occasion he acted on the advice of
subordinate generals, as when he imposed a corps-level organization on
an unwilling George McClellan, who preferred not to see such an aggregation of divisional commands below him (Epstein 1991, 21-46).
Perhaps most interesting of all Lincoln's mechanisms of control was
his reliance on Charles Dana, Assistant Secretary of War, as a personal observer of Union armies in the field. Dana, former assistant managing editor (and one-fifth owner) of the New York Tribune when the war broke out,
was summoned in March 1863 by Stanton (who often acted at Lincoln's
behest in such matters) and given a mission. The Secretary of War informed Dana that he and the president wanted such information “as
would enable Mr. Lincoln and himself to settle their minds as to Grant,
about whom at that time there were many doubts, and against whom
there was some complaint" (Dana 1898, 20). Stanton would provide Dana
with a cover assignment as ”special commissioner of the War Department
to investigate the pay service of the Western armies, but your real duty
will be to report to me every day what you see,” for which Dana used a
private cipher. Dana went west to Grant, who wisely hid nothing from
him, despite the misgivings of Grant’s staff. In short order Dana became
attached to Grant and, in fact, became one of his most articulate defenders in Washington.
Dana's training as a journalist made him a superb tool for the
purposes that Lincoln and Stanton had in mind. A regular and faithful
correspondent, he sent depictions of battle that were both accurate and
evocative. Even more valuable, however, was his ability to read character.
Thus he described Major General William S. Rosecrans at Chattanooga:
It is my duty to declare that while few persons exhibit more estimable social
qualities, I have never seen a public man possessing talent with less administrative power, less clearness and steadiness in difficulty, and greater practical
incapacity than General Rosecrans. He has inventive fertility and knowledge,
but he has no strength of will and no concentration of purpose. His mind
scatters; there is no system in the use of his busy days and restless nights, no
courage against individuals in his composition, and, with great love of command, he is a feeble commander. He is conscientious and honest, just as he is
imperious and disputatious; always with a stray vein of caprice and an over-
weening passion for the approbation of his personal friends and the public
outside. Under the present circumstances I consider this army to be very unsafe in his hands; but do know of no man except Thomas who could now be
safely put in his place. Weather pleasant but cloudy (Dana 1898, XXX:215).
442 l SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
Even after Grant had won Lincoln's and Stanton's trust, the president
kept Dana attached to Grant's headquarters, reporting back on the Union
genera1's movements. That Dana had become by this time a great backer
of Grant did not diminish his usefulness. Not only did he remain an acute
recorder of military operations, with a journalist's pen and a senior government official's access; as a sympathetic observer he provided Grant insight into the political environment in which the general had to operate.
For example, Dana bluntly warned General Rawlins, Grant's chief of
staff, of “the interior truth" of the political realities in the summer of 1864,
following a bloody campaign that had cost 70,000 casualties, and that had
left the capital undefended against a Confederate raid. Although the fault
for many of the disasters that had befallen the army were the faults of
Generals Benjamin Butler and George Meade, Grant, as general-in-chief,
had received criticism for failing to relieve either: “That is true & there is
no answer to it” (Simon 1967, 253).
As the end of the war approached, Lincoln maintained a close oversight of Grant's activities. On March 3, 1865, he gave Grant strict instructions, again through Stanton, that he was to “have no conference with
General Lee, unless it be for the capitulation of Lee's army or on solely
minor and purely military matters. . . . You are not to decide, discuss, or
confer upon any political questions. Such questions the President holds
in his own hands; and will submit them to no military conferences or
conventions. Meanwhile you are to press to the utmost, your military advantages" (Basler 1955, VIII:330—331). The president's concern was far
from theoretical. A few days after Lincoln's death, on April 18, 1865,
Sherman agreed to extremely generous surrender terms for General ]oseph Johnston's army, the last major Confederate force in existence. The
terms of the agreement included such provisions as the recognition by
the U.S. government of the Southern state governments, that conflicting
claims to state power would be submitted to the Supreme Court, full political rights for all Southerners, and a general amnesty-—all policies not
countenanced by the administration (Sherman 1990, 842—866). Grant
promptly instructed Sherman to revoke the armistice agreement, and Secretary of War Stanton administered a public repudiation that left
Sherman so outraged that he publicly refused to shake Stanton's hand in
Washington at the Grand Review of the Armies a month later (Dana 1898,
290).
Lincoln, then, did not merely "find" Grant and turn the war over to
him. Rather, down to the last days of his life, Lincoln exercised a constant
oversight and control, often using indirect means, and in particular working through the Secretary of War, Stanton, and chief of staff General
Henry Halleck, while monitoring Grant's activities through Dana's re-
THE UNEQUAL DIALOGUE
l
ports. Lincoln did not shy from calling Grant's attention to operational
and command problems, particularly during Iubal Early's march on
Washington in 1864 (Basler 1955, VII:476). An extraordinarily subtle and
sophisticated politician, the president did not engage in harangues or
personal confrontation, and he exploited a seeming rusticity and simplicity with the guile that those who knew him best remarked on as a distinguishing characteristic.
Clemenceau Pays a Visit
Successful civilian war statesmen select leaders, and in so doing often
probe deeply into the actual conduct of war. As the case of Lincoln suggests, their task is far from over even after they have “found their general.“ Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France during World War
I, had to handle two outstanding military leaders—Ferdinand Foch and
Henri Pétain—who had risen through the rigors of more than three years
of war. Foch, an audacious and indomitable commander, had contributed
to the ruinous offense-mindedness of the French Army before the war,
but had redeemed himself through a combination of tenacity and remarkable good sense in dealing with his British allies. Pétain--dour, pessimistic, mistrustful of Englishmen and Americans--was the better tactician,
one of the inventors of the system of defense in depth that dominated the
Western Front in 1917-18, the hero of Verdun, and a general who knew
how restore order to an army racked by mutiny (Miquel 1996; Mordacq
1930).
Neither general alone could have brought France victory during the
period from November of 1917, when Clemenceau became prime minister, until the war's end, almost exactly a year later. Foch and his disciples
rejected Pétain's doctrine of defense-in-depth, believing that France
should not cede one more hectare of French soil to the German invader.
Pétain, for his part, deplored the resumption of the offensive in the summer of 1918, following the collapse of German offensives that spring. As
it turned out, both men had a point, but on these and other matters their
professional differences were deep and only partly reconcilable.
To arbitrate between the two, but above all to learn how the war was
going, Clemenceau began a remarkable series of trips to the front lines,
usually traveling to the trenches at least once a week, and often twice, often coming within several hundred meters of the enemy (Mordacq 1939,
128ff). Accompanied by his military chef de cabinet, General ]ean Iules
Henri Mordacq (himself a military intellectual and successful division
commander), Clemenceau saw for himself, interviewed military leaders,
and prodded the army to purge senior ranks still filled with an older and
444 I SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
now very weary generation of general officers (Mordaq 1930, 72ff). Even
when Clemenceau believed that he had finally found in Foch the right
general to serve as supreme allied commander and bring the war to a
successful conclusion, Clemenceau did not relax his attention. In very
short order Clemenceau found himself confronted by a generalissimo
who had his own views about how the war should conclude, and the
terms on which peace with Germany should be made. Like Lincoln in
this respect, but faced with a far less docile general than Grant,
Clemenceau eventually prevented Foch from undermining the policies of
the government in the name of military necessity (King 1960). For him, as
for Lincoln, “finding a general" was not the end of the story, not least because of the way in which successful generals become political figures of
enormous importance in their own right.
Churchill Asks a Question
If managing generals is one of the great tasks of civilian war leadership,
so too is the management of risk. Winston Churchill's tenure as prime
minister during World War II reveals this side of war statesmanship, and
with it a very different technique of war leadership. Churchill, as his
generals often complained, kept a close eye on many matters of military
detail, including the scrutiny of exercises as well as actual operations. An
illustrative case is that of VICTOR, an anti-invasion exercise conducted
from Ianuary 22 to 25, 1941, under the auspices of the commander of
Home Forces, General Alan Brooke. At that time, Britain had no major
ally on the continent of Europe and, having staved off the Germans in the
Battle of Britain the previous summer and early fall, was expecting a renewal of the onslaught come spring. Britain was, at the same time,
mounting counteroffensives in Greece and the Middle East.
On March 30, 1941, Churchill sent a detailed query to General
Hastings Ismay, secretary to the Chiefs of Staff:
I presume the details of this remarkable feat [the anti-invasion exercise] have
been worked out by the Staff concerned. Let me see them. For instance, how
many ships and transports carried these five Divisions? How many Armoured vehicles did they comprise? How many motor lorries, how many
guns, how much ammunition, how many men, how many tons of stores,
how far did they advance in the first 48 hours, how many men and vehicles
were assumed to have landed in the first 12 hours, what percentage of loss
were they debited with? What happened to the transports and store-ships
while the first 48 hours of fighting was going on? Had they completed emptying their cargoes, or were they still lying in shore off the beaches? What na-
THE UNEQUAL DIALOGUE I 445
val escort did they have? Was the landing at this point protected by a superior enemy daylight Fighter formations? How many Fighter airplanes did the
enemy have to employ, if so, to cover the landing places? (Prime Minister's
Office 1941, 114.1)
Brooke replied on April 7, giving the figures demanded by Churchill,
including estimates of relatively light enemy loss rates, plus the curious
assumption that the Germans could sustain themselves with petrol and
food captured on British soil. Churchill responded a few weeks later, noting that the exercise gave the Germans credit for far fewer logistical
difficulties than the British had recently faced in conducting unopposed
landings in Greece, and continued to press his inquiries (Prime Minister's
Office 1941, 136.1). The exchange about the anti-invasion exercise continued until mid-May. This episode tells much about Churchill's manner of
dealing with his subordinates: a relentless querying of their assumptions
and arguments, not just once but in successive iterations of a debate. It is
noteworthy that the commander in charge of the exercise, Brooke, responded to the prime minister's arguments and requests for information
point by point: he provided the data but yielded stubbornly, if at all,
on the assessment. Not only did Brook not suffer by standing up to
Churchill, but he ultimately gained promotion to the post of Chief of the
Imperial General Staff and chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee.
Churchill's central concern was not so much Exercise VICTOR itself,
as how it would shape decision-making. “It is of course quite reasonable
for assumptions of this character to be made as a foundation for a military exercise. It would be indeed a darkening counsel to make them the
foundation of serious military thought" (Prime Minister's Office 1941,
136.1). At this very time, the Chiefs of Staff were debating the dispatch of
armored vehicles to the Middle East. Churchill was arguing-—against the
position of several of his military advisors (including the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Iohn Dill)—that the risks of invasion were sufficiently low to make the convoy worth the attempt.
The convoy went through, losing only one ship to a mine and delivering some 250 tanks to the hard-pressed forces in the Middle East. There
was no "sound military judgment" that could be offered about whether
the British could spare those tanks for the Middle East; it was, rather, a
matter of risk, and as such, required a political decision. To know
whether the risks were acceptable, Churchill had no choice but to delve
into the details of military calculations, and to do that, he had to find out
whether VICTOR was soundly rooted. Nor was he probing merely to establish the probabilities in his own mind. As in most war situations, a
446 I SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
committee would deliberate although one man would decide; even those
on the other side of the decision needed to believe that the risks, even if
high, were not outrageous.
Ben Gurion Holds a Seminar
Yet another task of supreme command in war is assessing the health and
effectiveness of military organizations: their aptitude for the tasks before
them. Of this few better examples can be given—and with it, yet another
technique of civilian control-—than that of David Ben Gurion, Israel's first
prime minister and defense minister, in the period shortly before the creation of the state of Israel. Ben Gurion, who assumed in December 1946
the "security portfolio" of the Israeli shadow government, had no particular background in military affairs; he had served as an unruly corporal
in the British army at the end of World War I with the objective of furthering the Zionist project. He was, however, the leading figure not only in
the largest labor party in Palestine, but the de facto head of the Iewish
Agency, the shadow government of the Iews of Palestine. Since the 1920s
the ]ews of Palestine had constructed a remarkably elaborate defense organization, the Haganah, which included an effective intelligence service,
an elite striking force, and a general staff.
From the end of March to the end of May 1947, Ben Gurion conducted what became known in the history of the Haganah as ”the seminar.“ For two months he suspended his normal duties and instead undertook systematically to interview the high command of the Haganah, and
many subordinate officers as well. Writing slowly in his diary, which he
kept as a kind of ledger of his deliberations, he probed all the facets of the
Haganah's activities: the quality of commanders, the nature of training,
the state of equipment, the position of the budget, the structure of the
high command, the quality of intelligence collection. Underlying Ben
Gurion's inquiry lay a simple, massive, and as it turned out, entirely correct political premise: that the upcoming confrontation between Iews and
Arabs would not, as in the disturbances of 1921, 1929, and 1936-39, be a
contest with gangs of Palestinian Arab villagers or clansmen, but instead
with the Arab states (Ben-Gurion 1993, 150). Ben Gurion's judgment at
the end of the seminar was typically harsh and direct: the Haganah was
profoundly unsuited for the challenge looming ahead: “I know that I am
saying very hard things. In my heart are even harder views, and I speak
therefore the minimum. . . . We have to start everything virtually afresh,
because the Arab front is becoming serious, and it is no longer a front of
bandits."
The Haganah had been a generally successful adaptation to one prob-
THE UNEQUAL DIALOGUE I 447
lem: the threat posed by the Palestinian Arabs, in both organized units
and as gangs of marauders, to the security of Iewish settlements. This
very success, however, had in many ways rendered it unfit for the challenges of the future, and not least because its leadership refused to admit
the fundamental differences in the nature of the future threat. Ben Gurion
realized that the Haganah's scale was all wrong: its leaders thought in
terms of platoons, not brigades (Ben Gurion 1993, 159). Its support functions, such as static radio networks, were designed to support guerrilla
warfare, not conventional mobile operations (Ben Gurion 1993, 176). Its
prejudice against British trained officers, and its sheer bureaucratic incompetence, had caused it to fail to tap the experience of some 25,000
men who had served in the British military during World War II (Avidar
1977, 12-13).
By the summer of 1947 it was clear that the climactic struggle was at
hand: Ben Gurion restructured the high command of the Haganah, dismissing some of its leaders and reaching out to veterans of the British
army, whom he promoted to senior positions. He accelerated the programs for mobilization and acquisition upon which the military structure
of a potential Iewish state would rest. Although hardly ready for the
quasi-war that broke out in November 1947, by May 1948, when formal
independence arrived, Israel was ready—if barely—to conduct war
against neighboring Arab states.
The Problem of Military Professionalism
These tasks of civilian supreme command-—selecting and monitoring
generals, adjudicating their differences, managing risk, assessing organizational health and intervening to restore it—go far beyond what the normal theory of civil-military relations would seem to require. Statesman
rarely discharge these tasks by means of fiat, but rather by the more indirect tactics described above. Direct orders are not unknown, of course, as
when President Franklin D. Roosevelt simply ordered his military chiefs
to undertake the North African campaign of 1942, despite their strenuous
opposition to it as a diversion that could delay---fatally, perhaps—the ultimate liberation of continental Europe.
According to the normal theory, the practices described above should
have led to disaster. To be sure, in all except exceptional cases, they did
not involve the direct issuance of orders to soldiers to engage in particular tactical or operational activities, but they involved an intrusive scrutiny and set of interactions that ran counter to all that the normal theory
would seem to require. One might, of course, say that the men involved
were political exceptions, geniuses whose other virtues compensated for
448 I SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
their vices of interference in military affairs, but we can be fairly certain
that they, at least, viewed their interventions as central to their tasks of
war leadership. A more extended argument than room permits here suggests that they were right (Cohen 2001, forthcoming).
It is more likely that there is a flaw in the concept of professionalism
embedded in the normal theory of civil-military relations, a flaw that
makes its prescriptions unworkable or dangerous. For although
officership is a profession, it differs in many respects from all others: in
some of the most important respects it does not at all resemble medicine
or the law. Indeed, the Huntingtonian construct represents a concept of
professionalism, prevalent in the 1950s, but since challenged in many
spheres as unrealistically pristine: “incomprehensibility to laymen, rather
than rationality, is the foundation of professionalism," in the acid words
of a scholar writing in the more cynical 1970s (Layton 1971, 4; Parsons
1968, 536-557). Officership varies in a number of important ways from
other professions. Unlike law, medicine, or engineering, it binds its members to only one employer, the state, and has only one fundamental form,
the large service branch. But other differences are more important, particularly those bearing on the ends of the professional activity and the nature of expertise involved.
All professional activities present difficulties of moral choice and ultimate purpose to those who practice them. The wrenching choices facing
a physician involved in the treatment of terminally ill patients are
well known; so too are the ethical dilemmas of a lawyer who becomes
privy to knowledge of a client's criminal activities. But by and large in the
professions of law and medicine, on which the classical conception of
professionalism is based, the ultimate goals are fairly straightforward.
They are, for the doctor, to cure patients of their diseases, or at least to alleviate the pain they suffer. For the lawyer they are, at least within the
American legal system, to achieve the best possible result, be it acquittal,
maximum financial redress, or some other result for the client.
The soldier's ultimate purposes are altogether hazier: they are, as
Clausewitz and others insist, the achievement of political ends designated by statesmen. But because political objectives are just that—political--they are often ambiguous, contradictory, and uncertain. It is one of
the greatest sources of frustration for soldiers that their political masters
find it difficult (or worse from the soldiers’ point of view, merely inconvenient) to elaborate fully in advance the purposes for which they have invoked military action, or the conditions under which they intend to limit
or terminate it. The "professional" concept of military activity, moreover,
depicts political purpose in war as a matter of purely foreign policy; and
yet in practice the "high" politics of war is suffused as well with "low" or
THE UNEQUAL DIALOGUE
I 449
domestic politics. A Lincoln wants a victory at Atlanta in the summer of
1864 in order to crush the Confederacy, but also to boost his own chances
of re-election, which in turn is necessary for the ultimate victory of the
Union. A Roosevelt, dismissing all professional advice, orders an invasion of North Africa in 1942 rather than a landing in France in 1943 in
order to keep the public committed to a strategy of “Europe First"
(although, in retrospect, the course recommended by his military advisors would most likely have proven tactically ruinous). A Iohnson limits
air attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong in 1965-68 in part to limit the chances
that China will enter the war, but also to preserve his ability to launch the
Great Society.
The traditional conception of military professionalism assumes that it
is possible to separate an autonomous area of military science from political purpose (Huntington 1957, 56, 255). But this sharp separation breaks
down in practice. Consider the question confronted by the Allies in the
late summer and fall of 1944: whether to advance on a wide front in
France and the Low Countries, or to concentrate scarce resources behind
a northern thrust along the French, Belgian, and Dutch coast directed by
a British general, or instead to devote them to a southern thrust into central Germany directed by an American general. One might say that there
was a military "best answer," assuming that the ultimate objective was
the quickest defeat of Germany. But in fact the political objectives were
far more complex than that: they involved questions of cost in lives and
treasure, minimization of damage to Allied civilian populations, including Londoners under threat from V-2 missile launchers in Holland, and
matters of national prestige. These were not political modifications to a
"military" objective of defeating Germany, but essential to it. “The distinction between politics and strategy diminishes as the point of view is
raised," Churchill noted after World War I. "At the summit true politics
and strategy are one" (Churchill 1923, 6).
That the good military officer requires a technical expertise no one
would deny. But is it indeed true, as Huntington argues, that “the peculiar skill of the military officer is universal" across time, nationality, and
place? The qualifications of a good North Vietnamese infantry officer in
Indochina in 1965 would surely have differed in some important respects
from those of a good American officer opposing him. The Vietnamese
would have needed a ruthless disregard for his own men's suffering and
casualties that would have rendered an American not merely morally
unfit to command, but a likely candidate for assassination by his own
men. He could easily have remained ignorant of large areas of technical
knowledge (for example, the employment of close air support, or planning procedures for heliborne movements) that the American required.
450
I
SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
More than one author has suggested that the American failure in Vietnam
stemmed at least in part from the stubborn resistance of American
officers to adjust their conception of professionalism to the peculiarities
of the war before them (Krepinevich 1986). And American leaders have
found themselves baffled by unconventional opponents like Somalia's
Muhammed Farah Aideed who, in turn, have adroitly executed a style of
warfare that exploits the American military's conception of what it is to
be “a professional" (Bacevich 1995, 50-63).
The assumption that, in the last two centuries at any rate, apolitically
professional armies are better armies requires, at the very least, some
qualification. The more research that is done on one of the most formidable fighting machines of all time, the German Wehrmacht, the greater appears the role of ideology in motivating its soldiers in battle (Bartov 1991 ;
Forster 1983, 413-447; Holmes 1985, 281-90). For a generation after World
War II, scholars attributed the fighting abilities of the Germans in World
War II to neutral professional characteristics, such as small—unit cohesion
and careful selection and recruitment of officers and non-commissioned
officers (Shils and Ianowitz 1948; 1975; Van Creveld 1982). More prolonged and careful investigation, however, has revealed that the permeation of the German army by Nazi ideology made it a better fighting
force. Not only did it instill in a large proportion of its men a fanatic determination to fight; it also contributed indirectly to the maintenance of
tactical effectiveness. The ruthlessness of the Nazis allowed for the harshest possible repression of dissent or doubt, including the execution of
15,000 of their own soldiers during World War II (Bartov 1991, 96). The
Hitler lugend provided a reserve of junior officers and leaders, while Nazi
ideology reinforced the central virtues of military leadership, including
selflessness, physical courage, and initiative (Forster 1986, III:180-220).
Perhaps the greatest proof of the contribution of ideology lies in the record of the units of the Waffen SS, which by war's end constituted no less
than a quarter of Germany's army, and which repeatedly turned in an
outstanding fighting performance. Of Theodor Eicke, the leader of the
Totenkopf (Death's Head) Division, one of the most successful Waffen SS
divisions, one historian notes: "Eicke's style of leadership differed little in
practice from the methods he had used to administer the prewar concentration camp system. . . . What he lacked in formal training, imagination,
and finesse, he attempted to overcome through diligence, energy, and a
constant effort to master the baffling technical intricacies of mechanized
war" (Sydnor 1977, 274). Eicke was a successful military leader not in
spite of those characteristics that would have earned him trial for his numerous crimes against humanity had he survived the war, but because of
them.
5
‘9
b
i.
if-
THE UNEQUAL DIALOGUE
I
451
l"‘”‘V-" ‘¢\'*5"\-v~
Nor is the German experience unique. Ideological armies--the Chinese People's Liberation Army, the international brigades in the Spanish
Civil War, and the pre-independence Iewish Palestinian Palmach are all
examples-have often turned in superior tactical performances against
larger and better equipped regular forces. The ideologically motivated
fighter may make a good junior officer: he often embodies the
self-sacrifice, integrity, and drive that leaders of soldiers in battle require.
More than a few higher-level commanders motivated by ideology have
also demonstrated high orders of ability.‘
If the content of military professionalism is, as Huntington contends,
the “management of violence," it is a definition that excludes large areas
of military activity (logistics, for example) that often have considerable civilian analogues and yet are indispensable to military operations (Huntington 1957, 11; 1963, 785). Many of these skills are readily transferable to
or from the civilian world: it is no accident that the U.S. Army's chief logistician in the Persian Gulf became, immediately upon retirement, a successful executive at Sears, nor that the military rapidly promoted civilian
executives to high military rank during the World Wars. Moreover, although all serious modern military organizations devote a great deal of
effort to schooling and training, history is replete with examples of soldiers taken up from civilian life who very quickly master the essentials of
military affairs. Even more common are great soldiers who spend only
brief periods of their life in regular military organizations, and then
flourish in times of actual war. General Sir ]ohn Monash, one of the best
generals of World War I, was a civil engineer whose pre-war experience
consisted solely of militia duty. Yet he rose to command perhaps the most
formidable of all Allied units, the Australian Imperial Force (Falkus 1976,
134-143). There are hardly any accounts of self—taught or part-time doctors and engineers performing so well.
Military professionalism is contingent, much as business management is. The brilliant entrepreneur may prove utterly unable to cope with
the problems of running the corporations their creative genius brought
into the world. The skilled manager of a long-established, high-technology firm like IBM would probably find it difficult to assume equal responsibilities in an entertainment company like Disney. There is, to be
sure, enough commonality in management experience to make it plausible to put a former manufacturer of repeating rifles in charge of a large
ice cream company (Ben & ]erry's), but that does not guarantee success.
1. Examples are the outstanding Israeli commander of the 1948 War of independence, Yigal Allon, who had been commander of the Palmach, and Leon Trotsky, the
Russian Revolution's "organizer of victory."
452 I SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
Indeed, the ruthless churning of higher management in many companies
reflects what might be thought of as "wartime" conditions--a ceaseless
turnover of executives who are unfit for their tasks or exhausted by their
previous work. This should not surprise us, for in some sense businesses
fight their "wars" every day, unlike military organizations.
This observation suggests a deeper problem with the notion that
expertise in the management of violence is the essence of the military
profession. While lawyers continually appear in court or draw up legal
instruments, doctors routinely operate, diagnose, or prescribe medication, and engineers build bridges or computers, soldiers very rarely
manage violence. They prepare to manage violence, they anticipate its
requirements, they study past uses of violence, they practice in simulations, but they very rarely engage in the central activity that defines their
profession (Hamilton 1921, 25). Many and perhaps most officers spend
entire military careers without participating in a real war. Even those
who do fight in wars do so for very small portions of their careers, and
very rarely occupy the same job in more than one conflict. A lawyer may
try hundreds of cases, or a doctor treat hundreds or even thousands of
medical problems of an essentially similar type during the course of several decades; a soldier will usually have only one chance to serve in a particular position. There are few generals who have had the experience of
being divisional or corps commanders--let alone theater commanders or
chiefs of general staffs-in more than one war. As a result then, particularly at the beginning of a war, a country's most senior leaders—nominally, the most seasoned veterans—are in a professional position as close
to that of the novice lawyer or doctor as to that of senior partner in a law
firm or the chief surgeon in a hospital.
The lack of practice military people have in their profession at the
highest level is but one factor that accounts for the astounding and by no
means infrequent catastrophic errors made by competent military organizations (Cohen and Gooch 1990). These calamities stem not from incompetence as normally understood, but from the features that make the
waging of war different from other professions: the distorting psychological effects of fear, hatred, and the desire of glory; the nature of a reacting
opponent; and the absence of rules that bound the activity concerned.
Moreover, as Clausewitz observed, “every war is rich in unique episodes.
Each is an uncharted sea, full of reefs" (Clausewitz 1911, I:7, 120). Each
age has its "own theory of war, even if the urge had always and universally existed to work things out on scientific principles" (Clausewitz 1911,
120, VIII:3, 593). Under these circumstances statesmen must work with
their military subordinates in an unequal and uneasy partnership: unequal because free government requires it, and uneasy because political
THE UNEQUAL DIALOGUE I
leaders will always trespass upon what the military conceives to be its
prerogatives and area of expertise. Submitting to a thousand questions
may prove more difficult for a general than accepting a single illconceived order. The unequal dialogue offers the promise of success, but
the certainty of friction.
The Unequal Dialogue
One might still contend that the successful war statesmen described
above, because they were geniuses, could meddle and interfere without
damaging the forces under their command; but that the normal run of
politicians would only breed disaster by so doing. Perhaps, although disaster may lurk on either side. When President Truman deferred to the
advice of his military advisors in permitting an advance beyond the 38th
parallel in Korea during the fall of 1950, he was largely accepting the implications of the normal theory of civil-military relations. When, in his
sole conference with Douglas MacArthur about what would happen if
the Chinese intervened in the war--"there will be the greatest slaughter"
by American air power, MacArthur assured him—he was also heeding
the dicta of the normal theory, accepting a technical military judgment.
Disaster followed the next month because the military advisors themselves had systematically and thoroughly underestimated the fighting
potential of the People's Liberation Army, notwithstanding the shock administered by earlier clashes with the leading units of the PLA operating
in North Korea (Cohen and Gooch 1990, 165-196).
Truman had the right, indeed, the obligation to subject his military
leaders to the kind of detailed scrutiny that American, French, British,
and Israeli generals endured in the cases described above. In the same
way, Lyndon Iohnson and Robert McNamara failed as war leaders not so
much because they micro-managed the war, but because they failed to
manage it properly. They failed, in the words of Robert McNamara's remarkable, self-excoriating memoir, to create "what Churchill called a War
Cabinet." It was this failure to “debate systematically the most fundamental issues," to review assumptions about military operations and
their probabilities of success, that he identified as a critical failing of his
and President ]ohnson's war leadership (McNamara 1995, 332; McMaster
1997). General Bruce Palmer, one of the senior Army commanders in
Indochina, agreed that this lack of open debate was one of the critical failures in senior leadership—civilian as well as military—during the war
(Palmer 1984, 35).
The Gulf War of 1991 has shaped much of contemporary American
thinking about civil-military relations in wartime. The public face of the
454 I SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
war was, as we have seen, one in which the military had a free hand in
the formation of strategy, with a strong civilian leader making the
difficult but relatively simple decisions: that there would be a war,
what that war would be about, how to build the coalition and finance the
effort, and when the war would end. Beyond this, according to the
common narrative of the conflict, the civilian leadership of the Defense
Department did little beyond mobilizing resources for the fight. The military, on the other hand, seems to have planned and executed its operations with near complete autonomy. It seems, in another words, like a
war fought very much according to the tenets of the normal theory of
civil-military relations.
The truth is considerably different. It is clear, for example, that the
leadership of the military, rather than serving merely as loyal executors of
a broader policy, had their own distinct views—strongly argued—about
whether there should be a war at all. So much is at least to be inferred
from a curious book by Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, who appears to have had privileged access to Chairman of the ]oint Chiefs of
Staff Colin Powell—and to his doubts-before the war (Woodward 1991;
Gordon and Trainor 1995). Civilian leadership, in the form of Secretary of
Defense Dick Cheney, made efforts to bypass the professional advice he
was getting from General Powell, leading to at least one dramatic
confrontation between Powell and Cheney's military aide, Rear Admiral
William Owens. The supposedly simple political objectives laid out by
President Bush—the protection of American citizens in the Gulf, the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the restoration of the legitimate government of that country, and the assurance of the security and stability of
the Persian Gulf-turn out to have been far more complex than the normal theory of civil-military relations would allow. The objective of protection of Americans-a reflection of the initial Iraqi seizure of Western
hostages-had become irrelevant by the time the war began; the objective
of restoration of legitimate government to Kuwait depended upon an understanding of what "legitimate" meant in the Kuwaiti context; and the
objective of security and stability in the Gulf was so nebulous as to be
meaningless. Meanwhile, at least two unstated objectives—-the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein's regime and the destruction of its stockpiles and industrial base for the manufacture of weapons of mass destructionloomed larger as the war unfolded.
3
Political pressure was indeed felt by operational commanders: local
air commanders felt a strong Washington-originated urging to attack
Iraqi surface-to-surface missile sites that threatened Israel. An American
general's public dismissal of these targets as "militarily insignificant"
added one more irritant to an already difficult U.S.-Israeli relationship.
THE UNEQUAL DIALOGUE I 455
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Similarly, it would appear that political concerns led to a ratcheting down
of U.S. attacks on Baghdad shortly after the destruction of the al-Firdos
bunker on February 13, 1991, which killed hundreds of family members
of the Iraqi regime's ruling elite. Where attacks on Iraqi governmental
targets, defense installations, and communications infrastructure in
Baghdad had occurred nightly to this point, such attacks ceased for several days, and then only resumed on a severely limited scale to the end of
the war.
In those cases, as others, the relationship between politicians and
generals was further blurred by the preemptive nature of much of the
political control that was exerted. General Colin Powell, a man of extraordinary political sophistication, anticipated much of the civil-military
discourse by his actions. In theory, General Schwarzkopf, the theater
commander, reported directly to the Secretary of Defense. In practice, all
communications went through Powell, and in fact Secretary Cheney appears not to have spoken with Schwarzkopf at all during the war.
Powell's political sense undoubtedly averted much of the friction that accompanies normal warmaking. But Powell's preemptive sensitivity to the
concerns of civilian control had its adverse consequences as well, and not
least in the way the war ended. A hasty telephone conversation between
Powell and Schwarzkopf led to the decision to terminate the war well before the core of the Iraqi regime, the Republican Guard, had been destroyed rather than merely evicted from Kuwait (Gordon and Trainor
1995, 400-432). General Schwarzkopf received, it would appear, no civilian guidance whatsoever in conducting the armistice negotiations, and
thus ceded to the Iraqis the discretion to use combat aviation, with which
they subsequently crushed revolts against the regime by forces in the
south and north of the country. The story of civil-military relations in the
Gulf War is one not of harmony resting on a wise distribution of roles,
but one of blurring and muddle, culminating in a remarkable collapse of
civilian oversight. If the war was largely successful, as indeed it was, it
stems as much from American and allied advantages poorly understood
before the conflict, but which loom ever larger in retrospect. These include massive superiority in every aspect of military strength, from alliances to technology, training to sheer numbers (Gulf War Air Power Survey
1991-1993).
The Gulf War, then, represented not a demonstration of the virtues of
the normal theory of civil-military relations but in some aspects only its
appearance, and in others, its weaknesses. Subsequent uses of American
military power in Yugoslavia and Somalia followed a similar pattern.
American civilian decision-makers hesitated before demanding much of
their military subordinates. Thus in 1992, after having denounced the
456 I SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
passivity of the Bush administration in Yugoslavia, the Clinton administration was paralyzed by military estimates that it would take 400,000
troops or more to intervene in Bosnia (Scarborough 1992). When the
Clinton administration did use American forces, there was virtually no
cooperation and communication—let alone subordination—to a broader
political effort. Indeed, Richard Holbrooke, America's chief negotiator in
the Balkans in 1995, recalls that his military counterpart, Admiral
Leighton Smith, viewed himself as an independent force: “he told me
that he was ‘solely responsible’ for the safety and well-being of his forces,
and he would make his decision, under authority delegated to him by the
NATO Council, based on his own judgment. In fact, he pointed out, he
did not even work for the United States: as a NATO commander he took
orders from Brussels" (Holbrooke 1998, 118).
The Somalia intervention of 1993 was little better. A commitment of
American forces under the auspices of the United Nations allowed for the
pursuit of parallel and conflicting policies, which culminated in a disastrous attempt to kidnap a Somali warlord whose cooperation would have
been essential to any stable arrangement in Mogadishu. Here too, civilian
abdication, not military arrogance, was to blame. Deferring to a zealous
UN high commissioner—an American-neither the president nor the
Secretary of Defense regarded American forces operating in Mogadishu
as forces fighting a war, albeit a low-level one, in which some effort
should be made by national authority to harmonize ends and means.
The decline in the quality of American civil-military relations at the
top has coincided with the emergence of an American military edgetechnological, organizational, and quantitative—that stems from the extraordinary U.S. economy and the overall quality of U.S. armed forces.
Yet even in successes such as the 1999 NATO war with Serbia led by an
American general, Wesley Clark, the failure of political leaders and commanders to come to terms with one another has had deleterious consequences. The early declaration by the president that no ground forces
would be sent to Kosovo—-an error that virtually guaranteed a prolonged
air campaign during which Serb forces could massacre the Albanian
Kosovars at leisure-—seems to have preceded rather than followed any
strategic discussions with military leaders. Similarly, the unthinking recitation of the requirement for "force protection" as the first mission for
American soldiers, ahead of any objective for which they might be put in
harm's way, reflects an unwillingness to come to terms with what the use
of force means—the error of reckless dissipation of strength having given
way to an only slightly less reckless conservation of it (Smith 1999).
At one level, contemporary civil-military relations are smooth and
easy; senior military leaders mix far more easily with their civilian supe-
THE UNEQUAL DIALOGUE
I
riors than they did in Lincoln's or even Churchill's day. They attend the
same meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations and converse with
equal ease on political if not on military subjects. This superficial harmony has even led some scholars to talk of a theory of concordance as a
more attractive paradigm for civil-military relations (Schiff 1995, 7-24;
Roman and Tarr 1999 and Chapter 11 in this volume).
When it comes to the use of force, however, the heart of sound
civil-military relations remains now, as in the past, an unequal dialogue.
The imperatives of politics and of military professionalism invariably,
and appropriately, tug in opposite directions; inevitably too, professional
judgments require scrutiny rather than unthinking acceptance. The most
successful war statesmen adopted, as we have seen, different techniques
for interacting with their military subordinates: Churchill's questioning,
Ben Gurion's deep study, Lincoln's indirect monitoring, Clemenceau's
first-hand inspection. In no case was the relationship without tension and
even hostility. For their military subordinates this attention was clearly
maddening. In the memoirs and diaries of men as different as the grim
Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the fiery
Marshal of France, Ferdinand Foch, and the scholarly young archaeologist tumed soldier, Yigal Yadin, one sees tremendous frustration and resentment flaring up at civilian chiefs who imposed yet another burden on
men already strained by the burdens of high command. On more than
one occasion the senior military leaders prepared to tender their resignations, although, interestingly enough, these crises have been averted in
almost all cases, if barely, and the anger has not been publicly revealed
until after the war. The unequal dialogue rests on the willingness of senior officers to court dismissal by obdurately making their case to their
civilian superiors. The Grants, Brookes, Fochs, and Yadins on more than
one occasion told their political superiors that their favored schemes
would not work. In no case did they pay more than a psychic penalty for
the ensuing conversation; in most cases an intermediary whose job consisted primarily of liaison prevented relations from breaking down. This
was often a military man, such as Clemenceau's Iean Mordacq, or Churchill's Hastings Ismay, but sometimes it was a civilian, such as Roosevelt's Harry Hopkins. Each of these men intervened at critical moments
to soothe the anger or temper the resentments that a brutally candid but
unequal dialogue engendered.
The precedent of the Gulf War is a particularly dangerous one. In the
absence of experience of real war—one in which the other side can inflict
damage, and has options-civilian and military decision-makers alike
will forget the lessons of serious conflict. Those are, above all, that political leaders must immerse themselves in the conduct of war no less than
458 I SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS
they do in great projects of domestic legislation; that they must master
their military briefs as thoroughly as they do their civilian ones; that they
must demand and expect from their military subordinates a candor as
bruising as it is necessary; that both groups must expect a running conversation in which, although civilian opinion will not dictate, it must
dominate; that that conversation will include not only ends and policies,
but ways and means. "Our highest civilian and military heads [must] be
in close, even if not cordial, contact with each other" (Palmer 1984, 201).
Statesmen must possess, not genius, but common sense and a willingness
to probe: qualities that the great war leaders of the past possessed in exceptional degree, but which are no different in kind from those of modern
political leaders.
A famous fictional general once remarked: “. . . do you recall what
Clemenceau said about war? He said war was too important to be left to
the generals. When he said that, fifty years ago, he might have been right.
But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither
the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought."
The words, one suspects, would win approval from more than a few
practitioners and observers of contemporary civil-military relations, at
least until they realized that these are the words of the half-crazed
General Iack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's dark-comedy film, “Dr.
Strangelove." There are a few if any General Rippers in the American
military, but the sentiment surely persists, and indeed is even shared by
some politicians.
Altogether wiser are the words of Aleksandr A. Svechin, veteran of
the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, and leading thinker in the general staff of the Red Army until his death in Stalin's purges on the eve of
World War II. “A politics that would renounce the retention of its authority over the leadership of a war and acknowledge the primacy of military
specialists and silently conform to their requirements would itself acknowledge its own bankruptcy" (Svechin 1991, 145). If such words held
true for the titanic struggles of the first half of this century, all the more
should they do so for the more ambiguous but, on a smaller scale, no less
sinister conflicts of the second half, and indeed the next century. In the
words of an important but neglected book by Bernard Brodie: "The civil
hand must never relax, and it must without one hint of apology hold the
control that has always belonged to it by right" (Brodie 1973, 496).
Soldiers and Civilians
The Civil-Military Gap and American
National Security
Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn, editors
BCSIA Studies in International Security
I
Q
<-r-'
Triangle Institute for Security Studies
MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2001 by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
(617) 495-1400
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-- electronic,
electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise — without permission in writing from the Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs, 79 Iohn F. Kennedy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Soldiers and civilians : the civil-military gap and American national security
/ edited by Peter D. Feaver and Richard H. Kohn.
p. cm. -- (BCSIA studies in intemational security)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-06223-2 (hc. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-262-56142-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Civil-military relations - United States. 2. National security -- United
States. 3. Militarism- United States. 4. Public opinion— United States.
5. Sociology, Military — United States. I. Feaver, Peter. II. Kohn, Richard H.
III. Series.
UA23 .S5269 2001
306.2‘ 7'0973 — dc21
2001042558
Cover graphic designed by Jared Bishop. Cover photographs clockwise from
upper left: "Drill Sergeant Reprimanding a Navy Recruit,"
© www.corbis.com. "President Bill Clinton Shakes Hands with Soldiers at
the Tuzla Air Field, Bosnia-Herzegovina," Department of Defense photo by
Spc. Richard L. Branham, U.S. Army. "Franklin D. Roosevelt, General
Marshall, and General Patton in Casablanca," courtesy of the Franklin D.
Roosevelt Library Digital Archives. "Drop Acid Not Bombs," © Robert
Altman, used with permission. "President Abraham Lincoln with Allan
Pinkerton and Major General Iohn A. McClemand at Antietam," Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-B8171-7949 DLC.
Printed in the United States of America