The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (15 page)

In short, the culture of the United States—characterized by an emphasis on youth, individualism, and practicality—is evident in our manner of making war. The controversial practice of widespread gun ownership in the United States has meant that a large segment of American youths does not grow up afraid of, or inexperienced with, firearms. Young people with guns—other than those in inner-city gangs—do not arouse the suspicions of the state police or incur social ostracism. From the pensions of the Grand Army of the Republic to the G.I. Bill and the Veterans’ Hospitals, the American military has been closely integrated with American society, whether as a source of income in old age or of subsidies for continuing education. The result is that military service and the idea of using weapons are not seen as strange or antithetical to our society at large—as has become true in contemporary Europe. For millions of Americans, military service provides access to education, health care, and retirement benefits—as well as generally recognized prestige and public thanks.

Shooting guns in uniform is accepted not only as central to the defense of our country but also as a legitimate avenue for career advancement—all paradoxically in a democratic climate deeply suspicious of militarism. American ideas of muscular independence are deeply embedded in our frontier experience, when guns and the willingness to use them were a means to feed one’s family, enforce justice when the “law” was a three-day-ride away, and form ad hoc militias to hunt down organized intruders, rather than serving in a centralized and permanent army.

Rising Expectations and Modern War

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MERICAN THINKING ABOUT
military strategy reflects these larger restless imperatives. The public puts a premium on employing overwhelming firepower to end wars quickly—as in Grant’s unthinking bloody hammer blows at the Wilderness and Cold Harbor, Pershing’s insistence on keeping a cohesive American army for massive assaults on German lines, and the Overlord strategy of simply blasting a path in a “broad thrust” through Normandy across the Rhine. Even our most skilled and successful commanders, such as William Tecumseh Sherman and George Patton, who sought to avoid casualties by employing flank attacks or deep sweeping penetrations into the enemy heartland, always labored against the charge that they were afraid of head-on assaults that might more quickly batter the enemy and end the war.

With such vast reservoirs of men and materiel, and a democratic population far removed from Asian and European squabbling, wouldn’t conventional American doctrine suggest using our forces to win quickly and bluntly, and then go back home? Indeed the purportedly uncouth language of a maverick Sherman or Patton may have simply been a necessary convention to ensure the public of their wartime ferocity. In fact, both were cerebral generals who sought a more mobile and flanking sort of indirect approach that might reduce American battle causalities and cause the collapse of enemy formation without costly frontal assaults.

Aircraft carriers are perhaps the best symbols of the contradictory American desire to be mobile, independent, and yet overwhelmingly powerful enough to annihilate an enemy through direct massive blows. They have now evolved into a virtual American institution. France has one, England three—all four together possess less offensive power than any one of our current eleven fleet counterparts.

Indeed, an American carrier’s flight deck of almost five acres possesses more lethal planes than the entire air force of most other nations. These hundred-thousand-plus-ton homes to five thousand men and women appear to the untrained eye as clumsy behemoths, but they can cruise well over six hundred miles in a day, at a clip of thirty-five knots, without seeking the permission of nearby countries or granting concessions to hosts for landing rights. The initial cost to build, man, and deploy an entire American carrier group can easily exceed twenty billion dollars.

American restlessness and mobility have also meant that political pressure can quickly mount against wars that get bogged down with high casualties and little progress. By spring 1951 the United States had essentially stopped North Korean and Chinese aggression, and was poised to retake the north. Yet public opinion was already tired with a conflict that did not seem to ensure decisive and immediate victory, had cost tens of thousands of American dead and wounded, and raised the specter of nuclear escalation. So Americans settled for stalemate and saw it as a victory that at least South Korea was saved. Yet over a half century later the United States was still talking of North Korea as “evil,” as the regime threatened to send ballistic missiles toward Hawaii.

Despite the establishment of a viable South Vietnamese government by 1973, the American public, after nearly a decade of fighting, was in no mood to continue bombing to repel the Communist invasions of late 1974 and 1975 that violated the armistice. And so the United States lost the peace negotiated at the Paris peace talks, not the shooting war against invading North Vietnam forces. It is controversial to what degree an American president can maintain support for a distant war of high casualties; what is not in dispute is that the American public will turn quickly on any commander in chief who cannot assure them that American armies are mobile, are on the offensive, and will bring home victory rather than become mired in stalemate, pitted against terrorists and insurgents, and subject to a negotiated armistice.

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

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HAT 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.