Andrew Bacevich has a great habit of pointing them out:
What are we to make of this record? For Krauthammer, Boot, and Barnes, the lessons are clear: dial up the rhetoric, increase military spending, send in more troops, and give the generals a free hand. The important thing, writes William Kristol in his own assessment of Obama’s Afghanistan decision, is to have a commander in chief who embraces “the use of military force as a key instrument of national power.” If we just keep trying, one of these times things will surely turn out all right.
An alternative reading of our recent military past might suggest the following: first, that the political utility of force—the range of political problems where force possesses real relevance—is actually quite narrow; second, that definitive victory of the sort that yields a formal surrender ceremony at Appomattox or on the deck of an American warship tends to be a rarity; third, that ambiguous outcomes are much more probable, with those achieved at a cost far greater than even the most conscientious war planner is likely to anticipate; and fourth, that the prudent statesman therefore turns to force only as a last resort and only when the most vital national interests are at stake. Contra Kristol, force is an “instrument” in the same sense that a slot machine or a roulette wheel qualifies as an instrument.
To consider the long bloody chronicle of modern history, big wars and small ones alike, is to affirm the validity of these conclusions. Bellicose ideologues will pretend otherwise. Such are the vagaries of American politics that within the Beltway the views expressed by these ideologues—few of whom have experienced war—will continue to be treated as worthy of consideration. One sees the hand of God at work: the Lord obviously has an acute appreciation for irony.
In the long run, however, the nattering of Kristol and his confrères is unlikely to matter much. Far more important will be the conclusions about war and its utility reached by those veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who will eventually succeed Petraeus and McChrystal on the uppermost rung of the American military profession.
Read the whole article. It is worth your time. I am not sure that I have the faith that Andrew Bacevich does in the ability of the American officer corps to lead us out of this wilderness, however. The current crop of flag officers lacks the self awareness and commitment that Marshall had.
I no sooner turn my back and you’re embracing strawmen! Stand them up so you can take them down.
Force, violence, unmitigated merciless and wanton killing and destruction. They still work just as they always have. When you apply them weakly, like a pussy, they aren’t the same thing at all. In the last century we and the Germans knew how to kill on a massive scale in battle. The Chinese and Russians perfected the art of killing children in the name of art.
Victory will still go those who shape and understand perfect violence. Yep, those that brought us Beslan are probably going to win the next round.
Ah, Ghenghis, Tamarlane and Attila. Now THEY understood war.
Andy lost his son in Iraq. A tragedy.
Great banner… I love the look on her face and her collarbone!! And the wine…
Great photo!!!
Richard, I didn’t know that.
I’m an almost 30 year navy vet, son and grandson of West Point Grads that both did the full yard, one in WWII and the other in Vietnam. My dad has a thousand close friends. Many of them have sons (West Point grads) fighting in those wars. Just a few months ago he asked what my chances were of being drafted to serve ashore and I responded with, “who in the world in their right mind would want a navy captain fighting ashore in either Iraq or Afghanistan?” He replied that perhaps there were provincial reconstruction teams in need of leadership. Hadn’t even considered that. Not afraid or anything like that but the last Army general I worked for in Kuwait was humor-. My books are all in storage but in Once An Eagle, a west pointer that came to work for Sam Damon mentioned looking in the mirror at West Point and saying to himself that they would never steal his sense of humor. The old man’s sense of humor is a little iffy.
Oh well, another 3 years to consider a sudden breeze blowing me to Afghanistan.
There were some good points in the article but also a number of not so good ones.
Korea was an example where force proved useful. The objective of preserving South Korea from outside aggression was achieved without the outbreak of a general war. But, that war could have been fought to Appamatox on the Yalu had the decision been made to do so. Our national leadership, including the JCS, decided that pushing things to that level and risking a general war was not required. There were those within the military and a significant part of the population who disagreed.
Vietnam could have been fought successfully using traditional COIN techniques, as the Marines and people like Sir Roger Thompson advised. The civilian leadership rejected the JCS view that the way to go was an all-out assault on North Vietnam including an invasion. There were many flaws with McNamara and Johnson’s approach to the war, but apart from bounding it in that way, the actual strategy in the south was left to Westmoreland and the military. To this day, many soldiers consider the error was not using enough force, not how it was used in that context. The utility of force, though, remained (ask the North Vietnamese), but only when tied to a correct strategy. And Vietnam was launched by liberal democrats, not conservatives.
The Iran rescue mission was not, contrary to popular views, micromanaged to disaster by Jimmy Carter. There were errors in planning on what was, even had those been approached in a better way, a very risky operation. But, again, it does not disprove the value of military force.
The current wars are a long discussion in and of themselves. My only point is that conservative commentators have as much of a right to their opinion of national strategy as do their liberal counterparts. The notion that only those who have served have special insight into this is belied by the numerous instances in which professional military opinion has proven wrong (some examples above) and the fact that generals such as Patraeus support the mission. We can and should debate the merits of these wars, but the notion that either side’s views are somehow illegitimate just because those on each side disagree with one another is just plain wrong.