The Politics of Victory. - 'Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime' - book review

National Review, July 15, 2002 by Richard Lowry

Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, by Eliot A. Cohen (Free Press, 272 pp., $25)

Conservatives all know why the U.S. lost the Vietnam War -- meddling civilian leaders handcuffed the military and prevented it from vigorously pursuing the victory that was there for the taking. The lesson has become an article of faith in conservative orthodoxy, and in the political culture more broadly: American generals should be left alone to make war as they see fit, protected from any interference from grasping, ill-informed, timid politicians.

Eliot A. Cohen makes a persuasive case in his excellent new book that there are three problems with this view of Vietnam: It is wrong as a factual matter; it blinds us to the lessons of history's truly great wartime leaders; and it impedes America's ability to fight successfully to this day. Cohen argues that, counter to the post-Vietnam conventional wisdom, war is inherently a political enterprise, and therefore requires the close supervision of political leaders.

For his core proposition, Cohen quotes Lincoln biographers John Nicolay and John Hay:

Every war is begun, dominated, and ended by political considerations; without a nation, without a government, without money or credit, without popular enthusiasm which furnishes volunteers, or public support which endures conscription, there could be no army and no war - - neither beginning nor end of methodical hostilities. War and popolitics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese twins, inseparable and interdependent; and to talk of military operations without the direction and interference of an administration is as absurd as to plan a campaign without recruits, pay or rations.

It is a testament to Cohen's intelligent and timely book that by its end, this point no longer seems so much brilliant or counterintuitive, as, simply, obvious.

When it comes to Vietnam, Cohen's perspective leads him to defend LBJ's notorious review of bombing targets as an appropriate exercise of oversight, given the strategic and political consequences of the targeting choices. In Korea, the military had heedlessly prompted a massive Chinese intervention, and a repeat was obviously to be avoided. Besides, LBJ approved most of the targets anyway. It is hard to blame Johnson's interference for the failure of the war, Cohen writes, when military leaders were also clueless about how to fight it: "There is no evidence that they understood any better than the civilian leadership the mentality of friend or foe, or that they had any ideas for bringing the war to a conclusion on terms acceptable to American diplomacy and bearable for the American public."

Oddly enough, the Vietnam War was fought largely in keeping with the post-Vietnam paradigm. LBJ never had sharp exchanges with military leaders over strategy and tactics, so Westmoreland was allowed to stumble on, unbothered, with his clumsy campaign. Cohen quotes Robert McNamara: "Looking back, I clearly erred by not forcing, then [in July 1965] or later, in either Saigon or Washington -- a knock-down, drag- out debate over the loose assumptions, unasked questions, and thin analysis underlying our military strategy in Vietnam." Thus, Cohen chalks up the LBJ team's failings to "their inability to pick the right generals, to conduct a strategic (and, for that matter, operational and tactical) dialogue with them, to set priorities and maintain proportion in a secondary conflict." In short, not enough political guidance, and especially not enough good political guidance.

The heart of Cohen's book is case studies of four political leaders who got it right: Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion. Cohen makes an especially spirited defense of Winston Churchill's World War II leadership from its revisionist detractors. The charge against Churchill is that he was an undisciplined, overenthusiastic pest, a rank military amateur who constantly harassed the professionals with his harebrained schemes. But, as Cohen points out, Churchill let himself get talked out of most of his ill-considered ideas (for example, an amphibious assault on northern Norway), while he got the big strategic questions right (the imperative of opposing Hitler as early as 1938, the importance of the American alliance) and operational ones as well (the need for high-tech equipment for an eventual cross- channel landing, the innovation of daylight precision bombing).

The most important thing Churchill did was simply to ask questions. "It is always right to probe," he once said. And so he did, engaging in a running argument with his military on everything from invasion plans to whether regiments should be allowed to continue to wear their traditional patches. Churchill took away from World War I a keen sense of the weaknesses of military leaders, and his constant questions kept the military from getting away with fuzzy thinking or weak assumptions. It also had a catalytic effect: "A new sense of purpose and of urgency was created," wrote one British official, "as it came to be realized that a firm hand, guided by a strong will, was on the wheel."