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The National Interest
Fighting Men
by Geoffrey Parker
. . . Cohen demonstrates how successive U.S. administrations adhered to the "normal" theory of civil-military relations and abandoned the conduct of war to their senior military advisers. They failed to pick the right generals (William Westmoreland would not have remained in command for four-and-a-half years under Lincoln!), failed to conduct a strategic and operational dialogue with them, and failed to set priorities and maintain proportion in what were, after all, secondary conflicts. They therefore lost sight of what they needed to do to prosecute a war - whether it ended in defeat (as in Vietnam, which saw a "deadly combination of inept strategy and excessively weak civilian control"), or in victory (as in the Gulf War, in which the politicians disastrously accepted the military's narrow definition of "victory" as "success on the battlefield" rather than as "ensuring the stability of the Persian Gulf.")
Cohen is particularly outspoken on the conduct and outcome of the Gulf War, a subject about which he possesses direct knowledge as a "subordinate." He excoriates the Bush Administration's abdication of responsibility for negotiating the armistice to the theater commander. Washington not only permitted General Norman Schwartzkopf to draw up the draft terms (and approved them with the change of a single word) but also to conclude a settlement relatively generous to Iraq—including permission for Saddam Hussein to use helicopters, with which he promptly massacred domestic opponents and thus preserved his rule. The contrast with Lincoln's lapidary order to Grant in March 1865 could scarcely be more striking.
Lincoln and the other three wartime leaders studied by Cohen maintained a constant but unequal dialogue with their commanders. It was, Cohen explains, "a dialogue, in that both sides expressed their views bluntly, indeed, sometimes offensively, and not once but repeatedly—and unequal, in that the final authority of the civilian leader was unambiguous and unquestioned." Commanders might loathe their civilian tormentors, but they still had to explain and justify their advice and actions. Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill's chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, probably spoke for Grant, Foch and many others when he wrote of his political master in his diary in September 1944: "Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent." Churchill, who never saw this entry, would probably not have cared. As he responded to another senior officer who apologized after disagreeing "very forcibly with some proposal of his [chief]: 'You know, in war you don't have to be nice, you only have to be right.'" . . .