The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

by Victor Davis Hanson

  * This article is derived in spirit from an essay that appeared in the Spring 2003 New Atlantis.

  Part IV

  How Western Wars

  Are Lost—and Won

  CHAPTER 11

  Your Defeat, My Victory

  The Nature of Past and Present Military Error*

  A Little Humility?

  AS WE HAVE seen, lacking familiarity with our military past, we suffer from the affliction of “presentism.” That is the notion that our current generation at war is mostly unique, in both its accomplishments and its pain and suffering. We claim technological advances as our own—themselves based on the steady, incremental research and contributions of those of the past—and then compound such egotism by confusing material improvement with cultural or even moral progress.

  That conflation in turn prompts us—the most affluent and leisured in civilization’s history—to convince ourselves that we are a kinder and more reflective generation than those before us, who faced a far more brutal and unforgiving world, and that for some reason we are exempt from the rules that accompany human nature and its expression during conflict. This infatuation with the present self, again coupled with ignorance of history, convinces us that the mess of a Vietnam, a Mogadishu, or an Iraq is unlike anything in the past. The result is that we are deluded into thinking that our near mastery of the physical world through technology should likewise make conflict equally domesticated—that the uncertain events of war must never be uncertain at all. Yet conflict is not as controllable and predictable as talking across the globe on our cell phones or calling up a Web address on the Internet.

  “Iraq,” said former vice president Al Gore, “was the single worst strategic mistake in American history.” Senate majority leader Harry Reid agreed that the war he voted to authorize became “the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history,” and indeed was already “lost.”

  Many of such historically minded politicians and commanders weighed in with similar “—est” and “most” superlatives. Retired General William Odom called Iraq “the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” Senator Chuck Hagel, who voted for the war, was somewhat more cautious, calling Iraq “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” Jimmy Carter took the loftiest view: The Iraq War, and Great Britain’s acquiescence in it, he said, constituted “a major tragedy for the world” and proved that the Bush administration “has been the worst in history.”

  Certainly there were legitimate questions about Iraq, as there have been about all wars. Why, for example, did Tommy Franks, the Centcom commander who led American forces in a brilliant three-week victory over Saddam Hussein, abruptly announce his retirement in late May 2003—prompting a disruption in command just as the successful conventional war ended and an unexpected insurgency in Iraq gathered steam? Would General George Patton have declared victory and then resigned when Third Army crossed the Rhine River?

  Why were looters allowed to ransack much of Baghdad’s infrastructure following the defeat of the Baathist army? Would the conquered Japanese in August 1945 have been allowed to strip what was left of Tokyo’s power grid?

  Why “disband” the Iraqi military and not reconstitute its officer corps of Baathists at precisely the time that law and order—not tens of thousands of unemployed youths—were needed?

  And weren’t there too few occupying troops in the war’s aftermath, along with too restrictive rules of engagement—but too prominent a profile for the American proconsuls busily dictating to the Iraqis? What can be worse than the foreign infidels who both bother you and yet cannot keep you safe?

  The queries don’t stop there, alas. Why in advance weren’t there sufficient new-model body armor and armored Humvees to protect American troops? Why did we begin to assault Fallujah in April 2004, only to pull back for six months and then have to retake the city after the American election in November? Why were the country’s borders left open to infiltrators, and its ubiquitous ammunition dumps kept accessible to terrorists who ransacked them for future explosive devices that would kill thousands of Americans? Did we really think that neighboring Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia were going to play supportive roles when democracy in Iraq might result in a Shiite-dominated government that threatened their own Sunni-dominated autocracies?

  The catalog of military error and postbellum naïveté could be multiplied ad nauseam. Then there are also the inevitable strategic conundrums over the need to attack Saddam’s regime in the first place, given the nature of the terrorist threat, the ascendant Iranian theocracy next door, and the colossal intelligence failures concerning imagined vast depots of chemical and biological weapons.

  But what was missing from the almost ritual national denunciation of the “worst” war in our history was much appreciation of past American military errors—political, strategic, technological, intelligence, tactical—that once nearly cost us victory in far more important conflicts. Nor do we accept the savage irony of war—that only through errors, tragic though they may be, do successful armies adjust in time to discover winning strategies, tactics, and generals. We completely miss the paradoxes of war through which events that were never imagined during a war’s planning transpire, and often prove providential. And we forget that sometimes one can still win a poorly conceived war—and that to do so may be better than losing it.

  Preoccupied with the daily news from Baghdad, we seemed to think that our generation in the twenty-first century was unique in experiencing the heartbreak of an error-plagued war. We forgot that victory in every war goes to the side that commits fewer mistakes—and learns more from them in less time—not to the side that makes no mistakes at all. A perfect military in a flawless war has never existed—though after Grenada and the air war over the Balkans, Americans apparently thought otherwise. Rather than sink into unending recrimination over Iraq and Afghanistan, we should reflect about comparable errors in America’s past wars and how they were corrected.

  Intelligence Failures

  TAKE ONE OF the Iraq War’s most controversial and enduring issues: intelligence failures. Supposedly we went to war in 2003 with little accurate information about either Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or its endemic religious factionalism. As a result the U.S. government lost credibility and goodwill at home and abroad, and was soon plagued by enormous political and military problems in trying to stabilize a constitutional government in Iraq. This may prove to be true in large part, but is it unusual? And have lapses of this magnitude been infrequent in past wars?

  Not at all, in either a strategic or a tactical context. American intelligence officers missed the almost self-evident Pearl Harbor attack, as an entire Japanese carrier group steamed unnoticed to within a few hundred miles of Hawaii. After fighting for four long years, we were completely surprised by the Soviets’ efforts to absorb Eastern Europe, and their rejection of almost all wartime assurances of elections to come. Almost no one had a clue about the Communist invasion of South Korea in June 1950—or the subsequent Chinese entrance en masse into North Korea months later in October and November. Americans were as surprised as Israelis by the sudden 1973 joint Arab attack on Israel. Neither the CIA nor the State Department had much inkling that Saddam Hussein would really gobble up Kuwait in August 1990, or that Pakistan was about to detonate a nuclear weapon in 1998.

  We should remember that long before the WMD controversy, the triggers for American wars have usually been odd affairs, characterized by poor intelligence gathering, inept diplomacy, and plenty of duplicity—and thus endless controversy and conspiracy mongering. Consider, for example, the so-called Thornton affair that started the Mexican War; the murky circumstances surrounding the defense and shelling of Fort Sumter; the cry of “Remember the Maine!” that heralded the Spanish-American War; the disputed claims surrounding the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania that turned public opinion against the kaiser; the Pearl Harbor debacle; an offhand remark in January 1950 by Secretary of State D
ean Acheson that South Korea was outside our “defense perimeter”; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; and an American diplomat’s apparent signal of nonchalance to Saddam Hussein immediately before he invaded Kuwait. It is no overstatement that almost every American war involved some sort of honest intelligence failure or misinterpretation of an enemy’s motives—or outright dissimulation.

  At the battlefield level, America’s past intelligence failures were even more shocking. On April 6, 1862, on a quiet early Sunday morning, Union forces at Shiloh allowed a large, noisy Confederate army under General Albert Sidney Johnston to approach unnoticed (by superb generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman) to within a few thousand yards of their front with disastrous results. Grant—still clueless as to the forces of nearly sixty thousand arrayed against him—compounded his error by sending an ambiguous message for reinforcements to General Lew Wallace, resulting in a critical delay of aid for several hours. Hundreds of Union soldiers died in the meantime. Following the battle, victorious Union generals knew even less concerning the whereabouts of the retreating, defeated Confederate forces and thus allowed them to escape in safety—and to reform into new units to kill more Northern soldiers. The hard-won Union victory became an object of blame-gaming for the remainder of the nineteenth century—as was true of Antietam, and as was true of Gettysburg.

  Perhaps the two costliest intelligence lapses of the Second World War preceded the Battle of the Bulge and Okinawa—both toward the end of the war, after radical improvements in intelligence methods and technology and long experience with both German and Japanese modes of attack. Americans had no idea of the scope, timing, or aims of the massive German surprise attack through the Ardennes in December 1944, despite the battle-tested acumen of our two most respected generals, Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and British and American intercepts of Wehrmacht messages. Days into the German offensive, there was no consensus about German aims or the proper way to push back the salient. Again, in such circumstances we are talking about errors costing the lives of tens of thousands of Americans in a matter of days, not four thousand Americans over several years in Iraq.

  At Okinawa, American intelligence officers grievously underestimated the size, position, and nature of the Japanese deployment, and thus vastly overestimated the efficacy of their own pre-invasion bombing attacks. Army commanders—in near insane fashion—persisted in head-on attacks against the nearly impenetrable Shuri Line, without a clue how well prepared the Japanese were for just such an unimaginative strategy. Yet Okinawa was not our first experience with island-hopping. It unfolded as the last invasion assault in the Pacific theater of operations—supposedly after the collective wisdom gleaned from Guadalcanal, the Marianas, Peleliu, the Philippines, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima had been well digested. Yet this late in the war, still more than 140,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing in the Ardennes and on Okinawa.

  Strategic and Tactical Lapses

  AT THE GEOSTRATEGIC level, American diplomats have had to make devil’s bargains far more morally suspect than going into Iraq. General George Patton and others lamented that the Second World War had broken out in 1939 over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe from totalitarianism—only to end, through the broken 1945 Yalta accords, ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile Soviet ally whose military we had supplied lavishly. In 1776, Americans, bent on establishing a free republic, looked to the soon-to-be-dethroned monarchy in France and its court aristocracy for help in a war against a more liberal parliamentary Great Britain.

  Today we worry whether the United States should have armed some anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan in the 1980s or whether it was moral to watch with unrestrained glee as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq nearly annihilated each other between 1980 and 1988—each in some small part occasionally helped by U.S. arms or intelligence. We forget that even worse choices than those have confronted us in the past—like sending billions of dollars of aid to Joseph Stalin to stop Adolf Hitler, just a few years after the former had slaughtered or starved to death twenty million Soviets, invaded hapless Finland, carved up Poland with Hitler, and sent strategic materials daily to the Third Reich as it firebombed London. America in the past has offered support for authoritarians such as General Somoza of Nicaragua and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to prevent both countries from falling into the sphere of an even worse Soviet Union, apparently on the logic that a right-wing anti-Communist dictatorship could either evolve or be pressured to reform in a way that a Stalinist satellite could not.

  The Carter administration by 1979 was confused over whether to support, abandon, or ignore the longtime allied, but increasingly beleaguered, shah of Iran—the object of hatred of thousands of Iranians (the Iranian left despised his repression and corruption, the Islamic right his efforts at modernization and secularization). In the end, the United States somehow simultaneously managed to lose a strategic ally in the Cold War, ensure the beginning of a three-decade-long aggression of Iranian-backed Islamic terrorists against American interests, and leave left-wing socialist reformers to be butchered by second-wave revolutionary Islamic fundamentalists. “The Great Satan” originally arose as a slur against Jimmy Carter’s kinder and gentler United States—at the same time democratic allies from Europe to Asia condemned America as an equivocal and unreliable ally. Thousands of Iranians flocked in waves to the United States, furious—depending on their own circumstances and politics—that a naive Carter either had sold out a staunch American Cold War ally or had sold out principled and secular left-wing reformers.

  In many of our wars, this country has committed strategic mistakes far greater in number and consequence than anything seen in Iraq. Perhaps the worst was to send thousands of American crewmen in daylight bombing raids over occupied Europe in 1942–44. To visit American cemeteries in Europe today is to walk among thousands of graves, marked with the shared information “8th Army Air Force” and the dates of those killed between 1942 and 1944. Prewar dogmas of the “bomber always gets through” blinded zealous proponents of strategic air power. Ignoring its critics, ossified Army Air Force planners sent hundreds of highly trained crews to their deaths on slow, unescorted bombing runs in broad daylight, amid thousands of German flak batteries and Luftwaffe fighters—and achieved very little in return until early 1944. By August and September 1943 the Wehrmacht may have been shooting down B-24 Liberators and B-17s almost as quickly as replacement crews and planes arrived in England. Before the war ended, more than ten thousand American bombers and escort fighters were lost to enemy flak, aircraft, and accidents—in a strategic bombing campaign deemed a “success.” Sending air crews over Europe in 1943 was analogous to British officers in the First World War ordering their men “over the top” to be slaughtered during the initial minutes of the Somme offensive of 1916. That said, where and how exactly was a previously unarmed, inexperienced, and unprepared United States supposed to attack Nazi Germany in 1942–43, if not largely through the air and on the periphery in North Africa and Sicily? Before we in hindsight damn the stupidity of our Army Air Force generals, remember that every flak gun transferred westward to shoot down B-17s, every German fighter redeployed over Europe, every factory bombed in Germany, meant that our allies on the eastern front had a greater chance to stop, defeat, and destroy the great majority of Wehrmacht infantrymen who fought in the Second World War.

  Even more regrettable was Admiral Ernest King’s initial decision in 1942 not to use American destroyers and destroyer escorts to shepherd merchant ships across the Atlantic to Great Britain. German U-boats had a field day, torpedoing slow-moving cargo vessels right off our east coast—which was lit up each night, almost as if to silhouette undefended American targets at sea and enhance submarine torpedo accuracy. King persisted despite ample evidence from the First World War that the convoy system had worked, and despite pleas from veteran British officers that their own two-year experience in the war had taught them the folly of sending unescor
ted merchant ships across the Atlantic.

  We often read of the tragedy of the September 1944 Arnheim campaign. Impossible logistics, bad weather, lousy intelligence, tactical imbecility, and much more doomed operation Market Garden and led to the infamous “a bridge too far” catastrophe. Thousands of Anglo-American troops were needlessly killed or wounded—even after the Allies had recently crushed an entire German army group in the west (although they had tragically allowed one hundred thousand Wehrmacht troops to escape at the so-called Falaise Gap). The foolery of Market Garden, which sought to push tens of thousands of Allied troops over a sole, narrow road toward the Rhine, also ate up scarce resources, manpower, and gasoline at precisely the time the American Third Army was nearing the Rhine without much major opposition. Once the Allied armies stalled for want of supplies, they were unable to cross the border of the Reich for another half year—in which the majority of Americans lost on the Western European front died. The Germans used the breathing space after their victory in Holland to rush defenders to the so-called Siegfried Line, which had been theretofore mostly undefended, and to refit once-shattered Panzer divisions. No senior planners involved with the Operation Market Garden disaster were sacked, despite the fifteen thousand allied casualties.

  Had General Douglas MacArthur in late 1950 listened to both superiors and subordinates, he would not have sent thousands of G.I.s with long vulnerable supply lines into the far reaches of mountainous, wintry North Korea—on his gut instinct that hundreds of thousands of Chinese “volunteers” would not cross the Yalu River and that his troops would be “home for Thanksgiving.” When Mao ordered the massive People’s Army to invade, the longest retreat in the history of U.S. forces ensued, with thousands of American casualties—and hysterical cries back home both that the war was now “lost” and that we had been stabbed in the back by Communist sympathizers. The real mystery was why and how any informed public could believe that a rather small American army could drive an enemy four hundred miles distant in frigid cold into the sanctuary of a hostile, eight-hundred-million-person Communist country—and not expect abject catastrophe to ensue.