36 A book with great, but to my knowledge unrecognized, relevance to the profession of arms is The Logic of Practice, by French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, trans. R. Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).
37 Tillson and Canby, Alternative Approaches, p. III-8.
38 Gal, A Portrait of the Israeli Soldier, p. 217.
39 Ibid.
40 The Reichsheer (German army), which had a total strength of about 400,000 in the spring of 1919, was reduced to 100,000 by March 1920. We must weep that the German army got better during the Weimar Republic, through its concentration on the human dimension of military organizations—cohesion, leadership, training—even though the Versailles Treaty forbade virtually every aspect of technological modernization. Dupuy, A Genius for War, pp. 192-93.
41 Charles E. Heller and William A. Stofft, America’s First Battles: 1776-1965 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986). According to historian John Shy, the defeats were Long Island (Revolutionary War), Queenston Heights (War of 1812), Bull Run (American Civil War), Kasserine Pass (World War II—European theater), and Osan/Naktong (Korean War). The unnecessarily costly victories were San Juan (Spanish-American War), Cantigny (World War I), Buna (World War II—Pacific theater, but Bataan maybe should count here), and Ia Drang (Vietnam War—against the NVA).
42 Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 163.
43 An Army lieutenant general recently pointed out to me that Army Special Forces is in many respects a traditional regiment, referring to its unit stability, its esprit, and its training rigor.
44 Bruce I. Gudmundsson, “The German Army in World War I: The Contingents,” Tactical Notebook, November 1991. He writes: The final service rendered to the German nation by the system of regional recruiting was, ironically, to help ensure a quiet demobilization. When, in November of 1918, the regiments of the German Army marched home, they marched, in good order, to their local barracks. There the regiments were demobilized and the soldiers freed to walk the few miles that separated them from their homes. Units that lacked a regional character, however, resisted demobilization. Men of the Assault Battalions, the Guard Divisions, or the Marine units formed by sailors who had volunteered for duty at the front, faced the hard choice between returning home to the loved ones of half-forgotten pre-war lives or remaining with the “families” that had sustained them in hard months and years of combat. Many opted for the latter, forming the hard nucleus of the Freikorps. These latter units had an ethos that was essentially different from that of regionally based units. The latter, however misinformed they might have been about the relationship to Germany’s aims in the First World War to the defense of their loved ones, were clearly fighting for hearth and home. The Freikorps, however, developed a nihilistic ethos that celebrated violence for its own sake. One of the symptoms of this was the resurrection of the cult of the Landesknechte, the 16th and 17th century German freebooters who ravaged Europe in search of booty and adventure. (By permission of the author.)
45 Waller’s chapter “Objectives and Principles of a Veterans’ Program,” The Veteran Comes Back, pp. 259-83, pulls no punches and has never been surpassed as a picture of what’s needed.
46 New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
47 There are ominous signs of “dumbing down” and hemorrhaging from our combat training centers. See Mark Lewis, “Lewis Report: Why Stopping the Exodus of Junior Officers Is Important, September 7, 2001,” www.d-n-i.net/FCS_Folder/comments/c426.htm. Mark Lewis is currently an analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally funded research and development center for the office of the Secretary of Defense.
48 Colonel John D. Rosenberger, “Reaching Our Army’s Full Combat Potential in the 21st Century,” Landpower Essay Series No. 99-2, February 1999, p. 1
49 Evidence for these assertions can be found in my paper for the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study, online at www.belisarius.com/modern_business_strategy/shay/shay_prevent_psy_injury.htm. Many important points, such as what “toughness” in training is, and why it is ethically required, are covered there, and are beyond the scope of this book.
50 General Charles C. Krulak, “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War,” Manne Corps Gazette 83:18-22 (January 1999).
51 Tillson and Canby, Alternative Approaches, p. III-4, quoting Thomas C. Thayer, ed., A Systems Analysis View of the Vietnam War, 1965-1972, vol. 8, Casualties and Losses, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Program Analysis and Evaluation, Defense Technical Information Center, 1975, DTIC #ADA051613, p. 225.
52 Gal and Jones, “A Psychological Model of Combat Stress.”
53 This cluster of leadership practices has been called various things at various times and places: Auftragstaktik, “Positive Leadership,” “Power Down,” empowerment, decentralization, and others. Both the benefits from these practices and the catastrophic consequences of the familiar rule-by-fear and manage-in-detail-from-the-top alternatives are lucidly documented in Faris Kirkland’s publications in professional military journals and textbooks, a partial selection of which can be found in the Bibliography.
54 Quoted uncut above on page 157. This time I use Carver’s translation.
55 U. F. Zwygart, “How Much Obedience Does an Officer Need?,” U.S. Army Command and General Staff College pamphlet, 1993.
56 I have explored the role of trust in lubricating both the external (Clausewitzian) and internal (self-generated) sources of friction in military operations in “Trust.”
57 See for example Major Donald Vandergriff, “[email protected],” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, June 1999.
58 Broadside by Jeff Davis, Navy Times Almanac, 1998.
59 To return to the matter of leadership responsibility in atrocities, Colonel Bernard’s judgment on the Kerrey affair is that employment of the SEAL team in the Mekong Delta’s densely populated area was wrongheaded from the start, and that the blame lies with the ignorance, negligence, and arrogance of the higher-ups who ordered these young Americans into morally impossible situations. The difference between an accident in the dark and a tragic us-or-them decision is thus a difference without a moral or legal distinction.
60 Current U.S. Marine Corps doctrine, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication No. 6—Command and Control, places great and explicit emphasis on trust. For excerpts from this doctrinal publication see my piece “Preventing Psychological and Moral Injury in Military Service” from the Commandant of the Marine Corps Trust Study, available online at www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm. Also found in the same piece is a discussion that relates the work of comparative economic historian Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity [New York: Free Press, 1995]) on trust in the civilian economy to the analysis of internal or self-generated “friction” in military operations.
61 “Military Leadership into the 21st Century: Another ‘Bridge Too Far’?” Parameters 28:4-26 (Spring 1998).
62 Readers who are hungry for information on our military institutions that is of high quality, trustworthy, nonpartisan, nonideological, and economically untainted by military contracting money should start by immersing themselves in the Web site Defense and the National Interest, www.d-n-i.net, edited by Chet and Ginger Richards. It carries Franklin C. Spinney’s famous “blasters” (e-mail circular letters), both current and archived.
21. Odysseus As a Military Leader
1 Very rarely is his mētis simply “good counsel”—good practical advice without legerdemain, without any “wow, how did he ever think of that!” The semantic range of mētis eventually extends to simply being expert at something, such as wood chopping, fishing, sailing, chariot driving. Not being a classical philologist myself, I must rely on secondary sources. The impression I gain from the main work on the subject, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1
991), is that the marker that indicates the border between everyday skill and mētis is the “wow!” response evoked in the witness. “Such an astonishing sight leaves the spectator dumbfounded and makes him feel dizzy,” p. 303.
2 Chester W. Richards, A Swift, Elusive Sword: What if Sun Tzu and John Boyd Did a National Defense Review?, Center for Defense Information, 2001, p. 15, quoting the Cleary translation. Richards’s short, clear, and illuminating book is available on the Web in its entirety at www.cdi.org/mrp/swift_elusive_sword.pdf. Within Chinese culture many of the same struggles erupted over the value and dangers of mētis, cunning intelligence, as were fought out in the Greek world. Scholar Lisa Raphals has given a fascinating account of these parallels in Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
3 Scholars, with some justice, will object that the whole hyperindividualistic culture of epic Greek heroism placed the acquisition of the tokens and emblems of personal prowess far above the common good. Their enormous economic value made a major if subsidiary contribution to the kleos-is-everything mentality of the epic hero. (Kleos means “fame.”) However, as the contrast with Achilles shows, other-regarding motivation was available even in this epic world.
4 In keeping with “dual motivation,” Athena is equally credited with the ruse. Epios is mentioned as the actual builder of the wooden Horse. The Greeks overcame defeat in two forms. One was catastrophic failure of the amphibious expedition, leading to its destruction, as visualized in Iliad 10. This was almost turned into victory by Patroclus’ surprise attack on the Trojans’ flank with the fresh troops that Achilles had released to him. The other was the kind of defeat suffered by the English in the American colonies, or the Americans in Vietnam—realizing they could not win, they gave up and went home. The trick of the Horse turned stalemate, which would have resulted in the second sort of defeat, into victory for the Greeks.
5 Virgil [Publius Virgilius Maro], Aeneid, Book 2, line 258, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1981). Line numbering is to the translation. Emphasis added.
6 The classic treatment of the psychology of the leaders and bureaucrats of the side that is successfully surprised by its enemy is Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1982).
7 Little Iliad 1, in Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press Loeb Library, 1914), p. 511.
8 Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
9 James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 133.
10 Both instances of Trojan deception somehow involve Paris, first in Iliad 3, where he slips away from the single combat with Menelaus, designed to end the war in a political settlement, and second when the Trojan Pandarus, a political ally of Paris, is egged on by Athena to break the truce. He shoots an arrow at Menelaus from a hidden position in Iliad 4. The Greeks also make two deceptions in the Iliad: first was the defensive surprise sprung by the Greeks in Iliad 7, when they threw up a rampart on top of the funerary mound of those killed in the battle after the truce was broken in Iliad 4. This was Nestor’s idea. The second was the offensive surprise (also Nestor’s idea) achieved by Patroclus, disguised in Achilles’ armor, when he and the Myrmidons took the Trojans on the flank.
11 Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, pp. 47,145. Homer pays great attention to Odysseus in the Iliad, who is often called “equal to Zeus in artifice.” Achilles, a guileless embodiment of the straightforward fighter, is repeatedly contrasted to Odysseus, who is called “master of stratagems” (Iliad 3:321, Fitzgerald). On the battlefield the Trojan Skôdos addresses him, “Odysseus, great in all men’s eyes, unwearied master of guile …” (Iliad 11:490f, Fitzgerald). His divine patron and inspiration, Athena, is daughter by Zeus of Mētis, the Olympian personification of mētis (Hesiod, Theogony 886, p. 511).
12 Thucydides III.82-83. See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 404, 507n 24.
13 Hesk translation. Hesk, Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens, p. 26. Hesk further demonstrates that the Athenian Hoplite ideology scorned military deception as a sign of fear or cowardice. See his section “Honest Hoplites and Tricky Spartans,” pp. 23-40.
14 Rhesus 510-11; Hesk, Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens, p. 113n. Hesk expands this theme in his section “Deceit, Fear and Hoplite Courage,” pp. 107-22.
15 While the troops were certainly undisciplined, the current ethos of the American officer corps finds the commander culpable when his troops run riot, unless he has demonstrated every reasonable effort to prevent such loss of control and to restore order in his command, once it has broken down.
16 Parts of this discussion are taken from The Secretary of the Navy’s Guest Lecture, “Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon: Homer on Military Leadership,” Pentagon, Naval Command Center Auditorium, February 23, 2000. Available in its entirety on the Web at www.belisarius.com/author_index.htm with the handouts distributed at the talk.
17 Homer shows Agamemnon’s courage by having him pray to be chosen by lot to duel with Hector in Iliad 7 and gives him center stage in the big battle in Book 11.
18 The story of Achilles’ invulnerability, except for his heel, was either unknown to Homer or suppressed by him as out of keeping with his picture of Achilles’ heroism, which requires that he be mortal and vulnerable, that is, human.
19 See Richard P. Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 146-205, “The Language of Achilles.”
20 See Shay, “Achilles: Paragon, Flawed Character, or Tragic Soldier Figure?,” for a discussion of the purely military background of the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon.
21 In response to this dishonor, Achilles pulled himself and his troops, the Myrmidons, out of the war. As the independent leader of a national contingent, Achilles was free to withdraw. No one could arrest Achilles for desertion, any more than Westmoreland could have arrested the head of the Australian contingent in Vietnam.
22 Erwin Cook, “Agamemnon’s Test of the Army in Iliad Book 2 and the Function of Homeric Akhos,” American Journal of Philology, in press, notes these same two betrayals of the army’s moral order, and their probable destruction of the army’s morale, but credits Agamemnon with recognizing the impact of his own actions, and with ultimately restoring the army’s loyalty and morale by his “paradoxical” test.
23 American military assignment officers insist that this is exactly what they do. However, many constraining concepts, practices, and policies make this illusory.
22. Conclusion
1 Stanford, Enemies of Poetry, p. 5.
2 See Gregory Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 13, giving Herakles as the early Greek pattern of the hero who both suffers and causes great pain; and see Cook, The Odyssey in Athens, pp. 29-32.
3 Otto, The Idea of the Holy.
4 Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama coins the word “megalothymia” for this inflammation and aggrandizement of the thumos.
5 There has been a burst of scholarship in this area, for example, Understanding the Political Spirit, ed. Zuckert; McGlew, Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece; Dēmokratia, ed. Ober and Hedrick; Koziak, Retrieving Political Emotion; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought. Inquiry into equal political respect is woven throughout Nussbaum’s large book.
6 Pp.7-32.
7 I hope it is clear from Part II that I do not believe this is all that is required for recovery, but some form of the circle of communalization of trauma seems to be essential to the second stage of recovery.
8 Homer’s contemporary Hesiod speaks of the Muses in his work on the history of the gods, Theogony. He describes therapy of suffering by these goddesses of the arts in terms of forgetting, which I do not endorse: Hesiod, Theogony, lines 96ff, in Hesiod, Works and Days and Theogon
y, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 63f. Happy is the man
Whom the Muses love. Sweet flows the voice from his mouth.
For if anyone is grieved, if his heart is sore
With fresh sorrow, if he is troubled, and a singer
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