Nor, it must be said, does Franks’s effort to portray the Iraqi army of 2003 as a formidable force—at one point he compares the Republican Guard to Hitler’s Waffen SS—stand up to close scrutiny. The fact is that Saddam’s army never recovered from the drubbing that it endured in 1991. More than a decade of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, plus aerial bombardment from 1998 onwards, had made any such recovery impossible. Thus, although Franks does not mention the fact, by 2003 Iraq for all practical purposes did not possess an air force—no small matter in an age when air power has come to dominate conventional warfare.
Franks asserts that “there’s never been a combat operation as successful as Iraqi Freedom.” Only the narrowest definition of success makes that claim sustainable. In fact, the tangible benefits accruing from America’s victory over Saddam Hussein have been few. In a sense, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 bears comparison to Germany’s invasion of Norway in 1940 or its lunge into Yugoslavia the following year. At the moment of execution, each seemed to affirm impressions that the German military juggernaut was unstoppable. But once the dust had settled, it became apparent that neither victory had brought the Nazi regime any closer to resolving the main issue. Each had saddled the Wehrmacht with burdens that it could ill afford to bear.
Then there is the almost forgotten matter of Afghanistan. The aim of Operation Enduring Freedom had been to “squeeze into extinction” the terrorists and terrorist-sympathizers present in that country. By the end of 2001, Franks declares, “we had accomplished our mission.” But this is palpable nonsense. To be sure, the US intervention in Afghanistan damaged al-Qaeda and ousted the Taliban regime—hardly trivial accomplishments. But Operation Enduring Freedom came nowhere near to destroying either organization. Of equal moment—although the point receives scant attention in American Soldier—both Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar managed to elude the forces that Franks commanded. Three years after they first arrived, US troops find themselves engaged in an arduous, open-ended effort to maintain even the most tenuous stability. They will not be going home anytime soon. In Afghanistan, General Franks no more accomplished his mission than did the younger von Moltke when he took the German army partway to Paris in 1914. Franks wrote American Soldier in hopes of securing his place in history. But in both Iraq and Afghanistan, history appears to be moving in directions not helpful to his cause.
Finally, no one even remotely familiar with recent trends in military affairs will find persuasive the general’s efforts to portray himself as an out-of-the-box thinker. The belief that information technology is transforming force from a blunt to a precision instrument of unprecedented versatility—among other things, providing commanders, Franks writes, with “the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods”—has been a shibboleth for the past quarter-century. At most, Franks appropriated the ideas of others and nudged US military doctrine further along the path down which it was already headed—completely oblivious to the possibility that this path, like any other, just might lead into an ambush.
As to denunciations of service parochialism and calls for greater “jointness,” they are today about as fresh (and as brave) as politicians speaking out against racial bigotry. At least since the days of Eisenhower, senior Army commanders have been touting the imperative of inter-service cooperation. Over the past twenty years even Air Force generals and Navy admirals have climbed on the jointness bandwagon—though, as with old-school politicos from the Deep South proclaiming their devotion to racial harmony, the depth of Air Force and Navy conviction may on occasion be in doubt. In short, the author’s claim to being a bold original is bogus.
Yet even if the victories that Franks won have lost some of their initial luster, and even if he was never quite the innovator he purports to be, American Soldier retains considerable value. Indeed, even if a decade from now the ambiguity that has come to surround General Schwarzkopf’s once-famous liberation of Kuwait envelops the liberation of Afghanistan and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, students of American globalism will still find in American Soldier a treasure trove of insight, if they read the book with the care it deserves. For these pages shed considerable light on one of the great unanswered questions of the day: How is it that over the past decade-and-a-half, as US forces have gone from one storied triumph to the next, the security of the United States has become ever more precarious? Why, when we flex our military muscles on behalf of freedom and peace, does the world beyond our borders become all the more cantankerous and disorderly? Madeleine Albright irritated Colin Powell by famously asking, “What’s the point of having this great army you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” From our present perspective, a better question might be: “What’s the point of using this great army if the result is Fallujah, Najaf, and Karbala?”
Of course, these are perplexing matters for which there is no neat, tidy explanation. Greed, envy, miscalculation, sheer stupidity, ideological blinders, the nature of the international system, the sins of past generations coming home to roost, the hubris of militarized civilian elites, the iron law of unintended consequences: all of these deserve mention. But in American Soldier we see on vivid display one additional factor: the political naïveté and strategic ineptitude of military officers selected and presumably groomed for high command. Far from being a maverick marching to his own drummer, Franks embodies a set of convictions and prejudices common among officers of his generation. Ever since they returned from the jungles and rice paddies over thirty years ago, members of that generation have been engaged in a project that aims, as it were, to put right all that the luckless William Westmoreland got wrong. In essence, they want to reverse the verdict of Vietnam.
More specifically, they have sought to purge war of politics, reconstituting the conception of war as the exclusive province of military professionals. Throughout American Soldier, Franks makes it abundantly clear that he views political considerations as at best a distraction, if not an outright impediment. (Discussing the understanding he reached, “soldier-to-soldier,” with Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf in the run-up to US operations in Afghanistan, Franks writes that such a partnership could have been forged long before, were it not for the “diplomatic envoys in business suits [who] had hectored soldier-politicians such as Musharraf about human rights and representative government.”) Never having forgiven Robert McNamara, he and other members of his generation instinctively view civilians as troublemakers, constantly straying onto turf that rightly belongs to soldiers. Averting such unwelcome encroachments constitutes a categorical imperative.
Keeping civilians where they belong and reasserting a professional monopoly over the conduct of warfare requires drawing the clearest possible line to prevent politics and war from becoming tangled up with one another. Whereas Westmoreland, remembered today as too much the political general, allowed the Whiz Kids to intrude in matters that belonged under his purview, the subalterns who experienced the frustrations of defeat but then stayed on after Vietnam to revive American military power have vowed never to let that happen again. They insist that the conduct of war be recognized as their business and theirs alone. Hence, the general-in-chief who (like Franks) experiences combat vicariously in the comfort of an air-conditioned headquarters nonetheless insists on styling himself a chest-thumping “warfighter.” He does so for more than merely symbolic reasons: asserting that identity permits him to advance prerogatives to which the officer corps lays absolute claim. This is my business; the suits—Franks would likely employ coarser language—should stay out.
It is the sort of sharp distinction between war and politics that Douglas Haig or Erich Ludendorff would have appreciated and understood. But what gets lost in drawing such distinctions—what Haig and Ludendorff lost in World War I—is any possibility of strategic coherence. Fighting is, of course, integral to war. But, if in ways not always appreciated by or even agreeable to those who actually pull triggers and drop bombs, war is also and always profoundly po
litical. Indeed, if war is to have any conceivable justification and prospect of utility, it must remain subordinated to politics. Effecting that subordination lies at the very heart of strategy. In the tradition of which Franks is an exponent there is a powerful tendency to resist this formulation. Thus, although the author of American Soldier mouths Clausewitzian slogans, when it comes to the relationship of war and politics, he rejects the core of what Clausewitz actually taught. And in that sense he typifies the post-Vietnam American officer.
Clausewitz sees the nature of war as complex and elusive; generalship requires not only intensive study and stalwart character, but also great intuitive powers. For Franks, war is a matter of engineering—and generalship the business of organizing and coordinating materiel. Thus, the Franks who reduces international politics to “five Cs” offers up a similarly schematic notion of strategy. When first directed by Rumsfeld to begin planning the invasion of Iraq, Franks sat down, legal pad in hand, and sketched out what he calls his “template” for decisive victory. The resulting matrix, which American Soldier proudly reprints in its original handwritten form, consists of seven horizontal “lines of operation”—enumerating US capabilities—intersecting with nine vertical “slices,” each describing one source of Saddam Hussein’s hold on power. At select points of intersection—thirty-six in all—Franks drew a “starburst.” For purposes of further planning, these defined points of main effort.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with generals sketching out ‘lines and slices.’ Commanders no longer wage war by pointing their swords at the enemy and hollering “Charge!” Campaign planning requires checklists and schedules, readily identifiable priorities and unambiguous lines of authority. If a seven-by-nine matrix can lend order to the process of gearing up a force for war, that is all to the good. But even a casual examination of Franks’s sketch shows that it does not even remotely approximate a strategy. It is devoid of any political context. Narrowly focused on the upcoming fight, it pays no attention to the aftermath. Defining the problem as Iraq and Iraq alone, it ignores other power relationships and makes no provision for how war might alter those relationships, whether for good or ill. It is completely ahistorical and makes no reference to culture, religion, or ethnic identity. It has no moral dimension. It fails even to provide a statement of purpose. But according to Franks, it is an exquisitely designed example of what he terms “basic grand strategy” (emphasis in the original).
Here we come face to face with the essential dilemma with which the United States has wrestled ever since the Soviets had the temerity to deprive us of a stabilizing adversary—a dilemma that the events of 9/11 only served to exacerbate. The political elite that ought to bear the chief responsibility for formulating grand strategy instead nurses ideological fantasies of remaking the world in America’s image, as the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of 2002 so vividly attests. Meanwhile, the military elite that could possibly puncture those fantasies and help restore a modicum of realism to US policy instead obsesses over operations. Reluctant to engage in any sort of political-military dialogue that might compromise their autonomy, the generals allow fundamental questions about the relationship between power and purpose to go unanswered and even unrecognized.
Into this void between the illusions of the political class and the fears of the generals disappears the possibility of establishing some equilibrium between ends and means. Instead, the United States careens ever closer to bankruptcy, exhaustion, and imperial overstretch. The US today has vast ambitions for how the world should operate, too vast to be practical. It wields great power, though not nearly so much as many imagine. But there exists nothing even approaching a meaningful strategy to meld the two together. In American Soldier, Tommy Franks helps us understand why.
____________
1. Tommy Franks, American Soldier (HarperCollins: New York, 2004).
13
Selling Our Souls
Of Idolatry and iPhones
(2011)
Confronting the twentieth century, Catholicism stood fast. This was its mission: church as bulwark against the disorders afflicting the age. The excitement of Vatican II (I was a teenager when the council convened) derived from the sense that the church possessed a hitherto unsuspected capacity to adapt its witness. Rather than merely standing in lonely opposition, the church intended to engage—and then redeem—modernity.
Catholics in the twenty-first century find it increasingly difficult—perhaps impossible—to sustain any such expectations. The problem is not simply that the institutional church today stands dishonored and discredited, but that it has misconstrued the problem. The ramparts it persists in defending—a moral order based on received, permanent truth—have long since been scaled, breached, and bypassed, and have fallen into ruin.
What went wrong? The great American historian Henry Adams—dead nearly a hundred years—offers a more cogent answer to that question than any we are likely to hear from Rome. Recalling his return to New York City after a lengthy stay in Europe in The Education of Henry Adams, the historian rendered this verdict: “The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway,” a panoply of false gods clattering in its wake. That failure had created a vacuum. The heresies that were filling that vacuum filled Adams with foreboding.
Worse, he could see no reason to consider Christianity’s demise as anything other than definitive and irreversible. Yet a century later we remain largely oblivious to its implications. We still don’t understand what hit us.
Not himself conventionally religious (watching his sister suffer an excruciatingly painful death, he had concluded that God might be “a Substance, but He could not be a Person”), Adams was referring to Christianity not as a belief system but as an organizing principle. Christianity as project—reference point, narrative, and source of authority—imparted to history a semblance of cohesion and purposefulness. So, for centuries, Europeans and Americans had believed, or at least pretended to believe.
For Adams, writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, even the pretense had become unsustainable. While attending the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and then the Exposition Universelle seven years later in Paris—subjecting each to intense inspection—he found himself face-to-face with ominous new forces to which he took an instant dislike and from which he expected more ill to come than good. Subsequent events amply vindicated his low expectations.
The preeminent symbol of the Christian age (then in the final throes of disintegration, as he saw it) had been Mary, the Mother of God. The preeminent symbol of the age then dawning was the dynamo. If the Virgin embodied a conception of truth as fixed and singular, the dynamo implied the inverse: constant change and multiplicity. In place of coherence and unity, fragmentation and anarchy beckoned. “Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude,” Adams wrote.
The cylinder had exploded and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky. Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable, and afraid.
The machines providing the source of this never-before-seen power, prosperity, and speed (along with electrical generators, Adams cited locomotives and automobiles, “a nightmare at a hundred kilometers an hour”) were displacing God, replacing him with objects more worthy of worship. Standing in a gallery at the Paris exhibition, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive than this huge wheel. Before the end one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.
Detached and sardonic, Adams was ideally suited to assess the implications of this emerging dystopia. He had no stake in the outcome. He merely observed, his interest reflecting his perpetual, if futile, quest for education.
For just that reason, Adams was quick to discern who profited from this
transfer of divine attributes. The principal beneficiaries were the “Trusts and Corporations” with which his friend President Theodore Roosevelt was even then engaged in epic battle. “They were revolutionary,” Adams wrote of these engines of enterprise, “troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They tore society to pieces and trampled it underfoot,” engineering a transformation of human existence rivaling that which Jesus had wrought through his death and resurrection. The great mechanisms of wealth creation were unscrupulous, obnoxious, and irreligious; but as TR and all his successors would learn, they were also wily, resourceful, and persistent. Trustbusting was a fruitless exercise.
When Adams composed these observations, of course, America itself embodied that ongoing transformation. In the United States, novelty and impermanence reigned. There factories and fortunes were bigger, machines faster, buildings taller. Yet Americans were oblivious to all that the onslaught portended. According to Adams, “They were wandering in a wilderness much more sandy than the Hebrews had ever trodden about Sinai; they had neither serpents nor golden calves to worship.” Rejecting the commonplace charge of a country seduced and corrupted by Mammon, Adams leveled an even more severe indictment.
Worship of money was an old-world trait; a healthy appetite akin to worship of the gods, or to worship of power in any concrete shape; but the American wasted money more recklessly than anyone ever did before; he spent more to less purpose than any extravagant court aristocracy; he had no sense of relative values, and knew not what to do with his money when he got it, except use it to make more, or throw it away.
Twilight of the American Century Page 15
