In the early part of the movie Patton, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel is about to board a plane for a flight from his Tunisian base to Berlin for consultation with Hitler. Nearby is a POW compound filled with American soldiers captured in the German victory at the Kasserine Pass, Rommel’s aide, trying to raise his commander’s dark spirits, comments that in that battle the Allies had to overcome the worst of conditions imaginable: American soldiers fighting under
overall British command. Rommel reminds the aide that a British general has driven the Germans halfway across North Africa, and that under better generalship the Americans will only improve. As he passes the captured Americans to board the waiting aircraft, Rommel salutes them.
The critics and the viewing public, as they frequently do, saw different things in Patton. The former interpreted the movie as an antiwar offering, a condemnation of American militarism and jingoism. What kind of a monster, after all, viewing the carnage of a battlefield, could utter, as Patton does in the movie, “I love it. God help me, I love it so.” The general public saw things differently, rather like Rommel: When American soldiers are properly led, no army, not even the dreaded Wehrmacht, can withstand them. If the United States had lost the recent Vietnam War, the fault must be with someone other than the men who had gone there to fight.
Like Rommel’s aide, foreign military observers frequently exhibit contempt for the American fighting man. A European observer of the American Civil War described that struggle as a brawl between two armed mobs. And only two years ago there were newspaper reports that German commanders expressed little confidence in the fighting abilities of their American allies in the event of a Soviet attack on NATO’s Central Front.
American military commentators, on the other hand, tend to blame U.S. defense deficiencies on structure and strategy. A spate of books, beginning several years ago with James Fallows’s National Defense and including more recently, Edward Luttwak’s The Pentagon and the Art of War, and James Coates and Michael Killian’s Heavy Losses places the blame for U.S. military failures squarely on American organizational defects and the consequent problems. A recent study done by the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee lays the basis for a major legislative overhaul of the U.S. defense establishment. The House of Representatives for the second year in a row has passed a bill reorganizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and its Armed Services Committee is currently holding hearings on a more comprehensive reorganization of the U.S. defense establishment. The thrust of the reformers’ argument is best summarized by Luttwak: Despite the patriotism, dedication, and individual excellence of American military men, the U.S. defense establishment has suffered one failure after another.
On the surface these two approaches to U.S. military affairs seem to be at odds. After all, three generations of American males drafted into the U.S. military have a vested interest in believing that they were much smarter than the “lifers” who could not make it on the outside. Thus their inclination to give credence to the view, expressed in such books as Heavy Losses, that the American soldier is usually the victim of military bureaucratic incompetence, which results from poor or indifferent organization.
But, in fact, many of the commentators who seem to attribute U.S. military deficiencies to organizational or strategic shortcomings rather than to the vices of the American soldier are just as disdainful of American military virtue as the Rommel aide in Patton. Many of the most respected “military reformers” (such as Luttwak, Steven Canby, Bill Lind, and Martin Van Crevald) have, despite their protestations to the contrary, at one time or other disparaged the American military ethic relative to that of their European or Israeli favorites. All of these commentators have been criticized for their overbearing arrogance or their lack of military experience (applicable to all but Canby). But these criticisms miss the point. The real weakness of these reformers is their failure to understand American political institutions. These institutions after all are the central influence on the “American Way of War” (and preparation for war), as authors from Samuel Huntington to Russell Weigley to Colonel Harry Summers have recognized.
One can understand neither strengths nor the weaknesses of the American national security system without understanding the American political tradition. After all, reform does not take place in a vacuum. Any reform that does not take account of general factors (such as the nature of the military in a liberal democracy, or particular ones, such as the characteristics of the people or their institutions of government) is doomed to failure. More importantly, any reforms put into affect which do not take account of these factors will only make things worse. Unfortunately, too few of the current reformers take account of what, following Ken Booth, Colin Gray, and Carnes Lord, might be called the “American strategic culture.” In Lord’s words, the strategic culture of a nation comprises it fundamental assumptions governing the constitution of military power and the ends they are intended to serve, which in turn are shaped by the social, political, economic, and ideological characteristics of a people. The assumptions which form the strategic culture “establish the basic framework for if they do not determine in detail the nature of, military forces and military operations.” Too many of the reformers take their bearings from European strategic culture, denigrating the different political goals, traditions, and institutions that shape the way military force is to be used in defense of the American Republic.
Those who wish to understand the dynamics of American strategic culture could ask for no better introduction than Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski’s For the Common Defense. One learns from this excellent work that, while military reform is hardly new to the American experience, successful military reforms have always followed successful societal reforms, and further, that while American political institutions do not encourage rapid adoption and implementation of good ideas, they at least protect citizens against truly bad ones.
The authors define military policy as the aggregate of the assumptions, plans, programs, and actions taken by the citizens of a nation through their government to achieve security against external military threats and domestic insurrection. Military policy manifests itself in two ways: through the instrumentalities by which military forces are organized and controlled, and through the development and implementation of military strategy. While other books have dealt competently with one or the other of these manifestations, the great strength of For the Common Defense is the way in which it treats both, always with an eye to the overarching American strategic culture.
Above all, For the Common Defense is an outstanding examination of the evolution of U.S. military policy in the light of changing circumstances, national goals, and most importantly, the constraints imposed by the political institutions and strategic culture of the nation. Indeed, Millett and Maslowski illuminate again and again the central problems of American military policy: how to defend the Republic against threats to its security while remaining true to the principles and character of the American regime. Debates such as those concerning standing armies versus militia, volunteer domestic constabulatory forces versus conscription, versus war-fighting forces, a coastal defense navy based on gunboats versus a “bluewater” navy capable of offensive action on the high seas, which raged during the first century after Independence, right down to contemporary issues such as those concerning defense organization and acquisition policy must be understood in the context of American institutions and the character of the American people.
Two of the themes that Millett and Maslowski suggest place U.S. military history within the broad context of American history as a whole are frequently forgotten or ignored by contemporary reformers. First, “national military considerations alone have barely shaped military policies and programs. The political system, the availability of finite…resources and manpower, and societal values have all imposed constraints on defense matters.” Second, “the nation’s firm commitment to civilian control of military policy requires careful attention to civil-military relations. The commitment to civilian control makes military policy a paramount function of the federal government where the executive branch and Congress vie to shape policy.”
Would-be reformers have ignored these principles at their peril. A case in point was Emory Upton. In words that could just as easily apply to contemporary reformers such as Luttwak, Canby, and Lind, the authors describe Uptom’s failure to achieve his Prussian-style reforms int he U.S. Army in the 1870s:
Nor did Upton understand that policy cannot he judged by any absolute standard. It reflects a nation’s characteristics, habits of thought, geographic location, and historical development. Built upon the genius, traditions, and location of Germany, the system he admired could not be grafted onto America. In essence, Upton wrote in a vacuum. He began with a fixed view of the policy he thought the U.S. needed, and he wanted the rest of society to change to meet his demands, which it sensibly declined to do.
The American political system has been surprisingly capable of adapting military policy to the threat within the constraints of limited resources and the American character. That system has done a creditable job of providing for the defense of the Republic and its principles while comprehending the limits to power. As the authors demonstrate, despite the popular belief that the U.S. has generally been unprepared for war, policymakers have done remarkably well in preserving the nation’s security by taking advantage of such things as geographic distance from dangerous adversaries, the European balance of power, and America’s own potential to mobilize materiel and manpower.
When gauging America’s strength against potential enemies, policymakers realized that the nation could devote its energies and financial resources to internal development rather than to maintaining a large and expensive peacetime military establishment. However, mobilizing simultaneously with a war’s outbreak has extracted high costs in terms of speed and ease with each new mobilization.
Since the end of World War II of course, changed geopolitical realities, as manifested in the growth of a militarily powerful and ideologically hostile Soviet Union and the increasing importance of nuclear weapons, have dictated that U.S. military policy be substantially changed. The peacetime establishment has grown, and the U.S. has become a major international power. Yet, even in these dangerous times, military policy must be developed and implemented within certain constraints. These constraints may not please the purists among the military reformers, but it is precisely the U.S. political system that has created the conditions necessary for tremendous economic growth, and it is the economic potential of the nation that has, in the past and at present, undergirded its military might.
At the same time, the American political system has generally produced courageous, clever, and adaptable soldiers. American soldiers, backed by the economic power of the nation and employed to achieve clear war aims and political objectives, have generally performed well. Their procurement is the topic of Eliot Cohen’s Citizens and Soldiers.
Cohen, like Millet and Maslowski, takes the American political tradition and the institutions arising therefrom seriously, eschewing the ahistorical, apolitical, and consequently barren mode of economic analysis that has characterized so much recent literature on American military manpower policy. In the words of St. Cyr, whom Cohen quotes in the epigraph of the book, “Les lois sur le recrutement sont des institutions” (the laws governing military recruitment are political institutions).
Citizens and Soldiers is particularly timely given recent rumblings among military planners that seem to presage the renewal of the debate over conscription which has up to now been postponed by favorable (though temporary) recruiting trends over the past two years and the antidraft preferences of the current administration. Changing demographics and economic conditions bode ill, it is said, for the future of the present voluntary system. Without a return to some form of compulsory service, most analysts agree that the gap between American commitments abroad and the manpower resources necessary to meet them will continue to grow.
Several alternative responses to this situation suggest themselves. First, the U.S. could reduce its foreign policy commitments. Such a response has been proposed by a number of responsible analysts, whose particular plans are as numerous as their various authors. Senator Sam Nunn would reduce the U.S. commitment to NATO. So would Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. So would Jeffrey Record. Robert Komer and Edward Luttwak would curtail the growth of the Navy in order to provide more resources for NATO. The Libertarian neo-isolationist Earl Ravenal would reduce all U.S. defense commitments. Such a retrenchment, in general terms at least, may be, required if the U.S. refuses to address the manpower problem, although thoughtful strategists point out the severe geopolitical costs of such a step.
Second, the nation could continue its current practice of putting off the hard decisions into the future. The danger of this approach was brought into stark relief by the Vietnam War, the costs of which to the foreign policy and social fabric of the U.S. are still being paid, as we attempted to fight that war with a manpower policy totally inappropriate to the enterprise. Yet that system had been maintained by inertia and default as the Congress extended selective service (a system admirably designed to prosecute total war) into peacetime while rejecting Universal Military Training (UMT) in 1948.
Third, the U.S. could reopen the draft debate in a way certain to result in the rejection of conscription. This could be done by ignoring the broad context of American politics and by restricting the argument to narrow economic terms. By rejecting all discussion but that based on the calculus of cost and benefit, policymakers could defeat their own purpose beforehand with the likely result of turmoil at home and defeat abroad.
Or, finally, the nation could begin a broad reexamination of military manpower within the context of the American regime, recognizing the constraints of necessity and choice as manifest in the imperatives of geopolitics, political philosophy and tradition, and wars, both large and small. This is the approach that Cohen offers.
Cohen observes that the dilemmas of U.S. military manpower policy are rooted in the nature of the American regime and America’s geopolitical situation. To begin with, the American regime is at once liberal and egalitarian. There is a tension between these strains of thought that manifests itself in debates over military man-power. “Anglo-Saxon liberalism” and ” democratic egalitarianism” accord with very different varieties of peacetime service, while both traditions are at odds with the forms of military service that are best suited for large-scale war.
In addition, the U.S., by virtue of its status as a great power, must prepare for two completely different kinds of war. On the one hand, the nation must maintain a large standing force for all-out conventional war on the NATO Central Front. On the other, the U.S. must prepare to fight what Colonel C. E. Callwell in 1906 called “small wars.” The forces necessary to fight these wars are, for political and military reasons, two quite different kinds of armies.
These dilemmas of political culture and political-military necessity have prevented the U.S. from settling on a durable system of military service. In addition, claims Cohen, these dilemma are intractable: In other words, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to create a system of military service that the American regime could live with for decades. In many other countries this is not the case: Canada, Switzerland, Great Britain, and France, to cite several examples, have all retained their types of peacetime military service for nearly a century.
Cohen is to be commended for taking a broad view of the issue of military manpower. His approach allows him to transcend the narrow question of “the draft.” He addresses instead the real issues that are missed by so many in the recent debate over conscription or the draft. He asks instead: What is the nature of obligation within the American political tradition? How does the obligation of the citizen relate to that of the soldier? What is the place of compulsion in the American system of military manpower? What is the claim of military necessity? How should the nation select some for service and not others? How do methods of recruitment affect foreign policy, domestic politics, and the performance of a nation’s forces in battle?
In treating the military manpower problem the way he does, Cohen rehabilitates the venerable notion, one at least as old as Aristotle and Polybius and stated succinctly by St. Cyr, which held that systems of military service are an integral part of a regime’s institutions, since they have a powerful and permanent influence on the central principles of the regime. This tradition has been superseded by an approach based on economics or systems analysis: What is the least costly way of obtaining X number of persons having such and such characteristics for a fixed period of time (given, of course, that any departure from the principle of voluntarism is suspect)? As Cohen observes, the economic approach denigrates statesmanship and citizenship, and slights the philosophical, political, and even military aspects of the question which are not susceptible to quantitative analysis.
Cohen concludes that a successful American military manpower policy must meet certain criteria. First, it must be consistent with both liberalism and egalitarianism: Service should be brief and limited but as universal as possible. Second, it must produce forces that are capable of meeting the requirements of both total small wars: The standing army must consist of volunteers. Finally, the system must not be excessively costly, nor can it place excessive manpower and organizational burdens on the armed forces. Cohen’s proposed policy, which provides for a durable system of service consistent with the central principles of the American regime and one that is best suited to meet the entire spectrum of threats to American security interest, is modeled upon the plans advanced by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton in “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment”: compulsory universal militia service.
Such a system would create a large and potentially effective reserve army while spurring enlistments in the regular establishment, ensuring that the standing force was a voluntary one. It would be in accord with American traditions and institutions. And it would be durable. There would, of course, be serious practical problems, not the least of which would be the need to permanently federalize the National Guard. But no system is without problems. Cohen observes that those that beset the militia system he proposes can be overcome by that combination of political courage, adroitness, and the mastery of political rhetoric we call statesmanship —itself very much in the American tradition.
To be sure, neither For the Common Defense nor Citizens and Soldiers is without flaws. Careful readers will find many things to criticize in both books. But Millett and Maslowski, and Cohen have rendered a great service by reestablishing the political context of military policy, a context that has been notably absent in so many recent analyses. And both books can help policymakers in their attempt to judge correctly the delicate balance between the internal constraints on American power and the imperatives of geopolitics which still so often require the exercise of military power. The dangers will not disappear, nor will the political responsibility to face them.
