My longstanding rule as a military historian and student of strategy is to read as widely as possible, from strategists and from generals and even from philosophers, and whenever possible I read histories from both sides of the same conflict. You need to read the good and the bad, in order to sharpen your own mind and define your own thoughts and ideas on strategy by comparing them to the ideas of others. I know Michael O’Hanlon from his earlier books and from presentations at The Brookings Institute, where we have conversed more than once, I knew I must read this work by him.
In these pages, the author draws upon the history of America’s wars to illustrate strategy. The book begins in 1861 with the American Civil War. Further chapters cover World War I, World War 2, the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts in a single chapter, and then the subsequent conflicts in the Middle East in a single chapter. As I consider the author at least an acquaintance, I was disappointed to find that the published book is not without its flaws. Some are as simple as typos that should have been caught, for example, a 20__ date is printed rather than the correct 19__ date. However, there are also sins of omission, suggesting perhaps that the author didn’t read deeply enough. There are also sins of commission where he placed too much weight on his selected sources. It must be noted that there is no bibliography, so the only way to know what sources the author used is to read his endnotes closely. None of these flaws invalidate his points on strategy, but more reading may have added to the depth and breadth of the discussion of strategy in these conflicts.
The American Civil War
Any modern discussion of the commanders in blue and grey must reflect the fact that most officers (the ones who went to West Pont) would have read primarily from Jomini’s Art of War, where the focus is upon Napoleon’s wars, his actions as a commander, and his thoughts and ideas about war as filtered by one of his staff officers. Clausewitz’s work, On War, wasn’t yet available in English and German would not be taught at West Point for another decade or more. It is likely that the only Union or Confederate officers familiar with Clausewitz, would have been one of the German émigré officers found in both armies, especially those who had served in their homeland’s army. It is also important to recognize that calculations made before the war about the relative economic strength of North vs South overlooked the harsh reality that a sizable portion of that Southern wealth was literally the human multitudes held in bondage – and Southern planters would find it hard to translate such a ‘resource’ into hard cash in wartime.
As a slight aside, I believe that I can address the Michael O’Hanlon’s question (echoing Russell Weigley) as to why it took longer to train Civil War soldiers that to train soldiers for the war in Vietnam. I went through Basic and Advanced Individual Training at Fort Knox in 1972, by which date the US Army had been training draftees for a good two decades. It had training facilities, training personnel, and manuals on how to do it. In 1861, the roughly 15,000-man US Army was scattered around the country and had little in the way of centralized training facilities or training personnel. An added complication was that the vast majority of new regiments created to fight the war were raised by the individual states, which had no training facilities or personnel (unless they could find a West Point, VMI, or the Citadel, etc., graduate to name as Colonel of the new regiment). However, the Union Army had a 3-volume manual (generically called “Casey’s” after its author) which covered everything the soldier needed to know. As a Civil War reenactor, we often joked that a brand-new officer would do just fine training his soldiers if he could keep at least a chapter ahead of the troops as he went through the manual. (The Confederate Army had “Hardee’s” manual.) My experiences with both training practices also showed me that this initial training primarily resulted in an individual who could stand, sit, march, and generally act like a soldier (including taking care of himself, his weapons, and his other equipment) – but he wasn’t yet a combat soldier. It would be the job of the regiment or unit in the field to which our new soldier would report to train that soldier into being a combat effective part of the unit.
The First World War
Explaining how the First World War came about is something numerous historians and others have attempted to explain over the following century, each placing special weight where that author thought it belonged. Such extended examination of how ‘the Great War’ came about are, of course, almost literally the foundation for modern deterrence study. Here, however, I am concerned that the author in this case may have tried too hard to be evenhanded but then focused in my view on the wrong things. For example, in discussing Ottoman Turkey’s belated entry into the war as a German ally, he mentions the story of the Germany cruiser Goeben reaching Turkish waters after a long sea chase by the Royal Navy – but he completely failed to note that before the war had broken out, First Sea Lord Winston Churchill infuriated Turkey by seizing for his Royal Navy the two new and nearly completed battleships in British shipyards that were already paid for by Turkey – and offered neither apology or compensation. The related anger set the stage for the Turkish decision triggered by the Goeben incident.
Similarly, I think too little attention is paid by the author to the British commitment (shared in international agreement with Germany) to Belgian neutrality. Germany’s brazen and bungling violation of Belgium’s neutrality presented Britain with the decision to either go to war ‘over a piece of paper’ or not. However, having helped create an international system (especially in Europe) that established the importance of such a ‘piece of paper’ and then helped to maintain that system for a century, Britain had no choice – however poorly it explained its position to Berlin. Such pieces of paper were of concern to those who wrote and signed them but in Germany these individuals failed to refocus the German General Staff’s attention from the question of ‘can it be done?’ to the real one of ‘should it be done’.
The Second World War
The extensive discussion of the Second World War did include one rather confusing sentence:
“In what became known as the Bataan Death March of early 1942, the American forces that had been garrisoned on the Philippines were isolated, outmaneuvered, and effectively starved into capitulation by a modest-sized but highly effective Japanese invading force.”
It appears that the author is applying the sobriquet of “the Bataan Death March” to the Japanese campaign in the Philippines when it actually refers to the subsequent march by the Japanese of some 76,000 American and Philippines POWs some 65 miles over 5 to 10 days without adequate food or water. Only 59,000 would survive this march and after the war a Japanese Major General and two Colonels would be tried, convicted, and executed for this.
This thought leads to another observation about how racial prejudice and mistaken preconceptions about other nationalities and races underpinned key bad decisions made by about every combatant nation participating in the Second World War, though this volume primarily calls out Japanese estimates that the US would not fight.
In my view, the author also missed the opportunity to discuss the Allied information war success against Germany, relevant as we follow the ongoing war in Ukraine. In April 1945, the German garrison in occupied Norway surrendered to the Allies – more than 400,000 of them. The garrison in Norway was tied down by a prolonged Allied information campaign, enabled by the ability to read German military communications and the control of multiple German agents who had been turned by the Allies, all aimed at convincing Hitler that the Allies were preparing to send troops to liberate Norway. The 400,000 men in Norway were only a bit fewer than the number who surrendered in Italy at the end of a prolonged campaign begun with the 1943 invasion of the Italian mainland, but which tied down a larger number of Allied troops over almost a full two years.
Korea and Vietnam
It should be noted regarding US participation in the conflict in Korea, that the US did not mobilize in the same way that it had for the Second World War. This imposed restrictions on what manpower and resources could be sent to Korea even as the US sought to bolster its forces in Europe fearing a Soviet invasion there. As for Vietnam, it needs to be noted that after 1954 the governments in both Hanoi and Saigon were primarily run by Northern Vietnamese figures. Also, as Hanoi started preparing for a renewal of armed conflict in South Vietnam, it began by organizing its sympathizers there into the Viet Cong – dominated in its early phases by Southerners who would over time be replaced by people sent down from the North because operations like the Tet Offensive had been so costly for that Southern leadership. I think also that Richard Nixon’s sabotage of President Johnson’s peace efforts in 1968 needs to at least be referenced in the discussion.
The Mideast Wars
The histories of Desert Shield/Desert Storm, like the various post-Cold War interventions in Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria are in fact still being written – and rewritten. This makes it a rather daring and even daunting effort to look to the history of these conflicts for strategic insights. However, here Michael O’Hanlon is on ground well-known to him as a long-time participant in open (and some more discrete) conversations about these countries, the challenges they represent, US actions in each, and what lessons about strategy might be drawn from these experiences. I believe what is presented here might be considered a good ‘first draft’ which we can keep at hand as more information and new histories are written about these conflicts and the US’s decisions with regard to each of them.
As I come to the end, I need to remind the reader of my advice at the beginning, read everything. I look forward to Michael O’Hanlon’s next project. He has a lot to tell us about strategy and I wish him the best as he continues to look for the historical underpinnings of it!
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