Calling the Shots: Should Politicians or Generals Run Our Wars?

What qualities should we look for in our political leaders in a time of war? The standard answer these days is that they must be able to set precise objectives for the military to meet and then resist any inclination to meddle as the military meets them. They must also sustain popular support and international understanding without revising war aims or interfering in the conduct of operations, for the only thing worse than mission creep is micromanagement.

It is no surprise to find that military organizations, at least, take this position. The supposed spinelessness and ineptitude of politicians is often one of the few things about which military officers can agree. Coping with a resolute and wily enemy is difficult enough without having to deal with pesky and often amateurish civilians on one's own side, especially now that modern communications have made it possible for politicians to keep in touch with soldiers on the battlefield. Vietnam is usually cited as the prime example

of what happens when these rules are disobeyed. In that war, civilians, it is claimed, imposed intrusive restraints on military operations in the name of dubious theories of controlled escalation, and the result was a debacle.

So accepted has this new conventional wisdom become, however, that now even politicians themselves are intimidated by it. Thus President George H.W. Bush, writing after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, noted his determination to give Colin Powell, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "the freedom of action to do the job once the political decision had been made. I would avoid micromanaging the military." The reason? Bush "did not want to repeat the problems of the Vietnam War (or numerous wars throughout history), where the political leadership meddled with military operations."

The ill-fated interventions in Beirut in 1983-84 and in Somalia a decade later are also often held up as object lessons, with politicians blamed in both cases for becoming too ambitious and carelessly shifting objectives mid-mission, causing the operating environment to change from benign to hostile and casualties to be taken without any strategic gain. It was after Beirut that then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger issued his famous guidelines restricting future U.S. military operations to cases involving vital national interests, clearly defined objectives, and the advance support of the American people. After Somalia, clear "exit strategies" joined the list of desiderata.

In his important new book, Supreme Command, Eliot Cohen describes all this as the "normal" theory of civil-military relations: the idea that civilian control must be exercised firmly within the political sphere but barely at all within the military sphere. Cohen challenges that theory, however, by arguing that such a model bears scant relationship to what is actually required for success in war.

Cohen has strong things to say about the recent cases that have helped forge the current conventional wisdom. But to make his point he ranges further back in time, assessing the performance of four civilian leaders of democracies who guided their countries to victory in major wars, even after facing serious early setbacks. The first two of his examples, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, are well known; less so are Georges Clemenceau, France's leader for the concluding stage of World War I, and David Ben Gurion, Israel's leader during its wars of independence. Cohen's accounts of their wartime experiences are marked by good writing and good sense, and are worth reading on their own terms, regardless of any general lessons they might teach. The book's larger significance, however, lies in its successful attempt to draw such lessons, which show why prevailing views of the subject are misguided.

HOW TO MEDDLE

The core of Cohen's argument is straightforward and convincing. War is a ruthless and cruel business, not for the squeamish. Successful wartime leaders combine an unfaltering strategic vision with tactical flexibility and understand that wars have to be fought with a view beyond the next battle to the peace that will follow. These leaders communicate their vision not only to the public and their allies, but also to their generals -- and if the latter cannot or will not find an appropriate military route to the goal, the leaders replace them with others who can and will.

Lincoln's rapid turnover in generals reflected his search for those who could overcome caution and take the war to the Confederacy, as well as his intolerance of those who followed their own preferences for a compromise peace. Clemenceau did not attempt to set precise objectives for his generals, a futile endeavor as the military situation became increasingly fluid, but he made sure that he understood the issues at the heart of their debates, and that his own views on the peace negotiations prevailed. Ben Gurion, meanwhile, worked hard to preserve his authority by reshaping the Israeli army into a disciplined and unified force. He noted the views of his military experts but felt that being "knowledgeable in technique" was not enough, and considered an "open mind and a common sense ... essential" for wise judgment.

Of the four, however, it is Churchill who stands out for Cohen as the true exemplar of the wartime leader. This is hardly an original view, but it has gone out of fashion in recent years, in part as a reaction to the development of a right-wing Churchill cult, but mostly as a consequence of revisionist scholarship that stresses his chronic depression, bullying behavior, and occasionally appalling strategic judgments. The United Kingdom was spared the full consequences of Churchill's folly, in this view, only by a combination of the resistance of the chiefs of staff and the luck in having, in Hitler, an opponent whose own misjudgments were even worse.