Mattis to Daddis: Strategy should come from civilians, not generals who execute

By Peter Mattis

Best Defense guest respondent

Colonel
Gregory Daddis' argument
is that strategy is overrated: "Talented American generals can develop and
implement a comprehensive political-military strategy and still lose a war." As
sympathetic as watching a poorly executed strategy fail is likely to make
someone to this argument, the argument itself rests on fallacious assumption.
In the United States, a general cannot develop and implement a comprehensive
political-military strategy. That's what civilian control of the military
means. We are not the Prussians under Frederick the Great or the French under
Napoleon, where civilian and military command was unified. A talented American
general only may advise on creating such a strategy, because he/she -- like almost
everyone else in the room -- lacks the standing and the comprehensive professional
competence to establish the political ends. Something civilian commentators
should remember when the national introspection and reflection begin, hopefully
with more honesty.

Does
a good strategy guarantee success? No. A good political-military strategy
however does mean that individual operational and tactical successes (or
failures) are far less important. 

The
Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 provides a useful antidote to the focus on
operational successes at the expense of thoughtful strategic planning. The
Chinese suffered enormous losses for the number of troops engaged. Apart from
the crossing the border with some level of operational surprise, it is hard
identify what the People's Liberation Army (PLA) did right. Beijing did however
achieve its political objectives. As Vietnamese documents later showed, Hanoi learned that Moscow could not
be depended upon to protect Vietnam from China. Vietnam's potential expansion
was stifled, because it had to maintain more forces closer to the northern
border. Beijing earned the gratitude of Bangkok and Washington, while getting
Moscow to back off in Asia. If there is a Chinese way of war, then focus on
political outcomes of campaigns is a key element to how the use of force is
measured. 

General
Ulysses S. Grant's peninsula campaign
in 1864 also shows the value of operations within a sound strategic
framework.  From the Wilderness to Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor and the
failed amphibious move on Petersburg, Grant continued to have
opportunities -- irrespective of stalemate or defeat on the battlefield -- to hurt
Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and separate it from the Confederate political
leadership. Because Grant understood this, he did not react the same way to
defeat as the previous commanders of the Army of the Potomac. Lee may have been
able to parry Grant's individual and successive thrusts; however, he could not
force Grant out. 

Although
Andrew Bacevich's charge that the
U.S. military has failed in almost every conflict since becoming an
all-volunteer force may be hyperbole, there is enough truth to warrant some
critical introspection. The lack of a draft meant a U.S. administration did not
have to think as critically about power, passion, and politics -- even if the
draft was not always a sufficient guard against supercilious "strategizing."
Similarly, we should compare the record of the PLA's operational competence against
the record of it accomplishing Beijing's objectives. That the former was poor
while the latter superb should raise important questions for would-be U.S.
strategists to consider about why and how to employ the U.S. military. 

On
one score at least Clausewitz was unequivocal: "War is not merely an act of
policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political
intercourse, carried on with other means." Although the military's professional
prerogative and special competence, victory on the battlefield and operational
competence are only relevant if they advance political objectives. The focus on
the war-fighting excellence of the U.S. military seems to distract those in the
civilian world from understanding that that excellence means little without
walking through the political steps of strategy long before the military
becomes involved. 

Clausewitz
was clear about war being simple, but he decried devotion to any simplistic
notion of how to design and execute strategy. One of the analogies used was a
comparison to chopping down trees with an axe. At first glance, the object is
simple. Chop the tree down. However, it rapidly gets more complicated. Which
direction does it need to fall? What about the knots in the trunk? Is it a
hard- or soft-wood tree? Where to start making the cuts and at what height?
Each tree grows in a different context -- even if in the same forest -- with
different features. Thus, what is simple in concept rapidly becomes more
difficult in execution. 

In
his book The Logic of Failure, psychological
researcher Dietrich Dorner highlighted how complex problems needed variable
levels of planning for good strategic decision-making to occur. Many
individuals had a marked tendency to plan too much or too little, based on how
insecure they were facing uncertainty. Dorner's experiments were not simplistic
"games" of strategic choice, but rather continuing tests of people to manage
the complex relationships -- such as the interrelationships between healthcare,
population, food supply, and more -- over time where they had near dictatorial
powers. Even people should know better by dint of training and experience still
fail to set clear objectives, to treat strategies like testable propositions,
and gather information related to the first two. Instead, most "muddle through"
and a repair approach, which, although often better than nothing, is the result
of a lack of clear objectives. In the face of such uncertainty, humans fall
back on what they know and can deal with -- no matter how trivial -- to preserve their
sense of competence. [[BREAK]]

Given
these complexities and the difficulty of strategy, it is a wonder that people
still think the Vietnam War was predestined to be lost and that Saigon was
destined to fall. South Vietnam only capitulated after the North had launched
one failed campaign when Saigon still had U.S. material support and succeeded
only once that support was withdrawn. Although I am distant in both time and
place, the Vietnam War is still personal. My father-in-law spent three years in
reeducation camps for being a doctor and being mustered during the Tet
Offensive in 1968. The morality or immorality of U.S. involvement does not
change the fact that the North's conquest of the South was conquest and the
resulting feelings are still alive today. And not just in U.S. émigré enclaves
where the three red stripes still fly. Hanoi itself has a large number of
failures and had to revisit its strategy a number of times. Perhaps that was
the biggest difference between Washington and Hanoi: The willingness to revisit
and evaluate strategy as new information and events changed the circumstances.
Accepting Eliot Cohen's arguments about great wartime leadership, which
country's leadership most resembles the kind of learning behavior exhibited by
Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben Gurion among others? 

To
even accept the argument that Vietnamese nationalism made the war unwinnable
requires a kind of historical amnesia and replacing the timeline of Vietnam's
struggle for independence with the timeline of direct U.S. military involvement
in support of Saigon. The two timelines are not the same. It was not the
Soviets or the Chinese who stood with Ho Chi Minh when he declared independence
on September 2, 1945, but rather the United States, and Truman later rejected
(or did not read) Ho's personal appeals. We also called for national self-determination in 1919, but accepted locking Ho and other nationalists out
of the Versailles Conference.

Maybe
Ho was a communist first and a nationalist second; however, critics of the
Vietnam War cannot have it both ways. If nationalism drove North Vietnam and
made the war unwinnable, then it highlights the tragedy of that war -- and
arguably of the Cold War writ large. The United States allowed national
self-determination to become a communist cause, allowing what should have been
a democratizing and developing process to be hijacked by
authoritarianism. 

It
is true General Westmoreland and the civilian "best and brightest," like
McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara, were not as foolish as they often look in
hindsight. To go back to the tree chopping analogy, they identified that they
needed to chop down a tree and maybe even which direction it needed to fall,
but did not go further or continue to adapt to the knots in the wood or the wind
over time. In unclear situations, as both Dorner and the late James Q. Wilson demonstrated, humans fall back on what
they know and bureaucracies use metrics that end up defining the mission. 

Robert
McNamara in his book, In Retrospect, said Washington lacked the
expertise to understand what was taking place in Vietnam. But as CIA analysts
Harold "Hal" Ford, in his scathing review
of In Retrospect, and George Allen's memoir, None So Blind, make
clear, the leadership's combination of objectives that were at minimum
undeveloped and metrics that did allow for this expertise to move up the chain
ensured Washington could not revisit and reevaluate strategy on the basis of
new information. The order of battle controversy that pitted CIA versus MACV
and DIA is but one example of this dissonance. General Cushman's reflections
are another. The U.S. leadership
lacked the means for understanding the data, even if they had a useful or even
apparently sound strategy.  

The
other problem was that the ability to execute the strategy based on the
limitations-such as trying to avoid a Chinese intervention, which was a
possibility up to the late 1960s, based on Beijing's material and military
support for North Vietnam -- was not necessarily reevaluated after the restraints
were imposed. Nor is it clear that strategy was reevaluated after it became
apparent that the Viet Cong were getting wiped out and being replaced by
regular NVA forces. It was one thing to contain an insurgency that was mostly
local with some foreign support and another to contain a foreign-based
insurgency that was mustered, trained, and supplied outside where the campaign
is being fought. 

The
most interesting finding in Dorner's study of decision-making was that
performance had no correlation with intelligence as measured by IQ. The only
distinction that made a real difference was practical decision-making
experience. As Robert Komer said, "good judgment is usually the result of
experience and experience is usually the result bad judgment." People can get
experience vicariously through study; however, studying is requires a
discipline most often confused with acquiring academic credentials. As one
commenter on Col. Daddis' post asked, did Westmoreland read Clausewitz, ask
questions in the margins, and, then, go back research possible answers to those
questions? It is a big job and a serious one, requiring a time that is rarely
available and respected. 

Careerism -- pursuing
the "be" part of John Boyd's famous "to be or to do"-- is the enemy of such practical
intellectual pursuits, but unfortunately is becoming more common. Rather than
critiquing the military, the intelligence community, or any other part of the
national security establishment, I simply point to my own experience on the job
hunt. Despite still being in graduate school, the most common question (even in
this economy) was why are you out of work, never what have you been doing with
your time. Outside the military, it is even more difficult for civilian
officials to have the experience of studying, teaching, and practicing. This is
arguably the trinity of developing insightful strategists.  

Dismissing
the value of strategy on the basis of poor execution is throwing the baby out
with the bathwater. The presumption that "the general" should develop and
implement the political-military suggests the kind of omni-competence that raised the question of whether
an American military coup was
possible. Recent survey results have shown younger military officers now
increasingly (and possibly alarmingly) think it is a military officer's job to
make civilian policymakers listen -- how to do so is a completely different
question. This is beyond their professional competence as managers of organized
violence and standing as military advisors. Bernard Brodie's solution (and seemingly General Cushman's as
well) to the tough dilemma was for
military officers to resign in the face of civilian unwillingness to do the
thinking necessary for strategy -- not disagreements or a refusal to respect
military judgment. Intellectual laziness about national interests and the
employment of force to achieve specific political objectives was Brodie's
concern. This "unequal dialogue" requires civilians to be literate in military and strategic affairs-a situation
made more difficult by fewer opportunities for vicarious experience and a
smaller percentage of the American population having been engaged in the
military during wartime. If the United States wants to get strategy and the use
of force right, then studying and teaching need to become more fundamental
parts of civilian advancement in government.

Peter Mattis is editor
of China Brief at The Jamestown
Foundation. The views here are his own and do not reflect those of the
Foundation.