Ain't gonna study war

The popularity of President George W. Bush has been up and down like the proverbial yo-yo over the last several years, a fact that the mass media never tires of telling us about. For the most part, and fully understandable, his approval rating has been linked to the war in Iraq, and to a lesser degree the war in Afghanistan. For a long time I couldn’t understand why so many Americans blindly believed everything they read in the newspapers or saw on TV about those wars, even when the conclusions drawn were so blatantly wrong. Then, suddenly, the little light bulb over my head flashed on.

Following two world wars, the postwar obscenity of “Mutually Assured Destruction” added the threat of apocalypse to the public concept of modern warfare. Or as President Kennedy warned, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” Armed conflict had become so destructive in this view, that it no longer had any relation to the battles of the past. It seemed absurd to worry about a new tank or a novel military doctrine when the mere press of a button could unleash a nuclear Armageddon, which would lay waste to any military equipment or planning, along with everything else on the face of the earth. Even more, the nineteen-sixties had brought us a utopian view of a society opposed to any serious consideration of war. Government, the military, business, religion, and family have conspired many believed, to warp the naturally peace-loving members of society. To insist that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because good men had done too little to stop them, was seen as antithetical in an enlightened Age of Aquarius, and our new understanding of human nature. In the words of often-quoted Mahatma Gandhi: “What difference does it make, to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

The academic neglect of warfare grew even more acute with the passage of time. Military history as a collegiate discipline faded, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs available. In 2004, Edward Coffman, a retired military history professor, reviewed the faculties of the top 25 history departments, and found that of over 1,000 professors, only 21 identified warfare as a specialty. When war does show up on a universities syllabus, it’s often about the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians. So a lecture on the Civil War will now focus on the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction, not on Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. One on World War II might emphasize Japanese internment, Rosie the Riveter, and the horror of Hiroshima, not Guadalcanal and Midway. A study of the Vietnam War will devote lots of time to the inequities of the draft, media coverage, and the antiwar movement at home, and mention little about the air war or artillery barrages at Khe Sanh. Those who want to study war in the traditional way face intense academic suspicion, after all, historians of war must derive perverse pleasure, their critics suspect, from reading about carnage and suffering. Why not figure out instead how to outlaw war forever, as if it were not a tragic, nearly inevitable part of human existence?

“If you want peace, prepare for war” counseled Roman general Flavius Vegetius Renatus over 1,600 years ago. Nine centuries before that, Chinese general Sun Tzu offered much the same advice. Yet today’s critics cite this ancient wisdom, and reject it. After serving up a perverse history of the cold war, the key point of which seems to be that the peace movement brought down the Berlin Wall, they will turn Vegetius’s insight upside down: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.” This purports to be wise counsel, a motto for the millennium. In reality, its wishful thinking that doesn’t follow the history of the cold war, or of any war for that matter. The cold war’s real lesson is the same one that Sun Tzu and Vegetius taught: conflicts happen, and power matters. It’s better to be strong than to be weak; you’re safer if others know that you’re ready to give them the fight of their lives, than if you proudly speak of your defenselessness, or your unwillingness to fight, and there’s nothing really mysterious about this truth.

The importance, and the challenge, of the study of war is to raise popular interest into a more serious understanding, one that seeks answers to such questions as: Why do wars break out? How do they end? Why do the winners win and the losers lose? How best to avoid wars or contain their worst effects? By ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom destroyed him. A generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William T. Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—believes that problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be discussed by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence. This totally ignores the fact that one’s opponent may be a heavily armed barbarian…

It’s hard to find wars that result from miscommunication. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence. Wars happen because the people who start them think they can win. Hitler did, as did Mussolini and Tojo. Bin Laden didn’t attack us because there was a shortage of American diplomats willing to negotiate with him. Instead, he realized that a series of Islamic terrorist attacks against U.S. interests had met with no real response, and concluded that the decadent infidels would never fight, or that if we did, we would soon withdraw as we had from Mogadishu.

The failures of America's leadership in both Vietnam and Iraq constitute a crisis in government, where, in both conflicts, the people designated to advise policymakers, prepare forces, and conduct operations, failed to perform their function because they, like the majority of Americans, don’t understand the causes, conduct, and the inevitable result, of war. President Bush’s current unpopularity stems from his failure to understand General Patton’s statement; “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” The American public has turned on the Iraq War not because of Cindy Sheehan or Michael Moore, but because only a few Americans understand warfare. The “uneducated majority” felt that, because the media reported battlefield news was uniformly bad, the war was irreversibly lost, and that the price of Iraqi freedom in American lives and treasure was far too high.