If Elected, I Will Not Serve
I found myself thinking yesterday about an unfortunate truism concerning military forces. The qualities that make a good wartime general are not the same as those that make a good peacetime general. There’s considerable overlap, to be sure, but considerable divergence, as well. Most notably, the men who win wars need to address problems head-on and with eyes open, deliver unambiguous orders and inform superiors frankly, while generals who rise to the top in peacetime are the people who rise in any hierarchy, good at political maneuvering, winning budget support, speaking diplomatically. The two are not wholly incompatible, but it’s hard to find both in a single person: one requires a warrior, the other a politician.
As a result, long periods of peace or war produce a preponderance of the appropriate kind of general, which can cause problems when the sands of history shift. The disconnect works in both directions: generals too used to war can undermine, deliberately or incidentally, desirable political efforts once the war is over, but the truism more often laments pencil-pushers emotionally or intellectually unsuited for war when it comes.
All this popped into mind during a radio report on the latest efforts to pacify Iraq, and specifically an American officer apologizing to an Iraqi family for intruding on their home life even as they dragged the head of the household away in chains. It was a strange moment, reminiscent of the bureaucratic disconnects satirized in the movie Brazil. And I found myself thinking that selling that kind of doublethink bullshit requires a true politician, the kind that’s supposed to thrive in a peacetime military, and is supposed to be so harmful to war efforts.
Maybe a politico is doing the harm right now, with this half-baked idea that an apology will turn aside the anger of war victims. But then again, perhaps a politically savvy military is exactly what we need. Great power wars may be a thing of the past. I wouldn’t say nuclear weapons and a consistent history of war between major powers doing more harm than good means big wars are gone forever, but they seem to be gone from the perceptible future. What we have instead—and what war looks to be like for generations to come—are either small, asymmetrical wars between mighty occupying power and guerilla resistance, or nasty little feuds between factions sharing some minor nation.
Both kinds of conflict depend at least as much upon political as upon military strategy. Occupying powers can get nowhere without winning hearts and minds of the occupied; insurgents cannot survive without turning native sympathies against the occupation. Intrafactional disputes face a similar dilemma, plus the added concern of crossing some invisibly shifting line of perception concerning atrocityI, and triggering the unwelcome intrusion of the UN, US, or EU. Arms will not—cannot—decide these wars; the very use of sufficient force is likely to turn the indispensable general populace against one. They will be decided by politicians, with political tools.
Perhaps for the first time in history, the ideal wartime general is the same as the ideal peacetime general, someone skilled at speaking in euphemisms and capable of looking like everyone’s friend. Patton, Sherman, and Genghis Khan are not the men to win these smoldering brush wars. Now we need generals who can be everyone’s friend, even while bombing them into poverty, desperation, and an early grave.