The Wall Street Journal had this fabulous piece about some of the books members of the Obama administration are grabbing from D.C. bookstore selves as they consider a new Afghanistan strategy. Believe it or not, what books leaders have sitting on their bedside is an interesting barometer of how they are thinking about the challenges before them. And according to the Journal piece, the Obama administration is looking at Afghanistan through the prism of Vietnam; both books mentioned in the piece study the civilian and military leaders of that war, particularly in the second half of the conflict.
“Lessons of Disaster” dissects the failings of McGeorge Bundy’s leadership from his eyes; “A Better War” celebrates Creighton Abrams’ leadership.
I know this may seem like a trivial discussion topic, but I think it is telling. Consider the Bush administration reading list. Among the books people like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld turned to was “Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime” by Eliot Cohen.
I just read that book, and it is a fascinating read indeed. It looks at how Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill and David Ben Gurion led during wartime. Each war and leader are different indeed, but Cohen eloquently ties the leaders’ experiences together. What he concludes ultimately is that generals are too often more confident then they should be, and as such ask for more troops and weapons then they should. So it falls on the civilian leaders to keep them in check. It is not a surprising conclusion coming from a hawk like Cohen, one could argue.
Soon Rumsfeld and Cheney were arguing for a streamlined military. Rumsfeld said that the military needed far fewer troops than the generals said. And the era of military transformation was born.
So what does this administration’s reading list tell us? Perhaps that they know that for all the planning, meeting and strategizing, counterinsurgency may hinge on the leaders on the field and in the White House.
"What he concludes ultimately is that generals are too often more confident then they should be, and as such ask for more troops and weapons then they should. So it falls on the civilian leaders to keep them in check. "
That's contradictory. An overconfident general would think he could win with only a few soldiers and weapons, and ask for too little. In practice, Rumsfeld's generals were warning that it would take far more troops than Rumsfeld wanted to invest, not because they were overconfident, but because they were being cautious.
And Rumsfeld kept them in check, by not giving them what they asked for and trying to win on the cheap. (It got vastly more expensive later on, of course).
Posted by: Joe Buck | October 08, 2009 at 07:34 PM
Dear Joe: Thanks for your comment. You raise a valid point, and I should have been clearer. I was just trying to sum up many wars in too few words. Cohen's underlining point is that the military is not to be trusted and that it falls on the civilian leadership to keep the military from growing larger and more equipped than it needs to be. He uses case studies to say that too often the generals gave the civilians bad advice.
If that is the lesson, one draw from those cases studies I don't think it is surprising that the age of military transformation was borne out of that.
But I would welcome your thoughts. Thanks again for your smart observation on the blog.
Posted by: Nancy Youssef | October 09, 2009 at 01:34 PM
"Cohen's...and that it falls on the civilian leadership to keep the military from growing larger and more equipped than it needs to be."
Cohen's point seems to be nothing original because the power is already granted to civilians in matters of military oversight(or is he just affirming his belief in that), and, leaving it to those civilians promotes the military-industrial complex in my opinion.
Plus, there are many instances of generals offering advice that would seemingly fall on deaf ears, or would lead to other political choices unacceptable to civilian leaders at election time...
Further, I haven't read the books referenced but, "Lessons of Disater" was written by someone who "thinks" they may have known what Bundy was writing about before his death. I'm not sure it's a valid case study if it's based on 3rd party assumption.
Posted by: CharlieH | October 11, 2009 at 10:54 AM
The assertion that a book is "on one's bedside table" isn't a sure indication that the reader has analyzed what he or she may have read. General William Westmoreland was supposed to have had Mao's Little Red Book on his bedside table when he commanded US forces in Vietnam; his actions while commander there, however, showed that he either hadn't read the book, misidentified VC and NVA actions within the content of Mao's book, or failed to act on a correct understanding of what communist forces were doing in Vietnam while he was there.
While it is encouraging that the President has a book on Creighton Abrams' experience in Vietnam on his bedside table, he is the head of a political party which sold Abrams and the South Vietnamese out to the communists when it counted. Time will tell whether or not the current Congress will repeat the mistakes of that earlier Congress.
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000107768414 | October 13, 2009 at 07:19 PM