Generals and Civilians
Iraq Debate Awakens Older Issues of Military/Civilian Decisionmaking

Attacking Iraq now will cause a lot of problems. I think the debate right now that's going on is very healthy. If you ask me my opinion, Gen. Scowcroft, Gen. Powell, Gen. Schwarzkopf, Gen. Zinni, maybe all see this the same way. It might be interesting to wonder why all the generals see it the same way, and all those that never fired a shot in anger and are really hell-bent to go to war see it a different way. That's usually the way it is in history. [Crowd laughter.]
— Gen. Anthony Zinni, August 23, 2002

War is too important to be left to the generals.
—Georges Clemenceau

General Tony Zinni’s remarks cited above, and Clemenceau’s famous aphorism, help encapsulate the recent debate in Washington over a war with Iraq. Though the uniformed leadership in Washington is, as it should be, publicly silent, anyone who has any contact with the professional military — at least until President Bush’s speech at the United Nations — has been aware of grave reservations among many senior commanders, particularly in the US Army. (The other services and the special operations forces appear a bit more accepting of the idea of a major war against Iraq.) But the military does not, in the US or other democracies, make policy, and as Clausewitz so famously noted, war is an extension of policy, and thus the decision to go to war is not left to the generals.

How a war is to be fought is another matter. The fundamental problem created by the Vietnam experience — and the present US Army’s general officers were formed by Vietnam, as were such retired officers as Zinni and Secretary of State Colin Powell — is that purely military decisions should be entrusted to those with the experience and training to make them.

Although some commentators have suggested that there is something unusual or even a bit unmanly about military men being more reluctant to go to war than civilians, such reluctance is in fact probably more often the case than the reverse. Generals tend to know what war means, and are less likely to impetuously risk the lives of those under their command or to leap without looking. Many general officers have always insisted that no one hates war more than a professional soldier: by doing their job well they prevent war rather than instigating it. Si vis pacem, para bellum. While one can find the occasional George S. Patton, who seems to genuinely love combat despite its bloody toll, such men are rare in most modern nations’ officer corps. Since Vietnam, another element has been added to this traditional soldierly caution: the conviction, so often expressed by Colin Powell, that the US should not engage in a military engagement that does not enjoy the strong support of the American people. Once an order for war is given, the generals will, as they always have, salute and do what they are ordered to do by the political leadership, but at the present stage of the debate over whether to go to war — and despite indications that many in the Administration have made up their minds, many elsewhere in the US government do not share that conviction — military men are to be expected to express their opinions, privately and through the chain of command. The retired generals, like Scowcroft and Zinni, have the luxury of being able to speak publicly.

American history is replete with examples of political leaders who were frustrated by the caution of their generals: Abraham Lincoln’s famous remark in 1862 to the effect that if General George B. McClellan did not plan on using the Army of the Potomac, the President would like to borrow it, being one of the classic cases. There have certainly been occasions where the political leadership has had to restrain an overly aggressive military commander (the firing of Douglas MacArthur being perhaps the most famous), but those instances are offset by at least as many cases in which the generals were more cautious than the civilians.

Generals can, like any other category of decision-maker, be too cautious, of course. Many French leaders in June of 1940 thought that elements of the French Army could break out or escape to North Africa to fight on; it was two career military men, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain and General Maxime Weygand, who insisted on the armistice with Hitler. Most of the officer corps then laid down their arms, except for Charles de Gaulle and his followers. But even the most ardent advocates of war are not making comparisons to Vichy.

It does little to enhance the debate when proponents of a war insist that there is something faintly disloyal about those retired officers who publicly (and serving officers who privately) argue against war. There is a national debate on the issue. It is worth noting that the most outspoken critics of the need for a war in the immediate future are for the most part neither pacifists nor antiwar activists, but those who made a career in the military. That does not mean that they are automatically right and their civilian opponents wrong, for indeed it is the civilian leadership which must make the fundamental decisions, but it does perhaps suggest that there is more ground to the caution than a mere reluctance to act. The issue is not whether Saddam Hussein is a bad man or whether his weapons of mass destruction pose a threat, but rather whether there is an urgent need to strike at this moment, without allies, without the United Nations, and possibly without the firm support of the American public. It looks as if the Administration has heard the message, following the President’s UN address.

Although action is often more attractive than inaction, the offensive seemingly preferable to the defensive, there are moments in military history when caution succeeds and rashness fails. The Roman Consul Fabius was known as “Cunctator”, the delayer, because of the harassing, guerrilla-style approach he took to fighting Hannibal, but in the end it was a more successful tactic than engaging in direct battle, which had proven such a disaster at Cannae. Mao Zedong, one of the more successful guerrilla commanders of all time, put it most famously in his little aphorism, only 16 characters in Chinese:

Enemy advances; We retreat.
Enemy camps; We harass.
Enemy tires; We attack.
Enemy retreats; We pursue.

The Long March was a disastrous retreat, but it became an iconic victory in Chinese Communist lore, and aided the ultimate victory. Editorialists are unlikely to begin any op-ed with “Enemy advances, we retreat”, but sometimes it is precisely the tactic that in the end will result in victory. Military men know this. Dunkirk was a victory because it saved a British Army, even if it was a defeat on the battlefield.

These reflections do not mean, of course, that the generals are right and the civilians wrong, or that all generals share the doubts and hesitations expressed by Scowcroft, Zinni and others. But they are issues worth bearing in mind as the United States debates the most serious decision any nation can make, the decision to commit its people to war.

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