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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST

9. Persistent Continuity at the Heart of Power

It is generally assumed that from the point of view of military competence, things got better after 1918. That despite a bad start for the Allies, both sides were better generalled in the Second World War than in the First. That the Staffs were more or less kept under control.

And yet it took the same number of years to defeat a Germany which began both far weaker than it had in 1914 and far weaker than the Allies in 1939; a Germany weakened by the self-inflicted decimation of large sections of its own population and numerically outnumbered by at least three to one in 1940 and ten to one in 1943. Even after the Normandy landings in 1944, when the Allies had absolute and permanent domination of the skies and the seas, as well as overwhelming advantages in all forms of equipment, our generals still took almost a year to advance ponderously across only one-third of Europe. [1]

The lesson our military professionals drew from the. two world wars was that there were worse things than being outgeneralled by the other side. No matter how mediocre the leadership, an army equipped with superior quantities of men, explosives and equipment would eventually win if it had the tenacity and the political approval to keep pounding away. Our generals seem incapable of unlearning this unfortunate lesson. And yet they have stumbled over the last half century through a myriad of stalemates, losses and pyrrhic victories. In short, while they eke out costly victories in full-scale wars, they are unable to adjust to the small, unpredictable wars which have gradually spread around the planet.

During World War II people were thankful that the commanders showed some restraint in sending their troops off to be slaughtered. Most of those generals had been junior officers in the trenches in the previous war and so were sensitive to the question of casualties. However, this laudable self-control tells us nothing about the central point, which was Germany's astonishing strength.

Perhaps the explanation is that while both sides suffered equally from the generalized bloodbath of World War I, it was rendered unbearable for the Germans by their defeat. That crisis temporarily broke the logic of the Age of Reason. Out of the fissure of shame and despair and dead beliefs emerged two sorts of men. One was the lunatic -- the Nazi. The other was the pure officer, eager to use the forces of reason but by no means their prisoner. In normal times the lunatic would have been laughed at and the good Soldier broken by the power of the staff. The Allies, on the other hand, were obliged actively to  maintain the pretense that they had won the First World War and, therefore, that men like Foch and Haig had been good soldiers. Twenty years later the emotional and intellectual liberation-cum-anarchy provoked by Germany's defeat was matched on the battlefield against the imprisoning effects of the Allied victory. The result in 1940 was a perfect illustration of Sun Tzu's belief that wars are won in the minds of the commanders.

Nevertheless the strategic innovations which led to the German victory had begun in Britain with Basil Liddell Hart, who had been the first to write about a fast, deep- penetration tank strategy. He began in 1919 with an ,article in the RUSI Journal, drawing on the German use of tanks in their March 1918 offensive -- itself a spark of desperate innovation produced by three and a half years of General Staff failure. Liddell Hart went on regularly trying to influence his government and the War Office. Within the British army soldiers like Fuller and Percy Hobart, already tank men, took up the same struggle, all to absolutely no avail.

In 1926 Liddell Hart toured the French army, spreading his ideas, and met Charles de Gaulle, who was then a young officer working for Marshal Petain. De Gaulle began his own crusade for new tactics, but the imprisoning false mythology of the "victorious" army was even stronger in France than in Britain. The arrival after Foch's death of his staff man and bag carrier, General Maxime Weygand, as the chief of staff and the bearer of Foch's flame, assured that nothing new would be allowed to happen. A year later, the British tank men made a first breakthrough. They convinced the army to create an Experimental Armoured Force. However, the British staff soon managed to have the force disbanded.

Meanwhile, Hans von Seeckt, commander-in-chief of the Reichswehr, had begun Immediately after the peace to create an army strategy in which "every action ought to be based on purpose." Although not a tank man, he made it possible for tank men to succeed. Defeat, however, had merely damaged the power of the Staff; not destroyed it. In 1926, von Seeckt was fired. In 1928, he fought back by publishing a book condemning conscript armies: "Mass becomes immobility.... Cannon fodder.... The whole future of warfare appears to me to be in the employment of mobile armies, relatively small but of high quality." [2]

All this time Heinz Guderian had been creeping up through the German tank regiments. At the time of the British Experimental Armoured Force, he was teaching tank tactics. By 1930 he was imitating British tactics with the use of dummy tanks, while waiting for the day when they would be properly equipped. In 1933 the British made another advance, with the creation of a Tank Brigade under Hobart. Had they continued on this road and convinced the French to do the same, 1940 could have been quite different. Instead the British military establishment did everything they could to limit Hobart's power. His brigade was reduced to the role of an experimental venture, as if tank strategy were still in its infancy.. In 1934 de Gaulle made his own declaration in Vers l'Armee de Metier, rolling all the new ideas from Liddell Hart's 1919 strategy and Seeckt's mobile professionals into a single vision. What he said was brilliant, self-evident and violently opposed by the whole military establishment. In all probability it also came too late, because a year later the Germans created three panzer divisions, with Guderian commanding the second. By 1936 he was carrying out manoeuvres using Liddell Hart's and Hobart's exact methods; using their books and manuals, which he had personally arranged to have translated.

It would be a mistake to believe that the German General Staff played any positive role in this remarkably intelligent breakthrough. Once Seeckt had been fired, they reverted to standard staff attitudes and opposed the tank strategy. They were opposing not the tank itself, but, like the staffs in England and France, the proposed way of using it.

The reason for this general, fierce opposition was that Liddell Hart's tank strategy fulfilled exactly the principles laid out by Sun Tzu. It was a strategy of surprise, flexibility and originality. It gave the commander freedom to adapt to circumstances. It was the precise opposite of a staff plan. Where were the charts? Where were the organigrams? Where were the committees? And the committee decisions? Where were the balanced payoffs of the different corps interests? Where was the proper use of hierarchical power? The respect due to hierarchy?

Instead the staff generals were being asked simply to hand over this expensive equipment to a couple of relatively junior field commanders. And with no fixed instructions for use. Decisions were to be made on the ground, in the light of circumstance and at great speed, without consultation with HQ. Rather than laboriously plotted attacks in the Schlieffen Plan tradition, the tanks were simply to take off across field and forest looking' for the best way through. All this was unacceptable to any rational staff officer. They therefore gave Guderian as much trouble as their British equivalents gave Hobart and the French gave de Gaulle.

It was Hitler who forced his own generals to allow the new strategy through. Hitler's genius lay in his use of the unexpected in order to paralyze opponents. That was what drew him to Guderian. He was able, as Liddell Hart pointed out, to demonstrate "the fallacy of orthodoxy." [3]

The reappearance of the word genius in the Hitlerian context reminds one how devoid it is of moral properties. It is a reminder of the lesson drawn by the established authorities of the day from the Napoleonic experience -- that genius comes from the dark side of reason and should be destroyed. This logic, however, was and remains shortsighted. Genius, being free from moral value, comes on all sides of the spectrum. If you set out to destroy genius as something dangerous, then the more stable the society, the more successful that destruction will be. Only societies in disorder will be unable to do this. But stable societies are precisely those best able to guide genius onto safe moral ground. Unstable societies have always invited the worst in those with the genius to use power. Thus Fuller, Hobart and de Gaulle were destroyed, while Guderian, with Hitler's support, made his way through.

What Hitler lacked was the professional evenness to take proper and long-term advantage of the victories his genius would give him. He was, after all, certifiable. The General Staff could have given him that evenness, but instead they maintained a silent and sullen opposition. This was the result neither of class differences nor of some altruistic opposition to Nazism. It was the refusal of Hitler and his friends to respect established military structures or the powers attached to those structures which annoyed the generals. Thanks to their control of the administrative machinery, they were able to fire Erich von Manstein, the Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief. It was Manstein who had created the general mechanized strategy which would win in 1940. To prevent him from having any role in its execution, the staff sent him off to command an infantry corps.

By the time the attack came in June 1940, they had even managed to half neutralize Guderian. He was limited to commanding a small part of the tanks. However, he more or less ignored orders and rushed ahead with what he had, as he had always said they should. The German General Staff had no choice but to run to catch up. Guderian not only beat an enemy far stronger and equipped with more tanks, he also did it with only a small portion of the available German tanks and while opposed by his own General Staff.

It was the friction between the staff's stolid, rational self-interest and Hitler's uneven genius which would fritter away over the next four years the clear victory Guderian had won for them all. In other words, Hitler was defeated by his own lunacy. He certainly was not defeated by the Allies.

After 1940 the Allied armies refused to use the liberty of thought defeat usually gives. Instead they settled down to amass enormous forces of men and armaments, just as they had in the previous war. Periodically an officer appeared who was capable of original thought. He was invariably fired as soon as this talent was demonstrated or shipped off to a theatre of war far from the heart of power.

Perhaps the most poignant case was that of the strategist Major General Eric Dorman- Smith, who created Wavell's victory of40,000 men over 134,000 Italians in Egypt in October 1940. His approach "would have been laughed out of court had it been presented as a solution at the British Staff College." [4] Instead of being rewarded for this victory and snapped up as an invaluable adviser, he was left virtually unemployed. In 1942 Rommel was in Africa, had reversed the British advantage and was destroying all in his path, This time Dorman-Smith was advising Auchinleck and the two men set about stopping Rommel. In fact, they completely outgeneraled him and brought the German army to a halt. In the circumstances it was a remarkable victory.

However, their free-flowing methods -- inspired rather than bureaucratic -- had required a rapid reorganization of local British forces. This had affected military structures, which outraged the General Staff. The staff set about manoeuvring in the back rooms and corridors to get both men fired. The method they found was an expression of bureaucratic intelligence at its most sophisticated. They convinced Churchill that Auchinleck had been so successful that he ought immediately to attack Rommel again, in order to finish him off. They knew Auchinleck couldn't do this. The campaign had left his already inferior forces in no shape to take an immediate initiative. So when Churchill ordered him to attack, he -- being an intelligent and responsible man -- refused. As a result he was fired. It was some time before he was given another job. And that was even farther away from Europe, in India. As for Dorman-Smith, he was pursued by a vendetta which was, in Michael Elliott- Bateman's words, "a national disaster and a disgrace to the profession of arms." [5] The official line insisted that Dorman-Smith was "clever but quite unsound." [6] Expertise and stability are the two great arguments used by the modern man of reason to disguise his own incompetence. Perhaps the earliest example of this phenomenon came in the mid- eighteenth century, when George III's courtier-officers complained that General James Wolfe was mad. The King replied that he wished Wolfe would bite his other officers.

The most famous case during World War II was that of Air Vice-Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding. He foresaw the Battle of Britain and tried to prepare the Royal Air Force, despite opposition from the experts. They believed that massive bombing of Germany was the only thing worth preparing for. When the war came, he made the best of a bad situation and won the Battle of Britain. It was the only major air campaign won in the Western theatres of war and perhaps Britain's greatest victory of World War II. After all, losing it would have led to the invasion of England. The moment it was won, Dowding was fired -- partly for being right, partly so that the strategic bombing experts could get on with flattening German and other European cities.

This insistent bombing of cities had so little to do with the idea of fighting wars to win them that it cannot simply be attributed to strategic incompetence. The Germans had already dropped as many bombs as they could on British cities without having any negative effect on either the Allied determination to fight or their military preparations. If anything, the more civilians the bombs killed, the more determined the citizenry became to fight. Why then, did the Allied command insist on a mirror repetition of what the Germans had done to Britain?

They must have believed their strategy would work. In this they were the inheritors of the Maginot Line mentality and of trench warfare strategy. Like Foch and Haig, they believed that their endless attacks would succeed. The men, equipment and explosives wasted in this way constitute one of the explanations for the war dragging on through 1945.

As for Dowding, his name was kept out of government publications about his victory and he was not made a marshal of the RAF. Gavin Stamp has pointed out that he was the only man since Nelson to have been called upon to save Britain, which he did. [7] His reward was the active enmity of the Air Force Staff, which, needless to say, focused only on the fact that he was a peculiar and difficult man.

Apart from odd, brief moments when Patton, the, French general de Lattre de Tassigny and perhaps Montgomery managed to do what they wanted, originality -- generalship in fact -- was eliminated from the European theatre. Instead, the war was ploddingly completed by relatively competent but unimaginative linear warfare, not so different from that of the First War. Had the Germans not already been weakened by the Russians and heavily outnumbered, the fighting might have gone on for years. As in World War I, originality had a better chance the farther away it was from headquarters. In the Pacific, MacArthur proved that mobility could work, as he leapfrogged over island after island, leaving the Japanese intact but powerless behind him. And in Burma, Slim carried out a relatively original campaign.

Before that, Orde Wingate, although hampered by a truly unstable personality, made the first contemporary Western attempts at guerrilla warfare. His operations behind Japanese lines in the Burmese jungle were based on a strategy which owed a great deal to Sun Tzu and might later have been mistaken for that of Mao." Pounce upon the enemy in the dark," Wingate wrote." Smite him hip and thigh and vanish silently into the night." [8] As early as 1938, convinced that the God of Israel was calling him, he had given the Jews in Palestine the military framework which is still the basis of their strategy. His ongoing influence in Israel shows what effect he might have had had he not been killed on the opening day of his second Burmese operation. One of his strengths was that he was conscious of the struggle between talent and managerial professionalism and could therefore fight back." The chief difference between a good and a bad leader, " he said, "is that a good leader has an accurate imagination." And yet, even had he survived, the defenders of professional orthodoxy would no doubt have eventually destroyed him. One has only to look at what they did to his memory. Although Wingate never lost a battle -- which the other generals in the East certainly did, often through pure incompetence -- he was the only commander treated roughly in the Official History of the Japanese War. [9]

What drives this petty persecution of good generals is not only the recognition that their success illustrates the incompetence of the staff approach. It is also a realization that these successful methods cannot regularly be imitated. Wingate instilled the spirit of his methods into the situation in Palestine and so they have come down to us via Israeli successes. But when Western armies attempt to imitate those methods, they fail. No general staff can adapt itself to a method based upon fluidity -- certainly not fluidity as Sun Tzu defined it." And as water has no constant form, there are in war no constant conditions." [10] Wingate, it should be remembered, had been refused admission to the Staff College when he applied in 1936.

***

The events of modern warfare have been part of a single, unbroken evolution. And yet the anonymity of the staff, as compared to our, throwing up of unrelated Heroic leaders upon whom to focus, has obscured this unity. General Maxime Weygand is one of the few famous staff figures to have been a major player over fifty years of warfare. If for no other reason, his is one of the great names in the rise of modern military structures.

His career carried him through the searing experience of the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the century, World War I as Foch's personal chief of staff, the between-war period as chief of the General Staff, the second half of the 1940 campaign as the military commander who led France to a conclusive defeat, and the postwar period, from which he emerged unscathed. It could be said that he was the model modern officer: mediocre, imperturbably self-confident, sectarian and personally victorious in all the military disasters for which he was responsible.

After Foch's death in 1929, Weygand was his natural successor as spokesman for the staff, with all their new and rational ways. And yet from his youth he had belonged to the classic Right. Like most officers he had combined army loyalty with anti-Semitism in his opposition to Captain Dreyfus. But Weygand had gone further. He had contributed to the memorial for Colonel Henry, the officer who had lied and blamed a Jew in order to protect the officer corps. And when de Gaulle published his Vers l'Armee de Metier in 1934, Weygand -- then chief of the General Staff -- had seen it as an irrational attack upon a rational system by a man who was difficult to measure and therefore unstable and therefore dangerous. He did everything he could to silence de Gaulle.

A creature of the staff, Weygand had scarcely seen active service. He stood for reason, efficiency, systems management, class privilege, anti-semitism and the interests of the system over the truth. De Gaulle stood for republicanism, open questioning of structures and indifference to systems, whether constitutional or administrative. He possessed a kind of piercing irrationality which shed light upon truth.

In June 1940, while everything collapsed, the system continued to be rational and Weygand to be loyal to it. Given command of the French forces late in the battle -- but not too late -- he must have sought within his training, experience, powers, command and imagination some way to stop the irrational dash of Guderian's tanks. He must have thrown his mind back to the words and actions of his mentor, Marshal Foch. And yet he found nothing. Absolutely nothing. On the other hand, he believed, like most of the conservative military technicians who served the state, that the collapse of existing structures would lead to a social explosion.

De Gaulle, by then junior minister of defence, came to him and asked what his plans were for a counter attack or a defensive campaign. Weygand had none. He was obsessed by the risks of a Communist coup if the army were beaten and its structure collapsed. He therefore. proposed to save the army, and the officer corps' power over it, by surrendering while the military structure was still intact. De Gaulle saw the situation quite differently. The system, he felt, had either gone mad or rendered itself traitorous by refusing to fulfill its obligations to the nation. He therefore got on a plane to London in order to pull that system down.

Finally the subsequent Allied victory and the postwar trials in France destroyed the reputations of most senior officers who had collaborated with the Axis. Weygand, almost alone in this category, emerged intact. To this day, his name is left off the list of those who can be criticized. A permanent vagueness hangs over his actions and his reputation. It could be said that this vagueness is, in fact, an aura surrounding the beloved of the staff.

***

Only by the most extreme subservience to chauvinism have we been able to go on telling ourselves that the Allies did well in the Second World War. The military difficulties of the West since 1945 arise in good part from this generalized childish boosterism, which has allowed the military establishment to act as if everything is in order, as if their methods are the right ones. The same is true of the German staff, who were able to blame their defeat in 1945 on the lunacy of the Nazis. They can all say that while there may have been some bugs in the new management systems during the First War, these were worked out in the Second to such an extent that staff planning now indeed makes circumstances change. In other words, their methods have been consecrated as military truth.

The staffs and staff colleges of the Western world cannot help but have noticed, however, their own almost unbroken line of military failure since 1945. The image of Western armies floundering about over the last half century is fixed in everyone's mind. But it is fixed there as a series of unrelated events. The last colonial wars were seen as wars of disengagement. The British failures were seen separately from the French, from the Spanish, from the Portuguese. The postcolonial wars were something else again. And on their tail came the guerrilla wars and the terrorist wars. In all there have been some two hundred conflicts, from Indochina, Algeria and Yemen to Korea, Lebanon, Cuba and Angola. [11]

The less expert observer might well wonder what has actually been happening. Is it not that sophisticated, rational armies have simply failed to come to terms with less sophisticated, irrational armies, who use guerrilla and revolutionary warfare and who are led by less sophisticated and less rational people? The result, to be absolutely clear, is that unsophisticated, irrational armies regularly beat sophisticated, rational ones. Our experts seem to draw some satisfaction from this rather in the way the French knighthood maintained that the English had only managed to massacre and defeat them at Agincourt in 1415 because they used peasants armed with daggers and socially unacceptable longbows. In fact many of the great armies that have been beaten over the last three thousand years -- carrying their civilizations down with them -- have been. beaten by armies which were, according to the logic of the losers, inferior and backward.

Those who beat us are not doing anything new. Their actions simply reflect the principles of flexible strategy, laid out in simple, clear language five hundred years before Christ. Our armies lose because they have forgotten that the purpose of their job is to win. Instead they concentrate on organization, on their own positions of power within that organization and on preparing for a particular sort of war which is theoretically suited to their organization. They think they are flexible because they have collected massive amounts of powerful and rapid equipment. Weaponry, however, is inanimate. It is dependent on the will and imagination of the commanders. And those commanders are slaves to methodology and structure.

Quite naturally we seek excuses for our litany of otherwise heavy-handed, ill-adapted operations. But these excuses are undermined by the simplicity of the victors' methods, as indeed they are by the positive results whenever a Western commander aligns himself with the basic principles of strategy. When MacArthur leapfrogged behind the Koreans to the Inchon landing, he specifically drew his inspiration from James Wolfe's surprise landing at Quebec City in 1759. [12] And when the British Commander, Gerald Templer, outmanoeuvred the Communists during the Malaya troubles in the 1950s, it could be said that he out-Sun Tzued Mao Tse-tung.

"The experts in defence conceal themselves as if beneath the earth; those skilled in attack move as if from the heavens." [13] Every guerrilla army has taken this phrase of Sun Tzu's and adapted the words to its own needs. Our military structure's inability to do so has led us farther and farther away from reasonable action -- and this despite frequent attempts by thinking soldiers to explain the problem. Elliott-Bateman tried in 1967 in his book Defeat in the East. It was specifically aimed at clarifying the American difficulties in Vietnam, in light of France's difficulties during the preceding Indochina campaign. He made no impact.

It was as if the American staff officers had convinced themselves of a triple-edged logic. First, the French Were poor, old-fashioned, under-armed and without the airpower to sustain strategic bombing. Second, the power of the American military system was such that the actual commanding officers were no more than ciphers of the structure. They were to be organized and directed to victory by technical remote control. Indeed, the physical distance and difference between the Pentagon and the Vietnamese jungle made the remoteness even more complete. Third, the role of the field commander was so limited that it could be entrusted to lesser minds. On a more cynical level, by giving command to less intelligent, less imaginative men, the Pentagon could control and manipulate them.

The result of this logic was that the greatest war machine in the history of the world was put into the hands of a series of commanders -- culminating, so to speak, in William Westmoreland -- who seemed to suffer from severe intellectual limitations. General Westmoreland would have been perfectly interchangeable with Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig or Marshal Foch.

The military tended to blame its subsequent failure on some combination of the press, the people and the government. The essential truth, however, is that while equipped with large battalions and sophisticated machinery, it lost successive battles. One of the most disturbing evocations of this failure was the dissatisfaction of the soldiers with their leaders, which led to the killing or wounding of one thousand American officers and NCOs by their own men. [14] The officers and NCOs were largely professional, the men mainly draftees.

Defeat in Vietnam led to the creation of a fully professional army. And yet, when part of this new force was sent in 1983 to the small Caribbean island of Grenada to fight fifty Cuban soldiers and six hundred Cuban civilians, it required seven full battalions and a full week to "win" the engagement. [15] Heavy equipment losses were suffered in the process, as well as relatively high casualties, the majority inflicted on the soldiers by their own army. Slightly more medals -- 8,633 -- were awarded than the number of men involved in the operation. The only lesson drawn from Grenada seems to have been that quantity, however clumsy, can overcome a lack of quality. And so, seven years later, 25,000 men were sent into Panama. This. use of an elephant to squash a fly couldn't help but produce serious civilian casualties. One would have expected that such dominance would at least have ensured the continuance of civil order. Instead it led to anarchy, including the destruction of large parts of Panama City, massive looting and economic collapse. The destabilization was such that Panama still shows few signs of recovery.

As to whether the American senior military leadership had reformed itself, one had only to watch General Maxwell Thurman in action. General Thurman was an intelligence officer in Vietnam, had a short tour of duty there in the artillery and spent most of the twenty years before the Panama operation in such staff areas as personnel, reorganization and training. In the midst of his heavy-handed Panamanian operation, this dry, bespectacled desk officer gave himself over to public statements reminiscent of a B movie. He seemed so unaware of how a real field commander might act that he tended to typecast people as good guys or thugs and to take on the mannerisms of a John Wayne character.

Despite protestations of superiority, the British did no better over the same period. They managed one clear victory -- Malaya in the 1950s -- versus a series of losses -- Palestine, Cyprus, Aden. Even the Suez landing was executed heavy-handedly and with such lumbering slowness that unsympathetic countries were given time to apply enough political pressure to stop the operation.

The British did pull off a set-piece operation in the Falklands. It was without any strategic or tactical use. Indeed, thanks to the distance involved and Argentina's badly trained and ill-equipped army, the whole, thing could be carried out as if nothing had changed since June 1944 and the Normandy landing.

That same British army remains unable to fulfill its real responsibilities in Ireland. The standard excuses are that what they do in Ireland isn't real warfare and that the government won't release the soldiers to do what is necessary to win. But a successful army is one which knows how to adapt itself to the limitations of each situation. The most important task given the British army over the last quarter century has been the maintenance of order within the realm and they have been unable to adapt their methods to that situation.

The French have developed a certain rapid-action skill for use in ex-colonies in Africa. But all the major operations undertaken by their army since 1945 have either been lost or won in such a heavy-handed way that the victory wasn't politically useful. Algeria is the prime example of a victory lost by the method of winning it. More recent operations -- the Lebanese intervention, the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior incident, the massacre in New Caledonia -- have shown that the French are little better adapted to contemporary military realities than are the British or the Americans.

These examples are reminders that technological advance and rational action are not innately on the side of intelligent, liberal reform. Neither are they innately on the side of inhumanity and destructiveness. Above all they are indifferent to value and comfortable with mediocre men whose chief qualities are ambition, self-assurance and a talent to manipulate.

This situation continues to rely upon a fascinating intellectual trick. Reason refers to modernity, which relates to systems and to methods. Intelligence, on the other hand, refers primarily to application. Even pure research is a form of application because it seeks to do rather than to manage. Application, as seen by systems men, is nonsequential. It seeks to do, not to continue. Continuity here has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with systems. Being nonsequential, application is unreliable and therefore untrustworthy. Intelligence in a soldier always invokes the fear of Napoleon -- the fear of a soldier who can fight.

In order to be trusted with men and equipment, an officer must therefore be modern but neither too intelligent nor too competent. That in the event of action he may have a tendency to lose both men and equipment is irrelevant. The creation of modern armies is only related to combat in an abstract manner. The ability to fight successfully, if called upon to do so, is therefore a secondary consideration.

***

The obsession of our military with management systems rather than winning led them quite naturally to replace strategy with technology. And this combination of method and machinery tended automatically towards large, absolute solutions. From Kitchener's pedantic Sudanese campaign, through the heavy bombing of the two world wars to the overkill of Grenada, Panama and Iraq, the same tendency repeated itself.

An interesting example of how this system can deform the simplest military action was played out on the fringes of the Vietnam War. Those geographic outer edges had a particular importance because the North Vietnamese used them to move men and equipment. The local complications involved hill tribes, marginal nationalist movements, opium production, hidden transport routes and difficult terrain, usually mountainous jungle. Each of these was a small-scale problem with large-scale implications. It quickly became apparent that Western systems couldn't act on such a small scale. They couldn't even plan to act on that level.

The officers who were detailed to deal with the frontier areas discovered that there were no global solutions. Nor any possibility for massive troop movements. Nor any use for large-scale investments aimed at resettlement or education or militia training. On the other hand, there were endless opportunities for small, individualized projects, which could have an enormous effect in such small and delicate situations.

However, any requests they made for the funding of a project at, say, $25,000, would be rejected by the staff in Saigon or Washington. The army planning system couldn't deal with a concrete proposal relating to a small hill tribe.

A particularly telling example was the. attempt to create Fortified Villages in Vietnam. This strategy had begun as one of the few successful Western post-World War II innovations, developed under General Gerald Templer during the Malaya troubles of the 1950s. The idea was to defend chosen villages in Communist-dominated areas and gradually to house the population from the outlying area inside the defences. They would then be safe from guerrilla threats, which usually came during the night. During the day they were within walking distance of their fields.

Peasants in Vietnam suffered from the identical problem. However, the American staff in Saigon. felt they could improve upon the solution. They constructed completely new villages in safe areas. These could have complex defence systems built in from conception. The army then moved villagers out of Communist zones into these safe zones.

This version of the Fortified Village, being technology-dependent, was expensive and required quite a bit of administration but not much soldiering. The villages hardly had to be defended. Unfortunately, the Saigon staff had also defeated the whole purpose of the exercise. Instead of building confidence in the countryside, they had emptied it. Instead of protecting the peasants in their homes, they had kidnapped them and dropped them down somewhere strange, far from their fields. On paper it all looked perfect and was of a size and consequence proper to modern management methods. They were convinced they had greatly improved the original shoestring-budget British plan. Of course the whole program was a disaster.

These large ideas applied to little problems are the result of an obsession with efficiency. There are two ways to define this word. The first has to do with quality as measured by a cost-versus-value ratio. For example, how much did a meal cost compared to how good was it? The second revolves around the idea that larger production runs permit lower costs per item: thus a McDonald's hamburger may not be any good, but it is cheaper because there are more of them.

Most people like to believe that they are benefiting from the first ratio. Certainly the mythology of advertising rarely mentions large production runs but never stops talking about quality versus cost. The staff officer's view of efficiency is not unlike that of modern commerce, with its use of quality ads to sell mass-produced goods. Thus the Pentagon believes itself to be more efficient for having financed five-million-dollar hill-tribe training programs and for having rejected those at twenty-five thousand. The same view of efficiency applies to sending armies into battle. More men and more equipment is efficient. It will get the job done.

Officers in France and England will effortlessly volunteer that this squandering of resources is an American phenomenon -- a product of U.S. prosperity. Comforting though that idea is for some, a glance at both world wars indicates that assembly-line warfare was invented by the German, French and English General Staffs. Not by the Pentagon or by Henry Ford.

This replacement of officers with strategical talents by those with a taste for quantity bears a curious resemblance to what happened in the armies of the European monarchies at the end of the eighteenth century. Guibert wrote about the unreformed French army of 1773: "We have created a uniform which obliges the soldier and the officer to spend three hours a day on their toilette, which has turned men of war into wig brushers, shiners and polishers." [16] But elaborate dress wasn't the real problem. Since the military leadership of the late eighteenth century was filled with courtesans who had no idea of how to fight a war, their unconscious hope was that soldiers would so completely identify with uniforms, regiments and a sense of belonging that they would willingly march out in an exposed straight line to be shot at. Weaponry has replaced uniforms as the toilette of our day. The unexpressed theory is that if soldiers are "well armed," they won't notice that no one has told them how to win wars.

The superiority of small, fast armies applies to armaments as well as to men. Napoleon, despite his reputation as an artillery officer in an era when artillery was changing war, wasn't particularly interested in the latest equipment. He refused to use either shrapnel or observation balloons. He liked to keep things simple so that he could move fast. He had a sense of what his soldiers could digest and dominate in weaponry. These weapons had to be a natural extension of the soldier, not the contrary. If dominated by his weaponry, the soldier would not be able to act naturally and with speed.

The devotion of contemporary armies to quantity and technological superiority has inverted this relationship. The officer and the soldier -- in fact, entire armies -- have become appendages of their weapons. Two incidents during a single week in the spring of 1987 and a third in the summer of 1988 poignantly demonstrated the dangers of a technology addiction.

The first disaster involved a U.S. frigate, the Stark. She was cruising in the Persian Gulf as part of an American decision to guarantee the passage of oil tankers between the opposing forces of Iran and Iraq. An Iraqi Mirage fighter approached her. The ship's crew had had the Mirage under surveillance for three minutes. The fighter then launched two Exocet missiles, which struck and severely damaged the ship. Thirty-seven sailors were killed. The Mirage flew away unhindered.

A public outcry followed. Why had the frigate not reacted before, during or after the incident? All crew members had been at their stations. The ship was equipped with an antimissile system which could deal with the Exocet.

The explanation was that the extremely sophisticated antimissile system had been turned off. The reason was that, if left on, it would fire automatically at any approaching aircraft. There were a lot of planes in the air over the Persian Gulf. Some were friendly. Others were civilian. In addition, the frigate had given the fighter two warnings. This took two minutes. The antimissile system takes ninety seconds to activate. It was therefore thirty seconds from activation when the first Exocet struck, knocking out the ship's electronic system. Just as they reestablished power, the second missile struck.

None of the above constituted an equipment failure or an error on the part of the crew. However, the bow superstructure blocks the ship's own antimissile sensors and weapons. Therefore, when a suspicious plane approaches, the frigate must turn its stern in that direction so that the antimissile system can detect any oncoming missiles. By close calculation, it has been established that there were enough seconds available to turn the ship, detect the missile and fire. Just enough seconds. What such a frigate is supposed to do if approached by two suspicious  planes coming from opposite directions is problematic.

Military authorities analyzed this incident. They established human error. The Captain was therefore relieved of his command and left the navy. But if one considers the complexity of the reactions required when faced by the indicators, of which only a few of the dozens possible have been given, another question arises. Did the Captain have a real opportunity to decide on action or only a theoretical opportunity? In the abstract, despite the confused circumstances, he had a couple of seconds to turn his ship, examine the information and order the antimissile missiles fired. In reality the remarkable equipment defending the Stark provided a theoretical defence -- not one which could easily be used even by well- trained men in a practical wartime crisis.

A few days later a young West German citizen flew a single-engine Cessna from Finland across the Russian border. He penetrated Soviet air space, crossed all the defence, lines, and flew 680 kilometers to Moscow, where he circled Red Square, buzzed Lenin's Tomb, and landed at the foot of the Kremlin wall. The Soviets gave no explanations, but Western experts suggested that the Soviet radar system could not spot either low- or slow-flying aircraft, partially as a result of tall trees obscuring the screen. Everyone agreed, however, that the fault lay with humans, not with the system. A number of men were fired.

In July 1988, again in the Persian Gulf, the American cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iran Air Airbus, killing 290 civilian passengers. After initially misleading excuses from the navy and American politicians, a thousand-page U.S. Navy report eventually put the blame on the Operations Officer. He was therefore to receive a letter of reprimand which would not become part of his official personal file. But if he was at fault, why was the punishment so light? And if he wasn't, then why punish him at all? The answer seems to be that the navy preferred blaming a man to blaming the machinery -- machinery so complex that it couldn't easily differentiate between a tiny fighter and an enormous Airbus. Their chief desire was to avoid criticism of the ship's Aegis protection system. The navy has invested $46 billion in this system in order to equip fifty-six cruisers and destroyers.

Meanwhile, twenty thousand men on twenty-five gigantic American ships in the Persian Gulf were immobilized, like dinosaurs, hardly able to move because of mines laid by little wood scows, and unable to turn on their electronic equipment for fear of destroying everything in sight, including fellow ships and planes. Shortly after the Stark incident and almost a year before that of the Vincennes, Admiral Carlisle Trost, Chief of Naval Operations, reacted to criticism of this general situation by invoking the magic formula -- the navy doesn't build small ships, because smaller ships would be far less cost effective. [17]

This problem of unmanageable machinery has been constant over the last decade. The Iran rescue mission was betrayed by helicopters that wouldn't work. The Grenada operation lost a good percentage of its equipment through malfunction. When the American marines in Beirut were Withdrawn to ships, after the explosion of a car bomb in their compound killed 240 of them, the navy suddenly discovered that so long as the ships stayed in the harbour their radar system couldn't be turned on. At any rate no one could figure out how to make it work while the ships' engines were off. They had to place marines around the decks with hand-held missiles to watch for low-flying planes and speedboats.

Richard Gabriel, in his study of recent American military engagements, concluded that an obsession with state-of-the-art equipment was crippling the army. The TOW antitank missile fails to work 30 percent of the time; 35 percent of Sidewinder missiles malfunction; so do 25 percent of the Sparrows. The fact is that the natural impulses of technocrats and the imperatives of technology have become so detached from the society of man that no one can tell where research ends and use begins.

An ever-growing amount of military equipment has been prematurely ripped from the womb of research. It has been put into an apparently practical form without taking into account what human beings can actually do in a real situation. On paper Western armies have a remarkable arsenal. In reality much of it is useless in wartime situations, unless the enemy can be so overwhelmed as to be irrelevant as an opponent. Quite simply, it is too complicated to use.

Even the M-16 rifle carried by the American soldier is too "sophisticated" -- a value-laden word that switches the responsibility for failure from the weapon to the soldier. In ideal circumstances, the M-16 is no doubt the best rifle in the world. In reality it jams easily. Guerrilla soldiers around the world, who are constantly fighting in difficult circumstances, are far happier to have a basic Kalashnikov in their hands, even though it can't do a quarter of the things promised by the M-16. Military planners will reply that guerrilla fighters are not as "sophisticated" as Western soldiers. In most cases this simply isn't true. The average Western soldier has a lot of training but not much experience. The average guerrilla fighter knows what he can and cannot manipulate during real use.

The Western problem is that weapons are now developed without taking into account the humans who will have to use them or the practical circumstances of their use. The contemporary staff general is so eager to get more of this complex weaponry that he often budgets for the maximum amount of equipment without leaving any reserve for spare parts or training.

As a result in 1985 the U.S. Air Force had 7,200 aircraft without the means to sustain them at military readiness. Nor did they have the bases in Europe capable of handling the equipment which would be deployed there in case of crisis. They didn't have the fuel, ammunition, repair facilities or control towers to make the equipment usable. All they had was the equipment. [18]

This frenzied desire to have the largest possible quantities of the latest and most complex equipment could be called the Armada complex. And while it is true that budgets in other Western armies limit this collector's folly, the Armada complex is nevertheless a generalized condition of the Western military.

***

The West's victory over Iraq would seem to have laid all worries about military leadership, strategical competence and impractical equipment to rest. With a single success the stigma of dozens of lost engagements and mismanaged wars had been wiped away. But nothing is worse than confidence based upon a false interpretation of events. And a war in which one side refuses to fight is not a victory for the other if there is a subsequent peace which leaves the loser with effective power. In place of soft self-reassurance, we would do better to ask ourselves exactly what this war demonstrated about Western armies.

First, there is the question of mobilization. We mobilized on the scale of a world war and yet were able to gather together, right on the battlefront, troops and equipment from around the world without military interference from the enemy. We did this at our ease over a period of months, .thereby confirming that the opponent was so inferior as to warrant neither world war methods nor rhetoric.

Second, we carried out a lengthy, unopposed bombing campaign which official publicity told us was the first of its kind -- accurate and effective thanks to the new "smart bombs." In reality, only 7 percent of the 88,500 bombs dropped were smart. [19] We have no information on bow smart they actually were. Only the successes were shown to the public on videotape. We do know, however, despite repeated claims by General Schwarzkopf that "we have managed to neutralize the fixed launchers" of the Scud missiles, that half of them remained operational. [20] As for the other 93 percent of Allied bombs, they had the traditional 25 percent accuracy rate. In other words, this campaign was not so very different from the interminable barrages of World War I and the strategic bombings of World War II, both of which caused heavy casualties while failing to accomplish military objectives. In the Iraq campaign, some military as well as most civil infrastructures were destroyed. We actually have no idea whether this had a determining effect on the Iraqis' ability to fight the war. The aftermath demonstrates that their army was not seriously damaged. Even the short ground war was. filled with indications that a heavy, prolonged, generalized bombing campaign did not have an important effect on the outcome. For example, entire regiments, which had not been targeted during the bombing, surrendered without firing a shot. It now appears that Saddam Hussein's army, with the exception of his Republican Guard, had from the beginning been unwilling to fight. Our military leaders have countered that they were forced to act as if the enemy would fight because they had no information to the contrary. In other words, Western intelligence networks were not functioning. An army cannot fight an intelligent war without accurate information about the enemy.

Third, it is not at all clear that our equipment functioned well. Because our armies were able to draw on total Western stocks without impunity, they were not subjected to the limited conditions of real war, such as incurring heavy risks in order to replace equipment. For all we know, Western armies may have suffered the 25 percent equipment failure rates that previous experience would suggest. Our forces had the luxury of overarming themselves to such an extent that even high levels of failure would have had little importance.

Fourth, the strategy for the ground invasion was almost standard. It benefited from the element of surprise only because the enemy, being so inferior; had no possibility of gathering information beyond its own borders. What was presented as a rapid and daring ground war was actually a predictable manoeuvre against an enemy waiting either to surrender or, in the case of the Republican Guards, to duck until hostilities were over.

The strategies of armies, equipment and leadership employed during this war were those we have been preparing over the last half century for a major land war in Europe. Received wisdom now has it that, with the collapse of the Warsaw bloc and the Soviet Union, the Cold War is over. However, the basic rivalries between East and West remain, along with their military infrastructures.

In order to evaluate the Iraq campaign, one has to imagine it taking place against a real opponent, most probably in Europe. For a start there would be no air superiority. Six weeks of strategic bombing would be returned by six weeks of the same from the other side. The gathering of troops and equipment not already on the battlefront would be virtually impossible because of the enemy's long-range strike capability. Without rapid attack both armies would be severely damaged. Once engaged they would be dependent upon immediately available supplies. And the strategic movement of any army in any direction would be picked up immediately by the opponent's satellites.

Two specific examples give a more realistic picture of our situation. The U.S. General Accounting Office completed a report in January 1991 which concluded that the American army was so badly equipped and trained to resist chemical warfare that more than 50 percent of exposed troops would die. [21] There is no reason to suppose that the other Allied armies were better prepared. The second example relates to the Patriot missile, hero of the technological war. It now appears that its performance did not conform to claims made during the war. One hundred and fifty-eight Patriots were needed to hit forty-seven Scud missiles. These hits did not destroy the warhead. Instead they struck the fuel rocket at a point when it was almost spent. As a result, the warhead was simply diverted to another site. In fact, Israeli casualties and damaged buildings rose several-fold once the Patriots began operating. [22]

President Bush insisted on comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler and, during his postwar state of the union address, persisted in comparisons with the military struggles of the two world wars: "Twice before in this century, an entire world was convulsed by war." Aside from this rhetoric, so overstated as to insult our intelligence, the West's pedantic methods against Iraq would have been a disaster if used against a real enemy. And even as a strategy for liberating Kuwait it was inappropriate. The Iraqis were left the maximum amount of time to prepare the destruction of the local civil and oil industry infrastructure and then were defeated in a manner which ensured they could carry out that destruction. This real catastrophe was exacerbated by the Iraqi refusal to fight followed by their reassumption of power at home. Worse still, not only did this war not solve the problems which caused it, the result will be massive regional growth in armed forces and new weaponry. Iran, fur example, 'is busy rearming. Nevertheless, for the first time in memory, the Pentagon did not sabotage its own army. This was the result of a personal decision by General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, simply to ignore the official Pentagon system. In other words, there has been no reform, only a one-time informal exception to the rules.

In many ways the victory over Iraq eerily echoes that of the British over the Mahdi in the Sudan in 1898. Kitchener, a superficially colourful commander who was in reality slow and predictable, followed up two years of battlefield preparation with an easy victory over an opponent unequipped with such things as machine guns. The Mahdis' casualties were high. Those of the British were very low. There was a dramatic cavalry charge, not unlike the recent tank charge, which hadn't much to do with the outcome of the war. However, it was very exciting. This victory caused the British to believe that they were on the right military track. As a result they bungled the South African War and undertook the massacre of 1914-18. Comparisons of this sort are never quite satisfactory. However, carefully used they can at least discourage easy triumphalism.

***

The swollen officer corps of the West have progressed from the myth of modern organization to the myth of the modern manager. All the syndromes of bureaucratic life are to be found in their headquarters. A nine-to-five attitude. Group decisions to protect each individual. An inability to respond to information which indicates that the system is doing  the wrong thing. Leadership rarely rewarded. Business management systems consciously applied to running armies. It is not an exaggeration to say that officers now know more about systems management than about fighting wars.

In these "entrepreneurial officer corps," Richard Gabriel has written, "competition and careerism make every officer look out for himself. ... Personnel managers are actually in charge of the system and they have redesigned the system of military promotion and rewards to reward managerial bureaucrats." [23] Army promotion boards are controlled by staff officers who have little or no frontline experience.

It isn't surprising that Western military organizations are unable to adapt themselves to doing battle with fast, light armies that fight outside rational tradition. The managerial officer is unlikely to understand why these conflicts are taking place. Or what the motivations of the officers involved might be. Or how such wars are fought on a daily basis. These Third World mysteries, which have now spread to the former communist world, are beneath their complex skills.

When on the morning of April 25, 1980, the American Secretary of Defense was obliged to announce the disastrous failure of the hundred-odd men sent on the Iran rescue mission, some 35,000 staff officers and other ranks stood ·outside their offices in the Pentagon watching him on overhead corridor television monitors. Their expressions were wry, curious, mildly confused. [24] They were hearing about a world indifferent to their methods and systems -- a real world they were often required to imagine on paper. Almost every American military operation of the last forty years had been debated beforehand at great length in the thousands of offices off those corridors. The preparation had sometimes been so long that the relevant circumstances had completely changed by the time the operation was carried out. The message of the Secretary of Defense to the staff was that their imagining of the reality in Iran had led to a disaster. It was immediately apparent to everyone in the Pentagon that there had been human error out there, outside, on the ground.

A few years later, when the U.S. interservice committee cranked out the plans for the Grenada invasion, a tiny role in the attack force was allotted to each service represented on the committee. Indeed, a role was given to each section of each service represented on the committee. The operation was almost as complex as the Normandy landings -- so complex that the only reason it succeeded was the total absence of any but token resistance. A large number of the 8,633 medals awarded were given to people on the planning staff who took no part in the operation. This was not unusual. In 1970 in Vietnam, 522,905 medals were awarded -- double the number of American military personnel in South Asia. [25]

But if all this is true of Western armed forces and their capabilities, what does it mean about the intricate web of nuclear weapons which now surrounds us? Quite probably a good part of the offensive machinery which is supposed to deliver the bombs doesn't work, and an even greater part of the defensive equipment. After all, everyone agrees that nuclear defence is far more complex than simply throwing bombs at the other side. It's unlikely that we shall get a chance to find out if all this is true. But the Star Wars proposition, when seen in this context, suddenly appears to have had nothing to do with nuclear warfare. It belongs in the category of the desk officer's dream: endless amounts of equipment incomprehensible to anyone except an expert and virtually inoperable in a real situation.

It is one of the great ironies of military history that victories are eventually and invariably claimed by courtesans, who cloak themselves in the verbiage of the victor. And since they don't themselves understand strategy, they have no difficulty in convincing themselves that they are really the inheritors of the victor's methods. Our Western general staffs probably believe that they are the inheritors of the rapid movement, deep penetration, highly mobile tank strategists who stand out as the military heroes of the last world war.

One example of this is the persistence with which they go on constructing ever more  complicated helicopters. These machines have taken on a logic of their own, unrelated to their proven battle performance. Whatever new equipment is stuck onto them, helicopters have a fatal flaw -- a soldier firing an ordinary rifle can still bring one down with a single shot. Helicopters have now been endlessly used in combat, almost always with heavy losses and little impact on the enemy. However, it has been decided that helicopters are the new tank. Their loss rate is therefore irrelevant.

Were Liddell Hart, Fuller, Guderian, de Gaulle, and Dorman-Smith, to say nothing of Wingate, to present at today's staff colleges a new version of their ideas -- a version adapted to current circumstances -- they would be laughed out of the room. And were they to attempt to influence strategic planning, the personnel directors would quickly ship them off to provincial postings.

***

Charles de Gaulle was one of the most surprising victims of the modern military's double addiction to management and technology. He was, after all, the only one of the great strategists to later gain real power. As President of the French Republic he had a chance to put into place the ideas he had first laid out in Vers l'Armee de Metier thirty years before. De Gaulle had come to power in 1958 when the army was in revolt against the civil authorities. This revolt ostensibly turned on the Algerian problem. In reality it was part of the larger question of the French army's inability to accept a republican and democratic system as the ultimate authority. In truth, the traditional officer class -- that strange combination of gentry and staff -- had gone on controlling the machinery in exactly the way it had since 1914.

As President of the Republic, de Gaulle wanted to create a high-technology army -- the modern version of his old tank force. It would be run by a new generation of officers -- technicians who would not come from the gentry or the staff and who would not have a private club approach to the army. They would become the first generation of truly apolitical officers in the history of the French republics. By their simple absence from the political process, they would ensure political stability. This, de Gaulle felt, would definitively solve the never-ending problem of civil-military relations in France.

These new officers were trained and promoted as fast as possible. The Chief of Staff, General Charles Ailleret, was himself a technician. He had been in charge of new weapon projects. He was officially the "father" of the French nuclear bomb. The old staff and the old officer corps resisted these changes as actively as the circumstances permitted. They feared that a high-tech, professional force would remove all need for them. They were particularly opposed to the nuclear force, which could be operated by a handful of men. The president would therefore have direct control over the military machine without any need for intervention by the central staff.

By the time de Gaulle left power in 1969, it was clear that he had won. It was also clear, however, that his victory had not turned out as expected. The new technocrat officers came from the lower-middle and middle classes. They found themselves caught up in the officer corps without the traditional, gentry-based officer mythology. Technocracy provided no emotional comfort. They were at sea in a role which had always belonged to others. Inevitably they reached out for the nearest, most obvious belief system and that was loyalty to the armed forces -- an in-house loyalty cut off from wider social or class commitments.

The rise of an inward-looking, technocratic, staff-oriented officer corps, isolated from society as a whole, was by no means particular to France. It has been a general Western phenomenon and has become, particularly worrying in the United States. There new officers are increasingly drawn from the children of senior NCOs. These young men have been brought up in the physical world of army camps and the emotional world of military mythology. They don't have the outside links of the old officer class. Nor do they have links to their own class, for the simple reason that the stable privileges of military life raise them above their origins, whether as privates, sergeants or officers.

On the outside, after all, public programs -- educational, social and legal -- have been collapsing throughout the United States. The sole major exception has been the world of the armed forces, where everyone is taken care of in what amounts to a society of socialist paternalism. For poor and lower-middle-class Americans, life on the inside is much better than life on the outside. The interests of an officer corps produced in this atmosphere are particular to the world they know.

In the case of France, President de Gaulle was able to see the shift in loyalty of the officer class even before he left power. The new officers were not responding to the challenge of his new strategies. They began instead to transform the simple, new nuclear force and the new conventional machinery into an ever-more-complex and stolid abstraction. They began to reinforce the old staff resistance to political power. They discovered that this was a way to apply pressure on the politicians for a constant stream of new equipment.

The tank strategy in particular, which had been so resisted by the old military authorities, was something they had now fallen in love with. That is to say they fell in love with the tank -- a wonderful piece of heavy, complicated machinery which could be armed in a myriad of ways. It was only a matter of time before they adapted it to a static view of strategy not unlike trench warfare. As indeed all the Western armies have done.

And the nuclear strategies suffered the same fate. Flexible response was the opposite of flexible. This term, stolen from the vocabulary of sensible strategies, was deformed to mean "gradual response." And gradual response is precisely what was used in World War I -- a fixed, in-depth defence which required masses of bombs, equipment and men, in endless variations of size and combinations.

That was why the Europeans recognized the implications immediately, when this strategy was first introduced by McNamara in the early 1960s. They understood that ,it meant the continent would have to be destroyed, before the United States considered any serious action of its own. But their moment of clarity gradually slipped away as the staff planners became mesmerized by the endless choice of interlocking weaponry which flexible response offered them. It was only a matter of time before the very complexity of French nuclear strategy, along with the strategies of the other Western powers, had been turned into an updated version of the Maginot Line. The American MX missile system, in particular, with its limited quantity of special railway tracks moving weapons about in a fixed pattern, is a physical parody of the old Maginot Line construction. And the recently renamed SDI, even if it were actually doable, would be a massive expansion of the same sort of static defence.

The military's response to the recent agreements on nuclear weapons reduction in Europe illustrated this state of mind. They really didn't care so long as they were compensated with increased quantities of conventional weapons. At first this appears sensible; the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, when added to the childish enthusiasm of the West, have left the impression that everything is up for grabs east of the EEC. But if one listens very closely to the demands of our military for conventional equipment or to their concerns over possible conventional arms reduction, a curious impression emerges. They seem almost pleased at the idea of fewer nuclear bombs and increased reliance on tanks and artillery. There is a revival of the old staff officer displeasure at the rise of nuclear weapons, which removed power from their headquarters and gave it to politicians. On a continent now crowded with fragile new nations whose diplomatic and military relationships may not be stabilized for a decade or more, a return to tanks and cannon holds out the hope of a return to manageable weapons and old-fashioned, thump-the-enemy warfare.

***

This sort of suffocating bureaucratic structure, which sees war as weaponry, rather in the way many aristocrats once saw war as protocol and uniforms, has turned a straightforward and brutal reality into an abstraction. In the process the officer's concrete sense that he is fighting to win has been undermined. This in turn has clouded the justification for asking a soldier to risk his life. Wars nevertheless have continued to turn around death and so it was inevitable that something would appear to counterbalance the atmosphere of obscure abstraction. Something comforting. This took the form of an emotional outlet called bravery.

Courage or bravery has become a pillar of the nation-state's mythology. In an earlier era "service" and "chivalric form" had played important roles. At that time courage was simply a practical characteristic required in the soldiers of a winning army. It was no more important than intelligence, humanity, professionalism and personality.

But with the rise of the bureaucratic staff army, courage evolved into a compensation for not fighting to win. It became a measurement for that new phenomenon -- the Hero. Each soldier, each officer, was an individual who could dream of his own glory by comparing his own courage to that of the Hero.

Courage had always been something every man could hope to possess. Now it broke down into three forms. The first was relatively rare that act of bravery which brought victory measurably closer. Not romantically. Not abstractly. Not the proverbial machine-gun post knocked out. But significantly closer. And not victory in a clash or battle, but victory in a great battle or war. The second sort of courage was not so rare. It was that of the individual whom fate throws into an impossible situation. This has nothing to do with victory. It has everything to do with a single man and his fate. It is war as an existential act, quite apart from victory or defeat. The third kind has become tragically common. It is that quality which men summon up from within themselves to deal with the hopeless fate dealt them by incompetent commanders. This courage is a form of individual dignity which makes the pointlessness of that man's death acceptable to his family and to society. Unfortunately that same dignity also has the effect of camouflaging both the commander's incompetence and the military structure which caused the man's death.

When we talk of valour and courage in the nation-state, we are more often than not talking about this dignified suicide of the inadvertently condemned. As for the medals which accompany such a waste of life, they are a trick of military incompetence. In lieu of victory and/or life, the individual is given a medal. As the Grenada operation demonstrated, in the American army even pointless death has been so devalued that the flushing of a general's toilet may as easily earn a shiny bit of metal.

The pinning on of stars reaches its full cynical significance when sanctified valour and bereaved families are used to lend dignity to wars stupidly fought. The courageous and their families are drawn into a circular trap. The sacrificed soldier was valorous under the orders of a commander who has rewarded his effort. The battle was therefore worth fighting. Courage made it worthwhile. The basic rule of war -- that it is fought to be won -- has been forgotten.

Courage has become a proof of virtue and of celebrity value. The point of the brave soldier's fame, like that of the pie-eating-contest winner who is interviewed on television, is that he or she, for that moment and in his or her own way, is the Hero. This is little more than hopeless dreaming to compensate for hopeless leadership.

***

There is no example in history of a nation that is unable or unwilling to defend itself surviving for any length of time. That was why Sun Tzu began by invoking the essential nature of military action. Machiavelli, with his cold and cynical eye and his ability to infuriate the good men who wished reason to be a moral force, nevertheless caught the essence of the problem: "There is nothing proportionate between the armed and the unarmed."

The West has never been so armed and yet felt itself so little defended. There is no consensus, even among the civil and military leadership, on a circumstance in which our arms might be used to defend us successfully. Repeated questioning of our citizenry over the last few decades reveals that a majority of those who have been in the direct line of fire -- the Europeans -- felt themselves unable to imagine any action which would defend their lives, their families, their homes or their countries.

In such an atmosphere it is hardly surprising that the officer corps are also looked down upon. Or that the officers themselves are genuinely confused about their role. For example, captains of nuclear submarines, if called upon to fire their warheads, have no idea where the missiles are aimed. The geographic coordinates are on an electronic disc legible only by the submarine's computer. When questioned about this, officers tend to express relief that their destructive powers at the moment of firing would remain abstract. They would rather not know what city will be destroyed by their personal action. [26]

A nation nevertheless has to defend itself. To defend a free people can only be understood as a moral act. To defend them well must be better than to defend them badly. A good defence minimizes the risks of death and destruction.

Guibert's eighteenth-century idea, of marshaling reason to organize armies in order to remove mediocrity and allow the competent soldiers to command, must certainly have been both a good and a moral idea. And yet the direct result of his success was the unleashing of Napoleon and, with him, the unleashing of the godlike Hero archetype. The subsequent deformation of reason into a bureaucratic sea designed to drown Heroes seemed perfectly justified. The stilling of genius became the free man's ultimate protection.

But this protection applied only where free men lived. Elsewhere the forces of darkness were able to gather up this entwined myth of reason and the Hero. And when those forces attacked free men, we found ourselves defended by a sea of technicians. The military staffs, called upon to fight on our behalf, proved themselves as bloody as Napoleon. The difference was that their killing arose not from the application of unbridled ambition but from ambition unapplied except as an adjunct of administrative power. Their casualties were the result not of aggression but of disinterest and ineptitude.

Mediocrity kills as successfully as genius and so we are forced back to our original beliefs about the relationship between morality and de fence. There are two kinds of morality in the world of arms. There is the most narrow, which is the honest relationship between an officer and his men. In this the technocrat fails and the good field officer may  succeed. But the rampant Hero also succeeds in this domain by distorting the devotion owed him by his men.

The larger kind of morality is that between the officer and the state. Within the nascent democracies of the nineteenth century it was possible fur ambitious men to distort reason to their personal service. Somehow, as Foch and Haig demonstrated, this weakness for distortion went on into the middle of the twentieth.

By now we no longer have the excuse of inexperience. We ought to feel comfortable enough with our way of life to believe ourselves capable of maintaining soldiers on their path of duty. "The enlightened ruler," Sun Tzu wrote, "is prudent and the good general warned against rash action. Thus the state is kept secure and the army preserved." [27] Surely it would be wiser today to hand our defence to those able to defend us in the belief that we are capable of controlling them. Better the risk of honest genius than the impossibility of controlling manipulative and unresponsive mediocrity.

But how could any state actually build a military system bound by skill and morality? The establishment of a common understanding between the population and their defenders is the obvious answer and no population could believe in such a unity so long as the staff control the armies. The list of what would have to change is impossibly long. It begins with the eradication of the idea that the modern officer is little different from the modern bureaucrat or businessman. The officer is not a manager. Not a committee man. Not one who works towards group decisions.

The essence of good strategy is what it has always been -- insecurity and uncertainty. The staff officers seek security and certainty. They build carefully laid-out attack and defence schemes. Only the removal of their controlling hand can change this.

One of the simplest steps in the right direction would involve a radical reduction in the size of our officer corps. They are now so bloated that they contain a self-serving internal logic, only indirectly related to strategy and national interests. Reduction is something advocated by such outsiders as the great British military historian Michael Howard and, of course, Richard Gabriel. A lean officer corps is more likely to concentrate on its role. The staff obsession with quantities of complex equipment could also be dealt with if the officer corps were small enough to have direction. On an even more practical level, soldiers should evaluate soldiers. There is no role for personnel officers in the molding of an officer corps. Any more than there is for bureaucrats in uniform acting as back-room strategists.

To do this and much more would require our political leadership taking on real responsibility. The history of the last forty years has been that of politicians letting staff officers dictate the agenda. Instead of playing bureaucratic games over money and equipment, governments would find themselves having to control thinkers who are capable of action.

As for the real staff structure needed to service any modern army, we have had two centuries of experience with rational administration. We now know what works and what doesn't. The politicians and the soldiers could control the staff if an intensive effort were made and maintained. What we must continually remind ourselves is that the original intent in professionalizing and rationally managing our armies was to have fewer, faster, less destructive and more decisive wars. The result instead has been the institutionalization of semi-permanent warfare which grows continually larger, more destructive and increasingly indecisive.

Our problem is increasingly one of identifying reality in a world which finds refuge in military illusions. Thus we pretend that we are at peace when the world is at war. We believe our armies are weak when defence budgets are higher than nations theoretically at peace have ever supported. We have enshrined the values of the fast and mobile wars while constantly preparing for slow, static, frontal assaults. We accept and encourage the generalship of technocrats, somehow ignoring their now long record of losses and draws. Finally, by glorifying our occasional victories over much weaker opponents, we manage to forget that the history of warfare is made up mainly of large unimaginative armies being defeated by small, imaginative forces.

The reality which can be identified in all of this is that the greatest risk for democracy is not the emergence of a Napoleon but the failure to reduce the function of administrators to administration. The real challenge is to control soldiers whose job it is to maintain a strategy of  uncertainty. Man is a great deal happier with certainty, even if its comfort is false and dangerous.

But if common sense were able to sweep from our minds the fears of a less stable past, this control would appear as the natural duty of responsible citizens and their governments. If the Napoleonic Hero could be exorcised, we would find the moral value in our own defence and therefore in our soldiers. A free man's defence depends upon his willingness to kill the Hero within himself in order to be able to reject it in others.

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