LETTERS: Sir, — If Scott Cooper is correct (“The Politics of Airstrikes,” June/July 2001), and the problem isn’t political micromanagement but the realities of coalition warfare, we, as the “lone superpower,” had better learn how to fight and win on our own. Our “coalition partners” will cost us American lives as constant coordination, compromise, confusion, and delay make our “ooda Loop” unravel like ramen soup noodles in boiling water. However, I suspect that micromanagement by politicians and senior commanders is a real problem, because that is the way we practice in peacetime, and that is the way we fight in wartime, and have done so since at least the 1960s. Why does this happen? Because the higher in position a commander or leader is, the more likely he will be in the crosshairs of the piranha-like press at the first hint of error, failure, delay, or loss of momentum — all of which happen constantly in war. Commanders and leaders who are subject to instant and insistent monitoring — and likely to be rebuked or canned if a significant error or disappointing performance occurs — tend to act the same way towards their subordinates, thanks to the dubious blessings of modern command-and-control communications and computers — that bad news rolls at increasing velocity downhill until every fighter pilot, department head, and platoon leader is under constant zero-defects-driven micromanagement. Limited war is a reality, and limited wars are especially and closely tied to political decisions. In a free republic, elected civilians make the political decisions, establish goals and objectives, and approve doctrine and top-level strategic plans. However, if the civilians go beyond that to micromanaging individual target selections (rather than targeting criteria) and individual mission flight paths (as opposed to general operating areas and restricted areas), and providing specific orders to tactical commanders (instead of guidance in the form of the Rules of Engagement and implicit reliance on “good military judgment”), they are guilty of a very common mistake. They are confusing responsibility and authority with expertise and focus. A very good president is more often than not able to make good strategic judgments. But even the best president cannot simultaneously be a very good Marine platoon leader or Navy tactical action officer or Air Force pilot (who is also increasingly his own navigator and bombardier). Nor can his generals and admirals. They just aren’t there, and all the near-real-time reporting won’t replace the situational awareness and tactical experience of that junior or mid-grade officer. War — especially limited war — is indeed an extension of politics, but it is also a real-time, life-and-death struggle to fight and win, and political and uniformed seniors need to do their jobs building that two-way trust and confidence and developing their subordinates, so that when war comes, the seniors can do their jobs — planning the next battle and the battle after next, and supporting the engaged forces — and let the operational and tactical commanders fight the battles of the moment. That mutual trust and confidence also includes accepting that in war, especially the confused and ambiguous combat environments common in limited war, mistakes will be made, troops will be lost, and even, sadly, non-combatants will be injured or killed on some occasions. While military professionals seek to minimize absolutely non-combatant casualties, it is impossible completely to eliminate them. Non-combatants cannot simply disappear when one is bombing a nation’s infrastructure to dust. Nor are they always able to escape a ground battle when the warring sides are mounted in armored vehicles while they are fleeing on foot or on tractors pulling their belongings in a harvest wagon. Cooper’s argument about the failure of Rolling Thunder and the success of the Linebacker campaigns is largely correct. Strategic (non-nuclear) bombing alone, especially when heavily constrained, will not destroy or break an adversary’s will or ability to fight, but it may bend the adversary to a sufficient degree — constraining actions or encouraging concessions he might otherwise not make. What Cooper overlooks is that the Vietnamese Lao Dong Party leadership knew our overall strategic situation better than we did. Ultimately, they gave up “concessions” to stop the heavy bombing campaigns, knowing that the concessions didn’t matter — the U.S. was only looking for a face-saving way out of a defeat, and once U.S. forces left Indochina, they would be gone for good. The North Vietnamese made promises they didn’t intend to keep, knowing that the U.S. would be very unlikely to follow through on the punitive clauses in the peace accord. They judged wisely. Also, there was not especially significant dissent among the senior military leadership on the overall air warfare strategies. The problem was that overly simplistic or fundamentally erroneous understandings of who the enemies were, what they were, and what they were after; how committed they were to their objectives; and what their underlying philosophy of war directed them to do to win led to largely inappropriate, ineffectual, and sometimes counter-productive American strategies, both in the air and on the ground.
Steve Daskal |
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