These days, we’re mostly Confederates
Antebellum strategy/policy ethos in 21st century America
by
Martin N. Stanton COL, USA (Ret)
Introduction:
Despite the recent Orwellian attempts to “unperson” him, Robert E. Lee remains an iconic figure in American military history. He was a great field commander who probably got more out of his outnumbered and ill-supplied tatterdemalion army than any other general of his time could have by sheer professional acumen and force of personality. However, with him (and every other senior Southern commander) that’s as far as it goes. He failed utterly in his responsibility to convince his political superiors of their folly in the strategic prosecution of the war. He also dissipated combat power he could not afford to lose in two futile invasions of the North. Worst of all, he allowed Jefferson Davis to tie the Army of Northern Virginia to the defense of Richmond and Petersburg like a staked goat for the implacable Grant to ultimately devour. By June 1864 he could see the writing on the wall. If he stayed in Grant’s gory embrace the Army of Northern Virginia would perish and with it the Confederacy. But he could not bring himself to forcefully challenge his civilian leadership who were willfully blind to the facts – or walk away from them. Instead, he soldiered on as nemesis approached.
The fact of the matter is that the South had terrible national level leadership and a national military strategy that was ill suited to achieve its policy goals. Worse, Southern military leadership was unquestioning in their acquiescence to the elite and insular civilian authority that was driving their cause to ruin.
You can see many similarities between the national level leadership of the Confederates and the civilian and military leaders in Washington today.
In my kinder moments, I compare most of the senior military leaders at the national level over the past two (+) decades to Robert E. Lee. Semi-tragic figures - honorable dignified individuals and competent practitioners of their craft, driven by duty to make the best of bad circumstances. But this is mitigation, not praise. Like Lee, they too have allowed their nation to be tied to losing strategies developed by obtuse elitist dilettantes with little protest.
Our Strategy and Policy community has lost a lot of ground
When we look at the military giants of the last century, G.C. Marshall, Eisenhower, King, Bradley etc. we see men of immense talent and leadership ability. However, if you’re going to compare them to the leaders of today you must first consider the overall milieu of strategy/policy decision making they operated in back then. A good deal of the reason they were successful is that they had educated, responsible and thoughtful civilian leadership with whom they could interact. To put it succinctly, General Marshall could be the Marshall he was because he had a Roosevelt, a Hull and a Stimson to work with.
This isn’t the case today. Today’s media, civilian administrative and political class, comes increasingly from an increasing insular elite that has little training in strategic affairs, is not inclined to learn and is becoming alarmingly divorced from reality in its outlook. The elites of Washington today resemble nothing so much as the Southern planter aristocracy in the lead up to the civil war. Those guys lived in a self-affirming bubble too; were focused on their own narrow interests and had a short strategic horizon. The impact of our 21st century political elite (planter) class on America’s national defense and security policy has been almost as ruinous.
Of Generals and Reindeer
It’s interesting to look at the criteria our WA DC political elite uses to choose our military senior leaders. In many ways their thought processes are like those of the Saami people of Lapland in choosing reindeer. They breed their reindeer for docility and strength. Any reindeer that looks too independent gets culled out. The Saami look for obedient, powerful sled pullers. Over time, our senior generals have become like reindeer, selected by the political elites for their professional competence but also for their ideological conformity and accommodating nature. George C. Marshall would unsettle today’s political elites and never be chosen for CJCS. A Robert E. Lee would probably be acceptable to them (although they’d snigger amongst themselves behind his back at his obsession with morally upright personal behavior). But mainly they’re looking for people who will do what they are told and who don’t ask many questions.
Or to use a phrase from Josiah Bunting’s insightful novel of the Army in the Vietnam War, The Lionheads, they are looking for “Cocker Spaniels that wouldn’t soil the rug”.
In turn, prolonged exposure to the political elite of this nation, their ethics, thought processes and priorities has had a corrosive impact on Senior Military leaders who serve in DC. Our political class and senior civilian policy makers all have largely the same resume of schools and rotational jobs within the beltway. Their view of the world comes from the faculty lounge and the bureaucracy. Their strategic horizons are limited to the 4-year US presidential election cycle. They’re also increasingly amoral and largely focused on their own interests. Washington and its politics have always had an unsavory side. But corrupt actors used to be the exception rather than the rule. It’s no accident that scandals like Fat Leonard and Army Generals trying to improperly influence promotion boards happen now. It also explains why we seem to be constantly beset by incoherent strategic / policy direction and scandal in the military’s senior leadership. Work with the DC Swamp for too long and you start to think like them.
One wonders what the ghost of General Marshall would say.
The Strategic Orkin Men
We’ve recently marked the third anniversary of the fall of Kabul and the collapse of the Afghan government. Lost in the grand guignol of recrimination, finger pointing and self-flagellation over why the campaign failed and whose fault it was, I never saw anyone ask the big question:
Was it a good idea to begin with?
I suspect if someone had gone to General Marshall and briefed him that the only way to keep the US safe from terrorist attack was to conduct a counter terrorism campaign on the other side of the world in perpetuity – necessitating the presence of a CT platform in one of the most remote nations on earth with tenuous lines of communication - he’d probably have taken the briefing stone faced. Afterwards he’d have made a note to himself that the originators of the briefing weren’t a good fit for the Strategic Plans division and would have them moved to another job.
September 11, 2001, was a dreadful day in American history and it damaged our psyche. Perhaps the worst outcome of it though was our resultant fixation with counterterrorism operations. The Global War on Terror (GWOT) occasioned a complete loss of strategic perspective on the part of Senior Leadership. September 11th was an outlier, and the USG did a pretty good job in closing the gaps in our intelligence and law enforcement cooperation that made the attack possible. The chances of another 9-11 happening quickly became remote.
At the national strategic level (where four stars reside), terrorists are like roaches, they’re a quality-of-life issue, not a strategic threat that imperils the larger well-being of the household (nation). Day-to-day you take reasonable precautions against roaches and periodically you have the exterminator come in and spray. Anything more is wasting assets on an issue that – in the big scheme of things – is not of strategic importance. Seeing the occasional roach on the floor is no reason to incur the cost and disruption of tent fumigating the house.
The single most inexcusable failure of strategic leadership in the first two decades of this century is that the senior military leaders of this nation passively allowed the post 9-11 political objective of “No-new-terrorist-attacks-on –the-US-homeland” to become a national strategic objective.
Think about that for a second.
Each of the two main political parties in the US is eager to blame the other for any new terrorist attack in the US. It’s the ultimate political “Gotcha!” As a result, regardless of who is in office the military is given the do-not-drop-glass-ball strategic objective of no new terrorist attacks on the US homeland. This has been going on since 2001. A whole generation of officers grew-up and made flag rank under this cannot-fail requirement.
No one challenged it.
Not a single four star said. You know, keeping tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan for a generation, spending trillions of dollars there and losing hundreds of people killed and wounded every year - all to keep a car bomb from going off occasionally somewhere in the USA is strategically unconscionable. Doing this cost us assets and opportunity. Our resources are finite and best used elsewhere or husbanded for likely future contingencies.
None of them pointed out the obvious to their political leaders; that terrorism is a tactic and cannot be defeated in the conventional sense. That is: A war on terror cannot be won, it’s a mitigation exercise. No one general in almost 20 years has gone to the president and told him that at a strategic level terrorism is not an existential threat to the United States and treating it like one wastes resources, tires the nation psychologically and prevents us from addressing other threats in a timely manner.
Our four stars – the best people our military produces, the guys responsible for sound military strategic advice to presidents and their administrations - allowed our planter elite political class to make counter terrorism a strategic imperative and prioritize it over the real strategic threats metastasizing before our very eyes. The GWOT became a 21st century version of the Petersburg lines, that the US was pinned to by the unsound priorities of its political (planter) class. A Marshall would have stood against this strategic malpractice. But his successors in the 21st century were not up to the task.
You want to see an effective national strategy being executed? I’m afraid you’ll have to go look at the Chinese. Since 9-11 the US has outsourced strategy to the Orkin man.
Stockholm Syndrome
In 2017 we had a change of national leadership. Our generals were ill-prepared for Trump. For sixteen years they had successfully managed conflicts for the Bush and Obama administrations. They had gotten comfortable with this. Victory was a chimera, but defeat didn’t seem possible so…just keep-on-keeping-on was what passed for strategic thought. Now suddenly here was this obnoxious Yankee reality TV host who wasn’t from the genteel administrative/political elite planter class they were used to and who was asking them all sorts of uncomfortable questions.
Trump questioned the whole strategic worth of the Afghan campaign. For the first time since 9-11 the generals had a president who was prepared to give them his political top cover to withdrawal from Afghanistan and reshape our counterterrorism strategy into something that was sustainable over the long term.
And in 2017, they talked him out of it. The generals pushed back. They could see that we had reached diminishing returns in Afghanistan but could not bring themselves to leave because of the artificial strategic imperative of “no-attacks-on-the –homeland” counter-terrorism that had been imposed upon them after 9-11 by the political class. It was a true Stockholm syndrome moment. Trump was telling them they could leave the bank vault (or the Petersburg lines – depending on which analogy you prefer) and they implored him to remain hostages.
This is where our 21st century military leaders differ from Robert E. Lee (and not in a good way). Lee inwardly despaired at Petersburg. He knew he was executing a ruinous strategy but couldn’t find a way out. Conversely, most of our 21st century senior military leaders in DC were fully on board with the GWOT program. In this, they resemble the perennial “Yes” men of the Wehrmacht, Generals Keitel and Jodl more than the tragic Lee. No strategy or policy was too bizarre or transparently unworkable for those guys either. It’s one thing to serve political masters who are strategic incompetents and do your best to make it work - trying to make chicken salad out of chicken shit as it were. It’s quite another to convince yourself that chicken shit …tastes good!
Of course, things that can’t last, don’t. We were eventually forced to leave Afghanistan - just like the Confederates had to abandon Richmond and Petersburg. For Lee, it was a simple equation of military force. For our 21st century leaders it was a confluence of factors, but the end was the same.
We emerged from Afghanistan to find that while we spent decades chasing the skewed priorities of our elite planter class, our nations enemies have been running the tables on us. China has expanded its power and influence massively worldwide while we have been distracted, Iran as well, both in terms of their own combat power and that of their proxies. (Quick question – who would have had the Houthis interdicting maritime traffic on the Bab al Mandeb for a year in the face of the US Navy on their bingo cards four years ago?) The Russians made their move on Ukraine and all three are working together along with the North Koreans. The groundwork for all this was laid by 21st century political leadership with venal, parochial, self-interested 19 century mindsets, their fixation with the GWOT and senior military leader’s acquiescence to it over the past twenty plus years.
The statues of the Confederates may be gone, but in AD 2024 the Confederacy’s strategic heirs dominate Washington DC. Hooray for life’s little ironies.