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Military Commanders Part 3: Politics and Strategy
- By ELIOT A. COHEN
- | February 16, 2016
- Category: Churchill in WWII Explore
Part 3: “At the Summit, True Politics and Strategy are One”
“I interpreted my duty in the following way: I accepted full responsibility for bringing about successful results, and in that spirit I exercised a close general supervision over everything that was done or proposed. Further, I claimed and exercised an unlimited power of suggestion and initiative over the whole field, subject only to the approval and agreement of the First Sea Lord on all operative orders. Right or wrong, that is what I did, and it is on that basis that I wish to be judged.”1
—Churchill on his conduct of the Admiralty, 1911-15
Politics and Strategy
The permeation of all war, even total war, by political concerns, should come as no surprise to the contemporary student of military history, who has usually been fed on a diet of Clausewitz and his disciples. But it is sometimes forgotten just how deep and pervasive political considerations in war are. Take, for example, the question of the employment of air power in advance of Operation “Overlord,” the Normandy invasion—extensively covered in Hillsdale’s forthcoming Document Volume 19 of the Official Biography.
As is well known, operational experts and commanders split over the most effective use of air power. Some favored the employment of tactical air power to sever the rail and road lines leading to the area of the proposed beachhead, while others proposed a systematic attack on the French rail network, leading to its ultimate collapse. This seemingly technical military issue had, however, political ramifications, because any attack (particularly one targeted against French marshaling yards) promised to yield French civilian casualties.
Churchill intervened in the bombing dispute to secure a promise that French civilian casualties would be held to a bare minimum. “You are piling up an awful load of hatred,” Churchill wrote to Air Chief Marshal Tedder. He insisted that French civilian casualties be under 10,000 killed, and reports were submitted throughout May that listed the number of French civilians killed and (callously enough) “Credit Balance Remaining.”2
The Churchillian Model
In The World Crisis Churchill wrote: “At the summit, true strategy and politics are one.” The civil-military relationship and the formulation of strategy are inextricably intertwined. A study of Churchill’s tenure in high command of Britain during the Second World War suggests that the formulation of strategy is a matter more complex than the laying out of blueprints.
In the world of affairs, as any close observer of government or business knows, conception or vision make up at best a small percentage of what a leader does—the implementation of that vision requires unremitting effort. The debate about the wisdom of Churchill’s judgments (for example, his desire to see large amphibious operations in the East Indies)3 is largely beside the point. His activity as a strategist emerges in the totality of his efforts to shape Britain’s war policies, and to mold the peace that would follow the war.
The Churchillian model of civil-military relations is one of what one might call an uneven dialogue—an unsparing (if often affectionate) interaction with military subordinates about their activities. It flies in the face of the contemporary conventional wisdom, particularly in the United States, about how politicians should deal with their military advisers.4
In fact, Churchill’s pattern of relationships with his Generals resembles that of other great democratic war statesmen, including Lincoln, Clemenceau and Ben-Gurion, each of whom drove their generals to distraction by their supposed meddling in military matters.
All four of these statesmen, Clausewitzians by instinct if not by education, recognized the indissolubility of political and military affairs, and refused to recognize any bounds to their authority in military activities. In the end, all four provided exceptional leadership in war not because their judgment was always superior to that of their military subordinates, but because they wove the many threads of operations and politics into a whole. And none of these leaders regarded any sphere of military policy as beyond the scope of his legitimate inspection.
The penalties for a failure to understand strategy as an all-encompassing task in war can be severe. The wretched history of the Vietnam War, in which civilian leaders never came to grips with the core of their strategic dilemma, illustrates as much. President Johnson, in particular, left strategy for the South Vietnamese part of the war in the hands of General William Westmoreland, an upright and limited general utterly unsuited for the kind of conflict in which he found himself. He did not find himself called to account for his operational choices, nor did his strategy of attrition receive any serious review for almost three years of bloody fighting. At the same time, the President and his civilian advisers ran an air war in isolation from their military advisers, on the basis of a weekly luncheon meeting from which men in uniform were excluded until halfway through the war.
A Churchillian leader fighting the Vietnam War would have had little patience, one suspects, with the smooth but ineffectual chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler. He would, no doubt, have convened all of his military advisers (and not just one), to badger them constantly about the progress of the war, and about the intelligence with which the theater commander was pursuing it. The arguments might have been unpleasant, but at least they would have taken place. Perhaps no strategy would have made the war a winnable one, but surely some strategic judgment would have been better than none. Nor can strategy simply be left to the generals, as they so often wish.
Here, perhaps, contemporary observers of foreign policy and civil-military relations have indeed forgotten the lessons of the First World War: that generals can get it wrong. In America’s successful 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, politicians abdicated their responsibility to shape a war’s conclusion, leaving matters in the hands of a volatile theater commander and a politically adept but reflexively cautious chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a result, the war ended with virtually no thought for what a postwar Iraq would look like, and before the destruction of those elements of the enemy’s army most essential to the maintenance of his regime.
The Gulf War offers evidence as well of the frequent diversity of military views—for example, the split before the war between Army and Air Force generals over the efficacy of a strategy heavily reliant on air attack. If politicians air only authoritative strategic estimates, the chances are that other views have been suppressed, not that they do not exist.
The Churchillian way of high command rests on an uneven dialogue between civilian leader and military chiefs (not, let it be noted, a single generalissimo). It is neither comfortable for the military, who suffer the torments of perpetual interrogation; nor easy for the civilians, who must absorb vast quantities of technical, tactical and operational information and make sense of it. But in the end, it is difficult to quarrel with the results.
Eliot A. Cohen is professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and has served as Counselor of the Department of State. He is the author of the prize-winning book Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (Simon & Schuster, 2002).
Further Reading:
Part I: War Statesmanship
Part II: The Churchill Method of Command
1 The World Crisis, vol. 1, (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), 241.
2 Walt W. Rostow, Pre-Invasion Bombing Strategy: General Eisenhower’s Decision of March 25, 1944 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
3 Premier Papers, PREM 3/334/4.
4 See, for example The Washington Post on ex-President George H.W. Bush’s receipt of the Marshal Medal, 2 October 1993, B-1.