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Not reviews, French Cliff notes.....;)
David Axe. Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. 111 pp. Illustrations. (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57003-660-6.
Reviewed for H-War by Michael S. Neiberg, Department of History, University of Southern Mississippi
Not Quite Ernie Pyle
We have all seen those "Bad Hemingway" contests that pass through our email accounts from time to time. Think of this book as a medal winner in a "Bad Ernie Pyle" contest. The idea behind the book is noble enough. David Axe, a freelance journalist and graphic novel memoirist, set out to follow the experiences of several members of the Gamecock Battalion of Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadets from the University of South Carolina. He purportedly wanted to see why they joined and get a sense of how their lives differed both from their non-ROTC peers and cadets at the United States Military Academy (USMA). He developed a certain sense of admiration for the cadets and the tasks they must complete, but the book ultimately fails to achieve any of its stated aims.
Although a number of journalists have made names for themselves writing history, this book suffers from a common problem journalists experience when dealing with the past. The "history" portion of the book is limited to a few pages replete with generalities and broad-brush history. According to Axe, nothing in history was "complicated" until September 11, 2001. As part of this uncomplicated pre-9/11 history, Axe claims that ROTC was born on the battlefields of World War I. It is true that the enabling legislation that created ROTC was signed in 1916, but Americans had yet to declare their belligerency in the war, let alone see a single battlefield. This error is indicative of a lack of any serious attempt to understand the book's central subject. The Reserve Officer Training Corps, and the ideal of the citizen-soldier in America more generally, have rich and illuminating histories that might have provided some important perspective, but the book has no real research and no footnotes.
The book's style obviously is designed to make for light reading. Most of the time, the style is too light and breezy. Several paragraphs are formed with one sentence, in some cases only a single word. Tenses change frequently, there is an annoying tendency to use fragments, and an unnecessary habit of using profanity in order, one presumes, to add a dose of realism through the inclusion of soldier's language. The end result, however, is unsatisfying. We also get descriptions like the one of a helicopter's arrival sounding like "the world's largest grandmother beating the world's largest dirty rug in fast forward" (p. 17) and a crass description of the mothers of cadets fanning themselves in a hot student union during a graduation ceremony as being "like fat hummingbirds" (p. 109).
Most fundamentally, however, this book misunderstands ROTC and its differences from USMA. Axe's description of ROTC is a "boys (and sometimes girls) will be boys" world of booze-filled partying, challenging military training, and the difficulties of adjusting to the capricious and arbitrary nature of Army life. Axe admires the men and women who endure these hardships, but he does not seem to know that none of these characteristics is unique to ROTC, as any student or faculty member at the nation's military colleges can attest. Instead of a sober analysis of how ROTC cadets are (or think they are) different from their West Point peers, we get a series of vignettes about the challenges of ROTC and how a handful of its students deal with them.
If a breezy style and a half-considered history of the ROTC program were the book's only faults, Army 101 could be dismissed as too short and too light for a serious comparison of commissioning sources. But there are much deeper flaws. With his wide brush, Axe tars ROTC graduates of traditional military schools such as the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Virginia Tech, and the Citadel as not being true citizen soldiers like the graduates of the University of South Carolina's ROTC program. Instead, they are all "reactionary brutes without the benefit of West Point's high standards of professionalism" (p. 42). African American women are depicted as unable to perform the physical tasks demanded of them, although there is no analysis to back the assertion (p. 70). > Worst of all is the dismissal of the Abu Ghraib scandal as a function of the fact that the military's "definition of fun doesn't always gibe with everyone else's" (p. 30), a statement that is an insult to service personnel (ROTC and service academy products alike) who see a lot of things in Abu Ghraib, but not humor. After all, ROTC is supposed to provide an exposure to civilian norms that prevents its graduates from completely adopting the military mindset and all of its less pleasant associations.
Ernie Pyle, whose style is an obvious influence on Axe, made his name with touching, personalized descriptions of American soldiers in the Second World War. Perhaps it is then fitting to conclude this review by noting that whereas Pyle was careful to let his readers get a sense of GIs and the places they came from, Axe changed names and created what he calls composites out of several of his characters. The ensuing picture struck one Gamecock Battalion cadet as so inaccurate that he posted a stinging rebuke on the Internet. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Ernie Pyle deserves better.
Reviewed for H-War by Michael S. Neiberg, Department of History, University of Southern Mississippi
Not Quite Ernie Pyle
We have all seen those "Bad Hemingway" contests that pass through our email accounts from time to time. Think of this book as a medal winner in a "Bad Ernie Pyle" contest. The idea behind the book is noble enough. David Axe, a freelance journalist and graphic novel memoirist, set out to follow the experiences of several members of the Gamecock Battalion of Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadets from the University of South Carolina. He purportedly wanted to see why they joined and get a sense of how their lives differed both from their non-ROTC peers and cadets at the United States Military Academy (USMA). He developed a certain sense of admiration for the cadets and the tasks they must complete, but the book ultimately fails to achieve any of its stated aims.
Although a number of journalists have made names for themselves writing history, this book suffers from a common problem journalists experience when dealing with the past. The "history" portion of the book is limited to a few pages replete with generalities and broad-brush history. According to Axe, nothing in history was "complicated" until September 11, 2001. As part of this uncomplicated pre-9/11 history, Axe claims that ROTC was born on the battlefields of World War I. It is true that the enabling legislation that created ROTC was signed in 1916, but Americans had yet to declare their belligerency in the war, let alone see a single battlefield. This error is indicative of a lack of any serious attempt to understand the book's central subject. The Reserve Officer Training Corps, and the ideal of the citizen-soldier in America more generally, have rich and illuminating histories that might have provided some important perspective, but the book has no real research and no footnotes.
The book's style obviously is designed to make for light reading. Most of the time, the style is too light and breezy. Several paragraphs are formed with one sentence, in some cases only a single word. Tenses change frequently, there is an annoying tendency to use fragments, and an unnecessary habit of using profanity in order, one presumes, to add a dose of realism through the inclusion of soldier's language. The end result, however, is unsatisfying. We also get descriptions like the one of a helicopter's arrival sounding like "the world's largest grandmother beating the world's largest dirty rug in fast forward" (p. 17) and a crass description of the mothers of cadets fanning themselves in a hot student union during a graduation ceremony as being "like fat hummingbirds" (p. 109).
Most fundamentally, however, this book misunderstands ROTC and its differences from USMA. Axe's description of ROTC is a "boys (and sometimes girls) will be boys" world of booze-filled partying, challenging military training, and the difficulties of adjusting to the capricious and arbitrary nature of Army life. Axe admires the men and women who endure these hardships, but he does not seem to know that none of these characteristics is unique to ROTC, as any student or faculty member at the nation's military colleges can attest. Instead of a sober analysis of how ROTC cadets are (or think they are) different from their West Point peers, we get a series of vignettes about the challenges of ROTC and how a handful of its students deal with them.
If a breezy style and a half-considered history of the ROTC program were the book's only faults, Army 101 could be dismissed as too short and too light for a serious comparison of commissioning sources. But there are much deeper flaws. With his wide brush, Axe tars ROTC graduates of traditional military schools such as the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Virginia Tech, and the Citadel as not being true citizen soldiers like the graduates of the University of South Carolina's ROTC program. Instead, they are all "reactionary brutes without the benefit of West Point's high standards of professionalism" (p. 42). African American women are depicted as unable to perform the physical tasks demanded of them, although there is no analysis to back the assertion (p. 70). > Worst of all is the dismissal of the Abu Ghraib scandal as a function of the fact that the military's "definition of fun doesn't always gibe with everyone else's" (p. 30), a statement that is an insult to service personnel (ROTC and service academy products alike) who see a lot of things in Abu Ghraib, but not humor. After all, ROTC is supposed to provide an exposure to civilian norms that prevents its graduates from completely adopting the military mindset and all of its less pleasant associations.
Ernie Pyle, whose style is an obvious influence on Axe, made his name with touching, personalized descriptions of American soldiers in the Second World War. Perhaps it is then fitting to conclude this review by noting that whereas Pyle was careful to let his readers get a sense of GIs and the places they came from, Axe changed names and created what he calls composites out of several of his characters. The ensuing picture struck one Gamecock Battalion cadet as so inaccurate that he posted a stinging rebuke on the Internet. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Ernie Pyle deserves better.
Peter Sluglett. Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 318 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-14201-4.
Reviewed for H-Albion by Priya Satia, Department of History, Stanford University
Lessons in Imperialism from Iraq's Past
The current war in Iraq has had many ironic consequences, the least sordid being perhaps the belated interest in Iraq's history. As Peter Sluglett confesses in the opening pages of the reissue of his thirty-year-old classic, Britain in Iraq, his happiness about the book's new lease of life is severely undercut by his awareness of its unhappy cause. (One at once anticipates and dreads a similar resurrection of long-neglected works on Iranian history in the near future.) While the continued obscurity of important historical texts underscores the ignorance guiding the prosecution of American war and diplomacy in the Middle East, the irony lies as much in the pedagogue's self-defeatist awareness that if only such books had been read in the halls of power earlier, they would have remained neatly irrelevant to our wider political life.
That said, the timely reissue of Sluglett's book is an opportunity to comment on scholarship as much as politics, and that is, happily, a notably less pathetic story. Sluglett's original 1976 edition has long been the definitive text on the period of the British mandate in Iraq, from World War I to 1932. Initially published by the Ithaca Press for the Middle East Centre at St. Antony's College in Oxford, the book provides the most complete and meticulous narrative of the formation of mandate policy in the tight space framed by British imperial interests and the political survival of its local collaborators, the Baghdadi political clique centered on King Faysal. The book offers "an assessment of Anglo-Iraqi relations and of Britain's role in Iraqi affairs during the period of the British occupation and mandate" with a view to making sense of "developments in both pre- and post-revolutionary Iraq" (p. xv). It provides an engaging and lucid portrait of the complex negotiations, politics, and imperial bureaucracy at the heart of the story. The diplomatic and domestic political pressures on local officials, their supervisors, the multiple imperial centers--Sluglett keeps all the pieces in play. The ad hoc and contingent nature of this chapter of imperial history is pressed home, with the light touch of a humane and wise chronicler. Sluglett presents with clarity and patience the intricacies of the entangled questions of oil, borders, and state finances. Five chronological chapters detailing the evolution of mandate policy are followed by three thematically focused chapters on land policy, defense, and education. Appendices on Shi'i politics and tenurial arrangements in the single province of Amara provide further close grain.
Sluglett's main argument is that the circumstances of the mandate locked Britain and the Sunni ruling clique into a relationship of interdependence that lasted through 1958. It is an instructive insight, and the book details the working of that relationship and the odd and mostly unfortunate dividends it paid in central matters of government, including defense, education, land revenue, minority rights, and so on. This argument remains in tension with another red thread running through the book: the British effort to devise institutions through which they could exercise power discreetly enough to convince Iraqis and the world of Iraq's independence despite Britain's actual control. The end of the mandate in 1932 was thus a momentous non-event in Sluglett's shrewd assessment, since little changed in substance until the revolution of 1958. In 1976, this was a revisionist view of a mandatory government that many were still holding up as an exemplary experiment in international development.
In 2007, however, the very coupling of the "interdependence" analytical framework with the book's anticolonial politics produces a peculiar schizophrenia: the crescendoing pathos of the theme of concealed imperial power at times sits awkwardly with a framework that implies a moral equivalence between the British and the Iraqi ruling cliques. It is a framework that tends to sweep as much history under the musty carpet of high politics as it airs in the fresh light of 1970s radicalism. What emerges is a picture of a venal, opportunistic cabal of Iraqi politicians challenging the entirely natural presumptions of the British imperial state. Take the depiction of King Faysal's position: early on, Sluglett explains that Faysal's problem was that he was dependent on Britain but had to "appear to oppose the most demeaning aspects of British control" (p. 42). However, this summarizing statement writes out a score of facts revealed on subsequent pages detailing Faysal's actual, and not merely politically calculated, criticism of British rule; his enduring confusion about the extent of his liberty; and his repeated efforts to interfere with what he increasingly recognized as British imperial designs on his adopted country. In other words, in many instances, he _really did_ resist British demands and was not merely "forced ... into the position of having to seem to resist British demands" (p. 49). The interdependence argument makes the Iraqi government and British state appear equal partners in an illusion perpetrated on the rest of Iraq, while the facts of Sluglett's story suggest that the Iraqi government played politics with considerably greater faith than its British counterparts: when asked to visit Europe in 1927, Faysal assumed he was being summoned to finally receive the gift of full independence, but, in fact, the invitation was merely a ploy to get him out of Baghdad and arrest his interference with British objectives. A measure of the stress under which this inchoate monarchy was struggling is provided by the 1929 suicide of Prime Minister 'Abd al-Muhsin al-Sa'dun, gesturing at a decidedly more sinister politics of empire than "interdependence" can allow.
> If, as Sluglett explains, Britain was obstinate about safeguarding its interests and the Iraqi government equally persistent about obtaining"'true' independence" (pp. 108, 119), these are certainly not ethically equivalent objectives. To admit as much is not to excuse the many crimes and failures of the Iraqi government but to attempt to better understand the kind of political context in which such failed, failing, or doomed-to-fail colonial and postcolonial states evolve. Stubbornness, however unproductive, can be admirable in some circumstances and indefensible in others. If the British were bent on preserving their imperial air route, oil fields, Royal Air Force training ground, prestige, and investments, there is surely cause to consider the legitimacy of this objective vis-á-vis the Iraqi government's foolhardy attempts to appear independent of the empire that had created it and foster a real sense of "national solidarity" (pp. 63-64). It was not the Iraqi government's idiosyncratic "weaknesses" that caused it to fail but its very nature as the spawn of indirect rule (p. 64). In short, there is analytical room here for considering structural causes--collaboration, indirect rule, anticolonialism--rather than pointing at individual Iraqi politicians' taste for acquiring land and tax exemptions. (If anything, the British government's imposition of
iniquitous and extractive financial obligations on Iraq, here painted as the "natural" pursuit of interests [p. 160], merits even greater condemnation on the counts of greed and venality.) The book's analysis of minority and defense policy, in particular, is marred by finger-pointing at an Iraqi government that seems frequently to be elided with the machinery of the Iraqi state, which it neither created nor controlled. In the end, if most Iraqis were losers, as Sluglett sympathetically concludes, the blame for their massive suffering surely does not lie equally on the shoulders of the ruling clique and the British; the one may have struggled vainly against leviathan, but the other was leviathan.
The book's organization tends to amplify the political dissonance produced by its analytical framework. In the blow-by-blow account of mandate policy in the first five chapters, the Iraqi position, like the British, is represented as a product of the naked calculation of political interest; but the brutality, exploitation, and injustices revealed in the final three thematic chapters on revenue policy, security, and education belie such evenhandedness. For instance, early references to the Iraqi government's revenue liabilities are cast in an entirely different light in the later chapters' depiction of the oppressive tax regime and violent methods of collection put in place by the British--although here, too, Sluglett emphasizes that this ugly end was the unintended consequence of misguided British policy rather than the inevitable result of destructive processes deliberately set in motion by a self-interested imperial state; if anyone was culpable, it was, again, the Iraqi government. Part of the problem lies in the obscurity of the moment in which those processes were put in motion the wartime occupation. Although the book purports to start in 1914, the conquest of Iraq receives short shrift. But, in fact, the exacting taxation system, the ecological changes wrought by "development" of the river system, and the violent postwar rebellion (which barely appears until p. 147) were all shaped by the exigencies of war. A more defined portrait of that era might have helped readers, and Sluglett, make better sense of Iraqi attitudes toward the British presence. Indeed, it is only in one brief moment near the end of the chronological account that Sluglett mentions British fears of tribal rebellion dating from the 1920 experience as a guiding principle in policymaking, but, in fact, that fear is central to understanding the history of the entire decade.
In the end, from the supposedly objective analysis of interdependent political interests emerges a portrait skewed in a surprising direction for a book so clearly anticolonial in its political commitments: the sins of the British state are the sins of omission and unintended consequences; the sins of the Iraqi government are ... sins. The trouble is that the book's politics are at odds with its traditional methodology. This failing was not only understandable in 1976 but imparted an avant-garde feel to the entire enterprise, as did the old rough-hewn typeface. But, in 2007, the uncritical use of British sources to represent Iraqi perceptions jars--especially when it is done with a view to making an argument about interdependence that might have been agreeable enough to some contemporary British officials. One wishes the revised text might have excised the traces of an era less sensitive to the constraints of working from an imperial archive (however sympathetic to colonial peoples), such as uncritical reproduction of British assessments of endemic "intertribal skirmishing," a people " 'naturally lawless and averse to paying taxes,'" and insincere Iraqi nationalism and Kurdish solidarity (pp. 152, 157).
For 1976, Sluglett did more than his share, and his book remains the indispensable, finely grained account of policy in mandatory Iraq. He gestured at a new type of imperialism in the making in Iraq, one that traded formal and even indirect control for something more discreetly menacing and that dispensed with the civilizing mission just when that mission had reached its apotheosis as the legitimate task of international institutions like the League of Nations. While outlining the contours of this new type of empire and the circumstances that made it possible, he stopped short of naming it or identifying it as the unfolding of a particular historical process. But, what Sluglett does leave us with is an indelible impression of the contingent nature of much of what occurred in Iraq, and it is this that keeps his a deeply human story, despite its focus on policy.
In the end, Britain in Iraq at once corrects the old tale of the altruistic mandate and exposes the limits of the genre of high political history, the methodological impasse it could not bridge as anticolonial politics began to leave their mark on the writing of history. A painstaking focus on policy tends to obscure the operation of power itself. Unveiling it requires a sense of the larger political context--the historical process at work--and an understanding of the evolution of state practice. All this tends to raise the broader question, Why has the history of the British Middle East focused so closely on the realm of high politics? Some of this is certainly the
> result of archival access and training. But, some of it is the product of the history itself: the hiving off of an exalted, elite realm of foreign policymaking in precisely the era that modern democracy came into its own and the Middle East became formally colonized by Europe.[1] In short, as the era of democratic nation-states came into its own, so too did a new style of imperialism that relied on the discreet diplomatic exchanges and collaboration of elites. To tell the history of twentieth-century empires as a history of high politics is to remain locked within that history; it is time to step out and observe the cultural, economic, political, and social scaffolding of the seemingly equally cynical machinations of the diplomatic stratosphere.
Note
[1]. For more on this, see my Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Partha Chatterjee has recently made a similar argument with respect to twentieth-century imperialism in general in Partha Chatterjee, "The Black Hole of Empire" (presidential lecture, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, November 7, 2007).
Reviewed for H-Albion by Priya Satia, Department of History, Stanford University
Lessons in Imperialism from Iraq's Past
The current war in Iraq has had many ironic consequences, the least sordid being perhaps the belated interest in Iraq's history. As Peter Sluglett confesses in the opening pages of the reissue of his thirty-year-old classic, Britain in Iraq, his happiness about the book's new lease of life is severely undercut by his awareness of its unhappy cause. (One at once anticipates and dreads a similar resurrection of long-neglected works on Iranian history in the near future.) While the continued obscurity of important historical texts underscores the ignorance guiding the prosecution of American war and diplomacy in the Middle East, the irony lies as much in the pedagogue's self-defeatist awareness that if only such books had been read in the halls of power earlier, they would have remained neatly irrelevant to our wider political life.
That said, the timely reissue of Sluglett's book is an opportunity to comment on scholarship as much as politics, and that is, happily, a notably less pathetic story. Sluglett's original 1976 edition has long been the definitive text on the period of the British mandate in Iraq, from World War I to 1932. Initially published by the Ithaca Press for the Middle East Centre at St. Antony's College in Oxford, the book provides the most complete and meticulous narrative of the formation of mandate policy in the tight space framed by British imperial interests and the political survival of its local collaborators, the Baghdadi political clique centered on King Faysal. The book offers "an assessment of Anglo-Iraqi relations and of Britain's role in Iraqi affairs during the period of the British occupation and mandate" with a view to making sense of "developments in both pre- and post-revolutionary Iraq" (p. xv). It provides an engaging and lucid portrait of the complex negotiations, politics, and imperial bureaucracy at the heart of the story. The diplomatic and domestic political pressures on local officials, their supervisors, the multiple imperial centers--Sluglett keeps all the pieces in play. The ad hoc and contingent nature of this chapter of imperial history is pressed home, with the light touch of a humane and wise chronicler. Sluglett presents with clarity and patience the intricacies of the entangled questions of oil, borders, and state finances. Five chronological chapters detailing the evolution of mandate policy are followed by three thematically focused chapters on land policy, defense, and education. Appendices on Shi'i politics and tenurial arrangements in the single province of Amara provide further close grain.
Sluglett's main argument is that the circumstances of the mandate locked Britain and the Sunni ruling clique into a relationship of interdependence that lasted through 1958. It is an instructive insight, and the book details the working of that relationship and the odd and mostly unfortunate dividends it paid in central matters of government, including defense, education, land revenue, minority rights, and so on. This argument remains in tension with another red thread running through the book: the British effort to devise institutions through which they could exercise power discreetly enough to convince Iraqis and the world of Iraq's independence despite Britain's actual control. The end of the mandate in 1932 was thus a momentous non-event in Sluglett's shrewd assessment, since little changed in substance until the revolution of 1958. In 1976, this was a revisionist view of a mandatory government that many were still holding up as an exemplary experiment in international development.
In 2007, however, the very coupling of the "interdependence" analytical framework with the book's anticolonial politics produces a peculiar schizophrenia: the crescendoing pathos of the theme of concealed imperial power at times sits awkwardly with a framework that implies a moral equivalence between the British and the Iraqi ruling cliques. It is a framework that tends to sweep as much history under the musty carpet of high politics as it airs in the fresh light of 1970s radicalism. What emerges is a picture of a venal, opportunistic cabal of Iraqi politicians challenging the entirely natural presumptions of the British imperial state. Take the depiction of King Faysal's position: early on, Sluglett explains that Faysal's problem was that he was dependent on Britain but had to "appear to oppose the most demeaning aspects of British control" (p. 42). However, this summarizing statement writes out a score of facts revealed on subsequent pages detailing Faysal's actual, and not merely politically calculated, criticism of British rule; his enduring confusion about the extent of his liberty; and his repeated efforts to interfere with what he increasingly recognized as British imperial designs on his adopted country. In other words, in many instances, he _really did_ resist British demands and was not merely "forced ... into the position of having to seem to resist British demands" (p. 49). The interdependence argument makes the Iraqi government and British state appear equal partners in an illusion perpetrated on the rest of Iraq, while the facts of Sluglett's story suggest that the Iraqi government played politics with considerably greater faith than its British counterparts: when asked to visit Europe in 1927, Faysal assumed he was being summoned to finally receive the gift of full independence, but, in fact, the invitation was merely a ploy to get him out of Baghdad and arrest his interference with British objectives. A measure of the stress under which this inchoate monarchy was struggling is provided by the 1929 suicide of Prime Minister 'Abd al-Muhsin al-Sa'dun, gesturing at a decidedly more sinister politics of empire than "interdependence" can allow.
> If, as Sluglett explains, Britain was obstinate about safeguarding its interests and the Iraqi government equally persistent about obtaining"'true' independence" (pp. 108, 119), these are certainly not ethically equivalent objectives. To admit as much is not to excuse the many crimes and failures of the Iraqi government but to attempt to better understand the kind of political context in which such failed, failing, or doomed-to-fail colonial and postcolonial states evolve. Stubbornness, however unproductive, can be admirable in some circumstances and indefensible in others. If the British were bent on preserving their imperial air route, oil fields, Royal Air Force training ground, prestige, and investments, there is surely cause to consider the legitimacy of this objective vis-á-vis the Iraqi government's foolhardy attempts to appear independent of the empire that had created it and foster a real sense of "national solidarity" (pp. 63-64). It was not the Iraqi government's idiosyncratic "weaknesses" that caused it to fail but its very nature as the spawn of indirect rule (p. 64). In short, there is analytical room here for considering structural causes--collaboration, indirect rule, anticolonialism--rather than pointing at individual Iraqi politicians' taste for acquiring land and tax exemptions. (If anything, the British government's imposition of
iniquitous and extractive financial obligations on Iraq, here painted as the "natural" pursuit of interests [p. 160], merits even greater condemnation on the counts of greed and venality.) The book's analysis of minority and defense policy, in particular, is marred by finger-pointing at an Iraqi government that seems frequently to be elided with the machinery of the Iraqi state, which it neither created nor controlled. In the end, if most Iraqis were losers, as Sluglett sympathetically concludes, the blame for their massive suffering surely does not lie equally on the shoulders of the ruling clique and the British; the one may have struggled vainly against leviathan, but the other was leviathan.
The book's organization tends to amplify the political dissonance produced by its analytical framework. In the blow-by-blow account of mandate policy in the first five chapters, the Iraqi position, like the British, is represented as a product of the naked calculation of political interest; but the brutality, exploitation, and injustices revealed in the final three thematic chapters on revenue policy, security, and education belie such evenhandedness. For instance, early references to the Iraqi government's revenue liabilities are cast in an entirely different light in the later chapters' depiction of the oppressive tax regime and violent methods of collection put in place by the British--although here, too, Sluglett emphasizes that this ugly end was the unintended consequence of misguided British policy rather than the inevitable result of destructive processes deliberately set in motion by a self-interested imperial state; if anyone was culpable, it was, again, the Iraqi government. Part of the problem lies in the obscurity of the moment in which those processes were put in motion the wartime occupation. Although the book purports to start in 1914, the conquest of Iraq receives short shrift. But, in fact, the exacting taxation system, the ecological changes wrought by "development" of the river system, and the violent postwar rebellion (which barely appears until p. 147) were all shaped by the exigencies of war. A more defined portrait of that era might have helped readers, and Sluglett, make better sense of Iraqi attitudes toward the British presence. Indeed, it is only in one brief moment near the end of the chronological account that Sluglett mentions British fears of tribal rebellion dating from the 1920 experience as a guiding principle in policymaking, but, in fact, that fear is central to understanding the history of the entire decade.
In the end, from the supposedly objective analysis of interdependent political interests emerges a portrait skewed in a surprising direction for a book so clearly anticolonial in its political commitments: the sins of the British state are the sins of omission and unintended consequences; the sins of the Iraqi government are ... sins. The trouble is that the book's politics are at odds with its traditional methodology. This failing was not only understandable in 1976 but imparted an avant-garde feel to the entire enterprise, as did the old rough-hewn typeface. But, in 2007, the uncritical use of British sources to represent Iraqi perceptions jars--especially when it is done with a view to making an argument about interdependence that might have been agreeable enough to some contemporary British officials. One wishes the revised text might have excised the traces of an era less sensitive to the constraints of working from an imperial archive (however sympathetic to colonial peoples), such as uncritical reproduction of British assessments of endemic "intertribal skirmishing," a people " 'naturally lawless and averse to paying taxes,'" and insincere Iraqi nationalism and Kurdish solidarity (pp. 152, 157).
For 1976, Sluglett did more than his share, and his book remains the indispensable, finely grained account of policy in mandatory Iraq. He gestured at a new type of imperialism in the making in Iraq, one that traded formal and even indirect control for something more discreetly menacing and that dispensed with the civilizing mission just when that mission had reached its apotheosis as the legitimate task of international institutions like the League of Nations. While outlining the contours of this new type of empire and the circumstances that made it possible, he stopped short of naming it or identifying it as the unfolding of a particular historical process. But, what Sluglett does leave us with is an indelible impression of the contingent nature of much of what occurred in Iraq, and it is this that keeps his a deeply human story, despite its focus on policy.
In the end, Britain in Iraq at once corrects the old tale of the altruistic mandate and exposes the limits of the genre of high political history, the methodological impasse it could not bridge as anticolonial politics began to leave their mark on the writing of history. A painstaking focus on policy tends to obscure the operation of power itself. Unveiling it requires a sense of the larger political context--the historical process at work--and an understanding of the evolution of state practice. All this tends to raise the broader question, Why has the history of the British Middle East focused so closely on the realm of high politics? Some of this is certainly the
> result of archival access and training. But, some of it is the product of the history itself: the hiving off of an exalted, elite realm of foreign policymaking in precisely the era that modern democracy came into its own and the Middle East became formally colonized by Europe.[1] In short, as the era of democratic nation-states came into its own, so too did a new style of imperialism that relied on the discreet diplomatic exchanges and collaboration of elites. To tell the history of twentieth-century empires as a history of high politics is to remain locked within that history; it is time to step out and observe the cultural, economic, political, and social scaffolding of the seemingly equally cynical machinations of the diplomatic stratosphere.
Note
[1]. For more on this, see my Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Partha Chatterjee has recently made a similar argument with respect to twentieth-century imperialism in general in Partha Chatterjee, "The Black Hole of Empire" (presidential lecture, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, November 7, 2007).
David J. Silbey. A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine American War, 1899-1902. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. 272 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, further reading bibliography, index. (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8090-7187-6.
Reviewed for H-SHGAPE by Christopher McKnight Nichols, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia
Three Conflicts: The Philippine-American War
On the morning of September 28, 1901, Lt. Col. Eugenio Daza led a group
of Philippine revolutionaries from their hiding places in a church inside an American army camp on the island of Samar. Armed mostly with bolos and machetes, the Filipino soldiers descended on a group of unsuspecting U.S. troops as they ate breakfast. "With the surprise, and at such close range, the insurgent disadvantage in weapons was neutralized, and bitter hand-to-hand combat broke out" (p. 191). U.S. forces were routed. Those that survived fled to the coast, climbing into small boats, and after several days at sea they made it to the nearest American outpost. Virtually every member of U.S. Infantry Company C had been wounded in the surprise attack, and forty-eight were killed, while approximately twenty-five to thirty Filipino soldiers died (p. 193).
David Silbey chronicles the dramatic events of the war such as these through a driving, concise narrative in "A War of Frontier and Empire:
The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902". The attack was one of the most sensational events of the conflict. For most Filipinos, it was a triumphant military victory. But for the American army, the events on Samar were best understood as a massacre, which represented their worst single defeat of the war. The American response was swift and terrible, underscoring the inherent military and moral hazards of this sort of conflict. Gen. Jacob Hurd Smith razed the town of Balangiga where the attack happened. He then reportedly issued the much-maligned direction to make the interior of Samar a "howling wilderness" in retribution. These events have tended to give rise to an interpretation of the war as evidence of America's racist, violent, and imperial motivations. Silbey is careful to show that while there is some truth behind such assessments, the Samar atrocities should not be construed as evidence that only the United States committed wrong. Rather, Silbey correctly notes that there was unconscionable violence on all sides.
In recent years new studies of American empire and the conflict in the
Philippines have flourished in part because of the pressing questions historians are asking about the U.S. role in the world. Noting the
"urgency of the asking," from 1899 to 1902 and today David Silbey has produced a good, brief survey of what he terms "three separate and distinct conflicts" in the Philippines (pp. xi, xv). The question "What form was American entry into true global power to take?" lies at the heart of the way that Silbey adeptly surveys and synthesizes much of the work on the American-side of the conflict, including a limited but attentive effort to explore the Filipino perspective (p. xi).
Silbey's book is an excellent introduction to the Philippine-American War that is primarily a military history and is best suited for students and for a popular audience. A War of Frontier and Empire is succinct, well written, and illustrated with maps and photos, although the maps could be more detailed and more plentiful to elucidate precise movements
of people and armies.
Silbey argues that the conflict itself represents a transitional moment
in American thinking about frontier and empire. He asserts that the Philippine-American War must be understood as occurring in three distinct periods and in terms of three discrete conflicts. First, in 1898, was the brief-lived alliance between U.S. and Filipino forces that fought and defeated Spain (not a major focus for Silbey). Then, in 1899, immediately on the heels of victory over the Spanish, tensions rose and shortly thereafter a "second" war began. It was a conventional conflict between American and Filipino troops in the field, largely restricted to central Luzon and the area around Manila. However, within one year it became clear the United States was likely to win most conventional engagements so, rather than surrender, Philippine revolutionary leader
Emilio Aguinaldo chose to engage in what Silbey argues was a "third" war. This was a guerrilla conflict (combined with a series of pacification campaigns) between U.S. and Filipino irregular forces that spread across the archipelago from roughly late 1899 through 1902. Silbey's thesis that there were "three conflicts" in the Philippines provides an excellent way to conceptualize and analyze the conflict (p.xv). It is also a great way to teach it and is just the sort of compact narrative that historians need to distill for lectures and for reading lists.
A War of Frontier and Empire_ is structured both chronologically and thematically. The first two chapters examine the precursor ideas and actions of the conflict: the election of William McKinley to the presidency in 1896 and the rise of American imperialism. The main theater of the Spanish-American war was the Caribbean, of course, but once Commodore George Dewey maneuvered his American Asiatic Squadron out from harbor in China, the importance of Pacific naval operations greatly increased. Under Dewey's command the inexperienced fleet shocked the world by defeating the seasoned Spanish armada at Manila Bay in only six hours, sinking seven ships without losing a single American sailor. President McKinley was stunned and yet not certain if the United States should push for full control of the Philippine island of Luzon, let alone the whole archipelago. Meanwhile, Aguinaldo's revolutionary Filipino Army of Liberation consolidated their gains and conquered most of the island chain, forming an independent revolutionary government. As American troops disembarked their transport ships, Filipino revolutionary forces were about to capture Manila from the Spanish. The war against Spain ended quickly yet at the city's perimeter a dangerous standoff ensued between Americans and Filipinos. This situation dragged on for months until, on February 4, 1899, a minor nighttime skirmish spiraled out of control and "both side's forces were engaged in a chaotic fight in the darkness" (pp. 64-65). Thus began a second conventional war in which it quickly became clear that the Filipino insurrectos, having defeated the Spanish without virtually any help,
were no match for U.S. troops.
In Silbey's account, Aguinaldo comes off as increasingly weakened and naturally vacillating. Yet Silbey finds that he was perspicacious enough to see that for the revolution to continue it would require a major tactical transition. After a series of losing battles in October 1899, the conventional war was nearly over. Hotly pursued, Aguinaldo headed
toward the mountains of Bayombong and made a heart-wrenchingdecision to "go guerilla" in December 1899. According to Silbey, the insurrectos "managed to reconstruct themselves organizationally and turn to an unconventional form of warfare that relied on ambush, concealment, and the avoidance of conventional set-piece battles" (p. 143). This new strategy prolonged the hostilities throughout 1900 and forced American troops, under the command of General Arthur MacArthur (Douglas's father), to fight a grim kind of jungle warfare in which enemies, neutrals, and allies were difficult to distinguish. Aguinaldo hoped that the sustained war would become unpopular enough to help elect William Jennings Bryan, and his an anti-imperialist bloc, which pledged to end the conflict. The resounding reelection of McKinley in November 1900 pushed Aguinaldo to despair and deeper into hiding. Within four months he was captured in a bold commando assault. While the fighting dragged on into 1902, "n combination with the surrenders of other generals, [Aguinaldo's] capture seemed a disastrous capstone" to the revolution (p. 178).
In his gripping narrative, Silbey shows the important role that race played in American descriptions of the war, particularly the depictions of the revolutionaries. He also highlights the struggles of African American soldiers as they grappled with the racism of their comrades. "The difficulties were profound for African-American soldiers; their duty was to fight against an enemy with whom they had some sympathy, and live among a people becoming victims of the same 'diabolical race hatred' that African-Americans experienced at home" (p. 111). These racial realities were so potent that Filipino propaganda stressed the hypocrisy of the U.S. Army and urged its "darker" troops to switch sides, with little success.
Silbey concludes his book with a powerful argument that the war was pivotal for all the nations involved. It signaled the demise of the Spanish empire, "long past its days of glory" (p. 218). The conflict marked the "final war of a frontier ethos" that had driven Americans across their continent and represented "the first war of a global ethos" that would propel them across oceans (p. 218). For the Filipinos, the defeat "looked, in later decades, a lot like victory" because the three wars united the vast, disparate archipelago (p. 218). The islands "became, largely because of the shared experience of revolution, war, and insurgency, a self-conceived nation" (p. 218). In the end, Dewey's naval victory and the haphazard events of war led to an American intervention that lasted almost half a century. The United States did not grant the Philippines their independence until 1946.
What A War of Frontier and Empire_ misses is common for any synthesis intended for a broad, non-specialist audience. There are a few conspicuous missed dates, such as the overthrow of Hawaii's Queen Lili'oukalani (which was in 1893, not 1883) (p. 17), and the misspellings of several names and places: for example, at various points Dagupan is termed "Pagupan," Sorsogon is rendered as "Sargosan," and Banaue becomes "Banane." In addition, a few generals and others receive incorrect names, such as Gen. Henry Lawton, misnamed "William" (p. 84) and Gen. Mariano Trias, called "Antonio" (p. 131). For a book surveying a complex topic requiring translation of Spanish, Tagalog, and other languages into English, these are not major problems.[1]
The book provides a good, succinct summary and a fast-moving narrative.
However, though well intentioned and well executed, A War of Frontier and Empire has one notable historiographical drawback. It does not quite recover from what is best characterized as the "usual problem" of America-centric historiography on the war in the Philippines. Silbey, like most historians well versed in this subject, himself notes his concern with the problem of United States-centered, primarily English-language scholarship on the subject. Historians since the 1980s have done much to move beyond America-centric narratives of the conflict in the Philippines. Postcolonial studies and the rise of the transnational frame have now become preferred models for such scholarship and have opened new and insightful vistas on this history. Yet this quandary remains stubbornly persistent in many studies of the larger encounter in the Philippines. Perhaps it is a problem without a clear solution because most of the local Philippines archives were destroyed during WWII. The remaining sources, chiefly those from the turn of the century and the period of American rule, are bureaucratic English-language documents, most of which are located in the National
Archives (Washington, D.C.). Nevertheless, excellent new histories, such
as Brian Linn's The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (2002) and PaulKramer's
Blood of Empire(2006), have begun to rectify this problem. These and
other recent histories shed new light on the relationships and intersections of race, empire, nations, and peoples at war and in peace in the Philippines. With so much on-going work in this vibrant field and on a transnational model, it is likely that the next wave of scholarship will continue to chip away at the age-old historiographical problem of America-centeredness.[2]
It is impossible to read the current spate of scholarship on the Philippines and American empire without reference to the present. U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has again furnished a contemporary prism through which to view the complicated history of American expansionism and the challenges of the Philippine-American conflict. Silbey's A War of Frontier and Empire does not directly address these concerns but they are very much evident in his absorbing account.
Reflecting on the history of America's "three wars" in the Philippines emphasizes the urgency of an enduring question: what is America's proper
role in the world?
Notes
[1]. With special attention to multi-linguistic sources, Philippine nationalism, and the revolution, see Julian Go et al., eds., The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999_ (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Augusto Espiritu, _Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Resil Mojares, The War against the Americans:
Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899-1906_ (Quezon City,
Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999).
[2]. See Brian McAllister Linn, _The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and Linn, The Philippine
War and the U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippines,
1899-1902_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Paul
Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and
the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Some representative recent works guiding new historiographical
directions include: Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A
Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues The
United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); and Mary Renda, Taking Haiti Taking
Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). See also Christopher Capozzola's review essay, "Empire as a Way of Life: Gender, Culture, and Power in New Histories of U.S. Imperialism,"
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 2 (2002):
364-374.
Reviewed for H-SHGAPE by Christopher McKnight Nichols, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia
Three Conflicts: The Philippine-American War
On the morning of September 28, 1901, Lt. Col. Eugenio Daza led a group
of Philippine revolutionaries from their hiding places in a church inside an American army camp on the island of Samar. Armed mostly with bolos and machetes, the Filipino soldiers descended on a group of unsuspecting U.S. troops as they ate breakfast. "With the surprise, and at such close range, the insurgent disadvantage in weapons was neutralized, and bitter hand-to-hand combat broke out" (p. 191). U.S. forces were routed. Those that survived fled to the coast, climbing into small boats, and after several days at sea they made it to the nearest American outpost. Virtually every member of U.S. Infantry Company C had been wounded in the surprise attack, and forty-eight were killed, while approximately twenty-five to thirty Filipino soldiers died (p. 193).
David Silbey chronicles the dramatic events of the war such as these through a driving, concise narrative in "A War of Frontier and Empire:
The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902". The attack was one of the most sensational events of the conflict. For most Filipinos, it was a triumphant military victory. But for the American army, the events on Samar were best understood as a massacre, which represented their worst single defeat of the war. The American response was swift and terrible, underscoring the inherent military and moral hazards of this sort of conflict. Gen. Jacob Hurd Smith razed the town of Balangiga where the attack happened. He then reportedly issued the much-maligned direction to make the interior of Samar a "howling wilderness" in retribution. These events have tended to give rise to an interpretation of the war as evidence of America's racist, violent, and imperial motivations. Silbey is careful to show that while there is some truth behind such assessments, the Samar atrocities should not be construed as evidence that only the United States committed wrong. Rather, Silbey correctly notes that there was unconscionable violence on all sides.
In recent years new studies of American empire and the conflict in the
Philippines have flourished in part because of the pressing questions historians are asking about the U.S. role in the world. Noting the
"urgency of the asking," from 1899 to 1902 and today David Silbey has produced a good, brief survey of what he terms "three separate and distinct conflicts" in the Philippines (pp. xi, xv). The question "What form was American entry into true global power to take?" lies at the heart of the way that Silbey adeptly surveys and synthesizes much of the work on the American-side of the conflict, including a limited but attentive effort to explore the Filipino perspective (p. xi).
Silbey's book is an excellent introduction to the Philippine-American War that is primarily a military history and is best suited for students and for a popular audience. A War of Frontier and Empire is succinct, well written, and illustrated with maps and photos, although the maps could be more detailed and more plentiful to elucidate precise movements
of people and armies.
Silbey argues that the conflict itself represents a transitional moment
in American thinking about frontier and empire. He asserts that the Philippine-American War must be understood as occurring in three distinct periods and in terms of three discrete conflicts. First, in 1898, was the brief-lived alliance between U.S. and Filipino forces that fought and defeated Spain (not a major focus for Silbey). Then, in 1899, immediately on the heels of victory over the Spanish, tensions rose and shortly thereafter a "second" war began. It was a conventional conflict between American and Filipino troops in the field, largely restricted to central Luzon and the area around Manila. However, within one year it became clear the United States was likely to win most conventional engagements so, rather than surrender, Philippine revolutionary leader
Emilio Aguinaldo chose to engage in what Silbey argues was a "third" war. This was a guerrilla conflict (combined with a series of pacification campaigns) between U.S. and Filipino irregular forces that spread across the archipelago from roughly late 1899 through 1902. Silbey's thesis that there were "three conflicts" in the Philippines provides an excellent way to conceptualize and analyze the conflict (p.xv). It is also a great way to teach it and is just the sort of compact narrative that historians need to distill for lectures and for reading lists.
A War of Frontier and Empire_ is structured both chronologically and thematically. The first two chapters examine the precursor ideas and actions of the conflict: the election of William McKinley to the presidency in 1896 and the rise of American imperialism. The main theater of the Spanish-American war was the Caribbean, of course, but once Commodore George Dewey maneuvered his American Asiatic Squadron out from harbor in China, the importance of Pacific naval operations greatly increased. Under Dewey's command the inexperienced fleet shocked the world by defeating the seasoned Spanish armada at Manila Bay in only six hours, sinking seven ships without losing a single American sailor. President McKinley was stunned and yet not certain if the United States should push for full control of the Philippine island of Luzon, let alone the whole archipelago. Meanwhile, Aguinaldo's revolutionary Filipino Army of Liberation consolidated their gains and conquered most of the island chain, forming an independent revolutionary government. As American troops disembarked their transport ships, Filipino revolutionary forces were about to capture Manila from the Spanish. The war against Spain ended quickly yet at the city's perimeter a dangerous standoff ensued between Americans and Filipinos. This situation dragged on for months until, on February 4, 1899, a minor nighttime skirmish spiraled out of control and "both side's forces were engaged in a chaotic fight in the darkness" (pp. 64-65). Thus began a second conventional war in which it quickly became clear that the Filipino insurrectos, having defeated the Spanish without virtually any help,
were no match for U.S. troops.
In Silbey's account, Aguinaldo comes off as increasingly weakened and naturally vacillating. Yet Silbey finds that he was perspicacious enough to see that for the revolution to continue it would require a major tactical transition. After a series of losing battles in October 1899, the conventional war was nearly over. Hotly pursued, Aguinaldo headed
toward the mountains of Bayombong and made a heart-wrenchingdecision to "go guerilla" in December 1899. According to Silbey, the insurrectos "managed to reconstruct themselves organizationally and turn to an unconventional form of warfare that relied on ambush, concealment, and the avoidance of conventional set-piece battles" (p. 143). This new strategy prolonged the hostilities throughout 1900 and forced American troops, under the command of General Arthur MacArthur (Douglas's father), to fight a grim kind of jungle warfare in which enemies, neutrals, and allies were difficult to distinguish. Aguinaldo hoped that the sustained war would become unpopular enough to help elect William Jennings Bryan, and his an anti-imperialist bloc, which pledged to end the conflict. The resounding reelection of McKinley in November 1900 pushed Aguinaldo to despair and deeper into hiding. Within four months he was captured in a bold commando assault. While the fighting dragged on into 1902, "n combination with the surrenders of other generals, [Aguinaldo's] capture seemed a disastrous capstone" to the revolution (p. 178).
In his gripping narrative, Silbey shows the important role that race played in American descriptions of the war, particularly the depictions of the revolutionaries. He also highlights the struggles of African American soldiers as they grappled with the racism of their comrades. "The difficulties were profound for African-American soldiers; their duty was to fight against an enemy with whom they had some sympathy, and live among a people becoming victims of the same 'diabolical race hatred' that African-Americans experienced at home" (p. 111). These racial realities were so potent that Filipino propaganda stressed the hypocrisy of the U.S. Army and urged its "darker" troops to switch sides, with little success.
Silbey concludes his book with a powerful argument that the war was pivotal for all the nations involved. It signaled the demise of the Spanish empire, "long past its days of glory" (p. 218). The conflict marked the "final war of a frontier ethos" that had driven Americans across their continent and represented "the first war of a global ethos" that would propel them across oceans (p. 218). For the Filipinos, the defeat "looked, in later decades, a lot like victory" because the three wars united the vast, disparate archipelago (p. 218). The islands "became, largely because of the shared experience of revolution, war, and insurgency, a self-conceived nation" (p. 218). In the end, Dewey's naval victory and the haphazard events of war led to an American intervention that lasted almost half a century. The United States did not grant the Philippines their independence until 1946.
What A War of Frontier and Empire_ misses is common for any synthesis intended for a broad, non-specialist audience. There are a few conspicuous missed dates, such as the overthrow of Hawaii's Queen Lili'oukalani (which was in 1893, not 1883) (p. 17), and the misspellings of several names and places: for example, at various points Dagupan is termed "Pagupan," Sorsogon is rendered as "Sargosan," and Banaue becomes "Banane." In addition, a few generals and others receive incorrect names, such as Gen. Henry Lawton, misnamed "William" (p. 84) and Gen. Mariano Trias, called "Antonio" (p. 131). For a book surveying a complex topic requiring translation of Spanish, Tagalog, and other languages into English, these are not major problems.[1]
The book provides a good, succinct summary and a fast-moving narrative.
However, though well intentioned and well executed, A War of Frontier and Empire has one notable historiographical drawback. It does not quite recover from what is best characterized as the "usual problem" of America-centric historiography on the war in the Philippines. Silbey, like most historians well versed in this subject, himself notes his concern with the problem of United States-centered, primarily English-language scholarship on the subject. Historians since the 1980s have done much to move beyond America-centric narratives of the conflict in the Philippines. Postcolonial studies and the rise of the transnational frame have now become preferred models for such scholarship and have opened new and insightful vistas on this history. Yet this quandary remains stubbornly persistent in many studies of the larger encounter in the Philippines. Perhaps it is a problem without a clear solution because most of the local Philippines archives were destroyed during WWII. The remaining sources, chiefly those from the turn of the century and the period of American rule, are bureaucratic English-language documents, most of which are located in the National
Archives (Washington, D.C.). Nevertheless, excellent new histories, such
as Brian Linn's The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (2002) and PaulKramer's
Blood of Empire(2006), have begun to rectify this problem. These and
other recent histories shed new light on the relationships and intersections of race, empire, nations, and peoples at war and in peace in the Philippines. With so much on-going work in this vibrant field and on a transnational model, it is likely that the next wave of scholarship will continue to chip away at the age-old historiographical problem of America-centeredness.[2]
It is impossible to read the current spate of scholarship on the Philippines and American empire without reference to the present. U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has again furnished a contemporary prism through which to view the complicated history of American expansionism and the challenges of the Philippine-American conflict. Silbey's A War of Frontier and Empire does not directly address these concerns but they are very much evident in his absorbing account.
Reflecting on the history of America's "three wars" in the Philippines emphasizes the urgency of an enduring question: what is America's proper
role in the world?
Notes
[1]. With special attention to multi-linguistic sources, Philippine nationalism, and the revolution, see Julian Go et al., eds., The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999_ (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Augusto Espiritu, _Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Resil Mojares, The War against the Americans:
Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899-1906_ (Quezon City,
Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999).
[2]. See Brian McAllister Linn, _The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and Linn, The Philippine
War and the U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippines,
1899-1902_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Paul
Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and
the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Some representative recent works guiding new historiographical
directions include: Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A
Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues The
United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); and Mary Renda, Taking Haiti Taking
Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). See also Christopher Capozzola's review essay, "Empire as a Way of Life: Gender, Culture, and Power in New Histories of U.S. Imperialism,"
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1, no. 2 (2002):
364-374.
The Eye of Command. By Kimberly Kagan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. 241 pages. Reviewed by Dr. J. Boone Bartholomees, Jr., Professor of Military History, US Army War College.
Kimberly Kagan has taken up dragon slaying. In a fascinating new and original book that relies heavily on literary interpretation, she proposes that John Keegan’s Face of Battle approach to narrating battles suffers fatal flaws. Kagan acknowledges that Keegan’s seminal work was a necessary palliative for the commander-centered battle narratives she calls general staff history—ones that approach battle as if commanders issue orders and armies obey those orders as unitary entities. Kagan works from the assumption that battle narratives must be historically accurate and precise, but also must explain the course and outcome of battles. She contends that by focusing on the thousands of individual experiences that comprise a battle Keegan and his disciples miss the forest for the trees and are unable to explain either the results of battle or why things happened the way they did. Face of Battle narratives provide excellent insight on the nature of battle, but their low-level focus actually obscures causality.
Kagan combines elements of Clausewitz with complementary elements of chaos theory and applies the resulting intellectual construct to two ancient narrators to prove her point. From Clausewitz come the concepts of critical analysis and friction, among others. Clausewitz distinguished between a simple battle narrative and what he termed the critical approach. The critical approach was a three-step method involving gathering all the facts, tracing effects back to their causes (which Clausewitz called critical analysis), and evaluation to assign criticism or praise. Kagan focuses primarily on the second step of critical analysis. She argues that without that step, battle narrative is sterile and essentially useless since it cannot explain either results or causation. Friction arises at least partly from the actions of all the individuals that a Face of Battle narrative relates. The problem is that individuals, even those directly responsible for friction, rarely recognize their complicity. The commander, who has a different perspective in terms of both location and responsibility, is in a much better position to see, recognize, and comment on the causes and consequences of friction. In fact, Kagan asserts that one of a commander’s primary duties during a battle is to critically analyze (in the Clausewitzian sense) the action in order to try to recognize and respond to the innumerable unexpected events. This makes him an excellent narrator for people interested in causality.
Chaos theory expands and enriches the idea of friction and addresses other important theoretical constructs like identifying and tracing causality. One does not have to be able to observe and catalogue every action in order to explain why things occurred. Important events with the potential for system-wide impact become noticeable at some point on their causal stream. It is the ability of the observer to see, understand, and interpret such events that leads to reliable interpretation of cause.
Commanders are ideally suited for such observation, recognition, and interpretation. Thus, Kagan, who understands that battle is a complex and chaotic activity, contends that narration by telling all the stories of individual participants, if that were even possible, is inadequate. Further, attributing causation to soldier reaction to weapons or the general actions of combat arms is misleading at best. She proposes that the more reliable source for those interested in more than the nature of battle is the commander, whose account would supplement and include relevant description of events by individuals.
The Eye of Command demonstrates its thesis primarily using Caesar’s narrations of battles from The Gallic War. Kagan includes an extensive analysis of Marcellinus Ammianus’s battle narratives as an ancient example of a pre-Keegan face of battle author, but the analysis supports her primary thesis only indirectly. Using Caesar, however, is significant since Keegan specifically denigrated Caesar’s narrations. Kagan examines several battles, although the most extensive and significant was the siege of Alesia. She analyzes Caesar’s reliability as a witness based on his own political agenda and natural tendency to protect his reputation, what he saw or could have seen or known during the fight, and how faithfully he related the action. She then evaluates whether Caesar’s narrative gives a reliable assessment of what transpired and why. In each case, Kagan finds much more reason to trust and accept Caesar’s narrative than did Keegan.
Kagan and Keegan used the same text, so their difference is in interpretation, expectation, and belief—in a sense, different conclusions about half-empty or half-full. And in some respects, Kimberly Kagan has picked a fight that does not really exist. Even she admits that nobody—including Keegan—really narrates battles exclusively from the Face of Battle approach. It simply falls apart for all the reasons she has so correctly pointed out. She also admits that at some individual level, Face of Battle elements are necessary to any good story of battle. Kagan notes, for example, that Caesar included the stories of what he considered to be relevant individuals to set up or illustrate his narrative. So, what we have here is not dragon slaying but rather something more akin to dragon taming or perhaps selective dragon breeding. Kagan is dead on and absolutely correct about the defects of the Face of Battle approach to history; however, it retains a valid place in the literature. Kagan’s Eye of Command narrations are an intriguing alternative and certainly better at explaining causation than Keegan’s approach, but their literary contribution should be to supplement rather than completely replace Keegan’s technique.
Kimberly Kagan has taken up dragon slaying. In a fascinating new and original book that relies heavily on literary interpretation, she proposes that John Keegan’s Face of Battle approach to narrating battles suffers fatal flaws. Kagan acknowledges that Keegan’s seminal work was a necessary palliative for the commander-centered battle narratives she calls general staff history—ones that approach battle as if commanders issue orders and armies obey those orders as unitary entities. Kagan works from the assumption that battle narratives must be historically accurate and precise, but also must explain the course and outcome of battles. She contends that by focusing on the thousands of individual experiences that comprise a battle Keegan and his disciples miss the forest for the trees and are unable to explain either the results of battle or why things happened the way they did. Face of Battle narratives provide excellent insight on the nature of battle, but their low-level focus actually obscures causality.
Kagan combines elements of Clausewitz with complementary elements of chaos theory and applies the resulting intellectual construct to two ancient narrators to prove her point. From Clausewitz come the concepts of critical analysis and friction, among others. Clausewitz distinguished between a simple battle narrative and what he termed the critical approach. The critical approach was a three-step method involving gathering all the facts, tracing effects back to their causes (which Clausewitz called critical analysis), and evaluation to assign criticism or praise. Kagan focuses primarily on the second step of critical analysis. She argues that without that step, battle narrative is sterile and essentially useless since it cannot explain either results or causation. Friction arises at least partly from the actions of all the individuals that a Face of Battle narrative relates. The problem is that individuals, even those directly responsible for friction, rarely recognize their complicity. The commander, who has a different perspective in terms of both location and responsibility, is in a much better position to see, recognize, and comment on the causes and consequences of friction. In fact, Kagan asserts that one of a commander’s primary duties during a battle is to critically analyze (in the Clausewitzian sense) the action in order to try to recognize and respond to the innumerable unexpected events. This makes him an excellent narrator for people interested in causality.
Chaos theory expands and enriches the idea of friction and addresses other important theoretical constructs like identifying and tracing causality. One does not have to be able to observe and catalogue every action in order to explain why things occurred. Important events with the potential for system-wide impact become noticeable at some point on their causal stream. It is the ability of the observer to see, understand, and interpret such events that leads to reliable interpretation of cause.
Commanders are ideally suited for such observation, recognition, and interpretation. Thus, Kagan, who understands that battle is a complex and chaotic activity, contends that narration by telling all the stories of individual participants, if that were even possible, is inadequate. Further, attributing causation to soldier reaction to weapons or the general actions of combat arms is misleading at best. She proposes that the more reliable source for those interested in more than the nature of battle is the commander, whose account would supplement and include relevant description of events by individuals.
The Eye of Command demonstrates its thesis primarily using Caesar’s narrations of battles from The Gallic War. Kagan includes an extensive analysis of Marcellinus Ammianus’s battle narratives as an ancient example of a pre-Keegan face of battle author, but the analysis supports her primary thesis only indirectly. Using Caesar, however, is significant since Keegan specifically denigrated Caesar’s narrations. Kagan examines several battles, although the most extensive and significant was the siege of Alesia. She analyzes Caesar’s reliability as a witness based on his own political agenda and natural tendency to protect his reputation, what he saw or could have seen or known during the fight, and how faithfully he related the action. She then evaluates whether Caesar’s narrative gives a reliable assessment of what transpired and why. In each case, Kagan finds much more reason to trust and accept Caesar’s narrative than did Keegan.
Kagan and Keegan used the same text, so their difference is in interpretation, expectation, and belief—in a sense, different conclusions about half-empty or half-full. And in some respects, Kimberly Kagan has picked a fight that does not really exist. Even she admits that nobody—including Keegan—really narrates battles exclusively from the Face of Battle approach. It simply falls apart for all the reasons she has so correctly pointed out. She also admits that at some individual level, Face of Battle elements are necessary to any good story of battle. Kagan notes, for example, that Caesar included the stories of what he considered to be relevant individuals to set up or illustrate his narrative. So, what we have here is not dragon slaying but rather something more akin to dragon taming or perhaps selective dragon breeding. Kagan is dead on and absolutely correct about the defects of the Face of Battle approach to history; however, it retains a valid place in the literature. Kagan’s Eye of Command narrations are an intriguing alternative and certainly better at explaining causation than Keegan’s approach, but their literary contribution should be to supplement rather than completely replace Keegan’s technique.
Women in the Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the Military. By Erin Solaro. Emeryville, Calif.: Seal Press, 2006. 409 pages. Reviewed by Richard Halloran, onetime lieutenant of airborne infantry and a former military correspondent for The New York Times.
When the volunteer force was struggling to stand up 30 years ago, it was confronted with three fundamental questions of personnel. Until then, the military services had been mostly white in their leadership, single in the young officer and enlisted ranks, and predominantly male. Now the services enlisted and retained a large number of black and other minority Americans, had to contend with young married officers and enlisted people, and brought in many young women. In sum, it might have been called the BMW revolution.
Over the years, the armed forces have done perhaps the best job in America of integrating minorities into the mainstream of institutional life. In the mid-1980s,
two master sergeants, one black, the other white, sat side by side in an office at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home of the field artillery. Asked about racial issues, one master sergeant (I don’t remember which one) said: “Man, we solved that problem a long time ago.” The other nodded in vigorous assent.
Similarly, the services have added institutional programs to informal support systems that have long been operative to look after young families while members are deployed. Commanders know that individuals will not be effective on patrol in Iraq if they are worried about the family back home. Most commanders have bought into the adage that soldiers are enlisted but families are re-enlisted.
Women, too, have made great progress in the military services since they arrived in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. But to Erin Solaro, an avowed feminist, military historian, and journalist embedded with combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan, that progress will not be complete until all restrictions on women serving in combat have been removed. “I believe we are at the end point of American women’s struggle for citizenship, a struggle that predates the Civil War and that is, in fact, almost as old as the Republic,” Solaro writes. “I think we are on the threshold of the only civilization that a free people should cherish: one that men and women create and defend together, as public and private equals.”
She asserts that “final changes” must be achieved so that the participation of women in all phases of military service is “de jure as well as de facto.” The author writes that her experience in Iraq and Afghanistan “convinced me that women are now firmly part of the American military, in all its aspects, and that it’s time to drop all remaining combat exclusion policies and procedures as a matter of military necessity and of equality of obligation in citizenship.” About that particular war, Solaro declares: “From the outset I believed, and still believe, that we are fighting a war with militant Islamic fundamentalism, and that the outcome of such a war is important not just to American men, but also to American women. Therefore, logically, women should be part of the military, even if the opening campaign in Iraq has proven ill-advised and poorly executed.”
The question of women in combat revolves around at least a half-dozen issues:
• Men discriminating against women. Solaro spends more ink on this issue than any other. “A person who is categorically excluded from combat, whether a male ‘nondeployable’ or a woman, is a second class member of the most hierarchical organization in the United States,” she contends as she gathers arguments reaching back to the American Revolution to prove her point.
• Physical ability. Solaro seeks to demolish this argument by contending that the difference between men and women “is predicated upon and aggravated by the military’s antiquated cultural assumptions about appropriate weights and body-fat levels for physically active women.”
• Mental capacity. This contention for the most part has gone away as women have proven that they are capable of doing many military jobs. A chief master sergeant at Langley Air Force Base said that, given a choice between a man and a woman who seemed equally qualified to work on “black boxes,” he would choose the woman because she was more deft and patient for painstaking tasks.
• Sexual tensions hindering unit cohesion. This is perhaps the most vehemently argued position of men who oppose assigning women to combat units. Solaro derides their arguments as looking “to the past instead of to a future defined by a civilian society ever more open to women’s potential and advancement.”
• Chivalry. Solaro acknowledges this trait as “a binding moral obligation upon men to protect women” but contends that “it too often devalued women into weak and transient creatures.” A chief petty officer aboard a destroyer in San Diego said he would not hesitate to slam down a hatch on men below to save his ship. “But if I knew there were women down there, I don’t think I could do it.”
• Primeval instinct. Solaro recognizes that “there is a deeply rooted, very powerful belief that women are not supposed to be risked in war because most women either have or will have children.” But she brushes that belief aside as the prattling of old men, statistics showing that “childbirth was more dangerous than military service, even in the infantry.”
In the end, Solaro’s book is a valuable contribution to the running debate over women as warriors. She is fairly convincing in arguments about discrimination, physical ability, and mental capacity. She is less persuasive in her contentions on sexual tensions, chivalry, and the primeval instincts about the role of women in the preservation of the human race.
When the volunteer force was struggling to stand up 30 years ago, it was confronted with three fundamental questions of personnel. Until then, the military services had been mostly white in their leadership, single in the young officer and enlisted ranks, and predominantly male. Now the services enlisted and retained a large number of black and other minority Americans, had to contend with young married officers and enlisted people, and brought in many young women. In sum, it might have been called the BMW revolution.
Over the years, the armed forces have done perhaps the best job in America of integrating minorities into the mainstream of institutional life. In the mid-1980s,
two master sergeants, one black, the other white, sat side by side in an office at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, home of the field artillery. Asked about racial issues, one master sergeant (I don’t remember which one) said: “Man, we solved that problem a long time ago.” The other nodded in vigorous assent.
Similarly, the services have added institutional programs to informal support systems that have long been operative to look after young families while members are deployed. Commanders know that individuals will not be effective on patrol in Iraq if they are worried about the family back home. Most commanders have bought into the adage that soldiers are enlisted but families are re-enlisted.
Women, too, have made great progress in the military services since they arrived in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. But to Erin Solaro, an avowed feminist, military historian, and journalist embedded with combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan, that progress will not be complete until all restrictions on women serving in combat have been removed. “I believe we are at the end point of American women’s struggle for citizenship, a struggle that predates the Civil War and that is, in fact, almost as old as the Republic,” Solaro writes. “I think we are on the threshold of the only civilization that a free people should cherish: one that men and women create and defend together, as public and private equals.”
She asserts that “final changes” must be achieved so that the participation of women in all phases of military service is “de jure as well as de facto.” The author writes that her experience in Iraq and Afghanistan “convinced me that women are now firmly part of the American military, in all its aspects, and that it’s time to drop all remaining combat exclusion policies and procedures as a matter of military necessity and of equality of obligation in citizenship.” About that particular war, Solaro declares: “From the outset I believed, and still believe, that we are fighting a war with militant Islamic fundamentalism, and that the outcome of such a war is important not just to American men, but also to American women. Therefore, logically, women should be part of the military, even if the opening campaign in Iraq has proven ill-advised and poorly executed.”
The question of women in combat revolves around at least a half-dozen issues:
• Men discriminating against women. Solaro spends more ink on this issue than any other. “A person who is categorically excluded from combat, whether a male ‘nondeployable’ or a woman, is a second class member of the most hierarchical organization in the United States,” she contends as she gathers arguments reaching back to the American Revolution to prove her point.
• Physical ability. Solaro seeks to demolish this argument by contending that the difference between men and women “is predicated upon and aggravated by the military’s antiquated cultural assumptions about appropriate weights and body-fat levels for physically active women.”
• Mental capacity. This contention for the most part has gone away as women have proven that they are capable of doing many military jobs. A chief master sergeant at Langley Air Force Base said that, given a choice between a man and a woman who seemed equally qualified to work on “black boxes,” he would choose the woman because she was more deft and patient for painstaking tasks.
• Sexual tensions hindering unit cohesion. This is perhaps the most vehemently argued position of men who oppose assigning women to combat units. Solaro derides their arguments as looking “to the past instead of to a future defined by a civilian society ever more open to women’s potential and advancement.”
• Chivalry. Solaro acknowledges this trait as “a binding moral obligation upon men to protect women” but contends that “it too often devalued women into weak and transient creatures.” A chief petty officer aboard a destroyer in San Diego said he would not hesitate to slam down a hatch on men below to save his ship. “But if I knew there were women down there, I don’t think I could do it.”
• Primeval instinct. Solaro recognizes that “there is a deeply rooted, very powerful belief that women are not supposed to be risked in war because most women either have or will have children.” But she brushes that belief aside as the prattling of old men, statistics showing that “childbirth was more dangerous than military service, even in the infantry.”
In the end, Solaro’s book is a valuable contribution to the running debate over women as warriors. She is fairly convincing in arguments about discrimination, physical ability, and mental capacity. She is less persuasive in her contentions on sexual tensions, chivalry, and the primeval instincts about the role of women in the preservation of the human race.
I read the last article, that's about it.
I didn't say that I know all those books.
This is only a collect of various summuries in order to show various kind of books who are dealing with our main activity.
visitor picks just what it wants to pick.
I could be more accurate in the choice, that's true
This is only a collect of various summuries in order to show various kind of books who are dealing with our main activity.
visitor picks just what it wants to pick.
I could be more accurate in the choice, that's true
The Morality of War. By Brian Orend. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 2006. 289 pages.
Reviewed by Martin L. Cook, Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Department Head, United States Air Force Academy.
In 1977, Michael Walzer published the first edition of Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. That volume has now become the common touchstone for all thinkers in the Just War tradition and more than any other single thing is responsible for the proliferation and currency of the vocabulary of Just War in American discourse. Its arguments are the common frame around which other scholars range their positions—both in agreement and in disagreement—and has served to inform the world of policy as much as the world of scholarship.
Brian Orend’s new volume, The Morality of War, promises to join Walzer’s in its widespread influence. Not since Walzer has there been a treatment of the whole range of issues in Just War as comprehensive and detailed in application to real-world circumstances. Indeed, Orend’s work exceeds Walzer’s in the range of topics treated and, even more importantly, updates the arguments to the many ways in which the world of international politics and use of military force have changed since the immediate aftermath of Vietnam.
Building on his earlier excellent books on human rights, Just War, and Walzer, Orend sets himself the daunting task of providing a coherent and comprehensive position on the whole range of moral issues that arise in war and executes the task masterfully.
He begins by providing a sweeping history of the Just War tradition and its bifurcation into its legal form (in international law) and its moral and religious form (in philosophy and theology). This chapter alone is a powerful antidote to the tendency in some military quarters to think that Just War is captured completely and adequately in the law of armed conflict.
Orend then explores the complex questions of the moral reasons for the regard we pay to states in the international system and the concept of aggression as it applies to the rights of states to defend themselves against aggression. He very helpfully explores the application of these concepts both to intrastate war (the historically common form since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) and to attacks by non-state actors such as al Qaeda.
A great strength of the book is that each theoretical discussion is then explicated as it bears on specific historical examples. Unlike Walzer’s use of history, which is often limited to very small vignettes to illustrate specific points, Orend develops these cases in richer detail so that the real complexities are allowed to play out. He explores fully the moral valence of the current international system with its deep tensions between sovereign states and the “on paper” legal authority of the United Nations Security Council over all uses of force not unambiguously in response to aggression, and applies that discussion to recent decisions to use force that failed to receive clear Security Council blessing. The result is a helpfully nuanced moral assessment of contemporary international organizations—judging them to be helpful and important, but acknowledging their very real limitations both in efficacy and legitimacy.
The book devotes entire chapters to the modern contours of non-classical wars, a critical assessment of Walzer’s famous and much debated attempt to establish a moral category of “supreme emergency” which allows violation of the normal constraints of the war convention, and especially jus post bellum (the relatively undeveloped area of the moral requirements of justice in the aftermath of major combat operations—a topic to which Orend more than anyone else in the field has given especially helpful attention). Included in the post bellum discussion is a very thoughtful section on the history and probable future of war crimes trials which, of course, become daily more important as the International Criminal Court begins to function in earnest. Of obvious great relevance to the contemporary situation, there is also a chapter devoted to the moral and practical aspects of coercive regime change.
The book concludes with thoughtful discussion of the two major competitors with Just War as a way of thinking through the moral issues involved in the use of military force. Pacifists, of course, reject the moral justification of the use of force entirely. But pacifism actually comes in numerous forms, based on different assumptions and convictions, and Orend provides an excellent typology of those alternatives. Realism, by contrast, rejects just war on the ground that moral thought is mere window-dressing in international relations. Instead, realists assert, international relations are (and should be, in the strong form of realism) the province of realpolitik. In their view, introduction of moral language and moral considerations is at best irrelevant—and at worst, dangerously idealistic.
Orend’s discussion of these alternatives is balanced and careful. He finds much that is useful in each. Nevertheless, the conclusion is that Just War is, all things considered and with limitations which the alternatives make apparent, the most comprehensive and intellectually defensible approach to moral thought about war.
In short, Orend’s book, in this reviewer’s opinion, provides the best single volume in English on Just War. Readers seeking a comprehensive and in-depth treatment of the whole range of thorny moral questions involved in war can find no better place to begin than with this book.
Reviewed by Martin L. Cook, Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Department Head, United States Air Force Academy.
In 1977, Michael Walzer published the first edition of Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. That volume has now become the common touchstone for all thinkers in the Just War tradition and more than any other single thing is responsible for the proliferation and currency of the vocabulary of Just War in American discourse. Its arguments are the common frame around which other scholars range their positions—both in agreement and in disagreement—and has served to inform the world of policy as much as the world of scholarship.
Brian Orend’s new volume, The Morality of War, promises to join Walzer’s in its widespread influence. Not since Walzer has there been a treatment of the whole range of issues in Just War as comprehensive and detailed in application to real-world circumstances. Indeed, Orend’s work exceeds Walzer’s in the range of topics treated and, even more importantly, updates the arguments to the many ways in which the world of international politics and use of military force have changed since the immediate aftermath of Vietnam.
Building on his earlier excellent books on human rights, Just War, and Walzer, Orend sets himself the daunting task of providing a coherent and comprehensive position on the whole range of moral issues that arise in war and executes the task masterfully.
He begins by providing a sweeping history of the Just War tradition and its bifurcation into its legal form (in international law) and its moral and religious form (in philosophy and theology). This chapter alone is a powerful antidote to the tendency in some military quarters to think that Just War is captured completely and adequately in the law of armed conflict.
Orend then explores the complex questions of the moral reasons for the regard we pay to states in the international system and the concept of aggression as it applies to the rights of states to defend themselves against aggression. He very helpfully explores the application of these concepts both to intrastate war (the historically common form since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) and to attacks by non-state actors such as al Qaeda.
A great strength of the book is that each theoretical discussion is then explicated as it bears on specific historical examples. Unlike Walzer’s use of history, which is often limited to very small vignettes to illustrate specific points, Orend develops these cases in richer detail so that the real complexities are allowed to play out. He explores fully the moral valence of the current international system with its deep tensions between sovereign states and the “on paper” legal authority of the United Nations Security Council over all uses of force not unambiguously in response to aggression, and applies that discussion to recent decisions to use force that failed to receive clear Security Council blessing. The result is a helpfully nuanced moral assessment of contemporary international organizations—judging them to be helpful and important, but acknowledging their very real limitations both in efficacy and legitimacy.
The book devotes entire chapters to the modern contours of non-classical wars, a critical assessment of Walzer’s famous and much debated attempt to establish a moral category of “supreme emergency” which allows violation of the normal constraints of the war convention, and especially jus post bellum (the relatively undeveloped area of the moral requirements of justice in the aftermath of major combat operations—a topic to which Orend more than anyone else in the field has given especially helpful attention). Included in the post bellum discussion is a very thoughtful section on the history and probable future of war crimes trials which, of course, become daily more important as the International Criminal Court begins to function in earnest. Of obvious great relevance to the contemporary situation, there is also a chapter devoted to the moral and practical aspects of coercive regime change.
The book concludes with thoughtful discussion of the two major competitors with Just War as a way of thinking through the moral issues involved in the use of military force. Pacifists, of course, reject the moral justification of the use of force entirely. But pacifism actually comes in numerous forms, based on different assumptions and convictions, and Orend provides an excellent typology of those alternatives. Realism, by contrast, rejects just war on the ground that moral thought is mere window-dressing in international relations. Instead, realists assert, international relations are (and should be, in the strong form of realism) the province of realpolitik. In their view, introduction of moral language and moral considerations is at best irrelevant—and at worst, dangerously idealistic.
Orend’s discussion of these alternatives is balanced and careful. He finds much that is useful in each. Nevertheless, the conclusion is that Just War is, all things considered and with limitations which the alternatives make apparent, the most comprehensive and intellectually defensible approach to moral thought about war.
In short, Orend’s book, in this reviewer’s opinion, provides the best single volume in English on Just War. Readers seeking a comprehensive and in-depth treatment of the whole range of thorny moral questions involved in war can find no better place to begin than with this book.
Strategy and History: Essays on Theory and Practice. By Colin S. Gray. New York: Routledge, 2006. 234 pages.
Reviewed by Dr. Stephen J. Blank, Professor of National Security Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.
It is a capital idea to have all these essays published together for they contain much wisdom. Admittedly, this reviewer is an admirer of Dr. Gray’s work, but the importance of the ideas he addresses in this series of essays collected over 30 years should give much food for thought even to less impressed readers. The issues Gray addresses range from the nature of security or strategic studies, to the importance for strategists and analysts to learn from history, to ethics, and most important of all, to the overriding necessity of focusing on the strategic level of war.
In all these cases, essays, and in his book titles the words strategy and history stand out as the lodestars of Gray’s thinking. Unfortunately, it is precisely these things and their attributes that are all too often missing from American strategy and policy. Indeed, we would do well to make this book or at least some of the essays required reading for policymakers and students and faculty at institutions of professional military education. Gray’s foundation has always been Clausewitz and his insistence that war is an instrument of policy which is chosen to achieve political, including strategic, ends or purposes. It is not merely a clash of arms as far too many Americans believe. Gray makes the acute distinction between warfare that is the tactical clash of two militaries and war that encompasses the multidimensional phenomenon of conflict between military or political entities. Throughout the book Gray finds that America has been deficient in understanding the need for a truly strategic approach, focusing instead on a methodology that glorifies technology and depreciates geography, culture, and history.
In fact, throughout these essays as well as in his other books Gray consistently emphasizes the need to learn from history, how others may have resolved or confronted strategic challenges based on their geography, history, and enculturation. Sound strategy cannot omit these factors from consideration. If that omission does occur, and it features prominently in America’s military tradition, victory may be achieved, but it will not be strategic in nature. Indeed, strategy will have failed its ultimate test. We may win the battles only to lose the peace or broader war.
Gray’s insistence on rigorously emphasizing the strategic dimension also leads him into controversy which he does not shirk. His essay “Nuclear Strategy: the Case for a Theory of Victory” from 1979 clearly states his insistence on the Clausewitzian dictum and the critical nature of strategy. The author makes it abundantly clear that if we were to enter into a nuclear war that war must be fought to achieve clear and tangible strategic objectives, i.e., it must result in victory. This insistence obviously flew in the face of those advocating deterrence theory and present-day political wisdom. Gray earned considerable opprobrium from those who insisted that there could be no victory in a nuclear war. Inasmuch as this was not necessarily the Soviet view at the time and the fact that Leninist theory was no less Clausewitzian in its insistence on the political objective of war, there is much to be said for this reasoning, unpalatable as it may seem.
The essential point here is that wars are conducted for the purposes of securing political gains, as Liddell Hart famously said, “The purpose of war is a better peace.” Thus, a nuclear war may have to be fought, if it comes to that, in an effort to obtain a better peace. These essays reflect Gray’s independence of mind, intellectual rigor, and willingness to challenge the political correctness or conventional wisdom of the time. There is another key point for which Gray is well known and one that is related to this issue. Gray insists that the advent of the nuclear era in 1945 does not represent a break with the past, nor does it consign all the accumulated strategic wisdom and experience that has gone before into oblivion. Instead, the burden of proof rests upon those who espouse the belief that we entered into a wholly new world in August 1945. Again, the importance of strategy and history are championed at the expense of popularity and conventional thinking. But since these two elements, strategy and history, are precisely those in which Americans have been most deficient, the challenge falls to those who seek the answers regarding how we blundered into our current strategic predicament. Anyone responding to this strategic conundrum could do much worse than to start their effort by pondering the lessons Gray imparts in Strategy and History.
Reviewed by Dr. Stephen J. Blank, Professor of National Security Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.
It is a capital idea to have all these essays published together for they contain much wisdom. Admittedly, this reviewer is an admirer of Dr. Gray’s work, but the importance of the ideas he addresses in this series of essays collected over 30 years should give much food for thought even to less impressed readers. The issues Gray addresses range from the nature of security or strategic studies, to the importance for strategists and analysts to learn from history, to ethics, and most important of all, to the overriding necessity of focusing on the strategic level of war.
In all these cases, essays, and in his book titles the words strategy and history stand out as the lodestars of Gray’s thinking. Unfortunately, it is precisely these things and their attributes that are all too often missing from American strategy and policy. Indeed, we would do well to make this book or at least some of the essays required reading for policymakers and students and faculty at institutions of professional military education. Gray’s foundation has always been Clausewitz and his insistence that war is an instrument of policy which is chosen to achieve political, including strategic, ends or purposes. It is not merely a clash of arms as far too many Americans believe. Gray makes the acute distinction between warfare that is the tactical clash of two militaries and war that encompasses the multidimensional phenomenon of conflict between military or political entities. Throughout the book Gray finds that America has been deficient in understanding the need for a truly strategic approach, focusing instead on a methodology that glorifies technology and depreciates geography, culture, and history.
In fact, throughout these essays as well as in his other books Gray consistently emphasizes the need to learn from history, how others may have resolved or confronted strategic challenges based on their geography, history, and enculturation. Sound strategy cannot omit these factors from consideration. If that omission does occur, and it features prominently in America’s military tradition, victory may be achieved, but it will not be strategic in nature. Indeed, strategy will have failed its ultimate test. We may win the battles only to lose the peace or broader war.
Gray’s insistence on rigorously emphasizing the strategic dimension also leads him into controversy which he does not shirk. His essay “Nuclear Strategy: the Case for a Theory of Victory” from 1979 clearly states his insistence on the Clausewitzian dictum and the critical nature of strategy. The author makes it abundantly clear that if we were to enter into a nuclear war that war must be fought to achieve clear and tangible strategic objectives, i.e., it must result in victory. This insistence obviously flew in the face of those advocating deterrence theory and present-day political wisdom. Gray earned considerable opprobrium from those who insisted that there could be no victory in a nuclear war. Inasmuch as this was not necessarily the Soviet view at the time and the fact that Leninist theory was no less Clausewitzian in its insistence on the political objective of war, there is much to be said for this reasoning, unpalatable as it may seem.
The essential point here is that wars are conducted for the purposes of securing political gains, as Liddell Hart famously said, “The purpose of war is a better peace.” Thus, a nuclear war may have to be fought, if it comes to that, in an effort to obtain a better peace. These essays reflect Gray’s independence of mind, intellectual rigor, and willingness to challenge the political correctness or conventional wisdom of the time. There is another key point for which Gray is well known and one that is related to this issue. Gray insists that the advent of the nuclear era in 1945 does not represent a break with the past, nor does it consign all the accumulated strategic wisdom and experience that has gone before into oblivion. Instead, the burden of proof rests upon those who espouse the belief that we entered into a wholly new world in August 1945. Again, the importance of strategy and history are championed at the expense of popularity and conventional thinking. But since these two elements, strategy and history, are precisely those in which Americans have been most deficient, the challenge falls to those who seek the answers regarding how we blundered into our current strategic predicament. Anyone responding to this strategic conundrum could do much worse than to start their effort by pondering the lessons Gray imparts in Strategy and History.
Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human. By Joel Garreau. Rpt.; New York: Broadway, 2006. 400 pages.
Reviewed by Dr. James R. Downey, Professor of Science and Technology, US Army War College.
Technology is advancing at a dizzying pace. The cell phone you buy today is nearly out of date before you leave the store. Sequencing your personal DNA for under $1000 may be just around the corner. Nanoscale robots might some day be built and enter your brain providing significantly faster and more sophisticated human intelligence, blending the line between man and machine. Joel Garreau takes these kinds of developments and explores them to their potential extremes, both good and bad, in his book Radical Evolution. At first glance, the title might suggest some major modification to the evolutionary development of humans or the planet. In one sense this is true since the book explores the radical evolution of technology and how it might affect the future of mankind. To those less familiar with developments occurring in info-, bio-, and nanotechnology this book presents a useful overview. For the national security audience Garreau’s work provides an insight into the impact that twenty-first century technologies could have on the continuing Revolution in Military Affairs.
The book opens by suggesting we are about to embark on dramatic changes previously not experienced by the human race. The chapter titled “Be All You Can Be” presents several accounts of research projects being conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the areas of biotechnology and human performance enhancement. Readers familiar with DARPA know it as the driving force behind stealth technology and the Internet. Today, DARPA is looking at how to make smarter, faster, and stronger soldiers as well as the enabling technologies that will make it all possible. Driving all the developments that Garreau describes in later sections of the book is something he calls “The Curve,” and an entire chapter is devoted to this subject. Garreau is not the first to describe the impact of exponential developments in technology, particularly computer processing capability. However, he does manage to do so in a way that will be accessible to a wide range of readers. The chapter identifies four areas of technological development many observers believe will be the key to a number of advances in this century. The primary driving force is the development of information technology (IT). Exponential advances in IT are enabling the other three technology areas the author highlights: genetics, robotics, and nanotechnology. He collectively names these the GRIN technologies. Carried to their theoretical extreme the exponential advances in GRIN lead some to think we may approach the so-called technological “Singularity.” The idea, first suggested by Verner Vinge (interviewed extensively in the book), is that as the rate of change increases it reaches a point where change occurs essentially instantaneously and we simply don’t know what the world will be like after that. The GRIN technologies become the focus of succeeding chapters which explore potential futures described with thought-provoking titles including “Heaven,” “Hell,” “Prevail,” and “Transcend.”
In the first future all the best possible things that could happen with the GRIN technologies combine to produce a world with greatly enhanced humans, reduced poverty, and increased prosperity for all. The main proponents of this view are Verner Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. In “Heaven” people can live forever, or at least a very long time, having tremendous mental and physical capabilities, and in the view of Kurzweil, may even transcend their biological existence. The “Hell” scenario which follows outlines what could go wrong in the future, particularly with nanotechnology. Here Garreau meets up with Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems) and Francis Fukuyama (Our Posthuman Future), well known for their concerns about the future. The downsides of the GRIN technologies include global environmental disaster and the societal and ethical dilemmas resulting from fundamental changes to what it means to be human. Finally, both the “Prevail” and “Transcend” scenarios take a more middle ground suggesting that humanity will learn to deal with The Curve and our basic nature will allow us to survive the coming revolution.
Probably the greatest strength of the book is the many interviews Garreau conducted with the leading proponents of the various scenarios. For readers who lack the time to read more in-depth accounts Radical Evolution presents the main arguments of individuals such as Vinge, Kurzweil, Joy, Fukuyama, Lanier, and others. Furthermore, this book introduces key issues and can spark some new thinking. At times Garreau interjects too much of his own opinion, even referring to classic environmentalist concerns like DDT. None of the technologies is explored in great depth, and the author bypasses some relevant topics like the future of energy. Most surprisingly to this reviewer, he essentially ignores the role that religion and faith will certainly play as some form of these futures plays out. Some readers may find that Garreau gives too many examples or repeats himself when describing a topic. This is particularly true in “The Curve” where most readers will get the point after just a few pages.
This book provides a good introduction to the set of technologies most likely to profoundly impact the future of human society. Whether the world will end up in “Heaven,” “Hell,” or somewhere else altogether remains to be seen. Regardless, Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution provides an opportunity to learn about technological developments coming in this century and opens the door to ponder the implications for both national security and the future of the human race.
Reviewed by Dr. James R. Downey, Professor of Science and Technology, US Army War College.
Technology is advancing at a dizzying pace. The cell phone you buy today is nearly out of date before you leave the store. Sequencing your personal DNA for under $1000 may be just around the corner. Nanoscale robots might some day be built and enter your brain providing significantly faster and more sophisticated human intelligence, blending the line between man and machine. Joel Garreau takes these kinds of developments and explores them to their potential extremes, both good and bad, in his book Radical Evolution. At first glance, the title might suggest some major modification to the evolutionary development of humans or the planet. In one sense this is true since the book explores the radical evolution of technology and how it might affect the future of mankind. To those less familiar with developments occurring in info-, bio-, and nanotechnology this book presents a useful overview. For the national security audience Garreau’s work provides an insight into the impact that twenty-first century technologies could have on the continuing Revolution in Military Affairs.
The book opens by suggesting we are about to embark on dramatic changes previously not experienced by the human race. The chapter titled “Be All You Can Be” presents several accounts of research projects being conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the areas of biotechnology and human performance enhancement. Readers familiar with DARPA know it as the driving force behind stealth technology and the Internet. Today, DARPA is looking at how to make smarter, faster, and stronger soldiers as well as the enabling technologies that will make it all possible. Driving all the developments that Garreau describes in later sections of the book is something he calls “The Curve,” and an entire chapter is devoted to this subject. Garreau is not the first to describe the impact of exponential developments in technology, particularly computer processing capability. However, he does manage to do so in a way that will be accessible to a wide range of readers. The chapter identifies four areas of technological development many observers believe will be the key to a number of advances in this century. The primary driving force is the development of information technology (IT). Exponential advances in IT are enabling the other three technology areas the author highlights: genetics, robotics, and nanotechnology. He collectively names these the GRIN technologies. Carried to their theoretical extreme the exponential advances in GRIN lead some to think we may approach the so-called technological “Singularity.” The idea, first suggested by Verner Vinge (interviewed extensively in the book), is that as the rate of change increases it reaches a point where change occurs essentially instantaneously and we simply don’t know what the world will be like after that. The GRIN technologies become the focus of succeeding chapters which explore potential futures described with thought-provoking titles including “Heaven,” “Hell,” “Prevail,” and “Transcend.”
In the first future all the best possible things that could happen with the GRIN technologies combine to produce a world with greatly enhanced humans, reduced poverty, and increased prosperity for all. The main proponents of this view are Verner Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. In “Heaven” people can live forever, or at least a very long time, having tremendous mental and physical capabilities, and in the view of Kurzweil, may even transcend their biological existence. The “Hell” scenario which follows outlines what could go wrong in the future, particularly with nanotechnology. Here Garreau meets up with Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems) and Francis Fukuyama (Our Posthuman Future), well known for their concerns about the future. The downsides of the GRIN technologies include global environmental disaster and the societal and ethical dilemmas resulting from fundamental changes to what it means to be human. Finally, both the “Prevail” and “Transcend” scenarios take a more middle ground suggesting that humanity will learn to deal with The Curve and our basic nature will allow us to survive the coming revolution.
Probably the greatest strength of the book is the many interviews Garreau conducted with the leading proponents of the various scenarios. For readers who lack the time to read more in-depth accounts Radical Evolution presents the main arguments of individuals such as Vinge, Kurzweil, Joy, Fukuyama, Lanier, and others. Furthermore, this book introduces key issues and can spark some new thinking. At times Garreau interjects too much of his own opinion, even referring to classic environmentalist concerns like DDT. None of the technologies is explored in great depth, and the author bypasses some relevant topics like the future of energy. Most surprisingly to this reviewer, he essentially ignores the role that religion and faith will certainly play as some form of these futures plays out. Some readers may find that Garreau gives too many examples or repeats himself when describing a topic. This is particularly true in “The Curve” where most readers will get the point after just a few pages.
This book provides a good introduction to the set of technologies most likely to profoundly impact the future of human society. Whether the world will end up in “Heaven,” “Hell,” or somewhere else altogether remains to be seen. Regardless, Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution provides an opportunity to learn about technological developments coming in this century and opens the door to ponder the implications for both national security and the future of the human race.
Insurgents, Terrorists, and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat. By Richard H. Shultz, Jr., and Andrea J. Dew. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 328 pages.
Reviewed by Colonel Glenn Alexander Crowther, Research Professor of National Security Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.
Richard Shultz and Andrea Dew of the Fletcher School at Tufts University have produced an excellent primer on the nature of warfare and our likely enemies in the twenty-first century.
Starting with the end of the Cold War, US investment in military capability has produced a military against whom no one can stand in conventional state-on-state warfare—so they won’t. Instead, the authors point out that we will face proud warriors who come from cultures that inspire them with centuries of martial tradition.
The book opens with several chapters related to the nature of warfare in the twenty-first century and insight into the cultures that the United States may encounter as it seeks to stabilize the world as part of the Long War. The authors provide a well-thought-out view of the cultures in question, concentrating primarily on tribal societies. In three chapters that address “War After the Cold War,” “Assessing Enemies,” and “Tribes and Clans,” the authors posit that these tribal societies will comprise the enemies of the future for the United States. The nature of these societies have led to a preferred type of warfare—decentralized, violent, and family-based. When faced with an extremely potent conventional threat, these societies turn to the fundamentals they have always known: the ambush, the raid, and other techniques that western militaries associate with insurgency and asymmetric warfare.
The book continues with four chapters devoted to discussion of recent theaters of conflict: Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Each chapter examines in-depth the society in question, analyzing the structure of family-based groups that comprise these organizations. Additionally, each chapter discusses the involvement of militaries from developed countries applicable to the particular case. These chapters provide details of what went wrong in a given scenario and why, emphasizing both the nature of the society in the country in question as well as the decisionmaking process exercised by outside forces.
This lack of a centralized state that makes family-based societies viable in the twenty-first century is the same characteristic often found in weaker states that do not have the ability to provide good governance. This failing makes these locales attractive to transnational criminal and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda. In such instances, the United States may engage the threat in an effort to impose stability. The target is never the local culture, but rather the lack of stability that US forces are seeking to address. The US presence in these areas inevitably comes into conflict with local power structures. Locals will almost always seek to drive away any foreign interlopers. The United States’ reliance on quick, kinetic solutions when faced with such attacks can lead to years of warfare. It is precisely the type of warfare that these family-based systems have specialized in for millennia.
One theme concurrent throughout the book is the propensity for militaries and policymakers in developed countries to underestimate the warfighting capacity inherent in these tribal/clan based societies. The authors go into great detail regarding the mishaps suffered by the British, Russians, and United States in the four countries reviewed. They posit that in each case, success might have been possible if security specialists had taken certain precautions and adopted a more flexible approach. Shultz and Dew also provide recommendations for security specialists and policymakers to use in future conflicts in regions dominated by instability.
Although the book does not necessarily plow new ground in terms of understanding different cultures, it does distill extant knowledge into a form readily understandable by today’s military professional. Although some aspects of the individual country studies are a bit detailed for the average reader, the overall effect is to provide insight into a world very different from our own. In addition, the authors are able to educate the practicing professional regarding what mistakes to avoid when operating in these environments.
As with all of Shultz’s works, this book is thoroughly researched and impressively referenced. The authors provide insight to not only popular writings on culture such as Culture Matters by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, but also less well-known treatises such as Ethnic Groups in Conflict by Donald Horowitz and Ted Robert Gurr’s Minorities at Risk. Any serious student of culture will find a worthwhile framework for pursuing such studies in this work. But it is the professional warfighter who will profit most from the book.
From soldiers on the ground to Combatant Commanders, to the Pentagon, and to politicians on Capitol Hill, everyone who specializes in international security matters on behalf of the United States should read this book. Additionally, the book describes the environment in which Army, Marine, and special operations forces will be operating for the foreseeable future. Sun Tzu implores us to know our enemy. Shultz and Dew have provided us with a superb roadmap to pursue that imperative. This book goes a long way in allowing the reader to get to know his opponent. We have only ourselves to blame if we are not ready the next time.
Reviewed by Colonel Glenn Alexander Crowther, Research Professor of National Security Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.
Richard Shultz and Andrea Dew of the Fletcher School at Tufts University have produced an excellent primer on the nature of warfare and our likely enemies in the twenty-first century.
Starting with the end of the Cold War, US investment in military capability has produced a military against whom no one can stand in conventional state-on-state warfare—so they won’t. Instead, the authors point out that we will face proud warriors who come from cultures that inspire them with centuries of martial tradition.
The book opens with several chapters related to the nature of warfare in the twenty-first century and insight into the cultures that the United States may encounter as it seeks to stabilize the world as part of the Long War. The authors provide a well-thought-out view of the cultures in question, concentrating primarily on tribal societies. In three chapters that address “War After the Cold War,” “Assessing Enemies,” and “Tribes and Clans,” the authors posit that these tribal societies will comprise the enemies of the future for the United States. The nature of these societies have led to a preferred type of warfare—decentralized, violent, and family-based. When faced with an extremely potent conventional threat, these societies turn to the fundamentals they have always known: the ambush, the raid, and other techniques that western militaries associate with insurgency and asymmetric warfare.
The book continues with four chapters devoted to discussion of recent theaters of conflict: Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Each chapter examines in-depth the society in question, analyzing the structure of family-based groups that comprise these organizations. Additionally, each chapter discusses the involvement of militaries from developed countries applicable to the particular case. These chapters provide details of what went wrong in a given scenario and why, emphasizing both the nature of the society in the country in question as well as the decisionmaking process exercised by outside forces.
This lack of a centralized state that makes family-based societies viable in the twenty-first century is the same characteristic often found in weaker states that do not have the ability to provide good governance. This failing makes these locales attractive to transnational criminal and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda. In such instances, the United States may engage the threat in an effort to impose stability. The target is never the local culture, but rather the lack of stability that US forces are seeking to address. The US presence in these areas inevitably comes into conflict with local power structures. Locals will almost always seek to drive away any foreign interlopers. The United States’ reliance on quick, kinetic solutions when faced with such attacks can lead to years of warfare. It is precisely the type of warfare that these family-based systems have specialized in for millennia.
One theme concurrent throughout the book is the propensity for militaries and policymakers in developed countries to underestimate the warfighting capacity inherent in these tribal/clan based societies. The authors go into great detail regarding the mishaps suffered by the British, Russians, and United States in the four countries reviewed. They posit that in each case, success might have been possible if security specialists had taken certain precautions and adopted a more flexible approach. Shultz and Dew also provide recommendations for security specialists and policymakers to use in future conflicts in regions dominated by instability.
Although the book does not necessarily plow new ground in terms of understanding different cultures, it does distill extant knowledge into a form readily understandable by today’s military professional. Although some aspects of the individual country studies are a bit detailed for the average reader, the overall effect is to provide insight into a world very different from our own. In addition, the authors are able to educate the practicing professional regarding what mistakes to avoid when operating in these environments.
As with all of Shultz’s works, this book is thoroughly researched and impressively referenced. The authors provide insight to not only popular writings on culture such as Culture Matters by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, but also less well-known treatises such as Ethnic Groups in Conflict by Donald Horowitz and Ted Robert Gurr’s Minorities at Risk. Any serious student of culture will find a worthwhile framework for pursuing such studies in this work. But it is the professional warfighter who will profit most from the book.
From soldiers on the ground to Combatant Commanders, to the Pentagon, and to politicians on Capitol Hill, everyone who specializes in international security matters on behalf of the United States should read this book. Additionally, the book describes the environment in which Army, Marine, and special operations forces will be operating for the foreseeable future. Sun Tzu implores us to know our enemy. Shultz and Dew have provided us with a superb roadmap to pursue that imperative. This book goes a long way in allowing the reader to get to know his opponent. We have only ourselves to blame if we are not ready the next time.
The Army After Next: The First Postindustrial Army. By Thomas K. Adams. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2006. 336 pages.
Reviewed by Colonel Max G. Manwaring, USA Ret., Professor of National Security Affairs, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.
Only a few months ago, this book and its author probably would have been dismissed as just one more blast at the Bush Administration, perpetrated by a malcontent who “just didn’t understand.” But history has a way of changing things in rapid and unexpected ways. Now, it turns out that The Army After Next is “spot on” and Tom Adams is something of a prophet. As we reappraise the US Army in the light of the expanding irregular asymmetric war in Iraq, the escalating conflict in Afghanistan, and the 2006 congressional elections in the United States, even ardent supporters of military transition can see that something has gone awry.
In this volume, Adams tells four stories. First, and most important, he presents a timely and well-reasoned explanation of the contradiction between transition, as it has been implemented, and experience encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan. As expected, the US military (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps) invaded Iraq quickly, and easily defeated Saddam Hussein’s army. But the conventional war unexpectedly turned into a grinding occupation, a multi-faceted insurgency, and something very close to civil war. The US military with all its firepower and technology could not control Iraqi territory or the population, and conventional state-on-state war was replaced by asymmetric warfare. In short, instead of providing a model for future war, the US military found that it was not trained, equipped, organized, or prepared for the kind of war we are fighting today and most likely will continue to face in the future. These “new” wars—whatever they are called—are insurgency-rooted, low-tech, and unconventional confrontations between the weak and the strong. There is no way a rational but weak competitor will confront a stronger opponent on his own terms. Rather, a wise competitor will shift away from conventional military confrontations, enlarge the proverbial playing field to include the whole of a society, and focus on non-traditional, inexpensive, and more political-psychological forms of war.
Second, the author analyzes the debate over the belief that airpower can deal effectively, cheaply, and quickly with all kinds of enemies, and the counter-argument that an adequate and properly prepared ground force is necessary to exercise control over territory and people. That is, without control of territory and people, the results of airpower must be—at best—transient. The experience in Afghanistan is a case in point. Despite precision bombing, airpower was unable to dislodge and defeat the Taliban fighters. Even with the introduction of infantry and Special Forces into the equation, the small, low-tech, and highly motivated Taliban forces have been dislodged, but not defeated. As a consequence, it appears that the airpower vs. ground forces argument is moot. The point is that contemporary, asymmetric irregular conflict requires more than military solutions. Contemporary conflict is multi-dimensional and requires the coordinated application of all the instruments of national and international power. In these terms, the US civil-military effort in contemporary conflict has not applied the appropriate physical and intellectual tools necessary to deal with the reality of an existential alien, political-psychological, inter-religious, and inter-cultural conflict.
Third, Adams carefully and logically leads the reader through the problem of trying to apply military transformation to an ill-defined future, while at the same time fighting a war that is quite different and real. The worst part of that issue is not the obvious difficulty of not knowing exactly where you are going or precisely how you are going to get there. The worst part of that conundrum is not that vast amounts of time, effort, and money are being spent trying to develop something that might prove to be really good against a conventional peer competitor in 30 to 50 years. The worst part is that men and women of the armed forces are right now risking their lives against wise asymmetric and unconventional competitors. They have been trained, equipped, and organized for something that remains ill-defined and technologically unfulfilled. Lacking the right training and equipment, they have attempted to “make-do,” while suffering and dying in the process. But for the advocates of transformation it is as if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not really happening, and that military demands of the real world do not matter. To the extent that reality is recognized and that the present force does matter, they are regarded as merely inconvenient aberrations.
The last story is not really a story. Rather, it is the lessons that should have already been learned, but remain unheeded. These lessons will speak for themselves. What we have here is a well-documented, well-reasoned, and well-written piece of work by a highly experienced practitioner. This book should be mandatory reading for citizens as well as decision-, policy-, and opinion-makers. At base, The Army After Next deals with the issue of security—our security. Too few of us have paid much attention. Pay attention now.
Reviewed by Colonel Max G. Manwaring, USA Ret., Professor of National Security Affairs, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.
Only a few months ago, this book and its author probably would have been dismissed as just one more blast at the Bush Administration, perpetrated by a malcontent who “just didn’t understand.” But history has a way of changing things in rapid and unexpected ways. Now, it turns out that The Army After Next is “spot on” and Tom Adams is something of a prophet. As we reappraise the US Army in the light of the expanding irregular asymmetric war in Iraq, the escalating conflict in Afghanistan, and the 2006 congressional elections in the United States, even ardent supporters of military transition can see that something has gone awry.
In this volume, Adams tells four stories. First, and most important, he presents a timely and well-reasoned explanation of the contradiction between transition, as it has been implemented, and experience encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan. As expected, the US military (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps) invaded Iraq quickly, and easily defeated Saddam Hussein’s army. But the conventional war unexpectedly turned into a grinding occupation, a multi-faceted insurgency, and something very close to civil war. The US military with all its firepower and technology could not control Iraqi territory or the population, and conventional state-on-state war was replaced by asymmetric warfare. In short, instead of providing a model for future war, the US military found that it was not trained, equipped, organized, or prepared for the kind of war we are fighting today and most likely will continue to face in the future. These “new” wars—whatever they are called—are insurgency-rooted, low-tech, and unconventional confrontations between the weak and the strong. There is no way a rational but weak competitor will confront a stronger opponent on his own terms. Rather, a wise competitor will shift away from conventional military confrontations, enlarge the proverbial playing field to include the whole of a society, and focus on non-traditional, inexpensive, and more political-psychological forms of war.
Second, the author analyzes the debate over the belief that airpower can deal effectively, cheaply, and quickly with all kinds of enemies, and the counter-argument that an adequate and properly prepared ground force is necessary to exercise control over territory and people. That is, without control of territory and people, the results of airpower must be—at best—transient. The experience in Afghanistan is a case in point. Despite precision bombing, airpower was unable to dislodge and defeat the Taliban fighters. Even with the introduction of infantry and Special Forces into the equation, the small, low-tech, and highly motivated Taliban forces have been dislodged, but not defeated. As a consequence, it appears that the airpower vs. ground forces argument is moot. The point is that contemporary, asymmetric irregular conflict requires more than military solutions. Contemporary conflict is multi-dimensional and requires the coordinated application of all the instruments of national and international power. In these terms, the US civil-military effort in contemporary conflict has not applied the appropriate physical and intellectual tools necessary to deal with the reality of an existential alien, political-psychological, inter-religious, and inter-cultural conflict.
Third, Adams carefully and logically leads the reader through the problem of trying to apply military transformation to an ill-defined future, while at the same time fighting a war that is quite different and real. The worst part of that issue is not the obvious difficulty of not knowing exactly where you are going or precisely how you are going to get there. The worst part of that conundrum is not that vast amounts of time, effort, and money are being spent trying to develop something that might prove to be really good against a conventional peer competitor in 30 to 50 years. The worst part is that men and women of the armed forces are right now risking their lives against wise asymmetric and unconventional competitors. They have been trained, equipped, and organized for something that remains ill-defined and technologically unfulfilled. Lacking the right training and equipment, they have attempted to “make-do,” while suffering and dying in the process. But for the advocates of transformation it is as if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are not really happening, and that military demands of the real world do not matter. To the extent that reality is recognized and that the present force does matter, they are regarded as merely inconvenient aberrations.
The last story is not really a story. Rather, it is the lessons that should have already been learned, but remain unheeded. These lessons will speak for themselves. What we have here is a well-documented, well-reasoned, and well-written piece of work by a highly experienced practitioner. This book should be mandatory reading for citizens as well as decision-, policy-, and opinion-makers. At base, The Army After Next deals with the issue of security—our security. Too few of us have paid much attention. Pay attention now.
Counterterrorism Strategies: Successes and Failures of Six Nations. Edited by Yonah Alexander. Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006. 288 pages.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Cassidy, a US Army officer and a non-resident Fellow with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.
The war on terrorism will have lasted six years by September 2007 and it has already lasted longer than the American Civil War and World War II. In fact, current US national security strategy considers it a Long War that may be protracted over the next several decades. Terrorism by non-state armed groups which are animated by radical interpretations of religion still represents a perfidious and present peril. Herein lies the relevance of a book that examines the history and evolution of counterterrorism across six cases, representing the efforts of six states. The aim of Counterterrorism Strategies is to glean best practices in order to arrive at some generalizations about the way ahead on national and international efforts to counter terrorism. For the United States, this framework is especially relevant because one of the 9/11 Commission findings was the imperative to formulate a long-term and balanced strategy to defeat terrorists, by compelling “the massive departments and agencies that prevailed in the twentieth century” to cooperate and “work together in new ways” to integrate and leverage all the instruments of national power. The editor, Yonah Alexander, is the director of the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies in Washington, D.C., as well as the director of the Potomac Institute’s Center for Terrorism Studies in Arlington, Va. The other authors are similarly qualified as contributors to this book, which in its essence, assesses how successful these six governments have been in adapting interagency and international approaches to counter non-state terrorist groups, particularly since September 2001.
For a book with the announced purpose of gleaning best practices, the end is the best place to begin because it reveals the quality and the distillation of implications for policy. It is also the most germane part as it offers a way ahead to counter terrorism. The book prescribes policy fixes which are not necessarily epiphanous or timely, but are indeed correct and cogent. The first is that states must act multilaterally and unilaterally to develop credible capabilities to counter future terrorist threats. Second, the authors conclude that simple and ideal solutions to the threat of terrorism do not exist, and states must therefore develop organizational structures and institutional cultures that will enable them to adapt as quickly as, or quicker than, terrorists. The book’s third implication is exceedingly obvious, as it describes the critical elements of a counterterrorism strategy to be patience, perseverance, and relentless pursuit. Fourth, Counterterroism Strategies arrives at best practices that include the “apprehension or elimination of operatives and their leadership; disruption of infrastructure and sanctuaries; denial of material support and funding; and infliction of severe punishment on state sponsors and collaborators.” The poor integration of foreign and domestic intelligence agencies and policies also represents a trend that is in evidence throughout the book. One recommended remedy for this is to somehow close the gaps between domestic and international law.
Counterterrorism Strategies also illumines a miscellany of realities and adaptations in the realm of counterterrorism that are relevant and interesting. Alliance Base is an adaptation that the book highlights as a paragon of cooperation, between French intelligence and the American CIA. Alliance Base is an international counterterrorism intelligence center that the two nations established in Paris during 2002. It has remained functioning and relevant, despite United States and French disagreements over Iraq. Also of interest are the sections that explain the German contributions to the post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts internationally, specifically their role in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2002, Germany contributed some special operations soldiers, along with air transport and maritime forces to support the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and patrol the seas near the Horn of Africa. Germany supported the International Security Assistance Force with a relatively substantial number of troops, manned Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and serves as the lead nation for the training and establishment of Afghan police. The German government also contributed 80 million euros a year beginning in 2002. Among America’s NATO allies, German contributions in Afghanistan were generally second only to Britain. Lastly, the chapter on Italian counterterrorism examines the challenges engendered in that country’s geographic position in the Mediterranean, which finds it in proximity to non-state terrorist groups from North Africa and as a land conduit between the Levant and the Middle East on the one side and northwestern Europe on the other. Non-state groups seek to exploit its favorable geography and its illicit networks of trafficking in humans, arms, and drugs.
This book is a well-written and well-researched contribution to the ever-expanding corpus of books on counterterrorism. It is a relatively easy read. Also, a best practices approach to learning and adapting better than our adversaries is very helpful because it allows experts to harvest heterogeneity, which is preferable to the ossification that sometimes inheres in closed bureaucracies. This reviewer recommends this book as reading for military counterterrorism professionals, civilian counterterrorism experts, and students of national security. However, a preponderance of the prescriptions and policy implications provided at the end of the book have already been articulated in national security strategy and policy. While Counterterrorism Strategies does not present any significantly innovative policy recommendations, its case study approach offers valuable insight into the practices of other states’ intelligence bureaucracies. This insight may offer utility in adapting more innovative and internationally collaborative measures to better undermine and defeat our ever-mutating adversaries in this prolonged conflict.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Cassidy, a US Army officer and a non-resident Fellow with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.
The war on terrorism will have lasted six years by September 2007 and it has already lasted longer than the American Civil War and World War II. In fact, current US national security strategy considers it a Long War that may be protracted over the next several decades. Terrorism by non-state armed groups which are animated by radical interpretations of religion still represents a perfidious and present peril. Herein lies the relevance of a book that examines the history and evolution of counterterrorism across six cases, representing the efforts of six states. The aim of Counterterrorism Strategies is to glean best practices in order to arrive at some generalizations about the way ahead on national and international efforts to counter terrorism. For the United States, this framework is especially relevant because one of the 9/11 Commission findings was the imperative to formulate a long-term and balanced strategy to defeat terrorists, by compelling “the massive departments and agencies that prevailed in the twentieth century” to cooperate and “work together in new ways” to integrate and leverage all the instruments of national power. The editor, Yonah Alexander, is the director of the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies in Washington, D.C., as well as the director of the Potomac Institute’s Center for Terrorism Studies in Arlington, Va. The other authors are similarly qualified as contributors to this book, which in its essence, assesses how successful these six governments have been in adapting interagency and international approaches to counter non-state terrorist groups, particularly since September 2001.
For a book with the announced purpose of gleaning best practices, the end is the best place to begin because it reveals the quality and the distillation of implications for policy. It is also the most germane part as it offers a way ahead to counter terrorism. The book prescribes policy fixes which are not necessarily epiphanous or timely, but are indeed correct and cogent. The first is that states must act multilaterally and unilaterally to develop credible capabilities to counter future terrorist threats. Second, the authors conclude that simple and ideal solutions to the threat of terrorism do not exist, and states must therefore develop organizational structures and institutional cultures that will enable them to adapt as quickly as, or quicker than, terrorists. The book’s third implication is exceedingly obvious, as it describes the critical elements of a counterterrorism strategy to be patience, perseverance, and relentless pursuit. Fourth, Counterterroism Strategies arrives at best practices that include the “apprehension or elimination of operatives and their leadership; disruption of infrastructure and sanctuaries; denial of material support and funding; and infliction of severe punishment on state sponsors and collaborators.” The poor integration of foreign and domestic intelligence agencies and policies also represents a trend that is in evidence throughout the book. One recommended remedy for this is to somehow close the gaps between domestic and international law.
Counterterrorism Strategies also illumines a miscellany of realities and adaptations in the realm of counterterrorism that are relevant and interesting. Alliance Base is an adaptation that the book highlights as a paragon of cooperation, between French intelligence and the American CIA. Alliance Base is an international counterterrorism intelligence center that the two nations established in Paris during 2002. It has remained functioning and relevant, despite United States and French disagreements over Iraq. Also of interest are the sections that explain the German contributions to the post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts internationally, specifically their role in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2002, Germany contributed some special operations soldiers, along with air transport and maritime forces to support the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and patrol the seas near the Horn of Africa. Germany supported the International Security Assistance Force with a relatively substantial number of troops, manned Provincial Reconstruction Teams, and serves as the lead nation for the training and establishment of Afghan police. The German government also contributed 80 million euros a year beginning in 2002. Among America’s NATO allies, German contributions in Afghanistan were generally second only to Britain. Lastly, the chapter on Italian counterterrorism examines the challenges engendered in that country’s geographic position in the Mediterranean, which finds it in proximity to non-state terrorist groups from North Africa and as a land conduit between the Levant and the Middle East on the one side and northwestern Europe on the other. Non-state groups seek to exploit its favorable geography and its illicit networks of trafficking in humans, arms, and drugs.
This book is a well-written and well-researched contribution to the ever-expanding corpus of books on counterterrorism. It is a relatively easy read. Also, a best practices approach to learning and adapting better than our adversaries is very helpful because it allows experts to harvest heterogeneity, which is preferable to the ossification that sometimes inheres in closed bureaucracies. This reviewer recommends this book as reading for military counterterrorism professionals, civilian counterterrorism experts, and students of national security. However, a preponderance of the prescriptions and policy implications provided at the end of the book have already been articulated in national security strategy and policy. While Counterterrorism Strategies does not present any significantly innovative policy recommendations, its case study approach offers valuable insight into the practices of other states’ intelligence bureaucracies. This insight may offer utility in adapting more innovative and internationally collaborative measures to better undermine and defeat our ever-mutating adversaries in this prolonged conflict.
Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War. By Robert M. Cassidy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2006. 211 pages.
Reviewed by Associate Professor William Flavin, Director of Doctrine, Concepts, Education, and Training at the US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, US Army War College.
Robert Cassidy has expanded on his previous look into military cultures, Peacekeeping in the Abyss, by addressing the challenges of global insurgency. He provides the reader with the key historical studies, research papers, and policy initiatives that have shaped the United States and United Kingdom militaries’ approach to counterinsurgency and stability operations, many of which have not been previously collected in a single source. For example, he discusses the Kupperman Study done for the US Army in 1983, a work that established the conceptual framework for low-intensity conflict; and resulted in the 1985 Joint Low-Intensity Conflict Report that identified the major deficiencies in conducting such operations; and the 1966 Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam Study that laid out a governmental approach to counterinsurgency operations. He has also expanded his examination of comparative military approaches by including not only the American and British, but also the French and Russian.
The first part of the book focuses on knowing the enemy. Knowing the enemy requires the study of the other forms of conflict. Often Americans have studied the writings of other cultures, such as Sun Tzu, to harvest ideas for incorporation into the “western way of war” but failed to examine what they say about the culture that created such thoughts. The author builds his case that al Qaeda is a global insurgency and that requires a global counterinsurgency. He examines the objectives and approaches that al Qaeda and various clones use and compares them with classic insurgencies. Cassidy comes to the conclusion that al Qaeda is best understood in the context of insurgency rather than the classic “terrorist” whose objectives are limited and as an organization is not interested in appealing to a larger population.
What type of conflict is insurgency? Here the author discusses the problem with terminology and how it has clouded thinking. The author calls for greater clarity regarding such terms as counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, low-intensity conflict, peace operations, irregular war, stability operations, and asymmetric warfare that have all been used and abused to describe the response to global threats. He proposes six “paradoxes of asymmetric conflict” as the path to greater understanding: strategic goals, strategic means, technology, will, tolerance of casualities, and military culture. If, for example, the greater power is not struggling for survival, is only using limited means, depends on conventional technology, is unable to generate domestic will, has limited tolerance for casualties, and embraces a “big war” conventional military culture, then victory over any insurgency will be difficult.
Powerful nations can succeed only when they understand the nature of the conflict, comprehend themselves, and are capable of adjusting to meet varying challenges.
Three chapters are devoted to understanding the American, British, and Russian military cultures and their strategy for defeating insurgents. Russia was judged as having the least flexible approach, with the United Kingdom having the most adaptable strategy, and the United States somewhere in the middle. All of these strategies were shaped by the particular nation’s geopolitical position, military culture, and accepted paradigm for war. With Russia being in the center of the continent it is naturally focused on land dominance, opting for structures to fight large wars, retaining an approach patterned after the glory of the great patriotic war (WW II). This strategy does not allow the required flexibility to successfully engage in such places as Afghanistan. The United Kingdom had a maritime focus and was focused primarily on a colonial policing strategy supported by the old regimental system, and curtailed by limited resources. Such an approach encouraged flexibility, permitting the British to succeed in a number of these endeavors. The United States also utilized a maritime approach, but equally embraced conventional war as a default strategy while continuing to conduct stability operations during the majority of its recent military history.
Cassidy describes why the American military has opted for its default setting of large conventional wars waged quickly and decisively while relying heavily on technology. He bases this conclusion on his study of the writings of Russell Weigley, Samuel Huntington, and Carl Builder, the influence of Generals William T. Sherman and Emory Upton, along with his experience as a serving officer. This inclination to revert to this default position is reinforced by such experiences as WW II and the Gulf War, even though the Army has spent the majority of its recent history involved in stability operations. This is a contrapuntal voice that extends throughout history and is exemplified by the counterguerrilla operations in the Philippines, campaigns against the American Indians, stability operations in Viet Nam, and advisory efforts in El Salvador. This chapter discusses each of these operations and focuses the reader on oft forgotten historical events and individuals having relevance today. The chapter concludes by identifying 2003 as the turning point where the challenge of post-conflict Iraq is the catalyst for the rediscovery of counterinsurgency and stability doctrine and strategy. Is this a true change in the American military’s default position or simply a bump in the road? The book does not offer any predictions. So we are left to wonder when the United States retires from Iraq will that move mirror Viet Nam where all of the institutional learning and doctrine was washed away.
How can you take this self-knowledge and exploit it to gain success? Here the book emphasizes that the majority of successful operations have employed indigenous forces. The bottom-line is that the local populace holds the answer to success. This chapter outlines innovative techniques such as the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Sections Administratives Specialisees in Algeria in the 1960s. Cassidy makes some excellent points, but what is not emphasized sufficiently in the political, social, and economic context is how will these newly trained indigenous security forces function after the United States leaves.
In conclusion, this is a valuable book containing information that the professional soldier and administrator will find useful and should be a welcome addition to the professional officer’s library. The author arouses the reader’s interest related to global insurgencies. He then provides insight on a number of successes and failures in various attempts at countering regional insurgencies, but unfortunately leaves it to the reader’s own devises to pull all of this together in terms of a successful global counterinsurgency. We anxiously await his next work where he will hopefully describe how to execute a global counterinsurgency.
Reviewed by Associate Professor William Flavin, Director of Doctrine, Concepts, Education, and Training at the US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, US Army War College.
Robert Cassidy has expanded on his previous look into military cultures, Peacekeeping in the Abyss, by addressing the challenges of global insurgency. He provides the reader with the key historical studies, research papers, and policy initiatives that have shaped the United States and United Kingdom militaries’ approach to counterinsurgency and stability operations, many of which have not been previously collected in a single source. For example, he discusses the Kupperman Study done for the US Army in 1983, a work that established the conceptual framework for low-intensity conflict; and resulted in the 1985 Joint Low-Intensity Conflict Report that identified the major deficiencies in conducting such operations; and the 1966 Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of South Vietnam Study that laid out a governmental approach to counterinsurgency operations. He has also expanded his examination of comparative military approaches by including not only the American and British, but also the French and Russian.
The first part of the book focuses on knowing the enemy. Knowing the enemy requires the study of the other forms of conflict. Often Americans have studied the writings of other cultures, such as Sun Tzu, to harvest ideas for incorporation into the “western way of war” but failed to examine what they say about the culture that created such thoughts. The author builds his case that al Qaeda is a global insurgency and that requires a global counterinsurgency. He examines the objectives and approaches that al Qaeda and various clones use and compares them with classic insurgencies. Cassidy comes to the conclusion that al Qaeda is best understood in the context of insurgency rather than the classic “terrorist” whose objectives are limited and as an organization is not interested in appealing to a larger population.
What type of conflict is insurgency? Here the author discusses the problem with terminology and how it has clouded thinking. The author calls for greater clarity regarding such terms as counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, low-intensity conflict, peace operations, irregular war, stability operations, and asymmetric warfare that have all been used and abused to describe the response to global threats. He proposes six “paradoxes of asymmetric conflict” as the path to greater understanding: strategic goals, strategic means, technology, will, tolerance of casualities, and military culture. If, for example, the greater power is not struggling for survival, is only using limited means, depends on conventional technology, is unable to generate domestic will, has limited tolerance for casualties, and embraces a “big war” conventional military culture, then victory over any insurgency will be difficult.
Powerful nations can succeed only when they understand the nature of the conflict, comprehend themselves, and are capable of adjusting to meet varying challenges.
Three chapters are devoted to understanding the American, British, and Russian military cultures and their strategy for defeating insurgents. Russia was judged as having the least flexible approach, with the United Kingdom having the most adaptable strategy, and the United States somewhere in the middle. All of these strategies were shaped by the particular nation’s geopolitical position, military culture, and accepted paradigm for war. With Russia being in the center of the continent it is naturally focused on land dominance, opting for structures to fight large wars, retaining an approach patterned after the glory of the great patriotic war (WW II). This strategy does not allow the required flexibility to successfully engage in such places as Afghanistan. The United Kingdom had a maritime focus and was focused primarily on a colonial policing strategy supported by the old regimental system, and curtailed by limited resources. Such an approach encouraged flexibility, permitting the British to succeed in a number of these endeavors. The United States also utilized a maritime approach, but equally embraced conventional war as a default strategy while continuing to conduct stability operations during the majority of its recent military history.
Cassidy describes why the American military has opted for its default setting of large conventional wars waged quickly and decisively while relying heavily on technology. He bases this conclusion on his study of the writings of Russell Weigley, Samuel Huntington, and Carl Builder, the influence of Generals William T. Sherman and Emory Upton, along with his experience as a serving officer. This inclination to revert to this default position is reinforced by such experiences as WW II and the Gulf War, even though the Army has spent the majority of its recent history involved in stability operations. This is a contrapuntal voice that extends throughout history and is exemplified by the counterguerrilla operations in the Philippines, campaigns against the American Indians, stability operations in Viet Nam, and advisory efforts in El Salvador. This chapter discusses each of these operations and focuses the reader on oft forgotten historical events and individuals having relevance today. The chapter concludes by identifying 2003 as the turning point where the challenge of post-conflict Iraq is the catalyst for the rediscovery of counterinsurgency and stability doctrine and strategy. Is this a true change in the American military’s default position or simply a bump in the road? The book does not offer any predictions. So we are left to wonder when the United States retires from Iraq will that move mirror Viet Nam where all of the institutional learning and doctrine was washed away.
How can you take this self-knowledge and exploit it to gain success? Here the book emphasizes that the majority of successful operations have employed indigenous forces. The bottom-line is that the local populace holds the answer to success. This chapter outlines innovative techniques such as the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Sections Administratives Specialisees in Algeria in the 1960s. Cassidy makes some excellent points, but what is not emphasized sufficiently in the political, social, and economic context is how will these newly trained indigenous security forces function after the United States leaves.
In conclusion, this is a valuable book containing information that the professional soldier and administrator will find useful and should be a welcome addition to the professional officer’s library. The author arouses the reader’s interest related to global insurgencies. He then provides insight on a number of successes and failures in various attempts at countering regional insurgencies, but unfortunately leaves it to the reader’s own devises to pull all of this together in terms of a successful global counterinsurgency. We anxiously await his next work where he will hopefully describe how to execute a global counterinsurgency.
Soldier and Warrior: French Attitudes toward the Army and War on the Eve of the First World War. By H. L. Wesseling. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. 265 pages.
Reviewed by Dr. Douglas V. Johnson II (LTC, USA Ret.), a research professor with the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.
I am delighted anytime anyone writes about our principal allies in the First World War. Aside from Colonel Bob Doughty's work on the French army, a gaping void remains in Americans' understanding of the French before, during, and after this conflict. That said, this work is unlikely to be popularly acclaimed or widely read, even though it has a good deal to tell us about changing French attitudes toward war and the social and political position of the army within French society. It is unlikely to be popular because of a fairly heavy academic style and, ironically, because it deals with the French. That notwithstanding, there is value in slugging through this work precisely because the issues confronting the American military establishment today are somewhat similar to those addressed here.
The loss of Alsace and Lorraine following the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War gave rise to a strong movement to recapture those areas, but the combination of the French army's miserable performance in that war and the passage of time gave fertile ground for pacifists to sow their contrary seeds. The result was a decline in respect for nationalism and consequently for the army within French society and the removal of nationalist teaching from the school system. This corruption of values caused alarm in other segments of French society and eventually engendered a reaction. The American parallel is a steady drumbeat of questioning the need for an army, an insidious movement toward a socialist pacifism that defines guns as inherently bad, and a growing view of the Army as reactionary. What is different in the case of the French is the degrees of change and reaction that took place. The concept of the army as the teacher of the nation, the keeper of essential values, was realized in major part through the return of nationalist teaching to the school system. Wesseling suggests that teaching stopped short of a militarism that dominated the political process, but it did lead to a militaristic attitude throughout the nation.
There is, in this story, another possible but unlikely parallel. As the wheel of French public opinion turned, there was a concerted attack upon rationalism and science. Americans are traditionally gadget-minded if not scientifically inclined. We possess a faith in technology that if somewhat overblown at times is nonetheless partly responsible for our economic and other successes. What occurred in France was a strange turn toward a form of irrationalism. Students of military history know well the portrayals of the cult of the offensive and its high priest Colonel Grandmaison. Wesseling is careful to explain the realities of Grandmaison's work, but does acknowledge the emphasis on use of words like "spirit" and "will" that allow for some misinterpretation.
Chapter 5, "The War: Image and Expectation," may well be worth the entire book as it offers a thorough review of who is writing what and what they are actually writing about war. It begins by noting that war was on the way to becoming an abstraction. While Europe enjoyed "peace" during the period 1870-1914, there was enough conflict in exotic distant lands to maintain a substantial level of hope for those wanting combat and enough to ensure a leaven of experience. The French successes in Africa and the Orient were enough to reawaken a positive interest in the army, although how much, Wesseling cautions, is not certain.
Wesseling concludes that his study is admittedly narrow in focus and examines attitudes through literature only, further noting that it is often second-rate writers who actually capture the popular imagination. He notes as well that the national and military revival connected with a religious revival (to Catholicism) and constituted "a single complex whose deepest roots lie in the rejection of modern society and its underlying rational and scientific inspiration." His final lines are from de Tocqueville, who, in noting French dualism, called France "the most brilliant and most dangerous nation in Europe and the one best designed to become in turn an object of admiration, of hatred, of pity, of terror, but never of indifference."
Reviewed by Dr. Douglas V. Johnson II (LTC, USA Ret.), a research professor with the Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.
I am delighted anytime anyone writes about our principal allies in the First World War. Aside from Colonel Bob Doughty's work on the French army, a gaping void remains in Americans' understanding of the French before, during, and after this conflict. That said, this work is unlikely to be popularly acclaimed or widely read, even though it has a good deal to tell us about changing French attitudes toward war and the social and political position of the army within French society. It is unlikely to be popular because of a fairly heavy academic style and, ironically, because it deals with the French. That notwithstanding, there is value in slugging through this work precisely because the issues confronting the American military establishment today are somewhat similar to those addressed here.
The loss of Alsace and Lorraine following the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War gave rise to a strong movement to recapture those areas, but the combination of the French army's miserable performance in that war and the passage of time gave fertile ground for pacifists to sow their contrary seeds. The result was a decline in respect for nationalism and consequently for the army within French society and the removal of nationalist teaching from the school system. This corruption of values caused alarm in other segments of French society and eventually engendered a reaction. The American parallel is a steady drumbeat of questioning the need for an army, an insidious movement toward a socialist pacifism that defines guns as inherently bad, and a growing view of the Army as reactionary. What is different in the case of the French is the degrees of change and reaction that took place. The concept of the army as the teacher of the nation, the keeper of essential values, was realized in major part through the return of nationalist teaching to the school system. Wesseling suggests that teaching stopped short of a militarism that dominated the political process, but it did lead to a militaristic attitude throughout the nation.
There is, in this story, another possible but unlikely parallel. As the wheel of French public opinion turned, there was a concerted attack upon rationalism and science. Americans are traditionally gadget-minded if not scientifically inclined. We possess a faith in technology that if somewhat overblown at times is nonetheless partly responsible for our economic and other successes. What occurred in France was a strange turn toward a form of irrationalism. Students of military history know well the portrayals of the cult of the offensive and its high priest Colonel Grandmaison. Wesseling is careful to explain the realities of Grandmaison's work, but does acknowledge the emphasis on use of words like "spirit" and "will" that allow for some misinterpretation.
Chapter 5, "The War: Image and Expectation," may well be worth the entire book as it offers a thorough review of who is writing what and what they are actually writing about war. It begins by noting that war was on the way to becoming an abstraction. While Europe enjoyed "peace" during the period 1870-1914, there was enough conflict in exotic distant lands to maintain a substantial level of hope for those wanting combat and enough to ensure a leaven of experience. The French successes in Africa and the Orient were enough to reawaken a positive interest in the army, although how much, Wesseling cautions, is not certain.
Wesseling concludes that his study is admittedly narrow in focus and examines attitudes through literature only, further noting that it is often second-rate writers who actually capture the popular imagination. He notes as well that the national and military revival connected with a religious revival (to Catholicism) and constituted "a single complex whose deepest roots lie in the rejection of modern society and its underlying rational and scientific inspiration." His final lines are from de Tocqueville, who, in noting French dualism, called France "the most brilliant and most dangerous nation in Europe and the one best designed to become in turn an object of admiration, of hatred, of pity, of terror, but never of indifference."
The Culture of Defense. By Christopher D. Van Aller. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001. 208 pages. Reviewed by Charles Moskos, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University.
What should be the direction of our armed forces? And what should be done to move the armed forces in that direction? These are the questions Christopher Van Aller raises and persuasively answers. The core thesis of this elegantly written and reasoned book is that national leaders and citizens need to examine the political and sociological characteristics of armed forces before they embark on military change, whether in technology or people. The need, in the title of the book, is to grasp the culture of defense.
The guiding principle in the analysis is the inherent friction between the military and civilian worlds. This friction is manifest, in somewhat oversimplified terms, in those who believe only high expenditures guarantee security and those who consider military programs basically as a waste of a society's wealth. But this friction can be complementary, Van Aller argues. Modern warfare, as well as operations other than war, requires the talents of both civilian and military worlds. The issue is the right ratio between the two spheres.
If the military should resist most of the organizational practices common to civilian organizations (e.g. frequent personnel turnover), the armed forces need the periodical infusion of civilian energy and creativity (e.g. breaking out of old modes of warfighting). Inasmuch as war or its threat is a recurring condition, it behooves us to understand what sort of soldiers it takes to win wars. We also need to understand how to avoid having these soldiers become a threat to the civil society. Van Aller sees the United States entering the 21st century as a country founded on principles inimical to peacetime service and martial values. Yet, it is, at the same time, the preeminent military power with global commitments.
Today as in much of America's military history, two key problems exist. One is the fascination with technology, to the detriment of understanding morale and initiative. This "technism" is particularly evident in the curriculum of the service academies. "West Point and Annapolis still emphasize mathematics and technology to the detriment of history and strategy." In a very provocative point, Van Aller states that American security planners ought to consider, though not necessarily adopt, less costly weapon systems rather than always planning for changes of greater technological complexity.
The other recurring problem is the avoidance of military service by privileged youth during peacetime and combat duty during wars. This in turn disconnects the armed forces from civilian elites, a state of affairs Van Aller sees as an increasing gap in the post-Cold War era. In fact, the overemphasis on weapon technology in defense planning leads to an avoidance of dealing with more decisive issues, such as who should serve.
Van Aller casts a wide historical and philosophical net, invoking the insights of Niccolo Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, and Alexis de Tocqueville. He adapts the theories of these political theorists to lay the groundwork for an updated notion of citizenship obligation and civil-military relations. Among modern theorists, the author frequently cites Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, Edward Luttwak, and Martin van Creveld (whose name unfortunately is misspelled in the text). A reference to some of the contemporary iconoclasts such as Ralph Peters or Charles Dunlap could have strengthened Van Aller's presentation.
Van Aller makes a highly original argument that the initial phases of most major American military conflicts are usually hamstrung by the existing military professional leadership, but rescued by outside civilian direction. He convincingly argues that such changes rarely come from within the military establishment itself. One example is how civilian leadership implemented the convoy system over the resistance of the naval leadership in both world wars.
Now more than ever, it is necessary to redesign forces for the threats of the contemporary post-Cold War period. Since the Cold War ended a decade ago, the Pentagon has built its force structure around the notion that the United States must be able to fight and win two major regional wars almost simultaneously to meet its global national security obligations. That the Defense Department review concluded by Secretary Rumsfeld has now recommended that the two-war scenario be scrapped in favor of a more complex approach buttresses Van Aller's thesis. Noteworthy, this significant change in security premises was a key recommendation of the early 2001 report of the US Commission on National Security/21st Century, headed by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman.
Van Aller makes a strong case for the contemporary relevance of the citizen-soldier concept. He would like to see a reinvigoration of the citizen-soldier, coupled with a solid professional officer corps. He argues for serious consideration of a compulsory form of national service for American youth, including civilian as well as military service. (Full disclosure: your reviewer is cited heavily in this regard.)
The Culture of Defense raises important and troubling questions. Van Aller's answers are persuasive as he attempts to reconcile notions of citizenship obligation with the realities of the post-Cold War era. The author performs an important service in casting a skeptical light on the traditional military profession and its unbridled faith in technology. The publication of this book is exceptionally well-timed.
What should be the direction of our armed forces? And what should be done to move the armed forces in that direction? These are the questions Christopher Van Aller raises and persuasively answers. The core thesis of this elegantly written and reasoned book is that national leaders and citizens need to examine the political and sociological characteristics of armed forces before they embark on military change, whether in technology or people. The need, in the title of the book, is to grasp the culture of defense.
The guiding principle in the analysis is the inherent friction between the military and civilian worlds. This friction is manifest, in somewhat oversimplified terms, in those who believe only high expenditures guarantee security and those who consider military programs basically as a waste of a society's wealth. But this friction can be complementary, Van Aller argues. Modern warfare, as well as operations other than war, requires the talents of both civilian and military worlds. The issue is the right ratio between the two spheres.
If the military should resist most of the organizational practices common to civilian organizations (e.g. frequent personnel turnover), the armed forces need the periodical infusion of civilian energy and creativity (e.g. breaking out of old modes of warfighting). Inasmuch as war or its threat is a recurring condition, it behooves us to understand what sort of soldiers it takes to win wars. We also need to understand how to avoid having these soldiers become a threat to the civil society. Van Aller sees the United States entering the 21st century as a country founded on principles inimical to peacetime service and martial values. Yet, it is, at the same time, the preeminent military power with global commitments.
Today as in much of America's military history, two key problems exist. One is the fascination with technology, to the detriment of understanding morale and initiative. This "technism" is particularly evident in the curriculum of the service academies. "West Point and Annapolis still emphasize mathematics and technology to the detriment of history and strategy." In a very provocative point, Van Aller states that American security planners ought to consider, though not necessarily adopt, less costly weapon systems rather than always planning for changes of greater technological complexity.
The other recurring problem is the avoidance of military service by privileged youth during peacetime and combat duty during wars. This in turn disconnects the armed forces from civilian elites, a state of affairs Van Aller sees as an increasing gap in the post-Cold War era. In fact, the overemphasis on weapon technology in defense planning leads to an avoidance of dealing with more decisive issues, such as who should serve.
Van Aller casts a wide historical and philosophical net, invoking the insights of Niccolo Machiavelli, Carl von Clausewitz, and Alexis de Tocqueville. He adapts the theories of these political theorists to lay the groundwork for an updated notion of citizenship obligation and civil-military relations. Among modern theorists, the author frequently cites Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, Edward Luttwak, and Martin van Creveld (whose name unfortunately is misspelled in the text). A reference to some of the contemporary iconoclasts such as Ralph Peters or Charles Dunlap could have strengthened Van Aller's presentation.
Van Aller makes a highly original argument that the initial phases of most major American military conflicts are usually hamstrung by the existing military professional leadership, but rescued by outside civilian direction. He convincingly argues that such changes rarely come from within the military establishment itself. One example is how civilian leadership implemented the convoy system over the resistance of the naval leadership in both world wars.
Now more than ever, it is necessary to redesign forces for the threats of the contemporary post-Cold War period. Since the Cold War ended a decade ago, the Pentagon has built its force structure around the notion that the United States must be able to fight and win two major regional wars almost simultaneously to meet its global national security obligations. That the Defense Department review concluded by Secretary Rumsfeld has now recommended that the two-war scenario be scrapped in favor of a more complex approach buttresses Van Aller's thesis. Noteworthy, this significant change in security premises was a key recommendation of the early 2001 report of the US Commission on National Security/21st Century, headed by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman.
Van Aller makes a strong case for the contemporary relevance of the citizen-soldier concept. He would like to see a reinvigoration of the citizen-soldier, coupled with a solid professional officer corps. He argues for serious consideration of a compulsory form of national service for American youth, including civilian as well as military service. (Full disclosure: your reviewer is cited heavily in this regard.)
The Culture of Defense raises important and troubling questions. Van Aller's answers are persuasive as he attempts to reconcile notions of citizenship obligation with the realities of the post-Cold War era. The author performs an important service in casting a skeptical light on the traditional military profession and its unbridled faith in technology. The publication of this book is exceptionally well-timed.
A Soldier's Duty. By Thomas E. Ricks. New York: Random House, 2001. 320 pages.
Reviewed by Professor Martin L. Cook, Elihu Root Professor of Military Studies and Professor of Ethics, US Army War College.
Much has been said and written in recent years about the state of civil-military relations and subordination of the US military to civilian leadership. Certainly the tension between the values of the officer corps and the civilian leadership has, in recent years, been marked and great. Contributing significantly to that discussion was Thomas Ricks' earlier nonfiction work, Making the Corps, and his many well-informed articles on military affairs in The Wall Street Journal and, in more recent years, The Washington Post.
In this novel, the author takes full advantage of the liberties fiction allows to explore the attitudes of some Army officers in particular on this subject. The novel's premise is that the President orders a deployment of ill-prepared forces on a humanitarian mission against the weight of professional military advice. Email begins to fly from untraceable addresses criticizing the deployment and, increasingly, advocating public expressions of dissent by uniformed officers, culminating in direct action to sabotage the deployment itself.
A thoroughly engaging mystery story unfolds as investigations are undertaken to determine the source of the emails and sabotage. The details of the plot would, of course, ruin the mystery for the reader. But the narrative vehicle gives Mr. Ricks ample opportunity to introduce extensive dialog among his characters on questions of the nature and scope of "a soldier's duty"--to the Constitution, to elected political leaders engaged in (from the military perspective) ill-advised action, to military superiors and subordinates, and finally to the Army. The author claims that much of this dialog is not his own creation, but plucked verbatim from emails he has received or had forwarded to him from serving officers. Indeed, they have the ring of reality.
The novel is effective as fiction, but it aims at more than engaging pastime reading. Mr. Ricks' real purpose is to raise pointedly the questions of ethical obligation and professionalism of an officer corps frustrated with taskings it often questions, if not outright rejects. Without the defining threat of the Cold War, the author perceives a military separated from and, to some degree, alienated from the American society it is pledged to serve. Mr. Ricks illustrates effectively the human tensions of obedient service to civilian leaders whose judgment some officers distrust, when those leaders send them on missions whose purposes are murky, in an atmosphere of casualty aversion and political management of the military aspects of the deployment.
The author's portrayal of senior Army officers is in many respects unflattering and, in the case of one officer and his subordinates, literally criminal. But he also shows good officers struggling with the ambiguities of strategic-level leadership, trying to triangulate their way through the complex pressures of supporting administration policies which, in private, they have opposed. He shows the challenges to their integrity in keeping their pledges to give their honest personal opinions to Congress when required, and yet not appearing to lobby for policies opposed to the President's. All of that, of course, is framed in light of their passion to protect and defend their service, and their pain in placing soldiers on deployments where their worst fears come true and ill-trained troops take casualties on missions they opposed in the first place.
A Soldier's Duty is bound to be a controversial and challenging read for any thoughtful military officer. One might well dissent from the picture painted of the state of civil-military relations as too bleak, too polarized. But one would have to look far for a novel that touches so deftly on the complexities and challenges of leadership of military organizations at the highest levels. However one reacts to the choices of these particular characters, reflection on the environment in which they strive to serve the nation, the Army, and their soldiers is a vitally important intellectual exercise. I know of no other work of fiction that forces the complexity of those questions so clearly on the reader.
Reviewed by Professor Martin L. Cook, Elihu Root Professor of Military Studies and Professor of Ethics, US Army War College.
Much has been said and written in recent years about the state of civil-military relations and subordination of the US military to civilian leadership. Certainly the tension between the values of the officer corps and the civilian leadership has, in recent years, been marked and great. Contributing significantly to that discussion was Thomas Ricks' earlier nonfiction work, Making the Corps, and his many well-informed articles on military affairs in The Wall Street Journal and, in more recent years, The Washington Post.
In this novel, the author takes full advantage of the liberties fiction allows to explore the attitudes of some Army officers in particular on this subject. The novel's premise is that the President orders a deployment of ill-prepared forces on a humanitarian mission against the weight of professional military advice. Email begins to fly from untraceable addresses criticizing the deployment and, increasingly, advocating public expressions of dissent by uniformed officers, culminating in direct action to sabotage the deployment itself.
A thoroughly engaging mystery story unfolds as investigations are undertaken to determine the source of the emails and sabotage. The details of the plot would, of course, ruin the mystery for the reader. But the narrative vehicle gives Mr. Ricks ample opportunity to introduce extensive dialog among his characters on questions of the nature and scope of "a soldier's duty"--to the Constitution, to elected political leaders engaged in (from the military perspective) ill-advised action, to military superiors and subordinates, and finally to the Army. The author claims that much of this dialog is not his own creation, but plucked verbatim from emails he has received or had forwarded to him from serving officers. Indeed, they have the ring of reality.
The novel is effective as fiction, but it aims at more than engaging pastime reading. Mr. Ricks' real purpose is to raise pointedly the questions of ethical obligation and professionalism of an officer corps frustrated with taskings it often questions, if not outright rejects. Without the defining threat of the Cold War, the author perceives a military separated from and, to some degree, alienated from the American society it is pledged to serve. Mr. Ricks illustrates effectively the human tensions of obedient service to civilian leaders whose judgment some officers distrust, when those leaders send them on missions whose purposes are murky, in an atmosphere of casualty aversion and political management of the military aspects of the deployment.
The author's portrayal of senior Army officers is in many respects unflattering and, in the case of one officer and his subordinates, literally criminal. But he also shows good officers struggling with the ambiguities of strategic-level leadership, trying to triangulate their way through the complex pressures of supporting administration policies which, in private, they have opposed. He shows the challenges to their integrity in keeping their pledges to give their honest personal opinions to Congress when required, and yet not appearing to lobby for policies opposed to the President's. All of that, of course, is framed in light of their passion to protect and defend their service, and their pain in placing soldiers on deployments where their worst fears come true and ill-trained troops take casualties on missions they opposed in the first place.
A Soldier's Duty is bound to be a controversial and challenging read for any thoughtful military officer. One might well dissent from the picture painted of the state of civil-military relations as too bleak, too polarized. But one would have to look far for a novel that touches so deftly on the complexities and challenges of leadership of military organizations at the highest levels. However one reacts to the choices of these particular characters, reflection on the environment in which they strive to serve the nation, the Army, and their soldiers is a vitally important intellectual exercise. I know of no other work of fiction that forces the complexity of those questions so clearly on the reader.
Thomas Bender. A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. xii + 368 pp. Bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-8090-7235-4.
Reviewed for H-Amstdy by James Gilbert, Department of History, University of Maryland
Context Matters
Thomas Bender, an accomplished and versatile historian at New York University, has undertaken a synthetic narrative of American history from a global perspective. By some measures, this might seem an impossible or contradictory task because it entails dissolving the solitary, progressive, and self-aggrandizing story of discovery,settlement, nation building, and international hegemony in favor of an
international point of view from which the nation itself seems less in focus than the interplay of larger forces shaping development, economic change, competition among empires, and so on. Unlike modernization theory with its depiction of inevitability and a more or less singular model of success, this bird's-eye view of the nation links it to larger developments and thus forces frequent comparisons. Building a narrative out of the process of interchange and broad-scale trends is a difficult task. The point--and I think it is Bender's central one--is that national history is not lost in the process so much as it appears very different. To sacrifice the ultimate centrality of the national narrative in the modern world would, in a curious sense, diminish what is really new in this account.
Bender's strategy is to segment U.S. history into five broad sections, discussed within a general chronological framework. These sections depict (in my own words) 1) beginnings, 2) the American Revolution, 3) concepts of freedom, 4) the self-denying American Empire, and 5) social freedom and the welfare state. Within these rubrics, Bender describes ways in which the United States is part of a shifting constellation of nations and regions, which interact to form new shapes and meanings. Indeed, what is most striking in this work is the ability of the author to discover the very broad connections among all of these subjects between what occurs in the United States and elsewhere. And the elsewhere is not just confined to Western Europe (England, Germany, and France), even if these nations loom particularly large in our history.
One of the two most successful chapters (although the others are also quite good) discusses the problem of freedom and slavery in the United States. Bender is quite right to see anti-slavery as an international development and convincing in his discussion, for example, of the centrality of the Haitian Revolution to the century that eventually liberated slaves. Beyond this, I was particularly struck by his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln, not just as an emancipator, but also as a subtle and thoughtful proponent of liberal nationalism and a major influence on European thinkers. Placed within the continuum of antislavery movements worldwide, the United States looks both different from but similar to other nations engaged in breaking the shackles of bondage. Perhaps we have heretofore thought so much about slavery as a uniquely American dilemma that we have lost sight of its ubiquity in the world as well as the general movement of abolition in which the nation participated.
The other chapter that most clearly demonstrates the importance of an international perspective describes the evolution of the American empire. In some respects, this revision follows the lead of historian William Appleman Williams who developed the notion of an American informal empire, growing out of nineteenth-century "Manifest Destiny," aggressive protection of free trade and open markets, and finally, into direct confrontation with the old empires of Europe in the twentieth century.[1] Bender's view is slightly different, emphasizing the very long history of American engagement with European Empires—the successful American Revolution was, after all, partly a consequence of the enmity of France and Britain. As Bender concludes: the "American way of empire was even presented as anti-imperialism because it guaranteed openness, in contrast to the exclusivity of the old empires" (p. 233). This statement is an important argument because it links the visionary perspectives of Thomas Jefferson, for example, to the much later engagement of the United States with European colonial empires. It also illustrates an essential point, which is the moral center of the work. It is Bender's contention that "American Exceptionalism," the notion that the peculiar circumstances of American history exempted the United States from many of the struggles and brutalities of Europe, is not only a misjudgment, but that, in a curious way, any inward-looking national narrative almost inevitably reproduces this exceptionalist story. This is not to deny difference, but rather to contextualize it within a larger framework to see connections and similarities as well as the simultaneous engagement of ideas and the play of related forces. As a thoughtful summation of research in areas like the transatlantic exchange of social welfare reform ideas, the African Diaspora, European expansion, and comparative studies of empire, this is a fine, even innovative work.
While it touches on many subjects, it remains a suggestive, rather than a comprehensive work. Bender might, for example, have chosen to emphasize questions of women's equality. Or he might have concentrated on science and technology, or perhaps, ecology. Given the cyclical predominance of first liberal and then conservative notions of the state, he might have emphasized the latter. Finally, it seems to me that a chapter on religions, their interactions with state and society, would be a very important story to follow. This list, which can certainly be extended, suggests the real limitations, or rather, the enormity of the task of rethinking American history from an international perspective. Bender has accomplished a great deal. He is convincing in his argument that the United States is not unique, but just different in the way that other nations also differ from each other. This is, however, much more than a shift in nuance. It makes all the difference in the world to see the United States as a nation among nations.
Note
[1]. William Appleman Williams, _The Tragedy of American Diplomacy_, 2nd ed. (New York: Dell, 1972).
Reviewed for H-Amstdy by James Gilbert, Department of History, University of Maryland
Context Matters
Thomas Bender, an accomplished and versatile historian at New York University, has undertaken a synthetic narrative of American history from a global perspective. By some measures, this might seem an impossible or contradictory task because it entails dissolving the solitary, progressive, and self-aggrandizing story of discovery,settlement, nation building, and international hegemony in favor of an
international point of view from which the nation itself seems less in focus than the interplay of larger forces shaping development, economic change, competition among empires, and so on. Unlike modernization theory with its depiction of inevitability and a more or less singular model of success, this bird's-eye view of the nation links it to larger developments and thus forces frequent comparisons. Building a narrative out of the process of interchange and broad-scale trends is a difficult task. The point--and I think it is Bender's central one--is that national history is not lost in the process so much as it appears very different. To sacrifice the ultimate centrality of the national narrative in the modern world would, in a curious sense, diminish what is really new in this account.
Bender's strategy is to segment U.S. history into five broad sections, discussed within a general chronological framework. These sections depict (in my own words) 1) beginnings, 2) the American Revolution, 3) concepts of freedom, 4) the self-denying American Empire, and 5) social freedom and the welfare state. Within these rubrics, Bender describes ways in which the United States is part of a shifting constellation of nations and regions, which interact to form new shapes and meanings. Indeed, what is most striking in this work is the ability of the author to discover the very broad connections among all of these subjects between what occurs in the United States and elsewhere. And the elsewhere is not just confined to Western Europe (England, Germany, and France), even if these nations loom particularly large in our history.
One of the two most successful chapters (although the others are also quite good) discusses the problem of freedom and slavery in the United States. Bender is quite right to see anti-slavery as an international development and convincing in his discussion, for example, of the centrality of the Haitian Revolution to the century that eventually liberated slaves. Beyond this, I was particularly struck by his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln, not just as an emancipator, but also as a subtle and thoughtful proponent of liberal nationalism and a major influence on European thinkers. Placed within the continuum of antislavery movements worldwide, the United States looks both different from but similar to other nations engaged in breaking the shackles of bondage. Perhaps we have heretofore thought so much about slavery as a uniquely American dilemma that we have lost sight of its ubiquity in the world as well as the general movement of abolition in which the nation participated.
The other chapter that most clearly demonstrates the importance of an international perspective describes the evolution of the American empire. In some respects, this revision follows the lead of historian William Appleman Williams who developed the notion of an American informal empire, growing out of nineteenth-century "Manifest Destiny," aggressive protection of free trade and open markets, and finally, into direct confrontation with the old empires of Europe in the twentieth century.[1] Bender's view is slightly different, emphasizing the very long history of American engagement with European Empires—the successful American Revolution was, after all, partly a consequence of the enmity of France and Britain. As Bender concludes: the "American way of empire was even presented as anti-imperialism because it guaranteed openness, in contrast to the exclusivity of the old empires" (p. 233). This statement is an important argument because it links the visionary perspectives of Thomas Jefferson, for example, to the much later engagement of the United States with European colonial empires. It also illustrates an essential point, which is the moral center of the work. It is Bender's contention that "American Exceptionalism," the notion that the peculiar circumstances of American history exempted the United States from many of the struggles and brutalities of Europe, is not only a misjudgment, but that, in a curious way, any inward-looking national narrative almost inevitably reproduces this exceptionalist story. This is not to deny difference, but rather to contextualize it within a larger framework to see connections and similarities as well as the simultaneous engagement of ideas and the play of related forces. As a thoughtful summation of research in areas like the transatlantic exchange of social welfare reform ideas, the African Diaspora, European expansion, and comparative studies of empire, this is a fine, even innovative work.
While it touches on many subjects, it remains a suggestive, rather than a comprehensive work. Bender might, for example, have chosen to emphasize questions of women's equality. Or he might have concentrated on science and technology, or perhaps, ecology. Given the cyclical predominance of first liberal and then conservative notions of the state, he might have emphasized the latter. Finally, it seems to me that a chapter on religions, their interactions with state and society, would be a very important story to follow. This list, which can certainly be extended, suggests the real limitations, or rather, the enormity of the task of rethinking American history from an international perspective. Bender has accomplished a great deal. He is convincing in his argument that the United States is not unique, but just different in the way that other nations also differ from each other. This is, however, much more than a shift in nuance. It makes all the difference in the world to see the United States as a nation among nations.
Note
[1]. William Appleman Williams, _The Tragedy of American Diplomacy_, 2nd ed. (New York: Dell, 1972).
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