the french library

John Nagl. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xxix + 249 pp, ISBN 978-0-226-56770-9.

Reviewed by Anthony J. Joes (Department of Political Science, Saint Joseph's University)


Leave It to the Marines?

Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, Military Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, possesses very impressive credentials. A graduate of West Point, where he later taught national security studies, a Rhodes Scholar, and an Oxford DPhil in International Relations, he led a tank platoon in Operation Desert Storm, and served as an operations officer in Iraq in 2003-2004.

This book evolved from his doctoral thesis; the title is a quotation from Lawrence of Arabia. In it, LTC Nagl considers the question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts for which they have not been prepared; or more bluntly, why the American Army had such a hard time in Vietnam. Army Chief of Staff Peter J. Schoomaker liked the book so much that he ordered copies for every four-star general and contributed a foreword to the second edition.

Nagl compares two case studies: the experiences of the British Army in the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) and the American Army in the Vietnam conflict (1961-1975). The book consists of four parts: a setting-the-stage discussion, followed by separate examinations of Malaya and Vietnam, and a concluding "lessons" section.

Nagl relies heavily on concepts from the field of organization theory, declaring that "the primary argument of [this] book is that the better performance of the British Army in learning and implementing a successful counterinsurgency doctrine in Malaya (as compared to the American Army's failure to learn and implement successful counterinsurgency doctrine in Vietnam) is best explained by the differing organizational cultures of the two armies; in short, that the British Army was a learning institution and the American Army was not" (p. xxii). "Organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from unanticipated conditions, a variable which explains why the British Army successfully conducted counterinsurgency in Malaya but why the American Army failed to do so in Vietnam" (from the book cover). The American Army's dedication to conventional war-fighting--to the destruction of the opponent--prevented it from arriving at, or even looking for, the correct formula for defeating the insurgency in South Vietnam.

Although the book has been widely praised, it raises some concerns. Consider first the use of a single case from which grand conclusions are drawn. Nagl does not remind his readers that not only the United States, but all major military powers of the twentieth century--the British, French, Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Soviets and Russians--have encountered great difficulties in suppressing insurgencies. Consider also that Nagl compares Malaya, widely accepted (perhaps too uncritically) as a textbook example of successful counterinsurgency with Vietnam, usually (and even more uncritically) offered as a textbook example of the opposite type. Nagl is of course aware of the structural problems inherent in his comparison, admitting that "the two conflicts were very different in scale, geography, and level of external support provided to the insurgents" (p. xxv). But that is quite an understatement. The British had very long experience in Malaya. On that peninsula bordered by pro-Western Thailand, they easily prevented outside aid to the insurgents, whom their forces outnumbered 28 to 1, and enjoyed the reflexive support of the Malay half of the population. Nevertheless it required twelve years to suppress the insurgency. In Vietnam, invaded daily by an implacable and well-equipped enemy, the Americans and their allies had a numerical advantage of merely 1.6 to 1, yet they broke the guerrillas in three years (a fact which the chattering classes have never grasped). Indeed, the Tet Offensive stemmed from the Viet Cong's inability to sustain their enormous casualties. And under General Creighton Abrams the Americans did in fact generate an effective system of counterinsurgency, which Nagl acknowledges and then dismisses.

But there is much more to the issue than that. Had Nagl compared Vietnam to British counterinsurgency in Palestine or Cyprus or Aden or Northern Ireland, the British Army would not have emerged looking quite so good nor the Americans quite so inept. Recall that in Northern Ireland, the British Army was operating in an English-speaking province no bigger than Connecticut and with one-third its population, where it enjoyed proximity to its bases, an overwhelming numerical ratio to the guerrillas, and the support of the great majority of the civilian population. Still, it took well over twenty years to bring the IRA in Northern Ireland to heel. And, Nagl notes correctly that despite its century of experience in small wars, between 1948 and 1951 "it is difficult to argue that the British Army [in Malaya] developed a successful counterinsurgency doctrine" (p. 78). In contrast, from 1965 to 1968 the American Army reduced the Viet Cong from a menace to a nuisance. Since, moreover, as Nagl suggests, the British Army's supposed culture of adaptability derived from the larger national culture, he seems close to blaming American soldiers for not being British.

Was the alleged gross American failure in Vietnam (a position that requires one to ignore the very effective changes under General Creighton Abrams) entirely or even mainly due to the Army's "inability to learn"? Recall that during the Vietnam conflict, the United States and its allies were confronted by overwhelming Soviet power in Europe; conventional strength, not small-war prowess, was going to determine the fate of the West. Moreover, the British did not have to contend with any Ho Chi Minh Trail, which the politicians in Washington forbade the Army to close, the key decision of the entire Vietnam conflict, and the one from which almost all the lamentable experiences of the Americans there flowed. Nor did the British face the North Vietnamese regular Army (at the time one of the very best in all Asia), whose increasing involvement in the war infinitely complicated the U.S. counterinsurgency task. Above all, does the American Army's drive to "get the war over with" not reflect the notorious impatience of a large element of the American people, impatience stoked by news media eager for the latest photogenic outrage? According to Nagl, "television was almost unknown during the Malayan campaign" (p. 94). Thus the British Army in Malaya could not be hounded by anything like the omnipresent and increasingly adversarial U.S. media, whose grotesquely incompetent reporting of the 1968 Tet Offensive went far to turn American opinion against the war. What if television had been absent from South Vietnam? Conversely, would it have been possible, with our contemporary media, to win through to victory in World War II, if the casualties of the first few days of Normandy had been trumpeted? Would the Battle of the Bulge have been presented as evidence that Roosevelt and Marshall had been lying about Germany's imminent defeat? How would today's television networks have presented the staggering losses to kamikaze attacks at Okinawa?

Toward the end of his book, Nagl concedes that "the very attributes that allowed the British Army to respond to the demands of counterinsurgency in Malaya--decentralization, minimal use of firepower, independent and innovative theater commanders--made it a less effective learning organization on the conventional battlegrounds of World War II" (p. 219). From this he concludes that "the demands of conventional and unconventional warfare differ so greatly that an organization optimized to succeed in one will have great difficulty in fighting the other" (p. 219). Does this mean that improving the American Army's admittedly inadequate approach to counterinsurgency will reduce its ability to fight conventional war? If yes, is that a good idea? The American Army was organized and trained first to defeat the Axis and then to deter the Soviets. It accomplished both tasks well. Had it failed at only one of those tasks, nobody today would be discussing either Vietnam or Iraq. Clearly this question deserves wide and thoughtful discussion.

Better than an either/or approach to the problem, as Nagl himself suggested in another venue, might be for the Army to assume responsibility for "clearing" a territory of conventional hostile forces and turning over responsibility for "holding" that territory--fighting guerrillas--to local or regional forces. Or might it be best to leave counterinsurgency mainly to the Marines?

All these difficulties aside, John Nagl has produced a book that is vigorously written, accessible to non-specialists, grounded in original research including primary sources and personal interviews, and animated by the passion of a highly talented and deeply dedicated professional officer. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife will reverberate in national security circles for a long time.
 
Jon Lee Anderson. The Fall of Baghdad. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. viii + 375 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-303585-5.

Reviewed by Wm. Shane Story (U.S. Army Center of Military History)


An Iraqi Tragedy

Like a greyhound chasing a mechanical hare, Jon Anderson has raced after America's war on terror without catching his prey. Nevertheless, the race has made a good story. A veteran foreign correspondent, Anderson returned to old haunts in Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11 to report on the fall of the Taliban. A year later, Anderson published The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan(2002), but the world's attention suddenly shifted to Iraq and Anderson continued the chase. The Fall of Baghdad is Anderson's travelogue of the next twenty-one months, from Saddam's referendum and prisoner amnesty in October 2002 to Ambassador Paul Bremer's self-congratulatory departure from Baghdad in June 2004. Anderson's writing emphasizes details, colors, and the ambience of the places he visits and the facial expressions of the people he meets and cultivates as sources. For background material, Anderson jumbles years and events--1958, 1920, 1979, an assassination, a coup--suggesting hidden meanings in such anachronisms. Anderson sees contradictions everywhere, and he dresses them up as riddles. Offering intrigue at the expense of analysis or answers, Anderson's riddles bear only a patina of wisdom.

Developing portraits of a few Iraqis to give his story depth, Anderson emphasizes the experiences of Dr. Ala Bashir, Saddam Hussein's doctor, favorite artist, and confidant. Bashir saw Hussein as a ruthless survivor, and his system of survival depended on tyranny. Tyranny, Bashir thought, was a virtual prerequisite for governing Iraq, so even its mass killings--or killings of the masses were not beyond the pale, because they were necessary to sustain the state. On the other hand, Bashir damned the regime he served for its unmitigated corruption, for "dictatorship, for murder, for torture and bloodshed" (p. 70). The system culminated in Saddam's despotic son Uday, a psychopath, serial rapist, thief, and murderer who transformed tyranny into recreation and "humiliated many Iraqis, many officials" (p. 292). Bashir believed such corruption sealed the regime's fate; someone had to overthrow Saddam.

Bashir admired western democracies and thought that life was worthless in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and communist China, and yet "no place was crueler than Iraq" (p. 71). Although Bashir prospered because Saddam survived, he held America responsible for Iraq's fate. Just as the United States kept Castro in power in Cuba, Bashir thought, the United States kept Saddam in power for its own purposes. Most Iraqis must have shared Bashir's impression of America's virtual omnipotence, because when the Americans came, resistance seemed pointless and the regime collapsed. Bashir claimed vindication; "I was expecting this" (p. 291).

The regime's swift collapse hardly seemed predictable in the midst of the invasion. The bombing campaign, which General Franks had billed as "shock and awe," was impressive in its scale and precision, but it failed to topple the regime. Once American forces reached Baghdad, however, panic set in and civilians fled. When Iraqi soldiers declined to fight, the government fell and disorder spread. Initial encounters between American forces and Iraqis tended toward friendly amusement in an atmosphere of liberation. Disorder grew, however, as looting escalated into mob frenzies. With the situation out of control, American forces began stopping traffic, erecting barriers, implementing curfews and detaining hundreds of suspects. Anderson left Iraq in late April 2003, when the Americans seemed to be re-establishing authority and laying the groundwork for a transitional Iraqi government.

Weeks of instability, however, kept Iraq in the headlines, and Anderson returned to Baghdad in the latter half of June 2003. An American official warned Anderson that Iraq was a mess and very dangerous, especially around the western towns of Ar Ramadi and Al Fallujah. The American enterprise, the official thought, gave every sign of failing. In Baghdad, Anderson found Bashir full of complaints about the Americans. Americans gave the impression of listening and caring about Iraqis' welfare, Bashir said, but they did not deliver on their promises. Moreover, tribal chiefs complained that the Americans dissembled about their intentions and had failed "to put things right"(p. 319). Anderson's visit to an American unit in Fallujah confirmed his worst fears about the American forces' inability to comprehend or deal with Iraqis. The troops were lost, and the chain of command was in denial. An American battalion commander, whom Anderson described as enthusiastic, stated, "Fallujah is a success story" (p. 328). Anderson's tour of Fallujah with an armored patrol indicated otherwise. At one point, Anderson witnessed an unwinnable testosterone-driven clash between a Fallujah shopkeeper and an American soldier, a "psy ops officer, a beefy man in his thirties" (p. 331). The American, who presumably thought his pierced tongue was an expression of stylish independence, found it brought only insults and ridicule from the Iraqis. Fear and respect were long gone, and laughing young Fallujans toyed with the Americans as a prelude to attacking them.

Month by month the situation deteriorated. Iraqis demanded solutions and respect from the Americans, but denounced and assassinated other Iraqis for working with occupiers. American actions seemed clumsy and inept, whether it was cracking down or backing off, all of it culminating in the stillborn Marine assault on Fallujah in April 2004. The first pictures of Abu Ghraib torture surfaced, followed by jihadists sawing off Nicholas Berg's head. Finally, Paul Bremer turned sovereignty back over to the Iraqis on June 28, 2004 and returned to Washington, satisfied that he had left Iraq better than he found it.

Anderson's style imposed its own limitations on his work. Long before the invasion, Anderson cultivated relationships with Iraqis approved by the regime--his driver, his "minder" from the Ministry of Information, and ranking regime insiders like Saddam's doctor--to provide personalities and depth for his stories. Anderson tracked these same individuals' lives after Saddam's fall. Anderson's regime-connected contacts accepted Saddam's demise as necessary, but they were stunned to see their own fortunes melt away as well. Theirs is the tragic story that Anderson relates, and not that of the Kurds or Shiites whose torture was Saddam and whose freedom was anything but Saddam.

As Anderson closed his work in 2004, he saw great risks in Iraq, both of a nationwide jihad against the Americans and of an Iraqi-on-Iraqi civil war. The Fall of Baghdad illuminates some of the prejudices and conflicts that energized the strife. Those insights make Anderson's work a worthwhile read, with the caveat that readers should not expect a developed or documented consideration of the failed defense of Baghdad or any comprehension of American military operations. Since Anderson offers no analysis, the wait continues for a capable study of the American war and the Iraqi crisis.
 
Luc Capdevila, Danièle Voldman, eds. War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War. Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press, 2006. xix + 200 pp., ISBN 978-0-7486-2297-9, ISBN 978-0-7486-2298-6.

Reviewed by Monica Black (Furman University) Published on H-German (January, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

A "Western" Way of War Death?

War death, both among soldiers and civilians, and its social impact, have recently been topics of interest to historians across a variety of fields, writing on subjects as disparate as Civil War America, the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Germany, and post-1945 Europe.[1] The history of death--including the procedures of burial; how the living interact with the dead and imagine death and afterlife; and the evolving material culture surrounding the commemoration of the departed--is perhaps as old as humanity. As Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman suggest, however, certain historical developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--including the rise of nationalism; racially inspired war and genocide; industrial methods of warfare; aerial bombing; the obscuring of demarcations between home and fighting fronts; mass civilian death in war; and the use and threat of nuclear weapons--have dramatically altered how war death is perceived and memorialized, and have produced new practices for handling the dead.

Rather than examining shifts in the perceptions and practices surrounding war death arising from any one national context or particular conflict, the authors focus instead on trends they see arising in the West, which they define as including western Europe, South America's Southern Cone, and North America. Within this "shared culture" (p. xv), it is the authors' central contention, experiences of war have "interrupt[ed], temporarily though persistently, the slow process which began during the century of the Enlightenment whereby the dead have been removed from the world of the living" (p. 182). The claim that the living want little to do with the dead in the modern West has its roots in the work of such scholars as Geoffrey Gorer and Philippe Ariès.[2] Both argued in the 1960s and 1970s that western society had become alienated from death and tended to suppress grief. Gorer, in particular, famously claimed that, among Britons in the 1960s, death had become so taboo as to be practically a new form of pornography.

With this conceptual framework in mind, Capdevila and Voldman set out to demonstrate how, in point of fact, violent conflict in the twentieth century has continually and inescapably forced the living and the dead together in a variety of ways. The blurring of distinctions between civilian and soldier, coupled with industrial methods of warfare, has produced unprecedented numbers of deaths; yet, the sensibilities of the twentieth century have tended to militate against the use of communal graves (commonplace until the American Civil War in the United States and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe). The living must thus seek carefully to locate and identify the remains of the dead and then to inter them individually, a massive undertaking under the best circumstances. New tools (such as dog tags) have been adopted to facilitate these processes. International legal norms have been developed for the treatment of "enemy" dead, although these norms have not infrequently been honored more in the breach than in the observance, as soldiers and civilians alike engaged in desecrating corpses or hiding the bodies of the dead to prolong the suffering of their enemies. While the vicissitudes of war have sometimes made preserving traditional ritual practices surrounding death impossible, societies have attempted nonetheless to maintain them, even in the heat of battle and as bombs rained down. Lastly, private and governmental associations to foster the remembrance of the war dead of individual nations have emerged; they bring communities together on key holidays to commune with the dead in national cemeteries and other sites of collective memorialization.

The authors' observations and the topics they choose to explore are fascinating and certainly raise many interesting points for discussion. Yet the framework imposed on their study by the assumption that there is an identifiably "western" way of death, that can be generally applied over a great span of time and to many, rather distinctive, cultures, presents some analytical problems. The authors contend, for example, that "the glorification of war has been undermined by the horror of death" (p. 18). One is not sure what to make of this statement in the context of the contemporary United States. Whether or not horror is necessarily associated with war death (itself an arguable point), it would be difficult to maintain that war has lost its glorifying aspects for contemporary U.S. Americans.

The study's generalizing tendencies also result in a lack of differentiation between types of violence, the ideologies that have inspired it, and the ensuing social impact of the deaths associated with that violence. _War Dead_ includes in its analysis the world wars, colonialist warfare, state-sponsored violence against domestic political enemies (as in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s), the Holocaust, the American Civil War, and other instances of violence. Yet, the vastly different motivations and justification behind each of these events, in the many societies affected by them, certainly have a role to play in how the deaths associated with them have been and are today viewed. To offer but one example: the notion of sacrificial death and of soldiers' blood "consecrating" the ground where the dead fell--ideas with real currency in Nazi Germany--might in some ways be fruitfully linked across cultures; after all, they are identifiably Christian in motif and origin. But in Nazi Germany, those ideas were used not only to justify but to sanctify mass murder, and that sets them apart from similar ideas that emerged in other places and times. Attending to such differences is important if the history of death has a larger story to tell about the evolving symbolic life of various groups of people; about the construction of their moral, cultural, and social norms; and if it can be used to show us how ideology informs and reshapes the practices of everyday life. In a similar vein, it is difficult to see how can we usefully compare responses to death among the French, Germans, British, and
Americans in World War II (which the parameters of the authors' analysis would seem to suggest that we can), given the strikingly different conflicts each of those societies saw themselves involved in, to say nothing of their dramatically different experiences during the war and the widely divergent outcomes each faced after May 1945.

Notes

[1]. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008); Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Catherine Merridale, _Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia_ (New York: Viking, 2001); Alon Confino, Paul Betts, and Dirk Schumann, eds., Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2008); Monica Black, "The Meaning of Death and the Making of Three Berlins: A History, 1933-1961" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2006); and Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a
Cultural and Social History of Europe_ _during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[2]. Geoffrey Gorer, _Death, Grief, and Mourning_ (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1965); and Philippe Ariès, _The Hour of Our Death_ (New York: Vintage, 1981). Citation: Black. Review of Capdevila, Luc; Voldman, Danièle; eds., _War Dead: Western Societies and the Casualties of War.
 
A. J. Birtle. U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976. Washington, D.C. Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 2006. xv + 570 pp. ISBN 978-0-16-072959-1; $52.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-16-072960-7.

Reviewed by Joseph Babb (U.S. Army Command and General Staff College)
Published on H-War (January, 2009)
Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine

Counterinsurgency and Stability Doctrine Déjà vu

Anyone who wants to understand the background of how the U.S. Army adapted its doctrine to better conduct operations in Iraq and Afghanistan should read this book. Not only will the reader learn about counterinsurgency theory and doctrinal development from the Second World War through the end of the Vietnam conflict, they will gain a broad, yet nuanced, understanding of this complex and dynamic form of warfare, and how it was, and is being, fought. This book is an outstanding follow-on to A.J. Birtle's _U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1860-1941 published in 2003. Both of these volumes are part of the curriculum at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

Between 1942 and 1975, occupation duty and military government; dealing with Wars of National Liberation; understanding Mao's People's War methodology; and fighting numerous low intensity conflicts dominated military operations for the U.S. Army. Although the nuclear arms race, the Korean War, and the conventional force standoff in Europe are the more often studied Cold War events, counterinsurgency and contingency operations are more representative of what the military actually did during this period. Birtle, very successfully and very clearly, explains how the army adapted to and met the nation's need to conduct counterinsurgency and limited peacetime contingency operations. Readers will find themselves frustrated as they learn of a bureaucracy fighting necessary change, but also hopeful as they read of the people and processes that designed and implemented systematic change in a very large and diverse organization.

After an excellent stage-setting introduction the book is arranged chronologically. Birtle then describes the operations conducted during a specific period, assesses lessons learned or observed, and discusses how new doctrine was either written or adapted as the conflicts and missions progressed. Chapters 2 through 4 look at four advisory efforts (China, Greece, the Philippines, and Indochina) and at counterguerrilla operations in Korea to offer an analysis of the state of army doctrine on the eve of the Vietnam period. Chapter 5 highlights contingency operations and Cold War era interventions in Lebanon, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic. In perhaps the most interesting and enlightening chapter in the book, chapter 6 ("The Counterinsurgency Ferment, 1961-65"), Birtle paints a picture of an army in turmoil, trying to come to grips with a form of conflict it was not trained, organized, or prepared to fight on the scale demanded by the national leadership. This period is also highlighted in chapter 1 ("Brushfires on a Cold Dawn") and chapter 2 ("The Revolution That Failed") in Andrew Krepinevich's book, The Army in Vietnam (1986).

It is not hard to make comparisons of this period with the army's struggle to develop counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine for the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan after the successful initial operations. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum 131, directing counterinsurgency education and training for the appropriate government agencies. Similarly, President George W. Bush issued National Security Presidential Directive 44 in December of 2005, directing very similar tasks and actions. Then, as now, both the army and the nation struggled to provide a comprehensive and consistent civilian-military approach to these complex political-military operations. Chapter 7, which looks at the military advisory efforts in Latin America and Asia from 1955-75, is also extremely relevant to ongoing operations. In June 2008, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (in his National Defense Strategy document) discussed the critical importance of training and advising host nation military forces. The military is reconsidering doctrine, education, and training for U.S. forces as U.S. military advisors on various transition teams, deployed with both Iraqi and Afghani security forces, are taking on a more significant role.

The last three chapters delve into the Vietnam conflict, and how doctrine was written, applied, revised, and reapplied; they also examine changes that were made in training and educating the Army. Birtle rightly highlights the critical role played by the Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson, who from 1964 to1967, personally directed the research, writing, and updating of counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine to insure a workable and consistent approach to this type of warfare. Once again, the comparisons to recent efforts to update and write new doctrine stand out. Linda Robinson's recently published book _Tell Me How This Ends: General Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq_ (2008) details David H. Petraeus's leading role. While General Petraeus commanded Fort Leavenworth--home of the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Center, and its Command and General Staff College--the army publishedField Manual 3-24 Counterinsurgency Operations (December 2006), arguably the first comprehensive counterinsurgency manual since the Vietnam War era. In addition, the army recently published Field Manual 3-07 Stability Operations (October 2008), updating a manual first published under General Johnson's guidance in 1967.

In his final chapter, The Counterinsurgency Legacy" Birtle concludes with the insight that the core of Army counterinsurgency and stability operations doctrine, although "revised and refined," was "essentially unchanged" (p. 468). Looking at the long sweep of counterinsurgency and contingency doctrinal development from 1860 to 1970 detailed in Birtle's two books, we see evolution and revision, but no revolution, in military thought about this complex form of warfare, and the conduct of military operations in such an operational environment. If Birtle writes a third volume covering 1976 to 2008 the conclusion would probably be much the same--adaptation and evolutionary change. If our army has conducted so much of this type of warfare and our doctrine has really changed so little, why do we constantly have to relearn old lessons? Sadly, one has to ask the question: why is it that the army will not study its own history and read its own doctrine? Birtle has provided two excellent and well-documented volumes of history and analysis of counterinsurgency, and contingency doctrine and operations. This second volume, covering the period 1942 to 1975, is a must read for every military officer, student of military history, and citizen concerned about how the military is going to deal with terrorism, insurgency, and failed states in an era of persistent conflict, as well as for all those interested in studying change in large organizations.

Citation: Joseph Babb. Review of Birtle, A. J., U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976. H-War, H-Net Reviews. January, 2009.
 
Alexander Watson. Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918. Cambridge Military History Series. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2008. xv + 288 pp, ISBN 978-0-521-88101-2.

Reviewed by Jesse Kauffman (Stanford University) Published on H-German (May, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Optimism in Hell, or: The Power of Positive Thinking

It is remarkably easy to take for granted the simple fact the First World War went on for as long as it did because every day for four years, millions of ordinary men not only endured unimaginable horrors, terrible tedium, and abysmal living conditions, they also continued amidst all this to do the hard work of soldiering--and, quite often, to do it well. The men in the trenches not only held on to their sanity as the war raged around them, but continued to pick up their rifles and go "over the top," to emerge from their dugouts after having tons of high explosives rained down upon them, and to expose themselves to danger in countless other ways, despite having seen up-close what shrapnel, machine gun rounds, and rifle bullets
could do to the human body.

Alexander Watson did not take these matters for granted. He set out to explore how British and German soldiers withstood the stresses of war and continued to fight on the western front. The result is this prize-winning work. The explanation Watson offers for this remarkable endurance is suitably complex. Deploying British and German archival sources, including combatants' letters, and mustering an impressive mastery of the secondary literature not only on each army, but on combat motivation and military cohesion in general, Watson argues that a complicated variety of factors kept men on both sides going: religious belief, a sense that their cause was just and their side destined for victory, the influence of formal and more subtle, informal coercion, and the leadership of able and concerned junior officers. While much of this has been argued before, Watson gracefully pulls it all together in a seamless synthesis, enlivened by well chosen quotes from his sources, that is all the more impressive for the clarity of Watson's prose. Watson stakes his main claim to innovation on his incorporation of modern-day psychological research. He argues, based on this research and on contemporary wartime accounts, that unrealistic optimism is a natural component of human nature, a component particularly helpful to people dealing with highly stressful situations (like combat). Thus, Watson argues, British and German soldiers not only kept sane, but kept fighting because they believed, despite highly suggestive evidence to the contrary, that they would emerge from the conflict unharmed. This conclusion seems plausible, and is a welcome addition to the literature on morale and motivation.

Also innovative is Watson's resolutely comparative approach, adopted to "avoid the cultural biases which may have crept into some of the existing almost exclusively national historiography" (p. 7). Enduring the Great War both testifies to the great potential of transnational and comparative work on the war and demonstrates the limitations of such an approach. At its finest, Watson's work reveals the shared human experience of the war. For example, he emphasizes that dark soldiers' humor (including the bestowing of silly nicknames on deadly instruments of war) played a role in helping combatants deal with the horrors on both sides of the front line; this point may seem minor, but in fact moves the discussion a long way from the images of German soldiers as Nietzsche-crazed, war-hungry madmen that still tend to surface in Anglophone scholarship on the war. Watson is also emphatic in his insistence that a strong belief in the defensive nature of the war drew men on both sides to the colors when war erupted. His analysis thus rejects the idea that a slavish, mindless obedience to authority led German men to serve, while British men joined the ranks out of a desire to take a principled stand in favor of Belgium. Still, Watson's insistence that cultural and social factors specific to each army were not as important as their shared essential humanity occasionally leads him to minimize some obviously important differences. The question of religion is one instance of this tendency. Watson notes that the German army was more deeply steeped in religious belief than the British. That these convictions had a major effect on combat motivation is strongly suggested by one of Watson's central sources, a questionnaire-based study conducted by a veteran combat officer, Walter Ludwig, who asked soldiers what they thought about in order to overcome their fears in the face of violent death. Religious belief is by far the predominant answer, suggesting that it should play a greater role in any attempt to analyze the morale and combat effectiveness of the German army. In addition, Watson himself admits that the British regimental system and the intense loyalties it could foster heavily influenced how the British army fought. This system had no real counterpart in Germany.

One intriguing, and possibly enormously consequential, difference between the German and British armies that Watson highlights is the differing targets of soldiers' bitterness. On the British side of the trenches, anger at war profiteers rarely escalated into a wholesale indictment of the British political system. In contrast, Watson finds, similar anger in the German ranks quickly escalated into wholesale condemnation of the German social and political order. "We all know," one soldier from Berlin noted in his diary in March 1916, "that we are being sacrificed for the interests of a clique. We fight for the Prussian _Junker_ economy.... This clique has become the ruin of the German people" (pp. 75-76). This information strongly suggests that German soldiers did not feel themselves as tightly bound to the institutions that had ordered them into battle as British soldiers did, a contrast that goes some way towards explaining the phenomenon Watson focuses on in his last chapter, "The German Collapse in 1918." One of the book's strongest, the chapter combines narrative elegance with a clear, well-supported challenge to the reigning historiographical consensus. Watson trains his sights most clearly on Wilhelm Deist and his argument that a "covert strike" by German soldiers brought the war to an end. Watson offers the more plausible argument that exhausted German soldiers gradually but inexorably lost both the will and the ability to fight a war that, at they end, they finally understood they could not win.

Watson further insists that the role of Germany's officers in bringing about the surrender of German troops on the western front in 1918 be made a central part of the story of the end of Germany's war. He is absolutely right; the part played by Germany's officers has been overlooked and needs to be examined. But Watson overextends himself here by arguing that Germany's officers expressly ordered their men to surrender in 1918. Watson bases this claim mainly on the fact that the officer/man ratio of Germans taken prisoner by the British from August to November 1918 was equal to the officer/man ratio of the German field army in July 1918. This data is certainly compelling, but doesn't quite support the argument. Watson shows indisputably that officers did indeed surrender; in addition, he uses contemporary accounts to highlight that officers were often crucial for carrying out the process of surrender. But, as he himself concedes, it is possible that these officers were forced to do so by their men. In any event, Watson has firmly implicated the officer corps in the steady erosion of the German army's effectiveness as a fighting force. We can hope that future research will elaborate on this still fairly mysterious chapter in the history of the German war effort.

This style of argumentation is symptomatic of a recurring flaw in this book; it is highly ambitious and seeks to overturn our understanding of the war on virtually every point it touches on. As a result, sometimes the evidence is asked to support a greater revisionist load than it is really capable of bearing. Still, with its impressive use of archival evidence, its mastery of the relevant secondary literature, and its scrupulously fair-minded treatment of the German army, this book is well worth reading for anyone who seeks a glimpse inside the minds of the men, both British and German, who fought the Great War.

Citation: Jesse Kauffman. Review of Watson, Alexander, _Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918_. . May, 2009.
 
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Gail M. Presbey, ed. Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism". Philosophy of Peace Series. Amsterdam and New York Rodopi, 2007, ISBN 978-90-420-2196-9.

Reviewed by Charles Brown (Emporia State University), Emmer, C. E. (Emporia State University)
Published on H-Peace (March, 2009) Commissioned by Robert A. Jacobs

Philosophers Interrogate the War on Terror

Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism_,_"_ assembled and edited by Gail M. Presbey, a collection of twenty original essays written by members of Concerned Philosophers for Peace, is the tenth in the Philosophy of Peace series from Rodopi's Value Inquiry Books. United in the belief that the current manifestation of the "war on terrorism" is both morally problematic and counterproductive to the pursuit of peace and justice, the authors of these essays offer a sustained and rigorous analysis of the "war on terrorism" in the same manner that philosophers have dissected such concepts as "just war," "domino theory," "collateral damage," "humanitarian intervention," and "just peace." The questions and issues that animate this book range from traditional topics in the ethics of war to questions about globalization, the meaning of democracy, and U.S. hegemony and empire.

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, many in the United States declared even the merest mention of the geopolitical and historical context for the attacks to be strictly taboo. Indeed, a philosophy professor told one of the review authors at the time that bringing up U.S. foreign policy so soon after the attacks was morally wrong. Though that stance has lessened over time, a related approach to shutting down open discussion of the attacks and the U.S. response to those attacks is still popular today, namely, to claim that anyone critical of U.S. foreign (or domestic) policy is promulgating "moral relativism." This charge was forcefully made early on in a tract, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It_, first distributed in November 2001 by Lynne Ann Vincent Cheney and Senator Joseph Isadore ("Joe") Lieberman's American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).[1] The pamphlet provided many quotations from university professors in reference to the attacks of September 11, adding the commentary that "'the message of many in academe was clear: BLAME AMERICA FIRST'"--clearly, the pamphlet went on to say, "'moral relativism has become a staple of academic life in this country'" (pp. 3, 5). Some of the quotations from academics provided in ACTA's pamphlet were indeed extreme, but practically none of them showed any evidence of a basis in moral relativism. Indeed, many of the quotations provided in the tract clearly rested not on moral relativism but instead on the idea that the same moral standard applies to everyone, which is the disavowal of moral relativism. At any rate, if Presbey's collection is any measure of the academic response, then academia is anything but morally relativistic (if anything, the proclivity of the current administration and its apologists to apply an all-but explicit double standard speaks much more of relativism than the opposed demand for context, criticism, and care).

The collection's title, _Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism,"_ raises the question, what is a _philosophical_ response to the "war on terrorism" in the first place? Certainly, a philosopher concerned with promoting peace could write a letter to the editor, take part in an antiwar rally, or donate to assist doctors working in Iraq. But are these specifically philosophical responses? Most would say not. What, then, can the philosopher contribute as a philosopher? On the one hand, the discourse surrounding the "war on terrorism" operates on a shockingly rudimentary level, due in large part to the administration's and the mass media's tendency to frame discussion of the "war on terrorism" in ahistorical "good"/"evil," "us"/"them" terms. With surprising nonchalance, government officials in the United States, for example, regularly refer to their critics not merely as "aiding and abetting the enemy," but as "terrorists."[2] Given this degraded discourse, practically any discussion of the "war on terrorism" and its presumed cause and effect--the attacks of September 11 and the occupation of Iraq--can be markedly improved simply by applying something as basic as the Golden Rule or pointing out the fallacy of false alternatives. On the other hand, precisely because of that concerted framing from above by the U.S. administration and the mass media, the efforts of those willing to contextualize the numerous issues involved are all the more necessary, and philosophers are particularly well equipped to do so.

Granted, philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, in a recent review of philosophers' treatments of William Shakespeare, has expressed the concern that "to make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher's study of Shakespeare should ... really _do_ philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101."[3] (Concerning the "war on terrorism," it would be hard to find a better example of just such a simplistic philosophical mash-up than Roger Scruton's _openDemocracy_ essay, which contended that Immanuel Kant would have approved of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.[4]) But a similar concern with spending too much time in Philosophy 101 can be seen in contributor William C. Gay's remark, at the outset of his second essay, that "if students submitted such highly fallacious work [as the National Security Strategy document] in an entry-level college course that stresses complying with basic principles of critical thinking, they would deserve a failing grade. Unfortunately, political documents, on which hinge the fate of the Earth, do not adhere to the standards of logic; so I will forego [such an undergraduate logic review].
Instead, I will turn to an assessment based on a comparison of the Bush Administration with previous administrations" (p. 132). However much some might equate philosophy with theory for its own sake, the
members of Concerned Philosophers for Peace--judging from the essays in the collection--do not. Consequently, the essays in the volume range from sustained metaethical analyses, such as Edward J. Grippe's argument against a consequentialist "shootdown" policy for civilian passenger planes, to layered arguments that collect empirical evidence and draw connections between normally isolated dots, such as the editor's detailed case against the idea that the occupation of Iraq contributes to a lessening of world terror and the "Terrorism Case Studies" that make up part 4 of the book.

To the extent that the "war on terrorism" is a "new kind of war," the meaning of the "war on terrorism" is still largely undetermined. The authors of the essays in this volume understand that the framework,
justification, meaning, and scope of any new reconceptualization of the nature of warfare must not be left to political and media elites, especially given that these elites are working hard to obscure the issues at hand. The attempt on the part of the George Walker Bush (Bush II) administration to articulate a new war discourse that both describes and justifies this new kind of war must be contested, not only in a democratic progress of political dialogue which is sadly deficient in our contemporary information age, but also by professional philosophers who wish to stress the normative value of peace and justice.

As the collection makes clear, rather than the familiar models of nation-states waging military action against another or regional liberation movements resisting occupation, the "war on terrorism" is a war against a tactic, a war with no clear understanding of what counts as victory, and a perhaps unending conflict which requires that the enemy remain indeterminate. The authors understand that it is imperative that philosophers use their particular skills of conceptual and logical analysis, and their ability to uncover hidden assumptions, contradictions, and double standards to help us understand more clearly what is at stake in this new kind of war.

The issues and themes that animate this book run throughout the collection's sustained critique of the prosecution of the "war on terrorism" and that war's underlying national security strategy. Nonetheless, five basic questions--which correspond very loosely to the collection's main divisions--come to the fore. The first basic question turns on the language and rhetoric surrounding the "war on terrorism." Gay's opening essay begins the task of deconstructing the "official discourse" of the "war on terrorism" and challenging the government's "right of bestowing names" and the mass media's uncritical adoption of this rhetoric (p. 24). Key terms in this official war discourse--"terror," "democracy," "freedom," "WMD" (weapons of mass destruction), "rogue states," etc.--have been subtly defined in narrow (or, sometimes, exceedingly loose) ways that are often disconnected from international consensus or historical precedent. Within this rhetorical regime, concerns about WMD manage to overlook cluster bombs, carpet bombing from B-52s, and ordinance manufactured from depleted uranium; likewise, nations that refuse to be bound by the Geneva conventions do not qualify as rogue states. James Kunkel observes that the designation of terrorism has been limited to armed actions by hostile forces, while Jennifer Eagan argues that key U.S. policy documents reduce democracy and freedom to global markets compliant to U.S. corporate interests. This rhetorical regime constructs a legitimation of militarily enforced conformity conceived in the binary categories of "us vs. them," "freedom or tyranny," and "order or chaos."

Dianna Taylor argues that this war discourse was constructed in the "crisis of meaning" that followed the mass murders of September 11. The shock, fear, anxiety, and terror widely felt could not be properly articulated within the fading categories of international relations shaped by the previous geopolitical period. Policies of massive overkill and mutually assured destruction no longer seemed relevant to military planners or strangely reassuring to an uneasy public. The Bush II administration promptly began to respond to this crisis of meaning by crafting a rhetorical regime to both describe and justify what we now know as the "war on terrorism." The Bush II administration framed the attacks and the subsequent "war on terrorism" with the patriotic sentiments of World War II as a new Pearl Harbor. Saddam Hussein was compared to Adolf Hitler, and, more recently, the now unending occupation of Iraq is being compared to the long-term American military presence in Germany, Japan, and Korea. These essays make clear that such politicized language of war undermines the language of peace--as well as reason, compassion, and sustainability.

The collection's second basic question focuses on the possibility for democracy to act as a kind of remedy for terrorism or an aid to furthering human rights. Central to the rhetoric that defines and legitimates the "war on terrorism" is the claim that "democracy" is an effective remedy for terrorism. While the authors of these essays generally agree that democracy can be an antidote or remedy for terrorism, they typically argue that the current U.S. strategy of promoting and understanding democracy is flawed on several grounds. Peter Amato points out that current U.S. policies tend to empower local elites and foster dependency at the expense of democracy; Eagan argues that the Bush II administration's 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) document, a blueprint for the "war on terrorism," reconceptualizes "democracy" away from the traditional American understanding of democracy as understood in the Declaration of
Independence and the Bill of Rights, i.e., away from the protection of individual rights of liberty and freedom and toward the primacy of unregulated markets. Current U.S. policies of rendition, secret
prisons, and aggressive interrogation techniques widely understood to be torture and contrary to the Geneva convention promote no traditionally understood ideals of democracy; in fact, these policies undercut traditionally understood ideals of democracy as well as international efforts to bolster human rights. Amato suggests that the sort of democracy to best resist terrorism would be a democracy rooted in a citizens' dialogue aimed at understanding the Good, while Eagan suggests a conception of democracy that replaces the primacy of individual self-interest with mutual respect and reciprocity.

The third basic question running through the collection asks, is the Bush II "war on terrorism" justified or effective? Gay's second essay approaches the question by asking whether the "new kind of war" the United States is waging is so new after all. This essay (one of the collection's especially clear texts) presents evidence that the presumably "unprecedented" Bush II preemption doctrine is, in fact,
not a new policy, but rather (as the NSS admits) a long-standing "option of preemptive actions" (p. 132; NSS, p. 15). Indeed, an idea suggested a number of times in the collection is that any novelty in the Bush II doctrine is merely a difference in degree and scope, not kind; it is the old doctrine with less outsourcing and fewer scruples; the passages that seem to contradict this thesis are usually discussing differences in rhetoric and labeling rather than actual changes in policy. Harry van der Linden's essay takes a different tack by asking whether the rule of preemption could be effectively universalized to all members of the United Nations (though his essay treats "preemptive" and "preventive" attacks as having different meanings, whereas elsewhere in the collection they are often treated as virtually synonymous). D. R. Koukal's essay (discussed in more detail below) looks at both the question of legitimacy and the question of the effectiveness of the "war on terrorism."

The collection's fourth basic question asks, how does the "war on terrorism" paradigm promote a misunderstanding of many regional conflicts from around the world and thus limit our ability to promote constructive solutions? Focusing on the current political violence in Chechnya, Palestine, Columbia, and Central Asia, several essays analyze how these conflicts have been misunderstood as a result of being reconceptualized within the parameters of the "war on terrorism." Focusing on Chechnya, Oidinposha Imamkhodjaeva argues that by understanding these conflicts in terms of the tactics of terrorism, we fail to see that these conflicts are often rooted in a quest for national identity. Such misconceptualization results in the failure to offer constructive solutions. Instead, solutions to these conflicts flowing from the "war on terrorism" involve an artificially imposed alignment which only aggravates the quest for regional or national identity. To make matters worse, as Harry Anastasiou and Robert Gould point out, these conflicts have been conceptualized within an adversarial discourse of competing human rights and competing nationalisms. Not only is a Hobbesian framework a poor foundation for understanding social and political relations, but is, as Wendy C. Hamblet points out, an impediment to envisioning new and constructive solutions rooted in an understanding of social life as grounded in reciprocity and solidarity. An irony that results from this Hobbesianism is that, though current administration under Bush II increasingly packages the "war on terrorism" in the terms of the Second World War, its harsh "us"/"them" binaries generate a rhetoric strikingly reminiscent of Carl Schmitt's well-known "friend"/"enemy" approach, brought to fruition under the Third Reich.

Finally, the fifth question of the collection asks how philosophical thinking on the ethics of war might help guide us to a more just and sustainable response to global terrorism. The authors typically express a sustained skepticism about both secular and religious justifications for the series of wars of humanitarian intervention following the end of the Cold War. Although these humanitarian interventions are often justified as the liberation of an oppressed people, these wars all too often impose new conditions of dependency on the liberated countries by integrating them into the capitalistic world order. Such liberation and integration are often justified by a doctrine of human rights conceived as timeless moral ideals resulting from the intrinsic value of free individuals pursuing their own self interests at the expense of others. The result is an imposition of a neoliberal world order that is often in conflict with the values of the "liberated peoples." Richard Peterson argues that if any such humanitarian intervention and the inevitable "neo-colonial tutelage" that goes with it can be justified, it must be rooted in a new conception of human rights that moves away from understanding rights as ahistorical, metaphysical, and moral absolutes and toward a shared understanding of minimal standards of moral behavior developed by an open dialogue within a community of nations (p. 379). Peterson envisions the possibility of a "democratic tutelage" supporting a cosmopolitan globalism rooted in a "post colonial reciprocity" (p. 384). The great challenge of our times, both in relation to the "war on terrorism" and the project of conceptualizing a more humane and just global future, lies in moving away from the grounding of moral, political, and economic ideals in self-interested egoism. Although it may be true that our naturally self-interested egoism is inherently violent, the promise of humanity has always been rooted in the possibility of transcendence guided by a sense of justice that inevitably asked us to overcome our natural egoism. Hamblet's concluding essay, for example, argues that human beings can rise above this natural egoism by first recognizing the violence in all of us and becoming open to our own guilt and complicity. In a similar way, Eagan and Mar Peter-Raoul look to ways in which love can serve as both a guiding ideal and living motivator for social justice and prudent policy.

Which philosophical figures do the authors in the collection turn to most? Some essays draw from a number of thinkers to accomplish their task or are not particularly concerned with utilizing any particular philosopher, whereas others settle in to work with one or two main thinkers. The philosophers or theorists who receive more sustained attention in the collection include Hannah Arendt, Benjamin R. Barber, Hegel, Samuel Huntington, Luce Irigaray, Kant, Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Luther King Jr., John Locke, Plato, Samuel Scheffler, and Bernard August Owen Williams. In addition, John David Geib's essay provides a sustained consideration of the pacifist roots of the Christian tradition. Given the cold calculation and promotion of f ear that reigns in so much of the United States' prosecution of its global "war on terrorism," however, one thinker in particular haunts the collection like a ghost--Thomas Hobbes. It is only fitting that Koukal brings this shadow to the surface by devoting his essay to examining the "war on terrorism" through the lens of Hobbes's _Leviathan_ (1651), and argues that the "Leviathanism" of present U.S. policy ultimately cannot succeed. Understandably, one of the texts to which the collection most often turns is not a classic of philosophy, but rather the scripture of the Bush II administration's 2002 NSS document.[5]

What, then, is our judgment of Presbey's _Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism"_? The collection does suffer from some omissions. Since September 11, a number of publications have appeared that bring philosophy to bear on war, terrorism, and the "war on terrorism."[6] Though it is clear that the makeup of Presbey's collection was largely determined by contributions to a conference held by Concerned Philosophers for Peace, it would have been helpful if Presbey had commissioned a survey essay to deal with this growing body of literature; alternatively, she might have prepared an annotated bibliography. On the one hand, though the collection deals with many thinkers, a surprising omission is any sustained discussion of philosopher Giorgio Agamben's writings on the fate of the political subject in an increasingly globalized world--one figure whose thought would have fit especially well in this book on the self-professedly "global" war on terror. Indeed, his early thoughts on the suspension of the law are especially prescient in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and accordingly he has since worked to expand on those ideas. On the other hand, one of Agamben's main sources of inspiration, Arendt, does receive repeated attention, though not in those aspects that Agamben particularly takes up. Likewise, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (authors of the widely discussed book, _Empire_ [2000]) appear in the notes to one essay but do not appear in the index or receive sustained treatment. Some of these absences, however, may have less to do with avoidable oversights and more to do with what might be called the intentionally "practical" orientation of the collection. There are more typos and missing words than one would wish, but no more than one usually encounters now that most publishers have cut back on or almost abandoned the use of copyeditors.
Overall, however, the collection has much to offer. Among its strengths is the lengthy, detailed index, which, though it does have some lacunae, provides the reader with over sixty pages to help navigate the text. In addition, Presbey's own contribution (one of the longer essays in the collection) provides a very useful overview--almost a timeline--of the policy decisions and justifications made during and after the buildup to the war in Iraq, the presumed "heart" of the "war on terrorism."

A clear message that emerges from these essays is the idea that if we are to continue or recover the guiding message of the Enlightenment--that human culture and social life can be guided toward a more peaceful and humane future by the use of human reason--the skills and dispositions of philosophers are much needed. _Philosophical Perspectives on the "War on Terrorism"_ takes up the task of restoring philosophical reflection as an integral part of public discourse traditionally valued by democratic societies. The essays in this book demonstrate that professional philosophy need not be merely an academic pursuit written for a specialized audience but can demonstrate and model the skills needed for responsible and engaged citizenship. This book helps restore the social and political role of philosophers. The essays here not only model how to ask the right questions, uncover unnoticed assumptions, and expose the contradictions between stated values and actual practices, but also point to alternative understandings of democracy, human rights, and intercultural dialogue. If the themes and ideas articulated in this book can help to shape a public (and not a merely academic) reflection on these issues, this book will accomplish more than being simply a welcome addition to philosophy of peace studies.

Notes

[1]. American Council of Trustees and Alumni, _Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It_, http://www.goacta.org/publications/Reports/defciv.pdf24, 2008 via a www.archive.org cache from May 3, 2007). This is a revised version from February 2002; the original was made public on November 11, 2001.

[2]. For example, in 2004 Education Secretary Rod Paige denounced the National Education Association as a "terrorist organization." See John King, "Paige Calls NEA 'Terrorist Organization,'" _CNN.com_, February 23, 2004, http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/02/23/paige.terrorist.nea/ (accessed June 4, 2008). More recently, in 2006, Lurita Alexis Doan, the administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration, claimed that the agency's inspector general and his staff were carrying out domestic "terrorism" for attempting to carry out their (accessed May oversight duties. See Scott Higham and Robert O'Harrow Jr., "GSA
Chief Seeks to Cut Budget for Audits: Contract Oversight Would Be Reduced," _Washington Post_, December 2, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/> AR2006120101645.html (accessed June 4, 2008). Such declarations are no laughing matter under a de facto suspension of habeas corpus enabled precisely by an appeal to the threat of terrorism.

[3]. Martha C. Nussbaum, "Stages of Thought," _The New Republic_, May 7, 2008, http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e1bd6ffa-> c648-4d40-8efd-40dd1b31b444 (accessed May 24, 2008).
[4]. Roger Scruton, "Immanuel Kant and the Iraq War,"
_openDemocracy_, February 19, 2004, http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-iraqwarphiloshophy/article_1749.jsp (accessed June 3, 2008).

[5]. _The National Security Strategy of the United States of America_, September 17, 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html.
[6]. Numerous books on the topic have appeared, such as inter alia Trudy Govier, _A Delicate Balance: What Philosophy Can Tell Us about Terrorism_ (Boulder: Westview Press, 2002); J. Angelo Corlett,Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis_ (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003); and Giovanna Borradori, _Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Juergen Habermas and Jacques Derrida_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Examples of special issues of philosophy journals and magazines include _Social Philosophy Today_ 20 (2004), a special issue on "War and Terrorism"; _The Philosophical Forum_ 36, no. 1 (Spring 2005), an issue of "New Essays on War, Peace, and International Ethics"; and _The Philosopher's Magazine_ 34 (2006), which contains a thirty-five-page forum on "Liberty and Security."
 
Gary W. Gallagher. Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War. Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8078-3206-6.

Reviewed by Brian S. Wills (Kenneth Asbury Professor of History, Department of History and Philosophy, The University of Virginia’s College at Wise)

Published on H-CivWar (April, 2009)

Union is the Lost Cause in Popular Culture

As Americans celebrate the two hundredth birthday of Abraham Lincoln and prepare to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, an understanding of the role popular culture plays in determining the ways in which people will view that powerful period of American history is certainly in order. Gary W. Gallagher, John L. Nau III Professor of History at the University of Virginia, has provided Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten as the means by which to offer his insights into the question of “how Hollywood and popular art shape what we know about the Civil War.” In four chapters, the author assesses the Civil War generation’s appraisal of its conflict, the depiction of the South as Confederacy in film, the North’s place in portrayals on the big screen, and the war as seen through the eyes and talents of artists.

Gallagher discusses Civil War culture and art in the context of four distinct traditions: Lost Cause, Union, Emancipation, and Reconciliation. He sees each of these as powerful influences at one time or another on what appeared in artistic renderings. While Gallagher offers context for his various discussions, he focuses by choice on works produced in the last few decades. Interestingly, the examination seems often to be as much a personal journey for the author as a professional one for the historian. Gallagher avers an interest in dissecting the individual works themselves, preferring to understand how they have affected the public’s perceptions of the war specifically and history generally.

Regarding the Union cause that focused on maintaining the integrity of the nation in the face of secession and rebellion, the author notes his surprise at the ability of that theme to sustain its audience through recent years. He rightfully points out that this emphasis was “the most important tradition to the North’s wartime generation” (p. 12). Indeed, it seemed that, in conjunction with Lost Cause advocates, anyone who had drawn a sword or saber wrote a memoir designed to reflect, and not infrequently rewrite, history for the sake of reputation, posterity, and sales to a general audience. Gallagher observes that since those earlier years, the Emancipation and Reconciliation themes that featured the effort to obtain freedom for millions of enslaved persons and sought to emphasize the restoration of harmony to the former enemies, respectively, have subsumed the Union one that prevailed for so long. Throughout the work, he particularly laments that the very cause motivating so many people to take up arms in defense of the nation should take a subordinate role in influencing modern cultural examinations of that conflict.

It is ironic that the success of the Union cause was the source of its own undoing. Once victory on the battlefield had saved the Union and the fate of the Republic itself was no longer in the balance, it was only logical that a shift of emphasis and a reordering of priorities took place. Reconciliation initially became the order of the day, and, not surprisingly, the clarion call of culture, followed much later by a shift to Emancipation as the modern civil rights movement took hold of the popular mind. Of course, in a sense it could actually be considered fortuitous that the Union cause did not require continual reproduction in art and film to demonstrate its strength and authenticate its validity.

The first chapter of Gallagher’s work depicts the American Civil War as seen through the eyes of the generation that witnessed it firsthand. Key to the Lost Cause interpretation was sacrifice and struggle against overwhelming odds and technology. Adherents could hold their heads high with the knowledge that anyone in the same position would have been forced to bow to such insurmountable odds. The fact that many of these Confederate loyalists apparently believed, at one time or another, that the odds could be overcome did not prevent them from later insisting that such was not the case once the war was over. In addition, former Union figures were no less susceptible to hyperbole and contradiction. It would be hard to imagine the circumstances under which either set of antagonists would not want to embrace the values they claimed to cherish, and, at the same time, to denigrate the flaws of their counterpart’s positions. But eventually the old veterans could bring themselves to shake hands across the bloody chasm of their personal histories, and art reflected this emphasis on reconciliation.

In the second chapter, the author bemoans the success of the Confederacy in surviving so well on celluloid when it could not do so in reality. Gallagher correctly underscores the lasting impact of such iconic films as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) upon the popular mindset. He asserts that while the Lost Cause influence waned in the wake of these films, it nevertheless remained significant. Finally, he sees Shenandoah (1965) as representing a break from the shackles of the Lost Cause, especially in the film’s portrayal of the chief protagonist, Jimmy Stewart’s Charlie Anderson, toward the conflict and his family’s role in it.

Of more recent motion pictures, Gallagher contends that with the notable exception of Gods and Generals (2003), Hollywood has veered away from championing the Lost Cause. Yet in his determination to distance most contemporary filmmakers from the focus on Dixie’s land, he occasionally goes astray. It is more than a quibble, for instance, to insist that Alvarez Kelly (1966), whatever its historical limitations and drawbacks, was no more than one of the myriad “westerns dressed up in ill-fitting Civil War garb” (p. 54). The film had a basis in the Wade Hampton/Thomas Rosser “beefsteak raid,” of September 1864, with Richard Widmark’s “Colonel Tom Rossiter” leading the cattle to Confederate lines.

Likewise, the subsequent explanation of Clint Eastwood’s The Beguiled (1971), which was, as the author notes, “dark,” could hardly have been “just as easily” turned into a “dark comedy set anywhere at any time” (p. 55). The film was certainly not like Valkyrie (2008), whose principals insisted at the time of its release that it was a suspense thriller that happened to take place in the Second World War. The flashback scenes of Eastwood as a Union soldier work precisely because they illustrate the hollowness of his claims of victimhood and expose the viewers to a despicable side that his Southern benefactors will discover in time for themselves. The Beguiled employed the elemental themes of deception, betrayal, and hubris, and therefore did not have to be set in the Civil War, but the film functioned in large part because it was.

Gallagher’s third chapter follows the decline of the Union cause in motion picture depictions of the conflict from the Northern perspective. Even so, it could be argued that Reconciliation provided ample support for the Union cause in another form. In the movies, unlike the postwar South for much of its history, re-Union would become the paramount theme. Thus, when John Wayne’s character lamented the continuation of hostilities in a hopeless cause to his Southern counterpart in the opening scenes of The Undefeated (1969) with the observation, “We’re all Americans,” Royal Dano responded with a sentimental tilt of the head, “That’s always been the saddest part of it.” Gallagher may be premature in dismissing the Union cause as an influential part of modern film culture since reunion in victory would mean the reassertion of the nation for such one-time enemies.

If “friends of the Union” appeared “irretrievably to have lost the war on film,” as Gallagher contends, that loss was apparently not uniformly experienced in many of the films he assesses (p. 234). For instance, while Glory (1989) emphasized emancipation and the excellent Pharaoh’s Army (1995) depicted an admittedly pained effort at reconciliation, both provided stories largely from the perspective of individuals fighting for higher national causes, even if they did not always appreciate or comprehend them. In the end, Trip (Denzel Washington) died carrying the national flag up the ramparts of Battery Wagner despite his earlier insistence that he would not do so in Glory, while Captain Abston (Chris Cooper) allowed his vengeance to carry him only so far toward a Southern woman and child before returning to his post in Pharaoh’s Army. Even the Lost Cause elements the author decried in Gods and Generals (2003) seem to have been more the exception than the rule.

The fourth chapter offers a wide-ranging analysis of art relating to the war that amounts, as Gallagher sees it, to a resurgence of the Confederacy, suggested by the sustainability in sales of anything related to Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, and Nathan Bedford Forrest. The historian is correct to point out the frequency with which these subjects are depicted and the almost religious fervor with which some of this material is presented, but he is on less solid ground when he attributes it to a concerted effort on the part of the artists or an indifferent public to enable the Confederate South to live again. Market forces certainly shape what artists, directors, and producers provide for their customers, and history inevitably takes a secondary position to broader and glamorized themes that too frequently distort the record.

The most problematic aspect of this work is Gallagher’s unwillingness to avoid editorializing. Historical interpretation demands assessment, but assessment can be taken into a less helpful sphere as when the author castigates Shelby Foote’s description in the popular Ken Burns television series on the Civil War (1990) of Forrest and Lincoln as “authentic geniuses” who emerged from the conflict. Gallagher can certainly take issue with what he deems “praise for Forrest” that amounts to a “mind-boggling observation” concerning an “unstable warrior,” but he ought to realize that the comment was meant to recognize the innate skills that both men possessed rather than as a favorable, moral comparison between them (p. 242).

Similarly, the fact that Southern veterans are unable to hit Lieutenant John J. Dunbar (Kevin Costner), in Dances with Wolves (1990), “(or even his horse),” becomes more of an opportunity to critique these “unimaginably inept riflemen” for their inaccuracy than to view them as the cinematic devices they represented of a soldier who desperately wished to free himself from the civilized world’s woes (p. 55). The Dunbar character must have recognized his opponents’ prowess by attempting to use it to carry out his own suicide. In any case, it is not so much the assessments that the author offers as the tone he frequently employs that distracts the reader and detracts from the analysis.

Popular culture has often been unkind to the historical record, not least to the individuals or events that have not managed to appear prominently in film, in print, or on canvas. Joshua Chamberlain benefited greatly from his time on camera in ways that Gouverneur Warren did not, for example, despite the fact that the latter’s statue still graces that portion of the Gettysburg battlefield in recognition of his role in directing troops to a timely defense of the ground. Likewise, the Round Tops that Warren, Chamberlain, and their Union colleagues defended have emerged as far more critical real estate in the public mind than the bloodied landscape on the opposite end of the Union line in that engagement. Motion picture and art depictions nevertheless have continued to do much to assist George Pickett in maintaining his connection with the famous “charge” on the third day of the battle.

It will be fascinating to see the ways in which art and culture continue to reflect and help to shape the ways “Americans” view one of their most important historical periods. Gallagher has assured that the discussion itself will not be forgotten, whether or not it can ever be won or lost.
 
Edward L. Widmer. Ark of the Liberties: America and the World. New York Hill and Wang, 2008. 384 pp., ISBN 978-0-8090-2735-4.

Reviewed by Don H. Doyle (University of South Carolina)
Published on H-Diplo (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Christopher L. Ball

The Dangers of Idealism

Edward L. (Ted) Widmer is a historian, a former political speechwriter, and an observer of American politics and foreign policy who is as worried as he is hopeful.[1] He is a gifted writer with a good eye for the apt quote--and a good ear, for many of his most memorable quotes come from oratory. He also has a knack for utilizing obscure, even quirky anecdotes to make his point. For example, he notes that during the U.S. incursion in the Philippines, the Senate debated torture techniques, including a "water cure" whose origins went back to the Spanish Inquisition (p. 155). In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt was the first sitting president to venture outside the United States. Operation Iraqi Freedom was originally named Operation Iraqi Liberation, until someone noticed the acronym.

In places, especially the discussion of the twentieth century, his interpretation seems partisan in its slant, but not consistently so and not to the point of undermining the author's credibility. He is given at times to soaring prose and loves to quote poetry, often to very good effect. This book, in turns, is inspiring, troubling, and often witty. Scholars of U.S. foreign policy will likely find much of the main story laid out here familiar, but the originality of this book lies in its ambitious scope (from the European discovery to the war in Iraq). The author's bold but not uncomplicated reaffirmation of America's historic mission in the world ought to provokereflection and argument. This a good book for the college classroom, and it will likely find an audience among more readers outside than within the corps of specialists in U.S. foreign relations.

This is a study of America's national ideals and how they have guided (and misguided) not only America's foreign policymakers but, more fundamentally, the popular understanding of America's role in the world as well. The title comes from Herman Melville's 1850 novel, _White Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War_: "'And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people--the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.... We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours'" (pp. xi-xii).

What may seem a classic instance of national chauvinism was, we learn, part of a lengthy diatribe against flogging in the American navy, a practice Melville condemned as an idiotic, backward custom inherited from the aristocratic British and entirely out of place in a democratic society. It is this juxtaposition of lofty principles and shameful practice that Widmer uses to preview his concept of American idealism and set up a standard against which national failings, as often as achievements, may be measured. It is only the first of many such inconsistencies he acknowledges aboard the good ship of U.S. liberty as he tracks its unpredictable voyage through history.

The metaphor of the ark performs multiple tasks, most often as a ship at sea rather than a religious totem signifying God's covenant with the nation. The ark as ship is a speechwriter's delight, full of possibilities for references to wandering off course, drifting, or sailing full speed ahead. This nautical symbol also serves Widmer's artful interpretation of American history as a voyage, rarely straight from point to point, often stopping to take on new passengers, always moving. He likes "ark" as a figure of speech for another reason, he reveals, because it suggests _arc-en-ciel_, the French word for rainbow, with its promise that "something wonderful--a pot of gold or simply a new beginning--waits over the next horizon" (p. xiii). Rainbows, readers less disposed toward such sunny expectations may recall, also result from dreadful weather.

Widmer rarely lets his optimism get the better of his task as historian for very long. By his account, the ark of the liberties keeps running aground, drifting, or, worse, launching unwelcome invasions on the shores of other nations. Though he spares none of these mishaps in his log, some readers may be left wondering whether this American ark of the liberties is a righteous vessel veering off course now and then, a _Titanic_ doomed by its own arrogant recklessness to disaster, or some dreadnought battleship portending trouble for the world whenever it leaves port. He quotes Simon Bolívar, who wryly observed: "'The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty'" (p. 83).

American historians, a British acquaintance once told me, rather than seeing their purpose as providing sardonic witness to human folly, like to think their work will somehow make things better. Widmer exudes American optimism but he is worried; he wants America "to learn from our mistakes and chart a new course" to move toward some more perfect version of our national ideals (p. 315). Accusations of hypocrisy and moral failings are rarely effective without the target espousing high principles against which actual behavior can be assessed. More than most nations, the United States seems to set itself up for poor marks in sincerity and moral consistency by its proclivity for idealistic pronouncements, not only but also--and especially--in its foreign relations.

Yet this is not the usual scolding book that excoriates leaders and citizens for their failure to live up to the nation's ideals, for Widmer wants to retrieve and restore the ideals themselves, applauding those moments when the nation rises toward its own lofty standards and anguishing when it betrays them. At the opening of the book, he promises to avoid "excessive adulation and criticism" of his subject, but he does so typically by countering one with the other (p. xiv). Throughout the book is a constant back and forth between an inspiring invocation of the national ideal and nagging reminders of its failings. At times, I wondered whether Widmer was straining to curb his enthusiasm for America's promise or keep his despair over current failings in check.

An opening chapter, aptly named "Fantasy Island," traces the origins of America as an idealized nation back to early European imaginings of the New World as a place where human society might redeem itself. Another chapter on the colonial era is the familiar story of the New England Puritans and early millennial thinking about America as the place God would work out his plan for humans. Though warning us against viewing Jonathan Winthrop's "city upon a hill" as a preview of the future Republic, Widmer stresses the millennialism that would continue to influence America's national creed (p. 29). Perhaps unintentionally, Widmer's exclusive focus on New England illuminates how this region would shape America's nationalist narrative long after it took its secular turn. New England dominates Widmer's telling of the American Revolution as well, but he closes with Thomas Jefferson predicting that his Declaration of Independence would, sooner or later, inspire all peoples to follow the American example. A chapter on "Empire of Liberty" gives the stage over to Jefferson and to foreign relations in the young Republic from the Louisiana Purchase to the Monroe Doctrine.

Widmer's treatment of the Mexican War is incisive and damning. The first full-scale invasion of a foreign country by the United States (an earlier invasion of Canada in 1812 was quickly defeated) was a radical departure from American national ideals, he explains. Few articulated those ideals more eloquently than John O'Sullivan who coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny" and prophesied America's role as the "great nation of futurity." Widmer seems to understand that the concepts underlying O'Sullivan's "Manifest Destiny" fall very close to his own understanding of America as the ark of the liberties. The ideas were "not entirely bad," he allows; it was their misuse and misapplication to an aggressive war of conquest that he laments (p. 110). The invasion of Iraq is never mentioned here, nor, in the equally cogent passages, is the U.S. incursion in the Philippines, but no one can read these passages without thinking of the American war in Iraq. By the end of the book, we understand how much the recent turns in U.S. foreign policy have informed Widmer's interpretation of the past--and vice versa.

Widmer, the historian, wrote the chapters on America and the world through the nineteenth century; Widmer, the political speechwriter and Democratic Party partisan, tends to loom larger in the telling of the rise of America as a world power in the twentieth century. He opens with a spirited interrogation of the dichotomy that has, on one side, Teddy Roosevelt, the "realist," who "vigorously asserted U.S. military might," and, on the other side, Woodrow Wilson, the "idealist," "tortured by naïve aspirations for democracy and reluctant to project the full force of American power" (p. 189). This myth, Widmer argues, laid the foundation for Republican and Democratic party identities ever since, and he wants to set things right by reassessing Wilson as "a visionary who saw things not only as they were, but as they needed to be" (p. 189).

If Widmer props up Wilson, he positively elevates Franklin D. Roosevelt as a hero not only of America's national ideals but also of the cause of world peace and democracy. In Widmer's rendering, we have in Roosevelt an intellectually inspired and learned president who was imbued with a pervasive sense of America's historic role in spreading democracy and liberty throughout the world. The Atlantic Charter, the United Nations, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stand as testimony to Roosevelt's idealistic vision and also to his capacity to realize ideals. "At long last," Widmer writes with buoyant enthusiasm, "America's capacity to change the world had caught up to her desire. The ark was sailing at full speed" (p. 213). This highly burnished version of Roosevelt is dulled slightly by the admission that he "was not a perfect crusader for freedom," the author conceding as evidence of this imperfection the internment of Japanese Americans, the slow response to Jewish and other refugees from Nazi Germany, and repressive measures against critics (p. 212).

Two chapters on the Cold War link its Manichean vision of good and evil with deep traditions of America's idealistic vision of itself as the champion of liberty in the world. George Kennan's "Long Telegram" in 1946 and his "Sources of Soviet Conduct" in _Foreign Affairs_ (July 1947) that followed forecast the coming world struggle between Russian Communism and American democracy. Widmer notes similarities between Kennan's article and a Puritan Jeremiad sermon in which Kennan compared the Soviets to "a dangerous rival church with 'mystical, Messianic' tendencies (he disliked its claim to 'infallibility,' a favorite complaint the Puritans had voiced about the Catholic Church).... He even ended his essay with an appeal to Providence and advanced the classic Puritan argument that this moral challenge was welcome, even necessary, if Americans wanted to live up to their potential" (p. 234). So much for Kennan the realist.

Likewise, Harry Truman's commitment to "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation," along with the entire discourse on the "free world," recapitulated centuries of America's self rendering as the beacon of liberty in the world (p. 235). Widmer neatly illustrates the dark side of U.S. Cold War policy in three episodes of intrigue in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and Vietnam (1954), each with lasting and disastrous practical results, to say nothing of their violations of the nation's vaunted ideals.

At this point in the voyage, it seems piloting duties on the ark of the liberties alternate between messianic zealots and sinister, paranoid Captain Queegs. John F. Kennedy comes aboard to rescue the ship with a renewed sense of America's mission: "'We do not imitate--for we are a model to others,'" he proclaimed the night before he took office (p. 269). But Kennedy appears to win points with Widmer for his signs of backing off the Cold War hard line and admitting America cannot impose its will on the world. The spirit of Captain Queeg, in the form of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, took back the helm after Kennedy's untimely death, and America's ark drifted deeper into troubled waters at home and abroad.

Ronald Reagan is depicted as something of a fool at the helm, albeit one with "an engaging manner, a mellifluous voice, and an unflinching belief in the superiority of American institutions" (p. 291). His references to America as a "shining city upon the hill" might have sent Winthrop (whose 1620 sermon to the Puritans inspired this image) spinning in his grave, but it drew very effectively on deep currents of America's idea of itself as a model for all peoples. Reagan, or rather his speechwriters and handlers, understood how to appeal to that historic idealism of the American people, Widmer concedes, though not without letting us know just how shallow and limited his understanding of those ideals was. While issuing paeans to freedom around the world, Reagan opposed or ignored the civil rights movement and other efforts to expand freedom at home.

Widmer's allegiance to Bill Clinton's administration reveals itself briefly and modestly. After offering kudos to several unappreciated achievements during the Clinton years, he writes: " As a minor participant in the Clinton administration, I realize that my perspective is hardly objective. But still, it seemed at the time--and it still seems, a decade later--as if the best of U.S. foreign policy was working and the worst was held in check" (p. 308).

In the epilogue, however, Widmer takes off his gloves and sets forth a withering assessment of just how far the United States has fallen since George W. Bush took office. "This is not a book about the Bush administration," he writes in the epilogue, but by this point it seems much of this story of America's engagement with the world is informed by recent events. "It is worth pausing for a moment," he continues, "to contemplate how a group of patriotic leaders could have inflicted so much harm, so quickly, on the world order that had been created by their own country" (p. 317).

Though couched in the language of America's traditional idealism as the ark of the liberties, Bush's incursion in Iraq, by Widmer's account, is a terrible betrayal of that idealism. Those who led America into the Iraq war, he argues, were the opposite of naïve idealists; they were _cynics_ who exploited America's tradition of idealism: "what does one call an effort to spread democracy by people who do not seem to believe in the basic consensus of democracy? What does one call airy theories of perfect human behavior floated by people with no inclination to utopia? What does one call the interventionist yearnings of people who have shown very little interest in foreign cultures?" These were nothing more than "wolves in Wilsonian clothing" (p. 321).

Widmer tells us in closing that "we Americans are at their best, and our most truly world-shaping, when we reject the idea of special destiny and simply get to work" (p. 328). Many readers of this book may feel less inspired to set sail on voyages reshaping the world in our image and more inclined to head for port and get to work repairing their own ship.

Note

[1]. Widmer previously authored _Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and coauthored with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. a biography of Martin Van Buren, _Martin Van Buren_ (New York: Times Books, 2005). He also edited two collections on American political oratory for the Modern American Library. Currently, he serves as the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and before that served as speechwriter and foreign policy advisor for President Bill Clinton.
 
Donna Alvah. Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946-1965. New York New York University Press, 2007. xi + 291 pp, ISBN 978-0-8147-0501-8.

Reviewed by Heather M. Stur (University of Southern Mississippi) Published on H-Minerva (April, 2009) Commissioned by Kara Dixon Vuic

Families, Friendship, and Foreign Policy during the Cold War

As the United States expanded its military presence throughout the world in the early years of the Cold War, Defense Department officials granted permission for families to join personnel stationed overseas. The policy had its roots in the immediate aftermath of World War II and concerns about the morale of war-weary troops. The idea was that sending wives and children abroad would lessen the strain on servicemen called to participate in postwar rebuilding and security efforts. Thus began a fascinating chapter in the history of U.S. foreign relations that, as Donna Alvah explains, reveals the intimate side of U.S. overseas interventions during the Cold War.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe before becoming Army Chief of Staff, understood the emotional difficulties of prolonged separation from family. Writing to General George Marshall while stationed in Germany, Eisenhower confessed that "'I just plain miss my family,'" and he arranged for his son, John, who served in the First Division in Europe, to remain in Germany rather than be transferred to the Pacific (p. 24). Eisenhower also noted the strain separation had on his wife, Mamie. However, he refrained from requesting permission for Mamie to join him in Europe out of concern that such a move might draw public ire since it was not general army policy. Ultimately, though, the army began allowing families to join personnel overseas in February 1946.

What began as a troop morale building effort soon became a foreign policy initiative. Defense Department personnel deemed service wives and children "unofficial ambassadors" who would represent the goodwill of U.S. intervention. They wielded the "soft power" that U.S. policymakers hoped would ease the minds of peoples alarmed by American military and political incursions. By working in orphanages, raising money for impoverished mothers, and attempting to establish common ground between American and local cultures, service wives helped foster ties between the United States and its allies. Indeed, some service wives considered their work a means of furthering the goals of U.S. international relations, and they
demonstrated the belief held by many Americans that U.S. intervention was noble and beneficent. In the early Cold War, U.S. foreign policy was a two-pronged endeavor of friendship building and nation building, and humanitarian efforts conducted by service wives demonstrated a maternalism that worked in tandem with the paternalism of U.S. military intervention. Yet, like paternalism, the motherly concern of service wives was predicated on notions of American cultural superiority, which became especially apparent when race was a factor. Alvah uses Americans' encounters with Okinawans to highlight the role race played in shaping paternalistic relationships between the United States and certain allies. While Americans found commonalities with Germans in Christianity and whiteness, they cast Okinawans as childlike and in need of American guidance. These attitudes were not lost on Okinawans, many of whom came to resent


U.S. intervention.

Drawing on a diverse set of sources, including military documents, U.S. census data, memoirs, magazines, newspapers, and Defense Department records, Alvah's book makes three important contributions to the scholarly literature on the history of U.S. Cold War foreign relations. First, it reveals an American aspect of what historian Ann Laura Stoler calls the intimate side of imperialism. Day-to-day personal interactions between foreigners and locals expressed power relationships just as demonstrations of military might did. Although the United States in the Cold War did not practice nineteenth-century European-style colonialism, its foreign policy aimed to build democracies of its own likeness, and, as Alvah illustrates, interactions between service wives and local populations were fraught with the tension between goodwill efforts and a sense of cultural dominance. Second, the book shows how Cold War-era family and gender constructions were deployed as part of U.S. foreign relations. Scholars, such as Elaine Tyler May, have explored the ways in which Cold War imperatives shaped the image of the nuclear family, but Alvah demonstrates how families became vehicles of foreign policy. Third, Alvah's book contributes to the relatively new process of incorporating women into the U.S. Cold War foreign relations narrative. Not only does the book bring women's voices into the story, but it also illustrates how constructions of femininity were key parts of U.S. overseas interventions. Alvah's work both builds on previous scholarship and broadens the historiography.

Criticisms of the book are minor. The subtitle suggests that the monograph examines the experiences of military families, but American service wives receive the most attention by far. Alvah covers children in one chapter, and she states up front that wives, not husbands, are the focus of her inquiry, because during the Cold War the majority of U.S. military personnel were men. However, a deeper examination of masculinity and its uses in military endeavors would have bolstered Alvah's argument that both maternalism and paternalism informed U.S. Cold War foreign policy. Overall, though, Alvah's work is a necessary read for scholars of U.S. foreign relations and a useful addition to graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in diplomatic history.
 
George Gavrilis. The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries. New York Cambridge University Press, 2008. 216 pp, ISBN 978-0-521-89899-7.

Reviewed by John Agnew (University of California, Los Angeles) Published on H-Diplo (March, 2009) Commissioned by Christopher L. Ball

Hands across Borders

Arguably, "state strength" has become the leitmotif of much writing about contemporary statehood with considerable attention given to detailing why some states succeed and others fail because of the relative adequacy or "strength" of their central state apparatus (p. 2). In his thought-provoking book about the management of interstate borders, George Gavrilis will have none of this. He uses border management and control to offer a different and distinctive understanding of state authority.

Gavrilis begins by noting how ineffective most states are at managing their borders. He goes on to examine in considerable empirical detail his theoretical position that border management is a function of state "preferences" rather than "capacity" (as in the conventional wisdom), domestic politics is the best predictor of such preferences, and the nature of the border "regime" determines the effectiveness of management (p.4). Most of his empirical analysis is devoted to establishing that cooperative border strategies with devolution of control to the local level are best at producing secure borders. The other parts of the argument are largely inferred from this rather than demonstrated separately.

Views of the book by political scientists concerned with questions of domestic politics versus international context and state preferences versus state capacities will depend on how well Gavrilis is judged to have made the connections. I think that this may well be the Achilles' heel of the book. From the perspective of those of us more interested in borders simply as instruments of state building, however, it is the typology of border management strategies and the innovative empirical studies undertaken to investigate them that stands out as the main accomplishment of the book. In this regard, Gavrilis has produced a first-rate monograph that will be widely read and stimulative of other research on border management.

The book is divided into seven chapters moving from a general outline of the central theoretical conundrum of border management, that those which are least policed through central fiat are the most successfully managed, and theoretical claims about how borders are illustrative of various facets of state formation, to detailed studies of the nineteenth-century Greek-Ottoman border in what is today central Greece and contemporary border management in Central Asia. The fundamental premise of the study is that borders are institutions and are shared with neighboring states. This leads to the central claim that "borders are local manifestations of the claims of a state's authority" (p. 6). A typology of border control strategies is used to lay out how from the outset "new states" adopt one of four approaches which reflect the nature of domestic politics within the state at that time. The four approaches are boundary regimes (involving local cross-border cooperation between guards), unilateral policing, conflictual unilateral policing, and ad hoc strategies. Following in the theoretical footsteps of Elinor Ostrom, Charles Tilly, and Roger Gould, Gavrilis focuses on how locally negotiated cross-border cooperation through shared communication and monitoring capacity rather than rent-seeking and corruption determines the course of state formation. The state's ability to let its local agents make their decisions unmonitored from the center is seen as crucial to securing borders and thus enhancing state formation. Successful states and secure borders are established from outside-in rather than vice versa. Gavrilis uses the case studies to empirically bolster his general argument.

Gavrilis relies on a mix of Greek and Ottoman archival sources to show how the border between the two sides was policed from the 1830s until the 1870s. He shows quite convincingly that there was considerable cross-border collaboration, particularly in the central more highland area before 1856. He interprets this as suggesting how much both governments converged in their approach to state-building by resisting centralized micromanagement of the border. As he notes, however, the longstanding system of provincial rule within the Ottoman Empire (of which Greece was, of course, also recently a part) encouraged such local collaborative policing. Many border guards on both sides were also former bandits whose local knowledge, multilingualism, and common norms worked to favor collaboration. Over time, and from the Greek side in particular, the policing became increasingly unilateral with negative consequences for both border management and relations between the two states. Great Powers, particularly Britain, are also invoked as having some role in resolving episodic disputes but they are downplayed theoretically in a resolutely domestic-focused explanation for why border strategies take the form they do. Whether the case study has much to say in such different circumstances as those that prevail, say in Africa or in Latin America, is clearly open to question.

The Central Asian case study relies more on ingenious and time-consuming fieldwork than archives, including the close observation of various border crossings between the various republics since their independence from the former Soviet Union: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Again, the theoretical thrust is that prior to interaction with other states, their governments established preferences for how they would manage their borders, thus illustrating their approach to state formation. In Central Asia, if Uzbekistan has the most state-controlled economy and has the most centrally controlled borders, Kyrgyzstan stands at the other extreme with the most liberal border regime oriented to demarcation more than control. Gavrilis does not investigate why this should have happened this way and for these particular states. All of the states were, until recently, Soviet republics. One might have expected greater uniformity after independence in border management practices than appears to be the case. Rather, Gavrilis assumes that they reflect the preferences of the respective political elites. He resists the idea that ethnic or nationalist politics or external influences have anything to do with it.

The most important contribution of this book is to make a simple point, albeit one that is frequently missed in border studies: that border security depends on institutional design (particularly that which encourages local cross-border collaborative policing) than on such vacuities as a state's capacity or strength, usually measured in terms of the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and military spending. The problem with the book is that it tries to do much more than this in suggesting how elite preferences (which seemingly arearbitrary constructs) determine the character of institutional design and strongly dismisses the wider international context as having much if any role. In these respects I find it overstated and unconvincing. Yet, its counterintuitive claim that a state which "delegates and surrenders authority to its boundary administrators has a better chance of achieving a secure border" is given substantial support, particularly from the Central Asian case study (p. 2). This is in itself an important achievement. It is one that enthusiasts for ever tighter, centralized, and unilateral border controls in the United States and elsewhere need to reflect on before they realize the exact opposite of what they intend.
 
All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Army Special Operations Forces in Iraq by Charles H. Briscoe et al. USASOC History Office (http://www.gpo.gov), Fort Bragg, North Carolina 28307, 2006, 517 pages,

Written by people involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom, All Roads Lead to Baghdad is an eye-opening account of that operation, including the occupation of Iraq. The staff of the United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) History Office has composed a superb picture of this war and its aftermath.

The book relates the importance and effect of special forces in Iraq through the eyes of the soldiers involved, from planners and generals to operatives in various special-forces teams. Despite the subtitle, the study deals not only with USASOC but also with many of the conventional operations during the war, including deployments and the history of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. USASOC also provides a wide variety of information, much of it conveyed by charts, graphs, and maps, as well as firsthand accounts of soldiers and airmen.

The first chapter, one of the book’s most valuable sections, explains the importance of Iraq to the Middle East and the United States. Many Americans still have false perceptions of the state of Iraq before coalition forces invaded in 2003. It describes Saddam and his regime as “not a toothless lion” (p. 6), explaining that he could call on 400,000 regular forces and twice that number of reservists. The author also discusses Saddam’s fedayeen and the capabilities of these fanatically dedicated brigades. This discussion includes diagrams of the Iraqi order of battle prior to Iraqi Freedom. I was surprised to see that, at that time, Iraq boasted 325 combat aircraft. Only 20 of them remain operational today.

Another section of the book that I found fascinating addresses the employment of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-North and the trouble experienced by coalition special forces because of Turkey’s refusal to allow their deployment during Iraqi Freedom. This impasse led to the creation of Operation Ugly Baby, a flight path so ugly “only a mother could love it” (p. 117). The war would have proceeded much more quickly with Turkey’s support.

Written chronologically, the study covers details down to the hour when the planning stage began and provides a “five-month snapshot” of Iraqi Freedom (p. 451). Some portions seem repetitive, however, and several times the authors’ clear recounting of operations makes the summaries unnecessary.

All Roads Lead to Baghdad gives readers a chance to see Iraqi Freedom through the eyes of the people who fight on and behind the front lines. It also allows them to understand how special forces of all branches affect the outcome of major operations. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has any interest in special operations and Iraq.

Cadet Jake A. Dugat, USAF
Air Force ROTC, University of Houston
 
Raffael Scheck. Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres
of Black French Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge Cambridge University
Press, 2006. xii + 202 pp, ISBN 978-0-521-85799-4.

Reviewed by Yannick Cormier (Université de Montréal)

The Unknown Massacres: Black French Prisoners in 1940

Historically speaking, the Holocaust, and the Nazi mass exterminations and atrocities committed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1945 have always received more attention than other crimes that took place during the Second World War. For instance, a long-forgotten fact was the various massacres of African French war prisoners during the German invasion of France in May and June 1940, when German soldiers randomly executed black Tirailleurs Sénégalais. Raffael Scheck, professor of modern history at Colby College, recently wrote on this in _Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940_. This book presents an interesting account of these events, and provides a fair analysis of the causes and motivations of the perpetrators.In four detailed chapters, Scheck presents an overview of the massacres of black French Colonial Troops, the number of victims(1,500 to 3,000), as well as the military events that led to them. In order to illuminate the motivations that led the German invaders randomly to murder so many black war prisoners, chapters 2 and 3 give an overall analysis of a problematic that seemed unanswerable in this particular case: why did this happen? Chapter 4 takes a look at the implications of such events, and it integrates those atrocities into the gradual barbarization process of the German Wehrmacht that took place between 1939 and 1945.

In 1940, the French army included more than 100,000 black French soldiers from France's African colonies, mainly Senegal, Mauritania,and Niger. More than 75,000 of them served in France before and during the German invasion; the rest of them served guard duty in the various colonies. As the Wehrmacht panzer divisions swept across France in May-June 1940, some of those black French soldiers (about 40,000 of them), mainly organized in black regiments or mixed units, were engaged in fierce combat against German soldiers. About 10,000 black soldiers were killed, some wounded, and others taken prisoner during the French debacle. Scheck states that between 1,500 to 3,000 black French prisoners of war were massacred throughout the campaign, either during or after combat. Generally speaking, _Tirailleurs Sénégalais_ were treated differently from other war prisoners by the victorious army. The existence of a well-implanted anti-black racism and stereotypes among the German soldiers frequently resulted in the black French troops being separated from other prisoners of war. Fear of _coupes-coupes_ (a hand-to-hand weapon used by the _Tirailleurs Sénégalais_ that German soldiers considered a treacherous weapon), latent desire for revenge because of German losses, or simple racism, resulted in random massacres of black French war prisoners by members of the Wehrmacht.

The author's investigation of what caused the slaughters is also interesting. Scheck gives a precise account of those situational factors and links them well to ideological ones, stating that racist Nazi indoctrination and stereotypes must be fully integrated into the chaotic context of fighting in order to explain the massacres. He remarks that there were no clear governmental or military orders authorizing such criminal behavior toward specific groups of prisoners of war in 1940. In fact, many of those atrocities were committed by heavily indoctrinated elite Wehrmacht,or Nazi military units like the SS Totenkopf, or the _Gross Deutschland._ Those troops were already (or would be, along with others, later on) held responsible for racist behavior and excesses, as well as mass murders during May-June 1940. Scheck avoids overall generalization on what happened to those prisoners by discussing the random character and inconsistency of the massacres. Readers quickly understand that not
all black French war prisoners were executed, and that some German or French officers even managed to prevent such events from occurring. In fact, the treatment of imprisoned black French soldiers actually improved after the May-June 1940 campaign, especially in prisoner of war camps.

By linking such events to the absence of guidelines issued by the German army on the treatment of black war prisoners, as well as with situational factors, the author brilliantly integrates the singularity of such atrocities in a concept of an informal "race war"waged by theWehrmachtduring that specific event. First observed in Poland after September 1939, and culminating with Barbarossa and the Holocaust later on, this "race war"was part of a gradual process of barbarization and nazification of the German army that took place throughout the conflict. By differentiating the two types of warfare conducted by the German army in the West and in the East, Scheck smoothly integrates the massacres of those prisoners into the larger context of Nazi crimes, thus giving us anything but a short-lived historical interpretation of the behavior of German soldiers during the May-June 1940 campaign. In fact, the author successfully integrates the concept of Nazi racist warfare in the German western
campaign, an idea that typically has not been assessed by traditional military history. He thus proposes an interesting, and new interpretation of German warfare excesses during World War II.

Scheck's overall assessment of the construction of anti-black prejudices and stereotypes in Germany with linkage to the May-June 1940 massacres is precise and well contextualized; he understood exactly how to integrate this long-existing racism into the events'causes. Wanting to assess the evolution of racist behavior in Germany, the author goes back to the early 1900s, namely to the time of Wilhelmian German colonialism in West Africa, providing context for the development of racist behavior toward black Africans. According to Scheck, important German anti-black racial stereotypes were linked to the use of _Tirailleurs Sénégalais_ in the French army during World War I, and of black French soldiers in the Rhineland in the 1920s. In his view, racism was wellintegrated in Germany before and during the Third Reich, and had been frequently employed by Nazi propaganda after the outbreak of the Second World War.Thus, it explains the May-June 1940 massacres.

Even though the author cites some important sources for assessing the German behavior that led to such atrocities, the analysis of the motivations and psychology of the Wehrmacht and SS perpetrators could have gone deeper. Despite a contextualization of a "Kelman and Hamilton"model (p. 6), which suggests psychological patterns of authorization-routinization-dehumanization leading to massacres, this particular approach still presents some methodological limits, especially on questions of whether authorization and dehumanization allowed such atrocities in the World War II context. The methodologies used to assess the sociology and psychology of perpetrators could have been broadened to include specialized literature on the behavior of Nazis orWehrmacht members. This would have offered an even better analysis of the situation. As well, more emphasis could have been put on the memory of those slaughters. Although it would have been difficult research to accomplish, the memory of survivors would have been an interesting theme to investigate.

Despite this criticism, Raffael Scheck offers us a valuable piece of historiography. This book is, and will remain, an impressive investigation into French and German archival records. In fact, it is difficult to criticize such a well-written example of proficient historical work. Scheck's book stands as a major reference for the
historian interested in the events related to those massacres, as well as an interesting exploration of the ideology and mentality of the German Wehrmachtduring the French campaign of May-June 1940. The integration, and comparative analysis of those atrocities in the broader context of Nazi warfare methods is remarkable, and should be read by any scholar of Nazi war crimes or of World War II. In fact, this new evaluation of theWehrmachtand Nazi behavior is also a valuable contribution to the history of blacks and Nazi Germany.
 
Boris Gorbachevsky. Through the Maelstrom: A Red Army Soldier's War on the Eastern Front, 1942-1945. Edited and translated by Stuart Britton. With foreword by David M. Glantz. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. xix + 453 pp., ISBN 978-0-7006-1605-3.

Reviewed by Stephen G. Fritz (Department of History, East Tennessee State University)




A Forgotten Soviet Soldier

Over sixty years after the end of World War II, western readers still search for the reality of Ivan, the average Red Army soldier. GI Joe, Tommy, and Jerry have all become familiar to us through a wealth of memoirs, published diaries, and collections of letters, as well as numerous scholarly studies. Ivan, though, remains elusive. The Red Army in our minds is as much based on literary metaphors as on any evidentiary basis: a dull mass of stolid, brown-clad soldiers rising out of the endless steppe of southern Russia; an army of mute peasants stoically enduring appalling hardships and brutalities; the "red horde" of Nazi propaganda bearing down on "civilized" Europe. With the collapse of communism, however, not only have historians published studies based on sources in previously closed archives, but memoirs of Soviet soldiers, until now inaccessible, have begun to appear in translation in the West as well. Boris Gorbachevsky's memoir is thus not groundbreaking in the sense that it reveals any startlingly new revelations, nor does it grip the reader with detailed, harrowing tales of combat. Although Gorbachevsky served as frontline infantry soldier and officer for three years, his memoir provides surprisingly little in the way of graphic descriptions of battle. It does include a valuable account of the fighting around Rzhev, one of the lesser-known, although still appallingly bloody, meat grinders of the eastern front, but this episode is not what gives his memoir its power. Rather, it is his relentless search for the truth of the war, for the reality of the system for which Ivan ostensibly fought but which treated him with callous disregard both during and after the war, for an understanding of the fear, hatred, and desire for revenge that dominated soldiers' lives for these horrible years that motivates Gorbachevsky. With its recreated dialogue and snapshot descriptions of life at the front, Through the Maelstrom is an almost Chekhovian chronicle of individuals caught in the grip of the ultimate inhumanity.

Gorbachevsky exemplifies well the contradictions and complexities of Soviet life: he was the Jewish son of a provincial Communist Party official in Ukraine and his wife, who had herself taken part in the revolution and civil war. His father, arrested in 1937 at the height of the purge, survived the gulag to return to local administration during the war. The young Boris, a Komsomol member who also joined the party, was thrown into war while still in his teens; as a front soldier, junior officer, and regimental Komsomol organizer, he remained skeptical of the politruks (political officers) at the front; he worked for forty years a professor, journalist, and editor in the Soviet Union before emigrating to the United States in 1994; and, like many others, he was proud of his accomplishments in helping to defeat Nazism, but troubled by the nature of the Stalinist system and its failure to create a better postwar life. His was, he claims, a lifelong quest to answer a question that had no simple answer: Why did the cost of victory turn out to be so unimaginably high?

In most respects, Gorbachevsky's story confirms other recent accounts of life in the Red Army. Working as an apprentice in a metalworking factory, the young Gorbachevsky was suddenly dispatched at the end of 1941 as a cadet to infantry school, where he was exposed to the usual petty harassment and harsh training. More troubling was the fact that, as would-be officers, he and his fellow cadets were forced to study field tactics and regulations that both they and their instructors knew were not merely outdated but suicidal. Worst of all, though, were the political classes, with their endless lectures and recitations of the speeches and orders of Comrade Stalin. The terror-inspiring specter of the Red Tsar, indeed, was never far removed from the minds of the men destined to be sent to slaughter at the front. Relentless political indoctrination and efforts to secure informants among the men, constant reminders of the impact of collectivization and the purges, and pervasive fear and suspicion that stifled initiative all left their mark on the Red Army. Some creeping appeals to nationalism were made, although they were mingled with a distinct political message, but most of his comrades seemed largely indifferent to both. More troubling, Gorbachevsky also notes a pervasive antisemitism in the Red Army, a theme that recurs throughout the book.

Their time at the infantry school cut short by the demands of war, the half-trained cadets in May 1942 were sent on a seemingly endless journey through the vast expanse of Russia. Their destination would be Rzhev, to the northwest of Moscow, a place not as well known as some other sites of the war, but just as bloody. Poorly fed and equipped, given indifferent combat training just behind the front, and still forced to endure endless political indoctrination, Gorbachevsky's unit was finally thrown into battle in late August. His baptism by fire evoked the usual emotions of fear, hatred, exhilaration, confusion, and frenzy, but what troubled him the most were the obviously senseless charges into the stout German defenses, the profligacy with which Red Army soldiers were squandered, the piles of dead littering the ground, and the seeming unconcern of higher Soviet commanders for their troops. Rzhev marked Gorbachevsky for life, but not just because of the trauma of battle. His honesty forces him to admit that he and his mates were fearful of two things: being taken prisoner by the Germans, and the osobisty, the agents of the Red Army Special Department. Stalin's famous Order No. 227 ("Not One Step Back"), issued in late July 1942, had intensified the already harsh, punitive measures common at the front, where the severest punishments were meted out on a whim or for the merest suspicion of disloyalty. Now a new terror confronted the men: fear of the penal battalions, the deadly, soul-destroying punishment units in which over four hundred thousand soldiers served a virtual death sentence. The reader can feel the turmoil, the confusion of emotions, and the mixed feelings that gripped Gorbachevsky and other front soldiers: many clearly hated Stalin and his brutal regime, but German atrocities, the evidence of which lay all around, drove them to fight.

Life, as the Red Army soldier quickly came to understand, was cheap at the front. With the costly failure of the Soviets to break German resistance at Rzhev, the front during the winter of 1942-43 settled into a dreary trench warfare reminiscent of World War I. As men in the ranks increasingly despaired at the huge losses and the distant prospect of victory, they sought escape in other ways. Gorbachevsky, wounded in the late-summer fighting, had already been stunned by the high incidence of self-inflicted wounds being treated in the field hospitals. Now, back at the front and a company commander, he had to confront another dilemma: the shockingly high rate of desertion and the savage measures taken against front officers to stop it. In one of the most interesting chapters in the book, Gorbachevsky details the assiduous German efforts to entice Soviet soldiers to desert, and the astonishing number who did just that, some five hundred thousand in 1942 alone. A combination of better food and living conditions trumpeted by the Germans with severe morale problems on the Soviet side fueled the nightly forays across no-man's-land. For Soviet front officers, though, these desertions were more than just a drain on manpower, since the Red Army sought to stem the flow by imposing draconian punishments on them, including sentences to penal battalions and prison camps. Political officers also stepped up their indoctrination efforts, but faced the unremitting hostility of peasant soldiers toward the regime in the wake of the collectivization measures sponsored by the party in the 1930s. Interestingly, although he mentions efforts to build bonds between men and officers, the notion of camaraderie as a primal force binding front soldiers together is conspicuously absent from Gorbachevsky's account, especially in comparison with German memoirs. Despite his efforts, even Gorbachevsky cannot overcome the deep suspicion that Ivan has for his officers: Stalinist terror and oppression have insured a nearly unbridgeable gulf. Two things, not necessarily independent of each other, eventually began to stanch the flow of desertions: front propaganda increasingly substituted "fatherland" for "party," and a string of Soviet victories touched off by the great triumph at Stalingrad finally persuaded men in the front ranks that they might yet win the war for Russia, not Stalin. Still, as Gorbachevsky notes, in 1943 the triumphs at Rzhev and in Belorussia came largely as a result of the application of brute force, with the front troops paying an awful price.

The combination of continuing sacrifices on the part of the average soldiers and the increasing prospect of victory now raised a frightening prospect to Stalin. According to Gorbachevsky, a new spirit, a new mood, and a new sense of freedom (if that term is not an oxymoron when used in conjunction with Stalin's Russia) now infused the front ranks. War was changing attitudes, as among themselves front soldiers increasingly expressed the expectation that they would return to a freer and more democratic society and that they would be rewarded for their sacrifices and hardships with a better way of life. Ominously for the future, though, fear of the osobisty and the influence of the political officers hardly abated. As the Red Army surged westward into Germany, the danger, from Stalin's point of view, grew ever greater, as peasant soldiers began to see how things might be different and better. Red soldiers, amazed at the wealth of their enemy, struggled to understand why Adolf Hitler had coveted Soviet territory. "Now tell us, Captain," one inquired of Gorbachevsky, "why did the stinking German come crawling into Russia with war, especially when his pigs live better than our peasants? It makes a man furious to see the wealthy way they live" (p. 374). Gorbachevsky tried to convince his men that the German people were not responsible for Hitler's crimes, but they knew better, having seen evidence of German atrocities spread over countless villages and hundreds of miles.

These two emotions, resentment and revenge, were now mingled in an explosive brew. As Soviet troops scrambled to send packages filled with German goods home, plundering everything in their path, they also began exacting an understandable, if no less brutal, vengeance. Was this retribution fanned deliberately by Stalin to distract Soviet troops from their troublesome questions? The answer from the front, as Gorbachevsky notes, is inconclusive. Even as orders were issued urging officers to restrain their men, Soviet propaganda continued to blare a message of hate, as best summarized by Ilya Ehrenburg's famous injunction to Red Army soldiers to "Kill the German! Kill the German! That is your mother's request. Kill the German!... Nothing will bring you so much joy as a German corpse" (pp. 361-362). And Red troops did just that, as well as engage in an orgy of rape, even as German soldiers fought savagely and continued to inflict astonishingly high casualties on the Russians. Not until mid-April, though, when it was apparent that the actions of Soviet troops were alienating the German population and endangering any sort of good relations, did Stalin finally act definitively to stop the violence. The bitterness of the last weeks and months of fighting, perhaps, ensured frosty relations between conquerors and conquered, but Germans themselves, their attitude marked by fear, hostility, and a stubborn unwillingness to see Soviet soldiers as anything but backward and primitive, evinced little willingness to cooperate. Too much had happened and Gorbachevsky's efforts as a local town commander to promote even minimal interaction largely failed although, ironically, he, a Soviet Jew, had a brief fling with a young German woman. Nor, in retrospect, would his efforts have amounted to much, even had they succeeded, since by mid-August the German population of Lower Silesia was expelled to make way for Poles. The era of border alterations and great migrations was well underway by the time Gorbachevsky and his men left, in American Studebaker trucks, for Hungary.

Gorbachevsky ends his memoirs with a short, bitter reflection on the meat grinder at Rzhev, a fitting conclusion, since this bloody battle, more than any other experience, marked the beginning of his lifelong quest for understanding. Professional historians will perhaps be troubled somewhat by the lack of any documentary evidence for Gorbachevsky's accounts. He evidently kept no diaries or journals, or made use of any letters; instead, he recreated his story from memory, a claim that will be amazing to some, especially given the detailed dialogue among soldiers recounted in the book. Given the furor over the veracity of Guy Sajer's autobiography, The Forgotten Soldier (1976), despite the fact that Sajer had filled numerous journals shortly after the war, the reaction to Through the Maelstrom should prove interesting. Like Sajer's work, it is also a compelling account that rings with authenticity, even if it does lack the comfort of citations. More importantly, Gorbachevsky reminds us that the Soviet soldier was not just an abstraction, part of the brown mass. Rather, he was an individual acted upon by the great forces of history, who also sought to influence his situation, whether through escape or by meting out revenge to his tormentors. Ivan, at bottom, was a human being just like all others, subject to despair, confusion, hope, anger, fear, and the desire for something in which to believe. In the end, Gorbachevsky suggests, all he and other soldiers can do is attempt to cut through the myth and cliches and give an honest account of what happened. This he has done in admirable fashion.
 
Jay A. Stout. Slaughter at Goliad: The Mexican Massacre of 400 Texas Volunteers. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008. xv + 242 pp. Illustrations., ISBN 978-1-59114-843-2.

Reviewed by Richard Bruce Winders (The Alamo)


An Introduction to the Goliad Massacre

Many people know about the Alamo, even though their knowledge about the famous 1836 battle and its significance may be hazy. But who knows about Goliad, an event which followed closely on the heels of the Texan defeat in San Antonio, and which actually produced more Texan casualties? Jay A. Stout contends that the answer is virtually nobody. In his latest work, Slaughter at Goliad, the author promises to bring forth "the most comprehensive treatment yet on the slaughter at Goliad" (p. xii). Thus, the purpose of his book is to shine light on the events that occurred in March 1836 around the old Mexican town of Goliad, and the Presidio La Bahía.

Goliad has always been the poor step-sister to the Alamo. Both were military disasters brought on by the inability of the leaders of the Provisional Government of Texas to set aside their personal grievances in order to devise an effective defense against the approaching armies of Mexico. Throughout the fall of 1835, the Texan victories resulted in the capture of the strategic settlements of San Antonio and Goliad. As factions within the Provisional Government bickered over what to do next, General Antonio López de Santa Anna showed no irresolution, but led his army back into Texas.

Two columns marched into Texas. The largest was led by Santa Anna himself, and destined for San Antonio. The second smaller one was commanded by General José Urrea, and it advanced on Goliad. The key to understanding why these settlements were so important to both the Mexicans and the Texans is the knowledge that both were population centers, military outposts, centers of commerce, and crossroads laying astride the two major roads that traversed Texas. The rebels and government forces did not just happen upon these places; they were drawn there by the dictates of war. Strategic locations have to be controlled.

The Texas Revolution, the setting for the story of Goliad, should be viewed as a reflection of Jacksonian American. Rampant egalitarianism made it difficult for the Texans to follow orders. Samuel Houston, appointed commanding general by the Provisional Government, was told that he could not exercise any authority over the volunteers in the field because they had already elected their own leaders. At the head of an almost nonexistent Texas regular army, Houston could merely suggest a course of action while he issued commissions and waited for his newly appointed officers to recruit their companies. Two men who received commissions were William B. Travis (Lieutenant Colonel of Texas Cavalry) and James W. Fannin (Lieutenant. Colonel of Texas Artillery). Respectively, these men--the first a lawyer and the second a struggling planter--were fated to be the commanders at the Alamo and Goliad. Their commissioning is indicative of the common belief at the time that every American was a natural born soldier, and that no special training was required to lead citizen-soldiers. As in government, commanding volunteers in antebellum America required the consent of the governed.

James W. Fannin has come off poorly in the history of the Texas Revolution, an assessment that Stout supports. The illegitimate son of a Georgia planter, Fannin struggled to find his place in life. A brief and unsuccessful period of study at the U.S. Military Academy gave him a claim to military prowess that he did not possess. Like many of his compatriots, Texas offered him the opportunity to reinvent himself. Once the revolution erupted, Fannin (with his quasi West Point credentials) emerged as a community leader capable of mobilizing volunteers, something his elevation to such a high rank acknowledged. As lieutenant colonel of the 1st Regiment of Texas Artillery, Fannin was third in command of the regular army, after Houston and Lieutenant Colonel James C. Neill, the post commander at San Antonio.

Fannin quickly became involved in the contentious split that developed in the Provisional Government of Texas. He sided with the General Counsel, which stood in opposition to Houston and Governor Henry Smith. His supporters in the General Council rewarded him with a commission as Colonel of Volunteers, and an independent command of an expedition intended to seize and hold the Mexican city of Matamoros. As such, Fannin controlled the largest gathering of Texas troops at that time.

Fannin's headquarters was at Goliad where an old Spanish fort was located. His inability to make critical decisions, coupled with the pervasive Jacksonian egalitarianism of the time, doomed him and his command to destruction and historical disfavor. He failed to push forward to Matamoros. When it became apparent that Urrea had already reached that place and was beginning his march northward into Texas, Fannin put his men to work fortifying the old presidio. When the plea for reinforcements from Travis (who was besieged at the Alamo) arrived, Fannin first ordered a march to San Antonio and then, at the urging of his officers, countermanded the order. Learning that colonists lay in Urrea's path, he sent a detachment to their rescue. When that detachment was trapped, he sent another to assist the first. In the meantime, Houston (who had finally been given command of all troops in the field, even volunteers) sent orders for Fannin to destroy the fort and to retire. Fannin chose to stay, hoping that his missing detachments would rejoin him. Once he did decide to leave the relative safety of the fort, Fannin allowed Urrea to surround his command and, after an intense battle, was forced to surrender to the Mexican general. Fannin and his men were marched back to the fort, held for a week, and then marched out by the Mexicans and killed on March 27, 1836--Palm Sunday. As Stout and others have pointed out, Fannin's record is not admirable.

Stout's work is not a campaign history of the Texas Revolution--for that, readers might want to see Stephen L. Hardin's book, Texian Iliad (1996). What Stout has done is craft a narrative of events leading up to, and then detailing, the Goliad Massacre. In order to accomplish this, he relied almost entirely on the information posted on two web sites: The Sons of DeWitte Colony Texas and The Handbook of Texas. To give Stout credit, he has combined the available primary sources into a readable narrative. If you are new to the Texas Revolution, Slaughter at Goliad will be a fresh, engaging story. But, more seasoned students of the conflict will unfortunately render the verdict no author wants to hear: "there is little here that is new."

The work is best classified as a trade book rather than an addition to the scholarly works on the Texas Revolution. Stout’s almost total reliance on accounts published on the internet highlights the opportunities for research made possible by the web. Nevertheless, he either failed to consult or failed to credit the not insignificant bulk of secondary literature on the Texas Revolution in general, and Goliad specifically. There are no references (even in the bibliography) to Chester Newell's History of the Revolution in Texas, Particularly of the War of 1835 & '36 (1838), Hardin's Texian Iliad, Kathryn Stoner O'Conner's Presidio La Bahía (2001), Jakie L. Pruett and Everett B. Cole's Goliad Massacre: A Tragedy of the Texas Revolution (1985), or Stephen L. Moore's Eighteen Minutes: The Battle of San Jacinto and the Texas Independence Campaign (2004). There is no mention of John H. Jenkins's ten volume set, The Papers of the Texas Revolution (1973).Omissions such as these cast doubt on the author's depth of knowledge about the conflict. It also makes it possible to discount what could otherwise have been "the most comprehensive treatment yet on the slaughter at Goliad" that Stout intended it to be (p. xii).

What are Stout's contributions if not in the realm of original research? He is a talented writer who has pieced together a story that has been somewhat fragmented. Thus, Slaughter at Goliad can best serve as a solid introduction to the killings at Goliad. Stout also raises the important larger issue about what happened. Was it a bona fide execution or was it a rank massacre? Stout's title announces his position: it was slaughter.

The Mexican government contended that the revolt in Texas was not really a revolt at all, but an invasion by "land pirates." Volunteers from the United States, in small groups and organized companies, were indeed coming to Texas to help establish an independent republic in the breakaway state. These men saw real links between the struggles of the American colonists of 1776 and the Texan colonists of 1835. On December 30, 1835, the eve of Santa Anna’s advance into Texas, the Mexican Congress passed a law stating that any armed foreigner caught fighting against the government would be treated as a pirate. Although not specifically spelled out, the implication was that this was to be a war without prisoners.

At its core, the story of Goliad is about the treatment and ultimate fate of men captured on the battlefield. Older literature on Goliad clearly proclaimed that what happened to the prisoners was a massacre. What else could you call the shooting down of nearly four hundred men who had surrendered and thrown themselves on the mercy of their captors? Moreover, subterfuge had been used to make the killings easier by telling the prisoners that they were being marched out of the fort so they could begin their journey to the coast, and then home. Only the term massacre was strong enough to accurately describe the event. Modern writers and community leaders sometimes blanch at the word, though. After all, weren't the Mexican soldiers only following their government's orders? The volunteers were considered outlaws (men outside the protection of the law) and Mexico had the right to treat them as such. Even in 1836, however, many Americans and Mexicans had trouble accepting Santa Anna's claim that he was merely "following orders" when he insisted that men of Fannin's command be put to death.

Why should modern military historians care about Goliad? The treatment of men captured on the battlefield (whether prisoners of war or enemy combatants) is particularly relevant following September 11, 2001. I do not believe the canard that "one man’s terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Nevertheless, nations combating nongovernmental forces encounter the dilemma of what to do with prisoners. As in the case of Goliad, it is possible to win the battle, but to then lose the public relations war in its aftermath. One does not have to look far for current examples as to how this lesson still holds true. Military historians would be well served to take Stout's advice to remember Goliad.
 
James D. Kiras, Special Operations and Strategy: From World War II to the
War on Terrorism, (New York, Routledge, 2006), 230 pp.


MATTHEW JOHNSON
Missouri State University Fairfax, Virginia, USA


Special operations are a popular topic today. The conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the continuing “long war” against terrorism have dramatically increased interest and focus on special operations (SO) and special operations forces (SOF). There is, however, little written about the relationship between special operations and strategy. This is unfortunate— and potentially dangerous, given the increased role that Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the umbrella organization in charge of all U.S. SOF units, has been given to combat the irregular threats the United States currently faces. James D. Kiras has performed a valuable service by demystifying the role that special operations can play in a prolonged military campaign. This work is a serious and scholarly approach to the art and science of special operations.
Kiras has worked extensively with the U.S. special operations community and was heavily involved with formulating policy on how best to use SOF against terrorists in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. This adds significant authority to the author’s work and recommendations.Kiras is a strong proponent of SOF and SO but hiswork is devoid of hype and hero worship. Rather, his belief in the utility of specialized troops for unique missions is largely the focus of his work; Kiras has no desire to waste such valuable resources on strategically insignificant missions or to have such units given roles not suited to their skills. The author’s argument is straightforward: “the central argument of this work is that understanding how SOF perform in extended campaigns, by inflicting moral and material attrition in conjunction with conventional forces, is crucial in order for special operations to be effective strategically.”1 The author manages to clearly explain both the nature and potential value of special operations and of strategic effectiveness. The concept of strategic effectiveness is not without its challenges and little has been written on the strategic impact of special operations, let alone on how to employ such operations and units in a campaign.
The timing of the book is crucial and policymakers and defense planners would do well to heed its instructions. The author draws together two seemingly incompatible theories of warfare, annihilation and attrition. Annihilation theory, also known as strategic paralysis, “suggests avoiding prolonged material damage and inflicting moral damage through indirect strikes or maneuver against an identifiable center of gravity. Attrition, in contrast, is widely understood only as the extended material erosion of combat power in sustained offensives over time.”2 Historically, annihilation theorists have focused on crippling the enemy’s ability to conduct war by searching for his “Achilles heel” or center of gravity. Strategic paralysis theory has been popular with military and political leaders for obvious reasons. Technological developments have caused variations of strategic paralysis theory and its proponents to declare that the tank, airpower, or more recently, SOF can bring about a decisive victory. Kiras points out that, historically, strategic paralysis theory has not lived up to its promise.

Kiras advocates for a broader understanding of attrition theory that includes erosion not only of the enemy’smaterial forces, but of hismoral ones as well. Kiras is rather skeptical of the claims of strategic paralysis theory and believes that attrition theory more fully captures the actual conduct of warfare. This will no doubt shock some readers, as the conduct of World War I has become nearly synonymous with attritional warfare. Nevertheless, Kiras argues this is only a narrow understanding of attrition. Enemies and their populations have proved remarkably immune to sudden paralysis, despite promises to the contrary. A sober analysis of strategic effectiveness must take into account not only material factors but also issues such as willpower.
The author argues that SOF and SO are best utilized in a creative and appropriately designed attritional strategy in a long military campaign. This position is counter to the classic view of special operations as a means to inflict a critical blow to the enemy. The concept of the “decisive raid” is based on annihilation theory and seeks the fastest and most efficient way to cripple the enemy. Throughout the history of SOF and SO, armies have
attempted to use special units to kill critical leaders or destroy strategic targets, hoping that such an operation would provide a moral or material death blow to the enemy. Kiras mentions several such operations, including the Telemark Raid in World War II on the Norsk Hydro plant—an effort intended to destroy the German’s heavy water production.
However, Kiras argues that all too often participants and proponents have exaggerated or oversold the potential impact of special operations. The Telemark Raid, while impressive, tactically superb, and a significant morale boost for Allied forces, did not have a long-term strategic impact, as heavy water production resumed five months later. Another example and case study in the book was the Dambusters Raid, designed to shut down the factories in the Ruhr Valley. The operation failed to cripple German war production as intended, having only a modest strategic impact. Again, the concept of annihilation—packaged, in this case, within air power theory—shaped the conduct of a SO and even how it was evaluated by Allied leaders.
Interestingly, Kiras argues that the main purpose of SOF is to enhance the strategic effectiveness of conventional forces in a prolonged military campaign. This is not to say that the author dismisses the utility of independent SOF missions or roles, but rather that such operations much be placed within a larger strategic framework and not simply be seen as a series of isolated operations. All SO efforts must be appropriately aimed at achieving the overall strategic goals of the operation. Kiras’s work rests largely on the argument that special operations should have the intended effect of improving conventional military performance. Although the author is
aware that special operations are often referred to as “self-contained” acts of war, nevertheless, such actions must be viewed within a larger framework. Kiras is relentless in his quest to understand how special operations can improve strategic performance. The most important question to a strategist is “so what?” Few doubt that successful special operations are a powerful way to boost both public and military morale while potentially dealing an unexpected blow to the enemy. The question, however, is how such operations affect the outcome of the campaign. In other words, did the operations make any substantial difference to the outcome of the war? For example, the use of U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam can be viewed as a series of tactical and operational successes that did not have an overall significant strategic impact. There remains significant debate as to the role that such forces could have played if U.S. leaders would have understood how to properly employ them. Kiras explores a similar topic in his work as he discusses his second case study—the role of the British SAS in the liberation of France. The author boldly postulates the potential strategic impact of such a unit if military and political leaders would have properly understood its role and used it appropriately. The book’s case studies reveal the dangers of incorrectly using SOF and executing a SO. Kiras also addresses the internal struggle within the U.S. SOF community as to the best way to employ such forces. The success of SOF in Afghanistan and Iraq has resulted in widespread admiration, general acceptance within the conventional military bureaucracy, and strong political support for SOF and special operations in general. The changed security environment has convinced many that the skills and roles of SOF will ensure an increased reliance on such units for the foreseeable future. Special Operations and Strategy also is highly valuable both in explaining the nature of strategy and special operations and drawing attention to how SOF can improve strategic performance. The author is well aware of the mystique surrounding special operations and SOF and the general misunderstanding of the capabilities and limitations of such units.
As his work demonstrates, if military leaders and policymakers undertake special operations without understanding how strategic effectiveness is achieved, SOF will be squandered or invested in inefficient ways. The Dambusters raid illustrates how preconceived ideas, strategic culture, and even wishful thinking can hinder sober evaluation of strategic performance.
SOF and SO will continue to play a vital role in the offensive strategy in the long war on terrorism and other irregular threats. Kiras clearly has a passion to ensure that such resources are utilized properly. There is a heated debate within the U.S. SOF community as to the best way to utilize such forces and which side of SOF—capturing and killing enemy targets or working with and training indigenous forces—should be given strategic and mission priority. Kiras’s position—that SOF are best utilized in a campaign of attrition—
represents another track. In Kiras’s model, all SOF units would be required and needed, not just hunter-killer units specializing in direct action and “snatch and grab” or only the “social workers with guns,” as Special Forces and Civil Affairs are sometimes dubbed, who focus on working with local populations. Special Operations and Strategy is an important original piece of scholarship and adds greatly to the literature of special operations and strategic theory in general; James Kiras should be commended for this important work. The author’s goal in writing the book is to
propose a framework to understand special operations and its contribution to the strategic effectiveness of a military campaign in the hope that such operations and units will not be misused by military commanders or policymakers, and he correctly points out that most discussions of special operations have focused on the impact of individual raids or the effectiveness of removing high-value targets. Most books written on SOF or special operations examine the impact of an operation, or a unit, or a period of time by examining the material or moral damage inflicted on the enemy. Kiras argues that the greatest utility of SOF is attrition of the enemy bothmorally and materially. This argument may strike readers, at first, as contradictory or even inaccurate but the author does an excellent job of building his case. The book is straightforward on the surface but confronts not only established military theory and doctrine but, more importantly, the philosophy behind current military practice. This fact sets Kiras’s book apart from contemporaryworks on SOF, as he addresses not only bureaucratic and strategic culture but what has shaped the formulation of strategy
and SOF’s role in it. Kiras has produced a tightly packed, scholarly piece on SOF and the nature of strategy itself. The book is not an easy read—it is aimed at policymakers and defense officials and may intimidate the causal reader who only enjoys works on SOF exploits—but it is an important contribution to the special operations community. For anyone seriously concerned about the future of SOF, this book needs to be read, reread, and deeply pondered. The lessons that current and future political and military leaders.

take away from this significant work may well determine how effectively SOF units are employed and whether or not future special operations will have a truly strategic impact for the United States.
Notes
1. JamesD.Kiras, Special Operations and Strategy: FromWorldWar II to theWar on Terrorism
(London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 112.
2. Kiras, Special Operations and Strategy, p. 3.
Jeremy
 
Mary Ann Heiss, S. Victor Papacosma, eds. NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Intrabloc Conflicts. Kent Kent State University Press, 2008. xv + 244 pp, ISBN 978-0-87338-936-5.

Reviewed by Luke A. Nichter (Texas A&M University-Central Texas)

Post-Pact Rivalry: New Insights into Intrabloc Rivalry

Although scholars have studied interbloc conflicts in the Cold War repeatedly, recent declassification of materials by NATO and member states of both blocs since the early 1990s has permitted them a closer study of intrabloc behavior on both sides. Much of this action, especially in the Warsaw Pact, had been somewhat shrouded in mystery. The essays in this volume were drawn from papers delivered at a conference, "NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Intrabloc Conflicts," held at Kent State University and co-hosted by the Lemnitzer Center for NATO and European Union Studies and the then-Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (now the Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security). The resulting volume provokes readers to consider issues of great importance, including the future of NATO, the ways in which both the Atlantic alliance and the Warsaw Pact handled crises that resulted in intra- as well as interbloc conflicts, new angles on the complexities of the Cold War, and the lessons that NATO still has to learn from the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. All of the essays are authored by scholars with broad expertise.

An introductory essay by S. Victor Papacosma sets forth the origin and structure of the volume. Its editors chose to split the contributions into two sections, on NATO and the Warsaw Pact, respectively. Given the focus on intrabloc conflict, however, greater comparison might have been facilitated had the essays been organized according to the types of intrabloc conflicts they describe. These include conflict that arose from routine pact decision-making, conflicts between pact member states, conflicts between member states and pact leaders, and conflicts that arose at least partially because of a non-pact third party.

The essays on conflict from routine pact decision-making reveal a strong contrast between the two sides of the Cold War. Lawrence S. Kaplan's "NATO United, NATO Divided: The Transatlantic Relationship" provides the backdrop for the NATO half of the volume. Kaplan argues that despite the constant presence of crisis or conflict with this alliance, the greatest sign of its enduring success is the lack of withdrawal by any member nation. NATO's recent expansion to the East also underlines this success. Kaplan notes that the greatest challenges to the alliance will be adaptation to expansion beyond its original boundaries and the need to respond to out-of-area conflicts. Meanwhile, Vojtech Mastny, in "The Warsaw Pact: An Alliance in Search of a Purpose," argues that the Warsaw Pact had a very different _raison d'être_ than NATO. While NATO clearly existed to protect member states against the Soviet threat, the true purpose of the Warsaw Pact was unclear at its inception in 1955. Mastny's argument is based on new archival evidence from former Warsaw Pact states, which shows that discord was rifer in the pact than outsiders used to suspect. In addition, Mastny notes that the Warsaw Pact's institutions were never tailored to accommodate a diversity of views, that the pact's purpose was more divisive than than of NATO, that its military and political purposes created an unresolved tension, and that Moscow never relied on it in the manner that Washington relied on NATO.

A second group of essays treats intrabloc tensions that arose from bilateral disputes between pact nations. Mary Ann Heiss shows in "Colonialism and the Atlantic Alliance: Anglo-American Perspectives at the United Nations, 1945-1963" that, although NATO member states were the world's leading colonial powers, frequent discord on the issue emerged between member states, especially the United States and the United Kingdom. Historical support in the United States for self-determination and self-government as universal rights had influenced major elements of U. S. foreign policy, such as Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and Franklin Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter, while the United Kingdom expected its allies to respond to challenges to British colonial policy. In response, Heiss argues, American diplomats employed a variety of tools designed to soften anticolonial sentiment at the United Nations and other forums. French diplomacy also mitigated intrabloc tensions within NATO states, as shown in Charles Cogan's "The Florentine in Winter: François Mitterrand and the Ending of the Cold War, 1989-1991." Cogan argues that while it has become commonplace to criticize Mitterrand for his inability to anticipate the sudden German call for reunification in 1989-90, at a fading point of his career and while in poor health, Mitterrand maintained equilibrium in the French-German relationship and thus worked to anchor Germany to the West. Cogan pays particular attention to late 1991 Maastricht summit, in addition to other achievements that have thus far received scant attention from Mitterrand's detractors.

In terms of intra-pact relations, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Germanies provoked their share of problems. With reference to the West, in tracing the origin and development of _Ostpolitik_, with its culmination during the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at Helsinki in 1975, Oliver Bange demonstrates, as many of us have always suspected, that West German _Ostpolitik _provoked intrabloc tensions in NATO. In "Ostpolitik as a Source of Intrabloc Tensions," Bange moves beyond the standard interpretation that _Ostpolitik _caused sparks in the Bundestag as well as in bilateral relations with the United States to show that the policy resulted in pushback from Chancellor Willy Brandt's Social Democratic Party and his coalition cabinet. Bange notes that Brandt sought to mitigate these problems by taking care not to speak of the ultimate objective of German reunification--preferring instead to use the term "zusammenwachsen." Regarding the Warsaw Pact, in "Polish-East German Relations, 1945-1958," Sheldon Anderson argues that insurmountable differences between the East German and Polish Communist parties precluded the "illegitimate" governments of each nation from brokering an honest reconciliation between their peoples after World War II. These differences included Polish administration of German territories east of the Oder-Neiße line, conflicting points of view toward policy regarding the West, especially West Germany, and tension over East German rearmament in 1956. In addition, the staunchly nationalist stance of the rank-and-file political leadership in both states posed a significant problem for Warsaw Pact cohesion on the strategic western front. Anderson notes that this problem became so serious that without intervention from the Soviet Union, a serious, perhaps epoch-making rupture would have occurred. Douglas Selvage, in "The Warsaw Pact and the German Question, 1955-1970: Conflict and Consensus," begins where Anderson left off by arguing that debate over Warsaw Pact policy toward the Germanies actually concerned how that body should function in the political realm. In particular, we learn that East Germany promoted the idea that the Warsaw Pact should serve as the "transmission belt" of the bloc as a way of bolstering its standing with Soviet leadership and improving East Germany's international position. Meanwhile, Polish leaders came into conflict with the East German government, and Poland sought to broaden the Warsaw Pact to take more interest in non-German issues. In the end, Selvage notes, Moscow tended to be more open to Polish than to East German views.

Conflict also occurred as a result of tension between pact nations and their respective bloc leadership. First, in "Containing the French Malaise? The Role of NATO's Secretary General, 1958-1968," Anna Locher and Christian Nuenlist argue that among the many instances of intrabloc tension throughout NATO's existence, the era of French Gaullist foreign policy was the most intense. What emerges from their treatment of this otherwise familiar theme is the role of the three NATO secretaries general during this period--Paul Henri-Spaak, Dirk Stikker, and Manlio Brosio. While Spaak actively sought confrontation with French president Charles de Gaulle in tackling key controversies, Stikker and Brosio tried to minimize the appearance of crisis within NATO, but all three succeeded in addressing the French tendency toward obstructionism. Looking at this sort of conflict from the Warsaw Pact perspective, Csaba Békés shows the effect that even small states had within the Warsaw Pact. In "Why Was There No 'Second Cold War' in Europe? Hungary and the East West Crisis Following the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," the author argues that Hungary was able to oppose the Soviet invasion and exert pressure on Soviet leadership because Moscow considered it a loyal member of the Warsaw Pact. In addition, Békés adds, the Soviet invasion enhanced the development of a unique eastern European identity that in turn contributed to the emergence of a growing European self-awareness beginning in the 1960s.

Finally, intrabloc conflict could arise because of the actions of non-pact third parties. In "'Leaning by Doing': Disintegrating Factors and the Development of Political Cooperation in Early NATO," Winfred Heinemann illustrates the trade-off for pact member nations between national and collective interests. Pushback by the United States after the creation of NATO's " Three Wise Men" in 1956--a committee tasked with identifying ways that NATO integration could expand into areas of cooperation beyond collective defense--resulted in a much-diluted recommendation to hold regular meetings of NATO foreign ministers. On this failed effort to expand NATO into a true "Atlantic community," Heinemann argues that such desires would have burdened the alliance unreasonably. Indeed, expansion was always a source of tension for NATO. In "Failed Rampart: NATO's Balkan Front," John D. Iatrides argues that the decision of the Atlantic Council in October 1951 to admit Turkey and Greece into NATO, a step designed to impede the advance of Soviet forces into the eastern Mediterranean, represented a significant expansion of the defense community's capabilities. Although NATO membership alone was not enough to stem the perennial conflict between Turkey and Greece, all-out war did not occur, due in large part to direct intervention by the United States. While continued conflict between Turkey and Greece showed NATO member nations that a unified "Balkan front" was unrealistic, Iatrides notes the advantages that both nations received from their access to the resources of NATO member nations.

As Jordan Baev shows, the Warsaw Pact also experienced difficulties along its southern borders. In "The Warsaw Pact and Southern Tier Conflicts, 1959-1969," Baev argues that at the beginning of this period Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria were all trustworthy allies of the Warsaw Pact. Yet, within the decade, Romania opposed Soviet initiatives in the Warsaw Pact, Albania opposed Soviet "revisionism," and Bulgaria suffered internal, allegedly Maoist, challenges to the nation's political leadership. Ultimately, she notes, this disintegration prompted western leaders such as Zbigniew Brzezinski to speak of the "desatellitization" and "heterogenization" of the Soviet bloc, which over time led to a different American policytoward eastern Europe. In dealing with another pact border, in "The Sino-Soviet Conflict and the Warsaw Pact, 1969-1980," Bernd Schaefer argues that institutional links between the Warsaw Pact and China were severed as early as 1961 over differences in policy toward Vietnam and China's decision to cut relations with the entire Warsaw Pact except Romania during its own Cultural Revolution. From 1969 onward, the author notes, China had become increasingly dangerous to Moscow, especially after full normalization of U.S.-Chinese relations in January 1979. Moreover, any Soviet hopes for a warming in relations with China after the 1976 death of Mao Zedong were quickly dashed when the strong anti-Soviet direction of Mao's foreign policy persisted after his death.

As these summaries indicate, many essays seem to conceptualize intrabloc conflict as a sign of the unraveling of perceived need for the alliances themselves. For example, in "The Multilateral Force as an Instrument for a European Nuclear Force?" Ina Megens argues that the idea that Europeans could one day provide their own nuclear protection was first raised at the end of the 1950s, when some west Europeans began to question the American nuclear guarantee. Such desires for independence created transatlantic tension during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations and suggested the need for a different type of bloc alliance. But, in sympathy with the wishes of European leaders such as Jean Monnet, the project met its end in late 1963 after Kennedy's assassination and the retirement of German chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

Each of these contributions adds to our understanding of the origins and operations of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, although over all, the essays rely more heavily on documents from the member nations of each pact rather than on sources from the pact leaderships: NATO documents, U.S. NATO documents, and documents from the Soviet Union. Certainly these are harder to come by, but especially in the case of NATO, these records have become available at the NATO archives in Brussels in recent years. Thus, we await their use before we can learn more about the inner workings of this enduring transatlantic reliance. As additional primary source documents become available, no doubt our understanding of intrabloc conflict will continue to develop. However, criticisms aside, this volume greatly advances our understanding of the inner workings of the two most powerful military alliances in history during a period of time in which the possibility that they could meet each other in armed conflict was never distant from policymakers' concerns.
 
Sasha Lezhnev. Crafting Peace: Strategies to Deal with Warlords in Collapsing States. Forward by John Prendergast. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2005. xv + 119 pp. Chronology of events, notes, bibliography, index, ISBN 0-7391-0957-X (paper), ISBN 0-7391-1765-3.

Reviewed for H-War by Iavor Rangelov, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science

Warlords, Practitioners, and Scholars

Books written for practitioners must offer straightforward solutions to problems that scholars often identify as intractable. Sasha Lezhnev's project--to articulate guidelines for countering warlords in failing state--is more ambitious. The book takes a comparative approach to the subject, drawing on two case studies: Sierra Leone and Tajikistan. Furthermore, the author's template for analysis implicitly incorporates some key lessons distilled from the academic literature. Nevertheless, this study will resonate better in policy circles rather than in academic ones, since at times the narrative moves too quickly from evidence to prescription and leaves important issues and arguments under theorized.

The narrative unfolds by offering a definition of warlordism in a globalized framework, then zooms out to consider the success of various efforts pursued in the context of the two cases, and closes with recommendations for designing strategies to deal with warlords. The author breaks down the definition of warlords by looking at their motivations and social make-up; the weak state environment that allows them to flourish; the methods that warlords employ (converging on assaults on civilians); and the organizational structures that enable effective mobilization and control. Sierra Leone and Tajikistan are then analyzed to illustrate the definition, emphasizing the degrees of warlordism (the former being closer to the ideal type than the latter), and are used to sift through evidence of what works and what fails in eliminating warlords. Important differences, for example pertaining to identity politics and the nature of the collapsing state regime, are briefly mentioned but not integrated in an overall framework.

The book emphasizes that sustainable peace requires efforts to dislodge warlords and to transform the broader political and security environment, arguing for alternatives to the standard approach that incorporates warlords in power-sharing structures in exchange for peace. Lezhnev's solution is a mix of short-term strategies of coercion to deal with intransigent warlords, and longer-term strategies of state-building to transform political incentives. Coercive options include imposing "smart" sanctions that are resource-sensitive and have a global reach; deploying internal, international or "transnational" (mixed) force; prosecuting warlords under international criminal law; and establishing programs for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. State-building policies involve undermining the power of warlords by supporting alternative sources of authority; promoting democratization; fostering economics reconstruction and employment; and, as a last resort, conducting structured peace negotiations that may provide for warlord reintegration.

The study is driven by a problem-solving imperative and moves swiftly from empirical analysis to policy recommendations. This sleek structure, however, comes at a price. Most of the key arguments are constructed at the interface of the Sierra Leone and Tajikistan cases, but in order to generalize them coherently the author needs a broader framework that is often missing. The field of ethnic conflict studies has moved to conceptualize the role of identity in recent conflicts and the dynamics of peace-building in such settings. Research on collapsing state structures, violence against civilians, and the globalized war economy has made rapid advances in the last years and is well integrated in the "new wars" literature. Similarly, the mushrooming literature on human security has developed the principles of multilateralism, regional focus, and rebuilding legitimate political authority in responses to warlord-driven conflict. Lack of deeper engagement with these bodies of scholarship will be puzzling for some academic readers. To be sure, however, the strategies to deal with warlords offered by Lezhnev are persuasive and relevant, even if they often reflect the underlying problem without capturing it explicitly. Since the book is addressed primarily to practitioners and policymakers, its target audience will be rewarded for picking it up.
 
Thomas M. Nichols. Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War. Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. xiv + 171 pp, ISBN 978-0-8122-4066-5.

Reviewed by John T. Broom Published on H-War (August, 2009) Commissioned by Janet G. Valentine

The Westphalian Order, Strained to Breaking

To many, September 11, 2001 was the day the world changed. Shortly afterward, President George W. Bush let it be known that the United States would act proactively in the world, identifying potential threats and dealing with them before they were actualized. This went far beyond the generally recognized right of sovereign states to act preemptively against imminent threats. The Bush Doctrine, as it became known, clearly warned that the United States would employ preventive war against potential threats, whether from rouge states, failed states, or non-state actors. In fact, as Thomas M. Nichols of the U.S. Naval War College clearly discusses in his book _Eve of Destruction_, this was not new with George W. Bush, but had emerged in the early days of the post-Cold War world. Whether undertaken in the name of humanitarian action, or more realistically because national interests were involved, this blurring of the lines laid down as part of the Westphalian (1648) Western major-state diplomatic system was, according to Nichols, clearly evident during the administration of President William J. Clinton. Over the course of the past fifteen years, other states have either exercised or claimed the right to act preventively, including Russia and the Peoples' Republic of China.

I emphasize Western major states because the non-Western world (in particular) as well as minor states were often, at least in the pre-World War II era, the targets of preventive war waged by the major Western powers. Occasionally, major powers waged preventive war against each other. Nichols pointedly cites the Japanese attack on the United States in 1941 (by which time Japan had been admitted to the major power "club") as one such example. Since the Second World War, the collective security apparatus of the United Nations (UN) has at least nominally added all sovereign states to the formerly Western diplomatic system.

To this emerging trend of preventive war might be added the re-emergence of significant non-state actors engaging in what was once known as "private war." This is, again, something that the Westphalian system had hoped to relegate to the edges of diplomacy, and war-making. Terror groups, revolutionary groups, criminal gangs, and various other non-state actors have engaged in significant cross-border operations that rise to the level of acts of war. All of this has strained the old Westphalian order to the breaking point.


Nichols, like Colin S. Gray in _The Sheriff: America's Defense of the New World Order_ (2004), examines possible options for how the United States in particular, and the major powers in general, will have to deal with this new geopolitical and diplomatic reality. Gray, who admittedly wrote well before the current economic crisis had begun to manifest itself to anyone but specialists, made the case for the United States acting alone if necessary, or with posses of the willing if possible, in order to protect at least Western interests. Nichols, however, endorses a restructured UN. He admits that the current UN is incapable of effectively acting to protect the world, or the interests of the West (particularly the United States) from the contagion of failed states, and the malice of rogue states. Nichols cites such things as the membership of such paragons of human rights as Libya and Zimbabwe in the UN Human Rights Commission. Nichols does lay out a possible set of reforms for the UN, including changing the veto process. Whether they could be successfully implemented is another question entirely. Personally, this reviewer does not think so. Nichols also explores other options, including regional organizations and groupings of similarly minded states, but in the end, rejects them as insufficient.

Nichols's book is not really a work of military history, although obviously it has implications for military historians. His grasp of diplomatic history, especially of recent diplomatic history, is
sound, and his understanding of international relations theory and organizations is a strength of the work. Nichols develops and uses a variety of sources, including many from both foreign governments and press organs. His notes, in themselves, can be fascinating reading.
 
Soviet Air Power: Tactics and Weapons used in Afghanistan

Lieutenant Colonel Denny R. Nelson

THE Soviet war in Afghanistan has provided a plethora of information about the Soviets and their use of military power. Additionally, the war has allowed the Soviets to learn many lessons and has offered them the opportunity to train, apply various tactics, and experiment with different weapons. Curiously, however, although the Soviets paralyzed the Afghan government initially with troops airlifted into the capital city of Kabul and since then have used helicopter, fighter-bomber, and bomber operations in the war, very little has been compiled heretofore in open U.S. sources regarding Soviet air power experiences and tactics. By studying Soviet use of air power in Afghanistan, we might gain a better understanding of Soviet air power doctrine and how the Soviets may employ air power in future conflicts.
Airlift

Soviet military doctrine stresses the primacy of offensive operations aimed at stunning and preventing organized resistance by opponents. In Afghanistan, as in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviets used the surprise landing of airborne units at strategic centers, particularly around the capital, in conjunction with the speedy movement of ground units along strategic routes toward vital centers to gain the initiative.1 The military invasion began on Christmas night, 1979, when the Soviets staged a massive, single-lift operation involving an estimated 280 transport aircraft packed with troops, munitions, and equipment. The aircraft were reported to be I1-76s (closely resembling the U.S. C-141), An-22s (a Soviet turboprop strategic transport), and An-12s (a C-130 equivalent). Subsequent airlifts completed the placement of three airborne divisions in Afghanistan.2

The size and swiftness of the airlift operation are significant. Each Soviet airborne division normally comprises nearly 8500 men, including artillery and combat support elements.3 The 280 transport aircraft represented approximately 38 percent of the total Soviet military transport air force (Voyenno-Tranportnaya Aviatsiya or VTA). If Aeroflot, the Soviet civilian airline, is included in the total transport capability figures, the 280 transport aircraft represented approximately 29 percent of the total Soviet transport fleet. This sizable transport fleet is a significant Soviet asset, contributing to the capability of the Soviets to mobilize and deploy quickly large numbers of troops. The Christmas night airlift was, of course, only the initial stage of the invasion; massive airlift of troops, equipment, and supplies has continued to flow into Afghanistan. To date, no Soviet transport aircraft appear to be permanently based in Afghanistan; transports are rotated in and out from air bases in the Soviet Union.4

Ironically, the Soviets may be copying U.S. transport tactics used in Vietnam. Soviet sources have suggested that An-12 Cub transports have been used as bombers by rolling bombs down and off the tail ramp while in flight.5 In Vietnam, the United States used 15,000-pound bombs dropped from C-130 transports to clear helicopter assault zones in the jungle.

Tactical airlift aircraft are used primarily, however, in their traditional role of supply. The Soviets have found that they often cannot use ground convoys to supply many outposts in the sparsely settled provinces along Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan. Even such significant bases as Khost and Gardez––each held by a battalion or regiment of the Kabul regime––normally must be supplied by air, while smaller outposts in these provinces require parachute drops for resupply.6
Helicopters

Perhaps the most widely used element of Soviet air power in the Afghan war is the helicopter. Helicopters have been used extensively in varied types of military missions. Estimates of helicopter strength range from 500 to 650 machines, of which up to 250 may be the Mi-24 Hind gunships.7

The Hind is an extremely lethal weapon, with machine guns or cannon in the nose turret and up to 192 unguided missiles under its stub wings. It has room for eight to twelve ground troops and their equipment in the fuselage, and it is widely used by the Soviets for punitive and search-and-destroy missions.8 The Hind has also been used to provide close air support for ground troops, to strike Afghan villages (sometimes in conjunction with fixed-wing aircraft), and to conduct armed-reconnaissance missions to detect and attack guerrilla groups.9

Due to its heavy armor, the Hind is nearly impervious to guerrilla small arms unless the guerrillas can fire down at the helicopters using weapons positioned high on the sides of mountains.10 The Hind has only three known vulnerable points: the turbine intakes, the tail rotor assembly, and an oil tank inexplicably but conveniently located beneath the red star on the fuselage.11

The terrain in Afghanistan has had considerable influence on the use of the Hind. Many of the narrow roads in Afghanistan snake through valleys overlooked by steep, tall mountains. Such terrain provides perfect ambush situations. As a result, whenever a Soviet troop column or supply convoy moves into guerrilla territory, it is accompanied by Hinds whose pilots have developed a standard escort tactic. Some Hinds hover over the ground convoy, watching for guerrilla activity, while others land troops on high ground ahead of the advancing column. These troops secure any potential ambush positions and provide flank security until the column has passed; they are themselves protected against guerrilla attack by the Hinds that inserted them and subsequently hover overhead. Once the convoy passes their position, the troops are picked up and reinserted farther along the route. Convoy protection is also provided by other Hinds that range ahead of the column to detect and strike guerrillas that may have concentrated along the route.12

Other information on Hind tactics indicate that a closer relationship between air and ground arms has been a major aim of the Soviet force development (the helicopter is a part of the Soviet Air Force). Hinds are the primary Soviet close air support weapon in Afghanistan. They not only strike enemy forces in contact with Soviet troops but sometimes carry out attacks as much as twenty to thirty kilometers forward of the forward edge of battle area. This tactic is apparently an attempt to increase responsiveness, tactical flexibility, and integration with ground forces.13

The Soviets have had some problems with their helicopters. In 1980, losses to SA-7 surface-to-air missiles (a hand-held, heat-seeking missile) led to a change in tactics at the end of 1980 or early 1981. Since then, the Hinds have used nap-of-the-earth flight patterns, for which the machines were not designed nor their crews properly trained. There have been reports of Hind rotors striking the rear of their own helicopters during some of these nap-of-the-earth flights. The wear on airframes and systems caused by these lower-altitude flights has also greatly increased rates of operational attrition.14

These nap-of-the-earth tactics are a significant change from those employed in 1979-80. Hind crews then showed little fear of the opposition, attacking with machine guns, 57-mm rockets, or cluster and high-explosive 250-kg bombs normally during diving attacks from a 1000-meter altitude. After the firing pass, they would break away in a sharp evasive turn or terrain-hugging flight before repositioning for another firing pass. The Soviets used these tactics with several Hinds in a circular pattern, similar to the American "wagon wheel" used in Vietnam. Such tactics may still be used in some parts of Afghanistan, but by and large they have been changed.

Reportedly, new tactics that use scout helicopters for target acquisition have been adopted for both attack helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft. These scouts are usually Hinds (or, in some cases, Mi-8 Hips) rather than smaller, lighter helicopters. Normally, they stay high, out of range of the target, giving crews a better field of view while directing attacks. This tactic may become standard in future Soviet conflicts.15

Current reports say the Hind now begins an attack run 7000 to 8000 meters from the target, running in at low altitude and then rising 20 to 100 meters in altitude to fire. Firing usually commences at maximum range, and mutual support is emphasized. One tactic that has endured the war has been to send one helicopter in at high altitude to draw enemy fire, while wingmen remain low, behind a ridge, ready to attack anyone who opens fire.16

The Soviets are also using helicopters in mass formations (a standard Soviet tactic). Reports have helicopters in packs of four and six, hovering, firing their rockets and machine guns, circling, hunting, and then swooping down and firing again.17

While the Hind is the primary attack helicopter being used in Afghanistan, the Soviets have also made extensive use of the big multi-purpose Mi-8 Hip in several different capacities. One of the major missions of the Hip is to serve as the main troop carriers.18 In this role, the Hip is enhanced by its ability to provide its own fire support/suppression with 57-mm rocket pods.19 The Hip has also been used for aerial minelaying, which the Soviets have found is a good way to reinforce a defensive perimeter quickly. Furthermore, the Hip has been used as a heavily armed attack helicopter to complement the Hind.20 As with the Hind, the Soviets have found problems with the Hip. These have come primarily in the areas of its exposed fuel system (a major hazard to crews in case of a crash), short rotor life, lack of engine quick-change capability, poor engine performance, and inadequate trim control. The engine and trim problems result from the low-density air conditions found in the high, mountainous terrain of Afghanistan, which force the engine to work harder and make hovering difficult.21

The Mi-4 Hound has also been employed in the war, often in concert with the Hind. Many helicopter airstrikes start with two Mi-4 Hounds, which attack with unguided rockets and machine gun fire, followed by four Hinds, which continue the strike with rockets and cannon. While the Hinds attack, the Hounds circle, ejecting heat decoy flares at regular intervals, apparently in an effort to protect the helicopters from hand-held SA-7s. The Hounds also have been reported to hover near villages being shelled, perhaps acting as air controllers for ground-based artillery.22

One other type of helicopter that the Soviets are using in Afghanistan is the big Mi-6 Hook. It has been used extensively to provide heavy lift support for Soviet forces.23

Observers report that Soviet helicopter roles in the war have varied from dropping Soviet parachutists, antipersonnel mines, bombs, and leaflets to providing close air support for Soviet armor. Yet, while significant tactical changes have occurred, the broad picture of Soviet Frontal Aviation tactics in Afghanistan has remained largely unchanged. Trends and concepts observed prior to the war have been reinforced. The Hips still carry troops for airmobile assaults and provide suppression; the Hind remains the Soviets' primary source of airborne firepower.24
Fighter-Bombers

Helicopters may be the main element of Soviet air power in Afghanistan, but evidence indicates that the Soviets are testing their fighter-bombers and associated weapons and tactics in the Afghan war as well. Compared to reports on their helicopter use, very little on the type of fighter-bomber tactics that the Soviets are using has appeared in the open press. However, enough has been published to provide a glimpse of Soviet fighter-bomber philosophy.

Soviet fighter-bombers have been employed exclusively in the air-to-ground role, since the Afghan guerrillas offer no air-to-air threat. They have been used for carpet bombing, terror bombing, and scorched-earth bombing in efforts to destroy the guerrillas or drive them from the country. Combined with helicopter attacks, Soviet fighter-bombers have pounded settlements throughout the country. Half of the city of Herat (Afghanistan's third largest city, with a population of 150,000) was leveled in an extremely heavy, brutal, and prolonged attack.25

Most Soviet fighter-bomber crews are trained for close air support roles with ground troops in the European theater. In Afghanistan, they have also proved their value on sorties against targets deep inside guerrilla territory. Houses, crops, livestock, vineyards, and orchards in some areas have been systematically bombed and rocketed in what appears to be a scorched-earth campaign aimed at denying the guerrillas food and shelter. Terror bombings of villages, by both MiG aircraft and helicopters, have reportedly become commonplace in areas that are sympathetic to the guerrilla movement. To complete the destruction, ground troops often enter these areas after an air assault and shoot at anything alive, eventually turning everything of value into rubble.26

Early in the war, the primary fighter-bomber used by Soviet forces was the MiG-21 Fishbed. The Fishbed has one twin-barrel 23-mm gun with 200 rounds of ammunition in a belly pack, and it can carry four 57-mm rocket packs, two 500-kg bombs, and two 250-kg bombs, or four 240-mm air-to-surface rockets in a typical ground attack configuration.27 Tactically, the MiG-2s have generally operated in pairs, 28 but they attack individually, taking turns firing rockets at or bombing guerrilla positions. After releasing their ordnance, they each eject three sets of four heat decoy flares as they climb away. Again, the flares are an apparent attempt to negate any SA-7 threat. Reports also indicate that the MiG-21s often fire from a range of about 2000 meters, which makes their strikes somewhat inaccurate and ineffective. This tactic, combined with the failure of many bombs to explode on impact and the failure of some cluster bombs to deploy and scatter, has at times rendered the Soviet fighter-bombers ineffective.29

Still other reasons have been cited for the ineffectiveness of the MiG-21. All seem valid. First, the MiG-21 is best suited as an air-to-air platform. Second, the guerrillas are an elusive enemy, and any kind of early warning of an impending airstrike helps negate the effects of that strike. Third, the mountainous terrain, where most of the guerrilla resistance is located, tends to restrict the effectiveness of air-to-ground fire.30 The steep, deep, winding ravines and valleys make the use of high-speed aircraft somewhat sporty, and Soviet pilots have often pushed the Fishbeds to their flight limitations. Like the helicopters, the fighter-bombers in Afghanistan are affected adversely by the high altitudes associated with terrain that includes 10,000-20,000-foot mountain peaks. The fourth major difficulty experienced by the Soviet air forces seems to be a lack of an adequate quick-reaction tactical fighter-bomber strike capability. The use of forward air controllers (FACs), especially in the mode in which the United States used them in Vietnam, has been conspicuously absent (although, as noted previously, some helicopter FACs apparently have been used). The fifth drawback appears to be the lack of any significant night or all-weather fighter-bomber capability.31

To counter some of these drawbacks, the Soviets have introduced their new Su-25 Frogfoot fighter-bomber into the war. The Frogfoot, designed as a close-support aircraft, is similar in performance to the USAF A-10. At least one squadron operates from Bagram airfield in Afghanistan. The Frogfoot can carry up to 10,000 pounds of ordnance on ten stations, making it a formidable weapon.32 Tactically, the Frogfoot operates in loose pairs, going in separately and very low. Weapons accuracy has improved considerably, and the Frogfoot is used primarily to hit point targets in rough terrain. Delivery distances, from the weapons release point to the target impact point, have increased steadily, making the Frogfoot a much-feared weapon system.

The Soviets have also employed the Su-17 Fitter, the Su-24 Fencer, and MiG-23 Flogger in the war. These aircraft engage in intensive bombings of known guerrilla concentrations and installations. In the April-May 1984 timeframe, their combined sortie generation was estimated to be more than 100 per day. During this period, the Fitters and Fishbeds were relegated primarily to missions requiring general accuracy, while the Fencer, the Flogger, and especially the Frogfoot were used more for direct air support against point targets.33 Very little has been published about the tactics used or limitations incurred by these aircraft.
Bombers

Recently, the Soviet Union introduced the Tu-16 Badger into the aerial bombing campaign in Afghanistan. The Badger is a medium-range bomber that can carry bomb loads up to 19,800 pounds. Its service ceiling is listed as 40,350 feet above sea level.34

The Badgers, stationed inside the Soviet Union, were apparently first used in the bombing campaign directed against the city of Herat.35 Prior to 21 April 1984, the Soviets deployed numerous Badger bombers on their common border with Afghanistan. On 21 April, they began high-altitude carpet bombing against guerrilla villages and strongholds in the Panjshir Valley, which is located approximately seventy miles north of the capital city of Kabul. Reports indicate that thirty-six Badger36 bombers were being used, and that thirty to forty airstrikes a day were being flown.37

With the service ceiling listed for the Badgers, they probably can bomb at a maximum of only 20,000 feet above the highest peaks in the mountain ranges. But since most of the targets are in the valley floor, bomb releases can still remain high above the target impact points. The bombers are relatively safe because the guerrillas apparently have no weaponry that can accurately reach the bombers' altitude. The Badger attacks are followed by close-in attacks from fighter-bombers, helicopters, and artillery shelling. 38 The bombing raids, flown in support of Soviet ground forces advancing into the valley, signal an apparent willingness on the part of the Soviets to use any conventional air power available to support their ground operations.
Weapons

Many other types of air-delivered weapons beyond those already mentioned have allegedly been employed by the Soviets in Afghanistan. The major headline grabber has been the alleged Soviet use of chemical warfare (CW). However, numerous conflicting reports surround this matter, with hearsay rather than hard evidence forming the basis for most conclusions.

A somewhat unique use of Soviet aircraft has been to lay down smoke screens. Smoke plays an important role in Soviet mountain fighting doctrine. By masking ground troop movements, it helps the Soviets achieve surprise. The Soviets also use air-delivered smoke to mark and direct artillery fire for their land forces.39

Other weapons employed by Soviet air forces include napalm40 and various types of antipersonnel mines. The standard small antipersonnel mine explodes when stepped on. This weapon does not seem to be designed to kill, but rather to injure. The injured person helps demobilize the guerrillas because they have to transport casualties. Thus slowed, the guerrillas become more vulnerable to helicopter attacks. Reportedly, many Soviet antipersonnel mines are camouflaged as toys, watches, ballpoint pens, or even books, which explode when picked up, blowing off fingers, hands, arms, etc. According to some accounts, these weapons have been aimed also at some of the civilian population in an effort to demoralize those who are pro-guerrilla.41 In an apparent effort to eliminate as many guerrillas as possible, the Soviets also have dropped enhanced-blast bombs and large blockbuster bombs. These weapons explode in midair, sending out lethal shock waves in a large-radius kill zone.42
Command, Control, and Communications

To complement the Soviet war effort, both in the air and on the ground, the Soviets have used a wide variety of command, control, and communications (C3) equipment and procedures. A look at the Soviet C3 system gives an insight into the complexities involved in the war and the Soviet ability to conduct such an undertaking.

The first two weeks of the invasion were an enviable demonstration of top level C3 and coordination. The C3 link went via satellite communications (Satcom) from the Army headquarters in Moscow to Termez, located in Soviet territory on the northern border of Afghanistan. Control of the complex and tightly scheduled initial airlift assault was impressive, with different aircraft types arriving from various routes. Radio command posts controlled the two motorized rifle divisions (MRDs) in their land invasion two days later, as well as the four MRDs that arrived within the next two weeks.

In mid-January 1980, the command post was relocated from Termez to Kabul, which has become the communications hub for the Soviet occupation force. Apparently, the antiaircraft, antitank, electronic countermeasures (ECM), and Frog missiles (a surface-to-surface missile) that normally accompany and comprise a Soviet C3 network of this type have since been removed, leaving the Soviet Signal Troop section as the major electronic element in the war effort. Within the Signal Troop is a wire company, which has three platoons: one for line construction and two for radio relay. In addition to the Signal Troop, each Soviet airborne division has one signal company of 22 officers and 221 enlisted men, 30 jeep-type vehicles, 23 GAZ-66 trucks, 11 motorcycles, and 9 SA-7 portable SAMs. Communications between the headquarters and MRDs are usually via UHF or VHF radios and/or land lines.43

According to Soviet literature, the signal companies have C3 survivability through concealment, dispersal, hardness, mobility, and redundancy. In addition to establishing various radio nets, the signal troops lay telephone and telegraph wire that provides communications via land lines. Thus, the Soviets use four systems to communicate:

* Line-of-sight––UHF,VHF, and microwave for twenty- to thirty-mile ranges.

* Troposcatter––set on vans or in fixed positions, with relays about 200 miles apart.

* Satcom––Malniya, Gorizont, and Kosmos series networks. The earlier Satcoms were in twelve-hour elliptical orbits; the newer ones are in synchronous twenty-four-hour orbits.

* Land lines––existing civilian lines or lines laid by Soviet forces. The Soviets favor secure underground land lines.44

Since the invasion, the Soviets have divided Afghanistan into seven military districts. The main army headquarters near Kabul may have Satcom and troposcatter links to some military districts or bases but not to all. Therefore, because of field command delays and the rigidity of the Soviet communications channels, it appears that each district commander has been given more than usual latitude to meet the combat needs of his area.45

Preplanned air support seems adequate in Afghanistan, but the Soviets seem to lack an adequate quick-reaction airstrike capability in support of field troops. To receive an airstrike, a junior-grade infantry officer must send a request, which is forwarded up to the division level in the Army and then over to the Air Force; there are delays at each command level and communications point. Associated with these delays is the fact that the Soviet army has neither aviation helicopters nor forward air controllers (although recently helicopter scouts have been used to some degree). Soviet air force helicopters and support aircraft are at the division level for Army interface. The compound communications structure tends to hamper support for truck convoys or airborne operations unless events proceed strictly in accordance with the advanced plan. An example of the communications problems that stem from this system can be seen in a July 1981 battle with guerrilla forces that occurred twelve miles from Kabul; here Soviet close-air-support jets mistakenly strafed Soviet and Afghan army troops.46

All in all, Afghanistan presents a benign electronic environment to the Soviets, with minimal need for electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM), jamming, or smart weapons to home on emissions. The guerrilla forces rely primarily on runners or civilian walkie-talkies for communications.47

Meanwhile, the Soviets are using long-range surveillance-type radars, which they have installed in Afghanistan, to observe air activities in the neighboring countries of the People's Republic of China, Pakistan, Iran, and other Persian Gulf states. It is highly probable that Soviet electronic intelligence and ECM troops are collocated with these surveillance radars to monitor electronic emissions in Iran, the People's Republic of China, Pakistan, etc., since that is a somewhat standard Soviet tactic.48

The Soviet army communications environment in Afghanistan has changed from mobile and temporary tent-city layouts to sites with permanent buildings, fixed communications sites, and fixed antenna arrays. According to reports, Soviet engineers have established elaborate communications centers at a headquarters north of Kabul (at Bagram), as well as elsewhere in the country. Yet, while probably enhancing Soviet communications, these sites also provide lucrative targets for the guerrillas; and attacks on various communications sites have been reported.49

A variety of other electronic equipment also is being used. These systems include ground control approach, surveillance radar, and precision approach radar to control aircraft into and out of air bases, plus various radars that control the different types of Soviet SAMs positioned in Afghanistan. The avionics in Soviet fighters, helicopters, and reconnaissance aircraft are probably being tested in a combat environment. Laser ranges, low-light TV and infrared sensors, radars, computers, and communications are installed in both the MiG-23 Flogger and the Su-25 Frogfoot. Earlier-model Su-17 Fitter and MiG-21 Fishbed fighters have moderate electronics on board. Due to limited forward maintenance support, Soviet aircraft are ferried to depots inside the Soviet Union for overhaul or repairs. It is probable that communications equipment is not adequately supported in the field except for simple module swapping.50

Lessons have been expensive but valuable for the Soviets in the electronic and communications arenas. Two examples stand out. The Soviet army is now replacing 1950s-vintage tactical field transceivers with newer, standard backpack and vehicle models. In addition, redundancy in Soviet command posts and the effectiveness of specific communication methods are being tested by guerrilla raids on garrisons and cities throughout the country. Overall, the Soviet communications personnel appear to be fulfilling their tasks even under adverse and primitive conditions, primarily because the new-technology troposcatters and Satcoms have reached the field level and are augmenting the simplistic land lines historically preferred by Soviet army communicators.51
Air Base Gains

The Soviets have gained much more than valuable experience in the Afghan war. They have gained many strategically important and possibly permanent air bases. Seven air bases have been built or improved by the Soviets in Afghanistan: Herat, Shindand, Farah, Kandahar, Kabul International Airport, Bagram, and Jalalabad. All of these airfields are now all-weather, jet-capable bases that are operable 365 days a year. At last report, Jalalabad air base has been used exclusively for helicopter operations but has jet capacity. Since each base is capable of handling large numbers of tactical aircraft, a huge fleet could be operated in Afghanistan or against other Southwest Asian countries from these bases.52

In the Afghan panhandle that stretches northeast to the People's Republic of China, the Soviets have cleared out the sparse population and are building highways, air bases, and an air defense and early warning network. The airfields may be nothing more than sod strips for resupply of the electronic intelligence sites located there, or they may become jet-capable. This area provides better terrain than the Soviets had in this central Asian military district previously, thereby improving their forward geographic position.53

The two most important Soviet installations in Afghanistan are at Bagram and Shindand. Bagram is the local supreme headquarters of the entire Soviet army in Afghanistan, where most of the senior Soviet officers in Afghanistan, as well as their Satcom system and other major facilities, are located. At Shindand, no Afghans are permitted on the air base because the Soviets have installed support and maintenance equipment for their naval aviation reconnaissance bombers. Soviet electronic warfare aircraft (converted bombers and converted transports) are operated from this installation by the air command of the Soviet navy. Most of these aircraft are not permanently based in any one location, so having the very sensitive technical support and maintenance capabilities needed for them available at various forward bases offers vital support for their missions.54

Having jet bases in the western/southwestern section of Afghanistan also places longer-range MiG-27 Flogger fighter-bombers and MiG-25 Foxbat reconnaissance aircraft 200 miles closer to, and within range of, the Strait of Hormuz––the strategic chokepoint at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. SAM-8 antiaircraft missiles have been installed to defend most of these bases, although currently there is no apparent air threat.55 Having these bases eliminates any overflight problems that the Soviets might have incurred from an independent Afghanistan and allows Soviet electronic warfare aircraft more time to trail and monitor U.S. naval activities in the Indian Ocean.56
Combat Experience and Lessons Learned

The Soviets have learned and continue to learn many valuable lessons in their war in Afghanistan. Whether they win or lose their battle with the guerrillas is perhaps not as significant militarily as the lessons they learn, the experience they gain in warfighting, and the knowledge they obtain about the effectiveness of their weapons. Afghanistan, which is about the size of Texas and has terrain that varies from deserts to rugged mountains, affords the Soviets ample opportunities (and time) to experiment with their aircraft, tactics, weapons, and command and control equipment and procedures.

From the standpoint of world power politics, the Kremlin has demonstrated in Afghanistan its ability to project power outside the boundaries of the Soviet Union through a massive airlift operation. This demonstrated ability creates a worrisome problem for other nations, especially those bordering on or near Soviet territory.

Evidence from Afghanistan indicates that the Soviet military has become increasingly reliant on its helicopter force. Most likely, this dependency will remain a part of the Soviet military system after the Afghan issue is resolved. Current helicopter roles that could easily transfer to other theaters, depending on the terrain and capabilities of the enemy, are: (1) landing forces on peaks to envelop an enemy in support of ground advances, (2) providing aerial attacks to channel the enemy into killing zones where ground forces can inflict maximum casualties, (3) providing close air support for advancing ground forces, (4) moving troops and supplies, and (5) acting as scouts or forward air controllers.57

Fixed-wing fighter-bombers, at least the older models, have proved somewhat ineffective in the air-to-ground role in which they have been used. As time elapses, more information on the successes and failures of later models should become available for analysis. The same can be said concerning the high-altitude saturation bombings being conducted by the Tu-16 bombers.

Some significant changes already appear to be occurring within the Soviets' command, control, and communications system. Some latitude in decision making is apparently now given to lower levels of command, and communications equipment is being improved. These changes should improve the Soviets' worldwide fighting ability. However, surface evidence indicates that the Soviet decision-making process is still controlled at fairly high levels, is still heavily layered, and continues to lack responsiveness.

A major advantage that the Soviets are gaining is combat experience. Exercises are good training, but real combat is the only true test of commanders, unit personnel, and equipment. Soviet Signal Troops in Afghanistan have a 25-percent turnover every six months.58 It seems logical to assume that crewmembers in helicopters, fighter-bombers, bombers, etc., would also be rotated frequently to ensure that a large segment of the Soviet manpower force gains combat experience and a chance to hone individual combat skills. It follows that reports of various tactics and the effectiveness of different weapons would receive high-level scrutiny from Kremlin officials and that refinements would be made to enhance the effectiveness of Soviet air power. Gradually, the Soviets are learning the same hard lessons we learned in Vietnam. Fighting guerrilla forces with conventional forces is a long, arduous affair.

In concert with all the lessons learned and skills gained through combat in Afghanistan, it is evident that the Soviets have accomplished one thing––they have gained strategically important new airfields from which they can operate. Whether the Soviets transplant any of their specific tactics to future theaters of operations is still a matter of conjecture, but the basic warfighting principles that guide the Soviets remain intact––mass, shock, surprise, and willingness to apply any of the conventional weapons in their military arsenal.

Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education
Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Notes

1. Jiri Valenta, "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan," Crossroads, Spring 1980, p. 67.

2. Lawrence E. Grinter, "The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: Its Inevitability and Its Consequences," Parameters, December 1982, p. 58.

3. Kenneth Allard, "Soviet Airborne Forces and Preemptive Power Projection," Parameters, December 1980, p. 46.

4. Yossef Bodansky, "The Bear on the Chessboard: Soviet Military Gains in Afghanistan," World Affairs, Winter 1982/83, p. 291.

5. David Isby, "Soviets in Afghanistan, Prepared for the Long Haul," Defense Week, 21 February 1984, p. 14.

6. Ibid.

7. Denis Warner, "The Soviet Union's 'International Duty' in Afghanistan," Pacific Defence Reporter, March 1983, p. 47.

8. Ibid.

9. David C. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," Soldier of Fortune, April 1981, pp. 44-45.

10. Ibid., p. 44.

11. Jim Coyne, "Afghanistan Update, Russians Lose Battles But May Win War," Soldier of Fortune, December 1982, p. 72.

12. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," p. 44.

13. David C. Isby, "Soviet Tactics in the War in Afghanistan," Jane's Defence Weekly, vol. 4, no. 7, 1983, p. 683.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Jere Van Dyk, "Journey through Afghanistan," New York Times Magazine, 17 October 1982, p. 47.

18. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," p. 4.

19. Isby, "Soviet Tactics in the War in Afghanistan," p. 683.

20. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," pp. 44-45.

21. Isby, "Soviet Tactics in the War in Afghanistan," p. 683.

22. John Gunston, "Afghans Plan USSR Terror Attacks," Jane's Defence Weekly, 31 March 1984, p. 481.

23. Isby, "Afghanistan's Winter War," p. 44.

24. Isby, "Soviet Tactics in the War in Afghanistan," p. 683.

25. "Update: Russia's 'Hidden' War in Afghanistan," U.S. News and World Report, 1 August 1983, p. 22.

26. Philip Jacobson, "The Red Army Learns from a Real War," Washington Post, 13 February 1983, p. 1; Borje Almquist, "Eyewitness to Afghanistan at War," World Affairs, Winter 1982-83, p. 312; Harold Johnson, "Soviets Cultivate Scorched Afghan Earth," Washington Times, 12 January 1984, p. 1C.

27. Jane's All the World's Aircraft 1983-84 (New York: Jane's), p. 216.

28. Charles Dunbar, "Inside Wartime Kabul," Asia, November/ December 1983, p. 27.

29. James H. Hansen, "Afghanistan: The Soviet Experience," National Defence, January 1982, pp. 23-24.

30. Ibid.

31. Coyne, p. 72.

32. "Su-25 Operating in Afghanistan," Aviation Week and Space Technology, 3 January 1983, pp. 12-13.

33. Yossef Bodansky, "Most Feared Aircraft in Afghanistan is Frogfoot," Jane's Defence Weekly, 19 May 1984. p. 768.

34. Jane's All the World's Aircraft, pp. 235-36.

35. Isby, "Soviets in Afghanistan, Prepared for the Long Haul," p. 14.

36. Fred Hiatt, "Soviets Use Bombers in Afghanistan," Washington Post, 24 April 1984, p. Al.

37. Fred Hiatt, "Soviet Troops Advance into Key Afghan Valley," Washington Post, 27 April 1984, p. A19.

38. Hiatt, "Soviets Use Bombers in Afghanistan," p. Al.

39. Bodansky, "The Bear on the Chessboard: Soviet Military Gains in Afghanistan," p. 286.

40. The Review of the NEWS, 24 November 1982, p. 64.

41. Joseph J. Collins, "The Soviet-Afghan War: The First Four Years," Parameters, Summer 1984, p. 52.

42. Associated Press, "Use of Deadly Air Bombs Reported in Afghanistan," New York Times, 24 May 1984, p. A5.

43. James C. Bussert, "Signal Troops Central to Soviet Afghanistan Invasion," Defense Electronics, June 1983, p. 104.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., p. 107.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., pp. 107-08.

50. Ibid.. p. 108.

51. Ibid.

52. Bodansky, "The Bear on the Chessboard: Soviet Military Gains in Afghanistan," p. 279.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., p. 280.

55. "Afghanistan Three Years Later: More U.S. Help Needed," The Backgrounder, 27 December 1982, p. 11.

56. Bodansky, "The Bear on the Chessboard: Soviet Military Gains in Afghanistan." p. 280.

57. Ibid., p. 287.

58. Bussert, p. 108.

Contributor

Lieutenant Colonel Denny R. Nelson (B.S., Oklahoma State University; M.A., Webster University) is a Research Fellow at the Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education, Hq Air University. He has had worldwide F-4 assignments and a staff assignment in DCS/Personnel at Tactical Air Command. Colonel Nelson, a graduate of Squadron Officer School and Air Command and Staff College, is a previous contributor to the Review.
 

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