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November 20, 2005

The Military and Political Implications of Disclosing Strategy

There is a critical point that needs to be made, that the media and the administration's opponents have been glossing over, and that the administration has characteristically not been making, or has made badly. The iron law of warfighting is this: the leaders of a country at war can publicly explain neither the underlying strategy being used nor the full extent of their successes and mistakes.

To see why this is so, consider two historical examples of grand strategy, and how knowing the actual strategy could have enabled the enemy to win: the American Civil War and WWII in the Pacific.

The Union strategy in the Civil War was known as the Anaconda Plan. This plan, developed by Winfield Scott (hero of the War of 1812 and commander of the Mexican War), essentially consisted of two elements: the first was to divide and isolate the Confederates by blockading the entire Southern coast and occupying the Mississippi river valley; the second was to then sit back and wait for pro-union sympathizers to rise up and force the rebel governments out of power. President Lincoln adopted the first principle, but the second was not enough when the Union public was clamoring for aggressive action to bring the South back into the Union. Instead, the Union adopted a plan to destroy Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and take Richmond.

The Confederates could have countered the second part of the Anaconda Plan. To do so, they would have had to conserve the Confederate armies, risking them as little as possible, while cutting Union communications along the periphery. While the Confederacy could not have overcome the blockade, they could have used their advantage of interior lines to frustrate Union attacks intended to either take Richmond or destroy the Confederate armies, while simultaneously inflicting great costs on the Union just to stay in the fight: it's hard to ship goods and people thousands of miles today; it was much, much more difficult in the 1860s. Eventually, the Union would have been exhausted if they had been unable to retake the Confederate states, and it's likely that the Confederate states would have been able to gain their independence.

Instead, the Confederates — Lee, at least — appear to have thought the key to victory was to take Washington. As a result, Lee was constantly fighting, and constantly pushing into Northern territory. And it was in doing so, at a small Pennsylvania town, that Lee's army was finally defeated so badly that it could never recover. There were still two years of war to go, but the South had passed the point where it could win without a massive Union blunder or failure of will. (General Longstreet recommended that the Confederacy instead use its railroads and interior lines to relieve the siege of Vicksburg, which would in fact, if successful, have both demolished General Grant's career and likely have led to a failure of the Anaconda Plan: the Confederacy could have kept the lower part of the Mississippi open.

But since the Confederacy did not know the strategy, they made fundamental errors that cost them the war.

The second example is WWII in the Pacific. The US intended to enter the war as soon as reasonable cause could be found. President Roosevelt knew that despite the anti-war (and in some cases actively pro-fascist) sentiment in the US, it would be necessary to defeat Germany; he was looking for a pretext, and the constant submarine warfare in the Atlantic had come close to supplying him one by late 1941. Apparently, Japan was seen as a considerably more minor problem — or at least one to be solved further in the future.

But Japan didn't know that. Japan saw the cutting off of raw materials shipments from the US as a clear provocation, and decided that it needed to act in order to maintain its ability to run a modern industrial economy. This required Japan to control a large part of the Pacific and SE Asia, where significant oil, rubber, mineral and other resources were located. This would inevitably bring Japan into conflict with Australia, which was actively defending New Guinea, in particular, which was a significant problem for the Japanese. The Japanese figured that the US would come to the defense of Australia (likely, but not certain), and that would pose a problem of major proportions: the US territory of the Philippines lay across the route of Japanese expansion southwards.

Looking at it from Japan's point of view, it was necessary both to keep the US from supporting Australia, and to keep the US from blocking Japanese expansion. This meant that the Philippines had to be captured, and the US Pacific Fleet destroyed, disabled, or kept away from the theater. And that is why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam and other US installations in the Pacific on December 7, 1941, after which their defeat was as close to inevitable as war ever gets.

But had Japan understood that America saw Germany as the main enemy, Japan could have waited six months. By that time, the US would almost certainly have joined the war against Germany, and in the process would have transferred significant resources from the Pacific Fleet to the Atlantic Fleet. This would have given Japan the ability to advance southwards without worrying about the US. Already involved in a war taking all of its resources to fight, the US would not have been likely to intervene in Japan's expansion. By the time US attention could have been focused on Japan — probably 1944 at the earliest — Japan would have been much more powerful, perhaps too powerful for the US to see intervention as useful, absent a Japanese attack on Guam and the Philippines.

So as a practical matter, while a free society must always debate its goals in order to come to consensus (required for maintaining any policy over the long term), discussing strategy openly — at least on the part of those charged with developing or implementing it — is folly. Yet this is precisely what the opposition in the US demands. Absent this complete disclosure of the strategy well in advance, the opposition claims that there is no strategy, and that's why so much "needless" losses are happening in places that simply "have nothing to do" with the "real war". Why do they do this, knowing as they must that the administration cannot get involved in a deep discussion of strategy without possibly losing the war?

The iron law of political opposition in a representative country in wartime is this: the opposition can make use of the iron law of warfighting to undermine the government, if it is more concerned with its own power position than with the country's success or failure in the war. The way that the opposition does this is to challenge the administration to account for funds it cannot admit to spending without tipping off the enemy to our plans, to bring forth evidence of intelligence the government cannot disclose without allowing the enemy to stop that source of intelligence, to detail the strategy in ways the government cannot do without telling the enemy how to fight us more effectively, and to constantly beat the drum of incompetence and irrelevance of the leaders of the government.

If you think that the US is bad about this now, you should read up on the political infighting in England during the Napoleonic wars. The Democrats are amateurs compared to the Radicals, or even the Whigs.

It might be possible to publish milestones for our success in Iraq, at this point, since we've mostly won that fight in real terms (assuming, of course, that we don't just give up, as we did after militarily winning in Viet Nam). But it would be a grave mistake for the government to talk about the wider strategy in the war, and why Iraq is so important as a campaign in the war. Yet that is precisely what the Democrats want to debate, because they know it's a one-sided debate: the government cannot answer without giving vital information to the enemy. It's a cowardly and self-interested and treacherous. And yes, I am questioning their patriotism: patriotism consists in putting the interests of the country above your narrower self-interest, and the Democrats right now are (at least rhetorically) doing the opposite. I am glad the Republicans called them on it.

Posted by jeff at November 20, 2005 12:08 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Nemo at November 20, 2005 8:27 AM

Posted by: Jeff Medcalf at November 20, 2005 9:10 AM