Reborn on We lost lost our country last fall.
| Jacksel (Jack) Markham Broughton |
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America lost her first war ever because bureaucrats 10,000 miles away from the fighting played a kind of ‘war monopoly’ game, in which the stakes were not play money but the lives of men sent out to die in the rice paddies and skies of Vietnam. Called to testify in a civil suit after the war, McNamara said under oath that he had decided as early as December 1965 that ‘the war could not be won militarily.’
During the war, President Johnson would talk by telephone to then Air Force Major John Keeler about what to say during the ‘Five O’Clock Follies,’ the daily press briefing held every afternoon in Saigon. As Keeler put it, Johnson called so that the press officer could ‘get the party line.’ The political agenda in America was obviously more important than the bloodshed on the hills around Khe Sanh. Johnson often bragged, ‘Those boys can’t hit an outhouse without my permission.’
More @ History Net
On War, by Carl von Clausewitz, from Book 8 Chapter 6 B, War as an Instrument of Policy
ReplyDeleteIn one word, the art of war in it highest point of view is policy, but, no doubt, a policy which fights battles instead of writing notes.
According to this view, to leave a great military enterprise, or the plan for one, to a purely military judgment and decision is a distinction which cannot be allowed, and is even prejudicial; indeed, it is an irrational proceeding to consult professional soldiers on the plan of a war, that they may give a purely military opinion upon what the Cabinet ought to do; but still more absurd is the demand of theorists that a statement of the available means of war should be laid before the general, that he may draw out a purely military plan for the war or for a campaign in accordance with those means. Experience in general also teaches us that notwithstanding the multifarious branches and scientific character of military art in the present day, still the leading outlines of a war are always determined by the Cabinet, that is, if we would use technical language, by a political not a military organ.
This is perfectly natural. None of the principal plans which are required for a war can be made without an insight into the political relations; and, in reality, when people speak, as they often do, of the prejudicial influence of policy on the conduct of a war, they say in reality something very different to what they intend. It is not the influence but the policy itself which should be found fault with. If the policy is right, that is, if it succeeds hitting the object, then it can only act with advantage on the war. If this influence from policy causes a divergence from the object, the cause is only to be looked for in a mistaken policy.
It is only when policy promises itself a wrong effect from certain military means and measures, an effect opposed to their nature, that it can exercise a prejudicial effect on the war by the course it prescribes. Just as a person in a language with which he is not conversant sometimes says what he does not intend, so policy, when, intending right, may often order things which do not tally with its own views.
Thank you and has been on my shelve for many years.
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