War lessons from the past

By Joe Vigliotti

The current conflict in Afghanistan is the longest war in American history and there are now more than 1,000 dead. Victor Davis Hanson’s book, “The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern” (Bloomsbury Press, 2010) provides timely insight. A military historian, columnist and former classics professor, Mr. Hanson is well-adept at political analysis and commentary. He explains that war is in an inescapable tenet of human nature. For better and worse, war will always be with us and therefore, we need a better understanding of war.

Mr. Hanson notes that military history is like the black sheep of historical studies. Classes are devoted to the home front, to women’s contributions to the war effort, to internment camps, but rarely to battlefield conditions, tactics, strategies or the men on the field. The study of war itself, uncultured and grotesque, is brushed aside by elite academics who prefer to focus on the circumstances of war. “The focus instead,” writes Mr. Hanson, “is frequently on the race, class, and gender of combatants and wartime civilians, and so our attention is turned away from the front to larger questions of ideology and identity.”

Yet an understanding of the battlefield is important to wartime civilians and successive generations. Mr. Hanson notes that public support of the Korean War (1951-53) ebbed and flowed along with success on the field–the same is true with Operation Iraqi Freedom. The initial three-week victory over Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist forces in the early spring of 2003 was deceptive to the American public, as a determined insurgency and fierce internecine rivalry followed Saddam’s toppling.

The Iraq War garnered overwhelming public support in the spring of 2003, which eventually declined as the insurgency dragged on and casualties mounted. “A sophisticated society takes for granted the ability to select from five hundred cable channels; so too, contemporary Americans, spurred on by ‘greeted as liberators’ assurances by our naïve leaders, almost expect Saddam instantly gone, Jeffersonian democracy up and running reliably, and the Iraqi economy growing like Dubai’s in a few seasons,” writes Mr. Hanson. Mr. Hanson explains that if this is not the case, “then someone must be blamed for ignorance, malfeasance, or inhumanity.” President George W. Bush and the Republicans were held up by Democrats as scapegoats in the 2006 midterm elections, which resulted in the loss of a Republican-controlled Congress.

In such situations, at least a cursory knowledge of military history is helpful to understand harsh truths about war. When one nation begins a war, that nation must only ever intend to win, otherwise a country like Korea will be divided into free and totalitarian partitions poised in an impermanent truce. Wars are not always simple open-and-shut incidents; nor are bombing campaigns, strategic missile assaults, highly advanced weapons technology or limited operations like those in Panama (1989) and Kosovo (1999) tantamount to replacing infantry brigades and tanks in the field as was the case in Iraq in March 2003.

Mr. Hanson also notes that spectacular successes–for example, the Union success at Gettysburg in July, 1863–are only ever possible after failures lead to learning, as was the case with the Union failures at Fredericksburg (December,1862) and Chancellorsville (May,1863). In a similar manner, the "small-footprint" strategy of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraq War failed by 2006. It was replaced by General Petraeus' offensive counterinsurgency strategy that focused on population protection, popularized as “the Surge.”

For an American public unused to large-scale conventional warfare after the nation-building and strategic bombing missions that characterized American military action in the 1990s, and clean victories like Grenada (1983) and the Gulf War (1991), a drawn-out affair in faraway lands becomes taxing and tiring. Such a distant conflict becomes especially exhausting when initial sweeping success is overshadowed by insurgency attacks, and a media that daily reports the dire situations on the front, and lists the dead and wounded like a tally sheet. "Our will power is predicated upon inevitable mistakes being learned from and rectified far more competently and quickly than the enemy will learn from his,” writes Mr. Hanson. The American public needs a more mature view of warfare: “If the United States is to fight future wars, our national wartime objective should be victory, a goal that brings with it the acceptance of tragic errors as well as the appreciation of heroic and brilliant conduct.”

Studying military history also reveals the origins and evolution of warfare. Mr. Hanson finds that “today’s conventional militaries are not only equipped with Western-designed weaponry and organized along Western lines, but they even look uniformly Western–if we can judge by Chinese boots, Egyptian camouflaged tanks and Venezuelan officer caps. Apparently, there is a universal consensus that the best way to marshal manpower and material for conventional war is to emulate the system that originated on the killing fields of Greece and Rome.” And so it is all the better to understand Greece and Rome–and their military history.

Therefore,  as Americans are confronted with drawing down the troops in Iraq and winning the war in Afghanistan, Mr. Hanson aptly reminds us that “Western military successes never progressed in linear or predetermined fashion.” The study of military history gives us perspective and provides lessons for current and future conflicts. Even when wars are conducted to a successful conclusion, they are inevitably harsh and turbulent—and fraught with many mistakes along the way.

-Joe Vigliotti is a writer living in Maryland. His work can be found at: www.traditiontomorrow.blogspot.com.