Dr. Abu Muqawama, the Duke of Wellington and the messiness of war
The other day my CNAS colleague Dr. Abu Muqawama commented about Libya, “I really think the administration has been terribly sloppy in its own management of this conflict.” This reminded me of something I have been thinking about lately: Because of its inherent messiness and difficulty, all wars are always terribly hard to manage. This ...
The other day my CNAS colleague Dr. Abu Muqawama commented about Libya, "I really think the administration has been terribly sloppy in its own management of this conflict." This reminded me of something I have been thinking about lately: Because of its inherent messiness and difficulty, all wars are always terribly hard to manage. This is so consistently true that I imagine that no war looks well-run from inside it. I suspect that any war feels "terribly sloppy" at the time. This is the originating impulse of all those jokes about anyone remaining calm not understanding the situation.
The other day my CNAS colleague Dr. Abu Muqawama commented about Libya, “I really think the administration has been terribly sloppy in its own management of this conflict.” This reminded me of something I have been thinking about lately: Because of its inherent messiness and difficulty, all wars are always terribly hard to manage. This is so consistently true that I imagine that no war looks well-run from inside it. I suspect that any war feels “terribly sloppy” at the time. This is the originating impulse of all those jokes about anyone remaining calm not understanding the situation.
Same goes true for organizations observing these things. I first began to think about this when I was an editor at the Wall Street Journal during the 1991 Gulf War, and was surprised at how pissed off everyone was most of the time the war was underway. After it was over I took a week off just to go hiking and calm down. I also think of the Duke of Wellington‘s comment that “nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”
My sense that war is the sloppiest of enterprises has been reinforced by the deep dive I’ve been doing over the last three years through 20th century American military history. This isn’t just a matter of the Vietnam War, in which I have been immersed for 14 months — I feel like my tour was extended, in part because I got mired in My Lai for six weeks last winter. I am emerging only now.
Even in wars we won, it is amazing how often everyone is upset with each other, feeling ill-used, misunderstood, even betrayed. I think of MacArthur once humiliating Eichelberger to tears. This goes double for working with allies. It is the genius of Marshall and Eisenhower that they understood this and made getting along with allies their top imperative of the war. Ike once remarked to an officer, I’m not sending you home because you called him a son-of-a-bitch, I’m sending you home because you called him a British son-of-a-bitch.
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