Starvin Larry

It is curious how little military men know about war. You would think they would think about it more. Yet, oddly, they regularly misjudge practically everything concerning the dismal trade. Their errors are not the sort that inevitably must occur in a contest, as when a quarterback doesn’t pick up a blitz. They are fundamental misappreciations of war itself.

The foregoing sounds both arrogant and improbable, like saying that dentists do not understand teeth. Actually it is neither.

The reasons are several. First, the military attracts certain kinds of men—authoritarian, hierarchical, conformist—who are not imaginative and do not think independently. Second, the  appeal of the military is visceral, emotional, hormonal. Neither of these things is true of dentists.

This explains why wars monotonously turn out not to resemble expectations. In WWI, the German command expected a lightning victory via the Schlieffen Plan. It failed, but the foolishness does not lie in the failure. Rather it is in the complete incapacity to foresee that the failure would result in four years of inconclusive static war. Trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns took them by surprise. Yet the existence of all of these things was well known.

This sort of blindness is common, almost normal. At First Manassas in the American Civil War, the armies had no faint idea that they might be embarking on four years of horrendous war, or of the kind of war it would be. When America invaded Vietnam, the Pentagon did not foresee ten years of a losing war. Nor did it have any notion of what would happen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Militaries  regularly underestimate the enemy and overestimate their own capacities. The reasons I think are several. One is that morale is important in war and a sober estimation of reality often does not conduce to high morale. For example, you do not tell your troops, “You are mediocre infantry and inferior man for man to the enemy but we have better technology and will rely on this.” Thus American troops are always the finest, best trained and best armed the world has ever seen.

Another and important reason is the Star Wars Effect. In movie theaters watch the audience, and particularly the male part, when the good space ships swoop in, dodging, maneuvering, firing, just on the edge of defeat, the music coming up, and blow the bad guy away. The watchers grip the armrests, sway with the turns of the hero’s spaceship. This visceral, adrenal response to war runs through humanity: The Ride of the Valkyries, The Sands of Iwo Jima, and the Charge of the Light Brigade.

Military training aims at the inculcation of a sense of invincibility. Years back at Parris Island a sign read, “The Most Dangerous Thing in the World: A Marine and his Rifle.” It was nonsense, the marines then being decent light infantry but no more, yet we were told endlessly that were unique in the annals of war. This sort of overconfidence has consequences. Sometimes it provides the elan needed to win. Sometimes it leads to disaster.

The unrealistic sense of power is instilled in training by, for example,  running in close formation. The rhythmic thumpthumpthump of fifty pairs of boots unleashes something deep in males. It is the pack instinct, a call to savagery intensified by calling cadence, “Luke the gook comes marching by, stick your bayonet in his eye, lefryelefrylefryelef….” We are the toughest of the tough.

Often the belief in invincibility becomes almost mystical. y. In WWI the French believed in cran, in l’offensive a outrnce, the fighting spirit that was sure to lead to victory. More attention to heavy artillery would  have been prudent. In Japan it was bushido. Yamamoto, who had been in the United States and knew what it was, suggested that starting a war with a country having ten times your industrial potential was not unduly bright. The Army ignored him.

Underestimation of the enemy is a military disease bordering at time on a death wish. Before WWII, the US military tended to regard the Japanese as funny little buck-toothed monkeys with thick glasses. The same monkeys had destroyed the Russian fleet in 1905, fought for years in China with an excellent fighter plane—the Zero—and conducted sophisticated carrier operations. None of this occurred to the Americans…

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