NEAL CONAN, host:
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Here are the headlines from some of the stories we're following here today at NPR News. The Supreme Court justices unanimously agreed today that a New Hampshire parental notification law could make it too tough for some minors to get an abortion, but the Supreme Court said a lower court was wrong to overturn the entire law, and sent the matter back to an appeals court, thereby avoiding a major decision of its own.
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If you check the bedtime reading of the leaders of the Bush administration during the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, you might have found a copy of SUPREME COMMAND: LEADERSHIP IN WARTIME. Its author, Eliot Cohen, is professor of Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Along with John Gooch, he's also the author of MILITARY MISFORTUNES: THE ANATOMY OF FAILURE IN WAR. That book was published 15 years ago. Military Misfortunes has recently been reissued with a new section about the war in Iraq.
This is not a book about incompetent generals or foolish, one-sided campaigns. It examines why competent military professionals made calamitous mistakes. Why, for example, the U.S. Navy refused to form convoys at the start of the Second World War; how a bold British strike at Germany's lesser ally in the First World War ended up in the fiasco of Gallipoli; and why the French military collapsed before the German Blitzkrieg in 1940.
If you have questions about military campaigns and the reasons for failures, give us a call. Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255, that's 800-989-TALK. The email address is talk@npr.org.
And Professor Cohen joins us now from the studios of the BBC in London, England, where he is at the moment. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today.
Professor ELIOT A. COHEN (Professor / Director of Center for Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University): Good to be with you.
CONAN: First of all, I have to ask, were you surprised when your other book on strategy became such a hit with the Bush administration?
Prof. COHEN: Yeah, I was, actually. It was a book that had been in the works for a very long time, and it happened to be, it really was coincidental that it came out during the run-up to the, to the war. I thought, you know, maybe it would speak to some of their concerns, but that wasn't why I had written it, and in fact, the main audience for it, to tell you the truth, has really been a military audience, military officers wondering, why do politicians do the things they do? In part, the purpose of the book was to help explain that to them.
CONAN: Hmm. Let's get to this earlier book, THE ANATOMY OF FAILURE IN WAR: MILITARY MISFORTUNES. You use the word misfortune carefully. In other words, you're not interested in just going after incompetent leadership, which is the first thing, I guess, everybody tends to do if, if you lost a battle, clearly the general screwed up.
Prof. COHEN: Well, the book grew out of a course that John Gooch and I taught at the Naval War College. We had these senior military officers and we were arguing, in fact, about one of the campaigns that we talk about here, the Dardanelles campaign of 1915, and we decided to turn it into a course where we had a rule that you weren't allowed to suggest that the people in charge had been idiots, until halfway through the seminar.
Now the, the, a number of cases ended up on the cutting room floor because the, the seminar's consensus was that, no, they really were fools. But then there was quite an interesting selection of cases where talking to these military professionals, and it was really quite a wonderful interchange, all of us agreed that, you know, you really couldn't say that the people in charge had been incompetent and yet, things had really become seriously unstuck. And John and I ended up writing a book trying to explain some of the ways in which that that happens.
CONAN: Mm-hmm. Let's pick one example, and there are several in the book, but I picked the example of the U.S. Navy in the opening days of the Second World War, in other words, after Pearl Harbor from our point of view. The British Navy reluctantly had resumed convoys in the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, the U.S. Navy was taking part in that, in that operation, but obviously German U-boats were having a field day, and then they proceeded to have, what I guess German U-boat commanders refer to nostalgically afterwards as the Happy Time after the U.S. declared war, and they just started sinking individual American ships silhouetted against the lights of American cities along the East Coast.
Prof. COHEN: That's right. And the British had learned through painful experience in the First World War that you had to have convoy, and so they instituted it right at the beginning of World War II. The thing that made that case so interesting is, it wasn't simply a case of not invented here, that the United States Navy did not want to learn from the Royal Navy. In fact, they, we had missions over there from the very beginning. We were copying all kinds of devices, particularly the British had done a lot of work on sonar as a way of detecting submerged submarines. But what we talk about in that chapter is the way in which the Navy was predisposed to learn technical lessons. That is to say, they were very eager to learn about the latest gadgets and gizmos and weapons and very narrow tactical techniques. But they thought the British had nothing to teach them about organization.
And so much of the key to the success of the British in the war in the north Atlantic was superior organization, not only the convoys, but also the way they structured their intelligence system, how they managed to let it communicate.
And on top of this, what makes it interesting is, the Navy had a good reason. You know, they had seen how the Royal Navy had to organize its naval aviation, which was not in very good shape at the beginning of the war. And so they said, well, we don't have any organizational lessons to learn from these people, and unfortunately, they were wrong.
CONAN: And the person who was in charge at the time, and this will sound strange to people, was the most obvious target to be scapegoated if anybody was going to be, was Admiral Ernest King, who later became one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and, you know, hailed as a great strategist during the war, particularly for the Pacific campaign. It was not a question in his case of incompetence.
Prof. COHEN: No, not at all. And I think that, one of the things that really intrigued us in writing the book is trying to understand what military competence means, and how much tolerance you should have for mistakes, and how much realization you should have that even very, very able people can do things which, in retrospect, you just say, this, this is really dumb.
CONAN: Mm hmm.
Prof. COHEN: I think one of the conclusions we came to is that the quality that you look for most in the military is the ability to adapt, and to change, and to adjust to circumstances, and to do so relatively quickly. That's the real measure of a military organization. By and large, the American military is reasonably good at that, but, of course, could always be better.
CONAN: Well, the, that chapter on anti-submarine warfare in 1942 is titled Failure to Learn. And in your brief afterwords about the War in Iraq, you come to pretty much the same conclusion, that the American military failed to learn some important lessons.
Prof. COHEN: Yeah, in a somewhat different way, I think the, what, the point that I was trying to make, we were trying to make about Iraq is that the United States military had had a very rich history of doing counter-insurgency operations. We, of course, had a tremendous amount of experience in military government during the Second World War, under different circumstances, but still military government. And there was almost a self-inflicted amnesia, which was part of the reaction to the Vietnam experience.
You know, there was a tremendous sense in the military that, gosh, we never wanna go through anything like that again. We wanna purge that from our curricula. We don't wanna update the field manuals. This is not what we do. This is not who we are. It was almost in some ways as much about identity as it was about strategy. And the result was that even though there was a lot of experience, including some fairly recent experience in places like El Salvador or in the Balkans in a rather different way, a lot of the lessons hadn't been absorbed. And so we went off with a kind of theory of war, which worked for the first part of the conflict, but was certainly not suited to everything that followed.
CONAN: You're not talking about the adaptability of individual soldiers or small units. You say they've obviously been adapting. But the failure of the institution to remember the lessons of Vietnam and, as you say, sort of willfully say, you know, we're about high-intensity warfare. Now, we're not doing this low-intensity stuff.
Prof. COHEN: Well, that's right. But you know, there are, I mean, there are some very good signs. And I do believe the American military remains quite an adaptable institution. You know, there have been some, for example, there was a, quite a sever critique of the American military that was recently written by a British brigadier general. And the amazing thing is, and he criticizes the American military for many of the things that I talk about...
CONAN: Mm hmm.
Prof. COHEN: ...at the end of the book. And what's interesting about that is that this critique was published in the staff journal of the Army's Command and Staff College, and, at least according to news reports, the Chief of Staff of the Army has sent it around to every general officer in the Army. So it, I think it proves that the, that quality of, ability to adapt once you're actually in the middle of a mess is still, thank goodness, something that exists in large measure in the American armed forces.
CONAN: Well, let's get some listeners involved in the conversation. Our guest is Eliot Cohen. The book we're talking about is Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War. 800-989-8255, and let's start with Keith, Keith calling us from Newtown, Pennsylvania.
KEITH (Caller): Yes, how are you?
CONAN: Very well, thank you.
KEITH: My question is I know Winston Churchill Gallipoli was his brainchild, I believe, and yet, what a colossal failure that was. And yet he goes on to reach the highest heights of English politics. In the United States, I don't think that ever could happen, someone who suffered such a failure, such a setback, never would have gone on to be as powerful as he was. I'm just wondering if you could draw a parallel of that for me. I'll take my answer offline, thanks.
CONAN: Okay, thanks for the call, Keith.
Prof. COHEN: Well, I think that overdraws what happened at the Dardanelles. I mean, Churchill pushed very, very hard for the Dardanelles operation. It was on several occasions a very near-run thing. You know, first they tried to force the straits. Basically the idea was that you were going to take Istanbul, then Constantinople, you'd open a sea lane of communication to the Russians.
So you'd be able to resupply them. You would separate Turkey from Austria and from Germany. And there would be all kinds of repercussions in the Middle East and the Balkans and so on. There was a serious effort made. There were, one attempt by ships alone, which was a naval assault, then two amphibious assaults.
And each time they came very close, and that's part of what we look at in that chapter. Churchill did absorb the blame for it, partly because the British do have a good way of saying, you know, the leading political figure should take the hit. But I think it would have been a, it was a mistake at the time, it would've been a mistake to simply blame Churchill for it. Churchill's own reading was quite interesting. He said afterwards that the lesson that he learned, and it was a lesson that he applied in the Second World War, was never to simply order the military to do something that they fundamentally opposed. He would bully. He would badger. He would harass. He would question. He would probe. But never again would he just say, look, you know, I'm the civilian in charge. Just do it because I said do it.
CONAN: Hmm.
Prof. COHEN: And that speaks to a number of things. It speaks to his remarkable ability to learn, but it also speaks to a certain style of high command, which is actually tied to the other book that NEAL mentioned at the beginning, Supreme Command.
CONAN: And it's also important, yes, the British did let him return to power only 25 years later. So, not an immediate whitewash.
Prof. COHEN: Right, although, you know, no, not at all. And the shadow of the Dardanelles was really over him for the rest of his career. To include the American reading of Churchill, General George Marshall was very, very wary of Churchill because of the Dardanelles.
CONAN: We're talking with Eliot Cohen, and you're listening to Talk of the Nation from NPR News. Let's get another caller on the line. We'll go to David. David's calling from St. Louis.
DAVID (Caller): Yes, NEAL and Professor Cohen, my, start with my personal favorite as far as a confluence of misfortune in the military context I guess would be Market Garden. But...
CONAN: A Bridge Too Far, people will remember it better under that title.
DAVID: Correct, correct. But apart from that, I wondered if you would, we always talk of, we keep talking about the major powers, the United States, Britain, France, as far as their misfortunes, or their adaptability. I was wondering if you could discuss what seems to be an increasing degree of adaptability and technical competence on the part of the insurgents operating in Iraq.
Prof. COHEN: That's a great question. There, I, it is, one of the things that is scary about Iraq is just how quickly the insurgents learn new techniques, new devices. It's a real measure, countermeasure gain. That, per se, that's not something that's new in warfare. You know, anti-submarine warfare in the north Atlantic during World War II is a real measure, countermeasure gain.
The pace of it, because of things like the Internet, particularly because of the Internet, is a lot faster. But I think a lot of that learning is essentially tactical and technical learning. It's not clear to me that the insurgents in Iraq are strategically any more sophisticated than they were. It, that they have thought in a kind of a bigger way about achieving what they're objectives are.
And I think one good example of that is it's, again, just going by news reports, it doesn't look as if there's a lot more tension and sometimes even fighting between the native Sunni Arab insurgents, who are, I think, the main force in the insurgency, and the Zarqawi group, this foreign Jihadi element, which is...
CONAN: al-Quaeda in Iraq, yeah.
Prof. COHEN: ...much more, much more extreme. Yeah, al-Qaeda in Iraq. And, you know, so you don't have a sense that they've really figured out how to make temporary alliances, how to make political overtures, how to carry this to the next stage. So the, and these folks are not nearly as sophisticated, I don't, yet, at that level in learning, as, say, Sinn Fein has been in the Irish context.
CONAN: And yet, they're still out there and doing pretty well.
Prof. COHEN: Well, they're, look, they're very committed. It's guerilla warfare, which takes a very long time. They're a number of actors from outside Iraq who have interest in keeping this going. They've got a lot of resources, which we sometimes don't, you know, just along those lines. One thing that makes this war unique, these people have no shortage of weapons and high explosive. In most insurgencies, just getting adequate supplies of high explosive and weapons is a real challenge. In Iraq because of the truly staggering amounts of weapons and high explosive that were left scattered around by the Saddam Hussein regime, that's not a problem for them.
CONAN: Hmm.
Prof. COHEN: That already is a huge difference, I think, from other insurgencies.
CONAN: David, thanks for the call.
DAVID: Thank you.
CONAN: One final question for you, Eliot Cohen. Another of the mistakes you said the United States made in Iraq, post-war Iraq, or I guess, post- the fall of Baghdad, was a lack of unity of command.
Prof. COHEN: Right, you know, I think a lot of the debate about what some of the mistakes that were made in Iraq followed a red herring, which is the numbers issue. That was important, how many troops. But I think the history of insurgencies tells us that organization, doctrine zone matter a lot more. And of the things that matters most is to have the military and civilian functions completely integrated. Do you have, the people who are in charge of security also worrying about development, and the supply of clean water and electricity, and all the rest?
Our most successful commanders over there, for example, General Peter Corelli, who's now the Corps Commander there, as a divisional commander, he said, you know, what's gonna be important for ensuring stability in Baghdad is, do these people have sewage? Do they have water? Do they have electricity? And he made that happen, and incidents in his sector went way down. On a much larger scale, it was a terrible decision to have military leadership on the one hand and then the Coalition Provisional Authority under Ambassador Bremer. And eventually you had two competing hostile bureaucracies which were not very cooperative.
And insurgency, above all kinds of war, is one where the political, the economic, the social has to be completely interlinked and interwoven with the military. And you only get that if you have one person in charge, the military or civilian.
CONAN: Eliot Cohen, thanks very much for being with us today.
Prof. COHEN: Thank you very much.
CONAN: Eliot Cohen, Professor of Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. The book we were talking about is Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War. I'm Neal Conan. This is Talk of the Nation from NPR News.
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