Air University Review, July-August 1984
THE Vietnam War was the chance for many rare birds to come out of their academic cages. For several years thereafter, Americans were treated to the spectacle of some anguished moaning over the sins of the Republic. The Vietnam War was the archetype of war, one which surpassed all others in ferocity and cruelty. Only recently has a more dispassionate analysis begun to emerge. Guenther Lewy's America in Vietnam dispelled the mythology about unprecedented American violence.1 Norman Podhoretz in Why We Were in Vietnam attacked the revisionist argument that U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia was inherently immoral.2 And Colonel Harry G. Summers's analytical work On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War destroyed the false impression that Vietnam was won by "insurgents,"3 explaining how the guerrillas were a diversionary sideshow for the North Vietnamese Army that finally steamrolled the Republic of Vietnam forces in a conventional attack using four army corps. Summers's more profound conclusion, though, is that U.S. strategists and their critics both failed to understand the war because they had lost touch with the fundamentals of strategy itself.
Viewing the Vietnam War from the perspective of the classical principles of strategy makes it a less than an end-of-the-world event. In much the same way, the American regime and its foreign policy are susceptible to analysis in terms of the classical notions of political science. The fundamental question of political science is presented in Books VIII and IX of Plato's Republic and takes the form of the query: "What is the nature of the regime?" Regime refers to the ordering (arrangement and filling) of public offices and the character of the men who rule.
Yet if we accept the Clausewitzian assertion that "war is the continuation of politics by other means," we cannot separate the analysis of war easily from that of politics. As Clausewitz himself writes:
. . . if we reflect that war has its roots in a political object, then naturally this original motive which called it into existence should also continue the first and highest consideration in its conduct.4
The prudent strategist or statesman thus will consider the nature of the means at his disposal but always with the primacy of policy in mind. "Policy therefore is interwoven with the whole action of war and must exercise a continuous influence upon it, as far as the nature of the forces liberated by it will permit."5
The implication of this interweaving for the strategist is profound. For him, the question of strategy turns out to be the question of political science: What kind of regime are we defending? A regime saver must be a regime knower.
To grapple with the nature of the U.S. regime is like wrestling with that mythological river-god who kept changing his shape and form. Its size, diversity, and newness remind us that the "human mind invents things more easily than words . . . . Hence a form of government has been found which is neither precisely national nor federal [and] the new word to express this new thing does not yet exist."6 This political creation, neither wholly classical nor entirely modern, is revealed in all its enormity and ambiguity by a trip on the interstate system. Along the highway lie small and large farms, husbanded by industrious lovers of thrift and wealth. Small shops and sprawling factories hide the labors and dreams of deft mechanics and energetic entrepreneurs. Periodically, the spires of a metropolis signal the restless desires of the multitudes in a feverish city where every type of character can be found, from the lotus-eater to the steel maker.
Let us simply call this kaleidoscope of occupations, aspirations, and desires an extended opulent republic. The task of strategy is to defend it. The problem in one sense is not new; it was present at the founding of the nation.
The Founding Fathers' first answer to the security problems of the new nation was provided by geography and fortuity. The vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean separated the American continent from the rivalries of Europe. The immensity of the American wilderness made a foreign invasion and occupation very unlikely events. Furthermore, Britain's interest in keeping European power politics out of the New World served America's purpose as well as Britain's during much of the nineteenth century.
With security guaranteed by distance, trackless wastes, and intra-European squabbles, America focused her energy on the debate over the organization and operation of the nation's government. What came out of the formative years was a regime characterized by the division of power, checks and balances, and frequent elections. Such a republic, it was argued, would be inherently peaceful because it emphasized commerce and domestic affairs. There would be little need for international intrigue, standing armies, and menacing fleets. The art and science of strategy could thus be ignored or at least relegated to the obscure province of a few military men.
For a long time, it went unnoticed that the argument over the nature of the regime and its security dilemma was "solved" by a form of geographical isolation rather than by philosophy. War and peace, or strategy and diplomacy, became separate categories of thought in the minds of the Americans.
After a century of attacking trees, wild beasts, and bottomlands, Americans found themselves thrown by technology and fortune into what Raymond Aron has called the worldwide "unity of the diplomatic field."7 The high-water mark of this involvement may have been World War II and its immediate aftermath. For our purpose, what is interesting about this era is the kind of Americans who planned and implemented U.S. foreign policy. The type is portrayed dramatically in the final pages of William Manchester's Goodbye, Darkness8 and seems to be a combination of the democratic (freedom-loving) and timocratic (honor-loving) men found in Books VIII and IX of Plato's Republic. A paradoxical man emerges: the American who loves freedom, license, even anarchy, yet has a powerful sense of honor, duty, and patriotism. His natural spiritedness, indignation, and righteous anger had been turned into a creative energy that upheld the safety and the principles of the regime.9
Many of our friends who returned from the Vietnam War remarked that something fundamental about the American regime had changed, something unlike the rapid changes in transportation, manufacturing, and housing that all generations of Americans had witnessed. Instead, the change seemed to involve the character of citizens themselves. It was as if the democratic tendency in American life had finally broken through its wall of coexistence with the parallel republican (or timocratic) tendency and overwhelmed its companion.
If this change is real--as real as the regime change in the 1830s, for example--the strategist in the 1980s is faced with this problem: How does one defend an opulent nation inhabited primarily by democratic men who favor self-gratification over the public good?
Human nature is unchanging in its essence but takes on many shapes and colors, like snowshoe hares or stoats. Might we not profit by examining men as they appear in other regimes in history? While history herself is a mute oracle, philosophy must encounter men as they appear against her scenery. Edward Luttwak has performed a similar task in Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire,10 which looks at the empire from the perspective of defense systems and subsystems. This study illuminates U.S. foreign policy by viewing it from a different angle; the same sort of activity might shed light on the problems of an opulent regime.
Look at the Romans. "Destined for war, and regarding it as the only art, the Romans put their whole spirit and all their thoughts into perfecting it," wrote Montesquieu.11 Does this picture of Roman manhood during the days of the Republic provide us with a paradigm for today's America? Probably not, since the formative centuries of the two regimes are so different. The Romans, "always exposed to the most frightful acts of vengeance,"12 developed the "virtues of constancy and valor,"13 and, in order "that they could handle heavier arms than other men, had to make themselves more than men."14 As Montesquieu dryly observed, "In short, no nation ever prepared for war with so much prudence or waged it with so much audacity."15 This sanguinary baptism of a nation suggests the image of a wrestler, "who has been thrown off balance by the sudden yielding of a taxing counterforce"16 but who rebounds to a fighting position, for "a body politic that has overcome a mortal threat will rush forward to regain its lost equilibrium--within an enlarged habitat."17 Frightful and continual wars, plus a certain genius for organization, strategy, and tactics, made the Romans into a people suited to the task of defending a republic and building an empire.
The first formative century of the United States suggests another image. One might use the "metaphor of the advancing current," which gets its impetus from secondary streams of immigrants who "effortlessly flatten minor natural obstacles."18 The resulting national character was precisely that which most of the Founding Fathers envisioned, and the regime became focused on liberty, commerce, and, especially, domestic affairs, while remaining unsuited to the patient and demanding work of perpetual defense in a world characterized by the Hobbesian phrase "state of warre." This unsuitability, in turn, was doubled by opulence, for, as Machiavelli wrote "it is of the greatest advantage in a republic to have laws that keep its citizens poor," as long as poverty is never allowed "to stand in the way of the achievement of any rank or honor."19 Montesquieu's writing supports this conclusion in his comments on the Punic Wars: "Carthage, which made war against Roman poverty with its opulence, was at a disadvantage by that very fact. Gold and silver are exhausted, but virtue, constancy, strength and poverty never are. "20
Our look at the Roman Republic causes us to reflect on our own republic. What things are similar? What different? Our thinking must now be directed toward another regime, one so different from the virtuous Roman Republic as to seem inhabited by a different species of beings.
For approximately a thousand years after the Roman state at last became opulent, corrupt, and vulnerable to foreign invaders, the Byzantine empire in the East survived in one form or another. From the transfer of the capital of Rome to Byzantium in A.D. 330 to the defeat of Byzantine arms by the Turks in 1071 at Manzikert, the Byzantine empire stood the shocks and blows of numerically superior enemies. And even after this stupendous defeat, Byzantium lived on in diminished power and wealth until the final Turkish conquest in 1461.21
This empire sounds magnificent; its reality seems to have been sordid. "The history of the Greek empire," wrote Montesquieu, "is nothing more than a tissue of revolts, seditions, and perfidies."22 Divided into factions, devoid of justice, wracked with superstition, ruled by fools for the most part, the empire was characterized by continuous internal troubles. "Once small-mindedness succeeded in forming the nation's character, wisdom took leave of its enterprises, and disorders without cause, as well as revolutions without motive, appeared."23 And still, as we have seen, the empire continued to stand for almost a millenium, opulent almost to the end.
Behind the political convolutions and mystical incantations of the empire stood the Byzantine army, "in its day the most efficient military body in the world. "24 What was the secret of Byzantine military prowess in a society whose name is a "synonym for effete incapacity alike in peace and war?"25
The answers are contained in the military doctrine of the Byzantines and the records of such great captains as Belisarius and Narses. Raising the art of war to the level of the psychological and as B. H. Liddell Hart suggests, the indirect,26 "the Strategicon of the Emperor Maurice and the Tactica of Leo . . . [provided a] structure . . . strong enough to withstand manysided barbarian pressure, and even the tidal wave of Mohammedan conquest which submerged the Persian Empire."27
As masters of the art of war, Byzantine military leaders stressed expertness in the employment of weapons and tactics, exact knowledge of the enemy, psychological preparation for battle, ruses and stratagems, and the relationship of war to the political end of saving the empire.28
But these are more symptoms than cause of Byzantine military greatness. There are two revealing passages in Sir Charles Oman's classic The Art of War in the Middle Ages about the armies of the Greek empire. The first is a summary of the military treatises of the day and concerns the ranks: "Unless the general is incompetent or the surrounding circumstances are unusually adverse, the authors always assume that victory will follow the banner of the empire. The troops can be trusted, like Wellington's Peninsular veterans, 'to go anywhere and do anything."29 The second portrays the military spirit of certain families who provided the army its officer corps:
A true military spirit existed among the noble families of the eastern empire; houses like those of Skleros and Phocas of Byrennius, Kerkauas, and Comnenus are found furnishing generation after generation of officers to the national army. The patrician left luxury and intrigue behind him when he passed through the gates of Constantinople, and became in the field a keen professional soldier.30
Taken together, these pictures of the Byzantine army present the spectacle of a society within a society, a small band dedicated to the military virtues, the art of war, and the defense of an opulent regime. This is the ultimate source of the victories of Byzantine arms and the security of the Byzantine state.
THIS brief study of two regimes should cause us to reflect on our own opulent republic. It seems clear that the defense of the republic and its liberal ethos ultimately will rest on the shoulders of men who must reject opulence and that ethos for the classical virtues. To make the armed forces of the republic the mirror image of that republic means the end of physical security and the values that make the American regime unique among the nations of the world.
Our visit to the Roman Republic revealed a republic in which citizen participation reached a level approaching the ideal. Barring unforeseen shocks and blows, it is unlikely that the American regime will ever again enjoy the energy and vigor of such participation. But our voyage to Byzantium uncovered a military establishment that protected its opulent society by rejecting the values of that society. Instead, the Byzantine army chose to retain the values that are always pure gold: fortitude, expertness, and loyalty to duty, honor, and country.
Radford University, Virginia
Notes
1. Guenther Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford, 1978).
2. Norman Podhoretz, Why We Were in Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
3. Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, California: Presidio, 1982).
4. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Vol. I, translated by Colonel J. J. Graham (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1956), pp. 22-23.
5. Ibid., p. 23.
6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. I, translated by George Lawrence, edited by J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 157.
7. Raymond Aron, On War (New York: Norton, 1968). p. 57.
8. William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness (New York: Dell, 1982).
9. This idea comes from a review of James Webb's Fields of Fire, and A Sense of Honor by Mackubin T. Ownes, Jr., "Soldiers and Statesmen," This World, Spring/Summer 1983, p. 163.
10. Edward N. Luttwak, Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976).
11. Montesquieu, The Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, translated by David Lowenthal (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1968), p. 33.
12. Ibid., p. 28.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 33.
15. Ibid., p. 37.
16. George Liska, Career of Empire: America and Imperial Expansion over Land and Sea (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1978), p. 8.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 110.
19. Nicholo Machiavelli, The Discourses, in The Prince and The Discourses (New York: Modern Library, 1951), p. 486.
20. Montesquieu, p. 45.
21. R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy, The Encyclopedia of Military History: From 3500 B.C. to the Present (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 437.
22. Montesquieu, p. 196.
23. Ibid., p. 203.
24. C. W. Oman, The Art Of War in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1953, 1968), p. 31.
25. Ibid., p. 32.
26. B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (New York: Praeger, 1967), p. 72.
27. Ibid., p. 73.
28. Oman, Chapter 111, passim.
29. Ibid., p. 32.
30. Ibid., p. 51. Emphasis added.
Contributor
Nicholas J. Pappas (B.S., Shepherd College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Radford University. He has served in the United States Marine Corps. Dr. Pappas is the author of an article on academic strategists during the Vietnam era, which was published in the Naval War College Review.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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