Max Boot Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 3 of 7

Small Wars

Tell us a little about how the book, The Savage Wars of Peace, came about. What were you looking for and didn't find which led you to write this book?

In the late 1990s I got interested in all of these lower-level American military interventions of the past decade in places like Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, and so forth. I started looking around and wondering, "Is this something new? Is this a new departure for the United States? Or have we done this kind of thing before?" The more I delved into the history, the more I thought, "This looks pretty familiar. We were just in Haiti, and we were in Haiti in 1915." But I didn't find a single account that put it all together and gave us a history of these small wars of the United States, and put them into the context of today's wars, the smaller wars that we've been fighting since the end of the Cold War. Finding that gap, I decided to go ahead and fill it.

What really drove me, the impetus for it, was as much as anything, the stories. I mentioned before the real attraction of history is that it has a tremendous story to tell. I was just blown away by the amazing stories of American military history that I was not familiar with, and I think most readers are not familiar with, about these lesser engagements that are very different from World War II or the Civil War. So I got into telling those stories. But then at the end of those stories, I decided to relate it to what was happening today. I didn't want to leave it at the stories. I wanted to offer my own take from having told the stories about what it meant and what the implications are for American policy for the future.

Why do you think, in terms of historiography, the stories hadn't been told or weren't there at your fingertips when you went to the library?

That's a good question. A lot of it has to do with the understandable fixation on the two big wars that we've fought, the Civil War and World War II. When you go to any bookstore or library, you see whole shelves groaning under the weight of volumes devoted to that. You see movies constantly coming out about that. And it makes sense, because those were the two most important wars we've fought. They've done a tremendous amount to shape our history, and I'm not going to sit here and claim that our intervention in Haiti in 1915 was as important as World War II or the Civil War. Taken individually, none of these interventions was very important, and so most of the coverage they received is from obscure historical monographs. But if you put them together, you see there's an important historical tradition, and that's what I'm trying to highlight.

[Barnes]
You made a good point in one piece, though, the one on the intervention in Russia, that if, in fact, not just the United States, but also the Allies, the French and the British, had managed to bring some force to bear, adequate enough to support the White Russian counter-revolution, the history of the western world might have been considerably different. Bolshevism might have been nipped in the bud.

That's a very good point. That was really one of the great lost opportunities in history. Often when American troops are sent somewhere, you hear very many warnings about the possible cost of failure. And that's appropriate; people are afraid of another Vietnam. But it's also important to keep in mind the cost of inaction. In the case of Bolshevism, where people like Winston Churchill, who was a minister in the British Cabinet at the time, and General Ferdinand Foch and various others thought there was a real opportunity to strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib, it didn't happen. As a result, untold horrors unfolded for Russia and the world. That was truly a terrible lost opportunity, where a small war, if pursued a little bit more aggressively, could have changed the course of history.

Were there any themes, or types of personalities, or political configurations that tended to emerge in a lot of these stories?

The causes of the interventions are broad and varied; it's very hard to generalize about them. One thing that emerged which I found really fascinating was the character of the fighting men of the United States who went off on these smaller expeditions. It is very hard for us to understand this kind of mind-set, where you would have a handful of Marines or sailors on a distance station, unable to communicate with the United States. Communication could take months. They were really on their own, and they couldn't call in air support. They couldn't call on any support. They had to do what they did. And they did it magnificently, and often displayed in most breathtaking feats of heroism and courage. That was really what fueled my interest in the book, just to read about these deeds, which don't get the recognition that they deserve, and all these amazing lost heroes of American military history, people like Smedley Butler, a great Marine; or Frederick Funston, a great army officer; or Steven Decatur, a great sailor of the early republic, who are heroes of these small wars.

What comes out in your work is that when we got involved in these places, what we said then about [involvement] is very different from the kind of showboating that developed in the 1990s about not intervening, about not getting bogged down, about how the military is supposed to have only a military mission and not do social work, and so on.

That's right. If you look at the history, we have violated pretty much every tenet of the Powell Doctrine, this notion promulgated by Colin Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, that basically we should only fight big wars and we should only do war with overwhelming force if we're going to win a total victory, and then leave immediately. That has seldom been the way we have fought wars. If you look at the historical pattern, we violated all of that. American troops have often been used as "social workers." American troops have often stayed in theaters abroad indefinitely. They were deployed in China pretty much continuously from the 1840s to the 1940s, roughly one hundred years, with no exit strategy in sight. Those kinds of examples you can multiply many times. All these things that people assume are the natural order of things are, in fact, a myth. If you look at the history, it clearly shows that it's not the case, that's not the way it's been.

[Barnes]
But what is the fundamental ethos of the American military? What larger lesson as to the nature of this ethos would you draw? How should we ... not so much how should we fight wars, but what best suits us in the form of fighting wars?

That's a very tough question. One of the things that strikes me reading the history is just how wide the variety of missions the American military has undertaken have been -- everything from fighting major wars to escorting school children in Arkansas.

[Barnes]
During the time of desegregation.

The armed forces, basically, wind up doing whatever it is the president needs them to do. It's a very narrow view that says they should only be used for fighting major wars. Very often, our interest make it necessary for them to do much more than that, especially in pursuit of these dreaded activities of nation-building, which everybody shudders with horror to think about, but in fact is absolutely necessary in order to convert battlefield success into long-term political success. The military since day one has been involved in nation-building activities, and often very successfully, but that history tends to get overlooked.

[Barnes]
Did you read Carl Builder's book, The Masks of War?

No.

[Barnes]
He suggests that each of the services -- he doesn't deal with the Marines -- has its own self-image. For the Air Force, they're boys with toys. For the Navy, it's the senior service, "run silent, run deep." For the Army, well, it's whatever anybody else wants you to do, whether you have something to do it with or not. So the ethos, to some extent, may have to be determined by the particular forces involved. Of course, The Savage Wars of Peace [shows that] an awful lot of the weight was carried by the U.S. Marine Corps.

That's right. One of the interesting things I found is that although all the services were deeply involved in small war missions, especially the Marines, but also, to some extent, the Army, their primary job was fighting Indians up until 1890. The Navy was certainly involved in gunboat diplomacy, especially in the Caribbean. But although this was a mainstay of all the services, all of them resisted it because they all wanted the greater glory of big war missions. Although the Army kept fighting Indians, they never came up with a "doctrine of Indian fighting." Their doctrine was always geared towards big European land wars. The Marines were masters of these imperial constabulary duties, and yet, they didn't want to do it either. They came up with amphibious warfare between the wars as being their new mission. So the resistance that we see today within the military is a tradition in and of itself. Even though they've always done it, there's always been a resentment of it.

But the Marines actually had a manual, which you came upon. Tell us about that manual, A Guide for Small Wars.

This was the small-wars manual which the Marines wrote between the wars, based on their experiences in places like Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua -- basically, a how-to guide for dealing with insurgencies, with guerrillas: how do you run counter-guerrilla warfare? The Marines did it very successfully. They set down some of these lessons. But the book, the Small Wars manual, had the misfortune to be published in 1940. A year after that, small wars seemed pass?. We were certainly in the biggest war in our history. And that was very much the mind-set which came to dominate the military post- World War II. I have a chapter on Vietnam in which I argue that, unfortunately, a lot of the lessons taught by the Small Wars manual were neglected by the military in Vietnam. They tried to fight Vietnam as a big war. I think that was responsible for part of the tragic outcome of our intervention.

[Barnes]
Couldn't we have learned something from the British experience in Malaya and the French experience in French Indochina? It's always amazed me the degree to which both those nations, and ours, dealt not with complete successes, especially in the case of France. I mean, 1954 Dien Bien Phu, May, 1954, it's really, in a way, the end of it. But both of them didn't know how to fight these small wars. We don't seem to have learned an awful lot from them.

Yes, certainly other countries had a proud tradition of fighting these small wars, and using counter-guerrilla tactics. And as I tried to show, we had the same tradition, but unfortunately it gets neglected. Part of it was an institutional rivalry in Vietnam, because the Marines had this institutional knowledge and they tried to implement it. But the war was not being run by the Marines, it was being run by General William Westmoreland and the Army high command, and their view was always, "We know how to do this war. We're going to put massive firepower down in our targets because that's the way we did it in World War II and Korea. That's the American way of war." And, unfortunately, it didn't turn out to be the best way to fight this kind of struggle. If we had looked a little bit at the history and at the experiences of other people who had fought these kinds of foes, I think we would have come up with a better approach.

Next page: Learning the Wrong Lessons from Vietnam

© Copyright 2003, Regents of the University of California