| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Max Boot Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 4 of 7
Your chapter on Vietnam is a pivotal chapter. You've just described what the problem was there. But what came out of that was a doctrine called the Powell Doctrine. Let's talk a little about that, because that doctrine and the perception of Vietnam that was associated with it influences all that follows up until the present. One could say that the nineties were defined by that doctrine in terms of the way we thought about the military and how we would use it. Remind us what the Powell Doctrine said, and give us an indication of what was wrong with that.
A whole generation of officers who went through the agony of Vietnam were deeply scarred by it, and understandably so. It was a horrible experience, not only because they lost so many of their brothers on the battlefield, but also because of the institutional damage it did to the military. And they came out of Vietnam saying, "Never again. We're never going to repeat this kind of fiasco." They didn't come out of it saying, "We're going to figure out a better way to fight next time." They just wanted to avoid these kinds of messy, low-level interventions altogether. And that's the essence of the Powell Doctrine: "We're not going to fight these low-level wars ever again. If we ever use force, it's going to be massive, overwhelming. We're going to win instantly and then go home via an exit strategy." That's the essence of the Powell Doctrine. And that was, I think, the essence of the post-Vietnam mind-set epitomized by General Colin Powell, who was the outstanding officer of that generation.
Unfortunately, as we found in the 1990s, that kind of mind-set is not a very good fit with the actual missions that the American military is called upon to undertake in places like Somalia, or Bosnia, or Haiti, or Kosovo. In places like that, or more recently, Afghanistan, you can't just win a massive overwhelming victory and go home, because if you do, the fruits of victory will crumble before your eyes. So you ought to have a longer-term intervention, if you're going to create a stable political order. We've been doing that since the early days of the republic, but it's very much outside the ethos of the Powell Doctrine. I suggest that history repudiates a lot of these tenets about how to employ American military force.
One of the consequences of the Powell Doctrine and this perception of what the Vietnam War was about is the notion that if you go in, not only do you go in and get out quickly, but you have to have total American support. More importantly, it was a loss if you lose one American life. So there was a high premium on a war in which no American lives were lost.
That's right. And in the 1990s, the government tried very hard to create these casualty-free interventions. Of course you don't want casualties, that's a horrible thing, you want to protect your troops as much as possible. But at the same time, if you set up ground rules under which no casualties will occur, it's very hard to achieve the mission that you're sent over there to do. The best way to protect your troops is to keep them in Texas. If you're going to be sending them to places that are inherently dangerous, like the Balkans or Haiti or Afghanistan, there's going to be a certain amount of risk involved.
I think the men and women who are sent over there understand that risk and are willing to take it because they know that's what it takes to accomplish the mission. But if you have these incredibly restrictive force protection guidelines in effect, it makes it very hard for those troops to achieve the mission, and it actually has a demoralizing effect on the military because they're being told, "We're sending you over here, but it's not very important. The job you're doing isn't very important because we don't want you to risk anything in order to achieve success." That's not the message you want to send to the troops. Soldiers I've talked to certainly don't like those incredibly restrictive guidelines that are, in part, a product of this Vietnam mind-set, which is that we have to avoid casualties at all costs, because if we suffer a single loss, political support will crumble and we won't be able to sustain this deployment.
[Barnes]
Can we now? Are we prepared?
I think we are. I think the American people are much more realistic about this than some of the policymakers in Washington. If you look at the survey data, they are much more accepting of casualties, and know that you can't have a completely risk-free military intervention. If you look at our recent experience in Afghanistan, we didn't suffer huge casualties, it was a couple of dozen, but they didn't have any perceptible effect one way or the other on the level of public support for the war.
If the public is convinced that the war is important, they're willing to take risks in order to get the job done. Part of the problem in the 1990s was that the government had a hard time explaining the importance of some of these missions, and therefore wasn't able to muster support, and tried to do them with the least cost possible in order not to have to muster that support. But I think when you're dealing with situations like Afghanistan or Iraq, where people can see a more immediate danger to the United States, it's much easier to get public support, even if there are real risks involved.
In looking at the history of these small wars in earlier eras, was public opinion important? And if it was, what made the difference? Is it that they didn't have pollsters then, or was it that we had leadership that could bring the issues to the public and that, somehow, that was aborted in this period after the Vietnam War?
The importance of public opinion can be exaggerated, especially when you're dealing with these smaller expeditions involving volunteer soldiers and sailors and Marines. Getting public support is vital if you're going to send draftees, because you're taking young men and women unwillingly from their homes and sending them somewhere to fight. It's very hard to sustain an unpopular war, as we found out in the later stages of Vietnam, if you don't have full public support. But in many of these smaller wars that I write about in The Savage Wars of Peace, there are wasn't a huge amount of public support. In fact, there was often quite a bit of opposition, particularly notable in the case of the Philippine [Spanish-American] War, from 1899 to 1902, when a who's-who of prominent Americans from Andrew Carnegie to Mark Twain mobilized the Anti-Imperialist League against the war. But there was also a substantial amount of public disagreement with deployments in Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Russia, as Professor Barnes mentioned earlier.
You can't expect public unanimity. In fact, the only war we've ever had close to unanimity behind was World War II. Every other war had some degree of public opposition. But as I try to show in my book, a small number of professional soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines were still able to get the job done even if they didn't have complete 100 percent backing at home. So I think it's possible to exaggerate the importance of public support.
[Barnes]
How about collateral damage? How about, in other words, the loss of civilians
on the other side, specifically?
That's an interesting question, because we've become much more wary of that than we used to be. It's amazing, when you read the accounts of World War II, that the firebombing of Japan in 1945 and even before the atomic bombing, when we killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, just incinerated ... and nowadays, if you have one stray bomb that hits a wedding in Afghanistan, this is an international crises.
This is partly a result of developing technology which changes standards and expectations. In World War II, the bombing technology was very imprecise and you were lucky if you hit within a few miles of your target. Everybody knew you were going to have massive civilian casualties, no matter how hard you tried to avoid it. Now, with the revolution in precision-guided munitions we've seen in the past twenty years, everybody knows that you can pretty well put a bomb very close to its target, within a few meters of where you're aiming it, which creates tremendous expectations that you will always hit only the bad guys, and you will leave the mosque next door perfectly alone.
[Barnes]
And the Chinese Embassy.
And the Chinese Embassy. Generally, I think we do a pretty good job of that. But, you know, this is a very hard activity. You can't be 100 percent right all the time -- you make human errors, you make intelligence errors, all sorts of bombs can go astray, no matter how good your technology is. So I think that we have set the bar unreasonably high at this point, but it certainly should be higher than it has been in the past. The American military has become pretty good about collateral damage. This has become much more of an issue than it was fifty years ago.
You point out that in this era in which the Powell Doctrine helped sway that, the concern for the loss of American life was so great that, in fact, the primary mission became not the mission itself, but the protection of the American troops who were being deployed for the mission.
Right. This crazy ethos where troops being sent to Bosnia were told force protection is job one, which made them wonder, "Well, what the heck are we doing here? If force protection is job one, why are we being sent to a war zone?" That seems inherently risky. I hope that we've overcome some of that.
It's funny, because in places like Bosnia or other war zones, our allies have been much more gung-ho in many ways, including the British and the French, both of whom are much more liable to send their troops to patrol in shirtsleeves, and without having a platoon at their back, or just to send a couple of men to wander through a marketplace and do that kind of policing. Whereas the American military ethos says we're going to hunker down behind encamped bunkers and other fortified facility. We're only going to send troops out in a reinforced platoon with armored Humvees and wearing the full battle rattle and all that. It makes it very hard to interact with the civilian population. It makes it very hard to do your job, which is to build up trust, and to create a stable and secure environment. You're not doing that if you give the impression of being scared yourself.
Next: The Neoconservatives
© Copyright 2003, Regents of the University of California