"The last surviving dependent of the Revolutionary War continued to receive benefits until 1911," according to a book on the Bonus March I've been reading. In other words, the last dependent of a Revolutionary War veteran died just over 100 years ago.

It's kind of like hearing the neighbors arguing late at night -- you can hear the shouts, but can't quite make out the meaning. That is, I don't quite understand the inside baseball here, but The American Conservative sets out to demolish neoconservative icon Leo Strauss:

Strauss was at best a mediocre scholar whose thought expressed a confused bipolarity between a very German and ahistorical Grecophilia on the one hand and a scattered, dogmatic, and unsophisticated apology for an American version of liberal universalism on the other. 

This is the equivalent of one soldier calling another "a lardass REMF fobbit liberal." Why do I mention this obscure intellectual squabble in this blog? Because there are those who contend that followers of Strauss at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the Bush administration were instrumental in getting the United States to invade Iraq.

More on rotations:

In a recent Leavenworth interview, Col. John Harding Jr. commented that, "The thing that we found in Iraq over the years was that we were fighting this war one year at a time."

In his last tour, in 2011, he noted, "at the general officer, colonel and even lieutenant colonel rank, you saw those that were just over there because they knew they had to be there and deployed, but they didn't have anything invested in Iraq."

Awhile back, one of you recommended this novel about the American occupation of Japan. I read it and sort of enjoyed it. I found it kind of slight. My favorite was the opening vignette, titled 'The Atom Bowl,' about a football game in Hiroshima.

It did make me think there is a good prequel for John Adams to write to 'Nixon in China,' titled 'MacArthur in Toyko.' Maybe a trilogy, with the third part yet to come. Maybe McCain in Hanoi'?

--By 1917, so many young British officers had been killed that "most company commanders were not more than twenty" years old.

--Despite the images of waves of soldiers being scythed down by machine gun fire, artillery and mortar shells inflicted the majority (60 percent) of wounds in the British infantry in World War I. Bullets caused 35 percent. (I didn't see numbers on gas casualties.)

--In 1938, some twenty years after the end of World War I, there were still 120,000 former British soldiers receiving pensions or awards for "shellshock" or other psychiatric disabilities -- that is, what he now call severe PTSD.

--Finally, I read aloud to my wife this passage by a Royal Fusiliers officer about dealing with a panicky soldier as they sheltered in a shell hole during a German artillery barrage during the battle of Passchendaele:

I tried to reason with the boy, but the more I talked top him the more distraught he became, until he was almost screaming. 'I can't stay here! Let me go! I want my Mum!' So I switched my tactics, called him a coward, threatened him with court martial and slapped his face as hard as I could, several times. It had an extraordinary effect. There was absolute silence in the shell-hole and then the corporal, who was a much older man, said, ‘I think I can manage him now, sir.' Well, he took that boy in his arms, just as if he was a small child, and when I crawled back a little later to see if all was well, they were both lying there asleep and the corporal still had his arms round the boy . . . .

I saw this on page 389 of Jean Edward Smith's new biography of Eisenhower: "Army Group B had three wartime commanders: Rommel, von Kluge, and Model. All three committed suicide." (In the photo, that's von Kluge with Vichy France troops in Russia.) That's quite a track record.

But on page 568, though, Smith has a footnote I just don't understand. He writes that "President Obama initially chose Marine Corps general James L. Jones [as national security adviser], the first nonacademic to hold the post since the Eisenhower years." What? How could the following people be considered "academics"? Brent Scowcroft, Richard Allen, William Clark, Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter, Frank Carlucci, Colin Powell, Sandy Berger, and Stephen Hadley. In fact, by my count, the majority of national security advisors have not been academics. 

From Six Weeks, the book about British junior officers in World War I that I've mentioned before, here is a stanza from a poem by Sub-Lt. A.P. Herbert, who fought at Gallipoli, and later saw his battalion destroyed at the Somme:

We only want to take our wounds away

To some shy village where the tumult ends,

And drowsing in the sunshine many a day,

Forget our aches, forget that we had friends.

I really like those lines. The emotion they convey is more complex than it may first appear, especially the last five words.

By Ken Weisbrode

Best Defense department of Thucydidian analysis

Some months after the 9/11 attacks the diplomatic historian Paul Schroeder published an article in The National Interest with the title, "The Risks of Victory: An Historian's Provocation." He posed a simple question that has been asked many times: How does a minor crisis lead to a major war? He considered the possibility that the 9/11 attacks would result in something far worse, and the analogy he gave was to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

Another Great War has not taken place, and even if it were to happen in the near future, it would be difficult at this point to claim that the fuse for it was lit on September 2001. Much has happened since in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, Schroeder's provocation should still be taken seriously. We recall that not once during the entire Cold War (with the partial exception of Soviet pilots in the Korean War) did soldiers of the two main protagonists fire on one another. But both superpowers were engaged in armed conflict to one degree or another during the entire course of the conflict. The remarkable thing is that none of these smaller wars or crises escalated to an all-out hot war between the superpowers.

The consensus seems to be that nuclear weapons and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction are primarily responsible for that. This may be true but there is no way to prove it. We are told that John F. Kennedy had the 1914 scenario in mind (thanks to his reading of Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Cold War calculus may have been reversed whereby nuclear weapons and the prestige associated with deterrence made escalation more, rather than less, likely in this instance.

A higher cost attributed to escalation, in other words, does not do away with Schroeder's basic question. How and why do major powers make crises worse? Political scientists and others have been testing hypotheses for a long time, but a general blueprint still eludes us. One reason may be that their models emphasize the roles of major actors over minor ones. For nearly a century historians have debated whether Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia or the "system" was most responsible for the escalation leading to World War I.

Tom has recently reminded us to ask who won the Peloponnesian War and, by implication, who lost the most after starting it. Our eyes are trained to hunt for underlying structural conditions, "the long fuse," and great, zero-sum rivalries.

Overlooked in many of these accounts are the active and sometimes dominant roles of instigators: Corcyreans, Serbs, Cubans, et al. These second- and even third-tier revisionist powers tend to follow a different, more opportunistic calculus. They too -- potentially -- have everything to lose, but also much more to gain, they must imagine, from provoking a war among much bigger powers. The burden falls upon the latter to master the ways of defusing crises before it is too late.

I had known that Enoch Powell, before becoming the most controversial politician in modern British history, was an intelligence officer in World War II (and a very good one, according to his boss) and a classicist before that.

But one thing I learned in London after a wine-fueled dinner at the old school bohemian Chelsea Arts Club ("dress code: none") was that Powell was one of the editors of a very good edition of Thucydides. I checked on Amazon and unfortunately it costs too damn much. 

Bonus fact: The original version of the Beatles song "Get Back" had an allusion to Powell's "rivers of blood" speech (which itself was a reference to Virgil). It is not often that you can pack Paul McCartney, Enoch Powell, and Virgil into the same song. What a bag of cats.  

I'm not even gonna get into Eric Clapton's 1976 endorsement of Powell.

While I am on the subject of what I did in London, can anyone name the one-time terrorist who is honored with a statue just west of the Houses of Parliament? Hint: She eventually became a member of the Conservative Party. 

I think I've mentioned that I can't find a good operational history of the Afghan war so far that covers it from 2001 to the present. (I actually recently sat on the floor of a military library and basically went through everything in its stacks about Afghanistan that I hadn't yet read.)

Here are some of the questions I would like to see answered:

--What was American force posture each year of the war? How and why did it change?

--Likewise, how did strategy change? What was the goal after al Qaeda was more or less pushed in Pakistan in 2001-02?

--Were some of the top American commanders more effective than others? Why?

--We did we have 10 of those top commanders in 10 years? That doesn't make sense to me. 

--What was the effect of the war in Iraq on the conduct of the war in Afghanistan?

--What was the significance of the Pech Valley battles? Were they key or just an interesting sidelight?

--More broadly, what is the history of the fight in the east? How has it gone? What the most significant points in the campaign there?

--Likewise, why did we focus on the Helmand Valley so much? Wouldn't it have been better to focus on Kandahar and then cutting off and isolating Oruzgan and troublesome parts of the Helmand area?

--When did we stop having troops on the ground in Pakistan? (I know we had them back in late 2001.) Speaking of that, why didn't we use them as a blocking force when hundreds of al Qaeda fighters, including Osama bin Laden, were escaping into Pakistan in December 2001?

--Speaking of Pakistan, did it really turn against the American presence in Afghanistan in 2005? Why then? Did its rulers conclude that we were fatally distracted by Iraq, or was it some other reason? How did the Pakistani switch affect the war? Violence began to spike in late 2005, if I recall correctly -- how direct was the connection?

--How does the war in the north fit into this?

--Why has Herat, the biggest city in the west, been so quiet? I am surprised because one would think that tensions between the U.S. and Iran would be reflected at least somewhat in the state of security in western Afghanistan? Is it not because Ismail Khan is such a stud, and has managed to maintain good relations with both the Revolutionary Guard and the CIA? That's quite a feat. 

Anybody got a recommendation on what to read that covers all this? Maybe articles that explain some of it?

By Peter Mattis

Best Defense guest respondent

Colonel Gregory Daddis' argument is that strategy is overrated: "Talented American generals can develop and implement a comprehensive political-military strategy and still lose a war." As sympathetic as watching a poorly executed strategy fail is likely to make someone to this argument, the argument itself rests on fallacious assumption. In the United States, a general cannot develop and implement a comprehensive political-military strategy. That's what civilian control of the military means. We are not the Prussians under Frederick the Great or the French under Napoleon, where civilian and military command was unified. A talented American general only may advise on creating such a strategy, because he/she -- like almost everyone else in the room -- lacks the standing and the comprehensive professional competence to establish the political ends. Something civilian commentators should remember when the national introspection and reflection begin, hopefully with more honesty.

Does a good strategy guarantee success? No. A good political-military strategy however does mean that individual operational and tactical successes (or failures) are far less important. 

The Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979 provides a useful antidote to the focus on operational successes at the expense of thoughtful strategic planning. The Chinese suffered enormous losses for the number of troops engaged. Apart from the crossing the border with some level of operational surprise, it is hard identify what the People's Liberation Army (PLA) did right. Beijing did however achieve its political objectives. As Vietnamese documents later showed, Hanoi learned that Moscow could not be depended upon to protect Vietnam from China. Vietnam's potential expansion was stifled, because it had to maintain more forces closer to the northern border. Beijing earned the gratitude of Bangkok and Washington, while getting Moscow to back off in Asia. If there is a Chinese way of war, then focus on political outcomes of campaigns is a key element to how the use of force is measured. 

General Ulysses S. Grant's peninsula campaign in 1864 also shows the value of operations within a sound strategic framework.  From the Wilderness to Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor and the failed amphibious move on Petersburg, Grant continued to have opportunities -- irrespective of stalemate or defeat on the battlefield -- to hurt Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and separate it from the Confederate political leadership. Because Grant understood this, he did not react the same way to defeat as the previous commanders of the Army of the Potomac. Lee may have been able to parry Grant's individual and successive thrusts; however, he could not force Grant out. 

Although Andrew Bacevich's charge that the U.S. military has failed in almost every conflict since becoming an all-volunteer force may be hyperbole, there is enough truth to warrant some critical introspection. The lack of a draft meant a U.S. administration did not have to think as critically about power, passion, and politics -- even if the draft was not always a sufficient guard against supercilious "strategizing." Similarly, we should compare the record of the PLA's operational competence against the record of it accomplishing Beijing's objectives. That the former was poor while the latter superb should raise important questions for would-be U.S. strategists to consider about why and how to employ the U.S. military. 

On one score at least Clausewitz was unequivocal: "War is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means." Although the military's professional prerogative and special competence, victory on the battlefield and operational competence are only relevant if they advance political objectives. The focus on the war-fighting excellence of the U.S. military seems to distract those in the civilian world from understanding that that excellence means little without walking through the political steps of strategy long before the military becomes involved. 

Clausewitz was clear about war being simple, but he decried devotion to any simplistic notion of how to design and execute strategy. One of the analogies used was a comparison to chopping down trees with an axe. At first glance, the object is simple. Chop the tree down. However, it rapidly gets more complicated. Which direction does it need to fall? What about the knots in the trunk? Is it a hard- or soft-wood tree? Where to start making the cuts and at what height? Each tree grows in a different context -- even if in the same forest -- with different features. Thus, what is simple in concept rapidly becomes more difficult in execution. 

In his book The Logic of Failure, psychological researcher Dietrich Dorner highlighted how complex problems needed variable levels of planning for good strategic decision-making to occur. Many individuals had a marked tendency to plan too much or too little, based on how insecure they were facing uncertainty. Dorner's experiments were not simplistic "games" of strategic choice, but rather continuing tests of people to manage the complex relationships -- such as the interrelationships between healthcare, population, food supply, and more -- over time where they had near dictatorial powers. Even people should know better by dint of training and experience still fail to set clear objectives, to treat strategies like testable propositions, and gather information related to the first two. Instead, most "muddle through" and a repair approach, which, although often better than nothing, is the result of a lack of clear objectives. In the face of such uncertainty, humans fall back on what they know and can deal with -- no matter how trivial -- to preserve their sense of competence.

Read on

Basically, South Vietnam committed suicide, but we handed Thieu the loaded gun, James Willbanks more or less concludes in this fascinating book. 

I think it is the best book I've read on the last part of the Vietnam War. Essentially, he argues that "Vietnamization" was a misnomer. Rather, it was the "Americanization" of the Vietnamese military. "Nixon's Vietnamization policy had worked very well to the extent that it taught the South Vietnamese to fight ‘American-style,' using air mobility, tactical air support, and lavish expenditure of ammunition and other materiel."  But in 1974, the Americans cut off all that support.

It makes me wonder whether the war would have been different if from the outset, the Americans had tried to help Vietnamese fight in their own way. Would that even have been possible? I think so. (There is a good but PhD dissertation to be done comparing the U.S. efforts to build security forces in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.)

One of the things that struck me in the book is how different the American experience of the war was from Vietnam. For us, the worst year was 1968, with nearly 15,000 KIAs. For the South Vietnamese military, the worst year was 1971, with nearly 40,000 dead. Their second worst year was 1974, when they lost 31,000 soldiers. In that year, American combat deaths in Vietnam numbered 207.

Look for yourself:

The Final Years, Jeffrey Clarke

Describing the evil effects of revolution, Thucydides writes, "Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them." (P. 199 of the Landmark edition)

That's an insight that strikes me as true, and that I don't remember seeing before.  Though Orwell's wonderful essay on the language of politics makes a similar point. (If you haven't read that, you should. You have my permission to take off the rest of the day to study it.)

It seems to me, reading Pericles' funeral oration (431 BC), that it clearly provided the inspiration for Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Pericles begins by dismissing his own speechmaking ability: "[I]t is hard to speak properly upon a subject where it is even difficult to convince your hearers that you are speaking the truth." That reminded me of Lincoln's "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here."

Pericles then dwells on what we might call "Athenian exceptionalism": "Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves." A bit later, he adds, "In short, I would say that as a city we are the school of Hellas." This brought to mind Lincoln's beginning, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

Most striking of all, both speeches conclude by challenging the living to live up to the standard set by the fallen. "So dies these men as became Athenians," says Pericles. "You, their survivors, must determine to have as unaltering a resolution in the field." I think Lincoln expresses that thought better: "It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

(After writing this I did some quick Googling and saw that the comparison between the two speeches is apparently a major theme of Garry Wills' book on the Gettysburg Address. So clearly I am not the first to come across this.) I knew that Lincoln was into Shakespeare and the King James Bible, but I hadn't realized he also absorbed the Greeks.