The New American Way of War

Military Culture and the Political Utility of Force

Ben Buley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134086412
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book explores the cultural history and future prospects of the so-callednew American way of war. In recent decades, American military culture has become increasingly dominated by a vision ofimmaculate destruction which reached its apogee with the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Operation Iraqi Freedom was hailed as the triumphant validati

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No substitute for victory

The separation of politics and strategy in the American military tradition

Once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war there is no substitute for victory.

General Douglas MacArthur, 1952

The notion that the American military tradition rejected the concept of war as a continuation of politics has been central to the dominant image of the American way of war. As we shall see, this image became widely influential in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Yet, as an all-encompassing generalization about American military culture, this a political characterization was most valid for the period in which it emerged—that is, the period from the beginning of the Cold War up to the mid-1960s. Moreover, it depicted some elements of the US strategic community—above all the Strategic Air Command—more accurately than others—for example, the group of ‘neo-Clausewitzian’ civilian strategists discussed in the next chapter. Ironically, the latter group played no small part in tarring the traditional American way of war with the brush of apoliticism. Cold War realists and Limited War theorists interpreted earlier periods of US military history through the prism of the American strategy adopted in World War II, in an era when the logical culmination of that strategy appeared to have been realized in the terrifying prospect of ‘Massive Retaliation’.

Russell Weigley once wrote that the strategy of unconditional surrender adopted by the Allies was a ‘characteristically American war aim’,¹ but he did not elaborate on what was characteristically American about it—perhaps because he regarded it as too self-evident to require explanation. Many of the central ideas that came to be associated with the American way of war were already well established before Weigley coined that phrase in 1973. In particular, a number of eminent ‘realist’ thinkers in the 1950s agreed that the legacy of American history had been manifested in a distinctive pattern of American military behaviour. Their conclusions reflected above all the recent memory of World War II, and were prompted by the new strategic imperatives of the atomic age and the Cold War. The need for critical reflection on the American military experience was given added urgency by the coincidence of the Korean War with the loss of the US nuclear monopoly.

The father of containment, George F.Kennan, observed in 1950 that the American approach to international relations was distinctive in its excessive ‘moralism and legalism’. Kennan argued that this moralistic-legalistic approach to world affairs, rooted in a desire to abolish war, paradoxically made warfare more enduring, more terrible, and more destructive to political stability than did more cynical motives of national interest: ‘A war fought in the name of high moral principle finds no early end short of some form of total domination.’² The eminent political columnist Walter Lippmann agreed that what he called the ‘Wilsonian system of ideas’ that mobilized Americans to fight tended to demand nothing short of unconditional surrender. All wars, therefore, became wars to end all wars, all wars became crusades.³ However, perhaps the most succinct statement of this realist critique came from the pen of Samuel P.Huntington, who argued in 1957 that the isolation of the United States from world politics in the nineteenth century had reinforced the dominance of liberalism. National security was ‘a simple given fact—the starting point of political analysis—not the end result of conscious policy’. American awareness of the role of power in foreign politics was consequently dulled by the absence of external threats.⁴ Thus, ‘the United States by virtue of its non-involvement in the balance of power was able to pursue foreign policy objectives defined in terms of universal ideals rather than in terms of national interests’. Like Kennan and Lippmann, moreover, Huntington also saw liberal ferocity in war as the obverse of liberal pacifism outside of war:

The American tends to be an extremist on the subject of war: he either embraces war wholeheartedly or rejects it completely. This extremism is required by the nature of the liberal ideology. Since liberalism deprecates the moral validity of the interests of the state in security, war must be either condemned as incompatible with liberal goals or justified as an ideological movement in support of those goals. American thought has not viewed war in the conservative-military sense as an instrument of national policy.⁵

This realist critique was not just of academic interest: it was also absorbed by some of the most eminent of the ‘limited war’ theorists writing in the late 1950s, during the era when Dulles’ doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’ was official policy. Its influence was apparent in Henry Kissinger’s contention in his Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy that Americans had confused ‘the security conferred by two great oceans with the normal pattern of international relations’. Thus, he argued, Americans came to develop a purist and abstract doctrine of aggression: they either waged war all-out, with crusading moralistic fervour, or they did not wage war at all.⁶ The influential limited war theorist Robert Osgood agreed that ‘the deliberate limitation of war assumes a conception of the relation between power and policy that is, in many ways, antithetical to American ideas and predispositions in foreign relations’.⁷ During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, these ideas contributed directly to the formulation of military strategy in Vietnam. Thus, as the concept of ‘limited war’ gained influence within US military culture, it was often defined against the image of an older, characteristically American approach to war, as if limited war theory was itself beyond all cultural influence, rather than an alternative conception of war that was nevertheless equally ‘American’ in its preconceptions and basic assumptions.

Weigley’s interpretation of the American way of war was pioneering in the sense that whereas the realists and limited war theorists had explained the American ‘crusading’ tendency in terms of the political culture of the US—the heritage of republicanism and liberal idealism—Weigley wrote a military history with particular sensitivity to the attitudes, unexamined basic assumptions, and educational bias of the military themselves. However, as we have seen, the core themes with which the American style of war is associated were already in common currency well before Weigley published The American Way of War in 1973. More specifically, the basic idea that Americans had historically rejected the Clausewitzian view of war as an instrument of state policy was something of a truism. Equally commonplace were its two associated concepts: that this rejection was nurtured during a long formative period of ‘free security’, and that the American ‘crusading’ tendency in warfare was the obverse of American passivity outside of war.

For the realists who coined this popular image in the 1950s, in the shadow of World War II and with the prospect of a long Cold War stretching ahead, the over-riding implication of American military history was that the American approach to war would have to change: as Lippmann put it, ‘Voices are now beginning to be heard, asking whether we can break the deadly cycle, and by taking thought and by mastering ourselves, resist the destructive impulses of our democracy—which is to be too pacifist in time of peace and too bellicose in time of war.’⁸

The unrefinable cruelty of war: war as the failure of politics

For Weigley, the formative struggle which defined the American Way of War was the Civil War. Some scholars have seen General William Sherman’s famous statement that ‘War is Hell’ as particularly illustrative. Indeed, if War is Hell, then it is not a continuation of politics by other means. General Sherman’s famous adage is normally discussed in terms of its moral connotations, but it also suggests the difficulty of subordinating the chaos of war to any political objectives short of the unconditional surrender of the enemy. The assertion that ‘War is Hell’ could be taken, of course, merely as the idiosyncratic view of a lone general attempting to justify the harsh measures he had employed in the American Civil War. My argument, however, is that it represents something more than this: Sherman’s military philosophy can be seen as a formative statement of a distinctive American understanding of the art of war, with profound implications for its relationship to politics, but one that became particularly influential amongst the uniformed military almost a century later. ‘War is Hell’ was merely the most succinct statement of a set of basic assumptions about the nature of warfare that came to dominate American military culture halfway through the twentieth century. This is not to say that the statement captures the complexity of Sherman’s own attitude to war, which was more complex than is usually recognized.

General Sherman’s comments on the nature of warfare must be understood in the context of his experience in the Civil War, and above all his infamous ‘march to the sea’, in which he not only made war against the enemy’s resources more extensively and systematically than was considered acceptable by contemporary conventions, but also developed a deliberate strategy of terror directed at the minds of enemy civilians. In 1864, he ordered the evacuation of the entire civilian population of the city of Atlanta to rebel territory. When Mayor James M.Calhoun protested that this ruthless action would cause ‘appalling and heart-rending’ suffering, Sherman responded that he was aware of the consequences, but such was the nature of war: ‘You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.’⁹

Sherman’s justification is usually discussed in the context of debates about the morality of warfare. Certainly, Sherman was expressing adherence to a distinctive military ‘ethic’, which resonated in later periods of American military history. It is important to note that Sherman’s line of reasoning does not amount to a position of amorality or moral relativism. It does, however, pose a serious challenge to a central strand of the Western ‘just war’ tradition. The just war tradition rests on two concepts, the jus ad bellum—which specifies the conditions under which resort to warfare can be justified—and the jus in bello—which specifies the military means that can legitimately be adopted in warfare.¹⁰ In ethical terms, the ‘War is Hell’ discourse rests on scepticism about the moral realism and thus the validity of core tenets of the latter concept, the jus in bello.

As John W.Brinsfield pointed out in his discussion of Sherman’s ethics, ‘Sherman, in his Civil War years, did not abandon his attachment to the law or to some of the ethical concepts he may have learned at West Point. Rather, he placed the laws of warfare on a continuum of expediency. The important thing was not the means but the end, and to this point Sherman was clearly a utilitarian thinker.’¹¹ In claiming that ‘War is Hell’, Sherman was implying that warfare represented the breakdown of all moral and political intercourse; consequently, it could only be morally justified by reference to an external standard of judgement, the jus ad bellum or cause for which it was waged. The second and less frequently quoted half of Sherman’s statement that ‘war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it’, was ‘and those who brought war in our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour on’ (my emphasis). For in Sherman’s view it was the Confederate states ‘who in the midst of peace and prosperity plunged the nation into war’, and therefore it was also they who bore the burden of moral responsibility for the ‘unrefinable’ cruelty that followed.¹²

There is a further moral implication of this philosophy of warfare. For if the cruelty of war cannot be ‘refined’, then once hostilities have begun, it follows that the most moral approach is to wage it at the highest possible intensity in order to finish it as soon as possible. For Sherman, this was how the burning of Atlanta was justified—for it brought the end of the war closer in sight. Had he been less ruthless, in his own eyes this would merely have prolonged the war and ultimately brought about more bloodshed. This position found particular support amongst proponents of strategic bombing in the twentieth century. Echoing Sherman’s philosophy, General Curtis LeMay once remarked in an interview, ‘I’ll tell you what war is about. You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.’¹³ In justifying the strategic bombing of Japan in World War II, he followed Sherman’s line of reasoning precisely: ‘Actually, I think it’s more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it is to use more. If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run because you are protracting the struggle.’¹⁴ Many American pilots in Vietnam found the castrating rules of engagement not just frustrating, but immoral—not the war itself, but the way it was fought, with so many constraints on the maximum use of force. A particularly extreme version of this philosophy was expressed by General Thomas S.Power (Strategic Air Force Commander) to a Pentagon audience in 1964: the task of the military in war was ‘to kill human beings and destroy man-made objects’, and to do it ‘in the quickest way possible’. It had been ‘the moralists who don’t want to kill’ that had given ‘Hitler his start and got us into the mess in Cuba and Vietnam’.¹⁵

The ‘War is Hell’ philosophy was thus in severe tension with a central tenet of the jus in bello tradition—the principle of proportionality, which states that the means used to att...

Table of contents

• LSE International Studies
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 No substitute for victory
• 2 The science of strategy
• 3 Overwhelming force
• 4 Immaculate Destruction
• 5 The new American way of war
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index