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Summary: Covers the highest level (politicostrategic) only!
Review: If you want the best ever book to assess the command and leadership of a single FIGHTING leader, buy Joel Hayward's highly praised "For God and Glory: Lord Nelson and His Way of War". Its assessment is original, thorough and relevant to today's leadership studies.But if you want a book that deals with that highest level of leadership, the political employment and direction of fighting forces, then this is your book. As you would expect from author Cohen, you get rigorous and insightful analysis of the difficulties and responsibilities involved in wielding massive force. You get lucid explanation, fluent writing and clear and compelling argument. In short, this book is better even than Martin van Creveld's book on military leadership.
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Summary: It is rare to find a book that is so enjoyable to read.
Review: The author makes a compelling arguement for the necessity of politicians to become intimately involved in every aspect of the warmaking process. Using four examples of excellent democratic leadership of the military during wartime: Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion. These four break the current "normal theory of civil-military relations," which holds that civilian leaders should set political goals and leave the details of implementation to the military.
"Historical judgement of war is subject to an inflexible law, either very imperfectly understood or very constantly lost sight of. Military writers love to fight over the campaigns of history exclusively by the rules of the professional chess-board, always subordinating, often totally ignoring, the element of politics. This is a radical error. Every war is begun,dominated,and ended by political considerations; without a nation, without a government, without money or credit, without popular enthusiasm which furnishes volunteers, or public support which endures conscription, there could be no army and no war - neither beginning nor end of methodical hostilities. War and politics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese twins, inseperable and independent; and to talk of military operations without the direction and interference of an administration is as absurd as to plan a campaign without recruits, pay or rations."
This book also shows the lack of historical knowledge that most of the American public has. Most Americans think the French are "wimps" because they have been against the war in Iraq. Let's look at World War I:
"France sustained casualties of 1,385,000 killed and 3,044,00 soldiers and civilians wounded in World War I, in all more than one-tenth of its total population of something under fourty million. In 1914 France, with a peacetime army of 823,000, had mobilized a total of 3,781,000 men; its casualties during the entire war, therefore, amounted to virtually the whole of its initial military strength...The battle of Verdun alone cost France, between February and December of 1916, 162,000 killed or missing in action and at least 200,000 more wounded; as Guy Pedroncini notes, a bell chiming once a minute for each French loss there would ring for four months without pause. Put differently, in that one battle, which took place during one year of the war, France lost almost three times as many men as the United States did in all of the Vietnam war. It suffered those losses from a population one sixth of that of the United States in the 1960's. One many think of French losses at Verdun alone, in other words, as the equivalent of eighteen Vietnams, suffered in one year."
Food for thought.
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Summary: What Makes a War Leader Great
Review: The true genius of leadership is found in the proper management of subordinates. In this excellent book, Eliot Cohen examines the actions of four democratic leaders and how they led their nations through four different kinds of total war. The four leaders are Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion. Each had differing styles and different concerns but each had one thing in particular in common, a determination that the strategic conduct of the war should be managed by civilian, not military leadership. Cohen agrees with the four that such civilian control is absolutely essential not only to the winning of a war but to the preservation of a democracy. In his chapter on Lincoln, Cohen describes how Lincoln formulated a political strategy for winning the Civil War which included complicated and sometimes contradictory goals: To name two of them, Lincoln needed to retain the loyalty of the slave holding border states that stayed in the Union while also refusing to compromise on the issue which led to the secession in the first place, the refusal to allow the expansion of slavery. He also had to ensure that the Confederacy received no diplomatic legitimacy. The political impacted on the military strategy. Much of this was beyond the grasp of the military generals and Lincoln had to lead aggressively. By contrast, Jefferson Davis, graduate of West Point, seemed completely oblivious to the need to formulate a larger political strategy. In discussing Clemenceau's leadership in the waning years of WWI when the French faced catastrophe, Cohen shows how Clemenceau played two military commanders Foch, with his offensive tendency and Petain, promoter of the doctrine of "defense in depth", off against each other. He reconciled the differences in tactics and doctrines and ultimately helped ensure the success of the French army. He educated himself with frequent trips to the front to see the situation first hand. Churchill, was known for his intense micro-management, not of individual battle tactics but of military strategy. Churchill, having seen the debacles of the first world war was determined that no decisions would be made on the basis of faulty assumptions. As such he questioned his officers and generals intensively and constantly. The officers resented this but such a management style enabled Churchill to base decisions on facts not on conjecture. Churchill's supple mind, much like Lincoln's enabled him at all times to reconcile distant and sometimes competing goals, including the political management of a difficult alliance. WWII was an intensely political war and considerations of state pervaded almost every strategic decision taken. Churchill's genius as a war leader was his ability to bring each disparate element together into a cohesive whole. Ben-Gurion had to fight a very different kind of war. As head of a fledgling state with no genuine army, in 1948 he was not only required to formulate military and political strategy, to enable Israel to survive an onslaught of Arab armies, Ben-Gurion was forced to create a modern disciplined army from scratch. In this he succeeded brilliantly. From Ben-Gurion's standpoint, the key was the imposition of discipline, from subordinate to superior officer and from military to civilian command. In the last part of the book, Cohen examines and contrasts the military/civilian relationship in the Gulf War and the Vietnam War. Contrary to popular wisdom, civilian leadership did not interfere excessively with the military in Vietnam. As Cohen argues, contrary to the leadership of Churchill, Lincoln et al., the Johnson administration failed to question the assumptions on which the military based its recommendations and strategies. It failed to challenge the military to find a way to comport military tactics with political realties. With the more recent Gulf War, Cohen is critical of the extent to which political generals like Colin Powell were able to substitute their own views for those of the elected civilian leadership. He cites the well-known "Powell Doctrine" on the use of military force as a completely inappropriate usurpation of civilian prerogative by the military. This is a thought provoking and extremely interesting book which I recommend to all interested in military and political history.
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