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Editor's
note: This article appeared in the May
3, 1999, issue of National Review
 n
Things to Come, Alexander Korda's classic 1936 version of
the novel by H. G. Wells, a petty dictator in a war-ravaged corner
of Europe is waging a campaign against the neighboring "hill
people." The year is 1970. The "Boss," a Milosevic
type played by Ralph Richardson, is thwarted by Wings Over The World
(WTW), a group of scientists and engineers planning to rebuild civilization
along rational and cosmopolitan lines. Their colossal, high-tech
aircraft easily best the Boss's primitive planes and humanely neutralize
his population with the harmless, sleep-inducing Gas of Peace. Standing
over the corpse of the Boss — a casualty, evidently, of obsolescence
— the allegorical John Cabal, played by Raymond Massey, declaims:
"Poor old Boss. He and his flags and his follies. And now for
the rule of the Airmen — and a new life for mankind!"
Substitute
NATO for WTW, and the silver-haired Bill Clinton for the silver-haired
John Cabal, and you have something like today's war of the West
against Serbia. Unfortunately, the absence of a Gas of Peace in
NATO's arsenal almost certainly ensures that in real life, unlike
in the movies, a utopian New Order is unlikely to be realized by
means of air power alone.
Unlike H. G.
Wells in the 1930s, we know that air power seldom if ever wins a
war. Even Japan's decision to surrender in World War II following
the atomic bombings might have been influenced by Soviet entry into
the Pacific war. Bombing failed to defeat Nazi Germany, bombing
alone did not roll back North Korean forces, and bombing did not
prevent North Vietnam from continuing its ultimately successful
war against South Vietnam. Bombing by itself would not have liberated
Kuwait from the forces of Saddam Hussein, whose regime, moreover,
has survived repeated rounds of massive U.S. bombardment, including
that of last winter.
Nevertheless,
the Clinton administration chose to bomb Serbia, with no back-up
plan for the employment of ground forces in case the bombing failed.
The result — the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by Serb forces,
while the bombs fall on Belgrade — is the greatest military
humiliation for the United States since the fall of Indochina.
The
Wrong Lesson
Indeed, the disaster in Kosovo has demonstrated that Americans —
and American conservatives, in particular, learned the wrong lesson
from the Vietnam debacle. For a generation, many conservative civilians
have credited the claims of some military officers that more intense
U.S. bombing of North Vietnam could have quickly and easily ended
the Vietnam War. In his 1976 memoir, A Soldier Reports, Gen. William
C. Westmoreland wrote that "the war still might have been ended
within a few years, except for the ill-considered policy of graduated
response against North Vietnam. Bomb a little bit, stop it a while
to give the enemy a chance to cry uncle, then bomb a little bit
more but never enough to really hurt. That was no way to win."
Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during
the latter part of the Vietnam War, claimed in 1987 that without
restrictions on bombing "we could have polished those clowns
off in six months."
In retrospect,
it is clear that the Vietnam War could not have been won by air
power alone. The Johnson administration's limited bombing campaign
failed to deter Ho Chi Minh, a ruthless Stalinist tyrant as willing
as Saddam to inflict enormous costs on his hapless subjects; the
more intense campaign favored by the Pentagon probably would have
failed as well. Nor is there any merit to the argument that a "sharp
knock" instead of gradual bombing would have changed the outcome
of the war. The historian Robert A. Pape, in Bombing to Win (1996),
notes that a twelve-week bombing campaign from August to October
1967 "closely approximates the air chiefs' plans. There is
no evidence that executing the sharp knock in 1965, instead of 1967,
would have produced better results." Apart from ruling out
some targets for legitimate strategic and diplomatic reasons, Johnson
did not "tie the hands of the military." In 1966, for
example, U.S. aircraft flew 81,000 attack sorties and 48,000 combat-support
sorties against North Vietnam; in the panhandle of Laos there were
48,000 attack sorties and 10,000 combat-support sorties. Johnson
and his advisors could not possibly have supervised these.
Air power could
not be used to destroy North Vietnam's industrial base because there
was none. The industrial base of North Vietnam was the Soviet Union
and its Warsaw Pact satellites and China. The Communist Great Powers
funneled supplies to the Vietnamese Communists overland through
China, through North Vietnamese ports, and also through the Cambodian
port of Sihanoukville.
Nor was bombing
an effective approach to combating the Vietcong insurgents. "Not
to denigrate what we accomplished against Hussein, but Hussein was
no military strategist," former secretary of the Navy James
Webb wrote after the Gulf War. "If Ho Chi Minh had put 60 percent
of his army in one spot where there were not any trees, we would
have blown them away in 40 days too." Only after North Vietnam
switched to a conventional invasion strategy, following the decimation
of the Vietcong guerrillas in the Tet Offensive of 1968, did Communist
forces became more vulnerable to the kind of air power Nixon used
in halting the Easter Offensive in 1972. The genuine Lesson of Vietnam,
then, is not that air power is a military panacea; rather, it is
that the U.S. military was not, and arguably is not, prepared to
fight long-term, low-intensity wars on the ground. This bias reflects
the traditions of the Army, and its offspring the Air Force. For
various reasons, including the low toleration for casualties on
the part of the American public, the indiscipline of militiamen
and conscripts, and the comparative advantage of the U.S. in industrial
production, the military has preferred to "spend shells, not
men." The emphasis on long-range firepower shared by Winfield
Scott, an artillery officer, and Ulysses S. Grant, who manned a
cannon during the Mexican War, lives on in the doctrine named after
Colin Powell, like Scott and Grant a product of the Army. The Powell
doctrine, which holds that the U.S. should use massive firepower
if it goes to war at all, effectively rules out the use of the military
in situations in which an all-out offensive would be inappropriate.
The only one
of the services with a tradition of expertise in low-intensity conflict
is the Marine Corps, which, unlike the Army, played the major role
in long-term pacification efforts in the Philippines, Haiti, and
Nicaragua. It is no coincidence that Marine generals like Victor
"Brute" Krulak and Lewis W Walt were among the most insightful
critics of the firepower intensive attrition strategy in Vietnam
devised by that Army general, Westmoreland.
Given the American
military's preference for air power and attrition tactics, and the
reluctance of American presidents to risk the lives of ground troops,
it was perhaps inevitable that bombing would become the instrument
of choice in the coercive diplomacy of the United States. Before
Clinton tried to bomb Milosevic into negotiations, Reagan bombed
Libya to punish it for terrorism (the result was the Libyan bombing
of Pan Am 103). Although light-infantry formations are most appropriate
for the kinds of low-intensity conflicts in which the U.S. is likely
to take part in the near future, including the war in Kosovo proper,
the Army today has even fewer light infantry formations, compared
with armored and mechanized divisions, than it did during the Cold
War. A rational great power tailors its tactics to its grand strategy.
For decades the United States has been tailoring its strategy to
its tactics. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like
a nail.
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