Pick A True Believer To Run Your Military Campaigns
As a rule military folk do the bidding of political grandees out of duty and honor, agree or not. But military history implies that statesmen are best advised to seek out an executor in full concord with the cause.
ByJames Holmes
Published5 days ago
It’s a recurring theme in military history, and perchance it’s been recurring in my extracurricular reading of late: sometimes a less-than-fervent general or admiral finds himself in charge of an expedition. That can create a quandary. The commander may be leery of the purposes impelling the enterprise, the methods he’s instructed to deploy to fulfill those purposes, or both. He might even sympathize with the foe. Commitment to the cause may suffer at the top of an expeditionary force.
What’s a soldier—or his political masters—to do?
Examples of civil-military dissent are legion. As Thucydides, the father of history, tells it, two-plus millennia ago the Athenian assembly assigned a troika of generals to head up a campaign to Sicily in hopes of securing the import-dependent city’s grain supply while flanking rival Sparta. The assembly recalled one commander to stand trial on spurious religious charges, another perished during the early going, and the last—Nicias, who had tried to dissuade Athenians from undertaking the expedition in the first place—ended up overseeing it.
One of history’s iconic martial catastrophes resulted.
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/03/pick-a-true-believer-to-run-your-military-campaigns/
