What Are We Fighting For? The Political Aim in War and the American Civil-Military Divide - Modern W

[TomSea]

What Are We Fighting For? The Political Aim in War and the American Civil-Military Divide - Modern War Institute

Editor’s note: The following is adapted from the author’s new book, Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present.

In war there is nothing more important than understanding the political objective or objectives of the combatants involved. This is the why of the war; the reasons the warring states and insurrectionist groups such as Islamic State spill blood and spend treasure. Sometimes the objective is masked by religious or ideological terms, but there is always some underlying political concern. States go war to get something they want or to preserve what they have. Carl von Clausewitz provides the keystone for analysis of all wars by reminding us that “war can be of two kinds, in the sense that either the objective is to overthrow the enemy [an unlimited aim]—to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to sign whatever peace we please; or merely to occupy some of his frontier-districts [a limited aim] so that we can annex them or use them for bargaining at the peace negotiations.” The political aim provides the basis for understanding the nature of the war being fought, something Clausewitz insists is the job of both the military and political leaders, and to which he provides a related admonition: “No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses should do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.” The last part of the passage demonstrates a key reason why understanding the political objective is so important. Everything else flows from this: “The political object—the original motive for the war—will thus determine both the military objective to be reached and the amount of effort it requires.”

But since the Second World War, the United States has too often had a problem determining its political aim as well as relaying it to the service members charged with achieving it. If you don’t know the political objective, what aim are you trying to achieve by fighting the war? If you don’t know what you are trying to achieve, why are you fighting? If you can’t answer these questions, you cannot define victory in the war (not on the battlefield, a sometimes-overlooked distinction), which makes it a lot harder to win the war and end it.

This failure of US political leaders to provide or explain the desired objectives is more prevalent historically than generally realized. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was rightly fired by President Harry Truman for insubordination, but what is forgotten in all of this is MacArthur’s accurate complaint in the wake of the Chinese intervention in Korea that he had not received clear political guidance from his civilian and military superiors regarding what he was supposed to achieve now that the Chinese intervention had changed the nature of the war. MacArthur testified about this in the congressional hearings held in the wake of his relief: “I felt that the position I was in, the military position, was untenable without having some directive, some mission which was more realistic than that which existed at the time; and I felt, in all conscience, I could not go on ordering men to their deaths by the thousands, in such a complete vacuum of policy decisions.”

Read more at:  https://mwi.usma.edu/fighting-political-aim-war-american-civil-military-divide/?mc_cid=8f0bb3adcc&mc_eid=ba816b4660