Unleash the Frogs of War

It is curious how little military men know about war. You would think they would think about it more. Yet, oddly, they regularly misjudge practically everything concerning the dismal trade. Their errors are not the sort that inevitably must occur in a contest, as when a quarterback doesn’t pick up a blitz. They are fundamental misappreciations of war itself.

The foregoing sounds both arrogant and improbable, like saying that dentists do not understand teeth. Actually, it is neither.

The reasons are several. First, the military attracts certain kinds of men—authoritarian, hierarchical, conformist—who are not imaginative and do not think independently. Second, the  appeal of the military is visceral, emotional, hormonal. Neither of these things is true of dentists.

Why does this happen? It is not actual stupidity since officers are not stupid. Part of it is the overconfidence that is the very heart of the military’s cast of mind. Did the French lose to the Viet Minh? What has that got to do with America? Those cheese-eating surrender monkeys couldn’t beat a troop of Girl Scouts. Victor Charlie? Rice-propelled paddy-maggots. Dinks, gooks, slopes, zipperheads. No problem.

A deeper reason I think is the Glorious Charge Syndrome, the clash of gorgeous cavalry and resplendent infantry of Napoleon’s days. It’s the excitement, Wellington on the reverse slope at Waterloo, la Garde advances, the Little Corporal drops back out of the pocket on fourth and one….Although wars are usually discussed as rational enterprises in pursuit of national goals, soldiers dream of glory, honor, and the overcoming of enemies in pitched combat. This has always been true. Read the Gilgamesh Epic, the Illiad, the Aeneid, El Cid, Orlando Furioso, and Beowulf. They all deal with climactic battles of heroic men. Sieges are all right, but soldiers want to get it on, steel on target, close and destroy, and they want an enemy they can get at.

A distributed war like that in Afghanistan, with nothing important to blow up and often nobody to fight because they are hiding, is not something soldiers easily get their minds around. Aerial combat, mano a mano is more to their liking, or commando teams moving silently through the night, or the Pacific fleet, alert, men at their stations, moving through enemy waters in search of trouble. Since war is no longer like that, the soldiers flail about for years, go home, forget what happened, and in the next war do it again.

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