I came upon this little gem this morning through a link from Doctrine Man (@Doctrine_Man) on Twitter. Harlan Ullman, Arnaud deBorchgrave Distinguished Columnist no less, points out quite accurately that U.S. military adventures since 1945 have not resulted in the sort of Appomattox/rail car at Compiegne/Deck of the Missouri moments of triumph that Americans see as the proper termination of conflict. The tidbits of causality he offers are fair and serious–imperial overreach and hasty intervention in poorly understood conflicts have not served out national interests and have led to embarrassing military debacles with inconclusive or conclusively bad results.
However, the challenge to his thesis is inherent in his murky timeline. He laments a record of failure stretching from Korea to Yemen and compares it unfavorably with our record of winning from the Civil War through the Cold War without noting that these periods overlapped by 49 years! The same administration that allowed “[p]residential inexperience and unachievable aspirations” to drag it into the Korean conflict also initiated the Cold War–unquestionably the decisive conflict of the post-1945 era and unquestionably a U.S. victory. Even Korea, though prosecuted ineptly, was hardly an unqualified failure. Today, South Korea is a prosperous, stable democracy while North Korea is a dysfunctional swamp of palace intrigue, famine, and international mayhem. One can argue that the Korean juice was not worth the squeeze (debatable) or that the U.S. military prolonged the war unnecessarily at the cost of pointless casualties and devastation (undeniable), but it is difficult to wish on the 50+ million South Koreans living in security and prosperity the miseries of North Korean citizenship.
Ullman is also too willing to see previous “successful” conflicts in purely military terms. Certainly the Union militarily defeated the Confederacy and received a clear surrender, but Confederate revanchists spent the next 11 years undermining and resisting the Union regime before fully recovering political control and imposing Jim Crow oppression. Southern legislators largely controlled the U.S. Congress for the century following the war, defeating most attempts to impose upon the recalcitrant southern states the political ends–beyond the formal abolition of slavery–for which the war was fought. Watching southern senators filibuster civil rights bills to death in the 1950s, Clausewitz might have questioned who won the war. The peace ending World War I was so badly botched that it plunged the world into a second and far more destructive conflagration within a generation. Military intervention in the Philippines initiated a drawn out, and politically unpopular counterinsurgency. Invasions of Haiti and Nicaragua hardly generated stable democracies. Even the 1990-91 Gulf War, cited by Ullman as a success, never really ended before sliding into the disastrous 2003 invasion. While it had the trappings of a clear victory, it was really a quagmire without a viable exit strategy.
Those military conflicts that qualify as clear victories pose a second problem–they are hardly among the nation’s proudest moments. The U.S. decisively defeated Mexico in 1848 and seized a vast swath of valuable territory. We fought a long and bloody war from the James River peninsula to Wounded Knee that succeeded in displacing the native people and securing the continent for European settlers, and in 1898 our trumped up war against Spain delivered Puerto Rico and Pacific coaling stations (though also that pesky Philippine insurgency).
Finally, it would be a mistake to view even military performance only through the lens of large-scale conflicts. The vast majority of U.S. military activity over the past 72 years has taken place outside the battlefields of Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. It has consisted of the naval patrols that ensure open sea lanes, the maintenance of open skies, and the security guaranteed by the deterrence by U.S. service members stationed in Europe and Asia.
There is much to lament in the U.S. military record from 1945 to the present, but the U.S. strategic record is not nearly so dismal. During that period, the United States established and sustained the institutions that have maintained global commerce and a substantial period of great power peace. We faced down the Soviets over Cuban-based missiles and emerged without destroying the world. We generated unprecedented security and prosperity for our own people and played a major role in securing the same for our close allies in Europe and Asia. Viewed from a greater distance, U.S. military failures appear less as a series of disasters and more as unfortunate and embarrassing sideshows. That does not absolve the architects of failure, nor does it lessen the pain of those who paid the price for those failures. We should be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about our military shortcomings and substantially improve our decision-making for engaging in military adventures. We should not equate those military failures with strategic failure and sacrifice what has been successful in an attempt to improve what is, after all, only one element of our strategic toolbox.
James W. Vizzard 