One month into the Iran war with a campaign of aerial bombardment and limited troop involvement, let’s relook at military history in the year 1964 through the eyes of H.R. McMaster in his seminal book on the American military involvement in Vietnam (Dereliction of Duty, Harper & Collins, 1997). The U.S. made a vain attempt to defeat North Vietnam through aerial bombardment and 25,000 troops on the ground. Robert McNamara and his “algebra of war” debated with George Ball’s observations of the current and past history of Vietnam’s resistance to foreign incursions.
Ball noted that the “most severe air campaign” to persuade a committed enemy to withdraw, in fact will cause “an intensity” of resistance and in fact “launch terror attacks on American personnel” such that a president must assess the “potential costs of war” and “saddle and destroy our freedom to choose the policies that are at once most effective and most prudent. Once on the tiger’s back, we cannot choose the place to dismount.”
Further, Carl Von Clausewitz noted, “It is in the nature of escalation that the party that seems to be losing will be tempted to up the ante.” The New York Times, March 31, noted that Clausewitz stated, “Long ago it was recognized that the reducing of war to a kind of algebra [think Robert McNamara 1964] is never merely a calculation. War is saturated with passion, uncertainty and political purpose.”
In fact, David Ignatius noted on MS NOW, March 26: “All war is a counterpunch for Trump.”
The Iran War exposes a failure of not just strategy, but of literacy. Literacy and history train the faculties of war, just the faculties that Trump and Hegseth lack: They are unable to grant that other minds are not transparent to them.
Frank Vozak
Oak Park