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Quote of the Day: The Guns of August
A Frenchman goes over to watch the Japanese beat the Russians in a war that was held just before the First World War, a mere decade before the date this book is set. What did he notice in his watching? He noticed that it is generally not a good idea to charge against people with machine guns. After, when he mentioned this to other French generals they decided that he was a coward. He said that wearing a uniform that featured a bright blue coat and bright red trousers might be the equivalent of wearing a bull’s eye tied around your neck and a neon sign saying ‘shoot here’. His saying this was considered not only utterly outrageous but also an insult to French soldiers…The lesson is that you can change the technology, but people might not understand what that change will mean. – Barbra Tuchman
Barbra Tuchman’s 1962 book The Guns Of August was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and made into a 100 minute documentary film in 1965. President John F. Kennedy commanded his cabinet and principal military advisers to read the book. Some scholars think this book affected Kennedy’s approach to the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The book led the political scientist Graham Allison in 1971 to propose the Organizational Process Model instead of the traditional Game Theory and other Rational Actor approaches to conflicts. So how does the quote above and Allison’s book hold up after 50 years?
In the quote, the French generals seem to be crazy, arguing about machine guns and bright uniforms; however, this was generally true with the British and other generals. Note that smokeless gunpowder was not in general use until the 1890s. Before that invention, the smoke on a large battlefield would be so intense that recognition of friend/foe was important, hence the British Red and the French Blue. In addition, the Pomp and Circumstance traditions along with the emphasis on bravery made camouflaged uniforms cowardly, as shown in the quote. The WWI British Generals were probably worse, sending waves of soldiers against the machine guns with the “British Spirit,” being the most powerful nation at that time. Although the generals look foolish 100 years later, their rationale seems understandable.
In Graham Allison’s book, he argues that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was unfounded. He also questions MacArthur’s Korean War disagreements with Harry Truman as a political backlash due to MacArthur’s popularity. That view was popular in the 1960s, yet missed MacArthur’s excellent administration of Japan after WWII and the goal of victory in Korea rather than a stalemate. The economist Milton Friedman questioned Allison’s bureaucratic models as too large and impractical in a crisis. Friedman also argued that even if Rational Actor theories do not describe reality, they provide accurate predictions.
Fifty years later, how do we analyze what methods should be used in geopolitical decisions? For Iran with their Mullahs in power, does the Rational Actor make sense? Does Trump have methods to change the Chinese belligerent ways like what Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis? And how does the Deep State, who looks at Trump as the enemy rather than Iran and China, give his administration accurate data to make a good decision?
As the curse says, “may you live in interesting times.”
Published in Group Writing
That should be Mutually Assured Destruction, but spell correct may have done you in.
All of the actors goal seek, but some of the goals may not strike us as rational. The Iranian mullahs reportedly want to bring the coming of the 12th imam, which makes as much sense as Christian millenarians purportedly backing Israel in hope of bringing the Rapture. Tough to weigh those on the same ‘rational’ realpolitik scale as held for the US vs. USSR match.
And we have our own Intelligence Community of which part went to the extent of trying to overturn a national election result by generating bogus information, far from passing Trump the good stuff for making decisions.
Interesting times, indeed.
Not to pile on, but that ancient Chinese curse was made up by an American reporter in the 1920’s.
It’s not the data, it’s the advice that goes with the data and maybe, more importantly, the trust between the President and his Intel team. That’s the bottom line here, isn’t it?
When James Clapper and John Brennan decided to involve the so-called intelligence community in domestic politics they did enormous damage. They probably felt it was a no-lose scenario as there was no way Trump was going to win and it would have the added benefit of ingratiating themselves with Madame President.
Now you have a President who is rightfully wary of those entities, and even if he does believe them he has a hard time selling that to his supporters, because they sure as hell don’t trust them.
So how does weaponizing politics fit into this whole discussion?
Yet it was almost twenty years earlier that Hilaire Belloc penned his memorable couplet, “Whatever happens, we have got; The Maxim gun and they have not,” in reference to the British conquest of the Dark Continent. (It’s from his verse satire, The Modern Traveller.) I’ve read that the Brits had an uneasy relationship with early machine gun technology, recognizing how much it leveled the playing field, and that it could be fired by just about anybody, on any side, with equally lethal effect. As it was.
So true. And so not limited just to military examples. If I had a dollar for every secretary or administrative assistant I caught out, in the 1980’s (some of whom I’d trained myself) simply refusing to use a word processor as it should be used, and insisting on pressing the “enter” key at the end of every line like the carriage return, and putting in a hard page code at the end of every page, so that every little revision, addition, or subtraction to the whole was a mind-bendingly nerve-racking and time-consuming ordeal, I’d be rich. Sometimes, there’s an element of willfulness, fear, and what Mr. She calls an iron whim, to the “not understanding what change means” business.
It seems that the present weaponizing politics is an extreme outcome of ordinary politics. In the Truman vs. MacArthur fight, it was the final say on who is responsible during war. Truman apparently started the fight by delaying MacArthur’s push to leave Japan after a peace treaty in the fall of 1947. This would have allowed MacArthur to run in the 1948 election. MacArthur handed over power to the Japanese government in 1949, but wasn’t relieved by Truman until April 1951. The peace treaty was not formalized until September 1951. This personal tug-of-war has always been a part of politics. But even President Reagan and Tip O’Neal could find some common ground to get things done in the 1980’s.
I have not read the Allison book, but he suggested a third way called the “Government Politics Model,” which includes:
In short, Allison (and others) have emphasized consensus building rather than true leadership for government action. This has IMHO supported the Administrative State and the associated problems we see today.
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The OP contains a great question—far beyond my capacity to answer it, but it does make me think about time, memory and change.
@Skylar was reminiscing about a bad experience he’d had with the New Orleans police department in 1986. That is now 33 years ago…but to Skylar, it’s a vivid memory and it might as well have happened last week. And if he happened to go back to New Orleans, he might react to the presence of a police officer based on something that happened before that police officer was even born.
We all do this, and we do it all the time.
There’s a building near me that once housed an ice cream parlor for a number of years. Painted a vivid purple, it was called “Miss Plums.” To this day, I find myself giving directions like: “it’s…you know, about half a mile beyond Miss Plum’s. “If the recipient is a long-time resident of the area, this will make perfect sense. She can see Miss Plum’s in her mind’s eye, and easily orient herself by the place even though Miss Plum’s hasn’t actually existed for decades.
Surely military strategists, politicians and generals have dozens of “Miss Plums” reference points in play as they are analyzing situations and making plans? This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. There’s a kind of cultural “muscle memory” that surely streamlines what would otherwise be an unwieldy welter of decisions, and provided those around you share, in broad outline, some of the same reference points, you can plan, communicate and execute quite effectively much of the time.
Until, that is, you can’t. Perhaps the great leaders are ones who can at least sometimes recognize and respond creatively to the more important alterations in the landscape before he is hip-deep in casualties?
The British Army used khaki field uniforms from the 1890s on. British infantry regiments were equipped with Vickers/Maxim machine guns.
But, the major European armies all had an offensive orientation. Believing a war of maneuver was the only sure path to victory. Faced with an entrenched enemy, well equipped with machine guns, the spirit of the offensive died. But the ideal of a breakthrough lived on as both sides fumbled with a variety of means to restore maneuver to the battlefield.
By 1918 the Germans had arrived at storm tactics, built around specially trained and equipped infiltration units. The Allies mastered the rolling barrage of massed artillery and tanks, supporting infantry.
Any decision making process will work if and only if the ultimate decision makers are willing to recognize the weaknesses in what a given process provides. The Bush/Cheney team made some serious errors in their beliefs about post invasion Iraq; their real failure was in taking so long to recognize error and change strategies.
I’m going to be that guy: Barbara Tuchman, for all her importance to the development of the historical discipline, was a bad historian. The French officers who observed the Russo-Japanese war came back having learned the lesson that you won modern wars by attacking first, hard, in mass, and accepting massive casualties. But if you could keep your formations together, once you got inside the defensive lines, the enemy morale would break and you could sweep them off the field. The Japanese were particularly noted for their near suicidal morale and confidence on the attack.
The French kept the red pants and the mass formations because their army was made up of reservists who already had the red pants, could be controlled in massed formations, and so long as both happened -the generals believed -would be able to sustain an attack to successful completion, as the Japanese had done.
This reasoning may have been wrong (I am not actually sure it is wrong: the French army’s performance in the war is often under-stated by people confusing it for the Second World War, and I’ve not seen much evidence that casualty counts declined later in the war because of the change to the Horizon Blue camouflage), but it wasn’t stupid or, Tuchman’s favorite word, “folly.”
As for Allison, there are many critiques of his book (including ones like my critique of Tuchman -that he simply got the history wrong, though in his case there are others who were present for the events that say he got it close enough). But Allison’s point was that you can’t treat complicated bureaucracies like rational actors -they lack the unitary mind. Everyone may well be acting rationally, but because of limited knowledge (called Bounded Rationality now), or because they come to the question with particular training and perspectives, the end results need not be also rational. Far from arguing in favor of consensus (though Allison may have thought it was a good idea, I did not read him that way -though it is not inconsistent), he was arguing that theories of government that are top down -the President orders and everyone carries out the orders as the President intends them to be carried out -are doomed to failure because the bureaucracy, not being psychically controlled the President, is literally incapable of doing that. Instead, it will do its best approximation. Wise governors will take that into account and ask bureaucracies to do things that the bureaucracy is already inclined by nature to do, and are very careful about assigning bureaucracies tasks they aren’t good at.
Thank you for your informed reply. I agree with your criticism of Tuchman being a little loose with the facts and their understanding. She was well regarded by the (more sensible) left of the 1960’s as discussed above.
The relationship between a government bureaucracy and a military organization seems to have some basis. Many times important battles are won by individuals that modify standard tactics to the situation at hand. One of the best examples was the US Submarine fleet in WWII. Even bureaucracies can change, like our excellent Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) here in Indiana.