In popular fiction, it is frequently generals who are advocating war, and there is some tendency in the American public to assume that the military must always be looking for an opportunity to try out its new weapons. In fact, I think that is a myth.
My reading of both recent and distant history suggests that it is usually the politicians – those who have never studied military history and know little or nothing about the real complexities of managing and supplying a battlefield army - who are most eager to find military solutions to difficult political problems. It is the generals, who have studied military history and understand the enormous uncertainties of wars and the terrible costs, who are most reticent to rush into war.
The brilliant Confederate general Robert E. Lee understood full well that the Confederacy was taking a terrible gamble to fight the northern states with their much greater manufacturing capabilities, while the Confederate political leaders were eager for a military confrontation. The equally brilliant WWII Japanese admiral Isoroko Yamamoto (who by the way attended Harvard and Annapolis, and understood Americans) was against a war with the US, and told the Japanese political leaders that with a surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet he could run wild in the Pacific for perhaps six months at the most, after which the enormous productive force of the US would make things increasingly difficult for the Japanese, but his political masters didn’t believe him. And in recent history the Bush administration launched a war in
Is it stupidity or is it arrogance that deludes politicians, most of them lawyers, into thinking they know more about warfare than the professional military people who have studied the field throughout their entire careers?
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