-Caveat Lector- From http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue225/item4235.asp The Lawyers' War in Yugoslavia by Thomas Lipscomb Thursday, April 29, 1999 Comments: 100 posts <Picture> <Picture: This Issue's TOC> <Picture: IC Archives> <Picture: Sign Up to the IC Mailing List> <Picture: Related IC articles> The Pitfalls of Foreign-Policy Morality : Alan Tonelson calls for a moral majority for war-making decisions. Clinton's Strategic Failure : Melvin Goodman sees plenty of room for improvement in the current administration's foreign policy. The 'Gatekeepers' Arrive on the Internet : Thomas Lipscomb laments the dearth of First Amendment advocates in cyberspace. <Picture> <Picture> <Picture> Search <Picture: Previous Article><Picture: Next Article><Picture><Picture>Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman spent some early years in the South and understood his campaign in Georgia was fighting the intransigent myth of a u nified culture as much as a military force. To achieve victory, his army had to leave the citizens of Georgia in total despair ("Make Georgia howl ...") as well as conquer it militarily. The only road to peace Sherman cou ld see was one violent enough to destroy the ingrained civilian will to resist. His lesson should not be ignored. Where's the fortitude? What we are pursuing currently in Yugoslavia is the same kind of "lawyers' war" we have fought repeatedly for the past 50 years with poor results. The lawyers, professors and wonks in charge of U.S. military policy today wring their hands over each casualty, and have difficulty dealing with the inevitable collateral damage and mistargeting of war. They dream of a legendary Renaissance set piece between mercenary condottiere where armies m aneuver, but never fight, preferring to negotiate endlessly for bloodless treaty exchanges of territory and gold. It does not help that the only military experience in the entire Clinton national security team is Sandy Berger's service as an Army file clerk and dental hygienist, curiously missing from his official biography on the Wh ite House Web site. Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Bill Cohen, et al. are "nice" people who have never been in a school yard fight, much less a bar brawl and do not particularly want to know anyone who has. Their idea of combat is withholding tenure, dropping people from VIP lists, holding insulting press conferences and filing lawsuits. Not surprisingly, in a field of expertise that employs "sticks and stones" rather than "words," the measured methods preferred by our current leaders are ineffective precisely because the results can be debated. After all , facing imminent invasion of the home islands, the Japanese War Cabinet was still arguing alternative military strategies and even considering a coup in August 1945. The arguments stopped a few days later. Unless we can bring sharp, cruel and violent war home to the Serbs, we have no business engaging them. And that is a difficult decision for an easily distracted polyglot superpower run by a national security superstructur e that cannot tell the Armed Forces from the Boy Scouts. Where have you gone, Colin Powell? This is not a new problem. The government of the early United States felt its institutional understanding of its military establishment slipping away as the experience of the Revolutionary War receded in the memory of its elites. The Military Academy founded to retain that understanding was only saved from elimination in the nick of time by the Mexican War. The concept of the use of military force as a fully professional set of skills and mental attitudes that must be learned and applied has endured only with the greatest difficulty. <Picture: Colin Powell> Is Colin Powell the only one who understands America's contempt for the military? Today, contempt for the professional military has reached an historic zenith among our leadership classes. Colin Powell understood that, which is why he extended and delayed his retirement until he coulduse his prestige t o keep the new administration's trigger-happy civilians from getting bogged down in Bosnia. But the perfumed princes we select for our General Staff candidates these days are not about to take any chances with their caree r objectives by trying to educate the administration's current team, much less resign in protest. And when our Yale- and Oxford-educated president believes World War II began in the Balkans and our secretary of state with a Columbia Ph.D. has a sense of history so fragile she does not even know who her grandparents ar e, one might wonder how much progress our military leaders could make even if they tried. A call for leadership Military operations succeed in proportion to their ability to rapidly process and respond to information from the battlefield. That information can be positive or negative, but there is a time premium on its validity paid in human lives. In the political arena, spin can contain or at least delay disaster. In the military, it compounds catastrophe. A defense establishment that does not understand this is likely to spend an inordinate time fighting the news cycle rather than the war, something we should have learned from the "five o'clock follies" fiascoes at MACV HQ in Saigon. That is why there are few more dangerous environments for military policy formulation than an administration that believes at its core what really matters is what the meaning of the word "is" is. One might accept the fact that truth is the first casualty in war, but in the Yugoslavian campaign of the Clinton administration, truth was dead on arrival. This is the kind of administration that stations American troops on the Kosovo-Macedonian border, refuses to issue them ammunition, and then argues internally for hours about whether it might be a political mistake to aff ord them the protection of POW treatment when three of them get captured on an easily foreseen cross-border raid. There are a number of perfectly sound military alternatives to the current "don't go near the water" strategy -- but let's not leave it up to the press to identify them. More nonsense has been written about the supposed e xperience of the German Army in the Balkans in World War II than about the "impregnable" fortifications of the Republican Guard that faced our troops before Desert Storm. But then our press's main contact with military hi story, like the members of the Clinton administration it covers, has been in making sure they did not have one personally. Neither the press nor the national security team understands that the success of the Gulf War campaign was not based upon some miraculous game plan that led to victory The only miracle was that our defense establishment h ad formulated clear objectives and then followed sound military principles in achieving them. That took character and intellectual courage: two items we are in far shorter supply of than we are cruise missiles. In the current environment it is difficult to see how intelligent policy can be formulated, much less supported. Under these circumstances we have no business trying to pursue any war that is optional. Thomas H. Lipscomb is the director of the Center for the Digital Future in New York. An an editor and publisher for many years, most recently as head of Times Books, he is also the founder of two public companies in digital technology. 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