how many wars are we in today?

 The White House released its twice-yearly War Powers report on June 8. No surprises and few specific numbers. The letter to Congress this time doesn't mention a classified annex.

the rogue secretary of defense

I’ve been studying America’s secretaries of defense for a long time. I wrote a book comparing the first 21 in 2006, just before one of the best ever, Robert Gates, began his service. Once former secretaries started writing memoirs, I began collecting them. But save your money when it comes to Christopher Miller’s Soldier Secretary.

That’s uncharitable. Let me put it differently. Don’t buy it unless you want to read –

-- the geriatric congressional leadership ”cowering like frightened children” on January 6 [xi]

-- the Iraq war conducted “all for a god-damned lie” [108]

-- the Army War College’s devotion to  the “dogmas of the ruling regime” [138]

-- how civilian control in the Pentagon made him “nauseous” [141]

--his first NSC boss, John Bolton, was a “classic ‘chicken hawk’” [158]

-- he concluded we need only “800 military personnel” in Afghanistan [159]

-- Chairmen MIlley in 2021 was “either lying or grossly incompetent” about Afghanistan [160]

-- he was an internationalist until he “was mugged by neoconservatives” [190]

-- Milley was “prone to histrionics” [218]

-- we should “cut  military spending in half,”[230] “demolish and rebuild the intelligence community” (the vast majority of whose products are “worthless and a colossal waste of time and resources”)[241], and “fire the generals” [248]

 

What he doesn’t say is how he maneuvered to be named Acting Secretary of Defense. He went to work on the NSC staff in March 2018, later had a political job at DOD, and was nominated by President Trump to head the National Counter Terrorism Center in March, 2020. The Senate Intelligence Committee held a hearing on his nomination on July 22, and the Senate confirmed him with a voice vote and no debate on August 6. That confirmation made him legally available to be named Acting Secretary of Defense, and he admits that he “had been on standby throughout the later summer and early fall.” [183]

 

President Trump waited until after the election, then fired Secretary Mark Esper on November 9 and announced Miller’s appointment. Miller had a long Army career, but slim accomplishments compared to the other men who have headed the Pentagon. What counted most was that he had the confidence of the president.

 

The most curious omission was any discussion of the November 11, 2020 meeting when the senior leadership was presented with memorandum signed by President Trump ordering the withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel from Somalia by December 31 and from Afghanistan by January 15. The document had been prepared by the team sent to the Pentagon with Miller but without the usual staffing by the NSC. General Milley protested the unorthodox process and Trump was persuaded to withdraw it. Miller brags that he was later able to fly to Africa and get the Somalia withdrawal accomplished before Trump left office.

 

I believe a soldier can become disillusioned with a war in which he fought bravely. I can appreciate that an official in the Pentagon and intelligence community can witness enough examples of unwise spending that he favors big cuts. I understand that Donald Trump’s impulsive and ignorant policymaking could appeal to someone with a shattered world view. But it’s scary to realize that such a  person could have been given such extraordinary power by a president actively trying to overturn a democratic election.

 

Books that changed my mind

 [I mentioned some of these items a few years ago, but now my list is longer.]

I was exchanging reading recommendations with a friend and realized that there have been a few books in recent years that actually changed my mind regarding what I thought happened in history. I read a lot of disappointing books -- too shallow, too heavy, too incomplete -- but I generally enjoy revisionist historians, especially if they have a provocative thesis and ample evidence. If you want to buy one of these, the best place to look  is https://www.bookfinder.com/ So here's a short list:

World War I: I'm now persuaded that Russia shares much of the blame for the start of the Great War by its policies to dominate Turkey and by mobilization during the July 1914 crisis. After deep dives into long-hidden Russian archives, Sean McMeekin showed in The Russian Origins of the First World War that even Barbara Tuchman got the sequence wrong by relying on the falsified memoirs of the Russian Foreign Minister. McMeekin's books on Russian diplomacy and the July crisis changed my view of German war guilt, though Austria-Hungary still deserves shared blame with Russia. See also his Russian Revolution, July 1914, and Stalin's War, which describes World War II from Stalin's viewpoint rather than the usual FDR/Churchill one.

Philip Zelikow's The Road Less Traveled persuaded me that leaders missed a chance to end the war in December 1916 with a poorly staffed peace initiative by Woodrow Wilson that was undercut by Secretary Lansing and "Colonel" House.

FDR's boldness: I had long admired Franklin Roosevelt's strategic bravery in maneuvering the United States in support of Britain and against Hitler, believing that he was just ahead of public opinion, skillfully pulling it along. Lynne Olson's Those Angry Days persuaded me that, much of the time, FDR vacillated, doing less than many of his advisors urged and hoped. He still was a great leader, just not quite as bold as I had thought.

World War II: James Lacey's The Washington War, a bureaucratic politics analysis of FDR's leadership, persuaded me that administrative and economic policies had as much to do with America's ultimate success as its military operations. Phillips Payson O'Brien's The Second Most Powerful Man in the World: The Life of Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt's Chief of Staff persuaded me that Leahy was far more influential on FDR's war policy than General George Marshall. Jonathan Schneer's Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet persuaded me that much of Britain's success was due to the way the cabinet worked together; Churchill dominated, but the cabinet mattered.

Postwar American policy: Derek Leebaert's, Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-57, persuaded me that Britain hoodwinked America into doing what it wanted until the collapse at Suez. Samuel F. Wells, Jr.'s Fearing the Worst: How Korea Transformed the Cold War, convinced me that American misjudgments in the Korean war made the nuclear arms race with the USSR more likely. Serhii Plokhy's Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, persuaded me that JFK lied about his policies and we came dangerously close to a full-scale nuclear war.

Slave Power's influence on foreign policy:  I never thought that slavery and its perpetuation had much impact on American foreign policy until I read Matthew Karp's eye-opening history, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy.

Karp details how the South dominated key foreign policy posts and consciously advocated policies to protect and even extend slavery in the decades before the War of the Rebellion. Defenders of slavery really had a "deep state."

The Revolutionary War:  I used to have a typical American high school student's view of our war for independence as a story of brave patriots, toughened at Valley Forge and led by George Washington, who finally triumphed at Yorktown. Two books have changed my understanding of that conflict. One was Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy's of British politics during the conflict, The Men Who Lost America. He argues that the British gave up for broader strategic reasons. Add to this Holger Hoock's Scars of Independence,   which describes the local violence on both sides and the mistreatment of Loyalists during and after the war. The good guys won, but they won dirty.

How many wars are we in today?

 The president sent Congress his latest report on troop deployments under the War Powers law on December 8. It shows that combat-equipped forces are in 15 named countries plus 90,000 in various NATO countries and others "postured outside Afghanistan." There is also a classified annex.

No surprises here. The letter has a defensive tone. For example, it says US forces in Yemen are doing counter-terrorism and are not engaged in hostilities against the Houthis.

I remain convinced that the war powers laws are useful in providing some transparency on US military activities and will continue to draw attention to the reports.

devils' bargains

 I experienced chilling reminders of events I lived through as I read journalist David Corn's American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party went Crazy.  Of course Corn tells only one side of the GOP story. He omits the Dwight Eisenhower of the interstate highway system and the National Defense Education Act; the Richard Nixon of  environmental protection and clean water laws; the Ronald Reagan of nuclear arms controls; the George H.W. Bush of the Gulf War and the Budget Enforcement Act; the George W. Bush of the No Child Left Behind Act and PEPFARS.

Instead, he tells of how Republican leaders and their presidential candidates embraced the radical fringes of their party in hopes of electoral victories. Eisenhower tolerated McCarthy to keep his rabid anticommunist supporters. Other Republicans repeated the smears of the John Birch Society throughout the 1960s. Nixon courted George Wallace and his segregationist supporters as part of his "southern strategy." Reagan welcomed them as well as the politicized evangelicals. George H.W. Bush wasn't radical enough for Newt Gingrich and his acolytes even though his campaigns used the nasty racism of Lee Atwater.  George W. Bush rewarded his religious supporters and even John McCain and Mitt Romney dropped their criticism of the GOP radicals in their search for votes.

I've been involved with political campaigns long enough to know that most candidates want to add to their base, not exclude potential supporters. But at what price? Have they no shame? My own disappointment at my boss Senator John Culver's loss after his campaign defending his liberal record despite pressures to change his views was eased a bit when he gave us mementos inscribed with Rosa Parks' words, "My feet are tired, but my soul is at rest."

The devils' bargains Republican candidates made were not news, but the pattern was stark and over many decades. The other shocker in the book was to read the actual language of the radical activists. Time and again they used apocalyptic phrases and said Democrats would destroy America if elected. And even when communists didn't invade us from Central America and capitalism survived with Medicare, they continued to predict imminent demise.

Even worse, the radicals weaponized language, seizing the most scary and pejorative words to use about opponents.I was on the team receiving the barbs of Terry Dolan and NCPAC in the 1970s and Lee Atwater in the 1980s, even before Newt Gingrich taught a new generation of candidates to be "nasty." The lesson they learned, sad to say, is that anger and outrage and fear work as campaign themes. Now it's everywhere, amplified and accelerated by social media.

I wish we could go back. To civility, to rational debate, to arguments over better and worse, more and less.  I wish we could treat opponents as honorable people until proven otherwise. So far the Democrats have tolerated but not adopted the views of their most radical candidates. But until the Republicans do likewise, we're in a downward spiral toward something very dark.

How many wars are we in today?

 Fifteen plus, according to the latest war powers report to Congress. The uncertainty comes because the report says" approximately 90,000 United States Armed Forces personnel are deployed to North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries in Europe" without naming the countries. The conflicts are basically the same as in recent reports: Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, Niger, Cuba [at Guantanamo], Philippines, Egypt, and Kosovo plus NATO. The law requires reporting of places where troops equipped for combat are deployed; there does not have to be active combat.

I post this for consistency, not to make other judgments. I believe the war powers act has been a valuable tool for congressional oversight of military operations.

the economics of the Civil War

 Napoleon may have said that an army marches on its stomach, and modern armies also need a sturdy supply train with weapons and ammunition, but governments fighting wars need money. In his illuminating new book on the financing of the American Civil War, Ways and Means, author Roger Lowenstein has an epigraph from Cicero,"The sinews of war are unlimited money."

Until now, my simplistic understanding of that conflict was that the Union won because it had more people and productive capacity to prevail in a war of attrition. I know now that deft diplomacy also kept foreign powers from recognizing and supporting the Confederacy and that generalship at key times kept the Union from giving up. What Lowenstein's book tells is how fractious politicians tossed aside their traditional views of money and government and responded creatively to the challenge of wartime financing.

The Union raised revenues by raising taxes, borrowing money,and printing paper greenbacks. The Confederacy did much the same, but less smartly and less effectively. By the end of the war, the South has only raised about 5 or 6% of its spending through taxes. [It had a smaller tax base, of course, but refused to tax the property held as slaves.] The North covered 21% of its spending with taxes, about the same as in World War I. The Republican Congresses also preferred high tariffs, raising them to an average duty of 47% by the end of the war. 

When it came to borrowing money, the Union's efforts were uneven, depending on success on the battlefield and the innovative salesmanship of Jay Cooke, who earned  hefty commissions peddling federal bonds throughout the North, beyond Wall Street. The South had good returns from Europe until after Gettysburg.

Both sides printed money, but the Union showed restraint. Only 1/6th of its war spending was in greenbacks, compared to 60% by the South. As a consequence. inflation in the Union was about 80%, compared to 9000% in the Confederacy.

I was surprised to learn that the value of greenbacks compared to gold plunged 50% after Gettysburg and didn't recover until the final weeks of the war. Until the capture of Atlanta in September, 1864, faith in Lincoln and a Union victory was on the verge of collapse.

The story centers on Salmon Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, whose loyalty to Lincoln was often subordinated to his own wish to be president. One delicious irony: named Chief Justice a few months after Lincoln had accepted a pro forma resignation, Chase was part of a court majority that ruled unconstitutional the Legal Tender Act allowing paper currency, despite having championed the law and having put his own picture on the money.

Congress comes across as ignorant and mercurial when it came to financing, at one point barring trade in gold futures and then repealing that law two weeks later. Many members strongly and openly opposed some provisions, only to embrace them when the votes were taken.

Another theme in Lowenstein's book is how the Republican Congresses during the war greatly expanded the scope and size of the federal government, finally enacting the activist role originally pushed by the Whigs. Lawmakers created an Agriculture Department to help farmers; funded a transcontinental railroad; established Land Grant Colleges; gave millions of acres of land to willing farmers under the Homestead Act; and established National Banks in order to create a single national currency.

After the war, however, the dominant Republicans insisted on a return to the gold standard and presided over three decades of deflation. But they had raised the money when it counted.