School of War - Ep 66: Michael E. O’Hanlon on Military History and Modern Strategy

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

Michael E. O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution and author of Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861, joins the show to talk about how the patterns of military history can shed light on today’s concerns. ▪️ Times  • 01:16 Introduction  • 01:50 Military history for the modern strategist • 05:16 Is military history relevant?  • 09:05 Lessons from the Civil War • 22:47 Could the South have succeeded? • 27:46 America starts slow • 35:35 MaArthur’s dismissal • 41:16 Could the Korean War have ended earlier?  • 45:11 What is our grand strategy?

On the School of War podcast, we are in the business of looking to history, generally military and diplomatic history, for insights that apply to present-day strategic and policy debates. Well, we might have saved ourselves the time and just waited for Michael O'Hanlon to write his most recent book, Military History for the Modern Strategist, which covers America's major wars from the Civil War to the present with just such an emphasis. Let's dive in. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii.

December 7.19. A date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Delighted to be joined today by Michael E. O'Hanlon, who is the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy. and Director of Research and Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. He is also the author most recently of Military History for the Modern Strategist, America's Major Wars since 1861.

Michael, thank you so much for joining the show. Aaron, great to be with you. Thanks for having me on. It's my pleasure. I'm looking forward to getting into this with you. I should note we are recording this essentially on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq,

so I hope we'll get to Iraq, which you address in the book. You address a lot in the book. you essentially are writing a history from a strategic perspective of America's wars from the Civil War on. So there's lots of different ways in there. I thought I would start by asking, you know, why this book and what does this book specifically do? What does it mean to be military history for the modern strategist? Yeah, thanks, Aaron. I think that the reason I wrote this book is fundamentally because I had always wanted to read this book. I probably hoped for a little better version

and then some, you know, how no one likes to read their own prose. But it's, it's a treatment of these major wars, sort of industrial scale, modern wars of the United States, the seven big ones, Civil War, the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. And it's an effort to really just understand the fundamentals of what happened, what caused the wars, the strategies that were employed by the belligerents, the major turns of momentum or milestones in the conflicts, the choices that the various sides made, what they might have done differently, perhaps what they should have done differently, and to really capture these conflicts at that level of detail,

rather than to do a traditional deep dive into one historical figure or one battle, the sort of thing that is what real historians, and I'm not one, what they earn their money doing and do so well. Archival research, you know, spending months and years with a given history, historical figure, reading their papers, all sorts of things like that. I did not do that. What I wanted to do was to complement that kind of literature for someone who, again, wanted to stay more at the conceptual level and think about how these wars could teach us about strategy in today's world going forward. Big lessons of what the wars of the past might be able to tell us about the future. And

so, you know, the individual detailed histories or biographies or what have you are still helpful. And I know a lot of people who draw inspiration from, you know, knowing a lot about Ulysses S. Grant or whomever, George Washington, you know, name your figure. I'm not in any way downplaying the importance of that. But I wanted something that, again, got the big picture right in one manageable 400-page volume. And I was, the last piece of my answer, I was always surprised that I had not really come across that book, had not been forced to reap that book in the course of my studies. I have a PhD from Princeton in public and international affairs with a concentration in international relations, and I never read a book like that. Now, there were some that I read over the years generally after getting my PhD that did similar things.

This professor Russell Weigley, who's not passed away, but he wrote a very nice book called The American Way of War. And it was not quite as much of a chronology of the conflicts as mine, but it was probably, you know, historically more. interesting and original. And he did a great job with that. There were a couple of other books that are sort of surveys. But of course, surveys can be dry. And I wanted to have a little bit of my own personality, a little bit of an eye of the moderate strategist on these conflicts. And so I was finally getting around to writing this book that I always wanted to read and was surprised that modern American policy schools and political science departments don't tend to assign or even produce, which to me seems an oversight in the field. Well, I'm going to

grateful that you wrote it. I mean, a premise of this podcast is that the study of military history is in bad shape. And this is our own modest contribution towards addressing the problem. Your book is a much more substantial contribution. Can I ask? I want to provoke you a bit and you'll, you'll recognize this comes from something you say towards the end of the book. Okay, so you're a strategist in the year 2023. You don't want to be ignorant of military history, of course. But considering the demands on your time, you know, don't some other subjects like, for example, technological change demand more of your attention than history. You know, I've been reading with amazement about what chat GPT version four can do. I'm worried it's going to take my job. You know, autonomous weapons are not something

that were concerned to anyone until quite recently. You know, what could a study of, for example, the Civil War, tell you that equals and value what careful consideration of questions like that could bring it? Well, I think, first of all, that people do, if they're specialists in the field, or even just interested in being good strategist, they can find time to read both technology and history. And frankly, most people do wind up reading a fair amount of history at one point or another in their lives. But I just don't know that they do it always with an eye towards getting the strategy and the campaign level analysis and the big choices, you know, sort of vividly on display. And so what I say in the book is that if you're trying to figure out

the right way to build a future military and the right battle plan for a future campaign or conflict, yes, look more at technology. But if you're trying to figure out the right way to build a future military, and If you're trying to understand what's probably going to go wrong in the next war, if you're trying to understand why the next war will probably wind up more costly and prolonged and difficult than we might expect, if we listen to our technologists and our fancy war planners, if you're going to avoid the hubris of, you know, the typical human tendency to believe that the moment that you're alive is the most fascinating, riveting, advanced in all of human history, and that we now do things better than our predecessors

and we don't make the same mistakes they do. If you're vulnerable to that way of thinking, which most of us are, because we see the pattern through history, then you should go back and learn history and learn enough of it that you see that even smart people make these huge mistakes. And you mentioned the Iraq invasion and also Ukraine's on all of our minds.

Let me just give two very quick examples. Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration in general went into Iraq 20 years, ago yesterday or today, depending on which time frame your end time zone. And they thought that all these wonderful American precision guided weapons, these satellite guidance systems and stealth aircraft and other things that nobody had ever had before in history at the least scale we did would allow us to rapidly defeat the Iraqi army. And they were sort of half right because we did overthrow Saddam fast, but 20 years later, we're still there. And then Vladimir Putin thought that

after his 10-year modernization plan, that, you know, facing a country that in his view wasn't even a real country historically, didn't have a strong sense of identity, had a comedian as its president, that he'd be able to walk all over the Ukrainians and actually the CIA agreed with them. The CIA did a lot of great work before the invasion, but they got it wrong because they too thought that this war might be fast, that Russia might steamroll the Ukrainians. History would have told Rumsfeld and Putin and the CIA to be. very wary of that way of thinking. Yes, there are some wars that go to plan, to script, and go fast and are decisively concluded more quickly or as quickly as hoped. But those wars are in

the minority. And it's a cycle throughout history. It's not like we're getting better at predicting the duration of war. We're controlling the scale and scope of war. We're not. So history is humbling and therefore sobering. And that's what I think makes it essential as a compliment to the technology. So maybe it would be helpful. Let's pick one. Let's pick a war. Civil War is first in the book, but dealer's choice here.

And talk about the approach you take to a specific war and drawing lessons from it for the modern strategist. Yeah, thank you. So I will go with the Civil War, partly because it fits this model perhaps the best, although other conflicts throughout my book due to like Korea and World Wars. And what I try to do is to, of course, explain how the war happened and then what the different parties were trying to achieve, sometimes just survival if they were the defender. But, you know, what produced the conditions that led to the conflict, recognizing as Klausovitz taught us that no war just happens in isolation and that it's essentially an extension of policy in other ways. And then what strategy did they develop to win the war and what were the components of that strategy?

So military planners often would describe this as, as you know, the operational or theater level of analysis or level of operations. And so at an operational level or a theater level, if you're thinking about military campaigns using sort of those words interchangeably, campaigning, fighting at the theater level, fighting, you know, across a larger geographic zone. If you think about campaigning, it's generally a series of operations and events that happen over a period of months, maybe longer, sometimes shorter, over a distance of hundreds of miles, sometimes less, sometimes more. The big campaigns of World War II in the oceans of the Pacific were often over thousands of miles. Campaigns can be over dozens of miles too. But campaigns are sort of the core ingredients of strategies. They are ways in which someone tries to sequence together a number of fights, battles, engagements, operations, such that they achieve some major interim goal on the way to winning the war on the terms they desire.

And so what I try to argue is that focusing on the campaign level of war, the theater level of war, is a wonderfully simplifying way to get a handle on what happened in these conflicts without having to understand each major battle. And so, you know, I've lived in the Washington, D.C. area now for 34 years. And so I've been around the Civil War sites, or at least, you know, more than half of them, the major sites of the American Civil War. And I always found it a little frustrating. Even someone like myself doing defense analysis with the interests I've had and the education I've had, I didn't always remember how all the different battles fit together, what happened at each one. And then I felt liberated writing this book to realize I didn't really have to remember. remember each one in isolation, because I argue in the book that there are seven major campaigns that define the preponderance of what happened in the Civil War. And I'll ask you for your permission before I go into the seven, and I'll try to be succinct. But if you're willing, what I'd like to do is illustrate this approach by looking at what I've identified, or at least what I claim to be, the seven major campaigns of the American Civil War.

Not to plug this podcast, you know, a second time in 10 minutes, but the whole purpose of the show is to connect military history to present-day policy consideration. So I feel like it would be remiss of me to not to not invite you to do this. Please. Thank you. So I'll go bang, bang, bang. And then, of course, some are going to know this history really well. Others, you know, please read my book or there are other very, you know, better books on the Civil War than my book, full-length treatments. But the first campaign, I would argue, is the famous or infamous General McClellan, the Union Commanding General in the early stages of the war, not the very first, but pretty quickly chosen by Lincoln. And he organized, at about this time of year, a big amphibious

armada, this is in 1862, after, you know, the first Battle of Manassas and a lot of skirmishing in the latter half of 1861, you know, Fort Sumner and in April of 1861, that was all sort of the warm-up phase. By 1862, the two sides are ready to fight. So McClellan loads up about 100,000 and troops in the Washington, D.C. vicinity and sail south in the Chesapeake Bay down to the James River Peninsula and disembarks. And his goal is to aim for Richmond, which by now is the Confederate capital. And General Lee is blocking his potential approach with the preponderance of Confederate forces helped by people like Stonewall Jackson. So the first campaign is McClellan with this amphibious movement and then, you know, infantry foot-based movement westward

from the peninsula down where revolutionary war history had been made, you know, in the vicinity of Yorktown and elsewhere towards Richmond. But then he gets stuck, he gets slow, he was very cautious, he was always too cautious. He always underestimated his own strength, overestimated the enemy. And so that campaign sort of peters out by midsummer of 1862 and he goes back home. So that's campaign number one. Campaign number two somewhat overlaps with McClure. And it's Stonewall Jackson's campaign through the Shenandoah Valley of Western Virginia, which by now is, you know, broken or lost West Virginia. And so it's it's in the Confederacy, West Virginia is still in the Union.

And the Shenandoah Valley for anybody in the Washington, D.C. or Virginia areas, they know this is a beautiful agricultural region. It's, you know, 10, 20, 30 miles wide, depending on where you are. And it's protected partly by some mountains, not super high mountains, but, you know, the blue Ridge. And so if you're over on the Washington side, eastern part of Virginia, it would be harder to see these armies moving. So Jackson takes a force, and he's notorious for going fast, for driving his men, but being very good at discipline. And he takes them and just winds up engaging in all these small to mid-sized fights with different pieces of General McDowell's Union armies up in Northern Virginia. And he makes the union feel like he must have two, three times the number of troops

that he really does because he's moving around so fast. They can't quite believe it's just one block of 17, 18,000 soldiers. And it culminates in the second battle of Manassas in August of 1862. But by that point, McDowell, the Union General, had been told by Lincoln to keep his forces up north rather than to go reinforce McClellan because they were so afraid that Jackson had enough strength to make a push for Washington and try to defeat the Union that way. So the second campaign, smaller scale, but I think fascinating and quite important for sort of producing this stalemate that the first campaign I just discussed ultimately resulted in. Third campaign builds off the second, and it's basically General Lee's decision to go north, first to Antietam

in September 1862, and then by after a break during which the Confederate forces spent the winter back home in Virginia, then going up, of course, ultimately resulting in the Gettysburg battle of July 1863. And that campaign was, you know, Lee's effort to so shock the North that psychologically we would just decide here in the North that it wasn't worth the trouble and maybe convince European countries to take the side of the Confederacy or at least to recognize the Confederacy as a new country. And it ultimately failed and Lee winds up offering President Jefferson Davis his resignation in July of 1863 after Gettysburg. But it reflected Lee's sort of cult of the offensive, which was alive and well in that period. And even though Lee was very good at

fighting on the defensive, he in this case wanted to see if he could produce this one big win. It was probably his biggest mistake to go north and to certainly fight these battles. And then campaign four is sort of, these are not perfectly chronologically separated because campaign four sort of happens halfway through campaign three. It's the union's effort in the winter of 1862, 1863 into the spring to come back down south one more time after the Confederate armies and after Richmond. And it's generals hooker and Burnside, very unsuccessful battles around Fredericksburg and elsewhere. And then ultimately resulting in the battle of Chancellorsville in May of 1863, which is a momentous battle. It's, you know, where the Confederates were defending

this heavily wooded area. It's almost like jungle in northern Virginia. And Stonewall Jackson and Lee decided that Jackson could take a big chunk of the Confederate forces and go through this narrow forest path and attack the Union flight, which they did extremely successfully, leaving just a small defensive position in front of the Union Army. But this was also the kind of battle that the South really couldn't afford to fight even when they won, because in addition to Stahlwell Jackson meeting his end there. Also, the casualty ratios were not so overwhelmingly in favor of the South that the South could keep replenishing the losses. But that was still the fourth campaign. It was seen as a decisive defeat of the North by the South, but it was still in many ways

a contributor to the North's ultimate victory because now I'm going to bring in Ulysses S. Grant for campaigns, numbers five and six. Grant had figured out by this point where he was watching the war from the Western region where he still was at this time. And he was watching the war and realizing, you know, these kind of battles, they don't look very good for us. Tactically, we're getting out-generalled and often out-fought. But we've got the numbers. And we've got like four to one in the numbers. And if a battle produces 20,000 union casualties and 15,000 Confederate casualties, and we just keep fighting those kind of battles, we're going to win. And it's, you know, going to produce as many casualties as the United States has,

suffered in all the rest of its wars combined to this date. But nonetheless, Grant figured that out. But before Grant became overall commander of Union forces in the fifth campaign, he basically took Vicksburg on the Mississippi, also July 1863, the same time as the Gettysburg battle. And that was a masterful action of campaigning where he had this lousy position north of Vicksburg, realized he couldn't attack from there. The rest of the Mississippi by this point is in union hands. If Grant can capture Vicksburg, he's going to then allow, you know, Union forces to dominate the river and then cut up the Confederacy into economically less viable pieces, which was another part of the overall northern strategy. And so this campaign was

designed to contribute to that. But he couldn't really take Vicksburg from the north to mushy and marshy and just no way for an army to assault. So he winds up crossing the Mississippi to the wrong side of the river, and then having his men disembark north of Vicksburg, and then march down to a point south of Vicksburg. Then he runs his ships past the Confederate guns on the banks of the Mississippi there in Vicksburg, but because there's nobody on board except a few sailors, he figures he can afford the risk and gets the ships, almost all the ships through, loads them back up, comes back to the south, or to the east side of the river, excuse me, but south of Vicksburg,

and manages to then prepare his siege and ultimately succeeds. Very quickly, campaign six is then, now Grant has succeeded. Lincoln likes it. People are accusing Grant of drinking too much. Lincoln, you know, makes the famous retort. Well, find out what kind of whiskey he's drinking and send it to all the rest of my generals, too, because they could use a little bit of the same inspiration. A lot of great, as you know, a lot of great quotes and a lot of great characters from this conflict.

And then Grant, along with General Mead, then start the campaign that will ultimately defeat Lee at Appomattox. They start that in the early spring of 1864. But it takes a whole year, and it's a slog. And even as late as the summer of 1864, it's not obvious the strategy will work. At least it's not obvious politically, because by now McClellan is out of uniform. He's running against Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election, and he, presumably, if he had won, would have let the South go. So even as late as the summer of 1864, it looked like the South might still in the war just by resilience and patience and just outlasting the union forces. But then General Sherman with campaign number seven takes Atlanta and then has his march to the sea and then his march later

through the Carolinas in the early part of 1865 and sort of completes the ultimate defeat of the South. So seven campaigns, McClellan, Stowwall Jackson, Robert Ely into the north, Burnside and Hooker, you know, ill-fated incompetent generals into the south, and then Grant out at Vicksburg, Grant and Mead through Virginia, Sherman to Atlanta and the C. I think 80 to 90 percent of the Civil War is understood or well understood with those seven campaigns. So thanks for your indulgence. I know that's a long answer, but that's pretty much the whole Civil War chapter in my book right there. Well, let me ask, so, I mean, we can again take this in a bunch of different directions, but you make the observation and these sort of lessons learned at the end of the book, one of the lessons

that you draw from your study of all these wars is that outcomes of wars are not preordained. When you look at the civil war, there is an impulse, any of us who have spent a minute thinking about it, have felt it to assume that what the union did must have made sense because they won, and assume that what the South did didn't make sense because they lost, right? If what they were doing was making sense, they would have won. But there were a couple of things that you said in your account just there suggest that maybe it's not quite so straightforward as that. Could the South's strategy as, you know, more or less as executed actually have succeeded had

the breaks gone their way? That's a good question. I don't know because they did pretty well at executing their strategy and they did lose. And you could say they came close to winning based on the politics, especially the politics of 1864. Because even though you can look back and say, well, the North was close to winning, but that famous Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War that most of your listeners may be too young to remember, but it's worth going back and looking it up that was made about 30 years ago,

pointed out that even the winter and spring of 1864 was sort of the season of discontent in the north. We've been at this war for a long time, and it still wasn't obvious to a casual newspaper reader how we were going to win because other Union generals had, you know, had numerical advantages previously, but hadn't figured out how to just pursue that advantage to the end. So I guess you could say that, yeah, I mean, if it weren't for Grant, figuring out what strategy was going to work for the North, and Lincoln being smart enough, and Secretary of Stanton being smart enough to choose Grant, and then empower him to make these decisions. By the way, once Lincoln visited Grant in camp, and Grant remarked afterwards, he said,

you know, of all the visitors I've ever had in my camps, President Lincoln was the only one who had the right to ask me about my future plans. And he was the only one who didn't actually do something because Lincoln had so much faith in Grant at that point. But I think that that Southern strategy did come close to working, but it would have taken the good luck of Lincoln not finding grants or of Sherman not taking Atlanta. And so, yeah, it came close to succeeding. But it was, they executed it about as well as they could have. And they still, you know, ran out of gas. So it's hard for me to say how doing a little better might have produced victory. Unless Lee had just decided not to try going into Maryland and Pennsylvania and just to fight a pure defensive action.

Now, if he had done that, he might have kept the Union forces frustrated longer, kept his own people alive longer so that he had more soldiers to resist that final push by Grant and Mead. But I don't see it. I can't prove it. I have a mathematical background and I'd like to think I have a semi-mathematical mind, but I can't see how to do a proof that would pull the pieces of data together and wind up with that confident conclusion. It always struck me that Richmond's proximity to, you know, as it were the, I can say the union suffers from the same problem with Washington, D.C. being where it is. But that Richmond having the political significance that it did was just a huge structural problem for the South.

because on the assumption that you can't abandon Richmond, that makes it hard to kind of, as it were, withdraw into their significant underdeveloped interior, more of a Fabian sort of war of attrition kind of approach with respect to the North, because they can't give up Richmond by their own lights. Well, that's a really good question, really good point, because what I would say to that is, I agree with, given the mindset they had, they couldn't abandon Richmond and couldn't, therefore, lose Richmond, but they didn't have to have that mindset, but they did have that mindset. And they didn't want to fight guerrilla war. They wanted to keep their wonderful southern nation,

as they saw it intact. They were trying to protect their plantations, protect their courtly streets and their beautiful cities and their way of life. They weren't Ho Chi men. They weren't even George Washington, who was prepared to have a few years of rough living. you know, at Valley Forge and elsewhere. And sure, I mean, the southern soldiers and generals were out in the field, but they weren't prepared to ask that of their fellow citizens. And so in that regard, yeah, they left themselves exposed. But they, of course, didn't make Richmond their capital until the Civil War began.

And so they could have easily, in theory, changed that decision back and put it back into the deep south. Yeah. Another lesson that you draw our attention to in the book is that war is harder and bloodier, usually than expected, obviously true of the Civil War, true of other conflicts that you, is it true of everything that you detail? I guess the Cold War might get us off the hook if we consider it discreetly, right, but not if it's part of the broader war with Iraq.

It is striking, right? You know, I grew up in Northern Virginia, so the Manassas battlefield was just down the street in the account of at first Manassas, everyone coming out in their picnic blankets to watch, you know, federal troops march to what is a certain victory and watch the army, you know, be defeated. This is an experience in American history that then unfortunately repeats, right? You know, we don't do so well in North Africa at first in World War II. Korea is a disaster through much of 1950, right? What is it about America, about America as a power that often does make war,

that our military is often seeming to have to relearn some similar lessons at the outset of a bunch of these complex? Yeah, well, it's a good question. I mean, I think there's two different answers. One is for the United States specifically, and then the other is the broader human tendency. And the human tendency is a little bit how we started the show, and you're asking about why study history versus technology. And I said technology is sort of intoxicating and being a modern human, which by definition anybody alive and making decisions about the next war is at the time they're alive anyway.

They are at the sort of, you know, furthest out on the line of the advancement of the human race. And most of us tend to think in terms of advancement, which may not be true. But there's an allure to all this. And history helps bring you back to it. But it is a human tendency to get overconfident, especially for a certain type of human being, the kind who probably pursues political power or military power. But I think beyond that, the American person, problem is often that we want to believe we have the luxury of not fighting other people's wars,

meaning that we wind up unprepared for them when they occur. And then we change our mind about the importance of those wars to our own well-being. And we usually have a transition period during which maybe we've already gotten into the war but are doing badly, or maybe we just haven't gotten in yet, but are starting to realize we must, like World War I. And that would probably account for this tendency in four or five of our wars. I don't know that it accounts for the tendency with the Iraq or Afghanistan campaigns, because by then we were pretty, we had been a, you know, militarized, not hyper-militarized society, but a military, a military with a very strong, well-resourced military for several decades.

And we chose to undertake those wars on our own, whereas most of the other wars, we either got attacked or we sort of got drawn into without a clear decision point. Korea, well, Vietnam. Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. My colleague Bob Kagan writes about this very eloquently about sort of understanding the American strategic psychology. And we sort of half believe we don't have to worry about other people's wars.

And we're sort of half right that we don't, in many cases at least. But then we tend to change our minds because we start to see a kind of a world emerge or begin to emerge that we don't want to live in that we think is going to eventually be threatening to us. And so we decide we better go do something about it. The single best example, I think, or at least it's, to me, it's stark and it's not when I thought about enough because most Americans don't understand and think about the Korean war enough.

But on January 24th, 1950, before that war had begun, as you well know, basically American strategists were more or less uniformly saying we don't need to worry about Korea. It wasn't out of complete callousness, but Korea was not yet industrialized. It was sort of a backwater strategically. We had bigger fish to fry and building NATO and helping Japan recover and become an ally, not another militaristic adversary. And the number one concern about Korea was let's just not waste resources there. And frankly, you know, I'm a professor at some schools and, you know, you are too probably,

and we both would probably grade that. A grand strategy paper that made that argument, given the circumstances of the day, might have gotten an A because on the objective. you know, reality of how the world looked. That was good analysis. But on June 26, 1950, the day after the North Korean attack, Americans, and I think it went from sort of 80, 20 in one direction to 80, 20 in the other, although I don't have good polling data to back that up. But Congress didn't even want to vote on the war. Truman just went off and did it, and nobody complained, because the North Korean aggression, backed by Beijing and Moscow,

as we could deduce, or at least condoned and blessed by Beijing and Moscow, was so egregious and therefore so indicative of what we now saw to be a fundamentally expansionist, communist international, that we realize that if the communists care that much about South Korea, we better care too. Yeah. And so it's fascinating, just to think about how much of a swing we had in 48 hours in the United States. No, I'm grateful that you write about it and give it serious attention in the book, and that we're talking about it now.

I mean, it does strike me, you know, it's the forgotten war, right? And it's forgotten really very much at our peril. It would be, it would overstate the case to say that it's the first sort of limited war that the United States face, fights. That's not true. But it's certainly the first sort of, you know, after two wars, as it were, for all the stakes and for democracy and everything else. It is the first war in the nuclear age where we make some decisions early on that we are

going to confine this war to the peninsula. We are going to restrain ourselves in our country. conduct of it at some military cost, right? But because we have a grand strategic vision that seems to require it. And then we sort of muddle through in these conditions with a tremendous amount of domestic turmoil. I was not telling you anything you don't know here, but just seems that so much in those years is relevant to today. From the point you just made that we, you know, us thinking that we're not going to fight a war to all of a sudden public opinion, you know, politicians do not take into account the future changes of public opinion nearly enough in my view. Yeah, but I think also

their own opinions in this case. And, you know, it just, it was just so blatant that it just changed the way you thought even about the structural fundamentals of the international environment in that period. I find the late 40s and early 50s fascinating in American politics. They're also, by the way, I don't know if it's reassuring or distressing, but, you know, they got pretty ugly. And we all know about McCarthy, but, you know, Vandenberg had said in 1947 politics stops at the water's edge. Well, that might have been true for about 15 minutes in 1947. It didn't last much beyond certainly the fall of China in 1949. And so, you know, that's one more thing. It's, it can be sort of partly reassuring at a political level to realize this country has been badly fractured

before. Maybe we can recover from our current mess if we've done it previously. Can I ask you, a sense around the subject, this is a question that's been on my mind and you, you point towards it in the books. I want to get your thoughts here from the Korean War and from MacArthur's relief by Truman. I mean, if you gave, if you gave Americans a quiz, about the Korean War, I feel like MacArthur's relief is probably the one thing that, you know, the largest percentage of people will know that MacArthur got fired.

And, you know, going back through your account and other accounts of the war, it's sort of overdetermined, you know? And in a way, I feel like when we're, when we study the war and as it were, the sieve milk questions raised by this, I personally start to just sigh of it. It was like, yeah, I know.

I thought you can't, after MacArthur sort of does the series of things that he does, and the letter from him is read on the floor of comments, Congress and so forth, like you can't not fire him. That's kind of a given. And to me, it obscures, the focus on that aspect of the situation, obscures what is actually a much more interesting kind of strategic slash policy debate that is occurring between

MacArthur understood broadly and Truman understood broadly. And that debate is often caricatured as Truman's vision of a limited war versus, is let's nuke China now, all of it, right? Like those are kind of the only two options. Crazy MacArthur wanted to nuke China. Truman quite reasonably didn't want him to. MacArthur started being insubordinate. That's the end of the story.

It seems to me there's more to it than that. Do you agree? And if so, what is to be, what might have relevance and interest might we find in that policy debate? Yeah, thank you. And I'm glad we're spending a little time on Korea. One more thing I would make about point I would make about Korea before coming to your specific question on MacArthur is that,

it's again mind-numbing to try to put yourself back in that period and to think that this country having built the greatest military in the history of the human race and together with the Soviet Union and Britain won the most resounding victory at huge cost especially to other countries 25 million dead Soviets you know and amazingly and civilians being the primary targets of of the violence, which is another heinous thing about World War II, that five years later, we couldn't even beat the North Koreans. It's stunning. It's like, you know, to make a sports analogy, it's like, you know, you go out and you

win the Super Bowl five years in a row and then you can't even win a pickup game down the street the next day against what's left of the high school team in your neighborhood. On at least two occasions, we have American. infantry divisions, you know, all but destroyed, you know, routed from the battlefield and as close to actual destruction as you can come without actually the final, the final knife falling. Stunning. And so on MacArthur, I would say the other thing, the other dynamic that I find interesting, and I like your point about how the high level and ultimately extremely confrontational Truman-McArthur relationship sort of sucks all the oxygen out of the broader debate.

By this point, George Marshall, five-star general George Marshall, architect of the Marshall Plan, as Secretary of State. He is now Secretary of Defense in the period of the famous, you know, I think he started in August or maybe September of 1950. So he's Secretary of Defense around the time of MacArthur's Inchon Landing, September 15th, 1950. And then, but certainly by the time MacArthur is now moving north of the 38th parallel and the decision to do so is now what we understand to have been what brought China into the war. It wasn't that we got close to the Yalu River. That was a further, you know, incitement to Chinese reaction. But even before that, the Chinese had already decided once we crossed the 38th, the, you know, halfway point that they were going to get

into the war. And MacArthur wasn't really wrong to do that in the sense that nobody told him otherwise, and nobody seemed to have a better idea. I think George Kennan wanted to stop back at the 38th, but he was always a voice of restraint, and I'm not sure he always carried the day. I know he didn't know he's carried the day. And Marshall didn't seem to own that decision. By this point, he's getting a little old. He's already been, you know, huge national hero on a couple of occasions. And they just sort of watched MacArthur, let him make the decisions. And so I think the relationship within the military, you mentioned Civmill, and that's certainly crucial, but within the military and certainly within, well, of course, Marshall at this point is out of uniform, but, you know, the chain of command within the Department of Defense, the way in which MacArthur was given a lot of leash and basically allowed to make these decisions a fundamentally strategic import until he wasn't. And then, as you say, it was determined that he was insubordinate. You could sort of see the roots of that dynamic back in decisions that at the time were not controversial, but perhaps should have been, or at least somebody besides

MacArthur should have owned them. So that's, it's the crossing of the 38th. And then leaving the forces sort of tactically exposed, you know, that so people talk about getting close to the Yalu River, the border with Korea and China. But the real problem was that we were basically speaking of Manassas, we were sort of out for a stroll in the park. You know, had a nice Thanksgiving dinner. MacArthur's promising his troops, even the ones 50 miles from the Chinese border. They'll be home for Christmas. I mean, the degree of overconfidence that emerged from that movement north was remarkable. For that one, I think everybody deserves some blame, not just McCart. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I was raised on tales of the first Marine Division's survival around the chosen reservoir. At one point, 20 years ago, I probably could have recited to you actually, you know, by battalion, you know, detachment, what the, one of the units were around the perimeter on a given night. And that's, it's a good story for Americans to have because so much else was going so poorly. And it's really, you know, it's two theater level catastrophes, right? There's the summer of 1950 where, starting with. Task Force Smith, which is sort of the story that people know, but it's really the whole

division that gets echeloned in is all but wiped out. And then again, again, that fall, we allow ourselves to be surprised at scale a second time and route it again. And here's my question for you. So we basically get punched in the face twice, hard, and feel it. But by what, March or so, right around as everything is coming to a head with MacArthur politically, we do sort of stabilize the situation. We are regaining the initiative by some point early to middle, 1951. We will have the initiative again and never really lose it again, except at the armistice negotiations table.

This kind of goes back to my question originally about MacArthur. If we had done then what Eisenhower goes on to do towards the end of the war and make credible threats of nuclear action. Could we have avoided the subsequent two years? I realize that's sort of hitting you with all these counterfactuals now, but when you talk about military history for the modern strategist,

like that's actually, to me, that's sort of what's interesting to start thinking about is these decision points. And, you know, did this war need to last for two more years? That's an interesting point. Well, the easier question, which is almost implied by your hard question, so I'll avoid it for the moment.

And the easier question would be, could we have done what General Ridgeway did sooner when he replaced McArthur and then, you know, well, I guess Walker and MacArthur subsequently? And I think the answer would be that, you know, Ridgeway with his focus on proper infantry fighting tactics and positioning and consolidating lines, not leaving forces exposed, 360 perimeter defense, being less greedy about holding territory and more concerned about maintaining strong positions and taking the high ground and so on. That set of traditional infantry doctrines and concepts, I think, would have allowed us to stabilize things a lot sooner.

And we could have liberated Seoul and established a position somewhere around the 38th and been done with the fighting by the fall. And whether we had moved up or down 10 or 20 miles, hard for me to imagine that we would have had to go through the Chosen experience or the experiences in the western part of the peninsula where the army had a much less, as you know, much less well conducted, you know, retreat or repositioning. And the Marines did it well and didn't have their units decimated and fought with dignity, just, you know, fought in a different direction as the saying went at the time. It's very good at fighting and at talking about how we fight. So we've done a pretty good public

messaging the whole situation, really. Attacking in a different direction. as the army was just running for its life over on the western coast. And I don't think most of that needed to happen. Obviously, in retrospect, easy to say. But I think that Ridgeway, to me, is the guy that would have been nice to have sooner. Then, in terms of nuclear threats, and, you know, it's impossible to disprove. It's the Chinese at that point were pretty rapidly pro-expansionist. Mao was very ideological. He was feeling his oats. He had just become the leader of a consolidated China and was at his most ideological as well as overconfident. And he claimed he didn't really, he wasn't afraid of nuclear weapons made that, you know, claim various times.

And so you'd have to sort of give me a target set and propose the specific attacks because I don't know that you could have intimidated the Chinese and is just giving up because we were willing to use a couple of nuclear bombs. Yeah. Maybe. But I wouldn't have been surprised if you actually had to use the nuclear bombs to defeat them tactically. Yeah.

Which is, as you know, a pretty tough proposition. Not impossible. By this point in the Korean War, we're probably up to a couple hundred nuclear warheads in our total arsenal. So we could have done a lot of damage against certainly major roads and bridges and, you know, obliterated Pyongyangong and done stuff like that. But I'm not sure the Chinese would have given up until we like literally, you know, just attritted them into a place where they could no longer fight. So the third lesson that you draw at the end of the book, which seems relevant to what we're

discussing now, is that America's grand strategy is strong enough to absorb some setbacks. And in that discussion, you kind of give a couple different sketches of what our post-World War II win-loss record looks like. And it's not wholly satisfying. depending on how you count it, it could be 02 and 2, right? Which is not a great record for anyone. And yet, and yet here we are, right? We have a rising China that needs to be managed and we had a Soviet Union that looked like it was going to surpass us on a couple of occasions, but never really did. Can I ask, what is our grand strategy? What is this grand strategy that has survived all of these hits? Well, the grand strategy I would summarize as certainly defending ourselves, but defending core allies

that we back up with standing military forces, not just paper treaties, but the paper treaties are also unambiguous about our commitment, at least to our most important partners. And so we sort of doubled down on the effort to be clear and, you know, resolute and transparent and convincing to would-be adversaries. So we've kept forces in Korea ever since the Korean War. And the places where we fought and struggled have been places where we did not have stand. or forward-deployed forces, and somebody questioned whether we really cared enough to fight, and maybe we should have known better in some of those cases, especially Vietnam, which to me is the most obvious unnecessary war of any of the ones I looked at.

I can understand at the time why people felt it was important, but I have an easier time understanding Korea than Vietnam in those terms. And anyway, the point being when we put treaty commitments and standing permanent for deployed forces in Germany and Japan, Korea, and elsewhere, we send a pretty strong and unmistakable message that we would fight to defend these countries as if they were American soil, which is a fairly bizarre concept when you think about it, that a country would treat another country as the equivalent of its own territory and people. But that's what we do. That's what we've done since World War II. And I think that's that plus then trying to create an economic system that is inclusive and opens up opportunity for others to join. And then with varying degrees of intensity, promotion of democracy, maybe as the third major piece

and human rights to some extent as well. But of course, sometimes we do that with military power. Sometimes we don't. A lot of times we fail when we try. But still, promotion of democracy and human rights, defensive allies, key allies in particular, and then development and protection of an open economic system that is designed to convince more countries not to fight by giving them a route to prosperity and membership in this community. That, to me, is basically the grand strategy.

There's a lot to discuss there, but I know we are pressed for time here. So I'm going to thank you, Michael O'Hanlon, author of Military History for the Modern Strategist, America's major war since 1861. I'm glad you wrote the book and I'm very grateful for you taking the time to come talk to us about it. Aaron, thank you very much. It was a privilege. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.