The Dictator's Handbook (38 page)

Georges Clemençeau, leader of France during the later stages of World War I famously declared, “war is too important to be left to the generals.” He was right. Relative to parliamentarians, generals do a lousy job of fighting wars. While completely counterintuitive, military men who lead juntas, and other forms of autocratic leaders, are much worse at fighting wars than their civilian counterparts who lead democratic governments. That's why it's so important for us to unpack the contrasting advice different leaders receive about how to and
when to fight. It turns out that autocrats and democrats should receive and follow radically different counsel. War, being about domestic politics, can be best understood, we believe, by putting it in the context of interchangeables and essentials and taking it out of the context of grand ideas about national interest and balances of power.

Two thousand five hundred years ago, Sun Tzu literally wrote the book on how to wage war. Although his advice has been influential to leaders down through the centuries, leading American foreign policy advisers have contradicted his war-fighting doctrines.

Ronald Reagan's secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, George W. Bush's first secretary of state, Colin Powell, and, with slight modifications, Bill Clinton's second secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, all prescribe a doctrine of when and how the United States should fight. And it differs radically from the time-tested advice of Sun Tzu.

The reason Sun Tzu has served so many leaders so well over twenty-five centuries is that his is the right advice for kings, chieftains, and autocrats of every shape to follow. Until recently, and with very few exceptions, small-coalition systems have been the dominant form of government. But these are the wrong policies for a leader beholden to many. Democratic war fighting emphasizes public welfare, exactly as should be the case when advising a leader who relies on a large coalition. Sun Tzu's advice is exactly right for a small-coalition leader. To see this, let's have a look at the ideas expressed by Sun Tzu and Caspar Weinberger.

Sun Tzu contended to his king, Ho Lu of Wu, that:

In contrast to Sun Tzu's perspective, Caspar Weinberger maintained that:

Sun Tzu's ideas can coarsely be summarized as follows: (1) an advantage in capabilities is not as important as quick action in war; (2) the
resources mobilized to fight should be sufficient for a short campaign that does not require reinforcement or significant additional provisions from home; and (3) the provision of private goods is essential to motivate soldiers to fight. Sun Tzu says that if the army initially raised proves insufficient or if new supplies are required more than once, then the commanders lack sufficient skill to carry the day. In that case, he advises that it is best to give up the fight rather than risk exhausting the state's treasure.

Weinberger's doctrine does not emphasize swift victory, but rather a willingness to spend however much is needed to achieve victory, a point made even more emphatically in the Powell Doctrine. Weinberger and Powell argue that the United States should not get involved in any war in which it is not prepared to commit enough resources to win. They, and Madeleine Albright too, argue for being very cautious about risking war. Once a decision is made to take that risk, then, as Weinberger (and Powell) recognize, the United States must be prepared to raise a larger army and to spend more treasure if necessitated by developments on the ground. War should only be fought with confidence that victory will follow and that victory serves the interests of the American people.

Sun Tzu emphasizes the benefits of spoils to motivate combatants (“when you capture spoils from the enemy, they must be used as rewards, so that all your men may have a keen desire to fight, each on his own account”). Weinberger emphasizes the public good of protecting vital national interests. For Sun Tzu, the interest soldiers have in the political objectives behind a fight or their concern for the common good is of no consequence in determining their motivation to wage war. That is why he emphasizes that soldiers fight, “each on his own account.”

Sun Tzu's attentiveness to private rewards and Weinberger's concentration on the public good of protecting the national interest (however that may be understood) represent the great divide between small-coalition and large-coalition regimes. Our view of politics instructs us to anticipate that leaders who depend on lots of essential backers only fight when they believe victory is nearly certain. Otherwise, they look for ways to resolve their international differences
peacefully. Leaders who rely only on a few essential supporters, in contrast, are prepared to fight even when the odds of winning are not particularly good. Democratic leaders try hard to win if the going gets tough. Autocrats make a good initial effort and if that proves wanting they quit. These strategies are clearly in evidence if we consider the Six Day War in 1967.

As its name tells us, the Six Day War was a short fight, begun on June 5, 1967, and ending on June 10. On one side were Syria, Egypt (then the United Arab Republic), and Jordan; on the other was Israel. By the end of the war, Israel had captured the Sinai from Egypt; Jerusalem, Hebron, and the West Bank from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria. The air forces of the Arab combatants were devastated and Egypt accepted an unconditional cease-fire. The Israelis had easily defeated their opponents. From a conventional balance-of-power perspective the outcome must be seen as extraordinarily surprising. From the political-survival point of view, as we shall see, it should have been perfectly predictable.

To understand the war and how our way of thinking explains it, we must first comprehend some basic facts about the adversaries. The combined armed forces of the Arab combatants on the eve of war came to 360,000, compared to Israel's 75,000; that is, the Israeli side represented only 17 percent of the available soldiers.
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The Arab combatants accounted for 61 percent of the national military expenditures of the two sides. For starters, comparing these two sets of values already tells us something very important that reflects a fundamental difference between large-coalition and small-coalition governments. Although the Arab side had 83 percent of the soldiers, they spent considerably less per soldier than did the Israelis.

Remember that large-coalition leaders must keep a broad swath of the people happy. In war that turns out to mean that democrats must care about the people and, of course, soldiers are people. Although conflict involves putting soldiers at risk, democrats do what they can
to mitigate such risk. In autocracies, foot soldiers are not politically important. Autocrats do not waste resources protecting them.

The difference in expenditures per soldier is greater even than the numbers alone indicate. The Israeli military, like the military of democracies in general, spends a lot of its money on buying equipment that is heavily armored to protect soldiers. Better training and equipment enable democracies to leverage the impact of each soldier so they can achieve the same military output while at the same time putting few soldiers at risk.
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The Egyptian military's tanks, troop transports, and other equipment were lightly and cheaply armored. They preferred to spend money on private rewards with which to ensure the loyalty of the generals and colonels.

Gamal Abdul Nasser, Egypt's president at the time, was not elected by the people; he was sustained in office by a small coterie of generals whose own welfare depended on the survival of his regime. For that reason, he was not beholden to the wives and mothers who scream about the avoidable deaths of their loved ones. Israeli prime ministers are elected by those mothers and wives, and this is reflected in the superior equipment, armor, and training given to Israeli soldiers. Give our troops the best, is a democratic refrain. This was why there was such a stink about US soldiers having insufficient body armor in Iraq and Afghanistan, and why the United States rushed to fix this deficiency, even if in some cases the extra armor made some vehicles so heavy that they became close to inoperable.

A bit of close reasoning shows us that making an extra effort to win the war made tons of sense for the Israelis and no sense at all for their opponents. Let's have a look at why it is that democrats, like Israel's prime minister Levi Eshkol, try hard to win wars and autocrats, like Egypt's Nasser, don't. Indeed, we will see that for a small-coalition autocrat like Nasser it could even make more sense to lose the war but keep on paying off his cronies than to win the war if doing so came at the cost of asking the cronies to sacrifice their personal private rewards.

In a small-coalition regime, the military serves two crucial functions. It keeps the incumbent safe from domestic rivals and it tries to protect the incumbent's government from foreign threats. In a large-coalition government, the military pretty much only has to worry
about the latter function. Sure, it might be called upon to put down some massive domestic unrest from time to time, but its job is to protect the system of government and not the particular group running the government. Its job description does not include taking out legitimate domestic political rivals. Autocrats, of course, don't recognize any rivals as legitimate. And to do their job in an autocracy, as Sun Tzu eloquently argued, the soldiers must have their rewards. If they don't they might turn the guns on the leadership that employed them to keep rivals at bay. With that in mind we can begin to unravel the seeming surprise of a larger military, backed by a larger gross domestic product—$5.3 billion derived from 30 million people in 1967 Egypt, compared to $4 billion generated by only 2.6 million Israelis—losing to a puny state.

Imagine that the Israeli government spent as much as 10 percent of its revenue on private rewards, probably a high estimate. Imagine that the Egyptian government spent 30 percent of its revenue on private rewards; that is, more than the Israelis as befits the comparison of large- and small-coalition regimes that we have seen in the earlier chapters. Then how valuable did winning have to be for Israel's coalition and for Egypt's coalition to justify trying so hard that it meant spending extra money on the war effort?

Anticipating the high risk of war, the usually fractious Israelis formed a unity government in May 1967, reflecting the national commitment to win the coming war. We know the government allocated $381 million to the military in 1967. That means, given our assumptions, that $38 million of that pot of money might have been available for private rewards to the government's winning coalition. Of course, even more would have been available across the whole economy (both in Egypt and in Israel) but we focus just on money committed to the military in 1967, thereby
understating
our case. Being a unity government it is likely that the Israeli winning coalition was very large, but we will err on the side of conservatism and assume that the government needed just 25 percent of the population to sustain it. That puts the winning coalition's size at roughly 650,000 people. With these numbers in mind, we see that the potential value of private rewards taken from the military budget for government supporters in Israel
would have been less than $60 a head ($381 million in military expenditures x 10 percent for private rewards/650,000 coalition members = $58.62 per coalition member).

Each member of Israel's coalition could have had a choice: take the private reward or agree to put that money toward the war effort. Putting it toward the war effort would certainly have increased the odds of victory, an attractive public good to offset the small private gain that would be sacrificed by each individual in the coalition. Surely each of the relevant 650,000 Israelis would have put a greater value on military victory than a paltry $58.62!