The Worth of War (7 page)

At the beginning of World War II, the United States was better prepared. Between the wars, a joint board of army and navy war planners established a Joint Planning Committee, which engaged in strategic contingency planning for possible future wars against Japan and Germany. In addition, the 1920 National Defense Act had made the secretary of war responsible for military procurement and supply policies. Successive secretaries issued orders detailing these functions and creating new agencies, such as the munitions board, a procurement division, a planning branch within the office of the assistant secretary of war, and the Army Industrial College (AIC) to ensure that the US military would possess an adequate capacity for planning, procurement, and logistics in the event of a future war. Aircraft production was stepped up in 1939, and between 1940 and 1941, military budgets had been sharply increased, conscription had been instituted, and work begun on aircraft carriers, tanks, and artillery in preparation for a war the Roosevelt administration thought almost inevitable.

The AIC, which included students and instructors from all services, was designed to train officers in all aspects of manpower mobilization, military procurement, supply of combat forces, logistics, and industrial organization for wartime needs, as well as to provide planning in these realms.
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By 1939, graduates of the AIC occupied important positions on the munitions board and in the planning branch, where they helped to manage military mobilization and industrial procurement. In addition, the individual services developed tactics, equipment, and organization designed to carry military forces and their
equipment to distant battle fields and supply them for long periods of time. The Marine Corps, for example, developed tactics of amphibious warfare designed to land heavily armed troops on distant and hostile beaches along with logistical plans and personnel sufficient to supply those troops for years of fighting in regions where the time-honored military tactic of living off the land was not an option. The vaunted German Army, as we saw above, was hampered by not having developed a similar logistical plan.

In the decades since World War II, of course, the United States has been at war on almost a continual basis. The nation has fought large engagements in Korea, Indo-China, and the Middle East, as well as numerous smaller conflicts throughout the world. For better or worse, America's prodigious military effort has been made possible by the enormous bureaucracies constructed to arm, feed, supply, and transport American troops to distant battlefields where they may spend months or years in combat.

Command

The final element of the general military curriculum is the question of what characteristics are needed in those persons who command armies. Sun Tzu said that a commander must possess wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage, and strictness. “These five heads should be familiar to every general: he who knows them will be victorious; he who knows them not will fail.”
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Machiavelli was suspicious of professional soldiers and favored generals who were “civic-minded” and happy to return to civilian life at the conclusion of a campaign.
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Machiavelli thought, further, that in addition to martial skill and experience, his ability to command depended upon his “courage and good conduct,” and his understanding that to lead troops he must “pay well and punish soundly.”
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And, of course, Machiavelli famously averred that a leader must combine the courage of a lion and the cunning of a fox.
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Clausewitz, who greatly admired Machiavelli, thought a general must be imbued with a “lucid intellect” and “great moral courage.”
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Some famous military leaders seem, of course, to have possessed these qualities and to have made it their business to personally direct battles and to inspire the troops by their personal presence on the battlefield—sometimes at the head of the front-line forces. Alexander the Great, for example, personally rode at the head of the elite Macedonian Companion Cavalry at Issus and Gaugamela. This sort of personal, charismatic leadership, however, has severe limitations. If the charismatic leader happened to be killed or incapacitated, the entire army could be thrown into disarray. For example, the death of Richard III during the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 led his army to quickly disintegrate and flee from their less numerous Tudor foes. Premodern military encounters, moreover, generally took place on relatively small battlefields where the presence of the leader could be felt by all the troops. Modern battles can, of course, be fought across hundreds of square miles of land and sea where no one general, however charismatic and energetic, can make his presence felt by the forces at his command.

Successful armies usually lessen their dependence upon the charismatic commander by developing cadres of lower-ranking leaders who can be suffused throughout the organization. The Roman legions, for example, depended heavily upon their centurions, a group of several thousand highly trained career soldiers who are the ancestors of today's NCOs. Centurions could be transferred from legion to legion as needed and generally served in the army for life. If a centurion was himself killed or incapacitated, another would take his place. In essence, the Romans supplanted the individual charismatic leader with a bureaucratic organization. This bureaucratization of leadership gave the Roman legions a distinctive advantage over opponents led into battle by some individual king or chief. According to Roman legend, a consul's son was executed for breaking ranks and slaying the enemy leader in single combat, a severe breach of discipline.
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Even today, bureaucratically organized armies are seldom thwarted by the death of a senior officer while forces that depend upon individual charismatic commanders—say, an Osama bin Laden—can be thrown into disarray by their leader's demise.

CIVILIAN APPLICATIONS: SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES

Charles Tilly observed that war made states. In other words, societies regularly threatened by war were able to survive if and only if they succeeded in establishing powerful armies, systems of taxation to support those armies, economic infrastructures and financial systems to generate sufficient revenues to provide the needed taxes, and a large cadre of trained administrators to operate the entire system.
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Building states required large-scale rationalization of authority. Like successful armies, successful states could only be built upon the foundation of bureaucratic systems of command. Bureaucracies developed from war. Once built, they expanded the scope of their operations to handle purely civilian tasks as well. Those societies unable or unwilling to build administrative institutions through which to facilitate waging war generally failed to survive, and had no need to study the remaining elements of the martial curriculum.

War also required societies to learn the rudiments of fiscal policy. Armies and war are expensive. And, very often, the expense cannot be deferred. A state threatened with attack must secure the funds to pay for armaments, fortifications, supplies, and troops. Once in the field, troops must be supplied and paid or they are likely to desert or mutiny. War is a harsh creditor as well as a harsh teacher. Over time, rulers have resorted to a variety of expedients to pay for their military efforts. In medieval and early modern Europe, the most common were outright expropriation and tax farming. The latter policy entailed selling some group the right to collect taxes from an area in exchange for current funds. In England, both policies often revolved around exploitation of the Jews. During the thirty-five-year reign of Henry II (1154–1189), Jews received royal privileges and protection in exchange for the useful commercial and fiscal services they provided to the Crown. During this period, Jewish merchants, a tiny fraction of England's population, paid approximately one-seventh of all the taxes collected in the kingdom. At the same time, Jewish financiers, most notably Aaron of Lincoln, as well as consortia headed by Moses of Bristol, Brun of London, and
others, were essential to the Crown's finances. These financiers earned money through the loans they made to members of the nobility and others needing cash. They then advanced funds to the Crown for its day-to-day expenditures and received, in turn, royal notes secured by anticipated tax revenues. Thus, they performed functions similar to those undertaken by commercial banks and such institutions as the US Treasury today. Without the Jewish financiers, the Crown would soon have found itself in financial difficulties. With the help of the Jews, England under Henry was quite prosperous.

Henry's successors continued to depend upon the Jews for taxes and to fund the Crown's debt. Indeed, during the reign of Richard I, the Crown created an institution that came to be known as the “Exchequer of the Jews” to govern transactions between the Crown and Jewish financiers and to safeguard the king's interests. While the Jews faced considerable popular and clerical anti-Semitism, made worse by their identification with the unpopular, however necessary, occupation of money lending, as well as the continued growth of a crusading spirit in the realm, their value to the Crown meant that the Jews could normally count upon the king's protection.

Richard, however, was followed on the throne by King John, who seems to have been unaware of the idea that one should not kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Desperate for revenues, John instituted a series of heavy new taxes and assessments against the Jews, held Jews in prison, demanding ransom from their coreligionists, and confiscated a good deal of Jewish property. These policies made it difficult for the Jews to pay their customary taxes or to support the royal debt on a regular basis.

To make matters worse, the outbreak of a civil war between the king and a number of his barons created great hardships for the Jews, who came under attack from both sides—but particularly from the king's foes. The barons saw the Jews as instruments of the Crown both because of the king's dependence upon Jewish financiers and the king's practice of acquiring debts that members of the nobility themselves owed to the Jews. Indeed, in the Magna Carta of 1215, the barons
compelled King John to accept limits upon the capacity of the Jews to recover debts from the landed gentry. The king was also forced to agree to accept restrictions upon his own power to acquire and recover debts that members of the gentry originally owed to the Jews. The acquisition of such debts had been a significant—and hated—mechanism through which the Crown extracted resources and enhanced its power over the nobility.

The hardships of the civil war coupled with harsh royal fiscal policies led most of England's Jews to flee the country toward the end of John's reign. In the absence of the Jews, the finances of the kingdom suffered. With the death of John and the succession of the child-king Henry III in 1216, William Marshall and Hubert de Burgh, successive regents, set about repairing the realm's financial system. To this end, they appealed to the Jews to return. To reassure Jewish returnees of their welcome, the regents released Jews being held in prison, promised to protect the Jews from anti-Semitic violence, restored some of the property that had been confiscated, and even went so far as to strike the clauses referring to the Jews when the Magna Carta was reconfirmed after John's death. Many Jews did return, and the old fiscal regime was reestablished.

Unfortunately, however, when Henry III reached majority and began to rule on his own, the Crown's revenue needs for foreign campaigns, for participation in crusades, and for expensive construction projects led the king to reintroduce the harsh policies of his late father, seeking as much short-term revenue from the Jews as possible without considering the long-term fiscal consequences. Thus, Henry introduced a variety of confiscatory taxes, and, if a Jew was unable to pay, the Crown might order his arrest, the imprisonment if his entire family, and the confiscation of his property. These policies were continued by Henry's successor, Edward I, who extorted money from the Jewish community by imprisoning large numbers of Jews and demanding that they be ransomed by their coreligionists. Jews who could fled England again, and, as a last act in 1290, Edward expelled England's handful of remaining Jews and confiscated their property. The expulsion of the
Jews was followed by fiscal problems for the Crown and capital shortages in the country.

In due course, England, like other European states, began to develop fiscal systems that did not depend upon outright expropriation. We shall return to this matter in
chapter 4
. At the heart of these systems was what historian Samuel Finer has called the extraction–coercion cycle.
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That is, early modern rulers created administrative agencies charged with identifying and enumerating all the state's inhabitants. Most, if not all, inhabitants were required to pay regular taxes. Collection of taxes was enforced by the military, which could now be paid on a regular basis. As revenues began to flow more regularly into the state's coffers, more troops could be recruited, trained, and equipped. This, in turn, meant that a higher level of extraction could be sustained which, in its turn, created the fiscal foundation from more soldiers. So long as rulers were careful not to kill the goose, or taxpayer, that laid the golden egg, large armies could be created, equipped, and paid on a regular basis.

Planning

Like attention to fiscal policy, the other lessons learned in the general curriculum of war have had important civilian applications. Societies that learned these lessons benefitted from them. Let us consider the case of planning. Planning began mainly as a military practice but evolved into a standard function in civilian agencies and private firms. Rather than consult soothsayers or fortune tellers as they once might have, government officials and the heads of large enterprises have learned to think rationally and to promulgate strategic plans that more or less parallel those of military organizations.