Conversations with History: Edward Luttwak

welcome to a conversation on strategy I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is dr. Edward Luke walk a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies of Georgetown University in Washington DC dr. Ludwig is the 1987 Nimitz lecturer at UC Berkeley he is a consultant to the Pentagon the he is on the editorial board of numerous foreign policy publications and he's the author of numerous books including the grand strategy of the Soviet Union the Pentagon in the art of war and history collected essays and on the meaning of victory his forthcoming book is called the logic of war and peace and it will be published by Harvard University Press in the fall a dr. Ludwig welcome to Berkeley dr. Luke walk you are a strategist give us a feel for that vocation first how did you become a strategist by accident of course I I suppose I've always had the childish interest in in weapons of war this developed into a layman's interest in military history then I had some experiences in our machines Wars Worth and I started working as a defense consultant at no time did I think of myself as a strategist I simply found myself working on very narrow and specific military problems the strategy came upon me uninvited as some continuities began to emerge in all these different things and I begin to see patterns in it and it is when one begins to understand those patterns that one begins to have something general the one can call strategy this part of one's mental equipment if you were asked to give a a quick sketch of what are the qualities of strategic thinking what would you and your answer be well one is our normal thinking a normal thinking is conditioned by our culture and our normal thing is pragmatic that is we like to be businesslike in our thought about everything including problems of defense and foreign affairs what's the problem what are the solutions let's get on with it now that may not be a good idea money specifically cares but clearly it's not a strategic and strategic can be defined in opposition to that as being the attempt to uncover the general patterns and which lead one to further conclusions which may show for example that what seems to be the right move on this issue at this time today to solve this problem may in fact bring into a neck situation which is much worse than the previous one and what is what is what is the best exponential ground for working with this theory I mean is it actually having fought in war observing wars studying the history of wars well I think I suppose one could get it in and also two different ways you could probably get to it just by sheer thinking through I only know how I got to it and there was really a mixture of all these different things but what we're talking about is the systematic understanding of just a couple of things one of them is that that when you're when you're operating in the realm of conflict everything you do voc's a reaction and that reaction this place is what you're doing I like to always to give an example of the difference between building a bridge and doing anything it's challenging you're building a bridge they were a river there that may be very hard to bridge and sometimes we'll change this course with the seasons but the river is not watching it building the bridge is not liberté trying to avoid being bridge that is the normal situation of strategy and therefore it's not necessarily the right thing to do the right thing according to the common sense of the situation being a good engineer in dealing with rivers may not mean that you're a good engineer in designing what is a war so this is a realm in which there is an adversary plus always who is thinking and moving so it is the analogy here a chess game really or are you saying something different it's it's it is it is it would be a chess game if there were rules but the very essence of conflict is that all the rules that are abolished it's not like business competition because business competition has rules too there may be a fierce market share fight between two producers or something right there and they can battle by prices quality advertising promotion or some but they cannot start blowing up each other's shops and yet that's the normal thing in war which is you do anything that you can to win so it is a chess game where the chess players are also allowed to rest so women are there shoot were a poison one another and of course you're not playing on the same board on the same table but two different boards and each can only glimpse a little bit of the other's moves I want to pinpoint one other issue here are we only talking about situations of war are we also talking about war and non war the logic is formed in war but the wars are rare as men fact you could say the logic is formed in battle now battles are great rarity a during the whole Second World War which lasted six years really the battle days were very few far between war is rare as well everybody more or less tries to avoid war we have an official and explicit declared policy of deterrence but all sorts of other people who didn't see themselves as being nice peaceful deterrence merchants also we're trying to avoid war in a sense they were to win without having to fight for it so what happens is that the logic is borne out to battle but then it's projected through war and from war is projected through normal life where there is no war where indeed everybody might be trying to avoid war but where people manipulate distractive war in order to do various things including preventing war and where the dealings of states with one another are conditioned by this background the possible war and I don't mean just the United States dealing with the Soviet Union where the threats of war playing wrong but the United States dealing with its allies where the ally when let's say we were having a quarrel with the common market of a chicken imports or something well the common market behavior in a quarrel is influenced by the fact that there may be a war in that war the United States would be the indispensable of patron and ally and therefore how they deal with us on on chickens is modified by that fact here is an imagined war playing the role in in in the matter as soon as this war however improbable enters into the situation with it enters the logical war which is different from the logic of everything knows how is this logic different is it is it more common it's not common sense you're not saying that you're saying that there are certain rules that that derive from its uniqueness that's what the most fundamental of course is that the logic of everyday life common sense is causal linear but it's just decided that if something is good it's good it could be better something is bad is bad it could be worse if one thing worked today it's gonna work tomorrow and things of that sort and war all these things are wrong I always like a simple tactical example if you want to advance to defeat an enemy and you have a nice broad well paved straight and short route you'd never take that road do you go over the mountains we're on a circus highway or even a poor path you don't go in the daylight you go tonight why because if you do the right and proper thing the common-sense thing in war then the enemy will be working for you and they will defeat you in order to prevail you have to go against common sense systematically and every choice and in fact the one of the key characteristic of the logical strategy is that is paradoxical and country right through and it affects everything in like in deterrence when we we say we don't want war that's why we have to be ready to attack at any time what is the useful nuclear weapon it's a nuclear weapon you never use if you ever use it is useless the we don't miss I don't think we recognize the degree to which this contradiction and paradox pervades everything that strategy touches and it is only rarely visible but in fact that is the logical strategy and parades are with it and in this this difference comes from the fact that your your your all your adversary is always doing what you are doing that is watching you ready to make and reacting to it so that you you you you're in a constant state of alert mental alertness well it's not alert it's just a question that that if you do anything that is linear common-sense and predictable and song it must fail because it can be anticipated and he can harness all these energies to prevent the accomplishment to what you're doing and that is why as a rule of thumb in war whenever you have to ask yourself what you supposed to do ask yourself what would common sense adjust and do the opposite that's the first step and begin but it is of course very fundamentally different because we've been trained since childhood to try and develop our common sense and extend it and apply it and what happens in war a lot is that a lot of people failing war simply because the counselor screwed their heads around and and suddenly adopt a whole set of new mental habits as I hear you speaking the image that comes to my mind is Errol Flynn in Robin Hood and his band of merry men in other words in alert to changing situation ready to move in in an unexpected direction now in reality and overtime obviously our wars are not fought by bands of merry men but rather bureaucracies large bureaucracies and and what I hear you saying about the strategic situation strikes me is very incompatible with the ways of military bureaucracy yes is true that there's always there's obviously a problem and that's why when we examine what happens in Wars we always say that sounds so one because he was more flexible there was he was less the Germans were able to outmaneuver the British again and again in North Africa because of there both were large bureaucracies one was more fluid than the other but let's not stick to the image of a maneuver and agility there's a much more fundamental logic the this logic has a much more fundamental effect take for example the question of designing bases and facilities let's say you need that you need a place where you recondition repair and ition your battle tanks now if you're involved if you apply a common sense logic the logic of peacetime what you want is to take a facility equipped with equipment as well as you can staff the people as well as you can and this is your repair facility now if you are operating a truck fleet you have a central repair facility and when you'll repent all your trucks now if you're operating a tank fleet and you have a central repair facility you're doing a terrible mistake and what you should really have is 9 or 10 or 15 of them very dispersed because otherwise the enemy can prevent you from fielding tanks more than once just by knocking out the one facility now what is it that drives the civilian operator to have one facility economies to scale the savings of not having to have heavy gantries at each of these prices let's say you have to have testing equipment that you only need quite rarely but when you need it you made it and now because you're seven different facilities you need several different expenses testing equipment economies to scale the efficiency of the design of the facility this is what common-sense jobs and what you need for war is the opposite now in our time the man who was going to revolutionize the Pentagon was Robert McNamara and he attempted to bring in efficiency criteria by your standards his efforts were bound to fail well what happened in fact was that there were always of course efficiency tendencies in a system like Amara was not the first person to come out to the business community and go into the Pentagon we had the great many of them before him but it is true that McNamara's Advan to the Pentagon came with a lot of fanfare and also came with a lot of people he brought them under the famous with kids and what happened was that they tried to to implement efficiency measures against the resistant military bureaucracy the militant burocracy did not have basically the the gumption of the mental equipment just to say wait a minute we're not resisting because we are high bound reactions were resisting because it's a wrong concept what you call cost effectiveness and efficiency is driving us towards doing things that be great if we were in the civilian world but we're not the driving us towards narrowing down a number of different fighters to one or two which is very smart if you're trying to get homogenization for civilian production you focus on one truck and you produce that it's wrong in war where the enemy will be able to use the weak points of any machine has to exploit then exploit them they didn't they just resisted as a burocracy no doubt they were having them and what happened was that we had a lot of efficiency solutions put into the Pentagon in fact and they were very harmful because whereas did they were indeed the efficiency improvements there were not war effective now in your manuscript from your forthcoming book you talk about the the air fences as an example of this failure of the McNamara strategy could you discuss that well I mean that's a classic I mean it's a classic case in in designing air defense missiles under the the efficiency rules what you tried to do is you design the best possible missile you then mass-produce it and you distribute it out you now have a single missile you have only one stalk of spare parts you only need one training scheme for the operators and maintainers of them in the meantime the Soviet Union was given example of the inefficient way of doing it and they had they developed for the 60 70 s and today different classes and whistles that very low altitude missiles like the same 7% line later on Sam aids there have medium-altitude sent three some sixes this is the Soviets yes went on your merry way and essentially ended up designing developing producing the point to this day about nine or ten different kinds of missiles now from the point of view of civilian efficiency this is a disaster for them because here we are nine different sets of spare parts all the different training schemes non compatibility there was a very inefficient to right but when you've in war when you're flying against a Soviet style missile defense you cannot countermeasure any one of the missiles with any one can do more because all these different missions using different principles of guidance you can't over fly because some of these missiles are so high altitude like to Sam fire but we go above the height any tactical fire to confine and you can't under fly because they have this ultra low altitude miss any did they have a whole range of Antioch have guns as well against the the single missile solution of the US produces you can fly over and it can fly under it and more to the point you can countermeasure because you're dealing with one miss over one set of characteristics now the American solution was very efficient and would be exactly appropriate if we were designing if you were doing machine tools let's say for a car plant in Detroit the Soviet system is very inefficient but one works in war much better than the other the logic of peace is to specialize reproduce mass-produce economies to scale the logic of war is redundancy coverage multiplicity because there's a an enemy there who is ready to exploit any specialization on your part to outmaneuver you now this realm of strategy in a democratic state has to coexist with other realms of concern and and the common umbrella these days is cost I mean cutting down costs there are only so many things we can afford we live in the age of gramm-rudman what you're suggesting about strategy seems to imply unlimited costs to the state well I it doesn't matter what logically follows you point out you have the discipline of cost any society is going to say this is what I'm willing to allocate for my defense according to the perception of reality how wicked the enemy is and how ready is to get a warm the logic however grows all the same it rose whether you spend a lot you spend a little the question is how you spend it if you apply the logical common-sense you spend it efficiently if you apply the logical strategy you spend it effectively and very often the effective is inefficient and the reason it is effective is precisely because it's inefficient I mean let me give you a very specific example that shows equal cost so the whole cost issue is by the internet how do you use personnel if you want to use personal and efficiently what you put on all your uniform all your military in a computer so you know what and they all have different skills and something and the current one is committed to maintaining certain number of army divisions and the squadron's Air Force and something and when you do is you want to saw everybody to his specialty you know whatever suppression work let's say an infantry Oliver what's a tank battalion has is too short to 20 turret of mechanics while has 15 governors over what do you want these one to match skills with just the same as in a factory you want to put people working where they can work machines or something now in war you follow this approach and you've had it because in the attempt to keep your your battalions staffed correctly with the current as people come and go and leave your service it perhaps even wounded or or tired whoever you end up constantly reshuffling the personnel and you will have a much weaker unit and you have if you accept inefficiency for the sake of having stability and cohesion the battalion that has too many turret mechanics not enough Gunners but which whose men have been together and are steady and know each other and have a grecian is going to fight much better the one that is highly efficient in having all the right man manpower in the right places but has no cohesion precisely because it's efficient because the people had to be shuffle through together what I'm suggesting is actually the the logic of strategy these are the directly opposed to the logic of civilian the civilian life which of course merely common sense or simply if not directly opposed then it is nevertheless a clash and that there is ultimately a very fundamental reason for it because the logical strategy is essentially the logic of destruction for example we have a Navy which is supposed to be a 600 ship Navy well this this Navy operates in distant oceans and has to be supplied aircraft carriers need constant resupply of aviation fuel so they can do all these evolutions at some and the non-nuclear ships which predominant need diesel I mean actually Bronco fuel and of course they food vegetables of son delivered and ammunition in cases of war now the application of common sense logic in the form took to this problem has resulted in the design and our fifty thousand tongue you know it's great big very efficient multi-use multis multi product bulk carriers we have fifty thousand resupply ton resupply ships each of these characters forces with this aircraft carriers cruisers destroyers and some will be resupplied by one of these fifty thousand ton vessels that that's very efficient if we try to resupply while having small five thousand ton fleet Oilers and separate ammunition ships and separate food and vegetable time perception we will have many more ships the crews many more crews will be much more costly to man to the repair refit and some but the logical strategy demands redundancy distribution dispersion and here we have a case where the United States could have in fact applied the logical strategy chose to apply the logic of civilian efficiency we'd ever have our magnificent carrier battle groups supplied by a very small number are very concentrated where supply ships that we cannot replace easy at all and we therefore enough force to protect them with a lot of combat ships around them as it as in be late when we belatedly discovered that it wasn't a good idea to do it the way it's done to civilian life so I really don't think that it's a question of circumstances I think that a it's true that a band of nomads but say a band of of nomads warriors hums moving over the countryside are more natural strategic a more naturally strategic than the a settled civilian population for them to be agile in reacting to threats it's normal the whole logic is the logical destruction they're not going to they're not going to be creating cities which then must be defended than which are vulnerable that is true and that indeed has characterized a lot of human history which is the barbarians defeating the more civilized for that very reason looking at recent American history have any of our political leaders evinced a finely attuned strategic sense in the way the years well if one one has to go back to to the Second World War and I think that everybody who who is from who has done the certain amount of reading on it to know something about it there of course were many people Rather's to participate in that must reflect there were as the United States entered the war only by the choice of Japan it was the Japan that decided the United States would enter the Second World War and although there was a lot of clumsiness at the very beginning and in the tactical sense and there were a lot of equipment problems and technical problems and there was never perhaps in the land armies the kind of operational skills to determine I mean there is no doubt of the superiority of America strategy America strategy was greatly superior to German and Japanese strategy and British strategy it was understood that even in look at the people involved everybody very quickly understood that Americans were not particularly good at operating regiments and divisions and some but at the higher level at the level of theater commanders let's say at the level of of higher field officers Patton Bradley above Eisenhower Nimitz in the Pacific there were infinitely superior to their opponents their opponents came off as as much less capable in that regard so why is that do you think I mean it was it the the pressure of war well I think that of course it was a great test to it and we ourselves even though there's no intellectual recognition I mean this perhaps may change with a book but even there is no international recognition of this truth that the logic of strategy pervades all and it is always paradoxical we have of course empirically sort of stumbled onto it and accepted it in adopted in many areas after all there is a lot of redundancy nevertheless we there was no intellectual rationale for it but military tradition had absorbed this as a value so we keep it so I wouldn't say that if you look over view all our defence plans and all our the design of all our weapons the organization of our forces indeed the nature of our statecraft you will find it contains a lot of a lot of it is in fact correctly strategic but to the extent that it isn't we created all sorts of ulnar abilities that would then emerge it's awful sadness in the event of a war let me see if I can restate what you're saying the pressure of war the in a way I think you're suggesting our wealth and power during that war made a lot of redundancies possible a successful matching of the complexity necessary for war is that yes also the fact that that although the military were not before the second war the military were neglected and poorly funded and not generously maintained the way they really have been since then they were also left alone they may have had very little money to spend but they were not under pressure to spend their money in a way the civilians thought was smart and were able instead to spend the money the way the military thought was right namely traditional and that tradition embodied a lot a very sound strategic precautions just built into it which military tradition had absorbed over the centuries since their formations he comes as a second nature it came as a second nature to soldiers to provide for his number thermally furthermore to the extent that we've had therefore we've had a much greater infiltration of the wrong kind of logic since the Second World War then we had before the Second World War and I just wonder how we would perform and we had to do it again before the second world war civilians gave very little money to the military but also left him alone and they often did the right thing since the Second World War they're given much more money but much more interference and penetration and a lot of stuff although it sounds smart it sounds right to the fore the point of your common sense is in fact very bad such as for example the Navy when it's huge vulnerable resupply ships that look just like these giant warehouses we see at the edge of American cities which are the most efficient way of resupplying supermarket but you wouldn't build if you were concerned about if your competitor in the supermarket business we're free to use arson they launched commando tactics you would not have all your warehouse capacity concentrated in one place along the Beltway along the freeway but that's exactly what what we've been doing to the extent we've had these infiltrations a problem that I keep hearing and what you're saying is is one of democratic accountability because you're suggesting that the realm of strategy has its own rules and if you look at the ideal form this is its logic and often it seems to be and you're admitting that incompatible with what we see as the normal way of doing things and here now getting into the problem of democratic accountability when we have democratic accountability I think we we wind up doing a lot of things in the wrong way wrong in the sense not according to your to your logic what is the answer there I mean we're not going to put our military off to one side and let it do whatever it won't but so is this the task of leadership here political leadership to to integrate these two realms and I not all that the military do reflects the logical strategy I was very pointing out that they are somewhere among the inert inertness of the military tradition there was a lot of unconscious and unacknowledged logic but to address your question I think the problem is much more severe when we don't look at all these technical stuff but look at the level of high state craft guard standards if you like there we have a very severe problem I'll give a very straightforward and familiar example of it in the question of the towns in the 1970s we had the turned to the Soviet Union seventeen who wanted to improve relations what did the privileges were all kinds of reasons but one reason was that the alternative of war was foreclosed through servant leaders whether they were peaceful or not peaceful looking at us they'd say wow the eye States is very strong but we can't easily defeat them that we have a choice do we deal with them do we try to extend the cooperation and get some technology and capital for them or do the rain very nasty with them and don't get and so they went on the path of the ton now that meant that American leaders had to stand up and say two things I'm a great president I'm a great president I have improve relations of the Soviet Union and we're now very friendly look at me here's me pictures here's me hugging Brezhnev this is my wife I'm hugging mrs. Berg and then had to turn around and say but you know by the logical strategy the reason why we have good relations is because we are strong and we could hit them and the reason why they want through girl relations because we are strong and therefore my dear citizens after you finished applauding me for my ability to hug you in case Brezhnev the last thing you have to do you have to find me that we have the problem with Gorbachev in more acute form Mikhail Gorbachev is now smiling and son because in the range of his choices one choice he does not have is to launch an attack and winners splendid in Egypt so here you have an acute problem but when you get to the technical stuff the more technical style I think that these institutions we have enable us to bridge the logic if we want to I think if a military man goes before Congress to say sir this is the manpower subcommittee and you have noticed that we have a lot of units on the strengths at the same time we have a lot of people not assigned to you and it's milling around we pose the reason sir is because although we recognize it'd be much more efficient to assign everybody instantly the fact is that we're trying to preserve the cohesion and of these units and their sense of togetherness because that's we consider very important congressmen understand that congressmen would instantly appreciate regard to that one issue that their common sense logic that you should not have both a factory undermanned and workers on the payroll that are not working there's not in fact apply to this case so I believe we have did them the institution if you like the specific institutions like congressional committees and son they could sit down and focus at least on the subjects where we can bridge this logic if the military themselves consciously understand it which they mostly don't do but to the extent that they can understand they can literally present it we can bridge the gap it's much more difficult or the higher political level regard to the broader issues where strategy requires you to behave always in a contradictory way if you want to be friendly when the Somerton you have to be strong if you find yourself in a position of weakness you yourself are compelled to ruin relations with Moscow in order to create that atmosphere of hostility which enables you to have the strength once you have it you could for the sake of the hill never deterred afterwards now what what exactly is the problem here is it our political leaders haven't been courageous enough to engage in the political education that requires to say look we have to negotiate and reach agreements on the one hand but at the same time we have to arm but they are they afraid to do that or they just haven't been smart enough what is the I think that that then recoiled before the complexity of communicating these things although the specific example I gave you which is the relationship between the talented so eventually once we engaged ourselves for long enough and went around this roundabout time and time again this idea they penetrate I think it could be argued that leaders couldn't have avoided a lot of troubles by in fact engaging in some more education and we willing to confront the some little complexity of the question but in general to operate according to the logic of strategy insofar as the logical strategy is irrelevant because see in our relations with Canada for example the logical strategy is not relevant if we are going to be very smart and conflictual and outmaneuvering of the Canadians we will not be doing good for ourselves been doing harm what we want to have between US and Canada is precisely not strategy but the logical common-sense applied that is we want to have a creative cooperative relationship so we don't just score points in the Canadian but in so far as one is dealing with let's say the Soviet Union there are two we don't want to just apply the logical strategy we'd want to if we can build cooperative relations and we have done in some areas and I don't know air-sea rescue the Bering Straits we don't ask ourselves how we could score points but we do the best we can to rescue people and help them rescue us and vice versa but there clearly the root strategy occupies a big part of the total territory of us summit relations and fundamentally to the extent that a lot of the strategies present we always ought to be contradictory and that's hard to do because in each case requires explanations across this gulf that exists between one logic and the other so that maybe we haven't been blessed with presidents who can deal with the complexity of moving from one realm to the other because the the strategic realm is clearly different from their domestic realm the logic there or as you just suggested with the realm of dealing with allies people that the chances of are well without yeah when allies with allies to there are always undertones of strategy but it's not an accident is really not just a personal issue that we are not being blessed with presidents we manufacture politicians who are responsive to our society as he as he suggests in fact our process involves people who can operate according to logical common sense and yet once they get out there and have to bat for the country on the international arena common sense is only right for them you so far as they're dealing on cooperative issues which meant we may have even with the sabbatarian to the extent that they're involved in conflictual and Italian relations their whole preparation through the diversity process has been the wrong one and you may contrast if you if you wish with the preparation that Communist Party leader gets in order to make it up for the ranks of the Congress party the politician has to engage in what might we call the protracted during the war he has to find little allies fight off against other cliques embarrassed them surprised them maneuver the opposing click into being responsible for agriculture when the harvest is bad and by the time to get to the top secrecy yeah all of this is done in secrecy which is very warlike in peacetime secrecy is a great drag and inefficient in every possible way and you avoid that of course you want to inform people you advertise send memos around the Congress party they operate exclusively in secrecy the internal politics of the inner party are always a secret secondly surprise and deception are very important for one click to move against the other they have to maneuver in a sense but I'm to get to the top and they sit in a particular they know about information is propaganda they know about secrecy they've lived in it all their lives they meet they know about maneuver so I would say that the training that come party gives is a much worse training for the sake of successfully managing a civilian society to become more prosperous but it's just about training you need for politics as war that is politics of the highest rhodesia content and it's interesting that regard that the servant leaders have not tend to be very good at dealing either with the domestic problems or with the allies such as they are but very successfully externally I have to know they're a big superpower with just over half the economic base we have they would were they're really a very small fraction of the economy base of the united states and all the towers if we take this subfield of strategy and democracies and try to relate it to america's present crisis with regard to Iran Gate the diversion of funds the whole set of affairs recently examined by the tower Commission what is as a strategist analysis problems well the I happen to think that it was a wrong thing to do in every possible way we're also executed we're poorly they've only had been a right thing to do which wasn't but please recognize that there were some unconscious elements of strategy in it first of all strategy tells you the common sense tells you that you should sit down with your friends and that the corporation if you develop with your friends now a strategy the people is the Gaussian when to get the highest leverage occur so you must fierce opponents in this sense United States in Iran being in in having terrible relations between them it didn't make sense to try and develop diplomacy with Iran the next step would have been for the United States government for the not not government or the Americans evolved to give the Iranian brochures and descriptions of all the wonderful weapons they could have in their war against Iraq if they returned all hostages you returned all hostages and then we'll give you the brochures then you promise not to do this now and then we will talk about possibly giving your weapons but of course we're giving you these weapons to protect Iran against the Soviet invasion if you're going to use them to fight the Iraqis and continue to make it except to exactly in other words the starting point was and unconsciously they blundered into let's say the track of strategy but left it immediately because they applied the logic of common sense they tried to they are Oliver North and the company tried they fell into the classic era of American negotiators which is to try and build a cooperative relationship that's what we keep doing when in we've had exceptions and they've been different cases but American the American negotiators meet the Soviet negotiators and they try to find a common framework they refuse to accept the harsh and cruel reality that this is an adversarial relationship and they try to form a common concepts and get to it then when there's a difference in positions they the natural tendencies to go halfway there were to apply these highly ritualized modes of cooperative relationship to the strategic relationship and even though Colonel North and these others portray themselves as being tough guys and I was opposed to these striped pants cookie pushers in the State Department it's interesting to me as soon as I sat down with the Iranians they themselves are suckered into the same kind of a phony cooperative relationship and of course they were simply cheated by Rob merchants but if they're not being cheated they still would have failed in this negotiation now reading through the lines of the tower Commission one gets a sense that there was in the national security staff a sense of frustration with getting the bureaucracy to do things that they wanted to do this also would would seem to go against your your your ideal type of the strategic realm and what in fact the leaders in democratic societies can do that that the CIA may not want to undertake this initiative or the the the Pentagon may not want to implement the president there is do you think that was a partly at the heart of this this this crisis well partly it would play the role there's no doubt that before we find junior officers in the NSC going off with their enterprising consultants and dubious intermediaries being active and operational there's a history there the National Security Council was supposed to be advisory it supposed to be a staff of nice people sit in offices look over problems and my memos how they got involved into negotiating let alone into shipping weapons operating aircraft or son well it didn't happen suddenly and it didn't happen only because they were trying to circumvent the will of Congress and did it operationally because that was the only way they could cheat as it were it all started much more innocently than that in reaction in frustrated reaction the fact that the departments of governments which are supposed to be operational and in the field and the special operations the commandos and some in the Pentagon and the CIA is paramilitary people they were very unwilling to do anything National Security Council would ask depending on we receive intelligence we have to the dis hostage we might be rescued and instead of depending on putting some commanders board aircraft sign them to Beirut and pull in the fallout if they could they would say well we need more intelligence we need to do a feasibility study within two there was the operational people kept behaving as if there were analysts and advisors and son and refused to get into the field and what happened was that people in the National Security Council did it themselves and this decide they used the whatever farcical again hold up and use these outsiders and sound to organize at one point I live in North controlled Abilene he controlled what were 40 druce's Drew's mercenaries in Beirut and he was going to use them to rescue some hostage now this sort of desperate resort to improvised operational capabilities in the fields we reached an extreme really began years ago in fact it began under the current administration in reaction to the fact that in order to remain to avoid bureaucratic risk the people who were supposed to be in the field just wouldn't do it so at the heart of all of this isn't it the problem of intervention democracies well this particular democracy of the United States unwilling to want to intervene when it needs to I I'm looking now it's a whole background of the debate about Contra aid the president wants to do this he feels it fits into his strategy he for he s to he winds up instead of dealing with what he perceives to be the adversary but rather dealing with his adversaries in Congress so it seems that at the heart of all of this is the the inability to - to realize the strategic logic that you've been talking about in a democracy that has gone through the throws of Vietnam and is very ambivalent in the sense that on the one hand it wants to protect our interests where they seem to be threatened but at the other hand it doesn't want to pay the cost well the logical strategy strictly speaking has nothing to say on this subject because what you find at the tactical level or the personal level is it turned government at the level of brand strategy and what governs it is political choice there is a if you decide that you want to surrender there's a strategic way of doing that this is important the logical strategy is never can override the political choice indeed the political choice tells you what is it that great thing you wish to achieve I'm just saying that the logical strategy enables you to achieve things in comfort if you apply the common sell it to submit to non conflict situations it fails absolutely just the same as as the common sense civilian logic right normal logic linear logic fails in the realm of conflict but you have to know what you're trying to achieve when only political decision can set that whether the political choice is made by a dictator by a traditional you know Emperor by a madman who happens to seize the office or by a democratic choice through proper parliamentary means and Congress and some makes a difference the political goal tells you what you're trying to apply the strategy for so strictly speaking the answer is no to everything but there are there is aside from from the logic that is followed there is a question of the cultural / disposition and we have this is a very violent Society in the United States which is been evolving towards a less - we seem to accept violence everywhere except in a battlefield we are willing to tolerate much more violence in our cities than the Japanese or Europeans the Japanese who are absolutely uninvolved in international violence who wouldn't dream of fighting wars in Korea Vietnam don't accept violence in the streets of Tokyo and hence their many more policemen than that we have and the police have much wider powers than American police force the Japanese are perfectly willing to allow the police force to break bones of people to prevent violence again in most of Europe there many people people pay for much more police and give them much wider powers if they see people they don't like they can move them on but these people answer back and break bones and if they go to court the Court finds always the police is right in this country we don't want to spend money for police forces we don't give them the powers to be effective and we accept a lot of violence in our streets but internationally we are willing to accept less and less but three Americans kidnapped in Lebanon and killed we think that's a terrible strategy terrible tragedy if the question about dealing with Central America may involve the hundreds of Americans will die we consider that that's an impossibility currently read Nicaragua will begin the war and they will have hundreds of people killed in something we accept hundreds of people killed in us he said it's a cultural a peculiar moment of transition for a once of violent an activist society where Nisour the middle of that and are we unable to make these these large political choices that the strategy is dependent on because one has the sense going back again to this Iran gate matter that part of what had may have been in the mind of the implementers of these actions was their inability to get a political a definitive political decision about what our policy would be in Central America and then when the decision was finally made half-heartedly that is during the period when there was to be no way to the Contras there was a feeling that well the president and his men would go around that decision so there's a there's a there's a fuzziness throughout this I think we had decided or not decided we should be clearer I think it is perfectly you're quite right but let me assure you that I never see the logic of strategy as inducing as requiring sir convention the will of Congress breaking the law acting in unconstitutional ways none of it is necessary we have mechanism to take care of it for example strategy civilian activity requires promotion advertising information everybody being coordinated and status requires secrecy now can we keep perfect secrecy or now is the democracy democratic system conducive to that with a free press now but can we provide tolerable secrecy enough secrecy so we do something the answer is yes does it require violating the Constitution bypassing Congress leaving it in dark now we have a mechanism of congressional charges committee and what you referring to is actually a mixture of two different factors in the one hand really wanting to circumvent the will of Congress behaving in unconstitutional wise fighting for the sake of democracy overseas while compromising the workings of democracy at home this were elements in the ran game the other element was the element we discussed the bureaucratic frustration staffers office analysts being frustrated because out there and all those rough and tough guys especially in the field aren't not because the towers but because their bosses are Karen's burocratic we speaking on December the third element yes the third element was frustration and refusal taking clear decisions particularly however in regard to Iran because what this happening was were pattern of intelligence coming in as we all know because he was in the papers as well saying that Khomeini was gonna die as any town haha he may be around to the year 2000 as you know his father died at the age of 103 as the brothers 11 years older was alive and doing well perhaps he should tell his dying book at anyway they were afraid that Kamini would die then there will be chaos then the Soviet Union would come in and help its supporters and then quote we would lose your out Wow then as it happens none of this information was correct but the important thing is the government didn't accept this correct and at that point they this and before the National Security Council starts all these dealings and some should come a cropper this first move is just trying to get a policy paper agreed by the State Department the Defense Department about what to do and they cannot get agreement enough that is they could not get the clear choice which you need to make the logical surgery into action dr. Lou Clark I regret to say our time is up thank you very much for this very fascinating tour of the realm of strategy and thank you very much for joining us today

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 11,203

Rating: 4.8736844 out of 5

Keywords: UC, Berkeley, Edward, Luttwak, international, politics

Id: ButWqdQg-DA

Length: 56min 33sec (3393 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 12 2008