Hoover fellow Victor Davis Hanson on the type of men who become savior generals

what does Themistocles have in common with General David Patraeus military historian Victor Davis Hanson author of the new book the savior generals is about to explain uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge now appearing on the website of the Wall Street Journal I'm Peter Robinson a classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford he is the author of countless essays and columns and of books that include the Western Way of war infantry battle in classical Greece a war like no other how the Athenians and Spartans fought the Peloponnesian War and carnage and culture landmark battles in the rise to Western power dr. Hansen's newest book the savior generals how five commanders saved wars that were lost from ancient Greece to Iraq Victor Davis Hanson welcome thank you for having me Peter my pleasure the savior generals Victor quote eleventh-hour landscapes of battle when most at home and officers in the field have given up on a war as in irrevocably stalemated or lost draw in a different sort of commander close quote what kind of men our savior generals well they're eccentrics they're iconic class so the people that don't start wars and sometimes they don't even finish them but at the eleventh hour is you quoted we need a particular type of person who can do what other people cannot so they have a personality profile they have a resume that's different they're outspoken they're not team players necessarily they're looked on with envy and jealousy at many times they come in they have nothing to lose they're sort of like Shane or the Magnificent Seven if I could use a western image or Ethan Edwards and The Searchers they're tragic heroes and they come in and they do things they've studied the situation they're optimistic they encourage they see they see things that other people don't see this is at least strictly military sense they're visionaries they can see they're visionaries and they're very distrustful they're empirical in a sense that they don't just follow 51 percent opinion so everybody say the Iraq war is lost or everybody said we can't win in Korea or everybody said asin's is burned we better give up they don't necessarily you know disagree with that but they want to know why and they want to know how and they will and they look at the situation and then they convince people to let them have a chance and people give them a chance that they otherwise would not have if things had been better so how did you become Linda I was about to ask how you became interested in writing about this special subset of generals but let me let me get to that but start with a prior question which is how did Victor Hansen growing up on a raisin ranch in Selma California deep in the agricultural heart of the Central Valley fifth generation ranchers in that place how did a California ranch boy become so interested in classical and military history that he is today one of the leading classicists and the author of a couple of dozen books of military history how did that happen people react against their surroundings so if you were told go to the library every day you might not want to go to the library but I was told go out and irrigate get on a tractor and I was out in the middle of nowhere and that was part of it I was trying to do the opposite of what I had to do but I had really gifted parents I had a mother who had gone to Stanford it was a judge and a father who was it World War two I think he was a hero he flew 40 missions in a b-29 and they encouraged me so even though we dad talked to you about the war all the time after my mother died especially but I was out in the middle of nowhere and my I would read books and they would encourage that even though we had to work on the farm my parents would and they also say if you want to save the farm don't farm everybody who farms loses it so we need an outside income so Victor I want you to study study study and do something and then come back and live here but don't try to farm and rely on that income so it was practical and theoretical and idealistic and by the way you you're a couple of dozen books your teaching positions you have saved the farm I have still have the 45 acres in the original house yes all right so now to this question after all the other books you've written how did you become interested in this subset well Frankie geniuses yeah well I had been part of the genre the great battles of antiquity and the modern era carnage and cultures and there's this whole jaunt of the 19th century the great captains who were the Wellington Napoleon who were the best Patton and then also who were the worst so anatomy of folly anatomy of error and anatomy had feet but in the every one of those cases the wood books are published with compendium of good or bad people there's so many extraneous factors yeah you know General Patton was great but the Third Army was great and the American had a lot America had a lot more advantages in 1944 than did the Germans and Zhukov was great however the Germans were exhausted at that time the Japanese we were great with Nimitz but the debt there were other things you could I guess factored into the equation so I was trying to thank well how do we really find greatness when everything is bad nobody wants to win the soldiers have no morale left technologies maybe not be not be an advantage and is there anybody who comes in when by all other criteria its defeat is looming and they should fail and they don't fail and there's about 15 or 20 throughout his or you look for examples when everything is going against a particular side except one man they have they have they do we do that in our own society I mean what made Steve Jobs famous it's not that he founded Apple he had a great career it's because Apple floundered after he left and it was completely destroyed essentially and they brought him back in he saved it and that's what we look it is empirically demonstrable that what made Apple great is Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs and nobody would have taken if you had said Steve Jobs is going to go back to Apple next year and the stock is worthless nobody would have thought he could ever turn it around and so we look in business and corporations and universities for these turnaround artist that's the word we use Savior Savior businessman and then Savior also is a moral term it doesn't mean not only you say but it you can't say rescue generals Savior has sort of a moral ethical tent that the war should be saved which by the way you embrace because all five of the figures here you approve these men I think the Byzantine Empire was better than the alternative I think what we did in South Korea was superior to North Korea I think the Union should have won the war let's start we alas we won't take all five because this is television a book is one thing television is another but let's let's try to get a flavor for this book Themistocles 480 BC Xerxes emperor of persia constructs a pontoon bridge crosses the Hellespont into greece with a force of perhaps a quarter of a million he conquers Thrace Macedonia Thessaly and as he approaches Attica the Greeks attempt to stop his land forces at Thermopylae yes and they fail they fail and they had tried to stop his naval forces at Artie's iam it failed and again they fail and Athens is evacuated and burned and burned and now the Athenian population goes to the island of Salamis Salamis and places in the Peloponnese at rhoids in Agana another island and they have a fleet of trireme yes ended in a commander not a general it wasn't called a general but a man called Themistocles first of all tell us who is the mystic leas well he's sort of an eccentric guy who's been around for twenty years he's of suspect lineage he's maybe a quarter or half Thracian he's a radical of the radical party that believes in more democracy not less he thought an aristocrat has no not an aristocrat and more importantly he's a visionary saying you know what we won a marathon ten years ago but infantry battle is just not going to do it this time and if you're going to have a democracy you just can't entrust the defense of the city-state in the land owning population is only fifty percent so he was a visionary that wanted more ships he wanted the poor people to be paid by the state to row and he believed that sea power offered advantages for a maritime cosmopolitan city in a way that infantry didn't but his problem was that there's no grease left north of the Peloponnese and the people south and their powerful states like Argos or corn but especially Sparta said why why risk everything at Salamis when we can go across the Isthmus of Corinth and build a wall and just be a bunker mentality so he first he had to convince the Greeks that that was a short-term policy they would be surrounded second he had to come up with a strategy to beat a fleet that was three times larger than his own and third he had to fight in a coalition where he was suspect as being a theme in general and raishin or radical in particular Xerxes occupies and burns Athens yes it's a short march to the Strait of Salamis yes the must the mystical ease now has perhaps 180 triremes yes the athenian contingent the Athenian contingent has perhaps 180 triremes and the Persians have somewhere between the estimates and antiquity range from 650 all the way to 1250 and the aggregate Greek is maybe 350 370 2 or 3 or even 4 times to one and a trireme is what it's almost closer to a war canoe than to a sailing ship in a way someone antiquity call it a floating spear you have 180 rowers and they and they're in three different try three banks of rowing and they have a ram and they achieve speeds of up to about 10 knots for you know four or five minutes and they're sleek and they ram into other ships make a hole and sink them they can't have archers they can't have Marines but the main offensive weapon is that is the RAM and they're very on stage so this is not this is not this is not naval warfare of manoeuvre no it has been a sense but they're in a very compact narrow Bay of Salamis right and the idea is it's oh go ahead go ahead and take us through the battle well so the whole idea is that they're in the Narrows and so Xerxes cannot take advantage of his numerical superiority they just don't fit enough and there are some controversies whether by a stratagem he convinced the Persians to send some of the ships around the opposite side of the island we don't know if that's true or not but the point I'm getting at is that the Athenians and the Spartans and the Greeks in general knew the current the wind conditions the the activities so to speak of the bay and they were fighting on their own home territory and they had a brilliant commander who was right with them in the first trireme and the persians were to be frank or coerced people's there were Greeks or Egyptians that were Phoenicians there was everybody in this polyglot multicultural Empire and it's keyed up on them I was going to say is that is that do we believe that to be true we know it is true oh so the king actually set up a throne on the mountain to watch the battle watching battle take place before him yes and then when a Greek was thrown into the water he usually could swim and he could swim to an island where there were Greeks on it in the case of these subject Persians often they could not swim and they were in hostile territory they had to get back to Attica which was occupied by the Persians so there were advantages but it took a general to say to his people we're not going to evacuate we have the advantages we're fighting on the defensive as he said and when they went out to fight they they said a lutherie are lutherie of freedom freedom freedom so they were they had the morale and they had the moral cause so they thought but it was only Themistocles who saw that I don't think any classicist believes that had Themistocles not been there a they would have fought or B they would have won it was it was hedged on that personality everybody else said over the Isthmus will build a wall yes everybody either said that sounds like a better deal to me than ramming oh yeah I think most people thought it was or people in Athens thought we should have fought out and had a glorious last stand and been butchered on the plain of Attica or we should just get out in our ships and go somewhere else he wins this glorious battle he saves the Athenians as a people yes he turns back the Persians I believe you could say he saves what we now continue to flatter ourselves calling flatter Western civilization and then the later career of Themistocles continues to be a no bling and heroic no for the next 25 years it gets worse each year because he wants to take credit for saving Athens and saving Greece and people don't quite agree that he did it all himself because the next year they have a land Battle of Plataea where the Spartans are very preeminent but more importantly his idea as a no he was the architect of maritime commerce Athens is a maritime power a naval power of radical democracy an Athenian commercial empire and his successors embodied or embraced or expanded his ideas and he didn't get credit for it so he's always suggesting that people are taking my prestige away from me or they're taking my ideas he's exiled he gets on the wrong side of history it's oligarchy fast forward to what 23 24 years later he ends up in Persia as they he sells out to the Persians in some sense he does and then he's probably killed himself at the age of 60 65 he didn't end up well his great moment was that Salamis but that's the theme of the book right all right William Tecumseh Sherman the situation in 1864 by June of 1864 you write in the Saviour generals even First Lady Mary Lincoln lashed out to her husband grant is a butcher by August 1864 consensus spread that Abraham Lincoln would lose the fall election close quote grant a butcher and Lincoln a loser Lincoln was nominated but if he was even nominee and may they thought John C Freeman who did try to get the nomination and ran as an independent for a while might be a better candidate at least Horace Greeley thought that well you remember that had been a year since Vicksburg and Gettysburg and the great fourth of July victories of 1863 so then we got the right guy we thought from the West grant we brought him in we put him in March and charge of the Army of the Potomac and he said I got a great lieutenant Sherman he'll take my place the army of the West we got two armies I'll go to Richmond seventy miles away he'll go to Atlanta from Tennessee 200 miles away and two great marches will win the war by July or August right before the election and all of a sudden they took off and it turned out that Robert Ely was not a great offensive general but he was a brilliant defensive general and he understood as some people had praised it the terrible or the awful arithmetic that even though the North may make progress if they lose 3-2 his to or that the northern public would not stand those losses so if we go into April May June July August as we approach the election in this front right next to the telegraph offices of Washington DC people are saying these hundreds and thousands of people coming into Washington wounded and named from the wilderness from the Cold Harbor Spotsylvania Petersburg and press flip and we know that Li does not mind a fighting retreat as long as he looks pain and he looks huge he did and Mary Lincoln who had some southern sympathies made the polluted her Horace Greeley's had worse things Lincoln was really the great editor of the New York Herald I recall yes and Nate Lincoln was incompetent he entrusted this war to a drunk and he said things that would now sound neat I'll stand here I'll stay out here all summer if I have to or I don't want to hear what the enemy is going to do to us let's do it but that doesn't translate into winning a war meanwhile they've got William Tecumseh Sherman who says to himself that's not working in the north the other between Washington Richmond I got to take Atlanta and I have to do two things I got to do it before the election and I can't do it the way grant is that country will only stand for one butcher so let me let me give a compact account here Maine 1864 Sherman begins the march from Tennessee to Atlanta September 1864 now he's fighting yes battle after battle after battle along the way but by September 1864 he had he occupies Atlanta he spares the churches and hospitals but systematically destroys much of the rest of the city rail lines in particular ripped up twisted the the rails November 1864 Sherman leaves Atlanta to begin the march to the sea destroying rail lines and civilian property and his troops consuming the recent harvest all the way from Atlanta to Savannah which he reaches in December 1864 Sherman is operating deep inside enemy territory no lines of communication no lines of supply how did he do it well he did it for variety rate ways and once he got to Atlanta I remember on September 2nd he said Atlanta is ours and fairly won and at that point the McClellan kandacy imploded Jimmy McClellan the Democratic candidate running unionist right but he probably would have settled for two different countries or a country that allowed slavery with the South back in it but nevertheless and then he waited until the election and then went through the March let's see how did he do it first of all he had a very different army than the Army of the Potomac most of the regiment I think over 200 of the 220 regiments are from places like Illinois Michigan Iowa Minnesota especially Ohio and an alum voice from the other boys who like camping out like to move and then he imbued them with sort of an L on that said I won't get you kill we're not going to do what the Army of the Potomac is we're going to move you guys like camping out we're going to outflank outflank and outflank and we're going to let them attack us and when the south got desperate and removed Joe Johnson who was a brilliant tactician and put in John Bell hood who ruined the southern forces by frontal attacks against Sherman then he wore them out when he got to Atlanta even though he'd been fighting at the same time as grant had he lost about 1/4 of the men that Grant had then suddenly the country woke up and said wow all this time we thought that Grant was a butcher but we see now that this was a synonymous strategy because Sherman this is why he was a great man he said I'm not antithetical to ground I don't want to take grants glory away plant what grant did was necessary I don't know if that's true or not but at the time he refused to use to undercut benefit at Grant sixpenny refused to say that his strategy of the indirect approach was a superior strategy to grant he said it was complementary and he was allowed to do this because grant like a bulldog tied Bobby Lee down and occupied the area around Richmond and prevented reinforcements to go to Atlanta so he really kept harmony within the Union the savior generals quote Sherman is often characterized as a heartless prophet of total war with the burning of Atlanta serving as a sort of precursor to Dresden her hamboards which the Allies firebomb during the Second World War yet few of the enemy died either inside Atlanta or on his subsequent marches his ravaging was largely aimed at buildings rails telegraph systems and the property of the slave owning elite close quote grant is always intent on closing with the enemy Army and destroying it and Sherman is intent instead on on what he's an anti Klaus wit see and he doesn't believe that war is predicated on destroying the enemy forces in the field but the situation the people the ideology the psychology that fuels that army so in Shermans way of thinking you don't kill the fish you drain the tank of its water an official died his attitude was and it was a moral attitude I know we call him a terrorist today but it was very a moral attitude because he said basically if I could summarize 97% of southerners don't own slaves the plantation class is the most wealthy affluent class in the history of civilization they started this war and they're sitting back why they're sending these poor white people there's no much of a middle class to die against grant I'm not going to do that I'm going to make it very clear and he said I'm going to make war and ruin synonymous I'm going to burn those big make Georgia's Georgia howl so his idea was to not just defeat the southern army but you Millie ate the plantation class you Millie ate them and say here we are you're a Cavalier class you brag about your manhood and that your superior morality we're here we farm boards or come out and do something and that was a very bitter blow he destroys the myth of southern Honor he does it's all Machiavelli said him you can forgive a man for killing your father but not for destroying your patrimony and that's what he did grant Lee and Sherman ranked them I would rank Sherman first grant second and Lee third grant was in his campaigns at Fort Henry Fort Donelson Vicksburg Shiloh is recovery ty were brilliant he understood what he had to do even though he was not a great tactician in 1864 Lee understood at the end of the war that he didn't have to win the war he just had to make it so costly to get a negotiated peace he did not believe that in 1863 and for when he went north and ruined his army at Gettysburg had he gone around the army at Gettysburg and come into Washington from the rear I think it might have been a different put it this way Peter Sherman went south and didn't lose his army or really have very many losses and humiliated the south and took a big city Lee went north and lost it broke his arm and did not take Washington when it was in his his round realm possibility the savior generals quite simply without Uncle Billy's men in Atlanta on September 2nd 1864 the United States as we know it today might very well not exist I think I don't think there's any doubt about it that he stumbled like grant did Lincoln would have lost the election McClellan would have been elected in early November and the platform that he ran on he might not have admitted it was a copperhead platform it basically said I'll give the South two options they can either exist as a separate and friendly state owning slaves or they can come back into the Union and the status before the war David Petraeus the United States invades Iraq in march 2003 and the war goes extremely well for three weeks then the insurgency begins they're killing Americans and Iraqis alike and the insurgents continue to kill for month after month after month as war in the United States first begins to erode and then all but collapses by late 2006 president george w bush found himself with fundamentally two choices choice one continue the approach of General John Abizaid who's the commander of Central Command and General George Casey who's the commander of the National multinational force that is the man in charge on the ground in Iraq describe the Abizaid Casey approach this is the first of the president's two choices I think the Abizaid Casey approach is simply that Islam radical Islam the Middle East is a foreign experience for Americans we don't belong here and we'll be there long after we're gone so our attitude is just keep a lid on things and Lao these inserts used to burn out don't expose your forces to losses or psychological damage or lose support back home and manage a situation may be of very gradual withdraw and then whatever it whatever is left in Iraq will be marginally better than having Saddam Hussein but do not try to have some nation-building grandiose idea that you can impose your values on a Middle Eastern society and make anything better than what was there before that's choice one here's choice to reject that military status quo and call instead for a strategy based on the thinking of David Petraeus and this new strategy began to be called the surge describes the Petraeus approach well the Petraeus approaches that humans are humans no matter what their culture is and they react to incentives both punishments and rewards so that why you try to kill the insurgents the Baathist XPath estar the al-qaida affiliates you also try to get the people on your side and how do you get the people on your side obviously hearts and minds means for aid Road improvement opening schools but also and this is I think a key is to protect them and to say that you can't publicly say that you're pro-american or you're pro-western but we don't care whether you do or not but privately privately you don't want al-qaeda any more than we do they don't represent your views so we're going to protect you from al Qaeda and that was that was a very interesting point President Bush fascinating passage in the Saviour generals that the president effectively overrules his own senior military advisors to go ahead with this surge I think over rude everybody the Iraq study group didn't want it his senior advisors most of them didn't want it the senior people in the Congress didn't want it he'd lost the house he lost the Senate he is approval waiting was about 25% Petraeus was very suspect by a lot of people in the chain of command and yet he he took a great gamble Bush said we're doing it he's going to yeah so the surge involves it an additional troops than the number of about 33,000 and it involves crucially putting David Petraeus in charge on the ground in Iraq so this happens by early 2007 the savior generals quote the additional manpower of the surge was to facilitate a new effort at securing neighborhoods protecting the population and expanding basic services the protocol sounded almost more sociological than military yet in truth General Petraeus and general Odierno this is general Raymond Odierno who's Petraeus is number two in Iraq and is now the army chief of staff in truth General Petraeus and general Odierno killed and captured more enemy insurgents than at any other period of the conflict close quote what is the surge it's both touchy-feely and deadly it is and I think that's why people have caricatured so successfully because they feel it's touchy-feely but they don't look at the statistics and they don't look at the other things that involved David Petraeus never said I'm a genius I have counterinsurgency strategy let me do this touchy-feely stuff and I'll win he said there are currents going on in Iraq that are favorable to us just like Matthew Ridgway in Korea nobody believed him but he said they've been fighting and losing for a long time he didn't attack Casey and Abizaid he said Casey and Abizaid haven't tried to the enemy and they're at the point of breaking even though nobody believed that they've lost a lot more than we have the problem is our will is breaking and there is not but they've lost my sope trick even as even as the war seems to go sideways for month after month after month even as support for the war collapses in this country what Petraeus saw was that through all these months we're killing bad guys he did and he also knew that if George Bush made a courageous decision that we weren't leaving we didn't have scheduled withdraws as we're doing Afghanistan that would be a force multiplier he also knew that there was a Anbar awakening there were people in Anbar province Sunni Muslims that were sick and tired of al Qaeda and on their own spontaneously had risen up and they could be co-opted through whatever means you know persuasion force money bribes absolutely and all of these perfect storm forces were coming together under what we call the surge and then we had these sort of brilliant guys at the American Enterprise Institute Fred Kagan Kimberly Keg and obviously Jacobean and people like Stephen Hadley and Dick Cheney were very supportive of them and they sort of did all of the logistical or the PR they did a lot of very important things around the channels Victor hold on what does it say about the American military establishment in our present time we're not talking about Themistocles and we're not talking about the Civil War we're talking about effectively the day before yesterday when we're talking about the surge that this vast Pentagon establishment including the Secretary of Defense was opposed to this surge and you had to have a couple of people at a think tank go to a retired army deputy chief of staff Jack Kane out in his house in Virginia and hold these little sessions over cups of coffee of people's coffee tables and Jack Kane says in effect I think I can get us in to see my old buddy Dick Cheney yeah but you're met yes I mean you're missing the scenes of dollars at the Pentagon and it's use I know Peter but the the consensus was not that we don't have enough troops in Iraq we have too many you're putting good money after bad it's hopeless and then somebody comes along like Petraeus or Kean or whoever they are and they say ah we need more people in this rat hole and everybody's that's the last thing that we need and they said no we need people where I guess one of the metaphors they would have used we're right near the summit we just need more people to push up the wagon over the top and we'll go downhill but if we don't if we quit now we're so close and they can they Island crushes yes and they evoked Vietnam we were close in 71 with Creighton Abrams and stuff and so why after all that investment give up now and yet most people thought we've all reinvested too much and bureaucracies that's one of the themes of the book as well these Outsiders these 11th hour saviours they always have to deal with bureaucracies the savior generals quote the question of what tactic actually brought the peace was never really answered the touchy-feely or the deadly but we know that without David Petraeus the American effort in Iraq along with the reputation of the United States military in the Middle East would have been lost long ago close quote we can argue or David Petraeus as critics say that he took credit for the amur awakening he took credit for the work of his brilliant Colonels who mapped out he took credit he took doesn't matter if without David Petraeus leadership without his vision without his endurance I mean the man literally was on the front lines with his men and getting two and three hours of sleep take away David Petraeus there was nobody else or the owner was a great American he was a hero but it took David Petraeus to see that Odierno had been unfairly caricatured as a RAAM RAAM evening characterized as a butcher we absolutely he'd been sort of a ram that buts his head against her and Petraeus thought this guy lifestyle tie their and their subtlety so he got the right people and he wasn't threatened by talented people so I think that because of the controversy surrounding Petraeus it doesn't matter just like it doesn't matter with Ridgway controversial or should we agree commander who save Korea or Themistocles 10 15 20 years from now people will look back and say had the American army lost in two thousand seven or eight it would have been humiliated in the Middle East and its deterrent effect would have been lost and whatever Iraq is it would be much worse today lessens the savior generals quote human nature even in this sophisticated age is unchanging there will be future wars against whom well against the so called bad guys I mean he used to be Italian fascists sometimes it's German militarists in 1914 sometimes Nazis sometimes it's communist sometimes it's al-qaeda's but human nature being what it is it's not going to change there's going to be people who are going to take risk for what they perceive as advantages unless they're deterred my Gina make you nervous China always makes me nervous simply because it's not a consensual Society France has nuclear weapons Britain has nuclear weapon it doesn't make me nervous Iran makes me nervous it's not the weapon or the technology it's the type of government and consensual societies are not as threatening to their neighbors throughout history so I'm a little worried because we're we have social reliance and drone technology and we have let's disappear rock recei let me get to that question yes again I'm quoting the savior generals quote do not believe that high technology has made military leadership outdated close quote by victor we live in a day when some lieutenant j.g sitting at a console at Central Command and Tampa Florida can push a button and cause a drone to kill people in Pakistan where in that setup is the space for military leadership because and now I'm quoting something to actually have maybe the drone will go down an Iranian territory maybe it has classified information somebody's going to have to say you're going to go get that drone so that the Iranians don't get the technology and sell it to the Chinese or say there's a his counterpart in Iran and maybe he says well we can't use drones against their leadership because they're going to use them against ours the point I'm making as long as humans are humans there's going to be a Joel characteristics audacity courage imagination no matter what the technology no matter what the bureaucracy the danger is that we fooled ourselves into thinking that we're such a bureaucratic iphone/ipad society that we've made the human element irrelevant so one lesson here this is a handbook for presidents of the United States and one lesson is read this book and you're going to discover that when you get in a scrape the officers you have in place may not be the best officers I hate I think I might even be worse obviously you haven't placed or not the people who should be here so so start looking for the renegade the Maverick the loudmouth the obnoxious smart gut correct is that fair look for will Kane and high noon and Shane a better horizon the savior general's once again a great general peels the veneer of invulnerability from a winning enemy convincing his own men that victory is entirely within their purview in Boston earlier this year two kids used pressure cookers yes to create bombs that killed people shut down one of America's major cities for more than 48 hours commanded the attention of the President of the United States and dominated the press for days and days how do you peel back the veneer from terrorists like that well one of the things you don't do is when somebody asks for refugee status because their homeland is too dangerous because they happen to be Muslims when they do arrive United States you don't say you can go back into your to dangerous territory and visit once in a while and you don't avoid the word radical Islam or terrorism you basically say this was an Islamic inspired terrorist act as was Major Hasan it was not workplace violence we're not worried about the Army's diversity program you have to identify it doesn't mean it has anything to do with Muslims it has everything to do with radical Islamists and you don't have a person in the administration saying that jihad jihad is a holy cause or the moja the Muslim Brotherhood is a secular is it you have to be explicit and not politically correct and make the enemy feel the enemy feel that you're unpredictable mysterious volatile but not predictable and not politically correct or they only going to get in bolded they're going to look at your Magnum entity as weakness I hate to say that the Savior generals one more time the Savior generals were amateur sociologists of a sort as leaders of constitutional societies they knew especially the constraints of public patience during the Civil War the northern public puts up with thousands and thousands of casualties before they begin to turn against Lincoln during the Korean and Vietnam wars michael lind has written a book in which he looks at this the casualty figures in both cases it's when we get to casualties of about 15,000 that the public begins to question yes Korea and Vietnam in Iraq the public turns against that war when we still have casualties well the total casualties for the war about right when we get what casualties are in the hundreds yes and the public turns against it well you can see where I'm going with this does our wealth our security as a nation our sophistication as a technological society in some fundamental way weakened us by making us too reluctant to take casualties to use our military power I think it does and that's the challenge for all great leaders because when you turn on your iPhone you expect to be able to call Uganda and if you can't call Uganda somebody screwed up so what you want it war has to be as predictable as Google or Yahoo and the more affluent leisured we are we wake up in the morning and we feel that it's our birthright to die at 90 in our sleep maybe 90 is too young today and to receive Social Security write up an absolute day before it's always them are they who if we're not perfect we're not good we have these incredible expectations ethical expectations on what America should be so every once in a while we find out that there are pre-modern and Neanderthal thinking going on in the world and that we need somebody in the US military to wade into a place like Iraq or to go into Korea to go into Okinawa and fight a pre-modern battle and when they do they're going to be jut their conduct we take it for granted they're going to be victorious the efficacy is going to keep us safe tonight but their conduct must the postmodern it must satisfy everything we learn in the university about utopian ethics and manners that's a very hard thing that we put the military in to be pre-modern on the battlefield in postmodern as soon as the shooting stops last question famous essay after the Second World War Henry Luce the editor of Time magazine says that the remainder of the 20th century would be the American Century that was the crate for the American Century all right to read the books of Victor Davis Hanson is the sense that you are reading the works of a patriot this is a man there's no doubt this is a man who believes that consensual Society that the United States that these values are worth fighting for and that American conduct even at its ugliest Vietnam the Cold War Korea Iraq was fundamentally sound if not indeed noble all that is in your works at the same time what's also in your works particularly your columns and magazine pieces you're beside yourself that history is not taught in our high schools you're infuriated the political correctness of every kind has infiltrated to a very deep level within the American University you're concerned in particular I've heard you discuss this that we're living on a kind of cultural capital in the sense that the American military is informed by 19th century values of valor and personal courage and personal sacrifice and that one reason we're able to do this is that the military is substantial overlap domestic is dr. Victor Davis Hanson will the 21st century be another American Century but you're talking about a vacuum compared to what compared to China compared to the EU fill it in fill it in well we in the 30s we heard the fascism had the the new answer National Socialism and then after the where we were told communism was a new man and then we were told that no it's Japan incorporated they just bought Pebble Beach Rockefellers then we said no that paradigm didn't work it's the EU we'd saw what happened and then we were told it's China we see what's happening with China so Constitutional Society of the American type has always been more flexible and reinvents and self-critical yeah we're in a bad situation right now but the building blocks of what's you judge societies by technology today Google right 10 miles from here Google Apple Facebook it's all American Yahoo that's what people are doing they're creating technology for the entire world defense one American carrier group at our Nydia right now has more conventional maybe even nuclear power than any other country come by most of the world combined US Marine Corps is bigger than any you infantry force demography 1.9 2.0 United States when Russia's shrinking China's shrinking Europe is shrinking constitutional stability the Arab Spring has imploded the entire Middle East the EU doesn't even have a workable Constitution if I look at even get it to fracking but oil and gas we're going to be the laurels largest oil and gas producer not just because we have oil and gas but because the constitutional system that prevents probably right property has prevents confiscation and we have a reasonable debate about fracking the way the EU does not so whether it's technology or energy or demography or constitutional stability or defense this country is very self-critical and we're going to I think a crisis right now but we've been on crises before not quite like 1861 yet it's not quite like I think 1946 or 1939 Victor Davis Hanson author of the savior generals thank you for thank you for having me Peter Victor this is one of the few shows when I've actually felt ready to go out and and and celebrate thank you Thank You Victor for the Hoover Institution and the Wall Street Journal I'm Peter Robinson

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 166,259

Rating: 4.8263917 out of 5

Keywords: war, leaders, generals, visionaries, strategy, Themistocles, Sherman, Grant, Petraeus

Id: 4icIzVYyhpg

Length: 42min 46sec (2566 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 06 2013