Abstract
“I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals.”
So reflected Harry Truman two decades after dismissing one of the most admired generals in American history. The decision to relieve General Douglas MacArthur of command was a highly contentious issue at the time—so contentious, in fact, that it elicited rare input from the Supreme Court of the United States on military matters, in an effort to avoid a constitutional crisis. Truman's personal feelings towards MacArthur aside, MacArthur's firing was undoubtedly political, resulting from an inability to reconcile the political ideas, held by Truman and MacArthur, about what it means to command, and by extension, what it means to be in command.
This book is ambitious, as is to be expected from Sir Lawrence Freedman, to say the least. And, because of the ambition that underpins this book, it is helpful to start at the very beginning. In doing so, somewhat unusually, I will begin with my biggest gripe: the title. The Politics of Military Operations implies an exploration into the civil-military relations and various political dynamics of military operations. While it does cover these dynamics well, the title simply does not do justice to the scale of theoretical and empirical insight that is present. Freedman's book is less about the politics of military operations and more about the foundational power structures that underpin what it means to command in the first place and the individual personalities that navigate those structures. Being decidedly uncreative, I have no suggestions for an alternative title, but this is certainly an extreme case of adhering to the strategy of “underselling” and “overdelivering.”
To that end, Freedman's book is both theoretically and empirically rich. Fifteen cases from 1945 to 2022 are examined in depth, with case studies ranging from Truman's political battles with MacArthur to the contemporary command structure in the war against ISIS. Highly organized and highly disciplined command structures are analyzed along with precarious and fragile structures. With such a wide scope, one might worry that the book would feel disjointed or compromised in parts. This is not the case. The cases are examined with a level of detail that one might expect from a deep dive into a single case study, let alone fifteen; this alone makes the book a worthwhile read. It is a comprehensive, and at times, gripping account of some of the most significant political and military decisions made in modern warfare.
The focus of Freedman's book can be summarized in two deceptively simple questions: 1) when an order is given, is it followed by action? 2) if an order is followed (or not), why? I call them deceptively simple because the implications of an affirmative or negative answer in both cases are far reaching. To carry out an order, as Freedman argues, is to uphold and affirm the entire hierarchical structure upon which a military organization relies and functions. To refuse an order, likewise, is to reject that same foundation—regardless of whether that refusal is justified or not. Moreover, when an order is given, there is a lot that can go wrong along the way. Does the interpretation of the order to whom it is given match its intention? Does the implementation reflect the interpretation? Does everybody, from the highest commander to the soldiers on the ground, understand the order in the same way? Are there information asymmetries between those at the top and those on the ground? And—something that cannot be guaranteed in a striking number of cases—does the order even make sense in the first place? Highly disciplined command structures serve to mitigate these risks in fundamentally different ways, but the risks encountered by both professional and non-professional military structures are the same.
As Freedman argues, to command is much more than giving orders and having them followed; it is about managing competing interests and information asymmetries while adapting old structures to new realities encountered on the battlefield and at home. For Freedman, changes in command are driven as much by cultural factors as they are by technological factors. On the surface this is obvious, but having a systematic analysis of several significant military operations over the last seventy years emphatically makes the significance of this point clear: The task of commanding has become much more complex and team-oriented—although the decision, in most cases, will always rest with one person at the top. This increasing complexity is driven by the changing nature of war, technological innovation, and access to unprecedented levels of information on and about the battlefield.
Given both the depth and scope with which the cases are examined, one might expect a patterned account of how decisions are made on the battlefield. Yet Freedman's analysis is hardly a deterministic view of how military operations unfold. The answer to the two-fold question mentioned earlier essentially amounts to: “Well, it depends.” When looking at power structures, the individual decisions made by commanders reflect idiosyncrasies that can only be understood within the context of that particular decision and sometimes only by that particular decision-maker. In the end, I think this is the best part of the book. Rather than trying to wrap the findings into a neat theoretical package, I suspect Freedman's aim is to complicate as much as it is to clarify the conceptual waters of what it means to command. War is chaotic and events on, and away from, the battlefield are driven as much by deliberately made decisions as they are by misunderstandings, mistakes, and miscalculations.