American Blitzkrieg

"Why do people have a fixation with the German military when they haven't won a war since 1871?" -- Tom Clancy

I've always been interested in the German military, especially the
Wehrmacht of World War II. As a young boy, I recall building many
models, not just German Panther and Tiger tanks, but famous Luftwaffe
planes as well. True, I built American tanks and planes, Shermans and
Thunderbolts and Mustangs, but the German models always seemed
"cooler," a little more exotic, a little more predatory. And the
German military, to my adolescent imagination, seemed admirably tough
and aggressive: hard-fighting, thoroughly professional, hanging on
against long odds, especially against the same hordes of "godless
communists" that I knew we Americans were then facing down in the Cold
War.

Later, of course, a little knowledge about the nightmare of Nazism
and the Holocaust went a long way toward destroying my admiration for
the Wehrmacht, but -- to be completely honest -- a residue of grudging
respect still survives: I no longer have my models, but I still have
many of the Ballantine illustrated war books I bought as a young boy
for a buck or two, and which often celebrated the achievements of the
German military, with titles like Panzer Division, or Afrika Korps, or even Waffen SS.

As the Bible says, we are meant to put aside childish things as we
grow to adulthood, and an uninformed fascination with the militaria and
regalia of the Third Reich was certainly one of these. But when I
entered Air Force ROTC in 1981, and later on active duty in 1985, I was
surprised, even pleased, to discover that so many members of the U.S.
military shared my interest in the German military. To cite just one
example, as a cadet at Field Training in 1983 (and later at Squadron
Officer School in 1992), I participated in what was known as "Project
X." As cadets, we came to know of it in whispers: "Tomorrow we're
doing 'Project X': It's really tough ..."

A problem-solving leadership exercise, Project X consisted of
several scenarios and associated tasks. Working in small groups, you
were expected to solve these while working against the clock. What
made the project exciting and more than busy-work, like the endless
marching or shining of shoes or waxing of floors, was that it was based
on German methods of developing and instilling small-unit leadership,
teamwork, and adaptability. If it worked for the Germans, the "finest
soldiers in the world" during World War II, it was good enough for us,
or so most of us concluded (including me).

Project X was just one rather routine manifestation of the American
military's fascination with German methods and the German military
mystique. As I began teaching military history to cadets at the Air
Force Academy in 1990, I quickly became familiar with a flourishing
"Cult of Clausewitz." So ubiquitous was Carl von Clausewitz and his book On War that it seemed as if we Americans had never produced our own military theorists. I grew familiar with the way Auftragstaktik(the
idea of maximizing flexibility and initiative at the lowest tactical
levels) was regularly extolled. So prevalent did Clausewitz and Auftragstaktik
become that, in the 1980s and 1990s, American military thinking seemed
reducible to the idea that "war is a continuation of politics" and a
belief that victory went to the side that empowered its "strategic
corporals."

War as a Creative Act

The American military's fascination with German military methods and
modes of thinking raises many questions. In retrospect, what disturbs
me most is that the military swallowed the Clausewitzian/German notion
of war as a dialectical or creative art, one in which well-trained and
highly-motivated leaders can impose their will on events.

In
this notional construct, war became not destructive, but constructive.
It became not the last resort of kings, but the preferred recourse of
"creative" warlords who demonstrated their mastery of it by cultivating
such qualities as flexibility, adaptability, and quickness. One aimed
to get inside the enemy's "decision cycle," the so-called OODA loop -- the Air Force's version of Auftragstaktik --
while at the same time cultivating a "warrior ethos" within a
tight-knit professional army that was to stand above, and also separate
from, ordinary citizens.

This idolization of the German military was a telling manifestation
of a growing militarism within an American society which remained
remarkably oblivious to the slow strangulation of its citizen-soldier
ideal. At the same time, the American military began to glorify a new
generation of warrior-leaders by a selective reading of its past. Old
"Blood and Guts" himself, the warrior-leader George S. Patton -- the commander as artist-creator-genius -- was celebrated; Omar N. Bradley
-- the bespectacled GI general and reluctant soldier-citizen -- was
neglected. Not coincidentally, a new vision of the battlefield emerged
in which the U.S. military aimed, without the slightest sense of irony,
for "total situational awareness" and "full spectrum dominance," goals
that, if attained, promised commanders the almost god-like ability to
master the "storm of steel," to calm the waves, to command the air.

In the process, any sense of war as thoroughly unpredictable and
enormously wasteful was lost. In this infatuation with German military
prowess, which the political scientist John Mearsheimer memorably described as "Wehrmacht penis envy," we celebrated our ability to Blitzkrieg
our enemies -- which promised rapid, decisive victories that would be
largely bloodless (at least for us). In 1991, a decisively quick
victory in the Desert Storm campaign of the first Gulf War was the
proof, or so it seemed then, that a successful "revolution in military
affairs," or RMA in military parlance, was underway.

Forgotten, however, was this: the German Blitzkrieg of World War II
ended with Germany's "third empire" thoroughly thrashed by opponents
who continued to fight even when the odds seemed longest.

What a remarkable, not to say bizarre, turnabout! The army and
country the U.S. had soundly beaten in two world wars (with a lot of
help from allies, including, of course, those godless communists of the
Soviet Union in the second one) had become a beacon for the U.S.
military after Vietnam. To use a sports analogy, it was as if a Major
League Baseball franchise, in seeking to win the World Series, decided
to model itself not on the New York Yankees but rather on the Chicago
Cubs.

The New Masters of Blitzkrieg

Busts of Clausewitz reside
in places of honor today at both the Army War College at Carlisle
Barracks, Pennsylvania, and the National War College in Washington,
D.C. Clausewitz was a complex writer, and his vision of war was both
dense and rich, defying easy simplification. But that hasn't stopped
the U.S. military from simplifying him. Ask the average officer about
Clausewitz, and he'll mention "war as the continuation of politics" and
maybe something about "the fog and friction of war" -- and that's about
it. What's really meant by this rendition of Clausewitz for Dummies is
that, though warfare may seem extreme, it's really a perfectly sensible
form of violent political discourse between nation-states.

Such an officer may grudgingly admit that, thanks to fog and
friction, "no plan survives contact with the enemy." What he's
secretly thinking, however, is that it won't matter at all, not given
the U.S. military's "mastery" of Auftragstaktik, achieved in
part through next-generation weaponry that provides both "total
situational awareness" and a decisive, war-winning edge.

No wonder that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were
so eager to go to war in Iraq in 2003. They saw themselves as the new
masters of Blitzkrieg, the new warlords (or "Vulcans" to use a term popular back then), the inheritors of the best methods of German military efficiency.

This belief, this faith, in German-style total victory through relentless military proficiency is best captured in Max Boot's gushing tribute
to the U.S. military, published soon after Bush's self-congratulatory
and self-adulatory "Mission Accomplished" speech in May 2003. For
Boot, America's victory in Iraq had to "rank as one of the signal
achievements in military history." In his words:

"Previously, the gold standard of operational excellence had been the German blitzkrieg
through the Low Countries and France in 1940. The Germans managed to
conquer France, the Netherlands, and Belgium in just 44 days, at a cost
of 'only' 27,000 dead soldiers. The United States and Britain took
just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of
France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin
Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison."

How likely is it that future military historians will celebrate
General Tommy Franks and elevate him above the "incompetent" Rommel and
Guderian? Such praise, even then, was more than fatuous. It was
absurd.

Throughout our history, many Americans, especially frontline combat
veterans, have known the hell of real war. It's one big reason why,
historically speaking, we've traditionally been reluctant to keep a
large standing military. But the Cold War, containment, and our own
fetishizing of the German Wehrmacht changed everything. We began to
see war not as a human-made disaster but as a creative science and
art. We began to seek "force multipliers" and total victory achieved
through an almost Prussian mania for military excellence.

Reeling from a seemingly inexplicable and unimaginable defeat in
Vietnam, the officer corps used Clausewitz to crawl out of its
collective fog. By reading him selectively and reaffirming our own
faith in military professionalism and precision weaponry, we tricked
ourselves into believing that we had attained mastery over warfare. We
believed we had tamed the dogs of war; we believed we had conquered Bellona, that we could make the goddess of war do our bidding.

We forgot that Clausewitz compared war not only to politics but to a
game of cards. Call it the ultimate high-stakes poker match. Even the
player with the best cards, the highest stack of chips, doesn't always
win. Guile and endurance matter. So too does nerve, even luck. And
having a home-table advantage doesn't hurt either.

None of that seemed to matter to a U.S. military that aped the
German military, while over-hyping its abilities and successes. The
result? A so-called "new American way of war" that was simply a
desiccated version of the old German one, which had produced nothing
but catastrophic defeat for Germany in both 1918 and 1945 -- and
disaster for Europe as well.

Just Ask the Germans

Precisely because that disaster did not befall us, precisely because
we emerged triumphant from two world wars, we became both too enamored
with the decisiveness of war, and too dismissive of our own unique
strength. For our strength was not military elan or
cutting-edge weaponry or tactical finesse (these were German
"strengths"), but rather the dedication, the generosity, even the
occasional ineptitude, of our citizen-soldiers. Their spirit was
unbreakable precisely because they -- a truly democratic citizen army
-- were dedicated to defeating a repellently evil empire that reveled
fanatically in its own combat vigor.

Looking back on my youthful infatuation with the German Wehrmacht, I
recognize a boy's misguided enthusiasm for military hardness and
toughness. I recognize as well the seductiveness of reducing the chaos
of war to "shock and awe" Blitzkrieg and warrior
empowerment. What amazes me, however, is how this astonishingly
selective and adolescent view of war -- with its fetish for lightning
results, achieved by elevating and empowering a new generation of
warlords, warriors, and advanced weaponry -- came to dominate
mainstream American military thinking after the frustrations of Vietnam.

Unlike a devastated and demoralized Germany after its defeats, we
decided not to devalue war as an instrument of policy after our defeat,
but rather to embrace it. Clasping Clausewitz to our collective
breasts, we marched forward seeking new decisive victories. Yet, like
our role models the Germans of World War II, we found victory to be
both elusive and illusive.

So, I have a message for my younger self: put aside those menacing
models of German tanks and planes. Forget those glowing accounts of
Rommel and his Afrika Korps. Dismiss Blitzkrieg
from your childish mind. There is no lightning war, America. There
never was. And if you won't take my word for it, just ask the Germans.