When academic bean-counters direct war-fighting, a nation ends up in a quagmire, eventual humiliation and finally defeat. Such was Vietnam. Aka: McNamara’s War. When John Kennedy nominated Robert McNamara for Secretary of Defense, McNamara was running Ford Motor Company. His experience in military matters, and as a soldier was “bean-counting during WWII. He spent the war in an office, devising flight schedules for B-29 supply sorties. The closest he got to combat was reading about it. Beans and counting them comprised his war-fighting experience. When Kennedy, died Johnson kept the bean-counter to run his expanding war in Vietnam. McNamara was a terrible choice to run a war-fighting organization. His ideas about fighting in Vietnam can be distilled into counting. Specifically, counting bodies.
McNamara examined casualty reports and if US forces had killed 200 and we lost 10, we were “winning”. Numbers. We lost fewer “beans” than the commies, so we must be winning. McNamara ignored that often the Commie KIA numbers were made-up. And he ignored what warriors, experienced Generals told him; that being, we didn’t have a stated “militarily valid objective for Vietnam.” McNamara and Johnson also embraced the strategically imecilic and tactically fatal mistake of a limiting Rule of Engagement. Those rules often got soldiers killed. Johnson infamously quipped that the Air Force “couldn’t bomb an outhouse” without his permission.
A recent article in the Atlantic by a neocon named Eliot Cohen further illustrated why eggheads need to shut up. Cohen is a Bush-era Dick Chaney acolyte neocon who saber-rattled for the Iraq war. Cohen was and remains a chickenhawk neocon who apparently didn’t understand the first thing about warfighting or the “why” we might go to war – nor did he have the least understanding of Iraq, Iraqis or the country’s imbedded tribalism. Yet Cohen now pounds away at his keyboard claiming Pete Hegseth is a terrible choice for SecDef. Why? Because Hegseth is an advocate of a warrior mindset and that our soldiers need to return to a mindset of winning and lethality.
Cohen begins his article and spends literally paragraphs talking about a myth. Achilles. Cohen tells us, Achilles was a warrior not a soldier. If you’re confused you should be. Cohen reasoned that a mythical Greek mercenary who died via a magical arrow to his heel – that was his best and most appropriate metaphor for Pete Hegseth. Part of it is because Cohen wants to present himself as an “I’m smarter than you”. And, he hate Trump.
Cohen then waxes on about history and that warriors actually lost a lot battles, from Achilles to the Iroquois. Confused? You should be.
Cohen’s thesis is that America needs “soldiers” not warriors. Absurd. Granted, not all of soldiers can or will be warriors. Supplies make an army run. REMFs are needed. What Hegseth means by a “warrior culture” is that the men and women in our military need to be war-fighters, even if they are cooks or part of the supply chain. Sure, not everyone is infantry. Few soldiers are Tier One. We know that. What we don’t need are people joining the military just for the VA benefits and run, like a Stolen Valor clown aka: Tim Walz when the shooting starts. We don’t need transgender officers pulling on a dress and the trotting the globe claiming ( on the DoD dime) that “diversity is our strength”. Pro tip: No it is not. Cohen is an imbecile or he really, really hates Hegseth because of Trump. I don’t think it is the former.
Cohen claims that Hegseth is a terrible choice because his was a warrior, and has no experience running big corporations like… Robert McNamara, I guess. He writes:
The civilian secretary of defense should be tough and highly experienced—Bob Gates or, earlier, Melvin Laird—as well as a capable organizer, a respected counselor, a shrewd politician, and a forceful leader from outside military culture.
They are not in the warrior business. Indeed, some of the most effective secretaries have had negligible military experience, or none whatsoever.
The ghost of Robert McNamara agrees with Cohen.
Cohen ends his article by invoking the big corp management skills of Peter Ducker. Cohen quotes Ducker claiming that the Pentagon was “unmanageable”. I don’t see the point, but nothing Cohen writes, really has a point. Unsurprisingly, Ducker was honored by neocon George W. Bush with a Medal of Freedom. Ducker has been widely criticized for his “management by objective” thesis as being a top heavy “control at the top” concept that never works.
I have no doubt McNamara would agree with Cohen.
Cohen seems fine with losing wars, as long as the reports are filed on time, and in triplicate. Cohen has authored a half dozen books about the military, apparently learning nothing while doing so.
Since McNamara, we have had a series of SecDefs who have had no “dust on their boots”. And no, Llyod Austin was not a ruck-carrying warrior regardless of what he and his DD214 claim. We need to change that.
People like Cohen – pundits, eggheads who write books and McNamara-like acolytes who have had “people” to clean the bust off their loafers, should shut the fuck up.
Hegseth for SecDef. I’m all in on a warrior running the DoD.