Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Max Boot's latest offering is as dangerously misleading as his "Savage Wars of Peace." In that first book, he was one of several of the loudest voices justifying the Bush (W) administration's view that something called "American values" should be represented abroad by the use of U.S. armed forces, even in wars the U.S. military feared would look like Vietnam. After Bush senior's success in the first Gulf War (1991), then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell penned an essay in Foreign Affairs (1992) in which he argued that the ghost of Vietnam had been finally laid to rest by the Bush (H.W.) administration's wise decision not to go to Baghdad and leave the United States in another quagmire. Instead, Powell emphasized, U.S. forces had been used for what they'd been designed, trained, and equipped for: confrontation with a major conventional adversary on open terrain. Boot's "Savage Wars of Peace" provided some of the theoretical underpinnings of a reversal of General Powell's "doctrine," by appearing to show that 'if only the United States military applied the lessons of victory in past small wars (i.e. read his book), the United States could intervene decisively in places that formerly would have alarmed the Pentagon as likely quagmires; such as Iraq.' In this book, which amounts to an apology for his former arrogance disguised as both a path breaking review of military history and as yet more sage advice to contemporary Americans, Boot argues that although the use of armed force to advance American values and U.S. interests is still valid, the U.S. military and Bush administration got the use of force wrong in Iraq. Having come dangerously close to blaming the U.S. military for failure in Iraq and the Bush administration for incompetence, Boot calls for more nuance on the part of U.S. armed forces and more administrative support from the U.S. government. As history, the book's failings reduce to the traditional one (in an American social context) of memory loss: failure to recognize previous, and much better, tellings of the same tales. Hans Delbrück's masterful four-volume "History of the Art of Warfare", or Martin Van Creveld's more recent (1989) "Technology and Warfare from 2000 B.C. to the Present," covered much the same ground and did a much better job of it than Boot. If the book deserves a higher rating than a single star (it does), this is mainly due to the book's value in getting people to read and think about this history anew: that's a worthy accomplishment and Boot rightly deserves praise for it. As theory, the book's key tenets are already years old. Previous and better advocates of the argument that the U.S. needs a different sort of military to engage asymmetric threats (e.g. terrorism) was advanced by Eliot Cohen's prescient "Constraints on America's Conduct of Small Wars" (International Security (IS), 1984), and by Andrew Krepinevich in "The Army and Vietnam" (1988). These ideas were further developed by Ivan Arreguin-Toft in an article entitled "How the Weak Win Wars" (IS, 2001); and published in a book-length treatment under the same title by Cambridge University Press in 2005. Finally, the argument that technology is not enough, which Boot makes much of here, was also previously cavassed in yet another IS article by Christopher Parker entitled "New Weapons for Old Problems" (1999). In "War Made New," Boot fails to cite most of this work, and thus perhaps inadvertently creates the mistaken impression that "his" ideas are in fact either original or new. They are neither. As policy advocacy, the U.S. military has already "got counterinsurgency religion;" so Boot's imprecations are at best unnecessary as regards changes in Pentagon strategic thinking. Senior U.S. military commanders, in fact "got it" from the very beginning of the war, and the Bush administration's response to the bad news that "terrorism is a political and police, not a military problem," and "occupation of Iraq will require three to five hundred thousand troops" was to fire or retire the messengers; until they ended up with the current crop of excellent soldiers who are every day doing their best to manage the increasingly dire consequences of the Bush (W) administration's disastrous political decisions without being so rude as to say so publicly. If the history and theory have already been done (and better at that), and the military already understands that it needs a different type of soldier to win in Iraq (and with future wars that resemble Iraq), what then are we left with? We are left with an argument for a better Prince: for less arrogant and ignorant political leadership. Amen to that! But the ultimate shortcomings of a book like Boot's are that it fails to think through the broader consequences of its advocacy. That, combined with the influence Boot's work has had in Washington circles, is what makes "War Made New" so potentially dangerous. For example, what if the military's traditional view that its primary mission is "fighting and winning the nation's wars" (where 'wars' mean threats capable of destroying the United States as a state) is right? As hurtful as terrorism is, the casualties from even an attack as severe as 9-11 only amount to about one-twentieth of what the United States loses every year in traffic fatalities. Compare that with the estimated 56,000 British soldiers who died in an afternoon during the Battle of the Somme in 1916; or to Israel's 1967 war; when a coalition of Arab states sought--not to coerce the state of Israel--but to kill every Jew in Palestine: now that's "war." Viewed this way we can see that neither the global war on terror nor the threat of Iraq's acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD) justify more than peripheral involvement by the Department of Defense (DoD). U.S. interest would be far better served by the Departments of State, Justice, and Commerce assuming leading roles, while DoD stood ready to support them with special operations forces where necessary. Recall that prior to 9-11, with the possible exception of WMD, the very involvement of the DoD in counter terrorism was controversial. Today it is widely considered to be normal: it shouldn't be, both for the military's sake and for our own. Moreover, based on ideas such as those Boot touts here, the U.S. military is currently attempting to turn itself into the equivalent of a "cross-trainer" athletic shoe: able to do a bit of everything in mediocre fashion but no single thing well. What we need is not the Brigade Combat Team or more "light" forces, but two different militaries: one specializing in defending the United States from major interstate threats and one specializing in defending U.S. interests and allies from terrorists. And the United States is a country that can afford more than one pair of 'shoes.' Finally, the elephant in the room that Boot rightly points to is that while our armed forces are techno-savvy and brilliant at firepower and maneuver, they too often engage either the wrong targets (think Chinese embassy in Belgrade, 1999), or the right targets with excessive collateral damage. Yet his solution points to something potentially dangerous. We need nuance as he suggests, but we don't need it in our troops, we need it in our government. Boot advocates the creation of a domestic political organization--perhaps even cabinet level--devoted to peace and reconstruction missions. The problem with this is that however useful and well-intended, to much of the rest of the world this organization could be called "the colonial office." As in the nineteenth century, colonial offices had the human expertise, intelligence, nuance, and even specialized police and armed forces necessary to maintain European control over far-flung empires. Then, as now, those staffing such offices often believed they were working for the benefit of those they governed. Today we say "democratization" and "freedom," whereas then we said "civilization." But however we justify it, the differences between what we say now and what we said then are unlikely to be appreciated by those we seek to save from themselves in the future. Taken all in all then, the U.S. military only needs to convert itself to full counterinsurgency effectiveness if either terrorism and insurgency are threats to our existence as a state (they are not; though current U.S. blunders appear to be increasing the likelihood that the U.S. will suffer a radiological, chemical, or biological attack in the near future), or you accept the proposition that a major conventional attack on the United States or its allies in the next two decades is impossible (it isn't). To suggest otherwise, as Boot does in this dangerous piece of dilettantism, is irresponsible at best.