Reflections on Leadership

Abstract

Last year I read Partners in Command, a book by Mark Perry. It is an account of the unique relationship between General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General George Marshall, and how they played a significant role in the American victory in World War II and laid the foundations for future success in the earliest years of the Cold War. Eisenhower and Marshall are, of course, icons, legends etched in granite. Their portraits hang in my office. One of the things I found compelling in Partners in Command is how they were both influenced by another senior Army officer who is not nearly as well-known and in fact, as a reader of history, I had never heard of. His name is General Fox Conner, a tutor and mentor to both Eisenhower and Marshall. Conner and Marshall first became friends when they served together on the staff of General Black Jack Pershing during World War I. In the 1920s, Eisenhower served as staff assistant under Brigadier General Conner in the Panama Canal Zone. Three Axioms From Conner, Marshall and Eisenhower learned much about leadership and the conduct of war. Conner had three principles of war for a democracy that he imparted to Eisenhower and Marshall. They were: * fight unless you have * fight alone. * And never fight for long. All things being equal, these principles are pretty straightforward and strategically sound. We have heard variants of them in the decades since, captured perhaps most recently in the Powell Doctrine. Of course, all things are not equal, particularly considering the range and complexity of the threats facing America today, from the wars we are currently in to the conflicts we are most likely to fight. So I would like to suggest how we should think about applying Fox Conner's three axioms to the security challenges of the twenty-first century. Never fight unless you have to. That one should only go to war as a last resort has long been a principle of civilized people. We know its horrors and costs. War is, by its nature, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Winston Churchill wrote in January 1942: Let us learn our lessons. Never, never believe that any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.... Once the signal is given, the statesman is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. In a dictatorship, the government can force the population to fall in behind the war effort, at least for a time. The nature of democracy, however, limits a country's ability to wage war, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed with perhaps the exception of World War II, every conflict in America's history has been divisive and controversial here at home. Contrary to what General George Patton said in his pep talks, most real Americans do not like to fight. Consider the conflicts today. Afghanistan is widely viewed as a war of necessity--striking back at the staging ground of the perpetrators of the September 11th attack. The Iraq campaign, while justified in my view, is viewed differently by many people. In testimony in front of the Congress on the Iraq war, I observed that we were attacked at home in 2001 from Afghanistan. We are at war in Afghanistan today, in no small measure, because we mistakenly turned our backs on Afghanistan after the Soviet forces left in the late 1980s. We made a strategic mistake in the end game of that war. If we get the end game wrong in Iraq, I told the Congress, the consequences will be far worse. Truth to tell, it is a hard sell to say we must sustain the fight in Iraq right now and continue to absorb the high financial and human cost of the struggle, in order to avoid an even uglier fight or even greater danger to our country in the future. We have Afghanistan to remind us that these are not just hypothetical risks. …