Isegoria

The military leader who eschews the matador’s coup de grace in an endeavor to attain the “glory” and “honor” of a boxer’s toe-to-toe slugfest must never be given responsibility for American lives, David Grossman (On Killing) argues:

This does not mean that there will never be times when we must meet the enemy head-on in equal combat. Far worse than a leader who has no spirit for maneuver is a leader who has no stomach for fighting at all. In the American Civil War, McClellan seems to have suffered from such a character flaw. Sun Tzu recognized a need for “ordinary” units that would hold the line while “extraordinary” units would maneuver to unhinge the enemy. At least U.S. Grant had the spirit to grapple with his opponent in order to apply his superior numbers and industrial resources to crush his opponent — and he was, arguably, capable of some pretty fair maneuvering upon occasion. A true “master” of war, in the sense of Sun Tzu and in terms of maneuver warfare, is one who can use both attrition and maneuver, both the ordinary and the extraordinary, and, most importantly, who knows how to properly balance the two.

MacArthur had to fight bloody, sustained battles in New Guinea in order to lay a base for his “island hopping” maneuver campaign of bypassing enemy strong points in the Pacific, and in Korea MacArthur had to fight a desperate holding battle at the Pusan perimeter in order to execute the decisive maneuver operation at Inchon. Someone has to, in Patton’s colorful words, “Hold’em by the nose” while the maneuver element “kicks ‘em in the ass.” The leader responsible for American lives must be the matador who distracts and frustrates the enemy with an elusive and flexible cape while striving for the opportunity to not just “kick” the enemy but quickly and cleanly pierce deep into his heart. But he must also be capable of courageously facing the enemy in mortal combat, while not preferring to do so.

There is in each individual who holds himself to be a warrior an atavistic, primal force that craves a special kind of domination glory, a force that desires to grapple with and best the enemy. It can be seen in those teenage boys who could not say please; it can be seen in the ceremonial, head-butting combats of goats and other horned and antlered creatures during mating season; and it can be seen in even the greatest maneuverists when their will power runs low and the hindbrain gains control over the intellect.

When worn down and exhausted deep in the enemy’s country, Napoleon and Robert E. Lee, two great maneuverists, both hit a point at which they seemed to be no longer willing to maneuver, no longer able to fight with the intellect. In a kind of moral exhaustion, like a weary Muhammad Ali in the fifteenth round of a hard match, Napoleon at Borodino and Lee at Gettysburg could not bring themselves to “will” their forces into one last flanking movement and seemed to almost fatalistically, unconsciously decide that “Today is the day I will come to grips with my enemy, today is as good a day as any to die.” Lee, without Stuart and his cavalry “eyes,” and deep in enemy territory, resigned himself to a blind grappling with the enemy at Gettysburg. Napoleon, his forces eroded by the long march deep into Russia, and frustrated by his inability to decisively defeat his elusive enemy, did the same at Borodino. And in both cases, when they stopped maneuvering they lost.

Future commanders, exhausted and frustrated by seemingly endless maneuvering against their enemy, will reach the point at which they cannot go on and come to feel that they must risk all on one last roll of the dice. In their staff and amongst their subordinates are the Pickets and the Murats: clamoring for glory, eager to lunge into the jaws of death, lusting for the honor of coming to grips with the enemy. These valuable and aggressive subordinates may give unspoken or even spoken messages of frustration or thinly veiled contempt and disgust for the failure of their leader to come to grips with the enemy. They are pistols full of impotent rage quivering in the commander’s hand. At some point their moral force may outweigh that of the commander, and he can no longer hold them back. He lets slip his dogs of war in equal battle, and the victory goes, not to the sly, nor to the swift, but to the strong in a bloody battle on equal terms.