In August 1775, nothing particularly dramatic was happening among the roughly 14,000 soldiers of the Continental Army besieging the British army in Boston. Indeed, nothing particularly dramatic happened for the next six months. And then, in March 1776, the British suddenly evacuated Boston. Which is why the months of apparent calm deserve a close look.
In August 1941, the British government received a very unwelcome piece of analysis from an economist named David Miles Bensusan-Butt. A careful review of photographs suggested that the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command was having trouble hitting targets in Germany and France; in fact, only one in three pilots who claimed to have attacked the targets seemed to have dropped their bombs within five miles of the sites.
“Why are the wrong people doing the right thing?” Henry Kissinger is supposed to have once asked, in a moment of statesman-like perplexity. That question recurred as Donald Trump, backed by a visibly perturbed vice president and two uneasy Cabinet secretaries, announced that the United States had just bombed three Iranian nuclear sites. It is a matter of consternation for all the right people, who, as Kissinger well knew, are often enough dead wrong.
It is a blessing for this troubled country that the semiquincentennial of its struggle for independence is upon it. Indeed, some notable anniversaries have already slipped by: In September 1774, delegates from Suffolk County, Massachusetts, approved a set of resolves rejecting Parliament’s authority, which were then endorsed by the first Continental Congress. In November of that year, the provincial Congress of Massachusetts authorized the enlistment of 12,000 troops.
One response to the egregious, often cruel actions of the Trump administration is outrage. That’s understandable, but mostly counterproductive, and, worse, a reaction that Donald Trump’s supporters enjoy. Ice is more advisable than fire in this situation, and the situation is better assessed with a cold head than a hot one.
Broadly speaking, there are three streams of influence on the administration. Trump’s vindictive, amoral, autocratic, and ignorant personality is the most obvious one.
The sacking of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, and the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, as well as the judge advocate generals of the Army, Navy and Air Force on Friday night was completely legal—and appalling.
The consequences of this Friday-night massacre will be long-lasting and damaging. The JAGs embody the deep respect that the United States military has had for the rule of law.
“After a long illness, the world as we know it has passed away,” a European friend recently said. A slightly premature obituary, perhaps, but not by much. The world has changed in fundamental ways, of which the Trump administration is both symptom and cause. There is no greater evidence than its emerging policy of imposing a cease-fire, which it incorrectly believes will bring peace, on Ukraine.
Many friends of mine are pretty deep in the slough of despond. I occasionally plead with them to make their predictions of catastrophe less hopeless and categorical, but with less success than I wish. I respect their points of view but have decided to look elsewhere for advice, and so have turned to a different set of friends—those sitting on my bookshelves.
Some of these friends have been with me for more than half a century; and they get wiser and more insightful with age.
When Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood against Israel on October 7, 2023, he intended to deal a decisive blow against a powerful nation-state—and he succeeded. But the state his attack has devastated turned out not to be Israel, but Iran, his key sponsor.
It is a persistent folly of progressive thought to believe that wars do not achieve meaningful political consequences. The past 15 months in the Middle East suggest otherwise.
For the second time in less than half a year, Iran has hurled hundreds of missiles at Israel. Although Iran technically launched more weapons at Israel in April, only 120 of those were ballistic missiles—a smaller salvo than the more than 180 ballistic missiles used this time. The drones and cruise missiles used in April were more easily intercepted and shot down by Israeli, American, and European air defenses, working in cooperation with some of Israel’s Arab partners.
As a teenager, I took boxing lessons. What I learned from that experience—and I commend a bit of pugilistic training to all budding civilian strategists—is that you can take a punch and keep on going. But if your opponent can fire off a combination that connects—jab, jab, jab, cross, hook—you begin staggering, and then the blows will keep raining down until the coach calls an end to the round, or you throw in the towel.
That is what the Israelis have done to Hezbollah over the past two months.
Israeli friends report an eerie calm: The hospitals are preparing for mass casualties, while citizens go about their more or less normal lives—and in the evening drag into place the steel plates that shut the windows to their safe rooms. For the residents of southern Lebanon, the atmosphere is no doubt considerably more fearful and uncertain, living as they do in a failed state dominated by Hezbollah that may soon feel the full weight of Israeli fury.
In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, the Earl of Warwick warns the king of an impending revolt, which is one of those
main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginning lie intreasured
The ailing but canny king rises to the occasion:
Are these things then necessities?
Then let us meet them like necessities.
A brutal war ensues, in which Henry saves his kingdom.
My wife the photo archivist likes to point out that all stills are a double crop—a crop in time (we do not know what happened before or after) and a crop in place (we do not know what was outside the photographer’s frame). So, too, are pulses of violence, like Iran’s recent salvo of 300 drones, cruise, and ballistic missiles aimed at Israel. To understand what we are observing, we have to push out beyond the frame of what we at first see.
Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. A drone launched by an Iran-affiliated militia hit an American base in Jordan, near the borders with Syria and Iraq, killing three service personnel and wounding 25 more. Now, once again, the United States finds itself wondering what to do next.
The overpowering temptation for this administration is to engage in a game of tit for tat, aiming more frequently at things (missile launchers, for example) than people, and then to let things lie.
“That film,” my friend Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general, said to me, “should be shown to all senior national-security officials and military officers. It is the most profound demonstration of what happens in the wake of slovenly strategic thinking.”The occasion was a visit to Israel with a small group of military and national-security experts. The film was a 47-minute compilation of videos taken from dashcams, body cameras, and closed-circuit-television cameras.
This Thanksgiving, three generations of my family will drink a champagne toast, eat the hors d’oeuvres that my mother used to make and my grandchildren now help produce, tackle the turkey that will succumb to my inexpert slicing, and then move on to the pecan and pumpkin pies.But first, as we have for decades now, we will read George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. The letter includes his declaration that the U.S.
Too much of the commentary on the war in Gaza begins with tactics, which are concerned with achieving small, concrete military objectives, such as taking a hill or launching an ambush. Tactics and operations (the combination of a number of tactical engagements) in turn support strategy, the matching of military and other means to political objectives. It is with strategy that an understanding of this conflict should begin. War is horrifying.
“The history of all coalitions is a tale of the reciprocal complaints of allies.” Thus said Winston Churchill, who knew whereof he spoke. This summer of discontent has been one punctuated by complaints: from Ukrainian officials desperate for weapons, and from Western diplomats and soldiers who think that the Ukrainians are ungrateful for the tanks, training, and other goods they have received.
Flawed judgments about military history helped fuel bad policy in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and through the conflict’s early phases. Bad historical analogies look to do the same now, in the debate over how to bring this war to some kind of durable termination.[Eliot A.
The long-range missiles matter. So do the super-accurate artillery shells, the surface-to-air missiles, and the winter weather gear; the training in the English countryside or the muddy Grafenwöhr maneuver grounds; and the intelligence provided from the eyes in space and the ears on airplanes that circle outside the battle zone.President Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv matters just as much as any of these.Other heads of government preceded him, earning deserved credit.
“Deeds, not words,” is the motto of the 22nd Infantry Regiment, a credo that befits a fighting unit that has seen service from the Civil War to Iraq. But wars are won by words as well as deeds, which is one of the reasons why President John F. Kennedy said of Winston Churchill that he “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
On Saturday, the Ukrainians hit the Kerch Strait Bridge, which leads from Russia to Crimea, with something—a missile, explosives planted by naval commandos, a truck laden with explosives. No one who knows is saying for sure. As is the way of military commentary in 2022, experts—real, fake, self-proclaimed—are studying the imagery floating around Twitter and insisting that they know just what happened.
On Saturday, the Ukrainians hit the Kerch Strait Bridge, which leads from Russia to Crimea, with something—a missile, explosives planted by naval commandos, a truck laden with explosives. No one who knows is saying for sure. As is the way of military commentary in 2022, experts—real, fake, self-proclaimed—are studying the imagery floating around Twitter and insisting that they know just what happened.
President Volodymyr Zelensky is playing the role of a Ukrainian Churchill, minus some of the fantastical notions and with an infinitely better workout regimen. Like Churchill in 1940, he has been the indispensable man in a mortal crisis, without whom his country might well have been lost, and whose eloquence has rallied not only his fellow citizens but a larger democratic world.
I never attended Ranger School, the U.S. Army’s nine weeks of unadulterated misery in woodland, mountain, and swamp. But I know plenty of those who have, and they have all reported the same thing: The instruction they received in patrolling and minor tactics was insignificant compared with the lesson they learned in perseverance, to “complete the mission though I be the lone survivor,” in the words of the Ranger Creed.
The relatively brief but bloody war in Ukraine is entering its fourth phase.
Russia appears to be revising its strategy in Ukraine. In place of the go-for-broke attempt to swallow the country in a hundred-hour war, to be completed with a tank parade in the Kyiv Maidan and a semi-annexation, some Russian leaders now talk more modestly of operations in the Donbas. Movements on the ground would seem, for the moment, to confirm this shift.
When I visited Iraq during the 2007 surge, I discovered that the conventional wisdom in Washington usually lagged the view from the field by two to four weeks. Something similar applies today. Analysts and commentators have grudgingly declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been blocked, and that the war is stalemated. The more likely truth is that the Ukrainians are winning.
First came the shock: the sight of missiles and artillery shells slamming into apartment buildings, helicopters pirouetting in flames, refugees streaming across the border, an embattled and unshaven president pleading with anguished political leaders abroad for help, burly uniformed men posing by burned-out tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, Russian police spot-checking cellphones on Moscow streets for dissident conversations. Distress and anger and resolution were natural reactions.