QandO

July 28, 2004

Why all the Vietnam? II
Posted by Dale Franks

The reason why John Kerry and his surrogates are pushing the Vietnam angle is simple. They are trying to make the argument that because Kerry served in combat in the Nam, he's qualified to e president of the United States.

12 years ago, Bill Clinton had no military service at all, yet Democrats--including Mr. Kerry--were keen to argue that it was irrelevant. Now, suddenly, military service is the chief qualification touted by Mr. Kerry.

That's an interesting argument, but there's not a lot of evidence that military service has much to do at all with the presidency. The job of the military--even at the highest levels--and the job of the presidency are two very different things.

The job of the military is to execute the orders of the president as a means of implementing his strategy. Even our highest generals have little or no input about strategy at that level. Our national objectives, as well as the shape of any subsequent peace--what B.H. Liddell Hart called "grand strategy"--are political, not military concerns. Military officers are concerned with strategy at the operational level. The president is concerned with grand strategy at the political level.

This doesn't mean that some generals are not keen strategists in that sense, and, many of the most successful generals are. Colin Powell, George C. Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Alexander Haig come to mind. But, just being a general is no indication that one is a very good player at the game of grand strategy.

In a previous post, I used the example of Curtis LeMay. LeMay became a 4-star general in WWII, and directed the country's strategic bombing campaign against Japan. At his retirement, he was the Air Force Chief of Staff under John Kennedy. But I doubt if anyone even mildly acquainted with Gen LeMay would have mistaken him for a grand strategist. His primary advice to President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis was to bomb Cuba, and he confidently predicted that if the President did so, the Soviets would do nothing. Fortunately, Kennedy disagreed.

Fortunately.

Gen of the Army Douglass Mac Arthur had served as the Army Chief of Staff in the 1930's, then was recalled to active duty in WWII, and eventually ended up as our supreme commander in Korea during the first part of the Korean War. Despite the direct orders of President Truman, he ignored warnings that the Chinese were preparing to intervene in Korea, and sent our troops straight for the Chinese border.

When the Chinese launched the surprise Thanksgiving attacks, Macarthur was stunned. Eventually, his unwillingness to obey orders, and his insistence on trying to bring in Chiang Kai-Sheck's Nationalist Chinese into Korea led to his dismissal.

Both generals were fantastically competent in their areas of expertise, but were poor strategists at the grand strategy level.

On the other hand, Franklin Roosevelt, who led the country through most of WWII, never served a day in uniform. Woodrow Wilson, who was president during WWI, didn't either. Yet no one would argue that they were incompetent in their role as commander in Chief, Abraham Lincoln's sum total of military service was a few weeks in the Illinois militia, yet he somehow managed to make it through the Civil War creditably, even though he was hamstrung by the equally arrogant and incompetent Commander of the Army of the Potomac, General McClellan, a man who was wonderful at building armies, yet fatally indecisive at using them.

So, then, with these examples in mind, what does John Kerry's service as a junior naval officer tell us about his fitness to be president?

Precisely nothing.

If generalship, or the lack thereof, cannot be correlated with effectiveness as commander in chief, a lieutenancy is hardly an awe-inspiring qualification.

The doubts about Kerry's fitness as president do not lie in his four years of active service. They arise from the two decades of recorded decisions he has made as a United States senator.

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