As the war in Iraq degenerated into a political and military stalemate by 2006, frustration rose among the American public and political leaders. Following a rapid initial conventional military triumph in Iraq, American forces bogged down, fighting by turns a brutal insurgency and various sectarian factions engaged in what most observers called a civil war.Footnote 1 George W. Bush was unable to achieve the ambitious political objective—establishing a stable democratic government that would become an example throughout the Middle East—he identified at the start of the conflict. At the same time, he refused to alter the broad strategic commitment of United States forces, rejecting the competing alternatives of massive escalation or military withdrawal. Instead, in early 2007 he embraced a modest force increase (popularly called “the surge”) and a new operational approach that would place American troops among the population, and rejected calls for an exit timetable. Bush paid a heavy political price for his strategic rigidity. In the wake of expanding violence in Iraq and rising American casualties in 2005–2006, public opinion turned against the war, contributing to Republican losses in the 2006 congressional elections and the shift to Democratic control in both houses of Congress. The president's public approval ratings hovered near historic lows for his last two years in office.
The Iraq War is not the first time a modern American president found himself thwarted in achieving his objectives through military intervention. Many have noted parallels to the Vietnam War,Footnote 2 in which Lyndon Johnson was likewise unable to convert superior American military assets into victory. Johnson sought to contain a communist insurgency and sustain a stable, non-communist government in South Vietnam. By 1967 (and perhaps as early as 1966), it became clear to the president and his advisers that the American military commitment had failed to compel the communists to negotiate a political solution. Yet Johnson, too, shunned the strategic alternatives of massive escalation or withdrawal. The stalemate imposed a steep cost on his presidency, culminating in his decision not to seek a second term in 1968.Footnote 3
The parallel behavior of the presidents responsible for the wars in Iraq and Vietnam presents a political puzzle: why do presidents persist in a strategic course that has failed to secure the goals they defined when they chose to embark upon war? As chief executive and commander in chief of the armed forces, the president bears the responsibility to define the nation's wartime political objectives and to pursue a military strategy that achieves those objectives. The inability of presidents to adjust to politico-military stalemate represents a failure, perhaps even a dereliction, of presidential leadership. Moreover, the puzzle takes on added urgency as President Barack Obama has wrestled with the scale of American military intervention in Afghanistan, another asymmetric conflict with features that resemble previous ones in which presidents eventually faced stalemate despite the apparent American military advantages.Footnote 4 Obama's initial moves on Afghanistan included approval of an increase of 17,000 troops and a full strategic review. As conditions on the ground continued to deteriorate in the view of American military commanders and civil officials,Footnote 5 the president announced on December 1, 2009 his decision to deploy an additional 30,000 US troops in 2010.
From the perspective of scholarship on the presidency, too, stalemate and strategic rigidity in wartime raise important questions. Little literature speaks directly to this phenomenon, as scholars instead have focused on the respective decisions to embark upon the Vietnam and Iraq wars.Footnote 6 In his classic and influential work on the presidency, Richard Neustadt emphasized the value of flexibility and suggested that presidents should take particular care to think strategically, preserve their options, and safeguard their power prospects.Footnote 7 Why, then, did Presidents Johnson and Bush, both of whom were experienced and savvy politicians, find themselves hemmed in by their war policies? A more recent theme in presidency research stresses instead that what presidents can do reflects the “opportunity structure” of the political situation they face when they assume office.Footnote 8 From this perspective, presidents are inhibited by their political environment, which only rarely permits expansive possibilities for bold action. Yet the constraints identified in this literature arise from the shifting fortunes of partisan coalitions and other domestic political and institutional elements. Presidents presumably retain much wider freedom of action when it comes to the use of force abroad; indeed, Stephen Skowronek suggests this is one reason why presidents in certain political situations tend to choose military intervention—they see it as a way to sustain their political coalition.Footnote 9 In pursuing limited war, they certainly do not expect to foreclose their flexibility. What is the source of constraint in a realm that appears to invite presidential action so much more readily than others?
Presidential strategic inertia matters, moreover, because it runs counter to another strain in popular and scholarly discourse, the emphasis on expanded presidential power. Among presidency scholars, increased attention has been given to the range and exercise of unilateral powers.Footnote 10 In the aftermath of 9/11, the passage of the Patriot Act, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the assertion by the Bush administration of sweeping surveillance and detention powers, critics both within academia and beyond have voiced alarm over the political uses of emergency powers to widen presidential authority and curtail dissent.Footnote 11 Other political actors and institutions appear incapable of checking a presidential rush toward warFootnote 12 or of putting an end to a conflict when it has lost public support.Footnote 13 If military stalemate does not invalidate these findings and concerns, it complicates the picture: how is it that chief executives with vast, effectively unchecked authority to deploy coercion abroad against much weaker enemies find themselves bereft of strategic options? What happens to presidential power that transforms its wielder from muscular to muscle-bound?
I argue that strategic inertia takes hold because the exercise of presidential agency in the earliest stages of a conflict dramatically circumscribes the scope of agency as the war continues. The two main cases that form that basis for the analysis are Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam and George W. Bush in Iraq. At the outset, I lay out the task of the president as a wartime leader and frame the strategic alternatives. Within the broad strategic possibilities that I identify, a president retains some initiative—strategic inertia as I define it does not preclude certain significant forms of presidential action. I next consider explanations grounded in the personalities and leadership styles of the two presidents, but I find that a focus on presidents' personal attributes do not take us very far. Rather, I contend that the strategic alternatives, withdrawal and escalation, have been removed from the table by other factors. The withdrawal option has been precluded because presidents have justified their initial military intervention through expansive rhetorical claims that left them no political space to revise their policies downward, and neither they nor their core supporters can embrace disengagement and its implication of defeat. Different considerations have undercut full-scale escalation as an option: both presidents sought an ambitious domestic agenda that would have to be curtailed by the cost of full-scale mobilization; contentious civil-military relations led civilian leaders to discount recommendations for more troops by uniformed commanders; and rising public discontent over the wars at some point made escalation politically unthinkable. Early choices, in sum, narrow presidential discretion, an outcome both presidents failed to anticipate. In the end, Johnson and Bush left themselves without broad strategic options. A similar fate may eventually confront the latter's successor in Afghanistan.
In proposing to account for the pattern of presidential leadership in the face of military stalemate, I must offer an important caution. The question at hand presents a challenge to social scientific analysis because of the small number of cases. Besides the two I examine in detail, only Korea (1950–1953) and Afghanistan (2001–present) qualify as limited wars that eventuated in stalemate. Although this problem may be alleviated by bringing in cross-national evidence—the United States is hardly the only nation to engage in foreign military interventionFootnote 14—certain elements of the situation in which presidents find themselves may be specific to American politics and culture. Still, despite the risks associated with an effort at generalized explanation from so few cases, the features that Vietnam and Iraq share appear endemic to limited and protracted asymmetric conflicts. Such conflicts, I would add, stand out as the most probable form of warfare for the hegemonic power in a unipolar world order. I offer propositions to explain presidential strategic rigidity in the face of military stalemate, then, in a provisional spirit, to open up discussion of a troubling leadership pattern that seems likely to recur when the United States engages in so-called small wars.
The Terms of Wartime Presidential Leadership: Strategic Direction, Operational Flexibility, and Strategic Alternatives
In leading the nation into war, the president's central challenge as commander in chief is to match military means and operations to political objectives.Footnote 15 A president will approach a military conflict with certain ideas about how best to use the available military resources, but the challenge is a dynamic one. As the conflict progresses, it may be necessary to revise the military approach, modify the political ends, or do both. International reaction, unexpected battlefield triumphs or setbacks, the emergence of other military threats, rising domestic opposition, and other factors enter the ongoing equation a president must solve in the pursuit of political objectives through the use of force. Historian James McPherson uses Abraham Lincoln to illustrate the kind of strategic adaptation war may require: he shifted the focus of the North's military effort from restoring the Union to the destruction of chattel slavery when it became clear that victory could not be secured on the basis of his more limited initial goals.Footnote 16
Presidential authority encompasses both national strategy and operational choices. In popular discussions, the two are often grouped together under the label “strategy,” but they represent distinct levels of politico-military activities. Strategy refers to the allocation of resources to secure the objectives a nation defines in a conflict, including the force levels to be committed; operations covers the specific use of those forces in military campaigns. The difference can be illustrated with familiar examples from World War II: the Anglo-American decisions to emphasize the defeat of Germany first and to achieve that defeat through the invasion of northwest Europe represent strategic choices, while General Dwight Eisenhower's post-invasion plan to advance across France on a broad front rather than in a single thrust was an operational one. The Iraq War also offers examples of both levels of decision. Strategic choices included the decisions to open a “second front” in the war on terror in Iraq in 2003 and to limit the forces available for the invasion to about 150,000 troops. General Tommy Franks' plan for a single thrust on Baghdad and General David Patraeus's embrace of the counterinsurgency approach that called for situating American troops among the population represent operational choices. Importantly, although strategic commitments foreclose some operational options and facilitate others, no strategic approach leaves political and military leaders without various operational possibilities. Strategic inertia, then, does not imply operational rigidity, and my analysis does not purport to explain presidents' operational decisions.
When the initial approach to a conflict proves insufficient for achieving the political goals a president has identified, several strategic alternatives are available, with corresponding operational implications. For the purposes of clarity, I will posit three generic possibilities for strategic direction, although in practice variations of each might arise. The first possibility is strategic disengagement, the withdrawal of American military forces in recognition that they cannot secure the political objectives defined by the president. Although various face-saving devices may be used to soften the impact of disengagement, such a course amounts to a concession that the United States will be unable to achieve by the use of force the results it sought in going to war. The pace of withdrawal may be gradual, as in the case of the drawdown of American forces from Vietnam under President Nixon, but it is clear to all sides that American troops will depart. At the opposite end of the strategic spectrum lies a massive increase in the American military commitment, supported by the mobilization of the American economy and the redistribution of public resources to support the war effort. Full escalation would require the abandonment of any presidential domestic program with a major budgetary impact; escalation might also require substantial time because a modern military cannot be trained or equipped over night. Between these two poles lies the third strategic alternative, strategic continuity or, in the popular phrase, “staying the course.” The nation continues to pursue the political goals a president articulated at the outset of the war and force levels remain relatively stable.
As I noted, a president who chooses the third alternative still has options. On a political level, new diplomatic overtures to the enemy remain possible. Lyndon Johnson in March 1968 announced a unilateral halt of bombing missions against then-North Vietnam that helped jump-start negotiations.Footnote 17 Presidents can also change how troops are used on the battlefield, but the choices are constrained because any new war-fighting approach presupposes at most modest increases/decreases in troop commitments. When President Bush endorsed the troop surge in late 2006, the United States could deploy at most 30,000 additional troops—no more were available given other commitments and the size of the military.Footnote 18 Strategic continuity, then, does not imply operational stasis, but does impose a significant check on operational flexibility.
To make this tripartite distinction more concrete, we can consider several real and hypothetical approaches to the Iraq war. A modest increase in force levels such as the temporary troop surge in Iraq in 2007 represents an example of strategic continuity. Notwithstanding the sharp debate at home over what critics depicted as a major escalation, the surge did not alter the Bush administration's longstanding commitment to deploy no more than 150,000 troops to secure a unified Iraq under an elected, pro-American government.Footnote 19 The gradual addition of five combat brigades made possible the new, controversial operational approach advocated by a number of military leaders (and possibly some civilian policy makers) to station US troops in places ravaged by high levels of sectarian violence.Footnote 20 On the other hand, strategic disengagement would be reflected in the 2006 recommendations by the Iraq Study Group to start a process of scheduled withdrawals while pursuing a face-saving regional political accommodation or in plans proposed by then-Senator Joseph Biden and others to divide Iraq into separate Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish states.Footnote 21 The third strategic option would involve a dramatic increase in American forces. Although this was never placed on the table after the 2003 invasion, it would have entailed an increase to the force level earlier envisioned by some Army planners who wanted to send at least 300,000 troops to Iraq. The higher figure received considerable publicity when Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki reported to Congress that such a force would be needed in the event of an insurgency.Footnote 22
Does Strategic Rigidity Reflect Personal Attributes?
When two presidents facing similar wartime frustrations and rising political discontent respond by continuing to adhere to an unsuccessful strategic course, it is tempting to seek an explanation in personal attributes, including character and leadership style.Footnote 23 Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush share several attitudinal qualities. Both were Texans and seem to have embraced aspects of the region's macho or cowboy culture that prizes confrontation. This outlook might lead one to invite a battle with insurgents (“Bring 'em on!”) or to challenge a violence-averse organization such as the United Nations to “show backbone,” as Bush did.Footnote 24 Cowboy attitudes might also contribute to a determination to persevere with an original strategic design, especially if the stalemate is interpreted in the Oval Office as a test of will against an adversary who boasts he can outlast the United States.
Explanations for strategic rigidity grounded in personal attributes, however, are insufficient and perhaps misleading—what we might term a “false positive.”Footnote 25 Although without doubt Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush can be described as forceful and resolute in the face of adversity, the same terms would apply to most presidents. After all, politics is not a career for the faint-hearted. Presidents typically have to deal with setbacks in their careers. The presidential selection process itself demands great determination, requiring a potential nominee to overcome a series of hurdles to get to the White House. Some of the attributes that stand out among presidents who persist in stalemated wartime strategies, then, appear to be common across all or nearly all presidents. Yet not all presidents have insisted upon staying the course when a military venture goes badly. For example, Bill Clinton decided to withdraw from Somalia after the costly “Black Hawk Down” incident early in his first term.Footnote 26 Put another way, determined chief executives can choose to exit from a no-win conflict under some circumstances.Footnote 27 Sheer doggedness alone does not explain a refusal to alter direction when a war goes badly.
Grounding the explanation for strategic inflexibility in personal qualities also ignores the very clear differences between the wartime leadership styles of Johnson and George W. Bush. The portrait of Johnson that emerges from numerous accounts of the Vietnam War suggests an almost obsessive daily concern with the war. “Bombing targets did become a personal fascination for LBJ. Stories, pictures, and recollections abound of him haunting the White House Situation Room at all hours, reading the latest reports of bombing missions, poring over maps of areas north of the DMZ [Demilitarized Zone, the boundary between North and South Vietnam], and picking targets himself.”Footnote 28 Johnson thus chose micro-management of bombing operations in his effort to integrate these precisely with diplomatic initiatives designed to entice communist leaders to negotiate an outcome that would preserve a non-communist South Vietnam.Footnote 29 It is riskier to make claims about how closely involved President Bush was in the daily conduct of the war in Iraq, but no published work suggests anything approaching the Johnson level of involvement.Footnote 30 To the contrary, if we are to believe the portrait that emerges from various journalistic accounts, Bush delegated most daily management of the war to subordinates, initially Pentagon civilians such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and later General Petraeus.Footnote 31
The disparate leadership styles of the two presidents as wartime commander in chief raise doubts about how much weight we can assign to this attribute in explaining why each man held firm to a strategic course that produced poor results. Strategic rigidity might be a by-product of inattentiveness by the president, resulting in a poor appreciation of how badly things were going in the war zone. However, accounts of Lyndon Johnson's approach to the Vietnam War point in the opposite direction, toward a level of concern that verged on obsession. In the case of George Bush, delegation should not be confused with a lack of information; reports of serious problems in the field reached the president in a timely manner.Footnote 32 At most, then, leadership style—more specifically, a hands-off approach to wartime leadership—might delay or discourage a thorough reassessment of a troubled strategic approach. Yet the Vietnam experience suggests that presidential detachment and delegation are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions to sustain an inflexible war strategy. President Johnson appreciated how badly the war was going, despite claims to the contrary by his military commander, General William Westmoreland. We need to look elsewhere for the answers to the puzzle, although I will return at the end to how we should understand the role played by presidents' personal qualities.
Limited War, High Stakes, and the Impossibility of Withdrawal
The magnitude of a military conflict—whether the nation is engaged in limited or total war—poses differing political challenges in a democratic society. Strategic theorists usually define total war in terms of both a nation's political objectives and the degree of social mobilization required to wage it successfully.Footnote 33 Total wars seek the destruction of an adversary's political system and basis for mounting a threat, a task that, if the foe possesses comparable resources, requires the full use of the nation's economic capacity and broad popular engagement. To allow for the reallocation of resources to support the war effort, other large public projects will be deferred. This was expressed vividly by Franklin D. Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor when he announced that “Doctor New Deal” had given way to “Doctor Win-the-War.”Footnote 34 Only when a democratic nation faces a clear threat to its survival will its citizens accept the sacrifices that total wars entail. Where such an existential menace presents itself—World War II being the paradigmatic example—political leaders find it relatively straightforward to maintain public support for even a lengthy and costly war effort.
Limited wars raise a more difficult political problem. Adversaries in limited conflicts do not pose a menace to the nation's survival; destruction of the enemy state may not be the objective (indeed, there may not be an enemy state, if the foes are insurgents). The use of force instead aims to secure such lesser goals as acquiring territory (e.g., the 1898 Spanish-American War), sustaining a friendly government in the face of aggression (Korea in 1950) or insurgency (South Vietnam in the 1960s), or restoring the territorial integrity of a friendly state (Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War). Although a limited war will not disrupt the economy or necessitate that all other political projects be deferred, the task of generating and sustaining popular support is more challenging. The citizenry is much more likely to doubt the necessity for war in the first instance and to feel little investment in the conflict as it proceeds. For much of the public the war entails no sacrifice, particularly if it is conducted without recourse to conscription.
For political leaders who need to generate public and legislative support for a limited war, one solution is to boost the stakes through rhetoric—to produce the moral equivalent of total war. If the conflict at hand does not rise to the level of a struggle for survival, then the artful use of language must make it appear otherwise.Footnote 35 This is most readily accomplished when the popular mind is predisposed to see the nation as engaged already in an existential struggle. Leaders need then only establish a linkage. Through rhetorical craftsmanship, the limited use of force becomes part of a broader struggle in which the survival of “our way of life” seems imperiled. Their rhetorical task has been abetted, moreover, by a popular culture in the United States that both reflects a pervasive sense of vulnerability to threats from abroad and readily embraces military supremacy as a cornerstone of American national identity and has “outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force.”Footnote 36
Leaders also need to justify to themselves the use of force in limited wars. The decision to go to war is not taken lightly. If the nation is attacked, of course, the moral question resolves itself: any American president would fight after a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11. But where leaders exercise initiative—where they choose whether or not to commence hostilities or join an ongoing war—they face a far greater burden. Here, too, the decision to go to war becomes more palatable if leaders are convinced the conflict is part of a wider struggle that the nation cannot afford to lose.
Reflecting these political and personal needs, Presidents Johnson and Bush chose expansive rhetoric to explain their decisions to go to war. Johnson understood (and was warned by his advisers) that it would be difficult to persuade the American people of the necessity to expend lives and treasure merely to preserve an authoritarian regime in South Vietnam. In choosing to escalate the American commitment, he appreciated from the outset the limited nature of the war. The United States sought to confine it primarily to Vietnam, north and south, and did not aim to overthrow the established communist government in the north. The president wanted to use force as a means of leverage that would compel the North Vietnamese and their communist backers to negotiate a solution that would preserve an independent, non-communist government in the south. Nor did Johnson propose full-scale national mobilization, the course some of his advisers preferred.Footnote 37 Notwithstanding the limited nature of the military effort, though, Johnson viewed and defended the war as part of a much larger, indeed epic, struggle. The United States and other democratic nations were engaged in a global contest with the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and other communist nations. The struggle was as much a battle of will as ideology. For Johnson, a member of the generation that had lived through the Munich crisis in 1938, aggression had to be resisted at the earliest opportunity.Footnote 38 To accept defeat in Vietnam, he maintained, would encourage the advance of the enemy, inviting further subversion and insurgency at other vulnerable points, the fall of one nation leading inexorably to the fall of the next.
George W. Bush likewise adopted a sweeping justification for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration realized that it might be hard to persuade domestic public and international opinion of the need for war. With those directly responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks still on the loose in Afghanistan or possibly Pakistan, Iraq might be perceived as a diversion from the primary threat. In part to offset that impression, Bush and his advisers keenly pursued any evidence of a connection between the two.Footnote 39 Whether or not Saddam Hussein's regime had been complicit in terrorist attacks against the United States, the president forcefully connected the invasion to the larger war against terror he had proclaimed after 9/11. The reasons he offered for the invasion presumed such a connection. On one side, Saddam Hussein's regime represented a grave if indirect threat of future terror attacks: the weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that his scientists and military allegedly had stockpiled might be passed along to terrorists. On the other side, in freeing the Iraqis from dictatorship and establishing a pluralistic democracy in the heart of the Middle East/Islamic world, the United States would establish a positive political alternative to fundamentalist regimes.Footnote 40 With Iraq at the center of both the danger and the hope, the war became vital to American security.
The justifications that presidents use to engender support for a limited war have ongoing strategic repercussions. Once a president defines success in war as indispensable to national security, he cannot rationalize anything less than victory. This does not pose a problem if American forces prevail and secure the political and military objectives the president has identified.Footnote 41 However, should military intervention prove less successful, resulting in a protracted conflict with mounting American losses, a president cannot then choose to disengage or withdraw. As public support begins to weaken in the face of a battlefield quagmire, moreover, a president typically ratchets up the rhetoric in an effort to undercut opposition to the war. Thus, when Iraq began to spiral into chaos in 2005–2006, Bush invoked apocalyptic scenarios about the consequences of leaving the country in the hands of extremists bent on destroying America:
Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions…. Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On September 11th, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities. For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq.Footnote 42
A president faced with a failed war policy he has initiated leaves himself, by his own words, literally no way out. Defeat would be catastrophic for the United States. In sum, the rhetoric a president deploys to gain and sustain political support for war effectively forecloses one of the three strategic alternatives that might be adopted in the face of a stalemate.Footnote 43
Public opinion may also reinforce a president's determination not to withdraw in the face of military stalemate. Both the Vietnam and Iraq wars became increasingly unpopular over time, particularly as political elites turned against the conflicts. Yet segments of the public continued to back the president's policy. Evidence suggests that presidents looked to these supporters, despite their minority status, to validate a steadfast course. Lyndon Johnson paid close attention to the mail received at the White House, which was far more hawkish than public opinion overall.Footnote 44 George Bush reached out to the families of soldiers who have been killed in Iraq—at least when the relatives did not condemn the war—and stressed his determination to redeem their sacrifice. Selective attention to parts of the public serves to confirm a president's belief that the war is too important to lose.
Given the political and psychic investment presidents make in wars that degenerate into stalemate, withdrawal is only an option for their successors. Richard Nixon sharply reduced the American troop presence in Vietnam, though it took him most of his first term to do so, and eventually concluded a peace agreement with Hanoi that was largely the same as the one the Johnson administration nearly reached in its last months. That disengagement from stalemate requires a change of political leadership, George W. Downs has suggested, seems to hold true in cross-national terms. Leaders who initiate military action find it too difficult to cut their losses.Footnote 45
Foreclosing Massive Escalation
A major increase in military effort represents the other potential strategic response to stalemate, yet presidents have not pursued escalation. Several factors have contributed to their refusal to embrace full mobilization of American military resources. Unlike the withdrawal option, which appears foreclosed in any limited war by the rhetorical moves presidents make to justify American intervention, escalation has been prevented by obstacles that are best seen as historically contingent: they reflect the particular circumstances of the Vietnam and Iraq wars rather than necessary or general factors arising in all such conflicts. I include here domestic political calculations and civil-military relations. Only one element—mounting public opposition as a war drags on and casualties mount—stands as a constraint likely to check any president considering full-scale mobilization in the face of a military stalemate in a limited war.
To begin with politics on the home front, Presidents Johnson and Bush launched their limited wars while undertaking substantial domestic initiatives that carried a steep price tag. Johnson sought to fulfill his vision of the Great Society by eradicating poverty, erasing the social and economic damage left by the sordid history of racial discrimination, rebuilding cities, and expanding health care for the elderly. All these things cost money, and it was doubtful whether even the rapidly growing American economy of the 1960s could afford simultaneously a domestic program that rivaled the New Deal and a major foreign war. Certainly, Johnson himself understood that Vietnam could destroy the Great Society: fiscal conservatives in Congress would not tolerate massive deficits and would likely oppose major tax increases.Footnote 46 But to abandon his agenda of social reform risked splitting the fragile Democratic coalition, held together at the time more by the glue of federal social spending than any common principles. George W. Bush had pushed through large, nominally temporary tax cuts shortly before the 9/11 attacks, and the cuts coupled with a sluggish economy resulted in a sharp increase in the federal deficit. If the United States had to sustain a force of several hundred thousand troops in Iraq indefinitely while also undertaking an ongoing campaign in Afghanistan, total defense outlays would rise sharply. He would then face a political dilemma: either the deficit would mount, making him vulnerable to Democratic charges of fiscal irresponsibility, or he would be forced to endorse tax increases that would antagonize his political base. Of note, even with a limited military commitment in Iraq, the Bush administration understated the cost of the war to forestall opposition demands to end the “temporary” tax cuts.Footnote 47
Interestingly, both presidents practiced what Stephen Skowronek terms the “politics of articulation,” a situation in which presidents must juggle the competing demands of the often-fractious dominant party coalition.Footnote 48 The requirements of coalition maintenance seem to collide sharply with the demands for full mobilization in a major war.Footnote 49 The former may entail various “side payments” to policy seekers in the party coalition that could take the form of increased social expenditures or tax benefits. Neither is consistent with an economy on a war-footing. In part for the sake of their domestic agenda, then, presidents confronted by a stalled military venture eschewed full-scale mobilization as a strategic option.
Another parallel between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq involves the state of civil-military relations, best described as chilly, in the period leading up to military intervention.Footnote 50 When Robert McNamara became Secretary of Defense in 1961 and set out to reform the Pentagon, he won few friends among the military leadership. Civilian defense officials in the early 1960s harbored deep skepticism about the capacity of the military to adapt to new challenges such as counterinsurgency warfare. Similar misgivings about whether the military could respond to new technologies and different threats marked the advent of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary in 2001. Rumsfeld and his neoconservative advisers had watched with dismay during the 1990s as uniformed commanders took increasingly public stands on the appropriateness of American military commitments (opposing intervention in Kosovo in 1999, for example) and insisted on defining narrow conditions under which forces might be sent into combat. To Rumsfeld and other civilian Pentagon leaders, the military command had become too assertive in “pushing back” against civilian direction, threatening the principle of civilian control.Footnote 51
In both cases, pre-war civilian skepticism spilled over during the ensuing military conflict into doubts about military recommendations for the commitment of larger forces and the application of violence on a wider scale. During the Vietnam War, the Joint Chiefs of Staff differed sharply with the civilian leadership over such matters as the bombing campaign against North Vietnam. The military developed a list of strategic targets and proposed an immediate, intensive campaign to destroy them quickly to undermine the north's capacity to support the insurgency. But the Johnson administration insisted upon a gradual increase in the bombing effort, accompanied by pauses in which to make diplomatic overtures.Footnote 52 Civilian-military differences extended to the conduct of the ground war: General Westmoreland repeatedly asked for more troops to make possible wider offensive operations, while Defense Secretary McNamara saw this as a recipe for higher casualties without yielding victory.Footnote 53 After Westmoreland predicted that the war might continue for another decade if US forces were not increased, the Joint Chiefs recommended attacks on enemy sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia, wider bombing of North Vietnam, and the mobilization of reserves—moves representing a shift toward total war.Footnote 54 The Johnson administration rejected these recommendations, as it did the Chiefs' proposal in the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive to send an additional 200,000 troops.Footnote 55
Sharp civilian-military differences over necessary force levels also marked the Iraq War, beginning with the plans for the invasion.Footnote 56 Even as uniformed planners considered an invasion on the scale of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was convinced that lighter forces could capitalize on American technological superiority to topple Saddam Hussein. Some military leaders worried that the troops would be insufficient for what are termed “Phase IV” or post-combat stability operations. The division became public and highly visible shortly before the invasion when Army Chief of Staff Shinseki responded to a question in a congressional hearing about a possible post-invasion insurgency by suggesting that as many as 400,000 troops might be needed to secure Iraq. For his troubles, Shinseki was repudiated by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and soon shunted off to early retirement.Footnote 57 The message to other commanders could hardly be mistaken: call for more troops at your peril. When the level of violence in Iraq increased following the invasion, then, they did not request a major build-up of American forces.Footnote 58 Whether they might have done so in a different political climate—one of civilian-military comity—is another matter.
The frayed condition of civilian-military relations in both eras meant that the advocates for escalation who in wartime tend to boast the greatest legitimacy had lost the ear of the president. I do not mean to suggest that the military viewpoint was necessarily correct. Many studies of Vietnam question whether General Westmoreland or the Joint Chiefs ever had a cohesive operational plan for victory, even if the president had acceded to all their requests for more troops or widening the scope of military operations.Footnote 59 As for Iraq, the question of whether Shinseki was correct cannot be answered definitively, although much of the chaos that followed the initial American invasion would have been contained had more troops been available.Footnote 60 More to the point, military recommendations for much larger troop deployment, correct or not, fell on deaf civilian ears. Given the political cost that escalation would have imposed, such a course required champions, and in Vietnam and Iraq alike those champions lacked the standing needed to make the case for this strategic alternative to stalemate.
At some point in any protracted limited war, full-scale mobilization to overcome military stalemate ceases to be a viable political option for a president. The broad public backing for the initial intervention erodes as the lack of progress becomes evident and the casualties mount.Footnote 61 With some effort presidents can forestall congressional efforts to end the war by terminating funds or establishing a withdrawal timetable or deadline.Footnote 62 But public opinion would not stand for a major escalation. President Johnson understood this in 1968 when he rejected the military's recommendation to send several hundred thousand more troops to Vietnam. He had just suffered a stunning political reverse in the New Hampshire Democratic primary when he barely outpolled Senator Eugene McCarthy.Footnote 63 President Bush likewise appreciated when he ordered the troop surge in 2007 that the time had passed for a commitment of force on the order of what General Shinseki had proposed four years earlier. He could not expect the new Democratic majority in Congress to agree to the major increase in the size of the US military that would be required; imposing conscription was not even on the agenda. The Pentagon struggled to scrape together just the few brigades he decided to send to Iraq, and military leaders worried over the impact on future military commitments.Footnote 64
The Personal Dimension Revisited: From Hubris to Making a Virtue of Necessity
In offering answers to one puzzle—why presidents remain wedded to a failed strategic commitment in the face of military stalemate—the foregoing discussion points us again toward another I raised at the outset. Recall that much of the presidency literature presumes presidents will be strategic and opportunistic. And for an office that faces many external political and institutional constraints, the use of force stands out as a realm in which the chief executive enjoys great latitude. How is it that presidents, as sophisticated political actors who appreciate the need to keep their options open, have allowed themselves to be caught in a situation with no viable alternatives? In both cases, moreover, the president had before him cautionary historical examples of predecessors who had become captives to the limited wars on which they had embarked. Johnson well knew that Truman's presidency had been undone by a stalled war in Asia; George W. Bush could look back at the price Johnson had paid for a quagmire.
Several possible answers present themselves, and some bring us back to personal qualities of those who occupy the Oval Office. To begin with, in sizing up the probable consequences of military action, presidents do not see it as forcing them into either/or choices about their larger policy agenda. Presidents who choose military intervention in limited wars do not expect it to foreclose their political options. Notwithstanding their rhetoric, they view the conflicts as limited; resources remain for other important items on the presidential agenda. Personal confidence, another attribute that most presidents share, also plays a part. They expect to win a victory over a much weaker adversary, which in turn will yield political capital that should make it easier to achieve the rest of their priorities. Under certain circumstances, moreover, confidence may morph into something more pernicious: hubris. This seems particularly likely after a president has gained a significant success and finds he rides a crest of public approval. Such was the case with both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush. The former pushed through major civil rights legislation in the months after he assumed the presidency and won a landslide victory in the 1964 election that seemed a mandate to continue pursuing all of his policy priorities, including a determination to thwart communism in Southeast Asia; the latter saw the US military topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan with evident ease and continued to command strong post-9/11 public support. Such conditions seem to invite even shrewd, calculating leaders to underestimate the long-term risks associated with their policy choices and to overlook the possibility that their decisions will tie their hands down the road. Overconfidence appears to be especially common in wars, and characterized American decision-making about Vietnam under Johnson in 1964–1965 and Bush administration planning for Iraq in 2002–2003.Footnote 65
Strategic inertia emerges, then, as the personal agency that a president exercises in a limited war becomes increasingly constricted. The initial decisions he made in pursuing military intervention preclude the strategic alternatives to continuity even when a new course would serve the national interest and possibly his own political prospects. On one side, he justified the war to the American people (and likely to himself) in a way that will not permit disengagement—such a path would place too much at risk. On the other, he insisted on continuing his domestic program to please core constituencies and dismissed military voices that warned a greater military commitment would be needed. By the time he acknowledges that the war is going badly, he has lost too much popular support to secure the backing needed for a much greater military effort. Presidency scholars who stress strategic calculation and military intervention as opportunism have it right—to a point. So, too, do other writers who have expressed alarm over the sweeping powers of the commander in chief and the political exploitation of national security emergencies. What the literature fails to appreciate, though, is that presidential action yields consequences that leave its protagonist with no way out.
When the war stalls, nothing is left for a president to do but to persist, to stay the course, to “tough it out.” With no strategic alternatives, firmness becomes a substitute for strategy. Rather than admit that the strategic cupboard is bare, the president sets his jaw and pronounces the need to demonstrate our will against a determined adversary. To his supporters, he appears resolute in the nation's darkest hour, Churchill's Battle-of-Britain model of leadership brought to life again.Footnote 66 To his critics (and their numbers steadily grow), he seems to have lost touch with reality, unable to recognize when a war has been lost, stubborn to the point of obtuseness, as he continues to steer the nation on a path to disaster.Footnote 67 Both perspectives overlook the key point: the president's posture is defined by his earlier actions, not by a personal quality that appears as either resoluteness or mad fixation. Doggedness is a president's public face when his choices are exhausted.
This inquiry into the roots of strategic inertia takes on added political significance as another president wrestles with another limited war. In his first months in office, President Barack Obama decided to send additional troops to Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies have backed a fragile regime against the Taliban insurgency in a protracted struggle that has spilled over the border into Pakistan. Conditions on the ground suggest the conflict will continue for years, raising the prospect that this president will also face a military stalemate. Perhaps mindful of what such conflicts did to his predecessors, Obama has tried to hold open his options. Yet the strategic alternatives have already started to narrow. The American commander, General Stanley A. McChrystal, identified a range of deployment choices that called for as many 80,000 additional troops. But with the president pursuing a sweeping and expensive domestic agenda and his core Democratic supporters at most tepid in their commitment to the war, the White House quickly removed such an increase (which would have more than doubled the American force level) from the discussion.Footnote 68 Obama already has faced calls from his political allies to draw down American forces in favor of an emphasis on targeted counterterrorist special operations and an expanded training mission to improve the effectiveness of the Afghan army. On the other hand, while avoiding the kind of irrevocable rhetorical investment in a limited war that Johnson or Bush made, Obama spoke of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity.” It is difficult to see how he could reconcile that language with something approaching early disengagement. Not surprisingly, then, on December 1, 2009 he chose strategic continuity, sending 30,000 additional troops in what amounts to a close copy of the Bush surge in Iraq. Thus we witness another president who, by his own early words and decisions, may soon find himself with little strategic choice but to stay the course.
