Stephen Biddle: War by Other Means
[Stephen Biddle is the Roger Hertog senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.]
Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, quotes the president expressing concern about the domestic political implications of military strategy in Afghanistan: "I can't lose the whole Democratic Party," he tells Sen. Lindsey Graham in defending his decision to announce July 2011 as the date for the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals....
This shouldn't be news. Good strategy has always been influenced by domestic politics. In World War II, for example, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall concluded that the right military strategy was to focus on Germany first, merely holding the line against Japan until the bigger threat was defeated in Europe; only after Germany was out of the way should the country swing forces east and deal with the Japanese. President Franklin D. Roosevelt opted instead for parallel offensives against both Germany and Japan at the same time -- in fact, under Roosevelt's policy the United States actually acted against Japan before it began its first attacks on German troops. Why? Among the more important reasons is that Roosevelt was worried that he would lose domestic political support for the war if he ignored the country that attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, fighting Germans instead. Most people today think the U.S. strategy in World War II was pretty successful. But if so, it was certainly not because it somehow isolated military planning from domestic politics. On the contrary, U.S. grand strategy in World War II was powerfully shaped by the president's need to sustain popular support at home....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, quotes the president expressing concern about the domestic political implications of military strategy in Afghanistan: "I can't lose the whole Democratic Party," he tells Sen. Lindsey Graham in defending his decision to announce July 2011 as the date for the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals....
This shouldn't be news. Good strategy has always been influenced by domestic politics. In World War II, for example, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall concluded that the right military strategy was to focus on Germany first, merely holding the line against Japan until the bigger threat was defeated in Europe; only after Germany was out of the way should the country swing forces east and deal with the Japanese. President Franklin D. Roosevelt opted instead for parallel offensives against both Germany and Japan at the same time -- in fact, under Roosevelt's policy the United States actually acted against Japan before it began its first attacks on German troops. Why? Among the more important reasons is that Roosevelt was worried that he would lose domestic political support for the war if he ignored the country that attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, fighting Germans instead. Most people today think the U.S. strategy in World War II was pretty successful. But if so, it was certainly not because it somehow isolated military planning from domestic politics. On the contrary, U.S. grand strategy in World War II was powerfully shaped by the president's need to sustain popular support at home....