Korean War: F-86 Sabre versus MiG-15

In War: Resolution

By Victor Davis Hanson
Claremont Institute, December 14, 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

We seem to think our generation is unique in experiencing the heartbreak of an error-plagued war. We forget that victory in every war goes to the side that commits fewer mistakes, not to the side that makes no mistakes. A perfect military in a flawless war never existed. Rather than sink into unending recrimination over Iraq, we should reflect about comparable blunders in America's past wars and how they were corrected.

Take one of this war's most controversial issues, intelligence failures. Supposedly we went to war in 2003 with little accurate information about either Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or its endemic religious factionalism. Have lapses of this magnitude been unusual in past wars?

American intelligence officers missed the almost self-evident Pearl Harbor attack. After fighting for four long years we were completely surprised by the Soviets' efforts to absorb Eastern Europe. Almost no one had a clue about the Communist invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Neither the CIA nor the State Department had much inkling that Saddam Hussein would gobble up Kuwait in August 1990.

At the battlefield level, America's intelligence failures are even more shocking. Perhaps the two costliest intelligence lapses of World War II preceded the Battle of the Bulge and Okinawa. Americans had no idea of the scope, timing, or aims of the massive German surprise attack through the Ardennes in December 1944. At Okinawa, American intelligence officers grievously underestimated the size, position, and nature of the Japanese deployment.

At the geostrategic level, American diplomats have had to make devil's bargains far more morally suspect than going into Iraq. General George Patton and others lamented that World War II had broken out over saving the free peoples of Eastern Europe, only to end with the Yalta accords ensuring their enslavement by an erstwhile American ally whose military we had supplied lavishly.

In many of our wars this country has committed strategic mistakes far greater in number and toll than anything seen in Iraq. Perhaps the worst was to commit thousands of American crewmen to daylight bombing raids over occupied Europe in 1942-43. Even more inexplicable was Admiral Ernest King's decision in 1942 not to use American destroyers and destroyer-escorts to shepherd merchant ships across the Atlantic to Great Britain.
 

B-17 Flying Fortress

B-24 Liberator

Had General Douglas MacArthur in late 1950 listened to both superiors and subordinates, he would not have sent thousands of G.I.s with long vulnerable supply lines into the far reaches of wintry North Korea. When Mao ordered the massive People's Army to invade, the longest retreat in the history of U.S. forces ensued, with thousands of American casualties.

In World War I, despite our assurances that our well-trained riflemen could broach enemy positions, seasoned British and French commanders warned novice American planners of the lethality of German rapid-firing artillery, machine guns, and poison gas. Americans died in droves before we got it right by early 1918. In World War II, D-Day was carefully planned and a brilliant success; its immediate aftermath was a near disaster. Within a week of the landings, Allied army groups stalled in the hedgerows for over six weeks. Apparently no planner had thought much about the terrain or navigability of the bocage.

America has a reputation for technological prowess, but in nearly every one of our major wars American troops initially entered combat with arms vastly inferior to their more experienced enemies. In this regard Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War, and the present Middle East conflicts are exceptional; these were our first major land engagements in which American weaponry has been at the outset superior in almost every category.

The United States went to war in 1941 equipped with far fewer aircraft carriers in the Pacific theater than the Japanese. Our Wildcat front-line fighters were inferior to the Japanese Zero. American-designed Lee, Grant, and Stuart tanks were intrinsically inferior to most contemporary German models, which had far better armor and armament. With the exception of the superb M-1 rifle, it is hard to rank any American weapons system as comparable to those used by the Wehrmacht, at least until 1944-45. The American military learned immediately in Korea that our first-generation jet fighters — F-80 Shooting Stars — could not match Russian MiG-15s.
 

Mitsubishi Zero

Have there ever been lapses in military leadership like the ones that purportedly mar our Iraq effort? The so-called "Revolt of the Generals" against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was nothing compared to the "Revolt of the Admirals" that led to Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson's forced resignation in the midst of the bitter first year of the Korean War.

Critics of the Iraq war wonder how a workmanlike Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, on whose watch Abu Ghraib occurred, had obtained command of all coalition ground forces in the first place, and later why General George Casey persisted in tactics that were aimed more at downsizing our forces than going after the enemy and fighting a vigorous war of counterinsurgency. But surely these armchair critics can acknowledge that such controversies over personnel pale in comparison to past storms.

World War II military historians cannot quite fathom how and why Major General Lloyd Fredendall was ever given an entire corps in the North Africa campaign. His uninspired generalship led to the disaster at the Kasserine Pass and his own immediate removal. Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner was bewildered by the unexpected Japanese resistance on Okinawa. The generalship of Mark Clark in Italy was often disastrous.

In comparison to past conflicts, the wonder is not that a gifted officer like David Petraeus came into real prominence relatively late in the present war, but that his unique talents were recognized quickly enough to allow him the command and latitude to alter the entire tactical approach to the war in Iraq.

Until the defeat in Vietnam, there was a sort of tragic acceptance of military error as inherent in war. Americans felt that ultimately the American system of transparency and self-criticism would correct wartime mistakes. Pearl Harbor and its attendant conspiracy theories may have set the Greatest Generation back, but such losses, humiliation, and suspicion were hardly considered tantamount to American defeat.

So we plowed on, accepting that in war choices are typically between the bad and worse. It was foolhardy not to escort convoys in early World War II. Admiral King believed that such a commitment would divert precious assets from the Pacific War. The Sherman tank trapped and incinerated thousands of Americans when torched by Panthers and Tigers. But Patton saw that its dependability, speed, and sheer numbers offered countervailing advantages in racing toward the Rhine.
 

U.S. M4 Sherman tank

Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger

Panzerkampfwagen VII König Tiger with Sherman behind

By the same token, for every purported blunder in Iraq, there is at least an understandable reason why errors occurred in the context of human imperfection, emotion, and fear. Such considerations do not mitigate the enormity of military mistakes, but they should foster understanding of how and why they occur. Had we kept together the Republican Guard, charges of perpetuating the agents of Saddam's genocidal regime would have followed. Granted, there were not enough American troops to close borders, monitor ammunition depots, and maintain order. But as a result, there were enough deployed elsewhere in the world.

When MiG-15s surprisingly proved superior to American F-80s, our Korean War planners took a pass on blaming each other and instead deployed with blinding speed the superb F-86 Sabrejet. Only the lethal experience during 1942 and 1943 in the skies above Germany ensured that improved bombers, tactics, and escort fighters would arise to devastate the Third Reich by late 1944 and 1945. We are relieved that recent emphasis on counterinsurgency under General Petraeus has brought radical improvement in Iraq, but much of our current wisdom accrued from the hard years of fighting between 2003 and 2006.

We may have started in Iraq with the naïve belief that thin-skinned Humvees were simply updated Jeeps good enough to transport personnel behind the lines. But we quickly learned that in a war with no lines they became underarmored coffins. Frenzied development efforts produced new vehicles like the Strykers, MRAPs (mine resistant, ambush protected), and Rhinos.
 

Stryker in Iraq, 2006

  
An MRAP vehicle

There is no need to document the stupendous strategic and tactical blunders that led to Saddam's ignominious defeat. But the supposedly sophisticated jihadists have made just as many mistakes. In a self-proclaimed war of Islamic liberation, al-Qaeda in Iraq has mutilated, butchered, and terrorized a once largely sympathetic population. As a result, a formerly receptive Sunni tribal community has turned against the jihadists and joined with American infidels.

In past wars there was recognition of factors beyond human control. The star-crossed and disastrous Dieppe raid of August 1942 did not mean that D-Day two years later had to fail. When in March 1945 maverick General Curtis LeMay sent high-altitude precision B-29 bombers carrying napalm in low over Tokyo, with little if any armament, the expected American bloodbath did not follow. By contrast the American media went into near hysterics during the so-called "pause" in the three-week victory over Saddam, when an unforeseen sandstorm temporarily stalled our advance.
 

B-29 Superfortress

Tokyo after the firebombing of March 10, 1945

Somehow we forget that going into the heart of the ancient caliphate, taking out a dictator in three weeks, and then staying on to foster a constitutional republic amid a sea of enemies like Iran and Syria and duplicitous friends like Jordan and Saudi Arabia was beyond the ability of any of our friends or enemies.

But we no longer easily accept human imperfections. We care less about correcting problems than assessing blame. We fail to assume that the enemy makes as many mistakes but addresses them less skillfully. We do not acknowledge the role of fate and chance in war. Most importantly, we are not fixed on victory as the only acceptable outcome.

The Vietnam War was not only the first modern American defeat, but also the last, and so its evocation turns hysterical precisely because its outcome was so unusual. Later victories in Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, and the Balkans persuaded Americans that war could be redefined as something in which the use of force ends quickly, is welcomed by locals, costs little, and easily thwarts tyranny.

We also live in an age of instant communications. Sensationalism was always the stuff of war reporting, but today it is with us in real time, 24/7. Those relentless news alerts ultimately impart a sense of confusion and bewilderment about what war is. The result is that the American public is too insecure to believe that we can rectify our mistakes, but too arrogant to admit that our generation might make any in the first place.

American statesmen need to provide constant explanations to a public not well versed in history of what misfortunes to expect when they take the nation to war. Americans should be told that what is reported in the first 24 hours may not be true after a week's retrospection, and that the alternative to the bad choice is usually only the far worse.

Only that way can we reestablish our national wartime objective as victory, a goal that brings with it the acceptance of tragic errors as well as appreciation of heroic and brilliant conduct. The Iraq war and the larger struggle against the anti-American jihadists can still be won.
 

AR  This attempt to rationalize and in effect to glorify the obscenities of war does not really work for me. Here as my attempt to redress the balance a little is a pleasant Pirelli calendar image that may go some way to remove the bad taste left by so much death and destruction.