The Mask of Command
Keegan, John
Does the West have a problem making war, and if so, what is it? Are we too fierce, spoiling for the clatter of advancing armored columns, or do we love peace excessively? In the last dozen years the...
...Throwing his army at the center of the Persian line in an opposed crossing of the river Granicus, he dismounts to command the attack himself...
...Waterloo is just as gory: dehydration, shock, loss of blood, and musket fire that tore flesh without knocking men off their feet...
...But he never knew how to conduct its day-to-day operations...
...he treated civilian authority with the respect it constitutionally deserves...
...We are, he thinks, ignorant of battlefield realities and even more dangerously—now that we are armed with nuclear weapons—prisoner to such ancient ideas as heroism...
...Popular will, as expressed in treaties, new protective defenses, and advances in conventional explosives and delivery systems, points the way to a future in which combatants, noncombatants, and nuclear freeze proponents alike can once again look forward to being killed by nonnuclear weapons...
...What we may hope for from totalitarian regimes is not explained...
...That democracies can act irrationally is a truth that has been known for almost as long as we've known that a superior practical system is hard to find...
...As supreme commander, Hitler never experienced these things...
...He, deluded by the apparent instantaneities of the radio, telex and telephone . . . believed that he saw with the immediacy of the men on the spot...
...Today, the world hasn't gone to nuclear war, and probably won't...
...Unlike Schell, however, Keegan's chief interest is not in pushing policy, either foolish or wise...
...And in Keegan's shadowy world, where leaders do not share our risk, yet remain possessed of a vestigial desire for heroic virtue—and where voters can sometimes be irrational—democracies with nuclear weapons need a spiritual overhaul...
...As a result, history's answer to the book's arch question—whether to lead from the front—turned from the path Alexander took...
...Popular passions are much less dangerous than the aggressiveness of our ambitious, unaccountable opponents...
...Keegan describes the freshly plowed fields wetted by recent rainfall...
...When frustrated by his engineers' failure to reduce the double-walled Indian city of Multan, Alexander leads a small group over the rampart, and, momentarily isolated, takes an arrow to the lung...
...Instead, in his most recent book, The Mask of Command, he argues that the course of history has inexorably driven us to the sticking point: humanity itself must transform or die...
...Keegan approves: the great captain exposed himself to hostile fire to see and be seen...
...Keegan thus glides, as befits a liberal Briton, over the possibility that the Hellenic imperialism Alexander brought into Egypt, Asia Minor, and India was better than the despotic rule of Darius and his Persian line...
...Keegan dismisses the obvious answer—the consent of the governed in free nations, and the sheer force of tyrannical rule elsewhere—because modern leaders like Truman, Nixon, and Carter still try to invoke their own personal experiences under arms "to heighten their military authority...
...They need "POST-HEROIC LEADERSHIP...
...In the last dozen years the British author John Keegan, formerly senior military instructor at the Royal Military Academy and now defense correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, has written two Seth Cropsey is deputy undersecretary of the Navy...
...Grant chews his cigar, takes a nip or two, and puts down the rebellion...
...neither is the notion that something's got to give or else...
...It defies common sense and the facts to think that popular passion, inflamed by the Macedonian Alexander's example, eggs us on to fight in these smaller conflicts...
...Even by Keegan's standards, there shouldn't be cause to complain about the result...
...Keegan is wrong...
...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1988This isn't news, and there needs no author come from the Daily Telegraph to tell us that Ulysses Grant mirrors the American regime, but Keegan does anyway...
...And combat machinery had neither radically increased killing power, nor altered the distance at which opposing armies could engage one another...
...In the historically determined world of Mask, Wellington's mechanical submission to duty is a nail in the casket of ancient glory...
...Keegan commits the usual mistake of utopians: half a loaf will not do...
...The trenches of the Somme numerically foreshadow Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka: along the twenty-mile front in Picardy, the British suffered 21,000 dead in the first hour of their assault of German lines in July 1916—almost four times the number of Marines killed in the extremely bloody three-week struggle for Iwo Jima...
...Published in 1976, Keegan's The Face of Battle aimed "to tackle again the concept of the 'battle piece' . . . into which [combat description] has been set for so long by custom and unreflective imitation...
...But even his modest proposal would throttle the patient...
...Agincourt was fought the morning of October 25, 1415...
...Cleverly, then, Keegan praises the Strategic Defense Initiative: it is a protective measure at a moment when human nature must change its aggressiveness to something less toothy...
...In fact, the wars of the past forty years—smaller, regional, and unconventional—are likely to be the wars of the next forty...
...In one sense, Hitler did grasp that reality, seeing that combat on land had become nearly as mobile and quick-moving as war at sea...
...But something had changed...
...Indeed, one of the book's themes is its blistering attack on today's military reformers who yearn for a system of general staff officers protected from operational necessities so they can ponder great (and small) military questions unsullied by the corrosive influence of reality...
...The reader is asked to suppose that nothing good came of this...
...Through Keegan's eyes, Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme are as graphically riveting as one could imagine without a TV reporter—whose camera Keegan's pen surpasses...
...Our problem is defending, not restraining, our democracy...
...More important, the modern state had evolved into an impassioned, demanding taskmaster...
...To Keegan it is good news when a people can resist the temptation to fuss over hero or war chief, a tendency "rooted in the subconscious of . . . traditional societies...
...Taking passion out of politics equals getting rid of politics...
...Keegan sketches a man as ill-equipped to command as a web is to hold water: obsessed with idiosyncratic notions of honor, wed to the mindset of a war fought in his youth, contemptuous of those who had not, as he had, suffered wounds in that war, unable to delegate authority, ill-served by a tiny cluster of obsequious cronies, capricious, and powerfully adept at creating an atmosphere among his subordinates of paranoia and mistrust...
...The two commanders depended alike on animal-drawn transportation once their logistical lines crossed the beach from the sea...
...He praises in others the ability to sense battle, a thing he happens to excel at describing—the rolling eye of a terrified horse, the sound of a thousand armored knights clinking across a muddy wash, the stench of decay on a littered battlefield...
...Lightly armed English archers group in twos and threes, picking off heavier French men-at-arms with an ax stroke here, a hammer blow there, and a death-dealing stab through the visor slits or the soft points of body armor...
...Keegan's Alexander represents the hero...
...in fact, nuclear powers take elaborate steps to shield top people from the physical consequences of theirultimate orders...
...These invocations appear to Keegan to support shared risk as the true foundation of legitimate political authority...
...The king is smart as well as brave...
...The thought that we can blow ourselves to smithereens is not new...
...Indeed, judging from the West's moral and editorial tussles with global responsibility, the warfighting spirit of even our most eloquent leaders is far from dominant in making policy...
...With Hitler dead and burned Keegan concludes...
...Keegan steers clear of proclaiming one...
...popular books that implicitly answer those questions...
...Today's leaders never see the front at all...
...His dreadful legacy," laments Keegan, "was to ennoble savagery in the name of glory and to leave a model of command that far too many men of ambition sought to act out in the centuries to come...
...In the final pages of Mask, this means correcting democracy to replace passion with reason...
...In this sense, it is truly unfortunate that Mr...
...On the whole, Keegan's course tracks with Jonathan Schell's: The political and strategic reasons for wars occupy a distant, if at all visible, station behind the immediate bodily suffering of combat...
...True, the blind Homer bristles with spear after ash-shaftedspear that penetrate bronze helmets, slicing through bone and brain to hurl young men twitching into the dust...
...People's wars and popular government stifle heroic virtue, too...
...Alexander's empire collapsed and his successors consumed the remains...
...But Keegan focuses on later literature of war, which is, to him, all too tersely mechanical, and silent on how it really seems to those who fight...
...What then is the basis of their leadership...
...And once he assumed command of the Wehrmacht, where he could not see the actualities or be seen by his soldiers, he had no use for a "mask of command" at all...
...A contrasting model, the Duke of Wellington, faced many of the problems of command at Waterloo that Alexander did at Granicus and Gaugemela...
...Mask contains one essay each on four men who wore differing "masks" of command: Alexander, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler...
...the shivering lines of troops laced into their armor, and, suffering from diarrhea, unable to relieve themselves as they stood in place waiting for action...
...Armies had enlarged since antiquity, and in Keegan's opinion, shrunken political liberties had tipped the scales in favor of command at the expense of leadership...
...A recent Alexander addressed the practical question of reducing passions in politics: the great objective of Hamilton and the other Founders...
...Keegan's angle is that the technology of war has shifted the demands of political and military leadership so that once-heroic qualities such as risk-taking, initiative, and rhetoric are today's recipe for global cinders...
...and, Keegan says—overlooking Grant's later election to the presidency—his countrymen were, wisely, not over-impressed...
...Because leadership demanded it, and because there was no other way to understand events soon enough to affect them, both men risked close proximity to action...
...Absent also is the idea that Alexander's extension of Greek language, culture, and administration paved the way for other men and systems that would imitate his ambitions at universalism...
...Alexander rejects staff advice to engage the Persian fleet that threatens his lines of communication with home, and chooses instead to lay waste enemy naval bases on Asia Minor's west coast—an example of a naval power's vulnerability to the loss of bases which applies no less today than it did 2300 years ago...
...Keegan reserves his highest praise for Wellington and Grant's willingness to risk danger in order to see the tactical situation, listen for the hints volleying gunfire could offer, and learn firsthand what was actually happening...
Vol. 21 • September 1988 • No. 9
