Why are America's wars so often mismanaged? Can they be better managed to achieve victory? Questions such as these haunt many Americans as the Obama administration winds down more than a decade of victory-less warfare. One approach is to realize that total war and the total victory of the World War II variety are the exceptions, not the rule. Thus, the problem is to come to terms with limited wars and limited victory. This was the approach taken by William C. Martel in his 2011 Victory in War. He sought to operationalize “victory” in limited wars for scholars, National Security Council staff, and others tasked with analyzing and defining limited war aims. He provided sharper and clearer guidance on the different levels of “victory” in different circumstances at different levels of national commitment.
Andrew J. Polsky has taken a different route in Elusive Victory. He has focused on presidential leadership in war. Whether well or poorly managed, the president is responsible. The buck starts and stops in the Oval Office. How then does one define responsible wartime leadership? Polsky begins by defining victory as “the accomplishment of the identified goals” (p. 23). Successful war leaders are, therefore, agents who identify appropriate goals and overcome all “recurring challenges” to those goals (pp. 5–6). Unsuccessful war leaders are agents who identify inappropriate goals and/or fail to overcome one or more of the recurring challenges. In between successful and unsuccessful are all the degrees of more or less. In fine, the logic of victory provides Polsky with a template to analyze the wartime leadership of seven wartime presidents. It also provides the structure of his six chapters and has allowed him to write absolute gems of grand strategic analysis.
In Chapter 1 on the Civil War, Polsky is able to accent forcefully the grand strategic reasons for and implications of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863. In Chapter 2 on World War I, he zeros in on Woodrow Wilson's April 2, 1917, address to Congress requesting a declaration of war (pp. 96–98): how it exhibited all of Wilson's strengths and weaknesses and how it foreshadowed both his trouble at the peace conference and the failure of the Senate to ratify the League of Nations treaty. In Chapter 3 on World War II, the author downplays the significance of Franklin Roosevelt's December 8, 1941, “A Date Which Will Live in Infamy” speech by all but ignoring it. Instead, he focuses on the military and political reasons for the crucial November 1942 invasion of French North Africa (p. 174), while not forgetting to note critical details, such as the effectiveness of American submarines in the Pacific (p. 189). In Chapter 4 on Vietnam, Polsky zeros in on Lyndon Johnson's April 7, 1965, speech at Johns Hopkins University as distilling all that was wrong with not just his conduct of the war but the conduct of successive presidents. The ironic outcomes of the Têt offensive of 1968 are captured in the subheading, “The Mutual Disaster” (p. 240). In Chapter 5 on Iraq, the author sketches the deft leadership of George H. W. Bush during the 1990–91 Gulf War and the incomprehensible leadership of his son, George W. Bush, during the 2013 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. And, finally, in a short Chapter 6 on the Afghanistan War since 2008 under Barack Obama, Polsky carefully analyzes how the surface plausibility of the three options given to him by the Pentagon partially hid the fact that only the 30,000 troop “surge” was politically viable.
In sum, for students of grand strategy, Polsky's template is immensely productive. One starts with a solid definition of “victory” and a set of recurring challenges to probe each president's wartime leadership. Next, one identifies the relevant presidential goals, and then measures his success or failure in overcoming each challenge one after the other. I cannot say enough about the quality, the judiciousness, and the generosity of the insights Polsky produces by employing this template.
The one issue I have with the book is found in the Introduction and the Conclusion. In these two chapters, the recurring challenges are listed and developed. However, the list is never stabilized. His first list contains seven challenges: 1) decide to go to war, 2) prepare for war, 3) define political objectives, 4) direct military operations, 5) prepare for peace, 6) engage in supportive diplomacy, and 7) sustain popular support at home (pp. 5–6). But another list of six challenges is found on pages 22–25, and three “fumbled challenges” are found on page 30. Finally, on pages 341–53, five “puzzles” are listed, number three of which has five subheads. The overlap is considerable, and, when consolidated, the challenges are all well chosen and recurring. They are all drawn from the grand strategic analyses of the six chapters and, hence, well documented. But the reader should not have to compile the fully consolidated list.
On a different note, Polsky ends with unexpected irony in a short “Afterword: The Story behind the Book.” “My analysis” he concludes, “suggests, however, that presidents have too little power, not too much” (p. 352). “More than anything else,” he continues, “the record of wartime presidents underscores the limits of power: despite increasing capacity to inflict violence on foe, no president has achieved all of his objectives” (p. 357). This leads the author to reflect that “[t]he book I have written, then, has taken a very different turn. . . . [From a] liberal lament about excess of executive authority, this volume has a distinctly conservative cast. It expresses a profound sense of the limits of power” (p. 363). True, no doubt. But it might also signal the value of an open mind, pursuing analysis wherever it takes one.
Basically, what Polsky has written is a mirror of princes—or presidents, in this case. Elusive Victory is much less pedantic than Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier and much less cynical than Machiavelli's Prince. Taken as a whole, it is a very impressive grand strategic analysis of six American wars, well worth reading and studying.
