Chains of Command

July 1, 1916, seven-thirty a.m., in the Somme region of France. Between the trenches, a sudden quiet descends. The rain, which had fallen half the night, has stopped. The guns, which had lashed furiously at the German lines for seven days, have fallen silent. It is as though time itself waits for the blow to fall.

Then, half-heard in the morning mist, a thin piping almost like bird song arises from the Allied trenches. The assault whistles are blowing along a twenty-four mile front.

Tens of thousands of British soldiers, most of them fresh from the Aldershot parade ground, climb over their own parapets into No Man's Land. They stand, each burdened with his sixty pounds of gear. They form lines, each no more than six feet from his neighbor. Together, and with agonizing slowness, the soldiers advance.

There is firing now from the German trenches. One soldier falls, then another, then ten. The German fire increases until it is a literal curtain of steel. To breach that curtain is to die.

Still the soldiers advance. Still they fall.

Miles from the chaos and death of the Somme front, Gen. Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British forces, is satisfied. At eight a.m. he records in his diary that his troops have everywhere captured the German trenches. By the end of the day, he professes no alarm at the casualties, which were "not high in view of the scale of the offensive."

By eight a.m., twenty thousand of Haig's troops have fallen. By the end of the day, sixty thousand. It is-as it has remained-the bloodiest single day in military history. It will be followed by months of fighting on the same field. At the end of the battle, the British and the Germans will be roughly where they were at the beginning. Only their armies will be different: a million soldiers, British, German, and French, will have died or been wounded.

Sir Douglas Haig was not, as human beings go, a bad person. He was deeply religious, honorable, honest through and through, physically fit, and handsome in a soldierly way. He was not a great or compassionate general, but, by the standards of the time, not a bad one either.

Haig did, it is true, have his flaws. In the age of the machine gun, he was obsessed with cavalry charges. He was inarticulate to the point of painfulness. He was stubborn. He did not learn from his mistakes. He was wildly optimistic, a mediocre strategist, and uneasy around his troops.

Yet Haig's greatest flaw was not-is not-even considered a flaw. It was an object of desire, sought by every military officer. It was honored by all, even those who died at the Somme. It was this: Haig was in command.

To be in command is to be at one remove, or several, from reality. Haig's diary, with its sickening optimism, is indisputably a command diary. No soldier at the front could have written it. No soldier at the front could have believed that the German barbed wire had been cut "most satisfactorily," or that the advance was proceeding without incident.

None of this was true, yet Haig believed it. For he was in command. He knew nothing but what his staff told him. And who dared tell him that his grand offensive, his design that had been months in the preparation, had failed at the outset?

Haig, like nearly every general before or since, was a victim of the chain of command. He had lost his grip on reality, and, having lost it, he issued orders that could not possibly be carried out. Troops who tried went into No Man's Land, some never to return.

None of this suggests that commanders suffer as much as their troops. Haig, after all, was awarded a title and an estate after the war. Westmoreland, who saw light at the end of the tunnel while millions died in Vietnam, is still honored in some circles despite his military blunders. The dead at the Somme have their names on village monuments; except for the Americans, many of the dead in Vietnam will remain forever nameless.

No: commanders do not suffer. They are honored or disgraced, but they do not die. Their agony, if they feel it at all, is mental.

Command is not all that is wrong in war. But if we do not understand it-how it pervades the military, corrupting it even when there is no fighting-we cannot hope to understand war.

Without command, one could almost say, war as we know it would not exist. The military is a command structure, divided rigidly into grades, ranks, and classes. A military structure without grades, ranks, and classes-without command-would still be a military structure. It would simply not be the kind of military which we now have. And it would not make war as we now make war.

Primitive warfare, so-called by military historians, is in fact warfare without command as we know it. Armies are less organized, and battle is a series of contests between individuals-not a carefully planned operation. The Zulus fighting the British depended upon primitive warfare tactics. They lost. Primitive armies seldom defeat modern, drilled armies because they cannot kill with the brutal efficiency we demand of an army. They have no command structure to give the order, and no carefully drilled troops to carry it out without thinking.

Nor have primitive armies learned to see as the command structure sees. It is inconceivable that a primitive war leader should sit in a war room, moving pins on maps and dictating orders to move one unit here, another there, and a third to yet another place. Command perceptions do not, cannot, occur outside of the command structure. If one sees, not units, but brave people, one will not feel quite as free to move them into and out of danger. And the primitive leader who fails loses his life, not merely his honor.

In war, said Napoleon, the moral is to the physical as three to one. Stripped of its quasi-mathematical trappings, Napoleon's dictum is unquestionably true. For warfare is a matter of perceptions as much as of weapons. It would not exist at all if nations did not see other nations as enemies. Commanders lose when their "nerve fails"-i.e., then they think they have irretrievably lost. Even the act of killing the "enemy" is, in the last analysis, a matter of how one sees the human being who is the target.

Killing another person in cold blood is no simple matter. In everyday life, those who do it are not merely punished, but regarded as in some way abnormal. Police who have, in the heat of the moment, shot a suspect, frequently vomit or break down when they see what they have done. Ordinary people cannot kill without remorse. They cannot kill for abstract principle, or because someone else tells them to do so.

Yet killing by order is a soldier's job. Battles are won by killing and wounding other human beings. And soldiers, with rare exceptions, are not psychopathic killers. Armies do not want psychopaths: they will run amok and ruin the battle plan. Armies must, however, kill to win; to do this at all, they must change the way the soldiers see. Soldiers must learn to see, not people, but "the enemy" or "targets."

To transform another person into "the enemy," however, is in fact to kill him spiritually, long before one has actually shot him. "The enemy" is a target, a "gallant foe," a "good soldier," a "fighting man." Or worse: he becomes a "gook," a "Kraut," "the Boche." He becomes an abstraction whose only function is to kill me, and whom I must kill before he does so. He is dead to me-and I to him.

I say "he" as a matter of convenience. Women and children, too, are targets, and so have become dead to us, though they bear us no ill will and do not menace us. Only by such a drastic change in perception could we even think of destroying entire cities at once. The powers that be never say this, for it is too repugnant to bear spelling out; but it is in fact what has happened.

All of this-the spiritual killing of "the enemy," our own spiritual death to him-all of it is done in the service of command. Without changing how soldiers see, commanders could not expect their orders to be followed. So military training becomes not merely drill but remolding a soldier's mind. Soldiers, when they are being soldiers, must think like soldiers, or they will not fight like soldiers.

Thus arises the paradox that soldiers, when they are away from the battlefield, may be gentle and compassionate. Yet in combat, they will be efficient killers. Little wonder that so many of them break down.

If the command structure's needs in effect destroy those at the bottom of the chain, their effects on those at the top are little less abhorrent. Warfare is a matter of killing and being killed. To accept and cope with these realities, the commander must see life in ways that sap his spirit. He, too, must die a kind of spiritual death, and the effects of his dying reverberate throughout the chain of command.

Douglas Haig, as I have said, was not an evil man. Yet he was directly responsible for close to two million deaths. He gave the orders, planned the campaigns, and accepted the losses.

"Accepted the losses"-an odd way to talk about or think about human death. People are not "lost" in combat. They die, often over a long period and in great pain. They are wounded. They lose arms, or legs, or their sanity. But to the commander, deaths and terrible wounds become "losses." A certain percentage of dead and wounded is an "acceptable loss." A higher percentage is not. But the losses are part and parcel of the plan. One thinks of the World War I "wastage"-a thousand dead and wounded a week, even when there was no battle going on. Or, closer to today, one thinks of Pentagon plans to field 400,000 "replacements" in an immense land war.

There is no such thing as a "replacement," or, in classic military terminology, an "effective." There are only people. Yet commanders must think not of people at all, but of replacements and effectives and losses and units. The very act of thinking in this way becomes, for the commander, a kind of spiritual death.

As the commander loses some of his humanity, so must his troops. They become, not people, but "good soldiers" or "poor soldiers," "qualified technicians" or "effectives." They become dead to the commander, just as surely as the enemy is dead to him-things to be manipulated as required. He {must} think of them that way; one cannot easily order people to charge forward while knowing that a third of them will die. Command perceptions make the order possible.

It is hardly surprising that military regulations are so little concerned with the individual soldier's welfare. It is surprising, in fact, that they are concerned with it at all. In strict military terms, the soldier's welfare is irrelevant unless it interferes with his fighting effectiveness.

Again and again, one sees evidence of this. The military medical manual suggests that military medicine is designed to increase fighting effectiveness. Drug abusers and alcoholics are not wanted in the military because they are poor fighters-not because they are destroying themselves. The healed wounded are desirable soldiers because, having more experience, they are the most effective replacements.

Thus a soldier who needs leave will not get it if it will interfere with military efficiency. Discharges will be denied if a soldier is deemed useful. Civil rights, freedom of speech, family needs-all are subordinate to military needs. Military needs are, in effect, the needs of the command structure.

So also with larger strategies. If the "mission" requires civilian deaths, the command structure will make civilian deaths possible. It will transform civilians who happen to live in the wrong place into "the enemy," just as surely as it does "enemy" soldiers. Commanders will see them differently, and soldiers under the command structure will be taught to see not women and children, but enemies.

The origins of the command structure are obscure, but there seems little doubt that it began out of necessity. Command is a rational way to organize an army. It is not perfect, for commanders seldom see reality. But, if one must have a military, the command structure is one way of making it work.

Once created, however, the command structure takes on a life of its own. It covers its own mistakes. It molds civilians into soldiers. It traps those in it in a structure and world view which corrupt everything they touch. Armed with nuclear weapons, it may yet be the death of us.

To say this is not to suggest that command will inevitably kill us. Even those trapped within the structure are not helpless victims. They can escape it, as many retired military officers have done, and learn to see the realities we face.

Yet, insofar as we venerate the command structure, it will devour us. That is one lesson of the Somme, of Vietnam, and of Hiroshima. We allow ourselves to see as the command structure sees at our peril. And at humanity's.

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