The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power

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Summary: FIRST RATE--BUY IT, READ IT, DISCUSS IT!
Review: I'm amused-one cannot be anything other than amused-by the reviewers who object to the fact that Max Boot is a civilian. The vast majority of military historians are, and have always been, civilians. Furthermore, the few soldiers who later excelled at writing history were usually not-so-successful warriors. Thucydides and Josephus come to mind. Indeed, among the great captains of history, few were even talented memoirists, let alone military analysts. After Caesar and Grant, the list of great soldier-writers shortens shockingly. So let's dispense with Boot's lack of epaulets. What Boot does bring to this topic is a fine command of the secondary source material, a lively-and even dashing-prose style, and excellent analysis, given space constraints. It's clear that those who object to Boot's civilian status are invariably those who object to his analysis. The former is an absurd subject for discussion, the latter the only relevant concern. I regard Boot's conclusion that such "savage wars of peace" continue to be vital to the security of the U.S. and the preservation of American lives to be well substantiated by this text. The accusation that he favors "war for the sake of war" cannot be made by any serious reader who approaches this book with even a shred of dispassion. On the contrary, Boot is very Clausewitzian in his recognition that all wars are ultimately political and can be judged as successes or failures not by the number of enemy killed or land conquered but by their long term political and national security results. Pungent, authoritative, and controversial, this book is both a scholarly and literary treat. Highly recommended.
William Altimari, author of LEGION: A Novel of the Army of Rome

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Summary: A lackluster vindication of Warhawkism by a civilian egghead
Review: I'm extremely contemptuous of Max Boot, the armchair general who wrote this book. Max reverently praises war for the sake of war. Boot's refusal to deal with substantive issues like security interests, strategy, and proper execution of military operations sullies this book. Instead, the ole civilian warhawk engages in war idolatry. Boot simply idolizes an American Empire, and praises war for the sake of war, as if war is an end in itself. General Robert E. Lee once said, "It's good war is so terrible, for we should become fond of it." Lee is right... If you're going to go to war, it should be for a damn good reason and fought with the intent to win and with clear-cut strategic objectives. Ironically, it is always these crusty Northeastern establishment (non-combatant) intellectuals like Max Boot that are so fond and affectionate of war.

Anyway, Boot offers a piercing tongue in criticizing the Powell Doctrine, enunciated by Gen. Colin Powell. As Powell once affirmed, "halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support" should frankly be avoided. Boot, however, seems to idolize "half-baked warfare," pointing to what he sees as a history of war with no well-defined strategic objectives or visible U.S. national security interest. Boot obviously rejoices at our successful counter-insurgencies, but never seems to learn anything from overseas adventures that didn't go so well. More often than not the bungled operations are those that lacked clear objectives or a visible exit strategy. Moreover, the Powell Doctrine held that there should be a clear risk to U.S. national security interests before military force should be deployed. The force deployed should be massive and overwhelm the threat. Likewise, the operation should have public support, well-defined objectives, and a clear cut exit strategy. Powell and the Pentagon brass for one learned some lessons from Vietnam, Max Boot did not. Also, Boot is extremely cynical that the public doesn't like to see high casualties. Boot finds it absurd that we premise operations with minimal casualties in mind. Boot seems to think willingly utilizing our soldiers as cannon fodder is a recipe for success. I guess, under Max Boot, the ole Army slogan, 'Leave no man behind,' might have to change to 'Leave lots of men behind.' For this reason alone, I'm extremely contemptuous of this smug civilian 'military expert,' who has never brandished arms in service to his country while gleefully rejoicing at war.

No doubt, America has had some successful counter-insurgency campaigns, and many endeavors were anything but strategic blunders. Nonetheless, Boot never takes issues with Pyrrhic victories (i.e. victories won at too great of a cost) or defeats, so he is NOT apt to glean any lessons from history, only to declare that war is the American way and we should pursue it for the sake of war. War is an end in itself for the author. What non-sense? Boot is certainly not another Carl von Clausewitz. He reasons a good skirmish every four to five years is requisite for the ole fictitious 'Empire' since he tends to think of 'the American mission' as being analagous to that of the Roman Empire. His conclusions are deeply flawed, and of course, he appeals to naive warhawks, who love war, but never try to understand strategy, objectives or military science. It is just an effort to vindicate reckless intervention abroad and stretching America's military to the breaking point. I don't purport to be an expert on the subject, but people that approach military science with an idolatrous love of war are usually those that make the most horrible historians, strategists and policymakers. Typically, they're usually civilians who have never joined the military much less seen combat. Their experience with war is limited mostly to sterile two-dimensional encounters with pictures in history books.

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Summary: To Police or Not To Police?
Review: In "The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power", Max Boot, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, advocates a renewed effort by America to engage in small wars throughout the world. Boot believes that the United States should play a similar role to that of Britain in the 19th century, what we today might refer to as 'globocop'.

The term 'small war' is very difficult to define. Perhaps it is easier to define what it is not. It is not World War I or II; it is not the Civil War; it is not the Korean War; it is not any war in which two large forces oppose each other with divisionally structured armies backed by large amounts of artillery, air ordnance, and/or naval power. In other words, a small war is the type of war that America has most often fought throughout its history. In fact, the first war we fought as a nation, the War for Independence, was a small war (although, in that war, we were the small side).

Boot spends the first four-fifths of the book describing various small wars America has fought. He ranges from the Tripolitan War against the Barbary Coast pirates to the efforts to pacify various Caribbean hotspots to the nearly 100 years we spent in China ensuring that country's territorial integrity and the lives and property of Americans in-country. These descriptions are very informative (I had no idea we had spent that long in China); but, they do little to provide any information with which to make a decision about the key question the book raises.

In the last fifth Boot describes the mistakes we made in Vietnam in light of the ways in which we had fought previous engagements of this type and how Vietnam has shaped American war planning and foreign policy ever since. Boot contends that the mistake we made in Vietnam was in trying to fight the Korean War all over again. Instead of pacifying the Vietnamese countryside, thereby taking away the Vietcong's primary source of support, we tried to bludgeon the Vietcong into submission. Boot very effectively describes the futility of using large amounts of firepower against an enemy who has the ability to simply melt away from the battlefield.

If you are going to fight guerillas, you have to fight them on their terms. That means taking away the guerillas' best means of support: the people in the countryside who feed, hide, and fight for them. To do so you must give those people a reason to stop supporting the guerillas. In other words, you must win their 'hearts and minds', which is something we failed miserably at in Vietnam.

The key statement is 'if you are going to fight guerillas'. The key question that Boot addresses is should the United States act as a quasi-imperialist. In many respects we already do and certainly have done so in the past. I'm sure many Puerto Ricans look around their Caribbean neighborhood and give thanks that the United States annexed them from Spain instead of just letting them become an independent country.

There is very little doubt that the United States should intervene in places that offer safe havens for terrorists or are some how destabilizing key regions of the world. The trickier answers come when talking about places like Haiti, Liberia, and Rwanda. These are places in which no amount of American involvement seems likely to provide anything but a temporary stop to the bloodletting. Is this in and of itself justification enough for America to send its men and women into harm's way at the risk of arousing further global anger at us for what is at best a band-aid mission? According to Boot the answer is: yes, but.

Boot says that we should intervene in these places when we can. He acknowledges that the United States cannot be everywhere at once; but, he also says that we may not have to be. A successful intervention every few years might be enough to keep otherwise dangerous situations from exploding. Boot makes a convincing argument that had we not pulled out of Somalia in the manner in which we did, perhaps we would have discouraged some of the terrorists who have caused major damage to American interests. I doubt it would have discouraged the true believers like Osama bin Laden; but, bin Laden cannot carry out his attacks without his foot soldiers.

I think the key thing to glean from "The Savage Wars of Peace" is that if we go into a troublespot, we should not leave until the job is done. That means staying in place, either as the only outside force or as a member of a coalition force, until the locals can take over the effective day to day operations of running the country. In some instances, like Germany and Japan, we have even stayed beyond the end of our administrative role as a purely deterrent force to protect these weakened states.

This of course leads us to the current situation in Iraq. While this book was written before the invasion of Iraq, I think the author would agree that we should stay in Iraq until the job is complete. It is pure fantasy to think that we will create a liberal democracy in Iraq overnight or even within ten or twenty years. Iraq is going to need international assistance for decades to come. As the leading world power, the United States must provide the lead on efforts to reconstruct and reform Iraq. Doing anything less would be an abrogation of the United States's moral duty to use its power for the good of all people, not just Americans.

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Summary: The Art and Science of Waging Small Wars
Review: In Savage Wars of Peace Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, Max Boot has written an authoritative treatise about guerilla warfare or small wars in which the country has been involved almost since the beginning of its existence. Contrary to the popular myth, the U.S. military has fought numerous small wars in its history to promote the country's interests overseas, often without a prior declaration of war. Boot masterfully explains how the country was first a commercial power before becoming a great power in the 1890s and then a superpower in 1941. Boot guides readers around the world and brings back to their memory some American heroes that are sometimes almost completely forgotten in the general public.

Boot also clearly shows that the U.S. military progressively lost its hard-won expertise in waging small wars after WWII with disastrous consequences in some small wars overseas that resulted in the birth of the Powell Doctrine (pg. 318-319). Boot reminds his readers that the U.S. military has to use the Powell Doctrine as a benchmark because of the sui generis nature of small wars (pg. 318-320, 336-341, 352). The U.S. military should continue to nurture its different branches with the same care so that it can fight any type of war with equal efficiency (pg. 331, 350-351). Boot also looks at the Body Bag Syndrome and its nefarious consequences on the deterrence power of the U.S. military in the world (pg. 327-330, 347). Under-commitment and lack of confidence are as dangerous as imperial overstretch and hubris (pg. 352).

Most importantly, Boot's masterpiece contains some life-saving lessons very useful to the duty-bound Coalition accomplishing its mission in Iraq:

1. The massive development aid, which could make ordinary Iraqis increasingly receptive to the coalition efforts, is a long-term project. The most immediate need is to provide Iraqi cities and villages with security against the irregulars who tax locals for food, shelter, intelligence and bodies (pg. 304).

2. Thanks to the nurturing of mixed, well-trained infantry units stationed in all places not yet pacified, coalition troops know from past experience that they can rapidly improve their urban-jungle-warfare skills (pg. 305, 331). Because of their vulnerability, small outposts in Iraqi cities and villages should be perceived as able to count on massive support, if necessary (pg. 306-307). The Iraqi police are not the right candidate to populate these units due to a lack of both proper training and equipment. No restive place such as Fallujah can be off-limits to the combined action platoons (pg. 307, 311); nor can rebel sanctuaries outside Iraq be tolerated (pg. 316-317). Otherwise, the cancer rapidly metastasizes (pg. 350).

3. An efficient program should be developed or further improved in conjunction with law-abiding Iraqi citizens to identify and neutralize the irregulars after the example of the efficient Phoenix program (pg. 310). By interacting in a friendly manner with the native citizens, the mixed fighting units will be able to win their trust and confidence and gain invaluable intelligence supplied by friendly informants about enemy intentions and movements (pg. 305-307). Furthermore, the close involvement of coalition troops in the daily life of ordinary Iraqis gives them a stake in the war (pg. 306). In addition, slow rotations of key members of coalition forces are essential because building trust and confidence is personal and requires time (pg. 306-307).

4. Some coalition soldiers who independently operate from their Iraqi counterparts have limited friendly interaction with ordinary Iraqis mainly due to linguistic and cultural barriers as well as their isolation in their fortified compounds. Their efficiency in the field is not always optimal for these reasons (pg. 306).

5. The large-scale search-and-destroy strategy alone often is a counterproductive attrition strategy in guerilla warfare due to its futility and high costs (pg. 304, 316). This strategy will repeatedly fail to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis due to the prohibitive costs they often incur. Furthermore, this same strategy is squandering public support for the operation Iraqi Freedom in the coalition countries due to the failure to deliver long-term, visible results (pg. 307-308, 316). Coalition forces have to restrict their operations because guerilla warfare requires the utmost discrimination in neutralization (pg. 289, 314, 348).

6. The continuing presence of coalition forces is necessary for many years after the transfer of sovereignty back to the Iraqis until the future apolitical and federal army can defend itself and the capitalist, democratic and peaceful regime its serves against the enemies of progress. Countries such as former West Germany and South Korea have shown the efficiency of this policy (pg. 312, 314). In too many places around the world, democracy and capitalism are foreign transplants that must be cultivated long enough to take deep roots (pg. 349). Premature withdrawal severely limits effectiveness by encouraging coalition foes to wait for its withdrawal (pg. 337). Furthermore, it often leads to a return to ineffectual dictatorships due to the absence of strong enough institutions (pg. 251, 324-325, 344-346, 349, 351).

After waging a conventional war successfully, the Coalition should remain optimistic about its chance to defeat the insurgency in Iraq. Despite the almost mystical aura that the word guerilla has won, most guerilla campaigns fail miserably (pg. 314).

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Summary: A prescription for the world...
Review: In this book, the author, Max Boot, does a superb job of introducing the reader to many of the small wars that have occurred in American history. Typically, these wars were 'police missions' meant to secure American lives and property, or acts of imperialism in which America tried to expand its reach throughout the globe.

Boot accurrately portrays the good and the bad that happened during these wars, and applies them to the problems of today. The author thinks that if we applied American values and ethics to the troubled areas of the world, that the Earth would be a better place to live. Come to think of it, maybe he is right. A wonderful book, highly recommended to the history reader or anyone interested in foreign/current affairs.

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Summary: Know Thyself
Review: Know thyself has been and continues to be a good first step before a new endeavor. This is a well-researched book about the small wars of the United States since the creation of the republic. Most of us are aware of the history of the major wars in the history of the United States such as the Civil War, World War I, and II. This book expands this historical picture to include small wars from the war against Barbary States 1801-1805 to our present time war against militant Islamic terrorism. The book further provides lessons to be learned from history for contemporary America in the 21ist century. I would highly recommend this book for parents and schoolteachers to help the younger generation better understand the history of United States.

The book starts by reviewing the historical background for the war against the pirates of the Barbary States. It however indicates that there are no similarities between the war against the pirates of the Barbary States and the militant Islamic terrorist of September 11, 2002. In this respect, the author seems to have not noted or considered some similarities. Prior to the Barbary war there was a debate in the United States whether to bribe or fight the Barbary States. President Adams felt bribery might work, whereas President Jefferson felt a military solution was needed. Appeasement and bribery did not work with the Barbary States; it simply wetted their appetite for more, and military action was necessitated to resolve the issue. In a similar manner, some contemporary policy makers thought that the threat of militant Islamic terrorism could be dealt with through appeasement or bribery. The first terrorist attack was launched against the New York World Trade Center in 1993. This was followed by other attacks such as the attack against the USS Cole in Yemen 1998. Nevertheless, many believe that policymakers attempted to appease militant Islamic groups by ignoring the glaring links between them and the Albanians in Kosovo. Appeasement failed however, and the terrorists attacked the New York World Trade Center for the second time in 2001.

One of the best chapters of this book is about the United States participation in the Allies intervention in Russia in the closing days of World War I. It illustrates the consequences of opportunities lost. Should the allies have taken decisive action to tip the balance against the Bolsheviks in their fight against the white Russians, the history of the 20th century could have been different and millions of people who perished under communism or in wars with communism might have been saved, The book reviews the conduct of the Vietnam War 1959-1975. The author argument is that the approach to conduct the war as a major war did not benefit from the experience the United States already had in counter insurgency wars. The author further reviews the Powell Doctrine and most recent wars in the 1990's. In the concluding chapter in Defense of Pax Americana, the book provides a good analysis and arguments against isolationist tendencies in the United States. He discusses issues such as wars without a declaration of war, wars without exit strategies, wars that are fought less than wholeheartedly, wars without vital national interest..etc The author notes that Britain in the 19th century protected not only free trade but also battled the enemies of all mankind such as pirates and slave traders. Today America faces equivalent tasks, on the behalf of mankind, battling terrorists, narco-traffickers and weapons proliferators. America should not be afraid to fight the savage wars of peace if necessary to enlarge the empire of liberty.

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Summary: Good history, bad policy
Review: Max Boot has a very interesting and informative book here, one that I recommend to all interested in military history or public policy. In fact, it's really three books.

The subject of the first book is USAmerica's 'small wars': the minor conflicts with foreign powers, starting with the war against the Barbary Pirates, and continuing through the our Caribbean adventures in the twenties and thirties. It's well documented and excellently written. My only complaint is that it isn't longer and more detailed.

The second book is only a few chapters long. It covers Viet Nam, and Boot's thesis is that our greatest military mistake there was that we DIDN'T fight it as a small war. Had we done so, he believes we would have won, at a far smaller price than what we paid to lose.

No one can prove might have beens, but I find his argument convincing, and even those who disagree should find it intriguing and thought provoking.

Finally, there's the third book, which is policy prescription. Here I really disagree with Mr. Boot. Boot wants us to go haring around the world, civilizing the 'natives' with M-16s. We tried this in the Phillipines, in Haiti, in the Dominican Republic, and in Nicaragua. Boot recounts all these attempts to "Take up the white man's burden," and by his own account, at least three were utter failures. The only one that sort of succeeded was the Philipines, where we stayed over forty years, and ended with an ex-colony that isn't sure it likes us, tends to lapse into dictatorship, and suffers a revolt every decade or so. For this we spent four thousand lives on our side, and tens of thousands on the Phillipino side. This is success?

Mr. Boot would like us to do this again, in lots of places all over the world, because he thinks the 'natives' will be better off being conquered by us than ruling themselves. Perhaps so, but I'm a USAmerican, and I think MY country would be decidedly worse off if we undertook these imperial adventures.

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Summary: A Timely History Lesson
Review: Max Boot has written a compelling book about a subject often forgotten and seldom understood by the U.S. military and the political elites that direct the use of military power. In covering the history of America's small wars, he knocks down persistent myths, revives memories of once-familiar heroes and introduces us to ones we never knew, all with a superior eye for the humorous or amazing anecdote. He draws important parallels to the situation our nation faces today and provides insightul lessons from history. This is a great book about a subject that is vital to America during these challenging times.

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Summary: Upsetting the Conventional Wisdom
Review: Max Boot has written a fascinating critique of the current thinking in the United States on the subject of overseas military adventures. Instead of talking mostly about Viet Nam, and its impact on our thinking in the years since, he looks at the history of our military interventions over the last 200 years or so, and concludes that we intervened regularly in various countries around the world. Most of these interventions, it turns out, were relatively inexpensive in lives lost, and successful, at least as long as they lasted.

The author begins this book with a survey of our interventions in the first century of our existence, then moves to a second section where the interventions get more extensive and comprehensive. He calls this second stage of American history our "empire," and he's not afraid to use the word. After this there's a chapter on Viet Nam, and then an analysis of the Powell Doctrine (which tries to counterbalance the Viet Nam syndrome) as it relates to the current situation in the world.

His look at the various interventions of the 19th and 20th centuries is fascinating. Boot has a talent for writing prose and bringing characters to life, and his sketches of the various individuals in the military (primarily the Marine Corps and the Navy) who carried out these operations is very good. The descriptions of the operations themselves is also interesting, if somewhat disconcerting to liberals who've learned their history from modern professors. For one thing he insists that most of the interventions in our history weren't prompted by financial interests in Wall Street. Instead, moral questions would rise, or American citizens (often missionaries) would ask for protection. The interventions themselves would often result in such things as a drop in the disease rate (as the Americans made everyone bury their garbage and sewage) and better education. Unfortunately, these things didn't take in most of these countries, because the Marines departed after a few months or years.

I have to say I got a little tired of Boot's writing. It's a sort of odd phenomenon. I enjoyed the book right up until the end of the imperial era, when he began to talk about Viet Nam. This section I enjoyed also, but mostly for the facts, not the writing. For one thing, Boot, a magazine writer, brought this style of writing to his book in this chapter. This means there were many choppy, incomplete sentences. While this is fine in an opinion piece about President Bush or something, it's a bit strange in a book of this sort.

Overall I thought this a good book, and look forward to what Mr. Boot will produce next.

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Summary: excellent and very timely book
Review: Max Boot has written an ambitious and in my mind highly successful book, chronicling all of America's small wars from its founding days through the 1990s, a work that is both authoritative and timely.

Boot does not chronicle America's large wars - "conventional, set-piece engagements" generally against large standing armies - and writes that they are not the norm of American military history. Rather the small war, many rather small-scale engagements that often involved few or no casualties, has been far more common.

In reality there have been four types of small wars engaged in by American forces; punitive (to punish attacks made against American lives or property), protective (designed to safeguard these American lives and property), pacification (to occupy a foreign territory), and profiteering (to grab territory or trade concessions), with some operations serving more than one purpose. Boot chronicles these wars through three major periods of American history; from the late 1700s to the 1890s when the U.S. was a growing commercial though not a military power; from 1898 to 1941 when the U.S. was one of the great powers; and from 1941 when the U.S. was a superpower. Boot notes the changes in mission objectives, strategies, and results in these three eras of American military and foreign policy history.

The bulk of this work chronicles these small wars, from the Barbary Pirates war in the early 19th century through our actions in Samoa in 1899, the expedition to China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the Philippine War (1899-1902), the U.S. intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918-1920 (which made for harrowing reading), various deployments and occupations in Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in the first half of the 20th century (including the famous expedition against Pancho Villa), the actions of the Yangtze River Patrol in China, up to the Vietnam War. This history makes for gripping reading, providing me with a history I know little or nothing about, one filled with personal stories of men who should be famous but who instead are largely forgotten today. We are introduced to such individuals as William Eaton, an "early-day Lawrence of Arabia" who was a U.S. consul to Tunis who helped organized a native and foreign army to dispose the pasha of Tripoli during the Barbary Wars. Another interesting one was Captain David Porter of the U.S. Navy, captain of the _Essex_, who while fighting the British in the Pacific in 1813 crossed 2,500 miles of ocean, put into the Marquesas Islands for repairs, and ended up becoming involved in a native war, trying to annex the islands for the U.S. One of the major stars of this work was Smedly Butler, according to some possibly the greatest Marine who ever lived, who fought in the Spanish-American War, Philippine War, Boxer Uprising, Nicaragua, at Veracruz, Haiti, and again in China in 1927, winning several Medals of Honor, though after retiring becoming an avowed pacifist and opponent of such conflicts.

I found his section on the Vietnam War enlightening, analyzing it in the context of the small wars that had occurred before. He notes some of the reasons as to why that war did not end in success; among them the South Vietnamese were trained as a miniature version of the American army, rather than as a much more effective constabulary force - part army, part police - one focused on internal defense, a type that had been highly effective for the US in the Caribbean, the Philippines, and elsewhere; the U.S. was not in direct command of locally recruited soldiers, as South Vietnamese soldiers were often picked for political rather than competence reasons, again contrary to prior U.S. experience in small wars; and one successful program, the Combined Action Program or CAP, which relied on small groups of U.S. soldiers paired with native soldiers stationed to particular villages, concentrating on knowing local villagers and patrolling the region, rather than on ambitious and ultimately frustrating and wasteful "search and destroy" missions in the Highlands and elsewhere, was not adequately supported, despite evidence both in Vietnam and in previous small wars that such programs worked and were even popular with U.S. troops and local citizens.

Boot closes the book with a highly useful section on analyzing the future of small wars in American foreign and defense policy. He notes that despite claims that the first Gulf War eliminated the Vietnam Syndrome, American military planners and presidents have been too timid in their deployments overseas, too afraid of generating casualties (particularly for humanitarian missions), believing that the only wars that will achieve any degree of support with the American people are the "sanitized, high-tech warfare" such as was attempted in Kosovo in the late 1990s. Boot writes that not only will this very policy backfire (crippling mission goals and encouraging enemies to attack American forces even more in the belief that any American casualties will force the military to leave their country, among other reasons), but that it is erroneous at its very heart. He writes that in fact the American public is often more motivated in its support of military missions abroad by such factors as the "odds of success and the stakes involved" rather than purely by body count, even if the mission is not purely one dictated by obvious goals centering on national security. He even notes that sometimes casualties can actually increase support for a mission, either for reasons of wanting revenge or notions that those who died should not have died in vain. He cautions that the Powell Doctrine not withstanding (stating that the U.S. should only get involved in wars with a clear national interest, with overwhelming force, and with a clear exit strategy), we will always face wars in which these things will be lacking and that we should prepare for this, wars that while limited in objectives and methods can achieve notable successes.