So, turns out military libraries don't do late fines. Which is great if the book is six months overdue. Which was plenty of time to finally sit down and read "Dereliction of Duty". Long story short, I was kinda disappointed.
I'm not really sure where I got the idea, but I had in my mind that the book was a searing indictment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). (Then) COL McMaster (now brigadier general) certainly has no problems taking the individual service chiefs to task for their complicity in America's deepening involvement in Vietnam. He finds them politically naive, jealous of their service prerogatives and ontologies, and personally deficient in providing professional advice to the President. Let somehow it's the lack of a dramatic buildup, or the repetition of faults, but in the end, the conclusions and meditations felt... self-evident. To make the conclusions feel that natural is a testament to the quality of the scholarship, but I still feel let down.
One, I expected more policy analysis, more critique of the JCS as an institution than his approach of savaging the JCS as individuals. I suppose this is as much due to my own schemata as everything, but I tend to look at these things as institutions, and ignore the people. "Derelictions" certainly exposed the obvious fallacy in approaching analysis in this fashion, and emphasized that no institution, no role, can transcend the people filling these positions. And considering how nascent the JCS was as an institution during the descent into Vietnam, expecting standardized roles, rituals, or habits that followed from the station rather than the people would be an overly simplistic analytical lens.
Yet for that very reason, I wish McMaster had done more to tease out the problems stemming from the individuals and the problems stemming from flawed organizational designs or murky mandates, the same flaws that led to the reorganizations in the 1980s. McMaster notes within the first few chapters that the JCS were required by law to serve as the principle military advisors to the President, but at this stage in the development of the JCS, the law serves more as general guidelines than concretized habit. By this I mean that thus far the JCS had been the primary advisors to Eisenhower, and I can't imagine the architect of Operation Overlord really needed military advice in the way that Kennedy or LBJ would need advice. JFK and LBJ needed an education in the military, in strategy, to interface with the JCS, they needed wise old men to provide wisdom and strategic options and reviews. They needed to be contrarian, difficult, and mentors. Yet the history of the JCS had thus far been the relationship of junior and senior commanders, cut of the same cloth, a history that hadn't really prepared the group for JFK and LBJ.
To boot, both men were intensely political, and the JCS did not know how to deal with that. Time and again, the JCS were outmaneveured in DC, and the only way they could think of developing the ageless DC coin of the realm, access, was to turn sycophantic. Taylor actively worked to subvert the capacity of the JCS to provide professional advice, and the politically niave JCS lacked the wherewithal to perform their duties. Expecting political sophistication sufficient to rival experienced, lifelong political operatives might be asking a bit much, and the civilian leadership deserves plenty of flaggelation for prizing loyalty and yes-men at the expense of competent advice or genuine professional. Still, acting solely as the professional soldier alone would no longer be sufficient. Presidents and Congressmen ignorant of military matters, and more concerned with reelections, would require a military leadership capable of taking them into hand. We would require warriors to be statesmen, even while still in uniform, all so they could execute their professional military duties.
Second, and similarly, McMaster saves his most repeated criticism of the JCS for their inability to rise about "service parochialism". Given how often the JCS would quarrel over elements of basic strategy, and how often such debates would delay consensus at time-sensitive periods, such castigation is certainly appropriate. But it also deserves some mitigation as well. There existed fundamental disagreements over what should be the US grand strategy, let alone more operational aspects like how to wage a little war, debates that would continue long after these officers left the service. These debates and questions were still uncharted territory, and there were no confident models to predict Soviet or Chinese behavior, models that later scholars could use to create coherent national strategies. The radical changes from "massive retaliation" to "flexible response" reflect the sheers differences in outlook, and to expect the JCS to suddenly produce consensus is unreasonable. They were participants in the debate, and they had their own role to play in answering these questions.
Their service parochialism wasn't just that of a jealous lord guarding his fiefdom (although there was certainly plenty of this), but their attempts to answer elemental questions about force, and the military. The Air Force was a service barely 20 years old, with an infantile doctrine, riven between SAC and TAC. The Army and the Navy couldn't provide a common narrative about who should own nuclear weapons, let alone whether the Army was even necessary even more in a nuclear era. Eisenhower's Massive Retaliation was predicated upon the material inability of the Free World to match Soviet military power, thus why even bother to maintain an Army as anything other than a speedbump long enough to launch? Their service parochialism wasn't just men fighting over their share of the budget or the ear of the President, but existential questions about their service.
McMaster acknowledges this need to determine the underlying variables in the strategic calculus by noting the failure of the JCS to challenge the strategic principles of graduated escalation. But his implication appears to be they should have said something along the lines of "this is a crazy doctrine and won't work", when it appears the best they could say and remain intellectually honest was "we no longer know what works and what doesn't, so we can't bless off on your doctrine". Given the unknown nature of strategy and the revolution in military affairs, their challenges should have been in the form of skepticism, yet McMaster seems to be saying they should have opposed the strategies proposed by the Presidents and it isn't clear that the coherency was there. Only with retrospect are we able to look back and say graduated response was a flawed operational concept.
Third, McMaster doesn't do much to address the inabilities of the JCS to overcome the resistance of their superiors. Despite the existential differences between the chiefs, they would still often come to consensus opinions. They might be circumscribed opinions or recommendations restricted to operational concerns that avoided strategic or existential questions, but they still represented the voice of the JCS. And they were constantly at odds with the expressed political preferences of the President. JFK solved the problem of people giving him advice he didn't like by simply appointing a new intermediary who would happily sign off on his policies. Taylor had no problem performing radical aboutfaces on some of his issues, issues that had caused him to resign from his prior position as Army Chief of Staff and to write books critical of the relationship between the military and their civilian leadership when it became personally expedient to rubberstamp JFK. McNamara, Bundy and Rusk all sought to contain the military exigencies within a framework palatable to LBJ, even when all advice from professional officers was to the contrary.
The JCS might not have provided the best, soundest advice to the President as often as they should have, but they did still attempt to consciously perform their duty, and ran into frequency obstructions for their civilian superiors in the DoD and DoS. In a situation involving lower ranking officers, it could be possible to perform an end run around the obstruction by appealing to higher. But here, there was no higher, no end runs, no additional levels of rank one could jump to when a superior inhibits one's duty. Again, their political naiveté would prove a hindrance in the performance of their duties, but the obstruction of McNamara and ilk cannot be overlooked as a contributing factor.
In sum, I think McMaster provides a wonderful insight into a critical two year period while we descended into madness. The depth of the sources, the frequency and repetition of the same errors only highlight the dysfunction of most parties concerned. But there were still differences, mitigations, and questions I wish McMaster had done more to address. I would have liked to see additional inquiry into the JCS as an evolving entity in a critical period between being more than the people involved, yet unable to transcend them. I would have liked to see more nuance about the service parochialism as more than just fighting over portions of the pie, as fights about the basic nature of American strategy and military policy, questions with existential implications. And I would have liked to see more meditation on the obligations incumbant to an officer when activity obstructed by superiors in the performance of their duty, especially at the flag level. Similarly, I would have liked to hear thoughts on the duties and respects owed a civilian superior at this level when they actively prevent the discharge of one's legal duties. When should a military officer shut up, recognize that his superior has decided, and see about the execution of his orders and when should an officer go public or carry the fight to new venues? As a work of historical research, "Dereliction" exposes plenty of material for thought, but I wish it had gone further and addressed implications of that research.
