Donald Trump: An Incompetent Commander in Chief

My combat experience came from serving in Vietnam in the village counter-insurgency program as a civilian assigned to our Military Assistance Command/Civil Operations Rural Development Support. To use today’s war-making narrative, our job then was to prevent regime change in South Vietnam, as demanded by the Vietnamese Communist Party ruling in Hanoi.

My part of the war used moral values and politics – “hearts and minds” – to defeat the Viet Cong far more than it did high explosives.

When I read On War by Carl von Clausewitz (1832), I was pleased to find my kind of war fully embraced in his theory of how to win wars. Clausewitz’s famous (because it’s true) law of war is that “war is a mere continuation of politics by other means.”

To ignore politics in waging war is to lose.

Does Donald Trump know that?

What does Trump know of the hearts and minds of his Iranian enemy or of the Iranian people in general? After more than three weeks of intensive bombing, the killing of dozens of religiously-driven Iranian leaders and the Strait of Hormuz being closed against his wishes, how close is our president to victory?

Clausewitz realized that politics – soft power – is “interwoven with the whole action of war and must exercise a continuous influence upon it. … under all circumstances war is to be regarded not as an independent thing, but as a political instrument.”

For Clausewitz, the heart and soul of politics is will and morale. You win when your enemy loses the will to continue, falls into an irresistible collapse of morale, just throws in the towel. So, Clausewitz says, the art of war is how to bring about such a collapse of will. In short, politics.

It seems Donald Trump never read Clausewitz. He was, after all, a draft dodger refusing to serve his country in Vietnam. It also seems that neither has his secretary of state/national security advisor, Marco Rubio, studied the art of war. I even wonder if his generals – none of whom have ever won a war – have ever internalized the teachings of Clausewitz.

Clausewitz defined war as an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will. Thus, we must proportion our efforts to the enemy’s different powers of resistance.

The endgame in war is forged from two forces – available means and strength of will. Insufficient means and a weak will bring on defeat.

But our means must be proportional to the enemy’s will – weapons and tactics which do not degrade the enemy’s will cannot win a war.

So, in Vietnam, General Julian Ewell, commander of our 9^th division when I was in the Mekong Delta, became well known for insisting that if we used high explosives and firepower to “grab ’em by the balls,” then “their hearts and minds will follow” and we would win.

It didn’t work in the villages where communist cadres lived among the people, evaded our tactical operations and kept their morale high.

The political object, as the original motive for waging a war, determines the aim of military forces and the amount of effort to be made. Clausewitz: “We must therefore consider the effect of the political object upon those masses which it is to move towards accepting our objectives. You can’t win a war unless you know the minds and hearts of those whose will you want to break. How those masses are animated by spirit and what cultural and religious values keep that spirit animated infusing vigor into their actions is the driver of victory or defeat – for them and for us. Powerful motives – the political side of war – increase the staying power of the will.

Thus, the Chinese master of the art of war, Sun Tzu, taught: first of all, study your enemy. He wrote simply: “What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.”

Bombs can’t do that. They only target enemy combatants and weapon systems.

A conviction that bombing could ever be a war-winning strategy is an illusion. It’s just another instance of the truth that, for some poor souls, when their only tool is a hammer, everything to them looks like a nail.

Data, said Clausewitz, the merely mathematical (like the number of bombs we have dropped on Iran) has no place in the art of war.

Rather, the moral forces are among the most important creators of outcomes in the art of war. Clausewitz called the moral forces the most brightly polished of all weapons. Not bombs or bullets.

The art of war, he said, must take into account the human element: “It must accord a place to courage, to boldness, even to rashness. The art of war has to deal with living and with moral forces.”

Most important, then, is the human element brought to the fight by the commander. A commander must have determination, but if that determination hardens into blind self-confidence, it becomes a liability rather than a strength. The commander who is too self-assured or conceited becomes dangerous because he stops questioning his own assumptions. In war, where uncertainty dominates, this leads to performative decisions that don’t adapt to reality.

Most importantly, Clausewitz advised, the mind of the commander must be free to think without being captured by prejudice. For Clausewitz, such freedom of the mind is indispensable if the commander is to dominate events, not to be overpowered by them. For him, the victorious commander must have an intellect which generates an “inner light” which reveals the truth in the midst of confusion and obscurity.

True military genius, according to Clausewitz, requires a balance: confidence combined with critical self-awareness. Overconfidence willfully abandons that balance.

Based on my Vietnam experiences, Clausewitz very wisely taught us:

“Strength of character… is not merely firmness against others, but against oneself.”

“Presumption is a fault… it is the result of an overweening opinion of oneself; it leads to neglect of precautions and to rash action.”

“Determination… must not degenerate into obstinacy. The latter is a fault… a stubborn adherence to an opinion in defiance of better knowledge.”

As far as I can tell, given Clausewitz’s criteria for winning a war, Donald Trump doesn’t and can’t pass muster as a competent commander in chief.

Stephen B. Young is Global Executive Director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism.