Much Ado About Nothing: Future of War v. Clausewitz

In his latest article, Tom Ricks presents an interesting interpretation of Rosa Brooks’ latest piece, describing it as an attempt to “smackdown” 19th century strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz and his modern disciples. This would be unsurprising as Mrs. Brooks can exhibit a disdain for the old. But the semantic debate is meant to serve a more significant argument about the expanding use of military force to address contemporary threats.

After the release of a concept paper by the Future of War team, of which Mrs. Brooks is a member, Christopher Mewett at War On The Rocks challenged the team’s reference to “the changing nature of war” and cited Clausewitz’s assertion that the nature of war does not change, “But Warfare, of course, doesn't have an enduring, unchanging phenomenological ‘nature,’ as it is merely the way war is made.” Brooks acknowledged that, “War and warfare are different words with a different meaning, and we should be careful about their use.” She challenges, however, that the nature of war is unchanging.

A better phrasing of both points would be to acknowledge that war is as Clausewitz defined it, having many shades and characters but one nature, and that war is also merely one dimension of conflict. Warfare can thus be thought of not so much as the way war is made but the way conflicts are fought, in whatever realm they occur, military or otherwise.

The West has traditionally viewed conflict as ultimately embodied and principally resolved through war, as if the round hole of conflict must be refashioned to fit the square peg of war. This view is in no small part due to the influence of Clausewitz as well as the west’s own dominance in the conventional military realm. The East, however, has often practiced a different philosophy. Examples of this approach can be seen in Communism’s “shift from the battlefield of armies to the battlefield of classes” as described by J.F.C. Fuller, or the writing of the two Chinese People’s Liberation Army colonels which provide a comprehensive view of conflict that includes other dimensions such as terror, cyber, financial and economic combat (or warfare). Especially relevant is the apparent Chinese strategy of denying a decisive transition to war in order to achieve its current goals in the Pacific. The Western hang-up on the term “war” is echoed in Mrs. Brooks article, which highlights how it is misapplied to other dimensions of conflict. But, in this piece and several others, Mrs. Brooks still presents it as one of only two possible options for dealing with entire spectrum of conflict, law or war.

If the 19th century’s most brilliant theorist can cause readers to become lost in the trees, the most brilliant theorist of the 20th century can help them take a step back to see the forest. John R. Boyd understood and valued Clausewitz but he also takes a broader view than both the Prussian’s work and the addendum offered by the Chinese colonels’ unrestricted warfare. Boyd dispensed, in many cases, with the narrow focus on the term “war” and in his corpus of work the word “competition” stands out much more — exemplifying the understanding of conflict as much more than just war.

Cavalier use of the term “war”—as in Mrs. Brooks’ references to the prevalence of terms like “cyber war” and “financial war”—is not done to enhance the logical and philosophical understandings of the topic but largely for political motives or for lack of a better term. Just because many people inaccurately use a term in certain contexts does not redefine it. These statements are in fact an argument for a more strict and narrow interpretation of war. Discrete boundaries are the key to preventing the expansion of the term and its accompanying increase the potential uses of military force and, more importantly, the effects war has on society.

Ricks quotes Brooks as positing that, “Clausewitzian strict constructionists will then respond, ‘You can blather on all you want about cyberwar or financial war, but if what you're talking about is not both violent and political, it's just not war, but something else.’” He goes on to note that Mrs. Brooks’ response is that, “…there are many other ways to understand and define violence. Consider various forms of psychological torture or abuse. Or consider cyber attacks that lead to loss of life as an indirect result of extended power outages. Why not view such attacks as a form of violence if they lead predictably to loss of life?"

A logical fallacy is at work here. If Clausewitzians say that all war is violent, it doesn’t mean that all violence is (or should be defined as) war. Further, the state may have a monopoly on violence but the military does not. The contemporary debate over responsibility for drone operations demonstrates different schools of thought in this regard. A case for redefining war must be made, not simply assumed.

It is also seems as though Ricks is implying that when competition exceeds the boundaries of war, the military is still the best arm for executing policy in these realms: “Then Brooks gets all neo-Westphalian on their asses. ‘It is the state that creates and defines the role of the military....It is also the state that defines the legal contours of war.’ So, for a truly subordinate military, war might be war, but war is what your civilian superiors say it is.”

But, as has been previously noted, there is no need to redefine violence or war to understand that “non-military” conflict exists and must be addressed. Such redefinition merely muddies the waters and extends a concept’s meaning far past its usefulness. Semantically changing the meaning of war to envelope the whole, or a much larger, area of competition will do little to solve our current problems and is likely to cause more of them. The military is raised, organized, equipped and trained for war as it has been defined by our Prussian theorist—not as whatever policymakers decide to call war. We have recently witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan what occurs when the military is asked to do everything, especially those things which are outside the purview of “war,” and without adequate interagency support. We have also seen that, even within the military realm, shifting focus from one method of warfighting to another tends to detract from the capability to conduct the former (e.g., the 2006 Hezbollah-Israeli War). Some outspoken U.S. commentators have warned of this as well. The capability to fight and win wars is still very much needed and must be maintained. As the saying goes, “When you try to do everything well, you end up doing nothing well.” This does not mean that the military cannot or should not engage in the cyber realm. It simply means that we must identify which framework a form of conflict falls into and determine the best tools and methods to deal with it. Setting aside the cyber warfare discussion and looking instead at “financial warfare” helps illustrate this. In realms outside of war, we may be better served by designing appropriate tools and responses for those arenas outside of war, rather than trying to tell the hammer that to hammer now means to screw, drill, and grip as well.

Mrs. Brooks points out that the state may choose which wars to fight and how to fight them, but this is merely defining a war or number of wars, not the essence of war itself. Mewett’s argument is still valid—as history has shown that the state is often in a reactionary mode rather than a managerial one when it comes to fighting—war influences the state as much as the state directs a war.

Brooks acknowledges this, describing it as a feedback loop and states that war, “can change the relationship between individuals and the state -- by altering ’rights’" for instance, or altering the degree to which the state's use of power is subject to internal checks and balances. Ultimately, by adding more to the war basket, the state may set in motion a cascade of changes that end by transforming the state itself.”

Indeed, the prosecution of the “War on Terror” has fundamentally changed American society in many ways, redefining how we think of both liberty and security.

In Ricks’ own column, an excellent piece by COL C. Anthony Pfaff notes the dangers of doing inherent when these changes result in expanding the concept of war: “However, given that the debate over the nature vs. character of war is largely a linguistic exercise (I don't mean to trivialize it -- words do matter), there is at least some utility in favoring the view that war's nature doesn't change and that it is inherently violent. Otherwise, metaphorical uses of the term could conceivably be employed to justify the use of military force in response to non-military "acts of aggression." Such a situation could set conditions for increased violent conflict, which under our current understanding of war would not be justified.”

Rather than an orchestration by the state, all conflict—especially war—must be viewed not simply as a struggle between two adversaries but also as a struggle between each and the act of war itself. One can win victory but lose oneself in the process. Mrs. Brooks often seems to be advocating for approaches that would actually result in this outcome.

In some ways, the Clausewitzian understanding of war could be viewed as a guide for when military force should be used, or even as a constraint against its excessive use. In this view, discarding it or saying it does not apply is likely to facilitate expansion and redefinition of war.

The semantic “tug-of-war” (pun intended) about defining “war” and “violence” is unnecessary, unless one is trying to expand it, and justify an escalatory, one-size-fits-all military response, as Brooks hints at: “Tell it to the Marines, or the Hellfire missile, whichever comes first.”

The Marines or a Hellfire may very well be the appropriate response but, as practitioners know, the application of violence tends to be a bit more nuanced than academics imagine.

The idea that there are only two choices, between law and war, between liberty and security, is a false dilemma that will lead to both being distorted in order to address problems for which they equally inappropriate. When this is done, not only does efficacy suffer but dangerous consequences emerge, as we have noted previously:

“These pre-existing frameworks [the legal framework and the military framework] emerged to address different challenges than those to which they are now being applied. This is not crime, this is not war and neither approach can sufficiently address the problem when the threat does not fall fully into either category. As such, these approaches have been expanded, modified and essentially stretched. The result has been confusion, indecision, and usurpation. On the one hand, the excessive prohibitions of the war framework hamper our effectiveness in combating non-state actors outside our boundaries, as seen in the failed Somalia raid, controversy over rendition programs, and the continuing issue of how to handle the Guantanamo detainees. On the other hand, the legal framework is being perverted by increasingly oppressive measures, such as the classification of citizens as enemy combatants, drone killings of citizens, and unbridled government surveillance — clearly undermining civil liberty within our borders.”

The current situation, embodied in the about how to address current threats, is the result of the nation not being able to choose between two equally bad options. Brooks thinks we need to just pick one and accept the consequences. Instead, we need to create another option.

The U.S. In Afghanistan - Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

Michael Scheuer highlighted that immediately following the attacks of 9/11, Sir John Keegan offered the United States some advice grounded in history when he warned that, 

"Efforts to occupy and rule [Afghanistan] usually ended in disaster. But straightforward punitive expeditions...were successful on more than one occasion. It should be remembered that, in 1878, the British did indeed succeed in bringing the Afghans to heel [with a punitive expedition]. Lord Roberts' march from 'Kabul to Khandahar' was one of Victoria's celebrated wars. The Russians, moreover, foolishly did not try to punish rogue Afghans, as Roberts did, but to rule the country. Since Afghanistan is ungovernable, the failure of their [1979-92] effort was predictable...America should not seek to change the regime, but simply find and kill terrorists. It should do so without pity." 

The U.S. did exactly this, embarking on a punitive expedition, targeting Bin Laden, his Al Qaeda associates and the Taliban regime which provided him sanctuary. These goals had largely been accomplished within three months post- 9/11.  CIA operatives and Special Forces teams supported by U.S. air power linked up with Afghan warlords to conduct a very successful unconventional warfare campaign against the Taliban regime. As Yaniv Barzilai has noted, by December 7, 2001 anti-Taliban forces were in control of every major city in Afghanistan.  The Taliban had surrendered its traditional stronghold of Kandahar and had been pushed into Pakistan.   Those members of Al-Qaeda who had not been killed or captured, or had not fled Afghanistan before the attacks, were cornered in Tora Bora along with Bin Laden himself.  At this critical moment in the campaign, the U.S. had, within striking distance, precisely the tools needed to finish off Bin Laden and the remaining members of Al Qaeda.  Barzilai writes, 

For weeks, Gary Berntsen, the top CIA officer in Afghanistan, pleaded for eight hundred Army Rangers to seal the six-by-six square mile sierra of Tora Bora. Then-colonel John Mulholland, the commander of the Special Forces A-teams in Afghanistan, was “concerned about the inadequacy of the force to the mission at hand.” General James Mattis, who commanded twelve hundred Marines at Camp Rhino near Kandahar, asked to reposition his forces to seal the border at Tora Bora. And, more than one thousand troops from the Tenth Mountain Division lay ready at Bagram Air Base near Kabul and Kharshi Khanabad in Uzbekistan.

Instead of turning the displacement into destruction, GEN Tommy Franks refused requests to put more U.S. troops on the ground and allowed the “battle for the existence of Al-Qaeda to be waged by ninety-three Western commandos and a contingent of generally untrustworthy Afghan rebels without any reliable force to seal the escape routes."  During this time Bin Laden, along with the core of Al Qaeda, was able to slip across the border into Pakistan undetected.  The U.S. would not know his exact location again for 12 years.  Decisive victory in Afghanistan was lost in that moment.

Despite this, victory, albeit a less satisfying one, was still within the nation’s grasp.  The U.S. had accomplished many of its goals by having displaced the regime that supported Al-Qaeda, forcing the organization out of Afghanistan and severely damaging it. The U.S. could have simply left Afghanistan to the opposition forces that defeated the Taliban and returned home, demonstrating to its enemies that terror sponsors will be removed from power.  It could then have continued to pursue Bin Laden in Pakistan through more smaller, less costly and maintainable clandestine actions until his final elimination.  Though not decisive, this would have classified as a victory.  It certainly would have been in keeping with the advice of  Lord Roberts, the very British General of whom Sir John Keegan spoke in his advice to the U.S.:

     It may not be very flattering to our amour propre...but I feel sure that I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us he less they will dislike us. Should Russia in future years attempt to conquer Afghanistan, or invade India through it, we should have a better chance of attaching the Afghans to our interests if we avoid all interference with them in the meantime.

Instead, however, the U.S. policy in Afghanistan shifted to one that has never been one of its strengths - nation-building, and its consequent condition of long-term occupation.  As Alicia Wittmeyer has noted,

The West was trying to do something it couldn't do, and it was trying to do something it didn't need to do. Its basic assumptions were wrong. Afghanistan did not pose an existential threat to international security; the problem was not that it was a "failed state." The truth is that the West always lacked the knowledge, power, or legitimacy to fundamentally transform Afghanistan. But policymakers were too afraid, too hypnotized by fashionable theories, too isolated from Afghan reality, and too laden with guilt to notice that the more ambitious Afghanistan mission was impossible and unnecessary.

In a 2008 interview, COL Gian Gentile asked a question about U.S. policy that has deep implications:  

With regard to Afghanistan the president's political objectives are to disable, disrupt, dismantle al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, to prevent it from using Afghanistan and Pakistan as a base to attack the United States. Then why, as a matter of strategy, do we have to embrace such a maximalist approach of nation-building to achieve those rather limited objectives?

Presumably it was to prevent the kind of instability it was thought might create another opportunity for terrorist safe-haven.  But this approach ignored a critical reality: that the desired outcome was not possible given the political conditions in the United States and on the conditions on ground in Afghanistan as they existed then.  


The shift from punishing the Taliban and targeting our enemies to nation building resulted in an enemy response: insurgency.  Thus the mission became counterinsurgency.  A new doctrine was codified to help win the war and its framework imposed on a situation for which it was ill-suited.  

Twelve years later, at a cost of almost $1.5 trillion, more than 6,700 dead, and over 50,000 wounded.  Bin Laden is dead but Al Qaeda remains intact and has an undeniably larger global footprint.  U.S. power, and its ability to to deter, has been irrevocably tarnished.  Meanwhile, observers, and even the U.S. government, have noted that Afghanistan is still no less likely, and possibly more likely, to devolve into the same instability feared a decade prior.  This is, in any view, a defeat rather than victory, and a costly one at that.  It is precisely when U.S. policymakers decided to alter the U.S. role in Afghanistan from punitive action to nation-building, whether in ignorance or denial of the conditions that would preclude the desired outcome, that they sealed the nation’s defeat.   

This is a vital lesson for future interventions.

Intellect Is Not Enough...Four Quotes

I. From a report concerning men recruited to work for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services during WWII):

"The organization has been recruiting too many men, civilian or military, who have intelligence and sometimes the necessary mechanical training but who lack common sense, know nothing about working with men or how to look after the welfare and morale of the men under them. We simply must have men who can shoulder responsibility and use initiative with common sense. Simply because a man is intelligent does not qualify him for this type of work."


II. Then-Major Carstens, OIC of a SF detachment commanders' course in 2002, cited by MAJ
Major Fernando M. Luján in his report Light Footprints:The Future of American Military Intervention:

"The OSS, when selecting officers to parachute into occupied France, described the ideal candidate as a Ph.D. that can win a bar fight. We don't just want an officer that can carry a hundred-pound rucksack on his back. We need someone who can think and improvise." 
 

III. Statement made by German general Hermann Balck about a division commander in WWII on the eastern front:

"It is interesting to note, incidentally, that this fellow was a highly rated General Staff officer. Clever, but unfortunately not very practical. So we were always brought back to the fact that cleverness is a curse. Clausewitz once said, 'Man needs a harmony of strengths.'"


IV. Michael Kenney, From Pablo to Osama
 
"The concept, James C. Scott reminds us, comes from the ancient Greek poets and philosophers. Mētis refers to a broad range of practical skills that sailors, athletes, doctors, statesmen, and others use to respond to a 'a constantly changing natural and human environment,' including prudence, perceptiveness, ingenuity, elusiveness, and deceit. This crafty intelligence 'bears on fluid situations which are constantly changing and which at every moment combine contrary features and forces that are opposed to each other,' observe Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, a pair of Greek classicists and two of the foremost authorities on the subject."

"Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions."

"Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war – against militarism, against fascism, against bolshevism. In the postwar age, uneasy, disliking and fearing the unholiness of Communism, they have prepared for jihad. If their leaders blow the trumpet, or if their homeland is attacked, their millions are agreed to be better dead than Red. Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must.

For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions – as its prophets have long proclaimed.

Except that in this world are tigers.

Before 1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them not their concern.

When so ordered, they went to war. Spreading themselves thinner still, they commanded and trained civilians who heeded the trumpet's call. The civilians did the fighting, of course – but they did it the Army's way.

The volunteers came and went, and the Army changed not at all.

In 1861, and 1917, the Army acted upon the civilian, changing him. But in 1945 something new happened.  Suddenly, without precedent, perhaps because of changes in the emerging managerial society, professional soldiers of high rank had become genuinely popular with the public. In 1861, and in 1917, the public gave the generals small credit, talked instead of the gallant militia. Suddenly, at the end of World War II, society embraced the generals. And here it ruined them.

They had lived their lives in semi-bitter alienation from their own culture ('What's the matter, Colonel; can't you make it on the outside?') but now they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college campuses.

Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the Army the civilians hadn't liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.

It was perfectly understandable that large numbers of men who served didn't like the service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles. In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.

The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did – but it could not have changed its nature.

But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized, America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist.

In a truly liberal society, centurions have no place. For centurions, when they put on the soldier, do not retain the citizen. They are never citizens to begin with.

There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around – the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiescence of the military toward the liberal view of life.

Domination and control society should have. The record of military rule, from the burnished and lazy Praetorians to the juntas of Latin America, to the attempted fiasco of the Legion Etrangere, are pages of history singularly foul in odor.

But acquiescence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and illiberal view of life and the world. Society's purpose is to live; the military's is to stand ready, if need be, to die.

Soldiers are rarely fit to rule – but they must be fit to fight.

The values composing civilization and the values required to protect it are normally at war. Civilization values sophistication, but in an armed force sophistication is a millstone.

Without its tough spearmen, Hellenic culture would have had nothing to give the world. It would not have lasted long enough. When Greek culture became so sophisticated that its common men would no longer fight to the death, as at Thermopylae, but became devious and clever, a horde of Roman farm boys overran them.

The time came when the descendants of Macedonians who had slaughtered Asians till they could no longer lift their arms went pale and sick at the sight of the havoc wrought by the Roman gladius Hispanicus as it carved its way toward Hellas.

The Doolittle Board of 1945-1946 met, listened to less than half a hundred complaints, and made its recommendations.

The new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors, with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said things like "Can Do." In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots – there was money for these – the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.

What they lacked couldn't be seen, not until the guns sounded.

There is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even brutal. But one essential part of breaking men into military life is the removal of misfits – and in the service a man is a misfit who cannot obey orders, any orders, and who cannot stand immense and searing mental and physical pressure.

For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.

It was not until the summer of 1950, when the legions went forth, that the generals realized what they had agreed to, and what they had wrought.

The Old Army, outcast and alien and remote from the warm bosom of society, officer and man alike, ordered into Korea, would have gone without questioning. It would have died without counting. As on Bataan, it would not have listened for the angel's trumpet or the clarion call. It would have heard the hard sound of its own bugles, and hard-bitten, cynical, wise in bitter ways, it would have kept its eyes on its sergeants.

It would have died. It would have retreated, or surrendered, only in the last extremity. In the enemy prison camps, exhausted, sick, it would have spat upon its captors, despising them to the last. It would have died, but it might have held.

The recommendations of the so-called Doolittle Board of 1945-1946, which destroyed so much of the will – if not the actual power – of the military traditionalists, and left them bitter, and confused as to how to act, was based on experience in World War II. In that war, as in all others, millions of civilians were fitted arbitrarily into a military pattern already centuries old.

What the Doolittle Board tried to do, in small measure, was to bring the professional Army back into the new society. What it could not do, in 1946, was to gauge the future.

The military have the preponderance of fact with them as far as Korea was concerned. Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army – at its own peril – had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.

The Army needed legions, but society didn't want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.

But the sociologists are right – absolutely right – in demanding that the centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic war – like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war against Communism will be – America can get a lot more mileage out of citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.

No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.

The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order – our own decent order – in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

In the first six months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into legionaries.

America was not more soft or more decadent than it had been twenty years earlier. It was confused, badly, on its attitudes toward war. It was still bringing up its youth to think there were no tigers, and it was still reluctant to forge them guns to shoot tigers.

Many of America's youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very normal in our un-sane world. It had not been ground into them that they would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.

It has been a long, long time since American citizens have been able to take down the musket from the mantelpiece and go tiger hunting. But they still cling to the belief that they can do so, and do it well, without training.

The problem is not that Americans are soft but that they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won. Free society cannot be oriented toward the battlefield – Sparta knew that trap – but some adjustments must be made, as the squabbling Athenians learned to their sorrow.

The sociologists and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world did."


- Every line of this was cut out of T.R. Fehrenbach's 1963 book This Kind of War, and specifically from Chapter 25, entitled Proud Legions.
This is my more concise, but obviously less rich edit, with some minor rearrangements to emphasize a point.