War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals
David Halberstam. New York: Scribner, 2001. 543 pp. Bib. Index. $28.00 ($25.20).
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Paul G. Johnson, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired)
David Halberstam has delivered again with War in a Time of Peace, a gripping, inside view of post-Gulf War national security decision making. In doing so, he has successfully employed the formula that first brought him to prominence with The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), which analyzed the flawed U.S. decisions of the Vietnam War. With a Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter's instinct backed up by 150 interviews, Halberstam tells the stories of U.S. involvement in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and Kosovo with a hard-hitting style that makes readers feel like they know the participants and are present at all the important events. If you plan to read only one book written this year about foreign policy, this book should be it.
I recommend this work for members of the military for several reasons. First, War in a Time of Peace is good history that reads like a novel, and like a good novel, it is hard to put down. More important, Halberstam vividly describes the various forces at play when the United States intervenes abroad—the effect of domestic politics, the role of Congress, the cautiousness of the Pentagon post-Vietnam and post-Somalia, and the crucial role played (or in some cases, not played) by the President. Halberstam also excels when he writes of the increase in the lethality of U.S. air power with the widespread use of precision weapons, and when he describes how some in the military embraced the changes that resulted, while others resisted.
This is Halberstam at his best—weaving a narrative of people, positions, and politics, showing the reader how these things are inexorably linked to events in the outside world, effecting them and being effected by them. His minibiographies of National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Army General Wesley Clark are particularly notable. Halberstam also is very talented at relating this package of information about each intervention to the broader contours of the U.S. foreign policy being pursued at the time.
War in a Time of Peace presents the story of two Presidents, George Bush and Bill Clinton. Halberstam sees both in somewhat tragic form—George Bush as the President who triumphed in foreign policy only to lose the 1992 election because of a perceived lack of engagement in domestic and economic affairs, and Bill Clinton as the domestic policy guru who wanted to avoid foreign policy issues, but who was increasingly forced by events beyond his control to deal with thorny foreign policy problems.
The book focuses mostly on the Clinton years, and shows an administration that, to Halberstam, progressed from one that had no overseas intervention policy to one that developed one because it was forced to do so by events in Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti, and then used the lessons learned to forge a policy for Kosovo. All this was done in the heat of dealing with enemies such as Slobodan Milosevic, Mohammad Aidid, and Raoul Cedras, as well as NATO allies, domestic politics, and Clinton scandals.
This book, while masterful, is not without slight flaws. Sharper editing would have reduced a minor degree of redundancy. In addition, while Halberstam is an able reporter who undoubtedly checked and cross-referenced his sources, the relatively thin set of endnotes provided does not fully reflect this. These small complaints do not detract from the insight and enjoyment that War in a Time of Peace provides in abundance.
Nuclear Weapons and Aircraft Carriers: How the Bomb Saved Naval Aviation
VAdm Jerry Miller, USN (Ret.). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. 296 pp. Photos. Bib. Index. $32.95 ($29.65).
Reviewed by Norman Friedman
This is a practitioner's account of the central reality of naval aviation for much of the past half-century. Vice Admiral Miller served as a naval aviator and rose to command the Second and Sixth Fleets, both of which had important nuclear strike responsibilities, before retiring in 1974. In Admiral Miller's view, it is impossible to understand the evolution of nuclear weapons and strategy without understanding the practicalities, not only of targeting, but also of actually delivering bombs on target. Several times he respectfully quotes Rear Admiral William Sims's dictum that only the shots that hit count and Admiral Arleigh Burke's injunction that before any elegant strategy can be framed, its inventor had better pay attention to how (and whether) the weapons involved work. Both are absolutely correct; much of what has been imagined about nuclear strategy, even at high government levels, ignored (and continues to ignore) such realities.
Historians will do a more comprehensive job of tracing the background of the various decisions that shaped the modern fleet, but they will do well to keep the practicalities that the author describes in mind. Often those practicalities lie beneath the apparently opaque language of the mountain of paper with which a historian works. Admiral Miller has two great advantages in this work. First, he had unusually good contacts among those who created the nuclear-armed fleet. Second, he experienced enough of the details of nuclear operations to make sense of what his sources told him. That the history is oral does, of course, limit it; memories are not always entirely accurate. Even so, they are worth pursuing, and this book does an excellent job of that.
The subtitle speaks to the common belief that the Korean War saved the U.S. carrier force from extinction at the hands of the Air Force and an over-ambitious Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson. In the author's view, nuclear weapons were so central to U.S. strategy in the 1950s that a Navy incapable of delivering them would have almost disappeared. Its claim to defending sea lines of communication would have been shouted down by an Air Force that claimed that, given nuclear weapons, no war would last long enough for sea communications to matter.
Admiral Miller implicitly dismisses, perhaps too readily, the point that, once the Soviets had nuclear weapons of their own, a major conventional war was unlikely, and peripheral wars such as Korea or Vietnam would become the dominant military venues of the Cold War. In any case, the Eisenhower administration said that it would be quite willing to use nuclear weapons in such warfare, so it is at least arguable that without a tactical nuclear capability the U.S. Navy would not have been able to justify its peripheral-- war role. As it was, the Eisenhower administration greatly valued naval capabilities on the periphery of Eurasia, using the Navy as its big stick.
Admiral Miller hints at the considerable irony involved. In U.S. military thinking, nuclear weapons were central. Enormous efforts, sometimes at great human cost, were focused on ensuring that weapons could be delivered where and when the national command wanted them. In reality, however, nuclear weapons were largely unusable. Admiral Miller quotes a remarkable comment by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the effect that in the end public opinion might be even more powerful than nuclear weapons. Ultimately, it is Admiral Miller's view that the nuclear era is effectively over, because modern precision weapons can destroy targets without the horrific side effects of nuclear attack.
The questions Admiral Miller raises are likely to be more, not less, meaningful as the war against terroism proceeds, because the central debate in this war is about what the United States has to do to win and get state sponsors to hand over Osama bin Laden and others. That is not to suggest we ought to return to nuclear weapons, but the subject of nuclear weapons automatically leads to the central question of war, which is about how inflicting some level of damage on some part of an enemy force or homeland leads to a desired outcome. Read this book. It raises the questions that matter.
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
James Bamford. New York: Doubleday, 2001. 721 pp. Notes. Index. $29.95 ($26.95).
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Ralph L. DeFalco III, U.S. Naval Reserve
Journalist James Bamford is no stranger to the secret world of the purposefully low-profile National Security Agency (NSA). His best-seller The Puzzle Palace (New York: Penguin, 1982) was the first book to provide a glimpse into the signals intelligence agency's inner workings, and it has proved since to be an enduring work on the subject.
Now, with the publication of Body of Secrets, Bamford has written another book that adds to our understanding of the roles, capabilities, and growth of NSA. In a historic break with the agency's past policies, Bamford was able to obtain NSA's cooperation in writing the book. This account includes information from his interviews with Air Force Lieutenant General and NSA Director Michael V. Hayden, as well as from interviews with past directors and current and former employees. That kind of access, from personnel who are briefed not to tell even their families about their work, is remarkable. Bamford also gained access to previously classified materials and reports from NSA. This information and the interviews provide the meaty substance of the book.
Body of Secrets is aptly titled, too. This is not a definitive history, nor is it the product of an in-depth study of the charter, missions, and technical capabilities of the world's most powerful foreign communications interception agency. Rather, Bamford has given us a highly readable and often engrossing body of work that recounts secret episodes that reveal much of the inner workings of the agency. Lucid and detailed, the book takes the reader from the days when the abandoned and forbidden military codebreaking operations were secretly resurrected to gripping accounts of the agency's secret role in fighting the Cold War and the challenges it faces today in a world of huge technological change.
Body of Secrets also is a shocking book that reveals ugly secrets hidden for decades. Bamford details, for example, a sick and sinister plan by members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to instigate a war with Cuba. In 1962 with Operation Northwoods, the members of the Joint Chiefs approved a plan to launch a secret campaign of terrorism against their own citizens, blame Castro, and provide a pretext for the invasion of Cuba. It was a time, Bamford writes, when the Joint Chiefs had become a "sewer of deceit."
Bamford pulls no punches in this work. This is not the product of a dispassionate investigative reporter and journalist. Bamford takes sides, names names, and serves up withering criticisms. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Lyman L. Lemnitzer is described as "a dangerous—perhaps even unbalanced—right wing extremist." In 1967, Israeli jet aircraft and motor torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty (AGTR-5), killing 34 Americans on board and wounding 171 others. Bamford makes a very strong case that the attack was premeditated and deliberate, part of an attempt by Israel to cover up its massacre of hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war. The incident was quickly whitewashed and hidden from the U.S. press. Bamford's criticism of Congress here also is coupled with a demand to open a new investigation of the incident.
The research efforts that went into this book were considerable. Bamford combed congressional records, dozens of journals and publications, NSA's own records and newsletters, materials from four presidential libraries, and records from the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Bamford writes well and he has a keen eye for stories worth telling and an ear for incisive quotations. Unfortunately, Body of Secrets lacks a bibliography and the editors at Doubleday made a very poor choice to use a hideously cumbersome endnote convention.
But these are small criticisms of a truly revealing and engaging work. If Bamford's purpose was to open our eyes to the hidden work of the NSA, he has done a masterful job.