In ancient times and modern, it has always been true that warfare makes as burdensome a demand on man’s patience as on his courage. To be sure, the exercise of patience, whether in adversity or merely in monotony, is not so richly rewarded as bravery. Neither the Congressional Medal of Honor nor the Victoria Cross is given for the fortitude exacted of those who simply endure the passage of time in places and circumstances not of their choosing. Yet, it can be argued, with citations of chapter and verse, that the qualities of character required for alert waiting, without loss of readiness, are at least as rare and fully as valuable as those qualities that inspire and sustain a man called on for a supreme act of bravery.
This is not a new idea—although it will be argued in this essay that it has a new relevance in our time. Long ago it was well expressed by George Monck, first Duke of Albemarle, and one of the great captains of 17th century England, who served Charles II so ably in the Four Days’ Battle of 1666. Monck wrote:
“If a man faint under the burden of such tediousness as usually attendeth upon warlike designments, he is in no way fit for enterprise; because the two chief parts of a soldier are Valor and Sufferance; and there is as much honor gained by suffering wants patiently in war, as by fighting valiently, and as great achievements effected by the one, as by the other . . . and yet it is an easier matter to find men who will offer themselves willingly to death, than such as will endure Labour with patience.”
Every century of military history offers abundant evidence that George Monck spoke truly. Sea war especially provides many clear- cut examples of the virtues of patience as a prime ingredient of victory. Perhaps the most highly advertised long period of inaction was that endured by Lord Nelson and his captains and crews in the years before their momentous victory at Trafalgar. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote in memorable phrases of Lord Nelson’s prolonged, yet alert, waiting through all of 1803 and 1804 and much of 1805. Mahan recorded:
“They were dull, weary, eventless months, those months of watching and waiting of the big ships before the French arsenals. Purposeless they surely seemed to many, but they saved England. The world has never seen a more impressive demonstration of the influence of sea-power upon history. Those far- distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the domination of the world.”
There was drama aplenty at Trafalgar, after the long wait; and a victory that stands as one of the great watersheds of history. But the capacity to maintain readiness throughout years of inaction, while waiting for opportunity, was quite as much a factor in that historic triumph as Nelson’s plan of action and the skill and bravery required to carry it out.
In the next great international conflict after the Napoleonic struggles, World War I, patience again played a singularly large role, for it was largely a war of attrition, not of movement, after the first few weeks of the initial German advance. Even more than for the ground forces, tied to positions by the dominance of the machine gun, it was a conflict of watchful waiting—Woodrow Wilson’s phrase, but applicable here—for the main fleets of Great Britain and America. In four years of relentless warfare, only Jutland broke the spell of everlasting vigil without combat. And, as a battle, even Jutland was unfinished and inconclusive. Except for that one spurt of action off the Danish coast, the main body of British heavy surface sea forces stood watch at the exits of the North Sea, making certain that the German High Seas Fleet remained in the impotent security of its home ports. And in so doing, Britain’s battleships, battle cruisers, and supporting ships, later assisted by their U. S. counterparts, assured Allied command of the oceans.
That command permitted the supply— and survival—of the British Isles; it also made it possible to ferry an American army and its equipment and supplies to the theater of war in France. Somber as was the threat of the U-boats, and heavy as their toll proved to be, it was nevertheless the imprisonment of the Kaiser’s proud High Seas Fleet that created the basic conditions for ultimate Allied victory. The Anglo-American capital ships accomplished all this by doing virtually nothing for four wearisome years. They only had to be there!
To the impatient layman, it may seem an appalling waste to build, man, and maintain great ships that never fire their guns in anger. But that is not a waste. It often happens in war—and in peace—that the gun that is never fired is in reality the most valuable of weapons. A half-century later, another term for this military phenomenon has been coined and has gained wide currency. We now call it deterrent power. The most potent of today’s weapons, for the most part, are like the capital ships of the British Grand Fleet. They were not really intended to be employed in combat—although obviously designed and fitted for hostilities. Rather, they were built to make certain the enemy would not try to use his equivalent weapons. By maintaining an unquestioned superiority, the British were able to assure their command of the oceans without even attempting to destroy the German fleet.
World War II was altogether different. The tyranny of the machine gun was ended. New weapons, new tactics, new strategies, in combination with a theater of war as great as the globe, ordained a war of movement, once the so-called “phony war” of late 1939 and early 1940 was done. Dull as it may have seemed to many participants, World War II was in fact a conflict of almost ceaseless action and movement, dominated by offensive weapons of great mobility. This is worth some emphasis, for it may well be that the mobile character of the last war has led us to some false assumptions and expectations. Thinking of the sanguinary three-ring military circus of 1939-1945, filled with venturesome operations, we are prone to assume that the road to security is the road to victory, that it is just what the French generals of 1914 constantly preached but could not really practice— toujours Vattaque. Only by the unrelenting offensive, the prevailing doctrine of the day had it, could a nation hope to triumph. Applied in 1914-1918, in the sluggish and unchangeable conditions of trench warfare, it was a miscalculation—a costly one in French, British, and American lives—because the weaponry of the day enforced siege warfare, and each offensive was a call for new slaughter, to little or no purpose.
A like mistake might be made today, or tomorrow. If so, it would be infinitely more costly. In any event, the patterns of World War II are exercising a kind of gravitational pull on nearly all of us, but especially on laymen. They are leading us to underrate the virtues of patience. This was evident in the Korean conflict, when nearly all the pressures of public opinion were for an all-out effort to achieve “total victory.” They ignored the awesome risks of pushing beyond a constricted theater and engaging the interminable manpower of China in the endless open spaces of the Eastern Asian mainland.
We can see it also in the drum-fire of agitation for a “strategy of victory.” Unfailingly, for 15 postwar years, our presidents, defense secretaries, and chiefs of staff have exercised caution, mindful of the appalling hazards of a nuclear exchange. Heedlessly, critics have denounced the government’s policy, sometimes labeling it callously a “no-win policy.” The zealous impatience instilled by a war of movement in the 1940s has led us—all too many of us—to downgrade the virtues of patience and to risk everything—even the very existence of mankind—on a bid for total victory, an undertaking to gain security by an all-out attempt to extirpate Communism, which now claims the allegiance of one-third the people of the world.
The trouble with this doctrine of intransigence, this contemporary version of toujours Vattaque, is that it ignores the profound change in military technology of the last two decades. Yet, military history has come full circle, since 1914. We are back to a condition of inevitable stalemate, although for different reasons. The prime offensive weapons of today— medium-range and long-range missiles with nuclear warheads, and fast manned bombers with like armament—are weapons of such destructiveness that they cannot be used deliberately by a sane government. To employ them by choice is to invite reprisals on an unacceptable scale. Like the British Grand Fleet of 1914-18, they represent deterrent power. They are most valuable, not if they are used, but if, with “barrels” cold, they achieve their vital purpose of containment or deterrence.
In one sense, the contrast is total. World War I was a war of stalemate, of immobility, because the machine gun gave the defense such an overwhelming advantage. Today it is the weaponry of attack that has a like advantage. But, being available to both sides, it forbids attack, because it entails inadmissible losses for the attacker as well as the victim of the attack. There may have been marked advantages, at one stage, for the power willing to launch surprise attack on a massive scale— when the United States still had a nuclear weapons monopoly. But any such advantage has been whittled down to negligible size by the development of fairly invulnerable means of reprisal on both sides.
As a consequence, the most significant and characteristic duty to which military personnel may be assigned, in our time, is what might be called the “interminable alert.” Such is the task of the bomber crews who keep their aircraft steadily airborne with full nuclear armament—for a war that may come tomorrow or may not come for a generation. The “interminable alert” is nowhere better illustrated than by the Polaris submarine. A big, costly ship, capable of prolonged operations submerged, she carries 16 medium-to- long-range missiles of enormous destructive power and great accuracy. Thanks to the secrecy of undersea operations, she can be expected to survive surprise attack. She patrols a prescribed area of sea, chosen to insure her ability, with other like vessels, to strike at the vital installations and power centers of the prospective enemy. Her commander can afford, without risk, to wait for absolute, authenticated confirmation of an enemy attack before launching missiles, thus reducing to near zero the risk of political or military error. So prolonged and monotonous is her mission, she systematically returns to port for a change of crew. Nelson’s three-year wait before Trafalgar was nothing to the vigil that may be required of our Polaris submarine force. And we must hope that they will continue their patrols, not just for years, but for the useful life of the ships. For as one Polaris captain so well said: “We have failed in our task if we ever have to launch a missile. Our real job is to prevent war, not fight it.”
In this fashion, we have come back to one of those epochs in the ever-changing character of warfare in which Sufferance overshadows Valor. Now and again, to be sure, mobile elements of our military forces may be called on to move with utmost speed to some remote, improbable place and engage in lively actions—the brush-fire operation. But even the personnel of a fire department spend most of their time just waiting. And such actions by lighter, mobile forces have to do with peripheral feuds, not with the crucial antagonisms of our era. As for the main body of our military establishment, including its most elaborate and costly weapons systems, it will be assigned constantly to stations of great responsibility, with only the most remote prospect of actual combat. Its task is, above all, what George Monck called Sufferance. And the longer the men of these forces stand at their arms, their control panels, their microphones, their infinite variety of duty stations, the more wearisome it will be for them to sustain their own belief in the value of what they are doing.
That is why it is so important that they should understand one fundamental principle —that their service to America’s security will be the greater if they never pull the trigger. They will most completely fulfill their responsibilities if they never have to step beyond the limits of deterrence. For in the state of military technology as we find it today, warfare itself has the dynamic quality of a chain reaction. Once unleashed, it cannot stop until both sides have suffered irreparably. Sir Winston Churchill wrote of World War II: “There are no safe battles.” As a warning that one never can be sure of winning, that was a reasonable generalization in the 1940s. Today, given the engines of massive retaliation, his assertion is true in a deeper sense. It is an infallible truism of the nuclear age.
This adjustment to prolonged inaction, men in uniform can make without too great difficulty. Professional soldiers long have understood that they must devote countless hours, and weeks and years, to perfecting their readiness for conflicts they quite frankly hope will never come. But this is not equally true of the main body of citizens. For them, sitting on the sidelines, familiar with the heady record of an unbroken succession of victorious wars for 185 years, the problem is not really military. It is one of good and evil. Most Americans seem to have resolved all the problems of international relations in terms of a game of cops and robbers—of good guys and bad guys. And they are persuaded that the good guys—meaning the American people and their allies at any given moment— are certain to triumph if only they will plunge in wholeheartedly, talk and act tough, and commit themselves and all their forces and resources to obliterating the evil ones from the Earth.
Some are more cautious than that. But even most of those are persuaded that America’s civil and military leaders are too soft, too easygoing, too prone to compromise, too reluctant to call for a showdown—and too willing to settle for less than total victory. This is a not unnatural attitude for Americans who for generations have thought of war in moralistic terms, not as a conscious instrument of national policy. They can understand fighting for a decisive, clear-cut victory. But they find it hard to visualize the armed forces as pieces on a chessboard, to be employed with cool foresight and great restraint, and always with the hope that patience will save us from the necessity of resorting to a showdown with the ultimate weapons of the nuclear age.
In other words, the division of the world into two great armed camps, combined with the weaponry of the nuclear era, requires us to pursue a policy of Sufferance, rather than one of Valor. When an outright bid for decisive victory entails the risk of 40 or 60 million American deaths, no responsible and sane government can pull the trigger—unless the alternative, demonstrably, is to invite national catastrophe by other means—unless the nation’s very survival is indubitably at issue.
The same forces and factors that place a premium on patience in military strategy are at work also in the political realm. We are being driven, despite our impatient, ebullient American temperament, to a political strategy of delay, of compromise, of caution, of self- restraint under provocation. We have to negotiate—as to Soviet bases in Cuba, for instance—when it would be far more satisfying to send an ultimatum. We have to acquiesce in half-satisfactory arrangements—at Berlin, for example—when we might prefer to put our cards on the table and demand an end to all harassment. In Southeast Asia, we already have abundant firepower to cut off the probing fingers of Communist penetration into the Free World. But it would be foolhardy to initiate there a war with mid-20th century weapons in the place of a sluggish, small-scale guerrilla conflict between indigenous forces. Such an outright challenge to Red China would be reasonable, as a calculated risk, only if we were certain that the Soviet Union was ready to desert its “great fraternal ally.” The ugly words which have passed back and forth between Moscow and Peking testify to a deep antagonism and rivalry. But they are not proof of Russia’s willingness to stand by in studied idleness through a major Sino-American war.
In the domain of the purely political, the same imperatives hold sway. Latin America is a continent in the throes of social change. It is a daily temptation, given our wealth and power, to put in our oar—money or troops or whatever—and try to tip the scales on the side of stable, responsible leadership and orderly social progress. But so great are the moving forces of history, and so deep the emotional currents of resentment toward the Yankee Colossus, we usually are wiser not to employ power outright. It is more rewarding in the long run to try to discern the trends, and then seek to employ modest, unobtrusive means of helping when the pendulum swing is in the right direction. However great its power, no nation in our time can afford to play the role of the bull in a china shop. The china shops of this world are more sensitive than ever before to the bulls that used to be called respectfully “the great powers.”
Swept by the fierce winds of native nationalism, Africa and Asia are perilous places in which to apply strong-arm methods from the outside. To intervene with force is to invite antagonism and reprisal—or worse, alienation to the camp of the Communist bloc. Yet there are forces of sobriety and good sense at work in those new countries. Most of them are led by men who were educated in the West, but who have to trim their sails to avoid being stamped as “pawns of Western imperialism.” They need help, and they know it. But the help has to be unobtrusive and non-coercive. Bravery is no assistance at all in dealing with the problems posed for us in those continents. What we require in superabundance is patience and self-restraint.
On the island of Formosa, to take another example, we have a sturdy, ambitious ally in Nationalist China. It has large, well-trained, well-armed ground forces, and a modest air force of skillful, strongly motivated airmen. Its leader would like nothing better than to strike into the mainland, hoping to stir such enthusiastic support among the Chinese rank and file as to topple the sinister regime at Peking. Even to make any probing attempt, however, he would require large-scale U. S. assistance, not only from U. S. naval forces but also from U. S. air cover. Political pressures have led at times to some official consideration of “unleashing” Chiang Kaishek’s army. But wiser counsels have prevailed. Such an adventure quickly would become a U. S. war against Red China, with the United States cast in the role of aggressor so far as the rest of the world was concerned. On the other hand, a strong defensive posture at Formosa makes good sense, without the risk of touching off an endless struggle that would consume the energies and resources of the United States for years. Patience must be the key to our policy at the Formosa Strait.
Our good friends, our oldest friends, in fact—the French—are momentarily sailing on a baffling course, seeking to create a “third force” in a world of two massive blocs. They are withdrawing forces from NATO control. They are blocking the admission of Britain to the Continental system. They are stubbornly holding out against the test-ban treaty, otherwise opposed only by Red China, Cuba, Albania and such. It is a temptation to pull out all the stops, to employ every device at our disposal to bring France back into the fold. But courage in its customary connotation is of no help in this dilemma. Only patience and temperate, conciliatory negotiation can serve us.
As for our most critical relationships— those with the Soviet Union—we are compelled to recognize that we are dealing with an equal. There is not enough difference in population, armament, resources, solidarity, esprit, leadership or any other factor to warrant our assumption of hegemony, save in specific situations and areas where geography and logistics work on our side, as in the Caribbean. Nowhere is George Monck’s three-centuries-old plea for Sufferance more relevant than in our frustrating and interminable dialogue with the Soviet Union. It is in that relationship that the penalties of overconfidence or bad judgment or mere arrogance are the gravest. Fortunately, the leaders of the Soviet Union have just as deep a respect for the devastating power of nuclear weapons as have our own leaders— and just as little taste for an exchange that would incinerate both of these rich, productive, populous lands.
With friends and allies, and also with possible antagonists, diplomacy and strategy alike have to be devised and conducted within well-defined limits. To venture beyond those limits is to invite the escalation of petty conflict and thus to embark on a course of national suicide. Inevitably, this makes our policy-makers appear pusillanimous, to those critics for whom everything is black and white, and for whom the only acceptable goal is total victory. It is quite impossible for a government to earn wide applause in these conditions, for it is obliged to temporize, to delay, to settle often for less than full accomplishment of stated purpose. It is just as hard for a government, in the political realm, to play a waiting game as for a military command whose only workable strategy is to wait in readiness for the moment when offensive action becomes meaningful. In fact, it is even harder for a government, since a military command, when compelled to pursue a strategy of delay, is somewhat insulated from the pressures of unthinking public opinion.
Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that our rightful role, in the 1960s and 1970s, may be to wait patiently, if apprehensively, until geopolitical forces have so done their work that finally we can discover in the Soviet Union a welcome ally against a malign, fanatical, newly-armed, and powerful China of 800 million disciplined people. Alignments quite as ironical and strange have thrust themselves on us in decades past.
There is no cliche more truly American than this oft-heard command: “Well, don’t just stand there! Do something!” It fits our temperament, as a nation. It embodies our zeal for action, our fondness for certainties, our innate conviction that there is always a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do in any situation, our inborn disposition to fight the battle and get it over with.
Yet, it may well be precisely the wrong doctrine for our age. The sheer destructiveness of today’s weapons forbids any global showdown. The built-in tendency to escalation of lesser conflicts forbids even “small wars.” And the sullen, smoldering forces of new, raw, heedless nationalisms preclude our use of our great power in many areas now wavering between the two giant blocks of world politics.
Victory is an inspiring, satisfying, mouth- filling word. For generations, Americans have been taught that it is somehow contemptible to accept anything less. But in a world of such divergent currents, so filled with penalties for the indiscreet use of power, we may do well to fasten our eyes on making progress piecemeal, on chalking up modest gains where they can be had at reasonable risk, and compromising where we cannot do better for the moment. Ours is a time, not altogether unlike the years from 1803 to 1805 as Lord Nelson found them, when quite often the fight thing to do is to just watch and wait.