Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State
Garry Wills. New York: Penguin Press, 2010. 278 pp. $27.95
Reviewed by Bernard I. Finel
Garry Wills' provocative Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State raises a number of compelling questions. But in his eagerness to tie together a multitude of threads, including civil-military relations, the militarization of foreign policy, government secrecy, and civil liberties, Wills develops a monocausal and linear argument that does not do justice to the complexity of the issues he seeks to explore.
Wills' thesis is straightforward. The abuses of President George W. Bush's administration are a direct consequence of how the atomic bomb was developed and the mechanisms implemented to govern its use. Wills traces the roots of Bush's unilateralism, militarism, and willingness to ignore domestic legal constraints to the Manhattan Project, a militarized program that drafted resources from across the nation and functioned with little oversight. There are three fundamental problems with his argument.
First, Wills describes the Manhattan Project as an unnecessarily pathological endeavor, driven by military obsessions with secrecy and shaped by Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves' empire-building personality. But surely, secrecy in the development of a wartime weapon program is not extraordinary. Indeed, even with the culture of secrecy Wills describes, the Manhattan Project was penetrated by at least three significant Soviet agents: Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, and Theodore Alvin ("Ted") Hall. And while the scope of the project was massive, so was the challenge, given early 1940s technology. It is difficult, in retrospect, to view the Manhattan Project as pathological rather than simply a tremendously successful wartime engineering project.
Second, in an effort to demonstrate a straight line from the 1940s to the Bush administration's "war on terror," Wills relies on a bizarre reading of history, one long on conspiracy and short on context. He jumps from the bombing of Hiroshima to the early 1950s, glossing over a period of stagnation in nuclear developments during which arguments for preventive war with the Soviet Union were explicitly rejected, and indeed during which the United States engaged in one of the most significant military demobilizations in history. He highlights the emphasis on nuclear weapons during the early Eisenhower administration, but gives short shrift to doubts over "massive retaliation" and the subsequent rebalancing of American capabilities. Throughout this argument, the Soviet Union is largely invisible, all too often appearing as an aggrieved party, the victim of American belligerence and militarism. Containment, in Wills' reading, was not a response to Soviet aggression, but rather a land-grab by the United States to establish forward bases for the Strategic Air Command. This would have been an extreme and unbalanced interpretation even 30 years ago. Now it is untenable, given Soviet documents released since the end of the Cold War.
Third, in an effort to hold his narrative together, Wills tends to imply that outliers are, in fact, the norm. He sees former Secretary of State Alexander Haig's anxious assertion that he was in control after the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan as typical of a disregard for democratic norms and emblematic of how real power rests with whoever happens to occupy the presidential nerve center. Worse, he assumes that the Bush administration's panicked response to 9/11 is standard operating procedure for the U.S. government. This is a particularly pernicious argument and paradoxically normalizes what was unquestionably a major deviation from American laws and practices.
Far from there being a direct line from the Manhattan Project to recent events at Guantanamo, Presidential power has ebbed and flowed, both in response to individual Presidents' conceptions of the office and changes in congressional assertiveness. The period after 2001 was not the apotheosis of the "national security state"; it was a historical anomaly, an extreme exception rather than the logical culmination of the past 60 years.
Ultimately, these flaws in Wills' arguments undermine what could have been a fascinating book. He is most effective in dissecting U.S. government secrecy—a truly pathological edifice that, as Wills points out, has little to do with security and much to do with avoiding embarrassing disclosures and criminal liability, winning bureaucratic battles, and keeping congressional funding for sacred cows flowing unabated. There is much to like in Bomb Power, but its central conceit represents a fundamental interpretive overreach that undermines the project.
Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945
Barrett Tillman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. 368 pp. Illus. Maps. Appends. Notes. Index. $28.
Reviewed by John Lundstrom
Mention the American air offensive against the Japanese home islands during World War II, and only four events are usually cited: the Doolittle Raid of April 1942, the Tokyo fire bombing of March 1945, and the atomic bomb missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki that immediately preceded Japan's offer to surrender on 15 August 1945. The key element in the victory was of course the long-range strategic bombing campaign begun in November 1944 by the Boeing B-29 Superfortress very-heavy bombers of the 20th Air Force based in the Mariana Islands. The systematic targeting of Japanese military and naval forces, particularly aviation, and the wholesale destruction of the country's economic resources, capped by the terrible nuclear attacks, providentially forestalled Japan's desire to fight to the death as it had everywhere else during the Pacific War. The likely result of an Allied invasion of Japan is almost too horrible to contemplate.
In his fine new book, Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945, renowned aviation historian Barrett Tillman ably recounts the story of the B-29s from their hasty, ill-considered move in mid-1944 to China, the tentative initial attacks on Japan from the Marianas, and finally to the fully developed bombing offensive that began in March 1945.
Tillman's compact yet comprehensive study is engaging and very readable. He is the first to integrate all the elements of the final air offensive against Japan in a single volume. As he stresses, a great deal more was involved in bringing about the utter defeat of Japan from the skies, not to mention the tremendous effort just getting the B-29s in position to strike decisively. Other forces played their part, most notably the fast carriers of the U.S. Navy and later the British Royal Navy, which repeatedly attacked Japan between February and August 1945; the Army Air Forces North American P-51 Mustang fighters that flew very long-range escort missions and sweeps from Iwo Jima to Japan; Army and Navy bombers and patrol planes based along the periphery from Okinawa to the Aleutians; and finally, the largely unknown but extremely effective mining of Japanese waters and ports carried out by B-29s. Nor does Tillman neglect the defenders, but summarizes Japan's evolving response, or lack thereof, to the intensifying attacks.
Tillman focuses on high-level strategy and specific air tactics; the experiences of generals and admirals and individual pilots and crewmen on both sides. He draws valuable fresh perspective from the many interviews of veterans that he has conducted over the years. He offers sharp opinions of the top leadership on both sides. He acknowledges the crucial role of General of the Army Henry H. "Hap" Arnold in creating the B-29 but is severely critical both of the pressure Arnold exerted to base the Superfortresses prematurely in China and of the tentative support he offered his commanders in the Marianas. He also savages the Navy brass—Admiral William F. Halsey Jr., in particular—for fixating on wiping out the few remaining Japanese capital ships that were already damaged or immobilized in harbor. The massive carrier strikes in July 1945 against the Kure anchorages, well defended by anti-aircraft artillery, were very costly and in Tillman's mind wholly unnecessary except as a sop to the Navy's pride. Tillman's star is Major General Curtis LeMay, who commanded the B-29s first in China and later in the Marianas. LeMay was not only a troubleshooter but an innovator with remarkable clarity of vision and audacity.
Tillman also stands foursquare behind the decision to drop the atomic bombs. He portrays the Japanese high command as riddled with interservice rivalry and unable to grasp the implications of America's overwhelming numerical advantage and superior technology. No one on the Japanese side displayed even remotely the acumen of Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, who was so instrumental in winning the Battle of Britain. Such an enlightened concentration on air defense going back more than a decade would probably have been the only chance the Japanese had to defend their homeland against the "Whirlwind."
The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps
William Styron. New York: Random House, 2009. 208 pp. $24.
Reviewed by Dr. Charles P. Neimeyer
The Suicide Run is a fascinating collection of short stories written by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer William Styron, author of the Confessions of Nat Turner (Random House, 1967) and Sophie's Choice (Random House, 1979). All five stories have their genesis, in one way or another, in Styron's own experience as a U.S. Marine.
This posthumous collection only leaves the reader wanting more. It is evident that at least some of the stories were perhaps intended to become novels that the author never got around to fleshing out before he died in 2006. Arranged in the order he had written them, four of the five tales have been published in other collections. Only the last and briefest, "Elobey, Annobon, and Corisco" is in print for the first time. Nonetheless, it is among the most powerful and seems to encapsulate the experience of Marines who came of age during World War II.
The first story, "Blankenship," written in 1953, is set in the depths of a New York City winter. It describes the struggle of a young and successful Marine warrant officer assigned to investigate the escape of two inmates from a dreary military prison. The eponymous protagonist, while interrogating a seemingly incorrigible inmate and yardbird named McFee, is forced to question the meaning of his own existence in the regular Corps.
In the second story, "Marriott the Marine," Styron's lead character, again obviously based loosely on his own experience, has been recalled to active duty during the Korean War and is happy to discover a literary soul mate in Lieutenant Colonel Paul Marriott, a "regular" Marine officer and of a class of men that Styron's protagonist had previously categorized as not really worth knowing. True to form, Styron demonstrates that even this assumption can prove to be illusory.
The third, and titular, story, "The Suicide Run," is about Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, preparing to go to war in Korea and trying to savor their very last ounce of enjoyment and freedom before they ship out. Every Marine who has ever served at Camp Lejeune will instantly recognize the urgency that Styron's character feels for maximizing weekend liberty in places even as distant as New York City. One can imagine how many of those war-prepping Marines made their own "suicide runs" on some lonely byway on the drive back to Camp Lejeune.
Styron's fourth tale, "My Father's House," clearly the most autobiographical, is an absolute delight to read. Set in tidewater Virginia immediately after World War II, the protagonist, Paul Whitehurst, explores problems of race and prejudice in postwar America and the return of Marines to homes they thought they knew but that had been forever changed by time and circumstance.
The final story in this brilliant collection, "Elobey, Annobon, and Corisco," may be the most moving, especially for those about to be thrust into combat for the first time. Here, Styron's anonymous Marine protagonist worries about how he will perform in battle, and his only mental solace seems to be his childhood stamp collection from exotic lands. Styron's eloquent prose conveys the fear and anguish that must haunt all Marines as they mentally prepare themselves for the ultimate test.
The Suicide Run, possibly the last published work from one of the 20th century's most important authors, was a pleasure to read from start to finish. I was genuinely disappointed at the end of each piece; I wanted more. I would highly recommend these stories to anyone interested in reading the work of an American master. Styron's like will not soon be seen again.
Flotilla: The Patuxent Naval Campaign in the War of 1812
Donald G. Shomette. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 500 pp. Illus. Maps. Notes. Bib. Index. $38.
Reviewed by Frederick C. Leiner
Donald G. Shomette is a marine archaeologist and maritime historian of the Chesapeake Bay. He is also an avowed admirer of Joshua Barney and his flotillamen who, badly outgunned and outmanned, tried to defend the Maryland tidewater against British invasion during the War of 1812. A prior version of Flotilla appeared in 1981, but Shomette's lifelong passion has been the Patuxent campaign, and based on a wealth of new materials and his own research and underwater explorations, he has produced in this version a deeper and richer narrative.
Implicit in his story is a lesson about the need for democracies to prepare for war during peacetime. The U.S. defenses were unbelievably amateurish, ad hoc, and inept against the greatest naval power in the world when, in the summer of 1813, a British naval squadron entered the Chesapeake and began raiding the bay's estuaries, burning and pillaging villages and plantations. Barney, a much-wounded Revolutionary War hero who had begun the War of 1812 as a privateer captain, perceived that the only possible defense against the British amphibious attacks was a flotilla of small rowing barges, armed with one or two cannon. He understood that the Achilles' heel of the British invaders was the deep draft of their oceangoing warships, which rendered them powerless to raid the shallow waters of the bay's rivers and creeks. Barney persuaded the government to approve and fund building and equipping a flotilla of armed barges, and he was made the commander, though not given a regular Navy commission. Thus sprang into existence the U.S. Flotilla Service, despite a lack of money, problems recruiting Sailors, and conflicting governmental priorities.
In the summer of 1814, Barney rowed his little cockleboats down the bay from Baltimore and went into action against the British. The flotilla won a series of small tactical victories near the mouth of the Patuxent River and then up St. Leonard's Creek. Inevitably, the outgunned American force was pushed farther and farther up the Patuxent, pinned by the British squadron. For three months, as the British hemmed in Barney's flotilla, marauding British landing parties laid waste much of southern Maryland, terrorizing the population. The untrained and disaffected state militia was late to arrive or ran away at the first shot. Reinforced by several regiments of British army regulars after Napoleon's abdication, the British moved upriver, forced Barney to scuttle his barges, routed the disorganized and disheartened American resistance at Bladensburg (where Barney's flotillamen and Marines from the Washington Navy Yard made a gallant but futile stand), and torched Washington, D.C. Barney was badly wounded at Bladensburg, but most of his men escaped, regrouped, and formed the backbone of the defense of Baltimore when the British invasion force decided to take on that "nest of pirates" a few weeks later.
Shomette's research is impressive. As a narrative of the 1814 campaign on the bay, Flotilla is likely to be definitive. The scale of the fighting was small, and the war was so intimate by modern standards that Shomette is able to identify the individual houses that were sacked and the layout of tiny, forgotten Maryland hamlets that were plundered. And, of course, Shomette knows the Patuxent River well (although it has literally changed course over the past 200 years). His account of the battle of Bladensburg sets a new standard for clarity in what usually just comes across as a confusing debacle.
But the author's personal identification with his subject has its negative side. Without irony, he refers to the hapless Americans collectively as "Jonathan," adopting the British derisory term. He adopts anachronistic figures of speech, and sometimes his exuberant style is clichéd, such as when he describes Barney as a "hardfighting seadog" or concludes the flotillamen "dared the impossible."
Nevertheless, Flotilla is a colorful, detailed history of Barney and his Sailors and the amphibious war waged in the Chesapeake Bay in the summers of 1813 and 1814. While Barney and his brave flotillamen could do little to deflect the British invasion, as Shomette makes clear, they provided the only light in one of the darkest periods in American military history.
The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey
James Richard Whittle. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. 434 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $27.
Reviewed by Colonel David H. Gurney, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)
"Your timing is perfect, Lieutenant. After you get your wings, you'll have a chance to fly the tiltrotor." So predicted my flight instructor the day I soloed at NAS Whiting Field during primary flight training in the summer of 1981. Although I was to accumulate more than 4,000 hours, command a Harrier squadron, and retire as a colonel before the V-22 Osprey entered operational service in 2007, my instructor, a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter pilot, can be forgiven his enthusiasm, if not his prophetic acumen. After all, the Bell XV-15 had just electrified the crowds at the Paris Air Show and inspired former Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman Jr. to tell General P. X. Kelley, then Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, "I want to bring the Marine Corps into the 21st century on the leading edge of technology, and that leading edge is tiltrotor." For most Marines, this was an institutional commitment to an experimental aircraft that promised to revolutionize the most critical function of Marine Corps aviation: delivering Marines over the horizon to challenges worldwide.
Tom Wolfe would probably have forgiven Dallas Morning News journalist Rick Whittle if he had called this aviation history The Rotor Stuff, since its narrative style is as readable as Wolfe's chronicle of the jet pilots who crossed the frontiers of "mach shock" to enter the vacuum of space. Leveraging aeronautics legend Alexander Klemin's dream of an aircraft that can "do in the air substantially everything that a bird can do," Whittle traces a parallel and equally rich history of rotorcraft and convertiplanes and builds a solid foundation for his exploration of the acquisition program that produced today's manifestation of a "dream machine," the V-22 Osprey. Unlike Wolfe's The Right Stuff, Whittle's storyline does not develop from the lives of increasingly devalued aviators, but from the engineers, designers, corporate promoters, politicians, and bean counters whose parochial interests poetically reflect even greater credit on the Osprey aircrew who feature more prominently later in the book.
The Dream Machine is part history, part aviation memoir. It creditably weaves elements of the Defense Department's politically charged acquisition process through an otherwise heroic story of technological innovation. Whittle's well-crafted tales of operational risks that in hindsight might have been mitigated are as gripping now as they were when aviators first encountered them. Despite following some of the characters into personal cul-de-sacs, the narrative sometimes benefits from these detours, which give context to the nuanced interactions among those who shaped the Osprey's future.
Whittle's background as a journalist serves him particularly well in explaining aerodynamic phenomenon (especially vortex ring state) and engineering compromises in clear prose for lay and professional readers alike. Most important, this book realizes Whittle's goal of emphasizing the imagination and ambition animating those who assume risks, whether entrepreneurial, political, physical, or emotional.
The Dream Machine is a therapeutic account. Readers from all backgrounds will glean from it how this program arrived where it did and draw their own inferences of cost and benefit. Those who flew other cutting-edge aircraft will recognize the compromises and tragedies that accompany the practical employment of emerging technology. Although the story of the Osprey is far from over, Whittle properly concludes his with a poignant reverie from the sadder-but-wiser Marine who commanded the first operational V-22 squadron: "The airplane is just an airplane; it's just a machine." Indeed, the dream is in the minds of men, and that is where "there be dragons."
Read this book. It is more than a valuable aviation history; it is a reminder of the human toll the technological revolution exacts while simultaneously promising future compensation in the very same currency.
Confidential: The International Politics of Intelligence Sharing
James Igoe Walsh. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 181 pp. Notes. Index. $40.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hanley, U.S. Air Force (Retired)
Dr. Walsh, associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, examines intelligence sharing among nation states from the perspective of the social scientist. His approach, he writes, is based on his understanding that intelligence sharing is
a form of cooperation that can be analyzed and understood using the basic tools of social science, including the systematic description of patterns of behavior, the development of hypothesized causes of this behavior, and a clearly articulated and methodical research design that allows for the rigorous collection of evidence.
Walsh organizes his book around collections of case studies under the categories of counterterrorism, the Cold War, counterinsurgency, and the European Union. He argues that an underlying lack of trust inhibits useful cooperation among nations on intelligence issues and that such lack of goodwill can be mitigated by constructing a hierarchical rather than a lateral relationship among intelligence-sharing partners. In other words, states that seek intelligence should exercise some control—oversight, direction, planning—over the intelligence services of states that provide the intelligence. This arrangement would be anchored in some sort of negotiated formal agreement, "relational contracting," in the author's terms.
Confidential is a worthy effort if one assumes that its readership comprises social scientists largely unfamiliar with military and diplomatic history and unschooled in contemporary law and policy. But will readers outside this circumscribed enclave find the book illuminating? My guess is, no.
For starters, the issues raised in this book have been dealt with at length by the executive and legislative branches, whose public documents provide the legal and conceptual framework for intelligence sharing. For example, the federal government's Information Sharing Environment Web site (www.ISE.gov) defines and explains much of what Walsh retails as original thought. One would also want to consult Executive Order 12333: United States Intelligence Activities, which was substantially revised in 2008 (the original version appeared in 1981), to bring executive policy in line with the Intelligence Reform & Terrorism Protection Act (IRTPA) of 2004. That law, among other initiatives, created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Executive Order 12333 spells out the goals and responsibilities, including the sharing of intelligence information with foreign partners, of the intelligence community. Walsh doesn't cite Executive Order 12333, the IRTPA, or other critical policy and legal documents.
Much of this book belabors the obvious. Sharing intelligence is at heart a risk/benefit analysis that relies heavily on circumstance. We share information to get information—taking into account the possibility that recipients can't or won't protect or use the information in ways the originator deems appropriate.
Walsh's writing is often vague or clouded by social science jargon, for example, "anarchic arrangements; mutual trust theory; neoliberal institutionalism." He writes that "Intelligence is the collection, protection, and analysis of both publicly available and secret information, with the goal of reducing decision makers' uncertainty about a foreign problem."
This seems less effective than the traditional understanding of intelligence: information on the activities, intentions, and capabilities of a nation's rivals, adversaries, and allies. Actionable intelligence is reliable, detailed, timely, and pertinent to a nation's permanent national interests. For the United States this means information that bears on national sovereignty, free markets, and strategic predominance. These are the universally understood ends of intelligence. The question then becomes, what are the most effective ways and means to accomplishing them? Walsh's book doesn't add anything substantial to this conversation.