Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime [Hardcover]

...This learned study of both the traditional and the more recent, iconoclastic theories of the proper relationship between the policies of state and the direction of military strategy documents the difficulties and dangers of preventing limited warfare from escalating beyond any semblance of civilian control. Supreme Command adds context and texture to the serious student's understanding of the history of the twentieth century and its wars, warriors, and statesmen, brilliantly limning biographical sketches of four statesmen who mastered military strategy and effectively controlled the apparently unstoppable momentum of battles by constant dialogues with generals quite willing to disagree with them, and who constructively shaped and limited the purposes and conduct of the wars over which they presided politically. Like characters in a great novel, Lincoln, Grant, and Meade; Clemenceau, Foch, and Petain; Churchill, Brooke, and Montgomery; Ben-Gurion, Yigal Allon, and Yigal Yadin - all come memorably alive as fallible beings with strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures. With an undeniably timely sense of foreboding, the author - a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University - examines the applicability of these and other historical precedents to the nuclear era, in which the dangers of war as the crudest tool of diplomacy threaten to outweigh by far its usefulness as an instrument of statecraft and polity.

Cohen is Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University. In this fascinating book, he studies the art of wartime leadership by examining Lincoln in the American Civil War, Clemenceau in World War One, Churchill in World War Two, and Ben-Gurion in Israel’s war of independence.
Cohen relates how Lincoln rightly dismissed Major John Key from the Union army for private remarks about the Union’s strategy that conflicted with agreed Union policy.
Cohen shows how all military matters are linked to wider political issues, how for instance a dispute in 1918 over whether to integrate American divisions or even regiments into larger French units had vast ramifications: as he sums up, “a seemingly tactical or even technical issue was fraught with the largest implications for French national morale, manpower policy, strategy, and alliance relations.”
Cohen over-praises Churchill’s strategic abilities. Churchill’s imperialism led him into the disastrous foray into Greece in 1941, into underestimating Japanese military and naval abilities, also in 1941, and into diversionary adventures in North Africa in 1942, Italy in 1943, and Greece in 1944. His anti-communism led him to refuse to open the Second Front, as he had promised, in 1942 and 1943, and to his stingy attitude to supplying the Soviet Union. Yet Cohen calls him ‘the greatest war statesman of the century’. Perhaps if Cohen had also studied the leadership of the country whose forces alone shattered more than 200 Nazi divisions - more than three quarters of Hitler’s army - he might have found a greater!
A chapter on ‘leadership without genius’ covers US wars since Korea - Vietnam, the Gulf War, Somalia and Serbia - ‘a period in which the United States finds itself chronically resorting to the use of force’, as Cohen quaintly puts it.
He sums up that leaders need to listen, to be fertile and resourceful in act and speech, and must see things as they are, without illusions. And they must never accept the dogmatic division between civilian and military spheres of responsibility. As Harry Truman said, “the buck stops here”, for military and political decisions alike.

Absolutely brilliant, in so many ways the power struggles between military command and civilian are also seen in other areas of our life. Between work and home etc.