A Frenchman goes over to watch the Japanese beat the Russians in a war that was held just before the First World War, a mere decade before the date this book is set. What did he notice in his watching? He noticed that it is generally not a good idea to charge against people with machine guns. After, when he mentioned this to other French generals they decided that he was a coward. He said that wearing a uniform that featured a bright blue coat and bright red trousers might be the equivalent of wearing a bull’s eye tied around your neck and a neon sign saying ‘shoot here’. His saying this was considered not only utterly outrageous but also an insult to French soldiers…The lesson is that you can change the technology, but people might not understand what that change will mean. – Barbra Tuchman
Barbra Tuchman’s 1962 book The Guns Of August was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and made into a 100 minute documentary film in 1965. President John F. Kennedy commanded his cabinet and principal military advisers to read the book. Some scholars think this book affected Kennedy’s approach to the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The book led the political scientist Graham Allison in 1971 to propose the Organizational Process Model instead of the traditional Game Theory and other Rational Actor approaches to conflicts. So how does the quote above and Allison’s book hold up after 50 years?
In the quote, the French generals seem to be crazy arguing about machine guns and bright uniforms; however, this was generally true with the British and other generals. Note that smokeless gunpowder was not in general use until the 1890s. Before that invention, the smoke on a large battlefield would be so intense that recognition of friend/foe was important, hence the British Red and the French Blue. In addition, the Pomp and Circumstance traditions along with the emphasis on bravery made camouflaged uniforms cowardly, as shown in the quote. The WWI British Generals were probably worse, sending waves of soldiers against the machine guns with the “British Spirit,” being the most powerful nation at that time. Although the generals look foolish 100 years later, their rationale seems understandable.
In Graham Allison’s book, he argues that Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was unfounded. He also questions MacArthur’s Korean War disagreements with Harry Truman as a political backlash due to MacArthur’s popularity. That view was popular in the 1960s, yet missed MacArthur’s excellent administration of Japan after WWII and the goal of victory in Korea rather than a stalemate. The economist Milton Friedman questioned Allison’s bureaucratic models as too large and impractical in a crisis. Friedman also argued that even if Rational Actor theories do not describe reality, they provide accurate predictions.
Fifty years later, how do we analyze what methods should be used in geopolitical decisions? For Iran with their Mullahs in power, does the Rational Actor make sense? Does Trump have methods to change the Chinese belligerent ways like what Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis? And how does the Deep State, who looks at Trump as the enemy rather than Iran and China, give his administration accurate data to make a good decision?
As the Chinese curse says, “may you live in interesting times.”
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