Clausewitz He’s Not : ON STRATEGY II; A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War, <i> By Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. (Dell: $4.99, paper; 294 pp.) </i>

From the height of the Vietnam anti-war movement in 1970 until Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the American media pretty much ignored the viewpoints of experienced professional soldiers. As a result, during those two decades, what knowledge officers like Col. Harry Summers had was missing from national public discussions of war. This meant, for instance, that Summers’ excellent first book, “On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War,” never gained the wide exposure it deserved. A subtle application of the teachings of the 19th-Century Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz to the question of American failure in Indochina, “On Strategy” remained a textbook for officer training at the Army War College.

But with the Persian Gulf War, the media worm turned. In their Gulf coverage, all the television networks featured former senior military officers; Summers was one of them, appearing on both NBC and CNN. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s soon-to-be-released autobiography was the subject of spirited bidding by the big publishing houses. Summers finally gets to plumb the depths of strategy for a wide audience in a mass-market paperback, “On Strategy II: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War.” (We’ll distinguish his books henceforth by calling them OSI and OSII.)

Summers blows it. Once invited to the media party, he seems to have checked his professional knowledge at the door. Summers wrote OSI six years after the war it examined was over. For OSII, make that six months . Maybe that accounts for why Summers couldn’t find any time to address the war’s “friendly fire” episodes that accounted for 24% of the U.S. dead. And why, although in a magazine piece last year Summers called for canceling the Stealthbomber and Star Wars, in this book he tolerates the former and endorses the latter.

In OSII, Summers refers to the “media’s own nattering-nabobs-of-negativism style of reporting”; he declares Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney “a godsend”; and he comments that the Gulf crisis (he calls it “The Remarkable War”) was “sweet revenge indeed.” It eventually dawns on the reader that OSII isn’t really a book, it’s a bumper sticker. In OSII, Summers is still trying to use Clausewitz as his theoretical guide, but his boosterism has blinded him to the Clausewitzian flaws in the Gulf War’s conception and conduct.

Put in plain English, the most important of Clausewitz’s teachings is this: To wage a war successfully, a nation’s people, its army and its government must agree on a clearly defined objective. Without that, neither the physical, fiscal nor psychological costs of war can be shouldered for as long as victory usually takes. Among the merits of OSI was Summers’ vivid demonstration of how the U.S. war in Indochina violated this tenet. There, Summers noted that nearly 70% of the U.S. Army generals who served during Vietnam were uncertain about that war’s objectives, and he observed out that over the years, the U.S. government gave 22 separate rationales for its involvement.

Summers’ main contention in OSII is that the secret of success in the Gulf War was that U.S. political and military leaders never lost sight of the importance of the test of the objective, and passed it with flying colors. “At every opportunity,” writes Summers, George Bush “explained America’s political objectives in the Persian Gulf. . . . This time we had done it right.”

Now, there is little doubt that as regards clarity of the objective, the Persian Gulf war was an improvement over Vietnam. You would have been hard-pressed to find a general in the chain of command who thought he didn’t know what the war was being fought for. And there were certainly fewer than 22 justifications offered by senior government officials. But it’s a bit of a leap from this to Summers’ conclusion that all went well objective-wise. For instance, more than a month into the American military build-up, while Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Dugan was sure he knew what the war’s aims were, his version didn’t match Dick Cheney’s. The general was fired in part because he thought they included personally targeting Saddam Hussein, his advisers and his family; Dugan’s boss didn’t. And according to General Schwarzkopf’s unscripted remarks in a television interview with David Frost (in contrast to the spin-control version of them he offered once the Frost show stirred up a controversy), even after the ground war was in full swing, the Desert Storm commander disagreed with Bush about whether the war plan included the pursuit of Hussein’s army once Iraqi troops had been repulsed from Kuwait.

The nub of the problem is this: Although Summers keeps crediting Bush with having a clear list of objectives, he doesn’t notice that it wasn’t always the same list.

The subject of Saddam’s nuclear threat provides a straightforward example of the President’s tacking. He didn’t include it as reasons for standing up to Iraq in his Aug. 8, 1990 address to the nation the day after he first ordered U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia; he cited it in his Nov. 26, 1990 Newsweek cover piece; but then he failed to mention it in the mid-war State of the Union speech he gave on Jan. 29, 1991. Isn’t this “one from column A, one from column B” approach pretty close to the justification game America played with Vietnam?

Summers claims that the Bush Administration honored Clausewitz’s inclusion of the people in the strategic equation by ordering a large-scale mobilization of the re serves and by asking Congress for a resolution on Kuwait. But get a load of why Summers is so enthusiastic about the reserve activation: “The size of the call-up meant that everyone had players from their state .” (Emphasis added.) Summers doesn’t seem to see the crucial distinction between having the war sweep up a “player” from your state and having it sweep you up, or a relative, or a close friend. Also, in OSI Summers argued that the need to keep the objective in very plain view meant that the U.S. should have declared war in Viet-nam. Why didn’t this reasoning apply in the Gulf?

Summers overlooks these issues because he is dazzled by the war’s battlefield success. But while students of war should certainly note and examine the things that work well, a critical analysis should focus on a war’s probable, projectable ingredients, not its special circumstances. What Summers completely misses is that the Gulf War was practically nothing but special circumstances--ones you couldn’t depend on seeing together again in the next hundred wars:

Iraq had no significant military or economic allies. Hussein wasn’t able to stir up any sort of indigenous civilian opposition to the allies (even Hitler was able to do that). The United States had the luxury of an uncontested six-month build-up. It was a single-front war. There were no trees to hide under. When Summers salutes the U.S. “Maritime Strategy” for providing the “offensive spirit, warfighting doctrine, and warships necessary for successful naval operations in the Persian Gulf,” he somehow forgets to mention that Iraq had no submarines. And any critical analysis of the Gulf War worth its salt would have to recognize that the lack of enemy resistance was a huge anomaly. If Gen. Schwarzkopf’s initial estimate of between 10,000 and 20,000 U.S. casualties had come to pass, would our grand strategy have held together any better than it did in Vietnam? Summers asks no such questions. “What if?” doesn’t seem to be in his vocabulary.

In effect, any war is a gigantic experiment, one you can’t begin to understand until you’ve considered an enormous number of variables. Summers’ insensitivity to those variables brings to mind a trenchant admonition of Mark Twain’s: “Be careful to get out of an experience all the wisdom that is in it--not like the cat that sits down on a hot stove. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again--and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” In this book, Summers has shown himself to be the cat who, having once sat on a cold stove, is now convinced that stoves are for sitting on.