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TRANSCRIPT OF TAPED REMARKS OF KADM JAMES B. STOCKDALE AT THE ARMED FORCES STAFF COLLEGE 9 APRIL 1975
(A Part of the "Art of Command" Lecture Series)
Thank you Jerry. It's my pleasure to address the staff, to welcome so many of my old prison friends who have gone out of their way to be here and particularly to address the Class of 57.
I was never fortunate enought to go to a service college. The closest I came, I suppose, was when I was going to postgraduate school at Stanford University. There I met, among others, a senior professor by the name of Tony Sokol. Tony Sokol was on the outs with the faculty. He was a man, at that time, of about 65, I expect, bless him. He's still alive up in Palo Alto. He was on the outs with the faculty because he was considered a militarist and this was back in the years 60-62.
Tony was a German. Tony was a great scholar. He spoke numerous languages. He had served with the Dutch Navy in Indonesia and he loved classic, military scholarship. He was my advisor the second year I was there and at one of our meetings he asked, "What are you studying this term?" I explained that I was taking Comparative Marxist Thought upstairs from Bob North and Russian Foreign Policy from Jan Triska. He said, "I know, but what are you reading?" I said - right now I'm in the midst of the lot of books on military strategy. Books written by those thinkers who are the experts in your field. Books by men like Thomas Shelling, and Brodie and Kahn. Men who are experts in deterrance. Men who are experts in the mechanics of war. I said, "That must please you, as a military scholar and old friend of Arlie Burke." Tony scowled and he said, "I do not read those books." He said, "Those ment are all economists, they do not know about war." He said the primary assumption of an economist is rationality. The whole discipline depends upon it. If you give a person two items of equal merit, two loaves of bread of the same quality, it is assumed that a rational man will buy the one with the lower price. This drives their profession. He said, "They will get us in trouble; they want to play games with people; people get mad in war. Remember Clausewitz" - and I can remember how he mouthed that name - "Clausewitz always said there are two sides to war. There is the objective side: that is the rational side; the planning, the deployment. But there is an equally important side: the subjective
side. That side which deals with psychology, with emotion, which morality and they have completely forgotten the subjective side. I warn you that you can be led down a primrose path by the logic that is in those books you are reading."
Well, of course, those were the only modern books available on the subject of deterrance. Professor Sokol was old, he was out of favor and I thoutht, well, poor old Tony. He just isn't in tune with modern civilization. But I swear that that came back to haunt me in my years in Hanoi when I saw a people that I detested, a people I didn't admire, but a people coping with seige. We POWs here, if we have any relevant military insight not commonly held by most people in the country, it is the firsthand observation of the power of united emotion. Admittedly we observed from a poor vantage point, from a cell - but we heard noises in the streets and we knew. Many rode to Hanoi as I did, on the top of trucks in huge caravans, bumper-to-bumper for miles, completely blacked out. I had flown at low level night aftet night down the same roads. Couldn't see a thing. But on the ground I could see that plenty had been going on down there. Those people moved the trucks in a hayride atmosphere, and we could now see how much spirit affected their performance. And I can remember lying in a cell and hearing the Vietmanese broadcaster in pigeon English, on our prison public address system, ridiculing the escalation offers being made by President Johnson. I can remember specifically in '67 wherein the offers made, if you listened through the contemptuous language, weren't really a bad deal for them. In fact, it was as good a deal as we thought they were ever going to get, yet how it was ridiculed. How preposterous the idea of playing games with people when their honor, as they saw it, when their emotions were at stake. So I guess the message as I open, is that I am in this talk going to present a thesis that stresses Tony Sokol's subjective side of the Clausewitz War Theory. That the sine qua non of the art of command is philosophical consistency: to be in tune with the nature of your profession, the nature of war, the nature of fighting; that is to say, to be at least equally attuned to the powers of charisma, comradeship, spontaneity, instinct, personal honor and commitment as to the rational powers of management and statistic keeping. As Admiral Tom Moorer said a year ago in describing officer attributes that he considered admirable, "management is important, but leadership is indispensible."
Well with that theses as a kick off, of course I provide myself with a vehicle for some POW sea stories. But I think
that I can direct this is in a way that the point that I'm trying to make is not one which is instructive only to people who are going to be prisoners of war, but rather, generally instructuve for all fighting men. The points are based on impressions of American men seeing and hearing from a unique vantage point. Prisoners who were in probably more bombing raids than any Americans have ever experienced. Men who saw the eye of the enemy under stress, under the stress not only of the conventional raids to which the enemy, I'm grieved to say, learned to accommodate, but also under the B-52 raids when their eyes had a completely different look; when the ground shook and America evidenced a commitment of the sort that would warm the cockles of the heart of not only Clauswitz but Tony Sokol.
Speaking before an academic audience I took the precaution to base my remarks not just on our experiences but I'll have you know, Jerry, I read some books - re-read others - not only the modern strategy books that are currently on the street, but I chose books with a more historical context from previous wars written by men who had the following combination of characteristics:
First of all they are educated authors. They are sensitive to men, all of whom have known war in the form of handto-hand combat. From World War II, I will quote from a book called The Warriors, by a man named Glen Gray. I leared of this book at my second son's college when at a convocation the President praised his previous faculty member Glen Gray as one of the few educated and sensitive men who have ever addressed the real feeling of men under stress in combat. Grey got his Ph.D. from Columbia the same day he got his draft papers in 1940 and spent the whole of World War II as a combat soldier in Europe.
For World War I, I chose what might be considered a rather odd selection but one that enthralled me; that is the story written by T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. If you remember, T. E. Lawrance was a British foreign office diplomat, an Oxford scholar, a man who knew military history better than most of us, but was a civilian through and through. He mastered all the Arabic dialects and almost single-handedly over a period of years in conjunction with and sometimes in opposition to the British military and diplomatic corps organized the whole of that part in the world to assault the eastern flank of Turkey. He lived a tough life, often on long day-in day-out, camel caravans. He was an expert at placing explosives under railroad tracks and so forth. It's a thrilling tale by a sensitive, intelligent, and experienced man.
And, of course, for the Napoleonic Wars I reviewed On War, by our old friend Clausewitz. It's interesting to note that both the latter two authors, Clausewitz and Lawrence, claim to have gotten the inspiration for their books during reflection as POWs.
Clausewitz probably makes my point best:
"If war is an act of force, the emotions are necessarily involved in it. If war does not originate from them it still reacts upon them and the degree depends not upon the stage of civilization but upon the importance and duration of the hostilities."
Well that though should hardly be controversial after our experiences of the last years. But strategic literature of today is strangely reminiscent of the literarure of the defense economists of the 60's. The most modern book I read was one by the '74 Brookings Institution called U.S. Tactical Air Power, by a young Ph.D., Williams D. White. I noticed that Dr. White received his Masters in Economics in the year '68. That was the year Byron Fuller and Al Brady were in Las Vegas and Ed Schuman and Al Carpenter were at the Zoo, and Jerry Denton, Jim Mulligan and I were in Alcatraz. Dr. White says:
"Waging war is no different in principle from any resource transformation process and should be just as eligible for the improvements in proficiency that have accrued elsewhere from technological substitution."
Clausewitx -
"War is a special profession, however general its relation may be and even if all the male population of a country capable of bearing arms were able to practice it, war would still continue to be different and separate from any other sensitivity which occupies the life of man."
White -
"It is better that wars be fought as much with dollars and as little with lives as technology will permit. There is strong evidence to suggest the ascendancy of weapons over warriors."
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Clausewitz -
"It is not the loss in men, horses, guns, but in order, courage, confidence, cohesion and plan which come into consideration whether the engagement can still be continued. It is principally the moral forces which decide here."
Well anyone can play games, read two books and pick out quotes and ridicule one man. But I think that I have a point that may be self-evident. I sense in intellectual, political, and even military circles a feeling now-a-days that somehow history is beginning today or maybe began last week. That we're at some sort of magic take-off point, that the lessons of the past are no longer applicable. Of course, in a minor way, I notice this in my job mainly by virtue of the nature of its orientation. I am ramrodding the S-3 into Fleet. It's really basically involved with untying the bureaucratic management tangles. The vocabulary in use bears little resemblance to that of the classic military writers. I'm not complaining; we all have to take our turns with the bureaucracy of management, but it is depressing to see how that culture has turned its back on the past. Perhaps I can better say what I mean by noting the contents of a recent monthly magazine put out by Stanford University in which they described a new course or history battery for freshmen. Previously they had an extensive Western Civilization Battery, but now they have only three professors who teach the whole freshman class a series of three courses in history. I know two of these professors; one is Gordon Wright, a French historian, another a man named Craig, a German historian. Craig, in his remarks, seemed to be obsessed with the idea that although it's a good intellectual exercise for young people to study history, by no means should history be taken as a source of instruction for the future because, as he said, we are in a period of "dynamic change."
I noticed this same attitude last spring when I went up to the Naval War College. They had a battery of speakers, many of whom were prominent in military and civilian life during the past ten years with obvious care. The implication being that that war was unique and that thet times were unique. I say what's unique about unpopular wars and inflation.
The Vietnam War, I would hazard to say, was not nearly as unpopular as our Revolutionary War in the late 1770's. Only one-third of the people ever backed it. One-third of them were neutralist including some of the most prominent names in American society today, and one-third of them were
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