Conflict

Firstly, they need comprehensively to grasp the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach – in essence, to get the big ideas right. Secondly, they must communicate those big ideas, the strategy, effectively throughout the breadth and depth of their organization and to all other stakeholders. Thirdly, they need to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, driving the execution of the campaign plan relentlessly and determinedly. Lastly, they have to determine how the big ideas need to be refined, adapted and augmented, so that they can perform the first three tasks again and again and again.

Given that the Viet Minh drew substantial support from both China and the USSR, by the mid-1950s President Eisenhower and other American leaders started to subscribe to the ‘domino’ theory, which posited that governments vulnerable to communist takeovers might be toppled like a row of dominoes if not stopped. Vietnam was seen as a critical domino, one of the principal countries in which the spread of communism had to be halted.

Much more common historically has been a disregard for enemy losses, though few instances can beat that of General Herbert Kitchener, who after killing 11,000 Dervishes at the battle of Omdurman in 1898 rued the ‘dreadful waste of ammunition’ involved.

It was Somalia which had inspired one Washington columnist to coin the term ‘mission creep’ to describe ever increasing military operations with hazy, moveable objectives and situations that could easily increase in scope.

There is a moral conundrum here: to what extent are nations responsible because they are powerful, even when their own national interests are not directly threatened?

‘Other than wars of national liberation, one is hard pressed to name a single war of aggression since 1914 that has yielded clearly positive results for the first mover.’