Green Berets and Wisdom

Henrik Bering reviews Linda Robinson’s Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces, the Green Berets. These guys don’t simply jump out of airplanes at 30,000 feet, only to open their chutes at the list minute to avoid detection, and they aren’t simply the best sharp-shooters around (though Canadian snipers in Afghanistan are pretty darn good as well). They are also diplomats and master tacticians on the ground:

But physical toughness and proficiency in arms is not enough. Equally important is the ability to act as diplomat and negotiator, to strike up quick alliances, and to read a situation quickly. That involves knowing your assigned region, its languages and local customs intimately, and that you can get only through books. The Green Beret is the embodiment of the ideal of the scholar-soldier, and according to Robinson it is precisely this combination of brawn and brain and the ability to operate on the plane of strategy that sets the Special Forces apart.

Above all, the book makes clear, the Special Forces is a way of life, a calling rather than a profession. Most of these men stay on for 20 years or more, which ensures a high degree of institutional memory.

This is the same group who would call in bombing runs on al-Qaeda positions from horseback. Their on-the-ground recon enabled them not simply to gather information for decision-makers further up the chain of command, but they themselves were the decision-makers. They’re spearheading the increasingly egalitarian command structures in the US military which makes them participants in “net war.” And so they must possess the kind of military genius that Clausewitz once defined as the quintessential military virtue of a commander:

What this task requires in the way of higher intellectual gifts is a sense of unity and a power of judgment raised to a marvelous pitch of vision, which easily grasps and dismisses a thousand remote possibilities which an ordinary mind would labor to identify and wear itself out in so doing. Yet even that superb display of divinatino, the sovereign eye of genius itself, would still fall short of historical significance without the qualities of character and temperament we have described (On War, I.3).

Sadly, it was the rejection of this kind of humanist knowledge that led to the intelligence failures in the CIA and the Pentagon leading up to the Iraq war. David Brooks skewers the process and mind-set that produced the errors and suggests an alternative:

I’ll believe the intelligence community has really changed when I see analysts being sent to training academies where they study Thucydides, Tolstoy and Churchill to get a broad understanding of the full range of human behavior. I’ll believe the system has been reformed when policy makers are presented with competing reports, signed by individual thinkers, and are no longer presented with anonymous, bureaucratically homogenized, bulleted points that pretend to be the product of scientific consensus.

(On Brooks and “intelligence,” hat tip goes to Claremont)