Why Nerds Should Not Be in Charge of War

Be wary of the national security generalist.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick‘s PBS series on the Vietnam War offers a timely lesson
about what might happen when people impressed by their own smarts—the ―best and
the brightest,‖as David Halberstam‘s called them—run a war. Despite their smarts
experts can make unwise decisions that spell disastrous consequences when your
nation is engaged in military conflict.

Just think of the Pentagon‘s so-called Whiz Kids flocking around then U.S. Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara: In their quest for clean data driven solutions to the war,
heavily influenced by systems thinking, they embraced deeply flawed metrics (e.g.,
body count) to gauge success on the battlefield, which made them recommend ever
more escalatory policies ultimately causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

The cold rationality of bureaucratic abstraction is encapsulated in this 1965 memo of

McNamara‘s closest advisor, John Mc Naughton, then a senior official in the Pentagon,
about U.S. aims in the war:

70 percent –To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).
20 percent–To keep SVN [South Vietnam] (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese
hands.
10 percent To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.

The U.S. primarily fought the war for reputational reasons, which at a certain theoretical
level may make sense. After all the conflict in Vietnam occurred at the height of the Cold
War and the nuclear arms race. However, fighting a real war based on an abstract idea
is a different story. ―No 19, 20-year-old kid wants to die to maintain the credibility of
Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon,‖ a Vietnam War veteran says in the documentary. Or
as George Orwell once noted about another academic argument that defied common
sense: ―One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary
man could be such a fool.‖

Of course, bashing intellectuals serving or advising the U.S. government has been en
vogue ever since the establishment of the national security state in 1947 and the influx
of academics. This has recently been taken to another level with the election of U.S.
President Donald Trump and the sidelining of the traditional Washington D.C.-based
foreign policy elite primarily recruited from a handful of American academic institutions.

The PBS Vietnam War documentary painfully illustrates what happens when national
security generalists run a war without the insights of regional experts. Walt Rostow,
McGeorge Bundy, and Robert McNamara were all talented and highly educated people.
But they had no expertise on Asia and limited military experience. (The U.S. military
leadership itself at the time was engulfed in anti-communist sentiments repeatedly
pushing to escalate the war in Southeast Asia in the 1960s.)

This lack of experience and expertise in the higher echelons of government was
amplified by the fact that most Asia experts had been purged from the U.S. government
by the McCarthy witch-hunts triggered by fears of communism in the 1950s. As a result,
there were no regional experts on board who ―might have been able to provide that
rarest of contributions in government: real expertise at a high operational
level,‖Halberstam writes, if the best and the brightest were of course willing to listen (not
a given).

The vacuum left by the regional experts had to be filled by national security generalists
and the military. Consequently, ―there was no real attempt, when the new administration
[Kennedy-Johnson] came in, to analyze Ho Chi Minh‘s position in terms of the
Vietnamese people and in terms of the larger Communist world, to establish what Diem
represented, to determine whether the domino theory was in fact valid,‖ he adds.

What the example of the Vietnam War shows is that there is a fundamental difference
between national security generalists and regional experts. The former lean toward
theory and abstraction embedded in ideology (e.g., Walt Rostow and McGeorge
Bundy), the latter focus primarily on culture and empirical evidence underpinned by on-
the-ground experience (e.g., John Paton Davies).

Based on Dan Drezner‘s definition of the terms, national security generalists tend to be
thought leaders, whereas regional experts have the attributes of public intellectuals. As
we have repeatedly seen in the run-up to wars including Afghanistan and Iraq, national
security generalists are much quicker to formulate an ostensible coherent theory (‗the
big idea‘) why military action is or is not necessary, while regional experts usually fall
into the ―on the one hand…on the other‖ category.

In order to be a national security generalist one has to be impressed with one‘s own
intellect (e.g., Henry Kissinger), otherwise it is impossible to display the confidence
necessary to comment with ostensible authority on a wide range of national security
issues. Presenting recommendations to solve the South China Sea maritime dispute,
while providing insights into Taiwan‘s military capabilities, next to offering advice on
North Korean sanctions runs contrary to the empirical approach of most regional
experts.

National security generalists–steeped in international relations theory, military history,

and ways of the Washingtonian bureaucracy—do not suffer from these empirical and
geographical limitations. (The same is true for some regional experts.) As a result, given
the current public policy and media environment in Washington DC favoring soundbitey
ideas, the national security generalist receives more attention from the government and
the media than the regional expert residing outside the capital.
This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. Some of the best analysts out there are what
I would call national security generalists. Yet, if there is one lesson to be taken from the
Vietnam War it is to distrust the judgement of national security generalists and to be
wary of their overarching theories if they run contrary to the general consensus of
opinion held by regional or country experts; or, as was the case in the 1950s and 60s,
be highly suspicious when they are made in an expert vacuum.

Generalism breeds (unwarranted) confidence and certitude.

As Lord Raglan said in the 1968 film Charge of the Light Brigade, ―It will be a sad day
for England when her armies are officered by men who know too well what they are
doing--it smacks of murder.‖ The lesson of Vietnam permeates his statement: National
security professionals who are too confident and too schooled in what they are doing
are often the henchmen of disastrous policies. A warning that the ―best and the
brightest‖ of the 21st century should heed.