By John Hillen
Monday, December 07, 2020
Seventy-ninth anniversaries of any event rarely merit
front-page coverage. Memory fades, survivors and eyewitnesses leave the scene,
and new days of remembrance are instated. Cover it again on the big
round-number anniversaries — next year perhaps.
So too with today’s 79th anniversary of the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into World War II. It is no
longer a fixture in the emotional, civic, and political calendar. For decades,
into the 1990s, it was rare to pick up a newspaper on December 7 and not see
the iconic USS Arizona in flames and sinking on the front page. No
longer.
Ironically, about the time December 7 started to slip
from active civic memory and observation, Congress introduced it into law as an
official day of remembrance in 1994.
Through the first four decades after the event, it was
hard to remember a Pearl Harbor Day not begun with thoughts of or lessons from
the attack. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Brantley, told us one December 7th of
being a little girl at Pearl and lying under the kitchen table in her home on
the hills above the harbor — seeing the faces of Japanese pilots through the
windows as they raced by on their bombing runs just a few hundred feet above
the home.
We have 9/11 now — a raw and contemporary day of national
tragedy to observe. The World War II generation is passing on, and our civic
culture, such as it is, focuses on different issues.
Pearl Harbor Day is still worth serious reflection
though, and not just to mourn the loss of the 2,403 souls killed that day, or
to salute the courage of those who persevered and fought through the attack. In
addition, our constant and annual refrain on Pearl Harbor Day should be to
remind ourselves that surprise attacks are an endemic feature of national
security, and it will continue to happen to the U.S. repeatedly if we do not
adopt a posture and set of policies that mitigate these attacks’ worst effects.
For a military historian, the only surprising feature of
surprise attacks is that anybody is surprised by their frequency. Almost
every major event of World War II before Pearl Harbor was a surprise in some
fashion: Consider the Japanese incursion into Manchuria; Hitler’s invasions of
Poland, France, the Balkans, and Russia; the British destruction of the Italian
Mediterranean fleet at Taranto; and many more.
After Pearl, the Japanese continued to surprise elsewhere
in the Asia-Pacific theater — sometimes by surprise tactics and methods, as in
their previously unimaginable landward-side invasion of the British redoubt at
Singapore.
The allies swung quickly into the surprise-attack line of
work, effectively shocking the Axis with the landings in North Africa almost a
year after Pearl Harbor, and then again in Sicily and on mainland Italy in
1943. Remarkably, after knowing the cross-channel invasion blow would fall in
northeast France, the Germans were still caught off guard by the Normandy
landings on D-Day. The Americans were surprised in return by the German
offensive a few months later in the Battle of the Bulge.
The pattern was ever thus and continues so. The U.S. was
surprised in the Korean War (twice) and surprised the North Koreans in return
with the landings at Inchon. The Tet offensive surprised us in Vietnam. Israel
seemed to have perfected strategically decisive surprise attacks with the
Six-Day War of 1967 but was surprised in return during the Yom Kippur War six
years later.
I was an Army lieutenant patrolling the border between
West Germany and Czechoslovakia in November 1989, when we witnessed the
slow-motion surprise of the Iron Curtain collapse. A year later, I was in Saudi
Arabia preparing to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had surprised the world
with his invasion of Kuwait. Our cavalry regiment surprised the Iraqi
Republican Guard by coming out of an unexpected corner of the desert — despite
their forces’ being prepared and awaiting our advance for weeks.
A surprise attack on the homeland and civilians is a
different order of surprise attack, of course. Before we let it fade into the
history books and out of civic practice, Pearl Harbor Day is a chance to
formally reflect on this phenomenon of surprise and what can be done about it.
First, we must consciously autocorrect our inclination
(especially Americans) to think that if we are done with surprise attacks then
they must be done with us. As Michael Howard’s brilliant treatise War and
the Liberal Conscience shows, liberal societies such as ours want to
believe that the last attack or the last war was . . . just that. The liberal
mind (in the classic, not political definition) believes, with a kind of
innocent hubris, that peace and commerce are the natural conditions of mankind.
The world is flat; countries with McDonald’s don’t invade one another; power
politics and surprise attacks are a thing of our barbaric past. Until they are
not.
Warnings, even of the most prescient sort, do not work
against this mindset. In 1999, I served as a scholar on a bipartisan
blue-ribbon commission that issued a report on the likely nature of future
security challenges. Our first point in a lengthy analysis was stated thus:
“The greatest threat to the United States in the future is the use of
catastrophic terrorism against our homeland and our military superiority will
not protect us.” The effort garnered maybe 50 short mentions in the national
media in the summer of 1999. In contrast, that summer there were over 500
stories about shark attacks at American beaches. This was, after all, the
height of post–Cold War peace and the go-go economic years. Nobody had time for
a bunch of national-security Cassandras at the Dow 36,000 party.
Second, we must realize that preventing surprise attacks
is not a matter of addressing “intelligence failures.” There are always
intelligence failures, process issues, and human failings (they were legion at
Pearl Harbor) that are culprits in such an attack. To our credit, we
investigate and correct them with rigor. But that does not prevent the next
one. The bomber will always get through, Stanley Baldwin reminded us.
Intelligence work and even good predictive analysis are
important, no doubt. But far too often this fails to detect or help arrest the
next surprise. As Lawrence Freedman pointed out in his recent book, The
Future of War: A History, we have a miserable track record of predicting
the next conflict. But it always comes. And it is different from what we
thought.
Finally, and most importantly, as a matter of policy we
must recognize that the only effective mitigation against being disastrously
surprised as we were on December 7, 1941, or September 11, 2001, is to be the surpriser
and not the surprisee. Not in the literal sense exactly, but rather in
terms of America’s overall strategy and strategic posture.
That posture should be one oriented on the initiative of
action (both diplomatic and military), on shaping events with constant activity
and ideas, on being positioned forward, of being intellectually if not
strategically on the offensive. This is not a call for invasions everywhere,
but rather a strategic state of mind. A great power must be on the front foot,
not the back. As a rule, for great powers, a passive posture invites attacks.
We are not in that forward-leaning frame of mind right
now. Both presidential candidates had a dovish attitude toward American
military deployments and commitments, using similar language about deployments
and missions abroad. One would end the “forever wars” and the other would
conclude the “endless wars.”
This is not a strategy, but rather a sentiment. One that
has stayed with us from the time of the draftee military — a World War II
sentiment, if you will — and the times when we mobilized on all levels
nationally to fight big wars, including the Cold War. But we now have a very
small and professional all-volunteer force. Nobody needs to go back to the farm
or the factory to get the economy moving and return to normal.
The troops I spent time with over the past few years in
Iraq, Afghanistan, the Southern Philippines, and elsewhere are triple
volunteers in some ways for these deployments. They like to play “away games,”
so to speak. Their work is done in these places — they exercise their craft and
their profession there. They are not seeking to end these deployments if the
national-security interest calls for keeping some pattern of them going. Great
powers do not have walls, oceans, allies, international organizations, or NGOs
behind which to retreat.
Over the past dozen years, our leaders have done a poor
job preparing the American public to understand that phenomenon and the
relatively low cost of having a high impact/low footprint set of deployments
around the world — and sometimes the need for high impact/high footprint
deployment.
An offensive posture in the world, even principally
diplomatic in nature, is the best tonic against tragic surprises. And then,
when we are surprised (and we will be), robust resiliency on the back end. We
have much work to do as a nation — especially in the areas of cyber and
infrastructure vulnerability.
How best to honor the memory of the fallen at Pearl
Harbor 79 years ago today? By reducing the chances of future Pearl Harbors and
9/11’s through being prepared intellectually, culturally, and strategically.
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