February 2021 Handgrenade-Off and On

H-War February 2021 Handgrenade-Off and On

Blog Post published by John T Kuehn on Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Attention Grenadiers!

February Handgrenade

Full-on or Full Off or Something Else?

The United States security and defense communities, even with the relatively pacific Joe Biden as President, still seems to have two settings. Full-on and full off—rarely has it resided, since about 1862, to somewhere in between.

What do I mean by this? In the past (history), the U.S. ability to wage limited wars, to employ limited and measured elements of national power, has always seemed to default to a “full-on” approach to problems—primarily with military power--at least since the Civil War. In that case the full-on of reconstruction was turned off prior to the election of 1876 (although to be honest it had begun to dilute to “not full on” much earlier). Enough time had been spent fixing the “problem” of southern intransigence, after all, slavery was abolished, black males were citizens, what more could anyone want?…other than the protection of law for civil rights of African Americans in the south (never mind Asian-Americans or Native Americans in the west)?

This all comes to mind as I teach a module for an online graduate seminar in American Military History—as we look at the famous “American Way of War” model [1] of Russell Weigley. My recent readings and classes with my students inform this Handgrenade. The Weigley model is about an American preference for annihilating perceived security problems with its military—preference is the right word, not some deterministic absolute trait of choosing the same course every time. Certainly that annihilative method had precursors in colonial warfare against Native Americans and even was something of a hand-me-down from the Pitt policies of the Seven Years Wars as it was conducted in North America against the French and their Native American allies. It continued after the Civil War (better named at the time as the War of the Rebellion) with the Native Americans until they were pacified,

Citation: John T Kuehn. February 2021 Handgrenade-Off and On. H-War. 02-03-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/blog/hand-grenade-week/7210092/february-2021-handgrenade-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-War cooped up in semi-concentration camps called reservations (something Japanese Americans would experience during World War II).

The Spanish American War seems an exception, but it is not if judged by its somewhat full-on aftermath, the Philippine War, where the U.S. was faced with the problem of what to do with Spain’s ex-colony and decided to show its population who was boss before adjusting its policy toward a trajectory of independence. The methods in that war reflected very much the methods of the American Western pacification—except that total pacification of the Philippines proved, in the long, impossible.

World War I, well…need I say more. Full-on.

After World War I—full off. Although the policies of the U.S. in China between the world wars offered a different view of the difficult in between ground (as mouthed by the captain of the USS San Pablo in Richard McKenna’s famous novel The Sand Pebbles).

World War II, forced upon us, but certainly full on—Germany first and Japan second, with nukes.

Korea was an interesting case—Doug MacArthur wanted full on, but Truman mandated a limited approach, although the American penchant for operational full- on with firepower as a substitute for manpower was utilized tactically until it became apparent that some larger full-on victory could not be achieved by firepower alone, especially given the other pressing security needs in the early Cold War.

Vietnam—‘nuff said. Full-on and firepower. Then defeat. Serendipity played its usual odd roll in making the aftermath some 60 years later in the U.S.’s security favor, but we might have had our Asian Yugoslavia much earlier with a less full-on approach. The full-off until the Cold War build up, which tended toward full-on as the 80s gathered steam. But our approach in the Cold War was surprisingly nuanced, but dictated by a perceived sense of weakness vis-à-vis Soviet weapons and manpower (a weakness that was not reality, but we did not know this until after the Berlin Wall came down).

Which brings us to today and the problem of Taiwan and my recommendation to use the Falklands War to inform U.S. policy. Both are islands/island groups (the objects of defense and conflict). We must also note that Argentina is no PRC. However, the Falklands War (1982) saw the U.S. not get involved when its ally was attacked, but

Citation: John T Kuehn. February 2021 Handgrenade-Off and On. H-War. 02-03-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/blog/hand-grenade-week/7210092/february-2021-handgrenade-and Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-War instead the U.S. provided logistics, political support, and intelligence to the United Kingdom for that conflict. Like any conflict over Taiwan, that campaign was decidedly naval and air in character.

Taiwan, unlike Britain is not a formal ally, the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) is not an alliance, but a rather esoteric piece of legislation meant to reassure the Taiwanese that even though the U.S. recognized Beijing’s “one China Policy” we remained committed to a peaceful achievement of that…whatever that was. At the time Kissinger and Nixon had, in fact, de facto, written Taiwan off in order to get the rapprochement with the PRC and balance the USSR on the global stage. Somewhat like the PRC’s relationship with Russia today, except in this trio the U.S. is the USSR (in the geopolicital triangle) not Russia.

So, please, no full-on vis-à-vis Taiwan—which one is seeing more and more in some quarters (especially the U.S. Navy community). There are ways to support the people of Taiwan that do not mean open warfare with China. The past provides insights (not cookie cutter lessons) for how to approach the problem. But the U.S. relationship with Taiwan is not the same as our relationship with UK was (and is), and we still let the UK go it alone without our active military support in regaining the Falklands. A similar path for Taiwan is also recommended. It is time for Americans to put the full-on course of action at the bottom of the priority list, under glass, and only break the glass if absolutely necessary. In the case of Taiwan, the glass should remain unbroken.

It will be interesting to see how the full-on/full off cultural penchant leads to responses to this post.

[1] See Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), xvii-xxiii; see also the very informative back and forth between Weigley and military historian Brian M. Linn inThe Journal of Military History, 66:2 (April 2002), 501-534. Posted in: Hand Grenade of the Week