Book Review: This Kind of War



The Korean War tends to get ignored in history classes, wedged as it is between World War II and Vietnam, but it deserves a lot more attention, because it was the first major conflict of the Cold War, and as such set the pattern for most of the conflicts that followed, both in terms of foreign and domestic policy.

T. R. Feherenbach’s This Kind of War provides a few chapters’ worth of background on the country of Korea, its politics, and how the United States got involved in a “police action” that was in fact a very nasty shooting war. For most of its existence, Korea has been a unified country, albeit one that faced invasion or occupation by one of several great powers in the area: namely, China and Japan, but later also the Soviet Union. As World War II was ending, the Russians were invading Manchuria, which Japan had captured from China back in the ‘30s. They got as far as Korea when the U.S. War Department (soon to be the Department of Defense) started worrying about having a Communist-dominated country so close to the Japanese mainland. Unlike Europe, the U.S. had no intention of sharing the occupation of Japan with any of the other Great Powers. Planners in the Pentagon tried to find a natural stopping point for the Soviet armies; finding none, they suggested the 38th parallel, a geographic line of latitude that cut Korea almost exactly in half. The Russians were made to hold up at the parallel, and soon established a Communist puppet government in North Korea under the dictator Kim Il Sung.




This artificial division between North and South Korea bothered citizens and political leaders on both sides of the parallel, and both sides felt the Korean Peninsula should be unified (predictably) under their respective governments: Kim Il Sung’s in Pyongyang or Syngman Rhee’s in Seoul, the traditional capital of the nation. The North Koreans struck first, in 1950, invading and overwhelming the South Korean army and its U.S. advisors.




Fehrenbach then spends the remainder of This Kind of War covering the conflict from several different perspectives, from the political to the cultural to the strategic to the grunt-level tactics and the prisoner-of-war experience. These multiple layers give the book richer detail than it might have had if the author had just covered the war from just one, and Fehrenbach’s prose is at turns humorous, lofty, and grotesque, for all such things could be found in war.




At the political level, Korea was unique to the American experience of war in that it involved no immediate national interest: North Korea’s attack was not on U.S. soil or (for the most part) citizens or soldiers. South Korea was not a particularly rich or important country from an industrial or resource perspective. What the nation had was the unhappy luck to be positioned geographically between the newly Communist People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union, and Japan. It was one of several flashpoints that would develop along the border between the First and Second Worlds from 1946 to 1990. The only vital interest political interest the U.S. had there was containing the further expansion of an aggressive Communism, and this President Harry Truman and his advisors were firmly determined to do.




What made American policy different in Korea was that the goal was not to engage in an all-out general war with the Communist world (a goal that would create problems throughout the war, which was not even called a war during its execution). They simply wanted to “hold the line.” This was the first direct application of the policy of containment, and it was a hard sell to the American public and the United Nations. The U.N allowed the U.S. to take over the defense of South Korea thanks to two errors by the Communists: they made a blatantly hostile move against another nation, and the Soviet Union, which held veto power in the Security Council, boycotted the proceedings. The U.S. would never have such a carte blanche mandate again.


The problem of containment became obvious once the U.S. started committing ground troops on the Asian mainland. After the North Koreans were halted at a narrow pocket around the city of Pusan, the question became what to do next. Douglas MacArthur, proconsul of Japan, was made Supreme Commander of U.S. forces in Korea, and he went to work within two months of the invasion. He ordered a combined Navy/Marine landing at the port of Inchon, near Seoul, to attack the right flank of the North Koreans’ southern advance. With that beachhead established and American fighting spirit restored, the North Korean armies were pushed back across the peninsula to the Yalu River, at the northern border with China and Russia.


From a strategic point of view, America held superiority at sea and in the air, and was easily more maneuverable than the Communist armies once it brought in enough motorized vehicles and tanks. The problem was that MacArthur was restrained from using American superiority to its greatest extent; the result would have been a general war with Red China and possibly the Soviets, a war President Truman did not want. This chafed MacArthur and his subordinates, especially when Red Chinese “volunteers” swarmed over the border and pushed U.S. and U.N. troops back south of the 38th parallel. MacArthur wanted to bomb sites within Chinese Manchuria to punish the Red Chinese, and said so on several occasions. On the last occasion, writing to a U.S. congressman, Truman had had enough and relieved MacArthur of his command.


Political considerations also won out on the tactical level, especially after the battle lines stabilized (for the most part) in mid-1951. Individual units—corps, brigades, battalions, and eventually even platoons—were prevented from gaining too much of an advantage or making too aggressive of a move on their enemies because the goal was containment, not total victory. This sort of fighting brought the U.S. Army back to the sort of static trench warfare that was common during World War I, and was very costly in terms of artillery and lives (more artillery shells were fired in the three years of the Korean War than in all of World Wars I and II!). A static army is a depressed army, but it is also an army vulnerable to unpopular casualties, able to react only when the enemy attacks, giving them the initiative.


From the cultural angle, Korea was an eye-opening and painful experience for the American public. Used to all-out crusades to defeat evil, the public didn’t understand that the nation could not go back to its pre-1941 isolationism, and that the U.S. role in the world had changed. As one of two superpowers, and the only one capable of resisting Communism, America was now assuming the mantle of the British Empire, holding the line and policing the seas. A general crusade against Communism, à la World War II, was no longer possible in a world with nuclear weapons.


Worse, from the Defense Department’s point of view, was that the American public’s desire to withdraw from world affairs after 1946 meant that the armed forces, particularly the Army, were slashed to the bone. In addition, the culture of the Army had changed after the war. Having routed fascism and made the world safe for democracy, Americans assumed that nuclear weapons would keep the Communists at bay, and they had a distaste for large standing armies that was as old as the republic itself. In Fehrenbach’s view, the Army was allowed to get soft: discipline suffered, equipment was allowed to fall into disrepair and the men as a whole—mostly draftees—did not think like soldiers. America was used to citizen-soldiers, not “legions defending the frontier,” but that was what it had inherited after World War II.


Given all these constraints and problems, Fehrenbach notes that it was remarkable the U.S. did as well as it did. Basically, the American soldier, after getting his teeth kicked in for the first couple months of the North Korean invasion, relearned the art of war the hard way and stood up to their Communist enemies as well as any generation before them.


A couple of things struck me about this book, which was written in 1962, before John F. Kennedy began sending large numbers of advisors to Vietnam. First, Fehrenbach makes a compelling and impassioned plea for the U.S. to establish a professional army, “legions,” rather than to continue to depend on citizen-soldiers to defend a frontier that most citizens do not care about unless the frontier is right on their doorsteps. Unfortunately, the change from draftees to an all-volunteer force did not occur until 1973, after an even worse and more contentious bloodletting in Vietnam.


Another strange side effect of containment in Vietnam was that the U.S. couldn’t expand its military operations into neighboring “neutral” countries for a similar fear of starting a world-wide nuclear war. When the U.S. government finally did start bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia—destroying the Viet Cong’s supply chain—a valid object in war, it faced a massive public uproar against what was already an unpopular war. Fehrenbach predicted the war protests of the late 1960s in 1962, but no one in Washington was listening. They continued to believe that they could send citizen-soldiers into holding actions, and thus permanently soured much of the nation against military action of any kind.


For the modern reader, This Kind of War and the Korean War in general still hold important lessons because Korea was a paradigm shift for politicians and military planners in the post-World War II era, much as the first Gulf War was the first major conflict of the post-Cold War era. While America now has an all-volunteer, professional army (“legions”) as a result of the Cold War, it now wishes to fight “crusades,” where there are clear enemies, clear victories, and clear exit strategies. The U.S. military never really much liked containment because their operational hands were tied by political considerations and they couldn’t engage in the kinds of bold maneuvers that characterized much of World War II. The Department of Defense can once again send massive tank columns on swift thrusts into enemy territory, provided that the enemy in question doesn’t have nuclear weapons. With a nuclear-armed enemy, goals and operations must necessarily be limited, or the nukes will come out, and once that Pandora’s Box is open, it’s very hard to get it closed again.


The lessons of Korea and This Kind of War are simple, but ugly: if you don’t want to destroy civilization through nuclear war, you have to engage in limited operations against your enemy’s proxies, and you need “legions” to do so. A democracy is not prepared to volunteer for an all-out crusade unless the homeland itself attacked and a maximum effort is expected. And as more and more nations acquire nuclear weapons, the U.S. military will have to fight more Koreas in the future under even tighter constraints.


And lastly, there’s this ugly truth about why the Korean War remains relevant today: we’re still there. There are still U.S. Marines on station near the 38th parallel. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) still exists. Kim Jong-Il, son of Kim Il-Sung, now rules North Korea with the same iron hand as the previous Beloved Leader. North Korea still has troops and bunkers amassed on their side of the border. South Korea and Japan are now major U.S. trading partners. Russia is no longer Communist, but China still is, as is North Korea, and all three now possess nuclear weapons. North Korea has been exporting nuclear hardware to places like Syria, Pakistan, and Iran. Korea is a problem that has not gone away. Nearly 60 years later, the best we’ve been able to manage on the Korean Peninsula is a cease-fire, and sometimes not even that. Another war is possible; what it will look like is anyone’s guess, but it will have its roots in the last war.

Humanity is Too Screwed Up to Inflict on the Rest of the Solar System

The first time I heard this argument, I was working at Disney, and I was utterly at a loss about how to respond. I'm still dumbfounded at the attitude, but then I'm also dumbfounded at people who think the United States was the worst nation in the history of the world, too. "For gosh sakes," I want to say, "If you hate life/America that much, leave it!"

More politely, I would say that I strongly disagree.

The source of this argument takes several forms:

• We've screwed up the Earth, so we'll only do the same to the Moon/Mars, etc. Have we polluted? Yes. But thanks in part to our own space program, the environmental movement got one of the best PR images ever: Earthrise over the limb of the Moon. Would the movement have gotten that big of a boost if Apollo 8 hadn't photographed that image? I leave that as an exercise for the reader. However, one can hardly argue with the political and environmental progress that the movement has had in the last 40 years. The Cuyahoga River no longer burns. You can fish in Lake Erie. I've even been told you can see Pittsburgh now and Los Angeles occasionally. Lead is gone from paint and gasoline. Cars are improving in efficiency and chemical emissions. We rail on about carbon dioxide as a pollutant, forgetting the sulfur dioxides and other nasty black stuff that used to come out of car tailpipes. We have safer nuclear reactors and smokestack scrubbers on coal-fired power plants. Are we perfect? Hardly. And China and India are not yet rich enough to afford the pollution-control technologies that we now take for granted and continue to improve. I cannot speak to the never-satisfied ethos of the environmental movement, but I cannot deny the improvements they've made in our world.
• Our culture is too screwed up to be allowed to expand. Take your perspective on this one--religious, intellectual, cultural, behavioral, social--and you can find plenty of reasons why particular activities we wouldn't want to see expand into space. But how much of that is the result of bad choices by individuals and how much of it is "the culture" as a whole? A culture is made up of individuals, with intelligences and abilities ranging up and down the Bell Curve. We have Stephen Hawking and Beverly Sills on one end, and the Octomom and Darwin Award winners on the other. Some of reader Allen's comments frankly disturbed me, but also made me think. Yes, there are people doing stupid things with their lives.
  
  When Columbus and Magellan sailed from Spain in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church was conducting the Inquisition while Isabella and Ferdinand were hounding Jews out of the country. Similar villainy could be found in Elizabethan England, which had its own festering religious quarrels but was also enjoying the plays of William Shakespeare. The difference between then and now is that there are more human beings in the world today and the tools of civilization, both benign and dangerous, are more widespread. So this means we need better education, better laws, better (idjitproof) technologies, or better people. I'd opt for the first three before screwing around with trying to make people "better." There are too many value judgments involved there.
• Capitalism will destroy other worlds like it's destroyed this one. I could say similar things about communism, and with greater cause. Consider Stalin's purges, Hitler's evil, or the bloodletting of China's Cultural Revolution or Cambodia's Khmer Rouge. All of these societies killed millions of their own people all in the name of some state-sanctioned idea of perfection. Anyone fighting those visions or even questioning them faced show trials, midnight knocks on the door, gulags, or much, much worse. And returning to the first point, environmental regulations and conditions are much worse in the former Soviet Union than the U.S. I'm sure someone will throw some other statistics at me showing all the evil capitalism has done. However, I would like to also offer, in comparison to the evil done by other contemporary social systems, what good capitalism has done. Through mass production and industrial technology, it has brought down the prices of thousands of goods that once belonged only to the very rich or royalty. It has brought about revolutions in communication, including this Internet that allows people to spread messages about the evils of capitalism to all corners of the world. It has brought human beings to the Moon, images of the far reaches of the universe to our TV screens, and economic and other aid to all corners of the planet within hours of nearly any disaster. One might rail against Enron or WorldCom or now AIG and the rest of the big banks, and perhaps with some justification. But it is capitalism that builds high-quality homes, cars, and cell phones, not governments. It will always be so, and if it is no longer so, well, expect poorer-quality products and rationing.
• Human beings have no business escaping to other planets when their primary duty is to make life better for their fellow men here on Earth. I caught a whiff of this sort of argument from some of my religious friends. Pro-space people are focusing too much on this life and other worlds, and not enough on the afterlife and redeeming themselves in this world. "Well, maybe, says I. But what about building asteroid defenses that protect life on Earth? If there's no life, there's no church to protect, right?"
  "If an asteroid strikes, that's God's will."
  "Yeah, but if we have the ability, we should build the defenses."
  "We could build the defenses, but whether they work or not is God's will."
  "But if we build the defenses, we're at least giving ourselves a fighting chance, right?"
  Get the feeling I've had this discussion before? Anyhow, I have yet to understand why some of my coreligionists have such a negative attitude toward science and technology, though I suspect it goes back to arguments having little to do with space itself. Still, it's an argument I've heard against building space hardware, and it disturbs me.
• Human beings were not meant to live on other worlds. This is a much harder argument to refute because we haven't done it yet...at least not long-term. But it's a simple fact: right now, Earth is the only place in the universe where Homo sapiens can live without need for artificial life support. Everywhere else, we face challenges related to atmosphere (or lack thereof), gravity, dust, and lifelessness. Barring some science fictional scenario where we find an Earthlike planet nearby and simultaneously develop "warp drive," we will only live on other worlds in this solar system, using the machines and life forms we bring with us. We might terraform Mars, cool down Venus, or build structures beneath the grey mountains of the Moon or the ice of Europa. In the meantime, we have those tuna cans and sausages that ensure structural stability and atmospheric integrity. To say we can't survive as unarmored, naked human beings is correct but also missing the point: we can do it, the question is, will we do it?

DVD Review: The Lives of Others

I don't have a lot to say about The Lives of Others, though I highly recommend it. It won an Academy Award for best foreign language film in 2007. The Lives of Others follows the activities of a member of the East German State Security (Stasi) in 1984 as he begins listening in on a socialist playwright for possible thought crimes against the state. The movie serves as an insight into life under the Iron Curtain, and demonstrates that the only way to be morally good as a human being under those states was to break the law. If you speak German, you might pick up some of the subtleties; if you're a subtitle reader, it won't distract after the first five minutes. The story explains why conservatives are so concerned about socialism today, and why the lesson of the Cold War needs to be relearned every generation. Worth watching!

Space Cadet Politics

Nader Elhenawy has a rather long, but worthwhile piece on The Space Review. Go on and read it, or my selective commentary won't make much sense.

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I could not help being struck by the predominance of a libertarian-conservative outlook among those who follow these matters online. (I specify it as libertarian-conservative because our use of the word “libertarian” tends to overlook the long history of left-libertarianism.)
Why this should be the case is far from obvious.

The author would not be surprised by the prevalence of conservatism/libertarianism in space if he read a little more Robert A. Heinlein, who was a science fiction writer focusing on rockets. He also was a 1930s liberal and later '50s and '60s conservative/libertarian, but a capitalist all the way down the line.

Re: postmoderism as a conservative perspective

I found this twist on things interesting, but ultimately irrelevant. Classical liberalism, with its emphases on individual liberty and progress, is now part of today's conservative-liberatarians. Meanwhile postmodernism is very much a part of progressivism/liberalism, with its emphases on relativism, postcolonialism, feminism, and other -isms that question Western rationality, technology, and universal philosophies (e.g. Christianity, capitalism).

The "final frontier" of Democrat John F. Kennedy (and his disciple Gene Roddenberry) is now questioned as "imperialist" by postcolonial theorists in that same party. Progressives support green power and genetic activities because they are small, earthbound, and so not likely to intimidate or overpower the individual. Rocketry cannot help but be big--a sin in itself, for reasons that elude me--because of the sheer number of experts and money required to make it a going concern.

In short, space is merely an extension of our present and past ideological battles applied to a broad canvas--the ultimate blank slate. Examples can be found in the pages of science fiction. The "Future History" short stories of Robert Heinlein collected in The Past Through Tomorrow might be seen as the genesis of the conservative-libertarian viewpoint. If you want to see an example of government-centric "New Deal" or "Great Society" liberalism in space, check out Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, starting with Red Mars. Another "grand vision" for space is the (Carl) Saganite ethos of making the universe safe for robots, while humans stay home. Still another is that of Gerard K. O'Neill, which is more or less the vision of the National Space Society. O'Neill believed in large orbital settlements/cities in space, manufactured by and sustaining a high-tech industrial civilization. It's very difficult to find a postmodern vision for near-term space exploration because most of the component ideologies that make it up are more concerned about denouncing and undoing Western capitalism/conservatism here on Earth.

One thing that I should point out is that science and technology are essentially apolitical. You can be a communist, a capitalist, a Mormon, or a Zoroastrian--if you follow the laws of nature and build things correctly, you can get people and cargo into space. As the Soviet Union proved. As did Communist China, India, and now Iran. A human future in space is, perhaps, inevitable. The form of society that the future takes is up for grabs. So we'll see how it all sorts out. The private sector might, indeed, win the battle to control the economy in low Earth orbit...at least until the government decides to regulate them out of existence.