Eliot A. Cohen

In "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime" scholar Eliot Cohen asks what is it that distinguishes great leadership when war threatens annihilation to an idea, a country, a history, a people.

Think about it for a minute.

What would it mean if you and your neighbours, your home, your city, everything you know were threatened by a menace like Hitler and the German war machine?

Do you think you would be protected by the professional class of killers that is your military?

In the example of David Ben-Gurion, there was no experienced military. There was barely a war machine at all when Israel declared independence and faced the wrath of a 100 million Arabs surrounding it.

Ben-Gurion fashioned an effective leadership from men who could organize themselves, not just an impassioned group of partisans.

Among these great portraits of leadership under duress we find Lincoln taking firm hold over his generals, which would lead and which would be cast aside. We find Winston Churchill burrowing through the war plans questioning them, questioning their assumptions, documenting, reading, and revising. We find Georges Clemenceau finding the best in his generals Foch and Petain and engaging first hand in the trenches.

Cohen's point is that leadship does not wait for the professionals to take hold of the situation. Leaders get engaged, push themselves, and leave as little to chance as possible.

I can't imagine a scenario where Ulysses Grant gets the commission to lead the army under any other president. Lincoln saw someone absolutely determined to defeat the South.

Churchill's military leaders hated his meddling, fought him over everything, and yet they got the results.

Lincoln, Clemenceau, and Churchill all had their detractors. Before they took the reigns of power none of the elite in their homelands would have given them a chance of success.

All of these men were great readers. They were tireless. They were worldly. And they were tyrannical in pursuit of the good end.

Those are certainly the qualities I would want in my leader. Especially when somebody was trying to tear my country apart.

Wouldn't you?… (meer)

Pages 59-94 were assigned reading for WWII in Europe Case Study as part of S&W at the NWC. I used this section as helpful research for my paper on Allied strategy in Europe, arguing against the inevitability of Allied victory due to resource superiority. One quote I pulled directly that came from the challenging U-boat campaign in the Atlantic, "Certainly, those who fought in the Battle of the Atlantic did not consider it won until the very last moment…”p93.

From the syllabus: Cohen and Gooch examine operational failure in war by exploring American anti-submarine warfare during the initial stages of U.S. involvement in the Second World War.… (meer)

The "America can do no wrong" attitude starts to grate very quickly and in the end I can't tell if the author is arguing for or against use of military force. You could argue it's a nuanced stance but it's more to do with how meandering the narrative is.

And how many times is he going to tell us that America's capabilities are surely great but we can't talk about the details because it's a secret. Too late, I'm onto your secrets and will carelessly reveal the existence of the American moon base right here!… (meer)