Status Updates From The Mask of Command

Mankind, if it is to survive, must choose its leaders by the test of their intellectuality; and, contrarily, leadership must justify itself by its detachment, moderation and power of analysis. Hopes of transition to such a style of leadership need not be based on mere wish.

Government is complex: its practice requires an endless and subtle manipulation of the skills of inducement, persuasion, coercion, compromise, threat and bluff. Command, by contrast, is ultimately quite straightforward; its exercise turns on the recognition that those who are asked to die must not be left to feel that they die alone.

For all the cosmetic Futurism of [Hitler’s] style, he remained a creature of his youth and its vanishing background, in which command emanated from an unseen All-Highest to whom the simple soldier owed the duty of strictest obedience and by whom was owed noting in return but the guarantee that his orders would bring victory.

…he knew that Americans were two peoples, and could be made one only through the defeat of the minority by the majority. Even after he had come to that conclusion, however, he persisted in seeing beyond the war’s end to the necessity of victors and vanquished learning to live together in harmony. That was the vision of ‘commingling’ he held thenceforward to the end of his life.

In only one advanced country was the title of military rank confined to those qualified to hold it by professional education. That country was the United States, which in 1802 founded what may well be regarded as the most significant of the world’s officer-training institutions, its Military Academy at West Point.

Generals as far apart in time as Caesar…and, as we have seen, Wellington himself – all were driven by an ethic, of which the heroic was still a strong element, to share the common soldier’s predicament and, if bullet hit or steel scored, to undergo his fate.

[Alexander] destroyed much and created little or nothing…His dreadful legacy was to ennoble savagery in the name of glory and leave a model of command that far too many men of ambition sought to act out in the centuries to come.

To such men a blow from a superior was a deadly insult, a denial of manhood, which could be expunged only by violence in return. Hence the relative frequency with which British officers in Indian or Arab regiments were murdered by subordinates. The explanation was almost always an ill-considered affront to a man’s dignity.