Voices of Leadership in Time of War

Contents

Political Leadership and War

Perhaps no demand for political leadership is as great as war and peace.  War can be a profound experience:

• Lives are on the line.  Wars kill.  They make widows and orphans.  They make parents bury their children instead of the other way around.  In 20th century culture these were unnatural events.
• War erodes a society's wealth.  Although war may boost industrial production, it does so for goods that are blown up.  As a result, economic production does not go toward enhancing a standard of living.  When production is directed towards goods that are blown up it cannot produce goods to expand the economy or goods to make lives better.
• War restricts freedoms.  Wars demand greater regimentation of society than is normal in a democracy.  Criticism becomes unpatriotic rather than a sign of lively democracy.  Normal rules of behavior are distorted in everything from how soldiers are treated to how prisoners are treated.  Even in a low commitment war like the war on al Qaeda, those of us living in the Washington area can see how our freedom to travel and our freedom to access our government is restricted.
• Total war changes societies profoundly.  One historian has observed that whatever the objectives for which we enter wars, the society emerges from the war much different than anyone envisioned.  Wars distort normal social development for better or for worse.  The society on the day the war starts will never be again.

War is a major element of the 20th Century

The century has been marked by three levels of military engagement:

• Total War. In conditions of total war, the societies themselves are engaged in the struggle. Life in the societies is distorted toward the war effort and the war becomes the dominant fact molding the character of life in the culture. In the 20th Century, World Wars I and II and the Cold War were total wars.
• National Confrontations. National confrontations are marked by nations warring with nations and governments, but the armies battle rather than the total commitment of the society. Other forces control the character of our society more than the war, although the war certainly has an impact. In the 20th Century, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq were the national confrontations that marked American life.
• Military Diplomacy. Often in the century there have been military ventures that the society hardly noticed except for blips in presidential popularity. They are often small scale operations against weak countries that do not tax American military strength. Examples from the final quarter of the century are Panama, Haiti, Grenada, Bosnia, and Afghanistan
• Organizational Targets.  Late in the century the military has been asked to contribute to quasi-wars growing out of commitments to destroy non-state organizations the political leadership or the society has judged worthy of destruction.  These wars generally require little societal commitment, are often fought with deception and clandestine activities, often drag on for years with minimal evidence of success, and command little attention from the society.  Support for them varies considerably.  Rhetorically they tend to have hit and miss visibility.  Examples of targeted organizations include the drug cartels of the Western hemisphere and the Islamist terrorist group al Qaeda.

Rhetorical Leadership in war

War requires many leadership skills, rhetorical among them.

• To initially motivate war. In our democratic system, the president must justify going to war.  This is true even if he avoids the Constitutional requirement that war be declared by the Congress.
• To maintain the commitment. As losses mount, the war lengthens beyond what was expected in the initial euphoria of nationalism, and the costs rise, the commitment will be tested.  Leaders must turn the ongoing events into a renewal of the commitment to the war.  They are aided in this by nationalism (and its variant patriotism) even as their task becomes more difficult with the passage of time.
• Coordination of the War Effort. Language must structure the community to perform the day to day activities necessary to the war's success. For example, leadership in time of war loses much of its democratic quality. Military chain of commands much more typically characterize the community with concentrations of power in particular people. That requires an altered language which diminishes criticism, open debate, and emphasizes the necessity of unquestionly following leadership. We also need to develop a way of talking about the importance of sacrifice that allows us to bury the dead as heroes, thus motivating the sacrifice of these and others.

In short, we can fight wars successfully or unsuccessfully depending on the motivational power which the discourse of leaders and the community provides to motivate the fight.

Getting Your Language Ready for War

Some rhetorical tasks were necessary before the war could start . . .

• Justifying War.  American culture requires that Presidents justify sending troops to kill and be killed.
• Motivating Sacrifice. Before wars are fought a rhetoric needs to develop through which people are willing to give even their lives for the common war objective. Of course, without unity these would have been in terms of the particular motivation of the particular culture within which the action occurred, and fighting for the other colonies would have been less than fully motivated. Thus, the rhetoric to motivate sacrifice required unity also.
• Promoting Unity. War requires a broader scope of support than normal democratic decisions.  Thus, Presidents must provide a special appeal for unity in fighting the war.

Other rhetorical tasks were necessary to fight an ongoing war . . .

• To divide the enemies from allies. A vocabulary typically develops that allows allegiances to take form that permits opposition. This vocabulary is often pejorative and dehumanizing.
• To transform both defeats and victories into support. Both wins and losses are inevitable in war. A good war rhetoric must transform the danger that defeat will dishearten into defeat resteeling the spirit. Similarly, a good war rhetoric must transform the danger that victory will encourage complacency into victory as energizing.
• To conduct the day-to-day war. War is a complex of drill, and orders, and supplies, and financing, and all the other things that constitute human institutions. A day to day vocabulary must evolve to allow these activities to proceed.

Leadership and Opposition

We have discussed the strategies for justifying war, but we must also look at War from the perspective of the community as well as the perspective of the leader. Communities forfeit much more than leaders in war. The people of the community are the ones who die in war and they are the ones whose economic productivity is destroyed in the destruction of war.

• When the community decides that war is the proper response, leadership is crucial. Leaders face no greater rhetorical challenge than taking their nation into total war. Lose total war and the culture is destroyed and fundamentally crushed. Leaders stake all -- theirs and the communities lives -- on their ability to motivate the war effort.
• But when war is an inappropriate response, leadership may be even more important and more difficult. There are no conditions in a democracy in which leaders have greater power than in time of war. Leaders can be too quick to use that power, to forfeit the lives and resources of their people in ill-advised assertions of their power. Political leaders have the power of office to use as authority in motivating war. Those who oppose war are faced with doing so without such authority. Therefore, opposition to war must use different media and different strategies to oppose wars that they consider illegitimate.

Reading War Messages

As we read rhetoric associated with war, there are two kinds of analyses we want to conduct:

• What arguments justify war?  How do leaders seek to warrant war?  What kinds of values and information do they turn to?  What kind of events do they feature to justify war?
• How do President's motivate war?  When President's speak to the society, how do they motivate sacrifice and war footing?  Although the answers to the first question will be part of the Presidential messages, how do President's supplement the reasons for war to intensify the commitment of the people to the war?