Supreme Command Analysis

The relationship between military and political leaders has always been complicated, especially during war times. In the Supreme Command, Eliot Cohen examines four historical portraits: Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion, to proof through a practical example, his argument that, despite their military experiences, statesmen should not turn their wars over to their generals. Cohen tried to sell his product of civil-military relations based on the concept that the civilian authority should intervene at the tactical and operational level in order to achieve success in war. In this paper, I will define the general argument of Supreme Command then I will explain how Cohen account of civil-military relations to Lincoln during the American
Civil War and to Churchill during World War 2, concluding which case better support his general argument.
Cohen presented four case studies of four great war leaders from different cultures and times to demonstrate that a civilian leader with a certain character and principles can lead people to a military victory. Contrary to Huntington, Cohen believed that the highest political authority should be very much engaged with the details of war and war planning. Moreover, he argues that, the civilian intervention should reach the tactical and operational levels in order to accomplish military success. However, Cohen acknowledges that it is almost folly for a politician to try to dictate military actions; but the entire military field should be open to the civilian oversight. This was the general argument of the Supreme Command, but, to put it into practice, we will address the case study of two war leaders: Lincoln during the American Civil War and Churchill during World War 2.
In fact, Lincoln exercised a constant oversight of the war from the beginning till the end, despite his modest military experience.
Significant that, on 1 April 1861 he ordered the commander in chief Winfield Scott to provide daily reports, only a few weeks after taking office. Likewise, within a week of writing a letter to Ulysses S. Grant, disclaiming any wish to know Grant’s plans, he sent a special emissary to report back regularly and on a daily basis in some cases on what Grant’s doing, and later on by sending his assistant secretary of war, Charles Dana, as a personal observer of the Union armies in the field. Even his relation with his generals was under supervision. Lincoln was an abler manager of man, he had the art of making use of able, but flawed subordinates who could not abide one another. For instance, through his letter to the blustering General Joseph Hooker in 26 January 1863, he showed Hook that the President saw his faults, no less than his virtues. Thus, Hook obeyed Lincoln despite his feuds with other
generals.
However, the prime case of Lincoln’s military interference at the operational level was on 15 March 1861, when he asked his subordinates whether or not to resupply the isolated garrison at Fort Sumter. Conversely to his generals, he ordered the nonviolent supply of Sumter overruling his senior advisors. Moreover, following the transformation of warfare due to the evolution of three elements: rifles, railroads, and the telegraph, Lincoln took a personal interest in the development of firearms, including test-firing the main types and establishing personal contact with the responsible officers.
On the other hand, Churchill was more experienced than Lincoln.
He served as minister of munitions and later secretary of state for war. Perhaps his four-volume book “the world crisis” was the clearest example of his passion for war. However, Churchill interference in the military had another taste. Instead of writing letters to his officers as Lincoln did, he prone to calling his captains at all hours of the night, and asked for meetings with specialists and high ranked officers to study a case in order to win the war challenges. A good example was on 21 June 1940, when he met twenty-eight-year-old London scientist, along with the highest chain of command in the army and the air force, to discuss the possibility that the Germans had developed a means of all-weather precision navigation to drop bombs through cloud
cover.
Likewise, on the operational level, he successfully persuaded President Roosevelt to adopt first, the invasion of North Africa and Italy before the northern Europe. However, he advocated courses of action that could have proved a desperate error; these include his believe in an amphibious assault on northern Norway, and the plan of the British landing in the Netherlands East Indies in 1944 or 1945.
Moreover, Churchill even involved in decision making about matters of details as his generals always complained. A good example was the note sent by Churchill to Ismay about “Victor”, an exercise to detect problems in case of a German invasion through the English Channel, where he asked about remarkable details like the amount and the quality of the invasion force. Furthermore, he extended his intervention to the administrative matters. A fine example is the regiment patches. After visiting the 53rd division on 21 November 1942, he knew that an order was issued banning regimental shoulder patches, and he gave directions to cancel this instruction.
In summary, despite their limited experiences, both leaders presented a shining argument of successful political interference in military matters, to the extent that it is hard to see how the war could have won without them. Although it is hard to define who better accounted Cohen’s main argument; but, Lincoln’s ability to read human character and successfully absorb his generals, despite his interference in military details, made his case a better job of supporting the general argument of Supreme Command than the British case with Churchill, who during his interference faced criticism from his generals, and has made many operational mistakes like Norway plan, that reduced his chances to be the better supporting to Cohen’s main argument since it shows that, a civilian authority interference in military matters is disastrous. In closing, in this paper, I defined the general argument of Supreme Command then, I explained how Cohen account of civil-military relations to Lincoln during the American Civil War, and to Churchill during World War 2, concluding which case better supported his general argument