Odysseus in America (41 page)

The leadership culture that both protects the troops from psychological injury and makes them militarily effective is well understood:
it is the constellation of leadership culture described above.
It's what I mean by “properly supported” leadership. These practices are neither anti-democracy because the Germans, Chinese, and North Vietnamese used them, nor military democracy, because they run counter to the authoritarian U.S. leadership culture that grew out of World War II—the use of the word “democracy” here is a red herring either way.

Thumos,
character, is a living thing that flourishes or wilts according to the ways that those who hold power use power. Character is fluid throughout life, and imitative throughout life. In high-stakes situations, people learn about the use of power from the ways power is actually used in their environment, even if they are not “directly involved.” Moral learning continues throughout life.

As Aristotle famously says in the
Rhetoric
I.ii.3, it is the
ethos,
the character of the leader, that is most compelling and persuasive. Listen again to Aristotle's explanation of
thumos
in the
Politics
VII.6.1327b39ff. He says,
“Thumos
is the faculty of our souls which issues in love and friendship….
It is also the source … of any power of commanding
and any feeling for freedom.”
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The spirited self-respect that Homer called
thumos
becomes particularly critical to leadership in a combat situation. To trust a leader, the troops need to feel that the leader is his or her “own person,” not a slave. In combat, trust goes to the leaders who give critical obedience, rather than blind obedience, to their own bosses. A leader giving blind obedience to an irrational or illegal order gets the troops killed without purpose [“wasted”] or irretrievably tainted by commission of atrocities.
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The “charismatic” impact of a leader being his “own person” doesn't come from a rational calculation that such a leader would not obey uselessly suicidal or atrocious orders. When Aristotle spoke of
thumos
as the
source of any power to command, he was speaking of its direct emotional impact.

Tell the truth and make it safe to tell the truth.
In military organizations, the core reason for truth-telling is the maintenance of
trust,
both up and down the chain of command. In the long run, neither punitive sanctions, nor the Ten Commandments, nor the finest system for selecting officers of good character can guarantee truthfulness. Consistent, reliable truth telling is only possible when power is deployed in such a way that it is safe to tell the truth. Only then do subordinates air their doubts and problems, tell bad news, own up to failures. This is not coddling, because truthfulness in leadership also calls for vigorous criticism of subordinates' shortcomings. The trust created by the practices of positive leadership given above is the main reason they are combat multipliers, while mistrust among peers and along the chain of command is a potent self-generated source of “friction.”
⁵⁶
Leadership truthfulness at all levels means eliminating perverse incentives to look good at the expense of
being
good. Unit “readiness” reporting has been laced with institutionalized fraud for decades.
⁵⁷
This is where personnel evaluation and promotion policy must converge with ethics and good leadership practices. But so far, every attempt to reform this policy area has gone on the rocks.

Use power in accordance with “what's right.”
Nothing destroys trust in the chain of command so quickly as a leader's exploitation of institutional power to coerce a private gain from subordinates, be it sexual, financial, or careerist. Of these, careerist exploitation is the most frequent and the most damaging. The whole unit—sometimes the whole service—is injured. As I have said, there are no
private
wrongs in the abuse of military authority. The target of the abuse of power is not alone in being injured.
That
service member's trust in the chain of command is going to be impaired or destroyed, of course, but in addition everyone that learns of the violation of “what's right” also suffers injury to the capacity for social trust. The competence, consideration, and moral integrity with which leaders deploy institutional power are central to vertical cohesion. Everyone watches the trustworthiness of those who wield power above them; and this “fishbowl factor” is far-reaching.

A cartoon titled
“Promotion Surgeries,”
⁵⁸
which appeared a few years ago in the
Navy Times—
it could have been in any of the services—showed three pictures of a mid-career officer stripped to his shorts, and in each frame a different sewn-up surgical incision. The first frame, referring to the rank of lieutenant commander (major in ground and air forces), showed an incision running across his forehead and was captioned, “Brain
Removal.” The second frame, a back view referring to the rank of commander (lieutenant colonel), showed an incision running down the middle of his back, and was captioned, “Backbone Removal.” The last frame, again from the front, referring to the rank of captain (colonel), showed an incision on the left side of his chest, captioned, “Heart Removal.” A well-led force needs all of its officers to have all of their literal and figurative organs.
⁵⁹

The technological advances that have taken place since the end of World War II do not change the basic need for cohesion, training, and leadership. Today, a few privileged military formations get these good resources. The veterans I serve demand that
every
American service member who can be sent into harm's way shall have them. There is no reason, other than cultural and institutional inertia, that this should not be done.

Trust is the master concept that links cohesion, leadership, and training.
⁶⁰
In fact, they are the things that build trust, forming and strengthening character throughout a military career.

Ethics, leadership, and policy are not distinct realms of function in military institutions—even though the current American institutions treat them separately. They are simply different refractions of the same beam of light, its culture. Recently, Lieutenant General Walter Ulmer, Jr., USA, retired, wrote, “Changing the culture of any organization is a leadership task, yet there appears to be no strategic design for how to change Army culture.”
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I propose that we make
creation and preservation of trust
across all ranks and between the armed services and the nation as the “vision statement” for such a strategic design, with cohesion, leadership, and training as its embodiments. We have known for more than a century that cohesion, leadership, and training are combat strength multipliers. In contrast, personnel turbulence, individual-based (rather than unit-based) manning, replacement, and rotation policies, training to check all the boxes and looking good rather than robust military competence, a climate of fear among officers, making them averse to decision, responsibility, and truthfulness—these are combat strength hemorrhages.

Some specific policy proposals to nourish the reader's imagination are found in Appendix III.

You, the American people, are the ultimate commander of the armed services. Caring about these things and
informing yourself—
so that your caring can be effective—are basic to democratic citizenship.
⁶²
If you make trust—founded in cohesion, training, and leadership—your “commander's
intent,” the specific reforms in Appendix III may be the best way to fulfill that intent. Or there may be other, better ways. That doesn't matter. What counts is that the civilian and uniformed leadership of the armed services faithfully and intelligently carry out your intent. To both the public and the military leadership, the veterans I serve say: Do it!

So many of Odysseus' grim and despicable failures of leadership responsibility have already been pointed out in this book that it is time to remind ourselves of his strengths and positive contributions to the Greek war effort. Odysseus was extremely productive in all of those military endeavors that involve
mētis—
cunning intelligence, deception, reconnaissance, manipulation, secrecy, spying, and strategy.
¹
It's hard to overstate the military value of these capacities. Good reconnaissance and intelligence allow the soldier to evade the enemy's traps and to lay his own. Both are keys to winning fights with minimum casualties, good reasons for Athena's moniker as “The Soldier's Friend.” She was the goddess
of mētis.
The ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu sings the praises of reconnaissance and spying in the final chapter of
The Art of War:

So what enables an intelligent government and wise military leadership to overcome others and achieve extraordinary accomplishment is foreknowledge. Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.
²

Odysseus was also a spy. During Telemachus' visit with Menelaus in Sparta, Helen describes Odysseus' daring solo penetration into Troy (
Odyssey
4:274, Fagles). We never hear what Odysseus learned, or whether it was of any value, but his solo mission is consistent with his courage and crafty intelligence.

Iliad
10 reports his night reconnaissance with Diomedes behind Trojan lines. During this exceedingly dangerous mission, he discovers the Trojan order of battle (
Iliad
10:471ff, Fitzgerald), but his boss, Agamemnon, the “consumer” of this intelligence, never makes any use of it, in keeping with his general incompetence. Odysseus and Diomedes also learn that Hector and his top commanders are conferring
unguarded
by the tomb of
Ilos (10:458ff). We know that Odysseus is armed with a bow (10:287) and that he is capable of aimed rapid fire of great accuracy. So why do they not decapitate the Trojan leadership or even try? Greed for personal gain gets in the way. Odysseus and Diomedes have just learned that a newly arrived and travel-weary Thracian contingent is camped in an isolated and vulnerable spot with (Iliad 10:481ff, Fitzgerald)

Horses most royal …
whiter than snow and swift as the seawind.
[The king's] chariot is a masterwork in gold and silver.

Homer puts the idea to go after this booty in Diomedes' mouth, but Odysseus never says, “Whoa! Let's keep our eye on the ball,” and wholeheartedly goes for the booty.
³
I'm trying to give a fair account of Odysseus' military virtues, but everywhere I turn I stub my toe on the defects of his character—in this case he has lost sight of the military purpose of the night reconnaissance. There's a fair chance that in the next morning's battle the Greeks would be thrown out of their beachhead and all slaughtered. Nestor had said, just before he proposed the night reconnaissance, (
Iliad
10:19Iff, Fitzgerald)

Terrible pressure is on us….
The issue teeters on a razor's edge
for all [Greeks]—whether we live or perish.

Odysseus and Diomedes find the Thracian camp, kill the Thracian king and a lot of sleeping soldiers, and race away with the prize team and chariot, outrunning the hue and cry. They drive their prize into the Greek beachhead. Amidst all the crowing and congratulations on their flashy prize, amid the relief that both Odysseus and Diomedes have returned safely, nobody remembers to debrief them.
Iliad
10 ends with the two warriors having a hot bath and a stiff drink.

The Greeks are saved the next day, not by Odysseus, but by Achilles' releasing his fresh troops under Patroclus' command to take the Trojans on the flank by surprise.

The towering achievement, the one that secures Odysseus' place in the pantheon of military imagination, is the ruse of the Horse. This deception, conceived and carried out by Odysseus, turned Greek defeat into victory.
⁴

We hear about the Horse twice in the
Odyssey,
first when Menelaos describes Helen's attempt to smoke out the Greek fighters concealed inside by imitating their wives' voices (4:307ff, Fagles), and second when Odysseus tips the singer Demodocus and requests that he sing about the Horse (8:552ff, Fagles). There's no taking this accomplishment away from Odysseus—he did it. The basic story is a familiar one: The Greeks build a large hollow wooden horse big enough to hold a force of picked fighters. The army then embarks, pretending to give up, and the ships sail away, but they only withdraw out of sight behind the offshore island of Tenedos. The Trojans celebrate their victory and the lifting of the siege, and are deceived into bringing the Horse inside the city walls. That night while the city sleeps, the Greek ships return, while the troops inside the Horse spread out, killing Trojans and opening the gates.

The most detailed account, based on Epic Cycle texts that have not survived to the present, except as summaries, is in Virgil's
Aeneid.
Because Virgil's analysis is so penetrating and still relevant to military surprise today, I shall rely upon it.

The deception of the so-called Trojan Horse was complex and subtle, and deserves to be rescued from the trivializing presentation it usually receives. The Horse, according to Virgil, was “too big for the gate,
not
to be hauled inside!”
⁵
Successful deception requires a dynamic falsehood, an untruth with beauty and appeal.
⁶

The key figure is Sinon, ingenious liar, who persuades the Trojans that he's a Greek traitor, by scarring himself as Odysseus had done to penetrate Troy. He points out a thing that would not have been obvious on the beach some distance from the walls:
the Horse was too big to be taken into the city.
This endowed the deception with the innocence and certainty of truth. Sinon proclaims that if anyone violates the Horse, which he says is an offering to Athena, all of Troy will suffer. On the other hand, if they contrive to bring it up into the citadel—which on the face of it was impossible because it was too big—it would more than replace the stolen Palladium as a talisman of the city's safety. The Palladium was a miraculous guardian statue of Athena previously stolen from the citadel of Troy by Odysseus and Diomedes.
⁷