the mexican war from which he emerged as an authentic and wounded war hero. . .

time on july 20, 1861 after addressing the congress though on the hot morning of july 21, he could stand the suspense no longer. he knew the combined armies of johnston worked with hunting the enemy near the railroad junction of manassas. he commandeered a special train and truck northward. arriving at manassas in the midafternoon, he wrote towards the south. he was dismayed by what he first encountered strugglers and wounded men with tales of defeat from the, discarded weapons,

damaged equipment in the battlefield. davis tried to rally the stragglers. i am president davis and he shouted. follow me back to the field. some of them data. by did. by the time he reached the headquarters where he found them sending reinforcements to the front it was clear that they had won the battle. union troops were in the retreat. davis went further forward in the justice soldiers cheered him to the echo. that evening he met with johnston at their headquarters. davis wanted to organize a pursuit and he suggested one of the generals order such a movement. they remained silent presumably because as the commander-in-chief davis was now in charge. he began to dictate in order that on that reflection and further information about the disorganized nature of the confederate army and more

consultation they concluded that in the darkness and effective pursuit was impossible. the next morning had the rain and the confederate troops brought them to a halt. now even though it was davis who was eager to follow up the victory aggressively an impression grew up in the south that it was he who had discouraged the pursuit. he said that smith was a passage in the battle report ending the comments to congressman this was the beginning of the growing rift between that became second only to the eventual between johnston and davis. but in the summer of 1861 committee to send johnston remains a pretty good terms. cordiality became seriously strained in september over the question of the ranking on the list of confederate generals. back in may 1861 the congress

had authorized the appointment of five full generals, the equipment in the u.s. army as a four-star generals. the law specified that the rank order would be equivalent to the relative grade in the united states army in the same branch of the service before they had resigned to go south. davis gave the top ranking to samuel cooper who may expect not very many of you have heard of and for the same staff position he had held in the old army and now of course a desk job in richmond. davis davis named his longtime friend albert sidney johnston who was on his way from california but has have not yet commanded the federal troops to the second position followed by robert e. lee who at this time was commanding a small army trying unsuccessfully to push the union troops out of the western part of virginia that

subsequently became west virginia. davis rounded out the list of the generals with joseph johnston as number four and number five. when joe johnston learned in september of the number four ranking he exploded in anger. all along he had assumed he was number one. based on his position as the quartermaster general in the u.s. army with the rank of the leader general while the three that davis ranked above him had been colonels. johnstone sat down and wrote a letter to davis with his outrage. the president's action, johnston told him, was a studied indignity that tarnished by name as a soldier and as a man and was a blow aimed at me only especially since he was commanding the great victory at manassas and they hadn't yet struck a blow for the confederacy as he put it. this reached davis while he was suffering one of his frequent bouts of illness.

this time the recurrence of his old fever which no doubt sharpening sharp in the asperity of the reply he acknowledged receiving johnston's letter and added the link which is as you say unused wall. its arguments and statements are utterly one-sided in its insinuations are as unfounded as they are unbecoming. that was it. no response to his arguments, no explanation of the reason to the ranking. such an explanation would have pointed out that the johnston's greed as a line officer in the old army was the tenant colonel or the three men that davis ranked above him had been for colonels. johnson's brigadier general ship in the army was in a staff position while the branch of service in the confederate comes with the terms of the law, the grade was below that of the others. even if davis bothered to

explain all this complicated business to johnston, the general wouldn't have been satisfied. the insult to his honor as he considered it wrinkled hand for the rest of his life. he dropped the matter for now and neither he nor they just mentioned it to each other again but given the large and brittle ecosoc )-close-paren it remained a festering issue in the recesses of both of their minds. they hate war to fight against up against the different enemy, the yankees traded for the next six months they cooperate as commander-in-chief and top field general to confront the enemy threat. he was transferred to the western theater here in tennessee and he went to south carolina to organize the south atlantic coastal defenses. johnston organized and trained his growing army occupying the center filled wine of northern

virginia where it faced a larger union army who was subject to increasing pressure from lincoln and from congress to do something with the army. concerned that he might do something he summoned to the meeting in richmond in february, 1862. they discussed the affordability of johnston's army at centreville to the movement by mcclellan. they agreed that johnston should pull back to the more defensible position south, but the condition of the roads caused by the winter rain and the chaotic state of the overworked railroads made a quick withdrawal impossible. davis ordered johnston to send his large guns from the camping equipment and huge stockpiles of meat and other supplies south as transportation became available.

and to prepare to retreat with the army itself when he received orders to do so with johnston began a withdraw when he detected federal activity that he thought was the beginning of mcclellan's movement. he said he feared the leak later. johnston fell back so quickly that he was compelled to leave behind or destroy his heavy guns coming in a admission and mounds of supplies including 750 tons of meat and other foodstuff that the confederates could afford to lose. david heard rumors of this retreat as he later told johnston, iowa sat a loss to believe it. his distress at the distraction of the supplies was accused. this came at a time of other

confederate defeats in the west here in tennessee and elsewhere in the west and in north carolina. these reverses in the confidence caused the president to recalled and install him as his top military adviser as the general in chief in richmond. one of the first activities in the capacity was to instruct general thomas j. jackson and stonewall jackson to carry out the attacks in the shenandoah valley which jackson of course it did with the famous success. they were the last that increased pressure with the build up a large army at the tip of the virginia peninsula 75 miles down the james river from richmond. davis and lee ordered johnston to bring his army to the winds at wines at yorktown, to block the calling.

johnston wanted to concentrate the army near richmond itself, but lee and davis supposed the plan and argued for taking the stand at yorktown where the army could be protected by the big guns on the river and by the css virginia the iron clad ship rebuild on the james river. this was a more defensible position and davis supported it. they would be abandoning more folks in the base and davis therefore ordered johnston to yorktown where he confronted the 110,000 troops with his own army of 60,000 men. instead of attacking, mcclellan brought up his big guns and prepared to pulverize the defenses with heavy artillery.

despite having been overruled by davis, johnston still intended to evacuate without a fight. he laid until the mcclellan was ready to open with the artillery. johnston failed to keep davis and lee informed until the last minute on may 1 when he told the president that he must pull out the next night. davis was shocked and replied that such would mean the loss of more folks and perhaps of the ironclad virginia and other ships under construction. johnston agreed to wait for one more day. on the night of may 34, the left and began to retreat towards richmond. the confederates fought a battle with the cautiously pursuing federals of williamsburg and continued to move behind the

river about 20 miles from richmond. more folks did fall to the yankees and the virginia crew had to blow it up because the draft was great to get up the james river. davis was dismayed by the developments and he allowed his anguish to weaken lamenting what davis called the cause of the country. the purpose of this letter was to carry out the earlier orders to group the regiment from the same same state together as a boost to morale. he told johnston some have expressed surprise at my patience when orders to you were not observed. johnston recognized this for what it was and an expression of exasperation with the conduct of the campaign. if you received such a letter from someone held personal

accountability he would have challenged him to a duel. the scenario was repeated yet again. the president expected to johnston to respect the line and even to launch the counterattack that johnston decided to withdraw to a new position even about 4 miles east of richmond. when the president rode out on horseback as he frequently did, when the armies were in the vicinity of richmond when he rode out on meeting to visit he was taken aback when he encountered the army before he got more than a few miles. davis confronted the johnston and asked why people back supposed to the city and they replied the drinking water was

so bad in the low lands that they moved to better ground and a safer supply of water. davis was unnerved created even tend to develop richmond without a battle, he asked back johnson's reply struck him as a quick cold. the president responded. he told johnston according to one of the aides he would appoint someone to the command that would. davis wrote back and summoned the cabinet to a meeting the following day and he asked johnston to attend so that he could learn of the general's intentions. that afternoon davis wrote to his wife could take in the family to north carolina because of the danger to richmond, i've been waiting all day for johnston to communicate his

plans. we are uncertain of everything except that a battle might be near at hand. johnston never did show up the davis went ahead with the meeting where he expressed anxiety about the fate of richmond. according to the postmaster general, lee became emotional. it shall not be given up. i have seen him on many occasions when the confederacy hung in the balance but i never saw him show equally deep emotion. the next day davis told the delegation in the legislature that richmond would indeed be defended. johnston finally seemed to get the message. the mcclellan crossed with part of his army leaving the other part of northeast of the stream and he told davis he planned to

attack the part of that part of northeast of the stream on may 22. davis had earlier discussed such a plan of attack and so he approved of the plans. he overlooked the valley to see the action commenced that he found nothing happening. and no one who could tell him why the attack had been called off. it turned out that they had learned that the enemy was strongly posted behind the creeks of the attack have been aborted. davis was depressed and this ended the offense and the defense of program from which he expected much in which i was hopeful. almost the same thing happened again one week later. once more johnston planned to attack the enemies and once more he called it off without informing davis who had again has again written out to watch

the battle. johnson this time changed his mind and decided instead to attack nearest to richmond. he explained later he did and told davis of this change and these were johnston's words because it seemed to me that to do so would be to transfer my responsibilities to his shoulders today i couldn't consult him without adopting the course that he might advise that you ask the advice would have been in my opinion to ask him to command for me. johnston was decidedly peculiar notion of the correct relationship with his commander-in-chief meant that davis first learned of the generals changed plan of attack when he heard the firing on the afternoon of may 31. he quickly left his office and mounted his horse and rode towards the sound of the guns. when he arrived near the village of seven pines just a few miles from richmond which gave its name to the battle for his whole

johnston writing the way to the front. the aides were convinced that the general had left in order to avoid davis. the battle wasn't going well for the confederates. it was clear that the attack had failed and at that moment, this treacherous past the president's party carrying the seriously wounded a johnston. all animosity forgotten, davis rushed to his side and spoke to him with genuine concern. it was clear that while his wounds were not immortal would be out of action for several months. as davis and lee rode together back to richmond at night, the president told him that he was now the commander of what he would soon designate as the army of northern virginia. in a new era would bond with its new commander.

johnson's recovery took almost six months. during that time he moved into the home of the senator of texas, a violent heavy drinking secessionist who had engaged in several tools and despite the differences in personalities, johnston had become close friends. he had initially supported the jefferson davis but they had come to a parting of the ways that became the most spacious critic congress. giving the convalescence in their home he and the senator no doubt had many conversations that reinforce their growing mutual hostility towards the president. when he reported himself fit for duty again in november 1862, davis faced the dilemma what duty to assign him. with johnston would have liked

us to return to the army of virginia but there was no chance of that because he had made the army his own. all other confederate field armies also had commanders. davis decided to make johnston a sort of theater commander giving him overall responsibility for the vast region in the mountains into the mississippi river including several armies including the army of mississippi. confederate prospects had recently approved after after the devastating losses earlier in the year. they hold vicksburg in the lower mississippi was still threatened and the position of middleton was still threatened and precarious after the retreat in october from the invasion of kentucky. giving johnston authority over these crucial theaters, davis

thought he was conferring important response of the interest each commensurate with the generals rank and the ambition. a johnston thought otherwise. seeing it as an effort as johnston put it to put me on the shelf by giving johnston a position with no real authority. though he gave some substance to that suspicion by requiring them to continue reporting directly to richmond as the last johnston. still, johnston could have made much more of the command if he had chosen to do so. but he preferred to complain about the lack of authority and expressed his desire for the real army command. but wendy this gave him the opportunity in early 1863, johnston declined. the army of tennessee had grown worse after its second retreat and january following the battle of murphysboro.

the division commanders and the army blamed him for the leadership and intrigued him to have been in place. davis instructed a johnston in the capacity of the theater commander and investigated this into to take the command of the army itself army itself if he found the complaints against him justified by the johnston gave him a clean bill of health telling him that the army's operation had great skill and requires the genital tract should be removed. nevertheless it only grew worse and in march 1863, davis ordered johnston to take the field command of the the army and to send him to richmond for the reassignment. however, johnston will again

achieved his wishes and when he arrived at the headquarters in tennessee, johnston learned that his wife was seriously ill for the gentleman could not be sent away. and johnston himself felt sick. i do find johnston had recovered a few weeks later from his own us the concern shifted to mississippi where ulysses s. grant launched a campaign against vicksburg. that would be a staggering blow to the confederacy. on may 9, davis ordered johnston to mississippi to take personal command of the troops. johnston arrived at jackson and the state capitol on may 13 to find that the grants grants army was about to capture that city and preparing to turn west to vicksburg itself. west vicksburg itself. the wide eared richmond high

into late. this pessimism set the tone for johnston's efforts or lack thereof during the next seven weeks. he ordered the general to evacuate and combine with armies forced to form a mobile army to defeat grant. he was reluctant to do this because they just telegraphed him a week earlier to hold vicksburg as necessary to the connection with mississippi. because he had been born an american in america and was a native but have chosen to go with the confederacy because he had married a southern woman who he feared that if he obeyed the johnston's instructions to abandon vicksburg, he would be accused in the south of treason. in any event, the victories of

champions phil on may 16 and in the big black river on the 17th drove the 30,000 men back into the defenses. the failure of the two union attacks against these formidable works caused grant to settle down for the siege. davis scraped together reinforce that for johnston building up the force to about 25,000 men hovering east of vicksburg. davis urged johnson to attack but they said the force was too small to cut through the troops under sherman grant established to protect. in vicksburg for the hope johnston would rescue them both soldiers and civilians who are under siege the vicksburg newspaper now being printed on wallpaper because it had run out of newspaper reported johnston

is at hand. pulled out a few days longer and the enemy will be driven away. for johnston was wanted and he was not at hand. on june 15 he awarded i consider saving vicksburg hopeless. they had said your telegram graves and alarms us the expert must not be lost at least without a struggle. the interest and the owner of the confederacy forbids it. i rely on you still to avert the loss. if better resource does not offer you must hazard the attack but johnston did not hazard the attack. on the fourth of july to the starving garrison surrendered. when the news reached richmond

davis was bitter. when he said of vicksburg failed because of the want of the traditions, davis replied yes from the ones of the provisions inside and the general outside who wouldn't fight. johnston we traded treated to the state capital at jackson and sherman pursued and began to surround the city hoping to salvage something from what he called the disaster this termination of the siege of vicksburg he urged johnson to hold the state capital as possible. the importance of your position is apparent, he told johnston. and you will not fail to employ all available means to ensure success but johnston appeared and went by the force comes as he evacuated johnson on july 16. he left so hastily that he failed to secure some 400 railroad cars and locomotives at

the confederacy would sorely match. davis relieved johnston of his theater command making brad independent -- and leading johnston and control only if the troops that he had evacuated from johnston. davis also wrote a 15 page letter in his own hand charging johnston with what amounted to their election of duty. johnston fired back defining the charge and this exchange and integrated with the biographer described as a paper war between the partisans of davis and joseph johnston and the decreasingly poisoned body politic of the confederacy. three months after the fall of vicksburg, mary chestnut broke in her famous diary that a member of the staff of the president after an inspection trip that every honest man he sought out westfall 12 of george johnston. he knows the president detests

him to control the trouble he's given him and general joe returns the compliment of compound interest his hatred of jeff davis announced to a religion. this mutual hostility also obviously had an impact on the confederate operations. the biggest headache in the autumn of 63 however is what to do about the army of tennessee. the chronic dissension between his senior generals continue to plague the army. even after its tactical victory it seemed to bear in the strategic results because of the defeated enemy remained in control of chattanooga. they blamed him for the state of affairs if he blamed some of them. davis twice tried to persuade

robert e. lee to go south and take command of the troubled army but he convinced the president that it was more important for him to remain in virginia. in october, davis himself made the long trip to georgia to sort out the problems between brad and his subordinates. after several painful conversations and confrontations, davis decided to keep brad in command. one reason for this controversy will controversy will the session is that the logical alternative to brag was johnston davis tried to get johnston to take the right command of the army back in the spring but of course that hasn't worked and now they just was so angry at johnston that it renewed and seemed impossible. after disastrous retreat with pressure on davis from all quarters to johnston became

overwhelming. davis tried that he didn't feel up to the task of leading that afflicted organization. so in the end, davis had nowhere else to go than johnston who became the army of tennessee's new commander in december 1863. johnston said the work to reorganize the army and prepare it for the spring offensive by sherman that everybody knew was coming. it is hoped that johnston could steal the march on sherman and launch a preemptive offensive that might tip the federal's back on their heels. but from johnston's headquarters in bolton georgia came a steady stream of dispatches to scrubbing the deficiencies of the army that made any kind of an offense if impossible. the army has not entirely

recovered confidence, he informed davis. the artillery is deficient in its construction if the horses are not in good condition. the troops of neither subsistence or enough and the enemy outnumbers me almost 2-1. abraham could sympathize with davis because lincoln had received endless messages from the same nature back in 1862. they were closer to the truth than johnston's case then the calling to be sure but davis knew that the same problem existed in the army of northern virginia. i-india come it had existed in the spring of 1863 just before its spectacular victory in chancellorsville. but it became eminently clear that he could expect nothing like chancellorsville from johnston. we making grant to pay in

virginia. but in georgia, sherman flanked johnston's positions and forced him him back step by step 70 miles to the outskirts of atlanta by the first week of july. johnston kept his army intact and bees retreats but he yielded the valuable territory and raised doubts in richmond about whether he intended to defend atlanta which was not only an important railroad and manufacturing center but had become a symbol of confederate resistance, second only to richmond itself. they disagreed with secretary of war appraisal of johnston's strategies. the theory seems to be never to fight unless strong enough certainly to overwhelm your enemy and then under all circumstances merely to continue to elude. davis might also have a great of a modern history of the campaign richard mccrery who was not

being entirely facetious when he said that if johnston had remained in command he would have fought the crucial battle of the atlantic campaign at key west. [laughter] by the fourth of fourth of july can johnston have pulled back to the river just north of atlanta. he assured senator benjamin hill he hold the line for at least 50 days. he went to richmond and conveyed the assurance to davis with a smile davis showed him a telegram he had just received announcing the sherman had crossed the river two days earlier and johnston had retreated into the atlanta fortifications. davis decided that johnston had to go. the cabinet agreed unanimously. secretary of state benjamin voiced their conviction. johnston is determined not to fight. it is of no use to reinforce

him. he is not going to fight. davis knew that releasing johnston would be an enormously controversial act. and he wasn't sure what replace him. he decided to give him one last chance on july 16 peter christ the general i'd wish to hear from you on the present situation and your plan of operations. johnston replied my plan of operations must depend upon that of the enemy. it's mainly to watch for an opportunity to go opportunity they are trying to put atlanta to be held for a day or two to the army movements may be free and wide. just as it had seemed back in 1862 he might not defend richmond and that in 1863 she

failed to try to rescue vicksburg. july 17, he replaced johnston into the transfer from the army of northern virginia. he did manage to hold him off for six weeks and later deviated tennessee but at the cost of virtually destroying the army of tennessee here at the battle of nashville. this caused many contemporaries and later historians to condemn davis removal of johnston as his greatest mistake as the commander-in-chief. many of those contemporaries and a good many historians also have taken johnston's side in his ongoing differences with davis. i leave this to each of you to decide where you stand on this matter. with that i will be glad to

answer your questions in the time that we have remaining. [applause] i notice there are microphones on each side of the room if they are available to you >> the best of the genitals into the theaters as far as i know was forced and although forest is kind of a laughingstock to a lot of people, whereas he said we grounded them up in a told them that despite that he seemed to be the best general but davis ever considered him. >> davis did actually utilize forest for the raids behind the

union lines. forrest was a good reader raider and good calvary commander committed battlefield commander for tactical battlefield commander. but i think that most historians would agree he didn't have the capacity to be in a large army commander. i think that is a davis proceeded the situation and i think that is how we and johnston and others perceive the situation. and so they use him as what he was really good at but i don't think that he considered him to replace brad. he didn't have the experience for the commanding of a large army of mixed artillery infantry and maybe some calvary. he didn't have the experience and qualifications to manage the

logistics said he was good at what he did probably wouldn't have been very good in the larger capacity. >> he would have had to jump over other people that don't rank ten and that is often a sensitive question, not that it can't be done but it's often a sensitive issue. >> tim johnson from lipscomb university where you will be speaking next month. we look forward to that. i have come since they are in the western theater, i have a question about this part of the country. can you comment a little bit more about the relationship with brad and why he would have kept him in the command as long as he

did. and also, do you have an opinion about who she might have turned to two commanded the army of tennessee for someone else? >> when i began the research for this book, i shared the negative consensus about the commander that the more i got into the material and into the research, the more i began to doubt that stereotype. he wasn't a likable guy there is no question about that. he was a disturbed disciplinarian who was unpopular with with this man and part of the problem in their relationships with his genitals was the nature of his personality which tended to be fairly quarrelsome. on the other hand he was a superb organizer and davis was impressed early in the war when they took the troops and

organized them into what turned out to be the division that fought at shiloh when he wanted to continue the attack. when he went after the battle of shiloh, he seemed a natural choice to command the army because he seemed to be the most effective commander within the army. and i think that his problems with his subordinates like dhl later on and some of the others that intrigue against him were more his doing then they are doing a. they didn't give him the kind of cooperation and support that the

subordinate generals and core division commanders ought to give their general and that the diminished to the effectiveness. part of it is his fault, no question about that because of his more than anything else, his personality. i bet i think even the larger part, the personalities and the ambitions of some of those subordinates. so i've changed my mind on that question and i'm sort of in the same camp with davis considering to be the most logical person to command the army that it was clear after the fiasco in november 1863 that they had to go into the other part of your question as well, who should

have replaced him. davis lacked confidence. he was almost potentially as bad a choice as johnston himself. davis felt he was forced to choose the lesser of two evils, and most of the pressure was on behalf of johnston and so finally holding his nose i think that he figuratively did appoint johnston. yes, go ahead. >> it is known to so many of these these northern and southern generals on each other at west point. but i'm wondering was there in the bullpen or common and alice is among the confederate generals as well as tedious

looking at the performance and then estimating that he probably would not do particularly when he was facing johnston. why would he say he had a case? >> people did see that he had a case especially lee once he became the commander he repeatedly took advantage of what he knew would be the sluggishness and cautioned. that's why he launched his attacks and repeatedly attacked and that's why he invaded maryland in the fall of 1862. so it wasn't only link and that's all that he had this. the confederates realized this and i think that they took advantage of it.

>> i thought you made a pretty compelling case for davis position. is this based upon the material that isn't available. is this simply the revisionist analysis? >> it is partly based on the new material there's been a project going on the last dozen years or maybe 15 years at rice university to publish all the papers of jefferson davis. and they've only recently gotten all of the wartime papers completed and published. some of it hadn't previously been available to the historians as one of the things that helped persuade me of some of the points i've been making here in

this analysis. in a way of looking at the relationship was an experience of déjà vu. basically joe johnston was jefferson davis mcclellan. the frustrations that he experienced almost replicated step-by-step by their relationships with johnston and it became increasingly clear as i went through this material that got was the case >> it's about 3:00 and we might take one more question. >> to pick up on what you were saying, the tension in the system between the civilian

commander-in-chief and military officers can you get a sense of who handled it better. the comments on the current situation where we tend to have the commander-in-chief we don't have any military experience. is that -- should we be looking for presidents with military experience and doesn't seem to make jobs or assessment on the? >> i think most people they been out here in tennessee that most people would think that lincoln was a better commander-in-chief than davis and of course lincoln had no military experience and davis had a great deal of military experience. whether that was the reason is another matter. but lincoln was quicker. that may not be true. he did fire mcclellan but of

course davis fired boulevard. and they got the other commanders quickly that didn't measure up. davis was a little more reluctant i think that the situation was different. the implications for the contemporary situation might be that lincoln had no military experience and obama had no military experience. lincoln seems to have done all right and maybe obama is better qualified than somebody that did have military experience but i don't want to go there very at [laughter] >> thank you very much. i need i eat the leaves that we are going up to the after the auditorium is that where they are doing book signings? i would be glad to sign your

books. [applause] we wrap up this program from the southern festival of books with a discussion on modern conflicts this is just under 90 minutes. >> i want to thank you all for coming today. >> if i want to thank you all for coming today. this panel is entitled of the invisible hand of the war, politics, morality and conflict. my name is tom schwartz a

professor in the end danger both university and i've been asked to chair the panel. i've been asked also by the organizers of the southern festival of books to remind you there is a signing of books after words upstairs and outside that the books are available for purchase and that purchase is through the bookstore book event and the proceeds go towards this and subsidizing that event to encourage you in that regard. another one of the injunctions that we have received in this past few weeks was to keep our introductions brief. and my guess is they actually highlighted it. this has been a problem in the past so undoubtedly with that in mind i will keep my introductions brief. i've met them all before because

he's someone that i've known the professional reasons for a number of years. i'm going to introduce them before the presentation so i will just do one at a time. he specializes in the study of the united states with a focus on southeast asia and the temporal interest in the cold war. the book that you will be talking about today is an international history of the war for peace and be at non. she just informed me she signed a contract for random house for a book that will be battles that changed the vietnam and cold war and that will be published in 2018 on the anniversary of the tet offensive that will be a very important date in the book. the book won numerous awards from the society of military

history of the society for the american foreign relations and of the conference of women's historians. i will tell a quick story because i have a quick story about each of the panelists watching the state department held in 2010 to commemorate what you note final publications and she found herself having to negotiate the diplomacy between the invited representatives of the socialist republic of vietnam and the former secretary of state henry kissinger and she did a masterful job in handling that and i think that would qualify her for the nobel peace prize which was awarded today as you all know. anyway, i've asked each of the panelists to speak about their book about some of the themes in the panel and then we will open up for questions afterwards.

i want to thank you for organizing the southern festival of books and for that lovely introduction into my co- panelists and especially to all for showing up on this rainy day. so nearly 50 years ago today actually, the united states as we all know was preparing to get involved in a conflict in southeast asia. as you know the united states will be preparing itself for the commemoration anniversary for the various signaled events of the war up until 2025. so basically as a result cents over the past 50 years we have nearly about 35,000 studies that i contend we still do not know much about that war particularly about the vietnamese perspective and so based on the never before seen archival materials and the

mom, i was the first to get into the archives what i do in this book if i examine the context in which the vietnam went to war and of the united states had that conflict and i try to address some of these questions that still persist. in the enemy war effort what i want to do in my ten or 15 minutes or so is talk about those questions i answer and i call them the who, what, why, when and where and in answering those questions i also challenge them on the conventions we have about that for area to the first is the most general is although ho chi minh and the generals

recently departed last year have been the two leaders most closely identified with the war and i showed that in fact they were never in charge. in reality it was this man that has never been that well known in the west and shielded the general secretary of which is the most important position in the vietnamese communist party from 1957 until 1986 yes we don't know much about that man. and i argue the reason is he wanted it that way. he didn't have the prowess and instead what he had is the organizational know-how and the determination that perhaps ho chi minh lacked that allowed him to allow them to control the communist party for those decades that he was in control. so that's the first utmost is

that it was not just ho chi minh in charge of the war and in fact it was this man who wasn't well known by the name. the second myth that i challenge, and this is linked to our understanding that it was involved or was charged and was a harmonious leadership in the communist party who all agreed and led a very popular war against the government in saigon and their allies the united states to read and what i show is in reality there were a lot a lot of interpretive struggles and a lot of kind of bitter rivalries and a lot of just ugly fights that took place in the upper echelons of power in north vietnam in hanoi so rather than this body of leadership for the

comrades that led, and i will agree that it is a very divisive communist party not quite as blood he has the counterparts of the soviet union and people's republic of china but there were a lot of interpretive struggles that we need to understand in order to really get a grasp of how can i delete the -- hanoi was able to lead to the war and as they showed under the general secretary, as well as his right-hand deputy demand awarded the nobel prize along with henry kissinger so long ago but they lead i called led by called a police state by promoting the parties. and what they did is the number one target actually was the two men who were so closely associated with the leadership and in fact marginalized and repressed silence that so many pivotal moments during the vietnam war.

basically those two men disagreed with the way that they handled the war effort. in addition to that sort of competing powers in the party leadership, the police state also clamped down on any antiwar defense which there was a lot of. we hear a lot of this in the united states both within the democratic republic of the north vietnam there is the individuals that sold saw the different routes towards the reunification which is what the leadership had wanted. in addition to sort of silencing the top leadership under ho chi minh and the general as well as the antiwar dissent within the general public they also control to the southern hand industries

and surely what they did is they elevated the deputies in the south to take over the southern border effort. so even the southern researchers were marginalized. in addition to addressing who was charged and what they wanted which was a total reunification versus a peaceful way for the reunification i also challenged the conventional wisdom regarding the military strategy. for example take the 1968 tet offensive we understand what understand ... how does the leaders try to strike a blow to the u.s. war effort and that was sort of the end goal and what i saw is in fact they had always held the objective of the regime that was supposed to be their goal from the very start. and the way they wanted to do this was through the strategy called the general offensive

uprising. .. >> it wasn't about, you know, sortf getting the americans to leave, it was about presenting the americans a fait accompli, i have toppled your puppet ally, now go. in addition to showing that, you know, it wasn't just the military balance of power on the ground that influenced hanoi's

decision making, i also revealed that foreign relations, hanoi's foreign relations had a lot of influence and impact on their military strategy. and in particular it was about the soviet split. we still don't understand how much that had an impact on revolutionary leaders in the third world during the cold war. in many ways, it had, i would say, a more profound effect than the east,/west rivalry. in many ways being sort of in between those two powers heavily influenced their military strategy in the south. so i reveal that in hanoi's war too. in addition to the who, what, when and how, i also show that hanoi's war addresses the diplomatic struggle from 1969 to 1973. and there i show that, and, you know, this is a bit controversial, that nixon's

strategy actually worked n. many ways, you know, nixon and kissinger come out as the bad guys in my book, and rightfully so, but what i do show is that their strategy to implement superpower offensive, diplomatic offensive against hanoi's war by getting the chinese and the soviets to put pressure on north vietnam to negotiate the working table, actually, it succeeded. the chinese and the soviets did betray the north vietnamese and force them to accept american terms. however, this is the second part to my diplomatic, my diplomatic struggle analysis is that i show hanoi's small power diplomacy, which included citizen diplomacy that targeted the global anti-war movement, the afro-american solidarity movement and, in fact, in many ways was the most impressive struggle and aspect of hanoi's war effort was the most underutilized because it didn't actually put much stock in the

diplomatic offensive. this actually proved the most effective. it was able to blunt nixon's superpower diplomacy, and i can talk more about that in q&a. but in the end, what i try to show is that, basically, you know, we don't know a lot about the vietnam or war, particularly the enemies' war, and what i tried to do was address the big questions. but in the end, i think the takeaway, the takeaway line of hanoi's war is that no side was interested in compromising for peace and lead earth on both sides of the 17th parallel in vietnam as well as on both sides of the pacific sacrificed tens of thousands of american lives and millions of vietnamese to pursue their type of war. thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much, hang. it's a good thing that i have to keep going, because i would love -- as many of my students

who are here and others -- i'd love to continue this conversation. but we are moving on. we have a broader set of themes here. in our next -- and our next panelist is very well equipped to deal and talk about some of the broader themes that emerged from the vietnam war and more recent conflicts, and that's michael a. newton who is a professor in the practice of law at vanderbilt university law school and is the author of "proportionality and international law" which will also be on sale upstairs. michael newton is an expert on accountability and transnational justice and the conduct of hostilities issues. over the course of his career, he has published more than 80 books, articles and book chapters and currently serves as the senior editor of terrorism international case law reporter, an annual series published by oxford university press since 2007. there's a lot to be said about mike newton. i have known him for almost ten years, since he's been at vanderbilt. what i, of course, and most significantly want to just stress here today is that he was the senior member of the team

that taught international law to the first group of iraqis who began to think about accountability mechanisms and a constitutional structure in november of 2000. he subsequently assisted in the drafting of the statute of the iraqi high tribunal, and newton has taught iraqi jurists on several other occasions both inside and outside of iraq. and he's also the co-author of what is an absolutely fascinating book called "enemy of the state: the trial and execution of saddam hussein." in addition to his role in these, he's been an operational military attorney serving with the u.s. army special forces command from fort bragg in north carolina in support of units participating in desert storm, and he has had numerous experiences in addition to that as well within the army before coming to vanderbilt. i just want to stop here and say that one of the single contributions i remember from mike was when i was teaching a course on the united states in the middle east, him bringing into the class or having my class exposed to a number of

these iraqi figures. at this time it was a group of kurds who were involved in the trial and how profound the impact of that was on my students, to meet people who had faced those issues and were trying to sort out the subsequent post-conflict issues in iraq. mike? >> well, with that introduction, i should stop while i'm ahead. the truth is that this is really a great panel. these are great books, all of them. i haven't read completely the hanoi's war book, i've dabbled in it. it's a really good book. and, of course, i've read ganesh's book, and i've read my book as you should too. [laughter] the theme that runs through all of these books is precisely that woven set of issues. but i'd be a little parochial here to tell you that the subtheme that really binds all of those things together is this concept of proportionality. and you say what a weird little word. it's actually a weird big word. but this crazy little word,

what's that got to do with politics, with drone strikes, with counterinsurgency and human shields and isis? the answer is everything. everything. in the very beginning, i tell this story, and our colleague professor worth is here, and, you know, she's heard me tell this story. i go in and i start talking to colleagues and say, you know, i want to -- we want todeconstruct proportionality, tear it apart and document why it is and what it is and all these things. and i would get this sharp intake of breath from people. they would say, well, good luck, you know? have fun. then i found my co-author, a guy named larry may. he's a very accomplished, very sophisticated philosopher in his own right. so this book is one part philosophy, where does this concept come from, what does it mean about human relationships and societal relationships and how we wage war, lots of really good granular, philosophical stuff there. one part law. lots of really good detailed

legal analysis. how do you assess the per misabout of a drone strike against isis on the syrian border today? how do you assess when hamas holds human shields in gaza? what precisely does that analysis look like? lots of issues. and there are, of course, some examples from vietnam as well. the book is two parts pragmatism. one of the things i'm proudest of is there's a great deal of material in the book with current applications from iraq and from afghanistan. and this twist, again, the title of the panel, politics, legality, tactics. it's proportionality that determines how those things interrelate and where you come out on a particular issue. one of the great scholars staid that the term itself -- said that the term itself is clunky and inexpressive, and this book is our answer to try to get around the inexpressivity of the term. there it is. but it took a whole book to do it. the concept of proportionality is hard in a sense partly because it's inexpress i, but

also because it's very context explicit, which is why you've got to take the time to really get the depth of where it comes from and what it means and how it's been twisted over time in terms of meanings. the danger in that, though, is that it's always used in a highly emotional, highly emotive, highly politicized or highly charged atmosphere. fallujah. marine rife lmen in fallujah are applying proportionality. we expect them to do it right. we want to send them out with the best equipment, the best training in the world, the best rules of engagement and expect them to do the job correctly and legally and proportionality, more times than not, becomes the fulcrum by which we assess that. so how many folks are familiar with sesame street? grandkids, right? so the core premise of book comes straight from sesame street. you have this same word, proportionality, that pops up in a virty of legal context --

variety of legal contexts. there's an entire chapter on the way that proportionality is replicated. so that chapter simply is a real detailed recitation of how it appears in all these other contexts. now, the two most poignant, pointed contexts for us in modern practice when we start talking about human shields or the right to wage war against isis or the right to go to war many vietnam for that matter or any counterinsurgency or any other context is the just war concept, and the when can we lawfully go to war? well, that's largely a proportionality concept. but then the other most familiar usage to those of us who work in this field is the permissiveness of the use of force inside the conflict. the problem is the sesame street sketch. remember that song one of these things is not like the other, right? they all line up, and the outlier in that is the use of

proportionality during armed conflict. in fact, it's not only the outlier, the intellectual opposite of all of the others and some very, very fundamental and very important ways. and it's the difference between a marine or an air commander or a four-star general being prosecuted and accused correctly of having violated the laws and customs, having committed war crimes and having a lawful defense be to say, no, my job is to win the war. this body of law allows me a wide range of permissiveness, a wide range of discretionary conduct and proportionality is the vehicle that carries the weight of that. so you could ask the question, and a lot of people have, you've got this wide range of uses, and here's the outlier which is the proportionality in the middle of armed conflict. why don't we gain something? what's the benefits of having some homogeneity, some intellectual consistency? let's make it like all the

others, let's push it to be like all the others. so one of, i think, the most important contributions of the book is to push back very strongly against that. that the way we conduct war fair, proportionality which is the central concept in everything from human shields to counterinsurgency to cyber war to drones, the usage inside the context of armed conflict is unique, it is different, and there's a lot of space devoted to pretty vigorous defense of that principle. to let me summarize the idea and then i'll tell you why we come out where we come out on that. in every other context, the actor typically bears the burden of proof. the idea is that you can't use force against people unless you have a very express legal permissiveness to do so, and even then think about the police officer arresting the bank suspect, for example, in that body of law. short of that you may only use that degree of force or that degree of coercion that is absolutely necessary.

and as an absolute last resort. and even then only when it's absolutely required only to the degree absolutely specifically and you, and this is important, you bear the burden of proof at each stage of that. the outlier, the use in bellow proportionality during the conduct of war is exactly the opposite. it's a permissive body of law like so many other baseline principles in the laws of armed conflict. the laws of armed conflict have many, many principles in them that are rock-bound, iron-clad, always applicable. you may never intentionally target civilians, for example. period, full stop. you may, using the principle of proportionality, frequently with absolute legal authority intentionally launch a strike knowing that it may kill some innocent civilians. and when hamas takes human shields, that's the example of what you have to go through. when isis is in a town of human shields, a proportionality analysis that ultimately

determines what can you do, when can you do it, how can you do it. the same thing with drone strike. what are the contexts, what are the contours. when can you use drones across national borders in the first place, and there's a lot of law and a lot of policy and a lot of tactics there. again, the name of the panel, politics, legality and tactics. proportionality is the principle that carries the weight of that. so in the end, the trick is -- and here's the paradox of it -- that it's a fixed standard. you know, proportionality as it's properly understood and properly applied has definitive meaning and definitive application. we know what it is. we can talk about it. we can talk across borders. one of the reasons i love practicing international law is because i can go to other countries, and we can talk about exactly the same principle drawn from their -- the vietnamese look at the same 1949 geneva convention and the same 1977 protocol and the exact same proportionality rule that i do.

and we can have those discussions. the problem is it's a fixed assessment, but it's applied reaching subjective standards, subjective evaluation. so it's very context-specific. it's a term that by its very nature does not lead to gross overstatements, doesn't lead to grand, grand statements of principle. but all the weight of so many lives hangs on the proper application of that. so the applications chapter in this book is about drones and cyber war and counter insurgency and the lawful and permissible and political limits of using those forces. and, you know, it's easy to sort of have a utilitarian view that says hey, whatever gets the job done. we're going to cover up for you, and we're just going to -- the point is, that's wrong. on political terms, legal grounds, and at the ultimate end, tactical terms. military practitioners going

back for 600 years want to be empowered to do the job, they want to be given a mission, they want to be given the resources, they want to get all the right equipment and the best legal talent, they want to get the job done, and every one of them when you interview them wants to go home. they want to win and go home. proportionality is an enabling principle that allows you to do that, and i don't have time to give you all the nuances and the details. that's why we wrote a book. so thank you for coming. [applause] >> the next panelist i met indirectly from an e-mail that i got from karen fury, the secretary of the american council on germany, who told me that ganesh was coming to vanderbilt and that he was fantastic. he was a young leader of the american council on germ phil which is a special -- germany which is a special event in which americans and germans are brought together every summer. i had done it back when i could still say i was a young leader, and it was a wonderful

experience. she introduced me indirectly to ganesh, and we had the occasion to meet at another event shortly after. but ganesh sit tarman is the assistant professor of law at vanderbilt law school. he is the author of "the counterinsurgent's constitution: law in the age of small wars." and so in some respects i think mike newton and ganesh, there's a lot of course of overlap and issues, obviously, immediately there. his current research addresses issues in constitutional law and administrative law. he has a policy or a political, direct political involvement. he was on leave from the vanderbilt faculty serving as elizabeth warren's policy director during her campaign for the senate in massachusetts, and then he was senior counsel in the senate. he's served as special adviser to her as well and the chair of of -- when she was the chair of the t.a.r.p. panel. ganesh has got a whole set of

issues, he's been a research fellow in afghanistan and kabul, a visiting fellow at the center for the new american security, he's commented on foreign and domestic policy in "the new york times"es, the new republic and "the boston globe." he also was a truman scholar which is something that i find extraordinarily interesting. i was, i headed up the vanderbilt truman scholars program for years. we could never get anybody nor years. it -- for years. it's such a hard scholarship to get, very impressive. and he received his degree as magna cum laude from harvard law school and was editor of the harvard law review, another distinguished figure in our public law was a former editor of the harvard law review as well. in any respect, i think he offers us, he will offer us a very interesting perspective on counterinsurgency. ganesh? >> thanks so much for that wonderful introduction, and thank you all for coming, and i'd like the thank the

humanities united as well for helping put on this event. i want to take you back to the summer of 2009, and if you remember that summer, we had a relatively new president at that time. and as of june we had a brand new commanding general in afghanistan, a guy named stan mcchris a. and in july -- mcchrystal. and in july of that summer be, general mcchrystal issued a tactical directive for all forces in afghanistan, and that directive -- i'll read you a little part of it. he said, we will not win based on the number of taliban we kill. this is different there conventional combat, and how we operate will determine the outcome of more than traditional measures like capture of terrain or attrition of enemy forces. he went on in the directive to stress the importance of limiting civilian casualties, of limiting excessive damage, even limiting the use of air support except when absolutely necessary, and and there were no

other options to protect our soldiers. now, i hope this seems somewhat puzzling to you. i think it should seem puzzling to most people. stan mcchrystal's not a human rights advocate, he is the commanding general of u.s. and nato forces in afghanistan. but he's taken this very different approach to thinking about warfare. and this different mindset is something that back in 2009 we thought of as counterinsurgency. this is a topic people don't talk as much about now, five years later, but i think many of the lessons of counterinsurgency, of the lessons of the war from those days are still very relevant today. and what i thought i'd do is just talk to you about three different lessons, themes that i talk about in the book and try to talk about them in the context of modern warfare or regular warfare more generally. the first is the relationship between strategy and humanity. and the conventional understanding, the kind of way in popular discourse we think about this relationship is that

the strategy for victory and warfare is all about killing and capturing enemy forces. you kill and capture the bad guys and then you win. humanitarian interests are, to some extent, a constraint on that. they limit your ability to kill and capture the bad guys. now, this is very different in counterinsurgency. it's different in the way mcchrystal talked about it. another place he talked about counterinsurgency maas. and what -- mass. and what he says is suppose you kill some people, some insurgents, and maybe there's even collateral damage on top of that. maybe you kill two of them, how many do you have left? traditional math would probably say you have eight left. but what mcchrystal says is, actually, that's wrong. you might have 20 insurgents now. and why is that? because the ones you killed, any civilians you may have killed, they have brothers and uncles and cousins and friends, and those people might be angry, radicalized by the fact that

their brother, nephew, friend, cousin had been killed. and then they turn into insurgents themselves. so this is a much more complicated scenario if you're trying to figure out who to target, how to engage in military operations. a second theme -- actually, let me say one more thing about that. this gets exactly to mike's point which is when we think about proportionality -- and i'll say something about that at risk of mike, who wrote a whole book on the topic. when we talk about how do you target someone, the way the proportionality analysis traditionally works is you say we balance the military advantage against the humanitarian costs incurred. and these are seen as two totally different things. military advantage is the benefits, killing the bad guys. humanitarian costs are collateral damage. you're supposed to weigh these against each other. it turns out, though, in counterinsurgency or under the kind of mcchrystal theory, you take into account the casualties

on the military side also because it turns out when you kill the bad guys, if you kill some civilians too, you might radicalize a number of other people, you might create more insurgents than you killed in the first place. now, in addition, you have to take into account the humanitarian costs, the fact that there was this collateral damage. and so the result is when you think about targeting in these kinds of conflicts, it's actually more humanitarian-friendly than it is on our conventional understanding of just kill and capture. so the first lesson then is that in these kinds of conflicts, strategy and humanity are actually aligned. they're not in conflict. now, the second thing i think is interesting about these conflicts is the transition from war to peace. now, the conventional way we think about this is there is a clean break between war and peace. you fight the war, war's over, then there's the peace. so we talk about post-conflict reconstruction. post-conflict justice. the conflict is, apparently, over. so you think about world war i

or world war ii, we can pinpoint days when things were signed in old wars that happened on ships often, that kind of thing. but think about our current wars. so did the iraq war end when the constitution was written, when saddam was tried? did it end with the surge? did it end in 2011, '12? is it over now? afghanistan. the soviets were in afghanistan in the '80s, and there was a civil war in the early '90s, then the taliban took over but was still engaged in conflict domestically, then came 9/11 and on and on. is that one war? is it many wars? and i would argue that in this kind of different kind of warfare, we need to think about transitions as turbulent kind of transitions. war moves in fits and starts towards peace. one area might be in conflict today, peaceful tomorrow, back in conflict the next day. these are much more complicated in the transition between war and peace, and ending a war of

this kind isn't as simple because it has as much to do with politics as with military might. so as a legal matter, when we think about things like transitional justice, war crimes prosecutions, you purge people from office, not let them serve in the former members of the previous regime serve in the government. you partly have to think about these not as post-conflict measures, but as things that are actually happening in the middle of a conflict and might actually have an impact on how the conflict proceeds and whether it moves towards peace or doesn't. third theme, i think, that's important here is how we think about this idea of reconstruction, the reconstruction of order or the construction of order perhaps even in the first place. and, again, here's a kind of conventional, general way we think about it is as something like the social contract. you get together after the war, everybody comes together, and you can design a new constitution. it means starting fresh. you build courts, you set up your structures, you elect a new

government, it's democratic, you choose your new values for your new society. i think that's more complicated here too in part because of these turbulent transitions. it turns out that in these contexts reconstruction is far more organic, and it grows from the bottom up based on the history, based on the relationships between people, based on politics, religion, ethnicity, traditions. and, yes, based on the fact that the war is still ongoing. and, in fact, in history there's a large literature of the relationship between war fighting and state building. and the process of war fighting over centuries in europe, for example, many historians argued is what partly led to the creation of modern states and the interactive nature between these two things. so we don't have so much a clean break as we have an ongoing story that is organic and that grows tumultuously over time. so, again, to bring it back to law for a moment, when we think

about the rule of law, we all often think it's about judges with black robes, prosecutors, courtrooms, that kind of thing. and those are all hugely important. but if you're in a society -- and afghanistan is one example -- where traditionally there are things like the shura and jirga which are these kind of tribal, informal dispute resolution mechanisms, those look very different. and you can't say on day one you've been doing something for decades, now we're going to change it all, and it's going to be something totally different as a matter of rule of law. you have to engage in thinking about the transition between different systems and how something grows from the bottom up into the kind of society that people want to create. so those are kind of three different lessons. and i think they're important because we're still engaged in conflicts, we're still thinking about conflicts all over the world, and they're not the kinds of conflicts that look like world war ii with trench

warfare, world war ii and tank warfare. they are these irregular kinds of conflicts where people are interspersed with insurgents and where it's very hard and where a big chunk of what's going on is politics as much as it is military. and these kinds of wars are messy, they're difficult. but there is, i think, an upside which is when we do fight them, we have a strong, positive thing on our side which is our values turn out at least in the waging of the military side not to be a drawback. they're actually an asset, and we can use the humanitarian side to support our strategic aims. [applause] >> i am going the steal the chair's prerogative to ask three quick questions of each of the panelists, but i promise one of the things they really do want is to have an opportunity for all of you to ask questions. but i'm going to ask each panelist one quick question, and then go right down. the first question for hang, we

now have a situation which the united states is using air power to deal with isis in syria. air power was a huge issue during the vietnam war, and i'm wondering if your own research leads you to have any reflections on current vogue of using air power, airstrikes and whether, in fact, researching from the north vietnamese side gives you a perspective on or a sense of what air power meant in the vietnam war. that for you, for hang. for mike, i'm going to put my historian's cap on, mike, and say has proportionality ever been an american way of war? historically, i think of world war ii, we were really disproportionate if you think of the atomic bombing to end the war, and i'm wondering if proportionality has a problem with democratic desires to get wars over as quickly as possible with the idea that's the way you avoid casualties, you end them as fast.

you don't care about the proportionality, you care about ending the war. and finally to ganesh, i'm curious both in your experience and in your own work, it's clear to me now in reading some of the military accounts of the iraq situation and others that there's a pushback by the military against counterinsurgency as a mission and a warfare, that there's very strong resistance to that. and i'm wondering if that can be overcome or if you feel like this is -- because i think this was also one saw this in the aftermath of vietnam, that the military also, the famous powell doctrine and others about using overwhelming force and not the type of nation building that, of course, we seem to be engaged in. so i just want to run those. >> thank you. that's a great question. just really quickly, i get that question a lot because i show that there wasn't agreement amongst the party leaders about how best to institute reunification, that there were

some that said maybe not go to war. maybe let's try economic competition, peaceful coexistence, and we'll defeat the saigon regime by just the sheer power of our, of our party, of the, you know, sort of the communist way to building the nation. and so when the bombs came to north vietnam, these north first leaders pointed out, you know, this is devastating our socialist revolution. let's stop the war. now, had the united states, you know, the what if questions, had the united states bombed faster, would this have -- you know, bombed faster, bombed more right from the start, not do this gradual escalation that lbj undertook, would this strengthened this north first faction, and my answer's just, no. all it did was, in fact, rally the people around the flag, around the party. it was devastating to the northern economy, to the nation, to the democratic republic of

vietnam. but they were able to rebuild the bridges, the storage facilities, the transportation networks that the americans, you know, tried to -- or did devastate and >> everybody wants to go back to world war ii, and it's a different world culturally, technologically and, no surprise, legally. huge amounts of legal and philosophical development in this field since then. partly in response to that, but partly because of this confluence of so many other factors. but the historian in me says

that some things have never changed, and this has to be clearly understood, which is that the ethos of professional war fighting, you know, ganesh wonderfully asked and answered the question what does the rule of law look like. well, i'll tell you as a military lawyer and as an operational lawyer, the laws and customs of armed conflict go back to the very roots of warfare. the rule of law looks like people with too little sleep, too much stress, too much pressure, incredible adrenaline running. it looks like a set of norms that both constrain them but also allow them to conduct the conflict lawfully. that is the law of war. that is the principle of proportionality, is this very complex principle that comes from philosophical roots, comes from legal roots, and it's changed over time, but it's been there all along, is what i would say. and the question is, how does it apply in a particular setting? we can debate that, but we can't debate it if we don't actually understand what it is, where it

comes from, what it means, what the values are, etc. so that's, you know, the law has changed, and that's why we need a very fine grained -- and it sounds so technical. but, again, the theme of this panel, politics, right? legality, tactics. those are the results of these kinds of detail analyses. >> so you asked a great question about kind of where is counterinsurgency now in the military and where is it going. there are, there is resistance to counterinsurgency as an idea. i think there's two types of resistance. the first is resistance to counterinsurgency as a theoretical matter. it's not a strategy, who knows what it is, it's complicated. and then there's a second kind of resistance that even some people who are practitioners and scholars of counterinsurgency have or at least hint at occasionally. which is, it's really hard. and it's really resource intensive, and you have to know a lot about the local area.

and so maybe we shouldn't do it for those reasons independent of whether we think it's workable as a kind of theoretical matter. now, where's the military now and where's it going? i think there's two possibilities, two things that i see that make me think that counterinsurgency is here to stay, at least on some level. actually, three possibilities. the first is there's a man named t.k. hamms who has a great quote, and he says you might not be interested in insurgency, but insurgency's interested in you. and we live in a world where that's the case. we might not be interested, but it's sure interested in us, it seems. so to some extent, we have to be interested in insurgency and counterinsurgency whether or not we want to be. the second thing, though, is we have a generation of people who have fought in two wars and who have seen up close and whose defining experience both in their lives and in their

military careers is this kind of new or different warfare. and i think those folks are soldiers, our marines who have been through it and who in the future will end up being our leaders, our generals, our admirals, they are going to have internalized and understood some of this which means we will keep many of these lessons just as a function of that. because if you talk to them, or at least the ones that i've talked to, they really get that there's something different about this, and they've seen it and tried to do it. the third difference is the military has internally tried to learn some of these lessons and adapt them not necessarily to kind of occupation of iraq or big style nation building. but to a more limited footprint version of the same set of lessons. and i think the best examples of this are, you know, the army recently released a new counterinsurgency field manual just this past year. it's the new revision of the

version that general petraeus famously worked on about eight years ago. and in this new edition, the focus has schiff ted a little kit been shifted a little bit. there's still discussion of what it means to do construction of big cupses, but a lot of it is how do do you actually work with partners, train and help and assist and advise? and the model here is not the occupation of iraq or afghanistan, it's actually a mission that most of us, most people don't really know much about which is the philippines. and in the philippines, our forces have been helping filipinos with insurgency, but we are not taking the lead. in fact, it's all run by the filipinos. but the know how, the knowledge, the experience, the strategic understanding is something that we can help with. and that is a very different kind of model that retains the lessons but without having united states forces as the kind of main player on the ground. >> there's a microphone over

here, one over there, and why don't you feel prix to ask -- feel free to ask questions here. >> i'm going to ask a simple question by using a simple illustration. one evening i came upon a couple fighting in a phone booth, and i thought it my duty as a citizen and a clergy to try to stop this. i did. immediately, they both chased me, and i had to run for my life. seems to me, many of our wars have been recently, especially since vietnam, of our trying to step into somebody else's fight. and i would like to hear the panel respond to that. >> so a big part of the answer, surprisingly enough, is proportionality. right? when to you lawfully get engaged? what are the limits of that? and the reason that's important both as a tactical matter and as a legal matter is because that's what informs the politics, you

know? it's very difficult to conceive of a political groundswell of support, a political decision making even if there's not good faith articulation a of a legal or strategic basis. that's not what happens. what happens is at least, and there's a big chunk of our book dedicated to tearing apart these kinds of ideas, how is the basic concept applied, sometimes how is it misapplied, how is it misunderstood? and these are vitally important national consequences both for the life of the nation, but where we come from centered in, the center of gravity of our book, yes, it's these weighty legal concepts and the philosophy, but at ground level it's individual americans that have to bear the price of that and the people that we're conducting armed conflict against. that's why this stuff matters. and that's why to sum up this entire book, we've got to get it right. we can't afford to say, well, this is really hard, and it's complex, and so we'll just kind of wing it. now, this is an effort to try to examine that with great

precision. >> my question for the panelist centers around this idea of accountability within the united states, especially in regards to war. and the question is if we, um, as a nation are so secretive about our various methods of military conflict, for instance, targeted killing, drone strikes, etc. just as one example, then how can the american populace kind of regulate the government and kind of insure this proportionality? >> you want to handle that at first or shall i? well, so the drone chapter, i mean, that's the drone chapter. and it's, it's not a political chapter, it's sort of a design to answer that exact question, what is the basis of accountability, what are the purported legal bases that have been publicly articulated, what are the other conceivable legal batess, and the reason it -- ways, and the reason it matters in a fundamental level is

because we can conceive of solutions where we say there has to be complete transparency, and the actor bears the burden of proof to show that it's an absolute last resort. there's a competing paradigm that says, no, in this other paradigm, in this other set of applications, the very meaning and, therefore, the law and the politics and the tactics and the legality is very, very different. and that chapter deconstructs all that and comes up with saying, you know, you can't have it every way. you can't say, well, we've got a legal justification, but we're not going to tell you what it is. and to the extent that we do tell you what it is, it's part -- it's like a hybrid animal, right? it's got zebra spots but an elephant trunk and a high year that rear, you know? -- hyena rear. try to describe that. when you talk about drone strikes, the legal analysis and the political analysis is all over the map. and so that particular part of our book says let's understand

exactly what is there, what would be permissible, and let's decide which one of these bases is permissible, and then you play it through to its logical conclusion which we make some suggestions about. >> so one of the, one of the ways people talk about counterinsurgency is you have to win over population. and i think be you take that seriously -- if you take that seriously, part of what that story is legitimacy of the kind of actions you're taking. and that's not just legitimacy with the people in the country affected, so say iraq or afghanistan, though that's certainly part of the story, it's also legitimacy at home. it turns out that you need to have popular support for whatever it is that you're doing, whether that's domestic policy or foreign policy. and so part of this idea of winning the population, of having popular legitimacy, i think, is explaining things, is having transparency around the kinds of operations that are going on now.

obviously, there are some limits to that. you can't declare tomorrow we're going to, you know, have, we're going to go off normandy beach, right? you don't want to telegraph that before you do something like that, but there are ways you can have transparency both around legal side and around operations that are very important to this. and i think those are places where, you know, the right understanding of the lessons of last decade would push us to place more attention and try to do more to set ourselves up better for the future. >> quickly, and the importance of studying history because nixon, the nixon administration is, you know, it's worthwhile to study to see how an administration can keep things so quiet from the american public while waging war. because the way the that nixon and kissinger saw it was that in a democracy public opinion was such a constraint to waging war that they just, basically, kept everything secret so that, you know, public opinion couldn't

wage, couldn't sort of have an influence. and they did this by the secret bombing in cambodia, by having these sort of mad men threats against the north vietnamese and con stint tin genesee plan -- on contingency planning. so there's all these examples of the way they were able to keep things quiet and keep things secret from the american public at a time when it looked like the united states was deescalating the war, there were troop withdrawals. well, in fact, in many ways nixon and kissinger escalated the war at a time when we were supposed to be pulling out. so that's a way to really get at your answer, look at these sort of concrete examples of the way the united states government has been able to do it. >> can i briefly add to that? with the permission of the next questioner, let me adjust one thought to extend that. again, the value of history, right in so you go back to kosovo, you go back to previous military operations when you didn't have drones, and they're both positive and negative examples of transparency and

explaining thing, and that really matters in terms of the perception of the american people and the perception of the enemy. but what's better? to have transparency, to be talking about why it is what you're doing, but doing it in such a muddled, garbled way that nobody's quite sure. and the problem is that you have very differing in one path, one set of parameters absolutely per missen, absolutely -- permissible and to use the term absolutely legitimate, and in another set of parameters, but the problem is the way you talk about it in public -- particularly drones in this day and age -- is that it's all over the map. you're drawing from all of these different varieties of law and applying them with great precision in a way that sounds transparent, we're talking to the mix, but we're saying so many different things in so many different ways that have flatly contradictory results. in the end, that's another form of obfuscation. >> i heard the word "tribal" used, and i wonder how much you

feel that our ability to look at situations primarily in this case as looking at other nations in the case of, say, north vietnam and south vietnam or afghanistan as nations when in reality we're dealing with groups of tribes. and their cultures, their law, what they do are more tribal than any artificial boundaries that were drawn primarily by western nations which had very little to do with the real organization of those areas which was tribal and still is. [inaudible conversations] >> okay. yes x this is linked -- i have an answer to the very first question, and so i'll take those two together. in many ways the united states did not know what was going on at all in vietnam, and that's quite apparent when, you know, they began showing interest. you know, that was definitely

the case under truman, under eisenhower, kennedy, johnson, nixon, so on and so forth. and what was taking place there was, you know, a vietnamese war. there was a lot of fighting between vietnamese parties that stretched back from the french and china war. they were also fighting amongst themselves. and in that case there were many different factions, paramilitary groups. but there was a lot of seat vietnamese on vietnamese violence, even those who opposed the french colonial presence. you can't say one had any greater nationalist aspiration than the other, they were all nationalist. they were all fighting the french, but they were fighting each other, and that was the case, you know, when the americans were also, when they became involved. so in many ways all i want to kind of underline is that when the united states became involved, they didn't understand the sort of, the divisions that were in place prior to their entry.

>> southern, you know -- so, you know, i think in any of these situations, but it's not even limited to vietnam or afghanistan or iraq, but if you pick any country, there's a lot of texture and a lot of understandings, historical, groups, differences. and i think there's a danger for any of us, historians, policymakers, members of the public in kind of characterizing any particular group or place as all one type or another. so i don't want to say afghanistan all tribal or not. it's obviously complicated in a lot of different ways. in a sense, that's the point. it's very complicated. there's a lot of history, there's lines that have been drawn in different ways by imperial powers -- namely the british in a lot of these cases -- there are different groups that have different religions, different ethnicities and, in fact, in different parts, say just in afghanistan, in different provinces in the

country you may have completely different causes of why people are choosing to be insurgents. in some places more economic, in some places less economic. and the, and the factors ten turns out it's -- then turns out it's very granular. so in a way that gets back to, again, the first question which is we may think that there are military solutions to everything, but it turns out there may not always be, or they certainly may not be the first best solution. in fact, political solutions, diplomatic solutions and other things might be important. as a way to start. and i think this gets to the second kind of important part that i'm, you know, partly happy all of you are here today. but part of what's important here is that we have to be engaged in learning about the world. and we should know more. we should travel more, we should learn languages, we should be engaged as citizens in the world around us. we live in an increasingly more,

increasingly connected world x that becomes more and more important. and this is just one of the ways in which it's more important. we should know more about other places. >> let me just add to that, because the original question was about role of tribal structures and tribal leaderships and tribal sensitivities. one of the classic counterinsurgency theorists called this ph.d.-level warfare, you know? it's complex. ganesh used the words the textured and granular. it's all contexted. and when you talk in the abstract about what a military objective is and the military advantage anticipatored, that's -- anticipated, that's contextual. it is all contextual, and it's partly based on personality, partly based on politics. ganesh talked about air constraints. there's an airstrike, it killed some civilians. general mcchris call -- based on his policy and u.s.

counterinsurgency doctrine -- went to apology. talk about transapartment city? why did we do what we did, etc. he goes out on the ground, and the village leaders stopped him mid sentence and said you don't understand, we can't protect ourself from these people. speaking of the taliban. we need you to protect them, we need you to kill them. please, do it more. be more aggressive. and, you see, it's all context. and the point is that, you know, we say this is contextual and it's complex. it really is. and a lot of it is i how uninformed we are about the historical trends and the different, the different fissures within a society and the different -- heck, we don't understand american politics, much less -- [laughter] their politics. >> okay. um, i guess a two-part question. you partially addressed it just a moment ago, professor newton,

but that is it seems to me all this has to be considered in the context of what the objective is in going in in the first place. is it deterrence? retribution? conquest? enrichment? and then on the back end, ganesh, when whatever arises out of the conflict organically, you know, what does that look like? if we're involved in that, it seems to me that that presupposes we have some notion of what that should look like, and we have a notion of a rule of law. we have a notion of the way fundamentally human relations should be conducted. and what grows up organically may not accept that notion. it may be spirally different. and -- entirely different. so how do we act? i'd be interested in hearing the discussion of context in relation to those two issues. thank you. >> well, as i've said, proportionality is a contextual term. newton didn't really give us the rule. it's a complex rule. the basic substance of the rule

says that you may never intentionally take particular action, intentionally conduct any action in the knowledge that it's going to cause these other consequences. ganesh simplifies them to, and i think correctly, to military objective versus. but the key contextual stuff here which is what you're getting at, it's got to be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct -- here's the keyword -- overall military advantage anticipated. so you can see there's the breadth of per misbe about, there's the breadth of deference to the war fighter who's caught in these very difficult contextual, sometimes almost impossible choices. it's what's anticipated, so there's permissiveness for mistake, but there's also the requirement built into the law and built into the politics that we're very clear about what does overall military advantage anticipated mean? there are parts of our book that are, and i think this may be the measure that a we did something constructive here, there are parts that the legal community says that's crazy, that's very

controversial. there are parts in the philosophy community people say, that's crazy. how can you say that? part of that overall military advantage anticipated -- and this is one of the controversial things in the book -- is that the lives of your own suicides, your own -- citizens, your own soldiers do have multimeaning and value. we've massed the era in world politics in the conduct of war where we say, oh, they're all just cannon fodder. after all, they're in uniform. that's wrong as a matter of fundamental human rights law. the problem is at the other extreme you can't say, ohness we've got to win the war, so we can do anything. and it requires this very fine-grained, i like ganesh's words, granular, texture, there's a lot of texture to these decisions. and at the end of the day, we can't oversimplify. we've got to go through in a very sophisticated kind of way those decisions. and, again, those are political decisions in part, they're tactical decisions in part, and in the end, they're legal decisions.

but one of the things that i'm just adamant about is we can't make those decisions at a very high strategic level and yet the people at the tactical level are completely in it, they're the ones that bear the consequences of those decisions, and we owe it to them to make those decisions in good faith based on what the law actually is, not on what we want it to be, not on what we wish it was, not on what yahoo! news says it is but what really is the law. >> so in terms of, you know, once you're in there, once you're coming out how do you think about, how do you think about-and-a-half dating the local and the -- navigating the local and the differences between our involvement and others, and i'll give you kind of two examples of this. the first is in afghanistan after a few years they started a program that was designed to try to break down this idea that economic aid and development was going to be top down decided by formers and, instead, was going to be decided by local communities to what they

actually needed. because they have a much better sense. i mean, you know on your street if there's a pothole, and you know it probably faster than the people in city hall know it. and similarly, the idea is at the local level people know what they actually need. so they created this decentralized program to try to have people deliberate and vote about what they wanted as economic development can, and those things got funded. it turned out to be hugely successful. so that's kind of one example, you can create ways to kind of encourage deliberation at the local level. a second kind of higher level is when we think about constitutional design. we don't actually, if you look at, you know, some of these cases, we don't always say everybody should have a u.s. constitution exactly like ours with 50 states regardless of how many provinces you have in your country with two senators per state, regardless of how many provinces again. you know, the way constitutions are designed reflect features of the country depending on, you know, the different groups in the country, the size and

various other factors. and so i think there's a lot of ability for variation in different places. and one of the benefits of thinking about it this way is what you want is for the people themselves in a place to be able to support their government. and if people don't -- and this goes for our government too -- if people don't support your government, you've got a bigger problem on your hands than, you know, how you design it. the, you know, the athenian -- in the ancient world, the law giver of athens, he is said to have remarked when he wrote the constitution for the athen items -- athenians, somebody asked him is this the best constitution, he said it's not the best i could create, but the best you could receive. and the idea is not to come up with a utopian constitution, to deal with the world that we have, and people need to come up with government that works for them. britain is not america, and they have different systems than we do, and that's a good thing.

>> i just want to add quickly that, you know, the history of the global cold war shows that whatever, you know, whatever america's intentions, objectives when they went in and decisions they made during the duration of the war doesn't always dictate what will happen and, in fact, it usually lies in, you know, the hands of the ally, america's ally or america's enemy. so it doesn't matter what the united states decides and when it will begin, how long it will fight or when it wants to leave. it won't, basically, in the end have the final say in many cases. >> well, taking your lead with that comment, it seems to me that since the 1940s our enemies each time are less and less powerful, nazi germany and imperial japan, then to korea, north vietnam, iraq. but it seems like the results we get from each involvement are

less and less satisfactory. and i know the concept of proportionality has to be tied up in this somewhere. and it seems like almost the more intemp rate our response, for instance, hiroshima, and i'd like to hear professor newton's applying of propositionerralty -- proportionality to that, the more intemp rate our response, the the better final result we seem to get. ..