Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the
West and What Can Be Done About It by Martin van
Creveld. DLVC Enterprises, 2016, 256 pp.
Martin van Creveld is one of the giants of twentieth-century
strategic studies and military history. His works, both scholarly and
polemic, deserve a place on the shelves of any serious student of
history or international relations, and even his critics must engage
with his ideas. His provocatively named Pussycats, which
seeks to examine the social, cultural, and institutional roots of
present-day Western military failure, could hardly be published at a
better time, as two poorly managed—perhaps
unmanageable—wars drag on past the midpoint of their second
decades and the full integration of women into the US military is
under way.
Van Creveld opens by pointing out that in the fifteenth century,
Europe began a process in which, due to scientific, technological,
political, and economic advantage, it dominated the known world,
reaching the height of its collective power on the eve of World War I.
Since then, he argues, the West’s engagement with other powers
has been marked by stalemate at best, and more often loss, despite
retaining most of the advantages it had enjoyed in earlier years. The
task he takes on in Pussycats is to explain this decline,
through four principal lines of argument.
First, he addresses the raising and education of youth, the raw
ingredients of armies. Children and young adults (a category which, he
points out, was only recently created) are increasingly directed,
guided, and sheltered not only from physical harm but also from
distressing sensations and ideas, making them fragile and neurotic. If
he is hardly the first to note this phenomenon, van Creveld is
nonetheless astute to point out that such an upbringing seems not to
be conducive to the ability to take initiative and act independently,
attributes required by soldiers at all levels in modern warfare. He
also revisits the territory staked out by Robert Putnam’s
Bowling Alone, commenting on how decreasing social capital
has led to an atomized and highly individualistic society.
Second, he describes the “de-fanging” of the military.
This has taken the form of a radical increase in the proportion of
generals, in particular, and officers more broadly, across service and
national lines, as well as a growing increase in rules and regulations
imposed on the day-to-day life of service members. In many cases, he
argues, these volunteers enjoy fewer freedoms than their own teenage
children might. That many of these regulations are reactions (or
overreactions) to the misadventures of a few adds insult to injury, in
van Creveld’s eyes. Here, though, he sounds a truly false note
in his description of the Tailhook scandal, which led to sexual
harassment prevention measures throughout the Department of Defense,
as an instance of “dubious claims by a female officer who said
she had been fondled” (p. 53). While the investigation was
indeed triggered by the complaint filed by a female aviator, it
ultimately concluded that 83 women and seven men were sexually
assaulted during the event, including an underage woman staying at the
hotel, who had no connection to the conference.
It is undeniable that in the wake of Tailhook, substantial
resources were devoted to reducing not only assaults but other less
overt forms of aggression against women in the military. Van Creveld
suggests that an inevitable effect of such measures, as well as
similar policies designed to integrate other ethnic or social groups,
is an erosion of trust. This has grave consequences for unit cohesion,
command climates, and therefore, at least potentially, military
effectiveness. It also contributes to an unprecedented number of
lawsuits filed by members of the military against their own service, a
phenomenon he rightly identifies as disturbing, implying as it does
not only a heightened sense of grievance but also an inability, real
or perceived, to obtain fair treatment through normal channels.
The “malignant” effects of women in the military are
the focus of the third section. Van Creveld’s critique of the
inclusion of women in the military in any but the most auxiliary roles
is long standing and well known, but it is expressed with particular
vehemence in Pussycats. A good sense of what to expect in
this chapter is telegraphed by his suggestion that an apt motto for
1960s feminism would be arbeit macht frei (p. 19). Valid
concerns about different musculoskeletal strength between the sexes
and the readiness challenges and cost implications presented by
potential pregnancy, intended or not, must be sifted out from
suggestions that higher rates of medical care for women in the
services are due to malingering or that women who are traumatized by
sexual assault at the hands of a comrade are unfit to serve (p.
111).
The final section addresses PTSD and in particular its relatively
recent place in the study of warfare and its effects. Van Creveld
makes a number of thoughtful points about how the cultural framing of
war influences warriors’ experience of it, asking whether
today’s pervasive view of war as illegitimate and damaging does
not make it more likely that veterans will view themselves as
psychologically or spiritually harmed. He notes that the disorder has
historically been less prevalent both in armies that were based on a
regimental system, in which cohesion between unit members could
develop and be sustained over entire careers, and in those that
expected higher levels of mental endurance. In cultures and armies
that did not recognize the disorder, or its earlier incarnations, PTSD
was diagnosed far less often, a somewhat tautological point, but not
an unfair one, to the extent that a mandate to detect any condition
will make doctors and psychologists more diligent in looking for it
and, presumably, finding it. He also takes issue with the unspoken
assumption that PTSD is the new norm for veterans, as reflected in
mandatory discharge screenings for the condition. Other portions of
the final section, though, reflect outdated and in some cases ugly
assumptions. Many of the most successful treatment modalities, for
example, treat PTSD as a form of brain injury rather than an emotional
one. His suggestion that treatment and benefits for veterans with PTSD
are a form of “reward,” which ought instead to be directed
to those who manage not to develop it (p. 148), is particularly
pernicious.
Pussycats is peppered by a number of errors. Some are
frivolous, as, when insisting that popular culture portrays
women’s physical strength in unrealistic ways, van Creveld cites
a music video by the performer Sia but names the wrong one (p. 106).
Others are more germane but still minor, such as his statement that
other Western countries’ militaries, including Canada and
Britain, “followed the US lead” (p. 85) in integrating
women. In fact, this is reversed, with the United States among the
last countries to do so.
More substantial errors undermine his broader and thematic
arguments. Van Creveld writes that after the US Marine Corps was
forced to integrate basic training, it dropped the requirement that
women do pull-ups (p. 92). In fact, boot camp in the Corps remains, as
it has always been, single-sex, and while attempts are being made to
improve upper-body strength among women recruits, it has never been a
requirement that women do pull-ups in order to graduate or indeed be
promoted throughout their careers. Most puzzling, he describes Marine
Gen James Amos as having been silenced and pressured to leave the
Corps for being politically incorrect (p. 67). This is a curious way
to characterize a 44-year career, culminating in three years as the
commandant. More disturbing from an academic, or indeed journalistic,
perspective is that the source he cites in support of this is a
CNN article from 2005 (a decade before Amos’
retirement) in which Amos is not mentioned and in which another USMC
general is defended for speaking plainly. A quote attributed to Amos
describing the media as “savages” is taken from, although
not credited to, The Duffel Blog, a parody website whose
articles are fictitious (if often on the nose).
A number of excellent points are raised in Pussycats,
often in passing. Van Creveld discusses the increase in the proportion
of senior officers and of lawyers in the military; he suggests that
their presence may have led to militaries becoming more similar to
modern bureaucracies and corporations than to war-fighting
institutions, with implications for the nature and quality of advice
provided to government authorities. He points out the growing gap
between the military and the rest of American society, arguing
powerfully that those who make decisions about when and how to take
the nation to war are increasingly unlikely to have any real sense of
what war is or what it is for. Most relevant, he documents the extent
to which large segments of Western society have come to see war as an
absolute evil to be avoided at all costs and questions whether it is
possible to craft and sustain a strategy for victory in such a
cultural climate.
These points are diluted, though, by the author’s rhetorical
excess and strange choices of anecdotes to flesh out his points. The
selection and promotion of generals deserves much more scrutiny, as
has been addressed in works by Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Ricks,
but van Creveld muddles the issue by diverting into an argument that
adulterers on the general staff should be excused, because boys will
be boys and great men in the past commonly had mistresses. The
question of physical fitness standards for women is vital, both in
terms of perceived and actual fair treatment and with respect to
combat effectiveness, but this point is weakened by van
Creveld’s complaint that women are excused from meeting normal
fitness standards while pregnant and for several weeks
post-partum.
More damning, much of the provocative argumentation is irrelevant
to the question at the heart of the book. Let the reader stipulate
that Western armies are etiolated, micromanaged, effeminate, and
traumatized; this still does not explain recent military failures. The
ISIS flag was raised over Fallujah not because the sergeants and
captains who fought there were the product of the helicopter parenting
van Creveld decries, lacking courage, initiative, or the willingness
to take or inflict casualties. The city was lost because of poor
judgment in the White House, the State Department, and at the highest
levels of the Pentagon. The great majority of van Creveld’s
complaints, if valid, should be borne out in documented incompetence
or failure at the combat and tactical level in recent wars. In
reality, American forces have seldom lost a battle or campaign level
engagement with the enemy post–World War II. Given their
tremendous advantages not only in material factors but also in
training, this is not surprising. The failure van Creveld wants to
explain—an inability to win at the strategic and geopolitical
level—is at best loosely connected to the issues he
discusses.
This is unfortunate precisely because van Creveld has chosen to
address so urgent a matter—why the superior armaments, training,
numbers, and resources of Western armies have not yielded lasting or
decisive victory—and because he is positioned so perfectly, as
an Israeli civilian, an expert on Western militaries but not of them,
to provide thoughtful analysis. There are the seeds of a powerful
argument in Pussycats, but they are obscured by needless
provocation, non sequiturs, and the pursuit of straw men. Given that
material, economic, and technological factors so overwhelmingly favor
the United States over its recent enemies, any explanation for failure
must be based largely in the domain of institutional, cultural,
strategic, and moral factors. The book van Creveld sought to write
might have provided the foundation for exactly that discussion, rather
than simply added fuel to the fire of a number of existing disputes
about the structure, culture, and training of today’s Western
militaries.
Rebecca Jensen
Visiting Scholar, The Elliot School
George Washington University