Generals and Their Leadership
The Myth of the Purely Military Decision
Grant and His Generals, Ole Peter Hansen Balling, 1865
The replacement of Valerii Zaluzhnyi with Oleksandr Syrskyi as the head of the Ukrainian military has brought back one of the most oft-repeated arguments about warfare is that politicians ought to stay out of it.
The argument goes something to the effect that political leaders don’t understand military technical affairs and as such are ill-suited to setting the strategic goals of the armed forces. Political leaders—as the logic goes—are too invested in their self-image or their short-term support to make the most effective choices on the use of military force.
If the generals were just left to their own devices, they would be able to enact whatever strategic or operational plans that would enable a victory.
Now putting aside the obvious—that generals are just as political as their civilian leadership and there’s no reason to think that military officers would be free from making decisions based on political self-interest—the theory is actively harmful to a coherent war effort.
In the context of the Ukrainian defeat in Avdiivka, the argument revolves around a theory that the Ukrainian military holding onto Avdiivka for an extended time was primarily driven by a political imperative from Kyiv rather than any utilitarian tactical Ukrainian advantage.
The answer to that is that yes of course it was driven by political imperatives from Kyiv. It’s very easy to lose the forest for the trees when you spend all of your time analyzing tactical actions along a frontline and forget that Ukraine is constantly engaging in a contest for international legitimacy.
The scale and scope of international assistance to Ukraine is directly tied to the perception of Kyiv’s success in the field. While it might be deeply unfair and morally odious that political leaders supporting Ukraine are making a continuous calculus concerning the viability of Zelensky’s war effort, feel free to ask Ashraf Ghani if I’m lying.
Avdiivka, or any piece of Ukrainian territory that’s taken by Russian forces, is a symbolic loss for Kyiv in the area that matters most for them—maintaining foreign support. The backdrop for this entire campaign has been a months-long absence of American military support on account of the GOP refusing to advance Ukraine aid in the House. Europe has also seen a rise in right-wing populist parties that advocate for the cessation of support to Ukraine.
Zelensky is in a position of needing to present a coherent case to the world that their support is going to a country that has a viable pathway to a military victory—even the false perception of a stalemate or “forever war” is going to rapidly depress Western support. Worse than that, political leadership in the West will perceive any serious battlefield reverses through the lens of the rapid collapse of the Afghan government.
Critics of aid even being disingenuous will seize on all of this, further limiting aid, and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The political risks of a flagging Ukrainian war effort—at least within the Zelensky administration—likely far outweigh the tactical military considerations of positioning on the front.
To get at what I’m trying to demonstrate, I’m going to turn to a somewhat similar situation to help this point: the almost constant friction between Lincoln and his generals during the American Civil War.
As the war dragged on Lincoln by 1863 was faced with very real domestic pressure from the so-called Copperheads—Union-aligned Democrats who sought a negotiated end to the war. A deadly draft riot had spilled across the streets of New York City killing over 100 people and there was a genuine belief that Lincoln might not win the 1864 election.
Despite all of the industrial advantages the Union could ever hope for, there existed a very real sentiment in the North that the war was unwinnable and not worth fighting for. In the context of Union manpower and material advantages—Confederate tactical success had created a symbolically important wave of defeatism in the Union.
This in turn created an imperative from Lincoln in terms of what the military needed to do. While some generals like Burnside and Hooker were truly not capable of Army-level leadership, others like Meade or (kind of) McClellan were competent.
The problem with Meade and McClellan was their preference for a cautious and methodical approach to campaigning that preserved their forces above all other considerations. While McClellan’s failure in the Peninsular Campaign left his military fully intact—it conferred very real political costs on Lincoln.
Similarly, Meade’s decision to not pursue Lee during Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg elicited a scathing letter from Lincoln that was never delivered. Despite Gettysburg (and the contemporaneous seizure of Vicksburg) being the largest Union victory of the war—Lincoln was very clearly focused on the messaging of what that victory would mean.
Despite the victory of Gettysburg, Lincoln was almost singlemindedly focused on the implication of Lee escaping as having a political effect on northern audiences believing that the war would never end. Meade won the largest victory for the Union side and was relieved less than a year later in favor of Grant.
Now putting aside the fact that Ulysses S. Grant was a supremely talented operational planner—he remains one of the great American generals in that he implicitly understood Lincoln’s political imperatives.
Grant would go on to marshal the industrial resources of the Union to engage in a suffocating campaign in Virginia, slowly choking the life out of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Day after day under Grant’s leadership—and Sherman’s concurrent March to the Sea—Union armies demonstrated that the Union would inevitably win.
The Confederate will to win wasn’t broken in one dashing engagement on the field, it was broken by the slow and painful realization that with every day that passed the Union would seize more Confederate land. There would never be some trick that Lee could pull out of his hat to save them. The Union public would never turn on Lincoln as long as Grant and Sherman were able to demonstrate that the Union would win the war.
In brief contrast to this on the opposite side was the Confederate war effort. Lee despite winning a series of tactical actions against the Union—never managed to produce a strategic result that advanced the Confederacy’s cause.
The most clear disconnect, and most disastrous, would come from Lee’s decision to invade the North in 1863. His Gettysburg Campaign came at a direct cost to a request from the Confederate Secretary of War for Lee to concentrate Confederate forces and send a relief column to the siege of Vicksburg. Lee would of course go on to disastrously lose at Gettysburg, and Vicksburg would fall cutting the Confederacy in half.
While it can be argued that Gettysburg was a desperate attempt to convince the Union public that the war was winnable—it came at a direct political cost to the Confederacy that Lee was blind to. In losing both Vicksburg and Gettysburg, he effectively handed the 1864 election to Lincoln.
Now after all of this, am I saying that Syrskyi is Grant? No, of course, I’m not. I’m not even saying that I think that holding Avdiivka longer than was militarily expedient was the right or wrong choice politically. It can very well be argued that taking undo losses takes on an even worse form of political symbolism at some point. It’s a constant act of calibration on the part of leaders to decide when one outweighs the other.
What I’m getting at in all of this is that civilian political considerations in war often matter significantly more than what military leadership wants those considerations to be. When people argue that a certain general is or is not better than another because that general is more in line with the intentions of political leadership, they’re missing the entire point of what you’re doing in a war.
In the same way that Lincoln was placed in a position where he needed a certain kind of military demonstration for the sake of the political capital to continue the war effort—Zelensky needs a certain kind of military strategy for the sake of his political position. Zelensky’s war effort depends on a continued international impression that their cause is worth supporting, other considerations come second to that.
You can win all the brilliant tactical actions you want, but it doesn’t matter if you lose the war in the process.
For anyone interested in further reading on the topic of civil and military leadership in wartime by actual historians or academics I’d recommend all of these:
Clausewitz. War without policy guidance is simple violence. Policy without understanding warfare is folly. Too many politicians have launched wars without understanding how to link policy to guide the violence to achieve political goals. Too many generals have let them get away with it.
There's a problem with this reasoning, partly stemming from very different circumstances among the comparands, partly with lack of foresight.
Zelensky 2024 (according to the post): We are outmatched in almost every facet. Foreign military aid has been on a downward trend for a year. NOT ONE STEP BACK. Because that might create the impression of a hopeless cause in foreign capitals. Even if it contributes to a readily-avoidable disaster that will create the impression of a hopeless cause in foreign capitals. (OK, fine, a few steps back.)
Lincoln 1863: We have massive military resources, but we're running out of time. Someone put them to aggressive and effective use.
So besides the fundamentally opposite strategic profiles of the belligerents, in Lincoln's case military necessity and policy/optics goals are fully aligned. Lincoln wants forward movement that damages the fighting power of the Confederates, and that's exactly what plays well anyway. Zelensky, in this reading, cares for nothing but *delaying* the optics of deterioration even while actually not doing enough to check real deterioration. In other words, the policy course defended in this post is at worst - or observably in the case of Avdiivka - contrary to both military necessity *and* policy/optics goals.