Supreme Command Analysis

The relationship between military and political leaders has always been complicated, especially during war times. In the Supreme Command, Eliot Cohen examines four historical portraits: Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill and Ben-Gurion, to proof through a practical example, his argument that, despite their military experiences, statesmen should not turn their wars over to their generals. Cohen tried to sell his product of civil-military relations based on the concept that the civilian authority should intervene at the tactical and operational level in order to achieve success in war. In this paper, I will define the general argument of Supreme Command then I will explain how Cohen account of civil-military relations to Lincoln during the American
Significant that, on 1 April 1861 he ordered the commander in chief Winfield Scott to provide daily reports, only a few weeks after taking office. Likewise, within a week of writing a letter to Ulysses S. Grant, disclaiming any wish to know Grant’s plans, he sent a special emissary to report back regularly and on a daily basis in some cases on what Grant’s doing, and later on by sending his assistant secretary of war, Charles Dana, as a personal observer of the Union armies in the field. Even his relation with his generals was under supervision. Lincoln was an abler manager of man, he had the art of making use of able, but flawed subordinates who could not abide one another. For instance, through his letter to the blustering General Joseph Hooker in 26 January 1863, he showed Hook that the President saw his faults, no less than his virtues. Thus, Hook obeyed Lincoln despite his feuds with other
He served as minister of munitions and later secretary of state for war. Perhaps his four-volume book “the world crisis” was the clearest example of his passion for war. However, Churchill interference in the military had another taste. Instead of writing letters to his officers as Lincoln did, he prone to calling his captains at all hours of the night, and asked for meetings with specialists and high ranked officers to study a case in order to win the war challenges. A good example was on 21 June 1940, when he met twenty-eight-year-old London scientist, along with the highest chain of command in the army and the air force, to discuss the possibility that the Germans had developed a means of all-weather precision navigation to drop bombs through cloud