COMMAND: Education of a General

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Adroit Timing. When the 30-day trial went into effect, a great quiet descended on the battlefront. At Panmunjom the negotiators took up the problems of safeguarding the truce—with inspection and exchange of prisoners. The delegates were heavily embroiled with these matters when the 30-day deadline passed.

Here the Red timing was adroit. A few days before the 30-day agreement expired, the enemy released the names of some 12,000 U.N. prisoners, including 3,000 Americans. The U.S. public was naturally excited over this; where were the other 8,000 U.S. soldiers reported missing in action? In the excitement, the failure of the U.N. strategists to resume the war went almost unnoticed.

Broken only by occasional small actions which altered the battle line hardly at all, the lull in the fighting has continued up to this week. The enemy, so shattered and bloody last July, had the upper hand now, and he kept it. There was no pressure on him except from the air, which he countered with his jets and hard-hitting anti-aircraft defenses. The U.N. had no policy except to try beating down the Red negotiators "with verbal maneuvers and high-flown rhetoric—which had no more effect than so much birdshot against a tank.

In February, under the label "Operation Quagmire," Matt Ridgway put out a bitter analysis of the Communist truce tactics: "The Communist plan...has called for a temporary show of progress following each period of complete delay. The Communists have known that, at certain times throughout the talks, they must inject a certain modicum of achievement as the price for their main program of bargaining inertia. This is part of the Communist war of nerves. Hope must be raised and dashed .according to schedule" (TIME, Feb. 18). This analysis seemed correct at the time; it still seems so today.

Principles of War. A startling fact emerges from this unhappy story. Although Ridgway, Joy & Co. were outmaneuvered on occasion, they came off, on the whole, with a much better score than the Metternichs and Talleyrands of Washington. It now appears that the military men were right about the truce talks—military pressure should have been kept up against the Communists to dissuade them from stalling.

Military men are supposed to be political innocents, and some of them undoubtedly are. But the top policy group in Washington, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the civilian secretaries and the State Department, are pulled one way by the misgivings of allies, tugged another by election-year politics; they keep ever in mind (as they certainly should) the possibility of war in Europe or over Detroit—but are apt to dismiss as "localitis" any forthright attempt to settle the war in Korea. Any shavetail out of West Point could have put his finger on the Kaesong-Panmunjom fallacy by quoting Clausewitz: "If our opponent is to do our will, we must put him in a position more disadvantageous to him than the sacrifice...we demand." In Korea, the U.N. had the Communists at a disadvantage but let them get away.