
After a long and risky advance far from their supply base, U.S. Army and Marine Corps units smash through the last enemy defenses and advance into the enemy's capital. The opposing president flees and his government collapses. The relatively small U.S. force now finds itself responsible for running the city, while an insurgency that threatens the army's supply line begins to boil. Meanwhile, as the U.S. president attempts to rein in an envoy who is disregarding his orders, he must also figure out how to convert an apparent battlefield triumph into the strategic goals he established at the beginning of the war.
Scenes from Baghdad in 2003? Perhaps, but these could be flashes of Mexico City in September 1847 where Gen. Winfield Scott's army had just arrived after a seven-month march from Veracruz. Like George W. Bush, President James K. Polk found himself in possession of the enemy's capital, but without a counterpart with whom to negotiate a final peace. The war had lasted longer and was more costly than Polk had anticipated. His army -- tiny and inexperienced before the war -- had pulled off daring feats spanning the continent. But now as a result of the unexpected collapse of the Mexican government, Polk risked getting bogged down with "nation-building" and battling insurgents determined to gain control of the road between Mexico City and his army's supplies in Veracruz. Polk kept his focus on his original war aims, the direct westward expansion of the United States to the Pacific Ocean. His envoy negotiated a peace treaty with one of Mexico's Supreme Court justices and Polk withdrew his army from Mexico a few months later.
Needless to say, very few of America's wars have ended so cleanly or delivered so completely on their prewar expectations. To help figure out why, Gen. Martin Dempsey, in 2009 the commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command and soon to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commissioned some of the country's leading military historians to examine how the United States has concluded its wars. Col. Matthew Moten, head of West Point's history department, recruited 15 distinguished military historians to each write one chapter of Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars. Beginning with Yorktown and the negotiations that ended the Revolutionary War to Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Between War and Peace brings many perspectives to the long-neglected subject of how America's generals and top policymakers have struggled with war's messy "endgame."
In Between War and Peace Moten and his historians explore how these American military engagements reached their culminating points, how each war's ending differed from the goals at the beginning of the conflict, and how the war's end would shape the future peace. Moten's aim, in the end, was no less than hoping, "that some future president, confronted with threats to American national interests and needing some time to think, will tuck this volume under his arm as he departs for a weekend of reading and reflection at Camp David."
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