Aug 5, 2026 · 52 min · 16 segments
How did George Washington overcome virtually every material disadvantage to defeat the British during the Revolutionary War? How did Ulysses S. Grant turn the tides of the Civil War in the Union’s…
Matt CavanaughGuest
John AmbleHost
So if we could sort of set the stage, can you define what you mean when we say Supreme Command? I think most listeners will have a sense of what that is.
Eisenhower, he was Supreme Commander during World War II, right? NATO has a Supreme Commander.
So it's the individual that has responsibility and authority for military strategic performance at war.
Different political systems produce different figures to fit those and fill those shoes.
In that particular case, General Eisenhower's opposing military supreme commander wasn't a military officer.
It was Adolf Hitler because of 650 major strategic decisions made by the German high command over the Second World War.
95% of them were made by Adolf Hitler to include all the major decisions surrounding breaking onto the European continent in 1944 and into 1945.
So in that particular case, it's not someone wearing a uniform with a slouch cap on, for example.
So does that mean that every war effort does ultimately have some form of supreme commander? You know, Eisenhower, we look at him, he was given the title supreme allied commander.
But would you say that the commander of multinational force Iraq, who was the coalition commander, was a supreme commander, was not? Or the commander of ISAF, which was, you know, the overall coalition conventional forces organization in Afghanistan.
But someone ultimately has to be responsible for making the core decisions for a particular military effort.
And that's the individual that ought to be held responsible for whether those decisions are superior or inferior.
And I think that gets us to sort of our most important point, which is that when we're talking about evaluating military supreme command, we're often doing so in a competitive environment.
So if we could sort of set the stage, can you define what you mean when we say Supreme Command? I think most listeners will have a sense of what that is.
Eisenhower, he was Supreme Commander during World War II, right? NATO has a Supreme Commander.
So it's the individual that has responsibility and authority for military strategic performance at war.
Different political systems produce different figures to fit those and fill those shoes.
In that particular case, General Eisenhower's opposing military supreme commander wasn't a military officer.
It was Adolf Hitler because of 650 major strategic decisions made by the German high command over the Second World War.
95% of them were made by Adolf Hitler to include all the major decisions surrounding breaking onto the European continent in 1944 and into 1945.
So in that particular case, it's not someone wearing a uniform with a slouch cap on, for example.
So does that mean that every war effort does ultimately have some form of supreme commander? You know, Eisenhower, we look at him, he was given the title supreme allied commander.
But would you say that the commander of multinational force Iraq, who was the coalition commander, was a supreme commander, was not? Or the commander of ISAF, which was, you know, the overall coalition conventional forces organization in Afghanistan.
But someone ultimately has to be responsible for making the core decisions for a particular military effort.
And that's the individual that ought to be held responsible for whether those decisions are superior or inferior.
And I think that gets us to sort of our most important point, which is that when we're talking about evaluating military supreme command, we're often doing so in a competitive environment.
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