America’s Strategic Attention Deficit Disorder
ADHD is really not too serious when children suffer from it. It means they need to find careers and life activities where constant, roaming alertness and multiple changes of focus are advantages rather than disadvantages. American preachers and political radio talk show hosts like the late Rush Limbaugh clearly suffered from it and made endless millions of dollars each as a result.
But when it afflicts national leaders and the political elites of superpowers, ADHD is enormously dangerous.
Adolf Hitler suffered massively from this Strategic Attention Deficit Disorder (SADD). It was arguably the single biggest reason Nazi Germany lost World War II.
As the great British historian James Holland perceptively notes, although in the first three years of the war, the apparently invincible German Army swept all before it, after conquering France in 1940, it was never able to fully defeat anyone else. Hitler simply lacked the patience, the discipline and the focus to keep his awesome forces concentrated and finish any job.
Thus, when the Germans were defeated by the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain in 1940, they turned to night bombing of British cities but failed miserably to obliterate or even significantly disable any of them.
Germany could then easily have won the war against Britain and outflanked the Soviet Union by conquering North Africa and driving to the Middle East oil fields: It would have taken only a fraction of the forces he committed against the Red Army to do so. But he simply never bothered. Only Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the least Nazi of his military and naval advisers, urged him to do it. And Raeder was ignored.
Leaving Britain unsubdued, a restless Hitler turned east and invaded the Soviet Union in the largest, bloodiest, most horrific land campaign in recorded human history. Yet after only six months, with the Wehrmacht ground to a halt and then driven back in front of Moscow, it was in fact clear, as Holland points out, that Hitler had not only failed to beat his gigantic adversary but also had no hope of winning the war.
Yet instead of cutting his losses and suing for peace on terms he would have commanded, Hitler doubled down, went for broke and destroyed Nazism and his beloved Third Reich instead in three and a half more years of hopeless, ever escalating carnage.
Indeed, right after Hitler’s failure in front of Moscow was rubbed in his face with the Soviet counteroffensive of December 1941, and with more than a million dead and seriously injured soldiers already from his badly mauled Wehrmacht, the Fuhrer, unperturbed, declared war on the United States as well when he didn’t have to.
This decision perplexed my Oxford modern European history tutor, the late, great, good and wise Dr. Hans Schenk, Dean of Wolfson College, Oxford.
“Why did he do it? Was he insane?” Schenk rightly asked in his tutorials.
And then my teacher sensibly answered his own question:
“He must have been.”
It was true.
And the form the madness took was Hitler’s hyper-activity expressed in his Strategic Attention Deficit Disorder (SADD).
Holland in his classic work “The Allies Strike Back” documents how this restlessness, this inability to focus on solving any single problem and prioritizing sufficiently to achieve any single goal led the Nazis into one catastrophic over-extension and distraction after another even in their crucial military procurement programs.
They never developed a single adequate long range four-engine heavy bomber, although both the United States and Britain did so smoothly and quickly.
For all their supposed technical expertise, it never occurred to them to put long range drop tanks on their excellent Messerschmitt Bf-109 and Focke Wulf 190 fighters though they could easily have done so – and had the technology easily available.
They never mass produced the outstanding Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter in sufficient quantities to win the air war against the Allied bomber fleets though they had plenty of time and resources to do so.
They could never focus on a simple, effective, relatively cheap and easy to produce light or medium main battle tank like the American Sherman or the Soviet T-34 to match the Allied armor forces that eventually swamped them.
They never bothered even trying to expand their potential war-winning U-boat submarine combat force until it was too late. They had designs for vastly superior U-boats too fast and able to stay underwater in ways the Allies could not match. But they never bothered developing them beyond the drawing boards.
Today, the humiliating failure of the Nazi war machine in World War II is more relevant than ever because the United States has made the same catastrophic strategic mistakes.
Strategic Attention Deficit Disorder and its accompanying over-extension and dissipation of effort has plagued US political and military leaders since the end of the Cold War. And it has now reached monumental, crisis-level proportions.
Whether it was Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011 and since, or the scores of billions of dollars in weapons and aid lavished on Volodymyr Zelensky’s ramshackle dictatorship in Ukraine since 2022 and now the obsession with “matching” the supposed “pacing’ threat” from China, we see the same old story.
Successive US presidents and Congresses madly jump into one new invasion, occupation and endless war after another. They inflict unending, unlimited chaos and destruction on each of the nations they are supposedly rescuing. They fail to achieve any peace, resolution or discernible goals in every case. And then, when they and their public get bored, they simply find another country to pulverize even while still blundering around in all the other ones.
Such bizarre, self-destructive and clearly psychotic behavior can only be explained on the psychological and spiritual levels.
“There is no peace, saith the Lord, for the wicked,” the Book of Isaiah teaches us. (Chapter 48, Verse 22).
This is not simply a poetic metaphor or empty conceit. As St. Paul perceptively explained in his Second Epistle to Timothy (Chapter 4: Verses 3 and 4) wicked sinners who reject the ways of God, sanity and wisdom simply cannot endure patience, restraint or caution. As St. Paul puts it, they cannot endure sound doctrine.
Can anyone doubt this curse of SADD, or hyper-activity madness now consumes our rulers in Washington – Republican and Democrat, so called liberals and conservatives (the terms have become utterly meaningless) alike?
Hitler and his Nazis were afflicted by this endless restlessness. This obsession was the driving force for all the invasions, genocides and mass enslavements carried out by the Fascist empires in the 1930s and 40s until they were all destroyed.
Now such utter destruction stares us in the face too – and soon – unless we mend our collective ways and turn inward to wrestle with our own national problems instead of spreading them wildly to the rest of the world.