In a conference I once attended, one speaker claimed that WW2 American “decision makers” — meaning senior civil servants and generals with research money to spend — treated the social scientists from whom they deigned to commission studies “as dogs treat lampposts.”
Finally, the texts in question cannot be understood without bearing in mind the underlying way in which Chinese culture approaches war. War was neither a means in the hands of policy nor was it an end in itself. Instead it was regarded as an evil; albeit one that was sometimes made necessary by the imperfection of the world. “Weapons are instruments of ill omen,” said Sun Tzu, “However vast the state, he who takes pleasure in the military will perish.” “A ruler might not have a liking for military affairs. Still not to prepare for war was to fail in his duty — when the dead lie stiff and you grieve for them, you have not attained righteousness.”
The military virtue of an army takes the form of strict discipline. Or perhaps one should say that, since necessity is not for every private to judge, discipline is the general’s way to impose it on his troops.
All the texts under consideration are set in a legendary past, assumed to be both unchanging and far superior to the present. Hence they have relatively little to say about armament. In this respect they differ sharply from the voluminous discussions of our present-day, which are based on the assumption that the key to warfare is shaped by technology.
Concerning supply, “money is the sinews of war.” According to Sun Tzu, an army numbering one hundred thousand men with all its equipment, if led one thousand li into enemy territory, will cost one thousand gold coins a day to maintain. The presence of an army will also cause the price of everything to rise. A commander who tries to support his forces from his own country will ruin the people. It is therefore best to impose the logistic burden on the enemy, a principle that Sun Tzu considers so important that he repeats it twice.
No state has ever benefit from a long war. Those that garner five victories will meet with disaster; those with four victories will be exhausted; those with three victories will become hegemons; those with two victories will be kings; and those with one victory will become emperors. The best way to settle a dispute is by diplomacy as when you negotiate with the enemy and give him presents. Second best is the use of dirty tricks such as assassinating the enemy commander or bribing his officers. Those who cannot use dirty tricks engage in maneuver. Those who cannot maneuver fight a battle, and those who cannot fight a battle lay siege.
As in the rest of life, the best way to achieve dao is not to depart from it in the first place. To paraphrase, the best war is that which is never fought. The second best is that which is avoided, the third that which is won without bloodshed, the fourth that which involves heavy loss of life. The fifth is that which has to be repeated time after time.
Those forget warfare will inevitably be endangered.
A commander should never fight a battle if he does not have the advantage, or if he is not compelled by necessity. The greatest and most important matter that a general should attend to is to have near him faithful men, very skillful in war and prudent, with whom he continually advises.
When either hunger or other natural necessity or human passion has brought your enemy to complete desperation, you ought to avoid battle in so far as is in your power.
Part I discusses preparations for war, including political preparations — the creation of alliances — on one hand and the amassing of supplies, arms and money on the other. Part II deals with training, discipline, logistics, and intelligence. This part also has much to say about the conduct of war, including fortifications, marches, operational maneuver. Part III deals with what we today would call “war termination” and the attainment of a more favorable peace.
The officers were to be drawn exclusively from the nobility. That was because the one factor that can make men march into the cannon which are trained at them is honor, and honor was to be found among nobles alone. Frederick was not incapable of putting on a show of gruff appreciation for the rank and file. Still, he firmly believed that the one means to keep them in line was ferocious discipline. As he once said, “they need to fear their officers more than the enemy.”
All armies, then, necessarily had lines of operation or, as we would say today, communications. Earlier commanders such as Alexander, Julius Caesar, or even Gustavus Adolphus during the first half of the 17th century, had been able to survive and operate for years in enemy territory while maintaining only the most tenuous ties with home. Now, however, the whole point of the art of war was to cut one’s enemy’s lines of operations without exposing one’s own. Doing so would lead to the enemy’s surrender.
In a certain sense, the maneuvers advocated by Jomini had always existed. From at least Hannibal on, armies had not only fought each other front to front but sought to outflank each other and surround each other. But before the middle of the 18th century, however, by and large there were no lines of operations to threaten or cut. Moreover, primitive communications and the fact that no formations of all arms existed compelled armies to stick closely together and only permitted them to engage each other in battle by mutual consent. Given the vastly increased forces made available by the introduction of general conscription in 1791, first Carnot and then Napoleon had been compelled to disperse them and form them into formation of all arms whether they wanted to or not. Once the machinery for commanding such dispersed formations had also been created in the form of the etat major, these changes greatly increased the repertoire of strategic maneuvers.
More to the point, Jomini like all his Enlightenment predecessors sought to create a “system” which would tell a commander how to conduct war on the higher level. Particularly in his earlier works, this objective forced him to present war as more rational than it really is, given that only the rational can be systematically analyzed, systematized, and taught. The same was even more true of the Enlightenment as a whole. From about 1770 on, this view came under attack at the hand of the nascent Romantic Movement which insisted that the emotions of the heart, not calculations of the merely mechanical brain, stood at the center of human life.
The very nature of their quest, however, had led all subsequent authors to overestimate the role of immutable laws while underestimating that of the unknown, uncontrollable forces of human will and emotion.
Soldiers were more than robots who could fire so and so many rounds a minute. An army was not simply a machine moving along this axis or that and carrying out evolutions as its commander directed. It was the ever-variable, often unpredictable, state of mind of commanders and troops, and not simply calculations pertaining to time, distance, and the angles between lines of operations which governed victory and defeat, to say nothing of about the role played by that great incalculable, chance.
This he did by focusing on two questions, to wit: 1. What war was; and 2. What purpose it served. According to Clausewitz, the purpose of studying war was to provide commanders with a sound basis for their thinking and render it unnecessary to reinvent the wheel with every new situation. In the eyes of some informed readers, the pages which deal with this aspect of the problem are the best and most enduring part of his entire opus.
Absolute war is defined as an elemental act of violence in which all ordinary social restraints were cast off. Since force would naturally invite the use of greater force, war also possessed an inherent tendency towards escalation. That made it essentially uncontrollable and unpredictable, “a great passionate drama.” Its successful conduct was above all a question of possessing the qualities needed in order to counter and mater these inherent characteristics.
Clausewitz also had much to say about willpower, bravery, and endurance both in the commander — whose “genius” they formed — and in the army which, from top to bottom, had to be imbued with “military virtue.” Though allowing the use of every expedient and requiring the full participation of the intellect, at its core, war was not a question of knowledge, but of character.
Much like his immediate predecessors, Clausewitz distinguished between tactics, which he called the art of winning battles, and strategy, which he defined as the art of using battles to gain the objectives of the campaign. More fundamentally, though, war was a duel between two independent minds. Its interactive nature sharply differentiated it from other activities.
The outstanding quality of the attack, he writes, is the delivery of a blow. The outstanding quality of the defense is the need to wait for that blow and parry it. Since anything that does not happen favors the defense, it is easier to defend than to attack, all else being equal. Moreover, the farther away an attacker gets from his base the greater his logistic difficulties and the more forces he will lose owing to the need to leave behind garrisons, safeguard his communications, and the like.
War was not simply a phenomenon in its own right. As a product of social intercourse it was, or at any rate ought to be, a deliberate political act. “A continuation of policy by other means.”
There can be no war without bloodshed; in dangerous things such as war, errors committed out of a feeling of benevolence are the worst.
Clausewitz recommend the use of maximum force, the Chinese of minimum force.
Regarding themselves as emerging from centuries of barbarism, the men of the 15th century were acutely aware of their own inferiority vis a vis the ancient world in every field, the military one included. Accordingly, for them it was a question not so much of seeking innovations as of recovering and assimilating the achievements of that world. No one was more representative of these attitudes than Machiavelli, to whom the very idea of outdoing his admired Romans would have been sacrilege.
And yet, even with von Bulow, the situation began to change. For von Bulow this was because the ancient textbooks had absolutely nothing to say about strategy, precisely the field to which he himself had made the greatest contribution, of which he was understandably proud.
Even so, battle remained very much what it had always been. Thus Napoleon towards the end of his career was able to boast of having commanded in no fewer than sixty “pitched battles”. A phrase that speaks for itself.
During the Civil War, commanders who had never previously been in charge of large units and amateurish troops less bound to the past than many of their professional colleagues across the Atlantic did not hesitate to break formation, seek shelter, and adopt camouflage clothing when they thought doing so could save their lives.
Fighting against non-European peoples, du Picq had witnessed the power of military organization at first hand. Had not Napoleon said that, whereas one Mamluk was the equal of three Frenchman, a hundred Frenchmen could confidently take on five times their number in Mamluk? Individual men were often cowards; however, having trained together and standing together in formation, they were transformed. A new social force, known as cohesion, made its appearance as comrade sustained comrade and mutual shame prevented each other from running away.
To paraphrase, four men who do not know each other will hesitate to confront a lion. But once they know each other and feel they can trust each other they will do so without fear. That, rather than any clever evolutions which it might carry out, was the secret of the ancient Greek and Macedonian phalanx in which men, packed closely together in their ranks and files, sustained each other and, if necessary, physically pushed each other into battle while preventing any escape.
Moltke’s starting point was the rise of the size of armies that taken place as a result of growing population and industrialization. Instead of tens of thousands, they now numbered hundreds of thousands. The problem was how mobilize them quickly and deploy them on the frontier, and it was here that the railways came in handy.
He drew up extremely detailed plans for using the railways to carry out mobilization and deployment. They took the world’s breath away as the Prussian Army mobilized with an efficiency, and at a speed, which had previously been considered unattainable.
He realized that the rise of quick-firing weapons had caused the balance between offense and defense to change. To attack frontally in the face of rifles was suicide. Much better to look for enemy’s flank and envelop him. The enemy would be caught between armies coming form two, possibly three, directions, and be crushed between them. Moltke called this “the highest feat which strategy can achieve.” Strategically speaking, Moltke intended his armies to take the offensive. Tactically the troops were supposed to use their firepower and remain on the defense, although in practice that order was not always obeyed.
To carry out the mobilization and coordinate the moves of his widely-dispersed forces Moltke made use of another new technical instrument, the telegraph. If only because the railways themselves could only be operated to maximum effect if the trains’ movements were carefully coordinated, wires and tracks tended to run in parallel.
The Kaiser himself was said to have kept it at his bedside, and made sure every naval officer read it. This success in turn was due to the fact that, in an age dominated by several great and would-be great “World Powers,” Mahan had succeeded in putting together a remarkably coherent case as to why such Powers should have navies; what having such navies entailed; and how they should be used.
Our American born and bred prophet of seapower might have said that the best naval strategy was always to be very strong. First in general and then at the decisive point. Once created, the battle-fleet should be kept as concentrated as circumstances permitted and launched straight at the opposing fleet with the objective of annihilating it. Thus considered, Mahan’s work represents one long diatribe against commerce-raiding and in favor of navies made up of the most powerful available capital ships.
Needless to say, this also entailed massive investments in other components of naval infrastructure such as qualified manpower, ports, depots, dry-docks, shipyards, factories for manufacturing arms and armor, and transportation facilities like the Suez, Panama and Kiel Canals. All of this Mahan explains at some length, which in turn contributed to his popularity, not only in naval circles, but among certain segments of industry and the political world as well.
Always tending to be pragmatic, though, the British had never been among the great producers of military theory, naval theory included. Many officers continued to argue that, in view of the Navy’s past record, a theoretical education was not really needed.
Add to the fact that, at sea as on land, the defensive was the more powerful form of war, and Mahan’s prescription for using the concentrated fleet for seeking out the enemy and dealing a single offensive blow turned out to be completely wrong. Instead, and other things being equal, a compelling case could be made in favor of a careful, and necessarily prolonged, struggle of attrition — safeguarding one’s own commerce, disrupting that of the enemy by every means that came to hand, and using the Navy to land forces at selected points in the enemy’s rear so as to disrupt his plans and throw him out of gear. All this was particularly true if the political entity waging the war was not a country facing a neighbor but a far-flung empire dependent on its lines of communication.
Each attacking aircraft would have to be countered by 20 defensive ones; or else, if the job were entrusted to guns, hundreds if not thousands of them.
A mere three aircraft could deliver as much firepower as could a modern battleship in a single broadside, whereas a thousand aircraft could deliver ten times as much firepower as could the entire British Navy — counting 30 battleships — in ten. Yet the price-tag of a single battleship was said to be about equal to that of a thousand aircraft.
Once command of the air had been attained — meaning that the enemy, his bases destroyed, was no longer able to interfere with operations — the attackers should switch from military objectives to civilian ones, knocking them out one by one. Industrial plants as well as population centers ought to be attacked; that attacker’s principal weapon ought to be gas, the aim not merely to kill but to demoralize.
He called Clausewitz the “Mahdi of Mass;” the prophet whose clarion-call had misled generations of officers into the belief that the best, indeed almost the only, way to wage war was to form the greatest possible concentration of men and weapons and launch it straight ahead against the enemy.
To restore the power of the offensive and save casualties, Hart went on to recommend “the indirect approach.” Rather than attacking the enemy head on, he had to be weakened first by having his limbs cut off, his organization disrupted, and the mind of his commander unbalanced. This could be achieved by combining rapidity of movement with secrecy and surprise. The goal was to conceal the true center of gravity for as long as possible; the means were to be strikes carried out by dispersed forces coming from unexpected directions and following the route of least expectation, even if mounting them meant overcoming topological obstacles. Above all, every plan had to possess “two branches,” which meant it should be drawn up in such a way to keep Red guessing at Blue’s true objectives. It should also be sufficiently flexible to enable that objective to be changed if, by some mishap, the first one turned out to be too strongly defended.
The next war would not be a gentlemanly fight for limited stakes to be won by the side with the swiftest and sharpest sword. Instead it would be a life and death struggle to be won by the belligerent with the greatest resources and the strongest willpower — which incidentally disposed of any childish illusions concerning small, professional and highly mobile, let alone chivalrous, armed forces. Anything not serving the war effort would have to be ruthlessly discarded, and this specifically included playing at politics. The latter would, in effect, be swallowed by the war; they would become identical with it. “All the theories of Clausewitz should be thrown overboard. Both war and policy serve the existence of the nation. However, war is the highest expression of the people’s will to live. Therefore politics must be made subordinate to war.” Or, to the extent that they were not, they were superfluous and, indeed, treasonable.
As both fighter bombers and armored divisions operated by dropping or firing massive quantities of steel into the air they were heavily dependent on lines of communications for that steel as well as fuel; with the result that the objective of strategy remained to cut those lines.
Over the decades, these debates provided a living for thousands if not tens of thousands of analysts in and out of uniform. More important, on both sides of the Iron Curtain they fed vast “military-industrial complexes” which gave employment to millions and were not without influence both on the economies and on the political system of the countries which they were supposed to serve.
Later the idea of “Massive Retaliation” was adopted by the incoming Eisenhower Administration. As Secretary of State Alan Dulles declared in a famous speech, the US would not permit the other side to dictate the site and mode of the next war. Instead, any attempt by the Communist to engage in aggression anywhere in the world might be instantly met with means, and at a place, of America’s own choosing.
From the late 60s on, any country in possession of the industrial and technological resources necessary for waging large scale conventional war was also able to build nuclear weapons. Hence, and not surprisingly, there was a growing tendency for such war to be fought solely by, or against, third and fourth rate countries — the most recent case in point being Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and then Libya.
Terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and insurgency are nothing new. Throughout history, people too weak to meet their opponents in open battle have resorted to attacking them by stealth, sometimes winning the struggle but more often losing it as ruthless countermeasures, including turning entire districts into deserts, were taken.
Instead they were to operate against his flanks, his foraging parties, the garrisons which he put into isolated places and the like; all the while relying on speed and surprise to concentrate their own troops, do their worst, and disappear again before reinforcements could be brought up and retaliatory action taken. Logistically speaking they were to be sustained partly from the countryside and to have permanent, and vulnerable, bases. So far, the theory; however, it should by no means be overlooked that, throughout the revolt, Lawrence and Sharif Hussein received both money and weapons from his British Military Headquaters, Egypt.
As will be evident from the above account, Lawrence was concerned above all with the tactical and operational — assuming the later term is applicable at all — aspects of guerrilla warfare. In this respect, subsequent authors have added little to his work; after all, there are only so many ways of saying that “when the enemy advances, we retreat.” What the other important writer on guerrilla warfare, Mao Tse tung, added was, first, an analysis of the relationship between the guerrillas and the people at large and, second, his famous “three stage” theory of the way in which the campaign ought to proceed. Dependent as the guerrillas were on the people for shelter and supply, the indispensable condition for obtaining success consisted of gaining the support of that people. Various methods could be used: including propaganda, deliberately provoking the enemy into reprisals, or by main force. If the third method was used, good care should be taken not to allow the guerrillas to become simply a group of marauders. The essential point to grasp — and it is here that Mao made his greatest contribution of all — was that the struggle is primarily political in nature.
The more countries acquired nuclear weapons, though, the less likely Clausewitz’s vision of war was to come true.
Thus it is scant wonder that, as of the beginning of the 21st century, military theory seems to be more confused and less coherent than it has been in a long time.
Here the assumption is that there are two basic kinds of war, i.e. those in which the distinction between government, armed forces and people is maintained and those in which it is not. The former prevailed in the Hellenistic world, Imperial Rome, and Europe from the end of the 30 Years War to 1945. The latter ruled most historical times and places including, increasingly, our own.
Like all other forms of war, cyberwar has its advantages and its disadvantages, its possibilities and its limitation. Given the secrecy in which the field is shrouded, and the limited experience we have with it, the debate about it is only in its infancy. Yet one thing seems clear. In the past, each time advancing technology enabled mankind to move into a new environment, war quickly followed. One could, indeed, argue that it is only when man uses an environment for war that he really comes to dominate it. To that extent, the extension of war into cyberspace appears inevitable.