“You know you never defeated us on the battlefield.” His North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, paused a moment, then replied: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
Although historically people have defined military strategy in various ways, the principal task of the strategist has remained virtually the same. Simply put, that task consists in countering the strengths and exploiting the weaknesses of an opponent in ways that make accomplishing one’s purpose ever more likely. In practice, strategy comes down to out-positioning one’s rivals, not just militarily, but also diplomatically and, if possible, economically and culturally, even before the first clash of arms and often well after hostilities have ceased.
Regardless of scope, scale, or aim, military strategy begins with appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of an adversary as they relate to one’s own, and to what one wants. It often requires revising one’s aims and improvising one’s courses of actions as the struggle progresses. It ends when one party, or the other, has had enough, or literally can do no more.
Sun Tzu discussed strategy in terms of gaining material and moral advantages such that a battle is won before it is fought. Others referred to it as “making war on the map,” that is, maneuvering for positional advantages. Clausewitz drew a sharp distinction between tactics and strategy: he defined the former is the use of armed forces to win engagements; the later is the use of engagements to achieve the purpose of the war. Moltke portrayed strategy as opportune adapting to war’s changing circumstances until victory is achieved. On the other hand, Freedman suggests strategy may well be the art of generating power.
Some modern historians refer to strategy as a long-term vision and stress its attendant need for planning and decision making.
Modern defense analysts often divide military strategy (and grand strategy) into 3 essential components: ends (objectives) + ways (course of action) + means (resources).
Ends may include intimidating, deterring, persuading, coercing, punishing, subduing, or conquering an adversary. Ways are essentially types of military strategy, or combinations of them. Means equate to military power.
A good strategy is said to be one in which all 3 components are in balance, that is, the means are sufficient to accomplish the ends through the designated ways. The basic rationale for balance is to reduce risk. Military commanders tend to vie risk differently from heads of state. Commanders define risk as the likelihood a mission might fail: high risk means high probability of failure. They usually try to reduce risk by increasing resources in some way. In contrast, heads of state view risk as a function of the political capital they might have to invest, or have already invested. Put simply, political capital is the trust and confidence the public has in its leadership. As the commitment of resources (lives and treasure) increases, so too does the risk to political capital. Accordingly, political leaders prefer to keep the resources they commit to a military action, especially human lives, as low as possible.
No scientific method exists for determining how much military power is enough, or when balance is achieved. That answer depends largely on the professional judgment of military commanders, and on what domestic conditions will allow in terms of the expenditure of fiscal resources and political capital. In truth, balance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
If the environment is competitive and an adversary is present, one needs a strategy; otherwise, a plan will suffice.
Like all forms of power, military power is inherently multidimensional. It is typically categorized as land power, sea power, air power, and informational and cyber power.
The following 9 principles appear most frequently in professional military literature:
- Objective: defining the goal and ensuring every military action contributes toward achieving it
- Maneuver: gaining positional advantage
- Surprise: attack one’s foe in an unexpected manner
- Mass: concentrating military power to achieve superiority
- Economy of force: ensuring secondary efforts receive only as much force as necessary
- Offensive: gaining the initiative or the temporal upper-hand
- Security: ensuring one’s forces are well protected
- Simplicity: avoiding complicated schemes and communications
- Unity of command: placing the direction of the war under a single political-military authority to avoid conflicting interests
There are many types of military strategy. Among the most common historically are annihilation, dislocation, attrition, exhaustion, coercion, deterrence, terror and terrorism, and decapitation and targeted killing.
Attrition and exhaustion are the polar opposites of annihilation and dislocation. Attrition means reducing an adversary’s physical capacity to fight; exhaustion amounts to wearing down the opponent’s willingness to do so.
Strategies of terror and terrorism endeavor to succeed by leveraging fear. Strategies of terror include the aerial bombing of a hostile party’s vital centers so as to cause its population to demand peace. Terrorism has many varieties, but in general it endeavors to compel a change in a party’s behavior by instilling fear either through selective targeting or through mass targeting of noncombatants.
The 21st century will see about a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.
Victory is the main objective in war. If this is long delayed, weapons are blunted and morale depressed. For this reason, most parties want to win quickly. The strategies of annihilation and dislocation are classic ways of doing that.
Certainly, Hannibal’s initial military strategy rested on an incorrect assumption about his opponent, and he lacked an appealing alternative in the event it proved false. Nonetheless, his error lay less in failing to use his victory to full effect but rather in expecting his enemy to act in a certain way, the way belligerents had traditionally behaved after a defeat of such magnitude.
While no official blitzkrieg doctrine actually existed, the German army at the time did have an established theoretical and practical preference for a war of movement rather than a war of position. In the 1920s, the Germany army consciously decided the static, positional warfare of WW1 was an aberration, a situation to be avoided in the future. It decided, instead, to return to the principles that had brought victory in the campaigns against France in 1870-71. Chief among these principles was the idea of relentless forward movement — an unremitting battle, battle without morning. Once a breakthrough was achieved, the object of a war of movement was to keep an enemy force off balance by constantly moving and attacking so as to retain the initiative and prevent one’s opponent from reestablishing a firm defensive line.
It was a concept that involved massive use of heavy armored divisions and cooperation between them and airplanes, but also the creation of disorder in the enemy’s rear by parachute raids and by false news and orders by telephone to the civil authorities. Reynaud then added, “Of all the tasks which confront us the most important is clear thinking. We must think of the new type of warfare we are facing and take immediate decisions.”
In truth, the Wehrmacht never possessed the level of mechanization or motorization necessary for such an undertaking. Germany’s logistical system, geared more for short, sharp offensives, could not keep pace with the incessant demand for troops and material caused by warfare on the vast Russian steppes.
The key to success appeared to be act quickly to isolate an uprising before it could gather momentum and spread, which usually required co-opting or apprehending rebel leaders and their followers while simultaneously restricting or destroying their logistical wherewithal. Mere acts of reprisal alone, as the Romans (and virtually every army since) discovered, often proved counterproductive. Nevertheless, extending olive branches without a supporting display of force was sometimes interpreted as weakness, and it usually encouraged opponents to hold out for a better deal, or to escalate their attacks.
Throughout the ages, effective results in war have rarely been attained unless the approach has had such indirectness as to ensure the opponent’s unreadiness to meet it. The indirectness has usually been physical, and always psychological. In strategy, the longest way round is often the shortest way home.
He took pains to explain not only when and why the indirect approach succeeded, but also why direct measures fell short. The greater the psychological surprise and dislocation, the greater the victory.
Despite Hart’s efforts to prove otherwise, history is replete with cases in which avoiding the direct approach ended in disaster or disappointment. Hart essentially pruned and grafted history to fit his theory, which can be reduced to avoiding the most obvious path to one’s aim.
However, sometimes an adversary can be brought to the point of exhaustion by continuing to resist and thereby making the war seem endless or pointless. HCM used a strategy of exhaustion to make French occupation too painful for them. He boldly warned a French general, though 10 Vietnamese will die for every Frenchman killed, the French will tire of the struggle first.
In fact, every military strategy involves wearing down an adversary’s material or psychological strength, or at least threatening to do so. Also, attrition and exhaustion are what typically results when other strategies fail.
In a single month during the Battle of Britain, the Fighter Command of the RAF lost a third of its aircraft to a combination of friendly fire and accidents.
Likewise, from 1941 to 1942 the Japanese military reported 40% of its aircraft losses were caused by direct combat, while the remaining 60% were the result of training or transportation-related causes.
The Soviet Red Army had to replaced about 20% of its heavy equipment on a monthly basis simply due to operational wear and tear.
The vast territory the Axis powers had conquered became a double-edged sword because they lacked the resources to hold it, and their attempts to relocate reserves to crisis areas left them exposed to greater transportation-related attrition as well as the ravages of Allied air power.
Exhaustion can be thought of as a form of psychological attrition. It hits emotional or intangible factors such as morale and public confidence.
The leaders of the Axis had miscalculated the resolve for the Allies, whom they saw as racially and psychologically inferior, and their frequent use of terror to weaken that resolve generally produced the opposite effect.
This type of blockade is also a form of economic warfare, and it can require months or even years to generate results. It is essentially a large-scale siege.
A “scorched earth” policy is the proverbial sword that cuts both ways.
His aim was to make the South, and Georgia in particular, feel the “hard hand of war” for seceding. His troops attempted to do this by looting crops and livestock, destroying railroads, and burning buildings. As always, civilians suffer most when such strategies are pursued, and they suffer by the hands of their own leaders perhaps more than those of the invaders. This is perhaps the chief disadvantage of a scorched-earth policy or a war of exhaustion in general.
His army initially consisted largely of militia and short-term volunteers, who lacked the discipline and training to go head to head with the British. Nonetheless, they could inflict considerable losses under the right conditions, and every British casualty was many times more difficult to replace than an American one. Thus, the necessary ingredients were present for Washington to inflict both physical and psychological harm on the British, as long as he could keep his army from being destroyed or dissolving from loss of heart.
Victories, even on a small scale, can be important for their psychological value. Victories strengthen resolve, offer proof of military prowess, and help attract allies and other forms of external support.
Attrition works best when used against materially weaker foes; exhaustion can help inferior powers outlast materially stronger ones, even when they are using attrition. However, one must have the requisite political and cultural patience to employ these strategies. Some political causes, such as “national liberation,” are more tolerant of prolonged military campaigns and high casualties than others.
The RAF claimed 2.7K kills. The Luftwaffle’s actual losses were 1.7K.
The Luffwaffe claimed 3.2K kills. The RAF’s losses were 1.6K.
The US found it difficult to apply a strategy of attrition during the Vietnam conflict not only because the NVA and VC took advantage of the thick jungle vegetation to conceal their movements, but also because the “political” geography of the region afforded them safe havens in Cambodia and Laos. Likewise, Pakistan became something of a safe haven for al Qaeda and Taliban forces.
Employing strategies of attrition or exhaustion generally will require taking the following considerations into account. First, one needs to assess how one’s resolve compares to that of one’s opponent with respect to the stakes at hand. Second, one must determine the degree to which material strength alone could prove decisive. Third, one has to evaluate how physical and political geographies in the region will affect the implementation of either strategy.
“If you desire peace, prepare for war.” Vegetius’s axiom is a warning based on a realist’s view of human nature. However, it also underscores the core principle of deterrence: to discourage aggression, we must appear strong enough to defeat an attack, or at least to make it too costly to be worthwhile.
Deterrence is define as making people decide not to do something, such as launch an attack.
Coercion is understood to mean compelling people to do something, such as withdraw their military forces.
Nonetheless, such an imbalance, however formidable, has little deterrent or coercive value unless it is accompanied by the political will to use it. Yet, determining whether the willingness to use military force exists is ultimately a subjective call.
During the Cold War, the study of deterrence theories expanded enormously, and virtually every type of deterrence was employed in some fashion by the superpowers or their allies.
Since deterrence can only be tested negatively, by events that do not take place, and since it is never possible to demonstrate why something has not occurred, it became especially difficult to assess whether the existing policy was the best possible policy or a just barely effective one.
If would-be attackers do not fear death, how can they be deterred?
Perhaps more than any other type of military strategy, deterrence requires a similarity in outlook, or a baseline of expectation, from which each party can understand the actions and reactions of the other. One way to describe this similarity in outlook is by means of the term “rational actor.” Without such a basis, misunderstandings are likely to occur, which can lead to overreactions.
Kahn’s ideas thus won more acceptance in the transparent world of game theory than in the much foggier realm of international relations.
The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy — vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.
At least 2 schools of thought emerged. The first believes coercive strategies are most successful when threats need not be carried out; it is the threat of force, or pain yet to come, more than its actual use, or pain already inflicted, that is most important.
The second school of thought views coercion as a function of the threat of military failure, which typically involves the systematic destruction of an opponent’s military capabilities until it realizes it would be better off if it complied. This is known as coercion by denial because at its core is the use of destruction to deny a party the ability to accomplish its aims.
Both Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2003 illustrate how difficult it can be do determine which instrument of military power, if any, produced the truly decisive coercive effect against a foe, despite very strong arguments by the military services. Rather than attempting to sort through situational ambiguities to find the single most decisive coercive measure, it is best to think of coercion as a compound employment of multiple forms of diplomatic, military, economic, and informational means.
Coercion has many of the same limitations as deterrence. It requires active monitoring of potentially fluid situations, credible communications across cultural and psychological boundaries, and at least some shared expectations as to certain actions. Like most other strategies, coercion is vulnerable to mirror-imaging, or projecting one’s values and ways of thinking onto one’s adversaries. Such projections lead to risky assumptions about what one’s rivals hold dear and how they will behave. Policymakers in Washington assumed Hanoi’s leadership would respond to the bombing in the way they would have responded.
In theory, coercive diplomacy and other forms of coercion offer more flexibility and greater control over escalation than military strategies such as attrition or annihilation. For instance, one can apply force in the form of “graduated pressure” to achieve limited gains. To stop the process, one’s opponents have to use military force more assertively, which they might not be prepared to do.
On the one hand, applying military pressure gradually or in stages offers the possibility of achieve one’s objectives at minimal cost. On the other hand, it can also prolong a conflict, increase one’s losses, and put one’s objectives at risk, particularly when an administration presides over an indifferent, unwilling, or divided public. The influence of friction and human emotion can also make it difficult to measure and control the level of force on must employ. It is unclear whether an American victory, or at least a favorable settlement, might have been achieved had the US employed greater force at the outset in Vietnam; this option enjoyed only limited political support at the time.
Terror is a psychological weapon of unbelievable power. Before the bodies of those whose throats have been cut and the grimacing faces of the mutilated, all capacity for resistance lapses; the spring is broken.
Terror and terrorism are military strategies largely because of their coercive power. They are used to break an opponent’s willingness to fight or to induce a change in a rival power’s policies or behavior. Terror is not just a military strategy; criminal gangs and drug cartels often use it to protect their respective operations and to send warnings to their rivals.
The finite assets he possessed during the war could not destroy every major industrial center in Germany without prolonging the conflict for another 4 or 5 years. Instead, he focused on “attacking as many centers as could be reached, and thus the moral effect was first of all very much greater, as no town felt safe.”
Once Britons proved to themselves they could survive such attacks, subsequent bombings became less terrifying. In short, a party’s citizenry could rebound psychologically from the terror and shock of aerial bombing. The psychological effects of terror were thus not necessarily permanent.
Strategic terror bombing assumes the will of a people and that of its leadership are linked. Accordingly, terrorizing the populace should drive the latter to capitulate. However, that did not happen in WW2, despite historically unprecedented destruction.
During the course of the Pacific war, nearly 161K tons of bombs were dropped on the Japanese home islands. However, less than 10% actually hit their targets.
The White House also had to deal with a growing moral backlash — as bombing levels rose, the antiwar movement intensified at home, and US allies began to waver in their support of American direction of the war.
New air power theories emerged, such as “Shock and Awe,” based on modifying an adversary’s behavior through the pinpoint use of terror. American air commanders put the theory into action in Iraq in 2003 with a massive strike of combat aircraft and cruise missiles. However, such precision applications of terrors proved less effective than expected, partly because the fear they inspired was only temporary and targeted populations simply waited out the storm.
Some of the most notable revolutionary leaders of the 20th century initially saw terror as integral to their strategies for political change. Lenin openly advocated the use of “guerrilla warfare and mass terror” to coerce “the masses” psychologically and to defeat, if not exterminate, any counter-revolutionaries. Violent overthrow and control of the population through terror were key principles in Lenin’s theory of revolution. Mao, too, promoted a theory of revolution in which the use of terror was essential to securing the support of the civilian population. “To put it bluntly, It was necessary to bring about a brief reign of terror in every rural area; otherwise one could never suppress the activities of the counter-revolutionaries.”
HCM also built his base of support in Vietnam largely through terror and psychological coercion. The Vietminh attacked not only occupying troops but also many Vietnamese civilians. By 1956, their successors, the Viet Cong, routinely used violence to intimidate Vietnamese villagers and to assassinate political leaders. Such actions sent clear warnings about where the population’s political allegiances should lie.
As Mao said of his army’s effort in those years, it had been 70% expanding our own forces, 20% resisting the Nationalists, and 10% fighting Japan. Throughout the campaign against the Japanese, Mao’s propaganda machine claimed responsibility for nearly every successful raid or ambush, and he accused his nationalist allies of incompetence and corruption.
Castro’s successful revolution in Cuba offered 3 main lessons. First, popular forces can win a war against a regular army, despite an initial inferiority in numbers and equipment. Second, one need not wait for the conditions to be right before beginning a revolution because the insurrectionist foco can create them. Finally, in underdeveloped lands, such as Latin America, the armed struggle should be fought mostly in the countryside where the lack of communication and transportation networks would prevent government forces from quickly reinforcing one another.
Dealing with terrorism, in other words, requires a sober perspective so as to avoid political and social overreaction; the effects of terrorism are obviously more dangerous than mere statistics might suggest especially because they can provoke negative political change and exacerbate social divisions.
In short, terror may indeed raise public awareness of a cause, but at the same time, it may strengthen the public’s determination to see that cause fail.
In addition, debates between consequentialists (those who justify a war act based on whether the consequences of not doing it are worse) and intrinsicists (those who believe certain acts are just or unjust in themselves) continue, and may do so for some time.
Warden’s theory likened an opponent to a dynamic system of 5 interconnected subsystems: leadership, organic or system essentials (raw materials, energy and food sources, etc.), communications and transportation infrastructures, population, and fielded military forces.
From the standpoint of collapsing an organization, decapitation runs the obvious risk of removing from power the person or group who actually can order opposing military forces to stop fighting. To illustrate the problem with an analogy, if the adversary were an octopus rather than a snake, the head might indeed be severed from the body, yet the individual legs and tentacles can still inflict a great deal of harm.
In Jan 2014, director of US National Intelligence, James Clapper, avoided the pitfall of rhetorical excess when he reported, accurately, that the true source of America’s cyber vulnerability was its trust in the security of online infrastructures coupled with the rapid migration of “essential government functions, industry and commerce, health care, social communication, and personal information” to digital networks. 18 months later, the US Office of Personnel Management admitted its security had been breached and that sensitive information about some 4M US government employees had been stolen.
Other experts have suggested that cyber war is only marginally about physical or financial damage, such as when people’s PINs are stolen or when bank transactions are blocked by DoS attacks. Instead, cyber war is more about the potential cyberspace offers for the manipulation of information. Such manipulation facilitates the shaping of political opinions, consumer biases and habits, social norms, group identities, and cultural values.
As Clausewitz said, war has its own grammar, or operational principles, but not its own logic.
Even when military commanders possess exceptional skills, they frequently lack the full authority to attack who, what, when, where, and how they wish; nor do they necessarily have enough of the right means at hand to execute the ideal strategy. Instead, what typically happens is the opposing sides do their best to pursue victory in an environment characterized by chance and uncertainty. This makes for some very untidy consequences, and all but ensure the ideal outcomes praised by Sun Tzu rarely, if ever, occur.
Numerous theories explain why strategies succeed or fail. Ultimately, though, a successful military strategy is simply one that works. Nothing in war is certain, but nothing in war should be left to chance either. Taking all the right steps will not guarantee victory, but doing so can tip the odds in one’s favor.
“There is no more precious asset for a general than knowledge of his opponent’s guiding principles and character, and anyone who thinks the opposite is at once blind and foolish.” Polybius had in mind the example of Hannibal, who exploited the key personality traits of several of Rome’s commanders to defeat them.
It is not always wise to abandon one’s original goals to pursue such opportunities, tempting as they may be. History is replete with examples of heads of state and generals, who, whether influenced by hubris or greed, imprudently attempted to seize goals beyond the reach of their military power. On the other hand, the failure to exploit opportunities can lead to greater costs, perhaps prolonging the conflict or causing it to fail.
Obviously, military strategies fail when they lack some of the elements crucial to success, namely, objective assessments, sound courses of action, expert military commanders, and war plans coherent enough to pull everything together.