In stating the foregoing I am not raising the old cry of armies preparing for the last war. Indeed, armies do not prepare for the last war, they frequently prepare for the wrong one — if for no other reason than that governments will usually fund only the anticipated primary threat as opposed to risk, and the adversary will usually play to his opponents’ weakness rather than strength.
In other words, I worked in tandem with diplomats and politicians, civil servants and officials of the UN and other international organizations, implementing the largely political mandates handed down to me. It was this insight into the civilian national and international decision-making processes that I took with me into subsequent commands, and which led me to realize there was a dissonance between the organization of existing forces and their operational activity. No less, it became obvious to me that the extant theories of military organization and application and the unfolding realities were wide apart. No more was I part of a world of wars in which the civilian and military establishments each had its distinct stages.
Part of my reluctance to write in the first place is that I distrust memory; my own as much as others. I am not suggesting we lie deliberately, but the moment and event has occurred and we know its outcome we are prone to reorder and reinterpret the information and decisions we took in light of the outcome.
Failure is an orphan but success has a thousand fathers.
War no longer exists. Confrontation, conflict and combat undoubtedly exist all around the world, and states still have armed forces which they use as a symbol of power.
The practice of war, indeed its “art,” is to achieve an asymmetry over the opponent. Labeling wars as asymmetric is to me something of a euphemism to avoid acknowledging that my opponent is not playing to my strengths and I am not winning. In which case perhaps the model of war rather than its name is no longer relevant: the paradigm has changed.
Military force when employed has only 2 immediate effects: it kills people and destroys things.
Military force is applied by armed forces composed of men, materiel and their logistic support. The capability of these armed forces to act is never merely an inventory of the 3 but rather a function of their organization, and always in relation to the opposing forces, the circumstances of the time and the specific battle.
I had failed to realize that my enemy had a free, creative mind and was not thinking nor was going to think like me. From that point on I tried to construct all my operations so as to learn continuously what my enemy was intending to do rather than assuming knowledge.
A regular force is employed to serve a political purpose decided upon by a lawful government, which instructs the military, as a legally sanctioned and formed body answerable to that government, to apply the force. A regular force is therefore legal, deadly and destructive. An irregular force can be just as deadly and destructive, but operates outside the state, and therefore the laws of that state. However, their irregularity does not in itself put them beyond the protection of international law.
Yet this cannot be so; whilst the application of force for immoral reasons or in an illegal way is not to be countenanced, it is also not a sufficient manner in which to understand a core reality: we the people need a force as a basic element of our lives for 2 generic overarching purposes — defence and security. Put more particularly, or even personally, we need people to defend our homes and ourselves, and to secure our interests.
However, it is necessary to understand that in many of the circumstances into which we now deploy, our forces as a military force will not be effective. The coalition forces in Iraq were a classic example of this situation: their effectiveness as a military force ended once the fighting between military forces was completed in May 2003.
Generally, except self-defense, the use of military force is seen as an act of last resort to be entered into only after all other measures to achieve a resolution have been exhausted.
Once at war the adversaries, whilst expected to obey the Geneva Conventions, do not have to play by the same rules of the game; indeed, much of the generalship involves arranging to play on a pitch, in a style and to rules that suit your side and disadvantage the other. Furthermore, and unlike all other socially acceptable behavior except some sports, wars and fights are not competitions: to be second is to lose.
Wars and conflicts are conducted at 4 levels — political, strategic, theatre and tactical — with each level sitting within the context of the other, in descending order from the political; it is this that gives context to all the activities of all the levels aimed at the same objectives, and enables coherence between them. The political level is the source of power and decision.
It is during this analysis of threats and risks that the role of military force is introduced, in terms of what is expected to achieve and the manner of its achievement. The purist will argue that this should be decided early in the debate, but in practice this only occurs with an imminent threat. In the main this policy debate is about anticipated threats and unfolds much like decisions about insurance: we know we need some, but not so much as to inhibit life today to cover some distant prospect that may not occur. Nonetheless, since the policy provides the nest for the strategy, in peacetime the strategist must still be involved with the formulation of the former. For it is he who brings the harsh realities of combat to the debate and the product of his efforts is to be found in the quality, morale, adaptability, equipment and quantity of the forces available to his successors when faced with an opponent.
At the same time, it must always be remembered that the political objective and the military strategic objective are not the same, and are never the same: the military strategy objective is achieved by military force while political objective is achieved as a result of the military success.
As such, one should be seeking to devise a strategy that is better than his opponent’s in the circumstances. Nor is the expression of a strategy a carefully crafted plan, but rather a desired pattern to events. Command in war rarely involves the rehearsal of a carefully laid plan. The enemy, who is missing in peace, is taking every step he can to destroy the coherence of our organization and plans. It is the will and the method of overcoming the enemy that decides the outcome.
The test of a good strategy is that it achieves its object without the necessity for battle. As Sun Tzu put it: “What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy; next best is to disrupt his alliances; next best is to attack his army.” However, these adversarial affairs rarely allow one strategy to be so successful over the other.
The essence of all tactics is fire and movement, and the basic tactical dilemma is to find the correct balance between how much effort to apply to striking the opponent to achieve the objective and how much to countering his blows. In many ways, tactical warfare is akin to the art of boxing. The combatants requires physical fitness, a degree of skill and enduring courage in the face of an opponent’s blows. On this basis each party guards and strikes, seeking to break through the other’s defense so as to deliver telling combinations of punches and ideally a knockout blow. The combinations are drilled into the boxer by long practice. His art is in forcing his opponent to leave a vulnerable spot unguarded and recognizing the opportunity in time to take violent advantage of it.
The art of tactics is more like a lethal brawl in the gutter where there are no rules or referees, and where low cunning matched with the maximum use of force available wins the day. The outcome of tactics is simple: kill or be killed.
In the world of industrial war the premise is of the sequence peace-crisis-war-resolution, which will result in peace again, with the war, the military action, being the deciding factor.
The most obvious costs are money and manpower, and these must be estimated not only as they exist when a force is being formed, but also in costs to a society’s overall and continued well-being. For example, the force cannot take all the people who would be needed for the harvest or the maintenance of the economy, since both the force and society would starve; or else not all horses can be requisitioned. In short, the formation of a force must reflect a realistic balance of investment from available and future resources.
If the costs of manufacturing or purchasing the weapons and maintaining the force are so great as to become a burden that adversely affects the economy of the society, then at best the society fails to prosper and at worst the leaders have destroyed the very thing they sought to defend. We now tend to see this outcome as a mark of an underdeveloped society, and also of an undemocratic society, since people will always seek prosperity over military strength, unless their survival is under threat.
Britain, from the 17th century to WW2, defended the British Isles and its maritime trade by maintaining a strong navy. Its army and at the very end its air force was kept at the minimum to secure the empire, it being judged at that in a time of crisis the navy could prevent the loss of the kingdom for long enough for a suitable army to be formed. This military strategy was then complemented by other measures: diplomacy was centered on maintaining a balance of power in Europe such that no single state dominated the north coast of Europe and should it come to war there would be an ally on the continent.
Military fights are brutal because force is applied by military forces armed with lethal weapons. When unleashed, they will kill and destroy. That is what they are trained to do — and that is actually what we, civil society, ask of them.
On the whole our armies, navies and air forces — for in essence air forces as military entities were in one way or another spawned from the other two services — still carry much of the structure and organization Napoleon created when he remodeled the armies of France and set out to conquer Europe.
To understand Napoleon’s innovations, their durability and relevance to our use of force, it is best to start with the birth of the citizen army which provided both the sheer bulk necessary for his strategies and the new model of manpower: national soldiers. No longer were these serfs in uniform fighting for the king; these were French patriots fighting for the glory of France. Napoleon did not initiate this innovation, since the concept of conscription as universal military service in time of need may be traced back to ancient Egypt, whilst the idea that the citizen had a duty to the state to serve as a soldier was a product of the ideas of liberte, egalite and fraternite that underpinned the French Revolution. All and everyone joined together as French citizens, for each other and for the glory of France.
The military planner of today would recognize it as the basis of any modern conscription system — yet for the time it was an absolute revolution: establishing and maintaining a standing army not through money, or duty to a lord, or penal servitude, or professional qualifications, but rather through universal service on the basis of citizenship and gender.
In 1805, on the eve of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon rode over 50km, much of the time along the ranks of his army, tiring out horses and staff to inform his troops of the next day’s battle plan. This direct show of leadership, the setting of each man’s goal as equal to his own, and the show of confidence ensured a high morale, and undoubtedly contributed to their success in the battle.
Moreover, without conscription these men were not available in a steady stream, nor could they be rapidly replenished if lost. For Napoleon’s enemies, therefore, to lose the army in a battle was to lose the war. In his manpower Napoleon had a major strategic advantage — which he complemented with a second: firepower. He usually massed his guns into a “grand battery” on the axis of his attack, and used their power to batter a path into his enemy’s defence for his assaulting infantry columns. Apart from the destructive effect of their fire, the psychological effects of being exposed to this lethal punishment without being able to respond tested his opponent’s leadership, morale and discipline — on occasion to breaking point.
With his mass manpower and early industrial firepower, Napoleon implemented this precept though his innovative use of force: attacking the enemy’s main strength directly; closing with and destroying an opponent’s main force in the field. As a general rule the strategic military aims of the wars of the previous century had not been of such a decisive nature, if for no other reason than that the forces were similarly matched and, as noted, no side wanted to risk losing their in totality since it would take years and vast sums to rebuild and replace them.
By “marching divided,” sending off corps on different roads, Napoleon increased their ability to “march on their stomachs” by living off the land, there being fewer people foraging on any one route, with the consequent reduction in logistic and supply units in each corps. In fact, Napoleon was to a large extent making a virtue out of a necessity: given his huge armies and the distances they travelled, lengthy convoys of supplies would have been both expensive and impractical. However, his enemies were exactly thus encumbered.
A significant part of Napoleon’s genius lay in his distinction between the use of force and the utility of force — and his ability to put the former at the service of the latter.
Seen within the broader context of what is known as the balance of power, if wars were resorted to, they were conducted within the clear strategic aim and understanding that everyone’s power was to be preserved, at one level or another. Rulers and states remained intact even if land was sometimes ceded. Napoleon completely refuted this premise. His strategic political aim was precisely to change rulers and states, largely in order to make them part of his empire. His genius lay in marrying the military means he created and the method he devised of using them to achieve the end: the decisive defeat of the enemy force.
Each of these cases also proved that the Napoleonic, and subsequently the industrial, way of war depends on constant access to all the resources of the state, and becomes increasingly difficult to conduct as resources become reduced. After Trafalgar the British blockade of the continent slowly eroded France’s ability to sustain its wars since it could not supply them.
The sea and the steppes provided the strategic space to refuse the Napoleonic battle at the operational level in the same way that the rugged theatre of the Iberian Peninsula allowed the guerrillas and Wellington, each in their way, to manoeuvre tactically — and in a manner superior to Napoleon’s forces.
Napoleon’s innovations gave him the advantage at the operational level, but the British could beat his forces at the tactical level: where Napoleon understood mass, the British understood firepower.
It is because all decisions are taken and implemented under fire that there is a need for the force to have undergone appropriate drills and procedures — a necessity true to this day, regardless of the number of men. Without these drills and procedures commander will fail to move their commands fast enough in relation to the enemy to bring effective fire to bear and thus retain the initiative — in other words, be the ones dictating events.
With width he gains the greatest sight of the enemy, can bring fire to bear over the greatest area and has the greatest number of opportunities to attack the enemy. Against this, however, his line is much easier to penetrate at any given point, it is difficult to control and he cannot reinforce success easily. With depth he has the reverse of these advantages and disadvantages. A concentrated force is strong at the point of concentration, and is easy to command and supply; however, it is difficult to move, is a single target, and cannot see what is happening elsewhere. Moreover, for the commander it is also difficult to choose the right place to concentrate.
The essence of tactical skill is to be able to move rapidly from one to the other, from width to depth, and to disperse or concentrate as appropriate.
As a result, most battalions were filled with deserters from foreign armies, prisoners of war, criminals and vagabonds, recruited through cunning, violence, and the lure of gold. Only savage discipline could hold this heterogeneous mass of soldiers together, without which they would promptly desert. Indeed, desertion was the main concern of military leaders: Frederick II began his General Principles on the Conduct of War with 14 rules to avoid desertion.
He and other Prussian military reformers understood the operational flexibility resulting from the idea of the corp d’armee relatively quickly, but then came to realize this was not enough: there was a bigger issue at stake than military organization. It was Scharnhorst who sensed that in some unclear way it had to do with the new revolutionary state — that it was a political issue — which needed far more insight and comprehension than most officers possessed. To begin to broach this complicated matter Scharnhorst introduced liberal studies to the syllabus, which was an important step in itself, but one that did little to truly reform the army.
Such diminishment and strictures were a further blow for the army, which was still stunned from its humiliating defeats at Jena and Auerstadt. Nonetheless, it was through implementing these strictures that reform was achieved, to lasting effect: over years a different army came into being, with its new “thinking soldier,” the innovative idea of a general staff, and ultimately the theories of On War. These three linked together produced a doctrinal energy, and the nervous system to carry it, that would enable Prussia and then Germany to evolve through the following hundred years — and create a model of command that came to be emulated by many of the leading militaries in the world. This would establish an understanding of the organization and application of force that dominated the battlefield through two world wars — and possibly to this day. And it began with the painful reforms post-Jena.
However, it is possible that Napoleon’s significance would not have been understood, nor the meaning of the reforms endured, but for one man: Clausewitz. It was he who properly understood that Napoleon presented not just a bigger or stronger force — but a completely different one, which fought for different strategic aims. It was he who translated this understanding into the monumental On War, thereby codifying Napoleon’s actions within a theoretical construct and thereby also describing the Prussian reforms. In so doing he created one of the most important and enduring texts of military philosophy ever written.
As of 1815 these basic structures led to the development of institutions to support them, fueled by government thinking that followed a circular logic: In order to defend our state and advance our interests, we need armed forces. To win, we have learned from Napoleon that we must fight wars with all available resources. To this end we need to be able to mobilize a mass army with considerable reserves. But no mobilize we need to a have strategic plan so as to know what is required, in what order, and to what purpose. However, to have a strategy, we need an enemy. It is most logical to choose the worst case, and therefore be prepared for all lesser events.
Battle is an event of circumstance, no matter how much planning, exercising and drill precede it. The chances of victory are undoubtedly increased with proper preparation, but ultimately opponents fight the battle on the day: on another day, in the same location, with exactly the same forces, they would fight another battle in different circumstances.
The commander is therefore vital to understanding force. He is the personification of the force he commands. His aptitude for war and his character, his morale and his will to triumph are the essential ingredients that weld and focus the will and effort of his command to win. The commander is the source of the command’s driving logic and the application of this logic to the achievement of its object. It is he who makes the military decisions, and should carry all authorities to do this; in turn he is responsible for the outcome, win or lose.
To achieve maximum utility, the commander must therefore accept the reality of his subordinates and cast his plan according to his judgment of them and their capacities. If a man is good for 80% it is folly to give him a job that demands 90%. He will fail and it will be the fault of the commander, who demanded more than that officer could give. “An order shall contain everything that a commander cannot do by himself, but nothing else.” It is up to the commander to know what his subordinates are capable of when giving the order.
The commander must be exceedingly knowledgeable of his forces: the people, the structures, the capabilities.
Above all, the commander is the primary source of morale for his command. I define morale as that spirit that triumphs in adversity: it is a product of leadership, discipline, comradeship, confidence in self, and in the commander and his staff. Without high morale amongst his forces, especially in war, a commander stands little chance of success. Equally, the commander must sustain his own high morale — for it is that which will help him endure the isolation of decision, and those grinding days and nights during which he assumes the risks and uncertainties. It is what enables him to carry his burden: the knowledge that he is responsible for the lives under his command — and that if he is to achieve his objective he has no way of being certain to save them. Indeed, the only certainty of a commander’s plans is that there will be casualties.
As he put it, the aim was to “train the judgment of the officers, so that, when left to themselves, they may do the right thing. They should have no hesitation in assuming responsibility.” What in time made the Prussian pursuit of the concept of the initiative-taking soldier remarkable was its marriage with another of the post-Jena innovations: the general staff. This body sought to address what had been perceived as a disastrous drawback in the Prussian performance throughout the Napoleonic campaigns, namely the lack of a central structure that could coordinate not only among the various military formations but also between the political and military leaderships. The French forces were commanded by marshals whilst the Prussians were all led by princes and dukes — each with his own force, each answering only directly to the king. The need for coherence and professionalization was overwhelming if the Prussian army was to be victorious in the future.
Napoleon’s greatness as a leader and commander was epitomized when, after he escaped from exile on Elba and landed in France, many of his previous command and much of the citizenship rallied to him despite their previous experiences of war culminating in defeat. For me, this is remarkable.
Both Lincoln and Bismarck had a deep and instinctive understanding fo the ability of force to achieve a political aim with a decisive military victory; both Grant and Moltke had the capability to shape and use military force to deliver that victory. Above all, all four had the unflinching determination to stay the course through to victory, however long and arduous, and even in the face of public and political distrust — because for each of them there were hard objectives of nationhood at stake.
Time and distance, two of the factors in planning for war, had become much shorter in comparison to the era of the marching army. Napoleon, as we have seen, to surprise the enemy sometimes held forced marches that lasted days rather than weeks; with the new modes of transportation this became the norm.
The development of the locomotive conceptually expanded the world, making it accessible to the individual and states alike. Large states such as the US and the Russian Empire now found it possible to exert effective political, economic and military control over the immense stretches of land to which they laid claim.
Before the advent of the railway, every major colonial military expedition had to rely on waterways or advance supply posts: animals and men could carry only a limited load, and after a short period of time — 8 days for an ox, for example — they consumed the whole of it. Railways changed the equation: provided the railway was developed to stay in contact with the force, or the force remained in contact with the railway, it could receive as many supplies as were available for it from the home economy.
The relatively long period of continental peace that followed the 1815 Congress of Vienna gave armies much-needed time to recover and reform, but also had a stultifying effect on the application of technological change to the military sphere: since the prospect of a large-scale European war appeared remote, government funds dried up.
Until the 19th century, the greatest drawback of firearms was that they were both slow to use and easily affected by rain.
As you rise in command, you become increasingly concerned about the bullets rather than the rifles, and all other weapons, since they are the force being propelled and applied.
I had urged the ex-Rhodesians to equip the new battalions with their rifles, which fired NATO standard ammunition that only they had, rather than leaving them with the AK-472 that they had acquired in the bush, and for which there was no shortage of ammunition, both declared and undeclared.
Money has always been made from war in one way or another, but usually in the activities surrounding it — moneylenders or banks financing monarchs in their wars, tradesmen selling wares to armies as they marched, blacksmiths shoeing cavalry horses and weapon builders making armaments.
In 1999 Vickers merged with Rolls-Royce — yet again a company that prospered through defense manufacture, for whilst it is best known for its luxury motorcars it was the engines it made for lighter aircraft in both world wars that made great fortunes for the company. Engines for military aircraft remain a significant element of the business.
This example demonstrates another important point, which is that the political objective and the military strategic objective are not the same, and are never the same. For example, the political aim of Sadat in launching the 1973 war against Israel was to force it to negotiate the return of the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. The military aim of his forces, however, was to cross the Suez Canal and hold a minimal amount of territory in order to put pressure on the Israelis. The military clearly sat within the context of the political aim, but was distinct.
Sadat aimed not for territorial gain but for a crisis that would alter the attitudes in which the parties were frozen — and thereby agree the way for negotiators. Rare is the statesman who at the beginning of a war has so clear a perception of its political objective. The boldness of Sadat’s strategy lay in planning for what no one could imagine; that was the principal reason the Arabs achieved surprise. Sadat, in fact, paralyzed his opponent with their own preconceptions.
After the war other nations that already had their own capabilities came to realize that a winning process such as that of the North could be made feasible only by the creation of a permanent bureaucratic machinery to handle it, whether in peace or war — and above all to interface between the military and civilian authorities. This machinery quickly established itself into new institutions which evolved into government ministries capable of implementing the strategy both in preparation and in time of need — and therefore over the projected disruption to the economy of a total war.
The Civil War also established the US way of war: the clear understanding that industrial ability decides a war, if not a battle, became embedded in the national way of war — as did the concept that seeking the decisive defeat of the enemy by destroying his means to make war is equal to scoring a decisive victory in the field. For at the end of the day it was the South, understanding their effort was no longer sustainable, that sued for peace. As such, industrial war, especially as practiced in the Civil War, is less an art than a search for the technical solution and a process, which is frequently the case with the US way of war to this day.
In war as in art there exist no general rules; in neither can talent be replaced by precept. And so he sought men who, while having all the characteristics of good staff officers — diligent, hard working and exact — had in addition the intellectual qualities to rise above the narrow and particular to comprehend the whole.
Between campaigns the staff spent its time exercising and formulating plans, often in minute detail, for the next war. Every element of military activity was examined, each plan and contingency constantly analyzed and revised, every formulation and unit configured and standardized down to the last item — ensuring a trained soldier, but especially a trained officer, could move seamlessly from unit to unit. Moltke created a body of staff officers and commanders who in thinking and understanding came close to being identical to him and each other, thereby ensuring that when dispersed amongst regiments and in battle they created a coherence — a nervous system — that enable the Prussian military body to perform as one, without the need for detailed orders from higher commanders.
Moltke drew a distinct boundary between politics and strategy, claiming diplomacy was paramount until the start of hostilities when military necessity reigned supreme. He and his generals resented Bismarck’s interference in military operations, found him to be basically rude and boorish and derided what they deemed his risible advice. Equally, Bismarck, in his view of war as a forceful means of achieving a political end, demanded that statecraft remain supreme at all time. He found the military masters to be narrow professionals, uncomprehending of — or uninterested in — diplomacy and politics. There had been strong clashes over the issue throughout the three wars, but over time — indeed, after two world wars — Bismarck was proved to be correct. After Moltke, the general staff slowly evolved into a body that concentrated on the tactical and operational matters at the expense of the strategic and political issues.
The logic of a war to end all wars was simple: since it had successfully reshaped the map of Europe though industrial capability, war could therefore also define its absolute dominant power. Unfortunately this simplicity was also its fatal flaw, since the possibility that industrial war could lead to absolute destruction across the map of Europe did not seem to occur to many, especially as prosperity increased all around.
When war broke out, the Schlieffen Plan, with some modifications, was put into action — and it ultimately failed in execution. Reality — starting with the vast quantities of men and materiel concentrated in a relatively small space, which is a basic attribute of industrial war — overrode the plan. Even before the hostilities officially commenced all the major European powers had begun the largest mobilization effort the world had ever seen.
Meanwhile, in the east, the Russians raised an impressive 114 divisions. These, together with millions of horses and tons of equipment, poured rapidly onto the battlefields in far greater numbers and far quicker than Schlieffen and his staff had reckoned when they drew up the plan.
The Schlieffen Plan failed quite simply because the French defeated the German attack. That is the trouble with plans: the enemy does not as a rule cooperate with the assumptions on which they are laid. It is even more the trouble with plans which are drawn up for a contingency some time before the event — Schlieffen stopped work 8 years before the war broke out — and executed by those who were not party to making them, and who do not necessarily know the assumptions on which they are based.
Infantry attacks became an extremely costly affair that led to huge losses for both the attackers and the defenders. In 1916, for example, on the first day of the battle of the Somme, some 60K British soldiers were casualties, of which 20K were killed.
Britain had always maintained the Royal Navy to defend its shores and trade and to project its power and influence, and by the end of the 19th century its size reflected the principle that it must be bigger than the next largest navies in the world combined. Fear for its naval supremacy had prompted Britain to enter into the arms race with Germany in the 1880s.
It was because of its small size in comparison to the millions of the French and German armies that the British army did not really figure in Schlieffen’s plan; in numerical terms it was not deemed a threat.
The French, who expected to use about 10K 75mm shells a day before the war (a war which was supposed to last for 3 or 4 months), were producing 200K per day in 1915.
However, despite Ludendorff’s offensive achieving the greatest advance on the western front in 3 years, the Germans faced the same problems as everyone else: there was always another trench to take and the further they advanced the harder it was to exploit the storm troopers’ successes. The British were falling back onto their railheads, whilst the Germans were constantly advancing from theirs.
For all participants, total industrial war had brought total industrial and human carnage. Between two sides, over 65M men were fielded — 42M by the Allies, 23M by the Central Powers; 15M people lost their lives — over 8.5M soldiers, and approximately 6.5M civilians; over 21M soldiers were wounded, and 7.5M taken prisoner or declared missing.
At the strategic level the Allies had shown that the delivery to the battlefield of mass industrial strength ultimately produced victory, but at a supremely high cost and with deep effects on society, by both direct attack and social upheaval. The force had a utility, but the cost left the people with a disinclination to engage again in such a war. The German military learned that if enormous force was to have its utility the next time it had to achieve its objective rapidly, within the 19th-century doctrine of Moltke the elder. For them, slow war was unsustainable.
For besides substantially reducing the size of the German military forces, the Treaty of Versailles specifically forbade the existence of re-creation of the general staff — probably the only treaty in the world to include such a clause, and a tribute to the strength and ability of that extraordinary body.
The Germans had deeply internalized the lesson that in war a standstill situation where there is tactical parity eventually benefits the side with the bigger and more enduring industrial output. Above all, they knew costly wars of attrition not only brought the home economy to its knees but could also lead to the destruction of the sociopolitical equilibrium — as the Armistice of 1918 and the upheavals in its aftermath always served to remind them bitterly.
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, its mechanized ground force, working with the close support of the Luftwaffe, was able to break through and penetrate deep behind Polish lines of defense. In 1940, in the attacks on Norway in May, and during the invasion of the Low Countries and France, the Germans made use of the same tactics once again, adding paratroop drops to shock and disorganize the defenders further. These tactics were known as Blitzkrieg — lightning war; they were those of rapid movement of small, well-armed groups into the enemy’s depth, bypassing strong points and seeking to break the coherence of the defense before destroying or capturing its elements. The attacks were conducted and successes exploited at the speed of the armored vehicle rather than the marching man. The defenders were organized to fight a more pedestrian battle, and therefore found themselves literally overtaken by events: their command systems effectively paralyzed, their communication lines swamped with refugees and their military reserves attacked by the Luftwaffe and moving towards positions long since lost. Doubt, confusion, rumor and panic ensured.
One can calculate with reasonable accuracy the fuel, rations, water and spare parts required to cover a given distance. It is the expenditure of these resources in a fight that is very difficult to quantify. The longer the fight, the more will be expended — and the greater the risk of calculations being wrong. Therefore, if the chosen tactics involve many small fights, each part of the greater battle but each over quickly, and if strong points that might require bigger and longer fights are bypassed, the probability of the calculations being wrong is much reduced.
In contrast to the land war, the German submarine offensive proved to be very difficult to defeat and the Allies, especially the British, suffered great losses in seamen, cargo and shipping. In the North Atlantic alone 2,232 British ships were lost during the war. This battle lasted for the duration, but the turning point came in May 1943; thereafter as a rule enemy submarines were sunk at a greater rate than Allied ships. In spite of these great losses, taking the war as a whole 99% of all merchantmen made port safely, a great credit to the Allied navies and the convoy system.
Nonetheless, as with the Nazi conquests in Europe, there followed a similar pattern of rapid victories for Japan in Asia, but then a familiar geostrategic reality: to defeat the US Japan must first enter the North American continent and, in the case of the British Empire, India must be invaded. At base, these, like the Russian steppes or the British Isles, were — and probably will always be — the greatest and most elusive prizes in the search for decisive victories by any who choose to attack them.
Having based their strategy on rapid strategic successes, using technology, tanks, aeroplanes and all products of industrial military might, the Germans found they had difficulty in sustaining the flow of that technology in the face of the Allies’ greater productive capacity, including resources of men and materiel. Locked into a defensive posture after the battle of Kursk in 1943, they were forced into the one outcome they had sought to avoid at all costs: a war of attrition.
42 tank factories produced 40K T-34 tanks and 18K heavy tanks during the war. The Russians produced similar volumes of aircraft, which regularly harassed the Germans.
Towards the end of the war, with the exception of Russia all sides began running out of infantry. The Germans fielded older and older men and younger and younger boys, while the British redesignated units into infantry combat.
The occupied states in the west had in the main been liberated; but it had taken 6 months from the invasion at Normandy to undo what Hitler’s armies had done in as many weeks. This was due to the fighting prowess of the Wehrmacht: the German soldiers, well trained and motivated till the last, fought well, strong and hard until defeated.
Around 17.5M combatants were killed on all sides, approximately 12M on the Allied side, including 2M in China and 8.5M in the Soviet Union, and 5.5M on from the Axis powers, including 3.5M Germans and just under 1.5M Japanese. Just over 39M civilians were killed, including 6M in the Holocaust, nearly 17M in the Soviet Union and 10M in China. In total, 56M were killed in the conflict. Approximately 35M soldiers were wounded on all sides along with untold number of civilians.
Conflict has been, is and probably always will be an integral element of human society. It is vitally important to maintain the search for peace, but peace must be understood as a condition relating to conflict: not in the sense of the absence of conflict but as one in which that option is not chosen.
Thankfully, the need never came — if it had, the paradigm could not have functioned in its historical sense. First, because with the atomic bomb amassed armies could be no more than a target: rather than reinforcing such armies, nuclear technology as a weapon of mass destruction demands the absence of a mass as a defense; in these circumstances a large army is best used dispersed rather than amassed. And second, because “decisive victory” came at a price that was potentially far too high to pay. In other words, the very thing fought for in interstate industrial war — the state, with its people, government and army — would be destroyed by the war.
The result of this lack of practice is that commanders must learn from the past by studying previous campaign and the decisions of the commanders at the time. As we have seen, this practice was institutionalized by the Prussian-German general staffs, and has since become standard amongst the successful militaries of the world. However, I do not think the appropriate lessons will be drawn and carried forward into the present, nor the whole strategy truly comprehended, if the reader does not understand the overall historical and geostrategic context of the particular action or campaign under study.
History is the context of the battle, whilst geography is the context of the battlefield. Geography dictates the physical contours of the battlefield. Even with all the technological advances of our age, the location of a battle, and the limitations and advantages of that location will affect the battle, and very possibly its outcome.
Two complementary wars followed: that of the people and that of the armies. The people called their conflict a little war: a guerrilla — the combination of the Spanish word for war, guerra and the diminutive suffix-illa. The term was coined to describe the tactics they used to resist King Joseph Bonaparte’s regime: small, mobile and flexible combat groups drawn from, concealed and sustained by the people, intended to harass an enemy force superior in strength while avoiding any large-scale direct confrontation. The political purpose of pursuing such a war was to maintain the people’s independent identity, even though occupied, by sustaining their will to continue to fight and resist. In this way they sought to recover their independence when Britain and its allies triumphed. The strategic objectives were to erode the enemy’s will to continue, to gather information and to disrupt and delay enemy operations so as to weaken their resistance to the liberating forces — the Anglo-Portuguese army under the Duke of Wellington.
Guerrilla tactics stem from the basic tenet of their forces seeking only to give battle on their terms, which entails knowing their opponent’s position and strength, knowing when it si possible to isolate him from help or escape before help arrives, having the element of surprise on their side and fighting at a time of their choosing. Lacking the numerical strength and weapons to oppose a regular army in the field, guerrillas prefer to avoid pitched battles. The ambush and raid are their favored tactical methods. Above all the guerrilla always avoids holding ground, for to do so is to invite discovery, isolation and destruction. Striking swiftly and unexpectedly, guerrillas raid enemy supply depots and installations, ambush patrols and supply convoys and cut communication lines, intending thereby to disrupt enemy activities and to capture equipment and supplies for their own use.
The stubborn Spanish defense of cities like Saragossa tied down thousands of French troops while the Spanish guerrillas wreaked havoc throughout the country, tying down to rear-area security a significant number of French troops, and maintaining a constant series of attacks on the French lines of communication.
In contrast to a conventional force they were “formless” and had no apparent formal command system. They also lacked political cohesion and expended a lot of energy and some blood quarreling amongst themselves. Nevertheless, they kept alive the honor of Spain and the will to be free of Napoleon. Above all, the constant guerrilla activity drained the resources and diverted the attention of the French military.
In reflecting on his miscalculation of the Spanish theatre, Napoleon once said: “That unfortunate war destroyed me. All my disasters are bound up in that fatal knot.”
The colonial expeditions of the 19th century succeeded because for the most part the polities they faced could neither conceive of acts that had an effect on the popular political will in some distant country nor were likely to empower the people by telling them to fight independently of the ruling authority. The locals being invaded tended to use their armed force, if they existed as such, in an endeavor to hold ground; where faced by superior weapons such as guns they were defeated. When imperial or colonial forces did not prevail, such as the two British wars with Afghanistan in the 19th century, it was the imperial invading power’s will that was changed. In Afghanistan, the terrain and the country’s distance from the sea, the source of Britain’s power and supply, coupled with the nature of the tribes as coherent and organized, satisfied Clausewitz’s criteria. As a result Britain could not find sufficient forces to achieve a dominating density.
Since Britain was the supreme power at the time it ignored the pressure of the other powers.
The campaign involved concentrating the widely dispersed rural population: with casual brutality families were taken from their burning farms to badly mismanaged, typhoid-ridden “concentration camps” whose disgraceful conditions were one of the major causes of criticism in London. The purpose of removing the people from their farms on the veldt was to prevent them concealing, sheltering and feeding the commandos. Once the veldt was clear, all movement could be viewed as enemy movement until proved otherwise, and the commandos, denied information and food, would have to come out of hiding as they sought these vital commodities, thus risking death or capture.
Politically and strategically the British were determined to win the war and incorporate the Boer Republics they had taken into the empire, and the Boers knew they could not now reverse the situation. Moreover, in their actions they British had negated the Clausewitz criteria by removing the people and systematically denying the Boers the advantage of the terrain. Tactically, the Boers were losing by a process of attrition. The final and most significant factor was that the British matched their campaign with a political option for their opponent that offered a credible and better prospect than the current situation: they promised self-rule, and $3M was allocated to reconstruction of the rural economy.
Unlike the Spanish guerrillas, the Boers were not part of a greater whole: they had no external backer and no sanctuary other than the veldt. In the two years of the guerrilla phase of the war, force was never applied for more than tactical objectives. In truth, it could not have been otherwise: the commandos only presented tactical targets, they never deployed as a whole, and because they would not do so they themselves could attack only tactical targets. The British understood this and did not attempt “decisive operations” at theatre level. It was a war of tactical engagements won politically at theatre level — at the negotiating table.
Our true strategic aim was to seek its weakest link, and bear only on that until time made the mass of it fall. The Arab army must impose the longest possible passive defense on the Turks (this being the most materially expensive form of war) by extending its own front to the maximum. Tactically, it must develop a highly mobile, highly equipped type of force, of the smallest size, and use it successively at distributed points of the Turkish line.
Alongside the propaganda of the deed a second line of operations was developed: the strategy of provocation. In this case the idea was to use the strength and weight of the counter-revolutionary forces to advantage, rather as a judo fighter seeks to use the energy of an opponent’s attack to throw him to the ground. Attacks, or “incidents,” are carried out such as to invite, or possibly demand, response from the government, the objectives here being to reflect the government as a brutal oppressor to the people and external agencies, to instill within the people the notion of the security forces as the enemy, to gain sympathy for the “cause” and to gain recruits. An excellent example of such provocation would be the marches in Northern Ireland that ultimately led to 13 of the marchers were shot by British soldiers. The strategy of provocation also has further operational value, as a way of reconnaissance: if the security forces fail to react to a provocation at a checkpoint, for example, the level of their tolerance is established, at least locally, and other activities can be undertaken within that level.
In simple terms the 3 phrases were, first, to form cells in the community, ideally deep in the rural areas and on a border with a sympathetic neighbor, in order to achieve a local dominance by corrupting and replacing government through massive use of propaganda and indoctrination. In the second phase this local area was developed into a sanctuary by expanding the cell structure and linking with other liberated areas to form a region in which forces were prepared and food and weapons could be stored; this was coupled with the escalation of attacks on government institutions and military forces. In the third and final phase formed forces consolidated the sanctuary and operated against government forces in other areas where the cell structure could support them. This phase would continue until the government forces were defeated in the field and revolutionary government had progressively taken over rural area after rural area until the cities fell as well.
In both the Russian and Chinese cases the revolutionaries ended their campaigns with conventional formed armies in the field — which were necessary in the final phase to defeat the formed government armies that faced them in a trial of strength.
After successfully defeating Japanese occupation forces and the KMT forces, the PLA also became more like a traditional army, geared towards interstate industrial warfare. Ironically, in the decades that followed, in the western Muslim provinces of China and in Tibet, it became the prey of local guerrilla actions.
It is notable that those movements that were based on the local Communist Party structure often did better than the others. This is not surprising, for a number or reasons: they had a vision of a better world, rather than just a return to the antebellum status quo, an existing cell structure and experience of the security measures to avoid penetration by intelligence services.
The UPA had the objectives of freeing the Ukraine from the Soviets, but just as long as the Germans occupied their land they fought alongside the Soviets to defeat them. Once the Germans were repelled the political and military strategic objectives merged into a single aim: kept their guerrilla war going against the USSR.
This shows the brilliance of de Gaulle. He provided a credible mechanism to formalize the informal, to neutralize it as a political force and then disband it. Unlike Russia or China or even Yugoslavia, the guerrilla force was not allowed to become a peacetime political force. In France the force that had proven utility was recognized on liberation for what it was, a threat, and therefore neutralized.
It is not merely method that makes this model of war a contrast or antithesis: industrial war has the overarching purpose of achieving the desired political outcome by the destruction of the opponent’s ability to resist. It is essentially a trial of strength leading to a loss of will to resist. Its antithesis, however, allows the militarily weak to engage the strong to advantage. It is based on only using military force in tactical acts, with the object at the strategic level of winning the clash of wills: to erode the capability to govern, and to form the intent of the people. The proponent of this model of war seeks the tactical trials of strength on his terms and will whenever possible refuse battle under any other condition. In industrial war the object is to destroy the opponent’s army and to prevent his government from making war and protecting the people. In the antithesis the object is to constantly and expensively undermine the stronger army and to thereby break the will of the government and the people to make war.
The object remains to separate the people from the activist — not only physically, but to the point at which they refuse to support him and will therefore inform on him.
At the same time, it reflects the crucial point made in the introduction to this book: that every armed force has to be made into a military force to achieve legitimacy. Thus in the newly formed Israel all armed forces had to become submerged int the national force or else be annihilated as a threat.
In confrontations the aim is to influence the opponent, to change or form an intention, to establish a condition and, above all, to win the clash of wills. In conflicts the purpose is to destroy, take, hold; to forcibly attain a decisive outcome by the direct application of military force.
Should deterrence fail each envisaged a period of conventional war — read war in the old style, but done better with modern technologies and communications — followed by nuclear strikes as one side or the other began to lose the conventional battle: “strategic” on the opponent’s homeland and “tactical” on his forces.
The business of war, whether in the command economies of the East or those of the capitalist West, did well: militaries provided employment and underpinned nations, defense industries thrived and education and research centers that provided technology, and fueled all elements of the war business, expanded heartily.
For some, the arms race was pursued with vigor, but in the main once the initial purchases were made their production lines were closed and limited stocks of munitions were held in the depots. If the West had failed to hold a Soviet attack, it would therefore have had to turn to the nuclear option, or else surrender.
And the crucial point was the Soviet adventure into Afghanistan in 1980, an interventionist venture to secure an unstable border region — in other words, an act of security rather than defense, and one therefore not absolutely essential to the survival of the state and the people.
In establishing the triangular relationship with the people and the army, the state will mostly favor defense, for a number of reasons. First, the people will pay for their defense; and the more the state and the military are aligned in their interests, the more the people will pay. Second, therefore, in defense there is the simplicity of matching the political object with the military. Third, and derived from the first two, is that defense enables the forming and sustaining of political will in a way attack or offense never does. Finally, defense enables a moral advantage, which is appreciated and sometimes necessary for the people, considered a bonus by the state — or at least its political leadership — and preferred by the military.
But during the late 1980s, a weakening of links within the Warsaw Pact and the loss of popular support was reinforced by the realization, particularly by the eastern Europeans, of how much better off the people of the West were than they.
General MacArthur was put in command of the expeditionary corps — and thereafter it became a war conducted by a US general responsible for the US president acting as the agent of the UN. By September, around 20 other states, mostly allied with the US for other political objectives, had contributed units to the UN army. However, Americans still represented half the ground forces engaged, 93% of air forces, and 86% of naval forces.
In this case the strategic objective being proposed by MacArthur, the destruction of China’s ability to intervene in the Korean Peninsula, did not match the political purpose. The US forces — with their long-range, air-delivered, ultimately atomic, firepower — did not have utility.
This was the first UN military operation, and also the last to be conducted in this unilateral way. As a result of the unsettling effect within the UN of the Security Council’s endorsement of American actions, the was for a time a general rule that major powers should not be invited to make a fighting contribution to UN operations. This policy remained intact until the end of the Cold war. Korea became the exception, although it was useful for a time in reinforcing the image of the UN as a body prepared to take action, as opposed to the League of Nations.
While international media attention was focused upon the Korea War, the British, drawing on their experience which reached back to at least the Boer War, decided to focus on removing guerrilla sympathizers from the field. A resettlement program was launched in order to move hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants living on the edge of the jungle into 500 “new villages,” built for the purpose. The new villages were carefully planned in advance: roads, water, sites for shops, a school, a clinic and all other basic necessities were taken into account. The main attraction for new arrivals was that they were given title deeds to their new property.
He also pushed through measures granting ethnic Chinese residents the right to vote and handed key positions to indigenous leaders, pushing them on the way to self-government. Templer continued the development of intelligence gathering and analysis, and instituted rewards for those helping to detect guerrillas. Crucially he promised that Malaya would be independent when the insurrection was over.
The Malayan emergency is held up to this day in militaries around the world as a successful example of counter-insurgency and counter-revolutionary war. Briggs and Templer between them removed the principle political objective from the MCP’s campaign. The depiction of the conflict as a liberation struggle from colonial oppressors that would never yield control lost credibility in the face of the promise of independence backed by the gift of land in the soon-to-be-independent state.
They had copied and adapted to advantage almost everything that the British had done in Malaya — but for one essential difference to which they were blind. The British were clear they were leaving Malaya; the question was to whom to hand power. The Rhodesian were not leaving and were not about to hand power to anyone else. The British could herd people into “protected villages” on the grounds that the villagers would inherit the village and the land; the Rhodesians were seen as corralling the people and denying them their land.
Such an operation was seen as a temporary aberration from the real business of war, rather than a new reality of conflict. It was an example of the paradigm: a long confrontation that constantly crossed over to conflict at the tactical level.
Take all popular adversarial ball games such as soccer, rugby or American football — all of which may be understood in terms of density, as each side endeavors to engineer a situation in which one of its players can breach the other side’s defense and score. The complexities of achieving this for an hour or so in a clearly defined area (the pitch) is what makes the game. A battlefield, especially the modern ones, is infinitely more complex.
Every technological innovation is in time countered by adopting a suitable tactic, which in turn spawns a demand for another technological innovation.
In France, de Gaulle as early as June had appointed General Leclerc to command an expeditionary corps to reestablish French sovereignty in Indochina. However, months were needed before such a corps could be mustered and shipped. As a result, the confrontation with the Viet Minh was more of a political nature than a military one until December 1946. These two years were characterized by a series of negotiations between France and the Viet Minh, as both parties lacked sufficient numbers of troops to attempt to overwhelm the other.
What was the use of having weapons that could crush the enemy if the enemy escaped? How could you find him if he was invisible? How could you understand him if he did not live, think or organize like you? How could you track him and interdict him if his logistic system was based on bicycles?
A main lesson to be learned from the Vietnam War, as indeed from all the wars and conflicts described in this book, is that it is rarely possible to predict the outcome, especially on the basis of the known forces that entered it, or their inventories. The strength of a force is not merely a matter of numbers, of counting men and materiel. This matter of assessing a force has always been of importance, but became more pressing and more difficult as the 20th century progressed and we arrived at our current era.
Both the French and the US forces were considered superior to any fielded by North Vietnam, yet both ended up defeated. Nonetheless, we still tend to deem the conventional force the better and stronger, largely because we have a need for certitude of force strength, especially when entering into a conflict. Such thinking was not useful then, and is no less a mistake now.
At base, therefore, because there is no such thing as a generic force, there is also no absolute measure of the strength or power of a force. First, because even with advanced technology, it is ultimately human: real people operate all the platforms, systems and weapons and real people direct them. A force is therefore an organic unit with a body, a mind and a will. Second, a measure of a force is always in comparison to the one opposing, it is never absolute or a possession. Power is a relationship, not a possession.
The power of a military force is composed of 3 related factors: the means — both men and materiel; the way they are used — doctrine, organization and purpose; and the will that sustains them in adversity.
The will to win is the paramount factor in any battle: without the political will and leadership to create and sustain the force and direct it to achieving its objective come what may, no military force can triumph in the face of a more determined opponent. On the battlefield we call this will morale, the spirit that triumphs in the face of adversity — and it is crucial. At the political and strategic levels the reward is defined in terms of the political purpose and the strategic objective: the grand prizes. However, as one enters the arena of the tactical battle, these objectives appear all the more distant and relative. In battle men fight to kill before they are killed, and for objectives they think are worth losing their lives for. These tend in the extreme to be emotional and abstract objectives such as race, creed, honor, regiment or group.
The morale, or fighting spirit, of the Foreign Legion and the Paras was never in doubt, but the will of metropolitan France to continue with the use of the means in the way they were being employed evaporated. Political motivation and morale diverged to such an extent that de Gaulle withdrew from Algeria and the generals mutinied.
Napoleon, being a prime example of a true commander, systematically imposed his own rules and preferences on his opponents, to their disadvantage, forcing them to fight on his terms. That is a mark of real generalship, since it is based on the deep understanding that wars are not competitions: to be second is to lose. That is why a general must estimate the true capability of his force before he enters battle, even if he can only have total control over the way, being dependent on the political level above him for a proper supply of the means and the political will to win.
Indeed, political developments had already overtaken the French army’s successes. In Algeria, military repression had destroyed any chances that might have remained of a dialogue between moderate Muslims and the French establishment. In France, public opinion was growing weary of this conscript war, while the constitution and the inherent weaknesses of the Fourth Republic prevented any liberal political solution. On the international level, France’s major allies deserted it.
Both India and Pakistan have the manpower, the industrial base and the ideological bent for old-fashioned industrial war. However, neither can give a guarantee of not escalating to the nuclear level. They are therefore locked in a strategic confrontation, very similar to the Cold War, which may now be moving towards a resolution.
We do not intervene in order to take or hold territory; in fact, once an intervention has occurred a main preoccupation is how to leave the territory rather than keep it.
To do this requires the suppression of the people — counter-terror — to where out of fear they reject the terrorist in their midst, or are so controlled that the terrorist is unable to operate, or else they are transported elsewhere. The political costs of taking these actions are strategically high in terms of morality, legality, manpower and finance. Moreover, they are of doubtful operational value since, as we have seen, the methods often serve the opponent’s strategy. The French attempt to counter terror with terror in Algiers was an example of such a failure: the method was militarily effective but it created a political condition that broke the will of metropolitan France to continue.
In truth, such a condition of democracy is militarily difficult to achieve when occupation is involved, as Israel has discovered in the occupied territories and as the imperial powers discovered after WW2, when the colonies sought independence. The reason is simple: upon occupation the military force loses the strategic initiative. Once all the tangible objectives have been taken or destroyed, and the land held, what is there left for force to achieve strategically, or even operationally? The initiative moves to the occupied, who can choose to cooperate with the occupiers or not.
During the Cold War the UN evolved a type of military operation called “peacekeeping” whose purpose was to maintain — not establish — a condition. Typically this occurred when two warring parties agreed to stop fighting, but neither trusted the other and they therefore needed a third party to stand between them.
When matters do not go according to our plan we tend to leave the assumptions unchallenged and blame “rogue elements” or “foreign fighters.” Yet practically by definition the opponent is always fighting for a different outcome and will resist the imposition of our vision of future. Failing to respect the existence and use of his free creative will, which is not the same as respecting his values of motivation, is set yourself up for defeat.
Capturing the will of the people is a very clear and basic concept, yet one that is either misunderstood or ignored by political and military establishments around the world. The politician keeps applying force to attain a condition, assuming the military will both create and maintain it. And while for many years the military has understood the need to win the “hearts and minds” of the local population, this is still seen as a supporting activity to the defeat of the insurgents rather than the overall objective, and it is often under-resourced and restricted to low-level acts to ameliorate local conditions and the lot of the people.
The Russians understood this and before attacking the Chechen capital of Grozny in 1994-95, in an attempt to bring the Chechen to a decisive battle, they removed the people before leveling the city.
In order to understand operations among the people, and to capture their will, we must first understand “the people.” The people are an entity but not a monolithic block. They form entities based on family, tribe, nation, ethnicity, religion, ideology, state, profession, skill, trade and interests of many different kinds. Within these entities the people’s position is incoherent, and their views and opinions are varied and various; only with political leadership do their position cohere. The family will discuss a matter; when, where and how depends on the family, but a member of the clan will lead and this small and specific entity will form a view. The chairman of a club committee — political or social — will perform a similar function in a more formal way. And the political leaders of states are clearly there to lead, guide and represent their states’ political discourse and position. Within these many circles, the guerrilla fighter needs to have entity supporting him, an entity whose position he controls. To this end he must know the needs of the people — and appeal to them in a way the state or other leadership do not.
In general terms, the administration need not be that financially efficient or run democratic standards when the requirement for it is more to do with providing the essentials of life, the “freedom froms.” But as these basic wants are satisfied so the people will come to desire more, and it is when they are focused on the “freedom to” that people want efficiency, high ethical standards and so on.
Above all one must never forget that the interest of a journalist or producer — which is usually genuine — is driven by a need to fill space with words and pictures. The position of “war correspondent” has a legal standing: one who volunteers for this position accepts and obeys instructions from the military as to movement, wears uniform if ordered and submits copy to censorship; in return the war correspondent receives access, information, an advantage viewpoint, food, shelter and security.
To this extent the media is a crucially useful element in modern conflicts for attaining the political objective of winning the will of the people. It has also become the medium that connects the people, government and the army.
That is always the preferable way, especially since fights cost less when fought rapidly, and a high tempo of telling blows allows one to dictate the course of the battle. But the guerrilla knows this, which is why he picks small fights on his terms.
Was this action to create an independent Kosovo? Or was it to cause Milosevic to be deposed, to change the regime in Belgrade to one that could govern Kosovo to the UN’s satisfaction? Without a clear political purpose it is not possible to have a military strategy objective.
The fourth trend brings us back to the pre-Napoleonic era, in which the warring armies could not fully commit to the definitive fight since, lacking a system of cheap manpower such as conscription and given the expense of materiel, they could not afford to replace their forces. These issues have once again become relevant in our modern times, for different reasons but with the same effect: we fight so as to preserve the force. A reason often cited now for this is the “body bag” effect: democratic governments conducting operations for “soft” objectives are uncertain of the support of those at home, and as has been shown repeatedly in these pages, every state and military must maintain the support of their people.
The situation is not much better regarding materiel: it is too scarce and expensive to waste. Much as the industrial-war personnel production line no longer exists now that conscription has largely been eliminated in most parts of the Western world, neither do the heavily subsidized wartime production lines for materiel.
The rest of the army had been stripped of its equipment in order to give me a sustainable force. I was conscious that I had the bulk of the army’s modern assets in my command, that there were no production lines standing ready to replace losses, and that we had other commitments that might require them. I thought at the time, and still do, that I was the first British general for a long time who had to consider how to fight so as not to lose the army. I am not suggesting my predecessors were careless of their commands; they were not. But when faced with the prospect of battle they knew there were reserves of equipment elsewhere in the service, and an industrial base behind them capable of rapidly producing replacements.
At root, therefore, our forces are still structured within the industrial paradigm, and we are constantly reorganizing them to conduct these modern operations. And when we do not reorganize, we find we have large forces in theatre that contribute little to achieving the objective but nonetheless need guarding and feeding: the force has no utility.
The business of war is closely linked with this process: there are always budgetary difficulties, and as a result equipment tends to be acquired to improve existing measures of proven requirement rather than to bring into service a new equipment type altogether, or to deal with anything but the primary threat. If a case had been made for the fighter-bombers we have today on the basis they would be used to patrol no-fly zones over Iraq or Bosnia, or to drop small quantities of bombs on small tactical targets, I doubt they would have been purchased. And when new equipment is designed, its cost is kept down by limiting it to the specific threat.
The major reason for this trend is that the opponents have learned to drop below the threshold of the utility of our weapon systems. They have learned not to present a target that favors the weapons we possess and the way we use them. When they make a mistake out of pride or overconfidence they suffer, but unless the blows they receive are catastrophic they learn from the experience and seldom repeat them.
Those who depend on the tactics of guerrilla or terrorist tend to avoid presenting themselves as a target suitable for attack by the weapons and tactics of the industrial war, at least until they are ready to compete on those terms, as General Giap did with the French at Dien Bien Phu. The guerrilla trick is to force the conventional military opponent to fight on his terms, where he is likely to have the advantage, or else to force the military to react in a full industrial manner against the guerrilla fighting amongst the people, and so reinforce the strategy of provocation and the propaganda of the deed.
We enter into these arrangements for a number of reasons: we need more forces, or more space; we want the legitimacy of numbers; we want to spread the risk — of failure, to our forces and resources, of responsibility; and we all want a seat at the table. An alliance is of a more permanent nature and denotes equality amongst all members; coalitions are usually ad hoc affairs, led by one or two powerful members. An alliance is formed in anticipation of the event, in an attempt to deter some course of action, and there is usually some coordination of planning and training to make it the more useful. The main difficulty with alliances is agreeing on common purpose, and hence the strategic objective, when the case in point falls short of the event for which it was formed.
There is no such entity as an international soldier, even if he or she dons a blue helmet or fights under the NATO banner or is part of an “international coalition” as in Iraq. Upon recruitment each soldier swears allegiance to the state to which the army belongs, and he or she remains within that allegiance and legal framework — while the state loans them to an alliance or a coalition for a limited period or for an operation.
For it is not just the military that is still caught up in the paradigm of industrial war, since it is the political leadership that sends out forces in search of a solution to a problem, assuming it can be definitively solved by the deployment of force. It is also the political leaders who allocate the funds to the military and are responsible for creating and maintaining the political will for military operations, and also the sustainment of each nation’s standing forces. Equally, it is the political leaders who create coalitions and alliances, and multinational military missions with the inevitable convoluted chains of command. Finally, it is the political leadership that, in seeking to use the forces available to it, endeavors to do so without risk to its asset — the force itself — and without ensuring that the military actions are coherent with the actions of its other levers of power. In other words, it seeks to use force like a tool out of a box, without a blueprint for the item under construction.
But armies are not tools; the means they possess and use, the weapons, are the tools — it is the way the means are used, and to what ends, that characterizes armies and their relationship to their political masters. On closer examination one can see that many of the issues the Weinberger principles seek to define before the event can be clear only only during or after the event, and are open to multiple interpretations. And General Powell’s addition supposes the enemy can be defeated quickly, and that such a defeat will lead directly to the achievement of the political purpose.
Indeed, the principles and the ethos they represent have become an obstacle to using military force with utility, since they are based on flawed assumptions that have nonetheless become written in stone. Take as an example the idea that “commitment of force should be the last resort.” Should it? The assumptions on which such an assertion rests seem to be as follows:
That there is an orderly process recognized by both parties in which the force is the last act.
That force is an alternative to other options rather than being used in concert with them.
That when all other options have been exhausted force will provide the solution.
The assumptions are satisfied generally when one considers the peace-crisis-war buildup to an industrial war in pursuit of a strategic military decision. But what if force cannot provide the solution? Does one just pile on more force? And if this might work, will the price be too high to bear? What other options are there other than to accept defeat? And if not, how do you terminate the engagement if your last resort is not working — or is defeat an exit strategy?
US forces have continued to become engaged in conflicts around the world in spite of the Weinberger principles. For as Madeleine Albright said when a general was using the principles in arguing against deploying US forces into some conflict: “What is the point of having all this army if we don’t use it?”
NATO chain of command is an extremely delicate and often complex web. The UN is an even more complicated proposition, since it lacks a strategic military structure. As a result, nations deal directly with their contingents on the ground, sometimes confounding the theatre commander who is attempting to employ them within his plan. For ultimately, each contingent remains under command of its parent state, since this is the source of its legitimacy and administrative support. To this end it hands a limited authority of command, depending on the circumstances, to the multinational commander. The national contingent commanders find themselves reporting to both their national and multinational commanders. This duality of command demands careful management, particularly in view of the ease of modern communications and the ever-present media.
Each fight or specific tactical engagement can only be undertaken by a national grouping; to do otherwise in the stress of the moment is to ask more of the language skills, training, military cultures and the interoperability of equipment than can be borne safely.
Political control in all forms of multinational deployment — UN, NATO or coalitions — is also exercised by rules of engagement (ROE), which came into being in their modern form during the Cold War in order to govern reactions to the adversary in every possible contingency, even the most minute, and covered when force was to be used, in what circumstances and to what degree. Above, the purpose of the ROE was to prevent any contingency causing a slippage into a nuclear war. ROE therefore proscribe action, and we are now applying this proscriptive logic to circumstances that are not remotely similar, which is an inhibiting factor in the appropriate and timely use of force in our modern circumstances.
These 4 functions fall into 2 pairs. The first 2, amelioration and containment, can be put into play without knowing the desired political outcome, though it is preferable this be determined in advance. To achieve the 2 other functions, deterrence and destruction, the actions taken must nest within a strategy, which in turn requires knowledge of the desired political outcome.
In the foregoing I have used the word “information” rather than “intelligence” quite deliberately. For me, “intelligence” has 2 meanings. The first is to describe the product of the assessment or analysis, one’s understanding or intelligence. This should be held securely and be concealed from your opponent except when you wish him to know what you know. The second use of the word is to describe information collected secretly: you wish to conceal that you have the information and how it was collected. The information collected must be assessed with the rest to produce the intelligence or answers to your questions. Above all, one must avoid the trap of assuming information is correct or valuable to you just because it is secret.
The nervous system is unlike that of a conventional armed force. Conventional forces evolved their nervous, or command, system as part of the development of industrial war, and most were well established before the radio came into service. The conventional system is in essence hierarchical: information flows up from the bottom, being aggregated at specific points in the chain of command, and orders and instructions flow down, being disaggregated into detailed tasks at each point in the chain. But the system is vulnerable to the loss of a point of command — in which case the chain is broken.
Guerrilla, and in particular terrorist, nervous systems do not work in this way, mainly because of their dependence on the people and their lack of strategic military objectives.
The centre provides the idea and driving logic; it also directs the overall effort by means of this conceptual outreach, often ruthlessly purging subordinate cells that do not understand the purpose of their tasks, or else follow their own selfish path. The centre will reinforce successful cells with funds, skills and weapons, seeking to establish an area of sanctuary from which to develop. It will allow cells considerable latitude in the method they adopt to suit the local circumstances — provided that security is not breached and that the cell is both successful and in its actions no more corrupt than condoned by the movement.
For unlike industrial war, in war amongst the people no act of force will ever be decisive: winning the trial of strength will not deliver the will of the people, and at base that is the only true aim of any use of force in our modern conflicts.
The UN arrangements for direction and command of the operation were those of a classic peacekeeping mission, where the combatants want peace and accept, indeed have requested, the presence of the “Blue Helmets” and white vehicles. Unfortunately, in Bosnia the combatants did not want a collective peace so much as their three distinct ideas of peace, and were bent on fighting for them.
I learned quickly how persuasive this contextual media reporting could be, and how on occasions it could cause other reporting to be ignored or discounted, especially when the viewer was presented with visual information that contradicted a view previously formed from the other reports. I therefore took to listening to the radio and not watching TV until I had read the other reports.
On the stage of the theatre the players were given visibility: petty officials and thugs, the vast majority of leading actors on all three sides, took center stage and became stars of the show, while international statesmen and generals fluffed their lines or appeared to be following a different script. Personalities rather than the actual issues at stake became the basis of analysis and commentary. The parties each played to the cameras: the Bosniacs by both pleading their desperate case and morally blackmailing the international community for allowing it to deteriorate, and the Croats by arguing their historical right to live separate existence. Above all, the Bosnian Serbs, in their arrogance and overconfidence, seemingly unaware that however much the coverage of their deeds might please them and their domestic audience, it revolted the external viewer.
But if there was any doubt about the matter the directive issued to me by the UN in late May 1995, clarifying that the safety of the forces was more important than implementing the mandate, made the position clear: it represented the lack of political will of all the nations to risk the deployed forces — and its instructions were not countermanded by any capital. But, as the lady said, you can’t be a little bit pregnant, and you can’t be a little bit interventionist either. If you stand in the middle of someone else’s fight you must expect to be pushed around; and if you do intervene, decide if you are fighting one or all of the sides and get on with it — and be prepared to risk the forces allocated to achieve the object.
In truth, it is essentially the same force: when the UN force became NATO’s, most of the troops already on the ground remained, swapping their blue berets for national ones and the UN flag for NATO’s. When the EU took over from NATO, the same troops largely remained once again, swapping their NATO flag for the EU one.
Our confrontations and conflicts must be understood as intertwined political and military events, and only in this way can they be resolved. As such, it is no longer practical for the politicians and diplomats to expect the military to solve the problem by force, nor is it practical for the military to plan and execute a purely military campaign, or in many cases take tactical action, without placing it within the political context.
When faced with a direct threat to one’s own existence and way of life the desired outcome is clear, but other circumstances are harder to assess: there is the moral dividend from humanitarian relief, or the security resulting from stability of the international order, but when there is also some prospect of material gain, in assets or territory, for example, the outcome is less clear. In reality, the priorities tend to be set on the urgency of action — what can I do now? — rather than setting the highest priority on the issue or item that has the greatest value in achieving the desired outcome.
This joins the various terms now used to apparently define what it is the military are expected to achieve — such as “humanitarian operation,” “peacekeeping,” “peace enforcement,” “stabilization operations,” “achieving a stable and secure environment” — which are in reality more of a description of the activity — and, of course, a resulting condition — rather than the outcome.
The two opposing visions of the future should be examined with care to see where commonalities lie, in the first instance because there is no need to have a fight about what one can agree on, and secondly to provide what all want in the way that suits your desired outcome, and to show it is to the people’s advantage.
As seen in the international public outcry surrounding the US-led coalition’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, there exists a perception that the legality of engaging in combat also establishes its morality, and vice versa; and that both legality and morality define the utility of using force — regardless of the desired political outcome.
The US refused to grant any internee in Guantanamo the status of POW, which is the agreed status in IHL for any combatant captured by an opposing side. Yet the entire premise of the invasion of Afghanistan was that the Taliban regime did not constitute a state, and that it needed to be removed because it was criminal. In other words, it was an anomaly — if viewed from the paradigm of industrial war. This anomaly also explains my note at the start of this book that “War on Terror” is a somewhat meaningless phrase, not least because it confuses a term from industrial war with what is clearly war amongst the people. This confusion was then extended to those taken prisoner within the ensuring conflict, a situation that either demands oa new category within IHL, which is unlikely and not necessary, or else a recategoriation of the detainees in line with it.
While it is true that in history at least, values — whether of the nation or of humanity — do not survive unless we fight for them, neither combat nor force suffices to justify them. The fight itself must be justified and enlightened by those values. To fight for the truth and to take care not to kill with the very weapons we use in its defense; this is the double price to be paid for restoring the power of words.
On the back of all this, Washington was waking up each morning to find that its agenda, at least as far as the media were concerned, was being dictated by Europe. It was a media mess, which held the seeds of political strife. Eventually, Tony Blair pulled the strings together to coordinate the content of briefings.
Never lie to the press, whether to deceive them or the opponent. You will in time be found out, with the result that your ability to communicate with the people will be jeopardized. On the other hand you can practice illusions: not every armored vehicle need have its infantry in the back.
The commander should avoid the temptation of cooperating with the journalist in becoming the story. The journalists will always see him as one: to pump him up and to deflate, to set him in contrast to others for good or ill, to personify and simplify what is a collective complex activity. He should remember that “fame has no present and popularity no future.” The commander should engage directly in public with the media only when he has a message to send to an audience that only he can transmit through the media. On the other hand he should be closely engaged in the background. His role is to explain the story of the operation. Just as the narrator is linking events so that the audience gains an understanding of the story, so the journalist briefed by the commander should understand the more complex linkages between events and the context.
As a result, the reality of what I had experienced with my command was lost or not conveyed. It was after viewing these tapes that I formed the view that a narrator was required in our modern operations — and ownership of the story must be claimed from the start.
One must take the long view, and beware the seduction of the short-term gain and effect offered by the journalist to achieve journalistic ends. The job of the military alongside all agencies conducting the operation is to defeat the opponent and win over the majority of the people for the future, not to sell a newspaper that is tomorrow’s cat litter.
Underpinning all these options and solutions would have been deep understanding that people seek normalcy, which is based upon sound administration; and whoever provides it will gain their favor, while whoever is deemed to destroy it will become their enemy.
The desire to protect the soldier so as to maintain his morale often manifests itself in measures that isolate him from the local population. He appears helmeted, armored and armed amongst them, or hin his heavy armored vehicle on the street. His behavior as he patrols is threatening. His bases are heavily fortified and often sited to overlook the people.