Strategic Logic and Political Rationality: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel

STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

ii

STRATEGIC LOGIC and POLITICAL RATIONALITY Essays in Honor of Michael I.Handel Editors

BRADFORD A.LEE KARL F.WALLING US Naval War College, Newport, R.I.

FRANK CASS LONDON • PORTLAND, OR

First published in 2003 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS Crown House, 47 Chase Side, Southgate London N14 5BP This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon, 97213–3786 Website: www.frankcass.com Copyright in collection © 2003 Frank Cass Publishers Copyright in individual chapters © 2003 individual contributors British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Strategic logic and political rationality: essays in honor of Michael I.Handel 1. Strategy 2. Politics and war 3. Rationalism I. Lee, Bradford A. II. Walling, Karl F. III. Handel, Michael I. 355′.02 ISBN 0-203-49707-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-58366-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-7146-5484-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8372-8 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strategic logic and political rationality: essays in honor of Michael I. Handel/editors, Bradford A.Lee and Karl F.Walling. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7146-5484-1 (cloth)—ISBN 0-7146-8372-8 (paper) 1. Strategy—Congresses. 2. Civil—military relations—Congresses. I. Handel, Michael I. II. Lee, Bradford A. III. Walling, KarlFriedrich, 1957– U162.S75 2003 355.02–dc21 2003046154 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

For the students and faculty of the United States Naval War College

Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on Contributors

x

Introduction Bradford A.Lee and Karl F.Walling

1

PART I: STRATEGIC LOGIC 1

Strategy in War and Sports: A Comparison David E.Kaiser

26

2

What is a Military Lesson? William C.Fuller, Jr

35

3

Why the Weak Win: Strong Powers, Weak Powers, and the Logic of Strategy Thomas G.Mahnken

56

4

Attrition in Modern and Post-Modern War Avi Kober

70

5

Sunzi Bingfa as History and Theory Andrew Meyer and Andrew Wilson

95

6

Policy, Strategy, and Operations Milan Vego

114

PART II: POLITICAL RATIONALITY 7

Thucydides on Democratic Politics and Civil-Military Relations Karl F.Walling

133

8

Winning without Fighting: British Grand Strategy and its Application to the United States, 1815–65 Andrew Lambert

157

9

British Strategy and Winning the Great War David French

188

vii

10

The Architecture and Soft Spots of Israeli Grand Strategy Gil Merom

207

11

Winning the War but Losing the Peace? The United States and the Strategic Issues of War Termination Bradford A.Lee

241

12

Clausewitz and the Two Contemporary Military Revolutions: RMA and RAM James C.Kurth

265

Index

288

Acknowledgements

The essays in this volume were written for an international strategy conference held in honor of the late Michael I.Handel during November 2001, at the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Michael Handel taught during the last decade of his life in the Naval War College’s Strategy and Policy Department. He was our esteemed colleague and close friend. When Michael discovered in early 2001 that he was seriously ill and had only a short time to live, we wanted to find some way to express our admiration for his life’s work and our gratitude to him for the way he enriched our lives. One of the traditional ways to honor a distinguished scholar, of course, is for his colleagues and students to join together in presenting him with a book of essays. We thought that this tribute would be a fitting way for our department to honor Michael, who has made such a valuable contribution to the study of strategy through his writings, lectures, teaching, and conferences. When we approached Michael about our plans, he embraced the entire project, and during his final illness played a major role in organizing the effort. Michael liked to encourage the study of strategy by bringing together scholars for gatherings marked by the lively exchange of ideas. His whole-hearted enthusiasm for this project was a tonic for those of us who deeply admired his work and would soon mourn his passing. The conference and this volume, by his involvement in their conception, bear Michael’s direct imprint. Our first debt in producing this volume, then, is to Michael Handel himself, whose teaching, scholarship, and intellectual rigor provided a model to us all. At the Naval War College, the administration gave their complete support to Michael and us in carrying out this enterprise. The then President of the Naval War College, Vice-Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, the Dean of Academics, Charles P.Neimeyer, the then Provost, Rear Admiral (ret.) Barbara McGann, and the President of the Naval War College Foundation, Rear Admiral (ret.) Joseph C.Strasser, provided generous funding and administrative support for the conference. Later, Alberto Coll, Dean of the Naval War College’s Center for Naval Warfare Studies, gave additional funding, without which the conference could not have taken place. Michael’s friend, Mary Estabrooks, working in the office of the Dean of Academics, made the wheels of the administrative bureaucracy turn for us. Anita Rousseau, also in the Dean’s office, ably assisted

ix

us in making this conference a reality. Meanwhile, William Spain, the Assistant Dean of Academics, oversaw the smooth running of the conference. The current President of the Naval War College, Rear Admiral Rodney Rempt, presided over the conference’s proceedings and graciously welcomed its participants to his home. George Baer, then chair of the Strategy and Policy Department, supplied everuseful advice for orchestrating the conference and gave his full backing for the project. The current chair, Tom Nichols, has also supported this major effort by the Department to honor Michael. From within the Strategy and Policy Department, Carol Keelty helped in the daunting task of bringing together for the conference scholars from Europe, Israel, Canada, Australia, and across the United States. The response to our invitation from Michael’s friends was overwhelming, with the result that they have produced three volumes instead of one in honor of Michael’s memory. These three volumes reflect some of the diverse interests and themes of Michael’s work. John Maurer, of the Strategy and Policy Department, edited Churchill and Strategic Dilemmas before the World Wars. Michael’s longtime friend, Richard Betts, of Columbia University, and Thomas Mahnken, from the Strategy and Policy Department, edited Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence. Bradford Lee and Karl Walling, also from the Strategy and Policy Department, edited Strategic Logic and Political Rationality. Credit, too, for bringing these volumes to print belongs to Michael’s publisher of long standing, Frank Cass, and to his son Stewart Cass. Michael himself had approached Frank and Stewart Cass, wanting them to publish these volumes. Stewart took the time to attend the conference, and his sound guidance and enthusiastic backing have greatly assisted us in our work. No authors could ask for a more congenial publisher. Finally, Michael’s partner in life, his wife Jill, helped us at every stage of this project. Jill faced the adversity afflicting her family with courage and constancy, caring for Michael during his final illness while tending to the needs of their four children. The presence of Jill and her older children at the conference lifted the spirits of its participants, and she has supported us in the subsequent preparation of these volumes for publication. These volumes, then, represent not only a tribute to Michael and his life’s work but to Jill’s bravery.

Notes on Contributors

David French was educated at the University of York and at King’s College, London. He is Professor of History in the Department of History at University College London. His most recent book, Raising Churchill’s Army. The British Army and the War Against Germany, 1919–1945 (2000) was awarded the Templer Medal by the Society for Army Historical Research and the New York Military Affairs Symposium Book Award for 2000. William C.Fuller, Jr is Professor of Strategy and Policy at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He graduated from Harvard College in 1973 summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to earn his AM and PhD in Russian history at Harvard, working under Richard Pipes. Prior to joining the faculty of the Naval War College in 1986, he taught at Colgate University and Harvard. A specialist in Russian military history, he is the author of CivilMilitary Conflict in Imperial Russia 1881–1914 (1985) and Strategy and Power in Russia 1600–1914 (1992). He has recently completed a study of treason trials and espionage cases in Russia during World War I. David E.Kaiser holds a PhD from Harvard and has taught at Harvard and at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War (1980), and Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler (1990). His latest book, American Tragedy, on the origins of the Vietnam War, was published in 2000. Avi Kober is lecturer in Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and associate researcher at BESA Center for Strategic Studies. He received his PhD from Hebrew University and specializes in modern military thought, Israeli strategic thinking, and the Arab-Israeli wars. He served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Planning Department and in the National Security Unit at the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and was co-editor of two IDF publication series—on Israeli national security and ‘creative military thinking’. Kober has been associate researcher with PIPES (Program on International Politics, Economics and Security) at the University of Chicago. He is author of Coalition Defection: The Dissolution of Arab Anti-Israel Coalitions in War and Peace (2002); Battlefield Decision in the Arab-Israeli Wars, 1948–1982

xi

(1995), and various articles on general security issues and Israeli strategic doctrine. James C.Kurth is the Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College. He received his AB in History from Stanford University and his MA and PhD in Political Science from Harvard University, where he taught prior to coming to Swarthmore. He has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), the University of California at San Diego, and the US Naval War College. He is the author of some 70 articles and editor of two volumes in the fields of defense policy, foreign policy, international politics, and European politics. His recent publications, including a series of articles in The National Interest, have focused upon the interrelations between the global economy, post-modern society, cultural conflicts, and US grand strategy. Andrew Lambert is Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London. In 1999 he was the first naval historian to be appointed to a professorial chair in naval history at a British university since the 1930s. His publications include: The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia 1853–1856 (1990); The Last Sailing Battlefleet: Maintaining Naval Mastery 1815–1850 (1991); The Foundations of Naval History: John Knox Laughton, the Royal Navy and the Historical Profession (1998), and War at Sea in the Age of Sail (2000). Bradford A.Lee has been a Professor of Strategy at the US Naval War College since 1987. Before that he was a member of the Society of Fellows and a professor in the History Department at Harvard. He is the author of Britain and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1939 (1973) and of a broad array of shorter studies of military strategy, diplomatic history, economic theory and policy, and the comparative politics of national priorities. He is currently writing a book on Theories of Victory, which analyzes the mechanisms that connect military operations and the political outcomes of war. Thomas G.Mahnken is a professor of strategy at the US Naval War College. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California and holds a PhD from the Paul H.Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University. He previously served in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and as a member of the Secretary of the Air Force’s Gulf War Air Power Survey. He is the author of Uncovering Ways of War: US Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918–1941 (2002). Gil Merom is an assistant professor of political science in Tel-Aviv University and a U2000 research fellow in the University of Sydney. He received his PhD from Cornell University and research interests include international relations, international and national security, strategy, intelligence, and low-intensity conflict. His recent articles on Israeli security, the Algerian War, the Cuban intelligence estimate, and small wars have appeared in Political Science Quarterly, Armed Forces and Society,

xii

Intelligence and National Security, and Small Wars and Insurgencies. Forthcoming publications include an article on realism and regional order in the Journal of Strategic Studies and a book about democracies and small wars. Andrew Meyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Brooklyn College. He is an expert in ancient Chinese philosophy and the history of Classical China and received his PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. Milan Vego is a Professor of Operations in the Joint Military Operations Department at the US Naval War College. He has published five books (Soviet Navy Today, 1986; Soviet Naval Tactics, 1992; Austro-Hungarian Naval Policy, 1904–1914, 1996; Naval Strategy and Operations in Narrow Seas, 1999; Operational Warfare, 2000) and over 230 articles in various professional journals. Karl F.Walling is a graduate of St John’s College (1984) and earned a joint PhD in political science and social thought from the University of Chicago (1992). He has taught at Michigan State University, the University of Chicago, Carelton College, and the United States Air Force Academy. He published his first book, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government in 1999. An associate professor in the Department of Strategy and Policy at the US Naval War College since 2000, he is currently writing a book on Thucydides. Andrew Wilson is an Associate Professor of Strategy at the United States Naval War College where he teaches courses in military history and strategic theory. He holds a PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University and has published several articles on Chinese military history, the contemporary Chinese military, and Chinese emigration. He and Andrew Meyer are currently collaborating on a new annotated translation of the Sunzi bingfa.

Introduction Bradford A.Lee and Karl F.Walling

This volume consists of essays in honor of the teaching and scholarship of Michael I.Handel, who ended his distinguished career as a Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where he died of cancer in June 2001. His academic life began in 1963 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he studied economics, political science, and west European history, with specialization in strategic studies and diplomatic history. His early academic accomplishments and curiosity soon led him to Harvard University, where he was a member of the Center for International Affairs and earned his PhD in 1974. As a young itinerant professor, he held appointments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the National War College of Israel, and Harvard University, where he became the founder and US editor of Intelligence and National Security. Eventually, he found a home in 1983 at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and began to distinguish himself as the leading contemporary scholar of Carl von Clausewitz’s classic work of strategy, On War. The US Naval War College had the good sense to steal him from the Army War College, and he spent the remainder of his academic career in Newport. Handel was a prolific author and editor. In addition to numerous articles and monographs, he published nine books on strategy, intelligence, and technology: Weak States in the International System (1981); The Diplomacy of Surprise: Hitler, Nixon, Sadat (1981); Strategic and Operational Deception in the Second World War (1987); Leaders and Intelligence (1988); War, Strategy, and Intelligence (1989); Intelligence and Military Operations (1990); and three editions of his most theoretically comprehensive work, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought (1994, 1995, and 2001). Masters of War is now the standard text for introducing students to the classic works of Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and Jomini, with serious attention being paid to Thucydides, Machiavelli, Corbett, and Mao Tse-tung as well. Pride of place in Handel’s study of classical strategic theory, however, belongs to Clausewitz, whom he read so carefully and slowly in seminars with countless students that many left with the impression he was Clausewitz himself. When Handel first studied strategy, he accepted the common opinion that there is a huge gulf between Clausewitz’s Western approach to strategy and the Eastern approach of Sun Tzu, who wrote more than 2,000 years before

2 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Clausewitz. Careful comparison of the two strategists led him to revise his initial opinions, however. Saying that Western strategic thought was fundamentally different from Eastern strategic thought (and never the twain shall meet) seemed similar to saying there was not one physics, describing universal laws of matter and motion, but two, either of which might be true in its own universe. For Handel, however, the logic of strategy was universal, that is, valid at all times and places. This was largely because he assumed that human nature has remained essentially unchanged. The same passions move us now as in the earliest days of strategy, so war remains a realm in which anger, hatred, fear, courage, and boldness are both necessary and dangerous to rational strategic calculation. Granted that Sun Tzu and Clausewitz approached strategy from different perspectives and used different methods to explain their conclusions, it remains the case that they, not to mention other less famous strategists, appealed to the same strategic logic. Thus, for example, although Sun Tzu was more optimistic about the possibilities for intelligence to remove the fog of war, the need for intelligence was proof that he shared Clausewitz’s understanding of war as a realm of uncertainty, friction, and chance. While Sun Tzu emphasized deception as an indispensable instrument of war, Clausewitz seemed to consider it a dangerous diversion of resources from striking a decisive blow at the enemy’s center of gravity. Yet both understood the need to be strong at the decisive point, with deception and concentration serving as alternative means to that end. Likewise, in the realm of naval strategy, Corbett may have dissented from the strategic culture of his time by arguing that it was sometimes better (to guard one’s sea lanes, for example) to disperse rather than concentrate a fleet. Yet, like Sun Tzu, Corbett valued surprise. This is more likely when the enemy does not know the shape and disposition of one’s own naval forces, which may then concentrate for local superiority in a decisive naval battle, if that is possible. If not, using them in support of the army in peripheral theaters is not necessarily a diversion from the main effort. It might be an example of Clausewitz’s understanding of economy of force, in which no part of one’s forces is left inactive (that is, not contributing to final victory). If land forces transported and supplied by sea were directed at an enemy vulnerability, such as Napoleon’s army in Spain, and compelled the enemy to divert forces from a main effort, such as the conquest of Russia, then such an indirect approach could have a substantial impact on an enemy center of gravity. In combination with allied forces, such peripheral operations could constitute an important part of a protracted effort to defeat a powerful and determined enemy. In this way, the apparent contradictions among strategists from different times, places, and cultures seemed to Handel to reflect the extent to which strategy is not an exact science following invariable laws, but rather an art or, to be more exact, a social science following probabilities varying according to the circumstantial nature of any particular war. From his reading of both these classical strategists, Handel concluded that strategy is, or ought to be, a rational process. It is based on identifying your

INTRODUCTION 3

country’s political goals clearly; assessing its comparative advantages against its enemies’; adapting to maximize your comparative advantages (while the enemy is trying to do the same to you); calculating costs and benefits carefully; examining the risks and rewards of alternative strategies; and, not least of all, making peace once goals have been achieved at an acceptable cost (the best case) or the costs and risks have come to exceed the value of the political objective (the worst case). This is not to say that Handel believed that war as such is rational. Far from it: he understood that one of the many things that makes strategy an art rather than a science was that, unlike physics, it is directed at an animate object that reacts to one’s own strategy. Inevitably, the violent interaction of two animate forces in war would inspire fear, anger, hatred, and other emotions capable of making the political objectives, or the strategy to achieve them, or even both, irrational. Moreover, there is a tendency for war to follow its own grammar, escalating toward the absolute, what-ever the costs and risks, unless it is subject to political control. The primacy of politics does not necessarily make war rational, but if there is any hope that war will be rational, it comes from the logic of strategy, supplied by politics. Not least of all, a host of intangibles, which Clausewitz referred to as moral forces, ranging from the passion of the people to the boldness and intuition of the commander to the training and discipline of troops, make it impossible to reduce war to a matter of algebraic calculations. National power is a product of the tangible, even countable, assets of a nation and its intangible, uncountable moral forces. Because the intangibles both defy precise analysis and vary not only from war to war, but also at particular times and places within an ongoing war, estimating one’s own strength as well as the enemy’s is always a matter of guesswork. Despite the tendency of wars to escape rational direction, and despite the intangibles that can be seen only with the mind’s eye, neither Handel nor his teachers among the classical strategic theorists gave up on making war a rational instrument of policy. If all plans lose momentum through the friction of opposing animate forces, if passion or strategy sometimes drives policy rather than the reverse, if the risk takers are sometimes in the government rather than the military, if in the heat of battle or during a protracted struggle Clausewitz’s ideal trinity of reason, passion, and creativity sometimes collapses into multiple competing forces that no one would call rational, the responsibility of the statesman and the commander is nonetheless to make strategy as rational an instrument of policy as the circumstances of a particular war admit. Forethought was necessary for rationality. Indeed, the first step toward making war a rational instrument was to understand the particular nature of the war at hand. Attention to the goals of the different belligerents, the value of those goals to them, how long they would fight, and how much effort they were willing to make would not suffice to understand the character of the war, but without such an assessment and ongoing reassessment a strategist has no way to begin to identify his country’s comparative advantages in a war that might be long or

4 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

short, high-tech or low-tech, conventional or unconventional, dominated by one instrument, like the army, or combining multiple instruments on land and sea, in the air, and from space in one theater or many. Likewise, examining the relation between the government, the military, and the people among the belligerents would not identify the nature of the war with mathematical precision, but might point out strengths and weaknesses, vulnerabilities and centers of gravity, essential to strike a decisive military blow and convert it into political success at an acceptable cost in time, blood, and treasure. In Handel’s view, it was a significant flaw in Clausewitz’s strategic theory for later readers that he paid little attention to material factors, such as the relative wealth of different belligerents, the state of their technology, or even the geography of their countries, as major elements in understanding the nature of modern war. Each of the three elements of Clausewitz’s famous trinity of war (reason, passion, and creativity) is an intangible, but war is a collision of tangible forces. For this reason, Handel suggested that Clausewitz’s trinitarian approach had to be updated. Handel loved to display his concepts graphically, so he wanted a picture of his revision of Clausewitz. If the revision was to capture both the material and the intangible dimensions of strategy, it had to go beyond the familiar triangle of government, military, and people. It had to become a rectangle including the material environment, or a triangle encircled by a material environment. Although Handel went beyond Clausewitz with his attention to the material changes in war produced by rapidly changing technology in the modern age, he was no technological utopian. Indeed, Clausewitz and other strategic theorists seemed to him to be necessary antidotes to vague and sometimes even dangerous talk about eliminating fog, friction, chance, and uncertainty from war. It is sometimes said that the information age allows an exact understanding of the battlefield situation and precise coordination of forces never before attainable, and sometimes in fact it does. Yet too much information, not all of which will be trustworthy or relevant, is part of the fog of war, so the information age may well often increase rather than decrease the uncertainty of commanders. Granted, the United States today has a distinct advantage in employing the technologies of the information age on the battlefield, but the rest of the world will not stand still. Especially in an age of globalization, some adversaries will catch up and be able to challenge those who rely on such technology on their own terms. Others may simply refuse to fight on unequal terms favoring their enemies. Since strength is a product of will and capabilities, where enemies have the will, they may discover ways for achieving their goals that do not require great wealth or technological sophistication. As the United States discovered in Vietnam and Israel in Lebanon, the most advanced technology may be of little use against an enemy who refuses to fight a conventional war and resorts to guerrilla warfare or terrorism instead. Against all adversaries, but perhaps these sort in particular, technology is no substitute for strategy, which remains a matter of knowing

INTRODUCTION 5

one’s enemy and oneself in order to identify a comparative advantage to defeat or overthrow the enemy while he attempts to do the same to you. In truth, Handel conceded, the owl of Minerva does fly only at dusk, so probably no one has understood the nature of any war completely until it was long over, but it is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness. Understanding just 10 per cent of a war is better than no under-standing at all. Often, the nature of a particular war changes in the middle of the conflict, through outside intervention, for example, so strategy becomes the art of adaptation, a race between the belligerents to under-stand (or, even better, dictate) the changing nature of the war better and faster than their adversaries. Handel seemed to have special admiration for Mao Tse-tung not merely for his understanding of strategy as a race in adaptation, but also because, through all the retreats, defeats, counter-offensives, and advances of a protracted and costly civil war, he kept his mind fixed on his ultimate political objective. Rather than seeing guerrilla war become an end itself (a version of what Handel called the ‘tacticization’ of strategy), Mao warned that it would be necessary for his followers to make a transition to conventional warfare to deliver a knock out blow to their enemies. Yet he also warned against making that transition too early, before his followers had built a virtual state within a state, a sanctuary capable of sustaining large conventional forces. This delicate balance is suggestive of another one, between what Handel called ‘continuity’ (keeping the pressure on a defeated or fleeing enemy) and the ‘culminating point of victory’, when the offense spends its momentum and can barely manage a successful defense of what it has acquired so far. To exceed the culminating point is to invite the enemy to counterattack, but not to keep the pressure on until the enemy is annihilated is to allow him to regroup, survive, and then counterattack. This tension seemed to confirm to Handel that in war there are no absolutely firm rules, that there is a need for intuition, which understands, among other things, when to break the rules (to depart from conventional doctrine). This kind of intuition seems to require a genius, but how does one identify a military genius? Is there a difference between the kinds of genius required on the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war? Indeed, do the same principles of war have the same kind of validity at all three levels of war? And how does one keep such genius under control, so that it remains the servant of policy rather than becoming its master? For these and other questions, Handel had no formulaic answers, though he insisted an answer could be found in the concrete circumstances of any particular war. It takes no genius, however, to understand that no one starts, or ought to start, a war without being clear in his mind what he means to accomplish and how. Every war must end sometime, but how and when? These questions led to some of Handel’s most thoughtful insights about strategy. If you want peace on your terms, keep the pressure on a wounded enemy until he yields, but beware: you may pass the culminating point. You may become overextended or invite outside powers to intervene. If you sue for peace, then, paradoxically, that may be a good

6 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

reason for your adversary not to make peace with you. He knows you are weak and, logically, should keep the pressure on to achieve his goals while he can. Paradoxically again, if both you and your adversary desire peace, neither of you can show it, lest one or the other of you take advantage. So some wars, such as World War I, Korea, and Vietnam perhaps, may drag on beyond what either side would wish to pay because neither side can admit its full desire for peace without risk of being exploited by the other. If you must sue for peace, remember the result in war is never final. As your adversary withdraws from the theater or his will to fight declines in the future, you may win through political means what you failed to win in battle, or you may renew the military conflict later, on your own terms, at a time and place of your own choosing. If you dictate a peace, however, beware again: nations do not keep promises unless it is in their lasting interest to do so. Your terms must therefore give your adversary a stake in the peace too, or you will throw away at the peace table what you thought you had won on the battlefield. Giving your enemy a stake in the peace settlement, however, may require concessions that are unacceptable to your people at home, who may well think that the costs of the war to them require the enemy to make concessions rather than ask for them. So in their desire for a victor’s peace, they may sacrifice the possibility of a lasting one. Here again, we see no rules, no formulas for strategic success. We see no science to ending a war, but we do see a systematic mind pointing out what every statesman and commander must consider in beginning, conducting, and ending a war. That is what Handel, and his great teachers, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Cornet, Mao et al, supply students of strategy: a set of questions to discipline the mind for rational enquiry and effective decisions, when time is often precious, in a realm where chance, friction, and uncertainty often undo the best-laid plans, where boldness and courage, though not risk-free, often impose greater confusion and uncertainty on the enemy than oneself, where even a partial understanding of the war is often good enough to win, if it leads to a more complete and productive assessment of comparative advantages than the enemy’s. The essays in this volume are in the spirit of Michael Handel’s scholar-ship and reflect many of his wide-ranging interests. All the essays cast significant light, from different angles of vision, on one (or both) of the two fundamental issues that were at the center of Handel’s thinking by the end of his life. The first is the one that stands out most in Handel’s published work during his time at the Naval War College: Was there indeed a universal strategic logic and, if so, what were the elements and limits of that logic? As Handel produced each successive, and enlarged, edition of Masters of War, and as he came to grips with an evergreater number of historical case studies of war in the Strategy and Policy course at Newport, his approach to that question became ever richer and more profound. The second does not figure prominently in the bulk of Handel’s published work, but is one that he discussed more and more over time with his colleagues at the Naval War College and elsewhere: How well could liberal democratic

INTRODUCTION 7

governments at war meet the test of political rationality in addressing the universal logic of strategy? That issue was indeed the main topic of discussion at the last of the many academic conferences that he organized and led in his career, a Liberty Fund conference on ‘The Responsibility of Strategic Thinking in a Free Society’, which took place at Newport in December 2000. Different aspects of the fundamental issue of ‘universal’ strategic logic are explored primarily by the authors of the first six essays in this volume: David Kaiser, in his comparison of strategy in sport with strategy in war; William Fuller, in his examination of the pitfalls in learning ‘lessons’ from past wars; Thomas Mahnken, in his explanation of why seemingly very strong powers can lose wars to materially weaker adversaries; Avi Kober, in his reappraisal of strategies that succeed through attrition; Andrew Meyer and Andrew Wilson, in their uncovering of the complex origins of the ideas attributed to Sun Tzu and their understanding of how these ideas should be viewed now; and Milan Vego, in his analysis of the place and importance of the operational level of war in the larger logic of strategy. The second group of essays deals with the issue of political rationality: Karl Walling provides a fresh look at how the internal political dynamics of ancient Athens affected its strategic performance at critical turning points in the Peloponnesian War; Andrew Lambert offers a new perspective on the cost-effectiveness of British strategy in the nineteenth century; David French synthesizes and draws out some implications of his voluminous, previous work on Britain in World War I; Gil Merom presents a strategic audit of Israel in its conflicts with its Arab enemies; Bradford Lee addresses the shortcomings of war-termination strategies in the major wars that the United States fought in the twentieth century; and James Kurth considers US strategic rationality in relation to how both the internal conditions and the external environment of the United States have been changing. All of these last six case studies focus on regimes that were or are either liberal or democratic or (in most of the cases) both. It may seem curious to begin a series of essays on strategic logic with a piece that discusses sports. Michael Handel was quite interested in how far the basic elements of strategic logic—purposeful rationality, dynamic interaction between competitors, and the influence of powerful emotions and moral forces—made themselves felt beyond the realm of war. He often discussed with one of the coeditors of this volume (Bradford Lee) the possibility of working together on a book comparing strategy in business and in war. Yet David Kaiser has good reason for focusing on athletic competition, for the analogical structure of strategy in sport may be closer than that of business to strategy in war. In business there is usually continual competition between more than two rivals with reference to a third group, actual and potential customers, whose purchases determine which of the rivals is more successful. One type of war, insurgencies, is similar to business rivalry, in that a government competes against challengers for the allegiance of the population, which is caught between, and may choose actively to support, one of the two rivals. Other types of war do not usually have

8 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

such a large group of ‘third parties’ whose choices determine the outcome of the conflict. In most sports, by contrast, the competition takes the form of episodic games or matches between two individuals or two groups of rivals, with third parties watching but not directly participating. The games or matches are analogous to battles and campaigns in war, and the ultimate result of the rivalry is determined by which team either has the best record over a series of contests or wins the critical match at the end of the competition. To be sure, as Kaiser points out, there are important differences between sports and war. Success on the athletic field may be an end in itself, or if it is a means, it is to the end of commercial reward; success on the battlefield is (or is supposed to be) a means to a greater political end. Athletic competition is regulated by written rules, with neutral officials interpreting and applying those rules; war takes place in a largely anarchic international arena, and though there are ‘laws of war’, these often are not respected by the belligerents, and there is no neutral referee to restrain or punish law-breaking during wartime. Athletic contests take place within specified limits of time and space; war need not conform to any such limits. And, not least, though most sports involve physical danger, war generates a degree of death and destruction not found in any other form of human interaction. Having noted such differences, Kaiser highlights common elements in terms of strategic logic. Notwithstanding the fact that the nature of goals differs in sport from those in war, at the top levels of competition both are highly purposeful activities with complicated mixtures of objectives. Both feature dynamic interaction between rivals, and Kaiser has many interesting observations to make about how one side or the other finds ways of mastering the interaction—ways that resemble such key military concepts as focusing on the ‘decisive point’, fighting on one’s preferred terms, attacking the enemy’s strategy, and making a well-timed transition from defense to offense. (What is more, Kaiser discovers in Bill James a strategic theorist of baseball worthy of comparison with Clausewitz—an assessment that not all managers of baseball teams would find palatable!) Finally, Kaiser shows how what Clausewitz calls ‘moral forces’ in war are also pervasive and important in sports. Thus, strategic logic is powerful enough to transcend the bounds of war and shape other forms of human activity. However, even within its quintessential realm of war, it is not deterministic in its power. If it were, knowledge of past wars ought to make it possible for strategists to predict the nature of a future war and to prescribe how to win it. But, as William Fuller demonstrates, learning straightforward and reliable ‘lessons’ from past wars has proven to be a treacherous exercise; in the past century, most military establishments in fact did it badly. Fuller identifies three approaches that military thinkers have tried. The first involves an assumption that war is fundamentally the same at all times and in all places. The second accepts the fact of historical change, but tries to tame it scientifically by projecting deterministic trends, ‘laws of development’, that run

INTRODUCTION 9

on a smooth path from past to future. The third, and radically different, approach rests on the belief that there are no principles or trends to uncover, that the specific circumstances of each war vary in vital ways, and hence that any given war has its own special character. None of these approaches, it would seem, can be dismissed out of hand. There are some elements—the basic elements of the logic of strategy—that are present to a greater or lesser degree in all wars. There may also be trends or at least discernible patterns, for example, arising from technological change in weaponry, that connect one war with the next. And yet each war surely has its own defining characteristics. Fuller’s signal contribution is to underline how the very elements that make up the universal logic of strategy account in large measure for the variation in the nature of specific wars, and thus make it difficult to extrapolate lessons from the past to the future. The element of purpose arises from politics, which tend to be highly context-dependent. The element of interaction arises from choices made by the two sides in a war, and choices are contingent. The element of passions arises from the life-and-death struggle of war and tends to make it hazardous to assume that rational calculation will prevail. There is a deep logic to strategy, but its manifestations in any given case are quite likely to be unpredictable. What is more, Fuller suggests, if both sides attempt to learn lessons from previous wars, but if each derives and acts upon different lessons from the past, the result may well be to make the course of the next war all the more unpredictable. Powerful though Fuller’s chapter is, it is not likely to sway military establishments from their determination to plan for future wars on the basis of lessons learned from past wars. If so, what ‘lessons’ might an intrepid but constructive analyst draw from Fuller’s warning about lessons? First and foremost, strategic planners should examine a wide variety of past wars. Second, they should ask—not assume—what will be similar and what will be different about the next war. Third, nuanced judgments arising from that enquiry should inform the plan, and if that plan is connected to the political purpose of the war, it will meet an important test of rationality. Fourth, be prepared, however, for dynamic interaction, which may well mean that the plan will not work and that the nature of the war will turn out to be quite different than anticipated. Fifth, it follows that strategists must be ready to reassess and adapt. The truly great strategists are those who can both plan rationally in advance and improvise creatively in mid-course. Sixth, since such great strategists are in short supply, perhaps there should be a ‘Team A’ to plan before the war, and a ‘Team B’ to scrap the plan during the war and come up with a new strategy. There should be what Fuller calls ‘pragmatic skeptics’ on both teams; they should probably dominate Team B. These prescriptions for strategic planning reflect the fact that not everything that happens in war need be an unintended consequence, but that there are enough ‘non-linear’ phenomena to trip up anyone who supposes that war is a deterministic realm of human activity. What if one is not planning a war, but simply trying to predict its outcome? Surely, one might suppose, the odds very much favor the side that goes into the

10 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

war with greater relative power. Thomas Mahnken’s chapter reminds us, however, that the stronger side does not in fact always prevail; in fact, he points out no fewer than nine wars in the twentieth century in which the materially weaker side won. To resolve what seems at first to be a puzzle, one must bear in mind the ambiguity in the word ‘power’. As Mahnken notes, the word is often used in two quite different senses: on the one hand, to denote ‘control over resources’ and, on the other, to denote ‘control over outcomes’. The key link between the two meanings—a link often overlooked by analysts—is strategy. The stronger side may not succeed in translating superior inputs into desired outcomes if the nominally weaker side better addresses the elements of strategic logic. First, if the weaker side has a political purpose that is of greater value to it than the value of the political object to the stronger side, that asymmetry may prove to be of great importance in the outcome of the war. As Clausewitz observed, power in war is a function of will as well as of means, and a stronger motive for fighting a war can generate superior will. In the idiom of modern political science, the balance of resolve may count for more than the balance of capabilities. Second, if the weaker side can turn the terms of interaction in its favor, and shape the nature of the war in ways that negate the main material strengths of the stronger side, that successful search for comparative advantage may also prove to be of great importance in the outcome. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, Japan was able to gain a major military advantage by integrating ground and naval instruments better than the Russians, as well as by benefiting from its geographical proximity to the main theaters of war in north-east Asia. The Israelis in 1967 gained a great edge in their interaction with their enemies by their pre-emptive use of the air instrument, and by their superior speed and skill in employing their outnumbered ground forces. Many insurgents have won wars of national liberation by relying on unconventional means to trump the conventional superiority of the foreign or foreign-supported rulers that they were fighting. In the political realm, many weaker powers have done a better job than stronger powers of mobilizing the assistance of allies. Third, the weaker side may find ways to attack and divide the enemy’s society (often by indirect means) while maintaining its own cohesion, and thus it can turn the once ‘positive’ passions of the enemy’s people into ‘negative’ passions. If so, that manipulation of the emotional, intangible element of strategic logic may prove to be the ultimate key to getting the stronger side to give up the fight once and for all. Indeed, in most of the twentieth-century cases in which the weaker side won, what stands out in the final analysis is that the stronger side wore down emotionally under the demands of a protracted war of attrition. That in turn provided the back-drop for a rational calculation that the war was not worth fighting any more. Avi Kober, in his chapter on attrition in warfare, picks up where Thomas Mahnken leaves off. Though some analysts have suggested that attrition is a condition, not a choice, Kober makes the point that it can be a deliberate and

INTRODUCTION 11

sophisticated strategy, not simply a process that develops without either side intending it. Like Mahnken, Kober discusses cases of low-intensity conflict in the twentieth century in which the weaker side won the war by ultimately eroding the will to fight of the stronger side. Indeed, as Kober notes, attrition has traditionally been thought of as a strategy of the weak; certainly, that is how Clausewitz was inclined to view it, long before the emergence of Mao Tse-tung as the seminal theorist of how the relatively weak can use a strategy of attrition to make themselves the relatively strong in a protracted, revolutionary war. But Kober emphasizes that many different types of belligerents, strong as well as weak, can make rational, purposeful use of strategies of attrition. The key to success for a belligerent employing such strategies is being able to interact with the enemy in ways that make the passage of time favor its political purposes. At the heart of Kober’s reappraisal of attrition is his identification of four general models of deliberate attrition, which capture the logic of attrition strategies from a variety of standpoints. Two of these models are best suited to the stronger belligerent in a war. One is exemplified by the North in the American Civil War, the Western allies in World War I, and the Grand Alliance in World War II. In each of these cases, the stronger side ground down the means and, ultimately, the will to resist of the weaker side in a protracted, high-intensity war fought for great political stakes. The other model is what Kober, following Edward Luttwak, calls ‘postheroic’ warfare; Kober also offers his own name for it, ‘deluxe attrition warfare’. This involves low-intensity, not high-intensity, conflict. As in strategies of attrition adopted by insurgents in wars of national liberation, it features small actions at the tactical level of war that, over time, have the cumulative effect of producing large consequences at the grand-strategic level of war. But in this model it is the stronger side that prevails, some-times even if the value of the object is relatively much greater to the weaker side (as it was, presumably, to Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo). The key to victory in ‘deluxe attrition warfare’ is not general material superiority, but specific hightech military capabilities that allow the stronger side to strike with precision at enemy targets of value without suffering high casualties. Kober sees the war in Kosovo as an example of this emerging model of attrition. But he cautions that there must be more than technological superiority, if the stronger side is to win. Political legitimacy—in the eyes of both domestic and international onlookers—is essential to success as well. Minimizing civilian casualties on the other side and military casualties on one’s own side is in turn necessary to sustain that legitimacy. Even then, one ought not to be overconfident about predicting success for stronger powers over weaker adversaries in the future, not least because it is part of the logic of strategy that the other side will adapt to the new model and seek ways to turn the terms of interaction in its favor. We thus see once again that the very power of the intricate logic of strategy makes for a lack of predictability. The idea that there is a universal logic of strategy can be tested and refined not only by examining different types of strategy in different types of wars, but also

12 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

by considering the works of theorists from different strategic traditions. What became Michael Handel’s Masters of War started as an effort to compare the theories of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu (Sunzi). If many of the same basic elements could be found in the great work of a Prussian in the nineteenth century and in a famous Chinese text over two millennia earlier, that would constitute important evidence for a universal strategic logic at work. Handel discovered that there was more common ground than many before him (and he himself, initially) had supposed. Within that commonality, to be sure, there were some interesting differences. Both theorists highlighted the fundamental element of political purpose and rationality, but Sun Tzu held out as an ideal the achievement of ambitious political objectives at a low cost in bloodshed and treasure, whereas Clausewitz (if he had been aware of Sun Tzu’s text) would have regarded such ‘hyper-rationality’ as hopelessly unrealistic. Both theorists were conscious of the dynamic element of interaction in war, but Sun Tzu thought that what we would now call ‘information superiority’ and ‘maneuver warfare’ would enable a skilled commander to master interaction with the enemy, whereas Clausewitz was skeptical of the usefulness of operational intelligence and of the viability of fancy schemes of maneuver. The contrapuntal elements of fog, friction, passion, and other factors that Handel termed ‘non-rational’ figure more conspicuously in Clausewitz’s picture of war than in Sun Tzu’s. The chapter by Andrew Meyer and Andrew Wilson helps us under-stand the historical context from which the Sun Tzu text emerged. They argue that the author of the text was primarily motivated by two concerns: first, to justify an elevated status for professional commanders in a Confucian intellectual milieu that demeaned the importance of military expertise in the affairs of state; and, second, to challenge traditional ways of making war dominated by aristocratic values that were no longer suited to a new age of mass conscript armies in ancient China. Meyer and Wilson hypothesize that the text was written in the Warring States period (403–221 BCE), but projected back into the voice of Sun Wu, a contemporary of Confucius in the bygone Spring and Autumn period (722– 481 BCE). The point of this intellectual ‘deception’ was to enhance the cultural legitimacy of the text. Meyer and Wilson also suggest that some of the bestknown ideas of the text were ‘ideal types’ deployed to serve the purpose of giving the work a sharper polemical edge. Against this complex historical background, Meyer and Wilson raise the issue of the theoretical validity of Sun Tzu’s strategic notions in our own day. They look askance at the promiscuous plucking of ancient ideas out of their original context by writers who do not fully understand those ideas but use them to add authority to contemporary nostrums. Just as William Fuller is skeptical about whether strategic logic means that there are straightforward lessons to be learned from past wars, so Meyer and Wilson are skeptical about whether strategic logic means that there are prescriptive ideas so transcendent in value that they can be applied in all times and in all places to all types of conflict. Making use of the universal logic of strategy for prescriptive purposes is an art that involves

INTRODUCTION 13

making careful judgments about what ideas are appropriate in which circumstances. It is not even clear that some of Sun Tzu’s recommended strategies and stratagems were all that well suited to the Warring States era, which saw fighting between the mass conscript armies of states contending for hegemony in north China. In our day, there is a case to be made that advances in information technology and precision-strike weaponry have made Sun Tzu’s ideas more applicable than they have been for a long time. But latter-day Clausewitzians would say that fog and friction still pervade warfare for even the most technologically advanced states, and that bloody combat between soldiers on the ground remains necessary to win any war of truly high stakes. Milan Vego provides a culmination to the first half of the volume by logically and methodically laying out, one on top of the other, the building blocks of strategy. He identifies each of those building blocks and defines their relationship with each other. He stresses that they are inter-locked, but not equal in their importance to the integrity of the whole structure. At the top of the logical structure is policy, which should determine the next level down, strategy; ends should drive means. Strategy in turn should establish a framework for operations (‘the actual employment of one’s combat forces’). Finally, operational design should crucially influence tactics. This logical chain can be broken down into a more elaborate ordering of elements. Ideally, first and foremost, political leaders, with the advice of military leaders, should define a desired end-state to be reached as a result of the war. That end-state can then be expressed in terms of one or more political objectives. Strategists, both political leaders and military leaders working together, must define a military objective that, if achieved, can deliver the political objective. If there is more than one theater of war, there should be military objectives defined for each of them. A series of tactical engagements should be put together to achieve the military objectives. War on paper is one thing; war in reality may be quite another. What looks easy or clear on paper may be much harder or fuzzier in practice. The enemy may make nonsense of one’s tidy blueprints. The dynamics of interaction may outpace a ponderous multi-level planning process hampered by organizational friction. Key players in the process may not act according to their assigned roles or may have hidden agendas. Within seemingly simple planning concepts there may lurk traps or ambiguities. For example, political leaders may fail to provide military leaders with any clear picture or map of the desired end-state. If (as US military doctrine does) one speaks of ‘strategic objectives’, rather than keeping in mind the distinction between political and military objectives, this conflation of what should be distinguished may result in military aims crowding out political aims. At the extreme, military leaders may get so carried away with tactical success that they try to drive strategy beyond the limits of the given policy. Or policy may demand of strategy and operations something that is impossible, or unrealistically difficult, to achieve, either because the political objectives are over-ambitious or

14 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

amorphous or because the political constraints put on the use of the military instrument blunt its effectiveness. As Vego points out, such problems highlight the need for a feedback mechanism among the different levels of the logical structure of strategy and for close interaction among those responsible for policy, strategy, operations, and tactics. If political leaders fail to give sufficient guidance to military leaders or demand something that is beyond the capability of military means to deliver, commanders must press higher authority to rectify this deficiency. If military leaders go beyond the bounds of policy, political leaders must intervene to keep them in line. Political leaders and military leaders must be able jointly to make trade-offs between political considerations and military considerations or, where appropriate, compromises between what is politically desirable and militarily feasible. All this is easier said than done in the real world. Interaction among political leaders and military leaders is rarely frank and friction-free. Political leaders, concerned not only about the external world but also about internal politics, may not want to tell the military leadership exactly where they want to go; indeed, the political equivalents of Clausewitz’s military ‘genius’ typically like to keep their options open as long as possible. Military leaders traditionally have wanted a sphere of action in which they are autonomous. Vego stresses the importance of the operational level as an indispensable link between the decisions of leaders at the level of policy and strategy, and the actions of those who have direct control of the military instruments at the tactical level. But Helmuth von Moltke, who played a key role in propagating the notion of ‘operations’, was interested in carving out a separate domain for that level of war, in part because he wanted to justify his resistance to ‘interference’ by political leaders in his conduct of war. He granted the legitimacy of Bismarck’s role in strategy, but not in operations. US military leaders do not in principle follow Moltke’s deviation from Clausewitz’s views on proper civil-military relations, but are in practice inclined to decry or deride political involvement in the operational sphere as ‘micro-management’. The current American problem that draws Vego’s most intense attention is what Michael Handel called ‘the tacticization of strategy’. What makes this problem loom so large now are the bright opportunities or dark temptations (depending on one’s standpoint) opened up by advances in technology. New information technology makes possible a sensor net and command/control/ communications architecture that holds out the pros-pect of a quantum leap in the speed at which targets can be identified and attacked with precision-strike weaponry. For the proponents of this new form of warfare, strategy is reduced to targeting, and planning at the operational level of war is an unnecessary impediment to ‘speed of command’. In the past, the need for planning at the operational level emerged when it became increasingly difficult to win a war quickly as a result of one or two early, decisive battles. Visionaries now think that in the future it should increasingly be possible again, with the new technology, to win such quick decisive victories. Indeed, they say that this vision

INTRODUCTION 15

materialized for the United States in its wars from 1991 to 2001. Vego’s retort is that when the United States has to fight stronger and more sophisticated enemies in the future, the recent tacticization of strategy is likely to prove to be a significant handicap to achieving the desired political result. In making the transition from the first half of this volume to the second half, we move from chapters that enrich our understanding of what ‘strategic logic’ means and what its limits are, to those that examine the extent to which liberal or democratic regimes, in addressing issues arising from the playing out of strategic logic, demonstrate the ability to be politically rational. Taking Thucydides’ justly renowned account of the Peloponnesian War as his basis, Karl Walling discusses the problem of political rationality in the strategy of Athens, the world’s first great democracy. His main focus is on the breakdown of strategically effective civil-military relations. The concept of ‘civil-military relations’ is a modern one, and at first glance it does not appear to apply well to Athens in the latter part of the fifth century BCE, because it implies a degree of differentiation in the respective roles of political leaders and military leaders that the Athenian polity normally did not exhibit. In Athens, generals were also political leaders and were elected by the people. But Walling points out that when military expeditions in the ancient Greek world were so far-flung that communications between commanders in the field and the assembly in the capital became extraordinarily difficult, there was in fact a substantial degree of separation between those making the key military decisions and those making the key policy decisions. In the Peloponnesian War of 431–404 BCE, as in many modern wars, two types of breakdown of civil-military relations loom large in strategic importance. The first occurs when a commander in the field makes his own policy, rather than adhere to the political objectives and other policy guidance laid down by the governmental leadership at home; and that in turn often happens after the commander has achieved a sudden or otherwise remarkable success that goes to his head and generates ‘victory fever’. According to the common interpretation, this type of breakdown, in which strategy comes to drives policy, inverting the rational subordination of the military instrument to the political purpose, was at work with General Douglas MacArthur in the Korean War. For a similar breakdown in the Peloponnesian War, Walling gives the example of the Spartan general Brasidas. Having succeeded in shaking loose Athens’ hold over key imperial outposts in northern Greece in 424–423 BCE, Brasidas wanted to complete the job of overthrowing the Athenian empire—even as the political leadership back in Sparta had decided to seek a negotiated settlement of the war with Athens. The second type of breakdown occurs when there is such a pronounced degree of actual or perceived political control of military commanders that their operational performance falls short of what is necessary to achieve the political objective. Walling finds that type of break down in the sorry story of the Athenian leader Nicias in the famous military expedition to Sicily in 415–413 BCE. He sees in that story the political irrationality of the Athenian

16 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

democratic system as it made strategy under the stress of a protracted, high-stakes war. Indeed, in his view, democracy had in effect become a tyrant in dealing with its military commanders. Though Athens was not an entirely ‘free’ or ‘liberal’ society as we would understand those terms today, its political system was more democratic than that of any other great power in history, at least in the sense that the mass of the Athenian citizenry had an unmatched degree of direct influence on basic issues of foreign policy and military strategy. One way in which it exercised its influence was to hold military commanders to stringent standards of accountability for their performance. If a commander was unsuccessful in a military campaign, he ran the risk of being fined, ostracized, or even executed. By the time of the Sicilian expedition, commanders had even more reason than usual to be nervous, for political factionalism in Athenian democracy had become extraordinarily vicious and vindictive, especially between the faction led by Nicias and that led by Alcibiades. Walling shows how this political poison infected the decision to send an expedition to Sicily—a decision that a ‘unitary rational actor’ probably would not have made; then compromised the command arrangements for the campaign; and finally worked to make Nicias an even more risk-averse operational commander than he ordinarily was. He missed opportunities both to win in Sicily and then to cut his losses, at least in part because he feared retribution from his political enemies in Athens. The result was a disastrous turn for the worse in Athenian fortunes in the larger war with Sparta. That result was not an indictment of the strategic rationality of democracy per se, for Syracuse, which defeated Athens in Sicily, was itself a democracy; but the result was, in the view of Walling (and no doubt Thucydides), an indictment of the way that Athenian democracy had come to function in strategic affairs by the middle of the Peloponnesian War. In the modern world, the closest analogue to ancient Athens in strategic circumstances (though not in the strategic decision-making process) has been Britain. So long as the British possessed an unrivaled naval instrument and robust financial and economic strength, they were able to expand and defend a far-flung maritime empire. Indeed, that empire far exceeded in geographical scale and chronological longevity the Athenian empire. Britain has never been the same sort of democracy that Athens was. Neither the main national political leaders nor military strategists have ever been directly elected by the mass of the British population; and during almost the entire period when the British empire was expanding, democratic suffrage was restricted in important ways. Nonetheless, Britain has long had a free society and a liberal political community. Andrew Lambert’s analysis of the strategic performance of this imperial power with a liberal metropolitan regime covers the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the early stage of the American Civil War in 1861. Unlike Karl Walling’s account of Athens in crisis, Lambert’s story is one of remarkable success. The British wanted to make money, not make war, which would bring greater costs than benefits. Britain was able for a long time to

INTRODUCTION 17

defend its formal empire and sustain its informal imperial interests through deterrence, coercive diplomacy, and an occasional limited war. Note that the title of Lambert’s essay suggests a strategic performance that came close to achieving what Meyer and Wilson regard as the Sun Tzuian ‘ideal-type’ of winning without fighting. Certainly, there is a case here for a remarkable record of political rationality in the form of a high degree of cost-effectiveness achieved by a regime operating strategically on a global scale, while constrained by traditional liberal notions of limited government. How, then, did the British manage to harmonize the maintenance of an extensive position abroad with limited government at home in the heyday of a ‘laissez-faire’ political economy? There are two explanations worth noting here. One is mostly implicit in Lambert’s analysis: the political system gave ample scope at its apex for prudent calculation. No great gusts of Athenian passions, puffed up by factional or partisan demagoguery, blew the decision-making of top leaders of Victorian Britain off a course of instrumental rationality, at least not in the period that Lambert covers. The second explanation is quite explicit in his chapter: new naval technology gave a force coming from the sea a significant advantage over defenders in fortifications on land. For Britain, an offensive power-projection capability served quite well what were largely defensive political purposes. Here we can see the basic element of dynamic interaction in strategy combining smoothly with the element of purposeful rationality. It was, in Lambert’s telling, the British mastery of military interaction in the littorals that made possible the rational political achievement of so much at so little cost. At least until the maturation of military aviation in World War II, forces coming from the sea in the modern world were usually at a disadvantage in taking on coastal defenses. Even Nelson, the most audacious naval commander of all, had warned that it was foolish to pit ships against forts. But technological developments in the nineteenth century, most notably the advent of armored steam ships and long-range heavy-shell naval guns, opened a window of opportunity for British power projection from the sea that was later to be closed by mines, torpedoes, improved artillery, and railway networks that could move ground forces around quickly on land. As Lambert has already shown in a previous work, the British ability to destroy Russia’s fortified ports played an important role in the outcome of the Crimean War of 1854–56. And in the final section of his chapter in this volume, he argues that the threat Britain could pose to obsolete coastal forts made it possible to coerce the United States into backing down in the Trent crisis of 1861. Of course, the success of British coercive diplomacy was facilitated by the fact that President Abraham Lincoln was a rational strategist, who recognized that his government already had its hands full with the South in the Civil War; one enemy at a time was more than enough. In World War I, Britain faced an enemy, Germany, much more formidable than the United States had been in 1861 or, indeed, than any other British adversary had been since the downfall of Napoleonic France. In the technological circumstances of 1914–18, an assault from the sea on the north

18 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

German coast had little chance of being strategically effective. To prevent Wilhelmine Germany from achieving hegemony over Europe required that Britain be part of a powerful coalition, and sustaining that coalition required in turn that Britain send to France the largest army that it had ever sent anywhere overseas. Winning in this case had to involve much fighting, at a very high cost. Having previously written two detailed volumes on the British role in World War I, David French in his contribution to this Festschrift provides an overview that allows us to reflect on the rationality of Britain’s strategy. The process by which British political and military leaders worked out that strategy was not tranquil. But, overall, there was an effective and adaptive effort to correlate means and ends in a rational manner. British leaders managed to handle tolerably well a number of challenging strategic issues. For example, they were able to maintain adequate cooperation with coalition partners during the war, even as they realistically anticipated problems with allies after the war. As the human and economic strains of the war rose to unprecedented levels, the government was able to keep the positive passions of the British people from turning negative to any debilitating degree. Despite rising tensions between Prime Minister Lloyd George and those generals committed to a strategy of attrition on the Western Front, there was no breakdown in civil-military relations. Though there was never any clear, common picture within the British government of the ideal ‘endstate’ in Germany, the peace settlement that emerged at the end of the war more closely reflected British interests in Europe than it did the preferences of France or the United States; and, outside of Europe, the British empire after the war spanned more of the world than ever before. Yet a nagging question remains: did the costs of World War I propel Britain down the road to ruin as a great power over the long run? David French highlights a paradox, or unintended consequence, of World War I for Britain: British leaders in 1914–18 wanted, as their Victorian predecessors had, to keep the costs of war down to the lowest possible level, but in the end the cost in blood and treasure mounted far higher than they had anticipated at the beginning. The dynamics of military interaction with a formidable Germany had pressed Britain to the bounds of political rationality. Niall Ferguson in his revisionist work The Pity of War has recently argued that Britain would have been better off staying out of the war. French does not agree. In the history of the war as it unfolded, he notes that Germany was not willing to quit when it was doing well. In the counterfactual realm, one might add, it would seem to follow that if Britain had stood aside and allowed the Kaiser’s Germany to achieve domination of continental Europe, there is little reason to suppose that the Germans would have been willing to rest content with that. A victorious Germany would surely have been an ever-present danger to the security of Britain and its empire, and to the liberties of the British people. Gil Merom’s essay examines not a traditional great empire, but a new small state, Israel, whose very existence has been threatened by enemies ever since it secured its independence by war in 1948. The domestic politics of this

INTRODUCTION 19

democracy, the only one in its region, have been, at least in the past generation, more fractious than those of modern Britain, but less fractious than those of ancient Athens. Merom’s contribution to this volume gives a balanced appraisal of Israeli strategic rationality, over five decades, in the context of external threats and internal political dynamics. On the one hand, the Israelis have done an impressive job of assessing their environment and their enemies and establishing a hierarchy of political goals. They also have been able to develop high-quality military forces and creative military strategies to offset a whole array of advantages that favor their Arab enemies and to meet threats quickly (if necessary, pre-emptively) and decisively, at the lowest possible cost, especially in casualties. As with the British powerprojection capabilities of the mid-nineteenth century discussed by Andrew Lambert, Israeli strategy is predicated on the assumption that the best defense is a good offense. Britain’s offensive orientation was driven by the financial impossibility of having large forces in place everywhere to defend its imperial territories scattered around the world; Israel’s offensive orientation has been driven by the dangers of relying on defensive operations to protect a home territory that has little strategic depth. In both cases, Lambert and Merom help us see that liberal regimes were able to achieve a rational match between political goals and military strategy within tight material constraints. On the other hand, Merom identifies some ‘soft spots’ in Israeli strategy. There are characteristics of Israel’s democratic political system that detract from strategic rationality. Three issues deserve some discussion here. First, Merom detects ‘the alienation of the educated middle class’ as a result of the dynamics of democratic politics in Israel. Politicians in quest of votes among the less-educated masses engage in anti-elitist rhetoric, adopt redistributionist policies, and cater to religious groups with divisive beliefs. Especially to the extent that this political behavior has spurred the emigration of well-educated Israelis, it has had the effect of eating away at the human capital that has given the Israeli military the major qualitative superiority that it has enjoyed over its Arab adversaries. Second, and going further along the same social dimension of strategy, Merom points out that within the Israeli political system small groups with ‘parochial interests’ have been able to get exemptions from military service even as they are an important political force pushing for the expansion of settlements in the West Bank—settlements that have only further fueled Arab enmity and thus, on balance, have had political costs that have out-weighed their strategic benefits. In this connection, Merom emphasizes that what he calls ‘the territorialization of strategic thinking’ in Israel, especially since 1967, has not simply been the result of ‘purely rational strategic considerations’; it is also very much the product of theological doctrine and ideological passion. The control over such a large Palestinian Arab population that occupation of the 1967 territorial gains has entailed may sooner or later put into question the viability of a democratic political system in Israel.

20 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Third, that political system has not always been able to keep its military instrument under rational control. On a number of occasions, activeduty military commanders, sometimes with the connivance of retired military leaders serving in high-level positions in government, have taken military actions that went beyond stated policy or did not have the approval of the government as a whole. More generally, Merom argues (in line with a point that Michael Handel made in his own trenchant analysis of Israeli strategy) that Israel’s foreign policy over time has become excessively ‘militarized’. Given the mortal threats that Israel has faced, an emphasis on military ‘solutions’ to security problems is quite understandable; so indeed is ‘the territorialization of strategic thinking’. But the chronic failure to achieve an optimal balance between military strategy and diplomacy has been, in Merom’s view, quite harmful to Israel’s best long-term interest. However much operational successes have bought time and gained space for Israel, it is difficult to imagine that military force alone can ever provide a durable resolution to its security problems. Thus, the verdict on the strategic performance of the democratic state of Israel must be mixed and nuanced. Bradford Lee reaches a similarly complex verdict on the war-termination strategies of the United States from 1918 to 1991. On the one hand, in every one of its major wars in that period except for the Vietnam War, the United States achieved its most basic political objective. On the other hand, in every case, critics of US strategic performance could make a good argument that, while the United States may have won the war, it lost the peace— in the sense that the postwar settlement was not as favorable or as durable as it should have been. Lee’s chapter explores the extent to which shortcomings in war-termination strategies have produced disappointing political results and offers a series of interlocking explanations for the shortcomings. One explanation is that war-termination decisions involve unusually difficult strategic choices. The two key choices are: (1) what to demand politically; and (2) how far to go militarily. Not only do decisions on those two issues have to be rationally correlated and to take into account the enemy (and, in many cases, allied) reaction to them, but they also embody a special case in the general logic of strategy, for calculations of costs and benefits must be made in increments at the margin: how much additional cost will going further militarily involve and how much additional benefit might going further deliver, in the form of a more favorable and durable peace? A major complication bedevils any such calculation. The costs will involve less uncertainty than the benefits, because the costs will happen soon and be quite palpable, while the benefits, if there are any, will only materialize over a much longer time and their possible value will be hard to measure in advance. It is no easy matter for leaders, especially in a democracy, to solve that riddle of rationality. Another explanation that Lee offers for real or perceived shortcomings in US war-termination performance is that in its major twentieth-century wars the United States tended to have multiple layers of political purpose, of which the most elevated layer was usually quite abstract or amorphous. By pitching

INTRODUCTION 21

ultimate purpose at a lofty moral plane, US leaders set them-selves up for disappointment. Results in the real world fell short of aspirations laid out on paper and in speeches; criticism followed. A final set of explanations in Lee’s chapter has to do with the limitations of the decision-makers and flaws in the decision-making process, which were at the root of problems in matching strategy to policy. US military leaders were limited in the degree to which, and the skill with which, they addressed matters of policy. US political leaders were limited in their willingness to push forward the generals and in their understanding of the political implications of military matters. These limitations on the two sides of the civil-military divide were not mitigated by ‘close and frank communication’ across that divide. In no case do US political and military leaders seem to have talked with each other early and often about the key war-termination issues. As in other essays in this volume on political rationality in handling the logic of strategy, civil-military problems stand out in Lee’s chapter on the United States. One might ground Lee’s findings in a more profound, or more cynical, interpretation of the impact of democratic politics on US strategy. According to this interpretation, the United States, like other great powers, typically goes to war for balance-of-power reasons. But since those reasons rarely have much appeal to the American electorate, presidents make their public case for war in highly moral terms. When the ‘crunch’ of war-termination decisions comes at the end of the conflict, one cost looms large in any consideration of going further military: the prospect of additional casualties. Political and military leaders fear that the public will react very negatively to such casualties arising from what might be criticized as an unnecessary prolongation of the war. That fear gives those leaders a strong incentive to devalue whatever long-term benefits going further militarily might deliver in the form of a more favorable and durable peace. Arguably, the incentive to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term is reinforced by the electoral calendar of American democracy. Presidents are elected for only four years per term. In the United States, unlike in other democratic great powers, national elections have been held even in wartime. What is more, again unlike in other democratic great powers, the president is the commander-in-chief and is directly elected by the people of the entire country. Remarkably, no US president who was in office when the United States intervened on a large scale in a twentieth-century war was still in office four years after the decision for intervention. Is it surprising, then, that decisions on war-termination strategies have short ‘time horizons’? That interpretation, with the rhetorical question to which it leads, is unduly cynical. There is little reason to doubt that presidents have meant what they have said in their pronouncements about fighting wars to create a more stable regional or world order conducive to American values and interests. It may be unrealistic, but it is not irrational, to pitch political purposes at a high level. It is understandable, though not necessarily rational in a strict sense, that after incurring high costs to achieve the most basic political objective of a war,

22 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

presidents and their advisers may decide that they do not want to pay any more for the sake of uncertain additional benefits. The last chapter in this volume is also on the United States and takes readers from the twentieth century into the twenty-first century. James Kurth notes many of the ways in which the recent past has been an era of transformations. He focuses on two that are of the greatest importance for US military strategy. The first is the ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA) that has been the subject of much discussion in the Pentagon and in publications by defense analysts. This RMA, the latest of many in military history driven by technological innovation, promises to enable the United States—and, subsequently, other powers as well— to make a ‘quantum leap’ in military effectiveness by capitalizing on the remarkable advances in information technology embodied in sophisticated sensors, new command-and-control architecture, and precision-strike weaponry. The other strategically momentous transformation is what Kurth dubs ‘the revolution in attitudes toward the military’ (RAM). This RAM, which also has precedents in modern history, is driven by changes in values in the new ‘postmodern’ society, changes that are a product of political, cultural, and demographic trends such as the end of military conscription, the spread of radical individualism at the expense of communitarian solidarity in a society that more and more is fluidly organized by networks rather than by large hierarchical bureaucracies; the transition (in Kurth’s words) ‘from a national identity to a multicultural one’, and the development (again, in Kurth’s words) of ‘one-child demography and its no-death mentality’. These post-modern phenomena have two major implications for US strategy. One, left implicit in Kurth’s essay, is the general attenuation of the ties that bind together the military and the people. The second and more specific implication, highlighted by Kurth, is the increased sensitivity to American casualties in war. In Kurth’s view, it is in the nature of liberal-democratic regimes in the AngloAmerican tradition to seek to wage wars at the lowest possible cost, especially in casualties. The sort of strategic behavior that Andrew Lambert sees in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century is no anomaly. To be sure, Kurth notes that in the high-stakes wars of the past—the American Civil War and World War II, above all—the American people, like the British in World War I and World War II, were willing to accept correspondingly high casualties and, more generally, have shown passionate ferocity in their attachment to the military effort. But, as Lee notes, even in World War II, casualty-aversion was a constraint on US wartermination strategies, and Kurth’s chapter may leave some readers wondering whether or not the American people will ever again be willing to support any strategy that generates a large number of American deaths in battle (not to speak of the home front). Probing forward on the question of the political rationality of liberaldemocratic governments in their strategic behavior, Kurth lays out two major lines of thought. One points toward just how rational and adaptable the US defense establishment has been recently in fashioning a strategic posture that

INTRODUCTION 23

exploits the RMA technological opportunity to maximize military effectiveness within the RAM socio-political constraints. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has made a transition to a method of waging war that features the use of high-technology weaponry in ways that have kept American casualties unprecedentedly low. The result has been a remarkable series of quick victories, at minimal human cost to Americans: in the Gulf War of 1991, the Kosovo War of 1999, and in the Afghan campaign after the terrorist attack of September 2001. Kurth’s second line of thought leads us back in a different direction, to a warning (also made by Milan Vego) against assumptions that such successes can be replicated in any environment against any enemy in any type of war. He echoes William Fuller’s point that projecting ‘lessons’ from past wars to future wars can be a chancy enterprise. He goes on to analyze specific theaters where the US military services can or cannot have realistic prospects of winning with high technology and low casualties. The analysis is a sobering enough one for American strategists that perhaps they will be prompted to take another look at the essays by Avi Kober on how to wage wars of attrition, by Thomas Mahnken on how the technologically advanced powers do not always win the wars that they fight, and by Milan Vego on the danger for the United States of the ‘tacticization of strategy’. Kurth also provides food for thought on how the relatively weak may become relatively strong by exploiting for themselves the RMA technolog ical opportunity. Historically, the powers who in the short run were quickest to gain a lead in the new technologies often met their match in the long run. If and when the current RMA spreads to some other country and that country ends up in violent conflict with the United States, the mastery of interaction that the US military displayed in the wars of 1991–2003 will likely come under serious challenge. Kurth identifies the most likely challenger as China. It is perhaps fitting to forecast that the country whose strategic culture was shaped by Sun Tzu might ultimately be the country that goes the furthest with information technology in warfare in the twenty-first century. After all, Sun Tzu was, arguably, the first known theorist to suggest that war was a contest of information. But a future war between two information-saturated belligerents in dynamic interaction with each other is not likely to be a war of Sun Tzu’s hyperrational ideal-type, a war that can be won at low cost without much fighting. It is much more likely to be a Clausewitzian contest of wills, a war full of friction, uncertainty, and the play of chance. In any such war between advanced states, and indeed in other conflicts, including the current war against that strange non-state actor al-Qaeda, strategic logic in all its complexity will be at work. Political rationality, military interaction, and primordial passion will ebb and flow, combining, separating, and recombining. The side that better handles and harmonizes these basic elements of strategic logic will be the side whose political purpose prevails in the end, though at what culminating point and at what cost one cannot predict. It is no

24 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

wonder, then, that Kurth and others affirm that Clausewitz remains highly relevant to the future. And if Clausewitz was Handel’s Messiah (as Michael himself liked to say), Kurth and his fellow contributors to this volume equally affirm the wisdom of our late colleague’s teachings.

PART I: STRATEGIC LOGIC

1 Strategy in War and Sports: A Comparison David E.Kaiser

Sports and war have many obvious similarities, not least because many cultures— from medieval Europe to the tribes of the North American plains—have blurred the distinctions between them. Both involve winning and losing, both settle disputes, and both arouse the same emotions of fear, excitement, euphoria, and shame. In both realms, men (and, increasingly, women) wear uniforms and compete on behalf of larger populations, and both feature endless ex post facto analysis, or ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’. Discussions of war rely heavily upon metaphors from sport, and vice versa. Differences are, however, equally critical. Sports are a closely regulated competition that take place according to complex rules kept by neutral officials. Such rules are designed to level the playing field—a complete contrast to war, where both sides seek superiority of all kinds. Athletic contests take place within specified limits of time and space, while wars do not. Elements of physical danger, while certainly present in sport, are generally kept within bounds. Most important of all, sports take place largely for their own sake, while war, as Clausewitz tells us, aims at a broader political objective. In war, victory on the battlefield is only a means; in sports, victory is the end, whether defined with regard to one game, or a long series of games that make up a season. Even at the highest levels of analysis, however, similarities between war and sport abound. Proceeding from the highest levels to the lowest, I shall explore some of the more telling analogies between these two realms. First, at the policy level, we shall look at the tension in both sport and war between long-term and short-term goals, an issue that raises problems of innovation, cost, and even when to fight. Moving downward to the strategic level, we shall see how some of war’s bestknown strategic maxims have won various types of games, as well as wars. And, lastly, we shall look at the similar demands that sports and war make upon individuals, and how, in both cases, competitors can cope with these demands and even turn them to their advantage.

STRATEGY IN WAR AND SPORTS 27

Battles and Broader Objectives Wars, of course, may have many different goals. Victory is the primary goal of sport, but it is not the only one. Modern professional sports seek profit as well as victory, and we shall find that the two goals can often conflict. In addition, sports, like war, often force commanders to assign greater or lesser importance to individual campaigns, or even wars, and to distribute their effort accordingly. Lastly, neither sports nor war ever stand still, and teams, like nations and military services, must innovate to remain victorious. They experience some of the same difficulties in doing so. Money, in modern team sports, is both one of the objects of the ownership and the tool that enables teams to win. Professional American baseball now faces, and not for the first time, a situation in which about half of its teams do not have the resources to buy a winning set of ball players in an increasingly free market. (Although the press frequently portrays this situation as a consequence of free agency, richer teams have always enjoyed an advantage, and from 1920 to the late 1940s the Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Braves, and St Louis Browns had even less chance of winning a pennant than teams like the Montreal Expos or Pittsburgh Pirates do today.) During the past ten years, several teams, including the San Diego Padres, the Florida Marlins, and the Chicago White Sox, have chosen to forego victory in the short and medium term in exchange for higher profits and unloaded some of the more expensive players on their roster. This step was especially striking in the case of the Marlins, who sold off their team after winning the 1997 World Series. In an earlier era, Connie Mack, who owned and managed the Philadelphia Athletics for almost half a century, confessed late in his career that he preferred a team that contended, but did not win, since it would draw fans to the ball park without requiring him to raise his players’ salaries in exchange for a pennant. While international politics and war may not offer exact analogies to this phenomenon, teams that forego attempts at total victory are similar, in some respects, to nations that insist upon proclaiming goals that they lack either the will or the resources to achieve, or to smaller nations who give up some of their independence in exchange for security provided by a powerful ally. The difficult relationship of battles to campaigns and wars plays an enormous part in sport, as well as war. Such problems pose special challenges for leading European soccer teams, which often have to fight on two or even three fronts at once: their domestic league competition, a domestic cup competition, and a European cup (or now, ‘Champions’ League’) competition. At some point in every season, some teams must decide to make one or the other of these goals their ‘center of gravity’, as it were, and rest players and schedule practice accordingly. In almost every American sport, the use of ever-increasing rounds of playoffs to determine the national champion at the end of the season has inevitably diminished the intensity of competition during the regular season—a campaign that it is no longer necessary to win. The best tennis players and

28 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

golfers save their best efforts for the Grand Slam events. Games, like battles, have different levels of significance, and both generals and coaches understand this and act accordingly. Sometimes even an entire season has to be sacrificed for the sake of the future. Bill Russell joined the Boston Celtics in late 1956, and that team won its first NBA (National Basketball Association) championship a few months later. They were on their way to a second one in 1958 when Russell sprained his ankle during the final playoff series against the St Louis Hawks. Russell returned to action for a few minutes in the next game, but his coach Red Auerbach—one of the most successful strategists in the history of sport—pulled the limping center out of the game. ‘There’ll be other seasons, Russ’, Auerbach said—and the Celtics and Russell won the next eight NBA championships in a row. The need to innovate—to abandon proven tactics, weapons, and strategies that have become obsolete—is one of the most difficult problems armies and nations face. The same problem plays at least as big a role in professional sports, where players are the team’s ‘weapons’, and where all of them are subject to obsolescence simply because of the deterioration of the human body. In the same way that the battleship became the symbol of great navies in the early twentieth century, established star players become, and remain, the symbols of successful teams—often well after their peak effectiveness has passed. In baseball, Branch Rickey, who created and maintained great teams with the St Louis Cardinals in the 1920s and 1930s and the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s, was one of the first to realize this. ‘You think you’re all right at first base’, he explained patiently to his Brooklyn manager Leo Durocher in 1943, Because you have a big-name player there who has done better in his day. You keep hoping he’ll do better again. At any rate, you think he’ll do well enough… The bad ball players don’t hurt you so much because you know they’re bad, and you take steps to replace them. But the…‘good enough’ boys kill you.1 Rickey, of course, could just as easily have been describing the Prussian Army in 1806 or the Royal Navy in 1940. The American football general manager who trades established stars for draft choices, or the soccer manager, like Sir Alex Ferguson of Manchester United, who lets stars transfer with several years of effectiveness left and breaks in younger players in their place, understands this principle. The championship team that automatically begins the next season with the same cast of characters—like the cavalry general on the eve of World War I— does not. Indeed, Bill James, the American baseball theorist (or ‘sabermetrician’), reduced this concept to what he called The Law of Competitive Balance’ in 1982. ‘There develop over time’, he wrote, ‘separate and unequal strategies adopted by winners and losers; the balance of those strategies favors the losers, and thus serves constantly to narrow the difference between the two.’2 Teams that

STRATEGY IN WAR AND SPORTS 29

improved in one year, James had discovered, tend to decline in the next (in part because their improvement owed something to luck), and vice-versa. This law, he acknowledged, had application far beyond sports. In the 1920s and 1930s, the British and French counted on defensive warfare and economic strength to win a new conflict with Germany, while the defeated Germans planned new tactics based upon new weapons to reverse the outcome of World War I. Defeat—in sport as in war—frees the defeated from the dogmas of the past and helps them discover new energy to improve. Victory is a soporific, and, human nature being what it is, these patterns repeat themselves again and again. In sport as in war one must not only distinguish between long- and short-term goals, one must also recognize the need for changing the weapons and tactics to achieve them. Fundamentals of Strategy Several basic strategic arguments have dominated the analysis of war since the beginning of recorded history. The same arguments, and the same contrasting strategies, continually emerge and re-emerge in the world of sport. ‘Know the enemy, know yourself’, says Sun Tzu,3 and you will not lose once in a hundred battles. This remains perhaps the most questionable of all the Chinese master’s maxims, since it ignores the critical role of chance in war, as in sport, but, nonetheless, winning through information dominance and surprise— as MacArthur did in Inchon and Brasidas did in Thrace—has been the goal of many great teams and players. In the 1980s, Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers tried to secure information dominance by scripting the first 21 plays his offense would run, making it impossible for the defense to infer the next play from the results of the previous few, or even from the down-and-yardage situation. He also included new, trick plays early in the game to create confusion.4 In his 1974 fight to regain the heavyweight title from George Foreman, Muhammad Ali stunned the champion in the first round with an unexpected tactic—a series of effective right leads to the jaw. Tennis players and fans alike know the importance of getting the first serve in the court, but few realize that this tactic also relies mainly on information dominance. A first serve is usually faster than a second one, but, more importantly, it is far less predictable, and the receiver cannot set himself up to hit a particular shot before he sees it. In baseball the never-ending duel between pitchers and catchers on one side and hitters on the other turns on the batter’s ability to anticipate the next pitch. Confidence plays an enormous role in both sport and war, and nothing increases confidence like the knowledge that the enemy has been caught unawares. Clausewitz, a somewhat more methodical strategist than Sun Tzu, argues for strength everywhere, but especially at the decisive point. For the Green Bay Packers of the 1960s or the Dallas Cowboys of the 1990s, this point was the offensive line that ensured their control of the ball and their dominance. In baseball, a belief in the decisive nature of the last inning or two has led teams since

30 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the 1990s to reserve an outstanding pitcher as a ‘closer’, whose role is to protect such a lead. The great baseball theorist Bill James has himself made a military analogy, arguing that Napoleon was the inventor of relief pitching, since he held troops in reserve for the crucial moment, but in his latest book he has also shown through simulations that today’s teams are making a mistake by reserving their closer for situations in which they are leading, since a more decisive point arises when the teams are tied in the late innings.5 This conclusion illustrates another common aspect of war and sport: how certain strategies become dominant within a particular army, or even within all contemporary armies, even though other strategies would work better. In the widely different sports of base-ball and soccer, many teams have won by being ‘strong down the middle’—a term which refers to the catcher, second baseman, shortstop and centerfielder in baseball, and the goalkeeper, central defender, central midfielder and center forward in soccer. In tennis, the ‘decisive point’ refers literally to break point, and players frequently reserve particular serves or tactics to deal with the points that can easily cost them sets and matches. Sun Tzu advises warriors to fight on their own terms, not the enemy’s, and few military maxims have found better application in sport. From 1923 through 1973, Yankee Stadium, the home of the Yankees, measured well over 400 feet to center and left-center field, but only 300 feet down the right-field foul line, and this extreme shape was modified, but not eliminated, by remodeling in 1974–75. Every Yankee dynasty has taken advantage of the park’s shape by acquiring lefthanded power-hitters (or switch-hitters) who could reach the right-field stands: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in the 1920s; Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Tommy Henrich and Charlie Keller in the late 1930s and 1940s; Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris in the 1950s and early 1960s; Reggie Jackson, Graig Nettles, and Chris Chambliss in the late 1970s; and Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Tino Martinez, and Paul O’Neill in the late 1990s. (New York has now lost Martinez and O’Neill, but added Jason Giambi.) Such a line-up has given the Yankees a natural edge at home. In the early 1960s, when the Dodgers moved into Dodger Stadium, it was a very hard park in which to hit, and Los Angeles built a team that relied on pitching, defense, and the ability to scratch out a couple of runs a game to win three pennants and two world series. The Boston Red Sox, meanwhile, have suffered because of the misconception that Fenway Park—an equally extreme stadium in a different way—favors a right-handed power hitter, whereas it actually gives more help to left-handers who hit for higher averages. From the 1940s through the early 1980s, the Red Sox also tended to overestimate their hitting and underestimate their pitching because they played in a park that favored offense. Sun Tzu also urges generals to attack the enemy’s strategy. Bill Tilden, tennis’s first great theorist as well as its first great champion, showed back in the 1920s how one kind of spin could be used to neutralize another, and clever players have put his lessons to work ever since. Billie Jean King kept Chris Evert from getting the initiative at Wimbledon in 1973 and 1975 by using a heavily

STRATEGY IN WAR AND SPORTS 31

sliced backhand that made the ball shoot low off the grass. In an even better example, in 1975 Arthur Ashe faced a younger and seemingly invincible Jimmy Connors in the Wimbledon final. Connors had overpowered his six previous opponents without the loss of a set, but Ashe played every soft shot that he could, quickly destroyed Connors’s rhythm, and won two quick and easy sets before the defending champion began to adjust. It was too late, and Ashe won a spectacular final in four sets. In boxing, the maxim, ‘Always crowd a boxer, always box a slugger’, expresses Sun Tzu’s idea in a different way. Defense, Clausewitz tells us, is the stronger form of warfare, but, as the Roman general Fabius had found many centuries earlier, victory only comes when one swings back to offense. The Fabian strategy, which allows the opponent to exhaust himself in futile attempts to keep the initiative before applying the coup de grâce, seems to have dominated American football in the first half of the twentieth century, when the same players played both offense and defense. Many teams preferred staying on defense and wearing out the opposition, all the while hoping to take advantage of a mistake that would give them the ball near the goal. In soccer, the Italian national team, in particular, generally relies on Fabian strategies, which produce boring games but often work, nonetheless, since they allow the team to control the ball and always leave many players available for defense. Boxing, however, provides some of the most spectacular examples of this strategy. In 1951, in the fifth and climactic fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta, Robinson danced away from LaMotta for 12 rounds before allowing himself to be caught on the ropes, where he received a long flurry of punches that left him still standing but left LaMotta exhausted. In the next round, Robinson took the offensive, backed a defenseless LaMotta up against the ropes, and won when the referee stopped the fight. In 1974, Muhammad Ali went Robinson one better by adopting his ‘rope-adope’ strategy against George Foreman in the second round and sticking with it well into the eighth. By the middle of the eighth, Foreman had entirely exhausted himself in his assault—tapes show that he could hardly hold his arms up—and with only seconds left in the round, Ali unleashed a sudden, devastating flurry of punches that knocked Foreman out for the count. The Fabian strategy had produced one of the greatest upsets in the history of sport. The Emotional Demands of War and Sport Danger, Clausewitz points out, is a critical aspect of war, one with which a successful commander must learn to cope. Actual physical danger -including, in very rare cases, the threat of death—occurs in many sports, including boxing, American football, and even baseball, where batters have been killed by pitched balls. ‘Intimidation’—that is, the ability to inspire fear in one’s opponent—has been a strategy of many football defenses, as well as of the great pitchers of the 1960s, like Bob Gibson, who tried to keep the fear of being hit by a fastball in

32 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the forefront of the batter’s mind. In sport as in war, the fear of injury can prevent athletes from performing well, and successful performers must learn to ignore it. Even in the absence of physical danger, however, fear clearly plays an enormous role in sport. For professional athletes in particular—whose whole identity is bound up in what they do—a key loss clearly inspires fears comparable in effect with the fear of death itself—and, ironically, such fears can help generate extraordinary performances. Soldiers, Sun Tzu wrote, fight best on death ground, and one should therefore not hesitate to put one’s own troops on death ground. This psychological dynamic frequently operates in the non-contact sport of tennis, exemplified by Pete Sampras in the 1999 Wimbledon final against Andre Agassi, when he produced his best tennis after going down 0–40 on his own serve late in the first set. When Jimmy Connors was at his peak in the mid-1970s he fre-quently went down an early break of serve, steeled himself, and won four or five games in a row to take the set and, eventually, the match. In an early-round match during his string of five Wimbledon victories, Bjorn Borg actually produced an entirely new shot—a low forehand volley hit with topspin— to save a break point that would probably have put him out of the tournament against Vijay Amritraj. In team sports, the German national soccer team spent the latter half of the twentieth century fighting, and frequently winning, on death ground. In 1954, they won their first World Cup final 3–2 after falling behind 2–0 to favored Hungary in the first ten minutes of play. In the quarterfinals of the 1970 World Cup they came from 2–0 behind against the defending champions, England, to tie the game in the last 20 minutes and win in overtime. They came from behind twice more against Italy in the semi-final before losing, 4–3. In 1974, they beat Holland in the final 2–1 after surrendering a goal in the very first minute of play, and in 1982 they fell behind 3–1 against France in extra time, but came back to tie the game and win on penalties. They scored two late goals to tie Argentina 2– 2 in the 1986 final, but their luck ran out and they gave up the winning goal with a few minutes left. Clearly, the ability to come back had become part of their psychological makeup to the extent that giving up the opening goal hardly bothered them any more. The Clausewitzian military genius possesses the coup d’œil, the ability to see the key element of a situation amidst the chaos of battle, and to give the proper orders in response. In sport such situations demand even more—the ability not only to see what has to be done, but to do it. The great quarter-back Johnny Unitas instinctively recognized the weakness in any defense and could throw the ball where only his receiver would be able to catch it. Soccer players like Michel Platini, the Brazilian Zico, and the Englishman David Beckham can control the ball, elude a defender, scan the field at a glance and pass the ball to the critical spot nearly in the same motion. Basketball players like Bob Cousy and Magic Johnson have the same ability, and on the smaller basketball court they can sometimes go a step further and make the right pass without even looking at the target. Great teams also rely upon defenders who can instinctively recognize the

STRATEGY IN WAR AND SPORTS 33

enemy’s most dangerous man and move to neutralize him. These skills, like command on the battlefield, can only be learned from experience, and experience in sport, fortunately, is cheaper than experience on the battlefield. Players, like soldiers, are expected to make sacrifices for their team, but a few commentators in both sport and war have understood that certain sacrifices help neither the player nor the team. The commander who leads his infantrymen against an enemy force without proper preparation or support is doing his army no good; neither is the baseball player who sacrifices weeks or months of his season for the sake of making one single out. ‘I will never understand’, Bill James wrote in 1982, ‘why baseball fans admire a player who runs into walls [to make a catch.] Running into walls is a stupid waste of talent.’6 In baseball, in particular, with a 162-game season, players must avoid needless risks. Even in American football, which values physical sacrifice more highly than any other sport, some coaches and teams have understood this point. The Oakland Raiders of the 1970s did not send their wide receivers on pass patterns over the middle because they were too dangerous—as the Raiders, one of whom actually paralyzed an enemy receiver while he was running such a pattern in a pre-season game, well knew. Epilogue: Chance in Sport and War While Clausewitz never specifically compared war and sport, he argued that war closely resembled a game of cards—emphasizing, presumably, the large element of luck. Luck plays an equally great role in sport—many a game, season, or championship has been won or lost because of a freak bounce, a change in the weather, or a random event in a player’s life. Analysts should never lose sight of this insight, if only because so many generals, fans, and publics resist it so ferociously. The history of almost any football game—like the history of almost any battle—can and frequently is rewritten to show how easily the outcome might have been reversed; but such exercises should generally be rejected, because they are trying to show that war and sports should be something that they cannot be: enterprises in which proper planning or sheer material superiority should always determine the outcome. Their appeal stems from deep in our culture, which has taught us since earliest childhood that our fate faithfully reflects our worth and our intelligence, and that nearly every mistake can, and should, have been avoided. Yet both sport and war prove the falsity of these assumptions, and no one should embark upon or analyze either who has not been able to grasp this fact. NOTES 1 Leo Durocher, The Dodgers and Me (Chicago, IL: Ziff-Davis, 1948), p. 167.

34 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

2 Bill James, The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1983 (New York: Ballantine, 1983), p. 220. 3 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B.Griffith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 84. 4 Bill Walsh with Glenn Dickey, Building a Champion (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 2–9. 5 Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Abstract (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 232–9. 6 Bill James, The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1982 (New York: Ballantine, 1982), p. 142.

2 What is a Military Lesson? William C.Fuller, Jr

‘Those who do not learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them.’ This hackneyed statement, popularly but erroneously ascribed to George Santayana, ought of course to be paired with the comment of the German philosopher Hegel, which (in paraphrase) is that the one thing we learn from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history.1 What can we or do we usefully learn from the experience of previous wars? This is a very important question, not least because if one contemplates the twentieth century, one notices almost immediately that a whole variety of military establishments compiled a dismal record at predicting the character of the next war—that is, at correctly forecasting the nature of the conflict they were to confront next. Consider World War I. Almost no one in Europe, with the exception of the obscure Polish-Jewish financier Ivan Bliokh, understood that World War I would be a protracted war of attrition and stalemate.2 Nearly every-body else expected that the coming pan-European war would be short and decisive, over in a matter of months, if not weeks.3 But the predictive skills of the leaders of the major powers did not improve later in the century. In 1940, for example, many Soviet leaders dismissed the idea that Germany could conduct a successful Blitzkrieg against the USSR, despite Hitler’s campaigns in Poland and France.4 Then, too, Japan, in preparing for a war against the United States in 1941 adopted a theory of victory that was utterly bizarre, that bespoke a fatal incomprehension of the US system of government and the temperament of its people.5 Still later, the United States itself failed to anticipate the Vietnam War and arguably never grasped its essential character, even at its end.6 Thus the Soviet Union also misunderstood the war on which it embarked in Afghanistan in 1979, with catastrophic results.7 This list could be expanded almost effortlessly, although it would be both unedifying and depressing to do so. The question naturally arises: Why was this the case? What explains why the military establishments of so many countries have been so badly wrong about the very thing that Clausewitz declared was their most important task? After all, in one of the best-known passages in On War, Clausewitz insisted that, the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish…the kind of war on

36 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that it is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.8 Why, then, do military establishments get it wrong? An answer proposed by some is that the ability of the military to perceive the obvious is clouded over by an almost willful blindness. It has, for example, been maintained that the great European military powers contemptuously ignored the experience of the American Civil War, supposedly because, as Moltke apocryphally said, that war was merely a matter of two ragged militias chasing each other around a continent and consequently had no instructive value for the officers of the professional armies of civilized countries.9 The ‘lessons’ of almost every war fought since are said to have been stupidly disregarded by one nation or another. This view—that military establishments have an uncanny capacity for overlooking the obvious— is still very much with us. Take Colonel (Ret.) John Warden of the US Air Force, an important air power theorist of the past decade. In an influential essay he argues that: many vital lessons have flowed from isolated events in the past. The following are examples of lessons that should have been obvious at the time but were subsequently ignored, with great loss of life: the effect of the long bow on French heavy cavalry at Agincourt; the difficulty of attacking the trenches around Richmond; the carnage wrought by the machine-gun in the Russo-Japanese War; the value of the tank as demonstrated at Cambrai; and the effectiveness of air-craft against ships as shown by the sinking of the Ostfriesland in tests after World War I.10 Now Colonel Warden is, of course, trying to make a case for the importance of the lessons (or his version of the lessons) of the Persian Gulf War, which is the ‘isolated event’ to which he wants to call our attention. Yet his remarks here are problematic, not in the least because the examples he cites are not ‘lessons’ at all, but rather empirical observations (and frequently incorrect ones) about the efficacy of various weapons.11 They are not prescriptive and tell us nothing about what to do (or what not to do), which a lesson by definition must. But a still greater objection can be made to Warden’s implicit allegation that military establishments routinely ignore the experience of prior wars: it is demonstrably false. For instance, it is simply not the case that Europeans dismissed the American Civil War; on the contrary, they studied it assiduously. G.F.R. Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War was a textbook at the British Staff College at Camberley for many years.12 In Germany, there were a number of serving officers—among them Scheibert, Mangold, and Freydag-Loringhoven —who specialized in writing about the North American campaigns of 1861– 65.13 Even in Imperial Russia, at the beginning of the 1880s, the Tsar himself

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 37

decreed a controversial (and extremely unpopular) reform of the entire Russian cavalry arm based upon his appreciation of the operations of ‘Jeb’ Stuart and Phil Sheridan.14 If European military elites did not ignore the American Civil War, they were even more eager to profit from the ‘lessons’ of their own recent conflicts. Consider the German Wars of Unification. The successes of Prussia and then Germany in 1866 and 1870, respectively, commanded the attention of the entire world. The armies of the other great powers, and even those of the smaller powers, attempted to analyze the factors that had produced German victory; there was an intense, even frenzied interest in studying and if possible copying the most important features of Germany’s military system. For instance, the Prussian advantage in numbers vis-à-vis France in 1870 was clearly a function of the Prussian practice of conscription, which led to the creation of large reservoirs of trained men. After all, Germany had been able to put 1.1 million troops into the field, while France could initially muster no more than 560,000. One form or another of conscription was adopted after the Franco-Prussian war by defeated France, Italy, Holland, and Tsarist Russia. Even Britain, which recoiled from conscription as alien to its traditions, still wanted to remain militarily competitive; the reforming Secretary of State for War, Edward Cardwell, used fear of Prussia to ram through Parliament a series of laws overhauling the British Army and abolishing finally the purchase of commissions by officers.15 Indeed, the reverberations of Prussia’s victories were felt in areas of European life not obviously connected to the performance of armies and fleets. Bismarck’s cryptic remark that ‘the battle of Königgrätz was won by the Prussian schoolmaster’ was interpreted to mean that efficiency in modern war depended on the intelligence and initiative of the troops.16 It was not enough any more to have soldiers who behaved like automata, who did exactly what they were told, and displayed neither independence nor ingenuity. It was also believed that education could develop these traits. If it was unrealistic to expect that every soldier would be a graduate of an elementary school, at a bare minimum the corporals and sergeants—non-commissioned officers in general—would have to be educated men. ‘Literate non-commissioned officers are a burning necessity for contemporary armies’, wrote one Russian commentator in 1873.17 As a result of this insight, governments throughout Europe took steps to make schools more numerous and accessible. The notion that popular education was somehow indispensable to national security put down roots, and it did so precisely because of the wars of German unification. What was true of the American Civil War and Bismarck’s wars of unification in the mid-nineteenth century is equally true of every major war fought since, for military organizations have scrutinized them all in the hope of ascertaining their lessons. Far from spurning the lessons of the past, most nations and their military establishments have, by contrast, evidenced an insatiate desire to assimilate them. In the US armed forces, for example, there are ‘lessons-learned’ databases; the army has a center for the study of lessons learned; and there are 516 volumes in

38 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the Naval War College Library that have the word ‘lessons’ in the title. What is true of the US military is true of other militaries. Moreover, it has been true for an extremely long time. Once Frederick the Great of Prussia happened to overhear some officers denigrate the value of studying past wars and military theory, maintaining instead that personal experience was the only source of military excellence. The king was moved to remark to them that he knew of two mules in the army’s commissary corps that had served through 20 campaigns. ‘Yet’, added Frederick ‘they are mules still.’18 It is hardly surprising that military organizations evince such profound curiosity about the so-called ‘lessons’ of the past; knowledge of military history can be construed as an inoculation against error and mistake in war, which at worst can produce defeat and at the very best can exact an extremely high cost in blood. It was Bismarck, after all, who observed that ‘fools say they learn from experience. I prefer to profit by others’ experience.’19 There are two components to the question of military lessons. The first is the problem of knowing what the lessons are. In Bismarck’s terms, how are we to comprehend what are the precise elements of other people’s experience that we ought to absorb? To extract useable lessons from the past, we have to interpret it, and interpretation can be skewed by prejudice, preconceptions, and tacit assumptions. The second problem concerns the action taken in response to this process of learning. The issue is one of receptivity—that is, the degree to which a military organization actually embraces a lesson in practice and alters the way in which it conducts business as a result. Extracting Military Lessons Three styles of interpreting or reading military history are pertinent to determining what the lessons of experience are. We might describe these as the antique (or pre-modern), the positivist, and the pragmatic.20 The antique or premodern style of interpretation was dominant virtually everywhere until the middle of the nineteenth century. It assumes that war is universal and fundamentally unchanging. In this view, what was true of war a thousand years ago is equally true today, for the reason that human nature is not malleable and people everywhere across time and space are very much the same. It is this attitude that lies behind the statement of Thucydides that he wished his book about the Peloponnesian War to endure forever and be a ‘possession for all time’. After all, Thucydides believed that an important objective of his work was to expose profound truths about war and about human polities at war that would be of permanent value, since ‘exact knowledge of the past’ would be ‘an aid to the understanding of the future’.21 It is also this kind of thinking that explains Napoleon’s famous comment that ‘knowledge of the higher parts of war is acquired only through the study of history of the wars and battles of the Great Captains’, by whom he meant Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Marshal Turenne, and Frederick the Great.22

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 39

There is obviously something profound and true about this point of view, particularly at the level of strategy. As Michael Handel rightly noted: ‘the basic logic of strategy…is universal’.23 Much that is instructive and suggestive about strategy can indeed be gleaned from an analysis of past wars, even wars fought in antiquity—for which reason the Naval War College’s strategy course gives Thucydides’ work a prominent place. Yet even at the strategic level there is something missing from this style of interpretation, since to understand any war one must grasp its political as well as purely military characteristics. And while the logic of strategy does transcend history and geography, politics are earthbound, the product of specific circumstances, cultures, and institutions. The values, mores, preferences, and expectations of particular societies are often quite different, and these differences play a significant role in shaping the nature of war. However, when the subject at hand is operations or tactics the pre-modern approach can be even more misleading, since history is by no means a perfect or exact guide to the future. It scarcely needs saying that the character of war has changed over the centuries. One of the more obvious instruments of that change has been technological advance. By the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, new technologies—the telegraph, the railway, the rifle, and so forth—began to revolutionize the battlefield. It was the beginning of a period of extremely rapid military-technical innovation that continued unabated until the outbreak of World War I. Between 1870 and 1914, the great powers of the world scrambled to adopt the newest and latest technological improvements in weapons. Smokeless powder, magazine rifles, quick-firing (QF) artillery, machine-guns, the dreadnought, and the airplane—all were added to the arsenals of the powers.24 However, despite all this rapid change, there were soldiers in Europe in whom the pre-modern view of war was so deeply engrained, and whose attachment to military tradition was so strong, that they denied that the new weaponry made any difference to the underlying logic of war. Baron Jomini, famous theoretician of Napoleonic warfare, insisted that ‘improvements in firearms will not introduce any important change in the manner of taking troops into battle’.25 Colonel G.F.R.Henderson remained convinced until his death that the increased lethality and range of the new weapons had neither reduced the value of the cavalry, nor invalidated the massing of troops in close order for the bayonet charge.26 And the colorful Russian General M.I.Dragomirov, war hero and influential military savant, was even blunter in his dismissal of the idea that modern technology could substantively change war: ‘there is nothing to make a fuss about in all the pretended revelations of the science of war’, he wrote. ‘Modern tactics remain substantially what they were at the time of Napoleon. Napoleonic tactics rest on a firm foundation, on principles that can never be affected by changes of armament.’27

40 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Yet everyone did not share this extreme opinion. Other military leaders and thinkers, perhaps less conservative, less hidebound, recognized that war had indeed changed.28 They disagreed, however, about how meaning-ful the changes had been. This leads us to the next style of interpreting military lessons and of war in general—what we might describe as the positivist approach. Positivism was an intellectual system worked out by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). It was the contention of Comte that it was possible to construct a thoroughly scientific method for the study of history and society that would eventually result in the discovery of actual laws of human development. One found these laws by deducing the present condition from all probable antecedents. This process of deduction would give rise to generalizations, and generalizations, once tested, would lead to positive laws—hence ‘positivism’. Positivism was one of the most ambitious intellectual systems created during the entire nineteenth century, a period notable for its system-building; Comte’s theory aspired to encompass the totality of knowledge. It additionally claimed to provide access to the future, for if the ‘laws of progress’, as Comte called them, explained the condition of society now, they also permitted reliable prediction about society in the years ahead.29 Comtean philosophy, with its ostensibly scientific rigor, was attractive and had influence in a variety of fields. Military thought was no exception. One feature that accounted for its appeal was that it recognized, embraced, and explained change, while simultaneously holding that there was an underlying core of unalterable truth. One person who fell under the sway of positivism in the military, who in fact almost exemplifies it, was the French Colonel Ardant du Picq (1828–70).30 The famous statement with which he began the second part of his book Combat Studies (Études sur le Combat) testified to the profound impression Comte had made on him: ‘the art of war is subjected to numerous modifications by industrial and scientific progress, etc. But one thing does not change, the heart of man.’31 Killed in the early stages of the Franco-Prussian war, du Picq did not live long enough to produce many published works. Virtually all his completed writings concern tactics, for he believed that effective tactics were the foundation of success in battle, and, by extension, in war. He was particularly interested in moral factors in war—the way in which such emotions as fear and the desire for self-preservation shaped the performance of troops in combat, which interest is epitomized in his famous aphorism that discipline was a matter of getting men to fight despite themselves.32 Correct tactics, or ‘a method of combat, sanely thought out in advance’, could be developed not only by studying prior wars in books, but also, in true positivistic fashion, by administering exhaustive questionnaires to the eye-witnesses and survivors of the most recent wars. Although few were as committed as du Picq to the value of accumulating a comprehensive database of modern combat experience, other later writers also betrayed the influence of positivism in various degrees. In his 1885 Modern War, General Victor Derrécagaix approved of tactical innovation, while insisting

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 41

that ‘the principles of the past preserve all of their importance’.33 Even Ferdinand Foch, the future Marshal and Supreme Allied Commander in World War I, although an eclectic borrower from many military traditions, also owed his own debt to positivism, as was evidenced in his 1903 volume Des Principes de la Guerre (The Principles of War), which included what he described as a ‘mathematical demonstration’ that the latest innovations in the technology of rifles and artillery continued to favor the offense, not the defense.34 There is much of value in the works written from a positivist stand-point, particularly those of du Picq, whose perceptive insights about morale and military psychology still eminently repay the reading. Nevertheless, positivism comes freighted with its own dangers. Positivists or quasi-positivists are often prone to fall victim to what might be described as the fallacy of the linear projection—that is, the view that what has happened in the immediate past is going to happen again in the immediate future; that by means of a straight-line projection, one can deduce what will come next.35 As an intellectual system positivism is utopian and presupposes a uniform continuity in history, from the past into the present and, by implication, into the future. Positivists are consequently interested in trends, and the quest for trends can blind them to aberration, accident, and chance, which of course are the engines of discontinuity. Moreover, whether conscious of it or not, those who make linear projections in military affairs are often basing them on unwarranted assumptions about the inevitability of prior military outcomes. This fallacy is not solely the property of positivists, of course. All sorts of people have been seduced by the simplicity of the linear projection. It is, however, a fallacy against which adherents of the third approach take extreme precautions —perhaps too extreme. This third approach is that of pragmatic skepticism, which holds that general laws of war or eternal principles of war really cannot be said to exist. To the pragmatic skeptic, effectiveness in war is a function of the prevailing environment—of the time, of the place, of the level of technical development of armaments and so forth. To seek inner truths about war, or to speculate about the eternal essence or meaning of war, is therefore a futile waste of time. Helmuth von Moltke was of this opinion. In an article of 1871, he observed that ‘[t]he doctrines of strategy hardly go beyond the first proposition of common sense; one can hardly call them a science; their value lies almost entirely in their concrete application’. ‘Strategy’, he insisted, ‘is but a system of expedients.’36 Other theorists found pragmatic skepticism equally congenial. General Rudolf von Caemmerer, author of The Development of Strategical Science during the Nineteenth Century, shared Moltke’s opinions and took great pains in his book to show how not only Napoleonic tactics, but Napoleonic operational principles had been rendered obsolete by technical progress and the industrialization of war. Caemmerer’s debunking of Napoleon’s methods did not mean that he thought there were no correct tactical or operational solutions to military problems; in his view, correct solutions did exist, but they were entirely situation-specific. It was

42 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the task of the gifted general armed with inspiration and willpower to choose judiciously from the options available to him. Were Napoleon to rise from the dead, insisted Caemmerer, he would be the first to repudiate those military techniques and procedures that he had employed with dazzling success against all of the powers of Europe in the early nineteenth century, techniques and procedures that were now completely passé, despite their servile emulation for generations.37 A skeptical posture can be quite healthy, for it can serve as a first line of defense against school solutions and the concept of ‘war by algebra’ against which Clausewitz warned us so eloquently. But, at the same time, skepticism can itself be a source of intellectual weakness, principally by leading people to succumb to what I call the fallacy of the significant exception. By accustoming the mind to look for differences, variations, and freak events, and suggesting that these severely limit the applicability of prior experience, skepticism can inhibit recognition of underlying patterns that can indeed provide food for thought as we contemplate the possible character of the wars to come. These three approaches to the reading of ‘military lessons’, particularly the last two, have significantly distorted the way in which future war has been conceptualized ever since the middle of the nineteenth century. To illustrate this point, I will take a closer look at the fallacies that stemmed from both positivism and skepticism, and at their implications for receptivity to ‘military lessons’. Fallacies and Receptivity: Linear Projection Let me begin with the fallacy of linear projection. A major consequence of the German wars of unification in the 1860s and 1870s was the creation of a paradigm for the future of European armed conflict that held sway for the ensuing 45 years.38 It was assumed that to be victorious in a future war, a power would have to field an enormous army, composed both of regulars and reservists, who would be called to colors from civilian life on the eve of hostilities. The mobilization and concentration of such a force would have to be calculated with mathematical precision in accordance with a rigidly detailed plan for exploiting the national system of railroads. In such an environment, advantages would accrue to the power that struck earliest and with the most mass, which meant that increasing the speed and efficiency of one’s own mobilization and one’s own offensive became an obsession of European general staffs. A parallel assumption was that the war would begin with a great battle, or set of great battles, that were likely to decide the entire conflict, just as Sadowa and Sedan were supposed to have done in 1866 and 1870 respectively. This misapprehension—the so-called ‘short-war illusion’—led European military planners to conceive of wars that would last for weeks or a few months at most. It also led them to assume that wars would be fought with the munitions and equipment that had already been stockpiled in peacetime. There would be no

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 43

need to put the economy on a war footing, for the conflict would be over before the stockpiles had been exhausted. As a result of these premises, in August of 1914 the French, Germans, Austrians, and Russians all attempted to execute extraordinarily complicated plans for rapid offensives that were supposed to result in decision. None of the plans worked. In reality, as we all know, World War I did not feature early, decisive battles, was not short, and resulted in the virtually total militarization of the economies and societies of all the belligerents. At first glance, the attachment of European elites to the ‘short-war illusion’ appears mystifying, for there were several conflicts at the turn of the century that one might think should have raised doubts about the Bismarckian paradigm, in general, and about the wisdom of offensives, in particular. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05 is a case in point. This conflict, a limited war fought in Korea and Manchuria, saw the use of such modern military technologies as machineguns, magazine rifles, and QF artillery on a scale heretofore never seen. One thing that has impressed many historians (as well as Colonel Warden) is the degree to which certain episodes in the Russo-Japanese War seemed clearly to foreshadow events that would occur in the great European war that broke out just ten years later. The Japanese siege of Russia’s Pacific naval base at Port Arthur, for example, featured trench warfare, the stringing of miles of barbed (and electrified) wire, the employment of electric searchlights to foil night attacks, and the highexplosive shelling of field fortifications. It saw artillery preparation before attacks that in terms of intensity and duration seemed to presage the monster barrages of World War I. To cite just one instance, prior to an assault on a single Russian strongpoint on the out-skirts of Port Arthur, the Japanese fired over a thousand artillery rounds in four hours.39 Some of the land battles of this war, such as Mukden, involving as they did hundreds of thousands of troops, seemed to be eerie dress rehearsals for the Marne, the Somme, and Passchendaele. The combat in Manchuria also provided abundant evidence of the destructive power of modern ordnance, rifles, and machine-guns, particularly when used against infantry trying to take fortified positions by frontal assault. Why, then, did not Europe’s military planners foresee the deadlock and carnage of the Western Front? Why did they not allow their knowledge of the Russo-Japanese War, and their knowledge of the devastating power of defensive military technologies, to temper their enthusiasm for the extraordinarily offensive plans they had all prepared? Why did they not allow this experience to inform their thinking? One answer to these questions is that the dominant paradigm of warfare, derived by linear projection from the era of Bismarck and Moltke, was so strong that the Russo-Japanese War was interpreted as reinforcing, rather than undermining it. In the first place, no one failed to note the prodigality with which human life had been expended during the war. But many foreign military positivists were even more intrigued by the simple fact that the Japanese had after

44 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

all won battles and indeed the entire war, despite the defensive firepower of modern military technologies. How had they managed to do this? On the tactical level, it seemed that they had done so through relentless offensive operations, high morale among the infantry, and a willingness to accept large numbers of casualties. The Japanese lost tens of thousands of lives in assault after assault on the famous 203 Meter Hill, which dominated Port Arthur, but in the end they took it—and it was this that impressed foreign observers.40 Study of the Russo-Japanese War consequently inspired two conclusions. The first was that the offense is always superior to the defense on the strategic level of war. The Russian Army had been on the strategic defensive for most of the war and had been defeated; initiative and surprise had been in the hands of the Japanese. Second, at the tactical level, the war was seen as proof that defensive positions, no matter how strongly fortified or held, can always be taken if the attacking force is motivated and willing to take casualties—even huge numbers of them. Major W.D. Bird of the British Army spoke for many when he condemned the Russians for adhering to ‘the fallacy of the advantages inherent in the occupation of defensive positions’.41 The important French theorist, General François de Négrier, shared this view, and wrote that ‘the RussoJapanese war had demonstrated yet again that by offensive tactics alone can victory be assured’. Négrier went on to argue that the war was an ‘object-lesson in the overwhelming influence of moral forces’. Owing to their discipline, patriotism, and courage, the Japanese had seized positions despite the murderous fire the Russians trained on them. Ergo, reasoned Négrier, an army with superior moral force could fight and win, even if it was outnumbered and technologically outclassed.42 In other words, the Russo-Japanese War resulted in the adjustment of the Bismarckian paradigm of warfare, not its supersession. The linear projection involved here, of course, ignores the question of contingency entirely. Just because a war turned out one way does not mean that this was the only possible outcome. If, for example, Russia had not agreed to negotiations, but had instead managed to defeat Japan in the summer of 1905, as was by no means impossible, who then would have argued that ceaseless offensive operations were always the key to victory? But why, indeed, was the Bismarckian paradigm so strong? One reason is that the Prussian method had at one time been astonishingly successful and seemed to be a recipe for quick victory. Who would not prefer favorable outcomes that were rapid and cheap to those that were slow and expensive? Moreover, and this is very important, by 1904, military establishments had been operating in accord with the Bismarckian paradigm for over 30 years. Virtually all planning and training had been based on its assumptions. This brings us to the first point about receptivity to military lessons. Military organizations are not loath to innovate, just as they are not averse to the study of the experience of recent wars. However, absent compelling reasons to the contrary (such as those supplied by catastrophic defeat), military institutions, like all complex organizations, prefer the stately pace of incremental change to the

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 45

disquieting staccato of violent transformation. This resistance to radical innovation goes a long way towards explaining the popularity and longevity of the dominant paradigm. Of course, as it happened, World War I did not resemble the German Wars of Unification at all. But in exploding the old paradigm, the Great War gave birth to a new one: the view that future wars would be protracted conflicts fought largely from static positions. In other words, they would be repetitions of World War I, or at least key phases of World War I, with the defense superior to the offense, stalemate, and the problem of the break-through unresolved. In the early 1920s, A.Kearsey, a retired lieutenant-colonel of Britain’s Imperial General Staff, published a book on tactics and strategy that opined ‘that a purely frontal attack against a well-entrenched position held by resolute troops must always involve prohibitive losses’.43 He then proceeded to argue that if it could not be averted, the next general European war would be characterized by the employment of great fleets of tanks and immense clouds of poison gas. This prophecy was a direct linear projec tion into the future of the military experience of the Western Front in 1918. In other words, a second world war would be like the first, except more so.44 One practical result of the emergence of the new dominant paradigm was the construction of a series of defensive positions during the inter-war period, of which the most famous was, of course, the Maginot Line. An enormous band of fortifications that shielded the north-eastern borders of France, the Maginot Line was based on the insight that, in the words of Marshal Henri Pétain, ‘assuring the inviolability of the national soil is…one of the major lessons of the [last] war’.45 The French were not alone in their faith in fortifications, for almost everybody in Europe was building them: the Czechs constructed the Little Maginot Line; the Finns, the Mannerheim Line. Even countries with aggressive military intentions, such as National Socialist Germany and the Soviet Union, made investments in fortifications: the West Wall and Stalin Line were put up by the Nazis and the Communists, respectively, in the 1930s. The bitter irony is that in the end, of course, the defensive mindset of the World War I paradigm proved to be just as costly, deceptive, and perilous as the Bismarckian paradigm had been in 1914. The temptation represented by linear projection, by the way, was not confined to theories of land warfare, for it had an impact on thinking about war at sea, as well. Consider Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett, two of the greatest of all naval theorists. When Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History in 1890, the battle of Lissa in 1866 was the largest recent naval battle. Lissa (which had been decided by ramming) was nonetheless merely an episode in Austria’s war with Italy and Prussia in that year, and of little significance to its outcome. Partly for this reason, Mahan insisted that, ‘It is doubly necessary…to study critically the history and experience of naval warfare in the days of sailing ships, because while these will be found to afford lessons of present application and value, steam navies have as yet made no history…’46 Given this perspective, Mahan logically placed enormous stress on the lessons afforded by Britain’s

46 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

experience in the Napoleonic Wars. In particular, Horatio Nelson’s defeat of the fleets of France and Spain off Trafalgar in 1805 shaped Mahan’s views about naval strategy and the role of navies in war generally. To Mahan, it was the duty of navies to prepare to fight and win another Trafalgar against their chief competitors. Mahan, then, talked about the future of naval warfare by doing a linear projection that reached back to the Napoleonic Wars. By contrast, Corbett, who published his Principles of Maritime Strategy in 1911, had a different vantage point. He was, after all, a British subject and thus belonged to a society that controlled the greatest maritime empire on earth, whereas Mahan was a representative of a country that was just beginning to move on to the world stage as a great power. But it must be noted as well that Corbett had a different set of historical examples before him in 1911 than Mahan had had in 1890. By that time, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War had all been fought, and it is to these wars that Corbett refers most often. All of these conflicts had been limited wars, had been fought on what we might describe as imperial peripheries, and had been won by countries that in the end successfully integrated land and sea power in relationships of mutual support. Although he admitted that there could be exceptions, Corbett tended to imagine future warfare as conforming to this pattern.47 Thus, despite all of their theoretical sophistication, both Mahan and Corbett were by no means immune to the seduction of linear projection themselves. Fallacies and Receptivity: The Significant Exception Positivists, of whatever stripe, were thus predisposed to linear projection, which could easily become a dangerous method for learning the lessons of war. Yet pragmatic skepticism could give rise to its own equally harmful fallacy—that of the ‘significant exception’. As we have already seen, the Bismarckian paradigm’s emphasis on the value of offensive action was not shaken by the Russo-Japanese War, which ‘linear projectors’ read as reinforcing that value. However, another characteristic of the Russo-Japanese War was that it was not short, but protracted. One might think that this would have raised the gravest doubts about the short-war illusion, but it really did not—especially among those who regarded the conflict in Manchuria as sui generis. One person who perpetrated this fallacy was the great German theorist Friedrich von Bernhardi, a firm adherent of skeptical pragmatism. Bernhardi explicitly warned against using the Russo-Japanese War mechanically to forecast a future European war: The next war will not come off distinctly under the same conditions and circumstances as those of recent date. Experience of war can never be applied directly to the future. The creative mind must anticipate experience of the future. Not the lessons that the latest wars apparently or really have

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 47

taught us must we adopt indiscriminately in the next war, but what appears to us to be the most suitable after close investigation of the likely conditions.48 On the face of it, this is a powerful and extremely intelligent statement. But this aperçu does not, however, provide us with much guidance. How precisely do we determine what the most ‘suitable’ lessons of any previous war are? Which lessons are we to accept and which are we to exclude? Obviously, the judgment will be subjective. Employing the familiar argument of pragmatic skepticism that wars were defined by the unique prop erties of time and place, Bernhardi insisted that key aspects of the Russo-Japanese War were highly unlikely to be replicated in a general European war, since, among other things, the scale and the geography of the theater would be so different.49 Thus, if the ‘linear projectors’ started with the presumption of continuity, Bernhardi began with a presumption of discontinuity; and this, of course, was the significant exception. Whereas in Manchuria the terrain had been rugged and the fronts extremely attenuated, in a general European war the terrain would be flat, and millions of men would be engaged, permitting operations and attacks in depth. He employed the same logic to explain why the European war would be short, rather than protracted, as the Russo-Japanese War had been. Then, too, he criticized the idea that numerical superiority had been a key to many of Japan’s victories by observing that bold and decisive generalship could more than compensate for inferiority in numbers. In Bernhardi’s view, the coming European war would be a short war of maneuver. Once again, this is exactly what World War I was not. Why did someone as capable as Bernhardi start with the presumption of discontinuity? Why was he so obsessed with limning the differences between the war of 1904–05 and a general European war? Bernhardi gives the answer away in various places in his book: he needed to imagine a war that he thought that Germany could win.50 If that war were a war of lengthy fronts and trenches, then it would by definition be a protracted war, a war of attrition. He believed that in such a conflict Germany and its allies would sooner or later lose, since they would be outnumbered by the powers arrayed against them—France, Russia, and perhaps Britain as well. To Bernhardi, this idea was impermissible and defeatist; accordingly, he censored his own thinking and rejected the possibility of protracted war a priori and out of hand. In other words, his own personal intellectual desires and needs decided for him what the useful lessons of the Russo-Japanese War would be, and what would be the significant exceptions. This brings me to my second point about receptivity, which is that military establishments often prepare to fight the wars they would prefer to fight, rather than others that may actually be more likely. Lest anyone think that this failing is not to be met with in recent times, let me jump ahead to the US war in Vietnam. Some scholars maintain that William Westmoreland’s relative neglect of counterinsurgency during his tenure at the head of Military Assistance Command

48 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Vietnam can be explained by his fear of the costs and risks to the US Army of a massive counterinsurgency campaign. He consequently decided that he did not want to wage one and instead planned for a large-unit war against the regular North Vietnam Army, a war with which the US Army would be more comfortable and for which it was better prepared.51 This, of course, is not the only possible interpretation of his actions. However, arguably, even if the largeunit war had been a splendid success (which it was not), without a better program of counterinsurgency, US victory in Vietnam was simply not possible, given the constraints imposed on the use of force there and the value of the political object to the United States in general. In other words, what Westmoreland may actually have done was to fight the war he preferred rather than the one he had. Ex Post Facto Lessons The search for ‘military lessons’ thus involves ransacking the past to acquire (putatively) valuable guidance for the future. There is nothing surprising about this enterprise. All military organizations would like to win wars quickly, decisively, and at the lowest possible cost in human lives. These are commendable aims, and no sane person can object to them. If the use of ‘military lessons’ assists in achieving these aims, so much the better. The problem is that ‘military lessons’ often do not facilitate such military effectiveness. This is so because the entire concept of the ‘military lesson’ may be dubious. That is not to say that we cannot learn valuable things by studying the wars of the past and reflecting upon them. There are all manners of things we can learn. We can, in fact, learn about the operation and maintenance of weapons and equipment. We can identify logistical and organizational failings and seek to rectify them. We can observe how certain tactics and approaches to operational problems worked in practice. The ‘shelf-life’ of such insights, however, may be short, and it may be a mistake to extrapolate from them. We can also use history to hone our ability to think creatively about strategy. But if we try to use a recent war, or even the most recent war, to deduce universal lessons about the nature of modern war, we will most assuredly fail. The word ‘lesson’ connotes authority and permanence, for a lesson is freestanding. But war is not freestanding, for its nature is dependent, as Clausewitz shows us, on the interaction of the belligerents. Because the nature of war depends on interaction, it is therefore impermanent, in the same way that centers of gravity cannot exist outside particular political and military contexts. There are many reasons why this is so; let us adduce two. First, say we presume that what succeeded against one adversary in the past will assuredly work against the next one in the future. But what if that new adversary acts unexpectedly, or merely differently, or figures out how to control the shape of the next conflict so as to maximize his strengths and exploit our weaknesses? A good illustration of this is the German Army during the Weimar period. After the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s military

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 49

planners eventually reached consensus that insofar as was humanly possible, they had to try to prevent the next war from being fought as World War I had been: were a subsequent war to be another prolonged, attritional struggle, the probability was exceedingly high that Germany would once again suffer defeat. The upshot was the adoption of tactics, weapons, and doctrine that were all supposed to promote the staging of mobile and decisive offensives.52 When London and Paris declared war on Hitler in 1939, the French were of the view that, despite its offensive doctrine, the German Army knew that it could not assault the Maginot Line defenses without incurring suicidal losses. Indeed, merely to attempt such an attack might provoke a domestic revolution against the Nazi regime. The war would therefore most likely be a long one, and Germany would be ground down by economic attrition, just as it had been in the conflict of 1914–18.53 Their reading of the ‘lessons’ of the Great War, then, disadvantaged the French both intellectually and psychologically and helped prepare the way for the military collapse of their country in the spring of 1940. Second, what happens if prospective belligerents learn exactly the same things from a recent war, or a recent trend, and this double knowledge cancels itself out? For example, by the end of the nineteenth century virtually everyone realized how devastating modern field artillery could be when fired from indirect positions against masses of infantry. As a result, all the major European powers increased the number of field guns and anti-personnel rounds in their arsenals prior to 1914. Indeed, artillery emerged as perhaps the dominant weapon of World War I; probably 60 per cent of all casualties in the war were the consequence of shelling.54 Ironically, however, field artillery did not produce the rapid breakthroughs and victory that its advocates had expected. It was the abundance of field artillery firing shrapnel that as much as anything else forced armies into the trenches. The interactive collision of belligerents who had all learned the same ‘lesson’ helped produce the unintended consequence of deadlock. In fact, the stalemate on the Western Front was the result of an entire series of unforeseen interactions among all the armies fighting there.55 At the strategic level of analysis, a ‘military lesson’ has two components: an interpretation of the nature and outcome of a previous war; and an explicit or implicit prophecy about the nature and outcome of the next one. An interpretation without the prophecy would merely be an exercise in historical reasoning and no contribution to military theory at all. In most so-called ‘military lessons’ the prophecy is as deeply embedded in the interpretation as a clove studded in an onion. In any ‘military lesson’ it is a discrete historical interpretation that both makes possible and validates the prediction. Yet both of the components of the ‘military lesson’ are often problematic. The hazards of prophecy are obvious and do not need to be belabored. Who can infallibly foresee everything that a future enemy might do? Still further, can one even confidently divine everything one’s own side might do in a hypothetical prospective war? As Michael Handel wrote, frequently ‘individuals and nations are unaware of their own limitations and weaknesses, let alone those of their

50 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

adversaries’.56 If it is difficult to know oneself, how can one be sure that one knows one’s enemy? To prophesy about future war therefore involves lightly brushing aside all of these imponderables and dismissing the principle of interaction. But the particular style of military-historical interpretation advanced by the ‘military lesson’ can have its analytic dangers, too, for it is usually anchored in retrospective determinism, of one kind or another. That is, it presupposes that the reasons one believes to have been most important in determining the outcome of a war equally ruled out any other dénoue-ment. In other words, given a belligerent’s superiority over his opponent in technology, generalship, doctrine, manpower, or any of a number of other factors either separately or in combination, the victory of the former and the defeat of the latter were inevitable. Whether acknowledged or not, it is the assumption of an inevitable outcome that permits the extraction of a ‘lesson’ from one war that can be applied to the next. However, the outcomes of previous wars frequently were not inevitable, but contingent. The way a war or a campaign turned out often depended on human choices and human interactions; had the choices or interactions been different, the outcomes might have been also. Therefore, to assume that success can be assured by emulating the performance of the winner and avoiding the mistakes of the loser in a previous conflict may well be to indulge in an impermissible exclusion of alternative possibilities. As we have already seen in the case of the Russo-Japanese War, if Japan had lost the war (and it could have, had the Russians made different decisions), then the ‘lessons’ of the war would have been different also. But an argument about a ‘military lesson’ denies the fact of contingency and ignores interaction, not only in the future but even in the past. To put it another way, whether a lesson from a particular war is true or false can only be determined ex post facto, in an unpredictable future. And, in consequence, sometimes you can only learn what the ‘true’ lesson was when it is too late. It is because of this that the distinguished military historian Michael Howard insisted in an essay published a generation ago that in any war ‘usually everybody starts even and everybody starts wrong’.57 It is also because of this that Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner ended an enormous threevolume work entitled The Lessons of Modern Warfare with the pessimistic observation that ‘under-standing the overall nature of modern conflict’ is ‘ultimately an impossible process’.58 NOTES 1 In his Life of Reason, Santayana actually wrote: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfil it’ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J.Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), p. 6: ‘peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it’.

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 51

2 Bliokh was, of course, a pacifist who wanted to demonstrate that a future general war would be so murderous, costly, and indecisive that it could not be considered a rational instrument of policy. He wrote different sections of this massive work in Russian, Polish, and German. The first publication was in Russian. I.S.Bliokh, Budushchaia voina v teknicheskom, ekonomicheskom i politicheskom otnosheniiakh, 6 vols (St Petersburg: I.Efron, 1898). The complete French translation has been reprinted: Jean de Bloch [Ivan Bliokh], La guerre future aux points de vue technique, économique et politique, 6 vols (Paris: Guillaumin, 1898– 1900; reprint: New York: Garland, 1973). 3 On the ‘short-war illusion’ see Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 423. See also Hew Strachan, The First World War, vol. I: To Arms (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 74, 173, 1010–13. Strachan presents a more nuanced interpretation of the ‘short-war illusion’ than has heretofore appeared in the historical literature. He identifies a number of European statesmen and military leaders who, prior to 1914, evidenced some awareness that a general war might become protracted. Nonetheless, he also shows that European military establishments had generally planned for a short war. 4 I.A.Korotkov, Istoriia sovetskoi voennoi mysli (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Nauka’, 1980), pp. 143–4. Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 127. 5 Nobutaka Ike, ed. and trans., Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. 153. 6 Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), pp. 4–5. See also Eric M.Bergerud, The Dynamics of Defeat: The Vietnam War in Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 89–90. 7 (No name given) ‘New Evidence on the Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, 8–9 (winter 1996/97), pp. 128–84. 8 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 88–9. 9 Jay Luvaas, The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988), p. 126. 10 Col. John A.Warden III, USAF, ‘Employing Air Power in the Twenty-First Century’, in Richard H.Schultz, Jr and Robert L.Pfaltzgraff, Jr (eds), The Future of Air Power in the Aftermath of the Gulf War (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1992), p. 80. 11 For example, the effects of the long bow became obvious to the French cavalry at the battle of Poitiers in 1356, that is, almost 60 years before Agincourt. The result, as one scholar has put it, was ‘great changes in armor design intended in part to make men-at-arms less vulnerable to archery’. Clifford J.Rogers, ‘The Efficacy of the English Long Bow: A Reply to Kelly DeVries’, War in History, vol. 5, no. 2 (April 1998), p. 241. While it is true that at Cambrai in November 1917 the use of tanks allowed the British to make an advance of 6,000 yards, there was no breakthrough and the performance of the tanks was quite properly regarded as mixed. See Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army’s Art of Attack 1916–1918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 164– 5. As for the sinking of the Ostfriesland, Billy Mitchell’s bombers did destroy it,

52 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

12

13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22

23

24

but only by dropping ‘bombs from an unrealistically low level to ensure fatal hits’: I.B.Holley, Jr, ‘Reflections on the Search for Airpower Theory,’ in Col. Phillip S.Meilinger (ed.), The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1997), p. 582. Brian Bond, The Victorian Army and the Staff College, 1854–1914 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), p. 157. Brian Holden Reid, Studies in British Military Thought (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press,1998), p. 136. Luvaas, Military Legacy, pp. 128–42. William C.Fuller, Jr, Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 20. Arvell T.Erickson, Edward T.Cardwell, Peelite (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1959), pp. 80–5. Quoted in M.V.Annenkov, Voina 1870 goda. Zametki i vpetchatleniia russkogo ofitsera (St Petersburg: Tipografiia tovarishchestva ‘Obshchestvennaia pol’za’, 1871), p. 9. M.Zinov’ev, ‘Zametki o Germanskoi armii’, Voennyi sbornik, June (1873), part 1, p. 278. G.F.R.Henderson, The Science of War (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), p. 184. See also Christopher Duffy, The Military Life of Frederick the Great (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 300. B.H.Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd rev. edn (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 3. Azar Gat has developed the argument that virtually all military thought from 1780 to 1914 can be divided into ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ strands. By the early nineteenth century, the latter had become ‘Romanticism’; by the midnineteenth century, the former, ‘Positivism’. Although I find Gat’s ideas stimulating, I do not think that his typology is ultimately successful. There are simply too many military intellectuals and theorists who have to be dragooned into their assigned categories under protest. Nonetheless, I do believe that there are typically ‘positivist’ and ‘skeptical’ approaches to the reading of military lessons. See Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The Landmark Thucydides, ed. Robert B.Strassler, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: The Free Press, 1996), p. 16. Jay Luvaas (ed. and trans.), Napoleon on the Art of War (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 24. Ironically enough, the argument has been made that this was not the way Napoleon himself acquired knowledge of the art of war. Jean Colin has maintained that the greatest intellectual influences on Napoleon’s thinking about warfare were the works of such eighteenth-century French theorists as Guibert and Bourcet. See Jean Colin, L’education militaire de Napoléon (Paris: Chapleot, 1901), pp. 141–2. Michael I.Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd ed (London: Frank Cass, 2001), p. xvii. See also Colin S.Gray, Modern Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), a book-length defense of the proposition that: ‘To under-stand modern strategy is to understand it in all ages’ (p. 364). Larry H.Addington, The Patterns of War since the Eighteenth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 44–5, 91–3, 106–8.

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 53

25 Baron de Jomini, The Art of War, trans. Capt. G.H.Mendel and Lieut. W.P. Craighill (1862; reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 325. 26 Henderson, Science of War, pp. 340–1. 27 Quoted in Henderson, Science of War, p. 144. 28 In fairness, I must observe that Henderson died in 1903 and Dragomirov in 1905. 29 See, for example, Auguste Comte ‘Fundamental Characteristics of the Positive Method in the Study of Social Phenomena’, in Stanislav Andreski (ed.) and Margaret Clarke (trans.), The Essential Comte (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974), pp. 144–50. 30 On du Picq, see Gat, Military Thought, pp. 28–39. 31 Ardant du Picq, Études sur le combat (Paris: Chapelot, 1914), p. 88. 32 Du Picq, Études, p. 94: ‘Le but de la discipline est de faire combattre les gens souvent malgré eux.’ 33 V.Derrécagaix, Modern War, trans. C.W.Foster, part 1 (Washington, DC: J.J. Chapman,1888), pp. 1–2. 34 Marshal [Ferdinand] Foch, The Principles of War, trans. Hilaire Belloc (New York: Chapman & Hall, 1920), p. 32: ‘Any improvement of firearms is ultimately bound to add strength to the offensive, to a cleverly conducted attack.’ Foch assumes an attack of two battalions against one. If both sides are armed with rifles firing a round a minute, the attackers will discharge 2000 bullets to the defenders’ 1000. Yet if each force is equipped with rifles capable of firing ten rounds a minute, the attackers will be capable of shooting 20,000 bullets to the attackers’ 10,000 in the same sixty second period. This argument is, of course, bizarre and completely overlooks such matters as the difficulty of aiming while on the run, the tactical advantages of firing from prone and/or fortified positions, not to mention the insalubrious effect of combat deaths on an attacker’s rate of fire. An illustration of Foch’s belief in the principle of continuity throughout all modern wars is the following observation, with which he concluded a brief account of the RussoJapanese War: ‘Once again, industrial improvements modified the forms of war and continued the evolution of the art, but without eliciting a revolution in it, without affecting in the slightest the fundamental principles of the conduct of war.’ (Maréchal Ferdinand Foch), Préceptes et Jugements du Maréchal Foch, ed. A.Grasset (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1919), pp. 227–8. 35 There are of course exceptions. The distinguished British theorist J.F.C.Fuller, for instance, can be assigned to the positivist camp. Not only did he believe that a ‘science of war’ was possible, he tried to develop one himself. See J .F.C.Fuller, The Foundations of the Science of War (London: Hutchinson, 1926), p. 43, for his debt to Comte. Yet Fuller, who had an original and powerful mind, most emphatically did not envision the next European war as aping the features of the war of 1914– 18. See his Machine Warfare: An Inquiry into the Influence of Mechanics on the Conduct of War (Washington, DC: The Infantry Journal, 1943), pp. 44–5. See also Holden Reid, British Military Thought, pp. 66–7, 73–4, 82. 36 Daniel J.Hughes (ed.), Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings, trans. Daniel J.Hughes and Harry Bell (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993), p. 124. 37 Lieut.-General [Rudolf] von Caemmerer, The Development of Strategical Science During the Nineteenth Century, trans. Karl von Donat (London: Hugh Rees, 1905), pp. xi-x, 212–13, 219, 276–7.

54 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

38 In an extremely interesting recent book, Antulio J.Echevarria II has argued that the application of the term ‘paradigm’ to changes in military theory is inappropriate. ‘Thomas Kuhn’s brilliant discussion of paradigm shifts relates better to the transposition of scientific models, where anomalies—the accretion of which indicates that the model is becoming obsolete—are the exception rather than the rule. In an environment characterized by friction, chance, fear, and uncertainty, however, anomalies are more often the rule than the exception.’ After Clausewitz: German Military Thinkers before the Great War (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2001), p. 226. However, as this passage makes clear, Echevarria (who incidentally uses the word ‘paradigm’ himself in other sections of his book) is confusing action with ratiocination. To make war is indeed to plunge into an environment of friction, chance, fear, and uncertainty; to think about making war is not. 39 This was the attack on the Waterworks redoubt prior to the second attempt to storm Port Arthur in September 1904. 40 Michael Howard, ‘Men against Fire’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 517–19. Also see Azar Gat, Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century, pp. 138–9. 41 W.D.Bird, Lectures on the Strategy of the Russo-Japanese War (London: Hugh Rees, 1909), p. 16. 42 General de Négrier, Lessons of the Russo-Japanese War, trans. E.Louis Spiers (London: Hugh Rees, 1906), pp. 54–5, 83. 43 Lt-Col. (Ret.) A.Kearsey, A Study of the Strategy and Tactics of the RussoJapanese War (Aldershot: Gale & Polden, n.d.), p. 5. 44 The case of the USSR is a particularly interesting one, because Russia had suffered through two very different wars since 1913: the world war, and the Civil War that followed immediately on its heels. Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s, Soviet military theorists debated whether the next war would bear a greater resemblance to the former or to the latter. M.V.Frunze, for instance, writing in 1921, clearly indicated his belief that the Russian Civil War would be the best model for thinking about a future conflict. See M.V.Frunze, ‘Edinaia voennaia doktrina v Krasnoi Armii’, in M.V.Frunze, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel’stvo,1984), p. 46. See also V.A.Zolotarev (ed.), Istoriia voennoi strategii Rossii (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Kuchkovo pole’, 2000), pp. 196–7. In Germany, the new defensive paradigm was eventually rejected, but only after serious debate. General Walther Reinhardt, for example, made forceful arguments on behalf of a doctrine of defensive war. See James S.Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1992), pp. 55–7. 45 Eugenia C.Kiesling, Arming against Hitler: France and the Limits of Military Planning (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1996), p. 130. 46 Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), p. 2. 47 Julian S.Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988). 48 Friedrich von Bernhardi, On War of Today, vol. II, trans. Karl von Donat (London: H. Rees, 1913), p. 98.

WHAT IS A MILITARY LESSON? 55

49 Friedrich von Bernhardi, On War of Today, vol. I, trans. Karl von Donat (London: H.Rees, 1912), pp. 77–8, 130; vol. II, pp. 10–11, 30–1. 50 The following passage is typical: ‘If at some future time Germany is involved in the slowly threatening war, she need not recoil before the numerical superiority of her enemies. But…she can only rely on being successful if she is resolutely determined to break the superiority of her enemies by a victory over one or the other of them before their total strength can come into action, and if she prepares for war to that effect, and acts at the decisive moment…’. Bernhardi, War of Today, vol. I, pp. 100–1. See also Bernhardi, War of Today, vol. II, pp. 442–3. 51 For a sympathetic account that nonetheless makes this point, see Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History 1946–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 430–1. For a less sympathetic view, see Andrew F.Krepinevich, Jr, The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 165–7. 52 Corum, Roots of Blitzkrieg, pp. 66–7. 53 Ernest R.May, Strange Defeat: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), pp. 285–8. 54 Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front, p. 43. 55 For an elegant and persuasive argument about interaction and stalemate during World War I, see Echevarria, After Clausewitz, pp. 224–5. 56 Handel, Masters of War, p. 238. 57 Michael Howard, ‘Military Science in an Age of Peace’, RUSI Journal, vol. 119, no. 1 (1974), p. 6. 58 Anthony H.Cordesman and Abraham R.Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, vol. III: The Afghan and Falklands Conflicts (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), p. 436.

3 Why the Weak Win: Strong Powers, Weak Powers, and the Logic of Strategy Thomas G.Mahnken

Introduction When states go to war, we naturally expect the stronger side to triumph. It is hardly surprising, for example, that in 1991 a coalition of 39 nations from across the globe defeated Iraq, a country that had only recently emerged from a bloody, eight-year war with Iran. Nor was it entirely unexpected when, in 1999, 19 of the world’s most prosperous and power-ful nations coerced Serbia, a state with an economy roughly the size of Idaho’s. Nor is it shocking that in 2001 US air power and special forces, backed by local insurgents (the ‘Northern Alliance’), were able to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, one of the most underdeveloped states in Central Asia. What is more remarkable is the frequency with which weak powers have overcome their more powerful foes, including in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War; the 1919–20 Polish-Russian War; the 1948, 1967, 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars; the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War; the US war in Vietnam; the French war in Algeria; and the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan. This chapter examines why it is that weak powers often defeat adversaries who are much stronger than they are.1 Its central argument is that the weak win when they develop a strategy to negate the material advantages of their more powerful adversaries and tap into the non-material strengths that they themselves possess. To be successful, the weaker power must accomplish four tasks: two negative and two positive. First, it must prevent its adversary from bringing its full material strength to bear against it. Second, once engaged, it must preclude its opponent from escalating the conflict. Third, it must use the material resources that it possesses as effectively as possible. Finally, it must convince its adversary that it cannot win. Such an approach allowed the American colonists to over-come the British in the American Revolutionary War, Japan to beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, and North Vietnam to defeat the United States in the Vietnam War. By contrast, failure in one or more of these tasks can bring disaster, as Argentina discovered in the Falklands War, and as Iraq and Serbia learned when facing the United States and its allies. Such considerations are of great importance to the United States. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world—politically, economically, and

WHY THE WEAK WIN 57

militarily. At least for the next several decades, any adversary that the United States faces will be weaker—if not considerably weaker—than it. While alQaeda is the most sophisticated and far-reaching terror network in the world, the United States towers over it in every index of power. Similarly, the United States will be considerably stronger than any regional power that it may face. However, such a vast disparity in power will compel its adversaries to seek ways to circumvent its power and to tap into the various non-material sources of power that they possess. Americans must understand how weak powers have beaten their stronger adversaries if they are to avoid defeat at the hands of a weaker opponent in future conflicts. Power: Resources, Outcomes and Strategy The concept of power plays a central role in traditional theories of inter-national politics.2 As Robert Dahl argued, power is the ability of one actor to get another to do something he would not otherwise do.3 Yet deriving a meaningful measure of power is an elusive task. As Andrew W.Marshall wrote over 30 years ago, ‘the conceptual problems in constructing an adequate or useful measure of military power have not yet been faced. Defining adequate measures looks hard, and making estimates in real situations looks even harder.’4 Nothing that has occurred in the intervening years has invalidated his conclusion. Two concepts of power dominate the theory of international politics. The first equates power with control over resources, the second with control over outcomes.5 Neither, however, provides an adequate method of predicting success or failure in war. Most attempts to measure power equate it with tangible economic or military assets, such as the amount of a state’s gross national product, the level of its military expenditure, or the size and composition of its armed forces.6 Implicit in such efforts is the belief that the more resources an actor controls, the more likely it is to influence the behavior of its adversaries and achieve the outcome it desires.7 In fact, such measures are of limited value in predicting which side in a dispute will triumph. History contains numerous instances of economically or militarily weak states defeating their more powerful adversaries. One study, for example, found that militarily stronger opponents emerged victorious less than half the time, whereas weaker opponents won almost two-thirds of the conflicts they engaged in.8 Another found that between 1800 and 1998 weak actors were successful nearly 30 per cent of the time.9 Successful insurgencies, such as the American Revolutionary War, the Chinese Civil War, and the French Indochina War, by definition involve the weak overcoming the strong. While such a record does not negate the utility of the concept of power, it does cast doubt on the usefulness of a definition of power based solely upon material factors to the exclusion of such important yet intangible elements as motivation, will, cohesion, and willingness to sacrifice.

58 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Recognizing the difficulty of using the balance of military or economic capabilities to predict who will win a war, others argue that the outcome of a conflict provides the only meaningful metric of power. Geoffrey Blainey, for example, has written that war is the most reliable and objective test of which side is most powerful. In his view, ‘War is a dispute about the measurement of power.’10 Wars occur when each side believes that it can triumph: that is, when each estimates that it is more powerful than its opponent. Of course, only one side —at most—can be correct; it is war that determines which is most powerful. In other words, the outcome of a war creates at least a temporary agreement over the hierarchy of power.11 According to this perspective, the question of why the weak win is a non sequitor. Weak states never defeat strong states, because strength and weakness are determined on the battlefield and the ‘strong’ state is, by definition, the one that triumphs. Blainey’s view is certainly appealing. Measuring power outside the context of war is clearly a challenge, particularly in cases where the belligerents appear to be closely matched. It is worthwhile to consider, for example, whether France or Germany was more powerful in May 1940. The outcome of the campaign in France would seem to indicate that Germany was markedly superior. The Wehrmacht achieved a crushing victory over the French Army, defeating a force that was quantitatively—and in many respects qualitatively—superior in a lightning campaign that lasted 46 days but was effectively decided in ten. So it makes sense to conclude that Germany was more powerful than France. On the other hand, a close look at the campaign shows that the outcome of the campaign was the result of German good luck at several important points. Had things gone differently, France and Britain might easily have been victorious.12 So it is not at all clear that Germany was as ‘powerful’ as the outcome of the campaign would indicate. A focus on outcomes is even less compelling in cases where one side enjoys a clear material advantage over the other. In 1968, for example, the United States possessed armed forces that were nearly eight times larger, a population more than ten times larger, military expenditure more than 160 times larger, and a gross national product 400 times larger than that of North Vietnam.13 It is something of a stretch to argue that North Vietnam was more powerful than the United States just because Hanoi defeated Washington. The idea that power has non-material dimension is not new. Carl von Clausewitz saw power as the product of a state’s means and its will.14 However, it is difficult to measure will without falling into the trap of inferring it tautologically from the outcome of a conflict. As Gil Merom has written, ‘Is it reasonable to claim that the Algerians, Palestinians, Lebanese Shiites and other communities that won independence, drove foreign powers off their territory, displayed greater motivation than the Tibetans and Kurds? After all, the Kurds and Tibetans faced (and still do) more misery and agony than did the Algerians and the Palestinians.’15

WHY THE WEAK WIN 59

Neither of the traditional approaches to measuring power provides a sufficient explanation of why weak states defeat strong ones. While the distribution of capabilities defines the range of strategic options that are open to the weak, it does not determine the war’s outcome.16 Judging power based upon the result of a conflict sidesteps the issue of what leads to success. What both approaches ignore is strategy, the link between capabilities and outcomes. To understand why the weak win, we must examine how weak states compensate for their material weakness and create a com-parative advantage over their more powerful foes. Strategy and Comparative Advantage Weak states and insurgencies, by definition, lack the economic and military wherewithal to defeat stronger powers in a head-to-head contest. To enjoy any chance of success, they must rely upon less tangible sources of strength to establish a comparative advantage over their adversary.17 As Mao Tse-tung wrote in the context of China’s war against imperial Japan: The enemy is strong and we are weak, and the danger of subjugation is there. But in other respects the enemy has shortcomings and we have advantages. The enemy’s advantages can be reduced and his shortcomings aggravated by our efforts. On the other hand, our advantages can be enhanced and our shortcoming remedied by our efforts. Hence, we can win final victory and avert subjugation, while the enemy will ultimately be defeated and will be unable to avert the collapse of his whole imperialist system.18 Weak states often possess such important non-material advantages as geographic position, skill, organization, a high threshold of pain, patience, and lack of humanitarian scruples. They also often have the opportunity to manipulate third parties to increase their power and offset that of their stronger adversaries.19 They often win not by inflicting a crushing military defeat upon their adversaries, but by wearing down their will to wage war. To be successful, the weak state must develop a strategy to dictate the nature of the war to its adversary. This requires that it capitalize upon its strengths while circumventing those of its enemy. If the foe possesses strong conventional forces, then the weaker power can adopt guerrilla warfare or terrorism. If he relies upon public support, then the weaker side can protract the war. As Mao put it in one famous formulation, ‘The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.’20 Successful weak powers have frequently employed strategies with four common features. First, they prevent their adversary from mobilizing fully against them. Second, they seek to limit their enemy’s escalatory options once the war has begun. Third, they attempt to wring the greatest possible

60 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

effectiveness out of their military capabilities. Finally, they convince their adversary that it cannot win, usually by imposing a steady accumulation of costs upon it. Establishing favorable initial conditions The first task that the weak power faces is to prevent its adversary from bringing the full weight of its material strength to bear against it. One way that weaker powers do so is by exploiting the imbalance that frequently exists in the value each side attaches to the conflict. As Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his unfinished masterpiece On War, ‘since war is not an act of sense-less passion but is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration. Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow.’21 States that are fighting for something of great importance will fight harder and longer than those who are fighting for peripheral concerns. In asymmetric conflicts, this balance of resolve may be as important as the balance of capabilities.22 The balance of capabilities nonetheless bounds the options available to each side. The weak power’s lack of material resources creates a high threshold for using force. When a weak state goes to war against a stronger adversary, it is generally because its leadership feels that the risks of not doing so are enormous. Indeed, they may believe that the very existence of the regime or the state is at stake. Imperial Japan chose to attack the United States in December 1941, for example, because the government felt that a failure to do so would lead to economic strangulation.23 The high value of this object, combined with the unfavorable balance of capabilities, means that the weak state must frequently mobilize all the means at its disposal to have any chance of prevailing. Moreover, when vital interests are at stake, there is little incentive to use limited means. As a result, while the barriers to using force may be high, once the weak state chooses to go to war, it is totally committed to the enterprise. It is much easier for a strong state to choose to go to war with a weak state. Because the strong state faces a favorable balance of capabilities, its threshold for using force is low. Strong powers are therefore likely to use force against weak powers for less than vital interests. Indeed, they may do so for ends whose value is quite marginal. The United States used force in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, for example, for such noble but ephemeral objectives as preventing starvation and atrocities. Strong states do not need to mobilize all their resources for the conflict to be successful. The weaker state’s limited aims, as well as its restricted offensive capability, further bound the stronger power’s level of commitment.24 While the weaker side is fully mobilized, and therefore totally committed, the stronger side is only partially mobilized, and therefore not totally committed.25

WHY THE WEAK WIN 61

While weak powers must frequently concentrate their power to protect their vital interests, strong powers must frequently concern themselves with threats in multiple theaters. Weak powers may use the fact that their stronger adversaries have divided attention to prevent them from mobilizing against them. A weaker power may also seek to deter its adversary from mobilizing against it by establishing a formidable force posture. By presenting an adversary with the prospect of a long, inconclusive war, it may hope to reduce the attractiveness of fighting. One approach that weak states have traditionally employed is to establish a nation in arms. Such an approach has been adopted by states as diverse as Sweden, Switzerland, and Singapore. The Palestinian Authority has similarly turned itself into an armed garrison to deter Israeli incursions. Weak states may also seek nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons as a deterrent to or constraint on intervention. The widening advantage of the United States in conventional high-technology warfare gives its adversaries considerable motivation to seek weapons of mass destruction as a countermeasure. A weaker power may also use geography to prevent an adversary from bringing its superior power to bear against it. As Julian Corbett correctly noted, ‘Limited wars do not turn upon the armed strength of the belligerents, but upon the amount of strength which they are able or willing to bring to bear at the decisive point.’26 Even powerful states face real limits to their ability to project and sustain force. A state is at its maximum power at home; its ability to dominate others declines with distance. The geography of the theater of operations itself may also constrain the ability of the stronger power to bring its power to bear. Rough, inaccessible terrain favors the defense, and weaker powers have throughout history proven adept at using geography to restrict the amount of force that their adversaries can bring to bear. For example, Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War, and the mujaheddin in the Afghan War all exploited the advantage of geography against their stronger adversaries. While the United States and coalition forces have fared considerably better in Afghanistan in 2001–02 than the Soviets did, the region’s rough terrain has hampered efforts to root out and eliminate alQaeda and the Taliban. Japan’s conduct of the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War demonstrates how a weak power can establish favorable conditions at the outset of a conflict. Japan both exploited an imbalance in the value of the object and used geography to prevent Russia from mobilizing its superior strength against it. The Japanese government fought the war for the limited aim of control over the Korean peninsula and influence in Manchuria, goals that it saw as being of vital importance. Japan’s leaders feared that if Japan did not go to war, then Russia would take over Korea, a move that would directly threaten Japan’s security. Indeed, the Japanese government started the war even though it felt that the odds were not in its favor. The Japanese Army Chief of Staff believed that Japan had at best a 50–50 chance of defeating Russia. The Japanese Navy staff believed that it could defeat the Russian Navy only at the cost of half of the Japanese fleet.27 To

62 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Russia, by contrast, Korea was a peripheral issue; St Petersburg’s main concerns lay in Europe, not Asia. The fact that Japan did not threaten Russian territory further reduced St Petersburg’s will to wage the war. In fact, Russia committed only six of its 25 army corps to the war with Japan. Moreover, St Petersburg kept its best troops in Europe throughout the conflict. The geography of Manchuria and the Korean peninsula further favored Japan. Moscow was some 5,500 miles from the theater of operations. Japan, by contrast, lay just across the Tsushima Strait from Korea. The only way for Russian troops to reach the theater was via the incomplete Trans-Siberian Railroad. Japan, by contrast, was able to use its superiority at sea to land troops on the Korean peninsula and supply them once ashore. If Japan’s 1904 invasion of Korea and Manchuria offers a positive example of how a weak power can prevent its adversaries from mobilizing against it, then Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait offers a negative one. Iraq’s attack upon Kuwait —and the threat it posed to Saudi Arabia—altered the regional balance of power and threatened to restrict the supply of oil, something of vital interest to the United States, Europe, and Japan. The invasion also alienated key regional powers, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. As a result, the United States was able to assemble a 39-member coalition that included not only traditional US allies and leading regional powers, but also former members of the Warsaw Pact as well as traditionally neutral states. Although the Persian Gulf had been an area of secondary interest to the United States during the Cold War, its importance grew with the end of the conflict. Indeed, the lack of a serious threat to western Europe allowed the United States to re-deploy an entire army corps from Europe to south-west Asia to assist in the liberation of Kuwait. The geography of the theater also gave the multinational coalition against Iraq a distinct advantage. The participation of Saudi Arabia, other Gulf Cooperation Council states, and Turkey allowed the coalition to strike Iraq from both the north and the south. The coalition’s naval dominance in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea further isolated Iraq. Iraq’s open terrain was perfectly suited for air power, a key coalition strength. Had Iraq been less blatant in its aggression—for example, by seizing the Rumaylah oil field rather than over-running the entire country—it is unlikely that such a broad-based coalition would have arisen to oppose it. The United States would likely have taken less interest in the conflict; and if it had, it would have encountered greater difficulty in gaining access to bases in the region. Controlling escalation Just as the weaker power must limit its stronger adversary’s mobilization against it, so too must it seek to control escalation once war has begun. The stronger power frequently has the ability to crush its weaker adversary, at least in theory. While it may not initially commit maximum force to the conflict, there is a natural tendency to escalate a conflict when success proves elusive. To be

WHY THE WEAK WIN 63

successful, the weak state must wage the war at a level that allows it to exploit its comparative advantage, while denying its adversary the ability to escalate the war in ways that would put it at a disadvantage. One way that weak powers attempt to control escalation is by seeking a greatpower ally.28 Weak states often see major powers as potential resources that can influence the course and outcome of a conflict. In his study of asymmetric conflicts, T.V. Paul found outside support to be a key determinant of a weak state’s decision to initiate war.29 Great-power allies may provide material assistance to the weaker power, augmenting its resource base. They may also give it needed strategic depth and deter the weak power’s adversary from escalating the war. In the Russo-Japanese War, for example, Japan was able to use its treaty with Great Britain to control escalation. According to the terms of the 1902 AngloJapanese alliance, if either party went to war with two or more powers, then the other would be obliged to enter the war. The treaty meant that Russia’s ally France could not come to St Petersburg’s aid without provoking a war with Britain. Germany was similarly unwilling to become embroiled in the war. Russia would fight the war alone, while Japan could count on at least benevolent neutrality from Great Britain. During the American Revolutionary War the Continental Congress skillfully used France’s entry into the war to change the nature of the conflict from an insurgency confined to the North American colonies to a global maritime war, a move that caused Britain to reassess the value of the colonies. Conversely, weaker powers may also attempt to fracture their adversary’s coalition. One frequent approach is to seek to portray themselves as the victim of a powerful bully. They may, for example, play up civilian casualties, overreactions, and errors. The current government of Iraq, for example, has been skillful at playing up the human cost of the United Nations-imposed sanctions in an effort to split the coalition opposing it. Similarly, the Palestinians exploited the April 2002 Israeli incursions into the West Bank—particularly the operations in Jenin—to gain sympathy for Palestinian independence. In this way they can turn the very fact of their weakness into strength. North Vietnam adroitly used its relationship with the Soviet Union and China to restrict the options open to the United States during the Vietnam War. Most concretely, Moscow and Beijing gave Hanoi considerable material assistance. Imports from the Soviet Union and China prevented food shortages in North Vietnam and made up for shortfalls in industrial production. Hanoi’s communist allies replaced trucks, rolling stock, and machinery destroyed in US bombing raids; and they provided North Vietnam with ammunition, small arms, artillery, tanks, and a sophisticated air-defense system.30 They also deployed troops to assist the North Vietnamese. In 1966, for example, China dispatched 50,000 military personnel, including engineers, railroad construction units, and antiaircraft artillery units, to North Vietnam. China, together with ostensibly neutral Laos and Cambodia, acted as a sanctuary for North Vietnamese military forces.

64 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

The Soviet Union’s and China’s support for North Vietnam made the US leadership fear the possibility that the war would escalate, potentially to the use of nuclear weapons. This fear was a major constraint on US action during the war. The fact that US leaders could not predict the point at which US bombing would precipitate a Chinese response served as a major impediment to a more determined air campaign against North Vietnam.31 The possibility of escalation also constrained the United States from pursuing more offensive options, such as a limited incursion into North Vietnam. Iraq, by contrast, was singularly unsuccessful in its efforts to garner allies and disrupt the US-led coalition during the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein, a secular nationalist leader, was unable to turn his confrontation with the coalition into a jihad (holy war). Indeed, his only allies were Yemen, Mauritania, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was also unable to bring Israel into the war, a move that could have fractured the coalition. Similarly, Slobodan Milosevic was unable to attract allies during his confrontation with NATO over Kosovo. Indeed, Russia’s abandonment of Serbia is one plausible argument as to why Serbia agreed to withdraw from Kosovo. Using material resources effectively While non-material elements of power play an important role in the weak power’s strategy, it cannot ignore the material dimension of strategy. Indeed, its weakness means that it must also use its material resources as effectively as possible. A weak power may develop and employ niche capabilities designed to exploit the adversary’s weaknesses; may pick out weak elements of the adversary’s army for attack; and may attempt to exploit its adversary’s mistakes. As Mao Tse-tung wrote in the context of China’s war with Japan in the 1930s: ‘The enemy command itself provides a basis for the possibility of defeating Japan. History has never known an infallible general, and the enemy makes mistakes just as we ourselves can hardly avoid making them; hence, the possibility exists of exploiting the enemy’s errors.’32 At least in theory, weak states have the choice of what strategy to pursue against their stronger foes. First, they may attempt to wage a war of annihilation and seek a quick decisive victory. They may be particularly motivated to employ force if they perceive that they can achieve limited aims in a short war.33 More often than not, however, such a strategy proves at best illusory, at worst self-destructive. As imperial Japan found out when it attacked Pearl Harbor, the early, massive use of force all too often galvanizes the adversary’s will. By contrast, weaker powers have fared much better in protracted wars.34 In particular, they have often been successful when waging wars of attrition culminating in battles of annihilation. The American colonists, for example, waged a war of attrition against British forces until the decisive battle of Yorktown; Japan waged an attritional war against Russia during the RussoJapanese War until its twin victories at Mukden and Tsushima Strait; and the

WHY THE WEAK WIN 65

Vietnamese communists waged an attritional battle against US forces until the 1968 Tet Offensive. In each case, the battle of annihilation convinced the stronger power that it could not win at an acceptable cost. Such a strategy, while frequently effective, is not without its risks. The weaker power faces the challenge of inflicting damage upon its adversary while also staying below its adversary’s threshold of escalation. Too little effort will lead to defeat, while too much effort can lead the stronger side to bring its full power to bear. Convincing the adversary it cannot win Ultimately, the weak state wins when it convinces its adversary that the cost of war outweighs any prospective benefits. One way it does so is by imposing a steady accumulation of costs upon the adversary in order to break its will. The weak power does not have to win militarily, or even come out ahead in the body count. All it has to do is convince its stronger foe that the costs of the war outweigh any prospective benefits. It is worth-while to remember, for example, that the Viet Minh defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, which had a major impact on the Geneva Conference that led to France’s withdrawal from Indochina, involved only a small portion of French forces in Indochina.35 The 1968 Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army was a major military defeat that dealt a body blow to the communist insurgency in the south. However, it was a strategic victory, because it convinced the US leadership and the American public that victory was not at hand. In each case, the key impact was political and psychological rather than military. The weak power may also employ political propaganda to erode public support for the war. Sagging public support may, in turn, increase con-straints on the use of force. The very disparity of power between the strong and the weak may lead the population of the strong state to call the morality of the war into question. The weak side may portray itself as a victim in an attempt to sap public support for the war effort. The Palestinian Authority has used such an approach versus Israel. The weak side may also appeal to public opinion in the strong state more directly. As Andrew Mack has written, the Vietnam War was fought not only in Indochina, but also in the political and social institutions of the United States.36 Former North Vietnamese Army colonel Bui Tin has observed that the American anti-war movement played a vital role in Hanoi’s strategy: Support for the war from our rear was completely secure while the American rear was vulnerable. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio…to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses… Those people represented the conscience of America. The conscience of America was part of its war-

66 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

making capability, and we were turning that power in our favor. America lost because of its democracy; through dissent and protest it lost the ability to mobilize a will to win.37 Conversely, the weak state may use conflict to increase support for its cause. The ability of the stronger power to occupy the weaker state helps generate nationalism.38 One of the great concerns of the current war on terrorism is that US operations against al-Qaeda will be transformed into a‘clash of civilizations’, pitting the United States and its allies against the Islamic world. Implications While power is a vital concept in international relations, defining what exactly power is continues to prove elusive. Those elements of power that are most easily measured fail reliably to predict the outcome of conflicts, while basing estimates of power upon the outcome of conflicts risks becoming a tautology. It is only when strategy is brought into the equation that one can begin to correlate power to outcomes. Past wars between the strong and the weak can give us insight into some of the challenges that the United States faces in the global war on terrorism. Most basically, the history of such conflicts should dispel any illusions that the United States’ vast superiority in the conventional indices of power somehow guarantees it victory. It is difficult to conceive of circumstances under which the forces of Islamic fundamentalism, as typified by al-Qaeda, could cause the downfall of the US government or annihilate the US armed forces. On the other hand, it is quite easy to envision scenarios where they would achieve some of their primary objectives, such as forcing the United States to withdraw from some or all of south-west Asia (the Middle East) or bringing about the overthrow of proAmerican regimes in the region. First and foremost, Americans must avoid complacency. This chapter suggests several things that the United States must do to prevent al-Qaeda from achieving its objectives. First, it needs to seek ways to wage the war on terrorism on terms that favor it over its adversaries. The campaign in Afghanistan was an impressive demonstration of US technology and skill. The use of a small number of highly trained special forces troops working with local insurgents and backed by air power proved quite effective. While future campaigns are likely to look quite different, the United States possesses a series of comparative advantages that it can employ against al-Qaeda, including the ability to project power globally and operate at night and in all types of weather. The challenge for the US military will be to develop concepts and organizations to employ these strengths against al-Qaeda’s weaknesses. This will likely require Americans to build new areas of expertise. The US armed forces will, for example, need to develop (or, more accurately, re-discover) expertise in counterinsurgency.

WHY THE WEAK WIN 67

Second, the United States needs to isolate al-Qaeda and other Islamic radical groups from outside support. In particular, it needs to ensure that Islamic fundamentalist groups such as al-Qaeda are denied state sponsor-ship. In ridding Afghanistan of the Taliban, the United States demonstrated its willingness to overthrow governments that overtly sponsor terrorist organizations; but Afghanistan was in many ways an easy case. Over-throwing other state sponsors of terrorism promises to be much more difficult. Iran, for example, is larger, better organized, and much better armed (including with weapons of mass destruction) than the Taliban regime. Perhaps more importantly, it is not an international pariah. Even more challenging is the task of isolating al-Qaeda from its reservoir of popular support throughout the Islamic world, particularly in states that are nominally friendly to the United States. Denying al-Qaeda and like-minded groups support will likely lean more heavily on diplomacy than force. Finally, the United States needs to develop a strategy for the long term; this will be a long war. As this chapter has shown, one way the weak win is by exhausting their stronger adversaries. In the current war, the United States must develop an approach to defeating al-Qaeda that can be sustained over the long term. The campaign in Afghanistan was important in that it denied al-Qaeda a sanctuary for its operations. It also provided a visible demonstration of US will to oppose terrorism militarily. However, even such a successful campaign incurs long-term responsibilities. It is likely that the United States will have forces in Afghanistan for quite some time. As additional campaigns unfold, the United States will likely gain long-term obligations elsewhere. A key challenge facing the United States will be to prevent overextension. The United States must also ensure public support for its war against terrorism. One way to do so is to win a series of tangible—if not crucial -victories. These incremental victories can demonstrate that US forces are making progress in the war. At the same time, those forces need to deny our adversary the incremental victories it needs to maintain support for its cause. To the extent that the United States can portray Islamic radicals as losers rather than martyrs, it will undermine their ability to recruit and retain adherents. The United States is—by all conventional measures—the most power-ful state in the world. However, if it is to be victorious, it will need to craft an appropriate strategy to bring its resources to bear against its adversary. Without such a strategy, it faces the very real prospect of defeat at the hands of a much weaker foe. NOTES 1 I use the term ‘power’ to connote both states and non-state actors such as insurgents. The basic argument outlined in this chapter applies to both.

68 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

2 See, for example, David A.Baldwin, ‘Power Analysis and World Politics: New Trends Versus Old Tendencies’, World Politics, 31, 2 (1979); Jeffrey Hart, ‘Three Approaches to the Measurement of Power in International Relations’, International Organization, 30, 2 (1976); Herbert A.Simon, ‘Notes on the Observation and Measurement of Political Power’, Journal of Politics, 15, 4 (1953). 3 Robert Dahl, ‘The Concept of Power’, Behavioral Science 2 (July 1957), p. 202. 4 A.W.Marshall, Problems of Estimating Military Power, P-3417 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, August 1966), p. 9. 5 For an excellent discussion of the concept of power, see Ashley J.Tellis, Janice Bially, Christopher Layne, and Melissa McPherson, Measuring National Power in the Postindustrial Age (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2000), chs 2–3. 6 On measures used for national power, see ibid., pp. 26–33 7 Zeev Maoz, ‘Power, Capabilities, and Paradoxical Conflict Outcomes’, World Politics, 41, 2 (January 1989), p. 240. 8 Frank Wayman, J.David Singer, and Gary Goertz, ‘Capabilities, Allocations, and Success in Militarized Disputes and Wars, 1816–1976’, International Studies Quarterly, 27 (1983), pp. 497–515. 9 Ivan Arreguín-Toft, ‘How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict’, International Security, 26, 1 (Summer 2001), p. 96. 10 Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, 3rd edn (New York: Free Press, 1988), p. 114. 11 Ibid., p. 122. 12 Williamson Murray and Allan R.Millett, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 66–90; Ernest R.May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000). 13 Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS), The Military Balance 1968–1969 (London: ISS, 1968). 14 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 77. 15 See the chapter by Gil Merom in this volume, pp. 215–48. 16 Maoz, ‘Power, Capabilities, and Paradoxical Conflict Outcomes’, p. 246. 17 For a discussion of the concept of comparative advantage, see Michael I.Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd revised and expanded edition (London: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. xxiii-xxiv, 111–16, 283, 284, 296, 343. 18 Mao Tse-tung, ‘On Protracted War’, in Mao Tse-tung, Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-Tung (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1967), p. 208. 19 Michael Handel, Weak States in the International System (London: Frank Cass, 1990), pp. 51, 69. 20 Mao Tse-tung, ‘Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War’, in Mao, Selected Military Writings, p. 111. 21 Clausewitz, On War, p. 92. 22 Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Changing Forms of Conflict’, Survival, 40, 4 (Winter 1998–99), p. 42. 23 Richard Overy and Andrew Wheatcroft, The Road to War (New York: Random House, 1989), ch. 6. 24 T.V.Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 27.

WHY THE WEAK WIN 69

25 Andrew Mack, ‘Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict’, World Politics, 27, 2 (January 1975), p. 182. 26 Julian S.Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London: Longmans, 1911), p. 55. 27 J.N.Westwood, Russia Against Japan, 1904–1905: A New Look at the RussoJapanese War (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 22. 28 Handel, Weak States in the International System, p. 120. 29 Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts, p. 171. 30 Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 196, 392. 31 Ibid., pp. 392–3. 32 Mao, ‘On Protracted War’, in Mao, Selected Military Writings, p. 252. 33 Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts, p. 13. 34 For the seminal expression of a protracted war strategy, see Mao, ‘On Protracted War’, in Mao, Selected Military Writings, pp. 210–14. 35 Mack, ‘Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars’, p. 178. 36 Ibid., pp. 177, 186. 37 ‘How North Vietnam Won the War’, Wall Street Journal, August 3, 1995, p. A8. 38 Mack, ‘Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars’, p. 182.

4 Attrition in Modern and Post-Modern War Avi Kober

‘Like smoldering embers it needs time to be effective’ Carl von Clausewitz1 Many Western countries and armies are reluctant to wage wars of attrition. Under the impression of high-intensity conflicts (HICs) such as World War I, the 1969–70 Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition, and the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War, attrition has been associated with a Goliath-type bloody and ineffective confrontation that is best avoided. Post-World War II attrition-dominated, lowintensity conflicts (LICs) have also earned highly negative connotations. The difficulty the strong side engaged in such conflicts often has encountered in translating its military power into political gains has only strengthened the negative image of wars of attrition. The aforesaid does not, however, change the fact that attrition has played a major role in modern and post-modern war and thus deserves to be treated more respectfully by both theorists and practitioners. In this chapter, I will put forth the following main arguments. First, wars of attrition are not necessarily less sophisticated than Blitzkrieg and can, to a great extent, be considered even more modern than Blitzkrieg. Second, attrition has adapted quite flexibly to the changes in the nature of war, adjusting its form over the course of the years. Generally, wars of attrition have receded from the actual battlefield and been transplanted to the civilian rear. They have become a combination of military engagements at the tactical level and confrontation at the grand-strategic level, while it is at the grand-strategic level that they are usually won. Third, although attrition as a strategy typically seems tailor-made to suit the limitations of the side that is militarily and technologically weaker, stronger sides have also used it from time to time. In the post-modern period, it has been adopted by Western democracies committed to post-heroic values. Attrition as a strategy has also become more offensive than defensive. Fourth, wars of attrition may also develop by themselves. This may happen as a result of the creation of a state of symmetry in capabilities between the parties, owing to operational, technological, or doctrinal reasons; a state of asymmetry in capabilities balanced by asymmetry in cost tolerance of the respective societies; or the existence of political constraints, limiting the freedom of action of the military.

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 71

In the ensuing pages, I will first discuss the meaning of attrition as opposed to Blitzkrieg and refer to four different models of attrition. I will then analyze the characteristics of attrition as a chosen strategy and the factors accounting for attrition that develops by itself. Finally, I will focus on some aspects of waging and winning wars of attrition that are typical of such wars. Most of the illustrations presented here are from the modern and post-modern periods. However, as resorting to attrition was highly popular with strategists during ancient times, and as ancient thinking and practice has inspired modern strategic thinking, I will permit myself to accompany modern illustrations with references to ancient ones, as well. What is Meant by Attrition? The difference between attrition and Blitzkrieg The concept of attrition is currently often referred to as the amount of erosion effected among the forces of warring sides, incorporating losses in terms of both personnel and equipment (‘attrition rates’ or ‘attrition ratios’), and exhaustion of will/determination. To one extent or another, however, all wars erode materiel and morale. In the above sense, attrition is not a characteristic that is exclusive to a ‘war of attrition’. What is unique to wars of attrition is that the depletion is gradual in the true sense of erosion; that is progressing over a considerable period of time. Furthermore, characterizing a war as being one of attrition requires that the cumulative nature of erosion over a protracted period be determined the most prominent characteristic of the conflict. In this sense, attrition is, to a great extent, the opposite of Blitzkrieg.2 Both attrition and Blitzkrieg can be defined in terms of the ratio between military achievements and time. They are different from one another, however, with regard to this ratio. Blitzkrieg aims at big achievements within an extremely short period; it is close to Machiavelli’s idea of ‘short and big’ war, according to which, armies finish a war in a very short time.3 Napoleon, too, expressed a similar idea in his maxim, according to which, ‘The strength of an army, like the power in the mechanics, is estimated by multiplying mass by rapidity.’4 Attrition, on the other hand, to use Clausewitz’s assertion, is about ‘wearing down the enemy in a conflict [, which] means using the duration of the war to bring about a gradual exhaustion of his physical and moral resistance’.5 Whereas the notion of quick battlefield decision lies at the center of Blitzkrieg, in attrition, the name of the game is resilience. Highly illustrative of the difference between the two molds was the name given by Israeli troops to the LIC with the Palestinians that started in late 2000—‘The Six-Year War’, as opposed to the ‘[1967] SixDay War’.6 There is a significant body of theoretical literature on attrition offered by distinguished modern military thinkers, each reflecting the particular nature of

72 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

attrition in his own time (their thought will be addressed in the framework of the discussion of the various attrition models, below). Blitzkrieg, on the other hand, mostly has been referred to as a doctrine or strategy. The notion of fists of armor advancing rapidly into enemy territory and practicing inter-arm and inter-corps cooperation while enjoying air and logistical support, aiming at bringing about the quick psychological collapse of the enemy while minimizing casualties,7 has for many years caught the imagination of both theorists and practitioners: Blitzkrieg was considered the jewel in the crown of strategy. It has at least tacitly been agreed that only high-quality armies could successfully apply Blitzkrieg, as it required the highest operational and logistical standards and skills. Indeed, Blitzkrieg was employed by the Germans in World War II; by the Israelis in the 1956 Sinai War and the 1967 Six-Day War; and by the Western allies during the 1991 Persian Gulf War (at least operationally, once ground operations were launched). Soviet and NATO strategies during the Cold War, too, emphasized the avoidance of attrition. The image of Blitzkrieg as a highly sophisticated modern strategy should not, however, blind us from recognizing that, first, attrition is not necessarily less sophisticated than Blitzkrieg, as, in most cases it, too, places emphasis on the adversary’s will power and morale, rather than on his capability. Second, attrition is even more modern than Blitzkrieg: whereas traditional Blitzkrieg restricted itself to the military levels-of-war, attrition has often also related to grand strategy, particularly to the societal and economical dimensions of war.8 Since the nineteenth century, it has become clear that a sustained attempt to wear down the enemy cannot be confined to operations on the direct battlefield. It must, perforce, spill over to the grand-strategic level, where it is aimed at the enemy’s economy and society, with the civilian rear becoming the center of gravity. Attrition, as Liddell Hart put it, has become ‘especially tiring to the mass of the people’.9 The warplane and, subsequently, the missile have served to bring war directly to the civilian rear, testing not only the resilience of the enemy’s army, but also that of its society as a whole. These means have endowed war of attrition with a broader meaning. In other words, war of attrition reflects the process wherein war has receded from its traditional battlefield fronts and is being increasingly focused on the enemy’s rear, which not only has become one of the targets, but sometimes is even the most important target. From this point of view, too, war of attrition deserves to be considered as more modern than Blitzkrieg. Models of attrition Attrition has preoccupied military thinkers and practitioners in modern times, and one can identify at least four different models of attrition that have emerged over the course of the years. The plethora of models risks creating the wrong impression, however, that the concept of attrition is no more than an arbitrarily chosen framework that serves as an umbrella for a variety of disparate

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 73

phenomena. It is important, therefore, to point out that attrition is indeed a multifaceted phenomenon and that what is truly common to all of its models is the slow erosion of materiel and morale on both sides over a considerable period of time. Delbrück and Liddell Hart, respectively, offered the first and second models. The third has been etched in the collective consciousness and in LIC doctrines since World War II without being explicitly suggested as a model. The fourth model is derived from Luttwak’s notion of post-heroic warfare. The difference between the models is not only reflective of different points of view of military thinkers as a result of different realities of war, but also of the shifting focus from HICs to LICs as a result of both the importance and the pervasiveness of the latter in modern and post-modern war. Most of the conflicts in the international system—80 per cent during the Cold War and 95 per cent in its aftermath—have been LICs, and their impact has reached beyond what is usually believed.10 Delbrück, inspired by Clausewitz, stressed what he considered to be the most typical of the strategies of attrition: the gaining of limited achieve-ments for the purpose of obtaining political bargaining power. Delbrück distinguished between two types of strategy. The first type is the strategy of annihilation (Niederwerfungsstrategie), pursuant to which one attacks the enemy’s military forces with the intention of destroying them and imposing the victorious side’s will on the defeated, which in Delbrück’s view, was characteristic of Napoleon. The second type is the strategy of attrition (Ermattungsstrategie).11 According to Delbrück’s model, a war of attrition is a limited strategy as far as both the objectives and the military means employed are concerned. It is, furthermore, a gradual war, which also is economical in terms of force, combines military and non-military resources, and emphasizes, alongside the element of ‘battle’ (what one would today call ‘firepower’), the element of maneuver. The model is based on the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). Frederick the Great, whose forces during that war suffered from enormous quantitative inferiority because they were engaging an entire coalition of enemies, utilized a strategy of attrition. At the heart of it stood prudent maneuvering, focused on trying to minimize actual direct military encounter with the enemy, severing its lines of supply and operations,12 and waiting for changes to occur in the external political circumstances. Frederick’s strategy, like the one Fabius had adopted during his time, although applied in what nowadays would be referred to as HIC, rather resembled guerrilla warfare. Delbrück’s interpretation of Frederick’s strategy was incompatible with that of other prominent Prussian thinkers. Bernhardi and other historians characterized Frederick as a military leader with a style of combat resembling the one later employed by Napoleon and Moltke the Elder, and portrayed his 1757 invasion of Bohemia as prefiguring Moltke’s wars against Austria (1866) and Prussia (1870–71). Others, such as Max Jahns, Reinhold Koser, and Colmar von der Goltz, shared Delbrück’s interpretation of Frederick’s strategy.13 But even Bernhardi admitted that, under the conditions Frederick found himself in the Seven Years’ War, he had to try and gain time.14

74 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

The second model can be attributed to Liddell Hart. He, unlike Delbrück, regarded war of attrition as an unsophisticated, Goliath-type war characterized by neither limits nor controls; focused on the battlefield and particularly aimed at destroying the enemy’s military forces; isolated from the political context; emphasizing firepower over maneuver and, as such, a static war, which is also expensive and wasteful from both national and military standpoints.15 In a war of this kind, neither side is capable of gaining anything, as the victor himself is ultimately exhausted and injured.16 ‘To adopt the method of attrition is not only a confession of stupidity, but a waste of strength, endangering both the chances during the combat and the profit of victory’, Liddell Hart concluded.17 He crystal-lized this model under the impression of the trench warfare of World War I and was outspoken in his criticism of the form taken by that war, which he believed had been influenced by Clausewitz’s notion of absolute war, and had taken root in the minds and actions of German generals in the years preceding that war.18 World War I, to use Liddell Hart’s words, was a‘progressive butchery, politely called attrition’.19 The strategy of Pericles, that of Fabius, and that adopted by Frederick, which Clausewitz and Delbrück would have characterized as based on the idea of attrition, constituted what Liddell Hart termed ‘the strategy of the indirect approach’; he reserved the term ‘attrition’ for wars of annihilation. Liddell Hart’s model is still rooted in the minds of some current military thinkers.20 The third, post-World War II, model of attrition has constituted a kind of synthesis between attrition à la Frederick the Great, on the one hand, and attrition à la World War I, on the other. Attrition, according to this model, is a prolonged war in which the achievement of the political war objectives is more important and relevant than military achievements. It is limited in terms of theater; entails the utilization of a combination of military and non-military resources; is aimed, simultaneously, toward the military forces on the battlefield and the civilian rear; and places emphasis on breaking the other side’s will, rather than its capability. The post-World War II attrition model has two versions: a symmetric one, in which one would find regular armies on both sides (HIC), and an asymmetric one, in which at least one side has irregular, guerrilla forces (LIC). The main difference between HIC and LIC versions of attrition is that, in the first one, firepower plays the major—sometimes the sole—role, whereas the second one entails a combination of firepower and maneuver. The HIC version is, to a great extent, based on the 1951–53 Korean case and the 1969–70 Israeli-Egyptian war of attrition. The LIC version, on the other hand, is inspired by the many struggles for national liberation and revolutions after World War II in Asia and Africa. As LIC has become the most pervasive type of conflict, and as attrition has—whether explicitly or impli-citly—been acknowledged as the major characteristic of LICs, the LIC version has come to overshadow the HIC version.21 In the past two decades, attrition has been ‘discovered’ by militarily and technologically stronger sides as a preferred strategy in the framework of the

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 75

so-called ‘post-heroic’ warfare. And indeed, Luttwak’s notion of post-heroic warfare could be considered the newest model of attrition. This applies mainly to Western democracies engaged in LICs, in which the defense of the homeland is not at stake. It reflects a combination of societal and political constraints, on the one hand, and opportunities created by technological superiority over the enemy, on the other. In a post-heroic war, one is allowed neither to get killed nor to kill— at least not civilians.22 Contrary to the belief that any protracted military engagement must be unpopular with democratic societies, thus being unsustainable, the post-heroic player would be able—and might even prefer—to wage a war of attrition. During such a war, he would prefer using fire, instead of maneuvering on the ground, so as to inflict damage on enemy forces or infrastructure while avoiding civilian casualties for the enemy and for his own troops. This was exemplified by post-Cold War US/NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo and Israeli fighting against Hizballah in south Lebanon, both in the 1990s,23 as well as by Israeli fighting against the Palestinians during the hostilities of the late October 2000 Palestinian intifada. Attrition as a Chosen Strategy Attrition might occur as a deliberately adopted strategy or as a form that develops by itself.24 The changes it has undergone as a strategy are discussed below. I will focus on two main changes: attrition becoming attractive for the strong and the strengthening of its offensive nature. From a strategy of the weak to one also attractive to the strong Attrition has traditionally been a strategy tailor-made to suit the limitations of the militarily weaker combatant. As Clausewitz observed, ‘It is evident that this method, wearing down the enemy, applies to the great number of cases where the weak endeavor to resist the strong’.25 This also applies to both HICs and LICs. As early as ancient times, attrition was acknowledged as the weaker side’s preferred strategy. During the Peloponnesian War, the Pericles-led Athenian forces adopted a strategy of attrition because of their relative weakness on land vis-à-vis Sparta. According to this strategy, they ‘were to reject battle on land…. Meanwhile, their navy would launch a series of commando raids on the coast of the Peloponnesus. This strategy would last until the frustrated [Spartan] enemy agreed to make peace.’26 Fabius (‘the Cunctator’) also used this strategy against Hannibal’s army, which was quantitatively superior to his own, so as to gain time and maintain his own forces as intact as possible.27 The Seven Years’ War, World War I, and the Egypt-Israel War of attrition all serve as modern examples of an attrition strategy adopted out of weakness. In other cases, a strategy of attrition was considered because of temporary weakness, although it was eventually not implemented. For example, in 1913, the Russian General Staff considered it as a possible strategy to be implemented

76 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

in a future war against Russia’s more developed European enemies. Time is the best ally of our [weaker] military forces, and for that reason it is not dangerous for us to follow a strategy of attrition and exhaustion, initially avoiding decisive engagements with the enemy’, explained Chief of Staff Mikhnevich.28 A strategy of attrition was also considered by the British General Staff in 1938, following Nazi Germany’s aggression against Czechoslovakia, because the quantitative and qualitative inferiority of Britain’s ground forces prevented defeating the Germans on the continent. ‘We have no means of making him [the enemy] give it up, except by killing him by a slow process of attrition and starvation’, was the British conclusion.29 Attrition is a commonplace strategy in LICs. True, during the nine-teenth century, attrition employed by guerrillas was often perceived as doomed to fail, as exemplified by the misfortunes of guerrilla warfare directed against regular armies during the German uprisings in 1848–49 or Prussia’s war against France in 1870–71. Nineteenth-century military theorists, such as Clausewitz, Jomini, Moltke, and Engels, were impressed by the phenomenon of ‘popular war’, in which actions were carried out by men not having military status in order to tie up enemy forces and possibly serve as a support for their own armies. They nevertheless expressed their belief that, given the weaknesses of the side employing guerrilla tactics, that side had no real chance when confronted by a strong, well-trained, and disciplined regular army.30 The twentieth-century experience, particularly post-World War II, was totally different. During numerous protracted, slow, and patient national or revolutionary struggles, the weaker side succeeded in compensating for its weakness in capabilities by eating away at the enemy’s staying power and translating this success into political gains. Twentieth-century guer rilla thinkers, such as Mao, Guevara, Giap, and others, some of whom took part as leaders in such struggles, identified that potential of attrition, addressed it in their thought, and influenced others’ struggles through the doctrines they crystallized and practiced.31 Prominent cases in which attrition has been applied by guerrillas are the Chinese Communists against the Japanese invaders and the Nationalists, the Vietnamese (first against the French and later against the Americans), the FLN (National Liberation Front) against the French in Algeria, the Mujahedin against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) and Hizballah against Israel. Nowadays, however, attrition has also become attractive to stronger sides. True, this is no novelty, as attrition has been used by stronger sides in the past— both in HICs, for example, by Montgomery, as a battlefield tactic against Rommel at al-Alamein,32 and in LICs, for example, the ancient Romans against Jewish insurgents—in the framework of a political-military strategy. In our age, however, the militarily and technologically superior side might perceive protracted engagements as attractive, at least in comparison with the alternative. As already explained, this applies particularly to post-heroic, Western

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 77

democracies engaged in LICs, which, via such deluxe attrition warfare, hope to achieve either grand-strategic decision or political victory. From a defensive to an offensive strategy One must distinguish between the objectives the use of force is meant to serve, on the one hand, and how the force is actually applied, on the other. As far as the objectives are concerned, in wars of attrition, a shift from defensive to offensive objectives may be detectable, with World War II being the watershed in this respect. For Clausewitz, who tended to distinguish between offense and defense in terms of their purpose, since ‘popular war’ in general, and war of attrition in particular, lacked any clear positive purpose, he assigned them to the domain of defense.33 It is no wonder, then, that he attributed a defensive strategy to Frederick the Great. Other nineteenth-century thinkers, like Jomini and Moltke, basically shared this view. In the twentieth century, however, popular war, with attrition as one of its main characteristics, became an independent phenomenon, rather than an auxiliary military activity.34 At the same time, it became more offensive than defensive, from a war-objectives perspective, as both preached and predicted as early as the mid-nineteenth century by Engels, a pioneer of revolutionary war. Mao’s innovative contribution lay in his doctrine of turning guerrilla warfare aimed at gaining time through the conduct of a defensive strategy of attrition, into a revolutionary or liberation war conducted by a regular army on the conventional battlefield in the traditional manner. Such war, unlike the guerrilla form, was geared at attacking to achieve battlefield decision, which would later be translated into positive, offensive political objectives.35 If one relates to the manner, however, in which forces are usually employed during wars of attrition, one may find it difficult to identify, at any given point in time over the course of such wars, who is attacking and who is defending; who is initiating and who is responding. This is because the military encounters in wars of attrition usually take place at the tactical level, where fighting is limited in terms of forces, space, and time. As such, an encounter tends to resemble a skirmish. Military thinkers referred to this phenomenon years ago. For example, eighteenth-century French thinker Guibert36 and twentieth-century French theorist and practitioner Foch addressed it as being a characteristic of ‘parallel battle’, as opposed to ‘battle of maneuver’. The parallel battle, according to Foch, is nothing but ‘a chain of more or less similar combats’, in which ‘attack develops everywhere with equal force, and ends by exerting a uniform pressure against a defender, who in his turn offers a uniform resistance’.37 The aforesaid applies not only to HICs, but also to LICs. Attempts to alter the nature of the conflict A strategy of attrition, like any other strategy, is interactive in nature. Success for a given side in adopting the attrition strategy will largely depend on the reaction

78 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

of its enemy. Will the other side ‘cooperate’ with the attrition effort being waged against it, or will it attempt to alter the nature of the conflict by switching to warfare of a different kind, which is less beneficial to the other side? Everything depends, of course, on the various constraints—military, political, economic, and other—within the framework of which each side is obliged to operate. The Spartans did not co-operate with Pericles. Frederick was never compelled by his enemies to abandon the strategy of attrition that he had espoused. The British tried hard to shatter the mold of the attrition featured by the World War I battlefield, but with little success.38 During the war of attrition in Korea in 1951– 53, the United States gave serious consideration to the option of putting an end to the protracted violence, which was costing so much in both human and financial terms. It weighed the possibility not only of threatening to do so, but of actually employing nuclear weapons to bring this about.39 Israel failed to switch to another form of warfare as a means of thwarting Egypt’s strategy of attrition in 1969–70, owing to a combination of political constraints and technical problems.40 During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, too, the coalition did not co-operate with Saddam’s strategy of attrition, instead seeking quick decision. In any case, he who imposes attrition on the adversary may find himself the victim of attrition by the enemy, as happened to Egypt in 1969–70. Almost needless to mention, the decision to abandon the attrition strategy can be implemented just as easily as originally initiated. For example, it was the Romans themselves who effectively abandoned the Fabian strategy, despite the fact that it had been successful, when they replaced Fabius with the bold and aggressive Varro. The Mao-led Chinese Communists, too, suspended resorting to attrition as soon as they felt it had outgrown its usefulness. It must be stressed, though, that any attempt by the weak side to leapfrog the guerrilla-warfare stage and establish a regular army with aspirations of contending with an adversary experienced and power-ful in traditional warfare will normally be doomed to failure, as happened with the communist uprising in Greece following World War II.41 Attrition that Develops by Itself Attrition need not be initiated deliberately by one of the sides. A war that had been intended to conform to an entirely different pattern may, on its own, deteriorate into a war of attrition. This is not a paradox, as there are logical explanations for this phenomenon. These explanations basically stress (a) the creation of a state of symmetry in capabilities between the parties, as a result of operational, technological, or doctrinal factors; (b) a state of asymmetry in capabilities balanced by asymmetry in cost tolerance of the respective societies; or (c) the existence of political constraints limiting the freedom of action of the military.

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 79

Symmetry in capabilities Operational factors

Attrition can develop as a result of a phenomenon that Clausewitz, though not applying it specifically to attrition, defined as ‘the diminishing strength of the attack’; that is, the tendency of an offensive to expend itself and lose its effectiveness. This can occur as a result of a drawing-out of the lines along which the attacker is operating, a lengthening of his logistical lines, or a weakening in the resolve of his forces to continue fighting as they move increasingly further from their homes, as well as in consequence of a parallel strengthening of the defender for precisely opposite reasons.42 The less negotiable the territory— whether because of natural obstacles, such as mountains, water (e.g., the swamps in the Iran-Iraq War), forests (e.g., the 1939–40 Winter War between the Finns and the Soviets), jungles (e.g., Vietnam), and the like, or because of artificial obstacles—the greater the likelihood the attack will soon reach its culminating point. From the point of time at which each offensive loses its impetus, the confrontation begins to assume the characteristics of wars of attrition. Classic examples of attrition that developed out of a diminution in the strength of the attack are Napoleon’s Russian campaign in 1812 and Nazi Germany’s Russian campaign during World War II. A more recent example is the 1980–88 Iran— Iraq War. The offensive of the Iraqis in late 1980 expended itself and lost its effectiveness. Two years later, in the summer of 1982, Iran launched a largescale counterattack on the Iraqi forces near the city of Basra, which diminished after a few weeks, owing to the Iraqi advantage in force ratios, strong Iraqi defenses, and the muddy terrain. In late 1986/early 1987, Iran managed to transfer the war to Iraqi territory, but failed to translate it into battlefield decision. The pattern of attrition continued to dominate the Iran-Iraq War.43 Technological factors

Since the Industrial Revolution, the technological factor has assumed increasingly greater importance and, more than ever before, started to affect the ratio between firepower and maneuver on the battlefield. It has, thus, become more likely that the deterioration of a war into a pattern of attrition would be traceable to the battlefield standstill created by a strengthening of firepower over maneuver.44 One could claim that Falkenhayn’s strategy of attrition was adopted within a situation that already constituted attrition. Ever since the battle of the Marne, in September, 1914, the combination of trenches, barbed wire, machineguns, and artillery, together with the sheer volume of forces along the 450-milelong Western Front—almost 5,500 French and British troops as against more than 4,000 German troops along every single kilometer45—froze the battlefield. Only toward the end of the war did new technological conditions develop on the battlefield that changed the relation between firepower and maneuver, making it possible to achieve battlefield decision.46

80 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

The increase in the range and accuracy of modern weaponry has created battlefield density that might impede the scope for maneuver no less than the density stemming from the volume of force relative to space.47 True, one cannot exclude the possibility that, instead of being dependent on maneuver, firepower may become a factor capable of creating the necessary conditions for a successful execution of maneuver. It seems more likely, however, that, on a battlefield saturated with precise, long-range, and destructive fire—which is likely to characterize symmetrical wars between two or more highly technological adversaries—it will be more difficult to maneuver, attack, and achieve battlefield decision, especially within a short period of time.48 Attrition would most probably develop on such a battlefield. Doctrinal factors Social structure or strategic culture could affect strategic conduct in general and the nature of doctrine and warfare in particular.49 Third World armies, unlike Western or Russian military forces, have been alluded to as inclined to converting wars into a test of perseverance, rather than of relative strik ing power. Such armies have been depicted as masters of evasion and delay. They are also said to have failed in taking advantage of opportunities for maneuver on the battlefield, and to have had a tendency to adopt defensive doctrines accentuating the quantity of force and fire over quality. This has apparently been the case even in circumstances when such armies have adopted positive, offensive war objectives, as was the case with the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli wars. Interpretation along these lines has been offered with regard to the indecisive nature of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88).50 It has also been claimed that Third World sub-national players have proven to be effective mostly with insurgency, in the framework of protracted LICs such as the wars in Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and many other instances.51 Asymmetry: capabilities vs. societal perseverance

As war has evolved into a matter in which entire nations are involved, societal cost tolerance has become just as important as the force ratios or destructive force. One can be militarily strong but socially and politically weak, and vice versa. When Bernhardi referred to the interplay between material and nonmaterial factors in war, he defined a phenomenon wherein, even in cases where one side enjoys material superiority, expressed in the number of casualties, this ‘does not at all imply that the side is victorious which has suffered the least loss. Rather that party is always beaten which suffers the greatest moral shock, and that does not depend merely on casualties.’52 In LICs, in particular, the small military achievements accumulated by the militarily weaker side during the protracted confrontation are often more effective in wearing out the enemy’s

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 81

society and political leadership than attempts to obtain rapid and unequivocal military achievements on the battlefield. In Vietnam, the United States lost the war not only because it had never clearly defined what its military was expected to achieve,53 but also because it failed to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Vietnamese people, and because the cost tolerance of its own society and politicians was much lower than that demonstrated by the North Vietnamese,54 exactly as had been predicted by Ho Chi Minh.55 In Algeria, France eventually gave up its claims after having lost the support of both the Algerian and the French people.56 The Hizballah is another example of a sub-national player that has managed to compensate for its extreme military weakness by demonstrating both reasonable loss ratios57 and stronger societal perseverance. Political constraints Deterioration into attrition may be the consequence of a deliberate political decision to restrict the scope of the war so as to prevent escalation. In the Korean War, the US administration imposed restrictions on its forces, for fear of escalation to global confrontation with North Korea’s patrons. This led to the onset of a war of attrition lasting from 1951 to 1953.58 As has already been pointed out, societies in general, and Western democracies in particular, have become more vulnerable and sensitive to the destruction entailed in the use of force. The legitimacy of using force is all too often conditioned on the ability to conduct war with the least casualties possible. In such a reality, and given the existence of highly effective technological means of command and control, the political echelon often feels that it must—and can—be more deeply involved not only in strategic and operational matters, but also in tactical ones, keeping the war going on no more than a low flame. Waging and Winning Wars of Attrition Prolongation of conflict and the impact on its nature and management In wars of attrition, as in protracted wars, processes are granted relatively long periods of time over which to develop and mature. Changes may take place in the following dimensions: (a) The scope of the conflict, as happened in the Vietnam War; (b) the stakes involved, as was the case with Egypt during its war of attrition against Israel, when the Israeli military threat became a threat to the Egyptian society, economy and regime; (c) the enemy, as happened to Frederick the Great, once the Russians with-drew from the coalition against his country, or to the Chinese Communists—who were facing the Nationalists, then the Japanese, then the Nation-alists, again—or to the Israelis in Lebanon, who were,

82 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

first, confronting the PLO, then, later, the Hizballah; (d) the means employed, as has been typical of the PLO, which has used guerrilla tactics, terrorism, and popular uprising, interchangeably; or (e) the level of enmity, as happened in the Vietnam War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or in Northern Ireland. The above characteristic of wars of attrition tends to reinforce both the unpredictable nature of the conflict and its likely outcome. Frederick’s chances of ending the Seven Years’ War without defeat were practically nil. Ultimately, however, he succeeded in recovering from his situation, thanks to the dramatic turnaround in the war following the death of the Tsarina Elisabeth and the succession to the throne of Tsar Piotr. Under the rule of its new tsar, Russia withdrew from the war, followed by Austria. This event subsequently came to be referred to as ‘the miracle of the House of Brandenburg’.59 After de Gaulle came to power in France in May 1958, it seemed that the FLN was weakening and that France was regaining control over Algeria. It also seemed that the masses in that country were gradually accepting the idea of Algeria remaining an integral part of the French republic, with the Algerian people enjoying the status of equal citizenship. But the FLN was soon to recover and tip the scales, again.60 When the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive failed in early 1968, the defeat was not translated into their weakening. The offensive had unpredictable political and societal repercussions, paradoxically marking the beginning of a process during which the United States’ perseverance was critically jeopardized.61 Conflict management may also be affected by the protracted nature of wars of attrition. In such conflicts, it is possible to learn lessons, not only once the conflict is over, but, rather, during its course, adapting to changing challenges and correcting failures by applying improved—or some-times new—doctrines or tactics shortly after each given event. For example, in the initial stages of the 1987 Palestinian intifada, as the scope of the unrest exceeded that of previous incidents in the occupied territo ries and took on the form of a popular uprising, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin basically rejected the idea of attrition. Instead, he was committed to a quick and effective military confrontation, which would theoretically end in a decision that would ultimately translate into political gains. Within four months, however, he realized the challenge could not be dealt with in ‘one go’ but, rather, via a cumulative process of physical and economic exhaustion.62 A levels-of-war perspective Traditional war has been waged across the entire range of the levels-of-war pyramid, from grand strategy, through strategy and the operational levels all the way down to tactics. War of attrition, on the other hand—at least since World War II—has taken place mainly at the two extremes of the level-of-war pyramid: grand strategy, on the one hand, and tactics, on the other. This is a feature unique to wars of attrition, and its repercussions are discussed below.

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 83

Waging a war of attrition: the combination of tactics and grand strategy In wars of attrition, the importance of the levels at both aforementioned extremes of the levels-of-war pyramid and their interaction have increased. In such wars, whether HICs or LICs, military encounters often take place at the tactical level, where only a small proportion of the force, generally, is actively involved in the fighting, and the fighting is usually limited in terms of forces, time, or space. The objectives of those engaged in such wars, and sometimes, also, the targets they choose—these often being the enemy’s society and economy—are, however, beyond the direct battlefield, at the grand-strategic level.63 Achievements or failures at the tactical level are often directly translated into achievements or failures at the grand-strategic level. For example, when President Nasser launched the War of Attrition against Israel in 1969, he hoped that, by inflicting ever-mounting casualties on Israeli forces during countless limited encounters along the Suez Canal, he would wear down Israeli society. He expressed his conviction that a country in which the photograph and life story of every fallen soldier appears on the front pages of its newspapers will be unable to bear up to a war of attrition for very long. Such thinking is also typical of LICs. Liddell Hart justifiably described guerrilla operations as limited operations of a tactical nature, the aim of which is to produce an effect beyond the actual battlefield. ‘A multiplicity of minor coups and threats can have a greater effect in tipping the scales than a few major hits, by producing more cumulative distraction, disturbance and demoralization among the enemy, along with a more widespread impression among the population’, he explained.64 The Afghan and Chechen guerrillas against Russian troops, the Kurdish PKK against Turkey, the IRA against Britain, the Islamic terrorists against the Algerian government and people, and the Somali militias against US troops are all cases wherein the conduct of the conflict has been channeled, particularly by the weaker side, to the two extremes of the levels-of-war pyramid. Winning a war of attrition—from battlefield decision to grandstrategic decision andlor victory Military thinkers have never excluded the possibility of achieving battle-field decision via attrition. According to Clausewitz, the very prolongation of war may gradually make the enemy lose its strength, to the point where the loss of strength would outweigh the political objective that motivated its resort to force. At this point, the enemy will abandon the struggle; that is, be defeated.65 Mearsheimer is even more explicit about the chances of decision being achieved in a war of attrition: ‘[It] follows a series of set-piece battles and is not expected to be quick. The process is protracted, and success ultimately comes when the defender can no longer continue to fight.’66 In practice, however, in a war of attrition, decision will always be one of fairly ‘minor’ scope; achieved ‘on points’,

84 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

rather than by a knock-out, if at all. It seems that it was precisely Mao’s comprehension of the difficulties involved in achieving battlefield decision in a war of attrition that influenced him to regard attrition solely as a stage in an overall strategy.67 In the first place, the guerrilla tactics and terror activities, let alone non-violent civil disobedience, often employed in LICs are not intended to achieve battlefield decision, as the weaker side usually acknowledges its extreme military inferiority. Rather, such activities are meant to wear down the opponent —usually a nation-state with a regular army—by demonstrating a higher tolerance for cost.68 A series of decisions at the tactical level may contribute to political achievements, but it is usually outside the actual battlefield, at the grand strategic level, where such conflicts are eventually won. Indeed, in contrast with the fairly slim chances of achieving battlefield decision via attrition, there are better chances of realizing achievements via attrition if the attempt to attain decision is effected at the grand-strategic level, or if one concentrates, instead, on achieving victory—that is, on realizing the war objectives. When using the term ‘decision’ in a grand-strategic context, what is intended is denying the enemy’s ability to carry on the fight not merely from the military point of view, but also from nonmilitary stand-points, such as economic, societal, or political. Modern examples of an attempt to defeat the enemy by employing attrition at the grand-strategic level include the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II; although in all of these cases the war was eventually decided on the battlefield, rather than at the grand-strategic level. The American Civil War was a classic example of a case in which opposing national powers stood behind a confrontation on the battlefield and, the longer the war went on, economic, societal, and political forces exercised a profound impact on both sides’ ability to carry on the fight. It was the North which, in this competition, succeeded in bringing to bear its superiority over the rural South in terms of both military resources and economicindustrial infrastructure. The exhaustion of the South, however, became effective only following General Sherman’s maneuver through Georgia and the two Carolinas. During this maneuver, Sherman managed to sever the lines supplying the army of the South and sap the capabilities and morale of the Confederate forces, to the point of bringing about their defeat four months later, in April 1865.69 An examination of Falkenhayn’s strategy of attrition during World War I will show that, unlike Schlieffen, he was aware of the fact that battlefield decision would be unattainable, given the conditions that had arisen on the battlefield. This had already been predicted many years before the outbreak of that war by the Polish banker Ivan Bloch (Bliokh), who based his analysis of future war on his comprehension of the nature of modern war, in general, and the impact of non-military dimensions on its conduct, in particular.70 Falkenhayn focused on grand-strategic decision—exacting a military, societal, economic, and political price so heavy as to be unbearable. Germany’s enemies, opined Falkenhayn, would have no option but to acknowledge its might and negotiate with it for a termination of the war on terms that would recognize its interests and status.

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 85

These assumptions were not far from becoming a reality when, in November 1916, the Asquith government of Britain was prepared to examine the German peace proposals. Two developments, however, conjoined to frustrate realization of the German objectives: German all-out submarine warfare that led to the entry of the United States into the war and the replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George, who opposed any concessions to the Germans.71 As for the Western allies, by imposing a blockade on Germany and its allies during World War I, they intended to starve the latter’s populations into submission. Were it not for deliveries of wheat from Romania and the Ukraine, the strategy might well have succeeded.72 The Germans were eventually defeated on the battlefield, once they had lost their will following the battle of 8 August 1918.73 In World War II, both Germany and Japan were unable to compete with the Allies at the grand-strategic level. The longer the war dragged on, and each side had to draw on more and more of its military and economic resources, the more likely it became that Germany and Japan would suffer defeat. In their cases, too, this eventually took place on the battlefield, rather than outside it. It was in the 1999 Kosovo conflict, for the first time, that Douhet’s vision of hitting the civilian rear and achieving decision without any significant operation on the ground74 at last materialized.75 Kosovo could certainly be considered a war of attrition. At the end of that war, grand-strategic decision was reached after 78 days of grand-strategic bombings and more than 31,000 sorties, during which NATO forces destroyed such counter-value targets as oil refineries, railways, and bridges, and such counter-force targets as command-and-control centers, airfields, airplanes, artillery, tanks, and other weapon systems.76 Alongside grand-strategic decision, it is also possible to realize one’s war objectives—in other words, achieve victory—via attrition. In the 1969–70 Egyptian-Israeli War of Attrition, Egypt placed emphasis on redressing the military weakness that the 1967 Six-Day War had revealed, strengthening the self-confidence of the Egyptian Army, and tying the Soviets up in a political and strategic commitment, so as to create better conditions for the next round with Israel.77 Israel, for its part, placed its emphasis on the objective of thwarting Egypt’s attempt to modify the post-1967 status quo, territorially, politically, and militarily. It had, however, during the war, considered attempting to achieve a grand-strategic decision, mainly through resort to grand-strategic bombing, which Israel hoped would exert pressure on Egyptian society, thereby inducing President Nasser to discontinue hostilities. There was even speculation in Israeli circles that this might result in the overthrow of Nasser’s regime and give rise to a new regime less hostile to Israel; perhaps even one prepared to consider entering negotiations for peace.78 In many LICs, the insurgents have focused on the achievement of grandstrategic decision by attriting the enemy’s society or on attainment of their war objectives, rather than on defeating the stronger enemy on the battlefield. Despite their clear-cut military inferiority and the highly asymmetrical loss ratios (including civilians) in the stronger side’s favor—6.6 to 1 in Algeria, 24 to 1 in

86 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Vietnam, dozens to 1 in Afghanistan, 56 to 1 in Somalia—the political winners in these conflicts were the insurgents.79 General Navarre, commander of the French forces in Indochina in the early 1950s, described the situation that he was facing fairly clearly: The war simply could not be won in the military sense.’80 Many years later, Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Defense Minister at the beginning of the 1987 Palestinian intifada, delivered himself of a similar conclusion. ‘The only solution to the…violence’, he said, ‘is a political one.’81 Conclusion Western democracies are most susceptible to attrition when involved in LICs wherein sub-national players possessing capabilities weaker than theirs usually employ attrition as a force multiplier against them. Western democracies are less immune to attrition under circumstances of LIC, owing to a series of moral, societal, and political constraints. They are inclined to set the individual and his personal safety before the collective good, especially in cases in which the stakes are not sufficiently high, as is typical of LICs.82 Their societies, which tend to question the morality of any war, reject the use of harsh measures of suppression against civilians, which are the byproducts of many LICs, let alone killing. Western democracies have more highly developed economies; on the one hand, constituting power, but, on the other, furnishing targets for terrorist attacks. Sometimes it is the lack of will on the part of politicians, misinterpreting societal resilience, that accounts for the low cost tolerance attributed to democratic societies, rather than any chronic perseverance problem.83 The weaker side takes advantage of these sensitivities and vulnerabilities. For example, when Gandhi suggested not co-operating with the British rulers of India in the 1920s, he based himself on the assumption that, when setting their army against civilians, liberal democracies in general, and Britain in particular, are influenced by moral and legal considerations.84 Mao, too, thought that democracies simply could not tolerate a war of attrition, either economically or psychologically.85 The Israelis faced similar moral and legal dilemmas during the Palestinian intifada.86 True, leaders of democratic states sometimes issue statements to the effect that their countries will never surrender to guerrilla and terror activities applied against them. But it usually requires little more than observation of what is genuinely felt by the societies of those countries, and by the elements that traditionally shape their public opinion—the media, politicians, and intel-lectuals in general—to detect that these are often only empty words. None of the foregoing, however, should be taken to imply that attrition, in general, and attrition employed in the framework of LICs, in particular, will invariably end to the detriment of the strong side. Even Western democracies could wage wars of attrition successfully. Experience has shown that most LICs cannot be won merely by employing military means and that processes in such attrition-dominated conflicts usually develop, mature, and bear fruit very slowly. For any state in general, and Western democracies in particular, winning such

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 87

conflicts would, therefore, require: (a) a multi-dimensional, grand-strategic approach, combining military and non-military efforts; (b) a great deal of legitimacy-supported patience and persistence. Though guerrilla tactics and terrorism used by the weak might threaten the personal safety of the citizens of the state against which they are operating, thereby demoralizing them, they would generally not be capable of significantly endangering the country’s national security, let alone its survival. The side opting for attrition via such means also has many vulnerable points, which can be actively used against it, if unsophisticated, Goliath-type means are avoided. The British, for example, unlike the French in Indochina and Algeria or the Americans in Vietnam, managed to adapt to LIC challenges quite efficiently.87 South Africa, Palestine (1936–39), Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, the Persian Gulf, and Northern Ireland have all become symbols in this respect, although Britain’s eventual decision to disengage from its colonies made its achieve-ments there almost irrelevant. Given such sensitivities within Western democracies, in cases where involvement in LICs is an option to be decided upon, countries had better weigh their involvement before committing their forces. Of particular importance is taking into consideration the potential for such conflicts to become wars of attrition. To that effect, it is worth developing major tests to be applied in advance, like the ones suggested at the time by US Secretary of Defense Weinberger.88 Whether involvement in LICs is eventually chosen as a course of action or forced upon a state, a special effort ought to be made to gain legitimacy, both domestic and external, and sustain it over the course of the conflict. Legitimacy is vital for successfully managing the conflict, especially if it becomes a protracted one. The weaker the state involved in LIC, the more important it is to ensure external legitimacy. The more democratic the society and the more pro-longed the conflict, the more important it is to achieve domestic legitimacy.89 Another issue, which deserves more attention, relates to the means Western democracies have at their disposal for handling LICs. As such states can, nowadays, conduct LICs with fairly low casualty rates, thanks to precisionguided armaments, thereby overcoming their societies’ aversion to war—is not the strong side again becoming the one that has better chances of winning LICs, as was the case in the pre-World War II era? Are we not now facing a new reality in which ‘peace-loving democracies’ are no longer quite as deterred from waging small wars as they used to be or as sterile in managing them? It would seem that superior technology and national resources would still be insufficient for winning LICs. Technological superiority would work only provided that the strong manages to abide by the two major rules of post-heroic warfare: (a) do not get killed; and (b) do not kill, at least not civilians. Violation of either of these rules might be detrimental to the strong side, as happened to the United States in Somalia in 1993 or to the Israelis in Lebanon in 1999–2000. It worked, though, for the Western Allies in Kosovo and for the Israelis during their almost 17 years of intervention in Lebanon.

88 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

NOTES Michael I.Handel was a great strategy professor and a dear friend of mine. I owe him much of my realist approach to international relations, in general, and my interest in strategic studies, in particular. This chapter is partially based on a paper presented at the Program on International Politics, Economics and Security, the University of Chicago. I wish to thank Moshe Grundman, Aharon Klieman, Charles Lipson, John Mearsheimer, and Bradley Thayer for their thoughtful comments and criticism on earlier drafts of this paper. 1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 480. 2 For a distinction between the two concepts based on the role played in each by fighting and destroying forces, on the one hand, and maneuvering, on the other, see Richard E.Simpkin, Race to the Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-first Century Warfare (London: Brassey’s, 1985), Ch. 2. 3 The Romans, in their wars against the Latins, Sammites, and Tuscans, had applied this idea. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), p. 342. 4 Napoleon, Military Maxims (Dublin: Richard Milliken, 1831), p. 12. 5 Clausewitz, On War, p. 93. 6 Amir Shelah, ‘Brigadiers [like Needles] in a Hay Stack’, Yediot Aharonot, 29 June 2001. 7 See, for example, Jehuda L.Wallach, The Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation (London: Greenwood, 1986), pp. 249–64; Michael Geyer, ‘German Strategy in the Age of Machine Warfare, 1914–1945’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 527–97; Larry A. Addington, The Blitzkrieg Era and the German General Staff 1865–1941 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971); Hans Guderian, Panzer Leader (London: Arrow, 1990), pp. 39–46; P.H. Vigor, Soviet Blitzkrieg Theory (London: Macmillan, 1984). 8 Post-modern or post-industrial Blitzkrieg, unlike traditional Blitzkrieg, is, rather, based on non-purely-military means, such as information warfare. In that sense, it is very different from traditional Blitzkrieg. Anthony Kimery, ‘Inviting the Electronical Pearl Harbor’, Military Information Technology, vol. 2, no. 4 (1999), pp. 8–12. 9 B.H.Liddell Hart, Strategy (London: Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 47. 10 For the pervasiveness of LICs, see Ruth L.Sivard (ed.), World Military and Social Expenditures (Washington, DC: World Priorities, 1987), pp. 29–31; ibid., 1989 edn, p. 22; Barbara F.Walter, ‘The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement’, International Organization, vol. 51, no. 3 (Summer 1997), pp. 334–64; Caesar D. Sereseres, ‘Lessons from Central America’s Revolutionary Wars, 1972–1984’, in Robert E.Harkavy and Stephanie G.Newman (eds), The Lessons of Recent Wars in the Third World (Lexington, PA: Lexington Books, 1985), vol. I, p. 161. For the importance of LICs, see Avi Kober, ‘Low-Intensity Conflicts: Why the Gap between Theory and Practice?’, Defense & Security Analysis, vol. 18, no. 1 (March 2002), pp. 15–38.

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 89

11 Hans Delbrück, The History of the Art of War within the Framework of Political History, vol. IV: The Modern Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), pp. 379–83; Gordon A.Craig, ‘Delbrück: The Military Historian’, in Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy, pp. 326–53. 12 Gerhard Ritter, Frederick the Great: A Historical Profile (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), p. 141. 13 For a summary of these views, see Delbrück, The History of the Art of War, pp. 379–83; see also Colmar Frieherr von der Goltz, The Conduct of War (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1899), p. 64. 14 Friedrich von Bernhardi, On War of Today (New York: Garland, 1972), vol. II, p. 308. 15 Liddell Hart, Strategy, p. 338. 16 Ibid., p. 52. 17 B.H.Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War (London: Faber & Faber, 1943), p. 208. 18 Liddell Hart, Strategy, pp. 379–83. 19 Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War, p. 52. 20 See, for example, Simpkin, Race to the Swift, Ch. 2. 21 LICs, under their various names, have been approached from different angles. First, they have been addressed by military professionals (both theorists and practitioners), on the one hand, and, on the other, by ideologists-strategists mainly interested in guerrilla warfare and terrorism in the framework of a revolutionary struggle. They have been contemplated by both those representing the militarily weaker side’s point of view and those representing the stronger side’s point of view in the latter’s struggle against so-called ‘insurgents’. Professional thinking related to the stronger side is represented by the works of Thompson or Trinquier: Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency (New York: Praeger, 1966); Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare: A French View on Counterinsurgency (New York: Praeger, 1967). A professional-ideological mixture particularly typifies works by such revolutionaries as Mao, Giap, Guevara, and Debray. Mao, Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse Tung (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967); Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, People’s Army (Hanoi: Foreign Languages, 1961); Che Guevara, On Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Praeger, 1961); Regis Debray, Strategy for Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970). 22 On post-heroic war, see Edward N.Luttwak, ‘Where Are the Great Powers?’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1994), pp. 23–8; ‘Toward Post-Heroic Warfare’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 74, no. 3 (May/June 1995), pp. 109–22; ‘A PostHeroic Military Policy’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 75, no. 4 (July/Aug. 1996), pp. 33–44. ‘In planning Operation Desert Storm, minimizing allied and civilian casualties was the highest priority’, asserted a publication on the lessons of the Gulf War, issued by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Armed Services: Defense for a New Era: Lessons of the Persian Gulf War (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, March 1992), p. 88. On the presumption that the United States must end future military conflict quickly and at minimum cost, see also Andrew P.N. Erdmann, ‘The US Presumption of Quick, Costless Wars’, Orbis, vol. 43, no. 3 (Summer 1999), pp. 363–81. 23 For Bosnia and Kosovo, see Luttwak’s pieces, note 22 above. As for Lebanon, when Chief of Staff Ehud Barak explained why Israel preferred using massive fire instead of maneuvering forces on the ground during Operation Accountability

90 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

24

25 26

27 28 29 30

31

32 33 34

35 36 37

(1993), he stressed the fact that ‘[during the operation] only one Israeli soldier was killed, whereas the Hizballah suffered heavy damage’. He added: ‘This kind of operation reflects our relative advantage over the Hizballah’ (interview with Barak, Ha’aretz, 30 July 1993). A senior commander elaborated on this during the operation, saying that ‘the less casualties we suffer on our side, the more successful we consider the operation to be…. We have methods by which we can inflict intolerable damage on the other side, while minimizing the casualties on our side’ (press conference with the Northern Command’s Chief of Staff, Ha’aretz, 29 July 1993). In 1999, Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz revealed that the IDF (Israel Defense Force) was now leaning on air activity against the Hizballah, rather than activities on the ground, so as to reduce casualties (interview with the Israeli Radio, Channel 2, 6 October 1999). For the distinction between war of attrition as a strategy, on the one hand, and as a war that has developed from another type of war, on the other, see Yaacov Bar-SimanTov, The Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition 1969–1970 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 29. Clausewitz, On War, p. 149. Donald Kagan, ‘Athenian Strategy in the Peloponnesian War’, in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox and Alvin Bernstein (eds), The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 34. Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 65–8; Liddell Hart, Strategy, pp. 46–7. Quoted in Walter Pinter, ‘Russian Military Thought: The Western Model and the Shadow of Suvorov’, in Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy, p. 373. Quoted in John J.Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 85. A.H. Jomini, ‘Summary of the Art of War’, in Roots of Strategy, Book II (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1987), p. 445; Friedrich Engels, ‘Introduction’, in Karl Marx, Class Struggle in France (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969). For Moltke’s view, see Wallach, Kriegstheorien, pp. 25, 83–4. Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), Ch. 2; Che Guevara, On Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Praeger, 1961), p. 11; Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, Peoples Army (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), pp. 28–30. J.F.C.Fuller, The Second World War 1939–45 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968), pp. 235–8. Clausewitz, On War, pp. 479–83. Engels distinguished between guerrilla activities in Europe, on the one hand, and guerrilla activities in Asia and Africa, on the other. In the latter areas, he believed they could be conducted independently and with higher chances of realizing their goals. Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), pp. 143– 4. Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works, Ch. 2. See Yehoshfat Harkabi, War and Politics (Tel Aviv: Ma’arachot, 1990 [Hebrew]), p. 416. Marshal (Ferdinand) Foch, The Principles of War (London: Chapman & Hall, 1918), pp. 297–8.

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 91

38 David French, British Strategy and War Aims 1914–1916 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986); David French, ‘The Meaning of Attrition 1914–1916’, English Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 407 (April 1988), pp. 385–405; John Gooch, ‘The Weary Titan: Strategy and Policy in Great Britain, 1890–1918’, in Murray, Knox, and Bernstein (eds), The Making of Strategy, p. 300. 39 Roger Dingman, ‘Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War’, International Security, vol. 13, no. 3 (Winter 1988/89), pp. 50–91. 40 The political constraints were both foreign—the negative expected superpower reaction—and domestic—the belief that the post-1967 borders were ‘defensible borders’. The main technical problem was lack of sufficient crossing devices. Avi Kober, Battlefield Decision in the Arab-Israeli Wars 1948–1982 (Tel Aviv: Ma’arachot, 1995 [Hebrew]), pp. 316–17. 41 Edgar O’Ballance, The Greek Civil War 1944–1949 (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), pp. 148, 181–5; Robert Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History (New York: Morrow, 1994), Ch. 42; Laqueur, Guerrilla, pp. 284–5. 42 Clausewitz, On War, p. 527. 43 Anthony H.Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, vol. II: The Iran-Iraq War (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990), particularly Chs 4,6, and 8. 44 On the impact of technology on the likelihood of wars of attrition, see, for example, Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 314–15. 45 B.H.Liddell Hart, ‘The Ratio of Troops to Space’, Military Review, vol. 45, no. 1 (April 1960), pp. 4–5; Eado Hecht, The ‘Operational Breakthrough’ in German Military Thought 1870–1945 (Tel Aviv: Ma’arachot, 1999 [Hebrew]), p. 79. 46 The tank, which had first been introduced in September 1916, was reintroduced in 1917, and in August 1918 it enabled the British to break through the German lines and bring about the breakdown of German morale. J.F.C.Fuller, The Conduct of War 1789–1961 (New York: Da Capo, 1992), pp. 175–7. 47 Eliot A.Cohen, ‘A Revolution in Warfare’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 75, no. 2 (March/ April 1996), p. 45. 48 Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 93, 143. 49 For strategic culture as a subjective concept and its impact on strategic behavior, see, for example, Yitzhak Klein, ‘A Theory of Strategic Culture’, Comparative Strategy, vol. 10, no. 1 (January-March 1991), pp. 3–23. For a social-structure focus and its advantages for explaining, predicting, and comparing patterns of statecraft in a more objective manner, particularly in countries with mass armies, wherein the impact of society on the military is strong, see Stephen P.Rosen, ‘Military Effectiveness: Why Society Matters’, International Security, vol. 19, no. 4 (Spring 1995), pp. 5–31. 50 Cordesman and Wagner, The Iran-Iraq War, Chs 12 and 15. For the difficulty in attributing culturally distinct strategic behavior to Third World countries and armies see, for example, Joseph Rothschild, ‘Culture and War’, in Stephanie G. Neuman and Robert E.Harkavy (eds), The Lessons of Recent Wars in the Third World, vol. II (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987), p. 53. 51 Norwell De Atkine, ‘Why Arabs Lose Wars?’, Middle East Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 4 (December 1999), pp. 17–27. 52 Von Bernhardi, On War of Today, vol. II, p. 173.

92 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

53 On the need to form policies with a clear understanding of what one hopes to achieve by committing one’s forces, see Caspar W.Weinberger, Fighting for Peace (New York: Warner, 1990), p. 437. On the confusion over ends in Vietnam, see Robert S.McNamara, In Retrospect (New York: Vintage, 1996). 54 Opinion polls showed that, as of July 1967, an increasing majority of the American people was expressing the view that the United States had made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam. See Brodie, War and Politics, p. 196. 55 Steven Rosen, ‘War, Power, and the Willingness to Suffer’, in Bruce M.Russett (ed.), Peace, War and Numbers (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1972), p. 168. 56 Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: The Analysis of Political and Military Doctrine (London: Pall Mall Press, 1964); Edgar O’Ballance, The Algerian Insurrection 1954–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1967); David Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Asprey, War in the Shadows, Ch. 55; Joachim Joesten, The New Algeria (Chicago, IL: Follett, 1964), p. 14. 57 In 1995, the loss ratios (in manpower) were 3.9 to 1 in Israel’s favor; in 1996, they declined to 2.3 to 1; and, in 1997, they declined even further to only 1.7 to 1 (the helicopter collision of February 1997 excluded). (Based on data published by the IDF Spokesman and Hizballah on their websites (www.israel/idf; www.moqawama.org), and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Hayat (Ha’aretz, 26 December 1997).) Only in 1998 was Israel successful in reverting to better loss ratios (2.5 to 1), thanks to new tactics. 58 Dingman, ‘Atomic Diplomacy during the Korean War’. 59 Delbrück, The History of the Art of War, p. 361. 60 Alistair Horne, Savage War of Peace (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), Part 3. 61 Harry G.Summers, On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, 1983), pp. 95–6. 62 Efraim Inbar, ‘Israel’s Small War: The Military Response to the Intifada’, Armed Forces & Society, vol. 18, no. 1 (Fall 1991), pp. 34–5; Efraim Inbar, Rabin and Israel’s National Security (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1999), pp. 104–5. 63 On war of attrition as politico-military strategy, see Bar-Siman-Tov, The IsraeliEgyptian War of Attrition, pp. 30–5. 64 Liddell Hart, Strategy, p. 377. 65 Clausewitz, On War, p. 94. 66 Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence, p. 34. 67 Mao Tse-tung, Selected Military Writings, pp. 181–3. 68 Such distinctions were inspired by the US experience in the Vietnam War. See for example: Rosen, ‘War, Power, and the Willingness to Suffer’, pp. 167–83; John E. Mueller, ‘The Search for the “Breaking Point” in Vietnam: The Statistics of a Deadly Quarrel’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 4 (December 1980), pp. 497– 519; Richard K.Betts, ‘Comment on Mueller: Interests, Burdens, and Persistence: Asymmetries Between Washington and Hanoi’, ibid., pp. 520–4. 69 Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War, pp. 76–7; Bruce Catton, The Civil War (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 198–253. 70 I.S.Bloch [Bliokh], Modern Weapons and Modern War (London: Grant Richards, 1900).

ATTRITION IN MODERN AND POST-MODERN WAR 93

71 Sir Llewellyn Woodward, Great Britain and the War of 1914–1918 (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1967), Chs 15, 16; David French, British Strategy and War Aims 1914– 1916 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), pp. 220–43. 72 Fuller, The Conduct of War, p. 178. 73 General Ludendorff, My War Memoirs 1914–1918 (London: Hutchinson, 1922), vol. II, p. 684; Fuller, The Conduct of War, pp. 176–7. 74 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air (London: Faber, 1943). 75 As an economically developed society, Yugoslavia was in a poor position to resist systematic bombings of its industrial base. This is one of the conclusions drawn by a recent study of Serbia’s strategy during the war for Kosovo. Barry R.Posen, ‘The War for Kosovo: Serbia’s Political-Military Strategy’, International Security, vol. 24, no. 4 (Spring 2000), pp. 72–3. 76 It is now quite clear that, despite the effectiveness of the grand-strategic bombing, the attempts to inflict high losses on the Yugoslav Army proved to be inefficient. Although the data regarding the level of destruction of Yugoslav fielded forces are still uncertain, it has been claimed that, despite the fact that NATO obtained dominant battlefield knowledge, and mostly due to the use of decoys by the Yugoslav Army, only some 6 per cent of its armor—not 46 per cent, as had been claimed by the Pentagon—was destroyed from the air. Posen, ‘The War for Kosovo’, p. 64. 77 Bar-Siman-Tov, The Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition, p. 200; Dan Schuefftan, Attrition: Egypt’s Post War Political Strategy, 1967–1970 (Tel Aviv: Ma’arachot, 1989 [Hebrew]), pp. 391–4. 78 Bar-Siman-Tov, The Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition, p. 193; Jonathan Shimshoni, Israel and Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 132. 79 For Algeria, see Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare; O’Ballance, The Algerian Insurrection 1954–1962; Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower; Asprey, War in the Shadow, Ch. 55; Joesten, The New Algeria, p. 14. For Afghanistan, see Robert S. Litwak, ‘The Soviet Union in Afghanistan’, in Ariel E. Levite, Bruce W.Jentleson, and Larry Berman (eds), Foreign Military Intervention (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). For a comparison between Afghanistan and Vietnam, see Stephen Blank, ‘Soviet Forces in Afghanistan: Unlearning the Lessons of Vietnam’, in Stephen Blank et al., Responding to Low Intensity Conflict Challenges (Maxwell Air Base, AL: Air University Press, 1990), pp. 53–176. For Somalia, see Eliot A.Cohen, ‘The “Major” Consequences of War’, Survival, vol. 41, no. 2 (Summer 1999), p. 145. 80 Quoted in Bernard Fall, The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis (London: Pall Mall, 1963), p. 122. 81 Quoted in Inbar, ‘Israel’s Small War’, p. 35. 82 For a study suggesting that the West would not tolerate extensive casualties for relatively unimportant objectives, see Eric V.Larson, Casualties and Consensus: The Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for US Military Operations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996). 83 See, for example, Steven Kull and I.M.Destler, Misreading the Public: The Myth of New Isolationism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999). 84 As Gandhi put it, no other people would respond to ‘soul force’ as quickly as the British. Judith M.Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power (Cambridge: Cambridge

94 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

85

86

87

88 89

University Press, 1972), p. 247. Indeed, in India, following the massacre in Amritsar, the criticism among liberal circles in Britain tied the hands of the military when con-fronted with unarmed civilians. As a result of this criticism, the British doctrine of maximum force was supplanted by one of minimum force. E.L.Katzenbach, ‘Time, Space and Will: The Politico-Military Strategy of Mao Tse-Tung’, in T.N.Greene (ed.), The Guerrilla and How to Fight Him (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 18. Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Ya’ari, Intifada (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Aryeh Shalev, The Intifada: Causes and Effects (Tel Aviv: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, 1991). For a comparison of the British and US responses to similar challenges, see, for example, Deborah D.Avant, ‘The Institutional Sources of Military Doctrine: Hegemons in Peripheral Wars’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4 (December 1993), pp. 409–30. Avant explains the differences in adaptiveness to LICs demonstrated by British and Americans via the distinct structure of civilian institutions and their effect on the development of military organizations. For a discussion of the doctrine, see Michael I.Handel, Masters of War, 3rd edn (London: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. 307–25. On normative and cognitive legitimacy, see Alexander L.George, ‘Domestic Constraints on Regime Change in US Foreign Policy’, in O.R.Holsti, R.M. Siverson, and A.L.George (eds), Change in the International System (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980), pp. 233–62.

5 Sunzi Bingfa as History and Theory Andrew Meyer and Andrew Wilson

The Sunzi bingfa, commonly known as Sun Tzu’s Art of War, is the most widely read work of strategic thought in the world. Moreover, unlike its more ‘challenging’ textual brethren—such as the works of Clausewitz, Jomini, Machiavelli, Mao, or Thucydides, to name just a few—the Sunzi is more often credited as a treasure house of transcendent strategic wisdom that is applicable to nearly any problem. Liddell Hart, for instance, held this view: Sun Tzu’s essays on ‘The Art of War’ form the earliest of known treatises on the subject, but have never been surpassed in comprehensiveness and depth of understanding. They might well be termed the concentrated essence of wisdom on the conduct of war. Among all the military thinkers of the past, only Clausewitz is comparable, and even he is more ‘dated’ than Sun Tzu, and in part antiquated, although he was writing more than two thousand years later. Sun Tzu has clearer vision, more profound insight, and eternal freshness.1 Certainly, the theoretical allure of the Sunzi is potent. The promises of winning without fighting, achieving strategic surprise through deception and maneuver, cultivating a thorough knowledge of oneself and the opponent are all instinctively appealing. Moreover, the obvious sagacity of the truisms that fill the Sunzi make it a useful tool for strategic theorists who seek to validate their own theories with reference to the classics. This is a problematic application of the text, however, because few people who quote the Sunzi have an appreciation for the theoretical and historical complexity of the work. Yet many more people quote the Sunzi than Clausewitz and Thucydides for theoretical validation. This is likely the result of more people having read the Sunzi, but also because there has always been a cadre of professional officers and strategic analysts who are careful students of Clausewitz, Machiavelli, and Thucydides who will take an author to task for any misapplied quotation, whereas the much smaller group of Sunzi experts remain cloistered in academe and isolated from the ‘pop’ strategy realm where the master is most often applied. As such, little theoretical rigor has been exercised over the host of self-styled ‘Sunzians’ who pepper their works with ancient Chinese secrets. The fault for the frequent misapplication and

96 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

misunderstanding of this text does not lie exclusively with the readers; it is equally a product of the way the book was originally composed and the rhetorical purpose that it was designed to serve. A second and frequently overlapping audience for the Sunzi bingfa looks to the text as a historical source. Most translations include an introductory essay on the historical personage of the general Sun Wu (styled Sunzi, or ‘Master Sun’, in the text) who was active around 500 BCE, and is the putative author of the Bingfa. Many translators also offer some description of what is known about warfare in the Spring and Autumn Period (722–481 BCE) when Sun Wu lived. In fact, much of the mental energy of Sunzi experts is expended on the questions of time and authorship. In actuality, the historical significance of the Sunzi has much less to do with the ways the text describes a particular historical context and much more to do with the work as an historical event itself. This fact renders much of Sun Wu’s career and the history of warfare in the Spring and Autumn Period irrelevant to the theory. To make a similar statement with reference to Clausewitz, Machiavelli, or Thucydides would be inconceivable because their works are so obviously grounded in a specific context. Nonetheless, this does not mean that they cannot be, in Thucydides’ words, ‘a possession for all time’,2 that is, enjoy a transcendent applicability, but it does impose strictures on students of the text to remain historically honest. These texts’ contemporary significance must be measured against the degree to which they are self-consciously and transparently rooted in the historical conditions of a particular time and place. The Sunzi, on the other hand, employs historical misdirection. It is crafted upon a conceit that attributes the text to an apical strategist of the Spring and Autumn period, while at the same time making an argument that is specific to but not descriptive of the later Warring States Period (403–221 BCE). This argument could not have been made by Sun Wu. We would contend that this purposive anachronism ironically undergirds the work’s historical significance, but has unfortunately also absolved generations of readers from the responsibility of being historically rigorous. Rather than calling into question the theoretical value of the Sunzi, this fact actually enhances its significance in much the same way that the rhetorical conceits of the other Masters of War, such as the speeches in Thucydides, do not undermine their value. The two issues of purpose and authorship in the Sunzi are examined in the following pages by looking first to the historical and then to the theoretical dimensions of the Sunzi bingfa. We have chosen this arrangement because the ways in which the Sunzi was crafted and received as an historical event informs the theoretical implications. Ultimately, we conclude with a brief comparison to Clausewitz’s On War, a book whose theoretical insights complement those of the Sunzi, but whose style and context differs so dramatically that the student of both Masters must undertake fundamentally different readings of each text as both history and theory.

SUNZI BINGFA AS HISTORY AND THEORY 97

Sunzi Bingfa as History Any historian who reads a text such as the Sunzi bingfa is looking for a window on to the world in which that text was created. For students of the Sunzi, however, such a picture is difficult to draw. Unlike Clausewitz’s On War or Machiavelli’s The Prince, which are often painstakingly grounded in the historical specifics of the Napoleonic Wars or Renaissance Italy, respectively, the Sunzi is essentially ‘non-historical’. Occasional mention is made of specific states: Now, the people of Wu and Yue hate one-another. Yet when they are crossing a river in the same boat and they encounter a storm they will save each other as if they were the left and right hands (of the same person).3 Or of specific devices, such as chariots, currency, or crossbows, which help scholars locate the work historically. Master Sun said: Generally the way of employing the military is this: 1000 fast chariots, 1000 leather carriages, 100,000 sashes and suits of armor, transport and provisions for a 1000 li, then total expenses, the use of liaisons and ambassadors, glue and lacquer materials, contributions for chariots and armor, amount to 1000 gold pieces per day. Only after this can 100,000 troops be raised.4 In the main, however, the specific context in which the Sunzi was pur-portedly written is conspicuously absent. To a great extent, this lacuna gives rise to the host of Sunzi ‘experts’ who apply this work promiscuously to whatever nominally ‘strategic’ problem they might face, be it on the trading floor or the basketball court. Unlike the other Masters of War, who demand that their readers look to the recent past for validation of their theories, the Sunzi is selfconsciously divorced from the immediate context of Sun Wu’s life and career. Apparently the only validation needed is reference to the mythical past. For example in Chapter IX, ‘The Army on the March’, a brief comparison is made to the mythical founder of Chinese civilization, the Yellow Emperor, to validate various prescriptions relating to maneuver. Such misty mythic references serve numerous pur-poses, but most critically they ally the author with a figure whose strategic wisdom is unquestionable, therefore impregnating the text with nearly scriptural authority. What historical information can be gleaned from the Sunzi is therefore anachronistic to Sun Wu’s era, either describing the mythic past long predating the Spring and Autumn Period, or offering prescriptions for planning and conducting war in the later age of the Warring States, when mass infantry armies were led by professional generals. The question, however, remains as to why this work is so consistently non-historical. The first answer to this question is

98 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

cultural. The audience for the Sunzi was intensely literate and intellectually sophisticated. Consequently, although Sun Wu was not nearly as famous as many of his contemporaries, it was reasonable to expect the audience to have a prior familiarity with the details of his career and the histories of the states that he served. The textual discourse of which the Sunzi was part was conducted at a very high level of analytical sophistication and was based on a shared knowledge of history. Brief references to states, such as Wu or Yue, would thus evoke volumes of images for the readers in much the same way that the mere mention of Lee and Grant would resonate with the legions of Civil War buffs. Little historical development was necessary, and many ancient Chinese texts similarly assume a deep grounding in historical context by their readership. How, then, can we explain the fact that the Sunzi bingfa sounds as if it was written long after Sun Wu’s death? Often oral transmission and later editing by generations of Sunzians is credited with the Warring States flavor of the text. Our view, however, is that the Sunzi is almost wholly a product of the Warring States, most likely the late fourth century BCE Given the text’s focus on leading mass conscript armies in an age of total war for hegemony, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the work as it has been transmitted was written in the Spring and Autumn Period. At that time, war was a ritualistic, seasonal, and limited affair dominated by aristocratic charioteers. Moreover, the text, as it currently exists, is very tightly organized. It moves systematically from theme to theme, building arguments and assertions in ways that a text compiled out of orally transmitted accretions would not. Though the current text might contain some orally transmitted aphorisms, these have been woven integrally into a larger edifice that is rhetorically and polemically complex. The other reason for the non-historical nature of the Sunzi is rooted in these rhetorical and polemical agendas and is particular to the cultural conundrum faced by the text and its author. The very name of the text -the Sunzi—embodies two redolent claims. The first is that the text was authored by the sixth century BCE general, Sun Wu. The second is that the putative author deserves the authority of a Master (indicated by the honorific ‘zi’ appended to Sun Wu’s name, transforming him into ‘Master Sun’). Herein lies the problem that drives the author into the realm of historical misdirection. In ancient China, it was not at all obvious that mili tary affairs were the proper subject of a Master’s text, or that an author who discoursed on such matters could claim this status. The problem is exemplified by the Analects, the anthology that records the teachings of Confucius (551–479 BCE): Duke Ling of Wei asked Confucius about military formations. Confucius answered, ‘I have, indeed, heard something about the use of sacrificial vessels, but I have never studied the matter of commanding troops.’ The next day he departed.5

SUNZI BINGFA AS HISTORY AND THEORY 99

Both his response and his abrupt departure from Wei demonstrated the deep offense that Confucius took to the Duke’s question and his general disdain for military affairs. (Confucius is identified in ancient texts as Kongzi or ‘Master Kong’—the first historical personage to have the honorific ‘zi’ applied to his name with this specific meaning.) All teachers and thinkers who subsequently joined the discourse of ancient China were in effect riding on Confucius’ coat tails, occupying a purchase and exercising an authority that Confucius, through his work and reputation, had bequeathed to later Masters. This is not to say that all later Masters were bound to agree with Confucius. Some, such as Mozi (c. 490– 403 BCE), vehemently opposed Confucius on doctrinal grounds. Yet, as the first and paradigmatic Master, Confucius’ persona exerted a narrowing pressure on the range of concerns a true Master could address. Even the latter-day disciples of Mozi, who eventually would enthusiastically discuss the defensive aspects of siege warfare, took the position that offensive warfare was to be completely banned. It was not until very late in the Warring States period that the issues raised in the Sunzi were widely recognized as appropriate for discourse among ‘Masters’. Masters were not the only people to participate in the political and cultural life of Warring States China. Aristocrats, shamans, diviners, medical practitioners, and others (including, increasingly, soldiers) occupied the same social arena as Masters and competed for power and influence. In such an atmosphere, the question of who could legitimately claim the status of a Master was highly charged. The author of the Sunzi bingfa was under a heavy burden to demonstrate that his concerns, which had so offended Confucius, were the proper subject of a written text. Even if military affairs could be discussed in writing, it was still highly doubtful that such a text should be classed alongside the works of the Masters, rather than among the narrowly ‘technical’ compositions of diviners and medical experts. Hence, the very first line of the Sunzi has to be read as a rhetorical salvo and be appreciated for its contemporary ‘shock value’. Master Sun said: The use of the military [bing] is the great affair of the state. It is the terrain of life and death, the path of survival and ruin, it must be studied.6 The polemical value of this statement would, moreover, have been under-scored for a Warring States’ reader by the fact that the Sunzi is paraphrasing a maxim passed down from an earlier age: ‘The great affairs of the state are sacrifice and warfare [rong].’ This phrase eventually made its way into a canonical text revered by the latter-day disciples of Confucius.7 In its restructuring of this dictum, the Sunzi makes two key moves. First, it eliminates sacrifice from among the ‘great affairs of state’, thereby disassociating military affairs from religion. Second, it replaces the word rong, literally ‘warfare’, with bing, a more general rubric for the military at large, opening up the possibility (pursued at length in

100 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the subsequent text) that the uses of the military are not restricted to combat. As we will see, this put the Sunzi squarely at odds with the conventional strategic culture of its day. Given this context, the choice of Sun Wu as the putative author of the Sunzi bingfa appositely serves the rhetorical purposes of the text. The historical Sun Wu possessed an invaluable asset simply by virtue of the era in which he was born—he was a contemporary of Confucius. In a culture where legitimacy was quantifiable in terms of antiquity, the choice to place the production of the Sunzi bingfa during the life of Confucius was inspired. The message: Confucius may have been unwilling to talk about military affairs, but someone of his own generation did not share this aversion. Thus the Sunzi bingfa cannot suffer by comparison to the Analects for shallowness of pedigree. Beyond his chronological assets, the legend of Sun Wu nicely abets the underlying assertions of the Sunzi bingfa. Warring States’ readers would have been familiar with the story of how Prime Minister Wu Zixu and General Sun Wu led the state and armies of Wu to triumph over the neighboring state of Chu, thus elevating their ruler to the status of hegemon. In conventional accounts, Wu Zixu and Sun Wu represented the perfect synergy between civil and military leadership. In these same accounts, reflecting the predilections of most literate intellectuals of that time, Wu Zixu was the more dynamic and important member of this synergy. Sun Wu was the mute partner who served mainly to exemplify Wu’s capacity for recognizing talent. The attribution of a text to Sun Wu against the backdrop of the legend implicitly asserts that military leaders are neither passive nor voiceless, that military leadership possesses its own autonomous realm of knowledge and concerns. In a synergy like that of Wu Zixu and Sun Wu, the military leader is a fully equal (if not more important) partner. The final stages of Sun Wu’s legend also powerfully bolster the Sunzi bingfa’s agenda. In the generation after Wu Zixu’s death and Sun Wu’s departure, in the absence of their leadership, Wu was destroyed by its southern neighbor, Yue. This fact lends an eerie ‘prescience’ to the opening passage, where the use of the military is simultaneously the central instrument for securing the wealth, power, and security of the state, as well as a path to death and destruction. The rhetorical uses of the Sun Wu legend do not require the author of the Sunzi bingfa to provide a detailed chronicle. Much of the power of the text lies in the fact that its implications remain latent (as the opening line of the text exemplifies). Moreover, the author perforce cannot give too much detail, and the end result is that the book is rarely descriptive, and therefore not free to explore particular contexts or a particular realm of praxis. Where Clausewitz and Machiavelli can, and do, recount specific engagements and allude to particular events, the author of the Sunzi bingfa is constrained to speaking to his own age from the perspective of the past. If, through fidelity to his anachronistic conceit, the author dealt specifically with the strategic and tactical conditions of the age of Sun Wu (the age of aristocratic chariot warfare), he would undercut his purpose. If he were to describe recognizably combat engagements of his own age, his

SUNZI BINGFA AS HISTORY AND THEORY 101

rhetorical sleight of hand would be exposed, and the legitimacy of ascribing wisdom to a historical Master would be lost. The unique historical constraints under which the author of the Sunzi bingfa operated can be appreciated by comparing it with another theoretical discourse produced in a different cultural context, The Art of War by Niccolò Machiavelli. All seven books of Machiavelli’s treatise are set in motion by an idle comment concerning the trees in the garden of Cosimo Rucellai: Fabrizio [Colonna] said it was a most delightful garden and, looking earnestly at some of the trees, seemed not to know their names. Cosimo being aware of it, immediately said, ‘Perhaps you do not know some of these trees, but you should not be at all surprised at it, for they are very old ones and were much more in vogue among our ancestors than they are at present.’ He then told him their names, and said that they were planted by his grandfather Bernardo, who was fond of growing such trees. ‘I thought so,’ replied Fabrizio, ‘and both the place and the trees put me in mind of some princes in the kingdom of Naples, who take much delight in planting groves and shady arbors, in the ancient manner… How much better, then, would those princes have done…if they had endeavored to imitate the ancients in bearing hardships and inconveniences, instead of giving themselves up to ease and indolence, in performing such exploits as were done in the sunshine and not in the shade… For once these pleasures had distracted my fellow Romans, our country soon fell into ruin.’8 Machiavelli employs a similar rhetorical conceit as the author the Sunzi bingfa: he displaces his own ideas on to a famous military commander, Fabrizio Colonna. As in the Sunzi bingfa, there is also an appeal to the legitimating stature of antiquity. The whole structure of the text would seem, on the surface, to mirror the rhetorical antiquarianism of the Sunzi bingfa. From this point on, the text takes on the structure of a Platonic dialogue, with Fabrizio in the role of Socrates and Cosimo and his guests as interlocutors. There are important differences, however, and these reflect the wide disparity between the cultural and historical contexts of the Sunzi bingfa and The Art of War. Colonna was a contemporary and an actual acquaintance of Machiavelli. Machiavelli does not borrow Colonna’s identity out of a need to justify the concerns of the text, but out of sensitivity to his own lack of military credentials. Although Fabrizio is made consistently to stress the value of antiquity over the present day, Machiavelli is never forced to retreat into anachronism. Machiavelli’s situation would not be truly analogous to that of the author of the Sunzi bingfa unless he had felt compelled to forge a text in the voice of Gaius Marius or Themistocles. The value of antiquity for Machiavelli is not limited to its mythic authority, but extends to its accessibility as a practical guide to strategy and tactics. In fact, Machiavelli argues against the reigning assumption of his own day, that modern

102 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

(i.e. fifteenth-century CE) warriors had surpassed the ancients in both the means and the understanding of warfare. His use of the Platonic genre does not express insecurity about the legitimacy of his subject matter, but rather demonstrates his seriousness about the imperative to imitate antiquity. As an author he follows the ancients in the same way that he hopes his readers will as warriors on the field of battle. Furthermore, because his dialogue is set in the present day, Machiavelli is not compelled to equivocate about the application of ancient models. Fabrizio and his interlocutors range over the breadth and scope of recorded history, assessing the degree to which ancient tactics and strategy will succeed in particular contexts. Machiavelli is free (in a way that the author of the Sunzi is not) to candidly acknowledge historical changes that differentiate his own time from that of antiquity, thus his prescriptions can assume a degree of specificity and contextual concreteness that the Sunzi’s cannot. The unique rhetorical nature of the Sunzi bingfa can further be appreciated if we examine the vehement response it instigated within the intellectual culture of the Warring States. A critical and often ignored aspect of the Sunzi is that the appearance of the text was a major event in the intellectual history of ancient China. As with any such event, its appearance was praised by some, condemned by others. It is not difficult to imagine the moral repugnance elicited by Machiavelli’s The Prince, but given the Sunzi’s status in the canon of Chinese (and world) strategic literature, similar criticisms are rarely heard. In the midthird century BCE, most likely within a century of the Sunzi bingfa’s composition, the scholar Xun Qing (known to posterity as Xunzi, or ‘Master Xun’) wrote a ‘Debate on the Principles of Warfare’, essentially an extended critique of the Sunzi.9 The essay describes a (likely fictional) oral contest between Xunzi and the Lord of Linwu, a military commander, held in audience before King Xiaocheng of Zhao (r. 265–244 BCE). In this debate, the Lord of Linwu offers up strategic wisdom that closely mirrors the advice contained in the Sunzi, and Xunzi counters with arguments in defense of his own interpretation of the doctrine of Confucius. In the opening passage of the debate, we read: The king said: ‘I would like to inquire about the essential principles of warfare.’ The Lord of Linwu replied: ‘Above take advantage of the timeliness of Heaven and below utilize the natural advantages of the Earth. Observe the enemy for changes in strategic circumstances and preparations for quick troop movements so that you can ‘mobilize after him but arrive on the field of battle before him.’10 These are the essential techniques for the use of the army.’ Master Xun Qing responded: ‘Not so! From what your servant has heard of the way of the Ancients, it was a general principle that the fundamental requirements to be met before using the army in attacks and campaigns was the unification of the people… Hence to be good at winning the

SUNZI BINGFA AS HISTORY AND THEORY 103

support of the people is also to be expert in the use of the army. Thus, the essential principle of warfare consists in nothing more than being good at gaining the support of the people.’11 Xun Qing was the most prominent scholar, teacher, and writer of his day, the leading guardian of the legacy of Confucius. The fact that he would devote an entire essay to an extended refutation of the Sunzi stands as testimony to its contemporary influence and its controversial nature. Much of what distressed Xunzi about the Sunzi bingfa was particular to the latter-day disciples of Confucius. However, in this opening passage we can see some of the general cultural and historical forces militating against the acceptance of the Sunzi bingfa by the literati of the Warring States, and some of the reasons for its author’s flight into historical camouflage. Xunzi issues a blanket rejection of the Sunzi’s premise. Specialized knowledge of tactics and strategy, the domain of the military leader, is extraneous to the use of the army. Instead, military affairs hinge upon ‘the unification of the people’, the first responsibility and final domain of civil officialdom. Xunzi thus rejects the autonomy and authority of the professional commander and asserts the sole legitimacy of civilian leadership. Xunzi’s opening salvo might be lost upon a modern American or European readership, but its rhetorical significance would have been obvious to readers during the Warring States: ‘from what your servant has heard of the way of the Ancients…’. According to Xunzi, what the Lord of Linwu has quoted is not the way of the Ancients, it is not the wisdom of a genuine Master. Here we see an example of the rhetorical thrust and parry that drove the author of the Sunzi bingfa to attribute his work to Sun Wu. Xunzi is not necessarily implying that the Sunzi bingfa is a forgery, yet he emphatically denies that, however old it may be, it properly belongs among the teachings of the Ancients. This would seem to be dismissive, yet the fact that this assertion needs to be made at all is testimony to the considerable influence of the Sunzi. At the time that the Analects was written, Xunzi’s attitude did not need to be articulated. We are simply told that Confucius left the state of Wei upon being asked about military tactics, and we are expected to understand why. The difference between that time and the era that produced Xunzi’s ‘Debate on the Principles of Warfare’ is stark. Here Xunzi does not merely fail to refuse a discussion of military affairs, he paints himself into an extended debate on the matter. In the course of this debate, Xunzi is asked question after question about all aspects of strategy and command. His responses contain very little pragmatic detail about the conduct of war. Instead, he returns consistently to the moral qualities of the leaders, the state’s institutions, and the people as key. Yet the very existence of the ‘Debate’ speaks eloquently of the change that has taken place in Warring States’ intellectual culture. A new space has been opened up in which military matters can (in effect, must) be examined and discussed. It is no longer a subject on which an aspiring Master can remain silent. While the

104 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

objective intensification of inter-state warfare might have contributed to this change, the Sunzi was also an agent. The character of the Lord of Linwu stands testimony: Xunzi would not have included a general who quotes Sunzi in his scene unless that figure was plausible and convincing to his readers. If the Sunzi is a Warring States’ creation, then what does it reveal about the historical chronology of that age? The answer, again, is relatively little. Rather than being a snapshot of warfare and inter-state conflict in ancient China, the Sunzi is exactly the opposite. Rather than a passive expression of the dominant strategic culture of Warring States China, the Sunzi was a revolutionary polemic that railed against ‘traditional’ approaches to war and argued for the creation of a new strategic culture. This aspect of the text does, however, make it possible to use the prescriptions contained in its pages to draw a picture in the negative of conflict in the Warring States. By this we mean that the ‘traditional’ approaches that are most roundly critiqued can be inferred to be prominent characteristics of war between the Warring States. Why is a detailed warning about the costs and dangers of protracted sieges necessary unless siege warfare was a common device? Laying siege to walled cities is a method of last resort. The building of siege towers and armored vehicles, and the amassing of materiel require three months to complete. The construction of earthworks will require an additional three months to complete. If the general has not controlled his own anger, and yet sends his men swarming against the walls, the slain officers and troops will be one third of the total, and yet the city will not be reduced. This is how a siege can be disastrous.12 What is often lost in a reading of the Sunzi, therefore, is a realization that the prescriptions are being made in response to a specific historical context, in which the polemic is so forceful because states are not conducting war in a way that the author finds satisfactory. The Sunzi must be polemical and rhetorically forceful because it demands of the general a coldly rational and anti-heroic approach to war, based on a nearly perfect knowledge of the adversary and near-total command of the physical environment. To paraphrase Michael Handel, therefore, the advice contained in the Sunzi is the strategic equivalent of ‘buy low, sell high’. This is excellent advice, but it is nearly impossible to put into practice. The implications of this fact for theory and praxis are the issue to which we now turn. Sunzi Bingfa as Theory Because of its non-historical nature, the Sunzi is freed from the constraints of a particular reality, a particular realm of praxis. This would seem to give this approach to the use of the military the universal validity that is craved by contemporary strategists, and yet this raises serious doubts about the utility of

SUNZI BINGFA AS HISTORY AND THEORY 105

this work as a direct guide for thought and action in war. The implications of this should be obvious. Polemically, the text demands that the general come as close as possible to the ideal state of foreknowledge necessary to guarantee victory, but these same strictures and demands placed on the Wise Commander significantly reduce the possibility that the Sunzian approach to war could ever be systematically applied. For all armies that you want to attack, cities that you wish to assault, people that you wish to kill, you must first know the names and sur-names of defending commander, his attendants, his protocol officers, his guards, and his household. Order our spies to discover them.13 If these strictures are taken literally, and to their logical level of abstraction, it would be impossible to put the theory into practice. This is not to say that good intelligence of an adversary is impossible, but rather that the perfect knowledge of the enemy described here should be seen as an ideal to which one should aspire. Given the ‘fog and friction’ of war, no one has ever launched an assault with perfect knowledge, and it is very unlikely that anyone ever will. To await such clarity of intelligence is simply not an empirically practical approach to war, but in many ways it does not have to be. It is important to keep in mind that many of the theoretical assertions made in the body of the Sunzi are part and parcel of the polemical attack the author is launching against the strategic culture of his own time. The point here is that the key to victory is not the martial aristocrat, but the lowly spy. In the Warring States period there was a dialectical relationship between social and cultural institutions and changing military technologies—as mass formations of infantry armed with crossbows displaced chariots on the battlefield, the hereditary aristocratic institutions began to break down. At the same time, the crossbow could not achieve its full potential as an instrument of war until certain key changes in social-authority patterns occurred. Mass, uniformed armies, like the one depicted in the thousands of terracotta soldiers guarding the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qinshi Huangdi, were inconceivable until new social roles were created, such as military officers who wielded routinized rather than charismatic authority. The Sunzi was an essential part of this process—the author of Sunzi is writing the role of ‘general’ into existence, providing the conceptual framework within which the military technology of his day could reach its full potential. Moreover, the author of the Sunzi is not alone in making these kinds of assertions. Given the scale of the state enterprise necessary to meet the challenges of the Warring States period, we also see the appearance of theorists of similarly routinized bureaucratic institutions, who argued for talent rather than pedigree as the criteria for office. The Sunzi, therefore, exemplifies a kind of military-intellectual complex that all (or most) sufficiently sophisticated societies manifest, hence some of the theoretical similarities to Clausewitz and Machiavelli.

106 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

The author of the Sunzi was contending with a military culture just emerging from the aristocratic era. Though new technologies and new forms of organization were being deployed on the field of battle, old values still prevailed. The aristocratic warrior operated under completely different imperatives than the military commander the Sunzi is attempting to invent. The aristocrat was born to lead, and his authority operated through ritual channels that tied him in kinship and sacramental observance to his lord, his ancestors, and the spirit world. From the perspective of the aristocratic warrior, the Sunzi’s injunction that ‘[t]o achieve one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the supreme excellence, to reject battle and yet force the submission of the enemy’s troops is the supreme excellence’,14 is worse than meaningless, it is offensive. The hereditary privilege of the aristocratic class was justified by their possession of martial virtue. Victory without combat precluded a display of this virtue and completely subverted the point of taking up arms in the first place. In the same manner, the use of arms had a sacramental value that, as Mark Edward Lewis has shown, was linked to the hunt and the blood sacrifice.15 As bloodshed was an integral part of this sacrament, to insist on victory without combat was to deny the spirits their due. The Sunzi is pleading for a rethinking of priorities to bring strategic doctrine and command into line with the new conditions faced by the Warring States. By the time the Sunzi was written, many commanders would not have been born aristocrats, yet their authority on the field of battle continued to be justified in terms of aristocratic values. This lag is reflected in the title (and contents) of an earlier work on military affairs, the Sima fa or ‘Methods of the Minister of War’. The Sima, the highest military post in the royal and noble courts of the Spring and Autumn and Western Zhou eras, literally translates as ‘Commander of Horse’. It was generally a hereditary office, and its equestrian valence reflects the aristocratic bias of early military culture. By contrast, what the Sunzi offers is a ‘bingfa’, a set of methods (fa) for the employment of the massed conscript infantry. Bing literally means an edged weapon and, by extension, the infantryman that carries it. Bing were marginal to the military operations of the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn Periods; they were deployed as support (and quite often as targets) for the chariots of the aristocratic lords. The Sunzi’s focus on bingfa expresses the new centrality of the conscript infantryman to the strategic situation of the Warring States. According to the Sunzi, the new warfare creates new imperatives and requires a new type of commander: The Army Ordinances say: ‘They could not hear one-another’s words, thus they made bells and drums. They could not see one-another, thus they made flags and banners.’ Bells and drums, flags and banners are what unify people’s ears and eyes. When people are unified, the brave will not advance alone, the cowardly will not retreat alone. This is the method of using the multitude.16

SUNZI BINGFA AS HISTORY AND THEORY 107

In engagements where thousands (or, quite commonly, tens of thousands) of soldiers are arrayed against one another, the individual qualities of soldiers average out until the whole is reducible to the least common denominator. Values such as personal courage thus become moot. Victory is no longer decided by individual valor or a special relationship with supernatural forces, but by objectively quantifiable factors: ‘Order and chaos is [born of] numbers, courage and cowardice is [born of] combat power, strength and weakness is [born of] formations.’17 By extension, the military has become a faceless, single instrument wielded by the general in the same way that a master swordsman wields an edged weapon. These new mass armies were so large that no network of personal relationships, whether founded on kinship or ritual bonds, could afford them a rational organization: Generally, ordering the many is like ordering the few, it is [a function of] division and numbering. Leading the many in combat is like leading the few, it is [a function of] ‘forms and names’.18 ‘Division and counting’ refers to the task of dividing the army into standard battalions, companies, and squads. ‘Forms and names’ is a phrase taken from the new parlance of state administrative theory; it refers to the new forms of bureaucratic organization being instituted in civil government. ‘Name’ refers to the specific powers and responsibilities designated to a particular office; ‘form’ refers to the actual conduct of the individual who fills it. Bureaucracies operated efficiently when form and name were in accord. Like the new bureaucratic state, the mass conscript army must be structured into discrete units, headed by exchangeable leaders exercising routine authority, all under the unified leadership of the commander. This creates a dilemma for the Sunzi. The commander is no longer an organic fixture in a matrix of pre-existing relationships. He has become the first and most important element, but nonetheless an equally arbitrary and replaceable one, in a wholly artificial structure. If this new type of commander does not derive his authority from heredity, personal valor, or a special relationship with the spirit world, how is he to be chosen and his leadership to be justified? One of the most famous maxims of the text exemplifies the author’s answer to this conundrum: Thus it is said: if one knows the enemy and knows himself, then in one hundred battles there is no danger of defeat. If one does not know the enemy and yet knows himself, then there is one victory for every defeat. If one does not know the enemy and does not know himself, then every battle will end in certain defeat.19

108 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Command is no longer a test of valor or a mantic office; it is an intellectual enterprise. This assertion pervades the Sunzi bingfa. Chapter I of the current text is ‘Assessments’, in which the author describes the calculations the commander must undertake prior to embarking on campaign. The final chapter, ‘The Use of Spies’, details the collection of intelligence. The text (and, by extension, the use of the military) literally begins and ends with the intellectual tasks of command. The Sunzi’s new type of commander is thus defined by a particular type of learning and a unique quality of mind. When reading the theoretical assertions of the text, it is important to remember that much of the theory is deployed in defense of the autonomy and authority of the new commander. A sense of how this awareness compels us to read the text in particular ways can be garnered from this passage: For this reason on the day the order is given, close the passes and break the tallies, do not admit his (i.e. the enemy’s) emissaries. Stay strictly to the upper halls of the temple in prosecuting the affair. If the enemy opens the door you must rush to enter. Anticipate what he cherishes, misdirect him as to the time, pace the marking line and follow the enemy in deciding the affair of combat. For this reason, be like a virgin girl at the beginning. When the enemy opens a door, be like a fleeing rabbit, the enemy will not be able to withstand you.20 There is some dispute over the word translated above as ‘strictly’. The word in the original Chinese, li, can variously take the meaning of ‘harsh’, ‘serious’, or ‘strenuous’. Some commentators and translators would thus take it to refer to the quality of the deliberations held in the temple halls prior to setting out for attack. The larger context of the passage argues against this reading, however. At issue is the sensitivity of military intelligence. Advantage goes to whoever gathers information most comprehensively; thus, as we collect intelligence about the enemy, we must close off all avenues for the enemy to gather intelligence about us. The Sunzi’s unique insight is that one of the most valuable sources of intelligence is concentrated in the person of the commander himself. Every move the commander makes potentially reveals insight into his plans, making it imperative that he physically remain out of sight. This is the import of the text’s quasi-ironic injunction to ‘be like a virgin girl at the beginning’. There is some humor in the tone, but the instruction is meant quite literally. Like a virgin girl (unmarried women were subject to patriarchal control in the society of the Warring States), the commander should remain indoors, ‘strictly’ confined to the upper halls of the temple, where his movements and moods cannot be observed. The provocative nature of the Sunzi’s chosen metaphor underscores the fact that this is more than mere pragmatic advice; it contains a powerful rhetorical assertion about the historical uniqueness of the new commander. The image of a virgin girl is deployed in stark contrast to the aristocratic warrior of old. Given the artificial and (by aristocratic standards) arbitrary structure of the new military,

SUNZI BINGFA AS HISTORY AND THEORY 109

the commander must remain constantly cognizant of how he adds value to the process of military affairs. The new commander is not a hero or priest, both of which roles require open and public displays. Rather, the Sunzi’s commander is first and fore-most a collector and assessor of information—that is the sole and vital function that justifies his participation in the military process in the first place. If, through his carelessness, he becomes a source of information to the enemy, he nullifies his value to the military structure, in effect doing more harm than good. This is where the genius of the book lies: the ultimate goal is to create a social role for the commander, to carve out a realm for the professional military officer. Thus, when the Sunzi enjoins the commander to fight only when he knows victory is certain, we must realize that this is as much a rhetorical justification for the authority of the professional commander as a dictum to be practically applied. To apply this principle consistently, a commander would have to possess an almost preternatural insight into the tactical situation and the contents of his opponent’s mind. Indeed, at points the text describes the commander as if he were possessed of mystical powers: ‘Subtle! subtle! to the point of formlessness; spirit-like! spirit-like! to the point of soundlessness, thus he can be the enemy’s “arbiter of fate”.’21 If we read the Sunzi literally and uncritically, we would be forced to assume that its author was either woefully naïve or willfully disingenuous. Rather, the Sunzi is presenting us with an ideal to which the professional commander should aspire and against which he is to be measured. While it may not be fully realizable in all or even most instances, it will serve better than the old ideals of the aristocratic warrior. The old ideals of heroic valor were themselves never completely realizable. However, given the new parameters of warfare, the pragmatic cost of even attempting to approximate the heroic ideal would have been catastrophic. Henceforth leaders needed to be chosen on the degree to which they approximated to the new paradigm the Sunzi had established, which placed a premium on the rational and cognitive faculties of command. That so many of the pre-scriptions are ‘ideal’ does not mean that there is no real and practical wisdom in the text of the Sunzi bingfa, but anyone who would apply its strategic principles dogmatically is ignorant of the original rhetorical import and of its true value. Conclusion One of Michael Handel’s great achievements was to make the comparative study of strategic theorists, even if separated by vast gulfs of time and culture, a profitable and intellectually rigorous pursuit. We feel, therefore, that it is wholly appropriate to conclude this chapter with a brief comparison of On War and Sunzi bingfa as both history and theory. Such a comparison will help highlight the ways in which a historical reading of military texts, regardless of their contextual origins, can aid their application as theory.

110 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

The purpose of the Sunzi was to establish a new rational and intellecarguing that the revolutionary changes that had taken place in the tual ideal to which the general could aspire. In On War, Clausewitz was Napoleonic era demanded an entirely new way of thinking about war, as well as an entirely new way of preparing the state to fight those wars. Both texts therefore are forceful polemics that were crafted to shatter conventional models for thought and action. Yet the ways in which the texts are crafted are so dissimilar that the commonalities are often obscured. Unlike the Sunzi, the intellectual process of On War is readily apparent, partly because the text was never finished and partly because European intellec tual custom demanded methodological transparency. But On War is far more than an academic exercise or a work of history. Beyond the ‘ideal-type’ methodology and the extensive descriptive aspects of the book, there is a distinct prescriptive character that sets new ideals to guide both the statesman and commander. Two examples should suffice to make the point: Since war is not an act of senseless passion but is controlled by its political object, the value of this object must determine the sacrifices to be made for it in magnitude and also in duration. Once the expenditure of effort exceeds the value of the political object, the object must be renounced and peace must follow.22 No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it. The former is its political purpose; the latter its operational objective.23 Taken out of context from the rest of On War, these statements appear to be woefully naïve expectations that war can be both wholly rational and scripted, when in fact the realm of praxis is prey to interaction, the play of chance and probability (which only the genius can master), and the ‘blind natural force’ of primordial hatreds. Therefore, Clausewitz’s appreciation of uncertainty and interaction in war would seem to contradict these overly rational maxims. The only way to reconcile the contradiction is to realize that these statements are prescriptive rather than descriptive. Moreover, the messy reality that wars are fought by human beings in the physical world does not undercut his rational ideals; rather, the prescriptions gain in rhetorical force precisely because war is also the realm of chance and passion. Given the destructive and unpredictable potential of war, it is the moral duty of the statesman and commander to optimize the chances for success and to conduct war as rationally as possible. As serious students of strategic thought, we are prevented from taking the above statements out of the context of On War by two complementary constraints. First, Clausewitz constructed his work as a pragmatic guide for practitioners of war and hence had to keep it within a context that they would recognize; therefore, On War is grounded in a wealth of particular cases. This gave Clausewitz a tremendous amount of freedom to explore the practice of war

SUNZI BINGFA AS HISTORY AND THEORY 111

and glean from this vast record of action those characteristics that were common to all wars. Second, the obvious intellectual context of On War prevents us from applying its aphorisms promiscuously. Clausewitz was working within a set of specific analytical rules that characterized post-Enlightenment Western thought. Therefore, as a theorist, he engaged in the self-conscious examination and reexamination of his own assumptions.24 Moreover, since there was an established debate on the role and use of the military in Europe, Clausewitz did not have to apologize for writing about war, nor is it difficult to locate On War in relation to other texts in the same genre, either the earlier Machiavelli and von Bülow or the contemporary Jomini.25 The Sunzi, on the other hand, is both creating and justifying the masterly discourse on the military. The author of the Sunzi was working within an entirely different set of constraints than Clausewitz. Whereas Clausewitz could speak transparently in his own voice and talk directly to contemporary issues within specific historical and theoretical contexts, the Sunzi’s author had to employ historical misdirection and allusion, while yet offering a polemically forceful critique of the strategic culture of the Warring States. Unfortunately, this artifice often results in an ahistorical reading that leads even the most serious students of war to conclude, as did Liddell Hart, that this text is the ‘concentrated essence of wisdom’.26 To read either the Sunzi bingfa or On War ahistorically is to run the risk of misunderstanding both their message and their theoretical implications. It is our contention that all Masters of War should be read historically, but a historical reading of the Sunzi will differ in striking ways from such a reading of the other Masters. All of the great strategic theorists and students of war aimed to critique the way violence was used in the pursuit of political objectives. Unfortunately, few modern students of the Sunziunderstand or seek to learn the unique historical conditions that shaped the text and prompted its author to structure his critique in this particular manner. Because the author of the Sunzi bingfa was compelled to project his voice on to a mute player in the tragedy of Wu, his forceful critique of his own age has become obscured. A modern reader who ignores the rhetorical artistry of the text and disregards the Sunzi bingfa’s intense engagement with the concerns of the Warring States may be lulled into a belief that the prescriptions contained in its pages are transcendent verities detached from any particular historical or cultural context. Exotic and mystical as this notion might seem, to be seduced by the promise of easy victory is to miss some of the most inspired and intriguing messages of an author who is speaking to a real world of danger and opportunity. Clausewitz’s On War suffers from a conversely analogous vulnerability to misinterpretation. Its wealth of historical detail creates the false impression that it lacks any content of transcendent theoretical value.27 On War demands a different kind, but equal degree of intellectual rigor in order to see the theoretical ‘forest’ for the contextual ‘trees’. A reader of On War must be able to see past the dense and variegated facade of the Napoleonic Wars to reconstruct its author’s deeper insights. A student of the Sunzi, on the other hand, must remain

112 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

continuously aware of the sophisticated structure, subtle purpose, and multifaceted Warring States polemic that underlies the nearly seamless veneer of the Sunzi bingfa. Pithy and aphoristic modern translations of the Sunzi bingfa may convey the original rhetorical ambience of the text, but run the risk of cloaking the process and purpose of the book’s authorship. Failing to view the text as a process and a construct is to potentially miss much of its value as history and as theory. The Sunzi makes a similar point about how the end-results of military action are perceived and praised by common folk: I employ formations to arrange victory with the multitude, and yet the multitude is ignorant. The common people all know the formations that I used to achieve victory, and yet none know the formations that I used to construct that victory.28 An appreciation of the historical structure of the Sunzi bingfa might compel us to relinquish some of the more romantic notions about its efficacy, yet may also enhance its value as a guide for thought and action in the contemporary world. NOTES 1 Basil H.Liddell Hart, ‘Foreword’, in Sun Tzu: The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Grifffith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. v. 2 See Robert B.Strassler, ed, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War (New York, The Free Press, 1996), 1:22, p. 16. 3 Sunzi bingfa, Jiudi (Nine Terrains), XI. We employ the following version of the Sunzi bingfa as our baseline text. D.C.Lau, and Chen Fong Ching, eds, A Concordance to the Militarists (Bingshu sizhong zhuzi suoyin [Sunzi, Yuliaozi, Wuzi, Simafa]) (Hong Kong: Commercial Press: ICS series, 1992). 4 Sunzi bingfa, Zuozhan (Initiating Combat), II. 5 Confucius, Analects, trans. D.C.Lau (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 132. 6 Sunzi bingfa, Ji (Assessments), I. 7 Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu, comp. Yang Bojun (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), p. 861. 8 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War, ed. Neal Wood (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2001), pp. 9–10. 9 The work of another later military writer, Wu Qi, is also mentioned, but is not quoted explicitly in the dialogue. 10 Quoting Sunzi bingfa, Junzheng (The Army in Combat), VII. 11 Xun Qing, Xunzi: A Complete Translation and Study, vol. II, trans. John Knoblock (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 15.la, p. 219. 12 Sunzi bingfa, Mougong (Strategic Attack), III. 13 Sunzi bingfa, Yongjian (Using Spies), XIII. 14 Sunzi bingfa, Mougong (Strategic Attack), III.

SUNZI BINGFA AS HISTORY AND THEORY 113

15 Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 15–52. 16 Sunzi bingfa, Junzheng (The Army in Combat), VII. 17 Sunzi bingfa, Shi (Combat Power), V. 18 Sunzi bingfa, Shi (Combat Power), V. 19 Sunzi bingfa, Mougong (Strategic Attack), III. 20 Sunzi bingfa, Jiudi (Nine Terrains), XI. 21 Sunzi bingfa, Xushi (Void and Substance), VI. 22 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 92. 23 Ibid., p. 579. 24 If Clausewitz had not undertaken a systematic self-critique and arrayed numerous counterexamples, his conclusions would have been suspect. As such, On War’s methodology is transparent and readily recognizable to a student of nineteenthcentury thought. 25 Clausewitz was distancing his work from the ‘positivists’, who felt that a scientific methodology could be applied to the study and conduct of war. On War is both a polemic and a practical guide for thinking about war rather than a corpus of ‘positive doctrine’. The grounding of On War in a specific intellectual context both constrained the text within a particular analytical debate and textual style and at the same time freed (and forced) Clausewitz to address timeless questions about bloodshed, genius, reason, and chance. See Machiavelli, The Art of War, Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow, The Spirit of the Modern System of War (London: T.Egerton, 1806), Antoine Henri Jomini, The Art of War (London: Greenhill Books, 1992; reprinted from the J.B.Lippincott & Co. trans., Philadelphia, 1862). See also Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 26 Liddell Hart, ‘Foreword’, in Sun Tzu: The Art of War, p. v 27 As an historian who saw his work as an accurate, analytical historical narrative, Clausewitz explored a specific realm of praxis—the land wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—to glean the theoretical patterns of war, which has liberated On War from the ranks of mere historical relics. Especially in his discussion of the Trinity, Clausewitz succeeded in giving form to the essentially formless tension between passion, reason, and the play of chance and probability. Yet for too many people, Clausewitz has become irrelevant because he is too constrained by a particular historical and theoretical context. To dismiss On War so facilely is to misunderstand it both as history and as theory. 28 Sunzi bingfa, Xushi (Void and Substance), VI.

6 Policy, Strategy, and Operations Milan Vego

Policy and strategy are conducted uninterruptedly both in peacetime and in time of conflict or war; they are inextricably linked to each other. Operations, or in US terms ‘operational art’, deal with the actual employment of one’s combat forces and, hence, are dominated by policy and strategy. Yet operations influence, often to a considerable degree, decisions made by the highest political and military leadership. The boundaries among policy, strategy, and operations are often difficult to separate clearly. This is especially true of policy and strategy. The mutual relationship among these three fields of study and practice is extremely close and highly dynamic. The effects of each on the others are by no means identical, however. Policy has a more critical and long-lasting effect on strategy than strategy has on operations. At the same time, errors or failures in the conduct of operations are bound to undermine, and might even lead to the failure of, strategy and policy. No policy or strategy can be successful for long without at least adequate performance in the conduct of operations and tactical successes in the field. The meanings of policy, strategy, and operations have undergone significant changes through history. Until the nineteenth century, policy and strategy were viewed separately. ‘Strategy’ was principally concerned with military aspects of war. It also included the actual employment of one’s military forces—what is considered today the domain of ‘operations’. Subsequently, the scope of strategy was expanded to include many nonmilitary instruments of national or alliance/ coalition power. The meaning of ‘operations’ is even less well defined or commonly accepted. A number of terms, such as ‘grand tactics’, by Jomini and J.F.C.Fuller, and ‘operational art’, by the Soviets and US/NATO military, have been used in referring to that intermediate level between strategy and tactics. The terms ‘policy’, ‘strategy’, and ‘operations’ are often used incorrectly or even interchangeably, so that their true meaning becomes obscured. This lack of commonly accepted definitions and, even more important, true meanings of what constitute strategy and operations is not trivial or a question of ‘semantics’, as some would have it; it greatly complicates the dialogue among theoreticians and practitioners, and communications within a military service and among the services.

POLICY, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS 115

Policy and Strategy The terms ‘policy’ and ‘politics’ are often used interchangeably. While related, these two terms are not synonymous. In general, policy contains a pattern or patterns of actions designed to accomplish a goal; it is a conscious effort by a distinctive political body to use power for a purpose. In contrast, politics is a process of distributing power—both cooperatively and competitively—and influence in a society.1 The primary aim of policy is to ensure peace for all citizens of a state or group of states. This, in turn, is linked with continuous efforts to obtain, maintain, and exercise power. Policy uses war to attain its goals. The principal aims of policy in a conflict or war are to force the enemy to obey one’s will; to avoid one’s own losses; and to reach a settlement.2 The boundary between policy and strategy is often blurred. This was acceptable as long as political and military leadership was concentrated in one person, such as with Frederick the Great and Napoleon I.Clausewitz made it clear that strategy depended on policy because war is the continuation of policy by other means. Von Moltke, Sr, argued that strategy is closely linked to the requirements and conditions of policy, while operations are conducted without regard to policy. Policy, in his view, unfortunately cannot be separate from strategy.3 In what was to cause severe problems under his successors, Van Moltke, Sr, also thought that policy should not interfere with operations. Strategy should be as independent of policy as possible.4 The politician is responsible for strategy in peacetime, while the soldier is the only one responsible for military actions in wartime.5 In his On Strategy (1871) Moltke, Sr, wrote that policy uses war to gain its object: it acts with decisive influence at the beginning and the end of the war, but also may either increase its claims during the progress of war or be satisfied with lesser gains. With this uncertainty, strategy cannot but always direct its efforts toward the highest goal attainable with the means available. Where strategy serves policy best and only works for the object of policy, it is completely independent of policy in its actions.6 Military considerations are decisive for the course of war. By contrast, political considerations are decisive only in so far as they do not demand something impossible in a military sense. In no instance should the military commander allow himself to be swayed in his operations by policy considerations only; rather, he should keep military success in view. Von Moltke, Sr also asserted that what policy can do with his victories or defeats is not his business, because the use of his victories or defeats is exclusively the business of policy.7 In contrast to the views of von Moltke, Sr, Liddell Hart wrote that policy has too often been governed by the military aim—and that this has been regarded as an end in itself, instead of merely a means to an end. When a proper relationship between the political object and the military aim -between policy and strategy— is lost, the military aim becomes distorted and over-simplified.8 The Soviets believed that the acceptance of war as a tool of policy also determines the interrelation of military strategy and policy, which is based on the principle of

116 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the full dependence of the former on the latter. Policy therefore affects the determination of the general and particular strategic objectives, the general character of state (national) strategy, and the selection of forms and methods of conducting war.9 Normally, policy should dominate strategy, but the two should not conflict.10 Policy’s superiority over strategy has its limits and should not be carried to the extreme, as it was in Nazi Germany, where Hitler was the person who made all the key political and military decisions. Allegedly, before the outbreak of war in September 1939, there was never an orderly estimate of the situation for the entire Wehrmacht; neither was there any long-range planning, in which factors of space, time, force, and their consequences were analyzed.11 In peacetime, the functions and structure of the armed forces depend on policy decisions. Policy also decides whether to enter a war and whether a war will be offensive or defensive. Once the decision to use armed forces in defense of national or alliance/coalition interests is made, it is the task of policy to determine and articulate a clear and militarily achievable, strategic desired endstate; the political and military strategic objectives; and the conditions for and timing of conflict/war termination. Policy also determines and defines the political, diplomatic, legal, and other limitations on the combat employment of one’s military forces. All subsequent military planning and actions should be carried out only within the frame-work established by policy and the nationalsecurity and military strategy. Political leadership and the military are mutually dependent on each other. Politicians have to depend on the loyalty of the military, so that they can successfully use the military instrument to attain national aims. Strategy is an area shared by political and military leadership. Even when a single person has simultaneously held both political and military leader-ship positions, he has had great problems in making sound decisions. Discord at the strategic level has most often occurred when politicians and the military have had strong and different views on what was the best course of action to accomplish a given objective. This has meant in practice that there is a permanent tension between political and military authorities.12 The results are often unfortunate when political leadership interferes in purely military matters.13 The government should not limit unnecessarily the military leadership’s freedom of action, to distribute and employ military means in such a way that it accomplishes the objectives of strategy. This does not necessarily mean that enemy military potential must always be destroyed.14 If the primacy of policy over the military is well established, the military essentially can act only within the framework determined by national-security strategy. The greater the limitations on the military leadership’s freedom of action, the larger the forces and assets that will be required to accomplish given strategic ends. In practice, measures taken by the military leadership are often compromises between purely military needs and political realities.

POLICY, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS 117

Military leaders should not be subjected to the capriciousness of politicians.15 The responsibility of the highest military leadership is to make sure that the political decision-makers determine and assign clear and militarily achievable strategic objectives. Thus, policy should never demand what is militarily impossible.16 Political leaders should be sufficiently knowledgeable about military affairs to ensure that the military instrument of power is used in the most effective way. Any conflict between military and political objectives results from a failure of one side to understand the other.17 What happened in Germany when von Schlieffen was the Chief of General Staff is a classic example of what the consequences are when military considerations become dominant and intrude into the sphere of policy and strategy. The ‘Schlieffen Plan’ (in fact, a memorandum) for a campaign in the west was conceived of in isolation from the Chancellery, although it entailed violating the neutrality of Belgium and the Netherlands. The War Ministry, responsible for providing the required forces for the plan to succeed, was in the dark about the exact scope of the plan until December 1912. Germany’s nominal ally Austria-Hungary was not consulted on the plan because von Schlieffen deeply distrusted alliances in general, and Austria-Hungary in particular. Moreover, the German Navy was not informed of the existence of the plan, but the German High Seas Fleet could have been of great help in ensuring its success by interdicting British cross-Channel transports.18 The contradiction between the military meaning of strategy and the political meaning of the word was most egregiously exemplified by Germany in World War I.19 Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his Chief of Staff General Erich Ludendorff took over the positions of the Army High Command Chief (OHL) and First Quartermaster General, respectively, in 1916. Soon afterward, they became virtual dictators. The Army High Command under their leadership repeatedly intervened in purely civilian affairs and organized the total mobilization of the country’s economy. They also reserved for themselves the right to conduct diplomatic and peace negotiations and define Germany’s war aims. The Army High Command even undermined the constitutional foundations of the Reich by reducing the power of Emperor William II to that of a figurehead.20 Extreme views on the relationship between policy and strategy gained ground in Germany after 1933. The former General Ludendorff in his book Total War expressed the view that since the nature of war had changed, and policy had changed, so the relationship between policy and war-fighting (Kriegsfuehrung) had to change as well. He argued that all Clausewitz’s theories relating to policy and war should be thrown away. War and policy should serve to preserve the life of a nation. War is the highest expression of the people’s will for life. Therefore, policy must serve war-fighting. He went even further and asserted that the military leader (Feldherr) should give direction to policy, to make sure that it would be put into the service of war-fighting.21 Ludendorffs views on the relationship between policy and strategy were not isolated beliefs in Germany in the 1930s, but were widely accepted by the Nazi leadership. This, in turn, led to

118 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

a truly perverse relationship between Germany’s policy and war-fighting during World War II, when its leaders determined the war’s political objectives by relying almost exclusively on the country’s military capabilities; these in turn were grossly exaggerated. This was evident even before the outbreak of war in September 1939. General Ludwig Beck, the Chief of the Army’s General Staff (and later one of the leading members of the July 1944 conspiracy against Hitler), warned that war, which is the means of policy, had started to determine policy. The irony was, of course, that the militarization of policy was caused by a civilian, Adolf Hitler, and not the professional military.22 Having a vision of future war is one of the main tasks of the military leadership in peacetime.23 This principally entails a sound vision of the character and probable duration of a future conflict or war. Failure to correctly develop this vision in peacetime invariably has serious consequences for force planning, development of service and joint doctrine, and the outcome of the war itself. Specifically, a realistic picture of the general character and duration of a future war helps national leaders to expand the existing industrial base and establish the forces necessary to accomplish national objectives. The more time available for preparing for war, the more thorough, and hence the more successful, these preparations will be. This is especially important in organizing mobilization and the national logistics system. Correctly estimating the duration of a war is also critical to anticipating the country’s vulnerabilities during the actual hostilities. Normally, a short war draws upon ready stockpiles, and therefore the destruction of manufacturing facilities does not affect its outcome.24 A long war, by contrast, requires significant increase in the country’s manufacturing capacity and also the conversion of some facilities and construction of new ones. All this takes a relatively long time. The expansion of war-waging capacity competes with current peacetime production for manpower, materials, and physical plant and machinery.25 The German military in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I focused almost exclusively on studying the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The lessons learned from this war were that any future war would be a war of movement, and therefore decisive and short. The American Civil War was not studied carefully by the Germans because it was widely thought to have little military relevance.26 This was partly the reason for German military’s firmly held belief that a positional war would be a sign of indecisive leadership, and that a longer war could occur only when fought by indecisive commanders and militarily inferior countries.27 Yet it turned out that the American Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 were the real precursors of World War I— that is, they were positional wars of attrition, and not the Moltkean wars of movement of 1866 and 1870–71. Most military leaders and diplomats before 1914 thought that the next war would be short. Von Schlieffen was well aware that Germany could not withstand a long two-front war because of its inferior military, economic, and financial potential, and because of possible internal unrest. Consequently, the

POLICY, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS 119

German General Staff focused on the quick destruction of enemy armies. They thought that the war would end after four to six months and that the planned campaign against France would last from eight to ten weeks.28 As it turned out, the war went on for more than four years, with horrendous losses of personnel and materiel on both sides. However, some historians have recently challenged these widely accepted views. Reportedly, the documents from the former East German archives indicate that the most senior German military leaders actually accepted the possibility of a long war, from six months to two years. They believed that the Schlieffen Plan was only the opening salvo in what was likely to be a campaign of attrition. Moreover, several German civilian agencies concerned with food supplies in wartime planned for a war not of 42 days, as envisaged in Schlieffen’s Plan, but rather for a war of one or two years.29 The prevalent French view prior to the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914 was that the conflict would be a short war of movement.30 During the 1930s, the French and British, based on their experiences in World War I, believed that the next war would be as protracted as the last conflict. Thus, in contrast to the Germans, they prepared for a positional war instead of a war of movement. The French vision of future war proved to be deeply flawed because it was based on three false readings of military developments at the time: the exaggerated destructiveness of firepower; the dominant role of the defense; and the superiority of the so-called ‘methodically fought’ battle.31 Strategy and Operations A sound and coherent strategy, in and of itself, cannot secure victory in a war, because an intermediate stage is needed to orchestrate the accomplishment of strategic objectives through physical combat or tactics. Operations are a vital link between strategy and tactics; without this link, tactics are unlikely to lead to favorable strategic results. It is critical that the operational level be properly identified; otherwise, the strategic objectives cannot be accomplished by the tactical steps.32 Yet for all the well-documented and proven importance of operations in winning wars decisively and with the minimum loss of resources and time, too many military theoreticians and practitioners have neglected or, even worse, disregarded operations. The skillful use of operational art can forestall, but not prevent, an ultimate collapse if the strategy is unsound. Not only must appropriate tactics be linked via operations to the objectives of strategy, but strategy must also be linked by operations to what is tactically realistic.33 Brilliance at the operational and tactical level, as the Germans consistently displayed in World War II, can only delay, but not prevent, the country’s ultimate defeat if the ends and means at the national-strategic level are seriously disconnected or mismatched. The situation becomes even more untenable if the political leadership is unwilling to commit all available power, as the US example in the Vietnam War shows.

120 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

The grammar of operational art is dictated by the logic of strategy. If the strategy fails, it is then the task of both strategy and operations to limit the war itself.34 Major operations or campaigns should be conducted within a framework of what is operationally and strategically possible. The strategic interface challenges the operational commanders to broaden their perspectives, to think beyond the limits of tactical combat.35 In general, strategy guides operational art by determining objectives, allocating forces and assets, and imposing conditions on tactical combat. In turn, operational art provides the framework for tactical combat. Both operational and tactical frameworks are determined by strategy. Strategy should dominate operational art; otherwise, the results will be flawed, if not fatal.36 The Axis campaign in North Africa in 1941–42 was dominated by operational, not strategic, considerations. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s successes against the British led to the steady expansion of Axis war aims, which, in turn, required more forces to be drawn into a secondary theater of operations. Rommel tried to advance to the Suez Canal and seize Middle Eastern oil fields that were far beyond a reasonable distance from his bases of support, resulting in a serious mismatch between ends and means.37 Likewise, the Allies had confused purposes in their Italian campaign—whether to tie down German troops or to force a way into Germany from the south. In both cases, the lack of clarity regarding what constituted a success led to compromises of the strategic purpose.38 Policy and strategy provide both the framework and the direction for operational planning. They determine the desired (strategic) end-state and the military-strategic objectives. Strategic guidance is the basic document issued by the highest political and military leadership to the subordinate operational commander. A properly written strategic guidance should spell out clearly the desired end-state, and the political and military-strategic objectives that will, when accomplished, allow the strategic vision to become a reality.39 It should specify which military and nonmilitary sources of power are available or will become available; the limitations (constraints and restraints) on geographic areas where one’s forces can and cannot be employed; the use or non-use of certain weapons; and the rules of engagement (ROE). Optimally, strategic guidance should provide a balance among ends (objectives), ways (methods), and means (resources).40 In practical terms, this means that a sound strategy should not have a serious mismatch or disconnect between the ends to be achieved and the means available; otherwise, the entire effort, regardless of performance at the operational and tactical levels, will end in failure. Thus, it is the duty of strategists to see that objectives and resources are kept in balance, and to ensure that the strategic objectives are achievable with the forces and other resources available or expected to be available. In other words, policy should not demand what is militarily impossible.41 The Vietnam War illustrates the critical need to establish interdependence between the ends, ways, and means at the strategic level and those at the operational level.42

POLICY, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS 121

Balancing ends, means, and ways is complicated by the fact that strategic guidance is heavily influenced by both international and domestic political considerations. These, in turn, determine the actions or methods that can constrain commanders at the operational level.43 The operational commander and his staff should continuously examine the probable effect of imposed political and other restraints in accomplishing the assigned military objectives. Where the political limitations seriously threaten the outcome of a campaign or major operation, the operational commander should urge the political leadership to relax or alter them. A mismatch between the ends and the means assigned to accomplish them will usually lead to failure. In the American Civil War, the South lost because its strategic means did not match its strategic ends. Therefore, the operational performance of Southern generals proved ultimately inadequate to overcome the vast gap separating the Confederacy and the Union in terms of industrial strength and manpower. The operational skills of the Confederate army were over time rendered almost irrelevant. In World War II, Germany was defeated primarily because Hitler’s strategic objectives far exceeded the country’s military capabilities.44 Mismatches between ends and means caused Britain to suffer serious military setbacks in both world wars, for example, at Gallipoli in 1915, in Norway in 1940, and in Greece in 1941. The results are also usually disastrous, as the US experience in Vietnam shows, when one’s ends and means cannot be harmonized, because of an unwillingness to pay the necessary political price to use the means potentially available. This disconnect between ends and means can also occur if tactical or operational considerations are allowed, either due to neglect or ignorance, to dictate strategy. A campaign or a major joint/combined operation intended to end hostilities requires a clear statement of the desired (strategic) end-state—the political, diplomatic, military, economic, social, ethnic, humanitarian, and other conditions that the highest political leadership wants to exist after the end of the hostilities. Defining the desired end-state requires a great deal of discussion among political and military leaders.45 Properly defined and understood, the desired end-state is the key prerequisite to determining the method, duration, and intensity of applying one’s available combat potential to accomplish a given military or theater-strategic objective. The Allied plan for the Normandy campaign, for example, lacked a clearly stated military aspect of the desired end-state. After the first phase—establishing lodgment on the continent—the second phase of the campaign, to employ some 100 Allied divisions and inflict a mortal blow to Nazi Germany, was given short shrift. The Allied planners were directed to prepare to seize Berlin as the final objective, but they never received a map of what Europe should look like after the end of hostilities.46 A realistic desired end-state also helps the theater commander avoid wasting sorely needed resources and reduces the risk to one’s forces.47 When the political leadership focuses exclusively or predominantly on the strategic objectives, and poorly articulates or, even worse, does not provide the theater commander with

122 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the desired end-state, the ultimate ends of the policy objective will be only partially achieved. Examples of properly articulated and achieved desired end-states are few. It can be argued that, with the probable exception of the defeat of Japan in World War II, none of the conventional campaigns fought by Western powers since 1939 has ensured the fruits of strategic victories. The lack of a properly defined desired end-state often results in an ambiguous and contradictory situation that could perpetuate or even worsen the conditions that led to the conflict. As the Gulf War of 1990–91 illustrates, this in turn might require one’s forces to remain in the area and intermittently engage in combat to ensure that the minimal national or alliance/coalition objectives are preserved in the post-hostilities phase. The situation in the aftermath of the Gulf War is perhaps the best example of only partially accomplishing the desired end-state. A military aspect of the desired end-state includes the conditions that, when achieved, would allow other sources of national or alliance/coalition power to accomplish other aspects of the desired end-state. These conditions may extend to the complete physical destruction of the enemy’s ability to fight. In wars of unlimited political objectives, where military elements of strategy predominate, national or alliance/coalition political objectives are translated into the use of military force to destroy the enemy’s armed forces and seize the enemy’s territory, including overthrowing the enemy’s system of government. The more ambitious the desired end-state, the more resources and time are required to accomplish it. In the Gulf War of 1990–91, for example, if the US-led coalition’s desired end-state had been drastically to alter the balance of power in the region, it would have been necessary to go all the way to Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein and his regime. The operational commander and his staff should also consider what actions and measures must be taken to end the hostilities and what situation is to exist in the post-hostilities phase.48 Ideally, only after the highest politico-military leadership determines and articulates the desired end-state is it possible to derive the proper strategic objective. To do otherwise would result in more rigidly determined objectives and also cause great difficulties in determining the proper conditions for conflict/ war termination. For each aspect of the desired end-state, a corresponding aspect of the strategic objective should be determined; only then is it possible to determine the military strategic objective. In the US context, the task of the theater commander is then to translate an achievable theater-strategic objective from the military-strategic objective. Liddell Hart warned that political and military-strategic objectives are not identical. The military objective is only a means to a political end. Therefore, it should be governed by the political objective, subject to the basic condition that policy does not demand what is militarily—that is, practically—impossible.49 In general, the more ‘mature’ or ‘developed’ the theater, the more complex, and hence the more difficult, it is to accomplish all aspects of a given national or theater-strategic objective. Whenever conditions in the theater change, the

POLICY, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS 123

selected strategic objective should be modified or even abandoned. This is the only way to ensure that the military forces are successful and not employed in seeking militarily unachievable objectives. There is always a great danger of not deciding on the objectives before the campaign starts, leaving that decision contingent on the enemy actions or resistance. Another danger is rigidly to adhere to the objective selected during planning, regardless of indications that it was improperly or mistakenly determined. Properly determined military-strategic objectives should achieve political objectives, while avoiding unintended and undesirable political consequences. The choice of military-strategic objectives seems simple, but often involves quite a difficult process. In determining the strategic objectives, political leaders should always ask for the advice of the military leadership. At the same time, the military should have sufficient room to accomplish the strategic objectives determined by the political leadership. The military leadership thus has the responsibility clearly and forcefully to point out to the political leaders the possibilities, risks, boundaries, and consequences of proposed options for military action. There is a great danger of determining military-strategic objectives that are inappropriate for the accomplishment of the political objectives. One’s militarystrategic objective may have unintended consequences or effects on the enemy, as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 illustrates. This is especially true where a delicate balance of power is in place; achieving given military objectives may alter that balance of power in such a way that the resulting political situation is actually less favorable to the victors. Another danger is that the selected military-strategic objective may not result in the accomplishment of one’s political purpose. History is replete with examples of military victories that did not lead to the attainment of the object of policy.50 Sometimes too much emphasis on the political aspects of the situation might lead to the selection of a political-strategic objective that, while highly desirable, is clearly unattainable with the military means at hand. The result can be a strategic blunder of the first magnitude, resulting in the dispersal of sorely needed military resources. A military enterprise undertaken primarily on political grounds, without consideration of what is militarily possible, might end in catastrophe, as did the ill-fated Allied expeditions into Norway in April 1940 and into Greece in the spring of 1941. The decision to start or terminate a conflict or war is a policy decision. As Liddell Hart emphasized, the object in war is ‘a better state of peace’, and all strategists need to bear that in mind.51 Conflict/war termination is both a science and an art, and also a bridge between the state of war and the state of peace; it is a link between the desired strategic end-state and the post-hostilities phase. Clear and achievable strategic objectives are critical for success, but it is also critical to know what the end should look like, because the desired end-state will affect the means and ways used in conducting the war.52 The actual fighting in a war is

124 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

important to achieve the desired end-state. Yet the way in which the war is concluded is equally important. Policy-makers should therefore not make a decision to go to war without giving serious thought to how to end the hostilities. This principally includes the conditions for and the timing of the end of hostilities. Conflict/war termination not only includes one’s use of force but also often involves all the instruments of power—political, economic, and informational. Military victories do not in themselves determine the political outcome of wars. There is a close relationship between how far one goes militarily and what one demands politically.53 The greater the demands one makes upon the loser, the less incentive he has to concede, and the greater the effort that will be required to force him to concede. The Prussian and German Chancellor Count Otto von Bismarck was a master of using moderate demands to entice his adversaries to concede. In a war fought for limited objectives, the decision to end a war should be the result of the bargaining process between the victor and the vanquished. The loser often has the ability to prolong the conflict; it is often he who holds the key to ending a conflict.54 The Gulf War of 1990–91 was a limited war, because the USled coalition never intended to defeat the Iraqi armed forces as a whole and seize the entire Iraqi territory. The coalition wanted Saddam Hussein removed by his domestic opposition but without endangering Iraqi territorial integrity; it did not want to defeat Iraq so completely that the ensuing vacuum would be exploited by Iran and spark further turmoil in Iraq.55 The United States was not willing to pursue the removal of Saddam directly; nor was it willing to be involved in the nation-building and humanitarian relief that would surely accompany the overthrow of the Iraqi regime. In other words, there was not only ambiguity in the policy but also a disconnect between the more ambitious ends and the modest means to be used by the United States and its coalition partners. Hence, it was not surprising that the termination of the Gulf War had unintended and adverse consequences for US national interests.56 Though conflict/war termination consists of political, diplomatic, military, economic, informational, and other components, using military sources of power is obviously one of the more critical parts of the entire process. Operations support the bargaining process preceding the termination of a conflict or war by inflicting, or threatening to inflict, further losses on the weaker side, either by seizing additional territory or causing significant reduction in enemy personnel and materiel. This indirectly supports the bargaining process by impressing on the opponent the need to end hostilities quickly rather than waiting and suffering more damage to his interests. In its strategic context, military victory is measured by the achievement of the overall political objective and associated termination objectives. The military success provides military, geographic, political, informational, or economic advantages and leverage for negotiations. The political component of the conflict/war termination process cannot be neglected; to do so would make war not a servant to policy but its master. The opposite is

POLICY, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS 125

equally true; neglecting the military component would endanger the attainment of the object of policy for which the war is fought.57 Conflict or war termination should be an integral part of campaign planning or planning for a major operation with a strategic objective. It should not only be considered from the outset of planning but should also be refined as the conflict moves toward termination. World War I is a case study that demonstrates a total absence of war termination planning. The Allied policy-makers and military planners gave no forethought to defining an end-state or war-termination objectives and conditions before military intervention. A clearly defined end-state allows the planners to develop the most effective path to its accomplishment. Termination of the Gulf War of 1990–91 was the result of the lack of a commonly understood and well-defined end-state. The fundamental problem was a disconnect between the means the United States was willing and able to employ and the desired end-state. Limiting itself in its means, the United States took various half-measures to achieve the desired end-state. A poorly defined or overly ambiguous end-state is more likely to result in a worse state of peace after the end of hostilities, regardless of one’s operational performance. Specifically, planning for conflict/war termination encompasses pre-conflict planning; sustaining communications with the adversary in the course of fighting; employing pauses, thresholds, or ‘break-points’ in the fighting as opportunities for intensified bargaining; holding forces in reserve as a further deterrent or added bargaining leverage; and demon-strating good faith, even through unilateral gestures, as part of the implicit or explicit bargaining that leads to conflict termination.58 The concept of ‘culmination’ has potential as the focus of a planning framework for war termination. The strategic culminating point may be the time when the opponent is willing to negotiate the end of hostilities. Conflict is not necessarily resolved once hostilities cease. Hence, adequate and timely plans and preparations must be made to continue using sources of military power in the post-hostilities phase. Transition to peace requires early planning and co-ordination both at the national level and in theater among diplomatic, military, and political leaders. Planning for the post-hostilities phase should include the employment of one’s forces for providing security and assistance for refugees and displaced persons in the theater or transiting the theater, securing territory to minimize the potential for resumption of hostilities, reintroducing civilian authority, providing civilian administration, nation-building assistance, and peace operations. Strategy-Operations-Tactics The accomplishment of operational and strategic objectives depends upon the results gained by tactics. Strategy must ensure that tactical combat is conducted under conditions favorable to accomplishing strategic objectives while considering the limitations imposed by tactics. Because bad tactics can invalidate

126 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

a good strategy, a sufficient level of tactical competence is invariably required to accomplish strategic or operational objectives. Defeat in a major battle, such as those suffered by the Germans at Stalingrad and the Japanese at the battle of Midway, not only doom the entire operation, but also invariably have a profound effect on the strategic situation in a given theater. In a low-intensity conflict where public support is fragile, relatively small tactical defeats or even the perception of the insurgent’s strength may undermine the country’s will to fight. For example, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 in the First Indochina War and the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong Tet Offensive in January 1968 were not militarily crippling. Yet they decisively undermined the popular and political support for the war in France and the United States, respectively.59 Field Marshal von Moltke, Sr, observed that tactics are the basis of operations (‘operational art’ today). Tactics must create the prerequisites for operational or strategic success, which the operational commander must then exploit.60 Tactics must ensure that the results are in harmony with the operational objectives. No battle or engagement should be fought unless it is part of the larger design and contributes to the accomplishment of operational or strategic objectives. Poor application of operations can lead to tactical defeats, which, in turn, may have not only operational but also strategic consequences. Tactical brilliance rarely can overcome poor operational performance. No number of tactical victories can save one’s forces from ultimate defeat, as the US example in Vietnam conclusively showed. Lack of operational thinking invariably results in wasting the fruits of tactical victories. The German offensive in April 1918 on the Western Front resulted in heavy losses for the Allies and considerable gain of territory for the Germans. However, despite this series of tactical victories, the Germans never succeeded in exploiting the tactical penetrations of the Allied front.61 The German tactical victories therefore meant little because they failed to achieve operational penetration at any part of the Western Front. Tactics can sometimes be heavily influenced by domestic policy considerations. This excessive ‘politicization’ of one component of military art often has fatal consequences for military effectiveness as a whole. Not only may politics influence tactics, but tactics may also influence operations. For example, the French tactical doctrine of ‘offensive at any price’ before 1914 affected the operational level. During World War I, as casualties mounted and the public criticism grew in intensity, this doctrine became increasingly disconnected from strategic reality.62 Field Marshal von Schlieffen’s teaching on the battle of Cannae in 216 BC, which ended in a catastrophic defeat for the Roman Army, was an example of oversimplifying and wrongly interpreting a historical example. That battle, which Schlieffen considered to be the foundation of military history, besides its tactical aspects, also showed war’s dependence on policy. Hannibal’s victories in Italy were not well used by the Carthaginian leadership. Moreover, von Schlieffen apparently did not realize that the Carthaginians, despite Hannibal’s victories, lost the war.63

POLICY, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS 127

Tactics should not significantly influence, much less dominate, strategy, either by design or by default. If this occurs, strategy would be defined or even applied as an afterthought by tactical or operational considerations.64 The principal reason for these phenomena, what the late Michael Handel called ‘tacticization’ of strategy, has been the uncontrolled ambition of military field commanders or the tactically and operationally oriented thinking of political leaders. For the United States, this trend started in World War II and continued during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. It intensified and became the dominant feature of the US method of warfare in the Gulf War of 1990–91, the conflict in Bosnia in 1995, the Kosovo conflict of 1999, and the current conflict in Afghanistan. The ever-increasing reliance on advanced weaponry and sensors, coupled with US reluctance to accept or even inflict casualties on the opponent, often in conflicts involving non-vital national interests, has created a situation in which targeting has de facto became a substitute for a sound strategy. In the US military today, there is a firm belief that any future war will involve further blurring between the levels of war and perhaps even eliminate the operational level. The assumption is that the new information technologies will allow much faster command and control through a flattening of command structure and therefore eliminate intermediate levels of command. The speed of command will be so much faster in the future than it is today that there will be little or no time for exchange of information between strategic and operational leadership. The outcome of war will then depend on one’s ability to identify and destroy targets by long-range and precise weapons rather than on a detailed, long-range strategic plan.65 Conclusion Policy, strategy, and operations are closely related but are also very distinctive. Their relationship is not one of equals: policy dominates strategy, and strategy dominates operations. If that relationship is degraded, under-mined, or, even worse, turned upside down, a war can be conducted only with great difficulty. It is likely to end in defeat when fought against a strong and resourceful opponent. Policy and policy decisions should dominate all aspects of strategy, but especially the desired end-state, strategic objectives, and conflict/war termination. The relationship between policy and strategy should be roughly in balance; otherwise, the aims set by policy will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. In Clausewitz’s times, strategy dealt with the actual employment of one’s combat forces. Because of the vast changes in the conduct of warfare, the lower part of strategy evolved in the late nineteenth century to what Moltke, Sr, called ‘operations’. Since then, operations have remained an indispensable part of warfighting. The gap between strategy and tactics is too large to be bridged by strategy alone. Thorough knowledge, understanding, and a high degree of skill are required to properly sequence and synchronize one’s military and

128 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

non-military sources of power to accomplish strategic and operational objectives in a theater. Technological advances have considerably affected and will continue to influence both the theory and practice of operations. However, it is simply preposterous to think that somehow technology is going to eliminate operations as the intermediate component of military art. There have been a number of dramatic technological advances in the recent past, and in each case operations have adjusted to the new capabilities. This is not going to change in the future. Operations are the most critical factor in accomplishing the desired end-state and conflict/war termination, as determined by one’s policy and strategy. Such success cannot be accomplished by tactics alone. The single greatest danger today is to reduce everything to weapons systems, targeting, and information dominance, thereby eliminating not only operations but strategy as well. The trend toward ‘tacticization’ of strategy should be reversed, and soon. The easy US victories in recent years were all achieved against weak, unsophisticated, and mostly passive opponents. As in the past, a war against a strong and agile opponent cannot be won without sound and coherent policy and strategy. It is at the strategic and operational level, not the tactical level, that wars are won or lost. The Clausewitzian theory of the relationship between policy and strategy and the nature of war is still valid today. It can be neglected or ignored only at one’s peril. NOTES 1 Headquarters, US Marine Corps, MCDP 1: Warfighting (Washington, DC, 20 June 1997), p. 23. 2 Joerg Bahnemann, Der Begriff der Strategie bei Clausewitz, Moltke und Liddell Hart. Eine Untersuchung der Beziehungen zwischen politischer und militaerischer Fuehrung (Hamburg: Fuehrungsakademie der Bundeswehr, 31 March 1966), p. 9. 3 Walter Mussel, ‘Strategie als Aufgabe der Politik’, Wehrkunde, no. 4 (April 1966), p. 180. 4 Hans Hitz, ‘Taktik und Strategie. Zur Entwicklung Kriegswissenschaftlicher Begriffe’, Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau, no. 11 (November 1956), p. 616. 5 Klaus Goldschmidt, ‘Grundlagen der Strategie’, Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau, vol. 1 (January 1969), p. 77. 6 Rudolf von Caemmerer, The Development of Strategic Science during the 19th Century, trans. Karl von Donat (London: Hugh Rees, 1905), p. 85; Generalfeldmarschall Graf von Moltke, Ausgewaehlte Werke, vol. I: Feldherr und Kriegslehrmeister (Berlin: Verlag von Reimar Hobbing, 1925), p. 30. 7 Daniel J.Hughes (ed.), Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993), p. 36. 8 B.H.Liddell Hart, Strategy (New York/Washington, DC: Praeger, 2nd rev. edn, 1967), pp. 351–2. 9 V.D.Sokolovskiy, Soviet Military Strategy, ed. Harriett Fast Scott, 3rd edn, (Moscow: Voyenizdat, 1968; New York, NY: Crane, Russak, 1975), p. 16. 10 Goldschmidt, ‘Grundlagen der Strategie’, p. 76.

POLICY, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS 129

11 Wolf Weth, ‘Fuehrungsgrundlagen und Ihre Bedeutung: Betrachtung ueber einige historische Ereignisse und die moegliche Nutzanwendung der dabei gewonnen Erkentnisses’, Wehrkunde, no. 2 (February 1967), p. 67. 12 Joerg Bahnemann, Der Begriff der Strategie bei Clausewitz, Moltke und Liddell Hart. Eine Untersuchung der Beziehungen zwischen politischer und militaerischer Fuehrung (Hamburg: Fuehrungsakademie der Bundeswehr, 1966), p. 8. 13 Hitz, ‘Taktik und Strategie’, p. 617. 14 Ibid., pp. 617–18. 15 Hubertus Sass, ‘Ueber das Verhaeltniss von Politik und Kriegsfuehrungganzheitliches Denken bei Clausewitz’, Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau, no. 6 (June 1970), p. 312. 16 Ash Irwin, The Levels of War: Operational Art and Campaign Planning (Camberley: Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, Occasional paper, no. 5, 1993), p. 6. 17 Christopher E.Wittmann, War-Termination Theory in Operations other than War: US Disengagement from Somalia 1993 (Quantico, VA: USMC Command and Staff College, 1995), pp. 5–6. 18 Holger H.Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914– 1918 (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 50. 19 Mussel, ‘Strategie als Aufgabe der Politik’, p. 181. 20 F.L.Carsten, ‘Germany’, in Michael Howard (ed.), Soldiers and Governments: Nine Studies in Civil-Military Relations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 85. 21 Erich Ludendorff, Der Totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorffs Verlag, 1936), pp. 6– 10, 115. 22 Mussel, ‘Strategie als Aufgabe der Politik’, p. 181. 23 Juergen Fehling, Das Problem der Uebertraegbarkeit taktischloperativer Erfahrungen aus der Kriegsgeschichte (Hamburg: Fuehrungsakademie der Bundeswehr, 1988), p. 14. 24 Charles T.Stewart, Jr, ‘Time as a Concept in Military Strategy’, Military Review, no. 4 (April 1959), p. 3; Bernard Brodie, ‘Implications for Military Policy’, in idem., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New Haven, CT: Yale Institute of International Studies, 1946), p. 79; T.F. Walkowicz, ‘Strategic Concepts for the Nuclear Age’, Annals, American Academy for Political and Social Science (May 1955), p. 121. 25 Stewart, ‘Time as a Concept in Military Strategy’, p. 6. 26 Fehling, Das Problem der Uebertraegbarkeit taktischloperativer Erfahrungen aus der Kriegsgeschichte, p. 14. 27 Ibid., p. 14. 28 Christian Mueller, ‘Anmerkungen zur Entwicklung von Kriegsbild und operativstrategischem Szenario im preussisch-deutschen Heer vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, Militaergeschichtliche Mitteilungen, vol. 57 (1998), p. 412. 29 Holger H.Herwig, ‘Germany and the “Short-War” Illusion: Toward a New Interpretation?’, Journal of Military History, vol. 66 (July 2002), pp. 681–2, 689. 30 J.F.C.Fuller, The Foundations of the Science of War (London: Hutchinson, 1925), p. 29. 31 Eliot A.Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 215.

130 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

32 Irwin, The Levels of War, Operational Art and Campaign Planning, p. 7. 33 Ibid., p. 7. 34 Martin Kutz, Operative Fuehrung als Denkfigur und Handlungskonzept der Heeresfuehrung der Bundeswehr. Politische und militaerfachliche Implikationen und Gefahren der aktuellen Diskussion (Hamburg: Fuehrungsakademie d.Bundeswehr, Fachgruppe Sozialwissenschaften-Beitraege zu Lehre und Forschung, 1989), pp. 6, 11. 35 David Jablonsky, ‘Strategy and the Operational Level of War’, in The Operational Art of Warfare across the Spectrum of Conflict (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army War College, 1987), pp. 11, 14. 36 David Jablonsky ‘Strategy and the Operational Art: Part I’, Parameters (Spring 1987), p. 73. 37 Meinhard Glanz, Rommels Entschluss zum Angriff auf Alexandria (Hamburg: Fuehrungsakademie der Bundeswehr, 1963), p. 5; Jablonsky, ‘Strategy and the Operational Level of War: Part I,’ p. 74. 38 Irwin, The Levels of War, p. 13. 39 Bruce B.G.Clarke, ‘Conflict Termination: What Does It Mean to Win?’, Military Review, no. 11 (November 1992), p. 85. 40 Headquarters, Department of the Army, FM 100–5, Operations (Washington, DC: August 1982; rev. edn, May 1986), p. 9; Jablonsky, ‘Strategy and the Operational Art: Part I’, p. 66. 41 Irwin, The Levels of War, p. 6. 42 Jablonsky, ‘Strategy and the Operational Level of War’, p. 8. 43 Ibid., p. 9. 44 Jablonsky, ‘Strategy and the Operational Level of War: Part I’, pp. 68, 66. 45 James W.Reed, ‘Should Deterrence Fail: War Termination in Campaign Planning’, Parameters (Summer 1993), p. 45. 46 Robert G.Fix, Operational Encirclement: Quick Decisive Victory or a Bridge Too Far? (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of Advanced Military Studies, US Command and General Staff College, 1993), p. 21. 47 Joint Pub 3–0: Doctrine for Joint Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 10 September 2001), p. III-2. 48 Ibid. 49 B.H.Liddell Hart, ‘National Object and Military Aim’, in Holt, Jr, and Milliken, comp., Strategy, p. 13. 50 Fuehrungsakademie der Bundeswehr, Operative Fuehrung (Arbeitspapier, Hamburg: Fuehrungsakademie der Bundeswehr, August 1992), p. 2. 51 B.H.Liddell Hart, Strategy (New York, NY: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 2nd edn, 1967), p. 351. 52 Susan E.Strednansky, Balancing the Trinity: The Fine Art of Conflict Termination (Maxwell, AFB, AL: School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University, June 1995), pp. 6–7. 53 See the chapter by Bradford Lee in this volume. 54 Thomas G.Mahnken, A Squandred Opportunity? The Decision to End The Gulf War (Newport, RI: Naval War College, unpubl. paper, 2001), p. 3. 55 Mark Garrard, ‘War Termination in the Persian Gulf’, http://www.airpower. maxwell.af/mil/airchronicles/apj01/fal01/garrard.html, p. 5.

POLICY, STRATEGY, AND OPERATIONS 131

56 Stanley T.Kresge, Gulf War Termination Revisited (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air War College, Air University, April 1999), pp. 22–3. 57 Reed, ‘Should Deterrence Fail’, p. 43. 58 Ibid., p. 43. 59 Jablonsky, ‘Strategy and the Operational Art’, p. 71. 60 Fuehrungsakademie der Bundeswehr, Operative Fuehrung, pp. 17–18. 61 Juergen Bassenge, Zur Zielsetzung der Deutschen Angriffe in Frankreich, Fruehjahr bis Sommer 1918. Ueberlegungen zum Problem des Kulminationspunktes (Hamburg: Fuehrungsakademie der Bundeswehr, 1964), pp. 19–20. 62 Ludwig Beck, Studien ed. Hans Speidel (Stuttgart: K.F. Koehlers Verlag, 1955), p. 79. Fuehrungsakademie der Bundeswehr, Operative Fuehrung, p. 15. Jablonsky, ‘Strategy and the Operational Level of War: Part I’, p. 73. 63 Fehling, Das Problem der Uebertraegbarkeit taktischloperativer Erfahrungen aus der Kriegsgeschichte, p. 23. 64 Michael I.Handel, Masters of War. Classical Strategic Though, 3rd and expanded edn (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2001), p. 355. 65 Ibid., p. 358.

PART II: POLITICAL RATIONALITY

7 Thucydides on Democratic Politics and Civil—Military Relations Karl F.Walling

Michael Handel loved Thucydides, whose account of the Peloponnesian War ranked in his mind among the three greatest books in the West ever written on war, along with Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Clausewitz’s On War. He even talked with this author before he knew of his impending demise about collaborating on a book in which there would be something of a dialogue between Thucydides and Clausewitz—authors of the Old Testament and the New Testament for many strategists—on the theory and practice of politics and war. Since Handel’s innovative proposal has been overtaken by events, let this chapter stand as an example of how one might begin to construct such a dialogue, with the questions raised being far more important than the conclusions reached. Why study Thucydides, who lived over 2,500 years ago, at least as seriously as modern militaries study Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Mahan, Corbett, and even more contemporary strategic theorists? Perhaps the best answer is because, one way or another, Thucydides raises virtually every significant question about the initiation, conduct, and termination not merely of the great war between Athenian naval and Spartan land power, but also, he suggests, of all wars. Partly because the 27-year-long war between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta allowed and required enormous adaptation and experimentation, but also because Thucydides’ account was written as a ‘possession for all time’ (1.23),1 he covers such fundamental problems as the causes of war, deterrence, net assessment, matching strategy to policy, building, sustaining, and dividing coalitions, land v.sea power, peripheral operations, proxy wars, political warfare using revolution as an instrument of strategy, economic warfare, war termination, and the influence of different types of regimes on strategy. This is not to say that Thucydides offered a list of prescriptions for addressing these problems. Instead, it is to affirm, first, his keen awareness of these underlying problems as perennial problems no strategist can ignore. Second, it is to insist that Thucydides is a particular kind of teacher, the sort who usually gives more than one side of the story, and thereby compels us to think through on our own both the nature of these problems and the variety of means, or alternative strategies, for addressing them. Like Socrates, apparently, he did not think wisdom could be taught, but it could be earned by readers determined to sift through the debates among the

134 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

different statesmen and generals in his account. By constantly reassessing our initial judgments in light of the contrast between rhetoric and reality, words and deeds, theory and practice, we become spectators of the great drama of this war who learn best from recognizing our original and frequent mistakes in interpreting it. Finally, this is to assert that Thucydides understood that strategists have to take a comprehensive look at these problems. They might be isolated for analytical purposes, but in practice they have to be addressed in tandem. This seems to be the reason why a general, or strategos, as the Greeks named such leaders, is called a general. To obtain his community’s political objectives, he must synthesize a grand strategy out of his disparate means for addressing these perennial problems. It is precisely this combination of depth and breadth of understanding that, so far at least, seems to justify Thucydides’ contention that his case study of two great powers at war with each other for almost 30 years is valuable for all time. However, there is one problem that receives scant attention, with fairly good reason, from scholars of this war in general and students of Thucydides, in particular: civil-military relations. The very idea of civil-military relations seems rooted in modern conceptions of the state, which is built on multiple divisions of labor: between the state and society, church and state, citizen and soldier, statesman and general, to name but a few of the distinctions that organize how private citizens, the military, and political leaders relate to each other today. Indeed, the concept of a private citizen is modern in its origins and character, insofar as it implies certain rights, held by the individual, which the community has no authority to transgress. Much less so was this the case in ancient Greece, where every citizen was also a soldier, considered bound to risk his life to defend his community, which was superior in authority to the individual. This difference from modern understandings of citizens and soldiers was especially characteristic of ancient Athens, the mother of democracies, where every military leader was also an elected political official. In modern times, Clausewitz’s famous ‘trinity’ of (presumably) rational policy, chance and creativity, and primordial passion is embodied in the state, which, one hopes, leads political authorities to design rational policy goals, helps military leaders devise creative strategies to maximize the probability of attaining those goals, and keeps popular passion both supportive of the war at hand and under rational control. If Clausewitz is right to say that war ‘always’ embodies his trinity, then his trinitarian analysis applies to Athens as much as to any other community in time of war. Unlike modern, liberal, representative, constitutional democracies, however, Athens did not have a separation of powers that gave institutional embodi ment to the trinity in the people, government, and military.2 It therefore lacked an institutional means to differentiate the components of the trinity according to their functions. Many citizens were also soldiers, military officers, and political leaders at the same time. Thus, whether one focuses on relations between military and political leaders, or relations between

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 135

the armed forces and society, one cannot speak of civil-military relations in the modern sense in democratic Athens: they simply did not exist. If that were all one could say about relations between political and military authorities in Athenian democracy, this chapter would have to stop right here. There is more to Thucydides’ account of political-military affairs than initially meets the eye, however. To say that Athenian democracy lacked an institutional separation between military and political leaders is not the same as saying that the democracy was homogeneous. All political communities are divided into some sort of parts, with perhaps the most fundamental division being between leaders and followers. In turn, this division promotes political partisanship, understood as disputes over who governs and for what ends. The most common embodiment of that partisanship in ancient Greece, if not even everywhere at all times, was the enduring quarrel between the few, who are often rich, and the many, who are usually not rich. In Thucydides’ account, it also takes the form of supporters of traditional Athenian society, rooted deeply in piety toward the gods, and innovators, whose departure from custom was perceived as a threat to the religious bonds of the Athenian people. In turn, this religious factionalism seems linked to generational quarrels, between older political generals, like Nicias, who are full of caution, and younger political generals, like Alcibiades, who seem to throw all caution to the wind. Because these partisans have different personal and public ambitions, they frequently desire different policy goals in time of war and advocate different strategies to achieve them. The numerous speeches in Athens in Thucydides’ account reflect these enduring quarrels. They go far to explain why Athens went to war in the first place, why it sometimes sought peace, and why it continued to fight despite the growing costs of the war. Not least of all, they explain why the Athenians decided to undertake some-thing perhaps as daring and bold in the ancient Greek mind as the decision to land a man on the moon in the minds of Americans in the 1960s: the invasion of Sicily. Why did that ill-fated expedition fail? In large part, I suggest, because of dysfunctional relations between political and military leaders competing for power at home and separated by such a vast expanse of saltwater that, de facto, geography alone established a dangerous division between political authorities and military leaders over how to prosecute the war. An effort to understand why relations between political factions in Athens and military leaders in Sicily became dysfunctional over 2,500 years ago may vindicate Thucydides’ claim to have written something of timeless value by helping us understand the necessary foundation of effective civil-military relations in our own time. At the same time, an investigation of the relations between the Spartan general, Brasidas, and Spartan political leaders can help us understand the difficulty of matching strategy to policy when political leaders change their original political objectives and military leaders remain on the original political course. In other words, the cases of Brasidas and the Sicilian expedition reveal the classic problems likely to

136 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

arise when military leaders are subject to too little and too much political control. Civil-Military Relations Prior to the Sicilian Expedition Thucydides’ discussion of Brasidas, the most brilliant Spartan general of the war, may be considered a parable on the ways in which limited wars breed enormous friction between political and military leaders. By 425 BC, eight years of fighting between the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League and the Athenian-led Delian League had produced an unequal stalemate, in which Athens had the upper hand. The Spartan land power had been unable to find a decisive means to undermine the Athenian sea power (and vice versa), but the Athenians had inflicted a serious wound on the Spartans at Pylos, where they built a fort as a staging area from which the Helots, the greatly oppressed slaves who constituted the vast majority of Sparta’s population, waged guerrilla warfare against the Spartans. The Athenians wounded the Spartans even more by blockading c. 400 élite Spartan soldiers on the island of Sphacteria, just off the coast of Pylos. To gain permission to supply these soldiers, the Spartans made a truce with Athens, but at the price of surrendering their infant navy to Athens, thus losing years of hard labor spent trying to find the means to compete with Athens in its own element at sea. Worst of all, the Athenians eventually captured the Spartan garrison on Sphacteria, and with it, the cream of Spartan society, the sons of Sparta’s ruling oligarchy. Spartan morale was shaken, and so too was confidence in Sparta among its allies, because the soldiers who surrendered at Sphacteria seemed lesser men than those who had fought to the death against the Persians at Thermopolae. Hence, Sparta sued for peace, but the Athenians, under the leadership of the demagogue Cleon continued ‘grasping for more’ advantages unacceptable to the Spartans (4.21). Necessity being the mother of invention, the Spartans were thus compelled to adapt to Athenian intransigence with a peripheral operation that snowballed into the most decisive campaign of the socalled ‘Archidamean’ period of the war. Prior to the advent of air power, the options for land and sea powers fighting against each other seem to have been quite limited. To overthrow their enemy’s center of gravity they had to fight in their enemy’s element, though at the risk of fighting on their enemy’s terms. Sea powers had to develop the means to fight on land and land powers the forces to fight at sea. Initially at least, neither Athens nor Sparta could pursue this option, because it would probably have required a revolution in their different regimes. To support an army huge, disciplined, and well trained enough to challenge Sparta’s would have required a large number of Athenians to become full-time, essentially professional soldiers, supported by others, like the Helots in Sparta, who worked to feed, clothe, and house them. Thus, if Athens sought to become a land power as strong as Sparta, it risked transforming itself into an oligarchy, ruled by a military caste, like Sparta, and losing its democratic freedoms in the process. Conversely, a large and skilled

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 137

navy demanded so much wealth, based largely on trade and an entrepreneurial spirit requiring equality of opportunity, that Sparta would have had to abandon its traditional xenophobic ways and caste system, that is, become more like commercial Athens. Since few in Athens or Sparta were willing to sacrifice their traditional ways of life to win the war, this strategic option was not viable politically for either city, though it must be conceded that in many wars, sometimes the best, even the only, hope of victory is to risk political revolutions making one people much more like its most hated enemies than it would prefer. To be sure, finding allies capable of supplying Athens the land power it lacked or Sparta the sea power it did not yet possess in sufficient strength to challenge Athens was another option. This is why the Athenians sought alliances with Argos and some of the barbarian kingdoms, and Sparta sought alliances with Persia and the many cities of Sicily. Yet neither Athenian nor Spartan diplomacy was persuasive enough to gain firm support from such potential allies at this stage of the war. At the time of Pylos, neither Argos, nor Persia, nor the barbarians, nor the Sicilians were interested enough in such alliances for them to make a difference for Athens or Sparta. A third option is what some call ‘peripheral operations’, which leverage an advantage in one element, on land or sea, into an advantage in a different element. If a land power cannot threaten a sea power’s center of gravity (its navy) directly, with its own navy or naval forces of allies, it must use its army in such a way that it can undermine its opponent’s navy indirectly. Since after its defeat at Pylos, Sparta had lost its navy and had few allies capable of challenging Athens at sea, it could not confront Athens at sea. Employing its army to persuade or compel Athenian allies in Northern Greece to defect, however, was a promising means to use Sparta’s army to threaten Athens’ maritime hegemony. This would both deny Athens the tribute it needed to fund its navy and threaten its sea lines of communications to the Hellespont. To do so, the Spartans needed a general willing and able to take enormous risks, the sort who could march an army through quasi-hostile Thrace and Macedonia to attack the vital seaports that linked Athens to its principal sources of timber for building ships in northern Greece and grain from the Ukraine through the Bosphorus. It is not clear that anyone in Sparta thought success in such a campaign was likely, but it was worth a try. So the Spartans appointed Brasidas to lead a small polyglot force of c. 1, 000 men, including Helots promised freedom if they fought in the campaign, to inspire revolts among Athens’ allies. The problem for Sparta was that Brasidas succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. A gifted speaker for a Spartan, he conquered as much through fraud as by force. He portrayed Sparta as the liberator of the Greeks suffering Athenian domination in the Delian League so success-fully that he convinced several Athenian-controlled cities to revolt, thereby inspiring hope among other cities that Brasidas would come and free them of their need to pay tribute to Athens. His most spectacular success was in taking the coastal city of Amphipolis, from which Athens received timber for its ships and silver for its

138 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

treasury, and by which grain from the Bosphorus had to come to Athens. Control of Amphipolis thus gave Sparta a bargaining lever for negotiations with Athens. Although the Spartans began the war with the unlimited goal of overthrowing the Athenian empire, their defeat at Sphacteria, difficulties in containing Helot raids from Pylos, and perhaps most importantly, fears that neutral Argos, the next most formidable land power in the Peloponnese, would enter the war against them led them to reduce their goals to the limited end of a negotiated peace. Their primary objectives were to get their prisoners back and end the war with Athens before Argos intervened (4.117, 5.14). Brasidas’ victories made it possible for Sparta to negotiate a truce on equal terms with Athens, but apparently, Brasidas, whose rapid success far from home was already something of an embarrassment to Sparta’s often sluggish leaders, had his own ideas about the proper political goals for Sparta. After the Spartans and Athenians had agreed to a truce, Brasidas continued his campaign at Mende and Potidaea, in what appears to have been an effort to continue Sparta’s original political objective to overthrow Athens’ empire (4.123, 135). The temptation to do so must have been enormous. He was greeted as a hero in every city he liberated. Indeed, shortly after his death, the citizens of Amphipolis tore down the statues of their founders and erected monuments to Brasidas, who began to be worshipped as if he were a god (4.121, 5.11). Failure to liberate other Athenian-controlled cities, or worse, the surrender of captured cities for the sake of peace with Athens would be to abandon Brasidas’ original mission and violate his promises to protect liberated cities from Athens. His honor was at stake, both to continue the war and to refuse territorial concessions to Athens. As Michael Handel has observed, much tension in civil-military relations arises from what Clausewitz called the ‘grammar of war’, which tends toward absolute war by leading military leaders to escalate before their enemies do so against them, and the logic of war, which comes from outside of war, from politics, which requires statesmen to balance the costs and risks of alternative strategies against the value of their political objectives.3 In an age of real-time communications, perhaps, the divergence between Brasidas, who believed Sparta’s goals had to remain unlimited, and the Spartan oligarchs, who now required limited goals that would leave the Athenian empire intact, might have been settled quickly and even amicably, but the Spartans found it extremely difficult to communicate with Brasidas. Even sending him messages required Spartans to pass through hostile territory, and he did not appear to be disposed to accept what the messengers had to say, thus suggesting that technology alone cannot solve this kind of problem. Brasidas’ geographical distance from Sparta thus contributed to his political distance from Sparta’s leaders at home, who grew increasingly envious of his success in battle and determined to end the war as soon as possible. Their blunt way of telling him to slow down was to delay reinforcements for Brasidas’ command (4.108). Even then, the message did not seem to get through, as Brasidas continued to plan offensive operations during the truce, which leaders in Sparta and Athens hoped would be preliminary to a

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 139

general peace treaty between the two powers. According to Thucydides, the Peace of Nicias became possible only after two generals, Cleon from Athens and Brasidas, had been killed in battle at Amphipolis. Both were determined to continue the war: Cleon to distract public attention from his slanders and other crimes against his enemies at home; and Brasidas to earn glory for himself and advantage for Sparta by rolling back the Athenian empire (5.16). Those who focus on Bismarck’s quarrels with Moltke or Truman’s with MacArthur might therefore add Sparta’s problems in keeping Brasidas on a leash to their catalogue of the impact of limited war on tensions between political and military leaders that may lead to major mismatches between strategy and policy. Sparta desperately needed peace with Athens lest it become involved in a multi-front war against both Argos and Athens at the same time. This was the nightmare coalition that had the best chance of defeating the Spartans, and one that Brasidas, concentrating on his theater alone, failed to take into account and might even have provoked. By seeking unlimited victory, Sparta’s greatest and most successful general had become a threat to Sparta’s survival against its rivals. It is thus perhaps not too much to say that it was a blessing in disguise for Sparta that Brasidas was killed in combat at Amphipolis; otherwise, the Spartans might have needed to get rid of him themselves. How to impose political discipline on military commanders in remote theaters looms large in the immediate background of Thucydides’ account of the Sicilian expedition. Athens had a strong interest in Sicily even prior to the outbreak of the war. As the first sea power in Greece, Athens had a defensive interest in preventing Sparta’s ally, Corinth, the second greatest sea power, from gaining control of Corcyra’s navy, the third largest naval force in Hellas. Corcyra, however, was also on the sea route to Sicily, a major producer of grain that offered Athens some hope of an alternative to supplying itself with grain from the Ukraine, which the Persians might cut off if they gained control of the Bosphorus, or which the Spartans might sever if they convinced Athenian allies to rebel, or—worst of all cases for Athens—if both happened at the same time. To secure Sicily’s alternative source of grain, then, Athens needed to keep Corcyra on its side. The Athenians might well not have made the alliance with Corcyra that triggered the war with Sparta had it not been the case that they wanted at least a sphere of influence in Sicily, if not even to conquer and control the island as soon as practicable (1.44, 143; 2.65). So the Athenians sent several scouting missions to Sicily in the early years of the war to make allies among the island’s quarrelsome cities that might be useful to them in the future (3.86, 90, 115; 4.2, 65). In fact, the Athenian contingent that built the fort at Pylos and captured the Spartans at Sphacteria was originally one of those scouting missions. Demosthenes diverted it to Pylos, but his initial mission was to exploit whatever opportunities he could find to increase Athens’ influence in Sicily (4.2). Evidently, Athenians expected more from their scouts than mere reconnaissance. For example, two of the commanders of an earlier expedition to Sicily, Pythodoros and Sophocles, were banished, and another, Eurymedon, was

140 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

fined, after the Sicilians made peace among themselves at the Conference of Gela. Rather than credit the Sicilians with using skill-ful diplomacy to keep the Athenians out of the island, the Athenians assumed that when their commanders returned from Sicily empty-handed, without any booty or anything else to show for their labors, they had been bribed by the Sicilians to betray their mission (4. 65). These facts are important for two different reasons. First, they make it difficult to believe that, when the Athenians finally decided to invade Sicily, they did so for defensive purposes, such as preserving their credibility by aiding their allies in Sicily or preempting the Sicilians from sending a navy to help Sparta renew its war with Athens. For the Athenians, Sicily was a vulnerable target, offering both individuals and Athens as a community an opportunity for enormous plunder. The Athenians’ punishment of their failed commanders also supports the conclusion that any future commanders of expeditions to Sicily, whether they be reconnaissance missions or full-scale expeditions for conquest, would be reluctant to return to Athens with nothing to show for their efforts, or after suffering substantial casualties, lest they too be fined and ostracized, or even worse, slandered or executed by their political opponents as traitors to their city. Thucydides makes no explicit judgment about how Athens treated failed commanders. He leaves it to us to figure out that anyone who accepted the responsibility of directing Athenian forces in Sicily would also accept the risk of seeing his reputation and career destroyed if he did not produce results that seemed to justify the costs of what would eventually become the most expensive naval campaign in Athenian history. The Decision to Go to Sicily So why, precisely, did the Athenians decide to go to Sicily? Indeed, why do empires seek to expand at all? According to Athens’ ambassadors to Sparta prior to the war, Athens acquired its empire for the same reasons any community able to do so acquires an empire: fear of attack, the honor of command, and the promise of gain from exploiting the resources of the empire (1.76). Each of these motives played a role in the transformation of the Delian League, which began as a voluntary alliance, into an empire that even Pericles admitted had become a tyranny (1.99; 2.63). Lest the Persians return and win against a divided Greece, it was necessary to unite them under Athenian leadership. And power tastes good to the strong, who feel superior in rank, status, and prestige to the weak. Finally, the Delian League, which started with a common treasury for the common defense on the island of Delos, was the equivalent of the goose that laid the golden egg for Athens. Pericles transferred the treasury from Delos to Athens, where it enabled him, somewhat in the manner of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to fund enormous public-works projects, such as the Parthenon, that kept Athenians employed and earned Pericles votes. These three motives—fear, honor, and gain —proved too strong for the Athenians to resist, and, they claimed, would prove

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 141

too strong for anyone else to resist either, for it has always been the law, they claimed, for the strong to rule the weak (1.76). In 415 BC, after the Athenians arrived in full force in Sicily, they explained to the Camarinaeans, whom they were trying to convince to ally with Athens that fear, or national security, was their primary motive for the expedition. The Athenian ambassador, Euphemus, said that Athens came to support its allies and to prevent Sicilians aligned with the Spartans from attacking Athens (6.81–87). The problem is that there is scant historical evidence that Euphemus actually existed. His name is also related etymologically to the modern English word, euphemism, understood as a pleasing name for something inherently ugly. In other words, he may be fictional, someone who says what Thucydides knew Athenians were saying at the time in a manner that disassociates Thucydides himself from what was said. No doubt many Athenians said exactly what Thucydides has Euphemus say to the Sicilians, but there is no reason to believe that Thucydides believed that Euphemus’ explanation, or, rather, rationalization, had much relation to the truth. Despite the Athenians’ previous scouting missions to Sicily, Thucydides stresses Athenian ignorance about the size and wealth of the island, as well as the character of its inhabitants. Perhaps because the commanders of earlier expeditions had been banished from Athens, perhaps also because no one in Athens was in the mood to hear discouraging news, few seemed to understand that waging war against the Sicilians would require a level of effort at least as arduous as required for a war with Sparta (6.1). Or perhaps the Athenians wished to hear only good news. This seems to be the implication of Thucydides’ account of a remarkable deception campaign waged by Egesta, Athens’ ostensible ally in Sicily, against the Athenians. The Egestaeans begged for Athenian help to subdue their warlike neighbors, but the response of Athenian scouts seemed to be, ‘Who will pay for the expedition and how? Show us the money first.’ So the Egesteans invited Athenian scouts to a banquet at the home of the wealthiest man in Egestea. The Athenians were impressed, but wanted to see more. Obligingly, the Egesteans invited the Athenians to a series of banquets in the homes of their wealthy leaders. The Athenians were thus led to believe that everyone in Egesta was as rich as Midas, though in fact the Egestaeans were pursuing a Potemkin strategy (i.e. a strategy of showing false wealth). They had collected all the gold and silver banquet ware in their city and moved it from house to house to create the illusion that they could easily defray the cost of any expedition sent to aid them (6.6–7, 46). Thucydides does not draw the conclusion from this story; we are compelled to do so on our own. As P.T.Barnum said, a sucker is born every day, and as con men often say, you can’t cheat an honest man. The Athenians wanted to believe that an expedition to Sicily would cost them nothing, and, like deception planners everywhere, the Egestaeans, having figured out what the Athenians wanted to believe, obliged with evidence confirming their most ardent desire.

142 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

So a key reason the Athenians went to Sicily was general ignorance, at least in the popular assemblies that approved the mission, based on lack of information about the island, a predisposition to filter out unpromising information, and a collective passion to try to get rich quickly. In this respect, they seemed susceptible to the ‘irrational exuberance’ that Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, ascribed to the bull market of the United States in the 1990s. Since citizens brought inside the city during the Spartans’ yearly invasions of Attica often lost their means of making a living, service in the Athenian navy was one crucial means of keeping a mass of displaced people gainfully employed. Indeed, naval service became a popular addiction for the Athenians, with this enormous consequence: to gain work, the Athenians had to conjure up reasons to keep their navy active, with the most grandiose missions being most attractive to those most needing employment. Since each citizen could vote directly in the assembly on the missions of the navy, the poorest and most numerous group of Athenian citizens had both the means and the motive to vote themselves work by voting for ever-more ambitious operations. Hence, said Thucydides, those who supported the expedition were full of dreams of ‘a neverending fund of pay for the future’, either from booty taken in Sicily, or by rowing back and forth between Athens and Sicily as the Athenians sought to support a new empire on that island (6.24). Not least of all, a desire for honor inclined the frequently impetuous Athenians to wish for adventures far from home. During the Peace of Nicias, a new generation had grown of military age and was not inclined to spend its youth on guard duty on the long walls (6.24). The most ambitious of the younger generation was Alcibiades, who was arguably the most brilliant Athenian general in this war. For him, honor and wealth went hand in hand. He showered money on racehorses to win honor at the Olympics and other games for his chariots. The empire handed down to him by his ancestors was also too small, since it was more glorious to acquire new allies and conquests than to preserve the old. If the Athenians were to meet the challenge of Pericles’ funeral oration, to exceed the accomplishments of their ancestors (2.43), then the only way to rival the older generation was to expand. The choice for Athens, the silver-tongued playboy said, was to expand or die. How far did Athens need to expand to preserve itself? In his speech in Athens in favor of the expedition, Alcibiades insisted the Athenians must go at least as far as Sicily, and probably to Carthage, the rising power of North Africa (6.15). In a subsequent speech after his defection to Sparta, he put all his cards on the table: with the resources of Sicily and Carthage behind them, the Athenians might be strong enough to challenge the Spartans successfully on land, as Alcibiades had originally planned for the ill-fated battle of Mantinea. Athens might then turn the Mediterranean into an Atheniandominated lake. As a result, it might rule the known civilized world, as Rome would do later. (6.90).4 Of course, not everyone shared Alcibiades’ breathtaking ambition. His main political rival, Nicias, had been the architect of the peace with Sparta. Though

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 143

the peace had eroded substantially, securing what Athenians possessed before grasping for more still seemed most rational to Nicias, the wealthiest man in Athens, who wanted to invest Athenian resources cautiously. In his first speech against Alcibiades prior to the expedition, Nicias only hinted at the strategic alternatives to the Sicilian expedition, but there were many reasonable ones (6. 10). The Spartans still possessed Amphipolis, so if the Athenians needed activity, securing the rear of their empire seemed the best use of their resources. The high costs of tribute to Athens from the allies continued to make them restless, so there was sound reason to consolidate the loyalty of the allies too. Perhaps most importantly, even Nicias knew that the peace that bears his name was at best a protracted truce. If détente with the Spartans proved impossible, the Athenians had to remain true to Pericles’ grand strategy for the war. They had to deal with their most formidable enemy before expanding the empire (1.65). Caution did not necessarily mean remaining on the defensive, however. Attica was still vulnerable to attack through the Megarian land bridge, so perhaps one more attempt to do what the Athenians tried in the first ten years of the war, to capture Megara, was worthy of a massive effort (2.3; 2.31; 3.51; 4.68–74). If Athens controlled that land bridge, it would be able to threaten Sparta’s principal ally, Corinth, and split the Peloponnesian League by isolating Sparta and Corinth from Thebes. Once isolated, Thebes would have been much more vulnerable to Athens and would perhaps even have made a separate peace. In turn, Athens would have been much safer from a combined assault from the three main powers of the Peloponnesian League. Or Athens could find another place, like Pylos, from which to inspire further Helot revolts. It might then resurrect the alliance with Argos and challenge Sparta on land. It might even try several or all of these options at the same time rather than risk overextending itself in Sicily, a new theater not vital to Athens’ survival. Despite Nicias’ efforts to dissuade them, the Athenians still inclined in favor of the expedition, so he tried an indirect approach. Even if Alcibiades’ original vision for the expedition were a good idea, it was too small, he argued, to accomplish anything substantial. This was probably true, so the Athenians needed to choose between giving up the expedition altogether or more than doubling the size of the original force of ships and hoplites, as well as the supplies and money required to sustain them. Assuming the Athenians were prudent investors, Nicias hoped that they would therefore reject the expedition as too costly, but not for the last time, Nicias’ indirect approach backfired on him (6.19, 24). The Athenians heartily endorsed his proposal for an expanded force, thinking that an augmented force would be safe from all disasters. To make certain this would be the case, they made Nicias one of the joint commanders of the expedition, along with Alcibiades (his primary political enemy) and Lamachus. Nicias’ indirect approach suggests that it was often difficult to give honest advice to the Athenian democracy. Indeed, in one of the most famous debates in Athens, between Cleon and Diodotus, it seems that ‘the best counselors’

144 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

increasingly found themselves ‘obliged’ to ‘lie in order to be believed’ (3.43). This was partly because slander was becoming an increasingly common weapon in Athenian political debates, but also because no one had the stature of Pericles, who was able to raise or lower Athenian spirits while speaking frankly to Athenians about his worry that their own blunders were the greatest danger to Athenian security. Lesser statesmen relied more on flattery, or at any rate, were reluctant to risk the anger of the assembly, which might banish or fine them, as the assembly had fined Pericles and banished Themistocles (2.65). In sum, Nicias’ speech reveals the extent to which frank and honest political discussion, serving prudent political calculation, was breaking down in Athens, where the wildest promises seemed to be gaining the most enthusiastic support and cautious advice was becoming the road to political suicide. In addition to this problem of candor, which may be a problem in any democracy, Athens had a unique problem of its own: reconciling leaders of different political factions to their political opponents’ possession of military command. In modern, especially democratic and constitutional, nation-states, which assume the subordination of military to political authorities, there is a strong aversion to divided commands because of the dangers of disagreement and confusion among the commanders. Not so in Athens, where generals were also elected officials. If the leader of one political faction had sole control of a substantial military force, his political opponents would need to fear that that force might be used against them. Hence, it was not uncommon for political opponents to be appointed to share command. It made them and their followers feel safe from their rivals, though at the risk of ruinous quarrels among the commanders when they led their forces in the field. The need to reconcile such factions thus helps us understand why leaders as diverse in their overall strategies as Nicias, Alcibiades, and Lamachus shared control of the expedition. Prior to the expedition, Nicias may have found a means to undermine Alcibiades once and for all, however. A wave of vandalism, the mutilation of the statues of Hermes, swept over Athens. Traditional Athenians were shocked at such impiety, which they associated with a threat to the democracy itself, and why not? If men lost respect for the authority of the gods, why would they retain respect for the authority of the democracy? At this stage of the war, every Athenian knew that his city, though free at home, practiced tyranny over its allies abroad (2.63; 3.37; 5.89). If tyranny was legitimate abroad, why not at home? And who would want to be a tyrant? Those who seemed most liberated from custom and ancestral ways, the younger generation, whose greatest symbol in the public eye was Alcibiades, that and rogynous libertine who accepted no limits on his ambitions for wealth, power, glory, and sexual partners. Athenians had to punish those who feared no laws of god or man. They had to get to the source of the problem, to discover and execute the ringleaders, lest they corrupt the rest of the society. It is not certain that Nicias inspired his followers to initiate the witch hunt that began in Athens over the mutilation of the statues, but Thucydides does say that ‘When Alcibiades was implicated in this charge, it was taken up by

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 145

those who could least endure him, because he stood in their way of obtaining the undisturbed leadership of The People’ (6.28). If Alcibiades was convicted of impiety, then Nicias was most likely to benefit. He would then have been left merely with Lamachus as co-commander and have had greater odds of ensuring that the Athenian forces came home quickly and safely, which seemed to be his primary concern at the beginning of the campaign. To the extent that Nicias was willing to play such cutthroat political games, we should not wonder that later in the expedition he feared that his political rivals in Athens might take revenge on him if any-thing went wrong. If he was willing to get his major rival and military colleague killed, might not his rivals try the same against him? All they would need would be a pretext, which Nicias was determined to avoid giving them by avoiding all unnecessary risks. As it turns out, Alcibiades offered to stand trial before the expedition sailed from Athens, but his enemies decided it would be easier to convict him if he were not able to defend himself in Athens. So the Athenians let him share command as the expedition sailed, though he was charged with a capital crime (6. 29). The big questions were what the Athenians would do when they got to Sicily, and whether Alcibiades could hold on to his command while his enemies were plotting his downfall. Athens and Syracuse The Athenians developed three options for using their army and navy when they arrived in Sicily. One, advocated by Lamachus, was a direct attack on Syracuse, the most powerful city in Sicily and another democracy approximately as large as Athens. Lamachus apparently relied on the surprise and shock at the size of the Athenian forces to weaken Syracusean morale. Whether the Syracuseans fell fighting outside their walls or as a result of a siege, once Syracuse had capitulated, the rest of the island would be vulnerable to Athens. Alcibiades took a more diplomatic approach. Although it was disappointing to the Athenians to learn that their ostensible ally, Egestea, had deceived them about the amount of wealth it could provide to pay for the expedition, it was possible to conquer Sicily by dividing it. If the Athenians gathered allies among the Sicilians and then advanced on Syracuse, they would be stronger than when they first arrived. Syracuse would fall and the rest of Sicily’s cities would make the best terms they could with the Athenians and their allies. Since Nicias did not approve of the expedition, he had the most cautious strategy of all. He wanted to sail around the island, show the flag with a perfunctory fulfillment of Athens’ promise to aid Egestea, and go home without having put Athenian forces in unnecessary danger, that is, without risking anything for which he could be blamed in Athens. (6.47–49) Since neither Lamachus nor Alcibiades wanted to return emptyhanded and Lamachus’ bold plan was apparently too risky, the Athenians adopted the plan of Alcibiades, who was soon recalled to Athens to face charges and almost certain execution. Rather than do so, he jumped ship, defected to

146 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Sparta, confirmed Sparta’s worst fears about Athens’ unlimited ends, and suggested a plan that the Spartans would soon adopt to bleed Athens on two fronts: fortifying Decelea in Attica (thus cutting off Athens from its silver mines at Laurium and offering a sanctuary for slaves escaping from the mines), and sending immedi ate reinforcements to Syracuse (6.53, 61, 89–92). By default, then, the cautious Nicias and the bold Lamachus were left in command in Sicily, but Lamachus was killed in combat outside of Syracuse (6.101), thus leaving the indecisive Nicias alone in charge of the expedition. This needs to be stressed: Thucydides does not say this expedition was bound to fail. In light of the initial defeats of the Syracuseans when the Athenians first attacked, Lamachus’ plan, which denied the Syracuseans opportunity to mobilize both materially and psychologically, looks like a winner. For all his faults as a human being, Alcibiades was no fool. Indeed, Thucydides has little but praise for him in his public capacity as a political leader and a military commander (6.15). It would have been extremely difficult for Athens to hold anything it conquered in Sicily, but perhaps Athens did not need to occupy much or even any Sicilian territory. If Athens used its allies in Sicily effectively, and left Syracuse no time or room to recover, then it could sell all of the Syracuseans into slavery after their city had been conquered, as the Athenians had already done to the women and children of Melos (the men were executed) (5.116). The wealth acquired thereby would have more than paid for the expedition and other Sicilian cities might well have hopped on the Athenian bandwagon, thus enabling Athens to dominate the island through proxies. This risked that nearby Carthage would intervene to protect itself, but Carthage was next on Alcibiades’ list of targets. It would exhaust Athens’ treasury to fight Carthage with Athenian resources alone, but if the wealth and manpower of Sicily were used for that end, then the risks would go down significantly and the leverage Athens would have acquired against the Peloponnesian League through the conquest of Carthage would have increased substantially. In the end, Alcibiades’ ambitions were so unlimited that he was bound to overextend the Athenians somewhere, if he were allowed to lead by himself, but Sicily did not have to be the place where the Athenian empire discovered its limits. This much is certain: in Thucydides’ account, Alcibiades is the most brilliant Athenian general, one capable of giving sound strategic advice to Athenians, Spartans, and Persians alike. Indeed, after the failure of the Sicilian expedition, it was Alcibiades, who eventually regained the trust of the Athenians, who saved Athens from almost certain ruin when the army was threatening to give up Samos, a key to their empire, in order to crush a coup against the democracy in Athens (8.86). So this expedition had more than a chance of success, provided it was executed with skill, that is, provided almost anyone but the indecisive Nicias had been in charge of it. What made Nicias indecisive? Thucydides lists a variety of reasons. He had been appointed to the command against his will (6.8). He was also an old and pious man with more than a little superstition (7.50). He had also been a fairly successful commander at Cythera and elsewhere, and was not inclined to push

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 147

his luck or risk his reputation by any decision that resembled a gamble. Most important, he knew that the price for failure in Sicily could be lethal for him at home in Athens, so he was not inclined to do anything that might lead his soldiers to complain about his leader-ship in Sicily. De facto, geography alone had separated him from the political authority of the Athenians. Hence, something very like the division of labor between modern civil and military leaders now clearly applied to the Sicilian expedition, with Nicias responsible for success, but worried mainly about becoming the scapegoat for failure. So Nicias took the most cautious approach to defeating Syracuse, one that protracted the campaign and gave the Syracuseans numerous chances to recover from the Athenian onslaught and adopt innovative strategies, first to survive, and then to destroy the Athenians (6.63). Just as Clausewitz requires us to come to terms with the fog of war, so Thucydides forces us to pay attention to the fog of politics. Had Nicias known, or known more, about the political situation within democratic Syracuse, he would have had good reason to throw some caution to the wind. Prior to the arrival of the Athenians in Sicily, a major debate took place in Syracuse between Hermocrates, perhaps the wisest statesman in Thucydides’ story of the war, and Athenagoras, a wily demagogue of great influence in the city. Hermocrates was the leader of the oligarchic faction in Syracuse, but he also had a Churchillian prescience about the growing threat to Sicily from Athens. He had warned the Sicilians that their best hope of survival was to unite against the common threat and save their internecine quarrels for another day (4.59–64). In the face of increasing evidence that Athens’ armada was approaching, he later called on the Syracuseans to do something bold and unprecedented, at least for them. Like Lamachus, Hermocrates believed in the power of shock to weaken an enemy’s confidence. He argued that the Syracuseans needed to mobilize their navy and surprise the Athenian navy off the coast of Rhegium, just as the Athenians had surprised the Persians off the coast of Salamis more than 50 years before. This was a high-risk, high-gain Mahanian strategy for a decisive battle, and ironically, one that cast Syracuse as a new Athens against an Athens that Hermocrates portrayed as a new Persia, with he himself reserved for the role of serving as a Syracusean Themistocles, the admiral who had led the Athenians to victory earlier against the Persians at Salamis. If the Syracuseans lost, they would lose everything, but if they won, they might rise in Sicily as Athens had risen in Ionia to become the dominant power in their region (6.33–34). Athenagoras, however, was not impressed. He could not believe the Athenians would attempt anything so risky as an attack on Syracuse, a city as large as Athens, while still preoccupied with the threat from Sparta. The war hysteria Hermocrates was stirring up had to serve some ulterior motive, he suggested. Recognizing that defeating Athens might require a transformation of the Syracusean regime, he was reluctant to see his dem ocratic faction commit political suicide to save the city. In time of war, it would be the wealthy few who commanded and manned much of Syracuse’s forces, but if there was no serious

148 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

threat of war with Athens, the wealthy few would have an opportunity to use the army to crush their political opponents in the popular faction, including their leader, Athenagoras himself. To save the democracy (and Athenagoras’ neck), then, it was essential not to hand military power to the oligarchs. It was essential to keep the army and navy small, so that the oligarchs would not even think of overthrowing the democracy because they lacked the means to do so (6.36–41). The result of this distrust between political factions competing for control of the military in Syracuse was that Syracuse was woefully unprepared for the Athenians when they first landed. So long as Syracuse was divided internally, the Athenians had a good chance of victory through political warfare, that is, by getting one side to betray the city to Athens in order to save itself. So long as Syracuse was unprepared and demoralized by the sheer size of the Athenian army and navy, the odds favored the Athenians, provided they acted quickly and with overwhelming force. Nicias and the Debacle at Syracuse As the battle at Syracuse unfolded, the role of intangibles in war became ever more evident in Thucydides’ account. Chance events, unexpected reactions, fog, friction, uncertainty, elated and depressed morale, unintended consequences, the personalities of commanders—in short, all the chaos and irrationality that characterize a battlefield—grew in importance with every day of the campaign. Temporarily, the Athenian navy bottled up the Syracuseans by sea. The Syracusean army was also defeated outside the city, but Syracusean cavalry prevented the Athenians from an effective pursuit and the army survived to fight again another day (6.70). Believing they needed more supplies and reinforcements, especially in cavalry, Nicias and Lamachus decided not to press the campaign with an immediate siege of Syracuse. Instead, they took up winter quarters in Catana (6.88), thus enabling the Syracuseans to recover from their initial defeat with further training, by extending their walls to make a siege by circumvallation more difficult, by arranging for the secret aid of ostensibly neutral Camerina, and by calling for immediate aid from Sparta (6.71–75, 88). Lacking much cavalry of their own, the Athenians, at Nicias’ command, opted to build a double-sided siege wall to protect themselves both from forays from within Syracuse and from Syracusean cavalry behind their lines. Such caution helped protect Nicias’ forces, but it doubled the time required to complete the wall around Syracuse. Further delaying the investment of the city, Nicias spent considerable time building forts to protect his supplies (6.97). All this gave the Syracuseans time to improvise. If the Athenians completed their siege walls around Syracuse, it was all but certain that they would starve the Syracuseans into surrender. So the Syracuseans built several counterwalls designed to outflank the Athenian envelopment. The battle became a race between the walls, with the Athenians aiming to cut off the Syracuseans completely and the

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 149

Syracuseans struggling desperately to block them and thereby keep open a line of supply (6.98–103). By the end of the sixth book of Thucydides’ account, it looks as if the Syracuseans, for all their adaptability and heroic labor, are finished. The Athenians were about to turn around Syracuse’s last counterwall, and inside the city the Syracuseans were discussing whether they ought to surrender to Athens (6.103). Had they done so, Nicias, the goat of this campaign, would have been heralded in Athens and throughout history as one of the most brilliant generals who ever lived. By refusing to take unnecessary risks, he would have achieved a completely decisive victory far from home and secured his position as the most influential political and military leader in Athens. Unfortunately, however, Nicias’ caution gave time for something completely unexpected to happen. The race of the walls was also a race to envelop Syracuse before Sparta and Corinth could send reinforcements to Syracuse. The commander of Sparta’s reinforcements, Gyllipus, upon hearing false news that Syracuse had surrendered, was about to turn back at Rhegium, but then heard reports that Syracuse was still not subdued (6.104, 7.1). Uncharacteristically for a Spartan, he rushed to get to Sicily and march to Syracuse as fast as possible. Failing to take the small naval force transporting Gyllipus’ reinforcements seriously, Nicias decided not to intercept the inferior Spartan-Corinthian navy, which transported the Spartan soldiers from Greece to Italy and Italy to Sicily (6.105). Just as the Syracuseans were about to ask terms of the Athenians, news arrived from a Corinthian naval squadron that had slipped into Syracuse that the Spartans were outside the city. So the Syracuseans decided to wait on the course of events (7.2). Though Nicias’ 5,000 hoplites outnumbered Gyllipus’s 1,700-man force substantially, Nicias remained inactive, perhaps for fear that Syracuse would attack his rear if he attacked Gyllipus. The Spartan general, however, was much more decisive and used the opportunity to capture Labdallum, a vital Athenian supply depot, the loss of which further weakened Nicias’ will for decisive battle (7.3). Perhaps the most impressive point in this story is that victory for Athens and defeat for Syracuse depended on a matter of hours. Had the Spartans arrived 24 hours later, Syracuse might well have surrendered and the Spartans would have been forced to go home. Had Nicias been slightly less cautious, had he started the siege in the winter rather than in the spring, the Athenians would have turned the last Syracusean counterwall a half a day, a day, a week, a month, or even a season earlier, and the same result would likely have happened. So Nicias’ caution, born partly of fear of political reprisals against him in Athens, was largely responsible for Athens’ failure to exploit the opportunity to defeat Syracuse while it was alone and isolated. The situation was not hopeless, however. The Athenians still had a larger force than the combined force of the Spartans and the Syracuseans. The aid Sparta supplied to Syracuse was principally moral: it gave the city hope of survival. Several battles occurred to control forts outside the city, but the result was a stalemate. Not until the Syracuseans built a last counterwall outflanking the

150 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Athenian siege wall did Syracuse have a clear hope that it would survive the Athenian assault. Nicias could not convince the Syracuseans to surrender and the Syracuseans could not convince him to withdraw. His options at this point included withdrawal with the bulk of his army and navy intact, either by going somewhere else in Sicily or by retreating to Athens. He could also ask for reinforcements from Athens to turn the tide in what had now become a battle of attrition. In a lengthy letter to the Athenian people, the political leadership supervising his command, he seemed to advocate reinforcements, but bearing in mind his habit of pursuing his goals with the Athenian assembly indirectly, in reality he was begging for orders to withdraw. Among other things, the letter is a studied effort to avoid responsibility for failure. Nicias pleaded illness, so he begged the Athenians to send someone else to share his command, that is, someone he could pass the buck to if the mission failed. The growing decline of Athens’ army, now hampered by sickness and harassed ever more by Syracusean cavalry, was not his fault, but that of the swampy terrain and perhaps even of the Athenians for failing to send him enough cavalry. The navy, with its ships rotting in the water, was immobilized not because Nicias failed to use it aggressively, but because there were no proper docks and dry docks. Trying the same escalatory approach that first led him to advocate doubling the size of the expedition in Athens in order to dissuade the Athenians from undertaking the mission, he now asked for reinforcements equal in size to that of the force the Athenians originally sent. As a prudent investor, Nicias must have believed the Athenians would decide not to throw good money after bad. Following the logic of a Clausewitzian rational calculus of war, they would reassess the campaign and decide that the costs and risks of the expedition outweighed any advantages they were likely to gain.5 Especially after the outbreak of renewed war with Sparta in Attica, the Athenians would give him orders to withdraw, which would place the responsibility for retreat on their shoulders rather than his own. Once again, however, Nicias was surprised by the reaction of his people, who trusted him completely, in large part because his piety toward the gods made them think he would never lie to them. His strategy to with-draw and save his reputation backfired when the Athenians decided to give him what he said he wanted, but actually feared: reinforcements that doubled the size of the force in Sicily and committed the bulk of the army and navy far from home, where it was most needed (7.8–16). In the mean-time, the besieger had become the besieged, as Gyllipus, Hermocrates, and the Syracuseans initiated a concerted effort to bottle up the Athenian navy in the harbor and prevent the escape of the Athenian army. The Athenian decision to reinforce failure in Sicily while the Spartans had opened a second front in Attica seems highly irrational, because that second front changed the nature of the war much to Athens’ disadvantage; but perhaps the wisest thing the Athenians did was send Demosthenes (and Eurymedon) to share command with Nicias. Upon his arrival at Syracuse, Demosthenes decided

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 151

that Nicias had wasted too much time, too much treasure, and too many Athenian lives. The Athenians simply ‘could not drag on and fare as Nicias had done’. The Syracuseans’ morale had plummeted when they saw Demosthenes’ forces arrive and Athenian confidence was restored to its normal state of arrogance. So now was the time to exploit the shock of their doubled force for maximum advantage. If there was any chance of rescuing victory from this self-inflicted debacle, the Athenians had to act immediately, with a massive assault at night on the high ground outside Syracuse, at Epipolae, which would enable them to complete the circumvallation of Syracuse and force its surrender. If that failed, they would need to withdraw immediately, while there was still time to save the expedition (7.42). As was true in the race of the walls, the night assault came dangerously close to succeeding, as the Athenians surprised the Syracuseans, but friction happens. Unable to distinguish friend or foe at night, the Athenians began to attack each other, and, still worse, believed their enemies had surrounded them. So they panicked in the night, gave up the ground they gained, and returned to their encampments. There was now no hope of enveloping the city. Demosthenes was nothing if not decisive, however. He pressed Nicias to order an immediate withdrawal, so the Athenians could go home and defend Attica from the new Spartan front. Nicias, however, was torn between his fondest hopes and his most dreadful fears. On the one hand, he had been negotiating with a party inside Syracuse to open the gates and surrender the city to him. This was the standard operating procedure in Athenian political warfare. It had worked many times before, most recently during the Athenian siege of Melos (5.116), so there was no reason to believe it could not work in Sicily. If it succeeded, he could survive the campaign with his reputation not only intact, but much enhanced. On the other hand, he did not wish to take responsibility to order the withdrawal, saying that ‘he was sure the Athenians would never approve of their return without a vote of theirs’ in the assembly. Back home in Athens, when the inevitable investigation of the failed expedition began, those ‘who would vote upon their conduct, instead of judging the facts as eyewitnesses like themselves and not from what they might hear from hostile critics, would simply be guided by the calumnies of the most clever speaker’. Indeed, many, perhaps ‘most of the soldiers on the spot, who now so loudly proclaimed the dangers of their position, when they reached Athens would proclaim just as loudly the opposite, and would say that their generals had been bribed to betray them to return’. So Nicias, Demosthenes, and Eurymedon would suffer the same fate of previous Athenian commanders in Sicily, and probably even worse, given the size of their losses. ‘For himself, therefore’, Nicias, ‘who knew the Athenian temper, sooner than perish under a dishonorable charge and by an unjust sentence at the hands of the Athenians, he would rather take his chance and die, if die he must, a soldier’s death at the hands of the enemy’ (7.48–49). In light of Nicias’s well-founded fears of punishment, Demosthenes had little choice but to compromise with Nicias. If Nicias would not order evacuation to Athens, then why not abandon Syracuse and find somewhere else to land in

152 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Sicily, where the army would still be the largest force on land and the navy would acquire freedom to maneuver? (7.49). So the debate continued until reinforcements arrived from Sparta for Gyllipus that increased the Syracuseans’ hope of defeating the Athenians by land as well as by sea. Now even Nicias was willing to relent and allow evacuation, so long as there was ‘no open voting’ among the commanders for the with-drawal, thus giving Nicias some political cover for a decision that could destroy his career and jeopardize his life. Yet an eclipse of the moon worried the soldiers greatly and Nicias even more. It was seen as an omen of disaster in the field for the soldiers and perhaps of political suicide in Athens for Nicias. He refused to allow the evacuation for 27 days, the period prescribed by the soothsayers to assure the support of the gods (7.50). The rest is tragic denouement in the greatest prose ever written on a battle. The time for making a successful retreat passed quickly. Aware that the Athenians wished to evacuate but feared to do so until they had satisfied their soothsayers, the Syracuseans gave them no time to recover and mounted another attack on the Athenian fleet in the harbor, which proved decisive. It struck a blow against the Athenians’ confidence that their navy could rescue them in the end. The Athenians had no hope but desperation and mounted one last effort to fight their way out of the harbor. Lacking room to maneuver in the crowded harbor against an adversary afraid to let them leave and determined to win the highest glory by capturing every last Athenian, the Athenians, though straining every fiber of muscle and emotion in the attempt, could not break the Syracusean blockade. Although the Athenian navy was still numerically superior to the Syracuseans’, the sailors’ morale was crushed. Losing confidence in themselves, some seemed to think the gods were against them; in turn, thinking the gods were against them increased their hopelessness. The Athenians were thus defeated in mind and spirit before they were defeated in battle. They refused Demosthenes’ anguished pleas to make one last attempt to break the blockade, thus leaving no hope but retreat by land. The equivalent of a small city, 40,000 Athenians abandoned their wounded, their sick, and their baggage, and sought to slip out by land at night, with Nicias leading one division and Demosthenes another. The divisions became separated in the night, however, and the Syracuseans and their allies, who now included citizens from most other cities in Sicily, surrounded both. Those not killed in the retreat, were enslaved and sent to the mines. Demosthenes and Nicias were murdered. The Athenians were ‘beaten at all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with total a destruction, their fleet, their army—everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned. Such were the events in Sicily’ (7.87). Implications for Our Time The contrast between Brasidas at Amphipolis and Nicias in Sicily suggests that civil-military relations can go wrong in many different ways. The example of Brasidas suggests the dangers arising from the tacticization of strategy, when

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 153

generals act independently of political control, and strategy acts as if it were autonomous rather than an instrument of policy.6 The example of Nicias points in a different direction, however, toward what happens when politics undermines the judgment of commanders in the field. Had the Athenians followed Nicias’ sage advice, they would not have gone to Sicily. They could have secured their empire at home by retaking Amphipolis or gaining Megara. With the aid of Argos, they could have renewed the war with Sparta on more favorable terms by another attack on Sparta, with the objective of overthrowing Sparta’s center of gravity, its army, in what was now clearly an unlimited war for survival. They could have inspired further slave revolts in Sparta. They could have tried all these things, but, having decided to go to Sicily, they ought not to have made Nicias, whose heart was never in the expedition, one of its commanders. Only Lamachus and Alcibiades had the aggressive temperaments required to make the risky endeavor succeed, but chance removed one in battle and a witch hunt in Athens turned the other into a traitor. With Nicias in command, Athens had a chance to win at Syracuse, but only if Sparta failed to intervene quickly. Leaving Nicias in command gave the Syracuseans time to recover. Sparta, never known for its speed of decision or execution, but urged on to action now by Alcibiades, opted to bleed Athens in a new peripheral operation that cost Sparta little and Athens most of its army and navy in Sicily. Perhaps as late as the eclipse that led the superstitious Nicias to delay evacuation, the Athenians had a chance to withdraw without over-whelming losses. Perhaps chance, the most unpredictable god of battles, intervened a hundred times to turn the scales against the Athenians. Most impressive in Thucydides’ account, however, is the sense that while Nicias lost the battles at Syracuse, the campaign was lost in Athens. Knowing the fate of previous commanders when they returned to Athens after failing in Sicily, Nicias was unwilling to take necessary risks that might have produced victory and equally unwilling to take those that might have averted disaster by a timely evacuation. Precisely because he feared the Athenian assembly, he lied to the Athenians not once, but twice; first, by exaggerating the likely costs of the initial expedition, and, second, by exaggerating the possibility that reinforcements could save the expedition (rather than admitting publicly that he had failed and saying it was time to retreat). Some might look to Thucydides’ account of this war for evidence that democracies cannot fight protracted wars. Some might even say that Thucydides himself believed that democracies are incapable of devising and sustaining effective strategy. Yet these conclusions are not supported by the facts of the Sicilian expedition. Two out of the eight books in Thucydides’ story pit one democracy, Athens, against another, Syracuse. Sparta helped, but did not decide the campaign in Sicily. It was Syracuse, primarily, that defeated Athens. The dramatic climax of Thucydides’ account shows us some of the best and the worst of which democracies are capable in time of war, with Syracuse coming off like the younger Athens that defeated the Persians in the Persian Wars (and Athens a

154 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

bit like Persia v. Athens earlier). Hence, Thucydides’ account is fair-minded. It forces democrats of all times and all ages to look themselves in a mirror showing both remarkable virtues and appalling vices, so they may begin to know themselves as well as their enemies. As both the Greek oracle at Delphi and Sun Tzu might say, such self-knowledge is a preliminary to sound strategic thinking, indeed to any wisdom about human things.7 Instead of treating Thucydides as an unabashed critic of democracy at war, we would do better to see him, among many other things, as a student of the effects of tyranny on strategy. Athenian civil-military relations became dysfunctional because Athens, a ‘democracy’ in name, had become a tyranny in fact; first over its empire, and then at home, during the witch hunt against those suspected of impiety and in its handling of failed military commanders, for example. In turn, this tyranny made it impossible for military and political authorities to speak honestly to each other. Nicias especially feared to tell the truth to the Athenians, lest he pay with his head. He refused to assume the responsibility for his command because the price of failure was lethal to him, and it continued to be lethal for other Athenian commanders. After the Sicilian expedition, the Athenians fought the largest naval battle of the war against the Spartans at Arginusae. The surprising upset after their self-destruction in Sicily even led the Spartans to offer peace. Yet in their haste to pursue the fleeing Spartan fleet, and thereby regain control of the sea, the eight Athenian admirals in charge were unable or unwilling to rescue approximately a thousand Athenian sailors swimming besides their sunken ships. Tragically, all of them drowned. In Athens, where every citizen could name a relative among the drowned sailors, these eight admirals were prosecuted for negligence, though they had saved their city by defeating the Spartan fleet. All eight generals were convicted and sentenced to death, though two, seeing the writing on the wall, fled the city before the trial.8 According to Machiavelli, the Romans were wiser about punishing their officers. No matter how badly a commander failed in the field, punishment was limited to his removal from office. The Romans knew too well that success in battle depends on taking necessary risks, which requires commanders willing to accept the responsibility to take such risks. Rather than undermine the responsibility of generals in the field, they preferred to let even the most incompetent escape punishment for defeat (and no less important, to allow more competent generals to claim the glory of success).9 The breakdown in Athenian civil-military relations during the Sicilian expedition points toward what is most necessary in healthy civil-military relations: honest dialogue. As Handel observes, both to preserve the constitutional supremacy of civil over military authorities and to ensure the primacy of policy over strategy, the conversation has to be one-sided, with those responsible for making policy having the dominant say. Yet, says Clausewitz, policy is not a tyrant.10 It can neither demand more from the military than the military can deliver nor refuse to hear the truth from those responsible for formulating strategy. So civil-military relations must be a two—way street, a genuine

THUCYDIDES ON DEMOCRATIC POLITICS AND CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS 155

conversation, with those responsible for military command given an opportunity to speak frankly and honestly to their political superiors, without fear of reprisal or punishment. The Sicilian expedition is often compared with the US intervention in Vietnam, if only because the Americans too did not have clear intelligence about the nature of that war and became overextended in a peripheral operation. Yet if one thinks of civil-military relations during the expedition to Sicily, perhaps the more appropriate analogy is the German Wehrmacht at Stalingrad during the Second World War. In December 1942, German military leaders knew that retreat from Stalingrad was the only viable option, but who could say so to Hitler, who demanded that the army defend every inch of captured territory? When policy becomes a tyrant, it seems, strategy is most likely to choose self-destructive alternatives. That is what happened to Athens in Sicily, where two great democracies struggled for mastery and survival. We ought not to turn away from the mirror Thucydides holds up to the democracies of his time, nor to accuse him of bias and prejudice because the picture we see is unflattering to us. We should beware that democracies can be tyrannies too. Those who mean to make democracies worthy of undivided loyalty must ensure that they remain free, that they not become tyrannies like Athens during the Sicilian expedition. If they wish their democracy to avoid the fate of Athens, they must ensure that generals, without fear or shame, have the right, the authority, indeed the duty to speak up to (not against) their political superiors in all appropriate ways. NOTES 1 All citations from Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War are from The Landmark Thucydides, ed. Robert B.Strassler (New York: Free Press, 1996). 2 Carl von Clausewitz On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1976), p. 89. 3 Michael I.Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd edn (London, Frank Cass: 2001), p. 73. 4 In truth, Alcibiades was unlikely to accomplish anything so grand. As Machiavelli observed, a main reason why Rome succeeded in conquering the world while the Greek cities failed is that the Greeks did not extend citizenship to those they conquered. Thus, their tiny cities became weaker and overextended as the empire expanded. By contrast, the Romans grew not merely in size but also in strength through their conquests, because they incorporated the vanquished as members of Rome. See Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy in Machiavelli, the Chief Works and Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 1.1: 209– 11; 2.3:334–5. 5 Handel, Masters of War, p. 78; Clausewitz, On War, p. 92. 6 Handel, Masters of War, p. 358. 7 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B.Griffith (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 129.

156 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

8 See Donald Kagan, The Fall of the Athenian Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 340–75. 9 Machiavelli, Discourses, 2.11:261–3. 10 Handel, Masters of War, p. 357; Clausewitz, On War, p. 87.

8 Winning without Fighting: British Grand Strategy and its Application to the United States, 1815–651 Andrew Lambert

As Clausewitz stressed, war planning does not occur in a vacuum. This reflection is peculiarly apposite for British war planning against the United States, a process dominated by the primacy of the European state system in British diplomacy, and the global spread of British interests, which were fundamentally commercial. This exposes a paradox, for British planning was essentially defensive and deterrent. Yet it relied on a technologically advanced offensive maritime strategy. This strategy had been developed from the war-fighting strategies of the eighteenth century to meet the new circumstances that pertained after 1815. In 1815, Britain finally concluded more than 20 years of conflict with much of the world. Its statesmen had no desire to engage in another major war. Economic exhaustion, evidenced by the massive level of national debt, was a powerful disincentive, one which could only be removed by long years of commercial prosperity based on overseas trade. Further-more, having secured a dominant position in world trade, shipping, and finance, the British wanted nothing more than to be left alone to make money. They had no ambitions that required them to attack another major power, well aware that they could not overthrow any of their great-power rivals in the short term, while a long war would prompt undesirable social and political change. The economic strand in British power was nowhere more obvious than in the relationship with the United States, which posed the greatest challenge to the maritime commerce on which sea power was based. The global nature of Britain’s strategy made its response to a crisis in the Americas a matter of individual calculation. Any strategy for the western hemisphere had to reflect the current situation in Europe, and vice versa, a point made by all British statesmen. Britain did not want to fight the United States. However, like a number of other major powers, the United States posed a strategic threat to vital British interests that had to be countered. British war planning was there-fore essentially reactive, and based on deterrence. Deterrence can only function when the rival state recognizes the power on which it is based, and is capable of responding rationally. Therefore Britain required a strategy that would pose a serious threat to the United States, giving its leaders cause to step back from war. While such a strategy had to be based on real power, it also had to meet wider requirements,

158 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

which reflected the global nature of British interests, and the primacy of a stable European balance in the world as viewed from London. In order to secure its global interests, Britain required a strategy that was equally suited to the defence of all its interests, and the challenge of any other state. While specific case studies of British policy are useful, they are too often flawed by limited scope and a failure to grasp the underlying principles. In an attempt to avoid these dangers this chapter will combine a global perspective on British strategy with an overview of Anglo-American strategic relations and a case study, the ‘Tren’ crisis of 1861. From these three strands it should be possible to establish how Britain thought about war with the United States, and how to ‘win’ without fighting. British Strategy Between 1815 and 1914, Britain was left in peace by all the major powers. In an age dominated by the rise of expansionist, aggressive nation states, and exponential expansion of the value and extent of the British empire, this freedom from attack was either uniquely fortunate, or the result of a particularly effective grand strategy. Furthermore, this security was secured at little cost. A combination of imperial expansion, effective security, and low cost raises a key question: how was the British empire defended? The question is not without contemporary significance. For too long analysts have compared British strategy with the strategies adopted by continental powers, which had very different interests and ambitions, strengths, and weaknesses. Britain had a unique strategic culture, which reflected its situation as a satiated economic power wanting nothing more than to be left alone to exploit the trade and resources of its formal and informal empire. However, this situation could only be ensured by dealing with any serious threat, territorial, political, or economic. In a crisis involving another major power, the British response would be based on deterrence, arms racing, negotiation, or concession, usually in a combination that met the individual circumstances. Only when all other options had been exhausted would Britain resort to war. The basis of British strategy was the European state system. While Britain had no ambition to control any part of Europe, having shifted its economic and territorial horizons overseas,2 its security would be compromised if any single power dominated the continent, especially if it occupied the obvious invasion base on the River Scheldt. Consequently, British European policy was an exercise in the maintenance of equilibrium, on a case-by-case basis. As Lord Palmerston famously declared, ‘we have no eternal allies and no eternal enemies, only eternal interests, and those interests it is the duty of the government to uphold’. Because its European aims were essentially negative, Britain could normally rely on the co-operation of other states, and, as the focal point of numerous alliances seeking to uphold the status quo between 1688 and 1815, Britain had not needed to build a continental-scale army. Consequently, while it

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 159

was a first-rank power, Britain lacked the military means to overthrow even a second-rank nation, let alone one of its political equals. This disparity between strategic weight and military force has confused many analysts. British strategy also reflected the conscious choice to become a mari-time power, basing national power on trade and dominion outside Europe. After 1688, the development of a modern fiscal system, centralized banking, and regularly funded national debt harmonized the interests of the landed and commercial classes as stakeholders in the British state, and provided the financial strength and political stability to maintain the Royal Navy as a dominant battlefleet over the long term.3 Economic power was used to extend British sea control across the globe by the systematic application of national funds. The decision of the new political/financial élite to spend their money on the navy reflected their preference for maritime over military forces, and profitable conquests to the sterile glory of the European battlefield. Britain’s global power reflected its insular position, internal stability, maritime dominance, financial credit, and industrial power. In each area, Britain possessed critical advantages, and their effect was cumulative. They provided the basis for a unique national instrument of power, the Royal Navy. Britain relied on the navy, a force of restricted utility in European conflicts, to secure its frontiers and overseas territories, and attack the colonial and commercial assets of its enemies. This was an effective strategic alternative to large-scale military activity and reflected the central role of overseas interests in the British economy. The main weapon in the British arsenal was economic warfare. This translated sea power into strategic impact on land. It was a long-term strategic option, working through slow exhaustion, and critically dependent on superior financial resources. This offensive element has often been undervalued, but it was always apparent to nations at war with the British.4 Between 1713 and 1815, the British exploited war and peace to create commercial openings outside Europe and secured them by the acquisition of defensible insular or peninsular naval bases like Minorca, Gibraltar, and Malta. Sustained naval mastery depended on adequate bases in the operational area. (The size and quality of such bases changed during the period under review.) Local bases supported sea control and staged the forces needed for power projection, which was employed to improve sea control and reinforce the punitive/economic element of the strategic offensive. As the main instrument of British power, the Royal Navy was continuously evolving to meet the needs of national policy. The basic requirement was sea control secured by the battlefleet. To maintain unquestioned dominance the battlefleet had to be equal to those of the next two naval powers. Between 1815 and 1865, those powers were France and Russia, not the United States. When this ‘two-power’ standard was not maintained, British policy was compromised, notably over the unification of Italy in 1859.5 However, a ‘two-power’ standard was not required for insular security; it was the basis for offensive global sea control, founded on battefleet superiority in European waters. Numerical

160 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

superiority, combined with individually more powerful ships, reflected a highly aggressive doctrine, based on seeking battle at every opportunity, to deny the enemy access to the sea for strategic or commercial purposes. Britain also sought legal control over the seas, which brought it into conflict with the free-seas doctrines of the French and Americans. On this issue, and all others that concerned its naval power, Britain refused to compromise, whatever the odds. If, as was normally the case, the enemy fleet would not face the Royal Navy in battle, it would be blockaded in harbor. Blockade enabled the British to sweep the seas of enemy commerce, capture their seamen and destroy their economies. Denied oceanic communications, enemy colonies and bases could be isolated and overpowered by superior local forces, while hostile cruisers were denied the bases from which to attack British shipping. The process of war at sea was attritional; there were no ‘decisive’ battles, only the steady erosion of enemy resources. This sustained pressure was the key to British victory. Continental rivals could not compete in maritime wars of endurance; they lacked the seamen, fiscal strength, infrastructure, and political will. Their defeat was no more palatable for being essentially limited. By contrast, the British Army remained small, emphasizing fighting power in regiment-sized units suitable for imperial and expeditionary warfare. The British Army was never adequate for full-scale European wars, because Britain had no ambition to win such conflicts. Here it relied on allies, who were usually provided with British financial subsidies. Britain could maintain a costly navy and fund allies because its economy was dynamic and exploited control of the sea to develop global trade. By the late eighteenth century, trading profits were funding industrial development and creating a reservoir of finance capital to open up new markets, generating ‘invisible’ income. This economic strength was a key strand in British strategy, and it was defended with the same ruthless determination as were its more obvious strategic assets, as the United States had discovered between 1807 and 1812. Commercial interest groups were at the heart of British policy-making, and they saw security in financial terms. The sustained funding of the Royal Navy was therefore an insurance policy on national wealth as well as national security. The commercial imperative in British policy was reflected in a marked preference for peace. Having established a global empire, Britain developed a deterrent strategy to avoid wasteful conflict. This strategy proved effective when used with vigor, and effectively signaled from a position of strength. British maritime strategy had played a vital role in the defeat of Napoleon: it supported his enemies, crippled his economy, and engaged his army in a war of attrition that it could not win. Britain could not defeat France alone, but Napoleon conspicuously failed to get to grips with the British, and his efforts to attack them finally created a coalition with the political will to destroy him. When peace was re-established in 1815, the British based their postwar planning on the experience of 1803–15, a limited maritime strategy.6 As a

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 161

satisfied status quo power the British worked for stable, peaceful European equilibrium, building the security of Belgium into the peace settlement.7 The British took relatively little territory in 1815, carefully selecting bases that would enhance and expand their global power. These were the Cape of Good Hope, Malta, Heligoland, Mauritius, Trincomalee, and Ceylon; by 1865, they had been joined by Singapore, the Falkland Islands, Aden, and Hong Kong. When added to the existing chain of colonies, bases and islands, the new possessions locked up global communications, enabling the Royal Navy to project power and defend commerce right across the globe. To support their diplomacy, the British cabinet based their postwar naval programmes on the worst-case scenario of waging war with all of Europe for 20 years. They were well aware of the deterrent and war-fighting power of this fleet. In the mid-1820s, there was a brief naval arms race with France, but British economic strength quickly killed off the challenge. It was a pattern that would be repeated throughout the century.8 In the eighteenth century, the British deterrent had lacked the short-term power to concentrate the minds of foreign statesmen. After 1815, the Royal Navy developed the capability for large-scale offensive operations from the experience of the Napoleonic Wars. British power-projection operations had destroyed the naval and maritime resources of their enemies, and any neutrals who got in the way, notably at Copenhagen and Washington. Armies were landed, towns bombarded from the sea, fleets attacked in harbour and rivers used to carry naval power far inland. In 1816, the pirate city of Algiers was overpowered by battleships and mortar vessels, setting a pattern for the naval operations of the next hundred years. While this enhanced coastal offensive power was used against lesser states, it was developed for war with first-class opponents. Indeed, it was the cutting edge of British war planning and deterrence. This offensive element in British strategy, already evident in the Napoleonic Wars, was enhanced by the careful application of new technologies. By 1840, steam warships armed with shell-firing guns could out-flank existing systems of coastal defense built to resist sailing ships. Heightened Anglo-French tension following the Syrian crisis of 1840 and the French effort to complete the arsenal and fortifications at Cherbourg focused this coastal offensive thinking. The ‘Cherbourg strategy’ relied on steam-powered flotilla craft to conduct a longrange bombardment of the ships and dockyard facilities with guns, mortars, and rockets; if the defenses were badly damaged battleships would close in to complete the destruction. A successful ‘attack at source’ operation at the beginning of a war would seize the strategic initiative, demonstrate British power, deprive the enemy of the naval assets with which to mount any sort of challenge at sea, and lay the foundations for the war of attrition that would follow.9 Despite financial constraints, the battlefleet, the deterrent base of British strategy, was systematically rebuilt, along with the dockyards from which it operated and the overseas bases that gave it global reach.

162 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

These bases were also the focal points for a system of communications that gave Britain control of global routes, initially with sailing packets, then steamships and eventually the submarine telegraph. Improvements in communications allowed the British to reduce local forces and rely on the rapid arrival of overwhelming strength from the metropolis. The combination of bases, colonies and dominions, secure communications, and intelligence gave the Royal Navy truly global reach and the ability to concentrate wher-ever the need arose, be it in the Channel, the Mediterranean, the West Indies, or the China Seas. The defence of merchant shipping from hostile cruisers relied on convoys and the destruction of enemy overseas bases. The global spread of British imperial and commercial interests and the economic impossibility of providing an adequate level of local military or fixed defense forced Britain to develop a novel strategy. The provision of minimum levels of local defense denied potential rivals an easy victory, while buying time to launch a full-scale counterattack. The novel element lay in the nature of that counterstroke. Unlike other nations, Britain defended its interests by attacking the weakest points of its rivals, not by meeting the attack where it fell. India was secured against Russian encroachment by mobilizing a Baltic fleet.10 Local forces would delay and channel any attack, but their role was limited. Only a centrally controlled striking force of great, and recognized, power could protect such an empire. The key remained the ability to seize the initiative at sea and project power ashore. The choice was determined by economic realities and strategic logic. After 1815, defence policy was dominated by the high level of debt repayment, the real cost of the conflict the Victorians called ‘the Great War’. Debt repayment remained well over 30 per cent of government expenditure in the 1880s, providing a constant reminder for those who framed policy that war was a costly business that left unwelcome legacies for succeeding generations.11 The financial ‘sinews of war’ had to be restrung before the country would be ready for another long conflict. After 1815, the British economy evolved into ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, based on cheap government and free trade, while power gradually shifted from the landed aristocracy to the financiers, and the middle classes were brought into the political system. The state pushed British trade into new areas, in a deliberate effort to increase national wealth and state revenue without having to increase the number or level of taxes. Trade outside Europe and the growing investment of British capital built up massive invisible earnings and made London the center of world finance. British policy-makers also saw new trading partners as potential allies against the European states. Domestic industry was subordinated to financial interests, giving the City of London the leading commercial voice in British external policy. The export of capital created trading partners and ensured they could service their debts. In many cases, Britain effectively ran the economies of otherwise independent nations, exchanging security guarantees for unre-stricted commercial access. This system of ‘informal’ empire more than doubled the effective area under

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 163

British economic control.12 Cheap oceanic transport, another sector dominated by Britain, integrated the metropolis with the formal and informal empire. This unique global power and the shipping that serviced it were both still growing in 1914.13 Naval power was regularly used to break down barriers to British trade, notably in Burma, the Persian Gulf, China, Latin America, and West Africa. Small states were brought into the British economic orbit, although not all had to be conquered. The leading exponent of this approach, Lord Palmerston, responded to a serious domestic economic downturn, social unrest and the loss of markets in Europe and North America in the mid-1830s by launching a series of aggressive campaigns to open new markets; or as he explained in 1841: ‘It is the business of Government to open and secure the roads for the merchants.’14 He forced the Chinese to open their ports to opium, along with more legitimate cargoes, and used naval support to secure a favorable trade treaty with Turkey, which he upheld in a brief war with Egypt in 1840.15 In 1840, Palmerston was effectively waging three small wars, while mobilizing the battlefleet to deter France. The underlying strength of his position has been effectively disguised by existing studies, which insist on examining each issue in isolation.16 The greatest test for British strategy between 1815 and 1914 came in the Crimean War (1854–56). After the failure of British diplomacy, war broke out over Turkey, a vital strategic and economic asset in Britain’s informal system. The war was waged as a maritime conflict for global dominance. Even the stumbling incompetence of the army, the stresses of operating with France, and the collapse of the government in the middle of the war could not deny Britain victory. However, the victory was limited. On becoming prime minister in the middle of the war, Palmerston discovered that the cost of a long war would be political reform of a type that he found unacceptable. This internal political dimension reinforced the existing British preference for deterrence and arms races.17 Although British naval operational planning in the nineteenth century was dominated by the possibility of war with France, and the strategic requirement to neutralize or destroy Cherbourg, the Crimean War found Britain and France fighting Russia. However, British war planning, based on the Cherbourg strategy, was simply refocused on to Russian naval arsenals. Intelligence gathering and analysis were, as they had been for half a century, provided by the Hydrographer of the Navy’s Department,18 with Deputy Hydrographer Captain John Washington writing the operational plans for an attack on Reval (modern Tallinn).19 Once the British had accepted the need to build a large flotilla, the Royal Navy quickly applied the ideas of the past decade to bombard the Russian naval bases and coastal positions. New steam gunboats and mortar vessels were used for a long-range bombardment of the dockyard at Sweaborg, the operation long planned for Cherbourg. In a little under three days, the whole dockyard complex was destroyed, without the allies losing a single man.20 The small bombarding

164 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

craft operated at such long range that the Russian forts could make no effective reply. In October, the fleet in the Black Sea destroyed Fort Kinburn in as many hours, using ironclad batteries and battleships to hasten the process. After Sweaborg and Kinburn, the British planned to attack Kronstadt in April 1856, using a force of 250 gunboats, 100 mortar vessels, nine armored batteries, and a host of support craft. This threat was a major element in the Russian decision to sue for peace in 1856. The war had been won by coastal power projection; large amphibious campaigns dislocated Russia’s strategy, while the blockade cut the logistics of its Crimean army and ruined its economy. The British celebrated peace by demonstrating this force to the assembled representatives of Russia, France, Austria, Prussia, and the United States on St George’s Day (23 April) 1856.21 As The Times observed, A new system of naval warfare had been created…We have now the means of waging really offensive war, not only against fleets, but harbours, fortresses and rivers, not merely of blockading, but of invading, and carrying the warfare of the sea to the very heart of the land.22 Machine-age seapower had moved into coastal waters, using long-range artillery, mortars, and armor to tackle the most powerful sea forts. The object of the naval demonstration was, in large measure, to show this new power to the assembled diplomatic corps as the basis for postwar deterrence. The Cherbourg strategy could be applied equally well elsewhere. Three years later, Sir Howard Douglas, the godfather of modern naval gunnery, observed the impact of new technology on naval warfare: Amongst the changes which steam propulsion for ships of war will introduce in naval operations, may be included the abandonment of the blockade system. For a steam fleet superior in strength to the fleet blockaded—if well supplied with Armstrong’s incomparable gun, and other descriptions of rifle cannon, and with an abundance of mortars for firing at high elevation—will be able to destroy from afar the fleet, or the arsenal in which the ships are crowded, and probably both at the same time.23 Sustained coastal offensive operations against major fortified harbors were the basis of British war planning. While initially focused on Cherbourg, this capability was, as the Crimean and Second China Wars demonstrated, of almost universal application. It provided British statesmen with a more dynamic warfighting capability on which to base their deterrent policy. Nor would the United States have to wait long to face this power.

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 165

British Strategy and the United States 1815–186124 Any British war planning for the western hemisphere had to be consistent with the grand strategy of the empire and the primacy of Europe in any calculations made in London. War in the Americas would weaken British diplomacy and expose it to insults closer to home. Even a first-class military triumph in North America would be of little comfort if France exploited British distraction to seize Belgium, or Russia captured Constantinople. It was therefore typical that in 1814 Britain was prepared to end the War of 1812 on the status quo ante bellum in order to focus on the European diplomatic situation. The British needed to build a stable, balanced European state system at Vienna, as the basis for long-term peace. This overrode any ambition in London to improve the strategic frontier of Canada,25 recover British prestige, or inflict further punishment on the Americans. The Treaty of Ghent deliberately excluded all mention of the strategic question of belligerent rights in wartime, which would be a key element in any British strategy against the United States. For Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh the local aims of 1814 had been replaced by the global perspective of building a stable postwar world. He saw no cause for war, worked to reduce tension, notably by limiting naval forces on the Great Lakes, and ensured that the British kept their side of all agreements. Castlereagh recognized that the Americans would always have the advantage when discussing minor local issues. To make full use of their greater ultimate power, the British would have to make an extensive mobilization of resources. Only then would Britain prevail. This pattern did not alter significantly in the next 50 years. Yet the War of 1812 had changed British opinion on Canada. The ministers now recognized the loyalty of the inhabitants, while the timber, ship-building, seafaring, and food resources had been very useful in the European war, and their loss to the United States would give it a dominant position in these trades from which to hold the British to ransom. The loss of the provinces, while embarrassing, would be as nothing to the economic damage that could be inflicted. The United States posed a unique threat to the economic underpinning of the British empire, and it was this commercial challenge, rather than its armed forces, that made it dangerous. This understanding begged the question of whether Canada was defensible. The war had demonstrated that the people north of the border had a distinct identity, but it would be vital to sustain their morale through a commitment to local security. After the war the government gradually abandoned the fleet on Lake Ontario. This could not be justified in the prevailing economic climate and did not fit in with the wider strategic pattern. In 1833, the last remnants of the wartime Lake fleet were sold; naval resources had been concentrated on the broad oceans. Instead, the military and political authorities shifted to a strategy, approved by the Duke of Wellington, to defend the core positions of Halifax, Quebec, Montreal, and Kingston, and the water communications that connected them. The costs were vast—more than £300,000 had been spent by the

166 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

1830s—and much more was always required. The fortresses at Halifax and Quebec secured British oceanic access to Canada. Kingston, the dockyard on Lake Ontario, was linked to Quebec and the St Lawrence through an extensive canal system built along a route that would not be compromised in wartime. This system had been established by the time the Lake fleet was sold off. It would allow small craft to pass, and, more significant, the materials and stores needed to rebuild the force in wartime.26 Local supplies of timber and shipwrights were perfectly adequate for the work, if guns and supervision could be sent from Britain.27 While the British authorities spent 40 years thinking about the ideal defense structure for Canada, one that combined secure communications, strong defenses, and an effective local militia, they were invariably dissatisfied by local parsimony, high costs, and the sheer scale of the project. At every crisis of the era fresh minds attacked the problem, but they usually came to the same conclusions as their predecessors; a basic British strategy for an American war had been established. The British effort on land would be defensive, although spoiling attacks might be conducted. The defenders expected to withdraw gradually in the face of superior American resources. Ultimately, if the local British and Canadian forces could hold the four key posts through the first winter, re-conquest was almost inevitable. It was realized that there were very few points on the long and exposed frontier where the British were really vulnerable. The Lake Champlain/ River Richlieu route opened Quebec or Montreal to attack, the Niagara frontier remained exposed, and Kingston could be attacked across Lake Ontario. Elsewhere, little permanent damage could be done. This understanding focused British efforts and secured a relatively effective use of the large sums of money expended in this period. In essence, while Britain retained command of the sea, Canada was safe. To secure that command, the British had to deal with two American challenges, their claim to have won the War of 1812 and their postwar naval forces. One of the most important sources of contemporary strategic culture was the historical record of past conflicts. Strategic lessons were easily drawn from the past, when there had not been any major technological change in the conduct of war for over a century. Both American and British authors examined the War of 1812 for such lessons. The American literature created a widespread impression in Britain, as well as the United States, that the war had ended with an American victory. The British literature, while less impressive in scale, refuted the American version and altered the strategic perceptions of the target audience. One British analyst, Captain Edward Brenton RN (1774–1839), originally a native of Newport, had been expelled with his loyalist parents.28 After service in the War of 1812, he concluded that the strategic pattern favored the British: Great Britain has it in her power, while she commands the seas, to convulse the continent of America, and by exciting and assisting her

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 167

discontented subjects. Had twenty thousand men been sent from England, as was originally intended, the rising of the slaves in Virginia would have been most probably fatal to the Southern States of America.29 He also reminded the Americans that they had achieved none of their war aims.30 Brenton’s words, which were widely circulated among naval officers and statesmen, were echoed by the leading British analyst of the war, the lawyer William James. Detained in Philadelphia in 1812, James had been astonished by American claims to have won single-ship actions with British ships of equal force. Devoting the rest of his life to correcting American misstatements, exaggerations and propaganda, he persuaded his countrymen that they had won the war and had nothing to fear from American warships, or another conflict. Unable to rebut his precise studies, American writers resorted to personal invective.31 James had also developed a sophisticated strategic analysis of the conflict. He sent this to Foreign Secretary George Canning32 in 1826, at a time of particular tension in Anglo-American relations. Sustained American attempts to secure access to British inter-colonial trade finally provoked the British to issue an Order in Council closing the British West Indies ports to American shipping in July 1826. Tension remained high until the following August.33 James reminded Canning of the menacing tone recently adopted by President Adams, which included fresh bluster about the War of 1812 and the power of the United States Navy. James provided Canning with the ‘lessons of history’. He explained the early British defeats, the real nature of the British victory, the need publicly to refute American bluster in Parliament, and an over-view of American strategic geography and political prospects to inform any future conflict.34 Among those who subscribed for James’ work were the key members of the postwar Tory cabinets of 1815 to 1830, and many of those who would frame policy thereafter, including Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and Lord Palmerston. Nor was his message forgotten; James’ book remained in print for eight decades, new editions appearing in 1837, 1847, and 1859.35 The power of the US Navy was also reduced when the postwar naval programmes were abandoned in the late 1820s.36 This left a small active force, a larger fleet of incomplete ships on the slipways, and an inadequate infrastructure. American naval power soon became outmoded and did not enter the steam age until the 1840s. A brief British alarm in 1826, caused by the very heavy armament being given to American ships of the line, has been widely misrepresented. The American ships were over-armed for local blockadebreaking missions, while the handful of ships that the United States possessed were far less significant than a new French construction program.37 There had been a third strand to the strategic balance in 1812–14, the ability of American privateers to inflict heavy losses on British commercial shipping. It was this danger, and not the United States Navy, that was always considered

168 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

when war was in prospect.38 If the Royal Navy could impose a close blockade, the threat would be reduced, while convoy had proved a strong defense, especially when fully introduced in 1814. However, some British statesmen were prepared to go further. In 1854, Lord Palmerston favored issuing a warning that if privateers were used, the British would burn American coastal towns.39 In 1856, Palmerston as Prime Minister presided over negotiations to outlaw privateering. He expected the United States would resort to this strategy in the event of war, for want of any other, but intended that this would confer major legal and diplomatic benefits on the British.40 The most significant British response to the American naval challenge was the development of bases to support the operation of powerful naval forces in the western hemisphere. The shipyard facilities and defences of Halifax and Bermuda, the key positions for a war against the United States, were continuously upgraded between the late 1820s and the end of the American Civil War. At Halifax, close on a quarter of a million pounds were spent on the main fortress alone between 1828 and 1861.41 This secured a sheltered and wellequipped harbor, although one that lacked a dry dock. Halifax enabled a superior naval force to control the American coast north of New York. It would allow the British to impose a blockade and resume their 1814 offensive into Maine. Bermuda was even more important. A large British fleet based at Bermuda could control the entire eastern seaboard and thereby secure Canada. Only 650 miles from the Chesapeake Bay, yet isolated and small, the islands were easily defended. They also covered the West Indian trade and access to the Gulf of Mexico. The only danger was a pre-emptive strike by the United States, but this was averted by a continuous program of defensive improvements that made Bermuda a major imperial fortress.42 These British developments emphasized the threat to American coastal cities and commerce. The slow progress of postwar coast defences, despite the expenditure of $8.25 million between 1815 and 1829, left all the major cities of the United States exposed to devastating seaborne raids.43 Even if they were completed, the forts posed other problems; the United States simply did not have enough troops to man them all and would not be able to cross the northern frontier while their professional troops were tied to the forts. There is little need to consider the problem of fortification and British strategy beyond the confines of Narragansett Bay.44 Here, Fort Adams provided the main defense between 1812 and 1865. In the war of 1812, the original Fort Adams, a feeble and dilapidated work, had not been tested, but in 1821 orders were given to build another fort in the ‘Third System’. This project occupied over 30 years and was the second-largest sea fortress on the coast when completed. A total of 468 guns could have been mounted, requiring a minimum garrison of 2,400 men.45 It was a massive investment in naval weakness, and utterly useless. The local interests at stake were not the towns, but shipping and trade. Consequently, when the British considered war with the United States in late 1861, they decided that this ‘work of great magnitude’ was best avoided. They had no desire to capture

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 169

Newport again, or threaten Providence; merely blockading the bay, and cutting off local shipping would, as in 1814, soon suffice to annihilate local economic life. This would be easily achieved.46 This was hardly surprising; the British had long recognized that economic warfare would be their most effective strategy. Not only was the United States a maritime commercial nation, but federal funds were largely drawn from customs receipts. Seizure of territory would improve access, cut revenue, and force Washington to accept a limited peace, using captured territory as bargaining keys or as countervalue for any territory lost in Canada. Commerce could be stopped, as it had been in 1814, by a close blockade. As the Secretary of the Navy explained in 1841: Whilst the combined Powers of the world could not subdue us, even a secondary naval Power could avoid our land defences, set our armies at defiance, and prosecute against us a war intolerably harassing, and disastrous.47 The impact of British operations would be greatly enhanced by Palmerston’s other strategic instrument, one which reflected a life-long commitment to the abolition of slavery. The significant incidence of slaves fleeing to join the British in 1814 suggested that a larger, more sustained British attack would prompt major servile uprisings. These would detain the state militias, if nothing more. In fact, as Brenton and James had stressed, the disunity of the country offered a real opportunity, one which would be exploited. The Hartford Convention was not forgotten in London. British strategy, although unwritten, was so effective between 1815 and 1865 that all other powers were forced to conform to it. They had to spend their budget on forts, purely defensive assets, while Britain developed a mobile strategic force of unique power. As Gil Merom has reminded us, the key tests of any strategy are its effectiveness and its efficiency.48 It would be hard to find a better examples of these criteria in action than the strategy used to defend British global interests between 1815 and 1914. Relations with the United States were a subset of the problem of defending such far-flung interests. Between 1815 and 1860, Anglo-American relations were rarely good. There was a constant succession of issues over which to argue; the mutual border from Maine to Oregon, Cuba, Texas, the slave trade, California, Central America, and even British attempts to recruit troops in the United States. Yet the statesmen on both sides always managed to avoid war. The issues were never so serious that good sense, clear diplomatic signaling, and timely concession could not avert a conflict that would have profited neither side. Having secured Canada and kept the Spanish in Cuba, Britain was unlikely to fight over the remaining points; not because it could not, but because to do so would weaken its ability to support more significant interests in Europe. The pattern remained the same from Christmas Eve 1814 to Christmas Day 1861: the European balance was the main call on British strategic and diplomatic effort.

170 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

By 1860, the British had given up attempting to prevent or delay American expansion in North America, where it did not directly affect British possessions. The experience of Texas, California, and Oregon was conclusive. Britain could not afford to become embroiled in American affairs when Europe was unstable. The gradual collapse of the Vienna settlement constrained British global policy, while the growing economic interdependence of Britain and the United States made war more than ever unpalatable. Although it had not been recognized at the time, the settlement of the Canadian frontier by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 marked a watershed; thereafter, there were no issues left that would warrant a conflict. That understanding was given its most severe test in late 1861. The Trent Crisis of 1861 While the ‘Trent’ crisis forms a central element in the diplomatic history of the American Civil War, most studies concentrate on international law, diplomacy, the deliberations of the British and US cabinets, public opinion, and the role of Prince Albert.49 Even when considering the strategic issues, existing accounts do not explain why the United States gave way.50 They ignore the underlying offensive/deterrent dynamic in British strategy, focusing on the small detachment of troops sent to Canada, which only symbolized British strength, rather than the real basis of British deterrence, the long-matured, and recently demonstrated power of the Royal Navy to assault the best-defended harbours in the world as the core of a unique maritime war-fighting capability. Furthermore, the main security threat facing the British empire in 1861 came from imperial France. After the Crimean War, Napoleon III mounted a sustained attempt to undermine Britain’s diplomatic freedom of action in Europe by building a wooden steam battlefleet and then an ironclad fleet so powerful that the two-power policy would be compromised. Once the British lost their unquestioned naval dominance, he wanted to coerce them into supporting his program of European reconstruction. The core of Napoleon’s threat, that he would use his new ironclad fleet to destroy the British dockyards, was negated by Palmerston, who supervised a sustained naval construction program, new dockyard fortifications, and the mobilization of popular political concern in the volunteer movement.51 This process was at its apogee just as the American Civil War broke out, and the strategic issues of the western hemisphere returned, albeit temporarily, to center stage. The Trent crisis began with two very literal shots across the bows of a British mail steamer; it would end after a rather more impressive metaphorical shot across the bows of a US administration caught between domestic popularity and diplomatic disaster. Around midday on 8 November 1861, the USS San Jacinto, commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes, USN, intercepted the British mail steamer RMS Trent in the Old Bahama Channel north of Cuba. Wilkes removed the Confederate States’

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 171

envoys Mason and Slidell.52 While Wilkes became a national hero, his action placed the Lincoln administration on the horns of a dilemma: it was too popular to rebuke, and yet wiser heads realized that Britain would respond. While the British had no territorial or commercial reasons to go to war, they could not accept so flagrant a breach of international law, especially at sea. Yet the lack of positive ambition and the threatening European situation complicated any response. While Prime Minister Palmerston would have welcomed the break-up of the United States, for long-term geopolitical reasons, his Civil War policy would be dominated by European concerns, a desire to protect British interests, such as the cotton trade, and a life-long abhorrence of slavery.53 In late 1861, Palmerston’s primary aim would be to deter an American attack on Canada. When the American Civil War broke out, the British had been expecting a repetition of the War of 1812, an invasion of Canada for domestic political reasons, for some time. Leading Republican W.H.Seward had publicly advocated this policy during the recent election campaign. British concern was heightened when he was appointed Secretary of State in the new administration of President Abraham Lincoln.54 In May 1861, Palmerston had reinforced the British garrison, sending three regiments aboard the colossal steamship Great Eastern, a typical response from a master of deterrence.55 When he wanted to repeat the gesture in September, the Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Newcastle, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Duke of Somerset, and the Secretary of State for War, George Cornewall Lewis, all objected. Although their arguments were somewhat unfocused, all three ministers were developing a new imperial strategy. With the addition of the submarine telegraph cable it would be possible to shift from large stationed forces to a central deterrent. As the Atlantic cable was not operational between 1858 and 1867, the ‘Trent’ crisis occurred in a transitional period. Later, both the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Lyons, and the American Minister in London, Charles Francis Adams, argued that a cable would have made war more likely.56 The absence of a cable also affected the Commander-in-Chief on the North America and West Indies Station, Rear Admiral Sir Alexander Milne. The Admiralty could only provide overall direction, relying on the calm, professional Milne for the day-to-day execution of policy. Milne appreciated their dilemma. Having been a junior naval lord from 1847 to 1859, he had an unrivaled insight into the Admiralty, a curious hybrid body, largely designed for peacetime administration, but also required to provide strategic direction in war. From Washington, Lyons advised the government to demand an immediate redress for the insult and the release of the envoys. He was not optimistic.57 When informed of the incident, Milne moved his small force from Halifax to Bermuda, to protect British shipping and prepare to blockade the American coast.58 News of the incident reached London on 27 November. On the 28th, the cabinet instructed the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, to demand an apology and the release of the envoys. Russell persuaded his colleagues to prohibit the export of arms and ammunition as an immediate and effec tive

172 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

demonstration of British resolve. As the Federal government was critically dependent on imports of saltpeter from British India for gunpowder production, this was a major blow. It was one that the Admiralty plans intended to follow up, with both major powder mills being targeted.59 Outside the cabinet, the leading proAmerican liberal politicians, Richard Cobden and John Bright, wrote to their American friend, the influential Senator Charles Sumner, warning him that a quarrel with Britain would end any hope of restoring the Union and advising concession.60 Cobden and Bright were anxious that the Americans should understand just how serious the situation had become. Although highly critical of Palmerston’s policy, their actions effectively reinforced the deterrent approach of the old master. By stressing the seriousness of the British position, they supported Cabinet policy, which sought an American climbdown to secure Canada and avoid war. Like many before and since, Cobden and Bright confused the alarming rhetoric of Palmerston and his press allies with the real objects of a sophisticated and calculating political mind. They saw preparations for war where Palmerston was creating an effective deterrent position. From his base in Washington, Minister Lyons was certain that such warlike preparations in Britain were the key to an American climbdown. On 29 November, the War Office began transporting stores to Canada.61 Milne was to remain at Bermuda and protect the valuable West Indian shipping.62 Privately, Somerset stressed that reinforcements would be sent before active operations began.63 On 2 December, the Admiralty ordered three frigates and a paddle sloop, to fit out and brought forward three more frigates, a paddle sloop and the floating factory Volcano, for the First Division of the Steam Reserve. It was highly significant that these ships were all fitted with the new long-range Armstrong rifled guns.64 The Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, Admiral Sir William Martin, warned about the possibility of war, was ordered to detach a battleship and two cruisers to Gibraltar, to join three frigates already ordered there.65 The Board also compensated Thames Iron Works for the extraordinary costs of building the pioneer ironclad capital ship HMS Warrior. They wanted to ensure the enthusiastic support of private industry in an emergency.66 By 2 December, the War Office had planned to send four regiments, with artillery and staff, to Canada, together with additional rifles for the militia. The Cunard liner Persia, the fastest ship afloat; would carry the first regiment, the rest would follow in ‘inferior’ ships. Lewis wanted to begin any war with an attack on Portland, Maine.67 Somerset doubted Canada could be held and, if lost, whether it was worth recovering. He favoured a naval build-up as a more cost-effective deterrent68 and quietly ensured that the Admiralty did not commit any resources to Canada. Palmerston, fearing the loss of Canada would affect Britain’s international standing, argued that Quebec must be held until reinforcements and pressure from other quarters could take effect. He believed Parliament would vote money to fortify Quebec.69 Palmerston still thought in terms of adequate forces in position to meet any attack. Somerset had more faith in the deterrent effect of a

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 173

powerful response from further afield. Somerset also had the problem of securing any funds from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone, who did not think there would be a war. In an intervention that demonstrated her long experience of British statecraft, Queen Victoria considered Russell’s draft instruction ‘meagre’. She wanted to build a ‘golden bridge’ for Washington, advising the Americans to disavow Wilkes’ action so that they could release the envoys and apologize for the insult to the British flag without embarrassment.70 This would be her last significant intervention; thereafter she would be distracted by the illness and death of her husband. Russell privately stressed to Lyons that he needed to prepare Secretary of State Seward for the ultimatum, to avoid any hint of ‘menace’, and that while the government insisted on the envoys being released, it would be satisfied with a reluctant apology. There was good reason to be confident, with solid support from France and the conservative opposition.71 The enthusiasm of the French gave Lord Cowley, the Ambassador in Paris, cause for concern. He reported that the Minister of the Marine was ‘itching to take part with us’, hoping the crisis would open the Southern ports for cotton shipments.72 Russell advised Cowley that while French diplomatic support at Washing-ton would be welcome, Britain would resolve the crisis alone.73 On 1 December, Palmerston discussed preparations with Somerset, Lewis, and the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the Army.74 On the 4th, he was stricken with a serious attack of gout, and from 10 to 28 December he was confined to bed. In addition, Palmerston was profoundly affected by the death of the Prince Consort on the 14th.75 While he left military preparations to the Service Ministers, Palmerston, sick as he was, continued to supervise Russell.76 From his sick bed, Palmerston reflected that with the support of France, and indeed almost the whole of Europe, this was a golden opportunity to take a studied revenge for years of American insults: If the Federal Government comply with the demands it will be honourable for England and humiliating for the United States. If the Federal Government refuse compliance Great Britain is in a better state than at any former time to inflict a severe blow upon and to read a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.77 He had no doubt Britain would be successful; ‘I feel at my ease as to all our points of attack and defence except Canada’, but ‘we shall have a great advantage by sea, and we must make the most of it’.78 The direction of British effort was settled by the Cabinet War Committee, Palmerston, Lewis, the Duke of Cambridge, Somerset, Newcastle, Russell, and Earl Granville on the 6th.79 The advantage at sea was being carefully prepared by Somerset, for whom the crisis was a distraction from battles with the Treasury and the ironclad naval race with France. He was careful not to spend any money mobilizing ships, simply shifting those already deployed to meet the French challenge from the

174 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Mediterranean and the home ports. He detailed the Hydrographer of the Navy, Captain John Washington, to report on the American harbors.80 This reflected the littoral character of naval warfare. Somerset’s dominant concern remained cost: You will see that without commissioning any vessels we shall in a few weeks have enough [battle]ships and frigates on the station to blockade their ports. This list of our force does not include any of the frigates and smaller vessels now preparing for commissioning, several of which could, however, be sent in a few days, as we have men in the ports available for them…I wish the Canadian affairs were as satisfactory as our prospects at sea. Captain Washington advised that eight battleships, nine frigates, 23 sloops and 20 gunboats would be required for a full blockade. Milne would soon have enough battleships and frigates; smaller ships would be sent if required.81 Somerset also sent over 10,000 tons of coal to the West Indies, rather more than the Admiralty estimate of Milne’s monthly wartime consumption, and hoped that in the event of war more could be drawn from Confederate harbors and the Nova Scotia mines.82 Later the same day, Somerset considered the role of the Royal Navy in the defense of Canada. Even before the crisis, he had tried to hand over any naval role on the Lakes to the Canadians, and he remained reluctant to incur any expense. He would send ‘an intelligent officer’ to advise the Canadian government and would prepare gunboats to be sent once the ice cleared.83 Further afield, the Admirals at Rio, Esquimalt, Malta, Cape Town, and even Hong Kong were advised of the danger.84 Despite Somerset’s best efforts, Gladstone complained that the need for economy had been ignored. Closely aligned with Cobden and Bright, he was convinced there would be no war and saw no need for costly panic measures.85 His coadjutor at the Admiralty, Captain Lord Clarence Paget, the Political Secretary, suggested saving money by sending troops to Canada aboard battleships.86 This would have been dangerous; the over-crowded ships would have arrived with their crew, and their passengers, in an inefficient condition. The risks were acceptable in wartime, but until war broke out the priority was for the rapid arrival of the troops, for which the large liners were better suited.87 Somerset responded to Gladstone by preparing a rough estimate of his costs. The Admiralty had hired three troopships at fixed prices, totalling £42,351. Seven more had been hired for three months. They would cost £4,700 to fit out, and a further £65,420 a month, making a total commitment of £243,311. He needed another ship, although some men were going in the regular Cunard mail packets: In regard to the expenses incurred by this Department I have not yet commissioned any ship for the North American Station. We have several ready and crews provided in case of War. We have, however, incurred some

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 175

expense in providing coal for Bermuda and Halifax and the West Indies. The cost of freight for all stores has naturally increased from the War Risk.88 While some frigates had been prepared to replace the battleships due to pay off,89 Somerset remained unwilling to spend money. On 14 December, the Admiralty advised Milne and the Senior Officer at Halifax that the troopships would disembark the troops in the St Lawrence, or at Halifax, depending on the ice, and advised sending war-ships to meet them off Cape Race.90 The following day Somerset advised Milne that if war broke out he should raise the Federal blockade, but avoid co-operating with the Confederacy.91 He could use Southern coal, but must not endorse their cause. Unlike most of his naval contemporaries, Milne had the finesse for this balancing act. On 15 December, Captain Washington printed his assessment of the American ports, the basic technical appreciation from which Admiralty war planning would be developed. Washington, while well versed in British grand strategy, was not privy to the political objects of the government, and therefore Somerset did not circulate the paper to the cabinet.92 Washington’s appreciation began by discussing an attack on Portland, Maine, the terminus of the Canada Grand Trunk Railway. He shared the widely held opinion that the people of Maine might be persuaded to join Canada by a strict blockade. He considered Boston too strong for a successful attack. New York, while formidably defended, was not invulnerable. It was so important to the United States that it might be worth risking an attack, as success here would end the war. Captain Washington took care to develop the basis for an operational plan, stressing the potential difficulties and calling for a well-equipped surveying force to chart and buoy the approaches. The American capital, Washington DC, was vulnerable, while Baltimore could be blockaded. The Hydrographer laid considerable stress on reestablishing navigation lights and marks, and on securing local coal supplies. His work did not command universal approval; Milne only received his copy of the document after the crisis had passed, when he considered that Washington’s force levels were ‘entirely inadequate’.93 However, Somerset used the report to plan a campaign that would begin by removing the Federal blockade, defeat the US Navy, occupy Chesapeake Bay, and finally blockade New York.94 The newspapers were a critical element in nineteenth-century deterrence. To ensure that the US government was left in no doubt that Britain was serious, Palmerston exploited his links with the major newspapers, the Morning Post, The Times and the Daily Telegraph. At The Times, the most important daily paper, and still widely considered semi-official, editor John Thaddeus Delane repaid the premier’s confidence with a sustained attack on the American position. Delane reflected a national desire to have revenge for ‘the foul and incessant abuse of Americans, statesmen, orators and press’. With the nation, the army, the navy and the militia all enthusiastic, he hoped that if it came to war the Americans would receive such a beating ‘that even Everett, Bancroft and Co. won’t be able

176 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

to coin victories out of them’.95 While Cobden and Bright thought the scare was being used to sustain excessive defense spending,96 Palmerston was actually exploiting an unprecedented peacetime naval build-up, designed to meet the French challenge, to coerce the United States without mobilizing. Newspaper reports of naval activity, which had a powerful effect on the American Minister and the Special Envoy Thurlow Weed, reflected double-shift work at the dockyards.97 The impression of activity was critical to the diplomacy of deterrence. Having received his instructions late on 18 December, Lyons thought the Americans would give way; ‘if the next news from England brings note of warlike preparations, and determination on the part of the Government and people’.98 Ultimately, the War Office planned to send 28,400 men to Canada.99 Palmerston exploited the crisis to justify long-term improvements to the fortifications at Halifax and Quebec. While Somerset moved forces from the home ports and the Mediterranean, he did not interfere with the Channel fleet, the front-line force against France, and did nothing to improve the situation on the Lakes. While Captain Washington’s ‘Confidential Memoranda on the Assistance which can be rendered to the Province of Canada by Her Majesty’s Navy in the Event of War’ advocated the early capture of three American lake forts,100 Somerset did nothing. On 17 December, he admitted to Palmerston that defensive measures on the Lakes would be very costly and that he had done nothing: ‘it is difficult to take any steps which will not involve very large expenditure whilst the control over such expenditure can never be otherwise than imperfect’. If there was a war he would send officers and shipwrights to arm lake ships.101 More significant, the all-important coast-assault flotilla at home was in excellent order, and many had been fitted with Armstrong guns. Somerset’s lack of urgency also reflected Adams’ communication of Seward’s letter of 30 November to Russell on 17 December.102 The cabinet now knew that Wilkes had not been authorized. They expected the Americans would now cross the ‘golden bridge’. Milne received his first response to the crisis from London on 20 December. In the absence of instructions, he had planned for Commodore Dunlop to use the force in the Caribbean to capture the American blockading squadrons. Milne would destroy the US fleet on the east coast, open the Southern ports, and prepare for large-scale assault operations. He required 54 ships, mostly corvettes and sloops for blockade, supported by frigates and battleships. He expected ironclads and gunboats would arrive in time to attack the major harbors. His main concern was to secure ade quate coal supplies, but he had no doubt he could defeat the Americans, with New York as the key to victory.103 The coincidence of views between two such experienced officers as Milne and Washington demonstrated the coherence and logic that underpinned British strategy. Milne also took care to secure his base, reinforcing the defenses at Bermuda.104 Steam transports continued to leave England for Canada. All told they carried over 10,000 troops in an impressive demonstration of global

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 177

mobility and strategic lift.105 Three frigates were detailed to escort them as they approached Canada and to protect the New Brunswick ports of St John’s and St Andrew’s.106 After 17 December, Russell remained jittery,107 but Somerset was noticeably more relaxed, concentrating on securing information and steadily increasing his forces.108 The real dangers of the moment now lay elsewhere. Newly restored to health, Palmerston was anxious about Europe. He was convinced Louis Napoleon III would attack Austria and Prussia in the spring; ‘and if we are engaged in a war on the other side of the Atlantic he will think himself free from our interference’. Only one force would then stand between this new Napoleon and European hegemony: The Prussian army, though brave, is quite behind the progress which the French have made in the art of war. They still attack in columns, which would be blown to pieces by the French rifle artillery long before they could come into contact with their opponents.109 A major French victory would be a disaster, destroying the European equilibrium that was the foundation of British global power and deepening the Anglo-French arms race. This put the Trent into context. On 25 December, the Lincoln cabinet met and agreed to give up the envoys. Lyons, backed by the British press and the French Ambassador, had persuaded them Britain was in earnest. He concluded: ‘the real cause of their yielding was nothing more nor less than the military preparations made in England’.110 He wanted to exploit the occasion, for, ‘unless we give our friends here a good lesson this time, we shall have the same trouble with them very soon, under less advantageous circumstances’.111 Milne agreed: ‘the steps adopted in England will have done good, not only to bring down the pride and arrogance of the American people, but it will have shewn the necessity for keeping our colonies prepared’.112 His fleet now included nine battleships and seven frigates. One year later, he had only one battleship and five small frigates.113 The Canadian garrison had reached an impressive 17,599 men by early 1862. This rapid increase of force and the reequipment of the militia demonstrated British commitment.114 Preparations continued in Britain, with the Foreign Office and Admiralty planning to intercept American shipping.115 News of the release of the envoys and a graceless apology reached London on 8 January.116 A convalescent Palmerston returned to his work room on that day and wrote to Cobden, the leading critic of his armaments policy. He stressed the deterrent value of adequate defences: ‘however expensive these means may be, they are infinitely cheaper than the war which they tend to keep off’.117 Palmerston had secured a satisfying victory over the Americans and a useful demonstration of British resolve. Double time in the dockyards ended on 9 January,118 the ban on saltpeter exports on the 16th.119

178 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

At the cabinet on 9 January Palmerston thanked Russell, Somerset, Lewis, and Newcastle for ‘the energy and ability which have led to this satisfactory result’. The Queen was anxious to create the legend that Albert’s intervention had avoided war, a conceit in which her ministers were prepared to indulge her.120 Those more intimately concerned, especially Lyons and Milne, knew better. Yet historians on both sides of the Atlantic have preferred the myth, for many reasons. The forces on station appeared inadequate, leading historians to underestimate the role of naval power in resolving this crisis. The most recent study argues that the Royal Navy could not have blockaded the American coast and would have been exhausted trying: Perhaps the British Government was never serious about going to war over Mason and Slidell, perhaps the Americans were not the only ones who could play the game of ‘brag’, a version of poker.121 This assessment is based on the forces on the North American station during the crisis, which were but a fraction of what would have been sent for active operations. If the British were playing poker, they did so with an unbeatable hand. Britain did not need to mobilize—the forces at hand were adequate to deter —and, as there was no desire for war, additional strength would be necessary only if the Americans decided to fight. The British had the power to inflict fatal damage on the Union. The response of the US legislature to the crisis was swift and revealing. In April 1862 the Committee of Military Affairs of the House of Representatives issued a report on Permanent Fortifications and Seacoast Defences. It recognized that in the face of steam warships, let alone ironclads, the nation was ‘as defenceless as in 1816’, and advocated a large new program of work. The Committee did not believe that the existing defenses could protect New York, the very point the British plans had been focused upon.122 After the crisis Somerset reflected that of a total expenditure of £364,338 on the crisis, £234,338 was for the transport of troops to Canada: It is difficult to state in figures what is the exact amount of expenditure on account of preparation for war. We have commissioned no ships, though we got several ready for commissioning; but this will not be an expense, in as much as these will take their turn of service when other vessels are paid off. We did not add to our number of seamen, but our number of seamen had been before above the number voted, and we continued to reduce them. We sent out a considerable supply of coals to Halifax, to Bermuda, to Jamaica, but these coals are not more than will be required for the force on the station, and we should have been obliged to send out this supply in the course of a few months without reference to war. The real fact is that except for the transports we have incurred no expense for warlike

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 179

preparations. It is not desirable to state this perhaps in the face of our supplementary estimate.123 The War Office had spent between one and one-and-a-half million, mostly on arms and stores.124 One thing had to be made clear at the time: the crisis had been about the Trent and the insult to the flag, not the Confederate envoys. When the envoys arrived, The Times, reflecting government policy, declared that they were ‘the most worthless booty it would be possible to extract’. The British government would have done the same for ‘two of their own negroes’.125 This insult was carefully calculated and very Palmerstonian. Renewed Anglo-American tension in late 1862 led the Admiralty to move all four available ironclads to Lisbon, where they were linked to Britain by telegraph cable, and only a few days from Bermuda.126 Together with a larger Canadian garrison, improved militia, and modernized defenses at Quebec and Halifax this would suffice. Conclusion Throughout the period under review, British involvement in a major war in Europe or North America would have constituted a failure of policy. Because Britain had no major interests that would be better served by fighting than by deterrence or an arms race, its plans were designed to avoid, not to wage, war. The nature of British strategy meant that any war planning was necessarily reactive. British planning depended on good information, supplied by consistent intelligence gathering both public and ‘secret’, in all relevant areas. This information was collated to inform the planning process, and it was dovetailed into the political and diplomatic background to create cabinet-level instructions for the strategic commanders. This strategy was also widely understood as a basic doctrine by service commanders, leading to a remarkable consistency of response across the globe.127 In 1861 the British did not plan for war. British ‘war’ plans were, as they had been since 1815, designed to avoid conflict through a clear demonstration of strength and political commitment. On this occasion they worked. The United States was deterred by the movement of existing units; troops from Britain and ships already in commission. The only extraordinary effort came from the newspapers, a critical element in Palmerston’s system. Palmerston exploited the Trent crisis to reinforce Canada, take revenge for years of American insults, and wield the naval deterrent. This time the Americans had gone too far; they would be forced to apologize. He recognized that British strategy only worked if major powers acknowledged British strength, consequently the deterrent had to be wielded occasionally. This was essential because Britain could not afford to station forces in Canada equal to the United States Army. Having increased the local defenses in the period of heightened tension that occupied much of 1861, Palmerston then backed his demands over

180 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the Trent with an impressive mobilization of newspapers and the movement of forces from other theaters. The US administration understood British power. During the War of 1812, Britain had blockaded the American coast, ruined its economy, and burnt its capital. The United States avoided a shattering defeat and a punitive peace when Britain accepted a return to the status quo ante because of the situation in Europe.128 After 1815, Washington administrations enjoyed an occasional bluster along the lines of ‘fifty-four forty or fight’ but were always ready to back down if the British were determined. This strategic relationship was reflected in postwar US defense spending, which was dominated by coastal fortresses. By 1861, these had been rendered obsolete by steamships, rifled guns, and armor plate.129 Nineteenth-century technology had shifted the strategic balance between land and sea forces to favor the sea. This had been demonstrated during the Crimean War, when technologically advanced British fleets out-maneuvered obsolescent Russian sea-forts and defense systems intended to deal with wooden sailing ships. Textbook operations at Sweaborg and Kinburn in August and October 1855 were followed by plans to destroy Kronstadt, the most powerful seafortress in the world. Unable to match the strategic mobility, operational sophistication, and tactical power of the allies, Russia accepted a limited defeat, rather than risk total defeat in a hopeless struggle.130 The lessons of that war soon reached the New World. Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War in the Pierce Administration (1853–57), had sent a military mission to report.131 Recognizing the strategic threat posed by the new armored steamships, Davis advised further fortress improvements.132 US naval officers Andrew Hull Foote and Samuel Du Pont witnessed British littoral offensive power during the Second China War of 1857–60. They recognized that steamships could pass any battery that was not linked to a fixed barrier, and taught this lesson to their secessionist countrymen at Fort Donelson and Port Royal. In 1861, the Royal Navy had the resources for a sustained coastal offensive campaign, including over 200 gunboats, mortar vessels, ironclads, and floating factories and depot ships acquired in 1856, with new rifled guns. It was the recognized strategic power of the Royal Navy that deterred the United States in 1861, rather than the movement of ships and men or the creation of plans. This strategic power was critical to Britain’s global empire, because a network of bases, trading posts, islands, land masses, and a continent simply could not be defended against serious attack at all points. This was a matter of basic economics and political expediency. Britain would not pay for a high level of local defense, and any attempt to make the individual territories, with the notable exception of India, pay the cost, was ended by the American Revolution. Colonial polities would only pay for defenses they could control, which were generally token gestures that made little contribution to the overall strength of empire. The only strategy that combined real power, global reach, and relative

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 181

economy was one based on the offensive strength of the Royal Navy. In the nineteenth century, the Royal Navy could destroy any rival navy, even those sheltering within strongly defended bases. Successful base attacks would deprive enemies of the ability to operate at sea, securing British imperial, maritime, and commercial interests and releasing much of the Royal Navy for further offensive operations. These would include the imposition of a military and economic blockade, the seizure of over-seas or isolated territories as diplomatic assets and, where possible, attacks on major cities. The war would be fought with a limited commitment of manpower and money, enabling the state to carry the burden with ease over the long term. While this limited strategy could not destroy a major power, it would exhaust their military and economic resources, ultimately breaking the political will that sustained the conflict. Only the Royal Navy had the reach and power to deter Russian moves in Asia, French threats in the Mediterranean, and the ‘Manifest Destiny’ of the United States in North America. Local military forces and fortifications could delay an attack while an overwhelming naval response was assembled at the key regional bases. The success of this strategy, as a component of British policy, is obvious. Between 1812 and 1914, no major power attacked Britain. While rival powers could identify areas of relative British weakness—the North-West frontier of India, Canada, and oceanic trade—none developed a strategy that could coerce Britain. France tried to control British policy with sustained naval building programs. Britain responded with crushing demonstrations of its political commitment, financial depth, and technological mastery. Once the ‘arms race’ ended, France joined Russia and the United States in large, costly, and strategically distracting programs to fortify its harbors and coastal cities. Ultimately, British war plans were written in stone, from Cherbourg and Kronstadt to Newport and New York. NOTES 1 This chapter is part of a large-scale project to recover and analyze the grand strategy of the British empire at the height of its power, economic success, and territorial magnitude. While it relies on historical methods and sources, the paper is not without contemporary relevance. The basic question behind my research is alarmingly simple: how is a vast, expanding empire of trade protected in an age of aggressive nation-states and empires? The answer will tell us much about global strategy, and not a little about the way in which historical understanding is generated. As might be expected, I benefitted greatly from the opportunity to discuss aspects of this project with Michael Handel. 2 P.J.Cain and A.G.Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688– 1914 (London: Longman 1993), pp. 86–9. 3 J.Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989) is the recognized authority.

182 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

4 R.Buell, In Irons: Britain’s Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) provides a study of this process, which lacked the glamor of ‘decisive’ battle, on land or sea, but proved highly effective. 5 A.D.Lambert, ‘Palmerston, Gladstone and the Management of the Ironclad Naval Race, 1859–1865’, The Northern Mariner, 8 (1998), pp. 19 and 30. 6 B.Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) for the autarkic grain policy of the postwar ministers. 7 P.W.Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1994), pp. 517–82 for this process. 8 A.D.Lambert, ‘Preparing for the Long Peace: The Reconstruction of the Royal Navy 1815–1830’, Mariner’s Mirror, 82 (1996), pp. 41–54. 9 A.D.Lambert, ‘The Royal Navy and the Cherbourg Strategy, 1840–1850’, unpublished paper from the VIIIth Anglo-French Naval Historians Conference, April 2001, held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. 10 A.D.Lambert, “‘Part of a Long Line of Circumvallation to confine the future expansion of Russia”: Great Britain and the Baltic 1809–1890’, in G.Rystad, K.R.Bohme, and W.M.Carlgren (eds), In Quest of Trade and Security: The Baltic in Power Politics, 1500–1890 (Lund: Lund University Press, 1994), pp. 297–334, esp. pp. 321–30. 11 J.F.Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli Era, 1865–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 53. 12 R.Robinson and J.Gallagher with A.Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent (London: MacMillan, 1961), Ch.l. 13 Cain and Hopkins Imperialism, pp. 466–73. 14 Quoted in Robinson and Gallagher, Africa, p. 5. 15 Ibid., pp. 99–101. 16 M.E.Yapp, Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran and Afghanistan, 1798–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 272–303; G.S.Graham, The China Station, War and Diplomacy 1830–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 102ff; K.Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years 1784–1841 (London: Allen Lane, 1982), Ch. X and XI. 17 The domestic political/economic cost of war was a major element in British government thinking from the 1790s. It was peculiarly significant, because British strategy relied on long wars of endurance, which made heavy demands on the support of the population. Every major war since 1793 has been followed by significant political/social/economic reform. 18 For a case study of the Hydrographic Department intelligence gathering and processing in a key theater of operations see A.D.Lambert, ‘This is all We Want: Great Britain and the Baltic Approaches 1815–1914’, delivered at the Carlsberg Institute, Copenhagen, September 2000. 19 A.D.Lambert, The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia 1853– 1856 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 73–4. 20 A.D.Lambert, ‘Under the Heel of Britannia: The Bombardment of Sweaborg, August 1855’, in P. Hore (ed.), Seapower Ashore (Chatham: Chatham Publishing, 2001). 21 Lambert, Crimean War, pp. 335–6.

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 183

22 Editorial, The Times, 24 April 1856: quoted in A.D.Lambert and S.Badsey (eds), The War Correspondents: The Crimean War (Gloucester: Allan Sutton, 1994), pp. 304–5. 23 H.Douglas, Observations on Modern Systems of Fortifications (London: John Murray, 1859), p. 191. 24 K.Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America 1815–1908 (London: Longman, 1967). This remains the standard account of the strategic relationship. 25 The short-hand ‘Canada’ is used here for the two provinces that existed before Federation in 1867, the colony of Newfoundland and the vast area governed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. 26 R.Legget, Rideau Waterway (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1955); R.Legget Ottawa River Canals and the Defence of British North America (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1988). 27 E.R.Marcil, The Charley-Man: A History of Wooden Shipbuilding at Quebec 1763– 1893 (Quebec: Quarry Press, 1995). 28 Fort Adams was built on Brenton’s Point. T.L.Gatchell, ‘Fort Adams and the Defences of Narragansett Bay’, Newport History, vol. 67, Part 1, no. 230 (1995), pp. 1–36. 29 E.P.Brenton, The Naval History of Great Britain (London: Henry Colburn, 1825), vol. V, pp. 199–200. 30 Ibid., p. 205. 31 A.D.Lambert. ‘William James, the War of 1812 and the Origins of Naval History’, in William James (ed.), A Naval History of Great Britain (London: Conway Press, 2002), 6 vols. 32 George Canning, Foreign Secretary 1807–09, 1822–27, Prime Minister 1827–28. Died in office. 33 K.Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815–1908 (London: Longman, 1967), p. 28. 34 James to Canning 8.1.1827 and reply of 10.1.1827: in E.J.Stapleton (ed.), Some Official Correspondence of George Canning; 1820–1827 (London: Longman, 1887), vol. II pp. 340–6. See Appendix 1. 35 See correspondence in Lambert, ‘James’. 36 C.L.Symonds, Navalists and Anti-navalists: The Naval Policy Debate in the United States, 1785–182 7 (Delaware: Delaware University Press: 1980), pp. 232–5. 37 A.D.Lambert, The Last Sailing Battlefleet, Maintaining Naval Mastery 1815–1850 (Conway Press: London 1991), pp. 23–4. 38 Washington, ‘List of the Chief Ports on the Federal Coast the United States, showing the Shipping, Population, Dockyards, and Defences as far as known; also how far accessible or vulnerable to an Attack, as far as can be gathered from the Charts. With an approximate estimate of the number of vessels required to blockade the several ports and Rivers.’ 15pp. 15.12.1861. ‘Confidential’. Copies in the Milne and Somerset Archives. Somerset’s is signed: DRO and MLN 114/8. pp. 2 and 14. 39 Palmerston Cabinet Memorandum of 10 September 1854: Bourne, Britain, p. 182. 40 A.D.Lambert, ‘Great Britain and Maritime Law from the Declaration of Paris to the era of Total War’, paper delivered at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, 9 August 2001.

184 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

41 H.Piers, The Evolution of the Halifax Fortress, 1749–1928 (Halifax: Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1947), pp. 50–9. 42 R.Willock, Bulwark of Empire: Bermuda’s Fortified Naval Base 1860–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), provides a good overview. www.bermuda-online.org/forts.htm offers a full listing and additional sources. H.C.Wilkinson, Bermuda from Sail to Steam: The History of the Island from 1784 to 1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 2 vols, offers a very detailed account of military developments. 43 E.R.Lewis, Sea Coast Fortifications of the United States (Washington, DC: Naval Institute Press, 1970), pp. 21–66; M.Z.Herman, Ramparts: Fortification from the Renaissance to West Point (West Point, NY: Avery Publishing, 1992), pp. 139–66; Permanent Fortifications and Sea-Coast Defences: Report of the Committee on Military Affairs, US House of Representatives 37th Congress. 1862 (reprinted Bel Air, MD: CDSG Press, 1998). This 528–page document contains all the major reports on the subject from 1826 to 1861. It demonstrates that these weaknesses persisted throughout the period. 44 Permanent Fortifications, pp. 181–4, for an 1836 Navy Department report on the importance of the bay as a potential naval base, invasion site, and economic region. 45 Gatchell, ‘Fort Adams’. 46 Washington, ‘List of the Chief Ports’, p. 4. 47 Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy, 4 Dec 1841; Bourne, Britain, p. 104. 48 See the chapter by Gil Merom in this volume. 49 The standard accounts are: N.B.Ferris, The Trent Affair: A Diplomatic Crisis (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1977); G.H. Warren, Fountain of Discontent: The ‘Trent’ Affair and the Freedom of the Seas (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); E.D.Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War (London: Longman, 1925) vol. I; B.Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, (Montreal: McGill/Queen’s, 1974), vol. I. 50 K.Bourne, ‘British Preparations for War with the North, 1861–62’, English Historical Review, 76 (1961) pp. 600–32. See also Bourne, Britain; R.A. Courtemache, No Need of Glory: The British Navy in American Waters 1860–1864 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1977), pp. 39–66. 51 Lambert, ‘Palmerston’. 52 G.S.Smith, ‘Charles Wilkes: The Naval Officer as Explorer and Diplomat’, in J. Bradford (ed.), Captains of the Old Steam Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1986), pp. 64–86. 53 See Bourne, Britain, for these issues. 54 G.G.Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). 55 Palmerston to Newcastle 24.5.1861: British Library Additional Manuscripts (henceforth Add.), 48,582 p. 111 56 Lord Newton, Lord Lyons (London: Nelson, 1912), p. 62. C.Adams, Charles Francis Adams (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900), p. 217. 57 Lyons to Russell 22 7 25.11.1861: Newton, Lyons, pp. 44–7. 58 Milne to Admiralty 30.11.1861: Public Record Office Admiralty (ADM) 1/5759 605; Milne to Sir F.Grey 30.11.1861: Milne papers, National Maritime Museum, (MLN) 116/2. 59 Washington, ‘List of the Chief Ports’, pp. 5 and 8.

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 185

60 Cobden to Sumner 29.11.1861 in J.Morley, Life of Cobden (London: T.Fisher Unwin, 1879), p. 856; Bright to Sumner 5, 7, and 14.12.1861: G.M.Trevelyan, Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1914), pp. 312–16. 61 War Office to Admiralty 29.11.1861: ADM 1/5769. 62 Foreign Office to Admiralty 29.11.1861: ADM 1/5768 593, 597, 612; Admiralty to Milne 1.12.1861: ADM 13/7/351. 63 Somerset to Milne 1.12.1861: MLN 116/1/C 64 Admiralty to War Office 2.12.1861: ADM 13/47/158 and 162; Admiralty to Controller 2.12.1861: ADM 13/47/160; D.Evans, ‘The Royal Navy and the Development of Mobile Logistics 1851–1894’, Mariner’s Mirror, vol. 83 (1997), pp. 318–27. 65 Admiralty Minute 3.12.1861: ADM 1/5766; Admiralty to Martin 3.12.1861: ADM 13/7/365. 66 Admiralty to Accountant General 3.12.1861: ADM 1/5773. 67 Lewis to Palmerston 2 and 3.12.1861: Broadlands Manuscripts (henceforth Bdlds) GC/LE/150–1. 68 Somerset to Lewis 1.12.1861; Ferris, Trent, p. 63. 69 Palmerston to Lewis 2.12.1861; ibid., p. 64. 70 The Queen to Palmerston 1.12.1861: Bdlds RC/F 1079; The Queen to Russell 1.12. 1861: Benson and Esher (eds), The Letters of Queen Victoria (London: John Murray, 1908), vol. III, p. 470; T.Martin, Life of the Prince Consort (London: Smith, Elder, 1880), vol. V, pp. 421–2; Palmerston to Russell 1.12.1861: Russell Papers Public Record Office (PRO) 30/22/21 f612; Palmerston Diary 1.12.1861: Bdlds. 71 Russell to Lyons 1.12.1861: Newton, Lyons, p. 50. 72 Cowley to Russell 2 and 5.12.1861: Cowley Papers Foreign Office Records (henceforth FO) 519/229 f120, 127. 73 Russell to Cowley 4 and 5.12.1861: FO 519/199 f206, 210. 74 Palmerston Diary 2.12.1861: Bdlds. 75 Palmerston Diary December 1861. There are few entries for the month, and hardly any mention of the Trent crisis. 76 Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary Hammond to Palmerston 3.12.1861: Bdlds. GC/HA 251. 77 Palmerston to the Queen 5.12.1861: H.C.F.Bell, Lord Palmerston (London: Longman, 1936), vol. II. p. 295. 78 Palmerston to Russell 5.12.1861: Bell Lord Palmerston, p. 295 and same 6.12.1861 PRO 30/22/2 1 f620. 79 Palmerston to Somerset 6.12.1861: Somerset Papers, Devon Record Office, (henceforth DRO) D/RA/2A 37 f36. 80 Somerset to Palmerston 6.12.1861: Bdlds GC/SO/69. 81 Ibid.,71. 82 Somerset to Palmerston 24.12.1861: GC/SO/75. 83 Somerset to Palmerston 6.12.1861: GC/SO/70. 84 Admiralty to Admiral Warren 7.12.1861: ADM 13/7/366–8; Paget to Admiral Martin 9.12.1861: ADM 13/7/369; Admiralty to Admiral Martin 12.12.1861: ADM 13/7/371. 85 Gladstone to Somerset 13.12.1861: Add. 44,304 f116. 86 Paget to Gladstone 10.12.1861: Add. 44,397 f224.

186 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

War Office to Admiralty 10.12.1861: ADM 1/5769. Somerset to Palmerston 13.12.1861: GC/SO/72. Somerset to Gladstone 14.12.1861: Add. 44,304 f1 18. Admiralty to Milne and SO Halifax 14.12.1861: ADM 3/269. Somerset to Milne 15.12.1861: MLN 116/1/C. There are no copies in the relevant archives. Washington, ‘List of the Chief Ports’. Somerset to Newcastle 19.12.1861 and to Granville 21.12.1861: Ferris, Trent, p. 149. Delane to William Howard Russell, 11.11.1861, History of ‘The Times’ vol. II (London: Times, 1939), p. 373. George Bancroft’s books helped to sustain the myth of US victory in the War of 1812 and, by encouraging educated Americans to hold unrealistic opinions on the outcome of another war, contributed to AngloAmerican antagonism. Bright to Louis Mallet 23.12.1861: Trevyelan, Bright, p. 316; Cobden to Charles Sumner 23.1.1862: Morley, Cobden, pp. 857–8; Cobden letter of 11.12.1861: J.A. Hobson, Richard Cobden: The International Man (London: T.Fisher Unwin, 1919), pp. 293–4. L.S.Pasley, Life of Admiral Sir T.S.Pasley (London: Arnold, 1900), p. 273. Lyons to Russell 19.12.1861: Newton, Lyons, pp. 52–3. Ferris, Trent, p. 150. Washington Memoranda ADM 7/264. The paper is undated, but from internal evidence it appears to have been printed no earlier than 19 December. Somerset to Palmerston 17.12.1861: GC/SO/73. Van Deusen, Seward, p. 313. Courtemache, Glory, pp. 56–60. Milne to Admiralty 25.12.1861: ADM 1/5787 635. Dunlop would have one battleship, two frigates, one corvette, three sloops, one gunvessel, one gunboat, and a battleship with a landing force of 700 Marines. Milne to Admiralty 31.12.1861 no.640: MLN 103/3/C; Milne to Sir F.Grey 17.1.1862: MLN 116/3. Somerset to Palmerston 24.12.1861: GC/SO/75. Admiralty Minutes 21.12.1861: ADM 3/269; Admiralty to Milne: ADM 13/31/ 288. Russell to Somerset 23.12.1861: D/RA/A 2A f31. Somerset to Russell 29.12.1861: PRO 30/22/24 f121. Palmerston to Russell 30.12.1861 in F.Wellesley, The Paris Embassy during the Second Empire (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1928), pp. 233–4. Lyons to Russell: Newton, Lyons, pp. 60–1. Lyons to Russell 23 and 27.12.1861L: ibid., pp. 54–60. Milne to Admiralty 2.1.1862 ADM 1/5787 11; Milne to Sir F.Grey 3.1.1862 MLN 116/3. Admiralty to Milne 11 and 13.1.1862: ADM 13/31/ 345 and 357; A.D.Lambert, Battleships in Transition (London: Conway Press, 1984), p. 84 gives details. W.Verner, Military Life of the Duke of Cambridge (London: John Murray, 1905), vol. I., p. 318. Foreign Office to Admiralty 1.1.1862: ADM 1/5798; Somerset to Palmerston 31. 12.1861 GC/SO/76. Palmerston Diary 8.1.1862: Bdlds.

BRITISH GRAND STRATEGY AND THE US, 1815–65 187

117 Palmerston to Cobden 8.1.1862: Add. 48,582 p. 214. 118 Pasley letter of 9.1.1862: Pasley, Pasley, p. 273. 119 Home Secretary Sir George Grey to Earl Granville (Lord President of the Council) 16.1.1862: Granville Papers PRO 30/29/24. 120 Palmerston Diary 9.1.1862: Bdlds; Palmerston to the Queen 9.1.1862: G. Buckle (ed.), The Letters of Queen Victoria (London: John Murray, 1926), 2nd Series, vol. I, pp. 7–8; the Queen to Palmerston 10.1.1862 in ibid., pp. 8–9 and RC/F 1083 and 1083A. 121 Warren, Trent, p. 139. 122 Permanent Fortifications, pp. 4 and 6. 123 Somerset to Palmerston 6.2.1862: GC/SO/78. 124 Lewis to Palmerston 6.2.1862: GC/LE /157. 125 History of the Times, p. 374, published on 30.1.1862. 126 Sir F.Grey to Milne 31.10. and 29.11.1862: MLN 116. 127 For the remarkably similar response to this crisis of the commander in the Australian waters see: A.D.Lambert ‘Australia, the Trent Crisis and the Strategy of Imperial Defence’, in D.Stevens and J.Reeve (eds), Southern Trident: Strategy, History and the Rise of Australian Naval Power (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2001), pp. 99–118. 128 C.Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1812–1815 (London: Bell, 1931), p. 197. 129 Lewis, Fortifications, pp. 21–66. 130 A.D.Lambert, The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853– 1856 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 131 The Art of War in Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1859). This report included plans of the Anglo-French floating batteries, which persuaded Davis to fund new coastal forts and inspired the Confederate ironclads. 132 H.M.Monroe (ed.), The Papers of Jefferson Davis 1856–60 (Baton Rouge, LA: University of Louisiana Press, 1988), pp. 77–9, 106.

9 British Strategy and Winning the Great War David French

The wording of the title of this chapter might be thought to be contentious in at least two respects. Faced by the domestic economic misery of much of the interwar period, and by another world war only a generation later, did Britain really win the war in 1918? And is it not insufferably chauvinist to argue that Britain won the war, if in doing so it is implied that none of the other Entente powers made a significant contribution to its outcome? My answer to the first point is fairly simple. In November 1918, no one had much doubt that it was appropriate to have victory celebrations in London, just as it was appropriate not to have them in Berlin. The fact that British statesmen and politicians were unable to manufacture a lasting and prosperous peace from the victory that their army and navy had helped to win should not cause us to be blind to the fact that they had indeed secured such a victory. The answer to the second point should become clearer as this chapter develops. The British experience between 1914 and 1918 exemplifies many of the problems that can confront a state with a liberal political system when it is fighting a major war in partnership with allies. During World War I British policy-makers never for a moment believed that Britain alone could defeat the Central Powers and they never tried to do so. They consistently made their strategic policies within the context of their alliance with France and Russia and the lesser members of the Entente and, in 1917–18, with their new partner, the United States. The fundamental reason that Britain was able to emerge on the winning side in November 1918 was that successive British governments managed to stumble towards a strategy of successfully sharing the burden of fighting the war with these other powers, whilst simultaneously successfully maintaining the determination of their own soldiers and civilians to continue the war until the Central Powers were willing to make peace on terms that Britain’s leaders deemed acceptable. In August 1914, Britain was ill-prepared to play a major part in a great continental land war. It had a regular army that numbered only about a quarter of a million men, and was supported by a similar number of half-trained Territorials. The German Army, by constrast, could mobilize about three million men.1 Britain’s major strategic assets were its economy and possession of the world’s largest fleet, and its policy-makers were determined to make the most of

BRITISH STRATEGY AND WINNING THE GREAT WAR 189

these assets. The Royal Navy performed several functions: it quickly bottled-up the German surface fleet in harbor, where it was to remain, despite periodic forays into the North Sea, until the end of the war; rather more slowly, it eliminated those German surface raiders that were at large outside the North Sea; and it instituted an economic blockade of Germany that, although imperfect at first because of the need to placate contiguous neutrals and the United States, eventually played a major role in undermining the Central Powers’ ability to endure a war of attrition.2 The navy thereby safeguarded not only Britain’s maritime lines of communication with its colonies and its major trading partners, but those of France as well. It also continued to act as a successful deterrent against a German invasion of the British Isles. The Germans had abandoned any possibility of invading Britain as long ago as 1898, and they were hardly likely now to revive such schemes.3 But the British did not know that, and throughout the war they maintained a sizable body of troops in the United Kingdom in case William came. But what the Royal Navy could not do was to maintain secure maritime communications with Britain’s other major ally, Russia. Admiral Troubridge’s failure to intercept and destroy the German cruisers Goeben and Breslau in August 1914 helped to tip the balance of political power in Constantinople toward Germany and closed the Straits to Russian trade. Henceforth, except for a trickle of trade through Russia’s often ice-bound northern ports or from Vladivostock and along the inadequate trans-Siberian railway, Russia was cutoff from its Western allies.4 That state of affairs had portentous consequences for British policy. Asquith’s Liberal government was not a warlike assemblage in August 1914. Not only did none of its members have any experience of the higher direction of a war, but its domestic political position was anything but secure and a general election was due by the end of 1915. Kitchener seemed to be an ideal solution to both problems. The man who had reconquered the Sudan and finally defeated the Boers could bring to the government the experience and prestige it so sorely required. It was Kitchener who was the major architect of British strategy in the first year of the war. In 1914, his strategic thinking was informed both by his own experiences in the Sudan and South Africa, and by his understanding of the American Civil and Franco-Prussian Wars.5 Mindful of the mistaken popular belief in 1899 that the South African war would be over quickly, he was skeptical of similar predictions in 1914. Aware of the magnitude of the political issues at stake in a major European war, he did not believe that either side would be willing to make peace until it had expended its last effort, and he predicted that the conflict would not reach a climax until 1917. Britain could achieve its objectives at the least cost to itself, and make a virtue out of a necessity, by allowing its continental partners to bear the major share of the European land war. Initially, Britain would restrict its contribution to sending the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) to France as a token of its commitment to the Entente. Simultaneously, the Royal Navy would blockade the Central Powers, and Britain

190 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

would make the most of its industrial and financial power by extending economic and financial assistance to its allies. In the meantime, Kitchener began to raise the New Armies in the expectation that by late 1916 the armies of all the continental belligerents would be exhausted. But Britain’s army would be unbloodied and, in early 1917, it would be able to intervene decisively on the continent. After the British Army had inflicted a final and crushing defeat upon the Central Powers, British statesmen would be able to grasp the lion’s share of the spoils, and dictate terms not just to their enemies but also to their allies. Kitchener’s suspicions of Britain’s current allies were shared by most of his colleagues. There was general agreement amongst British policy-makers that they had to safeguard Britain’s interests in the Middle East against France and Russia, and that the German menace to Britain’s security had to be removed by the obliteration of the German fleet and the exclusion of Germany from the Channel coast of Europe. However, that did not mean that they also sought to destroy Germany as an integral state. A powerful, but not over-mighty, Germany in the center of Europe would be a key factor in maintaining the postwar balance of power. The alternative, a Germany that had been utterly crushed, might lead only to an over-mighty Russia. Kitchener and his cabinet colleagues brought to the art of war-making a particular vision of Britain’s place in the world and its relationship with its major European neighbors that was the product of their upbringing and earlier experience. The policy-makers who determined British policy between 1914 and 1918 belonged to a generation who had come to maturity in the late 1870s and 1880s. They had grown-up to recognize Russia and France as Britain’s most dangerous imperial rivals. Although after 1900 Germany emerged as the most immediate threat to Britain’s security, and after 1914 they thought it was axiomatic that the war could not be ended until the German menace had been eliminated, they did not forget that once that had been done, the Entente alliance might easily disintegrate. In the future, Britain might find itself menaced by its former allies. Thus when they considered the future map of Europe, policymakers tried to devise a settlement that would not only protect them against their current enemies, the Central Powers, but also against their current friends. But what British policy-makers did not agree about was the form of the postwar German government. Most of the politicians, including Kitchener, insisted that the war had to be continued until the bellicose and Junkerdominated regime in Germany was overthrown and replaced by a more liberal system of government that would be far less inclined to wage aggressive war. However, Britain’s senior generals did not agree that a revolution was necessary to destroy Germany’s will to become a world power. They abhorred the notion of continuing the war to bring about the over-throw of the ruling dynasty in Germany, fearing that it would cost too much treasure and too many British lives. However, in practice, their own route to victory proved hardly less expensive. Sir Douglas Haig, the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF from December 1915 to November 1918, and Sir William Robertson, the CIGS from December 1915 to

BRITISH STRATEGY AND WINNING THE GREAT WAR 191

February 1918, believed that the best and indeed only way to secure an assured peace was to defeat the German Army in the field. Events in Russia, France, and Britain in 1917 further convinced them of the rightness of this course. In 1917, Haig, alarmed by the collapse of the Tsarist regime and by unrest among the Western allies, began to fear that the over-throw of the Kaiser would leave Germany at the mercy of left-wing revolutionaries and that revolution, once established in Germany, might spread to France and Britain. The best way to stop that from happening was to beat the Germans in the field, because nothing, in his opinion, would do more to buttress the prestige of the existing order than outright military victory.6 There was much to commend Kitchener’s original strategy. It promised to maximize Britain’s existing assets, its large navy, and its industrial and financial power, and to enable it to reap the utmost benefits from the conflict. Kitchener had willed the end—a peace settlement in which the ambitions of Britain’s principal enemies (Germany and Austria-Hungary) were defeated and its current allies and erstwhile rivals (France and Russia) were left so exhausted that they would be too weak to challenge Britain’s imperial dominance. But what he had not done was to calculate exactly how Britain might achieve these doubly desirable goals. At the end of 1914, Kitchener ordered the Director of Military Operations at the War Office, Sir Charles Callwell, to prepare a memorandum for the cabinet proving that the Central Powers must inevitably lose the war because their manpower reserves would be exhausted before those of the Entente. The result was a statistical conjuring trick of the highest order, for, as Callwell wrote privately to a colleague, ‘I could just as easily have proved that they [the Germans] were good for another two years. One must be a mug indeed if one cannot prove anything with figures as counters.’7 From this evidence, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that at bottom Kitchener was committed to a strategy of wishful thinking. The British began to discover the real cost of coalition-building in 1915. Although the success of Kitchener’s strategy depended to a large extent on the willingness of Britain’s continental allies to fight for two years without significant British military support, at no point in 1914 did he consult them about it. The reality of fighting a coalition war began to impinge on the British in late 1914. Intelligence of German attempts to secure a separate peace with one of more of their continental allies coincided with news from Paris and Petrograd that some allied leaders were not willing to see their countrymen suffer and die for the greater glory of the British empire while the British apparently stood back and did nothing.8 The realization that the British had to be seen by their allies to be carrying their fair share of the burdens of the alliance intensified in 1915 and 1916 and led to three major developments, as the British came to accept that burden-sharing within an alliance meant more than committing warships and gold to the common effort. Firstly, the failures of the initial British commitments to play a larger share in the land war on the Western Front at Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, and Aubers

192 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Ridge led directly to the establishment of the Ministry of Munitions. The ministry enabled the government to mobilize the whole of Britain’s engineering industry and eventually to outproduce the Germans in terms of guns and shells. As Hew Strachan has recently highlighted, it was the British, not the Germans, who were first to practice Material-schlacht.9 Secondly, the increasing costliness of the land war, even when it was set against the more than two million men who volunteered to enlist in 1914–16, led to the introduction of military conscription in early 1916. It meant that the British were able to maintain an army of nearly two million men in the field for the rest of the war, even after the supply of volunteers had dried up. Thirdly, in the spring of 1915, the pressing need to send help to Russia persuaded the British and French to commit ships, and eventually troops, to an expedition to make a passage through the Dardanelles. Initially, the Dardanelles seemed attractive because Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, persuaded his colleagues that they would not have to commit large numbers of troops, that they did not yet have to defeat Turkey. The campaign’s supporters also held out the hope that once the Dardanelles had been cleared they would be able to send badly needed supplies of munitions to Russia and that the sudden collapse of the Ottoman empire would persuade the Balkan neutrals, hovering on the edge of the war but afraid to commit themselves until they could identify the winners, to throw in their lot with the Entente. All of their hopes were stymied by the unexpectedly fierce resistance of the Turkish forces on the Gallipoli peninsula and the campaign ended in abject failure. The last remnants of the Allied forces that had landed on the peninsula in April 1915 were evacuated in January 1916. The threat that this failure posed to British prestige in the Muslim world led directly to another albeit smaller defeat in Mesopotamia. In April 1916, a British force surrendered at Kut because the British overextended themselves and outran their logistical system in advancing too far up the Tigris in an attempt to occupy Baghdad. Perhaps it was the need to explain why the Dardanelles campaign failed which has caused historians to shy away from examining the actual validity of the considerable claims for what might have been, had the Anglo-French forces carried the Dardanelles. The collapse of the Ottoman empire would indeed have unlocked a direct route to Russia that was ice-free for the whole year. But where were the supplies that were then meant to be sent to sustain the Russian war effort to come from? By the end of 1916, the British had an abundance of munitions, but in 1915 both the British and French Armies were so short of shells that they had little or nothing to spare for their allies. And, assuming that by some diplomatic miracle the British and French had been able temporarily to overcome the suspicions and bitter political differences that had divided the Balkan neutrals since the Second Balkan War, would the confederated Balkan states really have been able to make their weight felt in the military balance of power? They could have undoubtedly contributed considerable numbers of hardy peasant soldiers, but, like Russia, they needed modern military equipment, and where was that to come from? Simply to raise these questions is to suggest that

BRITISH STRATEGY AND WINNING THE GREAT WAR 193

the potential benefits of an outright Entente victory at the Dardanelles were by no means as clear-cut as has sometimes been assumed. Another problem that began to beset the British in the autumn of 1915 was a growing cash-flow crisis in the United States. The British had begun the war confident in the knowledge that they would have no difficulty in funding their own and their allies’ overseas purchases. But by mid-August, 1915, J.P.Morgan, Britain’s purchasing agents in the United States, faced liabilities of $17m and had funds of only $4m. The crisis was the result of a combination of factors. Since 1914 the Treasury had lost control over British and allied purchasing in the United States. Britain’s exports were declining as more and more of domestic industry was converted to war production and as manpower was channelled into the army. The efforts to intensify the blockade of Germany were, to an extent, also beginning to backfire, as British exporters progressively lost markets and earnings.10 In the short term, the problem could be solved by raising loans in the United States and buying American goods with US dollars. In the long term, the only solution was victory over the Central Powers. That was not something that the Royal Navy could provide, at least not in the short term. Jutland was not the great naval victory that the British public had been hoping for. But it was a strategic victory for the British; after the battle, the Royal Navy remained in control of the surface of the world’s oceans. And even had the Grand Fleet sunk most or all of the High Seas Fleet, it is difficult to determine how the British might have been able to exploit their victory. It might have encouraged them to try to mount an amphibious landing on the German coast. But that would have been a highly hazardous undertaking. The German Navy still possessed a U-boat fleet and plenty of mines, and they could have played havoc with an invasion force. Furthermore, the German Army had powerful shore batteries and plenty of troops available to repulse a landing. By the autumn of 1915, the Asquith coalition government had reluctantly recognized that if they did not render their allies large-scale and visible support on the continent, defeatism might take hold in Paris and Petrograd. Politicians like Joseph Caillaux in Paris or the so-called ‘reactionaries’ reputed to have coalesced around the Tsarina in Petrograd might come to power convinced that it was preferable to make a negotiated peace with the Central Powers rather than see their countries used as Britain’s continental cat’s-paw.11 These developments made the British anxious and the result was initially the battle of Loos and then the battle of the Somme. Devised at the inter-Allied conference at Chantilly in December 1915, the battle of the Somme was meant to be one of a series of concerted Allied offenses mounted on the Western, Italian and Russian Fronts in the summer of 1916 that were to deliver victory by forcing the Central Powers to divide their reserves. The Allied plan failed. For the British, the Somme produced huge casualties for no apparent gain of territory. It fulfilled one of its objectives in that it reduced German pressure on the French Army at Verdun, but the BEF never even came close to achieving Haig’s hoped-for breakthrough. It

194 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

also robbed the Asquith coalition government of the last shreds of its political credibility. When Lloyd George became Prime Minister in December 1916, he came into an unenviable inheritance. The Somme had been a gigantic strategic gamble. In early 1916, Asquith’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald McKenna, and the President of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman, had argued that if the British acceded to their allies’ demands, and if the New Armies participated in a grand Allied offensive in France in the summer of 1916, the losses they would suffer could be sustained only if conscription was introduced. But if still more men were taken away from the civilian economy, Britain might be bankrupt before the enemy had sued for peace. McKenna’s preferred strategy was for Britain to remain aloof from the continental land war and to continue to sustain France and Russia with munitions and food, for as long as ten years if necessary. However, the imperatives of the alliance meant that their doubts were cast aside. Britain might be able to continue fighting until 1925, but Robertson and Lloyd George thought it unlikely that France and Russia could do so. The Asquith coalition wagered that the Central Powers, under the weight of the Entente’s military pressure, would sue for peace before Britain had gone bankrupt. The gamble failed, and by late 1916 Britain was fast running out of the gold and dollars it needed to purchase vital imports in the United States. The Treasury believed that if the British could not meet their obligations in the United States it would be tantamount to abdicating their role as the world’s banker.12 At the end of the battle of the Somme the Germans were still in pos-session of most of Belgium and northern France, and were about to occupy Romania. Intelligence reports warned that the Germans would soon intensify their own efforts. They attempted to multiply munitions production and signaled their determination to continue the war into 1917 by adopting the Hindenburg Program and the Auxiliary Labor Law. If successful, these would enable them to double shell production and treble gun production in time for the opening of the next campaign in the spring of 1917. Other reports reaching the government in London indicated that the Germans intended to try to undermine the stability of the British war economy by launching unrestricted U-boat warfare in an effort to starve Britain into submission within six months.13 It was hardly surprising, therefore, that almost the first public statement the new Prime Minister made in the House of Commons was to warn his audience against expecting a quick end to the war, or that in private he agreed with Robertson that the war could not be won before 1918.14 The new government’s aims were the same as those of its predecessor: to preserve Britain’s status as an independent great power and to emerge from the war with its security enhanced against its enemies and allies. But it was more acutely aware than its predecessor that, if it wished to achieve these objectives, it would have to work hard to sustain popular support for the war. Privations and heavy casualties meant that by 1917 war weariness was becoming apparent in Britain, as it was amongst all of the European belligerents. Not the least of Lloyd

BRITISH STRATEGY AND WINNING THE GREAT WAR 195

George’s insights as a war leader was his understanding of the need to retain domestic support for the war, which he had highlighted as long ago as 1915. On 1 January 1915, he had reminded his colleagues that Kitchener’s New Armies were quite different from Britain’s regular army. No longer was the regiment the soldier’s home and family. Kitchener’s men were civilians in uniform. They had families in Britain who would watch their fate with the utmost care, so much so that ‘if this superb army is thrown away upon futile enterprises, such as we have witnessed during the last few weeks, the country will be uncontrollably indignant at the lack of prevision and intelligence shown in our plans’. That meant that only ‘a clear definite victory which has visibly materialised in guns and prisoners captured, in unmistakable retreats of the enemy’s armies, and in large sections of enemy territory occupied, will alone satisfy the public that tangible results are being achieved by the great sacrifices they are making…’.15 Lloyd George was, therefore, understandably horrified at the outcome of the Somme, hundreds of thousands of casualties for little tangible gain. In November 1916, he had predicted that if the British and Allied peoples were called upon to make further sacrifices on such a scale, if food ran short and taxes rose, war weariness might become defeatism.16 At home, the Lloyd George government’s priorities were, therefore, to maintain Britain’s morale and economic staying power so that the country did not seek a premature peace settlement. The army and navy that Britain deployed in 1917–18 represented a huge drain on its economic resources, for they had to be fed, clothed, transported, and supplied with equipment and munitions. Nothing was more likely to undermine domestic support for the war, or to cause discontent among troops at the front, than short-ages of food, fuel, and housing at home, especially if such shortages gave rise to the dangerous conviction that ‘profiteers’ were making unfair gains from the prolongation of the war. However, for the first few months of its existence the outstanding feature of the new government’s domestic policies was how little they differed from those of its predecessor. What seems to be significant was what it did not do, rather than what it did do, to marshal Britain’s economic and human resources behind the war effort. Lloyd George was a Liberal and as Prime Minister he was not master in his own house. He enjoyed the active support of only a minority of Liberal MPs, and the tacit support of most Labour MPs, but the majority of his supporters were Conservatives. They backed him only because they could not muster enough support in the Commons to form their own government and because they had more faith in him as a war leader than they did in Asquith. Lloyd George was, therefore, beholden to too many special-interest groups to be able immediately to ride roughshod over existing practices. The existence of a powerful Conservative farming lobby meant that he could not, for example, immediately introduce food rationing or place domestic food production under effective government control and force pastoralists to plough up their land to increase grain production. Similarly, he dared not renege on the pledge he had given organized labor to eschew industrial conscription, and was probably right

196 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

to do so, for when the government did try to extend industrial dilution it provoked potentially crippling strikes in the engineering industry in May 1917. When the government did act to ration food and mobilize domestic agriculture, it did so because it was forced into action by a combination of the strikes, consumer pressure, and the threat to food supplies posed by the German U-boat offensive.17 In the spring and early summer of 1917, German U-boats were making such dangerous inroads into Britain’s and its allies’ dwindling stocks of merchant tonnage that Britain was within measurable distance of starvation. Probably the most significant contribution the Lloyd George government made in 1917 toward securing ultimate victory was to defeat the U-boat offensive. The key to its success was not the introduction of the convoy system. When the Germans began unrestricted U-boat warfare in February 1917, they assumed that their campaign would inevitably persuade the United States to join the Entente. However, they hoped to force Britain to sue for peace within six months, well before the Americans could make their weight felt in the war. But convoys were not begun until late April, and were not universal until the autumn. Yet by August it was apparent to the Germans that they had failed. The most fundamental reason was that even by their own calculations the Germans did not have enough submarines to do the job within six months, and they were slow to increase the size of their fleet.18 The offensive forced the British to pursue a variety of expedients. These included increasing domestic food production and merchant shipbuilding, although given the inevitable time-lags between inaugurating their plans and the results working through to the farmyards and shipyards, these policies had only a very limited impact in 1917. The Corn Production Act did not become law until August 1917, too late to have any real impact before the 1918 harvest.19 More significant in maintaining the calorific intake of the British people was the government’s order to millers to mill their grain so as to include more husk in the flour.20 But what above all saw Britain through the short-term crisis in the spring and summer of 1917 was the decision to divert shipping to the shorter North Atlantic run, to reduce imports of munitions and non-essential items such as cotton and timber, and to use the tonnage freed up to increase imports of wheat.21 But although such expedients might prevent the home front from collapsing, they could not by themselves enable Britain to win the war. Like his predecessor, Lloyd George understood that Britain alone could not defeat the Central Powers, and so it was essential to act in co-operation with the Allies. But that did not imply that he was willing to sacrifice Britain’s postwar interests to them. As he explained in June 1917, Lloyd George wished the Allies to bear an even heavier share of the burden of fighting the war, so that Britain would ‘be able to last. He did not want to have to face a Peace Conference some day with our country weakened while America was still overwhelmingly strong, and Russia had perhaps revived.’22 But in early 1917, the major problem was that the power of Britain’s existing allies was visibly waning. In March, Tsarist Russia slid into

BRITISH STRATEGY AND WINNING THE GREAT WAR 197

revolution, and in April and May a large part of the French army mutinied. In the spring and summer of 1917, the only cause for optimism in the Entente camp was that the United States had declared war against Germany. But any hope that the United States would rapidly be able to make its weight felt on the battlefields of Europe was quickly dashed. The United States had a tiny regular army, and it would be months, if not years, before the Americans could deploy more than a token military force in Europe. Consequently, the strategic debate within the British policy-making élite in the summer of 1917 revolved around one question: what should be the new timetable for administering the knock-out blow against Germany that Lloyd George had promised the British people before he became Prime Minister? Two conflicting options were discussed during the War Policy Cabinet Committee’s deliberations.23 The British could emulate the new Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, General Pétain, remain on the defensive in the west for the remainder of 1917, and allow industry to increase its production of guns, aircraft, and shells, so that the army could use technology to conserve manpower. By 1918, when the US Army would have arrived in strength, the Entente would have a sufficient superiority in men, guns, and munitions to guarantee that it could defeat the Germans in a final offensive. In the meantime, the British might, as Lloyd George urged, divert resources from the BEF to either northern Italy or Palestine. Success in both regions seemed to promise much. If the Italians captured Trieste, it might cause Austria-Hungary to make peace and thereby put an end to Germany’s ambition of establishing a great middleEuropean empire stretching from Hamburg to Baghdad. If the British occupied Jerusalem or Damascus, it might give the British public a much-needed morale boost while they waited for the arrival of the Americans. The alternative was to allow Haig to attack in Flanders. Success there, by driving the Germans away from the Belgian coast, would remove the constant threat of invasion, safeguard communications between Britain and the BEF, deprive the Germans of the airfields from which their Gotha bombers were mounting air-raids against London, and perhaps inflict a considerable defeat upon the German Army and take German pressure off France and Russia at their moment of greatest weakness. The weight of opinion in the War Policy Cabinet Committee supported Haig. Lloyd George’s enthusiasm for the failed Nivelle offensive meant that his strategic preferences were at a discount. Haig still enjoyed the political backing of most of the Conservative supporters of the coalition government. He believed that his offensive would cause Germany to sue for peace by the end of the year. Some of his political masters were skeptical but were finally persuaded to allow him to continue, for fear that if the BEF stood idle during the summer, defeatism would spread amongst the populations of the Entente. The third battle of Ypres did not bring an end to the war by Christmas, and in its aftermath, the offensive at Cambrai, after promising so much, ended in fiasco. In October, Italy was defeated at Caporetto, and in November the Bolsheviks

198 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

took Russia out of the war. US military assistance was slower to arrive than the British had anticipated. Lloyd George remained convinced that the war could only be won on the Western Front, but by October 1917 he was also convinced that, if the British mounted another large-scale offensive in France in 1918, their army would be exhausted, the military and political balance within the Entente would swing towards the United States, and it, not Britain, would dictate the peace treaty. He therefore decided that Britain must husband its army and economic staying power in 1918. The effort to inflict a knock-out blow on Germany would be postponed until 1919. By then the US expeditionary force would give the Entente a decisive superiority on the Western Front, would guarantee that the Americans suffered their fair share of the casu alties, and would ensure that Britain still had enough soldiers left alive to retain sufficient diplomatic leverage to secure its interests when the time came to talk peace. In the meantime, he was determined that the British would exert themselves to secure those interests. In the winter of 1917–18 Britain’s relative power within the Entente Alliance was at its apogee. The Russian war effort had collapsed, the morale of the French and Italians Armies had been badly shaken by the battles of 1917 and the Americans were not yet fully mobilized. The British Army had suffered heavy casualties, but it had had also emerged as the Entente’s most powerful land force and at sea the Royal Navy retained its predominance. Lloyd George was now able to impose his ideas on his partners, despite the vehement opposition from his own General Staff in London and from Haig’s headquarters in France. At the end of January 1918, the Supreme War Council agreed that Britain and its allies would remain on the defensive in France, northern Italy, and at Salonika throughout the year. Each member of the alliance would increase its production of artillery, aircraft, tanks, and other mechanical devices in order to multiply the firepower of its dwindling military manpower. In the mean-time, Britain would gain a much needed morale victory for the Entente -and help to safeguard its own imperial interests in Egypt and India—by mounting an offensive in Palestine to knock Turkey out of the war.24 Historians who have argued that British policy-makers were wrong to contemplate diverting resources to Palestine and that they should have concentrated every possible man on the Western Front in 1917–18, leaving only the bare minimum necessary to ensure the security of their possessions in the Middle East, have betrayed a Eurocentric view of the war. Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914 made the conflict an Asiatic as much as a European war, and a war in which Britain might lose its Asiatic empire and its status as a world power.25 In 1917–18 no responsible British policy-makers believed that the conquest of the Ottoman empire would lead to the immediate downfall of the German empire. All feared that if the Turks were left unmolested, their empire would provide a spring-board from which Germany could threaten Britain’s possessions in Egypt and India. In March 1918, even that archetypal ‘Westerner’ Douglas Haig was impressed by

BRITISH STRATEGY AND WINNING THE GREAT WAR 199

the urgent need to take immediate action in Persia ‘to checkmate the Germans in their attempt to reach Afghanistan and India’.26 The Germans recognized that Britain’s empire was one of the bases of its world power, but they also saw it as a potentially major source of weakness. Even before the war, some German policymakers were convinced that parts of the British empire would revolt if Britain were to become involved in a European war. Once that war had started. they lost little time in trying to assist that process. The British were not blind to this threat, and in 1915–16 they had taken steps to block the German Drang nach Osten (eastward expansion) in both Mesopotamia and on the frontiers of Egypt. By March 1917, the fall of Baghdad, the Arab revolt, and Sir Archibald Murray’s advance to the frontier of Palestine appeared to signify that they had barred the path of the GermanTurkish threat to Britain’s eastern empire. But the collapse of Russia, and the consequent crumbling of the Entente’s military position in the Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Persia, confronted the British with the same threat in a more dangerous form.27 The British regarded the pan-Islamic and pan-Turanian threat to India with deadly seriousness. Whatever Lloyd George’s rhetoric, British operations in the Middle East were not designed to knock the props from under Germany but to bolt the door to its Drang nach Osten. The British did not fight World War I just to ensure their security in western Europe; the war was also a struggle for the balance of world power. The Germans wanted to supplant Britain as a world power by creating a middle-European and Middle-Eastern empire stretching from Hamburg and Belgium to the Persian Gulf and Egypt. It was a war, therefore, in which British policy-makers came to measure victory or defeat by the extent to which they were able to frustrate German ambitions and to maintain Britain’s security in both western Europe and in the Middle East and India. The British alone did not have sufficient forces to defeat Germany’s attempted expansion in both the east and the west. But in 1917–18 they did have allies— France and Italy—and partners—the United States—who were willing to cooperate in containing German imperial ambitions in the west. Following the Russian collapse, they had no such allies in the east. Indeed, their own ambitions clashed with those of Italy and France in the Ottoman empire. Lloyd George thought that it therefore behoved the British to concentrate a modicum of their own forces in the Middle East and to reduce the influence of their allies in that region. The final outcome that British policy-makers wanted was an Entente victory in France and Flanders, and a British victory in Palestine and Mesopotamia. But the British timetable for victory in 1919 failed to take account of one thing: that in the spring of 1918 the Germans would make their own supreme effort to win the war before they became exhausted. Between March and July 1918, the very survival of the Entente was called into question by the tactical successes the Germans gained in their offensive. The way in which British policy-makers reacted at what was the moment of supreme crisis for the Entente indicated just how high they rated its preservation. Far from dispatching troops

200 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

from France to Palestine, they actually deprived General Allenby of most of his European troops and rushed them to the Western Front. And when the Germans seemed to be on the point of physically dividing the French and British Armies in France, they took the momentous decision to establish a species of unified Allied command under the French General Foch and to order Haig to withdraw south-westwards in conformity with the French. It was more important, they reasoned, to preserve the French alliance than it was to protect the Channel ports.28 In failing to convert those successes into strategic victories, the German high command contributed massively to its own defeat by its irrational decision to mount a gigantic offensive in the west.29 Ludendorff had attacked for a variety of reasons. The U-boat offensive had failed to force Britain to sue for peace but, together with the discovery of German efforts to incite Mexico to attack the United States, it had persuaded the Americans to declare war on Germany. By late 1918, the arrival of the US expeditionary force in large numbers in France would tip the numerical balance decisively against Germany. Perhaps most important of all, the German high command was utterly committed to its program of extensive annexations in both east and west, and it knew that there was no way it could secure them unless the Western powers were defeated in the field. But it was the wrong strategy, because the German Army lacked the numerical superiority, the logistical capacity, and, above all, the morale to carry it out. Three years of blockade and attritional warfare had so worn down its reserves of manpower and matériel, not to mention the morale and discipline of its troops, that the loss of about one million men that it sustained between March and July was enough to rob it of much of its remaining combat capability. There was an apparent paradox at the crux of British strategy and policy. All three of Britain’s wartime governments were determined to win the war at the least possible cost to Britain, but that cost eventually proved to be very high indeed. Between 1914 and 1920, the national debt multiplied 12fold. In 1914, Britain was the world’s largest creditor nation. By 1918, it was in debt to both Canada and the United States. The human cost of the war was even more appalling, 772,000 dead. One in eight of all men mobilized was killed, and one in four was wounded. The British found them-selves on the winning side in November 1918 because they were willing to sustain such losses. Which leads to one final question that must be addressed: why did they continue fighting? There were at least theoretical opportunities in 1917 to reach a negotiated peace. These were not taken for a variety of reasons. It would take two to compromise, and the terms that the Germans seemed to be offering were not acceptable to British policy-makers. It was patently clear that the German Army and Navy were determined to retain control of Belgium, and as long as they did so Germany would continue to constitute a threat to Britain’s postwar security. Any peace in 1917 on terms that the Germans might have been ready to accept would have constituted little more than a truce in a continuing conflict. Lloyd George had come to power because he had insisted that the war should be continued until a knock-out blow had been inflicted on Germany; a peace brought about on

BRITISH STRATEGY AND WINNING THE GREAT WAR 201

anything less would shake the legitimacy of his government to its foundations. This was an issue that he simply could not compromise over unless the military situation became utterly desperate; and, of course, it did not. It was the British, not the Germans, who held the military initiative in France in the second half of 1917, even though the way in which they exercised it may have been questionable. However, it would be wrong to assume that where governments led, the civilian population and the rank and file of the army would unquestioningly follow. That was not inevitably the case, as the examples of Russia in 1917 and Germany in the autumn of 1918 demonstrated. War weariness was undoubtedly growing in 1917 and early 1918, both at home and in the army. But the government and military authorities recognized it and took effective steps to contain it. Domestic food supplies in Britain were never entirely disrupted. Following the Bolsheviks’ armistice in November 1917, the coalition government had to work hard in public to convince organized labour that Britain was not at war for selfish imperial reasons. On 5 January 1918, Lloyd George made a careful statement to a trades union conference, in which he carefully glossed over Britain’s more blatant imperial ambitions and tried to convince organized labor that Britain was fighting the war to make the world safe for democracy and small nations. But there was more to government policy than honeyed words, for they were also willing to use the full force of the state’s coercive powers to repress dissent. In Ireland, anti-war rebellion was put down with ruthless military action in April 1916. In Britain, the Security Service and the Special Branch extended their intelligence-gathering operations to pacifist and anti-war groups and to trade unionists suspected of fomenting strikes that could disrupt war production, and worked energetically to disrupt their activities. This widespread system of state surveillance and harassment of pacifist activists like E.D.Morel was justified on the grounds that their activities threatened the successful prosecution of the war effort.30 By 1918, the Lloyd George government was so concerned about the possibility of serious domestic unrest, amounting even to a revolution, that the War Office prepared plans to suppress it and retained the equivalent of eight divisions in Britain to do so.31 In France, morale in the BEF undoubtedly dipped in late 1917 in the aftermath of the failed offensive at Ypres. The considerable number of prisoners that the Germans were able to take in the opening stages of their spring offensive in 1918 indicated that it had not entirely recovered. But what was remarkable was how quickly it did recover in the summer and autumn of 1918. Recent studies of the morale of the BEF have shown that throughout the war it was sustained by a variety of factors, including a sometimes draconian disciplinary system that at the same time succeeded in maintaining generally deferential relations between regimental officers and other ranks, and the wholesale importation into France of many aspects of British popular culture.32 But in the summer and autumn of 1918 some of the credit for that must go to Lloyd George and his decision in January to retain men in industry rather than allow the army to recruit them.

202 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Consequently, after the initial German offensive, the BEF was able to make good some of its recent losses with some still surprisingly enthusiastic 18-year-old youths. The morale and skill of the army that eventually helped to defeat the Germans in France in 1918 was the product of an amalgam of two kinds of soldiers. Battalions consisted of a cadre of experienced officers and NCOs (NonCommissioned Officers) who had learnt their trade in the battles of 1915–17. They bought an invaluable knowledge of battlecraft to the BEF. But the young men who had been in uniform only for a few months brought something equally valuable, a vigorous and often naive determination to win the war.33 In July 1918, the Entente’s armies began a counter-offensive that drove the Germans back beyond their start-lines in March. The contribution of the BEF to the Allied counter-offensive was significant. Between 18 July and the armistice, although the BEF was only the third-largest of the Allied armies, it captured 188, 7000 prisoners and 2,840 guns, more than the French or Americans combined. Since the early 1980s, a stream of scholarly works has forced a reappraisal of the combat capability of the BEF. Although their precise conclusions are not always in accord, they do point toward one conclusion. In the final year of the war, there was a clear growth in professional skill, not just amongst the Dominion divisions in France, but amongst the whole of the British Army.34 The Asquith coalition government’s decision to establish the Ministry of Munitions to mobilize British industry to support the war effort had given the army the wherewithal to fight a Materialschlacht, and by 1918 it had acquired the professionalism it needed to do so with success. Despite the steady progress that the Allied armies made on the Western Front in the summer and early autumn of 1918, in London it was far from apparent that Germany was about to collapse. The sudden ending of the war in November 1918 took the British by surprise. In August 1918, the Cabinet Committee of Prime Ministers and the Supreme War Council were preparing plans on the assumption that the war would not be won until 1919 or perhaps even 1920. As late as mid-October, Haig still did not believe that the German Army was sufficiently beaten that the German government would accept the armistice terms which Marshal Foch was proposing. When news that the Germans were seeking an armistice through the good offices of Woodrow Wilson reached the War Cabinet, they had quickly to try to answer a number of questions. Was it desirable to continue to fight into 1919 so as to invade Germany and inflict a Carthaginian peace upon the German people, or would such a settlement produce a vengeful Germany and an over-mighty France? In any case, would the British people be willing to continue fighting for another year? How could they devise armistice terms that would prevent Germany from gaining a breathing space, after which it could resume fighting but which would not be so harsh that its government would reject them out of hand? The decisive factor that impelled British leaders into accepting an armistice in the autumn when the German armies were still on French soil was the likely cost of continuing the war into 1919. ‘If peace comes now’, the South African

BRITISH STRATEGY AND WINNING THE GREAT WAR 203

statesman and member of the War Cabinet Jan Smuts wrote in late October 1918, ‘it will be a British peace, it will be a peace given to the world by the same Empire that settled the Napoleonic wars a century ago’. However, if the war continued until Germany was invaded and utterly broken, Britain ‘would have lost the first position; and the peace which will then be imposed on an utterly exhausted Europe will be an American peace’. If the war continued for much longer, the United States would be the world’s dominant military and financial power, and that would not be in Britain’s interests. As he reminded his colleagues, ‘our opponents at the peace table will not only be our enemies; and the weaker we become through the exhaustion of war, the more insistent may be the demands presented to us to forgo what we consider necessary for our future security’.35 The means that British policy-makers had employed to fight the war were not always based upon impeccable military logic. Kitchener’s reliance upon the willingness of France and Russia to fight the continental land war without significant British assistance for three years was an outstanding example of this. Similarly, it is not difficult to fault Britain’s pursuit of allies in the Balkans. But Smuts’ comments exemplified the fact that, for all their sometimes muddled thinking about how to fight the war, the British had not lost sight of the fact of why they were fighting it: their ultimate goal was not just to win the war, but to win the peace. That in turn injected an element of rationality into British war policy that made it different from Germany’s; for it meant that the British were willing to quit when they were ahead. NOTES 1 P.Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914–1916 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 1–24. 2 A.Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); idem, ‘The blockade of Germany and the strategy of starvation, 1914–1918’, in R.Chickering and S.Förster (eds), Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilisation on the Western Front, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 169–88. 3 P.M.Kennedy, ‘The Development of German Naval Operations Plans against England, 1896–1914’, English Historical Review, vol. 89, (1974), pp. 48–76. 4 K.Neilson, Strategy and Supply: The Anglo-Russian Alliance, 1914–1917 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984). 5 K.Neilson, ‘Kitchener: A Reputation Refurbished?’, Canadian Journal of History, vol. 15 (1980), pp. 207–27; D.French, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914–1916 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986); G.H.Cassar, Kitchener, Architect of Victory (London: William Kimber, 1977); T.Royle, The Kitchener Enigma (London: Michael Joseph, 1985). 6 J.Gooch, ‘Soldiers, Strategy and War Aims in Britain, 1914–1918’, in B.Hunt and A.Preston (eds), War Aims and Strategic Policy in the Great War (London: Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 24–5; D.French, ‘The Strategy of Unlimited Warfare? Kitchener,

204 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24

Robertson and Haig’, in Chickering and Förster (eds), Great War, Total War, pp. 282–4. Callwell to H.Wilson, 2 Jan. 1915, Wilson mss 73/1/18, Imperial War Museum; General Staff, War Office, ‘The War. A Comparison of the belligerent forces’, 6 Jan. 1915, PRO CAB 42/1/10. French, British Strategy, pp. 62–3. H.Strachan, ‘The Battle of the Somme and British Strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 21 (1998), pp. 79–95. K.Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985); J.McDermott, ‘Total War and the Merchant State: Aspects of British Economic Warfare against Germany, 1914–1916’, Canadian Journal of History, vol. 21 (1986), pp. 61–76. R.Williams, ‘Lord Kitchener and the Battle of Loos: French Politics and British Strategy in the Summer of 1915’, in L.Freedman, P.Hayes, and R.O’Neill (eds), War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 117–32. PRO T 172/643. Keynes, ‘Memorandum on the Probable Consequences of Abandoning the Gold Standard’, 17 Jan. 1917. PRO CAB 42/23/12. Hankey to War Committee, 9 Nov. 1916; PRO FO 371/2939/ 30373. Howard to FO, 6 Feb. 1917. D.French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition 1916–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 15–17. PRO CAB 42/1/8. Lloyd George, The War. Suggestions as to the military position, 1 January 1915. PRO CAB 28/1. ‘Statement drafted by Mr Lloyd George as a basis for the Prime Minister’s statement at the Paris Conference on 15 Nov. 1916’, nd. J.Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict, 1915–1918 (London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 153–76. P.K.Lundberg, ‘The German Naval Critique of the U-boat Campaign: 1915–1918’, Military Affairs, vol. 27 (1963), pp. 105–18. L.M.Barnett, British Food Policy during the First World War (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 196–7. P.E.ewey, ‘Food Production and Policy in the United Kingdom, 1914–1918’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 30 (1980), pp. 71–88. D.rench, ‘The Royal Navy and the Defence of the British Empire, 1914–1918’, in K.Neilson and J.Errington (eds), Navies and Global Defence: Theories and Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995), pp. 126–7. PRO CAB 27/6. Minutes of the 7th meeting of the War Policy Cabinet Committee, 19 June 1917. These discussions can be followed in the minutes and memoranda of the committee, which can be found in PRO CAB 27/6 and PRO CAB 27/7. The committee’s deliberations have been the subject of extensive commentary. See D.Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1983); French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition; J.Terraine, The Road to Passchendaele: The Flanders Offensive of 1917- A Study in Inevitability (London: Leo Cooper, 1977). PRO CAB 25/120/SWC57. Permanent Military Representatives, ‘Joint Note No. 12:1918 campaign’, 21 Jan. 1918; PRO CAB 25/120/SWC60. 13th meeting,

BRITISH STRATEGY AND WINNING THE GREAT WAR 205

25

26 27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34

Permanent Military Representatives, 21 Jan. 1918; PRO CAB 25/1210/SWC70. ‘Draft summary of the opinions expressed at the 1st session of the 3rd meeting of the Supreme War Council’, 30 Jan. 1918; PRO CAB 25/120/SWC72. ‘Procésverbal of the 3rd session of the 3rd meeting of the Supreme War Council’, 1 Feb. 1918. K.Neilson, ‘For Diplomatic, Economic, Strategic and Telegraphic Reasons: British Imperial Defence, the Middle East and India, 1914–1918’, in K.Neilson and G.Kennedy (eds), Far-Flung Lines: Studies in Imperial Defence in Honour of Donald Mackenzie Schurman (London: Frank Cass, 1997), pp. 103–23. PRO WO 256/28. Haig diary, 13 Mar. 1918. The best and most recent analysis of British policy in the Middle East is M. Hughes, Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East, 1917–1919 (London: Frank Cass, 1999). W.J.Philpott, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914– 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 150–60. W.Deist, ‘The Military Collapse of the German Empire: The Reality behind the Stab-in-the-Back Myth’, War in History, vol. 3 (1996), pp. 186–207. N.Hiley, ‘Counter-espionage and Security in Great Britain during the First World War’, English Historical Review, vol. 51 (1986), pp. 635–70. B.Millman, ‘British Home Defence Planning and Civil Dissent, 1917–1918’, War in History, vol. 5 (1998), pp. 204–32. J.Peaty, ‘Capital Courts-martial during the Great War’, in B.Bond et al., ‘Look to Your Front’: Studies in the First World War (Steplehurst, Kent: Spellmount, 1999), pp. 89–104; G.Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches: Officer-Man Relations, Morale and Discipline in the British Army in the Era of the First World War (London: Macmillan, 2000); J.G.Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). F.J.Hodges, Men of 18 in 1918 (Ilfracombe, Devon: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1988). This process began with S.Bidwell and D.Graham, Firepower: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904–1945 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982). It was followed by T.Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare 1900–1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); idem, How the War Was Won: Command and Technology in the British Army 1917–18 (London, Routledge, 1992); R.Prior and T.Wilson, Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson 1914–1918 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992); P.Griffith, Battle Tactics on the Western Front: The British Army’s Art of Attack, 1916–1918 (London: Yale University Press, 1994); P. Simkins, ‘Co-stars or Supporting Cast? British Divisions in the “Hundred Days”, 1918’, in P.Griffith (ed.), British Fighting Methods in the Great War (London: Frank Cass, 1996), pp. 50–69; J.Bourne, ‘British Generals in the First World War’, in G.Sheffield (ed.), Leadership and Command: The Anglo-American Experience since 1861 (London: Brassey’s, 1997), pp. 93–116; J.P.Harris with N.Barr, Amiens to the Armistice: The BEF in the Hundred Days’ Campaign, 8 August-11 November 1918 (London: Brassey’s, 1998). Two recent and as yet unpublished doctoral theses should be added to this list, S.Robbins, ‘British Generalship on the Western Front in the First World War, 1914–1918’ (PhD, University of London, 2001) and A. Simpson, ‘British Army Corps Commanders on the Western Front, 1914–1918' (PhD, University of London, 2001).

206 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

35 PRO CAB 24/67/GT6091. Smuts, ‘A Note on the Early Conclusion of Peace’, 24 Oct. 1918.

10 The Architecture and Soft Spots of Israeli Grand Strategy Gil Merom

Although the idea of strategy is relatively well defined, for example as ‘the rational and reciprocal adjustment of ends and means by rulers and states in conflict with their adversaries?,1 states often fail to delineate for them-selves their own strategy. Moreover, although states are supposed to act according to at least some vague vision of grand strategy, they often seem to improvise policy. Instead of acting on the basis of perception of problems and solutions, in terms of principles and fundamentals, and in a cohesive, comprehensive, and long-term manner,2 they seem to proceed through trial and error toward what sometimes seem to be shifting goals. Nevertheless, at another level, states tend to define their general security interests and the threats they face, and then allocate resources to defend the former from the latter.3 In this sense at least, they act strategically. In fact, when the conduct of states is observed over time, one can often draw a rather coherent picture of their grand strategy, which can empirically be constructed from the sum of their leaders’ and agents’ statements, plans, and actions. In this chapter I draw the general contours of Israeli grand strategy as it has emerged from five decades of plans and policies and the statements of some of its best strategic minds and academics. I also check how certain elements of this grand strategy measure up against logic and reality First, I review the hierarchy of Israeli political goals and military objectives, as these serve as essential references in the framework within which Israeli grand strategy is formulated. Next, I present the overall architecture of Israeli general strategy through its principal components. Then, I discuss a few soft spots in Israel’s grand strategy. In particular, I present some political and cognitive obstacles to rational strategy making, expose cracks in the social foundations of strategy, and lay out the consequences of imbalance between the military and diplomatic arms of Israeli strategy. I conclude with lessons from the analysis of the above-mentioned soft spots in Israeli strategy. The Origins and Objectives of Israeli Grand Strategy At the root of Israeli strategy is an acute perception of threat. The Israelis, élites and masses, believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is existential, total, and

208 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

enduring. They are convinced that the Arabs have not accepted Israel’s right to exist, aspire to destroy it, and continue to search for ways to do so.4 In essence, they perceive the Israeli-Arab conflict as a zero-sum game played out in the sort of environment one finds in the offensive version of realist theory.5 The Israeli threat perception is acute for several reasons. Paramount among these is the territorial, demographic, economic, political, and military asymmetry between Israel and its Arab enemies.6 The people of the Arab world vastly outnumber Israelis, possess greater economic resources, are more capable of mobilizing international support, maintain larger standing armies, enjoy vast strategic depth, and can potentially build powerful regional coalitions because of their shared identity. By contrast, Israel is severely constrained by its limited human and economic resources, suffers from relative international and regional isolation, and, above all, is extremely vulnerable. Israel’s territory is small, and it has to defend long borders and a densely populated industrial heart that is located in a thin and vulnerable coastline strip.7 Israelis believe that because of this fundamental and radical asymmetry, the Arabs can afford to test different confrontation strategies, make mistakes, and suffer temporary setbacks, while they themselves cannot afford to fail even once in any major confrontation. They also realize that neither military superiority nor a successful war can bring the conflict with the Arabs to a favorable conclusion.8 Extrapolating from Arab capabilities and intentions, strategists in Israel define three principal existential threats: a conventional Arab attack; such an attack backed or assisted by unconventional force; and an unconventional attack.9 Until now, but not for much longer, only the first of these threats was considered imminent. The threat of conventional attack is further broken down to include different scenarios, whose severity is measured according to the size of the attacking force, the geographic scope of attack, and the level of Israeli preparedness. Thus, the worst conventional scenario, ‘case everything’ in past Israeli terminology, was defined as an attack by members of a grand Arab coalition on all fronts and from all directions.10 By definition, ‘case everything’ was perceived to be at its most extreme in case the Arabs started a war in a surprise attack. Down the ladder of severity, Israeli strategists defined military scenarios that included more limited attacks by smaller coalitions or individual states, on narrower fronts.11 Israel also defined a number of other less acute developments, which were considered to be potentially existential because they either threatened to erode the staying power of Israeli society or the Jewish identity of the state. Chief among these were the threats of separatism and insurgency among its large Arab minority, Arab international and domestic terrorism, a war of attrition, and (at least in the past) economic strangulation. Israeli leaders and planners defined the overall strategic goals and military objectives of Israel according to the definition of the potential and actual threats and the fundamental asymmetry between Israel and its enemies. However, they

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 209

also defined the goals and objectives in relation to the vision of Zionist ideology and their interpretation of Jewish history.12 At the highest level of abstraction, the primary Israeli goals are survival and preservation of the Jewish identity of the state.13 Defined otherwise, Israeli leaders first seek to prevent any Arab coalition from eliminating Israel or from dictating to it unacceptable political conditions that would eventually put the state in mortal danger.14 Second, they seek to assure that a sizable Jewish majority will reside within Israel’s sovereign borders. Israel’s next goal is more ambitious. Because the Israelis consider the ArabIsraeli conflict as ‘deep’ (i.e., as constituted of ideological, cultural, and other elements, beside the political dispute over borders), they aspire, much as did the Americans vis-à-vis the Soviets at the outset of the Cold War, to contain the Arabs until they mellow. In short, Israel’s most ambitious goal is to eventually gain Arab recognition and acceptance. Israelis hypothesize that this could happen either due to ideational fatigue or severe reduction in the Arab capacity to act on their hostility. They hope that modernity, growing domestic needs, or simply the reality of living by Israel for a long period of time would weaken Arab antiZionism, or lead to a fundamental change in the balance of power (for example, following sharp decline in the value of oil).15 At the next most immediate level, and as a result of the Israelis’ realization that they cannot dictate a political solution to the conflict with the Arabs, the Israeli goals are essentially defensive and meant to protect the status quo.16 As such, these goals are concerned with the actual threats Israel faces. In this respect, the primary goal is to convince the Arabs not to start a general war or engage in other forms of fighting. Because the Israelis tend to believe that the Arabs understand only ‘the language of force’, the next goal is to preserve at a minimum, and improve if possible, the balance of power. In fact, Israel seeks to influence both the material and political dimensions of this balance. That is, it aspires to secure military superiority, and at the same time reduce the Arab capacity to unite. Finally, Israel aspires to avoid getting into an inferior bargaining position. At the proximate level, Israeli strategists define military objectives and priorities. They start from the assumption that war is endemic in the Middle East, and all the more so where Israel is concerned. Therefore, their first objective is to delay war as much as possible so as to provide Israel with a ‘breathing’ space, or time to recuperate between wars. The next set of objectives concerns war itself. These include the prevention of a strategic surprise, the thwarting of any offensive Arab initiative, the shifting of battle into Arab territory, and the destruction of Arab military force. The last set of objectives concerns the termination of war. Israeli planners seek to end war quickly, with minimal casualties, while occupying and threatening vital Arab assets.17 Finally, since Israeli strategists are concerned with Arab perceptions, they want the course and outcomes of war to rehabilitate the credibility of Israeli deterrence (particularly

210 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

given that the out-break of war itself is often the clearest evidence of deterrence failure).18 Finally, Israel has a set of ‘complementary’ political objectives that are driven from both assessments of threat and Israel’s military needs. Thus, Israel seeks to offset the fundamental Arab advantage through alliance with an external power that can support Israel economically, militarily (in terms of technology), and diplomatically. However, because such an alliance means that Israel would have to take into consideration the interests of its supporter (or else pay a painful price), and therefore be operationally and politically constrained, Israel also seeks to limit its inevitable dependence on any patron to a minimum.19 Last, Israel aspires to create international conditions that would reduce the Arab political and strategic capacity to fight. Israeli Strategy: Key Constraints and Fundamental Principles Obviously, while Israeli grand strategy is designed to achieve national goals and military objectives, it is also constructed in response to domestic and international constraints. Primary among these constraints are the economy, society, the international distribution of power, and time. Almost by definition, the need to meet threats in a situation of radical asymmetry means that the strategy of the smaller party will be constrained by the economy. Suffice it to note that during the period following the 1973 war, Israel’s defense allocation grew to over 25 per cent of its GNP (Gross National Product) and about 50 per cent of its budget.20 Obviously, in the long run, such levels of expenditure could not be tolerated without sacrificing the prospects for national development and the capacity to meet future security needs. Indeed, in a period of far greater vulnerability, during the years following independence, Israel limited its security budget to about 10 per cent of its GDP (Gross Domestic Product).21 In recent times, the economic constraint on Israel’s defense lessened somewhat because the Soviet patron of the Arabs went bankrupt, while Israel’s own economic situation improved dramatically, both in absolute terms and vis-àvis its Arab neighbors. At the same time, however, Israel’s breathing span during war remains constrained due to the high cost of modern battle, and only more so because its economy is vulnerable to large-scale military mobilization. The second major constraint on Israeli strategy is social. The demography of inferiority, as Horowitz and Lissak have noted, has a considerable impact on Israeli strategic choices. In order to meet its strategic objectives, Israel has to ‘extract’ extensively from its citizenry. Hence the high taxation, national draft policy, and many years of military reserve duty after a long period of compulsory service. Hence also the need to involve the reserves in any major military confrontation. Israel is also constrained for socio-cultural reasons; its society and political system are more sensitive to casualties and perhaps harder to mobilize (in the mental sense) than those of Arab states.22 All in all then, Israeli strategy must take into consideration idiosyncratic social sensitivities. For example, the

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 211

Israeli capacity to operate effectively with full force for a long period of combat is necessarily affected by social (and economic) constraints.23 Third, Israeli strategy is constrained by international forces, be they the distribution of power or interests. Above all, Israel is constrained by its inevitable dependence on foreign powers. This has been a continuing source of concern for Israeli strategists that has intensified following a string of painful experiences. In 1956, Israel’s war partners, Britain and France, were late to join battle, and early to abandon conquest, because of Soviet and US pressure. In 1967, France, the intimate ally and chief supplier of arms, imposed on Israel a military embargo during one of its most trying moments since independence. Its patron since, the United States, has occasionally used economic and military clout in order to bring Israel’s policy into line with US interests.24 Finally, as a cumulative result of all of the above, time has become a critical constraint on Israel’s war strategy. Of course, time is often a constraint for states in war, though it may be less so for the more affluent great powers. However, for Israel it may be a particularly tough constraint, because even under the most favorable conditions its operational and political success still depends on short timeframes. Any Israeli war strategy must take into consideration the following temporal constraints. Friendly or hostile powers are likely to intervene in order to restrain Israel shortly after the outbreak of hostilities. Israel’s capacity to fight would depend, soon after the start of an all-out war, on external sources of supply. At some point after a war starts, Arab regimes would be either compelled or capable to join battle with more than token forces. Israel’s economy cannot withstand full mobilization for long periods without suffering heavy damage in terms of production and loss of international markets. Of course, the time available to Israel is always context dependent. However, Israeli strategic planners must consider very carefully every war scenario they develop in light of the limited time for action each of the above constraints entails. The Principles Underlying Israeli Strategy Much as in any other state involved in international conflict, Israeli grand strategy vis-à-vis its enemies has two arms, one diplomatic and the other military. The diplomatic arm operates on several planes in order to increase support for Israel and its positions and contain adverse international initiatives. Israel’s main diplomatic thrust vis-à-vis its Arab enemies has been threefold: build ‘peripheral’ alliances with actors on the rim of the Arab world, support disgruntled minorities within Arab states, and establish relations, preferably overt, with Muslim and Arab states. The peripheral alliance policy has included relations with Iran (under the Shah), Ethiopia, Eritrea, and, most recently, intimate relations with Turkey.25 The policy of supporting minorities has included ties with the Iraqi Kurds and the Maronite Christians in Lebanon, among others. The policy of undermining Arab unity through flirting and contacts with Arab states has included at one point or another (except, of course, the peace with Egypt and

212 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Jordan) relations with states such as Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, and, recently, the Persian Gulf States of Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain. Since the mid-1970s, Israel has also used its diplomatic arm in efforts to deal directly with its Arab enemies. This marked a significant develop-ment in Israeli strategy, but was of limited dimensions. Moreover, the diplomacy was mostly a reaction to external pressure and worsening conditions rather than the result of Israel’s own initiative or calculated effort to exploit diplomatically military success. Finally, the resort to the diplomacy of compromise remained contested within Israel. In short, the military arm of Israeli strategy remained much more developed and dominant than the diplomatic one. Indeed, the imbalance between the military and the diplomatic arms of Israeli strategy is easily observed in the attention each receives, and the relative power of the representatives of each in the process of strategy and policy-making.26 In fact, the balance is so much in favor of the military arm that diplomacy has often been controlled by the military, in the sense that military considerations guided foreign policy and the latter was formulated and executed by military officers or people of extensive security backgrounds. For whatever reason, diplomacy was largely perceived as subservient rather than an alternative to military policy. While the role of Israeli diplomacy remains contested, few would doubt that Israel has a good sense of the role of the military in its grand strategy. In essence, the military part of Israel’s grand strategy is structured in a modular way that is designed to widen its security margins. This modular structure contains pillars that are interdependent and at times ‘overlapping’. Some of the pillars support each other, some share constituting properties, while some are designed to become active if and when their predecessors fail. The pillars of the structure are the following: deterrence; artificial strategic depth; early warning; qualitative advantage; and an offensive force structure and doctrine. The first such pillar of Israeli military strategy is composed of deterrence, largely because it is the most economical way to use force, an effective method to delay (if not prevent) wars, and a means to limit their scope.27 In its nuclear form, deterrence is also Israel’s last line of defense, in case all conventional efforts to defend itself fail.28 Owing to deterrence, but also to war-fighting considerations, Israel aspires to maintain an overall military superiority, particularly in the offensive domain. In the words of one of its most influential strategists, General Israel Tal, Israel must maintain its ‘existential strategic deterrence’ and capacity to apply ‘firepower against strategic targets of the conflict states and their allies’.29 The second pillar consists of external strategic depth. Lacking any real measure of strategic depth, particularly in its densely populated and highly productive coastline, Israel defined its strategic border in the form of ‘red lines’ far beyond its sovereign borders (and the territory under its control since the war of 1967).30 This ‘virtual’ depth fulfills three related functions: it permits Israel to observe changes in Arab deployments and thereby Arab intentions, buys Israel precious mobilization time, and increases the chance that it could move the battle

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 213

outside its territory. Indeed, Israel insisted (after the 1956 war) that Egypt keep significant forces out of the Sinai peninsula, demanded that no Arab army enter Jordan, and warned the Syrians (as of the mid-1970s) not to deploy their forces, and in particular air defense, in southern Lebanon. In fact, Israel has also introduced ‘red lines’ into its peace agreements and negotiation position with Arab states. Thus, Israel insisted that only a token Egyptian force would be deployed in the Sinai, that Jordan would not permit deployment of any other Arab army on its soil, and that Syria accept the demilitarization of the Golan Heights and a diluted military deployment beyond this area. In its negotiations with the Palestinians, Israel demanded control over the air space and borders of their future neutral and largely demilitarized state.31 The third pillar includes the intelligence and early-warning systems. Haunted by the lack of strategic depth, fully aware of the critical weight of time, and believing that it cannot afford to lose a single campaign, Israel invests heavily in intelligence collection and analysis and in early-warning systems. This investment was increased dramatically following the traumatic failure to anticipate the October 1973 surprise attack by Egypt and Syria.32 The fourth pillar includes the development of force multipliers and in particular the emphasis on the ‘qualitative edge’. The qualitative edge is understood commonly as technological superiority that compensates Israel for its quantitative inferiority vis-à-vis its Arab enemies.33 Obviously, the technological edge increases the credibility of Israeli deterrence and improves its war-fighting capacity. As General Tamir explains, Israel seeks to maintain a qualitative and (certain) quantitative edge that would convince Arab states that they cannot eliminate Israel or achieve even limited territorial objectives.34 Israel also invests in advanced technologies, because, as the former Israeli Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant General Mofaz, explained in 1999, such investment can ‘save manpower and reduce attrition rates in combat’.35 Last, the investment in the technological edge serves a political purpose, as it helps to reduce Israel’s dependence on foreign support and thereby increases its military and political freedom of maneuver.36 It is important to point out that much of the Israeli investment in the technological edge is directed at securing an offensive advantage. The fruits of such investment were revealed during the 1982 war in Lebanon. Relying on an early version of ‘information dominance’ and superior target-acquisition capabilities, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) destroyed the Syrian Soviet-made SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems and shot down some 100 Syrian airplanes without suffering a single loss in these operations. The qualitative edge was also revealed in 2001, albeit on a much smaller scale, in the hunting of the operatives of the Palestinian terror campaign. For quite some time now, Israel has also been investing in developing a qualitative defensive edge, as its enemies are armed with mediumrange ballistic missiles, and are getting closer to obtaining nuclear weapons.37 Israel, however, has not done so at the expense of investment in

214 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

offensive dimensions of the qualitative gap, as can be learned from its acquisition and development of weapon systems.38 A second important point to note concerning the qualitative edge is that it is as much a social as a technological matter. This has always been understood so far as the IAF was concerned, as indeed Israel’s aerial superiority was attributed to its capacity to select and train the ‘best and the brightest’ among Israelis. However, this is also true for the IDF (Israel Defense Force) at large. In the final analysis, the IDF’s advantage in combat has always been predicated on its capacity to attract the sons of the educated middle class (and the Kibbutzim) to serve in its top combat units and, more importantly, in the ranks of its officers. Indeed, the social edge of the IDF was probably more responsible than anything else for the prevention of a catastrophe in the 1973 war.39 During the first days of war, the Israeli lines of command almost collapsed, chaos prevailed everywhere, diluted forces operated with little artillery and air support, and the battlefield balance of power heavily favored the Arab armies.40 Still, the Arab attack was broken, the Arab armies were repelled and then defeated, and the IDF ended the war in control of additional Arab land. These results were largely achieved because of the tenacity and improvisation of junior officers of the standing army and the officers of the reserve, who managed to regroup, fight fiercely in the face of great inferiority, and turn the tide. The fifth pillar of Israeli strategy consists of the military doctrine and force structure of the IDF. Both are designed in view of the lack of stra tegic depth, the vulnerability of the economy to long-term mobilization, the cultural sensitivity to casualties, self-doubts concerning staying power, and the risk of early international intervention during war. Thus, Israeli military doctrine is concerned with the economy of energy and time, and the velocity of action. Or stated less cryptically, the Israeli military intends to meet conventional existential threats with quick, decisive and cost-effective action that aspires to defeat the enemy in a decisive and convincing manner. Thus, while Israel’s strategic posture is essentially defensive, its doctrine is offensive.41 Hence, also, the emphasis given by the IDF to firepower and maneuver, and the cultivation of air power, armored divisions, and more recently squadrons of attack helicopters.42 Finally, being defensively offensive is not an attribute only of Israel’s warfighting doctrine. Rather, given the proper circumstances, Israel also prefers to pre-empt (as it did in 1967) and strike preventively (as it might have done in 1956, and as it did against the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981). For the same reasons, once in war Israel tends to prefer escalation. This is partially a matter of political calculus. Its leaders believe that a drawn-out struggle is likely to be indecisive and, as such, put Israel at a disadvantage. They also believe that escalation is preferable because it permits them to exploit the IDF’s mobility and firepower in order to achieve favorable results at a reasonable cost. Thus, tactical and strategic escalation are hall-marks of the Israeli way of making war, as indeed the war of attrition with Egypt (1968–70) and five decades of struggle against Palestinian terror suggest. However, one cannot ignore the fact that the preference for

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 215

escalation is also built into a ‘cult of the offensive’ that is pervasive among Israeli officers. Soft Spots in Israeli Strategy: The Fiddler Crab Metaphor Israeli strategy resembles a fiddler crab. It has two uneven arms, one military and the other diplomatic; powerful sensory systems; and multiple legs to support it— economic, technological, social, international, diasporic, and other.43 All ‘organs’ are interdependent and joined together by the body of Israeli politics. The Israeli strategic ‘crab’ must adapt to changing environmental conditions while it keeps its balance and maintains high co-ordination and synchronization. Too cumbersome or too light arms, faint senses, feeble legs, or a body and brain incapable of properly defining objectives, allocating resources, or setting priorities, can each throw it out of balance and thereby put Israel in harm’s way. In short, some of the risks awaiting Israel while it tries to address threats are necessarily embedded in the architecture and constituting elements of its grand strategy. I therefore propose to think of soft spots in Israeli strategy with the fiddler crab metaphor in mind. I will limit myself to exposing a few aspects of congenital and developmental pathologies in only three ‘organs’ of Israeli strategy. However, the metaphor permits others to expose further weaknesses in these as well as other organs. I will start with the body politic, avoid the sensory systems (which were revised and remodelled as a consequence of the 1973 intelligence failure), discuss one of the legs, and finish with some thoughts about the arms. In discussing the body of Israeli politics I will focus on structural and cognitive obstacles to rational and coherent strategic behavior, emphasizing in particular the effects of territorial bias on strategy. In discussing the supporting foundations of Israeli strategy I will focus almost exclusively on the social leg of strategy. Finally, I will discuss the military and diplomatic arms of strategy, and in particular the imbalance between them. The Body of Israeli Politics and the Making of Strategy Whether it is because parliamentary democracies display ‘chronic inability to judge strategic issues by raison d’état’,44 or for other reasons, the Israeli political system does not, and cannot, define and pursue strategy in a totally rational and coherent way. Political systems in general, one may add, are probably incapable of doing so even when they try to follow pure raison d’état considerations. Obviously, Israel is not alone in its limited capacity to act strictly according to strategic rationality. However, Israel’s rational decision-making capacity may further be undermined by its idiosyncratic political and cultural attributes.45 As a small-population state, Israel needs to meet threats with extensive mobilization and therefore act on consensus perhaps even more than other states. However, owing to its social and political structure, disproportional power is

216 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

vested in the hands of small factions that thrive on parochial interests. These have been responsible for a significant portion of irrationality in Israeli strategic behavior; so much so that some believe that ‘strategy in Israel—and in a broader sense, Israeli national security policy—is the wretched maid of politics’.46 Of course, having structural origins, irrational strategic behavior is not limited to security policy. Rather, it is pervasive in decision-making processes that concern other national issues, including water, agriculture, and public transportation. Israeli strategic rationality is also a victim of the past and the pressing present. In particular, international challenges and security threats have been magnified at times, and responses to both have been exaggerated, as a result of a collective memory that emphasizes persecutions in the diaspora, the Holocaust, and Arab hostility.47 At the same time, immediate security problems consume much of the attention of leaders and thereby undercut long-term strategic planning. Moreover, the intensive involve ment with both past and present security has given military officers a dominant role in decision-making. Michael Handel has explained the impact of all these factors on strategy formation in Israel: The combination of [Israel’s] geographic vulnerability, fear of annihilation, political isolation, and domestic political system gave priority to the immediate problems of national survival. Historically, top Israeli decision-makers have acted according to operational imperatives without a clear conception of long-range objectives and without assessing the ultimate consequences of operational success. Instead of strategy governing the use of force, the logic of military operations often determined that of strategy.48 Handel’s description of a militarized policy lacking coherent and comprehensive strategic reference is clearly evidence based. Indeed, national security policy in Israel has occasionally reflected the whims of ambitious officers and officersturned-politicians who made decisions of strategic consequence without adequate or even any deliberation. In June 1967, General David Elazar apparently connived to start a war with Syria and then decided to advance into Syrian territory as he pleased and expel the native residents of the territory his forces conquered.49 In late 1973, General Elazar (then the Chief of General Staff [CGS]), and even more so Moshe Dayan, the Defense Minister, apparently conspired, against the official position of the government, to break the USmediated ceasefire that had been achieved on the Egyptian front at the end of the October war.50 While it is hard fully to assess their motivation for restarting the war, it is difficult to ignore the possibility that Elazar and Dayan were motivated by a desire to improve their public standing, as they were certain to face public censure for the failure to anticipate the Arab 6 October surprise attack. More recently, in 1982, Defense Minister General Ariel Sharon connived with the CGS Eitan to expand the war in Lebanon far beyond the original approval of the government.51

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 217

In short, key Israeli decisions have occasionally been made because individuals, usually of military origin, acted on the basis of adventurism, opportunism, or ideological commitment that had little to do with proper longterm strategic planning. That, however, does not mean that Israeli strategic decisions were made in limbo, were utterly conjectural, or were devoid of some strategic vision. Rather, I believe that while important security decisions have been made in a decentralized manner and for opportunistic or other improper reasons, they have still reflected a general vision in which one factor in particular stands out. I therefore submit that the factor that should be recognized as having had perhaps the greatest influence on a wide range of seemingly unrelated strategic decisions is the Israeli attitude towards territory. The Territorialization of Strategic Thinking For obvious reasons, territory is a major consideration in Israel’s national security. Most notably, territory is highly valued because Israel is extremely vulnerable geographically. As already noted, within its internationally recognized 1949 borders, Israel cannot trade space for time, rely on strategic retreat (particularly in its critical central front), or enjoy sufficient room for deployment and maneuver (except in its southern desert). These are the strategic origins of the Israeli wish to control the territories conquered in 1967 in the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Indeed, such control significantly improves Israel’s situation in terms of space and time for deployment, maneuver, and if necessary retreat (though its territorial predicament still remains challenging even within these boundaries). However, as is the case with other issues of security, the Israeli interest in territory and the ways its leaders have acted on it have never been products of purely rational strategic considerations. Rather, the interest in land was born also out of the memory of landless life under gentile discrimination and persecution, Zionist ideology, and, more recently, theology (specifically, the obligation to resettle the ‘promised land’ and the inter-pretation of some religious groups that such action would draw closer the coming of the Messiah). The high value of territory can also be traced, though less so in recent times, to the doctrine of spatial defence, which considered a strong grip over territory (in the form of settlements) as essential for supporting the defense of frontier regions.52 The fact that Israel has to deal with an acute territorial predicament, and that it has strong ideological and other affinities for territory, leaves the question of strategic rationality unresolved. On balance, and in particular considering the vulnerability of Israel within its 1949 borders, is the Israeli approach to territory rational or not? In order to answer this question, I propose to consider the territorial issue in more than narrow tangible and operational terms and absolute gain calculations. That is, I suggest assessing the Israeli attitude towards territory in view of other than immediate military considerations, in light of the cost, rather than only the benefit, of holding territory, and in relation to feasible alternatives

218 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

to doing so. I believe that such a comprehensive approach leads to a clear verdict that the Israeli attitude towards territory has exceeded the boundaries of strategic reason more than once, and as such has corrupted the process of strategy formulation. In particular, Israeli decision-makers have ignored or underestimated the cost of holding conquered territory, avoided trade-off considerations, and occasionally been blinded by sheer territorial greed. While Israel has inherent hunger for land, its leaders by and large managed to control their territorial urge until 1967. The victory in the Six-Day War radically changed this situation. From a country living in a geostrategic nightmare and under siege, Israel emerged as an (over)confident regional superpower. Israel also lost sight of the consequences of defeat and territorial loss for its Arab enemies.53 Initially, Israeli leaders were conciliatory. The Eshkol government regarded the conquered territories as bargaining assets to be traded for Arab recognition of Israel and adequate security arrangements. Soon, however, the craving for strategic depth, exuberant nationalism, and a burst of messianic mythology pushed aside all other considerations. No Israeli expressed the consequences of this conceptual shift better than the Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan, who declared that he preferred Sharm al Sheik without peace to peace without Sharm al Sheik. In short, territorial seduction led Israeli leaders to blindness. Specifically, they failed to consider the cost of denying the Arabs any hope that they could recover lost land by any other means than war. The Arab national commitment to their territorial integrity, the political need of Arab leaders to back up this sentiment, the elevated motivation due to the humiliation of their armies and masses, and the logistic complexities involved in holding an active front away from the center of Israel were either underestimated or ignored. The ultimate result was that Israel adopted a strategy that had a limited and flawed military content and, worse, operated in a political void. Excessive interest in territory seems also to explain faulty Israeli decisions concerning defense and strategic retreat in other fronts. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and quickly achieved its objective of destroying the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) power there.54 Then, the Israeli leadership decided to stay in Lebanon until its more ambitious objectives could also be achieved. An alternative policy of retreating from Lebanon immediately following the expulsion of the PLO was declined. As time passed, local Lebanese militias increasingly opposed the Israeli forces and once again military-territorial consideration became dominant in Israeli thinking. As a result, Israel sank into defensive anti-guerrilla warfare that did not suit its domestic structure, attracted international criticism, and demanded more investment and attention than the alternative policy of deploying defensively within Israel. Moreover, because in the process Israel inadvertently helped to create for itself new Shiite enemies in Lebanon, the primary military objective of its invasion, the protection of the northern settlements of Israel, failed.

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 219

In fact, the territorial bias in Israel seems so powerful as to affect its decisionmakers also in a sort of a mirror-image way, whereby they over-value the territory their enemies control. A good example is the Israeli perception of the threat implied by Syrian deployment in Lebanon. The Syrian forces in Lebanon are vastly inferior to the IDF, if only because they do not have a credible air defense or air support in case of war with Israel. The mountainous Lebanese terrain sharply limits their maneuverability. Moreover, the Syrian defense and attack capacity in the Golan Heights front is reduced, because of the diversion of forces to Lebanon. Finally, their presence in Lebanon is a continuing source of Lebanese hostility and international and interArab criticism. In short, while the Syrian presence in Lebanon may for a variety of reasons be of benefit to the Syrian regime, it is a strategic burden for Syria that has probably served rather than under-mined the Israeli national interest. Another indication of the power of the territorial bias can be found in the fact that it has percolated deep enough to undermine rational decision-making even on the operational level. That is, Israeli leaders and officers have grown to value territory so much that on occasion they have refused to consider modest retreat in war, even when it was the most sensible battlefield option. For example, when in October 1973 the Egyptians over-whelmed the thin Israeli line of defense, the IDF command did not pull out its meager forces, although their utility became negative. Then, in a spasmodic decision, the command ordered an ill-prepared counterattack against the well dug-in Egyptians, although this meant that the disorganized IDF forces could not exploit their inherent advantage in fighting while combining firepower and maneuver. The obvious alternative, an Israeli evacuation of the Suez Canal zone and a further strategic retreat that would have given Israel an opportunity to regroup and lure the Egyptians into open space, was not accepted until after the first counterattack failed.55 A few days after this failure, the Israeli command did follow the ‘luring’ logic, which indeed resulted, in the form of the massive 14 October tank battle, in the fruits the IDF might have denied itself earlier.56 Equally indicative, but perhaps even more disturbing, this territorial bias seems to have contaminated strategic thinking even in ‘normal’ times. For example, following the peace agreement with Egypt, Israel received US funds for relocation of its major military bases in the Sinai Peninsula. The relocation included a naval base whose permanent whereabouts was to be decided by the Israelis. Ariel Sharon, then a minister in control of a lesser portfolio, and Rafael Eitan, the CGS, approached the Navy Commander in an effort to convince him to relocate the Southern Red Sea naval base to the Gaza strip (in the Mediterranean). Fortunately, the Commander, General Zeev Almog, refused to act on their pressure, reasoning that in case of war a base near Gaza City would be subject to enemy fire.57 Yet of all effects of the territorial bias, the one of utmost consequence is the failure of Israeli leaders to consider properly, or at all, obvious tradeoffs. This was the case with the decisions to stay both in Egyptian territory and in Lebanon

220 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

without seriously considering diplomatic settlement or even unilateral withdrawal. Yet, nowhere has this been clearer or more damaging than in the case of the West Bank and Gaza. Of course, from a narrow strategic-territorial point of view, Gaza and the West Bank differ significantly, even though they resemble each other in many other critical ways. Gaza has no inherent territorial value, while the West Bank, which topographically dominates Israel’s vulnerable coastline region, is of the utmost importance. Given offensive military capabilities, any hostile entity that controls the West Bank puts Israel in immediate mortal danger. Indeed, the ‘eastern front’ has always been the top concern of Israeli strategists.58 In short, holding on to the densely populated and underdeveloped Gaza and, even more so, settling Jews there were radical displays of strategic irrationality, whereas holding on to the West Bank was at least sensible from a narrow military point of view. Nonetheless, the Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank is still strategically flawed. There is simply no way to envision any gain from occupying territory and oppressing the people of an alien nation whose population is only slightly smaller than Israel, but has a far higher birth-rate. Moreover, it is patently evident that it was strategically foolish to implant scattered settlements throughout the heartland of such territory. Not only was such a policy certain to explode in Israel’s face, but it was always against Israel’s goal of protecting its Jewish identity and against, as important a goal for many, of keeping it democratic. In fact, the spreading of settlements in hostile and densely populated areas was senseless even from a military point of view. First, it undermined military preparedness and efficiency because as the IDF was assigned policing, public-order, and passive-defense missions, it had to give up precious training time for its major missions and challenges. Second, the IDF had to operate in a dispersed mode of deployment, while it is at its best in concentrated formation, on the offensive, and in motion. In fact, several strategic and security experts have long pointed out the proper trade-off that the conquered territories presented Israel. General Tal explained that while both the ‘geographic borders’ and ‘demographic borders’ of Israel are critical, the latter is more important than the former.59 Yehezkel Dror more cautiously concluded, after having reviewed demo-graphic trends, that ‘any solution to the Palestinian question and any judgement concerning Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip must prevent significant growth in the minority population of the state of Israel’.60 Finally, the late Avner Yaniv concluded— after having weighed the cost and benefits of keeping densely populated Arab territories—that returning the territories to Arab sovereignty would be ‘a favor Israel would do itself’.61 Yet, for over a quarter of a century successive Israeli governments have refused to deal with the dilemma posed by the fact that, while geographic vulnerability may push towards expansion, demographic and political realities leave little choice but contraction. In many respects, Israel today is belatedly trying to extricate itself from a situation that its leaders and strategists created while neglecting to consider inescapable geographic-demographic

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 221

trade-offs and failing to resolve the above expansion-contraction dilemma early on and on their own initiative. The Social Leg in the Foundations of Strategy Famous strategists, statesmen, and scholars have noted, directly or by implication, the critical role of society in strategy. For example, Clausewitz described the essence of war as resting on a trinity of government, army, and people (or society), while Michael Howard found the ‘social’ to be one of the four major dimensions of strategy.62 Yet, in spite of such insights, the social dimension of strategy remains under-discussed, a state of affairs that is particularly surprising in the Israeli case. After all, strategists in Israel believe that ‘the fundamental, necessary and required condition for Israel’s security is its internal fortitude’,63 and that ‘social cohesion is…the most important element of [Israel’s] national security’.64 They also warn that, ‘the shadow hanging over Israeli security comprises…also…the self-image of Israeli society, its efficiency and level of motivation’.65 Finally, they believe that ‘the greater danger’ to Israel is in ‘the erosion of the consensus concerning what [is called] existential war… [because] if part of the public would think…fthat [war] is not justified or essential…it would have critical influence on the motivation [to fight]’.66 There are of course exceptions in Israel to the neglect of the social dimensions of strategy, as, for example, Dror’s comprehensive essay on Israeli grand strategy suggests.67 These exceptions, however, largely focus on the potential threat the Arab-Israeli minority poses to Israel. In fact, the government, aware of the possible domestic challenge it might face, even discussed social remedies to the rise of Palestinian nationalism and separatist sentiments among Arab-Israelis. The Israeli National Security Council (NSC) even recommended in 2001 that the government allocate ‘out of its own initiative’ the resources needed for the implementation of the development program for the Arab sector.68 Yet, as many of the discussions of strategy in Israel suggest, the perceived domestic threat rather than the social foundations of Israeli security have dominated the social discussion of strategy in Israel. In short, issues that concern the Jewish population and strategy are all too often left out of the discussion. Of graver consequence perhaps, these issues seem to remain marginal also on the government’s agenda. Indeed, when the social foundation of Israeli strategy appears to be shaking, the government tends to improvise remedies rather than consider carefully and act upon long-term calculations. Above all, Israeli governments seem to continue to assume, rather than cultivate, a high degree of social commitment and readiness to sustain the cost of national security strategies, although Israeli leaders and scholars have long suspected that the staying power of Israeli society is on the decline.69 What, then, are the social risks to strategy that Israeli governments tend to ignore or neglect? At least as far as most Israelis are concerned, the most important security-related social risk Israel faces (after the perceived domestic

222 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Arab threat) grows out of inequality, in general, and unjust burden-sharing, in particular. The inequality and burden-sharing problems are threefold. First, Israelis who serve in the military or have kin in uniform are infuriated by the failure of the political system and institutions to end the draft-deferrals and subsidies to the members of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community.70 This anger is exacerbated by the fact that the military-service-dodging, less productive, and divisive ultraorthodox community seeks to force its vision of collective identity on the state and increasingly supports aggressive security policies, the ultimate cost of which others will pay. Second, bitterness concerning general burden and risk-sharing develops because reserve soldiers feel that they have become an endangered species in Israeli society. No single reason is responsible for this feeling. The exemptions given to the ultra-orthodox community certainly fuel bitterness, but other significant reasons are probably as responsible. For example, fewer Israelis serve in the military because the social sanctions and shame mechanisms that used to make the life of draft-dodgers and those unfit for service miserable have been eroding. In the past, whoever did not serve was tagged with an invisible mark of Cain that subjected its bearer to various social and institutional sanctions. However, demographic growth reduced draft needs and, consequently, discharge policies became more lenient. As a result, society stopped perceiving those not serving as undermining the national effort, and the cost of avoiding military service declined sharply. At the same time, compulsory and reserve service became less popular and attractive because the national ethos was losing force in a quickly transforming economy, society, and culture. At least among the secular and better-educated circles in society, service became less popular also because national and security policies seem to have followed the interests and extreme ideas of a messianic minority of settlers. The third source of discontent originates from inequality within the ranks. The problem has surfaced in recent years as reservists formed organizations and protest forums. The plight of reservists included demands by the Hitorerut (Awakening) movement that the state end draft discrimination and that reserve soldiers be treated fairly by the army.71 Yet, the so-called ‘mutiny of the reservists’ became most pronounced in the campaign of reserve pilots, who were joined by other reserve officers (from the ‘forum of battalion commanders’), for fair insurance coverage, equal to that enjoyed by officers of the standing army.72 The complaints and frustration of the reservists were rock solid. The higher echelon of the IDF has indeed accepted a discriminatory insurance system, and then misled the officers of the reserve and their families concerning insurance benefits.73 In a way, the IDF command seems to have become a union oligarchy that takes superb care of its members but is indifferent to seasonal workers, although the latter’s contribution is often a matter of good will and although their taxes pay for the lavish benefits of the ‘union leaders’. Needless to emphasize, from a strategic point of view, such a state of affairs is deeply unhealthy. Can

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 223

anyone responsibly assume that the criti-cally needed reserve officers will go on volunteering and taking risks while they know that their families are at a disadvantage vis-à-vis those of their pampered peers of the standing army? While the above questions of burden-sharing and social justice threaten the morale of the reserve force and the extraction capacity of the state, they may still be only the visible part of a social iceberg awaiting Israeli strategy. As I noted, one of the pillars of Israeli strategy and the main solution to the problem of asymmetry is the Israeli emphasis on the qualitative edge as a force multiplier. As I further noted, this edge is an empty concept without its human content, which largely, though not exclusively, consists of the educated middle-class. It is this class, or more accurately its alienation, that is perhaps the source of the softest spot in the social foundations of Israeli strategy, because the enthusiastic participation of this class in military service, and its disproportional yet essentially voluntary contribution to almost every aspect of life in Israel, is at the root of Israel’s qualitative edge. At the most general level, the alienation of the educated middle class is a result of brutal electoral politics. Israeli leaders, searching for ways to win elections and stabilize their hold over power thereafter, naturally turn to the largest pool of votes that is concentrated in the less-endowed sectors of society. The ways to get the votes of these sectors is through redistribution of resources and/or inflammatory rhetoric. At least in the short run, rhetoric is an effective and cheap method, and as such often the preferred method of political mobilization. The Israeli right was quick to note this and act accordingly. Unfortunately, in already polarized Israel,74 the political rhetoric has in recent years turned inflammatory, particularly against the ‘élites’, a term that refers largely to the educated and often Ashkenazi professional class of Israeli society. The inflammatory rhetoric was also directed at the institutions that support the social order this educated class cherishes, be it the Supreme Court, the office of the Attorney-General, the media, etc. In short, when right-wing politicians use polarizing rhetoric in search of political gain, they undermine the foundations of the Israeli qualitative edge. At a different level, the alienation of the secular middle class is born out of a deeper conflict over values between the former and a powerful coalition of religious and nationalist forces. This conflict is about national identity as much as it is about national goals. Reduced to its elements, it is about the place of religion in public and even private life and about the principles and authority that should define and lead national security policy.75 Among certain religious circles, the biblical ‘promised land’ (which includes the West Bank and Gaza) must be resettled by Jews and be under Jewish sovereignty. Moreover, for at least a minority among these circles, territorial and other issues that concern security are to be decided by religious authorities rather than the elected government or defense establishment. Recently, for example, this conflict emerged in relation to the drafting of women into combat units in general and mixed-service units in particular. Seen from a somewhat different perspective, the irritation of the

224 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

educated middle class arises from the feeling that the law is not applied evenhandedly and that the commitment to democratic decision-making is not universally and indiscriminately shared. The settlement and settlement-expansion policy in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the unmitigated and unaccountable lawlessness of some extreme Jewish settlers, are responsible for much of this sentiment. The outcomes are clear. The majority among the educated middle class, who are in principle ready to pay a high price for defending Israel proper and its loosely defined Jewish identity, reconsider their contribution to society and security. Finally, the negative impact of alienation may be further exacerbated because the international system provides exit opportunities for the ‘best and the brightest’. The point is that the temptation to emigrate is matched in recent times by opportunities to do so. Western economies and states -haunted by competition, declining birth rates, and the prospects of economic instability and failure to finance future pensions—are rather eager to harvest foreign professionals. Thus, whereas Rabin, as a novice premier, could call Israelis who had decided to emigrate a ‘fallout of nonentities’, the conventional wisdom today is that many of them represent the best Israel has to offer. Indeed, as if to underscore this fact, the IDF announced in the summer of 2001—under the pressure of a possible deterioration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a regional war—a plan to open reserve call-up centers in major western cities. In the final analysis, then, the most troubling soft spot in the social foundation of Israeli security can be presented as a simple problem of resource management. Israeli leaders overextract from and undercultivate the best and most productive patch of their social land. The possible outcome of this neglect of the social fabric of Israeli strategy—the erosion of the human component of the qualitative edge—is akin to muscular atrophy. In sum, the assumption of the Israeli establishment and society that they can continue to draw on deposits of good will —particularly from among those at home and, even more so, from those abroad who have been alienated—is rather reckless from a strategic point of view. The Arms of Strategy: the Consequences of Imbalance Life in an alien Middle East taught Israel to build and maintain the strongest possible army, give priority to military considerations, and listen carefully to the opinion of former and serving military officers. So much so, that Israel tends to display, as Handel pointedly noted, ‘undue reliance on military solutions’.76 Critics of Israeli strategy have already discussed many aspects of this state of affairs. I therefore limit myself to discussing only a few of the reasons and consequences of the ‘undue reliance’ that have received little attention, can be presented in new ways, or deserve further emphasis. I start by considering the consequences of the general Israeli view of military power. My central argument is that the most critical flaw in the Israeli perception of military power is in the tendency to consider it as related to political outcomes

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 225

in a linear way. Many Israelis seem to sub-scribe to the idea that achieving political objectives in times of conflict is primarily a matter of possessing, displaying, or applying a sufficient amount of military power. The possibility that military power may at times have a limited utility, or that it is of a dialectic nature, is all too often ignored. Furthermore, this misconception of the meansends relationship has been the source of an Israeli overemphasis on deterrence and preference for status quo situations that seemed defensible militarily, irrespective of what such policy entailed. In fact, Israel has already experienced the consequences of its preference for the status quo and its blind trust of deterrence during its conflict with Egypt, the war in Lebanon, and the struggle with the Palestinians. Yet, the linear understanding of the relations between military power and political results has proven hard to uproot. In short, in spite of evidence to the contrary, many Israelis believe that the way to contain every aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict is to perfect their military capabilities and the credibility of deterrence. For example, General Dan Halutz, the IAF commander, has recently explained that ‘the price one is going to pay [for attacking Israel with missiles] must be clear…[because] when the price is clear, it would be reconsidered many times before anybody acts’.77 It is perhaps ironic that this resolute statement was made in the context of a discussion of the 1991 Iraqi Scud attacks on Israel, which were encour-aged, as Barak Mendelsohn has convincingly argued, precisely because Israel’s deterrence posture was so resolute.78 I have already made a point concerning the Israeli attitude toward the status quo when I noted the Israeli refusal, because of excessive attachment to territory, to consider retreat from Sinai (during 1967–73) and Lebanon (during 1982–99). I nevertheless touch upon both cases again, because they shed light on another lacuna in the Israeli understanding of the nature of military power: disregard for what can be termed as the double-effect of overextended objectives. As General Tal (ret.) has noted, the strength of the defensive party in a conflict is in direct relation to the extremity of the enemy’s objectives, whereas the strength of the offen-sive party is in inverse relation to the extremity of its own objectives.79 That is, the more extreme the Israeli territorial and political objectives, the higher over time the Arab motivation to foil or reverse them, and the lower over time the Israeli motivation to defend them. Thus, as the theory of Lebow and others explains,80 the Israeli decision to preserve by means of deterrence the new territorial status quo achieved after Arab defeats was counterproductive, because while deterrence may have delayed confrontation it also made it more certain. Misunderstanding this logic was doubly damaging for Israel, because it both led to war and prevented Israel from considering, let alone exploring, the alternative political avenue of conflict resolution. Indeed, while Israel assumed that holding on to the Suez Canal and possessing superior military power would deter the Egyptians, both in fact motivated the latter to fight more stubbornly, as they first did in an attrition war (that failed) and then in a successful cross-channel assault in the October 1973 war.

226 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

The Israeli belief in military power has a second dramatic outcome. Because military thinking and military people dominate the process of national security policy-making, diplomacy is relatively neglected and in a distant second place as far as Israeli strategy is concerned. Consequently, diplomacy is all too often at the service of military strategy rather than the converse, and even in this subservient role it tends to underperform. Dore Gold, a strategist and political adviser to Netanyahu and Sharon, exemplifies a radical version of the Israeli militarization and marginalization of diplomacy. He defines arms control ‘as a component of national strategy, [that] seeks to neutralize the strategic advantage of potential enemies through diplomacy’.81 It is further indicative that he believes that ‘from each state’s perspective a successfully implemented arms control strategy should shift the focus of any future military competition to areas where it enjoys inherent advantages by virtue of relatively constant elements of its national power’.82 In essence, his vision suggests that diplomacy, at least in the case of arms control, is a method of gaining relative military advantage through other than military means. Notwithstanding the relationship between this vision and conventional definitions of diplomacy, it is almost self-evident that, since this logic assumes that one of the co-operating competitors must be out-smarted or miscalculating badly, co-operation would almost certainly lead to cheating and ‘defection’.83 Of course, the above view is also at odds with visions of strategy that consider diplomacy, arms-control agreements, and other forms of security co-operation between rivals as measures of reducing the chances of miscalculation and inadvertent escalation, particularly in times of acute crisis.84 In fact, Israel’s diplomacy vis-à-vis Arab states until 1974, anemic and subservient to military strategy as it may have been, was still based on the conventional rather than Gold’s vision of diplomacy. Indeed, what co-operation Israel managed to secure was limited to ceasefire agreements, armistice regimes, and recognition of a tacit system of deployment and action red lines that were meant to minimize the chances of inadvertent conflagration and escalation.85 Israel’s diplomacy has slowly changed following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when its leaders started, under pressure, to consider the strategic potential in compromise and co-operation. This process culminated in the 1979 land-forpeace treaty with Egypt. More important, even the skeptical military establishment that had distrusted the diplomacy of compromise eventually became convinced that peace with Egypt (and Jordan) is ‘the most important strategic asset of Israel’,86 and that as such it ‘must be preserved and strengthened’.87 Yet, in spite of these achievements, and the fact that even among the more hawkish leaders of the security establishment diplomacy is regarded today as an essential means of Israeli strategy,88 Israeli diplomacy has not recovered from the long years of neglect or from its inferior position. Indeed, the recent blunders in the Israeli handling of the Palestinian conflict attest to this shortcoming in Israeli grand strategy.

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 227

Most notably, the Israeli diplomatic initiative of the Barak government that culminated in the 2000 Camp David conference and the ensuing Taba talks was nothing short of amateurish. First, the initiative itself was belated and ill prepared because Barak, as a novice and diplomatically inexperienced premier, focused initially on negotiations with Syria (probably because he assumed that agreement with the latter would put him in a better bargaining position vis-à-vis the Palestinians). He tried to lure the Syrians into agreement by offering them, early on, about the maximum of Israel’s concessions. The gambit failed, however, and Barak gained nothing in return for his concessions. The Syrians, on the other hand, established a convenient benchmark for future negotiations. All that time, the negotiations with the Palestinians were practically frozen. When the Syrian track reached a dead end, Israeli diplomacy, led by Barak and Ben-Ami, turned toward the Palestinians. Then, both committed a second blunder—in large measure because they ignored elementary rules of negotiation. Having failed on the Syrian front and having wasted much time on the former, Barak and Ben-Ami got into negotiations with the Palestinians under great domestic and time pressure. This, in and of itself, left them in less than ideal conditions for negotiation. However, irrespective of the corner Barak had pushed himself into, he and Ben-Ami managed to add a few mistakes to those already committed in dealing with the Syrians. In a recent interview, Ben-Ami revealed that the Israeli negotiators had hardly insisted before, during or even after the July 2000 Camp David conference, on getting counterproposals from the Palestinians. Instead, they kept modifying their position in response to Palestinian objections.89 When the dust settled over the failure of the Camp David and Taba negotiations, Barak boasted that, while he made no territorial concessions, he ‘exposed’ the radical and uncompromising position of Arafat. Yet such ‘spin’ does not hide the poor Israeli performance nor an additional problem of Barak and Ben-Ami’s diplomacy: the lack of an exit strategy in case the negotiations failed, except for the improvisation of blaming the Palestinians. Thus, while Palestinian intransigence may have been exposed, the benefit from the blame-game was short-lived and the damage from the inept Israeli diplomacy is likely to haunt its negotiators in the future. In sum, Israeli diplomacy—as opposed to Barak’s realistic vision of the final status agreement—had left future Israeli negotiators an uncomfortably narrow room of maneuver. The Israeli diplomatic failure in negotiations with the Syrians and Palestinians could conceivably be attributed only to the inexperience and excessive zeal of Barak and Ben-Ami. At a minimum, however, such a claim is a strong indication of the weakness of the Israeli diplomatic arm. Moreover, a short review of other failures of Israeli diplomacy during this period indicates that the problems of Israeli diplomacy are structural rather than incidental. One wonders, for example, why Israeli diplomacy failed or, even worse, did not seriously try to mobilize global support for Israel’s positions on some obvious grounds. In particular, it remains a mystery why Israel was incapable of linking its interests to those of other powerful states, by evoking the risk of precedent embedded in

228 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

certain Palestinian positions. How is it, for example, that Israeli diplomacy failed to point out that the Palestinian demand for the ‘right of return’ is a fundamental challenge to the norm of sovereignty, and as such a threat to other states that are probably more vulnerable than Israel to similar claims? Consider, for example, the Russian vulnerability to a Finnish demand for return of the indigenous Karelian Isthmus population, vulnerability that is shared by many other states.90 Similarly, one wonders why Israeli diplomacy failed to point out the fundamental immorality and almost singularity involved in the refusal of Arab states to grant Palestinian refugees permanent-residence status, citizenship, and equality, for half a century, in spite of their being part and parcel of the Arab world. In the final analysis, then, the dominance of the Israeli military arm has significantly contributed to the weakness of its diplomatic arm and has thereby introduced an element of imbalance into its grand strategy. As a result, Israel has failed on occasion to offer diplomatic alternatives to military action, refused to give diplomacy the strategic lead unless it was forced to do so, and seen its diplomacy underperform even in its subservient role of support for military action. Indeed, one cannot but wonder why the Israeli military has often proved agile, stubborn, and victorious, whereas Israeli diplomacy has tended to be sluggish, indecisive, and ineffective? Conclusion At the most fundamental level, strategy must be measured for effectiveness against time.91 The purpose of strategy’, as Michael Handel wrote, ‘is to enhance the long-range survival and power of a nation by employing all diplomatic, economic, and military means at its disposal.’92 In short, the ultimate test of grand strategy is in its capacity to defend the security of the state and maintain or possibly improve the position of the latter vis-à-vis rivals. Analysis at this level suggests that Israeli grand strategy has been successful overall, though not flawless. Israeli grand strategy has been able to achieve three critical goals: it has secured the existence of Israel; has defended its territorial integrity; and it has done so while leaving it better off in terms of power vis-à-vis its enemies. That is, it has provided for the defense of the state without sacrificing its future security.93 Indeed, Israel has improved its relative power position because its economy has done better and because it has managed, through compromise and accommodation, to distance key Arab states (at least for the time being) from coalitions that seek to attack it. Along the way, Israel has also succeeded in gaining acceptance, if not legitimacy, from a few Arab states and thereby achieved a breakthrough as far as Arab ostracism was concerned.94 Finally, it has several times withstood the ultimate test of war, and to a degree has done so as designed to, even under extremely unfavorable circumstances.95

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 229

That stated, two caveats must be noted. First, it is impossible to measure exactly how responsible Israel’s strategic wisdom was for the above achievements, because the strategic success of any state depends also on developments it has no control over, including the strategic per-formance of rivals. Indeed, Israel’s strategic success is partially the result of developments such as the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet patron of Arab states, the rise of its own patron to global hegemony, changes in Arab preferences, Arab strategic failures, and so on. Second, Israel has failed to achieve one of its primary national goals: if anything, it has undermined rather than upheld its capacity to maintain a Jewish and democratic identity. In particular, the settlement policy and the inability to abandon the Palestinian territories on suitable terms has under-mined both objectives. At a second level, strategy should be assessed for efficiency. Israeli grand strategy at this level also receives above-average marks. In general, the Israeli capacity to achieve national goals and improve the balance of power without sacrificing long-term economic and military capabilities suggests that its strategy has been relatively efficient. However, as strategy is also a process of ‘constant adaptation to shifting conditions and circum-stances in a world where chance, uncertainty, and ambiguity dominate’,96 efficiency must also be measured in terms of adjustment time and learning cost. In this respect, Israel has occasionally been slow to adjust and has therefore paid a higher than necessary learning cost. Most obviously, Israel has been relatively slow to realize that military power is a political means of limited utility. The fact that its leaders and strategists have learned this as a result of trial and error, rather than through a process of critical deliberation, strongly attests to Israel’s partial strategic inefficiency. As I have pointed out in this chapter, Israel’s grand strategy risks facing pathologies that would reduce further its efficiency, though none of these is currently of a magnitude that could prevent it from meeting its primary goals and core objectives. Still, there are important lessons to be learned from both the pace of Israel’s strategic learning and the analysis of the architecture and soft spots of its strategy. First, Israeli grand strategy will improve once the political system is capable of rationalizing planning and decision-making. One way to do this would be through reform that would reduce the excessive influence of small factions on national decisions. Discussion of such political reforms, however, is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to note that Israel has been experimenting in the past decade with political reforms. In the early 1990s, it adopted a split-ticket vote that was supposed to strengthen the executive but ended up weakening it. In short, the reform was a failure from both civil and strategic points of view. At present, Israel is in the process of reverting to its old political system that, unfortunately, was also seriously flawed. At the same time, irrespective of flaws in the political structure, Israel can apply a strong remedy that might somewhat reduce the problem of irrationality in

230 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

national security decision-making. It could turn the weak NSC into a strong, authoritative, well-funded, and civilian-led body that would assume supreme authority for grand-strategy planning in Israel. The current NSC was created against bitter bureaucratic opposition during the Netanyahu era. Consequently, it was born circumscribed, and has been led until recently by a succession of former, retiring, and active-duty generals. Thus, Israel’s ability to plan in a comprehensive manner and in view of long-term and broad considerations, and then act on such planning, has remained more or less unchanged. In fact, grand strategy seems to remain largely the product of improvisation with excessive input from the military, and in particular its Department of Planning. Indeed, the latter is the ‘only military-political integrative planning body’, something that results, as the Israeli Controller General found, in a biased analysis of civil and political issues and, at the same time, a neglect of long-term military planning.97 This state of affairs can be changed through legislation and proper nomi-nations, but it cannot be done unless the political leadership first realizes the gravity of the structural void and then acts boldly to remedy it. Second, Israeli grand strategy would benefit from cognitive enlightenment of Israel’s security élite. First, the latter would be well advised to suppress any urge to consider solutions to political and military challenges primarily with a territorial yardstick. Second, this élite must think in sociological terms about strategy. In fact, there are signs that these changes are taking place, but the depth of change and expected outcomes are not certain. Thus, for example, Israel has been negotiating over territory with all its enemies and the Israeli NSC has proved aware of social problems in Israeli civil-military relations.98 However, so far as the social dimension of strategy is concerned, key challenges have not been recognized as such. Most urgent, the NSC and the higher echelon of the security establishment must recognize that the Israeli qualitative edge is largely a social matter that is rather unusual in comparison to other states. Specifically, they have to understand that Israel’s power, military and other, depends in part on the good will of a relatively independent, critical, and limited class of citizens, who have exit options. If Israel is to continue to extract the most out of this class, its leadership, society, and institutions have to get rid of various forms of discrimination, disregard, and contempt. Part of the essential recognition needs to involve the setting of goals, and the securing of civil order and the environment that do not challenge core beliefs of the educated middle class. For example, military occupation and counter-insurgency are in the long run a clear challenge to the temperament and wishes of this class. At another level, the government has to cultivate the status of this class in society, be it through rhetoric, taxation policy, or opening channels for its influence. At a minimum, politicians must stop alienating this class through inflammatory and derogatory rhetoric, and set out to protect it and the institutions its members cherish. Thinking in sociological terms about strategy should by no means be limited to introspection. Rather, Israeli leaders and strategists must also incorporate social analysis into their strategic planning and behavior vis-à-vis Arab states. In

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 231

particular, they must take into consideration the societies of Arab foes and friends, as much as their own, while they formulate Israel’s goals and strategy. They must therefore accept that the social foundations of Arab states set constraints and limits on Arab strategic planning and behavior, and therefore on what Israel can realistically aspire to achieve. In a nutshell, Israel must act while emphasizing two principles: caution and modesty.99 Thus, Israel needs to pursue, as much as it can, but short of compromising its core security values, a ‘hostility reduction strategy’ that aspires to minimize the place the Israeli-Palestinian conflict occupies in Arab politics. Israel must also assume that, although nondemocratic, Arab political systems can drag Arab leaders to act against their rational strategic interest. Consequently, Israeli leaders must prepare their society to tolerate a gap between moderate Arab policy and offensive Arab rhetoric, Arab reluctance to conclude peace agreements with Israel, and Arab intentions to keep relations ‘cold’. At the same time, because intellectuals and organized professionals in most Arab countries are often at the forefront of hostility to Israel, and because the Arab masses are easily instigated, Israel must also remain cautious and set sensible limits to co-operation.100 In this respect, Dror formulated the principal rule: ‘When Israel faces a choice between peace that does not let it withstand a general attack and a situation of lack of peace that lets it withstand a general attack—it…[must] prefer the second to the first situation.’101 Because the idea that Israel has the right to exist in the Middle East has not percolated deeply into Arab societies and is challenged on a daily basis, Israel must also maintain all of its layers of deterrence. For example, it cannot afford to accept transparency and international supervision of its nuclear program. Likewise, while broad strategic rationality compels Israel to give up its occupation of the Palestinian territories, its leaders must realize that they would then have to revert to old strategic imperatives. In short, Israel would have to insist on red lines, offensive strategy, and a pre-emptive strategic orientation. In fact, it may have to apply all of the above more strictly than before, because its capacity to mobilize and deploy the military reserve component is ever more vulnerable to an Arab pre-emptive missile attack. Adaptation to the new strategic environment—and sociological, demographic, and juridical considerations in particular—also suggest that Israel must remain vehemently opposed to the Palestinian demand for the ‘right of return’. Palestinian negotiators present this demand as merely symbolic rather than operational. Yet, symbolic claims and principles are of the utmost importance and are likely to become even more so in the future. In fact, there is a good chance that although an uncompromising Israeli position on the matter would be criticized initially, sound Israeli diplomacy could eventually convince key international actors to support Israel for their own sake. In particular, Israeli diplomacy would have to convince third parties that the above Palestinian demand is both an attack on the concept of sovereignty and, if accepted, a precedent that would leave them vulnerable to powerful demands for return from other dispossessed groups.

232 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Finally, as the previous paragraph implies, Israeli strategy would benefit from a correction of the imbalance between its military and diplomatic arms of strategy and a commitment to broad strategic thinking that considers political, territorial, and social factors together. For example, if Israeli leaders and strategists believe that regime and society matter, they must strive to preserve secular Arab regimes, because the latter lead their states in relatively moderate and predictable ways, even if their rhetoric and policies are unpleasant at times. Alternative ‘ideological’ regimes may simply present Israel with a far greater management problem, and all the more so in a Middle East flooded with weapons of mass destruction. In particular, it would be wise of Israel to remember that social revolution and acute inter-national crises have at times been born out of defeat.102 In essence, then, the strategic question for Israel is simply with whom it prefers to deal both as an enemy and as a possible partner. Thus, broadly speaking, Israel should think and act in ways reminiscent of the realist policy of nineteenth-century Europe. It should prefer diplomatic to military conflict-management strategies; if diplomacy is impossible, it should limit its objectives in war so that it will not find itself contributing, as it did in Lebanon, to the upsetting of the political order in secular and relatively moderate Arab states.103 In fact, at present, Israel faces precisely such an unpalatable strategic dilemma in its conflict with the Palestinians, which involves all three of the soft spots that I have discussed in this chapter. Moreover, if Israel makes the wrong choice, it is more than likely to take the road that would force it to face even graver consequences of the pathologies afflicting its strategic soft spots. NOTES The author wishes to thank Avi Ben-Zvi, Azar Gat and Peter J.Katzenstein for reading and commenting on a draft of this chapter. 1 MacGregor Knox, ‘Conclusion: Continuity and Revolution in the Making of Strategy’, in Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein (eds), The Making of Strategy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 614. 2 Yehezkel Dror, A Grand Strategy for Israel (Jerusalem: Academon, 1989 [in Hebrew]), p. 20. 3 Christopher Lane, ‘Rethinking America’s Grand Strategy’, World Policy Journal (Summer 1998), p. 8. 4 Alan Dowty, The Jewish State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), p. 89. 5 See Gideon Rose, ‘Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy’, World Politics, vol. 51, no. 1 (1998), pp. 146, 149, 170. For a discussion of the characteristics of the international system in an offensive realism environment (although not defined so by the author), see Stephen Walt, ‘Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power’, International Security, vol. 9, no. 4 (1987), pp. 13– 15.

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 233

6 See Israel Tal, National Security (Tel-Aviv: Dvir, 1996 [in Hebrew]), p. 50; Dore Gold, ‘Evaluating the Threat to Israel in an Era of Change’, in Shai Feldman and Ariel Levite (eds), Arms Control and New Middle East Security Environment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 98–104; and Avner Yaniv, Politics and Strategy in Israel (Tel-Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1994 [in Hebrew]), pp. 13–34. 7 See Avraham Tamir, A Soldier in Search of Peace (Tel-Aviv: Edanim, 1988 [in Hebrew]), p. 227. 8 Ariel Levite, Offense and Defense in Israeli Military Doctrine (Hakibutz Hameuchad, 1988 [in Hebrew]), p. 27; and Michael I. Handel, ‘The Evolution of Israeli Strategy: The Psychology of Insecurity and the Quest for Absolute Security’, in Murray et al (eds), The Making of Strategy, p. 537. 9 Tamir, A Soldier in Search of Peace, p. 228. 10 Ibid., p. 233. 11 Gil Merom, ‘Israel’s National Security and the Myth of Exceptionalism’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 114, no. 3 (1999), p. 423. 12 For an account of Zionism see Dowty, The Jewish State, particularly pp. 34–60. 13 See Tal, National Security, pp. 49–50. 14 Tamir, A Soldier in Search of Peace, p. 227. 15 In an recent interview, Prime Minister Sharon explained: ‘I estimate, from a strategic perspective, that perhaps in ten or fifteen years, the capability of the Arab world to hurt Israel will be diminished…because Israel will be a state whose economy thrives whereas the Arab world might be in decline…it is possible that due to environmental and technological developments, the price of oil will decline and Arab states will reach a state of crisis, while Israel will get stronger.’ Quoted in Haaretz, weekend supplement, 13 April 2001. 16 Levite, Offense and Defense in Israeli Military Doctrine, p. 61. 17 Tamir, A Soldier in Search of Peace, p. 234. 18 Levite, Offense and Defense in Israeli Military Doctrine, pp 31–2, 40–1. This was clearly seen in the debates within Israel over the proper response to the 1991 Iraqi missile attacks, the risks of unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, and the response to the Palestinian uprising. See, for example, on the debate over the 1991 Gulf War and Israeli deterrence in Aharon Levran, Israeli Strategy after Desert Storm (London: Frank Cass, 1997), pp. 81–96. 19 Dror, A Grand Strategy for Israel, p. 342. 20 Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1990 [in Hebrew]), p. 240. 21 Dowty, The Jewish State, p. 9; and Eliot A. Cohen, Michael J. Eisenstadt, and Andrew J. Bacevich, Knives, Tanks and Missiles: Israel’s Security Revolution (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998), p. 106, fig. 1. 22 Shai Feldman, Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 266. 23 See Horowitz and Lissak, Trouble in Utopia, p. 246. 24 For example, Kissinger forced an end to the Israeli counterattack in October 1973, and prevented the strangulation of the Egyptian Third Army and possible encirclement of their Second Army. Then, in 1975, Kissinger tried to muscle Israel, by halting the delivery of jets to the IAF, to accept an interim redeployment agreement with Egypt in Sinai on terms Israel considered disadvantageous. Since then, US administrations have generally been less brutal, but still have occasionally used

234 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

25 26

27

28

29 30

31

32

33 34 35

36 37

38 39

‘reassessment’ and other leverages in order to bring Israel into line with their own objectives. In 1991, the United States prevented Israel from retaliating to the Iraqi Scud attacks, although Israel felt this was essential as far as re-establishing its deterrence. Israel was also pretty much dragged into the 1991 Madrid conference, and when Prime Minister Shamir refused to put a halt to the settlement policy, the United States helped end his political career by refusing to underwrite Israeli loan requests. For a concise review of US pressure on Israel, see A.F.K.Organski, The $36 Billion Bargain: Strategy and Politics in US Assistance to Israel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 187–201. See Ofra Bengio and Gencer Özcan, ‘Arab Perceptions of Turkey and its Alignment with Israel’, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 37, no. 2 (2001), pp. 50–92. On Israeli diplomacy, see Aaron S.Klieman, Israel and the World after 40 Years (New York: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1990); and Aharon Klieman, Statecraft in the Dark: Israel’s Practice of Quiet Diplomacy, JCSS Study no. 10 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988). On the place of deterrence in Israeli strategic thinking see Tal, National Security, pp. 61–7; and Jonathan Shimshoni, Israel and Conventional Deterrence: Border Warfare from 1953 to 1970 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). On Israeli nuclear power and policy development see Shai Feldman, Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), in particular pp. 95–120; and Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Tal, National Security, p. 224. See also in Dror, Grand Strategy, p. 316. See Micha Bar, Red Lines in the Israeli Deterrence Strategy (Tel-Aviv, Ma’arachot, 1990 [in Hebrew]); and Handel, ‘The Evolution of Israeli Strategy’, p. 541. See Zeev Schiff, Security for Peace: Israel’s Minimal Requirements in Negotiations with the Palestinians, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Paper no. 15 (Washington, DC, 1989). For the latest analysis of the 1973 intelligence failure, see Uri Bar-Joseph, ‘Israel’s 1973 Intelligence Failure’, in P.R.Kumaraswamy (ed.), Revisiting the Yom Kippur War (London: Frank Cass, 2000), pp. 11–35. See Handel, ‘The Evolution of Israeli Strategy’, p. 546. See Tamir, A Soldier in Search of Peace, p. 231. Lt Gen. Shaul Mofaz in a lecture. Quoted in ‘The IDF towards the Year 2000’, Strategic Assessment, vol. 2, no. 2 (October 1999), see www.tau.ac.il/jcss/sa/ v2n2p 3_N.html Tamir, A Soldier in Search of Peace, p. 309. In particular, Israel has an active anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program that includes the development of the Hetz (Arrow) interceptor missile and the Oren Yarok (Green Pine) radar and control system. On the strategic lessons learned from the 1991 Iraqi missile attacks on Israel and the investment in defense, see Levran, Israeli Strategy after Desert Storm, pp. 1–24, 125–33. See Cohen et al., Knives, Tanks and Missiles, pp. 93–100. For example, 37 of the civilian graduates of the best private school in northern Israel died during the war (39 additional graduates of the adjunct pre-military school also perished); 17 of the 37 (~46 per cent) were officers. The 37 killed in

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 235

40

41

42

43

44 45

46

47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

action represent about 1.4 per cent of the total Israeli war casualties, while the family base of the school represents only about 0.3–0.4 per cent of the population. For a ‘sanitized’ account of the chaos during the first days of the 1973 war see Chaim Herzog, The War of Atonement (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1975), pp. 78– 115, 146–81. See also Avraham Adan, On Both Banks of the Suez (Jerusalem: Edanim, 1979 [in Hebrew]), pp. 27–37. As General Israel Tal explained, Israel built an ‘offensive force and…the power to be decisive rather than staying power’ and thereby made the IDF the “‘Israeli Defense Force” by mission, but in essence an “offensive force”’. Quoted in Tal, National Security, p. 52. For the origins and considerations that led to the Israeli offensive doctrine, see Levite, Offense and Defense in Israeli Military Doctrine, in particular p. 51, fig. 1. See also Murray and Grimsley, ‘Introduction: On Strategy’, in Murray et al (eds), The Making of Strategy, p. 9. As the Israeli CGS has recently stated: ‘the IAF is the nation’s long-range strategic arm as well as its reserve firepower during war. Its ability to shift from one front to other [fronts] is critical to the IDF’s strength.’ Quoted in Mofaz, The IDF towards the Year 2000’. For a particularly interesting analysis of the relations between Israeli security and the Jewish diasporas, see Yossi Shain and Barry Bristman, ‘‘The Jewish Security Dilemma’, Orbis, vol. 46, no. 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 47–71 and ‘Diaspora, Kinship and Loyalty: The Renewal of Jewish National Security’, in International Affairs vol. 78, no. 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 69–95. Knox, ‘Conclusion: Continuity and Revolution in the Making of Strategy’, p. 625. See Dowty, The Jewish State, pp. 73–84; Handel, ‘The Evolution of Israeli Strategy’, pp. 542–4; and Merom, ‘Israel’s National Security and the Myth of Exceptionalism’, pp. 410–17. Yaniv, Politics and Strategy in Israel, p. 471. This is, to a degree, also the observation of US officials such as Henry Kissinger. See Years of Upheaval (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Michael Joseph, 1982), pp. 484, 539, 800. A good example of strategic irrationality due to general domestic political pressure is the decision to distribute gas masks to all Israelis, in response to Saddam Hussein’s threats, on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. This decision ignored the fact that distributing gas masks undermined the credibility of Israeli deterrence, because it reduces the vulnerability of its society. Dowty, The Jewish State, pp. 87–8; Emanuel Wald, The Gordian Knot: Myths and Dilemmas of the Israeli National Security (Tel-Aviv: Yediot Aharonot Books & Chemed Books, 1992 [in Hebrew]), in particular pp. 11, 21–8. Handel, ‘The Evolution of Israeli Strategy,’ p. 570. See also pp. 553–63. Amir Oren, Haaretz, 1 June 2001. Amir Oren, Haaretz, 8 June 2001. Zeev Schiff and Ehud Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984). See Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 118–19. Yaniv, Politics and Strategy in Israel, pp. 273–4. On the Lebanon War, see Richard A.Gabriel, Operation Peace for Galilee (New York: Hill & Wang, 1984); Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War; and Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

236 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

55 See Adan, On Both Banks of the Suez, pp. 75–123. 56 See Herzog, The War of Atonement, pp. 205–6; and Adan, On Both Banks of the Suez, pp. 170–3. 57 Amir Oren in Haaretz, 22 June 2001. 58 Tamir, A Soldier in Search of Peace, p. 227–8; Merom, ‘Israel’s National Security and the Myth of Exceptionalism’, p. 423. See also a contemporary strategic analysis by Ephraim Kam, ‘The Jordan Valley—An Area of Vital Security to Israel in a Changing World’, Strategic Assessment, vol. 3, no. 4 (January 2001), see www.tau.ac.il/jess/sa/v3n4p.3.html. Indeed, during the first phase of the 1973 War, the IDF’s Syrian front received preference over the Egyptian front (particularly in terms of assigning forces and even more so air force support missions) precisely because Israel’s strategic depth in the Golan Heights was far smaller than in the Sinai. See Herzog, The War of Atonement, p. 129. In a recent review of Israel’s national security, Prime Minister Sharon drew President Bush a security map. On this map Israel pushes the 1967 Green Line border with the West Bank to the east (so as to protect the coastal ‘narrow waists’) and maintains control over a significant strip of land between the Palestinian authority and Jordan (so as to isolate the former). See Haaretz, 28 June 2001. 59 Tal, National Security, p. 230. See also an interview with Maj. Gen. (ret.) Ami Ayalon, former commander of the Israeli Navy and former head of the General Security Service, Maariv, weekend supplement, 13 June 2001. 60 Dror, A Grand Strategy, p. 306 (see also pp. 303–4). 61 Yaniv, Politics and Strategy in Israel, p. 463. 62 Carl von Clausewitz On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984), p. 89; Michael Howard, ‘The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 57, no. 5 (1979), pp. 975–86. Michael Handel also observes, following Clausewitz, that without harmony among the organizational, political, and social dimensions (the military, government, and people) no wartime strategy can be successful. See Masters of War (London: Frank Cass, 3rd edn, 2001), p. 10. 63 Tal, National Security, p. 231. 64 Interview with General Uzi Dayan, Israel’s National Security Adviser, Maariv, 30 September 2001. 65 Tal, National Security, p. 227. 66 Maj. Gen. Dan Shomron in 1980 (later the Israeli CGS). Quoted in Levite, Offense and Defense in Israeli Military Doctrine, p. 60. 67 Of all the social issues Dror covers, his central concern seems to be the Israeli Arabs. In this respect he is offering far-reaching remedies, such as granting the Arab Israelis who wish to integrate equality and full civil rights and the capacity to mingle among the Jewish population in terms of residence, lifestyle, (service in) the IDF, and marriage. Dror also suggests that other Israeli Arabs, who do not wish to blend, mingle, or assume Israeli identity, become permanent residents rather than citizens. See Dror, A Grand Strategy, p. 306. 68 Haaretz, 3 July 2001. See also an interview with General Uzi Dayan, Israel’s National Security Adviser, in Maariv, 26 September 2001. The Barak government decided to allocate substantial resources to the Arab minority following the October 2000 upheaval among Israeli Arabs, but the Sharon government that followed ignored the decision.

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 237

69 See Efraim Inbar, ‘Contours of Israel’s New Strategic Thinking’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 111, no. 1 (1996), pp. 56, 63; and Inbar, Israeli National Security, 1973–1996, BESA Security and Policy Studies no. 38 (Ramat Gan: BESA, 1998), p. 81 70 In a representative letter to the daily Maariv, a reader writes, concerning a recent treasury decision to tax the scholarship of students for advanced research degrees, the following criticism: ‘In contrast [to the students], there are battalions of bums, who are registered as if they study in orthodox Yeshivas. For this registration they receive plenty of scholarships and benefits. These scholarships and benefits will not be taxed because the ‘students,’ God forbid, do not work. As a result, research students whose studies and research contributes to the state’s economy, who serve in the IDF, do reserve duty, and work—will be punished. The tax taken from them will be transferred to bums, dodgers, who do not contribute to society. This is Israeli justice. Or Israeli Helem [an equivalent of Gotham].’ Udi Buch, letters to the editor, Maariv, 20 August 2001. 71 See, for example, a critical article by Itai Ben Horin, the spokesman of Hitorerut, in which the Defense Minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, was blamed for attention deficit, in Yediot Aharonot, 22 August 2001. See also an article by Avihai Beker, Haaretz, weekend supplement, 20 July 2001. 72 See Reuven Pedhatzur, Haaretz, 12 August 2001. Middle-level reserve officers threatened recently that unless their grievances were seriously addressed, they would refuse to serve more days than required by law, something they regularly do. See Yediot Aharonoti, 16 June 2001. On 23 September 2001, Yediot published a letter from Major Nir Gilad, a reserve helicopter pilot, to his fellow reserve pilots, that explains why he refuses to continue flying in the IAF. Gilad, a lawyer by education, explains in great detail how and why reserve soldiers are underinsured, blaming the bureaucrats of the defense establishment and the supreme command of the army for misleading and lying to the reservists. This letter is unprecedented in terms of the argument, accusations, presentation, and the source. It is nothing short of a bombshell, and therefore must be considered as a major milestone in relations between the Army and its reservists. 73 See Reuven Pedhatzur, Haaretz, 5 August 2001. 74 See Dowty, The Jewish State, pp. 143–78. 75 Ibid., pp. 178–83. 76 Handel, ‘The Evolution of Israeli Strategy’ p. 534. 77 Quoted in Israel Air Force Magazine, no. 136 (December 2000), p. 40. 78 Barak Mendelsohn, ‘The Israeli Deterrence in the Gulf War’ (MA thesis, Tel-Aviv University, 1999). 79 Tal, National Security, pp. 25, 26–7. 80 For a concise version of the criticism of deterrence see Lebow, ‘The Deterrence Deadlock: Is there a Way Out?’, in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janis Gross Stein (eds), Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 180–91. 81 Gold, ‘Evaluating the Threat to Israel in an Era of Change’, p. 95. 82 Ibid. 83 For an account of the logic of co-operation, cheating, and defection, see Robert Jervis, ‘Realism, Game Theory, and Cooperation’, World Politics, vol. 40, no. 4 (1988), pp. 317–49, in particular pp. 329–32; Joseph M.Grieco, ‘Anarchy and the

238 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

84

85

86

87 88

89 90

91

Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism’, International Organization, vol. 42, no. 3 (1988), pp. 485–507, and ‘Realist Theory and the Problem of International Cooperation’, Journal of Politics, vol. 50, no. 3 (1988), pp. 600–24. See Richard N.Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 334–7, and Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 15–28. See Yair Evron, ‘Confidence- and Security-Building Measures in the Arab Israeli Context’, in Efraim Inbar and Shmuel Sandler (eds), Middle Eastern Security (London: Frank Cass, 1995), pp. 152–72. This quote is from a General Security Service (GSS) October 2000 report to Prime Minister Barak. See Ben Caspit, Maariv, 6 July 2001. This assertion was made in the context of an assessment of Arafat’s value for Israel. The report found Arafat expendable, because among other things, he ‘threaten[ed] to bring down…the peace with Egypt and Jordan…[and] risk[ed] the stability of neighboring regimes ? …’. Mofaz, ‘The IDF towards the Year 2000’. Thus, it has been the IDF position, even of the hardline former Deputy CGS and current CGS Lt. General Yaalon, that the Palestinians must know that ‘political utility’ (something to be explored and achieved through diplomacy) awaits them beyond the military struggle. See Zeev Schiff, Haaretz, 24 August 2001 and interview with Yaalon in Maariv, 21 September 2001. See also interview with Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, The Head of the National Security Council, Maariv, 26 September 2001. See Haaretz, weekend edition, 14 September 2001. Mass refugees since the 1920s due to displacement in other far less justified wars, include Greeks and Armenians from Turkey, Turks from Bulgaria and divided Cyprus, Baltic refugees from the Baltic states (annexed by the Soviet Union), German-speaking refugees from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Muslims from India, Tibetans from Tibet (annexed by China), and many more. For a partial account, see Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile (London: Harrap, 1972), pp. 186– 273. The idea that strategy should be measured against time can be easily demonstrated with two opposing examples. The French strategy between the two world wars became increasingly defensive. Politically, the French thought to contain Germany through alliances, while militarily they thought to deter it and, if necessary, protect themselves by relying on a presumably impregnable static defense—the Maginot Line. At the time, and for quite a while, the French strategy seemed successful. In fact, as long as Germany did not possess a suitable armored striking force, the French strategy was sufficient. Over time, however, the fundamentals changed, and, consequently, the French adherence to this defensive strategy proved disastrous. The alliance with Britain did not deter Germany, and the Maginot Line did not deter or forestall the German military assault. At least in hindsight, it is clear that the French defensive grand strategy could not address the problem posed by an ambitious revisionist German leader who possessed aggressive military power. On the other hand, in the Cold War, US containment strategy, which was essentially defensive and at times considered too soft to deal with the presumably imperialist

THE ARCHITECTURE AND SOFT SPOTS OF ISRAELI GRAND STRATEGY 239

92 93

94 95

96 97 98 99 100

101 102

Soviet Union, proved brilliant over time. If anything, the outcomes of the combi nation of alliances, military deployments, displays of resolve, but also selfrestraint, exceeded what was intended for it. At the end, containment pushed the United States’ global rival out of the way, while the United States avoided the cost of war as well as the rise of some other challenger to its hegemony. Handel, ‘The Evolution of Israeli Strategy’, pp. 569–70. Indeed, it is the conclusion of the Jaffee Center (and apparently also of the IDF) that the current Middle Eastern balance is so much in Israel’s favor that it prevents an escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into regional conflict. Haaretz, 12 June 2001. See Efraim Inbar, ‘Arab-Israeli Coexistence: The Causes, Achievements and Limitations’, Israeli Affairs, vol. 6, no. 3–4 (2000), pp. 262–4. The 1973 October War was a limited test of Israeli war strategy in circumstances that could be depicted as consisting of ‘case everything’ minus. Overall, the strategy worked, although several sequential layers of the strategy collapsed, the results were less than expected, and the cost higher than anticipated. On the down side, Israel failed to identify the imminent attack, it had no credible deterrent, and its defense proved porous. The military wanted to launch a last minute preemptive strike against Syria but the political leaders held back, because they believed the IDF could handle an attack and that they had sufficient strategic depth, and because they assessed that the cost of acting against US wishes would be unacceptable. Consequently, Israel absorbed with insufficient forces and while ill prepared, a twofront attack. On the up side, Israeli reserves were mobilized and deployed at short order, and following the initial setback and paralysis among political and military leaders, the IDF managed to shift the war into Arab territory and destroy much of the enemies’ forces. Indeed, the war ended while Israel was in control of additional Arab territories and within striking distance of strategic Arab assets. The Third Egyptian Army was besieged and at the mercy of the IDF, the Second Egyptian Army risked encirclement, the road to Cairo lay open, and Damascus was within Israeli artillery range. For several reasons, however (including the heavy dependence on the United States), these military achievements did not buy Israel a strong negotiating position. At the same time, it would have been in a far worse bargaining position had the war ended otherwise or earlier. See, Yaniv, Politics and Strategy in Israel, p. 275. Murray and Grimsley, ‘Introduction: On Strategy’, p. 1. Haaretz, 24 September 2001. See, for example, interview with General Uzi Dayan, Maariv, 26 September 2001. See also Inbar, ‘Arab-Israeli Coexistence’, pp. 264–7. As General Israel Tal noted, Israeli-Arab peace agreements are only ‘political agreements between governments and leaders [whereas] only the acceptance of Israel by the different [social] layers of the Arab peoples can guarantee and entrench the termination of the historical conflict’. Tal, National Security, p. 216. Dror, A Grand Strategy, p. 317. Israel’s social blindness or indifference had already made bad situations worse. Its strategic ‘social failures’ included support for the growth of fundamentalist Muslim organizations in Gaza, as part of a short sighted ‘divide-and-rule’ policy designed to weaken the PLO. The efforts to socially engineer the political order in Lebanon

240 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

ended in the rise of Hezbollah (which is reminiscent of the legacy of US support for the Mujahidin in Afghanistan in their fight against Soviet forces in the 1980s). 103 Most disheartening, in the current context, is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to drive out of the Palestinian territories the educated layer in society, a layer that is indispensable for the creation of a civic society and a presumably moderate state. See Uria Shavit and Jallal Banna, ‘Voluntary Transfer’, Haaretz, 4 October 2001.

11 Winning the War but Losing the Peace? The United States and the Strategic Issues of War Termination Bradford A.Lee

War termination was the subject of one of Michael Handel’s earliest publications. Writing in 1978, when he was still in the civilian academic world, Handel shared the perspective of many other scholars about the ultimate purpose of studying war in general and war termination in particular: ‘It is our duty as students of international politics to study how to prevent wars through deterrence, avoid wars by miscalculations, accidents and escalation—but also to learn how to bring wars to an end in the fastest possible way, once they have started.’1 That interest in a quick end to wars motivated an analysis of the many reasons why the losing side in a war might stretch the bounds of rationality by resisting or delaying a decision to give up, even after its prospects for success had dimmed. Michael Handel’s final publication in 2001, the third edition of his Masters of War, invited more attention to the other side of war termination—the winning side—which will be the main focus of this chapter. By then, Handel had been a war-college professor for two decades, teaching strategy to groups of students that consisted mainly of American military officers. In that environment, the central issue is how to win wars. Strategists on the winning side should want to stop a war, not just to minimize the destructiveness of the military violence, but at the time and in the manner that is likely to produce the most favorable—and the most durable - political result. War termination may be thought of simply as the last stage, the final reassessment point, in a war. For the winning side, war termination begins when victory—the achievement of the basic political purpose of the war - seems at last (though perhaps deceptively) to be within ready reach. An armistice and, beyond that, a postwar settlement now loom large. To illuminate a major problem of this stage of a war, Handel turned to Clausewitzian theory, as he did on so many strategic issues. He found in On War two highly relevant operational concepts that had important strategic analogues or implications. On the one hand, Clausewitz argued that to derive the highest payoff from battlefield success the winning side should relentlessly keep military pressure on the losing side, in application of what Handel liked to call ‘the principle of continuity’.2 On the other hand, Clausewitz warned that the winning side should be careful not to overshoot ‘the culminating point of victory’.3 As Handel emphasized, there was a considerable ‘tension’ between the two

242 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

prescriptions.4 For academic theorists, addressing such divergent concepts may lead to a dialectical dance of trying to reconcile opposites. But, for strategic practitioners, wrestling with the principle of continuity and the culminating point of victory at the same time should drive home in their minds a key issue that they must face in terminating a war successfully: exactly how far should they go militarily? If those practitioners have been attentive to the primary strategic message of Clausewitz’s On War, they will try to relate that military question not simply to the operational circumstances of the military interaction between the two sides, but above all to the political purpose of the war. How far they should go militarily depends in great part on what they want to achieve politically. Yet, very often, political leaders will, until the final stage of the war, have conceived of the political purpose of the war only in rather general terms. Or, even if policymakers have previously converted that general purpose into a list of specific political objectives, some of those objectives may now appear to be incompatible with each other, or unrealistically hard to achieve with respect to the adversary, or at odds with the goals of allies. Thus, the second key issue of war termination becomes: what exactly should the leaders demand politically? The political demands will in the first instance be directed at the enemy. If the political leaders of the winning side have any strategic vision at all, those demands will be part of a larger policy that aims at what Liddell Hart called ‘a better state of peace’.5 If the demands on the enemy, or the outlines of the broader vision of a better peace, are at odds with the policies of coalition partners, strategists on the winning side may want to think in terms of getting strategic leverage over allies as well as over adversaries. If the demands on the enemy are extensive, or if leverage over allies is indeed required, matching strategy to policy may mean going further militarily (i.e., to a higher intensity of bombing, or deeper into the territory of the enemy, or on to secondary operations elsewhere) than if the aim were simply to get the other side to stop fighting as soon as possible. The more that the winning side demands, and the further that the winning side goes, the more the losing side will tend to see its very survival at stake, and the more likely it is to resist with greater determination. The cost of victory will rise. The prolongation of the war may nevertheless be rational from the victor’s perspective, if it pays off in more favorable and more durable peace terms. The logic of war-termination strategy is only a special case of the general logic of strategy. Handel, in his three editions of Masters of War, explored many different theoretical aspects and practical manifestations of what he saw as a ‘universal’ strategic logic; but for our purposes here, we can reduce the complex logic of strategy to two basic elements: rationality and interaction—elements that Clausewitz, more than any other classical theorist, highlighted. For Clausewitz, it was rational to keep fighting only so long as the ‘value of the object’ (which he gave no explicit guidance on how to define) exceeded the cumulative cost of the war (which he defined in terms of the magnitude and

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 243

duration of the war effort).6 While making such a rational calculation, strategists have to anticipate interaction: in war, the enemy will try to outdo the effort of one’s own side; and after peace has been restored, the enemy might try to undo the political result of the war.7 If this sketch captures the two most important features of the general logic of strategy, what special logic is required in deciding the key issues of wartermination strategy? A rational strategist nearing the end of a war must make calculations of costs and benefits at the margin. If the winning side goes further militarily, how much additional cost will it incur and how much additional benefit, in terms of a more favorable and more durable peace, will it gain? There is a major complication in doing such forward-looking ‘marginal analysis’.8 The costs will be mostly shorter term, more palpable, and thus easier to weigh. The benefits will be longer term and more uncertain. Clausewitz indeed warned that ‘the ultimate outcome of a war is not always to be regarded as final. The defeated state often considers the outcome merely as a transitory evil’—an evil to be overturned.9 Of course, the winning side should aim to make the peace as final as possible. But more than an optimal wartermination strategy is necessary for a lasting peace, and no one at the end of a war can make a reliable projection of which strategic options will add how much to the duration of a peace. Accordingly, it is hard to determine the current value of a peace of a longer but uncertain duration. A realistic theorist would thus expect short-term costs to weigh more in war-termination calculations than long-term benefits.10 There is perhaps a corrective to the natural tendency to put greater weight on more measurable short-term costs than on uncertain long-term benefits. Liddell Hart, in his passage about how ’[t]he object in war is a better state of peace’, went on to say that ‘it is essential to conduct war with constant regard to the peace you desire’.11 Clausewitz, for his part, advised strategists of ‘the need not to take the first step without considering the last’.12 The implication of these remarks might be that thinking early and often about the ultimate political ‘endstate’ is necessary preparation for a rational war-termination strategy that puts a proper value on future benefits. From Clausewitzian Theory to US Practice In late August and early September 1948, the sometime American diplomat William C.Bullitt wrote a two-part historical lament for the popular magazine Life on ‘How We Won the War and Lost the Peace’.13 The articles appeared just three years after the end of World War II, during the crisis brought to a head by the Soviet blockade of the Western sectors in Berlin, a crisis that crystallized widespread apprehension of an imminent World War III. A man with a brilliant intellect and an even more mercurial temperament, Bullitt had served under two wartime presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, but had become disillusioned with both. In May 1919, he had resigned from his position on the

244 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

staff of the US Commission to Negotiate Peace, protesting the compromises made by Wilson in the Treaty of Versailles that, in his opinion, undercut hopes for ‘a new world order’ and ‘a permanent peace’. Bullitt had predicted that delivering ‘the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections and dismemberments’ would mean ‘a new century of war’.14 In his articles of 1948, he again struck a highly moralistic note, registering in detail not only how the United States had done little to prevent the onset of World War II, but also how Roosevelt, and then Truman, ‘threw away the fruits of our victory’ in 1945, when ‘we [the United States] held the power to enforce our will throughout the earth’.15 Both in his letter of resignation in 1919 and in his articles of 1948, Bullitt’s primary emphasis was on diplomatic failures in negotiating the peace. But Bullitt was haunted by the memory that Wilson in October 1918 had not exploited US military potential to get the political leverage that he needed over Britain and France, if his vision of the proper peace were to materialize in the terms of the settlement; and in a letter to Roosevelt in early 1943, Bullitt warned of the danger of a postwar Europe dominated by the Soviet Union, unless Roosevelt exploited the full leverage inherent in US military power at that time. Bullitt even suggested an Anglo-American military strategy of invading Europe from the south-east in order not only to defeat the Nazis, but also to prevent the Soviets from gaining control of much of Europe.16 He thus foreshadowed a course of action broached by Churchill in 1944 and a postwar critique of US wartermination strategy developed by the American journalist Hanson Baldwin and the Australian journalist Chester Wilmot, among others.17 Less remembered now, but still noteworthy, are earlier American critics especially the Republican leaders Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge—of Wilson’s decision in October 1918 to respond positively to German overtures for an armistice, rather than take the war into Germany and compel the enemy to surrender unconditionally.18 It was such critics of US policy and strategy at the end of the two world wars who gave prominence to the notion that the United States wins wars but loses the peace. That notion gained renewed currency in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1990–91, as Saddam Hussein extricated himself from the depths of military defeat and evaded efforts by the United States to get him to continue doing its political will. Between 1945 and 1990, during the Cold War, there was also reason for criticism of American handling of war termination in Korea and Vietnam. With the benefit of hindsight, it seemed apparent that the United States could have achieved its original political objective in the Korean War at least two years earlier than it did, at a far lower human and material cost.19 At the end of the Vietnam War, a US colonel on the negotiating team of a delegation to Hanoi could say to his North Vietnamese counterpart, ‘You know you never defeated us on the battlefield’, only to receive the telling reply, ‘That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.’20

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 245

If it is indeed the case that the United States has failed again and again to translate military success in a war into the most favorable and durable political results possible in the postwar era, the task of a strategic analyst is to explore the factors responsible for such chronic failure. The working premise of this chapter is that mishandling of the key strategic issues of war-termination strategy constitutes a major part of the explanation. War-termination problems are not, to be sure, the only factors worth attention. Success in war cannot by itself provide the full solution to an international political problem. Diplomatic wisdom in framing the terms of the peace is of course also an important factor in the durability of the postwar settlement. There may be a trade-off between a favorable peace and a durable peace: sometimes a victorious nation or coalition must back away from the most favorable terms obtainable, in order to give peace a better chance to be more durable.21 If the military results of the war and the political terms of the peace do not remove either the capability or the will of the defeated side to overturn the postwar settlement, the power and resolve of the victorious side to enforce the peace over the long run becomes an important factor in preventing the outbreak of a new war. Finally, even if a postwar settlement remains stable for quite a while, some unexpected development, some disequilibrating shock, such as the Great Depression of the inter-war era, may knock the international system off the peaceful path. There is thus a complex variety of factors that makes it hard to explain why the United States has ended up ‘losing the peace’ after any given war. For some analysts, the mishandling of war-termination issues might get lost in that variety. But a sophisticated analyst will bear in mind the strong possibility that the different factors are not independent of one another, that problems in the wartermination stage may lead to problems in the peace terms and in the ability or willingness of the winning side to enforce those terms in the postwar era. Another, and very important, source of complexity has to do with the characteristic nature of US political objectives. Since ‘losing the peace’ means failing to achieve, or failing to sustain the achievement of, important political objectives, it is essential for an analyst to be aware that US political objectives in a war come in many layers. Like traditional great powers, the United States almost always has some relatively concrete political objectives in a war, such as which political entity should control which contested piece of territory. Again, like traditional great powers, it may project some favorable postwar balance of power as another layer in its political objectives. But, unlike traditional great powers, it tends to have an elevated layer of more abstract or amorphous political objectives as well: to ‘create a new world order’ (as with Woodrow Wilson); or to vindicate some already nominally established principle of order (for example, ‘collective security’ as embodied in the United Nations Charter in 1950); or to ‘enhance regional stability’ (as in the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91), or to ‘build a nation’ (in places fractured along ideological or ethnic lines, as in Vietnam or Bosnia); or to ‘reconstruct’ a nation on democratic foundations (as in Germany and Japan after World War II). Because it is not at all easy to achieve these types

246 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

of political objectives—in some cases, it is hard even to measure progress in their achievement—a realistic analyst would have to warn that the United States sets itself up for at least some degree of disappointment with the ultimate outcome of the wars that it fights. When managed by leaders steeped in the logic of strategy, destructive military violence can have constructive political results; but only romantic revolutionaries or other-worldly people can imagine utopia issuing from the carnage of war. If strategy has its limits, so too does this chapter. It can only offer a summary judgment on a complicated historical and strategic problem. In logical principle, an analyst would have to put together many intellectual building blocks in order to construct a systematic explanation of why the United States, in the major wars of the past century, has had trouble translating military success into the stable postwar political order that it has typically sought. To begin with, one would have to identify what major flaws marked each postwar order. As a further but even more difficult pre-liminary, one would have to make an effort to apportion the causes of the postwar shortcomings among the following complex of factors: unrealistic political purposes or expectations of the United States in waging the war; deficiencies in its war-termination strategy; lack of wisdom, skill, or good faith among those who negotiated the armistice or peace treaty; the limits to the resolve of those statesmen and strategists who had responsibility for enforcing the postwar settlement; underlying structural problems or ‘exogenous shocks’ or other problems that were beyond the control of US political and military leaders; and, not least, the efforts of the losing side to overturn the results of the war. Once the analyst has determined, for any given war, how large the deficiencies in war-termination strategy loomed among the other factors, the next step would involve determining to what extent those deficiencies manifested themselves in insufficient leverage over the enemy, and to what extent in insufficient leverage over allies. Then, and only then, would one be in an optimal position to evaluate decisions made by political and military leaders on the two key issues of war termination: how far to go militarily; and what specifically to demand politically. To the extent that those decisions seem (with the benefit of hindsight) to have been ill considered, the analyst can probe for the problems in the decisionmaking process in each case. Having gone through this formidable intellectual exercise for each major US war of the past century, one could finally look for patterns in the problems across cases. For even a very efficient analyst to do such thoroughgoing intellectual justice to the overarching question of why the United States ‘wins the war but loses the peace’ would no doubt require a thick book, with long chapters devoted to each of the six main cases: World War I, World War II in Europe, World War II in the Pacific and Asia, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War. (It is too soon to make any mature judgment on the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession in the 1990s or the current Terror War.) Starting from the premise that mishandling of the key strategic issues of war termination cast a long shadow over each postwar era, this chapter takes some short cuts. Appended to it is a list of ‘leading questions’ for the six cases from

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 247

World War I to the Gulf War—questions that represent the most controversial points related to the key US war-termination decisions in the twentieth century. With these questions as a backplane, the rest of the chapter lays out my judgments about what the main problems were with US strategic decisionmaking. Along the way, I highlight some pertinent examples and point toward some persistent patterns. Problems and Patterns Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard for a strategic analyst to make, with a high degree of confidence, a counterfactual argument that some alternative US war-termination strategy in any of the six cases would have produced a significantly more favorable or durable postwar order. The main exception to that observation would be the decision in September 1950 to go north of the 38th parallel and try to reunify Korea. In all the other wars, one could make respectable arguments for, as well as against, the actual war-termination strategies that the United States adopted.22 The implications of this observation go beyond the fact that doing ‘what-if history’ is an inherently uncertain exercise. It also reflects the fact that wartermination decisions are usually more difficult than any other type of strategic choice in war. That assertion especially holds for the United States, with its elevated layer of abstract or amorphous political purpose. Even if one is not trying to create a ‘new order’, however, it is often no easy matter to decide between an unlimited political objective and a limited political objective. It is hard to know whether or not a durable peace requires removing from power the enemy regime that started the war. That issue plagued US policymakers in 1950, in the Korean War, and in 1991, in the Gulf War. There is a temptation to hedge on the issue: perhaps it is necessary to remove the leader of the enemy state, but not the rest of the regime, as some argued in relation to Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist regime in Iraq; or perhaps it is necessary to remove the military leaders who dominate the making of enemy policy, but not the emperor, as Wilson was inclined to presume in October 1918 and as the Truman administration finally decided in August 1945, though only after the atomic bombings of Japan. On the military front, it is hard to strike the right balance between not going beyond the culminating point of victory and going far enough to give the peace settlement a greater probability of being durable. For every US war from 1918 to 1991, this issue of how far to go militarily has been at least as controversial as the issue of what to demand politically. Two cases require special comment: the Pacific War and the Vietnam War. The decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 has ultimately produced the most controversy—but not at the time of the decision itself. More controversial at the time among US strategists was the plan for the invasion of the Japanese home islands later in 1945. Indeed, as Richard Frank has recently suggested in his impressive book on

248 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the end of the Pacific War, if the United States had not dropped the atomic bombs, there would have been a renewed, and probably very intense, argument between US Navy leaders and Army leaders in the autumn of 1945 over the strategy of invading Kyushu and then Honshu.23 In the case of the Vietnam War, there has been a debate ever since 1969–70 over whether Richard Nixon pushed too far and long or pulled up too short and soon with the US military effort; there have been critics from both directions. In all the other cases, except for what General MacArthur hoped would be his war-ending drive north in Korea in the autumn of 1950, the main American dissenters at the time and the main American critics afterwards have argued that the United States did not go far enough militarily to bring about a better peace. In the Vietnam case, even Nixon and his closest advisers later regretted that he had not gone through with some of the extreme ideas for escalating US military action outside South Vietnam that he considered seriously in 1969.24 In Korea, after the Chinese entry into the war, not only the most vocal dissenters at the time, but also such a sober critic as Bernard Brodie later, argued that the United States did not exert as much military leverage on the Chinese as it should have to bring about an earlier armistice.25 It is not hard to explain why the United States stopped short militarily of what the critics wanted in all these twentieth-century wars. Going further militarily would have meant greater costs and greater risks. The cost first and foremost in the minds of political leaders and some military leaders in every case was additional casualties. Wilson and Col. Edward M.House could not see that taking the war into Germany in 1918 and 1919 was worth the extra cost in human life that going further would entail, especially after so many had been killed and maimed already. George Bush and Colin Powell in 1991 wanted to end the Gulf War before any great numbers of American soldiers were killed and maimed. The risks of going farther militarily varied from case to case. Some-times, as in 1991, there was fear of the US Army getting bogged down in a military quagmire, as it had in Vietnam. Sometimes, there was fear of public reaction; in 1969, Nixon was held back by apprehension of mass demonstrations in Washington.26 Sometimes, there was fear of third-party intervention, perhaps even leading to nuclear war; once China had inter-vened in the Korean War in 1950, it was all the more unpalatable to risk Soviet intervention in 1951 or either Chinese or Soviet intervention 15 years later in the Vietnam War. Sometimes, there was fear that going further militarily would precipitate the breakdown of a wartime coalition that policy-makers hoped to see survive into the postwar era, as in Europe at the end of World War II or in the Persian Gulf in 1991. Sometimes, there was the risk of shortchanging US power in another theater. In 1945, if the US Army had become embroiled with the Red Army in central Europe, that would have undercut plans to re-deploy forces to the Pacific theater; in the Korean War, escalation of the conflict with China would have hampered the build-up of US forces in Europe against the Soviet conventional threat to NATO.

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 249

Thus, as the theoretical discussion earlier emphasized, short-term costs and risks were palpable, and in all cases, except for the drive into North Korea in the fall of 1950, they did indeed outweigh, in the minds of US leaders, the more uncertain, longer-term benefits or rewards of going further. What about the constant attention to ‘a better state of peace’, the early anticipation of the political ‘end-state’, that the theoretical discussion held out as a possible intellectual counterweight? In the two world wars, Wilson and Roosevelt were thinking from early on—albeit quite abstractly - in terms of how to create a long-term peace. Under both Presidents there were groups making plans about the political endstate, though neither found it easy to form a clear, consistent picture of Germany’s proper place in the postwar world.27 In the case of the Korean War, the conventional wisdom is that the drive for a reunified Korea after MacArthur’s success at Inchon gained its energy from ‘victory fever’, but in fact the decision to try to reunify Korea took shape before the Inchon operation began, as a result of a two-month debate that involved the State Department, the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council.28 In the next war, so far as Washington was concerned, the political future of South Vietnam did slip out of long-term focus after the US military intervention of 1965, but over time US policy-makers regained an appreciation that the stability of the South Vietnamese government was the key not just to a US exit from Vietnam but also to any hope of a lasting peace. In 1990–91, one of President Bush’s original war aims was to enhance ‘regional stability’ in the postwar era. Among his policy advisers, there developed a sense that this goal required a postwar Iraq that was not strong enough to threaten its neighbors, but that at the same time was not so weak or divided that it would fall prey to possible Iranian designs.29 That notion was perhaps too clever by half. In any event, it did not provide an unequivocal answer to the question of whether the removal from power of Saddam Hussein in Iraq was necessary for a stable balance of power in the region. Still, among US policy-makers in all six cases, one can see fairly consistent, if not always realistic, efforts to think in advance about what shape ‘a better state of peace’ might take, though, often, presidents in the decision-making ‘crunch’ at the end of a war have tended in effect to devalue those efforts. When one turns to senior military leaders, one finds much less forward-looking attention to what the ‘last step’ militarily might, or should, be. It may be hard to know what the ‘culminating point of attack’ is, in an operational sense, until a force is quite near it. But the ‘culminating point of victory’ is, in a strategic sense, something that military leaders can and should ponder well in advance. Arguably, from the middle of 1943, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower ought to have been thinking more broadly about how to get US and British forces as fast as possible not only to Germany, but also to central Europe more generally. In the fall of 1950, MacArthur should have been able to appreciate that, even if he could reach the Yalu River before the Chinese intervened, it was not necessarily a strategically advantageous place for US forces to be. In 1991, by contrast, punching the ‘left

250 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

hook’ through to Basra as quickly as possible would have been strategically advantageous. Here, indeed, we come to the overarching problem of war-termination, American-style: difficulties in matching military courses of action, not to the most basic political objectives, but to other political considerations that were important if ‘a better state of peace’—a more favorable and durable peace—were to emerge. In 1991, the most basic political objective was to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. But if regional stability were to be further enhanced, military leaders had to be sure to go far enough to destroy or envelop more of the Republican Guard (not to speak of finding Iraqi facilities for producing weapons of mass destruction) than was done in the event. In 1950, the most basic political objective was to repel the North Korean aggression. If there were to be reunification of Korea as well, it had to be done without third-party intervention and without putting US forces in a position that would cut against simultaneous efforts to build up the US military presence in the strategically more important European theater of the Cold War; after all, the conflict in Korea was simply a war within a larger quasi-war. In World War II in Europe, the basic political objective was to achieve the unconditional surrender of Germany, but if possible in such a way that the United States and Britain could shape an overall postwar European balance of power favorable to the West. Roosevelt hoped that a community of interests with the Soviet Union might persist after the war, and Marshall and Eisenhower followed his cue in that script; but both the President and his military leaders realized—as Bullitt had vividly reminded Roosevelt in early 1943—that the Soviets had expansive aspirations that might seriously threaten the balance of power when the German threat disintegrated.30 The selection of Anglo-American courses of action needed to point, from 1943 on, toward liberating as much of Europe as soon as possible, yet without risking either military disaster in 1943 or 1944 or embroilment with the Red Army in a last-minute rush east in 1945. In the Pacific War, the basic political objective was to bring about the unconditional surrender of Japan, but a further political consideration was to do whatever might be possible to achieve a favorable postwar balance of power in east Asia as a whole. No one in a position of higher authority over MacArthur seems to have thought hard in advance about whether allocating nearly one-fifth of the US Army to him, and then allowing him to pursue his own personal agenda of liberating all of the Philippines, was the best way to advance broader US interests in the postwar world. The troops and landing craft that went to MacArthur in the second half of the Pacific War might well have brought a bigger political pay-off elsewhere. Problems in matching military courses of action with different layers of forward-looking political considerations in the war-termination stages of the United States’ conflicts from 1918 to 1991 reflected limitations of the decisionmaking process and of the decision-makers themselves. The first limitation has to do with military leaders’ addressing complex political issues. US military leaders characteristically want to do their planning only with reference to one

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 251

basic political objective; many of them tend not to feel at ease with multiple layers of political objectives, especially with abstract or amorphous ones. That unease is understandable, because it is difficult to match a military strategy to either multiple or abstract political objectives. The limitation is more deeply rooted than that. Traditionally, most US military leaders have felt a sense of restraint in talking about broad policy or political considerations. The most obvious source of that feeling is the constitutional principle of civilian supremacy, a strict interpretation of which suggests that it is illegitimate for military officers to do or say any-thing that smacks of interference in the political domain of their civilian superiors. No doubt the great majority of both political and military leaders in the United States in the past century have believed in that interpretation. MacArthur was a glaring exception, but even he denied in 1951 (rather unconvincingly) that he had a foreign policy of his own, and the outcome of his conflict with Truman made it all the more unlikely that other generals after him would succumb to insubordination. The MacArthur precedent may indeed have inhibited General Matthew Ridgway, the new theater commander in the Korean War. As armistice negotiations approached in the late spring of 1951, Ridgway’s subordinate commander in Korea, General James Van Fleet, proposed what Clausewitz and Handel would see as an application of the ‘principle of continuity’ to maintain offensive pressure on Chinese Communist forces: a thrust well north of the 38th parallel toward Wonson on Korea’s east coast. As an official historian later noted, the maneuver contemplated by Van Fleet resembled MacArthur’s Inchon operation, in that it involved Ridgway hastened to reject the idea. Perhaps he was reluctant to recom‘a deep amphibious encirclement coordinated with an overland drive’.31 mend a course of action to Washington that might remind policymakers there of MacArthur, especially since the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recently sent Ridgway a directive that for the first time since MacArthur’s drive north in the fall of 1950 had set a line restricting the scope of any ‘general advance’ northward.32 There was more than that to Ridgway’s rejection of the proposal, however. From his military perspective, it seemed that if US policy was to seek an armistice line at or near the current battle lines, there was no point to a major new thrust north that would mean additional American casualties to seize ground that would then be bargained away in the armistice or peace settlement. Despite the approach of negotiations with the Communists, he overlooked the urgent need for getting the maximum possible political leverage from US military courses of action.33 General Marshall had shown a similarly narrow military view in 1945, at the end of World War II. Churchill proposed that US forces under General Patton seize Prague, with the hope that liberating the capital of Czechoslovakia would pay postwar political dividends. Marshall’s argument against the idea reflected his distaste for the idea of incurring casualties for what he oddly dismissed as ‘purely political purposes’.34 There may also have been a similar distaste in

252 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

General Powell’s reluctance to continue ground operations further into Iraq at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, though he had political grounds, as well, for wanting to go no farther.35 The most interesting case of a US military leader dealing with broad political considerations at the end of a war involved the Commander-in-Chief of the US Expeditionary Forces, General John Pershing, in World War I. His famous memorandum of 30 October 1918 presented a bold proposal for going farther in the war-termination stage. It was also an example of a general’s suggesting a course of action with unmistakable political implications but not doing so with any effectiveness. Well along in the diplomatic process by which President Wilson steered the belligerents toward what became the armistice that ended World War I, Pershing suddenly offered his opinion ‘from the military point of view’ that the Western powers should ‘continue the offensive’ against Germany ‘until we compel her unconditional surrender’.36 In terms of what Wilson was trying to achieve politically in relation to the British and the French in the short run and the Germans in the long run, there was a serious political argument to be made for the military course of action that Pershing was proposing. Wilson wanted to remove German will to go to war ever again, and he was looking for leverage over Britain and France to get them to accept a moderate peace. Pershing certainly appreciated that if the war went on longer and the offensive continued deep into Germany, the US forces under his command would play an increasingly vital military role, and he probably had a sense that in such circumstances the British and the French would be more likely to accept Wilson’s diplomatic leadership; at the same time, the Germans would develop a more profound sense of defeat and would not only turn against political leaders who had led them into disaster, but might also be more inclined to stay away from bellicose leaders in the future. Yet there were only hints of this type of argument in the memorandum. Pershing simply suggested that ‘the full measure of victory’ against Germany and ‘the overthrow of her present government’ were prerequisites for ‘a permanent peace’.37 His clumsy intervention into the realm of policy produced a distinctly negative response.38 The only possible way to have gained a more positive response would have been for Pershing to send the memorandum not to the Allied Supreme Council, as he did, but only to Wilson, and to couch it in terms that showed the President how the proposal could serve Wilson’s most important political purposes. But that exceeded the limits of Pershing’s political and intellectual skills. If military leaders have had limitations in dealing with the interplay of military and political considerations in the key war-termination issues, so, too, have political leaders. The sources of this second limitation represent to some extent the converse of what we have seen on the military side. Many US political leaders in the past century have not wanted to be perceived as meddling in the military’s professional domain. To be sure, President Roosevelt, early in World War II, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, in the 1991 Gulf War, pushed military leaders into courses of action that ran counter to strong professional

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 253

preferences, and President Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara imposed tight constraints on strategic bombing in the Vietnam War. But beyond Wilson’s rebuff of Pershing’s proposal—a rebuff that Wilson did not deliver directly to Pershing—no US political leader has intervened, in any significant or sustained way, either to push forward or to hold back the military leadership in the termination stage of a war from 1918 to 1991. Fear of being accused of ‘micro-management’ has by no means been the only factor behind such reticence. Except perhaps for Franklin Roosevelt, no wartime president in the twentieth century was confident in his own judgment of how military operations were likely to play out. Even more striking, no president seems to have had a particularly good grasp of the political implications of complex military situations. Woodrow Wilson, the least military-minded of all wartime presidents, especially suffered from these deficiencies. He was content to leave the formulation of the military terms of the armistice in October 1918 entirely in the hands of the Allied commanders. The resulting terms were harder on Germany than Wilson wanted, but he did nothing significant to get them modified. He seems not to have realized that harsh armistice terms—terms that left open no realistic possibility for the Germans to resume fighting -undercut his main leverage over France and Britain.39 Once the French and the British were sure that Germany would have to accept even a quite severe peace treaty and, accordingly, that they no longer had to depend on US military support, they had much less reason than before to accommo-date themselves to Wilson’s desire for a moderate settlement. Even presidents with more military insight than Wilson have had problems in assessing the political implications of military operations or military circumstances. Roosevelt seems not to have grasped the potential long-term political as well as short-term military importance of a large-scale landing in southern France in June 1944, at the time of the invasion of northern France. A simultaneous two-pronged attack on Germany through France provided the most realistic chance for Western forces to liberate as much of Europe as possible, as soon as possible. Yet Roosevelt acquiesced in British efforts to delay and scale back the operations in southern France. In the Korean War, in October 1950 President Truman seems not to have understood the full strategic implications for his European policy of letting MacArthur project US troops to the Yalu River. In mid-1951, Truman and his advisers in Washington had only a belated appreciation of the political leverage that might be had from the sort of further thrust north in Korea that Van Fleet initially favored. On the basis of the limited evidence available now for the latter part of the Vietnam War, it is not clear that Nixon had a good sense of how best to exploit the favorable military balance in the South Vietnamese countryside brought about by the decimation of Viet Cong forces during and after the Tet Offensive of 1968. In late February 1991, President Bush did not have a clear picture of the military situation of the Iraqi

254 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

forces and of what an early, unilateral US ceasefire meant for Saddam Hussein’s prospects for political survival. The limitations of individual political and military leaders in interpreting the relationship between military circumstances and political considerations in the final stage of a war would matter less if there were always close and frank communication across the civil-military divide. Collectively, statesmen and soldiers ought to be able to put together a policy-strategy match that links answers to the two key questions: how far to go militarily and what to demand politically? When military considerations point in one direction and political considerations point in another direction, they ought to be able to work out tradeoffs between short-term military costs and political risks, on the one hand, and the long-term benefits of achieving elevated layers of political purpose, on the other hand. In fact, however, such political-military coordination has not been a conspicuous feature of the historical record of US war termination. During (and also prior to) October 1918, there was scarcely any direct, unfiltered communication between Pershing and Wilson. The US general apparently knew even less than his French and British counterparts about what was going on in Wilson’s pre-armistice negotiations with the Germans; and then it was the President’s turn to be surprised by Pershing’s proposal to carry on with the war. President Roosevelt’s style of decision-making was not conducive to collective political-military coordination; though he had a close working relationship with both General Marshall and Admiral King, any military issue with major political implications would end up coordinated, if at all, only in the President’s own mind. With his death less than a month before the end of World War II in Europe, and the advent of a new political leader, Harry Truman, who had only a remote idea of what Roosevelt had been doing or thinking, it is not surprising that the issue of how far to go militarily in Europe was essentially decided by Marshall and Eisenhower. Truman did make key decisions about war termination in the Pacific. But at a major meeting of policy-makers and strategists on 18 June 1945, General Marshall was less than frank with the President about the level of casualties that an invasion of Japan might involve, and Admiral King did not reveal the full extent of his reservations about the strategy favored by the army.40 The discussion later in the summer about whether or not the policy of unconditional surrender should be relaxed with regard to Japan has been featured in a book by the political scientist Leon Sigal, whose main point is that a rationalcalculation model does not adequately describe the process by which governments make war-termination decisions.41 The story of the US decision-making process does not get better with the limited regional wars of the second half of the twentieth century, despite the emergence of a much enhanced institutional apparatus for civil-military coordination. In the Korean War, Truman got two more opportunities to master the process of war termination. In September 1950, the instructions to MacArthur about going north that emerged from the deliberations of the

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 255

National Security Council were most notable for their ambiguity.42 When Truman had his first and only meeting with MacArthur the following month, little of their discussion focused on the key war-termination issues (at least so far as one can gather from the documentary evidence of the meeting).43 In the late spring and early summer of 1951, after the Truman administration had finally reverted to a limited political objective in the Korean War, the chain of communication among the policy-makers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Ridgway in Tokyo, and Van Fleet in Korea, seems to have been far from smooth. By the time that authorization arrived from Washington opening the way for Ridgway and Van Fleet to put greater pressure on the Communists through new ground offensives, the opportunity to do so with a good prospect of success had been lost.44 In the Vietnam case, the evidence for any solid judgment of theinteraction among Nixon, Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Laird, the JointChiefs of Staff, and General Abrams in Vietnam is not yet available, butgiven what we already know of the way that Nixon and Kissinger operated, it would be surprising to learn that there was close and frank communication between political and military leaders on war-terminationissues during 1969–72. Finally, in the Gulf War, there is reason to believethat, once again, the chain of communication among the senior policy-makers of the administration, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,the theater commander, the corps commanders in the field, and the subordinate commanders at the forward edge of battle fell victim to the fog andfriction of war and, in this case, also to the extreme compression of ‘timelines’ in late February 1991. In addition, President Bush’s senior policyadvisers showed no discernible interest in the work of high-level staffers inthe Office of the Secretary of Defense—one group that did try to deliberate about the key issues of war termination.45 There seems not to have beenmuch of an orderly decision-making process in this case. Indeed, in almostall of the cases from 1918 to 1991 the weighing of the costs and benefits ofgoing further militarily was quite rudimentary. Conclusion: Strategic Logic and Political Rationality The basic elements of strategic logic move into especially sharp focus in the final stage of a war. If war is simply a ‘grammar’ in which the logic of political purpose is expressed in violent terms (as Clausewitz suggested), then it is in war termination that the purpose finally achieves its ultimate definition or refinement in political demands.46 The winning side reaches for benefits in the end-state that justify the costs incurred in reaching that destination—and overarching those benefits (one presumes) is the prospect of ‘a better state of peace’. The losing side suffers what it must—but not without struggling to the end. The interaction that, along with purpose, is at the heart of strategic logic may indeed be more bitter than ever in the final stage. Some combatants on the losing side may be demoralized; but some may feel themselves to be on ‘death ground’ and fight all the harder.

256 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Some leaders on the losing side may be making rational calculations about the need to give up; but some, seeing in defeat the end of their careers and perhaps their lives, may resist any decision to end the war. The powerful emotions so characteristic of war remain highly charged. The basic elements of purpose and interaction put a premium on political rationality and military leverage. In this chapter the issue of leverage has loomed large in the question of how far the winning side should go militarily in war termination. We have linked that question in turn to the even more fundamental question of what to demand politically in the ‘end-game’. If the winning side’s political purpose is elevated or ambitious, the probability is that to achieve its farreaching goals, it will have to go further militarily at the end of the war than if its political objectives were more concrete or modest. Going further may well be necessary to achieve enough leverage to compel the losing side to do the winning side’s political will in full measure and for a long time to come; in other cases, it is necessary for the winning side also to get leverage over allies who have a different vision of ‘a better state of peace’. But in all cases going further involves costs and risks. The challenge of political rationality is to weigh accurately the possible benefits against the probable costs. The challenge of military leverage is to think through how force can contribute to achieving the maximum possible benefit, in terms of a favorable and durable political result, at a level of cost or risk that makes sense. In war termination, Clausewitz’s rational calculus of war— does the ‘value of the object’ exceed the magnitude and the duration of the violent effort to achieve it? - takes on a more concentrated, incremental form.47 The winning side must make calculations and choices at the margin: how much more force to achieve how much additional benefit at how much additional cost or risk? The thesis of this chapter has been that the United States, on six occasions between 1918 and 1991, had considerable difficulty in bringing political rationality and military creativity to bear upon the strategic logic of wartermination. To be sure, in five of those cases, the US government was nonetheless able to achieve its most basic political objective; even in the sixth case, the Vietnam War, the goal of preserving an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam was still intact, albeit tenuously, when the United States made peace with North Vietnam in early 1973. But, in every case, the postwar order proved to be significantly less favorable or durable than US leaders had expected it to be. The aftermath of 1918 produced the widest gap between expectation and ultimate result. Far from fulfilling Wilson’s utopian aim that it be the ‘final war for human liberty’ or at least a war that made the world ‘safe for democracy’, World War I was followed in two decades by another world war that put liberal democracies in even greater peril.48 World War II produced a remarkable result— the overthrow of the German and Japanese regimes that started the war and the postwar reconstruction of western Germany and the Japanese home islands on a long-lasting liberal-democratic foundation—but also led in its aftermath to a

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 257

highly danger-ous, protracted confrontation in Europe between the United States and its Western allies on the one side and the Soviet Union and its east European satellites on the other side; and to a series of wars in eastern Asia that came near to foreclosing any Western political influence or liberal ideals in the mainland mass of the former Japanese empire. In one of those Asian wars, the Korean War, the United States managed to preserve an independent, non-Communist South Korea; but war termination took two years longer than was, arguably, necessary to produce that result, and the armistice of 1953 has had to be enforced by a major US military presence that remains in place even now to contain a North Korean military threat that still has not gone away. In the Vietnam War, the peace treaty of 1973 that emerged from a major US military intervention of almost eight years’ duration failed to preserve an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam after the last US forces departed. In the 1991 Gulf War, the United States and its coalition partners ejected Iraqi forces from Kuwait in a quick and decisive manner, yet beyond that impressive achievement the long-term political result proved disappointing. Postwar efforts to contain Saddam Hussein were not only of diminishing utility, but also also gave rise to the ostensible justification for Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war on the United States.49 After alQaeda’s attack of 11 September 2001, the Bush administration’s fears of a confluence between the international terrorists’ will to use weapons of mass destruction and the increasing capability of Saddam Hussein’s regime to produce them called forth another US war in the Persian Gulf in March 2003, this time with the avowed aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and possibly with the lofty aspiration of triggering a transformation in the political culture of the Muslim world. Thus, the verdict on the historical record of 1918–91 is mixed. But, perhaps, one might argue, the standard of judgment is too high. Military force is a blunt instrument: it can determine which state controls what territory; overthrow a regime and occupy a country; and change a regional balance of power, for the time being. But perhaps one cannot reasonably expect military force to do much more than that, to bring about a Wilsonian reordering of the world or even a less utopian stabilization of a region. Yet a counterargument would be that a truly ‘better state of peace’ often requires the use of military force to go beyond one basic political objective and help realize a broader vision of what is necessary for a durable postwar settlement. And the United States in the twentieth century, more than any other modern power that has engaged in a series of major conflicts, often possessed enough residual military capability in the termination stage of its wars to have, potentially, a good chance of exerting the greater leverage required to achieve broader political objectives. Other powers, if their leaders were rational, have had to settle for concrete ends.50 US leaders have had at hand the means to pursue more conceptual ends. As this chapter has suggested, a profound problem in political rationality and a superficial regard for military leverage have again and again come together at

258 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

critical points in war-termination situations to hold the United States short of what it might have done or demanded. The problem in rationality has two aspects. One is the different ‘time horizons’ of costs and benefits arising from war-termination decisions: the disadvantages of going further—most notably, the costs in casualties and the risks of coalition troubles—materialize in the short term; the full advantages of ‘a better state of peace’ emerge, if at all, only over the long term. The second aspect is differences in tangibility: short-term human and material costs can be felt and measured much more readily than the ultimate and uncertain benefits of ‘conceptual ends’. As a result, it is hard to calculate accurately the relative weight of costs and benefits. Caught up in this problem, US political and military leaders at the end of wars have tended to put a higher negative value on palpable short-term costs and a lower positive value on possible long-term benefits. A sophisticated regard for military leverage can help make this profound problem in rationality more tractable. Leverage, if successfully exerted, not only may make benefits greater, but also may reduce costs. In terms of military courses of action, leverage can arise from simply continuing a successful offensive when the enemy is on the verge of potentially catastrophic defeat. Such application of this ‘leverage of continuity’ may indeed bring an upward spike in casualties in the short term for the winning side; yet if it brings the war to an end sooner than would otherwise be the case, it may mean fewer cumulative casualties in the long term. (Such an argument could have been made by Van Fleet in 1951, though not Pershing in 1918.) Leverage with an eye to the postwar era can arise from maneuvering forces to a position of sustainable strategic advantage in a timely way in the termination stage of a war. (This ‘leverage of maneuver’ might have been applied in all six cases cited above, but in the event was not done to a great extent in any of them.) And, not least, war-termination leverage can also arise from striking the enemy in some place or in some way that the enemy is not prepared to counter. (MacArthur at Inchon in 1950 had this ‘leverage of decisive surprise’ within his grasp, but then let its pay-off slip away for lack of careful thought about what the United States’ optimal position of sustainable strategic advantage was in Korea.) Far-sighted rationality and audacious creativity in exerting leverage must go hand-in-hand, if a war-termination strategy is to help produce a peace that lasts. In the institutional dimension of strategy, that prescription implies a more complex interplay between political and military leaders than conventional models of civil-military relations lay out. Political leaders may not only have to prod or push military commanders into thinking more seriously and creatively about the issue of leverage; if commanders want simply to declare victory and go home at the earliest opportunity, presidents and their advisers may have to become involved in generating further military courses of action—even while recognizing their limitations of expertise in military matters. Military leaders must not only understand and take account of lofty political purposes that go beyond the most basic political objective; if the political leadership turns

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 259

near-sighted toward the end of a war, military leaders ought also to be prepared to explain to the civilians how audacious military courses of action can be a rational means of delivering far-sighted political ends—even while accepting that the President as Commander-in-Chief has the final say. US political and military leaders shied away from such intense interaction with each other in the twentieth century. If US effectiveness in war-termination is to improve substantially in the twenty-first century, deep-seated patterns in civil-military decision-making have to be reconsidered.51 That idea may not be reassuring to those whose ideal image of civil-military relations takes the form of separate political and military spheres or arises out of deductive reasoning from constitutional principle. But it is an important conclusion that emerges from an inductive approach to the historical experience of US war-termination strategy. NOTES 1 Michael I.Handel, ‘The Study of War Termination’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. l, no. 1 (1978), p. 72. 2 Michael I.Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd edn (London: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. 165–81; Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 625–6. 3 Clausewitz, On War, pp. 528, 570. 4 Handel, Masters of War, pp. 181, 183. 5 B.H.Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd rev. edn (New York: Signet pbk reprint of Praeger hbk, 1974), p. 338. 6 Clausewitz, On War, p. 92. 7 Ibid., pp. 77, 80, 90, 139, 149, 483, 585. 8 ‘Marginal analysis’ evokes the style of thinking at the heart of neo-classical microeconomic theory. 9 Clausewitz, On War, p. 80. 10 Financial analysts, in thinking about the appropriate price to pay for an asset that will (they hope) generate a stream of dividends, earnings, or cash flow in the future, have devised methods for estimating the current value of those prospective benefits. By the same token, corporate strategists, in deciding on what use their firm should make of the capital available to it, must estimate the current value of future pay-offs of alternative investment decisions, comparing those estimates with the cost of making the investment and discounting for risks that the estimated pay-offs might not materialize. For a prescriptive example that touts a model of ‘discounted cash flow analysis’, see Tom Copeland, Tim Koller, and Jack Murrin, Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies (New York: John Wiley, 1994). Strategists in war-termination situations do not have even such imperfect methods at their disposal. 11 Liddell Hart, Strategy, p. 338. 12 Clausewitz, On War, p. 584. 13 William C.Bullitt, ‘How We Won the War and Lost the Peace’, Life, vol. 25, no. 9 (30 Aug. 1948), pp. 83–97, and vol. 25, no. 10 (6 Sept.1948), pp. 86–103.

260 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

14 Bullitt to Wilson, 17 May 1919, in the United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. XI: The Paris Peace Conference 1919 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946), pp. 573– 4. 15 Bullitt, ‘How’, Life, vol. 25, no. 9 (30 Aug. 1948), p. 83. 16 Bullitt to Roosevelt, 29 January 1943, in Orville H.Bullitt (ed.), For the President, Personal and Secret: Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), pp. 576–90. 17 At a War Cabinet meeting on 7 July 1944, Churchill endorsed General Sir Harold Alexander’s advocacy of an invasion of central Europe through northern Yugoslavia. CAB 65/47, Public Record Office, microfilm copy at Harvard University Library. A political rationale for such an operation appears fleetingly in Winston S.Churchill, The Second World War, vol. VI: Triumph and Tragedy (London: Cassell, 1954), esp. pp. 133–4. Martin Gilbert, Winston S.Churchill, vol. VII: Road to Victory 1941–1945 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), p. 949, quotes a political reference by Churchill on 9 September 1944. For the full-blown critique of US war-termination strategy, see Hanson W.Baldwin, ‘Our Worst Blunders in the War: Europe and the Russians’, Atlantic Monthly, vol. 185 (Jan. 1950), pp. 30–9; and Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1952). There is incisive analysis of the military difficulties of any Britishled invasion of Europe from the south-east in Michael Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), and Ralph Bennett, ‘The “Vienna Alternative”, 1944: Reality or Illusion?’, Intelligence and National Security, vol. 3, no. 2 (1988), pp. 251–71. 18 David R.Woodward, Trial by Friendship: Anglo-American Relations 1917–1918 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), p. 208; and Arno J.Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles 1918–1919 (New York: Random House, Vintage Books pbk edn, 1969), pp. 55–8. 19 Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 57–112. 20 Harry G.Summers, On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (Carlisle Barracks, PA: US Army War College, 1981), p. 1. 21 Handel, Masters of War, pp. 198ff.; Michael Howard, ‘When Are Wars Decisive?’, Survival vol. 41, no. 1 (1999), pp. 126–35. 22 For an example of a respectable defense of the US war-termination strategy in a case over which controversy remains undiminished, see Michael Sterner, ‘Closing the Gate: The Persian Gulf War Revisited’, Current History, vol. 96, no. 606 (1997), pp. 13–19. 23 Richard Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), pp. 273–6. 24 Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985), pp. 149–50; Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (New York: The Free Press, 2001), pp. 57–8. 25 Brodie, War and Politics, pp. 91–6. 26 Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 159–76; Melvin Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), pp. 163, 179–92.

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 261

27 On planning under Wilson, see Lawrence E.Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); for the evolution of, and ambivalence in, Wilson’s thinking about Germany, see Ross A. Kennedy, ‘Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and an American Conception of National Security’, Diplomatic History, vol. 25, no. 1 (2001), pp. 1– 31. For Roosevelt and the unruly process of planning within his administration about postwar Germany, see Warren F.Kimball, Swords or Ploughshares? The Morgenthau Plan for Defeated Nazi Germany, 1943–1946 (Philadelphia, PA: J.B.Lippincott, 1976); Paul Y Hammond, ‘Directives for the Occupation of Germany: The Washington Controversy’, in Harold Stein (ed.), American CivilMilitary Decisions (Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1963); and Earl F.Ziemke, The US Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944–1946 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1975). 28 United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. VII: Korea (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 393–5, 449–54, 458–61, 469–73, 480–1, 486–7, 502–10, 528–35, 567–73, 582–5, 600–3, 617–28, 635–9, 641–2, 649–52, 660–6, 671–9, 685–93, 705–8, 712–21, 781–2. 29 George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), pp. 383, 432–3, 489. 30 Mark A.Stoler, Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and US Strategy in World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 124–37. On 15 March 1943, after receiving the letter from Bullitt cited in note 16, Roosevelt asked British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden ‘if he thought there was anything in the Bullitt thesis that the Soviet Government was determined to dominate all of Europe by force of arms or by force of communist propaganda’. Excerpt from memorandum of conversation by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, 16 March 1943, as quoted in Warren F.Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 83. 31 James F.Schnabel, United States Army in the Korean War: Policy and Direction: The First Year (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, 1972), p. 397. 32 Van Fleet outlined his plan in a message to Ridgway on 28 May 1951. That night Ridgway flew from Tokyo to Seoul to present to Van Fleet in person the reasons why he opposed the plan. In a message to Washington after he returned to Tokyo, Ridgway did not even mention what Van Fleet had proposed. Billy C.Mossman, United States Army in the Korean War: Ebb and Flow, November 1950–July 1951 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1990), pp. 485–7; and Ridgway to JCS, 30 May 1951, RG 218, Records of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Incoming Messages, May 29, 1950-August 3, 1951, Box 1, at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. For the background of the Joint Chiefs’ directive of 1 May 1951 (and a further directive of 31 May 1951) limiting a northward advance, see the memoirs of the Army Chief of Staff at the time: J.Lawton Collins, War in Peacetime: The History and Lessons of Korea (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), pp. 298–305. 33 Ridgway’s greater sensitivity to the need to avoid American casualties than to the need to increase leverage on the Chinese comes through clearly even in his postwar recollections: Matthew B.Ridgway, The Korean War (Garden City, NY:

262 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

34 35 36

37 38

39

40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47

Doubleday, 1967), chs 6–7. See also Collins, War in Peacetime, p. 306. To the extent that Ridgway did seek to gain leverage, it was largely through the use of air power against Pyongyang and against Communist lines of communication. Mossman, Ebb and Flow, p. 506; and James F.Schnabel and Robert J.Watson, The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, vol. III, part 2: The Korean War, 1951– 1953 (Washington, DC: Office of Joint History, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1998), pp. 23–4. Lt Col Michael A.Kirtland, USAF, ‘Planning Air Operations: Lessons from Operation Strangle in the Korean War’, Airpower Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (1992), p. 40, points out that an air campaign to interdict enemy supplies is most likely to work in conjunction with, not as a substitute for, a major ground campaign. Marshall to Eisenhower, 28 April 1945, quoted in Forrest C.Pogue, George C. Marshall: Organizer of Victory 1943–1945 (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 573. Colin Powell, with Joseph E.Persico, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine Books pbk edn, 1996), p. 513. Pershing to the Allied Supreme War Council, 30 October 1918, reprinted in United States Army, United States Army in the World War, vol. X, part 1: The Armistice Agreement and Documents (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1991), pp. 28–30. Ibid. Marginal notes in ink by Edward M.House on his copy of Pershing’s letter to the Allied Supreme War Council, 30 October 1918, Box 89, and entry in House’s Diary, 30 October 1918, both in Edward M.House Papers, Yale University Library. See also House to Woodrow Wilson, 31 October 1918, Secretary of War Newton Baker to Wilson, 31 Oct. 1918, Baker to Pershing, 1 and 5 November 1918, in Arthur Link (ed.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. LI: September 14– November 8, 1918 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 523–6, 545, 596–8. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge made this insightful point about Wilson’s diminishing leverage: ‘His hold over the Allies is the German Army in existence, which makes our Army and our alliance indispensable.’ Quoted in Woodward, Trial by Friendship, p. 209. Frank, Downfall, pp. 131–48. Leon V.Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). See Department of State, Foreign Relations…1950, vol. VII: Korea, pp. 715–19, 781–2, 785, 792–3. ‘Substance of Statements Made at Wake Island Conference on 15 October 1950’, in ibid., pp. 948–60. Schnabel, Policy and Direction, pp. 401–2; Mossman, Ebb and Flow, pp. 499–500, 506; and Walter G.Hermes, United States Army in the Korean War: Truce Tent and Fighting Front (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, United States Army, 1988), ch. 5. Information from an official in the Bush administration at the time. For the distinction between the ‘logic’ and the ‘grammar’ of war, see Clausewitz, On War, p. 605. The key passage for Clausewitz’s rational calculus is on p. 92 of On War.

THE US AND THE STRATEGIC ISSUES OF WAR TERMINATION 263

48 Wilson’s call for making the world ‘safe for democracy’ was in his speech of 2 April 1917 asking Congress to declare war, and his vision of World War I as the ‘final war for human liberty’ was in his famous Fourteen Points speech on 8 January 1918. The speeches are reprinted in United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States 1917, Supplement 1: The World War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931), pp. 195– 203 (quotation from p. 201); and Department of State, Papers…1918, Supplement I: The World War, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), pp. 13–17 (quotation from p. 17). 49 Bernard Lewis, ‘License to Kill: Usama bin Laden’s Declaration of Jihad’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 77, no. 6 (1998), pp. 14–19. 50 Bismarck in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and Japan’s leaders in the RussoJapanese War of 1904–5 showed remarkable skill in war termination. They did not have enough residual combat power to go much further militarily than they did, with favorable odds of success, and they were wise to settle for limited, concrete political demands. Later German and Japanese governments pursued more ‘conceptual’ aims that far outran the military power that they had at hand. 51 As the final version of this chapter was nearing completion, there appeared a provocative new view of how four very able political leaders in four different democratic political systems have dealt effectively with military leaders in the making of strategy: Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: The Free Press, 2002). A companion volume on how able military leaders have dealt effectively with not-so-able political leaders in a democracy would be interesting and instructive.

Appendix: leading questions about US war-termination strategies World War I:

• Should Wilson have worked for an armistice in October 1918? • Should Wilson in the armistice negotiations have demanded a German change of regime? • Should Wilson have accepted the armistice terms formulated by French and British military leaders? World War II in Europe: • How early should US strategists have been thinking seriously about liberating as much of central and eastern Europe as possible? • Could an earlier invasion of southern France (simultaneous with Overlord) or an invasion of the Balkans have made a significant difference in the postwar balance of power in Europe? • Should US forces have tried to advance farther east in Europe in the spring of 1945?

264 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

World War II in the Pacific and Asia: • Should the US have relaxed its demand for the unconditional surrender of Japan? • Could the divisions and landing craft allocated to MacArthur in 1943–44 have brought a higher political pay-off for the US if deployed in another theater? • Should the US have done more (or less) to support Chiang Kai-shek militarily and diplomatically in 1944–45? Korean War: • Should, or where should, the US have stopped short its thrust into northern Korea in the autumn of 1950? • Should the US have continued its ground offensive north in the middle of 1951? • Should the US have taken the political stand that it did on the repatriation of enemy prisoners of war? Vietnam War: • Under what circumstances should the US have withdrawn its military forces from South Vietnam? • What, if any, steps of military re-escalation should Nixon have adopted in 1969–70? • What, if anything, should the US have done about North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam once it withdrew its own ground forces? Gulf War: • Should the US have made the overthrow of Saddam Hussein an explicit political objective to be achieved by force in 1991? • Should the US, instead of unilaterally declaring a ceasefire, have continued the war longer in order to destroy more of the Republican Guard or until Saddam sued for peace? • Should the US have kept military forces in some Iraqi territory (Margaret Thatcher suggested seizing the Rumaila oilfield) in an attempt to have greater leverage over Saddam’s behavior in the immediate postwar period?

12 Clausewitz and the Two Contemporary Military Revolutions: RMA and RAM James C.Kurth

The past two decades have certainly been an era of great transformations. There has been the transformation in international affairs, from a world with two superpowers to a world with only one. There has been the double transformation in economic affairs, from an industrial economy to an information one, and from an international economy to a global one. There has also been, in the United States and other advanced societies, the double transformation in social affairs, from a modern society to a post-modern one and from a national identity to a multicultural one.1 Given all these transformations, we would not be surprised if there had also been a transformation in military affairs. Indeed, there has been the well-known ‘revolution in military affairs’, or RMA, driven by the technologies of the new information economy. In addition, there has also been a transformation in the way that society thinks about the military This has been termed the ‘revolution in attitudes’ toward the military, or RAM, driven by the values of the new postmodern society. Thus, in military affairs, there has also been a double transformation. Given these two military revolutions, a number of contemporary military thinkers have called for the retirement of that master military thinker from the previous age, Carl von Clausewitz. Surely, he and his famous book, On War, must at last be obsolete.2 However, the leading recent interpreter of Clausewitz, Michael Handel, powerfully demonstrated that this was not so.3 We agree with Handel’s analysis. As we will see at the conclusion of our account of the two contemporary military revolutions, Clausewitz is even more relevant and important after these revolutions than he was after the two great revolutions of his own time. Any thinker who proved to be supremely useful for understanding the military consequences of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution is capable of being useful for understanding the consequences of the RMA and the RAM. The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) There is a long history of military strategy being changed to correspond to prior and successive changes in technology, industry, and the economy. The current

266 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

revolution in military affairs is just the latest in a long parade of technologydriven military revolutions.4 These revolutions in military affairs have had consequences most obviously for armies or land forces at the time. But they have extended also to navies or sea forces and, during the past century, to air forces as well. Indeed, as air forces demonstrate, new technologies and the resulting industries not only impact upon existing military forces, but they can bring wholly new military forces and organizations into being. Although technology-driven military revolutions occurred in agricultural economies (for example, those based upon the successive inventions of the stirrup, the longbow, and the musket), the most dramatic and well-known ones occurred in the industrial era. The Industrial Revolution, that began in Britain in the late eighteenth century, gave rise to a succession of revolutions in military affairs. The RMAs of the industrial era may provide insights into the RMAs that will inevitably result from the information revolution that began in the late twentieth century in the United States and from the new information era that we are now in. The Industrial Revolution and the Improvement in Military Transportation Among the most momentous of the new technologies of the industrial era were two that involved great improvements in land transportation, that is, the railroad and the automobile. The railroad, which was invented in Britain but then quickly spread to the European continent and to the United States, had profound consequences for military strategy It was crucial in shaping the strategies of the European great powers at the beginning of the twentieth century, strategies which were based upon rigid rail-road schedules for the rapid mobilization and deployment of troops to the frontier. In turn, the interaction of the similar mobilization strategies of the great powers was crucial in determining the way that the First World War began. The automobile, which also was invented in Britain but then quickly spread to the continent and to the United States, similarly had profound consequences for military strategy when it was converted and militarized into the tank. It was crucial in shaping strategies that were based upon flexible plans for the rapid deployment of troops into the territory of the enemy, most famously in the German Blitzkrieg strategy. In turn, the asymmetry between the German and the French tank strategies was crucial in determining the first phase of the Second World War (the rapid and dramatic defeat of France). Subsequently, the interaction between the more symmetrical tank strategies of Germany, on the one hand, and those of the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States, on the other, was crucial in determining the later phases of that war (the shifting of battlefields across a wide expanse of territory).

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 267

The Revolution in Attitudes Toward the Military (RAM) In addition, there is a long history of military strategy being changed to correspond to prior and successive changes in demography, society, and politics. The current revolution in attitudes toward the military is the latest in a long parade of demography-driven military revolutions.5 Again, these revolutions in attitudes toward the military have had consequences, most obviously for the armies or land forces at the time; but they have extended to the sea forces and to the air forces as well. Although demography-driven military revolutions occurred in feudal societies and absolute monarchies (for example, those based upon the manpower made available with the successive inventions of the manorial system, the yeoman system, and the system for centralized, royal taxation), the most dramatic and wellknown ones occurred in the modern era. In particular, they occurred in the period that began with revolutions in Britain, America, and France and that eventually saw the establishment of liberal-democratic regimes in these and other nations. Here it is important to distinguish between two different lines of development. One issued from the French Revolution (often described as a social revolution) and tended toward a great expansion in military man-power and in military casualties. This line of development greatly shaped the nature of war in the modern era and culminated in the period of the two world wars. The other issued from the Glorious Revolution in Britain and the American Revolution (often described as political rather than social revolutions), and tended toward an institutionalized limitation on military manpower and on military casualties. This line of development is greatly shaping the nature of war in the post-modern era and has culminated in the period since the end of the Cold War. The French Revolution and the Expansion of Mass and Maneuver The social revolution in France in the late eighteenth century resulted in a military revolution in regard to the availability and use of manpower. The French Revolution promulgated and implemented the concepts of ‘the nation in arms’, the levée en masse, and ‘the career open to talents’. It was Napoleon’s genius to combine and deploy these new social realities into a new military strategy, one based upon unprecedented manpower, mass, mobility, and maneuver. France also pioneered the creation of a centralized and systematic bureaucracy, which was engaged in the administration of large masses of people, and also of a centralized school system, which was engaged in the education of large masses of students. The bureaucracy and the school system provided models and sources for the creation of a centralized and systematic army, which was able to organize large masses of soldiers. This new kind of army provided the necessary instrument to carry out the new military strategy based upon manpower, mass, mobility, and maneuver.

268 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Although France pioneered in the new kinds of military organization and military strategy, it was Prussia and then Germany which perfected them, especially when they were combined with the successive new military technologies of the railroad and the tank. The military consequences of the German reaction to the French Revolution were as important as those of the Revolution itself. Indeed, Prussia used these French kinds of military organization and strategy to defeat France in 1870–71; Germany sought to defeat France with them in 1914 (the Schlieffen Plan); and Germany used them to again defeat France again in 1940 (the Blitzkrieg strategy). The military legacy of the French Revolution and the German reaction—the great expansion of mass and maneuver—defined the nature of war in the modern era and especially in the first half of the twentieth century. In the post-modern era and especially in the first half of the twenty-first century, however, the nature of war is being defined by the very different military legacy from the two earlier revolutions in Britain and America. The British and American Revolutions and the Limitation of Expenditures and Casualties The political revolutions in Britain in the late seventeenth century and in America in the late eighteenth century resulted in a very different kind of military revolution, one which seems to have reached its culminating point only within the past decade. The British and American revolutions eventually led to the establishment in the nineteenth century of the political system of liberal democracy. The liberal aspect best expressed the interests of a commercial class, which had an obvious interest in low taxes and therefore in low military expenditures. The democratic aspect best expressed the interests of an electoral mass, which had an obvious interest in low military casualties. Together, the two aspects of liberal democracy tended to institutionalize limitations on military expenditures and on military casualties, and to encourage national strategies and military strategies that were based upon these limitations. They were major factors causing Britain and the United States to avoid putting land forces at the center of their national strategies and instead to put their focus upon naval power and, later, upon air power.6 Of course, the geography of Britain (an island) and of the United States (a continent but one bordered by vast oceans) obviously inclined each of these two nations to emphasize naval forces over land forces. But this geographical factor was reinforced by the political one: naval forces seemed to be associated with lower spending and lower casualties than was the case with land forces, and particularly with large standing armies. In addition, of course, conventional thinking held that large standing armies were, in themselves, a threat to liberaldemocratic political institutions. Naval power played a role in British national strategy in the nineteenth century similar to that which naval power played in US national strategy in the first half

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 269

of the twentieth century and which air power played in US national strategy during the second half of that century. In each case, the leading world power of the day tried to convert its advantage in technology and industry into a way of war that minimized its military casualties. In the role of leading world power, Britain and the United States have shared several qualities. Economically, each has been the leading techno-logical, industrial, and financial power of the time. Politically, each has been a leading liberal democracy, with governments responsive to public opinion expressed in regular elections. In the industrial era of the nineteenth century, Britain had a comparative advantage, really an absolute one, in capital-intensive industrial products and also in capital-intensive weapons systems, above all in warships. In the industrial era of the twentieth century, the United States had a similar advantage in capitalintensive industrial products and also in capital-intensive weapons systems, above all in bombers, missiles, and air-craft carriers. Now, in the information era, the United States has acquired a new comparative and absolute advantage, this time involving knowledge-intensive or high-technology products and services and knowledge-intensive and high-technology weapons, above all in surveillance systems, stealth aircraft, and precision munitions. Conversely, when it comes to labor-intensive commercial products and labor-intensive weapons systems, Britain and the United States have been at a comparative disadvantage. In military affairs, this has meant a disadvantage in the fielding of traditional land forces, particularly infantry and artillery Britain and the United States have also been the leaders in liberal-democratic politics. In liberal democracy, governments must respond to public opinion. This has not prevented British and US governments from expending great numbers of lives in combat, as is demonstrated by the two world wars in the British case and by the Civil War and World War II in the US case. But democracies will endure great sacrifices only when the cause itself is manifestly great (as in those ‘great wars’). When the stakes are more modest—as with Britain’s colonial wars in the nineteenth century or with US interventions in the Caribbean in the twentieth century and for ‘humanitarian’ purposes in the 1990s—democracies expect that military operations will be conducted with economy, especially when it comes to the sacrifice of their own troops. These features of British economics and politics drove Britain to adopt a particular way of engaging in war. The British way of war comprised a particular trinity: naval power, financial power, and diplomatic skill. Whenever possible, Britain deployed these assets within a strategy of grand coalitions. In the obvious sense, this meant a grand coalition of several powers, who united to defeat the hegemonic ambitions of some overwhelming European land power. In another sense, however, it meant a grand coalition of comparative advantages, in which Britain provided the bulk of the coalition’s naval forces, its financial power bought or sup-ported the land forces of the other powers, and its diplomatic skill kept the coalition in place.

270 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Similar economic and political features seem to have driven the United States to an analogous form of waging coalition warfare. The contemporary American way of war comprises its own particular trinity: air power, technological superiority, and international organizations. In deploying these assets against some adversary, for example a rogue state, the United States prefers to act through a grand coalition rather than unilaterally. Furthermore, it organizes that coalition with an eye toward comparative advantage, in which the United States provides air power and high technology, while persuading its coalition partners to provide land forces (and to sustain most of the casualties entailed by the operation). The Gulf War, the Kosovo War, and the Afghan War have lent apparent plausibility to this strategy. The Gulf War demonstrated that the United States could fight a land campaign and sustain very few casualties. The Kosovo War demon-strated that it could win a war without any land campaign and without any casualties at all. The Afghan War demonstrated that it could win a land campaign even when its own contribution was largely limited to special forces, while again sustaining very few casualties. But as we will see in later sections of this chapter, this particular way of war is not likely to provide the United States with a permanent advantage and stable equilibrium. The Dialectics of Low-Cost Naval and Air Strategies This kind of low-cost strategic thinking in Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century led to a naval strategy centered upon the holding of islands as naval bases, the control of sea lanes of communication (SLOCs), and the use of marines as small and professional expeditionary forces. This kind of naval strategy was cost-effective and low-casualty, so long as one’s own navy did not have to confront another, comparable navy. This was the case for the Royal Navy throughout the world during much of the nineteenth century. It was also the case with the US Navy in the western hemisphere during the twentieth century (after the British in essence ceded the Americas to the United States after the Venezuelan Crisis of 1895). A big problem arose, however, when one’s own navy had to confront another, comparable one. This was the case with the Royal Navy during the first half of the twentieth century, most dangerously when imperial Germany built its own high-seas fleet prior to World War I. It was also the case with the US Navy in the Western Pacific during the first half of the twentieth century, when imperial Japan built its own large ocean-going fleet. Now the original cost-effective, lowcasualty naval strategy was changed into something entirely different. It became naval doctrine that the naval challenger or peer competitor would have to be annihilated in one decisive battle at sea. This gave rise to naval races (especially the Anglo-German naval race in the early twentieth century, but also the competitive build-up between Japan and the United States in the 1930s), with consequent high expenditures, and to large sea battles (Jutland in 1915, Midway in 1942), with high casualties.

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 271

The attempt to wage war and win victory while suffering only low casualties was also a major factor driving Britain and the United States to develop a particular kind of air force, one focused upon strategic bombing or the bombing of the enemy’s cities.7 The idea was to inflict high civilian casualties upon the enemy, while suffering only low military casualties oneself. In the asymmetrical conditions of the Second World War (after 1941, Britain and the United States had a much larger strategic bomber force than did Germany, and after 1944 the United States could bomb Japan at will, but Japan never was able to bomb the continental United States), the strategy of city bombing grew into the strategy of terror bombing and total war. Although the casualties suffered by the British and US bomber forces turned out to be quite high, they certainly inflicted high civilian casualties upon the enemy. However, in the symmetrical conditions of the Cold War (after the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union each had large strategic forces), the strategy of city bombing grew into the strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). This gave rise to the Soviet-US missile race, with consequent high military expenditures, and to the prospect of a mutual nuclear exchange, with unimaginably high casualties, both military and civilian. This hardly conformed to the original rationale for a strategic air force. This historical experience with naval and air strategies demonstrates that what was conceived to be a low-expenditure and low-casualty strategy can turn into its opposite, once it has spread to a competing great power. This suggests some caution about the current notion that military strategies based upon US leadership in information and computer tech nologies and in the RMA will always permit the United States to win its wars with low expenditures and low casualties. The Spread of Military Revolutions and the Dynamics of Uneven Development Military revolutions, like other revolutions, begin in one country and may initially provide that country a great increase, a quantum leap, in military power. An innovation in military technology or military organization, although it will be disruptive of the traditional military services of the innovating country in peacetime, will be even more disruptive of those of an enemy country in wartime. This was certainly the case with the revolution in military organization which was carried out by Napoleon in France. It was also the case with the revolution in naval technology that was effected by the adoption of steam-powered and ironclad ships in Britain.8 However, the military revolution then spreads to other countries. They may seek to emulate the original innovating country, in order to increase their own military power and to check the power of the innovator. Indeed, an emulating power may ultimately make better use of and benefit more from a military revolution than does the innovating power. This was the case with both the railroad and the tank; both were British innovations, and both served to increase the power of Germany relative to that of Britain.

272 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Furthermore, the spread of a military innovation is not a process of uniform diffusion, but one of uneven development. Like similar seeds scattered around different soils, the innovation will flourish in some countries, while remaining stunted or never taking root in others. This was the case with development of the strategic potential of the tank, which flourished in Germany and the Soviet Union before World War II, but was rather fitful in Britain and the United States, and languished in France. It was also the case with the development of the aircraft carrier, which flourished in the United States and Japan before the war, but was a secondary naval priority in Britain and consequently unimpressive. As was the case with earlier military revolutions, the spread of the RMA and the RAM will be characterized by uneven development. Each of these revolutions began in the United States, but they have already begun to spread to other major powers. They are doing so, however, in quite different ways. The revolution in military affairs, the technology-driven revolution, seems to be emulated best by China. The Chinese are seeking ways to leap over the US advantage in large, capital-intensive weapons systems (especially aircraft carriers and strategic bombers), and computer and information technologies, including disruptive technologies, may provide the means to do so. Furthermore, China’s own vigorous growth and performance in the commercial computer and information sectors provides it with a strong economic base for this military revolution. By contrast, Russia now seems to be unable to emulate the RMA. Its performance in the computer and information sectors is weak; its comparative advantage lies instead in the production and export of the weapons systems of the industrial age, especially military aircraft. Conversely, the revolution in attitudes toward the military, the demographydriven revolution, seems to be most characteristic of European nations and Japan. In fact, non-traditional attitudes toward the military are probably even more pronounced and pervasive in these nations than in the United States. Furthermore, despite many proposals over many years to modernize the militaries of these nations, they have fallen further behind the United States in regard to both the incorporation of high technology and the allocation of the gross national product. By contrast, China seems largely unreceptive to the spread of the RAM. Despite its famous (but not always effective) one-child policy, China has attitudes toward the military that have more in common with those found in the modern or modernizing societies of the West of a century ago than with those found in the post-modern societies of today. This should not be surprising, since China is now the largest modernizing society in the world. Discerning the Consequences of Military Revolutions: Lost in the Fog and Friction of War The dynamics of uneven development mean that, even when an innovation has reached a rather high stage of military development in one country, it is difficult to foresee how it will develop in other countries and how this will affect the

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 273

balance of power among them. This was the case with the US strategic bomber force in the early 1950s. At the time, it seemed that the Soviet Union would seek to create its own, comparable bomber force, although it might prove incapable of doing so. In fact, the Soviets were fully capable of building a bomber force comparable to that of the United States, but they chose not to do so and instead bypassed the bomber stage by concentrating vast resources on building a strategic missile force. It is even more difficult to foresee how a military innovation will actually be employed in the next war involving countries that have adopted it and how it will affect the outcome of that war. Although in July 1914 it was well known that each of the great powers had railroads and mobilization plans based upon them, no one could foresee the way that these plans would actually operate, both singly and in interaction with each other, to produce the bizarre and catastrophic outcome that occurred in August 1914. A military innovation may appear to come into being with the logic and precision of technology or by the plans and directives of a bureauc racy, but its actual use and results under combat conditions will be powerfully affected by what Clausewitz called ‘the friction in war’ and clouded by what others have called ‘the fog of war’.9 Even the experiences and outcomes of an actual war will be a poor guide to what will occur in a later one. The lessons learned, the light shown, by one war are likely to become a part of the fog of the next one. This is demonstrated by the experiences of even such a frequently victorious and consistently powerful nation as the United States. The military innovations and corresponding military strategies that the United States has used to win one war have rarely fit the next one; innovations and strategies that bring victory in some circumstances fail to do so in different ones. The US military strategies that won World War II against Germany and Japan (the offensive use of mobile tank forces by the army, carrier task forces by the navy, and large-scale strategic bombing by the air force) were based upon a prior military revolution in weapons platforms, which gave each of the services a large advantage in both mass and mobility. However, the strategy of mass and mobility soon became obsolete in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, because of the new military revolution brought about by nuclear weapons. It was replaced with the military strategy of nuclear deterrence, within the context of the generally static national strategy of containment. A strategy of mass and mobility was succeeded by a strategy of mass destruction and rigid lines. The United States did try to apply its World War II strategy of mass and mobility in the early stages of the Korean War. (General MacArthur’s invasion at Inchon followed by the break-out from the Pusan Perimeter offers the most conspicuous example). This worked against North Korea, but failed once communist China intervened in the autumn of 1950. The ‘new war’ against China obliged the United States to develop an alternative military strategy in Korea, that of attrition within the context of a limited war. Although this military strategy could not result in a victory in the World War II sense, it could achieve

274 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

the objective of preserving South Korea, which adequately served the national strategy of containment. In turn, the United States initially tried to apply its Korean War strategy of attrition and limited war to Vietnam (General Westmoreland’s search-anddestroy operations during the period 1965–68 were the most controversial example). Although not without success (the United States and its South Vietnamese allies did destroy much of the Viet Cong at the time of the 1968 Tet Offensive), this military strategy ultimately failed in the different circumstances of Vietnam. In the 1980s, the venerable strategy of mass and mobility (especially the latter) that had won World War II enjoyed a second coming—updated and modernized with what was then termed ‘emerging technologies’ (ET) in target acquisition, weapons precision, and battlefield information. This was expressed as the Air-Land Battle Doctrine of the US Army and the Forward Maritime Strategy of the US Navy, both designed to win a conventional war against the Soviet Union. As it happened, the Soviet Union collapsed a few years later, and these strategies were never implemented as planned. However, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the Air-Land Battle Doctrine (along with much of the US Army in Europe) was transported from the north German plain to the vast expanse of the Arabian desert, where it won the Gulf War. In short order, the US military strategy that won the Gulf War against Iraq was obsolescent. It did not fit the next great challenge for US military operations, the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s, particularly those in Yugoslavia. The Air-Land Battle Doctrine and the massive and mobile armored forces that were suitable for the north German plain and for the Iraqi desert were not suitable for the mountainous terrain of the Balkans. It is now claimed that new US bombing strategies, based upon the contemporary revolution in military affairs, or RMA, won the Kosovo War against the Milosevic regime and the Afghan War against the Taliban regime. In the Kosovo War, the strategy emphasized precision bombing of regime installations and civilian infrastructure. In the Afghan War, it again emphasized precision bombing of regime installations and also precisely coordinated mass bombing of enemy ground forces. However, the long record of mismatch between the strategies of one war and the necessities of a later one suggests some caution about the applicability of the US victories in Kosovo and in Afghanistan to future conflicts. The particular military strategies that appeared to win these wars are unlikely to fit the particular circumstances of the next war that engages the United States.10 The potential adversary that most resembled Serbia appeared to be Iraq, but the United States was unable to construct a grand coalition of allies for the war against Iraq in 2003. The potential adversary that most resembles Afghanistan is probably Sudan, but it is unlikely that the United States will achieve any important objective by going to war with Sudan, rather than dealing with it by diplomatic and economic means.

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 275

More generally, the record of mismatch demonstrates how difficult it is to foresee what will be the actual consequences of military innovations in future wars. The fog and friction of war have always hidden the full potential of a military revolution from view, and this is true of the contemporary military revolutions as well. The Post-Modern Transformation and the Culmination of the Low-Casualty Imperative At the present time, a great social transformation is underway. This is the change from modern society to post-modern society. Although not normally called a revolution, this transformation is having consequences as profound as the social revolutions that occurred during the modern era. Modern society was characterized by large, hierarchial organizations in virtually every dimension of social life: the corporation and the financial institution in business, the labor union and the professional association in employment, the political party and the bureaucracy in government, the church and the denomination in religion, and the large school and univer-sity in education.11 The archetype, and in some countries the prototype, for such large hierarchial organizations was the army, followed by the navy and the air force. The nation-state was both the combination of all of these large hierarchial organizations and the largest organization of all. The fullest development of large hierarchial organizations was reached in the first half of the twentieth century; this was the golden age, the high noon, of modern society. However, when these great organizations and their nation-states went to war with each other, the result was the dark age of the two world wars. We are now in the midst of the transformation from high-modern to postmodern society. This means the displacement, dismantling, or at least decline of many of the hierarchial organizations that loomed so large in social life only two generations ago and also of the customs and attitudes that went with them. Fixed and rigid hierarchies are being dis-placed by fluid and flexible networks. Formality and deference are being displaced by informality and irreverence. Values of community and solidarity are being displaced by the values of expressive individualism. By now, these changes have extended far into most sectors of American and European society. They are especially pronounced among the professional middle classes and among the technical experts of the new information economy. The displacement, dismantling, or decline of such features as hierarchy, formality, deference, and solidarity will obviously impact upon how military services are organized and how these services relate to the rest of post-modern society. The impact will be transmitted especially through the professional middle classes, which for many decades have provided the source and support for most of the officer corps. It seems likely that these changes will have an impact upon military strategies as well.

276 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Parallel to the change at the level of the society is another at the level of the family.12 This is the demographic phenomenon of historically low birth rates. It is characteristic of all advanced economies and post-modern societies that normally couples will have only one or two children. By contrast, in the modern or modernizing societies of a century ago, the number of children per couple was normally four or more. Whereas children were once common, they are now rare. A century ago, it was also normal for some of these children to die from disease while their parents were still living. If it happened that some instead died while fighting in a war, this was seen as a sad, but not surprising, variation on the familiar theme of death among the young. Today, it is very rare for a child in postmodern society to die from disease while its parents are still living; and if he/she should die in military combat, this will be seen as a shocking surprise. Indeed, for one of these rare children to die in such a rare way will seem a unique catastrophe and perhaps even an unacceptable scandal. It is difficult to imagine a post-modern society, with its one-child demography and its no-death mentality, undertaking such military operations as the massive infantry assaults and trench warfare of World War I, the massive amphibious invasions and foxhole fighting of World War II, and the prolonged and stalemated combat of the Korean War. All these kinds of operations could be undertaken by a modern society, but they probably are beyond the capabilities of a post-modern one. Rather, the military undertakings that are suitable for postmodern society are the highly mobile and brief operations of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2001–02 Afghan War (and, unfortunately, the erratic and feckless search-and-destroy operations of the Vietnam War). Above all, there will be a need to keep these low-casualty operations. This low-casualty imperative is a major feature of the RAM. It obviously has a major impact, and imposes major limitations, upon US military strategies. This is especially the case with the strategies of the US Army. It is also a major factor promoting the RMA, as the United States once again seeks to use high technologies to ensure low casualties. This is especially the case with the strategies of the US Air Force. The Two Military Revolutions and the Army These are only a few potential theaters where the US Army will be confident that it can abide by the imperatives of both the RMA and the RAM, that is, that it can both employ high technologies and experience low casualties. These theaters obviously do not include the Balkans. The US Army clearly resisted employment in Bosnia and in Kosovo, so long as the fighting there was still underway. It recognized that the Balkans (whose name derives from the Turkish word for mountains) were not a suitable terrain for its armored forces, even high-tech ones. The US Army also recognized that warring ethnic groups were not a suitable target for low-casualty operations.

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 277

Instead, the US Army’s preferred theater is the Middle East. Indeed, the ideal terrain for the army remains a flat, open desert like Iraq, and the ideal target remains another conventional army such as the Iraqi Army (and the ideal hightech, low-casualty war remains the Persian Gulf War). Other places in the Middle East may approximate these ideal conditions, but even a war with Iran might result in much higher casualties than did the Gulf War (because of the threat of Islamic-inspired terrorist bombings). The other appropriate theater, from the US Army perspective, is the Korean peninsula. Although the terrain is mountainous, especially in North Korea, the target is another conventional army, that of the North. Here, however, the imperative for low casualties has driven the US Army to supplement its hightechnology weapons with low-technology land mines. As for the rest of east Asia, including China, the US Army is still guided by the principle that it developed after its experience in the Korean War (and that was reinforced by its experience in the Vietnam War): no more land wars in Asia. Similarly, in regard to Russia, the US Army is still guided by the principle that British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery articulated early in the Cold War: the first law of war is don’t march on Russia. The US Army will certainly talk about the importance of high technology, and it will certainly procure high-tech weapons. It may even develop a distinctive military strategy based upon them. However, in practice, it will continue to resist being employed in actual combat, outside of a few places like Iraq and North Korea. The ways that it will resist such employ-ment are many and varied. They range from never drawing up operational plans for a particular theater, to always finding reasons for further delays in the employment of army forces (such as the Apache helicopters during the Kosovo War),13 to limiting the actual deployment of the army to its special operations forces (the Afghan War). The Two Military Revolutions and the Navy For the US Navy, too, there are only a few potential theaters where it will be confident that it can abide by the imperatives of the RMA and the RAM, that is, that it can employ high technologies and experience low casualties. The ideal theater for the US Navy remains a wide, open ocean that adjoins an extended coastline or littoral region, such as the South China and East China Seas, which adjoin China, and the Sea of Japan, which adjoins North Korea. The Arabian Sea may approximate these ideal conditions, but the US Navy has been reluctant to operate and expose its air-craft carriers within the close confines of the Persian Gulf itself. Its use of carriers during the Gulf War was unimpressive and had little impact upon the course of the war. The US Navy’s actual use of aircraft carriers during most of the past half century is rather similar to the Royal Navy’s use of battleships, especially the magnificent HMS Hood, during the 1920s and 1930s. The Hood and other battleships showed the flag and demonstrated British naval power in port visits

278 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

around the globe. The US Navy’s carriers have done the same for the United States. Since the end of the Korean War, the political and diplomatic use of the carriers has probably been more successful than their military use. (Unfortunately, when World War II came around, the German battleship Bismarck sunk the Hood, with the loss of more than 1,200 men and with only three survivors.) The US Navy’s adoption and use of cruise missiles is the most evident way in which it has adapted to high-technology/low-casualty conditions. Hypothetically, the navy’s cruise-missile capability might add new operating theaters to the short list that has been generated by its carrier-aircraft capability. However, the great expense of cruise missiles ($1.5 million each) means that their use is largely limited to a strategy of coercion, implemented with precision strikes upon a few largely symbolic targets, rather than a strategy of devastation, implemented with massive attacks upon the war-making capacity of an enemy By themselves, these cruise missiles are unlikely to achieve decisive results. Consequently, the main effect of the US Navy’s cruise-missile capability will be simply to add to the destructive power of its traditional carrier forces and to increase the depth inland of its traditional operating theaters. These are theaters where the navy would have to launch attacks against another military force in large-scale operations over a sustained period of time, that is, against China from the South China and East China Seas, against North Korea from the Sea of Japan, and against Iraq or Iran from the Arabian Sea. The Two Military Revolutions and the Air Force The two military revolutions and the two corresponding imperatives of high technologies and low casualties have very different consequences for the US Air Force than for the US Army and the Navy. The logics of the two revolutions and the two imperatives are much more consistent with the traditional air force conception of itself than is the case with the other two services. After all, the US Air Force from its beginning has always seen itself as the most high-technology of the military services, and it has always sold itself as being the most able to win victory with low casualties. In World War II, the US Air Force (then, formally, the US Army Air Force) promised ‘victory through air power’ and ‘precision bombing’. In the Cold War, it promised not only ‘more bang for the buck,’ but also less blood for the bang. Of course, the Korean War and the Vietnam War demonstrated the limitations of air power and the continuing necessity for ground forces, but the US Air Force persisted in its pursuit of its long-standing mission. The Persian Gulf War of 1991, with its initial air campaign of five weeks and its subsequent ground campaign of only four days, brought it closer to its goal.14 The Bosnian War of 1995, with the NATO air strikes overshadowing what was actually the more decisive ground campaign conducted by the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim armies, appeared to bring it closer still. Then, the Kosovo War of 1999 became

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 279

the first war in history to be won by air power alone and the first war in which the victorious side did not suffer a single combat casualty. The long journey of the US Air Force through the wars of the twentieth century toward its goal of victory through air power by itself had, at the very end of the century, at last reached its destination. Kosovo seemed to demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of a military strategy based upon air power and precision bombing. Finally, the Afghan War of 2001–02 seemed to confirm and underline this conclusion.15 The future of the Kosovo strategy Upon examination, however, the number and range of states vulnerable to a Kosovo-type strategy (precision bombing of regime installations and civilian infrastructure) is actually quite small. On the one hand, the target-state has to have reached a certain level of urban and industrial development, so that it has something essential to lose through bombing, and its government must be responsive to popular pressure from the people who feel pain caused by that loss. Although Serbia, particularly Belgrade, fitted these conditions in the Kosovo War, Iraq during the Gulf War did not. Despite intense bombing of Baghdad, a land campaign was still necessary to defeat Iraq and to achieve the US war aims. Nor is it clear that North Vietnam fit these conditions in the Vietnam War. (The actual impact of the US bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972 remains a matter of debate.) The less advanced the level of political and economic development, the less likely it is that precision bombing will be effective. It did not work against the guerrillas in South Vietnam, and it would not work against, for example, the FARC guerrillas in Colombia. Conversely, of course, the target-state cannot be so developed that it has acquired its own weapons of mass destruction, and therefore the capacity to deter the United States through mutual assured destruction. It is inconceivable that the United States would employ a Kosovo-type strategy against Russia or China, that is, bomb Moscow or Beijing in expectation of extracting political concessions. Indeed, it is not even clear that it would be able to employ such a strategy against North Korea by bombing Pyongyang. Excluding potential adversaries who are too developed and those who are not developed enough leaves only about a half-dozen rogue states that are plausible target-states for a Kosovo-type strategy of precision bombing. These are the usual suspects: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, perhaps North Korea, and, at the lower end of development, Sudan. (As it happens, three of these—Iraq, Libya, and Sudan—have already been the target of some kind of US punitive bombing, and in no case did the bombing yield decisive results.) In short, the high-technology/ low-casualty way of war displayed in Kosovo may have limited applicability for the future.

280 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

The future of the Afghan strategy An Afghan-type strategy (precision bombing of regime installations and precisely coordinated mass bombing of ground forces) may be applicable to a larger number and range of states. However, it too will have its limitations. A central component of the US military strategy in Afghanistan was the ground forces of the Northern Alliance (the local ethnic and tribal groups opposing the Taliban regime), which anchored the Taliban forces in static defensive positions, where they became suitable targets for mass bombing. For the Afghan strategy to work elsewhere, the enemy’s ground forces will have to be willing to adopt static positions, and the US military will have to find some kind of ground forces to anchor them there. As in Afghanistan, these might be local forces drawn from ethnic or tribal groups hostile to the enemy regime. As it happens, many Muslim countries contain such groups, and these could be the source for the ground forces, which would serve both as an ally and an anchor. Some of the more obvious examples are the Kurds and the Sh’ites in Iraq, the Christians and other southern rebel groups in Sudan, and the Azeri, Arab, and Baluchi minorities in Iran. Eventually, however, it may become necessary to drive the enemy regime out of its capital city (as in Afghanistan), and this objective will normally require ground forces that are more substantial. In underdeveloped Afghanistan, the local ground forces plus tribal diplomacy to bring about shifting alliances were sufficient to achieve this objective. In more developed countries, however, it may take more developed ground forces to do the job, and these likely would have to be conventional units of the US Army or US Marines. This kind of military operation -which could include urban combat—could easily entail a level of casualties that was no longer low. Overall, then, the logics of the two military revolutions and the two corresponding imperatives point to a limited number of theaters or targets for US military operations. For the US Army, these are principally Iraq and North Korea. For the US Navy, they are principally China (especially Chinese forces deployed beyond the Chinese mainland itself) and North Korea. For the US Air Force, they are principally Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. It turns out that the practical consequence of the new military revolutions and the new operational imperatives is that the most likely theaters and targets of the new era, the first half of the twenty-first century, will largely be those where the United States fought its wars of the last half of the twentieth: the Korean War (the Korean peninsula and the Sea of Japan), the Vietnam War (the South China Sea), and the Persian Gulf War (the Arabian desert and the Arabian Sea). Clausewitz and the Two Contemporary Military Revolutions It is often said that Carl von Clausewitz and his great work, On War, are no longer relevant because of the new realities produced by the two con-temporary military revolutions, as well as by such recent developments as the spread of

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 281

weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The major allegations given for his being obsolete are three: 1. Clausewitz wrote about conventional wars between nation-states. Since both conventional wars (wars involving combat between traditional military organizations such as armies, navies, and air forces) and nation-states are in decline, the importance of such wars is in decline also. 2. Clausewitz wrote about war as a rational means to achieve political ends. However, the widespread use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) means that war can no longer be rational. 3. Clausewitz wrote that the concentration of mass at the enemy’s center of gravity was fundamental to military strategy and operations. However, mass armies are no longer possible (because of the RAM and its low-casualty imperative) and no longer necessary (because of the RMA and its hightechnology alternatives). Each of these criticisms of Clausewitz’s relevance may be true in some sense. It is useful and sobering to remember, however, that there was an earlier time when Clausewitz was held to be obsolete because of a military revolution. The Clausewitzian Renaissance: Clausewitz Survives the Nuclear Revolution The development of nuclear weapons in the 1940s also brought about a revolution in military affairs. And as early as the late 1940s, nuclear strategists were writing about ‘the absolute weapon’ and were making criticisms of Clausewitz similar to those that are listed above.16 However, Clausewitz himself had written about the tendency toward ‘absolute war’, where war was no longer a rational means to a political end but had become an all-consuming end in itself.17 He condemned this self-destructive tendency, and much of his theory was devoted to restraining it. Immediately after the advent of the absolute weapon was proclaimed and after the Soviet Union had produced its own nuclear bombs (1949), the United States was plunged into its next war, the Korean War, which turned out to be a carefully defined and tightly constrained limited war that was not absolute at all. Some 15 years later, nuclear strategy had matured into the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). However, immediately after this doctrine was proclaimed, the United States entered into its next war, the Vietnam War, which was also a carefully defined and tightly constrained limited war. It was the utter failure of US military strategy in Vietnam which led to the renaissance of Clausewitzian thinking in the US military services, especially in the army.18 One result was the development of the Air-Land Battle Doctrine, which was meant to enable the US Army to fight a conventional but high-technology war with the Soviet Union. A second result was the articulation of ‘the Weinberger-Powell

282 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

doctrine’, which was meant to guide decisions by political and military leaders about whether or not to undertake military intervention. In the 1990s, the Weinberger-Powell doctrine provided a major critique of the idea of humanitarian intervention. A third result was the way that the military conducted the Persian Gulf War, which very closely conformed to Clausewitzian principles (as well as to the Air-Land Battle Doctrine and the Weinberger-Powell doctrine). The Clausewitzian Resilience: Clausewitz Thrives in the RMA and the RAM Let us address, however, the criticisms about Clausewitz’s relevance in the current era. 1. The obsolescence of conventional wars between nation-states. The nationstate may be in decline, but states continue to exist and to take actions that have serious consequences outside their borders. These states may not be nation-states like some of the powers of Clausewitz’s time, but his account of war was based upon states in general and not upon nation-states in particular. (In actuality, the only powers that were then nation-states were France and Britain, while Austria, Russia, and Clausewitz’s own Prussia were not.) The states of the contemporary era may be continental states like the United States, Russia, and China. They may be rogue states like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. In any case, they are still states that can take actions, including military ones, which have serious consequences outside their borders, including serious consequences for the United States. Some of these actions can be taken with conventional military forces, and can be opposed with other conventional military forces, that is, they are the kinds of actions that are at the core of Clausewitz’s analysis. In dealing with these actions, it might be said that if Clausewitz did not already exist, he would have to be invented. 2. The obsolescence of war as a rational means to political ends. There are indeed some kinds of wars that are not rational means to achieve political ends, particularly wars that involve the use of weapons of mass destruction. But wars that do not involve such weapons do continue to occur. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been several of these: the Gulf War, the Bosnian War, the Kosovo War, and the Afghan War, as well as a number of international wars in Africa. For such wars, Clausewitz is as relevant as ever. 3. The obsolescence of the concentration of mass. The capacity to concentrate a mass of ground forces at an enemy’s center of gravity may be obsolescent for the United States, the European nations, and perhaps even present-day Russia. But it would be risky to assume that it is similarly obsolescent for large, modernizing nations such as China or India. In any event, the concept of concentration of mass continues to apply to the use of air power. In the Kosovo War, it was the increasing intensity of air strikes concentrated upon economic

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 283

targets that was the major factor in inducing Serbia to surrender.19 In the Afghan War, it was the massive bombing of Taliban forces that was the major factor in inducing them to surrender. The strongest case for the continuing relevance and importance of Clausewitz does not derive from the refutation of these three familiar criticisms. It derives from the fact that a number of central and classical Clausewitzian concepts are even more valid now, because of the two con-temporary military revolutions, than they were before. We will consider three of these concepts. 1. The remarkable trinity. A central concept for the Clausewitzian renaissance in the US military, particularly in the army, has been ‘the remarkable trinity’. This is the idea that decisions about war should be made by a trinity composed of the political leaders, the military commanders, and the popular will, with each of these elements playing its own appropriate and necessary role.20 The remarkable trinity is even more relevant to a liberal democracy like the United States than it was to a conservative monarchy like Clausewitz’s Prussia. When going to war, the approval and coordination of the three elements of the President (or National Command Authority), the military (the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the theater commanders), and the public (in part represented by the Congress) should be a matter of simple common sense, to say nothing of the language of the US Constitution. Some military objectives cannot be achieved quickly, and a military operation, especially one that begins to involve large US casualties, cannot be sustained over a long period unless all three elements are supporting it. Several of the US military interventions which became failures did so because of the failure of the President to seek public support commensurate with the scope and risk of the operation. This was the case with Vietnam, of course, but also with Lebanon in 1982–84 and Somalia in 1993. By May 1999, the Kosovo intervention was not far from failing, because the Clinton administration had failed to get Congressional approval. The RMA and the RAM have actually increased the importance of the remarkable trinity, particularly the element of public support. The RAM increases the difficulty of obtaining public support for military operations, and its low-casualty imperative defines one condition for that support. The RMA provides the capability to fight certain kinds of war, while suffering only low casualties. In a sense, the RMA provides an answer (but only a narrow and limited one) to the problem posed by the RAM. A respect for the remarkable trinity is simply a recognition of political and military realities created by the two contemporary military revolutions. 2. The center of gravity. In On War, Clausewitz devoted much more space to the concept of ‘the center of gravity’ than he did to the remarkable trinity.21 He believed that, in order to succeed, military operations had to be directed at the enemy’s center of gravity or at least to take it into account. Different enemies had different centers of gravity; in some cases it might be the enemy’s armed

284 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

forces, in others his capital city, in others his public support, and in still others his ties with his allies. Proper identification and targeting of the center of gravity has contributed to the success of US military operations. Recent examples are General Noriega and the Panamanian Defense Force in Panama in 1989; the Iraqi Army in the Gulf War; Serbian economic infrastructure and public support in the Kosovo War; and the Taliban fighting forces in the Afghan War. Conversely, the failure to identify and target that center has contributed to the failure of the entire military operation. Examples are the North Vietnamese leadership and the city of Hanoi in the Vietnam War; Iranian direction of Shiite militants in Lebanon; and the absence of any clear center in the anarchy of Somalia. The center of gravity is even more relevant to the fast-tempo military of the contemporary United States than it was to the slow-moving army of Clausewitz’s Prussia. Because of the RMA and its high-technology capabilities, the US military can conduct and conclude some kinds of combat operations quickly. And because of the RAM and its low-casualty imperative, it must conduct and conclude most of its combat operations quickly. ‘Quick-in/quick-out’ is both a possibility (in a few cases) and a necessity (in most cases). In turn, proper identification and targeting of the enemy’s center of gravity is a necessity for quick-in/quick-out operations. 3. Friction in war. Clausewitz himself considered ‘friction in war’ to be one of his most important concepts.22 Clausewitz saw himself as arguing against a particular conception of war, which was prevalent in the eighteenth century and a product of the Enlightenment. This view held that war, like other human activities, could be made into a science, even into a mathematics with precise and sophisticated calculations of power balances and military operations. The siege warfare and the battlefield tactics of the time—based upon elaborate fortifications, calculated artillery bombardment, and close-order infantry drill—supported this scientific and mathematical conception of war. As we have seen, this notion of war was blown apart by the dynamics of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic revolution in military operations, which produced a great expansion in mass and maneuver. Clausewitz was immensely impressed by these developments, calling Napoleon ‘this juggernaut of war’.23 But, even more fundamentally, Clausewitz believed that war by its very nature was a matter of art and chance, rather than of science and mathematics. The friction in war prevented both precision in military calculations and predictability in military operations. It also produced what others have called the ‘fog of war’, which prevented the participants in a war, even the commanders on a battlefield, from seeing and understanding what was actually happening around them. To Clausewitz, the darkness of understanding brought about by friction in war demonstrated how presumptuous and preposterous was the Enlightenment illusion that war could be made into a science.

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 285

As it turns out, the concept of friction in war is even more relevant and important to the presidents and generals of the information era than it was to the kings and marshals of the Enlightenment era. The revolution in military affairs, analogous to the Enlightenment, encourages the illusion that war can be made into a matter of instantaneous information, sophisticated calculation, perfect communication, and precision munitions. It was this illusion which encouraged the Clinton administration to think that Serbia would yield in Kosovo after only a few sorties and a few days of bombing. In fact, even after 70 days of bombing, that is, even in the first week of June 1999, no one in the administration was confident that the US air strategy was going to prevail before the political support for it collapsed. War in the age of the RMA, like war in the age of Enlightenment, is a product of friction and is shrouded in fog. The revolution in attitudes toward the military should also encourage a respect among political and military leaders for the friction and fog in war. The very fluidity and volatility of attitudes in post-modern society makes even more unpredictable and uncertain how society and its military will think and act under the stress of war than was the case with the premodern or modernizing societies of Clausewitz’s time. Of course, the low-casualty imperative provides one certainty of a sort: a post-modern society will insist upon low casualties. But it also produces a greater unknown: what will be the actual response of that society when casualties cease to be low? This too will be a product of friction and will be shrouded in fog. There are other Clausewitzian concepts that continue to be useful, even central, in our time and probably in any time. The most obvious are Clausewitz’s notion of ‘the effect of the political aim on the military objective’ and ‘the concept that war is only a branch of political activity’.24 These concepts certainly explain crucial US decisions during the Persian Gulf War (the Bush administration’s decision not to press on to Baghdad and to occupy Iraq);25 the Bosnian War (the Clinton administration’s decision to limit the targets of the NATO bombing and to halt the advance of the Croatian Army);26 and the Kosovo War (the Clinton administration’s decision not to demand free movement of NATO forces within Serbia itself in addition to within Kosovo, a demand that the US had made in the original Rambouillet negotiations on the eve of the war).27 Further, Clausewitz’s concept of ‘the culminating point of victory’28 continues to be useful as a guide to military strategy and foreign policy. This is especially the case with the foreign policy of the victor in the Cold War, which now reigns as the sole superpower and is sometimes tempted to think that it can now use military force in any way and in any place that it wishes.29 It is now two centuries after the great revolutions and the great wars that so impressed themselves on Clausewitz’s mind when he was still only a young officer in the army of the Prussian king. Our time is completely different from his in many ways. We live in the liberal-democratic United States, which is now the world’s sole superpower, while he lived in con-servative and monarchical Prussia, which is now only ‘the vanished kingdom’.30 We live at the beginning

286 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

of the information age, while he lived at the beginning of the industrial one. We live in a post-modern society, while he lived in a modernizing one. Therefore, our two contemporary military revolutions, the RMA and the RAM, are very different from the Napoleonic military revolution that he experienced. No doubt the day will come when there will appear a military writer who will provide a theory and a strategy that will be perfectly suited to these two military revolutions. However, this master thinker for the RMA and the RAM has not yet appeared. Until he does, the best light to guide us through the fog of war is still that luminescent intelligence that first shone out of the misty plains and marshes of Prussia so many revolutions ago. NOTES 1 I have discussed these transformations in my ‘American Strategy in the Global Era’, Naval War College Review, vol. 53, no. 1 (2000), pp. 7–24. 2 One of the first to claim that Clausewitz was obsolete was Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991). The dispute within the military services over Clausewitz is discussed by Williamson Murray, ‘Clausewitz Out, Computer In: Military Culture and Technological Hubris’, The National Interest, vol. 48 (1997), pp. 57–64. 3 Handel provides a splendid exposition of Clausewitz’s continuing relevance and importance in his Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3rd revised and expanded edn (London: Frank Cass, 2001). 4 Andrew F.Krepinevich, ‘Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions’, The National Interest, vol. 37 (1994), pp. 30–42. 5 William H.McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since AD 1000 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World, rev. edn (New York: Collier, 1962). 6 For comprehensive histories of British and American national strategies and military strategies, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Scribners, 1976); Russell F.Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1973); Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States, rev. and exp. edn (New York: The Free Press, 1994). 7 Michael S.Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). 8 McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, chs 6–7. 9 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 119–21. 10 Regarding the Kosovo War, see Handel, Masters of War, pp. xx-xxiv, 358–60; James Kurth, ‘First War of the Global Era: Kosovo and US Grand Strategy’, in Andrew J.Bacevich and Eliot A.Cohen (eds), War Over Kosovo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 63–96; Stephen Biddle, ‘The New Way of War? Debating the Kosovo Model’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 3 (2002), pp. 138–44.

CLAUSEWITZ AND TWO CONTEMPORARY MILITARY REVOLUTIONS 287

11 A.J.Bacevich, ‘Tradition Abandoned: America’s Military in a New Era’, The National Interest, vol. 48 (1997), pp. 16–25; James Kurth, ‘The Post-Modern State’, The National Interest, vol. 28 (1992), pp. 26–35. 12 Edward N.Luttwak, ‘Where Are the Great Powers?’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 4 (1994), pp. 23–30; also his ‘Toward Post-Heroic Warfare’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 74, no. 3 (1995), pp. 109–22. 13 General Wesley K.Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and The Future of Combat (New York: Public Affairs, 2001). 14 Eliot A.Cohen, ‘The Mystique of US Air Power’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 1 (1994), pp. 109–24. 15 Daniel L.Byman and Matthew C.Waxman, ‘Kosovo and The Great Air Power Debate’, International Security, vol. 24, no. 4 (2000), pp. 5–38; Michael E. O’Hanlon, ‘A Flawed Masterpiece’ (on the Afghan campaign), Foreign Affairs, vol. 81, no. 3 (2002), pp. 47–63. 16 Bernard Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946). 17 Clausewitz, On War, especially pp. 579–94. 18 Handel, Masters of War, pp. 9–17, 307–25; Harry G.Summers, Jr, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1995 [original edn 1982]); also his On Strategy II: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War (New York: Dell Publishing, 1992). 19 Byman and Waxman, ‘Kosovo and The Great Air Power Debate’, pp. 17–22. 20 Clausewitz, On War, p. 89; Handel, Masters of War, pp. 102–11. 21 Clausewitz, On War, pp. 484–87, 595–600, 617–37; Handel, Masters of War, pp. 53–63. 22 Clausewitz, On War, pp. 113–23; Handel, Masters of War, pp. 82–8. 23 Clausewitz, On War, p. 592. 24 Ibid., pp. 88, 603–10. 25 Michael R.Gordon and Bernard E.Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1995), preface and pp. 413–32. 26 Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, rev. edn (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), pp. 94–198. 27 James Kurth, ‘First War of The Global Era: Kosovo and US Grand Strategy’, pp. 74–9. 28 Clausewitz, On War, pp. 528, 566–73; Handel, Masters of War, pp. 181–8. 29 I have applied the concept of the culminating point of victory to US foreign policy in my ‘The American Way of Victory: A Twentieth-Century Trilogy’, The National Interest, vol. 60 (2000), p. 14. 30 James Charles Roy, The Vanished Kingdom: Travels Through the History of Prussia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).

Index

Afghanistan, 55, 60–6; anti-Taliban campaign, 22, 66, 67, 269, 274, 279; Soviet invasion of, 34, 60, 76, 80, 85 Air-Land Battle Doctrine, 273–4, 281 air power, 268, 270–1, 274, 278–9, 278–90 al-Qaeda, 23, 56, 65, 66–2, 256 Alcibiades, 15, 134, 146, 152; ambition, 142, 146, 155(n4); defection to Sparta, 145–3; and Nicias, 144–2; and the Sicilian expedition, 145 Algerian War, 76, 80, 81–7, 85 American Civil War, 11, 22, 120, 170–9, 188; and attrition, 84; European study of, 35, 36, 118 American Revolutionary War, 55, 57, 62, 64 Amphipolis, 137 Analects (Confucius), 98 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 62 Arab-Israeli War (1973), 213, 216, 219, 234 (n39), 235(n58), 239(n95) Arginusae, battle of, 153–2 Art of War (Sun Tzu) see Sunzi bingfa (Sun Tzu’s Art of War) (Sun Tzu) Art of War, The (Machiavelli), 100–6 Asquith, H.H., 84 Athenagoras, 147–5 Athens: army, 136; and the battle for Syracuse, 147–60, 152–2; and Carthage, 146;

civil-military relations, 15–15, 144, 152, 154; decision to attack Syracuse, 145–5; decision to invade Sicily, 140–52; expansionism, 142–50; invasion of Sicily, 15, 134–2, 138–7, 145–5; military leaders, 133; navy, 141; political system, 15, 133–1, 141–9, 143–l; relations with Sparta, 135, 142–50; use of attrition, 75 attrition, 10–11, 64, 69–5, 86–3, 188; comparison to Blitzkrieg, 70–6; definition, 70; Delbrück’s model, 72–8; levels-of-war perspective, 82–8; Liddell Hart’s model, 73; models, 72–9; post-heroic model, 74; post-World War II model, 73–9; self-development of, 78–6; strategic use, 74–78, 83–86; waging wars of, 81–8; winning wars of, 83–86 Auerbach, Red, 27 Austro-Prussian War (1866), 262(n50) Baldwin, Hanson, 243 Barak, Ehud, 88–5(n22), 226–7 battleships, 27 Beck, General Ludwig, 117 Berlin crisis, 243 Bermuda, 168

288

INDEX 289

Bernhardi, Friedrich von, 46–1, 73, 80 bin Laden, Osama, 256 Bird, Major W.D., 43 Bismarck, Otto von, 36, 37, 123, 262–2 (n50) Bismarckian paradigm, the, 42, 43, 44 Blainey, Geoffrey, 57 Bliokh, Ivan, 34, 50(n2), 84 Blitzkrieg, 70–6, 87(n8), 267 Boer War, 46, 188 bombing strategy, 278–90 Bosnia, 11, 74 Brasidas, 15, 28, 135, 136–4, 138, 152 Brenton, Captain Edward, RN, 166 Bright, John, 171–80, 175 Brodie, Bernard, 247 Bui Tin, Colonel, 65 Bullitt, William C, 243, 250, 260(n30) Bush, President George H.W., 248, 249, 253 business: and similarity to war, 7 Caemmerer, General Rudolf von, 41 Callwell, Sir Charles, 190 Camarinaeans, 140 Cambodia, 63 Cambrai, battle of, 50(n1 1), 197 Canada, 164–4, 169, 171, 172, 178 Cannae, battle of, 126 Canning, George, 166–5 capabilities, balance of, 59–5 Cardwell, Edward, 36 Carthage, 146 Castlereagh, Lord, 164 casualties, 22, 43, 85, 92(n57); limitation of, 267–9, 276 center of gravity, 1, 283 chance, 32–7 Chantilly conference, 193 Cherbourg, 161 Cherbourg strategy, 161, 163–2 China, 23, 63, 76,271–2 Chinese Civil War, 57 Churchill, Winston, 191

civil-military relations, 13–14, 15–15, 20, 133, 135–7, 144, 147, 152–3, 257–8, 282–4 Clausewitz, Carl von, xii, xii–1, 23, 95, 109, 113(n24), 113(n27), 242; see also On War (Clausewitz); on ‘absolute war’, 280–2; on attrition, 10, 70, 74, 78, 83; calculus of war, 255; on the center of gravity, 283; on chance, 32; and civil-military relations, 282–4; comparison with Sun Tzu, 11–12; constraints on, 110–16; on danger, 31; on defense, 30; and economy of force, 1; effect on war termination strategies, 284–6; and friction in war, 283–5; Handel on, xii–1, 3, 264; Liddell Hart on, 94; Ludendorff on, 117; and nation-states, 281; on objectives, 59; and popular war, 75, 76; on power, 9–10, 58; relevance of, 264, 280–6; on the role of the people, 221; on strategic goals, 34–9; on strategy, 29, 114; ‘the remarkable trinity’, 133, 282–4; view of war, 1; on war, 110; on war planning, 156; on war termination strategies, 240–50, 242 Cleon, 135, 138 Cobden, Richard, 171–80, 175 Cold War, 237–8(n91), 244, 256, 270 Colonna, Fabrizio, 100–6 Combat Studies (Études sur le Combat) (du Picq), 39– Competitive Balance, Law of, 28 Comte, Auguste, 39 confidence, 29 Confucius, 98, 103 conscription, 36

290 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

continuity, 4 Corbett, Sir Julian, 1, 45–46, 60 Corcyra, 138–6 Cordesman, Anthony, 49 Corinth, 138–6 Crimean War, 16, 162–1, 179 culminating point of victory, 4–5, 241 Czechoslovakia, 75 Dahl, Robert, 56 danger, 31 Dardanelles campaign, 120, 191–1 Davis, Jefferson, 179 Dayan, Moshe, 216, 218 death ground, use of, 31–6 Debate on the Principles of Warfare (Xun Qing), 101–8 decisive point, the, 29 defeat, freeing effect of, 28 defensive positions, 43, 45 Delane, John Thaddeus, 174–4 Delbrück, Hans, 72–8 Delian League, the, 140 deluxe attrition warfare, 11, 78 Demosthenes, 150, 151, 152 Derrécagaix, General Victor, 40 deterrence, 156–5 Development of Strategical Science during the Nineteenth Century, The (Caemmerer), 41 Dien Bien Phu, 64, 125 Dodger Stadium, 29–4 Douglas, Sir Howard, 163–2 Douhet, Giulio, 85 Dragomirov, General M.I., 39 Dror, Yehezkel, 220, 221, 231, 235–6(n67) du Picq, Colonel Ardant, 39–4 Echevarria, Antulio I, II, 53–8(n38) economic warfare, 168–7 economy of force, 1–2 education, 36–1 Egesta, 141 Egypt, 226 Egyptian-Israeli war of attrition, 74, 75, 77, 81, 83, 85, 90–6(n40), 214 Eisenhower, General Dwight D., 249, 250

Eitan, Rafael, 216, 219 Elazar, General David, 216 end-states: articulation of, 121–8; and means, 120–7; strategic guidance, 119–6; termination strategies, 123–31 Engels, Friedrich, 75, 95(n34) escalation, 55, 62–8, 64, 80–6 Euphemus, 140 Eurymedon, 139 experience, 37 Fabius, 75, 78; strategy, 30–5 Falkenhayn, Erich von, 84 Falklands War, 56 Fenway Park, 30 Ferguson, Sir Alex, 27 Ferguson, Niall, 17–18 FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale, Algeria), 81–7 Foch, Marshal Ferdinand, 40, 53(n34), 77, 199–9,201 Forward Maritime Strategy, 274 France, 237(n91); and the Algerian War, 80, 81–7; and the American Revolutionary War, 62; and the Franco- Prussian War, 36; and Israel, 210; power, 57; and the Syrian Crisis, 161; and the Trent crisis, 173; and World War I, 118, 126; and World War II, 49, 118 Franco-Prussian War, 36, 75, 117–4, 188, 267 Frank, Richard, 247 Frederick the Great, 37, 72–8, 76, 77, 81, 114 French, David, 17–18 French Indochina War, 57, 64–65, 76, 85– 1, 125 French Revolution, the, 266–7, 284 friction in war, 283–5 Frunze, M.V., 54(n44) Fuller, J.F. C, 53(n35), 113

INDEX 291

Fuller, William, 8–9 Gallipoli, 191 Gandhi, Mahatma, 86, 93(n84) Gat, Azar, 51(n20) Gaza, 219–9, 223 Geneva Conference, 64 geographical advantage, 60–7, 78 German Wars of Unification, 36–1, 42 Germany, 54(n44); Army, 188; blockade of, 188; civil-military relations, 154; policy and strategy, 116–4; power, 57; reaction to French Revolution, 267; uprisings of 49, 75; Weimar, 48–3; and World War I, 18, 84–85, 116, 118, 126, 194, 196, 198–8, 199–9; and World War II, 117, 120, 154 Gladstone, William E., 174 goals, 26–1 Golan Heights, 212, 217, 219 Gold, Dore, 225 Goltz, Colmar von der, 73 Great Britain, 15–16; American challenge to, 156; and the American Civil War, 171; American naval challenge, 167–6; American strategy, 165–7, 178–90; American threat to, 165; and the armistice, 202; Army, 159, 187–7, 189, 194, 201–11; Baltic Fleet, 161; and Canada, 164–4; and coalition warfare, 269; cost of the Trent crisis, 177–7; cost of World War I, 200; debt repayment, 161; economic power, 158, 159–8, 162; economic warfare, 168–7; European policy, 157–6, 160; and France, 160, 161, 163, 170, 189; and Germany, 189–9; and Israel, 210; and LIC, 86;

maritime strategy, 156–5, 157–72, 179– 9, 268, 269–81; naval bases, 158, 160, 161, 167–6; naval forces, 16–17; See also Royal Navy; political system, 15–16, 267; and RAM, 267–9; relations with the USA, 169; Russian threat, 189; and the Russo-Japanese War, 62; strategy, 181(n17), 269; strategy towards the USA, 164–7; and the Syrian Crisis, 161; trade, 162; and the Trent crisis, 170–87; and the ‘two power’ standard, 159; war planning, 156, 163, 178–8; and World War I, 17–18, 187–202; World War I domestic policies, 194–4, 196, 201; World War I strategy, 187, 188–8, 190– 191, 196–6, 198–8, 200–11, 202; World War I war aims, 189, 189–9, 194–4 Greece, 120, 123 Greenspan, Alan, 141 guerrilla war, 4 Guevara, Che, 76 Guibert, 77 Gulf War, 22, 35, 55, 251, 253; aftermath, 121, 244–5, 256; air campaign, 278; Allied use of attrition, 71; casualties, 88(n22), 248, 269; coalition aims, 122, 124, 247, 249; geography and, 61–7; Iraq’s allies, 63; Israel and, 234–5(46); strategy, 77, 274, 278, 281; termination, 124–1, 244; US political-military coordination, 252, 255; war aims, 249 Gyllipus, 148 Haig, Sir Douglas, 190, 197, 198, 199–9, 201

292 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Halifax, Nova Scotia, 167–6 Halutz, General Dan, 224 Handel, Michael L, xii, 241–1; on civil-military relations, 137–5, 154; on Clausewitz, xii–1, 3, 264; comparison of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, 11–12; on Israeli strategy, 216, 224; and political rationality, 5; publications, xii–1; and strategic logic, 5; and strategic theory, 1–6; on strategy, 228, 235(n62); and Thucydides, 133; on the universality of strategic logic, 38; on war, 2–5; on war termination strategies, 240–50 Harvard University, xii Hebrew University of Jerusalem, xii Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 34, 50 (n1) Henderson, G.F.R., 36, 39 Hermocrates, 147–5 high-intensity conflicts (HICs), 69, 73–9, 75 Hindenburg, Paul von, 116 Hitler, Adolf, 115, 117, 120, 154 Hizballah, 74, 76, 80, 81, 88–5(n22) home field advantage, 29–4 Horowitz, Dan, 210 House, Colonel Edward M., 248 Howard, Michael, 49, 221 human nature, 1 Inchon Landings, 28, 257, 273 India, 86, 93(n84) Industrial Revolution, 265–6 Influence of Sea Power upon History, The (Mahan), 45 information technology, 14, 21, 127 innovation, 27, see also technological innovation insurgency, 7, 10, 55 intelligence, 1, 104–10, 108, 212 Intelligence and National Security, xii intifada, the, 82, 86

Iran-Iraq War, 78, 79, 80 Iraq, 61–7, 63 irrational exuberance, 141 Israel, 18–1, 71, 74, 76, 82, 88–5(n22); American influence on, 233(n24); Arab minority, 208, 235–6(n67); assessment of strategy, 228–42; casualties, 234(n39); deterrence strategy, 212; diplomatic strategy, 211, 225–7; economic constraints, 209–19; and the Egyptian-Israeli war of attrition, 85; force multipliers, 212–2; foreign policy, 19; and the Gulf War, 234–5 (46); international constraints, 210; military doctrine, 213–3; military objectives, 208–18; missile programs, 234(n37); political objectives, 209; political system, 18–1, 215, 222, 229; politics and strategic rationality, 18–1, 215–5; relations with the Palestinians, 212, 218, 226, 226–7, 231, 237(n86), 237 (n88), 239(n102), 239(n103); reliance on military power, 223–5; security budget, 209; and the Six Day War, 10; social constraints, 210, 230–1, 236 (n70), 236(n72), 239(n102); social dimension of strategy, 221–3; strategic depth, 212, 235(n58); strategic goals, 208; strategic principles, 211–3; strategic structure, 211–3; strategy, 206–42; temporal constraints, 210; territorial bias, 217–9, 225, 230; threat perception, 207–18, 218–8; war termination strategies, 209 Israel Defense Force (IDF), 213–3, 219, 220, 221–2, 223 Israeli National Security Council (NSC), 221, 229, 230 Italy, 119

INDEX 293

Jahns, Max, 73 James, Bill, 8, 28, 29, 32 James, William, 166–5 Japan, 34, 59, 247, 272; and the Russo-Japanese War, 10, 43, 60, 61, 64, 262(n50) Jenin, 63 Jomini, Baron de, 39, 75, 76, 113 Jordan, 212 Jutland, battle of, 192 Kaiser, David, 7–8 Kearsey, A., 44 Kissinger, Henry, 233(n24) Kitchener, Field Marshal Horatio, 188–8, 190–191, 202 Kober, Avi, 10–11 Königgrätz, battle of, 36, see also Sadowa, battle of Korean War, 5, 15, 249, 253, 260(n32), 260–1(n33), 273, 278; and attrition, 74, 77, 81; US military-political relations, 28; war aims, 249–9; war termination strategies, 244, 246, 247, 248, 251, 254–4, 256, 257 Koser, Reinhold, 73 Kosovo, 11, 22, 63, 74, 85, 87, 269, 274, 278, 282 Kronstadt, 163 Kurth, James, 21–5 Kuwait, Iraqi invasion of, 61–7 Lamachus, 145, 146, 147, 152 Lambert, Andrew, 15–17 Laos, 63 laws of war, 7 Lebanon, 87, 212, 216, 224; Israeli invasion of, 218; Syrian deployment in, 218–8 Lee, Bradford, 19–3 lessons-learned databases, 37 Lessons of Modern Warfare, The (Cordesman and Wagner), 49 Lewis, Mark Edward, 105 Liddell Hart, B.H., 71, 73, 83, 241, 242; on Clausewitz, 94;

on policy, 115; on the Sunzi bingfa, 94, 111; on war aims, 123 Lincoln, Abraham, 17 linear projection, 40–5; the Bismarckian paradigm, 42, 43; and naval warfare, 45–46; and the receptivity of military lessons, 44–9; and the Russo-Japanese War, 42–8; and World War I, 42, 44–9; and the World War I paradigm, 44–9 Lissa, battle of, 45 Lissak, Moshe, 210 Little Maginot Line, the, 45 Lloyd George, David, 17, 84, 193, 194–4, 196, 197, 199, 200–10 logistics, 117 Loos, battle of, 193 low-intensity conflicts (LICs), 69, 72, 73– 9, 75, 75–1, 80, 83, 85, 86–3 Ludendorff, Erich, 116–3, 200 Luttwak, Edward, 11, 74 Lyons, Lord, 171, 172, 176 MacArthur, General Douglas, 15, 28, 249, 251, 254–4 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 70, 87(n3), 95, 100– 6, 155(n4) Mack, Andrew, 65 McKenna, Reginald, 193 Maginot Line, the, 45, 49, 237(n91) Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 45 Mahnken, Thomas, 9–10 Mannerheim Line, the, 45 Mao Tse-tung, 4, 55, 56, 64; and attrition, 10, 76, 78, 83, 86 Marne, battle of the, 79 Marshall, Andrew W., 56 Martin, Admiral Sir William, 172 mass armies, rise of, 266–7 Masters, in ancient China, 97–1 Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought (Handel), xii, 11–12, 240, 241–1 Mearsheimer, John, 83 Megara, 143

294 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Mendelsohn, Barak, 224 Merom, Gil, 18-l, 58, 169 Meyer, Andrew, 12–13 Mikhnevich, Chief of Staff, 75 military history: antique interpretation of, 37–3; positivist interpretation of, 39–4; pragmatic skeptic interpretation of, 41 military leaders, 14, 20; instinctive analysis, 32; political control of, 138; punishment of, 154; relationship with political leaders, 13– 14, 20, 115–2; vision of future conflict, 117–4; and war termination strategies, 249–61, 257–8 military lessons, 9, 34–37, 48–3, 273; extracting, 37–5; importance of, 37; interpretation of, 49–4; linear projection and, 40–5, 42–46; receptivity to, 44–46, 47–2; the significant exception and, 41, 46–2; strategic, 49–4 166 Milne, Rear Admiral Sir Alexander, 171, 172, 174, 174, 175–5 Milosevic, Slobodan, 11, 63 Modern War (Derrécagaix), 40 Mofaz, Shaul, 88–5(n22), 213 Moltke, Helmuth von, 14, 35, 41, 73, 75, 76, 114, 126 moral factors, 40; moral forces, 1, 7, 8, 44 morality, 65 Mozi, 98 Mukden, battle of, 43 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), 281 Napoleon III, 170 Napoleon Bonaparte, 29, 38, 41, 51(n22), 70, 79, 114, 266–7, 271, 284 Napoleonic Wars, 1, 45, 160 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 83 national power, 2 National War College of Jerusalem, xii

naval forces, 16–17 naval power, 268 naval strategy, 1, 159, 269–81, 277–8 Naval War College, xii, 37, 38 naval warfare, 45–46, 163 Navarre, General, 85–1 Négrier, General François de, 43–8 Nicias, 15, 134, 142–51, 152; and Alcibiades, 144–2; and the battle for Syracuse, 146–4, 147, 148, 149–60, 152–1; indecisiveness of, 146–4; and the Sicilian expedition, 145, 146 Nicias, Peace of, 138, 142 Nixon, Richard M., 247, 248, 253 non-linear phenomena, 9 North Africa, 119 North Vietnam, 57, 63 Northern Ireland, 81 Norway, 120, 123 nuclear weapons, 280–2 objectives, 59, 110, 115–2, 118–5 offensive terms, 29–4 On Strategy (Moltke), 114 On War (Clausewitz), xii, 113(n24), 240– 50; comparison with the Sunzi bingfa, 109– 17; context, 109–16, 113(n25) Operation Accountability, 88–5(n22) operational art see operations operational design, 13 operations, 113; and the desired end-state, 119–8; and policy, 119; political limitations, 120; strategic objectives, 122–9; and strategy, 118–31, 127–4; and tactics, 125–3 Ostfriesland, the, 51(n11) outcome control, 57 outcomes, 9–10 Pacific War, 247, 250 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 76, 81, 218, 239(nl02)

INDEX 295

Palestinian Authority, the, 60, 65 Palestinian-Israeli conflict, 80, 81, 82, 86, 88–5(n22), 92(n57), 213, 218, 226, 226– 7, 231, 239(n102), 239(n103) Palestinians, 63, 71, 74, 212 Palmerston, Lord, 158, 162, 167, 169, 170; Civil War policy, 170–9; and the Trent crisis, 172, 173, 174–4, 176, 177, 179 parallel battles, 77 passions, 8, 10, 19, 23 Paul, T.V, 62 peace settlements, 5 peace terms, 244 Pearl Harbor, 64, 123 Peloponnesian League, the, 143 Peloponnesian War, 15–15, 75, 77, 133–42; Athenian decision to attack Syracuse, 145–5; Athenian decision to invade Sicily, 140– 52; battle for Syracuse, 147–60, 152–2; civil-military relations, 135–7; Egestaean deception campaign, 141 Peninsular War, 1 Pericles, 140 peripheral operations, 136–4 Pershing, General John, 251–1, 254 Pétain, Marshal Henri, 45 Pity of War, The (Ferguson), 17–18 policy, 13, 113, 114, 126; determination of objectives, 115–2; and operations, 119; and strategy, 114–4, 127; and war, 114, 115, 117; war as an instrument of, 2–3 political leaders, 13; relationship with military leaders, 13– 14, 20, 115–2; and war termination strategies, 20–3, 241, 252–3, 257–8 political legitimacy, 11 political rationality, 22 politicization, 126 politics, 2, 114 popular war, 75, 76–2 Port Arthur, siege of, 42–7 positivism, 39–4, 51(n20)

post-hostilities planning, 125 Powell, Colin, 248, 251 power, 9–10, 56, 58, 65–1; and outcome control, 57; and resources, 56–2 pragmatic skeptics, 9, 41, 46–2 Prague, 251 Principes de la Guerre, Des (The Principles of War) (Foch), 40, 53(n34) Principles of Maritime Strategy (Corbett), 45–46 privateering, 167 profit, in sport, 26 propaganda, 65 Prussia, 36–1, 267 Pythodoros, 139 Rabin, Yitzhak, 82, 86, 223 rationality, 2–3 Reinhardt, General Walther, 54(n44) resources: control of, 56–2; weak powers use of, 63–9 revolution in attitudes towards the military (RAM), 21–5, 264, 266, 276; and Britain, 267–9; Clausewitz and, 281–6; and the French Revolution, 266–7; spread of, 271–2; and the USA, 21–5, 267–9, 271, 276, 276–9 revolution in military affairs (RMA), 21–5, 264; Clausewitz and, 281–6; and the Industrial Revolution, 265–6; spread of, 271–2 Rhegium, battle of, 147 Rickey, Branch, 27 Ridgway, General Matthew, 251, 255, 260 (n32), 260–1(n33) Robertson, Sir William, 190 Rome, 155(n4) Rommel, Field Marshal Erwin, 119 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 243, 248, 250, 253, 254, 260(n30) Royal Navy, 158, 159, 160, 179–9, 270, 277; and the Crimean War, 163;

296 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

and World War I, 188, 192 Runciman, Walter, 193 Russell, Bill, 27 Russell, Lord John, 171, 173, 176 Russia: attrition strategy, 75; Napoleon’s campaign of 1, 79; and the Russo- Japanese War, 10, 43, 61; and the Seven Years’ War, 81; and World War I, 188 Russian Civil War, 54(n44) Russian Revolution, 196 Russo-Japanese War, 10, 46, 49, 53(n34), 55, 60, 62, 64, 118; geography and, 61; linear projection interpretation of, 42–8; significant exception interpretation of, 46–1; war termination strategies, 262–2(n50) Saddam Hussein, 63, 247, 256 Sadowa, battle of, 42, see also Königgrätz, battle of San Jacinto, USS, 170 Santayana, George, 34, 50(n1) Saudi Arabia, 61 Schlieffen, Alfred von, 116, 118, 126 Schlieffen Plan, 116, 118, 267 sea power, 135–3 Sedan, battle of, 42 Serbia, 55, 63 Seven Years’ War (1756–63), 72–8, 75, 77, 81 Seward, W.H., 171 Sharon, General Ariel, 216, 219, 233(n15) short-war illusion, 42, 50(n3) Sicily, Athenian invasion of, 15, 134–2, 138–7, 145–5 sieges, 103–9 significant exception, the, 41; and the receptivity of military lessons, 47–2; and the Russo-Japanese War, 46–1; and World War I, 47 Sima fa (Methods of the Ministers of War), 106 Sinai peninsula, 212, 224

Sinai War, 71 Singapore, 60 Six Day War, 10, 71, 214, 216, 217–7 Six-Year War, 71 Smuts, Jan, 202 social transformation, and military revolution, 274–6 Somalia, 87 Somerset, Duke of, 171, 172, 173–3, 175, 177–7 Somme, battle of, 193, 194 Sophocles, 139 Soviet Union, 54(n44); German invasion of, 34; and policy, 115; strategic bomber force, 272; and the Vietnam War, 63 Spanish-American War, 46 Sparta: and Brasidas, 136–4, 138; civil-military relations, 15; navy, 136; relations with Athens, 135; relief of Syracuse, 148–7; war aims, 137 spatial defense, 217 Sphacteria, 135 sport: chance and, 32–7; comparison with war, 7–8, 26, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32; emotional demands, 31–6; objectives, 26, 26–2; rules, 7, 26; and strategic logic, 7–8; strategy, 28–5 Stalin Line, the, 45 Stalingrad, battle for, 154 Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (Henderson), 36 Strachan, Hew, 50(n3), 191 strategic bombing, 270, 272, 274 strategic goals, 34–9 strategic guidance, 119–6 strategic objectives, 13, 122–9 strategic planning, 9 strategic theory, Handel and, 1–6 strategists, 13

INDEX 297

strategy, 13–15, 113; Afghan strategy, 279; air, 278–90; annihilation, 72; antique interpretation of, 38; assessment of, 228, 237–8 (n91); attrition, 69–87, 83–86; Blitzkrieg, 70–6, 87(n8), 267; defensive, 30, 76–2; definition, 206; Kosovo strategy, 278–90; liberal democracy and, 267–9; logic of, 8–9, 38; low casualty, 269–81; Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), 270; naval, 45–46; offensive, 76–2; and operations, 118–31, 127–4; and policy, 114–4, 127; pragmatic skeptic interpretation of, 41; rationality of, 2; social dimension of, 221–3; in sport, 28–5; tacticization of, 14–15, 126–3, 128, 152; and tactics, 125–3; technological innovation and, 273–4; and the two military revolutions, 276–9; weak powers, 55–1, 58–4, 64 strong powers, use of force, 60 Sun Tzu, 23; see also Sunzi bingfa (Sun Tzu’s Art of War) (Sun Tzu); comparison with Clausewitz, 11–12; and intelligence, 1; maxims, 28, 29, 30, 31; motivation, 12; strategies, 12–13 Sun Tzu’s Art of War see Sunzi bingfa (Sun Tzu’s Art of War) (Sun Tzu) Sun Wu, 95, 97,99 Sunzi bingfa (Sun Tzu’s Art of War) (Sun Tzu), 94–96; audience, 97; and changing military culture, 105–12, 109; on commanders, 106, 107–14;

comparison with On War, 109–17; constraints on the author, 111; context, 95, 96–4, 104, 111; as history, 96–9; on intelligence, 104–10, 108; nature of, 97–3; on organization, 106–12; rhetorical antiquarianism, 99–6; as theory, 104–14; Xun Qing’s critique of, 101–8 surprise, value of, 1, 257 Sweden, 60 Switzerland, 60 Syracuse, 145–5, 147–60, 152–2 Syria, 212, 218–8 Syrian Crisis (1840), 161 tactics, 13, 83, 118–5, 125–3, 127–4; antique interpretation of, 38–3; offensive, 43–8, 53(n34); positivist interpretation of, 40; pragmatic skeptic interpretation of, 41; the Russo-Japanese War, 42–7, 43–8 Tal, General Israel, 212, 220, 224–5, 234 (n41), 239(n100) Tamir, General Avraham, 212–2 technological innovations, 3–4, 14–15, 21– 5, 38–3, 40, 50–6(n11), 91(n46), 127, 127–4, 161, 212–3; and attrition, 79; military transportation, 265–6, 272; naval, 16–17, 160–9, 163–2, 179; and RMA, 265, 265–6; spread of, 271; and strategy, 273–4 terrorism, 65, 66–2, 256 Thucydides, 38, 95, 133–40; and Athenian ignorance on Sicily, 140– 8; on civil-military relations, 133; interpretation of, 153; praise for Alcibiades, 146 Tilden, Bill, 30 Total War (Ludendorff), 117 Trafalgar, battle of, 45 Trent, RMS, 170

298 STRATEGIC LOGIC AND POLITICAL RATIONALITY

Trent crisis, 16–17, 170–87, 179 Truman, Harry S., 253, 254–4

US Naval War College, xii US Navy, 270, 274, 277–8

United States of America, 21; abstract political objectives, 245; challenge to Britain, 156; and coalition warfare, 269; coastal defenses, 168; and the Gulf War, 61, 124, 125, 244, 247, 249, 255; and Israel, 210, 233(n24); and the Korean War, 77, 81, 244, 246, 247, 248, 251, 254–4, 256, 273; ‘losing the peace’, 243–4; maritime strategy, 268, 269–81; military power, 256–1; moral values, 20–3; naval power, 167; and the Pacific War, 247; political-military coordination, 254–4; political objectives, 20, 247; political system, 21, 267; power, 56; and RAM, 21–5, 267–9, 271, 276, 276– 9; relations with Britain, 169, 179; and RMA, 21–5, 271, 276, 276–9; strategic bomber force, 272; tacticization of strategy, 14–15, 126–3, 128; threat to Britain, 165; and the Trent crisis, 176, 177; use of force, 60; and the Vietnam War, 65, 80, 91(n54), 244, 247, 249, 255, 256, 273; and the war against terrorism, 65, 66– 2; war termination practice, 243–5; war termination strategies, 19–3, 243– 68; and World War I, 196, 197–7, 200, 202, 251–1, 254; World War I cash crisis, 192; and World War II, 254, 273, 278 US Air Force, 278–9 US Army, 276–7 US Army War College, xii

Varro, 78 Vego, Milan, 13–15 Victoria, Queen, 173 victory, 240; soporific effect of, 28; wars of attrition, 83–86; willingness to forego, 26 Vietnam War, 5, 19, 34, 55, 81, 120, 120– 7, 154, 249; aid to North Vietnam, 63; and air power, 278; and attrition, 64, 76; casualty ratio, 85; cause of US failure, 80; peace treaty, 256; terrain, 60, 78; Tet offensive, 65, 82, 125–2, 253; US political-military coordination, 255; US power, 57; US public opinion, 91(n54), 248; US strategy, 47–2, 273, 278; war termination strategies, 244, 247, 255 Vo Nguyen Giap, 76 Wagner, Abraham, 49 Walling, Karl, 15–15 war, 13, 32; chance and, 32–7; comparison with sport, 7–8, 26, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31; duration, 117–4; emotional demands, 31–6; Handel on, 2–5; information saturated, 23; lack of rationality, 2–3; lessons of, 8–9, 22, 34–37, 34–49; objectives, 26, 26; outcome control, 57; and policy, 114, 115, 117; theorists approaches to, 8 war aims, 5, 123 War of 164–3, 166, 179 war planning, 156

INDEX 299

war termination strategies, 123–31, 209, 240–51; Clausewitz’s effect on, 284–6; leverage, 255, 257–8; losing side and, 255–5; military limitations, 250–61; political-military coordination, 254–4, 257–8; and political rationality, 257–8; war termination strategies (cont) Russo-Japanese War, 262–2(n50); and strategic logic, 255–7; US practice, 243–68; World War I, 201–12 Warden, Colonel (Ret.) John, 35 Washington, Captain John, 174, 174 weak powers: control of escalation, 62–8, 64; control of initial conditions, 59–7; convincing the adversary it cannot win, 64–65; great power alliances, 62; strategy, 55–1, 58–4, 64; use of attrition, 10, 74–75, 83, 86; use of resources, 63–9; victories by, 9–10, 55, 56–2 weapons, 38–3, 40, 43, 53(n34) weapons of mass destruction, 60, 280 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 169 Weinberger, Caspar, 86 Weinberger-Powell doctrine, 281 West Bank, the, 63, 217, 219–9, 223 West Wall, the, 45 Western democracies, and LIC, 86–3 Westmoreland, William, 47–2 Wilkes, Captain Charles, 170 Wilmot, Chester, 243 Wilson, Andrew, 12–13 Wilson, Woodrow, 201, 243, 245, 247, 248, 252, 253, 262(n39), 262(n48) Winter War, the, 78 World War I, 5, 11, 17, 17–18, 22, 42, 73, 75, 77, 79, 91(n46), 116, 248; aftermath, 255; America enters the war, 196; American cash crisis, 192;

the armistice, 201–12, 243, 252; and attrition, 84–85; British Army, 187–7; British commitment failures, 191; cost to Britain, 200; Entente powers, 187, 198; expectations of, 34; final German offensive, 199–9; German Army, 188; German expectations, 118; Great Britain and, 187–202; lack of termination planning, 124; Middle East operations, 198–8; and paradigm change, 44–9; significant exception predications for, 47; tactics, 126; U-boat offensive, 194, 195–5, 200; US political-military coordination, 254; war termination strategies, 243, 251–1; war weariness, 201 World War I paradigm, the, 44–9, 54(n44) World War II, 11, 22, 34, 49, 71, 79, 84, 118, 120, 248, 251, 253; aftermath, 255–6; and attrition, 85; civil-military relations, 154; German policy and strategy, 117; invasion of Czechoslovakia, 75, 251; Italian campaign, 119; North African campaign, 119; Pacific War, 247, 250; strategic bombing, 270; US political-military coordination, 254; US strategy, 273; USAAF and, 278; war aims, 250; war termination strategies, 243 Wu Zixu, 99 Xun Qing, 101–8 Xunzi (Xun Qing), 101–8 Yaniv, Avner, 220 Yankee Stadium, 29 Yorktown, siege of, 64 Ypres, third battle of, 197, 201 Yugoslavia, 92(n75), 92(n76)