A History of Strategy (10 page)

Partly because he never rose beyond colonel, partly because his main interest was the heart of man and the factors which enabled it to function in battle, du Picq has very little to say about strategy. To the majority of officers, however, strategy was the key to large-scale war. They saw it as an esoteric branch of knowledge they alone possessed and which was intellectually much more satisfying than any mere psychological analysis of the rank and file could ever be. Accordingly, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the most important military theoretician by far was considered to be Jomini. The rumor that American Civil War-era generals carried him in their pockets may be exaggerated. But there is no doubt that his influence can be discerned e.g. in the Antietam and Chancellorsville campaigns as well as in Sherman’s march through Georgia to South Carolina.

What was more, just as the new rapid-firing arms began to transform combat after 1830, strategy was revolutionized by the introduction of railways. Hitherto lines of communications had been somewhat nebulous concepts. Now they were reconstructed in a new, cast-iron form anyone could trace on the ground or on a map. Clearly here was a novel instrument which had to be mastered if it was to be successfully harnessed to war and conquest.

This is not the place to outline the impact of railways on strategy and logistics, a topic that has been the subject of several excellent monographs. Suffice it to say that, outside the US (which, however, produced no military-theoretical writings of any importance) nobody was more closely associated with their use for war and conquest than the Prussian chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke. Moltke, who was born in 1800, rose to prominence through sheer intellectual qualities rather than by way of practical experience. In fact, he never commanded any unit larger than a battalion. Though he possessed a well-educated pen, he never wrote a single definitive work. His thought must be garnered from the campaigns he conducted so successfully. To this must be added the series of great memoranda which, in his capacity of chief of the general staff, he wrote between about 1857 and 1873. At heart a practitioner rather than theoretician, Moltke did not bother to go into first principles. Nor does he mention any of his predecessors. On the other hand, his memoranda do display a unity and a cohesion which justifies including him in the present study.

To simplify, Moltke’s starting point was the rise in the size of armies that had taken place as a result of growing population and industrialization. Instead of tens of thousands, they now numbered hundreds of thousands. Even a single corps, comprising some 30,000 men, was so large that its sub-units would take an entire day to pass a single point. As a result, the trains, making up the rear, would never be able to catch up with the leading elements. Prussia moreover, was the smallest of the five leading European Powers. To compensate, alone among those powers it had retained a form of universal conscription. Having spent two, later three, years under the colors the conscripts were sent home but remained on call in case of an emergency. The problem was how to mobilize them quickly and deploy them on the frontier, and it was here that the railways came in handy.

At the time Moltke was appointed chief of the General Staff it was merely a department inside the War Ministry responsible for training, preparation, and armament. Going to work, he drew up extremely detailed plans for using the railways to carry out mobilization and deployment. Rehearsed in 1859 and in 1864, in 1866 they took the world’s breath away as the Prussian Army mobilized with an efficiency, and at a speed, which had previously been considered unattainable. What was more, and as Moltke had expressly foreseen, attaining maximum speed in mobilization meant that as many railways as possible had to be utilized simultaneously. Together with the sheer size of the forces (“a concentrated army is a calamity: it cannot subsist, it cannot move, it can only fight”) this meant that the troops would be strung out along much of the frontier. A strategy of interior lines of the kind that had been recommended by Jomini and regarded as perhaps
the
one most important device of all would thereby become impossible.

To Moltke, therefore, strategy remained what it had been from von Bülow on. It was, first, a question of moving large forces about in two-dimensional space so as to put them in the most favorable position for combat; and second, making use of the outcome of combat after it had taken place. Like du Picq, however, he realized that the rise of quick-firing weapons had caused the balance between offense and defense to change. To attack frontally in the face of rifles, such as the French Chassepots, which were sighted to 1,200 yards and capable of accurately firing six rounds a minute was suicide. Much better to look for the enemy’s flank and envelop him. In this way the deployment in width, which contemporary critics such as Friedrich Engels regarded as madness when it was used against Austria in 1866, was turned into a virtue. The enemy would be caught between armies coming from two, possibly three, directions, and be crushed between them. Moltke, in a letter he wrote to the historian Heinrich von Treitschke in 1873, called this “the highest feat which strategy can achieve.” Strategically speaking, Moltke intended his armies to take the offensive. Tactically the troops were supposed to use their firepower and remain on the defense, although in practice that order was not always obeyed.

To carry out the mobilization and coordinate the moves of his widely-dispersed forces Moltke made use of another new technical instrument, the telegraph. If only because the railways themselves could only be operated to maximum effect if the trains’ movements were carefully coordinated, wires and tracks tended to run in parallel. This enabled Moltke to implement his strategy of external lines
and
remain in control, previously an unheard-of feat. The contemporary telegraph was, however, a slow instrument. The fact that wiretapping had been practiced both during the American Civil War and in the Austrian-Prussian War required encryption and decryption procedures at both ends, slowing down the lines’ capacity. Again turning necessity into a virtue—the mark of a truly great general—Moltke devised his system of directives or
Weisungen
. He insisted that orders be short and only tell subordinate commanders what to do, but not how.

The system presupposed very good acquaintance and strong mutual trust between officers. That in turn meant that it was possible only thanks to that élite institution, the General Staff. The latter had its representatives in every major unit. In time it spread from the top down, until in 1936 the volume known as
Truppenfuehrung
(Commanding Troops) announced that “war demands the free
independen
t commitment of every soldier from the private to the general.” The result was a uniquely flexible, yet cohesive, war machine that was the envy of the world.

As already mentioned, unlike many of his eighteenth and nineteenth century predecessors Moltke never produced a “system.” He did, indeed, go on record as saying that strategy itself was but a “system of expedients.” War has a penchant for turning the victor into a fool, however, and post-1871 Imperial Germany was no exception. As Moltke himself noted during his later years—he was to remain in office until 1888, when he could barely any longer mount a horse—the younger generation at the General Staff did not possess their predecessors’ broad vision. Instead, possibly because of the attention they paid to the railways, an instrument regarded as the key to victory and requiring painstaking attention to detail, they tended to be technically-inclined and narrow minded. Nobody exemplified these tendencies more than the next writer with whom we must concern ourselves here, Alfred von Schlieffen. Born in 1833, in 1891 he was appointed chief of the General Staff. By that time the latter, far from being an obscure department in the
Kriegsministerium
, had become the most prestigious single institution in Germany with overall responsibility for preparing the land army and leading it into war.

From 1893, the year in which Germany and Russia concluded an alliance, Schlieffen’s problem was to prepare his country for war on two fronts. The basic assumption was that Germany, was the smaller power caught between two others which, together, were stronger than it was. Hence it could not afford to remain on the defensive, leading to the abovementioned debate concerning the respective virtues of annihilation versus attrition. But against which of the two enemies should the Germans concentrate first? Schlieffen decided on France, suggesting that its capacity for rapid mobilization made it into the more dangerous enemy. Moreover, geographical circumstances—compared with Russia, France was small—would permit the delivery of a rapid knock-out blow. Like his late nineteenth century contemporaries, however, Schlieffen was well aware that advancing technology, including, by now, barbed wire, mines, machine guns, and cannon provided with recoil mechanisms, favored the defense. Furthermore, the French border had been fortified. Hence he decided that an outflanking movement was needed; and, after considering a left hook and a right one, finally settled on an advance through Belgium.

Having ruminated on all this for years, and having prepared the great Plan which will be forever associated with his name, on 1 January 1906 Schlieffen stepped down from his post. In the same year he produced his theoretical “masterpiece,” a three-page article entitled “Cannae” after the battle fought by Hannibal against the Romans in 216 BC. From this as well as his other essays, especially “The Warlord” and “War in the Modern Age,” one may form an idea of the way he, as the general in charge of the most powerful and most sophisticated military machine the world had ever seen, understood war. Tactics and logistics apart (he never showed much interest in either of them) war was the clash of large armies (he never showed any interest in navies) maneuvering against each other in two dimensional space. The objective of this maneuvering was to annihilate (
vernichten
) the other side with the greatest possible dispatch. Anything else, though perhaps admissible under particular circumstances, was considered a lesser achievement.

To annihilate the enemy it was not enough to simply push him back by applying pressure to his front. Given the superior power, under modern conditions, of both the tactical and the strategic defense such a procedure would merely result in an “ordinary” victory after which the enemy, though forced to retreat, would be able to reorganize and renew the struggle. The trick, therefore, was to hold the enemy in front while taking him in flank and driving him off his lines of communications and, ideally, forcing him to surrender. That was what Moltke had succeeded in doing at Sedan in 1870. To Schlieffen’s credit, it should be said that he did not believe it was simply a question of geometry. An alert enemy would not allow himself to be outflanked easily. Therefore, he had to be
enticed
into making the wrong moves. “For a great victory to be won the two opposing commanders must cooperate, each one in his way (
auf seiner Art
). To a critic who once told him that the art of war was at bottom a simple one, he responded: “Yes, all it turns on is this stupid question of winning.”

With Schlieffen, we have arrived at the end of the “long” nineteenth century. It started auspiciously enough with von Bülow and Berenhorst presenting their opposed interpretations of the factors which made for victory. Very soon afterwards Jomini and Clausewitz, each in his own way, rid themselves of “the ancients” and tried to penetrate the secret of Napoleonic warfare. Clausewitz in particular combined an understanding of strategy with a Berenhorst-like emphasis on moral factors. Philosopher as he was, he also sought to go much deeper and uncover the fundamentals of warfare by asking what it was and what it served for.

To Jomini, the secret was to be found in sophisticated maneuvering in accordance with a small number of fairly well defined, geometrically based, principles. Less interested in either geometry or maneuvering, Clausewitz before he started revising his work in 1827 put a much greater emphasis on the use of overwhelming force in order to smash the enemy main forces, after which the rest would be quite easy. Until about 1870, although Clausewitz’s greatness was admitted and admired, Jomini was the more influential of the two. Then, after the victorious Moltke had pointed to Clausewitz as the greatest single influence on him, the wind shifted. Jomini was studied less, Clausewitz more often. This was true not only in Germany but in France where the military revival that started in the 1890s adopted him and du Picq to justify its emphasis on moral forces and its doctrine of the offensive at all costs. Whether or not these doctrines presented the “true” Clausewitz has often been debated. It is a question to which we shall return.

Meanwhile, it is probably correct to say that Jomini’s name was not overlooked because he was outdated. To the contrary, it was because, like Lipsius before him, he had become so successful that his ideas on large-scale conventional warfare were considered the core business of strategy and taken very much for granted. Both Moltke and Schlieffen were, in one sense, his disciples. They employed his terminology but did no more than adapt it to their purposes. Moltke's most important contributions were to make the switch from internal to external lines and to adapt the Swiss general’s doctrines to the new technologies represented by the railway and the telegraph. In fact, if my understanding of Moltke is correct, it was the introduction of those new technologies that forced him to make the switch.

Schlieffen was even less original. In essence all he did was to present a much simplified, uni-dimensional version of Jomini’s thought. He limited it to enveloping operations and combined it with what, rightly or not, he saw as Clausewitz’s unrelenting emphasis on the need for a single, climactic, annihilating battle.

Jomini’s influence did not end in 1914. And it could be reasonably argued that as long as large armies go to war against each other in two-dimensional space, utilizing communications of every sort, and maneuvering among all kinds of natural and artificial obstacles, it is his work which will continue to provide the best guide of all.