A History of Strategy (7 page)

However, what really made Guibert famous was not so much the technical details he expounded as his implicit demand for far-reaching political reform which in turn would make possible an army of a completely new kind. Backed by the mobilized nation, such an army thanks to its numbers on the one hand and its patriotic vigor on the other would sweep away its opponents “like reeds before the north wind.”

As will be evident from the title of his work, Guibert still did not distinguish between tactics and strategy. At the same time, his distinction between “elementary tactics” (the use of the various arms) and “great tactics” (marching, combat, deployment and encamping) shows that he was groping his way towards the latter concept. Against this background, the term “strategy” was initiated during those very years by another French soldier-scholar, Joly de Maizeroy. Maizeroy too sought to put right the defects which had become apparent in the French Army during the Seven Years War. To do so, he too produced his own “system.” As he defined the subject, tactics were “merely mechanical.” They included the “composing and ordering of troops [as well as] the manner of marching, maneuvering and fighting” as expounded by Puységur, de Saxe, and others. On the other hand, strategy was concerned with the overall conduct of military operations against the enemy, a field which hitherto had been left almost entirely to the general’s intuition.

To call the conduct of war at the higher level by a new name was one thing. To devise principles for it was an entirely different matter, and one whose difficulty had defeated all previous writers if they had even attempted to accomplish it in the first place. The credit of putting together the earliest treatise on strategy belongs to a Prussian officer and writer, Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow. His
Spirit of the Modern System of War
(
Geist des
neuern Kriegssystems
) was published in 1799. An eccentric, arrogant genius who had a knack for alienating people and creating enemies, von Bülow’s point of departure was the much improved maps which were becoming available. For example, Roman commanders had maps (judging by the only specimen to have come down to us, the so-called
tabula peutingeriana
) in which only east and west, but not north and south, were indicated. Spanish commanders marching their forces from northern Italy to the Netherlands in the latter half of the sixteenth century had relied on mere sketches to show them the way. Even Vauban, as great an expert on military geography as has ever lived, at various times produced estimates of the surface of France which differed from each other by as much as thirty percent. However, by the time von Bülow wrote the first map of a large country (France) to be based on triangulation rather than on guesswork had just been completed and submitted to the
depot de guerre
in Paris. Several other works aiming to cover other countries in a similar way were approaching completion.

Strategy, then, was the art of conducting war not by means of
coup d’oiel
from behind a horse’s ears but in an office, on the surface of a map. Thus regarded, any army once deployed on the border would occupy a base, conceived by von Bülow not as a point but as a definite area with definite dimensions. Depending on geography and the general’s intent, a base could be either narrow or wide. Starting from it, the army was to advance upon its objective or objectives; between base and objective there stretched a line, or lines, of operations. Along these lines there flowed supplies and reinforcements in one direction and the wounded, the sick, and prisoners in the other. As of recent times, the growing role played by firearms had greatly increased the demand for ammunition and, in this way, the importance of the lines. It was in them that the key to strategy was to be found.

For example, a general who contemplated an invasion of a neighboring country might advance in one line, two, or more. Depending on the extent of the base as well as the number and location of the objectives selected, these lines might either diverge, or converge, or run parallel to each other. The columns moving along each one might be made equally strong, or else different numbers of troops might be assigned to each. To obtain certainty in such questions (as in any others) it was necessary to resort to mathematics. That made von Bülow’s work resemble nothing so much as a textbook in Euclidean geometry. Definitions are provided and followed by propositions, which are then linked to each other by “proofs.”

Various possibilities, such as diverging lines and parallel lines, are carefully eliminated. It having been determined that converging lines are best, the remaining question is how far away the objective ought to be. Like the power of gravity, that of the offensive diminishes the further into enemy territory it advances. If the advancing force is not to be cut off by a flanking attack, a definite relationship should be maintained between the length of the line of operations and the width of the base. Thus two lines, stretching from the flanks of the base, should meet at the objective in such a way that they should form a right angle. Proceed further than this—allow a sharp angle to be created—and you risk being cut off by a side-stroke. Thus the entire art of strategy was reduced to a single, simple, geometrical formula.

Von Bülow was not entirely without forerunners. In particular, the British officer and writer Henry Lloyd deserves to be mentioned. However, in claiming that his system of strategy marked “an entirely new” way of looking at war he had right on his side. For centuries if not millenniums past its students had busied themselves with the best method for raising an army; disciplining it; arming and equipping it; building camps for it, provisioning it; adopting this or that marching order; and, when it came to confronting the enemy, either fighting him or tricking him by means of this stratagem or that. What von Bülow did was to shift the emphasis from what we today would have called the organizational, technical, and tactical aspects towards the larger operations of war. No wonder he was carried away by his own discovery. Thus, in the face of unfolding Napoleonic warfare with its numerous climactic battles, he insisted that the correct understanding and adoption of his system of strategic maneuvers would cause battle to disappear. Given that their growing dependence on magazines and lines of operations prevented armies from proceeding very far from their base, he even expected that war itself would be recognized as futile and come to an end, not that this was a rare belief in the years before 1789 or, more surprisingly, after 1815, 1918, 1945, and 1989.

Von Bülow and his fellow German strategists (for some reason the term strategy caught on much faster in Germany than anywhere else) have often been ridiculed. Nowhere more so than in Tolstoy’s great novel,
War and Peace
. The censure is undeserved. Even if wars did not come to an end, his prediction that the art of strategy would work in favor of large states and lead to political consolidation proved correct. What is more, to this day, even those who never heard of von Bülow use the concepts he pioneered such as base, objective, and lines of operations. What is more, they look at strategy in a manner which was largely his making.

From now on, as far as strategy on land was concerned, it only remained to work out the details. Nineteenth-century schools of strategy, the multiplying staff colleges, were soon to engage in endless arguments as to whether a single line of operations or a double one, converging or diverging ones, were preferable; and whether to drive them forward (in other words, attack) was easier than maintaining one’s base (in other words, defend). Furthermore, as we shall see, von Bülow was by no means the last to try and arrange things in such a way that strategy, expressed in the form of lines, or arrows, on a map, would the place of battle take.

Von Bülow’s direct, and much better known, successor was Antoine Henri Jomini. Jomini was a Swiss citizen who saw service under Napoleon and eventually rose to become chief of staff to Marshal Ney. He began his career as a military theorist by throwing his own early essays, written before he discovered Lloyd and von Bülow, into the fire. His military career was not a great success; still he developed into the high priest of strategy or, as he himself preferred to call it,
les grandes operation de guerre
. Acknowledged or not, his influence has probably not been surpassed even by the great Clausewitz.

Very much like von Bülow, Jomini conceived as strategy in terms of armed forces moving against each other in two dimensional space. Much more than von Bülow, whose mind tended to work in eighteenth century geometrical terms, he was prepared to take into account such complicating factors as roads, rivers, mountains, forests, fortresses, and the like which either facilitated maneuver or obstructed it. As with von Bülow, the problem was to discover a “system” which would guide a commander in conducting those maneuvers.

The most important elements of the system remained as before, i.e. bases, objectives, and lines of operations of which there could be various numbers and which stood in various relationships to each other. To these, however, Jomini added a considerable number of other concepts. Some, such as Theaters of Operations (assuming a country engaged against multiple enemies, each of its armies would operate in a separate Theater) and Zones of Operations (the district between an army’s base and its objective, through which its communications passed), were to prove useful and made their way into subsequent strategic thought. Others merely injected unnecessary complexity and, some would say, incomprehensibility.

All armies, then, necessarily had lines of operation or, as we would say today, communications. Earlier commanders such as Alexander, Julius Caesar, or even Gustavus Adolphus during the first half of the seventeenth century, had been able to survive and operate for years in enemy territory while maintaining only the most tenuous ties with home. Now, however, the whole point of the art of war was to cut one’s enemy’s lines of operations without exposing one’s own. Doing so would lead to the enemy’s surrender, as actually happened to the Austrians at Ulm in 1805, or else to a battle in which he would be placed at a grave disadvantage, as happened to the Austrians at Marengo in 1800 and to the Prussians at Jena in 1806. Thus was born the
manoeuvre sur les
derrieres
, a method of operation by which one part of the army would hold the enemy while the other, if possible while using some natural obstacle in order to conceal and protect itself, would march around him and fall upon his rear. As Jomini very sensibly wrote, an army with two different lines of operations running back to two different bases would be less exposed to this sort of maneuver than its enemy who possessed only one. Particularly if the lines in question formed an obtuse angle rather an acute one. The fact that he spoke of the theater of war as a “chessboard” and presented his idea in an old-fashioned geometric manner reminiscent of von Bülow detracts nothing from its validity.

The second most important maneuver advocated by Jomini consisted of operating on internal (what von Bülow called diverging) lines. A blue army might find itself between two red ones. That was what had happened to Napoleon during his Italian campaign of 1796 and again in those of 1813 and 1814. Such a situation was not without its dangers. But it was also a source of opportunity. Separated from each other, the red forces would find it difficult to unite and thus bring superior force to bear. Conversely, the blue army was already concentrated and only a short distance away from each red force. These advantages might be used to deliver a swift, sharp blow at one red force before the other could intervene. Next, blue would turn around and the process would be repeated against the other. A perfect example, and one which shows the continuing relevance of Jomini even in the age of air warfare which he never contemplated, is Israel’s conduct of the 1967 war against three Arab countries. Each of whom, being separated from the rest by long and tenuous lines of communications, was attacked and defeated in its turn.

Whatever the precise maneuver selected, it was always a question of bringing superior force to bear against the decisive point. Given their importance as centers of communication, capitals were always decisive points. So, to a lesser degree, were road junctions, river crossings, fortresses which blocked or dominated a road, and the like. Another type of decisive point was one from which red
’
s line of operations could be threatened, forcing him either to retreat from his positions or else turn around and fight. If he tried to do the second without doing the first his forces would become divided. That in turn might present blue with an opportunity to beat them in detail.

In a certain sense, the maneuvers advocated by Jomini had always existed. From at least Hannibal on, armies had not only fought each other front to front but sought to outflank each other and surround each other. Before the middle of the 18th century, however, by and large there were no lines of operations to threaten or cut. Moreover, as explained earlier, primitive communications and the fact that no formations of all arms existed compelled armies to stick closely together and only permitted them to engage each other in battle by mutual consent. Given the vastly increased forces made available by the introduction of general conscription in 1791, first Carnot and then Napoleon had been compelled to disperse them and form them into formations of all arms whether they wanted to or not. Once the machinery for commanding such dispersed formations had also been created in the form of the
état major
, these changes greatly increased the repertoire of strategic maneuvers. It was the later that Jomini put into systematic form and codified.

Jomini’s earliest work on strategy, the
Treatise on Grand Operations of War
, was published in 1805. It was submitted to Napoleon who, according to its author, is said to have expressed his appreciation. From that point on he steadily added to it without, however, changing its essence. In his most mature work,
The Art of War
(1837) he had much to say about the political uses to which war could be put and also about the resources and military institutions of different states. At the same time he extended his theory to include formations, tactics, various kinds of special operations such as the crossing of rivers, and logistics. The last-named were defined as “the practical art of moving armies.” There is even a short chapter on “Descents, or Maritime Expeditions.” If Clausewitz in
vom Kriege
accused Jomini of having concentrated merely on strategy to the detriment of the political side of war, this is due to the fact that the Prussian general did not live to see his rival’s most mature work.