Strategy (15 page)

In Britain from the start of the nineteenth century, a plethora of words emerged:
strategematic, strategematical, strategematist, strategemical
. All sought to convey the idea of being versed in strategies and stratagems. Thus, a strategemitor would devise stratagems, while a stratarchy referred to the system of rule in an army, starting with the top commander. This word was once used by British prime minister William Gladstone to refer to how armies would go beyond hierarchy to require absolute obedience to superior officers. Then there was stratarithmetry, which was a way of estimating how many men you had by drawing up an army or body of men into a given
geometrical figure. An alternative word for strategist was strategian, which goes neatly with tactician—though this did not catch on.

The distinction between strategy and tactics was of acknowledged importance as a means of distinguishing between different levels of command and contact with the enemy. Thus strategy was the art of the commander-in-chief “projecting and directing the larger military movements and operations of a campaign,” while tactics was “the art of handling forces in battle or in the immediate presence of the enemy.”
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Soon the word migrated away from its military context and into such diverse areas as trade, politics, and theology.

The speed with which the word
strategy
gained currency meant that it came to be used without a generally agreed upon definition. There was a consensus that strategy had something to do with the supreme commander and that it was about linking military means to the objects of war. It involved making connections between all that was going on in the military sphere beyond the more intimate and small-scale maneuvers and encounters handled at the lower levels of command. But the activities that came under the heading of strategy were also understood to be intensely practical, a consequence of the sheer size of the armies of the new age, the extraordinary demands posed by their movement and provisioning, and the factors that would govern how enemies should be approached. Much of this might be subject to forms of practical knowledge and principles that could be described in a systematic and instructive way, with checklists of considerations to be taken into account by the more forward-looking commanders. It is not surprising therefore that strategy became closely associated with planning. Questions of supply and transport limited what could be achieved, and calculations of firepower and fortification influenced decisions on the deployment of troops. Put this way, strategy covered all those aspects of a military campaign that might properly be determined in advance.

Improved maps made an enormous difference to planning of this sort. Developments in cartography meant that it was possible to consider how a campaign might develop by plotting its likely course on sheets of paper, representing base camps and lines of supply, enemy positions, and opportunities for maneuvers. A start had been made on the reconceptualization of war in spatial terms by a Henry Lloyd, who had left Britain because of his participation in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and then fought with a variety of European armies. Having observed that those who embraced the profession of arms took “little or no pains to study it,” he claimed to have identified fixed principles of war that could vary only in their application.
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Lloyd is credited with inventing the term
line of operations
, which remains in use to this day and describes an army's path from its starting point to its
final destination. Lloyd influenced subsequent military theorists, including the Prussian Heinrich Dietrich von Bulow, who went to France in 1790 to experience the Revolution first hand. Having studied Napoleon's methods, he wrote on military affairs, including a
Practical Guide to Strategy
in 1805. He got somewhat carried away by the possibilities of geometric representations of armies preparing for battle. His reliance on mathematical principles led to him to offer proofs on how armies might constitute themselves and move forward, according to distances from their starting base and enemy objective. The approach can be discerned from his definition of strategy as “all enemy movements out of the enemy's cannon range or range of vision,” so that tactics covered what happened within that range.
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His observations on tactics were considered to have merit, but much to his chagrin his description of the “new war system” was ignored by Prussian generals.

Whatever the scientific method might bring to the battlefield, when it came to deciding on the moment, form, and conduct of battle, much would depend on the general's own judgment—perhaps more a matter of character, insight, and intuition than careful calculation and planning. When battle was joined, the theory could say little because of the many variables in play. At that point, war became an art form. Strategy could be considered a matter of science, in the sense of being systematic, empirically based, and logically developed, covering all those things that could be planned in advance and were subject to calculation. As art, strategy covered actions taken by bold generals who could achieve extraordinary results in unpromising situations.

Napoleon preferred to keep the critical ingredients behind his approach beyond explanation. The art of war, he insisted, was simple and commonsensical. It was “all in execution … nothing about it is theoretical.” The essence of the art was simple: “With a numerically inferior army” it was necessary to have “larger forces than the enemy at the point which is to be attacked or defended.” How best to achieve that was an art that could “be learned neither from books nor from practice.” This was matter for the military genius and therefore for intuition. Napoleon's contribution to strategy was not so much in his theory but in his practice. Nobody could think of better ways of using great armies to win great wars.

Napoleon was not creating new forms of warfare completely from scratch. He was building on the achievements of Frederick the Great, the most admired commander of his time. Frederick was king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786 and
a reflective and prolific writer on war. His success was the result of turning his army into a responsive instrument, well trained and held together by tough discipline. Initially he preferred his wars to be “short and lively,” which required accepting battle. Long wars exhausted a state's resources as well as its soldiers, and Frederick's country was relatively poor. His seizure of Silesia early in his reign, during the War of Austrian Succession, made his reputation as a tactical genius. Whitman uses this campaign as a prime example of how a “law of victory” could ensure restraint, so long as both sides accepted battle as a form of wager. Frederick observed that battles “decide the fortune of states” and could “put an end to a dispute that otherwise might never be settled.” As kings were subject to “no superior tribunal,” combat could “decide their rights” and “judge the validity of their reasons.”
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Over time, however, Frederick became more wary of battle due to its dependence upon chance. Success might need to come through the accumulation of small gains rather than a single decisive encounter. Unlike Napoleon, Frederick preferred to avoid fighting too far from his own borders, did not expect to destroy the opposing army in battle, and avoided frontal attacks. His signature tactic was the “oblique order,” an often complex maneuver requiring a disciplined force. It involved concentrating forces against the enemy's strongest flank while avoiding engagement on his own weak flank. If the enemy did not succumb, an orderly retreat would still be possible; if the enemy flank was overrun, the next step was to wheel round and roll up his line. What Frederick shared with Napoleon—and what later theorists celebrated in both—was the ability to create strength on the battlefield, even without an overall numerical advantage, and direct it against an enemy's vulnerabilities.

As a young officer, Napoleon also read Guibert and took from him some basic ideas which he made his own. In particular, he noted the need to launch attacks at the key points where superiority had been achieved, and to reach these points by moving quickly. Although Guibert had observed that “hegemony over Europe will fall to that nation which … becomes possessed of manly virtues and creates a national army,” he had not seen conscription as the means to this end. He assumed the duties of a citizen and a soldier to be opposed. At most, a militia might be raised as a defensive force. The actual creation of the mass army can be credited to Lazar Carnot, a key figure in the French Revolution, who had an uneasy relationship with Napoleon but served him until 1815. It was Carnot who as minister of war used conscription to create the
levée en masse
and turned it into a formidable, trained, and disciplined organization. Carnot also showed how a mass army could be used as an offensive instrument by separating it into independent units that could
move faster than the enemy, enabling attacks against the flanks and creating opportunities to cut off communications. Most of Napoleon's generals learned their trade under Carnot.

Napoleon's contribution was to grasp how the potential of the mass army could be realized. He imbibed the military wisdom of the Enlightenment and took advantage of the system created by Carnot in such a way as to upset not only traditional thinking about war but also the whole European balance of power. His genius lay not in the originality or novelty of his ideas on strategy but in their interpretation in context and the boldness of his execution. His focus was always on the decisive battle. He was prepared to embrace the inherent brutality of war and sought to generate sufficient concentrated violence to shatter the opposing army. This was the route to the political goal. An enemy with a broken army would be unwilling to resist political demands. As this required a comprehensive defeat, Napoleon had little interest in indirect strategies. When a point of weakness was found, extra forces would be poured in to break through. They could then move against the enemy from the rear or to the flanks. This required taking risks, for example, accepting vulnerabilities to his own rear and flanks as he concentrated strength. But Napoleon was not reckless. He would wait until the right moment to make his move. Since he put a priority on ensuring that he had the maximum strength, his great battles were often fought in obscure places where he saw an opportunity to strike with guaranteed superiority and utter ruthlessness. By combining political and military authority in one person, Napoleon was also in a position to act boldly without extensive consultations. His optimism, self-confidence, and extraordinary run of victories earned him the loyalty of his troops and kept his enemies apprehensive. This created a sense of irresistibility which he was always keen to exploit.

Napoleon never provided a complete account of his approach to war. He did not write of strategy, although he did refer to the “higher parts of war.” His views were recorded in a number of maxims. They were often practical reflections on the standard military problems of his day and lack the universal quality of Sun Tzu's writings. Yet they capture the essence of his approach: bringing superior strength to bear at crucial moments (“God is on the side of the heaviest battalions”); defeating the enemy by destroying his army; viewing strategy as “the art of making use of time and space”; using time to gain strength when weaker; and compensating for physical inferiority with greater resolve, fortitude, and perseverance (“The moral is to the physical as three to one”). Many of his maxims revolved around the need to understand the enemy: by fighting too often with one enemy, “you will teach him all your art of war”; never do what the enemy wishes “for this reason
alone, that he desires it”; never interrupt an enemy making a mistake; always show confidence, for you can see your own troubles but you cannot see those facing your enemy.
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We now turn to a battle which was neither an exemplary success nor a notable defeat but acquired importance because it raised doubts about Napoleon's method. The battle of Borodino, some eighty miles from Moscow, was fateful in its consequences. Fought between the French and Russian armies on September 7, 1812, it involved some quarter of a million men. Of these, about seventy-five thousand were killed, wounded, or captured. Although the French came out on top, the Russians did not consider themselves beaten. Moscow was occupied following Borodino, but the Russians refused to agree to peace terms and Napoleon found that he lacked the capacity to sustain his army for any length of time. After five weeks, he began the famous and harsh retreat from Moscow.

It was not that Napoleon lacked a strategy when he began the campaign in the summer of 1812. He expected to follow his past practice of keeping the enemy guessing, finding a point to concentrate overwhelming superiority, and then attacking. Once Russian forces were destroyed, he could dictate peace terms to Tsar Alexander. To keep the war short and avoid being sucked into the Russian heartland, he wanted to fight his battle in the frontier regions. He was confident against Russian armies, since he boasted such stunning victories as Austerlitz in 1805. Russian leadership had generally been abysmal, and Napoleon assumed that the spineless aristocracy would oblige the Tsar to concede once French superiority had been made clear.

Tsar Alexander had a far better, although politically controversial, strategy. It drew on Russia's excellent intelligence network in France. Alexander knew from 1810 that a war was almost inevitable. This gave him time to think about a response and to make preparations, taking a candid view of Russia's weakness, including a lack of reliable allies. One option was to fight at the first opportunity before the French could advance far on sacred Russian soil, relying on the superior spirit of Russian troops and what might be achieved by catching the French by surprise. But Alexander knew the numbers were against him and saw the danger in pitting his main armies, without reserves, against a well-supplied and fully formed French army. A defeat would leave the country unprotected. This led him into a defensive strategy, although this meant giving up on an alliance. Austria and Prussia were reluctant to
join an anti-French coalition involving a Russia that planned to retreat, but Alexander doubted that he could rely on them even if he embarked on an offensive strategy. Most importantly, he understood that Napoleon wanted battle. If that was what he wanted, that was exactly what he should not have.