Strategy (38 page)

Luttwak focused attention on the importance of what he identified as the “operational level.” This had been neglected, and with it the classical traditions of European war. Jomini, Liddell Hart, and John Boyd had referred to this level as one for grand tactics. Jomini described these as “the maneuvering of an army upon the battle-field, and the different formation of troops for attack.” Luttwak believed that the operational level was the critical sphere for generalship and for that reason deplored its absence in contemporary American military thought. It was there that “schemes of warfare such as blitzkrieg or defense in depth evolve or are exploited.” Americans had neglected this because of their dependence on an “attrition style of war.”
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The idea of an operational level of war as a politics-free zone where commanders could demonstrate their mastery of managing large forces over wide areas in a series of complex engagements with the enemy was an inheritance from von Moltke. It was given added salience because of its prominence in Soviet military thought. From the formation of the Soviet Union, its military leadership had been engaged in theoretical debates about the operational level as an intermediate stage between tactics and strategy, and which way they should turn when faced with the choice between decisive annihilation or more defensive attrition. In the build-up to the Second World War, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky's reflections on the impact of motorization and airpower had led him to come out firmly in favor of mass, mechanized forces able to conduct deep operations in a war of annihilation. His opponents were castigated not only for poor strategy but for poor theory, which was much more dangerous. This helped seal the fate of many in Stalin's purges, although
it did not spare Tukhachevsky a similar fate. After the war, the initial Soviet focus had been on the impact of thermonuclear weapons, which led to a reduced conventional army, but by the late 1960s the numbers were rising again. Reflecting the view that the best chance of victory was early in a war, before American reserves could get across the Atlantic to Europe, the general staff stressed the importance of being able to mount maneuvers deep in NATO territory with minimal prior mobilization, maximum surprise, and combined forces. This tradition, as reflected in the military doctrines of the Warsaw Pact, was another reason for NATO countries, led by the United States, to get on the same wavelength.
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Luttwak encouraged the view that attrition based on firepower and maneuver based on movement were almost polar opposites. Attrition was presented as not so much a regrettable response to a challenging predicament but a deliberate choice reflecting a particular mindset. For Luttwak it involved an “exaggerated dependence on firepower as such to the detriment of maneuver and flexibility.” This style, he acknowledged, had the “great attractions of predictability and functional simplicity.” All military effort could be geared to attacking sets of targets in a systematic fashion. Under its misleading aura, war would be “governed by a logic analogous to that of microeconomics.” The “conduct of warfare at all levels” would be “analogous to the management of a profit-maximizing industrial enterprise.” In the end, superior resources should win, even though applied with routine and repetitive tactics and procedures. The greater the input, the greater the output. The costs would lie in absorbing the enemy's reciprocal attrition and the calculation could be upended should the enemy attract an ally to achieve a superior balance of power. Against this dull, methodical, bureaucratic linearity Luttwak promoted imaginative flair and operational paradox. Against attritional science he sought a maneuverist art.
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Relational-maneuver warfare sought to avoid enemy strength in order to attack enemy weakness. It was, Luttwak suggested, an almost compulsory approach for the resource-weak side.

In posing the issue in these terms, Boyd, Luttwak, and their contemporaries were urging a return to the military classics of the modern era, but with a postmodern twist resulting from their heightened sensitivity to cognitive processes. On the critical issues of military strategy, the classics offered less clarity than was often supposed, and so the net result was often to update for a new audience the muddle of earlier times. The starting point was inevitably Clausewitz. But as was well known,
On War
was not a finished work and Clausewitz was in the process of revising his ideas at the time of his death. The resultant ambiguity had affected all those who had taken this work as their starting point, and further distortions had arisen in the
responses of key figures such as Delbrück and then Liddell Hart to what they believed Clausewitz had said. Complications of language and translation easily added to the confusion, which meant that the return to the classics led to some intense debates about what they really meant—as if that could help sort out the conceptual confusion that was developing around the attempted application of their ideas to contemporary problems. While these debates were gathering steam, an important new English translation of Clausewitz by Peter Paret and Michael Howard was published and an English edition of Delbrück became available for the first time.
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Behind all of this there was one large issue, which was whether there was an alternative to large-scale battle as a route to victory. There was a further and more difficult issue about the meaning (and possibility) of victory itself. Limited war had been prominent in the eighteenth century and there were examples of it from the nineteenth. If a war was to end without one state subjugating another, there was going to have to be some sort of negotiation. The bargain struck could be assumed to have some relationship to the balance of power at the conclusion of hostilities. Clausewitz had recognized this possibility, but he had not explored it fully. His main focus was the use of battle to eliminate the enemy army as a fighting force and thus render the enemy state helpless.

This became known as the strategy of annihilation, a term used by von Moltke and then compared by Delbrück with a strategy of exhaustion. Delbrück saw exhaustion as persuading the enemy to abandon the fight even though its army had not been annihilated. Exhaustion suggested that the enemy had been worn down to the point that it could not face further war. This was most likely to occur if its survival was not at issue and the stakes were limited and susceptible to compromise. Confusion then entered with regard to method, because there was no reason why exhaustion could not result from a series of inconclusive battles. Delbrück also used the term “bipolar strategy” to capture the idea of a commander deciding from moment to moment whether to achieve a goal by battle or maneuver.

The choice between annihilation and exhaustion could not just be a matter of strategic preference but had to reflect the material situation. If battle was unavoidable, there must be sufficient strength to prevail but also, even after a decisive battle, enough residual capability to go on and occupy enemy territory. It might be possible to gain an initial advantage through maneuver, but this might not be sufficient if despite the loss of one army the enemy could field another. Unless one was confident of possessing ultimate military superiority, a push for annihilation was unwise. If force had to be conserved for a long haul, set-piece battles were best avoided other than in the most
favorable circumstances. For this reason an association developed between exhaustion and maneuver, as ways of avoiding direct battle.
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It was Liddell Hart who took the idea of maneuver and developed it to a new stage by contrasting it much more sharply with major battle. To further add to the confusion, frontal assaults had now become associated with attrition since the Great War, although not as Delbrück understood the term (to the extent that was the term he had in mind). Battle of this scale and intensity went well beyond anything envisaged by Clausewitz, however much he might have recognized the underlying strategic principles in play. Liddell Hart kept open the possibility of defeating an opponent by leaving them confused and disoriented, caught by surprise rather than buckling under heavy casualties. What was less clear was whether something that could work well when one army caught another off guard could work with whole states. Even after stunning setbacks in the field, some states might be able to play for time to bring in reserves or move to civil resistance. There was therefore one issue about whether it was possible to defeat opponents in the field by means other than frontal assault, and another about how military victories could be translated into substantial political gains.

Which brings us back to Clausewitz, because these two issues—which go to the heart of his unfulfilled interest in deviations from the strategy of annihilation—were captured but not resolved in one of his enduring but most unsatisfactory concepts: the center of gravity or
Schwerpunkt
. This was a concept which came to be adopted by Western military establishments, although in ways that aggravated its inherent problems. So familiar did the concept become that it started to be referred to by its acronym COG. Clausewitz's focus was on the enemy army, but as the center of gravity was identified as the source of the opponent's power and strength, it could also refer to an alliance or national will.

By the late 1980s, these various strands had come together to form a distinct doctrinal form embedded in Western military establishment. There should be a military focus on the operational level of warfare. Here forces should be directed against the opponent's center of gravity. This would be that point or set of points where the application of military force would be most likely to result in the enemy's surrender. The new thinking encouraged the belief that the most important centers of gravity would be those that led to the enemy's brain, using shock and disorder to produce mental dislocation and therefore paralysis rather than blasting away at the enemy's physical strength.

This distinction between the two forms of warfare was sharpened, almost to the point of caricature. The maneuverists presented attritionists in an
unflattering light, seeing the “enemy as targets to be engaged and destroyed systematically. Thus the focus is on efficiency, leading to a methodical almost scientific approach to war.” Everything depended on the efficiency with which firepower was employed, encouraging centralized control rather than local initiative. Progress would be defined in quantitative terms, with battle damage assessments, “body counts,” and terrain captured. Relying on inflicting punishing attrition meant being prepared to accept it in return. Victory would not “depend so much on military competence as on sheer superiority of numbers in men and equipment.” The implication was that lives were being sacrificed because of a lack of imagination and skill. Here the maneuverist, relying on intelligence, scored. The maneuverist would

circumvent a problem and attack it from a position of advantage rather than meet it straight on. The goal is the application of strength against selected enemy weakness. By definition, maneuver relies on speed and surprise, for without either we cannot concentrate strength against enemy weakness.

The objective was “not so much to destroy physically as it [was] to shatter the enemy's cohesion, organization, command and psychological balance.”
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To do this required superior skill and judgment. Who would not want to be associated with such a strategy?

The key elements of this approach were all problematic, however. The idea of distinct levels of strategy was rooted in established hierarchies. The underlying principle was that at each level the objectives would be passed down from the higher. At the level of grand strategy, a conflict was anticipated, alliances forged, economies geared, people braced, resources allocated, and military roles defined. At the level of strategy, the political objectives were turned into military goals; priorities and specific objectives were agreed upon and allocations of men and equipment made accordingly. At the level of grand tactics or operations, judgments were made as to the most appropriate form of warfare to achieve the goals of that particular campaign in the light of the prevailing conditions. At the level of tactics, military units attempted to push forward the goals of the campaign in the specific circumstances in which they found themselves.

These levels reflected hierarchical command structures geared to regular warfare between great powers as much as sharp distinctions in contemporary practice. What was striking, given the contemporary fascination with systems theory and information flows, was that these were generally considered to challenge such structures. Under the influence of similar ideas, business practice was moving to flatter hierarchies. Too many chains in the command
structure were likely to lead to unresponsive organizations. Information up the chain about what was going on at ground level would be slow and subject to distortion, while initiative could be dampened if new orders always had to come down the chain.

This assumption continued to be reflected in discussions of tactical issues as short term, immediate, and not necessarily of lasting importance; while strategic issues were the big ones, long term and fateful, potentially existential in their implications. Yet in limited wars, single engagements could be decisive and so local tactical factors would become matters of grand strategy and subject to the highest political control. During the 1990s, as local factors became more important, the Americans began to talk of a “strategic corporal,” able to “make well-reasoned and
independent
decisions under extreme stress—decisions that will likely be subject to the harsh scrutiny of both the media and the court of public opinion.” The strategic corporal would be aware that his actions would “potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well,” and thus the “outcome of the larger operation.”
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