An Introduction to War Theory E-Book

Dr Chris Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 279

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A few years ago the author, Chris Brown, gave a lecture to a group of fifty eminent historians. He asked them two questions: had they ever written about war? Of course they all had, history is war. And how many had read a book about the theory of war? There was a resentful silence. This remarkable admission initiated the writing of An Introduction to War Theory. In the same vein, the pre-eminent military historian Michael Howard, having lectured young army officers at Sandhurst on the Italian Campaign of 1942, was asked a single question by an impatient captain: OK, but what were its lessons? Here are those lessons, distilled. This book is for the reader who is starting his or her journey in war theory – students, journalists, junior military professionals – and anyone with a general interest who would like to know more about how wars actually work.

Leseprobe

Can a battle ever be decisive? Stalingrad, perhaps, or Trafalgar? They are not easy to identify. One has only to ask what difference it would have made to the outcome of the Second World War if the Germans had held the ruins as securely as they had Paris. Was the apparent maritime Pax Britannica that followed Trafalgar the result of the victory, or was the battle merely a memorable historical marker in the flow of events? In AD451, Attila the Hun’s vast army was met at Aurelianum in what is now northeast France by the Roman army of Flavius Aetius. After the tremendous slaughter, the Romans left the field; but the Huns were exhausted and turned for home. Historian John Julius Norwich considered that ‘the whole fate of western civilisation hung in the balance. Had the Hunnish leader not been halted … both Gaul and Italy would have been reduced to spiritual and cultural deserts.’ Few people can name the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. (By Victor Ambrus from Battlefield Panoramas, The History Press)

Contents

Title

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Part 1 How Does War Happen?

1 Is War Inevitable?

2 The Study of War: Making a Salad or Baking a Cake?

3 Violence and Governments

4 Politics by Another Means

Part 2 The Pursuit of Conflict

5 Snow White and the Difficult Rifle Section

6 What We Think We Know

7 Tradition, Change and the Perception of Success

Part 3 Concepts, Institutions and Practical Examples

8 Command and Staff

9 Concentration

10 Economy of Force

11 Defence or Offence?

12 Focus; the Maintenance of an Aim

13 Combined Arms

14 Flexibility and Versatility

15 Casualties

16 Strategy, Tactics and Friction

17 Offensive or Defensive?

18 Fronts, Flanks and the Rear

19 Morale and Confidence

20 Structures and Articulation

21 Building a Better Mousetrap

22 Getting it Right and Getting it Wrong

23 Deterrence and Appeasement

24 When Everything Goes Wrong

Part 4 The Rules of the Game

25 Some Tricky Questions

26 If You Get into a Fair Fight, You’ve Done Something Wrong

Appendix Master Tzu and the Art of War

Further Reading

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction and Acknowledgements

No single volume could possibly provide a complete guide to the theory of war any more than one book could give any more than the most cursory overview of a history of war or the practice of war. As Lieutenant Colonel Ferdinand Foch wrote in Principles ofWar, ‘Everything in war is linked together, is mutually interdependent, mutually interpenetrating.’

The purpose of this book is to provide a starting point for more extensive and deeper study or to give some basic groundwork for anyone who has an interest in the principles of how wars come about and how they are pursued. It is more akin to a volume on basic mechanics rather than a workshop manual for a Ford or a Subaru. It will not teach the reader how to be a general; that takes a great deal of training and assiduous study … not to mention twenty years of service in the army.

In part, this book was prompted by teaching a military history class for Edinburgh University’s OLL department but it is also the result of finding myself in a conference room full of professional history scholars. It transpired that all of them had written essays, papers, articles and even books on wars, but not one had ever read a war theory textbook. I found that a little worrying as well as bewildering.

The pre-eminent military historian Sir Michael Howard, having lectured young army officers at Sandhurst on the Italian Campaign of 1942, was asked a single question by an impatient captain: OK, but what were its lessons? He found it a tricky one to answer! That, too, is part of the aim of this book, to explore what, if anything, we can learn from history.

All books are personal – we write them in the light of everything we ever read or heard or deduced in connection with the subject. For that reason the actions referred to in this book have been chosen from the conflicts that interest me. They are no more or less significant than any number of other battles and campaigns and there are others which might have made more appropriate examples, or they might have been more interesting to a wider range of readers, but these are the ones with which I am familiar.

As ever I am indebted to my wife Pat, who has borne the process with immense patience and fortitude. I am also indebted to Sean Anderson, Mike McEwan, Colonel Mark Boden (T.D.) John Neicho and Jimmy Moncrieffe for listening to me going on and on about war theory – among other things – and to Professor Donald Vandergriffe, the late Brigadier M.R.J. Hope Thompson, RSM J. Deeley, Majors D. MacDonald and G.M.A. Athey and my editor Shaun Barrington for various observations and suggestions – especially with regard to the illustrations.

PART 1

HOW DOES WAR HAPPEN?

1. Is War Inevitable?

The short answer is no, but that is very clearly not a lesson that has been learned, so perhaps we should consider why not. It is not the case that the horror of the entire process cannot be understood; it can be, but there are people who do not want to understand it. It is far too easy to simply blame politicians, though almost all warfare has been waged for political purposes – political in the very widest sense, including religious and ideological beliefs.

It is also far too simple to assert that war can only be waged if the people accept the government’s instructions. Very often they have no choice in the matter. People who stand their ground and refuse to do military service because they do not believe in the cause espoused or because they do not believe in war under any circumstances are making a courageous choice, but they are made of sterner stuff than most of us. In the past, they have risked hostility, imprisonment, violence, even death rather than serve in the army. Formalised conscription by the state is increasingly rare for a number of reasons, not least the economic burden and the increasingly complicated demands on the infantry soldier, which must be mastered if he is to be a really effective combatant. What we might call ‘informal conscription’ is very much more common than we might at first imagine and can been seen at its worst in the practice of kidnapping boys to serve in battle. The powers that kidnap these child soldiers are not especially interested in turning them into competent troops for battle so much as constructing armed bands that can terrorise civilian communities.

Experience should have shown us that a government does not have to have the support of the people in order to go to war. Where there is a small professional regular army a government simply makes a decision to project its power and then does so, to the extent that it can, in pursuit of whatever objective (usually political) it has identified. In the United Kingdom, public sentiment was largely opposed to war in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and for good reason. Neither country was a threat to the UK, there were no coherent strategic objectives, and, with the best will in the world, the United Kingdom does not have what might be called an outstanding track record in conflicts in either region. Both of those conflicts were widely seen as a pointless waste of lives and money and as being pursued for no better reason than to support some very questionable policies of the United States. This begs the question of why the populace of the United Kingdom tolerated either of these conflicts. In a sense they did not. The massive demonstrations that ensued attracted – rather unusually – people from all walks of life and all political backgrounds but the government could, and did, simply ignore the demonstrators.

In a democracy, the people get opportunities to sack the government at election time, but those opportunities are relatively rare and an election is virtually never about a single issue. More to the point, how will changing the government help if the only two parties that can possibly win an election are both in favour of pursuing a war policy? This is particularly difficult in Britain, where the electoral system is far from democratic and massively favours two parties at the expense of all other voices. The dictum that a war cannot be long pursued if it is contrary to the wishes of the people sounds very reassuring, but it is not at all clear that it is true now – or indeed that it ever was. Perhaps, if the people of a democracy feel strongly enough about it for long enough, the war will eventually be ended by one or other political party – or perhaps a new party – which embraces peace as a policy objective. That may take years, and once a war has been initiated it is not always possible or practical to abandon it at a moment’s notice, though generally that has been a rather threadbare excuse utilised by governments that have recognised the will of the people but have not wanted to carry it out … which is a pretty common condition in both war and peace.

None of this should be taken to imply or suggest that ‘the people’ are always implacably opposed to their country going to war; it is not always an unpopular policy and we should not ignore that fact, but it does call for examination. At different times, nations have gone to war amid a positive clamour of public excitement. In 1861, droves of men volunteered to fight for the Union or for the secessionists in America, and in 1914 British recruiting officers were overwhelmed by queues of young (and not so young) men eager to do their bit for King and Country. In the former instance, men volunteered for a variety of reasons – to save the Union, for States Rights or to end slavery; in the latter, men volunteered to protect ‘plucky little Belgium’ or because they saw service as a national duty. In both cases, the majority of men did not enlist or even give it serious consideration, but rafts of people staying away from the front does not make for dramatic newspaper material, and drawing attention to a reluctance to enlist does not suit the purposes of the government of the day.

Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, Saigon, May 1962. Following Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson used the spurious Gulf of Tonkin incident as an excuse to apply military force in Vietnam without consulting the Senate. Because he was a hawk? Rather, because his Republican rival for the presidency, Barry Goldwater, was seen as more hawkish by the public. ‘All the way with LBJ’, from 16,000 US military personnel in Vietnam at Kennedy’s death to 550,000 by 1968.

Both of these conflicts – and many others – attracted men because they wanted to go to war. They did not volunteer to live uncomfortably in camps or to contract diseases to which they would not have been exposed at home and they certainly did not volunteer in the expectation of being maimed or killed or of suffering brutal treatment as prisoners of war. All of these were very real possibilities, but they were not what the men signed up for. However many chose to serve for ideological reasons – including a sense of duty – a very large number enlisted in search of adventure. Most of them, and most of the men who joined for more creditable reasons as well – were confident that the war would be short and that they would be victorious … it would all be over by Christmas. It would be both crude and unjust to say that these men were seized by a pathological bloodlust, but it would be naive to assume that they did not expect to take part in battle or that they did not understand that battle would involve both killing and the risk of being killed. Tim O’Brien wrote in his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone of a later war:

It was no decision, no chain of ideas or reasons, that steered me into the war … Men are killed, dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think war is proper and just and others do not and most do not care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?

In both the American Civil War and the First World War there was a near-universal ignorance of the business of war. In 1861, the Mexican war was already the better part of 20 years in the past and although it had involved a degree of indirect conscription through the use of existing State militia units, for most Americans Mexico was a long way away and the war had had a limited impact on society. In 1914, the British Army had extensive experience of war, but every conflict since the Crimean War more than half a century earlier had been essentially colonial in nature and had been conducted by regular and reserve army units … and they had all happened at a great distance. The potential for death – and most who gave that any thought at all doubtless envisaged a neat and immediately fatal bullet at a moment of grand courage – was greatly outweighed by the allure of adventure and excitement.

We might, then, consider the business of going to war to have a ‘chicken and egg’ element. Governments – whether by desire or otherwise – go to war and men (and some women too, though there is a tendency to skip over that for cultural reasons) are content or even eager to get involved. Equally, since men and women join the military as a career option, governments have the capacity to wage wars when they see fit.

There are people – mostly, but not exclusively, men – who are inclined to like a scrap; a phenomenon that can be observed in football (or soccer) where there are certain teams who attract a greater proportion of men who enjoy a bit of a fight than the supporters of most teams. Not infrequently, those ‘supporters’ particularly relish encounters with other teams that attract a similar following. This is not, perhaps, limited to football, though one has to admit that rugby, tennis or lacrosse riots are few and far between. We should, perhaps, simply accept that some men have a propensity for enjoying violence, but they are certainly too few in number to provide the raw material for a war, so making a war is the business, responsibility and not infrequently the fault of governments.

That does not mean that war can always be avoided, or that a smaller war in the short term can sometimes prevent a much larger one in the future. War can be, and often is, forced upon an unwilling participant. The playground adage beloved of teachers that ‘it takes two to start a fight’ is worse than just plain wrong; it is intellectually incoherent, an insult to the intelligence. However patient we may be, however much we would rather avoid confrontation, most of us object to being punched and kicked. Sooner or later, if we have no means of escaping violence, we tend to have recourse to it ourselves even when we know that we cannot be successful. This applies to countries just as much as to individuals. The right to act in our own defence is generally seen as a natural, even laudable, thing; though interestingly the same teacher who tells a child that it ‘takes two’ to make a fight may well tell the same child to ‘stand up for yourself’ without seeing any moral or intellectual conflict in the two statements.

At its simplest, we might conclude that war itself is not inevitable; it is only inevitable if one party is sufficiently keen to have one. That does not mean that the aggressor necessarily strikes first, only that they develop a situation where the other party is forced to react. More often than not it is the defender who squeezes the trigger and strikes the first blow.

2. The Study of War: Making a Salad or Baking a Cake?

Why do we generally think in terms of the ‘Art of War’ as opposed to regarding conflict as a science? It is certainly the case that technology seems to exert a greater influence over the practice of conflict than at any point in the past, but that is a long way from war being even remotely close to being a science. There are no universal rules. What works effectively at a given place and a given time with a given scale and nature of military force may be less effective or even utterly disastrous in very similar circumstances. The practice of war is immensely complex. The range of factors involved at even the most fundamental level of two small parties of soldiers fighting to acquire an objective or to deny it to the enemy is so vast that conflict is simply not amenable to establishing the degree of universality that we expect to find in physics or chemistry.

The absence of ‘constants’ in the sense of specific phenomena that are always valid and therefore predictable and which can be expressed as unarguable facts is what makes conflict so very difficult to understand. There may be some value to Alfred Burne’s phrase ‘inherent military probability’, but accurately identifying what is genuinely ‘probable’ is extremely difficult unless we have a good understanding of the totality of the military experience in general and a well-developed, detailed knowledge of the forces involved and the environment in which a particular operation was mounted. All three of these things are quite rare, and in combination they are almost unheard of among professionals, let alone among the politicians, historians, journalists and instant experts (the kind that have read one book and/or seen one television documentary) who are most likely to use the phrase.

With the benefit of a little studying we can see that what ‘works’ in one set of circumstances can be a miserable failure in another, but understanding why that should be the case is a different matter. We may be able to identify some of the factors that have contributed to defeat or victory in the past, but we will seldom, if ever, be able to really understand every aspect of every part of a clash between opposing forces, let alone genuinely understand the significance of each part of the picture.

If we accept that war is not a science, do we necessarily see it as an art? There are certainly aspects that are not dissimilar. A good deal of what happens on the battlefield is the outcome of decisions made by commanders which are not made on the basis of equations and maxims learned in training or on deductions rooted in the study of past conflicts. Like an artist, a commander may learn a lot from the study of the great masters of days gone by, but his actions will be guided by the nature and size of his forces, his wider experience and his own ideas of what will ‘work’ for a particular project. His choice of actions will inevitably be influenced by cultural, social and ideological conditioning that may or may not have a relevance to the project and which may or may not be valid; he may well not even be conscious of those factors, but they are still going to have an impact on his general approach to dealing with the challenges of the battlefield.

In that sense, war can be seen as an art; every artist is the product of their background just like anyone else. Their work may be an almost linear development of the pieces produced by their predecessors or it may be a revolutionary departure or even an outright rejection of the artistic tradition in which they grew up, but everything they have seen or read will have had some influence on their own contribution.

The concept of war as an art has some validity, but the analogy breaks down when we consider outcomes as opposed to processes. The artist intends to produce work of quality, but what constitutes ‘quality’ or ‘success’ is very much in the eye of the beholder. To a great many observers, Picasso’s Guernica is a forceful and haunting depiction of suffering in conflict; to others it is a childlike drawing of a horse, a bull and a disembodied hand holding an oil lamp. For the military leader, success seems to be rather more clear cut; he wins or he loses. In fact, that is an oversimplification in the sense that it may be quite impossible to achieve outright victory, but the commander may have demonstrated skill and insight by avoiding defeat at the hands of a stronger opponent.

The chief similarity between the artist and the general is that both must combine ingenuity, imagination, innovation, judgement and perseverance with knowledge and commitment to achieve positive results. It is not always the case that either will have had the benefit of a structured education specific to their work. History provides many examples of both painters and fighters who have been very successful despite a complete lack of formal training. Genius can trump study in both professions, but in either case, a knowledge of ‘the classics’ and of technique is likely to come in handy.

War is not a science and is not entirely an art either, though there is a degree of congruency. Can we, therefore, accept that there is a ‘theory’? In the strict interpretation of a scientific vocabulary there really cannot be a ‘Theory of War’ in the sense of a ‘Theory of Evolution’. The work of Darwin (and others who are rather less well known) does not give us a blueprint that explains every last detail of the development of every species, but it provides more than enough material to allow us to ‘join the dots’ and see a general picture of the living world.

War theory does not give us quite so clear an insight, so what is it about and what does it do? How does it help us in our understanding of conflict as observers or our approach to conflict as practitioners? Since there are no perfect routes to success we might argue that there is no reality to war theory at all, but we can see that the study of military practice tends to lead to a better understanding of the battlefield and of war generally. Equally, we can see that the failure to understand some general principles, and to apply them in a manner that is rational in terms of the command-decision environment, is very likely to lead to a failure to win at best and to complete disaster at worst.

Theory of war can never be more than a helping hand of guidance – it will not win battles of itself – but unless we come to grips with general principles we will struggle to gain any useful level of understanding (it will never be truly ‘absolute’) of the battlefield – of why this or that commander chose to make certain decisions or to pursue or abandon a particular course of action.

Clearly this is – or at least should be – a matter of some interest to military professionals and historians as well as to the substantial segment of the population that happens to be interested in warfare. There is a wider dimension as well. Since our society expends so much money and effort on defence, there is a real value in understanding, at least to a modest degree, the nature of conflict and the practical constraints on soldiers and government who have to make decisions in relation to preparedness for war.

In an ideal world, defence planning would be a consequence of identifying and understanding potential threats and applying that knowledge in the light of the economic and political environment. In fact, this is a luxury that is seldom, if ever, available to either the politicians or the soldiers. Both have to work within an envelope which includes a near-infinite range of cultural and social assumptions, diplomatic commitments and traditional preferences which may be well past their sell-by date and be of limited relevance to the here and now. War theory will not provide us with all of the answers to current and future military challenges; it may not provide us with a complete solution to any of the problems, but it can provide us with a starting point. When we embark on a description of the principles or theory of war, we are faced with an immediate problem: where do we start?

Few people will come to study conflict without bringing an extensive collection of baggage with them. If we want to study war we must presumably be interested in it and we will, in all probability, have read some military history and watched conflicts unfold on our television screens. Most of us will have already formed opinions about the relevance and significance of political, technological, moral and cultural factors and have opinions about the brilliance or incompetence of certain generals, kings and presidents, and also perhaps the utility (or lack of it) of different approaches to war and combat. These may or may not be useful, fair or relevant. We may have arrived at our conclusions through observation and deduction or through prejudice and wishful thinking, but our opinions will not have been developed on the basis of a rational, planned course of study. This applies as much to the professional soldier with years of training and experience as it does to the casual student, the specialist academic or to the political leader who might actually have to make real decisions about the organisation and funding of the military establishment and, of course, the decision whether or not to go to war.

Quite simply, when it comes to war theory, there is no natural or inevitable place to start. The abilities of the lower strata of military activity may define ultimate success or failure, but it is not that level at which the more significant choices are made; on the other hand, the major decisions should be influenced by a detailed knowledge of the abilities of the lower strata. Making war is a decision made at the highest level of political life, but unless the politicians have a reasonable understanding of the workings of war (and they mostly do not) they are prone to serious errors of judgement in preparation and in the application of force. Clearly, neither a top-down nor bottom-up approach is going to provide us with more than a small part of the picture.

If we really must have a metaphor, perhaps we should look to cuisine rather than art or sport and consider whether war is akin to making a salad or baking a cake. Either process might involve a great many ingredients, but precise quantities and the order in which they are added to the process makes relatively little difference to the salad whereas (based on extensive personal experience of producing the inedible) it makes all the difference when it comes to baking a cake.

The revolution might not be televised but the Vietnam War certainly was. How much information should a government at war disseminate to its own people?

All of the ingredients of war are relevant to the process, and therefore to the outcome, all of the time. No aspect can really be understood in isolation. The best infantryman in the world cannot function without his comrades or the economic and industrial capacity of his country or without good leadership and planning. The most brilliant politician or general will struggle to win a war if the troops are not competent or motivated. War Theory has to reflect this. We will toil to understand the course of an engagement if we do not understand the weapons of the day, but that knowledge will not help us much if we do not understand how the weapon was applied or why a commander chose to fight in that location and at that time. If we do not have a grasp of the process of fighting, we will toil to get any real insight into the nature of a campaign, a battle or even a skirmish, let alone a war.

There are very real limits to the extent of our understanding of any action; we cannot interview every person involved in the fight or every person whose contribution was significant. Even if we could, we cannot be sure that their accounts would be valid even if they were entirely honest – and we cannot be sure that their accounts would necessarily be honest at all. We cannot be sure that we have a complete understanding of every application of every weapon, every vehicle, every feature of the terrain, every aspect of the climate or the effect of exhaustion, hunger, shock and morale; all matters of some importance.

This does not invalidate the study of warfare, and some factors are not always quite as important as they might seem; the baker of the cake does not need to know where the sugar or the butter have come from to know that they are essential to the business of producing a cake, but he does have to have some understanding of the relationship between the two ingredients.

That, in essence, is what War Theory is all about. It is not so much the knowledge of specific arms, practices, principles and military structures as gaining an insight into the relationship between those and myriad other factors, whilst bearing in mind that the whole process is conducted while somebody is trying to kill somebody else.

3. Violence and Governments

Part of the package of belonging to an organised community is that we entrust the state with a monopoly on the use of force. We may not always approve of the application of force by the state, but most of us certainly do not want the monopoly to be broken up or to be shared with institutions that are not directly under the control of our government. There may be minor departures which we accept, such as security guards at public events or in supermarkets, but even then we accept them only as functionaries of commercial enterprise, and the security guard is never the equivalent of a police officer. Even in countries where security guards can carry arms, it is rare for them to have powers of arrest. We may not like the government and we mostly do not like politicians, but we do (mostly) trust them not to wage war on the citizens and, other than in cases of self-defence, we certainly do not trust the citizen to ‘make war’ on his neighbours. If anyone is going to have authority to sanction violence it is going to be the state, not the individual, and it will be the state that controls the armed forces. Any alternative arrangement is generally called a coup.

In the 1960s, there was a fairly widely held belief that war is a direct product of the existence of the military. A song written by Buffy Sainte Marie in 1964 (and recorded to rather greater commercial success by the British folk singer Donovan) claimed that it was the ‘Universal Soldier’ who was to blame for conflict. If there were no soldiers there would be no wars. Simple as that. A similar view was expressed in a popular poster which asked, ‘What if they gave a war and nobody came?’

The line was not new; it had been borrowed from an anonymous combination of work by Bertolt Brecht and Carl Sandberg. The resulting poem actually offers a very different proposition:

What if they gave a war and nobody came?

Why then the war would come to you!

He who stays home when the fight begins and lets another fight for his cause should take care.

He who does not take part in the battle will share in the defeat.

Even avoiding battle will not avoid battle, since not to fight for your own cause really means fighting on behalf of your enemy’s cause.

It would be easy – and perfectly rational – to dismiss both the song and the poster as childishly simplistic, but the general sentiment is easily understood and has become strongly embedded in certain trends in both left-wing and right-wing thinking. A song of the 1970s told us that ‘Violence is caused by governments, armies, police force’ (Here & Now, 1977) and any number of conservative writers and politicians at different times has sought to reduce military expenditure as part of a general belief in reducing the cost of government and thereby lowering taxes, and also a view – shared by many on the left – that the reduction of armed force in one country will be followed by a commensurate reduction in neighbouring countries due to an outbreak of common sense.