A History of Strategy (16 page)

Drawing on his own experiences as leader of China’s civil war Mao, followed by his Vietnamese student Vo Nguyen Giap, believed that the first phase ought to consist of isolated, hit and run attacks against enemy forces with the aim of weakening and demoralizing them. The second would witness the consolidation of guerrilla power in some remote, outlying, difficult to access, area. From there they would continue their work of propaganda, harassment, and sabotage. Once the enemy had been sufficiently weakened and started to retreat the guerrillas, embarking on the third phase of their campaign, would resort to open warfare. The real trick was to carefully select the moment for this phase to begin. If launched too early it might lead to disaster as a still-powerful enemy hit back. If delayed for too long, the seeming endlessness of the struggle might cause the guerrillas themselves to become demoralized.

To Lawrence, then, guerrilla warfare was mainly another form of military action, one which, to use modern terminology, was “low intensity.” To Mao, by contrast, it was above all a question of drawing “the masses” to one’s own side and mobilizing them for action. Given that there are clear limits to both indoctrination and force, this in turn meant the implementation of economic and social reforms amounting to revolution or, to call it by another frequently-used name, “people’s war.” Thus war and politics became inseparable; though in practice Communist-led guerrilla movements in particular always took very good care to ensure that the will of the Party, and not that of the military cadres, should prevail.

The fact that military methods were not so much used as a tool of politics as fused with them made it very hard to fit guerrilla and its smaller parent, terrorism, into the accepted Clausewitizian framework. This is something Mao may have realized. Nor did guerrilla warfare offer nearly as much scope for powerful concentrations of troops and decisive battles against the enemy’s main forces as the Prussian writer would have liked to see. As a result, from 1945 on general works which tried to come to grips with the nature of war very often devoted a separate chapter to guerrilla warfare. They almost treated it as if it stood in no relation to anything else.

With the sole exception of Ludendorff, from the 1830s on the most important theoretical framework by far has been the one Clausewitz developed. Moltke and Schlieffen and von Bernhardi and von der Goltz and Foch; Fuller and Liddell Hart (in so far as he accepted that the purpose of war was to serve the political objectives of the state); many of the advocates of limited nuclear war; all these could, and often did, trace their intellectual origins to the great Prussian. However, by 1990, at the latest, the Clausewitzian framework was beginning to show serious cracks. As has just been said, it proved incapable of incorporating warfare by, or against, non-state actors. To the point that Clausewitz himself, in the five pages he devoted to the subject, treated guerrilla warfare solely as an extension of the struggle between states. At the same time, the question could not be avoided as to whether his insistence on the inherent tendency of war to escalate made him into a reasonable guide to nuclear-armed military establishments, one of whose objectives was deterrence rather than war-fighting.

As long as the Cold War lasted, and with it at least the possibility of large scale conventional hostilities between the Superpowers, these doubts were suppressed. Interpreted as the prophet of limited war, all too often Clausewitz was presented almost as if he were a tweed-clad, slipper-wearing, pipe-smoking, Western analyst. Not accidentally, nobody was more enthusiastic about him than precisely the so-called military reformers who, throughout the nineteen eighties, sought to bring about a revival of “maneuver war” theory. The more countries acquired nuclear weapons, though, the less likely Clausewitz’s vision of war was to come true.

Thus it is scant wonder that, as of the beginning of the twenty-first century, military theory seems to be more confused and less coherent than it has been in a long time. Some people, focusing on weapons and organization, still think in terms of nuclear war, conventional war (large or small), civil war, and insurgency/guerrilla warfare/terrorism. Others have constructed their own frames of reference: as, for example, the American analyst Bill Lind did. As Lind sees things, military history since the end of the middle ages has gone through four stages or “generations.” The first generation comprised the period from the Battle of Pavia in 1525 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Its outstanding characteristic was the slow demise of cavalry in favor of massed infantrymen armed with first pikes, then with both pikes and firearms, and finally with firearms alone. The second generation opened in 1816 and lasted until the last year of World War I. As growing firepower caused the infantrymen to disperse, essentially it relied on long lines of infantrymen supported by artillery of the sort that the British used on the Somme.

The third generation opened in 1917–18 when the Germans pioneered so-called storm troop tactics. Taking the place of the long lines of infantrymen of yore, they relied on cover, dispersion and flexibility to infiltrate through the opposing lines and burst into the enemy’s rear. During the 1930s storm troop tactics started to be combined with those new weapon systems, tanks and aircraft, thus adding mobility, range and flexibility. The outcome was the spectacular campaigns that, during the early years of World War II, enabled the Wehrmacht to overrun the continent. However, the evolution of warfare is based on imitation. Starting in late 1942 the Red Army, by combining third generation warfare with vast masses of troops and equipment, increasingly took the initiative. Having done so, within two and a half years fought its way from Stalingrad to Berlin.

The way Lind sees it, the only Western commander who ever mastered third-generation warfare was George Patton. All others remained stuck in second-generation warfare, a blunt, clumsy instrument that had long outlived its usefulness and only worked because of the overwhelming advantage in firepower they enjoyed over Germany. Meanwhile “the rest” did not stand still. Unable to match the West in terms of technology and firepower, it switched to fourth-generation warfare in the form of terrorism, guerrilla, and insurgency of every kind. The outcome was that, starting at the end of the Korean War—itself, from the end of 1950 on, a classic example of second-generation warfare—and with the sole exception of the 1982 Falkland War and the 1991 Gulf War, Western armies have been going from one defeat to another.

Lind’s scheme has been widely adopted. Note, however, that it is based mainly on developments on the tactical and operational levels. It has relatively little to say about strategy, let alone grand strategy and the kind of political, economic, social and cultural factors in which the latter is rooted. In this it differs from some other schemes, including my own which is based on the distinction between “trinitarian” and “non-trinitarian” warfare. Here the assumption is that there are two basic kinds of war, i.e. those in which the distinction between government, armed forces and people is maintained and those in which it is not. The former prevailed in the Hellenistic world, Imperial Rome, and Europe from the end of the Thirty Years War to 1945. The latter ruled most historical times and places including, increasingly, our own.

The two schemes approach the question from two different directions. Nevertheless, they do have some things in common. Both assume, or perhaps one should say, are based on the hope, that deterrence will continue to prevail and that nuclear war will not break out. Both start from the idea that large-scale conventional warfare between major powers has entered its death-throes. Both, though for different reasons and in somewhat different ways, assume that the future will consist of fourth-generation, or non-trinitarian, warfare in which conventional armies with their heavy weapons will be more or less useless.

The most recent development is attempts to combine third- and fourth generation war into something known as “hybrid war.” The term started coming into use during the mid-1990s. Since then the Google N-gram graph that shows the frequency with which it is used in print has rocketed into the stratosphere. As the name suggests, hybrid war is supposed to contain elements of both third- and fourth generation, trinitarian- and non-trinitarian warfare. The non-state organizations that wage it rely largely on terrorism, guerrilla tactics, and popular insurgencies. However, they also engage in small-scale conventional warfare. The perfect examples are Hezbollah in 2006 and Daesh (ISIS) in 2014–2015. Neither organization is a state. Neither maintains the usual distinctions between government, armed forces, and people. However, both have enough money, troops, and conventional weapons to do more than wage terrorism and guerrilla alone.

One new form of conflict that remains to be mentioned is cyberwar. Capable of being waged by any kind of organization as well as individuals, it seems to surround all others as the crown of thorns surrounded the head of Christ. Like all other forms of war, cyberwar has its advantages and its disadvantages, its possibilities and its limitations. Given the secrecy in which the field is shrouded, and the limited experience we have with it, the debate about it is only in its infancy. Yet one thing seems clear. In the past, each time advancing technology enabled mankind to move into a new environment—from the land into the surface of the sea, from the surface of the sea into the depths on one hand and the air and outer space on the other—war quickly followed. One could, indeed, argue that it is only when man uses an environment for war that he really comes to dominate it. To that extent, the extension of war into cyberspace appears inevitable. Nor will cyberwarfare always necessarily remain bloodless as has been the case so far.

Some of these forms of war are new, others as old as history. As of the time of this writing, a new and comprehensive theory that will be able to encompass all of them in such a way as to be cumulative, coherent, and clear does not appear to be in sight. Nor does the end of history and the time when wolves will live with sheep. Indeed the author of
that
thesis would be the first to agree that eternal peace might not satisfy those specimens of the human race who are affected by what he calls
megalotimia
, a hungering for great things. As Plato wrote long ago, the only people who will no longer see war are the dead.

Which, of course, is precisely why we need to understand it as best we can.

General

Earle, E. M., ed.,
Makers of Modern Strategy
, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1943.

Howard, M., ed.,
The Theory and Practice of War
, Bloomington, Id., Indiana University Press, 1965.

Paret, P., ed.,
Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age
, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1986.

Semmel, B.,
Marxism and the Science of War
, New York, N.Y., Oxford University Press, 1981.

Wallach, J. L.,
Kriegstheorien, ihre Entwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert
, Frankfurt am/Main, Bernard & Graefe, 1972.

Chapter 1. Chinese Military Thought

Grinter, L. E., “Cultural and Historical Influences on Conflict in Sinic Asia: China, Japan, and Vietnam ,” in S. J. Blank and others, eds.,
Conflict and Culture in History
, Maxwell Air Force Base, Air University Press, 1993, pp. 117–92.

Handel, M.,
Masters of War: Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Jomini
, London, Cass, 1992.

Sun Pin,
Military Methods
, R. D. Sawyer, trans., Boulder, Co., Westview Press, 1995.

The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China
, R. D. Sawyer, trans., Boulder, Co., Westview Press, 1993.

Chapter 2. From Antiquity to the Middle Ages

Aneas Tacticus, London, Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1948.

Asclepiodotus,
Tactics
, London, Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1948.

Bonet, H.,
The Tree of Battles
, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1949.

Contamine, Ph.,
War in the Middle Ages
, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984.

Frontinus, Julius Sextus,
Strategamata
, London, Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1950.

Maurice,
Strategikon
, G. T. Dennis trans., Philadelphia, Pa., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.

Onasander,
The General
, London, Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann, 1948.

Three Byzantine Military Treatises
, G. T. Dennis, trans., Dumbarton Oaks Texts, IX, Washington D.C., Dumbarton Oaks, 1985.

Vegetius, Renatus Flavius,
Epitoma Rei Militaris
, N. P. Milner, trans., Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1993.

Chapter 3. 1500 to 1763

Barker, T. M.,
The Military Intellectual and Battle
, Albany, N.Y., University of New York Press, 1975.

Frederick the Great on the Art of War
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Machiavelli, N.,
The Art of War
, in
Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others
, A. Gilbert trans., Durham, N.C., 1965, vol. 2.

Puységur, J. F. de Chastenet,
L’art de la Guerre par des Principles et des Regles
, Paris, Jombert, 1748.

Saxe, M. de.
Reveries or Memoirs upon the Art of War
, Westport, Ct., Greenwood, 1971).

Chapter 4. From Guibert to Clausewitz

von Bülow, A. H. D. von,
The Spirit of the Modern System of War
, London, Egerton, 1806.

Clausewitz, C. von,
On War
, M. Howard and P. Paret, eds., Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1976.

Gat, A.,
Clausewitz and the Enlightenment: the Origins of Modern Military Thought
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Handel, M., ed.,
Clausewitz and Modern Strategy
, London, Cass, 1986.