The 33 Strategies of War (15 page)

Some ten years earlier, Marshall had served as the assistant commander of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he had trained many officers. Throughout his time there, he had kept a notebook in which he recorded the names of promising young men. Soon after becoming chief of staff, Marshall began to retire the older officers in the War Department and replace them with these younger men whom he had personally trained. These officers were ambitious, they shared his desire for reform, and he encouraged them to speak their minds and show initiative. They included men like Omar Bradley and Mark Clark, who would be crucial in World War II, but no one was more important than the protege Marshall spent the most time on: Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The relationship began a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Marshall asked Eisenhower, then a colonel, to prepare a report on what should be done in the Far East. The report showed Marshall that Eisenhower shared his ideas on how to run the war. For the next few months, he kept Eisenhower in the War Plans Division and watched him closely: the two men met every day, and in that time Eisenhower soaked up Marshall's style of leadership, his way of getting things done. Marshall tested Eisenhower's patience by indicating that he planned to keep him in Washington instead of giving him the field assignment that he desperately wanted. The colonel passed the test. Much like Marshall himself, he got along well with other officers yet was quietly forceful.

In July 1942, as the Americans prepared to enter the war by fighting alongside the British in North Africa, Marshall surprised one and all by naming Eisenhower commander in the European Theater of Operations. Eisenhower was by this time a lieutenant general but was still relatively unknown, and in his first few months in the job, as the Americans fared poorly in North Africa, the British clamored for a replacement. But Marshall stood by his man, offering him advice and encouragement. One key suggestion was for Eisenhower to develop a protege, much as Marshall had with him--a kind of roving deputy who thought the way he did and would act as his go-between with subordinates. Marshall's suggestion for the post was Major General Bradley, a man he knew well; Eisenhower accepted the idea, essentially duplicating the staff structure that Marshall had created in the War Department. With Bradley in place, Marshall left Eisenhower alone.

Marshall positioned his proteges throughout the War Department, where they quietly spread his way of doing things. To make the task easier, he cut the waste in the department with utter ruthlessness, reducing from sixty to six the number of deputies who reported to him. Marshall hated excess; his reports to Roosevelt made him famous for his ability to summarize a complex situation in a few pages. The six men who reported to him found that any report that lasted a page too long simply went unread. He would listen to their oral presentations with rapt attention, but the minute they wandered from the topic or said something not thought through, he would look away, bored, uninterested. It was an expression they dreaded: without saying a word, he had made it known that they had displeased him and it was time for them to leave. Marshall's six deputies began to think like him and to demand from those who reported to them the efficiency and streamlined communications style he demanded of them. The speed of the information flow up and down the line was now quadrupled.

"Do you think every Greek here can be a king? It's no good having a carload of commanders. We need One commander, one king, the one to whom Zeus, Son of Cronus the crooked, has given the staff And the right to make decisions for his people." And so Odysseus mastered the army. The men all Streamed back from their ships and huts and assembled With a roar.

T
HE
I
LIAD
, H
OMER
,
CIRCA
N
INTH
C
ENTURY B.C.

Marshall exuded authority but never yelled and never challenged men frontally. He had a knack for communicating his wishes indirectly--a skill that was all the more effective since it made his officers think about what he meant. Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the military director of the project to develop the atom bomb, once came to Marshall's office to get him to sign off on $100 million in expenditures. Finding the chief of staff engrossed in paperwork, he waited while Marshall diligently compared documents and made notes. Finally Marshall put down his pen, examined the $100 million request, signed it, and returned it to Groves without a word. The general thanked him and was turning to leave when Marshall finally spoke: "It may interest you to know what I was doing: I was writing the check for $3.52 for grass seed for my lawn."

The thousands who worked under Marshall, whether in the War Department or abroad in the field, did not have to see him personally to feel his presence. They felt it in the terse but insightful reports that reached them from his deputies, in the speed of the responses to their questions and requests, in the department's efficiency and team spirit. They felt it in the leadership style of men like Eisenhower, who had absorbed Marshall's diplomatic yet forceful way of doing things. In a few short years, Marshall transformed the War Department and the U.S. Army. Few really understood how he had done it.

Interpretation

When Marshall became chief of staff, he knew that he would have to hold himself back. The temptation was to do combat with everyone in every problem area: the recalcitrance of the generals, the political feuds, the layers of waste. But Marshall was too smart to give in to that temptation. First, there were too many battles to fight, and they would exhaust him. He'd get frustrated, lose time, and probably give himself a heart attack. Second, by trying to micromanage the department, he would become embroiled in petty entanglements and lose sight of the larger picture. And finally he would come across as a bully. The only way to slay this many-headed monster, Marshall knew, was to step back. He had to rule indirectly through others, controlling with such a light touch that no one would realize how thoroughly he dominated.

Reports gathered and presented by the General Staff, on the one hand, and by the Statistical Bureau, on the other, thus constituted the most important sources of information at Napoleon's disposal. Climbing through the chain of command, however, such reports tend to become less and less specific; the more numerous the stages through which they pass and the more standardized the form in which they are presented, the greater the danger that they will become so heavily profiled (and possibly sugar-coated or merely distorted by the many summaries) as to become almost meaningless. To guard against this danger and to keep subordinates on their toes, a commander needs to have in addition a kind of directed telescope--the metaphor is an apt one--which he can direct, at will, at any part of the enemy's forces, the terrain, or his own army in order to bring in information that is not only less structured than that passed on by the normal channels but also tailored to meet his momentary (and specific) needs. Ideally, the regular reporting system should tell the commander which questions to ask, and the directed telescope should enable him to answer those questions. It was the two systems together, cutting across each other and wielded by Napoleon's masterful hand, which made the revolution in command possible.

C
OMMAND IN
W
AR
, M
ARTIN VAN
C
REVELD
, 1985

The key to Marshall's strategy was his selection, grooming, and placement of his proteges. He metaphorically cloned himself in these men, who enacted the spirit of his reforms on his behalf, saving him time and making him appear not as a manipulator but as a delegator. His cutting of waste was heavy-handed at first, but once he put his stamp on the department, it began to run efficiently on its own--fewer people to deal with, fewer irrelevant reports to read, less wasted time on every level. This streamlining achieved, Marshall could guide the machine with a lighter touch. The political types who were clogging the chain of command were either retired or joined in the team spirit he infused. His indirect style of communicating amused some of his staff, but it was actually a highly effective way of asserting his authority. An officer might go home chuckling about finding Marshall fussing over a gardening bill, but it would slowly dawn on him that if he wasted a penny, his boss would know.

Like the War Department that Marshall inherited, today's world is complex and chaotic. It is harder than ever to exercise control through a chain of command. You cannot supervise everything yourself; you cannot keep your eye on everyone. Being seen as a dictator will do you harm, but if you submit to complexity and let go of the chain of command, chaos will consume you.

The solution is to do as Marshall did: operate through a kind of remote control. Hire deputies who share your vision but can think on their own, acting as you would in their place. Instead of wasting time negotiating with every difficult person, work on spreading a spirit of camaraderie and efficiency that becomes self-policing. Streamline the organization, cutting out waste--in staff, in the irrelevant reports on your desk, in pointless meetings. The less attention you spend on petty details, the more time you will have for the larger picture, for asserting your authority generally and indirectly. People will follow your lead without feeling bullied. That is the ultimate in control.

Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.

--Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

KEYS TO WARFARE

Now more than ever, effective leadership requires a deft and subtle touch. The reason is simple: we have grown more distrustful of authority. At the same time, almost all of us imagine ourselves as authorities in our own right--officers, not foot soldiers. Feeling the need to assert themselves, people today put their own interests before the team. Group unity is fragile and can easily crack.

These trends affect leaders in ways they barely know. The tendency is to give more power to the group: wanting to seem democratic, leaders poll the whole staff for opinions, let the group make decisions, give subordinates input into the crafting of an overall strategy. Without realizing it, these leaders are letting the politics of the day seduce them into violating one of the most important rules of warfare and leadership: unity of command. Before it is too late, learn the lessons of war: divided leadership is a recipe for disaster, the cause of the greatest military defeats in history.

Among the foremost of these defeats was the Battle of Cannae, in 216
B.C.
, between the Romans and the Carthaginians led by Hannibal. The Romans outnumbered the Carthaginians two to one but were virtually annihilated in a perfectly executed strategic envelopment. Hannibal, of course, was a military genius, but the Romans take much of the blame for their own defeat: they had a faulty command system, with two tribunes sharing leadership of the army. Disagreeing over how to fight Hannibal, these men fought each other as much as they fought him, and they made a mess of things.

Nearly two thousand years later, Frederick the Great, king of Prussia and leader of its army, outfought and outlasted the five great powers aligned against him in the Seven Years' War partly because he made decisions so much faster than the alliance generals, who had to consult each other in every move they made. In World War II, General Marshall was well aware of the dangers of divided leadership and insisted that one supreme commander should lead the Allied armies. Without his victory in this battle, Eisenhower could not have succeeded in Europe. In the Vietnam War, the unity of command enjoyed by the North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap gave him a tremendous advantage over the Americans, whose strategy was crafted by a crowd of politicians and generals.

Divided leadership is dangerous because people in groups often think and act in ways that are illogical and ineffective--call it Groupthink. People in groups are political: they say and do things that they think will help their image within the group. They aim to please others, to promote themselves, rather than to see things dispassionately. Where an individual can be bold and creative, a group is often afraid of risk. The need to find a compromise among all the different egos kills creativity. The group has a mind of its own, and that mind is cautious, slow to decide, unimaginative, and sometimes downright irrational.

This is the game you must play: Do whatever you can to preserve unity of command. Keep the strings to be pulled in your hands; the over-arching strategic vision must come from you and you alone. At the same time, hide your tracks. Work behind the scenes; make the group feel involved in your decisions. Seek their advice, incorporating their good ideas, politely deflecting their bad ones. If necessary, make minor, cosmetic strategy changes to assuage the insecure political animals in the group, but ultimately trust your own vision. Remember the dangers of group decision making. The first rule of effective leadership is never to relinquish your unity of command.

Tomorrow at dawn you depart
[
from St. Cloud
]
and travel to Worms, cross the Rhine there, and make sure that all preparations for the crossing of the river by my guard are being made there. You will then proceed to Kassel and make sure that the place is being put in a state of defense and provisioned. Taking due security precautions, you will visit the fortress of Hanau. Can it be secured by a coup de main? If necessary, you will visit the citadel of Marburg too. You will then travel on to Kassel and report to me by way of my charge d'affaires at that place, making sure that he is in fact there. The voyage from Frankfurt to Kassel is not to take place by night, for you are to observe anything that might interest me. From Kassel you are to travel, also by day, by the shortest way to Koln. The land between Wesel, Mainz, Kassel, and Koln is to be reconnoitered. What roads and good communications exist there? Gather information about communications between Kassel and Paderborn. What is the significance of Kassel? Is the place armed and capable of resistance? Evaluate the forces of the Prince Elector in regard to their present state, their artillery, militia, strong places. From Koln you will travel to meet me at Mainz; you are to keep to the right bank on the Rhine and submit a short appreciation of the country around Dusseldorf, Wesel, and Kassel. I shall be at Mainz on the 29th in order to receive your report. You can see for yourself how important it is for the beginning of the campaign and its progress that you should have the country well imprinted on your memory.

N
APOLEON'S WRITTEN INSTRUCTIONS TO FIELD GENERAL, QUOTED IN
C
OMMAND IN
W
AR
, M
ARTIN VAN
C
REVELD
, 1985