The 33 Strategies of War (16 page)

Control is an elusive phenomenon. Often, the harder you tug at people, the less control you have over them. Leadership is more than just barking out orders; it takes subtlety.

Early in his career, the great Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman was often overwhelmed with frustration. He had visions of the films he wanted to make, but the work of being a director was so taxing and the pressure so immense that he would lash out at his cast and crew, shouting orders and attacking them for not giving him what he wanted. Some would stew with resentment at his dictatorial ways, others became obedient automatons. With almost every new film, Bergman would have to start again with a new cast and crew, which only made things worse. But eventually he put together a team of the finest cinematographers, editors, art directors, and actors in Sweden, people who shared his high standards and whom he trusted. That let him loosen the reins of command; with actors like Max von Sydow, he could just suggest what he had in mind and watch as the great actor brought his ideas to life. Greater control could now come from letting go.

A critical step in creating an efficient chain of command is assembling a skilled team that shares your goals and values. That team gives you many advantages: spirited, motivated people who can think on their own; an image as a delegator, a fair and democratic leader; and a saving in your own valuable energy, which you can redirect toward the larger picture.

In creating this team, you are looking for people who make up for your deficiencies, who have the skills you lack. In the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had a strategy for defeating the South, but he had no military background and was disdained by his generals. What good was a strategy if he could not realize it? But Lincoln soon found his teammate in General Ulysses S. Grant, who shared his belief in offensive warfare and who did not have an oversize ego. Once Lincoln discovered Grant, he latched on to him, put him in command, and let him run the war as he saw fit.

Be careful in assembling this team that you are not seduced by expertise and intelligence. Character, the ability to work under you and with the rest of the team, and the capacity to accept responsibility and think independently are equally key. That is why Marshall tested Eisenhower for so long. You may not have as much time to spare, but never choose a man merely by his glittering resume. Look beyond his skills to his psychological makeup.

Rely on the team you have assembled, but do not be its prisoner or give it undue influence. Franklin D. Roosevelt had his infamous "brain trust," the advisers and cabinet members on whom he depended for their ideas and opinions, but he never let them in on the actual decision making, and he kept them from building up their own power base within the administration. He saw them simply as tools, extending his own abilities and saving him valuable time. He understood unity of command and was never seduced into violating it.

A key function of any chain of command is to supply information rapidly from the trenches, letting you adapt fast to circumstances. The shorter and more streamlined the chain of command, the better for the flow of information. Even so, information is often diluted as it passes up the chain: the telling details that reveal so much become standardized and general as they are filtered through formal channels. Some on the chain, too, will interpret the information for you, filtering what you hear. To get more direct knowledge, you might occasionally want to visit the field yourself. Marshall would sometimes drop in on an army base incognito to see with his own eyes how his reforms were taking effect; he would also read letters from soldiers. But in these days of increasing complexity, this can consume far too much of your time.

What you need is what the military historian Martin van Creveld calls "a directed telescope": people in various parts of the chain, and elsewhere, to give you instant information from the battlefield. These people--an informal network of friends, allies, and spies--let you bypass the slow-moving chain. The master of this game was Napoleon, who created a kind of shadow brigade of younger officers in all areas of the military, men chosen for their loyalty, energy, and intelligence. At a moment's notice, he would send one of these men to a far-off front or garrison, or even to enemy headquarters (ostensibly as a diplomatic envoy), with secret instructions to gather the kind of information he could not get fast enough through normal channels. In general, it is important to cultivate these directed telescopes and plant them throughout the group. They give you flexibility in the chain, room to maneuver in a generally rigid environment.

The single greatest risk to your chain of command comes from the political animals in the group. People like this are inescapable; they spring up like weeds in any organization. Not only are they out for themselves, but they build factions to further their own agendas and fracture the cohesion you have built. Interpreting your commands for their own purposes, finding loopholes in any ambiguity, they create invisible breaks in the chain.

Try to weed them out before they arrive. In hiring your team, look at the candidates' histories: Are they restless? Do they often move from place to place? That is a sign of the kind of ambition that will keep them from fitting in. When people seem to share your ideas exactly, be wary: they are probably mirroring them to charm you. The court of Queen Elizabeth I of England was full of political types. Elizabeth's solution was to keep her opinions quiet; on any issue, no one outside her inner circle knew where she stood. That made it hard for people to mirror her, to disguise their intentions behind a front of perfect agreement. Hers was a wise strategy.

Another solution is to isolate the political moles--to give them no room to maneuver within the organization. Marshall accomplished this by infusing the group with his spirit of efficiency; disrupters of that spirit stood out and could quickly be isolated. In any event, do not be naive. Once you identify the moles in the group, you must act fast to stop them from building a power base from which to destroy your authority.

Finally, pay attention to the orders themselves--their form as well as their substance. Vague orders are worthless. As they pass from person to person, they are hopelessly altered, and your staff comes to see them as symbolizing uncertainty and indecision. It is critical that you yourself be clear about what you want before issuing your orders. On the other hand, if your commands are too specific and too narrow, you will encourage people to behave like automatons and stop thinking for themselves--which they must do when the situation requires it. Erring in neither direction is an art.

Here, as in so much else, Napoleon was the master. His orders were full of juicy details, which gave his officers a feel for how his mind worked while also allowing them interpretive leeway. He would often spell out possible contingencies, suggesting ways the officer could adapt his instructions if necessary. Most important, he made his orders inspiring. His language communicated the spirit of his desires. A beautifully worded order has extra power; instead of feeling like a minion, there only to execute the wishes of a distant emperor, the recipient becomes a participant in a great cause. Bland, bureaucratic orders filter down into listless activity and imprecise execution. Clear, concise, inspiring orders make officers feel in control and fill troops with fighting spirit.

Authority: Better one bad general than two good ones.

--
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

REVERSAL

No good can ever come of divided leadership. If you are ever offered a position in which you will have to share command, turn it down, for the enterprise will fail and you will be held responsible. Better to take a lower position and let the other person have the job.

It is always wise, however, to take advantage of your opponent's faulty command structure. Never be intimidated by an alliance of forces against you: if they share leadership, if they are ruled by committee, your advantage is more than enough. In fact, do as Napoleon did and seek out enemies with that kind of command structure. You cannot fail to win.

The critical elements in war are speed and adaptability
--
the ability to move and make decisions faster than the enemy. But speed and adaptability are hard to achieve today. We have more information than ever before at our fingertips, making interpretation and decision making more difficult. We have more people to manage, those people are more widely spread, and we face more uncertainty. Learn from Napoleon, warfare's greatest master: speed and adaptability come from flexible organization. Break your forces into independent groups that can operate and make decisions on their own. Make your forces elusive and unstoppable by infusing them with the spirit of the campaign, giving them a mission to accomplish, and then letting them run.

Finally, a most important point to be considered is that the revolutionary system of command employed by Napoleon was the outcome not of any technological advances, as one might expect, but merely of superior organization and doctrine. The technical means at the emperor's disposal were not a whit more sophisticated than those of his opponents; he differed from them in that he possessed the daring and ingenuity needed to transcend the limits that technology had imposed on commanders for thousands of years. Whereas Napoleon's opponents sought to maintain control and minimize uncertainty by keeping their forces closely concentrated, Napoleon chose the opposite way, reorganizing and decentralizing his army in such a way as to enable its parts to operate independently for a limited period of time and consequently tolerate a higher degree of uncertainty. Rather than allowing the technological means at hand to dictate the method of strategy and the functioning of command, Napoleon made profitable use of the very limitations imposed by the technology.

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

CALCULATED DISORDER

In 1800, by defeating Austria in the Battle of Marengo, Napoleon gained control of northern Italy and forced the Austrians to sign a treaty recognizing French territorial gains there and in Belgium. For the next five years, an uneasy peace held sway--but Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France, and many in Europe began to suspect that this Corsican upstart had limitless ambitions. Karl Mack, the Austrian quartermaster general and an older and influential member of the Austrian military, advocated a preemptive strike against France, with an army large enough to guarantee victory. He told his colleagues, "In war the object is to beat the enemy, not merely to avoid being beaten."

Mack and like-minded officers slowly gained influence, and in April 1805, Austria, England, and Russia signed a treaty of alliance to wage war on France and force her to return to her pre-Napoleonic borders. That summer they formulated their plan: 95,000 Austrian troops would attack the French in northern Italy, redressing the humiliating defeat of 1800. Another 23,000 troops would secure the Tyrol, between Italy and Austria. Mack would then lead a force of 70,000 men west along the Danube into Bavaria, preventing this strategically located country from allying itself with France. Once encamped in Bavaria, Mack and his army would await the arrival a few weeks later of 75,000 troops from Russia; the two armies would link up, and this unstoppable force would march west into France. Meanwhile the English would attack the French at sea. More troops would later be funneled into each war zone, making for an army totaling 500,000 men overall--the largest military force ever assembled in Europe up to that point. Not even Napoleon could withstand an army more than twice the size of his own, moving in on him from all sides.

In the middle of September, Mack began his phase of the campaign by advancing along the Danube to Ulm, in the heart of Bavaria. Having established his camp there, he felt hugely satisfied. Mack loathed disorder and uncertainty. He tried to think of everything in advance, to come up with a clear plan and make sure everyone stuck to it--"clockwork warfare," he called it. He thought his plan was perfect; nothing could go wrong. Napoleon was doomed.

Mack had once been captured and forced to spend three years in France, where he had studied Napoleon's style of war. A key Napoleonic strategy was to make the enemy divide his forces, but now the trick was reversed: with trouble in Italy, Napoleon could not afford to send more than 70,000 French troops across the Rhine into Germany and Bavaria. The moment he crossed the Rhine, the Austrians would know his intentions and would act to slow his march; his army would need at least two months to reach Ulm and the Danube. By then the Austrians would already have linked up with the Russians and swept through the Alsace and France. The strategy was as close to foolproof as any Mack had ever known. He savored the role he would play in destroying Napoleon, for he hated the man and all he represented--undisciplined soldiers, the fomenting of revolution throughout Europe, the constant threat to the status quo. For Mack the Russians could not arrive in Ulm too soon.

We find our attention drawn repeatedly to what one might call "the organizational dimension of strategy." Military organizations, and the states that develop them, periodically assess their own ability to handle military threats. When they do so they tend to look at that which can be quantified: the number of troops, the quantities of ammunition, the readiness rates of key equipment, the amount of transport, and so on. Rarely, however, do they look at the adequacy of their organization as such, and particularly high level organization, to handle these challenges. Yet as Pearl Harbor and other cases suggest, it is in the deficiency of organizations that the embryo of misfortune develops.

M
ILITARY
M
ISFORTUNES
: T
HE
A
NATOMY OF
F
AILURE IN
W
AR
, E
LIOT
A. C
OHEN AND
J
OHN
G
OOCH
, 1990

Near the end of September, however, Mack began to sense something wrong. To the west of Ulm lay the Black Forest, between his own position and the French border. Suddenly scouts were telling him that a French army was passing through the forest in his direction. Mack was bewildered: it made the best sense for Napoleon to cross the Rhine into Germany farther to the north, where his passage east would be smoother and harder to stop. But now he was yet again doing the unexpected, funneling an army through a narrow opening in the Black Forest and sending it straight at Mack. Even if this move were just a feint, Mack had to defend his position, so he sent part of his army west into the Black Forest to stem the French advance long enough for the Russians to come to his aid.

A few days later, Mack began to feel horribly confused. The French were proceeding through the Black Forest, and some of their cavalry had come quite far. At the same time, though, word reached Mack of a large French army somewhere to the north of his position. The reports were contradictory: some said this army was at Stuttgart, sixty miles northwest of Ulm; others had it more to the east or even farther to the north or--quite close, near the Danube. Mack could get no hard information, since the French cavalry that had come through the Black Forest blocked access to the north for reconnaissance. The Austrian general now faced what he feared most--uncertainty--and it was clouding his ability to think straight. Finally he ordered all of his troops back to Ulm, where he would concentrate his forces. Perhaps Napoleon intended to do battle at Ulm. At least Mack would have equal numbers.

In early October, Austrian scouts were at last able to find out what was really going on, and it was a nightmare. A French army had crossed the Danube to the east of Ulm, blocking Mack's way back to Austria and cutting off the Russians. Another army lay to the south, blocking his route to Italy. How could 70,000 French soldiers appear in so many places at once? And move so fast? Gripped by panic, Mack sent probes in every direction. On October 11 his men discovered a weak point: only a small French force barred the way north and east. There he could push through and escape the French encirclement. He began to prepare for the march. But two days later, when he was on the point of ordering the retreat, his scouts reported that a large French force had appeared overnight, blocking the northeastern route as well.

On October 20, finding out that the Russians had decided not to come to his rescue, Mack surrendered. Over 60,000 Austrian soldiers were taken prisoner with hardly a shot fired. It was one of the most splendidly bloodless victories in history.

In the next few months, Napoleon's army turned east to deal with the Russians and remaining Austrians, culminating in his spectacular victory at Austerlitz. Meanwhile Mack languished in an Austrian prison, sentenced to two years for his role in this humiliating defeat. There he racked his brains (losing his sanity in the process, some said): Where had his plan gone wrong? How had an army appeared out of nowhere to his east, so easily swallowing him up? He had never seen anything like it, and he was trying to figure it out to the end of his days.

The fact that, historically speaking, those armies have been most successful which did not turn their troops into automatons, did not attempt to control everything from the top, and allowed subordinate commanders considerable latitude has been abundantly demonstrated. The Roman centurions and military tribunes; Napoleon's marshals; Moltke's army commanders; Ludendorff's storm detachments...--all these are examples, each within its own stage of technological development, of the way things were done in some of the most successful military forces ever.

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

Interpretation

History should not judge General Mack too harshly, for the French armies he faced in the fall of 1805 represented one of the greatest revolutions in military history. For thousands of years, war had been fought in essentially the same way: the commander led his large and unified army into battle against an opponent of roughly equal size. He would never break up his army into smaller units, for that would violate the military principle of keeping one's forces concentrated; furthermore, scattering his forces would make them harder to monitor, and he would lose control over the battle.

Suddenly Napoleon changed all that. In the years of peace between 1800 and 1805, he reorganized the French military, bringing different forces together to form the Grande Armee, 210,000 men strong. He divided this army into several corps, each with its own cavalry, infantry, artillery, and general staff. Each was led by a marshal general, usually a young officer of proven strength in previous campaigns. Varying in size from 15,000 to 30,000 men, each corps was a miniature army headed by a miniature Napoleon.

Patton's philosophy of command was: "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

P
ATTON
: A G
ENIUS FOR
W
AR
, C
ARLO
D'E
STE
, 1995

The key to the system was the speed with which the corps could move. Napoleon would give the marshals their mission, then let them accomplish it on their own. Little time was wasted with the passing of orders back and forth, and smaller armies, needing less baggage, could march with greater speed. Instead of a single army moving in a straight line, Napoleon could disperse and concentrate his corps in limitless patterns, which to the enemy seemed chaotic and unreadable.

This was the monster that Napoleon unleashed on Europe in September 1805. While a few corps were dispatched to northern Italy as a holding force against Austria's planned invasion there, seven corps moved east into Germany in a scattered array. A reserve force with much cavalry was sent through the Black Forest, drawing Mack to the west--and so making it harder for him to understand what was happening to the north and easier to entrap. (Napoleon understood Mack's simple psychology and how the appearance of disorder would paralyze him.) Meanwhile, with Stuttgart as a pivot, the seven corps wheeled south to the Danube and cut off Mack's various escape routes. One corps marshal, hearing that the northeastern route was weakly held, did not wait for Napoleon to send orders but simply sped and covered it on his own. Wherever Mack went, he would hit a corps large enough to hold him until the rest of the French army could tighten the circle. It was like a pack of coyotes against a rabbit.

Agamemnon smiled and moved on, Coming next to the two captains Who shared the name Ajax As they were strapping on their helmets. Behind them a cloud of infantry loomed...Agamemnon Was glad to see them, and his words flew out: "Ajax, both of you, Achaean commanders, I would be out of line if I issued you orders. You push your men to fight hard on your own. By Father Zeus, by Athena and Apollo, If all of my men had your kind of heart, King Priam's city would soon bow her head, Taken and ravaged under our hands."

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

Understand: the future belongs to groups that are fluid, fast, and nonlinear. Your natural tendency as a leader may be to want to control the group, to coordinate its every movement, but that will just tie you to the past and to the slow-moving armies of history. It takes strength of character to allow for a margin of chaos and uncertainty--to let go a little--but by decentralizing your army and segmenting it into teams, you will gain in mobility what you lose in complete control. And mobility is the greatest force multiplier of them all. It allows you to both disperse and concentrate your army, throwing it into patterns instead of advancing in straight lines. These patterns will confuse and paralyze your opponents. Give your different corps clear missions that fit your strategic goals, then let them accomplish them as they see fit. Smaller teams are faster, more creative, more adaptable; their officers and soldiers are more engaged, more motivated. In the end, fluidity will bring you far more power and control than petty domination.