The 33 Strategies of War (70 page)

The best defense against moral warriors is to give them no target. Live up to your good name; practice what you preach, at least in public; ally yourself with the most just causes of the day. Make your opponents work so hard to undermine your reputation that they seem desperate, and their attacks blow up in their faces. If you have to do something nasty and not in harmony with your stated position or public image, use a cat's-paw--some agent to act for you and hide your role in the action. If that is not possible, think ahead and plan a moral self-defense. At all costs avoid actions that carry the taint of hypocrisy.

A stain on your moral reputation can spread like an infection. As you scramble to repair the damage, you often inadvertently publicize the doubts it has opened up, which simply makes things worse. So be prudent: the best defense against a moral attack is to have inoculated yourself against it beforehand, by recognizing where you may be vulnerable and taking preventive measures. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and initiated the Civil War against Pompey, he was highly vulnerable to the charge of trying to usurp the authority of the Roman Senate in order to become a dictator. He inoculated himself against these charges by acting mercifully toward his enemies in Rome, making important reforms, and going to the extreme in showing his respect for the Republic. By embracing some of the principles of his enemies, he kept their attempts at moral infection from spreading.

Wars are most often fought out of self-interest: a nation goes to war to protect itself against an invading, or potentially dangerous, enemy or to seize a neighbor's land or resources. Morality is sometimes a component in the decision--in a holy war or crusade, for example--but even here self-interest usually plays a role; morality is often just a cover for the desire for more territory, more riches, more power. During World War II, the Soviet Union became a beloved ally of the United States, playing a key role in the defeat of Hitler, but after the war it became America's darkest enemy. American self-interest, not the Soviets, had changed.

Wars of self-interest usually end when the winner's interests are satisfied. Wars of morality are often longer and bloodier: if the enemy is seen as evil, as the infidel, it must be annihilated before the war can end. Wars of morality also churn up uncontrollable emotions. Luther's moral campaign against Rome generated such hatred that in the subsequent invasion of the Holy City by the troops of Charles V, in 1527, German soldiers went on a six-month rampage against the church and its officials, committing many atrocities in what came to be known as "the sack of Rome."

Successful wickedness hath obtained the name virtue...when it is for the getting of the kingdom.

T
HOMAS
H
OBBES
, 1588-1679

As in war, so in life. When you are involved in a conflict with another person or group, there is something you are fighting over, something each side wants. This could be money, power and position, on and on. Your interests are at stake, and there is no need to feel guilty about defending them. Such conflicts tend not to be too bloody; most people are at least somewhat practical and see the point in preventing a war from going on too long. But those people who fight out of a moral sense can sometimes be the most dangerous. They may be hungry for power and are using morality as a cover; they may be motivated by some dark and hidden grievance; but in any case they are after more than self-interest. Even if you beat them, or at least defend yourself against them successfully, discretion here may be the better part of valor. Avoid wars of morality if you can; they are not worth the time and dirty feelings they churn up.

Authority: The pivot of war is nothing but name and righteousness. Secure a good name for yourself and give the enemy a bad name; proclaim your righteousness and reveal the unrighteousness of the enemy. Then your army can set forth in a great momentum, shaking heaven and earth.

--Tou Bi Fu Tan,
A Scholar's Dilettante Remarks on War
(sixteenth century
A.D
.)

REVERSAL

A moral offensive has a built-in danger: if people can tell what you are doing, your righteous stance may disgust and alienate them. Unless you are facing a vicious enemy, it is best to use this strategy with a light touch and never seem shrill. Moral battles are for public consumption, and you must constantly gauge their effect, lowering or raising the heat accordingly.

The feeling of emptiness or void--silence, isolation, nonengagement with others--is for most people intolerable. As a human weakness, that fear offers fertile ground for a powerful strategy: give your enemies no target to attack, be dangerous but elusive and invisible, then watch as they chase you into the void. This is the essence of guerrilla warfare. Instead of frontal battles, deliver irritating but damaging side attacks and pinprick bites. Frustrated at their inability to use their strength against your vaporous campaign, your opponents will grow irrational and exhausted. Make your guerrilla war part of a grand political cause--a people's war--that crests in an irresistible revolution.

THE LURE OF THE VOID

In 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte of France and Czar Alexander I of Russia signed a treaty of alliance. Now the period's two great military powers were linked. But this treaty was unpopular with the Russian court--among other things it allowed Napoleon nearly free rein in Poland, Russia's traditional "front yard." Russian aristocrats worked to influence the czar to repudiate it. Before too long, Alexander began to take actions that he knew would displease the French, and by August 1811, Napoleon had had enough: it was time to teach Russia a lesson. He began to lay plans for an invasion. The acquisition of this vast territory to the east would make him the ruler of the largest empire in history.

Some of Napoleon's ministers warned him of the dangers of invading such a vast country, but the emperor general felt supremely confident. The Russian army was undisciplined, and its officers were squabbling among themselves. Two forces in Lithuania were positioned to block an invasion from the west, but intelligence had revealed that they were unprepared. Napoleon would march into a central position between these forces and defeat them in detail. He would ensure victory by mobilizing an army three times larger than any he had previously led: 650,000 men would march into Russia, 450,000 as part of the main attack force, the rest to secure lines of communication and supply. With an army this size, he could dominate even the large spaces of Russia, overwhelming the feeble enemy not only with his usual brilliant maneuvers but with superior firepower.

Napoleon may have felt certain of victory, but he was not a reckless man. As always, he studied the situation from every angle. He knew, for instance, that Russian roads were notoriously bad, local food supplies were meager, the climate tended to extremes of heat and cold, and the vast distances made it much harder to encircle the enemy--there was always room to retreat. He read up on the failed invasion of Russia by the king of Sweden, Charles XII, in 1709, and anticipated that the Russians might revert to a scorched-earth policy. His army would have to be as self-sufficient as possible (the distances were too great to have extended supply lines from Europe), but, given its size, that would require incredible planning and organization.

To help provide for his army, Napoleon had vast storehouses close to the borders of Russia filled with wheat and rice. He knew it would be impossible to provide fodder for the 150,000 horses of his army, and so, thinking ahead, he decided they would have to wait until June for the invasion, when the grasses of the Russian plains would be rich and green. At the last minute, he learned Russia had very few mills to grind grain into flour, so he added to his growing list the need to bring materials to build mills along the way. With the logistical problems addressed and his usual well-devised strategy in hand, Napoleon told his ministers that he foresaw complete victory within three weeks. In the past, these predictions of Napoleon's had been uncannily accurate.

In June 1812, Napoleon's vast armada of men and supplies crossed into Russia. Napoleon always planned for the unexpected, but this time unmanageable difficulties began to pile up almost immediately: rain, the bad roads, the intense summer heat brought the army's movements to a crawl. Within days more than 10,000 horses ate rank grass and died. Supplies were failing to reach the forward troops fast enough, and they had to resort to foraging, but the uncooperative Russian peasants along the march not only refused to sell their food at any price but burned their hay rather than let the French have it. More French horses died when they were forced to feed off the thatch in the roofs of houses, only to find the houses collapsing on them. The two Russian armies in Lithuania retreated too fast to be caught, and as they went, they burned crops and destroyed all storehouses of food. Dysentery quickly spread through the French troops; some nine hundred men died each day.

In his effort to catch and destroy at least a part of his elusive enemy, Napoleon was compelled to march ever farther east. At points he came tantalizingly close to the more northern of the two Russian armies, but his exhausted men and horses could not move fast enough to meet or encircle it, and it easily escaped his traps each time. June bled into July. Now it became clear that the Russians would be able to join their two armies at Smolensk, over 200 miles east of where Napoleon had intended to fight them and a mere 280 miles from Moscow. Napoleon had to call a halt and rethink his plan.

In addition to wasting an ever-increasing proportion of French manpower, the elusive Russian tactics also contributed to the mental as well as physical exhaustion of Napolean's forces. Tip and run raids by small bands of Cossacks were continuous and exercised a baleful influence far in excess of the military danger they represented. The French army became increasingly subject to fits of the jitters. Captain Roeder noted one typical example in his diary. The Hessian troops were mustering for parade before the Emperor's quarters at Vitebsk on August 17, when "everything was suddenly thrown into ridiculous uproar because a few Cossacks had been sighted, who were said to have carried off a forager. The entire garrison sprang to arms, and when they had ridden out it was discovered that we were really surrounded by only a few dozen Cossacks who were dodging about hither and thither. In this way they will be able to bring the whole garrison to hospital in about fourteen days without losing a single man."

T
HE
C
AMPAIGNS OF
N
APOLEON
,
D
AVID G.
C
HANDLER
, 1966

Thousands of French soldiers had succumbed to disease and hunger without a single battle's being fought. The army was strung out along a 500-mile line, parts of which were constantly harassed by small troops of Cossacks on horseback, sowing terror with their bloodthirsty raids. Napoleon could not allow the chase to go on any longer--he would march his men to Smolensk and fight the decisive battle there. Smolensk was a holy city, with great emotional significance to the Russian people. Surely the Russians would fight to defend it rather than let it be destroyed. He knew that if he could only meet the Russians in battle, he would win.

And so the French moved on Smolensk, arriving there in mid-August, their 450,000-man attack force reduced to 150,000 and worn down by the intense heat. Finally, as Napoleon had predicted, the Russians made a stand here--but only briefly; after several days of fighting, they retreated yet again, leaving behind a burned and ruined city with nothing in it to feed on or plunder. Napoleon could not understand the Russian people, who seemed to him suicidal--they would destroy their country rather than surrender it.

Now he had to decide whether to march on Moscow itself. It might have seemed wise to wait through the winter at Smolensk, but that would give the czar time to raise a larger army that would prove too hard for Napoleon to handle with his own depleted forces. The French emperor felt certain the czar would defend Moscow, the very heart and soul of Russia. Once Moscow fell, Alexander would have to sue for peace. So Napoleon marched his haggard troops still farther east.

Now, at last, the Russians turned to face the French in battle, and on September 7 the two armies clashed near the village of Borodino, a mere seventy-five miles from Moscow. Napoleon no longer had enough forces or cavalry to attempt his usual flanking maneuver, so he was forced to attack the enemy head-on. The Russians fought bitterly, harder than any army Napoleon had ever faced. Even so, after hours of brutal fighting, the Russians retreated yet again. The road to Moscow lay open. But the Russian army was still intact, and Napoleon's forces had suffered horrific casualties.

Seven days later Napoleon's army, now reduced to 100,000 men, straggled into an undefended Moscow. A French marshal wrote to his wife that the emperor's "joy was overflowing. 'The Russians,' he thinks, 'will sue for peace, and I shall change the face of the world.'" In earlier years, when he had marched into Vienna and Berlin, he had been met as a conquering hero, with dignitaries turning over to him the keys to their cities. But Moscow was empty: no citizens, no food. A terrible fire broke out almost immediately and lasted five days; all of the city's water pumps had been removed--an elaborate sabotage to make Moscow still more inhospitable.

Napoleon sent letters to the czar, offering generous terms of peace. At first the Russians seemed willing to negotiate, but the weeks went by, and it finally became clear that they were dragging out the talks to buy time to build up their army--and to let winter grow closer.

Napoleon could not risk staying in Moscow another day; the Russians would soon be able to encircle his now meager force. On October 19 he marched the remains of his army out of the Russian capital. His goal was to get to Smolensk as fast as possible. Now those undisciplined bands of Cossacks that had harassed him on the road east had formed into larger divisions--guerrilla forces of 500 men--and every day they killed off more and more French soldiers. Marching in constant fear, Napoleon's men rarely slept. Thousands succumbed to fatigue and hunger. Napoleon was forced to lead them past the nightmarish fields of Borodino, still crowded with French corpses, many half eaten by wolves. The snow began to fall--the Russian winter set in. The French horses died from the cold, and every last soldier had to trudge through the snow on foot. Barely 40,000 made it to Smolensk.

The cold was worsening. There was no time to tarry in Smolensk. Through some deft maneuvering, Napoleon managed to get his troops across the Berezina River, allowing them a clear line of retreat to the west. Then, in early December, hearing of a failed coup d'etat at home in France, he left his troops behind and headed for Paris. Of the 450,000 men in his main attack force, some 25,000 made it back. Few among the rest of the army survived as well. Napoleon had miraculously escaped to fight more wars, but he would never recoup his losses in manpower and horses. Russia was indeed his grave.

Interpretation

By the time Napoleon invaded Russia, Czar Alexander I had met him a number of times in previous years and had come to know him quite well. The emperor, Alexander saw, was an aggressive man who loved any kind of fight, even if the odds were stacked against him. He needed battles as a chance to put his genius in play. By refusing to meet him in battle, Alexander could frustrate him and lure him into a void: vast but empty lands without food or forage, empty cities with nothing to plunder, empty negotiations, empty time in which nothing happened, and finally the dead of winter. Russia's harsh climate would make a shambles of Napoleon's organizational genius. And as it played out, Alexander's strategy worked to perfection. Napoleon's inability to engage his enemy got under his skin: a few more miles east, one solid battle, and he could teach this cowardly foe a lesson. His emotions--irritation, anger, confusion--overwhelmed his ability to strategize. How could he have come to believe, for instance, that the fall of Moscow would force the czar to surrender? Alexander's army was still intact, the French had grown frighteningly weak, and winter was coming. Napoleon's mind had succumbed to the powerful pull of the void that he had entered, and that led him far astray.

Alexander's strategy wreaked havoc on the French soldiers as well, who were renowned for their superior discipline and fighting spirit. A soldier can endure almost anything except the expectation of a battle that never comes and a tension that is never relieved. Instead of battle, the French got endless raids and pinprick attacks that came out of nowhere, a continuous threat that gradually built into panic. While thousands of soldiers fell to disease, many more simply lost the will to fight.

It is human nature to not be able to endure any kind of void. We hate silence, long stretches of inactivity, loneliness. (Perhaps this is related to our fear of that final void, our own death.) We have to fill and occupy empty space. By giving people nothing to hit, being as vaporous as possible, you play upon this human weakness. Infuriated at the absence not just of a fight but of any kind of interaction at all, people will tend to chase madly after you, losing all power of strategic thought. It is the elusive side, no matter how weak or small its force, that controls the dynamic.

The bigger the enemy, the better this strategy works: struggling to reach you, the oversize opponent presents juicy targets for you to hit. To create the maximum psychological disturbance, you must make your attacks small but relentless, keeping your enemy's anger and frustration at a constant boil. Make your void complete: empty negotiations, talks leading nowhere, time passing without either victory or defeat. In a world of accelerated pace and activity, this strategy will have a powerfully debilitating effect on people's nerves. The less they can hit, the harder they will fall.

Most wars are wars of contact, both forces striving to keep in touch.... The Arab war should be a war of detachment: to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing themselves till the moment of attack.... From this theory came to be developed ultimately an unconscious habit of never engaging the enemy at all. This chimed with the numerical plea of never giving the enemy's soldier a target.

--T. E. Lawrence,
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
(1926)

KEYS TO WARFARE

Over the centuries organized war--in all its infinite variations, from primitive to modern, Asian to Western--has always tended to follow a certain logic, which is so universal as almost to seem inherent to the process. The logic is as follows: A leader decides to take his country to war and raises an army for that purpose. That army's goal is to meet and defeat the enemy in a decisive battle that will force a surrender and favorable peace terms. The strategist guiding the campaign must deal with a specific area, the theater of war. This area is most often relatively limited; maneuvering in vast open spaces complicates the possibility of bringing the war to closure. Working within the theater of war, then, the strategist contrives to bring his army to the decisive battle in a way that will surprise the enemy or put it at a disadvantage--it is cornered, or attacked from both front and rear, or must fight uphill. To keep his forces strong enough to deliver a mortal blow, he concentrates them rather than dispersing them. Once battle begins, the army will naturally form a flank and rear that it must protect against encirclement, as well as lines of communication and supply. It may take several battles to end the war, as each side works to dominate the key positions that will give it control of the theater, but military leaders must try to end it as quickly as possible. The longer it drags on, the more the army's resources are stretched to a breaking point where the ability to fight collapses. Soldiers' morale declines with time as well.