Military Strategy

A while ago I mused, rather unproductively, on wargaming and strategy, mostly to the effect that wargamers are much more interested in tactics than strategy. Having decided to flesh my understanding of the subject out (that is, raising it from nearly zero to slightly more than that) I have recently finished this:

Black, J., Military Strategy: A Global History (Yale, 2023)

Fear not, gentle reader, I am not really that up-to-date with my reading; the book was published in hardback in 2020. Still, it is an interesting read. I confess I am rather ambivalent about Black as a writer and historian. While I have a fair few of his books on my shelves, I do find that is range sometimes lets him down a bit. I think he was originally a historian of the late 17^th and 18^th Centuries and, as many historians who have retired, he has expanded his scope rather a lot. On the other hand, I do not know all that much about history, even military history, from the Eighteenth Century on, so who am I to comment.

I suppose that Black concentrates mostly on what we can call ‘grand strategy’, the big picture. As such he is keen to emphasise the links between international and domestic politics as well as technology and capability, that is the ability to deploy effective forces somewhere where they might be needed. This of course varies with the context, and so military planning is often a case of guessing what is going to happen and hoping that you might be right and, therefore, have the right forces in the right place at the right time.

For Black, then, strategy is a practice rather than a set of theories or theoretical laws derived from history. On the other hand, a state does develop what he calls a ‘strategic culture’ which is what the elites who do the planning and commanding worry about. For Britain in the Eighteenth Century, for example, the strategic culture regarded, mostly, France and how to contain her, maintaining some sort of continental equilibrium. Similarly for Germany from the 1870s until 1945 the question was how to avoid a war on two fronts. Black notes that in World War One Germany eventually achieved that after 1917, while in World War Two Hitler provoked it. Not, perhaps, the most sensible strategic decision.

Another interesting point that Black makes is that many strategists (as opposed to academics), virtually ignore the literature on the subject, such as Sun Tzu or Clausewitz. Indeed, one of the Chinese emperors forbade his generals to read Sun Tzu, regarding it as useless. Academics, on the other hand, are a lot more comfortable with the written word and so spend a lot of time and ink on analysis of the masters of strategy.

In passing, it is interesting to note that a lot of academics seem not to think that strategy existed before Machiavelli. This is in spite of works on my shelf including Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire and Sharpe’s War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III. Even though Black starts his account in the Eighteenth Century, when the grammar of strategy started to be formalised, he does acknowledge that the concept and practice of it date back at least to Thucydides. The Athenians and Spartans did have strategies, even though they would not have called what they had such.

There are a lot of interesting snippets in the book. For example, when he came to power in 1940 Churchill did not really have a strategy for winning the war. Black remarks he just hoped for the best. Perhaps that is all he could do at the time. On the other hand, Black also discusses the debates in the Anglo-American alliance over the Mediterranean theatre, with the US being less keen on developing it. Churchill might have been at least a little bit right there. While Italy was not the soft underbelly of Europe that he hoped, Hitler diverted resources there from the Eastern Front which might have changed the outcome of the Battle of Kursk.

There are other interesting bits that I am sure period specialists can comment on. Napoleon, for example, is often held up as the epitome of a strategist. Black indicates that his grand strategy was flawed (he landed up fighting on several fronts at once), his diplomacy a failure, and that his operational successes were more often due to his opponent’s errors and the ability of his corps commanders to dig each other of the problems Napoleon had created for them. Maybe this is harsh, but Black references a book entitled Blundering to Glory: Napoleon’s Military Campaigns. Perhaps someone who knows more of the matter than I could comment.

In a sense, this is old-school military history, but it avoids the drums and trumpets of describing the battles, focussing instead on the issues of geopolitics and alliances which determine outcomes. As Black notes several times, it is harder than a lot of generals and politicians realise to move from a tactical victory to a strategically successful outcome. While German and Japanese ideology focussed on their will to victory, as opposed to the softies opposing them, and they obtained victories against said opponents, which sort of vindicated their approach initially, they misjudged both their diplomatic isolation and the determination of their enemies to win. This landed up, in Japan, with the military running out of strategic options. After the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf, the only option left as a strategy for the armed forces was to die heroically.

The book is most interesting and worth a read. I am not entirely sure how it could be translated into wargaming terms, although I am kicking some vague ideas around. For example, the American Civil War has an interesting strategic setup, with the capitals within 100 miles or so of each other, and the question for both sides as to what resources to devote to the area west of the Appalachians. One to ponder.