More Military Strategy

 

Ever being one to put my money where my mouth is, readers of last week’s post will have realised that I am reading about strategy, specifically military strategy. So far it has been quite interesting. The most controversial revelation so far is the proposition that Napoleon was a poor strategist – Black references a book called Blundering to Glory: Napoleon’s Military Campaigns. Has anyone read it?

Anyway, reading continues, of course, with the next book in the strategy pile:

Echevarria, A. J., Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, OUP, 2017).

I find the very short introduction series rather good, on the whole, and this is not an exception. It is more about specifically military strategy, as opposed to Black’s book which is much more focussed on the interface between military strategy and political strategy. Not that the VSI ignores these aspects, it is just that the emphasis is slightly different.

Echevarria discusses a range of military strategies, which I suppose you would describe as being at the theatre or operational level. These come in pairs, and each pair gets a chapter: annihilation and dislocation, attrition and exhaustion, deterrence and coercion, terror and terrorism, and decapitation and targetted killing. The introduction discusses exactly what military strategy is, and the book ends with a chapter on cyber power and military strategy, before considering what causes strategies to succeed or fail.

There are some interesting examples in the book. The annihilation section discusses Cannae (216 BC) which, as every wargamer will know, is a classic example of double envelopment. Very cunning and clever by Hannibal, we agree. I do wonder a little whether it is really an example of strategy, however, but there you go. Echevarria does observe that despite the victory in battle, Hannibal lost the war. This was not really his fault – Carthaginian councils were divided between empire and Africa, and that was never really resolved until it was far too late and the Romans were at the gates.

The next example is Napoleon in 1805 against the Austrians and Russians, culminating in Austerlitz and Ulm. Napoleon feinted, attacked from an unexpected direction, and separated the allies, defeating each in detail. As with Hannibal, this won the campaign, possibly even won the war, but did not win the peace. After all, Napoleon had massed his armies on the Channel threatening invasion of Britain; the campaigns to the east only came about once it was clear that was not going to happen, and with Britain (and, more importantly, Britain’s money) still in the fight, winning peace on French terms was always going to be difficult.

The next main example is the 1940 German attack on France, a thrust in an unexpected direction followed up by a war of movement in the Allied rear areas. This leads to a discussion of ‘getting inside an opponent’s decision cycle’, which means, basically, command and control which has accurate enough information and a swiftness of decision-making such that the enemy’s decision-making is always behind you. On the other hand, blitzkrieg had its limitations, at the Germans found to their great cost in Russia. While they managed to encircle and annihilate huge quantities of men and material, attrition wore the Germans down, dogged if doomed resistance delayed support troops and the logistics could not keep up.

As you might have surmised by now, there is a lot in a little book. Most of the elements of the chapters are mirror images of each other. Attrition and exhaustion refer to the running out of men and material on the one hand, and the destruction of the will to resist on the other. Deterrence and coercion refer to the ideas of stopping someone from doing something by threatening something worse and forcing someone to do something. And so on. The chapters on terrorism and cyber power projection are interesting, particularly given current events, as is the chapter on decapitation and targeted killing. As it turns out, a lot of these strategies, in terms of the war they are involved in, often collapse into attritional combat.

In terms of wargaming, the final chapter is the most interesting, perhaps, certainly for those of us interested in campaigns. Echevarria identified four stand-out tasks for a successful strategy. The first of these is a critical assessment of the enemy and their strengths and weaknesses, compared with your own. This should result in an objective assessment of capabilities, which can be updated as new information becomes available and circumstances change.

The second task of strategy is to use the assessment to develop courses of action. This requires the definition of an objective (or a number of objectives) and the means for obtaining them. This does not necessarily mean only military action; in these days, of course, information warfare, often conducted in cyberspace is thought to give the results the international actors require.

Thirdly, a commander must be selected who has the knowledge, skills, competence, and support to execute the strategy in detail. Echevarria observes that Lincoln fired six generals before appointing Grant, while Churchill went through three before appointing Montgomery to the Western Desert. Knowledge of the enemy’s commander helps a lot here. Rommel, which incisive and original became a little predictable, as did Marlborough. Thus the latter might have won at Malplaquet but the cost was because he used, roughly, the same approach as at Blenheim.

The last requirement of a strategy is a set of coherent and comprehensive plans. These form the link between policy and military strategy and set the objectives, parameters for the campaign, tasks, and subtasks for commanders. These can be simple or complex, direct or indirect, and have two divergent aims. The first is to weaken the enemy’s capacity to fight and to achieve the war’s aims. The military often pursue the first while politicians pursue the second if only to keep costs (men and material) down. We also can observe that often hubris and imperial overstretch cause wars to fail, as with Napoleon and Hitler, but on the other hand, the failure to exploit opportunity can lead to greater costs, prolongation of the conflict, and failure of the war.

I am quite enthusiastic about this book in terms of wargaming and campaigns. I think it should probably be on the shelf of any wargamer who raises their heads above the goal of capturing the crossroads as it is, firstly, fairly cheap, secondly, short, and thirdly, packed full of content to make us think.