Book Review: Strategy

Following closely upon my reading of The First World War by John Keegan, I decided to read B(asil) H. Liddell Hart's book, Strategy. Hart, an English army captain, was a military historian and strategist who had a great influence upon the military campaigns of Germany and the Allies during World War II.

World War I demonstrated the problematic nature of direct assault upon one's enemies, especially in the era of automatic weapons and industrialized warfare--in short, if you're an attacker, and you aim for the direct approach in going for your target, you make it easier for the enemy to defend against you and cut you to pieces because he knows exactly what you want and where you're going, and so can concentrate all of his forces in that one particular spot.

Here's how Hart puts it in his preface:

When...I first came to perceive the superiority of the indirect over the direct approach, I was looking merely for light upon strategy. With deepened reflection, however I began to realize that the indirect approach had a much wider application--that it was a law of life in all spheres: a truth of philosophy. Its fulfillment was seen to be a key to the practical achievement in dealing with any problem where the human factor predominates, and a conflict of wills tends to spring from an underlying concern for interests. In all such cases, the direct assault of new ideas provokes a stubborn resistance, thus intensifying the difficulty of producing a change of outlook. Conversion is achieved more easily and rapidly by unsuspected infiltration of a different idea or by an argument that turns the flank of instinctive opposition.

The first three parts of the book uncover examples of successful indirect warfare throughout European history, starting with the Greeks, and moving forward to World War II. For instance, the conquest of Sparta by the Theban general Epaminondas is covered, as is the overall military work of Alexander the Great. One of the most interesting and entertaining sections is the history of the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius. Belisarius managed to achieve many victories under less-than-ideal conditions, for example, when the Emperor Justinian deprived him of reinforcements for fear that the general might become too popular or a political rival, or on more than one occasion when he was outnumbered, but still managed to overcome his enemies. One of the few times Belisarius lost was when he allowed himself to be persuaded by his officers to attack the enemy directly.

Unlike Victor Davis Hanson, a civilian, Hart is more concerned with describing strategic or tactical victories and is not so concerned with the particular moral codes advanced by said victories. For instance, Hart offers up his admiration for Hitler's strategic and tactical insights--which are obvious, given his initial successess, while Hanson is more concerned about the victory of "the good."

One thing that was curious to me, as a civilian, was Hart's de-emphasis on battle per se. This differs from Clausewitz, one of the great European theorists of war, who believed the primary canon of military doctrine was "the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield." Instead, as part of his indirect approach, Hart's idea is that "the true aim is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this."

Hart also addresses matters of "grand strategy," which is the bigger picture of national policy, of which military force is but a part. He describes the aim of war as simply "to attain a better peace," meaning your nation ends up in a better situation (however you care to define it) after the war than you were before it. This view of grand strategy includes such no-duh ideas as not wearing yourself out so badly from war that you're unable to enjoy the peace once the war is concluded. Another bright idea Hart advances is not engaging in acts of war so egregious that they are bound to backfire on you once the peace is settled. He cites as one example the "strategic" bombing of civilian targets like Tokyo and Dresden, which did not necessarily advance the Allies' cause, break the will of the enemy, or leave the devastated populations in a state of civilization after the conflict.

Hart was writing in the midst of the Cold War, but his views on strategy are as relevant today as they were then. For instance, he devotes a chapter to "guerilla war," which is for all practical purposes what we've been fighting in Iraq for the last five years. Hart seems to have been particularly interested in this aspect of warfare, as he was friends with T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), and Lawrence's tactics were taught and spread throughout the world by Winston Churchill as a means of combatting the Axis. Hart's comments are prophetic for our own times:

[T]he prospects and progress of a guerrilla movement depend on the attitude of the people in the area where the struggle takes place--on their willingness to aid it by providing information and supplies to the guerrillas by withholding information from the occupying force while helping to hide the guerrillas.

Since 2003, the U.S. military had to overcome the willingness of the Iraqis to hide and support the insurgents. New tactics, plus "the surge," have done much to reduce violence in that country. When the population trusts the "occupying force" more than the insurgents, the insurgency crumbles.

So who is the "audience" for Hart's work? I would recommend it--though I doubt he'd read it--to Barack Obama or any other incoming U.S. President. Generals, of course, should read it, as should the officer corps, and perhaps NCOs and the whole frickin' army, so they know what their leaders are getting them into. Hart offers direct advice for the military man in clear, non-bureaucratese sentences. For instance,

In general, the nearer to the force [a cut in the enemy's communications] is made, the more immediate the effect; the nearer to the base, the greater the effect...while a stroke close in rear of the enemy force may have more effect on the minds of the enemy troops, a stroke far back tends to have more effect on the mind of the enemy commander.

There are also a couple of appendices regarding the Allied campaign in North Africa during World War II and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 that would probably be of practical benefit to the battlefield commander. Even if al-Qaeda's leaders have not read Hart's work, it's clear that they've grasped the essence of his "indirect approach," as may be seen by the recent attacks in Mumbai. It is equally clear that al-Qaeda suffers serious losses when they engage in direct attacks, as they have done in Iraq. It remains to be seen who will win the long war between the West and fundamentalist Islamism. If the West is to win and remain true to its military and political traditions, it will have to give Strategy more serious thought.

Book Review: The First World War

The great conflict of the last century has been World War Two; yet that worldwide bloodletting would not have occurred without the First World War. John Keegan's remarkable history, The First World War, provides the reader with a dark, comprehensive view of this conflict, which is often overlooked or remembered more for Ernest Hemingway's dramatized version of it. Earlier this year, I had read histories about the beginning of the war and the Treaty of Versailles, but still remained relatively ignorant about the war itself. The primary images or collective "memories" our civilization has of The Great War are of mud-filled trenches or hundreds of plain-uniformed soldiers in tin-pan helmets running through fields filled with barbed wire and artillery explosions.

There is a great deal to learn from Keegan's narrative. For instance, he posits a convincing "what if?" alternate-historical choice that explains how the War need not have happened. There is a general consensus that the diplomats of the era were unable to cope with or stop the war preparations made by each nation's military establishments. The nations that became known as the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey) and the Allies (France, Great Britain, Belgium, Russia, Serbia, and, later, the United States) had overlapping treaties and agreements of support should any of them be attacked by another party.

When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated by Serbian militants, Keegan points out that most of the nations of Europe might have simply stood aside and let the Empire punish the Serbians through a punitive, one-on-one attack. However, he points to a failure of nerve at the highest levels of the Empire, which more or less made the widening of the war inevitable. Worried that Russia might support Serbia if they were attacked, Austria-Hungary invoked its alliance with Germany as a way to check the Russians. Once the Russians started mobilizing its forces, the French, as Russia's allies, were required to do likewise to ensure that Germany would face a two-front war if confronted. From there, Great Britain wasn't far behind in the mobilization game, and from there, once declarations of war were made, all the dominoes fell, and the most civilized, advanced continent in the world at that time plunged into a brutal, mechanized, four-year bloodbath that would eventually take 10 million lives.

Keegan introduces and finishes his history by pointing out the ultimate tragedy of the conflict--the civilization and the men who were lost--and the lingering hatreds and "unfinished business" of the war that would bring Europe to fight a larger, even nastier war 20 years later.

While the war is known mostly for its immobile frontiers and trench warfare, it did not start out that way, and some battle lines were very fluid. Germany set the strategic pace for the early stages of the conflict. They planned a massive flanking maneuver through neutral Belgium, which would march quickly southwest and the south and east to surround the French armies concentrated on the French-German border. This defeat, it was assumed, could be accomplished in six weeks, giving Germany plenty of time to then transfer forces to the east to face a much larger Russian army. The Schlieffen Plan would be stopped through the bravery of French and British soldiers, who rolled back the German advance somewhat, and then were themselves stopped from outflanking the German right in a "race to the sea." The Western Front then more or less stabilized for the next two years.

The battle losses of the Great War (as it was then called) were incomprehensible, even after the hundreds of thousands who had died in the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of the previous century. In the intervening years, the machine gun had come into its own, as had massed artillery, mines, railroads, and chemical warfare. However, some technologies, which might have stopped bad plans from going forward or thousands of young men from being slaughtered needlessly, were not yet available or decisive on the battlefield, such as the telephone, the portable radio, tanks, jeeps, military aviation, or precision artillery.

The Battle of the Somme stands as one of the worst examples of leadership in the War, where over the course of four months, over one million men were killed or wounded in an allied attempt to break through the German lines. When Hemingway or Gertrude Stein spoke of the "Lost Generation," this is part of what people mean. Keegan is careful, however, to explain that while the Allied generals had their faults and misjudgments, much of the carnage and chaos was simply a lack of understanding into the nature of the war being fought. Heroic charges by cavalry were no match for millions of pounds of artillery shells or machine-gun bullets. The Somme changed the generals' appreciation for their predicament, but they were determined to go on--there was too much pride and (by then) too much blood involved to simply give up. The Germans believed they were in control of the situation, which was definitely the case in the East, while the French would not accept German occupation of their territory.

Meanwhile, in the East, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians fought pitched battles with the Czarist Russian Empire. The Austrians faced a weakness in that many of its subject peoples (and thus military service men) were Slavic, like the Russians, and so became less inclined to fight. The Germans eventually took over leadership in the East after Austria sustained some defeats. The collapse of the Russian army came about due to the economic pressure of the war back home, eventually leading to the Bolshevik Revolution. Keegan covers some of the military aspects of this struggle as well, though it is clear that once the Russian army left the field, they ceased to be a player in the Great War.

In reading this book, I was confronted again and again by the sheer number of casualties inflicted on one side or another. The numbers are so staggering, it is often difficult to make much sense of them. And perhaps because of Keegan's attempt to cover the entire war in one book (475 pages' worth), it is difficult to get a feel for what was going on. He takes the general's-eye-view, discussing topography, army locations and routes of march, as well as tactics and armaments used. However, there are only a few places where one can get a good "feel" for what the war was actually like to the average combat soldier. Here's one passage, however, that caught my attention:

Up the road we staggered, shells bursting around us. A man stopped dead in front of me, and exasperated I cursed him and butted him with my knee. Very gently he said, "I'm blind, Sir," and turned to show me his eyes and nose torn away by a piece of shell. "Oh God! I'm sorry, sonny," I said. "Keep going on the hard part," and left him staggering back in his darkness...

This is not a particularly pretty or, despite the rhetoric that led up to it, glorious war. It was, quite simply, the worst example of industrial civilization turned on itself. World War Two would produce more casualties and even more frightful weapons, but the First World War, in my view, is the worse of the two conflicts because it was this war that destroyed Western Civilization's confidence in itself. It would take a couple more wars before a similar loss of faith in Western rightness afflicted America (World War Two, Korea, and especially Vietnam). The cultural and political vacuums created by World War I would give rise to totalitarian governments in Russia, Germany, Italy, and Japan. The industrial, economic, and artistic progress of Europe were all diminished by the loss of so many of its young men. And, of course, the worst part of it all is that it need not have happened.

Keegan's book, together with The Guns of August and Paris 1919, deserves to be read, if only to give Westerners a better understanding of what created the mass wars, movements, and attempted genocides of the 20th century. Perhaps, by learning, we might learn better how to prevent such catastrophes in the future. One can, at least, hope for such an outcome.