Military Strategy

The Politics and Technique of War

John Stone

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441172945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Military strategy is concerned with the translation of armed force into intended political effects. As such, it constitutes one of the most important activities of the past two centuries; and yet during this period it has not always been practised very effectively. In this book, John Stone seeks to explain why this has been the case by examining various instances of strategic practice drawn from the period between the eighteenth century and the present day. He contends that, to be truly effective, strategy must faithfully reflect the political context in which it is formulated. Where strategy has failed, it is frequently because its practitioners have paid undue attention to military-technical matters at the expense of politics.

1 The French Revolution and Napoleon

No other year is more important for the history of Western strategy than 1789. Prior to the French Revolution, warfare in Europe had been distinctly limited in character. Wars were frequently cautious affairs characterized by the manoeuvre of armies rather than their whole-hearted commitment to battle, and were terminated more by mutual consent than by the complete defeat of one or other of the belligerents. In the wake of the Revolution the character of warfare underwent a profound change. Manoeuvre gave way to battle as the defining activity of military campaigns. War-termination lost its consensual aspect, and was now imposed on the losing side via a process of more or less comprehensive military destruction. As we shall shortly see, the root cause of this change was political in nature. While developments in military technique were certainly improving the efficiency of armies during the eighteenth century, such developments did not, in and of themselves, produce these dramatic changes in the character of warfare. Rather, it was the removal of political restraints on the formulation of strategic objectives following the Revolution that was most important in this regard. Under such circumstances the fortunes of France and its adversaries rested on the size and efficiency of their armed forces, in what amounted to a struggle for existential stakes. The result was a quarter century of bloody warfare before the enemies of France finally succeeded in imposing a new political order in Europe.

The eighteenth century

The conduct of war before 1789 was restrained in character chiefly because bitter ideological divisions were absent from European politics. States certainly went to war with each other on a frequent basis. Crucially, however, they also accepted the concept of dynastic legitimacy and the restraints this imposed on foreign policy. Generally speaking, a monarch’s right to rule was still regarded as divinely sanctioned and therefore inviolate. In consequence, wars were not conducted for political goals of a kind that we would today term ‘regime change’. Instead, monarchs typically resorted to war for the rather more modest purpose of territorial aggrandizement. Land remained the key form of wealth in early-modern Europe, and the question of who owned what was therefore of great importance to dynastic fortunes. Important as the question was, however, it was frequently difficult to answer definitively. The complex webs of intermarriage that had bound the European dynasties together over many centuries could frequently give rise to competing claims over territory, not least in the event of a succession crisis. In cases where dynastic claims collided, war was viewed as an acceptable option for resolving the matter.

There were of course always exceptions to the rule, with Frederick II of Prussia being a conspicuous example in this regard. Frederick’s dynastic claims over Silesia and Saxony were tenuous, to say the least, and his seizure of them by force (in 1740 and 1756 respectively) provoked widespread outrage. Nevertheless, the exceptional character of these annexations was not mirrored in the response it elicited from the European powers that went to war against the Prussian ‘rogue’ state. Frederick’s transgressions notwithstanding, the Hohenzollern dynasty’s legitimacy could not be ignored by other right-thinking monarchs. Thus their political purpose in making war against him was not to overthrow him but merely to deprive him of his ill-gotten acquisitions and to cut him down to size.¹

Poland, on the other hand, did disappear from the political map in 1795, a victim of partition by her more powerful neighbours. Although widely condemned at the time, partition was more readily conceivable in this particular case, however, because the Polish king had long been elected by a nobility who represented the real power in the land. As such, there was no dynastic legitimacy to preserve in the strict sense of the word. Thus when Stanislaw August Poniatowski (r. 1764–95) unexpectedly championed the introduction of a constitution designed to dilute the power of the nobility, they were quick to invite foreign intervention. Poland’s neighbours were happy to oblige. Not only was there territory to be had, but progressive constitutions were decidedly worrisome in the immediate wake of the French Revolution.

Although exceptions such as these qualify the general rule, it should be remembered that Frederick’s exploits and Poland’s sad fate stand out precisely because they were exceptional cases. They were much commented on at the time and subsequently. In a sense, therefore, their prominence in the historical record reinforces the point that eighteenth-century wars were normally fought for limited political objectives.

Moving, now, to the other side of the ends-means equation, the slender character of the military resources available to eighteenth-century states also exerted an important restraining influence on warfare. In an age before mass politics, when the rarefied dynastic concerns of monarchs did little or nothing to capture the imagination of their subjects, the latter had either to be paid from finite treasuries or coerced into serving as soldiers. Casualties were correspondingly difficult and expensive to replace, which was a serious consideration when a few hours of battle routinely killed or wounded around one-third of the soldiers involved.² This made armies into precious commodities that were not to be risked lightly.

This combination of limited political objectives and precious military means encouraged a prudent form of strategizing that held no place for the single-minded pursuit of battle. Indeed, from a strategic perspective, the risks associated with resorting to battle tended to loom disproportionately large when set against the less-than-vital character of the territorial disputes that gave rise to them. This in turn encouraged the view that the epitome of good generalship consisted not in falling upon one’s enemy at the first opportunity, but in artful manoeuvre designed to place him in a position from which he must either give battle on disadvantageous terms or retreat. Given the limited political stakes involved, an enemy who was placed at such a disadvantage was likely to retreat rather than fight, thereby ceding part of the territory under dispute. Considerations of this type led Maurice de Saxe to declare that

I do not favor pitched battles, especially at the beginning of a war, and I am convinced that a skillful general could make war all his life without being forced into one. . . . I do not mean to say by this that when an opportunity occurs to crush the enemy that he should not be attacked, nor that advantage should not be taken of his mistakes. But I do mean that war can be made without leaving anything to chance. And this is the highest point of perfection and skill in a general.³

For his part, Frederick II greatly admired de Saxe but nevertheless departed from him on the matter of battle’s necessity. ‘War’ he declared, ‘is decided only by battles, and it is not finished except by them.’ But Frederick, as we have already observed, was an exception in all such matters. Moreover, even he remained circumspect on the question of when to give battle, ‘which should be done opportunely and with all the advantages on your side.’⁴

Far from being the epitome of military art, therefore, the precipitate resort to battle was typically regarded as a symptom of poor generalship. It might occasionally prove possible to punish an adversary’s mistakes in the most severe manner, and battle might otherwise prove necessary in order to terminate a war outright. But under other circumstances a good general should find battle neither necessary nor desirable, and should seek to profit from the fact that his adversary would likewise consider it neither necessary nor desirable. Strategy, in other words, displayed a decidedly coercive character, the object of the exercise being to manoeuvre one’s opponent into a situation where the acceptance of battle would most likely result in disproportionate costs on his part. As such it represented an appeal to the power of rational cost-benefit calculation, and in this regard faithfully echoed the prevailing Enlightenment concern with subordinating human affairs to the dictates of reason.

Developments in military technique during this period can likewise readily be understood within this Enlightenment framework. For example, the organization of armies into independent ‘divisions’ helped make the whole easier to manoeuvre than had previously been the case, while the introduction of standardized weapon designs simplified problems of maintenance and supply. Similarly, the burgeoning literature on the ‘art’ of war (of which de Saxe’s work was an early example) contained various attempts to formalize the operational aspects of manoeuvre, rendering it more certain in its effects vis-à-vis one’s adversary. In short, the thrust of military innovation was intended to rescue warfare from the ‘bloody and conjectural’ status that Voltaire is said to have assigned it.⁵ The idea was to render war less susceptible to the influence of friction – to permit its being ‘made without leaving anything to chance’ – and thereby creating a more efficient instrument for the settlement of political disputes. Technical developments of this kind were not, therefore, intended to produce dramatic increases in the scale and scope of the violence associated with war. Rather, their desired effect was to rationalize the conduct of war within the restrictive framework of limited political objectives occasioned by dynastic disputes.

In the course of events, however, military technique would play a far more important role in shaping the character of warfare than had hitherto been imagined. For with the French Revolution came the abandonment of traditional political restraints on the formulation of strategic objectives. Under such conditions, the conduct of war was destined to be limited only by the resources available to the belligerent states along with their ability to employ them efficiently. If in the process warfare became somewhat less conjectural in its conduct, it also became far bloodier in its results.

The French Revolution

The origins and course of the French Revolution need not detain us here. What is important for our purposes is that it resulted in the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy, and its replacement with a republican system of government. This development was highly significant because French republicanism derived its sovereignty from the people, and therefore recognized nothing sacred in the institution of monarchy. As one of the chief ideologues of the Revolution, the Abbé de Sieyès, put it: ‘The nation exists before everything, it is the origin of everything. Its will is always legal, it is the law itself. Before it and above it there is only natural law.’⁶ One can hardly imagine a more damning indictment of monarchy, an institution that was commonly understood to operate in exactly that space between nation and natural law that Sieyès was now claiming did not exist. Indeed it was for this reason that the great conservative thinker, Edmund Burke, felt moved to characterize the revolutionary wars as a struggle involving

the partizans of the antient, civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which means to change them all. It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire.

From this he concluded that ‘this new system of robbery in France, cannot be rendered safe by any art; that it must be destroyed, or that it will destroy all Europe.’⁷ Under such conditions the limited political aims that had previously reflected the restrained nature of dynastic squabbles did indeed give way to extreme efforts intended to erase the opposing ideology – a development that would in time exert an equally extreme influence over the character of strategy.

War conducted for existential stakes could only be won by one side or the other being rendered defenceless. Such conditions provided no occasion for politics to exert a restraining effect on the formulation of strategic objectives, which therefore extended to destroying the enemy’s armed forces in battle. To seek anything less was merely to leave in place a mortal threat to oneself, and thus the battle of annihilation became the necessary goal of strategy rather than the recourse of poor or unlucky generals. Thus, whereas the wars of Frederick II resulted in just 12 major battles (involving a total of at least 100,000 soldiers), the wars consequent on the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rise to power resulted in no fewer than 49 such battles.⁸

Not surprisingly, the logic of the new situation took some little time to filter down to the level of strategic practice, especially among the enemies of France who still habitually thought in terms of manoeuvre and the dominance of territorial objectives, and who were still necessarily concerned to minimize the losses inflicted on their precious long-service armies. This, in turn, could produce a dangerous disjuncture between political and strategic goals, as was notably the case at Valmy in 1792.

The battle of Valmy was the result of a combined Austro- Prussian effort conducted with the express purpose of crushing the revolution and restoring Louis XVI to the throne of France. To this end, a powerful force of Austrian and Prussian troops was concentrated on the Rhine, under the command of the Duke of Brunswick. The troops were considered to be Europe’s best – long-service professionals possessed of considerable experience. Moreover, Brunswick himself was commonly understood to be one of the greatest generals of the age. A veteran of the Seven Years’ War, he instantiated the eighteenth-century model of skill at manoeuvre tempered with a prudent sense of caution.

To make matters even worse for the French, when Brunswick commenced his march westwards the best that could be interposed between him and Paris was a disorganized assemblage of levies, bolstered by a rather more technically proficient contingent of artillery. Nevertheless, the French general in chief, Charles François Dumouriez, quickly grasped the grave threat posed to the Revolution and was determined on making a stand and forcing the issue: there would be no ceding ground along the route to Paris for him. This made it easier for Brunswick to envelop him, and matters would have gone badly indeed for Dumouriez but for the timely intervention of General François Christophe Kellerman whose hastily committed forces were used to extend the threatened French flank, thereby producing a head-on encounter with the Austro-Prussian army. At this point Brunswick’s professionally ingrained sense of caution came to the fore. Having failed to dislodge his adversary by dint of manoeuvre, he was faced with the prospect of attempting to destroy him under less than ideal conditions. He subsequently essayed a couple of desultory frontal assaults that failed to break the French line and that cost him some hundreds of casualties. Had he continued in this manner he might well have succeeded in destroying the opposition. The cost to his valuable army would likely have been substantial, but the route to Paris would have been open and the revolution doomed. Brunswick’s heart was not in the fight, however. Having been repulsed, he preferred to preserve his command for another day rather than risk great losses, even though these might well have been considered justified by the political stakes. ‘Hier schlagen wir nicht’ (We will not fight here), he observed as he retired from the field in good order, thereby providing the revolution with an opportunity to draw breath and fight on under more favourable conditions.⁹

In the event, it was the French who first realized the logical consequences of the new political conditions as they pertained to the formulation of strategic objectives. Indeed, it was in this context that Lazare Carnot famously exhorted his generals to conduct operations intended to destroy the enemy’s armed forces.

It is evident [he claimed] that we cannot win the war in this campaign without major battles because, through lesser operations, we would succeed only in destroying part of the enemy army, which would retain the means to attack us again the following year, and thus prolong the state of hostilities. We must, therefore, mount a most vigorous offensive campaign.¹⁰

Not surprisingly, this new emphasis on battle and destruction proved very expensive in terms of casualties. On the other hand, the popular character of the new Republic enabled it to raise unprecedented numbers of citizen soldiers from a (more or less) enthusiastic manpower base via mass conscription. Emergency legislation in 1793 introduced a levée en masse, as a result of which the size of the French army approached the three quarters of a million mark. Thereafter a more carefully organized system was developed in order to place conscription on a more sustainable basis. So long as the necessary manpower could be found, therefore, the French war effort would be constrained only by the ability of its generals to achieve the kind of crushing military victories on which the Republic’s survival was considered to rest.

The Republic’s adoption of a battle-seeking strategy sustained by mass conscription came as a shock to the enemies of France. And yet for all that, experienced generalship – a clear sense of what was operationally feasible in the face of friction’s confounding influence – could still best an adversary whose chief advantage lay in a firm purpose bolstered by insensitivity to the costs associated with bold action. Superior technique could, in other words, still prevail over numbers and enthusiasm, as was notably demonstrated by Archduke Charles of Austria who, despite his cautious style, succeeded in inflicting a series of defeats on the French during the 1790s. Thus the new revolutionary armies were by no means everywhere successful despite the fact that, when they failed, their u...