New Directions in Strategic Thinking

Robert O'Neill, D.M. Horner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367621537
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000263022
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book, first published in 1981, examines the broader aspects of international strategic relations, and analyses Cold War developments within particular nations, fields of warfare and areas of political-military interaction. The role of force in international society changed as the nuclear deadlock between the superpowers continued, with military forces being deployed for political purposes in situations only just short of war. The balance between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces also changed as American technology increased and short-range nuclear missiles were deployed in Europe. This book also examines the development of strategic thinking in China, Japan and India, as well as insurgency in the Third World, so often the site for proxy superpower conflict.

1
Strategic Thinking Since 1945

THEODORE ROPP

Makers of Modern Strategy Revisited

Carl von Clausewitz would have been only mildly surprised at an Antipodean bicentennial celebration of his birth on June 1, 1780. Nor would he have been surprised to find his “nuggets” On War being used to test those “complete systems” and “comprehensive doctrines” which he did not try to construct for himself from his carefully arranged “materials”. Born in the 1770–89 decades when associates of the most intellectual of the Great Captains were working his maxims into a “puzzle-solving” system, Clausewitz saw it destroyed in the “crisis” of 1790–1809. After playing a significant part in its reconstruction in the decades of 1810–1829, he spent much of his time from 1818 to 1827 reflecting and writing on those mixtures of traditional and recently traumatic experiences and prophecies which his hieratic, disciplined, tradition-minded guild funds into its peacetime rules, balances, and sciences of war.

The years since Clausewitz’s death on November 16, 1831 have seen two more military intellectual crises. They are related to the sixty-year major cycles of war and peace in Quincy Wright’s Study of War (1964). Their crisis, paradigm-adaptation or reconstruction, and puzzle-solving phases are analogous to those in Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The dates of the major wars and crises which began in 1792, 1854, and 1914 are not hard to convert into a two-decade model of military intellectual change within a civilization which, since Clausewitz’s birth, has been expanding, industrializing, and increasing the scale and intensity of war, of peacetime preparations for it, and of what are now called strategic studies. If a crisis in Western strategic thought arrived on schedule for 1970–1989, it reflected the 1950–1969 puzzle-solvers’ perceived inability to connect their post-Korean War conventional war formulas with those they had hastily constructed to solve the new puzzles of nuclear and unconventional warfare. And while popular military historians still deal with Great Captains, Battles, and Empires, even they now lard their traditional epics with analyses of the men, institutions, and ideas which they epitomize.

Peacetime puzzle-solvers deal first with their Most Recent Traumatic Experiences in the language of the Most Recent Winners. But each of the resulting systems for winning the last war better still reflects a connected set of ideas about societies, states, and military power, or, in Robert E. Osgood’s and Robert W. Tucker’s terms, about Force, Order, and Justice (1967). Though their balance sheets are often compared to those of war gaming, Clausewitz compared them to those of “commerce”, or “still closer to politics, … a kind of commerce on a larger scale”. But the balance sheets of military, political, and commercial calculations are never quite comparable. The pay-offs are in different coin; assets on one may even be liabilities on another. Like those internal balances which military strategists must cast between war’s “remarkable trinity … of primordial violence … the play of chance and probability; … [and] policy, which makes it subject to reason alone”, each entry reflects separate “codes of law, deep-rooted in their subJect and yet variable in their relationship to one another. (Clausewitz, 1961, pp. 89, 149).

Many of the resulting intellectual problems are discussed in a forthcoming expansion of and commentary on Edward Meade Earle’s Makers of Modem Strategy (1943).¹ So a summary of these earlier cycles of strategic thinking may help to chart those developments which made Makers, Modern, and Strategy look rather different in 1980 than in 1943. There had been no entry for strategy — from the Greek word for general - in Charles James’s New and Enlarged Military Dictionary (1802). Those by Jomini and Clausewitz combined strategem — “the peculiar talent” of the French “to secure their victories more by science than by hardihood” - and stratarithometry — “the art of drawing up an army”. They added maxims on the art of generalship drawn from histories, biographies, craft manuals, and letters of advice to princes written as early as the Fifth Century B.C. The military crises of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, like those of the contemporary Warring States of China, had produced itinerant teachers, advisers, and handbooks on many aspects of war. That strategems from writers as distant as Xenophon or Sun Tzu were still found in the works of Frederick the Great reflected the technical, economic, and military limitations of analogous agrarian societies, limitations traditionally compounded by cumulative seasonal labor investments in fixed fortifications.

The Enlightened Despots’ strategic calculations had indeed been commercial. “Each government”, Clausewitz remarked, “owned and managed a great estate that it constantly endeavored to enlarge. Their means of waging war … consist [ed] of the money in their coffers and of such idle vagabonds as they could lay their hands on”. Since “each could estimate the other side’s potential in terms both of numbers and time”, a Great Captain such as Frederick with “relatively limited but highly efficient forces” could turn a “small state into a great monarchy”. Clausewitz had no formula for this. But the “fact that a whole range of propositions can be demonstrated without difficulty: the defense is the stronger form of fighting with the negative purpose, attack the weaker form with the positive purpose … that strategic successes can be traced back to certain turning points”, etc. meant that his maxims would bolster most of those staff planning systems which secured that “superiority of numbers” which was “the most common element in victory” in the great wars which began in 1792, 1854, and 1914. (Clausewitz, 1961, pp. 71, 194, 589).

The Prussian General Staff’s successes in 1866 and 1870 made those training and logistics specialists almost wholly responsible for postwar strategic planning. Rudolph von Caemmerer’s Development of Strategical Science during the Nineteenth Century (1904) fairly apportions credits to Frederick, Napoleon, Jomini, Clausewitz, and Helmuth von Moltke. But the planners’ increased prestige and isolation had made it harder for “the inquiring … mind” with “the comprehensive rather than the specialized approach” to recognize new peacetime factors which they “would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection”. Like Montesquieu, whom he was emulating, Clausewitz felt that every strategist’s calculations “must be governed by the particular characteristics of his own position … the spirit of the age … and the nature of war itself”. These would change the materials entered in the columns which he labelled as the moral, physical, mathematical, geographical, and statistical Elements of Strategy. (Clausewitz, 1961, pp. 102, 112, 183, 594).

Ferdinand Foch’s Principles of War (1903) stressed “preparation … and mass multiplied by impulsion” to break “the moral and material forces of the enemy” in battle. Jomini’s geometry of throwing “an army, successively, upon the decisive point of a theatre of war and also upon the communications of the enemy” demanded as many men deployed as quickly at the decisive point as possible. In war that was still becoming, in Foch’s words, “more and more national… more and more powerful… more and more impassioned”, the “ever increasing predominance of the human factor” would keep the offensive moving. So French revenge and German epics stressed the herioc offensive. Neo-Darwinist explanations for their new Empires stroked all Western egos. Army strategists hardly examined Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Darwinist codification of Eighteenth Century naval strategic maxims. And neither military nor maritime strategy and tactics were officially questioned by independent scientific or foreign policy specialists. “Competent only by definition” in their new imperial bureaucracies, Europe’s General Staffs had lost touch with what Guilio Douhet was to call “the living, acting, operating nation”. (Foch, 1921, pp. 95–96, 111, 221–222; Jomini, 1947, pp. 39–41; Douhet, 1943, p. 125)’.

A soldier needs peacetime intellectual security. He can practice his profession only by Douhet’s “glance at the past”, look at the present, and leap into the future. But this may upset doctrines which have become dogmas, and which readily suppress doubts and doubters. So peacetime strategists solve old puzzles while doubters may become unsung prophets. During the decades of 1770–1789, the Comte de Guibert had asked in 1772 what would happen if a people “arose in Europe, vigorous in spirit, in resources, and in government” with “a national militia, a fixed plan of aggrandizement, and … a cheap war-making system, which subsists on its victories and is not reduced to laying down its arms by financial considerations”. (Guibert, 1803, p. 16). Disowned by Guibert himself after he had met Frederick, this guess was so accurate that the doubters of 1830–1849 were chiefly concerned with the loyalty, logistics, and command of conscripted Napoleonic “national militias”.

In 1890—1909 the doubts were technical, economic, and political. Soldiers’ doubts about the tactical effects of their new rapid fire weapons were collected by the Polish Jewish economist and banker Ivan S. Bloch in six statistical volumes in The Future of War in its Technical, Economic, and Political Relations (1898). The new weapons would produce tactical and strategical deadlock, economic collapse, and political revolution. War had become politically impossible. Bloch’s ideas were repressed, but they had some influence on the calling of the First Hague Conference and on later statistical studies of modern warfare. The first international one was set up in Berne by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1911. It was to study war “scientifically, and, as far as possible, without preJudice either for or against war”, at a time when few of the subJects for its Commissions - on the Economic and Historical Causes and Effects of War, Armaments in Time of Peace, and Unifying Influences in International Life — were seen as part of the concerns of strategic science. (Clark, 1916, pp. vii-viii).

Sixty-six years after its 1914 debacle, historians are still classifying scientific strategy’s critics and crisis suggestions about power balances, arms control, strategy, and tactics. F.W. Lanchester had a mathematical formula for determining the effectiveness of Aircraft in Warfare (1917). Douhet thought that they could “disintegrate nations”. J.F.C. Fuller, B.H. Liddell Hart and others devised mechanized ground Blitzkriegs; others new submarine and amphibious tactics. Fuller thought that “the business of industrialized war demanded: … (1) political authority; (2) economic self-sufficiency; (3) national discipline … (4) machine weapons, and peacetime prepara tions”. (1943, p. 35). Each great power adJusted its strategy accordingly during the Long Armistice. Once strategy had again become a Joint political-military enterprise, both natural and social scientists contributed to the adJustments which led to the more-than-Napoleonic Western and Soviet victories of 1945. But the Great War idea that war was too serious a business to be left to the generals was not always replaced by the idea that it was too important to be left to any single group of either leaders or followers.

The Greening of the Military Intellectuals

The triumphs of the natural scientists and the modest victories of the social ones made strategic studies intellectually and militarily respectable. Their professors lunched with chancellors and generals, rather than with draymen and football coaches. Gaming and behavioural scientists helped Great Captains cope with scientific and technological innovation. The 1950—1969 decades produced a body of American social scientific theory - by Kenneth Boulding, Charles J. Hitch, Samuel P. Huntington, Morris Janowitz, Robert E. Osgood, Thomas C. Schelling, et al. - which helped to make postwar American strategy. But these makers were less personally influential than the Fullers or Liddell Harts of the previous decades. And the social sciences often taught in the military versions of strategic studies could be as dogmatic as the battle histories from which Foch had drawn his Principles of War.

The “Moral” columns of their strategic balance sheets were often as unsophisticated as those which had overstressed Napoleon’s maxim that morale is to material as three is to one. These columns estimate “the skill of the commander, the experience and courage of the troops, and their patriotic spirit”. Clausewitz knew that these were partially independent variables. “The wisest course is not to underrate any of them”. There is too much “historical evidence of the unmistakable effectiveness of all three.” (Clausewitz, 1961, pp. 183, 186). But som.e American balances treated the National Purpose and National Will like the Gross National Product, to be allocated by strategists to defend particular National Interests without any feedback into the National Will or Purpose. And their Traumatic Experiences with Western charismatic leaders in the 1930—1949 decades had made Communist, Social Democratic, and Liberal conflict managers reluctant to see how the rising expectations of the continuing democratic, national, and industrial revolutions might further change the “Moral” balances. Here A.J.P. Taylorish guilt over those combinations of containment and appeasement which had allegedly driven the industrial “have-nots” to war easily combined with imperialist guilt towards their new-free “sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child”.

Material on the last Great Captains was overwhelming in volume and tendentiousness. Everyone soon knew all about Adolf, Monty, and Ike, less about Joe and Mao than about Charlemagne and Sun Tzu. With strategy so collectivized that historians were still arguing over the personal roles of Churchill and Lloyd George or the military genius of such amateurs as Smuts, Lawrence, Monash, and Trotsky, it was hardly time to study the German General Staff’s performance in both wars as collective examples of Norman F. Dixon’s work On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (1973). Nor have those American intellectuals, politicians, and soldiers who spread their strategic incompetence over several levels of the conflict spectrum during the late 1960’s been collectively Clioanalyzed in this fashion.

The idea of a conflict spectrum was developed from the experience of Hiroshima, the early Cold War, and the Korean War. The concept was not new. It had been implicit in Clausewitz’s and other strategists’ comments on limited, people’s, and Small Wars, for which the British strategist C.E. Callwell had produced a War Office handbook in 1896. But the 1950–1969 decade’s first major change in the science of war was to replace the strategic calculations of Napoleonic warfare by as many as six sets of trial balances: for nuclear, conventional, limited, guerrilla, sub-national, and diplomatic coercion. And if some of the Berne Conference suggestions seemed strange to military strategists in 1911, subJects ranging from “Super-Power Policies and World Order” to “Sub-National Violence” would have again seemed stranger to military than to social scientists in the 1930’s. China’s accounting system, which ignorant Western strategists could only label “unconventional”, eventually presented the multi-national alliances which soon filled the nationally-fragmented and strategically-unified international conflict arena with several more types of strategic calculation. Assets on one sheet might even be liabilities on another. Investment and cash flow problems increasingly depended on the accountant’s own estimate of his “own position … the spirit of the age … and the nature of war itself”. The rules by which military guildsmen had conducted wars had become separate palimpsests. Each practitioner had to read his directions with whatever part of the light spectrum he thought his society and guild chapter wanted him to use.

The Biggest Winner usually sets the tone of postwar strategic debate. So 1950—1969’s topics and language tended to be as Anglo-American as they had once been French and German. The past decades’ Most Traumatic Experiences were now embedded in such political codewords as Depression, Isolation, Appeasement, Maginot Line, Blitzkrieg, Pearl Harbor, Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Cold War. The nearly simultaneous Anglo-American decisions for demobilization and deterrence posed the first puzzles, established the first balance sheets for nuclear warfare, and largely determined their relations to the traditional balances of conventional and limited war. Anglo-American military scientific think tanks - institutionalized in the Rand Corporation and internationalized in the Institute for Strategic Studies - had already solved the puzzles posed by the Manhattan Project and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Whether their later intellectual crisis was due to the complexity of the new puzzles which they had to solve, to their overuse of statistical analysis, or to the specialization and dogmatism which came with too much success too soon is unanswerable. But by 1970 some gulfs seemed clearly apparent, to use Clausewitz’s analogy, between the “analytical labyrinth” of some specialized military intellectuals and the strategic “facts of life”. (Clausewitz, 1961, p. 183).

There was little immediate debate on the Anglo-American shift to the strategic defensive at “the culminating point of victory”. Defensive firepower had led Bloch to conclude that war had become economically and politically impossible. Now technological “destruction by air” had become “too cheap and easy”.² (Arnold, 1963, p. 32). Its long-term implications were discussed in Bernard Brodie’s Absolute Weapons (1946). But natural scientists, except for P.M.S. Blackett, mostly turned to nuclear technology’s puzzles, while social and military scientists turned to those of political and economic recovery, and of peacetime military organization and administration. The Korean “police action” solidified these short-term strategic solutions. Though China had been added to the balance, containment, deterrence, and a less total post-Korean War demobilization still fitted Anglo-American political, economic, and territorial interests. The end of the Anglo-American bomber and nuclear monopolies had been accounted for. The speed of Russian technological catch-up and of Western European and Japanese recovery re-enforced American views of machines as the keys to security and prosperity. For the decades of 1950–1960 they bought the West about as much security and prosperity as could have been reasonably expected. And, as Brodie, the most distinguished American writer on Strategy in the Missile Age admitted in his Clausewitzian War and Politics (1973), they were used with “critical restraint with respect to anything that might involve China or the Soviet Union … despite the fact that the cost of that restraint was humiliation and military failure”, (p. 432) (My term in international relations is “viable chaos”.).

As Anglo-American strategists became absorbed in puzzle-solving, they wrote fewer general works. Fuller’s last Conduct of War (1961) gave little support to Liddell Hart’s ultimate ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Strategic Thinking Since 1945
• Section One: Concepts Governing Super-Power Policies and World Order
• Section Two: The Strategic Thinking of the Asian Great Powers
• Section Three: The Development of Concepts Governing Non-Nuclear Warfare
• Section Four: Political Problems in the Management and Application of Military Force
• Conclusions: Of Means and Ends
• Notes
• References
• Index