1.1 Introduction
One should not unquestioningly adopt this maxim by Carl von Clausewitz. Military history of the antiquity is useless only if one searches for detailed information on execution of battles. It is beneficial for students of the art of war who seek to penetrate the veil of time and see what could be learned from antiquity and how these lessons could be adopted and adapted to suit warfare of our times. As Dupuy (1987, p. xxii) argued, war is an observational science like astronomy. For the soldier the best laboratory is military history. Russian military tradition has relied heavily on historical operational analyses. Analytical study of the past was considered essential for predicting future developments in warfare (Adamsky 2010, p. 33). As Svechin (1992, p. 279) put it, “Work on military history and the art of war can improve our capabilities of drawing up good plans.” For Napoleon (1987, p. 81–82) tactics could be learned from treatises, but knowledge of strategy isThe further back one goes, the less useful military history becomes, growing poorer and barer at the same time. The history of antiquity is without doubt the most useless and barest of all. This uselessness is of course not absolute; it refers only to matters that depend on precise knowledge of the actual circumstances, or on the details in which warfare has changed. (Clausewitz 1989, p. 173)
If one cannot learn command of armies in praxis, the other option is to peruse how the “great captains” led their troops. The aspiring commander needs to model himself upon these examples and hopefully “learn to reject all maxims foreign to the principles of these great commanders.” (Napoleon 1987, p.82). Napoleon didn’t mean that war should be carried out by copying past history. His argument was that the basic principles of warfare remain intact.acquired by experience, and by studying the campaigns of all the great captains. Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, and Frederick, as well as Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar, have all acted upon the same principles. These have been: to keep their forces united; to leave no part unguarded; to seize with rapidity on important points.
This book focuses on the importance of meaning and management of time in the art of war and especially operational art. Theorists and pragmatists from different cultures and eras have been brought together to compare the roles of time and timing concerning the conduct of war in their writings. Views on warfare have greatly varied among different cultures. The art of war in Russian thought has traditionally been more of an ‘arithmetic’ type, based on calculations and strict rules. The German thinkers have tended to rely on overwhelming force to produce Wagnerian symphonies. The Greco-Roman culture used heavy tools to sculpt their military masterpieces and if the Oriental art of war reads like simplistic but deep poems of haiku, the French and the British have written their romances with the blood of their enemies and their own soldiers alike. There are numerous approaches to the art of war and this book will examine time as a factor in operational art. To quote Clausewitz again:
Time has a profound meaning in the dynamics of warfare but the relationship is more convoluted than would initially seem. Twice the forces, twice the speed is no formula for success. While since the days of Clausewitz it has become a matter of hours to transport troops from Berlin to Moscow, it remains true that every military operation has duration. As Vego (2009, p.III–58) writes, “Any movement in space requires time. Obviously, the longer the distance, the longer the time required to overcome the factor of space. Also, the greater the speed and mobility, the shorter the transit time.” This type of thinking about time and space was characteristic to the industrialized age. But especially in our information age, it is insufficient for any commander to satisfy himself with tackling only the problems related to the speed of movement of troops, since every activity requires time. Planning, decision-making, issuing orders, and executing given orders consume the time at the disposal of the commanders, their staffs, and their subordinates.When the strength and capability of armed forces are being calculated, time is apt to be treated as a factor in total strength on the analogy of dynamics. It is assumed in consequence that half the effort or half the total forces could achieve as much in two years as the whole could do in one. This assumption, which rests, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, at the basis of military planning, is entirely false. Like everything else in life, a military operation takes time. No one, obviously, can march from Vilna to Moscow in a week; but here there is no trace of that reciprocal relationship between time and energy that we could find in dynamics. Both belligerents need time; the question is only which of the two can expect to derive special advantages from it in the light of his own situation. (Clausewitz 1989, p. 597)
There are many maxims concerning proper timing in the art of war and operational art. Some remain constant as times change and some become obsolete as the ways and means of waging war develop. Leo VI (2010, p. 635) advised his general “to embark upon your expeditions at that time of the year when the harvest is ready.” This maxim is a product of its time and related to a certain type of army and its means of provisioning. It refers to an age when armies foraged and provisioned food from the civilian population and thus full granaries were essential. Such guidance suits only a relatively small army, since no region is agriculturally rich enough to feed a million-man mass army. As times change warfare follows. Therefore, old maxims have to be evaluated anew before they are accepted to shape doctrines. The principles of war don’t remain unaltered from one age of warfare to another. If two armies of equal strength, training, equipment, and mobility face each other, they likely need approximately the same amount of time to carry out their operations. Thus it remains a race in which one can gain the “special advantages” from his disposition and maximize the gains by utilizing time as effectively as possible. Every attempt must be made to win more time for oneself and deprive the enemy of his.
One of the reasons for writing this book comes from Liddell Hart’s idea of how one might understand war today and perhaps even envision its future outlook. The war of tomorrow is connected to the present way of war and this, in turn, is determined by the past. Evolution of warfare is a continuum.
Many proponents of revolution in military affairs (RMA), information war, network-centric war, cyberwar, and numerous others have fallen into this pit of isolating how war could technically be fought at a given time from the way it has been fought in the past. In the U.S. the RMA was seen as a revolution that consisted of technological drivers that created a shift from brute force to brain force (Strachan 2013, p. 47). The same hype has returned time after time. The outlook of warfare is determined by the level of technological and intellectual sophistication of the society that wages it, but the opponent may be on another level and thus abides to his own rules and worldview. An information society cannot effectively wage an information war with the entire spectrum of its high-tech arsenal against an agrarian society (Kagan 2006, p. 319–322). The most sophisticated cyber weapon is useless if the enemy lacks computers. Furthermore, there have been numerous occasions when one or all proponents have reverted during the course of a given war to ways and means of warfare of the past that may have seemed barbaric at the time.The future is moulded by the past. The best promise for the future lies in understanding, and applying, the lessons of the past. For that reason, in discussing the problems created by the current war, more light may come from tracing the whole course of the revolution in warfare than by dealing merely with the appearances of the moment. If we realize how the conditions of this war have come about, there may be some prospect of averting a more deadly recurrence. (Liddell Hart 1946, p. 76)
Ardant du Picq (1987, p. 130) argued that “The study of the past alone can give us a true perception of practical methods, and enable us to see how the soldier will inevitably fight tomorrow.” Even during the course of a single war warfare may change drastically. There is a continuous evolution of weapons and methods alike, but in a prolonged war high-technology weapons and other resources may be depleted and this affects the outlook of the war. Reading the famous military thinkers, one notices that many of them considered themselves as witnesses of revolutionary turning points. An example is Giulio Douhet’s (1999, p. 383) claim that “in the period of history through which we are passing, war is undergoing a profound and radical change in character and forms, as I shall show; so that the war of the future will be very different from all wars of the past.” For the authors their eras were separated from the past.
The fascinating thing about all turning points of history is that people at the time rarely recognize the importance of the moment. Warfare has its own turning points that shape the outlook of future wars. For Douhet (1999, p. 279), “the form of any war—and it is the form which is of primary interest to men of war—depends upon the technical means of war available.” We might or might not today live in a time that could in the future be characterized as a turning point—maybe the dawn of robotic and autonomous systems’ warfare. Or something completely different. Progress keeps speeding up and we need to keep up with the pace of “mechanical progress, whereby the latest product of to-day is obsolete to-morrow. (…) if we are to await mechanical finality we shall wait for all eternity” (Liddell Hart 1927, p. 13). Development will never stop as long as civilization prospers but its direction remains unfathomable.
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the deciding factors in warfare will be the intelligence, determination, will, and imagination of the human mind. Machines are tools and humans allocate their tasks. As we move from one age into another the outlook of warfare will inevitably change, but the essence of war remains immutab...The battle of machines, is this the ultimate goal in warfare? I do not think so, for a machine is but a means of waging war, a tool whereby men seek to impose their will upon each other. (…) Yet, whatever it be, it is the will and understanding of man which the machine forces man to accept. (Fuller 1923, p. 168)