Military Power

Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle

Stephen Biddle

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400837823
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

In war, do mass and materiel matter most? Will states with the largest, best equipped, information-technology-rich militaries invariably win? The prevailing answer today among both scholars and policymakers is yes. But this is to overlook force employment, or the doctrine and tactics by which materiel is actually used. In a landmark reconception of battle and war, this book provides a systematic account of how force employment interacts with materiel to produce real combat outcomes. Stephen Biddle argues that force employment is central to modern war, becoming increasingly important since 1900 as the key to surviving ever more lethal weaponry. Technological change produces opposite effects depending on how forces are employed; to focus only on materiel is thus to risk major error--with serious consequences for both policy and scholarship.
In clear, fluent prose, Biddle provides a systematic account of force employment's role and shows how this account holds up under rigorous, multimethod testing. The results challenge a wide variety of standard views, from current expectations for a revolution in military affairs to mainstream scholarship in international relations and orthodox interpretations of modern military history. Military Power will have a resounding impact on both scholarship in the field and on policy debates over the future of warfare, the size of the military, and the makeup of the defense budget.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

WHAT CAUSES VICTORY and defeat in battle? Why do the winners win and the losers lose? What makes some campaigns bloody stalemates and others apparent cakewalks? How can states maximize their odds of winning and minimize their casualties? And are the answers changing in the information age? Will new technology or changing geopolitics transform warfare, creating new winners—and new losers—on the battlefields of the future?

These are life-and-death questions, and not just for soldiers. They affect everyone: from infantrymen on the battlefield to office workers in the World Trade Center to entire nations and peoples. German victories in Poland and France condemned millions of French and Polish Jews to the gas chambers in World War II. Soviet victories in 1944–5 consigned a generation of East Europeans to a Communist oppression that was spared those who were reached first by American and British armies. The trench stalemate of 1914–18 sentenced millions to deaths that a quicker victory would have averted and ruined economies across Europe. By exhausting some countries and embittering others, it shaped the subsequent politics of the twentieth century. Today’s world would be very different if European generals had fought differently in 1914–18. Defeat in battle has meant occupation and a conqueror’s rule for nations from France to Poland and from Japan to Indonesia. Today, swift victory in a war against fundamentalist terrorism could spare the lives of thousands—or millions—in the West and Islam; failure could bring consequences too horrible to contemplate.

With so much at stake, great effort has been spent on these questions. The answers, however, often fall short.

As recently as 1991, a massive effort using state-of-the-art methods and the nation’s best analysts radically overestimated U.S. losses in the upcoming Gulf War. The prewar congressional debate hinged on casualty expectations; these were widely seen as the key to Congress’s vote on the use of force. With so much at stake, no effort was spared to achieve realistic estimates: prominent academics, government analysts, and senior military officials gave testimony using methods ranging from computer models to historical analogies to professional military judgment. Virtually all were way off. Even the closest estimate overshot the actual casualty count by more than a factor of two. The next best missed by a factor of six. The majority were off by more than an order of magnitude; official estimates were reportedly over by at least that much; while some official projections erred by a factor of over 200.¹

The pre-Gulf war debate was hardly unique, however. For over a century, soldiers and diplomats have analyzed military balances, yet the subsequent fighting has often surprised both sides. In 1914, for example, Europeans expected a short, decisive war of movement. None foresaw a nearly four-year trench stalemate—if they had, the war might never have happened.² In 1940 Allied leaders were astonished by the Germans’ lightning victory over France. They had expected something closer to the trench warfare of 1914–18; even the victors were surprised, with most German planners expecting an extended war of attrition in France and the Low Countries.³ In 1973 both Israelis and Arabs alike were stunned by the October War’s staggering losses, which forced Israel to beg emergency aid from the United States and spurred a wave of postwar pronouncements that tanks were now doomed, given their apparent vulnerability to guided missiles.⁴ By the mid-1970s, tanks were widely seen as dinosaurs, the next generation of obsolete weapon to follow the horse cavalry or the battleship. Yet this, too, proved wrong: by the mid-1990s, the M1 tank was widely hailed as an invincible “King of the Killing Zone” after its nearly casualty-free performance in the Gulf War.⁵

Academics have done no better. Military balance estimates are central to modern political science. Much of our current understanding of international politics rests on the assumption that state behavior is shaped by the threat of war and the pursuit of military capability. The empirical study of politics thus depends on measures of capability, which play a pivotal role in the war causation, arms racing, alliance formation, conflict duration, crisis escalation, or deterrence literatures, among others.⁶ Yet the standard capability measures at the heart of all this are actually no better than coin flips at predicting real military outcomes.⁷ An enormous scholarly edifice thus rests on very shaky foundations.

We must—and can—do better. But real improvement will require a new approach.

Today, most analyses are either rigorous but narrow, or broad but unrigorous. Mathematical models of combat, for example, are rigorous but typically focus on material alone: how many troops or weapons do the two sides have, and how good is their equipment?⁸ By contrast, holistic assessments consider issues such as strategy, tactics, morale, combat motivation, or leadership as well as just materiel but treat these variables much less systematically. Real progress demands rigor and breadth: a systematic treatment of both material and nonmaterial variables, backed up with a combination of empirical evidence and careful deductive reasoning. Below I advance such an analysis for one key nonmaterial variable: force employment, or the doctrine and tactics by which armies use their materiel in the field.

I hold that a particular pattern of force employment—the modern system—has been pivotal in the twentieth century and is likely to remain so. I argue that since at least 1900, the dominant technological fact of the modern battlefield has been increasing lethality. Even by 1914, firepower had become so lethal that exposed mass movement in the open had become suicidal. Subsequent technological change has only increased the range over which exposure can be fatal. To perform meaningful military missions in the face of this storm of steel requires armies to reduce their exposure, and since 1918 the central means of doing so has been modern system force employment.⁹

The modern system is a tightly interrelated complex of cover, concealment, dispersion, suppression, small-unit independent maneuver, and combined arms at the tactical level, and depth, reserves, and differential concentration at the operational level of war. Taken together, these techniques sharply reduce vulnerability to even twenty-first century weapons and sensors. Where fully implemented, the modern system damps the effects of technological change and insulates its users from the full lethality of their opponents’ weapons.

Not everyone can master it, however. The modern system is extremely complex and poses painful political and social tradeoffs. While some have been able to surmount these challenges and implement the modern system fully, others have not. Militaries that fail to implement the modern system have been fully exposed to the firepower of modern weapons—with increasingly severe consequences as those weapons’ reach and lethality have expanded. The net result has thus been a growing gap in the real military power of states that can and cannot implement the modern system, but surprisingly little change over time in outcomes between mutually modern-system opponents.

The modern system is also essential to understanding the role of numerical preponderance in war. Many suppose that victory normally goes to the preponderant side. Without modern-system exposure reduction, however, armies cannot survive long enough to make their numbers tell. Superior numbers can be decisive or almost irrelevant depending on the two sides’ force employment. This in turn means that states’ relative economic, demographic, or industrial strength are poor indicators of real military power: gross resource advantages matter only if they can be exploited via modern-system force employment, and many states cannot do so.

If so, then to assess military power without taking force employment into account is to risk major error. Assessments focusing solely on materiel will radically overestimate well-equipped but poorly handled armies—such as the Iraqis in 1991—and underestimate poorly equipped but well-handled troops—such as the North Vietnamese in 1965–72. The same policy initiatives can have opposite effects depending on the two sides’ force employment. Typical ceteris paribus cost-effectiveness analyses can thus be dangerously misleading: a new weapon can look wonderful when a non–modern system opponent is assumed but terrible if the enemy uses its forces differently, and neither assumption will hold true all the time. In fact, analyses considering materiel alone may be little better than blind guesses.

The results challenge a wide variety of standard views, ranging from current U.S. defense policy and common projections for future warfare to mainstream international relations (IR) theory and orthodox interpretations of twentieth-century military history. The defense debate is increasingly focused on technology; most assume that in the information age, superior technology wins wars, fueling growing pressure to speed modernization by spending less on training and readiness. Official analyses reinforce this trend: official models that focus on materiel and exclude force employment overvalue the former and under-value the latter. Policy decisions informed by such models are thus likely to over-spend on modernization and force structure and underspend on the readiness and training needed for sound force employment. Similarly, threat assessments based on the numbers and types of hostile weapons are likely to overestimate real capability for enemies with modern equipment but limited skills but underestimate militaries with older equipment but high skills. Ensuing intervention and use-of-force decisions could produce overconfidence and overcommitment against ill-equipped but adept militaries but underconfidence and unnecessary caution against enemies with state-of-the-art weapons but little skill in their use.

Projections of future warfare are now dominated by the claim that technology is creating a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) in which the nature of military power is being transformed. In the future, it is held, long-range precision air and missile strikes will dominate warfare, ground forces will be reduced mostly to scouts, and the struggle for information supremacy will replace the breakthrough battle as the decisive issue for success. These views misunderstand the relationship between technology and force employment, however. Because RMA advocates misunderstand warfare prior to the 1990s, they misread the 1991 Gulf War as a radical departure; by projecting this mistake forward into the twenty-first century, they derive a case for a radical restructuring of U.S. defense policy that is neither necessary nor desirable.

For international relations theory, the weakness of simple material proxies poses serious problems. Military power plays a pervasive role in the study of international politics; in fact, much of modern IR theory amounts to a debate on its influence over state behavior. Yet all of this rests on very simplistic treatments of its nature and determinants. Theoretically, the literature relies on logically unsound, unitary notions of military capability that mask crucial tradeoffs. Empirically, the use of weak proxies undermines existing findings and suggests that the literature may have underestimated capability’s effects relative to audience costs, signaling, or resolve. Analyses of deterrence, power distribution, and polarity rest on especially thin ice given the weakness of the measures used to represent capability. The mercantilist position in international political economy is based on the proposition that economic preponderance conduces to military power, yet the relationship between economic strength and real capability is much weaker than commonly thought. More broadly, much of the empirical and theoretical literature will need to be revisited in light of a more meaningful measure of real capability.

The received view of modern military history centered on technology for much of the postwar era. The World War I trench stalemate was seen as the product of the industrial revolution in the machine gun, new artillery, and mass munition production. World War II was seen as a war of movement brought on by the tank, the airplane, and the radio. Postwar conflict was seen as overshadowed by the atom bomb.¹⁰ A more recent interpretation emphasizes preponderance: industrial coalition wars are held to turn on the size of the combatant economies, with victory going to the side that could outproduce the other, and with the conduct of operations taking a back seat to the battle for production.¹¹ I suggest, however, that force employment has played a more important role than either technology or preponderance for twentieth-century warfare. How forces are used is critical; to explain historical outcomes chiefly in terms of materiel is to misinterpret the major military events of the century.

The balance of this chapter supports these contentions in three steps. First, I define what I mean by military power, or “capability,” and justify my choice. Second, I discuss how I will explain capability and present some of the limitations of my analysis. Finally, I outline the book’s structure and provide a road map for what is to come.

WHAT IS “MILITARY POWER”?

My focus is on the military dimension of power. It is important to be clear on its nature and limits. State power embodies “soft” persuasive or attractive elements as well as its “hard” or military component.¹² Nor does military power in itself guarantee success in war. Militarily weak but resolute states can prevail over militarily strong but irresolute ones. War outcomes are products of more than just military power alone.

Moreover, military power (or “capability”) itself can mean different things in different contexts. Military forces, after all, do many things, ranging from defending national territory to invading other states, hunting down terrorists, coercing concessions, countering insurgencies, keeping the peace, enforcing economic sanctions, showing the flag, or maintaining domestic order. Proficiency in one or even several does not imply proficiency in them all: good defenders of national territory can make poor peacekeepers; forces that can defend national territory cannot necessarily conquer their neighbors.¹³ For any one mission, moreover, “success” can be defined very differently by different actors. Defenders of national territory may all value low casualties, short wars, and complete restoration of the status quo, but these goals often conflict with one another, and different defenders value them differently at the margin. Some would trade higher casualties and a longer war for complete reconquest of lost territory; others would not.¹⁴ Some would bomb an opponent for months to avoid losing friendly ground troops; others would invade quickly to shorten the war at the cost of heavier casualties.¹⁵ If capability is the ability to succeed at an assigned mission, different states will thus assess capability very differently for the same forces—no single, undifferentiated concept of “military capability” can apply to all conflicts in all places and times.

Any analysis must therefore focus on a subset of the tasks militaries perform, which are in turn a subset of the elements of state power. For my purposes, I concentrate on the mission of controlling territory in mid-to high-intensity continental warfare, and I define its accomplishment via three interconnected criteria: the ability to destroy hostile forces whil...