Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age

Peter Paret, Gordon A. Craig, Felix Gilbert, Peter Paret, Gordon Craig, Felix Gilbert

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400835461
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The classic reference volume on the theory and practice of war The essays in this volume analyze war, its strategic characterisitics, and its political and social functions over the past five centuries. The diversity of its themes and the broad perspectives applied to them make the book a work of general history as much as a history of the theory and practice of war from the Renaissance to the present. Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age takes the first part of its title from an earlier collection of essays, published by Princeton University Press in 1943, which became a classic of historical scholarship. Three essays are repinted from the earlier book while four others have been extensively revised. The rest—twenty-two essays—are new.The subjects addressed range from major theorists and political and military leaders to impersonal forces. Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Marx and Engels are discussed, as are Napoleon, Churchill, and Mao. Other essays trace the interaction of theory and experience over generations—the evolution of American strategy, for instance, or the emergence of revolutionary war in the modern world. Still others analyze the strategy of particular conflicts—the First and Second World Wars—or the relationship between technology, policy, and war in the nuclear age. Whatever its theme, each essay places the specifics of military thought and action in their political, social, and economic environment. Together, the contributors have produced a book that reinterprets and illuminates war, one of the most powerful forces in history and one that cannot be controlled in the future without an understanding of its past.

PART ONE

The Origins of Modern War

1. Machiavelli: The Renaissance of the Art of War

FELIX GILBERT

IF THE VARIOUS campaigns and uprisings which have taken place in Italy have given the appearance that military ability has become extinct, the true reason is that the old methods of warfare were not good and no one has been able to find new ones. A man newly risen to power cannot acquire greater reputation than by discovering new rules and methods.” With these words from the famous last chapter of The Prince—“The exhortation to free Italy from the barbarians”—Machiavelli expressed an idea that recurs frequently in his writings: new military institutions and new processes in warfare are the most urgent and the most fundamental requirement of his time. Machiavelli is usually held to have introduced a new era, the modern era, in the development of political thought; his conviction that the military organization of contemporary Italian states needed changing was a driving force, a central concern behind all his reflections on the world of politics. It hardly goes too far to say that Machiavelli became a political thinker because he was a military thinker. His view of the military problems of his time patterned his entire political outlook.

I

Machiavelli occupies a unique position in the field of military thought because his ideas are based on a recognition of the link between the changes that occurred in military organization and the revolutionary developments that took place in the social and political sphere. To the ordinary observer, the connection between cause and effect in military developments seemed obvious. The discovery of gunpowder and the invention of firearms and artillery suggested that the armor of the knight was doomed and the collapse of the military organization of the Middle Ages, in which knights played the decisive role, had become inevitable. In his epic Orlando Furioso (1516), Ariosto, Machiavelli's contemporary and Italian compatriot, narrates how Orlando, his hero and the embodiment of all knightly virtues, was forced to face an enemy with a firearm:

At once the lightning flashes, shakes the ground,

The trembling bulwarks echo to the sound.

The pest, that never spends in vain its force,

But shatters all that dares oppose its course,

Whizzing impetus flies along the wind.

When the invincible Orlando succeeded in overcoming this redoubtable enemy and could choose from the rich booty:

…nothing would the champion bear away

From all the spoils of that victorious day

Save that device, whose unresisted force

Resembled thunder in its rapid course.

Then he sailed out on the ocean, plunging the weapon into the sea and exclaiming:

O! curs'd device! base implement of death!

Fram'd in the black Tartarean realms beneath!

By Beelzebub's malicious art design'd

To ruin all the race of human kind….

That ne'er again a knight by thee may dare,

Or dastard cowards, by thy help in war,

With vantage base, assault a nobler foe,

Here lie for ever in th' abyss below!¹

In short, if firearms had not been invented or could now be banished, the world of the knights would live on forever in all its splendor.

This dramatic explanation of the decline of the power of the knights hardly corresponds with reality. The history of military institutions cannot be separated from the general history of a period. The military organization of the Middle Ages formed an integral part of the medieval world, and declined when the medieval social structure disintegrated. Spiritually as well as economically the knight was a characteristic product of the Middle Ages. In a society in which God was envisaged as the head of a hierarchy, all secular activity had been given a religious meaning. The particular task of chivalry was to protect and defend the people of the country; in waging war the knight served God. He placed his military services at the disposal of his overlord, to whom the supervision of secular activities was entrusted by the church. Apart from its spiritual-religious side, however, the military bond between vassal and overlord also had its legal and economic aspects. The knight's land, the fief, was given to him by the overlord, and in accepting it, the knight assumed the obligation of military service to the overlord in wartime. It was an exchange of goods against services as was fitting to the agricultural structure and manorial system of the Middle Ages.

A religious concept of war as an act of rendering justice, the restriction of military service to the class of landholding knights and their retainers, and a moral-legal code which operated as the main bond holding the army together—these are the factors that determined the forms of military organization as well as the methods of war in the Middle Ages. The medieval army could be assembled only when a definite issue had arisen; it was ordered out for the purposes of a definite campaign and could be kept together only as long as this campaign lasted. The purely temporary character of military service as well as the equality of standing of the noble fighters made strict discipline difficult if not impossible. A battle frequently developed into fights between individual knights, and the outcome of such single combats between the leaders was decisive. Because warfare represented the fulfillment of a religious and moral duty, there was a strong inclination to conduct war and battles according to fixed rules and a settled code.

This military organization was a typical product of the whole social system of the Middle Ages, and any change in the foundations of the system had inevitable repercussions in the military field. When rapid expansion of a money economy shook the agricultural basis of medieval society the effects of this development on military institutions were immediate. In the military field those who were the protagonists of the new economic developments—the cities and the wealthy overlords—could make great use of the new opportunities: namely, to accept money payments instead of services, or to secure services by money rewards and salaries. The overlord could accept money payments from those who did not wish to fulfill their military obligations and, on the other hand, he could retain those knights who remained in his army beyond the period of war and for longer stretches of, time by promises of regular payments. Thus he was able to lay the foundations of a permanent and professional army and to free himself from dependence on his vassals. This transformation of the feudal army into a professional army, of the feudal state into the bureaucratic and absolutist state, was a very slow process and reached its climax only in the eighteenth century, but the true knightly spirit of the feudal armies died early and quickly. We possess an illustration of this change in a fifteenth-century ballad, describing life in the army of Charles the Bold of Burgundy.² In the fifteenth century Burgundy was a very recent political formation and the older powers considered it as a kind of parvenu; therefore, Charles the Bold was particularly eager to legitimize the existence of his state by strict observance of old traditions and customs, and became in effect the leader of a kind of romantic revival of chivalry. It is the more revealing, therefore, that in this ballad, “knight, squire, sergeant and vassal” have only one thought, namely, “when will the paymaster come?” Here, behind the glittering façade of chivalry, is disclosed the prosaic reality of material interests.

In the armies of the greater powers, France, Aragon, or England, old and modern elements, feudal levy and professionalism, were mixed; but the great money powers of the period, the Italian cities, came to rely entirely on professional soldiers. Since the fourteenth century, Italy had been the “promised land” of all knights to whom war was chiefly a means of making money. The single groups, the compagnie di ventura, were supplied and paid by their leaders, the condottieri, who offered their services to every power willing to pay their price. Thus, in Italy soldiering became a profession of its own, entirely separated from any other civilian activity.

The impact of the money economy provided a broader opportunity for recruiting armies. New classes of men, free from the preceding military traditions, were attracted into the services by money, and with this infiltration of new men, new weapons and new forms of fighting could be introduced and developed. Archers and infantry made their appearance in the French and English armies during the Hundred Years' War. This tendency toward experimentation in new military methods received a further strong impetus from the defeats that the armies of Charles the Bold suffered at the hands of the Swiss near the end of the fifteenth century. In the battles of Morat and Nancy (1476), the knights of Charles the Bold, unable to break up the squares of Swiss foot soldiers and to penetrate into the forest of their pikes, were thoroughly defeated. This event was a European sensation. Infantry had won its place in the military organization of the period.

The importance of the invention of gunpowder has to be evaluated against the background of these general developments: first, the rise of a money economy; second, the attempt of the feudal overlord to free himself from dependence on his vassals and to establish a reliable foundation of power; and third, the trend toward experimentation in military organization resulting from the weakening of feudal bonds.

Firearms and artillery were not the cause of these developments but they were an important contributory factor, accelerating the tempo of the evolution. First of all, they strengthened the position of the overlord in relation to his vassals. The employment of artillery in a campaign was a cumbersome task; many wagons were needed for transportation of the heavy cannon and for their equipment, mechanics and engineers became necessary, and the whole procedure was extremely expensive. The accounts of military expenditures for this period show that the expenses for artillery constituted a disproportionately large part of the total.³ Only the very wealthy rulers were able to afford artillery. Also, the principal military effect of the invention of artillery worked in favor of the great powers and against the smaller states and local centers of independence. In the Middle Ages, the final sanction of the position of the knight had been that, in his castle, he was relatively immune from attack. The art of fortification was much cultivated in this period.⁴ Small states protected themselves by establishing at their frontiers a line of fortresses that enabled them to hold out even against superior forces. These medieval fortifications were vulnerable, however, to artillery fire. Thus, the military balance became heavily weighed in favor of the offensive. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, one of the great Italian architects of the fifteenth century, who was in charge of the building of the fortresses for the Duke of Urbino, complained in his treatise on military architecture that “the man who would be able to balance defense against attack, would be more a god than a human being.”⁵

These changes in the composition of armies and in military technique also transformed the spirit of military organization.⁶ The moral code, traditions, and customs, which feudalism had evolved, had lost control over the human material from which the armies were now recruited. Adventurers and ruffians who wanted wealth and plunder, men who had nothing to lose and everything to gain through war, made up the main body of the armies. As a result of a situation in which war was no longer undertaken as a religious duty, the purpose of military service became financial gain. The moral problem arose whether it was a sin to follow a profession that aimed at the killing of other people. In the most civilized parts of Europe, such as Italy, people looked with contempt on soldiers and soldiering.

II

The circumstances of Machiavelli's personal life were a crucial factor in his becoming aware of the situation and the problems that had emerged in his time.

Machiavelli's career as a political writer began when the Medici returned to Florence in 1512 and ousted him from the Florentine Chancellery, where he had served the Florentine republic for fourteen years. His writings, as many have said, beginning with Machiavelli himself, present the lessons that he had drawn from his “long experience of the affairs of his time.”⁷ They reduce to prescripts, rules, and laws his observations of the political scene made in the course of his work in the Florentine Chancellery.

In the Italian cities of the Renaissance, chancellery officials usually were somewhat bloodless civil servants who wrote down and carried out the measures on which the ruling circle had decided. Machiavelli was an exception; he was a person of political importance in the Florentine republic between 1498 and 1512. As Guicciardini wrote to him teasingly in the years of his disgrace, when he had accepted a minor, almost ridiculous mission to a chapter of the Franciscan Order—“in other times [you] negotiated with many kings, dukes and princes.”⁸

There were several reasons why Machiavelli had played a greater political role before 1512 than Chancellery bureaucrats usually did. The Machiavelli were an old, highly regarded family with twelve Gonfalonieri and sixty-six high magistrates among them. Niccolò Machiavelli was descended from an illegitimate branch of this family and could not be a member of the ruling councils or of the policy-making magistrates, but his name and his friendship with Niccoló di Alessandro Machiavelli, a leading politician, set him apart from other Chancellery officials.⁹

The principal reason, however, for Machiavelli's prominence was his close relation to Piero Soderini, the lifetime Gonfaloniere.¹⁰ The office of a lifetime Gonfaloniere had been created in 1502 by a group of Florentine patricians who had hoped that the Gonfaloniere would restrict and reduce the influence of the Great Council in which the middle classes had the upper hand. But Soderini disappointed the patricians because he viewed his election as a mandate to maintain and stabilize the popular regime embodied in the Great Council. Soderini favored Machiavelli and used him in a variety of governmental tasks and missions, knowing that in his struggle with his aristocratic opponents it was useful to have the services of a man who was entirely dependent on him.

Beyond that, however, Machiavelli was a remarkable personality, and this was certainly the crucial factor in extending his activities and responsibilities beyond the scope of an average government official. Contemporary portraits of Machiavelli do not exist. The pictures and busts that are supposed to represent him and show a face of foxlike cleverness with an ambiguous smile were made in the later part of the sixteenth century when Machiavelli had become the personification of calculating amorality and evil. But Machiavelli was not just an embodiment of rationality and intelligence. He could be emotional, and in the storms of passion could throw all caution to the wind. He loved to make fun of himself and of others. The chief bond between Machiavelli and the leading Florentine statesmen—Guicciardini, Filippo Strozzi, Francesco Vettori—was a common interest in the political developments of their time, and certainly these Florentines found Machiavelli's analysis of the contemporary situation fascinating. But Machiavelli served them also in many other functions: he could eagerly embark on excogitating marriage proposals for the daughters of his friend Guicciardini, or organize a sumptuous meal for Filippo Strozzi. Machiavelli knew that acting as a maître de plaisir helped him retain the friendship of these great men, who kept in touch with the goings on in the world. His outlook and approach were formed by this situation: being kept in a dependent, outsider position, but feeling equal and even superior in his grasp of the political world to those who had the right and the power to make decisions. Machiavelli was deeply involved in the political world, yet he also looked upon it from a distance. None of his contemporaries had to the same degree a view that combined both sharpness and perspective, and that moved continuously between what is and what ought to be.¹¹ Machiavelli...